But when the three stood and came to the two on the street, when the two on the street stood and joined them, when all five turned their collective gaze on the Marauder....
Christopher shivered.
The blankness was gone. The vague irritation had been replaced by rage.
The zombies crouched a few inches lower.
"Go," whispered Aaron.
But before Amulek could move, the zombies leaped forward.
Toward the Marauder.
And the survivors inside.
51
THIS TIME, AMULEK LISTENED to Aaron.
Christopher expected him to put the Marauder in reverse, to slam on the accelerator and back them away from the creatures as fast as the huge vehicle would go. But the war-car lurched forward.
Christopher shouted. A half-begun, vaguely-formed sentence that was more idea than real protestation. Not all the way to "Go back," but more than a grunt. And it never got to anything resembling a coherent word, let alone a full command.
Because he looked behind them.
The rear of the Marauder had a rectangular window, barely more than a slit in the armor.
It was enough to see the other creatures, streaming out of the darkness.
Five.
Ten.
Twenty.
More.
Christopher looked away.
The Marauder illuminated the creatures in front of them. Four of them hit and disappeared under the hood. Not even impacted yet, they just disappeared under the thing's great height. Then the minute impact a moment later – whud-whu-wh-whud.
Christopher turned again. Saw things spewing out behind the Marauder. Much more than four bodies. Bits and pieces that twitched and spasmed as they rolled across the dusty road, disappeared in the night.
The creatures running after the vehicle leaped over what was left of their brothers and sisters.
Thud.
Christopher looked to the front of the Marauder again.
The fifth zombie hadn't fallen.
It had jumped.
It was on the hood. Crawling toward them.
52
THE MARAUDER DIDN'T sway in the slightest. Amulek might as well have been going to the store for a gallon of milk for all the attention he paid to the thing clawing its way over the hood toward them.
He must kill at Grand Theft Auto.
Christopher glanced back. The things – now perhaps a hundred, maybe even more – were still behind them. Keeping pace with the Marauder.
They're getting faster.
He had to resist the urge to pound the seat and scream, "No fair!"
Something thudded. The zombie on the hood had made it to the front windshield. Judging by its jeans and black t-shirt the thing had once been a man, though its face was nearly bereft of flesh, so for all Christopher knew it could have been a hermaphrodite or a female art history student. Whatever its gender, it slammed its free fist against the windshield. Again, again.
The fist crumpled. Turned into a mix of crushed bone, flesh, and blood held together by a leaking sack of ruptured skin.
It kept pounding. The fist gradually disappeared into the thing's wrist, which pulverized into its forearm.
It was, Christopher suspected, going to beat itself to pieces against the reinforced glass.
Someone was screaming. He thought it was Maggie, but it might have been Buck – the big man had a comically high-pitched voice.
Christopher filed away the fact that he'd have to bust the guy about that. Then he realized that he was the one screaming.
He shut his mouth. Looked behind the Marauder. The things back there still weren't falling behind. Illuminated by the red taillights, so they all looked like they were swimming through blood, clawing their way through pools of fluid in search of death.
"Faster," he said. Meant to shout it, but all that came out was a throaty whisper. Amulek grunted. A sound of pure air that was nevertheless more vocalization than Christopher had heard from him to date. And it was clear: Shut up and let me drive. You just sit there and stay busy wetting your pants.
Christopher wondered why Amulek didn't swerve a bit, try to toss the zombie on the hood off the Marauder. Then he realized that they were going full-speed, with a group of murderous monsters behind them. Amulek probably figured that any such maneuver would lose them critical speed.
And he was probably right.
GTA king, for sure.
The zombie on the hood stopped slamming its nub of a forearm against the windshield – which was smeared with dark fluid and bits of flesh. For a moment Christopher thought he glimpsed a pair of baleful eyes. Not reflecting the headlights this time, they seemed to burn with an inner fire. Hell couched in wrecked meat and dark ichor.
Then the zombie clambered up. On the roof.
53
THERE WAS HARDLY ANY noise.
That scared Christopher.
He could tell it scared everyone else, too.
Once he put a bootleg M-80 firecracker in the mailbox of his boarding school. Most M-80s still available in the U.S. – what had once been the U.S. – are red plastic tubes with fifty milligrams or less of low explosive flash powder or black powder. The powder is designed to make noise and light, but to minimize actual explosive power.
The one that Christopher put in the mailbox – an antique-looking thing that sat at the front of the long driveway to the school – was red plastic. It had a fuse. But instead of fifty milligrams of black powder, it had been packed with closer to three thousand milligrams of powder, along with picric acid. Picric acid, he had been told by the student who sold it to him, was related to TNT – a fact that Christopher verified on Wikipedia before buying the M-80.
When it blew, it took out not only the mailbox, but the post it sat on, the ground below, and a sizable chunk of the curb nearby.
