The Colony: Descent (5 page)

Not Derek.

Derek changed.

Fell.

Died in the
fire.

Changed.

It all flashed
through Ken’s mind in an instant.  He saw a single bit of ash falling, backlit
by a tongue of flame that streaked up the side of a blanket hanging from one of
the overhead luggage bins.  Both ash and flame ceased their motion.  Energy
sapped from the universe, pulled away by the power of Ken’s thoughts, the
swirling vortex of burgeoning madness.

When slumped
beneath is dead parents, the child-thing had been a mangled mass of nothing. 
Just torn flesh and broken bone, loosely contained by threads that no doubt had
once been an outfit carefully chosen for the trip.  Not human, not even a
body.  Barely a carcass.

But when the thing stood
up, Ken saw what Maggie had seen: the little round face, impossibly
unblemished.

Tornadoes ravaged
entire neighborhoods but left one home pristine.  Earthquakes sunk homes into
the ground and left random bits of perfection standing on the city streets as
mute witness to the past.  And apparently airliner crashes had the same
indiscriminate quality.  Breaking a body but leaving a face perfectly intact,
the visage of an angel peering out from the husk of a demon.

And he – Ken now
saw it had been a he – looked so much like Derek.  Or maybe not.  Maybe he just
wished it.  Maybe he just wished to see his son, even if seeing his son came at
the cost of death revoking its sovereignty.

But no, Maggie saw
it, too.  So it wasn’t imagination.  It was a cruel joke, or a continuation of
the awful prank being played out on a cosmic level.

The ash was still
frozen.  The flame seemed encased in ice.  Nothing moved.

The father-thing –

(
and Ken
wondered if it would look like him if it was a dark version of himself another
man who had also lost his son and failed his family
)

– broke the spell
first.  Clawed, pulled its way around.

The boy/thing/beast/corpse
resumed its flight through the air.  Mouth open in a scream that never came. 
Silent.

The silence was the
worst.  Because rage like Ken saw in the boy’s eyes, near-mindless evil of the
kind that could drive broken bones to grind against themselves and push a
shattered body into the air, that should
scream
.

It should not be
silent.

Ken didn’t
understand what was happening.

The living had
turned to vicious, unstoppable animals.

The dead were no
longer the dead.

The boy flew
through the air.

Straight at Ken.

Ken couldn’t raise
his hands.  Couldn’t do anything.

How could you stop
something that bore the face of your dead child?

The boy-thing
reached with crooked arms that ended in mangled fingers.  His mouth opened wide
to show bloodied gums.  Not many teeth.

But enough. 
Assuming that a bite from the once-dead could bring the change as fast and
easily as could a bite from the zombies spawned from the still-living.

Ken thought that
was likely the case.  The one thing that was consistent in all of this was the
deadliness of the things they faced.  The only two choices seemed to be
conversion… or death.

A bite would change
him.

But he did not
move.

He could not. 
Wasn’t sure he even wanted to.

He whispered his
son’s name.

The face was
perfect.  A round face, like Derek’s.  Lightly tanned.  Button nose.

The silent snarl
was not Derek’s.  Nor was the dried blood that streaked his cheeks and crumbled
out of his mouth like river clay.

But it was close
enough to paralyze Ken.  Close enough to make him wonder why he was fighting,
if fighting would only result in death and, worse, in having to confront the
faces of the dead.

The dead
boy/Derek/thing’s fingers were bent every which way, twisted and curling in on
themselves.

Derek always bit
his nails too much.

Filthy habit.

Ken knew he should
be moving.  Should be doing something.  But he just watched as the thing jumped
over several seat backs, leapt over a smoldering fire, and then pounced.

He’ll hurt
himself if he keeps that up
.

Ken looked for the
ash.  The ash that had hung for an impossible forever in the air.  It was
gone.  The miracle was over.  Time had started again, marching implacably
forward, resolutely pushing on to the inevitable dissolution of all things.

The ash was gone.

Derek’s gone
.

Ken shook his
head.  He moved.

But he was too
late.  The thing’s fingers – the dead, broken fingers of the thing that had
once been a boy but never Derek, never
his
boy – reached for him.

The thing was
airborne again.  Floating like ash, but mobile.  Dangerous.  Too fast.

Ken shrank back.

The thing darted
toward him like a torpedo, and then seemed to change direction at the last
second.  Something grazed Ken’s cheek.  He felt blood slick his face, and
didn’t know if it was his or the dead thing’s.

