The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise (11 page)

“I don't know, but it's not worth the risk. You and the kids can go. I'm feeling weak. I'll slow you down.”

Andrea grabbed his face, turning his head roughly to meet his eyes. “Fuck you. I'm not like those assholes out there. You're a human being. I'm not going to leave you behind if we can help it. And you promised to take us to New Haven. So no dice for you. We're safe enough for the moment. Now help me take off your armor so I can look at your shoulder.”

Kell gave in. With painful effort they managed to strip him to the waist. The exercise woke his right arm back up, both a blessing and a curse. Good because it showed the nerves weren't so damaged he'd lose the use of it. Bad because now the arm hurt like hell, too.

“Ah,” Andrea said as she brought the lantern toward the wound. “Wow, you're lucky. The bullet hit the strike plate in your vest. Must have been something wrong with the fabric, though, because the shards of the plate sheared right through it and into you.”

A gentle hand touched his shoulder, then Andrea's voice breathed into his ear. “I'm going to pull the pieces out and clean this up. You might want to bite down on something.”

Steeling himself, Kell nodded. “I'm ready.”

He wasn't.

An hour later the four of them moved through the woods again, this time at a slower pace. There were no signs of pursuit—not that the murky woods allowed them to see more than twenty feet—and as Kell was only just starting to feel the quick snack and drink he'd downed before leaving the cabin, they had to keep the pace easy.

Fresh bandages covered his shoulder and the back of his head, where a piece of shrapnel from his vest had dinged his skull. His weapons hung on his belt, thumping against his thighs in a steady rhythm as they walked.

The night air was chilly, doubly so for his lack of armor. It had been years since he'd traveled around without it, but there wasn't any choice in the matter. Blood had soaked through his gear, both the heavy tactical vest and the lighter Kevlar one he wore over it. Walking through the countryside wearing or even carrying objects permeated with human blood was ringing the dinner bell for every zombie inside a mile.

Even the sleeves were gone. Without the vests and harness they attached to, the custom protection on his arms—dozens of hours of work forming and weaving the chain mail—was useless. Left behind to gather dust in the basement of a lonely, abandoned cabin.

Kell wore a thick flannel shirt but felt oddly naked. He flexed his right hand and curled his arm as they moved, shaking off the last slivers of shock to the nerve. Or trying to, anyway. The arm still had a faint buzzing numbness to it, like it was wrapped in plastic.

They followed the highway, as planned, though how Andrea and Michelle could tell, he had no idea. Evan was content to move with them, silent but alert. The boy seemed glad to be out of the RV and on the move. He watched his little sister dart forward and even off the path. Kell watched Evan.

Hours passed. Mostly they walked, sometimes they jogged, and always the dark trees gave every step a sense of sameness, as if they were walking a treadmill in front of a moving screen. Michelle began to take longer and longer jaunts away from the group, the tiny girl flitting to their right and returning seconds, then minutes, later. Eventually she was gone so long Kell began to worry for her. Andrea was not concerned.

“What if she ran into zombies?” Kell whispered, trying not to let Evan overhear.

Andrea shook her head. “She hasn't. Shelly keeps a whistle in her mouth when she's away from us. Taught her that early on. Anything gets close enough to be a threat, she blows a long burst. We come running.”

Just before dawn the little girl reappeared, beckoning them to follow her. She stepped from the vague trail and through the treeline again, this time joined by the rest of the group. In the dim light, Kell saw an overpass and dilapidated signage. He noted the exit number and mile marker as they walked closer to the small town clustered around the interstate.

“We're going to stop here for a while, catch some sleep,” Andrea said. “There's a store I visit sometimes. Still a lot of supplies in there, and it's clear.” She eyed Kell's arm. “We'll have to climb to get inside, though. Think you can manage?”

“Yes, I should be all right,” Kell replied. “We're only about a mile from the rendezvous location with my people. They left days ago, but we should get on the actual road just in case they left information or something for us.”

