“Tomorrow is the day,” I said to the party gathered in the middle of our little camp. “Everyone knows the drill. Everyone knows their parts. You all know what we’re after in the short term, but we have to keep our eyes on the larger goal. We need to understand how these people work. Every space we can slide beneath their armor. What keeps their organization intact. That’s the central issue here.”
Greg and Allen had exchanged places with Scott and Kara again after another twelve hour shift. I’d been up longer than any of them but didn’t feel all that tired. I hadn’t had much to do but think between the trek to and from the watch post. Greg, right on cue, interjected. “They’re marauders, Mason. They stay together because that’s how they survive.”
I glanced around to see a few nodding heads and a lot of stoic observation. Whether the latter came from genuine doubt about Greg’s theory or a desire not to look dumb in front of everyone else was hard to say. “I’d agree with you except for the differences they have from your usual band of marauders. A few years back, every major band of them was either killed off or took amnesty when communities gave them the chance. How many former marauders have you talked to? All of you? Because I’ve talked to a bunch. And you know what I’ve heard?”
From the back of the surrounding group, someone murmured just loud enough to be heard but too quietly to be understood. “What was that?” I asked. “Speak up.”
A man’s voice carried from the gloom. “None of the bands was very big. Nowhere near this size.”
I pointed in the direction of the speaker, though my eyes couldn’t pick him out thanks to the small lantern blazing brightly right in front of me. “Yep. That’s one. There are at least hundreds of these people. Maybe thousands, as insane as it sounds. That implies either more discipline than you’d expect from a bunch of murdering nomads or some other factor we’re unaware of. The other thing is that they’re not just nomads, right? Think about it. From what we know so far, the Sons move into an area and spread out, slowly picking it clean like locusts. They—or at least their leadership—has some kind of centralized base. Here, we know it’s the distribution hub. You ask me, it’s damn weird that these guys somehow manage to fortify a position they know will become a target of the communities they harass but doesn’t get burned to the ground. We know they’ve done it before, and they came out on top. I think that’s profoundly strange, don’t you?”
This caused more of a reaction. There were no hard and fast rules for how people had to behave, and that was doubly true when law and order stopped at the wall of a given compound. Yet certain patterns often repeated, and one of them was the tendency of groups composed of lawless murders to disintegrate once they went past a critical mass in size. I could see them thinking about it, working out the differences.
“You said they don’t...uh, take advantage of women,” said a man named Cole, normally the quiet type. Lots of scouts and spies were. The trades valued independence and the ability to be cut off from other human beings for extended periods of time.
“No raping was a pretty strong rule for them,” Tabby said, her voice harsh. “Though they didn’t seem to have a problem killing kids.”
Nearly everyone bristled at that. Bobby, seated across from me, tensed every visible muscle. I saw the rage in the corded tendons in his jaw, the white of his knuckles.
“That’s not typical marauder behavior and we all know it,” Greg said, though no one had disagreed. I winced inwardly at the awkwardness of the words, but it wasn’t his fault. I had coached him on the sorts of things we needed to make clear, but massaging a crowd toward seeing things the way you needed them to see wasn’t a skill Greg had any practice with.
Even so, people nodded in agreement. Marauders weren’t universally one-dimensional movie villains, but as a class they tended to engage in the worst behaviors far more often than the rest of us. It was what you got when the controls and restrictions that came with society were torn away all at once. Norms were redefined, the unthinkable became commonplace, and cruelty often reigned.
“That’s why we need to do this as cleanly as we can. It’s too easy for us to say we’ll just kill every enemy, wipe them out like we’ve always done. I need you to see that we don’t have all the facts, and that getting them is our top priority. I can’t stress enough how important this is.”
“No cowboys,” Jo said, her arms loosely crossed. “No going off mission because you think you see an opportunity. Everyone has their roles. We should all stick to them.”
The faces around me were serious. No one spoke after Jo to offer agreement or dissent, but I could see it in the set of their features. They got it. Which wasn’t surprising, really. Every one of them was either a scout or had experience in the sort of long-range information gathering operations we were about to dive headfirst into. Their silence was framed by the sound of night insects harmonizing with distant frogs. Gentle reminders that no matter how dangerous or complicated the world grew for human beings, everything else would soldier on just fine.
I hoped they had the same insight. That we were finite, mortal beings. I could read expressions, but not minds. I had no way of knowing whether the people around me would put staying alive above the mission, and I hoped to whatever diving beings might be looking down on us that they hadn’t taken the wrong lesson from the meeting.
“We need information,” I said, trying to close things out the right way, “but we need you to come home alive even more. Get something to eat, rest, and be ready to do this thing. Because once we start, there’s no way to know how any of it will shake out. We’ll have to be on top of our game when the unexpected comes.”
I had no idea how true that statement would turn out to be.
23
No one noticed when a few new zombies moseyed in out of the woods. This was partly because those zombies didn’t join the crowd until the milling mass of bodies shifted in one of those odd, oceanic currents that sometimes happen and some of the number got close to the edge. A few new bodies drifting in attracted no notice at all, especially in the dying light of dusk.
