The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Buck lumbered over. Saw what the other man was trying to do. He put down Hope’s silent form in a movement that was almost too tender to be understood. He placed her in the row of seats behind the one that Aaron was pulling on, and Ken thought he even saw the big man brush his little girl’s hair out of her face.

  Then Buck leaned over. Grabbed hold of the undercarriage of the middle chair.

  Pulled.

  The sound of tortured metal, the shriek of Buck as he shouted in exertion, almost masked the sound of feet slipping over cloth.

  Ken turned his head. It took far too long. He felt like he wasn’t moving his own body, but a huge robot. One that was vast and ponderous and weighted down by the rust and weathering of a thousand years.

  The dozen undead that had been behind them were still behind them.

  Behind, and close enough to touch.

  Ken opened his mouth to scream. To warn the others.

  All that came out was a sigh. Like a final whisper, a whimper to carry his soul into the night.

  26

  DORCAS YELLED.

  Only it wasn’t really just a yell. Ken thought that every feminist who had ever talked about equal rights, every woman who had ever said something about equal pay for equal work, every female who had ever tried to make the case that they were as good and capable as men... every single one of those women must have been present in that shout. Dorcas sounded suddenly like a lion, like an enraged beast whose domain had been trodden upon.

  In that moment, Ken wasn’t sure who he would bet on for best two out of three between Dorcas and Aaron.

  The older woman roared that terrifying roar, and kicked her thick work boot out so hard that the zombie that had been reaching for Ken and Christopher nearly folded in half. It stumbled backward, up the tilted surface of the center aisle, arms flung out so that it caught – and effectively stopped – several other monsters that were coming down toward them.

  “Get out of the aisle!” Dorcas screamed.

  Ken felt himself jerked to the side as Christopher leapt into one of the mangled rows. He saw Maggie following suit as well, as though everyone in the plane had fallen captive to the siren power of Dorcas’ voice.

  She was already moving as she spoke, grabbing at something that was stuck in a nearby row. She twisted and pulled, grunting in what sounded like a mixture of determination and agony – Ken couldn’t imagine how the exertion was acting on her shattered arm.

  But she didn’t stop pulling. She wrestled at the thing, grunting as she pulled it inch by painful inch into the center aisle.

  It was a huge, soot-stained box that Ken finally realized was the drinks cart. The heavy-duty metal cart that the flight attendants would wheel down the aisle and out of which they would dole out cheap sodas and cheaper snacks to the passengers.

  Dorcas kicked at it. Again. A third time.

  Gravity finally did its job. The drinks cart flew away from Dorcas with a squeal of tortured metal and broken wheels, bouncing as much as rolling. It gathered speed quickly, and in the few feet between the survivors and the zombies it was already going fast enough to kill.

  It hit the first of the zombies – the one whose head Aaron had crushed – with a leaden thud. Kept going as though the thing were nothing more than a paper cutout.

  The other zombies – the “downhill” ones, at least – shattered like bowling pins in the path of a wrecking ball. Several got hung up on the cart, dragged downward toward the flames and smoke that obscured the bottom/front of the cabin.

  Ken looked behind him creakily.

  The other zombies. The “uphill” ones. The one Dorcas had kicked was already on its feet. It looked like it had once worked for the airline: wearing a colorful outfit with a small tag on its breast that said, “Brandi.”

  Brandi snarled silently. Her fingers clenched. Dorcas whipped around to face her, and Ken bet even odds that his farm girl could take that zombie.

  But that didn’t matter. There were still another ten or more behind Brandi.

  Something popped. It sounded like a soda can opening, if that soda can was the size of a swimming pool.

  “Got it,” said Buck.

  “Get over here!” shouted Aaron.

  Ken looked. Buck had pulled the seats a bit higher. Not much, maybe only a foot or so.

  Enough?

  He looked back at Dorcas. She was still staring at Brandi.

  “Go,” said Dorcas. “I got this bitch.”

