by Joshua Guess
Mason shot him in the head.
The shouts from the men in the courtyard were nothing but pantomime to him, drowned out by distance and the thunder of his rifle. Mason watched dispassionately as people appeared, most taking the cautious route and only peeking around corners and out of doorways. That was fine; he wanted to create enough fear to immobilize the enemy without taking so many shots he gave his position away.
A flicker of motion caught his eye. It was the barest twitch of a drape in the attic, but Mason knew the space well. There were shooting platforms set up at each window, long padded benches with adjustable rests for gun barrels.
He sighted carefully, and caught the slow panning sweep of a rifle looking for him. The shooter wasn’t stupid, choosing to limit the area of view by sitting further back in the window to give himself more cover. All Mason could see was the tip of the barrel. He thought the angle was good, though, and took the shot.
The enemy’s gun barrel jerked and stopped moving. Probably not a kill shot, but it didn’t really need to be. He just needed to give Greg and Allen enough time to get to work. As expected, the brothers weren’t screwing around. They must have been watching from their own hiding spot to gauge the reaction when the bullets started to fly.
From his blind, Mason watched it play out with a great deal of professional appreciation.
One of the contingencies he’d enacted before getting himself captured was cutting off the compound’s power. The shed containing the arrays of batteries was easy to identify from the lines entering it from the solar panels and wind turbines. The lines out were equally obvious, and Mason had flipped a switch that physically cut them.
There being no juice to power them, the LED floodlights couldn’t be used for security sweeps at night. Which was how Greg and Allen managed to sneak close to the compound at will. Their hiding spot, a low mound of wild brush a few hundred feet to Mason’s east, burst apart to reveal a midsize sedan. It was, he thought, what a family car designed by Satan would look like.
It was a leftover escape vehicle, covered in the same angular sheet armor all their cars and trucks carried. The driver was heavily protected, though the rest of the vehicle carried much lighter armor.
Allen emerged from the sunroof, flipping the steel plate there open and cocking his arm back in one smooth motion. Thick black smoke belched from the homemade bomb in his hand, which he threw with all his might as the sedan hurtled down the access road leading to the gate.
Mason put a round into the torso of a soldier who saw the approaching vehicle, and kept an eye out for others.
Allen chucked his bomb, which sailed in a graceful spiral and landed ten yards from the front gate. It didn’t explode as much as splatter. It wasn’t that kind of bomb.
Oil and chunks of solid matter spread across the road and burst into full flame in the sudden buffet of oxygen, sending a roiling mass of greasy black smoke outward. The sedan slowed dramatically behind this cover, and Allen climbed out of the sun roof and slid off the side of the car. Mason covered him as he darted off the road and pulled a length of cord from where it was covered by grass. With a spark, the fuse lit, the glowing portion zipping off down its length.
All around the exterior of the compound, bursts of black smoke erupted to life. Mason wasted no time pulling himself from the blind and setting off at a dead sprint. The smoke gave him cover to move, but it kept him from seeing targets, too. The gentle morning breeze luckily caused the smoke to drift somewhat east, which meant not having to run headlong into a cloud of the choking stuff.
Allen ran back to the car and hopped into the open trunk as the lid popped up and fell off. The car tore through the ridges of dirt and crops surrounding the fence, Allen fiercely lobbing more compact bombs with the practiced ease of a lifelong softball enthusiast.
Surrounded by a staccato of gunfire, the too-close thumps of homemade grenades, and the burning chaos of an enemy position under attack, Mason felt weirdly at home. Probably not healthy, but it was what he had.
He pulled a homemade weapon of his own from its strap on his thigh. Making thermobaric weapons was stupidly risky considering a mistake would, you know, explode him to death, but Mason considered the odds acceptable justification for the danger. He pulled the pin and threw in an arc with an end point hopefully very near the cluster of vehicles in the courtyard.
