by Joshua Guess
The girl’s mouth quirked at the edge. Kell didn’t fight his own smile. “Hearing myself say that out loud makes me realize how old I sound. But seriously, you must have done pretty well. Emily doesn’t praise without good reason.”
“Not as well as I wanted,” she said, shaking back the cuff of her shirt to reveal a wide, shallow gash running up her forearm. “One of them left me a present.”
Judith, who was finishing up her own bowl of stew, leaned in with interest. “I can clean that up when you’re done eating.”
“Would you mind if I tried?” Kell asked Jo. “My field medicine is rusty and I’d like the practice. Judith is welcome to watch and make sure I don’t screw it up, of course.”
Judith gave him a curious look, but Jo simply shrugged and said, “Sure.”
When the three of them were alone in the lab a short time later, Kell did take out the medical kit Judith stored there. “I wanted to talk to you privately,” he admitted. “Emily also said you’ve been trying to avoid those boys.”
Jo reddened as only teenage girls can. “Yeah. They’re on my last nerve.”
“Well,” Kell said as he carefully irrigated the wound, “why don’t you work here with us? It’s not like we’ll be letting them in here to hang out while we work, and Mason has mentioned before that you’re pretty smart.”
“Yeah?” Jo said with a lopsided grin. “Could I still go out with Emily? I know she’s supposed to do some work scouting and stuff.”
“I don’t see why not,” Kell replied. “I’m just saying if you want to help out in here, it’s somewhere you can use to get away. If Emily doesn’t mind having you with her, I’m not going to keep you here.”
“Thanks, man. That would be awesome.”
They chatted about Kell’s work and what sorts of things Jo would be doing in the lab if or when she spent time there. When he finished the job and Judith pronounced it passable, Jo flashed her teeth as she left. It was, he thought, the first time he’d seen her look happy. Giving people options out of stressful situations could do miraculous things for their outlook.
“You should have just let her beat them senseless,” Judith said. “It would drive the lesson home more effectively.”
Kell nodded as he began packing up the med kit. “She’s a good kid, and I think she’s trying hard not to make the situation worse. I’m with you, though I think it would drive the boys off. Embarrassment does weird things to judgment in boys that age.”
Judith stared at the door Jo had exited through. “They’re night and day. She looks for responsibility. For things to learn. I stopped counting the hours she spent learning to fight from Mason after the first hundred. It won’t help things to separate them, though. I’m not ignorant of teenage boys. I had three of them.”
The last word cut off in a sadly familiar way. It was the cessation of speech when a word or phrase escaped without thought, dredging up old loss and opening old wounds. Nearly everyone had a past full of pain and suffering, and those moments were common.
“I didn’t know that,” Kell said gently. “You don’t talk about yourself. Or even talk all that much.”
Judith nodded tersely. “I used to, before all this happened. I was a completely different person back then. Bubbly, you might say. I’d gab with the mailman for hours. When it happened, I lost everyone in a single day. It closes you off. Do you understand?”
“It feels like your emotions get cauterized,” Kell said. “You still care, but showing it means breaking the scars open, and you don’t know if they’d ever stop bleeding.”
“You do understand,” Judith said. “Well, my boys were fourteen, seventeen, and nineteen. My husband had to have a come-to-Jesus moment with them when it came to girls. I imagine you’ll have to do the same, or Jo will leave them bloody.”
Now Kell broke into a full grin. “Me? Oh, no. I don’t think they’d listen to me. Emily will be back any time now. Hal and Mason will be with her. I think it’s time Mason whipped Mike and Randy into shape, don’t you?”
Mason
“This is not fucking rehab!” Mike shouted from several body lengths behind Mason. Randy was so far back his labored breathing drifted forward as little more than a whisper.
Two weeks had done much to restore the function of his leg and hip. The bullet wounds were healing nicely thanks to the Chimera in his system, though he was nowhere near peak and it still hurt like hell. That pain was key; you had to stretch the tissue to keep it from scarring too tightly. Otherwise it would take years to stretch back out. If ever.
