I sensed mischief in her tone. Possibly shenanigans. “Sounds like you have something in mind.”
Grinning evilly, Tabby nodded. “Oh, yeah. I absolutely do.”
Tabby let out a moan of sheer physical pleasure beneath me. Her body tensed with it.
“Stop doing that,” I said. “You’re defeating the whole purpose of this, and it isn’t exactly comfortable for me.”
She paused, and then deliberately relaxed. “Good. Now stop moving so much and let me work.”
Since we couldn’t just leave and try our luck outside until I healed up some, we were stuck in the house. Tabby, as it turned out, had been suffering from overwork and shitty sleeping conditions for weeks. Every muscle in her body was a tense, knotted mess in need of some TLC. I was drafted into giving her a deep tissue massage.
My hands were up to the task; it didn’t require a ton of energy to work out the knots. But I had to be constantly mindful of my injuries. Even cautious movement hurt and pulled at the stitches. By Tabby’s count, I had more than thirty distinct and separate wounds. I figured I owed her at least a full minute of careful tending for each of them.
“So what’s our next move?” Tabby asked in a deeply relaxed voice as I dug a thumb into a twist of muscles in her upper back. “How do we get away?”
I worked for a few seconds as I thought about how to frame my answer. “I need a few days to get my strength back, for starters.”
Tabby’s head, already resting sideways, tilted even further toward me. She looked at me with one eye, eyebrow raised. “Won’t they leave? Your friends, I mean. You already got captured. Figured they’d go home for reinforcements.”
“Oh, I’d be shocked if they went further than a few miles from here,” I said. “They’re not going to give up until I’m back with them or they have proof I’m dead. And anyway, I’m not so sure going back to Haven is first on my list of things to do.”
Tabby frowned. “That sounds ominous.”
I chuckled. “I need to know everything about the Sons you can tell me. It was pretty clear Tony wasn’t in charge of the ones holed up back there. I want to know their chain of command all the way up to the top guy.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve overheard, but it’s not gonna be much,” Tabby warned. “I know the guy in charge of our camp wasn’t one of Tony’s guys. He was a biker. One of the original Sons. Everyone called him Smoke. One of those club nicknames, I guess. Past that I got nothin’.”
“That’s enough to work with,” I said, continuing my ceaseless, methodical work down Tabby’s back. “The reason they call it a chain of command is because one link always leads to another. I need to gather information. Data, data, data. I can’t make bricks without clay.”
Tabby’s body shuddered beneath me, and it took a second to realize she was laughing. “What?”
“I can’t believe you just quoted Sherlock Holmes while talking about investigating a bunch of murderous assholes,” she said with a snort. “Are you a detective?”
Again, caution was advised. I liked Tabby well enough even with the understandable mistrust I had to maintain for obvious reasons. She’d behaved like an ally and I wanted to keep it that way. I’ve stood with men who had tried to kill me on previous occasions. Worked with sworn enemies when the need was great. In my line of work, grudges are wasteful and stupid. Cautious observation, however, was an absolute necessity. Be professional and do the job, but don’t be a blind idiot.
“Gathering intel is a big part of the job,” I said. “If I’m a detective, it’s only in a really narrow sense. I promised the little girl those assholes shot that I’d take down every person responsible. Promised myself, too.”
Now Tabby turned, twisting herself so she could look at me. “You’re serious. You think you can kill like thirty people by yourself?”
I shrugged in a way I hoped came off as genuinely unsure but vaguely confident. “I’ve done bigger jobs. With more resources, I admit, but it’s not impossible. Can’t let these people dig in any deeper, or we’ll never scrape them free.”
Tabby shook her head ruefully and rested on her belly once again. She didn’t call me a moron or suicidal, which I thought was a good sign. I managed to kill our way out of the base by relying on stealth and surprise. The rest of the Sons would be on high alert for trouble, if they didn’t outright retreat to whatever fortress or camp the rest of their people called home.
