by Joshua Guess
Mike was eyeing the shabby state of the group warily. “We look like shit because someone decided to test how we handled surviving in the woods overnight with whatever we had on us. What’s your excuse? You all look terrible.”
Kell put the glass of water against his forehead, and his suffering was such that even the moderately cool surface felt great. “I fell off the wagon and instead of putting me back on, everyone sort of joined in.”
Mike stared in utter confusion, clearly not aware of what the phrase meant. Kids.
“I was having a few drinks to celebrate,” Kell said. “I got a little down, so everyone decided to make a little party of it. We might have overdone it.”
“Seriously?” Mike said. “You seriously all sat here and got drunk last night while we were stuck in the woods? What do you have to celebrate, anyway? It’s not like the cure is out there doing anything yet.”
Kell turned in his seat, facing the door. The words nettled him, but not as much as they might have the day before. He understood the driving force behind them; Mike was equally pissed he’d had to spend a night being chilly and wet and that he’d missed out on the fun. Teenagers weren’t known for their ability to empathize, so he tried not to take it personally.
Then Mike stepped forward, apparently taking Kell’s movement as a sign of aggression.
“Why the fuck do we have to work our asses off, but you get to have a good time?” Mike was within arm’s reach of Kell.
Kell frowned. Then he stood.
He wasn’t afraid. Of course he wasn’t. He’d faced down hordes of the living dead countless times. Men with guns and worse had come for his blood. Those things scared him, sure, but they also raised the bar much higher than a pissy child could hurdle. Kell didn’t threaten. He didn’t even speak. He just stood there and stared down at the kid a foot shorter than him.
“Come on, Kell,” said a voice from his left. Jo had decided to step in, putting a hand on his elbow with a feather touch. “Let’s go to the lab and set up for later. Let him calm down.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Mike said, face turning scarlet. “I’m not a fucking baby.”
Jo ignored him and gestured for Kell to come with her. He sighed and turned to leave, which was when things went bad.
It happened so quickly Kell only registered the details after the fact.
Mike shouted something along the lines of, “Don’t walk away from me.”
He reached out and shoved Kell surprisingly hard for someone eighty pounds lighter. Kell stumbled, not expecting it and caught off guard, and knocked Jo off her feet. She cried out as her knees slammed into the floor. She tried to catch Kell at the same time, which he found oddly endearing.
Mike rushed forward. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” He put a hand on Jo’s bicep and tried to help her up.
Jo spun and braced herself with hands on the floor, whipping her left foot out in a devastating kick that folded Mike in half at the waist. She was a blur, rebounding to her feet and stepping in as the boy tried to right himself. She didn’t try to fight him on his terms. There was no posturing or raising of dukes. Later, Mason would liken it to watching a butcher work.
Jo dismantled him.
In a space of seconds she unleashed a flurry of elbows and knees, most aimed at Mike’s midsection. She gave him no time to regroup or think as she switched the hard punches to his joints. He staggered back until his tailbone met the edge of the table. Emily casually lifted her mug out of the way as Mike fell back onto the table, a furious Jo surging onto him.
He raised his hands in front of his face as Jo took a fistful of his shirt in her left, the right pulled back to strike.
“Put your hands on anyone in this building again, and I won’t stop,” Jo said, her voice level even through hard breathing. She let go and backed away.
“I was just—” Mike began.
Jo whirled and raised a finger. “You were just acting like you always do. You said I treated you like a kid? Yeah, Mike, I did. Because you are. Both of you. Working out and doing what Mason tells you doesn’t change the fact that you just lost your shit at the idea that someone had a good time without you. News flash, man: the world isn’t fair and no one owes you anything. You obviously don’t care at all about how other people feel, so don’t expect me to give a crap you had to miss out because you’re so used to letting everyone else protect you that you have to make up for it. If you can’t handle being called out on your bullshit to the point you’ll get violent, you need to leave.”
She walked over and put her hands out to Kell, straining but managing to help haul him to his feet. He didn’t look back as they walked to the lab.
Mason
Mike and Randy only took ten minutes to leave. People didn’t tend to pack heavy when running for your life was a standard skill in the way driving had once been. He saw them out and watched until they were out of sight. He recognized the basic truth that the boys were no worse than anyone else their age, products of raging hormones and brains desperately trying to lay down the permanent wiring needed for adulthood.
While Mason felt regret at seeing them go, he also knew it was for the best. A softer world allowed for youthful passion and making mistakes. Even the world as it was now had leeway for it. Just not this group. Margin for error was slim.
While Kell and Jo cooled off in the lab, Mason pulled Hal and Judith to the table and woke Lee. He laid out an easy if uninspiring breakfast of dried meat and leftover bread. There was jam, however.
“Emily, what’s our next step?” he asked. Everyone in the group looked to her, which caused a slow flush to creep up her neck.
“Am I in charge now?” she asked in a sardonic tone.
Hal chuckled. “Haven’t you been?”