Still, the explosion wasn't what Christopher remembered most about the experience. Nor was it the elation of knowing that no one else was going to get mail for a while – a nice feeling, since the other kids had been hassling him about his lack of personal mail from family or friends for the last few months.
No, it was the silence.
He lit the fuse and used a silver strip of duct tape to fix it to the front of the mailbox. Then he ran like hell, all the way across the street to where a small stand of trees afforded some protection from what he figured would be an epic blast.
The fuse burned down.
There was a small puff, barely visible in the night.
Then... nothing.
The entire world seemed to slow down. There was only the silence of a night that should have been torn apart by an explosion and instead stood whole and unblemished.
He remembered the argument he had with himself: Do I go? Do I stay?
If I go I might get blown up.
If I stay, they'll find the M-80. They'll probably dust for prints or something and I'll be boned.
I should go.
Screw that.
But what if –
And over it all, the silence. A moth flew across the face of the mailbox, and he couldn't hear it of course, even though it had to be a huge moth for him to see it at this distance. He should have heard the wings like hammers smashing into the front of the mailbox.
Nothing.
Still.
Expectant.
I should –
BOOM.
Part of the mailbox embedded itself in the tree only six inches from where his fingers curled around the trunk. He barely remembered that, either.
Just that silence. That sense of something huge, something awful about to happen.
Just like now.
Everyone looked up. The only person who didn't was Amulek, staring straight ahead as he guided the Marauder through the night at its top speed.
Still no sound.
And then... the silence was broken.
Christopher expected the creature above to return to its original tactic: the venerable "B
eat Myself to Paste Against a Tank" technique.
But there wasn't a thud. No muffled slam.
Instead: a hiss.
Buck understood what was happening first. His high-pitched voice screamed through the cargo space.
"MOVE!"
54
THE ACID THE THINGS spewed was black. Except in the dark. In the absence of light, in yet one more of the impossibilities that had become the only reality since the Change, the stuff glowed with a strange purple/blue/black that reminded Christopher of lights at a rave.
Now, rave lights began gathering on the roof of the Marauder, right above Maggie. The first drop fell just as Buck grabbed her and yanked her away, practically piling all of them – Buck, Maggie, and the two girls they still held – into Christopher's and Theresa's laps.
Hiss.
Hissssss....
The purple fell, shifting the red interior of the vehicle to a new color, vibrant and strange. It dripped at first, then a sudden stream poured through the roof as a hole the size of Christopher's fist opened there. The liquid continued for a moment, hitting the seat and part of the Marauder's flooring.
Thankfully, none of it splashed on anyone. A single drop had streaked down Aaron's arm a few days ago, and the chemical burn had sent the man into a momentary panic of pain, an agony so intense even he couldn't control himself.
Christopher saw a hole open in the floor as the acid chewed right through it. Then he saw something that made his blood stop in his veins.
The acid fell through the floor. Gone. He felt the Marauder lurch and suspected the back right wheel had run over some of the stuff. His blood started up again, but now it was running backward – how far were they going to get on three wheels?
He glanced back at the things behind them. They didn't seem to be gaining. Yet.
Then he looked back at the thing that had terrified him. The hole in the floor. Still growing, wider and wider as the acid ate at the edges, disintegrating them, creating a space that was first the size of a fist, then the size of a plate.
And if the one on the floor was growing, then what about....
Christopher looked up in time to see the zombie on the roof push through the gaping hole there.
It was inside the Marauder.
55
CHRISTOPHER HAD CALLED the things that had turned Hope's and Lizzy's insides into jungle gyms "bees." And now he realized that the zombies bore another resemblance to those insects.
Bees – at least honeybees – could only sting once.
The creature on the hood had been a mess of blood, its face chewed to nearly nothing.
The creature inside was far, far worse.
The acid it had secreted had burned its jaw to a charred mass that crumbled to dust as the thing fell to the floor of the Marauder. Its chest had burned away as well, blackened sternum and scorched ribs clearly visible through the tattered remains of the thing's shirt. The arm that it had pounded against the windshield fell from its shoulder, a spastic length of flesh with a joint in the middle, spewing ichor at both ends until that yellow wax sealed it off.
A clicking noise came from somewhere deep in its throat. The flesh of its face continued to blacken just as with the roof and floor of the Marauder, the dregs of the acid kept eating away at whatever matter they contacted.
The zombie leaned toward Maggie. Buck.
Christopher struggled to move. Couldn't. Pinned.
"Get off me, Clucky!"
For some reason he was more annoyed than afraid. A defense mechanism, no doubt. Something to keep him from crapping his pants and curling up into a useless ball.
Not that he wasn't useless now.
The sizzling noise of the acid, etching its way through metal, through flesh, continued drawing razor nails across the slate of Christopher's mind. He wanted to scream.
The zombie was going to kill them.
Then the thing stiffened. It had free rein in the cargo space of the Marauder. Aaron was still turning around, trying to get past the huge center console of the vehicle. Amulek couldn't move from his spot as the driver. The rest of them were a hopeless tangle.
