Christopher moved to stand beside Aaron.
"Run," repeated the cowboy.
"And let Buck go out braver than I do?" said Christopher. He crouched. Ready to attack. To die. "No way."
The first zombie leaped at him.
95
HE ENJOYED A LAST MOMENT of clarity.
Christopher had been willing to die for his friends before. When they all ran down the tilted body of a jet, trying to escape the creatures that followed, he had used his body to barricade the way. Waiting to die – or to become a slave to whatever force Changed so many.
The zombies had pounded their way in – and right past him. It hadn't made sense then, but now he understood that it must have had something to do with the queens growing inside the little girls. A call so strong that in that moment the zombies wanted only them, and nothing else. He wasn't in the way anymore, so he held no importance in that moment.
Still, he had stayed behind knowing he would end. Either his life, or his thinking self – which was just as bad in his book. And he had carried a bit of pride for that.
Now, however, he felt something more. In that instant when the creature leaped at him and he knew that this time there would be no reprieve, he felt something greater than mere pride. He wondered if this was what the men of the Alamo had felt, if this was the sensation the three hundred Spartans had enjoyed in their final battle. The feeling of sacrifice. And not just for family or friends – this was sacrifice for something that could not be touched, but only felt. A sacrifice for good, for hope.
A sacrifice that, in Dorcas' words, was truly the Right Thing.
The zombie's fingernail – ragged and sharp from whatever destruction it had wrought since the Change – raked against Christopher's cheek. Christopher brought up a hand to the spot he knew the creature would be trying to bite him. That was their strategy, their only course: attack, bite, Change.
Failing that, they simply killed.
He rammed his forearm into the zombie's neck. The creature reached forward again, and this time it was like being attacked by pitchforks as the thing's strong hands ripped at his arms, his throat, his face. Everywhere the skin was exposed, the thing raked at him, slashed with those shards of nail that still hung to its fingers.
Christopher balled his free hand into a fist and slammed it into the side of the zombie's head. It barely noticed. He felt someone beside him. Grabbing at the zombie from the side, pulling it away.
It was Theresa. She was nearly hanging off the thing's back, feet and legs kicking it in a panicked attempt to get it away from Christopher.
"Get away!" Christopher screamed. "Get the girls and –" His wind was cut off as one of the zombie's hands went around his throat. It was a machine press covered in a thin layer of gory flesh. Compressing his throat, cutting off air and blood to his brain.
The world started spinning. Darkness gathered at the edges of his sight. Theresa was still trying to pull the zombie off Christopher, and he was aware that Aaron was engaged in a fight with a different zombie. That. Then a different beast, a different zombie, yanked her away. She spun in time to plant her hands on the thing's shoulders as it fell on her. She landed on the ground, flat on her back, doing a horrible parody of a bench press as she shoved against her attacker; tried to keep its mouth away from her flesh.
The darkness fell further over Christopher's eyes. A curtain gradually dropping over a movie screen. The zombie that held his throat drew closer.
Here I come, Buck.
96
THE THING OPENED ITS mouth wider. Christopher felt the heat of its body on him, something rank and raw pricked at his nostrils.
He saw every tooth. Most of them were broken, ground down to shards by biting things they were never designed to bite. The front one was whole. White as the perfect teeth of the average spray-tanned TV news anchor. For some reason, that tooth seemed so important. Seemed like everything there was, the only thing left in a world gone dark.
Then, suddenly, the thing's mouth slammed shut. Not the way it would if it were grinding down on something, chewing it to bits. Not even the way someone might close their mouth when falling to the ground, a hard hit that could cause a person to bite off their own tongue.
The zombie's mouth clacked together impossibly hard. Something hit Christopher's cheek – several somethings.
Teeth. Broken teeth.
And then the zombie just... disappeared. Christopher had an impression of feet in front of his eyes. Like the thing had suddenly leaped five feet in the air.
Or like something had yanked it upward, so hard and fast its mouth crashed shut hard enough to shatter everything hard inside it.
Christopher staggered as the pressure came away from his throat. For a moment the darkness disappeared, but he saw even less than he had a moment before as a blinding white enveloped his sight. Then crazed fireworks went off at the periphery of his vision, and where they appeared they burned away the fog until he could see again.
Sounds came to him. Struggles. Aaron, using his entire body as a weapon. Good hand, elbows, knees, feet. Zombies fell away from his onslaught, but only for a moment. Only to rise again.
Christopher heard something beside him. The sky above was a mass of smoke, a rank cloud that lay a gray pall across everything.
Something fell out of the smoke above them. So fast that Christopher barely had time to realize there was something above them before it slammed into the ground about twenty feet in front of the group.
It splashed.
Christopher, still stunned, still reeling from his attack, saw twitching bits swimming in a ten-foot-wide puddle of gore.
Theresa screamed. He looked at her, moving listlessly. She was still pushing on the zombie that had fallen on her. Its mouth inches away from her face. She pushed at it, rammed her hands into its throat, its eyes. Gouged them both, and black ichor sluiced over her hands and arms.
It didn't care. It raised its own hands and pinned hers to the side. Leaned in.
