by Joshua Guess
He fell to the ground clutching at his neck. Mason leveled the pistol at the other guard, who had frozen solid.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Mason told him. “Are you going to make me?”
In response, the guard slowly let the gun rotate on his extended finger and handed it over.
“Give me spare magazines if you have them. Any other weapons, too,” Emily said. “We’ve got work to do.”
On the ground, the injured guard was turning colors. Mason regarded him coldly as his partner stripped both of gear and handed them over. “Anyone got a pen?”
The crouching guard, fear glazing his features, reached into his breast pocket. Mason pulled it apart and flicked open the gravity knife that had belonged to his victim a few seconds earlier. “Lucky you. Your friend just saved your life.”
Guided by the guards moving with them, they found the armory. It wasn’t very big since it wasn’t the main armory, which was a massive vault on another floor, but they didn’t need to outfit an army. Mason’s weapons were stored there right alongside Emily and Kell’s, as well as all the stuff taken from their people from the convoy. Mason felt a pang of guilt upon thinking of them. He wanted to go check, make sure they hadn’t been taken by surprise by the zombie attacks. It was stupid. They were fully able to take care of themselves, and they would have been the first to tell him to prioritize the people in the cells who couldn’t do anything but sit and wait.
When they left the tiny room—Mason actually had to feed weapons out bucket-brigade style—every member of their unit carried weapons in their hands, on their belts, and stuffed into backpacks.
“Do we split up?” Emily asked. “If one group freed the prisoners, the other could hunt down zombies.
Mason pondered before shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. There aren’t many of us. Once we have a bigger group, yeah. But if you want to split off on your own, that’s your call. I know you’ll make it.”
“No, I’ll stay with the group. I actually thought you’d want to run off,” Emily said.
Mason looked back at the trio of guards now festooned with weapons. “I want to watch out for them. They’re not used to this kind of thing.”
Andi pursed her lips. “Hello? Standing right here, dude.”
Mason gave her a crooked grin. “Hey, you guys are awesome. Not many people will do what you did when they’re caught flat-footed. But we’re the experts here. Let us make sure you aren’t overwhelmed, okay?”
They agreed, though Andi shot him a dirty look. Emily took up the rear guard, Mason the front, and they set off toward the prison section.
The floor was eerily silent and empty of people. Mason thought—hoped—they were all locked safely in whatever rooms they could reach. This was another dual-purpose level, though he wasn’t sure if there were any residential units on it. The prison section took up less than a tenth of the space, and he hadn’t had a chance to see much beyond that.
They were halfway to the prison complex when the first bodies appeared.
“Oh, fuck me,” Andi said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” Mason said in a voice he wasn’t sure carried past his own ears.
The bodies scattered around the confluence of hallways were mostly children. Five in all, with two adults whose bodies were so badly mauled that Mason was instantly sure they’d thrown themselves in front of the little ones long past the point where it should have even been possible.
There were no zombies present, a small blessing. The tiny, ravaged forms lay still, but he knew it wouldn’t be for long. If their killers had moved on, it meant they had other prey, and the children were still in good enough shape to rise.
Goddammit.
“Emily, I need you to take the others and go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you in a minute or two.”
Andi spun to face him. “Why? What are you going to do?”
“They’re going to rise,” Emily said gently. “He’s going to prevent it from happening. He just doesn’t want you to have to see.”
Andi’s jaw set, her mouth tightening into a line. For a moment, Mason was sure she was going to stay, to demand to be here for it. Some people did that. They needed to etch those horrible moments in their memory. Reasons varied. Mason thought most people did it to prove something to themselves. Or maybe it was about knowing what you saw, even if it gave you nightmares, rather than seeing the infinitely worse in your imagination.
But she didn’t. Instead, Andi nodded and gestured for the others to follow Emily. He went about the work with as much reverence as possible. He pulled a tool from his recovered bag, one almost every survivor kept with them outside a community. A simple spike made from a filed-down screwdriver.
Mason took several deep breaths and blinked back tears. The little bodies were almost too much for him. They always were. No one could maintain a heart of stone forever, and in that moment he couldn’t stop thinking about Bobby and what he had gone through. Which led to him thinking of what the parents of these children would suffer.
As for the pain and terror the children themselves endured before the end, Mason had to wrench his thoughts away from that direction. When they began to drift that way, something wild and dark started moving inside his chest in response. An urge to find every coward who ran away and make them suffer for weeks for letting this happen.
He slid the spike home as many times as it took. That was who he was. That was what he did.
The necessary thing, no matter what it did to him.
When this was over, he would help take care of the bodies if possible. It was the least he could do for lives cut so stupidly, tragically short.
He found Emily and the others waiting only a dozen yards away, hunkered down in a hall a few turns from the awful place now behind him. Physically, anyway. Mason thought he’d carry it with him for a long time to come.
The others stood as he approached. Every face was haunted to some degree, even Emily’s.
