The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7]

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  The huge man was driving the thresher right at the zombies that separated him from the survivors.

  The John Deere suddenly leapt forward.

  The undead between Ken and the huge harvester finally seemed to take note of the new threat.

  They turned to see what had crept up behind them.

  They hissed that diamondback-rattler hiss.

  39

  THE BLADES HIT THE first of the undead.

  Then metal and flesh met.

  Metal won.

  Metal continued through to bone.

  This was a tougher contest, but again metal proved victorious.

  Blood flew in high arcs, a splash of red that painted the side of the green and yellow cab. Ken thought almost idly that the thing looked ready for Christmas.

  The horde ahead was gone in under two seconds. Not cut down, not blown to pieces the way the RPG had done.

  Just gone.

  They disappeared into the whirling cyclone blades of the thresher. Some simply flung into the air as mist, others were blended to a pulp and carried along a conveyor to a cylinder that had been angled out so the paste spewed onto the street instead of into the grain bin behind the cab.

  In moments all that was left of the undead was grume and a few tiny things that twitched and foamed yellow. Too small to worry about, too tiny to be threats.

  The thresher pulled past the kill zone, huge tires riding over the red patch that had once been things that, in turn, had once been people.

  The black man reached a massive arm over and pushed open the cab door. The door was mostly clear plastic or some kind of acrylic, and the man threw it open with such force that it warped, bouncing off the cab before he caught it again in a hand the size of a hubcap.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed. His voice was deeper than he was big, rumbling like tectonic plates about to quake. “Get IN.”

  He nodded.

  Ken looked over his shoulder and realized that in the sheer shock of the thresher’s appearance, he had forgotten that the undead in front weren’t the only ones.

  There were still the ones behind.

  The ones that hadn’t stopped chasing them.

  The ones that were now only feet away.

  40

  THE ROW OF PEOPLE SLUMPED toward the thresher.

  Ken pushed Maggie ahead. Pushed Buck. Neither resisted. They held the girls, the things that seemed to be at once the most important, fragile, and dangerous part of the group.

  Hissing followed them. He wondered if this meant the undead things were changing the way the... infected ones had been doing. The thought terrified him.

  If the dead could not only rise up, but learn and change and evolve, what hope for humanity?

  He didn’t look back.

  Sally fell suddenly behind them. The snow leopard roared, the bellow of a big cat that had marked its prey. Something hissed, then there were low sounds of struggle.

  Sally leapt back into view. More blood poured from the wound on his side. He had lost an eye.

  He didn’t seem to mind. He ran to Maggie and licked little Liz’s limp foot. He let Hope’s trailing hand fall across his back, then danced back silently to tangle with the undead behind.

  More growling, a roar. Hissing.

  Maggie was at the idling thresher. She put her hands on the guardrails that ran up either side of the steep ladder-stairs that led to the cab. Pulled herself in. The black man smiled tensely at her, as though even in the midst of a calamity certain niceties must be observed. Ken almost expected him to say, “This is your captain speaking.”

  Next was Buck. Maggie shuffled over to give him space on the bench.

  And that was it. The cab was full.

  No room for anyone else.

  The hissing increased.

  Sally leapt forward and somehow managed to navigate the ladder.

  “The hell is that?” shrieked the driver.

  Ken heard Buck and Maggie start to explain, heard bits of “He’s with us,” and “He’s all right” before the huge bear-man – so big he dwarfed even Buck’s six-foot-plus frame – waved them to silence.

  He looked over Ken’s head. Then at The Redhead.

  “Move, Theresa, move!” he screamed. And there was genuine terror in his gaze.

  Terror, but Ken wondered where they were supposed to move to.

  41

  THE REDHEAD – HARD to think about her as a Theresa – jumped onto the thresher, then clambered across the side of the cab as nimbly as Christopher might have done. She gestured to Aaron. “Get him inside!” She pointed at Christopher.

  Aaron eyed the cab. “Where should I put him?”

  “Anywhere you can fit him!”

  Christopher threw off the cowboy’s arm almost angrily. He bounded up the ladder, slammed the cab door shut, and then climbed across the blood-slick outside of the vehicle until he was next to Theresa. He eyed her as though daring her to say something.

  She looked almost admiringly at him. Nodded. Admitting his right to be there, Ken thought.

  Ken was next. Aaron propelled him halfway up the ladder. Then the cowboy barely made it onto the bottom rung before the thresher leaped forward.

  The blades churned again.

  They were pointed the wrong direction, but Ken knew that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t an attack, it was an escape.

  The things were still coming.

  One of them put a hand on Aaron’s work boot. Aaron hooked his left arm – his bad arm – through the handrail. He spun and kicked. The undead thing’s head exploded in red and pink. The thing danced mindless madness, instant and infinite insanity gripping it. It didn’t let go of Aaron, though, and the cowboy was losing his grip.

