To his surprise, Kell sat alone in the middle of the street. Mason wasn’t sure how long it had actually been, but the guy looked absolutely wrecked. There was no sign Kell noticed him pull up, so he was cautious when approaching on foot.
“Kell? You okay, man?”
Looking up at Mason, it was hard to tell. The guy had been through more than most, and it was obvious something was wrong. “What is it?”
Kell laughed, a half-snoring, half-sobbing mess. “John died. Took a bullet to a lung. Had a rib sawing into it, from what I can tell.”
Mason felt like someone hit him in the heart. One half of the world’s expertise in Chimera, the plague, whatever you called it. Gone. Just like that. “Jesus, man, I’m sorry.”
The other man laughed again, running a hand over his head. “No, you don’t get it. I mean, yes, thank you. It hurts so fucking bad to lose John, but what I mean is he’s
dead
.”
It took him a few seconds to figure out that no, Kell wasn’t having a break with reality. Mason just hadn’t grasped the contextual importance of the words. “Wait, you mean…?”
“Yeah,” Kell said. “Apparently our last trial three days ago was a success. We created a cure.”
The bus showed up not long after Mason.
“You’re alive,” Kell said, rushing toward Emily. He swallowed her in a bear hug, doing the same for Andrea and her kids.
“Yeah, thanks to Andrea. We almost ran into a herd in the road. Had to lay low for a while.” Emily’s mouth tightened. “Don’t know how many more made it out. Laura…”
He didn’t need to hear it. The awful truth was obvious. “Damn.” He tried to say something else, anything to convey the grief, but his throat almost closed completely.
Emily put a hand on his chest. “I know. I’m sorry. She went out like a warrior, though. Probably saved a lot of lives.”
“Of course she did,” Kell said with a half-chuckle. “Laura couldn’t let herself die like some normal person.”
They moved everyone into the bunker and took stock of the situation. At one point the place had been home to John and a collection of other researchers. They’d left zombies inside as a sort of security measure when moving John to the house that would become their compound. Some time later they decided that a highly defensible, hidden fortress might come in handy, so the group cleaned it out in a post-apocalyptic version of a community barn-raising.
They’d even let Mason work on the entrance to make it impossible to get inside without knowing exactly what the trick was.
Supplies were handed out and places to sleep assigned. Andrea took charge of the administration; she knew Kell, Emily, and Mason would want to sit down for a strategy session.
“How are we on power?” Emily asked as Kell joined them in the small rec room, one of the few spaces in the bunker without someone tucked in a corner to sleep.
He tossed a bag of dried meat onto the tiny card table and put the pitcher of water he’d been carrying next to the food. “We’re fine. We took a lot of stuff from here, but there were a bunch of redundancies. So long as we’re not firing up any equipment, we’ll have lights.”
Kell rubbed his face, trying to wake himself up a little. “Okay. I was doing what Emily ordered, getting away with John. I didn’t see much on my way out. Was it Rebound?”
Emily shrugged. “Didn’t see much more than you, but that’s my guess.”
“It was,” Mason said. “They didn’t say the name, but I’m convinced. I let them capture me.”
Kell gaped at him. “Oh, is that all? Just a little stint as a prisoner? Easy as pie to get away, I’m sure.”
Mason grinned. “These are skills I’m trying to pass on, young padawan. Besides, it wasn’t as spectacular as it sounds.”
“It never is,” Kell replied. “What’s our next move? Do we hit back? Move on? How long do we hang around here and hope there’s not some record of this place that Rebound dug up?”
Kell heard the anxiety in his own voice, but didn’t care. During the months of training with Mason every day for their attempt to infiltrate Rebound territory, he’d come to recognize the scarred man as a natural leader. Their areas of expertise didn’t overlap very much, and Kell needed someone to give him a direction to point at that moment. Something to aim at.
Emily cleared her throat. “I don’t think we can go with the original plan. If they knew where to find us, they have to know we’re the ones who hit their research facilities last summer.”
Mason took a bite out of a piece of jerky. “They knew what I looked like, and Kell. Not sure about anyone else, but that makes getting into Rebound itself next to impossible.” He chewed for a few seconds. “But since Kell says he has a cure, I think the situation has changed a little.”
