The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living (13 page)

Kell watched the zombie intently. The zombie watched Kell watch him. It was creepy.

“If Gabrielle finds out I'm fighting before she clears me, she's going to cut off something I'll miss,” Kell said, never taking his eyes from the dead man.

“Nah, you'll be fine,” Josh said casually, waving his hand dismissively. “You're just my backup, and anyway it's chained up.”

That was true; the captive New Breed had a collar at its throat and a heavy chain leading to a steel peg in the ground. The testing area was behind the clinic, a back yard with its swing set and picnic tables long since removed. Nothing grew there now, the ground packed dirt marked here and there by the occasional stone. A tall chain-link fence surrounded the area, reinforced to a ridiculous degree. No zombie had ever managed to get out, not that a single escapee would fare well in New Haven for more than a minute or two.

“Now watch,” Josh said.

He approached the zombie, whose attention shifted with the careful intensity of a stalking predator. It moved, chain clinking as it dragged the ground, but stopped before the slack was taken up.

It knew how much space it had to fight. It had learned. This itself wasn't surprising, but it sparked half a dozen questions, all of which Kell forced to the back of his mind as he observed.

Josh wore armor of his own design, made up of a martial arts uniform and a hundred additions to make it as resistant to zombie bites as possible. His face was bare, however, and he wore no extra protection around his neck. This was, he said, and intentional choice to goad the zombie into focusing on that area when it attacked.

Josh stepped forward, deftly striking out with his staff. It was almost identical to Kell's spear in dimensions if not composition. Josh's weapon was wood and had no point. Too easy to kill the test subjects, otherwise.

The tip of the staff darted toward the zombie's knee. It dodged, hopping back to avoid being hit, its foot catching on the dangling chain. It tripped, falling on its ass as Josh backed just outside of its reach.

The zombie hauled itself back up, giving the chain a shake as if to get it out of the way. Its eyes remained fixed on the armored man the entire time. There was no hate in them, no expression at all on its face, only impassive calculation.

When Josh moved in again, the zombie turned before the staff could come close to its knee, latching its hands onto the weapon as its teeth snapped together inches from the exposed throat before it.

Josh, to Kell's surprise, laughed. It was more of a giggle, really. “You silly bitch,” he said, letting go of the staff. He leaped back, once again just outside the zombie's range.

The dead thing moved forward, pulling its chain tight. Josh stood confidently as it struggled to move further before giving up.

“Now watch this part,” Josh said.

The zombie gazed hungrily at both men, glazed eyes narrowing in contemplation. Then its fingers tightened on the staff. It took a clumsy swing, which Josh ducked, laughing again.

“Has it done that before?” Kell asked, his curiosity piqued.

“Nope,” Josh replied. “But I figured it would. Damn things know how to use tools and their problem-solving skills get better all the time. If they had better coordination, we'd all be screwed. That's why we've been studying them, so we can exploit every advantage. Eventually they'll figure out how to get over the walls in numbers.”

Kell opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the rattle of the chain-link gate. He glanced over to see Kate standing with her arms crossed. She motioned for him to come over.

“I know better than to get between two people when a woman has that look on her face,” Josh said. “You go talk. I'm gonna take my stick back from this asshole over here.”

Kell steeled himself as he moved toward her. Try as he might, he could never quite put her out of his head. Too much history there.

“Kate,” he said, nodding.

Her face was unreadable, though she gave him a searching look. “Your boys were delayed heading out. I know they were supposed to leave for John this morning, but Juel broke her ankle this morning. They need a replacement scout to go with them.”

It wasn't hard to figure out. “And you're the only other person who can make the trip, because nobody is supposed to know John exists.”

“Yeah. I told Will I'd do it. I'm going to either way, but I need to know if this is going to be a problem between the two of us.”

Kell stared at her for a long time. When he spoke, it was in a voice devoid of tone, of any feeling whatsoever. He chose his words with care. “Not if you do your job the way you're supposed to.”

Her eyes flashed. “Of course I will. I'm not an idiot. I know how important this is.”

Kell snorted. “I thought your friends were important, too...”

“Don't give me that shit,” Kate spat, red spots blooming on her cheeks. “I didn't hurt anyone. I wasn't going to actually hurt Laura, you have to know that.”

Ice began to flow through his veins, a wave of cold fury so powerful it actually shocked him. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. The problem is, you don't seem to get how badly you betrayed our trust. We'd have died for you. Laura suffered the worst things a person can live through by your side. Threatening her that way...I can't even imagine what could have made you do it. I'd have never thought it of you, Kate. But then I've always had that blind spot with people, haven't I? Can't see what they're really capable of until it's too late.”

Kate had murder in her gaze, but somehow she wrangled it under control enough to speak. “For your fucking information, I did it because I wanted us gone. Out of here, as fast as possible. Because there's a
fucking war
coming. We've known it for months, but we still stayed here. I was trying to get us all to safety before it was too late.”

