Colony High, page 18
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” The skinny kid with the glasses cried, urging everyone forward tight against the wall.
The bats only flittered into them once, trying to get to the girl. Her blood.
His mind raced.
The one that bit me, it was so hot. And that might be what drove them off — not just the blast itself or the noise, but because I coated them in powder.
They eat meat and blood. All protein. The powder might blind them. Hide us. It definitely hurts ’em.
“Oh—!” The boyfriend hesitated when he saw the door to the admin office, nearly tripping the girl and Mark.
The door was closed, and even in the night Mark could see a bulk of human shapes standing against it on the inside, pulling it shut. The top part of the door was glass. But the glass had been broken in one corner where they’d reached in to get the lock, and the skinny kid shouted, “Open up, open up!”
Mark let himself drop out of the group, staying low. He turned and squeezed off the last of the fire extinguisher, one blast at random, the second at a swirl in the dark. Then the extinguisher hissed and died.
People were yelling. He threw himself toward the sound.
They must have gotten the door open because hands clutched at his hair and his bad arm, yanking him inside where he fell. Then the door slammed. Glass danced on the tile floor close to his face and a girl shrieked, “You idiots! Cover the window with something!”
Mark scrambled out of the way as a dozen pairs of feet shuffled around him from different directions. Binders, keyboards, a big desk calendar were passed forward to plug the hole. Two guys upended an entire table in a deafening crash of computers and printers and shouted, “Watch out! Move!”
There was no time to rest. While some hunted down any bat-things that had come in, other voices echoed in the hallway behind the office, other survivors, sobbing and shouting. Mark pulled himself to his feet and against a wall. He tried to peer through the black-on-black shadows.
He needed help. He found the skinny kid easily. Each lens of the kid’s square glasses held a smudge of moonlight that winked and went out when his face turned toward Mark.
“Holy shit, dude,” the kid said, making a shaky noise that might have been a laugh.
“We need as many fire extinguishers as we can get,” Mark told him. “There’s still people out there.”
The batoids (as some called them) were gone twenty minutes later. Someone marshaled a small gang of boys, girls, and two adults back into the darkness. They went through the main entrance in a tightly packed circle, armed with fire extinguishers, mops, brooms, and wearing wastebaskets for helmets or jackets wrapped like turbans around their heads. They were a big shuffling beast that gained more size as bleeding kids crawled out of hiding — from under benches, inside dumpsters or under huddles of clothes.
In the moonlight, the pavement seemed to squirm with wounded bats, like crumpled hunks of leather. In one spot they found fifty of the ugly things on the concrete, wheezing, barely moving. Mark didn’t know what to make of it, but he didn’t want to find out. He led the group in a wide detour around the patch of sluggish creatures.
A few human sounds dotted the darkness and small groups detached to reclaim wounded kids, guarded by sentries with fire extinguishers.
Leonard Kelly, the skinny kid, croaked, “Somebody oughta knock on the gym and tell them the party’s over.”
“Go for it, Leo,” Mark whispered. The poor guy had probably been picked on for years for looking like a geek. Here was a well-earned chance for him to get limelight. “Tell ’em to grab all the extinguishers they have and come help.”
They moved on, pulled a dazed boy to his feet and supported him between them as they continued.
The next fellow was less lucky, his throat open. Hundreds of little prints marked the edges of the bloody puddle. Wings. Claws. The swarms had intensified here. Drawing attention away from others, Mark thought, wondering if that made him cold-blooded.
Above them, the sky was so beautiful, clear and cool, with a million new stars and the giant moon.
“Anybody know who this is?”
Voices rose behind him as the gym doors clanked open. He felt glad – angry, exhausted, and glad. Two powerful flashlight beams stabbed out from a cluster of human shapes.
“Okay, let’s keep moving this way,” he said. He wanted to rest. He wanted to find Alex and Barry and Mr. Castro and Froggi and the twins … and Helene … and Dave and Charlie … but if anyone else was still out here, they might be in desperate need of timely first aid.
