by Joshua Guess
Dead, after all, was dead.
Kell worked himself to near-exhaustion. It was satisfying to do something constructive for a change, something that had a definite positive impact. He tried not to think about the very real possibility that the place would be abandoned in a week.
The long hours in the yard were enlightening as well. He got a feel for how attentive the guards were—not military crisp, but not lazy—and what sort of people the other prisoners were. The latter was trickier for Kell. It wasn’t that he was incapable of social interaction. He did fine with people for the most part. He simply lacked the real-life contextual experience to catch finer details and deeper meanings beneath the things people said and did.
He knew why this was the case, even if knowing didn't help. School had been his life from the day he'd graduated college in his middle teens. Put him in an academic setting and he could point out those trying to curry favor with professors without hearing the teacher's pet speak a word. That setting he understood because he'd had years of practice. There hadn't been a gap between graduating and working full-time at his lab. What little socializing he'd done mostly ended when he had begun dating Karen.
Busy scientist, busy lawyer, and eventual baby meant the pair were perfectly matched. Who had time to make friends when you were struggling just to see each other in the evenings? And when you were as happy as they had been, who really wanted to?
Once inside, Kell made his way to the odd, modular plastic cubes serving as the bathrooms for the main hall. Several on the right were marked as for men, the majority left for women. The ratio between the genders was nowhere near parity, the men being outnumbered about two to one.
Inside was cramped, the center of the cube a narrow hall containing four doors. Each door led to a space four feet on a side. The whole thing was plastic except for the small drain in the floor. There was a toilet and, overhead, a small shower head.
The cubes were hooked up to gravity-fed water from the roof of the church. They had been moved in and with the help of some creative plumbing added to the building's existing drainage system. They had been designed to do it—Mason said the cubes were a variety of disaster pod meant to be used in areas hit by earthquakes or whatever—but making them permanent was another subtle clue that this place was more than it seemed.
Clean and pleasantly tired after his shower, Kell made his way to the bar and was greeted by Liam, who sat a plate of mashed potatoes and a small piece of venison steak in front of him.
“Is that garlic?” Kell asked hopefully. “Did you actually season this?”
Liam's expression was proud. “They grow it here. Didn't take that long to turn some of the dried cloves into powder.”
Kell breathed in through his nose deeply, savoring just until his stomach burbled a warning to quit with the foreplay and get to eating. “I love you,” Kell said.
“I'm sure you say that to all the guys who feed you,” Liam quipped without pausing in his cooking. “Learn anything today?”
He asked the question in a tone of voice that was playful and even a little condescending. Kell smiled; it was a good way to make listeners think Liam was teasing Kell about the grunt work he'd been doing.
A quick glance showed no one close enough to hear if he spoke low enough. “I noticed a few interesting tidbits...” He explained the significance of the power system components. “Couldn't get a read on many people, though,” Kell admitted as he finished. “Only worked with a few, and most of them aren't talkative.”
“They won't be,” Mason said as he slid onto the seat next to Kell. Caught unaware, Kell only kept from making a startled shriek thanks to the forkful of potatoes he'd just eaten.
“Yeah,” Liam intoned sadly. “That's the feeling I'm getting, too.”
Kell hurriedly swallowed his food. “Having a hard time getting them to chat?”
“That's one way of putting it,” Mason said. “Another would be to say they're not complete idiots. The little bit I got out of my work mates today was an admission that they're terrified what will happen every time someone gets added to the group.”
“I heard that too,” Kell said, and related Sheila's story.
Mason took the news grimly. “If anything, she's downplaying it. It's easy to forget, but these people aren't sheep. They didn't come here willingly. They're survivors. They've killed and fought and scratched to make it out there.”
Slow comprehension went into high gear. “So what,” Kell asked, careful to keep his voice low, “is keeping them so scared they don't even want to talk among themselves?”
“Partly it's the guards,” Liam said. Kell looked at the young man in surprise—Liam sounded sure of himself, which was new.
“A couple guards came here for lunch,” Liam explained. “Apparently they do that from time to time just to remind everyone they can.”
“Something bad happen?” Kell asked.
“No, not really,” Liam said. “That was the weird part. The guards were actually pretty nice. Polite, even. But the way the others reacted to them wasn't just fear. It was disgust. I didn't ask why. The other prisoners didn't say a word while the guards were here.”
Mason nodded as if it made perfect sense. “I've been in a couple prisons. The guy you worry about isn't the one who constantly threatens. It's the one who is happy to talk to you about the weather and just as happy to cut your throat if you talk back to him.”
Like the many small observations Kell made, this was also not a revelation. It was another piece in the puzzle they desperately needed to solve in order to escape with the research.
“They're not ready to revolt,” Mason said thoughtfully, “but they've seen too much to put any trust in the guards.”
“Is that something we can use?” Liam asked.
Mason's smile was answer enough.
Twenty-Two
“I think I've got half a dozen people willing to fight with us,” Steph said casually two days later.
