Dead Will Rise
Date: 2013-12-11 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Dystopia; Science Fiction; Apocalyptic; Fiction; Post Apocalyptic
Description: Dead Will Rise The Fall: Book Two Kell McDonald killed the world. It is a truth that haunts him every day of his life. It is a fact etched so deeply in his mind that every waking moment is haunted by his sins. But for his choices, the dead would not walk. Men would not travel the decaying highways hunting for victims. Communities of survivors would not have to struggle to lay the foundation of a new society. Forced to migrate from his adopted home, Kell finds himself an unlikely leader. Caught between unimaginable guilt and duty to his followers, he must find a way to keep them alive while hol

Genesis Game

Book Four of The Fall

Joshua Guess

©2015 Joshua Guess

This book is dedicated to all the readers who have waited patiently for it,
overdue as it is.

And for all the people who weren't as patient, too.

Your passion for new words kept me going, and I'm eternally grateful.

Also for Grandma Monaghan, who has never been much of a reader
but never stopped encouraging me to dream big.

Love you, Grandma. You're the best.

Check out my Facebook page:

Joshua Guess, Author

Also by Joshua Guess

Living With the Dead

With Spring Comes The Fall

The Bitter Seasons

Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

The Hungry Land

The Wild Country

This New Disease

American Recovery

Ever After

The Fall

Victim Zero

Dead Will Rise

War of the Living

Genesis Game

The Next Chronicle

Next

Damage

Misc

Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

Soldier Lost (Short Story)

Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

With James Cook

The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

One

Kell prepared to kill himself for the third time that day. It was kind of exhausting.

“Want me to ballpark the number of brain cells you're frying every time you do that?” asked John Liebowitz, his research partner.

“No,” Kell laughed. “I'm fine. Stop acting like my mother. We both know my brain is perfectly safe as long as Chimera is in there with it.”

John sighed but had no response. That was the crux of it, of course. The reason the two men stood within the safety of a remote and fortified compound, in an enormous basement filled with equipment solely for their use. Chimera.

An organism which had lost its ability to naturally reproduce somewhere along the evolutionary path. It wasn't alone in that. A handful of similar life forms had been discovered over the years possessing the same strange coping mechanism, which involved copying DNA from host organisms as a basis for reproduction.

The difference with Chimera was in form and function. Where the others were single-cell or very rudimentary multicellular organisms, Chimera could grow and adapt into a seemingly infinite variety of complex systems. It was a benign parasite that created a symbiotic relationship with whatever host it attached to.

Chimera was unique in the sort of DNA it took from hosts. Its simpler cousins took at random and absorbed everything, while Chimera only kept what was useful. Rather than replicate itself using a fraction of good DNA and a majority without any utility, Chimera brought a staggering variety of genetic material to the party.

The discovery had been made by Kell McDonald. Methods used to alter Chimera to suit given needs had been pioneered by him and perfected by his team.

Until someone made the catastrophic decision to steal an unfinished strain of Chimera for use on the son of a politician. The young man was a veteran with severe nerve damage.

Kell had been livid when told. Not long after, the young soldier died as a result of that terrible choice.

Then the kid had come back to life. Sort of.

“Are you ready?” Kell asked as he did his final check on the equipment. “I'd rather not stay dead.”

“Yeah, I'm good to go here,” John replied. “You think it's going to work this time?”

Kell shook his head. “I don't know. If it doesn't, this will be my last time trying this. I might be crazy, but I'm not stupid.”

John caught his eye and held it. “You're stopping your heart. On purpose. Let's leave the decision regarding your intelligence until after we get your ticker going again.”

Kell smiled and lowered himself onto the gurney. The metal squeaked and groaned softly under his weight. He was tall enough to play for the NBA, had the NBA still existed. Before the dead began to rise, Kell had been bulky but not fat. The years following had whittled him down like an old piece of wood, leaving behind only the tough, thin core.

Of course, the last year had been good for him. For everyone in their small community. As a result, he'd put on a few pounds.

“Give me a count,” Kell said when John shuffled over to the machinery, grumbling about smart people being the biggest idiots. Kell closed his eyes and waited, his breathing normal and deep. He focused on the thrum of his heart, which hadn't picked up in the face of his impending—if temporary—death.

How could it? Faced with the gnashing teeth and raking fingers of zombies every day for nearly five years, forced to watch hundreds die, and knowing the billions of dead at his feet, how could this even compare? With the help of friends he still wasn't certain he deserved, Kell's guilt was something of the past. An artifact of a time that no longer seemed to have been real. If he could stare down death every time he had to so much as take a stroll outside and deal with the mental strain of a planet's worth of bodies, a little thing like cardiac arrest didn't even register.

Kell smiled as he closed his eyes. It never failed to amuse him that he felt pretty good about these little deaths. They helped fill in the picture of what Chimera had become during the wild years of its spread. Every second Kell spent as a dead man added to the sum total of human understanding in regards to the zombie plague, as the rest of the world called it.

Totally worth the risk.

John counted down from ten. Kell's heart actually did speed up a hair by the count of three. A few seconds later it stopped completely.

“Take it easy,” John said as Kell regained consciousness. “You know the drill. Don't try to move just yet.”

“Did it work?” Kell asked, not allowing himself hope.

John shook his head. “Sorry, man. Had to give you a kick start.”

Kell bit back his frustration and closed his eyes. As John recorded vital signs and other measurements, the scratch of pen on paper lulled Kell into a sort of in between place where his mind let go of the outside world. It was there that Kell did some of his best work, a state not unlike meditation.

He knew it was possible for Chimera to take over certain vital functions when a human host was severely injured. That was how zombies came about, essentially meat puppets for the organism trying to reboot the host after death. Kell had seen a man almost shot to death but still retain consciousness after his heart and breathing stopped. Within a minute his blood was pumping again, lungs working like bellows.

In the year since moving to the ass end of nowhere and creating a fortified compound, similar events had befallen others. No two were identical, but every incident taught them more about how Chimera worked.

Kell and John had been unable to recreate the circumstances which had originally ignited Kell's curiosity. Josh, the man who had come back to life, had done so without becoming one of the undead. The obvious reason was that his brain functions were still active, but all the testing since hadn't shown a definitive reason why Chimera would – or could - restart a heart.

That made Kell desperate. Hence the experiments.

“All done,” John said. Kell opened his eyes and glanced at his friend, who checked his watch. “It's about lunch time. You want to take a break?”

Kell sat up slowly. Dying left a body feeling drained and achy, but the storm clouds he felt descending on his mood were formed solely from disappointment. “I think I'll call it a day,” Kell said. “We're at a dead end.”

“Okay,” John said. “I'm gonna take a few more notes. I'll swing by later so we can talk about our next steps.”

Kell forced a smile and cuffed the smaller man on the shoulder. He meant it to be reassuring, but the truth was obvious if unspoken.

They had gone to incredible lengths and endured a lifetime's worth of horror to get to this place. Safety and seclusion gave them time to research. To plan. Kell had expected to make great strides in finding a way to eradicate the undead without affecting the Chimera inside the bodies of the living.

A year later, and they had almost nothing to show for it.

Kell sighed as he climbed the basement steps and pushed open the storm doors. Light assaulted his eyes as the humid furnace of the outdoors wrapped around his skin. Kell shook his head and blinked, squinting until the world around him was bearable.

“Watch out!” a woman shouted with laughter in her voice. Kell raised a hand to shade his eyes. The world resolved a little more, giving him just enough time to register the tiny blur moving at warp speed before it slammed into him.

“Piggy back ride, please!” the tiny blur pleaded.

Kell smiled and snagged the small girl in his arms, hoisting her into the air. Michelle was forever making a beeline to him whenever Kell stepped out of the lab. At first he wrote her interest off to the time he had spent with Michelle and her family as they made their way to safety together. Her mother Andrea and brother Evan treated Kell like family, too, if not as flamboyantly as Michelle did.

After a year living in their little community, Michelle had become something like a favorite niece. Though they shared no blood, Michelle had firmly established Kell as hers. So rather than be annoyed by the attention of the slim child with her banner of dark blonde hair streaming out as she chased after him, Kell found those moments brought something he had long thought impossible.

Peace.

“I gotcha!” Kell said with a mock growl as he spun the tiny girl around. “You can't get away! You're all mine!”

Michelle's giggle was muffled as her face was pressed against his chest. “No you don't,” she said, an unmistakable edge of mischief in her voice.

With a flurry of motion fast enough to catch him totally off guard, Michelle slipped out of his grasp. Much bigger and stronger, Kell hadn't held her very tight. The wee girl's right hand whipped up through the small gap between them and waved in front of his face. Kell recoiled instinctively and Michelle used the distraction to grab onto the collar of the light jacket he habitually wore.

She used it as an anchor, letting her body sag in his arms. He felt her tiny foot brace against the sheathed knife strapped to his leg, and with a sort of swooping twist she managed to drop far enough to get her other hand around to the back of his collar.

Without missing a beat, Michelle let go with her right hand and with a triumphant cackle scrambled onto his back. Kell stood dumbfounded as her arms snaked around his neck while she laughed in his ear.

“Told you I wanted a piggy back ride,” she said with a look too smug for her years.

Kell bit back laughter. “I see you've been taking your lessons seriously,” he said. “We're going to have to talk to Lee about that.”

The training ground was on the other side of the compound, but the walk didn't take long. The confines of the fortified home the group had built had expanded over the last year, but was still dwarfed by older, more established communities. New Haven, the community they had left behind when settling here, had expanded to an incredible size by the time they set out. It was nearly a mile and a half on its longest side.

Their home was far more modest. Even with Michelle on his shoulders bossily giving orders, the trip only took a few minutes.

Lee White stood watching a handful of students as they sparred in the dirt square used for combat training. In many ways he was Kell's opposite. Where Kell was very tall and heavily built, Lee was just below average height and slim. Kell's skin was dark and made more so by the long summer, while Lee was pale to the point where he got a sunburn just thinking about going outside.

The principle difference was training. Kell spent his formative years already in college working on a pair of doctorates. Learning to fight and building an instinct for it had been born of necessity. Lee on the other hand had grown up learning to shoot everything from bows to machine guns and had taken up advanced lessons in weaponry and unarmed fighting during his time in the Marine Corps.

“Hey, little fella,” Kell said as he approached.

Lee quirked an eyebrow but didn't look away from his students. “If you want to have a friendly match, I'll show you how a little guy fights.” His tone calm and even. Not that the way he spoke was an indicator of intent; Kell had seen him be just as conversational while lopping the heads off zombies.

“Not today,” Kell said. “I was just wondering if the rule about kids not using the things they learn from you outside of class still applies.”

Now he did turn, that calm gaze tilting up toward Michelle. “Yes. Yes, it does. In fact, I end every class with the younger kids with a reminder.” His eyes grew flat and hard as they locked on the space above Kell's head. “Did you break that rule, young lady?”

“Yes, sir,” Michelle's said.

Kell felt a strange moment of pride. Though there weren't a large number of children in the compound, the community still treated every one of them like their own. In New Haven the numbers had been higher, requiring a concerted effort to manage and teach the kids. Here it was closer to a family, and because Michelle wasn't his daughter Kell felt it was perfectly fine for her to be his favorite.

“You didn't hesitate or lie,” Lee said. “Didn't try to make excuses. That's good. Because you were honest, you only have to do five laps. Go get 'em done.”

Michelle scrambled down without any help and darted off to run around the perimeter of the compound. Kell shook his head ruefully as her banner of hair fluttered out behind her.

“She only climbed up on me,” Kell said. “I didn't mean to make her have to do all that running.”

Lee shrugged. “The conditioning won't hurt. It's important to make sure I enforce my own rules, especially with the young ones. It's the only way I can be sure they'll take me seriously, and since I'm teaching them how to survive out there...”

“I get it,” Kell said. “She slipped right out of my arms and pulled herself onto my back. Damnedest thing.”

The impassive mask Lee always wore when teaching cracked into a grin. “We started working on grappling a few days ago. She's a smart kid, learns fast. She just seems to get it, you know? Like some people have a natural talent for math or whatever. Michelle understands leverage and balance and force.”

“I think most kids do,” Kell noted. “Hence the climbing of trees as a time-honored rite of passage.”

“Probably true,” Lee agreed. “She's still got a real talent, though. I'd be willing to bet she'll do just as well with archery and marksmanship when she's ready for them.”

Kell opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the frantic bleats of an air horn.

“Dismissed!” Lee barked, though the class was already breaking apart. When the horn went off it was expected that anyone not performing vital work make their way to the defenses.

Kell and Lee raced in the direction of the horn, which had blown from the southern face of the compound. The main entrance was there, which was actually good news since it was also the most reinforced part of their wall.

His heart picked up its pace somewhat, but was a long way from racing. Too many years of fighting, killing, and facing the prospect of his own death on a daily basis had passed for that. There was worry, which was only natural in any being with a survival impulse, but no panic or fear. No real excitement. Unless an army was coming at them, there were few threats capable of harming their community.

The only real question was whether the strangers heralded by the horns were living or the dead.

Two

The advantage in building a permanent home—at least in Kell's opinion—rested in how much time it afforded you to get things right. He had seen it at New Haven, whose wall and defenses had undergone several major upgrades over the years. While Kell favored his spear when it came to fighting, it wasn't a practical weapon for use behind their own wall.

On the way to his assigned position, he swerved to one of the weapons lockers dotting the property. Intense practice made him an excellent marksman with a bow, which was his ranged weapon of choice. He slung one and quiver of arrows over his shoulder and dashed to the top of the shooting platform to the left of the main gate.

The scene below wasn't near the top of his expectation list. Zombies came first, marauders second, and this far out both were rare. Kell raised his bow and in the time it took to nock and draw an arrow he measured the variables before him.

A motorcycle sputtered toward the main gate, jerking erratically and bellowing thick black smoke. This didn't concern him by itself; a single rider wasn't much of a threat unless they were planning a kamikaze run on the gate. Besides, the bike and rider were vaguely familiar even at a distance and partly obscured by smoke.

What did fuel some small worry was the large pickup truck rumbling along behind the bike. Unlike its quarry, the truck didn't seem to have any damage. The pickup would have quickly overtaken the bike if not for the concrete bumps in the road they had laboriously placed to prevent enemy vehicles from approaching at full speed.

The approach to the main gate was a straight shot, another feat of engineering undertaken over the previous year. Before, the compound sat parallel to the road with only a short driveway. Now any enemies would have to drive through the packed dirt and lumps of stone that defined the quarter-mile road leading straight toward the heaviest defenses.

His assessment was fluid and natural, shaped by years of dealing with one damn thing after another. Kell held his shot only long enough to pick a target, then loosed without hesitation.

He had tried to compensate for the movement of the truck by aiming where it was going to be rather than where it was, and it worked. Sort of. Rather than take the man standing on the left in the bed of the truck in the chest, his arrow skipped against the roof of the truck and into the shoulder of the man on the right.

Wasting no time, Kell drew and fired a second time. The men riding in the truck bed wised up, however. They ducked. Kell held another arrow ready just in case. His eroded capacity for fear sprang to surprising life as he followed the lone biker—who was almost certainly a scout from his group—thread the needle between speed bumps to approach the compound.

A quick glance confirmed that several people stood prepared by the small gate to the right of the main gate to let the scout through. If necessary, the motorcycle could drive straight in, though it would require a tight swerve to fit.

That chance didn't come. Kell's throat constricted as the rider began to lose speed, the lumbering truck surging forward in response like a predator making the final approach on its prey.

Kell found himself with his feet suddenly on the ground again, bellowing as he sprinted for the auxiliary door. Surprised faces turned toward him, though he only noticed peripherally. His attention was focused on the failing motorcycle still struggling to close the last fifty feet. It clearly wasn't going to make it; the thing was wobbling now, going too slow to maintain balance.

Someone tossed Kell a spear as he rushed the door, which was opened by citizens caught off guard by his shouting. Once through the gate Kell loped down the road in huge strides, and it was only when the barrel of a rifle appeared over the roof of the truck that he realized he didn't have much of a plan.

Story of my life, he thought.

The next thirty seconds seemed to happen all at once. Kell had just enough time to take a mental snapshot of what was happening. He responded on pure instinct as he dashed at a long angle to meet the motorcycle.

What he saw were guns being aimed from the truck even as shots from inside the wall pelted the vehicle's armor. Kell knew the defenders were trying to avoid hitting the biker, making it nearly impossible to get in clean shots. Ever a problem-solver, Kell did the only thing he could.

He threw his spear with every ounce of strength he could manage on the run, and at the end of his throw jumped to intersect the biker. His momentum was more than sufficient to pull the rider away. Kell tensed as they tumbled to the side of the road, rolling his body to cushion the rider from the impact.

Something snapped in his shoulder when they hit the ground, wrenching a scream from Kell so loud it hurt his own ears. The shout was drowned out a second later by a torrent of gunfire from the compound. Kell made the mistake of turning his head to see if the bullets took care of the enemy, making whatever had broken slide around, bone grating on bone.

Kell passed out.

“Lay still, you silly bastard,” a voice said.

Kell's eyes opened glacially slow, the ratcheting of his eyelids a supreme effort. Rational Kell, the little corner of his brain bent on observing and connecting nearly every piece of information he encountered with clinical detachment, noted the familiar flavor to the fuzziness in his head.

“Cotton candy,” Kell said, and then laughed.

“Come again?” said the voice.

“My head is filled with cotton candy,” Kell said, clearly unsure why the voice was so confused.

“Did you break my best friend, John?” a new voice asked this one softer. Rational Kell interpreted this—correctly—to mean the speaker was female.

His eyes finally opened enough to see, and adjusted to the low light. He was in the lab, which doubled as a clinic when needed. John stood next to Kell, his face worried. Laura, who Kell had been close with for years, stood next to John. Beside her was a leather-clad figure holding a motorcycle helmet. This last person was...Emily. Yeah, that was her name. She was one of their scouts. She was covered in dust and dirt.

“You should take a bath,” Kell said to Emily.

Laura's expression somehow managed to convey worry and amusement at the same time. “Okay, he's not broken. Just stoned.”

“Give him a few minutes,” John said. “The effects will wear off fast.”

This prediction proved to be true; in a quarter of an hour Kell had returned to his usual self. This reassertion of normality came with a sharpened sense of exactly how damaged he was. The pain stitched through his right shoulder wove deeply through tissue and bone. His right arm was in a sling which was itself bandaged to his chest to keep it immobile.

The pain was present but dull. Not long after The Fall began, he had broken a bone in his leg. This was the same kind of pain, and the same lack of concern the painkillers had given him.

“Must be bad if you're giving me narcotics,” Kell mused.

John, who stood a short distance away speaking with the others, walked over. “We're not terribly bad off,” he said. “Our last scavenger team found a vet's office set up in a house. They brought back a lot of meds.”

Kell smiled. “I know I'm as big as a horse, but this is just insulting.”

John's mouth quirked into what Kell knew to be a forced smile. “They work, so don't complain. You're not wrong. It doesn't look good.”

Without moving his body, Kell very carefully flexed muscles in his chest. The lance of agony was instant and pervasive, running from the middle of his neck all the way to his fingers.

John winced. “Yeah, I'd just lay there and try not to do anything. Your collarbone broke. It's a green stick fracture, which is good, but the break is ugly. It's got a few bone splinters sticking out.”

Kell pursed his lips. “And here I was thinking we'd never use that portable X-ray.”

John pointed a finger at him. “This isn't funny, dammit! We'll need to do surgery to get the splinters out. We don't want them working their way free.”

In the world as it had been, such a thing would have been minor. Outpatient surgery, even. In the here and now, Kell knew, things were likely to be a lot more risky. Though the lab had plenty of disinfectant and surgical gear, they weren't set up to manage a sterile operating theater. Their best efforts would be better than third-world countries before The Fall, but nowhere close to truly safe. Add to the list of concerns their lack of a real doctor, instead reliant on people like Kell who had learned battlefield surgery in bits and pieces.

“You wanted to ask me if I was okay with it, I guess?” Kell asked.

John nodded. “Didn't seem right to do it without consent, even though I knew you'd agree.”

Kell tried to nod but caught himself before managing to do more than flex his neck. The accompanying jolt of pain was tolerably small.

“Yes,” Kell said, carefully forming the word. “Do it. As soon as possible.”

“Okay,” John said. “I'll set up.”

“Before he knocks you out again, we need to talk,” Laura said, shooing John away. Emily moved forward with her, the two of them hovering at the edge of his makeshift bed.

Laura had her serious face on, which more than any other factor told Kell he wasn't going to like whatever she had to say. His best friend wasn't famous for being worrisome to almost any degree. If she was concerned enough to wipe the ever-present smirk from her face, it was bad.

“There's good news and bad news,” Laura said. “The bad is that the people who chased Emily in are from a marauder camp about twenty miles south of here. Emily thinks they're here by coincidence, except now they're going to come looking for their missing people.”

Kell grunted. “Either we wait for them to show or take the fight to them,” he said.

Laura nodded. “I'll take it to a vote, but I'm guessing they'll want to lead a raid.” Her eyes tightened at the corners, turning her normally sunny face hard and flat as river stone. “Emily says they have captives.”

Kell closed his eyes and sighed. No more needed to be said, not really. Laura had been a captive herself. Regardless of the vote, there was no way she'd allow people to stay in marauder hands.

“What's the good news?” Kell asked, opening his eyes.

The storm cloud passed from Laura's face as quickly as it came, replaced with a grin. It was Emily who spoke.

“That's why I came home, even with those assholes following me,” Emily said. “I had to make sure you got the message.”

Kell's heart sped up, excitement flooding his veins like the warmth of a good bourbon. “You found what we've been looking for?”

“Oh, yeah,” Emily said. “Not just one person like Josh, who died but didn't turn. The last community I made my rounds at had half a dozen of them.”

Across the room, John dropped a tray of surgical tools. Kell laughed in pure, unadulterated joy. After months of clawing at the wall in their research, finally here was something new.

Three

There was no rush, which was a feeling Kell had cultivated like a rare flower since settling into his new home. Gone were the days of living near areas with heavy zombie traffic and central enough to be a target to enemies. Over the previous year Kell hadn't let his guard down or ease his readiness to fight, but the bustle of being part of a huge community was largely absent.

Laura had ordered rotating shifts of scouts to observe the settlement to the south. In the two weeks following Emily's action-packed return, they had shown no sign of preparing a search party for their missing friends. Kell wondered if that was the defining trait separating the average survivor from marauders. A sense of community was both a powerful shield and a dangerous weapon.

While the surgery had been minor, Kell had been told by numerous people that his shoulder would take a long time to heal properly. As a result he spent his days one-handed, putting no weight on his right arm at all. It had taken a while to get used to doing everything with his dumb hand.

“This is pointless,” Kell said as his fingers found a new grip on his weapon. “I can barely swing this thing without my sutures stretching.”

Lee, who stood a few feet away with an identical weapon, shook his head. “That is the point. We're in no hurry to go find the people Emily identified, but that doesn't mean something can't go wrong here. If a zombie gets through the defenses or you find yourself needing to defend your life, I don't want you to be caught off guard by how much your shoulder hurts.”

Though Kell had most of a foot and a hundred pounds on the younger man, he still forced his annoyance down. Lee was a patient teacher, but he had no tolerance for whining or willfulness. He had made the last order given to him by his commanding officer—to find Kell and protect him—into a way of life. There was no wiggle room when it came to Kell's safety. It was easier to give in at the start than slowly wilt under the stony Marine stare Lee had perfected.

Lee must have been able to see this eventuality behind Kell's eyes, because a few seconds later he jumped forward and lashed out with his stick.

Kell swiped with his own stick, pain igniting in his clavicle, racing up his neck and down his arm. A smaller aftershock came when their weapons met. Without conscious thought, Kell leaped sideways and counter-attacked, driving the tip of his stick toward Lee's belly.

“No,” Lee said casually as he twisted to let the stick graze his belly and pass by. His arms shot out as Kell overextended and lost balance, holding the much larger man up. Kell was silently thankful; a fall would probably have popped stitches at the least.

“What did I do wrong?” Kell asked as he straightened.

“You attacked, ignoring the pain. That's good.” Lee smiled slightly and nodded toward the weighted length of wood in Kell's hand. “But that isn't a spear. You try to skewer a zombie with it and it'll either bounce off or slide right through and tangle you up.”

Kell frowned at the weapon. That it wasn't a spear was obvious, of course. Lee had called it a baston, the traditional training weapon from Arnis. Not that the stave in Kell's hand wasn't capable of bashing a skull. Lee had warned before beginning the lessons that the heavier sticks weren't usually used in sparring.

It was the most basic of weapons, a technology barely on the modern side of bashing something to death with a rock. Still, the two and a half feet of hardwood clad in thin bands of steel (an addition of Lee's, as the standard version was only wood or rattan) felt comfortable in his hand. Probably from the years of fighting with a spear.

“You can definitely kill someone with that,” Lee said, pointing with his own stick. “When you have some basics down, though, we're switching you to something else.”

Kell scowled. “Why are you teaching me with this, then?”

Lee grinned and walked over to the small shed where the training weapons were stored. He ducked in and emerged almost immediately, holding a black cylinder in his hand. With a light flick of the wrist, it expanded into a metal baton. Lee moved through several of the basic Arnis drills with the easy grace of the naturally thin and light-footed. The metal baton cut the air as it moved.

“This is what I'd like you to use,” Lee said as he finished the drill. He tossed the baton to Kell, who had to drop his stick to catch it. “Not hard to crack a skull with that, which is why we're using the sticks.”

“It's much lighter,” Kell said, surprised. A question formed in his head, but the answer was immediately obvious. “You're strengthening my wrist.”

Lee nodded again, a pleased smile on his face. “Knowing you, you'll probably end up using both of them. But before you're put in a position to actually need them, I'd like to know you can swing them hard enough to kill and still manage to hit your target. Not spraining your wrist while doing so is a definite benefit.”

Kell, acutely aware that his current limitations were the direct result of him losing a fight against gravity, inertia, and the ground, saw the wisdom in that statement. Lee knew better than most how prone Kell was to injury.

It was just after Kell had completed his tenth and final set of drills, wiping the dust and sweat from his face with a towel, when the scout coming off duty from the marauder camp returned. Kell and Lee noted the scout's entrance, both men watching him move toward the main house to give Laura a full report.

“Did you see how he was walking?” Kell asked. “How he was holding himself?”

Lee nodded. “Yep. That's how every soldier I've ever known looks when he has to tell the boss the other shoe just dropped.”

Kell stood in the back of what had once been the living room of the large farm house. Other than the fireplace, everything that had signified the place as one meant for the gathering of family and friends had been stripped away. The space was transformed into the nerve center of their little community. Laura sat behind a desk piled with papers as the scout passed on the bad news. None of it was unexpected.

“They're starting to move,” the scout, a man named Matt, said. “The camp isn't big, but they've got quite a few people. It was only a matter of time before they started to run low on supplies. The good news is they seem to be low on fuel, too. They're not ranging far from the camp, and it's all on foot.”

“So far,” Lee said, standing in the doorway.

“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “The area they're in is mostly picked clean. It's near the center of a little town, one we scouted about eight months back. There might be some wild crops growing and definitely game if they're decent hunters. No matter how you cut it, though, they're going to have to start ranging out farther if they want to survive.”

“Which leaves us with two possibilities,” Laura said, leaning back in her chair and lacing her fingers over her stomach. “Either they run into us or they don't.”

A pause fell over the room as every person in it had the same thought in unison. The question was whether they would allow marauders to go free regardless of the situation. True, it would be less risky for their group to just let the bad guys wander off if they weren't in danger of stumbling across the compound, but that meant letting them continue to be a threat to the world at large.

The moral calculus after the fall of civilization was remarkably simple. Not easy or clean, but simple.

The apocalypse had thrown human nature into stark relief, the shades of gray shrinking to a very small margin. There were good guys, bad guys, and a tiny number who moved from one to the other. If you pillaged, raped, and murdered rather than trying to live in peace as best you could, then you were a cancer.

What Laura wanted to know was whether they had the obligation to be the scalpel.

In any other community it would have been a non-issue. Like ships on the sea, it behooved everyone to help when the need arose. You never knew when it would be you in need, after all. It was the nature of their community that made asking the question necessary, of course. The work Kell and John where doing was important and probably unique.

Laura didn't ask Kell's opinion, because she knew what his answer would be. Kell and John had discussed this exact scenario early on. They'd dealt with variations of it on a smaller scale. Their consensus was that the nature of their work didn't exempt them from the ethical duties other communities lived with.

If anything, their role in causing the end of human civilization demanded they involve themselves.

But it would be Laura's call. She had been chosen to lead for her level head and capacity for logic under stress. Kell wouldn't try to influence her either way.

Trying wouldn't make a difference, and there were even odds the marauders wouldn't give them any choice in the matter. Considering that possibility, Kell was suddenly very glad Lee had pushed him to learn to fight while partially disabled.

Four

While his clavicle healed faster than it would have before Chimera, the process was still slower than Kell would have liked. This struck him as especially relevant given his position two nights later, which involved a low hill, a pair of binoculars, and a bad feeling he was going to have to fight one-handed.

The marauder camp was not lazy or stupid in its design. Kell had run into a few of those in the first year or so. In a world where the night came teeming with the hungry dead, the careless and idiotic were sifted by natural selection into one of two categories.

Basically, either you died or you joined up with people smart enough to live.

The camp wasn't ideal for its type, but it did the job. Like most marauders, the concern was obviously for zombies rather than living enemies. The vehicles were circled up like wagon trains, armored skirts made from scrounged materials preventing the dead from moving beneath them. Though the trucks and vans sat with bumpers touching, masses of what Kell guessed were supplies filled the empty spaces around them to keep zombies from an easy climb across.

The formation might have been useful against Kell's people had they posted more than two guards. The sight of people lounging atop their transportation in lawn chairs had become so common it was almost iconic. Much like evolution, the same solution to the same problem appeared simultaneously in many places.

He smiled to himself at the thought. His professors would have taken him to task over the comparison. Not that it was a bad one, though. Lawn chairs were common; high places gave good vantage points and required fewer personnel. Lots of people made those observations and used them accordingly. Evolution wasn't much different; when the environment called for hooves, hooves happened.

Because the camp wasn't constructed with human attacks in mind—and to be fair, Iowa wasn't exactly a population hub before the end civilization—it was easy for Emily to slip in close without being seen. Kell watched her move across the dark ground with such deliberate randomness that he would have thought her just another shadow if he hadn't know what to look for.

The moon was the thinnest sliver as it hid behind the clouds, casting a thin light dispersed and weakened by the overcast sky.

As Kell watched, Emily vanished behind the curve of the makeshift wall. Even knowing what was about to happen, the next ten seconds still managed to catch him off guard and make him nauseous at the same time.

The guard perched not ten feet from where Kell saw Emily last jerked suddenly. There wasn't enough light to see the thin, weighted loop of wire as it flicked out and was pulled tight around the guard's throat. All Kell could see from his vantage was the result, that being a brief and futile reflex as the guard clawed at the garrote, followed a moment later by a forward tumble off the van he had been using for his post.

A twinge of pity tugged at him as Kell watched the doomed marauder vanish into the darkness below. This was a level of cognitive dissonance Kell could live with. You could hate a marauder for what he was, despise how he chose to survive, and yet still feel bad for the pain and confusion in those last few moments of life as someone lassoed you to death with a long piece of piano wire.

The body made no sound as it fell. Emily had a partner who had approached from the other side of the camp, ready to catch the guard before he hit the tall grass.

Focused as he was on watching Emily work, Kell completely missed what happened with the other guard. Here too he could only judge by what he knew was supposed to happen, and the context of what happened in the moments following Emily's flawless execution of her part.

What should have happened: a similarly quiet killing followed by half a minute of hoping no one noticed the missing guards so the assault teams could get into position.

What actually happened: someone screamed, the garbled and wet noise loud enough to wake the dead. Or to at least let the dead, who were already nicely awakened thank you very much, know that dinner was being served.

A lot of things happened in a short time after that piercing shriek filled the night and all of them were bad. Especially for Kell.

Kell was already up and moving when sections of armor plating began to slide with ominous screeches of metal on metal. In the event things went wrong—and things went wrong often enough to justify always having a We Fucked Up plan—every able body was to converge on the camp and disable anyone they fought if possible.

Left unsaid was how rare it was to have the luxury not to kill an enemy. Kell saw the standing order as a nod to the nearly forgotten concept of optimism.

Armored windows slid open, making Kell suddenly grateful for the faces which appeared from the dark spaces behind them. He had been stupid to react without observing. Any of the groggy, confused people he was seeing could have just as easily been guns pointed at him.

Then again, his dark skin and dark gray clothing made him the same sort of moving shadow Emily had been. Even someone fully alert would have had a hard time picking him out.

Taking merciless advantage of that fact, Kell whipped the metal baton from its sheath on his belt, flipping the weapon around into a reverse grip as he closed the last few yards and lunged for the nearest open window.

Coming at it from a strongly oblique angle, the man peering out into the night only saw Kell at the last possible second, eyes widening and mouth gaping in horror as a piece of the night rushed toward him.

That, or he was just super racist and the sight of an enormous black guy bearing down on him with a metal stick was enough to have the poor, doomed bastard clutching at his metaphorical pearls.

It made no material difference, of course. Kell brought his baton down as Lee had shown him, treating it more as he would a blade rather than a blunt weapon. It was the only way to assure contact since the window was barely larger than the face Kell targeted.

The man screamed as Kell made the only move he could, slamming the baton through the window and into the face of the still-groggy marauder.

As Kell moved to pull the baton back out a few seconds later, a sharp pressure on his side caused him to turn in shock. Someone had managed to sneak up on him. Worse, they'd gotten in an attack. By sheer idiotic luck the attacker had slashed with a killing blow right into the heavily armored right lower portion of Kell's coat. It still hurt like hell since the armor was meant to allow for flexibility and didn’t provide a rigid barrier from blades.

The baton clanged down inside the window, lost to Kell for the moment. In his surprise he'd let it go, and the slick metal had still held firm inside the face of Kell's victim by suction.

He jumped back as a cold glimmer of steel arced in the night, catching the thin light enough to give warning. Kell was careful to keep his right side toward the enemy. The sight of his restrained arm had done its job and tempted the enemy to go for the obvious attack, just as Lee had planned. Kell had been less than enthusiastic about making himself an easier target, but thought as he leaped backward that he might see if he could find Lee a bottle of good bourbon.

He fumbled at his lower back, trying to find the heavy stick Lee had correctly guessed Kell would keep as a backup weapon. The thing was too big and unwieldy to be out of the way anywhere but strapped to his back, but even with the custom sheath Laura had designed for it, the damn thing moved around.

The figure trying its best to introduce Kell's blood to the air resolved in single images as he glanced from the attack to his surroundings. His full attention fell onto the attacker when his left hand finally wised up and found the thick bottom of the wooden weapon's haft.

It was a girl. She couldn't have been older than twelve.

Seeing that round face framed by the darkness stopped Kell short. There were few things capable of putting him off his game outright, and fewer still that could manage it while his blood was up in the middle of a fight.

His pause stretched on for seconds. The girl obviously possessed the strong instincts of a survivor, because she sized up the situation and struck like a viper.

Kell tried to block, but was too slow. The slap of the baton on the girl's weapon arm lacked power and coordination, only knocking the blade off course rather than pushing it away entirely. Kell's universe went red as his clumsy defense sent the blade burrowing into his injured shoulder.

Fabric and flesh parted with equal ease, which Kell seemed to feel in slow motion. The scream ripped its way out of his throat with a will of its own, no more stoppable than the blood pumping through his veins.

Pain, so much pain, and then the worst of it was over. Panting, Kell found himself flat on his back, good hand clutching his injury. He shuddered as the memory of the knife skittering across his broken bone replayed in his head.

Someone leaned over him and tried to talk, and it was Kell's attempt to make out the words that brought him fully back to himself. Someone else screamed now, the same tone of abject, horrible agony, if at a higher pitch.

“Don't try to move,” Emily said as she knelt next to him. “We'll need to take a look at this and see if she damaged the bone, but I don't feel comfortable doing it here. She cut through one of the straps holding your arm in place, so I'm going to have to immobilize it again.”

“Who is that yelling?” Kell asked, ignoring her words. “You should be helping them.”

Emily paused as she opened her field medical kit. “That's the girl who cut you. She's not my problem.”

Kell looked up at Emily, who had begun to work with mechanical efficiency. “What did you...”

