Survival Colony 9 (5 page)

I knew sleep would be a long time coming. Another night of questions that had no answers lay ahead of me, without the company of a single sound or soul.

4

Rust

The next morning, we found tracks leading from the bomb shelter.

Human tracks. Not that that meant much. Skaldi make human tracks with whatever body they happen to steal.

But whoever or whatever had made these tracks hadn’t wanted to be identified by boot size or markings, because they’d gone barefoot. The prints got smudged and vanished into the dust about twenty paces from the shelter, so there was no way to tell where they’d come from or gone to. Maybe Petra could have figured it out. But none of the other scouts could.

The sentries swore they’d seen no one. Since my dad hadn’t posted any of them at the emptied shelter, that made sense. Still, he took the whole group into his headquarters with Aleka and the other officers, leaving one officer to stand watch at the front door. I got as close as the guard would let me, but I heard nothing.

Korah stood nearby, her upper lip in her teeth. Somehow, on her, that didn’t look bad at all.

“Why would anyone go back?” I asked her.

She jumped as if she’d just come out of a trance. Then she smiled. “They must have been hoping to filch extra rations.”

I was about to ask her who in camp was stupid enough not to know we’d cleaned the place out, but then I remembered who I was talking to. “He’s checking them, isn’t he?” I said. “To see if they’re infected?”

She shot me a look, and I thought I saw a flash of fear in her eyes. But before I could say anything else, Wali swaggered over. I swear the guy had a homing device on me. He took Korah’s arm, flexed every muscle in his body, and walked away.

An hour later the sentries came out, their shaken expressions making me glad I wasn’t them. A smear of blood crossed one of the men’s cheeks.

My dad appeared at their rear. His face revealed nothing.

“Let’s go, people,” he said. “Show’s over. Time to get to work.”

“Laman,” Aleka said. “Quarantine procedures.”

Everyone froze. My dad had told me about quarantine. It meant subjecting every person in camp to the trials, no exceptions. Risky, because the results weren’t always reliable. False positive, you torch one of your friends. False negative, you relax your guard. Normally, he’d told me, you put quarantine into effect only when you had a very good reason to suspect a breach.

“Laman?” Aleka repeated.

My dad must not have thought this was one of those occasions, because he didn’t even bother to respond.

“Querry,” he called. “Seems like you’ve got time on your hands. How about helping us out over here?”

We left Aleka standing there, a frown on her thin lips.

I spent the rest of the morning shoveling.

The location of our new camp might not have made us more vulnerable to Skaldi. I guess it depended on who you asked. But there was no doubt it made us vulnerable to a different kind of enemy: dust. Perched on the highest spot for miles, with only our flimsy fence as a windbreak, it had gotten pummeled by a dust storm that blew through overnight. I guess my dad should have foreseen that possibility the day we arrived, what with dust choking the empty swimming pools and painting miniature sand dunes up walls and foundations. Maybe he had, but he’d decided that was worth the risk, too. When daybreak revealed the dust piled on everything, coating our trucks, our equipment, our clothes, I’m not sure everyone agreed.

The strange thing for me was that I’d hardly noticed the dust accumulating while I lay half-awake those long hours before dawn. I’d heard the wind blow and felt the tickle on my cheek. But when I joined the work detail and discovered our supplies buried, I couldn’t believe it had all materialized in a single night. I guess it was something like the snowstorms the old woman had told me about, from the time when there still was snow. Overnight squalls that blanketed the world in white. People dreamed about it, she said. Prayed for it. Kids pressed their faces against frosty windowpanes and stared through the steam of their own breath at the sparkling shroud. Why they were so excited about seeing their world erased I don’t know.

But then, this was the woman who wouldn’t tell anyone in camp her own name, so I’m not sure I believed her until I waded through the brown powder that had obliterated everything we owned in a single night.

The shoveling took forever. We didn’t have nearly enough tools to go around, and the ones we did have were in lousy shape. Shovels, picks, crowbars with broken handles, blades bent and brittle. The adults hogged what we had, so we teens dropped to our knees and did the best we could with our bare hands. Over and over, I scooped the ground into my raw palms, carried it up the stairs, dumped it someplace else. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that meant we’d be doing the same thing tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. Yov vented his frustration by shouldering me out of the way whenever we crossed paths. He was the last guy I would have asked about our nighttime prowler, but my dad stood watch through the whole operation, so I wouldn’t have had a chance even if I’d wanted to.