Rather than look excited or happy about this news, Emily reached over and punched Kell in the shoulder. Really hard.
“What the shit?” Kell yelped, rubbing his arm.
Emily pointed a finger at his face. “You didn’t think it was important to mention this to me? Your…girlfriend or whatever we’re calling it?”
Kell put up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, jeez. There was a lot on my mind. And it’s not like I can start cranking it out here and now. It’s going to take a lot of work to rebuild our data. I didn’t get to grab it on my way out.”
Mason reached into his pocket and pulled out a thumb drive, put it on the table between them. “I grabbed the daily backup from the cache on my way in. It was updated yesterday, so it should have everything you need. I’d have mentioned it before, but like you said, a lot going on.”
With a smile, Mason cracked his knuckles. “I wouldn’t suggest you punch me in the shoulder over it.”
“Our biggest problem was dealing with the fact that Chimera doesn’t act like a disease,” Kell said.
Before they could decide what to do next, where to go and how to act, everyone needed an understanding of the stakes. That meant letting Kell put on his science hat and talk at them.
“There are microorganisms called bdelloid rotifers which have been asexually reproducing for eighty million years,” he said. “They steal DNA from other organisms and use it to diversify their own gene pool.”
Emily nodded. “Like Chimera takes DNA from hosts and incorporates it into its own cells.”
“Yes and no,” Kell said. “Bdelloid rotifers take theirs from fungi and bacteria, and they don’t exactly mutate as a result. Chimera is much more weird. It snags all kinds of DNA from any living thing it encounters. And once it enters a living system, its cells differentiate as they spread out. So Chimera gets in the brain and mimics lower functions, gets into the circulatory system and relays oxygen and even fights disease. It spreads, and improves the host—especially the version we created.”
He leaned back in the chair. “The problem was figuring out whether we could stop Chimera from taking over the brain after death without killing the person we were curing. It’s almost impossible to tell how deeply it intertwines with bodily systems. In some people it replaces vital tissue, so killing it off might cause nerve function to cease or a blood vessel to blow out.”
Mason leaned forward, fascinated. “What was the solution?”
Kell frowned. “As much as I hate to admit it, we got the idea from that doctor at the research facility. We got to thinking about how focused he was on the brains, so John and I did the same. Remember, Chimera might copy our bodily functions, but it isn’t an integrated system the way we are. The parts spread through our bodies work just fine on their own. They’re individual organisms linked together, not parts of a whole.”
Emily clapped her hands together, grinning broadly. “You guys figured out how to destroy the Chimera in brains?”
“Yeah,” Kell said. “Well, no. It’s really hard to slip things past the blood-brain barrier. Chimera did it, but being infected by Chimera means a more efficient blood-brain barrier. So instead of going to the source, we engineered a dumb strain of Chimera to attack those specific kinds of cells and injected it into our necks. We figured out that the change in the type of cell Chimera differentiated to happens below the base of the skull, in the spinal cord. It’s pretty consistent.”
Mason laughed. “That’s fantastic. You’re decapitating it without cutting off the head.”
Kell put up his hands. “Problem one is we have to use a neutered version of Chimera. We can mass produce it with the right equipment, but it doesn’t multiply in a host. We basically programmed a strain to target and attack the right kind of cells, then take their place as a barrier. Once the Chimera wrapped around the brain is cut off, it begins to die.”
“What do we need to start making the cure in bulk?” Emily asked.
Kell sighed. “Look, I’m leaving a lot of stuff out. This requires targeted genome editing, which is complicated beyond belief. So I’d need a lab. The one here isn’t going to be able to produce much, and that’s assuming we didn’t already take everything I’d need to the compound. After that we’d need a way to deliver it. People are easy, we can just inject them. An aerosol might work since zombies take in most of their oxygen through their skin, but…”
“So, a lab, then,” Emily said. “We need to start with that.”
“Yeah,” Kell said. “My lab back home is probably trashed by now. And as much as I want to kill the motherfuckers who hit us, I can’t take the risk.”
Emily patted his hand. “Honey, do you honestly think we’d let you? I’d tie you up and stick you in a closet until I could get you somewhere safe.”