Then he dived toward the uncomfortably narrow drainage outlet set below the wall and hastily crawled inside.
The explosion shook the ground, vibrated Mason’s elbows and knees as he shuffled forward, and made him smile when smaller explosions followed.
Emily
She woke up before dawn to a bunker not nearly as crowded as feared. Kincaid and the people with him cleared space in the labs to kip in, though a handful opted to sleep in their vehicles. They promised to do it in shifts in order to keep an eye out for bad guys.
Her watch told her it was too damn early, but Emily made herself get up and start moving despite the interruption in her sleep. Kincaid had everyone make an inventory of their supplies before coming here, which he’d handed over to her when a taciturn Kell refused to speak to the man any more than necessary.
She sighed as she made coffee—one of the few items the new group actually brought inside the bunker with them—and muttered to herself at the inflexibility some people had.
Kincaid was a functional sociopath. Being somewhere on the spectrum meant a lack of remorse for some of the things he did to protect the group. It also probably implied that his ties to the group were weaker than they’d be for other people, which was what put Kell on edge. For her part, Emily didn’t much care. The guy might have a conscience to make Scrooge’s look enormous, but he also lacked a filter.
“I’ll take an honest killer on my side any day of the week,” she had said to Kell on several occasions. Kincaid came through when it mattered.
She had just begun going over the lists of items when Kincaid spoke from the doorway.
“You’re up early.”
Emily nodded and took a long, scalding drink from the cup. “Wanted to get a head start on all this stuff. See what we have to work with. Fuel is the big worry.”
Kincaid poured himself a steaming mug and sat down. “We didn’t bring any more gas than the vehicles had in them, but I think one of our caches is good. Assuming Mason doesn’t recover anything from home, which I wouldn’t bet on. He knows we need it.”
Emily grunted absently and continued to scan the paper. Her eyes widened when she saw the heading for a truck everyone called the Sled. It was a heavy duty pickup too fuel-hungry for everyday use they’d armored to the nines and loaded with extra sets of armor and weapons.
She nearly choked on her mouthful of coffee. “You guys grabbed the Sled? We have assault weapons?”
Kincaid’s eyebrows knitted together. “Yeah, but they’re virtually all the guns we have. You’re not thinking about sending people back to help Mason, are you?”
Emily ground her teeth. “Of course I am. There are only three of them, right?”
“Yes,” he replied softly. “Only three. Which is what Mason wanted. He knows how risky this is, and he doesn’t want to put anyone in that kind of danger if he can avoid it. I guarantee you he did the math. Besides which, I don’t know the plan of attack. Do you? Last night you mentioned he forgot to tell you Hal and the others were bringing supplies. I kind of doubt he laid out his tactics.”
“You know, if you’re going to shoot down my ideas using rational arguments, you aren’t welcome to my coffee,” Emily said. “I get why Kell doesn’t like you.”
The smile on his face was faint and…the word that came to Emily’s mind was enigmatic. Like he knew the punchline to a joke no one had even asked.
“That’s not why he doesn’t like me,” Kincaid said. “It’s because I act on my rational arguments without wringing my hands before or after.”
It was a nice way of reminding her he’d killed a man who had betrayed their tru
st and was likely to do it again, just to make things easier on the group.
Her eyes wandered over the paper again, tallying the items in the small arsenal.
“Still, though,” Emily said. “It’d be nice if someone was there to back Mason up. You know, just in case.”
Kincaid raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. “I’m game if you are.”
It almost frightened her, how close she came to saying yes. She knew perfectly well Kincaid wasn’t offering an idiotic rush into the fight with guns blazing. Interfering that way would do much more harm than it would help. But the temptation to ride out, stay out of sight, and function as backup appealed to her much more than going over inventory and working out travel plans.
But that was survival. For every moment of thrilling heroics, there were hours, days, or weeks of just buckling down and doing the work. Whether it was farming or figuring out fuel budgets, that was how the real world functioned.
