by Joshua Guess
Emily wanted to laugh at her, but didn’t. She knew, albeit secondhand, how dangerous and impulsive Kate could be. “You know perfectly well, Kate. I respect your abilities. You’re smart, and you do the job better than anyone I’ve seen. But I’ve heard enough about some of the things you’ve done not to want to trade recipes with you. I’ll work with you, but we will never be friends.”
Kate’s eyebrows rose up in what might have been genuine surprise, though Emily had no doubt the woman could have brought home a convincing performance. “You’re judging me based on gossip? Hardly seems fair.”
Emily shook her head ruefully. “Play the victim if you want. I don’t give a shit. I know some of the things you’ve done even if I’ve only heard them secondhand. Let’s not forget I also read every single report your scouts write, and hear all the things they’re too scared to put on paper. My whole job is to mainline gossip and word of mouth. That is why I don’t trust you. Or like you. Or even want to be in the same room with you. Because when I hear chatter about how Will is doing his job, there’s disagreement. Some people think he’s great, others gripe and bitch. Not even Kell gets universal approval, which of course he doesn’t, right? No one is perfect.”
Emily set her shoulders back just a little, one of the tiny pieces of body language that said she wasn’t afraid. And she wasn’t. Not in the sense of overwhelming terror. Kate was the one who taught Kell to fight. She was an expert at it, especially after years of apocalypse to hone her skills in. But Emily was no slouch herself.
“Thing is, every single person who talks about you says the same thing. That you’re indifferent to the risks your people take. That you’re willing to sacrifice lives to achieve a goal when there are other options.”
Anger, very real anger, flashed across Kate’s features. “Sometimes you have to make hard calls. It doesn’t leave you a lot of room for popularity contests. If you don’t believe me, remember that just a few years back, Will handed this place over to invaders to prevent an attack that would have killed dozens at the least.”
Emily knew the stories shared across Haven from those days very well. “Yet Will is still liked. People don’t act as if he might go crazy at the drop of a hat and kill them. Think about what that means for you.”
She saw the subtle changes in Kate’s body as the woman held herself back. Giving in to her rage would validate Emily’s words and she knew it. She understood the trap she was in.
So Emily felt fine with a parting shot. “What we’re about to do might require those hard decisions you’re talking about, so you might wonder why you’re not involved in it beyond knowing what’s going on. If so, let me answer any lingering questions. You haven’t been in charge of any planning or training because dealing with Rebound and their little dictatorship is delicate. It has a ton of moving parts. There’s no room in it for the way you operate. Back when the world fell apart, striking out and doing what you had to in the moment was a great way to survive.”
Emily waved a hand around the room. “Things are different now. You’re a bull running at every flag anyone waves at you, and the situation is too damned fragile for that shit. Will trusts you to defend Haven because he knows you’ll lock your jaws on an enemy and shake it to death. You’re very good at what you do, Kate, but you’re still stuck on how things used to be. You might think about fixing that before the world passes you by completely.”
Mason
The reception wasn’t as nice as he hoped for, but was about what he expected. At least the cell was of a decent size.
“You fellas planning on letting me out any time soon?”
Mason’s guard stood with his back against the wall opposite the cell door, as if his captive would spring from his cot and rush forward cackling insanely the second a human body passed close enough to grab. It was a reasonable precaution, even if unfounded.
Mason tried again. “Pretty sure you can at least talk to me. Hitting me with a Taser from a distance was smart, I’ll give you that. It’s how I would have taken me down. I am here on a diplomatic mission, though. Kinda makes it a dick move on your part. Unless you’re just stabbing me in the back and never intended to work with us. In which case I strongly suggest getting a bunch of dudes to shoot me through these bars, because if that’s the case and I get out, I’m gonna fuck your entire year up.”
The guard tensed at the words, jaw clenching. He didn’t like having the honesty of his community questioned. To his credit, however, he said nothing. Mason respected that.
“There won’t be any need for that, Mister Mason,” said a voice from out of sight. Footsteps followed behind the words echoing off the cinder block walls, eventually revealing a stout man in his early sixties. He looked out of place in the dingy hallway of the tiny police station nestled just outside of Rebound proper. Mason almost did a double take. The guy wore a fucking suit. Not some off-the-rack bureaucrat nonsense, either. It was bespoke and probably cost as much as Mason’s first car.
“Just Mason,” Mason said. “First name. And who might you be?”
The round man smiled, gesturing for the guard to open the cell door. “No question about it, as a matter of fact. I’m Albert Hauser. You can call me Al. I’m your liaison.”
Mason stood, slowly for the benefit of the guard’s obviously twitchy trigger finger, and waited for the door to open. “Sir, did you just make a Paul Simon reference at me?”
Al pursed his lips. “You have no idea how much I hate that song. Unintentional, I promise you. I should apologize for the...well, let’s call it what it was and say attack. When you refused to give your weapons up, we believed the only way you would do so was if we didn’t allow you a choice.”
Mason’s back burned where the prongs of the Taser hit him, two bright spots of pain just above where his armor stopped. “So I guess you’re not giving them back, huh?”
