The Colony: Descent Read Online Free PDF Page A

her
face.  He knew in his deepest heart that she wasn’t really angry at him ,
any more than he was angry at Aaron or Christopher or God or anyone else for
what was happening.
    Sometimes, we just
needed a face to hate.
    Sometimes, the face
we hated just happened to be the closest one to our hearts.
    “What?” she said.
    “Liz,” he said.  It
was all he needed to say.
    Maggie looked
down.  She gasped.  A tiny inhale that threaded its way between the omnipresent tictictic of insects crashing their way to the windows, clinging to one
another’s backs and legs and heads.  A hand went to her mouth.
    “What…?”  Ken heard
Dorcas behind him, could almost hear her craning to see what was happening.
    “I don’t know.”  He
looked at the windows.  Black holes in the red/gray shimmer of the fire and
smoke that had enveloped their existence.  The smoke wrapped around the still
forms of the dead, making them seem less like corpses and more like an audience
in the world’s most macabre theater.  The shifting clouds of dark fog created
the illusion of motion, and the change of light as the fire moved from place to
place caused subtle shifts in shadow that heightened the hallucinatory effect.
    Maggie shook Liz. 
Only a moment before they had all been praying that the toddler would stop
shouting, stop moving, stop doing whatever it was that called the creatures to
them.
    Now, suddenly, Ken
could feel the company lean toward Maggie, and could feel them trying to
rescind that prayer.
    Liz wasn’t moving. 
Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, only whites showing.  Her head tilted
back, her mouth open.
    The rest of her
hung limp.
    “What is it?”  Buck
looked at Hope.  The little girl was still unconscious.  Then he looked left
and right at the dark holes, like black eyes that had once been windows. 
“What’s happening?”
    Tic. 
Tictictictic….
    Ken had been
concussed.  Bruised, beaten, maimed.  He had also had most of his back burnt in
an explosion.  So he had no small hairs on the back of his neck.  Still, he
felt the muscles there tighten.  A twitching, trembling, more civilized and
less developed version of the early-warning system that sent feral animals
howling out of the forest mere moments before the earthquake, the hurricane.
    He looked at the
buzzing darkness at the windows.  The dead bodies like visions of the future
come to claim them all.
    “Something’s
coming,” he said.

  11
     
     
    Everyone kept
moving forward.
    There was nothing
else to do.  They couldn’t go back – there were Heaven-only-knew how many
zombies behind them.  Couldn’t go sideways.  No way out of the airplane.  And
even if they found an emergency exit, Ken didn’t want to be the first one to
venture out into the swarms of insects.  He remembered the people he and Dorcas
had found, people who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the swarms.  Swollen,
bloated beyond recognition.  Only their clothing had identified the remains as
being of human origin.
    Tic-tictictic ….
    Ken realized some
of the sound was coming from inside his head.  Panic sent a bolt of purest ice
through his chest, down his stomach and testicles.
    It’s happening
to me.  I’m changing .
    Then he realized
the sound was his teeth.  Clicking.  Chattering in terror and the natural
reaction to all the adrenaline that had saved him… and now threatened to
overcome him.
    Easy .
    Easy .
    Tictictictictic ….
    The floor of the
aisle buckled suddenly after about fifteen feet, humping up and then dropping
off to an even steeper incline.  The group clotted up getting over it.  Ken
felt his skin continue to crawl, drawing tight against his bones and then
letting go explosively, then drawing tight once more, letting go, repeating the
process in an infinite loop that made him feel nauseous.
    Something’s
coming .
    Still, he didn’t
say anything.  Didn’t whisper at Buck or Maggie to hurry, because the last
thing any of them needed was