The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  “Going up is a bad idea,” he said. “Nowhere to retreat to if the things come again.”

  “Seriously,” said Christopher, taking up a position behind the older man. “We should get outta here.”

  Ken didn’t stop moving. “I can’t ask you to come with me. You’ve all saved me, and I can never repay you.” He kicked the dead man’s trailing foot out of the track of the elevator’s doors. “But I have to go.”

  “Bad idea,” said Aaron.

  “Yeah,” said Christopher.

  They both stepped in.

  Dorcas pressed the round circle with a “9” in the center.

  The doors shut.

  The elevator started to rise.

  With it, questions rose in Ken’s mind. What was happening? What were these things, that had destroyed almost everyone and everything humanity held dear in less than a day? Why did they stop moving and breathe in time, why were the times they did so decreasing, and what would happen when that “countdown” reached zero? What had killed all the insects? How come one had vomited acid?

  What would he find when he reached the ninth floor?

  Ken looked at the other survivors. At Christopher, to whom he had said less than a hundred words. At Aaron, who had saved Ken’s life but who remained a complete enigma. At Dorcas.

  She caught his gaze. Raised her shoulders as though unsure of why they were coming, and said, “It’s still the right thing to do.”

  Ken didn’t know if he would find his family when the doors opened.

  But he knew he had family here with him.

  END OF BOOK ONE

  THE COLONY: RENEGADES

  1

  THE WORLD HAD ENDED four hours ago.

  So why was Kenny G still playing music?

  Ken Strickland knew he was asking this question as a way to avoid the real questions, the questions he should be asking. The questions that had no answers.

  But still, it seemed so important.

  Civilization had fallen. Zombies had taken over. Zombies whose bites caused instant conversion, who were impervious to pain or grief or discomfort. Monsters whose only apparent thought seemed to be focused on killing those few normal humans that remained.

  But Kenny G was still playing music.

  Ken Strickland had never hated Kenny G before. Never particularly liked him, but didn’t hate him. Now, though, in an elevator in the Wells Fargo Center, riding up toward the ninth floor where he hoped against all reason to find his wife and three children alive, he realized that the fall of civilization came with some perks.

  There would be no more easy listening, no more Muzak.

  Beside him, Dorcas shuffled nervously. The middle-aged woman was tough as weathered saddle leather. She had saved Ken’s life several times, even though he was a virtual stranger to her. But she was nervous now, traveling up in a confined space with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide if things went bad.

  Maybe we should have taken the stairs.

  He discarded that idea almost instantly. Stairs would have taken too long. And the last time they had used the stairs, things had gone badly.

  Plus, who knew how long the power would last? This might be the last trip any of them would ever take in an elevator. This might be a magical moment they would tell children and grandchildren about someday.

  If we live that long.

  “Wonder how many times people took this elevator,” said Christopher. The twenty-two year old looked wistful, as though thinking along the same lines as Ken. He had been the son of Idaho’s governor until a few hours ago. Then, like all of the people in the elevator, he became just one more survivor, one more refugee, one more person fleeing the hordes that had taken over the world in less than ten minutes.

  Aaron grunted. Ken couldn’t tell if the cowboy was agreeing with Christopher, or telling him to be quiet. The older man was the most enigmatic of the group. Ken wondered anew who he was. How he’d learned to fight, how the older man seemed to know what to do in almost any situation.

  Mysteries. Mysteries in mysteries in mysteries.

  No one knew anything anymore.

  Welcome to the new world.

  The counter on the front panel of the elevator dinged at each floor, a low electronic chirp that was designed to be pleasing and unobtrusive. Each twitter set Ken’s teeth on edge, made him want to tear the circuitry out by its roots in order to shut down the sound.

  4 (ding)... 5 (ding)... 6 (ding)....

  Dorcas’ hand tightened against Ken’s right arm. The hand that held him was strong, though her other hand hung from the end of a makeshift sling, broken during a zombie attack. Aaron had a handful of broken fingers and a dislocated thumb. Ken had had to cut off the pinkie and ring fingers of his own hand in order to escape an attack.

  Everyone was injured. Broken. Beaten down.

  7 (ding)....

  Only Christopher looked fine. Better than fine. He looked like a cover model, stopped for a latte break and helping out with the zombie apocalypse for a few minutes until the photographer called him back on set.

  8 (ding)....

  “Get ready,” said Aaron.

  Christopher nodded. Ken did, too, though he wondered what they would do to get ready. Aaron had a gun, but it only had two bullets. Other than that the party was weaponless. And even if they each had an assault rifle and full body armor, Ken didn’t know what that would do against hordes of seemingly indestructible attackers. Nothing seemed to stop the things. Even major head trauma didn’t slow them down; just sent them into an indiscriminate rage that would have them attacking anything that moved – including each other.

  The elevator dinged. The final floor.

  Ken closed his eyes for a moment. He said a silent prayer. Imagined Maggie’s face. The smiles of Derek, Hope, and Liz.

  Please let them be alive. Or let them be dead.

  Just not things. Not zombies.

