The Colony: Descent (4 page)

The bugs had been
the first signal of the change.

They had clustered
on a window – just a single window – of Ken’s classroom.  So thick, so closely
grouped that they appeared to be some kind of moving plate mail.  They didn’t
fly away when Ken tried to spook them, not even when the first explosion shook
Boise and rattled the very pane to which they clung.

Later, the bugs
continued acting strangely.  Swarms of bees seemed to target human beings,
stinging any they came into contact with.

And then… they all
died.  Insects by the tens and hundreds of thousands – by the
millions
–
carpeted vast stretches of sidewalk and street.

Ken had, in the
back of his mind, assumed that the last ones he saw – a black expanse of dead
bugs outside the Wells Fargo Center – were
it
.  The last ones in Boise,
perhaps in the world.  And part of him wondered what would happen, how life
would change, if the insects were suddenly just gone.

He needn’t have
worried.

At least, not about
that.

The air in the
cabin grew suddenly dark as what little light had filtered through the
soot-fogged windows dimmed and disappeared.

Bugs.

Everywhere.

Tictictictictic….

The sounds of
thousands of tiny feet, so inconsequential on their own, was almost maddening. 
It joined with the crackling of the fires in the cabin to create a unique
drumbeat, one that captured Ken’s already heightened pulse and sent it spinning
into overdrive.  He felt like his head was going to explode.

“What’s going on?”
said Maggie.

“Shhh,” hissed
Aaron.  Ken didn’t know if the cowboy understood something about what was happening,
or if it was just good advice in general.  Either way, Maggie fell silent.

And Ken noticed
that she wasn’t the only one.

“Maggie,” he
whispered.

She looked at him. 
Fear in her eyes, though her mouth had drawn a thin line of anger across her
face.  He knew in his deepest heart that she wasn’t really angry at
him
,
any more than he was angry at Aaron or Christopher or God or anyone else for
what was happening.

Sometimes, we just
needed a face to hate.

Sometimes, the face
we hated just happened to be the closest one to our hearts.

“What?” she said.

“Liz,” he said.  It
was all he needed to say.

Maggie looked
down.  She gasped.  A tiny inhale that threaded its way between the omnipresent
tictictic
of insects crashing their way to the windows, clinging to one
another’s backs and legs and heads.  A hand went to her mouth.

“What…?”  Ken heard
Dorcas behind him, could almost hear her craning to see what was happening.

“I don’t know.”  He
looked at the windows.  Black holes in the red/gray shimmer of the fire and
smoke that had enveloped their existence.  The smoke wrapped around the still
forms of the dead, making them seem less like corpses and more like an audience
in the world’s most macabre theater.  The shifting clouds of dark fog created
the illusion of motion, and the change of light as the fire moved from place to
place caused subtle shifts in shadow that heightened the hallucinatory effect.

Maggie shook Liz. 
Only a moment before they had all been praying that the toddler would stop
shouting, stop moving, stop doing whatever it was that called the creatures to
them.

Now, suddenly, Ken
could feel the company lean toward Maggie, and could feel them trying to
rescind that prayer.

Liz wasn’t moving. 
Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, only whites showing.  Her head tilted
back, her mouth open.

The rest of her
hung limp.

“What is it?”  Buck
looked at Hope.  The little girl was still unconscious.  Then he looked left
and right at the dark holes, like black eyes that had once been windows. 
“What’s happening?”

Tic. 
Tictictictic….

Ken had been
concussed.  Bruised, beaten, maimed.  He had also had most of his back burnt in
an explosion.  So he had no small hairs on the back of his neck.  Still, he
felt the muscles there tighten.  A twitching, trembling, more civilized and
less developed version of the early-warning system that sent feral animals
howling out of the forest mere moments before the earthquake, the hurricane.

He looked at the
buzzing darkness at the windows.  The dead bodies like visions of the future
come to claim them all.

“Something’s
coming,” he said.

Everyone kept
moving forward.