If she knew my larger goal, she definitely would have called me every name in the book before running off to leave my poor, doomed ass alone.
Far from being afraid, my biggest concern was that the Relentless Sons would fall back faster than I could track them, deciding this area was too dangerous for their brand of hit and run supply raiding. That was where my initial mistake had cost me. I didn’t understand the conditions. The Sons didn’t give a shit about war—they were like me. Maximum return for minimum effort, the fewest possible risks taken. Attacking Haven or any other large community would never be on their agenda. That would kill the organism, the herd, they wished to scavenge from. Like vultures, they would circle and wait for the weakest targets, striking only when it benefited them.
The Sons were basically parasites smart enough not to immediately kill that from which they fed. Not much different than zombies. Just smarter and less dead.
And I kill zombies.
16
Over the next four days Tabby and I talked about every subject under the sun. She had been a lifelong fan of college basketball, while I was a football guy. I learned that she could play piano well enough to make decent money teaching it to get her through college. I jabbered on about being in the navy and how bored I got with it before SEAL training.
We talked a lot in between her sojourns through the neighborhood to find supplies, but there were many things I didn’t say. Like the fact that I had a way to communicate with Jo and Bobby if I needed to. Or even telling her their names, how many people were with me, or any concrete facts that I could avoid. I think she knew I was hedging my bets on the chance she wasn’t trustworthy, and if it bothered her she didn’t let it show.
On day five we went exploring. I wasn’t yet up to hunting down the Sons, much less doing anything lethal to Smoke or whoever else in their command structure I could get my hands on. I was, however, perfectly up for some light rehab, which was how I thought of working my way through the crowds of zombies roaming the neighborhood.
We weren’t worried about leading them back to the house. For one, we’d reinforced all the ground floor windows so nothing could easily get inside. Took Tabby the better part of a morning to scavenge what we needed. We also had the advantage of a messy neighborhood as our playground. Fenced in back yards, swing sets, all kinds of stuff we could easily maneuver around that would slow or trip up the dead.
Tabby jogged next to me with a baseball bat over her shoulder, whistling a tune. It took me a few seconds to place it: Float On by Modest Mouse. She looked more relaxed than I’d seen her before. Not carefree, but the body language of someone who has begun to adjust to circumstances and feels good about managing when they thought they’d fail. I knew that feeling intimately.
I began to sing along with the tune, drawing a surprised look. Tabby kept right on going. Neither of us was worried about being heard. The point of this trip was to draw attention, after all.
I only carried the knife. There were other weapons available, or at least tools I could use as weapons, but I didn’t want the temptation. Most of my injuries were confined to my upper body except for the nasty leg wound, and after some careful testing back at the house, even a hard run didn’t push the stitches to their limit.
So far we were keeping ahead of the pack. We’d run hard for about thirty seconds to open some distance, and then slowed down. As I sang, I glanced over my shoulder. The herd was catching up. They weren’t alone, either, as other zombies began filtering between the houses, attracted by the commotion.
“Let’s pick up the pace
a little,” I said, dropping the song. Tabby did the same, taking a deep breath and slowly ratcheting up her speed. Together we jogged in a wide circle around the neighborhood.
“Watch out,” she said after we’d turned the corner and moved two streets up. A cluster of zombies was lying in wait near a choke point in the road where two cars were left with bumpers nearly touching. A New Breed stood with them, canny eyes studying our approach.
“I’ll take left,” I said, drifting away from Tabby, who only nodded as she went right. The New Breed, perhaps taking note of the weapon and my lack of one so obvious, darted toward me.
I broke into a dead run, angling myself steeply away and vaulting over the back end of the leftmost car. The New Breed, showing its cleverness, didn’t take the long way around by following me. Instead it turned to run back through the gap.
