The Fall (Book 4): Genesis Game

by Joshua Guess

  Greg bobbed his head. “I've killed. You have too. I've even murdered a man, killed him when it wasn't necessary because I knew if I didn't he'd eventually do more horrible things. What should scare you is how far these people will go in the name of what they think is right. Six of these places have been running for months and months. Probably a thousand dead between them. Survivors, all. It's easy to say the sacrifice is worth the end result. Right until you have to ask what else they'd sacrifice for the greater good.”

  “What's our game, then?” Kell asked. “What's the trick to fighting them?”

  Greg chuckled sleepily. “You don't. You don't fight. Your enemy, if that's how you want to see them, is sitting in a fortress loaded with enough weaponry to outfit an army. Which they can and will do at the drop of a hat. Their territory and population is growing, and the bigger it gets the faster it grows. You can hit their research stations, which are in your own territory, but what are you gonna do? Travel a thousand miles or more to fight them where they're strongest? I'm not telling you all this so you can go get everyone you know killed in a stupid fight you can't possibly win.”

  “Then what's the fucking point?” Kell said, almost shouting.

  “The point is to make you understand what you're up against if you decide to take out those stations and free those people. They sent us here on one of several planes they keep up. We flew here from the ocean just because they were mildly concerned.”

  He met Kell's eyes. “Think about that and ask yourself what would happen if you really pissed these people off.”

  Thirty-Three

  Home was right where he left it.

  There were many smaller details between his conversation with Greg and the trip back to Iowa. Greg was moved to Haven, which had the facilities and resources to house him while getting every drop of information possible. Promises were made for meetings to discuss the dangers they faced from the east coast. Kate tried to have a conversation with Kell at one point, but he let her overtures roll off him like so much rain on glass.

  Too much history between them, and too much pity in her eyes when she saw the wound on his face.

  “Wow,” Laura said when she greeted him just inside the compound's gate. “You really should learn to duck.”

  Kell grinned. “You know, I haven't looked at it in a few days. Maybe it's not as bad as I think.”

  Laura made a dismissive sound. “Nah, it's absolutely as bad as you think. Not as bad as Mason, but you're making progress.”

  “That's kinda fucked up,” Mason said as he walked past. “But fair.”

  Kell had been walking toward the main house, but stopped when he saw a large chunk of the rear fence missing. “What's going on there?” he asked, pointing.

  Laura followed his gaze. “Oh, that. Well, we have new people to house and feed, so we're expanding early. Doubling the size of the enclosure, actually.”

  “That was supposed to wait until spring,” Kell noted. “We really couldn't find room for a few people until then?”

  Laura eyed him. “How many do you think came here?”

  “I don't know for sure,” Kell said, sure he was missing something. “The three from Trenton, and I know another five or six from the church who wanted to join up. More than that?”

  “A total of twenty-three,” Laura said. “Almost a third of the prisoners wanted to help with the research.” She paused, a wry smile on her lips. “Provided you don't take parts of their brains without asking.”

  “I'll make sure to get it in writing,” Kell said. The number was staggering. Most of the taken had families and lives to go back to. Not all the half-lives were like those in Trenton, who had been shunned to one degree or another. That so many were willing to help astounded him.

  “That reminds me, we're going to need to talk about Kincaid,” Kell said. In the final equation, getting caught deliberately had been a net positive. Not without its sacrifices, but a good thing overall. It had been such an abrupt change that Kell had nearly forgotten Kincaid and Victor and the rest.

  “He told me what happened,” Laura said. “I heard it from the whole group.”

  “And?” Kell said. “I guess you were fine with it, since you sent him to rescue us.”

  Her gaze turned flat. “You know me better than that. I'm not happy about what he did, but you're not one to judge, either. He made a call for the safety of the group. The thing that bothers you is that he didn't hesitate, and that he doesn't feel remorse about it.”

  “You knew what he was before you put him in charge of the trip,” Kell said, not really asking a question.

  Laura nodded. “You're surprisingly narrow-minded, you know. Kincaid is mentally ill, and he's functional. He was also the best choice in terms of decision making. I wanted someone who wouldn't risk you. Who would be decisive and who wouldn't allow emotional baggage to make him hesitate.”

  “He's not raving, I'll give you that,” Kell agreed. “Still...”

  Laura put a hand on his arm. “Here's the thing, Kell. Kincaid isn't a maniac. If anything, he's more reason-driven than any of us. You're still struggling to get your head around the truth, even after all this time. The world is different, now. Kincaid's way of dealing with things wasn't ideal for the world before. Can you honestly tell me he isn't perfectly suited for coping with how things are now?”

  Kell didn't say anything to that. Mostly because she made a good point, one he had been mulling over as it applied to larger problems. Hearing his own thought echoed back at him felt oddly like a defeat.

  It was going to feel a lot worse when he put in his two cents at the meeting to discuss Rebound.