  Ken jumped down a step and aimed his own kick. He wasn’t as expert as Aaron, but all the years of martial arts held him in good stead and he got a good front kick in. Right over Aaron’s shoulder, straight into the thing’s own shoulder. It spun the undead around, tearing it free of Aaron. The monster, the dead thing, was nearly headless, but it somehow sensed it was near to other moving creatures, because it grabbed one of its once-sisters and began tearing huge chunks of flesh from the other undead.

  The dead woman it was attacking didn’t even acknowledge it. She kept trying for the thresher as it slowly moved forward. The vehicle had been moving quickly when Ken first saw it, but apparently there had been a bit of momentum involved in its velocity. To get up speed it had to have time.

  Not like the zombies. They ran fast from the Change. They killed quickly from the get-go.

  The dead woman finally went down when the one Aaron and Ken had kicked ripped the back off her neck. It must have interrupted all signals from head to body because she fell and was still. Her fingers twitched.

  Then feet.

  She would rise again. Soon.

  Ken looked for the next undead.

  He kicked at one that was reaching for them. He connected, knocking the thing back. It went to one knee and the driver swerved at the same time. He was undoubtedly trying to miss something in the road, but it was almost a choreographed move. The huge tires of the thresher ground the zombie beneath them. It didn’t rise again. Ken couldn’t even see where it had been: just one more stain on a road filthy from the destruction of the past days.

  Aaron was fighting off the things, good hand and both feet a blur. Efficient motions meant not to subdue or still, but to cripple and kill. The moves of a trained soldier.

  Or assassin.

  Ken glanced at Christopher and Theresa. The redheaded woman was holding to a horizontal bracket on the side of the thresher’s cab. She was holding herself up out of reach of the undead, but every so often she would drop down and land a pair of heavy black boots in a forehead or face. Sometimes it triggered that jittering madness, other times not.

  She smiled regardless. Ken remembered the diamond tears she had wept. Wondered what had happened when the RPGs flew. What she had lost.

&nbs
p; Christopher was lower than Theresa. He wasn’t using his feet to kick at pursuers. Feet were more powerful, and safer to use than anything else.

  But Christopher had abandoned safety some time ago. He must have dropped the medieval style axe at some point, and now he was simply punching the zombies. Wild swings as he shrieked wordless screams of pain that nearly turned to pleasure each time his knuckles connected with a face, a body. He was crying in his rapturous rage. Ken wondered if he was attacking the things that had changed his baby, or if he saw himself in the things, and was murdering the father that had left a baby behind.

  Never mind that it wasn’t true in the slightest. It was the lie that good parents saw when they lost a child. The what if that haunted them. That would haunt Ken.

  It happened. Christopher’s recklessness caught him. One of the undead grabbed his arm. Pulled it toward him.

  Christopher almost fell off the side of the thresher. He would have been killed outright if that had happened.

  But he managed to hold on.

  Pulling away from the mouth.

  Always the mouth.

  Always the terror of Change. Fear of loss that even a man torn to nothing by grief could understand.

  42

  KEN LOOKED AUTOMATICALLY to Aaron. The cowboy was busy. Pummeling his own attacker, his arm still threaded through the handrail, still trying to stay on the still-crawling thresher while stopping the undead –

  (are there more of them there are where are they coming from how long will they come how long can we hold off how long can we hold out?)

  – from climbing on and taking them all down. Theresa was still doing her homicidal Tarzan move.

  No one could help.

  Ken ran up the stairs. Using both hands for speed, even though gripping with his three-fingered left was agony.

  He jumped to the thin strip of metal by the cabin.

  The driver looked at him. A look that said, “We can’t stop, you can’t come in.”

  Ken shook his head. He didn’t want in.

  43

  CHRISTOPHER WAS SCREAMING. Not the homicidal scream of a man born to the edge of madness. It was fear. Not fear of pain or death, but fear of something worse. This was damnation, pure and simple: condemnation to a mindless life of wandering and serving. No choice, no self. Just existence, and heeding the call to rise and destroy.

  Ken tried to blank out the cries, or at least to blank out the terror that they carried. The fear that tried to force itself into his own mind.

  One of his martial arts instructors, a barrel-chested Persian with scarred knuckles and a smile broader than a crescent moon, had always quoted Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, a seminal book on sword fighting written in the 1600s.

  “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined through calm,” Master Arman would say. The words would come as a whisper, usually during the last pushup after a grueling sparring session. Musashi’s wisdom moving through the centuries to remind Ken to focus not on the struggle to survive what – at the time – had seemed like the hardest thing he would do, but rather to focus on the calm that underlay the struggle.

  He wondered what had happened to Master Arman. If his old teacher had survived the Change. He hoped so.

  “Be determined through calm.” The swordsman’s words.

  He took what he wanted from the side of the cab.

  Christopher was still screaming.

  Ken felt the calm that he had always sought, the calm that had always eluded him. Not the feeling that everything would work out the way he hoped, but the sudden realization that, live or die, he was trying. That, live or die, everything would turn out the way it should; the way it must.

  Determined through calm.

  Musashi had been a ronin. A samurai whose lord had fallen.

  Ken had no master. His world had fallen, and all that was left were his friends.

  Through calm.

  His family.

  Calm.

