Hope backed away. But she didn't panic. She was slow. Moving carefully. Like Sally wasn't the only predator. Or even the most dangerous one.
And then another form got between the girls, this one inserting himself between Sally and Hope.
Buck.
"Help me, Clucky," said Hope. But her voice still had that... old sound. Devoid of fun, empty of innocence. The shell of childhood being worn by something eldritch, ancient and cool and cunninig.
Her voice sounded in Christopher's brain, too. Help me, Clucky.
Buck started growling. His arms crossed as though he was going to pray, then raised to cover most of his face. He stooped. It looked like a strange position until Christopher realized it would provide the big man the best protection from Sally's teeth and claws. He was offering only his extremities, hiding face and gut from devastation.
Buck was preparing to kill or be killed.
28
SOMETHING SHATTERED. A crash of glass that was probably the only sound that could have slashed its way through the rumbling animals – Buck and Sally – that had faced off.
Christopher whipped his head toward the sound. Glass had bounced off the wall. The only one who could have thrown it – the only one not involved in the tableau, or unconscious, or Christopher himself – was Amulek. The silent Māori kid trying to distract away whatever was happening.
It didn't work.
Buck crouched further. So did Sally. In the next moment there would be a pair of animals locked in death-combat.
"Kill him, Clucky," said Hope. Barely a whisper, but it slammed through Christopher's brain.
Buck jumped. Not waiting for the cat to make its first move. Neutralizing a threat by becoming a greater one. His feet left earth and he went nearly horizontal, one arm still covering most of his face, the other one extending, hand clenched into a powerful fist that slammed down.
It met only air. Sally was liquid. Sally was smoke. Sally flowed.
For some reason, Christopher focused on the snow leopard's tail. It dropped between its hind legs, almost wrapped around them as though to provide aerodynamic perfection down to the last nanosecond. But it twitched ever so slightly as Sally darted to the side, avoiding the fist that pounded down into nothing.
Sally's right foreleg swiped at Buck. The big man danced back –
("Kill him, Clucky," said Hope.
Kill him Clucky, the words echoed in Christopher's head.)
– but not fast enough. Three thin furrows appeared in his shirt. A once-white button-up stained gray, and now with streaks of red.
Lizzy laughed. Christopher remembered her voice, so long ago it seemed an eternity, but also just –
(has it been so little time so little time since this all fell apart all fell down and fell apart)
– a few days ago. "You are not family. You are renegades." So old, so at odds with what she should have been. Just like Hope's voice was.
And again, here and now, the toddler's laugh didn't sound right. High-pitched, the breathy whistle of someone who hadn't completely aged into belly laughs. But wrong. New, youthful... but at the same time old and withered. Like it was living two lives in two different places. Two versions of the same thing, but in different presents, different nows.
Buck didn't make a sound when Sally drew first blood. He crouched even lower. His lips drew back. Grew thin and disappeared. He looked just as much an animal as the snow leopard. He leaped again, and this time he didn't bother with fists. He abandoned his defensive crouch, arms open wide, legs cast in opposite directions. He made a net of himself and fell on the cat.
Sally screamed. A growl that, like everything else, was familiar and alien at once.
Buck slammed the cat's head with a huge fist. Sally reeled, but couldn't escape. Held in place by the big man's bulk.
Sally's mouth opened. Snout writhed free. He was going to tear Buck's throat away.
Buck's right hand turned into a huge hook. Slashed through the air toward Sally's throat. Ready to yank the leopard's life blood free.
Who would win? Or would they both die together?
Hope laughed. Clapped tiny hands in too-ancient delight. "Kill hi –"
"NO!"
The blood flow from Christopher's thrice-broken nose had been slowing. Now it burst forth again with such force that the gauze wads he had crammed into his nostrils shot out like soggy bullets. Blood gouted. He felt dizzy.
Who shouted?
It hadn't been him, but the word sounded in his skull just as loud –
(louder louder LOUDER SHUT UP TOO LOUD)
– as if he had been the origin of the scream.
Hope and Liz both fell over at the word. Sally immediately lowered himself to his belly and began preening himself. Buck shook himself and looked around, unsure eyes staring at an unfamiliar world.
Maggie blinked. She had shrieked the word that stopped what seemed an inevitable clash, but she didn't seem to know where she was for a moment, let alone what had just happened. She looked at the girls and fright yanked her eyebrows up, pulled her features taut.
"What's going on?" she whispered. Then whisper became scream: "What's happening?"
Again her words pounded through Christopher's brain. Pounded the blood right out of his head.
He thought he heard something pop inside his skull. Maybe it was his imagination. Maybe not.
He fell over. Not all the way, though. He toppled forward and his hands flung out to save him. The instinctive move to rescue the head, the heart. The parts that matter most.
His outstretched hand touched Liz. And as it did he fell the rest of the way to the floor. Into dark.
