The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2) Read online

  “Hope!” shouted Maggie.

  Aaron and Christopher were both near Ken’s daughter, one on each side of her. Both moved for her, but the cowboy reached her first. He caught the little girl before she fell, wrapping her up in his good arm.

  “Let me,” said Christopher.

  “No,” said Aaron. “I got her.”

  “Really?” said Christopher. He rolled his eyes. “You got one good arm, man.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Something moved past Ken. It took a moment for him to realize it was Buck. The big man took Hope from Aaron without a word, cradling her gently in his arms.

  He looked different holding her. Not the petulant, entitled ass he had seemed to be at first. Not the self-pitying man of a moment before.

  He seemed whole. Like he was holding not merely a little girl, but the only thing tethering him to life. Not survival, but life. Two different things, Ken knew.

  “We should go,” said Buck. His voice was strange, and Ken wondered what was happening. Not just to Buck, but to all of them. The world had changed, and the change had not escaped them.

  What are we?

  “Maybe I –“ Maggie began. She took a step toward the man.

  “Let him,” said Ken. He felt woozy, and put a hand to his neck. It came back red. Sticky. He wanted to vomit. He leaned against a wall that was painted white and had red streaks across it. Like everything else, it was dirty and bloodied.

  He felt an arm slip under his. Knew it was Dorcas.

  “Where to?” she said.

  Why are you asking me?

  He blinked. Everyone was looking at him. Everyone but Maggie, who was staring at Buck like she expected him to run off with Hope at any second.

  Ken wiped his mouth. He needed to drink something. He was thirsty.

  His fingers came up red as well. He hoped it was just a bloody cheek, and not internal bleeding.

  More screams came from inside the elevator shaft. Closer. They were climbing back up.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He pushed away from the wall.

  Dorcas had to help him.

  76

  “Where now?” asked Christopher. Ken waited for someone to answer, then realized with a start that they were looking at him.

  Waiting for him.

  He didn’t know why. Maybe because he was from Boise? But so was Christopher.

  Because he had family? That didn’t make much sense.

  Regardless, they waited. And he hated it. He hated that suddenly he had more than just a daughter in a coma and another who wanted to go to the monsters and a wife who hated him for losing their son to worry about.

  Now he was responsible for everyone? When had that happened?

  He didn’t have time to figure it out, or time to argue about the fairness of it. He looked around. They were in another hallway, and one that didn’t look familiar. He’d never been here before. He’d been in the upper floors of the building – though the floors had been several blocks over at the time – but he had no idea if the layout was the same or not.

  He decided to assume they were.

  “Left.”

  They moved. Christopher took point, leading the way with his light, sweeping it left and right. Buck and Maggie followed, each holding a silent child.

  Ken and Dorcas limped behind them.

  Aaron brought up the rear. Ken saw the older man sag for a moment, and wondered how badly he was hurting. But then the dangerous look returned to the cowboy’s eyes and Ken knew that anything – man, beast, or monster – that came upon Aaron in the next few minutes would likely regret the move.

  The corridor was deserted. Doors lined the way, and papers littered the floor where they had fallen from several billboards on the walls. Probably advertising local businesses and clothing drives and the upcoming “Fill the Boot” drive where local firefighters stood in the streets with empty boots asking for donations for burn victims.

  No more of those. Plenty of victims, but the first responders were gone. Dead or themselves converted to the scourge that had swept the earth nearly clean of human life.

  It was a marvel that this place was even standing. The top of the building had been blown clean off by a combination of a collision with a stealth fighter and exploding ordnance, and Ken figured it wouldn’t take a whole lot more for the whole place to come down around their ears.

  Everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing. No one spoke. It felt like they weren’t in a building, but in a hole deep underground. The kind of place where touching the wrong thing would cause a subterranean landslide.

  He and Dorcas were falling behind the others. Ken realized it at the same moment he felt a hand at his back, gently urging him to greater speed.

  “I don’t know if he can,” said Dorcas, responding to Aaron’s unspoken exhortation.

  “Gotta,” said Aaron.

  And Ken knew why. He could hear it, too. Could hear the things coming out of the elevator shaft in the darkness behind them.

  Some of them must have perished in the fall. Or if not perished, then at least been damaged beyond the ability to climb back up. Laying at the bottom of the shaft, their broken bodies intertwined with the wreckage and cables.

  But some had made it up. More than some.

  It sounded like a lot.

  77

  “Here!”

  Ken heard Buck shout, then saw the big man dart to the side. A moment later Christopher wheeled around and followed. So did Maggie.

  Ken moved through the open doorway the rest of them had disappeared through, partially of his own volition and partially because Dorcas more or less pushed him through. He didn’t know what would happen if she let go of him, but suspected he’d just fall and lay there. Maybe twitch a bit if he was lucky.

  Once inside the door, everything disappeared. Literally. There was no trace of Buck or Maggie or Christopher or the kids. No trace of anything at all, for that matter. No office, no floor, no nothing. Just empty space before them, dimly lit from somewhere below.

  It took a moment for Ken to refocus, to crane his neck down, each vertebra popping and screaming in protest as he did so. He felt something trickling on his lip and figured his nose was bleeding as well.

