The camp wasn’t far from where Bobby and Jo had initially waited for me when I went on my ill-fated scouting run. A circle of six large vehicles ranging from vans to trucks surrounded us, custom panels interlocked on the exterior to create a shield wall. It wouldn’t keep zombies out if they swarmed, but the level of protection was enough that even a little delay would give us the time to rally a defense.
Bobby grabbed me by the back of the arm and none-too-gently led me to our van. “Come on, big fella. Jo needs to take a look at you.”
“I’m fine,” I said, making a halfhearted attempt to pull my arm free.
“You look like a surgeon was practicing on you and didn’t realize you were alive,” Bobby shot back. “Let Jo look at you, and if you give either of us any trouble I’ll do it the hard way and knock your ass out.”
“Like to see you try,” I said, but I smiled.
Jo’s examination was quick and professional, with a few more motherly clicks of her tongue than I expected. Toward the end she leaned in close and pulled out a magnifying glass—which I found delightfully old school—to take a closer look at the smallest of my wounds, which was on my left wrist. “Can I take the stitches out? I want to see how this is healing. I can sew it back up after.”
“God, that sounds like a ton of fun,” I said. “Go on, then.”
She made short work of the fishing line, deftly slicing through the stitches and picking them out. She turned to Bobby and held the magnifying glass out to him. “Hold this for me, would you? I need both hands.”
Bobby, to my surprise, complied without a moment of hesitation. I watched as she carefully put her hands to either side of the cut and gently tugged. It was nothing to me; I wasn’t afraid of an inch-long cut reopening, especially not since the person I trusted to fix it was the one doing it.
“Huh,” Jo said with a grunt. Her fingers pushed a little deeper into my forearm and pulled a little harder to widen the wound. “Would you look at that. Bobby, check this out.”
Bobby hunkered in close and saw whatever it was Jo saw.
“Huh,” Bobby said.
I cleared my throat. “Any of you monosyllabic cave people want to fill me in on what’s so interesting?”
Jo looked up at me as if just remembering I was there, which I reckoned might have been close to the truth. She, like her mentor Kell, was prone to focusing on a problem or interesting bit of information to the exclusion of all else. “What? Oh. Yeah. Sorry. It looks like the stuff that grows behind your skin when you’re hurt sort of...I dunno, seeped up like blood? Or maybe more like tree sap. Whatever metaphor you prefer. I think it bonded the sides of the cut together. I can’t pull this apart. No matter how hard I try, all I see is a little line of white stuff that looks like bone where the inside of your skin should be.”
Frowning, I flexed the wrist, twisting it in every way I could think of. It didn’t feel tight or otherwise constricted the way scar tissue sometimes did. I should know since I’m mostly made of the stuff. “That’s pretty handy. I wonder if the rest of my injuries are the same. Want to take a look?”
“No,” Jo said. “I think I need to take a look. You’re not the only person Chimera does this kind of stuff to, but you’re the most extreme example. Remember, I’ve been there when Kell tests you. I kinda know what I’m seeing here.”
She was worried, her young face showing lines as she frowned and furrowed her brow. She checked two more cuts in ascending order of size and severity and came up with the same results. In deference to how concerned Jo was, I held back a chuckle as she pulled out a small notebook and began scribbling notes at a breakneck pace.
“I’m not seeing the problem here,” I said, hoping to snap Jo out of her obsessive writing. In response, she made a shooing motion at me. I stayed quiet until she was done.
Snapping the notebook shut, she set it aside and looked at me with serious eyes. “You might not, but I can imagine a few.”
Trying not to start a fight, I picked my words carefully. “Jo, you gave up on biology. You’re a mechanic now. Usually, anyway. This isn’t your area of expertise.”
For such a young woman, Jo had remarkably adult behavior. That was part of why I’d taken her under my wing when she and her group found me dying on the road and saved my life. She was smart and mature beyond her years. Whether that was the result of the rapid growing-up the end of the world forced on people or just part of her nature, I had no clue.