But he wasn't alone. Something was there in the blackness with him. Something young, but somehow old as well. It writhed up and down a ladder, trickled on legs that phased in and out of reality, appendages that Christopher couldn't quite see because they existed in so many different places – not just spots in this world, but spots in many worlds – at once. Like the faces of girls that were both young and ancient, this was a thing that was all and nothing, many and few. It was Legion, trapped in a single body.
The ladder the thing crawled on was familiar. Unlike any ladder he had ever used, craggy and bulging and angular in all the wrong ways. But he had seen this structure before. Not in the fine architecture of the Capitol building or in the gilded halls of the many mansions he'd passed through in another life. This was a stairway in a different building.
It was a human spine. Small. Still forming.
The spine of a child. A toddler.
The thing writhed up and down, in and out. Dancing through the Small now. Small, but growing. Growing.
It looked at him. Saw him somehow, there in the darkness where neither of them existed, and Christopher wanted to scream but didn't because if he did he knew the thing would not only see him but own him and he would never escape it, would never leave this Darkplace of the soul. He stifled the breathless scream, and tried to close his eyes, but could not. There were no eyes to close. At least, none he could control.
Like the thing's legs, the insectile creature's eyes were there-not-there, here-not-here. But though they only held part of this reality in their sight, they were still too much. The thing curled through the articulated length of the thing, playing on the spinal cord like a child on a hideous swing. It swayed to an unheard rhythm –
(in-out-in-out-give-up-give-in-give-up-give-in)
– and then turned toward Christopher and for a moment he saw it. Not in its fullness – he thought that would kill him – but more than he had. More and too much.
Far, far too much.
Now Christopher screamed. His body was still silent, insensate, but his mind shrieked. Cried out in a way that would last forever.
And then, finally on the wings of that scream, he completed his fall. Not simply into darkness, but into void. Into a place that had no place, because it was simply nothing. Blessed oblivion.
Thank God.
29
HIS MOTHER KEPT SHAKING him.
Only that was ridiculous. She never woke him up. So it must be Cheryl. Dumpy old Cheryl who was so crabby and outright mean sometimes and whom he adored because she was the only one who seemed to care what he did.
"Get up," she whispered.
Then she was gone. Now there was something else. Something in the dark, something he couldn't see. Not just because it was dark – he thought he might not be able to see it even in the brightest light, the sun of a hot summer day.
"Come," it said. It was a young voice. Dim, weak, frightened. "Come see, come serve, come save."
The voice was familiar. He had heard it before, but he couldn't remember the where or the when.
Then the voice was swallowed in a darker one. A voice so loud and large that it was the size of the world. And it wasn't weak or frightened. It was awesome. It was terrible.
It reminded Christopher of the eyes he had seen before oblivion. The eyes that were old and young together, those eyes that guided a thing up and down the twisted architecture of a changing spine, and thirsted for his doom.
"DIE. DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME."
The voice tumbled through the black, and suddenly Christopher was aware that he had no shape, no form. He was the darkness. And he was being taken.
"DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME."
He almost gave up. Nearly gave in right there. But the small voice forced its way back.
"Come see, come serve, come save," it said. Not Cheryl, not his mother. Something both more and less than either. The voice of a dead child.
Ken's child.
The boy who had turned not just to a zombie but to something like a king. "Come see, come serve, come save," the dead boy whispered. "Come see, come serve...."
"Come," said another voice, and the shaking continued. And Christopher finally opened his eyes and saw, and seeing he also screamed.
30
A DEMON LOOMED, A BLACK shape that hung over him in a dark room, and for a moment Christopher was back in his childhood bedroom. Six years old, afraid of the open door to the closet, the strange shapes that coats and toys took when the lights went out. Afraid and already knowing that calling to Mommy and Daddy – no, Mother and Father as they preferred he address them – wasn't a good idea. They had to be fresh for the next day, for a day of photos and hand-shaking and meeting Important People, and waking them always ended badly.
Nothing ever came out of the darkness in the closet. Until now. And this thing was huge. Big, strong. A hand clapped over his mouth.
"Shhh, e kare. Quiet, my friend. It is only me."
Christopher opened his mouth. Felt something strange as he did.
Skin. Just skin. No dirt or blood or tears. Someone washed me.
I'm clean.
And the answer to how it had happened stood over him. Mo and Amulek, looking down and smiling and near-glaring, respectively.
"Where... what?"
He remembered Hope. Remembered her grabbing Lizzy.
What was she going to do?
Was she going to hurt her sister?
Kill her?
He thought...
... he didn't know what he thought. Or perhaps he did. But his mind shied away, because that just wasn't possible. Even in a world as mad as this, it couldn't be.
"You fell asleep, e kare."
"How long?"
"More than a day.
Christopher shook his head. He felt something throbbing in his center. No new injury for once: he had to pee. Badly.
Either Mo had experience being down for a day, or he recognized the look on Christopher's face. "Come," he said. "You can make your toilet and I will explain."
31
CHRISTOPHER BARELY made it to the hub of the shelter – and one of the two toilets it held – before letting loose with what felt like the longest pee in history.
Is there any history? When the monsters own us, who will write our lives?
No answer for that.