Mason smiled. “I don’t want to hear about your sex life. Gross.”
“
Anyway
,” Kell interrupted. “I’d need to work on it in the lab, test out a delivery system. Then we could look at mass production. I guess the problem is finding a lab.”
“Nah, we got that covered,” Emily said.
Kell, very intelligently, said, “What.”
Emily yawned, extending her arms. “We have a backup. Might need to locate a few supplies for it, but Will has had people working on it since last summer. We knew Rebound might send people after us. Mason was sure they had observers watching the fight at the research facility.”
“Why would you not tell me about this?” Kell asked, bewildered.
Emily raised an eyebrow. “Because you’d have tried to micromanage it, and you know it. We had John give us lists of everything we’d need, specifications, power requirements, all that. It wasn’t a conspiracy, Kell. You just had more important stuff to think about.”
Mason tapped his fingers on the table. “Speaking of which, is there any chance Rebound’s people will get this from the compound?”
Kell blinked. “What? Well, yeah. I mean, we didn’t get out with our research.”
“Dammit,” Mason said. “How likely is it someone who looks at it will know what they have?”
Kell considered that for a few seconds. “The file is labeled pretty clearly. They won’t know it works, though. Not without trying. But since it’s the most recent attempt, they’ll probably try it. A lot depends on how familiar the people looking at our work are with Chimera.”
“We’ll assume intimately,” Mason said. “These people have been using survivors as guinea pigs, after all.”
“Why does it matter?” Kell asked. “If they want to make a cure, more power to them. Saves us the work.”
Emily sighed. “You’re not thinking through the consequences. If Rebound’s territory is suddenly zombie free—if their people gain the ability to remove that threat wherever they go—they can spread fast. Like, however fast they want.”
“Oh,” Kell breathed. “Look, I get it. I do. But most of those people are just regular folks trying to get by. If they get the cure, they’ll be more interested in how much more farming it’ll let them do. I’d rather not withhold something that can prevent deaths because we’re afraid of the politics involved.” His face darkened. “Not that I don’t want to murder whoever sent those mercenaries after us.”
Mason stood and pushed his chair back under the table. “I understand, Kell. You aren’t coming with me anyway. Like you said, we can’t risk you. But we have to stop those soldiers from getting back home. Not just because they have the cure, but because when they realize what they have, they’ll want you. They’ll do anything to find you. And that will start a war. Which means I need to stop the people who killed the compound before they get back home.”
It made sense. Kell didn’t like it at all, but he bowed to the necessity. He wondered, as Mason made his way out of the room and off to bed, how much more weight he could bear. The pile of bodies was getting awfully heavy.
Laura had been their leader, but Emily was usually somewhere to be found when details needed seeing to and plans arranged. The truth of any organization, even a community, is that it relies on the harmony between a central voice of leadership to guide, and delegation of responsibility to implement. Emily was one of those usually charged with tasks, but now she was a leader.
She worked on the theory that Mason would return from his recon trip to the compound with all bad news. No other survivors, no supplies or fuel, no vehicles. Planning with anything other than what was right in front of her was a fool’s game. There were too many variables, otherwise.
The bad news was mostly centered around transport. The vehicles on hand weren’t enough to get everyone to Haven, which was in Kentucky. It was a twelve hour drive under perfect conditions with no stops and moving at highway speeds. None of those things were even possible, now. The truck and SUV were gasoline engines, while the bus ran on diesel, so it wasn’t like they could just add up all the fuel.
Other than that dark spot, their situation was stable bordering on positive. There was plenty of food as long as no one minded eating dried meat, rice, and other dry goods. Since none of them wanted to starve, the refugees were just fine with it.
Emily looked up from the maps spread across the break room table when someone cleared their throat.
“Andrea,” she said. “Tell me that’s tea you’re holding.”
The tired smile was confirmation. Andrea sat down and handed one of the tall glasses over, the sides wet with condensation. “I found some bags earlier and made some. Chilled it in that freezer downstairs.”
Emily stopped with the glass an inch from her mouth. “The freezer they used to keep zombies in so they could study them?”
Andrea shrugged. “I mean, I cleaned the shelf before I put the pitcher in there.”
