The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Of course, that was before they added six more people to their group. Several of them drugged. Three of them children.

  Shut up, Ken. Just look.

  He looked. Rushed to the window and pressed his face against the glass. He couldn’t see anything but the reflections of the gray woman and her gray son, standing there and staring at him like they were irritated he hadn’t come better equipped to handle the situation. There wasn’t a good angle to see anything on the outside face of the building.

  The building shuddered again. More violently this time, fairly rocking on its foundation. Maggie had to lean on the web-covered desk, Derek and Hope fell into their mother for support. Christopher and Dorcas weaved on their feet. The gray mother and son pair went down in a pile, both complaining about the weight of the other on legs and arms.

  Only Aaron didn’t seem to notice the impossible tremor, simply stabbing another piece of wood through the disintegrating door as though hoping to pin the reaching zombies in place.

  Ken spun. Picked up a chair. He swung it as hard as he could. It went through the office window and kept going, careening through with the pealing crash of glass shearing apart. The window sailed away.

  “What the hell are you doing?” shouted the gray man, still writhing under his mother on the floor. “You got glass all over me!” He was a big man, tall and broad and solidly-built, but he sounded like a spoiled child who had just been told his party was over early.

  A sound came through the now-open space. Deep. Thrumming.

  The building rolled again.

  Ken leaned out. Looked to his right. His heart sank.

  There was no way to get out. Nothing to cling to. No footholds, no handholds. Just sheer concrete and glass.

  Behind him, the door to the office sounded like it was about to fall apart completely.

  “We gotta do something!” shouted Dorcas.

  Ken looked left. His heart caught in his throat.

  He looked down. And his heart stopped.

  19

  “YOU’RE KIDDING.”

  Maggie didn’t scream the words. Ken almost would have preferred it if she had. Instead, they came as a whisper when he explained what they were going to do – what they all had to do.

  Boise had been undergoing “improvements” to its downtown area for the last few years – between five and fifty, depending on whether you asked someone who was paying attention, or one of the old-timers who just liked to bitch about things. Traffic that had once been sparse at all times of the day and night, even in the most crowded parts of the downtown area, had grown congested as it was rerouted to avoid construction areas. Scaffolding had sprouted like skeletal fungus, protecting construction workers from traffic, and vice versa.

  The Wells Fargo Center they were in had been undergoing some kind of construction. A crane that was anchored somewhere in the street far below and extended beyond the top floor had been moving house-sized pieces of steel and concrete for weeks. In the first minutes of the change, the first moments when everything ended, something had blown up at the base of the crane. It tilted, then slammed into the side of the building.

  Now it was still hung up against the face of the high-rise, slung at a drunken angle as though even the inanimate objects of the old world were in a state of shock about what had happened around them. The many supports and braces of the tower crawled like a ladder up the side of the building, extending past the top level.

  The bottom was engulfed in smoke, a smoldering fire still barely-visible within the billowing clouds of black.

  The working jib, the long arm of the crane, extended across 9th Street, hanging like a bridge over toward what was left of a ruined building. Touching, or almost touching....

  “You think we can make it?” said Christopher.

  “We don’t have a lot of choice.” Dorcas looked at the tower, and Ken knew she was wondering what he was: if the crossbars were close enough to jump to from the window. If someone with one good hand could climb up a good sixty feet, then another hundred feet across the jib, then over to the ruined remains of the One Capital Center. Assuming the jib even extended it that far.

  And could they make it with children holding on? Ken knew she was thinking that, too, because her eyes kept flicking over to Derek and Hope. Not Liz: the baby was still knocked out – he hoped – in the sling on Maggie’s chest. But the other kids.

  “I... I can’t,” said Maggie. “I can’t go up.”

  The zombie at the door had its head all the way through. Its shoulders. The door was seconds away from cracking in half.

  Ken sighed. “We have to.”

  “Why can’t we climb down?”

  No one else had seen it yet. No one else had noticed.

  The building shuddered. Dorcas, still looking out the window at the tower, finally looked down.

  She gasped.

  20

  DORCAS TURNED AWAY from the window. She didn’t say what she had seen. And Ken was grateful for that. “I’ll go first,” she said.

  “Like hell,” said a voice. The new guy. The gray-haired man. He was a fairly big guy, maybe six-foot-two and stocky to boot, but he jumped quickly to the window, elbowing Dorcas out of the way.

  “Wait for me, Buck!” said the guy’s mother.

  Ken thought, Buck? The guy seemed more like a Sherman or a Eugene than a Buck.

  Buck grabbed his mother with one hand and a web-covered chair with his other, stepping up onto the chair and then from there to the sill. His eyes widened.

  “What’s... what’s...,” he stammered. He was looking down.

  Buck’s mother was more direct. She just screamed.

  Maggie started toward the window. Ken stopped her. “You don’t need to see what’s there. We just need to get going.” He looked at Buck. “If you’re going, go. If not, get out of the way!”

  Buck looked over his shoulder at Ken, terror and irritation warring on his features, then he and his mother jumped out the window. There was a thud a moment later. Clanks.

