Survival Colony 9 (11 page)

It wasn’t just his threat that made me anxious. It was my pledge.

By the time we finished dinner, I knew I couldn’t delay any longer. All meal long, my dad had pulled me around as he congratulated people for their hard work and bucked them up for tomorrow’s repeat performance. He shook hands, patted backs, told everyone from the oldest and weariest to the youngest and most oblivious that we’d made a great start and we really needed to pour it on now. He exchanged quiet words with his supporters, reminding them of the sacrifices people like Danis had made, telling them they were honoring his memory by fulfilling the dreams heroes like him had died for. To those who remained unconvinced, disgruntled, or openly hostile he changed his tune, challenging them in a soft but unyielding voice to have faith, to work for the benefit of the colony, to put aside differences in the name of the common good. No one said a word back to him. Those not too angry to speak seemed too tired to think and too busy licking their fingers for the last greasy traces of food. All he got were grateful smiles from disciples like Korah, ominous glares from holdouts like Araz. Petra was harder to pin down, what with all the blinking and her natural ability to evade. Aleka he didn’t bother trying to convince, which was just as well, since she kept her thoughts, and her person, to herself.

The whole time, while I stood by his side, unable to say a word and not invited to anyway, the speech I knew I would have to deliver gathered in the back of my mind, in the part of my memory not too damaged to call back. Every so often in the middle of a conversation he’d turn to me, nod, brace an arm behind my back, and I’d look at him evenly, the effort to control what I couldn’t show making my lip tremble. Then he’d grab my elbow and steer me to the next person crouched over their meal, and the whole thing would start all over again. The worst was when he launched into his speech in front of Korah. I saw the light beaming from a face she’d somehow restored to its flawless beauty, and I couldn’t do anything but squirm.

“This is what it means to be a leader,” she whispered to me, her breath warm on my ear, her hand squeezing my arm. When our eyes met, I thought I saw the soft promise I’d never seen her show anyone but Wali. Whether my dad heard her, whether he saw that look too before he dragged me away, I couldn’t tell.

When it was finally over, when we’d visited every last clump of exhausted, famished workers, he walked me to the crest of the hill and we stood looking out over a land drained of light and life. “You’ll have to learn to do this,” he said. “Someday.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m gone,” he said, speaking so low the wind tossed his words almost beyond my hearing. “They’ll need you then. To carry on.”

To carry on
what
? I almost screamed. “Dad . . .”

“Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

We strolled over to the group of officers who sat apart from the workers, their faces growing shadows in the twilight. Aleka stood to the side, so still and silent she might have been one of the pillars left over from the time before.

“Tomorrow it’s Querry’s turn,” he said. His voice took in the group, but his eyes rested on her. “He can supervise the fence construction. Take charge.”

“Dad,” I protested.

“Aleka will help you,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t.”

Aleka turned her gaze to me. The other officers stiffened as if I’d burst open and let loose a stream of Skaldi. Only my dad seemed unfazed.

“It’ll be all right, son,” he said quietly.

“Dad,” I said. “I’m sorry I—I’m sorry about what happened. I should have listened. But this isn’t the way. The way to win the war.”

He faced me squarely, his eyes showing not triumph but something else—weariness, sadness, maybe respect. It was too dark to tell.

“You’ll learn, Querry,” he said. “All of us remember that time. The time when you have to make a choice. No matter how dark it looks. When the alternative is much, much worse.”

“I don’t know how . . .” I began.
I don’t know how to tell you
, I recited in my head.
All the things I have to tell you, all the things I never have
. . . . But my riddled memory failed me, and I couldn’t complete the thought.

He stepped closer, his eyes boring into mine. I couldn’t mistake the sorrow in their coal-black depths. “Then it’s time you learned,” was all he said. He signaled to the other officers and strode away.

I turned to Aleka, but her gaze held neither promise nor encouragement. Her face and eyes blended with the gray of her uniform.

“I did try,” I said.

“I know you did.”

“He’s gone crazy, hasn’t he?”

She opened her hands in bewilderment. “I don’t know what to tell you, Querry. All I can say is that the Laman Genn I know wouldn’t do this.”

“Maybe you don’t know him anymore, then.”

