by Joshua Guess
It was nearly twenty minutes before Phillip was able to excuse himself from the crowd, Kell watching him the entire time. Laura appeared as Phillip was leaving, passing him as she approached Kell. Something about the way the older man looked or moved caught her attention. When she made it to him, she ladled a drink from the bucket and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“What's with him?” she asked.
After a brief moment of consideration, Kell smirked. “Had a rough fight out here. He's not used to it.”
“He looked like he was about to shit himself.”
“Might have been the fact that zombies were trying to rip his face off,” Kell replied. “But I suppose he's a little worried what's going to happen since he tried to make my left kidney into a kebab.”
Laura cocked her head. “I don't follow.”
He unsnapped his vests at the shoulders and turned them around on his body, fingers easily finding the slice made by the knife. “He tried to stab me. Lucky for my renal system, there was a ceramic plate in the way.”
He said it in a matter-of-fact tone, but his eyes tightened. Laura stared at the damage to his vest as if she were looking at some alien artifact totally beyond her comprehension.
“You're telling me he tried to stab you?”
“Well, technically he did stab me, he just didn't do it very well. I would call his stabbiness amateur but enthusiastic. He broke the tip of his blade in there.”
Laura punched him in the shoulder hard enough that it hurt even through the mail sandwiched between the layers of his sleeves. “This isn't a joke, K! This guy tried to kill you. In cold blood, during a fucking battle!”
The calm expression on his face cracked, the tiny smile drifting away. “I know it's not funny. But if I don't joke then I have to think about it seriously.”
Laura ran her fingers over the vest, then looked up at him. “You have to tell Jack. Right now.”
Jack was the leader of the Complex, the man who gathered people together in the first place and coordinated everyone's efforts to create a home. Kell had never seen the man, but had heard good things.
“No. Absolutely not.”
Laura frowned at him, but it wasn't the disbelieving stare she would have given such a statement a month before.
“No argument?” he asked.
“Not an immediate one, anyway,” she replied, studying his face. “You always have reasons for the ridiculous shit you do. I imagine you've got one this time, too.”
“I do,” Kell said. “The last thing I want is to make a big, public scene. I don't want everyone to start looking at me, and even if we go to Jack and he sides with us, Phillip is the kind of man who has people in his corner. I'm pretty sure if anything happens between us out in the open, it will make me highly recognizable instantly, and I'll have several new enemies. This way at least I know who I'm up against.”
“That...actually makes sense.”
A slow, dark smile spread across his face. “I don't want the attention, and he knows I'm watching him now. I like the idea that he'll have trouble sleeping.”
Laura was silent for a long time as they walked back home. It was, he thought, a companionable sort of quiet, but halfway there she broke it with a question. Her voice was soft and curiously neutral.
“Who were you?”
The simplicity of it brought every moment of the previous year back to him at once. Jennifer's birth, breakthroughs at work, the death and destruction and guilt, the final moment when his mind shut down the parts he couldn't handle. The parts that had been reluctantly coming back online as he spent more time around people.
“I don't want...I can't tell you that. I wasn’t anyone important.”
“Then why the secrecy?”
He found himself wanting to tell her, badly needing to explain his part in the plague. It was an urge based on a desire for absolution, but also one that hinged on the possibility that he would be punished. The guilt weighed on him so much more here among the living, and a small fraction of him wanted someone to take the load from him.
At the end of a blade or the barrel of a gun, most likely.
Laura couldn't understand that even though Phillip's attack had nothing to do with his past, the act itself didn't fill him with indignant rage. It was what he deserved, or so he thought in those low moments.
He sighed. “It's hard to say why I can't tell you without telling you, do you see?”
“Something top secret, then? Did you work for the government or something? I kind of thought that when I saw you fight that fist time.”
Kell smiled. “Then you learned how very hodgepodge my little system is, and the idea that I was a secret agent evaporated.”
“Something like that,” she said. “Look, K, we've all done bad things since everything fell apart. I'm willing to listen if you want to talk. If it's really bad I might go to Jack about it, but I don't know what could be so terrible that you don't even want people to know your name.”
They arrived home; Kate was inside making dinner. She waved and told them to sit. There was enough food for five people, and Kate portioned it out so Kell got a double helping. He knew better than to argue, since she always cooked on days he and Laura had to fight. The first time he tried to split the food evenly, her hand snapped out almost too fast to see, digging into a nerve complex in his arm and numbing it from the elbow down. She threatened to do the other one as well, then force-feed him.
“Thanks,” Kell told her as he took the plate.
As they ate he filled Kate in on the details of the day, leaving nothing out. She didn't ask to see the vest. The second telling brought another surge of guilt through him, and he could see the questions, the doubts, in Laura's eyes. Kate, however, seemed to accept that Kell had secrets. The idea his silence might drive a wedge between them was unbearable.
In the end he decided to tell them the truth. Just not all of it.
