by Joshua Guess
If you are reading it, remember that no matter what, you are loved. You are our son, and the most precious gift we've ever been given. Remember that quote? I think you know the one. Keep it in your heart.
Love,
Your mom and dad.
Part Three: The Fall
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
From Contact, by Carl Sagan
Chapter Ten
Four months later, Kell was still using the things his father left for him under the floorboard in the guest bedroom.
He had left his childhood home behind after only a few days. Loaded up with all the food he could carry and toting the backpack full of ammunition and the two of the handguns his father had dutifully cared for, Kell had worked his way back to his vehicle and left the neighborhood without a backward glance.
It was a week before he found a place close enough to the city that he could make it there on foot in a reasonable amount of time, yet far enough away that the undead couldn't find him when he outran them. The answer was a small cabin situated on the slope of a long and gentle hill. It was almost hidden among the trees, leading Kell to surmise the owners had used it as a hunting lodge. It was a better choice than the alternatives, but given the lack of a meth lab inside he chose to err on the side of positivity.
During those first hard days Kell began to understand the deficit he was running against the world. It wasn't a question of fitness, though years of comfortable living left him softer and weaker than he would have liked. It was the vast distance between his knowledge of how to survive without the amenities he had grown so used to, which was virtually nil, and the immediate need to do so. Like pretty much right then.
The cabin began as a marker, merely a point on the map he could use as a frame of reference. Somewhere to rest his head and stock up his goods. Not a permanent home.
He had planned to follow his mother's advice and strike out for the north, but he wanted to visit his lab again. The hope was to find some information regarding the whereabouts of the mobile CDC labs, primarily the one Jones had told him was in Iowa. If nothing else he wanted to see if anything had been left behind.
There was nothing. The building had been emptied thoroughly and efficiently, and despite a solid day of searching Kell came up with exactly zero. That had been two weeks after his visit home, and the trip had been easier even thought it was deeper in the city. You learned to adapt and survive, or you didn't.
With those early forays into the city came a continuous education. Few revelations came in moments of profound insight; rather, Kell used what he knew to learn, and fast. Science was about observation. The necessities came first as he learned the best places to gather food were abandoned houses at the edges of the city and beyond. Watching the undead in their wanderings taught him how to avoid them, then how to blend into their ranks. Which led inevitably to experiments in which he dragged off zombies one at a time to practice fighting them in relatively safe conditions.
Time with his nose in books helped, but the practical elements of survival etched lessons into him deeply the first time. He read about body mechanics and combat, but seeing one of the walking dead fall off balance the first time he managed a perfect hip check drove the reality home better than any book. So it was as he planted the first seeds in his garden and watched them sprout. The time passed from those early days, weeks stretching into months subtly and without drawing attention to itself. Kell, like the food he cultivated once he tired of canned junk and felt the urge to eat something truly his, grew as well.
Which was how he found himself kneeling in the dirt next to his cabin, thinking about the job at hand and the previous months at the same time. Weeds tended not to grow in the area thanks to the abundance of trees choking the life out of lesser plants, but the ones that did come up were hardy bastards. He had to put on his riot gloves to yank them from the ground in order to keep his skin intact.
A few days after his trip to Sinclair, Kell found his way back to Alan's house. By then he had exhausted every convenient source of fuel and had grown weary of siphoning gas. It didn't seem worth it to him to risk his life going where cars were simply to make traveling easier. His world, Cincinnati and the land around it, had grown very small. Kell learned to walk, really walk, the way ancient nomadic humans had done for tens of thousands of years.
It's not like he was in a hurry. He had no place to be.
He did keep a stockpile of fuel for an emergency escape if he needed it, but by the time Kell found himself crossing the tract of land that led to Alan's home, he felt no need to go anywhere. It was a curious sort of numbness, not suicidal, but uncaring about the future. The potential cure for the plague, the first makings of a solution, rattled around his brain. There was no one to tell it to. No lab to work in. It was enough to keep him going, but not enough to motivate him to risk travel into unknown lands.
Unknown lands like central Ohio. Mordor it was not.
Alan's place was abandoned. Kell searched it thoroughly, and while there was no note like the one his mother left, he was certain that the old man and Paulie had left of their own accord. Memories of neighing horses laced the broken and missing time from his stay there, but no horses or tack were at the house. No weapons, no food, no easily carried tools. The place wasn't locked, but that meant nothing to people who never planned to come back.
After his search ended, Kell had looked to the north and wished them a silent farewell.
Maybe they'd run into his parents. Stranger coincidences have happened.
His hands, thinner than at any point in his adult life but stronger, too, worked with fluid efficiency. Every pull came with a bundle of invasive vegetation. Kell looked down at the garden and thought of all the time he'd spent learning to move in and out of the city safely, all the hours in hiding with some pilfered tool or bag of seeds. His fingers grasped the weeds, and with each successful removal he felt a small surge of pride.
