The Fall (Book 5): Exodus in Black (16 page)

In addition to losing his lower leg, he had suffered a startling number of injuries in the crash. The worst of them were multiple cracked bones all over his body but especially his legs. Crushed muscle, badly beaten ligaments and tendons, and some minor head trauma as icing on that particularly shitty cake.

It took three weeks for him to leave the clinic. In the wake of his kidnapping, Kell didn’t get much in the way of personal choice. Mason and Emily, who visited him every day to share meals and keep him current on the goings on, had no problem with Will Price taking command of Kell’s life. For the most part he let them do it. It wasn’t hard to understand being overcautious given what had happened to Haven and him.

When he did finally get to leave, he asked to be taken to the north gate.

“My god,” he whispered when Mason halted the wheelchair at the top of the hill overlooking it.

“While we were out looking for you, a swarm hit the gate,” Mason said. “Must have been some New Breed keeping watch from a distance.”

While the gate itself had been replaced thanks to remarkable—almost paranoid—foresight of keeping the pieces of a spare handy, the damage to the inside of Haven surrounding it was still painfully evident. The ground in every direction was scorched and blackened from incendiary weapons used against the swarm. Hundreds of small holes pocked the slagged asphalt and nearby buildings.

“How many?” Kell asked. “How many people died?”

It was Emily, standing in front of him to one side, who answered. “Seven. Not as many as you might have expected considering how bad this was. They’ve had years to work out their responses. They’re really good at it.”

Kell recalled the time he’d lived here before leaving for Iowa. Memories of fighting on the wall and working fluidly with teams of people flooded his mind. His stump itched as if to remind him those days were probably over.

When the small inset gate opened to let the out, Kell twisted around in his seat to look at Mason. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” Mason said with a smile.

“There’s no way Will is going to let me live in the hangar again. After what happened, I can’t even blame him.”

Emily fell back a little to put a hand on his shoulder. “Sweetie, how about you shut up for a minute and take a look?”

From where they were on the road, it should have been impossible to see any part of the hangar thanks to the weird, rolling hillscape. But Kell
could
see things. Several trucks were parked on the edge of the raised, flat section of ground the hangar sat on. A crane towered over them, though whatever it was raising or lowering was below the line of sight.

“What is this?” Kell asked as they moved up the drive.

What it was? Damn near a fortress. The hangar was still there, but now it was only the central element in a larger complex. Several outbuildings were being constructed in a neat array around it, forming the corners of a square several hundred feet on a side. Between the north and south buildings, a stretch of wall was going up.

Emily gestured at the workers. “That wall will be steel on the inner and outer sides and filled with concrete and reinforced from the inside. We’ll have our own guards around the clock. They’re beefing up the power systems, gutting the inside, and turning this into a home. One where we’ll be safe.”

“Until someone drives a tank into it, anyway,” Mason quipped.

“Thought of that,” Emily said. “We’re going to have a trench. A big, deep trench. And traps.”

Kell tried to calculate the work hours involved, the resources needed. Compared to the sprawl that was Haven itself, this was tiny, but it was also a single building. A dwelling for a handful of people. The same effort would, in Haven, serve dozens if not more.

“Why go to all this trouble?” Kell asked. “We could just move the lab inside the walls.”

“We floated the idea to Will,” Mason said. “He wouldn’t hear it. You’re going to have to train people how to make the cure. You said you have more tests you want to do, and he wants you to have the space to do them and expand if you need to. That’s why the wall is so large; if you use up all the extra space inside the hangar, he’s ready to add on to the building. Space inside Haven is hard to come by these days.”

Kell sat there gaping stupidly. It was so much.
Too
much.

Emily crouched in front of him, careful not to bump his leg, and put her crossed arms on his knees. She met his eyes. “I think Will would have been thrown out of office if he tried to do anything less than give you your own place to live and work. Everyone here is a volunteer. While you were stuck in bed, the leadership had to decide what to tell everyone about the attack. They voted to be honest. About everything.”

Since the first day of The Fall—actually before it, when he’d seen the catastrophe looming—Kell had harbored one fear above all others. The idea of people knowing who he was and what his role in the end of the world had been was an oppressive weight he’d learned to live with. Part of the joy he found in the Iowa compound was not having to hide it.

“They know,” Kell said.

“They know,” Emily confirmed, smiling. “Will and the other council members held a bunch of town hall meetings and told them your story. How you’d been one of the people to discover chimera and tried to use it to help people. How your work was stolen and used to create the plague. And how you’ve been trying for so long to create the cure.”