  Haven had sent an envoy to meet with Laura, Kell, and a handful of others almost as soon as Kate and her troop had returned home. The delegation—if you wanted to call eight sweaty men and women packed into a pair of cars that—did not come to the compound. They didn't come within fifty miles of it, actually, as the exact location was kept as vague as possible.

  They met in an abandoned diner, a place Laura had asked the scouts to shore up months before. Even though it was midday, the boarded windows let in almost no light. Three large LED lanterns sat around the space, giving Kell the wildly inappropriate sense that someone was about to tell a ghost story.

  He and Laura had talked it to death. Hours of conversation over the previous few days while Kell ignored even the most basic of his responsibilities. It wasn't a matter of convincing her, but of the two of them clashing over how best to express their view without alienating Haven and the rest of the allied communities.

  Will Price, Haven's governor, sat with Kate on his right. The others were strangers to Kell. The pleasantries had taken only a few minutes as they greeted each other and settled in.

  “You know why we're here,” Will said.

  Laura nodded. “You want to talk about our response to Rebound.”

  Will smiled tightly. “Greg tells us that the larger community created by the Rebound project doesn't use its name. Their coalition government calls itself New America.”

  Kell didn't even try to contain his laugh. “A little on the nose, isn't it?”

  “Yeah,” Will said with a shrug. “But that was the whole point of Rebound, wasn't it? To reboot everything? Besides, a lot of the people around there are displaced New England residents. They're nuts for that kind of stuff.”

  “We don't have much room to talk,” Mason said from Laura's left. “The Alliance calls itself the Union, after all.”

  Will smiled. “So we're not all that creative when it comes to naming stuff,” he said. “Sue me. Patriotic jargon is effective.”

  “We're getting off topic,” Kell said.

  “You're right,” Will said, raising his hands in a pacifying gesture. “You're about to tell me why it's a really bad idea to go after these people.”

  “Yes,” Kell said.

  “You're welcome to, of course,” Will said. “But I happen to agree with you. It's not a fight the Union can win, and I
'm not convinced there's even a reason to fight to begin with.”

  Kell had been ready to make that exact argument, but curiosity forced him to play the other side. “Not even to stop the killings at the research camps?”

  “I didn't say that,” Will said. “That's in our territory. We have every reason to clean that mess up. We just can't pick a fight with them. We've run every possible scenario past every military mind in Haven, and none of them think we'll come out of it standing.”

  “You don't think they'll retaliate if we take out the research facilities?” Kell asked.

  It was Mason who answered, with the frantic energy of a child who just figured out the really hard word problem. “No, they won't. If they do, they'll have to answer tough questions about why those facilities were so far away in the first place.”

  “Nailed it,” Will said. “Our best guess is that they staffed each station with expendable guards with fairly low moral standards because their own people wouldn't sit still for murdering test subjects. We think they'll cut their losses if we liberate those stations.”

  There was a pause during which everyone glanced around. There was a larger question being avoided, one Kell ended up asking.

  “If that's true, then what do we do afterward? Nothing? Can we justify doing nothing when we know what lengths their leadership is willing to go to for a cure?”

  Will stared at his hands for a moment before speaking. His voice was measured, as if considering each word carefully before speaking it. “I was in the Army. I'm a military history geek. And I spent hours with Greg listening to details about New America. There are gung-ho types among the Union council who think we can pull off a victory the way we did against the UAS, but those people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how different the situations are. These aren't people pressed into service or bunker dwellers who haven't had to fight to survive. These are experienced survivors who believe in their new nation, armed to the teeth and not fazed by killing.”

  Laura frowned and leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. “You think we should just let them keep on, then?”

  “Yes and no,” Will said. “On the one hand, they're far away. Once we get them out of our land, what they do on theirs shouldn't be our concern. Shouldn't be, but...”

  “But you're not comfortable knowing the same thing is going to happen somewhere else,” Laura guessed.

  “Yeah. Which is where he comes in,” he said, nodding to Mason.

  Kell's brow furrowed. “What's that supposed to mean?”

  Mason sighed. “I'm good, but I can't assassinate their entire leadership. Those bunkers are going to be impossible to get into, and I'm not exactly inconspicuous.” He flexed his scarred forearms for emphasis.

  “I know that,” Will said. “I'm not an idiot. Killing them wasn't what we've discussed. I was thinking more subtle than that.”

  “Oh, holy shit,” Laura said. “You want to start a rebellion.”

  “Not just that,” Will replied. “The idea is to make sure the people in New America know what the people in charge have been up to, but that's also a means to an end. If we can gather enough sympathetic people, the end game is to take down their leadership through unrest and get access to their research. As much of it as we can get our hands on.”

  Kell felt a knot of ice forming in his stomach. “Which will mean a team of people, since Mason stands out. You'll need to smuggle someone in who'll know what their looking at. Someone who can remember it in context.”

