Renegades (18 page)

“What’s wrong with you?” Dorcas whispered, and Ken realized his entire face had pulled tight as a miser’s purse string, his mouth puckered and his jaw clenched.  He tried to relax, but then heard another noise and his muscles contracted of their own accord.

“The noise,” he said.

Dorcas kept moving forward, but cocked her head.  “I don’t hear anything.”

Ken gritted his teeth as the sound – now a combination of the zombies’ growl, sheet metal bending, and nails scraping plates – sounded again.  “You’re not hearing that?” he said.

Dorcas shook her head.  Her expression changed.  And suddenly she didn’t look like the friendly, selfless woman who had risked herself time and again for Ken and the others.  Now she looked like one of
them
.  The skin seemed to fall from her flesh, the bones peeked out from her cheeks.

“What?”

Ken blinked.  The zombie was gone.  Dorcas was back.  Back and she wasn’t hearing what he was hearing.

“Dorcas, I think I’m in trouble,” he whispered.  His feet felt funny, too.  He looked down and realized that he was leaving a steady trail of blood behind him, though he couldn’t tell what part of him it was coming from.

“Guys,” Dorcas whispered.  “Guys!”  Ken sensed rather than saw the halt of the parade of survivors.  “We need to stop.”

Footsteps.  Ken felt arms around him, displacing Dorcas’ arm and lifting him a bit higher than she had done.  “Can’t,” said a voice.  Ken recognized it as Aaron.  But he couldn’t actually see the cowboy.  Everything seemed far too dark.

“Where’s the light?” Ken said.  “Why’d Chris turn off the light?”  His voice sounded slurred and distant.

“Shit,” said someone else.  And Ken had no idea who had spoken.  “What’s wrong with him?”

“What do you think?”

Ken felt his body pulled forward, moved along by the hands that held him up, the arms that held him aloft.

He heard the sounds again.  And this time knew it wasn’t just his injury-addled mind.  Because someone cursed, and someone else said, “They found the door.”

79

Ken’s vision went from a mixture of sparklers-and-hallucinations to sparklers-and-globby-black-things.

A moment later the globby black things killed the sparklers.  All was dark.

He could feel himself being dragged.  Could hear sounds.

Growls.  The distant – but rapidly approaching – noises of the horde.

Voices.

“Spread out.  Look for it.”  Sounded like Aaron.

“You kidding?  What are the chances it’ll –“  An unfamiliar voice.  But whining a bit, so probably Buck.

“With all the different allergies people have, almost one in ten people need it or have a family member that does.”  Aaron, farther away.

“Hold on, Ken.”  A voice in his ear.  Whispering.  Dorcas.  Or no, not Dorcas.  Someone else.  Who was that?

“Still bad odds.”  Buck’s grumble.

“Add in the mothers who keep one for their kids, the odds go up.”

“Still, I –“

“Found one!”

“Just like I flrpp mrp mpt tpp.”

Even the sounds melted into one another.

Ken felt alone.

So this is what it feels like to die
.

“Hold on.”

This voice was clearer.  Understandable.  And he could place it now.  Not Dorcas.

Maggie.  Telling him not to die.  That he mattered to her.

He couldn’t smile.  Couldn’t move a muscle.  So he probably
was
dying.

But he felt better, just the same.

Everything disappeared.

80

Something bit him.  A stinging pinch on his outer thigh that rapidly shifted from discomfort to agony.

They found us!

Ken wanted to scream, but couldn’t.  His jaw locked up –

(
This is what it feels like to become one of them.
)

– and he was paralyzed by terror, pain, and sorrow.  The last because he knew the others must be dead.  There was no way they would have left him to the zombies.  So if he was being bitten, was changing, then they were all gone.

Dorcas, Aaron, Christopher.  Even Buck.

And Maggie.  Liz.  Hope.

Something bit his other leg.

The paralysis broke.  Ken’s heart rate seemed to quadruple, and he surged upward, swinging his arms at whatever was eating him.

His right fist connected with something that was both soft and hard.  The thing popped, crackled.

“OW! 
Seriously
?”

Ken blinked.  The dark blobbies were floating away, trailing the last of the July Fourth sparklers in their wake, leaving behind something that resembled normal vision.  Revealing not the expected monsters chomping on his legs, but….

“Christopher?”

The young man was holding his nose, which was spurting blood all over the front of his previously unmarked shirt.  “You broge by dose,” he said.

Ken looked down.  His right fist was still clenched.  It ached.  Probably less than Christopher’s nose ached, but enough to verify the young man’s claim.

