– but there was a trace of nature to it. The law of the jungle, if only as read through funhouse lenses crafted by a psychotic artisan.
This, though....
The family was moving. The dead family. The mother and father pulled away from one another, and Ken saw he had been wrong about something. He had thought the mother unblemished. But now he saw - heard – otherwise. She had reached to her husband, held his hands and arms as they tried to protect their child. Their arms had burnt and mangled together as they crashed, husband and wife had become one for a moment, in purpose and in body.
Now their flesh separated with a sound like shearing ice. They yanked their arms free from one another and the sound ripped through the cabin, overpowering the comparatively slight noise of the flames, rasping ragged holes in Ken’s mind.
The woman tried to stand. She pushed up, then sat back down again with a jerk. Repeated the motion. Ken realized that the sliver of metal he had seen in her chest must have pinned her to the seat, maybe to the wall of the cabin.
Her mouth opened, her face wrinkling in rage. But she didn’t speak. Didn’t cry out. No sound at all.
The zombies, the things that had changed from live people to... whatever they now were... were almost constantly vocalizing. But this was something else. As though when life had left this woman, so had her voice. And not even the power that had reanimated her sufficed to give her the semblance of speech.
She kept trying to stand. Kept falling back to the seat. Ken could see the shaft in her breast wiggling to and fro. It didn’t seem to bother her, and little blood came forth.
It’s already pooled in her feet by now.
A dull thud. Ken’s eyes flicked over.
The husband.
He had pulled himself free of the seat. But Ken had been wrong in his previous assessment of the husband’s injuries as well: the tray table hadn’t nearly cut the man in half.
The top portion of the man slid to the aisle. He fell on his back. The dark gray of his spine trailed out of the sudden terminus of his body. Entrails flopped out in looping masses.
Again, not much blood.
Again, no sound at all.
The man’s face was oriented away from the survivors. But he began working his way around, clearly trying to face them.
Ken had no illusions about what the thing’s intentions were.
More movement.
Ken looked back. Halfway between the still-pinned woman and the twitch-dancing feet of the man.
Something rose up between them.
Maggie shrieked. A single word.
The thing did not make a sound. Not even when it leaped through the air directly at Ken.
Ken didn’t shriek. But he did speak. Like Maggie, it was a single word. The same word.
“Derek?”
14
NOT DEREK.
Derek changed.
Fell.
Died in the fire.
Changed.
It all flashed through Ken’s mind in an instant. He saw a single bit of ash falling, backlit by a tongue of flame that streaked up the side of a blanket hanging from one of the overhead luggage bins. Both ash and flame ceased their motion. Energy sapped from the universe, pulled away by the power of Ken’s thoughts, the swirling vortex of burgeoning madness.
When slumped beneath is dead parents, the child-thing had been a mangled mass of nothing. Just torn flesh and broken bone, loosely contained by threads that no doubt had once been an outfit carefully chosen for the trip. Not human, not even a body. Barely a carcass.
But when the thing stood up, Ken saw what Maggie had seen: the little round face, impossibly unblemished.
Tornadoes ravaged entire neighborhoods but left one home pristine. Earthquakes sunk homes into the ground and left random bits of perfection standing on the city streets as mute witness to the past. And apparently airliner crashes had the same indiscriminate quality. Breaking a body but leaving a face perfectly intact, the visage of an angel peering out from the husk of a demon.
And he – Ken now saw it had been a he – looked so much like Derek. Or maybe not. Maybe he just wished it. Maybe he just wished to see his son, even if seeing his son came at the cost of death revoking its sovereignty.
But no, Maggie saw it, too. So it wasn’t imagination. It was a cruel joke, or a continuation of the awful prank being played out on a cosmic level.
The ash was still frozen. The flame seemed encased in ice. Nothing moved.
The father-thing –
(and Ken wondered if it would look like him if it was a dark version of himself another man who had also lost his son and failed his family)
– broke the spell first. Clawed, pulled its way around.
The boy/thing/beast/corpse resumed its flight through the air. Mouth open in a scream that never came. Silent.
The silence was the worst. Because rage like Ken saw in the boy’s eyes, near-mindless evil of the kind that could drive broken bones to grind against themselves and push a shattered body into the air, that should scream.
It should not be silent.
Ken didn’t understand what was happening.
The living had turned to vicious, unstoppable animals.
The dead were no longer the dead.
The boy flew through the air.
Straight at Ken.
Ken couldn’t raise his hands. Couldn’t do anything.
How could you stop something that bore the face of your dead child?
The boy-thing reached with crooked arms that ended in mangled fingers. His mouth opened wide to show bloodied gums. Not many teeth.
But enough. Assuming that a bite from the once-dead could bring the change as fast and easily as could a bite from the zombies spawned from the still-living.
Ken thought that was likely the case. The one thing that was consistent in all of this was the deadliness of the things they faced. The only two choices seemed to be conversion... or death.
A bite would change him.
But he did not move.
He could not. Wasn’t sure he even wanted to.
