The Fall (Book 4): Genesis Game

by Joshua Guess

  “Rob,” Mason said. “What's up?”

  Rob nodded in their direction of travel. “Got a big swarm coming down from the north,” he said. “Looks like they're sticking to the main road, and you're a couple miles west of them. Probably best you stay here while we make sure they keep moving south.”

  “Dammit,” Kincaid said. “Do we have any idea of the local terrain? Is there somewhere we can put the van that's far enough off this road that it won't be seen?”

  Kell had been in the same meetings as Kincaid where detailed explanations of the safety of the route had been laid out in plain English. Both men knew the entire purpose of taking this path was due to its lack of travel by marauders and normal survivors alike. Which meant the chance of some other fucking thing happening was just as likely. Better to find a safe spot and hunker down.

  Nodding, Rob pointed back the way they came. “There's a town about five miles back with a big industrial complex. It's fenced in all the way around.”

  “I know that place,” Emily cut in. “We scouted it. I can get us there.”

  Kincaid faced her. “How likely is it someone will come looking for us there?”

  She grimaced. “I seriously doubt anyone will come close.”

  Turns out she was right.

  “Wow,” Kell said. “You guys have a weird definition of the word safe.”

  The industrial complex was found as promised, and if at first something seemed a bit off about it, the place seemed to be in good repair and utterly deserted. Though the place was situated firmly within the small town it inhabited, there weren't even the usual straggler zombies you nearly always saw.

  That realization turned up Rational Kell's interest by a few magnitudes, and when they turned onto the road leading to the huge set of buildings, tanks, and pipes, understanding clicked into place like tumblers in a lock.

  The lack of zombies was unusual but not unheard of. That observation made the next almost impossible to miss.

  There were no animals. No birds fluttering across the warm winds, no dogs gone feral and chasing down squirrels. There were also no plants. Or rather, there were no living plants, at least within five hundred feet of the complex.

  “What the fuck?” Mason whispered as he huddled next to Kell, staring through the windshield. “What happened here?”

  Kell pointed to the vast round-ended tanks dotting the periphery of the site. “My guess is entropy. Without people to maintain the systems here, they started to fail.”

  Whatever agent had been stored in those tanks had clearly been strong enough to wipe out everything in the area, and keep even grass from growing near ground zero. Rational Kell began reciting a laundry list of possible culprits in the back of his mind, none of them appealing.

  “How screwed are we if we stay here?” Kincaid asked.

  Kell shrugged. “If the scouts came here before, then it's probably pretty safe. The fence looks brand new. Whatever happened here kept anything from growing on it, so we'll be able to see anyone approaching through the chain link.”

  Kincaid cleared his throat. “Not what I mean. Are we at risk if we stay here, do you think?”

  Kell glanced at Emily. “Did you guys hang around when you scouted it?”

  She shook her head. “It was a quick pass. Didn't go inside the fence.”

  “We should be fine,” Kell said. “Whatever killed everything off had to have dispersed relatively fast, so as long as we don't go licking any strange surfaces I don't see it being a problem.”

  “What if another system fails and a tank ruptures or something?” Kincaid asked.

  “Either it'll be something harmless or we'll be screwed,” Kell said. “Nothing we can do about it.”

  Camp was easy enough to set up since everyone but Kell—embarrassingly—would sleep on simple bedrolls on the ground outside the van. Lee helped Kell set up his own space in the safety of the van itself, which would be shut tight once the sun began to set.

  With sunset hours away, Kell decided to check out the huge tangle of mechanical equipment, buildings, and storage facilities. Lee joined him. The apocalypse had a way of showing you the importance of the buddy system. Especially when one of your arms is out of commission.

  Rather than wander aimlessly, Lee guided them in a wide circle along the fence. The instinct to search for danger was so deeply ingrained that neither man even realized he was doing it, but the complete lack of anything living made the job simpler still. There was always a chance someone had followed them or waited at a distance, though, so there was merit in having a look anyway.

