The Fall (Book 5): Exodus in Black (6 page)

She woke up before dawn to a bunker not nearly as crowded as feared. Kincaid and the people with him cleared space in the labs to kip in, though a handful opted to sleep in their vehicles. They promised to do it in shifts in order to keep an eye out for bad guys.

Her watch told her it was too damn early, but Emily made herself get up and start moving despite the interruption in her sleep. Kincaid had everyone make an inventory of their supplies before coming here, which he’d handed over to her when a taciturn Kell refused to speak to the man any more than necessary.

She sighed as she made coffee—one of the few items the new group actually brought inside the bunker with them—and muttered to herself at the inflexibility some people had.

Kincaid was a functional sociopath. Being somewhere on the spectrum meant a lack of remorse for some of the things he did to protect the group. It also probably implied that his ties to the group were weaker than they’d be for other people, which was what put Kell on edge. For her part, Emily didn’t much care. The guy might have a conscience to make Scrooge’s look enormous, but he also lacked a filter.

“I’ll take an honest killer on my side any day of the week,” she had said to Kell on several occasions. Kincaid came through when it mattered.

She had just begun going over the lists of items when Kincaid spoke from the doorway.

“You’re up early.”

Emily nodded and took a long, scalding drink from the cup. “Wanted to get a head start on all this stuff. See what we have to work with. Fuel is the big worry.”

Kincaid poured himself a steaming mug and sat down. “We didn’t bring any more gas than the vehicles had in them, but I think one of our caches is good. Assuming Mason doesn’t recover anything from home, which I wouldn’t bet on. He knows we need it.”

Emily grunted absently and continued to scan the paper. Her eyes widened when she saw the heading for a truck everyone called the Sled. It was a heavy duty pickup too fuel-hungry for everyday use they’d armored to the nines and loaded with extra sets of armor and weapons.

She nearly choked on her mouthful of coffee. “You guys grabbed the Sled? We have assault weapons?”

Kincaid’s eyebrows knitted together. “Yeah, but they’re virtually all the guns we have. You’re not thinking about sending people back to help Mason, are you?”

Emily ground her teeth. “Of course I am. There are only three of them, right?”

“Yes,” he replied softly. “Only three. Which is what Mason wanted. He knows how risky this is, and he doesn’t want to put anyone in that kind of danger if he can avoid it. I guarantee you he did the math. Besides which, I don’t know the plan of attack. Do you? Last night you mentioned he forgot to tell you Hal and the others were bringing supplies. I kind of doubt he laid out his tactics.”

“You know, if you’re going to shoot down my ideas using rational arguments, you aren’t welcome to my coffee,” Emily said. “I get why Kell doesn’t like you.”

The smile on his face was faint and…the word that came to Emily’s mind was
enigmatic
. Like he knew the punchline to a joke no one had even asked.

“That’s not why he doesn’t like me,” Kincaid said. “It’s because I act on my rational arguments without wringing my hands before or after.”

It was a nice way of reminding her he’d killed a man who had betrayed their trust and was likely to do it again, just to make things easier on the group.

Her eyes wandered over the paper again, tallying the items in the small arsenal.

“Still, though,” Emily said. “It’d be nice if someone was there to back Mason up. You know, just in case.”

Kincaid raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. “I’m game if you are.”

It almost frightened her, how close she came to saying yes. She knew perfectly well Kincaid wasn’t offering an idiotic rush into the fight with guns blazing. Interfering that way would do much more harm than it would help. But the temptation to ride out, stay out of sight, and function as backup appealed to her much more than going over inventory and working out travel plans.

But that was survival. For every moment of thrilling heroics, there were hours, days, or weeks of just buckling down and doing the work. Whether it was farming or figuring out fuel budgets, that was how the real world functioned.

“No,” she said, letting the idea die. “You’re right. If Mason fails, it’s a minimal loss of life. And he has the best chance of getting the job done.”

Kincaid looked impressed. “That’s a pretty cold calculation to make. Smallest investment for the largest return, but with people.”

Emily laughed, low and harsh. “Man, that’s the whole fucking world nowadays.”

Around noon things changed. Emily and Kell were outside, and the sense of bored sameness she’d felt since settling in at the bunker shattered at the distant sound of a motorcycle engine intruding on the day. Only one bike arrived with Kincaid and his people, and they’d sent a young woman named Kelsey out to scout nearby an hour earlier. She wasn’t due back for hours.

