Having spent time in a wide range of rooms with the shared purpose of keeping me contained until I could be killed, I had a solid working knowledge of the many shapes and styles of buildings. You gain a powerful intuition for those kinds of things when you spend time as a prisoner. ‘Oh, my screams echo in this exact way when they zap me with electricity,’ you realize. Wood reflects sound differently than metal, and I’m decent at feeling out distances from sound.
The ceiling was high up, maybe thirty feet. Which was also about the height of the building. Maybe the room was lined with the undead to keep prisoners from finding a window or a hatch. It wasn’t the sort of thing you did for sheer style. Wrangling them alone—
A piercing scream cut through the air. Even muffled by the doors between us, it was loud. I clenched my teeth and kept right on with what I was doing.
Once I had the lay of the land, I made my way in very careful increments toward the zombie nearest the right side of the door. My shoulder brushed the wall the whole way since I wanted to make sure I could only be caught off guard by one or maybe two zombies at worst. My hands made contact first, held up in front of me as if praying. Cold fingers scraped against my warm ones and despite years of exposure to zombies, I had to suppress a shudder.
I’m not fearless, no matter what anyone else thinks. A lack of fear is a death sentence. I just manage mine a lot better than most people, and dealing with zombies for me is just about managing the consequences. I know, because I’ve had a lot of practice, that staying cool will keep me alive. Not letting fear spread and take control. My reaction was not because I was afraid, but out of pure disgust.
These things ate people, for god’s sake. How could my stomach not want to flip over and escape my gut when their clammy flesh rubbed against mine? It wasn’t a reaction I let show when other people were around. Most survivors got over it pretty quick, and it was more than a little embarrassing.
Another agonized wail split the air. I pulled back a few inches, paused, and let Tabby finish before soldiering on. I felt for the questing hands in front of me, this time on purpose. They weren’t hard to find; the zombie got all excited when it realized I was close. I caught one of its hands in both of mine, gripped as hard as I could, then yanked the arm down and twisted. Bones popped like kindling. I kept on adding torque, and I could feel the muscles and ligaments tearing.
I repeated the process with the other hand, taking a couple scratches along the back of one hand along the way. The dead guy—or gal, it’s not like I checked—tried grabbing me with the broken hand, but I’d messed it up way too badly. The dead might not feel pain, but they needed muscle attachments and properly functioning joints just like the rest of us.
The zombie’s neighbor tried to swat at me, but I angled myself hard against the wall and felt only a few skittering brushes of its limbs. Whatever tethers kept the dead people in line were at their limit, so it couldn’t move any closer than it already was.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t do what I wanted, which was to clear a space along the wall. The darkness was my friend in that regard. No one coming in from the hallway would be able to see the slumped-over forms of any permanently killed zombies. Not only was the angle wrong, but their eyes wouldn’t be adjusted enough to the dark for the light coming in through an open door to reveal anything in the shadows beyond. I knew that much from being thrown in here myself.
I needed to kill the zombies, but I couldn’t do it. My bound hands were too limited in their range of motion, and despite what movies tell us, breaking a neck is super difficult. You can do it, but not with the casual twist it’s made out to be. I didn’t have the leverage to do it the only way I knew how.
More screams filled the night. I forced my mind to go to the weird, quiet place it always inhabited while on a mission. I don’t know how it worked for other people, but my experience was that half-assing focus was a bad idea every time. If you just shoved the thing bothering you to the back of your mind, there was always a chance it could sneak up on you. Instead, I pushed everything away. I let cold logic take the wheel. It was the best way I knew to stay on task.
I think of it like a surgeon. A patient’s pain is, no matter how awful it sounds to say it, a distraction. Letting that pain cause an ache in your heart does nothing to help the patient. I couldn’t do anything for Tabby. Beating my chest wouldn’t help her. Feeling bad wouldn’t help her. Only working on a solution to my current circumstances might stand a chance of doing so. Figuring out how to escape seemed like a good way to repay her suffering, if I could get her out with me.
I backed away from the zombie, now frenzied at the smell of the blood seeping from the back of my hand, and settled onto the floor again. Crossing my legs, I closed my eyes and went over every detail of my night with the finest mental comb I was capable of conjuring.
Tabby was gone for at least an hour.
When they came for me again, they were more gentle. I was pulled to my feet with some consideration, and allowed to walk at my own pace to the interrogation room. I didn’t push my luck, moving at decent pace instead of the funeral march my guards probably expected.
Tony was in the room already. So was Tabby. She sat curled up in a corner, damp blonde hair covering her ashen face. She trembled as she watched me enter the room, her breathing uneven and harsh enough to hear.
I sat on the stool and waited. Tony clearly expected more from me than neutral acceptance of the situation, that much was clear in his body language. He watched with interest. I refused to give him a show.
“How many people are with you?” Tony asked again.
I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “None. No, wait. Eleventy-million. Or maybe sixty-three. I forg—ahh!”
Tony hit me across the face with the back of his hand. He was wearing armored gloves. “Those are mine,” I said, nodding toward his hand.
