by Joshua Guess
Emily turned away from them, trying to regain some measure of composure. She didn’t want to shout. These kids were growing up differently than any children ever had before. Their culture was utterly beyond Emily’s own. For them, this was a normal event. Nothing remarkable.
Anger evaporated instantly, replaced by shock, when she saw one of the zombies laying in front of her. The shot that had taken it down hit right in the eye. Despite the lightning bolt of panic the appearance of the kids loosed through her chest, she couldn’t feel anything other than impressed just then.
Kell
“What do you mean, Mason has people working on supplies?” Emily shouted across the table at him.
Kell put up his hands as if to ward her off. “I thought he told you. He mentioned it to me before you got here. He has Hal and his people gathering what they can and keeping an eye on the compound.”
She balled her hands into fists and shook them in pure frustration. “That fucking asshole!” she growled. “He takes off knowing I’m trying to figure out the logistics to keep everyone here alive and doesn’t mention the fact that he has an entire team of people out there gathering supplies?”
“There’s no guarantee they’ll make it here,” he pointed out. “So you’d be working under the same conditions. You have to assume the worst.” He knew it wasn’t just Mason’s slip—something rare as hen’s teeth—bothering her.
He reached out and put his hand near hers, but not on it. Emily was particular about when she wanted to be touched, and how. When something bothered her, he had learned the hard way, it was fifty-fifty whether she’d respond with a warm gesture or a tight frown. “You’re worried because no one else made it here yet.”
He put some emphasis on the last word. Emily patted his hand, then leaned back in her seat.
“Yeah, of course I am,” she breathed. “We have, what, fifteen people here? Out of eighty? Did none of them make it to the backup vehicles?”
It was troubling, no question. While living in Haven, they’d heard about the measures the people there had taken to avoid being stuck in the open without resources. The paranoia turned out to just be good planning, back in the early days, as they’d been taken over by a rogue group of soldiers. Many of the citizens managed to escape because they’d seeded the surrounding countryside with gassed-up vehicles hidden in blinds or in the driveways of distant houses made to look ransacked and abandoned.
It was a concept copied by every survivor community who could manage it. Laura had insisted they do the same, despite the difficulty in having to trade at a distance and have their scouts haul in the goods. One of the many drawbacks of being a hidden community.
Lot of fucking good it had done them.
“Yeah, it bothers me,” Kell admitted. “But I keep coming back to two things. One is that literally anything could be keeping people from showing up. Maybe they don’t want to risk drawing those soldiers here. Some of them might have decided to chance missing us here by taking their time. Anything from engine trouble to flat tires.”
“Or they might all be dead,” Emily said.
Kell bobbed his head in agreement. “Or they might all be dead. Which brings me to the other thing: there’s nothing I can do about it either way. If I’m being honest, I do expect some of them to show up here. I’d be willing to bet money a few people are still at home, just hiding in the escape tunnels. We put drinking water in there, remember? They’d have pretty good reason not to want to pop their heads out, after all.”
Emily considered that. “You probably think I’m being crazy, right? Unreasonable?”
“Hell, no. If anything, I think you’re being too rational. No reason not to let yourself have a little hope until you know for sure things are as bad as they seem.”
Her mouth dropped open in naked astonishment. “This from you of all people? You walk around half the time with a chip on your shoulder the size of a continent! You’re the definition of tragic and moody. Where on earth did this Pollyanna streak come from?”
Kell arched and eyebrow, which had the unfortunate effect of tightening his scar and tugging most of his face off-center. He kept forgetting about that. “Well, I kind of learned it from you. Or, really, it’s because of you.”
Emily snorted. “We just established my bona fides when it comes to practicality to the point of being goth.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what I mean,” Kell said. “Mostly. You do have a kind of solidity to you. I went through a lot of ups and downs trying to cope with what my research did to the world. Still do. And losing my family on top of it…” He blinked, expecting the dull pain in his chest at the memory and wasn’t disappointed. “You don’t react that way. You just kind of endure. You cope. I envy that.”
“But what I really mean is that being with you, just the fact of it, has changed my outlook. I watched my wife and daughter die. I was there. I lost my mind. Part of my brain just shut off after that. It was like having a switch flipped in my head. I didn’t feel attraction to anyone. Ever. The idea of love, that kind of love, became completely alien to me. I couldn’t conceive of opening myself to it ever again. Not after what happened to them.”
Emily was studying his face and, as always, didn’t seem bothered by what she saw. “What changed? I know we took our time, but you never seemed reluctant. And you never talked about it.”
Kell smiled, his thoughts drifting. “Life happened, I guess. It wasn’t a moment of revelation or anything. Gradually those circuits started powering up again. By the time you offered to cook for me, the wounds had finally started to scar over. It didn’t feel wrong or like I was betraying Karen. More than anything, that’s what surprised me. The absence of guilt or fear. Like I was almost me again.”
He rubbed a hand across his jaw. Emily had told him he did that when he was thinking. “Of course, that’s not really how it is, you know? I was just feeling normal. People are always changing. There’s no such thing as going back to who we were.”