Turning away from Tabby didn’t work out well for it. She’d stopped her sprint as soon as the zombies focused their attention on me and somehow managed to conceal herself out in the open. From my vantage point, she just appeared, bat swinging. Her swipe took the New Breed in the side of the head with way more force than I expected. The gristly crunch of breaking bone announced a home run, followed by several others in quick succession. Tabby didn’t show a hint of fear. She danced away to keep the small herd from overwhelming her, picking them off one at a time between random changes in direction.
“Nice,” I said. “Damn, if I’d have known you had those kinds of skills, I’d have let you lead us out of the base. Come to think of it, I’m surprised you didn’t try to escape on your own way before I got there.”
Tabby took a few more swings before abandoning the remaining zombies and running to catch up with me. We had about twenty yards on them, which let us slow down enough to talk. “They took my shoes,” she said, a note of embarrassment in her voice. “I know that sounds stupid, but every time I was allowed outside, they made me work barefoot. I kept thinking I’d get a bad cut on my foot trying to climb the wall, or hurt myself running from zombies. Fucking shoes, man. Kept me there better than chains.”
“Pretty smart, though,” I said. “It’s a light touch. Doesn’t push you toward feeling like you have no other option but running.” It wasn’t an uncommon tactic, but it did tell me more about the Sons and what I could expect from them. Obviously taking in the people from Artemis only gave the group a wider and deeper arsenal.
It was time to build a little arsenal of my own.
“You kinda live your life like you’re in a video game, don’t you?” Tabby said as we prepared to leave the house we were shamelessly looting. “You can just wander out here and find whatever you need, make anything a weapon, and recover so long as you have enough time. That’s it. You’re a character from Grand Theft Auto.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We got lucky. That’s all. I don’t have any magic powers.”
Tabby waved a hand at the pair of backpacks sitting by the door. One was the usual, stuffed full of what dry goods and canned food we could scrounge. I wasn’t quite up for hunting yet. The other backpack had more of the same, plus two large plastic containers we’d...liberated when the need arose.
“You literally tripped over a patch of perfectly ripe watermelon, Mason,” Tabby said, somewhat exasperated. “That doesn’t happen to normal people. Are you a witch?”
“Wizard,” I said. “Gryffindor house.”
The words slipped out of my mouth so easily and casually that she wasn’t at all prepared for them. With a blink and a pause, she absorbed them. Then:
“Of course you’re a Gryffindor. It explains so goddamn much.”
I took a moment to recognize the complete weirdness of joking about Harry Potter while standing in a house where I had recently killed two already-dead people just so I could use the cutting board in peace. “Slytherin,” I muttered.
Tabby only grinned. “So, just luck? We gonna stumble across more fresh food that way? Because I could murder a cheeseburger right now.”
I shrugged. “It was a fairly nice neighborhood. I guess someone gardened here and the process just sort of kept going. My dad got a lot of volunteer fruits and vegetables every year. Have you seen some of the old abandoned farms? Some of them grow like crazy with no one tending them for years.”
Tabby sighed theatrically. “I accept that, however weird I may find it, wild food does grow in nature. Well, in back yards with a desperate need for a mow, but you get my point. What I’m really talking about here is this idea you have. We’ve been collecting stuff all day. Your plan is to go back to the house and, what, MacGyver it into something useful? Like we’re playing an RPG where you get to craft whatever you want so long as you have the materials.”
“Pick a genre,” I said. “And no, this is all stuff we’ve worked out with a lot of trial and error. I’m not even sure what I have will work. It’s pretty hard to make body armor out of random junk, so that part I may not bother with. In Haven we have people who make custom armor, and it’s so difficult they get special consideration and favors just to entice them not to quit.” I stood on my tiptoes and glanced through the window. The bottle of cleaning solution—heavy on ammonia to drive the dead away—was doing its job admirably. I only had to toss out about a cup of liquid from the gallon jug, but the yard was almost clear. “I’ll need to make a few other trips once we drop this stuff off. If we’re gonna be in the wild for the near future, we need to be prepared.”