He slowed to a stop and leaned one hand against the massive pile of firewood a thousand yards north of the hangar. The clearing was perfectly free of trees, though their stumps joined in with wild brush and tall grass to make a decent obstacle course. In a moment of impulsiveness, Mason decided to get a better view and scrambled haltingly up the stacked wood.
Mike stumbled to a halt just as Mason was settling into place, bent over double with hands on his knees and taking deep, ragged breaths. He tried to say something, then waved a hand and gave it up as a bad job.
Haven rose up in the distance. It had been called, in seriousness and irony, a city on a hill. In a literal sense it was true; the original neighborhood forming its core was situated on a rolling cluster of hills. The vast expansions spread out mostly to the east, devouring other neighborhoods. When he’d left years before, the expansions had barely begun. Certainly there were no steel walls stretching so far into the distance he couldn’t see them end.
And the buildings! Some houses had taken too much damage to be livable over the course of too many battles to count and one full-on war. Their lots had been cleared and David, the master builder for the entire community, had used his expertise to make good use of the space. The gravestones of those lost homes were solid blocks of stone and concrete rising four and five stories into the air.
Small water towers dotted the hills, obviously homemade but well-maintained. Though Haven was distant, its sheer size and lack of obscuring trees made the changes clear. The buffer surrounding the place stretched black before the wall, a barrier seemingly made of strings pulled taut between stout posts. He knew they were old power lines harvested from the surrounding town. Haven’s power lines were nearly invisible; they ran from house to house as needed.
When he left, the place held hundreds. Now it was home to thousands.
Randy joined them, picking his way slowly through the last dozen yards of stumps with no pretense of running. He scowled at Mason. “You were shot like three weeks ago. How is it even possible you can limp faster than we can run?”
“Practice,” Mason said, then pushed himself off the precarious firewood shelf. The landing was harder than he’d have liked and sent a lancing bolt of fire from his hip to his toes. He grunted.
“You were a soldier,” Mike said, finally catching his breath. “I get why you’d push yourself. But why do we need to?”
The question was earnest, which by itself would have pushed Mason to answer calmly. But the thick undertone of petulance beneath pushed the dangerous button in his head. The one soldiers under him whose unwillingness to do the work—and thus risk lives—had pushed from time to time.
“Have you two idiots not been paying attention for the last half decade?” The words slithered from his mouth far more coldly than intended, and with a flash of realization he knew where it came from. Back in Iowa it had been easy to write off the facts. His constant back and forth to the compound made it easy to ignore them. When he was with the boys and the rest of the group, much of his time went to training Jo, who was eager to learn.
How had he missed that Mike and Randy were utterly unprepared for the world? How had they all missed it? Hal and Judith knew their business, yet here before him stood two young men whose formative years should have honed them to a knife’s edge.
“What do you mean?” Mike said, his tone rebellious. Randy, to his credit, stood back looking mildly afraid. “Paying attention to
what? We can shoot. We can fight, too, even if we’re not as good as Jo.”
Mason wanted to slap the defensive, petulant tone right out of the kid’s mouth. Instead he turned toward the woods behind the rise and fall of the mountains of wood and motioned for them to follow. This time he moved at a comfortable walk, or as close to comfortable as any movement could be with his injuries.
They followed. He could almost feel the discomfort radiate from the boys as they moved from open ground and into the dense, untamed trees beyond.
“Where are we going?” Randy asked. “This isn’t safe. We don’t have any armor or weapons.”
Mason shook his head. “You really are clueless.” This elicited frustrated noises but neither boy was stupid enough to say anything else. They might grumble, but they knew what he was capable of. Fear was a powerful motivator, which was why Mason was so caught off guard by the fact these two had somehow managed to lose theirs when it came to the dangers of the world.
He came to a halt two hundred yards inside the treeline, turned, and rested a hand on the knife at his waist. “You’ll notice I’m not a fucking moron who goes around unarmed,” he said in a low voice, barely loud enough to carry the body length between them.