Kell, who was balancing a tray of empty jars with his left arm, almost tripped. He recovered with a tinkling clatter of glass knocking into glass. “Wow, really? How'd you find so many? Mason hasn't had any luck.”
“He was in the Navy, right?” she asked.
Kell nodded. “Yeah, he was a SEAL.”
“There you go,” Steph said. “Dude is scary. You know he's a good guy, and I think he is, but he's built like a tank and covered in scars. People aren't going to open up to him quick or easy.”
Kell's mouth quirked at one corner. “Judging him by his appearance. How sad.”
Steph smiled, gesturing at herself and nodded at Kell. “Kind of makes you miss the good old days when people had it easy and could just hate you by the color of your skin.”
Kell sat the tray down and made a weighing motion with his hands. “Racism, the apocalypse. Racism, the apocalypse...no, fuck the good old days.”
They laughed together, but there was some truth in the joke. Scientific study was dependent on conditions. Society was as well. The conditions which allowed you to perform an experiment with minimal outside influence were vital to the process. Screw that up and everything changed. Nothing within the experiment could be reliably predicted.
Society had been upended in that way. The old social forces had been so savagely broken and the conditions changed so dramatically that the contemporary landscape might as well have been alien. While there were a few holdovers, the game had changed enough that most people judged based on whether a person was an enemy or a friend. It was the first and most powerful instinct.
The guards were decidedly not friends, but within the rules set by their captors, they weren't exactly enemies. Not as long as everyone played nice.
“So who are these people you've made friends with, and why would they help us?” Kell asked as they set to canning food, a skill Kell did not have and one Steph had mastered back in Trenton.
“Wouldn't call them friends,” Steph said as she began ladling boiled tomatoes into a
jar from a crock beneath the counter. “They're not convinced the people leaving here are doing it alive. Took me a while to even get close to that conversation.”
“What makes you think they'd help us?”
“Something they said about time tables,” Steph explained. “Apparently new people don't get examined for a long time. Miles, one of the people I'm talking about, was here for two months before that doctor did more than draw some blood. Mostly it's observation, vital signs, that kind of thing.”
“Determining a baseline,” Kell said. “Makes sense.”
Kell slipped a heavy glove on his hand and held the jar she sat on the table in front of him, now full of cooked tomatoes. It wasn't as hot as he expected, but he could still feel it through the fabric. Holding the thing still while she put on the lid was close to his functional limit.
“So Miles is worried the doctor is going to start 'letting people leave' now that a new group is here,” Steph said. “He says he isn't going to let that happen.”
“Do you think he meant it?” Kell asked.
Steph paused, considering. “Yeah,” she said after a few seconds of though. “I do. He's intense, like you and Mason.”
Kell blinked. “We're just survivors like everyone else, Steph.”
Her laugh was rich and throaty. “Oh, my lord. You actually believe that, don't you?”
“Sure,” Kell said.
“You're not,” she said. “I think maybe you've been doing shit like this for so long that normal isn't something you can even recognize.”
Kell was about to ask her what she was talking about, but his brain caught up a second later. Of course she meant this ridiculous plan to get caught on purpose. The fact that he'd needed time to even consider what she might be talking about was proof enough that she was right.
She saw the understanding light his face. “Yep, there it is. Look, most people have fought. They've had to. We've had to push ourselves. But most of us don't put ourselves at risk if we can help it. Sure as hell don't run across a couple states and get captured for the fun of it. That's why people don't talk to the two of you the way they do me. They're afraid for themselves. You aren't.”
“I'm afraid,” Kell began.
“No,” Steph said with more force. “You're afraid you might fail. You came here with one good arm. You put yourself in this place knowing you wouldn't be able to fight back. You're not afraid to die like the rest of us, and it shows. You're not normal, not even what passes for it nowadays.”
She was right, of course. Hadn't Andrea made the same points during the nearly suicidal handful of days he'd helped her move her kids south? Oh, he could reason out the why of it. He had spent a long time alone learning to survive, teaching himself to fight. Back in the early days it had been his only activity. The void left in his life when his lab had been relocated and his career evaporated had been filled with cold determination to live.
Even then a part of him had known in the buried reaches of his mind that he chose to live for the chance to right the genocidal wrong he had committed. If his methods had become less self-destructive, the aim behind them was still the same.
“Damn,” he said.
Steph put a hand on his, patting it gently. “It's like soldiers who've been in the war so long they forget what peace is like. You pushed yourself so hard that you can't see other people trying to keep up.”
“This Miles,” Kell said after a few seconds. “He's a fighter?”
Steph pulled her hand back and resumed her work. “Sounds like it. Put him in armor and he could be one of the guards. Says he was part of all the fighting last year.”
“The war with the UAS, you mean?”
“Suppose so,” Steph said. “Trenton stayed out of it except to trade, and even that stopped once things heated up. Only news we got about it was after it was over.”
If anything could make a man intense the way she saw Kell and Mason to be, fighting a war of survival out in the zombie-filled wilderness would do it.
“We need to talk to Miles,” Kell said. “Think you can arrange it without drawing attention?”
