The Colony: Descent (11 page)

“What in God’s name
is
happening
?”

No one answered
Buck’s question, which sounded outraged more than surprised.  Like he had
reached his limit on things he was prepared to deal with and was now going to
start complaining to whoever was in charge.

Ken stared, of
course.  It was all he could do.  Maggie was silent as well.

The cats tore into
the mass of bodies that had obscured Aaron from view.  They growled and
screeched, occasionally hissing as they moved.  They weren’t as big as lions or
tigers – Ken knew that the male was about one hundred and twenty pounds, the
female perhaps ninety – but what there was of them was bone, muscle, claw, and
tooth.

“Are those from the
zoo
?” Maggie said in a breathless whisper.

Ken couldn’t answer
to anyone but himself.  But he was sure she was right.  The snow leopards had
been given to the Boise Zoo as cubs, and Ken had taken the family to see them
time and again.  They must have escaped their enclosures somehow.

Their cats’ paws,
so soft-looking when Ken had seen them with the kids, now showed the claws
sheathed in their pads.  They batted the zombies away from Aaron, the male
sending half-dried blood dribbling in dirty clots as it eviscerated one zombie
with a powerful swipe of its forepaw, the female grabbing another’s head in her
jaws and crushing it with a powerful snap.

The zombie the
female had mangled went mad, of course.  Black-red gore squashed out of the
snow leopard’s mouth, staining her muzzle and at the same time the zombie freed
itself.

Aaron was pulling
himself away from the melee.  Shock deepened the wrinkles of his face, his eyes
open so wide the whites were visible all the way around the irises.  His jaw
hung nearly to his chest as he crabwalked away from where the snow leopards
fought off the eight zombies that were still unbroken enough to stand.

“What… what…
what…?” he kept saying.  All the way back to the other survivors.

“Are you bitten?”
said Buck.  He said it almost as an afterthought.  His eyes were still glued to
the snow leopards.

“No.”  Aaron
remained on his butt.  Staring.  One of the undead lurched past the cats, tried
to get to the survivors.  The male snow leopard took it down, slamming into it
from behind, then severing its spine with a powerful bite to the base of the
skull.  The zombie twitched.  The cat kept biting, burrowing into and through
its trunk.

“We should… go….” 
Maggie’s voice had a dreamlike quality, as though she wasn’t sure if she was
awake or not.

Ken wasn’t sure
either.  He didn’t think he was dreaming, but maybe he was insane.  That would
make sense, wouldn’t it?  All this was just stress, just the lunatic dreams of
a madman.

He wished it.  But
knew it wasn’t so.

Buck nodded.  He
leaned down and lifted Aaron up.  “Yeah,” he said.  His voice sounded like
Maggie’s: distant and lost.  Hoping someone would pinch him and say it was all
right, none of it was real and it was time to wake up.

Ken remembered
Derek coming to his and Maggie’s room in the night, shivering in his underwear,
terrified of a bad dream.  Curled up between them in the bed and Ken whispering
that it was all right, that the bad dreams were just dreams and the monsters
weren’t real.

But he had been
wrong.  So wrong.  The monsters
were
real.  They killed his son, not in
his bed, but in broad daylight.

Ken watched the
female snow leopard savage another undead zombie that was trying to get past
it.

“Does it seem
like…?” said Buck.

Aaron nodded. 
“Like they’re fighting on our side or something.  Yeah.”

Then, as one, the
undead fell.  The ones who had
already
fallen – the ones on the street
who were twitching and injured, but still trying to move toward Ken and the
survivors – ceased their motion.

“What just
happened?” said Buck.

The snow leopards
continued tearing into the suddenly-still corpses for a moment.  No longer the
serene white and black cats Ken remembered seeing so often at the zoo, but
rather black and crimson, like warriors that had painted themselves in
preparation for coming conflict.

Ken felt himself
tense, if only mentally, as the cats looked at the survivors.  But neither of
the snow leopards made a move toward them.

The male looked up.

So did Aaron.  “Oh,
dammit.”

The female didn’t
look up.  She seemed to be looking straight at Maggie.

Ken couldn’t look
up to see what the male snow leopard was staring at; what Aaron had cursed.  He
was out of gas.  He felt hot, flushed all over.  Probably infection, maybe
total systemic shutdown.  Either way, he didn’t have the energy to raise his
head beyond a level plane.

