The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  Sally growled at the edge of the hole. The snow leopard’s back arched again, fur standing on end to such an extent that its streamlined body seemed to expand to twice its size.

  The chittering, skittering noise of something below them bounced through the hole and off the metal poles and rods and walls and ceiling of the bus.

  This wasn’t over.

  18

  THE THING BELOW APPEARED again. Ken got his first semi-decent look at it, and his knees almost went out from under him.

  Like the rest of the creatures that had followed Ken and the others in the storm drains, it was a baby. Had been a baby. Its face was gone. Not the way that some of the creatures’ faces had changed to accommodate huge eyes and scaly growths.

  No, its face was truly gone. There was nothing of the human left in its countenance. No eyes, no nose to speak of, though in the quick glimpse Ken had before the thing moved away again, he thought he could see a pair of nostrils. Even they were in the wrong locations, moved far to the side so that one hole was on each side of the thing’s face, just in front of the ears.

  The jaws had enlarged and shifted, moving forward and changing. The teeth....

  The thing appeared again. The teeth moved, and the sound that had been only a shriek now became the sum total of Ken’s auditory world.

  The thing’s jaw had split into four or perhaps five pieces. Hard to tell, because all of them were vibrating so fast Ken could barely see. The thing’s teeth were at the end of the jawbones, and the skin had pulled away from all of it so that what was once inside was now an external feature.

  The thing put its mouthparts to the underside of the floor and sparks flew, raining bright floral arrangements on its face.

  It paid no heed. Just kept sawing at the floor. Chewing through steel.

  Its plan wasn’t hard to figure out. It was going to cut the floor away a bit at a time. And the survivors would either fall to their deaths, fall to its reach, or be forced to stop the bus.

  Ken looked out the back window.

  He couldn’t see any trace of the horde, could see no sign of Derek.

  But they were there. He knew it.

  The thing below kept cutting.

  It stopped for a moment. Coughed that ratcheting cough, then started cutting again, and now it seemed the grinding sound of its teeth was even louder, stronger.

  19

  SALLY HUNCHED BEHIND the gaping hole in the center of the bus, back arched so high the cat was nearly bent in two. But he still didn’t make a sound. His muzzle drew back from his teeth and spittle fell in ropy strands to the metal floor.

  Then another section of the floor fell away and the cat nearly fell away as well. The portion of the center aisle that he had been standing on plummeted to the asphalt below, bounced and clattered and tossed up another sparkling floral arrangement. Then the whole bus jounced as the steel sheet went under the back tires on the driver’s side. Another pop.

  The bus started listing.

  “Do something about that!” shouted the driver. Both her hands were on the wheel at the ten o’clock position, pulling hard to compensate for the fact that the massive vehicle was trying to veer into a building on the side of the street. But she didn’t slow down. If anything, Ken felt like they were going faster.

  “You do something about that!” Christopher shouted back.

  Sally roared as though not wanting to be left out of the argument.

  Aaron shoved Christopher out of the way. He moved to the edge of the newly-widened hole, holding tight to the broadsword. Ken had a moment to wonder where exactly their driver/rescuer had gotten the school bus and a cache of medieval weaponry from before Aaron swung the sword.

  Ken caught a glimpse of the thing under the bus. It scampered away, barely avoiding the edge of the sword.

  It chittered.

  The sound made Ken’s legs grow weak again, and made his stomach feel loose in his guts. It was a wholly inhuman noise, the vocalization of something far removed from homo sapiens. It was no longer a child, but a thing.

  So why did it bother him so much that Aaron was stabbing at it? Trying not only to knock it away from the bus’ chassis but to stab it; to kill it?

  The thing scampered around the underside of the bus, always there, always just out of reach. Ken caught sight of it a few times. What remained of its skin was wet and suppurating, pus leaking from it so thick and fast that it fell not in drops but in sheets. The thing looked like a grub; a maggot recently wriggled free of dying flesh and rotten meat.

