Survival Colony 9 (18 page)

A uniform top.

But what remained inside was far less than its wearer. I lifted it free from the ground and the last traces sifted invisibly into the dust at my feet. To my utter surprise, the cloth itself fell apart next, leaving me with nothing but a fistful of prickly fibers.

Trembling, I crept to the next bundle and felt it lightly. This one contained more to feel, a complete uniform, but no more inside. I moved breathlessly to the next, and the next. Some of them, like the one I’d tripped over, felt relatively intact. I didn’t investigate deeply enough to see how much was left inside those. Others had been emptied of everything but air, while still others had disintegrated partially like the first. They formed a line, each one spaced roughly twenty feet from the next, leading back toward the river. I followed this new trail, shape by shape. I counted sixteen in all, along with spilled packs and the empty tank of a flamethrower. The rest I probably missed in the dark.

On the last one before the river, a bundle far bulkier than most, I found a gun and a walkie-talkie. I didn’t need to look closely to know that this had been Araz.

I lowered myself carefully down the rocky bank, my eyes scanning the water’s black surface. When I reached the river’s edge I cupped my hands, dipped them into the rank water, brought them to my face. I shivered, though the water was warm.

Araz and Yov’s colony was gone. Totally gone. Its leaders, its followers, and those who hadn’t been old enough to make a choice. Like Keely. I hadn’t seen a uniform his size, but he was so small I could easily have overlooked it. Nearly twenty colonists, trained fighters like Kin, bruisers like Kelmen, had been wiped out so quickly they hadn’t had time to do anything but scatter and run. I had hated the rebels, wished them out of my life, but never wished them dead.

But it hadn’t mattered. The Skaldi had wished differently. I knew now why Petra had seen nothing of them since yesterday’s late afternoon report: they’d been waylaid in their pursuit of Laman’s colony, and when it ended, their tattered remains were all the Skaldi had left behind.

Which Skaldi, I couldn’t say. I barely believed the pitiful thing crawling through Laman’s camp could have destroyed the rebels so completely, especially when it hadn’t touched anyone the night before. But I’d been there last night, and if my suspicion was right about it, its main objective at that point had been to get away. If this really was the same creature that had stolen my memory, it had wiped out Survival Colony Twenty-Seven all on its own. Who knew what it could do when there was no one to stop it?

I’d been so focused on tracking this wounded thing, I’d forgotten that wounded things can be the most dangerous.

A movement out of the corner of my eye made me freeze. Something stood at the water’s edge, a dark shape not ten feet from where I crouched. I had no time to light my tree-branch torch, and I doubted such a small fire would scare it off anyway. If Tyris was right, Skaldi feed until the last body is left. And now a new body had walked right into the middle of its feast.

I rose to face it. What else could I do?

But then I noticed that the thing I’d seen had backed away, as if it was as startled by me as I was by it. I debated what to do for a second before calling out.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” said a child’s voice. “Keely.”

Relief flooded me, followed by a new wave of fear. “Keely,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I hid under Daddy,” he said. “It didn’t see me.”

I struck a spark from my flint, saw his terrified face in the brief glow. I knew it was wrong to feel this way, but I couldn’t help giving thanks that Araz’s remains were complete enough to shield his tiny son. “Is there . . .” I meant to finish, “anyone else?” But I couldn’t ask him that.

“Keely,” I said. “There’s something I have to do. It won’t hurt. Can I . . .” I felt sick asking. “Can you come over here?”

Obediently, he took a series of small steps until he stood right before me. I could barely make out his face in the gloom. His cheeks were drawn and his teeth chattered, but his eyes, I thought, gazed back at me in trust. I tried to will mine to look the same.

“I’m just going to check to see if you’re okay,” I said, and I took his two small hands in one of mine. With my other hand, I gripped the ends of his fingers, wiggling them hard at the very tips.

A look of confused delight crept over his face. “This little piggy went to market,” he whispered.

I tried to smile back. “Now I’m going to check your teeth.”

“My teeth?” But he opened his mouth without protest.

I unfastened my rucksack and took out a strip of cloth and my glass jar. Stuffing the rag inside, I struck the flint until I got a corner of the fabric to catch, then set the homemade lantern at our feet. In the yellow light I inspected each of Keely’s tiny teeth, held each one between fingers that seemed clumsy and blunt, pulled as hard as I could without hurting him. On the top row, a tooth wiggled and came loose with a slight tearing of tissue.

I looked at him, horrified, then saw a dark spot of blood welling at the root. He smiled a brand-new smile.

