by Joshua Guess
To achieve that goal, Emily had bloodied her hands. Blood being a given in the world after The Fall, she preferred it belong to an enemy.
Mason
For days, Bobby alternated between not talking at all and a stream-of-consciousness flood of words threatening to drown Mason by sheer volume.
They were camped out in one of dozens of public campsites near Rebound. These were small clusters of wooden buildings just big enough for three or four people to crawl into and sleep. They sat arrayed around a central fire pit, with a clever system of extendable metal tubing acting as a radiator if needed. Mason studied the mechanism for a long while, interested in the device. You could extend the tube close to the pit, light a fire, and the heat would transfer through the tube and into the floor of your shack.
“Neat,” Mason muttered at it. He and Bobby were alone.
Bobby was staring at the fire, in one of his silent moods. Until a few seconds later, when he wasn’t.
“Tell me the rest,” Bobby said.
Mason turned away from the pipes and found a seat on one of the concrete slabs next to the crackling blaze. “You spent three hours on the repository. You’ve read or at least skimmed most of the major points. You know they’ve been lying to you.”
Bobby shook his head. “Keeping stuff from us, for sure. Maybe lying, which is why I want to know the rest. What they did to piss off your people so badly.”
Mason caught the phrasing and filed it away. Bobby was referring to his leaders as separate, as ‘they’ rather than including himself with them. Interesting.
“You already know about trying to take Kell several months back.” Bobby nodded. “They tried before. Killed a lot of people I cared about and took our home from us. That’s how we ended up back in Haven.”
“I know all that,” Bobby said. “I mean, you said it before. But why were they after you in the first place? I’ve heard bits and pieces...”
“They were taking prisoners,” Mason said. “Rounding up folks who died for a little while and came back, but not as zombies. We called them half-lives for a while, but Kell didn’t like it. He calls them Resets. Because that’s what Chimera is supposed to do when you’re hurt. Keep your body going until it can reset you.”
Bobby gazed at Mason, eyes burning with reflected fire. “We knew a lot of resources were going out. People volunteered and never came back. We thought they were homesteading.”
Mason let out a deep sigh. “No, I’m sorry. They were taking captives, observing them, then dissecting them to find out why we were different.”
Bobby jumped. “We? You’re one of them?”
“Yeah, I am,” Mason said. “One of the earliest by what we can tell. I died, but not for so long that my brain activity shut down. I won’t say the prison we stayed at was the worst I’ve ever been in, but it was bad enough. Snatching innocent people to experiment on them is some outright Nazi behavior. So we killed everyone responsible.” He cocked his head, then amended. “Everyone we could reach, anyway.”
“Is that on the repository?” Bobby asked. “If you took me back out to where we could get a signal, would there be documentation?”
“Yes,” Mason said, making himself as clear and straightforward as possible. “We have pictures of the site. Couple of them, actually, though they’re not hosted on the repository itself because of bandwidth issues. Haven has recorded interviews with people we took out of that place. Hell, we have a bunch of the people themselves.”
Bobby stared into the fire again. “It’s...hard to accept.”
“I get that,” Mason said gently. “Even if you resented the Rebound people for being safe underground, once they came up they helped you. Built a safe zone with your help. Fed you, protected you, gave you civilization again. Taking what I’m telling you as fact means feeling at least a little complicit in what they did.”
“Yeah,” Bobby agreed. “But more than that, right? It means having to stop them from doing anything like it again.”
“Again, yes,” Mason said. “That’s why I’m here. We want to work out a way to stop it. On the surface it’s about preventing war, which would happen if another attempt to take Kell came at us. But beyond that, we just want everyone to be left alone. No more research sites, people taken, innocents killed. If we can manage that, the Union will be fucking thrilled to leave New America alone.”
He deliberately named the larger community rather than Rebound, trying to separate the two in Bobby’s mind. Mason didn’t want to pick a fight with an enemy with those resources, especially since most of them lived in a heavily fortified bunker. But he recognized the potential necessity of decapitating New America’s organizational structure. The nation itself could live without its head if it came to that.
Replaying Bobby’s words in his head, Mason thought the other man might recognize it, too.
The next day, Bobby was a changed man. The jovial, light way he carried himself before was gone. In its place was someone more reserved, more suspicious. Mason believed the change was genuine, but that didn’t suddenly make him stupid enough to put more trust in the other man than necessary. When asked, Mason had created a believable fiction about arriving with a small crew who had hauled the tower and his horse in a trailer. Jessup was meant to make it look like the time it took Mason to get to New America was because he didn’t use a vehicle. It was only mildly believable, but it held together logically enough. Mason implied heavily that the deception was meant to cover a delay in the diplomatic process, which Will and the leadership at Haven had used to figure out a response to the current situation.
In reality, riding a horse here was the delaying tactic, but Mason wasn’t going to give up his agents within New America if he could help it. He would watch Bobby for any sign the man was more suspicious than he ought to be, and if so Mason would deal with it.
They returned to Rebound just before lunch. Mason had laid out the ground rules and terms for Kell’s visit before leaving on his tour of New America, and his expectation upon returning was to be presented with an outright refusal of those terms.