“Jumped down on her from the truck you two were fighting next to. Broke her ankle for sure, and I think I broke her arm when she tried to use that pig-sticker on me.”

The howls of pain gradually wore down as Emily worked. Not, Kell suspected, from any lessening of the girl's suffering, but judging by the breaks and cracks in the voice, from sheer exhaustion. Soon they were replaced by sobs and hoarse curses.

Someone else showed up to gingerly move Kell into a sitting position with his back against the wheel of the truck. The girl lay a dozen feet from him, broken limbs bound to healthy ones by yard-long tethers. Not enough to keep an uninjured person from removing them and escaping, but too much for the damaged child to manage.

Kell clenched his teeth as Emily finished tending him, all the while listening to the pitiful sobs coming from the wounded girl. It was twisted up in a disharmonious funeral song with the sounds of the nearby marauders being killed. The commotion died down even as Emily stood and brushed her hands across her stained pants.

His attention snapped from the girl to Emily as the scout squared her shoulders and flipped the snap on her holster. The two pieces of stamped metal holding the leather strap in place made a thin, almost nonexistent sound. To Kell it might as well have been the ringing of the headsman's axe as the whetstone glided down its length.

“What are you doing?” Kell asked carefully, though he already knew the answer. As did the girl, apparently, because broken bones or not, she went utterly still and silent. It was the physical representation of the ellipse, the pause which places emphasis and meaning on what happens next. The reaction of prey as its base instincts war between fight and flight.

Hobbled and bound, one of those was no longer a choice.

Emily stepped forward, hand casually expert as it slid the gun from its place on her thigh.

“Did you see her hurt anyone?” Kell asked, a profound desire to avoid watching an execution making him desperate.

“What?” Emily asked, not looking back at him.

“Did you actually see her hurt anyone? Or was it just the others here?”

Emily hesitated, though her hands remain rock steady as they gripped her weapon. “I saw what this group left behind, fifty miles south of here. Looked like a small band of nomads. Counted ten adults and six children, mostly pretty young.”

The words lashed into Kell, though over the years a thick weal of scar tissue had covered the loss of his own daughter. He let the momentary flash of pain pass through him before gritting his teeth and pushing himself to stand.

“She's a kid, Emily,” Kell said. “We kill marauders, but she's just a girl. We don't know that she can't be helped.”

Kell thought he heard the girl's breathing speed up just a hair, but it could have as easily been his imagination. As for Emily, it was impossible to tell whether his words were having any sort of effect. She hadn't yet begun shooting, which had to be a positive sign.

“We'll take her back with us,” Kell continued. “I don't like the idea of killing a kid who might not have had much choice about being here.” He considered for a moment. “We've seen enough of these people to know what to ask. We know what we're looking for. If it ends up that way, we can always finish the job later.”

The girl definitely made a noise at those last words.

Five

“In deference to the many years of professionalism you've shown me, I'm going to say this as nicely as possible,” John said as he none too gently probed Kell's mangled shoulder. “You're a fucking moron.”

“Nothing I haven't told myself a bunch of times,” Kell said.

John snorted. “I figured it's important you hear it from someone else. Smart as you are, it seems like you need a little help when it comes to remembering that big old brain of yours is capable of making equally big errors of judgment.”

Kell opened his mouth, but John cut him off with a gloved and bloody finger. “If you're about to use that Dumbledore quote to say the same damn thing I just said, I'm gonna start disconnecting nerves.”

With more than a little chagrin, Kell pressed his lips together. Maybe the small library of books they had found when taking over the house meant he read the same two dozen novels over and over again, and maybe that meant quoting the works of J.K. Rowling when he felt applicable, but John had to have gotten lucky there. No way he had used the one about how being clever made one's mistakes 'correspondingly huger' enough to make him predictable.

Upon further thought, Kell theorized that maybe intelligence and denial were directly proportional as well. It made sense.

John continued his delicate work with immense care, whatever Kell's pain receptors might be saying, though he did keep up a constant low boil of recriminations as he worked. This too washed over Kell in a familiar wave. When they had been designing the cutting edge gene therapies and manipulation techniques that would eventually end the world, John always did his best work while babbling away. The subject wasn't important. Kell thought the constant nattering and its effect on John's brain acted as a catalyst for the creative thinking which had been so critical in making Chimera work.

As John's current task, along with two of the compound's better medics, was to reconstruct the mess that was Kell's shoulder, hearing his friend bitch about his behavior was actually rather soothing. A spot of familiarity in a world grown unrecognizable.

The group finished their work well after the weak anesthetic had metabolized out of Kell's system, but by then it was mostly cleanup. Kell forced himself to remain still as the last few stitches went in.

“What do you think?” Kell asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

John removed his gloves, gesturing with his chin for the medics to leave them alone. When the door closed, Kell could see by the look in his friend's eyes that he wasn't going to like what he heard.

A few hours later, Kell sat on the edge of the roof and looked over the compound below. The old farmhouse already had a widow's walk and a direct access when they moved in, as well as several flat sections covering some of the many additions made throughout the decades.

John had gone directly to Laura after telling Kell about the bone chips he had carefully removed from where they were embedded against several of Kell's nerves. There was visible damage to the nerves themselves, which could be made worse in any number of ways. Laura, being Laura, had immediately made it clear that Kell was on heavily restricted duty.

Not just to Kell, either. The entire population was told in crystal clear language that if they saw him working out, doing chores, or participating in any activity that even occupied the same galaxy as strenuous, they were to gently stop him and gently take him back to his room where he would be locked in. With someone inside the room to act as both helper and guard.

All that time spent trying to find a place where he could finally settle in and work on the problem of developing a cure, but he hadn't considered the idea that his value in doing so would turn him into a commodity. Something of intrinsic value to be protected whether or not he wanted it.

Even now he could feel the tense gaze of someone standing at the open window behind him, just waiting for Kell to clench his ass in just the wrong way so they could heroically leap out and save him from a stupid fall from the second story.

Then a tiny voice piped up and the world got a few shades brighter.

“What are you doing up here?” Michelle said as she glided across the roof and plopped down next to him. “You brooding?”

Kell raised an eyebrow at her. “If I say you're too young to understand the concept behind that word, please do me a favor and punch me in my good arm.”

Michelle smiled up at him, sunny as ever. “I wouldn't hit you. Mostly because you'll get better one day and then you'll get even. And I do too know what it means. Mom told me it's how you get when you think about all the sad stuff that happened to you.”

It took an effort to hold back a smile. Michelle wasn't far off the mark, but the image her words conjured in his head were of him as Batman, being all broody on a rooftop. Jesus.

“Your mom said that, huh?”

Michelle nodded sagely. “She also told me if I saw you doing it, I should make you laugh even if I have to tickle you.” The last she said with a seriousness that would have been funny to anyone but Kell. He, however, had seen what happened when Michelle was tickled. Due to what was probably a crossing of developmental wires, Michelle did indeed laugh when tickled. But she also got intensely—almost impossibly—angry at the same time. The little girl turned into a mass of shrieking giggles and tearfully furious glares, and attacked the living shit out of the person tickling her.

It should have been funny to think of the little pixie going bananas on someone trying to get a laugh out of her. It might have been if not for the aftermath, the obvious emotional toll the reaction took on her. The sobering fact was that Michelle was particular about how people interacted with her, and didn't like losing control. Being put in a situation that forced her to have an emotional reaction wasn't fun or funny. At best it bordered on assault.

So Kell understood the serious concern Andrea, Michelle's mother, must have if she would suggest her daughter do something she herself hated so deeply.

“I'm okay, kiddo,” Kell said. “I'm okay.”

“You sure?” Michelle asked and the earnestness in her cherub face brought the long-buried fatherhood out in him. He pulled her into a one-armed hug and rained light kisses down on top of her head.

“I'm sure.”

And he was. Not only for the obvious reason, which was the fact that first and foremost Chimera had been designed to repair nerve damage. It was because even if his arm, whose fragile state precluded anything beyond basic sensation and motion testing, suddenly and permanently went dead, he would still get along fine. The value which turned him into a non-replaceable asset didn't require him to have use of both hands. Or any hands, if it came down to it. There was nothing he could do in the lab that John couldn't. Even a layman with a moderate amount of training could serve as his hands.

Kell's value as a fighter wasn't trivial, but only handful of the people around him could be categorized as non-combatants. Even the little girl next to him could fight like seven kinds of hell. His skill set was useful in combat, but its loss wouldn't noticeably affect the ability of the group to defend itself.

“I'm sure,” he said again.

In times past, Kell would have been one of the central players determining what to do with the prisoner. That meeting was held without his participation, which he was okay with. The level of pain he had been in combined with the need to quickly assess the damage kept him out of the loop. Of course, it was more than a year since he handed off his part in the major decision making off to others in favor of his work. Settling into a permanent home meant a change in priorities.

Which was why, several days after the near-disastrous run at the local marauders, Kell was little more than a fly on the wall during the discussion that would decide when and how they would go about meeting the people Emily had identified using Kell's criteria.

The positions of the people in the room were mostly predictable. Laura said little, choosing to instead see what the various points of logic were before nudging the conversation with a sentence here and a few words there. Lee advocated caution and preparedness by means of necessary force—which by the definition of anyone who wasn't a Marine was actually overwhelming force. It wasn't that the young man was bloodthirsty; in fact the opposite. Lee was prepared to kill and strongly supported having the tools needed to make it happen, but preferred to avoid situations that put his people in danger. One of the first lessons he taught people on the training ground was that the best fight was one you could avoid having in the first place.

There were several others participating in the discussion, but the most interesting to Kell was a man who went by the name Kincaid. He was close with Josh and Jessica, Josh's temporary death being the flash of inspiration which led Kell to ask all the scouts to find people who had clinically died and come back.

Kell had met the man before, and while the quarters inside their compound were snug bordering on uncomfortable, had only seen him in passing outside of the odd feast night.

He was certain why Kincaid was at the meeting, though Kell had no idea whether or not anyone else did. It was only because of the brief but tense days Kell spent with Josh after the man had died that he had been able to suss out what was off about Kincaid, who was rarely more than ten feet from the husband and wife.

Kell was fairly certain the man was a sociopath. Kincaid was certainly capable of some of the behaviors Kell remembered from his college years, yet didn't fit an easy definition or stereotype. Many of his colleagues in the hard sciences scoffed at the idea of psychology and psychiatry being called science, but not Kell. They fascinated him enough to keep him dabbling in the literature for years after leaving school.

The problem many scientists had with those fields could be found in the constantly shifting definitions and terminologies. Kincaid wasn't psychotic. He didn't break with reality. And he didn't fall into most of the highly granular criteria for defining a sociopath. If he was cold to most of the other members of the community, he was fiercely loyal and protective of Josh and Jessica.

They had stood up for Kincaid when the former marauder had taken an amnesty offer from New Haven. Others weren't happy that he'd come to live there, so they had made it a point to show the man trust. Add to that the fearlessness with which Kincaid fought to defend their new home, and you might miss the fact that there was a void in him not present in most people.

His moral compass was missing a direction.

When the meeting was over, Laura motioned for Kell to stay, along with Kincaid. When she asked Kincaid to voice his thoughts on the meeting, Kell knew he was right about why Laura had asked him there in the first place.

“They all had decent points,” Kincaid said, his voice just flat enough to make Kell's neck itch. “Lee wants to send an armada. Emily wants to take Kell by herself and sneak in. Perkins questioned whether bringing back samples would be worth the risks associated with the trip. Griner advocates waiting to see if other scouts fine more accessible subjects to study.”

Laura waved for him to continue. “What do you think, though?”

Kincaid chuckled. “I think you asked me here because I have no skin in the game. You know I make judgments based on logic. You want me to tell you what my take on their arguments is.” Kincaid shook his head. “Look, you know what I'm capable of. You know when it comes to keeping people I care about alive; I'll break rules and bones without batting an eye.”

Laura stared at him for a hard few seconds. Having known her for years, the look on her face made Kell want to get up and move around out of sheer nervous tension. Men had died under that gaze.

“People think you're crazy,” Laura said. “I think you're just amoral enough to not give a shit about anything else when your priorities are in danger. So what I want is for you to pretend for a minute that this trip is your priority, and tell me what you think we should do.”

“Okay,” Kincaid said. “We should do it, and as soon as possible. We have no way of knowing what will happen to the people Emily identified. From what she said, where they live is dangerous. If we're going to try for samples, it should be sooner rather than later. I know Lee wants John to go instead of Kell,” he said, glancing at Kell with a respectful nod, “but that's fucking stupid. John's a good guy, but he's never had to survive out there. He isn't a fighter. Even hurt, Kell has the experience to take care of himself and the temperament not to lose his shit when something goes wrong.”

Laura pursed her lips. “When something goes wrong?”

“Sure,” Kincaid said. “Something always does. When things start to turn pear-shaped, Kell won't flap his hands and run in a circle. He'll take action.” Kincaid looked at Kell again, eyes resting briefly on the mass of straps and bandages covering his shoulder. “He might do something dumb, but he'll at least do something.”

“Thanks,” Kell said.

“You're welcome,” Kincaid replied, no sarcasm in his voice. “And because things go wrong, Lee is also right. We'll need to send a team with him that won't make a fuss or pick fights, but will end them if they happen. Ideally we'd send five or six people in one vehicle capable of being as stealthy as Emily would like while being as secure enough to make Lee happy.”

Laura smiled approvingly. “What about Griner and Perkins? They're elected council members. Do their opinions matter to you?”

Kincaid shrugged. “They would, if they weren't completely neutral and trying to make it look like they aren't. They're more concerned with what we're doing here. They care about crop yields and security upgrades. They want a cure just like everyone else, but they expect you to make the calls when it comes to that stuff. For what it's worth, I think Perkins has a point when wondering if the trip will be worth it just for samples. But then I don't know the science, so maybe Kell can do wonders with some blood and scrapings. That's probably something you'll ask him about. Griner has no spine, though. He just wants to wash his hands of the whole thing. He has to know how lucky it was for Emily to find not just one but a group of people that fit Kell's criteria.”

Kell sat in stunned silence. He had been right. Whatever peculiarities Kincaid's brain might have, it made him a nearly perfectly blank slate when it came to analyzing situations like this. He had few prejudices to skew his judgment, almost no preconceived notions. It was as astute an analysis as Kell could have given and in far less time.

“I like this guy,” Kell muttered.

“That's good,” Laura said. “Because I'm thinking of putting him in charge of this trip.”

Six

“Why didn't you let her kill me?” the prisoner asked.

Kell sat across from the girl, whose name turned out to be Cari, as she leaned carefully on the narrow cot with her back against the wall.

She was young, confirming Kell's first impression. Underfed and with more stress than any child should endure, she looked even younger than the fourteen years she admitted to. She would have been, what, nine or ten when The Fall happened? Kell wondered if the dot on the letter I at the end of her name had once been a heart shape.

“You're a kid,” Kell said. “It didn't seem right to me. I figured you deserved a chance to be better. To do something better.”

Cari shook her head, a simple gesture but one with more weight of experience than anyone her age should have displayed. “I tried to kill you, man. And you don't know the things I've done just to survive.”

Kell couldn't help laughing even if it was a sound without an ounce of humor. “Trust me; I'm the last person to judge someone on what they've done.”

Cari tilted her head and immediately winced as the motion tugged on one of her injuries. “You do something bad? Why do they let you live here, then?”

“Weird as it sounds, it's because of what I did that they want me here. I know you've been interviewed. You know your options, right?”

Cari nodded. “Stay here and be a good girl or die.” The words were harsh, but her tone held no anger.

“Does that bother you?” Kell asked. “The restrictions?”

The girl shrugged. “My dad was one of the people your guys killed the other night. And I'm happy about it. He kept me alive right after things fell apart, but he had to do some bad shit. When he started in with the rest of those assholes, he put himself in charge. Made sure no one fucked with him.” A haunted, distant look took over her face. “Might be hard to understand, but when you're robbing and killing other people for what they have, it changes you. You go to sleep around a bunch of killers and rapists; you do what you have to so they don't see you as a target. Dad made sure I wasn't...weak.”

A pang of overwhelming sympathy flooded through Kell as she spoke. He tried to imagine growing up in a situation so hellish. What Kell had done in creating Chimera was a sin of hubris at best. Even if you ignored the scope it was far worse than what Cari had to suffer through. Because it was clear she did regret those choices and the necessity of them. There was a clear streak of self-loathing for the things she must have done to armor herself against the people of her group. It ran right along the vein of diamond toughness that must have kept her breathing.

“The thing is, if you choose to live here you're going to learn some pretty big secrets. Things we can't trust you to keep to yourself because we don't know you. If it helps, you should know that every other person living here has made the decision not to leave for the same reason. It's too much of a risk. Even our scouts and trading parties make sure they never sleep near people not from this compound, because they're afraid of what they might say out loud while they're dreaming.”

Cari's eyes widened at that. “What the hell are you guys up to?”

Kell gave her a tiny smile. “Can I assume that means you're agreeing to our terms?”

She nodded.

“My hope is that by the time you running off might become possible, you won't want to. But since you're going to be here, you need the facts. And I feel like it's my responsibility to tell you.”

He did.

The next week was a flurry of work as Kincaid put together everything the group would need for their trip. Kell wasn't involved in any of the physical labor, so he bent his efforts to helping plan everything from the load of supplies and weapons they would need to collating available information on routes and zombie migration patterns to design a better route.

Luckily the trip wasn't going to be a long one. Their destination was a fortified community just one state over, one of the rare communities larger than a dozen people near a large town. Kell worked within the parameters Kincaid had laid out in that first meeting and in two more since, and laid out a winding route that would keep them away from known zombie swarms and marauder hunting grounds.

“This should work,” Emily said when he showed her the map he worked out for the trip. “I'll run it by the other scouts just to be sure.”

It was the end of a long day, the late summer sunset marking one less spin of the globe before their departure. Kell felt apprehensive about the trip, and not only because his injuries made him dependent on other people for his safety. It would be the first time he had traveled away from the compound for more than a few hours. He had grown comfortable thinking of the place as home, especially after so many years of bouncing around.

Getting to his feet with a grimace, Kell pulled the straps holding his arm immobile tighter. He had to keep them loose when sitting or they constricted his movements, but when standing or jogging as he was planning to do, tight was good.

Jogging the perimeter had been a habit of his for most of the time he'd lived here, but since his initial injury Kell made it a point to do it as often as possible. If he couldn't fight effectively, he was going to be damn sure he could run.

That was the plan, at any rate. Kell only made it as far as the large open-sided metal building where vehicle repairs were before forgetting why he'd come outside. The sight in front of him caught him off guard, mainly because seeing a swarm of unfamiliar faces and one shockingly familiar one working together on a vehicle that hadn't been there a few hours earlier contrasted starkly with the idyllic farmland.

“Tim?” Kell asked mouth agape. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The tall man unfolded himself from the stool he was hunched over as he welded something to the cargo van in front of him. “Kell! Good to see you,” Tim said. “And you can call me Mason. That's my real name. We're not fighting a war any longer, so there's no need to keep that quiet.”

Tim—Mason, rather—walked over and extended a hand. Kell grasped it firmly and smiled at the other man. He was willing to bet Mason didn't get many smiles, looking the way he did. Heavy scars twisted along every inch of exposed skin. They weren't patterned in any real sense, not the way you'd think of someone with burn scars or injuries from a mechanical device would be. These scars were ragged and came in groups; the results of a fight with a bunch of zombies that Mason had somehow won.

The facial scars were bad, if not as thick as the ones on his arms and shoulders. The tank top Mason wore left little to the imagination. Heavy muscles and a frame not much smaller than Kell's own gave truth to the impression that the guy was just a beast. Though Kell had no idea what he'd looked like before, it was still obvious that the missing pieces of skin on Mason's face had resulted in hasty and inexpert sewing to pull the ragged edges together. His face had lost symmetry and gained a canted, stretched appearance.

“As for what I'm doing here,” Mason said with a wink, “I'm your driver. I even brought my own wheels.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the van, which was quickly being transformed into something fit for the dangerous world outside.

“How did anyone manage to find you in time?” Kell asked. “We haven't sent any scouts your way in a while.”

Mason shook his head. “Me and my people aren't staying down south anymore. Since the UAS stopped being a bunch of dicks, there's been no need for me to spy on them. Other people can do that. We were already talking about joining up with you when Emily sent word telling us you might need a little help.”

“Sent word?” Kell repeated, brow furrowed.

Mason grinned. “Sure. We've been camped out about a hundred and fifty miles southwest of here for a few months. Haven't you wondered why no random groups of zombies or other bad guys have come from that direction?”

Kell had, actually, but...wow. “You're telling me you've been guarding us in an arc that big? Jesus, man, your patrols must have been brutal.”

“Not really,” Mason said. “The others kept watch while I went through and made sure there were blockages along every major roadway and avenue I could find. Not all of them, but enough to drive most of the traffic in the direction I wanted, which was away from here.”

Kell gaped at Mason openly. The casual way he said it made guarding an enormous tract of land seem trivial. What the hell did they teach these guys in SEAL training?

“Are you a wizard?” Kell asked in a mock-dumb voice.

Mason laughed. “Nah, I just have a lot of practice and smart people helping me out. So what do you think? You want me with you?”

Mason was in the middle of explaining the many alterations being made to the van when a sound like a cross between a great jungle cat and an angry bull filled the busy courtyard. Mason's voice dwindled to silence while pointing out the advantages of armor over efficiency, and both he and Kell found themselves staring at the small mobile home situated just to the left of the main house.

The door stood open. Framed in it was Jess, six feet tall and wild-eyed at the sight of Mason. Just behind her was Josh, whose face contained nothing of the bright fury his wife expressed. His expression was one of unadulterated shock, which Kell granted made sense. The last time he had seen Mason, the man was facing off against a pack of zombies as a means of choosing his own manner of death. Injuries Mason had taken before that point were so severe everyone involved assumed they would be fatal.

A reasonable assumption given that at the time only a handful of people on earth knew what Chimera was and how much it accelerated the healing process. A deep part of Kell's brain couldn't help being amused at the idea that in a world where the dead rising was a daily concern, someone should still be caught off guard that a friend somehow survived when it seemed impossible.

“Well, shit,” Mason muttered just loud enough for Kell to hear. “I knew I forgot to do something.”

Jess strode across the courtyard, every hard-earned muscle flowing beneath dark skin tense. Though she didn't run or so much as glance at the other people staring at her, they parted like a biblical sea around her.

Of the things Kell knew about Mason, the first and most obvious was the utter competence at the core of who he was. A more shallow examination would assume that SEAL training had created it, but Kell thought it was the other way around. Mason had excelled in his career because the foundation was already there, a deep part of him. He had faced unbelievable odds and beaten them, had more practical experience with self-defense and killing than any five people Kell knew.

So when Jess landed her first punch squarely on the point of Mason's cheekbone, Kell knew it was because he'd let her. Jess could fight like a pissed-off wolverine, but she hadn't exactly caught Mason by surprise.

Kell stepped back from the fracas, worried he'd take an accidental shot to his injured bits. Being a few yards away gave him a beautiful view of the fight.

For all the obvious fury, Jess had perfect control. The blows she landed had real force, enough to make Mason bring up his forearms to block the face shots. She was wearing her usual working gear; a tank top tight over her chest and loose at the waist so that it flared with every fluid twist of her hips. She punched with the methodical efficiency of a martial artist, every shot backed by the rotation of her body.

The sudden rush of heat in Kell's body was unexpected. Logical Kell wondered why his long-dormant libido, essentially in a coma since the loss of his wife, had decided that watching a beautiful and muscular woman beat the shit out of someone was just what it needed. It wasn't the shine of sweat over her skin; he had worked with her enough that the sight was old hat.

Thirty seconds was all it took for her to make the point. After landing half a dozen meaty body blows, Jess pulled back. The fury in her eyes was undiminished.

“What the fuck, man?” she asked, shaking a finger at Mason. “Do you have any idea how hard Josh mourned you? And you just let him think you were dead all this time?”

The tumblers inside Kell's head clicked. Some part of him understood it from the first, but his conscious mind was the dumber of the two.

It was love he'd felt. Just a little, the sort of harmless crush you get for a friend who happens to be awesome. Attraction was a part of the deal. Kell had felt neither for so long that it was akin to touching your leg after it had fallen asleep; alien and strange, yet oddly familiar.

It was the righteous anger for what Josh had been through after losing his friend. The dedication. As the two of them argued, Kell wondered at the ways life could and would manage to surprise you. He'd thought those parts of his mind and heart dead. Beyond resurrection.

Yet here he was, with proof to the contrary.

Interesting.

Seven

Like most survivors, Kell had suffered his fair share of injuries over the years. The range was impressive, from the minor bumps and bruises of everyday life to life-threatening. He realized, as he finished packing for the trip, that he had never been so wholly in need of other people's protection.

Sure, the day of the outbreak had nearly killed him. That didn't really count. Those early days predated the months of practice and training he had set himself to with the same rigor he had applied to his doctorates.

Along with the many sundries needed to outfit even a short trip for half a dozen people, Kell packed a lot of extra bandages and straps. Get lost in the wilderness without supplies once, shame on you. Get lost in the wilderness twice...

“You about ready?” Emily said as she strode into his room. She wore camouflage, as did most of the scouts, though it wasn't military issue. From head to toe, Emily was shrouded in faded hunter's togs. Even the straps for her gear and weapons matched. With the balaclava draped around her neck pulled up, she would become a ghost in even mildly dense woods.

It was, Kell decided, a good look on her.

“Yes,” he replied as he slipped the bag closed and buckled it tight. “Not sure I'm comfortable needing you guys to guard me, but I'm ready.”

A few seconds passed without a reply. He looked up to find Emily's gaze raking the walls of his room.

“Man, you really are a genius, aren't you?” she said in a distant voice, lazily waving a hand at his unique style of wallpaper.

There were few bare inches of space. Every surface was covered in wide sheets of butcher paper, tacked up and overlapping. From a distance the paper appeared dirty, the light brown dusted with black motes. When you got within arm's reach—as Emily now was for the first time—the black resolved into lines of text, tables of information, and a fair amount of math.

“I mean, technically,” Kell said awkwardly. “Most of that is just my research over the last year; along with the relevant data from before everything went to shit to provide reference points.”

Emily nodded. “The end of the world does that, you know? Makes you forget who people used to be. You see a guy working in the field with you, the first thought on your mind isn't that he was a mechanical engineer and drove an expensive car. You know him as someone who has your back. Shares the work.”

Kell shrugged against his bandages, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. “It's not something I'm proud of,” he said.

She glanced at him, surprised. “Really? All that work and you're not proud?”

“No,” Kell said. “I mean being smart. Funny thing about being a geneticist is how it changes your outlook on things like that. My brains are a result of my biology. I was going to be smart no matter what. The work I did getting my degrees, the effort I put in researching, those are things I'm proud of. I don't have an opinion on being intelligent any more than I do on being tall.” He paused, cocking his head. “Then again, the end of the world happened partially because of my being at the head of the class, so...”

Emily gave him an exaggerated eye roll. “Laura warned me you tend toward being maudlin about that. Pretty arrogant to think no one else on the team who discovered Chimera could have made the same breakthroughs.”

Kell smiled. It was Laura's old argument, just from a different set of lips.

“You're right,” Kell said. “I came to terms with that a long time ago. Now I just want to fix it so things can start to get better.”

Emily grinned. “That's what this trip is all about, yeah?”

“Let's hope so,” Kell said.

There wasn't much in the way of fanfare as the small group made ready to leave. Laura and Andrea waited by the van, Michelle buzzing around and between them impatiently. The girl saw him first, eyes flashing with the sort of excited recognition only small children and serial killers are capable of.

Her weight slammed into his legs a few seconds later, tiny arms wrapping around them—as far as possible, that is—in a fierce hug. Kell chuckled and wedged his good arm between Michelle and his thigh, making room so he could scoop her up.

She clung to him, tiny fingers digging into the belts and straps of the gear festooned across his jacket. Michelle laid her head against his chest as a gust of summer wind blew through, sending her wavy hair floating in wispy spirals.

“Be careful,” she said in a small voice.

The words nearly stopped him in his tracks. For a moment, a sense of almost infinite dread filled him. The urge to call it off and stay so she didn't have to worry about him rose up and hit his brain with the speed of a striking viper.

It passed almost instantly, but left behind a thin sadness. A little pride for Michelle, too. Any other child might have told him not to go. That she would hate him if he went and died. Any of a thousand justifiable sentiments that a hurt kid might express because they didn't have the life experience to understand why he had to go.

But not her.

“I will,” Kell said, fighting to keep his voice level. “I've got good people watching my back. Not as good as you, of course,” he added with a smile.

Michelle nodded against him.

The discussion between Andrea and Laura died as Kell approached. The two had become almost inseparable over the last year. The three of them were close, so much so that with a glance Kell could read the situation without needing to hear the argument.

“Evan didn't want to see me off?” Kell asked lightly, trying to avoid the tension between the two women.

“No,” Andrea said. “All the work they did on the van unsettled him. He's in his room.”

“Poor kid,” Kell said. “I didn't even think about that.” Evan's autism meant that interruptions to the routine of compound life—especially when it involved the sort of ear-splitting racket involved in hastily rebuilding a vehicle—could necessitate him isolating himself. Evan couldn't fight, but he wasn't the only person in their community who didn't carry a weapon, and he made himself useful in a lot of other ways.

Kell hoped the noise didn't put the kid off his game for long.

“So,” Laura said in a tone that was dangerous for how deliberately conversational it was. “Andrea wants to come with you.”

Michelle tightened against Kell's chest, her only sign of distress.

“Yeah, I thought that might be it,” Kell said.

Andrea frowned. “You gonna tell me no, too?”

Kell shrugged, a minor feat of strength and coordination in his current condition. “Nope. I'm not the boss of you. But if you insist on going, I won't be.”

Andrea blinked. “What?”

“If you go,” Kell said, “I'm staying here.” He hitched Michelle a little higher up on his hip for emphasis.

Andrea's mouth curled in preparation for a retort, and then relaxed. Kell felt a little bad about the relief flooding through him as she deflated.

“I know you've been getting antsy,” Laura said, not unkindly. “But you know staying is the right thing to do.”

Rather than nod or speak a word of agreement, Andrea stepped forward and held out her hands for Michelle. Kell gave the girl a peck on the cheek and a fast hug before handing her over to her mother.

“I'll see you soon,” Kell said.

“You better,” Michelle replied.

He and Laura waited until the pair were out of earshot before turning back to each other. Kell didn't hold back the rueful smirk. “That's gonna cost you,” he said.

Laura sighed. “No fucking kidding. All that talk about wanting a safe place to settle down, but once she had it all she wants to do is go out and get herself killed.”

“That's not fair,” Kell said. “She thought she'd be doing more scout runs, fighting off swarms, all that. It's hard to live out in the wild, having to survive on pure adrenaline and fear, then drop back from race car speeds to a slow crawl. She's worried she'll get soft. Which would mean not being able to protect her kids.”

Laura's forehead crinkled as her brows arched. “You're sound pretty sure about that. You think you know my girlfriend better than I do?”

Kell shrugged, then tossed his pack into the waiting van. “I spent a long time taking a hard look at myself,” he said. “Maybe I learned something while I was doing it. What I do know? I'm not as close to it as you are. Might help me see the big picture more clearly. If I were you, I'd find something for her to do while we're gone. Maybe give her Emily's scout runs or Lee's training schedule.”

Laura rubbed her forehead. “Lord, help me. One of you has to go out but doesn't want to. The other wants to go out but shouldn't. How about I give you this job when you get back? You might be better at it.”

Kell backed up a step, raising his hands. “Oh, hell no. My only responsibility is fixing the world. Yours is way harder, and you know it. I've met our people, after all.”

Laura smiled and gave him a hug. She didn't tell him goodbye, which was their longstanding habit. She didn't tell him to be careful, because after the horrors each had been through, there was no need. Instead she let go of Kell and punched him lightly in his good arm before winking at him and walking away.

They left without fanfare, the gates opening and closing like a mouth around them. During the buildup for the mission, one or another of the people planning it remarked how deserted the route would be. How safe and without incident all the evidence indicated the mission would be. Kell watched the compound, his home, dwindle through the armored windows at the rear of the huge van. He knew the only way he wouldn't see it again was if he died out here, and the crew protecting him were some of the most dangerous people he had ever met.

Regardless, it still felt like a goodbye. Years of blood and pain had stripped away any notion of romance or fate about the world. Optimism was a rare and beautiful thing, but Kell was long past the point in his life where feeling positive made him more certain of an outcome. If anything, it did the opposite. Banking on luck or fate or God was a sure way to end up with your throat cut or your flesh devoured. Or both.

Better to rely on yourself and the people around you.

Eight

Kell's hand hurt.

It was an expected pain, one he had come to view as a sort of punishment for his injury. Being unable to use his right—and having to favor that side to keep it safe—meant putting an enormous strain on his left. The bench he sat on had originally faced the front of the van before Mason and his team of grease monkeys ripped apart and rearranged everything. Now it sat facing inward, with one of the aluminum hand rails perfectly placed for Kell to brace himself with.

The harness locked around him might have come from a race car, though he really had no idea if the five-point restraint had such lofty origins. Wherever it had come from, Kell was pretty sure the designers hadn't meant for the thing to be anchored to the bare metal wall with fat, sloppy welds.

Pretty much the entire van was that way. It was (thankfully) one of those odd passenger vehicles with an abnormally high ceiling. The sort group homes and moderately sized medical centers might use as shuttles. Which meant Kell could actually stand up, though not without hunching slightly.

The upside of having most of the seats removed was a nice bit of space between the six people in the van. Emily lay curled up on another bench to Kell's right, jacket rolled into a makeshift pillow. Lee stood in the stairwell next to the driver, relaxed posture belying the constant scan of the surroundings Kell knew he was performing. Mason sat across from Kell, as did Kincaid, both men checking weapons and making sure the containers of supplies filling the middle of the van were secure. Kell wasn't sure what the driver's name was. He thought Mason had called him Marco. Maybe Marcus? He was one of the men Mason brought with him to the compound.

The van itself was a testament to what a team of obsessive workers could do with a deadline and a lax concern for workplace safety. Painted on the outside to blend in with whatever thicket of woods they camped in, the thing was armored more heavily than Kell would have thought possible.

“Won't be that hard on the engine,” Mason had explained. “This thing was meant to transport twelve adults for hundreds of miles. We gutted it as much as possible, so the added weight won't make that much of a difference.”

The extra fuel tank hastily welded near the back would ensure they had gas to spare. Kell's worry wasn't so much they'd ruin the engine or run out of fuel, but that the modified vehicle would make too sweet a target. Because whatever the reports said, he didn't really believe this trip could be without the sorts of risk he knew to be out there. Deserted, clear routes like the one they traveled were obvious targets for groups of marauders or even just mundane thieves. Zombies could and did change migration patterns at the slightest scent of new prey.

Snapping fingers brought Kell out of his reverie. Mason leaned forward, slowly drawing his hand back.

“You okay?” Mason asked. “Had a look on your face like someone drowned your puppy.”

“I'm fine,” Kell replied. “Just thinking about how this can go sideways.”

Mason chuckled. “Yeah, I get that. But I wouldn't stress over it too much. Couple of my people are riding ahead of us. Making sure everything's Kosher. I'm with you, because I've been caught by surprise enough to know to expect it.” He waved a hand at the scars crisscrossing his face. “Things might go pear-shaped, but we'll know about it ahead of time.”

The matter-of-fact tone managed to calm Kell a little, something his brooding hadn't been able to accomplish.

Indeed, when keening of a stressed motorcycle engine grew from faint background noise to unavoidable loudness; it didn't bring with it the expected sense of dread.

The van rolled to a stop within a minute, everyone but Kell absently checking weapons and preparing for whatever bad news was about to hit.

Mason opened the door to a knock, pistol carefully angled for a clear shot through should it turn out to be an enemy. Not likely, in Kell's opinion, given the difficulty any attacker would have had prying the location of the van from Mason's people in such a short time.

The scout stood with the visor of his motorcycle helmet raised, exposing dark eyes and deeply tanned skin. Kell saw Mason visibly relax, clearly recognizing the man.

“Rob,” Mason said. “What's up?”

Rob nodded in their direction of travel. “Got a big swarm coming down from the north,” he said. “Looks like they're sticking to the main road, and you're a couple miles west of them. Probably best you stay here while we make sure they keep moving south.”

“Dammit,” Kincaid said. “Do we have any idea of the local terrain? Is there somewhere we can put the van that's far enough off this road that it won't be seen?”

