The Fall (Book 5): Exodus in Black

by Joshua Guess

  Emily regarded him flatly. “I imagine the place was crowded?”

  “Yeah,” Randy said. “Mike said we’d been living here,” he gestured at the Hangar, “but that we decided to move out on our own. When the bartender asked why you all lived outside Haven, he said it was because you were working on something big that had just been finished.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mike said. “I don’t remember any of this.”

  But Emily heard it in his voice. The first glimmers of doubt as Randy’s story struck on some memory obscured by booze.

  “Kell is hurt” Emily said simply. “His leg is hanging on by threads. He’s in surgery now.”

  She watched their reactions. There was guilt in their eyes, which she thought said more about Randy than it did Mike. Randy had only allowed his friend to speak, but the guilt of not stopping him from doing so was at least as obvious as Mike’s.

  “He’s going to live,” she continued. “That much looks as certain as it can. But you should know that Haven lost eleven men and women tonight.”

  Randy’s mouth twisted into a horrified grimace. Mike only stared dumbly at her. She saw tears in the eyes of the first, but nothing in the second.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Emily asked Mike. “Are you in shock, or do you just not give a shit?”

  Mike blanched. “I mean, I talked to a woman. I’m sorry for Kell and those people, but I didn’t kill them. I didn’t hurt him.”

  Emily bit the inside of her mouth to stop herself from killing him right there. “That bartender or someone in the room was a Rebound agent. Or they spread the rumor to a Rebound agent. Because you opened your mouth about something you knew was being kept tightly secret, it cost eleven good people their lives. That’s on you. That is your goddamn fault.”

  Mike began to protest as Randy hung his head and buried his fingers in his hair again. Emily backed away, afraid she was going to lost control.

  “Did you get all that?” she asked loudly. Mike looked at her in confusion.

  “I got it,” Will Price answered as he stepped through the cracked door leading outside. “We all got it.” Behind him, half a dozen militia stood with grim expressions. “We’ll have the trial tomorrow, if you want to come.”

  “Do I have to?” Emily asked.

  Will shook his head. “No. I can speak for you. I heard their confession.”

  “Confession?” Mike asked stupidly.

  Emily walked away, sick to her stomach. Whatever punishment came down on them, it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing could make up for the consequences of those few words.

  Later.

  She sat next to Kell’s bed, feet crossed and extended as she reclined in the world’s least comfortable folding chair. He slept, not with the beatific and careless smile of someone lost in the pleasant void of unconsciousness, but looking haggard and worn out. Lined. Even in sleep he frowned slightly, as if his resting mind could not let go of something it knew to be wrong.

  There was no question what that was; Kell’s left leg ended six inches below his knee.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Mason said quietly. “With a decent prosthetic and some practice, he’ll eventually have full mobility.”

  Emily, staring at the ceiling, gave him a disbelieving chuckle. “You say that like those things just grow on trees.”

  “He’ll get one,” Mason said, his voice intense. “There are tens of thousands of people spread across the Union and its allies. The UAS has those bunkers down south. Someone out there knows how to make them. If I have to go out and find them myself, I will.”

  He said it in that uniquely Mason way. That total certainty so thorough it was hard to doubt him. When the man focused on a thing, he made the thing happen. “Thank you,” she said.

  Mason nodded. “He’s my friend, too, Em. I’m old and grizzled enough to know better than to take responsibility for things I have no control over, but I can’t help feeling like this is my fault. At least some of it.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “You did more than anyone to try to straighten those boys out. You tried to make them understand how important watching out for each other was. This isn’t on you. Or me. None of us. They made their choice, and they’ll be punished for it.”

  Mason looked at the void where Kell’s calf had been. “Is it wrong that I feel worse for what happened to him than for the people we lost?”

  The words were soft, plaintive. The earnestness of them went through Emily like an arrow. A flash of understanding hit her.

