Unlike Bobby, I was used to Jo. She was reasonable and straightforward, traits respected in men and all too often derided in women. “The three of us will be the advance team. We can’t have many people knowing what we’ll be up to, so our backup team will stay a few miles behind. I want them there just in case we need firepower but far enough removed that they won’t know what we’re up to. Will is putting together volunteers who don’t mind going on a blind mission.”
Jo nodded. “Okay. So how long do we have?”
I checked my watch. “Oh, about twelve hours. Then we’re on the road. Put together whatever kit you think we might need. Tools, medical supplies, something to spread the cure in case we run into big groups of zombies. I’ll give it a check when you’re done.”
“’Kay,” Jo said before trotting off to talk to Kell and Emily, who were in charge of the Hangar and functionally her bosses.
“She’s a treat,” Bobby said, face like a thundercloud. “I was just trying to look out for her.”
I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Dude, I know, okay? I get it. I also think it’s more than a little patronizing, so I see her side of it. She can handle herself. Just let it go. You can keep bitching about it if you want, but remember she’s the one who’ll be sewing you up if you get hurt. Your call.”
Bobby pursed his lips. “This is going to be the worst road trip ever. I’m gonna go get our shit together. Fucking hate packing for these things.”
I let him trudge off angry, because honestly it was better for him to work through it all rather than be distracted into feeling less pissed off. That’s a thing people almost universally fail to realize; you deal with your issues now and like magic they don’t fester and grow into something worse later. It’s not like I’m the first person to notice this. Hell, they taught it in more than one of my psych courses—even the ones I took in the service. People have an incredible capacity for ignoring good advice in favor of easy short-term solutions.
We’re a species dead set on instant gratification. We killed our civilization with it.
No, really. Consider that the deaths of most of the human race are an artifact of a tiny group of people not wanting to patiently wait for a good outcome. That’s literally what happened with the plague. There Kell was, methodically learning all the ways he could alter Chimera into something that would revolutionize medicine, taking all the precautions and ensuring no apocalypses happened as a result, and someone stepped in and shit in his Cheerios.
A single DARPA agent let himself be swayed by someone more powerful than him—outside the chain of command, I might add—and because one man bowed to political pressure, Kell’s research was taken in violation of a bunch of contracts and agreements. The dicks who tried to fast track the work, altering Chimera in ways that were obviously ill-advised, ended up turning what was once a benign microorganism that aided the creatures it bonded with into a ravenous disease that raised the dead and made them hungry cannibals.
One of Kell’s biggest regrets—and yes, I know I’m talking about him a lot here, but hear me out—is killing that DARPA agent. This was as The Fall was happening, mind you. Kell shot the agent in the face shortly after watching some of the first zombies to rise kill Kell’s wife and baby daughter. The agent wasn’t trying to hurt him, in fact wanted to keep him safe above all else as Kell was one of the few people capable of stopping Chimera. Kell shot him in cold blood and spent half a decade feeling shitty about it.
And that’s the difference between us. I wouldn’t have lost a wink of sleep over it. That agent killed the world. He made this happen. Even in those early days when we thought all this might be contained, he was still responsible for many deaths. He had it coming.
Rebound, it turned out, was run by the very scientists who’d corrupted Kell’s work and caused the end of the world. We let them live. Really, he let them live. I think it was because he was never able to let go of what he did to that guy from DARPA. It was a chance for him to make the right choice, as far as he saw it.
Good for him, I guess. Everyone has a different moral compass, and if it helped my friend stay true to his by showing leniency toward the very people who bent the world over and fucked it to death without mercy, more power to him.
Like I said, we’re very different people in a lot of ways. I didn’t see much in the way of mercy in my immediate future.
4
Leaving Haven drove home a reality that living inside the walls has a way of obscuring: yes, society is slowly rebuilding, but with sharp limitations.
Haven is big as walled enclosures go. Really big. The interior, minus the inner walls that still exist from before all the additions, remnants of when it was a much smaller community, is more than a mile across in some places. We have power, limited manufacturing, and classes of every kind to keep the knowledge from the world that was from dying out. Part of the mission is to not let people devolve like some shitty TV movies. A hundred years from now, people should be building cars instead of wondering what the rusting hulks looked like when moving down the streets in a forgotten age.
Other than most people being armed to some degree and the vegetables planted everywhere we can fit them, walking down its streets isn’t that different from taking a stroll through any neighborhood a decade before.
What I’m saying is that we’ve come a long way, but also not very far. Outside the walls, patrols still have to run constantly to keep the streets clear of zombies. Even our bigger achievements like downing hundreds or thousands of zombies drifting toward us along the highways is both a drop in the bucket to their overall numbers and a double-edged sword as we’ll have to regularly send out crews to plow aside the fallen bodies. The corpses of your enemy piling up deep enough to impede travel is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.
As we traveled north, the reminder of how short the distance from our seed crystal of civilization to the unrestrained wilds of zombie swarms and banditry stung. I come off as tough—I am tough—but there’s nothing wrong with admitting it hurt a little to know how limited our reach was. The early years when Haven was just a little compound of a few dozen people, barely able to stay alive, weren’t so distant that most people would forget. But given the volume of blood and death in my wake, I felt like we should have more. Be further along.
