Survival Colony 9

by Joshua David Bellin

  He lowered the can. “I’m listening.”

  “It might be best to take what we can carry and go. I’m not . . . comfortable here. We’re exposed. There’s only one way out. If they were to block the road—”

  “Not their typical behavior,” he said. “And you told me the perimeter’s clean.”

  “So far as we can ascertain,” she said. “But this room—I suspect it’s been looted.” She shone her flashlight on the floor, revealing parallel tracks where cases had been dragged. “We may not be the only colony to have visited this place.”

  “And the ones who beat us to it are plainly gone,” he replied. “Driven away by Skaldi, most likely. Leaving nothing but food the Skaldi won’t return for.”

  “Unless they return for us.”

  My dad stared. “You believe they laid a trap?”

  “I’m merely suggesting we be cautious,” Aleka returned, her face showing not the slightest quaver under his dark eyes’ scrutiny. “The provisions are what we need. Let’s transfer what we can to the trucks and go.”

  He shook his head. “These are Skaldi we’re talking about, Aleka. They don’t strategize. They just feed.”

  “Are you willing to take that chance?”

  My dad’s face reddened and he opened his mouth to respond, but then he seemed to become aware of me. “Querry,” he said softly, “would you mind stepping outside?”

  I waited by the door for ten minutes. The sound of their conversation drifted from within, their voices low and calm. The words escaped me. When they emerged, my dad first, Aleka following, I could read nothing in their eyes.

  But I knew he’d won.

  We walked back to the group waiting by the trucks. If anything, the delay had made them even more anxious for my dad’s command.

  “All right, people,” he said. “You know what to do.”

  Instantly, everyone sprang into action. Workers started unloading the trucks, moving stoves and propane tanks and flamethrowers down wooden planks and into the basement of one of the houses. Or what used to be the basement, because the first floor was gone. While we worked, Tyris inspected the cans in the bomb shelter, checking for dents and bulges. When she’d given the all-clear, everyone over the age of ten made a chain from the shelter and passed the crates to the supply post. Under Aleka’s orders, we got to work with shovels and crowbars digging up sections of fence and replanting them in twin arcs closer to the building my dad had selected as headquarters, a house marginally more intact than most, only missing its second floor and with a gaping hole where one-third of its front used to be. The sun showed no mercy, the heat pouring out of the sky and emanating from the cracked, baked ground. Some people draped their jackets over their heads or rolled up their shirt sleeves and pant legs, but it made no difference. Sweat drenched my back and my neck felt like it was on fire when my dad finally came over, sized up our work, and told Aleka we could knock off for the day.

  I collapsed in the burning shade and surveyed our new home. It didn’t look like much, in fact it looked like a fort whose army had already surrendered to the enemy. The transplanted fence leaned crazily, anchored by nothing more solid than dirt. The buildings could have been mistaken for piles of rubble. But the adults made approving noises as they studied it, so I guess it was no worse than the bombed-out places they’d seen before.

  My dad took the opportunity to deliver a speech, or as much of one as he ever made.

  “This is a secure place,” he said to everyone who lay there, sick and dizzy with the heat. Aleka kept quiet, but she stared hard at him as he spoke. “There’s food, shelter, clear sightlines to the plain. We have to be prepared to defend it.”

  “To the bitter end,” Yov groaned. I guess three hours on anyone’s good side was about all he could handle.

  Night was coming by the time my dad had made all the minor adjustments to our defenses he always made. While he and Aleka roamed the compound, repositioning lookouts and tinkering with the location of the trucks, Tyris and a couple other adults doled out small rations of the food she’d decided was safest to eat. The meal consisted of slices of some dark purple vegetable and a lumpy white paste, all of it tasting sour and metallic. Thanks to my dad, there was only enough of it to make my mouth water for more. But for once, my stomach groaned with a noise that wasn’t pure emptiness.