“We’ll have to save this one for the . . .” I tried to remember the name of the thing the little kids talked about, some kind of boat that took baby teeth away. “The tooth ferry,” I finished, and slipped the treasure into his hand. Then I closed my own hand around his and led him up from the riverbed.

I walked him along the bank, away from the violated bodies. His hand felt cold, but his teeth no longer chattered. Once, he gave my hand an instinctive squeeze, and I squeezed back. He’d always trusted me, at least for the six months I could remember. Chances are he couldn’t remember much more than I could. All he had, really, was trust.

We couldn’t stay here, I knew. The thing that had done this might be coming back. Whatever my chances against it, Keely’s stood at exactly zero. But I had no idea where the creature had gone, whose body it had slain last, so leaving this spot in the middle of the night didn’t seem like an option either. I considered pocketing Araz’s gun, but the thought of touching it turned my stomach, and what good would it be against Skaldi, anyway? Retracing my steps to Laman’s camp seemed equally foolish. Not only would I have to deal with at least one minefield I could no longer detect, but if the Skaldi that had killed the rebels wasn’t the one I thought it was, I could be leading it straight back to Survival Colony 9.

I stood there far longer than I should, trying to focus, coming no closer to a decision. Keely shivered beside me.

“Querry,” he said. “I’m cold.”

That was what finally made up my mind. He was my responsibility now, at least until I found someone else to take care of him. Whatever lay ahead of us in the night, the one thing I knew for sure was that death lay behind. I might not be any good at making decisions, but I had to be better than a kid who’d just lost his first baby tooth.

“Come on,” I said, and we started off into the night, leaving the carnage of the rebel camp by the riverside.

17

Nest

Keely and I marched deep into the night.

When he got too tired to walk I strapped my rucksack across my chest and carried him on my back. When he got too sleepy to cling to me I switched him to the front and held him in my arms. A half-starved five-year-old doesn’t weigh much, and though my muscles grew numb, they also seemed strangely tireless, immune to fatigue or pain. His thin chest breathed against mine, his soft exhalations caressed my neck. I put my head down and forged ahead, one step at a time.

I abandoned the area right by the river in case of mines, but I tried to stay on course to the northwest. Even if there’d been enough light to spot yesterday’s trail, I wouldn’t have hunted for it, preferring not to think about it at all. My only thought was to put as much distance as possible between the child I held and the memory of the night. Let the thing catch us if it could. I didn’t know where we were going, or what we might find. I didn’t know if our next step would land us in a crater or lead us straight into the arms of the Skaldi. All I could do was walk on through the night, holding the one living thing that was mine to hold for as long as I could hold it.

Eventually, though, I had to set Keely down and get some sleep. The risen moon had shrunk to a fingernail-shaped sliver, and all across the darkened land there was nothing like shelter to be seen. So I lay down on my bedroll, draping an arm around Keely to keep him close. Not safe, just close. He murmured in his sleep, eyelids fluttering. Dreaming, I guess. I closed my eyes wondering if either of us would open them again.

But when a dreamless night passed and the sun rose on another day, I rose with it. Keely slept on, so I shook him gently, watched his brown eyes open. He seemed momentarily confused to see me, then he smiled. I wondered how much sorrow a single night could erase for a kid his age. If he asked about his dad, I didn’t know what I would say.

He didn’t, though. He watched me puncture the lid of a can with my pocketknife, accepted the couple mouthfuls of stringy yellow stuff I offered him, and waited for me to swallow some of the tasteless food myself. Then he took my hand and followed along, cupping the meal to his mouth and licking his palm as we went.

Now that the crisis of the night had fallen behind us and I could look at the situation in the brutal light of day, I had to admit that taking care of Keely presented some real problems. To begin with, his presence changed my plan—such as it was—from fight to flight. I’d glanced around for the Skaldi’s trail as soon as we woke up, but as I’d half-feared and half-hoped, it had vanished during our nighttime march. Whether the creature had stopped or changed course, I doubted we’d find it again. Maybe that was a good thing. But it meant I now had no particular destination in mind, and no particular goal except to get as far away from the ruins of Keely’s camp as I could.

And with Keely in tow, that might not be so easy. Though he seemed satisfied with the bare-bones meal I’d given him, an extra mouth to feed meant my cans would run out twice as fast, forcing me to spend time hunting for what little food the barren land provided. So long as we stayed within hiking distance of the river our water would last, but Keely drank much more than I did, in tiny but frequent sips, and that meant more river runs to refill my canteen and jar. He also stopped for bathroom breaks all the time, and he could never predict when they were coming, so they never coincided with a time we were actually at the river. The best I could do to erase our scent was dig a ditch with my knife, cover it once he was done, and hope the camp crazies were wrong and the Skaldi’s sense of smell wasn’t as keen as they said.

