Read Online Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joshua David Bellin
Ads: Link
enough plaster to make a cast. According to her, there’d been a time when people who got sick were taken care of better than anyone, with buildings to live in, workers to stand by their side, machines to feed them drugs and oxygen. Story was her own parents had been working in a building like that when it got bombed. But these days, people who got sick mostly recovered on their own. Or they didn’t, and the colonies dug a grave deep enough that the Skaldi couldn’t find it. And then they moved on, in case the Skaldi did.
I got my legs under me, stood, almost fell. This was the worst episode yet. The times before, my heart would slow to normal in a minute and all that would be left was a slight tightness in the pit of my stomach. Tonight I felt dizzy, drained. Like I wasn’t totally there, like some part of me was back in the depths of the dream I couldn’t remember.
I wondered what had triggered it. The truck? The stalker at the bomb shelter? The feeling I’d had since the attack in the hollow that something was wrong, something more than usual? Or the fact that Aleka seemed to feel the same way?
Maybe it was my latest argument with my dad. His anger when he thought I was giving up. Maybe this time, if I really focused, I could give him what he wanted at last.
But I couldn’t. The dream had evaporated, and the effort to concentrate made my stomach clench and my head throb. I knew that if I remained where I was, I’d spend the rest of the night staring at the moon-blurred sky, waiting for sleep that wasn’t about to come.
I stepped around bodies and made my way across the compound. Moving helped a little. The nausea subsided and my thoughts came into better alignment with the outside world. The trucks squatted in their new location, their black bodies like the shells of some long-dead creature. The light had gone out in the house my dad had designated as headquarters, so even he must have been sleeping. I knew I couldn’t get far without running into Wali, who was on guard duty tonight. Thinking about him reminded me of Korah, and thinking about what the two of them probably did when they were alone in the dark didn’t help my stomach either. So I stopped at one of the nearby houses, one with an empty swimming pool. I lowered myself carefully by the edge, dangled my legs into the hole, and listened to the silence. The crater in the compound’s center yawned like a lake of darkness.
I decided to try one of Tyris’s memory exercises. She’d taught them to me in the week after the accident, and though they’d done nothing to restore my past, they did help pass the time. Her favorite was to have me isolate a memory from as far back as I could, a pleasant memory. I’d almost laughed when she said that. “A memory where you felt safe,” she amended. I shut my eyes now and remembered the first time my dad took me out in the field after my accident. I’d been cooped up in my tent much of the time before that, and it was something just to get out and move around. He drew troop formations in the dust with a stick, X ’s for us and O ’s for them, wiped the diagrams out, made me redraw them from memory. He showed me a tattered field guide he’d picked up somewhere along the way, which described how to determine your position if you had a compass, how to plot points on the horizon if you didn’t. It gave me an odd thrill to realize I was one of only a handful of people in camp who knew how to read, though he said nothing about how I’d learned. He tested me on the book’s concepts, and it turned out I was pretty good at putting theory to practice. My mind seemed to expand with the open air. There’d been no signs of Skaldi in the days after my accident, so we stayed out well into dusk. When the light got too bad to do any more work, he clapped me on the back and we headed for the mess tent.
That’s when he saw a ball one of the little kids had dropped, a tightly wound bundle of twine. He leaned over to
I got my legs under me, stood, almost fell. This was the worst episode yet. The times before, my heart would slow to normal in a minute and all that would be left was a slight tightness in the pit of my stomach. Tonight I felt dizzy, drained. Like I wasn’t totally there, like some part of me was back in the depths of the dream I couldn’t remember.
I wondered what had triggered it. The truck? The stalker at the bomb shelter? The feeling I’d had since the attack in the hollow that something was wrong, something more than usual? Or the fact that Aleka seemed to feel the same way?
Maybe it was my latest argument with my dad. His anger when he thought I was giving up. Maybe this time, if I really focused, I could give him what he wanted at last.
But I couldn’t. The dream had evaporated, and the effort to concentrate made my stomach clench and my head throb. I knew that if I remained where I was, I’d spend the rest of the night staring at the moon-blurred sky, waiting for sleep that wasn’t about to come.
I stepped around bodies and made my way across the compound. Moving helped a little. The nausea subsided and my thoughts came into better alignment with the outside world. The trucks squatted in their new location, their black bodies like the shells of some long-dead creature. The light had gone out in the house my dad had designated as headquarters, so even he must have been sleeping. I knew I couldn’t get far without running into Wali, who was on guard duty tonight. Thinking about him reminded me of Korah, and thinking about what the two of them probably did when they were alone in the dark didn’t help my stomach either. So I stopped at one of the nearby houses, one with an empty swimming pool. I lowered myself carefully by the edge, dangled my legs into the hole, and listened to the silence. The crater in the compound’s center yawned like a lake of darkness.
I decided to try one of Tyris’s memory exercises. She’d taught them to me in the week after the accident, and though they’d done nothing to restore my past, they did help pass the time. Her favorite was to have me isolate a memory from as far back as I could, a pleasant memory. I’d almost laughed when she said that. “A memory where you felt safe,” she amended. I shut my eyes now and remembered the first time my dad took me out in the field after my accident. I’d been cooped up in my tent much of the time before that, and it was something just to get out and move around. He drew troop formations in the dust with a stick, X ’s for us and O ’s for them, wiped the diagrams out, made me redraw them from memory. He showed me a tattered field guide he’d picked up somewhere along the way, which described how to determine your position if you had a compass, how to plot points on the horizon if you didn’t. It gave me an odd thrill to realize I was one of only a handful of people in camp who knew how to read, though he said nothing about how I’d learned. He tested me on the book’s concepts, and it turned out I was pretty good at putting theory to practice. My mind seemed to expand with the open air. There’d been no signs of Skaldi in the days after my accident, so we stayed out well into dusk. When the light got too bad to do any more work, he clapped me on the back and we headed for the mess tent.
That’s when he saw a ball one of the little kids had dropped, a tightly wound bundle of twine. He leaned over to
Similar Books