“That’s not good,” Kell said as the roar of the engine echoed louder.

Emily turned to the nearest person she could find—Cameron—and motioned her toward the bunker entrance. “Run and find Kincaid, Andrea, every adult. We might have a situation here.”

Cameron nodded sharply, asked no questions, and sprinted off. She returned in less than two minutes heading a growing crowd of adults. The last of them piled through the door just as Kelsey reappeared, tearing toward them on the access road at dangerously high speed.

She braked closer to the group than Emily would have liked and extended the kickstand so hastily she almost missed. Flipping up the visor on her helmet as she jogged over, Kelsey breathed a single word.

“Swarm.”

Judging by the sweat dripping down the scout’s face, Emily was pretty sure she knew the answer to her next question, but it had to be asked. “How big? How far away are they? Take off your helmet, girl. It’s not like they’re here already. We can all get inside in thirty seconds.”

Kelsey’s cheeks reddened, at least what Emily could see of them. She whipped the helmet off and pushed a hank of brown hair behind her ear. “I went fifteen miles out, like you said, and started doing stop-and-check sweeps. Looks like they’re coming from the northeast, big enough to raise a dust cloud the size of a football field.”

“Numbers?” Emily asked.

Kelsey shook her head. “Didn’t get a good count. I stopped at two dozen, mostly because they were hard to see at a distance. I’d have had to bike cross-country to get to them. Didn’t want to risk it.” A look of sheer horror crossed her face, and the younger woman raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, God. Did I lead them here?”

“No,” Emily said with certainty. “They hunt by scent. They’re like dogs. They’d have caught our exhaust and other smells easily enough. Even if you hadn’t been there, they’d be our problem sooner or later.” She gave the girl a smile she didn’t feel. “You gave us warning, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Kincaid cleared his throat. “What’s the plan, then? Want us to move everything into the bunker so we can button it up?”

Emily surveyed the road, an idea materializing. “No. Get every car we have moved to either side of the entrance. Put them bumper to bumper, and I mean I want them touching.”

“Building a wall?” Kell asked.

“Yeah. Come on, big guy. We’re gonna need all that muscle.”

While they didn’t waste time, no one hurried either. According to her mental math, the swarm would take at least a few hours to arrive. The trick was to line up the vehicles in such a way that the ones that ran could be hopped in and driven away with little effort. That meant making sure every car that
didn’t
run was in neutral and able to move freely. They positioned the vehicles with the most powerful engines at the front of the line, where they could nudge the clunkers out of the way if needed.

The rest was just work. A lot of work. Mostly it involved pushing cars, though with the number of bodies on hand no single person had to strain themselves.

“Cameron,” Emily said as she backed away from a half-wrecked car now snugly seated against a van.

The girl darted over from her group of friends, who were all working together. “I’d rather be called Cam.”

“Cam,” Emily said with a smile. “Okay. I need you and the other kids to find shovels or anything you can dig with, and see if you can pile up enough on the sides of the cars that zombies won’t be able to crawl under them.”

The girl’s brow furrowed doubtfully. “You think that’ll stop them?”

Emily shrugged. “If it slows them down enough so we can kill them while they’re still trying to crawl through, then their bodies will help block the way through, too.”

Cam tensed and turned to speed off in the way only adolescents can, then stopped as if someone jerked her back with a chain. “I just had an idea!”

The girl ran over to the car Emily had helped push and crouched next to it. She was judging something closely, and Emily leaned over to see if she could figure out what it was when Cam almost rammed her head into Emily’s jaw shooting to her feet.

“Oh, sorry…”

Emily had jumped back and nearly toppled over. “It’s fine,” she said, waving away the apology. “What’s the idea?”

Cam flung an arm toward the car. “Cut the tires. All the cars we can’t drive. Most of them are pretty close to the ground anyway, so cutting the tires will make them too close to fit a person.”

Emily opened her mouth to argue for why that wouldn’t work.

Except it absolutely would.

“Can I adopt you?” Emily asked.

She meant it as a joke, but knew at once it was the wrong one to make. Cam’s eyes hardened at the edges, her body went tight. “I’ll get the others and we’ll cut them,” the girl said coolly. “Then we’ll put in dirt where we can.”

Before Emily could try to apologize, even if she was only vaguely suspicious of exactly what she might be apologizing for, the girl ran off to join her friends. The next few minutes were filled with a gleeful display of tire vandalism followed by frantic digging on either side of the access road.

