“I'll push it! I will!”
With dismay, Seiler saw the kid was crying. He was actually crying.
“I want to be like Moses,” Hans said. “You and me, Boris. You, and me, and Milo.” His thumb clicked over the large green button at the top of the device.
The last thing Seiler saw was the image of two prisoners standing outside the depot door, looking stunned. Then, the fire took him.
Chapter 21: The Colony
1
“They came with the dark,” Kate said. She set Dominik's diary on the ground beside her and looked at the darkening sky. It was almost too black to see now. The moon lay at the edge of the horizon, giant and red. It cast no light upon the fortress.
“Just a minute.” AJ had fashioned a dozen torches out of wood and old rags, and he was in the process of placing them around the camp. When he finished, he set them ablaze, one by one. “We should be able to see now, at least. What were you saying?”
“I said they came with the dark. When the sun set, that's when… that's when it happened.”
“When this place was destroyed.”
“Yes. When they came and took this place for their own.”
AJ cast a glance to the gate and beyond, looking at the fleshy shapes overhanging the hills. He studied them a long moment. “What else did it say?”
“They were prisoners here, that man and his family. The Carrion were smaller then, but they were studying it.” She paused and then clarified: “They were studying how to kill it.”
“And that stuff down in the tank, it does that?”
She nodded. “Better than acid.”
“Better than acid,” he whispered, looking back in the direction of The Aeschylus. “They've been here a long time. The Carrion, I mean. They've been here a long time.”
“Oh yes.”
“What do you think they are? I mean really. You read the book, Kate, what do you think? What did they think?”
At first, she was taken aback; she hadn't had a moment's breath to think about their situation. But when she stopped, she realized that wasn't quite true. She had been thinking about it, if only in the back of her mind.
“I think they're colonizing us.”
“Who? The Carrion?”
“No. Whoever sent them. Whoever put them here. You know about global warming, right?”
“Sure. The average temperature around the globe is heating up. Too many people, too much pollution.”
“No,” she said. “That might be the general belief, but it's not true. Global temperatures have changed only a fraction of a degree. Some parts of the globe have even gotten cooler within the last hundred years. But some areas have gotten warmer, a lot warmer. That's how both sides manipulate the data. It's because the data changes depending on what region you're talking about. The thing is, it's getting warmer in the places that matter. Places like the polar ice caps. Places like the south pole. The ice shelves are melting.”
A smile played across his lips. “The place you're going is a little far-fetched.”
“No!” She found her voice was emphatic and couldn't quite control it. “You heard Gideon. The sole purpose of those things is to generate heat. They're not trying to change things all over the earth, because they don't have to! They're changing things in the only places that matter. When the ice caps are gone, and the ice shelves melt—”
“Parts of the earth will flood,” he said. His voice was lower now, contemplative.
“Yes! And without the glaciers, the climate will change. It will change on a global scale, and not by a fraction of a degree, either. We're talking floods. Storms. Humidity and pressure changes. All of it! It all starts by affecting a few small areas, areas where no humans are supposed to be.” Her mind harkened back to all those months she had spent at Valley Oil, analyzing data for her job. Every time there was an outcry for green energy, for cutting reliance on gas-powered engines, every time the liberals protested drilling in a natural habitat, it was her job — and the job of her superiors — to sway the public. She knew the facts and figures of global temperature change all too well. The clean-energy representatives could never prove traditional fuel sources were to blame for isolated climate changes in other parts of the world. All the while, Kate had questioned whether or not she would live to regret her chosen profession, if maybe, just maybe, she had been wrong to write the things she did. Sitting here now, for the first time, she was afraid she might have been right. Because if there really was some other force, some other worldly thing responsible for warming the oceans at the ends of the earth, the worst was yet to come.
The whole purpose of creating a colony was to occupy it.
“Kate? You look like you spaced out, there.”
“Sorry. I just… I'm thinking, that's all.”
He did something she didn't expect, then: he pulled her close and hugged her. At first, she didn't know how to react, and then she threw her arms around him. How long had it been since she had really held someone? She couldn't remember.
They stood for a long moment, gripping each other in the primeval glow of the torches. When they broke apart, it was AJ who spoke.
“Dark or no, we don't have much time. If you're good here, I'm going to take a look at the boat and see if I can patch those holes. I'd just assume be ready to go when Dutch gets back.”
“Did you find something to patch them with?”
“Yeah. There are all kinds of goodies around here.”
“The Carrion don't take loot.”
He chuckled humorlessly. “No. No, they don't.”
With a rifle in hand, he was about to turn towards the hole in the fence. Then Kate spun with a sharp intake of breath. An approaching figure stumbled and then fell, clutching a wound in its side. Kate tried to shout, but no words escaped her lips. Dutch, she mouthed. Oh God, Dutch!
2
The cleft in the tentacle opened as Mason ran a finger down it. He put his hand inside, feeling the warmth like a man returning to the womb. I can heal in there, he thought. I can heal and be strong again.
His leg was broken. When he had jumped from the top of the boat, he had landed wrong, and the bone had given out around the bullet wound. AJ and the smart boy would be leaving, and a broken leg wouldn't get him there in time. He needed help. Help, from his new friends. The fact that he was still standing at all was a testament to the energy running through his veins. Now, he had an army with that kind of power at his fingertips.
“Boss,” Christian said. “What you do… Boss…”
The others were standing behind him, watching. He didn't know what he had expected. Well, maybe that wasn't true. He expected the tentacles to part, to move for him like The Red Sea before Moses. Moses… and The Red Sea… and The Exodus… and The Fire Telephone. He expected to walk right up the path, beyond the crater, to the front gates of the fortress. He expected to march inside and strangle AJ and the smart boy with him. The Carrion didn't work like that though, didn't move like that.
No matter. Path or no path, he would have his army. He and his men could take the long way around.
His men.
That turn-of-phrase meant little, now. The group was down to three. Peter was a rotting corpse, his brains scattered on the floor of the machine shop like candy. Christian was alive but of little use. The man had made it to the water in time to put himself out, but not before his brain cooked. He was naked now, the flesh melted around his chest and around his hips. His penis was a ruined, withered thing; it had fused with the side of his thigh in the heat. Even with The Carrion running through him, he could barely stand for the pain. Melvin was all right, but even he had taken shrapnel on the deck of The Aeschylus.