The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise (13 page)

They hiked another three miles before finding a motel just off the interstate. The place couldn't have been better than run-down before The Fall, and the intervening years did it no favors. Still, it used regular keys rather than electronic locks, and the area was mostly free of the undead. Kell offered to clean up the few wanderers making their way toward the group so Andrea could search the front office for room keys.

She declined, instead opting to sit with the kids on the second floor—where it was marginally safer—to wait for him.

Kell felt like he was putting on a show as he took firm control of himself for the first time in days. The cyclone inside had begun to calm as they drove, the constant banter between him, Andrea, and Michelle touching the part of him long closed off. It felt almost normal, like family. The sense of familiarity and normality made him smile even in memory.

Carefully, he moved. Kate taught him the physical motions of killing and defense, but the mechanics were easy. Practice and repetition, honing the muscle memory to automatic response. It didn't make him some unstoppable force by any means, but as all combat training it gave him a base to work from, a set of reactions in place of blind panic.

As his spear moved in small circles, the tip finding the tender spaces where bone was thin or missing completely, the other half of Kate's lessons took hold. The calm allowed him to manage awareness of his body, keeping him from overtaxing himself. The injuries hurt but weren't debilitating so long as he wasn't stupid.

He didn't put on a show. There was no anger in it. For the first time in ages—maybe since the day his wife and child had died before his eyes—the act of killing brought no emotional response. It was the simple necessity to make the area they camped in safe. In that he took small satisfaction, about as much as washing the dishes or picking up milk at the store when asked would have done in another world.

Four zombies lay motionless, less than a minute's work. “Stay there,” Kell said as he opened the door to the lobby. “I'm going to draw out any that might be inside.”

His scent and the scuffle in the parking lot should have attracted any enemies still behind the shattered windows, but to be safe Kell threw his last remaining piece of bait close to the empty frames. A safe ten feet from the lobby, he heard the scrabble of flesh grinding into shards of glass and the floor.

Half a body dragged itself forward. The thing was emaciated, weak. Its fingers would have been bare bone at the tips from the stress of its only means of movement had Chimera not spread itself to cover the raw ends. Kell had never seen a zombie in such a state; cut in half with the organism animating it clearly cannibalizing the tissues to sustain itself.

The dead man struggled forward, face blank and eyes wide in the fading light. Kell knew it was only widening its eyes to gather more light, an instinct it so hardwired that death couldn't stop it. Even so, as he watched its thin muscles strain and fail, the old hate refused to rise. The thing before him operated on pure starvation, wanted only to live. Just as the person it had been must have wanted to live.

Rather than the anger or cold satisfaction, he felt only pity. Kell let it get the bait into its mouth, to have a second of relief from the gnawing metabolic furnace slowly eating it, then ended its suffering.

He was in and out of the lobby in thirty seconds, rattling a set of keys overhead. Michelle clapped.

Their rooms sat next to each other, and as in many older hotels a door connected them. It was locked, and lacking the will to risk searching the lobby in the dark, Kell showed the kids how to pick a lock.

“I lived alone for a long while,” he told them. “Right after the plague started I made trips into the city all the time, and knowing how to do this saved me a lot of trouble.”

“Misspent youth?” Andrea asked.

Kell laughed. “Not at all. I was locked out of my house when I was eight or so, and tried to pick the lock. Didn't work, so I spent a week learning how and practicing. After things went south I broke into a locksmith's shop and took the tools. I'm just glad I kept them when we left my armor behind.” The last was said with a slight edge of frustration.

Michelle kicked the door after her third failed attempt. Evan moved in quickly for his last try, and had it open in thirty seconds. Kell clapped him on the shoulder, immediately regretting it, but the boy only gave him a shy smile.

“Good job,” Kell said. Turning to Michelle, he smiled. “Don't worry, you'll get it. We'll try again tomorrow.”

Andrea ushered the kids through the door and tucked them in. “I love you,” he heard her say, telling them she would be back in a little while.

A sharp sense of loss shot through him. How long had it been since someone told him they loved him? Since his wife died? For a moment the disorienting sensation of perfect recall contrasted with the present overtook his brain. The warmth of his old life, the simplicity of coming home and spending time watching television or having a meal with his loved ones.

The frigid hotel room felt like claws, shredding the memory. Reality was a bitch.

Andrea closed the door behind her. Kell sat on the edge of one of the beds, shivering as she pulled three small tea candles from the pouch at her hip and lit them. The little flames on the table between the beds put out a surprising amount of heat. Not enough to make them comfortable, but it took some of the bite out of the air.

“I was pretty out of it when we left my armor behind,” Kell said. “I remember thinking it was a good idea not to smell like blood so I wouldn't attract zombies. But then we had them following us anyway, and you used that little sports bottle full of ammonia to keep them away.”