Kell had been in the same meetings as Kincaid where detailed explanations of the safety of the route had been laid out in plain English. Both men knew the entire purpose of taking this path was due to its lack of travel by marauders and normal survivors alike. Which meant the chance of some other fucking thing happening was just as likely. Better to find a safe spot and hunker down.

Nodding, Rob pointed back the way they came. “There's a town about five miles back with a big industrial complex. It's fenced in all the way around.”

“I know that place,” Emily cut in. “We scouted it. I can get us there.”

Kincaid faced her. “How likely is it someone will come looking for us there?”

She grimaced. “I seriously doubt anyone will come close.”

Turns out she was right.

“Wow,” Kell said. “You guys have a weird definition of the word safe.”

The industrial complex was found as promised, and if at first something seemed a bit off about it, the place seemed to be in good repair and utterly deserted. Though the place was situated firmly within the small town it inhabited, there weren't even the usual straggler zombies you nearly always saw.

That realization turned up Rational Kell's interest by a few magnitudes, and when they turned onto the road leading to the huge set of buildings, tanks, and pipes, understanding clicked into place like tumblers in a lock.

The lack of zombies was unusual but not unheard of. That observation made the next almost impossible to miss.

There were no animals. No birds fluttering across the warm winds, no dogs gone feral and chasing down squirrels. There were also no plants. Or rather, there were no living plants, at least within five hundred feet of the complex.

“What the fuck?” Mason whispered as he huddled next to Kell, staring through the windshield. “What happened here?”

Kell pointed to the vast round-ended tanks dotting the periphery of the site. “My guess is entropy. Without people to maintain the systems here, they started to fail.”

Whatever agent had been stored in those tanks had clearly been strong enough to wipe out everything in the area, and keep even grass from growing near ground zero. Rational Kell began reciting a laundry list of possible culprits in the back of his mind, none of them appealing.

“How screwed are we if we stay here?” Kincaid asked.

Kell shrugged. “If the scouts came here before, then it's probably pretty safe. The fence looks brand new. Whatever happened here kept anything from growing on it, so we'll be able to see anyone approaching through the chain link.”

Kincaid cleared his throat. “Not what I mean. Are we at risk if we stay here, do you think?”

Kell glanced at Emily. “Did you guys hang around when you scouted it?”

She shook her head. “It was a quick pass. Didn't go inside the fence.”

“We should be fine,” Kell said. “Whatever killed everything off had to have dispersed relatively fast, so as long as we don't go licking any strange surfaces I don't see it being a problem.”

“What if another system fails and a tank ruptures or something?” Kincaid asked.

“Either it'll be something harmless or we'll be screwed,” Kell said. “Nothing we can do about it.”

Camp was easy enough to set up since everyone but Kell—embarrassingly—would sleep on simple bedrolls on the ground outside the van. Lee helped Kell set up his own space in the safety of the van itself, which would be shut tight once the sun began to set.

With sunset hours away, Kell decided to check out the huge tangle of mechanical equipment, buildings, and storage facilities. Lee joined him. The apocalypse had a way of showing you the importance of the buddy system. Especially when one of your arms is out of commission.

Rather than wander aimlessly, Lee guided them in a wide circle along the fence. The instinct to search for danger was so deeply ingrained that neither man even realized he was doing it, but the complete lack of anything living made the job simpler still. There was always a chance someone had followed them or waited at a distance, though, so there was merit in having a look anyway.

“Wow,” Kell breathed as they slowly spiraled back in toward the main complex. On the side farthest from their camp, a massive array of tanks filled what appeared to be numerous refill stations. That the place had once been a chemical plant and repository was without doubt, and the thought filled Kell with equal parts wonder and fear.

“You know, people probably didn't give this place a second look in the old days,” Kell said. “Took it for granted like most things. It was just a place to work at or an eyesore on the edge of town.”

Lee's brows drew together. “But not you, right?”

“Not me,” Kell agreed. “Though apparently I'm predictable.”

Lee shook his head. “Nah, I'm just used to getting a different perspective from you.”

“I think you're being nice, but I'll take it,” Kell replied. “But I mean look at this place. Look at what it represents. The steel and aluminum and composites used to make these containers are the end result of thousands of years of ingenuity. That's just the vessels to hold stuff, mind you. The chemicals? Fifty years ago some of them didn't even exist in nature, or if they did we had no means to store them. The sheer amount of work and knowledge needed to make a place like this possible is staggering.”

Kell pointed at a ruptured tank, the place where its valve stem should have been only a corroded, ragged hole. “I hadn't really put much thought into it before, but do you realize how many places like this must be out there? Hundreds, even thousands, of abandoned businesses, factories, and processing plants full of highly complex systems no longer getting any maintenance.”

Lee nodded in understanding. “Heard something similar happened with New Haven and the supply depot in Richmond. Bunkers full of dozens of tons of ammo, missiles, you name it. We knew for sure people have been raiding military facilities for years...”

“Yes, exactly,” Kell said, cutting in with a strange excitement. “Those are just the obvious threats. What happens when places like this start to fail one after another? Or when some self-made warlord decides it's time to up his arsenal?”

They had reached and climbed a small staircase leading up to what Kell assumed was the main office building. It wasn't high by any measure, but as the whole facility sat on a hill it even the slight change in elevation gave them a bird's eye view of the land below.

The answer to Kell's question was unspoken and obvious, etched into the earth as an empty ring of death.

Nine

Trouble didn't find the group that night, which isn't the same thing as not being troubled. Kell in particular looked haggard the next morning, his night a hellscape of dreams featuring the lost and forgotten weapons of yesterday being put to new and terrible uses.

Not that he was one to judge; he had played his part in killing the world. That it had been involuntary and with the intention to help didn't matter to the billions of corpses at his feet.

“Good morning,” Mason said in a singsong voice.

“Meh,” Kell muttered in response. Something slapped against his sleeping bag and slid down; a meal ration. One of the good kind they made back home, thank heaven. The smell of granola and dried fruit filled his nose as he tore it open. Not fancy, but a damn sight better than any of the military rations he'd tried.

“We got the all-clear while you were out,” Mason said, already stowing and strapping gear. “We'll head out as soon as you're ready.”

Kell eyed the bag of food, then sat it on the chair before starting the laborious process of wiggling out of his sleeping bag. “I'll eat on the road.”

It was a beautiful day. Not the sort of summer heat that pushed you to hate nature, instead enough cloud cover to dapple the landscape as they rolled by. Kell watched the slow meander of sunbeams lighting up shadowed places with casual interest.

They saw no swarms as the van cut through the area infested the night before. There were remarkably few singletons as well, and Kell thought it might be a result of the chemical release not far away. Human beings had a middling sense of smell at best, but the undead used it as a primary method of finding prey. If there was even the faintest residue hanging about, it would be a miles-wide warning sign for the dead to stay away.

It wasn't unheard-of. Most communities Kell had seen endured swarm attacks, and burning the undead often had the same effect, if for a shorter time. Ammonia would do the trick, but only held them off for so long. A brief flash of an idea came and went in an instant, dismissed as fast as he had it. Keeping zombies away was pointless if you had to poison the land—and possibly yourself—to do it.

The further east they went, the more the landscape changed. Iowa gave Kell a false sense of the world, pervasive even after a lifetime spent in cities. The wide, windy plains were home to almost endless movement in wild wheat and other plants, but poor in structures and cities in any number.

Now they moved toward greater concentrations of what had once been civilization, and Kell's mind needed time to adjust to it. Even though most of what he saw was at a distance—a purposeful choice to minimize the risk of encountering other people—it was still a jarring transition.

He was just getting used to it when the van lurched, Lee cursing like the Marine he was as he was slammed against the dashboard. Kell wanted to chide him for choosing to stand in the stairwell again, but decided bruised ribs would teach the lesson just as well.

They came to a halt, the muffled clinking of weapons and supplies dying out just as Marco let out a low whistle. Kell unbuckled himself and made his way to the front. Standing behind Marco, who was hunched forward over the wheel in slack-jawed wonder, Kell saw why they had stopped.

A herd of horses had wandered across the road. Not horses as Kell had ever seen them, carefully tended and tame. These were something else entirely. They had none of the controlled, easy manner he expected. They glanced at the van suspiciously, tossing their heads and sending long, tangled manes flying.

They were wild. Probably young enough that they'd never lived any other way.

“What...what do I do, here?”

Kell was at a loss. There was enough pure mass in the small herd to disable the van if the horses got it in their heads to try.

“Are you serious?” Lee croaked from beside them. “Just honk the horn at them. They'll scatter.”

Marco looked at Lee with doubt in his eyes. “You sure that won't just make them angry?”

Lee laughed with a wince. “Where are you from, Mars? They're wild animals. They get scared of loud noises. No different than half the things I used to honk off the road back in Texas.”

Marco honked, which if Kell was being honest seemed like a risky move with several tons of angry horse a handful of yards away, but it worked. They scattered, muscles rippling beneath coats of various colors, and Kell thought he understood the interest early humanity had in horses. They were big and strong enough to reach right down to the reptile part of his brain and make him unreasonably fearful, but there was a deep beauty in them as well. For a second he wanted to be out there with them, riding at that breakneck gallop and feeling the wind slice across his skin as it did their manes and fur.

“You falling in love there, Kell?”

Mason said it from behind him, but there was a smile on his face. “Used to watch wild horses with my dad when we'd go wilderness camping,” the scarred man said, a wistful note seeping into his voice. “I know that look. Had it on my own face a time or two.”

Kell watched the horses recede into the distance, the woods next to the road swallowing them. “We should probably get moving,” he said with more than a hint of regret.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. There was a minor band of zombies, easily avoided, but no other surprises. When the van slowed and made its way off the main road, Kell was curious. When Mason and Kincaid told Marco to stop in the middle of a road surrounded by trees overgrown with kudzu, he was confused.

The two men walked toward a nearby section of the green veil and pulled it aside. Mason seemed to know what he was looking for, and found it within a minute. He and Kincaid hauled tendrils aside and motioned for Marco to drive through.

There was a road there, narrow and crumbling. Pieces of vine slapped against the van, tree branches scraping discordantly across the armor and windows. The inside of the overgrowth was darker than Kell would have thought possible just before noon, but they broke through into the light a few seconds later.

The van came to a halt in a small parking lot sheltered on all sides by more verdant growth. The cedar fence surrounding the space was buckled in places from the weight of it.

“Are we going into the batcave?” Kell mused, mostly to himself.

Emily chuckled. “Dibs on any capes we find.”

Two sets of double-wide garage doors covered most of the building the parking lot butted up against, and one of them opened. Rob, the scout, appeared as it widened, hauling on a chain to raise the thing.

The van rolled in, Mason and Kincaid jogging in behind it before Rob lowered the door again. Emily helped Kell navigate to the rear door in the dim light and they stepped into the garage together.

It was far from what he had expected, especially considering he'd camped in a few garages over the previous five years. The word that came to mind was cozy, and a moment of contemplation cemented the impression.

The van sat on bare concrete, of course, but the rest of the huge space was taken up with what appeared to be a combination of hideout and observation post. One wall held a vast pegboard tool rack full of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The floor was covered in a dense pile of carpets, looking as though someone had unrolled bulk carpet in layers. Which, Kell realized, they probably had.

The rest of the space was lined with trunks, mattresses, various observation gear such as binoculars and an assortment of scopes, and the odds and ends that said it was well lived in. There were even lights; power-sipping LED strips traced the edges of the room. Kell didn't hear a generator, but survivors knew their business when it came to renewable energy capture and storage.

“What is this place?” Kell asked.

Emily flopped onto the only chair in the room, a huge leather recliner, and lounged in it with a leg thrown over one of the arms. “It's a safe house we set up with New Haven. Scouts from one of our communities are almost always here.”

Kell frowned and walked over to a low table stacked with recording devices, including a parabolic microphone. “What's with all this stuff?”

“We watch the locals pretty carefully,” Emily said. “The guy we're going to meet, he's the leader of the community where your test subjects are. He's...”

“What?” Kell said sharply. “Dangerous? Who isn't, nowadays? Or is he more like a marauder?”

Emily shook her head. “No, definitely not that. But dangerous as hell, sure. He's kept his people safe by being absolutely ruthless. He's not like us, Kell. He doesn't have much of a gray area when it comes to threats against his community. We like to keep an eye on what's going on around here. Sometimes people act differently when they think you're not watching.”

“We'll be walking from here,” Mason added. “This place is only half a mile from where we're headed.”

“As far as we know, this place is still a secret,” Kincaid said. “Marco is going to stay behind to make sure we're ready to roll at the drop of a hat. I'd rather not have anyone knowing where our ride is stashed.”

“That's great and everything,” Lee said, “but can we have a few minutes to get some lunch? If we're gonna meet someone who might kill us if we sneeze wrong, I'd like to do it with something better than granola in my belly.”

“There's a camp stove and a bunch of propane,” Emily said. “Here, I'll show you.” She and Lee went off through a door that presumably led deeper into the building. Mason and Marco gravitated toward the racks of weapons, quietly muttering to each other. Kincaid took Emily's spot on the recliner, and Kell situated himself on a stack of mattresses nearby.

“Any particular reason no one filled me in on how dangerous this guy was earlier?” Kell asked in a carefully neutral tone.

Kincaid shrugged. “It's not a big issue. I didn't even know until last night. He's apparently pretty harsh with threats, but he doesn't pose one to other communities. His people are almost all farmers. No real fighting force aside from a dozen or so scouts and former soldiers.”

“How is that even possible?” Kell asked. “How do they fight off attacks?”

Kincaid smiled. For once it wasn't a soulless crack in the man's blunt face, but a genuine (if small) show of amusement. “You know, I think it'll be better if you figure it out for yourself. I've only been told, but I still don't know if I believe it.”

Ten

“I don't fucking believe it,” Kell said.

“Yeah,” Kincaid agreed, standing next to him. “I'm seeing it and it's pretty hard to compute.”

The road the safe house was situated on bent and turned continuously, buildings and growth hiding the distant boundaries of Trenton, the name of their destination. Kell had suppressed a mighty curiosity as they wended their way through the choked streets. He had seen a lot of cities being retaken by Mother Nature in his time, but this place went beyond. Everywhere—everything—was slowly being devoured by greenery.

So when they came upon Trenton's boundary, those of them who hadn't been there before didn't even realize it. One second they were among a thinning expanse of buildings, then a sharp turn ran them straight into a wall of growth so thick it was impossible to see through at all. It ran across the road at a right angle, seeming to sprout from one building to another.

“What am I seeing here?” Kell asked Emily, who had a vaguely smug look on her face.

“That's their wall,” she said, jerking a thumb at the twelve feet of vines in front of them. “Somewhere inside that is pavement broken down to the dirt. There's reinforced chain link shaped into an inverted V. They grew all this shit on top of it. Through it, too.”

A resonant clang sounded in one of the buildings engulfed by the vines, prompting Emily to raise a hand in warning. “They know we're here. Do not touch a weapon.”

With little more than a whisper, a heavy steel door set into the building on the right swung open. A small woman carrying a submachine gun stepped out. Though the weapon was slung comfortably low and in their direction, she seemed at ease. Even if her finger was laid straight out next to the trigger guard.

“Hey, Emily,” the woman said. “Didn't expect you back so soon.”

“Shelly,” Emily said by way of greeting. “Told you I had a doctor interested in those people I met up with. This is him.”

Kell nodded. “Ma'am.”

Shelly smirked. “Politeness. Almost forgot what that's like. Come on in, all of you. Never know what might bite out here.”

They followed the guard through the door. It was a narrow space, at least for Kell and Mason. Their shoulders brushed the walls and ducking was not optional. The concrete walls were fairly new, not more than a few years old. Custom entrances. Kell would have figured that out from the three right-angle turns they had to make and the complete lack of any doors or windows.

The group moved down a steep set of concrete steps, through another twisting maze of corners, and up another set of steps to emerge inside Trenton itself.

Sure enough, there weren't any other guards to meet them. The land here was less flat than Kell would have expected Illinois, sculpted earthen terraces jutting out from gently sweeping hills. Everywhere he looked, food was growing. There were only narrow paths between the vast swaths of fruits and vegetables. In the far distance, a giraffe was eating from a tree.

“Wait a second, that's a giraffe,” Kell said flatly.

After a full beat, the entire group erupted into laughter.

“No, seriously,” Kell said, trying to edge a word into the gales of mirth. “Guys. Either I just had a stroke or that's a fucking giraffe!”

“Sorry, man,” Emily said, wiping tears from her eyes. “It was just the way you said it. So deadpan.”

Rational Kell noted that none of his group were looking at him like he was crazy, so he assumed what he was seeing was real.

“So what's the deal with this place?” Kell asked. “Why...where...” For once, words failed him. It was just too surreal to allow for logical thought.

Emily was still the only member of the group capable of speaking, though the laughter had died down to fits and bursts with the occasional chuckle bubbling up. “You can ask the big man when we see him. All new visitors are required to.”

There were some answers to be found along the way to the house of Trenton's leader, a man everyone simply referred to as Victor. Faded signage made it clear the place had once been a zoo, though that only raised more questions in Kell's ever-curious brain. Why move into a place that had been designed for ease of access, for one. It seemed like the last kind of refuge for safety.

That was what he thought at first, anyway. The walk also revealed some clever adaptations by the residents. Zoos worked hard to hide the concrete enclosures from their visitors to create a more natural appearance. The residents of Trenton took the opposite approach, removing large sections of soil from the edges of those hidden bunkers and outfitting them with custom defenses. One of the monkey pits featured two barred doors set in one side of its circular wall, both ringed with spears of steel and pit traps.

Kell wondered if the place was like some of the larger amusement parks he'd been to, with an entire network of connected tunnels and rooms below ground. If so, this place was more of a fortress than almost anywhere he'd seen since The Fall began.

“Here we are,” Emily said a short time later, leading them up a short and steep path to what had once been a gorilla habitat. So the sign said.

Kell once again revised his assumption when the door opened, spotting a large ape lounging on a fallen log behind a thick sheet of glass. The building itself was lived-in to an almost pathological degree. Clothes dried on lines strung from wall to wall, books stood in neat stacks next to every chair. A small camp grill sat beneath a makeshift stovepipe, surrounded by a surprising array of food, spices, and condiments. Kell eyed a jar of homemade pickles greedily.

“Hello,” said a resonant voice from the dimmer recesses of the room. “Let me get this thing going, hang on.”

Light bloomed in an old-fashioned oil lamp as sparks met wick, bathing a man's face in soft yellow light. He sat behind a table that served as a work desk, and leaned forward to take in the approaching group with intelligent eyes.

Survival in the long term meant cultivating an ability to trust your instincts and take the measure of a person quickly. Usually this meant observing a little, seeing how someone spoke to others and gauging them on things like body language.

Victor was much easier to figure out.

The light played across his face and threw stark shadows over the deep lines of it. He wasn't a young man, probably in his late forties or early fifties, and not without signs of hard living. A few of those lines were scars, too obvious to be surgical in nature but too clean to be anything other than knife wounds. They complimented a nose broken at least twice, judging by its crooked lean.

His eyes measured the group unabashedly, without fear or worry. This was a man who spent his days making decisive calls about who constituted a threat. Kell was reminded of nothing so much as a great jungle cat as Victor scanned them, then wondered if the guy was hiding tigers or something.

“Oh, you're injured,” Victor said, gesturing at Kell's arm. “Make yourselves comfortable. Grab chairs if you like.”

Kell took the warm tone and words at face value, dragging a chair and pulling it roughly in front of the desk. He was aware of Victor's eyes on him the entire time, measuring. Weighing. In itself the watchful gaze wasn't sinister, just a reflexive survival mechanism. The same one Kell had indulged in a minute earlier.

“Emily and I spoke the last time she was here,” Victor said once everyone was settled. “She explained that your group has managed to gather a few scientists who have been trying to come up with a cure.” His eyes rested on Kell. “I'm assuming that's you, otherwise you wouldn't have risked the trip while injured.”

Kell nodded but remained quiet, opting to err on the side of appearing meek.

“As I told Emily before, I have no problem giving you free run of the place. My people are free to talk to you, give you whatever samples, or leave with you.” He paused and scanned their faces, but when he continued his voice was just as pleasant and even. “However, if any of them choose not to speak to you, then you won't push the issue. At all. Each of them has the right to completely ignore you, and if they do you'll respect that and back off.”

It was the lack of threat or emphasis that scared Kell. This wasn't a man who growled or tried to instill fear. Victor saw no essential difference between letting them go about their business and killing them to keep his people safe. One of them was less work than the other, but it was a negligible job if it came to that.

Everyone on Kell's side of the room had enough practice governing their own reactions that no one so much as bristled at the implied consequences of disobeying.

“Would it be okay if I asked a few questions?” Kell asked.

Victor raised an eyebrow. “Other than that one?”

Kell nodded.

“Of course,” Victor said. “I might not answer, but you're welcome to ask.”

Kell glanced at the gorilla behind the glass, which itself was only a corner of the large parcel of land the ape had at its disposal. “Why a zoo?”

Victor smiled, which sent the hard planes of his face off at slightly odd angles. “What's not to love about them?” he asked. “They're already fenced in and walled. They're filled with hidden bunkers and have plenty of farmland, just to name a few reasons. But what you're really asking is why are some of the animals still here, right?”

“Yeah,” Kell said, dragging out the word.

Victor shrugged. “Who else was going to take care of them? Everything fell apart. Even if they'd been released, most of them would have died in the wild. I didn't want that to happen.”

He paused again, as if weighing a decision.

“I know what you were before the world went to hell,” Victor said. “You didn't become a biologist or whatever since then, I'm sure. I guess it's fair you know what I did. I was a criminal. I ran a local drug ring.”

Unsure how to react, Kell merely cocked his head slightly.

“I wasn't a kingpin or anything,” Victor continued. “We distributed a lot of pot, mostly. Sometimes pills. I tried to keep things peaceful, but in that business you always have someone trying to steal from you or take over. It got nasty from time to time.”

Victor waved a hand at their surroundings. “My town wasn't far from here, and by sheer coincidence it sat in the middle of a triangle formed by three other towns, each with their own zoos. When things got too stressful, I'd take my girlfriend and her kid to one of them. For a while I was able to forget. That's why I picked a zoo.”

Eleven

Trenton reminded Kell of something, but it took nearly two hours of walking around the place to put his finger on it.

“It's a little like the Shire,” he said when it finally came to him.

“The what?” Lee asked.

“You're right,” Emily said, chuckling. “All the hills, the openings in the ground, it's sort of like Hobbiton.”

“Ooooh,” Lee said, nodding his head. “Yeah, I can see that.”

The comparison was weirdly accurate. Beyond the loose similarities Emily stated, there were others. Food grew everywhere, for one, and the place had the sort of isolated English town vibe Tolkien had tried so hard to get across. The zoo had doubled as a botanical garden, so a wide variety of trees and other flora could be found in clusters at every turn. It gave the place a surreal quality, a small chunk of serenity in an otherwise rugged and dangerous world.

It was certainly a hell of a lot nicer than the death trap they'd stayed at the night before.

The people of Trenton served as a sharp break where the pleasant fantasy diverged from reality. They weren't rude or even impolite, but neither did they offer any sort of help or greetings. It made a lot of sense, when Kell spent a few minutes thinking about it. Living in relative isolation and relying on physical barriers to keep out threats meant anything from the outside was suspect. The bone-deep bonds forged by trusting your neighbor to have your back in a fight just didn't exist here.

A part of him felt distrustful—even a little angry—that these people had it so easy for so long, but Kell didn't hold onto the feeling. It was a stupid way to live your life, holding onto resentment because someone else was lucky enough to avoid the blood and death you had to fight through. Hadn't he isolated himself early in The Fall for that same reason?

Kell spotted a few kids playing as they moved about Trenton, and whatever dregs of anger he felt drained away. Maybe if he'd have moved faster and gotten his family to a place like this...

“Here we are,” Emily said, gesturing toward a re-purposed shipping container partially buried in the side of a hill. “This is where Esther lives.”

Esther would be the third stop on their tour, the previous two candidates refusing to cooperate after lengthy discussions. The first two stops had begun with a fluttering hope in Kell's chest along with the nervous energy of someone about to sit down for a job interview. Now he felt nothing but the bored anticipation of being rejected like a census taker or a political shill begging for donations.

Emily's knock on the door of the makeshift house resounded like a deformed bell as the metal hummed. The sound of footsteps led to a clanging rattle as the lock on the inside was disengaged. The door swung open to reveal Esther, who was smiling. Kell knew it was her from Emily's description, as the woman was unique in the way only people like Mason could be.

A wide, colorful bandanna held back a mane of thick, dark hair lightly threaded with strands of silver. It also held another piece of cloth in place, this one at an angle over what Emily had said was a missing or damaged eye. Rake marks from the zombie who had clawed her eye out ran down her cheek and jaw but missed the major vessels in the neck, which Kell thought a minor miracle.

“Hello!” Esther said, motioning for the three of them to come inside. “I've just put on some tea, if you'd like a cup.”

“Tea sounds great,” Kell said. “I'm a little surprised you have it.”

Esther chuckled. “I spent too many years in England to ever go without it,” she said. “The hill on over my home is where I grow the plants.”

Her accent was a fascinating mix of Dutch and British English that was measured but also fluid. Many people referred to the way people talked as musical, but Esther's voice truly was.

She led them through the shipping container, which held a neat array of shelves packed with tools and supplies, and into a hollow dome full of light. It was a concrete half-sphere that had the same look as many of the other animal shelters, though the rough skylight at the apex must have been added later.

Esther caught Kell staring and motioned for them to sit on one of the faded couches taking up the majority of the space. “It was part of a larger exhibit, this place,” Esther said as they settled in. “The little valley on the other side was a sort of melting pot. Several kinds of animals shared the space.” She waved a hand at the walls, an oddly sharp gesture. “This wasn't a habitat, or so I'm told. They brought different animals to this place to try them out before deciding whether to add a permanent shelter for them on the edge of the valley.”

“Like an airlock,” Lee said, nodding. Esther nodded.

“How did you end up with it?” Kell asked. “Seems like it could fit more people, so why not give it to a family?”

Esther smiled wryly. “I think you've already guessed that. When I had my...accident,” she said, gesturing to the scars running down her face, “Victor thought it best I be put away from too many other people.”

She took a sip of tea and set the cup down carefully. “That's why you're here, yes? To find out what happened to me?”

“Yeah,” Emily said, but Kell put up a hand.

“Not just that,” Kell said. “Knowing what happened will help inform me why you changed as a result. And you did change, didn't you?”

Esther's pleasant manner didn't fade, but froze solid. Emily's previous trip to Trenton had been a fact-finding mission. She identified people who, like Josh, had died just long enough to have Chimera partially take hold but not long enough to become zombies. Where Emily had been carefully subtle, Kell was being blunt.

Not from impatience or in irritation from the rejections they had already faced. Kell wanted to gauge Esther's reaction to being called out. Both to see how she felt about her condition and to determine whether she recognized it in the first place.

“How did you know?” Esther asked, fear saturating her words.

Kell leaned forward and patted her hand. “When people talk for a long time, they tend to take a deep breath before and after. You didn't. You didn't take a breath at all. The organism handles oxygenation of the dead by drawing in air through the pores.” Esther looked horrified, and Kell tried to reassure her. “We don't want to hurt you, Esther. We aren't going to tell anyone. But I think studying you can help me move closer to a cure. Are you willing to help?”

She nodded, some of the tension draining away. “What do you need?”

Kell sat back in his chair. “We'll start at the end. Tell me how you died.”

“It was two years ago,” Esther said, her remaining eye looking somewhere far away. “We were in the middle of expanding our wall. I was helping clear some brush, and one of those things was hiding beneath it. It got hold of my ankle. I fell, and it clawed its way up my body.”

She twisted on the sofa, pulling the hem of her shirt up several inches to reveal sections of long, twisting scars on her abdomen and side. “It was so much faster than the others I'd seen. The smell of it, the noise of its teeth gnashing...it was horrible.”

Esther took a deep, shuddering breath. “I remember the pain from its claws, and then it felt like a giant grabbed me. My chest, jaw, and neck hurt. The world went dark. When I woke up later, the people around me were terrified. I know it must have been a heart attack. I should have stayed dead.”

“They gave me CPR,” Esther said. “Closed my wounds with anything they could find. Duct tape and super glue out there in the field, then stitches later once I came back. They tried to resuscitate me for a quarter hour, and ten seconds after they stopped I sat bolt upright as if nothing had happened.”

Kell nodded. “Exactly like Josh. Like the plague hit a reset button.”

“What I've never understood is how. I mean, aren't heart attacks blockages? How have I never had any ill effects? And my injuries should have been enough to bleed me out, but the people who saved my life said the wounds stopped bleeding within minutes.” Esther shook her head. “It's always been a mystery to me.”

“Well,” Kell said, falling into the old frame of thought from his days as a researcher, “it's not that complex. The organism is symbiotic. It wants the host—that's us—to live. It reacted to your heart stopping by fixing the problem. The same with your wounds. I've got loads of data collected over the years showing how much it has improved our ability to heal. Coagulation isn't a tough job for something spread through every system in your body.”

A thought hit Kell so suddenly and with such strength that it would have knocked him on his ass had he not been sitting. As it was, the tea in his cup slopped over his hand.

“Esther, tell me,” Kell said as he carefully put down his cup. “The others like you, did they all have serious injuries as well?”

She frowned. “You mean wounds? Bleeding and such?” Kell nodded furiously. “Most of them, yes. Freddy didn't. He fractured his ribs, but none of them broke the skin.”

“Internal bleeding, I'd bet anything,” Kell muttered. “I'm a complete moron.”

Lee lightly punched him in the shoulder. “You're doing the thing where you talk to yourself and sound like a crazy person.”

“Sorry,” Kell said, coming back to reality. “I just realized what we've been missing. It's the degree of trauma, not just death itself. The part of the organism that takes control is in the brain. It's modeled after the brain. It must take a certain amount of activity to force it to react, and that somehow lets them come back without becoming zombies.”

“How does that help us?” Emily asked.

“Because,” Kell said, excited, “it means the brain is the key. There has to be some structural difference, some biochemical alteration, that makes it different than the material spread through the body. I'm betting it's something we can exploit. The only problem is that we'd need to study someone like Esther in ways that just aren't ethical. Or even practical, for that matter.”

Esther eyed him. “What do you mean?”

Kell gave what he hoped would be a disarming shrug. “It means unless one of you dies—for real this time—I don't have any way to study the organism in your brain.”

Esther flinched. “Well, thank goodness for ethics, I suppose.”

“Can't you just find a freshly dead person and study them?” Lee asked. “I mean, we've made enough corpses over the years. I'm willing to bet we'll run into another bunch of marauders at some point.”

Kell shook his head. “That's part of the equation, but I need comparisons. Ideally we'd want to take samples from someone who came back the same way Josh and Esther did. There could be any number of chemical changes caused by temporary death.”

“Hang on,” Emily said, her eyes flashing. “What about the New Breed? Isn't your theory that they're more advanced than other zombies because they've died more recently? Wouldn't their brains have the most evolved form of—”

Kell was just about to agree that it was a good idea that would, at the least, probably give them crucial data points. It was an inspired realization, one he should have made himself.

He didn't get the chance, however, because the world chose that moment to go insane. A warbling klaxon filled the air as multiple distant explosions thumped dully.

“Oh, lovely,” Esther said. “We're under attack.”

Twelve

They ran.

Kell kept up, which was harder than it looked considering it was his shoulder that was injured rather than his leg. The curious thing about systems, especially biological ones, was that the entire thing went out of sync when one part was damaged. Only hours of practice allowed him to maintain his balance without the use of both arms as nature intended.

There was no gunfire, which Kell took as a good sign. The only other option was to assume it was a very bad sign, so he went with the more optimistic choice.

“Do your people not have guns?” Lee panted to Esther, who was running side by side without even breathing hard.

“We do,” she said conversationally. “They are a last resort, however. We have other defenses. If it were living enemies, you'd be hearing gunfire. This is probably just zombies running into the grenade bushes.”

Kell had a powerful desire to know what, exactly, a grenade bush was, but he pushed it aside. A sharp unease filled him, far beyond the usual nerves from facing danger. This was too coincidental, too close to their arrival. Their group had done its best to watch out for anyone following, but no one was perfect. Not even the experts Kell had with him.

If they had unintentionally led some danger to Trenton, there was little chance they would make it out alive.

They slowed at the crest of a hill, then stopped to witness the destruction laid out before them. Kell's natural urge to fight was checked by Lee's hand on his arm, gripping firmly enough to remind but not hard enough to hurt.

A relatively level section of ground was clear of fence and vines alike, a ragged hole ten feet across blown through it. The land on this side sloped down slightly toward what Kell could see was a covered trench. On the other side of the fence, another explosion sounded, the force sending the chain link and its cloak of plant life shaking violently. Dust and debris rose in a cloud, and the zombies coming through the gap staggered.

“What the fuck is doing that?” Emily said.

“Those are the grenade bushes,” Esther replied. “Some sections of the wall don't have much in the way of support from existing architecture, so it was easier to design parts of it to fail and then plan for that. The weak spots have explosives dangling inside the vines and brush, just waiting for a zombie to slash at them. When they try to claw their way through, they dislodge the pins. Pretty effective.”

“Nice,” Lee said, a look of profound respect on his face. “That's some next-level shit right there.”

Esther smiled. “Yes, well, it isn't easy. We have to make the explosives, the casings, the ignition systems, and all the rest. It's a lot of tricky work.”

The covering on the trench was sly enough to trick the first wave of zombies to walk over it, dropping a handful into it up to their chests. The citizens who had arrived first began to move in, carefully striking at heads with tools and farming implements.

There were fewer defenders than Kell expected. Probably because the threat was fairly small, or because the place was too damn big to run across quickly. Not like the enclosure Kell had back home, which could generously be described as cozy.

Things were going fine one second, and then not so great the next. A sudden burst of activity through the hole pushed handfuls of zombies into and across the trench, trampled bodies serving as horrific bridges for the swarm that followed.

There were perhaps twenty defenders in place, none of them armored. Others could be seen as specks moving at top speed in the distance, though the sprawling hills made tracking them difficult. It wasn't that the number of zombies seemed high enough to overrun Trenton itself, but that the immediate threat was simply too much for the people at hand.

“Go!” Kell said, pointing with his good arm.

Lee barely hesitated, jetting forward much faster than anyone wearing armored clothing should have been able to manage. Emily stayed, as did Esther. The former didn't want to leave his side, which was as irritating as it was endearing. The latter was without weapons.

“Emily, go help them,” Kell said. “They're a good forty, fifty yards from here. I'm fine.”

“No,” Emily said tersely. “I can't leave you alone.”

“I won't be,” Kell said, trying to reassure. “Esther is here with me. Here, I'll give her a baton.” He did, unhooking the heavy weapon he had trained with from its spot on his right side and handing it over. “Worst case scenario, I can always run. Go help those people. Please.”

Unlike Lee, Emily didn't hesitate once the decision was made. Had she chosen to stay with Kell, there would have been no hemming and hawing, no guilt. Conversely there wasn't so much as a stutter in her step as she trotted off.

“I'm not much of a fighter,” Esther said, dry amusement twined with concern in her voice.

Kell snorted. “You were mauled to death by a dead man, yet here you are. I'll put my money on that sort of toughness.”

Five minutes later things took a turn.

The deliberately weakened fence had been reinforced on either side of where the designers wanted the breach to form, but the subsequent explosions combined with the weight of zombie bodies to cause a wider split. It wasn't much as the overall length of the wall went, but the opening grew by five feet almost instantly as supports failed.

A thin spot in the line of defenders caused it to buckle and temporarily fail in much the same way, allowing a fist of zombies to punch through and get behind the line. To their credit, the defenders changed formation instantly, putting themselves back to back.

Not all of the zombies went for that easy kill, though. Some ran into Trenton as fast as they could manage. The easiest route was also the one with two meals standing right in the middle of it, and Kell almost sighed in relief at the prospect of a fight.

“We should run,” Esther said.

“There aren't that many of them,” Kell replied, which was true. Half a dozen in a group, a couple singletons trailing distantly. “Besides, everyone else is occupied. If we can stop them here, we should.”

People were still showing up for the fight, which seemed to have lasted hours rather than a handful of minutes. The problem was the general chaos below, and the additional fighters only added to it. With a glut of zombies inside the defenses, it was nearly impossible for latecomers to join the fractured line.