The biggest problem of all, though, was how slowly my new companion forced us to move. He didn’t drag his feet or waste time playing, but he got tired and needed to rest, he took baby steps, and I didn’t think I could carry him forever. If a situation arose that called for speed, I could run, but where would that leave Keely?

I knew the answer to that. Nowhere.

And I knew I couldn’t leave him. But watching his tangled brown hair bob along by my side, I couldn’t help thinking how much easier it would be if I could.

By mid-morning we’d walked maybe two miles, less than half the distance I’d have covered on my own. A good two hours of that time had been devoted to naps and potty breaks. I’d become an expert at digging holes and finding shelter in the tiniest of divots, and for a short time I’d discovered that I could get Keely to pick up the pace if I turned our march into a kind of game, like tag minus the hard running. As high sun approached, though, a change settled over the land, from flat and sterile emptiness to a more varied terrain, low hills spotted with rocks and scrub brush, and that made it even harder for Keely to keep up. I tugged his hand, lifted him onto my shoulders, distracted him with nonsense jokes, anything I could think of to keep him moving. All I had left in my favor was that he hadn’t asked me where we were going or when we would get there. Which was a very good thing, because I had yet to figure that out myself.

While Keely rested in the lee of a hill during the day’s hottest hours, I debated what to do next. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had to stay near the river. I could keep trekking northwest, in hopes of finding . . . something. Araz’s fabled mountains. The Skaldi I’d lost overnight. A new colony to take Keely off my hands. Or I could backtrack, hope against hope to avoid whatever had slain the rebels, maybe even find some way to reunite Keely with Laman without being nabbed myself. But when I thought of that, I knew I was fooling myself. Survival Colony 9 would never willingly let me go. My plan had blown up in my face, but it was still the best I had. I’d stay on course and hope for a revelation or a miracle.

“You ready?” I said to Keely, who lay yawning and stretching from his nap.

He nodded and took my hand. At the moment, that seemed like miracle enough for me.

Over the next hour, the hills became steeper and more widely spaced. I found myself panting as I trudged up each rise with him on my back, catching my breath at the top and recovering it fully only at the bottom of each downslope, just in time to lose it again. I wondered if we might be nearing the mountains after all. I’d never seen mountains, so I had no idea what led up to them. The trees here I couldn’t place, low and spreading and blanketed in rusty needles, interspersed with bushes and boulders that could either hide us or conceal whatever might be lying in wait. I kept my eyes trained on the unsparing landscape, but nothing moved except our own shadows, linked by the thread of our twined hands.

Anxiety made me determined to keep Keely close. But as the day wore on he got fidgety, and I found it harder and harder to distract him. We hadn’t done much talking or anything I’d call playing since the game of marching tag fizzled, and by mid-afternoon it felt like our roles had switched: now he was the one who’d develop sudden spurts of energy, while I was the one who wasn’t always up to joining him. Probably that came from giving him piggyback rides the first half of the day. I decided to give him a job scouting ahead, not far enough that I couldn’t run him down if I needed to. That seemed to please him, and every time I caught up he’d give me a scouting report. “I’m Petra,” he said. “And you’re Laman.” I smiled for his sake, though the reminder of Petra’s superhuman skill and of the commander she served made me glance anxiously back the way we’d come.

About two hours past his midday nap, I let him climb to the top of the steepest hill we’d encountered so far while I took a break in the shade of a rusty tree. I was beat. I’d been trying to save on food and water since our last refill at the river, which basically meant none for me, all for him. Add to that the hills and the pounding of the afternoon sun, and I felt like a rag wrung dry. The ground beneath the tree blistered my back, but I lay out of the direct sun, and at least I could close my eyes for a second to escape the blinding day.

That’s when I heard him call out, “Querry!”

I jumped to my feet, realizing I’d been on the verge of nodding off. Instantly I spotted his small figure standing stock still at the hill’s crest, a slender brown body engulfed by the solid brown waste of land and sky. He turned to face me, his arm gesturing urgently, a “come quick!” motion. My exhaustion forgotten, I sprinted to where he stood.

When I reached his side, he pointed. But there was no need.

