Survival Colony 9

by Joshua David Bellin

  My mind flashed back to the day we’d found the gated compound. Wali had sworn he’d seen something in the distance, something the color of the land crawling on all fours. This thing matched his description to the letter.

  I braced for its approach. There was just me between it and the rest of the colony, all of them fast asleep and defenseless a hundred feet away. Maybe I’d have a chance to test Laman’s theory for real. A chance to save the people who had lied to me.

  But it didn’t come near me, or anyone else. It veered away from the cluster of bodies and crawled along the edge of camp, moving with painful slowness. I thought I heard a sound coming from it, a feeble cry, nothing like the wail I remembered from my dream. I watched as it crept inch by inch around our campsite, its head wobbling on its emaciated neck. Its body seemed to diminish even further as I watched, as if it was crumbling to dust before my eyes. Then the darkness closed over it and it was gone.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I told myself it must have been a dream, that my mind must still be reeling from its first solid memory in six months.

  But when I went to investigate the path the crawling creature had taken, I found a definite trail. Twin furrows in the dust, exactly what you’d expect from a body dragging itself on hands and knees. I traced the trail back the way it had entered camp, saw that the grooves continued far into the night. Then I reversed course and followed to the point where the creature had disappeared, and once again the trail stretched as far as I could see. The thing that had made the trail, though, had passed beyond my sight.

  I returned to camp, skirting the sleepers, back to the supply cache. My legs trembled, but not from the danger that had just passed. I had no idea what would have happened if this Skaldi had attacked, whether the power that had protected me once would have protected me again. But I felt no fear. What I felt was so new I barely recognized it.

  I felt excitement.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. Of that I felt certain. The very night my first memory returned, a Skaldi unlike any I’d heard of had entered our camp. A Skaldi that had worn its host body down to near nothing yet failed to attack when a fresh supply fell within its reach. There had to be a connection.

  My heart beat faster as I realized what the connection was.

  This was the one. The one that had erased my memory. It had to be.

  The creature that had attacked me had suffered, been damaged in some way. My dream, my memory told me that. Though everything had been dark and cloudy, I remembered its scream, remembered it falling away from me, its body burning as if my skin had turned into a living flame. I thought the creature had burned away completely. So did Laman and Aleka.

  But what if it hadn’t?

  What if it had merely been wounded, weakened? What if it had fled to one of the half-consumed bodies that lay at my feet, hidden there while Aleka tended to me? There’d been no reason, and no time, for her to scorch all the bodies after the attack ended. As soon as she could, she’d hit the road with Yov and me, desperate for help. And now, after six months of whatever it took for a Skaldi to recover from injuries its kind had never known, it had come back to find me. To finish the job it had started.

  Or, I thought with another burst of excitement, maybe it had spent the past six months trying to get away from me. Only now, after all that time, it had failed.

  My mind jumped at the thought. It all made sense. The Skaldi that had stolen Korah’s body had known things—about the colony, about her, about me—that it couldn’t have known unless it had also stolen her memory. Skaldi were mimics—how could they pretend to be us if they didn’t share our thoughts? If they didn’t assimilate the host’s mind along with the body? It came as a surprise that no one had ever suggested this to me before. Maybe it was because people like Laman Genn preferred to think of Skaldi as dumb brutes that they refused to believe the things that copied us also became us.

  But in the case of the one that attacked me, my memory was all it got. For six months it had held my past inside its wasted body, somehow clinging to that emptied shell far longer than we’d believed Skaldi could. But now, after a half-year of hiding, it had stumbled across our camp. Too weak or frightened to attack, it had crept away as fast as it could. But it had left behind a fragment of the memory it had stolen: the memory of the attack, the memory that haunted it as much as it tortured me.

  And that meant that if I could find the creature again, maybe I could force it to restore the rest of what it had taken.

  My past. My life. Myself.

  I felt something flame inside me at the thought of confronting it. Defeating it. Winning back what I had lost.

  Not for Laman, not for Survival Colony 9, not for the human race.

  For me.

  I snuck back to where we’d unloaded our supplies. Trying to move fast but as stealthily as Petra, I stuffed all I could fit into my old rucksack. I took a canteen, three cans of food, a length of rope, a tattered bedroll. I looked around for guns and ammunition, but Laman and Aleka had kept them hidden. In the end I decided they’d be useless anyway. I did take a pocketknife for carving, a tinder and flint for making fire, a jar for rainwater. I considered a couple other things, a shovel, an extra pair of boots, but I didn’t want to waste time or weigh myself down. I thought about trading my knife for the one Laman had left where I’d thrown it, but I let it lie. Its pale letters glowed like bone against its red flesh.

  I hoisted the rucksack onto my shoulders and tiptoed to the spot where the colony lay sleeping. For a moment I stood over them, silently reciting their names, as I’d done time and again that first week following the attack. Wali. Nessa. Tyris. Soon. Nekane. Adem. The old woman whose name I’d never learned. All the others I’d believed were my own. I watched Aleka, who slept on her side, her long legs crossed at the ankles, her head cradled in her arms. I felt a pang when my eyes came to rest on the huddle of little kids, sleeping on their stomachs with their knees bunched up to their chests or on their backs with their arms flung every which way, the circle of adults forming an ineffectual barricade around them. I wondered what would happen to them. If they’d live to see another year. If they’d miss or even remember me.