A small hand woke him by covering his mouth.
“It’s Michelle,” the tiny voice said, so close to his ear he could feel her breath. “Someone’s here. Mom sent me to tell you she saw it on the camera.”
Kell got his hammering heart under control and nodded. Michelle, Andrea’s daughter, removed her hand. “Who is it?”
The little girl shook her head in the dim light. “She didn’t wait to see. She was worried about everyone else.”
Of course she was. Andrea wouldn’t risk staying near the entrance if enemies were coming. Though only their people could open the heavy door, it wasn’t impossible to get inside. It would just take time, patience, and the right equipment.
Emily stirred next to him. He looked over to find her alert, eyes locked on him. “You should stay here,” she said.
“No. If they’re not ours, we’re all bottled up anyway. Won’t matter if I fight now or later. I’ll check it out, you make sure everyone is ready.”
He didn’t give her a chance to argue. They’d slept in their clothes, standard procedure when the need to run might strike at a moment’s notice. The only concession to comfort was removing outerwear. Kell stepped into his boots and shrugged on a too-small armored coat he’d found tucked away in the bed of the truck.
“I’ll yell if there’s any trouble,” he said as he hooked a sheathed knife onto his pants and hefted a weighted baton.
The bunker was the size of several houses, and navigating it was difficult even in full light. It wasn’t constructed with combat or even comfort in mind. All the rooms were different sizes depending on their use, with narrow, twisting hallways and steps connecting them. Two rooms right next to each other—the break room and the common area, for example—sat at different levels. The break room was on the ground level, even with the entrance, while the common space was lowered by a foot and a half.
Which was why, as Kell’s huge frame squeezed through doorways from room to room, he kept smacking his knees, shins, elbows, and shoulders
into damn near everything.
He met Andrea in the kitchen, which sat just before the common room. From there it was a relatively straight shot to the entrance. She must have run to their temporary armory to have made it back already. The rifle in her hands looked like it was designed to take down a tank.
“Have they tried to get in yet?” he asked.
Andrea’s left hand tightened on the stock of the gun. “I heard someone messing with the door. Sounded like they were trying to trip the latch.”
But of course, they couldn’t do that. Even before the modifications to the lock, the place had security enough to prevent someone from getting inside if the occupants didn’t want them to.
“I’m gonna go up and take a look at the monitor. They’re not in yet, so maybe I can see who it is.”
Andrea nodded.
Kell barely fit in the tiny security office, which was generously called a room. It was more of a security closet, the space barely four feet on a side before the addition of monitors, a chair, a computer, and a strip of wood serving as a desk.
The feeds were dark. Not dark in the ‘oh shit someone cut the lines because we live in spy movie’ sense. Just dark because it was dark outside. There were headlights in the distance, at least two pair, though the angle was wrong for Kell to get a good look down the road.
His hand hovered over the small control pad. His hesitation stemmed from an always-active mind gaming out the possibilities. Now and then he caught a glimmer of whoever stood inside the entrance trying to open the door. The light coming from the headlights wasn’t strong at the distance the cars sat at, but it was enough to screw up the night sensitivity of the camera out of whack. It left the figure shrouded in darkness in the front, but bright white at the back. He fiddled with the contrast to no avail, and though Kell would never admit it to anyone else, he thought it might be a simple case of not knowing what the hell he was doing.
The other option was to flip on the exterior lights, which he could do from the control pad. He’d be able to see the shadowy figure, certainly. But if whoever it was turned out to be an unfriendly stranger, turning on the light would signal that someone was in the bunker. Right now there was no way to be sure. All the exterior would show them was a locked door.
The figure in the doorway, which was actually a space between the exterior door resembling an airlock, grew frustrated. His hand lashed out against the thick steel, slamming a fist against it. In that moment the man turned and Kell caught part of his profile.
All Kell had seen until that point was that the man had fair skin and dark hair. Which, in the dimness, could have represented almost any combination of racial features you could imagine. The profile revealed a scraggly beard, which thickened at the mouth. The mustache and goatee were grown out, the beard was new. Kell’s brain tripped into pattern recognition mode, the setting that made humans capable of higher thought, and it all came together. The sweep of a cheekbone, the shape of an eye.
It was someone he knew. Someone from home.
Not, however, someone he particularly wanted to see.
Kell flipped the light on. The man blinked, cursing with obvious volume but as silent as a Chaplin film for the reinforced steel and concrete between them. With a resigned sigh, Kell keyed the microphone and caught the tail end of a creative string of curses.
“…could have fucking warned me you were about to blind me, after all.”
Kell gritted his teeth and made himself count back from five.
“Hello, Kincaid. Who do you have with you?”
Mason
The mercenaries were thorough, and Mason would have kissed them for it right before he shot them in the face.
Mid-morning sun lit the ruins of the compound and began to warm his body. He’d moved into place an hour before dawn, after catching a few hours of sleep in the driver’s seat of his SUV. The night had been long; driving back to speak with Hal and the others, taking stock of their progress, forming plans. They kept a fully-loaded armory hidden in the cellar of the old house the RV hid behind, and Mason had been liberal with what he took from it.
