Survival Colony 9

by Joshua David Bellin

  And I would find myself, too.

  * * *

  When at long last the sun started its descent, I climbed out of the pipe, stretched my legs, and continued on my way. Within minutes my resting place vanished into the blankness of the land. My shadow grew long again, a dagger slicing the ground to the east. The creature’s trail held amazingly steady, its endurance hard to believe. Tyris, the closest thing to an authority on the Skaldi we had, always maintained that the creatures needed new bodies on a regular basis, staying in each host only long enough to carry them to their next victim. She didn’t know why they tore through bodies so fast, but their relentlessness and insatiable hunger, she said, suggested that they did. That, she speculated, explained why they went on killing rampages when they had the chance: they stored up energy by consuming as many bodies as they could, leaving themselves only one final body as a vehicle to their next meal. What happened to them if they failed to find a new host we had no idea, though we’d always assumed their last body simply disintegrated and became part of the dust we tramped on. What would happen to them if they ever succeeded in destroying all of us we didn’t even bother to think about.

  But if I was right, this thing had been creeping through the desert for six months in a hollowed-out corpse, and still it showed no signs of slowing or stopping. Either it had gained some unheard-of energy when it attacked me, or it wasn’t what I thought it was after all. Its trail tempted and tormented me as I plunged deeper into uncharted territory. If I could only catch up with it, I told myself, the answers to all my questions would lie within my grasp.

  But as the day waned, the bitter realization sank into me that I would have to stop once again and find a relatively safe place to spend the night. The river had begun to wash out into the dull hue of the land, the cloud murk threatened to block any light from moon or stars, and I knew I’d never be able to follow the trail in the dead dark. I’d been walking, break excepted, for nearly twelve hours, and I couldn’t take the chance of growing groggy or careless without sleep. Not with the possibility of other minefields in the vicinity, not with the risk of crossing paths with Araz, Laman, or anything else that might be in the area. I delayed as long as I could, squinting into the dusk, trying to distinguish the creature’s trail from all the other nameless ripples in the land. But when the sun finally tumbled in a smear below the horizon, I knew I couldn’t delay any longer.

  The land had dimmed to shadows and outlines by the time I quit the river to seek shelter away from its shore. What light remained from the fading sun made the few visible shapes look like they’d been dunked in blood or doused in fire. I trod carefully, listening for movement, spooked by my own footsteps. Night falls fast in the desert, and I realized my desire to catch up with the creature had left me stumbling blindly in the dark.

  I hadn’t gone far before I caught my foot and fell over something I couldn’t see.

  Visions of my body exploding into fragments flashed through my mind. But I landed in one piece, my hands hitting the ground hard and my pack flying forward with a clatter to smack the back of my head. When I rose to my knees, I saw that I’d tripped over an object nearly the color of the land. For a second my heart leaped with the thought that this might be the creature itself, but it sat formless and motionless, a duffel-size lump with the solidity of clay. I rose, wiped my hands on my pants, and resumed my march, only to stub my toe on another blob a few steps on.

  This time I halted and looked around me, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the dark. When they did, I spotted a collection of darker shapes lying against the dark ground, one every few paces or so. All of them roughly the same size, the size of a . . .

  I stooped and reached for the nearest shape. My fingers closed around thick, heavy material, and when I pulled, I felt something like dirt shift inside. Probing further, I traced the edges of the material, touched a series of hard knobs, confirmed what it was.

  A uniform top.

  But what remained inside was far less than its wearer. I lifted it free from the ground and the last traces sifted invisibly into the dust at my feet. To my utter surprise, the cloth itself fell apart next, leaving me with nothing but a fistful of prickly fibers.

  Trembling, I crept to the next bundle and felt it lightly. This one contained more to feel, a complete uniform, but no more inside. I moved breathlessly to the next, and the next. Some of them, like the one I’d tripped over, felt relatively intact. I didn’t investigate deeply enough to see how much was left inside those. Others had been emptied of everything but air, while still others had disintegrated partially like the first. They formed a line, each one spaced roughly twenty feet from the next, leading back toward the river. I followed this new trail, shape by shape. I counted sixteen in all, along with spilled packs and the empty tank of a flamethrower. The rest I probably missed in the dark.