Kell had no idea where Kincaid or Mason were, but like Emily he made his decision with finality. Protected or not, he wouldn't let any zombies past to harm unprepared citizens. His thoughts drifted briefly to the children he had seen earlier.

“Do you want this club back?” Esther asked.

“Not at all,” Kell said. “I have other weapons. Another one of those, too.”

He slipped one of those weapons around the wrist of his injured arm as well as stuffing a sheathed knife from his pocket inside the sling. Kell cinched the straps tighter with quick movements. After that he extended the police baton with a flick and set his feet.

The zombies didn't slow as they closed in on Kell and Esther, though they did spread out. Predator tactics. Kell had checked the ground nearby to make sure there were no surprises, but the concrete sidewalk was surprisingly intact for its years of exposure. He supposed the residents would have cared for them, unwilling to give up such a useful path through their home.

Mindful of his balance, Kell gave the nearest zombie no chance to get its bearings. He did exactly as Lee taught him, attacking using big movements to counteract the balance problems caused by his bound limb. The result was something like ballet, Kell's body rotating with the wide swing of the baton. His right leg swept around the pivot of his left while his left arm tore through the air in a wide arc to smash the tip of the weapon into the side of the zombie's head.

Kell's momentum reversed at the end of the arc. As the first zombie's head caved and the body began to fall, he lashed in a reverse swing at a second. This required a stuttered, jumping step which ended with mixed results. The zombie went down, which was great, but his odd movement had put his aim off as well as made the zombie react. End result: baton through the eye and nearly through the back of the skull by the feel of it.

Reflex made him release the weapon as he felt it being pulled from his hand. Many a soldier and survivor had met their end chasing down a stuck knife or sword.

A third zombie reached Kell before he could ready another weapon, and the impact of the filthy thing against his frame rocked him on his heels. Fortunately, Kell was able to get his left forearm up in time, letting the zombie claw and bite the heavy armor sewn into the material.

Kell was considering the best way to get the thing off him, favoring a hard kick to the midsection, when Esther saved his ass with a heavy thwack of the baton. She used both hands, which made for an impressive swing.

“Thanks,” Kell said, panting. “Nice form.”

Esther's smile crinkled the corner of her remaining eye. “Tennis, love. Years and years of tennis.”

With a grin, Kell reset himself and aimed for the next zombie. This turned out to be a pair of them. He grabbed the first with his good arm and tried to kick the second backward using the one he was holding as an anchor, but the second zombie wasn't there. A flash of movement crossed his field of vision, spearing the second zombie at full speed.

Kell's kick, without an object of resistance, sent him badly off balance. He tumbled to the ground with the zombie held at arm's length. They landed in a jumble of arms and legs, Kell furiously trying to avoid having his face slashed to ribbons. Training took control again, forcing Kell to hold the thrashing zombie with his legs as he tried to turn the fight to his advantage.

Sickening wetness seeped through his clothes as he locked his ankles together and shimmied around the captive zombie by careful movement of his knees and hips. He tried not to think about what sort of fluids were saturating his clothes, which actually wasn't that hard in the face of grappling with a nightmarish cannibal.

The zombie tensed again, then burst into furious motion. It spun within the confines of Kell's legs wrapped around its torso, but he was ready for it. Its body was in almost perfect position, and Kell didn't let the opportunity pass. He let go with his good arm, reached into the sling on his right, and wrapped his fingers around a small wooden handle.

He pulled, careful not to yank too fast or hard in case the wire attached to the handle caught on his hand. The wire was thin enough to make it hard to see in good conditions, which made aiming it for the neck of the zombie trivially easy. Kell felt the tension in the wire as he pulled it tight, the other end attached to the handcuff secured around his right wrist. It made for a solid (if awkward) anchor point.

The zombie realized something was wrong, but by then it was too late. Kell flexed his entire body, pulled the wire as taut as he could manage, and felt the satisfying scrape telling him the wire had reached bone.

For Kell it was easy. Simple. Just a matter of physics. You take a strong, thin wire and put constant tension on it, and with enough pressure it will cut through almost anything. So when he felt the wire skip along the vertebrae, he pulled up ever so slightly to change the direction of its travel.

The wire bucked as it found the channel between vertebrae, then smoothed out as it severed the nerves within.

Thirteen

Kell kicked out hard to wrench himself from beneath the body of the zombie and its nearly-severed head. He put the handle of the garrote in his right hand to free up his left as he scrambled to his feet. To his surprise, there were no more zombies standing along the path between where he stood and the fight below.

Esther stood with the weighted baton dangling from one hand, dark ichor running its length to drip on the ground. A tall form rose up a few feet away; the flash of movement Kell had seen before he went to the concrete. It was Mason.

Down the slope, Kell could see Kincaid wiping a heavy machete on the grass.

“Nice of you to drop by,” Kell said to Mason.

The scars on Mason's face tightened as he smiled, ripples forming in them. “I had a sneaking suspicion you'd find a way to get into trouble. Have to admit I'm a little surprised at your choice of weapons.” He waved a hand at the garrote dangling from Kell's sling.

“Lee thought I relied too much on the spear,” Kell said. “He saw this as a good opportunity to knock the rust off some of my other skills while teaching me new ones.”

“Still no gun, though,” Mason observed.

Kell shrugged. “I'm right-handed, and even then I'm not a great shot. Lee says I'm too tense about it. Me trying to shoot one-handed and with my left is more likely to end in me hitting a squirrel or a bird in a tree than anything man-shaped.”

While Lee constantly gave Kell shit about his inability to shoot well, Mason nodded as if this made complete sense. “Well, if you're okay up here...”

“Yeah, sure,” Kell said. “We're good. Go do your hero thing.”

“Hardly,” Mason snorted. “I'll send Kincaid up here in case you two need backup.”

He trotted off, and Kell noted two things as he did. The first was that Mason didn't seem to have used a weapon to kill the zombie he tackled, which in and of itself wasn't shocking. SEAL training and years of surviving the end of the world made him dangerous beyond belief. As cliché as it sounded, Mason didn't really need a weapon. He was one.

The other thing Kell noticed was a bite on Mason's forearm. The man wore armored pants, but had apparently left his jacket behind. Fighting in street clothes was a bad idea, but the glance Kell got at the bite didn't inspire fear. Curiosity, certainly, but not any strain of worry. The bite bled very little, and didn't seem deep.

Surviving the mauling that left him covered with scars must have strangled what little fear Mason had to death. Kell shivered at the thought of being bitten, though to be fair he had used his own armored sleeve as an easy distraction often enough.

“Before he comes up here,” Esther said, pulling Kell back to reality, “did you run into a swarm on your way in?”

“What?” Kell said, confused.

“When you traveled here,” Esther said, her voice low. “Did you run into a swarm?”

Kell nodded. “Yeah, why—oh. We waited overnight for it to pass. They were miles south of us before we moved. I don't think they could have followed us, and certainly not this fast. That was a hundred miles from here. More.”

Some of the naked fear in her face drained away. “Good. That's what you should tell him when he asks.”

“Victor?” Kell ventured.

Esther swallowed and nodded. “He has a reputation. Victor is...unkind to people who put us in danger.”

“I've heard,” Kell said, letting his gaze fall onto the battle below. “You think we're going to get the blame for this?”

“I don't know,” Esther said. “Victor isn't irrational, and it's not as if we don't have attacks even without visitors coming here, so you might be okay.”

“Might be?” Kincaid said as he reached them. “You guys talking about Victor?”

Kell nodded. “Esther is worried he'll think we brought the zombies with us.”

With his typical flat expression, Kincaid gave little away. “Unlikely, but even if we did that's the price you pay for commerce. Dead people are everywhere. No much we can do to avoid them.”

“Yeah,” Kell said. “Let's just hope he sees it that way.”

It was nearly an hour before the final cleanup began, though the main sequence of fighting had been over for a while. The lack of a dedicated defense force was painfully obvious, and though Kell's own community didn't have even a single full-time fighter, every adult was trained and battle-tested. Most of Trenton's citizens were farmers and little else, though what they lacked in skill they made up for in brutality.

Kell amended that thought. It wasn't a lack of skill, actually, just a lack of proper equipment and readiness. The average citizen didn't appear to own armor or purely offensive weapons, but they used what they had well enough. The proof was in the death toll, which was decidedly tilted in their favor. None of the bodies being moved below had been a living person an hour previously, and none of the injuries looked serious enough to warrant bed rest.

The rest of Kell's group had migrated to the hilltop where he and Esther watched not long before, and the tension was high as Victor climbed the hill. Of all the citizens who had rallied to defend their home, Victor had been the most efficient. Watching him kill zombies was something akin to observing a machine in motion, carrying out its program with the cold efficiency inherent in its design.

Victor used his pole arm—a naginata of all things—as a walking stick as he approached. It was a decidedly more benign use than what had transpired over the previous hour. Victor had split several zombies nearly in half by crashing the blade of the thing completely through their heads, necks, and a good way into their torsos.

Eschewing a greeting, Victor stopped in front of the group and seemed to weigh them. “Did they follow you?” he asked simply.

“I don't think so,” Kincaid said. “We encountered a large swarm yesterday, but too far away for them to have made it here. We also took measures to avoid that group.”

“Not that this group couldn't have followed us,” Mason said. Everyone in the group stared at him. Kell wondered what the man was thinking, making the opposing argument. Mason wasn't the type to speak up unless he had a good reason.

“Oh?” Victor said. Kell thought there was a lot of meaning layered into that lonely syllable.

“Sure,” Mason said. “They might have caught our scent. Really no way to avoid that. Or they might have just wandered this way and got a good whiff of all the people inside the walls. We did everything we reasonably could to make sure we didn't bring anything bad to your door, but we're only human.”

The casual tone wasn't forced, but it made Kell's skin crawl all the more for how relaxed it was. A sudden, dread certainty came over him.

Mason was ready to kill Victor right here and now if he answered wrong. Few survivors put up with tyrants, even apparently benevolent ones. If Victor threatened the group, Mason would act. It was that simple. Kell understood this because it was something he himself would have considered had he been uninjured. Practical and necessary didn't always overlap.

And, Kell imagined, if Victor did decide to blame them despite the obvious care they had taken to avoid bringing trouble down on Trenton, it would be a sign of just how unreasonably dangerous the man was.

There was a space of a few seconds during which Kell was sure Victor would raise his large pole arm and attempt to strike Mason down, which would have ended badly for everyone. Mostly for Victor, because that thing was heavy and slow while Mason was deadly fast.

“Of course,” Victor finally said. “Emily has been here before. So have your other scouts. Your people have always been good about throwing off followers. I just wanted to make sure.”

Kell thought it was more likely the man recognized the fact that Mason could cut through most of Trenton's population like a wheat thresher, but kept the thought to himself.

“I'd like to go back with them when they leave,” Esther said suddenly.

Victor blinked, his head rocking slightly in surprise. “Leave? I thought they'd be asking for samples, things like that.”

“They did,” Esther said, though the conversation in her home hadn't gotten quite that far. “But if studying me closely over time can help find a cure, how could I not go with them? I'm going to ask the others as well.”

Victor frowned at this, though Kell didn't have enough of a grasp on the situation or the people involved to understand why.

“Well, it's your choice,” Victor said. He seemed frustrated as he abruptly turned and strode off.

“I'm confused,” Kell said as he faced Esther.

Through the run to the fight and the fight itself, the woman hadn't seemed at all rattled. Now she was breathing hard, a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead. “I think I just saved your lives. Yours wouldn't be the first group to vanish shortly after leaving here.”

A bleak silence followed that statement.

“I'm sure he told you what he used to do for a living,” Esther said. “Victor uses that as a way to make people understand how dangerous it is to cross him. He gave in too easily here. I don't think you'd have made it a mile from here.”

“And now we will?” Kincaid asked in his flat voice.

“Now you will,” Esther said. “People might look the other way or at least not ask questions if troublemakers disappear, but they wouldn't stay quiet if Victor started having citizens killed.”

“Wow,” Emily said. “You know, I'd have never brought you guys here if I'd have known just how fucking dangerous this guy was.”

Kell shook his head. “You couldn't have kept me away. Trenton could have been filled to the brim with scorpions, but I'd have taken a swim through them to study someone like Esther.”

Esther chuckled. “You say the sweetest things.” Turning serious, she nodded to Kincaid. “You'd better get everything you need to leave. I'll make a quick round to see if anyone else is willing to go, but when I get back to the main entrance we should leave as fast as possible.”

“You don't want to give Victor time to come up with something,” Lee ventured. “Doesn't sound like you coming with us is much of a guarantee.”

Esther smiled sadly. “What is? I used to lead orchestras, you know. Traveled the world. Now I'm half-blind and running from the only real home I've had since this madness started. If I've learned anything, it's to take what chances you can find. No matter how thin.”

That, at least, Kell could agree with.

Fourteen

When Esther returned a shade over an hour later, she carried a faded and overstuffed backpack and led two unfamiliar people. The new arrivals, a man and woman, had haggard faces and worried eyes. The man was pale and gaunt, though not deathly so. He looked like someone on the mend from a bad flu or serious injury. His partner was an Asian woman, fairly tall, and other than looking tired seemed otherwise healthy.

They made no introductions, choosing to follow the group as they moved toward the exit. This time there was no one to lead them through, which made sense. Kell imagined the door would lock behind them when they left, making an escort unnecessary.

In fact, there was no one nearby at all.

“Is there usually someone around the entrances?” Kell asked, suddenly worried.

“Sure,” Emily said. “Probably just helping with the cleanup or patrolling to make sure there aren't any other threats hanging around.”

“Makes sense,” Kell said. He didn't elaborate on the other possibilities, because there honestly wasn't anything the group could do about them. If Victor wanted to make a show of not having anyone around when they left in case he was up to something, they couldn't stop him. The group was savvy when it came to that sort of thing. They would have had the same thoughts.

Mason took point, and was cautious when exiting the building and hitting the open street. Kell was momentarily overwhelmed by the flood of light, but quickly recovered. Out of habit and what he thought was a healthy paranoia, Kell scanned all quarters. The others were surely doing the same.

Thankfully there were no signs of anything suspicious. No gun barrels glinting in windows, no suspicious debris that could hide a bomb, no sounds of anxious attackers waiting for the perfect moment.

Mason led them through numerous twists and turns. The safe house wasn't a long walk, but they came nowhere close to it in the quarter hour after leaving Trenton.

Instead he broke into an abandoned building and ushered them inside.

“Is this your normal level of caution?” Kincaid asked, deadpan.

“Not really,” Mason replied seriously. “I just have an itch on the back of my neck I don't like. Probably nothing, but I'd rather not take chances. You guys give this place a check while I do some looking around outside. If we're not being followed or watched, we'll head to the safe house.”

If Kincaid had a problem with Mason taking the lead, he didn't show it. “We will,” he said, then gestured for Lee to have a look around. “How long will you be gone? How long should we wait?”

“If I'm not back in half an hour, don't wait. Try to make it to the safe house and get away fast.” Mason didn't seem particularly bothered by this scenario. “Don't worry, I'll catch up. I know where my scouts are camped out, remember? They stayed away just in case we ran into trouble. Worst case scenario means we'll have to double up on one of their bikes.”

Kincaid brought up his watch and fiddled with the buttons. “Okay, half an hour. Get to it.”

Mason moved through the door as silent and smooth as a shadow, leaving them in the dim light filtering through the gaps in the boarded-up windows.

Kell waited in the large room where the entrance led as Lee and Emily did a fast search to make sure there weren't any surprises waiting.

“Looks like the lobby of a doctor's office from 1955,” Kell noted. Kincaid grunted.

Chairs lined the walls, some tipped over while others remained neatly in place. There were small tables between some of them, and magazines scattered about the room. A desk sat tumbled onto its face in one corner.

“Used to be a house,” Kincaid said. “Someone turned it into a clinic or something.”

It seemed likely to Kell. The place had a turn-of-the-century look to it from the outside, and the interior continued the theme. The walls were plaster with ornate moldings and wooden paneling covering the bottom three feet. The floor was old, scarred wood. It had a feeling of age. Age and sturdiness. The apocalypse had done as little to change it as the previous hundred years before.

The regular footfalls, creaking boards, and occasional scrapes from overhead as Lee and Emily took the search upstairs were the only things keeping Kell sane as he waited. The sound of his own breathing and the beat of his heart kept the time too well, and in the absence of distractions they made the passage of each minute seem painfully long.

Kincaid was utterly silent, a state Kell didn't want to change regardless of how unnerving he found sitting and being still to be. The man was doggedly watchful and observant. He would only get annoyed if Kell tried to make small talk. Esther and her companions were so quiet Kell almost forgot they were there. A single look told him everything he needed to know; they were all nerves, and scared. Hard to fault them for that, given how rarely Trenton natives when outside.

A sudden halt to the noise overhead caught Kell's attention. The quick tap-tap-tap of trotting footsteps following the silence sent his heart beating into a whole new rhythm.

Emily's voice came from the stairwell situated behind the desk, soft enough not to travel outside but loud and clear.

“Hey, you guys should come see this.”

It wasn't clear at first what it was Emily and Lee wanted them to see. The room was a tight fit for everyone, so Esther and the others let Kell and Kincaid enter while they stood bunched at the door.

It was part of a two-room setup. Lee and Emily were in the smaller of them, which appeared to be a private office. A narrow door sat open on a wall to the left, showing a slice of an exam table.

“You find medicine or something?” Kincaid asked.

“No,” Lee said. “Even if we had it would probably be worse than useless by now. We found this.” He pointed to a window with a deep sill, almost big enough to sit on. Kell stepped up to look at it, trying to suss out where the sense of wrongness tickling the back of his mind was coming from.

He looked out the window and it snapped together.

“This is a lookout,” he breathed. “It's one of ours?”

Emily shook her head, the reaction Kell expected but had hoped against. “Nope. No idea who was here, but it was recent. You can see where the dust has been cleaned off the center of the window. The view opens up on the street we were on.”

“And there are other tall buildings in my line of sight,” Kell said. “Want to bet whoever has been watching Trenton has a team with them?”

“Seems a bit lucky, don't you think?” Esther asked. “Us finding this place and it just happens to be a post for some boogie man?”

“Nah,” Lee said. “Whoever was here probably uses every building they can get into that has a decent view. Reduces the risk of anyone finding them, gives them a lot of options. Mason stopped here for the same reasons. See how there's no gear, no food containers? My guess is there are a few of them, moving in a pattern from building to building. They don't leave anything behind because they're only here for a little while.”

“But why would they do that?” Kell asked. “If they're watching Trenton, staying in one spot would be easier.”

“That might be true if it were Trenton they cared about,” Emily said.

Kell opened his mouth to ask what she meant, then sagged as he understood. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “When Emily was here before, she was careful about what she said. But all it would have taken was one of the people she spoke to running to Victor about a scientist trying to cure the plague. From there...”

“Victor could have told anyone,” Kell finished.

Lee nodded grimly. “We know there are remnants out there still looking for anyone who might be able to cure this thing.”

“That sounds paranoid,” Esther said. Kell looked at her and noted that she stood in front of her nameless followers in a faintly mama-bear sort of way.

“It really isn't,” Kell said. “We know for a fact there have been groups trying to find and capture people like me for years. Some of the better resourced communities pay a lot in goods and services for information. People are desperate for a cure.”

“No,” Esther said carefully. “What I mean is that it's paranoid for you to think these people are here for you specifically. There are any number of reasons for Trenton to be watched. It could be someone planning an attack, for instance.”

Lee frowned, his face thoughtful. “You're not wrong, but we've had reports from our scouts over the last year that people are searching hard for anyone who might be working on a cure.”

“It doesn't matter either way,” Emily said. “Whether they're looking for us or want to burn Trenton to the ground or just decided to bird watch, it doesn't change what we need to do next. We wait for Mason, and when time's up we leave. Getting everyone back home safely is the goal.”

“She's right,” Lee said. “All this means is we're a little more careful.”

Kell couldn't help feeling uneasy, no matter what the others said. The idea that Victor might have warned interested parties that someone like Kell might show up gnawed at him. It wasn't at all new territory, sure, but living the last year at their compound had changed his outlook on a fundamental level. It was a hard thing to be confronted with the truth that people were still looking for scientists, if not him specifically, when he had lived openly as himself in Iowa.

He had known that coming here would be risky, of course. There wasn't a shortage of dangers in the outside world. He just hadn't thought any of those risks would be a result of who he was.

They made their way back downstairs and waited. Three minutes before Mason's thirty minute limit, the man himself slipped back through the door.

“We may have a problem,” he said.

“People watching us?” Emily asked.

Mason blinked. “Yes. How'd you know?”

She pointed at the ceiling. “Saw signs of someone being here recently upstairs. Were you seen?”

Mason grinned. “Give me some credit. They weren't bad, but I'm better. Besides, they weren't interested in anything going on this far from Trenton.”

“What?” Esther said quietly.

“Whoever they are, they're moving toward the place. Not quite in the open, but keeping themselves to the edges of buildings and moving under the shadows of trees. They don't want to be seen but aren't wasting time, either.”

“What do you think they want?” Kell asked.

Mason shook his head. “No idea, and I don't really care. If they're going toward Trenton, that's good news for us. Means we can hoof it to the safe house and get the hell out of here.”

Kell knew he was right. It was the practical thing to do. Whatever was going on here, it wasn't their fault and definitely wasn't their fight. Not that the idea of leaving while something bad might be happening to a group of mostly decent people didn't grate on his sense of right and wrong.

Kincaid seemed to sense the tension in the room, because he raised a hand to forestall argument. “Normally I'd love to pick a fight if it means helping out, but this isn't a fucking movie. We don't have the numbers or firepower to do a damn bit of good. We have a mission, and we need to stick to it. Hard as it is to hear, finding a cure is more important than having a clean conscience. We're leaving.”

The barest hint of emotion crept into Kincaid's voice, which sent chills down Kell's spine. The thin anger came across as a veiled threat, a warning that he would not take resistance well. A complex surge of emotions flooded through Kell, then. Anger that he was being told he couldn't do what he felt was right. Relief that he wasn't being given a choice. Guilt at the relief for knowing Kincaid giving him an honorable way out was just an excuse to run.

Whatever the individuals in the group were thinking, they acted as one, and ran for the safe house.

Fifteen

As promised, they made it back to the safe house unseen. They piled into the van with the terrified efficiency of long-time survivors, and were on the road within a handful of minutes after arriving.

In those few minutes, Kell introduced himself to the couple Esther had convinced to leave Trenton. There was no time for life stories, but he did learn their names—Charlie and Katsumi, who went by Kat—and that they had both been shunned by Trenton with the same small cruelties Esther had endured.

The van was cramped with three extra people in it, though mostly due to the loads of supplies they brought in case of an emergency. Kell sat with Esther strapped in next to him, while Charlie and Kat took the seats opposite. Mason, Lee, Emily, and Kincaid stood watch. Each wore full armor and looked ready for anything.

The four of them didn't waver as they kept their eyes open for any sign of trouble. Mason watched through the small patch of window left clear at the back. Lee and Emily watched through narrow portals on each side, and Kincaid stood at the front as a second set of eyes for Marco.

Progress was maddeningly slow. Tension was high and no one spoke, afraid that distraction would somehow get them killed. Marco drove well, but his extreme caution combined with the quiet inside the van was even more frustrating than it had been back at the doctor's office.

“Not seeing anything,” Marco reported. “No debris that could be hiding bombs, no lines strung across the road. I'm thinking it wasn't us they were after, whoever they are.”

“What do you think, Mason?” Kincaid asked from the stairwell next to Marco. “This is your area of expertise. Should we pick up the pace?”

Mason grunted. “Not yet. I haven't seen either of my scouts yet, which means they didn't see us leave the garage.”

“Should they have?” Kell asked. “I thought they were hiding.”

“They were,” Mason said. “But they were positioned to see us leave. They were supposed to do the same and drive ahead of us to scout the way back.”

“What does that mean?” Kat asked, her voice low and coarse.

“Either both of them were caught and they're dead,” Mason said flatly, “or they saw something and went to check it out. Either way—wait. I think I see something.”

Kell strained his ears as he tried to catch a distant hum of motorcycle engine. The van itself wasn't a quiet beast, and between the hasty modifications and several hundred pounds of gear, it clanked and rattled endlessly. It took him a few seconds to filter out all the background, and then he heard it. Faint at first, but definitely there; two distinct mechanical voices half an octave apart and gaining ground.

“Interesting,” Mason muttered as he stared through the back window, presumably watching the scouts approach.

“What is it?” Kincaid half-shouted from the front. “Trouble?”

“Don't think so,” Mason replied. “One of them has a passenger. I think it might be one of the guards from Trenton.”

“That can't be a good thing,” Kell mused.

“Not bloody likely, no,” Esther said.

Whatever fresh hell the extra passenger on the bike might be a harbinger of would have to wait. Kell knew there was no way he could convince Kincaid to stop the van now that they were moving freely. Slowly, for sure, because strangers in the wilderness usually meant traps and other danger, but moving freely all the same.

To his surprise, the scout made the decision for all of them. The bike carrying two passengers zipped ahead and slowed suddenly, the scout signaling them to follow. Kell watch this by straining against his straps and craning his head at the windshield.

“Think it's a trap?” Kincaid asked the van, though the question was probably aimed at Mason. “Passenger could be holding a weapon on your man.”

“Doubtful,” Mason replied. “My guys can handle themselves. I don't see how one person would be able to coerce both of them. If he wants us to follow, he's probably got a good reason.” Mason paused. “He'd better have a good reason.”

“Do it,” Kincaid said to Marco. “Everyone else gear up. Even if this is on the level, I don't want us caught with our pants down. Someone you don't know pops up, don't hesitate. Shoot first.”

The scout led them to a narrow side street more overgrown than the average. Whatever the towns around Trenton had been before, they certainly hadn't lacked fauna. Kell filed this away with detached interest; the older, smaller towns were being devoured by Mother Nature much faster than their larger cousins. More nature to do the job, he supposed.

The street reminded him of something out of a movie, with wildly spreading tree branches lacing together to form a canopy. Though it wasn't close to dusk, the road was dark enough to give them decent cover by itself. The scout didn't risk it. He pulled into a debris-strewn parking lot behind old apartment buildings. It was as good a place as they were likely to find.

By the time the group exited the van, the pair of scouts already had the unexpected passenger on his knees with their weapons pointed at his head. The refugee—prisoner?—had fingers laced together behind his head, on which a modified and armored motorcycle helmet rested.

“Take off your headgear,” Kincaid said, not bothering to raise the Glock hanging in his own hand.

The prisoner complied slowly, in the manner of someone practiced at avoiding getting shot through careful displays of nonthreatening behavior. The helmet slid off to reveal Victor. Because of course it was Victor. If someone had to get away from Trenton unharmed, it would be him.

“Why are we here?” Kincaid asked Rob, the scout. “And what convinced you to bring this asshole with you?”

Rob gestured at Victor's head with his gun. “I didn't get all of it because he was yelling through his helmet and mine while we were riding, but what I heard was enough. Tell them,” he said, the last aimed at Victor.

“I assume you saw the men heading for my people,” Victor said, his voice no longer placid. Kell took a moment of furious joy in seeing the man rattled. He might not actually be evil, but a total lack of compassion for other people was close enough in Kell's book.

When no one answered, Victor continued, words spilling out in a widening flood. “They contacted me months ago, looking for people like them,” he said, tilting his head at Esther, Chuck, and Kat. “At the time I had no intention of giving up my people. Then Emily showed up with the same questions, though I only learned the reason for her visit after the fact. I didn't sell out my people.”

He said it with a petulant earnestness that struck Kell as sincere. Whatever else he was, Victor would not be seen as a traitor to his own. Kell could almost respect that.

“When Emily told me she might be bringing someone who wants to work on a cure, I made contact with them and—”

“You keep saying 'them' and 'they',” Mason interrupted. “Does this group have a name?”

Victor shook his head. “Not that I know of. Look, I was worried that if I didn't give them something, they'd take a harder look at Trenton. Maybe decide to check things out on their own. I figured one guy for the safety of my people wasn't a bad deal.”

“How'd that work out for you?” Kincaid asked flatly.

Victor blew a breath through his nose, tried to regain his composure. “They aren't crazies, I know that for sure. They're organized. Professional. They didn't steal anything or kill anyone who didn't resist. They overpowered us fast and started asking questions. All they wanted was him,” he said, looking at Kell, “and the other half-lifers who didn't go with you.”

Kell thought 'half-lifer' was a bit on the nose as names went, but said nothing. At the least it was accurate for people stuck midway between life and being a zombie, even if the callousness of the name made him want to kick Victor in the throat.

“You escaped...why, exactly?” Kincaid asked. “You would have had to do it fast for our scouts to have seen you.”

“He wanted us to see him,” Rob said. The other scout nodded in agreement. “Waved us down when we caught sight of him down a stretch of road.”

“They took my people,” Victor said, nearly growling. “I can't let that stand.”

“You think we're your personal hit squad?” Kincaid asked. “That you're in some fucking samurai movie and we're your convenient team to go get bloody revenge?”

Victor blinked. “You're trained and outfitted. I'd go with you. I wouldn't ask you to do this if I weren't willing to myself. I fucked up, I know it. But they shouldn't have to suffer for my mistakes.”

Kincaid put up a hand. “No, sorry. You don't get to plead any more of your case. We came to you peacefully and you sold us out. No, no,” Kincaid said over Victor's protests. “I get it. I really do. It was the logical choice. You literally can't see it from any other point of view. In your mind there wasn't another option for the safety of your people. Sure, you make noises of apology but in your own head you don't mean them. You still think you were in the right. Even after it blew up in your face.”

Victor flinched under the onslaught, which was more heated than anything Kell had heard from Kincaid. It was still less angry than Kell himself got when accidentally cutting himself shaving, but context matters.

“I just want to bring my people home,” Victor said, voice a little stronger. “Help me do that, and you can do whatever you want to me.”

Kincaid stared at the kneeling man with something like scientific curiosity. Victor might as well have been a bug transfixed by steel in an entomologist's display for all the emotional concern Kell saw in the look.

“Maybe,” Kincaid finally said. “I think you might actually want to bring them home, though not for the reasons you're telling yourself. You just don't want to be wrong. I can identify. Being wrong isn't something I can cope with easily, either.” He paused. “What I really think, though? I think you saw an opportunity to fix your mistake and decided to risk asking us for help. You did this because you recognized by the way my people behave that our group isn't bloodthirsty. That mercy and human decency are things we try to hold on to.”

Kincaid ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up in small, sweat-slick points. “I think you want to take advantage of the kindness you see in these people and use their compassion for your benefit. I'd bet a steak dinner you spent the ride here working out how likely it was that we'd see your willingness to do anything for your people and give you a pass. That we'd work with you for days or weeks to get them back and let you slide on selling us out.” Kincaid shook his head. “The really fucked up thing? Odds are you're right. These are good people and they believe in second chances.”

Kincaid grinned, which was when Kell knew shit was about to get real.

“Second chances have to be earned, though,” Kincaid said, raising his pistol. “Not schemed for. And not for men who try to sell my friends like animals.”

Victor's face held a truly surprised look right up until the bullet ruined the expression.

“So!” Kincaid said as the echoes of the gunshot died down. “Who wants to talk about our next move?”

Sixteen

In movies, sudden acts of violence always cause a group of people to raise their weapons and start shouting, even when they're allies. In real life, most people are too stunned and confused by such acts to do more than stare dumbly for a few seconds after.

“What the actual fuck, man?” Marco said.

“You just...shot him,” Esther said.

Mason stepped in and motioned for everyone to remain calm. Kell understood why, on a couple levels. Kincaid had lowered his weapon after putting Victor down, letting his arm hang loosely at his side. It was obvious the guy hadn't lost his mind and decided to go out in a hail of bullets. Also, it was just a good rule of thumb not to antagonize someone who killed in such an open and remorseless way.

“Care to explain?” Mason said.

Kincaid actually smiled. It was a look of long-suffering parents amused by the antics of their children. “I think I said it all. What were we going to do? Take him with us, this guy who sold us out without hesitating? Were you going to trust him at your back, Mason?”

“No,” Mason said without hesitation.

“We could have left him behind,” Kell added. “It's not like he was any real threat to us.”

“Maybe,” Kincaid agreed. “Or maybe not. Letting him go might not have blown back on us, but that wasn't a risk I was willing to take. The difference between me and all of you is that your mental math is different. Letting him live was worth not feeling the guilt of making sure he couldn't betray our trust a second time. I don't feel bad, so for me it was a simple equation.”

“And what if we decide the math doesn't work out in your favor?” Kell asked. “If we decide we don't want a psychopath along for the ride?”

Kincaid shrugged. “Then you'll kill me. God knows I have it coming.” He cocked his head slightly as if remembering a detail. “I'm not psychotic, though.”

Kell blinked. “What?”

“I'm not psychotic,” Kincaid repeated. “I'm a sociopath. That's what my doctors told me. My emotions are toned down. People don't matter as much to me as they do to others. All sorts of symptoms. What you need to know is that what I do feel is gratitude for being given a second chance. That's why I threw in with Josh back at New Haven. He asked me to watch out for everyone on this trip and to make sure I did everything I could to make sure you got home safe.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “That's great, but we need to take the conversation on the road. That gunshot might as well have been a big glowing sign announcing there are still other people out here. We need to move.”

Kell shook his head. “Not until Kincaid gives up his weapon.”

“Fine with me,” Kincaid said, handing Kell the pistol. “Can we go now?”

Everyone watched Kincaid like a rabid dog as they all loaded back into the van. Mason huddled with the scouts, too far away for Kell to hear. The conversation seemed detailed, though. Mason never used five words when three would do.

He climbed into the van thirty seconds after Kell.

“We're going to head to a location Emily and the other scouts have used before,” Mason said. “We should be safe there until whoever these guys are move on.”

“What aren't you saying?” Kell asked. “You look worried.”

Mason grimaced. “I am, just not for us. We knew the UAS was looking for doctors to help cure the plague, and were grabbing interesting cases to study when people like Esther showed up. Attacking entire settlements to get them, though? This is new. Or at least I hope it is. They're fucking stealing people. Rounding them up like animals to study them or worse.”

A slow understanding dawned on Kell. “You want to take them on, don't you? Find out where they're based and hit them? Mason, we just can't risk it. We have to get everyone back home.”

“No,” Mason said. “I want to get captured. With my scars it won't be hard to pretend I'm half-dead. I have the skills to gather information and get out again. I can lead others to wherever they're keeping the captives.”

“That's kinda, y'know, suicidal,” Lee said conversationally. “If I ran across a big, healthy guy like you I'd be suspicious as hell, scars or not.”

“He's right,” Emily said. “If these fuckers are making it a habit to hit settlements, they're going to be super cautious.”

“It's a good thing he won't be going alone, then,” Kell said.

Every set of eyes turned to him. Even Marco stared back using the rear view mirror.

“No way,” Emily said.

“Hell no,” Lee said.

“There is literally not enough nope in the world to show how emphatically that isn't going to happen,” Kincaid droned flatly.

“Shut it,” Kell said to Kincaid. “You don't get a vote right now.”

“You're still recovering,” Mason said. “You wouldn't be able to fight if it came to it.”

Kell raised his good hand and wiggled it. “Eh. Probably more accurate to say I can't fight well. I can certainly try. But that's not really the point. With me there, it's more believable. You're trying to help your fellow half-lifer get away, right? And if they're doing experiments wherever the captives are being taken, there's a chance I might learn something. Maybe steal some samples on the way out.”

Kincaid leaned forward. “You can't be serious, either of you. Mason going I sort of understand. He's scary good at this stuff. You going is batshit crazy. There's not enough reward for the risk you'd be taking. There would be no guarantee we could get you out.”

“Oh, no,” Kell said, shaking his head. “All of you will be getting Esther and the others back home. I'll write out a note to John with some of my initial thoughts, but he can do the work.”

“Kell, you can't be serious about this,” Lee said. “How is this worth the risk?”

“You mean aside from the people Mason and I might be able to help?” Kell asked sharply. “I think a large-scale research operation probably has way more data than we've been able to gather, for one. And in a worst case scenario I can out myself and get put on the staff. In that case I'd have access to everything, and you know how good my memory is. Imagine what I could bring back.”

“I'm convinced,” Mason said. “If he's willing to put his life on the line, I'll do my best to make sure he gets through it in one piece. That going to be a problem for the rest of you?”

