by Joshua Guess
The last words came out thick with emotion. Kell forced himself not to look at her. Kate had been a friend once, someone he trusted absolutely. He’d been blinded by that friendship, unwilling to admit to himself that she might be as dangerous and unscrupulous as some of the people they’d fought out there in the world. She sounded angry that he might give up a gentle retirement, and hurt on his behalf.
But he couldn’t let her back in. Kate wasn’t evil, not by the definition Kell used, but she was toxic. Her willingness to hurt, lie, and kill without compunction or doubt wasn’t something he wanted in his life.
Instead he crossed arms over his chest and stared at Will. “If I don’t go, they’re going to use force. You know that. It’ll be another stupid war. How many people should I let die because I won’t risk living up to what looks like a pretty reasonable request?”
Will laced his fingers together and rested them on his stomach. It was a familiar pattern; the more seriously he thought about something, the more relaxed he looked. “We’re taking measures against that.”
Kell threw up his hands. “Will, come on. Taking measures? You’re really willing to take that kind of risk? The last war didn’t go so well. For anyone. And the other side in that one were considerably farther away.”
Will said nothing to this. Kell knew it was a weak spot in the armor. Unfortunately, so did Kate.
“I know that look,” she said to Will. “Before you make a stupid decision, let’s keep in mind that these people might not even honor a treaty or pact or whatever you want to call it. If they get what they want, which is Kell and the cure, they might decide to do as they damned well please and attack us anyway. Could take a while, but it’s pretty hard to believe they’d just decide not to expand their territory once they have everything on their wish list.”
“She’s got a point,” Will said.
Kell nodded curtly. “She does. But I’m pretty sure they don’t just want me on general principle. It’s easy to shape public sentiment by making me the scapegoat, but why do it in the first place? Why even tell anyone there who I am?”
“Because they wanted to capture you so you’d make the cure,” Will said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “No way could they send agents out to get you without knowing the details. Once that genie was out, no way news didn’t spread.”
Kell clapped his hands excitedly. “Exactly! Think about what you just said, Will. They wanted me to make a cure. Past tense. I made the cure. We’re using it as leverage to broker peace.”
“Ah, I see,” Kate said. “Mason’s message said Rebound wanted you so their people could see you’re working to save everyone that’s left. But they all know you came up with a cure.”
“Exactly,” Kell said. “Which means there’s something at Rebound, some problem or project so important they’re willing to risk all-out war just to get me there so I can fix it. Hard to see any other option since the whole population knows about the cure.”
Will leaned forward. “Kate, get on the horn with Mason’s people. I want to know if any of them have a clue what it could be.”
Kate bristled. “You can’t seriously be considering this.”
“I can and I am,” Will said with an edge in his voice. “I won’t give Kell up. He’ll be protected if he goes at all, but the logic can’t be argued. Preventing another war and figuring out what Rebound wants him for isn’t a bad cost/benefit ratio.”
Kell knew he had him in that moment. Mason had contingencies atop contingencies in place that would help in a pinch. Add that with whatever protection detail Will was thinking of giving him and the reward was just too good to pass up.
Which was good. Sneaking out would have been a huge pain in the ass.
“You really don’t need to do this,” said Kevin, one of the dedicated guards who lived in the small barracks inside the hangar. “You have us to protect you.”
Kell double-checked his gear. Triple-checked, if he was being honest. He’d lost a couple sets of custom armored clothing over the years. The set he wore now was still brand new; untouched by even a speck of dirt in the three months he’d owned it. The coat was a firefighter turnout jacket taken from a warehouse thirty miles away the people of Haven had raided years ago. In between the lining and the shell was a layer of thin plastic discs. The collar was remade to attach to a custom piece of headgear somewhere between an armored balaclava and a helmet. His batons were snapped into place on the chest of the coat, a shiny new spear held in his hands.
The spear was the weapon he’d used the longest. The length of wood with its metal bands and tip felt perfectly familiar.
“I’m not going gung-ho or anything, Kev,” Kell said. “I’m cool with you jumping in if you think I can’t handle it. Just give me a chance to try. That’s all I ask.”
“I don’t like it,” Kevin grumbled. “I don’t see why you have to do it at all.”
Kell tapped his fake leg with the butt of the spear. “Because of this. It looks like Will is going to let us make the trip, but anything could happen along the way. I need to know whether I’m coordinated enough to defend myself. It’s not a confidence thing or a big dramatic moment, man. I’m rusty and I don’t want to get my face eaten if we run into some bad luck.”
They arrived at the north corner of the wall around the hangar, where a large chain link pen stood. Cages took up a quarter of its length, the rest by an open space. The zombies used in lab experiments were kept there, and every cage was full.
“This is dumb,” Kevin said.
Kell smiled. “Only if I get hurt. It’ll be fine. I need some kind of real-world test before I let myself go on the road.”
There wasn’t any ceremony to it. Kevin waiting for Kell to shut himself into the paddock and show he was ready before flipping the latch on the cage door. Some people made fighting zombies into a kind of rite, a milestone with importance far beyond anything the act itself warranted. For him this was no different than a patient rehabbing after knee surgery and doing range of motion exercises. A systems check to see if all lights were green.
