But he also knew he was trapped. Caught in a dark place in his mind, and he wondered if he would ever be able to escape.
Derek giggled. “Renegades,” said the boy. Then screamed it. “Renegades, renegades, renegaaaaaaadesssssss....”
Knowing something is a dream doesn’t mean you can wake up. And knowing it is madness that beckons doesn’t mean you can resist the call.
Derek reached out. Still saying “renegades” in hideously stretched-out syllables.
Ken, still screaming, closed his eyes in the dream.
And reached to embrace his dead son.
63
“I KILLED THEM. I KILLED them all.”
Tears ran down Ken’s face, wetted his cheeks. The words poured out of him like foul water from a broken pump. He hadn’t let himself think of anything that had happened up until now. Hadn’t had time. But now, in the dark of the tunnel and the deeper dark of his memory, he replayed it all. Every stab, every attack. Every maiming that tore a bit of his own humanity away.
He knew part of this was the sickness, the infection that his body was still coping with. Part of it.
But part of it was real. Part of it was guilt, not just at taking a life, but at the sheer ferocity he had discovered in himself.
He was a history teacher. He knew that for most of us, civilization is just a veneer. But he had never dreamed how thinly gilded his own sense of goodness was. How easy it had been to scratch off the layers of humanity and expose the animal rage that lay beneath.
“I killed them.”
Only gradually did Ken realize that the dream was gone. Not fully – he thought he could still sense it, coiling darkly at the edges of his sight and mind – but withdrawn enough that he could see reality again.
Still in the tunnel. In the tunnel, and no longer in the side branch where the kids had been.
A form moved. “Ken?”
“Yeah.” Speaking was an effort. His throat was dry.
“You’re awake.” The figure stood. “We moved you because you kinda freaked out the kids. And.... Well, be right back.”
Ken realized the figure was Christopher, that the young man had been keeping watch over him in the darkness. But before he could speak, the other man had gone. Ken was alone.
The water still streamed through the tunnel’s center. Ken rolled over and drank from it, lapping it up like a dog. It tasted smoky and dusty, but he kept drinking. His body was so thirsty he would have drank deeply of the ocean, and smiled as it killed him.
“Renegadesssss.” The word spoken to him – impossibly – by his toddler daughter, and then echoing in his dream. He heard it again in his mind, and wondered how long it would be before he could ever sleep. He had no wish to return to the nightmare he had just left.
“Ken?” This time he knew the voice instantly.
“Mag –“ He coughed as his voice choked through a mouth that seemed stuffed with sawdust. Tried again. “Maggie.”
She dropped beside him, knees splashing into the water. She held his face in her hands.
“Are you okay?”
“I killed them.” The words were from his dream, and dreams weren’t reality. But real or not, dreams could still be true.
He had tossed his own student out a window. Had rammed what was basically the business end of a crowbar through another man’s face. Had punched and kicked and all but chewed his way to his family.
He hadn’t even thought twice.
Some of what he had done could be chalked up to the simple fact that he was being attacked, that he had people trying to kill him basically non-stop for every second since the Change.
People?
No, not people. They were....
What? What were they?
But that only explained away so much. The rest was simply that he had defaulted to animalistic response. Kill or be killed.
He didn’t think he did anything wrong. Ken wasn’t one of those pacifists who believed it was better to put defenseless children in front of a bullet-wielding maniac than it was to put guns in the hands of cops. No, he had done the right thing.
But doing the right thing didn’t inure a person to the consequences. To the fact that he had savaged people with an intent to destroy them.
He had been attacked. And his solution had been to degenerate, to turn himself into something even more dangerous than the monsters around him.
“I killed them,” he whispered again. The words were nearly silent. He didn’t think Maggie heard them.
She put her arms around him, though. Held him tight.
After a moment he put his hands around her as well. Clinging to one another in the dark, just two people in a black place on a newly-changed world spinning through clouds of dust in space. He shivered, and it wasn’t because the tunnel was cold.
He was holding to his wife, to the one person he understood, the one person who understood him. And he felt so alone.
Would she love me if she knew? If she had really seen, not just what I did, but how little I cared about it?
He had no answer for that. He just pulled Maggie tighter to him, as if he could somehow press the doubts out of his soul.
They remained silent in the dark for a moment. Then more splashing signaled the approach of someone else.
“Guys,” said Christopher.
“Not now,” said Maggie in a steely whisper.
Her tone didn’t seem to slow Christopher in the slightest. “Sorry, but now.”
“What?” she said, and squeezed Ken in a way he knew well. The way she did when they were relaxing, curled up with one another on the couch after a long day and one of the children called. The way that said, Stay here, I’ll get this. Relax. I love you.
He felt like maybe he could get through this. For a moment he felt hope.
And then it was dashed.
“You better come down here.” Christopher turned and started splashing back down the tunnel. “It’s Lizzy.”
64
“WHAT IS IT?” KEN STRUGGLED to his feet. It was easier than he thought it would be. Shaky at first, but Maggie got under his right arm – his left hand ached where his fingers were missing, though he could feel the stumps had scabbed and were starting to heal – and he only needed to lean on her for a second before he could stand on his own. At least as far as the tunnel allowed. He couldn’t quite stand fully upright without bumping his head on the low concrete ceiling.