Kell knew as much, of course, but it didn't change the basic and unbridgeable gap between who Kate was and who the rest of them were. “I know that. My problem is that you never tried to talk to me about it. You never made your case. Instead of taking a chance of being rejected, you tried to manipulate me and the rest of the group, and you hurt your best friend in the world to do it.”

For a moment, it seemed as though a glimmer of understanding danced across her face, a brief surge of understanding. It was gone so quickly Kell assumed it was his imagination, as Kate's face fell back into the impassive mask she wore at the start of the conversation.

“So yeah, go do your job, Kate. Make sure Scotty and the rest are safe. Say hello to John for me, if you want. But until you grow the fuck up and take some responsibility for the things you do, don't bother talking to me again.”

Kell walked away without looking back.

The dogs greeted them when they returned to Josh's house. Jess was nowhere to be found, but that wasn't unusual. She spent most of each day overseeing an improbable number of agricultural projects. Kell rarely saw her unless he came to the house especially early in the morning.

He wrestled with the dogs while Josh stowed his weapons and armor. It was becoming a bit of a ritual upon entering the house. Something about the doggy grins made him incapable of feeling the weight of the world. For those brief minutes, it was just him and the furballs engaging in mock battle.

Josh bustled around the house, surprising Kell with a dark brown bottle. He looked at the other man quizzically.

“It's beer,” Josh explained. “Well, okay, it's closer to bread, but my brother brews the stuff and
he
calls it beer, so we try to do the same. Thought you might like one. I hate the stuff, myself.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Kell said, twisting the cap off with one hand. The beer was not a fan of this treatment, foaming over immediately. Kell tried to catch the overflow, bringing the bottle to his lips as quickly as he could, but his chest took a dose of suds despite his best efforts.

Josh grinned. “Dave—my brother—calls that a baptism. I think he brews it that way on purpose, just so everyone knows you've been drinking his creation.”

He threw Kell a towel and dug out a fresh shirt, handing it to him. “Might be a little small, but it'll do. You're welcome to take a shower if you like.”

It was a mark of just how far the world had fallen that Kell needed time to process the last sentence. “Uh, what?” Kell muttered intelligently.

“A shower,” Josh repeated. “Like, alone. I wasn't offering to take one with you or anything, if that's what that look on your face is for.”

“What? No,” Kell said, thankful for the darkness of his skin as a flush climbed his face. “I'm just surprised. You have an outdoor shower? I thought most people tried to conserve water.”

Now the other man grinned. “Outdoor? Hell, no. We don't do freezing our asses off in this house, man. We have a setup on the roof. Even in winter, the sun will warm it up really well. It's all rainwater we capture here, so no one can bitch about us using up the public supply. Just hop in the tub and turn it on. Just like you used to.”

And that was how Kell McDonald took his first real shower in longer than he could remember. Maybe since the day his family died.

It.

Was.

GLORIOUS.

He kept it short, unwilling to overstep his welcome by using up the entire supply. Even so, the difference was stark. The man who stepped out of the tub was, in some minor but very real way, a different man than who had stepped in. Maybe it was reliving a boring old experience made exotic by the end of the world. It could have been the subtle realization that all was not truly lost, some small pieces of what was surviving through the ingenuity of those who refused to let the past die completely.

Mostly, though, it was the sense of cleansing, of finally saying to Kate what he needed to say. The words had been inside him for years, really, the pressure building nearly unnoticed as she grew more distant and brutal. It was that and a hundred other things New Haven had shown him or brought out in him, which all added up to a better world than he could have imagined existing in the hell he had created.

It felt good.

And if the UAS had their way, it was all going to burn.

War, being an efficient beast, does many things. Chief among them, it prioritizes.

In the weeks following the decision to send Scotty and the rest on to John's hiding place, the central United States became a very active place. It was no longer possible to hide the truth from the masses. Sightings of large groups of heavily armed people became common. The western communities—among them a huge number of people living at the Google campus—were suddenly cut off from New Haven and the east. Not that more than the occasional brave soul made the insanely dangerous trip from California to Kentucky, but it was more that they
could
. Now they couldn't.

In reaction to the sudden appearance of an organized nation, the allied communities of the east made their friendship formal. Every settlement reorganized, mimicking the setup defined by New Haven itself. Elections were held for councils, which themselves put forth candidates for governors or whatever title each group decided on for the person in charge. Those leaders formed a sort of grand council, and as a group chose one person to lead them against the rising threat.

“I can't believe they picked
me
,” Will complained, downing his fourth shot of whiskey.

Kell raised his shot glass, grinning crookedly. “Congratulations!” he said, finishing his own shot. He refilled both from a bottle of something called 'Pappy Van Winkle', which Will assured him was the finest bourbon known to man. Kell drunkenly reasoned that his palate must be unrefined, as the stuff tasted as much like paint thinner as any other whiskey he had tried.

