by Joshua Guess
“No,” Emily said. “Mason thinks they’ll have sent people here before that. Probably around the time we were attacked if not before.”
Will rubbed at tired eyes. “There’s no way we can start looking at that many people without making it obvious we’re searching for someone. That’s if we could even find them. This place isn’t lacking for places to hide. We register every visitor and new citizen when they come in, but once they’re inside, they’re pretty much free to do what they want.”
She tapped her fingers against her closed mouth. “Well, shit. That pretty much means our only options are waiting for that shoe to drop or forcing it to.”
Will laced his fingers together and rested his chin on them. “I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t intentionally start a war inside my town.”
“I’d rather not,” Emily said flatly. “But do you see much choice? They’re here. The evidence points that way. If there’s going to be a fight either way, wouldn’t you prefer it be on our terms?”
“Stop using logic on me,” Will said. “It’s completely—”
A distant roar filled the air and rattled the window of the small office.
Emily shot to her feet. “Was that a bomb?”
Distant screams drifted through the cracked door. Emily rushed outside and automatically looked north toward the hangar. Much like a mother will always fear for her child when she hears an ambulance moving through the neighborhood on her way home, Emily’s first instinct was to worry for her people. The heart is magnetic in that way.
Thick black smoke marred the already darkening sky, a smudge against a dusky background. First glance sent a powerful surge of terror through her, but the distance wasn’t right. The smoke was too close to be from the hangar.
“It’s the front gate,” Will said. “Someone bombed the fucking gate.”
Bells rang in every direction, each a distinctly different type and sound. This was by design, a means of differentiating location as the coded patterns in the rings themselves told the citizenry where to go and what to expect when they got there.
“This has to be them,” Emily said.
“You think?” Will said acidly. He raised his hands. “I’m sorry.”
Emily waved off the apology. “I get it. I have to go. They have to be after Kell.”
He said something, but she didn’t hear it. Emily was already running at a dead sprint. The hilly terrain was a help, here, as it was all down between her and the gate. She reached the main road running through the nucleus of the original kernel Haven was built upon in seconds, and from there it was a straight shot to the main gate. The hill was steep, so much that she had to lean back while she pelted down to keep from tumbling forward.
“Oh,” she breathed when she caught sight of the north gate.
Where the guard house should have been was a smoking crater. The thick stone wall was missing fully half its thickness, and the massive hinges holding the reinforced gate in place were gone. The gate itself was tilted crazily, heavy timbers shattered where they had once met the wall.
The smoke was almost too thick to see through. Emily pulled the kerchief around her neck up over the lower half of her face and drew it as tight as she could tolerate. It wouldn’t do much, but hopefully it would keep her from inhaling too much particulate.
She ran for the gap, which was itself a cluster of burning debris. Jumping over it at a full run was an actual leap of faith, because there was no way to tell what she’d face on the other side through the smoke. If the enemy had managed to drive a herd of zombies in to create a buffer, she’d be landing among them.
Emily stumbled to a stop and shook away smoke-induced tears. Blinking, she scanned the area. There were a few zombies—toward nighttime they occasionally filtered past the patrols—but no sweeping crowd. Small favors.
Taking a deep breath and silently thanking the winds for blowing the smoke away from her, she took off once more. Emily was on autopilot as she homed in on the hangar, dodging the undead as if they were stones. A few hundred feet from home, a New Breed nearly caught her off guard, its claws catching the fluttering end of her kerchief and yanking her head sideways.
She pushed herself into the motion and took a graceless roll across the uneven ground. She let momentum carry her to her feet and whipped her belt knife free as she stood. The zombie rushed her, arms raised defensively to ward off the attack it knew was coming.
Instead, she dropped and knelt at the last second. The overextended zombie didn’t expect that; neither did it plan for her arm to piston upward and skewer it though the bottom of the jaw. Emily put her other hand to the hilt of the knife, pushing on the end as the zombie stiffened, and forced herself to stand.
The zombies made a thin sort of choking sound, impressive considering it didn’t use lungs for anything, and went limp.
She didn’t feel anything as she pulled the blade free. No anger, no worry it was playing possum. Just an intolerable need to move. To know.
The hangar loomed into view and at first glance seemed untouched. At least there was no smoke, no obvious sign from a distance that anything was wrong. For a few seconds, Emily felt a swell of hope this was all some improbable coincidence.
Then she moved closer and saw the bay door to the lab, raised a few feet from the ground and dented inward at least a foot. Dark stains stood out violently against the pale metal. She could make out at least one body there.
Heart hammering against her sternum like a mental patient trying to escape a padded room, she burst into another sprint. But the body resolved into an unfamiliar form all in black, a white man of early middle years she’d never seen before. His neck was a frayed mess of red with vacant eyes staring up at the sky and seeing nothing.
“Kell bit the fucker’s throat,” said a weak voice, startling Emily.
Allen was sitting inside the lab, his back against one of the tables. She ducked beneath the door and slid to her knees next to him. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Not okay,” he said, his voice tight. “They hit me with their van. I crawled in here. Hurt too bad to help. They grabbed Kell when we opened the door to step outside. Must have been watching us. Waiting.”