  Will nodded, a sad look on his face. “Yes, Kell. I hate to ask you to do this, but we don't have anyone else.”

  A surprisingly heartwarming amount of argument followed as Mason, Laura, and even Kate heatedly explained why it was a terrible idea and there was no way they would let Kell put himself in that sort of danger again. After all, look how close he'd come to losing his eye or worse, and how could Will even think it was okay to send him into that sort of mess...

  And while Kell was wary of the idea, he wasn't quite as weary as he had been. The proposal didn't spark the same adventurous spirit and excitement at the unknown as his decision to join Mason in being captured. This wasn't the spur of the moment idea put into action by two men on a what amounted to a whim.

  It was the careful strategy of a brilliant man designed with the input of other brilliant men. Nor was it going to be fast work. Kell let the discussion happen around him, listening to his friends debate the merits. He said nothing for a long time, determined not to let his words thumb the scales of anyone's point of view. He wasn't keen on the idea, but above all else and before any other consideration, Kell was a man who let logic and rationality drive his world view.

  And so he listened for a long time before he made his choice.

  Epilogue

  “This is really cool,” John said as he examined Mason's arm a few days later. “Are you sure you're okay?”

  Mason sat, impressively shirtless, and pointedly didn't look at his arm as it sat strapped to a padded support. “I'm good. I just don't want to look at it.”

  “You should,” Kell said as he rotated a fixture to bring a magnifying glass as thick as a hockey puck over Mason's arm. “It's fascinating.”

  “You asked me if you could look under my scars,” Mason said. “I let you go crazy. And hey, happy to help. Doesn't mean I want to see what's there.”

  Kell scoffed. “I've seen you kill a zombie with a coffee cup. And this was your idea, if you remember. We were just going to take samples.”

  “Yeah, that's a good point,” John said. “Isn't this a form of torture?”

  Mason had been given a local anesthetic, of course, so there was no pain involved, but a casual observer would have probably gone pale at the scene. A thick line of scar tissue following the curve of Mason's brachioradialis muscle had been given a careful incision at its base, the wound held open by a small retractor.

  “Look, it's ethical because I told you to do it,” Mason said. “You're not coercing me.” At this he laughed, as if the idea was ridiculous. John, who hadn't had the sort of reality checks needed to understand that it was utterly ridiculous, looked mildly offended. Kell, who had after all seen Mason kill a zombie with a coffee cup, had no such illusions. “If it even has a chance of helping, then I'm happy to do it. Take measurements, samples, whatever. I just don't want to see inside my own skin. That's weird.”

  Kell found exactly what he had hoped beneath the scar; smooth, tough tissue made entirely of Chimera cells. Even a fast visual inspection revealed clear differences between what he was seeing in Mason and the tissue present in New Breed zombies.

  “You know, he might have been one of the first,” John said as he carefully scraped small curls of tissue from the fibrous layer. “We might get lucky just doing comparisons.”

  “That would be great,” Kell said. “If this tissue has major structural differences, it might give us a clue about how to differentiate between people and zombies.”

  “That's kind of vague,” Mason said. “Are you two sure you're doctors?”

  “Yes,” Kell and John said in unison.

  “We're not going to go into specifics,” Kell said. “First off, you wouldn't understand it if we did, so what would be the point? Second, actual science is boring for most people. That's why it takes years of study. When John and I talk like this, we both know the steps we'll have to take. No need to spell them out.”

  “What we're hoping to see here,” John said, shaking the sample container, “is an obvious chemical and biological difference between the evolution of Chimera in your body compared to what we see in zombies. If we're lucky it will give us something to build a cure on. We've had false starts before, mainly because everything we've tried has affected Chimera the same way, regardless of whether the host was alive or not.”

  “This is going to be a great start,” Kell said. “We've had a lot of good starts, but this combined with Rawlins's stuff actually shines a little light at the end of the tunnel.”
>
  “Good,” Mason said. “It was worth it, then.”

  Kell ran a finger along the edge of his own scar, which was healing nicely. The stitches would be coming out soon. “Yes,” Kell said. “I think it was.”

  “You're going to have some time,” Mason said, sensing Kell's thoughts going elsewhere. “We have all of fall and winter to do other work and to plan for what's to come. Try not to dwell on it too much. Trust me on that. I have a lot of practice dealing with these situations.”

  Kell responded with a broad grin. “I actually wasn't thinking about New America at all just then.”

  “No?” Mason said, unconvinced.

  “No,” Kell echoed. “I was just wondering what Emily would be cooking tonight. She invited me over for dinner.”

  “Nice,” Mason said. “I'm kind of surprised you said yes.” He left unsaid why, choosing not to bring up everything Kell had lost with the fall of the world that was.

  “Honestly, so am I,” Kell admitted. “I guess it's just time to accept that everything changes. Me included.”