He stopped in front of them, hands running on autopilot to check the placement of his weapons. Not quite a nervous habit, but certainly a thoughtful one.
“If those two guards are still in that hallway when we’re done,” he said, surprising even himself, “I’m going to kill both of them.”
Andi’s face was fierce, but it was the stout black man with blood crusting the side of his face who spoke. “If you don’t, we will.”
Mason was starting to like these people.
Kell
Not only did the guards leave him alone, they left him a gun. Which left him with a dilemma and an opportunity.
“Here’s the problem,” Kell said to the cowering scientists. “I’m concerned that if I leave you alive, you’re going to try all this over again. Maybe not here, but somewhere. I can’t let that happen.”
“You’d kill us in cold blood like that?” someone asked from behind cover.
Kell snorted. “To save lives? Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong, I’d lose sleep over it. I have a bad habit of holding onto guilt, even when it’s dumb guilt. I’d still do it. I would just lock you in one of the lab rooms while I destroy every bit of your research, but that would require me to use fire. You’re smart people. I don’t have to explain to you all the reasons that would be a terrible idea.”
He deeply hoped they didn’t grasp the real reason he wanted to avoid such a thing; he needed this lab. Or rather, this lab needed to exist. It was far too valuable to risk damaging.
“Options,” Kell said. “You have one. Just the one. You destroy the work. Right here and now. If you do this, I don’t have to kill you. When I turn you over to whoever ends up in charge of this place, I tell them Ian was driving the research and that all of you deliberately slowed him down to keep it from being finished. I’ll even argue for leniency for you. You’ll probably end up doing labor or something, but you’ll be alive.”
“We’ll have to discuss it,” said another hidden scientist.
Kell shook his head. �
�Get to it, then. I’m not going anywhere. You have three minutes starting now.”
The fact that it took them the whole three minutes said a lot about how comfortable these people had become with their power.
He tried not to think about what must be going on above. Too much dwelling was torturous. Knowing he could help clear out the zombies in the bunker and also knowing what he was doing in this room was not optional work created a tension in his head. Better to focus on making sure the work in front of him was being done correctly.
Considering the gargantuan volume of paper records, the job would have taken days if not for whatever forward-thinking designer had sketched the lab out. While not as large as the other levels, the space was still several times the size of any lab Kell had worked in. This was because the people in charge of the Project Rebound would have had no idea what the lab might be needed for. They just knew that in the event it was needed, it would have to be able to serve many purposes.
Hence the variety of sealed rooms, some of which had very specific purposes. At the far end of the level, down an isolated hallway lined floor to ceiling with ceramic tile, was an incinerator. Big enough to fit two cadavers at a time, the hungry maw made dealing with the paperwork, hard drives, and memory sticks as simple as hauling them from one end of the space to the other.
Even so, it took a subjective eternity. Hard drives had to be pulled, and Kell was forced to follow the doctors around to make sure nothing was squirreled away. By the time the job was done, everyone was exhausted and hungry.
“We’re leaving in a minute,” Kell told them once the last body slumped into a chair. “I’m taking you directly to the detention level and throwing you in a cell until things calm down.”
This announcement was met with a chorus of dissent, which Kell waved away.
“I’ll protect you,” he assured the group. “And if not, I’ll lock you in room up there. I don’t think it’ll come to that. It’s been hours. Pretty sure that level will have been cleared by now.”
“You have no way of knowing that,” said the older woman. “I’m not walking into that situation blind just because you trust your hunches.”
“Call it an educated guess,” Kell replied. “A bunch of our people are being held there. Mason and Emily would have gone for backup. That was part of the plan, so it should be clear. I’m actually more worried about what your people might do to you.”
Herding the scientists wasn’t quite as hard as herding cats, but it got easier once they made it a little way into the detention level. Groups of people moved about the place, some hauling bodies while others bent their backs to clean up the blood and gore with grim faces. When a group of them approached and started asking questions, the older woman in Kell’s little nerd herd tried to order them to take Kell into custody.
Instead, weapons were produced and brandished. Kell was allowed to say his piece.
“We’ll put them in the cells,” assured a man who introduced himself as Tim. He was one of the haggard survivors. “You should catch up with your people.”
Kell nodded. “Any idea where they are?”
Tim pointed at the ceiling. “All I can tell you is to go up. They said they’d clear everything above us, then take the elevator down to make sure the lower levels were good.”
“They’re clearing the entire bunker by themselves?” Kell asked, glancing skyward. “No, never mind. Of course they are. I don’t suppose anyone could lend me a weapon? I’m not a big fan of guns. Be happy to trade as long as you promise not to shoot me.”
He thought it unlikely; whatever goodwill Emily and the others garnered by fighting for these people seemed to have rubbed off on him. No one looked at him like the man who had killed the world. Of course, the adrenaline rush and unspeakable carnage might have just overridden that particular reaction. Whatever the reason, Kell wasn’t looking any gift horses in mouths.