The ground sloped sharply away at our feet, forming a broad bowl where it met with other, lower hills far beneath us. Within the hollow of these hills, maybe a mile northeast of where we stood, a huge spire reared out of the desert. It looked to be made of rock or soil, the same color as the surrounding terrain, though it appeared less a part of the land than a slim finger balanced precariously on the plain. I had no guess as to its actual height, but it seemed simply enormous, towering all alone with only a few bare, lowly knolls in its vicinity. It might have been a mountain, I thought, except it didn’t look at all like what I’d imagined when people talked about mountains. Those sounded like welcoming places, places of peace, even of beauty. This looked like an ugly growth, as if an explosion from long ago had burst the face of the land and left this monstrosity behind as a grave marker.

Keely peered up at me eagerly. “Can we go there, Querry?”

I glanced at him uncertainly, then back at the spire. To his eyes, it must have seemed like a play place, a place to explore, or at least to break up the monotony of the day. To me, it seemed like the kind of place we should stay away from. Yet at the same time, I had to admit I was curious to find out what it was, if only to know how wide a berth to give it. Plus it looked shadier in the valley between the hills, and at this point getting out of the sunlight seemed a good enough reason to take a detour.

“We have to be careful,” I said. “You stay with me.”

Without a word of agreement or disagreement, he set off down the slope, playing Petra’s part except without an ounce of her stealth or caution.

I followed him. The hill dipped steeply and the soil lay rocky and loose, but we kept our feet. Clouds of dust billowed around us, especially him as he skidded downhill. During the entire descent, all I could think was how visible we’d be to anything scouting the hillside. I kept half an eye on Keely, the other half on the neighboring elevations, but nothing showed itself.

In less than half an hour we reached the saddle formed by adjacent slopes. Looking across the valley, it became apparent to me the spire was even more massive than it had seemed from above. It dominated the landscape, rising so high above the plain we might as well have been ants emerging from our anthill. It stood farther away than I had thought as well, two miles distant at least. I glanced at Keely, whose bright eyes focused on the single pinnacle rising from the empty land.

“You sure you’re up for this?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His face told me all I needed to know.

I turned to the hill we’d descended, traced our path in the dust, realized it would take double the time to climb back up. Two miles, if it was two miles, meant another hour minimum at Keely’s pace. To reach the spire and return by nightfall would be pushing it, especially if he wanted to stay and play. But the arguments that had gotten me this far made me reluctant to turn back. We had half a canteen and a full jar of water, and as long as we could reach the river before we ran dry, did it really matter if we got back to where we started?

“Come on,” I said to Keely, who was already tugging my sleeve. “And stay close.”

For the next hour, in the stifling shade of the valley and the sporadic shelter of the strange trees, we marched toward the monolith. Or I marched, Keely skipped. As our goal advanced I got a better sense of its size and shape: about two hundred feet tall and maybe a third as wide, tapering slightly from base to rounded peak, and not as smooth or featureless as it had seemed from far away. On closer inspection it appeared more like mud than stone or soil, mud built up over the years and baked by the sun into lumps and swirls and dribbles. On size alone I’d have said it looked like one of the skyscrapers Laman had told me about, steel pylons that pierced the polluted sky. But the closest thing it resembled from my own experience was a termite mound, a hundred times bigger than the ones I’d seen.

At last the spire loomed directly above us, its shadow swollen to gigantic dimensions and flung far away to the east. I laid a hand cautiously on its warty surface, but it felt no different from any piece of rock or clay heated and dried by the sun. Its consistency exactly matched that of a termite mound, slightly porous but too hard to break with my bare hands. The only difference lay in the scale: where you could cup your palm around any of the bumps on the termite mounds I’d seen, both my arms weren’t wide enough to girdle the monstrous bubbles that hung from the tower’s side. A million termites couldn’t have built this, not in a thousand years. I walked a circle around its base, craning my neck, squinting at the sunlight on its crown, but I saw nothing that might give me a clue to what this thing was, how it had come here. Maybe, I thought, it had been here forever, an ancient ruin left over from the death of the modern world.

When I completed my inspection, I found Keely standing beside the mound with his face angled up at the peak, a frown clouding his brow. Whatever he’d been hoping for, he must have realized he couldn’t play with this thing. It wasn’t even possible to climb. I could imagine how disappointed he must have felt after walking so far to get here. But now that we were here, he had to see that there was nothing to do but go back.

“Querry?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m tired.” His eyes looked teary, and his voice was a kid’s pout.

I tried a smile. “Me too.”

“I need a nap.”

“I can carry you.”

“No!” he said, more violently than I expected. “I want to nap here!”

“Keely . . .” I reached for his arm.

He swung and hit me with a balled fist. It didn’t hurt, but I jerked back in shock.