  My eyes lingered on the man who’d pretended to be my father. He slept on his back beside his followers, his bearded mouth open, his breath issuing in a rattling snore. I’d spent hours with him every day, learned his lessons and rules, thought I’d learned who he was. But it had all been a deception, and I couldn’t forgive him for that. I couldn’t forget the way he’d looked at me, dark fire burning in his eyes, when he told me a lie so basic I never thought to question its truth.

  Your name is Querry Genn.

  But in one way and one way only, I did thank him. He’d taught me everything I needed to know to survive on my own. I could guide myself by sunlight or rare stars, hunt for the few sources of food that survived in this dying world, tie a fast knot or strike a larger opponent where it’d hurt most. Why he’d taught me these things didn’t matter anymore. He’d told me my time was coming, and he’d been right.

  He just hadn’t known he wouldn’t be with me when it came.

  I tightened the straps of my rucksack and followed the creature’s trail toward a row of stunted trees that edged the camp. I turned back only once. I’m not sure if I said good-bye. The word poised in my mind and on my lips, but if I spoke it aloud it was too quiet for even me to hear.

  16

  Trust

  Morning, hot and red, found me miles from camp, miles from anywhere.

  I’d avoided Petra somehow, hadn’t seen her on the way out. She’d been my biggest worry. I’d been dreading the thought of facing her, trying to explain myself, hearing her scoff at my explanation. Lacking any weapon other than the pocketknife, I’d snapped a branch from one of the trees, tested its broken end against my palm. It felt sharp as a thorn, and might work as a
spear. But after what I’d seen her do the morning we freed Laman, I doubted I would stand a chance against her. I doubted even more that I was prepared to skewer a fellow human being. So I was relieved I didn’t have to test either theory.

  With the camp behind me, I focused on following the Skaldi’s trail. It angled toward the river, roughly three miles to the west, then forked northwestward to follow the water’s edge. It ran remarkably straight and true, and as the sun crept over my right shoulder, I had no doubt I’d catch up to the thing that had made it. But somehow the creature eluded me, stayed always out of sight. I puzzled over how something moving that slowly could outrun me, but I reminded myself that I knew next to nothing about its abilities. It had gotten past Petra, so it had to have something going for it. Maybe it had sensed me following and increased its pace, or maybe it had recovered its strength once it got out of my range. The thing Wali had seen the day we discovered the compound had disappeared too, moved out of reach of Aleka’s binoculars. But we’d seen no trail that day, hadn’t even looked for one, and as long as I could see a trail, I wasn’t worried about losing the creature, or myself, in the desert.

  And tracing the river had other advantages. Aside from water, it offered wet rocks where edible creatures liked to hide. None of them with less than six legs, but you had to take what you could get. Even more important, keeping to the riverbank gave me my best chance of staying ahead of Laman. I knew he would start looking for me the instant he found me gone, and he had Petra on his side. But I also knew he wouldn’t expect me to travel toward danger, which meant toward the west and most of all toward water. Petra would look for footprints, not the creature’s trail, so I walked on the pebbly shoreline, where I wouldn’t leave as much of a mark. If I moved fast, I figured I could stay ahead of any pursuit from my former colony. It occurred to me that Araz and Yov might be hunting for me as well, trying to get their hands on the power Laman had told them I possessed. In fact, maybe that’s why they took over the colony: not so much to do away with him as to get at me. If so, they’d expect to find me with Laman’s colony, not on my own. And if Petra was right that Kin couldn’t track a whole colony, there was no way he could track a solitary hiker.

  It gave me only a slim edge to know more about my own position and movements than anyone else, but it was all I had. And after six months of knowing less about myself than anyone, it was about time I had the advantage.

  The Skaldi presented another story, impossible to figure out, impossible to predict. As soon as I left camp I wrapped the blunt end of my walking stick in a rag, hoping I could light it with my flint in case I needed a weapon against them, or in case I needed something to threaten the one I was pursuing. But I knew my makeshift weapon was nowhere near as effective as a flamethrower, and I wasn’t about to walk through the desert lugging one of those. From what I understood of Petra’s conversations with Laman, the Skaldi had set up a line to the east, squeezing us along the river’s bend toward the northwest. But traveling solo, I might just slip through their net. Or if not, I would have to hope that Laman’s story and my own memory really were true.

  I stifled a quiet laugh at the thought that I was actually chasing Skaldi instead of the other way around. I hoped that unexpected twist would work to my advantage.

  Through the better part of the morning, my plan seemed to be paying off. The sun climbed, revealing the empty land around me. My shadow shortened and pooled at my feet. The creature’s trail held steady, but nothing else met my eye. I took a swig of water and settled into a hard march, hoping to catch up to my prey or at least cover as much ground as possible before the sun reached its meridian.

