by Joshua Guess
He circled around and retrieved his spear and ended its suffering.
There were no more undead coming over the swell of the hill, but that didn't mean they wouldn't. Quickly he wiped the weapons down with a cloth from the pouch at his hip, then stowed them.
As he tied the cloak back on, Kell studied the woman still watching him with a shocked expression. She was tall, maybe five eight, and well fed. Her clothes were either new—well, newish anyway—or had been taken care of. Her hair was short but nicely trimmed, and that along with a dozen other details made him sure she had to have come from a community. Civilization, if such a thing still existed.
“Jesus, man, you just went right out there and fought 'em. With your fucking hands! Like, I just watched you punch a zombie in the face, for real,” she said, slightly awed.
Kell nodded.
“You a martial artist or something?”
“No,” he replied, laughing. “Not at all.”
“Okay, because I wasn't going to say anything, but that was pretty sloppy. A couple of them bit you, dude, but you didn't seem to notice. I had an uncle used to get into bar fights. You looked like him, just brawling.”
Kell shrugged and tapped a finger against one of the hard plates in his pants. “They can't bite me through this. And I don't care what it looked like. Got the job done.”
He had almost lost his balance a few times, though he didn't mention that. Every fight was a lesson in what mistakes not to make.
The woman scratched her head. “Well, we're heading south if you want to join us. There's a compound of some kind in central Kentucky we're joining up with. Rest of our people came through this morning, but they went around the west side of the city. We're taking a shortcut.”
“That,” Kell said, pointing toward the city, “is the worst shortcut in the known universe. Go around. You won't make it half a mile before you're swarmed and dead. There are probably fifty thousand of those things left in town.”
She recoiled in shock. Up in the cab, the driver swore and leaned his head out. He was an older man and clearly related to the woman. “Don't suppose you could give us directions, could you?”
The woman laughed. “I've been your daughter for twenty-five years, and that's a first.”
“Extenuating circumstances, Susie,” the driver said with a smile. “How about it, Mister?”
More zombies began to appear at the top of the hill, and Kell took a calming breath. “All right. Let's not do it here, though. I'll hop in the back. You turn around and head north. I'll guide you to a safe spot where we can talk.”
There were four of them crammed in the truck: Susan—Susie to her father, Glen, and no one else on pain of death—and two passengers that were family friends, Ronnie and Jeremy. The five of them sat in a clearing just off the highway. The travelers were unaware, but they brought Kell nearly all the way home.
From a pocket he produced a notebook and pencil. He began to sketch a map of the route, and Susan laughed. The others looked sideways at her.
“What?” she said. “Come on, he's dressed like that, covered in weapons, lives in the woods, and he carries around a neat little notebook? That's comedy gold.”
The youngest member of the group, Jeremy, was the only one to smile. Kell went back to drawing his map and tore the page out when he was done. “There,” he said. “That should take you safely around most of the swarms.” He stood to leave.
“Wait,” Glen said. “Look, we can take you with us. The place we're going is safe. You don't have to live out here on your own.”
For a moment, the profound loneliness inside him swelled up out of its cage. There was no sign of it on his face or in his mannerisms; but he did sit down. Glen took that as an opportunity to sell the place.
“It's a lot safer than Xenia, where we came from. They're working on a wall, and they're farming and everything. They even have internet access somehow, and--”
Kell leaned forward. “They have electricity?”
Possibilities moved through his brain at the speed of light. With power he could work on the solution. It would take him a long time to gather the supplies and machinery he would need, but eventually...
“Well, they have a little. Some solar panels and a few turbines. But man, that's just icing on the cake. They have food, weapons, security. We don't have room in the cab, but you're welcome to ride in the back and we can switch out in a few hours.”
There was a hopeful look on Glen's face, the sort of desperate need to help that came with watching too many good people die. Kell hesitated. Four months had passed since the last time he'd spoken to a living human being, and he found himself not wanting it to end. If he refused their offer, they would leave, and he would be alone again.
The place didn't sound ideal for his needs, but as he scanned the woods for threats and thought about the shack he lived in, he admitted his current situation was even worse.
“What kind of notes do you keep in there?” Jeremy asked.
Kell's attention moved back to his guests. “Observations, mostly. That's how I learned to fight them. I watch, remember, and write it down.”
The young man's eyebrows shot up. “Really? You just kind of observed your way into being a badass?”
“I wouldn't call myself that,” Kell said with a chuckle. “I've been in too many close calls. I wouldn't have even fought those ones earlier if you hadn't been there. They were distracted.”
“But you had survival training or something, right?” Jeremy eyed Kell's gear.
“No. Actually I figured out pretty early that those things operate strongly by smell. Normal people can douse themselves like I did with my cloak and walk right through them. The rest I learned at the library.”
Jeremy gaped at him, disbelieving. “What, like when you were a kid?”
Kell let out a laugh, the first real one he'd had in ages. “It was about three and a half months ago. I camped in there for four days, gathering everything I thought I'd need to learn. Must have read thirty, forty books since then.”