  27

  CHRISTOPHER PULLED Ken away, and the last thing he saw of Dorcas, the older woman was kicking for all she was worth, swinging what looked like a fire extinguisher – maybe a piece of red luggage, Ken’s vision wasn’t so great right now – at an oncoming monster.

  Laughing.

  It wasn’t hysterical laughter. Not the laughter of the cursed or the condemned. It was the sound of someone who has not resigned to death, but determined to live.

  If only for a moment.

  Then he was away, yanked in a jumble of smoke and fire and tumbling images. He saw Maggie, pulled along as well. Saw Lizzy hanging from her chest, still empty-seeming, devoid of whatever strangeness had taken hold of her and pronounced Ken and the rest of the survivors to be “renegades.”

  He saw himself, tumbling toward darkness. Descending into a black that reminded him of the elevator shaft he had climbed down with Hope strapped to his chest. Only this was worse, because he wasn’t climbing, he had no power of his own. And the darkness was below a layer of smoke and fire and vaguely-seen demon things.

  So this was... what? The basement below the worst parts of Hell?

  Ken saw a face in the darkness. Aaron.

  “Pass ‘im to me.”

  Ken was moved into place, shoved over, and handed to Aaron, who was standing in the darkness under Hell.

  Ken tried to help the hands that moved him into place. But he was limp and loose as Liz or Hope. A helpless observer.

  He was pulled into the pit by Aaron’s strong hand. Placed quickly but carefully on something hard and boxy.

  “The girl,” said Aaron. In the bit of light that filtered from above, Ken could see that the cowboy wasn’t standing after all – he was squatting, almost kneeling in the low space beneath the passenger area of the cabin. Aaron reached for something, pulling a small shape into the baggage compartment. Hope.

  A second later, Maggie followed, turning to allow herself to fit in while still strapped to Liz.

  Christopher slipped in. Aaron looked at the younger man. “Dorcas?” he said.

  Christopher jerked his chin upward, where the sounds of scuffling could be heard. And laughter, Dorcas was still laughing. Though the laughter was low, wheezing. Tempered by pain.

  Aaron’s eyes went cold. Ken, remembering how Aaron had reacted just a moment ago when he thought Dorcas was bitten, was sure the man would leap out of the hole under the seats, would try to save Dorcas.

  But apparently the cowboy recognized a difference between someone being brought down from behind... and knowingly sacrificing herself to save her friends. He knew what she was doing, and respected it. So he didn’t go crazy, didn’t jump back into the cabin. He just reached his hand out and grabbed Buck’s blindly grasping fingers.

  The big man barely made it through the fissure he had opened. He grunted, then yelped, and Ken heard cloth tearing. “Sonofa...,” said the gray man. Not whining. Not anymore. That part of Buck seemed to be gone. He was just in pain, like all of them. But strong enough to still be alive, like all of them.

  Above them, the last strains of life-laughter ceased.

  There were thuds as things – silent things, things whose voices had been stolen along with their lives and their free will – pounded toward the hole.

  “Find something to block ‘em,” said Aaron. He pulled his head away from the hole, feeling around in the near-dark.

  They didn’t have time.

  The first dark shape slipped through. Into their space.

  Am
ong them.

  28

  KEN COULD ONLY LAY there and watch. He tried to sit up and couldn’t even manage that. He felt his legs and hands trembling, felt sweat burst out along his forehead as he bent his will to force his broken body into motion.

  Nothing happened.

  In the movies the heroes came out of seven-year comas ready to fight, able to do marathon foot-chases and amazing scissor-kicks within hours of recovery. The reality of major physical trauma, Ken found, was different. Different even than his worst injuries practicing hapkido. He’d always been able to muscle his way through the pain, to grin and bear it.

  Now he couldn’t muscle his way through. He couldn’t grin and bear it, because the bare muscle control required for grinning was well beyond him.

  He had already been slumped against something loose and boxy, something that ground painfully at his bruised and abraded back. But after only a second of trying to move, he practically melted into it. He felt like his bones were on fire, melting and searing him from the inside.

