Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons

by Guess, Joshua

I sat on the stool, leaned over so the blood on my face could drip to the floor. My hands were still bound in front of me. The plastic was warped from the constant tensing of my wrists. When you’re hurt, your hands want to move and shift. I was a strong guy, so the fact that the zip tie held together was a testament to its toughness.

  The two goons were in their assigned places behind me during this little break. Tony stood with his shoulders stooped, knife dangling from his hand.

  I took a few long, deep breaths and tried to find the place in my mind where pain and fear didn’t touch me. It was a construct built of necessity in my life. A state of mind that served as both shield and refuge.

  A titanic explosion ripped through the night, shaking the building and filling the room with the sound of shrapnel plinking against the metal walls. Automatic gunfire erupted in the near distance. Tony whirled around toward the door, an entirely human instinct.

  They’re early, I thought as I took advantage of the distraction and shot my wrists into the air. I rose to my feet, using the downward thrust of my arms to help me stand, and the cuffs snapped. Fun fact: a zip tie will usually break if you stress it this way, even when they’re not worn out by constant struggle.

  Tony saw me from the corner of his eye and tried to react, but I had too much of a head start. I grappled him and spun us around, an arm around his chest with my left hand gripped tightly to his throat. With my right I grabbed his knife hand. Oh, you better believe he held onto it with a death grip. That was what I wanted. He was so busy trying to keep me from taking the knife, holding it close to his body, that he didn’t realize I was about to shove it into his thigh. Which I did.

  No scream came out because I was also holding his throat, but Tony did begin to collapse from what I had to assume were some sheared muscles. I shoved him forward, letting him tangle up the legs of the goon on the left. The goon on the right was halfway across the room already, and I flicked out a foot, shoving the stool in front of him.

  He danced around it, but the save cost him a precious second. I took a huge step forward and extended one booted foot, planted in his knee, and pushed with all my weight. The guy was tougher than a three dollar steak; his knee held up. Huh. That usually worked.

  The move did throw his balance off and sent him crashing into the floor. I turned on my heel and launched myself toward goon number one, making sure to kick his buddy in the face as I went.

  Goon one was just getting to his feet when I crashed into him. It wasn’t graceful, pretty, or even particularly planned. Just effective. I managed to slam some part of my body onto the knife jutting out of Tony’s thigh, eliciting a strangled scream. Goon one hit the wall and caught his balance.

  Then I took the knife. A spurt of blood came with it.

  I flipped the knife into a reverse grip and went to fucking work. The trick to knife fighting isn’t to kill with a single strike, or at least it never has been for me. A knife is an up close weapon. It incites instantaneous lizard-brain terror about what it’s going to do to you. This is only amplified by any actual damage done by the blade, which was how I used it.

  Tony was busy trying to keep himself from bleeding out, his damaged throat too raw to call for help. Not that anyone would have heard him. I was sure everyone was outside, and even if they weren’t, the continuous gunshots and chaos would have relegated any shouts to secondary importance.

  I swiped at goon one a couple times, catching his forearms as he tried mightily to disarm me. Without the blade, he’d have been all too happy to get in close. With it, he was scared. Truly scared.

  Which was how I was able to lull him into a pattern. He reached out with the same hand three times, reacting to my feint the same way. After switching things up, I tried the same feint again and when his hand shot out, I grabbed it and used his body for leverage as I slammed a knee into his liver.

  The goon passed out right there. Liver shots are fucking rough, and this dude looked like he’d been doing his best to kill his for a few decades. I spun to face the other guard only to find him already dead. Or pretty close to it; the purple face above Tabby’s belt—securely wrapped around his neck and twisted in place by her white-knuckled fists—was doing a fine job.

  I glanced down at Tony, who was very carefully not looking at me. Instead he was bent nearly double on his side, arms shaking with the effort of holding pressure on his wound.

