by Joshua Guess
Kate rolled her eyes. “Bullshit. I know your brooding face. That, good sir, is you at your most broody. I heard you talking to that woman last night, and I know you too damn well. You're beating yourself up over killing those men, no matter what you told her.”
Kell said nothing. Loudly.
She went on, Laura keeping suspiciously quiet. “You shouldn't. Those guys had it coming. You said as much last night, but you don't believe it.”
Her tone was that of a mother speaking to a child. The condescension sent a tremor of anger through him. “Maybe not, but at least I question myself when I have to do terrible things.”
Kate's eyes narrowed in anger. Laura looked ready to jump between them. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well! We had this discussion what, three days ago? You were ready to kill Ben without a second thought,” Kell said, his voice booming. “Just like you killed Phillip. Not in a fight. Not to defend your own life or even someone else. Because of convenience. Or maybe revenge, I don't know.”
Laura gasped. “What is he talking about, Kate?”
“You're one to talk,” Kate spat at him, ignoring the question. “You killed that DARPA guy for a hell of a lot less.”
His fists were clenched so hard he could feel the bones grinding. “You're right. My wife and daughter dying were nothing,” he said sarcastically. “And you know what? I know it wasn't his fault. He had no idea what would happen. None of us did.”
Kell made a conscious effort to calm down. The urge to lash out at her was overpowering, the anger muddling up his thoughts. She knew it, Kate did. Experience and training burned the lessons into her so deep they were automatic, and he saw the recognition in her eyes. He was a threat.
Instead Kell turned his back and headed for the basement door. “The difference between us, Kate, is I've spent every day since living that moment again. Regretting it some days, happy about it others. But questioning it, wondering if it was right. Can you honestly say you've done the same? Have you spent a second doubting yourself?”
He shut the door and left them behind.
Maybe for good.
No one followed him down the stairs, though Kell heard a muffled argument in the kitchen above. He ignored it and hardened himself to the angry voices. One last job to do and this nightmare of a week would be done.
“I might take a vacation,” he muttered.
“Hello?” Ben said, voice cracking. “Mister...uh, K? Is that you?”
“I'm here,” Kell said.
The smell hit him first, days of waste built up. The entire area was in disarray, with blankets strewn about and pillows ripped to shreds. A sheet of dry blood ran down Ben's arm from the cuff that held him, a dark scarlet still seeping from the wound around his wrist.
“You're alive,” Ben breathed.
“Clearly,” Kell said.
“Are you going to let me go?”
“I'm taking you out of here,” Kell said.
Leaving the shackle around Ben's wrist, Kell unhooked the other end from the pole, the long chain wrapped in his fist. He gestured for Ben to follow before leading the man toward the hidden exit along the back wall of the basement.
As Kell worked the inner barrier back into place and slid the glass door closed in front of it, Ben breathed in sharply. The younger man was staring at the pit. He knew what it was.
Silently Kell led him away from the house and through the woods. Ben's fear was almost palpable, a weight like hot breath on the back of his neck.
They stopped more than a mile from the house atop a hill looking down on a state highway. A breeze ran up the slope and brushed across them, carrying the faint stench of the shuffling dead below. Not many, a dozen or so. Not too many for Kell to handle on his own. Not that he was worried since the undead were in the wrong place to catch the scent of the living who watched them.
Kell ran the chain around the base of a small tree and locked it tight.
“What are you doing?” Ben said in a low voice, rough and terrified. “I thought you were letting me go?”
Settling against a large rock, Kell slid to the ground with a suppressed groan. “I've been thinking a lot about right and wrong lately,” he said.
Despite the conversational tone and the frigid air, sweat beaded on Ben's forehead. “Uh, have you?”
Kell nodded. “Yeah. It's funny, you know. I hated myself—still do, at times—because right before all this happened I killed a man. Think about that. The world hadn't had a chance to fall yet. This was on the morning of the first outbreak.”
Ben remained silent. The subject matter was a little close to home.
“He was partially responsible for the death of the two people I loved most in the world. I was a murderer. I was living in a world where laws existed and were enforced because society said they should be. I broke them. If the outbreak had been contained, I would have even turned myself in. Game over for me.
“But had I done it even a month later, few people would've batted an eye at me. Society broke down, the rules changed. Survival was key, and people began to recognize that without police and cohesive civilization, the definition of right had changed. Nowadays a man who kills a family gets shot, no one wonders if it was right. They just ask if it was necessary.”
Kell scrubbed a hand across the stubble on his head. “The really hilarious part was that what I did? It wasn't either. It was wrong and unnecessary. Man I killed might have been able to save a lot of lives. I did it for revenge, pure and simple. It didn't bring my family back. It didn't make me feel any better. I did it because I wanted to.”