That struck a spark in his chest. “What about John?”

Mason chuckled. “I told you he’d ask. You owe me a beer. We made sure Will knew to include him and let everyone know that his dedication to the cause is why we have a workable cure today.”

Emily nodded along. “You could put your name in the hat and win Will’s job without breaking a sweat. I wouldn’t say you have universal popularity, but I’ve heard dozens of folks around here call you a hero. I think they consider this,” she said, jerking her head at the construction, “the least they can do for the man who created the cure.”

Until the hangar was finished, they would live in the house next to the clinic. It was kept empty of permanent occupants, instead sheltering patients who needed frequent checkups and physical therapy. Kell required both, and he was politely shouted down when he tried to argue that it was too generous. He’d have been happy to sleep in the back of a van, so long as it was safe.

The first night out of the clinic was hard. Staying there meant he was a patient. He had doctors and nurses to answer to. His brain recognized it as a fundamentally alien way to live. Like prisoners coming home after a month in lockup, coming home meant taking a hard look at himself in daily life. Coming back to reality always had a certain momentum to it.

He sat on the edge of the bathtub wearing only a pair of cotton shorts. Long habit had ingrained the need to always wear enough clothes to fight in but for the time it took to bathe. Or have sex. He’d been shirtless and clad in shorts for hours because there were no imaginable circumstances where he’d need to fight.

The scars added up. The one on his face seemed inconsequential, now. The stab wounds and bullet holes told a story about him, but it wasn’t the only story. The expertly dressed stub of his leg told another. It was the truncated end of a sentence, words broken off abruptly to signal an end.

Also? A beginning. He had been warned about the sense of loss he would feel, and sure enough it was nestled against the inside of his ribs, a small glowing coal of grief that flared up whenever he looked down.

The injury was such that it might spell the end of his fighting days, and for the first time since The Fall began, Kell was starting to think he’d be okay with it. So much stock was placed on how well a person could protect, but even now that was starting to change.

Haven was proof. The Union and the other allied communities had begun to move past the hunter/gatherer mentality necessary to survive the collapse of civilization. A new one was rising in its place, and in it there were people whose value was measured in what they contributed to that society, not on how many zombies they could kill.

Mason promised he’d find someone to make Kell as close to whole as possible, and he felt almost guilty about how much he wanted that. Not to reclaim some ridiculous notion of manliness, but so he would at least be able to defend himself or someone he loved if it came to that.

A gentle knock sounded on the bathroom door. Thinking it was Emily, he said, “Come in.”

Lee’s face appeared in the crack of the door. “Hey, man.”

Embarrassment flooded through him, freezing him in place. “Hi. I thought you were Emily.”

Lee glanced at Kell’s stump openly, his face free of judgment or emotion. “I just realized I never got around to saying I was sorry for not being there with you. When you were taken, or the fight after.”

Kell forgot his discomfort for a second as he stared up at Lee in puzzlement. “You were still recovering. You were, what, staying overnight at the clinic when it happened? No one blames you, Lee. You were hurt.”

Lee’s eyes twinkled. “Exactly.
You were hurt
.”

Kell’s mouth worked for a few seconds, trying to form words. Hearing Lee repeat his own back to him had, for whatever reason, robbed him of speech. They were a steel ball dropped into a clock, rattling off gears and making them spin in ways he couldn’t yet understand.

“When I got here and Emily said you’d been sitting in here for a while, I knew what was going on,” Lee said, his tone as close to gentle as his Texas drawl allowed. “Had friends in the Marines lose limbs. I saw what it did to them, how they acted afterward. It can be pretty subtle, man. That look on your face when you saw it was me at the door? That was shame.”

Again, he glanced pointedly at Kell’s stump. “That right there? Nothing to be ashamed of. Neither is what comes next. All the PT and figuring out what your new limits are, that’s just part of being hurt. I’ve seen too many good people fall down a hole because they can’t get through what happened to them. Too many boys who stay in the bath too long looking at what they lost and trying to make sense of it.”

He straightened and moved to leave. “If it starts to get to you, come talk to me. That’s mostly what I wanted to say.”

Lee left the room before Kell could form a reply or even offer his thanks.

The truth about trauma, no matter what anyone tells you, is that no amount of suffering through it makes it easier to cope with the next time. The idea of growing numb is false; that’s just the cumulative damage changing the shape of who you are.

