Colony Z: The Complete Collection (Vols. 1-4) (5 page)

It was Michael who heard the demonic yell from the dead plotting outside the gate. The three year-old
boy awoke with a scream, but could not tell his wondering mother why he was so upset.

It was Judith Marie who really began the fear when she awoke across the room with more than just a yell, but a shriek of pure terror. Hannah could not calm her.

“Owen,” Hannah begged, shaking her husband awake. “Get up. Please get up. Something’s wrong.”

Owen had always been a light sleeper, and tonight was no different. He shuddered awake from one of his recurring nightmares and sat up quickly.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s something out there, Owen.”

“There’s always something out there, Hannah,” Owen consoled her, taking the sobbing Judith Marie into his arms. But, for once, she would not quiet. “They can’t get in.”

But Owen didn’t quite sound like he believed it tonight.

“Please, Owen. Did you do the perimeter tonight?”

“Of course I did. What makes you think…”

A scream came from a floor down. Phillip and his wife slept directly below them, and the poor woman sounded terrified. It was in this moment that Owen realized the truth behind his toddler’s tears.

“Owen!” Hannah yelled at him expectantly.

“Take the children and get to the safe room.”

“But, Owen…”

“NOW!”

Hannah, with tears in her own eyes now, took Judith Marie in one arm and snatched the half-asleep Michael in another. She tried to calm them, but her own sense of panic was overpowering her ability to comfort anyone else. She was scared not only for her own life, but for her senseless husband and her children. If anything were to happen to them, her own point of living was completely gone. She needed them.

The safe room was basically a metal box with about twenty steel locks that the school used to use as a freezer. Owen had made some basic adjustments, but all of the members of the colony could fit inside. It didn’t occur to her until she began running down the quiet hallway that no one else knew. What right did she have to leave them to their fate?

But her children were more important. Hannah’s arms were close to failing her. She set her son on the floor and begged him to awaken himself enough to run with her. He tried his best. They trampled down the stairs toward the cafeteria. Still no one else awakened.

“Please, God, please,” Hannah begged as she ran. “We’ve come so far now.”

So far, no walking dead approached them, but Hannah knew the diseased. It was only a matter of time before they returned for the remaining survivors. And Hannah feared they would be the only ones left.

And so, Hannah ran on in the darkness with her two children. She had to pick up a sense for what lay ahead in the darkness. She had to learn to listen for their darkened breathing. These were the tactics survivors had. Sometimes, Hannah wondered how she could call herself a survivor when all they did was run. But she was alive. And that seemed to be the only requirement for the title.

That was when she saw the movement in the darkness. And it was no human movement. This had the slimy, dark imprint of the dead. There was at least one of them between her and the safe room. And she had no plan.

In all the time they had spent here waiting for her to give birth, it was expected of Hannah to come up with some kind of escape plan. For Owen to come up with more than simply a safe room. If their way was blocked, what then? But no one had seemed to honestly believe the dead would ever find their way in.

Had it seen her? Hannah didn’t know. Hannah didn’t want to know.

Michael and Judith Marie were eerily silent. It was as though their intuition told them that this was not the moment to cry. It was time to be patient. It was time to let Mommy handle things. The only problem was, Mommy didn’t know what to do. Mommy had no idea what to do.

The slow moment dragged on for what seemed an eternity, even though it was only a few seconds.

And then, suddenly, a great bright light threw itself toward the shadow of the creature. The flame made it scuttle away in fear, downsized to the strength of a child.

When Hannah turned to see her savior, she found the wild eyes of her husband.

“Safe room.” Were the only two words he could manage to get out.

Hannah nodded, gaining back her courage. She led the children forward, each one too shocked to continue with their tears. Daddy had saved them. Not Mommy, but Daddy. And that was enough for Hannah. She had never been daring or a leader, much as her husband liked to believe she was. In this way, it was best to let Owen lead. Because, when things went completely wrong, he knew how best to handle it.

He had saved them. Again.

And, as they pushed themselves into the safe room and Owen instructed her to lock them in and to not open the door for anyone without the password, under
any
circumstances, he gave Hannah a look she knew all too well.

“Owen, no.”

“I have to warn them, Hannah.”

“Owen, that’s not your job.”

“It became my job when I brought them into this colony and created the Albion Tribe, and I won’t leave them for dead.”

“Owen, please…I need you…
the children
need you…”

“No, Hannah. They need
you.
You were always the parent. Keep them safe.”

“Owen…”

But before she could finish, he kissed her forehead and each of his children and was gone from the room. Hannah was terrified he would never come back. What would become of them?

She tried to convince herself that she trusted her husband. He would do everything in his power to come back to them, and she would believe in him, no matter what the cost.

If there was anything she’d learned after all this time, it was that there was much more to Owen than he let on.

