Colony

by SpunSilk

Part four: Wilderness

I live the city. I breathe the city. The city is everything.

––James White
reporter/photographer

Every day I walked. I wandered outward from the cabin in ever-expanding circles until I grew tired, or bored, or just too angry to continue.

I tried to get my head around the whole thing... not a lot of success there. Maybe there's a safety switch in the human brain that keeps us from understanding our own mortality. Certainly there seemed to be something that kept me from believing a new plague could be loosened out onto mankind – and by my hand. That idea was just too big for me. And I felt okay, that was the conundrum! In the mornings, I would sit on the lumpy mattress and revisit the turquoise haze around my aura. Yeah – in her haste to leave me, back then in my room, Lady Vet had left behind (by oversight or by design) her three diagnostic tennis balls. They had made the trip into exile with me. I monitored the slow progress of my infection with them, but I only saw small changes each day. The orange seemed to grow more intense. The turquoise a bit more granular... but it seemed it certainly would not be threatening me in the time-frame the Lady Vet had told was common in non-human victims. For once, my being human seemed to be an advantage.

Why couldn't I have just had a nice normal life? Was that too much to ask? Just normal, just vanilla. (Okay... vanilla with a Pulitzer.) I figured it had to be the damnable magnetic force lines I carry, against my will, that attracted the Colony plague to me. Was it not enough that the stupid things already pulled every manner of monster in the Ether in my direction? Hadn't I already seen enough terror for one poor human in this life?

The woods annoyed me. Too green. Too peaceful. Personally, I need the hubbub of activity a big city offers, the crush of the crowd, the colorful lights, the action and energy, the endless possibilities. I'm a man who needs the security of tall stone buildings on either side of a paved street. I was at a total loss in the beginning, the proverbial fish-out-of-water. Foolish man that I am, those first few days I found myself just sitting for long stretches in the Mustang, with my eyes closed against the view, just to feel some familiarity. I was lost in this green exile.

I don't particularly like people, never have. (That feeling is mostly mutual) But their total absence wasn't right either. I guess I needed their back-ground hum. Damn, it was quiet. That is, until nighttime; then I had to deal with crickets, and a more un-earthly noise you've never heard. A noise that a pillow-over-the-head doesn't snuff out.

The boxes of provisions held more than just cans and beef jerky; I had been clever enough to include bourbon, of which I took full advantage those first days. I wasn't concerned with rationing, I figured this discomfort would not last long. From Lady Vet's description, the days I had left could be counted on a small number of hands.

About a week into my exile, I came across a creek in my daily explorations. I followed it along until I stopped at a waterfall, and bent to rinse my hands in the icy water. Focusing only on my hands in front of me, I suddenly sensed eyes on me. I swung to look behind, but no-one was there. I glanced around, mistrustingly, until my gaze made contact with – a barn cat higher up on the rocks of the waterfall. I let out a tight breath in a whoosh. He stared at me silently with those alert, expression-free, soulless eyes.

I scowled. "Shoo!" I told him. He flinched once, but he did not budge. He stared at me. "Go 'way!" I waved my arm at him. Nothing. He was at home here and not I, and both of us knew it. We stared at each other in silence, as the waterfall babbled.

Well, if he wasn't going to leave, I decided to be the one to move on. It was unnerving how he stared, with the air of a wild-thing, but at the same time the calm confidence that a body feels when it's doing what it knows how to do, and doing it well... That feeling was lost to me now.

In an attempt to keep my sanity, I sat down that afternoon with my trusted old manual typewriter. I stretched both hands luxuriously, and laid my fingertips on the keys. The woods could go away now, I was at home as soon as my fingers found their place. I started my work on the next Great American Pulp Fiction Novel, and my fingers flew as fast as my thoughts. The act of creation danced in my brain as I typed. My hero was a manly sort; a detective, wise in the ways of the street, and as the story opened he was facing a string of puzzling murders. Poor sap. I planned bad business for him like a villain.

From then on, after my walk each morning, I returned to my 'office' to my manual, and here I poured my whole self into typing – to keep from going crazy. This was normal, the only normality in this damned exile. Words flowing onto paper, ah! It felt good. It was the only thing in the world I seemed to have any control over anymore. There's really nothing like the feeling of temporary godhood a body gets from typing fiction, I thought with a smile.

The days looked far too similar to each other. I typed, I walked. I ate, I slept. I monitored the slow expansion of the turquoise haze.

Later that week I sat typing at my table, setting the stage for a confrontation of epic proportions in the novel, when again I felt eyes on me. I glanced up at the window – and there was the barn cat again, peering in through the window at me. Oh, fer cryin' out loud. He had found my cabin. I waved my arm at him again, and added a firm "Git! Go hunt mice!", but I was about as effective as I had been at the waterfall. He did exactly as he pleased. He stared with large, unchanging eyes; unperturbed. I resolutely turned my back on him and continued typing, glancing up only occasionally to check if he had gone. The ding! of the carriage return seemed to interest him. I ignored him.

That night, on the way to the outhouse, the racket of the crickets was overwhelming (again). These critters seemed determined to add an audio facet to my discomfort. I happened to look up into a cloudless sky, and stars filled the entire sky. I was momentarily shocked to see how many were up there. I knew in my head that they were there all along, of course, but knowing it and seeing it were two different zip codes. The moonless sky seemed to glow with an even, dense light all its own. For a few moments I stood with my jaw hanging open at the sight. Then I continued on my way, in a foul mood. Everything in this place appeared to be conspiring to make a man feel small.

Moments of depression had started showing up as the days progressed. A symptom of the Colony infection? Or maybe it was just being in this uncivilized place.

I missed the sight of people. I did. I will admit it. I missed electric light, too. I missed Larry's Deli being down the block. I missed traffic jams and car horns blaring their annoyance. I missed having a shower instead of a bird-bath-in-a-bucket. I missed Vincenzo's beef-witted arguments and irrational deadlines. I missed the thrill of the story, the fights with each and every police chief, I...

I missed the feeling that what I did mattered.

Hell, I even missed the smog.

A few times, I was tempted with the idea of just going back. No one was holding me here, after all. Certainly no court could convict me of any resulting deaths. I couldn't be blamed for anything that happened – this whole Ether aura-thing was invisible to the human eye. I could just... go back. Nothing stopping me.

Nothing but myself. And that small, powerful word – plague.

I had saved a lot of deaths in my day. I'm not one to brag, but facts are facts. There was a long list of "encounters" I'd had with dark things: things that killed. I had, through wit and luck, defeated them. The police would not have stopped these killers, the men in blue lacked the imagination to actually see what was happening. They lacked the folk-knowledge to act. They lacked the simple grizzle to choose human lives over their own reputations in the sight of the public! Oh, don't get me started on the police...

So now, after all that, after risking my own life so many times to put a stop to the dying, was I going to stay in the city with a diagnosis of Colony, risking untold lives? I couldn't do it. That's not the way I'm made. As much as this exile grated my nerves, grated my sanity, I stayed. The turquoise haze expanded at a glacial pace.

What if this was all for nothing? What if Colony really wasn't something that could live on a human at all? What if it ended up being harmless to us? I certainly felt healthy.

On the other hand, I couldn't risk a human epidemic on that uncertainty...

I stayed. And I drank my bourbon.