“What are we doing out here?” Randy asked, fear etching cracks in his loud voice.
Mason shook his head again, an involuntary response to the situation. Just as softly as before, he said, “We wait.”
It didn’t take long. They heard the zombies coming long before the shambling dead could be seen.
“You really should have kept your voice down,” Mason said conversationally. “And while we’re on the subject of things you should have done, regular exercise to keep your cardio up is on the list.”
He leaned against a tree and watched the boys react. Every line of their bodies screamed at him that they were on the edge of panic. The only thing keeping them from running, in Mason’s estimation, was an equally powerful fear of the other seeing the weakness. It was why one bad seed in a group of friends could incite the worst sort of behavior. The genesis of peer pressure was found in the bedrock need for approval.
“We need weapons,” Mike hissed. “They’re getting close!” His eyes darted to Mason’s knife.
Mason shook a finger. “No, sir. You can try to take it, but I promise you’ll be jerking off with the other hand for a few months if you do.”
The moment Mason knew was coming happened then, when Mike and Randy realized he wasn’t going to jump in and take command. The balancing act failed, a the razor’s edge no longer straddled, and both of them tensed to bolt away.
“If you run, don’t bother stopping at the hangar,” Mason said. “Go on to Haven and stay there. I’ll let Will Price know you’re not to be trusted in a fight, but I’m sure there’s enough farm work to be done that they can spare you.”
The first zombie burst into view a dozen steps away. It was especially grisly, missing half its face in a jagged white crater from forehead to upper lip. Its remaining eye locked on the group as it rushed toward them.
Randy dropped low and snatched a branch from the debris-strewn ground, coming up in an awkward arc to smash the wood across the zombie’s face. The branch was brittle, however, shattering into splinters on impact and leaving Randy holding a foot-long shard. He thought quickly and jammed the thing into the zombie’s good eye a split second later.
Meanwhile, Mike had delved for his inner caveman and grabbed a rock about twice the size of his fist. When the second zombie—the only other one Mason could see or hear—appeared around the bole of another tree, the kid didn’t throw himself into the fray. Instead he waited, letting the enemy come to him. The second zombie was in no better shape than the first, missing its right hand below the wrist, and dragging a badly broken foot in what would have been a parody of the classic Romero zombie in other circumstances.
The lame dead woman didn’t pose much of a challenge, but both boys were shaking and breathing hard when the dust settled.
“That’s what we’re doing out here,” Mason said. “It’s partly on me and Hal and Judith for not giving you the attention you obviously needed. We protected you too much. Hid you behind us. Hell, hid you away where no zombies were likely to show up. You got soft. Distracted. That ends today.”
“You were gonna let those things kill us,” Mike gasped. “You just stood there.”
“I just stood here,” Mason agreed. “And look! You’re still alive. Unharmed, too, I’d like to point out.” He pointed to the now fully dead bodies on the ground between them. “Right here, right now, you get to pick whether you’re men or boys. Either you dedicate yourself to being men and fighting your own battles, or you get the hell out of our lives. Because once Kell is ready, we’ll be riding into danger you can’t even imagine. I won’t have you distracted and acting like children.”
Randy wiped sweat from his forehead. “We’ll be ready. Or I will, anyway.”
“Good,” Mason said. “Speaking for someone else is stupid unless you trust them with your life. If you do, you better be right. While I’m thinking about it, try to remember that speaking at all is a bad idea if there are zombies around and you’re doing it loudly. You guys have to get your shit together. I’ve seen five year old kids learn that one.”
He gave them a few seconds to gather themselves. “One other thing, and this is a deal breaker. You agree, or you’re out on your ass.”
Once their attention was firmly on him, Mason let his body tighten and hardened his voice. “As of this moment, you treat Jo like your sister. Normally I’d let her teach you a lesson, but there’s a practical reason why not; we need bodies. When we set out, I’d like to do it with you. But if Jo has to crack your heads, I don’t know I’ll be able to trust that you won’t hold a grudge and do something suicidally stupid later.”
