Colony High, page 17
— when Alex shot up and did something that took Mark completely by surprise.
“No donkeys!” She screamed, at the top of her lungs, drawing all eyes her way. “We won’t eat your donkeys! Poor donkeys. Poor donkeys. Poor donkeys …”
Amid some frantic giggles, others took up the chant.
“Poor donkeys! Poor donkeys!”
Mark had seen it before. Near murderous tension, broken by a moment of hysterical relief. Only this time it wasn’t achieved by a diplomat or soldier or teacher, but a coltish 15-year old.
“Poor donkeys! Poor donkeys!”
Alex cast him a sidelong grin, as the chant took off without any further help. A mantra of utter nonsense, soon lost to even its original meaning, as laughter mixed with sobs. And everyone knew who the ‘donkeys’ were, deserving pity for a fate that was not at all their fault.
We are the donkeys. Poor us.
Mark didn’t let his wound-up muscles relax till he saw the man in denim bring his hand back around – empty. Serpa nodded acceptance to the shouting students, attempting a stern smile, though his eyes said this isn’t over.
No, it isn’t, Mark thought. He was thinking ahead. Even if the carnies shared their supplies fairly, and even if the Garubis “gift” of this world meant there was food to be had, he knew harsh days were ahead. And donkey meat might yet be on the menu. And llama. And hamster.
And then, maybe, us.
Principal Jeffers made no effort to regain an agenda, clearly recognizing the time had come to close. Taking control again with raised arms, he simply ended on a hopeful note.
“Good night, and God bless us all.”
Even under ideal conditions, the squeeze to empty the bleachers was never pretty. Migration out of the gym was even clumsier as a majority wanted out on one side, through doors leading to the main building, where a table staffed by volunteers offered each person one rationed cup of water. A guide path of solar lanterns illuminated long lines at the makeshift latrines, though a lot of the boys headed off in the dark to one of the open storm drains, along Rimpau.
Alex held back, briefly surrounded by a few admirers who patted her on the back, or shook her hand, for defusing the tense situation. Mark watched, proud of her, but above all surprised by how unsurprised he was. Well, I always figured she was special.
Yet his gaze drifted to Gracie Donner, gathering her team of biologists and guards for tomorrow’s expedition. That’s where I belong. And yet, he held back, watching as Helene Shockley managed the long line allocating blankets. The youngest kids were handed those first. But when it came the turn of juniors and seniors, by almost silent agreement among the boys – maybe some kind of chivalry reflex learned from old movies – the guys plucked up tarps and painters’ dropcloths from the hardware store, leaving all remaining blankets for the older girls. And no one raised it as an issue.
Under the watchful eye of Mrs. Swain, some hetero couples clung tearfully before separating in opposite directions in search of someplace not too hard or cold. To collapse.
A few went the other way, including Froggi, Greg and Nick. “Meet us at our spot in twenty minutes!” Froggi said, and Mark nodded, wondering what they had in mind.
Our spot. That must be the climbing wall.
With that, the Hammar boys pushed open the wide doors at what had been the gym’s north end, letting in a current of strange air, refreshingly cool after the heat of so many bodies, yet tinged with the acid vinegary jungle aroma. At least it pushed aside the stink of a thousand filthy teenagers, with showers right in this building but zero water to spare.
Alex sent her last freshman admirer scooting toward Women’s Country, but seemed in no hurry to join that purdah. Mark told her of the rendezvous. Unless I’m mistaken, they want to organize our own dawn patrol into the forest.
“Wait!” Barry called, and Mark slowed down enough for them to regroup. Barry seemed much happier now, chattering about his long night ahead. The hackers would be issued unlimited caffeine, in hope of reconfiguring the bio-assay machines by tomorrow morning. The prospect invigorated him, until a sight abruptly rendered Barry speechless.
Stars. Unknown stars. Outside, a few meters beyond the gym lights, they seemed to swarm overhead like a sparkling wave. The clear sky, colored like gunmetal, seemed to spray hot pinpoints overhead, completely alien. Four of them seemed very close. One was a big, red ember.
