Survival Colony 9 Read Online Free PDF Page A

dad said to me. “The head was the last thing to go. And I’ll swear it still had that half-smile on its face.”
    Leeches, he calls them. Soul-suckers. Others call them a whole lot worse.
    No one knows how they do what they do. How they mimic the people they infect, why they use up bodies so fast. You’d think after a half-century of being hunted by them we’d have a better idea of what we’re up against, but the sad truth is, we’re no closer than we ever were. No one knows how many of them there are, why they tend to attack singly, why their attacks have always come from the west. I’ve heard that the cities, what’s left of them, are overrun by Skaldi, and that’s why the colonies fled to the desert fifty years ago. But it’s all rumor. No one’s ever seen Skaldi outside the bodies they steal, or at least no one’s ever lived to tell the tale. No one even knows how they got their name. They’ve always been called Skaldi, and I don’t think anyone’s ever figured out where the word came from.
    And no one knows where they came from, either. The first anyone heard of them was after the wars, when the survival colonies had newly come into existence. Once the colonists realized the Skaldi were among them, their task—rebuilding civilization—turned into something a lot less lofty: staying alive. Everyone has a theory of Skaldi origins. Radiation, evolution, outer space. But no one knows.
    All anyone knows is that they’re here.
    *    *    *
    When the missing scouts straggled into camp, I was still in bed. Not sleeping, just lying there, running over lists in my head. Trying to fill in the blanks. I knew I should be up, I knew I needed to set an example. I also knew that with my dad a fine line existed between toleration and fury. But it was one of my few moments to be completely by myself, and I wasn’t willing to lose it.
    This morning, though, it wasn’t going to happen. The scouts were too beat to go back out, and we needed to investigate our new surroundings. We’d never been this far west, not that I could remember, and Korah confirmed what my memory couldn’t. We’d seen no signs of Skaldi at our new camp, but that was like saying we’d seen no signs of air. Some things you don’t need to see.
    So while the scouts dozed in the tents, me and the rest of the teens went out on recon. In the company of grown-ups, of course. Not that it’s all that dangerous in the daytime. The Skaldi mostly come out at night. Aside from the obvious advantage darkness gives them, Tyris thinks the light hurts their skin and eyes. Something about what they do to the bodies they steal makes their flesh burn easily, she thinks. But she and Soon took along flamethrowers just in case, and Aleka carried one of our four functioning walkie-talkies. Before we left, she sat us down for a lecture.
    “We have no idea what’s in this sector,” she said. “If anyone steps out of line, Laman will hear of it.”
    “I’m quaking in my boots,” Yov muttered. Aleka glared but said nothing.
    Tyris and Soon went up ahead with the main body of teenagers, and I pretty much stuck with Aleka. At first I expected an environment totally unlike anything I’d seen—canyons, prairies, I didn’t know what—but it turned out the land didn’t look so different from what we were used to, except the east-west road had vanished into the dust. Bombed, probably. The desert undulated a little like waves, but other than that it was as bare and blank as ever. Once the tents and trucks disappeared into the heat haze, I had the feeling I always got out in the field, like I was a thousand miles from where I’d begun. I’d turn around and in the time it took to turn back, I’d need to use the sun to orient myself. Every once in a while I’d see Wali or Korah glance back, as if they were checking up on me. Wali wasn’t so bad, I’d gotten used to him looking at me coolly, like I was inside a jar. With Korah it was different. My heart