He stood with another small groan and knelt next to Ben, whose eyes were wide with fear.
“Please don't kill me,” Ben said.
“I have a perfectly good pit in my back yard,” Kell said. “Do you think I'd have walked you all the way out here if I were just going to cut your throat and be done with it?”
Ben relaxed a little. “I don't understand.”
Kell's face turned grim. “I had a long talk with one of the prisoners from your father's camp. Your camp. You gave us good information and it saved the lives of innocent people.” Kell's eyes blazed. “I killed your dad. My people and I killed every one of your people.”
A flash of rage flickered across the boy's face, but he held his tongue. Had to give it to him; the kid was tough.
“But you also raped those girls, Ben. No, don't bother denying it. You did it. No one made you. You hurt them as bad as a person can be hurt while they were chained up and helpless. I can't just let that go.”
“Please,” Ben begged. “You don't understand. If I hadn't, they would have hurt me. I couldn't stand out like that, there was—” Kell cut him off with a heavy slap to the face.
“Shut the fuck up, Ben. You stupid bastard. I practically told you what to say. All you had to do was own up to it and I would have given you a fighting chance. God, how did you survive this long being so stupid? All I needed to hear was you taking responsibility. Then,” Kell said as he produced a knife. “I would have given you this to defend yourself with.”
“What are you talking about?” Ben shrieked frantically.
Kell stared at the young man with dead eyes. “I was going to give you this knife and a first aid kit. Let you decide if your hand was worth your life. Too many movies use that, but I never claimed to be creative. All you had to do was take the fucking hint and show some guilt, and you'd have had the knife and a first aid kit. That's the best I could have offered you. Instead you gave me excuses. Peer pressure made you do it? You're a fucking joke, son. You always have a choice. You just chose wrong.”
Snakelike, Kell darted close and slashed lightly at Ben's stomach. The young man cried out in pain, though the cut was shallow and not serious. Kell wiped the blade off on the sparse grass as he stepped back. “Now you get nothing. I guess you could try to gnaw through that wrist.”
He turned to leave, and in a half-sob, half-snarl Ben screamed
“You can't just leave me like this!”
Kell whirled on him. “I can. I will. Just like you left those women. I'll be back in a day to see if you're still alive. If you are, I'll let you go. You get to spend twenty-four hours living the nightmare you brought on others. It's not right. It's really not even necessary.”
Kell spit in Ben's face. “But it's what I choose to do.”
Chest swelled like a bellows, Kell whistled, high and clear. Ben stiffened in horror as, over the lip of the hill, the zombies below all snapped to attention as one. Twelve sets of eyes followed Kell as he stepped back from view. They were already scrambling toward him.
“No, please,” Ben wailed. “You can't do this. You can't.”
Kell stared at him, eyes narrow and hard as nail heads. “I can. I told you I talked to one of your prisoners. All night long. I know she was your 'favorite', Ben. You didn't just rape her. You tortured her. She told me how you liked to humiliate her. She told me everything. Even after hearing all that, the fact remains you helped us. I wanted to give you some kind of chance for that.”
He crouched next to the boy as the sound of hands scrabbling through the dead grass on the side of the hill grew louder. “World's falling apart, Ben. There are precious few people left, and most of them are trying to rebuild. What does it say about you when you're one of the few still trying to tear it all apart?”
“Fuck you,” Ben said.
Kell nodded at him. “I'm making no bones about it, Ben. The big difference between us is I own the bad things I do. At least right now, right here, I'm doing something terrible to make the world a little safer for the rest of them.”
If the boy had another retort, he held it back. Kell turned from him and jogged toward home. Given the choice of an easy meal and chasing after him in the woods, he was safe as houses. Ben's agonized screams echoed between the trees for nearly a solid minute when they reached him, and between them, when he took a breath, the wet snapping of shattered bone and rending flesh could be heard until the young man screamed again.
Then nothing. One moment a death howl and shouted curses, the next a silence filled with only the sounds of the world around him. One less human being in a world grown short of them, but in the final equation a world better for the loss.
Without guilt, without doubt, and without a second thought Kell made for home. Now he could rest.
Epilogue: Rise Again
Fall Seven times. Stand up eight.
Japanese Proverb
Two days later they came for him. Not only for Kell, but for Laura, Kate, Shaun, and the rest of the team from their foolishly brave assault on the marauder compound. As the pounding on the front door of the house woke him, Kell tumbled out of bed.
They've come for us, he thought. Some of the marauders survived and want revenge.
As his muzzy brain cycled into the on position he revised that theory, his pulse slowing. No, of course they weren't. Bad guys rarely knock. Since the IRS wasn't a thing any longer, that was especially true.
The meeting was quick, over so fast Kell didn't even get the name of the woman in charge. She told them bluntly that every person who took part in the raid would be asked to leave. Sent south to North Jackson's sister community in Kentucky.
