by Joshua Guess
“Yeah,” Kell said. “They never did try to communicate, did they?”
Emily shook her head. “I just want you to remember when we get to Rebound that our first experience with these people was seeing them kidnap people for their experiments. That’s who they are.”
A powerful factor driving Emily’s frustration was a lack of knowledge. Rebound didn’t want Kell for the reasons they gave the rest of the citizens of New America, that much was obvious. There was no populist uprising calling for his blood. Kell’s reasoning was sound; they wanted to corner him into doing some kind of work for them. Only after would they perhaps put him on trial or whatever.
Some of the pressure let off when they made their first real stop. Not just a quick rest and refuel, but actually taking a day and camping. They had to; the site they used was more than just a cache of supplies hidden by one of the scout teams. The location was also a dead drop on the long chain meant to ferry information back to Haven in case electronic means failed.
It was an abandoned church. There was something about the idea of using a forgotten house of worship as a place to pass on crucial information that tickled Emily.
The drop was used just a day before, which was excellent news. The notebooks had more detail and nuance than the radio transmissions could safely carry, which made the tedious process of decoding the messages worth the effort.
Being out of the transport was nice even if the church was less comfortable than home. Emily nestled against a wall using her bedroll as a cushion and worked on the notebook. She only noticed the passage of time when the light coming through the cracks between the boards on the windows dimmed enough to make reading difficult.
When she closed the notebook, intending to trot out to the truck to grab a lamp, she noticed the church was empty. Sleeping bags and other gear was strewn about, but no people to go with them.
She stuffed the notebook in her pocket and picked up her pace.
The door was slightly ajar, and a rush of relief went through her when she saw Kell standing nearby through the crack. It faded to mild concern when she saw his face in profile; expression pinched, mouth tightened into a grim line that tugged on the scar running down his face. He noticed her from the corner of his eye and turned his head. “Trouble.”
Emily considered how strange it was for one word to carry so much information. It was one of those things where context provided what you needed to know. Considering the fact that every person but her had left the church, that they were out in the world on their own, and that Kell’s tolerance for danger was suicidally high, ‘trouble’ had to constitute a major threat.
“The living kind or the dead kind?” she asked through the crack in a low voice. “You’re not moving so I have to think you’re trying not to draw attention to yourself.”
His nod was almost imperceptible. “I think it’s both. There’s a pretty big swarm shuffling around the edges of the buildings but they’re not moving in just yet. Could be some New Breed guiding a pack of dumb zombies.”
Ah. “Or someone alive is herding them toward us. Rebound?”
“No idea,” he said. “Doesn’t seem likely since they want us for themselves, but anything’s possible.”
Emily bit the inside of her lip. “Do we have eyes up high somewhere?”
Kell gave a tiny shake of his head. “Donny was supposed to be our lookout, but he’s sitting with that prisoner we brought. Danielle? No one wants to move and draw attention.”
Emily blew out a breath. “Okay. Put your earbud in and turn on your radio. I’ll grab my kit and see if I can find roof access from inside. Don’t move until I say, but if the swarm starts heading this way, get everyone inside.”
Despite—or possibly because of—the situation, Kell’s mouth tugged up at the corner. “I love it when you get all dominant.”
She rolled her eyes even though he couldn’t see it. “Yeah, yeah. We’ll find some handcuffs and test how long you can keep that opinion. Live first, get kinky later. Just listen for my word, okay?”
His smirk didn’t waver. “I’m totally holding you to that.”
And despite—or possibly because of—the situation, Emily found herself energized at the thought like a kid looking forward to after-prom shenanigans.
“Keep it in your pants, big fella. Also keep your head attached. I’ll be quick.”
She ghosted away from the door, scout instincts taking over without effort. Years of scouring buildings for salvage while dodging and sneaking by the shambling dead ingrained the reflexes into her bone-deep. Much as hunters learned to walk silently in forests, when in danger Emily fell back into what others lovingly called her ninja mode.
She slipped the backpack on and shouldered her rifle in quick, fluid motions. She knew from the reports on this place that there should be a ladder to the roof on the back wall, but if someone had targeted her messengers long enough to set a trap in this podunk town, they could have destroyed the route to prevent escape.
If this was simply a zombie attack, Emily would act as over-watch and guide her people as much as possible. If there were human hands guiding the dead, well, she considered it her duty to make sure none of those hands would clench into fists against her group ever again.
Mason
There was precious little for Mason to do while waiting for Kell and the others to show up, so he gave in to the worst impulses inside him.
He became a tourist.
Granted, being ferried around the various settlements inside New America wasn’t the boring kind of sightseeing teenagers endured with their parents in the world before The Fall. There were no pictures or long-winded speeches about the historical importance of the sites he visited. Instead Mason was treated to a succession of stops where the full scope of what had been accomplished here stood on proud display.
And Mason was genuinely impressed.
