It all came back to him then, and Colt remembered where he was. A big tin building that had become his refuge in this strange place last night. Not home. Not the Farm. He rolled onto his side and cracked the crust out of his eyes. Not thousands of horde feet, thank God, but rapid-firing, tiny explosions from dozens of internal combustion engines.
There was a swarm of men below—men, not Exers—dressed in white bodysuits of some kind. They were climbing into the big, yellow trucks and starting them up. That’s what caused the building and his bed on the gangway to shake.
Not Exers. Men.
And not trucks. School buses.
He took a sip from a bottle of water he’d been clutching like a teddy bear in his sleep. He hadn’t seen a school bus in five years. Not since he’d been in fourth grade. Not since the Blindness.
The rumbling below had invaded his dreams. No wonder he’d awakened so frightened. The last time he’d heard that mechanical rat-a-tat-tat of exhaust had been last night, near the Farm when the bikers attacked. And then the huge explosion when Chuck blew Fontana’s Bridge to save them from the biggest horde any of them had ever seen.
That one had been real.
Colt’s heartbeat slowed as he chased away his night terrors. He stared quietly from his nest on the bus barn’s second-floor gangway while the men below cranked the buses up, one at a time. Some had their hoods raised, the men working on the engines.
He watched and remembered what had happened at the Farm. The horde of zombies had cut him off and he’d run for his life. But a few of the horde had turned to follow, maddened by their need to eat, to ingest protein, to service the insatiable hunger burning in them, wrought by Slenderex, the wonder diet drug of the 21st century.
They’d chased him all the way past the Pillbox and into the forest, shrouded in yellow mist, on the south side of the Valley. Just when he was sure his legs would fall off, he passed through a yellow-orange haze that smelled like sulfur, from the darkness of that night into the sunshine of daylight. The wooded ground beneath his feet had suddenly hardened to pavement. He’d entered the forest only to pop out … wherever this was. And after a moment of disorientation, of adjusting to sunlight and quiet and the sudden stench of decay—he’d remembered the Exers were hot in pursuit. He’d sprinted forward and rounded the corner of a large building, cringing at the thronnnng of the tin when his back slammed against it.
He’d watched as first one, then other Exers had appeared out of thin air, just as he must’ve done, trailing that same yellow mist he’d seen in the forest. The Exers’ skin-and-sinew-thin legs carried them forward, straight along his previous path, mindlessly pursuing a prey no longer in front of them. Colt watched them go, then locked his eyes on the spot where they’d popped into reality, in case others followed. But none came.
Catching his breath, he’d looked around him to assess his environment. Wreckage everywhere. Trees down. No, not trees, power poles. Water standing everywhere, like a major storm had just passed.
Weird. Very weird.
This wasn’t the Farm. That much was evident. Just as obviously, it was a town, and a large one, but it certainly wasn’t Central City. Despite the destruction around him, everything looked … well, newer … than he’d seen since before the Blindness. And that was five long years ago. What felt like several lifetimes of scampering and surviving alone. Until he’d met Ellis on one of his scavenging runs.
Colt shook his head. And what would Ellis say about what had just happened?
Determine your situation, Ellis said in his head. The sun was setting. And nighttime was horde time. Find shelter. Get safe. Then think.
His quickest option was the building he was leaning against, so he found an already-broken window and crawled through into a pristine, well-maintained building with row after row of yellow buses inside, lined up like sardines in a two-story tin can. The place was gigantic and he’d stared for a moment in wonder at how new everything looked. Damaged, yes, but not rusted. Not overgrown with weeds, reclaimed by nature. And those perfectly maintained school buses, he noted, after remembering what they were; shining like beacons from five years ago. Before everything went to shit.
Burning daylight, Ellis said in his head. Higher is safer. It was one of the things he’d taught the kids at the Farm in what served for school. Survival school. Staring at the buses, Colt smirked. Then Ellis’s voice came again, more insistent this time: higher is safer. Colt could see the reddening sky of sunset casting a bloody light through the barn’s windows.
