The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living (7 page)

The explosion had done its grisly work well, clearing enough leaves from trees—along with a great number of branches—to give him a decent view of the hill. New Haveners and the volunteers with them swarmed to the base of the wall like ants attacking a carcass. With desperate heaves they threw object after object over the lip. Some were water balloons, and those semi-solid orbs Kell recognized. New Haven used thermite as a weapon often, as it was simple to make, and filled balloons with it. Other people tossed Molotov cocktails or small glass jars filled with liquid. Every time one of those went over, a whoosh of flames and smoke followed.

The front of the compound near the door was just...gone. Fifty feet of wall had vanished in an instant. The truck was also nowhere to be seen, though a blackened twist of metal dangling over the side of the crater left in the hill might have been part of its frame.

Fire raged where the door had been, obviously spreading throughout the compound on its own but helped by the people feeding it from the outside. Gunfire filled the deepening dusk in scattered bursts, coming from the other side of the compound where the fire had not yet spread. As Kell stumbled forward to stand on the edge of the woods, he could see the scene in his mind clearly.

People would be running from the fire in a desperate attempt to escape. They would use any means, risk any danger, to clear the wall. Outlined against the bright fire raging behind, they would make easy targets. Every staccato blip of gunpowder-made thunder was another life. Another death.

It took a long, long time for the fire to spread to every corner of the place, but eventually night fell and was filled with a funeral pyre almost too large to comprehend.

Kell watched then entire time. No one bothered him, told him to help. He stood there in stunned denial until the last embers of day had guttered and died.

But the work was not yet finished.

The smell of burning bodies and the chorus of screams brought visitors, many of them. Though the compound was situated in a location chosen to prevent the undead from approaching, they had rung the largest dinner bell imaginable.

They filtered into the woods in ones and twos at first, cut down by watchful sentries or clumping into larger swarms when missed. They appeared in larger numbers as the night wore on. The number was impossible to gauge. There could have been a hundred or a thousand, it didn't matter. The only number Kell cared about—other than the unknown assigned to the dead inside the compound—was how many he had to face at once.

He fought. He moved as he had never moved before. It wasn't anger which drove him, or hate, or even a need to escape a mournful sense of finality. It was purely a need to move, to fight something that deserved it.

His collarbone burned, punctuated by brutal knives every time he moved quickly or met resistance. As he was fighting with his spear, those razor-edged pains were nearly constant.

He didn't care.

Everyone else worked in groups. Here, four men and two women used homemade shields to fend off zombies while two members of their group stabbed over them from the safety of the shield wall. There, a dozen people whip-thin and hard as old leather, all swinging machetes with the careful control of jungle guides.

Kell worked alone. Unlike the rest, he didn't stay in one place. He darted from group to group, stopping only long enough to drive the point of his spear into the temple or eye of a zombie, to kick the legs out from under them, to put an armored fist across their face.

The familiar boiling anger inside him was nowhere to be found. There was no fear, no shock, no trigger to yank the chains off his self-control. He fought with an even, cold efficiency.

As he loped along the vague circle surrounding the bonfire atop the hill, he came across a young man who also fought alone. There were bodies all around, all zombies. Three undead remained, but the man was in trouble; his weapon, which appeared to be a simple metal bar, had snapped. Kell carefully avoided low-hanging branches as he rushed in.

The man drove the foot of steel in his hand into the face of the nearest zombie, but the price of getting so close was falling into the thing's grip. The blow wasn’t enough to kill it completely, and the pair went to the ground.

Kell thrust his spear toward the closest of the two zombies still standing, but his aim was thrown off by a slick spot on the forest floor. Just a few inches, but it was enough to send the point of his weapon down a foot and a half as he tried to correct.

The spear burst through the chest of the zombie and stuck there. Kell pulled, but he knew the split-second it stopped the thing was hopelessly seized, caught between bones.

“Shit,” he breathed, pushing on the spear instead. This did nothing to hurt his enemy, but the advantage of six feet of aluminum being firmly stuck was the leverage it gave him. His push turned into a swing as the zombie began to tilt dangerously, then graduated into a hard shove. The tottering dead thing tripped and fell into the other zombie still on its feet, taking both of them down.

He glanced around for another weapon. He hadn't brought his knives or ice-axes, none of the arsenal he usually carried around. There hadn't been any reason to think he would fight hand to hand. Stupid. Reckless.

He saw a straight dark shape amid the dead leaves, dark against the night around him. Kell dove for it, snatching it from the ground.

