The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  What happens next?

  What happens after?

  What happens when we die?

  Ken stared at the answer. And, staring, wanted to scream. Not in victory, not in joy. He felt none of the ecstasy reported by seers and prophets through the ages, only a black madness that threatened to break over him like a tidal wave. To carry him off into depths so profound that he drown in them. And, drowning, would suffer forever. Because this wave brought death. And death had ceased to be a cipher and transformed to terror.

  Ken stared at his dead son.

  His dead son stared back. And growled.

  No. It’s not him. It’s not Derek.

  But it was. Even bent and broken from his hundred-foot fall off the side of a construction crane, even with one eye covered by scabrous growths, there was no denying that it was his boy. His brave, beautiful boy who had sacrificed himself so that his mother – and perhaps all of them – might live.

  Derek –

  (not Derek, not really, this is once-Derek, false-Derek, a Derek-of-lies, not my boy, oh, please, God, NOT MY BOY)

  – snarled. The sound had weight. It hit Ken like a fist. Not the give up give in of the snarls he had heard thus far, the low psychic vibration that had accompanied the cries of the zombies.

  This was a shriek in his mind. Not give up give in but GIVE UP GIVE IN.

  And he wanted to. Dear God, he wanted to.

  GIVE UP GIVE IN.

  GIVE UP GIVE IN.

  (daddy no)

  Ken realized he had stepped out of the storm drain access tunnel. Into the too-bright sunlight, into the clutches of the fifty or so zombies waiting there.

  Why aren’t they attacking us? he wondered.

  He also realized that the other zombies, the tiny child-monsters that had pushed themselves through even tinier holes to get to them, had halted. They were swaying and snarling, but their cries were muted. Lower than they had been. He could hear them –

  give up.

  give in.

  – but the sound wasn’t as forceful. It was almost... worshipful. Like they were in the presence of deity.

  Beside Derek stood a six-foot-plus monster. A zombie with perfectly white skin on one side of its body, utterly unblemished. Its left side. Its right side was charred and blackened by a trip through flame. It was an injury that would have killed a normal human, but the monster didn’t register pain, didn’t seem to notice it at all.

  It stepped toward the group.

  Ken realized that no one else was moving. His wife was screaming in terror, Maggie’s cries almost as loud as those of his no-longer-son. Aaron and Christopher stood mute, though whether from shock or terror or some other emotion Ken could not say.

  Buck held Ken’s little girl. Hope was crying out, ecstatic screams that rose and fell in counterpoint to those of Liz, Ken’s baby who hung naked from a baby sling strapped to Maggie’s stomach. The screams fell into low moans at times, and Ken shuddered. They sounded nearly sexual, and were nothing he wanted to hear from his little girls.

  Sally.... Ken glanced around. The snow leopard that had saved them from a zombie attack was standing still. The cat’s fur spiked to attention, even its tail held erect. It looked like it was fighting something.

  GIVE UP.

  GIVE IN.

  Derek stopped snarling.

  GIVE U –

  (run, daddy)

  derek stepped forward. So did the half-burnt monster beside him, the unholy retainer at the right hand of a slight-figured god-child. At Derek’s left, Dorcas – good and kind Dorcas, Dorcas whose eyes had shone with selflessness and bravery and whose gaze now flared with hunger and need – stepped forward as well. Like an unholy godhead, a trinity that served darkness instead of light.

  (daddy, please run, plea –)

  It was only when the tiny voice in his mind cut off that Ken realized it had ever been there. And with the realization he was forced to question its appearance. A thing defined not by itself but by the shadows that surrounded it.

  Had the voice been there?

  Was it real?

  Or did he merely wish it to be so? Did he simply hope Derek was still in there?

  Derek opened his mouth wide. Dark ichor welled out. His legs crackled, shifting as he stood.

  The once-boy – once-child, once-bright star of their little family – shrieked, and the sound drove spikes into Ken’s mind.

  GIVE UP.

