The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  The others were safe. The monsters couldn’t reach them, either.

  The shaft was a good thirty feet square, with the survivors hanging pretty close to dead center of the space.

  Brightness again.

  “Move down!”

  It was Christopher’s voice. That surprised Ken. He had thought it would be Aaron. But of course, the cowboy wouldn’t have been able to climb up, not with only one good hand. So Christopher must have volunteered to come last. Must have gone back up.

  But for what?

  It didn’t matter. He was crying out for everyone to get moving again.

  Ken did, letting the cable he’d been holding onto with a death-grip start reeling out once more. He looked at Hope as the light bloomed around them again.

  She still said nothing. She just watched as the zombies flung themselves into void in their rabid attempts to destroy what hung in the shaft.

  Hope was mesmerized by the sight. She looked like Ken imagined a moth must look right before it threw itself headfirst into a candle, right before it erupted into a suicide of flame.

  She actually started leaning away.

  “No!” he shouted.

  She reached for one of the things.

  And it grabbed her hand.

  46

  KEN SAW IT UNFOLD, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing he was going to be able to do. The thing was going to either rip Hope away from him, or it was going to use her as an anchor to climb up and tear both of them apart.

  He honestly didn’t know which would be worse.

  A sound tore through the artificial night of the shaft. A tearing, rending noise. It sounded like a combination of thread unspooling on a sewing machine and meat being torn apart.

  Something hit the zombie in the face. A moment later, something hit Ken in the head.

  He almost lost his grip on the elevator cable. Almost forgot where he was for a moment. He’d fallen out of a two-story building today, hit his head on a freeway abutment, and concussed himself Heaven-only-knew how many times. This last was nearly the straw that broke him.

  He slid a few quick feet before the pain in his neck, the agony of metal cable fibers ripping at his throat, awoke him from the half-trance he had fallen into. His good hand clenched automatically and his fall arrested. He stopped.

  What had happened?

  Screams. Everyone – everything – was screaming.

  The monsters. The survivors. Hope was shrieking, reaching downward as though for a fallen toy.

  And he heard someone calling his name. “Ken! Ken, you okay?”

  Dimly, he realized that it was Dorcas. That she must have seen the monster jumping at him and had slid down the cable and kicked it in the face before it could grab Hope away from him. Her other foot must have caught him in the head.

  “Ken?”

  “Yeah!” He snapped the word. Realized he was sounding ungrateful to a woman who had just saved his life and that of his child, and tried to soften his tone. Not easy when your daughter is screaming bloody murder and trying to throw herself to her death while monsters toss themselves at you from every direction. Still, he managed somehow. “Yes. I’m okay. Thanks.”

  Her answer was typical Dorcas. Good-natured in a to-the-point sort of way. “You can thank me by getting your butt in gear.” She kicked at a falling zombie. The kick missed by a mile, but the motion seemed to make her feel better. It certainly made Ken feel better, knowing that the farm woman was as full of fight as ever and ready to protect him.

  He started going down again. “Where’d Christopher go?” he called as he dropped. Trying to ignore the monsters, trying to ignore how weird it was to be having this conversation, or any conversation, under these circumstances.

  Hope was still screaming. Still trying to jump away from him. He was finding it ever harder to hold onto her. What had happened to her?

  “Beats me,” shouted Dorcas. “How much farther down?”

  Ken tried to see below them. Darkness swallowed the shaft only a few yards under his feet. “I can’t tell.”

  “I hope it’s soon.”

  He didn’t like the tone of her voice. He looked up. Realizing at that instant that the things were no longer falling like screaming autumn leaves around them.

  And he saw why Dorcas sounded worried. And why he should be worried, too.

  47

  KEN HAD OBSERVED HOW the things seemed to function better when they were with others like them. How when they were in ones and twos and threes they seemed somehow more awkward, less fluid. As though what had changed them had stolen not merely their ability to speak and reason, but to be alone.

  As though they feared solitude.

  So he had seen them grow stronger, more agile, when they were with others. He had seen the zombies cluster around one another and then crawl over and crush one another so that they could create ramps of themselves, so that they could reach higher and higher in search of their prey.

  But he had never seen anything like this.

  At first he wasn’t even sure what it was he was seeing.

  Then he understood, and wished to God he could forget.

  One of the things scampered across the wall of the elevator shaft to where a piece of exposed metal had thrust through the concrete. It was jagged and sharp-looking, but the zombie didn’t seem to care. It grabbed onto the metal and then just hung there.

  Another zombie joined it a moment later. Running along the walls with that sickening plop-plop-plop as its fingers held, then let go, then held, then let go of the sheer surface of the shaft.

  The second zombie crawled along the length of the metal spear, then onto the first beast’s head and shoulders. It wrapped its arms around the other’s chest, its legs around the legs of the first. Both the monstrosities were nearly bereft of skin, flayed by their entry into the shaft, their flesh torn away by the edges of the too-small rift in the concrete. It was impossible to tell if the creatures were women or men – they were only things, just masses of wet muscle and bone in the permanent night of the shaft.