“Where are the others?”
Allen shook his head. “Took the RV out to stock it up at the supply depot.” He laughed bitterly. “Mason said just in case we had to make a run for it. I said I’d stay here with Kell. I found a guy selling cigars today. Wanted to have a smoke. Stupid. My fault.”
“It’s not,” Emily said. “Just human. There was no way to know they’d strike this soon. Let me get the medical kit. I should check you over.”
“Not dying,” Allen said. “At least, I don’t think I am. Not important.” He paused to hiss out a long breath, carefully taking control of himself. “It was a black van. No idea where it came from. They must have hidden it somewhere in the airport. They went west. You have to get him back.”
He reached out and gripped Emily’s arm, almost painfully. “They didn’t just take Kell. They took everything. All the samples. They knew what to look for.”
“Fuck,” Emily said. “Of course they did. They’d have been given instructions to clean out anything in a cooler. Give me a second.”
She ducked outside and trotted to their collection of vehicles. The van they’d used to capture zombies was there. An utterly flat front driver’s tire, slashed. One of the rotating cast of trucks borrowed from Haven’s motor pool sat next to it in identically bad shape.
Emily went back inside and began taking Allen’s vitals.
“What the hell? Aren’t you going after him?”
“Would if I could,” she said through gritted teeth. “Our vehicles are down. They set off a bomb at the north gate, so Haven is chaos right now. I could probably run there and get a vehicle if I tried, but then I’d be going after Kell on my own. I need Mason and the others. They won’t stay gone after that explosion. If they’re not here in the next two minutes, I’ll be shocke
d. Until they get here, let me make sure you’re not going to die, okay? That much I can do.”
“Yeah, okay,” Allen said.
She worked the problem as she examined Allen. The exam was easy, done without thought. Her brainpower was reserved for everything else piled atop her at the moment, and all the synapses were in overdrive.
There were only certain number of exits available to an enemy inside the patrol area the locals covered. She knew them well, having been a patrol scout here before moving away to Iowa. The map in her head went dark everywhere they couldn’t possibly go, every place they might be seen or intercepted. Will’s people didn’t get by with being bad at their jobs; any vehicle hauling ass out of Haven without explanation would be chased. Period.
Given the location Mason had discovered, the possible rendezvous points narrowed further. Geographically speaking, there weren’t many options. A handful of roads that would allow them to skirt patrols and get far enough north to have a shot at getting away from Union forces while also meeting with the main force waiting for them.
Not that it would be easy, but Emily felt a little better narrowing down the possibilities.
When the RV pulled up, she wasted no time explaining. She pointed to Judith as the woman nearly fell out of the passenger door. “You take care of Allen. He’s hurt, broken bones I think, but not in immediate danger. Greg, you’re staying here too. Get to Haven as fast as you can and let anyone you can find know we’re heading west, then north toward the bypass. The scouts will know what I mean. We’ll need reinforcements. As fast as they can go, as many as they can spare.”
She dashed to the weapons locker inside the hangar and grabbed her rifle, a spare magazine, and a box of ammunition. As she walked by Greg, she spoke without slowing.
“Also spread the word that I want Mike and Randy here when we get back. I don’t care how long they have to wait here. Just make it happen.”
“O-okay,” Greg said, seeming overwhelmed by this onslaught.
“Let’s go,” Emily said, climbing into the seat vacated by Judith. “Hal, you keep this thing on the ground but you go as fast as you can. It’s the only vehicle we have right now.”
“How bad is it?” Hal asked as he put the RV in gear, his biker-Santa face lined with concern.
“They have Kell and all the samples of the cure,” Emily said. “It’s not a worst-case scenario, because Kell’s alive, but it’s pretty bad.”
She badly wanted to be on the roof, watching through the scope of her rifle, but Hal needed directions. A part of her long buried almost looked forward to what was about to happen. Because yes, it was bad; bad for them. Nothing would stop her from getting Kell back and retrieving the cure. And should they harm him, no force on earth would prevent her from killing every one of them with a smile on her face.
Part Three
Kell
“My friends are going to find us,” Kell said conversationally. “You better hope it’s the guy with the scars, because if my girlfriend gets here first it won’t be pretty.”
“Please shut up,” one of the soldiers, a woman, said. She wasn’t dressed as such at the moment, wearing regular clothes, but Kell knew what she was. “I don’t want to have to hurt you, but after what you did to Donald, I won’t feel bad about it.”
“Donald? You mean the old blond guy with the bad tan I killed? He was trying to kidnap me, so you can’t really blame me.” Kell grinned at the woman, taking extra care to show off his bloody mouth in the dim light of the van.
She tensed and muttered something in Hebrew.
“Do you have a death wish?” another of his three remaining captors asked, a white guy in his thirties. “You know you’re asking for it, right?”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Kell said. It earned him a hard kick to the ribs, and he laughed. That seemed to incense the man further, because he leaned in and punched Kell surprisingly hard in the head.
“H-hit a little close to home, there?” Kell stammered. “Guess we know how popular you are with the ladies.”