“That’s a planet,” Barry said, almost whispering. “Dang, I can make out a disk, bare-eyed.”
Mark gaped like a child. He stumbled as the pressure of more students made them step to the side.
I wonder if we’re even in the Milky Way anymore.
“Look. A moon!” Barry pointed toward the west, where a narrow crescent hung above the horizon, at least twice the apparent width of Luna. “They said it was close, but man, it’s big.”
“So many stars,” someone else gasped nearby, and these were desert kids, accustomed to decent skies. Mark noticed crowds gathering where the astronomy club had set up many instruments, at the far end of the plaza, chattering with more enjoyment than anybody ought to, if they’d just been kidnapped across a galaxy.
Yep. We are a really varied species of ape.
“There’s another planet over there,” Alex said, pointing in a different direction. Mark turned. Then screaming began somewhere in the twilight behind them.
14
VISITORS
It was a boy. Terror raised his voice into a screech, but Mark never doubted the screamer was male. His instant, worried guess: one of the big jocks standing guard out at the edge.
“Gaaaaaaaah!”
He sounded hurt. Also brave, because the cry twisted into words before cutting off.
“Bats! Bats! RUN! Bats! They’re —”
The clarity that Mark had felt, absorbing the new sky, stayed with him as he turned — not to escape, but to help. That would have been a mistake. Two things saved him.
There were people everywhere in the shadowy space between the gym and the main wing of the school, milling around bike racks and raised planters as they tried to fit into one line or another. One column stretched from the nurse’s office inside the main wing out to the flag pole. Another, leading back into the locker rooms was another zigzag mess.
These formations shattered as the guard screamed, as a maelstrom of bodies barred Mark’s path. Worse, the gym doors rattled open again as several dozen girls came out to investigate. Some instinct told him to look up.
The night rippled, as if the surrounding forest horizon lifted and then fell on a sudden wind. A cloud rushed over them, and darkness became a solid, biting thing, filled with screams.
Bats? Mark had a brief impression of spasming black worm-like things — small, no bigger than his thumb, with wings about the size of his hand and long, thin, cutting tongues that stabbed and darted in the moonlight. Their only noise was a staccato rustling of frenzied motion, soon lost in a rising roar of human cries. The wave of dark fliers rushed past him like ten thousand needles stitching through paper as the savage little creatures formed swells and bunches, almost like deliberate knives, dividing the crowd. And he realized —
They’re isolating some of the smaller kids.
Even as he moved, Mark recognized the pattern, like a school of piranha, or a pack of wolves, culling out and then taking down cornered animals. The crowd surged again as everyone ran, hundreds of voices echoing from the tall cinderblock walls.
Mark bumped uselessly against the panicked mob, one step, two, trying to reach a freshman girl lost in a jittering cyclone of wings, but he was struck in the hip and then in his ribs. Arms and elbows, everywhere. He staggered as the human stampede turned him toward the gym.
The change of direction, giving in to the group impulse, went through Mark with much deeper force than the impacts against his body. Heart pounding, his body and mind trembled with adrenaline. His first thought was loud and wild, full of anger at himself. If you’d run out there you might have died.
Then he looked for Alex.
Where is she?
Searching for his friends in the gloom, Mark slammed into several mountain bikes chained to a rack, scraping his ankle and stomach.
Something whispered against his hair. He ducked and threw an awkward swat, maybe hurting one or two of the swarming creatures. A stiff little body smacked into his knuckles, feeling a lot like a hackeysack, and further down his arm a dry mass of wings crumpled against the bones of his wrist.
That was when pain began.
Mark choked and twisted away from his own left arm. He banged his shoulders and lower back against the hard protrusions of two bikes and was hardly aware of it. His world had closed down to one bright jagged spike of horror and he threw his arm from side to side into tires and metal struts and gears, frantic to get the bat off.