Al spread his hands. “When you’re out here, yes. Inside the Spire and Rebound itself, no. You will not be allowed to carry weapons past the boundary fence. Since I assume you’ll want to meet the leadership, there’s no point in recovering them just yet.”
Mason frowned. “So rather than just ask me to drop them off, you decided to remind me you have teeth. Also, my horse better be okay.”
Al nodded. “We have a stable, actually. He’ll be fine there until you need him. And while I hope you won’t hold a grudge, I should remind you that you broke our rules first. It’s hardly out of bounds for us to enforce them.”
The door had long since been open, but Mason hadn’t moved forward. He did so, watching the guard drop a hand to his sidearm. “Well, I have killed a lot of your people. I guess I can’t really blame you for electrocuting me a little.”
Al blanched at this, and the guard frowned deeply. Mason decided not to favor them with even a smile. That might have been too far. The idea was to leave them just off balance enough to see him as aggressive. He’d considered and discarded acting like a supplicant, looking for approval and trying to play a true diplomat. Anything too submissive would invite greater suspicion. Mild aggression focused attention on him, which was right where he wanted it.
“Yes, well,” Al said, clearly unnerved by the casual admission. “Mistakes were made on all sides. That’s something we’ll discuss with our governors. They’re in committee right now, if you’re ready to go. If not we’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s session. If you prefer to wait, we can get you settled in a room here in town.”
“Nah,” Mason drawled. “I didn’t get callouses on my ass riding six hundred miles to stop two hundred yards away and take a siesta. Let’s go meet your bosses.”
The town was remarkably well taken care of. Mason had walked through a gate in the impressive wall surrounding it, a creative mixture of wooden posts, layers of chain link, and steel bars for support. He saw no buildings that weren’t being used, and like Haven every patch of grass and dirt was used to grow food.
Rebound itself was less impressive. Oh, what it represented was
amazing, even Mason could admit that. But it didn’t have much in the way of looks. It took up perhaps a fifth of the land area of the town and was surrounded by its own wall. Mason couldn’t see over it, but a wide square finger of stone jutted up from it in an abortive reach for the clouds.
The Spire was ugly. Plainly constructed and studded with balconies and shooting platforms, it was a strictly utilitarian edifice. Mason liked it.
Inside the walls, the place had an orderly look that caught him completely off guard. After years of operation, he expected Rebound to have emptied out. The considerable resources would have been spread out and used. Reality upended that notion. The huge concrete area was a maze of pressure vessels holding various gasses, various kinds of fuel tanks, and cargo pods. And that was just what he could see from the path leading away from the gate. As he moved, a small refinery could be seen in the distance. The smell of burning metal betrayed the presence of a forge of some kind.
“Where are we going?” he asked when they took a sharp right away from the Spire. “Aren’t we meeting with your people?”
Al glanced up at the concrete building. “Sure, but they aren’t there. That’s more of a watch tower. Too exposed. We’re going underground.”
Al came to rest on a large rectangle outlined in the concrete by thick metal bands. It was about ten feet by twenty, one of five sitting in a neat little row. They stood in place for a few seconds before the rectangle lurched and lowered itself into the ground.
The drop wasn’t much, about thirty feet. To call what the lift descended into a room was almost an insult. It was lit by hanging lights, too bright to be anything but LEDs, and they stretched away in every direction. Far enough that he couldn’t see three of the walls. The one he could see was the eastern, and it had to be butting almost against the Atlantic.
“Holy shit,” Mason said in a rare loss of self-control.
Al chuckled. “Yes, most people have that reaction.”
The massive space was packed with supplies. Cargo containers, bins of metal ingots, construction equipment, a thousand things he couldn’t begin to guess at in boxes wrapped in plastic. He shook his head slowly in utter astonishment. “This is crazy. I knew you guys were set up for just about anything, but I’m honestly blown away.”
Al waved a dismissive hand. “This is just the top floor. Four more like it between here and the living spaces. Project Rebound was intended to act as a fail-safe against exactly the sort of catastrophe we’ve faced, Mason. We didn’t half-ass it.”
There was an unmistakable note of pride in Al’s voice. “You aren’t just a resident, are you? You had something to do with putting the project together.”
Al waved a hand at the stacks of supplies lining the aisle as they walked. “Oh, absolutely. Funnily enough, I was a liaison then as well. I served as the bridge between the public and private sectors. I had a hand in every aspect of Project Rebound, from selecting the cave we expanded to build it in to how many kinds of seeds to store in our vault. I take a lot of pride in what we accomplished here.”
As they moved through the facility, Mason began to appreciate that pride more and more. It wasn’t just the impressive scope, but the brilliance of execution. How something so large was even constructed without attracting a lot of attention was a question he desperately wanted an answer to even when he knew it was only his own pointless curiosity. The human factor was no less thought out. Everywhere they moved, people flowed around them with clockwork efficiency. Not one of them was less than well-fed, clean, and apparently content. There were no thousand-yard stares or hopeless frowns.
They just looked like people. Regular old folk. Not scarred and sunburned. Not haunted. Mason had and odd moment where his brain couldn’t avoid thinking of them as the sumptuous meal they would be out there in the real world. The human equivalent of veal cutlets.