He went through the usual process of entering the bunker, escorted by Bobby through checkpoints until a nameless functionary guided him toward an unfamiliar meeting hall. Apparently Mason didn’t rate the same conference room where the council met this time around.
“Someone will be in to speak with you shortly,” the bland bureaucrat said as he closed the door, leaving Bobby outside.
“Awesome,” Mason replied flatly.
Mason had been suspicious when he was given and open invitation to return for this meeting. Generally, hostile nations didn’t let you stroll in and hear an answer at your whim. They’d told him to give them three days to discuss his terms, but that he could take as long as he wanted to discuss it.
When the representative came through the door, Mason knew he was right to be hesitant.
“I’m Parker,” said the new arrival, an ancient man. The door locked shut behind him. “I’m here to give you the council’s response.”
“No,” Mason said. “You’re not. You’re here because they needed to send someone expendable.”
Parker blinked. “Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean I want to die, son.”
Mason pointed at the base of the old man’s neck. “You’ve got a radiation therapy tattoo at the base of your throat, and it’s not an old one. Either you’re planning on telling me something I’m not going to like, or you’re going to do something that’s going to make me violent.”
“My, you’re perceptive,” Parker said with a shake of the head. “I’d say you have an active imagination, and you clearly do, but yes. You’re not wrong. Not fully right, but that will become clear.”
Mason waved at the chair opposite him. “Go on, fella. Have a seat. I’m not gonna make a sick old man stand the whole time. Hit me with it.”
“Thank you,” Parker said as he took a seat, letting out a relieved groan. “The council considered telling you they would acc
ept your terms to lull you into compliance, but thought that might get your dander up.”
Mason snorted a laugh. “No shit.”
Parker nodded. “Right. So instead they opted for honesty. They want your man, this McDonald, and they aim to keep him. I’m told there won’t be any more aggressive acts against your people once he’s in custody. Unfortunately, this leaves you as a prisoner. Which is where the violence you were talking about probably comes in.”
He awkwardly drew a bulky handgun from his coat, an air-powered tranquilizer. “The assumption is you’ll kill me, but they wanted to try it this way on the off chance we could avoid having any of our guards killed. I’d like to live, however much time I might have left. But those doors only open again if you’ve been drugged or I’m dead. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which, son. I can’t fight you.”
Mason had to think about it, and on a deep level the hesitation bothered him. There was a lot of distance between him and the surface, not to mention thousands of people in the immediate area. The guards surely waiting outside the door were certainly armed. They wanted him alive, probably to use as leverage against Kell, but his death would only complicate things. It wasn’t a deal breaker for them.
So: shooting would definitely be on the table. And Mason didn’t want to kill some defenseless old man.
It wasn’t a revelation that Kell was their target. The repeated attempts to take him were what precipitated this entire thing, after all. What surprised him was that they would tip their hand this early. Something had to have happened, a factor he wasn’t aware of had changed. Why else let him roam free for days after getting Kell to agree to come?
“I’ll go peacefully on one condition,” Mason said. “I want to talk to your governor. One on one. Chain me up or whatever you want to do to make them feel safe, but put the person in charge in front of me.”
Because he knew perfectly well that whatever hand was guiding this place, it was none of the people in the room from his first meeting. If these people would go to these lengths to protect a few guards when taking him, there was zero chance of putting him in a room with anyone of real importance without precautions.
“I can’t promise that,” Parker said. “But I’ll argue for it. Strongly.”
“Fair enough.” Mason pulled off his jacket and exposed his left forearm. “Here you go.”
There was a brief flash of pain when the dart went in. The tranquilizer started slow and built up speed quickly. He was vaguely aware of Bobby angrily shouting through the door, and then slumped over in his chair.
It would be incorrect to say Mason was unaffected by the drug. He certainly was. But he also didn’t get a full dose. His forearms carried more and deeper scars than the rest of his body, and for two reasons. He’d taken more injuries to them in the attack that had ended in his temporary death, and because of that they were ideal spots for Kell to experiment with. Every time he took an injury, the Chimera in his body reinforced the area with bands of the thick, fibrous material that some zombies formed as a kind of armor beneath their skin. Mason’s forearms were ridged with the stuff.
He had no intention to attack. The Chimera in his arms was slowing, maybe even absorbing, the drug, but the basic facts were still the same. He’d die if he fought back, plain and simple.
But he was able to listen, and that’s just what Mason did as he was hauled off.
Kell
“Mason has been taken,” Emily said.
Kell gave her a curious look. “Taken by the culture of New America, taken aback...”
“Into custody,” Emily clarified, a baleful gaze threatening to come out. “Word got out through our agents. They’re holding him inside Rebound itself. Presumably there are a lot of heavily armed guards outside his cell trying not to shit their pants and wishing they hadn’t drawn the short straw.”
“Okay,” Kell said, drawing out the word. “Do we have any idea why? Things were going well.”