She didn’t find insult in the words, not that I could see. Instead she paused and weighed them. I knew she was applying one of the first lessons I ever taught her: assess all information and consider the source. Jo respected me and my experience. I could almost hear the finely tuned gears in her head turning as she judged the value of the statement against what she knew to be true about herself and this new development with my Chimera infection.
“That’s true,” she said after a few seconds. “I did enough studying with Kell and enough hours helping him in the lab to know some of how it works. I cataloged every single strange little variation he came across, Mason. And you know how much people in Haven want to help him study it. Hundreds of volunteers totally willing to give whatever samples he needed. But you’re right. I work with machines now, for the most part. I like to know how things work. I like making new stuff.”
She leaned back on the bench and rubbed a hand across her mouth. “There’s a lot of overlap, though. I can diagnose a car engine and fix it because I know the pieces and parts. Human bodies aren’t that different. So think about this. Right now you have this stuff spreading in ways it hasn’t before. Sure, it’s helping heal your injuries, and maybe that’s great. But what happens if it sort of...keeps going? Decides to get into your liver or kidneys? Your heart? What if it starts spreading anywhere you get a bruise rather than a cut and chokes off the blood vessels there? That’s what has me worried. We just don’t know enough. This is totally new, as far as I know. And your case has always been unique in how much damage you lived through. We don’t know what that means. Not really.”
My mouth had fallen open just a bit as she talked, because she was absolutely right. I hadn’t considered that at all. Sure, Chimera was a symbiotic organism. It tried to help whatever life form it was attached to, and since the version that killed the world was engineered to only work for people, what was inside me had a vested interest in keeping me alive. Not that it had any capacity to know or understand that.
When I was injured all those years back, Chimera had saved me. Oh, it couldn’t have done it alone. Jo and the others definitely did the lion’s share of the work. But it fought the infection—infections, plural, if I had to bet on it—and rapidly grew thick sheets of itself to cover my wounds. I had always seen that as quirky, possibly unique, and ultimately harmless at worst.
I never considered the possibility that something that was historically beneficial might not always be so, and in my line of work that sort of oversight is unforgivable.
“You’re basically saying you think this could be turning into some kind of Chimera cancer,” I said. “Good cells growing out of control.”
Jo closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, calming herself slightly. It was a habit I knew well. “You said that, Mason. Not me. I don’t think that because I try not to extrapolate the worst possible scenario from almost no information. That’s your job. What I’m saying, again, is that we don’t know. I’m not stupid enough to think you’ll go home and have Kell look at you without finishing what we’re doing here. I just want you to be careful. Please. I don’t know if Bobby and I can pull off another distraction like the last one.”
Bobby, standing in the van hunched over with his hands dangling at his sides, shrugged and smiled a little. It was charmingly boyish. “Besides, we don’t have another rocket to launch. Which sucks. Last one was pretty fun.”
I smiled back at him, genuinely if thinly. The idea of my body betraying me, especially after so long thinking I could bounce back from anyt
hing, had me scared in a way I hadn’t been in years. “How’d you guys decide which one of you got to fire it?”
“Oh, Jo let me,” Bobby said. “Thought she’d give me shit about it, but that thing is heavy and I’m stronger.” His joy was clear and without the sort of contamination most people let into every feeling they had since the Fall. It was one of the things I loved most about him. Pure happiness, even at such a childish thing as blowing stuff up, was a gift like diamonds in these times.
I caught the small, satisfied smirk on Jo’s face, there and gone in a flash. Ah. So that was why things were better between them. Clever, clever girl. When confronted with an enemy, find their weakness and exploit it. Sometimes that meant cutting a man down, and sometimes it meant giving him a gift.
I had no doubt that someday, Jo would far surpass me in pure, sneaky brilliance. If she hadn’t already.
19
“You’re not very eager to get moving,” Tabby said the next morning. She plopped down next to me with a small camping plate full of breakfast—mostly potatoes and a little jerky—outside the confines of the camp. We were alone. I was alone, until she showed up.
