The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise (2 page)

The zombie regained its footing. The first step was slow, awkward. The second more firm. The third was the beginning of a run. By the time the thing closed the three yards between them, it was moving at a brisk jog. Hands at his sides, Kell did a sliding step. He bent slightly, hip extended and braced by his leg.

The zombie bounced off him, landing in a sprawl. Kell's back was to Laura as she spoke.

“You are your own best defense, your best weapon. We've been teaching you to fight, but you need to remember the fundamentals more than anything. Always keep your balance. Always observe weaknesses. Always know your own strengths. It's okay to be afraid. Hell, that's even a good thing. But control it, use it. Don't let it use you.”

The zombie tried to stand, but its arm twisted in the middle of its bicep. With an eerie lack of reaction, the thing kept trying to balance on the shattered limb.

“Look at that,” Laura said. “K got lucky, but all it took was a bad fall and it broke its arm. Because K kept himself balanced and calm, he was able to knock this guy off his feet without much effort. Against a single zombie, even a person with no training has a hard time losing if they're prepared.”

A clattering of metal rose from behind him. Kell glanced over his shoulder, keeping his enemy in his peripheral vision, to find Laura and the two adult students releasing three more zombies.

“Lesson two,” she intoned. “Fighting multiple enemies.”

Placidity vanished, replaced by tightly reigned anger. How could she risk her students that way? She had no way to know the undead would come for him, though at least she had the sense to unleash them from the posts rather than risk the untrained getting bitten opening the collars. He saw that much before spinning all the way around to face the new threat.

Something soft splattered against his chest, small flecks of liquid hitting him in the face. The smell was strong—blood. The iron of it filled his nose.

“Watch,” Laura said with laughter in her voice.

The smell of the blood drew them toward him, but Kell didn't make himself an easy target. As soon as Laura tossed the  sponge soaked in deer blood, an item they often used to corral zombies, everyone else ceased to exist. He knew the damaged enemy on the ground would be working its way toward him, could hear it scrabbling in the grass as he backed up.

Kell shot sideways suddenly, moving far enough to get all four enemies in view. He circled behind the injured one and ran up to it just when the thing managed to finally get to its knees. Armored hands clenched the sides of its head and twisted. Not the sharp but short jerk you see in the movies, but a fast and continuous rotation. Bones snapped, followed by the wet tearing of connective tissue. Zombies largely lacked guile; the moment the thing went limp Kell knew it was for real. He let go and launched himself at the three remaining enemies.

The fight was blessedly short. Kell slammed an elbow into the face of one, the blow crunching through the bridge of its nose. The second he took out of the fight by grabbing the cable trailing from its neck, keeping the zombie under his control. He used the thing's weight to his advantage, pulling on the cable for balance as he stomped the knee of the third enemy inward, snapping the joint sideways before kicking it to death.

From there it was a simple matter of working his hands up the cable and grabbing the last enemy by the neck, then crushing the vertebrae. He looked at Laura, who had a satisfied look on her face.

“Let's take a short break before lesson three,” she said. “I'd like to talk to K alone.”

Thirty feet from the confused and half-awed students, Kell let his anger show.

“What the fuck was that? You told me you'd let them go
after
I killed the first one. What if one of those things decided to go for the students? I wasn't ready to help them if they needed it. What the hell, Laura?”

She studied him for a moment. “You're not even breathing hard. You didn't pull any of your weapons.”

He blinked. “What?”

Laura cocked her head as if she were trying to figure out a math problem. “You could have used any of your weapons and made that fight a lot easier. You didn't. Instead you kept to the lesson plan and took them out barehanded. Why?”

Kell shrugged, his anger evaporating. “I didn't see much point. I've fought worse odds with no weapons.”

“So you just think I'm stupid, then?”

“What?” Kell asked. “No, of course not.”

Laura smiled. “Good. Because I'm not. I know what you're capable of. I had the sponge in my pouch just in case,” she said, patting the leather bag hooked to her belt. “I wanted to get outside their expectations. They saw what we were doing as a controlled experiment.” She waved a hand toward the woods. “That out there? It's anything but controlled. Those people saw the shock on your face. They also saw you react to defend yourself. That's gonna stick with them.”