Aaron was kneeling at Ken’s right.  Grinning at Ken, then at Christopher.  “You were too pretty anyway,” said the cowboy.

The younger man mumbled something that sounded like “Fug oo,” but probably wasn’t.  Aaron chuckled.

Ken blinked.  Wiped away a sheet of sweat that had appeared on his forehead.  His hand shook as though the movement was a bit too fine for it.  His motor control seemed off.

“What… what happened?” said Ken.

Aaron plucked something off the floor by Christopher.  Held it in front of Ken, along with a match he held in his own hand.  “EpiPens,” said the cowboy.

“Wha?”  Ken wasn’t processing this.

“The stuff people use for bee stings and peanut allergies.  It’s basically just a shot of adrenaline.”  Aaron stood.  Held out a hand to Ken.  He took it and, surprisingly, managed to stand.  “You, sir, are banged up pretty bad.  But we bought you some time.”

A scream sounded.  Aaron looked up as though trying to pinpoint the source.

Something hit Ken.  Wrapped itself around him like a constrictor.  He almost panicked, almost swung at the thing.  His nerves were pulled tighter than ukulele strings.

It was only at the last second that he recognized the strange shape as that of his wife.  With Liz in front of her, between them as she held to him.

“What’s happening?” she sobbed.

He put his arms around her.  And for a moment the world was fine again.  For just a second, the space
between
seconds, he felt alive, felt right.

He had lost Derek.

Liz was unconscious.

Hope was… different.

But his wife still loved him.  That was something.

“End of the world, baby,” he said.  He kissed her hair.  It smelled awful.  Sweat and blood and the webbing she had been wrapped in and a thousand other things, none of them pleasant.  But it was Maggie and he just wanted to drink her in.

“Love this, really,” said Buck.  Ken looked over.  The big man was still holding Hope, thrown over his shoulder in a rough fireman’s carry.  “But we gotta get outta here.”

Ken nodded.  He drew Maggie back.  Kissed her on her lips, full-on.  Not passionate, exactly, but not the “honey-I’m-leaving-for-work” peck either.  A real kiss.  He needed her to know what she meant to him.  What it would mean to him if something happened to her.

He saw her eyes.

Saw that she understood.

And then realized that someone else was staring at him.

Liz.

The two-year-old hadn’t opened her eyes through all this.  Now her eyes were open, and staring at him in a way that sent shivers not just through Ken’s spine, but through his soul.

He tried to convince himself that it was all right.  This was good.  She was
awake
.

Ken realized that everyone had stopped moving.  Maggie was staring at the toddler, watching her with excitement.  And he couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for her to see her daughter hanging comatose for all this time.

The entire world seemed silent.

Liz smiled.

And Ken’s stomach seemed to fall into his legs.  It wasn’t the adrenaline surging through his body, either.  He knew about adrenaline; knew it was a stop-gap and that he maybe had an hour before he crashed again and was back to being nothing more than a bleeding burden on the group.  But it wasn’t that.  It wasn’t his injuries.

It was the smile.  Not the smile of an infant.  Not the smile of his Lizzy.

She spoke.  The same high-pitched toddler voice, but it wasn’t “Lizzy go now” or even his favorite “Daddy kisses.”  She looked at each person in the company, even straining her neck to look at Maggie, then said in a cold voice, “You are not family.  You are renegades.”

And then Liz started to scream.  Her body contorted in seizure spasms, the movements of someone who has not only lost all control, but who never had it in the first place.

Ken looked at Maggie.  She was staring at their daughter in horror, trying to hold the baby’s flailing limbs, trying to keep her from hurting herself.

Growling came from above them.  The pounding of feet on the ceiling.

“Good God,” said Buck.  “She called them.  She called them to us.”

Ken looked at the man and wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, wanted to shriek at him and punch him into submission because how
dare
he say such a thing about Ken’s baby?

But he didn’t.

It
was
true.

The monsters were among them.

END OF BOOK TWO

THE SAGA WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK THREE

THE COLONY: DESCENT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michaelbrent Collings is an award-winning screenwriter and novelist.  He has written numerous bestselling horror, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy novels, including
Strangers, Darkbound, Apparition, The Haunted, Hooked: A True Faerie Tale,
and the bestselling YA series
The Billy Saga
.  Follow him on
Facebook
(at facebook.com/MichaelbrentCollings)
or on Twitter @mbcollings.

And if you liked
The Colony: Renegades
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