Survival Colony 9 (20 page)

Finally it stopped. The creatures squirmed away, and I saw that though nothing ebbed from their bloodless flesh, their naked backs bubbled with red marks as if from an iron brand.

The leader hadn’t moved from its spot. Its arm hung in the air, its body shuddered as if with heavy breaths. Its faceless face turned toward me once more, and I sensed a movement in its mind. A split second before it acted, I knew what it planned to do.

I scooped Keely’s sleeping form into my arms and ran.

I heard the creatures in pursuit. When their stench told me I couldn’t outrun them any longer, I dove to the ground, my body cocooned around Keely’s to protect him from the assault.

Just in time.

They swarmed my back, grappled with me, slashed at my throat and wrists. I lay pinned to the ground by the iron strength of their claws, the dead weight of their bodies. Their breath hissed in my ears. The sickness inside them tore at me.

But they couldn’t tear me from the child I shielded.

I knew I couldn’t throw them off if I tried. So I made no effort to. I curled myself around Keely’s frail form, and the creatures fell from me like dead skin. A force that came from somewhere other than my muscles, a force I felt as a hot coal glowing in the pit of my stomach and spreading outward like the path of a wildfire, defended me from their attack. I huddled around that flame and fought to hold on.

Time passed, but I had no way to mark its length. Sound and silence emitted the same dull roar. Memories slid and merged.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the creatures retreated. Their shrieks sliced the dark, pierced my heart. I lay shaking and weak, my stomach twisted and a foul taste in my mouth. Tears and darkness blurred my vision. I could barely see my attackers, barely keep from choking on the stench of their burned bodies. I didn’t know what would happen if they came at me again.

They didn’t, though.

Instead, a lot of things happened at once.

I heard shouts, voices. Footsteps hammered the ground so hard it shook. I lifted my head to see, but as I did, the soil collapsed beneath me. Instinctively, I clutched Keely’s body. But the fall wasn’t far, five feet at most, into the deeper darkness of underground. We landed softly not on dirt or stone but, incredibly, on human hands.

The hands lowered us carefully to the floor of the pit. Bodies brushed past me, nearly invisible in the dark but solid and alive with warmth. Fingers closed on my wrist. I tried to jerk away until I realized they were feeling for a pulse.

“Stay here,” a gruff voice commanded. I didn’t need to see her face to know it was Petra.

Her stocky body leaped over me, out of the hole. Heavy footsteps diminished as she ran. I felt another hand brush hair from my eyes, and a face I couldn’t see leaned over to press dry lips to my forehead. Then it, too, vanished into the dark above.

The sky over my head blazed with twin ribbons of flame. The Skaldi wailed, a confused chorus of screams rising above the deep cough of the flamethrowers. I shivered as I remembered those screams from the night Korah died. But I took heart in the human voices that shouted in response, not words I could distinguish but monosyllables of encouragement and resolve.

Then I heard Laman Genn’s voice, sturdy and calm above the chaos of battle.

“For the colony!” he called. “For our lost brothers and sisters! Let none escape!”

The flamethrowers unfurled into the pitchy sky, and the throats of the Skaldi howled in baffled rage and fear.

Carefully, making sure to keep track of Keely’s body, I lifted myself from the ground. Standing on tiptoes, I could just peer over the edge of the pit.

In the orange glare of their two remaining flamethrowers, the last members of Survival Colony 9 marched in a tight formation, driving the Skaldi away from the nest. Laman and Petra I couldn’t locate, and it was impossible to tell the Skaldi leader from the rest of the blind, groping things. Some lay dead, their bodies charred beyond recognition. Others wriggled frantically away from the advancing line, but the wide arc of the flamethrowers caught them and ignited them with a crackling sound. Dozens, it seemed, would die, cut off from the safety of their nest.

Still, I knew something was wrong.

I turned my eyes upward and saw in the flamethrowers’ glow many more pale bodies scaling the spire. Some had already vanished into the inky darkness at the nest’s peak. In a couple minutes of slow, painful climbing, the others would reach the top, well beyond range of the flamethrowers, and would be able to secrete themselves in their nest once more.

Laman’s words rang in my ears.

Let none escape
.

And I knew what he meant. He was determined to end it tonight.

I didn’t want to leave Keely. I’d been watching him only a day, but already it seemed I’d had him with me a lifetime. And I didn’t want to go back out there. I felt weak, dizzy, sick at heart and sick at soul. All I wanted was to curl up inside my hiding place and let the others finish the job.