As he served dessert—a simple turnover cut into three parts—he calmed himself.
“I can't tell you all of it,” he said. “But both of you deserve to know what I can tell you. But fair warning: you may not want me to live here after I tell you.”
Laura nibbled her turnover and motioned for him to continue. Kate, seeing the strain on his face at the thought of revisiting those events, shocked him by putting a hand over his.
“Take your time,” she told him.
“When everything started to go bad, I was living in Cincinnati. You guys know that. My wife Karen and our newborn, Jennifer, lived in the city. I worked for a man who was trying to get a handle on the plague. This was really early on, you understand. The very beginning.”
Kate and Laura were paying attention. It was the first either had ever heard about his life before.
“This man, he was part of the response teams the government sent in. I wasn't one of his agents. I was more of a subcontractor. My company was trying to figure out how to slow the plague down, maybe stop it. I was working as a lab tech.”
The lie cut at him, but there was nothing for that.
“I knew the shit was about to hit the fan, so I called Karen, told her to go to my parents and leave town with them. The man I was working for found out about it. He stopped my wife and daughter from leaving.”
He closed his eyes, the memory of them sharp as broken glass, but filling him with warmth all the same. A deep, shuddering breath nearly became a sob as their deaths replayed in his mind.
“They died. Right in front of me. God, saying that is like saying a hurricane is a rough storm. I fucking watched them get torn apart not three feet away, and there was nothing I could do.”
Laura shook her head, scrubbing a hand across he eyes. Kate's face fell, again reaching out to touch Kell. “I'm so sorry,” she said.
“That's not the end of it. I made it back to the place we were working from. I went up to the office where this man, this bastard who kept my family there, was working. I confronted him. I had him cold, no chance he could
even fight back.”
Kell's eyes grew distant with the memory, the sense of icy satisfaction, empty as it was.
“I shot him in the face. I have never for a second felt any guilt over it.”
Shaking off the anger he still felt for Jones, Kell glanced at them. “I murdered a man. Not for survival, not because he was going to hurt someone else. For revenge. And I would do it again, a thousand times. No hesitation.”
Laura only watched, misery on her face. It was Kate who spoke next.
“Do you think we would have done differently if we had the chance? What those men did, taking our husbands? We would have killed them for it if we could have. No question.”
“It's different,” Kell said.
Kate shook her head. “It's not. Not at all. You killed that man because he was responsible for the death of your wife and child. We would have done the same for the sake of our husbands, much less what came later.”
“Yeah, but I did that when there were only a few casualties from the plague. The rules hadn't changed.”
Laura chuckled bitterly. “You're confusing the law with what's right, K. You ignored one to follow the other.”
He pondered her words, leaning back in his chair. Relief washed over him. Telling even an edited version of the story was like unclenching a fist held too tight for too long.
“If you want,” Laura said after a minute. “You could tell us about your family. I'd like to hear, anyway. But it's okay if you don't want to go there.”
They spent a long time talking, though for once it was mostly his voice filling the small home. And it was a home, he realized. It wasn't perfect or even really comfortable in the physical sense, but with Kate and Laura he felt safe for the first time in ages. He felt accepted.
Somewhere along the way Laura produced a bottle of what had once been a very expensive bourbon, the kind of thing rich people drank to impress. Kell regaled them with every awkward, embarrassing story he could think of about him and Karen. Their first date was a given, of course, and the time they'd gone hiking and decided to have sex in the woods only to realize they were right in the path of one of those watchtowers where people could look out through a scope for a mile in every direction.
He told them about his proposal, which started with a clever scavenger hunt and ended in a real search when the ring came up missing. There was the time he fell off the bed one night and woke up the following morning, alone under the covers and trapped under what turned out to be eleven rolls of plastic wrap looped around the entire bed. To keep him safe, Karen told him.
Kate, Laura, and Kell got drunk. Laura revealed herself to be a lightweight and a giggler, which made Kell laugh so hard he almost vomited. Kate was the introspective type, but it loosened her up enough that eventually she started telling stories of her own.
Kell felt it, but his body mass made the bourbon go a lot further. He was relaxed, tipsy, but in control. It was, after the day he'd had, exactly the release the doctor ordered. In light of his losses, a man trying to kill him seemed trivial and stupid. The women came up with more and more complicated ideas as to how he should handle Phillip, each more daring and ridiculous than the last. One involved a slow poison over the course of a year. Another called for an elaborate love triangle followed by treachery and a thin length of piano wire.
It was those silly ideas that finally set him on a definite course; he didn't want to deal with it, so he wouldn't. He would just ignore Phillip until and unless the other man decided enough was enough.
Kell had plenty of practice ignoring his problems, after all.
Chapter Fifteen
The battle lasted for three days. Kell spent most of that time manning a position on the wall. Defending the gaps became pointless when the main body of the zombie swarm finally came into the open, thousands at once, all flooding toward the empty spaces in the wall.