“Maybe neither of us does.”

“Maybe,” I said, “this isn’t him.”

She opened her mouth as if to respond, then turned away and wouldn’t say another word.

I went to bed sure I’d wake to a night terror. Almost looking forward to it. Wishing for a nightmare I couldn’t remember to cancel out the one I could.

10

Lost

Screams woke me.

At first I thought they lived in my head. Then I realized they were coming from all around me. Screams, magnified by the stillness of the night, rebounding off the ghost-town buildings. Screams of people I knew. Maybe. It was impossible to tell. Screams are just screams.

I sprang to my feet and searched the moonless dark for the source. I could barely make out shadowy figures in the distance and hear the slap of running feet. A gunshot sounded, an unidentifiable voice responded with shouts and curses.

Then a jet of fire bloomed in the night. In its glare I saw Araz standing on the edge of the crater holding a flamethrower, others in camouflage uniforms racing in every direction. Some darted between the pillars and walls of crumbled buildings, others plunged deeper into the night. Some I thought I saw stumble and fall into the crater. I couldn’t tell whether they were escaping from the stream of fire or from something else. I couldn’t tell if they were the people I’d known for the past six months or something else.

But I did know one thing.

This was no night terror.

It was real.

Without a thought as to what I was doing, I leaped over the wall and ran toward Araz. My feet, bootless, suffered the piercing sting of rocks at every stride. In the swirling dark I nearly collided with a group of little kids who appeared out of the night, running in the opposite direction. Their screams of terror chilled my blood. But I kept moving toward Araz, dodging piles of brick and stone I could sense more than see. My lungs drew air laced with the smell of gasoline and burning wood, though nothing seemed to be on fire. The only things clearly visible in the whole camp were the driver and the outlines of the buildings into which he shot flickering tongues of flame.

“What is it?” I screamed at him over the rush of the flamethrower. Sweat covered his face and his eyes shone wildly in the orange glow.

“Skaldi!” he screamed back. He shot another gout of flame at something only he could see, or at nothing at all.

“Where’s my dad?”

He didn’t answer. He sent a long, sweeping arc of fire toward the buildings closest to him, and I had to jump back to avoid the flames. My skin prickled and felt as if it was blistering.

Half-blinded by the firelight, I spun and headed for the building where my dad had set up his quarters. I could just make out its shadow, separate from the other dim shapes that rose around it. I slammed against rock, pitched blindly forward. For a horrifying second I thought I had tumbled into the crater, but then my hands hit solid ground. Ignoring the pinpricks of pain from my scraped palms, I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the command building. Blurry figures brushed past me, too filmy to see clearly but firm enough to bruise my shoulder and spin me from my feet. I had no idea if they were people fleeing the Skaldi or Skaldi fleeing the man who flourished the flame gun.

“Dad!” I yelled into the night. “Dad!”

I thought I heard a weak voice answer, “Querry!” But before I had a chance to listen for a repetition, the flames erupted again and swallowed all sound in their exultant roar.

I reached the door of headquarters, pawed for the empty frame, swung myself into the front hall. For a moment I stopped short in total darkness. Then, moving as cautiously as my rising panic would let me, I picked my way past broken pieces of furniture to the room where I’d witnessed Petra’s interrogation. My gut twisted as I remembered that day. Nothing stirred in the dark, no sound of voices or anything else. I passed through the archway that led to the back room where my dad slept, but it was as dark and silent as the rest of the house.

“Dad?” I breathed. “Dad?”

Nothing.

I slid one foot forward, then the next, groped for the place where I knew he’d laid his mat. I fell to my knees and felt around on the ground in front of me. My fingers found the mat, a coarse and scratchy piece of canvas, but no one lying on it. I thought I felt some lingering warmth from a body, but my feverish hands might have been playing tricks on me.

I stood and peered into darkness my eyes refused to penetrate. I wondered if he’d started sleeping in his third-story armory, if he was up there right now watching the chaos on the ground.

Or worse, if he was the cause of it.

The flamethrower sprang to life once more, and the outline of the room’s sole window came into focus. The throaty noise emerged in bursts, the sound of screams resuming every time the weapon fell silent. The window flickered black and orange as the flames rose and fell.

