The Colony: Descent by Michaelbrent Collings

been in
several hailstorms, only one of which was dangerous.  He and Maggie had been
out sledding during Christmas break before they got married.  Fully in love,
ready to start a life together, and neither noticed how far they had gotten
from their car, or how dark it was getting.
    The first hail fell
and they ran for the car.  But the snow was thick.  The car seemed to have
moved away from them.
    The hail came down
in golf ball-sized stones that were hard enough to crack limbs from the nearby
trees.  One hit Ken in the shoulder and he thought for certain he’d broken his
collarbone.
    They got to the car
and found the front windshield with three long splits running its length.  They
didn’t dare to drive until the storm passed.  Just huddled and hoped that the
hail wouldn’t shatter the safety glass completely.
    It was terrifying. 
The only good part had been the fact that Maggie didn’t get touched.  That… and
the fact that she insisted on kissing the spot he had been hit, “to make it
better.”  So on the whole it turned out all right in retrospect.
    But the sound of
hail falling, of things tumbling from the sky with enough velocity and force to
shatter bone, had remained in his dreams for a long time.
    And it was nothing
compared to the sound of bodies letting go of the walls of the buildings
above.  The noise of a fleshy tidal wave as they sloughed away from the
concrete and plummeted to earth.
    Buck was already
pulling them toward the building across the street.  And that was madness,
because the zombies that had let go were already standing.  Lurching up on legs
that were broken, the bones sticking straight out of their sheared flesh. 
Pushing up on arms that had so many breaks they looked almost like the
segmented tails of scorpions.
    Many of the things
– more than before – had the scaly growths on their bodies.  A lot of them
covered the things’ eyes, though Ken knew that they would be able to zero in on
the survivors just the same.
    The things that had
fallen were moving slowly.  Picking themselves up and shifting as though trying
to figure out how to adjust for the broken parts of their bodies.
    Ken noted one of
the zombies.  It had broken legs, two limbs that jutted out in forty-five
degree angles from its hips, then jerked back inward at mid-femur.  Shattered
bones, there was no doubt.
    But as Ken watched,
the thing’s legs straightened.  He thought he could hear crackles.  The thing
leaned over and vomited the same yellow goo that they had been using to build
walls and seal in Ken’s family in the Wells Fargo Center all over its legs.
    A cast?  Some
kind of healing solution?
    Ken didn’t know. 
Whatever it was, the thing seemed to move faster with each step.
    They all did.
    The broken
creatures were healing.
    Ken looked down the
road.  The tidal wave of zombies had collected there, especially.  A clot of
broken, shattered, deadly once-humanity that completely cut off the survivors
from any escape.
    They were ringed
in.
    Some of the zombies
were vomiting on themselves.  Worse, some of them were puking on others, like
medics seeing to the wounded.  Working together to be in top condition to
eradicate the enemy.  Another evolutionary step in an enemy that was already
beyond dangerous and yet kept finding new ways to become even more terrible.
    Many of the fallen
zombies had shattered so badly they could move only feebly.
    But most of the
things were already walking or crawling or slithering toward the survivors.

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    Ken was moving
toward the things.  Moving toward them, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
    Because he had no
strength.  Buck was holding him up completely.  And toward them was where Buck
was going.
    “Get over here!”
snapped the big man.  He sounded different.  It wasn’t just that the petulance
and self-entitled whine was gone, either.  He sounded… stronger.
    And to Ken’s
surprise, both Maggie and Aaron moved to follow him.