Vehicles and steel plates were brought in, covering all but one exit. That last gate was used to send out harriers in an effort to thin the herd. He watched it happen from his position.
In the end they survived; it wouldn't have been possible without the people from the south, from Kentucky. He wondered briefly if anyone he knew lived there, if it was the final destination of Glen and company. The thought was equally appealing and disturbing.
The southerners brought men and equipment with them, but also ideas. The brightest of them found ways to slow the swarm, mostly with water that froze to the undead and weighed them down. A collection of people came up with the idea to use their access to electricity and abundance of raw wire to electrocute parts of the herd. Kell thought it was brilliant.
But he avoided telling anyone.
In the days that followed he overheard several of the visitors ask how the northern people had developed their methods of fighting the undead. It seemed the Kentuckians favored an even more hodgepodge approach to combat. Though he didn't hear his name mentioned, his fellow citizens were free with the information that a recent arrival had survived in the wild on his own.
It was only after their visitors finally left that Kell made the conscious decision to become as unimportant, as unnoticeable, as he could.
Laura gave him the solution he needed.
A week after Phillip's failed stabbing, Kell gave in to the constant stream of suggestions coming from his roommates. Three hours of sitting at the table listening to Kate and Laura explain that if he wasn't going to expose his attacker, if in fact he wasn't going to do anything about it at all (which both of them disagreed with), then he had to spend as much time away as possible.
“You hit him right in the pride in front of people at that first meeting,” Laura said. “And now he's tried to kill you. He's going to be scared and desperate, and that's just going to be worse with you here where he can bump into you.”
“I can just tell him we're square,” Kell said. “Bygones and all that bullshit.”
Kate shook her head and chimed in. “What, did you grow up in a commune or something? This guy tried to stab you because you made him look bad. You tell him everything's cool, he's going to take it as you trying to make him drop his guard so you can kill him.”
Kell's eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “Why would he think that? I don't understand.”
Laura lowered her forehead into her hand. “You're completely hopeless when it comes to people. Did you never have to deal with office politics or anything? I mean, seriously, this stuff is not hard.”
Kell shrugged. “It doesn't make sense to me, honestly. If I just tell him I'm not coming after him, then--”
“You're going to have to trust us on this one, K. You're frighteningly naïve in some ways. You need to get out of here, stay out of sight,” Kate said.
“Yeah, but how?”
Laura's eyes lit up. “You should volunteer for supply runs, or scouting. No one wants to do those. And I hear there are supposed to be more people coming to live here, so there will be need.”
Kell snorted. “Hope they have an easier time of getting accepted than I did.”
Kate waved a hand at him dismissively. “Whatever, man. You're alive, aren't you? Besides, we're at a point now where small groups joining big ones like ours is inevitable. Those people from the compound in Kentucky have been taking in people since day one, and it worked out pretty well for them. We have to grow if we're going to survive.”
It didn't take much deliberation on his part; Kell liked living with his friends, but found himself missing the purity of being on his own, just him versus the panoply of challenges out there.
“Do you think you could put in a good word for me with the people who arrange the supply runs?” Kell asked Laura.
“Actually,” she replied with an evil grin. “I meant to mention it when I got home today, but we got into this whole conversation. I've been put in charge of planning them, starting tomorrow. Apparently each section leader is splitting responsibilities among people beneath them. They're anticipating a much larger workload w
hen the new arrivals start coming in, and want to spread the work out among people who can handle it.”
Kell smirked at her. “So how'd you get the job, then?”
She punched him in the arm. “Do you want to start doing runs or not? Because I can have Kate here do my light work for me and break your legs.”
“Yeah, sounds like fun,” Kell said.
This is not fun, Kell thought.
His first run, two weeks later, was as the junior member of a pair. The idea was to show the new runner the ropes by giving them a partner who had completed at least four runs themselves. Kell's mentor—they actually gave that title to the more experienced runner, which made not bursting into laughter a constant chore—was a gruff older man whose name Kell still didn't know.
It was something Slavic, and it started with a 'P', but the man's accent was so thick and the name was so garbled every time Kell asked that after the third try he gave it up as a lost cause. Kell and P, the irony of thinking of the man by a single letter of his name not lost on him, left the Complex early in the morning. By noon they had stopped at one of the waypoints set up by other runners, small camps made safe by the addition of trailers or shipping containers that were proof against the undead.
P was one of the old guard who remained too cautious about the undead to risk going up against them for the sake of a good find. P would fight, had even done so twice that morning as they cleared a few zombies from the road, but never near or inside a building if he could avoid it.
He told Kell this repeatedly in his dense accent as they drove on their assigned route. “Never enter building with undead nearby,” he said. “Never try to clear outside of building by force. You never know what will pop up around a corner.” When Kell questioned the logic of those rules, P responded with a question.
“Have you seen horror movies?” P asked.
“Uh, sure, yeah, I have,” Kell replied, nonplussed.