Andrea's face could have belonged to a mannequin. Unable to help himself, Kell let out an amused grunt. “Let me guess, you saw an opportunity to make me a little more vulnerable in case I turned out to be a psychopath or whatever.”

“I didn't expect you to jump out into a pack of ghouls,” Andrea said. “I just...look, these are my children. I didn't want to risk taking them on the road without someone else to watch our backs, but yeah, at the time it seemed like a good idea.”

“A completely reasonable attitude that I'll keep in mind should someone decide to use me for target practice,” Kell said with a sigh.

Andrea shrugged. “Thought that was unlikely. Anyway, the rest of us don't have armor. Now we're even.”

Kell studied her for a minute. “I get it. This is your kids. You were willing to take a chance on a stranger, but not a stupid one.”

To her credit, Andrea had the decency to look slightly ashamed. “I'm kind of surprised you figured it out.”

“Kate calls it 'survivor logic', her term for how people think differently now. I mean, there are pretty basic considerations we all worry about, not like it used to be. We don't spend time thinking about taxes or getting a promotion or whatever. Just security, food, water, shelter, and a little social interaction,” Kell said. “Without all the clutter of civilization it's a lot easier to understand why people do things.”

She leaned forward. “So tell me why you decided to run like an idiot into a bunch of ghouls with no armor and fight with a metal stick.”

“I did tell you afterward that I thought I was trying to kill myself,” he said sheepishly. “Subconsciously, I mean. I lost my wife and baby daughter the first day all of this started, and I never really dealt with it. I lived out in the woods, alone, just...keeping to myself. Staying alive, but not really living.”

There was a flash of pity, gone in an instant. “So your penny psychological analysis is that your repressed grief has been bubbling up and making you reckless?”

A note in her voice warned him. She had been at the camp, rescued him from the hunters. Clearly she'd heard a lot. Though she never called him K, she had to have heard Grim do so. She didn't bring up his science background in any detail. It was all very cautious. How much had she deduced, or at least suspect?

“No,” he finally said. “There's much more to it than that.”

Then he told her everything.

It took much longer than he expected. Andrea wasn't formally educated in the sciences in the way he was, but she had a good understanding of the principles and more than a passing interest in biology and medicine. A good chunk of the hour or more he spoke was explaining Chimera and his theories on it while regaining his equilibrium between the harder parts of his story.

“I've only told Kate and Laura this stuff before,” he said. “And they figured out a lot of it from reading my notes while I was unconscious. For the most part we didn't talk about the...bad parts.” Scrubbing his hands across his eyes, Kell yawned. “You know it all now. It feels good to finally get it off my chest to someone with no emotional stake. I've been keeping quiet for so long, lying to good people. And it's really been for nothing. I can think of six ways to cure this thing, but the technology I need is so difficult to power and maintain that it's functionally impossible for me to create one. If you do decide to kill me, you won't be hurting the human race much.”

Andrea had been staring thoughtfully at the candles, now glowing half-pools of wax, as he finished the last parts of his story. She listened in silence as he described the cold detachment with which he killed the leader of the marauder group his volunteers had attacked.

At his last words, however, her eyes locked on his with almost painful intensity. “What the hell do you mean, 'if I decide to kill you'?”

“This whole thing is my fault, Andrea. I've killed most of the human race. You'd be well within your rights to--”

She burst into frustrated laughter, eyes wide with disbelief. “Seriously, dude? Okay, a couple things. First, you're a drama queen. I'm not going to kill you. Only an idiot would kill the guy who might be able to cure this thing, and Darwin had it right. Stupidity is in short supply. That's one trait the plague was pretty hard on.”

“But I just said I don't have the means to cure--”

Andrea put up a hand. “I know. But you're a smart guy. Went into a doctoral program before most kids know what their major is going to be, right? Let me ask you something, Kell. Did you start out altering the plague—Chimera, you said it was called—on the genetic level? I mean, did you need all the technology you say you need now to start work on it?”

Frowning slightly, Kell thought back. “No. At first we just bred it in different hosts to see how it reacted.”

“Okay,” Andrea said. “You said Chimera mutates and jumps species in nature. So why doesn't it still do that?”

“Well, the version stolen from my lab was heavily altered. We basically forced all the DNA that wasn't compatible with human beings to become unusable, junk DNA.”

“What you're telling me is this thing isn't capable of infecting trees or horses or anything, right?”

“Sure,” Kell said. “But that doesn't change anything. It's still on me--”

Andrea huffed out an agitated breath. “You're stuck on that. This is
not
your fault, man. You did everything you could to make sure no one could do what they did, you said as much yourself.
You
didn't take your work and kill the human race, Kell. Someone else did. You tried to stop it.”