“Is it more of the same?” said Maggie.
“No,” said Christopher, and then hurried away, splashing down the tunnel again.
“What do you mean, ‘more of the same’?” said Ken. He moved as fast as he could, but didn’t really know how far they were from where Buck and Aaron and the kids were.
And Sally. Don’t forget the kids’ new “pet.”
“We didn’t get a chance to tell you before you passed out again,” said Maggie. “Hope’s been acting more or less normal.” She hesitated.
“But Lizzy?”
“Not normal.”
Ken’s heart started fluttering, batting at his ribs with the glancing blows of a hummingbird’s wings. “What’s been going on?”
“Nothing bad,” said Maggie, in a voice he knew was meant to reassure him but which failed miserably. “Not overtly bad, at least. Just... she’s not talking. And she won’t leave the side of that animal.”
“Sally?”
Maggie choked out an angry laugh. “I don’t know what’s going on with that thing, but it won’t leave her alone, and Lizzy starts screaming anytime someone tries to take her away from it.” She sniffed in the dark, not the sound of tears but the sound of a woman under tremendous strain trying to keep her emotions in check. “It’s like the damn cougar’s her mother.”
“Snow leopard,” said Ken. He didn’t mean it as a rebuke or even as a correction. It just popped out, and the second it did he felt the air freeze around him. One of those stupid things you say to someone you love that has no importance to the real issue but
can sidetrack the conversation in a second.
“Whatever,” said Maggie. Her tone could have given frostbite to a polar bear.
“Sorry, I didn’t –“
“Forget it.” She sighed. “We’re all on edge. Everyone wants to get out of here, we’re all tired of eating power bars and crapping in the side of the tunnel. We’ve just been waiting for you to get well enough to go.”
Ken felt warm. They could have left him. It made sense for Maggie and the kids to stay, he guessed, though Heaven knew many families had splintered under less pressure than this. But for Aaron and Christopher, even Buck, to stay.... It made him feel like maybe the world he knew was over, but this group carried the seeds of civilization with them.
Maybe the future was here, in this tunnel.
What if we’re all that’s left? Can we rebuild a world if it’s only us against seven billion zombies?
He thrust that thought deep. Pushed it away.
“Other than the weird leopard fixation and her not talking, anything else?” he said. He was thinking about the strange words Liz had spoken.
“You are not family. You are renegades.”
And then she had called out to the zombies, her body contorting as she screamed and gave away the survivors’ location.
Maggie must have been thinking about the same thing, because she said, “No, she’s not saying anything weird, nothing at all, not even the stuff she used to say. We were worried for the first little while down here that those... things... might find a way in. But it seems like we’re buried pretty deep, and Buck says there’s only one way out, really.”
“So what’s happening with Lizzy now?”
They were almost at the side tunnel. Ken could see the light ahead. He could hear a low noise. He didn’t understand what it was at first, then placed it.
Weeping.
Ken and Maggie turned the corner.
65
KEN SAW HOPE FIRST. She was buried in Buck’s lap, curled into a ball so tight she nearly disappeared in the big man’s arms. He was rocking her back and forth, patting her head with a big hand as she cried. She was whispering something, the same words over and over, words that gradually resolved as Ken came closer.
“I don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it...,” and on and on in a never-ending chorus delivered with almost machinelike precision between sobs.
“What’s going on?” said Maggie. The words came out harsh, almost accusatory. The demand of a mother hen whose brood has been threatened.
“I don’t know,” said Aaron. And to Ken’s surprise, the tough-as-jerky-made-of-old-nails cowboy sounded decidedly scared. Not by what was happening, but by Maggie. Apparently even spec-ops rodeo clowns knew not to cross pissed off mommies. “She just started doing that a second ago.”
“What about...?” Maggie’s voice faded away.
Ken saw it at the same time she did. Liz was standing there. Still naked, her toddler gut hanging out over her waist, staring intently skyward.
Ken’s heart, already racing, now shifted into overdrive. Whatever held his children in thrall, it seemed to worsen in effect when they were looking up like that.
But this time was different. She wasn’t panting, and her eyes were still open. Still seeing. They hadn’t rolled back in their sockets. She was staring, not at nothing, but at something.
Ken looked at the point she was staring at. Nothing was there. Just solid concrete, the gray sky over their temporary human habitat.
He realized that the snow leopard was staring up as well. Looking at the same exact spot as Liz. That made the hairs on his arms – what few hadn’t been burnt or bludgeoned out of existence – stand up at full alert. Fear pricked the muscles behind his ears, made his skin feel tight on his skull.
Slowly, Liz raised a hand. Tiny, chubby. She was barely learning to use a baby fork when the Change happened.
Now, one finger extended in an unmistakable gesture. Pointing up, directly at the spot she and the leopard were staring at.
Hope stopped crying. Her weeping choked off mid-sob, and she stopped saying “I don’t like it I don’t like it” over and over. Silence reigned thick and heavy for a long second.