Andrea cocked her head. “You really think they'd have stopped, even after a gunfight?”

Kill smiled. “Not only do I think they did, I'm sure they wouldn't have done so without at least dropping some food or better directions for me.” He paused. “For us, now.”

“Must be some friends,” she said.

Kell fought back a surge of longing for Kate and Laura, joined by an intense desire to see the rest of his group as well. Even the pretty girl with kind eyes who gave him food, and the people with her. They'd set out on a trip together, which in this world was putting your life in someone's hands. The memories of them, all of them, outlined the empty place inside where they should have been.

“They really are,” Kell said. “And when I see them again, I'm going to tell them so.”

Back on the road at noon, Kell watched for any sign his friends had stopped. As much as he hated to think about it, Andrea was right. In the heat of the moment as they fled from their attackers, did anyone in the convoy pay attention to how far they'd gone? Would they have remembered the order to stop ten miles away? Kell, Andrea, and the kids had exited the woods close to the spot Kell estimated the convoy should have stopped, but it was possible, even likely, that they'd already walked past it.

All that was left was hope.

“Be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary,” Kell said to Andrea. To his surprise, it was Michelle who answered.

“What, like a world full of dead people walking around?”

He laughed. “Maybe a little more specific, like something on this road you wouldn't expect to see.”

The little girl nodded, smiling. “Okay. I'll watch.”

“You're a smart kid, aren't you?” Kell asked. “Your mom trusts you to run off alone, you know a lot about surviving, and—”

“And I say things you don't expect an eight year old to say,” Michelle finished. Kell nodded.

She smiled. “I learn fast. I remember things. I was really good in school, I even skipped a grade. Mom taught me a lot before I went to kindergarten. And I always helped with Evan. Since I was little.”

Kell's lips quirked. “Many moons ago, I'm sure.”

She punched him in the side, small fist connecting with his hip with a fair amount of power. “I know I'm still little, but mom says the way things are makes us grow up faster.”

Kell nodded. “I promise you, I feel much older now than I did two years ago. I imagine it's much worse for someone your age. Going from playing with dolls to running from zombies.”

Michelle snorted. “I never played with dolls. I had a chemistry set and read books.” She turned to her mother. “Dolls? Really?”

Andrea was making an effort not to laugh. “Remember, honey, they're called 'sexists', and the world is still full of them.”

“Hey, I'm not a sexist!” Kell said in mock irritation. “Girls like dolls, it's provable fact. I mean, boys like dolls too, and that's fine...”

Andrea grinned. “
So
glad boys around the world have your approval to play with dolls if they want, because I'm sure without it they'd just pine away for lack of Barbie.”

Michelle chimed in, her voice lost amid the banter, but all three of them lost the thread of the conversation when they nearly ran into Evan in their distraction. The boy stood in the road with narrowed eyes, then raised his hand to point.

“Orange,” he said.

Kell followed his line of sight. “I'll be damned. I'd have walked right by it while we were talking.”

“What is it?” Andrea asked.

Kell's grin spread from ear to ear. “It's where my friends stopped.”

The sign was clear to anyone from North Jackson; the florescent orange spray paint was impossible to miss. Kell used the stuff on his scout trips, and the symbol scrawled on the derelict car before them was the one they'd used to indicate a good find. It was a simple V shape with a horizontal line drawn through it.
Stop here,
it said,
and check this out right now.

It looked as though whoever left the sign didn't want it to be obvious. Only someone looking for it would notice it, the majority of the paint on the side of the car facing the woods. Evan had noticed only the small corner of it bleeding over onto the trunk. In retrospect it seemed perfectly obvious; the world around them still carried the dreary gray of late winter, the trees not yet blooming with green. Kell would have seen the tag had he not been distracted by Andrea and Michelle.

Still, he didn't feel guilty at the slip.