He whispered his son’s name.
15
THE FACE WAS PERFECT. A round face, like Derek’s. Lightly tanned. Button nose.
The silent snarl was not Derek’s. Nor was the dried blood that streaked his cheeks and crumbled out of his mouth like river clay.
But it was close enough to paralyze Ken. Close enough to make him wonder why he was fighting, if fighting would only result in death and, worse, in having to confront the faces of the dead.
The dead boy/Derek/thing’s fingers were bent every which way, twisted and curling in on themselves.
Derek always bit his nails too much.
Filthy habit.
Ken knew he should be moving. Should be doing something. But he just watched as the thing jumped over several seat backs, leapt over a smoldering fire, and then pounced.
He’ll hurt himself if he keeps that up.
Ken looked for the ash. The ash that had hung for an impossible forever in the air. It was gone. The miracle was over. Time had started again, marching implacably forward, resolutely pushing on to the inevitable dissolution of all things.
The ash was gone.
Derek’s gone.
Ken shook his head. He moved.
But he was too late. The thing’s fingers – the dead, broken fingers of the thing that had once been a boy but never Derek, never his boy – reached for him.
The thing was airborne again. Floating like ash, but mobile. Dangerous. Too fast.
Ken shrank back.
The thing darted toward him like a torpedo, and then seemed to change direction at the last second. Something grazed Ken’s cheek. He felt blood slick his face, and didn’t know if it was his or the dead thing’s.
Then the child hit the ground.
Ken looked up. Dorcas was laying on top of it. She had tackled it in midair, tumbling with it to the ground. The thing was pinned under her greater mass,
but still Ken could hear its teeth snapping together as it tried to bite her.
Aaron stepped forward. He had pulled a piece of metal from one of the broken tray tables and was holding it like a short javelin. He half kicked Dorcas away from the boy, then slammed the metal through the back of the child’s small neck, pinning it to the floor. The thing trembled, its fingers spasmed. Its legs kicked, once each, though not at the same time.
All in silence.
Then it was motionless. But only for a moment. Then its fingers began twitching. Slowly, as though it was figuring out how to use them again. They opened and closed, curled and uncurled. The unsure movements of a stroke recovery victim.
“Get on up, lady,” said Aaron, helping Dorcas to her feet. She stood. Then hollered.
The dead father had finally flipped himself around. Half a man, but half a man was enough in this situation. It had crawled forward during the scuffle with its once-son, trailing a long hose of intestine, like a man knit of too-loose thread, destined to slowly unravel.
Ken thought that strangely appropriate.
The thing had grabbed Dorcas’ ankle.
It bit down.
16
“No!”
Aaron had gone crazy before. When he had been touched by acid in the elevator, a thin trickle that burned a line of third-degree flesh down the length of his left arm, Ken had thought he would never see anything more terrifying that still managed to be human.
He was wrong.
The cowboy’s face twisted in a way Ken had never seen. He didn’t know a person could look like that. Aaron had said he was a rodeo clown. But had hinted at something else in his past. Something darker, and infinitely more dangerous.
In his face, already wrinkled by long years in the sun, already stained by soot and grime, Ken thought he now caught glimpses of sun in alien places, of dirt that could never be washed away. Aaron’s face was not that of a man, not that of an animal. It was that of a machine, programmed to do only one thing.
Ken realized the cowboy’s face looked a lot like the face of the zombies.
“NO!” the older man shrieked again. He brought his foot down on the head of the half-man that was gnawing on Dorcas’ foot. Dorcas’ own scream disappeared in the thundering rage of the cowboy’s roar. Then disappeared again in the dull thud-crunch of a boot slamming through hair and bone and brain and bone again before coming to rest on buckled carpet.
The half-thing began twitching. Frenzied tremors rippled through its body as the chaos that took control of these things whenever their brains were damaged seized it. Its fingers curled back on themselves, then one hand reached straight into the air as though the headless, legless torso were trying to pull itself erect. The other dug deep into its abdomen and began pulling soft tissue from its body.
Aaron didn’t even notice. His cowboy boots kept pounding down, slamming into the thing’s head – where the head had been – over and over and over until what had been brain and bone and blood was little more than a gritty stain on the warped floor.
The father-thing never made a sound.
The son-thing, moving a bit more with every passing second, never wailed.
The mother-thing kept trying to pull herself free a few rows back. But mutely. Mouth opening and closing in silent screams, airless breaths.
Aaron kept grinding the paste under his feet. He didn’t look at Dorcas.
She touched him. Laid her one good hand on his one good arm.
“I’m okay,” she said. “It didn’t get through my boots.”
She lifted her pants to show her thick work boots – now darker than they had been, the double-stitched leather starting to fray. But whole.
Aaron stopped as if frozen. His foot caught in mid-grind.
The child-thing struggled.
The mother-thing pulled herself apart to get to them.
The father-thing yanked its innards out as if in offering to whatever deity had resurrected it.
