by Joshua Guess
Emily tucked the canister back into her coat. “It’ll make our job a damn sight easier, that’s for sure.”
She left unsaid that these tests were the first step in figuring out if their job was even possible. While Kell, Judith, and Jo kept themselves busy working in the lab, Emily took it upon herself to make sure no one in the group got settled in. Haven bustled with familiar echos of the society they had all lost, and it was dangerously intoxicating. When and if the cure was finished and a delivery system finalized, she wanted to know the team wouldn’t be caught with their collective pants down by someone deciding to stay at the last minute like an asshole.
They rolled to a stop in the middle I-64 about ten miles from Haven. Lee looked over his shoulder. “There’s a crowd up ahead. You want me to let them get close or try to find some ground where they can’t swarm us?”
“We’ll have to shoot from the roof,” Emily said. “I’d prefer we didn’t let them pile up so badly they can climb over each other. It could be a while before we know whether these darts are effective. Err on the side of caution.”
“Roger that,” Lee said.
The SUV wasn’t really an SUV any longer, at least not by any definition that would have applied when it was manufactured. It was jacked up and shod with deep rubber meant for off-road travel. The moon roof was now a hatch, and every window was replaced with sliding armor plates. Emily felt perfectly safe inside it, but no amount of reinforcing changed the surface area of the roof, which was a very small space for two adults.
Luckily the people of Haven had years to prepare this ground for any and every possibility. Sentries often needed to keep watch in vehicles without getting mobbed, so they’d come up with a simple yet elegant solution the locals called Tilts.
Tilts were just modified truck beds welded to a frame and, well, tilted down to allow a vehicle to drive up them. The angle wasn’t steep, and the weight of nearly any passenger vehicle was enough to raise the back end of the Tilt once you drove up it. Put it in park and presto! You have yourself a raised platform zombies had to work extra hard to climb.
They found one right where it was supposed to be and Lee muscled the SUV through the thin herd and drove up. Emily wasted no time unbuckling herself and standing in a crouch below the hatch.
“You ready?” she asked Jo.
“Yeah, though this thing is pretty narrow. If we have to fight, we’re gonna be in trouble.”
“If we have to fight, we’ve fucked up royally,” Emily said. “I’m more worried about falling asleep.”
“We should have brought sandwiches,” Lee piped up through the hatch an hour later.
Emily chuckled. “You wound me, sir. There’s a cooler behind your seat. I even wrote our names on the bag. If you eat my food, I’ll shoot you in the dick.”
It was taking a while, though. “Jo, how fast was this in the lab?”
“It varied. The shortest was just over seven minutes. The longest took nearly this long. But remember, we were injecting into the base of the skull. This is definitely not the same.”
The gathering of zombies around the Tilt was modest. Less than thirty wandered the edges of the platform, the bright green plumes of the darts sticking out of the ones they’d shot making the job of watching for reactions easy.
“There!” Jo said, pointing.
Emily followed the line of sight and found a New Breed acting very strangely. It stood at the edge of the crowd, and if she were to put a name to it, the dead man looked confused. Its gray skin seemed more pale than usual, and it stared at its fingers as it flexed them. Or tried to; even as Emily observed, the zombie seemed to lose control of its digits.
Then it stumbled.
Then if fell.
What transpired over the next five minutes was hard to watch despite the fact it was happening to a dead guy. Terrible spasms took over as the cure worked its way through the delicate lace of Chimera in the brain, disconnecting it from the extensive tendrils running through the rest of the body. She knew the basics of it from long discussions with Kell—sounding board was one of her more enjoyable jobs, as he grew more animated and excited when talking about work—but seeing it in action this way was hard.
She took notes on the progression of symptoms, and it was hard to forget during the eerily silent but all-too-human thrashing of limbs and gnashing of teeth that this had once been a person. The entire ordeal took a remarkably short time once the finale began, perhaps ten minutes. Putting down the pen, she slid the notebook over to Jo and wiped a thin sheen of cold sweat from her forehead.
“I really hope there’s nothing left inside them that can feel that,” she said hoarsely.
Over the next half hour, Emily kept the watch while Jo recorded observations. It was better, really, since the girl had a much more thorough working knowledge of cure than she did. There was no great variation in how the tagged zombies died, only minor differences. One seized up remarkably quickly, freezing in place and falling over with a few jerky tremors before going profoundly still. Another slowed over the course of ten minutes, taking another twenty to fully wind down like a broken toy.
In the end, the results were a perfect six for six.
“I’m a little worried about setting this thing off where it might have an effect on us,” Emily said as she took the gas grenade from her pocket. “How sure are we this won’t have some weird reaction with living people?”
Jo looked sheepish. “Ah, well. See, it won’t do anything to me. I sort of…let Kell use me as a test subject.”
“You what?” Emily sputtered. “I can’t believe he’d—so fucking irresponsible! I’m gonna murder him!”