What does make coping easier? Knowing what to expect. Having people with you for support. That was a lesson Kell had finally, blessedly learned. As he washed, carefully avoiding getting the dressings wet, he tried to imagine what it would have been like to suffer this injury before he’d found Emily, or even his friends.

“I’d have laid down and died,” he muttered to himself. It was probably true.

Later, when he and Emily lay together in bed—an actual bed, a luxury he could get used to—his mind wandered on tangents as he considered all the ways he would try to compensate for the missing leg. He rather thought the Kell he’d been a few years ago would have dwelt on the worse aspects.

He had adapted. Changed. It was, at its root, just another facet of survival. Use what works, learn from experience, discard everything else. Work the problem. If necessary, ask for help. Listen to advice.

Kell knew it would be a long road ahead, that he would stumble and fall, but when he finally drifted off to sleep that night, it was with a smile on his face.

He dreamed of brighter futures.

“I’m not even thirty,” Will said as he settled in behind his desk, loaded with stacks of reports. He gestured toward his guest to take the glass of vodka he’d poured. “Look at all this gray in my hair. This job is going to kill me.”

Mason, never one to sip, slugged back the two fingers of Russian booze in a single gulp. “You’re pretty good at it, though. This place is way more than Josh or Jess could have imagined back in the day.”

Will smiled wistfully. “I miss them. Any idea where they ran off to after the attack?”

Mason shook his head. “No, and I honestly don’t want to know. I’d be tempted to go find them. They want to live out there where no one will bother them; I can respect that.”

Sipping his own vodka, Will sighed. “You realize telling everyone about the cure is going to change things. Rebound is going to be all over us unless we take steps to prevent it.”

Mason shrugged. “If we hadn’t been attacked, we’d have been leaving the compound about now to infiltrate their territory.”

“Insurrection?” Will asked, professionally curious.

Mason grinned. “It’s what I’m good at. Spend a few months sniffing out key people in their outlying territories who might be sympathetic, and building from there. Even if it didn’t do any real damage, they’d have to waste time and resources putting out fires in their own back yard.”

“It might have worked,” Will said. “Too bad they knew your faces. And followed you home, apparently.”

“Yeah, it had to have taken a lot of effort, because I never saw anything suspicious,” Mason said, slightly grumpy. “I’m not what you’d call careless about being followed.”

Will barked a laugh. “Oh, I know. I remember.” He shook his head. “It’s so bizarre seeing you here, with your scars. I watched you go into the desert to die.”

“I
was
dying,” Mason said. “Judith has this idea that all the wounds I took fighting the zombies out there forced Chimera to kick my immune system and healing into overdrive. She thinks the infection would have done me in, otherwise.”

“Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad. I’m going to need your advice and a lot of help in the days ahead. We have to do something about Rebound. I’m not willing to go to war over this cure, but I don’t want to just hand it over, either.”

Mason nodded. “You’ll offer an olive branch, then?”

Will’s mouth twisted in distaste. “As a general rule, I prefer it. I don’t have so much pride that I can’t swallow it to deal with people who put agents in my home and attacked it, but I don’t have to like it. Yes. I want to try diplomacy. I think rather than handing the cure over, we send an envoy with an offer to train one of their scientists how to make it. We’ll stretch out the process as much as possible to give our people time to build a nice lead, though.”

Mason, never slow to pick things up, sat forward with interest on his face. “Who might you have in mind to be this envoy?”

Will took another sip of vodka. “Oh, I think it should be someone experienced in surviving impossible odds. A person who knows the value of self-control. Someone who has no compunctions about implementing a backup plan just in case diplomacy doesn’t work. Say, sowing agents for an insurrection as he travels through their territory?”

Mason nodded. “That person would need to recruit some people quickly and train them as best he could.”

“He’d better get to it, then,” Will said. “We’re not going to have much time. I’ll be sending a scout to their nearest outpost in a few days to pass along a message expressing our hope for a dialog. Once that process starts, we’ll need to be ready as fast as possible.”

Mason poured himself some more vodka and raised his glass. He had already begun to game out the possibilities, and while his heart hoped Rebound would decide the cure was important enough to justify curtailing their less pleasant behaviors, he was ready to use it as incentive to create the insurrection he had spent months planning.

Beyond heart and mind was hope that this might be his last war. One final mission to help create a safer world, one he might finally be able to stop and enjoy.

Mason drank to that.