Survival Colony 9 (19 page)

“I want to nap here!” he said again.

“Let me carry you,” I said. “You can sleep with me like you did last night.”

Again I reached for him, and again he took a swing.

“You’re not my daddy!” he said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Your daddy has been scattered to the wind
, I thought.
He can’t tell you what to do either.

“Keely,” I tried once more, but before I could continue he let out a scream that stunned me with its vehemence. I looked around as if someone might hear, but there were only the two of us, him red-faced with childish rage, me speechless with confusion and doubt.

I knew I could pick him up, fend off his fists for the few minutes it would take him to exhaust himself. But I was as tired as he was, and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. I glanced back at the hill we’d started from, its slope smothered in shadow. At that moment, home base seemed as far away as the craters of the moon.

“All right,” I said. “Come here.”

I sat by the foot of the spire, patting the dust beside me. His mini-tantrum melted from his face, and he smiled.

I would let him fall asleep before taking him back, I decided. Give him a chance to dream off his disappointment and wake with what he’d left behind forgotten. I’d cover more ground with him asleep anyway.

He came over to me, but he didn’t sit on the ground. Instead, he curled into my lap, his head tucked under my chin. Hesitantly, I lifted my hand and stroked his matted hair. He slipped a filthy thumb into his mouth, and instantly his breathing softened. I looked down to see his cheeks flexing and his eyelids flickering.

“Tell me a story,” he said in a muffled whisper, just as his eyes slid closed.

*    *    *

I woke to catch the last rays of sun winking behind the hill where I’d hoped to deliver us by nightfall. Twilight blanketed the land, a muddy vagueness that turned brown to gray. Keely slept on in my lap, his thumb planted in his mouth, his sucking cheeks baby-smooth. The story he’d asked for remained untold.

We’d been asleep for hours.

“Keely!” I hissed. “Get up. We’ve got to go!”

He stirred, his eyelids struggling to open. Then his thirty pounds flopped back onto me and his eyes closed. The thumb never left his mouth.

“Keely.” I shook him, lifted him from my chest, set him on his feet. He refused to stand on his own. I propped him up and, not knowing what else to do, slapped him lightly on the cheeks. He winced and feebly waved his free hand, but still he wouldn’t wake.

At last I gave up and lifted him into my arms.

“We’re getting out of here,” I whispered, and turned toward the hilltop’s distant silhouette, a black knob against a crimson and purple sky.

In my arms he spoke at last. But his eyes stayed sealed, and his thumb-muted voice emerged as if from a dream.

“It’s too late, Daddy,” he said. “They’re already here.”

I spun in a wild circle to take in our surroundings, but I saw only what I’d seen before: dirt, rock, haunted trees, the lonely spire soaring above us. Detail had slid away with the dusk, making everything seem a shadow of itself. Then my ears caught a faint sound like moaning from above, and I stepped away from the pillar and stared into the darkening sky.

Things were crawling down the side of the spire.

Things pale yet dim as darkness, with livid skin and blunt, obscure faces. Their heads swung blindly from side to side as they descended. Their arms were long and veined as if they’d been flayed, but their trunks ended in a short, flat paddle like a larval tail. The walls of the tower glistened with a slick substance in their wake.

There were too many of them to count. More emerged each moment from the dimness at the peak of the spire and climbed steadily down.

I retreated, hugging Keely to my chest. His body remained limp, but I could feel his cheeks moving and hear their sucking sound.

When the first wave of the creatures reached a point ten feet from the base of the nest, they fell heavily onto their stomachs and lifted themselves to face me.

That’s when I saw that they had no faces.

No eyes, no mouth, no features of any kind, only veined knobs like a fist stripped of flesh. Starting where their mouth would have been and stretching the length of their chest ran a gash, wide and ragged, as if they’d been ripped apart to expose the cavity of their bodies. But instead of revealing organs or muscle or bone, the gash opened on a smooth gray emptiness. The only signs of life were a waving motion at the torn edges of the gaping wound and a rotten smell that exhaled from within, accompanied by the chorus I’d heard, like the wailing of someone in pain.

I remembered Korah’s story, the body of her father halfway corrupted by the thing that had taken him. I remembered Korah herself, her beauty changed to something reptilian, flesh and blood and bone dissolved to flailing skin. And I remembered my dream, my one link to the past, the excruciating feeling I’d experienced not of being invaded but of being consumed. No one had seen Skaldi before, Skaldi without the human hosts we’d always thought they nested inside. No one had seen them and lived.

Now I had seen them. And I knew what I was seeing.

Skaldi didn’t enter you. Just the opposite. They drew you in, into the emptiness of their own bodies. They made you fill that emptiness, ingested you while they assumed your shape. When they moved on to their next victim, the scraps we found were the mimic coverings they had shed.

