The Colony: Descent Read Online Free PDF Page B

mixed feelings.  Hope and dread, poignant loss and
melancholy surrender.
    Now he saw them
simply.  They were evil.  Evil in its purest form.
    It was one thing
for people to suddenly change, to turn on one another and become snarling,
biting beasts.  But really, wasn’t that just a small nudge down a slope so many
people already rested on the crest of?  Just a push into a shadowy precipice
over which so much of humanity eagerly lunged of their own accord?
    There was nothing
beautiful about what had happened to this point.  Nothing poetic, nothing
bright –
    ( nothing bright
about Derek being bitten, about blood streaming from his pores, about his eyes
flooding with madness, about his fall to flame )
    – but there was a
trace of nature to it.  The law of the jungle, if only as read through funhouse
lenses crafted by a psychotic artisan.
    This, though….
    The family was
moving.  The dead family.  The mother and father pulled away from one
another, and Ken saw he had been wrong about something.  He had thought the
mother unblemished.  But now he saw - heard – otherwise.  She had
reached to her husband, held his hands and arms as they tried to protect their
child.  Their arms had burnt and mangled together as they crashed, husband and
wife had become one for a moment, in purpose and in body.
    Now their flesh
separated with a sound like shearing ice.  They yanked their arms free from one
another and the sound ripped through the cabin, overpowering the comparatively
slight noise of the flames, rasping ragged holes in Ken’s mind.
    The woman tried to
stand.  She pushed up, then sat back down again with a jerk.  Repeated the
motion.  Ken realized that the sliver of metal he had seen in her chest must
have pinned her to the seat, maybe to the wall of the cabin.
    Her mouth opened,
her face wrinkling in rage.  But she didn’t speak.  Didn’t cry out.  No sound
at all.
    The zombies, the
things that had changed from live people to… whatever they now were… were
almost constantly vocalizing.  But this was something else.  As though when
life had left this woman, so had her voice.  And not even the power that had
reanimated her sufficed to give her the semblance of speech.
    She kept trying to
stand.  Kept falling back to the seat.  Ken could see the shaft in her breast
wiggling to and fro.  It didn’t seem to bother her, and little blood came
forth.
    It’s already
pooled in her feet by now .
    A dull thud.  Ken’s
eyes flicked over.
    The husband.
    He had pulled
himself free of the seat.  But Ken had been wrong in his previous assessment of
the husband’s injuries as well: the tray table hadn’t nearly cut the man
in half.
    The top portion of
the man slid to the aisle.  He fell on his back.  The dark gray of his spine
trailed out of the sudden terminus of his body.  Entrails flopped out in
looping masses.
    Again, not much
blood.
    Again, no sound at
all.
    The man’s face was
oriented away from the survivors.  But he began working his way around, clearly
trying to face them.
    Ken had no
illusions about what the thing’s intentions were.
    More movement.
    Ken looked back. 
Halfway between the still-pinned woman and the twitch-dancing feet of the man.
    Something rose up
between them.
    Maggie shrieked.  A
single word.
    The thing did not
make a sound.  Not even when it leaped through the air directly at Ken.
    Ken didn’t shriek. 
But he did speak.  Like Maggie, it was a single word.  The same word.
    “Derek?”

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    Not Derek.
    Derek changed.
    Fell.
    Died in the
fire.
    Changed.
    It all flashed
through Ken’s mind in an instant.  He saw a single bit of ash falling, backlit
by a tongue of flame that streaked up the side of a blanket hanging from one of
the overhead luggage bins.  Both ash and flame ceased their motion.  Energy
sapped from the universe, pulled away by the power of Ken’s thoughts, the
swirling vortex of burgeoning madness.
    When slumped
beneath is dead parents,