The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Death?

  Will Maggie even notice?

  He turned away from that last question, which, strangely, bothered him more than the idea of dying. And not because he didn’t know its answer – rather, because he was afraid he did know the answer. And didn’t like it.

  Aaron motioned for Ken to move ahead. Ken nodded. The cowboy held Dorcas tightly to him, waiting for Ken to go forward. Following the light that Christopher held as it bounced through the wreckage of the One Capital Center building.

  “Hey!” Christopher’s voice was excited. “You gotta check this out!”

  “What is it?” shouted Aaron.

  “It’s... well, it’s cool!”

  Ken looked at Aaron and Dorcas. The cowboy arched an eyebrow – a fairly expansive sign of emotion for him. Dorcas rolled her eyes. Or at least one of them. The other was swollen shut.

  Christopher was an enthusiastic kid. He also liked to scale the outside of buildings – and had apparently enjoyed the pastime even before the world turned to crap. So his idea of “cool” allowed for a much wider range than that of most people.

  Aaron gestured for Ken to go ahead of him.

  Ken took a step. Then heard something. He looked behind them.

  And saw a pair of glittering eyes in the darkness.

  A zombie.

  3

  THE THING PULLED WAS on its stomach, pulling itself forward on a single hand. The other arm was missing at the bicep, the stump crusted over with a yellow, waxy substance that Ken had seen before. The zombies secreted it, much like the acid they could also use to burn through flesh or bone or steel with equal ease.

  The thing’s body ended at the sternum. Where the rest of it had gone, Ken couldn’t begin to guess. How it was still moving, he had no idea. It was wrong. Just like everything else in this world, the concepts of mortality and injury had turned on their heads.

  The thing – what looked like it had been a woman, if its hair length and makeup that smeared across its face was any indication – snapped its teeth and growled. The sound was low, strangely weak.

  It’s missing most of its lungs. It doesn’t have the air to make more noise.

  The thought should have been a comfort. Anything that bought a few minutes – even a few seconds – was the closest thing they had to good news anymore. Instead, all Ken could focus on was the thought that the thing shouldn’t be making any noise. It should be dead. Laying in a pool of blood somewhere. Not moving. Not crawling toward them inch by agonized inch. Not growling.

  He jumped as something touched his shoulder. His heart hammered at the insides of his ribs, fluttering like a bird in a cage. He was over-adrenalized. His already-on-edge senses pushed over the edge by the shots he’d been given to keep him moving.

  How long do I have?

  It was Aaron. “Come on,” said the cowboy. He was staring at the thing crawling toward them, and Ken could see a question in the other man’s eyes. He suspected Aaron was considering whether or not to try and silence the thing.

  But how? A “killing” head wound just drove them into mad, manic attacks on anything that moved – including their own kind. And cutting them up just resulted in smaller pieces that fought on.

  “Come on,” Aaron said again.

  “Guys?” Christopher’s voice came from ahead. “Seriously, this is neat.”

  Ken nodded at Aaron. He turned away from the snuffling monstrosity behind them.

  And tried to ignore the noises in the darkness behind it.

  More of them.

  Coming fast.

  4

  THE THINGS WERE LIKE ants at a picnic. See one and more would come.

  Only these ants puke acid.

  And you can’t kill them.

  And if they bite you, you turn into one of them.

  Ken hobbled through the rubble of the building, moving toward the light ahead, wondering what Christopher sounded so excited about. The kid was a mystery. His dad had been Idaho’s governor, and he’d apparently seen his mother and father kill each other in the first moments of the change. But he didn’t seem like the son of Power. He seemed like the son of Crazy, with generous side-helpings of Charm and Courage balancing things out.

  Though maybe that’s what power is.

  Ken felt Aaron pulling him forward. Realized that the noises around them were growing louder.

  The light was getting brighter, too.

  They’d been in the middle of the building. Now they passed through several doors – or the crumbled semi-archways that marked where doors had once been before a stealth fighter exploded on the upper levels of the edifice – and Ken knew they must be getting toward the outer ring of the building. The office they were in now was no less destroyed, but there was light. Not just the pin-sized illumination of Christopher’s flashlight, but a general gray gloom. Smoky and dim, but better than the pitch black that had held them all for so long.

  “Come on!”

  The flashlight moved up and down. Getting larger.

  Shouldn’t it be brighter?

  It was spring, so it shouldn’t be getting dark until six or seven at least. Was it already that late?

  Was it only that early?

  It had been less than a day since this all started. Since the bugs clustered on the window of Ken’s classroom. Since Matt Anders had a seizure and Ricky Briscoe tore out Becca Lee’s throat with his teeth.

  Since the zombies came.

  Fifty percent of the world turned in under ten minutes. And a few minutes later, almost everyone else was either dead or turned as well.

  Things were moving fast. Too fast.

  So maybe it was getting late.

  Maybe the sun was setting.

  Then a familiar smell hit Ken’s nostrils, and he understood why it was so dark. So dark, and probably about to get much lighter.

  5

  THE DARKNESS WASN’T the black of night, or even the gloom of twilight in a city that has lost all power.

  It was smoke.