But I knew if I didn’t do something, the creatures would escape. And I knew I couldn’t abandon my colony, not again, not now.

I knew the time had come.

I braced my hands on the crumbling lip of the pit and vaulted into the open. As soon as I did, I realized some of the bodies at my feet weren’t Skaldi but my own people, burned by their fellow colonists to destroy the monsters that had tried to camouflage themselves with human forms. They’d been caught at all stages of the transformation, gray-white bodies with human faces, human bodies with gaping scars running their length. I didn’t stop to identify the dead. I ran toward the row of attackers, waving my arms, trying to make myself heard above the din of battle.

“The nest!” I shouted. “Don’t let them reach the nest!”

No one turned. They continued to march in a mechanical line toward the retreating creatures, while the main body of Skaldi crawled nearer and nearer to safety.

More decoys, I realized. Sacrifices. Driven by the silent command of their leader, the Skaldi on the ground would forfeit their lives to allow the others to escape.

And if they did, their colony would win.

“The nest!” I shouted hoarsely. “They’re getting away!”

No response came from the attackers. I stumbled with the effort to increase my speed, but I knew I was too late.

Then a hand gripped my arm and I turned to look into Laman Genn’s eyes.

“Let’s finish this now,” he said.

He raised his walkie-talkie, spoke a few quiet words. I didn’t hear the response, but he nodded as if satisfied.

“Petra’s on it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“What is she—?”

“We’ll wait for her to report back.” Then he took my arm and, leaning heavily on a stick carved in the shape of a crutch, led me away from the noise and flames.

We stopped at the edge of the pit. To my relief, Keely’s sleeping body lay where I’d left him. Laman said nothing for a long moment, just stood looking at me with keen but weary eyes. His face in the firelight was grimier than I’d ever seen, his hair and beard like that of a man who’d emerged from a lifetime in the desert. Which, I guess, he had.

Finally he broke the silence. “Their own tunnel,” he said, indicating the pit. “Good to finally use one against them.”

I saw then that the hole where Keely lay gave way to other holes, branches beneath the surface, snaking in every direction. “That’s how they were getting around?”

He nodded. “Explains a lot. The surprise attacks, their ability to evade our sentries. How they made it appear as if they were everywhere, even to an experienced scout like Petra. They were right under our feet the whole time.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“The crater,” he confirmed. “That’s how it got in that night.” The lines around his eyes bunched with pain. “If only I’d figured it out sooner.”

I felt my throat tighten. “You can’t know everything.”

“Huh.” He averted his eyes, scratched the tangled mop of his hair. “You noticed.”

“It was Yov,” I said. “The Skaldi that led me here. The one that attacked me before. It was in our colony from the start. It summoned the one that killed Korah.”

His face registered less surprise than I expected. “It’s over now,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Querry,” he said, and I saw him reach toward me.

That’s when the world shook with a muffled concussion, accompanied by a brilliant glare that threw our shadows into the far reaches of the night. We both spun, me a second before him. I saw the Skaldi nest blazing like a huge, grotesque candle. The fire shot high into the night, revealing for a moment the pale bodies of the creatures clinging to its sides.

Then another booming noise issued from deep within the nest, and I watched the black obelisk explode into fragments. Or I didn’t watch. It happened too fast to watch. One second the spire stood there, the next chunks of fiery rock hailed around us and a pile of flaming rubble marked the spot where the nest had been. The forms of our companions still showed where they’d marched away from the nest, but the bodies that had clung to the nest were gone.

Laman frowned. He stared at his walkie-talkie. Then recognition lit his eyes.

“Petra!” he breathed, and began limping toward the remains of the nest.

He didn’t make it. A black figure rose from the ground and launched itself at him. For a second my mind went blank. The thing struck Laman full in the chest and sent him sprawling, his crutch flying beyond his grasp.

I realized it was the Skaldi leader, charred and smoking but not dead. It rose above the helpless form of Laman Genn, its voracious mouth opening to consume him.

I had no time to think. As its jaws closed over Laman’s body I threw myself at it, gripped its smoldering flesh and pulled with all my strength. My hands burned, waves of dizziness and nausea washed over me. But the creature, whether surprised by my assault or weakened by its own injuries, fell from its victim and rolled to the ground with me underneath. I could see nothing except its dark shape, but a hot liquid that had to be blood bathed my face and hands.