It wasn't a problem for the rest of them. Whether the grumbles of agreement were out of sheer logic or fear of what a man with Mason's skills could do when pushed, Kell didn't know. Or particularly care. Once the decision was made, Mason worked things out with startling efficiency.

The van had barely stopped when Mason and Kell took their packs and explained to a confused Rob why they were stealing his motorcycle.

“Chances are some of them are still around,” Mason said as he explained his plan. “One advantage is that we'll be loud and slow since that bike will be carrying a lot of weight. It'll draw them to us. We'll need that since we have no way of knowing which direction they'll be going when they leave.”

“What if they don't come for you?” Lee asked.

“Then we'll come back here in a few hours,” Mason said. “You should probably stay hidden until morning, just to be safe. I can't imagine these people are stationed anywhere nearby, but I doubt they'd travel more than a few hundred miles to bring in test subjects.”

And so they found themselves in the strange position of needing to move slow enough to be seen as an easy target without making it obvious they wanted to be caught. Kell couldn't help feeling more than a little silly at how they must look: two very large men on a motorcycle straining beneath them, packs hanging on the sides like saddlebags. Kell had never been comfortable on bikes of any kind, and kept his free hand tightly laced into the empty weapon loops on Mason's jacket.

“This was a bad idea,” Kell said as he tried not to look at the cracked pavement so close to him. “Motorcycles are the worst.” Having to yell to be heard was a small but very real part of why they were terrible, if you asked him.

“Are you kidding?” Mason shouted back over his shoulder. “Feel that wind, man. Almost makes me want to do a Kate Winslet from Titanic and spread my arms out.”

“If you let go of those handlebars I will fucking end you,” Kell threatened. Mason laughed.

They reached the edge of town in a depressingly short period of time. Trenton was invisible in the distance, with too many walls and buildings in between to allow even a glimpse of the place. Kell thought they would have to turn back in order to give their hunters time to find them, but no sooner had the thought crossed his mind...

Horns blared in the distance. They were a far cry from the deep, chest-rattling bellow of ancient hunting horns. The feeble beep of car horns had a certain thematic appropriateness to it; like the world around them, they were just poor shadows of what had come before.

“Follow my lead,” Mason shouted over his shoulder, then brought the bike to a halt. “I'll do the talking; you just pretend to be scared and suspicious of them when they get close.”

“I am scared and suspicious of them,” Kell pointed out.

Mason laughed. “Good. You won't have any trouble convincing them, then.”

Kell was tense but ready in case their pursuers decided to fight first and ask questions later, but the change that came over Mason was nearly magical. One second he was himself, all confident bearing and with the fearless stance of the truly capable. The next he...melted. It was the way Kell saw it. The strength went out of Mason's posture, the readiness to fight draining from his limbs. A dozen pieces of body language changed as one. The man positively radiated weakness. Lethargy. A profound desire to just be done with the fight.

It was so effective that, had he not known Mason, he would have bought the act outright.

“Wow,” Kell said. Mason merely sighed in response, a defeated sound.

Three large and surprisingly shiny SUVs rolled to a stop about forty feet away. They could have been pulled from any police procedural where the FBI made an appearance. They were uniformly black, windows tinted opaque and unmodified by armor or external weaponry.

The lead vehicle's doors all opened together, disgorging four men who were as ragged and unkempt as their vehicles were neat and clean. They had the look of seasoned survivors from the soles of their oft-repaired boots to the armored gorgets around their necks to protect from zombie bites.

Mason raised his hands, putting them behind his head. “We surrender,” he said, voice cracking at the edges.

Kell did as he was asked and followed suit, lowering himself to the ground in the least threatening way he could manage.

The driver of the lead vehicle walked forward as his men covered him with assault rifles. Kell watched as the man sized them up, quick and efficient.

“You're two of Victor's half-dead?” he asked, eyes lingering on Mason's scars.

Kell nodded. The man smiled.

“Good. You should know he sold you out. You'll be safer with us, anyway.”

Seventeen

They were searched, though not as thoroughly as Kell would have expected. No one bothered to dig around inside his sling, for example, leaving him in possession of both his knife and garrote. He briefly hesitated when trying to decide whether to volunteer the weapons and save himself eventual punishment when they were discovered, then gave an internal shrug.

Fuck that. If he was going to take a beating for hiding weapons, he wanted to have earned it.

Their gear was stowed in the back of the SUV they were thrown in. Mason was chained prisoner-style, heavy bracelets linked to equally heavy shackles around his ankles. Kell was only shackled, a show of mercy he hadn't expected. Not that having a free hand would be especially helpful; the SUV they were loaded into was extensively modified on the inside to prevent escape.

The seats behind them were filled with two other captives from Trenton, while Mason and Kell sat just behind the driver and front passenger behind a thick wire screen. Kell was too wired; too amped up on fear from what he now understood was a completely insane idea, to even manage to sit still. Mason, on the other hand, had fallen asleep within a few minutes.

Kell sighed.

They traveled east for a long time. They weren't roads Kell knew personally, but he tracked their progress as best he could anyway. His brain cataloged information in an expanding map to make sure he could get them home again if possible. The way was surprisingly clear, both of obstructions and of zombies. Whoever his captors were, it was obvious they had expended a lot of effort making this trip go as smoothly as possible.

“How'd you hurt your arm?” asked the guard in the passenger seat, nearly causing Kell to jump in his seat.

“Sorry?” Kell asked.

The guard turned in his seat and gestured at Kell. “Your arm, I said. How'd you hurt it?”

“Uh, I tackled somebody off a motorcycle,” he said truthfully.

The guard's eyebrows rose. “Yeah? That how you ended up dying, too?”

“Y-yeah,” Kell said, hoping his stutter came across as nerves rather than fear from having to lie on the spot. “Broke a couple ribs and the shock of the fall stopped my heart, or so they told me.”

The guard shook his head. “Goddamn. Why were you knocking someone off a bike in the first place?”

Kell smirked. “Just trying to do the right thing, believe it or not.”

“Aren't we all, brother,” the guard said in an almost meditative voice. “Aren't we all.”

The conversation trailed off, the SUV falling into easy silence. Experience taught Kell many important lessons, one of which was that context was ideal. Essentially it meant that no matter what the larger circumstance, there were conditions that allowed for things like comfort and relaxation.

Kell had gotten himself captured, making him a prisoner. He was guarded by men who would not hesitate to shoot him if he appeared to be a threat. He had no guarantees of getting free and no solid evidence that he would be able to recover helpful information from his captivity.

All that being true, circumstances like the comfortable seat, the casual friendliness of the guards, and the endless rolling landscape outside made him relax. Adrenaline and fear were a booster rocket for human survival, but eventually you had to refuel.

As he had on countless childhood road trips, Kell fell asleep without realizing it was going to happen.

He woke up disoriented and in the dark. It only took a few seconds to register where he was and why he was there, but the initial confusion was strong. Only instinct kept him from saying something out loud.

The SUV had stopped. Doors were opening and prisoners being led out, Kell last among them. Sounds of crunching gravel and human voices filtered through the air. When Kell finally stepped out, he frowned at the building revealed in the moonlight. It seemed too small to be the sort of research facility he expected to find, and utterly without light or sound.

“We're camping here tonight,” one of the guards said. “We're going to have to lock you in, but at least you'll have your own beds.”

They were surprisingly professional about it, Kell thought. The guards led the prisoners—counting Kell and Mason, there were only five—into the building and turned on a battery-powered lantern. Inside were neat rows of bunk beds complete with covers and sheets. What looked like a bathroom sat at the far end.

A wire mesh gate divided the narrow entrance space from the majority of the room. Kell glanced at a nearby guard, the question on his face.

“It was a work camp,” the guard said. “Juvenile detention center. Safe as can be, don't worry about that. We'll have people watching for biters in shifts.”

“Oh, good,” Kell said, realizing as he did that he meant it. “Is it much farther from here? I never did like long car rides.”

The guard shook his head. “Can't really talk about that.” He turned and directed two other guards who were bringing supplies in.

Five minutes later, the prisoners were secured behind the mesh and stocked up with a ten gallon jug of water, a box of ration bars, and freedom from their restraints. The last guard looked back at them as he stepped through the door.

“We'll be on the roof,” he said. “If there's an emergency, just yell. Otherwise, get some sleep. We'll be heading out at first light.”

With that, he shut the door. As soon as the lock clicked, Mason was on his feet and moving in a silent prowl.

“What are you looking for?” Kell asked as Mason peered closely at the narrow slits that served as windows.

“Anything that might be useful,” Mason replied softly.

“Thanks,” Kell said. “Glad you weren't at all cryptic just then.”

One of the other prisoners, a black woman about Kell's age, sat on the bed opposite him. “What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked. “You're not from Trenton like the rest of us.”

“Oh, shit,” Kell breathed. “You guys didn't say anything to the guards, did you?”

The three prisoners shook their heads.

“Fuck those guys,” said one of the others, a young white man with an asymmetrical jawline radiating scars. “If they ask, I've known you for years. I'm not giving up anyone to the people who took us from our home.”

“Same here,” the last prisoner said. He was older—maybe even old, which was a rare state of being since The Fall—and tan enough to belong to any of a few dozen ethnic groups. Though those kinds of distinctions were less important when survival was the main concern, even less when being held captive.

“What are your names?” Kell asked. The old man went by Turner, and gave no indication whether it was a first or last name. The young man, little more than a kid, was Liam. The woman who still watched Kell with a measuring gaze, introduced herself as Steph.

“That's Mason,” Kell said. “My name is Kell.”

From across the room, Mason hissed. “Do you really think that's a good idea?”

Kell shot him a withering glare. “If we're going to make it through this, I'm not going to lie, Mason.”

“Lie about what?” Steph asked. “Who the hell are you?”

Kell sighed. “It's a really long story. What you need to know is that I'm the scientist who was visiting Trenton to see if you could help me with my research on a cure...”

He explained the situation to them as best he could. While Turner and Liam seemed surprised at the decision to get themselves caught, Steph was less impressed.

“You boys have a death wish,” she said.

“No,” Kell insisted. “I know it's insane, but if these people have been doing research then I need to get my eyes on it. To do that, they need to think I'm a test subject for as long as we can manage.” A thought struck him. “Wait...we took three of you from Trenton, and you three are here, but I haven't met you. There were only supposed to be six...”

“Yeah, about that,” Turner said, cutting in. “Victor fed you a lot of bullshit. There were more than a dozen of us, maybe more. He kept all of us separate. Most of us are from different communities, actually. Victor found us and did everything he could to make Trenton an attractive retirement spot.”

“No idea why, though,” Liam added.

Mason appeared and lowered himself onto the bed next to Kell. “Wow,” he said. “I think I owe Kincaid an apology. Victor totally had it coming.”

Steph leaned in. “Had it coming? Victor's dead?”

Kell nodded. “Leader of our group shot him.” He turned to Mason. “What are you thinking?”

Mason sighed and ran a hand over the stubble on his head. “Sounds like Victor was stocking up on half-life people,” he said, grimacing. “We really need a better name for them. Anyway, the only reason I can think of for why he'd try to gather them from other groups and keep them from interacting with the larger populace and each other...”

Steph frowned. “Is to make it easier for people to overlook us being gone. Jesus. He was going to trade us?”

Kell felt sick to his stomach. Horrific as it was, the facts fit in nice, straight lines.

“Yeah, looks that way,” Kell said. “Remind me to buy Kincaid a beer when we get home.”

“If we get home,” Mason said. “Unless they're taking us to a supermax prison, I'm pretty confident I'll be able to escape wherever we're going. I'm pretty sure I can get you out, too. But the farther we go, the harder it's going to be to make the trip home or bring backup.”

“I'll help,” Steph said. “Whatever you need.”

Kell was about to wave her off and explain that she didn't need to make such an open-ended offer for what would certainly be a dangerous situation, but Mason spoke up before Kell could even open his mouth.

“What's your skill set?” he asked. “If I'm going to plan, I need information.”

Before she could answer, Turner and Liam chimed in to offer their help as well. Mason grinned broadly as Kell mentally threw up his hands in defeat.

“I'll do anything I can to help,” Steph said. “As long as when this is all over you can promise us a safe place to live.”

Kell blinked. “You seem awfully sure we don't have bad intentions,” he said, playing devil's advocate.

She laughed, a light and pretty sound. “Man, you got yourselves caught just to see if you could help people.” She shook her head. “If I can't take that as a sign I can trust you, then I don't know what would do the trick.”

Eighteen

The next morning Kell's heart fell somewhat as he watched their guards refuel the vehicles from containers they removed from a locked storage building. The place had to be used on a regular basis, probably as a way station between abductions. That alone would have been enough to depress him—the thoughtful planning behind creating infrastructure to make kidnappings easier—but it wasn't the main reason.

He had hoped their trip might be nearly over, but the refueling crushed the thought flat. The economics of survival were simple but iron in that you didn't top off a vehicle with fuel if you weren't going to use most of it. It looked like a full day of driving, probably hundreds more miles.

Every mile meant less chance of getting home safely. Try as he might to get the nagging thought out of his head, it repeated in a ceaseless mantra.

They had been on the road for a few hours when the SUV braked suddenly, the seat belt across Kell's injured shoulder digging into him, pain lancing through him. He choked off a scream.

“You okay?” Mason asked from beside him. “Pop any stitches?”

Kell shook his head and felt the sudden sheen of sweat there move as he did. “No stitches left,” Kell croaked. “Just hurts. What's going on?”

The sound of doors opening caught their attention. Kell ducked his head to get a better look out the windows and saw four of the guards striding toward the front of the caravan with purpose. The angle wasn't the best for Kell, tall as he was, but with a little wiggling he managed to get a decent look.

It became clear immediately why they had stopped; there was a small herd of zombies in the road. In itself that wasn't surprising. Kell found himself wondering why it hadn't happened already. Maybe these men, whoever they were, kept a dedicated force of workers to clear roads and draw swarms away. Lots of survivors did, since it was the only way to ensure regular trade.

“No guns,” Kell said in a low voice.

Mason nodded without looking away. “I want to see this...”

The guards moved with confidence but with no trace of cockiness. Their motions were practiced and sure, but no less cautious than Kell or anyone back home would have been. The four men worked in unison, staying close enough to guard each other but with enough space between to use their weapons without hitting their friends.

Each wielded a piece of black metal about a foot and a half long, sharpened to a point at the business end. The weapons must have been kept in reserve where the prisoners couldn't see them, because Kell thought he'd have noticed miniature versions of his spear.

He saw the familiar movements of men using armored jackets to their advantage, striking zombies in the face with shielded knuckles or letting teeth gnash at thick material over forearms. Despite his own circumstances, Kell found himself feeling honest respect for the skill he saw as the guards let the zombies slowly push them back, drawing the swarm along while slowly thinning its numbers.

All told it took about fifteen minutes. There were no celebrations. No high-fives. You'd have thought the guards had done nothing more impressive than take out a load of garbage, from the reaction they had.

Then again, Kell thought, that's pretty much what they had done.

“Damn,” Mason breathed, too low to be heard by the guards at the front of the SUV. Kell looked at him quizzically.

Mason frowned. “They're real survivors,” he said. “I wanted to get a feel for them in a fight. They're good.”

Kell bobbed his head in agreement. “How much does that change things?”

“Not a lot,” Mason admitted. “I plan for worst-case scenarios, but I was hoping they'd be a less capable. Like all those people in the UAS who came out of the bunkers barely able to hold a gun or look at a zombie without pissing themselves.”

Kell got his meaning. “Because then you might have been able to frighten or intimidate them,” he guessed.

“Yeah,” Mason replied. “Looks like whoever these people are, they're not going to flinch if it comes to a fight.”

“Damn,” Kell said. He wasn't the tactician Mason was, nor had he seen the same sheer volume of conflicts, but neither was he naïve. The math was simple, and when it came time to tally the score, it would be bloody. “If we want to get out, we're going to have to kill a lot of people, aren't we?”

Mason nodded sadly. “Probably. I'll have a better idea once we get wherever we're going. Maybe we'll be able to get enough captives on our side that we can get everyone out with minimal bloodshed. Not likely, but not impossible.”

Kell hoped so, but for once every part of him was in agreement. His conscious mind, both the emotional part and the separate, rational aspect, sang in perfect harmony. The math here was also simple:

If it meant making progress toward a cure, those deaths would be worth it. They had to be.

Kell didn't spend the rest of the trip beating his chest over the inevitable internal struggle he would face by putting the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Mostly because he fell back asleep.

He woke up when the SUV doors slammed shut—again—but only halfway, in the muzzy sort of in-between of someone who was thoroughly enjoying a nap. Mason elbowed him to full alertness, and Kell took in the sight.

Whatever he had expected of the place, it wasn't this.

The vehicles sat in a gravel parking lot straight out of the world that used to be. There wasn't a weed to be found, and the stone itself gleamed almost painfully white beneath the sun. A similarly white building loomed before them. Its exterior was uniformly clad in painted corrugated metal, broken only by a set of heavy steel doors surrounded by a dark red frame.

Off to the right side of the building stood a fence—or rather, fences. They stood as high as those back at the compound, and it took Kell a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Layers of chain link had been sandwiched together and raised on thick square timbers. A broad walkway sat between the exterior fence and the one behind it.

Past that he saw the prisoners. They could be no one else based on the number of them, and the two dozen or so in his immediate field of view worked rows of vegetables. There were no overseers barking orders, no guards watching disdainfully. Just people working. The only sign that the place was anything but a normal community were the uniforms they wore, surgical scrubs in the same shade of pale blue-green.

“Hmm,” Mason said. “They look fairly happy.”

“Yeah, they do. I guess that's something,” Kell said.

Mason grimaced. “No, it's not. Not anything good, at least. Pretty hard to push for rebellion if the prisoners are happy about being prisoners.”

Kell's eyebrows shot up. “You say that like it's easy, otherwise.”

Mason gave a tiny shrug. “Won't be my first insurrection.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment. “Before they pull us out of here, give me the weapons in your sling. We can't risk you getting caught with them.”

Kell didn't argue as he once might have done. He wasn't afraid to be unarmed. Having a weapon when faced with such overwhelming odds would only be helpful if it came with launch codes. The knife and garrote might be of use in Mason's hands, given that he at least had two functional ones.

In short order they were removed from the SUV and escorted through the thick front doors. The interior was as neat and clean as the exterior, though with more signs of use. Beyond the small foyer lay tight networks of hallways branching off in several directions. Kell got barely a glance at them before being herded down the hall farthest left.

Kell was ushered into a small room, alone. As the door closed he expected the sunlight from the hallway—piped in through numerous but thin skylights—would vanish. Here he was surprised again. A dim tube of light hung from the ceiling, looping back on itself and vanishing into the tile overhead again. Kell stared at what appeared to be a faintly glowing rope for a solid minute until he realized it was a section of fiber optic cable.

The room wasn't bare, but it was sparse. A chair sat in one corner, a spindly wooden thing Kell suspected had never been meant to support men tall enough to smack their heads on door frames. He lowered himself to the ground instead; careful not to jostle his arm as he did so.

No sooner had he leaned against the wall than someone knocked politely on the door. When the handle didn't turn, Kell bemusedly realized the jailer on the other side was actually waiting for permission to enter.

Shaking his head, Kell said, “Come in.”

An older man entered the room, a messenger bag slung across his hip and a folding chair in his hands. The pale light gleamed on his bald pate and splintered across the thin fringe running around his head in what Kell's father had called an 'old guy donut' hairstyle. He was average in every way, with pale skin that hung a little too loosely, something Kell knew came from the rapid weight loss heavier people went through after the end of the world. The skin was stretched, and that was that. It didn't have anywhere to go, without surgery.

“Hello,” the man said with a curious tilt to his head. “They told me you had a shoulder injury, but is there something wrong with your back or legs?”

Kell blinked. “Uh, no. Just my collarbone. Why?”

“You're not using the chair,” the man said, pointing.

Kell smiled, then worked himself to his feet. He took a small measure of satisfaction as the smaller man grew visibly nervous when Kell unfolded to his full height. Kell gestured at himself. “I figured it would be splinters if I put all my weight on it...” he let the sentence trail, his tone of voice the unused and unique blend people once used on public officials and people in the service industry every day of their lives.

It was one of those things most people knew how to do, a way of modulating your words to get a particular response. In this case it was an implied question, and the smaller man did not disappoint.

“Ah, sorry, my name is Bruce,” he said, putting out his right hand.

Kell glanced at it and shook it with his left, eliciting an embarrassed smile from Bruce. “I'm Kevin,” Kell said, using the name he and Mason had agreed upon.

“And what's your last name, Kevin?” Bruce asked as he removed a clipboard, a pen, and a small LED lantern from the messenger bag. Kell gave him time to set up the chair and get comfortable, then met Bruce's eyes.

“Just Kevin,” Kell said, keeping his voice neutral. “I'm not inclined to be cooperative with people who took me prisoner. You seem like a decent enough guy, but you work for whoever they are.”

He expected Bruce to blanch but was surprised. Instead the older man nodded sadly.

“Yeah, a lot of people react that way. I wish I could say I did, but I'm pushing sixty and wasn't in good enough shape to be brave.”

Kell opened his mouth but the words died when Bruce tugged the neck of his t-shirt down to reveal the end of a twisted scar climbing his chest.

“Huh,” Kell said in a noncommittal grunt.

The inmates weren't just docile, they were actively helping.

Mason was going to hate this.

Nineteen

Kell ended up answering questions when it became clear that he would stay in the little room until he did so. It wasn't the matter of principle he made it out to be, but an attempt to measure the sort of people his captors were. When no threats or pressure beyond being forced to sit in a room materialized, he gave in.

The questions told him a lot about what the research here was looking for. There were the standard metrics such as age and the like, but a huge number of specific questions that sent his mind racing.

They wanted to know details about injuries he had suffered, both before and after The Fall. The same for illnesses. There were several inquiries about reproduction, though he lied on those. The memory of his wife and daughter were his and only his. He would not give these people even a grain of truth in that regard.

From the questions he was asked, it became clear his jailers were on the right track. They wanted to know how his immune system functioned now when compared to before The Fall. It was obvious they were trying to build a data set about how fast people healed, what type and degree of damage they could endure, and a dozen other factors.

It made Kell's heart sing, because it meant the chances of finding something useful had been raised significantly. He had no doubt about his own research, but honest examination of the facts meant admitting that his pool or subjects had been too small to do anything like approach a cure. There just wasn't enough data, and not enough points on the map to guide him in the right direction.

After the questions were over, a pair of guards took him down a different hallway which ended in a large room tiled from floor to ceiling. A younger man waited there with a large bag stuffed with fabric the same blue-green the rest of the prisoners wore, as well as several empty bags.

“I'm Trey,” the young man said, swiping a fall of golden curls from his forehead. He gestured for the guards to take their places outside the room, and the men complied.

“First thing, we're going to get you a hot shower,” Trey said. “I'm going to take your clothes and armor. We clean them before we put 'em in storage, so when you get your bags when you leave they won't be stale and gross.”

The words and tone were earnest, but Kell raised an eyebrow. “You're telling me I won't be staying here forever? You're going to let me go?”

Trey shrugged. “That's the plan. We aren't keeping people here for fun, man. We're trying to fix this thing.” He set the bags down and fished a clipboard from inside one of them. These people were organized, that was sure. “I'll take an inventory of your stuff for you to give to the next station.”

Kell sighed. Excited as he might be to see what information could be found, the surprising amount of bureaucracy involved in being taken prisoner was tiring.

He did as he was told, shucking off clothes that had begun to stiffen and possibly attain sentience and handing them out to Trey.

“I'll need that sling,” he said before stepping into the shower stall. “Or a sling, anyway.”

A towel that had seen better days hung on the outside of the shower door. Inside sat an irregular bar of soap—probably homemade—and an equally ragged wash cloth. He turned on the water and tested it gingerly and almost cried out in surprise.

It was hot.

Nice.

The long habits of a survivor not to waste resources warred with the even longer habit of a man who enjoyed a nice long shower and hadn't managed many in recent history. Kell soaped and scrubbed himself with gusto, careful to avoid agitating the skin around the healing incision over his collarbone.

He didn't linger. While Kell doubted there would be any serious consequence to taking advantage of the chance to enjoy one of life's little pleasures, he also had no desire to test the patience of the guards while stark naked and defenseless. It was with mild regret that he turned off the water and toweled himself dry.

The bag of scrubs hung on the inside of the bathroom, and Kell dressed himself. It was painful given his healing shoulder, but doable. There were brand new underwear included, which was a small blessing, though the lightweight shoes were woefully undersized. He tossed them back in the bag.

Trey frowned at Kell's bare feet when he stepped through the door. “You can't walk around like that.”

Kell wiped a stray drop of water away as it rolled down his cheek. “Unless you have some size fifteens, I don't have much choice. Or you can just give me my boots back.”

“I'll look and see what we have in stock,” Trey said. “For now, yeah, take your boots.”

Kell slid them on and laced them up with careful boredom on his face. The boots looked absolutely normal, but like many survivors he made sure to keep a few surprises tucked away in all parts of his gear. Getting them back was a stroke of luck, if not stupendously helpful.

“Please take him to the next station,” Trey said to the guards. He handed the clipboard to Kell.

Kell glanced at the paper and was surprised to see it filled with neat, tiny handwriting. The kid had covered his bases. “How many more of these stations do I have?”

“This is the last one before we send you to the bunks. Or probably to the mess, this time of day. Get some food in your belly before you rest. Once you see Dr. Rawlins, you're done.”

Rawlins turned out to be a tall, broad man in his late thirties. His skin was light brown over his soft middle-eastern features. He studied Kell's paperwork from behind a desk piled with folders.

They sat in a room equal parts laboratory, office, and exam room. Kell fought to keep relief off his face when he belatedly realized that his story would only hold up until someone took an X-ray of his ribs. One of the first things Rawlins had done was complain about the lack of imaging equipment, expressing a desire to see how the ribs had healed for himself.

The man had skimmed over the personal history quickly but took his time with, of all things, the list of Kell's belongings.

“It says here you have a jacket with armor sewn into it,” Rawlins said with a barely-there southern twang.

“That's right,” Kell said.

“Was that custom work?”

Not sure where the conversation was going, Kell played along. “Yeah. One of the people I used to live with made molds and cast these plastic discs in them. Thin but tough, the kind of plastic they used in car engines. Took a while to wire them together into a coat, but once that's done all you have to do is sew a shell over it. Lot of survivors have something like it.”

Rawlins glanced at him over the clipboard. “A lot of fighters do, yes,” he said. “In my experience even large communities don't waste custom gear like that on people who can't do the damage of three people.”

Kell shrugged and got a jolt of pain for his trouble. His sling had been taken for cleaning, Trey promising to have it to him before lights-out. “I can handle myself. Or could, rather.”

Rawlins nodded thoughtfully. “Of course. People who couldn't to one degree or another generally died out years ago. What I'm curious about is whether you're going to be dangerous. You come in with a full body set of armored clothing, but you're hurt. So maybe we don't have to worry about you, at least for a while. Your friend has scars head to toe but sports a t-shirt and cargo pants. I would think he'd have learned his lesson about wearing protective gear.”

“Can't help you,” Kell said.

Rawlins set the papers down on his desk, growing the pile slightly. “I didn't imagine you would. I just find it odd, and I don't like odd. Whatever you might think of us here, we're not monsters. My singular goal in life is fixing this mess.”

Kell's lip curled. “Even if it means kidnapping innocent people.”

“Absolutely,” Rawlins said with a nod. “The human race numbered almost seven billion just five years ago. We lost nearly half that number in a matter of weeks. Weeks. The attrition rate only slowed because the major population centers took the brunt of the casualties. The dead needed time to spread out and continue feeding. Now? Who the hell knows. There could be as little as a few million people alive, worldwide.”

Kell clenched his jaw. The logic was sound, of course. He himself tended to think along the same lines, though he was unwilling to compromise his personal morals to the degree Rawlins was.

“It's not just rebuilding we have to worry about,” Rawlins continued. “In addition to an almost total lack of modern medicine, people face everything from starvation to exposure because we're not well adapted to coping with things like freezing temperatures without technology. Every person who dies from disease or anything else is a loss to humanity as a whole.”

Kell knew what Rawlins was going to say before he said it. It was obvious.

“I have to cure this goddamned plague just to give us a chance,” the doctor said. “Just to even the playing field. If that means taking the people who can help me do that from their homes, yes, I'm comfortable with it. It's worth it to make sure our species makes it through this choke point.”

It had the sound of a practiced argument, which made sense given the number of people Kell was sure Rawlins had given it to. And while the logic of it struck uncomfortably close to home, even resonated with his own thoughts about coming here in the first place, there was an essential difference he couldn't ignore.

Kell had been—and still was—willing to kill any number of Rawlins's men to get the research kept here. He would lose sleep over it. Those deaths would haunt him for a time. But he could do it because at the root they were people who ruined lives to get what they want. They snatched men and women who had survived hell itself from the scant comfort they had managed to carve out for themselves.

Rawlins saw things more starkly. There was right and wrong, and in his mind he was doing right. That meant everything that didn't go the way he wanted was wrong.

It was a dangerous way to look at the world. Almost megalomaniacal. And not without precedent.

“History is full of people who were sure what they were doing was for the greater good,” Kell said. “The scariest kind of person isn't the guy who'll mug you for what you have and shoot if you resist. It's the guy who'll kill you for what he's certain are good reasons. People like that can't be reasoned with.”

Rawlins smiled, a shallow expression without any real mirth in it. “Dead is dead, Kevin. What matters is how much good can come from it.”

The finality in the words was a clear dismissal. Kell walked to the door and knocked. The guard escorted him from the room.

As they passed through narrow halls, Kell turned over the new information in his head. Everything he observed here mattered. Everything. From the locks on the filing cabinets in Rawlins's work space to the fact that every guard seemed to be a survivor. The rational part of him usually so interested in solving mysteries had changed gears completely. Now every fact needed to be analyzed and understood for one purpose only:

Taking Rawlins down.

Because whatever the man said, the things Kell had noticed in his office proved the lie. None of them were leaving any way but feet first. Most people wouldn't have been able to tell the neat row of containers held samples of brain tissue, but Kell had. More than forty of them. Living people generally didn't give those sorts of samples.

Twenty

The communal living space was as wide-open as the rest of the building was cramped. One moment Kell was being hustled along the slender hallways, the next he was through a door and standing in a vast room.

The ceiling rose in gentle, sloped angles five stories from the floor, but the additions to the giant space were what kept his attention. Beds were scattered in regular groupings, though here and there makeshift walls marked off private areas. Families, maybe?

A bank of modular bathrooms filled most of the wall opposite the door Kell entered through. The wall to the left sported an open kitchen and long bar made of plywood. There were a fair number of people eating, others going to and from the plastic cubes that were the restrooms, and a few just lounged around.

Kell spotted Mason at the bar and went to join him. Turner and Liam stood behind it, cooking, while Steph stood next to Mason, leaning against the bar while he ate. Kell got the impression she was acting as lookout.

No other prisoners were anywhere close, though a good number were watching with interest as Kell seated himself.

“Hungry?” Liam asked as sat a pan on a small camp stove.

“Starving, yeah,” Kell answered. “What's good?”

In response Liam smiled and pulled a carton of eggs out from under the table. Kell grinned appreciatively. “No bacon, sadly, but they've got some leftover shredded potatoes from this morning if you want hash browns.”

“I'll take anything,” Kell said. “Thanks.”

Liam waved at him with the spatula. “No worries, man. I worked a truck stop Waffle House. This is cake.”

Kell looked up and down the counter behind the bar, which was stocked with a surprising variety of foods, from long-term rations to freshly-canned preserved food. “I wonder if they have any pickles...”

Turner, who was cooking on a separate camp stove, let out a belly laugh. Steph shook her head with a smile. Liam's mouth fell into a surprised little O, and Mason looked supremely proud of himself.

“I told them you'd ask about pickles in the first five minutes,” Mason explained. “Laura mentioned they're your favorite food.”

“There aren't any up here,” Liam said.

“Doesn't mean they don't have 'em,” Turner cut in. “They're easy enough to make and last forever. Saw some cucumbers growing outside, so even if they don't already have some ready, we can make some.”

Mason's smile dimmed somewhat. “I don't plan on us being here that long.”

That brought the conversation to a halt in the same way brick walls stopped cars. It didn't need to be said that being able to leave would require planning and no shortage of violence. They all knew it.

“Did you see what I saw in there?” Kell asked. He didn't aim the question at anyone in particular, but Mason nodded.

“Yeah. Looked like brain samples.”

The other two men cringed, but Steph merely shook her head. “Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Any chance they're from dead people?”

Kell barked a short, quiet laugh with no humor in it. “Oh, I'm absolutely sure they're dead.” He raised a hand to forestall her correction. “Sorry, sorry. I know what you mean, and no. I don't think those people died naturally. What are the chances that dozens of folks here happened to pass away? Has anyone managed to talk to the other prisoners yet?”

Mason shook his head, but Steph said, “Yeah, a little.”

Kell perked up slightly. “Anything we can use?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I was the first one through the little song and dance they did. There were a few people waiting to show me around the common hall, here.” She gestured at the massive room. “Asked them if it was true that people get to leave eventually.”

Mason leaned back on his stool and spun to face her. “Do they?”

“The people here think so,” Steph said, disbelief in her voice. “I don't know how in the world they could, since anyone they let go is another chance someone will come back here and shut this operation down. But they do. The lady I talked to said they get together and see off the folks who're leaving. Watch while they're driven away.”

Mason nodded, absently running his knuckles along one side of his jaw. “Probably have a nearby off site facility. Don't want to spook the prisoners by having someone go into the lab and just never come back.”

“If that's true,” Steph said, “then how do we convince the people here they're in danger?”

“Some of them probably aren't buying it,” Kell said. “I mean, they were kidnapped, after all. That's bound to make some people distrustful despite any reassurances they might get.”

Mason nodded. “He's right. We can't take the time to give this place a serious investigation, not the way we were going to.” He turned to Kell. “I wanted to be subtle about this. Put ideas in the heads of the other prisoners and get them on a slow boil for when we made our move. The longer we wait, the more people will die.”

Mason stopped. “Steph, did anyone mention how often people get driven off?”

Steph shook her head. “I can find out.”

Mason nodded. “Be subtle as you can. Don't raise any suspicions.”

“What about us?” Liam asked, Turner nodding as the younger man spoke. “What should we try to find out?”

“Nothing direct,” Mason said. “One person asking questions, even carefully, is enough risk. I want you two to listen. Liam, since you're a decent cook, I'm willing to bet these people will be thrilled to let you make meals for them. Turner can help serve.”

Liam frowned. “That's it? Just make meals and listen?”

“That's brilliant,” Kell said, impressed. “Think about it, man. People sit down for lunch and what do they do? They talk about shared interests, whatever is going on in their lives. Putting yourselves here is perfect. You'll probably hear more in one meal than the rest of us could find out in a day.”

Mason nodded. “I'd rather not risk more lives than necessary. We'll need a week at minimum to even have a chance at getting out of here by ourselves. It'll take that long to figure out guard patterns, how well-armed they are, what the emergency procedures are, and the other hundred pieces of information we're going to need.”

“What if they're killing people faster than that?” Steph asked.

“That's not something we can control,” Mason said. The words had the barest edge to them. Not angry, but certainly hard. Kell understood the sharpness; Mason didn't like the idea of sitting by while innocents died.

Steph surprised Kell by nodding sadly. “You mean we can't move before we know enough to have a decent shot at escape, right?”

“Yeah,” Mason said, deflating a little. “We're not going to have a chance in hell without a lot more information.” He glanced at Kell. “Can we talk in private for a few minutes?”

Kell nodded. The others made to leave, but Mason waved them back.

“We'll walk. You guys can stay here.”

They moved off at a slow walk around the perimeter of the vast room. Kell stared at the peaked ceiling, trying to put a finger on where he'd seen something like it before. He must have muttered something about it, because Mason actually answered.

“It was a church,” he said. “This used to be the nave. The main gathering hall,” Mason added when Kell blinked at the word. “Brain like yours, how can you not know what a nave is?”

“Eh,” Kell said dismissively. “Never had much interest in church. Or architecture, for that matter. There are lots of things I'm ignorant about.”

Mason smiled, shaking his head. “You can tell me what genes control my eye color, but...”

“What was it you wanted to talk about that the others couldn't hear?” Kell asked just a little too politely.

“Ah,” Mason said, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Well, there's a chance one of us might have to escape early.”

Kell's mouth dropped open. “What? Why? Won't that screw up, you know, everything we just talked about?”

