The Colony: Descent (15 page)

Silence held sway
in the tunnel again.  Christopher clicked off the light.  There was nothing but
darkness and the trickle of water a few feet away and the soft purring of the
snow leopard’s breathing.

Ken took a bite of
his second energy bar.  He managed to reign himself in this time, nibbling
rather than inhaling the food.

He was going to ask
about Sally.  Clearly the snow leopard had been integrated into the group on
some level.  There was no way that Maggie would have let Liz sleep with the
animal unless she was completely secure with the beast.

But how could that
be?  Ken had seen the thing eviscerate several zombies, destroying them one
bite and one crushing claw-swipe at a time.  There was no doubt the animal was
fierce and had the capacity for destruction.

But….

… but when he
attacked the zombies with the female snow leopard, neither of them went for
Aaron.

… but he dragged
Ken out of the water and probably kept him from dying of hypothermia before the
others found him.

… but Liz was
sleeping against his stomach, utterly at peace even though this was the girl
who had trouble sleeping anywhere but her crib.

So many questions,
and he sensed that many of the answers might mean the difference between life
and death.

What was the snow
leopard doing?

Why hadn’t anyone
left him behind?

Why hadn’t he
turned when he was bitten?

Ken opened his
mouth to ask.

But before he
could, before the questions did more than dance ever-so-softly across the
surface of his mind, he started to shake.  Tremors sped from toe to crown,
pulsing through him with the strength and speed of lightning strikes.  He
dropped the piece of the energy bar that remained uneaten in his hand.  It hit
the concrete floor with barely a whisper, just a murmur of plasticized aluminum
as the wrapper rustled against the ground.

It was enough to
alert Maggie, though.  Either that or she heard his rank clothing as it
shuffled back and forth in a series of near-microscopic twitches, pushed by the
spasming muscles underneath.

“Ken?” she said.

He didn’t answer. 
He couldn’t.  He felt like his mouth had been filled with concrete, his jaw
wired shut.  Every muscle that wasn’t jerking back and forth was locked into
painful stasis.  Only his eyes felt like they were at all under his control,
and they flitted heavenward, then back and forth as he sought something in the
darkness.  Something elusive, something hidden.

“Honey?” said
Maggie.  He still didn’t answer, not even when he felt her arm on his. 
“Christopher, hit the light,” she said.

“It’s getting low,”
he said.

“Turn it
on
.”

The light sparked
to dim existence.  Hope said, “Daddy?” in a lost voice.

Ken didn’t look at
her.  He was still staring upward, still looking back and forth along the line
of the tunnel ceiling, still searching for something.

And even in the
light, he couldn’t find it.

“Honey?”  He heard
the panic creeping into Maggie’s voice.  She put a hand on each of his arms and
shook him.  He knew she was trying to get him to look at her.

He didn’t.  He
wouldn’t.  He couldn’t.

Tears spilled over
his cheeks.

Then his eyes
closed and he slumped.

Still dark.  Dark,
and Ken was alone.  Then Matt Anders was standing over him.

“Come on, Mr. Strickland,”
said the kid.  His voice scraped out at a volume so low that Ken had to strain
to hear it.  Nothing new there: the kid
always
spoke that way.  Always
quiet, never any trouble.

Teachers were
supposed to be like parents.  They were supposed to like their students
equally, to care for and pay attention to one exactly the same as to another. 
But Ken had his favorites.  Maybe that made him a bad teacher.  Or perhaps it
just made him human.

No matter what the
case, Matt was a kid Ken liked.  So when the boy held out his hand Ken didn’t
think twice about taking it.

“Where are we
going?” he asked as he and Matt started walking down the tunnel.  Water slapped
and sloshed around their feet.  The sound echoed around them and Ken felt like
every step he took was one of many, like he was in the middle of an invisible
mob, shuffling from side to side and waiting only for the word to be let
loose.  To attack.  To destroy.

“It’s just up
here,” said Matt.  He turned back and smiled.  His smile seemed lopsided.  The
smile of a stroke victim.

“Where is it?” said
Ken.  The smile scared him.