The other reason neither camp took note was because of the ever-present tension between them. The dead were still being ignored. If one of the dead looked relatively fresh and still wore clothes not yet abraded down to rags, well, sometimes that happened. Nothing odd about it. What was less forgivable even if it helped us out was that no one noticed two of the new zombies slowly hustling the third close to camp one, where Smoke was confirmed to be.
Beside me in the blind, Tabby took a long look through the binoculars. She had already identified camp two as her—our—captors, but she had barely put down her pair since doing so. There was a hard look on her face. She wanted payback. I could relate.
“How much longer?” she asked.
I glanced at the sky. “Not long. A few minutes at most. Our ringers finished their work ten minutes ago.” I raised my own binoculars and glanced at the scene. There, exactly where they should be, were Allen and Greg. Their bodies were mostly bare and slathered with a thin coating of zombie gore. Jo and a few other people had done their magic with makeup and a concoction of Jo’s own creation. The makeup gave the brothers the hollow-faced look of the dead from a distance, but the goop Jo put together was nothing short of brilliant.
It was a mixture of petroleum jelly and a handful of other stabilizing agents that kept the scent-heavy brew from rubbing off or wearing out quickly. It gave people a good hour or more of protection in a crowd of the dead, the stench overwhelming the scents of living bodies.
“Do you really think this will work?” Tabby asked.
I smiled. “We’re about to find out. But I wouldn’t have put this together without being fairly confident. Come on, let’s climb down. I need to be ready for this next part.”
In case I never made it clear, I don’t like not having control of situations. Yet the plan required others to instigate what happened next. Tabby and I were far enough back in the shadows of the trees
to be functionally invisible. Throughout history, armies have attacked at dawn and dusk because the remaining light is bright enough to prevent easily seeing in the growing dimness created by cover. The best part was that the camps were clearly visible through the trees and grew easier to make out as we stalked toward them.
I wish I could say there was a big dramatic moment when I knew it was coming, but it doesn’t work that way. The whole point was to catch everyone off guard, to manipulate circumstances in a way that nullified the enemy’s advantage in numbers.
Two gunshots fired.
The shots came from camp two. Or close enough to it that even people inside it might believe it was true. The reaction was instantaneous. Two of the guards atop the bus raised their weapons and fired at their counterparts. One body flew backward in a spray of crimson that spread out on the wind in a fine mist. The other was spared being shot but tumbled backward in her haste to avoid death and fell off of the truck she was sitting on.
I’ll give this to the group of people who took me: they didn’t fuck around trying to make any suicidal last stands. Gunfire erupted from the guards on the bus and new bodies appeared to join the fight, but the people of camp two had been ready for this for days. Few of them even left their vehicles during the day, and our watchers saw why.
They were sitting behind the wheel, many of them even napping while they did it. Ready to roll out at a moment’s notice. That’s just what they did when hell began breaking loose around them.
Greg and Allen were supposed to have made it into the woods as soon as they fired the shots, but I couldn’t see them. Probably at the edge of the crowd. Zombies were being pushed out of the way left and right as the circle of vehicles that made up camp two came apart and raced away for freedom. They moved north, probably looking hard for any side road or path to get them out of the line of fire.
I tried not to grin too hard at that. Didn’t want to get distracted.
Several people began climbing over the short ladders connecting the larger camp to its everyday vehicles parked outside it. They piled in; at least a dozen bodies spread between the pair, and took off after the fleeing men and women.
The camp was a beehive of activity. That was noticeable even with the metal plates covering most of its exterior. The windows of the school bus were high enough that they didn’t need protection, and people scurried inside. Clearly everyone was trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“I’m sorry, Mason,” Tabby said. I knew the tone of voice. It broke my heart every time I heard it. And I believed the words every time as well. “I know how dangerous you are. I’m not stupid. Please turn around slowly. I don’t want to have to use this.”
I complied. Tabby stood about ten feet away with a pistol raised in rock steady hands. Salting the wound, it was my pistol. An old 1911 I kept for when a gun was necessary. “Well, this is embarrassing. I really thought you were legit.”
Tabby’s eyes never wavered. She didn’t look angry. If anything, her eyes were sad. “I was. I...didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t decide to do this until last night. I hate them, Mason, but if I stop you from taking Smoke, stop you from going in there and attacking his people, and maybe give you to them alive, they might forgive me for escaping with you.”
I stood perfectly still with my hands raised, doing nothing that might cause her to twitch. “But why? We’d have taken you in. Once we got back to Haven, we wouldn’t have made you come back out into this.”
Tabby’s eyes were intense, and for once I couldn’t read them. One second they seemed glacially cool, the next blazing with heat. Maybe she was switching between the two that fast, but I had my doubts.
“You wanted to know how they keep control,” Tabby said, her voice empty of emotion and dry as autumn leaves. “I’ll tell you. They take your kids. And keep them. They have my son.”
I was wrong before. I thought her apology broke my heart, but her reason shattered it.
