The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  “Wait!”

  The voice spun Ken around like a top. He expected to hear the deafening blast of Aaron’s gun discharging, the sound of Dorcas’ brains exploding through the already-defiled hallway.

  But there was nothing. No sound. Aaron must have caught himself. Waited on Christopher’s shouted word.

  One of the things had reached the kid. It had leaned in. Its teeth were chittering, snapping as though attacking the air itself. Christopher held so still he almost appeared to be a statue.

  The zombie before him – a woman in a skirt and blouse that were so bright red they seemed offensively out of place – leaned in even closer.

  And did not bite him.

  She bent over. Picked up a dismembered leg. She coughed. The last time Ken had heard that ugly, gagging cough, the zombie doing it had vomited a black acid that had melted concrete. He tensed, waiting for Christopher to be splashed with the tarry substance, waiting for the young man to start screaming.

  It didn’t happen.

  Instead, the red-garbed monster vomited up a slick yellow substance. Ken realized that the thing had it all over the front of her clothes. Just like the first one they had found in the corridor. And, he saw, just like the other zombies that had crowded into this space.

  The woman rubbed the end of the leg in the yellowy bile and then lay it on the floor before turning away, looking for another gory building block.

  Ken realized that the yellow was some kind of biological mortar.

  The things were building.

  But what?

  And why weren’t they attacking him and his friends?

  “We should go,” said Christopher.

  Ken was torn. He needed to find his family.

  But there was bravery... and there was suicide.

  He turned back to the elevator. Dorcas turned with him. They both stepped together, as synchronized as the monsters all around them.

  And the zombies growled.

  Ken froze. He looked behind him. The original monster, the one in the gray suit, was now staring right at him and Dorcas. Eyes looking at and through them both. Madness and rage battling for supremacy in its gaze. Ken waited for it to attack.

  A moment later, it returned its gaze to the body it was trying to pull back into place.

  Ken took another step toward the elevator.

  Another growl. He looked back again. This time it wasn’t just the gray-suited zombie, but more than half of the things that had crammed their way into the hall.

  “I don’t think they want us to leave,” said Christopher.

  8

  CHRISTOPHER WAVED, gesturing for the others to follow him as he began walking down the corridor, threading his way between the eleven zombies that were now hiccupping and puking that waxy substance all over the place, using it as an adhesive to begin rebuilding the wall that Ken and the others had torn down.

  After walking a few feet, Ken realized that the beasts had shifted subtly. Before, they had been simply working to rebuild the wall of corpses. They were still doing so, but had moved down the hall toward the elevator. Building so the wall would be between the survivors and the elevator.

  Cutting them off.

  Ken caught Dorcas’ eye. Her jaw was clenched. No longer whimpering, back under control like the tough farm girl he had always taken her to be, but clearly unhappy about this new development.

  The things kept working. Every so often one of them would make that weird chirping sound. Ken couldn’t tell if it was an unconscious noise or a communication.

  Then the beasts all stopped moving.

  The survivors halted as well, as though their muscles had been intertwined with those of the beasts in the hallway.

  The zombies raised their faces heavenward. Their mouths opened and they started breathing in time, panting.

  In-out-in-out-in-out....

  Ken had seen this, too. Each time it got shorter. Like a countdown.

  This time the pause barely lasted ten seconds. And when it was over something different happened. Something new. And new was always bad.

  The zombies shook their heads. Not like a person might do upon waking from a pleasant nap. No, they whipped their heads back and forth so violently it was like they were trying to shake their skulls free. Several of them started slamming their faces into the nearest walls, hitting so hard that the brittle crunch of breaking bones could be heard.

  Ken braced for the madness that came whenever one of the beasts suffered head injury. It didn’t come. The things all stopped moving again. Simultaneously. Completely. Ken wondered if the things everywhere in the city, the state – the world – were similarly silent.

  Then they moved. They went back to rebuilding their structure of bodies as though nothing had happened, vomiting up the glue-like substance and sticking pieces of what had once been people together in a wall that crept ever higher.

  “I don’t think we should be here when they finish,” said Aaron.

  “Yeah,” said Christopher.

  They walked the rest of the way down the hall. It ended in a T-intersection, allowing them to move to the right or the left.

  “Which way?” said Dorcas.

  Ken looked around. He didn’t know.

  Then he heard the scream.

  9

  THERE IS NO WAY TO explain some things. No way to explain what it feels like to hold a new baby in your arms. No way to explain the joy of a new life.

  There is also no way to explain the ache that takes hold of your heart when you hear one of your children cry in pain.

  Derek broke his elbow when he was five. Nothing critical, just the typical little kid things that happen to everyone. Just a wrong move on a new bicycle. A moment in time that divided perfection from pain. One moment he was smiling, the next he was screaming.

  Ken was home. It was summer. He saw it happen, and all he could think when it happened was how much he wished he had been working. Because the look on his boy’s face was too much to bear. The look of pain – of real pain for the first time – coupled with the unspoken question, “Daddy, why did this happen? Why did you let this happen?”

