by Joshua Guess
“Got him!” Mason piped up from behind. Those two words from that man were all Kell needed to know the injured cannibal was no longer something he had to worry about.
Three dead zombies later, the handle in Kell's left hand snapped off. It wasn't surprising. After all, he'd been putting a lot of force on that one attachment. He let go with his right before the weight of the spear could jerk it away. That he hadn't meant to do, but the habit of protecting his right side had become ingrained since his injury.
“Step back,” Mason said. “I'll take over for a minute.”
Kell did as he was asked, but his blood was still up. It wasn't a matter of animal rage, or rather not only that. He was in that curious place survivors everywhere had learned to cultivate, a head space where all the proper levers for fury had been thrown, but the baffles used to channel energy into useful work were still secure. Rational Kell was absolutely in tune with emotional Kell, and that had historically always led to best results.
He was about to reach down and find new grips for the spear when a hand gently touched his elbow.
“Here,” Steph said, handing him a wooden pole about two feet long.
Kell blinked. “I thought you guys went inside.”
She puffed out a breath through pursed lips. “Please. Give me some credit. I went to get weapons. Miles went to get help.”
Kell hefted the rod, surprised by its weight. Felt like an ironwood. After a quick survey of the available materials, Kell propped the stick at a steep angle against a support welded to the nearest pole, then stomped its middle. It broke with a satisfying crack.
“Why...” Steph began, but stopped when he picked up the pieces.
Kell spun the pair of makeshift spikes in his palms and darted into the fray again.
It was controlled chaos. Organized mayhem. Kell stayed to Mason's left, taking out any zombie bashed with the shield while it was still dazed. The hardwood made for an effective if primitive tool. Kell barely felt the strain on his right side as he stabbed again and again. He took scratches on his left when he used his forearm to push away a few of the more eager attackers, and those did hurt.
He ignored the pain.
Time stretched. At some point during the onslaught Miles called for him to step back while Steph briefly took Kell's place. Her technique was wild and her stick unbroken, but Kell watched appreciatively as she cracked a few skulls, the muscles in her arms standing out like steel cables.
Kell only became aware of what Miles was doing when the man finished his work with a firm knot at the wrist. Lifting his left arm up, Kell found it wrapped to the elbow in thick layers of rough leather.
“Thanks,” he said to Miles with a grin. The other man nodded solemnly.
“Go get 'em,” Mile said.
Just as Steph finished breaking another head, Kell stepped past her and speared another zombie through the eye with his stick. The trick to getting the weapon back easily was an even twisting motion as you pulled. That helped break the suction.
A small part of him was saddened to know such a thing. The shred of him left over from before everything had gone so terribly wrong. That kernel which had been Kell McDonald, family man and whose strongest dilemma had been when to find the time to organize game night, was sad for this piece of knowledge, which itself was only one among thousands like it.
The rest of him, the part that could not forget, let that dusty corner of his brain have its existential crisis. It was both the least and most he could do to mourn what had passed far from his control.
In the now and for the future, Kell fought.
Twenty-Five
“This kind of thing happen a lot?” Mason asked when the fight was over.
The guards had managed to close the gate and lock it with a heavy chain. One of them stood nearby, helmet tucked under his arm and an expression of disbelief on his face. The group sat wearily just inside the open section of fence, every one of them sweating but only Kell and Mason carrying wounds.
“No,” Miles said softly. “Almost never. There's a reason they set up shop here.”
Kell tilted his head quizzically. “You sound...disturbed.”
“You mean beyond the normal kind of disturbed you get when you have to fight off a bunch of undead cannibals?” he asked wryly. “Yeah, I am. I've been here a long time and this is only the third attack I've seen. The other two didn't have half as many zombies between them as this one had alone.”
They quieted as the guard approached. He wasn't young by any definition of the word—who was, anymore—but the slightly awed expression on his face gave him an air of innocence that felt out of place here among the bodies.
“If you're injured, Doctor Rawlins will take stitch you up,” he said, eyeing Kell and Mason.
Which was fair. Mason would have new scars in his collection when all was said and done. Kell's arm was still bleeding beneath the leather scraps Miles had strapped over it. You could tell because the seal wasn't at all water tight, and a steady patter of drops fell to the ground. It had a pretty good beat.
Doctor Rawlins saw both of them together. Kell's impression of the man as a fussy academic rather than a real sawbones evaporated when the man failed to so much as blink at their bloody, disheveled state. Rawlins evaluated them with a passionless glance and pointed to Mason.
“You first,” he said. “Get on the table.”
“I'm good,” Mason replied cheerily.
“You've been bitten,” Rawlins said, as if he were pointing out that the sky happened to be blue. “Since this is my lab, you'll get on the goddamn table.”
Kell had left the blood-soaked leather behind in the nave, and was holding a sodden scrub top against his own wounds. He nodded. “You heard the man.”
Mason complied with a theatrical sigh and climbed onto the exam table. Rawlins methodically irrigated the wounds on Mason's arm, and then stopped to stare at his shirt. It wasn't immediately clear what the man was seeing given how the shirt was mostly blood at this point.