Someone had the idea to drag fallen branches and even a long-dead tree over to the makeshift barrier. The woods surrounding the area were small but dense and yielded a surprising volume of useful debris.

The barrier was finished well before the swarm’s earliest possible arrival time. As people milled about, distributing weapons and double-checking the sturdiness of the barrier, Emily called for a break.

“Everyone grab something to eat,” she said. “We’ve been working for a couple hours, so stop and fuel yourselves up. Grab a nap if you can. Hopefully this won’t be a big fight, but we need to be as rested as possible.”

Kell walked over to her as the crowd began to thin. “What about you? I don’t see you running for a sleeping bag.”

“I’m good,” she said, settling against a truck fender with her eyes glued to the northeast. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

He nodded and climbed up on the hood of the derelict vehicle. “Why do this? We could have just gone inside. It’s not like they could get through the door.”

“I know that. It was just logical. This swarm was probably nudged toward us by the Rebound soldiers, right? We almost never see clusters of zombies around here anymore. Probably been following the trail for days or weeks. So I figured there might be even more coming we don’t know about. Swarms can get pretty big and strung out over miles.”

“Ah,” Kell said, his eyes lighting up. “You didn’t want to trap us inside with no easy way to get to the cars. Now we can at least hold them off long enough to load up and escape.”

She gave him a lazy grin. “Nailed it.”

He was right, but not completely. Emily had no desire to leave people behind, no wish to see anyone hurt or carry the guilt on her conscience, but that hadn’t been her primary driver. She wanted the buffer zone for a safe escape, just not for everyone. If it came to a situation where it looked like they might be overwhelmed, getting him out was the priority.

Not that she’d tell him that. God knew the man couldn’t help getting all noble. Still, she’d fight like hell before taking a drastic measure like leaving everyone else behind to die. She knew that as clearly as she knew that faced with the choice, she absolutely could live with the guilt of making the call to flee.

The rough wall of cars might have had a narrow gap in it to let zombies in one by one if Kell and Emily hadn’t learned the hard way that giving the enemy an advantage, even if might give you one too, was stupid. Instead the cars formed a closed loop, which would hold off the dead while also allowing the defenders to attack.

When they came, it wasn’t a surprise. Though the surrounding area was grassy and more hardy than the dusty plains outside it, the overgrowth made sneaking up impossible. The sound of feet crunching through knee-high grass and snapping wind-broken branches preceded the swarm by a fair margin.

“Keep in your triads,” Kell said in a deep, booming voice meant to carry over the ruckus. It came out louder and more fierce than intended, but that was fine. If he seemed confident and aggressive, it might help someone else find some confidence of their own.

He turned to his own team. One was Kelsey, the other a younger man Kell didn’t know well at all named Juan. “I have the longest arms, so let me stay in front. Step in if I get mobbed, and always speak up with what side you’re on so I don’t accidentally hit you. No heroics. Just work together and we’ll be fine.”

Kelsey nodded, perhaps a little nervously, but the young woman was seasoned enough to not let the fear rule her. Juan grinned.

“Just try not to put one of those big elbows in my face, okay? I’m too pretty.”

“Yes, you’re gorgeous,” Kell said. “Don’t get cocky. Your face isn’t going to stop a zombie unless it’s as a snack.”

Shapes emerged through the trees as the sounds of approach reached a crescendo.

“Here we go!” Kell boomed over his shoulder.

He moved toward his assigned stretch of barrier. There weren’t enough people to allow everyone to remain static, so each triad covered a given length of the makeshift wall. Kell was happy to do it. While Emily was better at fighting than him, she was also a more capable leader. She assigned groups, organized the support teams made up of the refugee kids, and ran the show.

For once it was nice to have everything be simple. Point him at a target and let him fight.

The first zombie bumped up against the side of a truck. The hood reached its chest, but the starving thing didn’t notice or care. Its arms stretched over the smooth metal, clawing strips of paint away as it tried to pull itself over. Kell, unworried about the paint job, silently thanked the dead man for making it easy. His baton sang through the air and slammed home, its weighted end making easy work of the zombie’s skull.

“Back up, boss,” Juan said, and Kell did.

The young man crouched with his crowbar and thrust it toward the ground beneath the truck two-handed. Only when he’d stepped back far enough could Kell see the zombie that had tried to slip under. Juan’s strike hadn’t quite done the job—the angle was terrible—so Kell snatched the stunned zombie by its outstretched arm and yanked it forward.