  The building rumbled again. This time the tremor didn’t stop. It just kept moving through the entire building, looping rolls that made it hard to stay standing.

  “How are we going to take the kids?” whispered Maggie.

  “I’ll take the girl,” said Christopher, stepping forward. “You’ve got the baby.”

  Maggie started to protest. Ken cut her off with a gesture. “He’s right. I’ll take Derek, he takes Hope. You take Liz. The others are working with one good hand each, so they can’t do it.”

  “Is he...?” Maggie’s voice drifted off.

  It didn’t matter. Ken knew what she was trying to say. “You can trust him with Hope,” he said. “You can trust Christopher with her life.” He turned to Derek and said, “Can you hold tight to me, champ?” Derek nodded. “Okay. We’re gonna go climbing. Don’t look down.”

  “I won’t.”

  The door shattered. Snarls – multiple growls – rammed their way into the room.

  “Go!” shouted Aaron. “Go now!”

  21

  KEN YANKED DEREK UPWARD, and at the same instant Derek’s arms wrapped around his neck in a death grip, so tightly he would have worried about suffocation if he hadn’t already been holding his breath.

  The door fell to pieces. Completely. Utterly. Only the remains of the huge conference table between the beasts and the survivors kept them alive.

  Ken propelled Maggie toward the window as Christopher picked up Hope and slung the six-year-old over his shoulder. She started screaming, kicking. Not understanding what was happening, still half-dazed from the effects of whatever had been done to her.

  And Ken had to ignore it. He was only one man, there just wasn’t enough him to do more than what he was already doing. He had to trust Christopher to save his daughter.

  He shoved his wife out the window. Barely a moment to let her get her grip on the sill, get balanced.

  She jumped.

  She screamed in mid-
air. Not because of the jump – the crane tower was only a few short feet to the left of the window, an easy jump even with an unconscious toddler strapped to you. He didn’t even think it was because of the heights involved. They were on the ninth floor, easily one hundred and twenty-five feet above the ground. More. But that wasn’t the frightening thing.

  Not frightening at all. Not compared to what was happening. Not compared to the thing that had caused the building to rumble.

  Ken and Christopher went to the window next, both of them squeezing into the opening. He glanced at the young man, once the son of Idaho’s governor, now just another person running a series of wind sprints against the Grim Reaper himself.

  The kid had settled Hope into a death-lock under one arm. Holding her so tightly she could barely move.

  “Thank you,” Ken mouthed.

  Christopher nodded.

  Something shoved them from behind. A not-too-subtle reminder that the zombies were in the room. That Dorcas and Aaron needed to get out, too.

  Something scraped behind them. There was a scream, what Ken guessed was the sound of someone shoving the remains of the conference table against two dozen surging zombies.

  Ken and Christopher jumped.

  They hit the crane’s tower with twin thuds. Ken was holding his son with his bad hand, the one that was missing two fingers. Agony speared up through his wrist and his arm. His other arm felt only marginally better, the impact making his shoulder feel like it was on the verge of twisting out of its socket.

  “Daddy, I can hold on,” said Derek.

  Ken looked at his son. The boy didn’t wait for an answer, just spun around Ken’s midsection like he was on the jungle gym at the playground. Then his hands went around Ken’s neck again. “Gotcha,” said his son. He could almost hear the kid smiling. “Don’t cry,” shouted Derek, and Ken realized his son was trying to cheer up Hope. “The man looks nice!”

  “I don’t like it!” shrieked the little girl. “Who are they?”

  Ken began climbing, and could tell from the vibrations in the steel that Christopher was doing the same. He looked up and saw Maggie scaling the tower right above him.

  Buck and his mother were nowhere to be seen. He didn’t know if they had fallen or were just far ahead. He didn’t care, either.

  Twin thuds. Twin tremors. Ken looked down and saw Dorcas and Aaron. Dorcas almost fell, screaming as she landed straight on her broken arm. Aaron threaded his own good arm through a crossbar and then grabbed her tank top. It stretched, almost tore.

  Then Aaron grunted and yanked her back to the tower. They started to climb. Each of them one-handed.

  Hope was still shrieking.

  “It’s okay,” said Derek again.

  “I don’t like it!” screamed Hope.

  “The man looks nice!” shouted Derek.

  “Not him, them!”

  Don’t look, Derek, thought Ken. Don’t look down. Don’t look at what Hope is seeing.

  But the boy did. Ken could tell he looked, because his son’s breath suddenly sped up.

  He didn’t scream. Derek wasn’t a screamer, not unless his loved ones were hurt. But Ken knew his son was terrified.

  Because he had seen what was coming for them.

  22

  KEN HAD NOTED THAT the things, the zombies, moved as if connected. Aware of one another. They seemed to be more complete when near others of their kind, to the point that when he and Dorcas had been surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of the things while on top of a storage building, he had thought they almost seemed like one single organism. Like each zombie wasn’t its own creature, but rather a single cell of a larger monster.

  Now he saw that even more clearly. Looking down from over a hundred feet, watching as what looked like most of the population of Boise swarmed to the base of the Wells Fargo Center.