  The elevator doors opened.

  2

  THE ELEVATOR OPENED to a corridor. Just a blank wall. Normal, save only for the thick smear of brown-red-black that trailed down its middle.

  Christopher stepped forward, clearly intending to move into the hallway. Aaron grabbed him.

  “Stop,” the cowboy said. It was barely a whisper. The kind of speech Ken associated with survival.

  Christopher halted. The four people in the elevator were silent. Ken couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. They were held in a momentary stasis, an instant before the future hit them with its usual freight-train momentum.

  What if Maggie’s gone? The kids?

  “Okay,” breathed the cowboy.

  Christopher stepped out of the elevator cab.

  He looked to his left and right, and Ken saw him grow pale.

  “What?” said Ken.

  Christopher turned around. Fast. Like he didn’t want Ken coming out.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t –” he began.

  Ken stepped out of the elevator.

  And felt a scream tear loose from his throat.

  3

  AARON’S GOOD HAND CLAMPED over Ken’s mouth, stopping the scream before more than a whimper came out. Then the cowboy leaned over and retched. None of them had eaten since this all started, since the world ended. There was nothing in the man’s stomach. But he dry-heaved as though his body was trying to expel the very memory of what he was seeing at either end of the corridor, only about twenty feet away from the elevators.

  Two solid walls. Not of brick and mortar, not of plaster or wood.

  Bodies.

  It looked like every single person on this floor had run for the elevator at the same time. And every single person had fallen prey to whatever had turned the world upside down.

  The hall was blocked at either end by a solid plug of corpses, bodies and body parts ripped limb from limb and then piled atop each other haphazardly like a madman’s version of an Erector set. Heads, arms, legs, trunks. Entire bodies shredded and then stuffed into place.

  “Wh
at...?” Dorcas’ voice was soft. So soft, like the vision of death in the still-lit corridor had somehow stolen away the very years she had lived. Had turned her into a little girl, shying away from thunder and whimpering at the vision of lightning in the sky.

  Humanity’s defenses had been stripped off. All pretenses of civilization pulled away, and not even their dead were sacrosanct. Even humanity’s holiest objects had been rendered profane. The monsters had come for them.

  “What do we do?” said Christopher.

  No one spoke. The lights above them flickered, and Ken wondered what would happen if the lights failed – as they would have to do eventually – while they were stuck here between the bodies of the dead.

  He was shaking. His head ached, his back hurt where he had twisted it earlier, the bones of his left leg felt like white-hot pincers were clamped against them every few inches.

  His absent fingers, the ones he had hacked off himself, ached. He missed his wedding ring.

  He walked toward the wall of bodies on his right.

  He reached out and grabbed a stiff hand. Pulled it away from the wall of the dead.

  A moment later Dorcas and Christopher joined him and they started to dig through the bodies.

  Aaron waited a moment. He had been standing halfway in the elevator cab, and now he looked around and spotted something in the hall: a small aluminum trash can. He stomped it flat, then wedged it in the track of the elevator. Ken saw Christopher eyeing the older man.

  “We don’t want anything surprising us from behind,” said the cowboy. “And better to have the elevator available when we want it.”

  Christopher nodded and resumed digging.

  They pulled bodies and dismembered bits away. Piled them along the corners of the hall. Ken tried very hard not to think about what he was doing. And failed miserably.

  He wondered what he would do if one of the hands he touched turned out to be small. Soft. The hand of a child. A hand he recognized.

  He kept digging.

  4

  SLOW GOING.

  It was harder than Ken would have thought. Partly because it was just emotionally taxing to grab ahold of a piece of what had once been a person, to pull it out of a pile of other pieces. To drag it behind you and try not to think of what you were doing, of the reality of what was happening.

  Part of it was because everyone stopped every minute or so. Just stopped as one, no words spoken. Listening. Trying to hear the sound of thunder that would indicate one of the hordes of thousands of once-human killers that now ruled the world. Or perhaps listening for the growl, that otherworldly sound that the things made. As a single voice it was disquieting, a sound like someone gargling a mixture of gravel and razor blades. In a large chorus it had a strange power, a psychic effect that encouraged you to just give up, to give in and die.

  But there was also something else at work. Something making their job more difficult. At first Ken thought it was his imagination, this last obstacle – a literal wall of gore between him and a goal that he didn’t even know for sure still existed – just pushing him over the edge and making everything seem harder than it really was.

  Until Dorcas grunted. “What the...?” she said. As with all words in this place that was bookended by death, the words were whispered. And as with all the words thus far, even whispered they seemed far too loud. Ken felt like they were screaming in a church. Any life here had become an obscenity.

  The dead ruled this place. The living were interlopers. Were profane.

  “What is it?” said Christopher. Even his ever-present smile had waned in the gory environment, though he had somehow managed to keep his clothing less spattered with filth than should be possible.

  Dorcas hesitated. Then she held out the piece of former humanity – now reduced to so much ghastly masonry – that she had yanked out of the crumbling wall of death. “What is this stuff?” she said.

