Survival Colony 9 Read online

  About two hours past his midday nap, I let him climb to the top of the steepest hill we’d encountered so far while I took a break in the shade of a rusty tree. I was beat. I’d been trying to save on food and water since our last refill at the river, which basically meant none for me, all for him. Add to that the hills and the pounding of the afternoon sun, and I felt like a rag wrung dry. The ground beneath the tree blistered my back, but I lay out of the direct sun, and at least I could close my eyes for a second to escape the blinding day.

  That’s when I heard him call out, “Querry!”

  I jumped to my feet, realizing I’d been on the verge of nodding off. Instantly I spotted his small figure standing stock still at the hill’s crest, a slender brown body engulfed by the solid brown waste of land and sky. He turned to face me, his arm gesturing urgently, a “come quick!” motion. My exhaustion forgotten, I sprinted to where he stood.

  When I reached his side, he pointed. But there was no need.

  The ground sloped sharply away at our feet, forming a broad bowl where it met with other, lower hills far beneath us. Within the hollow of these hills, maybe a mile northeast of where we stood, a huge spire reared out of the desert. It looked to be made of rock or soil, the same color as the surrounding terrain, though it appeared less a part of the land than a slim finger balanced precariously on the plain. I had no guess as to its actual height, but it seemed simply enormous, towering all alone with only a few bare, lowly knolls in its vicinity. It might have been a mountain, I thought, except it didn’t look at all like what I’d imagined when people talked about mountains. Those sounded like welcoming places, places of peace, even of beauty. This looked like an ugly growth, as if an explosion from long ago had burst the face of the land and left this monstrosity behind as a grave marker.

  Keely peered up at me eagerly. “Can we go there, Querry?”

  I glanced at him uncertainly, then back at the spire. To his eyes, it must have seemed like a play place, a place to explore, or at least to break up the monotony of the day. To me, it seemed like the kind of place we should stay away from. Yet at the same time, I had to admit I was curious to find out what it was, if only to know how wide a berth to give it. Plus it looked shadier in the valley between the hills, and at this point getting out of the sunlight seemed a good enough reason to take a detour.

  “We have to be careful,” I said. “You stay with me.”

  Without a word of agreement or disagreement, he set off down the slope, playing Petra’s part except without an ounce of her stealth or caution.

  I followed him. The hill dipped steeply and the soil lay rocky and loose, but we kept our feet. Clouds of dust billowed around us, especially him as he skidded downhill. During the entire descent, all I could think was how visible we’d be to anything scouting the hillside. I kept half an eye on Keely, the other half on the neighboring elevations, but nothing showed itself.

  In less than half an hour we reached the saddle formed by adjacent slopes. Looking across the valley, it became apparent to me the spire was even more massive than it had seemed from above. It dominated the landscape, rising so high above the plain we might as well have been ants emerging from our anthill. It stood farther away than I had thought as well, two miles distant at least. I glanced at Keely, whose bright eyes focused on the single pinnacle rising from the empty land.

  “You sure you’re up for this?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His face told me all I needed to know.

  I turned to the hill we’d descended, traced our path in the dust, realized it would take double the time to climb back up. Two miles, if it was two miles, meant another hour minimum at Keely’s pace. To reach the spire and return by nightfall would be pushing it, especially if he wanted to stay and play. But the arguments that had gotten me this far made me reluctant to turn back. We had half a canteen and a full jar of water, and as long as we could reach the river before we ran dry, did it really matter if we got back to where we started?

  “Come on,” I said to Keely, who was already tugging my sleeve. “And stay close.”

  For the next hour, in the stifling shade of the valley and the sporadic shelter of the strange trees, we marched toward the monolith. Or I marched, Keely skipped. As our goal advanced I got a better sense of its size and shape: about two hundred feet tall and maybe a third as wide, tapering slightly from base to rounded peak, and not as smooth or featureless as it had seemed from far away. On closer inspection it appeared more like mud than stone or soil, mud built up over the years and baked by the sun into lumps and swirls and dribbles. On size alone I’d have said it looked like one of the skyscrapers Laman had told me about, steel pylons that pierced the polluted sky. But the closest thing it resembled from my own experience was a termite mound, a hundred times bigger than the ones I’d seen.

  At last the spire loomed directly above us, its shadow swollen to gigantic dimensions and flung far away to the east. I laid a hand cautiously on its warty surface, but it felt no different from any piece of rock or clay heated and dried by the sun. Its consistency exactly matched that of a termite mound, slightly porous but too hard to break with my bare hands. The only difference lay in the scale: where you could cup your palm around any of the bumps on the termite mounds I’d seen, both my arms weren’t wide enough to girdle the monstrous bubbles that hung from the tower’s side. A million termites couldn’t have built this, not in a thousand years. I walked a circle around its base, craning my neck, squinting at the sunlight on its crown, but I saw nothing that might give me a clue to what this thing was, how it had come here. Maybe, I thought, it had been here forever, an ancient ruin left over from the death of the modern world.