We managed to clean out the basement before the sun got high. We also moved our equipment around, transferring it to the corner that seemed best protected from the wind. But the area of the compound just east of the central crater, where we’d set up our sleeping quarters, still swam under a sea of dust.

“We could shift the trucks,” one of the officers suggested. “Create a windbreak.”

To my surprise, my dad agreed. If it had been a matter of moving the trucks more than a couple hundred yards, I’m sure he would have said no.

The drivers jumped into the trucks and started the engines. Two motors churned to life, two puffs of black smoke chugged from tailpipes. Two of the three trucks crept forward. Aleka and my dad stood in front to direct the drivers where to pull in.

That’s when I noticed that the command truck, the one my dad always rode in, hadn’t moved. It hadn’t even started. Araz sat hunched over in the cab, doing something I couldn’t see. His head bobbed out of sight for a second, rose back into view. He rolled down the window and gestured for my dad.

“We’ve got trouble, Laman,” he said.

He lowered his bulk from the cab as my dad limped over. The two of them poked around under the hood for a couple minutes, then Araz swore. I strained to hear the rest of their hushed conversation, but I couldn’t make anything out. Araz kept pointing at the truck, then at my dad, his face contorted and his lips moving nonstop. Finally he slammed the hood down and stomped away, wiping greasy hands on his already filthy pants.

“Get back here, Araz,” my dad called.

Araz kept on walking. My dad was left standing by the truck, his face calm but his eyes stormy. In a minute the hollow clatter of propane tanks echoed from the storage basement. Aleka slipped away, I guess to stop Araz before he blew something up.

I took a step toward the truck. “Dad?”

“Where’s Mika?” he said, talking not to me but to the group, or maybe to himself.

Korah’s mom, the black hair she shared with her daughter cut short over her ears, separated herself from the crowd and approached him.

“Distributor cap,” he said, and she winced.

“Everything checked out fine last week,” she said.

“It’s cracked,” he said. “Can it be replaced?” He corrected himself. “Fixed?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

She lifted the hood and quickly confirmed the diagnosis. Heat, dust, rough terrain, or just age, she couldn’t tell. Whether it could be fixed she refused to say. But there was nothing like a replacement part, unless somewhere out in the desert we stumbled across an abandoned auto supply store that hadn’t been smashed to pieces or ransacked by colonies past. The trucks were old, no one knew how old. Soldiers had probably driven them to the wars that swept away the old world. There’d been three times as many when he was a boy, my dad had told me, enough for everyone to ride in with room to spare. But one by one they’d died, lost working parts, developed flat tires that couldn’t be patched, and one by one they’d been left to litter the landscape. We’d circled past one a couple months ago, found it axle-deep in dust like it was being devoured by the hungry land.

People in camp exchanged nervous glances. With three trucks, we could barely squeak by. If we’d had only two the night the Skaldi attacked us, not all of us would be standing here.

And after two, one. And after one . . . what?

The thought of sabotage jumped into my head. I tried to catch people’s eyes, but no one would look at me. If a vandal had left any tracks, the dust storm had erased them. The idea that someone would actually disable one of our last vehicles made my stomach twist, but I wondered if the thought had passed through anyone else’s mind too.

A crowd watched in stony silence as Mika got to work. She rechecked under the hood, crawled beneath the chassis with a flashlight in her teeth, as if she might spot some miracle hidden from view that would cancel out the one thing that was obviously wrong. Araz wandered over to take a look at her progress once he’d finished beating up on propane tanks.

“Give it a rest, Mika,” he said laconically, leaning against the hood. “I’ve been over all that.”

She pulled herself from under the truck. “Unless you’re here to help,” she said, “why don’t you go find something else to do?”

Araz kicked a tire. “Such as?”

“Be creative, Araz.” She ducked back under the truck, her tools banging away. “Take a nap. Torture puppies. Just get the hell out of my hair.”

Araz spat on the ground and sauntered off, hands in his pockets. My dad watched him go and, for once, said nothing.

But he wasn’t letting the rest of us off the hook that easy.