He smiled at me. It was pleasant, even warm, but still an obvious facade. He nodded in the direction of a cabinet centered on the rear wall of the room, which I hadn’t been able to see the first time I was in here. “Been looking through your gear. I liked the gloves, and it’s not like you’re going to need them. I am curious about your coat, though. Must be custom to have all that armor sewn in it. Makes me think you’re telling the truth about being from Haven.”
“Got no reason to lie about that,” I said, spitting a glob of blood onto the floor in front of me. “I’m not exactly hard to miss.”
“But you won’t tell me how many of your friends are with you,” Tony said. “Why is that?”
He and I both knew why, of course. As soon as he believed me, he’d probably kill me. That was, if Tony was around the level of smart I expected. A dumber man would have killed me already. A more intelligent one would recognize the potential trove of information I represented and keep me alive at all costs. Tony wasn’t bad at this—I would have bet a week’s rations he’d done a similar job with Artemis—but the years had added rust to his skills and he had an ego. When it came to getting intelligence from your enemy, that was something you had to check at the door.
Also, having that information would precipitate some kind of reaction. If the Sons believed a large force was bearing down on them, they might run. I couldn’t have that. These cunts weren’t going to get away with it, even if I couldn’t rain down hell on everyone in their organization. If they thought—correctly—that a small team was around, they would send out hunting parties, find my friends, and murder them to death.
No way.
When I didn’t answer, Tony glanced over at Tabby. “Next time I put her in this chair, the boys will hold you down and make you watch. I won’t ask again.”
I pondered that for a second. “Okay. Go ahead.”
Tony blinked and stood straight, his artful pose forgotten. “What?”
I shrugged. “I said go ahead and do it. I can’t stop you, and I’m well past the age where emotional manipulation like that will work on me. I’m not the one threatening to torture her. You
are.”
Tony gaped at me. It was somewhat restrained but incredulous nonetheless. “You’d let me hurt her just to save yourself from telling me what I want to know just a little bit longer?”
“Well, that’s the trick,” I said. “You weren’t really hurting her. She was in on it.”
I looked at Tabby right as I spoke the words. There was no confusion on her face. No shock or fury. Though she resumed her mask quickly, I saw what I was desperately hoping to find.
Surprise. It was all the confirmation I needed.
Tony didn’t miss her reaction, either. “Well, aren’t you a clever son of a bitch? How’d you know?”
The question lacked his usual bite. That too was a facade, an act he put on to achieve what he thought would be the desired outcome. This was more professional, like a software engineer asking a coworker how they’d overcome a pesky, recurring bug.
Normally I wouldn’t have responded honestly, but then I wasn’t planning on letting the Sons have more chances to interrogate people. “The room you put me in, for one. She said she was in there for ten or twelve hours at a time. There wasn’t a bucket or anything for her to go in, and if there were she’d have kept it where the light from the door could fall on it. No one would want to leave something like that where it would always be in the dark and close to zombies. No smell, either, which there would have been if she had to go on the floor.”
I looked over at Tabby, who had given up her pretense. She still looked afraid, but for entirely different reasons. “My guess is she really is from New America but made herself useful after you questioned her so she could stay alive. Which included selling out her people.”
Tabby’s eyes lowered. Even if I was right, I found it hard to judge her. It would be so easy to play the hero and pretend that there’s some kind of list of Lines That Cannot Be Crossed, and doing so made her a villain. The world was infinitely more gray than that even before The Fall. Everyone, man, woman, and child, is faced from birth with a nearly infinite number of choices. What Tabby had done in the moment might have saved her life. Armchair quarterbacking life and death decisions that happened in seconds was easy if you refused to see the situation from the point of view of the person making them.
I didn’t hate her. I didn’t even blame her. She wasn’t innocent in this situation, but Tabby was also a victim.
“Do what you want with me,” I said. “I can’t stop you from hurting me, either. But I’ll bite my own tongue off before I give you shit. That’s just the way it is.”
Tony studied me with clever blue eyes. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Son, if you’ve done a tenth of the homework on this place I think you have, then you know exactly who the fuck I am. If Tabby is from New America, chances are she knows too. I’m betting you wrote my reputation off as exaggeration. It’s not.”
I glanced toward his knife. “So either shit or get off the pot. I’m getting bored.”
12
A lesson they don’t teach you in training because it should be so obvious that no student of any sort of warfare would ever do it: don’t egg on a sociopath with a knife. It never ends well.
Like a machine forced to obey its programming, Tony couldn’t help but do the things he said he would. The training was too deeply ingrained in him. It made sense to me why he’d try the slow buildup to doing permanent damage. In his mind, it at least had a chance of working, whereas just going nuts on me with the blade probably wouldn’t. He had a better feel for me now, and knew a slim chance was better than none.
I suspected he thought I might help him along if he mutilated me. All it would take as a well-timed jerk on my part and Tony could accidentally puncture an artery. I’d bleed out in minutes. It’s what I would be concerned about in his position. The people in charge, no matter who they were, would always take a good faith failure better than an abject fuck up before you could even get started.
Man, have I been there before.