  Dark clouds were now visible, pushing at the buckled ceiling tiles above Ken’s head like foggy fists trying to batter the building into final submission.

  The thing behind them – out of sight but far from out of mind – groaned weakly. It trilled, a high-pitched sound like a thousand piano wires garroting a thousand finches, and there was an answering roar from somewhere else in the building.

  On the same level.

  Ken moved faster. He tried not to cough, even though the smoke in his lungs made his body itch and ache from the inside out.

  Aaron did cough. A low, wet hack. Dorcas said, “Shhh,” though Ken get the impression it was an automatic response more than a command. The things already knew they were here.

  Because Lizzy told them. She called them.

  No.

  Yes.

  The smoke thickened around them. And as Ken had suspected, it soon tinged with orange and red and yellow – flowers of color superimposed on ashen crepe.

  Crackling noises. The dry-leaf sound of fire.

  Ken could see Christopher. He was standing next to Maggie and Buck. Maggie held Lizzy, the toddler still hanging from the carrier on Maggie’s chest. Her arms and legs dangled, but Ken could see his daughter –

  (if that’s what she is)

  – looking around with eyes bright and entirely too aware. She caught sight of him and he thought she winked. It could have been his imagination, or a trick of the smoke and light.

  It could have been.

  But it wasn’t.

  Buck stood slightly behind the group. He was taller than the others, looking over their shoulders at the thing they had found. His mouth drooped lightly, open in mute amazement.

  Christopher waved at Ken and the others. “It’s awesome,” he said. His voice was a near-reverent whisper.

  Ken didn’t understand what he was looking at for a moment. He understood that his daughters were changing. That his son was gone. That his wife somehow blamed him for all of it.
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  That the world had ended.

  But he didn’t really understand what he was seeing.

  Behind him, the growl filtered through wreckage and destruction. It pierced his mind, finding the cracks of fear and levering them into full-blown crevasses of terror.

  Give up.

  (no)

  Give in.

  (NO)

  Christopher’s smile widened. “Found our way out.”

  Ken finally understood what he was seeing. Understood what Christopher meant to do. And said the only sane thing.

  “Oh. Hell. NO.”

  6

  IT LOOKED LIKE AN AIRLOCK. Like someone had realized ahead of time that the world was about to move to one of the rougher zip codes in Hell and had tried to construct a bunker out of the building. This was the exit, the place to equalize between reality and the nightmare outside.

  But it hadn’t worked. Of course not. The change had happened too fast. Too fast, and certainly earlier than anyone could have anticipated. Because no one thought that something like this could ever happen.

  It is human nature to imagine the impossible. But not to prepare for it. People don’t even buy umbrellas for rainy days or put away food and money for tough times or build dykes that will withstand inevitable storms. Forget about zombie-induced Armageddon.

  All this went through Ken’s mind in the first instant that he saw the strangely slanted oval that had punched through the wall. Smoke billowed around the edges of it, and surged from the tunnel-like interior.

  The lower edge of the cylinder stood a foot off the floor. The upper edge was almost invisible, ramming its way through the ceiling before ending in a mass of bent and smoldering metal.

  From his vantage point, Ken guessed the cylinder was probably leaning on the building at a sixty-degree angle. Maybe more.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said.

  He didn’t know if he was addressing Christopher’s suggestion that this was a way out, or just the concept of what he was seeing. Maybe it was both. Or more than that, maybe he was just giving voice to his general disbelief at what the world had come to. His life had never made sense: he was a high school teacher who made almost as much as the average fry cook. He was an average-looking guy who had managed to score the love of his life. He was an everyday man whose entire family had survived the world’s shift to lunacy.

  At least for a little while. Until Derek died.

  But now this....

  “Is that really...?” He couldn’t even finish the thought.

  Aaron left his side. He had Ken and Dorcas lean on each other, and Ken wasn’t quite sure who was supposed to help whom.

  The cowboy leaned into the smoke that billowed out of the cylinder. He touched the lower edge. Grimaced as he cut himself on sharp, splintered metal.

  “Looks like a 737,” he said. He looked past the outer edge of the plane’s fuselage, squinting as he tried to sight along the craft’s exterior. “But we can’t get out through it. Looks like it crashed, broke apart, and then slammed right through the street.”

  The growl behind them grew louder.

  And then it wasn’t just behind them. It was behind them, and to their left, and to their right.

  Ken felt the thud of a heartbeat. Dorcas’ or his, he didn’t know. But it was fast. Terror speeding it along.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  Join us.

  Die.

  A wheezing noise came from somewhere. Ken looked and saw Lizzy. The toddler was breathing in and out so quickly she was almost panting, the breaths coming in small puffs above her mother’s hand. At first he worried that she was suffocating, or having a seizure. Or worse, that she was doing that strange thing the zombies periodically did: looking up, opening their mouths, and all breathing in unison. He didn’t know why they did that, but it scared him.

  Then he realized none of those was occurring.

  No, she was laughing.

  7

  “WE CAN’T GO.”

  Ken looked at his wife. He could see her hand shaking over Lizzy’s face, could see terror and revulsion fighting a strange battle for control of her expression. She looked like she had just found a dead cockroach in her shoe, and then discovered it was an advance scout for an assassination squad.