It made a kind of sense. He'd learned the hard way, after all. Months on his own spent watching and learning, failing more often than he won, which involved a lot of running afterward.

“To be honest, I was kinda hoping to see more of a reaction out of you, Kell.” Laura's eyes locked on his. Worry filled them. “You've always been withdrawn, but the last few months it's like you're someone else. So quiet, always keeping to yourself.”

Kell forced a smile, no more than a quirk at the corner of his mouth. “Just getting ready for the move. That's all. I'm getting a chance to lose myself in a crowd, after all. Need to get used to being a guy nobody knows and who doesn't stand out in a crowd.”

“And the nightmares, they don't have anything to do with it?” Laura asked with a sigh.

At the mention of them, his heart began to race. Images swirled in his mind, the terrible memory of losing Karen and Jennifer replaying over and over again.

“Don't know what you're talking about,” Kell said.

Laura's saw through the lie. Karen told him many years before he cried out in his sleep at times. If Laura was asking, she'd heard him. But goddammit, those memories were
his
, no matter how awful. They were no one's burden to bear except his own.

“I'm not feeling so well. Better finish the lesson without me. Dan Rickwalder can step in, he knows the drill,” Kell said.

Laura only nodded, and he walked away. Back to the house where no one would bother him. Back to his bare room with only the ghosts of his mistakes for company. She said nothing as he left, but he felt her eyes on him. Worried, perhaps, though whether it was for him or for the cure he might create, Kell McDonald didn't know.

Night fell across the world, draping Kell in moonlight as he walked.

He had no fear of being caught unaware. Laura thought he didn't care about his own life, but that wasn't true. Kell didn't want to die. It was just exhaustion. The constant raw emotions each morning, old wounds torn open in his sleep. Wanting to die and not wanting to suffer were different things. It wasn't his fault the two often intersected.

Still, Laura's implication couldn't be missed. She thought he was on the edge of some mental precipice, and no matter how right she might be, Kell didn't have the energy to deal with her mothering him. She and Kate wouldn't mean for it to be an argument, but more often than not lately their concerns for his well-being turned into fights when they brought it up.

Walking was a lovely substitute. It wasn't avoiding the topic or a form of denial
at all
.

Beside the desire not to suffer through a heart-warming chat about his feelings, patrolling the area was a necessity. Though a good number of their expanded group lived on Kell's property now, waiting for the notice to move south, most of them didn't keep guard. They locked down at night inside their sheltered vehicles and trusted the tripwires and bells strung about the property to alert them.

Kell often thought about the raid against the marauder camp. Not all of them died in the fighting. Some ran. There was a constant worry in the back of his mind. Men who did the things those marauders were guilty of didn't take violence lying down. Rapists and murderers all, Kell lived under the persistent belief the survivors would attempt payback. It was an itch on the back of his neck with no signs of going away.

Following the fishing line and thin wire crisscrossed around the area, he searched for footprints. The ground was no longer frozen, and regular rain left the earth soft. A man taking the deliberate and careful action of stepping over a warning system had to put all his weight on one foot. Kell's analytic brain translated that into pure physics; all the weight on one foot would leave a deeper print. More noticeable. Concentrate the weight on a smaller surface area, increase the force applied to the dirt. Simple.

Which made patrolling much easier. He wasn't a great woodsman.

Though he'd looked around the property more nights than not, Kell had yet to see evidence any surviving marauders—or any new ones, for that matter—were trespassing. It isn't paranoia when they're really after you, however, and burning a man's friends alive is a powerful reason to think they are.

Not finding evidence wasn't proof they weren't close. Kell had no doubt someone was out there, though he had no idea how far away they were. Near enough to watch, almost certainly. He knew this due to a curious lack of zombies coming from the south. Directly in line with the distant flatland beyond the hills. The undead filtered in from every other direction—except the places where people lived. Human beings were good at stopping the shambling corpses.

So why would zombies be coming from the woods all around except for that one area, unless there were people camping there, offering resistance? The south was ideal for watching the house. The woods behind the place dropped off after a few dozen yards, and though the house was all but invisible from within the trees, from the flatland it was easy enough to spy on.