“Just up here.” 
Matt disappeared around a sudden bend in the tunnel.  Ken followed, afraid of
what he might see but even more afraid of being left alone.

Being alone was the
ultimate terror now.  Alone meant you had been left for dead.  Meant you were
worthless.  Meant you were good only as meat to divert the beasts.

Ken made the turn,
and as he did he wondered where the light was coming from.  He could see Matt,
could see the tunnel walls and floor and ceiling.

How?

“Shouldn’t it be
dark?” he said to himself.  The words mumbled, fell out of his lips like dirt
from the mouth of a corpse that has chewed its way up from the earth.

And, saying that,
he nearly tripped over Matt.  The boy was on the tunnel floor.  Twitching and
writhing.

Of course he is. 
It’s that he’s dead
.

And he suddenly
realized that Matt was the boy who had changed under Ken’s hands.  The boy had
gone into a seizure when the Change first swept through Ken’s universe.  Ken
had held him down, had tried to help him… until Matt tried to kill him.

Then Ken threw him
out a window.

As he realized
that, remembered kicking one of his favorite students out a third-floor plate
glass window, Matt changed.  His eyes rolled back.  Blood spurted from his
unbroken skin.  Ken backed up with a scream, ready for the boy to come for him.

What’s going
on?  What’s happening?

But Matt didn’t get
up.  Instead, he suddenly threw his arms and legs wide.  Harsh cracks split the
air and Matt’s limbs twisted in on themselves.  He didn’t scream.  Just moaned
as his head seemed to deflate like a punctured basketball, blood flowing out
the back in a widening pool.

His eyes rolled
forward.  “You killed me,” he said.  His voice was normal.

Ken backed away. 
Something bumped into him.  Something soft.  Warm.  He turned.

A man stood behind
him, dressed in sweats and wearing a silver whistle around his neck.  The man’s
face was impossible to look at, a concave mass of bone and cartilage and
blood.  But Ken knew who it was, would have known in an instant even if he
hadn’t heard the man’s voice issuing forth with impossible clarity from the
gaping wound that was all that remained of his mouth.

“You killed me,”
said Joe Picarelli, the gym coach at Ken’s school.

Ken shrieked and
ran.  Turned away from the coach with his eyeless face and his gaping sore of a
mouth.  Leapt over the still-crackling limbs of Matt Anders.

Three steps.

He stopped.

A horde of undead
were crammed into the tunnel.  He recognized some, but not all.

A fat zombie he had
skewered with a lug wrench.

A huge zombie,
thickly muscled, half its skin perfectly white and the other half charred and
black and peeling away from yellowed bone.  The thing that had caught and
changed and killed Ken’s son.

The burnt monster
reached behind itself.

And drew out a
small form.

Ken stared at Derek. 
His son’s face was greasy and loose, as though about to slide away from the
underlying muscle.  The child’s eyes had the whites-only stare of the zombies.

“You killed us
all,” said Derek.

Ken started to
scream.

He knew it wasn’t
real.

He knew it had to
be a dream.

But he also knew he
was trapped.  Caught in a dark place in his mind, and he wondered if he would
ever be able to escape.

Derek giggled.  “Renegades,”
said the boy.  Then screamed it.  “Renegades, renegades,
renegaaaaaaadesssssss
….”

Knowing something
is a dream doesn’t mean you can wake up.  And knowing it is madness that
beckons doesn’t mean you can resist the call.

Derek reached out. 
Still saying “renegades” in hideously stretched-out syllables.

Ken, still
screaming, closed his eyes in the dream.

And reached to
embrace his dead son.

“I killed them.  I
killed them all.”

Tears ran down
Ken’s face, wetted his cheeks.  The words poured out of him like foul water
from a broken pump.  He hadn’t let himself think of anything that had happened
up until now.  Hadn’t had time.  But now, in the dark of the tunnel and the
deeper dark of his memory, he replayed it all.  Every stab, every attack. 
Every maiming that tore a bit of his own humanity away.

He knew part of
this was the sickness, the infection that his body was still coping with.  Part
of it.

But part of it was
real.  Part of it was guilt, not just at taking a life, but at the sheer
ferocity he had discovered in himself.