Mason raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Quietly, dude. Quietly.”

Fighting the urge to strangle Mason for the apparently infinite well of calm he was able to draw on, Kell took a deep breath. “Okay, explain.”

“I think there's a better than even chance that Kincaid might have come after us,” Mason said, then tilted his head in thought. “Probably sent someone after us, actually. It's what I would have done.”

Kell considered what he knew of Kincaid and decided it wasn't an entirely insane idea. “Anything more than logic or intuition, or whatever?”

“Not really,” Mason said. “But it wouldn't have been hard. Emily is a damn good scout and part of her job is being able to follow at a distance without being seen. While we were still close to Trenton, the secondary roads were shit. We were moving really slowly. She'd have had all the time in the world to zero in on us and watch us get taken. From there all she would've grabbed the bike we left behind and kept far enough back to avoid being seen.”

Kell let the scenario play out in his head, and tried to imagine Emily not doing just that. He failed.

“Yeah,” Mason said, correctly judging Kell's expression. “I've been considering it since we left. The only thing aside from knowing she could easily do it that makes me think she did was something I heard just before they brought us inside this place. It was a bird call, so faint I thought I might have imagined it.”

Kell glanced at him. “One the scouts use?”

Mason shook his head. “No. One I use. My little group taught the scouts our calls, and this one was from a Kurdish Wheatear. It's not a native species, and it's one we use.”

“What does the call mean?” Kell asked.

“That help is on the way,” Mason explained. “Really, it's meant to mean 'I'm here', but in this context I think they're the same thing. If she came alone, then we've probably got time. Emily—or whoever it might have been, assuming I wasn't hearing things—will have to leave to go get help.”

Kell sighed. “If she had a partner or a group, then they're probably going to move a little faster.”

“Yep,” Mason said. “Which means a worst case-scenario of acting without full information. If it comes to that, you'll be the one escaping.”

“Why me?” Kell asked, confused. “My arm is still barely usable.”

Mason's look was so matter-of-fact, so suddenly and completely bluff, that Kell felt a wash of fear run down his spine. “You're the asset here, Kell. You're the one who matters. If one person has to get out of here alive, it's you. If I can't get a message to whoever might be waiting to spring us from this place, then someone has to get to them to tell them to wait for our signal. If that happens, it's going to be you.”

“Do you think you can get me out without getting yourself killed?” Kell asked.

Mason's eyes darkened. “Sure,” he said, utterly confident. “It'll just mean killing a lot of other people to do it.”

After a few seconds to let the words sink in, Mason clapped him on the back. “Don't worry over it, though. It's possible I was hearing some local bird with a similar call. None of our people are stupid. There's every chance they'll watch us to make sure they aren't screwing up our own plans.”

It made sense. It was perfectly logical. Kincaid, however, had shown Kell that he willing to do whatever he thought necessary to keep his word. That meant making sure Kell got home safely.

“We should probably hurry,” Kell said. “Just to be safe.”

Twenty-One

It has often been said that on your first day in the prison yard, you should find the biggest, scariest guy you can and fight them to show you're not afraid. Kell took the lesson to heart and did exactly that, except with gardening.

The fenced area was much larger than it appeared from the parking lot. The fence wasn't constrained by forgotten concepts like property rights and wandered at odd angles to encompass as much usable land as possible. Up close it became obvious that the conversion of the church happened after The Fall, as sections of fence right next to each other varied in age from basically new to old, bent, and rusted.

An astounding variety of foods were grown within the enclosure. Potatoes were given the most space, but everything from tomatoes to chili peppers flourished. One tiny corner had a well-stocked cannery with three workers dedicated to preserving food, while another area in a far opposite corner was curtained off.

Kell pointed at the closed area with his chin, then asked the woman he was working next to about it. “Sheila, what is that over there?”

Sheila, a sturdy woman in her early forties, stopped and brushed a damp strand of short blonde hair off her forehead with the back of one hand. “Oh, that? It's where the hunters clean their kills. We turn about three quarters of the meat into jerky.”

“Why is it surrounded in curtains?” Kell asked.

Sheila made a sour face. “Some people don't care for the sight. Also, that's the only place in the fence with a gate going out, and the guards don't want people knowing when it's open.”

“Sure, sure,” Kell said casually. Mason would be interested to know that, assuming the man hadn't already sussed it out.

Despite circumstances, Kell found himself enjoying the work. He wasn't ideal for the more delicate work of picking ripe veggies using his non-dominant hand, so he focused on helping with the potatoes. Each plant was being slowly built up within cylinders made of chicken wire. On a large scale it wasn't worth the effort, but with this many workers per plant the system kept everyone well fed.

Instead of just letting the plant grow and then harvesting, they let it mature just enough that adding a layer of soil wouldn't hurt it. The plant would have whatever the floral equivalent of an oh-shit moment was and realize it was now partially buried. It would root into the new soil and grow above it, creating another layer of edible tubers in the newly added layer of soil. All around Kell were yard-tall tubes of potato plants, each packed full of living spuds waiting to be pulled from the soil.

In an idle moment he tried to figure out how much food was there, but eventually gave up. There were too many distractions. Too much raw, new data to process.

There wasn't one item in itself Kell found to be a revelation. Rather, the observation of many small facts led to a growing sense of awe tinged with concern about how the facility was run. While it had some obvious touches of survivor culture such as using salvaged materials, there were other things that reeked of a larger infrastructure investment.

For example, there was electricity. It was provided by a combination of solar panels, small wind turbines, and a handful of generators all feeding a massive bank of batteries. The batteries he hadn't seen but took on faith. The rest he saw with his own eyes, and the sight put him on edge.

His own compound had a similar setup. There, the solar arrays were cadged together from panels they had retrieved from every available source. Some were new, taken from stockpiles left at installation companies. Others, like the fence here, ran the gamut from ancient to barely used. The wind turbines back home were all hand-made. It wasn't that difficult once you had the materials, plans, and tools.

Every panel and turbine here was identical and fairly new. There were a lot of them. Kell knew where his own people got the fuel for their vehicles and generators—several survivor communities with access to huge stockpiles of crude oil made refining that oil a profitable form of trade—but had no idea where the people who ran this facility got the fuel for their generators. As far as Kell knew, every source of new fuel was in on the trade with the communities his people were allied with.

“Son, are you okay?” Sheila asked, gently poking Kell's arm. “You drifted off there for a few seconds.”

Kell smiled, hoping it came out as genuine rather than the forced mask it was. “Yeah, sorry. This is all so new...”

Sheila smiled back at him. “Don't worry yourself too much,” she said in a voice so motherly that Kell flashed back to his own childhood for a second. “Everyone's nerves are raw the first few days, new arrivals and old guard alike.”

“Really?” Kell asked, genuinely curious. “Why would the rest of you be nervous?”

Sheila glanced at him in another motherly way, this time clearly expressing that she knew he was smarter than this and was slightly disappointed. Weirdly, it made Kell miss his own parents. “We're not idiots, son. People don't usually come here because they're asked nicely. Some of them aren't willing to be peaceful about it.” Her eyes hardened at the corners. “We had a fella brought in here at the end of winter who played it calm until he was put into the common room. Killed four of us and two guards before they brought him down. Couldn't handle being a prisoner.” She bent back to her work. “Your friend with the scars, I thought he might be like that. Glad to see I was wrong.”

Kell had a hard time imagining Mason losing control that way, though it was easy to envision his reaction to being captured without someone like Kell to act as a governor on his behavior. Kell thought that Mason's need to keep him safe was probably the only thing preventing the man from turning the guard quarters into a slaughterhouse. That he would do it silently and with exceptional skill and care was immaterial.

Dead, after all, was dead.

Kell worked himself to near-exhaustion. It was satisfying to do something constructive for a change, something that had a definite positive impact. He tried not to think about the very real possibility that the place would be abandoned in a week.

The long hours in the yard were enlightening as well. He got a feel for how attentive the guards were—not military crisp, but not lazy—and what sort of people the other prisoners were. The latter was trickier for Kell. It wasn’t that he was incapable of social interaction. He did fine with people for the most part. He simply lacked the real-life contextual experience to catch finer details and deeper meanings beneath the things people said and did.

He knew why this was the case, even if knowing didn't help. School had been his life from the day he'd graduated college in his middle teens. Put him in an academic setting and he could point out those trying to curry favor with professors without hearing the teacher's pet speak a word. That setting he understood because he'd had years of practice. There hadn't been a gap between graduating and working full-time at his lab. What little socializing he'd done mostly ended when he had begun dating Karen.

Busy scientist, busy lawyer, and eventual baby meant the pair were perfectly matched. Who had time to make friends when you were struggling just to see each other in the evenings? And when you were as happy as they had been, who really wanted to?

Once inside, Kell made his way to the odd, modular plastic cubes serving as the bathrooms for the main hall. Several on the right were marked as for men, the majority left for women. The ratio between the genders was nowhere near parity, the men being outnumbered about two to one.

Inside was cramped, the center of the cube a narrow hall containing four doors. Each door led to a space four feet on a side. The whole thing was plastic except for the small drain in the floor. There was a toilet and, overhead, a small shower head.

The cubes were hooked up to gravity-fed water from the roof of the church. They had been moved in and with the help of some creative plumbing added to the building's existing drainage system. They had been designed to do it—Mason said the cubes were a variety of disaster pod meant to be used in areas hit by earthquakes or whatever—but making them permanent was another subtle clue that this place was more than it seemed.

Clean and pleasantly tired after his shower, Kell made his way to the bar and was greeted by Liam, who sat a plate of mashed potatoes and a small piece of venison steak in front of him.

“Is that garlic?” Kell asked hopefully. “Did you actually season this?”

Liam's expression was proud. “They grow it here. Didn't take that long to turn some of the dried cloves into powder.”

Kell breathed in through his nose deeply, savoring just until his stomach burbled a warning to quit with the foreplay and get to eating. “I love you,” Kell said.

“I'm sure you say that to all the guys who feed you,” Liam quipped without pausing in his cooking.  “Learn anything today?”

He asked the question in a tone of voice that was playful and even a little condescending. Kell smiled; it was a good way to make listeners think Liam was teasing Kell about the grunt work he'd been doing.

A quick glance showed no one close enough to hear if he spoke low enough. “I noticed a few interesting tidbits...” He explained the significance of the power system components. “Couldn't get a read on many people, though,” Kell admitted as he finished. “Only worked with a few, and most of them aren't talkative.”

“They won't be,” Mason said as he slid onto the seat next to Kell. Caught unaware, Kell only kept from making a startled shriek thanks to the forkful of potatoes he'd just eaten.

“Yeah,” Liam intoned sadly. “That's the feeling I'm getting, too.”

Kell hurriedly swallowed his food. “Having a hard time getting them to chat?”

“That's one way of putting it,” Mason said. “Another would be to say they're not complete idiots. The little bit I got out of my work mates today was an admission that they're terrified what will happen every time someone gets added to the group.”

“I heard that too,” Kell said, and related Sheila's story.

Mason took the news grimly. “If anything, she's downplaying it. It's easy to forget, but these people aren't sheep. They didn't come here willingly. They're survivors. They've killed and fought and scratched to make it out there.”

Slow comprehension went into high gear. “So what,” Kell asked, careful to keep his voice low, “is keeping them so scared they don't even want to talk among themselves?”

“Partly it's the guards,” Liam said. Kell looked at the young man in surprise—Liam sounded sure of himself, which was new.

“A couple guards came here for lunch,” Liam explained. “Apparently they do that from time to time just to remind everyone they can.”

“Something bad happen?” Kell asked.

“No, not really,” Liam said. “That was the weird part. The guards were actually pretty nice. Polite, even. But the way the others reacted to them wasn't just fear. It was disgust. I didn't ask why. The other prisoners didn't say a word while the guards were here.”

Mason nodded as if it made perfect sense. “I've been in a couple prisons. The guy you worry about isn't the one who constantly threatens. It's the one who is happy to talk to you about the weather and just as happy to cut your throat if you talk back to him.”

Like the many small observations Kell made, this was also not a revelation. It was another piece in the puzzle they desperately needed to solve in order to escape with the research.

“They're not ready to revolt,” Mason said thoughtfully, “but they've seen too much to put any trust in the guards.”

“Is that something we can use?” Liam asked.

Mason's smile was answer enough.

Twenty-Two

“I think I've got half a dozen people willing to fight with us,” Steph said casually two days later.

Kell, who was balancing a tray of empty jars with his left arm, almost tripped. He recovered with a tinkling clatter of glass knocking into glass. “Wow, really? How'd you find so many? Mason hasn't had any luck.”

“He was in the Navy, right?” she asked.

Kell nodded. “Yeah, he was a SEAL.”

“There you go,” Steph said. “Dude is scary. You know he's a good guy, and I think he is, but he's built like a tank and covered in scars. People aren't going to open up to him quick or easy.”

Kell's mouth quirked at one corner. “Judging him by his appearance. How sad.”

Steph smiled, gesturing at herself and nodded at Kell. “Kind of makes you miss the good old days when people had it easy and could just hate you by the color of your skin.”

Kell sat the tray down and made a weighing motion with his hands. “Racism, the apocalypse. Racism, the apocalypse...no, fuck the good old days.”

They laughed together, but there was some truth in the joke. Scientific study was dependent on conditions. Society was as well. The conditions which allowed you to perform an experiment with minimal outside influence were vital to the process. Screw that up and everything changed. Nothing within the experiment could be reliably predicted.

Society had been upended in that way. The old social forces had been so savagely broken and the conditions changed so dramatically that the contemporary landscape might as well have been alien. While there were a few holdovers, the game had changed enough that most people judged based on whether a person was an enemy or a friend. It was the first and most powerful instinct.

The guards were decidedly not friends, but within the rules set by their captors, they weren't exactly enemies. Not as long as everyone played nice.

“So who are these people you've made friends with, and why would they help us?” Kell asked as they set to canning food, a skill Kell did not have and one Steph had mastered back in Trenton.

“Wouldn't call them friends,” Steph said as she began ladling boiled tomatoes into a jar from a crock beneath the counter. “They're not convinced the people leaving here are doing it alive. Took me a while to even get close to that conversation.”

“What makes you think they'd help us?”

“Something they said about time tables,” Steph explained. “Apparently new people don't get examined for a long time. Miles, one of the people I'm talking about, was here for two months before that doctor did more than draw some blood. Mostly it's observation, vital signs, that kind of thing.”

“Determining a baseline,” Kell said. “Makes sense.”

Kell slipped a heavy glove on his hand and held the jar she sat on the table in front of him, now full of cooked tomatoes. It wasn't as hot as he expected, but he could still feel it through the fabric. Holding the thing still while she put on the lid was close to his functional limit.

“So Miles is worried the doctor is going to start 'letting people leave' now that a new group is here,” Steph said. “He says he isn't going to let that happen.”

“Do you think he meant it?” Kell asked.

Steph paused, considering. “Yeah,” she said after a few seconds of though. “I do. He's intense, like you and Mason.”

Kell blinked. “We're just survivors like everyone else, Steph.”

Her laugh was rich and throaty. “Oh, my lord. You actually believe that, don't you?”

“Sure,” Kell said.

“You're not,” she said. “I think maybe you've been doing shit like this for so long that normal isn't something you can even recognize.”

Kell was about to ask her what she was talking about, but his brain caught up a second later. Of course she meant this ridiculous plan to get caught on purpose. The fact that he'd needed time to even consider what she might be talking about was proof enough that she was right.

She saw the understanding light his face. “Yep, there it is. Look, most people have fought. They've had to. We've had to push ourselves. But most of us don't put ourselves at risk if we can help it. Sure as hell don't run across a couple states and get captured for the fun of it. That's why people don't talk to the two of you the way they do me. They're afraid for themselves. You aren't.”

“I'm afraid,” Kell began.

“No,” Steph said with more force. “You're afraid you might fail. You came here with one good arm. You put yourself in this place knowing you wouldn't be able to fight back. You're not afraid to die like the rest of us, and it shows. You're not normal, not even what passes for it nowadays.”

She was right, of course. Hadn't Andrea made the same points during the nearly suicidal handful of days he'd helped her move her kids south? Oh, he could reason out the why of it. He had spent a long time alone learning to survive, teaching himself to fight. Back in the early days it had been his only activity. The void left in his life when his lab had been relocated and his career evaporated had been filled with cold determination to live.

Even then a part of him had known in the buried reaches of his mind that he chose to live for the chance to right the genocidal wrong he had committed. If his methods had become less self-destructive, the aim behind them was still the same.

“Damn,” he said.

Steph put a hand on his, patting it gently. “It's like soldiers who've been in the war so long they forget what peace is like. You pushed yourself so hard that you can't see other people trying to keep up.”

“This Miles,” Kell said after a few seconds. “He's a fighter?”

Steph pulled her hand back and resumed her work. “Sounds like it. Put him in armor and he could be one of the guards. Says he was part of all the fighting last year.”

“The war with the UAS, you mean?”

“Suppose so,” Steph said. “Trenton stayed out of it except to trade, and even that stopped once things heated up. Only news we got about it was after it was over.”

If anything could make a man intense the way she saw Kell and Mason to be, fighting a war of survival out in the zombie-filled wilderness would do it.

“We need to talk to Miles,” Kell said. “Think you can arrange it without drawing attention?”

“Out of curiosity,” Mason asked Miles that evening, “what did you do before?”

Miles sat across from Mason at a game board. The main room had a small recreation area stuffed with a surprising variety of games. Kell had voted for Dungeons & Dragons and lost. Miles had picked instead, and he and Mason played checkers.

Kell sat across from Steph. They were playing chess, and she was winning handily. It was because Kell didn't care about the game, since it was only cover for this talk. That's what Kell told himself as he watched her pick off yet another pawn.

“Translator for a private security company,” Miles said. He was somewhere between Steph and Mason in height, which put him above average for a man but well below Kell.

“A lot of call for Spanish translators in private security?” Mason asked.

Miles, who had a large Puerto Rican flag tattooed on each forearm, smiled. “Yes, actually. Lot of rich people needed security when they traveled to Central America and further south. But that wasn't what I usually did. I was in Afghanistan about half the year. I'm fluent in Pashto and passable in Dari.”

“Wow,” Mason said without a trace of sarcasm. “That's impressive.”

Miles shrugged. “Linguistics always interested me. Learned English and Spanish growing up. Took French in high school, German in college. When I got the chance to learn the others, I took it.” He continued playing as he talked. “Steph tells me you want to talk. So talk.”

“We've got concerns,” Mason said evenly. “That maybe we're not being told the truth about being able to go home eventually.”

Miles nodded. “Sure. Lot of new people worry about that. Funny you mention going home, though. I've never heard them use those words. It's always something about being able to leave. Did they tell you specifically that you would be able to go home?”

“No,” Mason said.

Miles glanced at Steph, who shook her head.

“Me either,” Kell added.

“They wouldn't,” Miles continued. “Because words matter. When you take someone captive, telling them they can go home has a powerful effect. Might have been a good one, back before everything went bad. Now people are too suspicious. Tell survivors they can go home and it sets off alarm bells. Tell them they'll be able to leave, on the other hand, and the vagueness of it makes them think they might be hearing the truth.”

“Putting a lot of stock in a few words,” Mason said.

Miles snorted derisively. “Fuck yeah, I am. You know what happens when you're in a war zone trying to talk down a pissed-off farmer with an AK-47 who just wants you to leave him in peace?”

“Yes,” Mason said simply.

Miles grinned, a fierce expression. “Good, then you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass.”

“I do now,” Mason said. Miles frowned for a few seconds. Then his face lit up.

“Holy shit,” he said, staring at Mason with chagrin. “You wanted to make sure I wasn't with them, weren't you?”

“I needed to know you weren't a plant, yes,” Mason answered. “If I were running an operation like this, it would be the first thing I'd do. Put someone on the inside posing as a prisoner.”

Miles nodded. “Are you convinced?”

“I'm sure you've been honest about what you used to do for a living,” Mason said. “I'll have to take the rest on faith for now.”

“You're not worried I'll turn you in?” Miles asked, his tone carefully neutral.

Mason shrugged in a way Kell knew to be deliberately casual. “If you do, I'll kill you.”

The words, said with perfect blandness, drove home the utter certainty of the statement. Water was wet. The sky was blue. Mason would be able, physically and mentally, to end your life without hesitation or concern for failure.

“Well, okay then,” Miles said. “Points for being honest. What do you want from me?”

“For now, information,” Mason said. “I've been casing this place but it'll go much faster if you and anyone you trust can tell me what I need to know.”

Miles narrowed his eyes. “What about later? What are we talking about, here?”

Kell had discussed the meeting with Mason earlier, and had advised playing their cards close to the vest. Mason, who had seen more intrigue and gathered more intelligence than Kell could even comprehend, had explained gently enough to avoid bruising Kell's ego that he knew what he was doing.

“If Doctor Rawlins decides to kill someone else,” Mason said, putting it in plain words so Miles couldn't mistake his meaning, “then we make sure that's his last victim.”

Miles made another move, skipping one of his pieces across the checker board. “Why? You don't know any of us, and you're not in any immediate danger. Why do you care enough to risk your life?”

Kell wondered in a detached way what reason Mason would give that would convey as little information about their ultimate aim while still being convincing. Kell knew himself to be a marginal liar at best, and much the same way he was a bad marksman but loved watching good ones, he was fascinated by seeing someone expert in deception work.

“You probably guessed I was military,” Mason said. Miles nodded. “I went into the service to get away from home after things got uncomfortable. Funny, because people like me weren't allowed to serve openly.”

There were a couple of surprised looks, and Kell amused himself with knowing Steph was probably thinking back to their conversation about judging people by appearance.

“It was hard,” Mason continued. “I hid who I was while I pushed to be better, to do more. At first the Navy was a way to get away from home and be my own man. A means to an end so I could live how I wanted, where I wanted. It became a lot more. I've seen innocent people die in more countries than you can name. It's not something I can ever forget or leave behind. I became a SEAL because it was the best way I knew to be where I could do the most good. I stopped a lot of bad people before they were able to do a lot of damage.”

He leaned back in the flimsy plastic chair. “I care because I had my fill of following orders to stand by while good people suffered long before The Fall happened. I'm not going to let it happen here, whether you help me or not.”

Slowly, Miles extended a hand across the table.

“I'm in,” he said simply.

Twenty-Three

Kell woke to an air raid siren going off somewhere just inside his ear canal. The noise was so powerful that his terrified brain skipped the warm-up steps and transitioned from a dead sleep to fully alert instantly. He slapped his hands over his ears, ignoring the pain arcing through his collarbone in favor of not letting his gray matter liquefy from the noise and drain from his ears.

“What the hell?” he shouted, his voice lost in the wailing.

The nave was full of terrified people mirroring Kell, wide-eyed faces framed in hands trying to block out the din. He saw one of them mouthing something and realized after a few seconds that the other man was counting.

The siren began to cycle down, moving from deafening to merely painful and finally silent over the course of fifteen seconds. The guards must have left it on long enough to make sure everyone was awake.

“What the shit?” Turner asked, wiggling a finger in his ear. “Somebody bombing us?”

“Tornado siren,” Steph said as she moved closer. Their beds were all adjacent to each other, which thankfully wasn't suspicious here. People tended to clump into groups based on when they arrived. “Used to have an apartment right below one of those things.”

“That has to mean an attack,” Liam said, plopping next to Steph.

Kell struggled very hard not to glance at Mason, who was standing with his arms crossed in the dim light behind the bed Liam and Steph sat on.

“Probably,” Kell said. “I didn't think to ask what their alert system was like.”

Mason cocked his head. “Zombies. First thing I asked.”

“So what's the warning for an attack by people?” Turner asked. “Living people, I mean?”

“Gunfire,” Mason said with a humorless smile.

The heavy rattle of the main door being unlocked suddenly echoed through the room, followed by the entrance of two heavily armed guards.

“Whoa,” Liam said as the two men stepped forward. Kell understood the sentiment.

The tan and green the guards normally wore—hunter's togs—could be seen below the new gear, but only in patches. Over their everyday wear the men wore pieces of sleek armor, heavy plastic gleaming all over. Black plastic shone in the dim space, though the effect stopped at the limbs. On their chests the guards wore heavy ballistic armor, the kind soldiers in war zones packed around to stop rifle fire.

“We need volunteers for the garden,” One of the guards said from behind what to Kell seemed a custom helmet. “Bad timing. We were in the middle of replacing a section of fence.”

“Do we get to be armed?” Kell asked.

“Push spears and shields only,” the same guard answered. “They're outside by the door.”

“Any zombies inside the garden already?” Mason asked.

The guard shook his helmeted head. “No, that's why you should hurry.”

“I'll go,” Kell said. Mason opened his mouth to protest, but Kell undid the straps keeping his binder on and held up a hand.

“If we're using push spears, I can anchor. I don't need both arms for that. You'll need someone big.”

Mason hesitated—not a state of being he was famous for—then nodded. “Fine.”

“Me too,” Steph said. She turned to Liam and Turner. “You two stay here.”

The authority in her voice was quiet but powerful. Both men nodded.

“We'll need at least one more,” Kell said.

Miles, who had seen the guards stop to speak with Kell's people, had jogged over. He was careful to make plenty of noise to the heavily-armed men didn't whip around and give a demonstration on the use of their submachine guns.

“Hey, I'll go,” he said as he came to a stop. “I'll make sure the new guys can manage.”

The second guard cleared his throat and finally spoke. “Make sure you do. We'll be close.”

Kell stepped into his boots and felt a pang of guilt that the others had to make do with their flimsy institutional slippers.

“I can't believe I'm about to fight the undead wearing Crocs,” Mason grumbled, casting a jealous eye at Kell's footwear.

“You can wear them—”

Mason shook his head. “I'm a couple sizes smaller than you. Those boats you wear would rattle around on me and throw me off.”

The talkative guard gestured toward the door leading out to the enclosure. “Let's get to it, people.”

They moved quickly, only slowing long enough to let the guard unlock the door for them. Just outside the door, as promised, was a large shield and a push spear. The shield was nothing special, just a hexagonal traffic sign reinforced with wood to hold the leather straps in place. The spear was also standard for its type, a rod of smooth pine eight feet in length and studded with thick dowels to serve as handholds.

“I'll take anchor,” Kell said, in case Miles hadn't figured it out.

Miles snorted. “No shit you will, man, you're like nine feet tall. I'll take front.”

“Middle,” Steph said. “Unless you want me on shield. I can do it, but I'm out of practice.”

Mason grinned. “Nah, no worries. I'll take the shield. And you guys just keep back and ready in case I miss any.”

Kell felt a sigh struggling to work its way out of his chest. He had seen Mason in action before, and it was impressive as hell. The example was nothing on the stories he had heard. Even if you ignored the insane—almost impossible—amount of damage the guy had taken to get all those scars, what Kell had heard was enough.

“What are you talking about?” Steph said. “You can't fight dead people with just a shield.”

Mason smiled wryly. “Don't worry, mom. I've got another weapon in mind.”

And with that, Mason stepped forward and snagged a small garden trowel off its peg near the door.

“Jesus in heaven,” Miles said in horrified awe. “You're all crazy people.”

“You know, most people would never consider gardening the enemy to death,” Kell said from the back end of the long spear. It's not really badass, if you think about it. A shovel would be more appropriate, maybe?”

The four of them moved toward the half-repaired section of fence slowly. It was a rusty segment, the top right corner slouched open like a page frozen in while being turned. The bottom corner still had a tie holding it in place, but every other tie on that side was missing.

Miles cursed in German. At least Kell thought he was cursing; German was an angry language to start with.

“What is it?” Steph asked quietly.

“We were weakening those ties a little at a time,” Miles said. “The guards must have seen it. Man, this feels like a setup.”

“I don't think so,” Kell said. “If they suspected anyone they wouldn't have asked for volunteers, would they? They'd have sent whoever they thought was responsible out here to die if it was a trap.”

“I don't get why they need us out here at all,” Steph said. “There's another layer of fence.”

The sharp pinging of overworked steel filled the night. It was a more piercing version of the weird sound chain link fences make when you grab them with both hands and rattle them.

It was coming from the gate in the fence.

“Ah,” Mason said. “How much you want to bet that outer gate isn't going to hold up to a bunch of zombies clawing at it?”

“Why the fuck wouldn't it?” Miles asked, exasperated.

“Oh,” Kell said. “I get it. They wanted to leave an easy way in. The guards, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “If you're more worried about the dead and you're in a rush, you want to be able to get in quick. I bet the outer gate is held shut with a quick-release lock. The kind you can pull on with one hand and open. Or maybe wire just weak enough to break with a solid kick.”

“Shit,” Steph said. “Yeah, that makes sense. Not like this fence would keep out living people anyway, so why bother with a real lock?”

They took their place between the mounds of potato plants, and it was a tight fit trying not to damage them. They would, if it came to that. Better to lose a few in the scuffle than let the dead trample all over the place in a swarm. The idea with a push spear was to transfix a zombie or two on the spike and use their bodies to plug the hole in your defenses. Usually the shield man served as a means of protecting the people behind him. Mason hadn't been given a real weapon, which Kell assumed meant they were only supposed to hold out for a short time until more help arrived in the form of men with guns.

“A little anticlimactic if you ask me,” Miles said after a full minute of waiting in place.

Steph punched him in the shoulder. “You're gonna jinx us, asshole.”

“I don't believe in that shit,” Miles said, his voice one of a man who did believe in that shit but wanted to convey confidence.

“Wide as that hole is, I'm not really sure of our chances if a bunch of them come at once,” Steph said.

Groaning metal in the direction of the gate changed suddenly into a bright ping of something rigid snapping.

“Asshole,” Steph repeated. Miles glanced back at her with a roguish smile.

Two things worked in their favor. The first was the geometry of the outer and inner fences, which forced the zombies to take a right-angle turn in the narrow space. Their distant forms were visible—the flood lights were already on when they had entered the garden—and none betrayed the more graceful stride of a New Breed. Which wasn't necessarily an indication of facts, as New Breed were notorious for acting like their less evolved cousins when they could get away with it.

In the dark, that job was a lot easier. In the light it was a pointless act.

The second advantage rose in importance after the zombies cleared the turn and the first few toppled onto their faces. While working, Kell had noticed the more subtle defenses within the bailey between the fences. Chains strung from one fence to the other at ankle height, spaced out every six or seven feet. Not fatal in and of themselves, but excellent for slowing down careless—or in this case, dead—enemies and creating choke points.

Mason raised the shield and pointed with his spade, a small rain of dirt dislodging as he did so. “Come on,” he shouted with a feral grin. “Let's do it!”

Kell had been under the impression they would stay in the garden and mind the breach, waiting for the zombies to come to them. Mason had other ideas.

Without looking to see if the rest of the team agreed, he bashed aside the hanging fence and leaped into the infested walkway.

“Son of a bitch!” Steph shouted.

Then they ran forward to join him.

Twenty-Four

Mason calmly walked forward and decapitated a zombie by slamming the edge of his shield into its neck as it struggled to regain its feet. Not a bad start, in Kell's opinion. He'd used the same move from time to time.

“Be ready to aim,” Kell said to Miles. As the head of the spear, it would be up to Miles to give the order to strike. Usually a two count. Kell and Steph would push in unison while Miles guided the weapon. It was an effective system when everyone knew what they were doing. So much so that it had sprung up in several communities of survivors at the same time as different groups worked out the same solution to the same problems.

Evolution did that sometimes, rational Kell noted. Organisms separated by distance would adapt the same physical characteristics or behaviors to address similar problems.

Ahead of them, Mason continued his assault mercilessly. From removing the head of the first downed zombie he hopped, slamming his weight onto the backs of two more. Kell couldn't see the details, but a fast sort of shuffle-and-stomp followed by the wet crack of bone told him the dead people serving as Mason's landing pad were out of the equation.

The shield flashed beneath the diamond pattern the floodlights draped across them as it cast shadows and light through the fence. Mason was in fine form, bashing back zombies and following through with surgical thrusts of the trowel. Kell could barely follow the swift dart of Mason's hand as he attacked.

When a New Breed zombie burst from its hiding spot within the larger pack, Mason was in mid-motion. Inertia, especially the sort a dedicated fighter needed to make every strike count, was damn hard to overcome even when you saw the threat. Mason didn't even try to redirect the impetus of his swing, opting instead to use the momentum to angle his body for a kick.

Whether through sheer dumb luck or a new sort of cleverness, the New Breed managed to catch Mason's leg and throw him totally off balance. Had Mason been without the shield, Kell was certain the man would have easily caught himself. Instead he tumbled backward awkwardly, his feet tangling in the limp arms and legs of his dead enemies.

The New Breed wasted no time in the follow-through, lunging forward and falling on Mason to attack furiously.

Kell saw it happen from his place at the back of the line. He felt pressure on the wood and heard Miles count. Pure reflex took over and Kell pushed, using his legs and hips to make up for the weakness in his shoulder.

Except the spear didn't hit the New Breed. It struck the closest of the now unopposed swarm moving toward them. The only reason they weren't instantly overrun was thanks to the minefield of bodies before them.

“No!” Kell snarled, a guttural sound so loud and primal it hurt his throat. “Help him!”

“We can't!” Steph said. “We'll get swarmed!”

Kell caught a sparkle of red in his peripheral vision from the general direction where Mason was being savaged. A bright ruby mist was already settling.

“Let go of the spear,” Kell said.

Miles looked back over his shoulder, which almost cost him an ear as the zombie already impaled on the weapon snapped at him. “You fucking crazy, man?”

“Let go and get behind me. Or run inside. I don't care which, but in three seconds I'm going to take it from you.” The words were somehow cold and molten hot at the same time, a controlled fury driving him. “Do it NOW!”

The last word was a bellow, one that so startled Miles that he actually did let go. He stumbled back, tugging on Steph's arm as he went. Kell saw the hesitation in the set of her shoulders, the tension in her neck. He observed these things and recorded them in the indelible memory he had been so famous for in a previous life.

He saw that fight go out of her as the facts became clear. Without the man on the front, the push spear wasn't a weapon she could help him use. Not enough mass. Not enough control. Too unwieldy for a pair of people.

There was a defeated look on her face when she spun away and let Miles drag her back. Kell knew what she was thinking; if two people couldn't use it, then the spear was useless.

For perhaps any other person, she would have been right.

Internally thanking the speared zombie for keeping the spear from dropping as the others retreated; Kell stepped to the side and moved forward. He grabbed two of the posts sticking out from the wooden shaft like a cop with a battering ram and raised a boot. At more than six and a half feet tall and with long legs, kicking the relatively short zombie in the face wasn't hard. Using the spear as a counterweight made it even easier to ensure he broke the thing's neck as he did so.

The zombie fell back into its fellows, giving him enough time to at least see if Mason was still alive.

“Hey, fucker!” Kell shouted at the New Breed. The horrible thing's head snapped toward his voice, recognizing the potential threat Kell represented. New Breed were smart—creepily so—and they could do everything from use tools to forming variable tactics. What they could not do, by the very nature of the organism giving them a second life, was turn off the predatory instincts and reactions which drove them.

When the dead thing turned its rheumy eyes to Kell, its gray skin rippling over cords of tough fibrous tissue beneath, its attention was entirely focused on him. The thin ribbons of flesh glistened between its teeth, blood splashed across its face in a macabre imitation of a smile.

Then Mason drove the trowel through the bottom of its jaw at the perfect angle to jam into its brain.

In any good action movie, this would be the point where Kell and Mason would share a brilliant set of catch phrases and one-liners. Instead Mason cursed like the sailor he was and set about yanking his weapon free. The smell of blood was thick, but Kell was satisfied. If the man could swear that creatively, he wasn't in immediate danger of dying.

All of this transpired in less than ten seconds.

Charged with adrenaline, Kell faced the swarm again and bellowed a wordless war cry. His boots crushed dead fingers as he planted his feet, spear already swinging on its abbreviated arc. His left arm was providing the power, his weakened right mostly aiming, but the effort still hurt like a son of a bitch.

He pulled with his right hand at the last second, forcing a change in angular momentum in just the right way. The tip of the spear veered upward sharply and slammed into the space where cheek and nose met. That gentle swoop of skin and bone might as well have been paper for all the resistance it gave.

Kell worked the problem methodically, never accidentally falling into the more fluid spear forms he would normally use. Part of the many dozens of hours of training was spent learning to fight in an enclosed space. Those drills came back to him automatically, some internal gear locking into place.