  “I bet you think I’m not going to hurt a defenseless man,” I said. Tony twitched. I won’t lie; I wanted to savor it for a second. He had it coming, and certainly not just for what he’d done to me.

  “Wrong,” I said, and cut his throat.

  I finished off the guards coldly and quickly, heart shots both. Tabby eyed me warily when I put out a hand to help her up. “You’ve got two choices,” I told her. “Take your chances with me, or hide here until someone comes to find you. But if you try to get in my way, I’m going to kill you. We have no time. What’ll it be?”

  13

  It took us all of a minute to find the keys and liberate my stuff from the cabinet. Unfortunately, Tony wasn’t a complete idiot. All my weapons were gone. The canteen and jerky were still there along with the pack of emergency supplies tucked into the lining of my pack, but other than my spare shirts, they’d cleaned me out. The only weapon I had was the knife. The guards weren’t armed. Also a smart move. The fewer weapons available, the less options a prisoner like me would have when deciding he’d taken enough abuse.

  “Why are we going back to the cell?” Tabby asked. “And why the hell did you take their clothes?”

  I glanced down at the collection of socks and scraps of shirt balled up in my hand. “Because I couldn’t find a flashlight.”

  No one was in the hallway—I suspected almost everyone was outside at that moment based on the amount of gunfire I was hearing—which made sliding into the cell a lot easier. When I went to close the door, Tabby put up a hand. “Dude, that’s gonna lock behind us. We’ll be trapped in here.”

  That was a fair point. “Here, let me just do this...”

  The door had two locks. The larger one was a sliding deal that truly secured the thing. The other was in the handle, the sort of thing that was meant to keep the door from blowing open on its own. “It needs to at least look locked so they don’t immediately come in here checking for us. I’m hoping they’ll assume the last place we’d go is back in here.” I stuffed a scrap of shirt into the plate on the door frame, preventing the lock from engaging, and then pushed the door closed.

  “What’s the point?” Tabby said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Not a lot of time, here,” I said as I put the bundle on the concrete and made a neat pile. I pulled the emergency kit out of my bag and removed a tiny glob of sticky material from it. Petroleum jelly with old dryer lint mixed into it. Even in the apocalypse, clothes shed fibers. I wrapped the goo in a sock and lit it on fire with a match from my kit. One of ten. I’d need to make those count.

  The flames burned through the knit of the sock and caught the jelly, turning it into a merry little fire almost at once. I looked away as fast as I could, not wanting to blind myself.

  “There,” I said, pointing to the rafters over the wall to the left of the door.

  Tabby looked up, squinting. “Oh. You clever son of a bitch. We’re going to climb?”

  I smiled, hefting the knife.

  Even with the dim light, killing the zombies wasn’t hard. They were restrained, after all. I cleared enough of them that Tabby and I could climb the wooden studs and beams making up the wall and easily get into the loft overhead. If I was right, it probably ran the whole length of the place. That was the only reason I could think of for the upper section of the building to open into this room. If I was wrong, well, at least it was a better hiding place than where we were now.

  “Go on up,” I said. “I have something to do down here, and the fire won’t last long.”

  Tabby didn’t look convinced, but she took my pack and started cli
mbing. I wasted no time running around the room and sawing through the ropes holding the zombies back. There were eight of them left, and I left just enough strands intact to make them have to work for freedom.

  By the time I was working on the eighth, the first zombie I’d semi-freed snapped the remains of his rope. I picked up the pace, and then decided the last one wasn’t worth risking my hide over. With a running leap, I latched onto the wall and climbed the cross beams like a spider monkey.

  “Are you fucking insane?” Tabby whispered when I settled onto the overhead ledge. “Now we can’t go back that way. If there isn’t an exit up here, we’re boned.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Really? You saw what I did to three living men in like thirty seconds. Do you really think I have less of a chance against a bunch of dead ones?”