I rolled to the side, trying to throw it from me. My hand struck something on the ground, something small and smooth with marks like gashes along its surface. I gripped it, flicked it open, stabbed blindly upward. I felt my fist tear through the creature’s chest, felt its body shudder. But still I remained trapped beneath it, unable to free myself.

Its breath hissed. Its body burned. Its maw was the darkness I could see, the darkness that covered the whole world. I struggled to keep from falling into that pit.

But I couldn’t hold on, and the darkness closed around me.

19

Ghost

My eyes opened to a colorless dawn.

Daylight spilled in its queasy way over the world, illuminating an area of blighted ground and scrubby brush. I lay on my back with a rolled-up blanket beneath my head. Another wrap, equally threadbare, covered my legs. My hands, resting on the blanket, were swaddled in rags that did little to ease the burning pain in my palms. A hilltop rose in the distance, not the one I’d descended with Keely the day before. The air, though, hung thick with the smell of burning. Either the downed pillar was nearby or I’d carried the odor with me on my skin.

I lifted my head to look around, and instantly regretted it. A headache the size and shape of a fist connected with my temple, my eyes popping with pain. Nausea coiled through my stomach, my vision blurred. The morning I’d woken after the attack six months ago had been better than this. Then, I’d had no memory. Now, I felt like I had no strength, and no will either.

But I had to find out what had happened, what had become of Keely and Petra and Laman and the others. Had they lived or died? Had we won, truly won, or only gotten away, escaped with fewer and fewer of us left, like always?

Gritting my teeth, I kicked the blanket aside, lifted myself to one knee, and stood. My head and stomach protested, but my legs held. I took a couple hesitant steps, heard the blood pounding in my ears. That was the only sound I heard. I tilted my head delicately to listen for a human presence, but the world rested as still and dead as dust. If anyone had survived the battle, if they’d bound my wounds and carried me to this place, they’d left me to fend for myself.

But as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I knew it was wrong. They wouldn’t leave me. I was the one who’d left them, but they had followed. Followed me right into the worst place I could imagine. They had fought for me there. Died for me there.

They weren’t going to leave me. The question was, was I going to leave them?

I jumped at the sound of footsteps. Moving that fast made lights dance in front of my eyes. I staggered, almost fell, then felt a strong arm catch me and hold me up.

“Good morning, Querry,” a voice said. It was Aleka’s.

I searched her somber face. In the short time since I’d left camp, she seemed to have aged, becoming thinner, the lines of her face starker, her pale eyes larger in their dark sockets. The gray depths of those eyes held a well of pain. But as she looked at me, the whisper of a smile I’d seen on her lips surfaced again. She looked both worried and relieved, sorrowful and glad.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

She didn’t answer, just gripped my arm and guided me along with her. The look on her face never changed.

We passed more empty waste, the stub of a tree, the husks of vegetation past. My head and hands throbbed, the aroma of burning lingered in my nostrils. Then a familiar scent cut through the burning, the greasy smell of water. I realized we were near the river once more.

The camp had followed, what was left of it. Maybe fifteen people, adults and children, sprawled by the riverbank, faces and uniforms darkened by the night’s fires. With relief, I saw that all the little kids had survived, Keely included. He looked at me as we walked by, and I tried to see in his dreamy eyes if any memory of the nest remained with him. Others, grown-ups and teens, roused themselves from their reclining positions and stared at me as we passed. I looked around for Petra, but her short, stocky frame was nowhere to be seen. Neither were the tangled hair and knotted beard of her commander. Fear clutched me, and I turned to Aleka.

“Petra,” I began.

“Petra’s gone,” she said. “She was the one who destroyed the nest. From within.”

“Then she . . .”

“Yes,” she said. “She must have been hanging on to explosives all this time, waiting for her moment. No one but Laman knew, and he swears she said she’d get clear before the charges went off. But I think she never forgave herself for what happened to Danis. And I guess she decided to handle it her own way.”

“Laman’s alive?”

She nodded. “But he’s lost a terrible amount of blood. The Skaldi that attacked him—”

“Was Yov,” I said. “It was the same one that attacked me.”

She nodded again, her lips and throat tightening with pain.

“Yov,” I stammered, “I mean, the Skaldi—it told me you were . . .”