  Mason had surely dealt with psychiatrists and evaluations aplenty during his military service and after. He knew the intellectual answer to the question. But all the years of moral relativism, making hard calls and doing objectively terrible things for what he considered to be good reasons, it had knocked the edges off his judgment. It didn’t quite fit.

  Any man who sees horrors often enough will become numb to them. A man who commits them can only keep his moral compass steady for so long before he starts to question its direction.

  “It’s not wrong,” Emily assured him. “You know it. You just need to hear someone else say it.”

  Mason, still looking at the missing piece, inclined his head.

  “So listen to me and remember this,” she said. “Those people were soldiers. They died doing their job. Even if they didn’t know they were saving the cure, they went out and did the work. Because it was their duty. Just like you or me. They made the choice.”

  She sighed. “That’s what the shrinks would have told you. It’s true enough. But really, on a much more fundamental level, it’s okay because you didn’t know them. You weren’t invested the way you are with Kell. They were strangers, and you don’t feel their loss because there wasn’t any history between you. You can mourn their loss for what they did, what they represent, but it’s not on you to grieve them the way their families will. There’s no shame in it. It’s just how things are.”

  Mason stood and stretched. “If it’s okay, I’m going to head back and try to sleep. I’m coming down off those drugs pretty hard.”

  Emily smiled. “Eat something before you crash. I’ll be here all night.”

  Mason winked trotted off, leaving Emily alone with Kell for the first time all day.

  “He needs some time off,” she said to herself. “Time to recover and be a person again.”

  “No kidding,” Kell said.

  Emily jumped. He snickered.

  “You two are louder than you think,” he murmured. “Also, my leg itches like a son of a bitch. The one that isn’t there, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry, babe, but I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “I do,” he said. “I don’t think we have a mirror box laying around, though.” When her brows lowered in bewilderment, he smiled. “I’ll explain in the morning. I’m too tired right now. Want to crawl up here with me?”

  “Aren’t you worried I’ll hurt you?”

  “Eh. Just stay on my right and don’t kick me in the stump, and we’ll be kosher.” He scooted over.

  Emily nearly purred at how comfortable it was. “Thanks. I think that chair was supposed to be used in a Turkish prison.” She nestled her head against his chest, and he tightened his arm around her. “How are you doing? You joke, but I can’t imagine.”

  She felt him shrug beneath her. “It’s weird, you know? We talk about losing a piece of ourselves in the abstract, like when someone dies. But I lost an actual piece and maybe it just hasn’t really set in yet, but it feels okay. Not ideal. But I’m not mourning it. I know a lot of people do. Just feels like it could have been so much worse. I’m free, when I could have been taken. I have you when I could be alone.”

  It made sense to her in a very Kell sort of way. He was sentimental for people, but not for things. His mind was more inclined to be interested in discovering first hand what living without a limb was like. Oh, he’d swear and bitch when he forgot there wasn’t a foot there and fell on his face,
but Emily was willing to bet that any sadness or mourning he might do would be brief. He had a world to save, after all.

  She opened her mouth to tell him as much, but he was already fast asleep.

  Kell

  In addition to losing his lower leg, he had suffered a startling number of injuries in the crash. The worst of them were multiple cracked bones all over his body but especially his legs. Crushed muscle, badly beaten ligaments and tendons, and some minor head trauma as icing on that particularly shitty cake.

  It took three weeks for him to leave the clinic. In the wake of his kidnapping, Kell didn’t get much in the way of personal choice. Mason and Emily, who visited him every day to share meals and keep him current on the goings on, had no problem with Will Price taking command of Kell’s life. For the most part he let them do it. It wasn’t hard to understand being overcautious given what had happened to Haven and him.

  When he did finally get to leave, he asked to be taken to the north gate.

  “My god,” he whispered when Mason halted the wheelchair at the top of the hill overlooking it.

  “While we were out looking for you, a swarm hit the gate,” Mason said. “Must have been some New Breed keeping watch from a distance.”