But I also knew that knowing this wouldn’t save me.

The creatures circled us, dragging themselves blindly but surely on emaciated arms. Dozens more hung expectantly from the sides of the mound. Their swaying motion resembled a snake’s.

The moaning grew louder as the creatures closed in. Still I could see nothing inside them, only a hollow space, dull and gray as dead tissue. I gathered myself to leap their squirming forms, but a feeling of horror made my legs tremble, and I dropped to my knees.

“Keely,” I whispered to the inert bundle in my arms. He refused to wake from his dream. Then I realized it was better if his dream never ended, and I lowered my head and buried his sleeping eyes in my chest.

The creatures had drawn so close I could feel nothing but their icy breath, smell nothing but their suffocating stench. I tried to rise, but a crushing weight pinned me to the ground. Whatever power had protected me six months ago now seemed as remote as my stolen past. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

But the Skaldi didn’t strike. Their moans rose to a pitch of grief and pain.

Then I heard footsteps, a scuffing against dirt and stone. I raised my eyes to see that the creatures had flattened their bodies to the dust, arms outstretched. Their moans had died. The footsteps echoed in the stillness of the dusk as both the Skaldi and I waited for whoever or whatever was coming.

A moment later, a shadowy figure stepped from behind the nest. I couldn’t distinguish a face, but the voice was unmistakable.

“Space Boy,” the voice said. “Welcome to the family, little brother.”

18

Host

At first I thought the twilight had tricked my senses.

Then he stepped from the shadow of the pillar and I saw that it was him: tall, gangly, slouching, his face spread with the same smirk he’d been using to torment me for the past six months. He wore his usual filthy uniform, though his holster hung empty. Yet he approached the circle of Skaldi fearlessly, sliding with perfect confidence between their prostrate forms. Even more astonishing, a break appeared in their ranks to let him through. The circle closed once more as soon as he was past, and the creatures inched forward, groveling at his heels.

I tried to form words, but my mouth had gone dry. “Brother?”

His smile broadened. “Mom always said you were the smart one.”

“But,” I stammered. “Laman told me . . .”

“
Laman told me
,” he sneered. “Laman didn’t know about Aleka and you. There’s so much Laman didn’t know. I told you not to follow his advice. But you wouldn’t listen to your big brother, would you?”

“But,” I tried again. “The camp. By the river. I thought you were . . .”

“Oh, that,” he said, as if he was referring to a lost button or a skinned knee. He reached down, and one of the creatures lifted itself on skeletal arms to accept his caress. Watching his hand stroke its slimy back both mesmerized and repulsed me. “Rookie mistake,” he said. “You can’t kill us.”

My mind whirred, stalled, sputtered to a halt. “Then you’re . . .”

In answer, his smile yawned so wide it obliterated the rest of his face, as if his mouth formed the beginning of the gash I’d seen in the creatures at his feet. For a second there was nothing else, only a cavity like the empty skull of a thing long dead. Then the slit narrowed and the face became Yov’s again, or what appeared to be Yov’s, smugly grinning.

“We are,” he said, “what we are.”

“You’re Skaldi.” The fact that I was speaking to it seemed as incredible as the transformation.

It threw back Yov’s head and hurled a long, mocking laugh into the twilit sky. The groveling creatures echoed its shout with ghostly moans.

There was only one way this could be, I thought feverishly. The Skaldi that had destroyed the rebel camp had taken Yov’s body. Somehow it had missed Keely, and then it had left in search of other victims. That was the only answer.

“Let Keely go,” I said, knowing even as I said it that I couldn’t bargain with Skaldi. “Do what you want with me, but let him go.”

The thing with Yov’s face smiled, malice glistening in its gray eyes. It lowered itself to sit among the squirming creatures, Yov’s long legs stretched casually in front of it.

“We could have killed him six months ago if we’d wanted to,” it said, speaking conversationally despite its ugly words. “But that was never our purpose.”

“Six months?” I said dumbly. “How could you . . . ?”

The Skaldi tapped Yov’s forehead with a long finger. At first I thought it was mimicking Laman’s “focus” signal. But then I realized what it meant. This time I was so dumbfounded I could barely choke out the words.

“My memory,” I said. “
You’re
the one.
You
stole my memory.”

“We
are
your memory,” it gibed. “We take what we need, and throw the rest away.”

My mind spun as its words sank in. I’d been right that my attacker hadn’t been killed. But it hadn’t been reduced to the creeping creature I’d seen. It had jumped from me to Yov. Against everything we thought we knew about them, it had kept his body intact for six long months, bleeding enough of Yov’s stolen blood to pass the initial trials, remaining stable far beyond the point where anyone would suspect him. And the morning of Laman’s rescue, when the one I’d thought was Yov had been shot in the leg and gone down screaming . . .