He didn't bother drawing the curtain behind him. He figured Mo and Amulek probably knew what he was doing, and could hear it, and wouldn't do anything weird while his back was turned. They had cleaned him somehow – probably some kind of a sponge bath – and it felt like they'd been pretty thorough about it, so it wasn't like he had a lot to hide at this point.
Besides, after all that had already happened a family of creepy pervs who got off on people peeing was way down on the list of things to worry about.
Hell, hillbilly cannibals who rape your eyeholes and then eat your junk are way down on that list at this point.
"Where is everyone?" Christopher said. Still peeing. Peeing forever. Maybe he'd pee himself away to nothing, just disappear into whatever septic tank the toilet emptied into.
Maybe that'd be a good thing. Dissolving into piss. Better than dying in a world that had gone to crap.
"My grandson told me what happened," said Mo.
Christopher finally finished and stepped out of the curtained-off area, zipping his fly. "How'd he – I thought he didn't talk."
Amulek made a writing motion, fingers of his right hand scribbling against his open left palm. He also favored Christopher with a withering stare. "You're an idiot," he said with his eyes, which were tremendously expressive – at least for this sentiment.
"He told me," said Mo again. "And he said each of you fell down at once when the mama screamed. Even the kitty cat and she herself fell. He thought it best to separate you all as much as possible." He pointed at the hatch doors. All sealed. "Mama and baby and kitty are in the sleeping room." He swiveled to the hatch directly across from it. "Big sister and your large friend are in the kitchen. Amulek thought it best to keep the little girls far from each other." Another slight turn. "We left you in our hospital."
Christopher thought back. Buck and Sally facing off. Hope whispering death to Lizzy. Maggie screaming. He nodded: the separation had fallen across the correct lines.
Christopher looked back at his hosts. "Do you know what's going on?" he said.
Mo shook his head. "I do not, e kare. And I regret that I cannot accompany you. But now is the time to go."
A chill ran up Christopher's spine –
(like a thing with eyes-not-eyes, a thing that sees-not-sees)
– and he felt terror reaching for him, even though he didn't fully understand Mo's words. All that penetrated was a single word. A word that meant a flight from safety. From this respite that already seemed too short.
"Go?" he said. "Where are we going?"
32
"WHERE YOU WISHED," said Mo. "You go to your friend."
For a second the words didn't compute. Whatever hamster that spun the wheel of Christopher's brain had either fallen asleep or just plain had a stroke and keeled over dead. He couldn't blame it.
"What...?" he began. Then he knew. And the hamster that had been asleep now started running again. Fleeing.
Zombie hamster!
"Now? Now? Shouldn't we –?"
But he was shaking his head, even as Mo and Amulek shook theirs. "If you wish to reclaim him, now is the time. He is going to begin to smell soon. He will attract the animals and," said Mo with a sigh, "perhaps other things much worse."
That was a sobering thought. Would the zombies eat Ken's body? Christopher hadn't seen them eating much. In fact, the only place he had seen them eating – not just biting, but chowing down – was in the web-strewn offices where they found Maggie, the girls, Derek, Buck, and Buck's mother.
Why only there?
He thought the answer to that question might be important. Mostly because he had no idea what it might be, so of course it would be a critical item. The only things that mattered were things he didn't understand. That was life. Life before, life now.
"What do I do when I find him?" he said. "Not like I packed a shov –"
Amulek held something out. Christopher couldn't tell if the teen had been holding it for
the entirety of their conversation or if he had simply conjured it from nowhere using some aboriginal magic. Either way, he suddenly had a collapsible spade in his hands. It was green, folded on a hinge just above the blade. Military-looking, probably meant to be bound to some drab backpack and hauled into enemy territory.
Just where I'm going.
"Aaron's going to be out there."
"Is this the name of the man who shot me?" said Mo. Christopher nodded. Mo shook his head in reply. "I doubt it. This Aaron has been outside for more than a day in a strange world. He is either fled or dead. Besides, I myself can barely move. And I am Māori." He said this last quietly but with conviction: no boast, simply an observation that carried with it the weight of fact.
Only one problem: "Aaron isn't what you think," said Christopher. "He's more. He's worse. He's alive. He's still looking for us."
For the girls.
He still couldn't believe that. Couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea that Aaron – the "rodeo clown" who was so much more, the man who had saved the survivors time and again – had so swiftly decided the girls were a threat.
Did he, though? He said he wasn't sure. He tried to stop Elijah and Theresa from killing them. Kept saying we had to be sure.
Christopher didn't know what to think of Aaron. He was a deadly enemy, that was certain. But was he an enemy to Christopher, or just the girls? Was he even an enemy to them?
And if so, did that make him a bad person?
Christopher didn't know. He didn't understand anything. He had thought Aaron was a friend. And he still thought maybe the cowboy was just that. A friend, a good person. But one who was willing to kill for the greater good.
And that was the most terrifying thought of all.
Mo snapped Christopher out of his reverie. "Perhaps he is alive. If so, he would be a toa of much strength, much cunning. He would be a man to be feared."
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 67