Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin Read Free Book Online Page B

owned in a single night.
    The shoveling took forever. We didn’t have nearly enough tools to go around, and the ones we did have were in lousy shape. Shovels, picks, crowbars with broken handles, blades bent and brittle. The adults hogged what we had, so we teens dropped to our knees and did the best we could with our bare hands. Over and over, I scooped the ground into my raw palms, carried it up the stairs, dumped it someplace else. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that meant we’d be doing the same thing tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. Yov vented his frustration by shouldering me out of the way whenever we crossed paths. He was the last guy I would have asked about our nighttime prowler, but my dad stood watch through the whole operation, so I wouldn’t have had a chance even if I’d wanted to.
    We managed to clean out the basement before the sun got high. We also moved our equipment around, transferring it to the corner that seemed best protected from the wind. But the area of the compound just east of the central crater, where we’d set up our sleeping quarters, still swam under a sea of dust.
    “We could shift the trucks,” one of the officers suggested. “Create a windbreak.”
    To my surprise, my dad agreed. If it had been a matter of moving the trucks more than a couple hundred yards, I’m sure he would have said no.
    The drivers jumped into the trucks and started the engines. Two motors churned to life, two puffs of black smoke chugged from tailpipes. Two of the three trucks crept forward. Aleka and my dad stood in front to direct the drivers where to pull in.
    That’s when I noticed that the command truck, the one my dad always rode in, hadn’t moved. It hadn’t even started. Araz sat hunched over in the cab, doing something I couldn’t see. His head bobbed out of sight for a second, rose back into view. He rolled down the window and gestured for my dad.
    “We’ve got trouble, Laman,” he said.
    He lowered his bulk from the cab as my dad limped over. The two of them poked around under the hood for a couple minutes, then Araz swore. I strained to hear the rest of their hushed conversation, but I couldn’t make anything out. Araz kept pointing at the truck, then at my dad, his face contorted and his lips moving nonstop. Finally he slammed the hood down and stomped away, wiping greasy hands on his already filthy pants.
    “Get back here, Araz,” my dad called.
    Araz kept on walking. My dad was left standing by the truck, his face calm but his eyes stormy. In a minute the hollow clatter of propane tanks echoed from the storage basement. Aleka slipped away, I guess to stop Araz before he blew something up.
    I took a step toward the truck. “Dad?”
    “Where’s Mika?” he said, talking not to me but to the group, or maybe to himself.
    Korah’s mom, the black hair she shared with her daughter cut short over her ears, separated herself from the crowd and approached him.
    “Distributor cap,” he said, and she winced.
    “Everything checked out fine last week,” she said.
    “It’s cracked,” he said. “Can it be replaced?” He corrected himself. “Fixed?”
    “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
    She lifted the hood and quickly confirmed the diagnosis. Heat, dust, rough terrain, or just age, she couldn’t tell. Whether it could be fixed she refused to say. But there was nothing like a replacement part, unless somewhere out in the desert we stumbled across an abandoned auto supply store that hadn’t been smashed to pieces or ransacked by colonies past. The trucks were old, no one knew how old. Soldiers had probably driven them to the wars that swept away the old world. There’d been three times as many when he was a boy, my dad had told me, enough for everyone to ride in with room to spare. But one by one they’d died, lost working parts, developed flat tires that couldn’t be patched, and one by one they’d been left to litter the landscape. We’d circled