Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons

by Guess, Joshua

  The practical effect of gradually and jerkily dragging a small leafy branch across a forest floor is a good simulation of the shuffling zombie gait. As it grew closer, the guard took notice. In fact, he picked up the sound earlier than I expected by a wide margin. He wasn’t just alert, but had excellent hearing. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Most people in the world had been infected with Chimera long enough to have gained physiological advantages from it. Symbiotic organisms that copy or replace parts of your biology come with benefits, I guess.

  I watched as the tension in his body increased. The guard raised his rifle and peered through its scope in the direction of the noise. I stopped pulling the branch just as he did so, rendering it functionally invisible. Who is going to notice one fallen limb among the tons of debris on a forest floor, after all?

  Just when the guard began to relax—a relative term, I promise you—I pulled on the line again, this time a little harder. The gun snapped up immediately in a display of excellent reaction time, so I picked then to throw the rock.

  Again, the oldest tricks are often the best. With his vision narrowed through the scope of his gun, presumably with some kind of night vision included, he couldn’t see the stone sail over his head. Growing up in the country meant a lot of my youth spent tossing a baseball, so my aim was pretty good. The egg-sized rock slapped into the mess of tree branches making up the wall about twenty feet to the guard’s right.

  In a fluid motion, the guy spun and fired a three-round burst that blew through the wood within a yard of where the rock hit.

  The next guard over immediately went totally fucking bananas.

  “What the fu—AAAAGHHHH SON OF A BITCH!” he screamed.

  You might be thinking he was shot, but no. The guard being shot at—or at least in the general direction of the shots fired—shouted as he leaped up at the sudden noise. He landed on his feet, graceful as anyone with Chimera managing their nerve conductivity and muscle control, but the infection did nothing for his aim. His feet came down on the edge of the already precariously balanced sheet of plywood. Physics took over, tipping the plywood and sending his legs straight down into the tangled branches below.

  Now the important observations could begin.

  I was dismayed to see the other guards maintain their positions. I’d hoped for a flurry of activity as they left their posts to investigate the shots and subsequent screams. No such luck. Instead, bodies began to stream from the building almost at once. Or that was what I assumed was happening behind the wall since I couldn’t see them. The cascade of shouting voices demanding information probably didn’t belong to a bunch of ghosts or anything, so it was a safe bet.

  I was intent on the scene before me, and in my certainty that I was well hidden and in control of the situation, I fell victim to the same tunnel vision as the enemy I’d tricked. The guy who snuck up on me did so on feet silent enough to catch me completely off guard.

  “Don’t move or I’ll shoot,” he said from five feet away. “Put your hands up.”

  The voice was perfectly calm. Utterly in control. I did as I was told.

  “Turn around and face me.” I turned. I saw the familiar moment of revulsion as my face, features distorted and stretched by scars, registered to him. “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

  “Same thing that’s about to happen to you, buddy,” I said, and launched myself at him.

  Okay, look. I know what you’re thinking. It’s monumentally stupid to throw yourself bodily at a guy with a military grade weapon pointed at your center mass. I didn’t do it lightly or without some consideration. Admittedly the length of time I thought about it was short, but come on. It’s not like I haven’t been in this situation before.

  I took in my assailant for long enough to grasp some basic facts. He was a younger guy, which itself didn’t mean much. Sandy hair, good features, and most importantly, left handed. Which hand he used for shooting wasn’t in itself that big a deal. I wouldn’t have been any safer against a right-handed person. But knowing which he used gave me a small but useful advantage in how I attacked.

  When shooting, a person’s dominant hand will tend to pull. The geometry of their hold on the gun informs how this pull, slight though it might be, will change aim and drift patterns of the barrel. Soldiers train for years to overcome this, and right now you’re probably thinking no way can I have judged all this and made these decisions in such a short amount of time.

  But I did. Not consciously, for the most part, but using the vast stores of experience and instinct gained from dealing with shit just like this over the course of my life. Several of my scars predate my zombie injuries by a decade or more, testaments written in my skin about less successful attempts at this same leap of faith.

  I felt the burst of rounds tug at the side of my jacket, but there was no corresponding pain. I was already rolling by the time the second burst filled the space I was just in. I’m a big guy, about six foot three, and my dive covered pretty much all the distance between us in a single motion.

  Rolling to my feet, I sprang up and barreled into the enemy like a wrecking ball. I pushed the rifle up and away, using his death grip on it to control his upper body. Men used to using guns will adamantly refuse to let go of them. Everything in their brain screams that the guy attacking them is intent on taking the weapon to use against them. Which was exactly what I hoped for. Held tight in his hands, the gun became a lever I used to easily throw the shooter off balance.

  It gave me the second I needed to aim the head-butt. The top of my forehead smashed down into his nose and upper jaw with thunderous force. Bones cracked, but the fucker was tougher than I expected. He didn’t drop or even loosen his grip.

  Pro-tip: even the hardest bastard in the world will crumple if you hit the same spot twice. So I did.

  I slipped a foot behind his leg as he wailed in pain and began to fall backward, pulling his foot out from under him in a small sweep. Now I did make a play for his gun. I’d need it since things went sideways so quickly.