The guard drew back to pummel Kell some more, but the woman caught his wrist. “He wants you to do it. Stop.”
Kell tried to decide if that was true. He decided reality fell somewhere in the middle. There wasn’t a masochistic bone in his body, but death would be preferable to being taken wherever they were going and getting thrown in a cell. A weird sort of mania filled him, a freedom he hadn’t felt in a long time. This was it. This was rock bottom, the worst case scenario come true. He no longer had to worry it would happen, because here it was.
After being awarded his doctorates, Kell had been invited to a party held by the other postgraduate students. The drinking binge that night stood out in his memory as one of the best and worst experiences of his life, and the feeling coursing through his brain echoed it. He balanced on the edge between good and bad judgment, feeling like he could do anything and survive but not worrying much whether he did.
Rational Kell still muttered in his little white room at the back of his mind, but they were words of encouragement. Anything he could do to slow his captors down would help. Delay was his friend.
His head rang from the sharp blows, and Kell reckoned timing was important, too. Getting the stuffing beat out of him didn’t slow the van down at all. He decided to hold his tongue and wait, letting the pain fade so he’d be clear when the moment came.
Studying the space around him helped. There was no way to open the cargo door, especially not in a split-second rush of movement. That would be all the time he’d have. The handles were recessed into the door itself, not comically overlarge levers he could pop with a kick.
His hands were tied behind him, which sucked in several ways since he was laying on his back staring up. They hadn’t done his legs, but both guards sat on narrow benches on either side of his torso. They clearly weren’t worried he would be able to stretch his leg up that far or do any damage if he did.
The van was moving at a steady pace, but not fast. They were on a reasonably straight stretch of road without the sorts of extreme degradation that prevented driving at speed many highways had. They certainly weren’t moving faster than forty miles an hour, possibly much less. It was hard to gauge without some kind of external marker. All he had was the sound of the road beneath him and the occasional bump.
“How much longer?” the female guard asked the driver, who glanced back at them.
“I don’t know, we hiked most of the way last time,” the driver said. “I don’t know this road, so I’m having to watch out for bad spots. It’s slower than I’d like.”
A low burn crept up his arms and legs from the constant tension needed to keep him from sliding across the floor. He flexed and stretched as best he could.
His right leg bumped into something that moved. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, he looked down to see what it was. Seemed to be an empty container of some kind. He tried to hook it with his boot and failed, but it gave him an idea.
Slowly, methodically, Kell overlapped one boot with the other. His right lay flat on its side, the hard sole held firm by the pressure from his left. He worked his foot out a millimeter at a time until he felt the saddle resting loosely on the top of it.
For a second he felt the insane urge to spout some witty one-liner to get the attention of his guards, to let them know he was not done with them yet. But that would also take the driver’s attention from the road, and he didn’t want that. The man was so focused on not wrecking on the unfamiliar road that he wasn’t paying attention to anything else. Kell could read in in how he hunched toward the wheel. Even a quick look confirmed it; the driver’s knuckles stood out white in the dim light as he death-gripped the wheel.
Kell slowly rolled his shoulders and grunted in real—if deceptive—discomfort. He used this movement as cover for the windup, then said a silent prayer to a whatever gods might be listening before whipping his boot up and forward.
He must have nailed the driver in
the face, because everything went all sideways and painful.
Biology and genetics were first loves, but physics had always been a passion for him. All science at its most basic level is physics when dealing with the real world. The first lesson you learned in those classes was that physics is unavoidable.
Kell didn’t do the math before taking the shot. Oh, some part of him couldn’t help roughing out the speed and combined mass in motion, the edges of his conscious mind brushing against the figures for changes in angular momentum. He didn’t try to work it out. If he had, Kell might have lost his nerve.
The van jerked hard to one side and then the other, a classic fishtail and over correction, then all that forward motion was turned into lateral motion relative to the front of the vehicle, which resulted in enough energy to overcome the center of gravity.
Twice.
They rolled awkwardly, and Kell knew what it was to be in a rock tumbler. He had no way to protect himself as the van flipped, though since he was already on the floor the experience was something like the world’s worst centrifuge. He rattled around and slammed into every conceivable thing including both guards, but was better placed to survive than the others.
He struggled to keep his thoughts focused during the ordeal, knowing he’d only have seconds to take advantage. When the van finally slid to a stop, he forced his aching, battered body to move. Pulling himself onto his knees, he flexed his wrists to see if his bonds had any give. No luck.
The driver wasn’t moving. The guards groaned and stirred, spurring Kell to action.
Pushing to his feet was hard, especially given the unnervingly sharp pains in his legs. Staying bent over while moving even the few feet he needed to close the distance was worse, though the van being on its side helped. He stepped up to the man who’d hit him and put his bootless foot across his neck.
Hands immediately snapped forward, grasping Kell’s ankle, but it was too late. Physics couldn’t be reasoned with. All he had to do was shift his weight and straighten, pushing his broad shoulders against the side—now top—of the van. His mass and leverage did the rest, crushing the guard’s windpipe and popping his neck with a sound like a monstrous turkey leg being pulled free.