  Blood dripped off them in thick streams. It looked almost black. Ichorous. Ken couldn’t tell if that was a trick of the un-light of the shaft, or if their blood, like everything else about them, was changing.

  Another zombie pulled its way onto them. This one had once been a man, identifiable by the tattered remnants of a business suit and what looked like part of a tie thrown over its shoulder. The third zombie crawled onto its brother/sister things and, like the first, held tight.

  Ken watched a fourth climb into the middle of the shaft and hold to the growth, then a fifth. The excrescence seemed to pulse as the zombies in the middle of the mass shifted slightly, the ones on the outside layers adjusted their grips. It was like watching a beating heart coming into being from nothing. An unholy vision of creatio ex nihilo.

  “What are they doing?” said Dorcas. The woman’s voice was low; clearly she was speaking to herself.

  But with the question came an answer. Ken looked at Hope. She was still reaching out. Reaching for the dark tumescence just above them. Reaching and now she was groaning, almost....

  Ken’s blood ran cold.

  She was almost growling.

  And he knew what the things were doing.

  “They’re building a bridge,” he said. “Building a bridge to the cable. To us.”

  48

  KEN FELT... dark.

  His wife and baby were somewhere below him. Below and unseen.

  (Dark.)

  His daughter was reaching out for the things that tried to kill them. Hands lifted up as though in praise or prayer.

  (Darker.)

  His son was gone. Bitten. Changed. Dead.

  (Darkest.)

  And then he realized with a start that the feeling wasn’t merely a mood, it was a reality. That the light in the vertical tunnel that had become a sudden deathtrap was fading once more.

  He looked up.

  The light wasn’t just fadi
ng. It was departing. Christopher was leaving them. Again.

  What’s he doing?

  The light dimmed to almost nothing. Almost. And perhaps complete nothingness would have been better. Would have been a gift. Because as it was Ken could see just enough to make out the glistening, pulsing mass that added to itself bit by bit, that reached out inch by inch, foot by foot.

  How long until one of them reaches the cable?

  How long until one of them reaches us?

  The things worked in near-silence, not even trilling or growling anymore. There was only the moist sloughing of flesh on flesh, of raw muscle fibers sliding across one another as they gripped and clenched with strength that was just one more impossibility in a world where the impossible had come to snuff out the once-real.

  And yet, though silent, still the things moved in preternatural harmony. As though each could not only see what the others needed, but read the others’ very thoughts.

  Move, Ken. Move, dammit!

  He knew that to stay would be to die. The things were reaching out. Grappling half-blindly in the ever-darkening stillness of the long coffin-shaft. Perhaps ten feet above where he and Hope and Dorcas hung, perhaps another seven or eight feet away from the cable. Only a few feet, only a few moments.

  But he was frozen. Frozen by the sight of the monsters that were coming for him. By the things that were happening all around him. By his wounds. By his exhaustion, his hunger, his thirst.

  Most of all by his daughter, his Hope, reaching for the beasts.

  “Go.”

  Ken didn’t know whether he was the one who said it, or if it was Dorcas urging him on. He didn’t know if it really mattered, either. He didn’t see how they could possibly outrace creatures willing to slice themselves to ribbons and able to stick to featureless walls.

  Then he felt Hope’s heartbeat. She was reaching for the things above them. Reaching, growling, groaning, almost moaning in what sounded like pleasure.

  But he felt her heartbeat. He remembered holding her for the first time. Barely bigger than his hand and still trailing the lifeline to her mother. Cupping her in his palm and feeling the hummingbird-pulse of her heart as she screamed at a new and terrifying world. Feeling the softness of her skin and whispering to her that he loved her and he would be her daddy forever and he would protect her because that was his job and that was what daddies did.

  He couldn’t give up.

  He began to lower himself again.

  Looked down.

  And stopped.

  Another pulsing bridge of bodies had extended out over the emptiness just below them. This one even closer to the cable, the leading edge of the zombies just inches away from grabbing the thick tether.

  There was nowhere for Ken and Dorcas and Hope to go.

  They were trapped.

  49

  THE THINGS HAD BEEN silent before.

  Now, inches away from completing the span of flesh that would enable them to reach their prey, Ken could hear them again. Sniffling, grunting.

  Growling. Always that same growl, that same wheezing noise that invited listeners to come to them. To give up. Give in.

  To die.

  He wanted to. Wanted to let go. To let it end.

  Suspected it was already over. Even if he hadn’t accepted that fact yet.

  Certainly Hope seemed to want the end. She strained for the things above them, reaching up like a supplicant at the many feet of a throbbing, wheezing god made flesh.

  Then she noticed the things below. She cooed. Cooed, like she was a baby again and had just received a shiny new toy, or had just seen her mother after a long absence. And then she was reaching not up, but down.

  More appropriate, Ken thought, because if this was some strange god, then surely it was a god of darkness, of abyssal regions too black to contemplate.