He would have liked a spear or even a staff. Those were so familiar to him they might as well be a part of his body. But even if such a thing were available, using either in the tight confines of the hallways here would have been problematic at best. Kell settled on one of the mass-produced steel clubs the survivors of New America preferred over the larger but lighter heavy machetes used across the Union. Two feet long and sporting a bulbous tip, the thing made him feel like he was waving around a giant metal dick. He eyed the weapon before shaking his head slightly.
“Yeah, trust me;” Tim said with a tired grin, “we all thought the same thing.”
From there he walked through sights made all too familiar from years of living through the end of the world. Men and women weeping over the bodies of the fallen, children wandering around hollow-eyed while looking for missing parents. Forms wrapped in sheets as makeshift shrouds, some of them so small that Kell had to look away.
The interior of the bunker was not quite a wasteland, but it had taken a beating. Kell found no satisfaction in the idea that this idyllic place should suffer so. Only a tiny number of the people here had ever been his enemy.
Using directions given to him by Tim, Kell made his way to a stairwell. He told himself it was better to leave the use of the elevators to the crews responding to the emergency. Maybe the physician now locked in a cage would get a reduced sentence for helping.
Kell stepped over two dead guards on the stairwell landing, one with what looked like a pen jammed through his windpipe. Weird.
It struck him as he ascended the steps how utterly normal it felt. This little slice of the world could have been any building in the forty years before the Fall. That came to an end when he stepped onto the next floor. As soon as the door opened, the smell of blood and death assaulted him. There were no sounds of fighting, which could have been a good or bad sign depending on your level of optimism.
Less people moved about here, and the carnage was more immediate. Something had dragged a body a good long way, painting the floor with a wide slash of blood for the entire length of the hallway in front of him. Kell moved cautiously but quickly. The trick was to step as lightly as possible—not as easy with one real foot—while constantly scanning across the quadrants of your vision for threats. Look as he might, Kell came up empty. He came across dead humans and zombies alike on his tense walk through the hallways, but no living people. The dead all had the telltale indentation around an ear, so at least Kell knew none of them would rise behind him.
He made it all the way to the other end of the level before seeing another living soul, but when he found them it was all at once. They were clustered around, on top of, and inside open storage containers. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people. A makeshift barrier sat in front of them along with a thin line of heavily armed people readying themselves to move. None of them noticed him coming, which Kell could hardly hold against them. They looked on death’s door with exhaustion, and he knew all too well what even a few hours of relentless combat could do to a person. Even so, they cleaned their weapons and checked their gear, which let Kell get within thirty feet of the group.
“You guys look like you’ve been busy,” he said in a loud voice.
Emily jerked her head around and locked her eyes on him. Without a word, she sprinted over and threw her arms around his middle, doing her best to crush his ribs. He returned the embrace with equal passion if not force.
“Wondered whether you’d be okay down there,” Mason said.
Kell gave his best nonchalant shrug. “You know, things happened. Ian released all the zombies, got shot in the face for it, and then I forced those dick scientists to destroy their research before I threw them in jail. Nothing major.”
Mason’s mouth fell open in a rare unguarded moment. “Wow. Really?”
“It’s not as cool as it sounds,” Kell admitted.
Emily snorted. “These stories never are.”
Kell waved an arm at the scene around them, which included a great many zombies piled up in drifts like rotting snow. “You guys seem to have one yourself. I’d have though
t you’d be to the top of this place by now.”
“Might have been,” Emily said, stretching her neck from side to side with a pained expression. “Think I pulled something. Anyway, we probably would have gone further but the people on the floor above us somehow managed to get communications back up. They put together a plan and drove their zombies down the steps and toward us.”
Kell looked over the hastily constructed barrier. “Ah. Grind ’em up from both sides.”
Emily nodded. “Worked pretty well, too. We’d already cleared most of the level and had the people herded into these boxes, so it made sense. Took longer than any of us expected.”
“The good news,” Mason said, “is that it looks like people on the other levels have either stopped or contained most of the zombies. Some help came down from the surface for the top levels, and the bottom ones didn’t have nearly as many in storage.”
“Probably owing the fact that the higher ranks live down there,” Emily added.
Kell put the club on his shoulder. “So, where do we go next? Who needs the help the most?”
Emily and Mason glanced at each other. Emily cocked her head. “Aren’t you going to tell us?”
“Fuck no,” Kell said. “I’m officially and forever out of the leadership game. You’ve been running things in my life almost since I met you. I’m happy with that arrangement. Point me in a direction.”
God, was he ready to not make any decisions. Intellectually he recognized that as of that moment, the worst of their problems were, if not over, at least not imminently lethal. The rest was details. What Kell wanted most of all was to tie up loose ends, make sure New America wouldn’t collapse under its own weight, and get the hell back home.
First, there was work to do. Kell followed behind Mason and Emily’s group so he could get to it.
As they moved along, Mason leaned over and said out of the corner of his mouth, “You know that thing looks like a giant cock, right?”