The Colony: Descent (3 page)

It looked like an
airlock.  Like someone had realized ahead of time that the world was about to
move to one of the rougher zip codes in Hell and had tried to construct a
bunker out of the building.  This was the exit, the place to equalize between
reality and the nightmare outside.

But it hadn’t
worked.  Of course not.  The change had happened too fast.  Too fast, and
certainly earlier than anyone could have anticipated.  Because no one thought
that something like this could
ever
happen.

It is human nature
to imagine the impossible.  But not to prepare for it.  People don’t even buy
umbrellas for rainy days or put away food and money for tough times or build
dykes that will withstand inevitable storms.  Forget about zombie-induced
Armageddon.

All this went
through Ken’s mind in the first instant that he saw the strangely slanted oval
that had punched through the wall.  Smoke billowed around the edges of it, and
surged from the tunnel-like interior.

The lower edge of
the cylinder stood a foot off the floor.  The upper edge was almost invisible,
ramming its way through the ceiling before ending in a mass of bent and
smoldering metal.

From his vantage
point, Ken guessed the cylinder was probably leaning on the building at a
sixty-degree angle.  Maybe more.

“You can’t be
serious,” he said.

He didn’t know if
he was addressing Christopher’s suggestion that this was a way out, or just the
concept
of what he was seeing.  Maybe it was both.  Or more than that,
maybe he was just giving voice to his general disbelief at what the world had
come to.  His life had never made sense: he was a high school teacher who made
almost as much as the average fry cook.  He was an average-looking guy who had
managed to score the love of his life.  He was an everyday man whose entire
family had survived the world’s shift to lunacy.

At least for a
little while.  Until Derek died.

But now this….

“Is that really…?” 
He couldn’t even finish the thought.

Aaron left his
side.  He had Ken and Dorcas lean on each other, and Ken wasn’t quite sure who
was supposed to help whom.

The cowboy leaned
into the smoke that billowed out of the cylinder.  He touched the lower edge. 
Grimaced as he cut himself on sharp, splintered metal.

“Looks like a 737,”
he said.  He looked past the outer edge of the plane’s fuselage, squinting as
he tried to sight along the craft’s exterior.  “But we can’t get out through
it.  Looks like it crashed, broke apart, and then slammed right through the
street.”

The growl behind
them grew louder.

And then it wasn’t just
behind them.  It was behind them, and to their left, and to their right.

Ken felt the thud
of a heartbeat.  Dorcas’ or his, he didn’t know.  But it was fast.  Terror
speeding it along.

Give up.

Give in.

Join us.

Die.

A wheezing noise
came from somewhere.  Ken looked and saw Lizzy.  The toddler was breathing in
and out so quickly she was almost panting, the breaths coming in small puffs
above her mother’s hand.  At first he worried that she was suffocating, or
having a seizure.  Or worse, that she was doing that strange thing the zombies periodically
did: looking up, opening their mouths, and all breathing in unison.  He didn’t
know why they did that, but it scared him.

Then he realized
none of those was occurring.

No, she was
laughing
.

“We can’t go.”

Ken looked at his
wife.  He could see her hand shaking over Lizzy’s face, could see terror and
revulsion fighting a strange battle for control of her expression.  She looked
like she had just found a dead cockroach in her shoe, and then discovered it
was an advance scout for an assassination squad.

And the fact that
she was looking at him at all nearly managed to drown all that out.

Ken didn’t know
what to say next.  He wanted to hold her, wanted to clutch her to him and
whisper that it was going to be all right.

But he had told
Derek the same thing.  And look how that ended.

So he didn’t know. 
He didn’t know, and he didn’t move.  Probably the wrong thing to do.  Though
perhaps if he
had
moved she would have rebuffed him again.  Would have
pushed him away and reminded him that their son was dead because of him.  And
it wouldn’t matter that Ken couldn’t have done anything, that
no one
could have.  She was right.

He was the father. 
The daddy.  The protector.  And he had failed his family.

“We have to go.” 
Christopher stepped forward.  Touched Maggie’s shoulder.  The growling was
louder, surrounding them like a blanket of needles.  Painful and invasive.

“We can’t.  We
can’t.”  Maggie was losing it.  Losing it, and Ken still didn’t know what to
say.  What to do.

Help came from an
unexpected place.

“We can.”  Buck
moved to the edge of the plane.  He peered into the cabin.  Ken couldn’t see
what he saw.  Too smoky, and the angle was wrong.  The big man shifted Hope on
his shoulders.  She moaned but remained unconscious.

Which was probably
for the best.  Ken didn’t know what the small band of survivors would do if
they had
two
erratic children to deal with.

Would this have
happened to Derek?  If he had lived?

Aaron was shaking
his head.  Still looking along the outside of the fuselage.  Ken thought he
could see bits of blue and orange paint, though both colors had been
desaturated to near-gray by the smoke.  A Southwest Airlines jet.  Ken thought
their slogan was “Welcome Aboard,” but he thought this wasn’t exactly how they
had meant it.

