(Mine. Die. MINE, ALL MINE.)
The screams were loud, louder than any child or toddler had a right to produce. But it wasn't the screams that staggered Christopher in place. It was the rage, the twisted knowledge, the cunning and guile that were packed into the shrieks that bored into his mind.
Maggie was still shrieking, too. Still had hands to her head. Christopher remembered that the first time the two queens had attacked each other, it had been through Sally and Buck. The snow leopard had faced off against the big contractor as champions for the queens. Willing to kill or die on their command.
But Maggie hadn't joined in the fight. Maybe it was because whatever happened to the others in the top of the Wells Fargo building hadn't had time to take. Maybe she was too old for it to work.
Maybe she resisted simply because she was a mother, and wouldn't take sides against either daughter – or both of them.
No matter what, she had resisted, and Christopher could see she was resisting now. Digging in her heels against the call of the queens. He thought maybe he and the rest of them were only getting an echo of their screams. Thought maybe Maggie was getting it all. Because they were still her children – what remained of them after Derek had –
(Changed)
– gone.
Maggie's body went rigid. Fighting against the queens, against her children, against herself.
That fight was going to decide the outcome. Not directly – Christopher didn't think Maggie was going to give in to any urge Hope might be sending her way – but she was too busy struggling against whatever pulled her to intervene.
And that meant Hope was going to kill her sister.
Lizzy's eyes widened. Terror finally winning over wrath. Hope's jaws drew farther apart. She leaned toward the toddler's face.
Toward Lizzy's throat.
Christopher pushed himself to move faster. To get to the girls in time.
He was going to fail.
Lizzy raised her arms. Small arms, hands that should playing with blocks, with cars and dolls and the childish things that had died in the Change, just like so much else. The hands pressed out, pressed against Hope.
Hope laughed.
Then clamped her teeth down on Lizzy's throat.
132
A FLURRY OF IMAGES pummeled Christopher.
The first time he saw Carina. He noticed her toes right off the bat. Perfect little toes that had never touched the earth. The feet of an angel that hadn't quite finished her descent from Heaven.
Lizzy. Sleeping against Sally's stomach – the predator now a protector, the child smiling an innocent smile that somehow made the stilled savagery of the beast make sense.
The first time he saw Heather. Smiling. Laughing. Beautiful.
All gone.
Carina had become a thing with blades for a mouth, a saw-toothed monster that could chew through steel. Heather had become an addict, a shade of what she had once been. Lizzy – no longer even remotely related to the child she should have remained.
The images superimposed themselves over what he now saw. The then of yesterdays falling across the now of a today he never could have conceived.
Christopher ran toward the girls, but he knew he was too far to do anything about it. Too far to stop Hope from biting down. Too far to reach her before she tore out her sister's throat.
But close enough to see. Incapable of changing anything, only there to watch.
He had gone through life watching. Watching his family fall apart, watching everything he held dear disappear.
A line of blood appeared around Hope's mouth as her teeth broke Lizzy's skin.
Lizzy screamed – a terrible, final scream.
And then...
133
... THE WORLD...
... just...
... stopped.
Christopher was still running, still reaching out. Aaron and Amulek, he realized, were beside him, their own hands reaching for the gruesome murder happening right before their eyes.
But still. But still....
For all that motion, for all that sound and fury, the world seemed to have ground to a sudden halt. The earth might as well have spun right off its axis when the Change came... but it was still spinning. Now, though, there was a change. Christopher sensed it before he understood it. Knew it before he could explain it.
Something drew near, and everything else stopped in awe.
He stopped running. Whatever was happening, it slowed his steps, brought him to a halt.
She's not dead.
The thought bounced through his mind, ricocheted around a brain already nearly undone by the events of past days. He didn't understand it. Not even when he heard it again.
She's not dead.
The third time, though, he did understand.
She's not dead.
He was staring at Lizzy. Staring at a little girl whose life had been counted in milliseconds.
She was staring back. Not dead. Blood still ran in a thin stream down her neck, then spread in a lopsided triangle across her bare chest. But she was breathing. Her eyes open.
Why isn't she dead?
Lizzy wasn't moving. Neither was Hope, who still had her teeth clamped around her once-sister's throat. A quick yank and the battle between them could be over. Just a few more centimeters of motion.
But Hope was frozen. Then, slowly, her jaw loosened and she straightened. She still clung to Lizzy, to Theresa –
(No one's screaming anymore, what's going on?)
– but whatever had pushed her to murder was gone.
No. Not gone. Just... stopped.
Christopher could still see the rage in the little girl's eyes. Lizzy's.
What's going on?
The world's stopped.
Christopher felt a hand on his shoulder. Aaron. He didn't seem to know he was doing it – just an automatic action, an instinctive move in the face of....
Christopher saw what the other man saw.
The world's stopped.