His knife was razor sharp. I know because he tested it on his forearm, shaving away a little hair. Then he leaned in and deftly sliced away my shirt, leaving me bare from the waist up.
“Holy fucking shit,” one of the guards said from behind me. The other gave a surprised grunt.
Tony took in the scar tissue nearly covering my entire torso with something like respect in his eyes. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.”
Then he leaned in and stuck the knife into the thick mat of scar tissue covering one side from hip to the top of my armpit. The roughly oval patch stretched around well onto my chest and belly and a third of the way across my back. Beneath the skin was a layer of the fibrous material Chimera caused some zombies to develop. In my injured state, the stuff infecting everyone in the world did its best to keep me alive. That was its purpose, after all.
I flinched and made a raspy, pained sound in my throat as the blade parted my skin but also saw Tony’s eyes widen when the tip only traveled a quarter inch before stopping. “What the hell?”
He pulled the blade out and glanced at its barely bloodied tip, then back at me. I shrugged. “Getting mauled by a pack of zombies comes with a couple perks.”
Rather than be put off, Tony’s eyes narrowed with interest. He grabbed my wrists and pulled them up by the zip tie. He found the other bands of the tough tissue on my forearms and studied the overlapping surgical scars, so starkly different from the ones given to me by zombies, decorating me in a painful geometry. “Someone studying you, huh? Taking out pieces of this stuff?” I must have betrayed some kind of surprise, because Tony laughed. “Oh, yeah. You’re right. We know a lot about you and your people. Well, as much as the people leaving New America for Haven knew, anyway. Is your friend with you? McDonald?”
“Kell is retired,” I said. “He found the cure. It’s not perfect, but I think it earned him a nice quiet life.”
Tony slowly pushed the tip of the blade into my forearm. “I’m going to choose to take that as a no. So he’s not with you. What about his woman, the redhead? She had your back in Rebound.” When the knife hit the fibrous layer, Tony carefully worked the blade inside the wound.
Inside, I was screaming. Look, pain is pain, okay? How much I feel it varies, but this was not fun. On the outside, however, I maintained my cool. I wasn’t totally free of reaction—that’s impossible no matter how many times action stars do it—but I kept it in check. Sweat formed on my brow and my voice was tight, but my breathing barely rose as I spoke. “Emily took up teaching. She’s gonna have a baby, from what I hear. If you want to congratulate them, write a card and I’ll make sure they both get it.”
Tony smiled and shook his head. “Bravado never gets old.” He pushed the blade a little harder, puncturing the sub layer and forcing the tip of the blade into muscle. I let out a choked scream. Fuck that hurt.
“I’m going to keep doing this,” Tony said in a matter-of-fact voice. “I don’t particularly like it, but I’ll go on until you die or you tell me what I want to know. I won’t try to intimidate you, just passing along the facts.”
And you know what? I believed him. The words had the ring of truth, though like an iceberg there was a lot more hidden below the surface than was apparent above. Tony was valuable—anyone with interrogation skills would be for a group that fed on information—but not so valuable that his betters didn’t scare the shit out of him. He’d do the work because it was his job and his well-being depended on it. He might even manage to get something from me, though we were both old enough hats at this game to know whatever I yelled out in a moment of horrible pain had long odds against being useful. Or even true.
“Guess I should be straight with you, too, Tony,” I said. “Part of why I was so good at my job back in the day is that it takes a lot to start having an impact on my frame of mind. Pain won’t wear me down mentally, not fast enough for it to help you. I spent a career as a closeted gay man in one of the most dangerous, physically demanding jobs on the planet. I promise, your little
pig sticker won’t impress me. I’ve been stuck with bigger.”
I winked at him and blew him a kiss.
Remember that thing I said about not pissing off dudes with knives?
Do as I say, children. Not as I do.
About an hour later, I was bleeding a lot. Note here that I don’t say I was bleeding severely; there’s a difference. No single wound was too bad in terms of blood loss. Tony started trying to go after nerves by cutting little gashes and digging around. He wasn’t as good at it as he wanted to be—thankfully—so the pain wasn’t mind-shattering. It very well could have been. Directly fucking with the nerves is just about the most painful thing you can experience.
Not that Tony and his goons didn’t shoot for variety. I took a good number of blows to my kidneys. Sharp, carefully measure strikes that wouldn’t do permanent damage (or so I hoped) but would definitely leave me pissing blood for a little while.
So far, nothing was cut off. Tabby sat in the corner with her eyes averted. She didn’t weep for me, but neither did the woman want to watch me get butchered like a side of beef.
Tony asked me a lot of questions. I answered some of them honestly because the information was either public or incredibly easy to find out. How many full-time soldiers in Haven? Sure. I’ll tell you that. But every adult and most older children were hell in a fight. If you’re going to come for my people, best come correct or they’re gonna fuck your entire universe up.
At the end of that hour, Tony was tired. Not blown out with exhaustion, but clearly running on fumes. Thanks to the constant rush of chemicals from my glands, I felt relatively okay. In pain, sure, but not at all sleepy. Being slashed with a knife has a remarkable effect on your wakefulness.
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 8