by Joshua Guess
He sighed. “You know I hate it when you call me that. Unless you and Jem finally broke up and you’re gonna do it in the heat of passion. Then it’s cool.”
I made a buzzing noise. “Nope. Wrong answer. Dude just traveled hundreds of miles to spring me from jail. I’m gonna do things to that man that will almost certainly earn me a spot in the worst circles of hell.”
Gregory laughed. “Hey, I helped.”
“When we get somewhere safer, you’ll get my firmest handshake for it,” I said.
The sound of gunfire grew distant, and with it the safety the fort provided. This became very clear to everyone as Gregory slid to a halt, putting his arms out wide to keep anyone from running past him.
“Deadfall. Fuck.”
Deadfalls were clumps of sleeping—or more accurately, inert—zombies often found in wooded areas. The popular theory was they chose the woods because it offered protection from easy line of sight, preventing living people from easily killing them before they could ‘wake’ and get moving. They also made super-efficient traps for people unlucky enough to stumble across them. Like us.
I didn’t joke about Gregory running us into the thing. I knew from Ellis that he’d been camped in the woods near the fort for a few days, and any number of zombies could have filtered through in that time. This deadfall wasn’t quiescent; they had heard us coming or felt the ground tremble under seven pairs of feet.
Without missing a beat, Gregory pulled one of the knives from his belt and a baton from its sheath on his left leg. The knife he kept, the other he tossed to me.
“Just like old times,” he said as the already-moving zombies finished rising and stumbled toward us.
18
I flicked the baton to extend it, felt the rush of the Shivers, and was promptly knocked to the side by a form blowing past me as it bumped my hip.
“Whaaaat the fuck,” I drawled as I witnessed what was, I shit you not, the most impressive thing I have ever seen in my life.
Anthony and Samantha had moved forward in almost perfect unison. The pair of them waded into the dozen or so zombies like they were fifth-grade bullies hardly worth their attention. Anthony moved so fast it elicited surprise from the zombie he attacked first, a rare expression of remnant human emotions. The kid stunned it with a fierce sideways elbow to the temple, then grabbed its jaw and base of its skull and twisted.
Breaking a neck with brute force borders on the impossible. In movies there’s this simple twist and the guy drops, but the human neck is super important and nature abhors making vital spots vulnerable. The neck is a column of bone and dense muscle designed to protect the spinal cord.
What Anthony did was called a hangman’s break, which is exactly what it sounds like. He pushed the back of the neck forward, yanked the jaw nearly straight up, and replicated with his bare fucking hands the sort of force needed to snap a neck you see in a hanging or a car wreck without a seat belt.
I knew offhand how much energy that took because I was a statistics nerd, and seeing anyone do it, even a Trigger, was well outside my wildest expectation.
But that kid didn’t even let the body fall before moving on to his next target.
Samantha used the stiff lack of coordination in zombies to her advantage, knocking a pair into each other while she bowled over a third. The zombie beneath her tried to claw at her, and she responded by raising a knee, catching its wrist, and shattering its forearm with the latter against the former.
Then the rapid, almost mechanical rise and fall of her fists sent echoing snaps of breaking facial bones into the night.
I shook off my shock and stepped up to help. Anthony picked up a zombie in an overhead press, one hand white-knuckled around its belt, and drove it face first into a tree. Both its arms flopped uselessly, clearly broken but still trying to cushion the impact.
It didn’t help.
I heard someone get sick behind me with a wet splash. Had I not been riding high on my own Shivers rush, I probably would’ve been right there with them.
I misjudged my swing. Not by much, maybe two inches. But that miss turned what should have been a crater an inch across in the tough bone of a zombie skull into a shot that skipped across it without slowing the thing down a bit. The zombie had an extra second where my defenses were basically nonexistent, and it used that time to get in close.
I shoved my empty hand under the shelf of its jaw and pushed up. I lacked Anthony’s terrible strength and had no leverage in any case, so the best I could do as we topple to the ground was keep it from biting me in the face.
It was awkward. My left hand was shoved up, crossed over my right which was trapped between the two of us. My shirt rode up to expose my belly as we scrabbled on the detritus littering the forest floor, stones and fallen branches digging into my back as one claw-like hand worked hard against the skin of my gut, trying to tear a hole to get to the tasty bits.
Its other hand raked my left arm, ragged nails and exposed bone at a few fingertips slicing long sections of my skin to ribbons.
One thing I’d forgotten about the Shivers was how much it increased pain sensitivity. A supernova of agony went off inside my head, white-hot wires leading from my arm and stomach and shooting impulses into my brain until I thought it would explode. I’d have screamed if my throat hadn’t constricted with the sudden wash of agony.
My vision narrowed and darkened. I wasn’t passing out, but something worse. Nero pushing itself harder, pumping me full of more god-knew-what kinds of chemicals to sharpen my survival impulse to a molecule’s thickness.
Like a Reaver, rational thought dropped away. Things like abstract concepts and compassion were just gone. I only retained a basic understanding of my surroundings amid the overwhelming animal instinct to kill, to run, to live any way I could make it happen.