  He plucked the cherry red fire extinguisher off the side of the cab. It was held in place by a clamp designed to be stiff enough that the extinguisher wouldn’t come off during the normal jouncing of the machine’s operation.

  In Ken’s –

  (calm)

  – hands it fell open like the arms of a long-lost friend.

  Christopher was still shrieking.

  Ken eschewed the handle or the shell. He pulled the hose assembly, throwing the red canister over his shoulder like some strange scuba gear.

  Then dancing down. Dancing like a swordsman. Like the calm Musashi in his Five Rings, moving from prologue to epilogue. Inevitable start to inescapable end.

  He used his bad hand to grab a bracket similar to the one Theresa was still using. Then he stepped on Christopher’s shoulder. The younger man screamed again, terrified anew at what was happening. But Ken could not help that.

  He was calm.

  This was how it had to be.

  He used his foot to push Christopher back against the side of the thresher, then used the same thrust he had generated to lean forward. The momentum thus created traveled through his foot, his leg, his torso. Velocity increased as it traveled up his arm, then through the hose of the fire extinguisher.

  The canister snaked out, then the forward momentum ended like the crack of a whip, turning forward to down in a tight arc.

  The head of the zombie that had been pulling Christopher toward it disappeared in a spray of blood and bone. The thing danced. But Ken barely noticed the dance as he pushed it away. It was not Musashi’s dance, so he did not care.

  It was not calm, so it did not deserve notice.

  The fire extinguisher exploded as well, the impact separating tubing and handle and canister. It disappeared into the frenzy.

  Ken let it go. He had no need for it.

  The thresher lunged forward as the driver shifted gears.

  The undead were suddenly left behind.

  And all was silent.

  All was...

  ... calm.

  44

  IT DIDN’T LAST.

  Nothing good could last, at least not now, not so soon after the change.

  Perhaps not ever again.

  Ken felt the calm that had captured him suddenly release him. He felt the pain in his back, his leg. The agony sprouting from absent fingers and sending tortured tendrils grinding their way through his left hand and arm.

  He vomited on Christopher’s head.

  It wasn’t much, just a thin gruel of storm water and the power bars that Ken had managed to choke down while lying in a semi-comatose state and then awake for far too short a time in the underground areas of Boise.

  Still, it was enough to wring a shriek out of the younger man.

  “Are you kidding me?” Christopher glared up, then averted his eyes in time to barely avoid getting a faceful of round two. More warm vomitus trailed around his ears and down the back of his shirt. He looked up, squinting to make sure he wasn’t going to get hit a third time, then unleashed a stream of invectives so enraged and inventive that Ken almost smiled.

  Sometimes the universe sends us gifts.

  Sometimes the gift is a calm to get us through an impossible moment.

  Sometimes it is a faceful of puke, and the incredibly hilarious sight of a once-too-handsome-to-be-believed friend trying haplessly to clean himself off one-handed while clinging to a giant tractor that trundles through a dead city.

  Christopher was still screaming, still raging.

  The redheaded Theresa started laughing with Ken. Wheezing “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh” over and over, a phrase that seemed so innocent and out of place beside Christopher’s raging epithets that it just made Ken laugh all the more.

  Another laugh joined theirs. Aaron, the old cowboy hanging off the side of the ladder, the arm threaded through the handrail and one foot on the ladder the only things keeping him on the vehicle. He was laughing so hard that he was crying, tears rolling
down his weathered cheeks like streams cutting their way through long-dry beds.

  They had all lost people. Had all found them in horrible ways. Ken sensed that Theresa, too, had been touched by the loss that was felt so keenly and quickly now.

  Of course she has. It’s the World After. Everyone alive has lost someone. The lucky ones haven’t found them again.

  The thought just made Ken laugh all the harder.

  A moment later, Christopher laughed as well.

  Hooting like maniacs, they rode the thresher through Boise.

  45

  THE LAUGHTER PETERED out.

  Aaron fell silent first, and Ken saw steel come back into the cowboy’s eyes. He began scanning: left, right, left right. Up, down. Left, right, left, right. Up, down. His eyes moved methodically and without ceasing. The other side of the thresher was a huge blind spot for the time being, but at least on this side nothing would get past the wary eye of the older man.

  Ken looked around as well.

  He saw nothing.

  But he heard a cry. One of terror, one of fear.

  And his heart almost jumped out of his body for happiness.

  He climbed as quickly as he could toward the cabin. The grace and agility that had been endowed upon him like some Heavenly gift were gone, so it seemed to take forever. Forever in which he could bask in the sound.

  It was Lizzie.

  The sound of his daughter, crying. Not the sound of a tiny demon shrieking for help, not the sound of panting, of gasping, of –

  (give up give in)

  – growling that demanded despair. It was just the sound of a little girl hungry and tired and afraid.

  It was music.

  Ken pulled himself to the cabin and was almost hit by the door as it opened. It would have been a sort of cosmic irony, to survive all that he had only to get whacked in the face by the cab door and so thrown off and probably crushed to death by the blood-inked wheels of the thresher.