“No,” she said, letting the idea die. “You’re right. If Mason fails, it’s a minimal loss of life. And he has the best chance of getting the job done.”
Kincaid looked impressed. “That’s a pretty cold calculation to make. Smallest investment for the largest return, but with people.”
Emily laughed, low and harsh. “Man, that’s the whole fucking world nowadays.”
Around noon things changed. Emily and Kell were outside, and the sense of bored sameness she’d felt since settling in at the bunker shattered at the distant sound of a motorcycle engine intruding on the day. Only one bike arrived with Kincaid and his people, and they’d sent a young woman named Kelsey out to scout nearby an hour earlier. She wasn’t due back for hours.
“That’s not good,” Kell said as the roar of the engine echoed louder.
Emily turned to the nearest person she could find—Cameron—and motioned her toward the bunker entrance. “Run and find Kincaid, Andrea, every adult. We might have a situation here.”
Cameron nodded sharply, asked no questions, and sprinted off. She returned in less than two minutes heading a growing crowd of adults. The last of them piled through the door just as Kelsey reappeared, tearing toward them on the access road at dangerously high speed.
She braked closer to the group than Emily would have liked and extended the kickstand so hastily she almost missed. Flipping up the visor on her helmet as she jogged over, Kelsey breathed a single word.
“Swarm.”
Judging by the sweat dripping down the scout’s face, Emily was pretty sure she knew the answer to her next question, but it had to be asked. “How big? How far away are they? Take off your helmet, girl. It’s not like they’re here already. We can all get inside in thirty seconds.”
Kelsey’s cheeks reddened, at least what Emily could see of them. She whipped the helmet off and pushed a hank of brown hair behind her ear. “I went fifteen miles out, like you said, and started doing stop-and-check sweeps. Looks like they’re coming from the northeast, big enough to raise a dust cloud the size of a football field.”
“Numbers?” Emily asked.
Kelsey shook her head. “Didn’t get a good count. I stopped at two dozen, mostly because they were hard to see at a distance. I’d have had to bike cross-country to get to them. Didn’t want to risk it.” A look of sheer horror crossed her face, and the younger woman raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, God. Did I lead them here?”
“No,” Emily said with certainty. “They hunt by scent. They’re like dogs. They’d have caught our exhaust and other smells easily enough. Even if you hadn’t been there, they’d be our problem sooner or later.” She gave the girl a smile she didn’t feel. “You gave us warning, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Kincaid cleared his throat. “What’s the plan, then? Want us to move everything into the bunker so we can button it up?”
Emily surveyed the road, an idea materializing. “No. Get every car we have moved to either side of the entrance. Put them bumper to bumper, and I mean I want them touching.”
“Building a wall?” Kell asked.
“Yeah. Come on, big guy. We’re gonna need all that muscle.”
While they didn’t waste time, no one hurried either. According to her mental math, the swarm would take at least a few hours to arrive. The trick was to line up the vehicles in such a way that the ones that ran could be hopped in and driven away with little effort. That meant making sure every car that didn’t run was in neutral and able to move freely. They positioned the vehicles with the most powerful engines at the front of the line, where they could nudge the clunkers out of the way if needed.
The rest was just work. A lot of work. Mostly it involved pushing cars, though with the number of bodies on hand no single person had to strain themselves.
“Cameron,” Emily said as she backed away from a half-wrecked car now snugly seated against a van.
The girl darted over from her group of friends, who were all working together. “I’d rather be called Cam.”
“Cam,” Emily said with a smile. “Okay. I need you and the other kids to find shovels or anything you can dig with, and see if you can pile up enough on the sides of the cars that zombies won’t be able to crawl under them.”
The girl’s brow furrowed doubtfully. “You think that’ll stop them?”
Emily shrugged. “If it slows them down enough so we can kill them while they’re still trying to crawl through, then their bodies will help block the way through, too.”