“Damn,” Jeremy said. “That's crazy. I can't imagine just reading about this stuff and doing it.”
“It wasn't perfect,” Kell said with a shrug. “There was a lot of trial and error, but I'm a scientist. I'm used to observing and learning from my mistakes.”
“What kind of scientist?” Susan asked, her pixie face curious.
Kell cleared his throat to buy time. This conversation was veering into dangerous territory.
“Doesn't really matter anymore,” he said, standing once more. “I don't want to slow you folks down more than I already have. I might make my way down that direction one day. Be safe.”
He walked over to the tree his where he'd draped his cloak and fastened it. A hand grasped his arm and turned him around.
Susan looked into his eyes, her neck craned to manage it.
“I know you're not used to being around people, but you can't stay out here. You'll get sloppy or unlucky someday, and you'll die. You can't survive forever by just...observing things. Eventually you'll need someone to watch your back. Hell, we could have been marauders for all you knew, and you walked into the street to fight with guns pointed your way.”
There was something in her tone that went straight into him. It was a tenderness, a fear for his safety entirely out of proportion to the scant time she'd known him. Understanding that helped him recognize the same chord of worry for them in his own heart. The origin was obvious, and even then his deeply analytical mind broke it down.
Humanity had been whittled down to scraps. When the endless mass of living people become rare creatures, it's so much easier to appreciate them as individuals.
Every one of them became precious.
He hardened his heart and let his expression turn neutral.
“You are from a community. I knew that at the very first; your haircut, clothes, the way you hold yourself and the way you react to violence. Your vehicle is well-maintained and designed for power a
nd speed, so you clearly had access to resources. You held your gun awkwardly, so you aren't that practiced with it. My guess is that you've only used it rarely, in emergencies.”
His eyes drilled into hers. “I won't join a group of people who think they have a handle on the world. You think I was fighting those things because I enjoy it? I do it often, because I have to. Because I don't want to end up like my family. The truth is, even if this compound you're heading for were a walled fort staffed by Green Berets, I would still stay here. Because I have no one left. There could be a thousand people around me. I would still be alone.”
The woods enveloped him as he walked away, and a minute later he heard the truck start and the crunch of gravel as it pulled off the shoulder.
Chapter Eleven
Five weeks later and Kell felt once again that he was in hell.
August in the Ohio Valley was as predictable as all the other months of the year were insanely variable; it was humid and hot. Barely past dawn, and the temperature outside had to be in the eighties already. Sweat beaded beneath his armor and ran into his boots. The cloak, at least, had been left at home. He didn't need it on hunting trips.
The tree stand was very basic, just a few salvaged boards nailed across branches. Sections of tall grass and undergrowth provided cover as he waited for dinner to saunter by. The bow grew heavy in his hands.
Only been up here an hour, he thought. Not for the first time he imagined what his life would be like if he had left with Susan and her father. People to talk to, regular meals that didn't require hauling his ass up a tree every few days.
In the world as it was now, it sounded almost like paradise.
A rustle in the woods below banished fantasies of showers and clean clothes. Motionless, he scanned for whatever had made the sound. Unlikely it was one of the undead, as they rarely made it this deep into the trees and didn't care for inclines if there wasn't prey to be had. He hoped for a deer. With the makeshift dehydrator he'd constructed—hand cranked but functional—he would be able to eat for a long, long time.
More likely it was a rabbit, and if so he would probably go without meat for a while. He had spent the first entire week at the cabin practicing with the bow, firing so many arrows that his arms ached too badly to let him sleep for hours after he laid down. He was a good shot, but the angles were funny and rabbits were small.
Then he it—a buck. Big one, too, and almost perfectly profiled only twenty yards away. Easing the bowstring back, he slowly shifted his weight. The only warning he had was a slight creak, and then his foot went straight through the tree stand's simple crosspiece.
Flailing madly as he fell, Kell managed to catch a branch with one hand. The practical effect was to slow his fall, with the unintended consequence of putting him into a spin as his hand slipped off the wide limb. He threw his arms over his face as he continued toward the ground, and the impact was jarring and unexpected.
Gravity came with a lot of silly rules, one of which was an agreement with the conservation of momentum that all laws needed to be obeyed. Kell hit the ground with enough force to stun him, and the sudden stop broke his right fibula.
It took him a long while to gather his wits. The pain in his leg was intense, making it difficult to concentrate. Nausea gripped his insides, but after a few minutes he began to laugh.
“Guess you were right after all, Susan,” he said to the woods around him.
The bow was next to the tree, broken and held together only by the string. The arrow was lost, probably sticking in the undergrowth near a whitetail buck busily thanking its deer version of Jesus for the miracle.
Ten incredibly torturous minutes later, the bow became a rough splint and Kell was standing after worming his way through the dirt to where he'd left his spear. He'd nearly screamed as he pulled himself upright, and he actually did so when he took that first experimental step.
His cabin was a mile away.
It took him until lunch to get there.
