Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons

by Guess, Joshua

  She leaned over the girl and brushed a strand of greasy hair from the tiny face. “Sweetie, what’s your name? Can you tell me your name? I’m Jo.”

  The girl’s eyes darted around, but flickered toward Jo at the kind, gentle tone. Her breathing became a touch more even. After a long half minute, she spoke. “Hannah.”

  Jo smiled. “Hannah. Nice to meet you. Listen, I need to take care of this wound. I won’t lie to you, honey, it’s going to hurt. I have some stuff I can inject into it to numb you, but before I do that I need to check to see if you have any broken bones here. It won’t take long, but you won’t like it. Can you tough it out for me for just a minute?”

  Hannah looked up at me. I gave her the tiniest of smiles; my scars made smiling a lot scarier than I preferred. If my ugly mug bothered her, the kid didn’t show it. “Okay.”

  Bobby had to look away when Hannah screamed. I saw his hands tremble a bit at the sound and my heart went out to him. I could scarcely imagine the bad memories that had to be boiling up in his head at that moment.

  “Got a break here,” Jo said. “Bullet cracked the rib when it ricocheted. Not much we can do about that, but I only see one chip and I’m gonna pull it out. Cleaning and dressing this might be the best option. It’s awfully messy for me to be able to close it up.”

  Bobby’s head snapped back to Jo. “She’s bleeding a lot, Jo.”

  Jo shot him a withering glare. “Is she, Bobby? I hadn’t noticed. Guess I better break out the pile of hemostatic sponges I brought with me just in case someone got hurt. Glad you said something; I’d have totally missed the bleeding without your brilliant observations.”

  Bobby’s mouth tightened into a line, which just made Jo smile.

  Before things could take a turn, I sighed. “Can you two shelve it until after Jo is done with the fucking job I brought her here for? The one she should be mature enough to keep doing even when Bobby is being an overbearing jerk?”

  Jo stiffened but didn’t look up from her work. A flush of scarlet crept up her neck. Bobby glared at me but said nothing, which was the best possible outcome as far as I was concerned.

  A basic truth of human interaction is that any complex, stressful situation will always end up with a lot of bleed-through of emotions. Existing tensions will be inflamed; minor irritations become major rough spots. We hadn’t come here expecting to rescue anyone. This was a wet work job.

  But save someone we had—or at least delayed the girl’s death.

  “Bobby, get on the horn with the backup team,” I said once Jo had the bleeding stopped and began dressing the wound. “I want them here as fast as they can manage. Tell them they’re going to drop half their gear for us to use and take her back to Haven at top speed.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds, and then nodded. I ignored his grumbles as he crouch-walked to the radio at the front of the van.

  “Am I going back with her?” Jo asked. Not an accusation, just an honest question.

  I ran a hand over my stubbly, scarred head. “Do you think you need to? This isn’t a test or anything. You know more about medicine than I do. Will she be stable enough to make it there, or is there a chance she’ll need your attention?”

  Jo weighed the possibilities. She had a fine mind and a good heart. “That depends on what the priority is. You’re in charge. If you tell me you’ll wait for me to get back here, then yeah. I’ll go with her. If you’re going to charge after these assholes while I’m gone, then I’d rather stay here in case you need my help. It’s your call. I’ll do what you tell me.”

  I looked down at Hannah, her tired eyes following us as we spoke. “Go with her. Get back here with the team as fast as you can. I’m going to do some more scouting while you’re gone. That should be safe enough.”

  Jo weighed the words. Then she let out a long-suffering sigh of her own. “Don’t think I missed the fact that you didn’t say you wouldn’t start a fight. I’m wise to your tricks, Mason.”

  I raised my hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Hey, I’m not arrogant enough to think of myself as a hero. I’m not going to go in there like Batman, kid. But I can fuck with them a little, make them too nervous to try going after another target.”

  Jo’s eyes flicked to Hannah, who was beginning to drift off. “Hard to argue with that.”

  I let some of the anger I was holding back—to some degree, I was always holding back—fill my voice. “They’re marauders. I’m not super concerned about them as a cohesive fighting unit. I’ve dealt with them more times than I can count. You know that.”

  In point of fact, I was wrong. If Kell’s flaw was the guilt he’d carried for years at his work being stolen and used to create the plague, mine was occasional overconfidence. The chief concern of any operator should always be gathering and working with accurate information.

  Marauders they might be, but not like any I’d seen before.

  7

  This time I wasn’t fucking around.

  I knew where the scouts were, had seen where their buddies came from. It was trivial to find the hidden, narrow path through the woods on the side of the highway that would be all but invisible to travelers. As I stalked through the night-shrouded trees, the rage only grew.

  The highway here might be far outside of Haven, but it was ours. We sent teams to keep it clear. We repaired it when and where we could. These marauders were using it as their own little fishing hole and innocent people were paying the price.

  I didn’t join the Navy from any high-minded ethical consideration. That had come later, as I did the work and slowly shaped myself into a man. I saw the good we could do and the people out there who benefited from protection. Oh, I knew the system wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of morally gray areas and bad calls. No institution lacks for ugly flaws or skeletons in closets. But dammit, knowing the guy you killed in a raid on a terrorist compound would have taken out dozens or hundreds the next day cuts right through all the other bullshit. Knowing deaths like that can be prevented and realizing you’re one of the people able to do it? That’s a powerful motivator.

