The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  The RPG hit the semi-circle of zombies that had crowded into the road ahead of them.

  Exploded in a firestorm of heat and light.

  29

  “GEDDUB”

  “can’t geddub”

  “godda geddub”

  Everything sounded funny.

  “baby?”

  “babyzokay”

  Ken put a shaking hand to his head. Touched his ear. Felt something wet. Probably blood, and he tried to bring his hand forward to verify that, but couldn’t seem to make his hand work.

  “hope?”

  “hopezokay”

  “geddub”

  “can’t geddub”

  He realized that at least one of the mumbling, stumbling voices was his. That he was sitting in the middle of something wet –

  (did I crap my pants? again?)

  – and something was pulling on him. Yanking his arm and hand. He thought about ignoring it, but whatever it was –

  “goway goway ‘n’leaveme”

  – was pulling on his bad hand. The left. The hand he had slashed two fingers off of in order to escape a horde.

  “theystillhere”

  “still here geddub we gottago”

  The hand hurt. Whoever was pulling it wasn’t stopping, and Ken finally realized that the only way to stop his hand hurting would be to geddub. To get up.

  “geddub. Geddub. Get up.”

  A final yank, and Ken managed to stand. His feet slipped on the wetness beneath him and he almost went down again. His vision finally cleared enough of the white fog that had surrounded it to see that he had been sitting not in his own waste but in what looked like a pile of entrails.

  He looked at his own gut.

  His shirt was torn. He had a new collection of scrapes.

  But the viscera were not his.

  He looked at the hand still holding his. It was big, almost too big for the sinewy arm to which it attached. Aaron.

  “Come on.”

  The cowboy gave him another yank. Ken lurched forward. He stumbled over a hand that was laying in the road, bereft of a body. He wondered for a moment if the hand belonged to any of his friends. Then the fingers snapped shut as he passed, trying to grab him, and he noticed the yellow gunk already seeping out of the stump and oozing from the pores. Answer enough. Not a friend.

  He raised his eyes.

  He had seen Hell. But that had been Hell from a human perspective. The end of the world. Earth brought to its knees in mere minutes.

  This was a different sort of perdition: damnation for the already-damned; a deeper circle of Hell. The small horde that had been in front of the survivors had been hit squarely by the RPG, the payload shattering and splattering them like a puddle under a boot. Bits of the zombies were everywhere, pieces laying on the ground, parts on cars, shreds hanging from walls and streetlights.

  The Redhead was struggling to stand. A disembodied hand clutched her upper arm, and blood welled around the fingers. She seemed to notice it for the first time and screamed in terror and revulsion. She swung her entire body in a tight arc. Slammed the stump against a nearby parking meter, once, twice, three and four times and Ken heard the crackle and then the crunch and then nothing as the bones inside the impossibly-gripping hand were pummeled to mush.

  The hand fell away. She ground it under her heel.

  She turned to the survivors. Zombies that had been blown to pieces were pulling themselves toward them on shattered arms and fingers. Yellow froth was hardening, sealing what remained of their organs inside.

  “Come on,” she said. She looked behind them. Ken remembered that there had been more than one horde.

  We can’t outrun them. No way.

  As if to answer his thought, he heard the sound of another RPG. Felt the vibration of another payload delivered, another explosive ignition.

  The Redhead did not react as he might have expected. Rather than triumph or relief, he thought he saw desperate grief shine in her eyes.

  She turned away before he could be sure.

  “Come on,” she said again. Her voice still grated around the devastating throat wound. But no amount of grit and gristle could hide the sob that choked her words. “We’re almost there."

  Ken didn’t know if she was talking to the survivors alone, or to herself as well. Perhaps only to herself.

  He looked for Maggie. His wife was standing. Covered in gore, looking as surprised as he felt to be alive.

  He tried to smile but couldn’t. He was too tired, too confused.

  Too curious.

  We’re almost where?

  30

  BY THE TIME THEY MADE it through the line of carnage that had once been a solid wall of zombies, the survivors were all leaning on one another. All touching, everyone holding hands and arms and slumped into the center, bracing for the strength that they no longer had.

  The only ones who walked under their own power were The Redhead, who took point, and Sally, who padded softly just ahead of Buck and Maggie – walking near the children as he always did.

  The snow leopard had apparently been closer to the blast radius of the RPG than the rest of them. His right side was stained with blood and his right ear looked decidedly shorter than the left, ending in a ragged black stump that twitched every few seconds as though the cat were batting away a nonexistent fly with the equally nonexistent organ.

  Ken was at the center, held up by Buck on one side and Maggie on the other. He had an arm around each, and could reach out and touch his girls’ hair if he wanted to.

  He didn’t. He didn’t do it, and he didn’t want to do it. They were still asleep, still comatose through all the running and the violence and the explosions. He didn’t want to think about why. Didn’t want to think about what it would do to him if he felt their hair and they didn’t respond.

  Worse, what if they did respond... and the responses were not those of his little girls, but simply two more cells of the zombie organism?

  So he kept eyes mostly forward. Concentrated on putting foot after foot, step after step.

