Survival Colony 9 (12 page)

She landed and slithered after me on her belly. Her arms and legs coiled against the dirt as if they’d been emptied of bones.

I heard a booming noise overhead and ran for the steps, but her hand clutched my ankle with an icy strength and pulled me to the ground. The red-handled pocketknife leaped to my fist, blade extended, slashing wildly. I felt contact, saw the ends of two fingers fly, but there was no blood. What remained of her hand gripped my ankle so tightly I felt the fingernails sink into my skin, and though I grappled for the stairs she pulled me down toward her waiting mouth.

It had opened so wide there was no face left, only teeth like strips of peeling flesh.

Then I heard another boom, louder than the first, and saw a blurry shape come crashing down the stairs, narrowly missing me and the Skaldi as it landed with a metallic clang on the basement floor.

I heard a puff of compressed air and another blur flew past me, and the thing that had been Korah fell back, its faceless mouth splitting in an inhuman scream. Sharp nails raked my ankle as it let go. Its arms and legs flailed wildly, its head twisted nearly backward, but something pinned its writhing body to the ground. Through the dust and frantic motion I couldn’t make out what held it, but when its head turned toward me I could see its eyes again, all trace of blue gone, burning white-hot in its withered face with torment and loathing.

A hand touched my shoulder. I flinched, looked up into the face of Aleka. A harpoon gun lay across her arm, a flamethrower was strapped to her back. Her fist closed on my shoulder and pulled me painfully to my feet.

“Go,” she said hoarsely. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears.

Trembling, I set my foot on the stairs. My knees wobbled but held. I looked back for a second at the creature that lay there, teeth bared in its once beautiful face. Then Aleka’s body blocked my view, and as she advanced on the Skaldi I turned and climbed. At the top of the stairs I heard the roar of the flames behind me, the screams of the thing they consumed. How Aleka could stand it I didn’t want to think. The heat burned through the uniform on my back, the screams seemed to penetrate my skull.

I stumbled to the front door, which hung from a single hinge. Throwing myself through the open frame, I collapsed onto the ground, and my stomach emptied of what little was in it. But the screams followed me.

The thing screamed and screamed. The echoes multiplied its scream into a thousand screams.

For the first time since my accident, I knew those screams were something I’d never be able to forget, no matter how hard I tried.

11

Cost

I stayed on my knees until Aleka exited the building where the Skaldi had burned.

At first I shrank from the fire in her hands, the singed fabric of her clothes. But she wouldn’t let me stay down. With her help, I struggled to my feet, too shaky and sick with the loss of Korah to care about my soiled shirt front. I felt a trembling in my chest that I knew would turn to tears if I gave in to it.

“Let’s go find Laman,” she said.

My reunion with him was brief. We met midway between the bomb shelter and headquarters, along with a few others, including Araz. The flamethrower, still smoking, hung from the driver’s broad back. My dad approached me, looked me up and down, his face haggard in the first feeble light of dawn. His uniform was buttoned to the top just like the night before, his bearing in it as erect and unyielding as it had been then. The Skaldi had convinced me he was the infected one, but now I realized that had been another of its lies. He was battered and bruised, but he was himself. Why I’d doubted him so easily, why he’d made it so easy for me to doubt, were questions I couldn’t answer.

But we had no time to ask questions, no opportunity for more than a bare acknowledgment that we were both alive. Before he had a chance to say a word, Araz stepped to his side and grabbed his elbow.

“Game’s up, Laman,” the driver said. Next to him my dad looked like a child, or a very old man. “Come with me.”

My dad didn’t respond at first. He simply looked at the man who’d been his chauffeur, his brow wrinkling as if he couldn’t imagine what the problem was. Then he nodded once, curtly, and let Araz lead him away. The rest of the camp straggled after them.

Araz put him in the house that had been his headquarters. He took his gun away and posted Kelmen at the side window, Kin at the front door. He even stripped the cloth curtains away so the guards could keep a better eye on him. He also removed the canvas bedsheet to prevent the prisoner, so he said, from doing anything rash. The one officer who’d survived the night’s attack he sent to guard the weapons. Then Araz went to check on Keely and the rest of the little kids, to survey the damage to camp, to recover the bodies of the dead. To take charge of the colony my dad had once commanded.

I went with him. He wouldn’t let me near my dad’s cell, anyway.

As dawn marbled the sky we looked out over the wreckage of our camp. Long black streaks from Araz’s flamethrower scarred the ground, and the tents we’d strung up dangled from their lines, charred and smoldering. In some spots the floors of gutted houses still glowed like hot coals. Many of the fence posts had been knocked down in people’s haste to find or escape the intruder, while other sections had tipped over just enough to present lethal spikes. Wisps of black smoke twined around the building where the creature had met its end. The air hung heavy with the smell of oil and burned things.