“On your right,” Kelsey said, followed by a beautiful kick worthy of any NFL punter. Her boot caved in the side of the skull and, unless Kell missed his guess, snapped its neck in the process.

“Nice one,” Kell said. “Come on, Juan. Let’s push him back under.”

The work had just begun. The woods made it difficult for the swarm to become a flood, but there were definitely more of them than Kell would have liked. It wasn’t the sort of combat you wrote home about with astounding play-by-plays, but closer to chopping wood. A necessary, repetitive, and fairly safe way of getting the job done.

“Son of a bitch!” Juan shouted a few minutes later when a New Breed zombie burst through the woods at a run, and being faster, smarter, and stronger than its old school brethren, managed to hurl itself neatly across the hood of a car.

Kell shoved the younger man to the side and threw himself into the zombie with a hard shoulder block. Fear exploded through him in an unexpectedly powerful torrent, sending a cold line of terror through his stomach and beyond. Kell tucked his head, not eager to get another scar.

Physics, unlike biochemistry or genetics, is a predictable set of rules. The zombie had momentum, but its body was dehydrated and thin, and the person it had been wasn’t much past average in size to begin with. Kell, on the other hand, was past six and a half feet tall and even in the food-poor conditions he lived in, still outweighed his enemy by a solid eighty pounds.

It wasn’t anything like unstoppable force meeting immovable object. The zombie bounced off Kell, its back slammed against the fender of the car it had slipped over.

He raised his head just in time to see Kelsey flow into the narrow space between Kell and the dead man and jam her knife into its eye before it could find its bearings.

“Thanks,” Kell said. “That’s twice now. I’m gonna have to get you a medal when we’re done.”

His tone was light, but his heart continued to hammer. Memories of the day his face was ruined appeared and were pushed away in constant blips and flashes. He tried to stay cool, but it was nearly impossible.

“Hey, man,” Juan said, putting a hand on Kell’s arm. “You’re okay. Nothing to be ashamed of. I almost shit my pants just then. You’re okay now.”

Kell nodded, knuckles cracking as they gripped the baton even harder. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m good.”

It was an obvious lie, but the others didn’t call him out on it.

If there was an advantage in having to fight for your life and work for your food after the fall of civilization, it was the conditioning. Kell would have rather fought a brief, intensely violent struggle that was over in a few minutes than the hours-long slog of slow, grinding activity that followed.

The defenders didn’t take stupid risks, which meant no one leaping over vehicles to fight among the dead. It was something Kell might have done—had done—in the past, but the years had given him patience. The only element of such a risk he would have preferred was getting it over with quickly.

“Here’s some water,” Kell said, handing a canteen to Kelsey, who slugged back a mouthful before passing it to Juan. The kids serving as helpers were marvelously efficient, bringing food and water to the fighters, hauling dead zombies out of the way of using them to fill gaps in the wall, even treating wounds.

Kelsey wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “This is fucking crazy, man. Thirty seconds of fighting, two minutes of waiting for the next one to get close. How many of these things are there?”

“Could be thousands,” Kell said. “If they followed those soldiers, chances are the swarm attracted more zombies over time. That’s kind of how they become swarms.”

Juan shook his head tiredly. “We’re gonna need a break soon. I can barely lift my arms.”

There was not disagreement to be found. The work was unpredictable and full of so much stop and go that they never had time to get any real rest. Kell stopped being the primary in their trio half an hour in, letting the other two rotate to the front as needed. It helped stave off the worst of the exhaustion creeping through their bones, but the woods were still full of approaching forms.

No rest in the near future.

Juan stood and put his fists into his lower back, arching as he popped the vertebrae. He stared out forlornly through the trees. “Back to it?”

“Yep,” Kelsey said, accepting a hand up. The pair of them gave Kell a lift, and once he was on his feet the water seemed to move around in him a bit. He knew it wasn’t really that, but the small burst of energy as his circulation improved was welcome enough that he bought fully into the self-delusion.

Kell was back in the front when a zombie rushing toward him caught his attention in a way that had little to do with how badly it wanted to eat him.

The rest of the swarm had the tattered or often entirely missing clothes of zombies long risen. This one, however, looked almost alive. Its body was covered in black fatigues and armor, though the torso was misshapen. A knife hung on its belt next to an empty holster. The dead man stood out from the rest like a bonfire at night, so obvious it almost hurt his eyes.

“Is that one of those soldiers?” Juan asked. “The ones who attacked us?”