He saw enough to understand the complexity of the machine running New America. The effort being put in was real. It was too bad they didn’t seem to have anyone wily enough to wonder why Mason would so obviously put himself in danger. He’d come here expecting to cope with an opposite number who could think around corners and ask the right questions. Yet here he was being walked through the nerve center of their little empire.
Which said either they underestimated him or didn’t expect him to ever go home. He was mildly curious which it would turn out to be.
One tiny but important detail was Rebound’s lack of ostentation. Everything from the carpets to the paint on the walls was simple and ruggedly utilitarian. The conference room Al led him into at the end of their long walk was no different. It was cramped and plain enough to have served any county board of elections without raising eyebrows.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Al said, nodding his head at Mason, “I’d like to introduce you to Mason. He’s the envoy from Haven.”
The men and women around the table spanned the gamut of races and ages. None of them wore suits. Every single person there but for Al and Mason himself had the haggard, unkempt look of an engineer working on the latter part of a double shift. A round of greetings followed. Mason cataloged a barrage of body language, remembering who nodded tersely and who shook hands. It was an old game for him, perfectly second nature.
He was offered a seat, though since there weren’t any extras one of the men would have to stand. Mason declined. Al faded into the background when the committee spokeswoman, a short and slender black woman in her early middle years named Mira, began rattling off the standard boilerplate about mending fences and building a lasting relationship.
When her speechifying ended, everyone looked to Mason. He thought about his words carefully. This wasn’t a check point with a low-level supervising agent. Keeping his mouth in check mattered in this context. Yet it couldn’t look like he was bending the knee.
Mason clasped his hands loosely in front of him and leaned against the wall at the foot of the table. “First, let me thank you for extending me a peaceful hand to come here and speak for my home. No matter how this works out, know that I’m genuinely touched that you would look past your own fears and worries about the conflicts we’ve had and make the attempt.”
This produced a collection of appreciative nods. Mason took those few seconds to scan the room under the cover of looking from face to face. There were no defenses he could make out. Nothing to prevent him from doing serious harm if he so chose. They weren’t idiots. Every person in their whole command structure had to know who he was by now. How taking away his weapons didn’t much reduce the danger he posed. Maybe they took him at his word that he would not initiate violence, maybe they were dangerously blasé with the lives of the people who guided their ship. Too many possibilities to game.
“From our previous communications, we understand that our offer to share the cure to seal a non-aggression pact and cement definite borders is not enough for you. I’m here to find out why you want Doctor Kell McDonald brought here as part of the deal.”
He raked them with his gaze and let his voice drop into its natural pitch, which had a bit of growl to it thanks to the damage to his throat from zombie claws. “We’re offering you a way to kill zombies in huge numbers with no risk to your people. We’re even willing to let your attacks on us—including the one that killed dear friends of mine and Doctor McDonald’s—go unanswered. We’re going to need a compelling reason to let him come within five hundred miles of New America.”
Mira stood, mirroring Mason’s own pose. “To put it plainly, we’ve been researching Chimera since before the first outbreak took Cincinnati. We believe further mutations are inevitable, and that Kell McDonald can use our research and resources to avoid a likely fatal mutation that will wipe out the rest of the human race.” She paused as if gathering strength for her next words. “Many people within our borders think this is the least he can do to make up for his crimes.”
“Crimes?” Mason said, voice harsh.
Mira nodded. “Of course. He was the one who designed the pl
ague. The burden of the world’s dead is on his shoulders. Everyone here knows it. I’m afraid if we can’t bring him here and show our people that he’s working to save the remnants of humanity, we won’t be able to keep them from going to war.”
Ah. Mason got it. It was damned clever, and he appreciated the move even as it pushed his ‘kill everyone in the room’ button. They knew damn well Kell’s work hadn’t caused the plague. Not directly. But what better way to unite a people than to give them a common enemy? He’d done it himself a time or two. The political dynamics he’d been building in his head took a major shift as he worked through ramifications of this new information.
Out loud he said, “Huh.”
Kell
“You can’t go,” Will said, and sounded like he damn well meant it.
Kell cocked his head. “You gonna physically stop me?”
Kate, who sat in a corner chair with a leg casually thrown over its arm, laughed. “Of course we are.”
That brought him up short. “Oh. Well. I didn’t expect that.”
Will leaned back in the chair behind his desk, which was piled with stacks of papers as always. “I’m not a big fan of taking you prisoner to keep you safe, but you’re too valuable. When Mason contacted us and explained that you’re basically a criminal in the eyes of New America, it kind of sealed the deal.”
“But we have the cure,” Kell said. “A bunch of people can make it now, and all of them are on their way home to spread the knowledge of how to do it as far and wide as possible. I did my job. I don’t see how I can be that damned important.”
“No?” Kate said. “What if Chimera mutates again? Hell, what about just the potential advantage in having someone with your skills and knowledge in our corner in case some other fucking thing comes up that we need you for? Or maybe we think you’ve earned the right to live your life and not be used as a bargaining chip.”
