The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living

by Guess, Joshua

With a frustrated snort, Juel sheathed her knife and stepped inside. She knelt, slapping hands down on the mouths of her wayward scouts. None too gently, at that.

  Both snoozing women woke with a start, their reactions dangling across the edge of violence before they realized what was happening and stopped themselves.

  While Juel spoke to them in a low but clearly irritated voice, Kell stepped toward the front. There was a partial wall set just behind the observation window, creating a narrow stall to stand in while watching the world.

  The ridge in front of the window rolled forward gently for several yards, the trees and undergrowth following the slope. Past that things picked up the pace, dropping off sharply in more of the artificial cliffs so common in the area. Through the tangle of bushes, vines, and branches, a space had been cleared. It was angled such that no one below could possibly notice it, no wider than a basketball. It was through that small empty spot Kell saw the enemy for the first time.

  The camp was distant, at least a quarter mile. The land was flatter to the west, the ridges and hills becoming thick as the road stretched in Kell's direction. The woods all around were being leveled, stumps ringing the campsites. Kell took it in with detached interest, his brain too overwhelmed by the scope of the threat before him to allow for any overt emotional reaction.

  Hundreds of vehicles filled his sight. Thousands of men and women milled about. There were tents beyond counting, the largest big enough to drive trucks into. There were armored personnel carriers, pieces of artillery, and a myriad of other vehicles he had never seen before. Smoke spiraled from hundreds of cook fires, and in the distance he could see people drilling in neat squares.

  Lee was right about one thing; there were enough of them to roll over New Haven with the merciless strength of an ocean storm.

  Twenty

  Kell ran.

  For days, it seemed as if running was the entire purpose of him, the sum total of his reason for being. There was always a good reason for him to hurry, of course. He carried vital messages. Someone needed help. Zombies needed killing. Will Price wanted something to eat.

  Vital stuff.

  There was no one in New Haven better informed than Kell, Laura, and Lee about anything having to do with the enemy or the compound itself. Whatever might have been missed during their time away from Will, he caught them up on. It wasn't altruism, but a pragmatic requirement that the three of them know everything Will know. Being informed meant they had context and information should something happen to Will. In a pinch, he explained, they would be able to speak authoritatively enough to convince subordinates to listen.

  The running left him breathless, gasping for air. It rubbed his throat raw, and wouldn't it just be hilarious if Kell lost his voice, finding himself unable to give those orders?

  These were the thoughts drifting through the back of his mind as he ran, and they were the most pleasant of the lot.

  Days had passed without incident, though as he slowed and approached Will's office, he knew it couldn't last. Inside the door was a water cooler—it even worked, having been hooked up to their precious power supply—which gurgled pleasantly as he filled a cup.

  The reason the peace would fail stared him in the face as he drank; a detailed, hand-drawn map of the area surrounding New Haven showed the enemy's advance. Red push pins filled the top of the paper, broad at the top but narrowing as they moved toward the bottom. That much of the plan was working, at least. The enemy would be able to slip people by their scouts on foot, but the vast majority were being forced to use the roads Will wanted them to use.

  Reports had been coming in relentlessly, painting a vivid picture of what the enemy had endured in their approach. Hundreds dead on the UAS side already, blown apart by traps or taken by small groups of Union operators.

  Kell understood the psychological havoc those teams were inflicting. He had done it himself, at one point or another. He had been the ghost in the woods, waiting for a man to lose focus. One second there were six men around the fire, the next only five. The sheer terror of realizing you weren't safe for even a second was enough to shake even the most seasoned veteran.

  He knew, because he'd been one of the men around the fire, too.

  “Any news?” Kell gasped as he approached Lee, who was guarding Will's office door.

  Lee glanced at the sky. “We got word from out people out west. There's a storm headed this way. Scouts are saying the UAS are gearing up to move.”

  Kell frowned. “Using the storm for cover?”

  Lee nodded. “Seems like it. Will is talking to Dodger and a bunch of officers now.”

  “What about?”

  Lee gave him a look that clearly questioned Kell's intelligence, but it was absent from his voice. “Planning an attack, if I had to guess. If they're gonna be on the move, Will's bound to take the chance to hit them hard.”

  The meeting didn't take long—they rarely did. Even in the best of times, pointless politicking was frowned on.

  Eager to talk to Will and find out the details of the meeting, Kell tried to step through the office door between people exiting. Instead, Dodger appeared and put one hand on Kell's arm, the other on Lee's.

  “Hello, boys,” Dodger said with a predatory smile. “Guess who you're working for tonight?”

  It was, in all honesty, a dark and stormy night.

  Occasional bursts of lightning flashed above, briefly illuminating the woods. Kell was not afraid of being seen; he was too far back in the trees. The rain, less severe beneath the boughs woven into a canopy above, barely registered. He did not fear anything that might find him in the woods, be it zombies or other predators. Beyond his own ability to defend his life, there were hundreds of other people within easy shouting distance.

  Kell was afraid.