  What’s that, you say? Mason, you sound as if you expected it to go bad! Aren’t you supposed to be a specialist at these kinds of things?

  Well, yeah. I am. And in my professional opinion, the old adage is close to gospel. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  I yanked the gun free and flipped it into my grip. Without compassion, mercy, or the slightest fleck of anger, I turned the rifle on its owner and fired a three-round burst into his face where he lay. I’m still human, so there might come a time when I lay awake at night remembering that moment and asking what kind of man can I be to kill so callously and without hesitation. When I squeezed the trigger, however, there was no worry over the morality of the action. Nor was there even a thought about what the guy was. That he preyed on the innocent and killed with equal mercilessness wasn’t a consideration. In that brief slice of time, he was simply a threat to my own life.

  That’s all I needed. All I’ve ever needed.

  At that point I was committed. No, I didn’t want—or even think it was possible—to attack full-on and take all the marauders out. I’m not an idiot. But I also couldn’t just try to slip into the shadows and pretend I wasn’t there. Having a roving sentry out here wasn’t something I expected at all. So, like I had many times in the past, I made lemonade with what life handed me.

  In the next ten seconds, I emptied the rifle’s magazine while on the run. I know I took down at least three of the guards, and once my bullets were gone, I tossed the useless hunk of metal away.

  Running for your life through a forest at night is hard. Not braining yourself on a low-hanging branch is tricky, made more so by also trying to avoid being shot in the back by someone who just watched you explode a friend’s head with a bullet.

  An engine started in the distance, followed immediately by a grinding shriek like a thousand nails on a chalkboard. That had to be the truck serving as a gate moving out of the way, the fallen branches scraping its paint as it m
oved.

  “Not good,” I said as I rocketed in a zig-zag through the woods. “Not good not good not good.”

  Hey, everyone needs a mantra.

  I had to stop about a hundred yards from the gate to snatch up my bow from where I’d left it. I planned for the eventuality of a retreat, but even I had to admit that following the sparse markers I’d left on my way in had even odds of working in the dark.

  I nocked an arrow and turned in place, panning quickly across the shadows behind for an enemy. One of the guards, a tall, lanky man with a mane of silver hair, had abandoned his post. I must have been too busy to notice him jumping down into the outside world. He’d followed me closely enough to at least keep me in sight, and the five seconds I stood still was enough for him to eat up much of the remaining distance.

  His expression upon seeing me with the bow when I turned to face him elicited a chuckle totally against my will. His mouth dropped open in a cartoonish O of surprise. I loosed the arrow with less aim than feeling. Bows weren’t my first choice, but I was an above average shot.

  The shaft took him low in the gut. His old, threadbare body armor was made to stop pistol rounds. The arrow went through it as if it were paper.

  Not seeing any other pursuers, or at least not ones with a clear line of sight to where I stood, I did the smart thing and turned back to continue running away from this place.

  Of course I ran straight into a pack of four zombies. I tried to swerve around them but one of their arms tangled in the bow, the shock ripping it out of my hands. Which would have been fine except my own arm got trapped in the crook where bow limb and string met. Not much of a problem under normal circumstances, but freeing myself slowed me down enough for the other three zombies to pounce.

  Somewhere in the middle of me protecting my head and neck from the onslaught—badly, as one of them nipped a small bit of flesh from an ear—another marauder caught up to me. Two, actually, since one gave an order to another.

  “Take him alive,” the voice said. It was what you told a subordinate when you wanted to get answers. I was sure they wouldn’t be gentle about it.

  When the Taser hit me, it was almost a relief. For a little while, I’d have no responsibilities. It seemed a nice change from what had been a terrible day on the whole.

  9

  The many thousands of volts did a good job incapacitating me, but they didn’t knock me unconscious. That happened when someone stood over my prone body and hit me in the noodle with the butt of a rifle. You know how people get knocked out with a single punch in movies? Yeah, that rarely happens in real life. Boxing matches or MMA bouts prove the lie.

  In actuality—and this is just an aside I feel is a necessary public service announcement—getting knocked unconscious is super bad for you. As in — can result in brain damage.

  While I was out, my jumbled gray matter replayed bits and pieces of when I was recruited out of the Navy by the CIA. The Special Activities Division liked to pull from the military since much of their work was paramilitary in nature. Because of this, the company had quite a few feelers out for potential assets. They did their homework.

  I drew their attention by managing to hide the fact that I was gay for my entire career. Not just that I did it, but how I did it. My recruiter talked to a few of my buddies, guys I’d been in the shit with countless times, on the sly. He even chatted with me once, though I didn’t know who he was at the time. Later I learned that my use of subtle psychological tactics to keep myself comfortably in the closet was the part that interested him.

  I may be better at reading people than most, but everyone does it to some degree. The way someone reacts to a subject or a line of questioning will often influence how or even if the person talking approaches that subject in the future. So when the guys in whatever unit I served in at any given time would talk about their girlfriends or wives, I always gave back as little as possible. You draw attention to yourself when you say you’re a private person and would rather not discuss it. But keep your body language standoffish just a bit, your answers short but polite, and you send low-key signals that the subconscious absorbs like grass eats up sunlight.

