Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons

by Guess, Joshua

  None of this was what had Tabby looking at me as if I’d just stripped naked and started running around with a carrot sticking out of my ass.

  Wait, that was a suspiciously detailed example of crazy. Let’s say we all make stupid bets when we’re teenagers and leave it at that.

  “You’re going to use a stop sign as a shield,” she said patiently. “Like, that’s an actual thing you’re going to do.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Why not? They’re relatively light, strong, and they sharpen nicely.”

  Nicely, but not easily. It took me the better part of two days to form an edge on the thing using only what we could pilfer from houses. A lot of that time was taken by the pilfering itself owing to a strong need to hydrate ourselves. Food scarcity we could deal with, and the diminishing returns for searching for canned goods basically assured we’d be hungry before long. Water, however, was even harder to come by. It hadn’t rained since we got to the neighborhood, making the buckets we put out to catch rainwater useless. Oh, there were the occasional bottles of water. Most everyone drank them at some point, and to think I used to complain about how stupid the idea of selling the stuff in bottles was.

  But when the Fall happened, stretching out over weeks and months, people not only took what they had in futile attempts to find somewhere safer—futile because everywhere was terrible and staying in familiar territory seemed much more survivable—but also scavengers went looking for stuff like water first and foremost. At least the smart ones had.

  “We’ve been here a week,” I said. “If we stay, we’re gonna get real thirsty very fast. I know it looks silly, but this is something I’ve used before. Lots of people have.”

  Tabby put a hand on her hip and gestured toward me with an upraised hand. “That thing is held onto your wrist with shoelaces, Mason. You’re asking me to trust my life to a guy who suddenly thinks post-apocalyptic cosplay is a good idea.”

  I smiled. “I know it looks stupid, but it works. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

  With a long-suffering sigh and a minor slump of the shoulders, Tabby gave in. “Fine. But I’m on record as doing this under protest. If I hadn’t seen how fucking scary you can be when you’re on your game, I’d be long gone by now.”

  She turned to pick up her own gear, and I used the distraction to tighten up the laces on the shield. They weren’t my best work, but I’d superglued the living crap out of the four pair of laces I’d taken from various sets of boots to make sure they couldn’t detach from the shield. They were basically short nylon rope, after all, and had to stand up to constant stress and use. The knots I used to tighten the makeshift straps—thanks for that skill, US Navy!—were also not my best work. I could tighten them like ratchet straps but to keep the tension in place I had to tie the ends down. Which was as hard to do with one hand as you might imagine.

  Still, if worst happened and it just fell off my arm, I could still use it as an awkward but functional edged weapon. I was hoping the handle I’d slathered in glue would hold; that would allow me to jam the edge of the thing into zombie necks. With luck, far enough to cut into the spinal cord. I even went to the trouble of making sure one of the broad points of the sign was lined up with my fist.

  No way to know how it would work without trying it. The people back home who made these things would have shaken their heads in deep, abiding shame. Not that I planned to mention that part to Tabby.

  The first few minutes of travel were the worst. We used the ammonia, but it wasn’t enough. Tabby and I had drilled as best we could inside the house and our first test came before we made it out of the yard. Zombies didn’t come at us all at once—we’d have been overwhelmed instantly—but a handful peeled off from the pack. I guess a week of seeing and smelling us drove them past the point where a negative stimulus mattered at all. I suspected the rest had eaten more recently. There was a suspicious lack of squirrels and other small wildlife in the neighborhood.

  I stepped toward the closest of them and put the shield close to my body, slamming into the dead woman hard enough to knock her flat on her ass. Tabby had fallen in behind me as smoothly as anyone I’d ever practiced this maneuver with. When I turned away from the prone zombie, Tabby spun with me. She barely paused as she brought the bat down in a sideways golf swing into the dead woman’s head.

  Meanwhile, I brought the shield up until its edge was level with my shoulder and struck out like I was throwing a jab. My fist tightened hard against the handle and to my mild surprise it didn’t snap off as the edge of the stop sign sailed over the hands of the next zombie and took it in the throat. I must have hit perfectly as well as the zombie’s forward motion carrying it into my strike and adding to the force, because the stop sign went nearly clean through its neck.

  Its head flopped back as its body tumbled forward, looking like the world’s grossest Pez dispenser.

  The third zombie managed to actually get hold of the shield and pulled on it really hard. Not even on the sharpened part, either, which was frustrating. Since it was nice enough to put itself close to me, I stabbed it through the face with a screwdriver. Sword and shield might work for knights, but survivors use what they have.

  “Time for some crowd control?” Tabby asked from behind me.

  For a fleeting moment, I considered that if she wanted to betray me and escape, those few seconds were ideal. I was facing away from her, three of the handful of zombies hungry enough to fight through the ammonia taken care of. She could have easily caved in my skull and used me to distract the swarm for more than long enough to hightail it away.

  She didn’t. There was no dramatic music playing in the background as my trust in her became complete. Partly because I didn’t live in a shit movie written by a hack, but mostly due to the inescapable truth.

  Tabby would have plenty of other chances to kill me if that was her plan. Ones that entailed far less risk than doing it while surrounded by enemies.