  Fever. Infection.

  He was a history teacher. He knew that for most of human history, the killer wasn’t warfare. It was a combination of starvation and infection. He was about to fall into first-hand experience of a life without hospitals.

  The sound of the thing snapping its teeth drew Ken’s frazzled thoughts into something resembling cohesion. Worrying about infection was probably premature.

  The thing had barely pushed into the hole. It was crouched on the floor. Now standing. Then it would turn. Turn and be on the survivors, crammed like the proverbial fish in this very dark, very frightening barrel.

  Buck didn’t let it happen. The big man roared and grabbed the thing by the hair. The zombie’s head was yanked back, and at the same time Christopher grabbed something out of a mountain of debris. It looked like a fireplace poker.

  Why would anyone travel with a poker?

  Christopher rammed the thing forward. Ken saw it in a flash of firelight that seeped like liquid gold from the cabin above. Not a poker, a ski pole. Hardly the season for skiing, but some kids in the area trained for skiing year round, using skis with wheels on them and special ski poles with wickedly-pointed ends, suitable for gaining traction on asphalt roads.

  The ski pole rammed through the zombie’s trunk, piercing it under its right arm and then going through the soft tissue and emerging between its left ribs. The thing didn’t make a sound, but thrashed around even harder. Buck kept one hand secured in the zombie’s hair, kept the thing’s gnashing teeth away from him, but now his other arm went around its chest. Black-red dirtblood spewed in clots from the thing’s ruptured body.

  “Over here!” shouted Aaron. “Bring it here!”

  Christopher and Buck maneuvered the zombie over to the cowboy, who was holding some sort of flat panel up to cover the hole they had all come through. The way the panel was flapping and bouncing in his hands, it was clear that other things wanted in as well.

  “Push it over here when I say. Hard push,” said Aaron.

  Christopher nodded. Buck grunted.

  Aaron took a breath. “Now!”

  Buck and Christopher lurched in a semi-coordinated motion. The zombie fell forward as Aaron dropped the panel – a long, thin suitcase of some kind – and then Aaron spun around and grabbed the ski pole. He kept the zombie’s momentum going, pushing the ski pole up and skewering the face of the next zombie trying to ram its way into the baggage hold.

  The zombie above went crazy. Tearing at its own arms and chest, black pebbles of congealed blood flying with dry tac-tac-tacs that sounded like hail to Ken.

  Aaron used the moment to push the ski pole through a pair of structural pieces, effectively using the skewered zombie as a blockage. The thing snapped silently at them, reached for them, but couldn’t get itself free.

  Aaron turned around. Firelight filtered through small holes above them and around the edges of the newly plugged hole just behind him. Enough that Ken could see the cowboy’s eyes moving slowly around the group.

  Ken, laying sprawled on a heap of luggage. Useless.

  Maggie, still holding Liz, crouching a few feet away from him.

  Buck, moving to pick up the silent form of Hope.

  Christopher, breathing hard as he looked around for some weapon, something useful.

  That was it.

  “Dorcas,” said Aaron. Not a question. A simple entreaty, a prayer of some kind, though Ken couldn’t tell if it was to God or to Dorcas herself or to some other party. Perhaps Aaron didn’t know either.

  Christopher’s movements stopped for a moment. Everyone’s did. Maggie and Buck, who hadn’t really known the old farm woman, even seemed to pause for a moment.

  The cowboy blinked rapidly a few times. His eyes remained dry, but he wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. His bad hand, Ken noticed, though the cowboy didn’t seem to notice the pain it must have caused. Or maybe he did. Maybe he needed the pain right then. Sometimes broken bones were easier. Sometimes torn flesh was less cruel.

  A noise made everyone refocus on the hole.

  The zombie whose face Aaron had staved in was gone. Others had taken its spot. They were looking at the ski pole, at the body of their fellow pinned in place. They all had faces that were slick with the black, rotten blood of the undead. Maybe that was because of the crash, but Ken wanted to believe that it was Dorcas; that the older woman had given a good reckoning of herself.