  GIVE IN.

  DIE!

  The other zombies ran forward as one. Inside the drain tunnel Ken heard the tiny scratches of child-things scrabbling forward.

  Nowhere to run.

  DIE!

  2

  THEY WERE ALL SCREAMING.

  Maggie, shouting in terror. Making noises he hadn’t even heard on the days and nights she gave birth to their children – two of those times completely without anesthetic.

  Christopher, his cries waxing and waning so they sounded almost like laughter. But chilling. Terrifying.

  Even Aaron screamed. Just a staccato yell, a pair of pistol pops to Christopher’s machine-gun cry. Still, it was more of an admission of fear than the cowboy-cum-rodeo-clown-cum-whatever-Aaron-actually-was usually made.

  Buck screamed as well. Big man, high voice. He had sounded whiny when Ken first met him, but the sound he was making carried no trace of begging, no hint of complaint. It was pure terror, the kind that laced its way up your guts and then pulled tight and forced you to open your mouth and let it out because to keep it in would be to die.

  The girls....

  Hope and little Liz....

  Hope was looking up. Staring at the sky. Mouth open. Breathing in time with...

  ... Liz. The toddler strapped to her mother’s chest. Her arms splayed out, fingers wide as though experiencing her first rain, her first snow. She was smiling.

  Then laughing.

  The laugh made Ken’s legs wobble. There was nothing of Liz in the laugh. Nothing of the little girl who ran to him and buried her face in the space between neck and shoulder and kissed him and giggled at the feel of his whispers. Nothing of Sesame Street and apple juice in sippies and mornings going in to little eyes staring over the top rail of the crib, eyes that lit up when you walked in because it was day and DADDY WAS HERE!

  Liz was gone. Only –

  (give up)

  – hunger remained. Only hunger and –

  (give in)

  – hatred and –

  (GIVE UP)

  – NEED.

  (GIVE IN.)

  Sally was still. The leopard was male, had been adopted by and named so ridiculously by Hope. Ken suspected that the beast had adopted the girls as well. Certainly there was something about the animal that changed the effect the zombies had on his children. Lessened it.

  But not now. The things’ call was too strong.

  Derek was too strong. His son was in some strange but undeniable way the leader. His boy had come to kill him.

  The zombies were rushing them.

  Ken opened his arms. Just like little Liz. No agony, no ecstacy. Only welcoming. He was throwing himself to his boy. Even though his boy hated him, despised him, wanted only his death.

  (daddy please run)

  The voice was too small, or the growls of the beasts too loud. The urge to flight was lost in Ken’s mind.

  The first of the zombies was only perhaps ten feet away.

  The zombies in the tunnel behind them – small bodies wriggling through the flowing water in the storm drain, tiny hands and feet impossibly clinging to walls and ceilings – were reaching out.

  Ken didn’t care.

  He couldn’t.

  He was giving up.

  Giving in.

  Gone.

  3

  THE LEADING EDGE OF the zombies reached out. Their hands – some whole and human-seeming, others bent bloody, still others covered in the waxy yellow substance that seemed to serve as both poultice and building material – reached for the
survivors. Buck was closest to them. He would be taken first.

  Ken wondered, briefly, whether they would turn him or just kill him.

  He wondered what they would do to Hope, who was still in the big man’s arms.

  The closest zombie was one of the whole creatures. A thing that had once been a boy with bright red hair and thick glasses that now hung askew from one ear, propped up on his nose in a way that looked impossible in the same way Escher drawings look impossible.

  The redhead touched Buck.

  Buck was still screaming.

  All of them caught by the scream. By Derek.

  Give UP.

  Give IN.

  Then the redhead’s hand was red. Red as something splashed it, and then an instant later it disappeared and Ken fell back into his own mind as the scream cut off.

  He heard a series of thuds and thumps.

  Yellow streaked past his vision. Yellow and black. Ken thought of bees, of the insects that first clustered around his class window, then the bees that tried to kill him and Dorcas –

  (before she Changed)

  – before dying en masse.