  A strange lump bunched around its hips. Ken didn’t see it clearly for a moment. Aaron’s sword kept getting in the way as he swung at the tiny demon whenever he caught a glimpse of it below his feet.

  The saw-screech came again. Another section of the floor fell away. This time below Christopher. He barely danced out of the way before it dropped into the rushing sea of air and pavement below the bus.

  “Hurry up!” he screamed.

  “This ain’t like shooting fish in a barrel,” Aaron shouted back. “Not like I got a lot of practice at it.” He was moving back and forth between the two holes now, trying to find and kill the tiny monster below them.

  Ken was worried he wouldn’t be able to. But only with part of his mind. The other part of him saw the thing again. Saw it and saw that strange bulge around the creature’s hips.

  He realized what it was. Realized what was wrapped around the thing.

  He felt fear bloom anew, panic flowering with blossoms that matched the sparks that burst into being whenever the thing cut through the floor, whenever metal fell to earth and was crushed.

  “No,” he whispered. “Nonononononono....”

  20

  AARON WAS STILL STABBING down, running back and forth between the two holes in the bus like he was playing the world’s strangest game of Whack-A-Mole.

  Christopher held the axe, the one that said “Cass” in thick red letters. Screaming at Aaron to “get it kill it get it man get it kill it!”

  Maggie and Buck still pressed on opposite sides of the bus, feet up on the seats they occupied so they sat sideways directly across from one another. They held their silent burdens tightly, so tightly Ken wondered how the little girls could breathe.

  He wondered if his daughters needed to anymore. They were changing. Becoming....

  What?

  Sally roved restlessly, back still arched, now in the aisle, now perched atop the metal bars that ran along the tops of the seats. Ken often wondered about those bars, often thought that in a bus meant to ferry children from place to place they could have come up with something softer and safer than a bare iron bar right at the spot a kid’s face would hit in case of a front impact.

  The driver, their mysterious savior with the raw voice, still struggled to keep the bus on the road while at the same time avoiding the debris field that had been left when the world fell apart.

  The wheels on the bus kept turning.

  Ken saw it all. Saw it, registered it in some peripheral portion of his mind.

  But mostly he was watching through the holes. Looking at the thing. Replaying what he had just seen. Figuring out what it meant.

  When Derek came home from the hospital two days after his birth, he was so small. And Ken and Maggie, first-time parents, still hadn’t learned how tough babies really were. He seemed so tender, so fragile. The soft spot at the top of his head where the skull bones still hadn’t fused occasionally pulsed, as though he was destined –

  (to die to fall and die and then rise again but not as a man from heaven but a demon from Hell, oh Derek why couldn’t you just have died)

  – to have thoughts that would change the world. But looking at that slight bounce, the drum beat of his life overlaid on the nearly unprotected surface of his brain, how could Ken and Maggie help but think he might break, might just shatter like finest crystal left from a long gone age?

  Changing diapers was the worst at first. Derek had been circumcised, and it did
n’t matter that the doctors said he’d heal up quickly and there wouldn’t be any lasting ill effects. Looking at him, seeing a piece of gauze over his crotch – a piece of gauze that was stained through with blood and Vaseline and then plastered down with liberal amounts of urine and fecal matter – Ken always shuddered. Wondered if his baby would be the first kid in recorded history to lose his wiener to poop-infection.

  It got so he hated the mere sight of diapers.

  Eventually he got over it. Eventually he even got to the point that he enjoyed changing diapers. Enjoyed the bonding it provided. Though he could have done without the time he learned the hard way that little boys could pee straight up and if you didn’t do some strategic pre-aiming a good deal of that pee was liable to go right in your mouth.

  Still, for a while there the mere sight of a diaper was enough to put Ken into a strange version of a PTSD attack. Just seeing a picture of Elmo – who figured large on all Derek’s diapers – was enough to start him sweating.