“I talked him into it,” Jo said, a little panicky. “It’s a long story, but once I told him how scared I was to I’d change over and hurts someone, why it scared me so bad, he agreed. It worked on John, so it wasn’t like I was the first. And he tested it on some samples he took from me.”
Emily gaped in horror. “He took tissue from your brain?”
“What? No. Jesus, no. The Chimera the cure targets doesn’t just cut off at the brain. It diffuses into the tissue around the base of the skull. There’s little patches of it in the skin. He used that.” She frowned. “Not that having a little piece of my skin cut off felt great, but he wouldn’t even try without testing it first.”
Some of Emily’s wrath drained away, but she’d still be having a talk with Kell about this. Testing on living people, especially someone in their group, was deeply unnerving.
“My point,” Jo said doggedly, “is that I can toss the grenade and run back to you guys. That way you won’t risk getting exposed. And if some of it gets on me, it won’t do any damage before it disperses.”
“At least now I know why Kell was so insistent you come with me,” Emily grumbled. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”
Getting down from the Tilt was mildly scary but relatively easy. Lee just put the SUV in reverse and eased backward until the whole thing began to tip. Once they were on level ground, getting away from the herd and onto open ground was cake.
“Be careful,” Emily told Jo as they slowed to a halt a hundred yards from the slowly approaching zombies. “I want you in one piece later when I break my foot off in your ass.”
Jo smiled, perhaps a bit nervously, and bolted through the door. She loped with the effortless grace of the young, her form a pristine and powerful engine eating up the distance. Emily had run like that once, but the years and too many abused joints took the pep from her step, as her mother had been fond of saying.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be too hard on her,” Lee said as they watched and waited.
Emily grunted. “Maybe you should remember I threatened to shoot you.”
“In the dick, yeah,” Lee agreed happily. “Tough to forget. But you’ve been taking this girl on scouting missions, right? Mason taught her how to fight. Kell’s showing her how to science.”
“Your generation and your weird phrases,” Emily groused.
“I—holy shit, would you look at that?” Emily said, her train of thought derailed at the sight before her.
Jo had stopped halfway between their vehicle and the zombies. Having removed the pin, she stood waiting for the group to close in. Emily silently approved, as it was a good habit to always put the fight on your terms. By letting the zombies come for her, she left enough distance that they couldn’t swarm her, and she’d have a head start.
At some point while Emily and Lee talked, she’d thrown the grenade. The gentle slope of the road here gave them a stadium view of the result, and it was impressive.
Kell hadn’t added a coloring agent to the mechanism he’d used for dispersing the cure. Emily saw no visible cloud, but the results were as fast as they were obvious. One after another, mere seconds after the fist-sized canister landed among them, zombies jerked and toppled. A handful of hardy individuals stayed upright for a few seconds longer, looking as if they walked against hurricane winds, but they too fell. Within a minute, every zombie in the group was perfectly still.
Kell
Despite the thousand-dollar price tag of the bourbon he drank, there was a slightly bitter taste in Kell’s mouth.
He sat with legs splayed on a steep hillside which gave way to a cliff fifty feet from him. Beyond was a vast gulf cut out by the Kentucky River that showed the broken and scorched buildings across it. A minor war had been fought here, a pair of shattered twin bridges serving as punctuation on the fact that some parts of the world were damaged enough to make cutting them off completely a reasonable course of action.
“You should be happy,” said Will Price as he approached. “Instead you look like someone just kicked your puppy.”
Kell studied the younger man. Will had been in the military before The Fall. He’d lived in Haven since nearly the beginning. The history there was often confusing. Kell knew he was seen by some as a traitor for hard decisions made years before. Others revered him. Whatever the truth—and Kell was capable of believing all of the above—he knew Will as a capable leader. One who would go to any lengths to keep his people safe.
“You did it, Kell,” Will said, looking to Emily, who sat at Kell’s left, for backup. “You finally did it.”
Kell raised the bottle in mock salute. “I did it.” He drank some more.
Will lowered himself to the ground and sat. “You’ve got baggage. Okay, that’s your business. I assume you asked me here for some other reason than to have me pick away at your problems?”
Emily cleared her throat. “We’ve had a long time to think about how we’d go about spreading the cure. Kell has made himself pretty clear that withholding it for any reason is a non-starter.”
“Okay,” Will said carefully. “Obviously it would be hard for us to give it to our enemies, but I’m listening.”
Emily grimaced. “We watched our home die. We’re not eager to cross that bridge, either. But there are considerations. We can breed as much of the altered Chimera here as we need, but it would be more effective to set up labs all across the Union, and to start sending people to the coalition in the west and scouts to the settlements we know about elsewhere. Rebound isn’t what I’d call evil, but they are willing to do just about anything to get the cure.”
Will frowned. “I’m getting mixed signals here. What are you suggesting, exactly?”
Kell blew out a breath. “That we spread the cure across every friendly and neutral settlement first. That we delay putting it in the hands of those fuckers.”
“Doing it this way gives us a lot of advantages,” Emily said.