  On the last one before the river, a bundle far bulkier than most, I found a gun and a walkie-talkie. I didn’t need to look closely to know that this had been Araz.

  I lowered myself carefully down the rocky bank, my eyes scanning the water’s black surface. When I reached the river’s edge I cupped my hands, dipped them into the rank water, brought them to my face. I shivered, though the water was warm.

  Araz and Yov’s colony was gone. Totally gone. Its leaders, its followers, and those who hadn’t been old enough to make a choice. Like Keely. I hadn’t seen a uniform his size, but he was so small I could easily have overlooked it. Nearly twenty colonists, trained fighters like Kin, bruisers like Kelmen, had been wiped out so quickly they hadn’t had time to do anything but scatter and run. I had hated the rebels, wished them out of my life, but never wished them dead.

  But it hadn’t mattered. The Skaldi had wished differently. I knew now why Petra had seen nothing of them since yesterday’s late afternoon report: they’d been waylaid in their pursuit of Laman’s colony, and when it ended, their tattered remains were all the Skaldi had left behind.

  Which Skaldi, I couldn’t say. I barely believed the pitiful thing crawling through Laman’s camp could have destroyed the rebels so completely, especially when it hadn’t touched anyone the night before. But I’d been there last night, and if my suspicion was right about it, its main objective at that point had been to get away. If this really was the same creature that had stolen my memory, it had wiped out Survival Colony Twenty-Seven all on its own. Who knew what it could do when there was no one to stop it?

  I’d been so focused on tracking this wounded thing, I’d forgotten that wounded things can be the most dangerous.

  A movement out of the corner of my eye made me freeze. Something stood at the water’s edge, a dark shape not ten feet from where I crouched. I had no time to light my tree-branch torch, and I doubted such a small fire would scare it off anyway. If Tyris was right, Skaldi feed until the last body is left. And now a new body had walked right into the middle of its feast.

  I rose to face it. What else could I do?

  But then I noticed that the thing I’d seen had backed away, as if it was as startled by me as I was by it. I debated what to do for a second before calling out.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me,” said a child’s voice. “Keely.”

  Relief flooded me, followed by a new wave of fear. “Keely,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I hid under Daddy,” he said. “It didn’t see me.”

  I struck a spark from my flint, saw his terrified face in the brief glow. I knew it was wrong to feel this way, but I couldn’t help giving thanks that Araz’s remains were complete enough to shield his tiny son. “Is there . . .” I meant to finish, “anyone else?” But I couldn’t ask him that.

  “Keely,” I said. “There’s something I have to do. It won’t hurt. Can I . . .” I felt sick asking. “Can you come over here?”

  Obediently, he took a series of small steps until he stood right before me. I coul
d barely make out his face in the gloom. His cheeks were drawn and his teeth chattered, but his eyes, I thought, gazed back at me in trust. I tried to will mine to look the same.

  “I’m just going to check to see if you’re okay,” I said, and I took his two small hands in one of mine. With my other hand, I gripped the ends of his fingers, wiggling them hard at the very tips.

  A look of confused delight crept over his face. “This little piggy went to market,” he whispered.

  I tried to smile back. “Now I’m going to check your teeth.”

  “My teeth?” But he opened his mouth without protest.

  I unfastened my rucksack and took out a strip of cloth and my glass jar. Stuffing the rag inside, I struck the flint until I got a corner of the fabric to catch, then set the homemade lantern at our feet. In the yellow light I inspected each of Keely’s tiny teeth, held each one between fingers that seemed clumsy and blunt, pulled as hard as I could without hurting him. On the top row, a tooth wiggled and came loose with a slight tearing of tissue.

  I looked at him, horrified, then saw a dark spot of blood welling at the root. He smiled a brand-new smile.