My eyes flickered over the wounded leg. The uniform showed no sign of a bullet entry. This shape-shifter had faked its own injury to fool Araz and his camp, and had restored itself when it no longer needed the disguise.

I met the creature’s gaze. Its mimic face lit with a cruel smile. In its gaping mouth, Yov’s yellow teeth seemed as tiny as a child’s.

“How?” was all I could say.

The creature shrugged. “We don’t ask
how
. We don’t ask
why
. That’s the thing that took the most getting used to. All the questions, the doubts. We had to learn to weed through that to get at what we wanted. To use your frailty for our own purposes.”

Absently, it stroked the back of the nearest creature as it spoke.

“You and your brother taught us everything we needed to know. It was like waking up from a long, long sleep.” Its voice sounded almost wistful. “So weak, so divided. You say one thing and do another. You call yourselves a colony, yet you let petty squabbles get in the way of your objectives. You wrangle over toys and trinkets. You follow a pair of pretty eyes into the dark, even if that means certain death.”

I thought over my past six months in Survival Colony 9, the past couple weeks. The creature’s portrait of us—of me—sounded so true I felt compelled to argue. “We’re not—”

It held up a hand as if asking for patience. “And your so-called leaders! Laman made it so easy for us. He must have suspected the compound was ours. Must have realized he couldn’t hold it together once we trashed his truck. But he wouldn’t face the truth. He wasted time sending that little bitch girlfriend of yours snooping around. We had to call one of the others to kill her off before he’d listen. Before he’d”—its teeth flashed like daggers—“focus.”

It shook out Yov’s legs and rose. The creatures cowered at its feet.

“And let’s not forget the fabulous Space Boy,” it jeered. “You couldn’t have played it any better if we’d asked you to. Really, tracking our decoy right to our front door? Bravo.”

Movement rippled among the Skaldi. A form emerged from their ranks: the crawling creature, its head bowed to the ground, its arms so emaciated it could barely drag its body forward. It lifted its head long enough to stare at me with vacant eyes, then it crumbled to dust at my feet.

“Mission accomplished,” the thing that had been Yov purred. “It’s been fun, Space Boy. But the game’s over. Now it’s time to go.”

I met his eyes. They flamed red in a face that had wilted like dripping wax. I was surprised to find myself trembling, not with fear but with rage at the creature that had used my memory to attack the colony, and now was using the memory of people I’d known to mock their deaths. I wondered if Yov had always been as cruel as the one that had replaced him, if the monster that had consumed his body had inherited his soul. Was this twisted thing my real brother? Or had he ever been someone I looked up to, trusted, loved? Someone who loved me back?

Had he ever been someone like Korah, who loved her colony and her family enough to put herself in harm’s way when the Skaldi struck?

“You haven’t won,” I said. My voice came out dry and cracked, but it grew stronger with each word. “You killed my brother, you had one of your little friends kill Korah, but you couldn’t kill me. My memory is all you got.”

A spasm passed over its stolen face, distorting it again, replacing Yov’s smirk with the bulging knob of the Skaldi’s blind forehead. Then Yov’s features returned and the creature shook its head. When it spoke again its words sounded muffled and broken, as if it was losing the ability to work Yov’s tongue and teeth.

“Your—memory is all we needed,” it gasped. “Soon—there will be nothing left of you. Like there is nothing—left of them.”

Again Yov’s face buckled as if it was about to split open, and I sensed its deadly purpose coiling. I didn’t know what it was that led me to continue taunting it.

“You call us weak,” I said. “But you’re the one that’s weak. You steal people’s bodies, people’s memories. You use the strength of others to cover your weakness. You’re afraid to fight on your own.”

“No!” the voice burst from the monster’s bottomless mouth, bringing with it the same stench of rot that breathed from the ring of lesser creatures. “Skaldi know no fear. No weakness. Skaldi know only death.”

Once more the mask of Yov’s face warped as the Skaldi-self strained to break free. Its lips twitched, its rabid eyes bugged. I knew there was no time left, no point in delaying what had to happen.

Gently, I laid Keely on the ground at my feet. He slept on, lost in whatever dream or nightmare had claimed him. Slowly, wearily, I stood and planted myself over his sleeping body. Then I raised my head to face the one I’d hated for so long, not knowing who or what I hated. My fists clenched as its frame melted away under the pressure of the monster Yov had become.

“Prove it,” I said. My voice shook, and I hoped I sounded a lot braver than I felt. “Show yourself to me now.”

With a shrug, the Skaldi threw off the last shreds of Yov’s body and struck.

