Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin

Author:Joshua David Bellin [Bellin, Joshua David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2014-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

11

Cost

I stayed on my knees until Aleka exited the building where the Skaldi had burned.

At first I shrank from the fire in her hands, the singed fabric of her clothes. But she wouldn’t let me stay down. With her help, I struggled to my feet, too shaky and sick with the loss of Korah to care about my soiled shirt front. I felt a trembling in my chest that I knew would turn to tears if I gave in to it.

“Let’s go find Laman,” she said.

My reunion with him was brief. We met midway between the bomb shelter and headquarters, along with a few others, including Araz. The flamethrower, still smoking, hung from the driver’s broad back. My dad approached me, looked me up and down, his face haggard in the first feeble light of dawn. His uniform was buttoned to the top just like the night before, his bearing in it as erect and unyielding as it had been then. The Skaldi had convinced me he was the infected one, but now I realized that had been another of its lies. He was battered and bruised, but he was himself. Why I’d doubted him so easily, why he’d made it so easy for me to doubt, were questions I couldn’t answer.

But we had no time to ask questions, no opportunity for more than a bare acknowledgment that we were both alive. Before he had a chance to say a word, Araz stepped to his side and grabbed his elbow.

“Game’s up, Laman,” the driver said. Next to him my dad looked like a child, or a very old man. “Come with me.”

My dad didn’t respond at first. He simply looked at the man who’d been his chauffeur, his brow wrinkling as if he couldn’t imagine what the problem was. Then he nodded once, curtly, and let Araz lead him away. The rest of the camp straggled after them.

Araz put him in the house that had been his headquarters. He took his gun away and posted Kelmen at the side window, Kin at the front door. He even stripped the cloth curtains away so the guards could keep a better eye on him. He also removed the canvas bedsheet to prevent the prisoner, so he said, from doing anything rash. The one officer who’d survived the night’s attack he sent to guard the weapons. Then Araz went to check on Keely and the rest of the little kids, to survey the damage to camp, to recover the bodies of the dead. To take charge of the colony my dad had once commanded.

I went with him. He wouldn’t let me near my dad’s cell, anyway.

As dawn marbled the sky we looked out over the wreckage of our camp. Long black streaks from Araz’s flamethrower scarred the ground, and the tents we’d strung up dangled from their lines, charred and smoldering. In some spots the floors of gutted houses still glowed like hot coals. Many of the fence posts had been knocked down

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.