Then the child hit
the ground.

Ken looked up. 
Dorcas was laying on top of it.  She had tackled it in midair, tumbling with it
to the ground.  The thing was pinned under her greater mass, but still Ken
could hear its teeth snapping together as it tried to bite her.

Aaron stepped
forward.  He had pulled a piece of metal from one of the broken tray tables and
was holding it like a short javelin.  He half kicked Dorcas away from the boy,
then slammed the metal through the back of the child’s small neck, pinning it
to the floor.  The thing trembled, its fingers spasmed.  Its legs kicked, once
each, though not at the same time.

All in silence.

Then it was
motionless.  But only for a moment.  Then its fingers began twitching.  Slowly,
as though it was figuring out how to use them again.  They opened and closed,
curled and uncurled.  The unsure movements of a stroke recovery victim.

“Get on up, lady,”
said Aaron, helping Dorcas to her feet.  She stood.  Then hollered.

The dead father had
finally flipped himself around.  Half a man, but half a man was enough in this
situation.  It had crawled forward during the scuffle with its once-son, trailing
a long hose of intestine, like a man knit of too-loose thread, destined to
slowly unravel.

Ken thought that
strangely appropriate.

The thing had
grabbed Dorcas’ ankle.

It bit down.

“
No!
”

Aaron had gone
crazy before.  When he had been touched by acid in the elevator, a thin trickle
that burned a line of third-degree flesh down the length of his left arm, Ken
had thought he would never see anything more terrifying that still managed to
be human.

He was wrong.

The cowboy’s face
twisted in a way Ken had never seen.  He didn’t know a person
could
look
like that.  Aaron had said he was a rodeo clown.  But had hinted at something
else in his past.  Something darker, and infinitely more dangerous.

In his face,
already wrinkled by long years in the sun, already stained by soot and grime,
Ken thought he now caught glimpses of sun in alien places, of dirt that could
never be washed away.  Aaron’s face was not that of a man, not that of an
animal.  It was that of a machine, programmed to do only one thing.

Ken realized the
cowboy’s face looked a lot like the face of the zombies.

“NO!” the older man
shrieked again.  He brought his foot down on the head of the half-man that was
gnawing on Dorcas’ foot.  Dorcas’ own scream disappeared in the thundering rage
of the cowboy’s roar.  Then disappeared again in the dull thud-crunch of a boot
slamming through hair and bone and brain and bone again before coming to rest
on buckled carpet.

The half-thing
began twitching.  Frenzied tremors rippled through its body as the chaos that
took control of these things whenever their brains were damaged seized it.  Its
fingers curled back on themselves, then one hand reached straight into the air
as though the headless, legless torso were trying to pull itself erect.  The
other dug deep into its abdomen and began pulling soft tissue from its body.

Aaron didn’t even
notice.  His cowboy boots kept pounding down, slamming into the thing’s head –
where the head
had
been – over and over and over until what had been
brain and bone and blood was little more than a gritty stain on the warped
floor.

The father-thing
never made a sound.

The son-thing,
moving a bit more with every passing second, never wailed.

The mother-thing
kept trying to pull herself free a few rows back.  But mutely.  Mouth opening
and closing in silent screams, airless breaths.

Aaron kept grinding
the paste under his feet.  He didn’t look at Dorcas.

She touched him. 
Laid her one good hand on his one good arm.

“I’m okay,” she
said.  “It didn’t get through my boots.”

She lifted her
pants to show her thick work boots – now darker than they had been, the
double-stitched leather starting to fray.  But whole.

Aaron stopped as if
frozen.  His foot caught in mid-grind.

The child-thing
struggled.

The mother-thing
pulled herself apart to get to them.

The father-thing
yanked its innards out as if in offering to whatever deity had resurrected it.

Aaron fell against
Dorcas.  She grunted as he hit her broken arm.  Grunted, but didn’t pull away.

The cowboy wept.

Ken stared at the
older couple.  And realized he was jealous.

They had found each
other.

All
of them had found each other,
of course.  But Buck had lost his mother.  Christopher had lost his family, had
seen his parents rip each other apart.

Ken had lost
Derek.  Maybe the girls.  Maybe Maggie.

Aaron and Dorcas
were holding each other.  Clinging to one another in one-armed, broken
embraces.  Weeping in relief and terror and pain.

But they were
alive, and perhaps they had more now than they had when this all began.

Ken hated them for
a moment.  Less than a second, just another frozen ash-fall of an instant.  But
it was real.

