Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons

by Guess, Joshua

  It was as basic a piece of field craft as existed in the world today. A single zombie or even a few dozen zombies might track any one of a dozen trails left by humans. A swarm, however, would always revert to the mean and latch onto the biggest, densest concentration of people they could find. It was close to a physical law.

  Tabby not immediately figuring it out was understandable. Spending days at a time on the ground with zombies, not safely within the walls of a community, has a way of shifting your brain into a different perspective. You get used to first viewing them as a threat, an obstacle to be overcome or avoided. She’d gone from prisoner to fugitive and that can stop just about anyone from seeing the forest for the trees.

  The rest of those gathered around me had no such excuse. I saw the reaction my words caused. That same violent gleam of excitement found in the eyes of so many young soldiers. They knew that hunting down the Sons would end in payback for the lives taken, and they wanted it.

  Best to burst certain bubbles before they could grow too large.

  “I need to make something clear before I give any of you the go-ahead to come with me,” I said, putting as much calm authority in my voice as possible. “I know you’re looking forward to a fight, but that’s not the purpose of this trip. Our primary focus has to be gathering information. The group we’ll be tailing either will or already has met up with a larger group led by a man named Smoke. If the people who took me captive haven’t rendezvoused with Smoke, we’re going to let them.”

  It was interesting, watching their passion get into a fistfight with their reason. The people in front of me were largely strangers, but few survivors in general and far less than average in Haven were ignorant of the need to be clever and sneaky when it came to big threats. They wanted to defend—or more accurately, get revenge for—the innocent lives taken by these fuckers. Hard to blame them for it; Haven and the Union overall were built on sticking together against the dead and the predatory living alike.

  I let my face go hard, eyes drilling into them. “Don’t get me wrong. We can’t fight the Relentless Sons. If we do, we’re going to die. As a group they have no chance of standing up against Haven, but Haven isn’t here. Just us. If we want to have a chance of stopping them from turning our area of the country into their new hunting grounds, we have to be smart. We have to be controlled. No taking pot shots or letting our anger get in the way of the larger goal. Everything we do from here on out has to be cold. If you can’t do that, I can’t use you. Is that understood?”

  In a slow, uneven wave, they agreed. Some nodded stoically, others with enthusiasm. There were a few angry frowns in the mix, but it was enough for me. I was counting on each of them to keep the others honest, or failing that to at least prevent the hotter heads from doing anything stupid. It would have to be enough.

  When I judged the small surge of reactions had settled into some kind of emotional level, I hit them with the rest. Best to give bad news first, that way everyone is pleasantly surprised.

  “I don’t know if the group that took me will stay with Smoke or not, but from what I understand they only changed out personnel rarely. Even then it was the same people back and forth, which suggests to me that the Sons have a fairly rigid, granular structure. Smaller groups tend to stay together. Which means it’s likely the ones we’re after will eventually leave as one. If that happens, we’re going to follow them. I just hope they stay with their superiors long enough to give us plenty of intel.”

  One of the less enthusiastic members of the camp, a guy named Howard who I didn’t know well, actually raised a hand. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Howard, you’re not in fourth grade. Just talk.”

  Howard blanched and sheepishly lowered the hand. “Uh. Yeah. Anyway, you just said the goal is to gather information. Why are we gonna follow that group specifically?”

  “First, because if the Sons operate the way I think they do, in relatively small cells, then watching one will give us a lot of insight into how the organization as a whole works. Yes, getting eyes on their larger command structure is key, but without being able to infiltrate them and pretend to be one of them, observation of leaders only takes us so far.” I left out a few key details there, because they didn’t need to know every potential move I might decide to make. “If my captors are sent back out, which I think is likely, then we’ll be able to see how they behave and what moves they make. It might do nothing more than confirm my suspicions.”

  “And those are?” Jo asked, leaning her narrow frame against the wheel well of a pickup truck.

  “That each cell acts as an autonomous unit covering a particular range,” I said, silently thankful for the prompt. “They get a territory and survive off what they take. Tabby told me a couple things that make me think the personnel changes were mostly so my captors could send along a tithe to Smoke and whoever else is up the chain. If all we can manage is to confirm that, it’ll be a huge help.”

  It was Tabby who asked the vital question. “What do we do when you’ve gathered all the information you think we need?”

  I grinned. “I told you we’re not going to fight them, and that’s true. But this particular splinter of the Relentless Sons killed our people. Doesn’t matter that they never set foot in Haven. They were still our people if only because they were allies and survivors instead of marauders. I’ll be goddamned if I let that stand. When we’re done, we won’t fight ’em. But we will kill them. I promise you that.”

  I shouldn’t have taken comfort in the satisfied looks on their faces, but I did. Will clearly knew this was the direction I’d take things. Otherwise he wouldn’t have given us the arsenal we’d use to cut at least one digit off the hand of the Relentless Sons.

  20

  This time we weren’t making it up as we went along. And we were not alone.

  “I can’t believe you’re still lugging that stop sign around with you,” Tabby said.

  But we were not leaving without snark, apparently.

