The Fall (Book 5): Exodus in Black

by Joshua Guess

  He straightened and moved to leave. “If it starts to get to you, come talk to me. That’s mostly what I wanted to say.”

  Lee left the room before Kell could form a reply or even offer his thanks.

  The truth about trauma, no matter what anyone tells you, is that no amount of suffering through it makes it easier to cope with the next time. The idea of growing numb is false; that’s just the cumulative damage changing the shape of who you are.

  What does make coping easier? Knowing what to expect. Having people with you for support. That was a lesson Kell had finally, blessedly learned. As he washed, carefully avoiding getting the dressings wet, he tried to imagine what it would have been like to suffer this injury before he’d found Emily, or even his friends.

  “I’d have laid down and died,” he muttered to himself. It was probably true.

  Later, when he and Emily lay together in bed—an actual bed, a luxury he could get used to—his mind wandered on tangents as he considered all the ways he would try to compensate for the missing leg. He rather thought the Kell he’d been a few years ago would have dwelt on the worse aspects.

  He had adapted. Changed. It was, at its root, just another facet of survival. Use what works, learn from experience, discard everything else. Work the problem. If necessary, ask for help. Listen to advice.

  Kell knew it would be a long road ahead, that he would stumble and fall, but when he finally drifted off to sleep that night, it was with a smile on his face.

  He dreamed of brighter futures.

  Will

  “I’m not even thirty,” Will said as he settled in behind his desk, loaded with stacks of reports. He gestured toward his guest to take the glass of vodka he’d poured. “Look at all this gray in my hair. This job is going to kill me.”

  Mason, never one to sip, slugged back the two fingers of Russian booze in a single gulp. “You’re pretty good at it, though. This place is way more than Josh or Jess could have imagined back in the day.”

  Will smiled wistfully. “I miss them. Any idea where they ran off to after the attack?”

  Mason shook his head. “No, and I honestly don’t want to know. I’d be tempted to go find them. They want to live out there where no one will bother them; I can respect that.”

  Sipping his own vodka, Will sighed. “You realize telling everyone about the cure is going to change things. Rebound is going to be all over us unless we take steps to prevent it.”

  Mason shrugged. “If we hadn’t been attacked, we’d have been leaving the compound about now to infiltrate their territory.”

  “Insurrection?” Will asked, professionally curious.

  Mason grinned. “It’s what I’m good at. Spend a few months sniffing out key people in their outlying territories who might be sympathetic, and building from there. Even if it didn’t do any real damage, they’d have to waste time and resources putting out fires in their own back yard.”

  “It might have worked,” Will said. “Too bad they knew your faces. And followed you home, apparently.”

  “Yeah, it had to have taken a lot of effort, because I never saw anything suspicious,” Mason said, slightly grumpy. “I’m not what you’d call careless about being followed.”

  Will barked a laugh. “Oh, I know. I remember.” He shook his head. “It’s so bizarre seeing you here, with your scars. I watched you go into the desert to die.”

  “I was dying,” Mason said. “Judith has this idea that all the wounds I took fighting the zombies out there forced Chimera to kick my immune system and healing into overdrive. She thinks the infection would have done me in, otherwise.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad. I’m going to need your advice and a lot of help in the days ahead. We have to do something about Rebound. I’m not willing to go to war over this cure, but I don’t want to just hand it over, either.”

  Mason nodded. “You’ll offer an olive branch, then?”

  Will’s mouth twisted in distaste. “As a general rule, I prefer it. I don’t have so much pride that I can’t swallow it to deal with people who put agents in my home and attacked it, but I don’t have to like it. Yes. I want to try diplomacy. I think rather than handing the cure over, we send an envoy with an offer to train one of their scientists how to make it. We’ll stretch out the process as much as possible to give our people time to build a nice lead, though.”

  Mason, never slow to pick things up, sat forward with interest on his face. “Who might you have in mind to be this envoy?”

  Will took another sip of vodka. “Oh, I think it should be someone experienced in surviving impossible odds. A person who knows the value of self-control. Someone who has no compunctions about implementing a backup plan just in case diplomacy doesn’t work. Say, sowing agents for an insurrection as he travels through their territory?”

  Mason nodded. “That person would need to recruit some people quickly and train them as best he could.”

  “He’d better get to it, then,” Will said. “We’re not going to have much time. I’ll be sending a scout to their nearest outpost in a few days to pass along a message expressing our hope for a dialog. Once that process starts, we’ll need to be ready as fast as possible.”

  Mason poured himself some more vodka and raised his glass. He had already begun to game out the possibilities, and while his heart hoped Rebound would decide the cure was important enough to justify curtailing their less pleasant behaviors, he was ready to use it as incentive to create the insurrection he had spent months planning.

  Beyond heart and mind was hope that this might be his last war. One final mission to help create a safer world, one he might finally be able to stop and enjoy.

  Mason drank to that.