The Colony: Descent (8 page)

Ken could only lay
there and watch.  He tried to sit up and couldn’t even manage that.  He felt
his legs and hands trembling, felt sweat burst out along his forehead as he
bent his will to force his broken body into motion.

Nothing happened.

In the movies the
heroes came out of seven-year comas ready to fight, able to do marathon
foot-chases and amazing scissor-kicks within hours of recovery.  The reality of
major physical trauma, Ken found, was different.  Different even than his worst
injuries practicing hapkido.  He’d always been able to muscle his way through
the pain, to grin and bear it.

Now he couldn’t
muscle his way through.  He couldn’t grin and bear it, because the bare muscle
control required for grinning was well beyond him.

He had already been
slumped against something loose and boxy, something that ground painfully at
his bruised and abraded back.  But after only a second of trying to move, he
practically
melted
into it.  He felt like his bones were on fire,
melting and searing him from the inside.

Fever. 
Infection.

He was a history
teacher.  He knew that for most of human history, the killer wasn’t warfare. 
It was a combination of starvation and infection.  He was about to fall into
first-hand experience of a life without hospitals.

The sound of the
thing snapping its teeth drew Ken’s frazzled thoughts into something resembling
cohesion.  Worrying about infection was probably premature.

The thing had
barely pushed into the hole.  It was crouched on the floor.  Now standing. 
Then it would turn.  Turn and be on the survivors, crammed like the proverbial
fish in this very dark, very frightening barrel.

Buck didn’t let it
happen.  The big man roared and grabbed the thing by the hair.  The zombie’s
head was yanked back, and at the same time Christopher grabbed something out of
a mountain of debris.  It looked like a fireplace poker.

Why would anyone
travel with a poker?

Christopher rammed
the thing forward.  Ken saw it in a flash of firelight that seeped like liquid
gold from the cabin above.  Not a poker, a ski pole.  Hardly the season for
skiing, but some kids in the area trained for skiing year round, using skis
with wheels on them and special ski poles with wickedly-pointed ends, suitable
for gaining traction on asphalt roads.

The ski pole rammed
through the zombie’s trunk, piercing it under its right arm and then going
through the soft tissue and emerging between its left ribs.  The thing didn’t
make a sound, but thrashed around even harder.  Buck kept one hand secured in
the zombie’s hair, kept the thing’s gnashing teeth away from him, but now his
other arm went around its chest.  Black-red dirtblood spewed in clots from the
thing’s ruptured body.

“Over here!”
shouted Aaron.  “Bring it here!”

Christopher and Buck
maneuvered the zombie over to the cowboy, who was holding some sort of flat
panel up to cover the hole they had all come through.  The way the panel was
flapping and bouncing in his hands, it was clear that other things wanted in as
well.

“Push it over here
when I say.  Hard push,” said Aaron.

Christopher
nodded.  Buck grunted.

Aaron took a
breath.  “Now!”

Buck and
Christopher lurched in a semi-coordinated motion.  The zombie fell forward as
Aaron dropped the panel – a long, thin suitcase of some kind – and then Aaron
spun around and grabbed the ski pole.  He kept the zombie’s momentum going,
pushing the ski pole up and skewering the face of the next zombie trying to ram
its way into the baggage hold.

The zombie above
went crazy.  Tearing at its own arms and chest, black pebbles of congealed
blood flying with dry
tac-tac-tacs
that sounded like hail to Ken.

Aaron used the
moment to push the ski pole through a pair of structural pieces, effectively
using the skewered zombie as a blockage.  The thing snapped silently at them,
reached for them, but couldn’t get itself free.

Aaron turned
around.  Firelight filtered through small holes above them and around the edges
of the newly plugged hole just behind him.  Enough that Ken could see the
cowboy’s eyes moving slowly around the group.

Ken, laying
sprawled on a heap of luggage.  Useless.

Maggie, still
holding Liz, crouching a few feet away from him.

Buck, moving to
pick up the silent form of Hope.