The palsied monster was humping and squirming. Somewhere under a tent of wings were tiny claws, four or six or more, scratching at him like fine needles, but it was the whipcord tongue that made him yell. It unfurled like an oily pink wire and cinched completely around his wrist, breaking the skin, squeezing his tendons and muscle.
The bat-thing’s eyes were yellow beads.
It was hot and stank of musk and droppings.
Mere seconds passed before the agony in Mark’s arm changed, perhaps from a natural anesthetic in the creature’s saliva. It left him more aware of the severe bruises he was inflicting on himself but he didn’t stop, bashing his arm down on the bike’s ridged gears again and again.
Mark had no way of knowing if the toxin would paralyze or kill him if it reached his heart or brain. Yet fear was overwhelmed by greater emotions. Duty to his friends. And revenge. The bat clung to him even in death and he ripped at its broken wings, feeling one claw let go. His fingers were slick with its thin, dark blood and his left hand wasn’t working well, but he finally peeled the ugly thing away as he turned.
At least a hundred students and adults jammed entrances to the gym and main building, shrieking, flailing blindly at the haze of bats. Four sets of doors just weren’t enough. He saw an adult trip over one boy’s feet. Both of them went down and the boy dragged someone else with him.
Yet, the tumult at the doors had benefits. The bat-things whirled and slashed over the mob, yet curled away from the howling turbulence of heads and arms. In well-defined, arrow-like swirls, they retreated from the heart of the crowd. The tiny monsters were feeling out the shape of the stampede, cutting people away from the back end in ones and twos, like a hideous, lashing tide. Teens screamed and flailed with jackets and backpacks, and some of the predators fell.
They always from come above, he noted, squirming out of his own jacket and waving it like a helicopter blade, over his head. Never from the side.
We need shields. Armor. Clubs. Lacrosse sticks, football helmets, shoulder pads, even blankets might work. If I could only get to the equipment room. Heck, umbrellas would be great! As if there were many of those, in good old Twenty-Nine Palms, Mojave Desert, California.
The darkness added to the chaos. Peeling away from the door jam, in their terror students careened into each other, channeled by the raised planters and bike racks— A blond girl, with a lick of blood across her temple—
An adult man, hunched over to make himself smaller than the children—
We have to get out of here, Mark thought. Head for other doors.
Unable to keep whirling the jacket, he wrestled it overhead, kept his elbows bent and let the fabric stretch against his scalp and shoulders, like a sail. Doing this exposed his torso, but it also gave him extra protection where it counted most. Bat-things swooped, but only hit his left hand and the empty decoy of the jacket.
“This way!” he shouted into the white face of a junior he recognized — Cammie Rosa — she had wisps of blood-wet hair stuck to her ear and cheek. “Tell everyone! This way! We’ll go around the main wing!”
Incomprehension flashed through Cammie’s eyes, swiftly replaced by a glint of steel — and he saw she was attached to another girl, one hand clenching her friend’s wrist. They made a daisy-chain of three, with the last girl sobbing back over her shoulder for someone else they’d lost in the screaming dark.
Mark turned to holler at two more kids. “Your jackets! Over your head! Like this!”
Cammie started yelling, too, luring more students to form into her chain. Groups glommed together. In less than a minute, twenty-five or more were shuffling past the flagpole, most of them with a shirt, a jacket, a purse, a backpack over their heads. The knot of teenagers became large enough that a spearhead swarm veered away, seeking stragglers.
Mark shouted at two seniors who’d burrowed to the center of the group. “Smaller kids in the middle! You two keep everyone moving. Around the cafeteria. I’m going after others.”
Even as he yelled, Mark looked back at the gym, thinking the doors must have cleared.
But what he saw made his heart plummet.
One set of doors was closed! The double-doors on the far right had been shut, despite the horde of people clamoring to get in. Students and adults trampled each other to move left, toward the remaining set. For an instant, Mark thought he saw Alex, her wiry frame struggling to hold a door open against much larger bodies. The sight froze him. But he knew hesitation was death.