I nodded as I chewed my own food. The rest of the group wanted to arm up and get moving as soon as Jo finished looking at my injuries, but that was the absolute last thing I wanted them to do. Explaining to them that not scaring off the Sons, and that we needed them to think they had no one looking for them right away, was incredibly wearing on my nerves.
I’d come out here this morning to avoid wading back into that mess for as long as possible. “I’m not worried about being able to follow them,” I said once I finished chewing. “That’ll be the easy part.”
Tabby raised an eyebrow. “Are you a wizard?”
I grinned. “No, come on. We’ve covered this. Just trust me, it won’t be a problem.”
Her face grew serious. “But you’re not going to tell me how. Because you’re still not sure if I’m really with them.”
I gave myself a few seconds to think hard about how to respond. “No. I don’t think you’re spying for the Sons. You killed one of them, not that they have any way of knowing it was you. But you know you did it, and I don’t think you would have if this were some elaborate trick.”
“Then why—”
I raised a hand to cut her off. Normally I wouldn’t have been that dickish, but my patience was thin so early in the morning. Especially after the long night before. “Not thinking you’re with them isn’t the same thing as being sure you’re with me. You have a lot of reasons to worry. To be afraid. I’m trusting you as far as I can, but I’m not inclined to tell you what we’ll be doing and how we’ll be doing it until you need to know. If you did decide to run off and try your luck with the Sons, you’d know how to find them and warn them.”
She grimaced, pushing some food around on her plate. “I get it, I guess, even if it sucks.” She looked up suddenly. “Wait, I’m going with you? You trust me to have your back in a fight but not tell me how we’ll get there? That’s messed up, dude.”
I shrugged. “I need you. You’re the only one who knows what the rest of the people who lived at that compound look like. I saw the ones on guard duty, but it was dark and I didn’t get a close look. You can help me identify them. I don’t want to kill the wrong people.”
Tabby laughed. It was that absurd kind of laughter where you’re so blown away by the ridiculousness of a concept that your brain rebels against it completely. “So, what? We show up at whatever base the Sons are using and you hunt down something like thirty people and kill them while you’re surrounded by hundreds or thousands more?”
The weird thing? She only sounded disbelieving. The normal kind, like when your kid comes home telling you he aced the test but you know he takes after his dad and math is never going to be his strong suit. There was none of the dismissal expected from someone suggesting anything as crazy as ending a threat so massive alone or even with a small group.
“No, that would take more time and planning than we have,” I admitted. “I think we both know the situation is beyond those kind of solutions. The Sons are a big threat. That’s something Haven is going to have to deal with eventually. I’ll probably get drafted. We can’t just sit with our thumbs up our asses hoping they go somewhere else to do their thing, after all. Pretty much everywhere in this half of the country has one or another of our communities. No one is safe.”
Tabby frowned. “Then what? Just more scouting? Is this all fact finding? Because I want to get some licks in, even if I have to do it without you.”
Again, I shook my head. I also took another bite of food because healing makes a man hungry. Especially when that healing comes faster thanks to Chimera. “No. I made myself a promise. I’m killing those assholes. Tricky part is going to be doing it without bringing the rest of the Sons down on us. It’d be impossible to hit them when they’re with the rest of their friends. I’m hoping whoever they’re meeting up with is just another link in the chain with relatively small numbers. If we’re really lucky, they’ll be sent somewhere else after they meet with...”
“Smoke,” Tabby reminded me. “His name is Smoke. Or maybe Smokey? I think I heard someone call him that once.”
“Yeah, him,” I said. “We’re not going alone. I know at least Allen and Greg are good woodsmen. They can track and scout. We won’t lose them this time. We’ll have eyes on the Sons from here on out. Gotta say, you don’t sound like someone who wants bloody revenge. You want to put some hurt on the guys who held you captive, but you don’t sound angry. Most people I’ve met who’ll risk their lives the go on a killing spree don’t have that self-control.”