“Let's see what goodies we've been given,” Kell said as they approached the car. He pointed to the bumper. “Michelle, would you mind feeling under there for a set of keys? We used to hide good stuff in abandoned cars and slip the keys under the back if we could...”

“Sure,” the girl said.

A few seconds later she stuck her hand up and jangled a set of keys. Kell took them and opened the trunk.

Inside was an assortment of supplies, from tightly sealed packets of food to a bundle of general supplies and even several small weapons. Atop it all was a note in Kate's looping script.

Andrea reached inside the trunk and pulled out a jug of ammonia. “Nice,” she said. “I was starting to run low. We can put off dealing with
them
for a while longer.”

Kell, Andrea, and Michelle all glanced back at once to check on what the little girl called their 'fan club'. Thirty feet behind, kept away by the overwhelming odor of the ammonia Andrea regularly squirted on their shoes, was a swarm of zombies. Unable to push themselves closer but incapable of leaving an obvious free meal, they'd begun to follow the group as they left the store they'd camped in.

“What does the note say?” Michelle asked, bringing Kell's attention back to the trove before them. He unfolded the paper and scanned the page, then broke out a grin.

He turned and walked directly to the right, going a few paces into the woods edging the highway. There, strapped to the back of a tree with tape, just as the note said it would be, was the slender silver length of his spear.

Kell charged from the treeline, heading straight for the pack of undead waiting for an opportunity to devour them. For a blissful moment the pain in his shoulder vanished, the shooting ache in his foot gone like smoke on the wind. The heavy aluminum with its wrapped grips and signs of wear felt perfect in his hands as he rushed toward the crowded zombies.

He moved fast enough they didn't have time to reel from the powerful scent of ammonia washing across their skin. He'd tested the theory on captured undead; they breathed through their skin. Chimera was pervasive in its programmed need to infiltrate and improve all bodily systems. Wading into combat with the smile of a joyous warrior, the rational voice taking notes in the back of his head wanted to study the skin of his victims under a microscope to see precisely how the organism managed direct movement of oxygen through the skin and into the muscles.

The butt of his weapon took the first zombie between the eyes. The creature had been stumbling forward at the time, and the flat end actually broke through the nasion, the thin space between the eyes, and jammed into the brain.

Kell whipped the spear around like a quarterstaff—the only use of the weapon Kate knew and taught—moving his damaged body with it. His second strike took another zombie broadside, her skull bending unnaturally. Strike three was with the point; Kell took a zombie through the stomach and vaulted the thing over his head, intending to use his size and weight achieve the feat.

That was the plan, but adrenaline only goes so far.

If he'd thought about what he was going to do, Kell would have realized how bad the idea was. In his excitement he had forgotten that while the rush of chemicals dulling his pain receptors was making him
feel
fine, he wasn't
actually
fine. The damage to his shoulder caused him to drop the zombie before he'd managed to lift it high enough to slide a piece of paper beneath its feet. His foot sent warning signals to his brain, shouting
no, no, this is NOT okay!

Then his leg gave out. Rather than slam his enemy into the ground like a lawn dart, breaking its head against the pavement, Kell instead slipped back and dragged the pinned creature onto his body, which served as a reminder that he no longer wore armor above the waist.

Kell was in the odd position of trying to fight off a zombie that was desperately trying to bite him while also fighting like mad to get away. The ammonia on the cuffs of his pants burned its senses, an effective ground-zero attack. The overwhelming need to sustain itself drove the wallowing corpse to gnash at him ceaselessly even as it scrambled to get away. In his peripheral vision he saw the rest of the crowd reel and back off.

Lucky, damn lucky, and stupid.

He kicked and shoved, hands gripping the haft of the spear with desperate strength as he made space between the two of them. Then a shadow crossed over him, a flash of silver with it, and the zombie was dead.

Michelle crouched in a dancer's pose, right leg out in front as she crouched with a hand forward. A thin metal rod three feet long jutted from her fist and into the zombie's eye. The little girl stood, quickly pulling the weapon from her victim as she kept a wary eye on their enemies. Without looking at him, she said, “That was dumb.”

