The Colony: Descent (10 page)

Ken dropped, and
expected the fall would be a short one.  A few inches into some depression in
the plane’s tortured structure.  Instead, he fell what felt like several feet. 
He couldn’t do anything to stop the fall, didn’t even have the strength to
throw out his arms in the instinctive reaction born in every human.

He was careening
through space, and helpless to stop it.  Helpless to even
try
.  Locked
into himself, into a mind that had only pain and terror as its companions.

Then something
caught him.  Hands – too many to just be Buck.

Ken felt himself
slung up.  Still a ragdoll, a bit of nothing masquerading as a man.

He saw Aaron. 
Maggie.  They had caught him.

He saw Hope,
propped against a broken piece of pavement and –

Pavement?

A thud announced
the arrival of someone else.  New, larger hands grabbed him.  Ken felt his arm
slung over a beefy shoulder and Buck said, “Let’s get moving.”

“What about the
other one?” said Maggie.  “The young guy?”

Ken saw Aaron pick
up Hope.  She still lolled.  But Ken was less interested in that than in the
fact that she was
outside
.

They were outside
the plane.

They had
made it
.

“We should get
going,” said Buck.  His tone made it clear what had happened to “the young
guy.”

Maggie made a
strange hitching sound.  Almost a sob.  Ken wondered why she would be so upset
about losing Christopher when she hadn’t even known him long enough to remember
his name.

Was it just the
loss of a person?  Or more?  Had she sensed what an amazing young man he was,
even in the few moments they had interacted?

Buck started
moving.  Ken found he could keep his head upright, though it hurt from the base
of his spine to the top of his head when he did.  It would have been easier to
let his head droop.

But he didn’t want
to.  He had to see.

More than that, he
had to keep his head up.  He couldn’t fight, couldn’t even run.  Chances were
he was going to die soon.  But he could face his fate with his head held high. 
He couldn’t fight off the hordes the way Dorcas had done, couldn’t use his body
as a shield like Christopher had.  He couldn’t even get between a zombie and
his loved ones the way Derek had.

But he could at
least face his fate.

So he kept his head
up.  Kept his eyes open.

The plane had
smashed right through the ground, pounding the sidewalk and pavement into
chunks that lay all around them.  Fires were everywhere, which was a good thing,
because without them it would have been impossible to see anything.

Darkness had
finally fallen.

It had been less
than a day since the change had swept through the world.  Less than twelve
hours, and almost everyone was dead.

“Hurry up,” said
Aaron.  The cowboy was moving at a fair clip, followed closely by Maggie.

“Wait,” said Buck. 
The big man wasn’t panting as hard as he had in the plane, but he was moving so
slowly that Ken guessed he was almost out of energy.

“We don’t have time
to mess around,” said Aaron.

“We’re not,” said
Buck.  “I’m looking for something.”

He turned, drawing
Ken with him.  Ken heard him say, “I know it’s around here somewhere….”

They turned back to
the plane.

And saw the undead
had found their exit.  A full dozen of them were loping toward them.  Not as
fast as the zombies that were recently-changed humans, not by far.

But fast.  Too fast
for a bunch of mangled survivors holding onto children and cripples to escape.

Aaron pitched Hope
at Maggie.  Ken thought his daughter was going to fall, but Maggie caught her
at the last second, juggling her so that she was wrapped around the
equally-unconscious shape of her other daughter.

“What are you
doing?” she said.  Her voice was harsh, grating.  Ken had always loved her
voice.  From the first time he heard it, he thought it sounded like wind in the
trees and a roaring fireplace and simmering stew and a million other things
that all said
home
.  Now, though, terror had razed the home from her
voice and left it desolate.  Ken would have cried if all his energy wasn’t
devoted to the simple acts of keeping his eyes open and his head upright.

Aaron didn’t
answer.  But Ken knew what he was doing.  Knew even before the cowboy wended
between the remaining survivors and took up position between them and the
zombies.

“Go,” he said.  No
panic, no screaming.  Just a single word in a voice that was used to being
obeyed.

Maggie turned away
automatically, one child cinched to her stomach and the other clutched to her
chest.  Her chest heaved as though she was sobbing, but Ken saw no tears on her
soot-stained face.

Buck did
not
turn.  He kept casting his eyes around.  Looking for something.

Aaron glared at the
gray man.  Buck ignored him.  Then got a look on his face that Ken thought was
terribly out of place.  Excitement.  Happiness, even.

“There,” said Buck.

Ken didn’t see what
the man had seen.  He didn’t care, either.  He was watching Aaron.  The
cowboy/rodeo clown/whatever-he-really-was was tough.  Tough and more dangerous
than anyone Ken had ever met.

Tough… but he had
to be tired.

Dangerous… but he
only had full use of one hand.

And neither of
those things mattered, because there was no way he could stand against a dozen
undead things.

The first of them
was five feet away from the cowboy.

Maggie was hobbling
away with their children.  She threw a look over her shoulder, shock rippling
her features.  “Come
on
,” she said.

Buck darted toward
her.  But not to follow.  He grabbed her.  Stopped her.

She screamed.

Using his free
hand, Buck pulled her back.  Back toward the danger.  Toward the zombies.

The first of them
reached Aaron.

“Let me go!  Let me
go, let me
go
!”  Maggie was screaming and kicking, but she couldn’t do
much more than that without either dropping Hope or losing her balance.  So
Buck just yanked her backwards, her feet dragging intermittently as she raised
one foot to kick, then dropped it quickly before she keeled over.

“Shut
up
,”
he snapped.

