He realized how foolish both hopes were. He switched to hoping that his friends were still alive, and that he himself would survive the next minutes.
He made it halfway over the concrete. Then a bit more than halfway. A tipping point. He slid like a fish over the top, splashed down on the other side.
The current held him once again.
70
HE WAS THE WORLD’S slowest, wettest, most unwieldy pinball in a machine designed by a sadist.
Bouncing back and forth from bank to bank, mud getting into his ears each time he collided with land, water ripping past his eyes so fast he was blind, the sound of the current and the splash of the rain so loud hearing was impossible.
Somehow Ken found the presence of mind to realize that he had never specified a point for him and the others to get out of the canal. No rendezvous point to shoot for, to try and meet up.
No plan is perfect, Ken.
Then he was under again. Kicking frantically, hoping he was kicking up instead of down. Knowing it probably didn’t matter. His clothing and his shoes kept pulling him, pulling him.
His hands were cupped. The one swim teacher he’d had – a young woman named Carrie who seemed so old to an eight-year-old boy but who was probably all of nineteen – would have been proud at the way he tried to catch the water. “Pick an apple and put it in your pocket,” she always said.
Only the frigging apples kept falling apart in his hands, kept disintegrating in a frothy flow that was impossible to catch or use to pull himself forward.
At last, in desperation, he let himself go limp.
“Be water, my friend.”
Maybe good ol’ Bruce had gone for a dunk or two in an irrigation canal at high tide. The second Ken loosened up and stopped struggling, the sinking sensation, if not disappeared, then lessened significantly. His body lengthened out, his feet actually felt like they were trying to surface instead of bury themselves in the muck at the bottom of the canal.
He caught his first apple. Carrie would have been proud.
Look, Mom! I did it!
Ken’s parents had been dead for a decade. Mom died of breast cancer, Dad died in a car accident a year later. They died before Derek was born. Why was he thinking of them?
Not ready to meet you yet, Mom and Dad. Hope you understand.
Put an apple in his pocket. Pick another.
The swimming was clumsy. Awkward. But the rain he felt on the occasions he managed to turn up his face and grab a quick breath sounded like the applause of a beautiful older girl in a blue bathing suit. “Great job, Kenny! Pick those apple trees clean, kiddo!”
Another thought intruded into the almost-pleasant dream. It cast away the remembrance of something that might have been a first crush if he’d been old enough to understand the concept. Ripped it in two like old cloth.
Gates. Other gates.
The flow control gates came in all shapes, all configurations. Ken didn’t know if the next one would be anything like the last one.
He switched back to his previous attempts to right himself. The water grabbed him again, trying to push him down like the one big boy in the pool had done every time Carrie’s back turned.
What was his name?
Does it matter?
He saw the gate.
Unlike the first one – the one he slammed into – this one extended well out of the water. Ken couldn’t see past it, didn’t see how any of his friends could have gotten past it.
Then he realized that the water level wasn’t nearly high enough for this to be a closed flow control gate. That would be a dam, with water surging high against its back.
He had time for a quick breath. Then the water dragged him completely under.
Into the concrete box.
71
KEN PASSED FROM TWILIGHT to midnight in an instant. One moment he was in the green-gray of the rain and the speeding sluice the canal had become. The next moment he was in blackness as he passed into a concrete tunnel.
He collided with the sides of the box. Piece of skin came away. He screamed. Couldn’t help it. Bubbles rose. Had nowhere to go. Clustered around his nose and face, but gave no light to his eyes.
The dark lasted forever, and Ken knew that sometimes canals shifted sideways. Passed under street intersections or long stretches of empty land. He hoped this wasn’t one of those moments.
No. Can’t be. Saw the others.
But had he seen them before the gate – in which case this could be a sideways, subterranean shift – or after?
He had just enough time to panic.
Be water.
He floated. Began to sink. It was a good thing: his body stopped hitting the concrete.
Twilight came again. Or perhaps the dawn.
A hand grabbed him by the hair. Yanked him up.
A voice.
“Look at this. The big fish that didn’t get away.”
Ken was dragged, sputtering, to the bank. He grabbed a patch of weeds. They were spiny thistles edged with thorns that cut him cruelly. Blood ran with the rain, a pink reminiscent of the color that came when the zombies were hit in the head.
It was the color of a man who had left the pinball machine.
The hand finally let go of his hair. Ken looked over and saw Christopher smiling tightly at him. The younger man’s other hand was buried in the weeds as well, also bloody.
On the bank: Buck, tall. Holding Hope.
Maggie. Liz bound to her.
They were waterlogged as stray dogs in a hurricane. But standing, neither seeming afraid of the girls’ health. Or no more than before at least.
Sally was even there. His tail twitched from time to time. Almost as though he was saying, “I don’t know why you’re all acting so upset about what just happened to you. After all, I was the one who got rained on.”