  But then, maybe an hour before noon, I hit a major roadblock.

  Not a living one. A leftover from the wars that had given us this dead land. It was the remains of a mine field, no telling exactly how long or wide, the land pockmarked with craters where the charges had gone off, other unexploded mines showing as dark disks beneath the veil of dust. Laman had told me the combatants of a half-century ago often seeded the rivers with minefields. In fact, any body of water, even a dried-up lake half-filled with muddy sludge, had become as precious as gold in the waning days of the old world. Chances were whoever had planted this field had blown themselves to bits along with the ones they called their enemy. But I couldn’t risk a walk through what was left. I searched for the creature’s trail, but it became confused at the field’s edge, maybe plowing straight through, maybe hooking to the east. I stood there a long, painful minute, my legs tightening with the desire to move forward. But my head knew better.

  I wanted my past back. Just not enough to risk losing my future.

  I backtracked a quarter-mile and took a wide detour to the east, probably wider than I needed, but Laman had warned me about outlying mines planted to trick the unwary. By the time I’d circumnavigated the field and returned to my route by the river’s edge, a new problem rose, or hung, before me: the sun. Much as I hated to lose more time, I knew I’d have to take a break soon. The camp buzzed with stories of people who had plodded forward looking for shade and water, only to collapse in the dust. Once, we’d found the decomposing remains of someone who’d been too fatigued and dehydrated to realize he was dying. We could tell that was what had killed him because there were still bones, and unless they’re in a huge hurry, Skaldi don’t leave bones. I’d been drinking sparingly throughout the morning, small sips every fifteen minutes or so, not only to make it last but because that was about as much of the oily fluid as I could stand to hold in my stomach at a time. But I had started to feel headachy and woozy, and I knew I needed to find shade before confusion set in. Once I crossed that line, I couldn’t count on myself to stay by the river’s edge. I could just as easily end up walking myself to death in search of a mirage that stayed always a step or two beyond reach.

  I’d just about convinced myself the creature itself was a mirage when I found its trail again, arrowing straight along the riverbank as if it had never deviated an inch from its course despite the minefield. The temptation to follow took all my waning strength to fight. But I reminded myself that I hadn’t sidestepped the mines just so I could kill myself slowly an hour later. The trail still showed. The creature might tire. I could rest a couple hours through the full blaze of day and wake refreshed and ready to make up lost time.

  The riverbank provided some shade, so that seemed an obvious place to take a break. But then I saw a white blur on the horizon, something I felt confident was more than heat distortion. I approached it cautiously, though it didn’t have the look of anything I needed to fear. Within a quarter hour I confirmed what I’d hoped to find: a broken section of pipeline, the kind that used to pump fuel across the land. We’d found scattered pieces of these lines every so often, never with much of the original pipe left, because the fuel supply had been one of the first things to be targeted by air strikes. Occasionally we’d found sections sticking up from the ground, most times flat on their bellies, the metal struts that had supported them collapsed or buried in the sand. The first time we came across one, I made a fool of myself by asking Laman if there was still oil inside. Yov had had a field day with that one.

  The length of pipe spanned about thirty feet, with jagged ends and a huge crack down the middle, empty of everything but dust. It had collapsed completely, so it was a cinch to climb inside. The pipe itself was made of plastic, luckily, because the metal ones got too hot to touch at midday. Not much room, and not exactly what I’d call cool, but it kept me out of the direct sunlight. The smell of oil or gas or tar that had probably been overpowering a half-century ago had been completely erased by the ever-present scent of dust and decay. And the creature’s trail, I was gratified to see, held steady right past the pipe, so I could pick it up again the moment I finished my rest.

  I stayed inside the pipe a couple hours, not really sleeping. My eyelids felt heavy enough to fall, but every time they started to close I’d jerk awake with t
he fear that I’d heard some noise, the stamp of a boot, the scraping sound of the Skaldi I was pursuing. Probably nothing more than wind in the pipe or the rustle of my own attempts to find a comfortable position, but I’d never been so completely alone, and the quiet of a land without people dwarfed the hushed movements of our life as a colony. Out here by myself, it was hard not to magnify every squeak and shuffle into the rumble of an approaching army. That, plus the nervous excitement in my stomach, kept me on high alert.

  I replayed the memory from last night time and again, and though nothing new came to fill in the gaps in the sequence, the thought that I might be on the verge of recovering more of my past ran like an electric current through my body. I imagined myself waylaying the creature, intimidating it, forcing it, I had no idea how, to give back what it had stolen. I refused to let myself believe it was impossible, that the creature could snatch memory but not restore it. The hardest part was waiting. The curved plastic walls of the fuel pipe enclosed me like a cage, even though I knew they were the only thing protecting me from sunstroke and death.

  Just a little while longer, I told myself as I peeked out of the pipe to see how far the sun had limped across the sky. Just another hour, another few minutes, another few seconds, and I’d be free again. The trail would be there. I would find the creature at the end of it.