  “Wow,” Kell breathed as they slowly spiraled back in toward the main complex. On the side farthest from their camp, a massive array of tanks filled what appeared to be numerous refill stations. That the place had once been a chemical plant and repository was without doubt, and the thought filled Kell with equal parts wonder and fear.

  “You know, people probably didn't give this place a second look in the old days,” Kell said. “Took it for granted like most things. It was just a place to work at or an eyesore on the edge of town.”

  Lee's brows drew together. “But not you, right?”

  “Not me,” Kell agreed. “Though apparently I'm predictable.”

  Lee shook his head. “Nah, I'm just used to getting a different perspective from you.”

  “I think you're being nice, but I'll take it,” Kell replied. “But I mean look at this place. Look at what it represents. The steel and aluminum and composites used to make these containers are the end result of thousands of years of ingenuity. That's just the vessels to hold stuff, mind you. The chemicals? Fifty years ago some of them didn't even exist in nature, or if they did we had no means to store them. The sheer amount of work and knowledge needed to make a place like this possible is staggering.”

  Kell pointed at a ruptured tank, the place where its valve stem should have been only a corroded, ragged hole. “I hadn't really put much thought into it before, but do you realize how many places like this must be out there? Hundreds, even thousands, of abandoned businesses, factories, and processing plants full of highly complex systems no longer getting any maintenance.”

  Lee nodded in understanding. “Heard something similar happened with New Haven and the supply depot in Richmond. Bunkers full of dozens of tons of ammo, missiles, you name it. We knew for sure people have been raiding military facilities for years...”

  “Yes, exactly,” Kell said, cutting in with a strange excitement. “Those are just the obvious threats. What happens when places like this start to fail one after another? Or when some self-made warlord decides it's time to up his arsenal?”

  They had reached and climbed a small staircase leading up to what Kell assumed was the main office building. It wasn't high by any measure, but as the whole facility sat on a hill it even the slight change in elevation gave them a bird's eye view of the land below.

  The answer to Kell's question was unspoken and obvious, etched into the earth as an empty ring of death.

  Nine

  Trouble didn't find the group that night, which isn't the same thing as not being troubled. Kell in particular looked haggard the next morning, his night a hellscape of dreams featuring the lost and forgotten weapons of yesterday being put to new and terrible uses.

  Not that he was one to judge; he had played his part in killing the world. That it had been involuntary and with the intention to help didn't matter to the billions of corpses at his feet.

  “Good morning,” Mason said in a singsong voice.

  “Meh,” Kell muttered in response. Something slapped against his sleeping bag and slid down; a meal ration. One of the good kind they made back home, thank heaven. The smell of granola and dried fruit filled his nose as he tore it open. Not fancy, but a damn sight better than any of the military rations he'd tried.

  “We got the all-clear while you were out,” Mason said, already stowing and strapping gear. “We'll head out as soon as you're ready.”

  K
ell eyed the bag of food, then sat it on the chair before starting the laborious process of wiggling out of his sleeping bag. “I'll eat on the road.”

  It was a beautiful day. Not the sort of summer heat that pushed you to hate nature, instead enough cloud cover to dapple the landscape as they rolled by. Kell watched the slow meander of sunbeams lighting up shadowed places with casual interest.

  They saw no swarms as the van cut through the area infested the night before. There were remarkably few singletons as well, and Kell thought it might be a result of the chemical release not far away. Human beings had a middling sense of smell at best, but the undead used it as a primary method of finding prey. If there was even the faintest residue hanging about, it would be a miles-wide warning sign for the dead to stay away.

  It wasn't unheard-of. Most communities Kell had seen endured swarm attacks, and burning the undead often had the same effect, if for a shorter time. Ammonia would do the trick, but only held them off for so long. A brief flash of an idea came and went in an instant, dismissed as fast as he had it. Keeping zombies away was pointless if you had to poison the land—and possibly yourself—to do it.

