Humanity's Edge- The Complete Trilogy

by Paul B. Kohler

  “Exactly.” His heart started pumping again. “I knew you’d understand.”

  She cut him off. “That is to say—you were the sheriff of Carterville.”

  Clay’s eyebrows furrowed. “What—”

  “You were the sheriff. Just another servant to another dumpy little town that no longer exists. That is, if Carter-son-ville, or whatever it is, is anything like the other towns I’ve seen so far, it’s nothing but a wasteland.”

  Thousands of images of Carterville flashed through Clay’s mind. All the unique places that every town had that made it home. Memories that shaped him into the man he was today.

  Could it really all be gone for good?

  “If anything,” the woman continued, “If anything, I should be worried about you and your deputy even more.” The word “deputy” in air quotes, belittling them. “You’ve made it this long, in this . . . this nothingness. You’ve survived against these horrible creatures. You’ve had these weapons, and I’d bet that you haven’t been afraid of using them. Otherwise, you’d be dead. Like the rest of the world. No, no. I think I’ll keep all the weapons to myself. If you’re worth anything, I think you’ll be able to survive without them. And if not, that’s not really my problem. Is it?”

  She turned away, whispering curtly toward her soldiers. They began to retreat, easing through the mounds of death.

  “Please,” Clay said, his voice low. “We just need the medication. The kid at the hotel. The one who’s sick—”

  “I’ve already told you,” the woman snapped. “I don’t give a damn about your sick kid. I don’t have time for it. This world doesn’t have a future. Why should we give up anything to save him?”

  “He knows things about my daughter,” Clay said, spelling out his last hope. “He knows where she is, and that’s all I care about anymore. I don’t care about hurting you, or anyone else for the matter. You can go kill anyone you please. You can rule this dystopian universe, for all I care. I just want to find my daughter. My wife. My family.”

  Chapter 42

  The woman stopped. Something in Clay’s words reached her. She tilted her head slightly, almost birdlike, before turning to face them. She no longer wore that look of superiority—the one that implied she’d fill both Clay and his deputy full of bullet holes if they said another word about compassion or her lack of it.

  Her new expression told a story, maybe of a past life—one rich in the matters of family, of love.

  She stood there, silence stretching between them. Her comrades flicked their eyes from Alayna to Clay and back to Alayna, uncertain which one to point their guns at with the most ferocity.

  Finally, when Clay thought that the reticence would go on forever, the blonde woman found her response. Her words were hesitant, reminiscent of someone who’d perhaps had lower self-esteem in the time before.

  “How do I know you’re not making them up? Your wife and daughter?” she asked. “As far as I know, you’d say just about anything to get what you want.”

  Clay shrugged, sensing a crack in her outer shell. “You really don’t,” he said truthfully. “I could tell you for five minutes the way Maia likes her oatmeal, or the way Valerie twirls her hair when she’s nervous—but you’re right, I could be making any of that up. You just have to take my word that I’m telling you the truth. I took an oath as a sheriff about a million years ago, pledging to be a truth seeker. Pledging to fight for justice.”

  “Justice,” the woman echoed, her eyes fixed on Clay’s. “I haven’t heard that word in a long time. It doesn’t seem to belong to this reality.”

  “My wife and daughter left Carterville before I did, right after the outbreak,” Clay said, trying to start a dialogue. “I thought they’d be able to stay together, but apparently, they were separated when they got to Helen. My wife was sent to a military base up north, and my daughter—well. She was sent south. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” the woman said, her voice dropping.

  “We found a boy at the nearby hotel. Like I said, he’s very sick. But if we get him this medication, then he’ll be able to tell us where they took her—my daughter. She apparently stayed with these people at the hotel. You understand? Once we get him to wake up, he can tell me where to go next. He’s the missing link.”

  Beside him, Alayna flinched slightly. Clay’s lie was subtle—giving a bit more weight to Alex’s knowledge. All he’d said was Maia’s name. That was true. That was going to have to be enough.