There was nothing
else to do.  They couldn’t go back – there were Heaven-only-knew how many
zombies behind them.  Couldn’t go sideways.  No way out of the airplane.  And
even if they found an emergency exit, Ken didn’t want to be the first one to
venture out into the swarms of insects.  He remembered the people he and Dorcas
had found, people who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the swarms.  Swollen,
bloated beyond recognition.  Only their clothing had identified the remains as
being of human origin.

Tic-tictictic
….

Ken realized some
of the sound was coming from inside his head.  Panic sent a bolt of purest ice
through his chest, down his stomach and testicles.

It’s happening
to me.  I’m changing
.

Then he realized
the sound was his teeth.  Clicking.  Chattering in terror and the natural
reaction to all the adrenaline that had saved him… and now threatened to
overcome him.

Easy
.

Easy
.

Tictictictictic
….

The floor of the
aisle buckled suddenly after about fifteen feet, humping up and then dropping
off to an even steeper incline.  The group clotted up getting over it.  Ken
felt his skin continue to crawl, drawing tight against his bones and then
letting go explosively, then drawing tight once more, letting go, repeating the
process in an infinite loop that made him feel nauseous.

Something’s
coming
.

Still, he didn’t
say anything.  Didn’t whisper at Buck or Maggie to hurry, because the last
thing any of them needed was for someone to fall at this point.  Not now.

Tictictic
….

Teeth or bugs?  He
couldn’t tell anymore.  The sounds had mingled in his mind, bouncing around and
creating a noise that was half alien, half familiar.  The familiarity made it
worse.  Anything fully alien is merely incomprehensible; it is only when mixed
with a modicum of ourselves that we understand it enough to fear it.

Tictictic
….

Buck had stepped
over the hump.  Not much, just a six-inch jutting in the floor.  Normally not
even a nuisance, but the big man was treating it with utmost care.

Tictictic….

Buck turned and
held out a hand to assist Maggie.  She looked at Liz.  The toddler’s head still
pointed up, her eyes still rolled back so far only pure white showed.  It was
so bright it almost glowed in the brimstone cylinder of the plane cabin.

Tictictic
….

Maggie took Buck’s
hand.  She stepped forward.

Ticticti –

Silence.

Everyone stopped
moving.

Everyone.

But not every
thing
.

The sounds stopped,
and the silence was almost painful.

Until that moment,
Ken hadn’t realized how much his world had come to be defined in terms of
noise.

The sounds of Liz
crying, of Hope and Derek playing.

Maggie laughing.

The pervasive tones
of electronic media – beeps and boops and laugh tracks and commercials that
were all just a bit too loud for comfort.  But you didn’t notice after a while,
because even the obnoxious, even the almost-painful became mere background. 
First we notice, then we tolerate, then we embrace, then we forget.  The human
condition as expressed by mass communications.

Then, after the
change….

Explosions.

Screams.

Shattering bones.

Breaking glass.

The growl.

Give up.

Give in.

And just like that,
it was gone.  All of it.  Only the corpse-breath crackle of the flames in the
cabin.

“You hear that?”
said Buck.

“Where’d the creeps
go?” said Christopher.

The growl was
gone.  As though the zombies had, all in an instant, disappeared.

Ken dared to hope. 
Dared to dream that something might be going, if not
right
, then at
least
less wrong
.

He looked at
Maggie.  Her arms around Liz.

The toddler’s
eyelids fluttered.  The whites of her eyes, so blaring and bright they almost
glowed, suddenly disappeared as her head slumped forward.

Brightness streamed
back into the cabin.

“Wha –“ said
Dorcas.

Ken looked at the
windows.

The insects were
falling away.  Letting go.

Dead?

No way to tell.  No
way to know without going outside.

All was silent.

Just the breath of
the survivors, the crackle of flame.

Then something
shifted
.

Maggie clapped her
hands to her cheeks.  It was a strangely juvenile gesture, the kind of thing
Ken had seen his students do occasionally.

When Ken saw a high
schooler do it, he tried not to laugh.