There were few places to easily hide close to the compound, which was by design. The point of the place was safety, and generally that meant being able to see your enemy coming. Mason had parked a mile and a half away, an easy enough jog should he be spotted. He’d walked that far with his gear in the dark, and crawled very slowly and very carefully into place the last twenty yards.
The blind wasn’t perfect, but at a hundred yards it afforded the best view he could hope for given the flat terrain. The tall, wild bush with its vine-like branches provided excellent cover. It was set on a section of ground that might charitably be called a hill, though the difference in elevation from there to the compound was less than ten feet.
He was okay with that. With his binoculars, which he was looking through, or his rifle scope, which he planned on looking through shortly, he could see everything.
No, thorough wasn’t the word. Though Mason was thrilled to learn every mercenary was still at the compound, making his job way easier, he was disturbed by the attention to detail. These mercs were meticulous.
They’d moved their remaining vehicles into the courtyard. Several folding tables were set up, across them stretched what looked to be every item from the lab. Two men who didn’t look like fighters at all sorted through it, pausing their endless labeling once in a while to read some of John and Kell’s notes with obvious excitement.
While the rest might be muscle—admittedly talented, dangerous muscle—these two men knew exactly what they were looking at and, unless Mason was far wide of the mark, what they were looking for.
“Interesting,” he muttered.
Greg, who was in the blind behind him, grunted. “What’s that?”
Mason smiled. Of course the guy would talk when they were sitting a football field away from trained killers. Being silent, Greg's base setting, was for when life wasn't filled with immediate danger in the form of bad guys. Why bother wasting words when everything was boring?
“The two guys at the table. See them?”
Another grunt. “So?”
Mason grinned. “They’re scientists. I’d bet my life on it. They’re the reason these guys are here. Why they tracked us down. Somewhere along the line, someone got the memo about the distinctively huge black fella and put it together with what they knew about Doctor Kelvin McDonald.”
A brief silence, then: “Rebound probably knew about John and the bunker, too.”
“Yeah,” Mason said. “Yeah, that’s true. Well, no doubt about it. This place is burned we’re not coming back here.”
“Are we leaving, then?” Greg asked, a curious note in his voice. Almost…disappointed?
Mason chuckled. “Oh, no fucking way. Nope. This isn’t a safe place for us anymore, but that doesn’t mean these assholes walk away. Go meet with Allen. Make sure he knows the plan. My first shots are those two guys at the tables. They absolutely cannot get away.”
“None of them are getting away,” Greg said, his voice as calmly certain as it would be when discussing a sunrise. “Want me back here after I find Allen?”
“No,” Mason said. “You two work best as a team, and I’m fine here. I’ll give you what cover I can.”
“Roger that,” Greg said. Mason heard the smile in the words.
He hated it. Hated asking these men to risk their lives. It was a personality flaw that, ironically, had been the driving force behind his career as a SEAL. He took on more and more responsibility as an operator, volunteered for the worst and most brutal kinds of training, to make himself into the most effective weapon possible. Because at his core, Mason loathed the idea of sending other people into danger.
Not that it mattered, at least while he was in the Navy. Teams were the rule. All he could do was make himself capable of protecting his teammates. The last three years of his career before The Fall weren’t in the Navy at all. He’d been given an opportunity to se
rve in ways that fit his inclination to risking only his own life as part of the Special Operations Group—SOG—of the CIA.
He shook his head ruefully at the thought of even mentioning that to anyone who knew him. People already put him on a pedestal as if his skills didn’t come from twenty years of monotonous hard training and practice. He owed the nonexistent CIA nothing. His silence was solely a function of his desire not to put up with people’s questions and stares. SOG operators weren’t spies. No James Bond shit. Just what he did in the Navy, but with more…specificity.
He blamed the goddamn movies for the air of mystery. Mostly, being an operative was like any other job; long periods of boredom punctuated by short bursts of excitement. His species of excitement usually involved guns.
The predetermined signal was Mason’s first gunshot. He was content to give Greg and Allen as much time as they needed to prepare, so long as nothing of consequence changed inside the compound. The only way they could communicate was visually, but Mason decided even a brief mirror flash was too risky. Instead he counted on the brothers to be their normal, capable selves, which meant having faith they’d be in place and ready to move within twenty minutes.
Mason counted off the time by humming songs to himself.
Fortune smiled on them; the pair of nerds in the courtyard kept on working. Not surprising given the large volume of notes stored in the basement. It wasn’t just the work John and Kell had done since moving here; it was everything from the bunker and the years before The Fall, too.
Staring down the scope of his rifle, Mason hoped he didn’t get too much blood on it.
The first shot was an obvious kill, right through the heart. Predictably, the other scientist dropped where he was and tried to use the table as cover. That might have worked had there been a long tablecloth or skirt, but Mason could easily make out the man’s lower half. His second shot rang out, drilled through the crouching man’s calf, and sent him sprawling on the dirt.