  “It’s a shield now,” I defended. “And look. It’s black. Stealthy, even. It’s much cooler this way.”

  She fixed me with a look I can only describe as wife-like. The sort of tolerant but exasperated expression women were forced to adopt by a society shaped around putting up with men’s shit. In my defense, the shield really was better suited to the kind of work we were about to undertake. I went through half a roll of black tape covering it, as well as a fair amount of reinforcement. No more boot laces for me!

  “I just don’t see why you’d need it,” Tabby said as she loaded the last of the gear into the van. Though the pack and weapons were brought by the rest of the team, it was hers now. Not that she packed only her own stuff; she’d buckled down and put in as much or more work as any person in the camp. “We’re doing recon with a huge team. I can’t imagine you’ll need to dungeon crawl through a bunch of zombies.”

  I shrugged. “They give low XP but every kill adds up.”

  Tabby grinned. “Okay, don’t tell me why you’re keeping it. I guess the surprise will be part of the fun.”

  We got on the road. The truth was simple. So simple I figured she already knew it. I’d be the one tasked with getting the closest to any camps we ran across. Oh, Allen and Greg were almost as stealthy as me thanks to their years of hunting and training to move silently in the wilderness, but it was my show. The shield was now a solid piece of protection. Being able to use it offensively was also nice.

  In short, it was good for the up-close work I would surely need to do.

  The drive north was slow. And I mean glacially slow. We couldn’t risk accidentally giving ourselves away. Greg and Allen left well before the rest of the group, hunting for zombies to follow and leaving a trail we could follow.

  “There’s one,” Tabby said, pointing to a tiny, bright orange dot spray-painted onto the tire of an abandoned car. “How do you know what they mean?”

  Bobby was driving, his burly frame hunched over the wheel as he concentrated on not
accidentally running into a trap. Jo, on the other hand, was comfortably sprawled in the passenger seat with her feet propped up on the dash, so she explained.

  “It’s not that complicated,” she said. “Dots just mean keep going on a given road. A slash pointed left means turn at the next road, which will be painted with another dot. Right, the same. There are others you’ll pick up as we go along.”

  The land road was in bad shape. It hadn’t received even the minimal maintenance we put into the main thoroughfares used by Haven and the rest of the Union, which was saying a lot. The deep cracks in the asphalt teemed with plant life, the edges of the road nearly gone as chunks fractured and sloughed away like dead skin.

  It took us almost four hours of crawling along to reach our first stop. Fortunately we had ample fuel reserves, or we’d have been in deep shit once it came time to make an exit.

  “No turns off the main road,” Bobby noted as he threw the van in park and killed the engine. “Looking more and more like they hauled ass away from that compound.”

  “Probably,” I said with a nod. “Doesn’t mean they went far. If it was a forward base meant to test the waters, then yeah, we might have a long haul ahead of us. But I don’t think it was. Or rather, it wasn’t just that. I’ll bet the closer we get to wherever they’re going, the more territories they’ve staked out.”

  Jo turned in her chair to look at me without taking her legs down, an impressive feat of late-teen flexibility that made my old man bones ache just looking at it. “How are they getting by, though? If they’re hitting travelers, they aren’t doing it up here. None of our convoys to Michigan have had any trouble, and there aren’t any other communities in this area.”

  “That you know of,” Tabby said. “How many small groups do you think are secreted away in the woods or at the edges of towns, not big enough to have ever been on your radar? You think the Sons wouldn’t hunt them down one by one and feed off them like ticks?”

  It was a possibility I hadn’t considered, and it made my blood run cold. “Haven did a lot of sweeps for those kinds of people, but she’s right. We could have missed some. Probably did. And that’s ignoring folks who might have drifted in and settled somewhere. It’s easy to forget not everyone knows about us or wants to be part of the Union if they do.”

  Tabby smiled tightly. “Survivors tend to be an independent lot, that’s for sure. But they also do have supplies stocked up. The Sons, I mean.”

  Every head turned toward her. Tabby shrank back under the weight of our collective gaze. “What?”

  “That’s a useful bit of information,” Bobby said. “Why haven’t you brought up that they have stockpiles before now?”

  Tabby shrugged defensively. “It didn’t seem important? They have food. People need food to eat. It seems kind of basic.”

  “What kind of food?” I asked. “Is this stuff they hunted for, or was it canned?”

  Tabby’s face scrunched up in thought. “Canned, but also a lot of MREs. I think one of them mentioned finding an abandoned distribution center not long ago.”

  Bobby looked excited, but Jo was the one who sprang into action. “I’ll go find whoever has the maps.”

  Tabby looked at me questioningly. “Maps?”

  I smiled. “You just gave us a clue where they might be camped out.”

  Every scout mission came back with information, even if it was nothing more than the state of the various roads inside a given area. With years of access to fresh gasoline and a powerful need to keep an eye on its surroundings, Haven made sure its scouts were constantly mapping.

  “You guys knew about a distribution center and didn’t raid it?” Tabby said, bending over the map.