  He heard sobbing. Christopher. Something had broken in the young man. Ken didn’t understand it, but the bus had destroyed the strong, carefree person they all knew. Aaron was all but carrying him along, and finally said, “Kid, you gotta get it together.”

  “Did you see?” said Christopher.

  “See what?”

  “The baby. The baby,” was all Christopher could manage.

  “We all saw it. And it wasn’t a baby.” Aaron sounded tired. Drawn. He had lost as much as any of them, had been hurt as badly. But he kept on going, never complained.

  Ken wondered what the man’s secret was. Just training? Or was it more than that?

  Who is he?

  “She was wearing a red bracelet,” said Christopher.

  “What?” Aaron almost stopped walking. Almost, but not quite. Ken was glad. That would have brought the whole group to a shuddering halt, and Ken thought they all might simply collapse in a spent pile if that happened. Worse, he didn’t know if they would have the strength to get up again.

  “Her little bracelet,” said Christopher. “But it wasn’t white, it was red.” He said it again, his voice tearing out of him between sobs. “Red.”

  Aaron looked at Ken, then at Buck and Maggie. All of them shrugged.

  Maggie touched Christopher’s shoulder. Squeezed. She was going to say something, and Ken knew it would be the right thing. The thing that needed to be said, and that would heal. Or if not heal, at least soothe. Maggie had always had that talent.

  Before she could, though, before she had the chance to work her magic with Christopher, The Redhead turned around. Tears shone on her cheeks and fury sparkled through glistening eyes.

  “Can’t you shut him up?” she demanded.

  For a second Ken thought Maggie was going to yell back at The Redhead. That was when he knew his wife had adopted Christopher, fully and completely. Maggie’s first instinct was to defen
d him like a momma bear with a cub, whether he was in the right or not. That more than anything meant that the young man was as much a part of their family as Liz or Hope.

  Maybe more, depending on what’s happening....

  Shut up, Ken. Don’t think that.

  But Maggie managed to bite back her sharp retort. She shrugged. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

  Aaron’s expression shifted. “He knew the baby,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  Christopher sobbed again. It was a sound beyond agony. Beyond terror. It brought to mind one thing. One moment that Ken wished he could forget, one moment that he knew would hang before him in every instant of whatever life remained to him.

  Falling. Falling and falling forever.

  “We all knew people,” spat The Redhead. The tears were large in her eyes, diamonds of exquisite color and clarity that shimmered then shattered and fell down her cheeks along silvered streams.

  Ken was lost in their descent. Lost in another fall.

  The moment Derek let go of him.

  The moment his boy fell to save his mother.

  The moment his son was lost.

  And he knew who the baby was.

  Who it must be.

  31

  “THE BABY,” SAID KEN. “Yours?” He meant to say it with sympathy, with soothing tones that would show he understood. Instead they came out flat, toneless. The words of a man who had no sympathy to give, because every bit of pity was devoted in that moment to salving his own wounds.

  Christopher’s sobs stopped almost immediately. He wiped his eyes, and his spine turned into a steel rod. He transformed to one of the supports in their shrinking bastion of humanity, rather than one of the burdens.

  Ken wasn’t surprised. Even in a society as purportedly developed and professedly forward as the one they all came from, men were trained to push through what had happened to Christopher. What was still happening.

  Women lost babies and it was a tragedy and they wept.

  For the fathers it was a tragedy as well, but one that many felt they were expected to muscle over the same as they would any other sticky issue they confronted. That was how men dealt with things. They muscled on. They pushed through. Women pushed through as well, but they often allowed themselves to push through a wall of tears, like a waterfall they had to part around them, a veil of grief they had to cut through to find a valley of healing beyond.

  Men, whether culturally or just because of the way they were wired, more often felt the need to hold back their anguish. No waterfall allowed; they built a dam at the top of their feelings, shut all the control gates and let their grief drown them in isolation.

  It might not be the right way – Ken knew teachers at his old high school that would debate the rightness and wrongness of it until they passed out from oxygen deprivation – but it was reality. It seemed that most men swallowed their grief, tamped it down, and let it eat at them from the inside. It was what Christopher was doing now.

  It was why, when Ken finally touched his shoulder, the younger man didn’t do anything. Didn’t lash out, didn’t push him away. Just stood a little straighter. Don’t worry about me, the motion said. I’ll deal. I’m a man. It’s what I do.

  Maggie was a woman. She had to walk through that waterfall, and she expected others to do the same. So she wouldn’t let him drown quietly, and Ken loved that about her.

  She reached for Christopher. He didn’t respond to her, either, but she didn’t take that the way a man would have. She didn’t understand it as “Leave me alone,” but rather as “Try to understand, try to be with me.”

  “That’s why you were in town,” she said. “It wasn’t just so you could be part of a photo op with your parents.”

  He nodded. The nod was so fast you would miss it if you blinked, an up-down that was more twitch than response. But Ken saw the motion as hopeful. Even such tiny movements kept you afloat when you swam through grief and despair.

  “I made that red bracelet for her,” he said. His voice carried no emotion. No sadness, no fear. He sounded like he had already joined the ranks of the dead. “I put it on her myself.”