She said nothing, just met my questioning look with a solemn, steady gaze.

“Is it true?” I asked.

“The Skaldi lied about many things,” she said gently. “But not about that.”

A warmth spread through me as I regarded my forgotten mother. I stood awkwardly, not knowing whether to smile, shake her hand, throw my arms around her. But in a private place in my heart, the sting of betrayal kept my hands at my sides. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was the only way,” she said. “The only way I knew to ensure our safety. When we joined Laman’s colony, I had no idea who I could trust. Out of desperation I’d told him about the attack, and it was obvious he was captivated. I sensed that if he knew you were my son, it could cause trouble.” The somber smile touched her lips once more. “Call it a mother’s intuition. So I agreed to participate in his deception as a condition of our joining the colony, and I kept to myself the truth about the boy he insisted on claiming as his own.”

“You lied to him too,” I said, not angrily. I was just amazed to hear that there were secrets Laman Genn hadn’t known.

She reached out and touched my face as she’d done the morning we rescued him. Her fingers felt rough as if with years of accumulated scars, but their touch was warm. “The commander of a survival colony does what she must for the good of her people.”

I smiled, even though what I had to ask her next filled me with fear. “And my—my dad,” I said. “My real dad. Mine and Yov’s. You said that he . . .”

“Is gone,” she said softly. Her hand cupped to fit the curve of my chin. “There will be a chance to talk about him later. About him, and many other things. But there’s only one place you need to be right now. And there’s very little time.”

At her words a chasm opened inside me, cold and empty. But I nodded, looked once more into her eyes. They were gray as clouded moons, deep as water, eyes that shone with a mixture of intensity and sorrow. I reached up and held her hand against my cheek.

“Yov had your eyes,” I said.

She tried to smile. “Both my boys did.”

She squeezed my hand, and the eyes we shared brightened with tears.

We walked on, through the shell-shocked camp, to the bank of the river. Everyone stared, but no one spoke, no one stood in our way. They all knew where we needed to go.

He lay by the water’s edge, so pale and thin I thought he was already gone. His shirt and jacket were missing, and bloody stripes crisscrossed his chest and shoulders. For some reason his hair and beard had been shaved, showing even more clearly the hooked nose, gaunt cheeks, and wide, grim mouth of the man who had called himself my father. As I neared I saw that the crown of his head and his deeply corded neck were laced with gashes from the Skaldi’s bite. Tyris knelt by his side, patting his wounds with a rag reddened by his own blood, while he stared placidly at the empty sky.

His eyes moved when our shadows fell on him, and his lips cracked in a soft smile, a natural smile that chased some of the deathly pallor from his face.

“I’ve brought you a visitor, Laman,” Aleka said.

“No one I’d rather see,” he said weakly. “How are you, Querry?”

“I’m okay,” I said, catching myself before I added, “Dad.”

“Have a seat,” he said in the same thin voice, waving feebly at the ground beside him. The skin of his hand barely clothed the bones beneath. “You can go now,” he said, his words meant either for Tyris or Aleka. Both left, Aleka squeezing my arm one last time before she climbed the bank and was gone.

I sat by his side. With Tyris no longer hovering over him, I could see that the slash marks were the least of his injuries. A thick bundle of cloth packed his stomach, soaked through with bright red. Tyris had no way to stop the bleeding, no way to repair the damage. The creature had torn a hole in him, and his life was ebbing away.

I didn’t want to waste what little time we had left. I tried to focus on the most important things I needed to say. But exhaustion and grief clogged my thoughts, and the first thing that came to mind tumbled from my lips.

“Are they gone?” I asked. “The Skaldi?”

“I wish I knew.” His voice, low and thready, carried a measured cadence. “Did Petra destroy
the
nest, or only
a
nest? But I have no way of answering that. I still know so little about them.”

“What about—the one that attacked you?”

“Gone,” he said. “Aleka had her flamethrower trained on it the whole time. You stabbed it with a blade, and that seems to have knocked the fight out of it. It struggled with you briefly then fell away, and she torched it.”

I tried to imagine Aleka burning the body of the creature that had murdered her firstborn son. “Did you know it was Yov?”

“I knew Yov lay behind the unrest in camp,” he said. “But I didn’t know the real reason until last night. And there was little I could do in any event, because of Aleka.”

“You had him watched.”