  “Oh, it was raided,” Jo said. “A bunch of times. I went on two runs there myself. But those places are fucking huge. They had to fill trucks for dozens of stores every day. Do you have any idea how much stock that is? There was no way we could take it all if we made a hundred trips.”

  Bobby grunted. “So you just went there when you needed something. Like when stocks at Haven got a bit low.”

  It was easy to forget he was still new to Haven himself. The little pieces of information the rest of us took for granted were fresh to him. “Yeah. Haven is self-sufficient, but once in a while food would get tight. Will decided it would draw too much attention to mount a big convoy to haul back a bunch at once.” I studied the map, focusing on the notations around the site itself. “According to this, the last run there was two months ago. That fits in with the timing of the attacks. We’ll have to wait for Allen and Greg to get back here. Though we’re only about sixty miles away. They might have already figured it out.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. The brothers left our convoy an orange cross sprayed onto a tree telling us to stop because there was potentially lethal danger ahead. I figured, given the lack of zombies in the area, that it meant a swarm. And a swarm probably meant enemies.

  When Greg and Allen finally returned on their mountain bikes, both men looked exhausted. They’d been at it for the better part of a day and the effort showed. Which made it all the more unnerving when they rolled to a stop in almost perfect unison, let the bikes fall, and hurried over to the card table we were all standing around.

  “Did you find them?” Bobby asked, fists unconsciously clenched at his sides.

  Greg and Allen shared a glance, but the former waved for the latter to go on. Greg took the chance to snag a water jug and drink as his brother talked.

  “We didn’t find the camp yet,” Allen said. “But we know we’re close. Spotted sentries in the trees. Damn good thing you told us to look for ’em.”

  “How many?” I asked just as Jo said, “How close?”

  Allen sighed. “How about everyone calm their tits and let me just give you a report so I don’t have to pick favorites? Good? Okay.”

  He stepped up to the map and started laying it out. “Starting about ten miles north of us, they have sentries placed every mile or so on the road. A mile into that zone, they run patrols. Foot, from what we saw, but Greg and I stayed long enough to watch the midday shift change, which used cars. New guys drove up; guys going off duty drove away. Also north.”

  His finger traced the state road we were currently sitting at the bottom of, which led most of the way to the distribution center. Like most buildings of its kind, the thing was off the main road somewhat. “We went in through the woods for that mile, and then backtracked. Might have been able to slip through on foot past that, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try. So we got out of their patrol zone, away from the sentries, and started going around. I went east, Greg went west.”

  Allen marked a wide circle around the main road. “They’re guarding for two miles on either side of it. That was how far we had to go to find a northern road without sentries watching. It was a bitch, too. You know how hard it is to watch a sentry from a distance without being seen, while moving?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yup,” Bobby agreed.

  “Of course,” Jo piped up.

  Tabby sighed. “You guys know how to make a girl feel like shit. I didn’t have to do all this scouting crap before I joined New America, okay?”

  I chuckled and she slapped me gently on the back of the head, which seemed fair enough. “Go on.”

  Allen scratched the top of his head tiredly. “Y’all have probably guessed they’re at that distribution center we go to sometimes. At least, that’s what Greg and I figure. We didn’t go that far. Couldn’t.”

  His finger stabbed the map about ten twenty miles north of us. “Near as we can tell, they’ve got camps strung along that whole highway. Forty, fifty people in each one, with vehicles set up as barriers they can move to let their people in. On every back road we could find that wasn’t actively being patrolled or watched, they’d cut down hundreds of trees. Blocked every road that we could find.”

  “Jesus,” Jo breathed. “How many camps are we talking about?”

  Alle
n grimaced. “At least ten. And if they’re spreading their people out like that, they must have a bunch more at the main base.”

  Tabby crossed her arms. “How do we find the people we’re looking for in all that?”

  To my surprise, Allen gave a rare smile. “That much we can help you on. We found your man Smoke. He’s in the fourth camp up the road. Hard to miss the big bastard. He’s got to be six-six, three hundred pounds. Watched him through the binoculars for about twenty minutes.”

  I frowned. “How’d you know it was him?”

  “The vest,” Tabby said. “He’s wearing one of those vests with his name on it, right?”

  Allen nodded. “All the camps are set up like ours. Circled wagons. But his has a second circle off to the side. Looked like new arrivals to me. We won’t be able to get our vehicles through the roadblocks, but if we get as far as we can in the east and hoof it, no reason we can’t get past the sentries and to that camp if we’re careful. Reckon if Greg and I can do it, you can.”

  I let out a slow breath. “What about zombies? How thick are they between here and there?”

  Greg, having finished hydrating himself, wiped his mouth and stepped up to the table. “That’s the really bad news. These fuckers are smart. They’re like us; the camps are designed to be zombie proof. So they just let the dead pile up around them. Makes a nice barrier, and pulls the attention away from patrols and sentries.”

  “So,” I said, straightening and putting a hand to the small of my back, which ached slightly, “all we have to do is infiltrate enemy territory without being seen, slip through a horde of undead without letting them give away our position with a show of interest, and attack a defended position against enemies who’ll have the high ground. Yeah, I can’t see how this could possibly go wrong.”