The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Ken wondered if that was why Christopher was still alive. Not because of his survival skills, but because the world curved to accommodate happiness. Because the universe exerted itself to protect the joyful among us.

  Then I am well and deeply screwed.

  After the turn, the tunnel went for about fifty feet, then folded into a cascading mass of rubble. Christopher had shown himself on numerous occasions to be adept at blowing things up, but this had to take the cake. It looked like whatever building had been above the tunnel here had toppled over and punched right through the concrete infrastructure. There were bits of wallpapered drywall, pieces of rebar, some shelving.

  And, of course, a pile of half-buried displays full of energy bars. Enough to feed an army of Mr. Olympia contenders for a decade, it looked like. No wonder everyone had stayed here once determining it seemed safe. Or safe-ish. No way in, according to Buck.

  It looked like Buck had been right about that, too. Ken couldn’t see any gaps wider than eight inches in the rubble. Most of those closed off after a depth of only a few inches. A few of them wormed into blackness, uncharted tunnels into the darkest of Wonderlands, but those were small enough that Ken couldn’t see any way for a zombie to get through.

  “Looks like Buck was right,” he said. He looked at Christopher. “You see anything?”

  Christopher weaved the flashlight around. The beam flickered, bright enough to see but clearly down to its last hour or two of usefulness. “No,” he said. “Not unless it’s a zombie eel or something.”

  Ken snorted. He was about to turn back when he remembered climbing down the elevator shaft in the Wells Fargo Center. The zombies had pressed through cracks in the walls of the shaft. Cracks much too small to accommodate them. They had flayed themselves alive, little more than blood and bone remaining, to get to the survivors.

  Still... those cracks had been much bigger. Not big enough for a full-sized person, but bigger than these tiny holes.

  “Should we go back?” asked Christopher. His voice had dropped to a whisper, as though he was having second thoughts about the tunnel’s security.

  Ken wished he hadn’t asked. He had been out of it for a few days, and some portion of him hoped that when he woke he wouldn’t be in charge anymore; that no one would ask him any questions or look to him for guidance.

  But he had made the call about splitting up the group, and no one really questioned it. Now Christopher was deferring to him, asking what their next move was.

  It made Ken want to scream.

  Christopher was still looking at him. Still waiting.

  Ken didn’t scream. Instead he said, “Yeah. Let’s go back.”

  They both turned around.

  “They’re coming. They found us.”

  Hope’s words blared in Ken’s mind. He stopped. Looked upward. He tracked the direction his daughters had been looking. Followed the line their eyes had been moving.

  There was a hole right there in the rubble. One of the snake-like gaps that just disappeared into nowhere.

  “What is it?” Christopher asked.

  “Nothing,” said Ken. And that was true, wasn’t it? It had to be nothing. Because the hole was barely half a foot across. Maybe eight inches, tops, about five feet above the tunnel floor.

  Still....

  He moved toward the void.

  A trickle of concrete dust slid out of the cavity.

  Like something had dislodged the debris.

  Like something was coming out of the hole.

  A moment later, something twitched into view.

  69

  RUN.

  It wasn’t a thought, it was a command. An impulse all-but-impossible to resist.

  But Ken’s feet didn’t move.

  He leaned toward the hole. Toward the thing – then things – that scraped out of the darkness.

  Christopher seemed equally frozen. “What...?” he began. Then even his tongue froze.

  The weak, flickering beam of Christopher’s light began to shake. Almost delicately at first, barely a tremor. Then the shaft of light – outlined by floating motes of dust dislodged by the thing pulling its way into the tunnel, inch by terrible inch – started to weave back and forth drunkenly as terror took control of Christopher’s limbs.

  Ken looked through the flickering, strobing, twitching light. Focused on the darkness of the hole and the things coming out of it.

  At first he thought they were snakes, or perhaps some new kind of worms born in the Change. Stubby things, wet and slick and eyeless, inching forward with painful movements, seeking the light. One, then two. Another. Four, five.

  It was the fifth one that forced him to accept the obvious, the thing that his mind had been trying to avoid admitting.

  Not snakes. Not snakes at all.

  Fingers.

  But how could that be? The cracks were too small for the zombies to press in, there was no denying that. Besides, the fingers themselves were too small, almost....

  Ken abruptly felt what little food he had in his stomach rising into his throat. He felt his esophageal muscles tighten, stemming the flood of gorge that wanted to erupt.

  “What is that? What are those?” said Christopher. His voice wavered as much as his flashlight, and Ken could tell that he was fighting against the conclusion that Ken had already come to.

  Ken didn’t answer. He took a step back, bumping into Christopher. He almost screamed. Only the fact that he had locked his jaw, trying not to vomit in fear and disgust and a sense of sheer wrongness at this sight, kept him from shrieking at the contact.

  He made a noise that sounded a bit like someone holding a small animal underwater, drowning it oh-so-carefully. Oh-so-slowly.

  “Hrk.” It was almost enough for the puke to start spewing. He swallowed again.

  More fingers. A hand.