  “Cover me for a sec,” she said, and I did.

  I moved around her in what must have looked like a parody of wariness as she dug an item out of a pouch at her waist. I want to stop here for a second and point out that the pouch was in fact a florescent green fanny pack whose better days ended some time before the Clinton administration. The faded and peeling orange letters were more gone than there, making whatever was written on it as mysterious as any other dead artifact from the Before Time. Only in this case, the strange item in question came from an era where Grunge music was new and hair metal was an object of growing shame.

  My eyes darted around quickly, ceaselessly. I moved my body in quick, precise quarter turns as fast as I could scan. I killed another zombie, this one far too weak to pose much of a threat, with the screwdriver. These zombies really were starving. There were New Breed in the crowd, too, but they thankfully stayed away. Probably waiting for their lesser brothers and sisters to do the hard work for them, or to at least feed on the new corpses we made. So far as I knew, they were the only type of zombie that would, or maybe could, eat their own.

  “Got it,” Tabby said, hoisting a small plastic-wrapped bundle. She peeled off the outer layer with her teeth and gave the whole thing a vigorous shake before lobbing it into the crowd.

  Now, friends, let’s remember that at the very best of times, zombies are driven by powerful and instinctive hunger. The Chimera animating them had protein requirements to make a bodybuilder drop his jaw in amazement. Regular zombies don’t think. They react. The thing they react to most of all is the smell of human blood.

  Lucky for us, I bled enough to make this moment possible.

  By stuffing my bloody rags inside a water bottle and wetting them down, we were able to keep it somewhat fresh. Certainly the scent was still there, captured by the plastic. Before stepping outside, we made a couple of these things.

  The wet ball of crimson fabric spread out at the end of the arc when Tabby threw it, and her aim was worthy of historical note: she pegged a New Breed right in the fa
ce.

  The effect was immediate, violent, and even to my jaded eyes, profoundly gross. The zombies clustered around their New Breed brother all attacked as one, teeth and claws rending flesh as the smart zombie tried to use its superior strength and cunning to escape.

  Tabby whistled. “Wow, I didn’t expect that to work so well. Impressive.”

  “One more,” I said, stepping between her and the threat. It was a big guy, easily four inches taller than me, making him about Kell’s height. Broad in the shoulders but with less mass than it should have had; the dead man’s Chimera had cannibalized much of his body’s tissue to keep itself fed. Even so the thing was probably only thirty pounds lighter than me, and I’m a big guy. Its clenching hands looked like they could crumple my shield as an afterthought, and I suddenly became self-conscious about using the thing at all. It wasn’t a logical reaction in the least.

  “Knees,” I said, dashing to my left. Tabby took the direction perfectly, moving to the right of where I’d been standing. I brought the shield up and bashed the hand of the big guy, making sure I had his attention. His massive frame oriented on me quickly, and Tabby moved in with the speed of a striking viper. Her swing connected with the dead man’s left kneecap in a nauseating crunch of muscle and tissue, and to my surprise the leg hyperextended and then almost folded backward.

  A living person would have screamed themselves hoarse in seconds, but all the zombie did was glance down at its badly broken knee as its balance was wrecked. Unable to bend it properly or manage its forward momentum, the zombie made a slow and surprisingly graceful fall to the ground. Not unlike a felled tree.

  Tabby raised the bat, but I put up a hand. “You’d have to get close to its arms. Let’s not risk it. I’d like to get out of here while the crowd is occupied.”

  Tabby’s eyes scanned the pile of slashing, gnashing dead and made a little face like she smelled something that disagreed with her. “Yeah, good call. Kinda thinking a few of them are going to come out of that hungrier and probably giving less fucks.”

  And so we did what anyone would have in our situation and headed for the woods. It wasn’t far, just past the back yard and south toward safety. The woods would be far less crowded with the dead, and eventually we’d find a place to set up camp.

  In order to send my smoke signal to Bobby and Jo, we’d need to go south a fair bit. It might take a few days for them to notice—no one could watch the sky forever, even when you had a set time of day to send the message—but eventually one of them would. Then we’d be back in business.

  I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to risk them with Tabby. I no longer had any doubt she really was from New America—she knew details about the inside of the Rebound bunker that would have been nearly impossible to find out unless she’d been there. Yet a sliver of doubt remained that this all might be a very long con on her part. A way to gather intelligence about me and Haven. If I were in charge of a group of opportunistic scavengers, it would certainly be on my list of things to do.

  Risking my own life with her—in other words, trusting her to have my back—was a different beast than doing the same for my loved ones.

  Somehow, I think she understood that without the words ever having to pass my lips.

  18

  One piece of information I’d gotten badly wrong was how far the neighborhood was from the compound manned by the Relentless Sons. In my injured, hazy state, there was no good way to mark the passage of time or distance. Every step felt like forever, time slipping back and forth as blood loss fought adrenaline for control of my perception.

  Which was why I stood there like an idiot when I figured out we were more two miles further west than expected. A couple miles was nothing for a healthy person, especially in this day and age where being able to run that distance could mean living to see another birthday. For me, in the state I’d been in, ten and a half thousand more feet bordered on the miraculous.