  The seconds ticked away, a countdown approaching zero.

  “Suppose I believe you,” she started. “Suppose I believe everything, down to Maia eating oatmeal.” Her eyes flashed. “What’s in it for me, if I help you?”

  Clay’s mind raced. “If you do this, and I’m lying, you can keep everything. You can keep our weapons. You can keep the medication. You can have all the supplies back at the hotel, even. But if we’re telling the truth, we split everything equally. Except for the defibrillators. We get to keep those.”

  The woman glanced at the backpack filled with clunky devices. “And what on Earth is so important about those?” she asked. “Are you planning on having some sort of cardiac event?”

  Clay offered her a small smile. Jokes were rare enough, especially coming from an enemy.

  “We have—” he considered how much of his hand he should really show. “We have this device that actually neutralizes the crazed, without firing a single shot. But it needs a power source.”

  Chapter 43

  The armed man on the left spoke up in a voice reminiscent of a cartoon villain.

  “We shouldn’t believe him, Sam,” the man said. “They’re lying. They obviously want to ambush us. And there’s no telling how many of them there really are. We can’t give them the upper hand.”

  Sam. That was the woman’s name. Clay took it in, beginning to humanize her—if only slightly. He focused entirely on her as she began to shake her head, having already made up her mind.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I’m a pretty good judge of character, as you know.” With this, she rolled her eyes slightly—almost mocking herself.

  The men beside her shifted, their boots crunching on the glass.

  “I believe them,” Sam said. “Clay Dobbs. Sheriff of Carterville. I think you’ve piqued my interest. I’ll follow you to the hotel. If what you say is true, I get half of everything. Absolutely everything. That said—” she paused, giving weight to her next words. “I keep the defibrillators.”

  Clay’s mind flashed on the two other defibrillators still on the shelf in the storage room. He nodded slowly, knowing he could come back and retrieve them whenever he pleased—if he got out of this alive. Focus on survival, he thought. “Sure. Okay. We have a deal.”

  But Alayna chose this moment to protest. “What do you need them for?” she asked, her voice tinged with anger. “We’ve already told you why we need them. We need them desperately.” Tears began to glisten in her eyes.

  Had she forgotten the other defibrillators, or was she just making a scene? Clay wondered, shifting uncomfortably.

  Sam tilted her head back, reclaiming her authority with Alayna’s protest. “You want them. You want them desperately. And so, my darling deputy, I want them too. And that’s the end of it.” She turned back to Clay. “Let’s go.”

  She spun back, marching through the dead and leading them to five large trucks with their engines still purring. There, Clay and Alayna met her team of a dozen or so men, women, and children—each looking haggard, yet resolute. They all remained silent, and only stared.

  “People,” Sam addressed them. “We’ve met Clay and Alayna from Carterville, and we’ve negotiated a deal that could be quite good for all of us. We will follow them back to their hotel on the other side of town.”

  Taking a step forward, Clay addressed Sam. “It’s going to be nearly impossible to drive there,” he said. “The streets are full of abandoned vehicles. If you try
to drive, it’s going to take you all day to find a route. We came here on foot.”

  Sam’s lips parted in a moment of shock. “Y-you walked here?” she asked, incredulous. “You’re braver than I thought. Or maybe just crazy.” She turned back to her crew. Her gun hung across her back, glinting. “Okay. We’ll walk, while the rest of you drive as best as you can toward the hotel.”

  “You know where it is?” Clay began. “It’s across town. Directly east of—”

  Sam waved her hand. “We know this town,” she said. “We’ve been through Dearing before. Isn’t that right, people?”

  Nobody in Sam’s group offered a nod, or uttered a single sound. They seemed like shells of the humans they used to be, following Sam blindly, with nowhere else to turn.

  “I’ll get word to you from the hotel once the coast is clear,” Sam said with finality.

  Get word? Clay wondered. He’d long since discarded his cell phone once they’d discovered that the satellite network was no longer in operation. Was she planning to send up smoke signals?