  “We’ll have to save this one for the . . .” I tried to remember the name of the thing the little kids talked about, some kind of boat that took baby teeth away. “The tooth ferry,” I finished, and slipped the treasure into his hand. Then I closed my own hand around his and led him up from the riverbed.

  I walked him along the bank, away from the violated bodies. His hand felt cold, but his teeth no longer chattered. Once, he gave my hand an instinctive squeeze, and I squeezed back. He’d always trusted me, at least for the six months I could remember. Chances are he couldn’t remember much more than I could. All he had, really, was trust.

  We couldn’t stay here, I knew. The thing that had done this might be coming back. Whatever my chances against it, Keely’s stood at exactly zero. But I had no idea where the creature had gone, whose body it had slain last, so leaving this spot in the middle of the night didn’t seem like an option either. I considered pocketing Araz’s gun, but the thought of touching it turned my stomach, and what good would it be against Skaldi, anyway? Retracing my steps to Laman’s camp seemed equally foolish. Not only would I have to deal with at least one minefield I could no longer detect, but if the Skaldi that had killed the rebels wasn’t the one I thought it was, I could be leading it straight back to Survival Colony 9.

  I stood there far longer than I should, trying to focus, coming no closer to a decision. Keely shivered beside me.

  “Querry,” he said. “I’m cold.”

  That was what finally made up my mind. He was my responsibility now, at least until I found someone else to take care of him. Whatever lay ahead of us in the night, the one thing I knew for sure was that death lay behind. I might not be any good at making decisions, but I had to be better than a kid who’d just lost his first baby tooth.

  “Come on,” I said, and we started off into the night, leaving the carnage of the rebel camp by the riverside.

  17

  Nest

  Keely and I marched deep into the night.

  When he got too tired to walk I strapped my rucksack across my chest and carried him on my back. When he got too sleepy to cling to me I switched him to the front and held him in my arms. A half-starved five-year-old doesn’t weigh much, and though my muscles grew numb, they also seemed strangely tireless, immune to fatigue or pain. His thin chest breathed against mine, his soft exhalations caressed my neck. I put my head down and forged ahead, one step at a time.

  I abandoned the area right by the river in case of mines, but I tried to stay on course to the northwest. Even if there’d been enough light to spot yesterday’s trail, I wouldn’t have hunted for it, preferring not to think about it at all. My only thought was to put as much distance as possible between the child I held and the memory of the night. Let the thing catch us if it could. I didn’t know where we were going, or what we might find. I didn’t know if our next step would land us in a crater or lead us straight into the arms of the Skaldi. All I could do was walk on through the night, holding the one living thing that was mine to hold for as long as I could hold it.

  Eventually, though, I had to set Keely down and get some sleep. The risen moon had shrunk to a fingernail-shaped sliver, and all across the darkened land there was nothing like shelter to be seen. So I lay down on my bedroll, draping an arm around Keely to keep him close. Not safe, just close. He murmured in his sleep, eyelids fluttering. Dreaming, I guess. I closed my eyes wondering if either of us would open them again.

  But when a dreamless night passed and the sun rose on another day, I rose with it. Keely slept on, so I shook him gently, watched his brown eyes open. He seemed momentarily confused to see me, then he smiled. I wondered how much sorrow a single night could erase for a kid his age. If he asked about his dad, I didn’t know what I would say.

  He didn’t, though. He watched me puncture the lid of a can with my pocketknife, accepted the couple mouthfuls of stringy yellow stuff I offered him, and waited for me to swallow some of the tasteless food myself. Then he took my hand and followed along, cupping the meal to his mouth and licking his palm as we went.

  Now that the crisis of the night had fallen behind us and I could look at the situation in the brutal light of day, I had to admit that taking care of Keely presented some real problems. To begin with, his presence changed my plan—such as it was—from fight to flight. I’d glanced around for the Skaldi’s trail as soon as we woke up, but as I’d half-feared and half-hoped, it had vanished during our nighttime march. Whether the creature had stopped or changed course, I doubted we’d find it again. Maybe that was a good thing. But it meant I now had no particular destination in mind, and no particular goal except to get as far away from the ruins of Keely’s camp as I could.