The cowboy wiped
his forehead with his one good hand.  The other, his left, was a mess of broken
and dislocated fingers.  He had it tucked into his belt, which must have hurt
but he didn’t seem to mind at all.  “No,” he said.  “It goes straight into the
street.”

The things could be
heard all around them.  There were over two hundred thousand people in Boise,
and most of them had been on the survivors’ trail.  Were they coating the
outside of this building?  Hanging from it like so many vicious, venomous
spiders?

The floor started
to shudder.

“We can make it,”
said Buck.  He sounded different than he had before.  Gone – at least for the
moment – was the whiny, entitled man-child they had rescued.  He shifted Hope’s
limp form to his other shoulder, then stood onto the lip of the plane’s
fuselage.

“It doesn’t
go
anywhere,” Aaron insisted.  He sounded frustrated.  Not scared, just irritated.

“It does.”  Buck’s
calm was oddly contagious.  Ken saw Maggie’s body stop quivering.  She stepped
toward the big man.

“Ma’am,” said
Aaron.

Maggie looked at
the cowboy.  Her hand was still clamped over Liz’s mouth.  “What else are we
going to do?” she asked.

She stepped into
the plane.

Ken followed them.

“I don’t know that
this is a good idea,” said Aaron.

“I know,” said
Ken.  “But where my family goes, I go.”

He stepped into the
plane as well.

The world shimmied
underneath his feet.

A moment later
there was a light tremor behind him, and that was when Ken realized that the
world wasn’t actually rolling below him.  It just seemed like it to a mind
suddenly steeped in revulsion and horror.

The dead were
everywhere.

It hadn’t really
occurred to Ken until this moment that the zombies weren’t dead.  Not really. 
They had all been alive, then they were changed.  From human to
other
in
the blink of an eye.  But not dead.  Never dead.  Many of them suffered wounds
and damage that would have –
must
have – killed any normal organism. 
Still, somehow they had sidestepped death, moving out of its path at the last
instant, tumbling bodily into something different, something alien and
frightening.

The zombies, the
things
,
had never been dead.

What Ken saw now
was different.

The plane had been
struck by the same force that enveloped the entire globe, that much was
certain.  Ken remembered Sunday School stories from his childhood: the God of
the Old Testament cursing the people who tried to build a tower to Heaven.  He
had changed their languages, confounding their speech so they could no longer
work together to reach His domain.

The dark god that
had acted a few hours ago had been more direct.  Bypassing simple confusion in
favor of chaos, preferring destruction to distraction.

Even if he hadn’t
seen the planes pirouetting drunkenly through the sky, Ken would have known in
an instant what happened here.  Even through the permanent haze of smoke he
could see long swaths of blood along floor, walls, even the ceiling.  Luggage
had fallen in the center aisle, and much had been torn apart as though by a
rabid animal unable to discern friend from foe, animate from static.

The change had hit
the plane as well.  Half the passengers had changed mid-flight.  Had killed
their fellow-travelers as the jet plummeted to earth.  Then the zombies had
somehow survived enough to leave.  To walk or crawl away in search of more people
to kill.

Not that the plane
was empty.  Some of the seats – Ken guessed about a quarter of them – held
silent, still cargo: all that remained of those who had not been turned by the
zombies – killed but not utterly disintegrated by the crash.

The imagery was
strange; nightmarish.  Torn metal, buckled plastic.  Luggage sprawled from
overhead bins, wiring trailing from the ceiling in spots like the rotted limbs
of willow trees.  The cabin must have lost pressure, too, because the emergency
oxygen masks had all dropped.  They hung over the seats like the suckers of a
tentacled monster hiding somewhere above.

The survivors had
crowded into the top of the fuselage, standing at the top of a buckling center aisle
that led downward at a steep angle into smoke, fire, and death.

“Where are the rest
of the creeps?” said Christopher.  Ken saw Dorcas look askance at him.  “There
must have been some zombies in here,” said the young man.  “Where’d they go?”

“Must’ve left after
the plane hit,” said Aaron.

“You think?” said
Dorcas.

No one answered
her.  Either because Aaron had given the best answer or – more likely – because
no one knew the answer.

“What now?” said
Dorcas.

A roar behind them
made the answer easy.

“We go down,” said
Buck.  The big man shifted Hope’s loose form in his grip, then took a careful
step forward.  Ken heard a double
pop-pop
and thought at first he was
hearing the crackle of the fire, coming from some unseen spot below them.

Buck grinned
sheepishly.  “Weak ankles,” he said.  Ken almost laughed.  Then the laugh
dissipated utterly from his thoughts as Buck stepped forward again.  Forward,
and downward.

Down into smoke.  Into
fire.

Into the province
of the dead.