Christopher,
breathing hard as he looked around for some weapon, something useful.

That was it.

“Dorcas,” said
Aaron.  Not a question.  A simple entreaty, a prayer of some kind, though Ken
couldn’t tell if it was to God or to Dorcas herself or to some other party. 
Perhaps Aaron didn’t know either.

Christopher’s
movements stopped for a moment.  Everyone’s did.  Maggie and Buck, who hadn’t
really known the old farm woman, even seemed to pause for a moment.

The cowboy blinked
rapidly a few times.  His eyes remained dry, but he wiped his cheeks with the
back of his hand.  His bad hand, Ken noticed, though the cowboy didn’t seem to
notice the pain it must have caused.  Or maybe he did.  Maybe he needed the
pain right then.  Sometimes broken bones were easier.  Sometimes torn flesh was
less cruel.

A noise made
everyone refocus on the hole.

The zombie whose
face Aaron had staved in was gone.  Others had taken its spot.  They were
looking at the ski pole, at the body of their fellow pinned in place.  They all
had faces that were slick with the black, rotten blood of the undead.  Maybe
that was because of the crash, but Ken wanted to believe that it was Dorcas;
that the older woman had given a good reckoning of herself.

And they stared at
the stuck zombie.  Not confused, exactly.  Ken didn’t understand the look on
their faces, but he didn’t like it.  They looked at each other.  Three, maybe
four of them – he couldn’t tell for sure in the smoke and the dim light.

Then they looked at
the one that was pinned.  And started to pull it apart.  Not angrily.  Not for
revenge or spite.

It was just in the
way.

And they needed to
get inside.

“You got any more
of them ski poles?” said Aaron.  His voice was perhaps a shade gruffer than
usual.  Hard to tell.  But he was calm as always.  No trace of what might be
going on in his mind.

That scared Ken,
for some reason.  The idea that the zombies would destroy them was terrifying. 
The idea that survival meant they would inevitably have to give up what
remained of their humanity was almost as bad.

Christopher was
tearing through stacks of luggage that had been tossed asunder by the crash. 
Some of it had exploded, others looked pristine, at least in the near-dark.

Ken had an insane
urge to ask Christopher to remember what kinds of luggage had best weathered
the crash.

You know, just
in case we all survive and fly to Hawaii
.

That made him think
of his honeymoon, and Maggie.  He looked at her – a bit proud he was managing
to move his head on his own – and saw she was trying to help with the search
for a weapon.

Above them, the
zombies were yanking the pinned beast to pieces.  Pulling slick bits of flesh
off its body with low, wet noises that reminded Ken of stepping on a snail
after a rainstorm. 
Crackle-krrrssssrip
.

The zombie that was
being pulled apart didn’t seem to notice it.  It grabbed at the survivors every
time one of them wandered too close, and its teeth never stopped snapping.

“Nothing,” said
Christopher.  “Just clothes and stuff.”  He was standing in piles of material,
looking like he was preparing the world’s worst how-to video on panty raids.

“Nothing here,”
said Buck.

“Nothing,” echoed
Maggie.

“Come on, then,”
said Aaron.  He looked at Christopher.  “You get Ken?”

Christopher nodded,
glancing back at the hole.  “The creeps are coming in soon,” he said.  And Ken
could see he was right: they had cleared more than half the hole.  The thing
that had once been pinned was now falling apart.  Its legs had fallen – still
moving – to the luggage.  Soft internal organs had tumbled out.  One of its
arms torn off and thrown aside.

One of the zombies
pulled off the skewered monster’s head.  Another started to push past it.

“Down we go,” said
Aaron.

Christopher slung
Ken over his shoulder, but the young man didn’t stand up.  None of them did –
there was no room to do so.  The baggage area below the cabin was a tiny place,
contrary to what Ken had been led to believe by many movies – likely the same
ones that had taught him the crap about one’s ability to recover from massive
physical injury and deliver devastating scissor-kicks.