  Tabby waved a hand at the unfinished rafters ahead of us. Other than a series of plywood strips, there was nothing to walk on other than the supports themselves. It was not an encouraging sight. “What if you slip, go through the ceiling, fall thirty feet, and break your legs? Then I’m up here looking like the asshole who stabbed the Sons in the back the first chance I got, with no way to get down. I’m not bad in a fight, but I’m not from fucking Krypton like you seem to be.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, shit. Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. Sorry.”

  Tabby blinked. “What?”

  I shrugged. “You’re right. It was a dick move. My fault. I’ll try my best not to get myself killed.”

  It was her turn to laugh, a slightly maniacal sound. “Yeah, please do. I can’t believe I’m going along with this. A dude taking criticism without trying to hedge or pass the blame is just...honestly that makes me wonder if I’ve started losing my mind.”

  I put a hand to my chest. “Oh, that’s hurtful. Accurate, but hurtful. Now, let’s move a little further away from the edge so no one can see us if they do come in, then I’ll start looking around to see if there’s a way out.”

  Seeing became easier once we moved away from the cell. Dark as it was in there, the attic area was relatively well lit. The glow rising up between the cracks in the ceiling tiles and other spaces outlined the space nicely. Granted, we still had to feel around a lot, but it wasn’t the hellish darkness I worried it might be.

  Admittedly, even a dimly lit and treacherous attic space is made ten times worse when accompanied by the sounds of gunfire and screaming. The low-grade, constant anxiety this caused was counterbalanced by the pride I felt for Jo and Bobby for keeping the distraction up so long. Their orders were clear about not putting themselves in immediate danger. They were supposed to cause as much carnage as possible, and then withdraw. If they could pull some of the Sons away and give me an opening, so much the better.

  It took us about five minutes to find the ladder and roof access. The other end of the attic space opened up on the main floor of the building, a wide area strewn with the usual survivor debris. Blankets, makeshift rooms with sheets for walls, assorted pieces of gear and supplies. I stood as straight as possible so I could get a better angle on the room below. I trusted the darkness to hide me only so much, though the scattered handful of lanterns didn’t throw much light upward.

  I couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t there standing guard. I carefully got on my belly and crawled right to the edge of the loft, then looked straight down.

  No one. I’m one of those people who always worry the worst possible scenario is going to happen, and someone leaning against the wall I was standing on would have been it. A sentry there would have heard us open the hatch and climb the ladder.

  I sat up and leaned close to Tabby. “I can almost guarantee you someone will be up there. They’ll be armed. I’m going to go first. You wait on the ladder just below the opening until I tell you it’s safe.”

  Tabby frowned. “Don’t you think two of us will handle that better than one?”

  “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “Not in these circumstances. Without knowing the layout up there, we have no way to coordinate. I wouldn’t want one of us to get shot because the other tangled up their feet. I’ll take the risk. It’s kind of my thing.”

  “Fine,” Tabby said, obviously not pleased but unwilling to fight about it. She made a shooing motion. “Go, go. I don’t want to wait here any longer than I have to.”

  The ladder itself ran from a room below us, through its ceiling, and toward the roof. There was only about four feet between the roof and the floor of the attic, which meant I had to scrunch myself down to fit in the space. I took a few deep breaths, grabbed onto the ladder, and coiled myself beneath the hatch.

  I pushed it open just a hair at first, certain it would make a shrieking, rusty wail. It didn’t. Apparently it was annoying enough that someone had taken some oil to the hinges. Readying myself, I pushed slowly but consistently and raised my head to look through the crack.

  A pair of boots stood about two feet in front of the hatch, facing away.

  Oh, thank you merciful Zeus, I thought.

  When it was about halfway open, the hatch squeaked. Not badly, but enough to cause the feet in front of me to twitch. I threw it all the way open and reached up with my free hand, straightened my legs, and silently prayed this guy didn’t have time to turn around and aim.