He winced at a sudden pain. “Korah,” he said, his teeth gritted as if to trap what remained of his strength. “She kept an eye on him. And you. In case of trouble.”

I thought again of bodies burning, this time not Yov’s but Korah’s. “You assigned her to watch us?”

“She volunteered,” he said sorrowfully. “Insisted. When it became evident the strain was wearing on her, I relieved her of her duty. That didn’t sit well with her, as you can imagine.”

I remembered our conversation by the pool, her squabbles with Yov and Wali, her anger at me. Or at Laman. I remembered the kiss we’d almost shared, before the creature took her. I wished I’d known what she was going through. “So Wali took over . . .”

“But by then it was too late,” he said. “The camp was lost, and any word I said against Yov would have imperiled us both. I did try to warn you, but . . .” His shoulders lifted incrementally.

“You tried to warn me?”

His head moved in a fraction of a nod.

“When?”

He said nothing for a long time, seeming to gather himself inwardly. At last his chest settled into a calmer but shallower rhythm. “That night,” he said. “After they took the camp.”

My thoughts felt as thick as mud. All the days and nights flowed together in a single litany of sorrow. Then it came to me. “The sign you made. Not
V
but
Y
.
Y
for Yov. Focus on Yov.”

“It was all I could think of,” he sighed. “I knew by then that Yov was the ringleader, Araz only the figurehead. I suspected he’d been responsible for the truck, the tracks at the shelter. I even wondered if, somehow, he’d been consorting with the Skaldi. I thought if you watched him you might figure it out. As it happened, there was no time for that. The creature kept us all in the dark. It was more powerful than anything we’ve encountered.”

I nodded, but impatience gnawed at me. His breath moved like a shadow, faint and uncertain. I felt it could flee at any moment. And there was still so much I needed to know.

“He—the creature spoke of the Skaldi as if they were a colony,” I said. “A colony with him as its commander. It said they—he—learned about us from me and Yov. And then he passed that knowledge to the others.”

Laman’s chest rose in a long, slow, rattling sigh. I feared the strength had left him for good. But then his eyes sharpened on my face, and even without hair and beard he looked like the man I’d known, the man I’d thought I’d known.

“There’s still a lot we don’t understand, Querry,” he said. “A lot where all we’re going on is speculation. Maybe this one was unique, something new. An evolved form. Its longevity suggests that. As does its unusual power of mimicry.”

I nodded, wondering how much he’d seen last night. But I held my words as he continued.

“But the other way of looking at this is that its power came
from
you. From the attack that robbed you of your memory. If it’s true the Skaldi acquire the attributes of their victims, it would stand to reason that it gained some of your power during that attack. Had it finished the job, there’s no telling how potent it might have become. But thankfully, the same power prevented it from doing so. And if I were a gambling man,” he said with a slight smile, “I’d bet that’s because you’re an evolved form too.”

I ignored his final words. I just wasn’t ready to go there. “And now it’s gone.”

His smile faded, and he nodded.

“Along with my memory?”

His eyes closed for a long minute. I noticed how thin his eyelids looked, like scraps of peeling bark. When he looked at me again the orbs seemed to have retreated deep into his skull. “I wish I had an answer for you, Querry,” he said. “I truly do.”

You must
, I thought desperately.
If not you, then who?
“How will I know?” I blurted.

“Know?”

“
Know
.” I struggled to find the words. “Know if I’m the one to blame for—everything. If it learned from me, got its power from me, then isn’t it my fault? Aren’t I the one who taught them how to think like us, trick us, trap us? You say it was an evolved form. But that means it evolved from
me
.” I swallowed hard, feeling the bitterness of grief rising in my throat. “How will I know if it was me?”

His faraway eyes gave me a long, searching look, the kind I remembered from before I learned the truth. Before any of the things happened that had torn apart the world I thought I knew. “Querry,” he said, “you can’t live your life regretting what you can’t change.”

I hung my head so he wouldn’t see the tears start in my eyes.

“It wasn’t you who did this to us,” he said. “You tried to warn me that night at the compound, but I wouldn’t listen. I knew you were right, but—I fell in love with that ruined fortress. It reminded me of a place I barely remembered, a place I knew long ago. I couldn’t bear to give it up. And so we lost Korah, and the colony was shattered, and now . . .” His voice broke with the remembrance. “It wasn’t you, Querry. It was me. It was everyone.”