  As the temperature dropped the few merciful degrees night afforded us, everyone in camp who wasn’t on sentry duty settled down to sleep. I watched people hunt around to make sure everything they’d had with them at our last encampment was still there, every button of their uniforms, every nail or utensil or photograph they’d stuffed in their packs. Next they freed their feet from their patched, splitting boots, stripped off their belts and sweat-stained uniform jackets, and hung everything on the fence posts to air out until morning. Most dropped off to sleep instantly, with the conditioning that comes from never knowing when you might need to wake up. Four of the adults, though, stayed up into the night, bent over pieces of tin they’d flattened into wiggly mirrors, to complete their bedtime rituals.

  I’d been watching the four perform the same acts for six months. But I still couldn’t watch without a knot forming in my stomach.

  Two of them shaved or plucked hair from their heads, their arms, their eyebrows, then collected the trimmed hair in jars and tucked the containers into the deepest pouches of their packs. The other two cut or chewed their fingernails to the nub and stashed the clippings in similar containers. The next time we made a trip to the river, they’d empty the jars and watch the sluggish water carry dead bits of their bodies away. Korah had told me of one guy in the colony, years ago, who’d kept his entire body wrapped like a mummy, only his eyes showing through the bandages. What ever happened to him she didn’t say.

  But it was no secret why some people went to such extremes to keep anything from falling off their bodies. No one knows how the Skaldi track us, but the best we can guess is that they use our smell. Our sweat, our blood. I’ve seen people suck cuts until the bleeding stops, so they don’t have to use a bandage. I’ve even heard people say that anything you touch, anything that falls off you, can lead them to us. Clothes. Crumbs. Hair. Fingernails. Skin. I asked my dad about it, and all he said was, “Some people don’t know when it’s time to move on.” He told me it was pointless to trim your nails and hair, because you shed your skin all the time and there’s not a thing you can do about it. He said if a single hair was all it took to fill the Skaldi’s nostrils, we’d all have been dead long before now.

  Still, he must have half-believed the theories himself, because he always told us not to leave anything behind. He insisted we dig the latrine pits extra deep and cover them extra well. And he went ballistic one time when Wali, who’d just started shaving, had the bright idea to burn the trimmings in a rusty, dented mess tin.

  “Are you out of your mind?” my dad yelled that time, his face so close to Wali’s he could have bit him. His own chin lay buried beneath a dirty, tangled beard, his matted hair trailed to his shoulders. The camp stank, thick and sweet from Wali’s fire.

  “Do you have any idea what this smells like?” my dad demanded, shoving the tin under Wali’s nose.

  Wali’s mouth moved in the word no, but no sound came out.

  “It smells like you,” my dad said. “Like supper. Like another body for them to chew up and spit out.”

  He threw the tin at Wali’s feet, scattering sparks.

  “You want to kill yourself, be my guest,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if you kill anyone in my camp.”

  “I’m sorry, Laman,” Wali managed to say.

  “Clean this mess up,” my dad cut him off. “And get with the program.”

  He left Wali on his knees, putting out the fire with dirt and his own shaky hands.

  Korah stooped to help him. I heard her say, “He’s just trying to protect us” befo
re I turned away and left them to work it out themselves.

  I’ve often wondered what we smell like to the Skaldi. Living in camp, washing as little as we do, and then in muddy water with a film of oil on top, we don’t smell so great to each other. People talk with faces averted to avoid getting a whiff of each other’s breath.

  But to Skaldi, I guess we smell good enough, or maybe bad enough, to eat.

  * * *

  By the time the diehards were done grooming, full night had arrived, the moon riding high and casting a net of shadows over camp. In the pale light, the place looked even emptier than before, the homes seeming as threadbare and precarious as the matchstick houses the little kids built. Me and the other teens had set up against a low wall that framed one of the structures. My own bedtime preparations weren’t much, taking off my boots and rinsing my mouth and swallowing the dirty water. All I felt like doing after a day of work was lying there and staring at the sky until sleep came.