Emily considered that for a second. “Eh. It’s tea,” she said, and took a drink.
Andrea leaned over the map. “What are you working on?”
“Trying to figure out how to get us to Haven,” Emily said with a sigh. “I don’t know if Mason will come back with fuel, so I’m assuming what we have is what we have.” She tapped a highlighted section of the map. “There’s a trading post here, but it’s a hundred miles in the wrong direction from where we want to go. They supply fuel for Union scouts who come through, so they’re probably stocked.”
Andrea frowned. “So what’s the problem?”
Emily dragged her finger along the map carefully. “It’s further away than we can drive with the gas we have. It would be easier if we could go east, but that’s the direction the dicks who attacked us came from. I’d rather not risk driving right into more of them.”
“Yeah, fuck that,” Andrea said vehemently. “I have my kids to think about.”
The knife edge in her voice was clear. Andrea and Laura had been a couple, and the wounds were still bright and fresh. Emily tried to imagine the combination of grief and fear bolstering her instinct to protect her children, and couldn’t. She’d never had kids herself, but had once seen her own mother savagely attack a man who tried to snatch her from in front of her grade school.
You don’t fuck with moms. Ever.
“That’s the problem. I just can’t figure a way we get there with what we have.” Emily put the cool glass against her forehead and let out a satisfied
ahh
of relief. “Staying here long term isn’t an option.”
“Well,” Andrea said, stretching the word out in consideration. “Maybe we won’t have to. Mason’s supposed to be stopping those soldiers, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Emily said. “Not sure how, but he says he can do it.”
Andrea brightened. “That solves your problem right there. They might have destroyed our reserves, but they got here somehow, didn’t they? Those SUVs they drove were custom. They had to have a source of fuel.”
Emily opened her mouth to make a counterpoint, because it couldn’t be that easy. Not after half a day spent poring over maps, working out routes, and wracking her brain for a solution.
“Well, fuck me,” Emily said. “I didn’t…yeah. I didn’t think about that.”
Andrea actually laughed. “Don’t feel bad. You were a scout. You spent all your time out on the road, so you
had
to think in tunnel vision. I know what that’s like. When the kids and I were living out in the wild, every day was that way. Beating your head against a wall trying to make some berries and a few squirrels feed three people. You get in the mindset of having to use what you’ve got and only that, and it’s hard to get out of.”
“That’s assuming Mason manages to kill them,” Emily said.
Andrea gave her a frank stare. “Have you, y’know, ever met that guy?”
They took turns doing sweeps outside the bunker, and it was on Emily’s shift in the afternoon when the zombies showed up. She saw them from a good distance, far enough away that her reaction was more resigned irritation than primal fear.
The herd was small and had clearly seen better days. There was none of the coiled strength and predatory cleverness common in New Breed zombies. These were obviously older models, left almost nude from years of carelessly snagging clothing on obstructions. Their flesh was pale and gray, withered against their bones and damaged in places.
As they drew closer, she could see the same kinds of hateful claws that had scarred Kell’s face. She had a twisted stripe across her side from identical weapons. The things were constantly grabbing, using their fingers, but for all Chimera did to control and drive them, it couldn’t force the mutated tissues to heal properly.
The tips of every finger had worn away. Nails long gone, with only thin ribbons of flesh clinging to the base of exposed bone. Ceaseless abrasion filed them to points, though often fresh breaks left them with razor edges.
“Let’s get it over with, guys,” she muttered, hefting her oversize machete.
Emily had listened patiently over the years to the thoughts other people had when confronted with the dead. Some remarked on how strange it was to realize that these things, years after death, still managed to keep going. That any number of dangers could have stopped them, from violent wildlife to natural hazards in the landscape.
She agreed with the unlikelihood of it, if you only looked at the surface. But she rather thought the zombies were like any other predator. They had a base level of intelligence and vague memory to guide them. Bears didn’t jump off cliffs, after all.
There were almost as many reactions to the undead as there were kinds of people. They were informed by everything from culture to religion to what kinds of books they preferred to read. Anything capable of shaping a worldview contained the potential to similarly affect how they saw the dead.