  And the fact that she was looking at him at all nearly managed to drown all that out.

  Ken didn’t know what to say next. He wanted to hold her, wanted to clutch her to him and whisper that it was going to be all right.

  But he had told Derek the same thing. And look how that ended.

  So he didn’t know. He didn’t know, and he didn’t move. Probably the wrong thing to do. Though perhaps if he had moved she would have rebuffed him again. Would have pushed him away and reminded him that their son was dead because of him. And it wouldn’t matter that Ken couldn’t have done anything, that no one could have. She was right.

  He was the father. The daddy. The protector. And he had failed his family.

  “We have to go.” Christopher stepped forward. Touched Maggie’s shoulder. The growling was louder, surrounding them like a blanket of needles. Painful and invasive.

  “We can’t. We can’t.” Maggie was losing it. Losing it, and Ken still didn’t know what to say. What to do.

  Help came from an unexpected place.

  “We can.” Buck moved to the edge of the plane. He peered into the cabin. Ken couldn’t see what he saw. Too smoky, and the angle was wrong. The big man shifted Hope on his shoulders. She moaned but remained unconscious.

  Which was probably for the best. Ken didn’t know what the small band of survivors would do if they had two erratic children to deal with.

  Would this have happened to Derek? If he had lived?

  Aaron was shaking his head. Still looking along the outside of the fuselage. Ken thought he could see bits of blue and orange paint, though both colors had been desaturated to near-gray by the smoke. A Southwest Airlines jet. Ken thought their slogan was “Welcome Aboard,” but he thought this wasn’t exactly how they had meant it.

  The cowboy wiped his forehead with his one good hand. The other, his left, was a mess of broken and dislocated fingers. He had it tucked into his belt, which must have hurt but he didn’t seem to mind at all. “No,” he said. “It goes straight into the street.”

  The things could be heard all around them. There were over two hundred thousand people in Boise, and most of them had been on the survivors’ trail. Were they coating the outside of this building? Hanging from it like so many vicious, venomous spiders?

  The floor started to shudder.

  “We can make it,” said Buck. He sounded different than he had before. Gone – at least for the moment – was the whiny, entitled man-child they had rescued. He shifted Hope’s limp form to his other shoulder, then stood onto the lip of the plane’s fuselage.

  “It doesn’t go anywhere,” Aaron insisted. He sounded frustrated. Not scared, just irritated.

  “It does.” Buck’s calm was oddly contagious. Ken saw Maggie’s body stop quivering. She stepped toward the big man.

  “Ma’am,” said Aaron.

  Maggie looked at the cowboy. Her hand was still clamped over Liz’s mouth. “What else are we going to do?” she asked.

  She stepped into the plane.

  Ken followed them.

  “I don’t know that this is a good idea,” said Aaron.

  “I know,” said Ken. “But where my family goes, I go.”

  He stepped into the plane as well.

  The world shimmied underneath his feet.

  8

  A MOMENT LATER THERE was a light tremor behind him, and that was when Ken realized that the world wasn’t actually rolling below him. It just seemed like it to a mind suddenly steeped in revulsion and horror.

  The dead were everywhere.

  It hadn’t really occurred to Ken until this moment that the zombies weren’t dead. Not really. They had all been alive, then they were changed. From
human to other in the blink of an eye. But not dead. Never dead. Many of them suffered wounds and damage that would have – must have – killed any normal organism. Still, somehow they had sidestepped death, moving out of its path at the last instant, tumbling bodily into something different, something alien and frightening.

  The zombies, the things, had never been dead.

  What Ken saw now was different.

  The plane had been struck by the same force that enveloped the entire globe, that much was certain. Ken remembered Sunday School stories from his childhood: the God of the Old Testament cursing the people who tried to build a tower to Heaven. He had changed their languages, confounding their speech so they could no longer work together to reach His domain.

  The dark god that had acted a few hours ago had been more direct. Bypassing simple confusion in favor of chaos, preferring destruction to distraction.

  Even if he hadn’t seen the planes pirouetting drunkenly through the sky, Ken would have known in an instant what happened here. Even through the permanent haze of smoke he could see long swaths of blood along floor, walls, even the ceiling. Luggage had fallen in the center aisle, and much had been torn apart as though by a rabid animal unable to discern friend from foe, animate from static.

  The change had hit the plane as well. Half the passengers had changed mid-flight. Had killed their fellow-travelers as the jet plummeted to earth. Then the zombies had somehow survived enough to leave. To walk or crawl away in search of more people to kill.

  Not that the plane was empty. Some of the seats – Ken guessed about a quarter of them – held silent, still cargo: all that remained of those who had not been turned by the zombies – killed but not utterly disintegrated by the crash.

  The imagery was strange; nightmarish. Torn metal, buckled plastic. Luggage sprawled from overhead bins, wiring trailing from the ceiling in spots like the rotted limbs of willow trees. The cabin must have lost pressure, too, because the emergency oxygen masks had all dropped. They hung over the seats like the suckers of a tentacled monster hiding somewhere above.