  That was probably why he saw what he did; and not only saw, but understood.

  The child-thing, the baby-thing below the bus, the monster that was trying to pull the entire vehicle apart from the bottom up, had a strange bulge around its center. Flesh-colored, scabbed partially over the same way that the rest of its body was starting to scab. Sores wept dark fluid from part of the fleshy growth, while other parts of it seemed perfect and unblemished.

  In fact, one part was so perfectly unmarked that Ken could see the design.

  Could see Elmo, mouth open, big eyes wide and staring the way they always were. And the whole thing coated by a translucent film of flesh.

  The child/infant/creature had Changed wearing a diaper. And whatever had caused the Change was causing the thing to integrate the material into itself. To make what was outside inside.

  Ken looked at his arm. He saw a half-circle where he had been bitten by one of the things. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t Changed.

  Why?

  And if he had, would he now be slowly growing a gauzy membrane over his clothing?

  And then...?

  He didn’t know.

  But the fact that the thing below them was integrating something as synthetic as a diaper was more disturbing than Ken cared to admit, even to himself.

  As though to highlight the strangeness, another section of floor fell away. Aaron ran to the new hole and swung his sword.

  It clanged off the metal edge of the floor. Something coughed. The sword started to smoke, and when Aaron brought it back it was sagging from the mid-point to the tip. The thing must have vomited that acid on it.

  Ken remembered Derek, Derek in a diaper that rested on the outside and not on the inside, vomiting as a baby. Puking so hard from a stomach virus that Ken swore the kid had to be absolutely hollow. Just a baby-shell filled from toes to fontanelle with twenty pounds of puke.

  That had been bad. Always bad when your children suffered. Always terrible.

  This was worse.

  Aaron dropped the sword with a curse. It disappeared below the bus.

  “Let me,” said Christopher. He took position over the nearest hole, looking for all the world like a lumberjack who has decided to use his axe for ice-fishing.

  A hand appeared. Tiny, curling around the denticulated edges the thing’s jaws had left in the floor.

  The fingers were longer than they should have been. The nails were grotesquely hooked, and Ken knew somehow that this change – just as the change from lovely, kissable lips to organic chainsaw – had been wrought for the sole purpose of creating a killing machine out of something that had once been the pinnacle of innocence.

  A plastic band, the kind issued upon admission to hospitals, circled the thing’s wrist. Just behind it, another strip of material circled the wrist. This one looked homemade, a lanyard or some other kind of bracelet a kid would make for his baby brother or sister.

  Christopher reacted instantly at the sight of the thing’s hand and wrist, moving so fast it had to be an unconscious motion: no thought, only instinct.

  He swung the axe.

  The thing below squealed.

  And at the same moment, someone screamed. A shriek of sudden terror and pain. No, more than simple pain. This was agony.

  It wasn’t the thing below the bus. Not the infant-creature.

  It was someone above.

  Someone in the bus.

  It was Christopher.

  21

  CHRISTOPHER SLUMPED. Ken thought the young man would have fallen right through the hole in the floor before him, but Aaron grabbed the neck of his shirt and yanked him backward. Aaron’s left hand had been crushed during a zombie attack – the fingers all broken or sprained, some so badly Ken wondered if they would ever completely heal – but his right was strong enough to haul the younger man back from the abyss. It was a struggle, though, and for a moment Ken was sure Christopher would pitch forward and disappear below the wheels of the bus –

  (wheels of the bus or wheels on the bus? which is it and when does this song end?)

  – as had the beast the young man just dispatched.

  As soon as it became obvious that he wasn’t going to fall through the floor, Christopher turned to the cowboy. Aaron was a good five or six inches shorter, but Christopher folded into him like a little boy, sobbing. “Cass” fell from his hands, the axe clattering to the floor.

  The blade was stained with blood and ichor.