He’d found the main office and scavenged supplies left behind by whoever had been here before. Recently, he’d realized. Some of the perishable foods were barely rotten. He’d found a blanket to use for a bedroll, bottled water and a flashlight, snack food (still packaged!) and warm beer—marveling at how much he could get for the untainted water and the functional flashlight, if he could only get it back to Central City—then carried everything up to the second floor, where he’d made his nest for the night.
Higher is safer.
By the time darkness descended, he’d organized his stash on the second-floor’s gantry. And that was his safe place now, where he observed from on high the invaders below. He sipped bottled water and reveled in the clean taste he’d all but forgotten.
Chapter 4: Tuesday, morning.
At least they’re not Exers, Colt thought as he watched the men work on the buses. Prisoners, he corrected himself. He’d overheard enough of their conversations to know. Those guys are prisoners.
He wasn’t used to so much manufactured noise. It seemed to stack on itself in his head.
The rat-a-tat-tat of multiple internal combustion engines.
The harsh clang of tools on engine blocks.
The cursing and snarling of frustrated men.
Colt stayed still, though he wanted to run, to get away from the thunder kicking around the walls of the barn. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. Another life lesson from Ellis. Do what I tell you and stay alive, he’d say.
It was the cloudiness in Colt’s head that eventually made him move. It came on him slowly, the air heavy with an acrid, refined smell he had to pull up from memory, from way back before the Blindness. When he’d been a child of ten and watching his father, now dead, repairing their Blazer. The smell of engine exhaust from the buses.
Colt looked up, and his Ellis training kicked in once again. The barn’s open, airy construction allowed bus fumes and the summer sweat of workmen to exit through the louvers along the open eaves of the roof. But some diligent someone had battened the louvers down.
He shook his head to try and clear it. His brain was slowing down, or that’s how it felt, anyway. Ellis was screaming in his head. The shut louvers trapped the fumes at the ceiling, where they hung, toxic and heavy. And the cloud was descending as more of the buses were cranked and idled.
Maybe higher isn’t always safer after all, he thought.
Squinting his eyes against his throbbing forehead, Colt knew he needed to get away from the fumes, before they made him any weaker. But he couldn’t move down, that would be even more dangerous. But if he stayed here…
He put one hand to his aching forehead and accidently knocked the water bottle off the gantry. And froze.
It popped. It smacked. For a moment, he thought they hadn’t noticed. Then it landed squarely on a man’s head.
Curses in Spanish. Fingers pointed upward, straight at him. Some of the men had seen him through the latticework steel of the gangway.
He needed to move, but down was no longer an option. He needed to move up and away. Colt began to crawl slowly on hands and knees.
Higher is safer, insisted Ellis in his head again. But the voice was distant and echoing now, as if it came from a deep, dark hole in the ground.
It’s the fumes, the boy realized, crouch-walking now along the gantry. Glancing up toward his only route of escape, he was no longer sure Ellis knew what he was talking about.
* * *
&
nbsp; “Hey! Hey! We got a runner!” someone shouted from across the barn.
Simpson and Cackler followed the whiteshirt’s pointing finger. A flicker of light, the backs of shoes, the clang of metal on the gangway above them.
“Find out who that is,” Simpson told Cackler. “If it’s one of ours gone AWOL, bring him to me. If it’s not …” He wanted to tell Cackler to convert the intruder to the Lady’s cause. Add one more foot soldier to her Army of the Black Hand. But they’d found fewer buses than they needed, and the ones they had would be packed with sweating prisoners on the edge of losing their cool as it was. They were, Simpson knew, one bumped shoulder away from complete anarchy.
“If it’s not,” he repeated, “kill him.” Simpson’s words were flat and firm.
Cackler stared a moment longer at the man who’d slapped him. Then he turned, yelling “Caw, caw, caw!” The other prisoners took it up, and the airy tin bus barn reverberated with the hungry cries of fifty men screaming like a murder of crows.