“Strip to the waist, please,” Rawlins said.
“Usually that's a two drink minimum,” Mason quipped. Rawlins actually smiled. Well, his mouth made a slight trajectory change from expressionless line to slightly crooked line, which was progress. Mason pulled off his scrub top.
“Holy mother of Jesus,” Rawlins said. “How in the world are you alive?”
Mason's torso was even more crisscrossed with scars than the rest of his body. One side was a mass of what looked like burn tissue from armpit to waist, an area larger than a basketball. Kell knew better; it was an entirely new patch of skin grown over a wound that probably had killed Mason for at least a little while. That the skin had been able to regrow over such a large area on its own stood as testament to the power of Chimera.
“Kind of a redundant question, considering the people you bring here,” Mason pointed out.
At crease between Mason's neck and shoulder was a fresh bite, which had been hidden by the neck of his shirt. This wound didn't appear nearly as bad as the others. It bled slowly, where it pierced virgin skin and not at all where the zombie had tried to gnash through scar tissue.
“You're right, of course,” Rawlins said as he irrigated Mason's wounds. “I read your file. I simply hadn't seen this with my own eyes. It's incredible. None of the people I've studied have had such extensive trauma.”
For Kell, time slowed. The tumblers in his brain whirred and clicked into place. He had heard the story about Mason's presumed death before, both from the people who had seen him 'die' and the people who had found him afterward. Mason had suffered a ridiculous level of trauma during that fight, but had done so while already coping with the massive injury on his side. It had been infected to the point where death was certain, and Mason had chosen to go out swinging.
A bedrock lesson every experimental scientist had to learn was how to be objective. Physicists who studied the Higgs Boson needed it just as much as biologists who might observe living subjects. Yo
ur prejudices and expectations had to fit within certain parameters. When people were part of the experiment, it could make things difficult.
Mason was a friend, and Kell suddenly realized he might have been blinded by that friendship. Mason didn't have to pretend to be a half-life or whatever these people were called. He actually was one of them. And if Kell was right, the trigger causing Chimera to become fully active had come before the fight. Mason hadn't actually had to die for it to happen like all the rest.
That was...new. And unexpected. It gave Kell's brain something he would have called, back in his college days, a science boner. It wasn't so much a matter of Chimera exhibiting a new behavior, actually. If Kell was right, the organism had performed as he had designed it to.
Except the version of Chimera that had been released upon the world had been an early one, incomplete. It shouldn't have been able to do so.
Several possibilities flickered through Kell's head, each more exciting—and more alarming—than the last.
“Mason,” Kell said without allowing himself to think about the words spilling from his mouth, “I think we need to have an honest talk with the doctor here.”
Rawlins paused, frowning. Mason, on the other hand, understood perfectly. Before the doctor could do more than begin to open his mouth, he was spun on his heels and put into a choke hold. As with most acts of violence Mason committed, it was expertly done. Enough air to breath, not enough to shout.
“Make a fuss and I'll squeeze until you turn purple,” Mason said. Rawlins nodded.
Kell stood, letting his eyes soak up the room and wondering for the millionth time what secrets it held. He stood in front of Rawlins, meeting the man's frightened eyes.
“Doctor, I need to know some things. You can start with what you know about the plague in general terms, and who is backing this place.” He hesitated, then leaned forward. “But before that, I want to know if you've come across anyone in your studies who has exhibited the half-life state without dying first. Because in my own research, I haven't.”
He nodded at Mason for emphasis. “Until now.”
Rawlins's eyes widened.
Yes, Kell had his attention.
“Look,” Rawlins said after Mason let go of his throat. “I don't want to be here any more than you do.”
The good doctor had resumed his work, cleaning and dressing Mason's wounds. The only difference now was a more open understanding of the facts. That, and the scalpel held in Mason's uninjured hand. Rawlins glanced at it fearfully now and then. “These people do not fuck around. One day I was working in the bunker, the next they're carting me off to here and telling me I have to study people and take samples.”
“I find that kind of hard to believe,” Kell said. “You're a prisoner here? And what bunker was this? The big ones in Texas have been open for a couple years now.”
Rawlins scowled as he slipped a roll of gauze out of its packaging. “I don't know anything about Texas. My bunker was in Maryland. One of three in a grouping. Each one held two thousand people. I was in the research bunker. When everything went tits-up, the company and the government got together and shoved a bunch of us in there.” His face softened. “My family is there. Threats were made.”
“Were you doing the same kind of research there that you're doing here?” Kell asked.
“Yes and no,” Rawlins said. “Same type, different subject. I was digging deep into the source organism. When we were evacuated underground, the government had copies of everything.”
Kell should have been surprised but wasn't. The small bunker John had lived in also contained every scrap of Kell's work, but in hindsight it would have been irresponsible on a biblical scale to leave the research and samples in only one place. Certainly, his lab in Ohio had many copies of every version of Chimera they had worked on. Enough to supply a fair number of facilities.
Which, now that he was thinking about it, brought up a question.
“Are there other places like this?” Kell asked. Rawlins froze for a second.