“Yes,” Mason said. “We’ve all talked about it. It’s not like we didn’t know we’d have to leave here eventually, and if Kell is this far along we need to start planning for it. So, again, what’s our next step?”
Emily took a remarkably short time to compose her thoughts. “Kell has a few more tests to run, and needs to work out the kinks in manufacturing. If we’re going to do this right, we’ll need to either train people in other communities to operate bioreactors to grow their own colonies of the cure or find people with the right background who can do it on their own.”
“What are bioreactors?” Hal asked. “It’s not something I’ve heard of.”
“Pretty simple,” Emily said. “It’s basically just a petri dish on steroids. It’s more complicated in execution, but they’ll let us use a growth medium to make more of the cure. Spreading production capability across the Union is going to require people knowing how to use them, if not make their own.”
She stood and pulled something from her pack: a used gas grenade sealed in plastic. She gave the bag a little shake. “This was its own little bioreactor, actually. Kell replaced the cartridge inside with a substrate growing a colony of the cure strain of Chimera.”
Mason snorted. “Have you ever tried to take one of those things apart? You’ve just breezed over a minor miracle. How’d he figure it out?”
Emily shrugged. “He has access to every file Haven does, which includes a lot of databases people collected for safe keeping. You know how he is. If he wants to do something, he’ll teach himself how.”
Mason smiled. “Of course he does. Well, if we have some time, that’ll give Lee a chance to heal up. He’ll need it if we’re going to be running all over creation showing people how to make this stuff.”
“You sure you don’t want to be in charge?” Emily asked. “You seem to have a handle on it.”
“No,” Mason said with a shake of his head. “I’m good at many things, but handling the number of spinning plates you can manage is not one of them. Also you have a way of getting people to listen to you. You’re a leader. Lee and I can handle security with Allen and Greg. Probably hunting, too, while we’re out on the road. Beyond that, it’s up to y
ou to figure out what everyone else will be doing.”
Judith cleared her throat. “Is it really the most efficient use of our time and energy to do it that way? To travel all over the Union? Wouldn’t it be much easier and faster to send out word and have communities send people to us so Kell can instruct all of them at once?”
Mason opened his mouth to disagree, then thought about it. “Huh. That actually does make way more sense.”
“Yeah,” Emily said appreciatively. “I vote for Judith to be in charge.”
Judith scoffed. “Not on your life. I just know we’ve been talking for a long while now about having to leave here as if it’s the only way we can get the cure out in the world. Seems like a dangerous way to do it, taking the only man alive who knows how to make it on a road trip where anything could happen.”
Mason leaned back in his chair. “Everything changed when Rebound hit us, you know? Originally we were going to try to infiltrate their territory and wreak a lot of havoc. Then we lost John, who was supposed to stay safe at home when Emily, Kell, and I left. Even when Kell figured out they’d stumbled across the cure, I guess I was still looking at it as if we’d leave here and hand it out to people before going after Rebound.”
Judith leaned forward in her chair and put a hand on Mason’s. “It’s understandable, sweetheart. You’re an idiot. We all know that.”
Mason laughed.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Emily said. “The last month has been…well, I think all of us got tunnel vision. We weren’t looking at all the consequences and dangers.”
“Not entirely true,” Mason said. “I’ve thought of a few. Such as the fact that if Rebound found us way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, they probably know where we are now. Or at least have an idea. That’s part of why I’ve been so intense about getting us into shape, because I’m worried they’re going to show up looking for us.”
“They’d be pretty stupid to,” Hal said, nodded in the direction of Haven. “There are a lot of heavily armed people a quarter mile that way.”
“True,” Mason replied. “Though there are two points I should make. The first is that they can easily do to us what we were going to do to them, which is show up as traders from a community, or even just travelers. Haven lets people like that in all the time. They could already have agents here.”
That got him a round of horrified reactions. Emily was thoughtful as she said, “What’s the other?”
Face grim and heart cold, Mason said out loud what he knew she’d already worked out on her own. “Rebound had to expend a lot of resources to move their kill squad all the way to Iowa. We’re six hundred miles closer to them. If they just wanted to do damage and capture Kell, it would be much easier to do it here.”
While it was true that Mason had been working his body back into usefulness from a general concern that more Rebound operatives might show up, it wasn’t the entire truth. With so much progress being made with the cure, it was only a matter of time before word began to spread. If there were agents inside Haven already, things could and would go from bad to worse with no warning.
Which meant the other reason for all that hard work came into play.
“I’m going for a jog,” he said to Emily, who was poring over a list of things Kell would need to build bioreactors.
“Yeah, okay,” she replied distractedly.
“Might be gone a while. Haven’t done a long run in a while.”
“Uh huh, love you too,” Emily said.
Mason left with a grin on his face, wondering if she’d even realized who she was talking to.
He wore camouflage, which wasn’t unusual around these parts. Lots of people wore the stuff, and the scent-blocking variety was in high demand the way cigarettes used to be in prisons. It gave people a better chance in the open against zombies when tracking by smell was harder.