  “The mother?” said Maggie.

  “She was one of the reasons Mom and Dad always hated me.” Christopher grimaced. There was no joy in his face, only a reservoir of self-loathing so deep it likely had no bottom. “She was great when I met her. Wonderful. High school.” For a moment his face shone, memory past made vision present. “I loved her. I loved her so much.”

  He stopped, his mouth working dryly. Maggie put her other hand on his shoulder. Little Liz was sandwiched between them and Ken more than half-expected the toddler to come awake and start screaming the way she always seemed to do when he and Maggie started fooling around.

  But no. That was a thing from Before. A thing she would have done before she –

  (started Changing started Becoming)

  – had been caught up in this madness.

  Maggie had stopped walking, and so had the rest of the row. They had to stop, they were all linked in a mass of arms and legs. One stopped, they all stopped. One fell, they all fell.

  “I went to college and when I got back she was a junkie.” The grimace returned to Christopher’s face, if possible less cheerful than the first had been. “I didn’t know about her problems until after she was pregnant. I tried to get custody, but she was careful enough that I couldn’t prove the drug problems so the courts defaulted to her as the mother. And Dad didn’t want to create a stink that would hurt his reelection chances, so he helped her. Helped her keep my baby away from me.”

  He beat a fist against his thigh, hard and fast. “She died a few days ago. OD’d. And they found the baby in the apartment, dehydrated and starving and holding onto her mom. They took her – Carina, that was her name, the baby’s name, Heather named her after her grandmother – to the hospital, that’s where she was, she was in the hospital, critical condition when....” What had been a babbling sentence, a fear- and guilt-ridden monologue drifted off. He waved, taking in the entirety of the ruined world in one gesture.

  “I’m so sorry.” Maggie’s voice was low. Ken knew she was reliving her own loss. Was seeing her own son fall, and die, and then come back. The return of a dead child, which was every bereft parent’s dream, had been twisted into a nightmare by the Change.

  Just like everything else.

  Christopher shrugged. Trying to muscle through, to build up the walls of his dam, making the reservoir deep enough that it could hold the grief, could contain the guilt. Could let him drown until he was as dead as his baby. Only she wasn’t dead, was she? She was horribly alive.

  “The hospital fell down,” he said. “One of those planes hit it and it fell down. It was St. Luke’s, over on Jefferson.”

  He looked at them with a haunted gaze. “It fell down.”

  Ken knew what the young man was saying. What he was asking for.

  He also knew he was the only one who could give it.

  He moved slowly to Christopher. He felt like he was approaching a wounded beast. In a way he was.

  He took Christopher in his arms. His missing fingers throbbed, pounding a drumbeat from chest to arm to phantom fingers. Pain speared down his left leg, worse than the thrumming of burns and bruised muscles, worse even than his missing fingers. He took the pain and held it tight. Pain was life. The dead didn’t feel.

  “You didn’t let her die,” he said. Ken could tell that to Christopher, and he was the only one who could. Because he knew what it was like to be a father and watch your child die, to be the protector and let your child fall from your arms and be helpless to stop it. “You didn’t let her die, and you couldn’t stop her from changing.”

  Christopher collapsed against Ken. He sobbed again, and tears hot as blood fell against Ken’s neck.

  Ken held him.

  He heard a growl.

  (... give up...

  ... give in...)

  Far away. But comi
ng closer.

  Ken didn’t move. Not yet.

  What was the point of surviving if the survivors were not permitted to live? To grieve for the dead and so demonstrate that they were still alive?

  Aaron spoke, and any comfort that Ken might have felt in that moment bled out of him.

  “This isn’t an accident,” said the cowboy. Everyone swiveled to stare at him. The older man took a breath, and wiped his face with his one good hand. The other, a starfish with twisted legs that he had tucked into the waist of his pants, twitched with nervous energy.

  He looked at Ken. “Your boy came for us.”

  Then at Christopher. “Your girl.”

  He muttered something. Ken thought it was “Dorcas,” but couldn’t be sure.

  Then Aaron looked at them all. “These aren’t random coincidences. They’re targeted attacks. Psychological warfare.” The cowboy looked shaken, weary and worn at the idea of what he was saying. “These things aren’t just trying to kill us or turn us, they want to break us first.”

  32

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” said Buck. Ken thought the big man sounded much smaller than he was. Almost like a child, lost in an unfamiliar place without care of a parent.

  Buck had lost his mother only a few days before.

  What if she shows up, too?

  Ken thrust the thought away. Tried to. It wouldn’t go far.

  What if she’s in the horde coming now?

  No, she’s dead. Aaron killed her to stop her from being Changed.

  So? The dead are rising.

  (the children are raising them)

  No. She won’t come. She can’t. We can’t take it.

  “I mean these things are smart,” said Aaron. “And they know us.”

  Aaron looked like he was going to say more, but at that moment The Redhead broke in. “We can’t chat about this right now.”

  She pointed at Maggie. At Liz. The little girls’ fingers were twitching. And at the same moment, Ken realized that the sounds of the horde – the far-off but still-too-close-for-comfort horde – had died.