Ken wrestled his way up the bank. The mud kept peeling away under his hands as though the canal wanted to keep him; had claimed him as its own and was loathe to give him up. Still, he made it up before Christopher and reached down to give the other man a hand.
Christopher came up, huffing and puffing. Again, Ken wasn’t breathing as hard as he thought he would. He pulled Christopher the rest of the way, then said, “You need to hit the gym, man.”
“I’ll sign up at the next Gold’s.”
Ken clapped him on the shoulder. He turned to Maggie. Hugged her harder than he’d ever hugged anyone. Careful not to crush Liz, but still managing to nearly meld his wife’s flesh with his own.
“Still sure I don’t gross you out?” he said.
“You keep saying that,” she answered with a shake of her head. “You’re beautiful.”
He smiled. Had a moment to feel something... odd.
What the –
Then a shot rang out. He felt something punch him in the back.
Turned.
Elijah was running toward them farther down the bank than they had been.
They hadn’t accounted for the big man. For the man who had already fallen into the same canal, had been dragged the same direction they had gone. Hadn’t accounted for his toughness, his persistence.
For his gun.
Another shot.
Another punch. This one hit Ken’s shoulder.
He fell to his knees.
Someone was screaming. A high-pitched scream. Could have been Maggie. Might have been Buck, too. The guy had a surprisingly high voice for such a big man.
No, probably Maggie.
Elijah was within twenty feet. Gun pointed at Ken. At his face.
Maybe he’ll miss.
But he hadn’t missed at longer range. In the rain. While running.
“Sorry,” yelled the big man. “The world. We’re saving the world!”
He stood carefully. But switched his aim. To Lizzy. Strapped again across Maggie’s belly.
A shot that would likely kill them both.
72
KEN REACHED UP A HAND. His left.
He sta
red at it. Just for a moment. An instant. Too long, perhaps, given what was happening around him, but still –
Elijah was set.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. The sound was a whisper.
The shot rang out. Maggie screamed.
And did not fall.
Elijah’s head exploded.
The man’s body flung backward. Rolled down the bank. Into the canal they had all navigated with such cruel care.
Gone.
Ken didn’t understand. And almost didn’t care.
He looked down.
Blood soaked his black shirt. “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP.” He snorted and more blood exploded from his nose and mouth. Even that was funny. It was all so terribly funny. So damn funny.
Footsteps sounded in the rain.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Buck.
A voice answered. Thick and gravelly. A voice Ken knew instinctively belonged to the type of man you did not screw with.
He knew he should be curious about what happened.
He wasn’t.
He grinned. Gritted his teeth. That strange feeling – that wrong feeling – was still there.
He lifted his left hand. It was hard. He did it anyway.
He could hear his pulse. Double pumps in time with the surges of red across his shirt.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
“Not now,” said the other voice. The new voice. Maggie was still screaming. “Any more of them out there?”
“Maybe,” said Christopher.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
Ken couldn’t look away from his hand. Couldn’t stop gritting his teeth.
He suddenly remembered kicking Aaron.
Climbing around on the train.
Running faster than the others, without losing his breath.
Making a deadly swim without benefit of any flotation device, and again emerging without losing his breath.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
Fighting off zombies with a knife and then with the train coupler. And how heavy did those things have to be, to bind freight cars together? But he had swung it like it was nothing more than a baseball bat.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
Most of all, he remembered how the zombies swarmed the train. And how he had grown resistant to their call to give in to their attacks.
How they slowed down at the end. Slowed down when he wished it.
Lub-dub.
Lub... dub.
Heart beating slower.
He looked down. Blood no longer spurting out. Just dripping.
He slumped to his back.
Lub...
... dub...
Looking at his hand. Gritting his teeth.
Feeling the tooth. The tooth he had lost.
The tooth that was now there again.
Lub...
...
... dub...
Looking at his hand.
The hand he had mutilated himself.
The ring and pinky fingers he had cut off.
Nothing but stubs.
Lub...
...
...
... dub...
The stumps glistened. Not from the swim in the canal.
Coated with yellow. A waxy substance he had seen before.
And small nubs in their centers. Nail-like growths.
Lub...
...
...
...
... dub...
Ken’s hand fell to his side.
Did I really hear him? Was Derek’s voice in my head... was it real?
What’s happening to me?
He felt Maggie hold him. His face to the sky.
His mouth fell open. He remembered that was what happened when you Changed.
His heart stopped.
And Ken Strickland died.
END OF BOOK FIVE
THE COLONY: BURIED
1
This is what happens when you stare at a dead man:
Water falls on your face.
Blood mixes with the rain, makes it pink and barely-there and somehow both less real and more vivid than it should be.
The boom of nearby gunshots that ended lives fades away, replaced by distant thunder that echoes like the sky itself is screaming in confusion, rage, pain.
And through it all, a woman screaming. A big man gasping, gasping, gasping for breath. Two children who stare at nothing and make not a sound.
