The Fall (Book 4): Genesis Game

by Joshua Guess

  The blade bit into bone as the man pushed, the sudden resistance changing the direction of his wrist, wrenching it into a painful right angle. Teeth gritted against what had to be bones creaking and scraping against each other, the guy pushed the blade forward with everything he had.

  Kell rotated and took careful aim before lancing one of the man's attackers through the neck with a spear thrust that looked a lot like a shot with a pool cue. The next zombie looked at Kell, and in that moment of distraction the man finished his laborious cut.

  From there the guy was able to extricate himself, which he did with a grateful nod at Kell.

  He turned back to his own section just in time to be mobbed by a leaping New Breed.

  “Fuck!” Kell screamed as the thing fell on him. He turned at the last second, giving the zombie his back but saving his face and throat from being savaged. The New Breed's fingers, tipped in exposed, sharp bone, raked at him. In the fracas Kell dropped the spear. The long weapon wouldn't have done him any good, anyway.

  Keeping his chin tucked low; Kell reached into his right sleeve and pulled a small piece of wood from it. He unspooled the garrote's wire to its full length, though he had to go by feel since he was protecting his face. The cuff on his right wrist went tight, telling him the wire was fully extended, and Kell flipped his hand in a practiced circle to make a loop.

  Sharp fingers dug into his scalp, eliciting a scream. Encouraged, the fingers pulled, then did a tiny jump onto Kell's face. He shook his head with all the force he could bring to bear and felt a surge of relief as most of the fingers lost purchase before they could do much damage.

  It was that last one that did the trick.

  A line of fire ignited just above the left corner of his mouth and traced a burning path toward his forehead on the right side. It felt like the goddamn thing was tearing his nose off, and judging by the amount of blood sheeting down Kell's face, it might be.

  With a supreme effort of will, Kell slung his arms back and caught the New Breed in his loop of wire. He pulled it tight, feeling the zombie tense against him as it realized something was very wrong, and executed a furious hip throw.

  The wire, as it turned out, had captured the zombie's arm as well as its neck. This made it impossible to fully sever the spine and kill the thing, but Kell wasn't thinking about that as the zombie lay struggling on the ground in front of him. As a point of fact, Kell was beyond thinking about anything at that moment.

  A steady tattoo of blood bridged the gap between Kell and the zombie in those few confused seconds. Rational Kell recognized the confusion in the face of the New Breed, and understood that the ability to express confusion was a remarkable thing to find in a zombie.

  Then Kell yanked on the garrote, pulling the zombie around by the immensely strong wire sliced through flesh and held tense against bone. He kicked, which was less effective bent nearly double.

  So he let go of the garrote. Forgot about it. Ignored the tug of its tangled length through the cuff still attached to his right wrist. Logic and reason were pushed back along with rational self-preservation as Kell kicked full-force, smashing the heavy steel toe of his boot into the face of his enemy over and over again.

  The world had turned blurry and red, but Kell didn't care.

  It wasn't the burning chasm in his face that pulled him from the edge, nor the heavy pain in his right hand. It was Emily's voice.

  “You're okay, Kell,” she said, putting a firm hand on his chest. “Just stop and have a seat.”

  The pain in his hand throttled down as soon as he came to rest. Kell looked down and saw, with mild interest, that the nearly headless corpse of the New Breed was still attached to his garrote. He had been dragging it behind him as he staggered away from the fight. His hand was noticeably swollen beneath his armored glove.

  “Sit here,” Emily said, pointing to an empty weapons crate. “We need to take a look at that gash.”

  “I'm fine,” Kell said, droplets of blood spraying on Emily's coat with the words. He started at them for a second. “Sorry.”

  He felt his brain coming down from the overwhelming rush of adrenaline and rage. It wasn't the first time he'd fallen into that mindset. He had long suspected that Chimera was more volatile when it came to things like brain chemistry, and that these combat-related rages were a direct result. As his synapses fired in patterns that didn't focus on violence, he wondered if Chimera was stimulating his aggression as a way of shoring up his survival instinct. Before being infected, before The Fall, Kell had been remarkably passive by nature.

  He spit some more blood, this time at the ground.

  “Yeah, it keeps running into your mouth. Maybe keep it closed for now.”

  Kell nodded.

  The fighting was dying down, and that more than anything rocked Kell to his core. How much time had he missed, lost in his fugue state? The idea that he wasn't fully in control of his actions for more than a few seconds made his heart heavy in his chest.

  The number of zombies was dwindling swiftly, the decrease only growing faster with time. He watched the final moments of the battle dispassionately as Emily gently irrigated the canyon in his face and dabbed it relentlessly with gauze.

  As soon as the last zombie fell, Mason appeared as if by magic. The usual mask of competent disregard was gone, genuine worry replacing it.

  “We should get him inside,” Mason said. “Into the lab. We'll see who has the most medical training. If that gets infected...”

  Emily shuddered. “This is a claw wound. God knows what was on that thing's hands.”

  They hustled him inside, and he let them. As he came down from the odd combat high, more and more reality piled onto his thoughts. That thing had come close to taking an eye. In no time at all he could have lost half the light of the world. Or worse, if the damn zombie had gotten lucky. The eye socket was a convenient channel to the brain, after all.