Cam tensed and turned to speed off in the way only adolescents can, then stopped as if someone jerked her back with a chain. “I just had an idea!”
The girl ran over to the car Emily had helped push and crouched next to it. She was judging something closely, and Emily leaned over to see if she could figure out what it was when Cam almost rammed her head into Emily’s jaw shooting to her feet.
“Oh, sorry…”
Emily had jumped back and nearly toppled over. “It’s fine,” she said, waving away the apology. “What’s the idea?”
Cam flung an arm toward the car. “Cut the tires. All the cars we can’t drive. Most of them are pretty close to the ground anyway, so cutting the tires will make them too close to fit a person.”
Emily opened her mouth to argue for why that wouldn’t work.
Except it absolutely would.
“Can I adopt you?” Emily asked.
She meant it as a joke, but knew at once it was the wrong one to make. Cam’s eyes hardened at the edges, her body went tight. “I’ll get the others and we’ll cut them,” the girl said coolly. “Then we’ll put in dirt where we can.”
Before Emily could try to apologize, even if she was only vaguely suspicious of exactly what she might be apologizing for, the girl ran off to join her friends. The next few minutes were filled with a gleeful display of tire vandalism followed by frantic digging on either side of the access road.
Someone had the idea to drag fallen branches and even a long-dead tree over to the makeshift barrier. The woods surrounding the area were small but dense and yielded a surprising volume of useful debris.
The barrier was finished well before the swarm’s earliest possible arrival time. As people milled about, distributing weapons and double-checking the sturdiness of the barrier, Emily called for a break.
“Everyone grab something to eat,” she said. “We’ve been working for a couple hours, so stop and fuel yourselves up. Grab a nap if you can. Hopefully this won’t be a big fight, but we need to be as rested as possible.”
Kell walked over to her as the crowd began to thin. “What about you? I don’t see you running for a sleeping bag.”
“I’m good,” she said, settling against a truck fender with her eyes glued to the northeast. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
He nodded and climbed up on the hood of the derelict vehicle. “Why do this? We could have just gone inside. It’s not like they could get through the door.”
“I know that. It was just logical. This swarm was probably nudged toward
us by the Rebound soldiers, right? We almost never see clusters of zombies around here anymore. Probably been following the trail for days or weeks. So I figured there might be even more coming we don’t know about. Swarms can get pretty big and strung out over miles.”
“Ah,” Kell said, his eyes lighting up. “You didn’t want to trap us inside with no easy way to get to the cars. Now we can at least hold them off long enough to load up and escape.”
She gave him a lazy grin. “Nailed it.”
He was right, but not completely. Emily had no desire to leave people behind, no wish to see anyone hurt or carry the guilt on her conscience, but that hadn’t been her primary driver. She wanted the buffer zone for a safe escape, just not for everyone. If it came to a situation where it looked like they might be overwhelmed, getting him out was the priority.
Not that she’d tell him that. God knew the man couldn’t help getting all noble. Still, she’d fight like hell before taking a drastic measure like leaving everyone else behind to die. She knew that as clearly as she knew that faced with the choice, she absolutely could live with the guilt of making the call to flee.
Kell
The rough wall of cars might have had a narrow gap in it to let zombies in one by one if Kell and Emily hadn’t learned the hard way that giving the enemy an advantage, even if might give you one too, was stupid. Instead the cars formed a closed loop, which would hold off the dead while also allowing the defenders to attack.
When they came, it wasn’t a surprise. Though the surrounding area was grassy and more hardy than the dusty plains outside it, the overgrowth made sneaking up impossible. The sound of feet crunching through knee-high grass and snapping wind-broken branches preceded the swarm by a fair margin.
“Keep in your triads,” Kell said in a deep, booming voice meant to carry over the ruckus. It came out louder and more fierce than intended, but that was fine. If he seemed confident and aggressive, it might help someone else find some confidence of their own.