  When I completed my inspection, I found Keely standing beside the mound with his face angled up at the peak, a frown clouding his brow. Whatever he’d been hoping for, he must have realized he couldn’t play with this thing. It wasn’t even possible to climb. I could imagine how disappointed he must have felt after walking so far to get here. But now that we were here, he had to see that there was nothing to do but go back.

  “Querry?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m tired.” His eyes looked teary, and his voice was a kid’s pout.

  I tried a smile. “Me too.”

  “I need a nap.”

  “I can carry you.”

  “No!” he said, more violently than I expected. “I want to nap here!”

  “Keely . . .” I reached for his arm.

  He swung and hit me with a balled fist. It didn’t hurt, but I jerked back in shock.

  “I want to nap here!” he said again.

  “Let me carry you,” I said. “You can sleep with me like you did last night.”

  Again I reached for him, and again he took a swing.

  “You’re not my daddy!” he said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  Your daddy has been scattered to the wind, I thought. He can’t tell you what to do either.

  “Keely,” I tried once more, but before I could continue he let out a scream that stunned me with its vehemence. I looked around as if someone might hear, but there were only the two of us, him red-faced with childish rage, me speechless with confusion and doubt.

  I knew I could pick him up, fend off his fists for the few minutes it would take him to exhaust himself. But I was as tired as he was, and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. I glanced back at the hill we’d started from, its slope smothered in shadow. At that moment, home base seemed as far away as the craters of the moon.

  “All right,” I said. “Come here.”

  I sat by the foot of the spire, patting the dust beside me. His mini-tantrum melted from his face, and he smiled.

  I would let him fall asleep before taking him back, I decided. Give him a chance to dream off his disappointment and wake with what he’d left behind forgotten. I’d cover more
ground with him asleep anyway.

  He came over to me, but he didn’t sit on the ground. Instead, he curled into my lap, his head tucked under my chin. Hesitantly, I lifted my hand and stroked his matted hair. He slipped a filthy thumb into his mouth, and instantly his breathing softened. I looked down to see his cheeks flexing and his eyelids flickering.

  “Tell me a story,” he said in a muffled whisper, just as his eyes slid closed.

  * * *

  I woke to catch the last rays of sun winking behind the hill where I’d hoped to deliver us by nightfall. Twilight blanketed the land, a muddy vagueness that turned brown to gray. Keely slept on in my lap, his thumb planted in his mouth, his sucking cheeks baby-smooth. The story he’d asked for remained untold.

  We’d been asleep for hours.

  “Keely!” I hissed. “Get up. We’ve got to go!”

  He stirred, his eyelids struggling to open. Then his thirty pounds flopped back onto me and his eyes closed. The thumb never left his mouth.

  “Keely.” I shook him, lifted him from my chest, set him on his feet. He refused to stand on his own. I propped him up and, not knowing what else to do, slapped him lightly on the cheeks. He winced and feebly waved his free hand, but still he wouldn’t wake.

  At last I gave up and lifted him into my arms.

  “We’re getting out of here,” I whispered, and turned toward the hilltop’s distant silhouette, a black knob against a crimson and purple sky.

  In my arms he spoke at last. But his eyes stayed sealed, and his thumb-muted voice emerged as if from a dream.

  “It’s too late, Daddy,” he said. “They’re already here.”

  I spun in a wild circle to take in our surroundings, but I saw only what I’d seen before: dirt, rock, haunted trees, the lonely spire soaring above us. Detail had slid away with the dusk, making everything seem a shadow of itself. Then my ears caught a faint sound like moaning from above, and I stepped away from the pillar and stared into the darkening sky.

  Things were crawling down the side of the spire.

  Things pale yet dim as darkness, with livid skin and blunt, obscure faces. Their heads swung blindly from side to side as they descended. Their arms were long and veined as if they’d been flayed, but their trunks ended in a short, flat paddle like a larval tail. The walls of the tower glistened with a slick substance in their wake.

  There were too many of them to count. More emerged each moment from the dimness at the peak of the spire and climbed steadily down.

  I retreated, hugging Keely to my chest. His body remained limp, but I could feel his cheeks moving and hear their sucking sound.

  When the first wave of the creatures reached a point ten feet from the base of the nest, they fell heavily onto their stomachs and lifted themselves to face me.

  That’s when I saw that they had no faces.

  No eyes, no mouth, no features of any kind, only veined knobs like a fist stripped of flesh. Starting where their mouth would have been and stretching the length of their chest ran a gash, wide and ragged, as if they’d been ripped apart to expose the cavity of their bodies. But instead of revealing organs or muscle or bone, the gash opened on a smooth gray emptiness. The only signs of life were a waving motion at the torn edges of the gaping wound and a rotten smell that exhaled from within, accompanied by the chorus I’d heard, like the wailing of someone in pain.

  I remembered Korah’s story, the body of her father halfway corrupted by the thing that had taken him. I remembered Korah herself, her beauty changed to something reptilian, flesh and blood and bone dissolved to flailing skin. And I remembered my dream, my one link to the past, the excruciating feeling I’d experienced not of being invaded but of being consumed. No one had seen Skaldi before, Skaldi without the human hosts we’d always thought they nested inside. No one had seen them and lived.