  But I knew I had to fulfill one more ritual, just for me, before the day was done.

  I heard the crunch of his boots and turned to see his shadowy shape, outlined in bronze. His belt and holster were strapped on, his uniform jacket buttoned to the top. I don’t know if he ever took them off. He came around the wall and sat on a stone that’d come loose, leaving a gap like a missing tooth. He rested his hands on his knees and drew a deep, grunting breath. I stopped preparing my bed and waited for him to begin.

  “This place,” he said, taking it all in with a nod. “You kids did all right.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How’d it go today?” he said. “Any change?”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

  “About the same, Dad. No real change.”

  “You sure, now.”

  “Pretty sure.”

  He fiddled with something in his hand, tucked it in his jacket. When his eyes met mine his expression had hardened. “It’s been six months. Lot of things have happened since then. All that time, I’d have thought. . . .”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “It just gets further away.”

  He acted as if he didn’t hear me. “The memory exercises Tyris taught you. You’ve been using them?”

  Truth was, I barely remembered the memory exercises. “They don’t seem to work very well.”

  I got ready for him to blow up at that, but he didn’t. He just sat there, scratching his beard absently. When he spoke again his voice was deadly calm.

  “I don’t know how long we’re going to be here,” he said. “If it was up to Aleka, we’d already be gone.”

  “She thinks we’re sitting ducks.”

  He sniffed. “We talked that through.”

  “Maybe she’s right.”

  Again I braced for an explosion that never came. “I’ll worry about when it’s time to move on,” he said. “But while we’re here, you have a chance to focus on what happened. Really focus. You might not get another chance like this for a long time.”

  “Is that why we’re here?”

  “That’s why you’re here,” he said. “And I don’t want you to waste it.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Do better,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”

  He rose with an effort, stood beside me and laid a hand on my shoulder, like he’d done with Yov. Through the thick cloth of my uniform I felt his hand clench as if to pull the memory out of me.

  Then he released my shoulder and left. I watched his dark shape limp toward headquarters until he was lost from sight.

  I spread out my bedroll and lay perfectly still, arms under my head, staring into the moonlit dark. The frames of houses glowed skeletal above me. Every night since I’d recovered from my accident it had been the same. Though he told me to forget the past, he insisted I try to remember the accident itself. For the good of the colony, he said. I couldn’t see what good it would do for me to remember how I lost my memory, but I knew better than to say that to him.

  I felt eyes on me and turned to find that Yov had lifted himself on an elbow and was staring at me across the row of sleeping bodies, a taunting smile on his lips. I wondered if he’d heard the whole conversation. I got the feeling he’d heard others like it on other nights.

  “Daddy tuck you in real tight, Space Boy?” he said. “He tell you the big bad monsters won’t come back to get you?”

  I looked away, tried to focus.

  “Boo!” he hissed. And wouldn’t you know it, I flinched.

  His laughter trailed off until there was only silence.

  The empty houses leaned over me like sentinels. I shut my eyes, tried to trace the lost memory in the pulsing darkness beneath my eyelids. But it was like looking down a dark tunnel with a twist in it, seeing solid rock then, just beyond, nothing. What came into my mind instead were Aleka’s words: Are you willing to take that chance? If my dad had chosen to keep us here on the off chance that staying put would help me remember the attack, was that worth what we risked? Worth waiting here, in unknown territory, for someone or something to find us?

  I knew sleep would be a long time coming. Another night of questions that had no answers lay ahead of me, without the company of a single sound or soul.

  4

  Rust

  The next morning, we found tracks leading from the bomb shelter.

  Human tracks. Not that that meant much. Skaldi make human tracks with whatever body they happen to steal.

  But whoever or whatever had made these tracks hadn’t wanted to be identified by boot size or markings, because they’d gone barefoot. The prints got smudged and vanished into the dust about twenty paces from the shelter, so there was no way to tell where they’d come from or gone to. Maybe Petra could have figured it out. But none of the other scouts could.

