by Joshua Guess
Kell Again
“Despite the fact that you seed our community with spies and saboteurs, that you willfully committed acts of war against us, this council has decided to take your other actions into account,” said the foreman of the newly-elected Leading Council of New America.
Agreeing to stay behind until things in the area settled down was the conservative call to make, and Kell thought it was the right on. Showing a willingness to speak for himself and to make a case for peace rather than take their people and leave was a strong foundation to build trust upon. That it had taken a month was surprising and irritating, but at least he wasn’t a prisoner.
The foreman continued. “The accusations against the former council are unfortunately impossible to prove as all the records have been destroyed. However, as we now have access to your digital archive, the evidence does point toward your innocence in causing the plague. Add to that the help you and your people gave us on Revelation Day along with the things the former council members themselves have admitted, and we are forced to believe. That being the case, you may well have prevented those men and women from causing another extinction-level event.”
Kell raised an eyebrow. “When you say it like that, it sounds kind of awesome.”
He wasn’t a fan of the way everyone referred to that day. Revelation Day gave it an apocalyptic feel, and as far as Kell was concerned, the world had enough of that business. It also just sounded weird to him, but as Mason explained, people have been giving titles to events and people since the dawn of human history. It was a way to instantly delineate things while divorcing them from the reality. It was how the events of September 11th became possible to talk about. The universal shorthand of calling it by its date raised it up and set it apart.
Also he thought it sounded dumb, but whatever.
The foreman’s mouth twitched at the corner. “Yes, well. Our ruling is that there isn’t a basis to charge you with a crime. As our constitution is still being worked out, this is convenient for everyone. On top of that, we want to thank you. You could have stayed hidden and avoided the fight.”
“No,” Kell said slowly, “I couldn’t have.”
And that was the goddamned truth.
The foreman did smile now. “Opinions inside New America’s communities are still divided. Even inside the bunker itself. I’m afraid there will probably always be people here who don’t trust you or think you’re guilty, but this council is not among them. So what can we do to repay you?”
Kell didn’t need to think about it, but Mason had been drilling him on seeming prepared while not looking overeager with his answers. So he paused as if in thought, then crossed his legs and rested his hands on his knee. “Be peaceful. Work with us and anyone else who wants to. You’ve got incredible resources here and more room than your population will need for a century.”
The foreman blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Kell assured him. “I just want to go home knowing a squad of hitters isn’t going to shoot me while I’m having pancakes or something.”
A look bordering on suspicious crossed the foreman’s face. “What will the cure cost us?”
Kell frowned. “Nothing. I mean, we’d like to have some kind of agreement for peace, but it’s not contingent. We’ll give you the cure.”
The foreman didn’t look convinced. “That’s generous.”
Kell shrugged. “Well, we can supply you with it. By now production is ramping up all over the Union. I won’t teach any of your people how to make it, though. Not without a treaty of some kind. If you decide not to draft one, we’ll still trade with you. But then your only options are getting the stuff from us or letting one of your mad scientist prisoners have a crack at it.”
You could have heard a feather hit the ground in that room. This wasn’t a moment of great decision. There was no imminent war to ward off. Kell, along with everyone within a hundred miles, knew that New America was still recovering. The disarray was helped somewhat by a rapidly designed and implemented government structure, and everyone who mattered in the decision-making process knew that Mason and Emily had been vital in designing it. They used the same precinct system found in Haven as the basis.
“You have to know it’s fair,” Kell said. “Your former leaders started this. They attacked us. We didn’t know who we were going after when we hit the remote labs where they were keeping prisoners snatched off the damn street. I guess you can blame us for that if you want.”
He leaned forward in his seat, raking the council with his stare. “We would be idiots to hand you the means to make the one thing that gives us any leverage without some kind of concrete agreement in place first. Even then, we’re going to require a grace period to make sure any such relationship is stable. We’d like to avoid any instantaneous betrayals.” The council looked mildly offended in aggregate, which Kell understood. “Forgive me for being blunt. We didn’t have a lot of trust built up with your last council.”
The foreman sighed. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s fair. We can work out the details at another time. For now, I’ll say the idea of a trade agreement and peace treaty are definitely items on our priority list.”
“Of course,” Kell said. “Just wanted to make sure everyone knew the score.”
An hour later, Kell was truly free for the first time in years. It was a feeling so big and complex that he couldn’t internalize it all at once. It wasn’t a logical thing even if he did understand the logic of it. Like the way he felt when he’d married Karen or held Jennifer for the first time, the sensation encompassed his whole being. The realization of this truth struck him almost the moment he rose from his chair in the council chamber and only grew stronger as he walked.
The people responsible for the end of the world were outed. The recording Kell made was copied and shared in every way people could manage it. Alone it wasn’t as damning as he would have liked, but the sentiment that spread with it more than made up for any lack of punch. The weight he’d carried since the Fall began—the idea that he would be blamed by the masses—was just gone. It was an intensely weird thing for him.