  It had to be two hundred thousand of the things.

  Nor did they stop at the bottom of the building. The tremors that the group had been feeling weren’t what it felt like when a coordinated horde of two hundred thousand zombies mobbed the base of the building. No, it was the feeling when they were climbing up the building.

  Ken didn’t know how it was possible. But then, he didn’t know how the zombies could be producing acids that ate through wood, concrete, even steel. He didn’t know how they could be spinning webs. He didn’t know how beating their brains out could seem to simply enrage them. How the things could exist in the first place.

  It was all impossible.

  And there they were. Scaling the side of the Wells Fargo Center, screaming and growling, the sounds of their cries grinding into Ken’s mind, calling to him. It was harder and harder to keep climbing. He wanted to let go.

  Only the weight of his son around his neck kept him going. Only his family kept him from giving up.

  He glanced down as something hit the crane. Hundreds of the zombies were flinging themselves through the smoke that obscured the base of the massive machine. They erupted like demons from the worst parts of hell. Smoke clung to them like a garment, and some of the creatures were actually on fire.

  They didn’t seem to notice or care.

  More of the things clambered up the side of the building. Snarling, spitting, growling. Thousands and thousands coming at Ken and the other survivors. Hundreds more coming up the crane’s tower, leaping from bar to bar, from strut to strut.

  He wondered if it was possible for too many people to be on a building; what would happen if too much weight fell against the already-stressed crane.

  The things were fast. Faster than the survivors. Much faster.

  There was a ripping sound. The crane had been hung up on the side of the Wells Fargo Center, stuck at an angle and clearly at least partially separated from whatever tethers had once kept it upright and stable.

  Now it started to slip across the face of the building.

  It started to fall.

  23

  THE NOISE THAT CAME from the combination of metal scraping across concrete and the metal itself twisting and bending was by far the loudest thing Ken could remember hearing. Louder even than the explosions that had gone off nearby and – in some cases – right on top of him. It was loud enough that it even drowned out the sound of the throngs of zombies that were yanking themselves bodily up the crane and the sides of the high-rise toward him and the others.

  The crane tipped. Vibrating as it shredded along the side of the building. And Ken couldn’t think about holding onto Derek, couldn’t think about Hope or Liz or Maggie. All he could think about was clamping his fingers around the nearest pieces of metal, circling his legs around the closest crossbars.

  Praying.

  The crane tilted. Shrieked. Stuttered to a stop. Shrieked and began tilting again. Moving toward 9th Street. Ken had been almost upright a moment ago, and now he was holding on at a seventy-degree angle. Still upright, still closer to vertical than horizontal, but being like this somehow made the crane seem like an even more precarious place to be.

  It jerked and stopped moving.

  Ken realized that Derek was still holding on to his neck, screaming in fear, the sudden movement of the thing that constituted their entire world wrenching terror shrieks from the boy.

  But the screams were music. His boy was still here. Still safe. And maybe... maybe the shift had bought them some time.

  He looked down. Hoping that some of the things had fallen, that they had lost speed at the very least.

  They were still close. So close.

  And then something above made a sound.

  “Help!” Ken’s overwrought brain registered that it was Maggie, but only barely. He was running on empty – physically, emotionally, mentally. It seemed to take everything he had just to look up.

  Just to crane his neck.

  Just in time to see his wife fall.

  24

  “MAGGIE!”

  She hung for a second, probably less. But time is one of the indicators that who
ever is behind the universe is a madman. The entirety of Ken’s week-long honeymoon had only seemed to last minutes. The first years of his children’s lives had come and gone in an eyeblink.

  But the time he had had an infected tooth in Chile and couldn’t find anyone to take care of it... three days that had lasted years. The night that Hope had had a fever that hit one hundred and five degrees before doctors managed to get her temperature under control... a lifetime.

  And now, watching for the half-second before his wife let go, he felt himself grow old and die five times, ten times, a thousand times.

  Then the eternal second finally – mercifully – ended. Her hands let go of the crossbar that they had been holding onto.

  She fell.

  Not straight down. The crane was at an angle, and she didn’t plummet between the massive support beams that the survivors had been using as a ladder. Instead she slid down, falling past Ken and Christopher with a scream, twisting –

  (Protecting the baby, she’s falling on her back to protect the baby but now she can’t grab onto anything, dear God, Mags, turn around!)

  – so she was face-up, reaching for Ken as she slid past him. He reached for her. Too slow.

  Christopher tried to grab her as well. Missed. Hope screamed, “Mommeeeeee!” the final syllable seeming to trail after the little girl’s mother as Maggie plummeted downward.

  She careened past Dorcas, who was watching with an agonized look on her face, clearly wishing she could do something. But the older woman could barely hold herself onto the steel frame that had become so ephemeral beneath them, let alone grab another person.

  Then....

  “Oof!”

  The sound of bodies hitting, of wind thumping out of lungs, was audible. Painful.

  Aaron had somehow jumped down and over. Putting himself in the path of Maggie’s fall. She collided with him, her legs smashing into his shoulders, then rolling over him in a strangely balletic move before continuing down.