Kell stood next to one of the tripwires, gazing out across the land. Silvery light bathed the south as he tried to catch a glimpse of the enemy. A stray spark from a hidden fire, a whiff of smoke. Even the distant sound of the human-on-zombie violence would have been enough.

The thought sent electricity through his veins. Moving against an enemy he could see, touch. Fighting something he could win against. The basic struggle for life and death. If he witnessed something to prove his theory, he could act. Only a promise not to risk himself unnecessarily stopped Kell from investigating more closely. Facing monsters of flesh and bone was simple, black and white. There was no guilt in it for him.

Easier by magnitudes than the ghosts he carried with him.

So he watched. For long hours, most nights, he watched and hoped.

After only a few hours of sleep, Kell rose before dawn to check the traps.

Following the same path through the woods in the predawn light he'd abandoned for bed at three in the morning, he snagged the captured zombies. The traps were set outside the tripwires a good distance. To keep the undead from constantly breaking the lines and setting off the bells attached to them, Kell and his people set up blood-soaked traps to attract the wandering dead.

At first they used pits, but the effort required to dig them out wasn't worth the reward. Instead Kell and Kate worked out a solution involving spears carved from thick branches, easy to reproduce and reset. As a zombie walked toward the bait, a bloody chunk of leftover offal from the kitchen, it had no choice but to step on a crude lever hidden beneath the leaves. The traps were screened in by branches and fallen limbs on three sides, forcing the zombie to take a single approach.

When weight fell onto the lever, the length of wood it was attached to pivoted as the bottom end fell into a shallow trench. The top end held a length of wood, serrated to make backing off nearly impossible, which proceeded to transfix the zombie like a giant undead butterfly.

Kell killed ten zombies impaled by those traps, and found half a dozen more in the pit traps. Those were the ones they used for practice.

As he moved from station to station, it never occurred to him to feel pity or sadness. He'd ceased seeing the undead as human beings long before. Many of his expanded group talked about a particular experience that stuck with them
, such as
a reanimated child catching them by surprise or running across a familiar face trying to devour them. Kell listened on the rare occasions he socialized with them, but never commented. The fundamental detachment he maintained for the shambling dead made those kinds of conversations alien.

Just after dawn he returned to recruit other members of the group to help him bring the undamaged zombies in from the pit traps. Killing them was easy enough. Hauling them from holes in the ground without taking an injury was much more difficult.

Kell approached the early risers coming from the trees just northwest of the house where the larger group made camp.

“Dan, Scotty,” Kell said without greeting. “Grab three or four volunteers and help me bring in the catch.”

The men nodded, heading back to the camp at a jog. In minutes half a dozen armed and armored people took positions behind Kell as he led them to the traps.

Five of them peeled off, moving one direction along the vast circle of traps surrounding the property. Kell was big enough and had the strength to need the help of just one other person. Dan Rickwalder, a man in his late thirties, was as different from Kell as it was possible to be. Kell was tall, the size of an NBA player but thicker of build. Dan was short, at least in comparison. Kell's skin was dark, Dan so light he was nearly translucent. Kell was quiet, while Dan liked to talk.

Which the smaller man did, in abundance, while they walked. It wasn't the vapid nattering of an empty head—the end of the world being the Super Bowl of Darwinism—but instead a constant stream of theories, ideas, observations, and concerns. When the volunteers and their families learned they were being forced out by the North Jackson leadership and would be sent as the early first wave of the migration south, Dan found himself thrust into a position of leadership among those unwanted souls. The others saw how easily he got along with Kell, Kate, and Laura, and put the onus of responsibility for the group on him.

Dan was sharp, almost too observant. Though he never said as much on their walks, Kell was beginning to think the other man knew something deeper was going on. It was unlikely he knew the origin of Chimera or Kell's identity, but he clearly had suspicions.

The smaller man was musing about the best route south to their new home when Kell chimed in for the first time.

“Any news from the world? I know you talk to people who get to communicate.”

Dan smiled. “Yeah, bits and pieces. I keep a running list of things to tell Laura and Kate, every time someone comes up with a new way to fight the dead or encounters something new.”

