“You don't know these people,” Lee had said when he learned about the people joining them. “Aren't you worried?”
Kell explained why he wasn't; he trusted Josh to know his friends, and Josh trusted them. Simple.
A weight had been lifted from his shoulders almost as soon as he saw the farm, but it took nearly a week for him to figure out what it was.
It was late August, a balmy night in central Iowa. The fence was almost finished, and behind the house a familiar scene unfolded. Nearly sixty people gathered, seated on stumps and camp chairs, behind card tables and planks nailed to timbers at the last minute. In the center sat a beat-up picnic table, reassembled hundreds of miles from where it began.
Candles burned on every surface, casting soft light across the faces of men and women, children and teenagers, who had all seen more horror than anyone should ever have to endure. The warm luminescence made them beautiful—or rather, more so—even as it glinted from weapons kept close at hand.
Lee sat on Kell's left, Laura at his right. Andrea was on Laura's right, and if anyone but Kell noticed her occasionally brushing Laura's hand and sharing a playful glance, they said nothing about it. Across the table sat Josh and Jess, their friend Kincaid next to him and one of the new arrivals next to her. Courtney, Kell thought her name was.
A buzz of conversation filled the air, punctuated by laughter and the occasional slap on the back. The food was plentiful if plain, and even a boring meal was a blessing in so harsh a world. Food, water, shelter. These were the necessities of survival. People rarely mention friends and acceptance, mostly because you don't need those things to survive.
But you can't really live without them.
Kell was listening to Jess tell an incredibly dirty joke when understanding washed over him. The burden he had carried for so long was gone; he could simply be himself. Kell McDonald. Scientist. Architect of Chimera. Father. Husband.
The fear under which he had lived to one degree or another was gone, replaced by a breed of relief unimaginable a few years before. Not one of the people around him was unaware of who he was or what he had done, but they welcomed him. They loved him, and he them.
That was not the burden itself, only the symptom. The weight had been the loss of his wife, daughter, and parents. It was the black hole of living in a world without family.
Looking at the sea of faces around him, Kell knew he had one again.
The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living Page 24