There was no discussion about what would happen if they refused. The tone of the meeting was dark enough that leaving was the only good option.
The timing was fluid; plans were made but the details had yet to be worked out. As a group Kell and the rest were told they would be allowed to bring only the essentials. Everything else would stay behind. The logistics of transporting housefuls of belongings were too difficult.
Later that day, after Kell and his housemates returned home, he climbed onto the roof and watched the sky. It was a simple thing, the movement of the life-giving orb across the blue, but something he hadn't done in ages.
He expected to feel discouraged, but he didn't. There was no sense of loss that now, after so many months spent gathering supplies, he was jerked back from the cusp of restarting his work. Instead he felt a profound sense of relief. His time alone taught him the value of people. Time with people taught him the importance of relying on himself for some things. But above it all, the previous year had been hard. Trying to integrate into the new community budding here in southern Michigan was brutal, and he'd made mistakes. Too many people knew him or had heard of him. Pulling off a vanishing act was impossible, as was keeping a low profile.
The sun marched its way in the solar dance, and Kell remembered a day much like this one twenty years before. Lying in the back yard, observing the sheer infinite vastness above and wondering. Just wondering. The universe seemed so mysterious to him then, and even as a young boy with his nose buried in text books he understood the beauty in the clockwork motions operating on a scale so large he could barely comprehend it.
After a while Kate and Laura clambered onto the roof and sat next to him as he stared upward. They said nothing, only watched. Enough had passed between them recently that words failed. Their bond was strong, strong enough to overcome almost anything.
“A lot of kids got into science because of stargazing,” Kell said. “Not me. I wanted to know how the sun worked. I used to do this for hours, even after I understood. It's all so big, so logical, but amazing and fantastic. Up there is a ball of hydrogen burning and fusing into helium, and helium into heavier elements. Repeat that over and over again and it's just like Carl Sagan said—we're all star stuff. Everything we are comes from the bodies of dead stars. Spent their lives making something out of the simplest material just so they'd have an audience.”
Kell smiled. “It's messed up, but I feel better than I have in a long time. In my head I know a lot of bad things have happened. That hasn't gone anywhere. Just knowing we can go forward and start over...I don't know, it changes things. And looking at all that above us, all that sky, just reminds me we're small things. If we fail, the world will go on.”
There was a long silence as the three of them watched clouds move in and block out the light. Not dark ones. Nothing ominous. But enough to rime the clouds in a bright nimbus of light while leaving the watchers in shadow.
“We have to start over,” Kate said, breaking the silence.
“I know,” Kell said. “I should be pissed. But we've screwed up a lot. A fresh start may be exactly what we need. Keep our heads down, work on a cure. I don't know if it will be possible where we're going, but from what I'm told, New Haven is a good place to live.”
Laura lay down on the roof, arms stretched over her head. “It is. Hard, but fair. They have more to offer than these ungrateful bastards.”
“It's okay,” Kell said. “When I came here I wanted to be nobody. Not to stand out. Even one person commenting to someone who knew about my work, about my role in the outbreak...it was a risk. I don't blend in anyway, but I made my choices and they didn't help matters. The leadership wants us gone because we took matters into our own hands. And why shouldn't we start over fresh somewhere people don't know anything about us?”
“You're not wrong,” Kate said. “But we have so much going here. We could probably fight it. I think I could convince them to let us stay so we don't have to begin from scratch.”
For a little while Kell said nothing. “I thought about it. Truth is, all it will take is one person in North Jackson describing me to some surviving member of the old DARPA teams. How many of them, or their families, do you think there are around this part of the world? You think they kept quiet about who started all this when the world fell to pieces? I don't care either way if they know, but I don't want to be burned alive because someone recognizes the NBA-sized nerd who set the gears in motion.”
Laura sighed. “And if we fight it and try to stay, it only draws more attention on us. Some husband or wife who heard third-hand the plague started with a man named McDonald could connect the dots. I hate to say it, but you're right. A clean break is for the best.”
It was true enough, b
ut deeper than all of it Kell felt cut off from this community. It had never really been his, but he stayed for Laura and Kate. There was no sense of belonging on the larger scale. He held no hope New Haven would be better, but he doubted it could be worse. Then there was the thrill of the unknown; maybe the place would surprise him. Treat him like family.
Until and unless he found the comforting warmth of community, of belonging to something greater, Laura and Kate were there. The world was important and the potential for a cure even more so, but in the end Kell lay next to them on the frozen roof and knew that come what may, they were family.
They watched the sky for a long time, content to be together. There were problems between them and pitfalls just around the corner, but for now it was enough. They would stumble and fall, but they would do it as one.
And they would stand back up again. No matter the number of failures, they would rise together.