  I knew a couple other guys in the service who did the same thing. It certainly doesn’t make me unique. I just did it without having to construct lies about who I was dating or how I spent my time off. Instead I became known as the hyper competent dude who got jokey when in stressful situations and didn’t like to talk about his personal life. Some might have suspected the truth, but if so they didn’t give a shit. It’s not like the subject never came up in a general sense. Most people in the service cared about competence over all else.

  I’m sure others theorized in idle moments. Maybe they thought a woman did me wrong and it made me reluctant to open up to anyone. Some probably thought I was, like many sailors, an unabashed hound who refused to settle down. I gladly let them form whatever opinion or idea they liked and went about getting things done.

  My bruised noggin flashed through these memories and thoughts in a series of disparate still images, single frames that evoked the memories associated with them in fits and starts. The shattered, disorganized fragments of my conscious mind slowly worked themselves back together as I woke up. Pieces of glass grated against the inside of my skull as I pawed at them, intent on making them whole once more.

  It felt like coming to after a night of drinking. Not the fun kind. The sort of evening that stretches into morning and half a paycheck is sacrificed to Dionysus. A familiar nausea twisted my belly. Ah, concussions. Gotta love ’em.

  Consciousness was forced upon me. It said something about how hard my bell was rung that the repeated jabs of a baton into my ribs only registered as vague pokes on the periphery of my awareness. The world—and a breathtaking depth of pain—resolved into existence as my eyes opened.

  Pressure under my arms turned out to be two guys holding me upright. Apparently they’d lifted me from the dirty concrete floor while a third, the one with the baton, slid a mechanic’s stool under me. It was a precarious position for someone out like a light, but as all my switches flipped back into the on position, I took up more of the load.

  I leaned forward, resting my bound arms on my knees. The men at either side slowly relaxed their grip and stepped away, staying far enough back to be out of my sight completely. It was smart. The man in front of me held my attention while his buddies kept an eye on me.

  The zip tie holding my wrists together didn’t quite cut off circulation, but it was uncomfortable enough to compete with the incredible throbbing in my head.

  I looked up, slowly panning my head across the guy absently rolling the police baton in his hand and the walls behind him. At a guess, I’d say this was once a storage room. The exposed studs in the walls were clad in cheap metal siding, the electrical system basic and exposed. It was the kind of room an owner had built inside his business as cheaply as possible in order to fit a simple need.

  “I have questions,” the man with the baton said, far too casual in his delivery. He was about my age, somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, and carried himself almost like a military man. His hair was cropped close to the skull, a blond fuzz that carried over into his beard. He wore what looked like stripped-down body armor—interesting—beneath a leather vest adorned with faded white patches. The name patch over the heart read “Tony.”

  I met Tony’s eyes and took a full second to study him. Normally a glance was enough to provide me with plenty of insight, but Tony was unusually composed. He didn’t fidget or seem tense, displayed no body language markers I could use to infer from. Of course, this level of control by itself conveyed facts. The most important of which was that Tony was the sort of guy who had spent a lot of time in dark rooms with prisoners. This wasn’t new territory for him.

  “Sure,” I said amiably. “If you wouldn’t mind telling me how long I was out first, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  I said it conversationally and honestly. Tony
seemed skeptical, but nodded. “That seems fair. You were unconscious for about three hours. Now, where are you from and who sent you after us?”

  “I’m from Haven,” I said. “Our governor gave the order for me to come out here and find you. Was supposed to observe your base, slow you down a little before reporting in and letting them know how many people to send in to wipe you out.”

  The best lies contain a lot of truth. I didn’t have any reason to hold back—that’s pure movie shit. Talking in a believable way that doesn’t actually convey much useful information is the real trick to getting through almost any interrogation.

  Tony frowned. “Haven? What’s that?”

  His question seemed genuine, but there was plenty of reason to doubt. First and foremost was that the place was pretty well-known. It was entirely possible the guy and his people were from somewhere that did no trade with Haven, but that would also mean they hadn’t traded with almost anyone in the US over the last four or five years. Were I in his place, I’d want to test the honesty of my captive as well.

  “Big community,” I said. “Kind of famous, too. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

  Tony tapped a finger against his jaw. It was a deliberate gesture rather than an unconscious tic. He was putting on a performance. That was bad. It meant he knew what he was doing. He would remain in control. Amateur interrogators in situations like this will sometimes screw up and lose their cool when they think they’re being lied to or disrespected. Experienced ones, as I suspected Tony to be, rarely did anything they hadn’t thought out beforehand.

  “How did you find out about us?” Tony asked, a little too casually. “We haven’t been leaving survivors.”

  My mind immediately went to the little girl and I couldn’t blank out the momentary bloom of rage. It manifested physically as a twitch, there and gone but still noticed. I pushed it down and forced myself to answer calmly. “You’ve been hitting people moving from one settlement to another. The place they’re moving from sent watchers to keep an eye on them. Scouts. They saw what you did.”