  While the gate itself had been replaced thanks to remarkable—almost paranoid—foresight of keeping the pieces of a spare handy, the damage to the inside of Haven surrounding it was still painfully evident. The ground in every direction was scorched and blackened from incendiary weapons used against the swarm. Hundreds of small holes pocked the slagged asphalt and nearby buildings.

  “How many?” Kell asked. “How many people died?”

  It was Emily, standing in front of him to one side, who answered. “Seven. Not as many as you might have expected considering how bad this was. They’ve had years to work out their responses. They’re really good at it.”

  Kell recalled the time he’d lived here before leaving for Iowa. Memories of fighting on the wall and working fluidly with teams of people flooded his mind. His stump itched as if to remind him those days were probably over.

  When the small inset gate opened to let the out, Kell twisted around in his seat to look at Mason. “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” Mason said with a smile.

  “There’s no way Will is going to let me live in the hangar again. After what happened, I can’t even blame him.”

  Emily fell back a little to put a hand on his shoulder. “Sweetie, how about you shut up for a minute and take a look?”

  From where they were on the road, it should have been impossible to see any part of the hangar thanks to the weird, rolling hillscape. But Kell could see things. Several trucks were parked on the edge of the raised, flat section of ground the hangar sat on. A crane towered over them, though whatever it was raising or lowering was below the line of sight.

  “What is this?” Kell asked as they moved up the drive.

  What it was? Damn near a fortress. The hangar was still there, but now it was only the central element in a larger complex. Several outbuildings were being constructed in a neat array around it, forming the corners of a square several hundred feet on a side. Between the north and south buildings, a stretch of wall was going up.

  Emily gestured at the workers. “That wall will be steel on the inner and outer sides and filled with concrete and reinforced from the inside. We’ll have our own guards around the clock. They’re beefing up the power systems, gutting the inside, and turning this into a home. One where we’ll be safe.”

  “Until someone drives a tank into it, anyway,” Mason quipped.

  “Thought of that,” Emily said. “We’re going to have a trench. A big, deep trench. And traps.”

  Kell tried to calculate the work hours involved, the resources needed. Compared to the sprawl that was Haven itself, this was tiny, but it was also a single building. A dwelling for a handful of people. The same effort would, in Haven, serve dozens if not more.

  “Why go to all this trouble?” Kell asked. “We could just move the lab inside the walls.”

  “We floated the idea to Will,” Mason said. “He wouldn’t hear it. You’re going to have to train people how to make the cure. You said you have more tests you want to do, and he wants you to have the space to do them and expand if you need to. That’s why the wall is so large; if you use up all the extra space inside the hangar, he’s ready to add on to the building. Space inside Haven is hard to come by these days.”

  Kell sat there gaping stupidly. It was so much. Too much.

  Emily crouched in front of him, careful not to bump his leg, and put her crossed arms on his knees. She met his eyes. “I think Will would have been thrown out of office if he tried to do anything less than give you your own place to live and work. Everyone here is a volunteer. While you were stuck in bed, the leadership had to decide what to tell everyone about the attack. They voted to be honest. About everything.”

  Since the first day of The Fall—actually before it, when he’d seen the catastrophe looming—Kell had harbored one fear above all others. The idea of people knowing who he was and what his role in the end of the world had been was an oppressive weight he’d learned to live with. Part of the joy he found in the Iowa compound was not having to hide it.

  “They know,” Kell said.

  “They know,” Emily confirmed, smiling. “Will and the other council members held a bunch of town hall meetings and told them your story. How you’d been one of the people to discover chimera and tried to use it to help people. How your work was stolen and used to create the plague. And how you’ve been trying for so long to create the cure.”

  That struck a spark in his chest. “What about John?”

  Mason chuckled. “I told you he’d ask. You owe me a beer. We made sure Will knew to include him and let everyone know that his dedication to the cause is why we have a workable cure today.”