Its speed blinded me.

The instant it charged at me, it seemed as if a shroud settled over my eyes, and its form vanished into the darkness. The next instant, something powerful attached itself to my arms. It didn’t feel like a body, a solid shape I could grasp or define, but a force that wrapped me in shadow and flooded my senses with the icy corpse-stink of its breath. A sickening sensation of being entombed in another’s flesh washed over me, and my gut churned violently as I felt not only my body but something deep inside me being drained away. I tried to concentrate, to focus, but the more I tried, the muddier my thinking became. I seemed to be trapped at the bottom of a night-black pit, my body floundering amid the members of the two colonies the creature had consumed. I heard its mocking laugh in my head, urging me to kneel before it, to bow down as its latest sacrifice. It wanted me to give up, to surrender the parts of me it hadn’t already claimed. For a long moment I forgot who I was, forgot that I was. There was no me, only it.

As in my dream, I heard a whisper. But this time I could make out what it said.

There was only one word.

Forget
.

It would have been so easy to obey. I’d lost everything I’d ever called mine—my past, my hope, my people—and I almost felt as if it was my own voice telling me to give up. Did I really want to remember, if that meant remembering nothing but loss?

But another part of me fought back. A part of me that hadn’t been drowned by the creature’s venom bubbled up from the depths, and I clung to it as the waves buffeted me in the dark. It spoke to me not in words but in images: my game of catch with Laman, the trial where I stood beside Aleka, my march through the night with Keely, my talk at the pool with Korah. I looked into her eyes as I had that night, and this time I saw the strength and love that shone within them. I focused on the light in her eyes, a frail blue flame in the surrounding darkness.

And then the darkness receded, and I returned. The flame spread outward from my chest to my arms, the tips of my fingers. My hands gripped something solid and sank in. The creature’s taunting laugh turned to a shriek of pain, and the wall of darkness fell away, the suffocating stench retreating at the same time. A new smell wafted over me, the stink of burning flesh.

I opened my eyes.

The creature lay on the ground, convulsing, howling in pain. Wisps of smoke rose from its pale flesh, and in spots the sickly gray hue had turned an angry red. It thrashed so violently I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought the marks on its body matched the shape of my hands.

I staggered back, quaking with more than cold. But before I had time to think, to move, the Skaldi rose and lunged again.

Its force clutched me, its breath licked my face. Again I felt myself being turned inside out, exposed to its hunger, my skin raw and prickling as a newborn’s. The world around me spun, the world inside me darkened. The name I called myself was snuffed out like a blown candle, and the only word that filled my mind was
Skaldi
.

But once again, when it seemed I could hold out no longer, a rush of memories flowed through my mind, and I felt a surge of air like a swimmer breaking the surface. The memories weren’t all good, but they were mine, and I rode them back to the light. Laman giving me a tour of the weapons horde. Aleka guiding me the morning of the rescue. The old woman telling me about birds. Korah again, the first time she’d spoken to me, teaching me how to set up my tent, touching my hands as she showed me the way.

My own pulse became the pulse of a flamethrower. I shoved blindly and the Skaldi reeled, fell to its clawed hands on the ground. It tried to rise, but its arms gave out under it. Its tail thrashed feebly against the dust, threads of smoke curled from its blistered flesh. My own legs felt like rubber, but I faced it, waited for its next move.

Bracing itself with one hand, the Skaldi that had been Yov lifted its body shakily from the ground and pointed a single long, clawed finger at me. The scar that should have been its face split wide. The members of its colony reared from the dust in unison, and their skin peeled back like an opened wound.

With a speed I could hardly believe, they struck.

Some collided with my back, others my chest. All clutched at me, chewed my arms with their claws, clogged my nostrils with their breath. At their touch I gagged and nearly fell into the dead hollows of their bodies. A word echoed in my mind, a different word this time.

Querry.

Que . . .

Qu . . .

Then memory resurfaced, the sensation of fire flooded me once more, and the creatures broke contact, their writhing bodies dropping to the ground, their moans escalating to a high-pitched squeal. But they didn’t stay down long. As if driven mad by their master, they flung themselves at me, strained to swallow me, to make me one of their own.

But they failed.

I did nothing. There was nothing I could do.

I stood, paralyzed by their speed, unable to resist when they clenched me in their arms. Too many came at me to catch them, grip them, fling them aside. I stood unsteadily, my head and heart pounding, dizzy and sick as if I’d gone a week without water. Memory was all that kept me on my feet, the fuel that fed an inner fire. At the creatures’ touch, my flesh grew so hot it seemed as if my bones blazed. And the ground on all sides of me piled with pale bodies that twisted and clawed at the dust.