  But... bees were small. Not bigger than an inch long. Certainly not twenty feet long. Thirty.

  Something hissed, a sound Ken vaguely remembered from his past life, his life when he was a teacher and his biggest problem had been getting the kids to do homework, maybe discovering one of the seniors copping a feel off his girlfriend during passing period.

  What is it?

  Ken couldn’t focus. He kept thinking about Derek and bees and the laugh/scream/moans of his daughters.

  And the thumps. The meat-smacks of bodies hitting something hard. The penny-smell of blood aerosolizing. Pink mist in the air.

  He realized he couldn’t hear Liz or Hope anymore. Nor could he hear his son’s –

  (no not Derek, not anymore, Derek’s gone)

  – thoughts in his mind. He took a breath. Felt blood puff into his lungs.

  Will that infect me?

  The bee stopped moving. It stopped right in front of Ken, humming with a strangely rhythmic thud-chug-thud-chug that also touched memories of times before the world fell to its knees.

  Ken stared at the bee’s black lines. Vaguely aware that the monstrous insect had slammed into the zombies, but that they were regrouping. Would come again.

  The ones in the tunnel were still coming.

  He didn’t move. Just looked at the stripes on the bee’s sides. Two black lines. The words Boise City Public School District sandwiched neatly between them.

  There was another hydraulic hiss, this time smaller. The school bus had hugged up so tightly to the wall where the storm drain access door was that when bus door folded open Ken felt the wind of it on his face.

  A voice punched out. Raspy and jagged as a saw with broken teeth, and there was something else beneath it. Something Ken couldn’t quite place....

  “Get in,” said the driver. “Two seconds and I leave.”

  The bus engine gunned, and Ken knew the owner of the voice was not bluffing.

  4

  KEN USED TO SING A song to Derek. Not always. Only when he was a baby, and then only when the baby was so colicky it seemed death was imminent. Not his death, not the baby’s. The parents’. Ken’s and Maggie’s. On those occasions, Ken picked up the little ball of writhing arms and legs and bunched him up so tight that movement was all but impossible and sang about wheels on the bus that spun around and around and around. He sang and sang, and sooner or later Derek always calmed.

  The wheels on this bus were not spinning. They weren’t black, either. They were gray from dust, red from blood, brown from where the two came together to form a mud-blood-mess of dirt and death.

  One of the wheels had a hand on it, holding tight to the lug nuts and the gaps in the heavy duty rim.

  No arm, no body. Just a hand. Torn raggedly apart mid-forearm, stump crusted over with the waxy substance that built and healed.

  The hand twitched. The pad of a finger ran over the edge of the rim, like it was questing for something. It probably was. Ken had been grabbed by a similarly disembodied hand a few days earlier; had seen a head with no body crying windless screams.

  The zombies didn’t stop.

  “Move! Ken, move!”

  Aaron punctuated his shout with a yank. He’d been half-dragging Ken thus far, propping up Ken’s broken body with his own strength, even though he was far from untouched by the chaos himself.

  Ken stepped into the bus.

  He thought about the wheels on the bus.

  He saw Derek. Not the baby Derek, not the child he rocked until sleep stole the pain. Not even the older Derek, who was a real person, on his way to becoming a real man.

  Not even the Derek who had saved his mother by taking the bite meant for her.

  No, this was the new Derek. Not the kind Derek-that-was but the broken (though rapidly unshattering as that yellow shit pushed out of his pores and coated his broken bones and flesh) and hungry Derek-of-now-and-forevermore. The boy was standing next to piles of zombies that had been plowed to the side by the massive weight of the bus.

  The wheels on the bus.

  Babies crying.

  Derek’s lips pulled back from his teeth. Some of them had shattered away, probably when he fell from the crane. Not a gap-toothed grin the way kids had had before the world fell down in ashes –

  (ashes we all fall down like he fell down

  DIE

  run daddy)

  – around them, but with the serrated grin of a saw blade. Rusty, spattered with darkness that might be blood. Hungry.