Will laughed. “No fucking kidding! If we’re able to kill whole herds at a time, it will change everything. Look at what we’ve accomplished over the last few years, and imagine what we’ll be able to do with even half the trouble zombies give us.”
“What you’ll need to do,” Emily said, her face grim, “is prepare for the possibility that once Rebound has the cure, they’re going to want to expand their territory dramatically. I don’t know what their capabilities are, but to send a death squad across half the damn continent for us says a lot, I think.”
Kell took another swig of bourbon, and winced. It wasn’t a taste he’d acquired. “One thing that’ll help is starting to deliberately gather herds. We haven’t tested how well the cure vectors. It’s something I need to know going forward.”
“Sure, sure,” Will said, clearly excited. “Whatever you need. When can you get me a list of everything you’ll need from me?”
“That’s why she’s here,” Kell said. “Without Emily, the rest of us would be sitting with our thumbs up our asses, wondering what to do next.”
She winked at him as she led Will to their truck, where detailed papers mapping out the plans waited to be perused. Kell let them handle it; he was not a details guy. Not a big-picture guy. The state of the world proved that much.
It wasn’t as hard a pill to swallow as it had once been. He knew his limits, the narrowness of his vision. Being recruited to work on Chimera the way he had was flattering, but he’d been hopelessly naïve to think no one would break the contract he’d demanded as part of the deal. Sending his work to another team had started this mess, but he had long ago come to terms with that.
He stared out across the emptiness at the broken buildings below and admitted to himself that as much as the end of human civilization was on his shoulders, the cure was not his accomplishment in equal measure. At most he had been a custodian, someone to come in and put the last shine on the work.
John had done this. He and every person in that bunker, but mostly John. He’d been the one to stay and work frantically when all the others left or died. Emily had said that the cure seemed obvious, even simple, when Kell explained how it worked. Kell told her that science was often that way when you didn’t see the hundreds of hours of effort behind the results. Kell had no illusions in this. John had worked through endless permutations, thousands of variations of cures working from dozens of angles.
Without that tireless, even heroic ethic, this day would never have come. It wasn’t jealousy Kell felt. It wasn’t even envy. He didn’t begrudge the accomplishment to John. Hell, he’d do everything he could to make sure every person knew the name John Liebowitz. That they gave him a place in history to immortalize his achievement as the man certainly deserved.
Kell was drinking to celebrate John, and was bitter that he wasn’t here to share a glass with him.
The next morning Kell felt better mentally, but he was reasonably certain Satan himself had vomited fire into his body. Waking up was a groggy hell of dehydration, aches, and a pressing need to visit the bathroom bordering on a medical emergency.
When he walked back into the main space of the Hangar, he grew confused.
“Okay, I’m starting to remember last night,” he said, taking in the randomly strewn forms of his friends. “So it kind of makes sense why you’re all passed out here. But where did you find all that booze? And where the hell did that traffic cone come from?”
Jo, who was draped across the picnic table with arms tightly wrapped around the orange cone, let out a creaky groan. “Stop yelling. So, so loud.”
“Good morning,” Emily said, stepping out of the kitchen nook. “I see you’re back in the world of the living.”
Kell sat at the table and prodded Jo’s leg out of the way. “That’s a wildly inappropriate phrase. How are you so perky? I feel like someone put me through a wood chipper a couple times.”
Emily raised a mug. “I have coffee. Also, I didn’t turn into a sad sack and try to drink my way through an entire fifth of Pappy Van Winkle’s.”
He stumbled off to find water, and the first few gulps were nearly a spiritual experience. The others began pulling themselves together as he moved to sit at the table again, and Kell wondered idly whether he would ever be hungry again. Judging by the mass of snakes currently pretending to be his stomach, he doubted it.
Jo had moved to sit next to Emily, while Judith cradled her head in both hands. Hal snored on a pile of pillows in the little reading corner they’d set up. Lee could be heard doing the same from his room.
“Where’s Mason? And the boys?” Kell asked. “I didn’t see them last night, either.”
Emily waved at the bay door with her mug. “He took them out overnight. I don’t know what happened with them, but the last few days those kids have been working their asses off. He must have lit a fire under their asses.”
“He did do that,” Judith said from beneath the banner of hair hanging down over her face. “Does anyone know what happened to Greg and Allen? They were here last night, but it got fuzzy.”
“Hunting?” Kell said uncertainly. “I think they had a few drinks and turned in because they wanted to go deer hunting this morning.”
Sunlight flooded the room suddenly as someone opened the small door next to the giant bay entrance.
“Oh, come on,” Jo said, wincing from the light. “A little warning, maybe?”
Kell turned in his seat to find Mason walking in with a haggard Mike and Randy. Mason was a bit damp from the morning dew, a few bits of leaf stuck to the cuffs of his pants, but the boys looked like warmed-over hell. They shivered and rubbed their filthy hands together.
“You guys do some camping?” Emily asked with a bemused smile, then sipped her terrible excise for coffee. “I remember those days.”