But that was nothing compared to my regret for what came next.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I wish things were different.”
She shook her head. “Me too. But I have to do what I can to get Alex back.”
With a grimace, I carefully tensed my legs. “No, you don’t understand. I trusted you, but I wasn’t stupid either. We kept some things from you.”
Her eyebrows began to twist in confusion as she processed the words, but they were interrupted by a deafening series of explosions.
The bullet whizzed by my head so fast I could hear it. In the fraction of a second I had to take in the details, it was clear Tabby didn’t mean to pull the trigger. She jumped at the sudden noise, throwing her aim slightly off. Her eyes went wide even as the involuntary twitch of her fingers sent death flying at me.
I hurled myself forward, not at all gently slamming my body into her legs. I felt rather than heard something snap in one of them as the full force of my weight contorted her joints beyond their limits. In a brief bout of fevered wrestling, I got the gun away from her. I tucked it into the back of my pants, then quickly flipped her over and checked for other weapons. The knife I tossed as far away as I could. There was nothing else immediately dangerous to me, just a few capsules of ammonia and one of the cylinders containing the cure for the plague.
As soon as I crouched and backed away, Tabby curled into a ball. Her leg bent up and she grabbed the knee protectively. It might have been hurt, too, but the left ankle was the real problem. Her snug boot bulged in the wrong places. I didn’t have time to worry about it. Instead I stood and drew the gun.
“If you’re here when I get back, I’ll help you,” I said. “If you try to interfere—at all—I’m going to stop you. Whatever that takes. If you run, then I’ll assume you’re going to tell the Sons everything about us. That will make you my enemy.”
Tabby nodded, tears of pain streaming down her face. If could have been agreement. Might have been simple acknowledgment of my words. An acceptance of terms.
I turned and ran off. Whatever she did next, I had a job to do.
The gun went into my pocket—I wasn’t wearing a holster for it—just before I grabbed the shield and other items I left at the base of the tree. I was already late. The plan had me running from the second the explosion happened.
Fortunately the consequences of the blast took longer than the minute I’d spent on Tabby to play out. I approached the edge of the woods to find a seething mass of zombies still trying to right itself, along with a nontrivial number of body parts ripped free of their hosts.
The zombie escorted in by Allen and Greg had been hooked by its belt to a thin spot in the wall of camp one. The steel plates where two vehicles met had a small gap, and it was easy for the brothers to slide the end of a knotted piece of cable through the top of that space. The other end was attached to the poor victim’s waist, making it impossible to move. I wondered idly if the zombie had tried to pull the knot through the gap and gotten anyone’s attention. I guess it didn’t matter. The explosives strapped to its chest beneath the ragged shirt would have erased any curiosity about its behavior quickly enough.
The blast pushed those vehicles apart far enough to let zombies into the camp. I cursed as I ran into the edge of the recovering swarm. I was supposed to get here fast so I could make sure the dead didn’t pour into the camp before we could take our prize.
I needed to get there, and I had to do it quickly.
My brain fell into the gear that both terrified and relieved me. It was almost automatic by now, that cold state of nearly mathematical observation. It let me do great things over the years, but also awful ones. Now it would hopefully get me through the worst of the crowd.
I bashed the first zombie to come at me with the shield, knocking it away like a rag doll. I didn’t slow my forward motion, making my next step in perfect time with an overhand swing of the club in my right hand. It was the simplest of weapons, but one of the most effective. Technology as old as the human race but updated
with modern flair. Two feet of hardwood with a steel core all banded with strips of aluminum to keep it from cracking. Weighted at the end for a bit of extra oomph.
The zombie I swung it at had a skull as strong as any person’s, but it cracked like an egg. A swift kick sent its body tumbling sideways into others scrambling for me.
I took a couple bites on my right arm in the next five seconds, a pair of dead men latching on and not letting go. Lucky for me the others brought plenty of extra gear, The shirt I wore was a monstrously thick and heavily armored affair. The tough plastic bands sewn between its layers kept teeth from so much as pinching my skin. The zombies only had fabric to chew on.
With an expert twist of my hips and thrust of that arm, I threw both of them into the increasingly ferocious swarm. It wasn’t pretty and almost didn’t work, but their jaws let go as they tangled up together. The sudden momentum took their balance from the top down—a handy trick for living and dead alike. A person will instinctively move their body in the direction their head goes. It’s a survival mechanism.
Which I used against dead guys. The irony was not lost on me.
24
The claws caught my face even as I pulled my head away from the strike. Hot streaks, hopefully not too deep, suddenly bloomed across my right cheek. More scars for the collection.
I thrust the club forward, catching the dead woman under the jaw and knocking her off balance for a second. I whipped the baton out and around in a vicious sideways slash. The tip met her temple and broke the orbit of her eye, badly. The strike crushed a quarter of her face but only staggered the zombie. She found her footing and lunged back toward me before I could hit again.
This time I nearly leaped backward, bringing the shield forward. Her momentum forced her extended fingers hard against the sharpened edge when she reached for it and sheared off the offending digits.
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 16