He used the space to his advantage, timing the mechanical swings of the spear to make the best use of the crowded zombies. Every falling body reduced the momentum of the swarm. When one of them finally squeezed through the press while Kell was occupied, he swept a harsh sideways kick. The boots he wore had started life as fireman's gear before being heavily modified, but the original steel toe cap and attached sole tongue remained. They found the kneecap of the slippery bastard and crunched the zombie's leg sideways.

“Got him!” Mason piped up from behind. Those two words from that man were all Kell needed to know the injured cannibal was no longer something he had to worry about.

Three dead zombies later, the handle in Kell's left hand snapped off. It wasn't surprising. After all, he'd been putting a lot of force on that one attachment. He let go with his right before the weight of the spear could jerk it away. That he hadn't meant to do, but the habit of protecting his right side had become ingrained since his injury.

“Step back,” Mason said. “I'll take over for a minute.”

Kell did as he was asked, but his blood was still up. It wasn't a matter of animal rage, or rather not only that. He was in that curious place survivors everywhere had learned to cultivate, a head space where all the proper levers for fury had been thrown, but the baffles used to channel energy into useful work were still secure. Rational Kell was absolutely in tune with emotional Kell, and that had historically always led to best results.

He was about to reach down and find new grips for the spear when a hand gently touched his elbow.

“Here,” Steph said, handing him a wooden pole about two feet long.

Kell blinked. “I thought you guys went inside.”

She puffed out a breath through pursed lips. “Please. Give me some credit. I went to get weapons. Miles went to get help.”

Kell hefted the rod, surprised by its weight. Felt like an ironwood. After a quick survey of the available materials, Kell propped the stick at a steep angle against a support welded to the nearest pole, then stomped its middle. It broke with a satisfying crack.

“Why...” Steph began, but stopped when he picked up the pieces.

Kell spun the pair of makeshift spikes in his palms and darted into the fray again.

It was controlled chaos. Organized mayhem. Kell stayed to Mason's left, taking out any zombie bashed with the shield while it was still dazed. The hardwood made for an effective if primitive tool. Kell barely felt the strain on his right side as he stabbed again and again. He took scratches on his left when he used his forearm to push away a few of the more eager attackers, and those did hurt.

He ignored the pain.

Time stretched. At some point during the onslaught Miles called for him to step back while Steph briefly took Kell's place. Her technique was wild and her stick unbroken, but Kell watched appreciatively as she cracked a few skulls, the muscles in her arms standing out like steel cables.

Kell only became aware of what Miles was doing when the man finished his work with a firm knot at the wrist. Lifting his left arm up, Kell found it wrapped to the elbow in thick layers of rough leather.

“Thanks,” he said to Miles with a grin. The other man nodded solemnly.

“Go get 'em,” Mile said.

Just as Steph finished breaking another head, Kell stepped past her and speared another zombie through the eye with his stick. The trick to getting the weapon back easily was an even twisting motion as you pulled. That helped break the suction.

A small part of him was saddened to know such a thing. The shred of him left over from before everything had gone so terribly wrong. That kernel which had been Kell McDonald, family man and whose strongest dilemma had been when to find the time to organize game night, was sad for this piece of knowledge, which itself was only one among thousands like it.

The rest of him, the part that could not forget, let that dusty corner of his brain have its existential crisis. It was both the least and most he could do to mourn what had passed far from his control.

In the now and for the future, Kell fought.

Twenty-Five

“This kind of thing happen a lot?” Mason asked when the fight was over.

The guards had managed to close the gate and lock it with a heavy chain. One of them stood nearby, helmet tucked under his arm and an expression of disbelief on his face. The group sat wearily just inside the open section of fence, every one of them sweating but only Kell and Mason carrying wounds.

“No,” Miles said softly. “Almost never. There's a reason they set up shop here.”

Kell tilted his head quizzically. “You sound...disturbed.”

“You mean beyond the normal kind of disturbed you get when you have to fight off a bunch of undead cannibals?” he asked wryly. “Yeah, I am. I've been here a long time and this is only the third attack I've seen. The other two didn't have half as many zombies between them as this one had alone.”

They quieted as the guard approached. He wasn't young by any definition of the word—who was, anymore—but the slightly awed expression on his face gave him an air of innocence that felt out of place here among the bodies.

“If you're injured, Doctor Rawlins will take stitch you up,” he said, eyeing Kell and Mason.

Which was fair. Mason would have new scars in his collection when all was said and done. Kell's arm was still bleeding beneath the leather scraps Miles had strapped over it. You could tell because the seal wasn't at all water tight, and a steady patter of drops fell to the ground. It had a pretty good beat.

Doctor Rawlins saw both of them together. Kell's impression of the man as a fussy academic rather than a real sawbones evaporated when the man failed to so much as blink at their bloody, disheveled state. Rawlins evaluated them with a passionless glance and pointed to Mason.

“You first,” he said. “Get on the table.”

“I'm good,” Mason replied cheerily.

“You've been bitten,” Rawlins said, as if he were pointing out that the sky happened to be blue. “Since this is my lab, you'll get on the goddamn table.”

Kell had left the blood-soaked leather behind in the nave, and was holding a sodden scrub top against his own wounds. He nodded. “You heard the man.”

Mason complied with a theatrical sigh and climbed onto the exam table. Rawlins methodically irrigated the wounds on Mason's arm, and then stopped to stare at his shirt. It wasn't immediately clear what the man was seeing given how the shirt was mostly blood at this point.

“Strip to the waist, please,” Rawlins said.

“Usually that's a two drink minimum,” Mason quipped. Rawlins actually smiled. Well, his mouth made a slight trajectory change from expressionless line to slightly crooked line, which was progress. Mason pulled off his scrub top.

“Holy mother of Jesus,” Rawlins said. “How in the world are you alive?”

Mason's torso was even more crisscrossed with scars than the rest of his body. One side was a mass of what looked like burn tissue from armpit to waist, an area larger than a basketball. Kell knew better; it was an entirely new patch of skin grown over a wound that probably had killed Mason for at least a little while. That the skin had been able to regrow over such a large area on its own stood as testament to the power of Chimera.

“Kind of a redundant question, considering the people you bring here,” Mason pointed out.

At crease between Mason's neck and shoulder was a fresh bite, which had been hidden by the neck of his shirt. This wound didn't appear nearly as bad as the others. It bled slowly, where it pierced virgin skin and not at all where the zombie had tried to gnash through scar tissue.

“You're right, of course,” Rawlins said as he irrigated Mason's wounds. “I read your file. I simply hadn't seen this with my own eyes. It's incredible. None of the people I've studied have had such extensive trauma.”

For Kell, time slowed. The tumblers in his brain whirred and clicked into place. He had heard the story about Mason's presumed death before, both from the people who had seen him 'die' and the people who had found him afterward. Mason had suffered a ridiculous level of trauma during that fight, but had done so while already coping with the massive injury on his side. It had been infected to the point where death was certain, and Mason had chosen to go out swinging.

A bedrock lesson every experimental scientist had to learn was how to be objective. Physicists who studied the Higgs Boson needed it just as much as biologists who might observe living subjects. Your prejudices and expectations had to fit within certain parameters. When people were part of the experiment, it could make things difficult.

Mason was a friend, and Kell suddenly realized he might have been blinded by that friendship. Mason didn't have to pretend to be a half-life or whatever these people were called. He actually was one of them. And if Kell was right, the trigger causing Chimera to become fully active had come before the fight. Mason hadn't actually had to die for it to happen like all the rest.

That was...new. And unexpected. It gave Kell's brain something he would have called, back in his college days, a science boner. It wasn't so much a matter of Chimera exhibiting a new behavior, actually. If Kell was right, the organism had performed as he had designed it to.

Except the version of Chimera that had been released upon the world had been an early one, incomplete. It shouldn't have been able to do so.

Several possibilities flickered through Kell's head, each more exciting—and more alarming—than the last.

“Mason,” Kell said without allowing himself to think about the words spilling from his mouth, “I think we need to have an honest talk with the doctor here.”

Rawlins paused, frowning. Mason, on the other hand, understood perfectly. Before the doctor could do more than begin to open his mouth, he was spun on his heels and put into a choke hold. As with most acts of violence Mason committed, it was expertly done. Enough air to breath, not enough to shout.

“Make a fuss and I'll squeeze until you turn purple,” Mason said. Rawlins nodded.

Kell stood, letting his eyes soak up the room and wondering for the millionth time what secrets it held. He stood in front of Rawlins, meeting the man's frightened eyes.

“Doctor, I need to know some things. You can start with what you know about the plague in general terms, and who is backing this place.” He hesitated, then leaned forward. “But before that, I want to know if you've come across anyone in your studies who has exhibited the half-life state without dying first. Because in my own research, I haven't.”

He nodded at Mason for emphasis. “Until now.”

Rawlins's eyes widened.

Yes, Kell had his attention.

“Look,” Rawlins said after Mason let go of his throat. “I don't want to be here any more than you do.”

The good doctor had resumed his work, cleaning and dressing Mason's wounds. The only difference now was a more open understanding of the facts. That, and the scalpel held in Mason's uninjured hand. Rawlins glanced at it fearfully now and then. “These people do not fuck around. One day I was working in the bunker, the next they're carting me off to here and telling me I have to study people and take samples.”

“I find that kind of hard to believe,” Kell said. “You're a prisoner here? And what bunker was this? The big ones in Texas have been open for a couple years now.”

Rawlins scowled as he slipped a roll of gauze out of its packaging. “I don't know anything about Texas. My bunker was in Maryland. One of three in a grouping. Each one held two thousand people. I was in the research bunker. When everything went tits-up, the company and the government got together and shoved a bunch of us in there.” His face softened. “My family is there. Threats were made.”

“Were you doing the same kind of research there that you're doing here?” Kell asked.

“Yes and no,” Rawlins said. “Same type, different subject. I was digging deep into the source organism. When we were evacuated underground, the government had copies of everything.”

Kell should have been surprised but wasn't. The small bunker John had lived in also contained every scrap of Kell's work, but in hindsight it would have been irresponsible on a biblical scale to leave the research and samples in only one place. Certainly, his lab in Ohio had many copies of every version of Chimera they had worked on. Enough to supply a fair number of facilities.

Which, now that he was thinking about it, brought up a question.

“Are there other places like this?” Kell asked. Rawlins froze for a second.

“This is station three,” Rawlins said, then licked his lips. “There are six, total.”

Mason grunted as if he had been punched in the gut. “Six? Jesus, how many people have you killed?”

Rawlins flinched. “I don't kill them. I don't want them to die. The guards have their orders and carry them out. What am I supposed to do when they bring me the samples, let them go to waste?”

“You could refuse,” Kell said, without much force.

“Yeah, I could,” Rawlins replied in an equally weary tone. “Maybe my family doesn't suffer as a result, maybe they do. I definitely wouldn't see them again, because I would be dead. These people are not screwing around. They want a cure, and they're willing to kill off as many subjects as needed to get one.”

Mason caught Kell's eyes and a complicated bit of body language passed between them. Kell nodded to the nonverbal question.

“Tell me, Doc,” Mason asked, “how do you get your results back to the home office?”

“Each of the stations is located not that far from a regional airport,” he said. “Light planes fly to a central location every two weeks and drop off my notes and any samples I might send, then a larger plane takes them to Maryland.”

There was a long silence following this statement.

“What?” Rawlins asked.

“That's a lot of fuel, a lot of infrastructure,” Kell said. “Pilots, plane maintenance, fuel; God knows how many other things I'm not even considering. How are they pulling it off?”

Rawlins blinked. “Did you not listen? We're talking about facilities meant for exactly this kind of thing. I don't know what the place in Texas was designed for, but the one in Maryland is huge. The bunkers are the least of it. It's almost a small city. Tens of thousands of barrels of crude, a refinery, a power plant, everything you can imagine. It's all being put toward this. If I die here they'll replace me in no time. If this station is compromised—which the attack tonight seems to imply—they'll build a new one and have it running by the spring.”

Kell grunted. “I guess the question now is what we do with you. See, we came here to take your research back with us to see if it would help me create a cure. I only realized while you were examining Mason that he might be a unique case. I need to study him, and I can't do that here.”

“So you just want to leave?” Rawlins asked. “That's it?”

“No,” Kell said. “I can't let the people here die, even if I can't stop the assholes running the show from doing it elsewhere.”

“And you can't trust me once you aren't threatening my life,” Rawlins said, a note of resignation in his voice.

Kell nodded. “Means we don't have a lot of options here. I don't think we're ready to take the guards down just yet, but if we let you live with what you know, I have to think you'll immediately order us killed or locked up.”

“If you kill me, you're still going to have to fight,” Rawlins pointed out.

Everyone chewed on that for a moment, and then Mason broke the silence.

“There's a third option,” he said brightly.

Rawlins smiled sardonically. “I'm all ears.”

Mason's grin split his face nearly in two. “What if there was a way for everyone to get what they want? A way to get you home while we get to free everyone here and take your research to boot?”

Rawlins chuckled. “Are you a wizard?”

“Not at all,” Mason replied. “But I'm a genius when it comes to narrow escapes. Which means I know how to make yours look completely believable. You'll get to go home to your family.”

Kell didn't need to be an expert in reading people to see the hunger in Rawlins's eyes.

They had him.

Twenty-Six

Mason laid out the details over the next twenty minutes, careful to reveal as little information as possible. Rawlins was not a hard book to read. The man was obviously terrified and hopeful in equal measure. Kell knew something about being separated from the people you care about and having to live in isolation. The calculus going on behind the doctor's eyes was just as clear.

When Mason finished, he stared Rawlins down. “This hinges on you doing exactly as you're told and not giving us up after we leave this room.” When Rawlins stammered an agreement, Mason raised a hand to quiet him. “I have no reason to trust you, and believe me, I don't. At all. So please understand that when I say you'll regret it if you stab us in the back, I mean it. I've survived mortar explosions, IED shrapnel, gun shots, a swarm of hungry zombies nearly shredding me to bits, getting hit by an RV right after that—even a fucking sword through my guts. I've broken out of prisons so violent and brutal you can't even begin to understand how much worse they are than this place.”

He leaned in close to Rawlins. “So you should believe me when I say that if you fuck us over, I won't have a problem hunting you down. I mean that mechanically and ethically. It will be easy to do, and once I get hold of you I won't feel bad about the pain I cause before you die. I'm not saying this to sound like a big, scary badass. I don't give a shit what you think of me. I just want us all to get what we want, and I'm going to be pissed to levels they don't have words for if you make it harder than it has to be. There's no reason we can't all walk away happy.”

Rawlins took it all in with more aplomb than Kell would have expected. Clearly the idea of being murdered outright had become blasé. “I won't lie, part of me wants to tell the guards to shoot you. But I won't. I want out of here. I want to go back to my wife and son. I'm so fucking tired of this place.”

Kell heard the sincerity in Rawlins's voice. Hell, he believed both of them. Mason didn't threaten when he couldn't follow through, and Rawlins didn't have to risk anything in the coming fight. His role was simple and not even outside the scope of his normal behavior. The only deviation from the routine was in the setup. Once Rawlins established a reason for the guards to get him safely away in the event of some kind of emergency, all it would take was an actual emergency.

Rawlins simply had to claim a breakthrough. The guards, then confronted with the choice to evacuate the doctor or risk his life during the revolt to follow, would have no real choice at all.

It was elegantly simple.

Kell really hoped it would work.

They left the lab without immediately being killed. Kell spared a glance over his shoulder as they were escorted down the hall. Rawlins gave him a slight nod before vanishing back into the room.

There was no outcry. Kell only half-expected the other shoe to drop, but even that much put his teeth on edge. However things were going to go, they were on a timer. Rawlins would lose his nerve one way or another given enough time and breathing room.

A small crowd waited for them when the door opened and they were finally in sight of their beds. Kell did not miss the fact that while the gathering nearest their group's chosen spot was only Steph, Turner, and Liam, another knot of people centered on Miles stood not far away.

Miles caught Kell's eye and gave him a slight nod. There were more than the previously mentioned half a dozen standing around Miles.

Kell smiled.

“That looks like good news,” Mason said low enough that only Kell could hear.

“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing,” Kell replied. “You think they'll come through in the clinch?”

“Can't say for sure,” Mason said. “But I'd give them better than even odds. People don't like being prisoners, no matter how nice the prison. Being taken from their homes and families has a way of giving folks courage.”

“Are you okay?” Steph asked when they approached their respective beds and flopped onto them. “How bad were you hurt?”

Kell waved away her concern. “It's really not that serious.”

Steph eyed his arm skeptically. “Took a long ass time for a couple scratches, then. You don't have to be a tough guy with us.”

“He isn't,” Mason said. “Sit down and I'll tell you about the chat we had with the good doctor.”

Kell let Mason tell it, content to lie where he was. He tuned out the words, turning the hushed conversation into a background hum. Though the adrenaline had worn off, leaving him physically exhausted, Kell's mind was working. The worry about whether Rawlins would give them up was a new ball of fear clustered with the many other concerns Kell carried around with him, and he ignored it along with all the rest.

Instead he wondered exactly how Mason had survived, what the trigger had been for Chimera to activate in his system. From what he knew, it could have been the massive infection, the blood loss, or a combination of the two. There could have been other factors as well. It would require a lot of questioning. Probably boring questions, as far as Mason was concerned, but fascinating data points for Kell.

He was still cataloging them in his head when sleep overtook him.

Kell and Mason were given the next day off. Apparently the combination of their winning heroics and their injuries won over the hearts of people in charge. Really, Kell thought it was a more calculated play. Rawlins and the guards would face serious unrest if they forced injured men to work. Even that seemed to Kell more a reaction based on self-interest. The few people who stopped by to speak to Kell in the morning were assertive about how glad they were to see him getting a well-deserved rest, but the undertone was that they would have expected the same consideration in his place.

It was a fair way of looking at things. The world had changed dramatically enough that the more petty concerns about social standing and appearance no longer applied. People generally held to a more practical standard of fairness, one centered on themselves. It could appear to be true selfishness, but the optimist in Kell chose to see it as an application of the golden rule.

Not long after breakfast—waffles, a rare treat—Mason was called in to see Rawlins. It wasn't unexpected, as both of them were on weapons-grade antibiotics and needed their dressings changed regularly.

Kell was sitting in front of the Go board he and Mason had been using a few minutes before, Mason winning handily, when Turner ambled in from the garden and took Mason's empty seat.

“How are you feeling?” Turner asked, running a hand over his gray stubble.

Kell waved his bandaged arm a little. “Fine. Nothing I can't ignore.”

Turner smiled. “You know, it says something about you that you assumed I meant your arm.”

“I don't understand,” Kell said. “Why wouldn't I be okay, other than that?”

Turner grew thoughtful. “Did you know I'm old enough to have fought in Vietnam?”

“I didn't,” Kell said, unsure where the abrupt change in conversation was heading.

“Yes, sir,” Turner said, a southern twang creeping into the edges of his voice. “I was old enough to to, even got drafted, but never served.”

“Why not?” Kell asked.

“Bad heart,” the older man answered. “Structural defect. Of course, back then all they knew was my pulse was erratic and I had palpitations, but it was enough. On the one hand I wanted to be there with my friends, serve my country. On the other...well, I saw what war did to them. Knew the cost. Took me a long time after not to feel like a coward. Told myself that it was better for me not to go if my ticker wasn't up to it. That way I wouldn't be the weak link that got someone killed, you know?”

“You shouldn't feel guilty,” Kell said. “Not everyone is built for fighting.”

Turner nodded, a ghost of a sad smile flickering across his face. “Ain't that the truth, son. You're right, of course. Plenty of good kids went over there who weren't built for fighting. Some of them came back. I took a volunteer job helping those vets out. Saw how hard it was for them to get back into civilian life. Saw the toll it took on their minds. I won't claim I understand, because I never went through it myself, but I get the shape of it.”

“Are you trying to tell me you're worried you won't be able to help us?” Kell asked, careful to keep his voice gentle. In truth, none of their discussions had mentioned Turner in any sort of combat role, but he didn't want to hurt the old man's feelings by pointing it out.

“No,” Turner said, barking a laugh. “We're talking about you, here.”

“Me?” Kell asked. “I'm not fighting a war.”

“Maybe not,” Turner said with a shake of his head, “but you're on the ragged edge. I see it in the way you sit. The way you look around. Lot of survivors get that way. It's a natural consequence of being under stress for a long time. But you, son? You look like you've been running at full speed for years.”

Kell smiled ruefully. “I don't want to burst your bubble, but I spent the last year on an isolated farm. Stress-free.”

“Oh?” Turner asked innocently. “Is that the same farm where you've been doing this research you've mentioned? The research you haven't been able to take any further?”

Kell responded with silence.

“Yeah, thought so,” the old man said. “Lots of different kinds of stress. Just because you weren't out there fighting to survive doesn't mean you weren't pushing yourself. It's clear as crystal. Even when you're eating or talking—like you are right now—you're watching. You've checked the exits in here every ten or fifteen seconds since I sat down. You keep yourself on the edge of your chair in case you need to move. If money was still around, I'd bet all of mine that your friends back home saw the same.”

“A few of them might have accused me of pushing the research too hard,” Kell admitted, deciding not to mention that time he'd stopped his own heart.

“I imagine so,” Turner said. “Now, I don't know you all that well, but you seem like a good enough man. Heaven knows I wouldn't have got myself caught the way you did. And from what Mason said, you gave up a chance to leave just to make sure the rest of us don't have to stay here.”

Kell waved away the last remark. “That's just being a decent human being,” he said. “Wouldn't have been able to sleep at night knowing I left people behind.”

“Sure,” Turner said with a sage node. “Didn't occur to you that if you'd gotten free, you could have led others back here to save us?”

“Well,” Kell said, sure he'd had that very thought. “You see, uh...”

“No?” Turner asked.

“No,” Kell admitted.

“When I was helping those vets, one thing I kept on hearing was how they could have done more. How they should have saved some soldier who had died on their watch. I'm not an expert but a lot of those boys just couldn't think any other way. To them, it was all on their shoulders. It was their fault, their responsibility.”

He gently patted Kell's hand in a way that reminded Kell overwhelmingly of his own grandfather. “All I'm saying is that you might want to step back at some point and really ask yourself how much you can do on your own. That's all.”

Twenty-Seven

Kell was alone in front of the Go board when Mason returned twenty minutes later. He sat down and glanced around with a deceptive casualness before slipping a folded piece of paper from beneath his bandages.

“Check this out,” he said, handing the paper to Kell.

“Whatcha got there?” Kell asked in his best impression of a curious child.

What Mason had there was a comprehensive list of guard rotations and other vital information. The list named every guard, contained a crude map of the facility and the off-sire location where the 'freed' prisoners were taken, and the rough locations of the observation posts the guard watchers used to keep an eye on the local traffic.

“Wow,” Kell said. “Rawlins gave you this?”

Mason nodded with a restrained excitement that Kell had never seen. “Yeah. Couldn't have asked for better proof he's going to go along with us.”

“How sure are you that this information is good?” Kell asked.

“Almost certain,” Mason said. “Everything I've been able to put together on my own and what Miles has given me matches it exactly. He's being straight with us.”

“Now that you have the schedule, when's our best time to strike? And have you figured out if Emily is really out there?”

Mason grimaced. “I've done a few calls while outside, but no response. We'll have to move forward assuming we're on our own. As for when, well...”

The hesitation and uncertainty in Mason's voice was unusual, enough to make Kell suspect the worst. “Soon, I'm guessing?” Kell asked.

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Tonight, actually.”

“What?” Kell hissed. “You can't be fucking serious. There's no way.”

“It's our best chance,” Mason said. “Rawlins already told the head guard that I'm some miracle of modern science. Logical since he examined me last night. So the head honcho is sending another guard ahead to prep the plane. That leaves them a man short until tomorrow morning.”

Kell felt his blood pressure going up. “Okay, yeah, but one guy isn't going to make that much difference.”

“No,” Mason agreed. “Normally it wouldn't. But Rawlins is also going to call me in for my antibiotics this evening after dinner, and two more guards will be waiting there to escort me somewhere else.”

“Ah,” Kell said as he got it. “Which will mean two less guards here.”

“Two less guards period,” Mason said with emphasis. “The second we get out of sight, I'll take them out. I even know which way they'll take me, which gives me a good idea how long it'll take to get back here.”

Kell tried not to look queasy at the casual mention of such cold killing. “Pretty high opinion of yourself there, buddy,” he said, hoping it came out light.

Mason's shrugged with one shoulder. “I know my limits, and two guards aren't close to them. Also, the doc put a scalpel in my dressings, so that'll help.”

“How many will that leave for the rest of us to deal with?” Kell asked.

“Nine,” Mason said. “But two of them will be on lookout in the hills. Two more will be off duty and asleep. That leaves five total to guard this place. Two of them will be on the door to the nave. One will be walking the perimeter. The other two will be harder to pin down, but I think once we've got weapons they'll try to get Rawlins to safety.”

Kell grunted. “You sound pretty confident this is going to work.”

“I am,” Mason said with what Kell would have called perfect honesty in anyone else. Knowing the man, it could have just as easily been a calculated effort to give Kell some extra confidence. “This will work as long as everyone is on the same page. So we've got to get Miles and his people up to speed quickly.”

“Sure,” Kell said. “Go ahead. I'll do what I can to help.”

Mason clapped him on the shoulder as he left to find the others. Kell expected to find himself twisted up about the sudden change in plans, but instead found himself looking forward to it. Afraid, sure, that was only natural when you went up against armed killers with nothing more than makeshift weapons and good—or bad, depending on how you saw it—intentions, but far outweighed by the knowledge that by this time tomorrow he'd be on his way home.

If he wasn't dead.

Not long after, Kell made his own trip to visit Rawlins. He took his medicine like a good boy, and passed along a few words from Mason that would hopefully smooth out the night's events.

Once he got back to the nave, Kell took a nap. It seemed like a good idea considering how busy the night would be.

Mason was taken from the nave shortly after dinner. The clock began as soon as the door shut behind him. Kell began humming to himself, using a song to mark the time. Before the sound of the heavy door closing had finished its echo around the room, Kell's conspirators began moving like a startled flock of birds.

All around people put themselves into a ready state as they palmed makeshift weapons and worked themselves up for the violence to follow. Kell watched it all as he marked the passing of seconds in his head. It would be at least a few minutes before they could act, and the tension in the room was palpable.

He wasn't worried about his people pulling their weight, if for no other reason than worrying would do no good at this point in the game, but the uneasiness in the rest of the prisoners did make him pause. Sheila was one of those, a member of the majority ignorant of what was about to happen. Some of Miles's people had complained about the uninitiated essentially getting a free ride out of this, being set free through the risk of others, but it didn't bother Kell.

Sane people rarely decided to attack armed and armored men with enough firepower to kill everyone in the room twice over. It was simple math. Fortunately, Kell and Mason were just insane enough to try and have a reasonable expectation of success.

Five minutes later, Kell stood. The room seemed to hold its collective breath.

Liam strode toward the door, face resolute. Kell moved to meet him. From the other side of the room, Miles did the same. Kell could feel the eyes on him as he walked, though no one else budged.

They kept clear of the narrow line of sight through the security glass set in the door. The paranoia of their captors was an advantage Kell meant to use, and it allowed them to set up close to the exit without being seen.

Liam lowered himself to all fours, then nodded. Miles crouched next to him.

“Ready,” Liam said.

Kell glanced over his shoulder to gauge the room. So far the furtive looks among the people ignorant of what was about to happen hadn't mutated into outright alarm. He saw Steph ready to do her part, right along with Turner. The single advantage was that these people were survivors. By their very nature, they had seen violence up close and personally. Kell hoped it would be enough to keep them from raising too much of a fuss.

“Go” Kell said in a harsh whisper.

Liam began to shriek. For good measure he dragged a razor pulled from a shaving kit across his forearm and wet his hands with blood. The kid was dedicated; Kell had to give him that. The blood added a note of realism.

Kell and Miles knelt tensely, only glancing up when the door opened.

“What the hell is going on?” One of the two guards asked.

“He's hurt,” Kell shouted, fumbling at Liam in a failed attempt to grab onto the young man's blood-slicked wrists. “I don't know what happened!”

Protocol dictated that two guards be present at all times in the event they had to enter the nave. The door could be locked from both sides, and that too was protocol. Once the guards entered, they were to secure the door to keep people from rushing it.

Luckily, the second guard remembered this. Upon seeing a bleeding, screaming Liam on the floor, he turned to lock the door. Kell waited for the man to take a hand away from his submachine gun, then fish out the key, before he struck.

It happened without thought, just another piece of training drilled into Kell by people who knew far better than he how to fight. The first guard was a pace away, and probably not concerned about the man with the sling on one knee.

Kell lunged forward, keeping his body moving on the outside of the guard's gun hand. It was risky because a good shooter would instinctively track that direction, but it also made them predictable. Kell used the split second when the guard tensed his entire body in anticipation of the tackle he expected to come, and rose fully to his feet.

Then Kell slapped his left hand on the guard's extended trigger finger. From first motion to wrapping his fist around the exposed digit took less than two seconds. Kell wrenched the finger inside its glove, feeling the gristly snap as it separated at a few joints simultaneously.

The guard would have screamed—and even managed the beginnings of one—but Kell had repeated this moment in his head dozens of times. His injured arm erupted from his sling and slammed into the guard's throat.

Kell followed through, twisting his hips and knees as the punch turned into a grapple. Kate, Laura, and Lee would have been embarrassed at the poor form, but in the real world throws rarely looked pretty. Given the result, he thought they would have been equally impressed with its effectiveness.

Kell's guard, reeling from two painful injuries delivered in the space of a breath, didn't have the focus to even begin preparing for the sudden shift in orientation. He slid over Kell's hip in a flash and came down with another gut-wrenching crack as his weight drove his neck into the carpeted concrete.

The fight went out of the guard immediately. The ragged, labored breathing through a crushed trachea ceased. Kell was depressingly familiar with the set of observations that added up to another life taken.

Kell, freed from the weight of the guard, regains his balance and sought out Miles.

He needn't have worried. Miles had done well. He stood, covered from neck to crotch in blood, with his own guard still releasing gouts of arterial spray into the air. The poor bastard had forgotten all about his gun as he pawed at the red gash carelessly pumping his life away.

The room was silent but for the guard's weakening struggles. The patter of blood sounded like summer rain. Miles watched the guard die, and Kell watched Miles. Though Miles's gaze was flat and hard, Kell knew part of it was a mask. No one without serious personality problems—Kell's mind flashed to an image of Kincaid—could murder coldly. Not without conflict. The guard had been a part of the system that had stolen and killed innocents. That had fueled the act of will it had taken to do the deed.

But he was still a man. Still a person. And it still hurt. Kell knew it because Miles was, at that moment, a perfect reflection of Kell himself.

Twenty-Eight

“What the fuck!” Sheila shouted, though not at an unreasonable volume. “What the fuck did you just do?”

Kell didn't bother answering or even looking in her direction. He didn't need to see the horror in her eyes. Not when there was even more work to do. Instead, Steph and Turner did their part. The pair of them could be heard moving among the crowd, trying to calm the others and explaining what was happening.

Miles called over several of his people, who set to arming themselves. The guards, like most survivors, carried an alarming number of weapons. In addition to the submachine guns, each carried a pistol with extra magazines, a knife, and rods of metal about a foot long.

“Okay,” Miles said. “Ronny, Jen, you two stay on guard here.” The pair, who had been given the pistols, nodded. Their function would be to keep the prisoners safe as well as keep anyone from causing problems, as much as possible.

Kell armed himself with a rod and a knife. “The rest of you are coming with us. Miles will lead his  team toward the guard quarters. You are absolutely not to open fire unless absolutely necessary. The off-duty guards should be asleep when you get there, and we don't want to wake them up.”

There were nods all around. Kell's job was trickier. He would have one person on his team, a woman named Gretchen, who would be armed with the other SMG. She knew the score about letting the other two guards escape with Rawlins, and Miles trusted her to do the job right.

Kell had only doled out trust sparingly over the last few years, so he was taking a lot on faith. Gretchen didn't seem easily spooked based on her lack of reaction to the mayhem in front of her, but he didn't know if her restraint would hold when faced with seeing her captors in her cross hairs.

Miles opened the door slowly, keeping the noise to a minimum. While it was likely the two guards still in the building were in the small office set aside for their use, they could be anywhere. Fortunately Miles's group would have to go outside to reach the guard quarters, which were housed in an attached outbuilding. Rawlins had explained it as a precautionary measure to prevent an uprising exactly like this from being able to easily reach the place without alarms being raised.

In seconds the everybody was in the entrance lobby. Miles nodded to Kell, who nodded back. Kell fervently hoped, as they made their way outside, that Mason was as good as he claimed. If the guard walking the perimeter was still alive, it could be a problem.

If anyone was capable of killing two men in a car then running full speed back to the prison and killing a third without raising a fuss, it was Mason. Kell let it go. Nothing he could do about it. Either Mason had pulled it off, or he hadn't.

Once the front door closed behind the last of Miles's crew, Kell waved a hand forward. Gretchen stayed on his left, gun angled toward the floor. They made their way down the hallway slowly, checking each room they passed. It wasn't strictly necessary, since most of the rooms served no purpose, but there was always the chance one of the remaining guards in the building was sneaking a nap in one of the empty spaces.

Rawlins would be poking his head out and calling for the guards shortly, assuming the doctor was keeping up with his part of Mason's plan. It wouldn't do to have an armed enemy at their back when Kell and Gretchen harried them through the door.

They were halfway to the guard office when the lab door opened at the far end of the long, dim hall. Rawlins stood there, eyes wide in either genuine fear or some of the best acting Kell had ever seen.

“Help!” Rawlins screamed. “Get me out of here!”

The door to the office burst open, two guards spilling into the hallway. Kell shouldered the nearest door open, dragging Gretchen into the doorway with him for cover.

Gretchen raised the SMG to her shoulder, sighting the two men without firing. They raised their own weapons while Rawlins continued to scream from the far end of the hallway.

“Those are the last two!” Kell shouted. It might have been true and it the timing had worked out right actually was, but the words were meant to make the guards believe they had no backup coming. That their only option was to run.

Instead, they took positions on either side of the hall and fired. Kell ducked back into the small waiting room, which could have been the one he'd been sequestered in days before. Gretchen only leaned her body back, giving herself as much cover as she could. She leaned forward again and fired a short burst at an upward angle, making sure she didn't actually hit anyone.

“Stop shooting at them and come get me the fuck out of here!” Rawlins screamed. “We can't let this data go to waste!”

Kell didn't risk peeking his head out for a look, but the torrent of gunfire immediately dimmed. “Pulling back?” Kell asked between bursts of noise.

Gretchen nodded shallowly. “In stages,” she said, and then fired again.

The enemy shots became more regular, falling into a pattern. Short burst, three seconds of silence, repeat. He used one of the silences to quickly poke his head out, just a flash, and saw the guards much further back than they had been.

“They're covering each other as they retreat,” Gretchen said. “Don't do that again.”

She yanked herself back inside the room just before a section of the frame disintegrated into splinters. Kell flinched as the particles of wood dug into his face.

“Sure you don't want me to kill one of them?” Gretchen asked. “That one is really pissing me off.”

“No,” Kell said. “Just keep them from making any brave runs at us, please.”

With luck it would be over soon.

The hallway had been quiet for nearly a full minute after Gretchen told him the guards had entered the lab. Kell wasn't eager to move forward, preferring instead to give Rawlins and the guards plenty of time to escape through the lab's exterior door. There were multiple vehicles available, of course, so getting away cleanly wouldn't be a problem, but Kell worried that moving while one of the guards was still in the room watching for them would lead to problems. Such as death.

Instead he put a hand lightly on Gretchen's shoulder. “Let's give it a few more seconds, just to make sure they aren't waiting for us.

When another half minute passed without incident, Kell pulled his hand back. “Okay, let's take it slow and easy here.”

They stepped into the hall, and that was when the lab door opened wide enough to allow a man's armored hand to slip through. It flung something small and black down the hall. Something spewing smoke.

“Grenade!” Kell said, diving to the ground and pulling Gretchen with him.

Bullets tore through the smoke, leaving little streams like jet contrails just over their heads. Gretchen, even held down at the waist by Kell's arm, still managed to fire a few shots at the door. The sound of lead slapping into steel rang down the hallway in counterpoint to the deafening crack of the gun itself.

“Smoke grenade,” Gretchen groused. “Covering their exit. You can let me go, man. That sound you were hearing means the lab door is closed. No more shots coming at us.”

