by Joshua Guess
Revelation Day
Book Six of The Fall
Joshua Guess
©2017 Joshua Guess
All Rights Reserved
For every voice who supported this series
For every critic who made me strive to be better
For every loved one who listened to me blather on
For every friend who encouraged me
This final book of The Fall is for you
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Joshua Guess, Author
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Also by Joshua Guess
The Fall
Victim Zero
Dead Will Rise
War of the Living
Genesis Game
Exodus in Black
Revelation Day
Carter Ash
The Saint
Living With the Dead
With Spring Comes The Fall
The Bitter Seasons
Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)
The Hungry Land
The Wild Country
This New Disease
American Recovery
Ever After
The Next Chronicle
Next
Damage
Black Sand
Earthfall
Ran
Apocalyptica ( Also serialized into multiple parts)
This Broken Veil
Misc
Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)
Soldier Lost (Short Story)
Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)
With James Cook
The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)
Prologue
Elizabeth stood watch at the furthest outpost on the western border of New American territory and watched the day fade away. The setting sun would bring on night and in the infinite turning of the world, with a new day to follow. Her mother always liked to say that every new day was a chance for change, and Elizabeth often wondered how much more change the world could handle.
Boston was a nightmare six years before, when the dead began to rise. Zombies. Fucking zombies. She was lucky enough to live in the suburbs at the time. Getting away was an ordeal, but she had managed. It proved there were kernels of truth in every movie made about the end of the world. For those in cities or anywhere with a lot of people, getting out was the best way to survive. For people in less-densely populated areas, staying put made the most sense. She’d gone from the first to the second without hesitation.
Living out here, hundreds of miles from her home, was hard for the first two years. Just like everywhere else, she had to extend cautious trust to others and scrape together a way to survive. Hunting, farming, coming up with novel ways to fend off the hungry dead and work around the lack of modern convenience.
Then Rebound happened. Well, not happened so much as came out of their hole. Some people found it hard to believe an entire government program designed to rebuild after a cataclysm could exist without people knowing. Elizabeth wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t like she saw every jet the military used or even knew how many boats the Navy had. How would she have known if a few billion dollars went to buying and modifying a shipping yard?
Yes, the place was huge. But the bunker beneath it was invisible and the truly ludicrous volume of supplies and weapons stored above looked mostly as it had before. Add an experimental nuclear reactor built in a natural cave system to power it all, and even the worst skeptic had to admit it was a brilliantly executed plan.
Except for all the people living out in the world. Those lucky enough to get a space inside Rebound before civilization reached the tipping point and collapse became unavoidable saw it as a great thing. People like Elizabeth, who lived only a few miles outside its high concrete walls for years, were at first angry. Why had they been left to fend for themselves for so long? No help from the hidden soldiers when raiders came, no food on hungry nights, no heat when the bitter cold set in and killed the unprepared?
Elizabeth spit over the rail of the guard post at the memory, almost wishing for a few seconds that the people inside Rebound had never come out of hiding.
As always, the impulse to hold on to that anger passed quickly. She understood the logic of it. When they went underground, the world hadn’t yet finished teetering into the abyss. Given a choice, there was no doubt in her mind that she would have done the same. The fall of civilization held a surprising number of opportunities to display the nobility of the human spirit, from the almost psychotic defense of children, to the willingness to put aside differences to work together and make something better.
But for Elizabeth, self-sacrifice could only stretch so far. A pang of guilt climbed her throat as she thought of making that choice, but deep down Elizabeth knew she’d have left every friend behind for the chance to go underground.
“Still,” she said to herself as she stared out at the grassy fields, “this kinda makes living out here worth it.”
Though Elizabeth had often wondered what the view from the new tower constructed in the center of the original Rebound site had to offer, she wouldn’t trade this sight for anything. Oh, the land wasn’t filled with any particular beauty. The hills rolled so gently they barely existed, covered in a fur of tall grass stretching in every direction. To the distant south stood a copse of trees, barely a smudge of dark green touching the horizon.
It wasn’t what she got to watch that filled her with the quiet contentment of a woman softly in love with her job, it was how she did it. The box she stood in was ten feet on a side, raised ten feet off the ground, and was accessible only by a ladder she could lower. No zombies could reach her here, and even if one—or a thousand—drifted by, she was under strict orders never to engage.
No problem there.
There were hundreds like it scattered across the borderlands, each manufactured by the men and women of Rebound once they began to consolidate control. The design was deceptively simple and incredibly effective. The small solar panel on the roof powered a battery for the LED lamp and the salvaged eReader stocked with hundreds of books. The roof itself acted as a rainwater collector, filling the fifty gallon tank within minutes during even the lightest storm. The panels over the thick Plexiglas windows could be lowered from the inside, sealing the box. Between the built-in systems and the bi-weekly resupplies of food and fuel for her tiny camp grill so she didn’t have to dry and burn grass, Elizabeth had everything she needed.