  Ken felt the clank of feet on metal. He realized they were his.

  He was getting on the bus.

  He wondered where the wheels on the bus would take him.

  Derek ran toward the bus.

  Beside him, the black/white monster and the creature that had once been Dorcas did the same.

  Ken looked at the driver. According to the song the driver would tell him –

  “MOVE YOUR ASS!”

  5

  KEN DIDN’T MOVE. HE just stared. A mental stopwatch clicked past the two seconds they’d been allotted, but the driver didn’t start the bus moving. Ken didn’t know if that was because they weren’t all on yet or because they were half on and the guy didn’t want to scrape anyone on the side of the wall beside which the bus had shuddered to a halt.

  So he stared. Not long. Maybe a second.

  Too long for what was going on outside. Not nearly long enough to understand what he was seeing.

  “Holy shit, we’re being rescued by Darth Vader!” said Christopher. Ever the most emotionally-resilient of the group, he said it as a joke and his tone almost sold it as such. He could have been poking fun of a friend at a party. Though this would have been a very strange friend indeed, and a completely terrible party.

  “Language!” snapped Maggie in a tone that made it clear she was speaking out of habit more than sincere remonstration. In the next instant she pushed onto the bus and said, “Holy fu –“ She managed to stop herself.

  Buck rammed his way down the aisle with Hope in his arms. Ken’s oldest daughter was screaming, reaching for the side of the bus.

  For Derek.

  There was a gentle tap, just the tiniest shifting of the bus. The only sound of a snow leopard hopping on board.

  “You’re shitting me,” said the driver.

  “You should talk,” said Christopher.

  They were all inside.

  The folding doors extended. Closed.

  5

  THE DRIVER FACED FORWARD. It didn’t matter. Ken was still anchored to the spot by surprise. He had seen a lot of things on buses just like this: kids groping each other, kids chewing tobacco, kids getting into fistfights they apparently hoped would go unnoticed.

  He had never seen someone dressed in blood-crusted full-body armor with the words “Boise Police” across the back, a pair of machetes strapped t
o his back, and a gasmask that looked like it had stepped through a wormhole from World War II.

  “Siddown.”

  That was how the driver said it: one quick word. Not “sit down” or even “sit the hell down” but rather the most efficient distillation of the words: “Siddown.”

  It was still enough for Ken to hear what he had missed in the first moments after the seven-ton bee smashed right through the throng of zombies. Still enough for a small surprise to find its way through the madness.

  Ken wondered if the others had heard it. Had noticed.

  He turned to the back of the bus. Aaron was already gone, and Ken hadn’t even noticed. But the cowboy must have guided Ken to a support rail because that was what he was now holding onto. The vertical rod was bolted to a seat, welded to ceiling and floor.

  Ken felt his grip twist across blood and fear-slick sweat as he caught a glimpse of what was outside, what was now behind them.

  Derek, running over the crushed bodies – all of them still moving, still twitching, some of them struggling to stand on feet and legs that corkscrewed around to point behind them.

  Dorcas, snarling and shrieking as she did the same. She and the black/white zombie were running a strange kind of interference for Derek, pushing the wounded out of the way. Not that Ken’s boy – his once-boy – noticed. He ran across the pavement, the dead, the blood, the innards with equal abandon.

  And the tunnel. The access door.

  Tiny fingers circled the jamb. Tiny hands appeared.

  Tiny bodies came to light.

  6

  KEN HADN’T SEEN THEM yet.

  He saw their fingers, saw their eyes glimmering behind him as they caught what light there was and threw it back at him. Saw eyes blinded by armored scabs, others reflective as those of a hyena come to tear at a carcass in the night.

  But what he had seen had been too little to sink in. Or maybe it had been enough, but his mind had rejected it. Had refused to acknowledge what it was seeing.