  No room. No room for a zombie.

  “What is it?” said Christopher again. Ken felt the young man grab a handful of his shirt and start pulling him backward.

  The thing in front of them pulled into view. Not just fingers. Hands.

  No room for a zombie.

  Arms, bloody and torn from its passage through dark tunnels too small for movement by any earthly creature.

  No room.

  One shoulder, bone poking through wet muscle partially sheared by sharp concrete edges and buried steel points. The joint crackled loudly as it pushed through.

  “What is it?” Christopher shrieked.

  No room. No room for a zombie.

  No room for an adult zombie.

  The thing pushed its head out. Eyes concealed by armored scabs but that nevertheless oriented right on Ken and Christopher dully reflected the flashlight beam.

  “The head’s the hardest part.” The voice in Ken’s head belonged to Doctor Baird, the man who delivered Derek. “Once the head’s out, it’s all over. Now push, honey!”

  The thing in the hole looked through blinded eyes at Ken. It chirped, a high-pitched sound that made Ken’s teeth shake in their sockets.

  Then it slipped forward, sliding over a trail of its own ichorous blood, emerging like Hell’s bastard version of a newborn from the darkness. It fell head over feet, thudding down the rubble.

  It was a child. A child-thing no bigger than Hope, barely bigger than Lizzy.

  It had broken its legs in the fall. Ken could hear the crackles as they reset.

  Then he heard something else. The gentle sifting and soughing of dust over dirt, of silt sloughing off cement.

  There were other holes, he realized. Many of them no bigger than a cat.

  Hope had been right. The zombies had found them.

  Another set of flayed fingers groped for the light. Another. More.

  “Run,” said Ken.

  Christopher pulled him backward, yanking him as if they could outrun the hungry trilling of the small things that fell into the tunnel behind them. As if they could outrun the memory of what they had just seen, the nightmares that would
last the rest of whatever lives they had left.

  They heard footsteps behind them. Small, light, obscene.

  “Run!” Ken screamed. Not for Christopher, but for the others.

  He hoped that whatever exit Buck had planned was close. And usable.

  70

  WHEN KEN STUMBLED AROUND the bend, back to where he could see the rest of the group, he was glad to see that they were on their feet. He would have been happier if they’d already been moving, but at least they had taken his shout seriously.

  “What did you see?” said Buck. He was holding Hope in his arms, and Ken could see at a glance that the way he was holding her wasn’t just for porting her from one place to another. The man had his body half-hunched around her small frame as if to provide a living suit of armor.

  “They got in,” Christopher said breathlessly.

  “How?” said Maggie. She was holding Liz, the toddler still naked but back in her carrier on Maggie’s chest.

  Ken noted that Liz had extended one hand toward Sally. The snow leopard was standing just behind Maggie, as close as he could get to Ken’s wife in the cramped tunnel.

  Other than that one hand, though, Liz was limp. Her head fallen forward, her legs and her other arm dangling.

  What’s with her and the cat?

  A question for later. He heard the scuttling of myriad small hands and feet on the concrete behind them. Didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to see what the darkness might be hiding.

  But he had to. They all had to know.

  Christopher spun as though hearing Ken’s thoughts.

  Maggie screamed.

  The walls and ceiling behind them were coated with bloody, moving things. None of them had much in the way of distinguishing features, all of them seeming like jumbles of wet limbs stripped of skin. They were climbing over each other, sticking to the ceilings and walls, their feet and hands making horrible suck-pop noises each time they shifted.

  They were all small. So small. None bigger than Hope. Most even tinier than that.

  The light hit them and they growled. The same growl as the rest of the hordes, but lighter. Higher in pitch, but still pushing that same message into Ken’s head.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  Maggie was still screaming. Sally roared, the bellow of the big cat nearly deafening in the small space of the tunnel.

  Aaron stepped past Ken. He was holding something: a length of rebar that ended in series of barb-like frays, almost like a medieval halberd. He pointed it at the things that clambered toward them.

  “I’ll hold ‘em off,” he said.

  Ken’s stomach roiled. He felt disoriented, the terrible realities of what had been done to him and what he had done to others really setting in for the first time.

  Still, he thought he could have fought off the hordes again. If they needed to.

  But these... they weren’t the hordes. They were children. They had been changed, they had lost themselves.

  But any one of them could have been Hope. Liz.

  Derek.

  Was his son one of the horrible skinned beasts rushing their way?

  “No,” he said. He grabbed Aaron’s shoulder with a shaking hand. “We run.”

  Aaron looked at him. “I can buy you time.”

  “We won’t need it. We can outrun them. We need to stick together.” He pulled Aaron toward him. “We can’t lose any more people. We can’t.”

  He looked behind him. Buck was already moving, grabbing Maggie and pulling her into the main tunnel. Sally followed them closely, and Ken knew that the snow leopard was tied somehow to his children.

  More questions. More questions and no answers.

  Christopher ran past. Gagging and sputtering. Looking sick. The light went with him.

  “Come on,” said Ken. “We can make it together.”

