by Joshua Guess
He had tried to compensate for the movement of the truck by aiming where it was going to be rather than where it was, and it worked. Sort of. Rather than take the man standing on the left in the bed of the truck in the chest, his arrow skipped against the roof of the truck and into the shoulder of the man on the right.
Wasting no time, Kell drew and fired a second time. The men riding in the truck bed wised up, however. They ducked. Kell held another arrow ready just in case. His eroded capacity for fear sprang to surprising life as he followed the lone biker—who was almost certainly a scout from his group—thread the needle between speed bumps to approach the compound.
A quick glance confirmed that several people stood prepared by the small gate to the right of the main gate to let the scout through. If necessary, the motorcycle could drive straight in, though it would require a tight swerve to fit.
That chance didn't come. Kell's throat constricted as the rider began to lose speed, the lumbering truck surging forward in response like a predator making the final approach on its prey.
Kell found himself with his feet suddenly on the ground again, bellowing as he sprinted for the auxiliary door. Surprised faces turned toward him, though he only noticed peripherally. His attention was focused on the failing motorcycle still struggling to close the last fifty feet. It clearly wasn't going to make it; the thing was wobbling now, going too slow to maintain balance.
Someone tossed Kell a spear as he rushed the door, which was opened by citizens caught off guard by his shouting. Once through the gate Kell loped down the road in huge strides, and it was only when the barrel of a rifle appeared over the roof of the truck that he realized he didn't have much of a plan.
Story of my life, he thought.
The next thirty seconds seemed to happen all at once. Kell had just enough time to take a mental snapshot of what was happening. He responded on pure instinct as he dashed at a long angle to meet the motorcycle.
What he saw were guns being aimed from the truck even as shots from inside the wall pelted the vehicle's armor. Kell knew the defenders were trying to avoid hitting the biker, making it nearly impossible to get in clean shots. Ever a problem-solver, Kell did the only thing he could.
He threw his spear with every ounce of strength he could manage on the run, and at the end of his throw jumped to intersect the biker. His momentum was more than sufficient to pull the rider away. Kell tensed as they tumbled to the side of the road, rolling his body to cushion the rider from the impact.
Something snapped in his shoulder when they hit the ground, wrenching a scream from Kell so loud it hurt his own ears. The shout was drowned out a second later by a torrent of gunfire from the compound. Kell made the mistake of turning his head to see if the bullets took care of the enemy, making whatever had broken slide around, bone grating on bone.
Kell passed out.
“Lay still, you silly bastard,” a voice said.
Kell's eyes opened glacially slow, the ratcheting of his eyelids a supreme effort. Rational Kell, the little corner of his brain bent on observing and connecting nearly every piece of information he encountered with clinical detachment, noted the familiar flavor to the fuzziness in his head.
“Cotton candy,” Kell said, and then laughed.
“Come again?” said the voice.
“My head is filled with cotton candy,” Kell said, clearly unsure why the voice was so confused.
“Did you break my best friend, John?” a new voice asked this one softer. Rational Kell interpreted this—correctly—to mean the speaker was female.
His eyes finally opened enough to see, and adjusted to the low light. He was in the lab, which doubled as a clinic when needed. John stood next to Kell, his face worried. Laura, who Kell had been close with for years, stood next to John. Beside her was a leather-clad figure holding a motorcycle helmet. This last person was...Emily. Yeah, that was her name. She was one of their scouts. She was covered in dust and dirt.
“You should take a bath,” Kell said to Emily.
Laura's expression somehow managed to convey worry and amusement at the same time. “Okay, he's not broken. Just stoned.”
“Give him a few minutes,” John said. “The effects will wear off fast.”
This prediction proved to be true; in a quarter of an hour Kell had returned to his usual self. This reassertion of normality came with a sharpened sense of exactly how damaged he was. The pain stitched through his right shoulder wove deeply through tissue and bone. His right arm was in a sling which was itself bandaged to his chest to keep it immobile.
The pain was present but dull. Not long after The Fall began, he had broken a bone in his leg. This was the same kind of pain, and the same lack of concern the painkillers had given him.
“Must be bad if you're giving me narcotics,” Kell mused.
John, who stood a short distance away speaking with the others, walked over. “We're not terribly bad off,” he said. “Our last scavenger team found a vet's office set up in a house. They brought back a lot of meds.”
Kell smiled. “I know I'm as big as a horse, but this is just insulting.”
John's mouth quirked into what Kell knew to be a forced smile. “They work, so don't complain. You're not wrong. It doesn't look good.”
Without moving his body, Kell very carefully flexed muscles in his chest. The lance of agony was instant and pervasive, running from the middle of his neck all the way to his fingers.
John winced. “Yeah, I'd just lay there and try not to do anything. Your collarbone broke. It's a green stick fracture, which is good, but the break is ugly. It's got a few bone splinters sticking out.”
Kell pursed his lips. “And here I was thinking we'd never use that portable X-ray.”
John pointed a finger at him. “This isn't funny, dammit! We'll need to do surgery to get the splinters out. We don't want them working their way free.”