* * *
Colt scurried into the shadows of the second floor as the prisoners charged toward his nest. When he was sure he was beyond their eye line, he stopped short behind a metal column and held his breath. Slowly he turned to watch them ascending the ladders, his thick head pulsing larger with every heartbeat.
“Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”
The screeching echoed off the barn’s metal walls as the men took up the chase. The noise bounced in and out of corners, assaulting Colt’s besieged brain. He felt the flesh of his arms prickle at the primal call to hunt him down.
Their work boots pounded on the stairs as the Weisshemden swarmed up the catwalks. They headed straight for his stash of junk food and bottled water and warm beer, all the booty he’d secured from the office the night before. The thundering herd of shriekers in white reminded him of Exers, and Colt closed his eyes against the terror squeezing his spine.
Only the dead close their eyes, said Ellis. Another lesson, whispered from a well. Open eyes see opportunity.
Colt could barely recognize Ellis’s voice now, but he opened his eyes again.
The interlacing steel of the beam in front of him seemed made for climbing.
Higher is safer.
The men in white were at his nest, flinging his treasures aside in aggravation.
“Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”
Keeping the column between him and them, Colt shook his head to clear it and quickly realized what a mistake that was. He stopped moving altogether, and finally his brain stopped sloshing in his skull. It felt ten pounds heavier than just a little while ago. Still, he had no choice now.
How many times had he climbed trees in the forest with the others? Colt wrapped his hands around the column. Letting muscle memory do the work for him, he shimmied like a monkey, up-up-up. At the top, the very top of the bus barn’s roof, he stopped and tried to hold his breath. The fumes, much thicker here, made him want to puke.
They apparently hadn’t seen him scurry his way up to the ceiling. But they knew he was here, and they were coming. All of the men were searching for him now. They’d abandoned their efforts with the buses to spread into all quarters of the barn and find him.
“Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”
His arms were already getting tired as he clung to the metal column, half-upside down. The position made his nausea worse. The fumes were making him loopy, and holding his breath wasn’t working. His muscles shook, begging for oxygen.
“Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”
Their damned screaming scared him more than any horde ever had. His dread of being found grew as they came closer, their eyes darting left and right, seeking out every nook and cranny of the barn, looking for the boy that dared to run away.
“Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”
A skinny, nattering goon, the loudest of the shriekers, led the men away from his nest along the upper catwalk and toward his hiding place. Goony was gesturing dramatically and muttering as he looked around, clearly irritated that Colt had eluded them.
“Look everywhere!” ordered Goony, flailing his arms.
Everywhere but up, Colt prayed. His fingers were so stiff against the cold steel, they felt like they’d break off if he tried to pry them loose. His legs, rigid from fright and supporting his weight, began to cramp.
“He’s around here somewhere, boys, that’s for sure,” said Goony. “He couldn’t have gotten away, I mean, there’s no way out is there, does anyone see a door outta here, I don’t…”
Goony sounded just like he looked, Colt thought. Shrill and piping, like a Myna bird. The goony man walked slowly along the catwalk toward his position.
“He’s got to be here somewhere. We can’t go back till we find him.”
“Caw, caw, caw!” came from every corner of the bus barn now. Goony’s men answering his call to action.
Colt steeled himself against the noise, the fumes, the fear. Anything less was weakness, anything less would get him killed. He’d learned that a long time ago.
“No stone unturned,” said Goony as he came to a halt beneath Colt’s hiding place. The awkwardly thin man was ten feet below him. “Find that little bastard.”
More steps click-clacked along the catwalk below. More prisoners closing in on his position.
They’re coming together, said Ellis in his head. You treed yourself.
But higher is safer, Colt argued back. Isn’t it? It was getting hard to think.
“Man, it stinks up here,” complained Cackler. Putting his hands around his mouth, he shouted down, “Open the ceiling vents!”