“Yes, but if I hadn't done the work to start with, none of this would have happened!” Kell said heatedly.

Andrea took a deep breath and recaptured her calm. “I'm sure whoever discovered nerve toxins felt the same way about what governments did to weaponize them. Do you think Marie Curie should roll over in her grave because someone built an atomic bomb? If she hadn't discovered radiation, maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn't have happened.”

“I see what you're doing here, but it's not the same thing.”

Andrea pointed at him. “You're right, it isn't. Because you were actually trying to use your discovery to save lives. You only see it differently because it's you it happened to.”

“That's not true,” Kell said weakly.

“Really?” Andrea replied with a smile full of knives. “Then you blame your staff as much as yourself, right? I mean, they did their own work on this thing, their hands altered as many strands of DNA as yours.”

Kell said nothing. Goddamn logic.

“That's what I thought,” she said with a triumphant gleam in her eyes. “I don't think you're going to agree with me right away. Remember what I said about stupid people? I'm not one. But someone needed to tell you, man. This isn't on you.”

Without waiting for a reply, she switched tracks. “Now, as I was saying. I don't know much about genetics on the level you've been talking about, but if what you told me is true, the largest part of the problem is changing the individual genes to fit a pattern, right?” Kell nodded. “Then explain to me why you can't just start cultivating different strains of the New Plague you've already got samples of. I mean, you collected them for a reason, but if they're already human-only and attacking the zombies, isn't there a chance you don't
need
a huge lab and all the toys? Isn't it possible you could just breed it to attack only the dead?”

Kell opened his mouth to argue, then sat there gaping as his brain started whirring into top gear. True, he'd spent most of the last two years dividing his thoughts between trying to acquire the lab gear he'd need to start work, and the work itself. Which had focused exclusively on the later stages of his efforts; high-technology solutions.

He'd been over-thinking it. Tunnel vision took over when he'd come up with a solution based on his successes with Chimera, blinding him to the simpler, if less precise, methods he could employ with only basic tools and precautions.

Excited, he met Andrea's eyes. Had he been less entranced with the possibilities, the smug look on her face might have taken him down a peg.

A combination of a heady sense of optimism brought about by his conversation with Andrea, and cold that managed to sneak under his covers like a biblical plague kept him from sleep long after Andrea left the room to snuggle up with her kids. Eventually Kell did nod off, falling into a rare dreamless sleep, leaving him rested and fresh for the first time in months.

“Well, shit,” a voice said loudly.

Kell woke between heartbeats, throwing himself into a sitting position and standing. The floor had apparently transformed into a sheet of ice overnight. He could tell because it felt like a yeti was gnawing on the soles of his feet.

“What is it?” he asked as he jammed his feet into boots.

The door between the rooms stood open, and through it Kell saw Andrea staring through the window. “It snowed last night,” she said. “Not much, but the cold front must have pushed the locals to get somewhere sheltered.”

Kell went to his own window, and what he saw through it dried his mouth in a flash.

The parking lot below was a warren of footprints, and the few zombies he could see through the iron railing were obviously the edge of a crowd, trying to get beneath the overhang created by the walkway outside their rooms. There were no prints in the dusting on the walkway itself, but the lobby and stairs were certain to be lousy with the dead.

“We're stuck here,” Andrea said, closing the shade and resting her head against the window. “Stupid to stay on the second floor. I bet they smelled us. That's why they came close. We should have sprayed ammonia all over, kept them away--”

“No,” Kell interrupted. “We needed to ration our supplies. We saw nothing to tell us there were this many of them around.” He thought furiously for a few seconds, then took up his spear. “If they're not already on this floor, they will be soon. We need time.”

Halfway to the door she was next to him, hand on his bare wrist. She was fast, her fingers strong and callused. “What are you doing?” she whispered angrily. “You're going to go out there and do something idiotic just like you did yesterday, aren't you?”

“No,” he replied. “I'll be careful and I won't take unnecessary risks. But I need to go
now
. If they get up here in numbers we're all going to be stuck up here for a long time. Do you think we can all jump the rail without getting hurt?”

Andrea's eyes blazed, but she let go his arm. “Be careful. And put on a long-sleeved shirt. You're gonna catch your death out there.”

“Yes, mom,” Kell said with a chuckle.

In point of fact, he pulled on two more shirts and grabbed an attachment for his spear Kate and Laura had left for him in the bag of gear. Kell snapped it on as he stepped through the door and into the chilly world, slipping the bolt through and tightening it. The crosspiece made it nearly impossible to get his spear stuck in an enemy.