When Owen left his wife and children in the safe room, he didn’t dare mention how bad things looked
outside. Though he could not pin down the exact reason for the Undead’s invasion into their camp, Owen had seen the wide-open gate through a window upstairs, blasted to pieces. The others, those
things
, had gotten their hands on explosives, and that was painfully obvious. The undead were learning, growing smarter – evolving. The Albion Tribe was in big trouble.

But, with explosives, Owen realized there was no place left for the Albion Tribe to hide. Even if they survived tonight and left this place in the morning, where would they go? What place in the world would be safe for them? It seemed to him that the answer was nowhere. In that moment, Owen wanted to drop the pretenses and just quit.

But the inhumane screams that came from the next hallway kept him going, regardless of his broken feelings. He found himself standing outside Phillip’s room in a matter of seconds. He looked in…and what he saw rocked him to his core. Everything he had seen in the past years of his life did not prepare him for this.

Willa, Phillip’s young and pretty wife, had always been kind to everyone in the group. The two, unlike most of the partnerships in the company, had been married when they joined. Unfortunately, only rarely did two of the same family survive the Zero-Hour. More often than not, they fell for one another in the danger and fear that came with running.

Willa reminded Owen of his own mother. She cared about everyone else before herself.  And so, Owen only had to imagine what she had done when the zombie broke into the room. For some reason, the dead always targeted the men first. Perhaps because they were the larger challenge, the bigger threat. Whatever the reason, Owen could imagine how the scene unfold in his mind.

The blundering zombie barged in on the unsuspecting couple. Phillip was pushed against the wall, death in his face. Willa screamed bloody murder, which Owen himself had heard through the floor. When the zombie ignored this, she ran at it herself and stabbed it with the knife that each person was required to have near them at all times. The few precautions they had taken may have saved Phillip’s life.

When the zombie was stabbed, it did not fall. It turned on her.

The blood, gore, and dismembered body tossed to the floor in the corner may have looked like a shameful, pointless death. But Owen promised himself that the world would remember Willa as a hero. A hero who risked it all for the man she loved.

Phillip, who had to watch this terrible act, had nothing but anguish and rage within him. There was more than one dismembered body in the room, and Owen knew Phillip had never destroyed anything as badly as he destroyed the thing that murdered his wife. She was cruelly avenged.

Phillip now sat in the corner of the room, shivering and shaking.

“Phillip,” The words came to Owen as he entered. “Phillip, you need to get out of this room before you get the virus.”

“I won’t leave her…” He sobbed.

“Phillip, we’ll come back for her body when the daylight is coming through the window. But we can’t do this now. You know as well as I do what happens when you are exposed to the blood for too long…”

“I WON’T LEAVE HER!”
Phillip bellowed. And Owen knew he was no longer making a simple statement. He was giving an order. And when you gave an order and it wasn’t followed, drastic measures had to be taken to save good people.

Owen traveled forward and picked up Phillip like a sack of potatoes. He fought, but Owen’s immense strength could not be overtaken.

“Please don’t leave her…” He cried against Owen’s shoulder.

“I promise I won’t, Phillip. I promise.”

Owen carried the young man to the safe room door, told him the password to enter, and left in search of the others, praying they wouldn’t take nearly as long as this one had. He would never get to all of them before the dead realized where they were hiding.

If they hadn’t realized already.

Phillip and Willa had been the only two with a room downstairs, because Willa preferred a room with several escape routes. The rest were in the same hallway that led to the room where Owen and his family slept. Owen took the stairs three at a time and tried to finish what he had started before he ran downstairs to Hannah and the children. A thought struck him - Every school had to have a fire alarm, right?

But would it work without the power?

Owen knew the answer to that question. He would have to come up with another way to quickly alert the group. It occurred to him at this point that he maybe should have planned for this before it had happened.

“What’s going on, Owen?” A sleepy James asked as he walked out of his room. The boy was only sixteen, several years younger than Owen himself, but he had within him a daredevil personality. “I heard screaming.”

“I need you to help me, James,” Owen said on a whim. “We need to tell everyone to get downstairs to the safe room.
Now.
”

“What’s going on, boss?”

“They’re here.”

And that’s all Owen had to say. James, shockingly enough, smiled.

“Finally, a fight.”

“No, no, James. Not a fight. You can’t win against them. We need to get everyone to safety.”

A non-human bellow echoed through the walls of the school, making both men jump. Owen ran to the nearest window and looked out. Dozens of zombies stood below, just waiting to enter the school.

“We have to move.
Now.”
Owen looked at James with a more serious look than he had ever given anyone in his entire life. But, again, James only smiled.

“Looks like you need a diversion.”             

Before Owen could say anything in response to this, James took off into the darkness of the hallway. And, as he set off to pull together the other thirty members of the clan, Owen told himself it was the last he would ever see of the boy.