Is that in
everyone?  Can we all hate not only for real injuries but merely for blessings
others have the gall to accept?

He thought so.  And
didn’t know what that meant.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  If that kind
of hate was buried in everyone, that kind of selfishness resided in all hearts,
maybe the monsters that had come upon them weren’t unnatural after all.  Maybe
they were just the next evolutionary step.

Swinging in the
trees to picking fruit off the ground.

Picking fruit off
the ground to cultivating crops.

Cultivating crops
to building cities.

Building cities to
traveling to space.

But the constant
through it all was warfare.  Murder.  The attempt to bring others down and bury
them beneath our feet.

The zombies were
simply doing it with a bit more focus.  Casting off the subterfuge of
civilization and simply being their true selves.

Ken looked at
Maggie.  She was standing by Buck and Christopher, almost leaning against them.

Not me.  She
should be holding
me
,
not leaning on them
.

Liz was still limp
in the baby sling.  Hope flopped loose and boneless in Buck’s thick arms.

None of them
noticed the things rising out of the seats behind them.

“Look out!”

The self-pity that
had been on the verge of battering down Ken’s last defenses vaporized at the
sight of the burning things standing behind Maggie.  He was moving even as he
shouted, shoving her behind him, then pushing Christopher to the side as well. 
The kid went sprawling into the remains of a – blessedly empty – row of mangled
seats.

Buck was harder to
push.  But even the big man flew to the side under the adrenalized shove Ken
sent his way.  Ken saw out of the corner of his eye that the gray older man
fell sideways with his body curved around Hope’s still form.  Another
surprise.  Another connection found in the world of the lost.  The snippy,
selfish older man had somehow discovered someone in whom to subsume himself.

In that moment Ken
started to think of the man as one of the group.  One of the survivors.

Then he was past
them all.

Throwing himself
into the three dead bodies that had struggled to their feet two rows down.

The closest wasn’t
really on fire, he saw.  Just smoldering.  Steam venting from singed rags that
were the only funerary clothing the thing would ever enjoy.

The whole world was
a cemetery.  But the dead were not going to stay buried.

The steam hissed
and popped, and one of the thing’s eyes suddenly exploded under the internal
pressure of expanding gases and liquids.  A second later the thing started to
jitter.  Then it dropped suddenly, disappearing to the floor in its row of
seats.

Ken didn’t know
what to make of that.  He didn’t have time to wonder if it was a trap, because
the two other walking corpses were climbing over the intervening rows of
seats.  They could have been on him in an instant if they had come into the
center aisle, but they seemed unaware of that.  They saw only him, their target
and prey.  A straight line seemed to be the only way they would move.

Footsteps behind
him.  Several sets.  A scuffle.

One of the zombies
reached him.  It moved awkwardly.  Ken had noted that the zombies moved better
the more of them there were, seeming to draw agility and strength from
numbers.  He couldn’t tell if that was what was happening here, or if this one
was struggling because it was born not of a living person but of a cadaver.

Either way, the
thing’s tenuous movements bought Ken enough time to backpedal a bit.  The thing
reached out, grabbing at him with fingers stained and bloody.  Ken’s own hands
went back, and brushed into something.  He grabbed it reflexively, then yanked
it forward as the zombie lurched at him.

The thing snapped
its teeth.  Silently.

Ken was not
silent.  He screamed in terror, but didn’t run.  He couldn’t.  There was
nowhere
to
run.  His family was behind him.  He couldn’t let this thing
get past.

Instead he used
what was in his hand: the flexible tube connected to an oxygen mask.  The thing
had a little give.  Not a lot, but enough that he could yank it forward and whip
it around the zombie’s head.

Ken meant to throw
it around the thing’s neck like a noose.  Some thought in the back of his head
whispered that he might be able to hang the thing up in the tubing, stop it
completely right here.

He missed.

The tubing didn’t
get to the thing’s neck.  The zombie had its mouth open, trying to take a bite
out of its enemy.  The cord got hung up in its maw like a bit for a horse’s
bridle.  The thing gnashed down automatically, and Ken had no choice but to
continue his motion, wrapping the oxygen tube around the thing’s neck.

The thing
was
stuck.  At least for a moment.

But Ken felt
something odd.

He looked at his
hand.  His right hand.  His good hand.  The hand that had grabbed the tubing.

There was a shining
hemisphere of red on the meat of his hand.

Teeth marks.

He had been bitten.