As he came up, the zombie not doing its best impression of a kebab rushed him. The gray skin, the smooth motion—it was New Breed, and he hadn't noticed. The damn thing had recovered from its fall fast enough to nearly catch him off guard.

He swung the metal bar with his right arm, his collarbone screaming as the heavy rod cut the air. A horrible wet crack filled the night as it connected with the zombie's neck, an almost surprised expression on its ghoulish face as vertebrae shattered and the force of the impact reduced its spinal cord and the Chimera entwined within to so much jelly.

Kell hopped over the body to the zombie he had stabbed, who was now pinned to the ground in what he had come to think of as the 'gross butterfly' position. It happened sometimes, when the spear got stuck after passing through the back. Another whack across the face with his bar, and it was still.

The young man struggled to push the zombie laying atop him away. The thing was dead. Judging by the damage to its face and the sheer volume of disgusting ejecta covering the boy's hands and face, he had reamed the broken piece of steel around in his enemy's face until it died.

Kell slipped a boot under the zombie's shoulder and gave a pushing sort of kick, flipping it most of the way off. He put out a hand, which the young man took.

“Thanks,” the boy said, out of breath.

Kell nodded in return. “Out here alone? Where's your group?”

The other man glanced around nervously. “I must have lost them,” he said.

With no immediate threat to distract him, Kell began to see the pieces. The boy was perhaps old enough to shave, but didn't need to do it often. While Kell wore his armor, a mixture of scavenged and homemade gear common among survivors, the boy wore only working clothes. Thick jeans, scuffed boots, a long-sleeve shirt. There was a small pack dangling from his hip, big enough to hold a canteen and a small amount of food. An emergency kit, most likely.

Most telling, he simply didn't have the
look
. There were no sharp edges to his features from weight loss. No, the boy had seen plenty of meals. He didn't carry himself with the wary tension of someone who had spent nights sleeping in fits across the branches of a tree to escape the hungry dead below.

“Got separated from them,” Kell said, tasting the words.

“Yeah. No idea how,” the other man said. “I should probably head out. You know, look for them.”

Kell hesitated, locking eyes with the young man. He tried to understand him, to read anything beyond the stark terror he saw in their depths. Both knew that with a single question—anything having to do with the attack—Kell could break the fragile illusion that the boy was one of his people.

“Yeah,” Kell finally said. “It's dangerous to go alone.”

The boy smiled tentatively. “
Legend of Zelda
. I loved that game.”

Kell didn't smile in return. Instead he handed the bar to the boy, then worked his spear free with a practiced twist-and-pull. He raised the point toward the south, nodding. “You should go,” he said. “I hope you find your people.”

The boy backed away several feet, making sure Kell wasn't going to attack him, then turned and began to walk away slowly.

“Hey,” Kell said to the boy's retreating back. He froze. “Be careful. Dark as it is, anyone could mistake you for an enemy.”

Without another word, the young man walked off.

Kell fought until the sun rose.

Kell hauled shit, and he was happy to do it.

In the weeks following the destruction of the Hunter base, there was much upheaval over the revelations found in the smoking remains of the place. Kell heard it every morning as he rode the honey wagon through New Haven, collecting the waste of the people he lived with. From door to door, it was the same, though a sparse few held rigidly to the idea that every person in that compound had deserved it.

Kell would have agreed but for the bones of the children they found.

On the one hand, no one had expected the Hunters to have kids in their fortress. They were essentially a military group dedicated to the mass murder of small communities for their supplies. They were a far-flung outpost of the UAS, an arm dedicated to supplying their distant compatriots through death and theft. Who in their right mind would put more than a thousand people in the field
knowing
they would be risking horrific retribution for their actions, and let them bring children along?

On the other hand, it made sense. The pessimistic part of him wondered if the children weren't there exactly
because
they were innocent. The idea was too dark to fully wrap his head around; surely no group of people that large could agree as a unit to keep kids as human shields. The most probable scenario was simply that because there were so many Hunters, there were a good number of people who wouldn't leave their kids behind. Rather than leave them in the hands of strangers a thousand miles to the south, wasn't it better to have them close at hand, behind walls and heavy weaponry?

The overwhelming sentiment in New Haven and in many other communities was that someone should have known. The logic of the situation didn't factor in, for the most part. People rarely asked precisely how the scouts should have known. Kell shook his head as he approached his next stop, forcing himself to smile.

The horses pulling the cart slowed and halted, though they seemed impatient for a run. One of the great jokes about living in Kentucky after the end of the world was the uses people found for almost everything. New Haven had grown—and was growing—so quickly that there was more work than hands to do it. With a wide range of abandoned farms to stable them, it was easy enough to care for a large number of horses.