"Dear God," he said. It was a prayer.
Or perhaps a goodbye.
134
CHRISTOPHER HAD SEEN the creatures move in mobs before. Small ones at first, then they gathered in greater and greater numbers until it was impossible to look at any one of them. All that could be seen was a teeming, swarming mass – a single thing, a creature with a hundred thousand angry eyes, bent on the destruction of the last dregs of humanity.
He had seen the things – the thing, that single thing they had become – climbing up walls. Coating the sides of buildings, making high rises tremble under its sheer weight. It had been a terror, an atrocity: to see what people had made as monuments to their own achievement, all unmade in moments.
But as bad as that had been, as horrifying and just wrong... what Christopher now saw was worse. Less violent – almost peaceful. But the peace was a lie, and the lie perverted the very air around him; made it thick and foul.
The field the survivors stood in was ringed by trees on three sides. And it seemed for a moment as though the trees themselves were moving. Shadows danced and writhed in the depth of the forested area. Tree limbs seemed to tear away from trunks, then shift toward the light that demarked the end of the forest and the beginning of the field.
The trees danced. Then the dancing could be seen for what it truly was. No longer the trees, but the things in their midst.
The first zombie stepped into the field. Its movements were marked by the fluidity and grace the things achieved whenever they were close to large numbers of other zombies.
It did not growl. It was silent.
The silence was part of what Christopher had felt earlier. A quiet that had fallen over Lizzy and Hope, then Maggie, and now the whole world. No birds, no sighing of water or soughing of wind. Christopher couldn't even hear his own breath.
Just... nothing.
The zombie was joined by another, and a third. Sliding, gliding steps into the field. Then there were ten, and fifty.<
br />
A hundred.
Christopher shifted slightly. Saw the creatures emerging from the trees on all three sides.
Five hundred.
A thousand.
He spun, and saw more of them behind, rising into view as they crested a small hill behind the barley field that was the fourth boundary behind the survivors.
So many.
So quiet.
"What's happening?" said a voice. Christopher couldn't tell if it was Aaron or Theresa or maybe even him. The voice was a whisper, a sigh of near-awe.
The creatures walked forward. Still silent, which was not just strange but terrifying on some primal level. The zombies had always vocalized. Chittering, rasping, and of course there was always that growl. That call.
Christopher had seen zombies that were silent like this before – the ones that had risen in the bodies of men and women already dead. Those undead creatures had been silent, too.
But these things that surrounded them... these were the living creatures. The people who had Changed while their hearts still beat. Always angry, always screaming in his mind
They came in silence, more and more of them entering the field.
"What's happening?"
This time Christopher placed the voice. Theresa.
"I don't –" he started.
The voice cut him off. A voice that sounded in his mind, a voice he had heard before.
DIE. DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME.
The king.
Christopher looked around, expecting to see Derek's small body somewhere near, at the front of the zombies that walked toward the survivors.
He wasn't there.
But someone else was.
"Ken," he said.
"Where?" Aaron said.
Christopher pointed. Someone sobbed.
This time he was pretty sure it had been him.
135
THE MASS OF ZOMBIES stretched around them, an unbroken circle that stretched into the darkness of the forest and over the hill beyond the barley field. A swaying, synchronized mass of creatures that had been melded into one single organism by the overriding will of the king.
DIE. DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME.
The sound was louder by far than any Christopher had yet heard in his mind. But at the same time, it was subtle, careful – a screaming caress, if such a thing were even possible.
No. Not possible.
None of this is possible. We've fallen off a tilted planet, fallen into the deep dark of madness.
Totes cray-cray.
The thoughts swirled in his mind, and he recognized in a small part of himself that they were trying to cover up panic, a fear so great it would completely consume him.
He tried to hold onto hope. But it was Ken who undid that. Ken, who had survived so much, and even after death had come back to protect them all, to save them all.
And now... now Ken was gone.
Oh, his body was still there, but whatever had made him a friend, a person who wasn't just loyal or kind, but actually good, was gone. The fluidity, the grace, the way he walked in perfect lockstep with the rest of –
(the organism, the one thing, the king)
– the rest of the creatures: these marked what had happened more clearly than if he had appeared with "I am one of THEM" branded across his broadened chest.
"Ken." Maggie must have come to the same conclusion – there was none of the hope he had heard in her voice before, none of the desire to run to her husband and hold him. Just despair, sharp and raw. "Ken."
Ken, the unKen, marched forward. His hands held at his sides shifted to sharpened blades of bone.
The zombies closed. Coming for them all. And this time there was truly no way to escape. No hole to hide in – Christopher somehow sensed that the zombies fighting below them had ceased their struggles. Unified with the ones aboveground, all in thrall of the boy-king.
No hole to hide in.
No building to climb.
Nowhere to run to.
The zombies closed. A mass that went on forever.