In the world as it had been, such a thing would have been minor. Outpatient surgery, even. In the here and now, Kell knew, things were likely to be a lot more risky. Though the lab had plenty of disinfectant and surgical gear, they weren't set up to manage a sterile operating theater. Their best efforts would be better than third-world countries before The Fall, but nowhere close to truly safe. Add to the list of concerns their lack of a real doctor, instead reliant on people like Kell who had learned battlefield surgery in bits and pieces.
“You wanted to ask me if I was okay with it, I guess?” Kell asked.
John nodded. “Didn't seem right to do it without consent, even though I knew you'd agree.”
Kell tried to nod but caught himself before managing to do more than flex his neck. The accompanying jolt of pain was tolerably small.
“Yes,” Kell said, carefully forming the word. “Do it. As soon as possible.”
“Okay,” John said. “I'll set up.”
“Before he knocks you out again, we need to talk,” Laura said, shooing John away. Emily moved forward with her, the two of them hovering at the edge of his makeshift bed.
Laura had her serious face on, which more than any other factor told Kell he wasn't going to like whatever she had to say. His best friend wasn't famous for being worrisome to almost any degree. If she was concerned enough to wipe the ever-present smirk from her face, it was bad.
“There's good news and bad news,” Laura said. “The bad is that the people who chased Emily in are from a marauder camp about twenty miles south of here. Emily thinks they're here by coincidence, except now they're going to come looking for their missing people.”
Kell grunted. “Either we wait for them to show or take the fight to them,” he said.
Laura nodded. “I'll take it to a vote, but I'm guessing they'll want to lead a raid.” Her eyes tightened at the corners, turning her normally sunny face hard and flat as river stone. “Emily says they have captives.”
Kell closed his eyes and sighed. No more needed to be said, not really. Laura had been a captive herself. Regardless of th
e vote, there was no way she'd allow people to stay in marauder hands.
“What's the good news?” Kell asked, opening his eyes.
The storm cloud passed from Laura's face as quickly as it came, replaced with a grin. It was Emily who spoke.
“That's why I came home, even with those assholes following me,” Emily said. “I had to make sure you got the message.”
Kell's heart sped up, excitement flooding his veins like the warmth of a good bourbon. “You found what we've been looking for?”
“Oh, yeah,” Emily said. “Not just one person like Josh, who died but didn't turn. The last community I made my rounds at had half a dozen of them.”
Across the room, John dropped a tray of surgical tools. Kell laughed in pure, unadulterated joy. After months of clawing at the wall in their research, finally here was something new.
Three
There was no rush, which was a feeling Kell had cultivated like a rare flower since settling into his new home. Gone were the days of living near areas with heavy zombie traffic and central enough to be a target to enemies. Over the previous year Kell hadn't let his guard down or ease his readiness to fight, but the bustle of being part of a huge community was largely absent.
Laura had ordered rotating shifts of scouts to observe the settlement to the south. In the two weeks following Emily's action-packed return, they had shown no sign of preparing a search party for their missing friends. Kell wondered if that was the defining trait separating the average survivor from marauders. A sense of community was both a powerful shield and a dangerous weapon.
While the surgery had been minor, Kell had been told by numerous people that his shoulder would take a long time to heal properly. As a result he spent his days one-handed, putting no weight on his right arm at all. It had taken a while to get used to doing everything with his dumb hand.
“This is pointless,” Kell said as his fingers found a new grip on his weapon. “I can barely swing this thing without my sutures stretching.”
Lee, who stood a few feet away with an identical weapon, shook his head. “That is the point. We're in no hurry to go find the people Emily identified, but that doesn't mean something can't go wrong here. If a zombie gets through the defenses or you find yourself needing to defend your life, I don't want you to be caught off guard by how much your shoulder hurts.”
Though Kell had most of a foot and a hundred pounds on the younger man, he still forced his annoyance down. Lee was a patient teacher, but he had no tolerance for whining or willfulness. He had made the last order given to him by his commanding officer—to find Kell and protect him—into a way of life. There was no wiggle room when it came to Kell's safety. It was easier to give in at the start than slowly wilt under the stony Marine stare Lee had perfected.
Lee must have been able to see this eventuality behind Kell's eyes, because a few seconds later he jumped forward and lashed out with his stick.
Kell swiped with his own stick, pain igniting in his clavicle, racing up his neck and down his arm. A smaller aftershock came when their weapons met. Without conscious thought, Kell leaped sideways and counter-attacked, driving the tip of his stick toward Lee's belly.
“No,” Lee said casually as he twisted to let the stick graze his belly and pass by. His arms shot out as Kell overextended and lost balance, holding the much larger man up. Kell was silently thankful; a fall would probably have popped stitches at the least.
“What did I do wrong?” Kell asked as he straightened.
“You attacked, ignoring the pain. That's good.” Lee smiled slightly and nodded toward the weighted length of wood in Kell's hand. “But that isn't a spear. You try to skewer a zombie with it and it'll either bounce off or slide right through and tangle you up.”