  Everything became a blur—or rather, more of one. Kell felt himself drifting off when someone mentioned an injection. That woke him up enough to agree and wait for the party to start.

  Nothing in his life prepared Kell for the next hour. No amount of tragedy, death, or acts of battlefield medicine can properly build the framework your mind needs to really understand how nerve-wracking it is to have someone deep cleaning a gash in your face and sewing it shut.

  Every pass of the needle went right in front of his eye, close in a way even lovers rarely managed. The local anesthetic numbed him perfectly for the task, but the deadening of sensation spread unevenly. Parts of his face felt oddly slack, others cold.

  During the procedure, Kell was utterly awake. Totally sober in a way that made everything seem hyper real. A large part of this awareness was an intense fear that the enemy strike teams would attack at any moment and cause the stranger knitting his flesh back together to flinch in surprise.

  What would the sudden, nearby sound of gunfire do to those delicate motions? This was what ran through Kell McDonald's mind ten times a second for what felt like ages.

  Lucky for him, the actual shooting started between stitches while the line was slack. Kell was pleased to see his...doctor? What did you call the stranger sewing you back together? Who and whatever they were called, the man doing the work barely reacted to the shots. Kell was suitably impressed.

  Kell found himself deeply uninterested in the fight. Getting your face split in half had a way of creating perspective. He worried for his friends and hoped all was going well, but didn't dwell on it. There was nothing he could do. Instead he let the doctor do his work. Kell reminded himself that the gunfight portion wouldn't have been his shining moment anyway. The plan had been to put him on the roof with the snipers and arm him with a bow. Hard to focus on an assault with a sharp yard of aluminum jutting out from your vitals.

  “Almost done,” the doctor said an interminable time later. Kell swiveled his eyes to see the man's tongue caught between his teeth as he concentrated. “There. Finished. Lay still while
I put something on this, and then you can move around.”

  “Sure,” Kell said. As he was no longer in danger of having a needle shoved in his eye by accident if he moved, he slowly bent his neck from side to side. It was definitely going to be stiff tomorrow from holding tension for so long.

  Just as the last thin strip of bandage was taped in place, the guard standing in the hallway opened the door. Mason rushed through a second later, a stranger in hunting togs draped across his arms. The man was bleeding and unconscious and Kell threw himself to his feet to avoid having the guy dropped on him where he lay.

  “We need him alive,” Mason said.

  The doctor paused as he wiped his hands on a cloth. “Alright,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because,” Mason said, his tone urgent, “right before he lost consciousness he told me he knows all the backup locations for these research stations.”

  The doctor didn't get it right away, but Kell did. If the enemy on the table in front of them hadn't been lying to save his skin, then the information was invaluable. Knowing where the rest of the research stations would relocate to would give the Alliance a huge advantage.

  “I'll help any way I can,” Kell said, fighting back his exhaustion and preparing himself for a long, long night.

  Thirty-Two

  Two days later the world looked like a much smaller place than it had been in years.

  Kell had done what he could to assist Donald, his previously unnamed doctor. Donald turned out to be a former veterinarian. Kell had to tap out an hour into the rough surgery, overtaken by exhaustion, and fell into what could charitably be called sleep when he reached the nave and his bed. Emily tried to wake him several times, and even Kell was forced to agree that the fourteen hours he was dead to the world for were closer to coma than normal rest.

  He woke with a cramped bladder and a mighty appetite, and spent a few hours waiting for the patient to come out of his own repose.

  By the time Kell woke again, the man was awake and busy informing everyone who would listen that every fear they had about the people behind the research facilities was valid.

  “How many times am I going to have to repeat it?” asked the injured enemy soldier, who said his name was Greg.

  “As many times as you're asked,” Kell said. It was morning on that second day, and he had only heard bits and pieces over breakfast. Greg had come around in the middle of the night. “If it helps, I don't need the details. Just give me broad strokes. What are we facing, here?”

  Greg was being guarded constantly, but had one hand cuffed to a chain secured to his hospital bed. There were three in the recovery area, which was another fairly small room set in the hallway leading to the lab. He sighed, then grimaced as the change in the pressure of his torso caused his wounds to flex.

  “Ah, that fucking hurts,” he mumbled. He took a drink of water with his free hand, and then cleared his throat.

  “First thing you have to know is where it started,” Greg said. “It was about five years before the plague.”

  Kell put up a hand. “This doesn't sound like broad strokes,” he said. “I don't need a history lesson.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Greg said. “You want to know what you're up against, then you need to understand the scope. To do that—”

  “Fine, okay,” Kell said. “Go on.”

  “So about ten years ago, some committee or whatever in the Department of Defense gets a hair up their ass about what we do if there's some kind of game-changer. Nuclear war, biological attack, whatever. Everyone knows about the bunkers in Texas, and there were others, too. Those places were always meant for plain survival. Food, water, some power, that sort of thing.”

  “But the bunkers in Maryland are different,” Kell said.