  Now I had seen them. And I knew what I was seeing.

  Skaldi didn’t enter you. Just the opposite. They drew you in, into the emptiness of their own bodies. They made you fill that emptiness, ingested you while they assumed your shape. When they moved on to their next victim, the scraps we found were the mimic coverings they had shed.

  But I also knew that knowing this wouldn’t save me.

  The creatures circled us, dragging themselves blindly but surely on emaciated arms. Dozens more hung expectantly from the sides of the mound. Their swaying motion resembled a snake’s.

  The moaning grew louder as the creatures closed in. Still I could see nothing inside them, only a hollow space, dull and gray as dead tissue. I gathered myself to leap their squirming forms, but a feeling of horror made my legs tremble, and I dropped to my knees.

  “Keely,” I whispered to the inert bundle in my arms. He refused to wake from his dream. Then I realized it was better if his dream never ended, and I lowered my head and buried his sleeping eyes in my chest.

  The creatures had drawn so close I could feel nothing but their icy breath, smell nothing but their suffocating stench. I tried to rise, but a crushing weight pinned me to the ground. Whatever power had protected me six months ago now seemed as remote as my stolen past. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

  But the Skaldi didn’t strike. Their moans rose to a pitch of grief and pain.

  Then I heard footsteps, a scuffing against dirt and stone. I raised my eyes to see that the creatures had flattened their bodies to the dust, arms outstretched. Their moans had died. The footsteps echoed in the stillness of the dusk as both the Skaldi and I waited for whoever or whatever was coming.

  A moment later, a shadowy figure stepped from behind the nest. I couldn’t distinguish a face, but the voice was unmistakable.

  “Space Boy,” the voice said. “Welcome to the family, little brother.”

  18

  Host

  At first I thought the twilight had tricked my senses.

  Then he stepped from the shadow of the pillar and I saw that it was him: tall, gangly, slouching, his face spread with the same smirk he’d been using to torment me for the past six months. He wore his usual filthy uniform, though his holster hung empty. Yet he approached the circle of Skaldi fearlessly, sliding with perfect confidence between their prostrate forms. Even more astonishing, a break appeared in their ranks to let him through. The circle closed once more as soon as he was past, and the creatures inched forward, groveling at his heels.

  I tried to form words, but my mouth had gone dry. “Brother?”

  His smile broadened. “Mom always said you were the smart one.”

  “But,” I stammered. “Laman told me . . .”

  “Laman told me,” he sneered. “Laman didn’t know about Aleka and you. There’s so much Laman didn’t know. I told you not to follow his advice. But you wouldn’t listen to your big brother, would you?”

  “But,” I tried again. “The camp. By the river. I thought you were . . .”

  “Oh, that,” he said, as if he was referring to a lost button or a skinned knee. He reached down, and one of the creatures lifted itself on skeletal arms to accept his caress. Watching his hand stroke its slimy back both mesmerized and repulsed me. “Rookie mistake,” he said. “You can’t kill us.”

  My mind whirred, stalled, sputtered to a halt. “Then you’re . . .”

  In answer, his smile yawned so wide it obliterated the rest of his face, as if his mouth formed the beginning of the gash I’d seen in the creatures at his feet. For a second there was nothing else, only a cavity like the empty skull of a thing long dead. Then the slit narrowed and the face became Yov’s again, or what appeared to be Yov’s, smugly grinning.

  “We are,” he said, “what we are.”

  “You’re Skaldi.” The fact that I was speaking to it seemed as incredible as the transformation.

  It threw back Yov’s head and hurled a long, mocking laugh into the twilit sky. The groveling creatures echoed
its shout with ghostly moans.

  There was only one way this could be, I thought feverishly. The Skaldi that had destroyed the rebel camp had taken Yov’s body. Somehow it had missed Keely, and then it had left in search of other victims. That was the only answer.

  “Let Keely go,” I said, knowing even as I said it that I couldn’t bargain with Skaldi. “Do what you want with me, but let him go.”

  The thing with Yov’s face smiled, malice glistening in its gray eyes. It lowered itself to sit among the squirming creatures, Yov’s long legs stretched casually in front of it.

  “We could have killed him six months ago if we’d wanted to,” it said, speaking conversationally despite its ugly words. “But that was never our purpose.”

  “Six months?” I said dumbly. “How could you . . . ?”

  The Skaldi tapped Yov’s forehead with a long finger. At first I thought it was mimicking Laman’s “focus” signal. But then I realized what it meant. This time I was so dumbfounded I could barely choke out the words.

  “My memory,” I said. “You’re the one. You stole my memory.”

  “We are your memory,” it gibed. “We take what we need, and throw the rest away.”

  My mind spun as its words sank in. I’d been right that my attacker hadn’t been killed. But it hadn’t been reduced to the creeping creature I’d seen. It had jumped from me to Yov. Against everything we thought we knew about them, it had kept his body intact for six long months, bleeding enough of Yov’s stolen blood to pass the initial trials, remaining stable far beyond the point where anyone would suspect him. And the morning of Laman’s rescue, when the one I’d thought was Yov had been shot in the leg and gone down screaming . . .