Which was irrational as hell, but people often are.
As Bobby drove, I gazed along the woodlands and knew that the rest of the allied communities that made up the Union were out there doing the same good work. Surviving the apocalypse wasn’t a checklist where you finally reached the end and everything started over from zero. God, I wish. The rules of the world had changed. The dead would continue seeking the living, and if we were safer and more secure it was because of how hard we’d fought for it.
The process of expanding our communities would take decades. The idea of open towns without protective barriers was something from the old world. A relic best left behind. You could do it on an island or maybe a mesa, but the average group of survivors in the world today needed walls.
That simple bit of truth chafed my sense of calm any time I went outside, though I never talked about it.
“You okay?” Jo asked as the trees rolled by outside.
I nodded. “I’m good. Just enjoying the scenery.”
Which was true, if not the whole of it. All those thoughts about how small the bubble of normality we’d created was, and yet I still found small moments of contentment out in the wilds. The roads were slowly losing the battle with entropy; we patched and fixed where we could to stave off their unavoidable crumble. Nature encroached on either side, years of nonexistent landscaping gave birth to tall grass and an endlessly variety of other growth. The trees, no longer trimmed neatly each summer, reached their branches ever closer. It was a world as no one had seen it since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Really, as no one had seen it since the fall of whatever the last great civilization had been. Rome, maybe? Where and when else h
ad roadways and buildings been slowly eaten by the landscape?
It brought to mind all those weird pictures you used to see on the internet of abandoned amusement parks and old mining towns, but writ on a scale so large it bordered on incomprehensible. The Japanese have a particular philosophy regarding finding beauty in the imperfections around us.
There certainly wasn’t a lack of them to be found.
“How are we planning on finding these people?” Jo asked sometime later. “Do we know if they have a base? There’s six hundred plus miles between us and New America. Lot of ground to cover.”
I reached over and pulled my backpack close. The briefing papers stuck out of it in a sloppy roll held together with a rubber band. I gave it to Jo. “Read that. So far the attacks have been along the same five mile stretch of road, and pretty close. Which tells me the attackers probably have a relatively small group. If I were going to do it, I’d put a lookout down the road to send a warning to the rest of us so we could be in position when the target showed up. My guess is they staked out that bit of highway because it offers some advantage.”
Jo riffled through the pages, frowning. “How do we know any of this? Aren’t they killing the people in these convoys?”
I nodded soberly. “Yeah, but the folks in them aren’t stupid. They had a system set up before leaving New American territory. They’re not migrating with permission, but they’re organized. Now that they’re on our communications grid, they can get text messages through it. That’s how we know how many convoys have gone missing, and where. Once the organizers of this little system fessed up to what was going on, they told us who and what to look for. Our people found burned-out husks of convoy vehicles and dead bodies matching descriptions of the people in them. The bad guys were smart enough to pull them off the highway, but our scouts were looking for signs of covered tracks to begin with.”
Jo flipped over to the page listing out the total number of victims. I knew it because I saw her eyes widen, and then go tight around the edges. That page haunted me. It was a long list, with names, genders, and ages laid out in cold black and white.
“My god,” Jo said, her voice brittle. “So many of them were children.”
Bobby made a low sound in his throat as he drove. He had a hair trigger when it came to kids being hurt.
“Yeah,” I said. “You can see why I’m not going to lose any sleep over killing every one of these motherfuckers.”
We set up camp half a mile south of the highway where our mystery men preferred to do their hunting. As camps go it wasn’t much, just a place to park the van where it wouldn’t be spotted from any road.
I laid out a map on the tiny fold-out side table. Gotta love conversion vans.
Jo leaned over the map and traced a finger along several of the areas I had marked on it. “You think they keep scouts stationed in both directions, I get that. But why do you think they’re in these places?”
“Topography,” I said. “We have detailed topographical maps of the state back in Haven. These are the tallest spots on the highway within twenty miles. I figure that gives any lookouts plenty of time to signal their buddies and have them ready. I’m going in from the west. Since the convoys they’ve been hitting have all come from the east, my guess is the other guy isn’t going to be paying as much attention. I’ll get in close and see if I can spot him, wait for the shift change, and follow him home.”
Bobby squeezed himself onto the captain’s chair next to the table. The van wasn’t small, but the fit was still tight. We were not small men. “And we just wait here for you? You’re not going to take a radio or anything?”
I shook my head. “Nope. If I’m captured, I don’t want there to be any evidence I’m not alone. If I’m not back in twenty four hours, you fall back and let the guys in the other van know what’s going on. I already gave them orders for a couple possible scenarios.”
Bobby looked worried, which I understood. My dad had the same furrowed brow and nervous hands whenever I had to leave for another deployment. “I don’t understand why you don’t want us to come with you. You’re so adamant about Jo handling herself, and you know I can.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, but it felt awkward. I’ve never been good with people. Fighting them, killing them, sure. I can do that all day. The little things like saying the right words to lighten someone’s load or comforting them, not so much. “Depending on what I find, I might need you guys. We brought a lot of firepower for that possibility. But this first part is pure recon. It’ll be safer and easier for me to do that on my own. I’m also better at it than both of you put together. If they do a shift break at night like I expect them to, I’ll have the cover of darkness to work with.”