The ditch we’d started the day before had survived, parts of it collapsed from running feet. In the harsh light of dawn, it looked like a mocking smile.

Six people had died in the attack: Korah, her mother Mika, three officers, and the man with the picture of the light tower, who’d fallen into the crater in his panic to get away. Had the creature gone after human victims immediately, the death toll would almost certainly have been much higher. But for some reason, it had attacked our equipment before seeking out its prey. The tires of the trucks were slashed, their fuel lines bleeding into the dirt. The water drums had been tipped over, spilling their contents into soil eager to lap up any moisture it could find. Shovels had been snapped in two, canteens punctured and torn. The weapons, stored high in the tower room and guarded by a single officer, had been spared, as had the flamethrowers, too risky for the creature to touch. But much of what we relied on to survive had been trampled into the dust. My dad had posted sentries, Petra included, in all the best locations: high in the naked windows of houses, out on the precipice of the hill. But his choices, I realized, were based on past practice. We’d never had to worry about our supplies before, because it was always our bodies we’d had to protect. And so, once the creature managed to slip past the sentries, it found itself free to go on its rampage. Considering how easily it had torn the camp apart, it might have finished us all off if Mika’s scream hadn’t sounded an alarm.

The scream hadn’t helped her, though. We found her lying among the ruins, her head twisted crazily to the side, her mouth frozen open and her eyes wide and empty. When two workers tried to lift her they found there was no weight to her body at all, and her skin sloughed off like dust in their fingers. They wrapped her in canvas and set her aside.

In the case of the officers, there wasn’t enough left to wrap. So far as we could reconstruct, the creature had started with them, moving from one to the next and depositing their tattered uniforms in the dust before jumping to Mika. She must have woken as it attacked her, giving her a split-second to scream. That had been enough to wake those lying nearby, whose own screams woke others, and the creature had fled to a new victim before it had time to consume Mika as thoroughly as the officers. It had made the jump to Korah probably for no better reason than that she had come first to her mother’s aid. Unarmed and unprepared, she’d been defenseless against its attack. It had taken her body as it had taken her mother’s, then grabbed the flashlight and set out to hunt for me.

I wished Korah hadn’t been roused by her mother’s dying scream. I wished she hadn’t been awake when the creature scoured her soul.

Aside from the man guarding the weapons hoard, the only member of the officer corps to survive was Aleka. She told us she’d been restless and unable to sleep, so she’d been roaming the outskirts of camp when the others met their fate. What she’d been looking for, and whether she’d found it, she wouldn’t say. While Araz shot blindly into the night and everyone else ran away, Aleka returned to the sleeping quarters and found Mika, and when she spotted boot prints leading from the body, she set out in search of whoever had made them. She had no idea, she said, that Korah housed the creature until by pure luck Araz’s flamethrower revealed the two of us heading for the bomb shelter, somewhere the real Korah had far too much training to go. “She knew we never lock ourselves in,” Aleka said, and though she said it without any accusation in her voice, I cringed to think how stupid I’d been. Arriving at the shelter, she’d been lucky once again to find the hinges so old and rusty she was able to force the door with the butt of her harpoon gun, lucky a third time that the creature had toyed with me before striking. Otherwise, I’d have been its final victim.

It sickened me when I thought of that, when I remembered the monster’s burned-out eyes and corpse-gray teeth. Twice now, counting the night at the swimming pool, I had been careless, letting my feelings for Korah override the caution my dad had tried to instill in me. My stomach twisted with shame and dread when I imagined what would have happened if Aleka hadn’t been there.

But I couldn’t feel thankful for the way I’d been saved. The sounds of Korah burning, even if it wasn’t really Korah, haunted me and wouldn’t let go.

And another thought made me tremble in the pit of my being: How had the creature known so much about us? How had it known the best way to cripple the colony would be to damage our supplies, kill our officers and mechanic? How had it even known who our officers and mechanic were? No one wore a uniform that distinguished them from anyone else, and even if they did, how could Skaldi know about chain of command or rank? Petra’s words resounded in my mind, forcing me to ask: How did the Skaldi
know
?

Even more terrifying, how did it know so much about
me
?

My attraction to Korah. Our talk at the pool. Even my suspicions about my dad. It had known all those things, had spoken just the right words to get me to go along with it. And it had used its knowledge to hunt specifically for me. I couldn’t believe it had sought me out simply because I was the single person in camp most likely to follow Korah wherever she led. Almost everyone trusted her. Almost anyone would have gone with her to their death.

It made no sense, but what if the thing the Skaldi
knew
had to do with me?