  The further east they went, the more the landscape changed. Iowa gave Kell a false sense of the world, pervasive even after a lifetime spent in cities. The wide, windy plains were home to almost endless movement in wild wheat and other plants, but poor in structures and cities in any number.

  Now they moved toward greater concentrations of what had once been civilization, and Kell's mind needed time to adjust to it. Even though most of what he saw was at a distance—a purposeful choice to minimize the risk of encountering other people—it was still a jarring transition.

  He was just getting used to it when the van lurched, Lee cursing like the Marine he was as he was slammed against the dashboard. Kell wanted to chide him for choosing to stand in the stairwell again, but decided bruised ribs would teach the lesson just as well.

  They came to a halt, the muffled clinking of weapons and supplies dying out just as Marco let out a low whistle. Kell unbuckled himself and made his way to the front. Standing behind Marco, who was hunched forward over the wheel in slack-jawed wonder, Kell saw why they had stopped.

  A herd of horses had wandered across the road. Not horses as Kell had ever seen them, carefully tended and tame. These were something else entirely. They had none of the controlled, easy manner he expected. They glanced at the van suspiciously, tossing their heads and sending long, tangled manes flying.

  They were wild. Probably young enough that they'd never lived any other way.

  “What...what do I do, here?”

  Kell was at a loss. There was enough pure mass in the small herd to disable the van if the horses got it in their heads to try.

  “Are you serious?” Lee croaked from beside them. “Just honk the horn at them. They'll scatter.”

  Marco looked at Lee with doubt in his eyes. “You sure that won't just make them angry?”

  Lee laughed with a wince. “Where are you from, Mars? They're wild animals. They get scared of loud noises. No different than half the things I used to honk off the road back in Texas.”

  Marco honked, which if Kell was being honest seemed like a risky move with several tons of angry horse a handful of yards away, but it worked. They scattered, muscles rippling beneath coats of various colors, and Kell thought he understood the interest early humanity had in horses. They were big and strong enough to reach right down to the reptile part of his brain and make him unreasonably fearful, but there was a deep beauty in them as well. For a second he wanted to be out there with them, riding at that breakneck gallop and feeling the wind slice across his skin as it did their manes and fur.

  “You falling in love there, Kell?”

  Mason said it from behind him, but there was a smile on his face. “Used to watch wild horses with my dad when we'd go wilderness camping,” the scarred man said, a wistful note seeping into his voice. “I know that look. Had it on my own face a time or two.”

  Kell watched the horses recede into the distance, the woods next to the road swallowing them. “We should probably get moving,” he said with more than a hint of regret.

  The rest of the trip was uneventful. There was a minor band of zombies, easily avoided, but no other surprises. When the van slowed and made its way off the main road, Kell was curious. When Mason and Kincaid told Marco to stop in the middle of a road surrounded by trees overgrown with kudzu, he was confused.

  The two men walked toward a nearby section of the green veil and pulled it aside. Mason seemed to know what he was looking for, and found it within a minute. He and Kincaid hauled tendrils aside and motioned for Marco to drive through.

  There was a road there, narrow and crumbling. Pieces of vine slapped against the van, tree branches scraping discordantly across the armor and windows. The inside of the overgrowth was darker than Kell would have thought possible just before noon, but they broke through into the light a few seconds later.

  The van came to a halt in a small parking lot sheltered on all sides by more verdant growth. The cedar fence surrounding the space was buckled in places from the weight of it.

  “Are we going into the batcave?” Kell mused, mostly to himself.

  Emily chuckled. “Dibs on any capes we find.”

  Two sets of double-wide garage doors covered most of the building the parking lot butted up against, and one of them opened. Rob, the scout, appeared as it widened, hauling on a chain to raise the thing.

  The van rolled in, Mason and Kincaid jogging in behind it before Rob lowered the door again. Emily helped Kell navigate to the rear door in the dim light and they stepped into the garage together.