  The sentries swore they’d seen no one. Since my dad hadn’t posted any of them at the emptied shelter, that made sense. Still, he took the whole group into his headquarters with Aleka and the other officers, leaving one officer to stand watch at the front door. I got as close as the guard would let me, but I heard nothing.

  Korah stood nearby, her upper lip in her teeth. Somehow, on her, that didn’t look bad at all.

  “Why would anyone go back?” I asked her.

  She jumped as if she’d just come out of a trance. Then she smiled. “They must have been hoping to filch extra rations.”

  I was about to ask her who in camp was stupid enough not to know we’d cleaned the place out, but then I remembered who I was talking to. “He’s checking them, isn’t he?” I said. “To see if they’re infected?”

  She shot me a look, and I thought I saw a flash of fear in her eyes. But before I could say anything else, Wali swaggered over. I swear the guy had a homing device on me. He took Korah’s arm, flexed every muscle in his body, and walked away.

  An hour later the sentries came out, their shaken expressions making me glad I wasn’t them. A smear of blood crossed one of the men’s cheeks.

  My dad appeared at their rear. His face revealed nothing.

  “Let’s go, people,” he said. “Show’s over. Time to get to work.”

  “Laman,” Aleka said. “Quarantine procedures.”

  Everyone froze. My dad had told me about quarantine. It meant subjecting every person in camp to the trials, no exceptions. Risky, because the results weren’t always reliable. False positive, you torch one of your friends. False negative, you relax your guard. Normally, he’d told me, you put quarantine into effect only when you had a very good reason to suspect a breach.

  “Laman?” Aleka repeated.

  My dad must not have thought this was one of those occasions, because he didn’t even bother to respond.

  “Querry,” he called. “Seems like you’ve got time on your hands. How
about helping us out over here?”

  We left Aleka standing there, a frown on her thin lips.

  I spent the rest of the morning shoveling.

  The location of our new camp might not have made us more vulnerable to Skaldi. I guess it depended on who you asked. But there was no doubt it made us vulnerable to a different kind of enemy: dust. Perched on the highest spot for miles, with only our flimsy fence as a windbreak, it had gotten pummeled by a dust storm that blew through overnight. I guess my dad should have foreseen that possibility the day we arrived, what with dust choking the empty swimming pools and painting miniature sand dunes up walls and foundations. Maybe he had, but he’d decided that was worth the risk, too. When daybreak revealed the dust piled on everything, coating our trucks, our equipment, our clothes, I’m not sure everyone agreed.

  The strange thing for me was that I’d hardly noticed the dust accumulating while I lay half-awake those long hours before dawn. I’d heard the wind blow and felt the tickle on my cheek. But when I joined the work detail and discovered our supplies buried, I couldn’t believe it had all materialized in a single night. I guess it was something like the snowstorms the old woman had told me about, from the time when there still was snow. Overnight squalls that blanketed the world in white. People dreamed about it, she said. Prayed for it. Kids pressed their faces against frosty windowpanes and stared through the steam of their own breath at the sparkling shroud. Why they were so excited about seeing their world erased I don’t know.

  But then, this was the woman who wouldn’t tell anyone in camp her own name, so I’m not sure I believed her until I waded through the brown powder that had obliterated everything we owned in a single night.

  The shoveling took forever. We didn’t have nearly enough tools to go around, and the ones we did have were in lousy shape. Shovels, picks, crowbars with broken handles, blades bent and brittle. The adults hogged what we had, so we teens dropped to our knees and did the best we could with our bare hands. Over and over, I scooped the ground into my raw palms, carried it up the stairs, dumped it someplace else. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that meant we’d be doing the same thing tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. Yov vented his frustration by shouldering me out of the way whenever we crossed paths. He was the last guy I would have asked about our nighttime prowler, but my dad stood watch through the whole operation, so I wouldn’t have had a chance even if I’d wanted to.