I made this. I did the work. My sweat, my effort.
It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when indecisiveness and fear of the unknown had transformed into possessive satisfaction for his land and home, but he had a lot of spare time for reflection. He could leave if he wanted and be well provisioned for a long trip, but why? Why abandon what his own hands had bled to create?
The answer to his question did not come immediately, and when it did Kell took a long time to admit it. But the first spark fell into the tinder that very day. From then it was only time and fuel; the initial conditions did eventually smolder into fire.
After weeding his vegetable garden, Kell got ready for a trip into the city. There were countless useful things he wanted to bring up to the cabin. Regular commutes had become a part of his everyday life.
He stripped off the armored riot gloves to make the job easier.
Over his pants went armored leggings, mostly stitched together from pieces of police-issue gear he had laboriously hauled from more than one station house. There were bits of football and soccer padding in there, too. He stepped into heavy boots, steel-toed and with an additional steel tongue that ran along the sole.
Over his chest went a heavily modified vest in two parts. The inner vest was a thick tactical affair he had pulled from a dead soldier. It had ceramic plates covering the important parts like his heart and spine and kidneys. There were extra pockets with additional plates to give even more coverage, which added a considerable amount of weight.
Over that went a thinner Kevlar garment made from several smaller vests. Kell had lost a tremendous amount of weight, but the inner vest was more than bulky enough to make up the difference. Attachment points studded the web harness he had added to it, and to those he clipped on his weapons and gear.
He pulled on the sleeves he had made himself and snapped them to the vest, the heavy firefighter turnout gear material proof against bites. There were no armored bits in there.
Then came the long process of wrapping hi
mself. Hours of practice made the ritual faster, but it still took him more than fifteen minutes to secure the patchwork of brown and green material across his body. Each limb had its own piece, as well as his trunk and head, which he wrapped last in a kind of man-of-the-desert veil and hood combination. On went the armored gloves and one last check to make sure every piece of hardware was free and clear. He had almost lost fingers once because his knife had been tangled in the camouflage fabric.
The last piece waited outside. Kell's nose wrinkled as he pulled the thick cloak from the branch it hung from. The smell was fading but still enough to almost knock him over. Experience taught him to always freshen it before he set out on a trip.
Spread out on the ground, the cloak was nearly as long as he was tall. There was a wide, deep hood, and it was broad enough to wrap around him with plenty of room to spare. The inside was thick but flexible plastic, the outside more of the rough browns and greens that made up the strips wrapped around his body. Next to the tree where the cloak was always left was a large plastic tote. He always hated this part.
He picked up the large ladle sitting on the tote and took three deep breaths before sucking in as much air as he could hold. The top hung a little but Kell pulled at it hard, and as always the contents made him want to retch. Four quick scoops into the tote, each slung at random over the fabric side of his outerwear, and it was done. His breath gave out just as he secured the last corner.
The image of human body parts rotting in water stayed with him, but it was by far the best method he had discovered for moving around unhindered. As long as he didn't do anything that made him stand out from the crowd, the undead left him alone. Sight and sound mattered, but anything vaguely human-shaped that moved slowly was uninteresting to the undead if it smelled right.
Kell unsnapped a small respirator from his vest. The filters were treated to cut down on the overpowering stench, and he kicked himself for forgetting to put it on first.
Cloak on and secured, he took his spear from its place next to the door and headed off for town.
Used to navigating the wasteland that was Cincinnati, Kell was ill-prepared for almost being run over.
Cars came through every now and then, though most of them went wide around the city. It was rare for him to even see the vehicles, far away as he was from town, but the silence of the end of the world made any noise carry a very long way.
It was a truck, or rather it had been a truck at one point. Whatever production line it rolled off of had been ages ago and far removed, because what almost ran Kell over was as different from how the metal beast had started life as the undead were from him.
It was raised on tires that came up to his waist. He knew that to be accurate as he had to step to the side to avoid being crushed by one of them. His spear was tucked into the custom holster he had made from his ample supply of deer hide, else he'd have considered putting its point through one of those massive tires out of pure spite.
As it was, he shouted. It was more in anger at himself for becoming so focused on melting into the crowd of zombies around him that he didn't pay attention to the rapidly approaching sound.
The truck was heading south, and Kell couldn't imagine the desperation that would force anyone to risk driving through the heart of the city. The undead were legion, here, and enough bodies could stop any vehicle if luck wasn't on its side.
The windows, well above the grasping hands of the undead, were open. Kell's shout must have been heard, because the driver stopped abruptly and spun the thing around. The passenger, a disheveled woman with short blonde hair, poked her head out the window.
“Grab the roll bar, get in the back!” the woman screamed.
The truck slowed down. Whatever they expected, it wasn't for Kell to nod at them and walk away, headed back toward his destination. The road wasn't as thick with zombies as it would be closer to the center of town, but Kell still had to be cautious as he walked. Too many gestures would make him stick out. Months of practice made slipping into an unremarkable gait easy enough.