But he
could
look at Maggie.  And realized the female cat wasn’t watching his wife.  The cat
was staring at Hope and Liz.  At his daughters.

Both of them were
awake.  Eyes rolled back.  Panting.

Smiling.

And Ken knew what
Aaron had cursed about.  Knew it even before he heard the movement above,
before he heard the first wet clonk of a body shattering against broken
concrete.

The zombies – the
dangerous, fast,
living
ones – were moving again.

Ken had been in
several hailstorms, only one of which was dangerous.  He and Maggie had been
out sledding during Christmas break before they got married.  Fully in love,
ready to start a life together, and neither noticed how far they had gotten
from their car, or how dark it was getting.

The first hail fell
and they ran for the car.  But the snow was thick.  The car seemed to have
moved away from them.

The hail came down
in golf ball-sized stones that were hard enough to crack limbs from the nearby
trees.  One hit Ken in the shoulder and he thought for certain he’d broken his
collarbone.

They got to the car
and found the front windshield with three long splits running its length.  They
didn’t dare to drive until the storm passed.  Just huddled and hoped that the
hail wouldn’t shatter the safety glass completely.

It was terrifying. 
The only good part had been the fact that Maggie didn’t get touched.  That… and
the fact that she insisted on kissing the spot he had been hit, “to make it
better.”  So on the whole it turned out all right in retrospect.

But the sound of
hail falling, of things tumbling from the sky with enough velocity and force to
shatter bone, had remained in his dreams for a long time.

And it was nothing
compared to the sound of bodies letting go of the walls of the buildings
above.  The noise of a fleshy tidal wave as they sloughed away from the
concrete and plummeted to earth.

Buck was already
pulling them toward the building across the street.  And that was madness,
because the zombies that had let go were already standing.  Lurching up on legs
that were broken, the bones sticking straight out of their sheared flesh. 
Pushing up on arms that had so many breaks they looked almost like the
segmented tails of scorpions.

Many of the things
– more than before – had the scaly growths on their bodies.  A lot of them
covered the things’ eyes, though Ken knew that they would be able to zero in on
the survivors just the same.

The things that had
fallen were moving slowly.  Picking themselves up and shifting as though trying
to figure out how to adjust for the broken parts of their bodies.

Ken noted one of
the zombies.  It had broken legs, two limbs that jutted out in forty-five
degree angles from its hips, then jerked back inward at mid-femur.  Shattered
bones, there was no doubt.

But as Ken watched,
the thing’s legs straightened.  He thought he could hear crackles.  The thing
leaned over and vomited the same yellow goo that they had been using to build
walls and seal in Ken’s family in the Wells Fargo Center all over its legs.

A cast?  Some
kind of healing solution?

Ken didn’t know. 
Whatever it was, the thing seemed to move faster with each step.

They all did.

The broken
creatures were healing.

Ken looked down the
road.  The tidal wave of zombies had collected there, especially.  A clot of
broken, shattered, deadly once-humanity that completely cut off the survivors
from any escape.

They were ringed
in.

Some of the zombies
were vomiting on themselves.  Worse, some of them were puking on others, like
medics seeing to the wounded.  Working together to be in top condition to
eradicate the enemy.  Another evolutionary step in an enemy that was already
beyond dangerous and yet kept finding new ways to become even more terrible.

Many of the fallen
zombies had shattered so badly they could move only feebly.

But most of the
things were already walking or crawling or slithering toward the survivors.

Ken was moving
toward the things.  Moving toward them, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

Because he had no
strength.  Buck was holding him up completely.  And toward them was where Buck
was going.

“Get over here!”
snapped the big man.  He sounded different.  It wasn’t just that the petulance
and self-entitled whine was gone, either.  He sounded… stronger.

And to Ken’s
surprise, both Maggie and Aaron moved to follow him.  Buck tossed Ken into
Aaron’s arms, then knelt and started pushing a piece of crumbling concrete to
the side.

“What are you
doing?” said Maggie.

“This is why I
wanted to come down here in the first place,” said Buck.  Ken had forgotten
that.  Had forgotten that it was Buck who had been the first one to advocate
going into the plane.

He knew.  Knew
about something down here
.