Tabby sat back and stared at me for a long time. Enough that it got uncomfortable. “Wow. You really need to stop sometimes and remember that you might be better trained, but you’re not actually better than other people.”
I blinked. “Wait, what?”
She sat her fork down into her mostly uneaten breakfast, resting the bowl in her lap. There would be no dramatic statements about losing her appetite. Survivors ate what was in front of them. It was close to a law of physics in the apocalypse. “First off, I didn’t say I wanted to kill them. I’m not psychotic. I get why you want to, but honestly that’s just not me. They deserve it, but I can’t kill anyone unless they’re trying to kill me. I’m just not built for it. Doesn’t mean I won’t bust some knees, though. I’m totally down for that. Second, you really do need to check yourself, Mason. The whole ‘constantly analyzing everyone around you’ shtick is probably a great way to stay alive, but it’s a shitty way to make friends. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in the world today is an action star, or even interested in drama. I’d rather not be condescended to all the time like you can read my mind. Okay?”
A couple responses popped into my head. I was a bit worried that words—any words—would just come out wrong. I did have a knack making that happen at the worst times. Instead I grunted a general assent, speared half a potato, and finished my breakfast.
“A lot of the others want to know why we’re risking these guys getting away,” Bobby said to me a few hours later. We’d spent a lot of the day cataloging our resources and putting together a plan—a real plan this time, not one that just relied on me being creative—and working out our goals and time line. Haven sent along a lot of gear. I guess Will, being told some of what happened by the group we sent back to get Hannah medical attention, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Judging by the arsenal at our disposal, that might not be hyperbole.
I sighed. “Yeah, well, they haven’t spent the last ten days getting hurt and recovering, then walking their happy asses back through the woods hoping to find a friendly face. I still can’t believe you guys camped so close to where the Sons were looking for targets. I figured I’d have to light a couple signal fires to finally get your attention.”
Bobby raised an eyebrow at me. “We camped so close because they were hunting in this area. Figured we mig
ht get lucky if they decided to come back this way. Mostly Jo and I made the call because we figured if nothing else, you’d come back here once you got free.”
I chuckled. “Lot of faith in my abilities, huh?”
Bobby leaned over and kissed the top of my stubbly head. “Well, I have met you, you know. We gave you a distraction like you asked. Figured you’d find a way to take advantage of it.”
I nodded appreciatively and ran a hand over my face. “The others need to take a lesson from you, then. These guys aren’t like other marauders we’ve dealt with. They’re not really like marauders at all. And there’s a fucking ton of them. The last thing I want is to lead a bunch of people who think they’re just going to steamroll the bad guys. That’s not what we’re here to do.”
Bobby crossed his arms. “I know that. They need to hear it. From you, is what I’m getting at here.”
I wanted to argue, but he was right. This was my show, and it was up to me to make sure everyone knew not just the stakes, but the purpose. We finished up the last of our plans, jotting down a few stray thoughts, and climbed out of the van.
It took less than a minute to gather everyone in close. Jo and Tabby stood near each other, curious body language between them. Not the tension I might have expected. It looked like I’d interrupted a conversation when I yelled for everyone to gather around.
I scanned the crowd, stopping briefly on faces I knew. Allen and Greg especially, since I’d be relying on them for the more dangerous work. “I know you’re anxious to get going. You’re worried we’re going to lose the trail. I told you last night that wouldn’t be a problem.” I pointedly didn’t glance at Tabby, who I had kept in the dark about this part. Oh, well. It wasn’t exactly a secret. If she hadn’t figured it out by now, she would have on her own within two minutes of us leaving camp. “We’re not going to lose this gang because they draw zombies after them in huge numbers. The house Tabby and I recuperated in was smack in the middle of a neighborhood saturated with the dead. It wasn’t on a major highway or road, which means the Sons drew them in. We know they went north. All we have to do is track the swarms. They’ll be like a giant flaming arrow pointing right at the bad guys.”
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 13