“Sorry,” Kell said. “Do you think they're gone?”

Gretchen worked herself into a sitting position, keeping her SMG aimed down the hall as she slithered onto a knee. “Yeah. Otherwise they would have used the cover to keep shooting, maybe come at us through the smoke.”

“Let's go make sure, then,” Kell said. Gretchen grunted what he took as agreement.

It was a stressful minute as they let the smoke clear and made their way down the hall once more. It was possible one of the guards had stayed behind and slipped into a door in the hallway, but Kell doubted it. The men were survivors, mercenaries from the look of it, and as such weren't likely prone to heroic acts or self-sacrifice.

That didn't stop Gretchen from forcing Kell to check every room on the way, however.

By the time they reached the lab, Kell was certain no one was left inside. Kell opened the door and let Gretchen slip in first, scanning the room with the barrel of her gun. The exterior door was shut, the lab empty.

“Looks clear,” Gretchen said. “What now?”

Kell walked over and slid the bar lock on the exterior door into place, ensuring no one could enter from the outside even if they had a key. “Now you make sure no one who wants to kill us comes down that hallway, while I look around.”

“You want me inside or out?” Gretchen asked.

Kell considered. “Out, if you don't mind. If Mason comes down here, please let him in.”

She nodded and slipped outside.

Kell knew he should be worried about Mason, Miles, and the rest. The part of him that had fretted over the dangers they faced tonight chided him for being so callous. He ignored that voice. Either Mason and the others had succeeded, or they hadn't. He wasn't going to make a difference if they failed. The worst-case scenario from here, only discussed with Mason, involved Kell taking all the research he could carry along with a set of car keys from the pegboard by the door.

Until events proved otherwise, he chose to believe their little revolution had been a success.

He made his way to the desk. The stacks of files were in disarray, a few scattered on the floor. The drawers and shelves lining the back half of the room stood open here and there. Rawlins had probably taken some of it with him, enough to make a good show for the people back home. Kell was a researcher at heart, and thought about what he might have done in the same situation. The idea of leaving behind all of his work was nearly unthinkable.

Kell was torn between a compulsion to start the work of cataloging the research, searching for anything Rawlins might have stumbled across that he himself had missed, and curling up on the floor to sleep. It had been a long day. The stress crash was coming now that his fight or flight response had been turned down to sane levels.

So he compromised and sat at the desk. In addition to the stacks of files there were several legal pads covered in dense writing, and a thick notebook bristling with colored page markers. Kell blinked at the last; it looked like every project bible he had created. Leafing through, he realized it was exactly that. Every major piece of data, every observation, even an index of all the files and samples.

Kell flipped to the back and found a small yellow sticky note. It had today's date on it, and a file name. Apparently Rawlins left the hard copy behind for Kell.

Another sticky note caught his eye, this one only a corner protruding from beneath the desk blotter. Kell teased it out and found the ink smeared but legible, as if it had been shoved under the blotter in a hurry.

The zombie attack got them worried, the note said. They're sending a strike team here.

Kell's sleepiness vanished.

“Oh, son of a bitch,” he breathed.

Twenty-Nine

Kell burst from the lab, which wasn't a great idea. It was bad form to scare someone holding a weapon capable of fully automatic fire.

“Jesus!” Gretchen said. “What's wrong?”

“Stay here and guard this room with your life,” Kell said. “We have a problem.”

Gretchen stared at him with an incredulous look on her face. “What, you're going out there alone?”

“Yes,” Kell said. “I need to make sure the research in the lab stays safe, but I also need to let the others know we may not have a lot of time here.”

He didn't bother explaining any further, and took off down the hall at a dead run. His boots squeaked on the tile, and shrieked in protest as he came to a sudden stop just before reaching the main entrance.

People were gathered there. People Kell knew.

“Emily?” Kell said, dumbstruck.

She looked at him, grinned, and dashed forward to throw her arms around Kell in a bear hug. She pulled his head down where she could reach it and kissed his cheek right at the corner of his mouth, hard.

“Argh, beard face,” she said with a mock grimace. “You need a shave, big fella.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kell said, disoriented. “Sure. We thought you might have followed us here...listen, I need to talk to everyone. Mason, you, everyone who's still alive.”

Emily gauged the serious look on his face with a glance and nodded. “Okay. I'll gather them up. You want Kincaid, too?”

“He's here?” Kell said, surprised. “I thought he'd have gotten everyone home.”

Emily flashed another grin. “He did. Then he left the compound again with some backup.”

Hope flared in Kell's chest. “How much backup?”

“See for yourself,” Emily said, and opened the door leading outside.

Mason stood there talking to a vaguely familiar person, and past them stood several other people who Kell almost recognized. Kincaid leaned against the van they'd left the compound in. All told there were perhaps thirty heavily armed people standing around as casually as if they were about to have a barbecue.

Then Kell saw Kate.

“What did you do?” Kell asked Emily.

“Not me,” she replied. “Kincaid. He sent a scout to New Haven—er, Haven. They changed the name again. Silly, but whatever. Kate asked Will Price to send some help. They've got transports on the way to get the prisoners out of here.”

The world had come loose from its moorings, and Kell struggled to find his balance. Emily and a little backup he had believed possible. To see Kate, someone who had once been as close to him as family, risk her life to be here, was surreal. The idea that their former home, Haven, had sent so much support so quickly was...

Amazing. It was amazing. The world was a darker and more mistrustful place than it had been in centuries, and Kell had no illusions about his part in making that way. To see this sort of support was staggering if for no other reason than the sheer good it represented. It said a lot about the quality of people in Haven.

Now to make sure they weren't going to be ambushed and killed in the next ten minutes.

“Yo!” Kell boomed, bringing conversation to a halt. “I've got some bad news, and we need to move fast. I really want to know how things worked out, but for now we need to get a scout to the airport, because I think our friends are about to drop a planeload of soldiers there.”

“Well, hello,” Kincaid said. “We missed you too.”

“We've got people there already,” Mason said. “Wasn't planning on taking Rawlins's word that he would leave without some kind of betrayal.”

“He left a warning on his desk,” Kell said. “The zombie attack raised some red flags, apparently.”

Emily flinched. “Shit. Sorry, that was me. I rounded up a swarm to test the defenses.”

Kell shrugged. “No way you could have known this place doesn't get attacked often. And anyway, right now we have to worry about getting the prisoners and the research out of here.”

Kincaid stepped forward and started giving orders. The people around him darted off to various tasks. When he was done, only Kell, Emily, Kate, and Mason were left near the entrance.

“Let's get inside and start planning for a fight,” Kincaid said. “Just in case we can't evacuate in time.”

“You better hope we can,” Mason said. “If we don't the only option left is killing everyone they send this way.”

“Why the scorched earth?” Kell asked.

Mason frowned. “Because anyone we let live is going to go back home and this won't look like a simple prison revolt anymore. They're going to report that a well-armed and organized group helped make it happen.”

“So?” Emily said. “Why do we care?”

Mason pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because there are five other facilities just like this one. If they think this was just a revolt, then they probably won't see us coming when we attack the other prisons. If they see a larger threat to their operations, they'll move them or beef up security.”

It was Kell's turn to frown. “Who decided we were going to attack the other prisons?”

Kincaid cleared his throat. “As of two days ago? The entire Union. Every survivor camp we're affiliated with.”

Which amounted to tens of thousands of people spread across the Midwest and the south.

“Oh,” Kell said. “Well, okay then.”

What followed was a council of war unlike any Kell had seen.

In every meeting he had attended since The Fall began, there was always some unifying force. One person who, by vote or by force, was ultimately in charge of the whole thing. Kincaid was nominally in charge by virtue of being given command by the leadership of the two communities the outsiders at the prison represented. He was an outsider, however, and the prisoners had no obligation to listen to or do as he said.

Miles had reappeared and after some fierce back and forth with the rest of the former prisoners was elected their temporary leader.

“Thanks for the save,” Miles said to Emily as the group sat around the small table in what had been the guard's office.

“No problem,” she replied. “Once we saw them take Mason, we knew something was going down.”

Kell had heard bits and pieces of what had happened beyond the confines of the church. Emily's team had been charged with watching the pair of snipers set to guard the church from a distance. By sheer bad luck the two guards had spotted the SUV carrying Mason and decided to check in. The two men had seen Miles and his party going for the sleeping guards in their living space.

They hadn't seen Emily and her people stalking them from behind.

“What does a strike team mean?” Kincaid asked Mason, both men on Kell's left. “Seems like overkill to ship in soldiers for a zombie attack.”

“Probably a contingency,” Mason said. “If they thought the attack was orchestrated by someone—a good guess, by the way—then they wouldn't want to risk the personnel here falling into enemy hands. The research, either. It would give up their operation.”

“Sure,” Kincaid said, “but the place is already done for.”

“The people in charge probably don't know that,” Kell said. “Right now all they're getting is radio silence. Rawlins and his guards have checked in by now, so they know something went down here.”

Mason nodded approvingly. “Right, and that means they have to send in fighters. The sooner the better, actually. They'll want to hit us before we abandon the place and spread the knowledge it exists.”

“How did you find this place?” Miles asked Emily.

She snorted a laugh. “Whoever these fuckers are, they're not subtle. The road here was clean. Like, super clean. They spent a lot of time and effort fixing and clearing it to drive on regularly. I lost sight of the guys bringing my friends here a few times, but I always knew to keep on the pretty roads.”

Kell oscillated between the two conversations, which themselves were part of a larger discussion going through the room. Though the five of them were seated at the table, another half dozen people leaned against the walls, chatting. The small talk and exchanges of information had been going on for a few minutes, then reached a sort of critical mass as one person after another ran dry of facts. Eventually the cross talk started, those outer conversations turning inward to the table as people sought clarifications from one of the people sitting at it.

Kincaid raised a hand for silence. “We're going forward with the understanding that we'll have to make a fight of this either way. The transports will be here in the next day or so, assuming no delays on the road, but the strike force could be here any time. The people in charge of this whole setup have some pretty serious resources, which apparently includes maintaining and fueling a plane they can just send off full of fighters on a whim.”

The room stayed silent but for the creak of furniture and the rustle of clothing.

“Any prisoner,” Kincaid said, facing Miles, “who wants to fight with us, can. We have a stock of extra weapons in addition to what your people took from the bodies of the guards and their stores.”

Miles nodded, his face grim. “I'll talk to everyone.”

“Make sure they decide fast,” Kincaid said. “No one will blame them if they don't want to fight, but we need to prepare. We can't afford indecision.”

“Sure,” Miles replied, less enthused.

They discussed the usual from there, working out the possibilities based on what their own capabilities were up against what sort of force the enemy might bring to the fight. The advantage was theirs, given an equivalent or even slightly larger number of bad guys. Defending a place had inherent advantages.

Kell wasn't sure it would be close to an equal fight. Whoever the nameless people behind this facility were, they had brains. They had resources. They had the will to use them. Those three things together made them a terrible foe. Add a desperate need to keep their activities quiet, and it was a recipe for an overwhelming attack.

He didn't shy away from making the point, either. No one was silenced and no conjecture outright dismissed from consideration. For the first time in a long while, they faced a truly unknown enemy. Anything was possible.

This point was made clearly an hour into the meeting when a scout burst through the door, heaving ragged breaths and unmindful of the half-dozen pistols snapped up in response to his surprise entry.

“There's a swarm coming in,” the scout said. “Maybe half an hour away.”

Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “How convenient.”

The scout grimaced. “We were ordered not to engage the enemy for any reason, but when we saw them harrying zombies this direction, I was sent back to warn everyone.”

“It's a common enough tactic,” Mason said. “It's going to make defense a harder.”

Kincaid pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment. “Get every decent shot with a rifle on the roof. I want them picking off living people only. We'll need as many people fighting hand to hand as possible. I don't want to waste bullets on the dead if we can help it.”

Kell listened to the string of orders, sometimes supplemented by Mason's suggestions, and saw the shape of the fight to come. They would have to clear the swarm fast, or it would be a distraction at best. At worst, if the horde of zombies simply loitered, it would provide cover for enemy agents to get close. That too was a tactic all of them had seen before.

Kell idly wondered when someone was going to try to tell him to stay out of the fight. Thinking about the trove of data a dozen yards away, he was curious whether he would listen.

Thirty

He didn't listen.

Admittedly the discussion was short and heated, comprised mostly of Mason and Kincaid trying to convince Kell it was best for him to stay safe and Kell trying to convince the pair of them that it was in fact physiologically possible for them to go fuck themselves.

Eventually both men gave in and Kell went hunting for his gear.

There had also been a brief but frantic argument on whether or not they should try to ferry the prisoners to somewhere safer before the enemy arrived. Kincaid was for it, but Mason won by pointing out that they couldn't spare the bodies if they wanted to defend the church, and that any activity on the road might be spotted. The last thing they wanted to do was split the strike teams up. It would be chaos.

Kell searched room after room, a huge ring of keys taken from a dead guard jangling as he went along. There were surprisingly few locked doors, most of the rooms being for storage of more mundane things. After a few frustrating minutes trying to match keys to locks, Kell gave up and started kicking in doors.

Like many a mystery date, door number three was lucky. Inside the room were rows of steel mesh lockers, each stuffed with bags of personal belongings. Kell found his after less than a minute. Not many people had heavy jackets with armored plates.

His right shoulder and collarbone were stiff but only pained him when he raised his hand above his head. Getting dressed was easier than it had been in what felt like epochs, though he had apparently been lied to about his stuff getting cleaned.

It was a short dash to the nave, where Kell shared the location of the personal belongings. There were more than a few happy faces at the news. The end of the world meant growing used to not having things, but also attaching more meaning to what you did have.

Just as he was about to leave the room, Emily walked in. For a second his brain spun its tires at the sight of someone walking through the open door, which had always been shut and locked when not being actively used. Even knowing what had happened to change his circumstances didn't eliminate the expectation that the door would be shut and secured.

“Got something for you,” Emily said, gesturing for him to follow.

She led him outside and to the van. Kell could hear the approaching zombies in the distance in the same way you heard a thunderstorm. Low, menacing, and inevitable. Either the swarm was closer than the scouts thought—unlikely—or it was pretty large. While he couldn't make out individual noises, the aggregate of shuffling feet hissing through tall grass and clomping in the dirt made it sound like a drunken army.

Logic told him that there couldn't have been many zombies to send, not the overwhelming force he was imagining. The whole point of this place was to avoid large concentrations of the dead. So it was likely nerves amplifying his fear.

“Here you go,” Emily said, straightening from where she had been digging in the van and tossing something to Kell.

His right arm, free of its bindings, shot out on instinct and caught the spear.

It wasn't his old one, the length of battered metal that had seen him through so many close calls. Whoever had packed gear for this trip had decided to add a cache of new weapons instead of risking one Kell had sentimental attachments to.

“Nice,” Kell said, flexing his gloved fingers around the friction tape winding around the haft. “What's this made of? It's light.”

“No idea,” Emily said. “Someone found a bunch of bar stock and Patrick played around with it until he decided it was tough enough for weapons.”

The spear was very close to his own, the tip a simple narrowing of the haft rather than a blade shape. It looked like a giant, thin pencil with an elongated tip. The bare metal parts shone almost white beneath the flood lights.

Kell stretched, letting his hands get a feel for the weapon. He tried to judge the pain in his shoulder, tried to form some idea of how much mobility he had. The real test would be in the heat of the moment, he knew. Fighting with Mason made him sure he could do it again. Chimera helped the healing process along, and Kell wouldn't have been surprised to find a ridge of stiff, fibrous tissue similar to what New Breed zombies had beneath their skin growing under his own to support his damaged clavicle.

“You think you're going to be able to manage?” Emily asked.

From anyone else the question might have been loaded with subtext. From her Kell could take it at face value.

“Do you think I should stay inside?” Kell asked, the question equally honest.

“Couldn't say. You're a smart guy, Kell. You know your limits. Sometimes you need someone to stop you and tell you when you're pushing too hard, but this doesn't look like one of those occasions. If you think you're up to an extended fight, then I'll have your back.”

Kell smiled. “If you're watching out for me, I'm pretty sure I could fight missing an arm. Maybe a bit of leg, too.”

She gave him a wink. “Don't think I'm going to let you get lazy, big fella.”

When the zombies came, they did it all at once. The hills surrounding the church slowed them but didn't stop them. They were too gently sloping for that. The small rises of land jutting up from the perimeter were in the direction of the airport, which was also the direction of the zombie invasion. The enemy hadn't any need to be subtle about who was sending this particular care package.

The smell of so many tasty humans overrode the natural instinct of the undead to avoid too much expended energy. Left to their own devices, zombies were like water in seeking the path of least resistance.

Prodded by the promise of someone to eat, they became much more energetic.

The swarm burst over the small rise of dirt and grass at the end of the parking lot, hemmed on one side by the fence surrounding the garden and by the rise of another hill on the other. Aside from those two features, there was no natural barrier to stop or even slow the slavering horde.

“Front line, ready!” Mason called.

Kell was in the second line, which was situated about a foot behind the front. They had used several of the remaining vehicles in the parking lot to create a funnel to direct the swarm toward the fist of men and women Kell was a part of. The people in front of him rested on one knee, each holding their massive shields in an interlocking pattern.

The zombies saw their prey and sped up as a result. A few lost their footing or were pushed only to be crushed by the rest. If they'd had access to an arsenal as simple as a big pile of rocks, they could have rolled them down the hill at the crowd to thin the ranks.

“Contact in three!” Mason shouted.

The front line tensed in a clatter of shields, and a wave of zombies crashed against them. This wasn't the chaotic dance most combat with the dead had been in the early days. Kell didn't throw himself against the enemy as he had when defending Mason between the fences. Instead he trusted the people next to him to do their job.

His spear struck out, each thrust finding a weak spot. It was a comfortable sort of fight, well-practiced. Hit below the jaw or through the eye, wait that split second to make sure you scrambled the brain, then pull the weapon out. The bodies fell at first, but then began to pile up. When the weight of the fully dead before them began to add up, Mason called for the line to step back.

They did it in unison, by Mason's count. The packed corpses took a spill, the zombies moving over them tumbling. The lot beyond the barricade of SUVs was growing a large delta of dead people, some slipping through the cracks in the defense.

Kell caught the other defenders in his peripheral vision as they moved in threes to slaughter the trickle of zombies who made it behind the lines. Most of his attention was focused on the job at hand, though, which would require another step back any second. The gap they had opened was also filling with corpses.

Just as Kell's arm began to ache from the repetitive motion, Mason called for a rotation. Kell's line struck out as one, less worried about killing strikes than they were about slowing the tide. On the back stroke they stepped back together and let their replacements move up.

Free to look around, he took in the scene. The swarm was finishing its pile-up, the back end mostly composed of stragglers. The parking lot was thick with the sickly smell of flesh not quite dead but far from truly alive. If the zombies were their only concern, hundred or so filling up the lot would have been manageable. The defenders would work safely, as much as it was possible, to thin the herd methodically.

Unfortunately they didn't have that kind of time. The swarm was part distraction, part attrition tactic. The living enemies who had sent it would use it to their advantage in any way possible.

The obvious solution was to take down the zombies as fast as possible without wasting resources. Kell stretched his arms, working out the kinks the tight spear work had built up in his biceps. The really fun part was about to begin.

“Get ready for the spill!” Mason shouted.

Kell stepped back, arraying himself in the rough semicircle of people holding melee weapons a few yards behind the shield and spear line. At Mason's command, the replacement spearmen abandoned the line as Kell's had. The shield-bearers followed, darting to either side of the barrier as they stepped to the rear.

The pile of crushed and torn corpses was impressive, Kell thought. It served as an effective barrier in its own right, if one the zombies could still climb. They did so, the first several of them falling hard and splattering to the ground with gruesome results. Those following had an easier time, though their unsure footing made them easy prey.

The zombies came through the gap into a ring of steel. The uninitiated would have seen it as a far worse defense than the shield barrier had been, and to a degree that was true. But the mass of zombies had grown large and insistent enough that without a release of the pressure, they would have crushed the shield wall by sheer weight.

They came in twos and threes at first. Kell called out his kills before he made them to avoid clashing weapons with his partners. The stream grew dense quickly, requiring the circle to widen. That, too, was fine. As the carpet of dead zombies spread, it created an obstacle course every dead person who followed had to navigate.

The circle grew, and more defenders stepped in to fill the gaps. Some of these held firearms, though the standing order was only to use them to save a fallen comrade or if everything went to hell. Everyone at least had a knife, though the shooters would only use short blades to put down a wounded zombie.

The pattern continued for another minute, and by then the circle was huge and sparse. The nearest person to Kell was a yard away.

Mason, who stood a few paces from Kell, cleared his throat. “Full attack!”

Thirty-One

Seen from above, the parking lot had a certain grisly symmetry to it. The pool of zombies on the approach side took up about as much real estate as the carpet of bodies on the killing floor. The difference was that one side had easy footing while the other was a dense patchwork of tangling limbs. It was, Kell noticed, his fight between the fences writ large.

When Mason bellowed the order to attack, that rough circle of downed zombies was bristling with standing ones frustratingly picking their way through the mess.

Kell leaped forward and resisted the urge to boot the nearest zombie back into its brothers. The point was to kill as fast as possible, after all.

So he swooped low, letting the upward thrust of his legs provide most of the force as the spear traveled forward. This one was especially rotten, because the spear passed through the bottom of its jaw with ease. A solid foot of gore-spattered metal erupted from the back of its head.

Kell stepped back, dragging the body onto a patch of clear ground before whipping the spear in a huge overhead chop onto the skull of another dead man. Had it been an axe, Kell would have cleaved the thing in two down to its sternum. As it was, the blunt cylinder made a divot four inches deep and dropped the zombie in its place.

When he reset himself, Kell saw the line bulge nearby. The person on his right—a man from Haven he had never met—was too close when the small burst of zombies surged forward. The guy didn't lose his cool. Instead of panicking, he leaned his exposed head and neck back as the zombies grasped his coat and drew his machete behind his head like a punch.

The blade bit into bone as the man pushed, the sudden resistance changing the direction of his wrist, wrenching it into a painful right angle. Teeth gritted against what had to be bones creaking and scraping against each other, the guy pushed the blade forward with everything he had.

Kell rotated and took careful aim before lancing one of the man's attackers through the neck with a spear thrust that looked a lot like a shot with a pool cue. The next zombie looked at Kell, and in that moment of distraction the man finished his laborious cut.

From there the guy was able to extricate himself, which he did with a grateful nod at Kell.

He turned back to his own section just in time to be mobbed by a leaping New Breed.

“Fuck!” Kell screamed as the thing fell on him. He turned at the last second, giving the zombie his back but saving his face and throat from being savaged. The New Breed's fingers, tipped in exposed, sharp bone, raked at him. In the fracas Kell dropped the spear. The long weapon wouldn't have done him any good, anyway.

Keeping his chin tucked low; Kell reached into his right sleeve and pulled a small piece of wood from it. He unspooled the garrote's wire to its full length, though he had to go by feel since he was protecting his face. The cuff on his right wrist went tight, telling him the wire was fully extended, and Kell flipped his hand in a practiced circle to make a loop.

Sharp fingers dug into his scalp, eliciting a scream. Encouraged, the fingers pulled, then did a tiny jump onto Kell's face. He shook his head with all the force he could bring to bear and felt a surge of relief as most of the fingers lost purchase before they could do much damage.

It was that last one that did the trick.

A line of fire ignited just above the left corner of his mouth and traced a burning path toward his forehead on the right side. It felt like the goddamn thing was tearing his nose off, and judging by the amount of blood sheeting down Kell's face, it might be.

With a supreme effort of will, Kell slung his arms back and caught the New Breed in his loop of wire. He pulled it tight, feeling the zombie tense against him as it realized something was very wrong, and executed a furious hip throw.

The wire, as it turned out, had captured the zombie's arm as well as its neck. This made it impossible to fully sever the spine and kill the thing, but Kell wasn't thinking about that as the zombie lay struggling on the ground in front of him. As a point of fact, Kell was beyond thinking about anything at that moment.

A steady tattoo of blood bridged the gap between Kell and the zombie in those few confused seconds. Rational Kell recognized the confusion in the face of the New Breed, and understood that the ability to express confusion was a remarkable thing to find in a zombie.

Then Kell yanked on the garrote, pulling the zombie around by the immensely strong wire sliced through flesh and held tense against bone. He kicked, which was less effective bent nearly double.

So he let go of the garrote. Forgot about it. Ignored the tug of its tangled length through the cuff still attached to his right wrist. Logic and reason were pushed back along with rational self-preservation as Kell kicked full-force, smashing the heavy steel toe of his boot into the face of his enemy over and over again.

The world had turned blurry and red, but Kell didn't care.

It wasn't the burning chasm in his face that pulled him from the edge, nor the heavy pain in his right hand. It was Emily's voice.

“You're okay, Kell,” she said, putting a firm hand on his chest. “Just stop and have a seat.”

The pain in his hand throttled down as soon as he came to rest. Kell looked down and saw, with mild interest, that the nearly headless corpse of the New Breed was still attached to his garrote. He had been dragging it behind him as he staggered away from the fight. His hand was noticeably swollen beneath his armored glove.

“Sit here,” Emily said, pointing to an empty weapons crate. “We need to take a look at that gash.”

“I'm fine,” Kell said, droplets of blood spraying on Emily's coat with the words. He started at them for a second. “Sorry.”

He felt his brain coming down from the overwhelming rush of adrenaline and rage. It wasn't the first time he'd fallen into that mindset. He had long suspected that Chimera was more volatile when it came to things like brain chemistry, and that these combat-related rages were a direct result. As his synapses fired in patterns that didn't focus on violence, he wondered if Chimera was stimulating his aggression as a way of shoring up his survival instinct. Before being infected, before The Fall, Kell had been remarkably passive by nature.

He spit some more blood, this time at the ground.

“Yeah, it keeps running into your mouth. Maybe keep it closed for now.”

Kell nodded.

The fighting was dying down, and that more than anything rocked Kell to his core. How much time had he missed, lost in his fugue state? The idea that he wasn't fully in control of his actions for more than a few seconds made his heart heavy in his chest.

The number of zombies was dwindling swiftly, the decrease only growing faster with time. He watched the final moments of the battle dispassionately as Emily gently irrigated the canyon in his face and dabbed it relentlessly with gauze.

As soon as the last zombie fell, Mason appeared as if by magic. The usual mask of competent disregard was gone, genuine worry replacing it.

“We should get him inside,” Mason said. “Into the lab. We'll see who has the most medical training. If that gets infected...”

Emily shuddered. “This is a claw wound. God knows what was on that thing's hands.”

They hustled him inside, and he let them. As he came down from the odd combat high, more and more reality piled onto his thoughts. That thing had come close to taking an eye. In no time at all he could have lost half the light of the world. Or worse, if the damn zombie had gotten lucky. The eye socket was a convenient channel to the brain, after all.

Everything became a blur—or rather, more of one. Kell felt himself drifting off when someone mentioned an injection. That woke him up enough to agree and wait for the party to start.

Nothing in his life prepared Kell for the next hour. No amount of tragedy, death, or acts of battlefield medicine can properly build the framework your mind needs to really understand how nerve-wracking it is to have someone deep cleaning a gash in your face and sewing it shut.

Every pass of the needle went right in front of his eye, close in a way even lovers rarely managed. The local anesthetic numbed him perfectly for the task, but the deadening of sensation spread unevenly. Parts of his face felt oddly slack, others cold.

During the procedure, Kell was utterly awake. Totally sober in a way that made everything seem hyper real. A large part of this awareness was an intense fear that the enemy strike teams would attack at any moment and cause the stranger knitting his flesh back together to flinch in surprise.

What would the sudden, nearby sound of gunfire do to those delicate motions? This was what ran through Kell McDonald's mind ten times a second for what felt like ages.

Lucky for him, the actual shooting started between stitches while the line was slack. Kell was pleased to see his...doctor? What did you call the stranger sewing you back together? Who and whatever they were called, the man doing the work barely reacted to the shots. Kell was suitably impressed.

Kell found himself deeply uninterested in the fight. Getting your face split in half had a way of creating perspective. He worried for his friends and hoped all was going well, but didn't dwell on it. There was nothing he could do. Instead he let the doctor do his work. Kell reminded himself that the gunfight portion wouldn't have been his shining moment anyway. The plan had been to put him on the roof with the snipers and arm him with a bow. Hard to focus on an assault with a sharp yard of aluminum jutting out from your vitals.

“Almost done,” the doctor said an interminable time later. Kell swiveled his eyes to see the man's tongue caught between his teeth as he concentrated. “There. Finished. Lay still while I put something on this, and then you can move around.”

“Sure,” Kell said. As he was no longer in danger of having a needle shoved in his eye by accident if he moved, he slowly bent his neck from side to side. It was definitely going to be stiff tomorrow from holding tension for so long.

Just as the last thin strip of bandage was taped in place, the guard standing in the hallway opened the door. Mason rushed through a second later, a stranger in hunting togs draped across his arms. The man was bleeding and unconscious and Kell threw himself to his feet to avoid having the guy dropped on him where he lay.

“We need him alive,” Mason said.

The doctor paused as he wiped his hands on a cloth. “Alright,” he said. “Why?”

“Because,” Mason said, his tone urgent, “right before he lost consciousness he told me he knows all the backup locations for these research stations.”

The doctor didn't get it right away, but Kell did. If the enemy on the table in front of them hadn't been lying to save his skin, then the information was invaluable. Knowing where the rest of the research stations would relocate to would give the Alliance a huge advantage.

“I'll help any way I can,” Kell said, fighting back his exhaustion and preparing himself for a long, long night.

Thirty-Two

Two days later the world looked like a much smaller place than it had been in years.

Kell had done what he could to assist Donald, his previously unnamed doctor. Donald turned out to be a former veterinarian. Kell had to tap out an hour into the rough surgery, overtaken by exhaustion, and fell into what could charitably be called sleep when he reached the nave and his bed. Emily tried to wake him several times, and even Kell was forced to agree that the fourteen hours he was dead to the world for were closer to coma than normal rest.

He woke with a cramped bladder and a mighty appetite, and spent a few hours waiting for the patient to come out of his own repose.

By the time Kell woke again, the man was awake and busy informing everyone who would listen that every fear they had about the people behind the research facilities was valid.

“How many times am I going to have to repeat it?” asked the injured enemy soldier, who said his name was Greg.

“As many times as you're asked,” Kell said. It was morning on that second day, and he had only heard bits and pieces over breakfast. Greg had come around in the middle of the night. “If it helps, I don't need the details. Just give me broad strokes. What are we facing, here?”

Greg was being guarded constantly, but had one hand cuffed to a chain secured to his hospital bed. There were three in the recovery area, which was another fairly small room set in the hallway leading to the lab. He sighed, then grimaced as the change in the pressure of his torso caused his wounds to flex.

“Ah, that fucking hurts,” he mumbled. He took a drink of water with his free hand, and then cleared his throat.

“First thing you have to know is where it started,” Greg said. “It was about five years before the plague.”

Kell put up a hand. “This doesn't sound like broad strokes,” he said. “I don't need a history lesson.”

“Yeah, you do,” Greg said. “You want to know what you're up against, then you need to understand the scope. To do that—”

“Fine, okay,” Kell said. “Go on.”

“So about ten years ago, some committee or whatever in the Department of Defense gets a hair up their ass about what we do if there's some kind of game-changer. Nuclear war, biological attack, whatever. Everyone knows about the bunkers in Texas, and there were others, too. Those places were always meant for plain survival. Food, water, some power, that sort of thing.”

“But the bunkers in Maryland are different,” Kell said.

Greg nodded. “You almost don't believe it even when you see it. There are three of them, and they're huge. All of us who've lived out in the world since the shit began know the Texas bunkers were big, but those things were meant for maximum people, minimum of everything else. The Rebound facilities are much more.”

“Rebound?” Kell prompted.

“Stupid name, but that's what the project was called,” Greg said. “The idea was to renovate those three bunkers solely to create a backstop in case something catastrophic happened. Not just to keep politicians or powerful people alive. Rebound was stocked with the best of everything you'd need to do research in any branch of science you can think of. It was meant to be a haven for the best minds in the world.”

Kell snorted. “Sounds nice. So what happened?”

Greg blinked. “Nothing happened. Or rather, everything happened the way it was meant to when the plague hit us. Rebound went live, and people from all over the country were escorted there.”

“You weren't one of them,” Kell said. “You mentioned living out in the world.”

“Yeah,” Greg said. “I first saw the place about a year ago. They gave me a fucking guided tour, if you can believe it. We're talking hundreds of tons of supplies, everything from weaponry to food to all the weird shit their nerds needed to make their lab work. They even showed me their reactor.”

Kell's eyebrows shot up. “As in...”

“Nuclear reactor, yeah,” Greg said. “It's not as big as you think and it's buried underground. Apparently it can run for like forty years or something. All the power they'll ever need.”

“I'm still not sure why I should be so afraid of these people,” Kell said. “Scientists and administrators don't scare me. All the really bad things they're responsible for were made possible by people like you. Outsiders who worked for them.”

Greg shook his head. “I'm not done. See, one of the three bunkers is pure research. It's not just for the plague, either. People at the top of their fields were selected to go there to continue their work. Rebound is meant to keep continuity, was how they put it.”

He licked his lips, took another drink of water. “Think about the sort of long-term planning that takes. The most advanced research in pretty much every kind of science never stopped. It's all going on there. Won't mean much if no one can ever use it.

“Which brings me to the other bunkers. One of them houses two thousand soldiers. Not just grunts, either, but leaders. Specialists in taking down crooked regimes. Generals who know how to get a population to work with them for everyone's benefit. Some of them are Rebound's designers. The other bunker is a mixed bag, but even it's full of engineers, architects, every kind of person you need to start the ball rolling.”

Kell got it. The implications were still unfolding in his mind, but he began to understand. “They want to restart society. That's not terrible.”

“No,” Greg said. “Which is why people like me help them. And you're wrong; they aren't going to do anything. They're already doing it.”

Kell blinked. “I assumed they would try to cure the plague first.”

Greg shrugged. “They've been working on it, sure. But this isn't just about walking into town and telling people they're boss, not like those UAS assholes tried to do. It's a long, thought-out process drawn by people expert in getting people to follow them. You and your allies don't do much travel to the east coast or the northeast, right?”

“No,” Kell said. “Not a lot.”

“See, I know that because if you did, you'd know Rebound is already really strong there. The bunkers were just the seed. They've been giving refuge to people who need it, sending doctors out into communities, doing everything from helping people reinforce their defenses to planning crop layouts for maximum yield.”

Kell chewed on the inside of his lip thoughtfully.

“Thing is,” Greg said, his tone almost careful, “they were subtle about it. It started out with them helping some people, then doing more. They won hearts, man. Do you get that? They didn't ask for anything in return. When they started setting up outside the bunkers, they invited people to join them. Said it was totally voluntary, but made the terms too good for anyone who's had to live outside in this nightmare to refuse.

“Communities voted. People were happy to be a part of something doing so much good. You wanted to know why Rebound and what they've put together is so dangerous? It's because most people are true believers. They've got forty thousand people spread across three states ready to answer the call.”

“That's impossible,” Kell said. “There's no way that many people went unnoticed.”

“You said it yourself,” Greg replied. “Your people don't see the east coast. There were a lot of people in those states. That made for a lot of survivors, and more join up every day.”

“When you talk about them that way, it makes Rebound sound like a good thing,” Kell said.

“It is,” Greg said. “It's not like they're over there torturing people or whatever. They've cleared thousands of acres of land and roads of zombies. They worked out something in their labs that does the trick over huge areas. There aren't any marauders in the territory they control, because Rebound puts trained soldiers in with militiamen and sends them patrolling with brand-new weapons in armored vehicles. It's a pretty nice place to live. The fact that the land over the bunkers has basically everything you need to build and run a city helps, too.”

Kell frowned. “If you're so sure they're good people, why are you giving us all this information?”

Greg shrugged again. “I was in the Army for four years when I was younger,” he said. “That got me put into the special ops group for Rebound. I knew I'd be sent into some fucked-up situation or another. We even knew we might have to strike one of the research facilities. I always thought it was wrong to take people for these things, but I didn't know they were being killed. When I told your man after I'd been shot that I could give him information, I was trying to save my own ass. After I woke up and they explained what this place was doing to people...” Greg trailed off, his face troubled.

“It's tough,” Kell said. “Because you can't reconcile the people who've done so much for you and yours with this sort of cold-blooded business.”

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.”