  Ken would rather have broken his own elbow than suffered through that moment for another instant.

  Derek forgot about it. He was up riding his bike again the next day, trundling along in a bright purple cast that he seemed to pick precisely because it clashed with his red bike helmet. But Ken didn’t forget. That scream became something that he heard in his dreams. The thing that signified the dangers of parenthood, the moments when you found that your children were vulnerable to the world.

  It was that scream that told Ken that his children were as mortal as he. That they could be hurt. Could be killed.

  It was the scream he heard now.

  He ran to the right. The others pounded down the hall after him, but he was in the lead. And that was right. It was the way it had to be.

  He had to get there first.

  He was the daddy.

  There were doors on either side of the hall. Some were closed, others were open. A few were missing: ripped off their moorings by hands far more powerful than they should have been. Blood stained the walls, but there were no bodies anywhere: all the corpses seemed to have been moved to the area near the elevators.

  Ken ran past everything. The scream didn’t repeat, but he ran without question for the door at the end of the hall. It had to be that one.

  That was the one that was sealed. Not by locks or bolts.

  No, it was covered by a thick curtain of that same tacky secretion. That yellow wax that the things in the halls were using.

  Another scream.

  Ken’s child. Alive. Beyond the door.

  And in pain.

  10

  KEN’S OWN INJURIES and agonies disappeared.

  There was nothing but the sound.

  Before, when the zombies had come together in masses, their growls had made him and the others want to lay down and quit. To give up and die
. He had thought that was the most devastating thing he would ever hear.

  He was wrong.

  The high-pitched trill of Derek’s scream was worse. The scream of a little boy in extremis tore Ken’s own aches and pains away in an instant. He bounded down the hall and was at the doorway full seconds ahead of the others. Pounding against the waxy substance with his hands, even the handkerchief-bound hand that ended in three fingers instead of five. Slamming at the tacky, glue-like secretion all over the door.

  He left red streaks behind. He knew he should feel it, should feel the pain of one more attack against an already overburdened system. But he felt nothing.

  “Derek!” he screamed.

  “Daddy!” The call came back even higher than before. As though hearing his father’s voice had not provided peace, but rather an increase of terror.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

  But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t get a purchase on the slick wall of waxy mucus left behind by the monsters that had God-knew-what planned for his children.

  Whump.

  Something slammed into the substance beside Ken’s head. He looked over as it was drawn back.

  It was Christopher. The kid had found a tall, cylindrical trash can somewhere and was ramming it into the yellowish wall. Pieces of the secretion came off in flakes, then chunks, then sheets.

  “Shit.”

  The word was whispered, but intense. Intense enough that it even managed to pull a grief- and terror-stricken father away from his single-minded task, if only for a moment.

  Ken looked over his shoulder.

  Whump. Whump. Whump. Christopher kept driving the trash can into the yellowed wall. A door began to emerge. Solid-looking, save for the glass window on the top where the words “Law Firm of Stacy Gomberg, Attorney At Law” could be vaguely made out, stenciled in gold lettering.

  Whump. Whump.

  Aaron and Dorcas had turned around. Facing behind them down the hall. Aaron still had his gun drawn, and had pulled the woman behind him in a gesture – useless – of protection.

  The hall beyond the two was choked with zombies. All of them emitting that bizarre trill.

  And walking toward them.

  “Daddy!” screamed Derek from beyond the door. “Daddy, Mommy won’t wake up!”

  11

  BEFORE, THE THINGS in the hall had seemed almost unaware of the survivors. Focused solely on rebuilding their wall of bodies, on the grisly task of shutting off this part of the building.

  Now, though, all of them were clearly staring at Ken and his friends. The madness was there, the rage simmering behind half-shuttered eyes. Something held them in check, but he didn’t know what it was, or how long they would refrain from attacking.

  And it didn’t matter. There had to be more than thirty of the things crowded into the hall just a few feet beyond Aaron and Dorcas. No escape if they attacked.

  “Daddy!”

  “I’m coming!”

  Ken turned back to the door. Peeling back immense shards of the substance that the things had vomited forth. Yanking it away from the door like half-dried plaster. Some of it stuck to his fingers, gummed up under his nails, and he wondered if he would ever be able to scrub his hands hard enough or long enough to make them feel clean again. He suspected not.

  He also wondered if the stuff could be toxic. It had to be getting into his bloodstream, through the still seeping stumps at the end of his left hand. What if it infected him?

  What if he changed?

  The thought was enough to make him pause for a second. But only a second. Only long enough to think of the few people he had seen bitten. They had changed instantly. Human one second, and something terribly different – both more and less – in the next.

  So no. He wasn’t infected. He believed that. He had to believe that.

  And there’s nothing I can do about it at this point.

  He pulled away another flaky, leprous mass of the resin.