Safety, even safety in isolation, was its own form of freedom.
This thought had just finished percolating through her head when the emergency radio mounted to the wall began to click at her. As a watchman, her orders were to never use the radio unless absolutely necessary. Its batteries would recharge from the solar panel, but it took a while.
She listened as the Morse came over, translating it in her head. That part was a bit harder than it should have been; Elizabeth hadn’t kept up with her practice religiously. The message repeated three times, as it should, and by the end of the second she was certain.
The next post over had spotted a rider. The term was nebulous enough to make her wonder if it was a motorcycle or a tank, even if the former would have been near impossible to get through the grass. The answer came a few minutes later, the noonday sun revealing a slowly growing line in the grass led by a dark spot. The mental image of a shark fin leaving a wake in the ocean stuck in her mind and wouldn’t dislodge.
Eventually the spot resolved into a man who was indeed riding. The horse was lovely if a little haggard, chocolate with white so
cks. The man atop it was the opposite of beautiful. Scars lined every inch of his face, which was pulled tight up and to the side. The way those thick bands of damaged flesh snaked down his neck suggested his body, which was covered to the toes, hadn’t escaped whatever hellish thing had happened to his face.
He wore dark tactical clothing, heavily worn, and was draped in a flapping serape which made her think of every cowboy Clint Eastwood ever played, right up to how it failed to cover the frankly ridiculous number of weapons strapped on the guy. Had young Elizabeth been asked by a teacher to draw a dangerous man, a sinister man, still she would have never sketched this person in her worst fever dreams.
Every inch of him screamed danger. No, not that exactly. He radiated dangerous, but not malicious. Even from a hundred yards away and spied through a pair of binoculars, he gave off an air of pleasant disregard, as if the dangers of the world couldn’t touch him by dint of how fucking terrifying he’d made himself.
An old quote bubbled up in her mind, something she’d read in a book on Japanese martial artists back in college when she’d dated a Judo instructor. Make yourself such that no man would make war upon you. That was this guy right here.
Elizabeth climbed through the hatch and onto the roof, raised her rifle, and held it on the man as he drew in. He couldn’t have missed her, yet his body language shifted not an inch.
“Hey,” he said as he reined in the horse and came to a stop. He even waved a hand genially.
Elizabeth nearly pulled the trigger on sheer reflex, though if he realized it the man never twitched in response.
“State your business,” Elizabeth said. “Border is closed. Are you New American?” She didn’t think he was. There were many thousands of people in the territory, but even so she imagined she’d have heard of someone like him. Even as she had the thought, something tickled in the back of her mind like an item on a grocery list forgotten in the rush.
He smiled, the expression twisting his face grotesquely. “Nope. I’m as old American as they get. I was told you’d be expecting me. I’m the envoy from the Union.”
The tumblers, spinning since his first greeting, stopped and locked in place. The briefing packet with her last load of supplies mentioned this, along with a short dossier about the man who would be coming to speak with the leadership. No wonder she hadn’t put it together at once! The idiots had only mentioned that he was scarred, not that someone had held his head under a running lawnmower.
The paper listed the injuries he’d inflicted on a large number of Rebound operatives, with a final line in bold ordering the watchmen not to engage this man under any circumstances.
Also no problem there.
Elizabeth looked at him, though keeping eye contact was impossible. It wasn’t his face, though the sheer savagery of the damage done did make keeping her gaze on him difficult. It wasn’t even a fear that he would harm her. No, what made him so hard to look at was the way he seemed to perfectly fit in with the world around him. The sense that this man needed no period of adjustment when the world ended. Anyone who could so comfortably slide into such a brave new world grated against her idea of decency like sand caught inside clothing.
She nodded and looked away, putting her rifle to one side. Covering her reluctance with busywork, she took out a slim pad of paper from a pocket and removed the tiny nub of pencil. “Your name?”
“Mason,” said the man. “From Haven.”
Elizabeth did look at him then, a flat stare. “Last name?”
His mouth quirked. “Just Mason. Like Prince or Madonna, but sexier.”
She barked a laugh despite her raw nerves and as it had many times in her life, Elizabeth’s mouth got ahead of her brain. “Tell that to your mirror, buddy.”
The insult hung in the air, and she desperately wanted to reel it back in. Yet the man—Mason—was as unaffected by this as a he was by having a rifle trained on him.
“Believe me, I keep telling the mirror I’m sexy, but the fucking thing just won’t listen. One day, maybe.”
Elizabeth went red. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
He waved it away. “It’s fine. Few minutes ago you were ready to shoot me. I reckon pointing out that life hasn’t been especially kind to my mug isn’t much more than accidental rudeness and I stopped holding grudges over that shit when I was fourteen. You’re good.”
