The Colony: Descent (16 page)

“What is it?”  Ken
struggled to his feet.  It was easier than he thought it would be.  Shaky at
first, but Maggie got under his right arm – his left hand ached where his
fingers were missing, though he could feel the stumps had scabbed and were
starting to heal – and he only needed to lean on her for a second before he
could stand on his own.  At least as far as the tunnel allowed.  He couldn’t
quite stand fully upright without bumping his head on the low concrete ceiling.

“Is it more of the
same?” said Maggie.

“No,” said
Christopher, and then hurried away, splashing down the tunnel again.

“What do you mean, ‘more
of the same’?” said Ken.  He moved as fast as he could, but didn’t really know
how far they were from where Buck and Aaron and the kids were.

And Sally. 
Don’t forget the kids’ new “pet.”

“We didn’t get a
chance to tell you before you passed out again,” said Maggie.  “Hope’s been
acting more or less normal.”  She hesitated.

“But Lizzy?”

“Not normal.”

Ken’s heart started
fluttering, batting at his ribs with the glancing blows of a hummingbird’s
wings.  “What’s been going on?”

“Nothing bad,” said
Maggie, in a voice he knew was meant to reassure him but which failed
miserably.  “Not overtly bad, at least.  Just… she’s not talking.  And she
won’t leave the side of that animal.”

“Sally?”

Maggie choked out
an angry laugh.  “I don’t know what’s going on with that thing, but it won’t
leave her alone, and Lizzy starts screaming anytime someone tries to take her
away from it.”  She sniffed in the dark, not the sound of tears but the sound
of a woman under tremendous strain trying to keep her emotions in check.  “It’s
like the damn
cougar’s
her mother.”

“Snow leopard,”
said Ken.  He didn’t mean it as a rebuke or even as a correction.  It just
popped out, and the second it did he felt the air freeze around him.  One of
those stupid things you say to someone you love that has no importance to the
real issue but can sidetrack the conversation in a second.

“What
ever
,”
said Maggie.  Her tone could have given frostbite to a polar bear.

“Sorry, I didn’t –“

“Forget it.”  She
sighed.  “We’re all on edge.  Everyone wants to get out of here, we’re all
tired of eating power bars and crapping in the side of the tunnel.  We’ve just
been waiting for you to get well enough to go.”

Ken felt warm. 
They could have left him.  It made sense for Maggie and the kids to stay, he
guessed, though Heaven knew many families had splintered under less pressure
than this.  But for Aaron and Christopher, even Buck, to stay….  It made him
feel like maybe the world he knew was over, but this group carried the seeds of
civilization with them.

Maybe the future
was here, in this tunnel.

What if we’re
all that’s left?  Can we rebuild a world if it’s only us against seven billion
zombies?

He thrust that
thought deep.  Pushed it away.

“Other than the
weird leopard fixation and her not talking, anything else?” he said.  He was
thinking about the strange words Liz had spoken.

“You are not
family.  You are renegades.”

And then she had called
out to the zombies, her body contorting as she screamed and gave away the
survivors’ location.

Maggie must have
been thinking about the same thing, because she said, “No, she’s not saying
anything weird, nothing at
all
, not even the stuff she used to say.  We
were worried for the first little while down here that those…
things
…
might find a way in.  But it seems like we’re buried pretty deep, and Buck says
there’s only one way out, really.”

“So what’s happening
with Lizzy now?”

They were almost at
the side tunnel.  Ken could see the light ahead.  He could hear a low noise. 
He didn’t understand what it was at first, then placed it.

Weeping.

Ken and Maggie
turned the corner.

Ken saw Hope
first.  She was buried in Buck’s lap, curled into a ball so tight she nearly
disappeared in the big man’s arms.  He was rocking her back and forth, patting
her head with a big hand as she cried.  She was whispering something, the same
words over and over, words that gradually resolved as Ken came closer.

“I don’t like it I
don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it…,” and on and on in a
never-ending chorus delivered with almost machinelike precision between sobs.

“What’s going on?”
said Maggie.  The words came out harsh, almost accusatory.  The demand of a
mother hen whose brood has been threatened.

“I don’t know,”
said Aaron.  And to Ken’s surprise, the tough-as-jerky-made-of-old-nails cowboy
sounded decidedly scared.  Not by what was happening, but by Maggie. 
Apparently even spec-ops rodeo clowns knew not to cross pissed off mommies. 
“She just started doing that a second ago.”

“What about…?” 
Maggie’s voice faded away.

Ken saw it at the
same time she did.  Liz was standing there.  Still naked, her toddler gut
hanging out over her waist, staring intently skyward.

Ken’s heart,
already racing, now shifted into overdrive.  Whatever held his children in
thrall, it seemed to worsen in effect when they were looking up like that.