Fear still pulsed through him, shame soon following with it. It
had
been a stupid thing to do, utterly unlike him. Every word Kate and Laura had spoken to him about his increased recklessness came back to him then on a wave of realization.

Tears followed, but panting as he was and dripping with sweat, they went unnoticed.

Andrea approached. “You want to tell me what that was about?” she asked, her expression guarded.

“I don't...no, I do know. I just didn't want to think about it before. I'm sorry. That was idiotic.” He slowly rose to his feet, knocking the dust off and turning to Michelle. “Thanks for the save. Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing to the weapon in her hand.

She glanced at the thin rod. “It was in the trunk, under the packs. I think it's a tent pole or something.”

Andrea stepped between them, facing Kell. “You need to tell me why you just ran off into a swarm of ghouls with no armor like you were some kind of crazy person. I'm trying to keep my kids safe, here, and you act like you're trying to kill yourself.”

The words hit him like a physical blow. “I think I might be.”

She studied his face for long seconds. “Tonight after the kids go to sleep, we're going to talk.”

Kell heard the threat in her words. Not in the heated anger a person would have shown in the old days before the world fell apart. In an interesting display of human adaptation, he'd noticed such things were much less common nowadays. His theory was that people needed anger to work themselves up to doing something they might get in trouble for. To break the rules. Now, of course, there were none.

Andrea's words were flat and measured. A single sentence told him all he needed to know and more. Explain yourself and do it well, or be left behind.

Maybe worse.

Laura and the rest gave them another gift, this one a surprise in the form of a few gallons of gas in the car along with the care package. It wasn't enough to get more than a few dozen miles, but given the alternative was walking, all four of them saw the short trip as a great gift. Assuming the convoy made sure the car worked, Kell suggested they pile in and leave as quickly as possible.

The zombies following them were looking especially restive after his excited charge, and he had no desire to test their limits. A new and shiny guilt sat atop the mountain he carried at all times. Putting Andrea and her children in danger should have been a small weight compared to the world of people he'd killed, but it sat heavy and noticeable as they drove off.

It was, he supposed, the difference between killing faceless billions and nearly harming people with precious little trust who'd taken a chance and given it to you. Many times since The Fall began, Kell felt depression edging up on him, and the constant burden of responsibility never left. But this was the first time he'd grown angry with himself. It wasn't just that he'd almost hurt them, but that he'd done it in a stupid and pointless way.

It was sloppy and impulsive, two things Kell McDonald was not.

Kell kept the growing unease to himself. For their part, the children didn't seem to notice. Michelle sat shotgun next to him, and devoted her whole attention to watching out for threats. The single-mindedness of such a small child was unnerving. Evan stared as well, but at his own hands as he twisted his fingers together in his lap.

Andrea's eyes studied him. He saw her measuring gaze every time he glanced in the rear-view.

“Do we want to stop before the tank runs dry?” he asked. “Just in case those hunters are following us and we need to get away fast, I mean.”

“No. I say we go until it stops and walk from there.”

Kell cocked an eyebrow. “Aren't you worried about them coming after us?”

Andrea shook her head. “Not at all. This isn't a movie, where the bad guy chases you to the ends of the earth. I watched those people for a long time. Other than regular shipments of meat and skins picked up by whatever community they're from twice a week, I never saw any evidence they had access to a vehicle. Plus they'd have to stop producing to catch up with us, and we're not worth the effort.”

“That makes sense.”

The corner of her mouth twitched into a smirk. “You say that like it's a surprise.” Kell tried to sputter a response, but she laughed. “I'm just messing with you. I don't know what kind of place you come from, but in the wilds there aren't a lot of resources. You can't just drop everything and go find a fight.”

Thinking back to his watchful nights at the house in Michigan, Kell decided to keep to himself that he'd been doing exactly that.