Now on his fourth stop, he couldn’t deny that the often brutal method of rule here achieved amazing results. Certainly there were elements easily found in any colony of survivors. The watch towers at the border were similar to the scout posts around Haven. Zombies were handled by a combination of defensive measures and dedicated teams of fighters and guards. More efficiently, too. Whatever secret means these people used to ward off zombies kept the flow from outside the border to a trickle.
What he stood in front of now was very much outside his expectation. He stood in the door of a building about ten miles from the Rebound complex and stared across the vast space. “This is a hell of a thing.”
His guide, a man close to his own size named Bobby, nodded. “No one expects to find a factory running at the end of the world. Takes some getting used to.”
There were several sections clearly visible across the giant floor space. On the far end, some kind of ore refining was happening, or so he judged from the glowing liquid. Closer, a machine was stamping out metal shapes. Several dozen people worked the blanks when they were spit out, grinding them in showers of sparks.
“What’s that?” Mason asked, pointing to the area that interested him the most. An enormous room had been constructed to the right, well away from the more industrial sections. It was made of thick white panels, the front lined with glass. Fume hoods and exhaust fans crouched on the roof of the space-within-a-space. Inside the room he saw a huge machine take up the entire wall opposite the window, and no matter how he turned what he saw over in his head, he couldn’t make sense of it. Too many unfamiliar parts, tubes leading to cylinders in configurations that baffled him.
Bobby grinned. “It’s called a molecular printer. Only two of them in the world. The other is inside the bunker.”
Mason gave him some side-eye. “That sounds like some science fiction bullshit.”
Bobby returned the look. “Bro, we live in the zombie apocalypse.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “That’s fair.”
“And anyway, no, it’s real enough,” Bobby said. “The concept isn’t that hard. It’s basicall
y just automated chemistry. They were prototypes back when things started to go downhill. The guy who designed them offered them as payment for being put in Rebound. So now all we have to do is feed these things a bunch of basic chemicals, and it can produce a lot of interesting stuff. Mostly we use it to try out new medicines.”
Mason knew better than to ask things like how many citizens were in New America, or anything else that might be seen as looking for a tactical advantage. Seeing so many people working made him deeply curious, however. He had no idea this place had moved so far past subsistence-level survival. The reports he’d read mentioned manufacturing, but nothing like this.
That lack of specificity bothered him, but was something he’d have to think about later. When he wasn’t being observed.
He and Bobby wandered the factory floor for a while, the other man proudly showing off the pieces and parts of everything from custom weapons to gate mechanisms for defensive walls around communities.
After that, they went to lunch. This was at an actual diner with running water and electricity. Mason wondered how big their nuclear reactor was. It was supposedly an experimental model—untested technology was a theme around these parts—and apparently could feed Rebound and its environs well enough that no one batted an eye at running a grill from the grid.
The presence of the diner itself wasn’t world-shaking. Haven and the Union at large had progressed enough over time to have luxuries like it. When his salad came, the chicken grilled to perfection, he posed the question to Bobby. “How long have you guys had stuff like this place? Took us years to rebuild to that point.”
Bobby frowned slightly. Not in anger, but as if he didn’t grasp the question. “Always. I mean, since right after Rebound opened up and their people came out to help everyone. They cleared out everything for twenty miles and hooked us up to power. Said giving us a sense of normality was important. We all needed places to eat, so it made sense to use what was available, you know?”
“Sure,” Mason said, and he meant it. Riding into town with easy solutions and shiny baubles like electricity was one thing. It was a practical and effective way to get people on your side. But giving people things that reminded them of home, handing them slices of what they’d lost? That was just fucking brilliant. It made asking the populace to do questionable things and make hard choices that much easier. It was an incredibly effective means of making them pliant enough to bend their morals.
You had to respect the craft of it even if you hated how it was used.
Halfway between the diner and their next destination, Mason and Bobby had to make an unplanned stop. New America didn’t just rely on the old roads left over from the old world. Extraneous blacktop was removed in an ongoing process, the pieces of roadway broken up and used to pave new ones or as filler for barricades. The result was a network of small surface streets strung between a web of larger roads in concentric arcs connecting busy areas together.
Mason imagined it from above, looking something like a baseball diamond writ large.
The design made it easy to situate guard posts and coordinate everything from travel to rallying a defense. It was the latter they stumbled upon as they drove. A guard post sitting at the intersection of the arc road they traveled and a surface street was surrounded by zombies. Not many as Mason counted the undead, maybe thirty, but enough to cover all the exits..
“Any idea why they’re mobbing a secure building rather than mosey on and look for easier meals?” Mason asked.
“Sure,” Bobby said. “Take a hard whiff.”
Mason frowned, wondering for a second if Bobby was telling him he smelled bad. Which didn’t even make sense in context, but Mason had never claimed to have the most logical or reasonable brain in existence. He closed his eyes, blew out a breath, and inhaled slowly and deeply through his nose. They were far enough away from the guard post that he could only catch the edges of it, but the smell was one he knew intimately.