Emily shook her head. “They didn’t put out a fucking press release, but I can guess. They’re using the hostilities with the Union as their justification, and you specifically. They’ll be claiming we’re at war and all that crap. Which is just a smokescreen for what they’re actually doing, which is using him as bait and leverage at the same time.”
“At least they’re efficient about it,” Kell mused. “Think he’ll be okay?”
It was almost a rhetorical question. They could joke while Mason was in danger because the idea that anyone could kill him was ludicrous. Kell immediately felt a pang of guilt at the thought, because of course Mason could die. His scars were indelible proof that he had, at least for a little while. Alone in a cell, all it would take was one man with a gun and a single bullet to the head.
No sympathy woke in his chest, however. For almost anyone else, Kell would have grown heartsick at the thought of being taken prisoner. Those feelings would have been based on feeling isolated, terrified, worried about what would come next. Mason wasn’t emotionless, something Kell knew all too well, but he was wired very differently. A man who has never fired a gun will flinch. His brain will scream that there is danger, causing all sorts of interesting biochemistry to happen. A man who fires a gun regularly will treat the act as normal.
Mason lived a life of extremes, from being in danger to doling out violence. Kell didn’t want him to die, but knew the man well enough to understand that for him, dying during the mission wasn’t as bad as not completing it. For nearly any other human being still alive, being taken captive by a ruthless enemy would be a life-changing event. For Mason, it was just another Monday.
“As okay as bait can ever be,” Emily said. “Though since we were already on our way, leverage seems like a better descriptor. They’re using him to make sure we behave.”
Kell stared out from their current rest area, another dead-drop location. This place was less likely to be targeted. Even with years of practice living and working in hellish surroundings when the need arose, this spot was enough to set his teeth on edge.
They sat on top of a small cylindrical water tower perhaps fifty feet high and ten wide, a smooth column of steel jutting out of broken, dead earth. The tower was the only intact structure anywhere in sight. Craters pocked the land, buildings rent and burned until only shattered fangs of blackened wood remained. Skeletons carpeted the place, some still in agonized poses from when the fire had taken them. The years wore away the ash and what little flesh remained.
He didn’t want to talk about the mission any longer. A small part of him did worry about Mason, the illogical section of his brain that placed the scarred man into a box labeling him as a friend and thus worthy of concern no matter what his logic said. But even then, Kell’s reluctance to discuss what lay ahead was rooted more in the reaction it created between him and Emily than anything else. There were huge portions of her work he knew nothing about, presumably for his own good, but the stress it put on her was obvious. He had a peripheral set of suspicions about the kinds of things Emily might be dealing with, but no experience of his own to guide him in how to help her cope.
Instead, he talked about anything else. “What do you think happened here?”
Emily looked up from her coded message. Not sharply or in annoyance, but as if she’d forgotten exactly where they were. It was a look he was used to seeing recently and that worried him too. Preoccupation led to distraction and tunnel vision. Almost nothing was more dangerous than not seeing what was around you, considering how often the scenery tried to eat you alive nowadays.
Her eyes raked the area in a single encompassing scan. “Military would be my guess. Probably in the early days. Just a few weeks in. Didn’t go well for them.”
Kell blinked. “How can you tell?”
“That it was the military, or that they didn’t come out on top?”
Kell frowned. “Both, I guess.”
She waved a hand at the ruptured pavement and blown-apart buildings. “Not much short of bombs or artillery can do
that. Not many civilians wandering around with that kind of gear. Saw a lot of places like this on the news, back when there was still news.”
Kell shook his head. “I never saw any of that, but then by the time it was bad I already lived in the woods.”
“Which was pretty fucking smart of you,” Emily said. “Weird thing was, people didn’t seem to get that the actual end times were upon us, you know? Reporters were still acting like the military bombing and shelling American cities was just another story. Like it would win them an award. Some of them stopped to ask just how bad things had to be not just for the order to be given, but for soldiers to follow it.”
She waved a hand at the devastation. “As for how I know the boys in camo had a bad day here? There aren’t any military vehicles. No barriers, no big pieces of equipment. Some other cities out there actually saw a little progress once the early swarms went down. Knock down the closest zombies; come in with their trucks and guns, set up a perimeter. Same old story over and over again, with damn few exceptions. They set up a command post, think they’ve made progress, and then a herd shows up to ruin their fucking day.”
“It makes no sense,” Kell said.
Emily gave him a curious look. “What doesn’t?”
“How something as effective as Rebound could be set up, yet the national response was so disjointed and uneven. In some places the military actually did get the job done. We have a few communities made up of those people. Then you have spots like this or one of the places where they were eventually overrun.”
Emily laughed. “Oh, sweetie. Sometimes I forget how hopelessly naïve you are when it comes to human nature. You forget not everyone is like you. I mean, everyone does that to some degree. We see something happen and imagine ourselves in the same situation and then the armchair quarterbacking starts. We’re sure we could have done it better. And you know what? Maybe we could. It’s just that any group of people, from a bunch of friends riding out of town toward safety to local governments to the mighty United States military branches, is just that. It’s made up of people. Any time you try to judge the effectiveness of a group, it’s a fool’s errand. We’re just too erratic and unpredictable when we get together.”