  That same impulse drove me along the rutted tracks heading toward whatever base these guys called home. I was deeply looking forward to it.

  This time I didn’t bother blending in. I ran into a few zombies on the way, and I killed them when needed. It’s not as impressive as it sounds; there were fewer than you might think. One of the advantages of the damn things tracking human activity by scent, such as vehicle exhaust, was that they tended to cluster together on roads and stick to them. Despite what movies led us to believe, there were rarely big clumps of them just waiting in the woods for unsuspecting hikers to stumble over them.

  Even so, the dozen I encountered were all among the trees, strung along the winding path left by the tires of marauder trucks. They’d been here long enough to attract a following, apparently.

  I knew I was getting close when the number of zombies began to increase. In the mile and a half of so I’d stalked through the woods, I’d seen twelve. In the last few hundred feet before I saw the marauder camp, I saw at least five times as many. Most walked with their attention focused on the perimeter of the camp. A few stragglers took note of me, so I hung back and waited for them. Better to deal with them at a distance where I was unlikely to be seen or caught off guard by anyone on watch who might be paying attention.

  I grabbed the first one by the throat and let its hands scrape against my coat. I drove the screwdriver into its face with my free hand, and then pushed it back. The second and third went down just as easily, but they came at me together. I got a little distracted.

  That was how the fourth one snuck up on me.

  A huge weight hit me in the back. I stumbled forward, trying to find my balance beneath the pressing force. A ragged hand snaked around and dug its bone talons into my cheek, white hot lances of pain etching lines through the scars there.

  My jaw ached with the effort of clenching it against the scream trying to tear its w
ay out of my throat. I reached up and grabbed the fingers, yanking hard on them as I bent and tried to toss the zombie over my shoulder. The damn thing was smart enough to tangle its other hand in the straps of my backpack, and the throw ended up taking me right along with it.

  What followed was a writhing scrum with no hint of training or skill. This was pure caveman survival, desperate thrashing against a predator bent on taking chunks out of me if at all possible.

  It took about ten seconds to get free enough to even begin to get myself right. When I finally got a good look at the zombie, I was unsurprised to see the grayish skin and clever eyes of a New Breed.

  You can’t miss them. Used to be different. Not too awful long ago the New Breed, or newbies as we sometimes call them, mostly looked like regular zombies. The divergent changes in each of the two main species of the dead made telling them apart easier. The old school types began to whither, not falling apart like fiction would have you believe thanks to Chimera preserving them, but slowly reducing down to the barest amount of flesh needed to function. You might call it a more efficient form.

  New Breed went the other way. Far hungrier than their simpler cousins, these damn things gorge themselves to fuel the continuous mutations Chimera wreaks on their bodies. The bands of tough fiber beneath thick, tough gray skin, added muscle, and what Kell assures me is a drastically altered digestive tract adapted to a diet of nothing but blood and flesh.

  This one had ice blue eyes—no hazy corneas from years of exposure there—and I saw the spark of intelligence behind them as it reoriented itself on all fours. It was smart enough to take a moment and judge its position, and that alone was enough to make even me scared. Hell, that it was even smart enough to realize pausing and analyzing was even possible made my balls want to crawl up inside my torso and settle in for the winter.

  In the split second between regaining its footing and action, I moved. Its only move was to surge forward on all fours. Smart it might be, but the predatory instincts driving the zombie were in control now. A New Breed in close combat with prey almost always went for the kill.

  I slammed the screwdriver through the top of its hand and into the hard ground beneath. The facsimile of a brain made up entirely of Chimera cells worked pretty well, but not even a normal person would have had time to react. My strike happened just as it was starting to move forward. The thin length of metal didn’t do much more than throw the zombie’s aim off a handful of degrees as it encountered the resistance and pulled free, but it was enough.

  Story of my life; doing the bare minimum to not die at the end of a fight.

  I lurched to my right, letting the slowed left hand of the zombie graze my shoulder as it went by a hair too slowly. I threw out a leg to arrest my momentum and spun in place, grabbing at the blade of the screwdriver. It gave me a lot of leverage and I yanked the zombie’s arm out from under it. Having a solid piece of metal jammed through part of your opponent made for a lot of control over their body.

  Another spin and slam put the zombie face first on the forest floor like any cop might drop a suspect. I put a knee on the dead man’s back and wrenched the arm up and around. With a human I might have been tempted to go easy. With zombies my conscience was always clear. I felt the joints strain and pop as I increased the torque to a degree that would have had a living person screaming themselves mute if they didn’t just pass out from the pain. With a final hard push I manage to get the badly dislocated and broken limb in a position where the captive hand and the screwdriver were at the back of the neck.

  I put both hands on the handle of the tool and leaned forward. The sharpened tip bit into the toughened skin and between the vertebrae. The zombie jerked violently once, twice, and I gave the weapon a hard back and forth before a third convulsion tightened every muscle.