*    *    *

We spent the first part of the day restoring what order we could to camp. Supplies the creature had failed to destroy we consolidated in a single corner of the commissary. Supplies it had damaged beyond repair we left lying in the dust. Mika’s body we moved to a secluded spot for later disposal. I felt her remains shifting like sand inside the wrapping and knew we’d never open it again. A brief debate took place about how to recover the body of the man at the bottom of the crater, but in the end we left him where he was. The empty uniforms of the fallen officers we folded and set beside Mika’s shroud. What we would use in place of Korah’s body when it came time for the burials was a mystery.

“We could search the shelter,” Wali proposed. “Once it cools down. We might find something. . . .”

His voice broke and he turned away. Nessa wrapped him in her arms, holding him while he shook with sobs. Though I kept to myself what I had witnessed in the shelter, I doubted there’d be anything left to find.

With all our attention focused on our fellow colonists, it didn’t occur to anyone right away to search for the body the Skaldi had arrived in. Personally, I’d have preferred not to know. Araz, though, insisted on it. So we spent another couple hours hunting through camp, starting at the site of the attacks and fanning outward from there. We found hundreds of footprints, most of them so blurred and confused they could have been anyone’s. Even Petra, who had followed wordlessly as my dad was incarcerated and as Araz led the clean-up operation, shook her head and shrugged over signs she normally proved so confident at reading. But nothing else turned up, no skin, no hair, no teeth, and eventually Araz called the search off. Maybe, like Danis and the three officers, there’d been next to nothing left of the body that had carried the creature to camp, and the chaos of the night had trampled that little bit into the dust.

The sun beat down on us by the time we’d cleaned up as best we could. Exhaustion and grief rimmed everyone’s eyes. But today, there’d be no relief from the brutal afternoon, no break to spend seeking out shreds of shade. No time, either, to mourn. Our new leader and his handpicked accomplices had decided not to waste a moment before revealing their own master plan.

The first step of which involved erasing the memory of the past.

They marched my dad under armed guard to the central clearing, the same place he’d made his speech a couple days before. His guard, Wali, prodded him with a rifle to the back. My dad’s uniform had been blackened by fire and his limp seemed more pronounced than usual, but he held himself erect and struggled not to stumble as Wali roughly positioned him before us. Araz took the stage his commander had formerly occupied. A couple paces to the big man’s side, their arms crossed behind their backs, stood Kin and, to my disgust but not surprise, Yov. This was the first I’d seen of him since the day before, and looking into his smug face and gloating eyes made my blood boil.

Araz motioned for quiet, needlessly, since everyone watched the proceedings in a silence bordering on trance. The driver’s squat face and brawny arms stood in sharp contrast to my dad’s lean, whittled frame. Araz was in his mid-thirties, so he would have been younger than I was now when my dad first took charge of camp. I’d always thought he admired and respected the man whose truck he’d driven for the past five years.

“Laman Genn,” he said, “your failed leadership has placed the colony at dire risk. Your own officers, along with an innocent child and her mother, were the first to suffer from your indiscretion. We have come here to exact justice.”

“On whose authority?” my dad said in a calm voice. Across the distance, his eyes sought mine. I looked away, unable to bear his scrutiny, unable to stand his humiliation.

“On the authority of the dead,” Araz replied gruffly. Though deeper than my dad’s, his voice lacked the razor sharpness of his former commander’s. “On the authority of the survivors.”

“A popular uprising,” my dad said, “normally relies on the will of the people.”

For a moment Araz didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Then he spread his hands and smiled at the forty-some remaining colonists.

“Anyone who supports the leadership of Laman Genn,” he said, “is welcome to join him now.”

Nobody budged. Nobody even met his glare. The little kids danced over the felled buildings, focused only on their game. I wondered if they knew about Korah. I felt my foot lift hesitantly, but then, seeing my dad make a sharp movement with his hand, I stopped short.

“Satisfied?” Araz said.

“Only that people are scared, and grieving,” my dad said. “We suffered a terrible blow last night. But we can’t let our grief destroy who we are. We must—”

“Enough speeches, Laman,” Araz cut him off. “If we’d had less talk and more action before, we might not be where we are now.”

I saw a few heads nod around the circle, a few expressions of agreement or anger or contempt. Mostly, though, I saw people with strained faces and terrified eyes, people who didn’t know what to believe or what to do. Not like Wali, whose grief over Korah’s death had driven him to Araz’s side. Or Yov, who’d hated my dad for years. The others might side with the camp’s new commander, but only out of fear, not conviction.

It occurred to me just then to wonder if my dad had ever had any friends in the colony. Any real friends. Or only followers.

“Do you deny,” Araz directed his words at my dad, “that despite incontrovertible evidence pointing to a Skaldi presence in this compound, you failed to order quarantine procedures as is mandated in such cases?”

“Quarantine lies at the discretion of the commander,” my dad said.

“And do you deny,” Araz continued as if my dad hadn’t spoken, “that it was on your orders that our weapons were sequestered in a location accessible only to you?”