“What are we waiting for, people?” he said to the group of loiterers who stood there listening to the muffled clatter of Mika’s tools. “Let’s move.”

He pulled the sentries to patrol the compound, assigned a couple teens to keep an eye on the little kids. While Korah stayed with her mom to work on the truck, Aleka and a couple officers gathered the rest of us and we trooped back to the sleeping quarters. She told us to empty our rucksacks and lay the contents on the ground. If the truck couldn’t be fixed, we’d need room to carry more supplies in our packs. Yov grumbled, but he hauled out his pack along with me and the other teens. The grown-ups simply stood there in stunned silence.

“Everything?” one of them said at last.

“Everything,” Aleka said flatly.

I watched as people stooped over their packs and shakily began removing items. For the first time ever, I was glad not to have anything from my past.

Because frankly, it was pathetic. I’d always assumed everyone carried pretty much the same supplies I did: rope, blankets, bandages, utensils, cot, tent, all the stuff our colony needed to survive. And they did carry those things, but that wasn’t all. The desert, it seems, wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. It constantly spit up discards from the time before. And now here it lay, junk someone else hadn’t had the time or heart to bury, scavenged on the road by one of the adults from Survival Colony 9 and hoarded for a day, a decade, a lifetime.

It was only the grown-ups. Yov and the other teens’ packs were as clean as mine.

One man pulled out a framed painting of a tall, slim tower with a light on top, standing by the kind of coastline I could hardly believe had ever existed: dark blue water, lush green trees, pale pink and purple clouds. The glass had chipped away and the frame was splintered and cockeyed, but the guy stared at the image as if mesmerized. Someone else had a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing, another had a pair with the frames completely empty. Practically everyone had palm-size flat screens that had once been phones, but now their batteries and the networks that used to carry their signals and the people who used to receive their calls were all dead. One guy even had a computer that opened like a book, its screen as blank as the phones. A woman produced our only picture book, the one about the mother and baby bunny, its spine cracked and its last few thick cardboard pages torn out, so it was anyone’s guess if the mother bunny ever came back or not. Another woman unwrapped a dirty rag from a foot-long stick with a fake gold ball on top of it. An old flag, possibly, though too faded and shredded by now to know which country someone had waved it for. A man had scavenged a dirty pink shoe, nubby on top and with cracked leather on the sole and toe, that didn’t look like it would fit anyone with a normal-size foot. A woman had found a plastic baby doll head, dotted with holes where I guess it used to have hair, and when she pulled it from her pack and laid it on the ground, miniature eyelids closed over empty sockets with a tiny click. Then there was the ceramic handle of what might once have been a mug. A hinged, cracked plastic case. A small paper pouch with a picture of a lumpy orange vegetable growing from a twisting green vine. The scarred remains of a piece of thick rubber, with two raised letters on it:
M-E
.

And that was just the beginning. It was unbelievable, the stuff that came out of those packs and lay spoiled and rotten in the desert dust.

And it was all worthless. The mug handle you could maybe use as a weapon or a scraper. The doll’s head would have been a water container if not for the holes. A few other odds and ends might be salvageable. But everything else was an obvious, total loss.

“What about these?” an officer said, snatching a collection jar from one of the camp’s chief crazies. Its owner stiffened, eyeing the clouded jar half-full of his own hair and clippings.

Aleka cocked her head. “I’ll have to double-check with Laman.”

“Take your time.” Yov smiled as she headed off to find my dad. “It’ll give me and Space Boy a chance to catch up.” He nudged me with an elbow. “Now, where were we?”

An uneasy murmur passed through the grown-ups once Aleka was gone. My dad had never made a stink about people’s jars in the past, so long as their owners didn’t slack off in their other duties. It was weird, considering that the few people who used them washed away what they’d collected every time they had a chance, but they clung to those containers like they actually held their bodies. The craziest of the bunch, the old woman who’d told me about snowstorms though she wouldn’t tell anyone her own name, didn’t use a jar herself. But she still carried her dead husband’s, a jug-size container filled to overflowing with black hair despite the fact that the hair on her head had long since turned white. He’d died twenty years ago, Korah told me, but she wouldn’t give it up. She held it, cradled it, rubbed its side, mumbled to it all day long. What she would do if it ever broke I had no idea.