  The hatch thudded dully against the roof. I caught the barrel of a rifle and instinctively yanked it sideways, far away from me. The person holding it apparently didn’t have a finger inside the trigger guard, because it didn’t go off. My forward momentum carried me up enough to grab their collar with my other hand, and I pulled with all my might.

  The top of my forehead met nose and mouth with a sickening crunch and a splash of blood. A chunk of flesh fell between us when I pulled back for another hit, and I realized it was part of their tongue.

  Her tongue. The guard was a woman. I felt bad about that for a microsecond, then hit her again. This time her fingers were in the way—reaching for the wounded area was a natural reaction, and all too predictable if you weren’t in the middle of a fight—and I felt fingers break when I slammed my head into hers again.

  I don’t like hurting women if I can avoid it. Call it sexism if you like. I grew up with a certain set of values. I’ve known women as competent in a fight as anyone, including myself, and I’ve trusted my life to them. No part of me sees them as inferior in any way. But you try breaking eighteen years of conditioning by a man like my dad, whose bedrock beliefs included the simple idea that you don’t hit girls.

  Sorry, dad.

  On a subconscious level, the part of you that operates at hyper speed and doesn’t use words but feelings and ideas, I processed in about a tenth of a second that she had it coming. She was one of them, after all. A Relentless Son. Or maybe Daughter. I had no idea what their naming structure was like for female members. Now that’s sexist.

  I wrenched the gun away from limp fingers, stepped onto the roof, and drew the knife. The injured woman tried to pull away from me, her now-free hands darting for and snagging a pair of knives from her belt. The thrusts were solid an unhesitating. They’d have ruined my day if I hadn’t let go of her lapel and dropped low, sweeping her legs out from under her.

  What came next wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t nice. I lunged forward and landed on the enemy, a brief but painful wrestling match ensuing. Her blades caught me in a couple places—fucking knife fights will do that—but I won in the end. I always seem to win, no matter how much I hate it.

  “You can come up now,” I said wearily in the direction of the hatch.

  Tabby appeared, grimacing at the bloody mess in front of her. “Damn. She messed you up, man. You gonna be okay?”

  I nodded, the back of my stubbly head rubbing against the metal roof. “Soon as we get somewhere I can patch up, sure.” I didn’t know if there was a deeper meaning to her words, but at that moment I just preferred to take them at a surface level.

  “How do we get down?” Tabby asked
.

  I sat up. “Well, worst case scenario is we drop down onto the entrance. It’s a single story. We probably won’t hurt ourselves too badly. But when I was watching this place, I saw what looked like a coil of rope right by the south edge of the roof. Pretty sure it’s supposed to be for if one of these guys gets stuck up here and needs a way out. If we’re smart, we can time it so no one is looking our way, then escape.”

  “Through the gate, you mean? They’ll be watching it.”

  I smiled. “My friends made us a hole. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll find a way. There’s always a way.”

  14

  Things that went according to plan: there was a hole and the Relentless Sons were in total chaos. Getting off the roof and into the woods was relatively easy.

  Things that did not go according to plan: getting lost.

  Look, I’m not proud of it. And under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have even been capable of it. My sense of direction couples well with an ingrained habit of memorizing everything around me so I always have a point of reference for my mental map. A couple factors interfered with this. Part of the wall was on fire, which kind of made sense given it was made up of felled trees. The smoke was choking and obscured everything, and it only got worse as we made our way to the ground.

  Add to that my many, many wounds and a volume of blood loss concerning even to me, and you get a slightly unfocused guy not paying attention to where he is while trying to dance his way through a storm of bullets. It was also possible I had a concussion.

  I knew Bobby and Jo were far away by now, taking shots with rifles and moving every thirty or forty seconds. I knew they’d used the RPG, one of the last of its kind from Haven’s stores and brought on this mission for a Hail Mary play, to blast a hole in the wall. I knew that whatever plans we made to meet up after I escaped—because we definitely considered it a high probability event—were now so thoroughly boned that they were probably beyond recovery.