Kell enjoyed being around Dan—the man was funny and smart—but this was what he hungered for. Dan was one of the few of their group still treated with respect by the North Jackson leadership, which meant he had sources of information handy. Over the previous months Dan had shared huge amounts of data well-known to the larger survivor communities, but unknown to Kell and the ladies due to their isolation.

The previous winter he'd encountered a zombie more intelligent than the others. At the time Kell hadn't known the wider population had been aware of them for ages. Thanks to the guy in Kentucky who wrote the blog, the average person saw this as proof the plague mutated and evolved at breakneck speeds. On the one hand, Kell knew Chimera could and would do so, but on the other the increase in intelligence didn't fit the pattern of the organism's mutation. More likely it was a result of being more firmly entrenched in a host before it reanimated.

There were other, more clear examples of the unchecked evolution of Chimera, however. Early in the first winter of The Fall, it became clear the undead were adapting. Where the cold made them immobile to begin with, certain zombies eventually became tolerant of the cold. Kell suspected that was due to a number of undead diabetics with high blood sugar. Glucose in a biological system acts like antifreeze, after all. From there the mutation must have spread to the general population.

Much more interesting were a variety of zombie universally referred to as the New Breed. Stronger, smarter, more coordinated, capable of working in groups and using crude tools as well as resorting to cannibalism—of the zombie-on-zombie variety—when other food sources were scarce. That was definitely new. Unheard of.

Dan chuckled. “Got confirmation from New Haven just yesterday about that thing Kate asked me about, you know, how the zombies are getting less tolerant to heat.”

Kell and the ladies had completely missed the fact that the previous summer, a new version of the plague hit most of the major communities. They'd been sequestered out on their property, unaware of the terror sweeping through every group of survivors. Someone figured out that making the people suffering from the new plague breathe hot air would weaken and eventually burn out the invading variant of Chimera.

Further testing indicated an increasing weakness to heat and fire all across the zombie population, which came as a total surprise to Kell. In all his experiments and study, that was a trait he'd never seen.

“So, yeah,” Dan continued. “I printed out a summary report from New Haven. It's only a page, but the guy laid out all the methods they use to weaponize fire, and all the data they've gathered about the weakness to heat.”

“Nice,” Kell replied. Much of the combat training Kate taught used Kell's own observations and theories, culled from years of working with Chimera. To ensure no one thought he knew more about the disease than he should, Kate presented them as her own ideas, brilliantly deduced from information widely available to others.

“Here we are,” Dan said as they approached the first pit trap. Several more zombies had fallen into it between his first check and now. “Think we can handle four on our own?”

Kell nodded, reaching into the backpack under his cloak. He produced loops of steel cable, closures, and a fistful of zip ties. Dan unhooked a short catch pole from his belt, a heavy aluminum rod about two feet long with a loop of braided steel at one end.

“Ready?” Dan asked.

Kell arranged his gear on the ground and nodded. “Go for it.”

The smaller man lassoed the nearest zombie, hauling it back toward him but taking care not to jerk. The first few times he'd tried this had ended with broken necks. Kell leaned in, running a length of cable under the arms of the thrashing monster, careful to keep it between him and the other zombies in the pit. The others could only claw ineffectively around their brother as Kell worked, but it was still best to be cautious, especially given his precarious perch on the edge of the pit.

“On three,” Kell said as he secured the loop.

Together they hauled the body from the pit. Dan kept steady pressure on the catch pole, guiding their captive to the ground. With practiced ease, Kell zip tied the thing's wrists together and worked the cable around its neck into a collar, closing it off with a carabiner. Dan released the zombie as Kell hauled it to its feet.

The thing surged forward, snapping at Kell's hands as he tried for a better grip on the cable. Dan, standing a pace away, jumped in surprise. Kell only jerked his hands away, snatching the cable as he moved. Otherwise he remained placid, calm.

Dan eyed the big man as they tied the zombie's leash securely to a tree. “You're a little creepy sometimes. You know that, right?”

Kell smiled.

Half an hour later they tromped into the front yard, captive zombies in tow. The training grounds were swarming with activity. Kate stood in the middle watching a tiny woman destroy a larger man in small, calculated chunks.

Kell raised a hand, catching Kate's eye. “Aww, look at that,” she said. “Following behind you like the worst ducklings
ever.
”