After stopping by the RV and grabbing a few weapons just in case, he set out northward at a leisurely pace. His hip had the barest ache, which he knew the run would stoke into a strong, resonant throb after a few miles.
He was a hundred yards into the woods when he ran straight into Greg and Allen.
The brothers stopped, the deer slung on a pole between them rocking slightly. “Hey,” Greg said. “Whatcha doing?”
Mason pursed his lips. “Having a run. Kind of a stressful day. Jo had it out with the boys, and they left.”
“Blowing off steam,” Greg said. “Sure. And you’re wearing a knife, a sidearm, and have a machete strapped to your back because you’re suddenly worried about your ability to defend yourself?”
“And,” Allen piped up, “you’re running in the woods because all those safe roads in Haven don’t offer enough of a challenge, right?”
Mason rolled his eyes and made sure both of them could see it. “Fine. I’m doing a little recon. I’ve been worried for a while we might have eyes on us. And before you ask, no, I didn’t tell anyone. They’d just worry a lot and tell me I’m being stupid by going out on my own.”
Greg shifted the pole to his other shoulder and scratched his nose. “You’re being stupid. Why don’t you let us come with? We can drop off this deer and be back out here in ten minutes.”
Mason shook his head. “I’d rather not risk all three of us.”
“We appreciate that,” Allen said. “But that’s not your call. You can go, but if you do it without us I can’t be sure I won’t accidentally tell Judith what you’re up to.”
Greg nodded in agreement. “That’s always a risk. Besides, we’ve spent the last two weeks hunting around here off and on. We can tell you where they aren’t, which might help us figure out where they are, if they’re here at all.”
“You guys are dicks,” Mason said. “Fine, hurry up.”
Mason didn’t ask what excuse they’d given when the brothers rejoined him. More than likely they’d just handed the deer off to Jo, told her to get to work, and left without another word. Being enigmatic had its advantages, the most important being that people learned not to bother asking questions.
They waved at a few men and women running a patrol a mile north of Haven as they passed each other, but otherwise saw no sign of bodies living or dead. It wasn’t surprising considering how long the area had been populated. Getting close enough to keep watch would be difficult bordering on impossible for an outside group.
Slipping a few people inside was much easier.
“Are we planning on walking around randomly, looking for bad guys?” Greg asked when they’d gone a mile past the patrol. “I’m not against it, but I’d prefer to have some kind of plan.”
“No,” Mason said. “There aren’t a lot of places they can be, if they’re close. I used to live here, and back then patrols were running five, ten miles out. That was when there were only a couple hundred residents. I don’t think we’re going to find anyone, but that’s not my expectation.”
“Ah, I get it,” Greg said. “You think they’re slipping in between patrols, then slipping back out.”
Mason nodded. “It’s what I’d do. Set up a prearranged time each day in case your people inside need a quick escape. They only need to be in the vicinity for half an hour, an hour at the outside. I’m betting if they do have agents in Haven, they’re running out here to do information drops every couple days.”
Over the next hour they moved from place to place with decreasing speed. Greg and Allen could move all day without complaint, as Mason had done before being shot. Now a measly handful of miles pushed him to his limit. The area they searched was a small part of the county mostly cut off from the southern half by severely damaged roads and hundreds of downed trees. A tornado had come through years before in almost perfect sync with a powerful flash flood.
There were several good spots where a small force could hide their numbers, places patrols would pass by at a distance. So long as they weren’t seen moving in or out, it was unlikely the patrols would send people in to check. Staying too long meant not cooking, of
course. Smoke would be a dead giveaway. And sound, too. Mason had spent enough cold and quiet nights to know how much more likely it was that any Rebound operatives would be moving in and out rather than risk camping close by.
“There,” Allen said. “It’d have to be there.”
He pointed to a splintered raft of trees all shoved together to form a thick wall nearly thirty feet high. It shielded anything behind it from view, the only cover of its size in the area. Mason knew the approach from the north was easier, and that the patrols to the south and west were much more dense.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”
He wasn’t concerned with being seen. There wasn’t much chance even one person would stay behind. No reason to. They made their way around the crumpled mass of trees and split apart to search.
It was immediately clear someone had been there. Fresh, deep tire tracks marred the tall grass with bare dirt. Greg found a heavy plastic tote wedged inside a mass of branches. Inside were some supplies and a small box with a dial lock.
“Should we take it?” Allen asked, glancing around.
“No,” Mason said. “We’ll put it back where we found it. We know they’re here. The only thing we have going for us is that they don’t know that.”
Or so he hoped.
Emily
“If you’re fucking with me right now, I swear I’ll punch you in the face so hard it will break the laws of time and space and your younger self will feel it.”
Will blinked. “That was an unusually creative threat.”
“I’m in love with a giant nerd,” Emily said. “When all you have to read is a battered collection of science fiction books, it rubs off on you. Now, tell me you’re serious.”
“I’m serious,” Will answered. “We’ve had close to four hundred people through here in the time frame you’ve given us. If it was just since you showed up, the number would be much lower.”