  Then the zombie went limp beneath me. Just to be safe, I pushed and pulled the screwdriver around a few more times. You never knew when these fucking things were playing around with you.

  I made a long, careful arc around the marauder base. Knowing they had access to fuel was the first clue that these guys might be better off than your average crew. Mostly big settlements and cooperative sets of communities had fresh gas. It was a matter of resources. Crude oil still existed, and not just the relatively vast petroleum reserves in barrels. The Union partnered with groups in Texas to pump the stuff out of the ground and refine it. Civilization wouldn’t have been making the slow crawl back to existence without it.

  Marauders generally came by fuel one of two ways. Either they stole it from vehicles on the road, which was highly inefficient, or they hit supply depots. A few hundred gallons could be stretched a long way if you were smart about it.

  The base itself was evidence that these people were at least as smart as we were. Assuming they were even partially nomadic as marauders tended to be, they’d come up with clever defensive measures. The building they were holed up in was what looked like a small distribution center, the kind you barely notice in a medium sized town or small city designed to house goods. Not the sprawling things big box stores required with dozens or hundreds of bays for trucks, but a modest metal building maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty five feet on a side.

  The dense woods surrounding it on three sides had been cut down in careful patterns. The dead trees lay in controlled shapes, each heavy bole overlapping with the one next to it to create an impenetrable barrier of trunks and branches. That was on the outer edge, of course. A quick jaunt up a tree and a glance through my binoculars showed a much neater interior, branches lopped off and plywood boards laid out in places to create perches for their watchmen. The wood from all those amputated branches had to come in handy for fires.

  The entire wall of fallen trees probably took an afternoon to create. Call it another hour or two for the gate cut through it where the road intersected the barrier. A low-slung box truck with hanging steel plates on one side served as a gate door, the plates stopping zombies from slipping beneath its frame.

  “Impressive,” I muttered to myself as I took in the overall vista.

  Keeping an objective outlook was crucial for never underestimating your enemy. I don’t think I need to explain why falling in that trap is bad. These people were impressive. They hadn’t succumbed to the mental gravity of pure barbarism, instead finding a stable—if close—orbit around it. They might do awful things to innocent people, but they weren’t beasts just yet. Might never be, having managed to maintain the balance for this long.

  After sitting in the tree and thinking about it for a while, I decided that this was even worse. Giving in to the lizard brain and forgoing the ingrained lessons of modern society completely wasn’t okay in any way, but it served as a psychological release valve. The thoughtlessly savage man was in hock to no conscience or morals, only animal instinct. I’ve seen men devolve toward it over time, becoming less thoughtful and careful, less willing to think at all as the weight of sins forced their minds to find a less painful mechanism to function by.

  These men knew what they were doing, and they did it well. Professionally, almost.

  I’d taken some time discussing this trip with the others after the girl was off to Haven with our backup. Coming here carried a host of risks, all of which I was willing to accept. I too was a professional, however. I wouldn’t let my own base instincts and desires push me to do something idiotic.

  I watched for a few hours. It wasn’t the basic observational stuff other survivors would have noticed. Oh, I did that too. I tracked movement patterns—no guard stayed on a particular perch longer than an hour, since rotating them kept their minds fresh—as well as counting bodies, weapons, and the like.

  I also looked deeper. It wasn’t just what weapons they had or the kind of clothing and armor they wore. It was how the man third on the left settled in immediately after shifting perches, zoning out and growing instantly bored again. My eyes caught the way the first on the right nervously scanned the woods at ground level, meaning he had to cr
ane his neck to look down nearly all the time. The way his fingers tapped on the sides of his worn and scratched M4 said a lot about how he might react to a sudden threat.

  These tells and a hundred other details flooded my brain as I wove a detailed tapestry of how these men worked as human beings. It wasn’t perfect, but my observations gave me both broad strokes and enough specifics to formulate my next few moves.

  When I was satisfied what those moves should be, I didn’t waste time. I made them.

  8

  I’ve always found it weird that people always misuse the phrase ‘the oldest trick in the book.’ You see some detective stop just before the trick would have worked on him, cleverly sussing out the ruse in the nick of time.

  Real life is different. Old tricks become famous because they work. Most of them trade on bedrock aspects of human psychology and instinct, stuff you can’t bypass no matter how much you try. My plan to fuck with the marauders wasn’t just me gleefully watching them dance on my strings. I wanted to gauge reactions, observe how they behaved in their stronghold. People get overconfident when they feel secure, and forcing them out of that comfort zone even a little bit would be hugely informative about their reaction times, training, and many other factors.

  And yes, I wanted to mess with their heads a little.

  After killing the New Breed zombie, I smeared myself with a bit of its gore. It wouldn’t hold off zombies for long, but a few minutes of invisibility could go a long way in the hands of an asshole dedicated to using it well.

  I spent a little time making a few preparations, and then slowly worked my way close to the wall. Relatively speaking, obviously. Walking right up to it would have been idiotic.

  I positioned myself near the twitchy guard. I’d moved in sideways, slowly spiraling in toward his position. In my wake was a length of fishing line. When I was hunkered down in the dark space beneath a dense cluster of trees, I began reeling it in slowly.