“Okay,” she replied lamely. “Well, Mason, you should know that when you reach the next checkpoint, you may be required to surrender your weapons.”
His eyebrows rose, oddly stilted by the scars. “Yeah? That’ll be funny.”
Elizabeth pursed her lips. “Right. Well, head straight east. You’ll see markers directing you to one of the main roads at some point. You can’t miss them, they’re cars painted bright orange. Any of them will have directions to the Spire written on it.”
“The Spire?” he asked with a twitch of his mouth. “Really?”
Elizabeth had to suppress the urge to roll her eyes in sympathy. “Yeah, I know. It’s pretentious, but that’s what they named the damn thing they’ve built at headquarters. It’s not much of a spire, if you want the truth.”
Mason frowned. “What was it called before? The place where Rebound was originally located, I mean. They had to call it something, give it a name.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I know out there you guys do that. Haven is in what used to be Frankfort, right?”
Mason nodded.
She waved a hand back at the miles behind her that represented the fledgling nation called New America by its citizens. “Not that way here. The closest community is West Six. Closer to the coast on the same road is West Five, and so on. There’s a whole system in place to make sure everyone knows how everything works together. It’s annoying but effective.”
Mason scratched what was left of his chin. “Rebound is on the coast, isn’t it? East One or something?”
Elizabeth shook her head, this time a little sadly. Part of her wondered exactly when she’d become comfortable enough to talk to him this way. That she couldn’t place the exact moment seemed like a red flag. “No, the clever bastards called their complex something simple back in those days. Something they knew would draw us like flies. The one thing all of us wanted and no one had.”
She looked toward the coast, hundreds of miles too distant to be seen. Though she had no way to know, at that moment Elizabeth looked in nearly a perfect line directly at the new building jutting up from the concrete of the Rebound facility like a vast stone seed finally sprouting toward the light.
“They just called it home.”
Kell
Through the dark years of The Fall, he barely allowed himself to imagine anything as hopeful as a new dawn for mankind.
Not that Kell McDonald thought in those terms. He was a lapsed Christian whose faith had long been superseded by a belief in science. His work before the end of civilization had been predicated on the real, in tinkering with and understanding the building blocks of life itself. The concept of a higher power reaching down and touching the world in order to save it required a belief that the same power allowed the dead to rise in the first place, creating a logical null in his brain. If God did exist—and Kell had to admit such a thing was possible—then he preferred to believe that a being with infinite power was like himself. An impartial scientific observer.
For all his brilliance, in this Kell was no different from any other man. He imposed himself upon that which he did not understand to give it order.
If the remnants of humanity were to experience a miracle, it would be one of their own making. Despite his reluctance to put stock in the divine, the small device in Kell’s hand still felt like the miraculous made solid.
“It works?” he asked, turning over the cylinder.
The girl standing next to him was a bit taller than she had been when they moved here, or maybe it was only that she stood with her head held a little higher. Jo was rapidly losing the coltish look of youth and ma
turing into a woman. “Oh, it works. I’ve tested all twenty prototypes, one hundred uses each. Took a solid month of twelve-hour days, but I did it.”
Kell took a moment to soak in her pride. Jo started as a refugee alongside Kell and some others, returning to Haven from the home he’d expected to live out the rest of his days in. She made herself indispensable as his assistant. Somewhere along the way her interest in what he did—genetics and microbiology—was overtaken by a fascination with engineering. She liked to make things. The proof of her talent rested in the palm of his hand.
He rolled the aluminum cylinder, enjoying the cool smoothness of it. “How does it work?”
Jo reached out and pulled an empty copy from the rack of them she’d plopped on his workstation. With a deft twist, she pulled it apart. The thing looked like a test tube in the broadest sense, one end rounded and the other flat. The flat end, when pushed slightly and twisted, came off to reveal a slender plug that perfectly fit the hole it rested in.
Jo turned the device in her hand. “It’s simple. You put a dose of the cure in the housing.” She shook the body of the cylinder. “Then you push the plunger in slowly. You have to make sure the O-ring is perfect. We’re only getting about twenty uses out of them before they start wearing from the strain. We have a machine to melt down plastic and make new ones now, if the stock ever runs out.”
Kell chuckled. He doubted that would be a problem. One thing the people of Haven and the Union at large were good at was finding things they needed. When word spread that the scientist who had a cure for the zombie plague needed a particular size O-ring, the reaction was akin to dedicated gamers suddenly being granted a new quest. Within a week every plumbing supply outlet, manufacturing center, and distribution hub within two hundred miles of Haven was searched. The result was a supply of O-rings numbering the hundreds of thousands and the machinery needed to make them.