It was the first time he had seen Will since his confrontation with Kate. Well, that wasn't entirely true; Will could be seen most days, though only as a flash as he zoomed across the compound on his golf cart, seeing to one detail or another. Now that Kell and his people were decidedly seeing the coming war through in New Haven, his position on the List of Shit Will Needs to Worry About went from near the top to somewhere below whether or not kilts should come back into fashion.

It was understandable; a cure doesn't matter much if you're too dead to enjoy it.

“Man, it's just...” Will slurred, trailing off for a second before finding the thread again. “The Union is important. Maybe the most important thing we've ever done. And it's on me to do the right thing.”

Kell hid his surprise. There was something raw in Will's voice, the admission itself a show of vulnerability Kell had never seen in the man. The sudden, perfect understanding of the moment was sobering; say the wrong thing, and it might give the doubts brewing in Will's mind more power.

“You're going to be fine,” Kell said lightly. “You've done a great job here, and it's not like you'll have to run the other communities or anything. They'll just be following your lead. Leave the details up to them.”

Will looked at him sideways. “What if they don't agree with my strategies? I'm not good at politics. I don't know how to win people over. I only got this job because people knew I wouldn't bullshit them with that kind of thing.”

Kell shrugged. “If they don't like it, tell them to leave or elect someone else. You've kept trade going between all our towns, man. You've organized and dealt with all that crap. They voted for you, so make them understand you mean to take that seriously.”

A thoughtful look fell over Will's face, slightly marred by the inebriated slackness of his features. Then he smiled. “Maybe you're right. I'll just tell 'em how it is, and they can follow orders or fuck off.”

Kell laughed in agreement, raising another drink in salute.

He didn't quite stumble home a few hours later, having given himself time to sober up slightly. Someone had helped this along by bringing by coffee and a huge plate of fries, though he wondered what assistant was unlucky enough to be on duty for that in the middle of the night.

The hundred yards or so between Will's office and his RV were shrouded in darkness, but the black shapes standing out against the slightly blacker sky were unfamiliar. War, changing things again. Everywhere were new barriers, even inside the walls. New plantings of rugged vegetables in raised beds and tables, to feed the volunteers going out on the road. Vehicles parked on every road to give them protection against sabotage and so they could be worked on in safety.

Even now, the place felt like home. The changes were necessary in the face of the rising threat. Rather than alienate, they built on a growing sense of respect. These people wouldn't do as the people of North Jackson had done in the early days. They wouldn't fight
among
themselves and cause division if it could be avoided. There was no knee-jerk reaction to be found. Only calm, rational response to observed facts.

In that small way, they were all scientists. The thought made him smile.

Then he leaned over and vomited, splattering the dregs of some very expensive whiskey all over the wheel of a parked school bus.

Still, he felt good. Alone but not unhappy, he made his way home.

“Are you okay?” someone shouted in the voice of God.

Kell groaned, weakly flapping his arms at the noise as if he could bat away sound waves. “Stop yelling,” he whispered.

“I'm not—are you hungover?” the voice—Laura's—asked in a lower, surprised tone. “
You
?”

“Me,” Kell said, cracking open grainy eyes. The RV still had most of its armor cladding, keeping the space dim. The rich smell of coffee filled his nostrils, ruined by the smell of food creeping in from the outside. “What time is it?”

“After nine,” Laura said. “What happened to you?”

He sat up, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. “Will. Wanted to celebrate the vote.”

“He's not setting a very good example,” she said in a sickly-sweet voice, rubbing a hand over the stubble on the crown of Kell's head. “Bad old Will, getting my little guy wasted.”

The slight movement of his skull sent his stomach into a panic, feeling like it was running around looking for an exit. He clumsily slapped Laura's arm away and groaned again. “Quit it, I'm gonna hurl.”

She chuckled, a sound almost pure in its disregard for his suffering. “You must be feeling terrible, I've never heard you use the word 'hurl' before.” She slapped him lightly on the shoulder, then stood up. “Come on, you baby. Suck it up, grow a pair, whatever it is men say to embarrass each other into being responsible. We have work to do.”

Slowly gaining control of himself, Kell glanced up at her. “Work? It's...Saturday, right? I'm not due anywhere until this afternoon.” Another wave of nausea rolled over him. “Though death has its appeal. Yeah, that'll work. I'll just die.”

Instead he was hauled to his feet, too busy keeping himself from vomiting again to protest.

“No dying today, stretch. You might have been too out of it to notice, but the call came in to mobilize a few minutes ago. Which means we've got jobs to do. Get some coffee, I'll find you some aspirin, and if you can keep a few eggs down, even better.”