  Can’t keep this up.

  Not much choice.

  Sure, keep telling yourself that, Ken.

  He finally saw the floor. It had collapsed a few feet past the doorway, falling away at a forty-five degree angle and ending in a pile of rubble on the level below.

  At the bottom of the ramp, Maggie was being helped to her feet by Buck and Christopher. Buck was still holding Hope, and Liz sagged from her carrier, arms and legs limp and lifeless-seeming. It was clear that they had all slid down, and just as clear that this was the best way to make their way one floor closer to freedom from this building.

  “Come on!” shouted Buck.

  “You’re nuts,” said Dorcas. Ken couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or Buck or herself.

  “Not much choice,” he said.

  A grunt sounded behind them. Aaron. He squeezed into the small area of the floor that still remained intact and then slammed the door shut. “Go,” he spat.

  Dorcas sighed. She sounded beyond tired. Weary. Losing hope.

  How much longer before we just stop? Before dying becomes preferable?

  But that wasn’t really the question. If death had been the stake, then Ken suspected they would have given up long before this. It wasn’t just death, though. It was whatever waited at the end of a bite. Whatever cross between madness and oblivion would claim them.

  Not just death, but damnation.

  Dorcas helped Ken lower himself to a seated position, then sat behind him, her arms clasped around him and supporting most of his weight. He remembered doing this with Liz and Hope and Derek, all of them sitting in a long train on the slide at the local park, sliding down and laughing and then laughing harder when their combined mass inevitably caused them to
stall halfway down. “Daddy’s Choo-choo” they called it.

  “Choo-choo time,” he muttered. Tears came to his eyes. Derek would never ride the slide again. Not even if they had playgrounds in Heaven. Because he hadn’t simply died. Nothing so kind. Nothing so merciful.

  Ken thought he might lose it. He had seen his own students pull each others’ guts apart, had cut his own fingers off to survive, had somehow waded through a city full of the living dead. And now he was going to be done in by the memory of a little boy laughing as he went down a slide.

  “What?” said Dorcas. She glanced back at the door with eyes clearly expecting it to be flung open at any moment.

  “Nothing.” Ken leaned forward. Tilting into darkness, but away from memory.

  He slid down the broken floor. Dorcas came with him. He moved faster than he expected – a lot faster than the green plastic slide at the park – and started to panic when he realized he was going to roll off the edge of the floor and into a pile of broken shelving that featured several stake-like pieces of wood and metal.

  Christopher snagged him, reaching out and stopping his forward momentum with a low, “Oof.” A similar noise nearby indicated that Buck and Maggie had stopped Dorcas.

  Christopher helped Ken to his feet as Aaron came sliding down. The cowboy somehow ended the slide on his feet, not needing any help but seeming to just step off and start walking forward, gesturing for the others to follow.

  Dorcas resumed her position under Ken’s arm. He glanced at Maggie as she did so, wondering – hoping – if his wife would try to take the older woman’s place.

  Maggie didn’t. She didn’t even look at him.

  Just turned her back and followed Aaron as he picked his way through the rubble.

  78

  This room was a large interior room of the building. No outside windows, so the only illumination was still Christopher’s light. A light that did little to brighten, and less to cheer. It served to highlight large objects in their path, but not much else.

  Aaron was still in the lead, but Christopher was right beside him. Buck and Maggie followed them, the kids in their arms.

  And Dorcas and Ken were left in back. With the noises.

  At first Ken thought that the things had found them already. Strange sounds assaulted him at every step. And every time he heard something it registered as more than noise. It was a blow to the base of his spine, a pounding that ran the length of his already-pained left leg, then up to his back and through to the bottom of his skull before rattling around in his head like a bell clapper.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Dorcas whispered, and Ken realized his entire face had pulled tight as a miser’s purse string, his mouth puckered and his jaw clenched. He tried to relax, but then heard another noise and his muscles contracted of their own accord.

  “The noise,” he said.

  Dorcas kept moving forward, but cocked her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Ken gritted his teeth as the sound – now a combination of the zombies’ growl, sheet metal bending, and nails scraping plates – sounded again. “You’re not hearing that?” he said.

  Dorcas shook her head. Her expression changed. And suddenly she didn’t look like the friendly, selfless woman who had risked herself time and again for Ken and the others. Now she looked like one of them. The skin seemed to fall from her flesh, the bones peeked out from her cheeks.

  “What?”

  Ken blinked. The zombie was gone. Dorcas was back. Back and she wasn’t hearing what he was hearing.

  “Dorcas, I think I’m in trouble,” he whispered. His feet felt funny, too. He looked down and realized that he was leaving a steady trail of blood behind him, though he couldn’t tell what part of him it was coming from.

  “Guys,” Dorcas whispered. “Guys!” Ken sensed rather than saw the halt of the parade of survivors. “We need to stop.”

  Footsteps. Ken felt arms around him, displacing Dorcas’ arm and lifting him a bit higher than she had done. “Can’t,” said a voice. Ken recognized it as Aaron. But he couldn’t actually see the cowboy. Everything seemed far too dark.