The thing could bite them. Turn them. Change them.
But it stopped. Stiffened.
Christopher didn't understand.
Then he did. And wished for a return to ignorance.
The acid must have made its way past its skull. Not just proceeding down into the thing's chest cavity, but up as well.
Into its brain.
The thing twitched. Jerked.
Danced.
The madness that gripped all the zombies when their brains were injured came over it. Christopher could see it happen. He'd never been this close before – or at least, never been this close and not been just running for his life. He saw the thing's eyes, already feral and violent, switch off. The light inside them, whatever semblance of intelligence it had possessed, turned to something more basic. Less focused. Where it had been a beast, now it was simply a hurricane. Something with no sense of self, just a need to destroy anything and everything in reach.
The thing fell on Buck.
56
BUCK WAS TURNED SIDEWAYS, twisted up with Maggie, still holding tight to Hope. But he didn't even try to fight the thing off. Instead, he turned his back on the thing. Curled up in a tight ball.
In just about any other situation, just about any other person, Christopher would have suspected this was an act of blind panic. Or simply someone too terrified to face their own doom.
But with Buck – with his friend – it wasn't that. He knew it wasn't.
Buck was curled around Hope. He was protecting the little girl.
Buck's eyes caught hold of his. He exhaled, nearly a cough, that managed to convey, "Why is it always me that gets the short end of the stick?"
Then the zombie fell on him.
There was no biting. Even if the thing's jaw hadn't been cauterized to nothing, Christopher knew it wouldn't have tried to Change Buck. The impulse to Change was something the zombies only had when they acted as... themselves.
When gripped in this madness, there was no such urge. There was only the driving need to rend. To destroy.
That was what the creature wanted to do. It grabbed Buck's hair with its good hand. Pulled. Yanked so hard that Christopher heard a tearing sound and saw the thing fall back with a wad of Buck's gray hair in its hand. It growled and threw itself back on the big man's back.
Buck still didn't move, except to curl a bit tighter around Hope.
Theresa was struggling to get out from under Maggie, but it looked like her body armor had caught on something – one of the seatbelts she was jammed against. She couldn't help. Could barely move.
Christopher managed to free one of his legs from the tangle of people on this side of the Marauder. He shoved it into the zombie's gut, hoping he'd be able to push it back.
Then what, genius?
First thing's first.
He got his foot exactly where he wanted it to be. But it sunk farther than he expected. And then punched right through the zombie's stomach. Whether the thing had rotted somehow, or been weakened by the acid, or some other mechanism, Christopher's foot just went into the creature, and out the other side.
He screamed – disgust and revulsion combining with fear and pushing him back against the inside of the Marauder. He shook his leg, trying to free himself of the thing that had surrounded it.
The zombie didn't seem to notice. It just pulled itself toward Buck. Clawed at the older man with its good hand, slammed the bloody stump of its other arm against him like an unruly club. Buck grunted with each attack, but still didn't move. Kept acting as a protective shell around Hope.
Blood ran in a trickle over his forehead. Down his cheeks. It looked like he was crying blood. Christopher saw his friend begin to lose consciousness.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
He was caught.
Watching his friend beaten to death in front
of his eyes.
57
THE NEXT TIME THE THING's arm came down across Buck's back, it made a different noise. No longer the solid flesh-on-flesh sound it had been. It made a metallic creaking. Christopher wondered if his friend had a pin in his back. Wondered if he could make fun of Buck about that.
Wondered if Buck was going to survive to be made fun of.
The zombie tore loose another hunk of skin. Raised its stump to hit Buck.
Buck's eyes rolled back. Out.
Then the zombie jerked backward.
Christopher saw it fly through the air, and it took him a moment to realize that the rules of physics and gravity hadn't flipped sideways.
It was Aaron.
The cowboy had grabbed the thing by the neck, then planted his hip against the zombie's spine. Twisted. The zombie flipped through the cargo space.
And right out the side door of the Marauder. That was the sound Christopher had heard: not impact of an arm on his friend's back, but the sound of Aaron yanking the door open. Getting ready to chuck the creature out of the vehicle.
Christopher looked at Buck. The man's eyes fluttered open.
"You protected her," said Christopher.
"What?" Buck said in a drugged-sounding voice.
"Hope. You didn't even think about it. You just protected her. And it can't be the queen thing, because we've still got the jammer." Christopher grinned. "You're actually a pretty nice guy, Clucky."
Buck growled. "Don't tell anyone." Then he grinned back.
And Aaron shouted.
58
AARON WAS ALREADY SHORT, and it wasn't like there was room for him to stand up straight in the back of the Marauder, but now it seemed like he had shrunk a good foot. He was grunting, too, flailing as his hands grabbed onto what remained of Buck's seat – the parts that hadn't been burned away by acid.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 81