Tabby sighed and patted my shoulder. “You can just say you want to build something. It’s okay. Even big boys play with toys.”
I chuckled. “Wow. You’ve really come out of your shell. A week ago I wouldn’t have guessed there was such a smart ass in there.”
“Wait till I get my plumage,” she said, giving her hips a little shake. “My tail feathers spread out and form a pattern that spells ‘fuck off and die.’”
I stared at her in utter bewilderment. “Uh, what?”
“Plumage. Feathers,” Tabby said, looking at me like I was a complete idiot. “You said I came out of my shell. You know, like a bird? It was a joke.”
I felt my face go red. “Oh. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I missed that.” Rather than give her the chance to pile on, I peeked out the window again. “Okay. We’re clear. I think we can just take a straight run to the house. I can see it from here. Might have to jump a couple trash cans, but we should be okay.”
Tabby grabbed the pack with the containers of freshly cut watermelon. “Saved by the life-or-death sprint to safety. By the way, I’m taking this one because if we get separated and I end up trapped somewhere, I want my last meal to not be canned peas well past their better years.”
“Fair,” I replied, snagging the other pack and opening the door.
The ammonia cleared a roughly circular space about ten yards wide in what was otherwise an almost solid wall of zombies that filled this part of the street. Forty or fifty of them. A nothing crowd in Haven, but here? Might as well have been a thousand. Too many for us to fight fairly. Which was why I used the ammonia. It wasn’t a cure all. Zombies had a sense of smell to put a dog to shame, but they’d push through the discomfort caused by the overwhelming stench of ammonia if they were hungry enough. And once one did, others would follow in an exponential domino effect.
These ones didn’t, however. Kell once told me that the ammonia didn’t just cause them pain—or whatever analogue to pain zombies felt—but blinded them in a way. Chimera remade the dead so their pores could sample the air around them constantly, vastly increasing what they could instinctively know about the world nearby. Dogs can smell certain cancers and sense oncoming seizures. Zombies can track human beings for hundreds of miles just by the lingering scent of car exhaust. I thought of what the ammonia did to them like a human being who could read a book from a hundred feet away suddenly having a spotlight shined across his eyes.
I just hoped it would keep on working. The kitchen towel I’d soaked in the stuff flopped wetly from its spot on
my belt, making my eyes water. The zombies hovered around us as we moved, clearly hungry but not so desperate as to brave getting any closer. Not yet.
“Keep steady,” I said. “If we run, that might be what sets them off. I don’t have to tell you what happens if they decide hunger is more important than pain, do I?”
Tabby hefted her baseball bat and rested it on her shoulder. “No, dad. It’s not my first rodeo.”
I nodded, and we set off for what passed for home, at least in the short term. I planned to give her a few more days, feeling out whether or not I could risk letting her meet the others. All I had to do was start a fire to call them to our location. Of course, Bobby and Jo might not be the only people attracted by such an obvious lure.
17
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Tabby said as she took me in.
I absolutely wasn’t fucking kidding her, I swear.
“What?” I asked, raising my arms innocently. “You don’t like my outfit?”
The outfit in question wasn’t all that odd at its base. I wore my boots and pants, of course, but added a heavy coat that I’d modified to the ensemble. It was one of those thick, dark tan deals that farmers used to wear. I’d pulled the lining and added a handful of thin metal plates to the interior. You’d be amazed what you can manage with a pair of metal shears, a hacksaw, and a cabinet full of expensive cookie sheets. They wouldn’t protect me from a bullet, but knife wounds? Yes, sir. At least the worst of one, anyway. Any blade short of an actual sword would bind up if it managed to get through at all. I’d also cut the sleeves open from wrist to elbow and glued extra protection to the inside of the brown outer shell. Between the quilting and that shell were layers of leather from a coat I slashed to ribbons. It wasn’t the same as my custom armor, but it would do in a pinch.
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 11