And disappeared.
Theresa was left staring up at nothing. Her hands clenched in space as though fighting the ghost of the thing that had almost killed her. But there was nothing there.
Another few seconds, then the second zombie fell. This one didn't make it to the ground. It hit the blade of the bulldozer. Its head severed cleanly, rolling away as its body exploded across the hood of the machine.
Two more drops. Two more crashes. Two more splashes.
Christopher saw one of them as it flew up, moving so fast he barely glimpsed it before it disappeared in the smoke overhead. A turbine-twist in the dark cloud – something had just gone in. Something bigger than just the zombie.
He caught sight of a shadow in the smoke. It shifted, pulsed. Seemed in one moment to be small as a hawk, and in the next to grow huger than any bird Christopher had heard of.
It fell into the remaining zombies. Nothing more than a gray blur of ash and smoke.
It slammed into the mass. Then reversed direction in an impossibly fast motion. Flying back upward again. It seemed bigger as it ascended – grown to twice its previous size.
What now?
A long moment. He realized the zombies had frozen. No longer moving, but standing so still it was as though they had been replaced by perfect statues fashioned to look like the creatures.
Christopher blinked, his mind trying to cope with what it had just seen. Trying to put together all the pieces.
He was so focused on trying to figure out what it was he was seeing that he only peripherally noticed the shadow dropping again. Rising once more, seeming twice as large.
Two more drops. Two more crashes. Two more splashes.
The zombies still didn't move. Just... waited.
Grab, crash, splash. Grab, crash, splash.
Two zombies left. One in the back, in the smoke. Crash, splash.
Then the shadow fell on the last zombie. Christopher caught the impression of a giant creature, of wings buzzing from i
ts back.
The last zombie splashed across the ground in a gory circle that was so close Christopher felt chunks knock against his already-drenched shoes.
Then the shadow fell again. And stood before them.
Huge, iridescent wings buzzed. Then they folded. Disappeared into two huge, fleshy flaps at the creature's back. Gone, covered like the wings of a beetle.
Only this was no beetle.
"Hello," said Ken.
97
IT ROOTED CHRISTOPHER to the spot. Theresa, Aaron, and Buck froze as well.
Maggie did not.
"Ken!" she shrieked.
The sand beneath their feet had turned to a strange, loose sludge – saturated by the fluid the zombies used as blood. So Maggie slipped twice as she ran toward her husband. One time she went down to one knee, her pants instantly darkening a few shades. But she slid her way back to her feet and kept running.
She didn't seem to notice the differences in her husband. The lengthened arms, the uneven, slightly pointed teeth. The bony hands that seemed to fold slightly at the middle – a joint that no human had ever been born with. Armored wrists that pivoted in ball joints, a rounded chest that was both broad and streamlined.
She didn't see any of it. Just screamed his name again as she ran to him.
"Maggie!"
Christopher hadn't been sure the thing was his friend. He saw the resemblances in the body, but the look in his eyes when he destroyed the zombies in the bunker – there was a rage and ferocity in those eyes that banished all thoughts it might be his friend.
Now, though, he knew: this was Ken. The voice was deeper, odd in tone. But there was no way to mistake the sound of longing, the ache of love nearly lost.
That was the way Christopher would have said Carina's name, if she had somehow returned to him.
Maggie took the last few steps, Hope still in one arm but the other one sweeping wide to take in the husband she had lost. To hold him, perhaps to never again let him go.
When she came within a few feet of him, Christopher saw something change in his friend's eyes. For a split second the thing that had made him Ken disappeared. The wrath, the savagery, came back into his eyes. He danced back, his movements marked by the grace of legs that bent at the knees – and also at the shins and thighs. His right hand shot out, fingers splayed and extending suddenly into bony blades that shot out of them.
"Don't touch me!" he shouted. The last word drifted into an animal growl.
Maggie slid again, this time because her feet shuddered and skipped across the ground as she tried to stop her forward rush. "Ken?" she said. Christopher couldn't see her face, but the sound of the word conveyed her sudden confusion, the terror that had sliced through her momentary euphoria. "Ken?" she said again.
Ken kept moving back. No longer leaping, but still inching away from his wife until he was about ten feet away. His bladed hands remained up, points directed at her. He trembled.
"I'm... sorry," he managed. The voice still had a growl hiding within it.
"Ken, what's – what's going on?" Maggie asked.
The blades shifted, now pointed at Maggie's stomach.
Then Christopher realized that Ken wasn't pointing at Maggie after all. He was gesturing at Hope. At the little girl who was still unconscious after all they had been through.
"Hope?" said Maggie. Confusion still reigned in her voice.
"Not Hope," said Ken. "The thing she is. The thing...." He frowned, his jaw working, struggling for words. "The thing she will be."
Christopher spoke. "The queen?"
Ken looked at him. Surprise in his eyes, like he had forgotten anyone else was present. "Queen?" he said. The word rolled around in his mouth. Then he nodded, a brusque up-and-down that somehow managed in itself to convey that this was no longer completely Ken – it was a thing that was perhaps both more and less. "Yes. Queen."