Then I heard a voice, in the gaps of flame, faint but unmistakable. “Where’s Querry?” he shouted over the other noises. “Where’s Querry?”

“Dad!” I ran for the archway, knocking my shoulder against the wall, and sprinted blindly through the interrogation room. The flamethrower gave me just enough light to detect the front door and fling myself through it.

Araz remained visible in the distance, flames seeming to spout from his arms. Small fires had sprung up in the ruins of the buildings around him, so he looked like a gardener tending bushes of flame. What had caught fire, whether fuel or bodies or our meager supplies, I couldn’t tell. No other figures were in sight, though the sound of their voices, calling for help or for each other, could still be heard when the flames fell silent. I couldn’t determine what direction my dad’s voice had come from, and I didn’t know whether to risk another race across the compound’s courtyard, another close encounter with the gaping crater. So I stood still and lifted my voice as loud as I could make it.

“Dad!”

No answer.

“Dad!”

“Querry!” The voice came from the direction of my own sleeping place. We must have run past each other in the dark.

“I’m coming!” I yelled, but then I felt a hand grip my arm and I spun, a scream about to form on my lips.

“Shh!” a voice said. “It’s me.”

The voice was Korah’s.

She stood so close I could feel her warm breath on my ear and see the sweep of her dark hair blurring the night. Then Araz’s flamethrower exploded again, and in the brief burst of brilliance I saw her face, soft and comforting yet full of concern.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” she whispered. “Before that thing finds us.”

“How did it . . . ?”

“It’s been here all along,” she said. “We just didn’t know it.” She tugged my arm. “Come on. This way.”

I resisted. “My dad . . .”

She stopped pulling. Even in the dark her eyes seemed to melt with sorrow and pity.

“It
is
your dad,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

I staggered, caught myself against her shoulder. I thought I’d prepared myself for this, but hearing the words from her lips, it felt like the world had ended.

Aleka’s instinct had been right. The Skaldi had taken my dad. When it had infected him, why it had waited till now to strike, I might never know. But he was gone. The madness I’d thought was his was the creature’s madness, thwarting our will, forcing us to stay until it was ready to spring its trap. If I’d only been able to stop it, maybe this night would never have come. I couldn’t have saved him, but maybe I could have saved his camp.

But I hadn’t stopped it. I had helped.

I hadn’t wanted to, but I had. Aleka and I had been the only two who might have been able to expose the monster in our midst. But we’d failed, and so whatever happened tonight would be on my conscience as well as hers.

And if she died, it would be on mine alone.

“We have to go back,” I said haltingly. “To tell Araz. So he knows what to kill.”

“We’d never make it.” The pressure on my arm became more insistent. “We have to hide someplace it won’t find us.”

“But Wali and the others . . .”

“Will have to fend for themselves.” In the firelight her face grew grave and tender. “I’m sorry, Querry. I loved your father too. But you know he would have wanted you to be safe.”

I did know. I knew it to my shame.

“Come on,” Korah urged, her fingers massaging my arm. “We can’t waste time.”

I looked into her eyes. They seemed to create a light all their own. She had been one of my dad’s staunchest supporters, I thought bitterly. She had seen his actions as those of a leader, not a madman, not a monster. She had even forgiven him for what happened to her own father. If we survived this night, she would grieve with me.

I threw one last look in the direction I’d heard the Skaldi speaking with my lost father’s voice, then I turned and followed her.

She led the way past rubble, flattened herself against buildings, peered around corners before gesturing for me to follow. Bit by bit we made our way from the central area of the compound to the perimeter, where we’d started building the doomed wall. I could tell by the increase in wind that we’d neared the edge of the hill, but I couldn’t see the hole we’d made. The screams of the others grew fainter, and the sound of Araz’s flamethrower became little more than a pop or a hiccup, innocent as one of the blow-darts the little kids made out of hollowed branches.

We skirted the cliff. For a minute I thought she’d found some way down and was leading me out of camp altogether, but then I realized our steps pointed toward the bomb shelter. The only building where we could lock the creature out. I couldn’t help admiring Korah for picking the shelter as the safest spot in camp.