He didn’t attack at first. He felt confident that his reflexes weren’t so bad that he couldn’t strike out with a thrust of the spear and kill the zombie. That much was easy enough he could do it without even twisting below the hips. If the raw ability to kill was all he wanted, the test would have been easy.
Instead he went through a series of motions meant to test his balance, reaction, and endurance. Once upon a time Kell had the grace to step just out of the way of an approaching zombie, bump it with his hip, and knock it off balance. Now that precision was lost to him, but he found himself strangely Zen about the change. Life was change, after all.
Instead he moved big, sweeping around in a broad circle to get away. He did it quickly and purposefully without the conscious smoothness he always put into his steps now that he had an artificial leg. The torque on his fake foot twisted the prosthetic where his stump fit into it. His knee took the stress well, but his hip was unused to the quick and rough movements after so many idle months. Without the days working with Emily, it would have been worse. Even a little practice can knock off a lot of rust.
It went like that for ten minutes. Kell trying a different maneuver to get away from the zombie and taking mental note of what worked well, what didn’t, and what hurt. There were a few irritated gasps from Kevin, who had let himself into the paddock ten seconds after letting the zombie loose. His presence brought Kell a measure of comfort. Safety nets were good things to have.
Those few clumsy moments did something unexpected; they gave Kell confidence. Part of his fear rested in the idea that his body would fail, that he wouldn’t be able to recover from a mistake. Yet even as he cataloged the difference between this performance and what he had been before the amputation, it became obvious that he was in better shape than he had imagined.
At the end of those ten minutes, Kell flipped the spear and stuck it in the ground. He let the zombie get close and tried one l
ast thing.
Its grasping claws latched onto his outstretched arms at the wrists, trying in vain to burrow through the dense material of his coat. Kell took a few steps back, moving along with the zombie to get a feel for his balance and its weight. Then he took a risk.
He pulled the zombie off balance, steadily pulling one wrist toward him while pushing the other back. His weight shifted entirely to his metal foot as his flesh and bone leg rose from the ground, shot out, and swept in a huge throw as he twisted and pulled. Judo was not Kell’s first love, but it was excellent practice.
The throw was not perfect. Any wise practitioner would say that no throw, no punch, no movement is ever perfect. It couldn’t have been called pretty or even skillfully done. The throw was big and ugly and Kell felt wobbly about halfway through.
But it worked. The zombie planted itself directly on its face. The dead man and Kell broke apart at the impact, which momentarily stunned the zombie. He deftly plucked the spear from the earth, raised it in both hands, and drove the point into the face of his enemy.
From his spot leaning against the fence, Kevin huffed out a pent-up breath. “Won’t win any awards, but not bad. Surprised you went for a throw.”
Kell yanked the spear free and used it to support a bit of his weight. “I spent years using them. I was a little worried I’d do it out of reflex and snap my prosthetic off in the process. Better to find out now whether it would work, rather than when I don’t have someone to back me up out in the field.”
Kevin gave Kell an appraising look. “You did pretty good. Guess the question is, do you think so?”
“Enough so I don’t feel completely helpless, anyway,” Kell said.
“Yeah, I can understand that,” Kevin said. “Being hurt that way, getting a permanent injury, scares the shit out of me.”
They weren’t just idle words. Kell heard a thread of genuine fear in them. “Why? The community wouldn’t let you starve or anything if you couldn’t fight.”
Kevin smiled, somewhat sad and distant. “Oh, sure. I know that. Things are better now than they were at the beginning, but even then we stuck together. You ever run across any nursing homes or community centers for the disabled when you were out scavenging?”
Kell nodded. “Empty ones, sure.”
“Some of mine weren’t,” Kevin said. “When things went to shit, it was easy to forget how vulnerable some people were. We’ve heard some horror stories. Stuff that makes your average zombie attack sound like a picnic in spring. Worst one for me was a run we did at a rehab place for veterans. Bodies with missing legs, like you, or arms. Sometimes both. Every one of them looked like he fought to the end. Can you even imagine?” Kevin blushed. “Well, yeah. Of course you can. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” Kell said. “You’re right. I’ve thought about it a lot. My friend Andrea has a son with autism. She got him out into the country to watch out for him, but not before hearing a story on the news about the day center she used to send him to. Everything unraveled so fast that when a zombie stumbled in, no one even knew what it was. Heard a lot of stories about that at hospitals and doctor’s offices, too.”
They walked from the paddock in silence. Horror stories—tragedies, really—abounded. The helpless had died just the same as everyone else, but at least the rest had a chance to defend themselves. The pervasiveness of those tales was a big part of why Haven and the other communities in the Union were so dead set on making sure anyone and everyone was protected. That there were safe spots for those who couldn’t raise a weapon.
Kell wasn’t worried that others would abandon him now that he was among the partially disabled. It was solely for his own well-being that he needed to rely on himself should the worst happen.
Today wasn’t iron-clad proof that he could, but it was a damn fine start.