So the survivors moved
forward into darkness, bent nearly in half, each of them holding onto someone. 
Aaron was the only one who didn’t have another human being in his care, and
that allowed him to burrow through the tossed suitcases.

Down.

Aaron tossed
suitcase after suitcase over his shoulders, descending to one level of
Samsonites and TravelPros and Tumis, then pulling that level out from under his
own feet and passing it up to Buck, who threw it to Maggie, who tossed it to
Christopher.

Christopher then
tried his best to pile it behind him.  To make a wall that would seal them away
from the undead creatures that were still coming.

Down, down, down. Like
moles knowing safety only in darkness; in the depths.

It never went
completely black.  The plane was still on fire somewhere above them, and Ken
started sweating as the nearby flames grew hotter and hotter.  He wondered if
they were close to a fuel source.  He remembered the explosion outside his
school when an SUV exploded.  Remembered the heat burning his back and hair, and
knew that would be nothing compared to an explosion of jet fuel.

He wondered if
Dorcas was one of the things behind them.  If she had been turned.

Probably.

The things were in
the baggage compartment now.  They still weren’t vocalizing, but Ken could hear
them nonetheless.  Throwing luggage around, looking for their prey.

None of the
survivors spoke.  Silent and purposeful as the monsters from which they fled.  They
just kept moving down.  Kept pulling up the floor beneath their feet, turning
it into a roof over their heads.

Ken wondered if he
should pray.  He hadn’t prayed in a while.  He didn’t feel like it now.

What if there was
no God?

Even worse, what if
there
was
?  How would someone – even an omniscient being – explain all
this?  The loss of the world, the loss of his strength, the loss of his
son
?

“Damn,” whispered
Aaron.

“What?” said Buck.

“End of the line.”

Ken still couldn’t
move, but a fluting trill seemed to sound in his fingers and toes,
panic-stirrings of fear that had not merely weight and feeling, but
sound
. 
He could hear his terror, and the sound was horrific.  Horrific…

… and strangely
sweet.

He realized that he
could give in to the fear.  No one would blame him if he folded.  He could just
give up now.  Not because the things were growling their siren call, but
because his world was over.  He could just wrap himself up in the comfort of
terror and disappear in fright’s velvet folds.

He could do that.

He could give up.

He didn’t have to
do
this.

It was appealing. 
The world had ended in less than ten minutes.  And now, only six or seven hours
later, Ken had already seen two of the group’s bravest members – Dorcas and his
son – killed.  Or worse.

What chance did
he
have?  What future could he look forward to?

Life, he realized
in that instant, meant nothing without a hope for tomorrow.  All the past built
to the present, and the only purpose for the present was to provide for the
future.  His children were his hope.  One was dead.  The other two… changed.

Why should he keep
fighting?

He realized he was
trying to whisper something.  His lips moving silently, and even he wasn’t sure
what he was saying in the widening abyss of his mind.  “Forgive me,” perhaps. 
“Leave me.”

“Let me die.”

The others were
tearing around the small burrow they had created.  Tossing suitcases and totes
left and right.  Maggie looked strange in the near-darkness, a weirdly bulbous
creature with Liz hanging from her.  Grunting as she moved things out of the
way.

Other noises came
from behind Ken.  He was laying where Christopher had put him –

(
When did he put
me down?
)

– something sharp
jabbing into his back.  Staring at nothing, at the nothing above him that was
as dark as any black hole in the deepest parts of space.

Then the darkness
shifted.

Buck grunted somewhere.

“You find
anything?” said Aaron in a whisper.

“No.”

The darkness moved
again.  Ken had thought it might be his injuries speaking, his loss of blood or
the concussions or any of a million other things overriding his senses.  But
now he was sure.  The sky of tightly-packed bags and suitcases had shifted.

Fingers poked
through.

They were stained. 
Smeared with soot and congealed blood.  One of them ended midway to the first
knuckle.

The other suitcases
moved some more.

One of the things
had found them.  The moles had been trapped in their burrow.