  It was far from what he had expected, especially considering he'd camped in a few garages over the previous five years. The word that came to mind was cozy, and a moment of contemplation cemented the impression.

  The van sat on bare concrete, of course, but the rest of the huge space was taken up with what appeared to be a combination of hideout and observation post. One wall held a vast pegboard tool rack full of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The floor was covered in a dense pile of carpets, looking as though someone had unrolled bulk carpet in layers. Which, Kell realized, they probably had.

  The rest of the space was lined with trunks, mattresses, various observation gear such as binoculars and an assortment of scopes, and the odds and ends that said it was well lived in. There were even lights; power-sipping LED strips traced the edges of the room. Kell didn't hear a generator, but survivors knew their business when it came to renewable energy capture and storage.

  “What is this place?” Kell asked.

  Emily flopped onto the only chair in the room, a huge leather recliner, and lounged in it with a leg thrown over one of the arms. “It's a safe house we set up with New Haven. Scouts from one of our communities are almost always here.”

  Kell frowned and walked over to a low table stacked with recording devices, including a parabolic microphone. “What's with all this stuff?”

  “We watch the locals pretty carefully,” Emily said. “The guy we're going to meet, he's the leader of the community where your test subjects are. He's...”

  “What?” Kell said sharply. “Dangerous? Who isn't, nowadays? Or is he more like a marauder?”

  Emily shook her head. “No, definitely not that. But dangerous as hell, sure. He's kept his people safe by being absolutely ruthless. He's not like us, Kell. He doesn't have much of a gray area when it comes to threats against his community. We like to keep an eye on what's going on around here. Sometimes people act differently when they think you're not watching.”

  “We'll be walking from here,” Mason added. “This place is only half a mile from where we're headed.”

  “As far as we know, this place is still a secret,” Kincaid said. “Marco is going to stay behind to make sure we're ready to roll at the drop of a hat. I'd rather not have anyone knowing where our ride is stashed.”

&nbs
p; “That's great and everything,” Lee said, “but can we have a few minutes to get some lunch? If we're gonna meet someone who might kill us if we sneeze wrong, I'd like to do it with something better than granola in my belly.”

  “There's a camp stove and a bunch of propane,” Emily said. “Here, I'll show you.” She and Lee went off through a door that presumably led deeper into the building. Mason and Marco gravitated toward the racks of weapons, quietly muttering to each other. Kincaid took Emily's spot on the recliner, and Kell situated himself on a stack of mattresses nearby.

  “Any particular reason no one filled me in on how dangerous this guy was earlier?” Kell asked in a carefully neutral tone.

  Kincaid shrugged. “It's not a big issue. I didn't even know until last night. He's apparently pretty harsh with threats, but he doesn't pose one to other communities. His people are almost all farmers. No real fighting force aside from a dozen or so scouts and former soldiers.”

  “How is that even possible?” Kell asked. “How do they fight off attacks?”

  Kincaid smiled. For once it wasn't a soulless crack in the man's blunt face, but a genuine (if small) show of amusement. “You know, I think it'll be better if you figure it out for yourself. I've only been told, but I still don't know if I believe it.”

  Ten

  “I don't fucking believe it,” Kell said.

  “Yeah,” Kincaid agreed, standing next to him. “I'm seeing it and it's pretty hard to compute.”

  The road the safe house was situated on bent and turned continuously, buildings and growth hiding the distant boundaries of Trenton, the name of their destination. Kell had suppressed a mighty curiosity as they wended their way through the choked streets. He had seen a lot of cities being retaken by Mother Nature in his time, but this place went beyond. Everywhere—everything—was slowly being devoured by greenery.

  So when they came upon Trenton's boundary, those of them who hadn't been there before didn't even realize it. One second they were among a thinning expanse of buildings, then a sharp turn ran them straight into a wall of growth so thick it was impossible to see through at all. It ran across the road at a right angle, seeming to sprout from one building to another.