Emily
They left on a crisp Sunday morning. To say Emily had a particular thought on her mind was inaccurate bordering on the insulting. In that way, her own brilliance complimented Kell’s nicely. He was smarter than just about anyone she’d ever met, wholly focusing on a single thing at a time. Her talent lay in keeping a huge number of mental plates spinning, which was what she did as their caravan moved out.
Some described her as coldly analytical, but that was half wrong. Emily sat in the passenger seat of the second of three transport vehicles and let the moving parts whirl away in her head with deep concern. The bellows of worry and fear pumped in time, making her think through every potential outcome she could dream up.
The only person who had argued with her about the need to take the transports was Haven’s quartermaster. Not because he was stingy about the ludicrous volume of fuel they required for the trip—with the slow increase in refinery capacity, it was less of a worry—but for the transports themselves. Relatively light, enclosed trucks were not resources the quartermaster was keen to risk. He was the only person in the Haven bureaucracy to complain.
Yet Emily saw them as the bare minimum. The logistics wouldn’t physically allow armored vehicles to make the drive. The amount of gas required was more than they could load onto them even with auxiliary tanks.
The trucks were a single moving piece. Another were the zombies.
Yes, they had the cure with them. A lot of it. The cure itself was damned useful, a fact Emily would argue with violence if necessary, but it wasn’t a panacea for the ills of their brave new world. Statistical reality demanded an accounting of remaining zombies in the US in the tens of millions. Chimera kept the bodies functional indefinitely. Swarms would build and break apart like flotsam on roiling waves.
They could use up every drop of the stuff with them and not impact the zombie population between here and New America by a measurable amount.
Then there were the dozens of frighteningly complex things that could and probably would leap into motion when they reached their destination. Every danger from politics to being shot to pieces at the first opportunity. The thought that this was a trap solely meant to lure them all in and kill them had a special place in her head, unlikely as it might be.
“I can feel you worrying from over here,” Kell said.
Emily glanced over at him across the cramped space inside the transport. “Hmm?”
He marked his place in the book—reading while riding in a vehicle made Emily vomit in ways that could only be described as biblical—and gave her his whole attention. “You’re doing your Rain Man thing. The one where you sit there and make little humming noises while you over think every terrible remote possibility that might happen.”
She bobbed her head agreeably. “Yep. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Someone needs to.”
“You’re being paranoid,” Kell said.
“No, I’m not. It isn’t paranoia when you’re driving toward a group of people who spent a lot of time and effort trying to kill or capture you. I’d rather spend the trip there chewing my nails to bits and not sleeping well and be prepared, thanks very much.”
For the briefest of moments, Emily wanted to slug him. Not because he was wrong—she did obsess to an unhealthy degree sometimes—but from frustration rooted in the understanding that they were so close to moving past all this. She’d honestly believed their home in Iowa would be the last. True, she had scouted because the monotony of farming every day started to wear on her nerves, but also because she got to come back home again on a regular basis. That thrill of seeing the place never grew old and always filled her with a sense of rightness.
She was angry at the stupidity of it all. Her face must have given it away, because Kell’s expression grew worried. “What’s wrong? I wasn’t trying to upset you. Sorry if I did.”
For a few seconds Emily thought she wouldn’t be able to respond. Certainly she didn’t want to, but long hours and stress built up in her like poison. Months of being in charge of an espionage network with very little training wore her patience thin in ways the end of the world hadn’t been able to.
“It’s stupid
,” she said quietly. “It’s all so stupid.”
Kell cocked his head. “What is? I know I’m supposed to have telepathy about this stuff, but in many ways I am a profoundly dumb human being.”
Emily laughed, though it was a weak sound. “We should be past this petty shit, you know? Think about how hard, how fucking unlikely, it was for all of us to survive. Zombies rose up and that was terrible. But between fighting them or even hiding from them, we had to adapt to a whole new world. No society to fall back on. No grocery stores or psychologists or babysitters. And we did it, you know? We fucking did it. We fought and scraped and pushed bricks together to make something new.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, but they were tears of rage. Sadness at what had been lost was the cosmic background radiation of her world, soft and rich but with every sharp edge capable of hurting her long since worn away. “Turns out people just won’t stop being assholes, though. How many marauders have we had to kill? We fought an entire war, and for what? Both sides spent more resources than winning would have gained us and we still ended up working out a partnership. I thought we were retired. Then these cunts come and attack our home and now we’re going there for mysterious reasons and because of politics. I’m pissed off that we live in a world where almost all the people died but somehow is still populated with greedy, selfish assholes who can’t just ask for something straight up. I’m furious we haven’t overcome all these stupid ulterior motives and justifications for doing awful shit to each other.”
Kell sat in silence for a while, absorbing and considering. “I’m tempted to say that’s one side of the coin. That along with how terrible people can be, you also get to see how full of wonder and grace they’re capable of being. But that’s not right, is it?”
Emily snorted. “Fuck no, it isn’t. That’s a weak platitude at best. Makes it sound like people can’t change or grow. Look at history. We’ve proved time and again that we can grow and change. That’s why I’m so pissed off. Because despite hard evidence, these fucks still choose to throw together some made up stories about you and threaten us into walking into what has to be a trap. All because they want you there for some reason or another, but won’t just ask.”