His nearly Sisyphean task to give humanity a little brighter future by fashioning a cure was over. Oh, he would probably spend the rest of his days tinkering with it along with the other projects he wanted to work on, but if anything taught him the dangers of fucking around with mother nature too much, it was the last six weeks.
There were no more wars to fight. No more budding empires with ambitious leaders to blunt. At least not now. Not yet. The future was a wonderful and terrifying thing for the infinite variety of situations it could drop on your lap. Kell had to shake his head at the thought. Not his problem anymore. He could just be a citizen again.
He met up with Emily and the others. Their camp was on the surface just outside of Rebound’s walls. For some reason, all of them had lost their taste for underground life. Most of the people who had infiltrated New America had joined the group save for two who decided to stay. Months of living with these people combined with a likely peace had given them the moral ground to make staying reasonable without feeling like a betrayal.
“Last meal as a free man?” Emily said from next to the small fire where Mason was cooking dinner.
Kell winked at her. “More like first meal as a free man in years. I feel, I don’t know, lighter somehow.”
A knowing look flashed across Mason’s face as he stirred the simmering pot. “Guess that means we’re not going to need to break you out of jail or anything?”
“I’ll remind you that we were the ones who sprung you, sir,” Kell said piously.
“Right,” Mason said with a roll of his eyes. “So we’re good to go?”
Kell flopped down on the ground and leaned against the truck that formed one wall of their small enclosure. “Yep. We can leave tomorrow. We even get an escort to the border. We’re good.”
A figure approached the group from the west, slipping into the camp on lig
ht feet for someone so large. “Here. I told you, coriander.”
Mason looked up at the new arrival and grinned. “Bobby, you’re a magician. Thank you.”
The glorious thing about their situation was that Kell didn’t need to say anything else at that moment. The previous month had been a constant, seemingly endless discussion about all the possible ways things could go badly for them. Now that it was over, rehashing was pointless. All those many futures were narrowed down to two.
The council kept its word.
The council didn’t.
Kell’s duty was to get them to this point as much as possible. He used his faint celebrity for all its worth.
“How long until that’s done?” he asked, stomach grumbling. “I think I brokered a peace today. Builds an appetite.”
Emily made a disbelieving pssh noise. “Are you kidding? I did most of the ground work. You were just a figurehead. That was a month of me busting ass just to make the couple hours you were in that room work out correctly.”
Bobby leaned against the truck not far from Kell, his bounty of coriander passed on. “I’m shocked. Just shocked and appalled that you people manipulated the leaders of my adopted nation behind the scenes. I’m gonna write a letter.”
Everyone laughed.
“I’m cool with being a figurehead,” Kell said. “Especially because it’s done.”
Mason took a sip of the mystery contents cooking in his pot. “That’s not the only thing that’s done. We’re good to go here. Though I’d like to give the coriander more time to simmer...”
Crouched as he was, Mason didn’t have the same dexterity as he usually did. The cascade of random items thrown at him mostly found their mark. Someone lost a pair of socks to the fire when they bounced off his face.
The food was ladled out into bowls. Jessup the horse, recovered by Mason, nickered softly. Muted conversation filled the early evening air as those gathered within it fell into an easy comfort with each other over a meal.
“This is really good,” Kell noted as he dipped bread brought to them by thankful townies into his stew.
“It is good,” Emily said as she sat down next to him, though he wasn’t sure she was talking about the food. “It’ll be even better when we can make it back in Haven. But then I think everything is better when you’re at home.”
It was a sentiment Kell couldn’t have agreed with more.
“Yeah,” he said, pausing to look up. The first stars of the evening were showing against the darkening sky. “Home is good.”
Epilogue One
Mason
“I can’t believe you declined the chance to have a long ride back to Haven together on a horse. A horse, Mason. It would have been so much fun,” Bobby said.
Mason chuckled. “Would have been a long walk, you mean. Jessup is good, but he’s not the Hercules of his species. We’re not featherweights, either of us. I think he likes the trailer. He does okay in there.”
Bobby scowled at him, which would have been intimidating if Mason didn’t know him. “I offered to move to Haven for you. The least you could do in return is give me a little romance here.”
Mason laughed out loud. “You’ve had to too easy for too long. Traveling in the open isn’t romantic. It’s a desperate struggle for survival. And I call bullshit on the idea of you coming to Haven for me. You were on the fence until someone from the group told you we have a burger joint.”
He knew Bobby wasn’t serious. The endless ride home simply wore on them. Joking arguments were one way to fill the space between long bouts of irritating music chosen by other people in the convoy and the awful books on CD preferred by a few others in the transport. Mason enjoyed the bickering. It was good fun and not unlike combat, just without stab wounds. The back and forth of it kept his mind alert and fresh.
And it was fun. Mason couldn’t remember the last time he had fun. Bobby made him feel better. It was as simple as that. In specific ways and generally, just better.