  And they stared at the stuck zombie. Not confused, exactly. Ken didn’t understand the look on their faces, but he didn’t like it. They looked at each other. Three, maybe four of them – he couldn’t tell for sure in the smoke and the dim light.

  Then they looked at the one that was pinned. And started to pull it apart. Not angrily. Not for revenge or spite.

  It was just in the way.

  And they needed to get inside.

  29

  “YOU GOT ANY MORE OF them ski poles?” said Aaron. His voice was perhaps a shade gruffer than usual. Hard to tell. But he was calm as always. No trace of what might be going on in his mind.

  That scared Ken, for some reason. The idea that the zombies would destroy them was terrifying. The idea that survival meant they would inevitably have to give up what remained of their humanity was almost as bad.

  Christopher was tearing through stacks of luggage that had been tossed asunder by the crash. Some of it had exploded, others looked pristine, at least in the near-dark.

  Ken had an insane urge to ask Christopher to remember what kinds of luggage had best weathered the crash.

  You know, just in case we all survive and fly to Hawaii.

  That made him think of his honeymoon, and Maggie. He looked at her – a bit proud he was managing to move his head on his own – and saw she was trying to help with the search for a weapon.

  Above them, the zombies were yanking the pinned beast to pieces. Pulling slick bits of flesh off its body with low, wet noises that reminded Ken of stepping on a snail after a rainstorm. Crackle-krrrssssrip.

  The zombie that was being pulled apart didn’t seem to notice it. It grabbed at the survivors every time one of them wandered too close, and its teeth never stopped snapping.

  “Nothing,” said Christopher. “Just clothes and stuff.” He was standing in piles of material, looking like he was preparing the world’s worst how-to video on panty raids.

  “Nothing here,” said Buck.

  “Nothing,” echoed Maggie.

  “Come on, then,” said Aaron. He looked at Christopher. “You get Ken?”

  Christopher nodded, glancing back at the hole. “The creeps are coming in soon,” he said. And Ken could see he was right: they had cleared more than half the hole. The thing that had once been pinned was now falling apart. Its legs had fallen – still moving – to the luggage. Soft internal organs had tumbled out. One of its arms torn off and thrown aside.

  One of the zombies pulled off the skewered monster’s head. Another started to push
past it.

  “Down we go,” said Aaron.

  30

  CHRISTOPHER SLUNG KEN over his shoulder, but the young man didn’t stand up. None of them did – there was no room to do so. The baggage area below the cabin was a tiny place, contrary to what Ken had been led to believe by many movies – likely the same ones that had taught him the crap about one’s ability to recover from massive physical injury and deliver devastating scissor-kicks.

  So the survivors moved forward into darkness, bent nearly in half, each of them holding onto someone. Aaron was the only one who didn’t have another human being in his care, and that allowed him to burrow through the tossed suitcases.

  Down.

  Aaron tossed suitcase after suitcase over his shoulders, descending to one level of Samsonites and TravelPros and Tumis, then pulling that level out from under his own feet and passing it up to Buck, who threw it to Maggie, who tossed it to Christopher.

  Christopher then tried his best to pile it behind him. To make a wall that would seal them away from the undead creatures that were still coming.

  Down, down, down. Like moles knowing safety only in darkness; in the depths.

  It never went completely black. The plane was still on fire somewhere above them, and Ken started sweating as the nearby flames grew hotter and hotter. He wondered if they were close to a fuel source. He remembered the explosion outside his school when an SUV exploded. Remembered the heat burning his back and hair, and knew that would be nothing compared to an explosion of jet fuel.

  He wondered if Dorcas was one of the things behind them. If she had been turned.

  Probably.

  The things were in the baggage compartment now. They still weren’t vocalizing, but Ken could hear them nonetheless. Throwing luggage around, looking for their prey.

  None of the survivors spoke. Silent and purposeful as the monsters from which they fled. They just kept moving down. Kept pulling up the floor beneath their feet, turning it into a roof over their heads.