Survival Colony 9 Read Online Free PDF Page B

earlier ones that had started rebuilding before the Skaldi killed them off or forced them to run. But Aleka said no survival colony would have built houses that large. And she was right, they dominated the landscape, a cluster of them standing stark against the lowering sky. Our boots struck clumps of something black, the remains of a road.
    We climbed to the crest and surveyed what was left. The buildings the road had once led to consisted of nothing but shells, uprights and crossbeams without roofs or floors, cracked patios and walkways surrounded by acres of emptiness. Beside some of them, deep rectangular holes had been carved into the ground, holes now filled with hills and valleys of dust like subterranean sand dunes. Those used to be swimming pools, Aleka speculated. Whatever had leveled this place had made a crater in the center, and she pointed out how the shockwave had flattened the buildings in a circle outward from that point. But we found plenty of usable stone from collapsed walls, plus broken stretches of metal fence with tall, sharp points in a perimeter around the entire compound. Aleka suggested, haltingly, that this must have been a gated community, built by rich people far from the cities for protection. All I could think was, they’d thrown away a lot of money to construct their own cemetery.
    Yov voiced my thought. “What were they trying to keep out?” he scoffed. “Dust?”
    “Laman will want to know about this,” Aleka said.
    She called base on her walkie-talkie. After a few minutes of silence followed by a few minutes of crackly talk, to which she gave short replies like “seems to be” and “nothing obvious,” she announced, “They’re coming.”
    We sat in the shadows of the houses to wait. The sun had climbed to midday, and looking out over the land was like squinting through rippling ribbons of heat. I squeezed my empty stomach to keep it from growling. No one talked.
    A half hour later I saw the trucks inching across the plain, clouds of dust billowing behind them. My dad must have been impressed by what Aleka told him if he was willing to relocate camp so shortly after we’d moved. He’d told me a hundred times: fuel was like blood. Only more precious.
    The trucks crawled up the hill, coughing and wheezing, pulled up on bare dirt, and stopped with a squeal. My dad, moving faster than I’d seen him move in weeks, jumped down from the cab. He took a long look at the place, hands on hips, nodding slowly. Then he turned to us.
    “Who found it?” He directed his question at Aleka, but I could tell he hoped the answer was me.
    “Yov,” she said. “The kid’s got eyes like a hawk.”
    My dad stepped over to Yov and reached up to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. Yov had a calm look on his face, like he was saying, “Hey, just doing my job,” but I knew I’d be hearing about this later. From both of them.
    “Good work,” my dad said.
    Sure enough, Yov looked sidelong at me and smirked.
    “We’ll have to double-check,” my dad said. “Aleka, have your team sweep the perimeter. Querry,” he said, signaling, “get over here.”
    While Aleka and the others fanned out to circle the compound, I accompanied him to the interior, near the crater. For an hour he had me get down on my hands and knees to peer in the dust for signs of Skaldi. He’d taught me how to detect their presence, but it’s not easy. When they leave a body behind, there’s nothing much to see. Emptied, like a sack of skin.
    He kept up a running commentary as I crawled around in the dirt searching for evidence. “It doesn’t have to be much,” he reminded me. “Scraps, flakes. Teeth. Anything they might have left behind.”
    “What about this?” I lifted a long, thin strip of some translucent material from the floor of a ruined house.
    He scrutinized it. “I don’t think so. Bring it back, though. I’ll have Tyris take a look at it.”
    Eventually we came to the very lip of the crater. He considered