"It's your daughter," Maggie whispered.
After a moment, Ken nodded. That same motion. "Yes. But also, inside her..." Ken's face still looked more or less human – maybe a bit higher in the cheekbones than it had been, skin that was perhaps a shade darker. But when he said "inside her," something shifted in his expression.
Not his expression. His skull.
The bones flexed under his skin. The eye sockets narrowed, the forehead suddenly seemed thicker. Jaw tapering to an alien point that thrust the teeth into sharp relief against thinned lips.
Ken shook himself. Took a few more steps back. His face returned to – not normal, but closer to what Ken had once been.
"She... she calls me," he managed. He forced his hands to his sides, and as he did the blades at the ends of his hand retracted and turned back to fingers, clenched into fists. "The queen. She calls us all. I can't... I can't be too close."
Maggie turned back. She didn't slide this time. She placed each foot carefully.
Christopher was closest to her. She headed right for him. Without a word she thrust Hope into his arms.
The queen. She calls me.
The words made his skin crawl. He had an image of the little girl just exploding like the monster in that movie The Thing right before biting his face off.
She didn't. Just hung, loose and insensate, in his arms.
Maggie waited until he had a firm grip on Hope.
Then she turned back. And ran.
This time Ken didn't dance away from her.
This time, he caught her in his arms.
98
THERE ARE MOMENTS IN time, moments that are wonderful and strange and miraculous. Moments that remind us that we are not truly alone. That there are others who suffer with us, who cry with us. Who smile and laugh with us.
Moments that give us hope, for we are loved. And love cannot exist with fear. It pushes it out like the sun pushes away the night. Only brightness, only light.
This was one of those moments.
Christopher watched Ken and Maggie hold each other. Wondered how it must be, to lose someone forever, then find them again – not in eternity, but in the finitude of the now. He wasn't jealous. For once watching others' love didn't remind him of the feelings he had never experienced himself. He was with them, he felt what they did.
He was happy.
He realized this was the first time he had been completely, unconditionally happy in a long time. Since long before the Change, in fact. He had felt like this when he found out he was going to be a father. Had felt like this sometimes after he made love to Heather, in the good days before he went away and then returned to find her a hopeless junkie.
And it had only taken the end of the world to make him feel this way again.
Maggie and Ken drew apart. She looked at him, and said, "What happened to you?" The words could have been angry, or disgusted. But as she said them she touched his cheek with her fingers. A tender gesture that spoke only of concern, of care and love.
Ken's eyes darkened. Not the inhuman shifting of his features that Christopher had seen a moment ago; this was the too-human look of someone who would not answer a question that led too deep into darkness.
Ken shook his head. His neck swiveled too far to each side, a motion impossible for Christopher – or anyone else – to replicate. Maggie saw it, and pulled herself away from Ken for a moment. "What happened to you?" she repeated. But it was a whisper. It was the echo of the first time she said it.
Ken waited a moment. No longer shaking his head, but not answering either.
He looked at the others. "Buck?" he said.
Christopher shook his head. Tears pushed at his eyes, then spilled suddenly over his cheeks.
All the people we've lost, and I finally cry over that cranky s.o.b.
Out loud, he said, "He saved us. Just a minute before you got here."
He didn't have to say what price Buck paid. Ken nodded somberly. He pushed Maggie away a bit. The motion was tender, but again Christopher got the sense there was more than just a human need for a bit of space.
; Ken was two things. And one of them... one of them was not human.
Could it be trusted?
"I am sorry I didn't come sooner," he said. "I... I lost myself for a time, then had to find you again."
"What do you mean, 'lost yourself'?" said Maggie.
Another question answered only with a look. A narrowing of the eyes that managed to be both apologetic and slightly hostile. Maggie took a step back. She looked at Ken, then at the bulges on his back where the wings had disappeared.
"Are you still... are you still you?" she managed.
No one spoke. The smoke roiled above them as though it, too, worried what the answer might be.
Ken looked at each of them in turn. His eyes rested longest on Lizzy and Hope. "I am more." His voice deepened. "I am all." He shivered.
Ken looked away from the unconscious girls. He smelled the air, nostrils flaring like those of an animal scenting prey.
"We should leave," he said. "More will come." The blades extended from his hands. "I can protect you, but not if there are too many." The blades shot the rest of the way forward. His hands were gone, and he was more weapon than man. "I cannot try if there are too many. If I lose myself again...."
He didn't finish his sentence.
No one asked him to.
If I lose myself again....
Christopher looked at Aaron. And saw an unusual look in the old cowboy's eyes.
Fear.
99
"CAN WE HOTWIRE THIS thing at all?" said Theresa. She pointed at the dump truck.
"Don't know," said Aaron.
"I bet I can get it to run," said Christopher. His voice sounded ragged. It trembled at the edges.
Dammit, Buck.
"You?" said Theresa. She had her hands on her hips and was eyeing him as though trying to decide whether he was joking or just a liar. "How's that?"
"It's not like in television, son," said Aaron.
Christopher ignored them. He looked at Ken. "How much time do we have? Before more of them get here?"
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 89