What just happened?
Ken's dead, that's what happened.
Ken Strickland's body started to slide down the bank, down the mud-blood beneath his soaked body, toward the rushing canal.
Maggie didn't move. She was rocking, screaming, staring as her husband slid away. Perhaps she couldn't move, perhaps she didn't want to move. Maybe she thought it wasn't real. Maybe she thought if she waited long enough Ken would jump up and never mind the gaping hole in his shoulder or the even bigger one in his chest, he'd just jump up and smile and shout "Just kidding" and they'd all laugh right there in the middle of the storm and the death and the Apocalypse.
Maybe.
Buck didn't move, either. He kept gasping. Maybe having a heart attack? Young for that, but certainly high-strung enough. The dude could give a strung-out cheetah lessons in spaz-osity.
Ken's little girls didn't seem to notice that their father had been killed. Lizzy hung from a carrier on her mother's back, her chubby arms and chubbier legs dangling loose and limp, her head tilted back, her mouth and eyes open and totally oblivious to the rain. Hope, seven years old to her sister's two, hung from Buck's arms. Equally limp, her face also turned skyward. They were breathing in time. In-out, in-out, in-out. Panting.
The snow leopard licked Liz's feet, legs. He took no mind of the dead. He never had. Just the girls. The biggest and least fluffy-lovey teddy bear of all time.
Ken slid toward rushing water, a few inches from being swept away.
Other than to breathe or scream, no one moved. Maybe no one could.
Why is no one moving?
Christopher's thoughts crashed in on themselves, jumbled in his mind like a hundred-car pileup.
His body remembered how to work, though. Seemingly on its own it lurched toward the bank, toward the water.
Toward the body of a friend.
Christopher fell forward, sprawled purposefully in the slick mud, plowing through long grass and reeds as Ken's body twisted its way to the water. He felt for a moment like he was a kid on a Slip'N Slide.
Only no prize for going the farthest or fastest. No prize I want, at least.
He caught Ken's arm. The body was heavy, a loose weight that yanked at Christopher harder than he expected.
Ken's legs fell into the canal. The current – fast, strong, terrible – tore him into a position nearly perpendicular to Christopher.
Christopher didn't let go. He wouldn't. It didn't matter that Ken was dead. It didn't matter that Aaron was still hunting them all, or even that the world had mostly ended. He wouldn't let go of his friend. He couldn't, he refused.
Christopher had left his baby behind. He had left what he believed was his dead child, and then had buried an axe in the child's head when it came back. And it didn't matter that the baby survived both times, that the thing that he had once cradled in his arms kept right on going. It didn't even matter that the second time the baby had been a monster, and the first time had been when the hospital where the baby was staying had turned to rubble in the first moments of the finality of civilization; that he thought his baby surely dead.
The fact remained: he left the child behind. Ran from an innocent.
So no more. Not again.
He wouldn't leave Ken. Not like this.
The current pulled. Pulled. Pulled.
Christopher didn't let go.
So the current pulled him, too. He started moving down the bank. Anchored by his grip on
a dead man's hand, by his determination to keep one thing sacred, one thing safe in this world gone haywire.
The current pulled them both toward the canal, into the water.
Into death.
2
CHRISTOPHER'S TOES kicked down. Deep divots in the mud that turned into furrows as he was dragged closer to the water.
A part of him screamed to let go. Shrieked that he was going to die; that he had barely made it out of this canal in the first place. He had jumped in to escape from Aaron, the cowboy/rodeo clown/special forces operative/clear-overachiever-with-a-severe-lack-of-self who had decided Ken's girls probably had to die to save the world. And Christopher had survived. But only barely. Plus, that last time in the canal he had had a makeshift flotation device to help, to keep him afloat.
Now? With a dead body pulling him down? No way. He was going down, he'd drown for sure.
But he didn't let go. He screamed at himself to let go, and then screamed back to shut the hell up. There was no turning back. No turning away.
Ken dropped completely into the canal. The only part of him above the water was his hand, still clutched in Christopher's.
Christopher's feet no longer left any furrows. They flew up from the ground as the current took full control of Ken – and of him by extension. He shot forward. Felt his arm spear into the water. His shoulder.
His head went under.
A terrifying instant – an instant that lasted forever. A deep, coughing, choking inhalation. Foamy water that was as much air as liquid. He coughed, inhaled more fluid, almost vomited.
Still wouldn't let go.
Slid further in.
And something stopped him.
He reversed direction. Started moving backward.
His head came out of the water. Shoulder pulled free of the canal's grasp. The water seemed to hiss below him, enraged by the loss of its prey.
The backwards motion continued. Christopher kept a tight grip on Ken's hand.
They both came free of the water. Christopher's fingers cramped, pain shooting up his arm and all the way to his twice-broken nose. He grinned through the pain. Ken had broken his nose, both times. It now seemed almost a happy memory.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 61