Along the way he snatched a long forked branch to use as a crutch, but it dug into him sharply. It was an angry, upset man who finally flopped down on his bed. It was a man who finally realized he had wasted almost half a year. Not because he was injured and needed others; the break seemed to be clean. But because he had been fooling himself, and knew it.
He had told himself the cabin was safe. That it was as good as any place to live given that he had no means to work on the solution to the plague. That if he were going to continue on, it should be away from other people. Because he didn't believe he deserved to live among them. At best it was half a life, and Kell wondered what his parents and Karen would think if they could see him now.
It took him hours to pack, and after he fell into a deep, nearly comatose sleep.
When he woke, consciousness came with the sharp memory of a bottle of pills tucked away in a storage container. Another slow and painful ten minutes later, and his prize was in his hand. Two small oval pills. He almost moaned in satisfaction.
Heavy painkillers. Praise god. He downed them dry.
Half an hour later, things began to get much easier. Also, Kell felt happy. The fussy, practical part of him recognized this as only a side effect of the medicine, but stoned Kell told that part to shut the hell up. He hobbled to the front door and looked down into the valley below and saw the SUV at the bottom, pointed toward the road and ready to roll.
Glancing back at all the accumulated stuff in the cabin, he grabbed a few more items and stuffed them in the huge pack. There was no way he would be able to pull the rest of his vegetables, so he would have to forage on the way.
The question was, on the way where?
One unpleasant and shaky walk down the hill later, Kell was trying to figure out how to drive without using his right foot. That was a complication he hadn't considered as he made his way down the slope, pausing to shove the heavy bag full of his possessions tumbling down ahead of him.
After a few minutes of effort he managed it, but driving was awkward. As the SUV pulled away from the place that had been his home for most of the year, he gave it one more long look.
“Fuck that hill,” he said.
A few minutes later he took another pill, careful not to overdo it but aware that a full dose of pain would be almost as bad. After an hour he had to pull over, overcome with the absurdity that he was living in the zombie apocalypse and had spent his morning complaining to himself about having to drive with the wrong foot.
God, my priorities are screwed.
The going was slow, but he was really doing it. Susan had made it clear that people were welcome in the compound down in Kentucky, provided they behaved. Part of him longed to see people he knew, even if only from a single meeting. The idea that he could be greeted with warmth, be recognized, was similar to the feeling you got as a kid when you were done playing in the snow and came inside to sit by the fire.
So he headed north.
As much as he wanted to embrace the feeling, he couldn't allow it. Susan and her people knew he was a scientist, and even that was too much for his comfort. All it would take was one moment of weakness, for him to tell a single soul who he was, and the solution he had pondered for months would be gone from the world. He knew that much in his bones; it was exactly what he had done to Jones, after all. The man had taken his wife and daughter from Kell, even if only in a roundabout way, but he was responsible. Anyone who knew his part in the plague would be almost morally compelled to kill him, and he wouldn't blame them.
The danger wasn't running into a person who knew the truth, but that he would reveal it himself. He had suppressed the urge during his brief meeting with Susan and her bunch, but like any repentant murderer, his crimes weighed on his soul.
Nearly the entire population of the planet. A heavy burden.
Which was why he went north. Theoretically there was a small chance he might run into his parents, who were no one's fool and wouldn't dream of mentioning their son's occupation to a soul. He doubt
ed they were still alive, but if they were and if by some miracle he found them, then he would at least have two people he could confess to safely.
If not, well, the north was an unknown variable, which suited him. Strangers were easy to be guarded with, and his experience with Susan deepened his resolve to give away as little as possible about himself.
Science, after all. Observe, record, learn.
Kell looked down at the flat tire.
“Hm,” he said to it. The tire did not reply.
A hundred and twenty miles north of Cincinnati, just before the Lima exit, the roads grew more dangerous. The debris was sparse at first, pieces of scorched metal here and there which were easily avoided. A few miles short of the exit the minefield of metal shards and some other leavings of civilization grew more dense, but it was so subtle and slow Kell's narcotic-riddled brain barely registered the change. He altered his path but didn't see a larger significance to them.
Then, within sight of the exit, he ran over what looked like a discarded blanket on the road.
The front passenger tire blew instantly, and further inspection showed the blanket hid a shallow depression in the road. The missing chunk was four inches deep and square, a foot and a half on a side. There were small spikes studded through the hole, and Kell was at a loss to explain them. Was it some kind of zombie trap, intended to slow the undead down as their feet were impaled on the sharp metal?
Interesting, but not relevant.
With a constant eye to the road to check for unwelcome visitors, Kell slowly went about changing the tire. Several times his gaze fell back to the depression in the road. He had only backed away from it a few feet, and its presence nagged at him as he worked.
The SUV jacked up, he pulled the wheel off. That was when the sound of an engine roaring to life cut across the quiet afternoon like a peal of thunder.
Down the exit ramp came a vehicle resembling something that resulted from a drunken night of passion between a pickup truck and a tank. There were pieces of metal welded over the windows and windshield, bits of armor added to key locations around the paneling. Kell gave it a glance as it came toward him and continued to work.