“This is station three,” Rawlins said, then licked his lips. “There are six, total.”
Mason grunted as if he had been punched in the gut. “Six? Jesus, how many people have you killed?”
Rawlins flinched. “I don't kill them. I don't want them to die. The guards have their orders and carry them out. What am I supposed to do when they bring me the samples, let them go to waste?”
“You could refuse,” Kell said, without much force.
“Yeah, I could,” Rawlins replied in an equally weary tone. “Maybe my family doesn't suffer as a result, maybe they do. I definitely wouldn't see them again, because I would be dead. These people are not screwing around. They want a cure, and they're willing to kill off as many subjects as needed to get one.”
Mason caught Kell's eyes and a complicated bit of body language passed between them. Kell nodded to the nonverbal question.
“Tell me, Doc,” Mason asked, “how do you get your results back to the home office?”
“Each of the stations is located not that far from a regional airport,” he said. “Light planes fly to a central location every two weeks and drop off my notes and any samples I might send, then a larger plane takes them to Maryland.”
There was a long silence following this statement.
“What?” Rawlins asked.
“That's a lot of fuel, a lot of infrastructure,” Kell said. “Pilots, plane maintenance, fuel; God knows how many other things I'm not even considering. How are they pulling it off?”
Rawlins blinked. “Did you not listen? We're talking about facilities meant for exactly this kind of thing. I don't know what the place in Texas was designed for, but the one in Maryland is huge. The bunkers are the least of it. It's almost a small city. Tens of thousands of barrels of crude, a refinery, a power plant, everything you can imagine. It's all being put toward this. If I die here they'll replace me in no time. If this station is compromised—which the attack tonight seems to imply—they'll build a new one and have it running by the spring.”
Kell grunted. “I guess the question now is what we do with you. See, we came here to take your research back with us to see if it would help me create a cure. I only realized while you were examining Mason that he might be a unique case. I need to study him, and I can't do that here.”
“So you just want to leave?” Rawlins asked. “That's it?”
“No,” Kell said. “I can't let the people here die, even if I can't stop the assholes running the show from doing it elsewhere.”
“And you can't trust me once you aren't threatening my life,” Rawlins said, a note of resignation in his voice.
Kell nodded. “Means we don't have a lot of options here. I don't think we're ready to take the guards down just yet, but if we let you live with what you know, I have to think you'll immediately order us killed or locked up.”
“If you kill me, you're still going to have to fight,” Rawlins pointed out.
Everyone chewed on that for a moment, and then Mason broke the silence.
“There's a third option,” he said brightly.
Rawlins smiled sardonically. “I'm all ears.”
Mason's grin split his face nearly in two. “What if there was a way for everyone to get what they want? A way to get you home while we get to free everyone here and take your research to boot?”
Rawlins chuckled. “Are you a wizard?”
“Not at all,” Mason replied. “But I'm a genius when it comes to narrow escapes. Which means I know how to make yours look completely believable. You'll get to go home to your family.”
Kell didn't need to be an expert in reading people to see the hunger in Rawlins's eyes.
They had him.
Twenty-Six
Mason laid out the details over the next twenty minutes, careful to reveal as little information as possible. Rawlins was not a hard book to read. The man was obviously terrified and hopeful in equal measure. Kell knew something about being separated
from the people you care about and having to live in isolation. The calculus going on behind the doctor's eyes was just as clear.
When Mason finished, he stared Rawlins down. “This hinges on you doing exactly as you're told and not giving us up after we leave this room.” When Rawlins stammered an agreement, Mason raised a hand to quiet him. “I have no reason to trust you, and believe me, I don't. At all. So please understand that when I say you'll regret it if you stab us in the back, I mean it. I've survived mortar explosions, IED shrapnel, gun shots, a swarm of hungry zombies nearly shredding me to bits, getting hit by an RV right after that—even a fucking sword through my guts. I've broken out of prisons so violent and brutal you can't even begin to understand how much worse they are than this place.”
He leaned in close to Rawlins. “So you should believe me when I say that if you fuck us over, I won't have a problem hunting you down. I mean that mechanically and ethically. It will be easy to do, and once I get hold of you I won't feel bad about the pain I cause before you die. I'm not saying this to sound like a big, scary badass. I don't give a shit what you think of me. I just want us all to get what we want, and I'm going to be pissed to levels they don't have words for if you make it harder than it has to be. There's no reason we can't all walk away happy.”
Rawlins took it all in with more aplomb than Kell would have expected. Clearly the idea of being murdered outright had become blasé. “I won't lie, part of me wants to tell the guards to shoot you. But I won't. I want out of here. I want to go back to my wife and son. I'm so fucking tired of this place.”
Kell heard the sincerity in Rawlins's voice. Hell, he believed both of them. Mason didn't threaten when he couldn't follow through, and Rawlins didn't have to risk anything in the coming fight. His role was simple and not even outside the scope of his normal behavior. The only deviation from the routine was in the setup. Once Rawlins established a reason for the guards to get him safely away in the event of some kind of emergency, all it would take was an actual emergency.