Emily only knew a few people like herself, who had the deeply ingrained binary view of the world. It was simple, inelegant, and wonderful for survival.
You were a threat or you weren’t. Threats were eliminated.
Her machete came down with brutal force, half-crushing the head of the nearest zombie. It barely had time to react, though the others in the group managed to surprise her. Despite their drawn, almost skeletal appearance, they moved with unnatural fluidity. As her machete hung, momentarily stuck in the zombie she’d killed, the others pounced.
They weren’t moving at superhuman speeds or anything. Not even
human
speed, really. Their ragged looks lulled Emily into a false sense of security, and like good predators the zombies took advantage of her foolishness.
Claws skittered across the tough, heavy coat wrapped around her, seeking her exposed neck. The coat was one of the custom, armor-lined ones survivors learned to make and rely on, but she hadn’t worn headgear to protect her.
She let go of the machete with her left hand, but kept her right on the handle. Emily dropped her head low, extended her right leg back for balance, and barely avoided having her throat torn out. Her left arm swooped out, trying to push away the zombie on that side.
Instead, the thing yanked on her sleeve. Emily didn’t fight the sudden change in momentum, but went with it. She kept the arm level with her face as she shifted her weight. As soon as her feet both felt solidly planted, Emily returned the favor by pulling the zombie clinging to her sleeve off balance.
The movement was too much for it to handle. Emily probably outweighed the wraith by thirty pounds, so when she snapped her left arm toward her waist suddenly, it had no choice but to sail forward in a split second. Had Emily waited even a heartbeat longer, the zombie would have tumbled into her as it lost balance completely. Instead she rocked on her heels and pushed hard.
Emily’s right arm whipped up and slashed wide at the same time. She’d seen another zombie trying to flank her, and the timing was perfect. Just the clinger was thrown into the small pack of zombies, her blade cleaved through a quarter of the new attacker’s skull on its upward swing.
“I’m coming!” shouted a high-pitched voice, the words echoing across the debris-strewn road.
Emily whirled to see one of the kids they’d saved on the bus running at a full sprint toward her. Cameron, she thought that was the right name.
“No! Stay back!”
The hurried slap of feet didn’t even slow. Emily could take care of herself, but even if she couldn’t there was no part of her that wanted to risk a ten year old kid to save her own life.
Cameron, to Emily’s great surprise, slid to a sudden stop fifteen feet away. While her feet were still shedding momentum and throwing up a small wave of pebbles and twigs, the girl had produced and drawn a hunting slingshot. There was nothing childish in that face, intense concentration etching lines where none should be.
The zombie Emily had thrown pitched forward as the steel ball cracked into its skull. Whether or not the shot actually penetrated didn’t matter; the effect from the transfer of force was the same. Emily leaped forward, carefully articulated movement abandoned in favor of speed. She threw herself against another zombie, shoulder flashing with pain as it connected with the dead man’s sternum. Emily brought the tip of the machete up and ran it through the bottom of the dead man’s jaw.
Several other twangs filled the air, and just past the falling body, Emily saw the rest of the herd topple.
Cameron was no longer alone. Three other children, who must have seen her run to help Emily, stood arrayed around her in a rough semicircle. All of them carried identical weapons.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Emily said, struggling to keep her voice from breaking. “You know you’re supposed to stay inside. Those things are for hunting small game, not killing zombies.”
The other kids managed to look sheepish, but Cameron regarded Emily with an all-to-adult gaze. “You think we haven’t had to use them for this on hunting trips? Didn’t you notice we all had our weapons with us when we had to run from home? We’re young, not stupid.”
“Yeah,” another of the kids said, emboldened. “Cam’s right. We saw what was happening from the video screen by the door. We thought you were gonna get eaten.”
Emily turned away from them, trying to regain some measure of composure. She didn’t want to shout. These kids were growing up differently than any children ever had before. Their culture was utterly beyond Emily’s own. For them, this was a normal event. Nothing remarkable.
Anger evaporated instantly, replaced by shock, when she saw one of the zombies laying in front of her. The shot that had taken it down hit right in the eye. Despite the lightning bolt of panic the appearance of the kids loosed through her chest, she couldn’t feel anything other than impressed just then.