Then Hope stood.
“Chicken?” said Buck.
Hope ignored him. She walked to Liz. Put one hand on her sister, who remained frozen with one finger upraised. The other hand buried itself deep in Sally’s fur.
Hope looked up as well. Then spoke.
“They’re coming. They found us.”
66
THE CHILLS THAT HAD been pricking at Ken’s skin exploded into a full-blown shudder. It ran up and down his body as he realized that there was only one thing Hope could be talking about.
The zombies. They had found the survivors. Had found his family.
They weren’t safe here. Not anymore.
He believed Hope’s words, completely and without reservation. And that meant that whatever connection, whatever infection his daughters had suffered, was not cured. In remission, at best. And perhaps just gaining strength for some unknown purpose.
The shudder threatened to become panic-spasms. Ken had to consciously calm his muscles.
“They’re getting closer,” said Hope. She and Liz and Sally were still staring upward, peering at the same spot as before.
No. Not the same spot.
Ken saw he wasn’t imagining it: his daughters and their strange nanny were now looking at a slightly different spot. A few inches toward the back of the side tunnel.
“No, that’s impossible,” said Buck. “We’re totally buried.”
“You sure?” said Ken.
“I’m telling you, there’s no way anything bigger than a cat could get in here.”
Sally chuffed at that. But the animal’s gaze didn’t waver from whatever invisible object she was staring at.
The triple stare was further down the ceiling now. Toward the area that they had been going to in order to get their food.
Ken felt his belly tighten. “Buck,” he said. “What do you mean that nothing bigger than a cat could get in?”
Buck turned a fear-bleached face toward Ken. “I mean that there’s only one way out of this tunnel that I know of. The rest of it is totally collapsed. I checked it myself before we settled down here, and I saw no holes bigger than,” he held his big hands about six inches apart, “this in any of the rubble.”
The tightening in Ken’s stomach got that much worse. He looked at Maggie. “Stay with the girls,” he said.
“Where are you going?” she said.
He looked at the girls’ slowly-moving stares. Tracking along the ceiling toward the turn of the side tunnel.
What was beyond the turn?
“Where are you going?” she repeated.
“Christopher,” he said. “You up for some exploring?”
Christopher got to his feet. He smiled, but the grin was tired, pulling the wound on his cheek into a tight slit that made him look like a pain-maddened Cheshire cat. “Sure.”
Ken turned to Maggie. “I’m going to see if any cats got in the house.”
67
AARON GRABBED KEN’S arm before he took a single step.
“I should go with Christopher,” said the cowboy.
Ken shook his head. “I want you to stay with my family. You and Buck can protect them. Christopher is fast on his feet, so if there’s something back there,” he said, jerking his chin toward the darkness beyond the snow leopard, “he can get back here and warn everyone.”
“And you?” said Aaron. “You ain’t looking too spry.”
Ken showed him the bite on his arm. A mostly-healed half-circle of scabs. “Maybe I’m immune,” he said.
“Yeah, I have a theory about that –“ began Aaron.
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Ken. He tried to bear down on the cowboy with his eyes. “I really don’t.”
Aaron glanced at Maggie. She was splitting her attention between Ken
and their daughters. Ken didn’t think she noticed the look Ken was sending the cowboy’s way. Which was good, because he didn’t want her thinking about what he was trying to tell Aaron.
Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me I might not be immune. Because it doesn’t matter. I’m either immune or I’m expendable. I’m injured, I can’t move fast. You take care of my family.
Aaron hadn’t told them the truth about his past – not all of it. But Ken knew the man had to have been some kind of soldier, probably a special ops fighter like Delta Force, Green Beret, SEAL.
Aaron understood making choices. Cutting losses. He understood sacrifice.
“I didn’t like what Dorcas did,” whispered the cowboy, and Ken saw his eyes grow misty for a split-second before Aaron blinked and his steely gaze returned. “So don’t you do that.”
Ken nodded. “I promise,” he said. He clapped Aaron on the shoulder, and knew he was lying, and that the cowboy knew it as well.
But some lies need to be said. Because some lies make the world bearable.
“Be right back,” he said to Maggie.
He thought that might be a lie as well.
68
CHRISTOPHER HAD THE flashlight. He offered it to Ken, but Ken shook his head and the younger man held the light even though Ken led the way into the darkness beyond the curve of the side tunnel.
“I miss the good old days, when all I had to worry about was whether my mom and dad were going to kill each other,” said Christopher.
Ken laughed. He tried to stop it from happening, as if a vague sense of propriety warned him against joie de vivre when going into a place of possibly fatal danger. The laugh forced its way through and he ended up snorting so hard he felt like his sinuses had turned inside out.
“Wow, that sounded painful,” said Christopher.
Ken tried to glare at him, but the younger man was smiling so good-naturedly it was impossible. Ken felt envious of Christopher’s ability to find things to laugh about. Even now, with his family gone, his wealth and the luxuries he had known just a memory, he was smiling. Slashed face, broken nose, and still grinning away.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 39