  Aaron nodded curtly. He grabbed Ken and started pulling him. “I hope you’re right.”

  Ken hoped so, too.

  71

  GIVE UP.

  Give in.

  It wasn’t the same call after all, Ken realized after running only a few hundred feet in the dark storm drain. The call was stronger. Harder to resist. The only time it abated was when Sally roared, which he did periodically as though to consciously combat the effect of the small things behind them.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  Ken heard them, the wet/dry mixture of bones crackling and suction pulling and loosing as the things scuttled over the ceiling and walls.

  Something splashed. Another splash.

  “They’re gettin’ closer,” said Aaron. He sounded unconcerned, but Ken had finally figured out that the mere fact of this observation was a sign the cowboy was worried.

  “Where we going?” huffed Ken.

  “Buck said there’s a way out of the tunnel up ahead.”

  “Where?”

  “Couple hundred yards.”

  A couple hundred yards. A block or maybe two. The kind of trip that comprised a pleasant stroll in normal times. But in a tiny tunnel with a flashlight that was barely hanging onto life as your only illumination it got harder. Add two children, injuries, a predatory cat threading between the group’s feet and it got tougher.

  That was without the monsters.

  Ken looked over his shoulder. He didn’t see anything at first. Just darkness, a wall covered in pitch that sprang into existence a few feet behind him.

  Then he saw things glinting in the black. The darkness turned from a wall into the emptiness of space, with perfectly paired stars twinkling along the outer rim of the galaxy.

  More of the stars winked into existence. Eyes that reflected the weak light in the tunnel, seemingly illuminated by hidden fires from within.

  Ken remembered the glowing acid the things vomited. The pinkish ooze that had apparently taken the place of brain matter. Maybe their eyes really were glowing. Certainly it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that had happened.

  “Eyes front,” snapped Aaron. Ken turned forward just in time to avoid hitting a lip in the floor of the tunnel. He stumbled forward and only the cowboy’s strong grip kept him from going down face-first.

  If that happened, he knew he wouldn’t get up.

  “We’re almost there!” shouted Buck. Ken could see him ahead. A huge shape lit from behind by Christopher’s light.

  Would they make it? Ken hoped so. He honestly didn’t know if he could raise a hand against the things behind him. He knew they were just as changed as the adults had been; knew they presented just as much of a danger.

  But knowing something wasn’t the same as believing it. People know they shouldn’t drink and drive, they know they should eat right. They know all manner of things that they don’t really believe – or at least don’t believe apply to them. And they die because of those distinctions.

  Ken didn’t want to find out if he could believe that it was worth attacking a once-child to save his family. Didn’t want to discover anew the depths of his savagery.

  Buck stopped suddenly. The tunnel had ended, and at first Ken despaired, thinking it must have collapsed.

  Then he saw the door built into the side. Buck swung it open.

  Daylight swam into the tunnel. Ken could barely look at it. He groaned as his eyes tried to adjust to long-absent brightness. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  He kept pounding forward.

  Collided with something soft.

  It growled. Sally. Not moving.

  Ken blinked. Everything was a blur. But he could see that Buck wasn’t out the door.

  “Move!” he shouted. He heard the chitter of the child-things, the infant-things, the things that had once laughed and played and now hungered for their blood.

  “I can’t,” sobbed Buck.

  Maggie started crying.

  Ken shoved past them.

  He saw out the door.

  Looked right at the fifty full-sized zombies standing directly outside.

  Liz start
ed to scream. A moment later, Hope joined in. Not screams of terror, but ecstasy as they surrendered anew to whatever power held sway over them.

  Ken looked at Maggie. She couldn’t return his gaze. Just held tight to their baby.

  The chittering of the things in the tunnel came closer.

  The zombies outside turned to gaze on them.

  Then they parted. Moving aside to let something pass through.

  Ken’s blood chilled. Then froze completely as a massive form passed between the dozens of other zombies. Six and a half feet tall, skin of pure white on one side of its body, the other side charred.

  It was the thing from his dream. The muscled beast, half charred, half pristine, who had captured and bitten and turned his son. Who had stolen Ken’s boy.

  Beside the black and white creature walked another figure. Ken registered who it was at the same time he heard Aaron curse. The cowboy’s voice was strangled, halting. Not just afraid, but... lost.

  The figure was Dorcas. Dark fluid pouring from a dozen wounds, black scabs covering one eye completely and circling the other like an army laying siege. She growled.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  One more figure moved to join the horde. Lurching, walking on a body that had been impossibly broken and just as impossibly mended again. But not completely. Never completely. The eyes rolled back, sightless but somehow still able to find prey, to track the last vestiges of humankind.

  Light brown hair lay plastered against the forehead. The skin was singed. A face that should have been unlined but was peeling away in curls.

  The air left Ken’s lungs in a gasp and felt like it was yanking part of his soul out along with it.

  “Derek,” he whispered.

  END OF BOOK THREE

  THE COLONY: VELOCITY

  1

  Since it first acquired the ability to think, humanity has obsessed over a single question: