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

  The hall beyond the two was choked with zombies. All of them emitting that bizarre trill.

  And walking toward them.

  “Daddy!” screamed Derek from beyond the door. “Daddy, Mommy won’t wake up!”

  11

  Before, the things in the hall had seemed almost unaware of the survivors. Focused solely on rebuilding their wall of bodies, on the grisly task of shutting off this part of the building.

  Now, though, all of them were clearly staring at Ken and his friends. The madness was there, the rage simmering behind half-shuttered eyes. Something held them in check, but he didn’t know what it was, or how long they would refrain from attacking.

  And it didn’t matter. There had to be more than thirty of the things crowded into the hall just a few feet beyond Aaron and Dorcas. No escape if they attacked.

  “Daddy!”

  “I’m coming!”

  Ken turned back to the door. Peeling back immense shards of the substance that the things had vomited forth. Yanking it away from the door like half-dried plaster. Some of it stuck to his fingers, gummed up under his nails, and he wondered if he would ever be able to scrub his hands hard enough or long enough to make them feel clean again. He suspected not.

  He also wondered if the stuff could be toxic. It had to be getting into his bloodstream, through the still seeping stumps at the end of his left hand. What if it infected him?

  What if he changed?

  The thought was enough to make him pause for a second. But only a second. Only long enough to think of the few people he had seen bitten. They had changed instantly. Human one second, and something terribly different – both more and less – in the next.

  So no. He wasn’t infected. He believed that. He had to believe that.

  And there’s nothing I can do about it at this point.

  He pulled away another flaky, leprous mass of the resin.

  Behind it was the doorknob.

  He touched it.

  The trilling of the creatures behind him went up in volume. Expectant. Excited.

  Hungry.

  “Daddy?”

  His boy’s voice sounded weaker. Terrified, anxious. Giving up.

  Ken turned the knob.

  12

  Ken went to South America with his church group one summer. They visited six different countries in three months, twenty teenagers out to do good and three church leaders who – looking back – Ken was certain were mostly hoping no one died or ended up pregnant. Because sometimes achieving goodness ran a close second to the basic necessities of civilization.

  Ken understood the trip was a great success. Houses were built. Wells were dug. Some lives were genuinely changed.

  The things Ken mostly remembered, though, were the amazing case of diarrhea he picked up in Brazil, and the spiders that almost picked him up in Paraguay.

  Paraguay, he understood from his reading, was basically a nothing place. The only landlocked country in South America. Lots of poverty. It had once been a technological and economic power of South America, and had even boasted the first steam-powered locomotive. But decades of political mismanagement had crushed the economy and the people, and over a century later that locomotive was still in use as basic transportation while other countries in South America were using diesel and electric trains.

  Still, that made it perfect for a charity trip. Many people were in need. And a hundred dollars could feed a family for a month.

  Ken went in with his friends. They built, they dug, they sweated in the hundred-degree-plus heat. They cowered from torrential rainstorms that came out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast as they had come.

  And Ken made the mistake of going for a quick walk.

  He just wanted to see what was in the foliage. Something had moved. He thought it might be a monkey – he had a strange desire to see a wild monkey – and followed the movement into the thick trees.

  A moment later the sounds of his friends faded. He barely noticed. He was too entranced by the new world in which he had found himself.

  It was sunset. The pinkest light he had ever seen picked its way through broad leaves, piercing air so thick and wet it felt like he was swimming all the time. He watched it set, not realizing he was walking toward it, not realizing he was following the setting sun like it was some sort of will-o’-the-wisp.

  And then the spider dropped into view.

  Not a big one. Just a small thing, the size of Ken’s thumbnail, dark brown and curling around a filament that extended up into nothing. But it was followed by another.

  And another.

  And another.

  Ken looked around. He saw more of the spiders. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions.

  He had somehow wandered into a web of a size greater than anything he had ever heard of. It had to be thirty feet long, thirty feet high, thirty feet deep. And every inch or two was another spider.

  They seemed to be swarming toward him.

  Ken screamed. He dropped to his belly and did his best army crawl back the way he had come. Shrieking back into the area where his friends were taking a Coke break and talking about quitting for the night.

  They laughed at his story. Until they saw the web. Then they stopped laughing.

  Their local guide shrugged. He mumbled something in the local dialect, then told them in halting English that Ken was in no danger, the spiders made “happy tents” but left people alone.

  Ken did not believe him. He dreamed of spiders for weeks.

  But he never thought he would see a web like it again. Certainly not in the middle of a high-rise in downtown Boise.

  He stepped into the room. Silken strands brushed against his arm.

  “Good hell,” said Christopher. Ken didn’t look, but he was fairly sure the kid was referring to what was in front of them.

  “Oh, shit,” said Dorcas. Ken didn’t look at her, either, but he was fairly sure she was talking about what was behind them.

  The zombies in the hall stopped trilling. They started growling.

  13

  “RUN!” Aaron shouted.

  Ken turned in time to see Dorcas and Aaron racing the last few yards to the attorney’s office. Screaming in terror. The three dozen monsters behind. Aaron was pushing Dorcas, propelling her forward, faster, faster.

  They ran into the room with Ken and Christopher.

  And everything stopped.

  Ken and Christopher were already motionless, held in a kind of mental stasis by what they had found in the room. Aaron and Dorcas seemed to be affected equally, halting only inches into the new area.

  And the zombies….

  They stopped just outside the doorway. Still snarling, still growling that awful growl.

  One of them – the very same gray-suited thing that Ken and the others had first run into – reached out. Ken felt like his skin was covered in ants, like it was trying to separate from his muscles and bones and leap to one side. But he still couldn’t move.

  Not with what was behind him.

  And his son… Derek was silent.

  The zombie reached out.

  Reached out… and grabbed the door. Swung it shut. The lettering “Law Firm of Stacy Gomberg, Attorney At Law” – now backwards – could be seen once more. So could dozens of shapes, dark forms leaning close.

  One of the things – probably Gray-Suit – leaned in. Even through the door, the sound of the gagging cough was enough to make Ken wish he was deaf. The thing vomited, and something splashed against Stacy Gomberg, Esq.’s, office door.

  More of the things clustered around the door. All of them gagging, coughing. Excreting.

  “They’re sealing us in,” said Dorcas.

  “Good times,” said Christopher.

  Ken turned away from them both. Because he heard Derek again.

  Somewhere in the office.

  Somewhere in the web.

  Crying.

  14

  It was like looking for a dark ghost. Not only because the soun
d was so weak and faraway, but because it came from the depths of the gray-white-black masses of webbing that coated everything in the office.

  The office itself was fairly large; apparently Stacy Gomberg ran a successful firm. There was a receptionist desk, a waiting area with chairs, an open central space with several doors leading to other offices.

  At least, Ken thought that was the layout. The silken threads that covered everything made the most basic observations little more than blind guesses.

  Even the air was spun thick with threads, with strands that stretched from ceiling to floor, from wall to wall. Ken saw the overhead fluorescent lights straining to illuminate the area, but the webbing seemed to be bouncing the photons back, rejecting the light itself. The office was dingy, dark. It felt like a prison. A dungeon. An oubliette on the ninth floor of a skyscraper.

  Christopher shouted. Ken looked over. The younger man had stepped forward into the waiting area, and tripped over what looked like a thick mound of silk. The webbing had sheared apart, though, revealing a white face. Not a mound of silk, but a wrapped-over body.

  Something hissed. This time it was Aaron who screamed, the cowboy permitting a rare showing of emotion as something moved behind him. What had been wall a moment before now shifted.

  Not wall. Not wall at all.

  It was a zombie. Encased in silk, spun into a cocoon-like shell. Standing silently right behind Aaron. Now it tore forth, ripping out of the threads that held it.

  It went to the body that Christopher had revealed. Leaned over. Tore into its cheek and began to feed on it.

  “Daddy, please help!”

  Ken turned away. For whatever reason, the zombie wasn’t bothering them. He had a child calling him.

  One thing at a time.

  He walked through the lobby area, shivering as the trails of silky material trailed over his bare skin. He felt like vomiting.

  “Derek,” he shouted, trying to keep his voice calm. Strong. And failing. “Where are you?”

  “In here,” said the voice.

  Ken followed his son’s voice. Derek still sounded hurt. And in this world where so many new kinds of pain had recently erupted into being, Ken hesitated to think of what that might mean.

  He passed several offices. Barely glanced into them. Still, it was enough to show him nightmare visions, silk-wrapped sheets of once-life. Bulky objects that were once desks and bookshelves and filing cabinets and phones and people.

  Some of the corpses had been ripped open and torn to pieces.

  Others were still whole and unmoving in their cocoons.

  Ken wondered what he would find when he finally located his son. Derek had said his mother wasn’t moving. So would Maggie be dead? What about Hope? What about the baby?

  “Kiddo?” he said. Soft footsteps behind him, the sounds of shoes treading lightly on carpet sheathed by an alien secretion.

  “In here,” said the voice.

  Ken found the office.

  He saw his son.

  15

  It was the fifth office. Not really an office, in fact – more of a conference room. A large table sat in the middle, the kind of thing around which high-powered attorneys haggled over even higher-powered deals, or glared at one another while deposing white-collar criminals. To one side of it, a long coffee table ran along the wall. Beyond that, a couch sat along a back wall, underneath a square that could be a flat screen TV or framed art. Impossible to tell, because everything was covered in the same sticky gobs of black and gray threads.

  The monstrous excretions made everything look dirty and foul. Even the light: they covered the windows on the far wall in thick drapery-like sheets, shrouding the room in a depressed twilight that weighed on the eyes and on the mind.

  Derek was on the conference table.

  At first Ken was sure that his son was hurt. Nearly every inch of his skin was covered in webbing, but his face was still open to the air. Still uncovered. His eyes glistened with barely-contained terror.

  “Mommy,” said the boy. “Save Mommy, save Hope, save Liz!” He started crying, tears that he had clearly been containing – perhaps for hours – spilling out over his cheeks.