  It also put us a lot closer to where the others should have been waiting and watching for a signal.

  “Forgot how peaceful it can be out here in between,” Tabby remarked as we shuffled slowly through the woods leading toward the highway. Hopefully a highway without any enemy lookouts.

  I scratched my nose. Damn allergies were already starting to bother me. “In between what? Fights?”

  She swept a hand across the expanse of trees. “Communities. It’s how I think of the rest of the world, you know? I used to travel a lot when I was a kid. I remember thinking the highways and country roads were the wilds, these big dangerous spaces in between the little dots of civilization you rolled into when you got to a town. Funny thing, I guess. Stopped feeling that way as I got older, then the universe decided to take my idea and turn it up to eleven.”

  I understood what she meant. “The first year and a half after the outbreak, I spent most of my time acting as a scout and courier. That’s how I ended up in Haven. I’d spend days out here never seeing anything more dangerous than a wild animal exploring places where people used to be. Deer walking down city streets, bears digging through spilled luggage some poor bastard dropped as they tried to find a safe place. Then I’d stumble across zombies or marauders. Hot spots were everywhere back then. A lot has changed.” In fact, we had changed it. Survivors banding together, working in unison to force the fallen world to bend with our will. It was painful, bloody work. Necessary work.

  “I read about some of that,” Tabby said. “When you and your friends worked out the treaty with New America, we got access to all those old archives. You guys fought wars and everything, huh? You’d think that sort of shit would be one bit of history people would be happy to leave in the past.”

  I laughed. It was a deep, rich, and honest sound. A startled bird flapped off through the mingling branches above us. “Sorry, I’m not laughing at you. Well, maybe a little. I’ve seen too much human nature to think war is anything but a core part of what we are. You spend a career watching different people make the same stupid choices over and over again, and you get jaded.”

  Tabby snorted a laugh. “My mom would have called it ‘realistic’ if you said that to her.”

  I waggled my hand back and forth. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It’s easy to judge when you’re not the one doing the stupid thing. But then, you’re probably the one making a different dumbass choice with someone else watching and shaking their head. The beginning of wisdom is knowing you’re fucking up and at least trying not to do it so badly the next time around.”

  Tabby gave me an appraising look. “Well, turns out there’s a philosopher under those scars. Color me impressed.”

  We stepped into a relatively clear section of trees looking down on the highway. Between us and the blacktop were the expected scrub bushes, the result of years of no one mowing. There was a steep drop from the tree line, and I put my free hand out to Tabby so we could support each other as we moved down it. “I don’t know about philosopher, but—”

  I was interrupted by a pair of dudes popping up less than twenty feet in front of us, rifles aimed and ready.

  Tabby froze, which seemed like the smart move. You never know if a gunman will have an itchy trigger finger. Remaining still was smart. For once, I also did the smart thing. Hey, I’m a hell of a combatant. I survive where others fall. But even I come up short against rock-steady aim and cold-eyed killers who won’t hesitate to cut you down from a range.

  Also, I knew them. They were friends of mine.

  “Greg, Allen. What’s up, fellas?”

  The two men weren’t twins, but they looked enough alike that people just assumed. Both were black men in their forties, with salt and pepper hair trimmed close to their skulls. Their builds—slightly taller than average but otherwise unremarkable—held the same lean strength as most survivors I’d seen.

  Greg lowered his gun first, a surprised look on his face. The rich brown skin was more lined than the last time I’d seen it, but his smile came far easier than I’d ever see
n before. “Mason. Sorry, man. We weren’t sure it was you. How you been? And who’s your friend?”

  Allen’s gun lowered, but not all the way. He was more taciturn than his brother, and more thoughtful. Neither had any special training that made them better survivors unless you counted a few decades mining coal in Virginia, and I kind of did. The constant stress and strain of working where the ground might kill you at a moment’s notice along with the ever-present terror of something more insidious like black lung went a long way toward explaining how well they’d adapted to the end of the world. Allen studied Tabby, reading the small signs. He might not be trained like me, but the guy was no slouch. He could pick up on the subtle tensions as well as anyone and knew what to look for.

  “Mason,” Allen said, his usual talkative self. “We were expecting bad guys. Everything okay?”

  I motioned at Tabby to lower the bat. She was deeply confused until she actually looked at her hands, seeming surprised the weapon was at the ready. Instinct can be a tricky bastard.

  “How about we wait on that part until we get back to camp,” I said. “I’d rather not have to tell it twice.”

  Both the other men nodded. We’d drifted apart a little since before the trip to New America. Allen had taken a serious injury and grew more withdrawn after it, while Greg seemed to come out of a shell he hadn’t even realized he’d been in. Old news. Ancient history by the current way we measured it.

  “So,” Tabby said as everyone stood there awkwardly. “How’d you guys meet each other?”

  An hour later we sat in a camp composed of a lot more people than I expected.

  “I thought we were supposed to keep this small and quiet,” I said, glaring at Bobby.

  He raised his hands defensively. “Hey, don’t look at me. The guys we sent back to Haven showed up with a small army. What was I supposed to do?”