And though many roamed free with no one left to stop them, the more precious of the breed had been kept secure. It was in the early days they had been rescued, and Kell never ceased to be amused that he hauled human refuse under the power of thoroughbreds. One of the two hitched in front of him had won the Derby before a short retirement to stud.

The early morning air was crisp, but not terribly cold. Winter might be around the corner, but the insanity that was weather in the Ohio Valley brought unseasonably warm winds. Kell stepped down from the cart and locked the breaks, then rang the bell to tell the street he had arrived.

Not that most of them needed it; it was almost the end of his run, and as it was every morning, they had heard him ring the bell on the lower streets before making his way up the hill.

It was easy enough work. He waited as people approached to dump their buckets and basins, making small talk with a few. It was only after the rest of the residents of the street had returned through their armored doors that the last person came out. He always waited.

The house he lived in was the most heavily modified in New Haven, on account of it being the very first to undergo the process. The windows were covered in a thin layer of sheet metal, which was bolted into the bricks of the house. He had wondered aloud at the effectiveness of that defense at one point, only to be told the metal was simply a slim cover for several inches of plywood reinforcement.

A thick wall was built around the original porches, both front and side. The owner had let him through the outer door to see the small pair of decks within, a square of gravel and grass between. The entire space was filled with supplies, tools, and weapons. There was a grill, too, meticulously cared for and used often.

The top of the house had a hatch to the inside, homemade catwalks, and a long walkway to the houses on either side. The crowning feature was a raised perch, fully ten feet above the peak of the roof, from which a shooter could cover a solid hundred yards of New Haven.

It was, Kell thought, one of the strangest and most secure homes he had ever seen—which seemed to fit the owner perfectly.

He was taller than average, but nowhere close to Kell's own six and a half feet. He was broad in the shoulders, fairly thick in the chest, and gave the impression of once being overweight. Something about the way he walked, maybe?

Now he was anything but. The long black hair in its ponytail pulled back the skin on an already underfed face, framing a square jaw and sharp cheekbones.

“Jay,” Kell said. “Good morning.” He thrust out a hand.

Jay smiled. “K, how's it going?”

“Can't complain,” Kell answered. “Are you ever going to let me call you Josh?”

“Not until you tell me what K stands for,” Jay replied.

Everyone called Kell by his first initial except for the people who knew his identity, and only then in private. Kell had used the name Kevin in North Jackson, but somewhere along the way people had forgotten it. Not that he cared to tell the man the false name, but it had become something of a running joke between them. Jay never asked anyone what K stood for, and Kell refused to even think of the other man as anything but Jay, because he wouldn't answer to his own name so long as Kell remained silent.

Below the banter, there was something sad about Jay. Kell had heard bits and pieces from other people—the man was something like a local celebrity—but never dug deeper. If anyone on the planet understood the need to deal with demons privately, it was him.

“And how are things with you?” Kell asked.

Jay smiled again, a sunny if tired expression. “Not terrible. I'm working on all kinds of stuff, but there's never enough time. Busy is good, though.”

“Well, if you ever want help, let me know,” Kell said.

Jay snorted. “As if they'd let you. I mean, my entire job is paperwork. I write about this place, work on the survival manual, and keep records. I don't get to do anything else. You think they'd give up another able body for that?”

“You never know,” Kell said.

Though his shift only lasted four hours, Kell was one of several people who did the job around the clock. New Haven had spread across multiple neighborhoods, walls going up to enclose street after street as they took in people by the hundreds and beyond. It was a relief to finally hand over the reins and have his part done.

He watched the cart trundle away under the hands of his relief, and took a moment to stretch. The damn thing was death on his back.

Halfway to the RV he called home, Laura found him.

“Where you headed?” she asked as she swooped in behind him, hooking her arm in his.

“To find some lunch,” he replied. “Then onto the wall for guard duty.”

With her free hand, she produced a brown bag as if by magic. There was something suspiciously like a grease stain on it. Laura waggled her eyebrows at him.

“I suspect you have ulterior motives,” he said, eyeing the bag.

“I really do,” she said, giving the (surely delicious) mystery bag of food a little shake. “But I also have this. So it evens out.”

New Haven was enormous, it was true, but there were surprisingly few places to just sit. Almost all the yards were taken up with gardens, even now flush with autumn-sown vegetables that would get you a good thump to the head if you walked on them. The streets were an option, but there were people walking along them constantly, not to mention the odd vehicle here and there.