  Sam turned toward a darker man that was puffing a hand rolled cigarette, as if he were watching them all from far away. “Rodney. He says there’s a sick kid at the hotel. Says it’s a matter of life and death. You mind coming along?”

  Rodney shrugged. He dropped from the back of the truck, still puffing. “I’ll grab my medical bag.”

  Sam’s eyes twinkled at Clay, she knew she looked impressive. “We have a doctor amongst us,” she said. “How fortuitous for you. If you’re telling the truth, that is.”

  Chapter 44

  Clay and Alayna began to lead Sam and her small entourage toward the hotel. As they retraced their steps, the quaint southwestern town looked different. It still had an aura of gloom that seemed to blanket everything. But in the early morning hours, the rising sun cast an eerie glow on the vacant streets. Everyone remained alert, watching for the crazed in the shadows behind cars and between buildings. Clay and Alayna walked with their fists clenched as if they were weapons. They both felt naked, as good as dead unarmed.

  Ten minutes into the hike, Alayna spoke up. “I’d feel much safer if I had my weapon. If they jump out in front of us. I’m doomed. And wouldn’t we all be better off if—”

  Sam cackled, interrupting Alayna’s almost certainly rehearsed speech. “Don’t worry your pretty face, darling,” she said. “My boys and I will protect you. You saw it yourself. I’ve kept more than a dozen people alive since this all started. I can’t be all bad at this game.”

  Alayna glared at Clay. He shrugged, trying to tell her, “It’s going to be fine. We just have to get through this hard part, and then we’ll get rid of these people.”

  There was so much he wanted to say, but he knew he had to keep things to himself. Everything hinged on this. His daughter’s life was at stake. He decided not to react to Alayna, as it only fueled her anger. There was nothing stopping Sam or her goons from murdering them in cold blood. Bleeding out on the streets of Dearing wasn’t exactly one of Clay’s preferences.

  They walked in silence. Awkward glances from untrusting eyes in all directions. After many years as sheriff of Carterville, Clay had learned how to deal with just about every type of personality; he had to in order to get information from those that refused to give it . . . initially. As the minutes ticked by, he racked his brain, trying to come up with a way to get information out of Sam—a woman that was clearly resistant. After several minutes though, Sam broke the silence herself.

  “So. It all began for you back in Carterville?”

  “Yes,” he said. How much should he tell her? He didn’t know. Revealing that the outbreak had actually begun in Carterville, before spreading out to other parts of the world, seemed a bit much. “Some of us who stayed behind after the initial groups left Carterville made it to Helen a few weeks later.”

  There was so much he left out of that. The energy field. The lab. Leland. The military operation. The ones they’d left behind, dead.

  “I see,” Sam said. “And in Helen? What did you find there?”

  “More of the same. We stayed there for a few days. Discussed what had gone down there in Helen with a few of the remaining survivors. They explained the evac process: who went north and who went south. Val, my wife, had been sent to Earlton. Since my daughter had shown signs of the illness, I knew she’d come this way.”

  “That’s a Sophie’s choice if I ever heard one,” Sam said. “Choosing between your wife and your daughter.”

  “My wife’s not ill,” Clay said, his heart thumping. “I know she can take care of herself.”

  Even as he said it, he didn’t truly believe it. Valerie’s face flashed through his mind, becoming younger in his memory with each passing day. Now, he remembered her as a twenty-something, pregnant with Maia, anticipating the day that their family would start. Painting walls. Choosing decorations. Crying over drapes that had come in the mail in the wrong color.

  Sam seemed uninterested. She proceeded to her next questions, stamping through Clay’s uneasiness. “And the ones with the disease? How have you found them?”

  “We had to learn to fight them,” Clay said. “But since those first weeks, they seem to be adapting. Getting stronger. Recognizing our sounds, rather than just hunting us on sight alone. If we didn’t have weapons . . .”

  “We’d be dead,” Alayna said, illustrating the point.