When Maggie did it,
he had to force himself not to scream.  Instead, he turned and looked at what
she was staring at.  He didn’t want to see it, but he knew that avoidance was
the fastest way to die.  The only way to survive this world was to keep your
eyes wide open, watch for danger… and run when you could.

He saw what she
saw.

And like Maggie,
Ken did something he would have thought of as cartoonish if he had observed
someone else doing it.

He rubbed his eyes.

He did it almost
carefully, scrunching up his one good hand and pressing it against his right
eye, then his left.  Each time adding a quick circular motion as if to remove
whatever grit was causing this vision.

He opened his eyes.

And it was still
there.

The world made less
sense than it had.

The mere insanity that
had gripped the world was gone, replaced by full-fledged homicidal psychosis.

Someone cursed.

Someone else screamed.

Sound snapped back
to existence, found its way to a place where there was no hope for survival, no
hope for escape.

Not even in death.

Because the dead
themselves were moving.

The family Ken had
spotted earlier had led to mixed feelings.  Hope and dread, poignant loss and
melancholy surrender.

Now he saw them
simply.  They were evil.  Evil in its purest form.

It was one thing
for people to suddenly change, to turn on one another and become snarling,
biting beasts.  But really, wasn’t that just a small nudge down a slope so many
people already rested on the crest of?  Just a push into a shadowy precipice
over which so much of humanity eagerly lunged of their own accord?

There was nothing
beautiful about what had happened to this point.  Nothing poetic, nothing
bright –

(
nothing bright
about Derek being bitten, about blood streaming from his pores, about his eyes
flooding with madness, about his fall to flame
)

– but there was a
trace of nature to it.  The law of the jungle, if only as read through funhouse
lenses crafted by a psychotic artisan.

This, though….

The family was
moving.  The
dead
family.  The mother and father pulled away from one
another, and Ken saw he had been wrong about something.  He had thought the
mother unblemished.  But now he saw -
heard
– otherwise.  She had
reached to her husband, held his hands and arms as they tried to protect their
child.  Their arms had burnt and mangled together as they crashed, husband and
wife had become one for a moment, in purpose and in body.

Now their flesh
separated with a sound like shearing ice.  They yanked their arms free from one
another and the sound ripped through the cabin, overpowering the comparatively
slight noise of the flames, rasping ragged holes in Ken’s mind.

The woman tried to
stand.  She pushed up, then sat back down again with a jerk.  Repeated the
motion.  Ken realized that the sliver of metal he had seen in her chest must
have pinned her to the seat, maybe to the wall of the cabin.

Her mouth opened,
her face wrinkling in rage.  But she didn’t speak.  Didn’t cry out.  No sound
at all.

The zombies, the
things that had changed from live people to… whatever they now were… were
almost constantly vocalizing.  But this was something else.  As though when
life had left this woman, so had her voice.  And not even the power that had
reanimated her sufficed to give her the semblance of speech.

She kept trying to
stand.  Kept falling back to the seat.  Ken could see the shaft in her breast
wiggling to and fro.  It didn’t seem to bother her, and little blood came
forth.

It’s already
pooled in her feet by now
.

A dull thud.  Ken’s
eyes flicked over.

The husband.

He had pulled
himself free of the seat.  But Ken had been wrong in his previous assessment of
the husband’s injuries as well: the tray table hadn’t
nearly
cut the man
in half.

The top portion of
the man slid to the aisle.  He fell on his back.  The dark gray of his spine
trailed out of the sudden terminus of his body.  Entrails flopped out in
looping masses.

Again, not much
blood.

Again, no sound at
all.

The man’s face was
oriented away from the survivors.  But he began working his way around, clearly
trying to face them.

Ken had no
illusions about what the thing’s intentions were.

More movement.

Ken looked back. 
Halfway between the still-pinned woman and the twitch-dancing feet of the man.

Something rose up
between them.

Maggie shrieked.  A
single word.

The thing did not
make a sound.  Not even when it leaped through the air directly at Ken.

Ken didn’t shriek. 
But he did speak.  Like Maggie, it was a single word.  The
same
word.

“Derek?”