A single bead of sweat crawled down from Colt’s forehead. On instinct he shook his head to keep it from seeping into his eye. A bass drum exploded in his head and he almost lost his hold on the girder. But he felt the bead of sweat launch from his brow.
The droplet of fear went flying, gravity curving its course downward like an arrow. Colt froze, head throbbing. He wanted to shut his eyes tight, to pretend not to see and maybe the danger would go away. Instead, his eyes spread wide as one wet sphere arced toward the men below.
They’d looked everywhere.
Everywhere but up.
Cackler turned. The droplet of sweat fell behind him. Then Colt heard metal screech on metal. And he felt it … the breeze that swept over him from above. Someone following Goony’s orders had cranked open the louvers.
“Well?”
The shouted question came from the floor of the bus barn. Colt turned his head and spied a man of average build standing in the middle of the garage below. He was staring hard up at Goony.
The stick-figure man leaned over the rail and shouted, “Nothing, boss. We searched high and low, and we ain’t found a thing. I mean, we found a nest, you know, a place where someone’s been sleeping, but he run off. We scared him good I guess, boss. Weren’t one of ours for sure. Weren’t no one we need to worry about, I don’t think. Just some kid, from the glimpse I got. Just some refugee from the storms.”
Colt watched the man down below, the one apparently in charge. He didn’t look pleased, but he did look distracted. Searching for Colt seemed to be costing him time he didn’t have to spare.
The breeze sweeping in from outside washed over him, and Colt took a tentative breath. His head still pounded, but the air was cleaner now. The heavy, manufactured smell was lessened. Colt had never been so glad to feel the warm, sticky air of a Texas summer in his life.
The man below paced left, then right. Colt glanced at Goony, who stood waiting for orders. From the far end of the barn, the caw-caw-cawing was dying out. Men were getting bored with finding nothing.
God, his arms and legs hurt.
“Fine, let ’im go. Take whatever he’s got we can use. And get back down here. Dawn’s coming. Marsten will be wondering where we are. And we still need to fill the buses with gas outside and get the hell out of here. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Colt
watched Goony turn to the muscle around him and motion self-importantly with his thin arms.
“You heard the man—chop-chop, boys. Grab whatever you can find in the kid’s belongings and let’s get back to work.”
Goony led the way, and Colt watched from inside his foggy head as the men in white tore apart his nest. Once they’d removed themselves below again, he carefully, painfully, inched his way down the girder. Releasing his fingers from the crosshatch metal almost made him cry out in pain.
But the vents were open now, and his head was clearing. From behind the beam that had saved his life, he watched them throw open the wide steel doors below, load onto the buses, and roll out of the barn, a long line of yellow links in a very long, very loud chain of school buses.
Colt had sought refuge up high, and that kept him safe. Just barely. If the fumes had gotten to him, if he’d breathed another five minutes’ worth without those louvers being opened … Maybe it was time for a new survival rule. One even more important than seeking higher ground to stay safe.
Keep your head, keep your life.
But this time, it wasn’t Ellis’s voice Colt heard in his head. This time, it was his own.
* * *
“There used to be gun shop around here,” said Lauryn as they walked up South Frazier Street. Patting the .40-caliber on her hip, she remembered, “It’s where Mark bought….” She stopped speaking and cast a cautious glance toward Megan, but her daughter seemed entirely preoccupied with Jasper.
Stavros caught Lauryn’s eye and shrugged. Don’t think she heard you, his look said.
“Oh God,” said Megan, her voice muffled by the hand over her mouth. She jogged left and angled across Frazier, dragging Jasper with her. “Another one.” The dog pulled against her, jutting his nose at the air wafting from the direction they’d been heading. Despite being in pain, Jasper insisted on investigating when he smelled a dead body nearby. But this time his injuries and Megan’s disgust prevented him from satisfying his curiosity.
Ironheart (The Serenity Strain Book 2) Page 4