Eggs were out of the question, but after downing two cups of java so dark and strong it probably qualified as a biohazard, Kell felt human enough to try toast. There was even butter to be had, a gift from one of the local farms run by New Haven citizens.

Though the first few steps away from the breakfast table were a struggle, his body began the climb back to operational efficiency quickly enough. He slogged his way through the vast field his camp sat in to the duty officer standing at the inner wall leading to the central section of the compound.

“Let's see,” the officer, a tiny woman with smoky brown skin and a thick Bronx accent, said as she scanned the paper in her hand. “Looks like you're at the clinic today.”

“Weird,” Kell said. “You sure? I never get work details there.”

The small woman gave him a put-upon look. Without glancing back at her paper, she nodded. “I'm sure.”

At the clinic he found the person in charge, who took the shape of Gabrielle in one of her better moods.

“I asked for you,” she explained when he asked about the assignment. “I figure they have plenty of big guys like you to lift heavy things. You've been one of the best in our classes, so I figure I can trust you to remember what to do and how to do it without me holding your hand.”

Kell was oddly touched. “Yeah, sure. Just tell me what to do.”

“Let's wait until your partner shows up—oh, there he is. Right on time.”

The partner in question was Lee White, who walked through the front door of the clinic with an air of casual surprise. “Hey,” he said. “What are we doing?”

The work turned out to be easy on the surface, but delicate. They were to assemble medical kits, which were as close to sterile as could be managed under the circumstances. They wore gloves and paper gowns. One of them set out and set up the pieces, the other assembled them into kits. It was the same work Kell had done months before, on their run against the Hunters.

“Does it seem kind of weird to you that everyone around here is super calm about this?” Kell asked between assembling kits, as they rolled gauze.

“About what?” Lee asked.

“Us going to war. Sending out so many people to fight.”

Lee shrugged. “I'm a marine, man. Spent a lot of time learning not to freak out. I might not be the best judge.”

“I'm not suspicious or anything,” Kell said, unable to let it go. “I'm all nerves. I don't see how people can be so accepting.”

Lee paused, his expression thoughtful. “I'd guess it's because they've spent the last few years dealing with one crisis after another, you know? Neither one of us would bat an eye at a dead person trying to eat us. But when the shit hit the fan at the beginning, I thought I was going crazy. Now it's not even an afterthought.”

He tilted his head toward the front of the building, and New Haven beyond. “I've been here a while, seen these people deal with constant warfare with one group or another. Before I showed up, it was even worse. This is just one more bunch of assholes.”

“Yeah, but this is a
lot
of assholes we're talking about here.”

Lee smiled. “True. But how long has New Haven been building connections with other communities? Do you even know how many of them are in the Union with us? I don't, but it's got to be a pretty big number. The UAS fucked up by even looking like they were coming this way, because it made the one thing they were afraid of happen.”

“It brought us all together to fight,” Kell said.

Lee winked at him. “Yep. When they told us what was happening a few days ago, I wasn't surprised. I'd heard about something like them a while back, when I was out west. They kept quiet, though, which says a lot. I'm guessing they're afraid to actually come at us, especially now. If they're too careful, our people can take advantage of that.”

The analysis, delivered in Lee's laconic Texas drawl, impressed Kell. “So why aren't you volunteering to go fight? Seems like they could use you.”

Something like fear passed across Lee's face, there and gone in an instant. “You might be right,” he said slowly. “But I've got something more important to do. It's for sure bigger than me being in the trenches again.”

The sober way he said it was almost too serious, like a child feigning remorse after being caught in the cookie jar.

“What is it, if you don't mind me asking?”

Lee's hands worked, rolling his gauze perfectly without any apparent conscious effort. His eyes stayed locked on the far wall. “I've been looking for someone. My last orders were to find him, and I plan to follow them.”

It might have been the lingering effects of his night spent drinking, because despite the chill of caution that sprung to life in the pit of his stomach, Kell spoke anyway.

“Who are you looking for?”

Lee was definitely avoiding looking at him when he answered. “A doctor. Maybe the only guy alive who can fix things, cure the plague.”

Kell had expected it, of course. Too many years of living in paranoia to be caught off guard. “And what are you planning to do with him, when you find him?”

Lee grinned, a sudden and bright expression. “I'm gonna stick to him like white on rice and make sure he stays alive, no matter what. Wherever he goes, I'll follow.” He met Kell's eyes. “Even if that means jumping into a swarm to back him up.”

Relieved, Kell smiled back. “Pretty dedicated soldier, aren't you? To be carrying out your orders so long after the corps is gone.”

“The corps isn't gone as long as there are any of us left,” Lee said, a little fire in his eyes. “Knowing what I know, I'd still be doing it even without orders. This guy is our only hope.”

Kell began laying out the next set of kits. “You should come to our camp after we're done,” he said. “We should probably talk.”