I wrenched my right arm loose with a painful heave, something in my shoulder popping with a meaty sound. I drove my right thumb into the zombie’s left eye all the way to the back of its eye socket, then yanked its head sideways.
It was enough to get the damn thing to stop scratching me to death for a pair of seconds, not nearly enough to get free, much less win.
Then a pair of dark-skinned hands appeared, grabbed the zombie’s wrists, and pulled them backward. It looked a bit like the zombie was zipped away from me by a rope attached to a catapult, it was gone so suddenly. A smaller burst of pain came from my thumb as the rough exit from the zombie’s face scraped it.
I’d love to say I got up and fought on, but I didn’t. The last thought I had before I lost consciousness was frustration with myself for not pulling the gun I’d taken from John. Mixed with it was a little vindication.
At least I grabbed his medical kit.
Ran Lawson’s list of ways not to wake up:
1) by having someone scrub pieces of leaves and bark out of a dozen open wounds.
End of list.
I didn’t just startle awake, I fucking catapulted into full-throttle consciousness like a starship going to warp from a dead stop. I tried to sit up and when that didn’t work because hands were pushing me down, I tried to punch someone—anyone, really—in the face because ow holy shit why would you do this to me?
“Stop moving, goddammit,” Samantha said, the black veins in her neck flared dark with the effort of holding me down. “This isn’t fun for me, either.”
Anthony was at my legs, nearly crushing them in his arms as he tried to keep me still.
“I’m almost done, sweetheart,” Julia said. “Please bear with me.”
We were jostling a lot, I noticed. The world was coming back into focus again. Or rather, my focus was expanding to encompass the world instead of narrowly zeroing in on pain and rage. It took a few more seconds to understand we were in the back of a moving pickup truck, and one that was fairly booking it down a darkened road.
“What happened?” I asked in a half-scream through gritted teeth.
Julia’s hands didn’t pause in their work a
s she glanced at my face. “You passed out. Probably from the pain. Anthony carried you the rest of the way once he was done, er, cleaning up.”
Flashes of the young, unassuming man displaying the strength of a professional strongman lit behind my eyes. It wasn’t anything a regular person couldn’t do in an emergency, like a mother hyped up on adrenaline lifting the back end of a car off her child, but to do it continuously that way couldn’t be good for him.
Or for me.
“How long?” I gasped, biting back another scream as what felt like sandpaper scoured the wounds in my arm.
“Until we get where we’re going? No idea.” This time it was Samantha who spoke. “If you’re asking how long you were out, about fifteen minutes. We really hauled ass.”
The pain in my arm suddenly dropped off to a dull burn and Julia sat back. “There. That will do for now. Try not to move, though. I can’t dress your wounds moving like this, so I wrapped a shirt around your arm and taped it tight.”
“Thank you,” I said. “All of you.”
Samantha let the pressure off me slowly. “You’re welcome. Thanks for getting us free. Though from what your friend said after you passed out, it might not be for long.”
I shot her a curious look. “Why?”
“Radio in the cab started blowing up as soon as Gregory turned on the ignition,” Anthony said, now resting back on his heels. “The soldiers the colonel led out of here apparently got free of the trap your friends set a lot faster than they planned on.”
Samantha nodded. “Phillips isn’t an idiot. He had to at least assume there was a chance someone would take a shot at the fort. Word over the radio was Phillips has units moving on foot and with vehicles all over the roads. Unless we want to walk through miles of woods to slip the net, we’re trapped in a circle of soldiers about ten miles wide and shrinking fast.”
For a few seconds I wondered whether Jem’s plan to take out the trucks and leave all those soldiers stranded had failed. Maybe, or it could have partially worked and left them with a few functional ones. I decided it didn’t matter, because when it came to the kind of preparations and logistics needed for warfare, Phillips and his people were damned smart. In their position, I would have seeded the area around the fort with vehicles and spread what gas I could find between their tanks. We were closing in on the time when old fuel would start to go bad and become useless, but for all I knew there were other bases out there with small refineries and lots of crude oil to work with.
Escape was great, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t help feeling our situation reminiscent of frying pans and fires. It must have showed on my face, because Samantha gave me a sympathetic look.
“Yeah, it doesn’t look good. Been listening through the window,” she said, hiking a thumb at the open space at the back of the cab. “Sounds like we’ll be able to meet up with the rest of your guys no problem, but we can’t exactly outrun a couple hundred soldiers who have wheels. Not that trying to walk in the open far enough away to be safe would count as a high-probability survival situation.”
“But you’re smiling,” I said.
The smile in question widened. “Fuck yes I am. Out here at least there’s a chance. If I’m gonna die, I’d much rather do it running under my own power, trying to stay free. Better than being poked and prodded and run to death like all the others.”
I had spent long days and nights talking with the group about the many lies I had been told, lies even good people like Garcia believed to be true. The pervasive idea that some test subjects chose to stay became unbelievable when you became one yourself. Yet the false belief persisted in those who weren’t. Mix wishful thinking with a bit of not seeing the full picture and add a dash of denial. Bake to perfection.