“That way!” he yelled at Cammie and a skinny kid with glasses who seemed to have it together. While they cajoled the growing convoy forward, Mark dashed over to three hunched forms huddled by a planter. Mark used his jacket to disperse a swarm, then to whack feeding bat-things off their victims. It took strength to yank the kids out of their fetal balls and then send them stumbling toward Cammie. The skinny guy had guts, running forth to retrieve the trio, screaming like a banshee as he whirled his own jacket, using it also to drive the wounded ones along.
Another pair of stragglers hurried over when Mark called. But a third group wasn’t so lucky. Mark had to carry a wounded boy while others clutched his belt. That left Mark’s jacket hanging from his head like a hoodie, with bat-oid things crawling across, seeking an opening. They departed only when Mark’s rescues reached the comparative safety of the herd.
“Stay together!” Cammie shouted. “It’s not far! We’re going for the offices around to the left!” Kids banged against each other, cursing, stumbling, yet they reached the immense flat shape of the main building and got some respite. The batties were incredibly nimble, but the building should offer some cover.
Fifty meters, he thought. It can’t be more than a fifty, can it?
It was a perfect nightmare. A dart of bats across his face. A wailing kid who ran past the convoy without seeing or realizing its partial safety. Mark tried to find the energy to chase after the poor fellow, and found that he had no reserves. Across the quad, he saw a body unmoving on the concrete.
Someone – he never knew who – took the wounded kid from his arms. Maybe he could walk now.
They were forced to waddle, knees bent but chests up to make their raised arms their highest points. Too many of them had naked backs or nothing more to protect them than a bra strap. One boy screamed when a bat lashed at his spine, and others cried out in fear. But having recovered from their panic, now two of the larger guys took turns patrolling the group, swatting predators, crushing them with bare hands. Of course that would only work until —
The thin guy pointed and shouted. “A big swarm… I think it’s the main one. They look like… they’ve spotted us!”
We’ll never make it to the doors. If only there was a window. Mark looked around desperately. He spotted more stragglers, six teenagers and an adult kneeling beside a Coke machine and another bike rack—
And a fire extinguisher.
Summoning some strength, Mark ran for it, breaking ranks. “Stay close to the wall! Keep moving!”
Wings skittered overhead. He ducked and yanked his shirt off entirely, making a rough wad of it in his left hand. His bad hand. He punched into the glass. On the third try, it shattered.
Somewhere an alarm went off, clanging above the din of voices. Battery-powered. Awesome. Mark hoped everyone on this hellish little island would realize what he’d done and make the connection themselves.
Barry and Alex and Froggi, he thought. They’ll know.
If they’re alive.
Two of the stragglers argued with each other, a girl pulling at a boy. “Please, let’s join them! Please!” she cried, on her feet, but the boy stayed against the Coke machine with his rigid fingers clamped onto its red plastic, yelling, “We’re safer here!”
The girl was exposed. The bats recognized it. An open black claw of spasming wings and tongues shot out of the night. It covered her head first, spiraling around her long hair and bangle earrings, tugging her off-balance away from the boy. Her delicate hands came up helplessly even as the bats began to twist her off her feet.
Mark swung the canister around and blasted the swarm with a loud shock of fire retardant. The girl fell hard on the concrete, bleeding but alive. She screamed as bats landed all around her and convulsed and twitched. Most of them leapt back into the sky. Mark crushed one with his shoe and felt another strike at his pantleg. The girl shoved herself onto her knees even before her boyfriend reached her.
“Oh, Shawn, oh my God—”
“Move it! Run!” Mark hollered as he hurried along the convoy of refugees, shooting brief bursts wherever the attackers seemed to be clustering on prey, breaking up concentrations, desperately hoping the ammo would hold. Night vision had kicked in. But other senses seemed more reliable — every hair on his body stood up as stiff as a pin, as if each one was a quivering nerve reaching away from him. The premonition of another attack was as real and sickening as his icy hot pulse.
It didn’t come. He did dash over to blast a clump that almost covered two desperately flailing teens. A large student and one of the town citizens gathered the victims in their arms as Mark scanned about, ignoring bats that swept by in twos or threes.