The bats might come back, he thought. We have to be ready. There’s no telling what their normal patterns are, and we might have confused them as badly as they did us.
The notion stayed with him as he crept forward, wishing he had one of those flashlights.
Then he stepped on another bat-thing and jumped. “Aah!”
This one was alive. A sophomore girl stepped out of the group to stomp it with her designer-heeled sandals.
He waved his group forward, hoping he might recognize his friends among the thin crowds filing out of the gym. Flashlights. Voices calling.
Great. Now you bring out the sports equipment, Mark mused, as a couple of dozen burly guys emerged all suited up in football pads, helmets, and gloves with towels packed in the joints. In an eclectic touch, they wielded baseball bats and proceeded to go after bat things that were flopping on the ground, while Grace Donner and a few of her bio gals dashed ahead of the vengeance squad, grabbing still-living ones to stuff into plastic jars. Two townies and a carnival man brandished shotguns.
Together, they took back the school grounds.
Alex found him sharing the remnants of one small bottle of water with Leo and two other kids on a far corner of the gymnasium grandstand. She had a bruise rising on her left cheek, where a right-handed punch would have landed. Some panicking fool who tried slamming the gym door against refugees, Mark figured. Whoever it was, probably came out worse for the struggle. I pity the fool.
Alex also had a raw stripe on her neck where a bat licked her. He recalled the boy they’d seen whipped across the throat … Another inch and Alex might have shared that fate.
She hugged him while he was still trying to make sense of his feelings. Good. She couldn’t see his face with their arms around each other, and she started crying and Mark realized he couldn’t breathe. Fortunately, Barry was there too and he punched Mark’s shoulder in a very unBarry-like way.
They settled down together after Leo volunteered to get more water in the teeming chaos.
“Do you think they’ll be back?” Alex asked.
“We’re probably safe for the night, but I’m just guessing. The swarm probably pounced because … well, they probably seldom see so many warm bodies, after dark.”
“Yeah,” Barry agreed. “There’s no way any other native life would stay exposed at nightfall like we did. The natives must go to ground and wait out the bats, but there were so many of us … I’ll bet the bats usually gorge on their prey and then go home to digest and sleep.”
“Then why … the ones lying on the ground. So many of them looked just lethargic. Not injured, but they seemed more tired than the humans.”
“Could be they were driven wild by how defenseless we seemed,” Mark commented. “That kept them attacking and gorging, when normally they would’ve burned out after just a few minutes.”
“And so they died.” Barry nodded. “Ironic.”
“We don’t know what fraction died. A lot. But … They must live near here. That’s a problem.” He shrugged. “Anyway, this disaster won’t happen again. Now we know better.”
Alex nodded. “One lesson learned. But at what cost?”
Mark could see Principal Jeffers, his face stricken as Ms. Takka, the younger biology teacher held out a clipboard, no doubt tallying the dead. Mark had only seen three, and heard of two more, including the guard who shouted the first warning. But he suspected darkly there’d be more.
Flexing his still half-numb left arm, Mark refrained from speaking aloud his other worry. He didn’t have to. Everyone must be thinking the same thing.
What if the bites and tongue-licks are poisonous to humans?
The gym was overpacked again, with half the basketball court set aside as a makeshift hospital and frightened kids and adults stacked up through the bleachers. At least the lights were on again, no matter if they were burning up irreplaceable gas. Darkness would have been terrifying.
Mark spotted Mr. Castro helping with the wounded, but nobody had seen Dave McCarthy’s black jacket or Charlie Escobar’s big chin, or a lot of other people. Froggi and the twins were gone, too, but Mark didn’t worry much about them. The X Kids had probably taken cover away from the rest of the population.
Out on the basketball court, some were being treated for neck wounds. Several wore bandages over an eye. One girl – both eyes. There were broken bones from falls … and no lack of volunteer nurses.
I should help, he thought. And Mark knew that he was too spent to do anyone else the slightest good.