“This way,” she whispered.

She eased the front door open, slipped inside, and pulled me in after her. For a moment I had a dim view of the empty room, then the door closed and plunged us into total darkness. I heard a click as she turned the deadbolt, then another click and a beam of light sprang from her hand. I recognized her flashlight as the one Mika had used when she’d tried to fix the truck.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked.

“She’s safe,” Korah said. “She’s the one who sent me to look for you.”

The beam danced across the floor, showing me a room as bare as a pit. The light reflected off metal: the handle to the trapdoor that led to the basement. Korah lifted the door and shone the light down the stairs.

“You first,” she said.

Guided by the beam of her flashlight, I climbed down the stairs, which creaked beneath me as if they were about to break. The dirt floor felt shockingly cold against my bare feet. Korah lowered herself onto the stairs and started down. At the halfway point she stopped to pull the door closed and snapped the bolt. The sound echoed dully in the airtight room.

The room itself was as blank as I remembered it, gray walls and brown floor and nothing else now that the crates of food had been removed. The sounds from outside had died the moment the front door slammed shut, and in the silence I heard the faint hum of Korah’s flashlight. She shone the light on all the corners of the room, ceiling and floor, checking in case anyone or anything had beaten us here. Then, satisfied, she sat cross-legged in the middle of the room and stood the flashlight beside her. I sat too, the light between us painting a yellow circle on the low ceiling.

Now that I had a moment to think, I realized my heart beat wildly and my breath came in staccato bursts. The image of my father hollowed out by the monsters he’d spent a lifetime fighting wouldn’t let me go. Korah seemed surprisingly calm, resting back on her arms with her legs stretched in front of her, crossed at the ankles. She tossed her long black hair, which looked glossy and soft in the flashlight’s glow. I tried to inhale her scent, but the air seemed too stale to carry it. How she kept her hair in perfect condition when everyone else in camp had a nest like twigs and straw I had no idea.

“How long do we have to stay here?” I asked.

“Until it’s gone,” she said simply. “Why?”

“You could go crazy in this place.” Then, realizing what a stupid thing it was to say, I felt my face turn warm.

She laughed, the same unforced laugh I remembered from our conversation at the swimming pool. The sound echoed loudly. “Oh, Querry.” She reached over to squeeze my arm. “I’ll try to make the time go faster.”

I thought she’d let go of my arm, but instead she used it to pull herself closer. The flashlight between us wobbled. Our hips touched.

“Do we need this light?” she asked, reaching between her leg and mine.

“I—” The thought of sitting there with her in the complete dark made my stomach lurch. “Maybe we should leave it on. In case anyone else comes.”

“No one’s coming,” she said softly. “I’ve got you all to myself.”

She turned to face me. Her lips parted slightly, but her amazing blue eyes stayed wide open.

“Let me get this off,” she said, reaching for the flashlight without taking her eyes from mine. Her fingers brushed the cylinder and it clattered to the floor, but instead of picking it up she let her hand drop onto my thigh. The beam shining off the far wall gave me just enough light to see her flushed cheeks and soft eyes.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” she whispered. “Ever since that night at the pool. I think you have too. Haven’t you?”

Her hand stroked my leg. Her breath quickened.

“Korah,” I said. “I thought you . . .”

She put a finger to my lips. “Whatever you thought, it’s over now.”

“But what about,” I gulped, “what about Wali?”

“What about him?” she whispered back.

Her mouth loomed closer. I felt her breath, strangely cold on my cheek. Her eyes didn’t even blink.

I closed my eyes just as her lips met mine. They moved against me, far drier and rougher than I’d imagined. There was no warmth to her touch. I opened my eyes and found her staring straight back.

That’s when I realized I really could see through those luminous blue eyes.

And I realized at the same time there was nothing to see.

I jerked away as her lips drew back in a snarl that revealed pale, bloodless gums. Her head lunged forward in a convulsive motion, her teeth barely missing my throat. I scrambled away from her, backpedaling on my hands and heels. The bare ground scratched my already scraped skin. She rose to a crouch and launched herself toward me, and her body seemed to thin and lengthen in midair like an elastic band pulled tight.