The muscles in the
back of the big man’s neck bulged.  He exhaled in a steady stream.  The
concrete started to rasp against whatever was under it.  Moving an inch at a
time.

Aaron put Ken
down.  Moved to help Buck.

Ken could see up. 
The zombies streaming down from the sides of the buildings, moving lower and
then dropping.  Lit by the still-burning plane.

Above them, dimly visible
through clouds of smoke… stars.  The sky had taken no notice of humanity’s
demise.

The grinding noise
stopped.  “What’s that?” said Aaron.

Buck shifted and
started moving whatever had been under the concrete.  This time the noise was
metallic.  “Storm drain access.”  More noise.

The zombies started
growling.

Give up.

Give in.

Ken heard his
daughters start to laugh.  Then scream.  He didn’t try to look at them.  Didn’t
want to see.

“Get in,” said
Buck.  “
Hurry
.”

Ken felt himself
dragged.  Then stop, then dragged again, pulled into a hole.

Down again. 
Down the elevator shaft, down the plane, down into the ground.

Where will we go
when we can’t go down anymore?

The growling took
on a different tone as he dropped into the darkness.  Not just the call to despair:
there was rage, too.  And something else.  Something even darker.  Something he
dared not think about, for fear it would drive him mad, or just kill him
outright.

Ken was in Aaron’s
arms.  Maggie stood beside the cowboy, holding their children –

(Are
they our
children?  Or something else?
)

– protectively,
both of them ankle-deep in running water.

Ken realized he
must be standing in the water, too.  But he couldn’t feel it.  Couldn’t feel
anything below his thighs.  Everything was just cold.

Buck dropped down
into the tunnel.  It was barely tall enough to let him stand.  He reached up to
grab the metal grid that still lay partially over the entrance.

And a hand grabbed
his.

Buck screamed.  So
did Maggie.  Aaron twitched, and Ken could feel the sudden indecision in the
cowboy: hang onto Ken, or help Buck?

Buck started
batting at the hand, still screaming.

The hand started
hitting him back, flailing at Buck like the two were engaged in the most
over-the-top slap-fight ever.  Ken thought that was odd.  The zombies were more
of the claw-at-you/pull-you-to-pieces school of fighting.

This kind of thing
– what Ken’s high school students would have called a series of bitch-slaps –
were not their style.

“Stop it.  Stop it,
dammit!”

Buck kept
screaming.  Kept slapping, even when the hand disappeared.  Even when the feet
popped into the hole.

Even when
Christopher dropped down among them.

“Christopher!”
Aaron screamed, and dragged Ken across the sluicing water in a huge, leaping
step in order to engulf the young man in a one-armed hug.  He let go and Ken
caught a glimpse of Christopher’s grin.  Then Buck hugged him.  An even bigger
hug.

“How did you –“ 
Aaron looked on the verge of tears.  He swallowed audibly.  “They were coming
in.”

Christopher
shrugged.  “I held ‘em off.  Tried to fight them when they got through.  But
they didn’t seem like they cared about hurting me.  Just wanted past me.”  He
felt at his right arm for a moment, and Ken saw that his shirt sleeve was a
mass of tears, the flesh of his arm shredded and rent as well.  Then
Christopher shrugged.  “They just forgot I was there.”

“So Dorcas….”  The
hope in Aaron’s voice was apparent.

Christopher’s smile
disappeared.  He shook his head.  “No.”

“But they left
you
.”

“I went around the
side of the plane.  She was there.  She was… not her anymore.”  He put a hand
on Aaron.

Aaron puckered his
lips, then nodded.  “It’s what she wanted.”  He looked away, looking up and
down the storm drain tunnel.  “We should –“  He cut off suddenly.  Looked back
at Christopher.  “What were you doing on the side of the plane?”

Christopher’s mouth
rounded into a geometrically perfect circle of surprise.  He bolted toward the
opening he had just come through.  Reached up.

Something thumped.
An explosion.

Then louder.  Closer.

Ken couldn’t feel
the water below him.  But he felt the ground leap up below them all.  It sent
him rocketing into the ceiling.  Or maybe it was the ceiling that was punching
its way down, slamming into the survivors.

Ken thought he saw
something slip through the storm drain opening.

Zombie.

Then his head
collided with something hard.

The darkness
cocooned him.  Enfolded him.

Took him away.