  It had been months, maybe years, since he had felt more than a flutter before a fight. The end of the world had the curious effect of turning your anxiety up to eleven and leaving it there until it burnt out. That morning, he would have sworn there was nothing left capable of setting his nerves persistently on edge. He would have been wrong.

  Droplets sprayed gently from his lips as he breathed, lost in the fat drops falling from the trees. The clouds above did their dance with physics, diffusing the light just enough to cause reflections in the rain. Barely any of it filtered to the ground beneath the towering trees, but it was enough.

  Lee, who crouched next to him, stiffened. Kell's eyes had adjusted well enough to see that much, so he was aware something was wrong even before Lee put a hand on Kell's calf and tapped out a rhythm.

  Enemy scout west of their position, the code said. Kell looked down at Lee, who was staring through an infrared scope. Kell couldn't see the enemy, and couldn't do much unless the man walked directly into him. Then again, if the scout was far enough away...

  A muffled cry was quickly silenced, followed by an equally muffled crunch. Lee relaxed somewhat, though only relative to the total-body clench he always had when in the field.

  Lee grunted, a pleased sort of sound. “Laura got him,” he said in a low voice.

  Headlights appeared not long after, their light shattering against raindrops. Four hundred fighters waited, surely as tense as Kell was, split between the two sides of the road. The tension had grown, an antarctic void in his belly, with every mile down the hidden side roads. The feeling had only grown worse as they made their way through the drenched woods, readying themselves for the fight ahead.

  The enemy had been made bold. The oncoming lights were not the first group of UAS soldiers to pass this way. The soldiers waiting with Kell had stayed farther back, hiding, as the vanguard passed through. Those were the troop carriers, and men on foot. They were the trail breakers who dealt with any problems. Their scouts hadn't been bad. Kell had watched them move around the woods, after all. There was simply no way for them to check as far and as deeply as they would have needed to find the hidden fighters.

  Lee had explained that the UAS woul
d probably expect a roadblock if Union forces planned an attack. Traditional thinking would be to use the cover of the storm to kill as many of the enemy as possible. It was the most efficient and logical use of force possible, and to do otherwise would be suicidally wasteful for a group as outnumbered and outgunned as the Union was.

  Traditional thinking was ignorant of several factors.

  They had let the vanguard pass, confident if still wary. There were no downed trees or other roadblocks to bar their passage. Kell and the Union soldiers had even waited until the second UAS column's scouts had mostly passed. The one killed by Laura must have been a straggler.

  Once the scouts had moved on, making sure the way was clear for the second column, Kell's people had moved in. The bravest of the lot had darted forward, working furiously at the treeline less than twenty feet from the edge of the road. Their reports had been clear; time between scouts and column were limited to ten minutes at most.

  The lead vehicles passed, quicker and more agile than those following behind. Kell's heart hammered against his sternum as more lights swam into view. He knew when the lead trucks reached the edge of the area controlled by Union soldiers, because the unmistakable crack of trees falling filled the night.

  He was up and moving before the boles could hit the ground. More broken trees fell with the deafening sound of rifle shots, their trunks weakened and only held up with wooden blocks to be pulled at exactly the right moment.

  The vehicles dotting the road, large and small, were being cut off from each other. The point wasn’t to harm the soldiers driving and guarding them—though that would be a nice bonus—but to create as much confusion and havoc as possible.

  The first ranks of Union soldiers slid to a halt inside the tree line, lobbing flash-bangs. Kell didn't envy the people closest to the ensuing detonations, which filled the night with a sound like God's own firecrackers.

  Kell pulled his knives, painted black to reduce the chance a stray reflection would give him away. He plunged through the trees, wading through men still trying to blink away their blindness. The first he punched in the face, the knife giving his fist quite a lot more stopping power than he was used to. The man gargled a scream as his jaw disintegrated beneath armored knuckles.

  Barely slowing, Kell whipped an elbow into the face of a second man, the armor plates in his jacket spreading the impact out along his arm while shattering the nose of his enemy. The man's head snapped back, bounced against the side of the beast of a truck behind him. He slid to the wet pavement bonelessly.

  Lee stepped through the space Kell cleared, pulling himself onto the vehicle. A third man was struggling to regain his senses, raising his weapon toward Kell. In response, he grabbed the soldier by the wrist, yanked him off balance, and flipped the knife into a reverse grip before slashing it across the man's throat. Kell held onto the dying soldier's arm long enough to be sure he wouldn't be shooting anyone.

  A crackling hiss and a flare of day-bright light filled the night, creating a tiny sun above Kell's head.

  Lee jumped down from the vehicle. “Run!” he shouted.

  Kell ran.

  They left the piece of artillery behind, along with the three soldiers guarding the side of it they'd hit. It didn't explode. Explosives were complicated, incredibly dangerous to carry around, and too precious to use when other options were available. They would have made for a more dramatic moment, certainly, but Kell was perfectly happy to get away while leaving the enemy to figure out exactly what had happened.

  Thermite, or more accurately a modified military version called thermate, was easy to make. New Haven produced it by the barrel. Lee laughed, nearly a giggle, as the two of them pelted into the woods.

  “That thing is fucked,” Lee said when they finally slowed. “I put it right on the barrel.”