Nothing remained of the confident, almost cocky TNPHS spooky spirit, when the Grand Meeting had broken up. No one would soon forget how students, townies and carnies battled each other at the doors, some fighting to close them and others – like Alex – to keep open a way for refugees.
There were fractures throughout their community — mistrust and doubt — to say nothing of the bruises and bloody lips inflicted by each other.
Some “colony.” We failed our first crisis, Mark thought.
We have to be able to rely on each other. It’s all we’ve got.
No one slept well through the long, alien night.
ADULT SUPERVISION?
Many of us wanted the assignment – to watch how Earthlings will do the inevitable. How they will waste the Great Gift that we have given them.
It happens every time that we do a favor for a young race, following rules laid down long ago by the absent Law-Givers. We are bound by ancient oaths, to fulfill obligations. Bound … but if we fulfill the letter of the law, in our own way? The Law-Givers are gone, and we now satisfy our debts in whatever way might amuse the Garubis Polity.
On Earth, I bared this body of mine for capture and abuse by foolish human grubs. And their larvae behaved mostly as-predicted, with savage insensitivity to possible consequences. But some of them … a few … acted with surprising grace, saving this one’s life. Saving my life. And so they spared their species from our fore-planned trap. Our retribution would have been justified and fierce –
— but instead, I lived. I was returned to the Garubis Bosom. And Retribution had to be set aside for a time, in favor of Reward. And from the list of prizes, we chose to give them a colony.
A settlement-refuge, for several hundred brooding-age human females and their attendant drones. For them to make the best of. Or to fail, according to their talents and moral character.
Having spent months among them, I know how the human adults and sages would complain over this gift. Had they been given just one day of warning, they might have gathered two thousand volunteers with a myriad skills and equipped with every clever tool to make this colony a success. And perhaps that is the way a Law-Giver would do things.
But the Law-Givers are gone. Leaving us behind, shackled by their laws.
Oh, but we Garubis have become fine lawyers!
Let the humans scream, mourning their lost spawn. Their rage will only make them more prone to error, when next we meet.
Meanwhile, we will watch this experimental brood nest of their soft, ill-disciplined hatchlings. Our simulations predict some amusing failure modes, as we observed happen to other gift-recipients, in the past.
Humiliated by my failure to be killed on Earth – shamed by receiving their kindness – I did not think I would win the prize I next sought — this assignment to watch the children fail, close-at-hand. But blood counts and my high caste prevailed, one more time. And so, I will supervise from shadows, relishing the painful ironies.
For revenge is the highest art. And we take payback seriously. And so we retaliate, time and again, against our Masters. By living according to the letter of their laws – but never the spirit.
So come now, human teens. Do not disappoint me.
As you would say: blow it.
End of Book One
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement and thanks go to the fine folks at the Golden Duck Foundation and Reading for the Future, for inspiring me you write something for Young Folks, and to Robert Silverberg, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein and others for inspiring me, much earlier.
And Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press for publishing the earlier, much shorter version of this story called Sky Horizon, a version that won the Hal Clement Award for best science fiction novel for Young Adults, in 2008. That version got substantial nibbles from Hollywood. Maybe this time...
And Scott Hampton for his terrific interior art and vivid cover for that SubPress edition.
And this round of sharp-eyed pre-readers, Steve Ruskin, Jennifer Claver, Roy Harvey, David Ivory, Jonathan Armstrong, Doug McElwain, Darrell Ernst and Duncan Cairncross, Steve Jackson, Matt Crawford and Bonnie Hartmeyer. And earlier Mark Grygier and Ari, Terren and Ben Brin.
And of course Cheryl Brigham, who also has wonderful stories to tell about youth and perseverance.
You too... go forth. Thrive and persevere..
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Brin is a scientist, tech speaker/consultant, and author. His novels about our survival and opportunities in the near future are EARTH and Existence. A film by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His 16 novels, including NY Times Bestsellers and Hugo Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web. David appears frequently on shows such as Nova and The Universe and Life After People, speaking about science and future trends. His non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
(Website: http://www.davidbrin.com/ )
David Brin, Colony High