Jo frowned. “But there are zombies, too. That’s going to be a problem.”
That much was unavoidably true. The dead had learned early on to avoid vehicles. Owing to the weird nature of Chimera, some of them learned much faster and easier than others. There were several kinds of zombies, but I didn’t care much about the difference between original recipe and what everyone called the New Breed. Highly original, that name. But like most things it stuck once people started using it in casual conversation.
“Yeah, they probably will be,” I agreed. “And of the three people in this cramped little van, which one of us has survived naked, unarmed combat with a herd and can tell the tale?”
Jo see-sawed a hand. “Eh. Technically you died for a little while, so...”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a rules lawyer, kid. It ruins the game for everyone else. My point is that it’ll be a ton easier for me to navigate the swarms on my own. They’re thinner on this stretch of road than you’d expect this time of year. I imagine that’s thanks to our bad guys. I’ll be fine. Worst case, I’ll just run away from them. I’m not too proud to hightail it away from danger I can’t win against.”
Bobby chuckled. “Holy shit, someone write that down. Mason admits there are some things he can’t beat in a fight.”
I smiled. “I will deny everything. Except the tussle I got in with Eric Belmont when I was fourteen, right before my growth spurt. That kid stomped a mud hole in me and walked it dry.”
“What, is that your secret origin or something?” Jo quipped. “You got the shit kicked out of you in front of other kids and dedicated yourself to becoming Superman?”
“That would be way cooler than what actually happened, but no,” I said. “People don’t all have one big defining moment. I sure as hell didn’t. I wanted to see the world and get paid for it, so I joined up. Just like everyone else, I kind of stumbled my way into a bunch of weird life changes through a series of choices that only look like a plan in hindsight. I fucked up a lot along the way.”
Bobby gave me a sarcastic slow clap. “Wow. You should write a self-help book. Very inspirational.”
Jo snickered. “I’m picturing you going out there and tripping over your own feet.” She sobered a little. “Kinda nice to hear, though. I mean, you’re old so you’ve been through all the stuff I worry about dealing with someday.”
I put a hand to my chest. “Old? Me? That’s hurtful. You were such a sweet child. What happened to you?”
Jo punched me in the arm. “You sound just like Kell. Every time I complain about maybe not wanting to keep on with the mechanical engineering classes, he tells me I have lots of options. But I always feel like if I don’t pick one thing and do it, I’ll just bounce between jobs or education and never settle on anything.”
I gave her a wink. “Everyone feels that way when they’re young, kiddo. Don’t stress too much. Fake it until you make it, or whatever cliché you prefer.”
I wondered if either of them noticed the casual way we talked about jobs and school, as if these things were totally normal and not the result of countless gallons of blood and sweat in our concerted effort to maintain a structured civilization. The fact that they were being treated as a given brightened my heart. That right there? It was why I didn’t mi
nd a fight. Because I knew that putting my ass on the line to keep that civilization rolling along as smoothly as possible was as worthwhile a contribution as you could find. Maybe not glamorous and it certainly came with its own unique nightmares, but it mattered.
At least in my own mind, this was no different than what I’d done in the Navy and the CIA. Unlike then, now my lines were a lot clearer. The morality was sharply defined.
Though like those bygone days, I still had a uniform to put on when I finally readied myself to get to work.
5
Hiding inside a swarm of zombies used to be a lot easier. You can still do it sometimes, but the existence of the New Breed makes it a dicey call. Normal zombies use smell to distinguish between living and dead people, so if you cover yourself in zombie gore to block your own scent, you can trick them. It’s not a perfect method; sometimes scents slip through. But it works.
New Breed are smarter. They note visual cues and it doesn’t trick them. Fortunately for me, I didn’t see any of them. Their distinctively gray skin with its thickened areas where bands of fibrous material grows beneath the skin makes them easy to spot in the day time. The small swarm I found a few miles from the area we knew the marauders to be working in were old school dead people and paid me little mind as I shambled toward them from the southern side of the highway.
To a human I would obviously stand out as alive if I got close enough for them to see me. My facial scars notwithstanding, the heavy armored coat I wore along with my weapons and other gear was in good shape, obviously lacking the careless treatment a wandering corpse would have visited on it.
That was okay. I didn’t need to get super close. I was mostly hiding inside the crowd to save myself the trouble of killing the zombies and leaving evidence someone else was here.
Roughly where I expected to find a lookout, I found a lookout. I know, I know: I’m so good it hurts. It only made sense given the terrain and the analysis of the incidents provided by our scouts. Our people were careful about not making a scene in case any of the marauders were watching, noting the carnage as they would any other violent episode. Our people were trained well enough to know not to spend time looking for enemies they suspected were there. Not when they’d be outgunned and at risk of scaring off the predators to a whole new location.
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 3