But this time was
different.  She wasn’t panting, and her eyes were still open.  Still
seeing
. 
They hadn’t rolled back in their sockets.  She was staring, not at nothing, but
at
something
.

Ken looked at the
point she was staring at.  Nothing was there.  Just solid concrete, the gray
sky over their temporary human habitat.

He realized that
the snow leopard was staring up as well.  Looking at the same exact spot as
Liz.  That made the hairs on his arms – what few hadn’t been burnt or
bludgeoned out of existence – stand up at full alert.  Fear pricked the muscles
behind his ears, made his skin feel tight on his skull.

Slowly, Liz raised
a hand.  Tiny, chubby.  She was barely learning to use a baby fork when the
Change happened.

Now, one finger
extended in an unmistakable gesture.  Pointing up, directly at the spot she and
the leopard were staring at.

Hope stopped
crying.  Her weeping choked off mid-sob, and she stopped saying “I don’t like
it I don’t like it” over and over.  Silence reigned thick and heavy for a long
second.

Then Hope stood.

“Chicken?” said
Buck.

Hope ignored him. 
She walked to Liz.  Put one hand on her sister, who remained frozen with one
finger upraised.  The other hand buried itself deep in Sally’s fur.

Hope looked up as
well.  Then spoke.

“They’re coming. 
They found us.”

The chills that had
been pricking at Ken’s skin exploded into a full-blown shudder.  It ran up and
down his body as he realized that there was only one thing Hope could be
talking about.

The zombies.  They
had found the survivors.  Had found his family.

They weren’t safe
here.  Not anymore.

He believed Hope’s
words, completely and without reservation.  And that meant that whatever
connection, whatever
infection
his daughters had suffered, was not
cured.  In remission, at best.  And perhaps just gaining strength for some
unknown purpose.

The shudder
threatened to become panic-spasms.  Ken had to consciously calm his muscles.

“They’re getting
closer,” said Hope.  She and Liz and Sally were still staring upward, peering
at the same spot as before.

No.  Not the
same
spot.

Ken saw he wasn’t
imagining it: his daughters and their strange nanny were now looking at a
slightly different spot.  A few inches toward the back of the side tunnel.

“No, that’s
impossible,” said Buck.  “We’re totally buried.”

“You sure?” said
Ken.

“I’m telling you,
there’s no way anything bigger than a cat could get in here.”

Sally chuffed at
that.  But the animal’s gaze didn’t waver from whatever invisible object she was
staring at.

The triple stare
was further down the ceiling now.  Toward the area that they had been going to
in order to get their food.

Ken felt his belly
tighten.  “Buck,” he said.  “What do you mean that nothing bigger than a cat
could get in?”

Buck turned a
fear-bleached face toward Ken.  “I mean that there’s only one way out of this
tunnel that I know of.  The rest of it is totally collapsed.  I checked it
myself before we settled down here, and I saw
no
holes bigger than,” he
held his big hands about six inches apart, “this in any of the rubble.”

The tightening in
Ken’s stomach got that much worse.  He looked at Maggie.  “Stay with the
girls,” he said.

“Where are you
going?” she said.

He looked at the
girls’ slowly-moving stares.  Tracking along the ceiling toward the turn of the
side tunnel.

What was beyond the
turn?

“Where are you
going?” she repeated.

“Christopher,” he
said.  “You up for some exploring?”

Christopher got to
his feet.  He smiled, but the grin was tired, pulling the wound on his cheek
into a tight slit that made him look like a pain-maddened Cheshire cat. 
“Sure.”

Ken turned to
Maggie.  “I’m going to see if any cats got in the house.”

Aaron grabbed Ken’s
arm before he took a single step.

“I should go with
Christopher,” said the cowboy.

Ken shook his
head.  “I want you to stay with my family.  You and Buck can protect them. 
Christopher is fast on his feet, so if there’s something back there,” he said,
jerking his chin toward the darkness beyond the snow leopard, “he can get back here
and warn everyone.”

“And you?” said
Aaron.  “You ain’t looking too spry.”

Ken showed him the
bite on his arm.  A mostly-healed half-circle of scabs.  “Maybe I’m immune,” he
said.

“Yeah, I have a
theory about that –“ began Aaron.

“I don’t want to
hear it,” said Ken.  He tried to bear down on the cowboy with his eyes.  “I
really don’t.”

Aaron glanced at
Maggie.  She was splitting her attention between Ken and their daughters.  Ken
didn’t think she noticed the look Ken was sending the cowboy’s way.  Which was
good, because he didn’t want her thinking about what he was trying to tell
Aaron.

Don’t tell me. 
Don’t tell me I might not be immune.  Because it doesn’t matter.  I’m either
immune or I’m expendable.  I’m injured, I can’t move fast. 
You
take care of my family.