  Emily nodded along. “You could put your name in the hat and win Will’s job without breaking a sweat. I wouldn’t say you have universal popularity, but I’ve heard dozens of folks around here call you a hero. I think they consider this,” she said, jerking her head at the construction, “the least they can do for the man who created the cure.”

  Until the hangar was finished, they would live in the house next to the clinic. It was kept empty of permanent occupants, instead sheltering patients who needed frequent checkups and physical therapy. Kell required both, and he was politely shouted down when he tried to argue that it was too generous. He’d have been happy to sleep in the back of a van, so long as it was safe.

  The first night out of the clinic was hard. Staying there meant he was a patient. He had doctors and nurses to answer to. His brain recognized it as a fundamentally alien way to live. Like prisoners coming home after a month in lockup, coming home meant taking a hard look at himself in daily life. Coming back to reality always had a certain momentum to it.

  He sat on the edge of the bathtub wearing only a pair of cotton shorts. Long habit had ingrained the need to always wear enough clothes to fight in but for the time it took to bathe. Or have sex. He’d been shirtless and clad in shorts for hours because there were no imaginable circumstances where he’d need to fight.

  The scars added up. The one on his face seemed inconsequential, now. The stab wounds and bullet holes told a story about him, but it wasn’t the only story. The expertly dressed stub of his leg told another. It was the truncated end of a sentence, words broken off abruptly to signal an end.

  Also? A beginning. He had been warned about the sense of loss he would feel, and sure enough it was nestled against the inside of his ribs, a small glowing coal of grief that flared up whenever he looked down.

  The injury was such that it might spell the end of his fighting days, and for the first time since The Fall began, Kell was starting to think he’d be okay with it. So much stock was placed on how well a person could protect, but even now that was starting to change.

  Haven was proof. The Union an
d the other allied communities had begun to move past the hunter/gatherer mentality necessary to survive the collapse of civilization. A new one was rising in its place, and in it there were people whose value was measured in what they contributed to that society, not on how many zombies they could kill.

  Mason promised he’d find someone to make Kell as close to whole as possible, and he felt almost guilty about how much he wanted that. Not to reclaim some ridiculous notion of manliness, but so he would at least be able to defend himself or someone he loved if it came to that.

  A gentle knock sounded on the bathroom door. Thinking it was Emily, he said, “Come in.”

  Lee’s face appeared in the crack of the door. “Hey, man.”

  Embarrassment flooded through him, freezing him in place. “Hi. I thought you were Emily.”

  Lee glanced at Kell’s stump openly, his face free of judgment or emotion. “I just realized I never got around to saying I was sorry for not being there with you. When you were taken, or the fight after.”

  Kell forgot his discomfort for a second as he stared up at Lee in puzzlement. “You were still recovering. You were, what, staying overnight at the clinic when it happened? No one blames you, Lee. You were hurt.”

  Lee’s eyes twinkled. “Exactly. You were hurt.”

  Kell’s mouth worked for a few seconds, trying to form words. Hearing Lee repeat his own back to him had, for whatever reason, robbed him of speech. They were a steel ball dropped into a clock, rattling off gears and making them spin in ways he couldn’t yet understand.

  “When I got here and Emily said you’d been sitting in here for a while, I knew what was going on,” Lee said, his tone as close to gentle as his Texas drawl allowed. “Had friends in the Marines lose limbs. I saw what it did to them, how they acted afterward. It can be pretty subtle, man. That look on your face when you saw it was me at the door? That was shame.”

  Again, he glanced pointedly at Kell’s stump. “That right there? Nothing to be ashamed of. Neither is what comes next. All the PT and figuring out what your new limits are, that’s just part of being hurt. I’ve seen too many good people fall down a hole because they can’t get through what happened to them. Too many boys who stay in the bath too long looking at what they lost and trying to make sense of it.”