  All this happened in the space of a breath, an instant. And in the next moment Ken saw a small form flung out from beneath and behind the bus. The size of a beach ball, a bloody semi-sphere, the thing rolled for twenty or thirty feet and then came to a stop. Barely visible in the dust that coated the road behind the bus.

  But barely was enough. Enough to see the quad-jaws, the still-twitching limbs.

  It got up. Started a loping run after the bus, a run that was all the worse for the fact that it was being done by a body that under other circumstances barely would have learned to walk.

  Fast though it was, the thing couldn’t possibly catch up to the bus. But it kept running. Like it wouldn’t give up –

  (give in)

  – until it had caught its prey.

  Ken couldn’t look away, couldn’t tear his gaze from the aberration that was following the bus in a lopsided sprint.

  It had no eyes to see their progress, but it followed them. There were other things with that sense of sight-unsight. Ken had seen them in an elevator shaft. But they were different. This was worse. An evolution that was a stage of magnitude beyond what they had already seen.

  A large part of the thing’s shoulder was cleft, a wicked gash opened up by an axe coupled with Christopher’s near-inhuman reflexes. And as Ken watched the gash filled with yellow secretion and began to close.

  They left it behind. Only rubble and debris and the bodies of the dead caught unaware and unready – as were they all – for the Change.

  He stopped watching. Not only because there was nothing to see now, but because –

  “Hold onto something!” screamed the driver.

  Ken dropped to the nearest seat, spinning as he did, seeing....

  22

  ... THE FRONT END OF THE bus folding like the world’s largest piece of origami. It was an experiment in modern art gone hideously awry. The yellow of the bus melded with the red of another vehicle – impossible to tell what make and model, though it looked like it might have been a sporty little coupe of some kind – to create a stunning piece of abstract art.

  Ken’s mind vomited up a name for the new sculpture: The Bloody Bee. It sounded about right: the kind of thing you might find selling for a million dollars at some museum filled with pretentious crap that everyone pretended to understand even though no one had the foggiest idea what it meant – beyond contempt of artist for audience. The emperor’s new clothes had found a new hold in the well-educated, the well-bred, the well-to-do. People searching for meaning where there was none, and mis
sing the meaning that really surrounded them. Finding art in a dog turd shaped into a crucifix and missing it in the smile of a loved one.

  Ken knew the interpretation of this particular creation, though. It was dark art, a pastiche drawn on a shifting canvass, but its meaning was clear.

  It meant death.

  The bus bounced. A strange sensation: not stopping exactly, but a stutter-step in its forward momentum, as though it had momentarily changed its mind about moving onward, then changed its mind again and resumed course.

  Ken’s face bounced off the bar that ran along the top of the seat in front of his. He tasted blood in his mouth. Something hard, too. He spit. Something fell on the floor with a tap that sounded far too loud for what it was.

  Lost a tooth. The Bloody Bee and The Tooth At My Feet.

  His tongue pushed into the hole where his front tooth had been.

  That’s gonna cost a million bucks to fix.

  He realized that was a ridiculous thought. There were no more deductibles. No more insurance, no more dentists. Cosmetic dentistry had gone the way of the dodo and uninterrupted cable service and the primacy of the human race.

  He would never sit in a badly-carpeted waiting room and listen to crappy music while reading a fishing magazine circa 1972 again. The thought made him suddenly and surprisingly sad.

  Ken leaned over and picked the tooth up from the floor. People were shouting, Sally was growling. It all sounded muffled. He focused on the tooth.

  Is the baby coming?

  He heard the words in the voice of the doctor who had delivered Derek. But it wasn’t Derek whose arrival he was worried about. Not yet, at any rate. It was the thing whose body had integrated a diaper and whose face had become a saw capable of chewing through solid metal.

  And still he reached for the tooth. Held it in front of his face. It was blurry – everything was – but it looked whole. Not cracked or broken, but an entire tooth that had been pounded out of his jaw from root to crown.