The Colony: Descent Read Online Free PDF

for someone to fall at this point.  Not now.
    Tictictic ….
    Teeth or bugs?  He
couldn’t tell anymore.  The sounds had mingled in his mind, bouncing around and
creating a noise that was half alien, half familiar.  The familiarity made it
worse.  Anything fully alien is merely incomprehensible; it is only when mixed
with a modicum of ourselves that we understand it enough to fear it.
    Tictictic ….
    Buck had stepped
over the hump.  Not much, just a six-inch jutting in the floor.  Normally not
even a nuisance, but the big man was treating it with utmost care.
    Tictictic….
    Buck turned and
held out a hand to assist Maggie.  She looked at Liz.  The toddler’s head still
pointed up, her eyes still rolled back so far only pure white showed.  It was
so bright it almost glowed in the brimstone cylinder of the plane cabin.
    Tictictic ….
    Maggie took Buck’s
hand.  She stepped forward.
    Ticticti –
    Silence.
    Everyone stopped
moving.
    Everyone.
    But not every thing .

  12
     
     
    The sounds stopped,
and the silence was almost painful.
    Until that moment,
Ken hadn’t realized how much his world had come to be defined in terms of
noise.
    The sounds of Liz
crying, of Hope and Derek playing.
    Maggie laughing.
    The pervasive tones
of electronic media – beeps and boops and laugh tracks and commercials that
were all just a bit too loud for comfort.  But you didn’t notice after a while,
because even the obnoxious, even the almost-painful became mere background. 
First we notice, then we tolerate, then we embrace, then we forget.  The human
condition as expressed by mass communications.
    Then, after the
change….
    Explosions.
    Screams.
    Shattering bones.
    Breaking glass.
    The growl.
    Give up.
    Give in.
    And just like that,
it was gone.  All of it.  Only the corpse-breath crackle of the flames in the
cabin.
    “You hear that?”
said Buck.
    “Where’d the creeps
go?” said Christopher.
    The growl was
gone.  As though the zombies had, all in an instant, disappeared.
    Ken dared to hope. 
Dared to dream that something might be going, if not right , then at
least less wrong .
    He looked at
Maggie.  Her arms around Liz.
    The toddler’s
eyelids fluttered.  The whites of her eyes, so blaring and bright they almost
glowed, suddenly disappeared as her head slumped forward.
    Brightness streamed
back into the cabin.
    “Wha –“ said
Dorcas.
    Ken looked at the
windows.
    The insects were
falling away.  Letting go.
    Dead?
    No way to tell.  No
way to know without going outside.
    All was silent.
    Just the breath of
the survivors, the crackle of flame.
    Then something shifted .
    Maggie clapped her
hands to her cheeks.  It was a strangely juvenile gesture, the kind of thing
Ken had seen his students do occasionally.
    When Ken saw a high
schooler do it, he tried not to laugh.
    When Maggie did it,
he had to force himself not to scream.  Instead, he turned and looked at what
she was staring at.  He didn’t want to see it, but he knew that avoidance was
the fastest way to die.  The only way to survive this world was to keep your
eyes wide open, watch for danger… and run when you could.
    He saw what she
saw.
    And like Maggie,
Ken did something he would have thought of as cartoonish if he had observed
someone else doing it.
    He rubbed his eyes.
    He did it almost
carefully, scrunching up his one good hand and pressing it against his right
eye, then his left.  Each time adding a quick circular motion as if to remove
whatever grit was causing this vision.
    He opened his eyes.
    And it was still
there.
    The world made less
sense than it had.
    The mere insanity that
had gripped the world was gone, replaced by full-fledged homicidal psychosis.
    Someone cursed.
    Someone else screamed.
    Sound snapped back
to existence, found its way to a place where there was no hope for survival, no
hope for escape.
    Not even in death.
    Because the dead
themselves were moving.

  13
     
     
    The family Ken had
spotted earlier had led to