It wasn’t as if the soldiers were present when John did exactly as Samantha said and ran a man named George so hard and long that he collapsed on the treadmill and died. Not even a Trigger, just a carrier. A normal person. George was just one of many stories they told me. My own weeks had been bad but not terrible, though the trend had certainly been a downward one.
I tried to imagine what it had been like for them after months of watching friends suffer and die with no movement toward a cure. Knowing those lives were being wasted and that they could be next.
I couldn’t. I had lived just enough of it to grasp the edges, but my mind could not conceive of the whole.
“Die free,” I muttered. “If we have to, I guess that’ll do. But I’d much rather live.”
19
Fact: most of the ways trauma kills human beings can be simplified to lack of oxygen. Blood loss is what gets written down on paper, but it’s the lack of hemoglobin carrying oxygen which accounts for the actual death.
Another fact I learned during my time as a guinea pig was that for its many other qualities, Nero does some weird mojo to our bodies and makes the infected, especially Triggers, capable of carrying much more oxygen in their tissues and using it more efficiently. Which translates into better cardio and an ability to hold my breath for four minutes without passing out.
So on a purely intellectual level, I knew the breathless moment when I saw Jem again and the head-spinning that came with it, wasn’t a physical reaction.
We raced to each other across a secluded field of tall grass, the designated meeting spot, our embrace lit only by the half-moon in the clear night sky.
We embraced each other fiercely, each holding the other with the bone-crushing strength of people certain they would never meet again in this life.
“God, I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said into my hair as his face nestled in it. His voice caught in his throat.
Me? I was crying my eyes out. I’m generally not weepy, but fuck you if you think I’ll feel bad about it or apologize. “Same here. How many did you lose?”
You might think the question would break the romance of the moment, but you would be wrong. It was emotional, sure, and damned satisfying, but it was not romantic. I was bloody and dirty and neither of us had bathed recently enough to matter. It was also cold. Unless a septic tank erupted out of the ground at that moment to vomit its contents on us, the imagination faltered when considering how to make the scene less romantic.
“None,” Jem said, tight pride in his voice. “We kept a distance. We weren’t aiming to kill, just distract. Our guys weren’t close enough to be in much real danger.”
I pulled away from him, met his eyes. “You’ll probably be thankful for that decision before this is done. How many of the colonel’s men do you think died back at wherever you trapped them?”
He shrugged. “Considering how fast they got free, probably not many. If any. We set it up so they’d be stuck between a couple cliff faces on this road cut into a hill. Wrecked some vehicles at one end, then when they drove through and saw that, caused a rockfall behind them. Zombies at either end of the road. Boxed them in.”
I did that face where you frown but you’re actually showing you’re impressed. I think of it as the De Niro face. “Smart. How’d it go wrong?”
“Not a clue,” Jem said, and I felt a little thrill at the simple words. One thing I really dug about the guy were straightforward admissions like that. He didn’t bullshit or equivocate to make himself sound smarter or better. When he said a thing, you could take it to the bank that it represented the truth as Jem saw it.
He looked down and brushed a finger against my injured arm. “How bad is that?”
“Probably going to need like a thousand stitches,” I said lightly. “Fortunately my mutant healing factor will keep it from scarring too badly.”
He jerked his head to one side. “Come on, then. One of the guys I brought was a corpsman when he was younger. He should be able to patch you up while we figure out our next move.”
The field we sat in was surrounded by woods but for the deeply rutted path just wide enough for our pickup cutting through them. Chances were excellent the soldiers would be keeping watch on roads in and out of the are
a rather than spreading themselves thin enough to check every potential hiding spot. In the short term it was a great place to lay low. I suspected Phillips would have ordered his people to scour the area when they moved here, learning the lay of the land to a fault, but there were only so many bodies to spare for a search.
The guy who worked on my arm and stomach did indeed have the crisp, practiced hands of someone who’d treated his share of battlefield wounds, though his appearance and manner were that of an old hippie. Right down to the ponytail and an abundance of visible chest hair. I knew him by sight if not by name. He introduced himself as Nicholas.
As soon as I came to a stop, another Nik greeted me. My giant dog either broke free of whoever was holding his leash or gave enough of a fight to make the person give up on the job, because that heavy bastard assaulted me with doggy kisses. With one arm being held down and injected with various things, I couldn’t do much to protect myself from the love-fest. I seemed to have conveniently forgotten every command word that would have done the job for me.
“You realize we can’t just go back home,” I said to Jem, who was sitting on the ground next to the sleeping bag I was laying on.
He nodded. “Worked that one out before we even got here. It was always a problem. They know where we live. Even if we could just drive away, there’s nothing stopping them from going there and doing this all over again.”
“Well, not nothing,” I said, stressing the word. “I have to imagine Phillips will know we wouldn’t give up without a fight twice. Not knowing what we do now.”
Jem regarded me flatly. “And him knowing that, you think his decision would be to just back off and not even bother? Or would he come at us without mercy.”
Which was the same as asking me whether the man was what he appeared to be, a dedicated officer trying to make the best of a terrible situation, or if he would let the more violent human impulses drive him to something like revenge. Though I doubted Phillips would see it that way. He’d think of it as destroying a proven enemy before they could strike at his people again. And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that assessment.