Aaron fell against Dorcas. She grunted as he hit her broken arm. Grunted, but didn’t pull away.
The cowboy wept.
17
KEN STARED AT THE OLDER couple. And realized he was jealous.
They had found each other.
All of them had found each other, of course. But Buck had lost his mother. Christopher had lost his family, had seen his parents rip each other apart.
Ken had lost Derek. Maybe the girls. Maybe Maggie.
Aaron and Dorcas were holding each other. Clinging to one another in one-armed, broken embraces. Weeping in relief and terror and pain.
But they were alive, and perhaps they had more now than they had when this all began.
Ken hated them for a moment. Less than a second, just another frozen ash-fall of an instant. But it was real.
Is that in everyone? Can we all hate not only for real injuries but merely for blessings others have the gall to accept?
He thought so. And didn’t know what that meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. If that kind of hate was buried in everyone, that kind of selfishness resided in all hearts, maybe the monsters that had come upon them weren’t unnatural after all. Maybe they were just the next evolutionary step.
Swinging in the trees to picking fruit off the ground.
Picking fruit off the ground to cultivating crops.
Cultivating crops to building cities.
Building cities to traveling to space.
But the constant through it all was warfare. Murder. The attempt to bring others down and bury them beneath our feet.
The zombies were simply doing it with a bit more focus. Casting off the subterfuge of civilization and simply being their true selves.
Ken looked at Maggie. She was standing by Buck and Christopher, almost leaning against them.
Not me. She should be holding me, not leaning on them.
Liz was still limp in the baby sling. Hope flopped loose and boneless in Buck’s thick arms.
None of them noticed the things rising out of the seats behind them.
18
“LOOK OUT!”
The self-pity that had been on the verge of battering down Ken’s last defenses vaporized at the sight of the burning things standing behind Maggie. He was moving even as he shouted, shoving her behind him, then pushing Christopher to the side as well. The kid went sprawling into the remains of a – blessedly empty – row of mangled seats.
Buck was harder to push. But even the big man flew to the side under the adrenalized shove Ken sent his way. Ken saw out of the corner of his eye that the gray older man fell sideways with his body curved around Hope’s still form. Another surprise. Another connection found in the world of the lost. The snippy, selfish older man had somehow discovered someone in whom to subsume himself.
In that moment Ken started to think of the man as one of the group. One of the survivors.
Then he was past them all.
Throwing himself into the three dead bodies that had struggled to their feet two rows down.
The closest wasn’t really on fire, he saw. Just smoldering. Steam venting from singed rags that were the only funerary clothing the thing would ever enjoy.
The whole world was a cemetery. But the dead were not going to stay buried.
The steam hissed and popped, and one of the thing’s eyes suddenly exploded under the internal pressure of expanding gases and liquids. A second later the thing started to jitter. Then it dropped suddenly, disappearing to the floor in its row of seats.
Ken didn’t know what to make of that. He didn’t have time to wonder if it was a trap, because the two other walking corpses were climbing over the intervening rows of seats. They could have been on him in an instant if they had come into the center aisle, but they seemed unaware of that. They saw only him, their target and prey. A straight line seemed to be the only way they would move.
Footsteps behind him. Several sets. A scuffle.
One of the zombies reached him. It moved awkwardly. Ken had noted that the
zombies moved better the more of them there were, seeming to draw agility and strength from numbers. He couldn’t tell if that was what was happening here, or if this one was struggling because it was born not of a living person but of a cadaver.
Either way, the thing’s tenuous movements bought Ken enough time to backpedal a bit. The thing reached out, grabbing at him with fingers stained and bloody. Ken’s own hands went back, and brushed into something. He grabbed it reflexively, then yanked it forward as the zombie lurched at him.
The thing snapped its teeth. Silently.
Ken was not silent. He screamed in terror, but didn’t run. He couldn’t. There was nowhere to run. His family was behind him. He couldn’t let this thing get past.
Instead he used what was in his hand: the flexible tube connected to an oxygen mask. The thing had a little give. Not a lot, but enough that he could yank it forward and whip it around the zombie’s head.
Ken meant to throw it around the thing’s neck like a noose. Some thought in the back of his head whispered that he might be able to hang the thing up in the tubing, stop it completely right here.
He missed.
The tubing didn’t get to the thing’s neck. The zombie had its mouth open, trying to take a bite out of its enemy. The cord got hung up in its maw like a bit for a horse’s bridle. The thing gnashed down automatically, and Ken had no choice but to continue his motion, wrapping the oxygen tube around the thing’s neck.
The thing was stuck. At least for a moment.
But Ken felt something odd.
He looked at his hand. His right hand. His good hand. The hand that had grabbed the tubing.
There was a shining hemisphere of red on the meat of his hand.
Teeth marks.
He had been bitten.
19
AARON THUDDED PAST him, bypassing Ken to get to the third zombie, the one that was still climbing over seats. The cowboy had grabbed the severed arm of one of the passenger seats and as the zombie jumped at him he swung it.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 31