  The mass below them was larger than the one above. It was impossible to tell how many of the zombies were clinging to the side wall of the elevator shaft, and to each other. Ken couldn’t tell where each ended, where each began. There was just a massive agglomeration of oozing arms and legs, of dripping trunks and heads partially covered by black, cancerous growths.

  He couldn’t see individual monsters.

  But he did see the hand that reached out and grabbed the cable.

  Surprisingly, the thing didn’t haul itself onto the line. Didn’t pull itself up to where Ken and Hope and Dorcas waited, easy spoils.

  It just held.

  And Ken realized that the thing didn’t want to grab them itself. That wasn’t its job. It wasn’t its place.

  Ken looked at the bridge of bodies. Saw a half-dozen things scampering across the span. And knew that these were the hunters. The killers. The beasts that would end his life.

  Half would go up to kill him and Dorcas and Aaron and Christopher.

  The others would go down and finish Maggie and Liz and Buck.

  The things were not only working together now, they were strategizing.

  Thinking.

  The first of the things was halfway across the bridge.

  It had those same plate-like growths on its face. Its cheeks were pocked with them, its forehead partially obscured. Its eyes were completely covered. Bristling growths had either enclosed them, or replaced them.

  Ken expected the thing to fall blindly off the roiling mass of bodies under it. But it bounded along on hands and feet with the sure movements of a spider in its web. Roaring. Growling.

  Blind, it has to be blind.

  Why doesn’t it fall?

  The blind zombie roared. And looked with eyeless eyes right at Ken and Hope.

  The rest of the zombies in the shaft – the ones that had formed themselves into a bridge, the ones that still skittered like bloody roaches across the walls, all of them – shrieked as well.

  50

  THE SOUND OF THE MONSTERS was so loud, so deafening, so nearly complete, that Ken almost didn’t hear... the other signals.

  Almost didn’t hear the low thud.

  Almost didn’t hear the wrenching crack.

  Almost didn’t hear the whistle.

  But he must have heard them all. Must have, at least on some subliminal level.

  He looked up.

  Something was falling.

  Something big.

  Huge.

  His first thought was that something new was happening. And new was bad. New was always bad, new was just this world’s way of trying to kill them with more variety. Evolution was speeding up, and had focused on one task: the complete eradication of humanity.

  They’re growing. They’re already invincible and spewing acid and they climb walls and now they’re growing, dammit!

  The thing fell from above, plummeting through the shaft like a piece of the night sky.

  Invincible. Acid-puke. Stick to walls. Growing. What next?

  And then a voice forced itself into his fragmented, panicked thoughts. Christopher: “Timmmberrrrr!”

  Ken’s fingers clenched even tighter around the cable, his arm pulled Hope so close to his chest that he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her bones creak and crack.

  The whistling increased in intensity. So did the growling.

  Then....

  BOOM.

  The falling mass hit the fleshy bridge that had built itself across the shaft above Ken and Dorcas. The zombies screeched and then seemed to shatter into ten thousand fragments. Bodies and body parts exploded in every direction. They fell past Ken.

  He saw a disembodied hand, fingers still opening and closing, and he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t reaching for him. That it wasn’t trying to grab Hope as it passed her.

  But he failed. Because he was certain that the hand was doing just that. No brain, completely disconnected. But still reaching. Still trying to kill.

  Then in the next instant he saw a huge piece of what looked like rock – the mass that had plowed through the bridge above them – rocket past.

 
It hit the zombie with the growths covering its eyes. The thing had time for a single abortive shriek before the gray block went right through it. Then the massive chunk continued through the bridge, tearing it apart as violently as any explosive could have done.

  “Look out below!” screamed Christopher, his voice still coming from the dim light far above. Ken thought wildly that this must be what it was like to talk to an angel. To hear a voice from the light of Heaven.

  Sure. If God sent angels who had weird senses of humor and dropped bricks on monsters’ heads.

  But that was what had happened. Christopher must have somehow managed to climb up and loosen some of the wreckage around the sides of the shaft.

  He had saved them. Again.

  It occurred to Ken that he owed everyone in the company his life, many times over.

  Hope was still screaming, but her shrieks were no longer the fever pitch they had been a moment ago. As though when the monstrous bridges had been torn apart, so had whatever power held sway over her.

  She quieted.

  But there was still screaming. Not hers, but screaming nonetheless.

  It’s not over.

  Ken looked up.

  And saw that some of the zombies had made it. Were on the cable above them.

  And climbing down toward Dorcas.

  51

  THERE WAS NOTHING KEN could do. He could only watch.

  Dorcas had saved him. Not just once, but time and again. Had dragged him unconscious through the most hostile environment, had protected him and provided for his physical and mental safety.

  And now that she needed help the most, he could do nothing. Fate was playing a cruel game, making him watch from inches away and making those inches an infinite gap.

  Two zombies had made it to the cable. One of them was missing a leg, the other was one that had flayed its way into the tunnel: no skin on its body, just gleaming, seeping muscle and bone.

  They oriented themselves, then began sliding toward Dorcas as she hung below them.