Which was how they found themselves having a small picnic at Kell's guard post. They were alone on the narrow platform atop the wall. They sat with legs dangling over the outside of the wall. One of the other guards at a nearby post gave them a strange look, but after Laura gave him a cheery wave, the man shook his head and turned away. There were a few zombies below, but the section of wall they sat on, close to their small encampment, was ten feet high and had a finished section of buffer around it. The undead could only watch them in frustration.

The bag contained a mouth-watering combination of barbecue and fries. One the advantages of rebuilding society was the keeping of livestock and people with the ingenuity to make favorite foods possible despite technological hurdles.

For a while they sat in comfortable silence, the same kind of well-worn companionship he had shared with Kate during his first excursion against the Hunters. The three of them had been inseparable, once, though more and more often Kell found himself with one or the other rather than both.

“I told you we'd talk,” Laura said after finishing the last bite of her food.

Kell paused. There was something in her tone, a stone just beneath the surface. “Yeah,” he replied, chomping another handful of fries. “But it's not a big deal. You don't want to fight, I get it.”

The stare she fixed on him was beautiful in its parts. One half was steel-cutting glare at the implied challenge to her bravery, the other a sort of wide-eyed bewilderment usually reserved for especially slow children. “It's not that I don't want to. I just didn't want
that
fight.”

“You think I did?” Kell snorted. “If I had known, I wouldn't have gone.”

“Kate knew,” Laura said. “So did I. Difference is, she went.”

“What?” Kell said.

Laura sighed. “Smart as you are, it's easy to forget how naïve you can be about some things. You see this place,” she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at New Haven, “and you think that because these are good people, they can't do terrible things. You don't let yourself see the forest for the trees.”

Kell said nothing, choosing instead to shovel more fries into his mouth. Laura continued.

“When we saw how things were going at North Jackson, we decided to move out of the main building and into the woods. You didn't realize what was going to happen. I should have told you, or Kate should have.”

Swallowing carefully, Kell shook his head. “I didn't even know she went. Never saw her while we were out there, and she didn't say anything after.”

“That's because she knew how you'd react,” Laura said, nodding. “That once you saw the destruction, all the death, that you'd want to leave.”

Kell surprised her by laughing. “Is that what you think? That I want to leave?”

“You don't?” Laura asked, eyebrows raised.

“Not because of what we did,” Kell said. “I still want to join up with John and work on a cure, but Will is right. It's too dangerous with the UAS out there. Both of us in one place is too risky. But no, I don't want to leave because of what happened with the Hunters.”

Laura studied him carefully as he gazed over the wall. “I don't get it,” she finally said. “You've always reacted so strongly to that kind of violence. I thought...”

“You thought I would be disgusted and tear off in anger,” he finished for her. “A year ago, I would have. And I feel shitty about it. Thing is, almost everyone else here does, too. Had we known there were kids, maybe we'd have tried something else. But we didn't. We had no way to know. I mean, we couldn't exactly ask them, could we? The attack hinged on getting close without them having the faintest clue.”

His jaw clenched. “Will has a map of every community they hit, large and small. They killed children, too. Thousands of people over the last eight months, gone. With what we knew, there wasn't any other way.”

“I know,” Laura said.

He turned to face her. “You figured beforehand that we'd have to kill them to a man, and you didn't want to be a part of it if you could avoid it. I understand that. I wish I'd have known. But if you expected me to want to leave afterward, why didn't you tell me? Do you want to stay?”

Laura smiled crookedly. “You're halfway right. I didn't want to go, and I didn't tell you because Kate asked me not to. She was...pretty vehement about it. She wanted you to go, and she knew you wouldn't if I told you.”

There were sharp stones beneath those words, too, but Laura didn't explain further.

“I'll still fight when I have to,” she went on. “But there's another reason I haven't volunteered for trips to the outside since we got here.”

“What's that?”

“Find me after your shift is over, and I'll show you,” Laura said.

The walk back to his RV was short, as his guard post was close enough to home that he could yell to his camp mates and be heard. Someone must have told Laura he was coming, because she was walking toward him seconds after climbing down off the wall.

A small gathering of people circled the large communal picnic table where the group took meals together. With so many of them working odd hours at multiple jobs, it meant a constantly changing set of faces around the table. Out of the forty or so people in the group, there were never more than a handful of the same people at each meal.

But now the core members were present. Andrea, who Kell had traveled with from the north earlier in the year. Laura, of course. Kate was there, looking slightly irritated. Scotty, Dan, Chris, and all the rest. It was Dan who motioned for him to take the empty spot at the table, and Dan who cleared his throat once Kell was comfortable.