Then the truck backed up, and the woman in the passenger's seat leaned out, her face incredulous.
Kell sighed. Deeply.
“Dude, I can see you're not dead. Did you not hear me? Get in the truck, we can help you.”
The respirator hid his clenched teeth. “I don't need help, thanks,” Kell said.
Keeping pace with him, the monster vehicle rolled forward. The blonde snorted. “Mister, you're walking toward the middle of town. You don't even have a car.”
“I walk there at least twice a week,” Kell said, voice low. He was unable to hold back his annoyance. “And as you can see, I'm clearly capable of keeping myself from being eaten. Unless you keep drawing attention to me, of course.”
“Shit!” someone inside the cab of the truck shouted. “They're coming.”
His eyes had been relaxed halfway between the ground and the road ahead, but the note of fear in the man's voice made Kell snap them up. A dozen zombies breasted the hill in front of them, coming toward the sound of the truck.
“Goddammit,” Kell said. “You people have just cost me a whole day.”
The woman smiled and gestured toward the driver. “If you're bent on walking in there, we can help you clear them out. We have to drive that way, anyway.”
Kell shook his head. “It's not that easy. They heard your engine. These will just be the first of hundreds. Maybe thousands.” The approaching cluster of undead gained speed. “Though we might want to take care of these.”
The truck door opened and the woman jumped out, assault rifle in hand. He put an armored glove on the stock as she sighted. “No!” Kell whispered harshly. “Think about what I just said. Your truck was enough noise to get their attention. Do not use that gun.”
The swarm was closing in. Eyes on the undead, the woman frowned. “What am I supposed to do, then?”
Kell stepped away and pulled a string dangling from the complicated knot that held his cloak on and close around him. The heavy garment pooled on the ground.
“Watch,” Kell told her.
The nearest enemy was ahead of the others. A common occurrence in swarms—there were always some outliers faster than others.
The spear slid from its holster with practiced ease. A few wide steps later and the point sheared through the soft palette of the foremost zombie, followed by a sharp pull on the haft as he pushed the motionless body away. He stepped to the side of the fresh corpse and swung his weapon like a staff, catching the next enemy in the temple with the blunt end. He heard the thin bone there shatter, and as the second body fell, it became nothing to him. Just an obstacle lying on the road to be avoided during the fight.
By then the rest of the swarm had begun to converge; the next two were shoulder-to-shoulder. Staff held parallel to the ground, both zombies were hit at the same time, the bar snapping bones in their faces and knocking them down but not killing them outright.
Kell danced back and to the right, avoiding the bodies he'd left behind him. He flipped the spear over in his hands and thrust it into the closest of them, leaving it sticking up in the air as if to say, “I claim this land in the name of crazy people who live alone in the woods!”
He pulled the two ice axes from their loops on the front of his vest. Their blades and handles were worked smooth, the result of hours of grinding them by hand. The familiar calm fell over him as he moved into the fray, trusted weapons ready.
The fight was a blur of motion. Kell didn't rush, didn't risk. He moved in and the checklist built up over months from trial and error took over. His mind took in details and they caused instant reactions, like a machine working solely on feedback.
This one is limping, left foot dragging. He kicked at the injured foot and felt whatever was left of the ankle give out, the bone jutting through skin. He kept moving as the zombie fell, knowing he could come back and finish it off. Minimize threats. Don't waste time.
His armored fists, each holding the
haft of an axe, fired like pistons as he waded into the fray. His armor was tested and true; he wasn't afraid of bites. Even his neck had protection, a thick layer of cloth he could barely cut through with a knife, much less teeth.
Size was definitely an advantage here. Even after the weight loss Kell was still a heavy man. Gauntleted fist to the face of one zombie, stunning it, elbow to another, axe blade down through the top of the third's head. Move, move, move.
That one rears back, ready to throw her upper body forward in a grasping bite. At the moment the zombie was as far back as she would bend, ready to lash out, Kell hip checked her as hard as any hockey player, sending her tumbling. He brought a heel down on her head as he went past, enough force to shatter her skull like an egg.
That was how it played out; a fight that looked ungainly and random yet ultimately won by the man instead of the monsters. Kell thought nothing of it, a dance he did on a regular basis. Sometimes it was close, especially with odds this high, but the travelers watching from the truck seemed to take some of the attention off him.
Once several of the undead were down it wasn't much of a conflict. Precision blows thinned those still standing until he no longer had to strike out constantly. Then there were no undead left on their feet and the rest was cleanup. One sharp hit each, a pull, and on to the next.
In the end the only zombie left moving was the one whose ankle he had shattered. It was trying to stand and move forward at the same time, but lacked the balance needed to manage the feat. Coldly, he observed as the thing inched toward the truck, hauling itself up onto its palms and pushing forward with the good leg. Experience taught the dead do not feel pain; the broken limb was simply too damaged to have any function left in it.