  “Where’s the light?” Ken said. “Why’d Chris turn off the light?” His voice sounded slurred and distant.

  “Shit,” said someone else. And Ken had no idea who had spoken. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “What do you think?”

  Ken felt his body pulled forward, moved along by the hands that held him up, the arms that held him aloft.

  He heard the sounds again. And this time knew it wasn’t just his injury-addled mind. Because someone cursed, and someone else said, “They found the door.”

  79

  Ken’s vision went from a mixture of sparklers-and-hallucinations to sparklers-and-globby-black-things.

  A moment later the globby black things killed the sparklers. All was dark.

  He could feel himself being dragged. Could hear sounds.

  Growls. The distant – but rapidly approaching – noises of the horde.

  Voices.

  “Spread out. Look for it.” Sounded like Aaron.

  “You kidding? What are the chances it’ll –“ An unfamiliar voice. But whining a bit, so probably Buck.

  “With all the different allergies people have, almost one in ten people need it or have a family member that does.” Aaron, farther away.

  “Hold on, Ken.” A voice in his ear. Whispering. Dorcas. Or no, not Dorcas. Someone else. Who was that?

  “Still bad odds.” Buck’s grumble.

  “Add in the mothers who keep one for their kids, the odds go up.”

  “Still, I –“

  “Found one!”

  “Just like I flrpp mrp mpt tpp.”

  Even the sounds melted into one another.

  Ken felt alone.

  So this is what it feels like to die.

  “Hold on.”

  This voice was clearer. Understandable. And he could place it now. Not Dorcas.

  Maggie. Telling him not to die. That he mattered to her.

  He couldn’t smile. Couldn’t move a muscle. So he probably was dying.

  But he felt better, just the same.

  Everything disappeared.

  80

  Something bit him. A stinging pinch on his outer thigh that rapidly shifted from discomfort to agony.

  They found us!

  Ken wanted to scream, but couldn’t. His jaw locked up –

  (This is what it feels like to become one of them.)

  – and he was paralyzed by terror, pain, and sorrow. The last because he knew the others must be dead. There was no way they would have left him to the zombies. So if he was being bitten, was changing, then they were all gone.

  Dorcas, Aaron, Christopher. Even Buck.

  And Maggie. Liz. Hope.

  Something bit his other leg.

  The paralysis broke. Ken’s heart rate seemed to quadruple, and he surged upward, swinging his arms at whatever was eating him.

  His right fist connected with something that was both soft and hard. The thing popped, crackled.

  “OW! Seriously?”

  Ken blinked. The dark blobbies were floating away, trailing the last of the July Fourth sparklers in their wake, leaving behind something that resembled normal vision. Revealing not the expected monsters chomping on his legs, but….

  “Christopher?”

  The young man was holding his nose, which was spurting blood all over the front of his previously unmarked shirt. “You broge by dose,” he said.

  Ken looked down. His right fist was still clenched. It ached. Probably less than Christopher’s nose ached, but enough to verify the young man’s claim.

  Aaron was kneeling at Ken’s right. Grinning at Ken, then at Christopher. “You were too pretty anyway,” said the cowboy.

  The younger man mumbled something that sounded like “Fug oo,” but probably wasn’t. Aaron chuckled.

  Ken blinked. Wiped away a sheet of sweat that had appeared on his for
ehead. His hand shook as though the movement was a bit too fine for it. His motor control seemed off.

  “What… what happened?” said Ken.

  Aaron plucked something off the floor by Christopher. Held it in front of Ken, along with a match he held in his own hand. “EpiPens,” said the cowboy.

  “Wha?” Ken wasn’t processing this.

  “The stuff people use for bee stings and peanut allergies. It’s basically just a shot of adrenaline.” Aaron stood. Held out a hand to Ken. He took it and, surprisingly, managed to stand. “You, sir, are banged up pretty bad. But we bought you some time.”

  A scream sounded. Aaron looked up as though trying to pinpoint the source.

  Something hit Ken. Wrapped itself around him like a constrictor. He almost panicked, almost swung at the thing. His nerves were pulled tighter than ukulele strings.

  It was only at the last second that he recognized the strange shape as that of his wife. With Liz in front of her, between them as she held to him.

  “What’s happening?” she sobbed.

  He put his arms around her. And for a moment the world was fine again. For just a second, the space between seconds, he felt alive, felt right.

  He had lost Derek.

  Liz was unconscious.

  Hope was… different.

  But his wife still loved him. That was something.

  “End of the world, baby,” he said. He kissed her hair. It smelled awful. Sweat and blood and the webbing she had been wrapped in and a thousand other things, none of them pleasant. But it was Maggie and he just wanted to drink her in.

  “Love this, really,” said Buck. Ken looked over. The big man was still holding Hope, thrown over his shoulder in a rough fireman’s carry. “But we gotta get outta here.”

  Ken nodded. He drew Maggie back. Kissed her on her lips, full-on. Not passionate, exactly, but not the “honey-I’m-leaving-for-work” peck either. A real kiss. He needed her to know what she meant to him. What it would mean to him if something happened to her.