  “You sure that will ruin it?” Kell asked, gasping for breath.

  Lee snorted. “You can weld railroad tracks with that shit, man. It was already melting the barrel when we left.”

  All up and down the line of broken trees and stopped trucks, gunfire sounded. The screams of men and women filled the night in a discordant piece of grim music. Scared as he still was—now balanced by relief—Kell didn't move to help. He and Lee had been two of the first off the mark, and closer to the road than most. Many, many others faced enemies who had time to recover from their disorientation, time to raise and aim weapons.

  They were to hit their target, deposit the thermate in order to disable the big weapons, and run back to cover in the trees. Under no circumstances was any Union soldier to return to the road, no exceptions. The orders were clear.

  Kell tensed as the sounds of violence and death washed over him. Lee's rush of elation ebbed as fast as it came, leaving him coiled and ready to move.

  Kell jerked now and then when some new horror rang through the night, and more than once he caught Lee start toward him as if to grab his arm. He had a sneaking suspicion the other man had been ordered to stop him from running back to rejoin the fight.

  He wondered idly how Lee had been given that order, since the two of them had been together since Dodger hauled them away from Will's office. Dodger was just that good, he supposed.

  There was no need to worry. The time when he had been bent on self-destruction had long since passed, and no matter how the deaths of his fellow citizens tore at him, Kell knew better than to take any more risks tonight.

  There would be plenty of time for that in the days ahead.

  Part Four

  Summer:

  Storms

  Twenty-One

  Kell watched as the UAS poured into the enormous clearing around New Haven. Hundreds of men and women, faces grim as they readied for combat, moved in sync. He was far enough away to be well out of the fight, though a stray bullet could easily reach him from his watch post.

  The western clearing was big enough to make seeing the surrounding woods on one side almost impossible if you were standing on the other, except for the narrow throat at the entrance to the clearing. Add in the rolling hills—including the one the community itself was built on—and it made for difficult terrain for attackers.

  They had lost nearly half the volunteers on that rainy night several days before, but everyone agreed the cost was well worth the reward. That sacrifice had purchased an invaluable advantage; the number of big guns the enemy could bring against them was reduced to a handful.

  Word from Mason was the UAS had officially decided to stop fucking around. Their leadership no longer cared about liberating the vast stores of supplies here in order to feed the troops making the attack run. They wanted to cut the head off the Union, to make an example.

  Kell wondered how well that news was sitting with the hungry people actually doing the fighting.

  Through his binoculars, he saw uneasy looks on the faces of enemy soldiers. Many of them seemed put off by the ease with which they were allowed to stage their assault. There the target itself sat, only a few hundred yards away.

  “Come on, you fuckers,” Lee, at Kell's side as always, said.

  “Be patient,” Kell replied. “We want as many as possible before...”

  As if on cue, a massive explosion rocked New Haven, followed by several smaller detonations. Soldiers all along the enemy lines raised weapons to shoulders, firing at the few milling figures atop the wall. Others fired shoulder-mounted rockets and mortars. New Haven became a pillar of flying dust and chips of stone as houses inside her boundaries were destroyed, the wall pelted with thousands of bullets.

  The zombies on the wall fell quickly, and while the sight of New Haven taking such a heavy beating sent a pang of sadness through him, Kell took solace that no living people were inside to be harmed.

  “Here we go,” Lee said.

  From all around the woods, shots rang out. What Kell could see was only the beginning of what the UAS faced along the length of the road their forces stretched down. The vanguard fell almost immediately, snipers having picke
d their targets while the opening salvo rained hell on the buildings.

  Kell and Lee were not part of the assault force, though Lee chafed at being kept out of the fight. Kell, on the other hand, was happy to observe and act as support. Guns were not his area of expertise. As horrifying as the slaughter was, it still fascinated him to watch it happen. All through the woods, men would be taking shots from behind armored panels, moving to new positions as needed. The trees themselves gave a great deal of cover, and much work had been done to build as many sheltered areas as possible.

  Kell had been one of the people cutting down trees to lay sideways as backstops capable of soaking up bullets. His arms still didn't feel right.

  The tactic wouldn't have worked if the UAS had any suspicion the Union volunteers were there. And why would they? Who in their right mind would plant themselves in essentially plain sight with minimal protection while an invading army rolled through?

  Question: answered.

  Kell watched the front ranks of the vanguard fall, and could see the confusion and chaos reverberate down the road. Part of the problem was the language barrier, as a huge portion of the enemy were conscripts from South America. The leadership, almost certainly shouting orders in English, might not be getting through.

  It seemed the conscripts were better off, however. They had, according to all reports, been survivors out in the world. Many of the other UAS soldiers had been drafted from bunker-dwellers, who had less time to get used to the brutal, murderous place the world had become.

  Less than two minutes after the Union fighters began shooting, the UAS called the retreat. This was only a fraction of their total number, meant to be a probe of New Haven's strength. It left hundreds dead, their soldiers in disarray.

  Killing soldiers had only been part of the plan. Just like the night of the storm, the more valuable goal was to remove the enemy's ability to hit them from a distance.