“Blood?”
Bobby nodded. “We raise livestock just like everyone else. When we butcher, we keep the blood and use it as bait. Draws the biters in really well.”
Mason watched the scene play out.
The windows were covered in flat steel bars woven into a sort of giant mesh. The holes were too small for hands larger than a child’s to fit through. All around the post, the inner glass slid out of the way and the points of weapons stuck out through the square holes. The tips caught the attention of zombies, some of whom would tilt their faces right at them to get a look. And they did get a good one, up close and personal, as the guards inside jammed the spears forward with calculated and merciless strikes.
While this was going on, a pack of men and women in body armor rode up on bicycles. It said something about how incongruous those two things were that Mason, who had seen horrors beyond human imagination and lived through watching the dead rise and walk the earth, had a hard time believing what he was seeing.
Each of the armored figures took the time to put their kickstand down before taking a strong stance. They spread into a wide semicircle and raised the bows that had been draped over their chests, picking and choosing their shots with calm detachment.
The zombies were mostly wiped out by the time a couple of them wised up and made a run for it. The direction they chose was right at the jeep Mason and Bobby sat in. The archers didn’t fire at them, probably not wanting to get yelled at for shooting toward bystanders. Mason looked over at his tour guide. Bobby seemed levelheaded to Mason, so there was no expectation he’d freak out. Few people survived out in the world without developing a thick skin for zombie shenanigans.
Sure enough, the other man just looked annoyed. “There are only a couple of them. How many can you handle?”
Mason grinned. “Are you inviting me to battle or an orgy?”
Bobby shrugged. “Can’t it be both?”
“You have my attention, sir,” Mason said as he hauled himself out of the jeep.
Bobby grabbed a baseball bat from behind the driver’s seat but Mason didn’t bother with a weapon. He opted for outright fisticuffs for a couple reasons. The first was that he wasn’t entirely sure some trigger-happy patriot wouldn’t shoot him by reflex if he drew steel. A second was that he had an image, carefully crafted, that needed a little reinforcement after days of sitting around. He needed to look like the guy they saw him as, and that dude was a brawler who might not be stupid but for sure wasn’t brilliant. Fighting alone would help etch that perception deeper, because people were mostly driven by what they saw and how it fit into their preconceived notions. Human beings really liked having their biases confirmed, which probably explained why so many people were put off by his being gay.
Another reason? He just wanted to fight something.
Striding up to the closest zombie, Mason raised his wrist. The heavy, armored fabric there took the brunt of the zombie’s hunger, teeth sinking into the cloth as the claws scrabbled across it looking for purchase. When it had a solid grip, Mason yanked the thing off-balance and kicked its left knee in sideways. The sound of snapping cartilage and scraping bones was shockingly loud. The zombie almost fell but managed to stay standing on one good leg. The grip it had on Mason helped, there.
He put the same boot on the inside of its right knee and took a sort of step into it, driving the zombie into a controlled fall as he broke the shit out of its other knee. The fall tore it free, and Mason danced back a few feet. Predictably—and zombie predictability was why the same tactics usually worked—it flipped over and started to crawl toward him. It was a bad position to be in, made clear by the horrible, hollow thud as Mason’s steel toe collided with the middle of its face. A few careful kicks and stomps later, the zombie was dead.
When he turned to face the next, he found Bobby supporting himself with one hand on the Jeep. Mason thought the other man might be injured at first, but there was no blood, no obvious wounds. Bobby’s eyes were wide, his breathing harsh, a look of anguish and terror on his fa
ce.
In front of him was a little girl, years dead. She looked to have been seven or eight when the plague brought her back, and while the plague kept zombies from falling apart as they did in all those Romero movies, it couldn’t prevent time from ravaging them in other ways.
Her dark blonde hair could only be seen in slivers. What hadn’t been torn out by snagging on things on her endless walk across the country was caked with grime and muck. Her fingers ended just past the last joint, the clearest sign that she had been reanimated long ago. The skin of her fingertips was gone, the bones there worn down to claws from constant friction. Her hollow face was slack, eyes clouded by damage from the elements. And in an indignity as common as it was unnerving, she was nude. Her clothing had long since shredded away to a few scraps here and there. The indifferent, gradual loss of clothing bothered Mason more deeply than he would ever admit out loud, because it represented the stripping away of the last vestiges of humanity in the things.
He knew they lost that much when they died the first time, but logic didn’t enter into it.
The little girl moved toward Bobby, whose horrified expression barely changed as he pushed her back. She didn’t like that; her next move was a hissing leap toward his face.
Mason snagged her by the filthy hair before she could finish the movement, throwing her to the ground and putting a knee in the middle of her back. He looked up at Bobby. “You okay, man?”
The words seemed to snap Bobby out of his daze a little, because he slowly met Mason’s eyes. “What? Oh. No. I’m not okay. At all. She looks like my daughter.”