  Greg nodded. “You almost don't believe it even when you see it. There are three of them, and they're huge. All of us who've lived out in the world since the shit began know the Texas bunkers were big, but those things were meant for maximum people, minimum of everything else. The Rebound facilities are much more.”

  “Rebound?” Kell prompted.

  “Stupid name, but that's what the project was called,” Greg said. “The idea was to renovate those three bunkers solely to create a backstop in case something catastrophic happened. Not just to keep politicians or powerful people alive. Rebound was stocked with the best of everything you'd need to do research in any branch of science you can think of. It was meant to be a haven for the best minds in the world.”

  Kell snorted. “Sounds nice. So what happened?”

  Greg blinked. “Nothing happened. Or rather, everything happened the way it was meant to when the plague hit us. Rebound went live, and people from all over the country were escorted there.”

  “You weren't one of them,” Kell said. “You mentioned living out in the world.”

  “Yeah,” Greg said. “I first saw the place about a year ago. They gave me a fucking guided tour, if you can believe it. We're talking hundreds of tons of supplies, everything from weaponry to food to all the weird shit their nerds needed to make their lab work. They even showed me their reactor.”

  Kell's eyebrows shot up. “As in...”

  “Nuclear reactor, yeah,” Greg said. “It's not as big as you think and it's buried underground. Apparently it can run for like forty years or something. All the power they'll ever need.”

  “I'm still not sure why I should be so afraid of these people,” Kell said. “Scientists and administrators don't scare me. All the really bad things they're responsible for were made possible by people like you. Outsiders who worked for them.”

  Greg shook his head. “I'm not done. See, one of the three bunkers is pure research. It's not just for the plague, either. People at the top of their fields were selected to go there to continue their work. Rebound is meant to keep continuity, was how they put it.”

  He licked his lips, took another drink of water. “Think about the sort of long-term planning that takes. The most advanced research in pretty much every kind of science never stopped. It's all going on there. Won't mean much if no one can ever use it.

  “Which brings me to the other bunkers. One of them houses two thousand soldiers. Not just grunts, either, but leaders. Specialists in taking down crooked regimes. Generals who know how to get a population to work with them for everyone's benefit. Some of them are Rebound's designers. The other bunker is a mixed bag, but even it's full of engineers, architects, every kind of person you need to start the ball rolling.”

  Kell got it. The implications were still unfolding in his mind, but he began to understand. “They want to restart society. That's not terrible.”

  “No,” Greg said. “Which is why people like me help them. And you're wrong; they aren't going to do anything. They're already doing it.”

  Kell blinked. “I assumed they would try to cure the plague first.”

  Greg shrugged. “They've been working on it, sure. But this isn't just about walking into town and telling people they're boss, not like those UAS assholes tried to do. It's a long, thought-out process drawn by people expert in getting people to follow them. You and your allies don't do much travel to the east coast or the northeast, right?”

  “No,” Kell said. “Not a lot.”

  “See, I know that because if you did, you'd know Rebound is already really strong there. The bunkers were just the seed. They've been giving refuge to people who need it, sending doctors out into communities, doing everything from helping people reinforce their defenses to planning crop layouts for maximum yield.”

  Kell chewed on the inside of his lip thoughtfully.

  “Thing is,” Greg said, his tone almost careful, “they were subtle about it. It started out with them helping some people, then doing more. They won hearts, man. Do you get that? They didn't ask for anything in return. When they started setting up outside the bunkers, they invited people to join them. Said it was totally voluntary, but made the terms too good for anyone who's had to live outside in this
nightmare to refuse.

  “Communities voted. People were happy to be a part of something doing so much good. You wanted to know why Rebound and what they've put together is so dangerous? It's because most people are true believers. They've got forty thousand people spread across three states ready to answer the call.”

  “That's impossible,” Kell said. “There's no way that many people went unnoticed.”

  “You said it yourself,” Greg replied. “Your people don't see the east coast. There were a lot of people in those states. That made for a lot of survivors, and more join up every day.”

  “When you talk about them that way, it makes Rebound sound like a good thing,” Kell said.

  “It is,” Greg said. “It's not like they're over there torturing people or whatever. They've cleared thousands of acres of land and roads of zombies. They worked out something in their labs that does the trick over huge areas. There aren't any marauders in the territory they control, because Rebound puts trained soldiers in with militiamen and sends them patrolling with brand-new weapons in armored vehicles. It's a pretty nice place to live. The fact that the land over the bunkers has basically everything you need to build and run a city helps, too.”

  Kell frowned. “If you're so sure they're good people, why are you giving us all this information?”

  Greg shrugged again. “I was in the Army for four years when I was younger,” he said. “That got me put into the special ops group for Rebound. I knew I'd be sent into some fucked-up situation or another. We even knew we might have to strike one of the research facilities. I always thought it was wrong to take people for these things, but I didn't know they were being killed. When I told your man after I'd been shot that I could give him information, I was trying to save my own ass. After I woke up and they explained what this place was doing to people...” Greg trailed off, his face troubled.

  “It's tough,” Kell said. “Because you can't reconcile the people who've done so much for you and yours with this sort of cold-blooded business.”