“Don’t tell me to
–“

Buck shook her. 
Hard.  Ken could feel the jerk through the big man’s trunk, and it jerked his
mouth hard enough he bit his tongue.  Blood flowed into his mouth.  Not a thing
he could do about it, though.  He could barely keep his eyes open.

And it was getting
harder to keep his head upright.

Sounds behind them
indicated that Aaron was fighting.  Trying to buy them time to run.  Time Buck
was determined not to let them use.

Was the big man
trying to make them commit some strange sort of suicide?

He’s lost it. 
Lost his world, lost his mom.  Decided to take us with him
.

Aaron grunted.  Not
in pain.  Not yet.  Something crashed into what sounded like a board,
accompanied by the noise of rending wood.  Ken figured the undead couldn’t
vomit acid like their “living” cousins – at least, they hadn’t yet done so –
but they were still fast and strong.

And they wanted to
kill the survivors.

Buck kept dragging Maggie
back.  She tried to speak again, and he shook her again.  “Shut up,” he
grunted.  Then yanked her close to him and said, “Look up.”

She did.  Gasped.

Ken looked up as
well, though it took him longer.

They’d been in the
plane for no more than thirty minutes.  But like everything that had happened
since the universe flung itself off its axis, time had taken on an insane
quality.  Ken had almost forgotten that they had entered the plane for a
reason.

Running.

Fleeing from two
hundred thousand zombies – the kind that had converted from living humans –
that had followed them into the Wells Fargo Center.  Had coated its walls like
a living oil slick.  An infestation.

And those zombies,
the living zombies, were still looking for the survivors.

No, that’s wrong. 
They’re not looking.  They’ve found us.

As soon as Ken saw
this, he also realized why Buck had pulled Maggie back.  The plane had fallen
into the street, had jammed into the pavement and asphalt.  There were pieces
of metal and plastic everywhere, butting right up to the building across the
street.  The body of the plane itself effectively created a blind alley from
which Maggie had been trying to escape.

But escape to what?

Nothing good: the
side of the One Capital Center building they had entered the plane from was
completely coated with zombies from the third floor up.  So was the building
across the street.  Ken couldn’t see any glass or masonry.  Just bodies
interlocked, clinging impossibly to sheer sides of buildings.  Some were broken
and bleeding black ichor, others appeared nearly whole.

But they were
everywhere.  And they continued on to the edges of both buildings, curling
around the building faces.  Maggie had been running right to more of the
things, and the only reason she hadn’t seen them was the combination of smoke
in the artificial alley and the fact that they were still about fifty feet
overhead.

But Ken knew height
wouldn’t matter much.  They would toss themselves down at the survivors.  He
had seen it happen before.  And there was no way they could resist and
onslaught of thousands of the things in this tight space.

Aaron was still
fighting.  At least, Ken assumed he was.  Not screaming, at any rate. 
Grunting, though the sounds he was making were getting more and more ragged.  Desperate-sounding
even in their near-silence.

There was nowhere
to go.

Why aren’t they
jumping?

His mind tossed the
question at him before he realized it, like a surprise throw to first base,
coming so fast it catches not only the runner but the baseman by surprise.  It
took a half-second to process, and in that half-second Maggie noticed the same
thing.

“They’re not
moving,” she said.

Buck looked up.  He
grunted, a sound that was half confusion and half relief.

The things were
everywhere.  Ken and the others were theirs for the killing.

But Maggie was
right: they weren’t
moving
.  Just hanging there.  Not even watching.  It
was like the zombies – all but the undead ones that had followed from the plane
– had shut down for the time being, like machines that had lost their power
source.

“What the hell is
happening?” Buck said.

Aaron screamed. 
Everyone turned.

Aaron had positioned
himself between a broken chunk of concrete the size of a car and a section of
wing, trying to create a bottleneck.  Two zombies lay on the ground in front of
him, twitching, slowly getting to their feet.

A third tackled
Aaron.  The cowboy went down.  Trying to keep the undead thing’s teeth away as
it silently bore down on him.

Aaron had only one
good hand.

The undead thing
had two.

And another of the
undead grabbed Aaron’s cowboy boots and began chewing at them.  Worrying them
like a pit bull attacking a meal.

A fourth dove onto
Aaron’s stomach.  Ken saw that the cowboy’s shirt had ridden up, exposing a
thin slice of flesh.

The thing opened
its mouth.  It seemed to smile.

Aaron looked back
at the other survivors.  “Run, you idiots,” he said.

Ken knew that was
the man’s goodbye.

A flurry of
thoughts went through Ken’s mind.

Where would they
go, with the hundreds of thousands of zombies everywhere around them?

Buck should drop
Ken and run – there was no chance for Maggie and the others if they were
dragging him behind them.

Ken couldn’t do
anything.  He couldn’t even tell Buck to let go of him.  He was just fighting
to stay awake.  Fighting to watch.  As though knowing what happened to his
family and to himself would be some kind of mercy.

What a joke.

All those thoughts
flashed through Ken’s brain with the speed and violence of an electric shock.

Then he heard the
roar.  Loud, terrifying.

But it was not the
roar that had come to define his world in the last few hours.  Not the sound of
the zombie horde, growling their siren song of despair.  No, this was a sound
that belonged even less to this part of the world.

Still, it was a
sound that Ken had heard.  One that he knew.

A white and black
blur bulleted into the alley.  It passed Maggie and Buck, seeming not to notice
them, rocketing at the things that were now coating the still-screaming Aaron.

The roar
intensified.  It split.  Ken realized that he was hearing – and now seeing –
not one creature, but two.  Creatures as out of place in downtown Boise as the
zombies were.  Animals who walked the frozen steppes of Russia, the Himalayan
mountains of Tibet.  But Ken knew them.

He had seen the
creatures dozens of times.

They were snow
leopards.