Maggie followed
Buck.  Liz continued to struggle in the carrier, and Ken’s wife still had her
hand clamped over their daughter’s mouth.  The sight of Maggie gagging the
toddler chilled Ken: not something he had ever thought he would see his wife
doing.  He had been on the fence as far as spanking went when he entered the
marriage, but Maggie very quickly let him know it wouldn’t be an option for
their children.  She believed in time outs and reasoning and positive
discipline.

Not shoving her
hand over their child’s face.

But then, are
you even sure that
is
your child anymore, Ken?

A valid question. 
And not one he was sure he could answer.

Ken moved to follow
Maggie, but before he could Christopher slipped into the aisle.  He looked over
his shoulder and shrugged as though to say, “Better not get to close to her
right now, man.”  Or maybe that was just Ken’s imagination, imputing meaning
where there was none.

It was easy to do. 
People had been doing it since the beginning of time.  Interpreting the
universe in a way that had it making sense, in a way that drew order out of
chaos.

But what order could
there be now?  When humanity was changing before Ken’s eyes, and even the
release of death was denied to so many.

He shuffled down
the aisle behind Christopher.  The adrenaline that Aaron had pumped into him
was still blasting through his veins and arteries, making him feel on edge. 
The world seemed to have a blue tint to it, as though everything had been subtly
electrified.  His aches and pains were still there, but muffled under a blanket
that pulsed with the erratic beat of his overstressed heart.

He could barely
feel his back, and though the nerves in his left leg still hurt considerably
the pain seemed faraway and more abstract than concrete.  As though it was
something being described to him rather than something he was actually experiencing.

He looked around. 
The cabin was lit by fire somewhere at the bottom of the incline.  Small flames
licked along lines of upholstery and carpeting along the length of the
fuselage, as well.  Some of the bodies still smoldered.

The seats were
arranged three on the left, three on the right.  Extending into the distance
below.  Some of the seats had been knocked off their moorings and either hung
dreadfully askew or had seemingly disappeared completely.  Perhaps they had
flown through the front or side of the jet when it impacted the ground or the
building – Ken couldn’t tell which it had hit first.  Perhaps something else
had happened.  The FAA would have had a field day investigating a wreck like
this.

Only there’s no
more FAA.  No more FAA, FDA, NSA, CIA.  None of those good ol’ acronyms that
mean everything is A-OK.

Ken looked to his
right.  About three-quarters of the seats were empty, but it wasn’t a regular
dispersal.  Some rows were completely vacant, others had a single body, others held
a full contingent of cadavers.

Beside him now, he
saw what looked like the remains of a family.  A man and a woman with a smaller
body between them.  Impossible to say whether the smaller body had been a boy
or a girl – the face was hidden below the parents’ forms, what was visible of
the child’s flesh was torn and twisted, and the clothing was so bloodstained
there was no way to discern color or cut.

The tray table on
the seat back in front of the man had popped free of its little lock and
punched halfway through his body, nearly cutting him in half.

“Please return your
trays to their locked positions,”
Ken heard a voice say in his mind,
words that had been spoken a thousand times and would likely never be spoken
again.  They belonged to a world that was already a memory.

The woman looked
almost unblemished.  Whole.  Only the thin sliver of metal puncturing her
breast giving a hint as to the cause of her death.

Man and woman –
mother and father? – were twisted, almost huddled, over the smaller body.  As
if they had thrown themselves across the child in the last moments before
impact. 

Ken didn’t know how
to feel about that.  He wanted to find hope in it.  Because it showed that
there was more to life than just selfishness.  There was more to existence than
a clawing grasp for one’s own survival.

On the other hand,
what had it benefited them?  Mother and father were both dead, and the child
was a shrouded scrap of tissue between them.  At best they had the blessing of
feeling the child die before they themselves expired.  Of knowing what had
happened to their baby.

Was that what they
were all doomed to feel?  To hope for?  Was humanity’s aspiration now merely
that death would take them – and not something darker, and harsher, and far
more eternal?

Ken felt Derek in
his arms.  Felt him as real as he had ever been.  Felt him falling away. 
Changing.  He wondered if he was going mad.

Thought it might be
better.  Everyone talked about insanity as a curse.  But the reality, the dark
secret that he suspected now more than ever, was that recent years had seen
spikes in mental health problems because more and more people had discovered
the relief of lunacy.  The comfort that came with
not
knowing… and never
having to know anything again.

Never having to see
your son fall.  Never having to see your daughters change.

Ken’s musings took
him so far into himself that he almost didn’t notice the sounds for a moment.

Tic.  Tic-tic. 
Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“What’s that?” said
Aaron.  The cowboy was a pace behind Ken, following with Dorcas.

“I don’t –“ began
Christopher.

Tic-tic-tic-tictictictictic….

And then Ken knew
what the sound was.  He had heard it before.

He looked at the
windows.  They were double-paned, and they seemed to have survived the crash,
for which he was grateful.

Because they were
the only thing standing between the survivors and the source of the sound.