  Behind it was the doorknob.

  He touched it.

  The trilling of the creatures behind him went up in volume. Expectant. Excited.

  Hungry.

  “Daddy?”

  His boy’s voice sounded weaker. Terrified, anxious. Giving up.

  Ken turned the knob.

  12

  KEN WENT TO SOUTH AMERICA with his church group one summer. They visited six different countries in three months, twenty teenagers out to do good and three church leaders who – looking back – Ken was certain were mostly hoping no one died or ended up pregnant. Because sometimes achieving goodness ran a close second to the basic necessities of civilization.

  Ken understood the trip was a great success. Houses were built. Wells were dug. Some lives were genuinely changed.

  The things Ken mostly remembered, though, were the amazing case of diarrhea he picked up in Brazil, and the spiders that almost picked him up in Paraguay.

  Paraguay, he understood from his reading, was basically a nothing place. The only landlocked country in South America. Lots of poverty. It had once been a technological and economic power of South America, and had even boasted the first steam-powered locomotive. But decades of political mismanagement had crushed the economy and the people, and over a century later that locomotive was still in use as basic transportation while other countries in South America were using diesel and electric trains.

  Still, that made it perfect for a charity trip. Many people were in need. And a hundred dollars could feed a family for a month.

  Ken went in with his friends. They built, they dug, they sweated in the hundred-degree-plus heat. They cowered from torrential rainstorms that came out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast as they had come.

  And Ken made the mistake of going for a quick walk.

  He just wanted to see what was in the foliage. Something had moved. He thought it might be a monkey – he had a strange desire to see a wild monkey – and followed the movement into the thick trees.

  A moment later the sounds of his friends faded. He barely noticed. He was too entranced by the new world in which he had found himself.

  It was sunset. The pinkest light he had ever seen picked its way through broad leaves, piercing air so thick and wet it felt like he was swimming all the time. He watched it set, not realizing he was walking toward it, not realizing he was following the setting sun like it was some sort of will-o’-the-wisp.

  And then the spider dropped into view.

  Not a big one. Just a small thing, the size of Ken’s thumbnail, dark brown and curling around a filament that extended up into nothing. But it was followed by another.

  And another.

  And another.

  Ken looked around. He saw more of the spiders. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions.

  He had somehow wandered into a web of a size greater than anything he had ever heard of. It had to be thirty feet long, thirty feet high, thirty feet deep. And every inch or two was another spider.

  They seemed to be swarming toward him.

  Ken screamed. He dropped to his belly and did his best army crawl back the way he had come. Shrieking back into the area where his friends were taking a Coke break and talking about quitting for the night.

  They laughed at his story. Until they saw the web. Then they stopped laughing.

  Their local guide shrugged. He mumbled something in the local dialect, then told them in halting English that Ken was in no danger, the spiders made “happy tents” but left people alone.

  Ken did not believe him. He dreamed of spiders for weeks.

  But he never thought he would see a web like it again. Certainly not in the middle of a high-rise in downtown Boise.

  He stepped into the room. Silken strands brushed against his arm.

  “Good hell,” said Christopher. Ken didn’t look, but he was fairly sure the kid was referring to what was in front of them.

  “Oh, shit,” said Dorcas. Ken didn’t look at her, either, but he was fairly sure she was talking
about what was behind them.

  The zombies in the hall stopped trilling. They started growling.

  13

  “RUN!” AARON SHOUTED.

  Ken turned in time to see Dorcas and Aaron racing the last few yards to the attorney’s office. Screaming in terror. The three dozen monsters behind. Aaron was pushing Dorcas, propelling her forward, faster, faster.

  They ran into the room with Ken and Christopher.

  And everything stopped.

  Ken and Christopher were already motionless, held in a kind of mental stasis by what they had found in the room. Aaron and Dorcas seemed to be affected equally, halting only inches into the new area.

  And the zombies....

  They stopped just outside the doorway. Still snarling, still growling that awful growl.

  One of them – the very same gray-suited thing that Ken and the others had first run into – reached out. Ken felt like his skin was covered in ants, like it was trying to separate from his muscles and bones and leap to one side. But he still couldn’t move.

  Not with what was behind him.

  And his son... Derek was silent.

  The zombie reached out.

  Reached out... and grabbed the door. Swung it shut. The lettering “Law Firm of Stacy Gomberg, Attorney At Law” – now backwards – could be seen once more. So could dozens of shapes, dark forms leaning close.

  One of the things – probably Gray-Suit – leaned in. Even through the door, the sound of the gagging cough was enough to make Ken wish he was deaf. The thing vomited, and something splashed against Stacy Gomberg, Esq.’s, office door.

  More of the things clustered around the door. All of them gagging, coughing. Excreting.

  “They’re sealing us in,” said Dorcas.

  “Good times,” said Christopher.

  Ken turned away from them both. Because he heard Derek again.

  Somewhere in the office.

  Somewhere in the web.