"Ken," Maggie sobbed again. Aaron cursed quietly. Amulek held his knife – the only weapon that remained to the group – and waited with a face so impassive Christopher knew it had to mask sudden, violent terror.
Theresa didn't move. Just held tightly to Lizzy, and by extension to Hope.
Hope and Lizzy no longer tore at one another. They simply watched the creatures as they closed in. A small, secret smile played across Hope's lips. Lizzy grinned outright.
(My king.)
(My lord.)
The zombies were within fifty feet. Ken was closest. His hands rose.
DIE. DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME.
The scream-whisper nearly broke what remained of Christopher's resolve. Nearly sent him screaming to join the creatures.
But something else picked its way into his mind. Inserted itself into the holes between the words spoken by the king. It wasn't a sentence, wasn't even a single word.
Just a feeling.
Fate.
Ken was close enough for Christopher to see the nothing in his friend's eyes. He remembered Ken telling him that he had died. That what remained wasn't Ken at all.
Maybe he's right.
(no)
Ken pulled back his arm. Ready to strike Amulek, who was closest. Amulek's lips pulled back, exposing the teeth that marked a man determined to die a warrior's death.
It wouldn't matter. Ken would bring him down. Perhaps kill him, perhaps just wound him so the others could Change him.
DIE. DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME.
(fate)
Christopher knew what to do. Not all of it, maybe not enough.
But something. For now, a single something. After... after would have to take care of itself.
And that would have to be enough.
(fate)
136
"KNIFE!" HE SHOUTED.
Amulek didn't hesitate. He moved so smoothly it seemed as though he had been waiting for this particular moment.
Maybe he had been.
Christopher felt it again: that something that had pressed itself upon him before. Smaller than the voice of the king, but somehow still powerful in its own right.
Amulek turned. Swung his arm in a short arc that had the knife flipping Christopher's way. Christopher snatched it out of the air. He caught it by the handle – an impossible thing to do, but he did it, it was –
(fate)
– as though he had been waiting, too. As though his body knew this was coming. And it wasn't just ready, it hungered for this moment.
He swept the blade, a quick turn that had him pointed at Maggie.
And then he was yanking at Hope, peeling her still-motionless body away from Lizzy, away from Maggie. He jammed the blade against her throat. Realized someone else was moving with him.
Theresa pulled Lizzy away from Maggie. Yanked her from fingers so stiff and white that Christopher expected to hear the young mother's fingers crack and break.
Theresa held the toddler in her hands. And there was no doubt what she intended.
Christopher looked at Ken. Stared the thing he had become in the eye.
"We'll kill them," he said. "Right now."
137
MAGGIE STILL DIDN'T move, but a thin moan made its way through lips pressed tightly together.
Christopher ignored it. He kept his eyes on Ken.
DIE.
The voice of the king had changed. It was abbreviated. Angry.
(afraid?)
Ken took a step in Amulek's direction.
Christopher pressed the knife against Hope's throat, and now her throat matched Lizzy's: a thin line of blood sluiced around the blade, dripped to her dirty shirt.
"I'll do it. And so will she," Christopher said, motioning at Theresa. "You're not fast enough to stop it."
Ken waited. A long moment – a time that abided in Christopher's mind, that rest
ed there for the eternity between instants – then his arm dropped. The blades didn't disappear from his hands and arms. He held himself ready.
But didn't move.
Nothing moved. That same silence that had accompanied the zombies' first appearance held sway again. The world waited.
Finally, there was motion. Not physical, but mental.
WHAT?
The word that came to Christopher's mind nearly sent him to his knees. It was part rage, part shock – the feeling of a creature that has never known defeat, never experienced the slightest disobedience. Christopher was struck by a sense of agelessness, the impression that everything that had led to this moment had happened in other, distant times and in other, even more distant, places.
Again and again, and never a change. Breed, consume, and leave to breed and feed again.
But this time – for the first time – there was a change. Something had dared to thwart its will.
WHAT?
This time the voice asked something different. Not "how dare you" or "how is this possible?" – it was something simpler, but colored with subtle tones of threat, of violence-to-come. This time it was, "What do you want?"
But below it... "I will destroy you."
And under that, even deeper, almost silent now in the full power of the king...
(hope)
That was it. It wasn't fate that he had felt for all this time. It was something stronger, greater. The thing that had kept Ken going on so long, that had kept the survivors together, that now moved him to take this action.
Hope.
WHAT?
More insistent this time. Ken took a small step, drawing a bit closer to Amulek, and the threat was clear: Speak, or die.
Christopher spoke without knowing what he was going to say. One word opened to his mind at a time, the whole sentence a mystery until it was already spoken in full. And when he had finished, he couldn't believe he had said it.
And yet, at the same time, he knew it was the only thing to say.
"Don't kill us, and I'll bring the queens to you."
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 97