  And with Keely in tow, that might not be so easy. Though he seemed satisfied with the bare-bones meal I’d given him, an extra mouth to feed meant my cans would run out twice as fast, forcing me to spend time hunting for what little food the barren land provided. So long as we stayed within hiking distance of the river our water would last, but Keely drank much more than I did, in tiny but frequent sips, and that meant more river runs to refill my canteen and jar. He also stopped for bathroom breaks all the time, and he could never predict when they were coming, so they never coincided with a time we were actually at the river. The best I could do to erase our scent was dig a ditch with my knife, cover it once he was done, and hope the camp crazies were wrong and the Skaldi’s sense of smell wasn’t as keen as they said.

  The biggest problem of all, though, was how slowly my new companion forced us to move. He didn’t drag his feet or waste time playing, but he got tired and needed to rest, he took baby steps, and I didn’t think I could carry him forever. If a situation arose that called for speed, I could run, but where would that leave Keely?

  I knew the answer to that. Nowhere.

  And I knew I couldn’t leave him. But watching his tangled brown hair bob along by my side, I couldn’t help thinking how much easier it would be if I could.

  By mid-morning we’d walked maybe two miles, less than half the distance I’d have covered on my own. A good two hours of that time had been devoted to naps and potty breaks. I’d become an expert at digging holes and finding shelter in the tiniest of divots, and for a short time I’d discovered that I could get Keely to pick up the pace if I turned our march into a kind of game, like tag minus the hard running. As high sun approached, though, a change settled over the land, from flat and sterile emptiness to a more varied terrain, low hills spotted with rocks and scrub brush, and that made it even harder for Keely to keep up. I tugged his hand, lifted him onto my shoulders, distracted him with nonsense jokes, anything I could think of to keep him moving. All I had left in my favor was that he hadn’t asked me where we were going or when we would get there. Which was
a very good thing, because I had yet to figure that out myself.

  While Keely rested in the lee of a hill during the day’s hottest hours, I debated what to do next. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had to stay near the river. I could keep trekking northwest, in hopes of finding . . . something. Araz’s fabled mountains. The Skaldi I’d lost overnight. A new colony to take Keely off my hands. Or I could backtrack, hope against hope to avoid whatever had slain the rebels, maybe even find some way to reunite Keely with Laman without being nabbed myself. But when I thought of that, I knew I was fooling myself. Survival Colony 9 would never willingly let me go. My plan had blown up in my face, but it was still the best I had. I’d stay on course and hope for a revelation or a miracle.

  “You ready?” I said to Keely, who lay yawning and stretching from his nap.

  He nodded and took my hand. At the moment, that seemed like miracle enough for me.

  Over the next hour, the hills became steeper and more widely spaced. I found myself panting as I trudged up each rise with him on my back, catching my breath at the top and recovering it fully only at the bottom of each downslope, just in time to lose it again. I wondered if we might be nearing the mountains after all. I’d never seen mountains, so I had no idea what led up to them. The trees here I couldn’t place, low and spreading and blanketed in rusty needles, interspersed with bushes and boulders that could either hide us or conceal whatever might be lying in wait. I kept my eyes trained on the unsparing landscape, but nothing moved except our own shadows, linked by the thread of our twined hands.

  Anxiety made me determined to keep Keely close. But as the day wore on he got fidgety, and I found it harder and harder to distract him. We hadn’t done much talking or anything I’d call playing since the game of marching tag fizzled, and by mid-afternoon it felt like our roles had switched: now he was the one who’d develop sudden spurts of energy, while I was the one who wasn’t always up to joining him. Probably that came from giving him piggyback rides the first half of the day. I decided to give him a job scouting ahead, not far enough that I couldn’t run him down if I needed to. That seemed to please him, and every time I caught up he’d give me a scouting report. “I’m Petra,” he said. “And you’re Laman.” I smiled for his sake, though the reminder of Petra’s superhuman skill and of the commander she served made me glance anxiously back the way we’d come.