“Out of curiosity,” Mason asked Miles that evening, “what did you do before?”
Miles sat across from Mason at a game board. The main room had a small recreation area stuffed with a surprising variety of games. Kell had voted for Dungeons & Dragons and lost. Miles had picked instead, and he and Mason played checkers.
Kell sat across from Steph. They were playing chess, and she was winning handily. It was because Kell didn't care about the game, since it was only cover for this talk. That's what Kell told himself as he watched her pick off yet another pawn.
“Translator for a private security company,” Miles said. He was somewhere between Steph and Mason in height, which put him above average for a man but well below Kell.
“A lot of call for Spanish translators in private security?” Mason asked.
Miles, who had a large Puerto Rican flag tattooed on each forearm, smiled. “Yes, actually. Lot of rich people needed security when they traveled to Central America and further south. But that wasn't what I usually did. I was in Afghanistan about half the year. I'm fluent in Pashto and passable in Dari.”
“Wow,” Mason said without a trace of sarcasm. “That's impressive.”
Miles shrugged. “Linguistics always interested me. Learned English and Spanish growing up. Took French in high school, German in college. When I got the chance to learn the others, I took it.” He continued playing as he talked. “Steph tells me you want to talk. So talk.”
“We've got concerns,” Mason said evenly. “That maybe we're not being told the truth about being able to go home eventually.”
Miles nodded. “Sure. Lot of new people worry about that. Funny you mention going home, though. I've never heard them use those words. It's always something about being able to leave. Did they tell you specifically that you would be able to go home?”
“No,” Mason said.
Miles glanced at Steph, who shook her head.
“Me either,” Kell added.
“They wouldn't,” Miles continued. “Because words matter. When you take someone captive, telling them they can go home has a powerful effect. Might have been a good one, back before everything went bad. Now people are too suspicious. Tell survivors they can go home and it sets off alarm bells. Tell them they'll be able to leave, on the other hand, and the vagueness of it makes them think they might be hearing the truth.”
“Putting a lot of stock in a few words,” Mason said.
Miles snorted derisively. “Fuck yeah, I am. You know what happens when you're in a war zone trying to talk down a pissed-off farmer with an AK-47 who just wants you to leave him in peace?”
“Yes,” Mason said simply.
Miles grinned, a fierce expression. “Good, then you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass.”
“I do now,” Mason said. Miles frowned for a few seconds. Then his face lit up.
“Holy shit,” he said, staring at Mason with chagrin. “You wanted to make sure I wasn't with them, weren't you?”
“I needed to know you weren't a plant, yes,” Mason answered. “If I were running an operation like this, it would be the first thing I'd do. Put someone on the inside posing as a prisoner.”
Miles nodded. “Are you convinced?”
“I'm sure you've been honest about what you used to do for a living,” Mason said. “I'll have to take the rest on faith for now.”
“You're not worried I'll turn you in?” Miles asked, his tone carefully neutral.
Mason shrugged in a way Kell knew to be deliberately casual. “If you do, I'll kill you.”
The words, said with perfect blandness, drove home the utter certainty of the statement. Water was wet. The sky was blue. Mason would be able, physically and mentally, to end your life without hesitation or concern for failure.
“Well, okay then,” Miles said. “Points for being honest. What do you want from me?”
; “For now, information,” Mason said. “I've been casing this place but it'll go much faster if you and anyone you trust can tell me what I need to know.”
Miles narrowed his eyes. “What about later? What are we talking about, here?”
Kell had discussed the meeting with Mason earlier, and had advised playing their cards close to the vest. Mason, who had seen more intrigue and gathered more intelligence than Kell could even comprehend, had explained gently enough to avoid bruising Kell's ego that he knew what he was doing.
“If Doctor Rawlins decides to kill someone else,” Mason said, putting it in plain words so Miles couldn't mistake his meaning, “then we make sure that's his last victim.”
Miles made another move, skipping one of his pieces across the checker board. “Why? You don't know any of us, and you're not in any immediate danger. Why do you care enough to risk your life?”
Kell wondered in a detached way what reason Mason would give that would convey as little information about their ultimate aim while still being convincing. Kell knew himself to be a marginal liar at best, and much the same way he was a bad marksman but loved watching good ones, he was fascinated by seeing someone expert in deception work.
“You probably guessed I was military,” Mason said. Miles nodded. “I went into the service to get away from home after things got uncomfortable. Funny, because people like me weren't allowed to serve openly.”
There were a couple of surprised looks, and Kell amused himself with knowing Steph was probably thinking back to their conversation about judging people by appearance.
“It was hard,” Mason continued. “I hid who I was while I pushed to be better, to do more. At first the Navy was a way to get away from home and be my own man. A means to an end so I could live how I wanted, where I wanted. It became a lot more. I've seen innocent people die in more countries than you can name. It's not something I can ever forget or leave behind. I became a SEAL because it was the best way I knew to be where I could do the most good. I stopped a lot of bad people before they were able to do a lot of damage.”