He was a history
teacher.  He knew that for most of us, civilization is just a veneer.  But he
had never dreamed how thinly gilded his own sense of goodness was.  How easy it
had been to scratch off the layers of humanity and expose the animal rage that
lay beneath.

“I killed them.”

Only gradually did
Ken realize that the dream was gone.  Not fully – he thought he could still
sense it, coiling darkly at the edges of his sight and mind – but withdrawn
enough that he could see reality again.

Still in the
tunnel.  In the tunnel, and no longer in the side branch where the kids had
been.

A form moved. 
“Ken?”

“Yeah.”  Speaking
was an effort.  His throat was dry.

“You’re awake.”  The
figure stood.  “We moved you because you kinda freaked out the kids.  And…. 
Well, be right back.”

Ken realized the
figure was Christopher, that the young man had been keeping watch over him in
the darkness.  But before he could speak, the other man had gone.  Ken was
alone.

The water still
streamed through the tunnel’s center.  Ken rolled over and drank from it,
lapping it up like a dog.  It tasted smoky and dusty, but he kept drinking. 
His body was so thirsty he would have drank deeply of the ocean, and smiled as
it killed him.

“
Renegadesssss
.” 
The word spoken to him – impossibly – by his toddler daughter, and then echoing
in his dream.  He heard it again in his mind, and wondered how long it would be
before he could ever sleep.  He had no wish to return to the nightmare he had
just left.

“Ken?”  This time
he knew the voice instantly.

“Mag –“  He coughed
as his voice choked through a mouth that seemed stuffed with sawdust.  Tried
again.  “Maggie.”

She dropped beside
him, knees splashing into the water.  She held his face in her hands.

“Are you okay?”

“I killed them.” 
The words were from his dream, and dreams weren’t reality.  But real or not,
dreams could still be
true
.

He had tossed his
own student out a window.  Had rammed what was basically the business end of a
crowbar through another man’s face.  Had punched and kicked and all but
chewed
his way to his family.

He hadn’t even
thought twice.

Some of what he had
done could be chalked up to the simple fact that he was being attacked, that he
had people trying to kill him basically non-stop for every second since the
Change.

People?

No, not people. 
They were….

What?  What were
they?

But that only
explained away so much.  The rest was simply that he had defaulted to
animalistic response.  Kill or be killed.

He didn’t think he
did anything wrong.  Ken wasn’t one of those pacifists who believed it was
better to put defenseless children in front of a bullet-wielding maniac than it
was to put guns in the hands of cops.  No, he had done the right thing.

But doing the right
thing didn’t inure a person to the consequences.  To the fact that he had savaged
people with an intent to destroy them.

He had been
attacked.  And his solution had been to degenerate, to turn himself into
something even more dangerous than the monsters around him.

“I killed them,” he
whispered again.  The words were nearly silent.  He didn’t think Maggie heard
them.

She put her arms
around him, though.  Held him tight.

After a moment he
put his hands around her as well.  Clinging to one another in the dark, just
two people in a black place on a newly-changed world spinning through clouds of
dust in space.  He shivered, and it wasn’t because the tunnel was cold.

He was holding to
his wife, to the one person he understood, the one person who understood
him
. 
And he felt so alone.

Would she love
me if she knew?  If she had really seen, not just what I did, but how little I
cared
about it?

He had no answer
for that.  He just pulled Maggie tighter to him, as if he could somehow press
the doubts out of his soul.

They remained
silent in the dark for a moment.  Then more splashing signaled the approach of
someone else.

“Guys,” said
Christopher.

“Not now,” said
Maggie in a steely whisper.

Her tone didn’t
seem to slow Christopher in the slightest.  “Sorry, but now.”

“What?” she said,
and squeezed Ken in a way he knew well.  The way she did when they were
relaxing, curled up with one another on the couch after a long day and one of
the children called.  The way that said, Stay here, I’ll get this.  Relax.  I
love you.

He felt like maybe
he could get through this.  For a moment he felt hope.

And then it was
dashed.

“You better come
down here.”  Christopher turned and started splashing back down the tunnel. 
“It’s Lizzy.”