Despite the common impression people had about him, Mason was just as susceptible to the long-term traumas the world piled onto people. He dealt with pain better in the short term than most, but just because the wounds closed quickly didn’t mean the scars weren’t there.
Everyone’s life was that way, wasn’t it? A slow crawl forward in time, during which indignities and disappointments, heartbreaks and betrayals accumulated? Yes. Everyone lived through those things. It was in the grace of another person whose very presence eased the burden, someone who brought light and joy into the mix, that people found any kind of balance. For a long time, Mason’s light had been his friends. And they still were.
It amazed him that at this point in his life he could find something that could surprise him. Living on the edge as he did, even the idea of a new person entering his life was virtually nonexistent. He was incredibly good at what he did, and part of that was knowing that he could die at any moment.
As the miles wore on beneath their tires and as Bobby snored softly with his head against the wall of the transport, Mason wondered long and deep on how this might change things. How it might change him.
He had a suspicion that whatever those changes might be, they would be worth it.
If not, he’d deal.
“Do you like to travel?” Mason asked Bobby a while later.
“This is the first real trip I’ve made in years,” Bobby replied, scratching at his beard. “Remains to be seen how much fun it will be. Why?”
Mason smiled. “Well, the Union is big. And we’ll certainly have our hands full with trade ramping up with New America. Haven is my home now, but that doesn’t mean I want to be there all the time. Before all these big conflicts started, I did a lot of moving around between communities. Got to see quite a few interesting spots. Thought I’d give that another whirl.”
Bobby raised an eyebrow. “You asking me to join you?”
“If you want,” Mason said. “I’d like to do a couple trips, and they’d for damn sure be safer than us riding a horse across six hundred miles of open ground. I think it would be fun. Then maybe I could retire to do something else.”
Bobby let out a chuffing laugh. “Like what? You have a pretty specific skill set. Useful, but it doesn’t exactly make you a tradesman.”
Mason nodded. “Exactly. I’d like to spend a year or so helping smooth out things in the Union and making sure your people are keeping up their end of the deal. Afterward, I think it would be a good idea to start passing on my skills. I’d have to work out how to go about doing that. Emily has mentioned doing the same thing once or twice. She might have a starting point.”
“God help us,” Bobby said. “A bunch of tiny Masons.”
“Eventually, yes, my awesomeness would spread,” Mason agreed. “But I reckon we can go see a bit of the world and have a little fun first.”
Epilogue Two
Emily
Will sat back in his chair and ran a hand across his face. It was a few months since she’d seen him, and he looked older. Seemed like every time she saw him she thought that.
“You want to do what now?” Will asked.
“You heard me,” Emily said. “I want to train the scouts.”
Will raised his hands. “Wait. No. You want to train children to be scouts. That’s not what we do. No one goes into the program until they’re sixteen.”
Emily waved a dismissive hand. “You’re wrong, Will. That’s all we do. Your problem here is your own bias.”
Will frowned. “If you’re going to insult me in my own office—”
“Hear me out,” Emily said. “I’m talking about the bias that comes from living in the world the way it was before. You, me, Kate, everyone old enough to have habits and a way of looking at things from a certain point of view. There’s nothing wrong with it, but that kind of ingrained mindset is why you’re bothered right now. Because it forces you to look at things from a certain perspective.”
Will leaned back in his chair, resting his chi
n in his hand. “What perspective is that?”
The tone was calm but dangerous. She knew it well enough to understand his patience was wearing thin. “The one that tells you kids are just kids and shouldn’t have to face the sort of rigorous training it takes to be a scout. Or a front-line combatant. Or any of the other things we train adults to do. You’re overlooking the basic reality that every child under the age of eight or nine only knows this world. A few might have memories of what came before, but not more than the odd flash from being a toddler.”
“Oh, I get it,” Will said. “Have you forgotten the way we run schools here? Kids get education in everything from English to survival techniques. We teach them how to pick locks, for the love of Christ. They’re already getting a thorough grounding in how to live in this shitshow.”
Emily made a frustrated noise deep in her throat. “Yes, they are. Teaching them all that is good. Making them learn to fight is great, even. But we’re not showing them how to use unit tactics, or how to fight in a phalanx, which are things every person who mans the wall knows. The more complex skills needed for specialties like being a scout take time to master, and we still lose a lot of scouts out there in the world. It’s not just about having a ready-made pool of people for the job, Will. I want to prepare as many of them as possible for anything the world might throw at them.”
Will steepled his fingers in front of his face, and Emily knew she had him. The guy didn’t have many tells, but that one she knew well. To drive the point home, she broadened her attack.
“We both know that despite the cure and our best defenses, the world is still a dangerous place. There are millions of zombies out there, not to mention marauders and other threats. Not everyone is made to be a scout, and not everyone I’d train would be. It’s dangerous work. I just like the idea of preparing as many young people as possible, whatever form that training takes.”