“Must be,” Kell said, trying to figure out how one of them had come so far.

Kelsey suddenly burst into ugly, vicious laughter. “Oh, holy shit. Do you guys get it?”

Juan and Kell shared a brief glance and shrugged. As Kell leaned forward to club the zombie to death, she explained through fading bubbles of vindictive glee.

“Those fuckers must have left a truck behind. I’d bet anything they were going to try to sneak in with this swarm, just in case we had a fallback point somewhere nearby.”

Juan pulled the dead soldier across the hood by its limp arm, then nudged the body onto its back once it was on the pavement. “Wonder what happened to them?”

Kelsey knelt, measuring the dent in the hard armor with her hands. “About the size of a steering wheel. I bet they crashed. The others might be out there, though I have no idea if they’re alive or what.”

“Probably dead,” Kell said. “If this guy got out of his vehicle, I’d guess the others did too. We’ll keep an eye out, but it’s pretty hard to imagine a crash powerful enough to kill someone outright left them in any shape to walk, much less march, and attack us.”

It was dusk before the seemingly endless swarm began to peter out. By then nearly everyone had accumulated injuries, many people had several. Kell had missed a swing badly and got a nasty bite on his calf as a result, though his pants hadn’t ripped. The force of it still broke the skin, though, and the ache was a hell that only increased the longer he stood.

The last few zombies fell and no others appeared to replace them. The long spring days made it difficult to tell exactly how long they’d been at it, but the evidence was littered around the space. Piles of bodies, some haphazard, others stacked like cords of wood, were everywhere. Kell’s shoulders burned from pulling them over the barrier, but letting too many land outside it would only make climbing over easier for the zombies that came after.

“I think I’ll be able to sleep for the next week,” Kell said, easing himself into a crouch Sweat still coated his face, but only in a thin layer. No amount of drinking had been able to replace the water he’d lost from so much activity. “I think we’re going to drain the tanks tonight. Hopefully we’ll…”

“Multiple contacts!” screamed a voice from atop the van they used as a watch post. “Moving in fast!”

Kell bolted to his feet and was rewarded with a mild wave of dizziness. Every cell in his body begged for rest, food, and water.

Groans filled the air all around, turning to curses and not a few muffled sobs as the enemy appeared.

A dozen New Breed streaked forward at breakneck speed, too fast for the tired defenders to react perfectly. Most of them made it over the barricades at, Kell noticed, carefully chosen spots that were particularly low to the ground.

Juan and Kelsey backed away as the closest New Breed barreled toward them, setting themselves for combat.

Kell had had just about enough of this shit.

“I want a fucking nap!” he screamed. It wasn’t the best war cry, but was probably the most honest. Costing him an effort that felt ripped from his bones, Kell forced himself into a fiddly, difficult maneuver that required grace.

His left foot shot forward while his right remained planted. He rocked with it like a fencer, his torso shifting down and ahead. Timing was crucial, and Kell nailed it. His legs were going to hate him in the morning. Then again, maybe he’d just die. That would be nice.

The New Breed was too close and moving too fast when Kell dropped into this weird, crab-like lunge. Momentum carried the dead man into his grasp, though not for long.

Kell hooked an arm between its legs and pushed up and back as hard as he could, flinging the dead man over his head entirely. The New Breed were smart—smart enough to shepherd an entire swarm of zombies at the bunker to wear out its defenders, akin to tenderizing meat—and fast. They had coordination on par with an average living human.

But even normal people didn’t tend to react well to being treated like the stone tucked into the business end of a catapult. The zombie came down with a meaty crack, already scrambling to rise to its feet when Kelsey stomped on its neck so Juan could deliver the killing blow.

Kell lumbered forward, too tired to dip into the reservoir of fury he always carried around as survival fuel. The strain of the day prevented him from moving with the deliberation he’d have needed to kill with single strikes.

So he didn’t.

Instead he waded into the smaller but devilishly fierce newcomers and didn’t concern himself with killing them at all. He saw Andrea on her back, arms and legs tangled with the crouching New Breed trying to slam her brains into the pavement. She was intensely focused, using her limbs to hold off the attacker. Not many people had the talent and presence of mind to use Jiu-Jitsu on a zombie, but the slim woman managed it without apparent effort.

Still, Kell helped her along by kicking in the side of the zombie’s right knee as he walked by.

“Thanks,” Andrea said. “I got it now.”

“No problem,” Kell mumbled.