Kell frowned at the weapon. That it wasn't a spear was obvious, of course. Lee had called it a baston, the traditional training weapon from Arnis. Not that the stave in Kell's hand wasn't capable of bashing a skull. Lee had warned before beginning the lessons that the heavier sticks weren't usually used in sparring.
It was the most basic of weapons, a technology barely on the modern side of bashing something to death with a rock. Still, the two and a half feet of hardwood clad in thin bands of steel (an addition of Lee's, as the standard version was only wood or rattan) felt comfortable in his hand. Probably from the years of fighting with a spear.
“You can definitely kill someone with that,” Lee said, pointing with his own stick. “When you have some basics down, though, we're switching you to something else.”
Kell scowled. “Why are you teaching me with this, then?”
Lee grinned and walked over to the small shed where the training weapons were stored. He ducked in and emerged almost immediately, holding a black cylinder in his hand. With a light flick of the wrist, it expanded into a metal baton. Lee moved through several of the basic Arnis drills with the easy grace of the naturally thin and light-footed. The metal baton cut the air as it moved.
“This is what I'd like you to use,” Lee said as he finished the drill. He tossed the baton to Kell, who had to drop his stick to catch it. “Not hard to crack a skull with that, which is why we're using the sticks.”
“It's much lighter,” Kell said, surprised. A question formed in his head, but the answer was immediately obvious. “You're strengthening my wrist.”
Lee nodded again, a pleased smile on his face. “Knowing you, you'll probably end up using both of them. But before you're put in a position to actually need them, I'd like to know you can swing them hard enough to kill and still manage to hit your target. Not spraining your wrist while doing so is a definite benefit.”
Kell, acutely aware that his current limitations were the direct result of him losing a fight against gravity, inertia, and the ground, saw the wisdom in that statement. Lee knew better than most how prone Kell was to injury.
It was just after Kell had completed his tenth and final set of drills, wiping the dust and sweat from his face with a towel, when the scout coming off duty from the marauder camp returned. Kell and Lee noted the scout's entrance, both men watching him move toward the main house to give Laura a full report.
“Did you see how he was walking?” Kell asked. “How he was holding himself?”
Lee nodded. “Yep. That's how every soldier I've ever known looks when he has to tell the boss the other shoe just dropped.”
Kell stood in the back of what had once been the living room of the large farm house. Other than the fireplace, everything that had signified the place as one meant for the gathering of family and friends had been stripped away. The space was transformed into the nerve center of their little community. Laura sat behind a desk piled with papers as the scout passed on the bad news. None of it was unexpected.
“They're starting to move,” the scout, a man named Matt, said. “The camp isn't big, but they've got quite a few people. It was only a matter of time before they started to run low on supplies. The good news is they seem to be low on fuel, too. They're not ranging far from the camp, and it's all on foot.”
“So far,” Lee said, standing in the doorway.
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “The area they're in is mostly picked clean. It's near the center of a little town, one we scouted about eight months back. There might be some wild crops growing and definitely game if they're decent hunters. No matter how you cut it, though, they're going to have to start ranging out farther if they want to survive.”
“Which leaves us with two possibilities,” Laura said, leaning back in her chair and lacing her fingers over her stomach. “Either they run into us or they don't.”
A pause fell over the room as every person in it had the same thought in unison. The question was whether they would allow marauders to go free regardless of the situation. True, it would be less risky for their group to just let the bad guys wander off if they weren't in danger of stumbling across the compound, but that meant letting them continue to be a threat to the world at large.
The m
oral calculus after the fall of civilization was remarkably simple. Not easy or clean, but simple.
The apocalypse had thrown human nature into stark relief, the shades of gray shrinking to a very small margin. There were good guys, bad guys, and a tiny number who moved from one to the other. If you pillaged, raped, and murdered rather than trying to live in peace as best you could, then you were a cancer.
What Laura wanted to know was whether they had the obligation to be the scalpel.
In any other community it would have been a non-issue. Like ships on the sea, it behooved everyone to help when the need arose. You never knew when it would be you in need, after all. It was the nature of their community that made asking the question necessary, of course. The work Kell and John where doing was important and probably unique.
Laura didn't ask Kell's opinion, because she knew what his answer would be. Kell and John had discussed this exact scenario early on. They'd dealt with variations of it on a smaller scale. Their consensus was that the nature of their work didn't exempt them from the ethical duties other communities lived with.
If anything, their role in causing the end of human civilization demanded they involve themselves.
But it would be Laura's call. She had been chosen to lead for her level head and capacity for logic under stress. Kell wouldn't try to influence her either way.
Trying wouldn't make a difference, and there were even odds the marauders wouldn't give them any choice in the matter. Considering that possibility, Kell was suddenly very glad Lee had pushed him to learn to fight while partially disabled.
Four
While his clavicle healed faster than it would have before Chimera, the process was still slower than Kell would have liked. This struck him as especially relevant given his position two nights later, which involved a low hill, a pair of binoculars, and a bad feeling he was going to have to fight one-handed.