Aaron hadn’t told
them the truth about his past – not all of it.  But Ken knew the man had to
have been some kind of soldier, probably a special ops fighter like Delta
Force, Green Beret, SEAL.

Aaron understood
making choices.  Cutting losses.  He understood sacrifice.

“I didn’t like what
Dorcas did,” whispered the cowboy, and Ken saw his eyes grow misty for a
split-second before Aaron blinked and his steely gaze returned.  “So don’t you
do that.”

Ken nodded.  “I
promise,” he said.  He clapped Aaron on the shoulder, and knew he was lying,
and that the cowboy knew it as well.

But some lies need
to be said.  Because some lies make the world bearable.

“Be right back,” he
said to Maggie.

He thought that
might be a lie as well.

Christopher had the
flashlight.  He offered it to Ken, but Ken shook his head and the younger man
held the light even though Ken led the way into the darkness beyond the curve
of the side tunnel.

“I miss the good
old days, when all I had to worry about was whether my mom and dad were going
to kill each other,” said Christopher.

Ken laughed.  He
tried to stop it from happening, as if a vague sense of propriety warned him
against
joie de vivre
when going into a place of possibly fatal danger. 
The laugh forced its way through and he ended up snorting so hard he felt like
his sinuses had turned inside out.

“Wow, that sounded
painful,” said Christopher.

Ken tried to glare
at him, but the younger man was smiling so good-naturedly it was impossible. 
Ken felt envious of Christopher’s ability to find things to laugh about.  Even
now, with his family gone, his wealth and the luxuries he had known just a
memory, he was smiling.  Slashed face, broken nose, and still grinning away.

Ken wondered if
that was why Christopher was still alive.  Not because of his survival skills,
but because the world curved to accommodate happiness.  Because the universe
exerted itself to protect the joyful among us.

Then I am well
and deeply screwed.

After the turn, the
tunnel went for about fifty feet, then folded into a cascading mass of rubble. 
Christopher had shown himself on numerous occasions to be adept at blowing
things up, but this had to take the cake.  It looked like whatever building had
been above the tunnel here had toppled over and punched right through the
concrete infrastructure.  There were bits of wallpapered drywall, pieces of
rebar, some shelving.

And, of course, a
pile of half-buried displays full of energy bars.  Enough to feed an army of
Mr. Olympia contenders for a decade, it looked like.  No wonder everyone had
stayed here once determining it seemed safe.  Or safe-ish.  No way in,
according to Buck.

It looked like Buck
had been right about that, too.  Ken couldn’t see any gaps wider than eight
inches in the rubble.  Most of those closed off after a depth of only a few
inches.  A few of them wormed into blackness, uncharted tunnels into the
darkest of Wonderlands, but those were small enough that Ken couldn’t see any
way for a zombie to get through.

“Looks like Buck
was right,” he said.  He looked at Christopher.  “You see anything?”

Christopher weaved
the flashlight around.  The beam flickered, bright enough to see but clearly
down to its last hour or two of usefulness.  “No,” he said.  “Not unless it’s a
zombie eel or something.”

Ken snorted.  He
was about to turn back when he remembered climbing down the elevator shaft in
the Wells Fargo Center.  The zombies had pressed through cracks in the walls of
the shaft.  Cracks much too small to accommodate them.  They had flayed
themselves alive, little more than blood and bone remaining, to get to the
survivors.

Still… those cracks
had been much bigger.  Not big enough for a full-sized person, but bigger than
these tiny holes.

“Should we go
back?” asked Christopher.  His voice had dropped to a whisper, as though he was
having second thoughts about the tunnel’s security.

Ken wished he
hadn’t asked.  He had been out of it for a few days, and some portion of him
hoped that when he woke he wouldn’t be in charge anymore; that no one would ask
him any questions or look to him for guidance.

But he had made the
call about splitting up the group, and no one really questioned it.  Now
Christopher was deferring to him, asking what their next move was.

It made Ken want to
scream.

Christopher was
still looking at him.  Still waiting.

Ken didn’t scream. 
Instead he said, “Yeah.  Let’s go back.”

They both turned around.

“They’re
coming.  They found us.”

Hope’s words blared
in Ken’s mind.  He stopped.  Looked upward.  He tracked the direction his
daughters had been looking.  Followed the line their eyes had been moving.

There was a hole
right there in the rubble.  One of the snake-like gaps that just disappeared
into nowhere.

“What is it?”
Christopher asked.

“Nothing,” said
Ken.  And that was true, wasn’t it?  It
had
to be nothing.  Because the
hole was barely half a foot across.  Maybe eight inches, tops, about five feet above
the tunnel floor.

Still….

He moved toward the
void.

A trickle of
concrete dust slid out of the cavity.

Like something had
dislodged the debris.

Like something was
coming out of the hole.

A moment later,
something twitched into view.