  The others moved closer. Ken wanted to keep pulling at the bodies at this end of the corridor. He knew that taking a break was a bad idea; that if he stopped, getting started again would be that much harder.

  But he did stop. He looked with the rest.

  Dorcas was holding an arm. It looked like it had once belonged to a woman. The long, elegant arm of a woman in her twenties or thirties. Thin and beautiful. Fingers with several rings. Arm covered in a once-tailored suit sleeve that had been shredded.

  The shoulder ended in a stump. It glistened. But not with blood. A pus-yellow substance coated the end of the arm, the flickering lights above them reflecting dully off the waxy patina.

  Christopher reached out to touch it. Aaron stopped him. Grabbed the kid’s hand. “Don’t,” said the cowboy.

  “What?” said Christopher. “It might be important.”

  “So you’re just going to stick your finger in it?” said Aaron. “You remember that thing that puked acid before we came up here?”

  Christopher stopped. But only for a moment. Then he poked the yellow substance. Dorcas yipped in sympathy, as though expecting his finger to melt off.

  Christopher grinned. “Nothing ventured.” He removed his finger, touching it with his thumb. “Tacky,” he said. “Feels like....” He searched for the words. “Wet Play-Doh?”

  “What do you think it’s for?” asked Dorcas.

  Aaron shrugged. The older man turned around and grabbed the next piece of the wall of body parts. Another hand.

  And he screamed, a strange scream that he bit off, muffled it the way they were all learning to do, the way they were learning they had to do in order to survive.

  But the rest of the survivors heard.

  They turned.

  Ken saw what had scared the normally imperturbable cowboy.

  Saw the hand that Aaron had grabbed.

  The hand that was moving.

  5

  KEN STUMBLED BACK FROM the movement, falling into Dorcas and Christopher even as Aaron backpedaled as well.

  And what remained of the wall of the dead collapsed.

  There was a crackling sound that reminded Ken of ice crunching underfoot on a winter day, and then the bodies that had been so hard to pull apart only a moment ago just seemed to... drift like so many snowflakes caught in a windstorm.

  All that was left was the hand. Still moving. Attached to a middle-aged man who stood in the place just beyond the wall. The man was dressed in the ragged remains of a gray business suit. Expensive-looking glasses hung askew from his blue face.

  His chest and arms were coated in the waxy substance that Dorcas had just found.

  He looked at the survivors. And even without seeing the bite marks that seemed to glow like brands along his neck and the right part of his jaw, Ken would have been able to tell from the look in the thing’s eyes.

  It wasn’t a man at all. Not anymore.

  The four survivors froze. Running for the elevator was out of the question: even if they got inside, there was no way they could get the doors closed and get the thing moving before the zombie was on them. And a single bite would end the struggle.

  “Think we can take it?” whispered Christopher. Ken didn’t look, but suspected the kid was still smiling. Only this would be a death-grin, the kind of smile worn by a man about to kill or be killed.

  “Let’s hope so,” said Aaron. “There’s just one.”

  The thing in the suit held up its arms. It made a strange sound. Not the growl that Ken was used to. More of a cross between a dentist’s drill and something you might hear during a recording of exotic birds. Loud and thoroughly unpleasant.

  An instant later, ten more of the things shuffled into the hall.

  6

  ALL OF THEM PUSHED into the corridor, the flickering lights making them appear at once ghostly and all-too-solid. Six men and four women joined the original business-suited thing.

  They all made that same strange chirping.

  Dorcas started whimpering. A noise that Ken didn’t expect from her, not from the woman who had sav
ed his butt repeatedly. But then, she’d never been pushed up against a wall of corpses, facing certain death – or worse – like this.

  The things stepped toward them. As with other groups of the things, these moved in a coordinated fashion. Not lockstep or synchronized, but they never bumped into each other either. They seemed to be aware on some level beyond sight or sound where each of their fellows were and would be.

  Aaron pulled out his gun. A .357 Magnum with two bullets. The draw was a bit awkward since he had to pull it with his left hand and it was set for a right-handed draw.

  Aaron looked at Ken, and Ken saw in his eyes the question: “Are you brave enough to face them?”

  Ken nodded minutely. He knew what the cowboy was saying, what he was asking.

  Aaron turned to Dorcas. He smiled to her. “Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was soft. Not just quiet, but soft. The cowboy sounded like a father saying good night to a sick child. Like a husband saying goodbye to a beloved wife.

  He clicked back the hammer.

  Dorcas pulled her gaze away from the approaching beasts long enough to see what Aaron had in his hands. To see what he had in his mind.

  Ken saw her shake her head.

  Then the motion turned to a nod. Acceptance. Better to die than to become one of the things.

  Aaron pointed the gun at her.

  Ken wondered who would get the last of the two remaining bullets. He supposed it would be Christopher. He thought that was what Aaron’s look had meant: an old-fashioned request to let the women and children go free. Even if the children were simply the young men, and the only freedom available was the promise of quick death.

  Dorcas closed her eyes. A trace of a smile played along her lips. She looked at peace.

  Aaron’s trigger finger clenched.

  7