  Sam didn’t appear to notice. “What was it you said about your daughter being sent south? Because she was ill?”

  Clay didn’t answer immediately. He could feel his blood begin to boil at the mere thought of the atrocities committed by Wallace. “Ahh. The work of an insane—and I don’t use that term loosely—Colonel Wallace. After he evac’ed Carterville, he wasn’t happy. He continued on to flaunt his egotism in Helen, where I’m told that he rounded up some of the crazed and shipped them south. In big trucks,” Clay said. “I don’t know exactly where they went, though.”

  Sam didn’t break stride, but she caught her breath, revealing that she was startled.

  “So that Colonel’s the piece of shit who sent them to me.”

  Clay spun to look at her, visibly shocked. “You know about the trucks?”

  “I do,” Sam said. “I was on duty one night. A dozen or so containers came into my shipping yard. Hordes of these monsters—it seemed like thousands of them, of people who were no longer people, you know—came pouring out of the containers. It was a complete horror show. Blood everywhere. All my men down there . . .”

  “So, you fought them firsthand early on, then,” Clay said.

  “No. I was in the observation tower. I had to watch it all, like some kind of film. If I hadn’t been up there, I’d be dead right now. Everyone else . . .”

  “We’ve all lost a lot of people,” Clay said, not sure that was any consolation.

  Sam glossed over her moment of emotion. “Well, thankfully, they cleared out pretty quickly. Went on to ravage one town or the next, who knows. I was able to hide until I could calm down enough to think of what to do. Course, that feels like a forever ago, now. If I could only . . .”

  Clay and Alayna didn’t speak for a long time. They watched Rodney roll another cigarette, looking vaguely European. Clay remembered that his doctor had handed out anti-smoking pamphlets every time he’d gone in for a checkup, which never seemed frequent enough at the time. When had this doctor decided that enough was enough—that being dead sooner rather than later was preferable?

  Maybe he had nothing left to live for. But what was with Sam? Was she living for the pure power? She seemed high on it, wielding a gun as if it were as natural to her as wearing a wristwatch. Imagining her quivering at the top of an observation tower, watching as her friends were mauled helped him understand who she could have been in the before. But how had she gotten to this after?

  Chapter 45

  “And the rest of you, how did you all come to . . . survive together?”

  Sam seemed to weigh the p
rice of telling the truth, of telling too much, much like Clay had earlier. “After I left the yard, I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t want to run into those same monsters on the road. It was pretty early in the morning. Nobody was awake, meaning they were safe in their beds. Behind locked doors. I drove as fast as I could back to my house, packed up some things, then called the people I knew—as many as I could. Told them to get to high ground. Told them to get ready. Rodney, he was my best friend’s husband. Claire. But Claire—she was . . .”

  “Taken?” Clay finished.

  “Killed,” Rodney said, spitting his words through a cloud of smoke. “Told you to stop dwelling on it, Sam. Gotta fuckin’ move on.”

  Sam didn’t speak. It was clear she was embarrassed, but she ignored Rodney.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’re all still alive, at least for now.”

  “Right. That’s the important thing.” He felt himself closer to Sam—realizing she was as human as he was, just trying to protect the ones depending on her. “Carterville was where it all started,” he said.

  Alayna inhaled sharply, shocked at Clay’s statement.

  Sam eyed him. “What do you mean?”

  “It was a lab experiment. A Department of Defense project, using nanite technology to make human soldiers stronger, faster. But one of the scientists was a bit too clumsy with the experiments and released nanites into the town. God, it was a nightmare. Nobody knew what was going on. And it spread rapidly. We had to get the people out of there. What I didn’t know at the time was that the mayor was actually aware of the entire project. She knew she was endangering the people of Carterville by allowing this lab.”

  “Shit,” Sam replied. She continued her steady pace, but her shoulders loosened. “That must have been horrible. You were literally on the front line from day one. What happened to the project? I mean the research lab. Were you able to shut it down?”