  The depth of the boy’s pain nearly brought Ken up short. So did the realization that Derek probably wasn’t hurt at all. That the pain Ken had heard in his son’s voice wasn’t his own, but merely the pain he felt for his loved ones. Derek had always been that way. Had always been more apt to cry for others than for himself.

  One time Derek accidentally knocked Hope into a tree while the two were riding their bikes. Hope cried. Derek screamed, terrified he had hurt her. And even when she stopped crying, he went into the house and couldn’t be coaxed back onto his bike for days.

  “They won’t move,” he whimpered now. “They won’t move, they won’t move!”

  Ken looked at his son. Followed Derek’s gaze.

  Ken’s breath caught in his throat. He saw Maggie’s face, her eyes closed. Her form pinned against what looked like a filing cabinet, anchored there by millions upon millions of silken strands. Liz’s face seemed to sprout from Maggie’s chest, like she was giving birth to the two-year-old in a particularly gruesome way. But it was just an illusion, the little girl glued directly to her mother’s chest by the same webbing that covered everything else.

  Hope was next to them. Another caterpillar. Her beautiful, dark hair stark against her too-pale skin. Hope had always been tan. She had inherited her coloring from Ken’s dad. But now she looked like a ghost of herself. A specter.

  Was she dead?

  “Daddy,” whimpered Derek. “Daddy, wake them up.”

  Ken looked at the others. Everyone else had crammed into the doorway of the office, as though leery to join him in this strange place. As though peering into a mass grave.

  He locked eyes with Christopher, the only member of their party who still had use of both hands. “Can you get this crap off my son?” he said.

  Christopher nodded. He stepped into the office, and Aaron and Dorcas stepped in with him as though afraid to be too far away from the rest of the group.

  Ken thought he saw movement outside the office. But he didn’t have time to stop and digest that fact.

  He turned to the still-unmoving forms of Maggie, Hope, and little Liz.

  He reached out for them.

  A sound stopped him. Stopped all of them.

  “What about us?”

  The voice was nasally. Old. The voice of someone who was not only accustomed to complaining, but who enjoyed it. Perhaps reveled in it. Ken turned quickly. On the other side of the table, laying under the windows, he saw two more cocoons. Adult-sized, a man and an old woman. The woman – the clear owner of the voice – was staring at him angrily, as though all this was Ken’s fault.

  “You going to help us?” she demanded. “My son and me’ve been laying here for hours. Just laying here, mind you. Not saying anything, not making any trouble. Just laying here. But I guess we’re not good enough to help.”

  The man beside her – her son, Ken supposed – remained silent. But he didn’t look patient. He looked petulant. Taciturn.

  Dorcas moved into the room. She almost slipped on the webbing that coated the floor, but caught herself on the table, moving around toward the pair under the window. “We’ll help you,” she told them.

  “About time,” said the old woman.

  There was a tearing sound. The shearing noise of threads being torn apart. Ken saw Christopher pulling the first strands away from Derek. Freeing his son. His boy.

  And that was when everything exploded.

  16

  The walls, the ceilings. It had all seemed so thick with the spun fibrils. So coarsely coated with the threads.

  Now Ken saw through the open door of the conference room that there was more hiding beyond the sticky masses than just wood and tile and plaster. Much more.

  Zombies. As though the sound of his son being torn loose had awoken them from a slumber, they erupte
d from dozens of hiding spots in the web-coated walls and ceilings, ripping free of the sacs where they had rested for some unknown purpose.

  In an instant the deserted office suite was filled with dozens of the things. They growled, the same as the zombies that Ken and the others had been dealing with until now. The sound punched out, slammed at Ken’s mind and soul. Crying at him to give up. To join them.

  Derek screamed. The scream was as bad as anything Ken had yet experienced.

  One or two of the things coming at them had bristly growths on their faces. Tumorous excrescences, with thick hairs, about the size of quarters. Dark and easily visible even at a distance.

  What the hell are those?

  Not important, Ken. Move!

  Then his view was cut off as Aaron slammed the conference door shut. There was a lock and a deadbolt on this side. The cowboy engaged both. “Get your family moving,” he said. Calm. Always calm. But his face was pinched, and he stood by the door, ready for the things to get through.

  And they would get through.

  Ken didn’t have to be told twice. Christopher turned back to tearing the strands from around little Derek’s form. Dorcas started shredding the moist threads that bound the old woman and her son beyond the conference table.

  Ken knelt down and felt Maggie’s throat. He had to dig under some of the webbing to get to the hollow where her pulse could be found. The strands were sticky and moist. Sickening.

  Her heart was beating. He checked Hope. Liz.

  Both alive.

  “Maggie,” he said. Then shouted. “Maggie!” She didn’t move.

  Something pushed his leg. It was Derek. The boy was lurching against him. He seemed to be moving oddly. Uncoordinated. Ken didn’t know if that was because he’d been motionless for hours, or because the webbing had a narcotic or numbing effect. Either way, it took Derek several attempts to grab his mother’s face.