“You can’t expect—” Randy said angrily.
Mason cut him off. “I absolutely can fucking expect you to obey. Jo made herself clear to both of you how things are. I shouldn’t need to have this conversation with either of you. You act like men and respect it, or we’re done. Period. If the fact that we’re on the verge of curing this plague doesn’t make you understand how very fucking little your crush means, how pointless this sad contest between the two of you is, then nothing will. I’m not offering an array of options here, kids. This is a yes/no proposition, and once we leave these woods you either agree or you don’t. What’s it going to be?”
Mike stared holes into Mason, who hadn’t flinched under enemy fire and felt no urge to do so beneath the gaze of a hormonal teenager. Randy seemed more thoughtful, which was a good sign. Letting themselves slack off by way of distraction wasn’t a mortal sin, but it also wasn’t a weakness Mason could allow on the team.
“You could have just talked to us,” Mike finally said. “You’ve been running us ragged since you got back. Instead of punishing us, you could have sat down and had a conversation.”
“That’s what this is,” Mason said, a note of sadness in his voice. “I can see you still don’t get it. I needed to know whether you could look past your own fear and shame and take in the bigger picture. I had to know if you could grasp the needs of the group and what we want to achieve and put those needs over your own wants. I don’t think you can.”
“You know what?” Mike said. “Fuck you, Mason. You were gone half the time back in Iowa, and you don’t get to judge me. You sure as hell don’t get to put me through these psychotic tests just because I might have lost focus a little. In case you haven’t noticed, I actually am a kid. And you’re an adult. If you can’t see how fucked up this is, then you need serious help.”
Mason nodded as if every word was expected. He pushed himself away from the tree and stretched his back. “You’re right, Mike. It is fucked up. You are a kid. Thing is, the world is fucked up right now. If you want to act like it isn’t and pretend everything’s the way it used to be, go to Haven. It’s big enough you might be able to manage it. Civ
ilization is rebuilding itself, even if it has to claw for every damn inch.”
Mason took in their faces, wondering if it would be for the last time. “If you can’t understand that what we’re trying to do is bigger than us, that it’ll help make that struggle to build something new easier and keep people safe, then I don’t need you.”
And he walked away.
Emily
“You’re sure we just need to shoot them with these things?” Jo asked nervously.
Emily patted the tranquilizer gun at her side. “You’ve seen it work in the lab. This won’t be any different.”
“Except the whole reason we’re out here is to test whether it works on all kinds of zombies, not just the subjects Kell has been working on. So, technically we might be fucked, right?”
Lee, who was driving, glanced at them in the rear view mirror. “Y’all keep talking like I’m not even here. That’s fine.”
“You’re strictly a wheelman,” Emily reminded him. “Shoot from the window at most, and only if we need it.”
Lee snorted. “If you think I won’t jump out to help you, you’re crazy.”
Emily leaned forward and poked him in the side, which drew a sharp, pained breath. “You’re still recovering. Stay in the damn car so I don’t have to drag your wounded ass to safety. If we get into trouble, we’ll handle it.”
Lee grumbled something inaudible but didn’t argue any further. Emily turned back to Jo and pulled a small canister from one of the pockets lining the inside of her armored coat. “Kell told me to use this if we get perfect results on all six of the darts he gave us.”
Jo took the small cylinder and examined it. “It’s a gas grenade, right?”
“Very good,” Emily said. “He doesn’t want to risk trying it out if we get any abnormal reactions from the darts, but I for one am pretty curious to see if it’ll work.”
Jo nodded vigorously. “God, me too. I’ve tried to understand everything we’ve been working on in the lab, but all I can be sure about is that this,” she said, putting a hand on the tranquilizer gun, “will probably work, but it’ll be slow. It’ll also make it hard to transmit the cure. Man, if this can be airborne, it’ll change everything.”
