The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise (17 page)

The clatter of plastic and metal hitting the ground filtered around the RV, followed by the opening and slamming of doors. Kell fell to his knees in relief. He would have fought to the end for any of them, but it was mostly a bluff. Kate only had the one grenade that he knew of.

Leaning against the grill of the RV right next to his spear, Kell tried to muster the energy to stand. He'd promised Michelle and Andrea to return as fast as he could. When he tried to wind his fingers into the grill so he could stand, he saw the damage to his hands for the first time. For a moment he felt light, then incredibly heavy.

Oh, I'm passing--

An hour later Kell sat next to Andrea, helping the kids keep her still. His blackout lasted the thirty seconds it took Kate to leave the RV and slap him awake. Triage was a nightmare; Kell's foot and leg were in need of attention, Andrea was shot, Michelle had hurt her arm when she dove into the ditch, and Laura had been hit by a bullet fragment.

His own wounds weren't nearly as bad as he'd worried. The bullets had indeed stitched up the side of his leg starting at the foot, but the only bad wound was on the foot itself. That one required some creative bandaging, as a shallow scoop of flesh was missing almost to the bone on the outside of his left foot. The shooter must have been pulling away slightly as he fired, because each subsequent groove notched in the side of his leg was less severe. It did make movement awkward, which was why Kate threw a first aid kit at him before helping the others haul Andrea inside.

Kate hit a rough spot in the road, eliciting loud cursing from Laura, who was lying in the dining nook holding a bandage on her head. From his position on the bed, he could see her legs dangling out into the aisle.

Andrea tried to turn over, forcing Kell to put pressure on her shoulder and hip to keep her still. “Easy,” he said. “Try to stay still.”

Michelle and Evan did their part on the other side of their mother, though the younger could only use one arm. “Is she going to be okay, Kell?” Michelle asked. “Why is she like this?”

Trying to put as much reassurance into his voice as he could manage, Kell said, “I think so. I've looked at her wound, and it's not as bad as it could be.” Not arterial, anyway. Whether her intestines had been punctured, he had no idea. “She's lost a lot of blood, but I don't think she's in serious danger as long as we can get her to a doctor. And Haven has a few of those, from what I understand.”

“But why won't she answer us? Why is sleeping?”

“I don't know,” Kell said. “Might just be the trauma that made her pass out.” It could be true, of course, but he wondered. He'd been sitting next to her when it had happened, and it hadn't been like other people he had seen lose consciousness due to injury. There was no gradual descent, no slow passage into sleep. One second her eyes had been open and focused, fighting to hold herself still. The next she was out, as if someone tapped her skull with a mallet.

His eyes kept falling back on the even thump of her pulse, easily visible on her slender neck. From everything he knew about the human body, Andrea was stable. Her pulse was strong and regular, no obvious signs of any other problems beside the hole in her abdomen.

Though he had no way to prove it, Kell suspected Chimera. More than once he himself had received wounds and had lost consciousness afterward. The zombies were proof that the organism had a degree of neurological interaction while the host was alive. It was reasonable to assume Chimera would push an injured host toward sleep to force the person into a state better suited for healing. It was another piece in the puzzle of his life's work and its amazing evolutionary capabilities.

The RV glided down the highway, every second bringing them close to their new home. Holding his friend still, his mind drifted further into the realm of solutions to the plague than it had in months.

“What the hell happened?” Andrea said groggily.

“You fell asleep,” Michelle said, leaning in to give her mother a hug. “Kell said we shouldn't try to wake you.”

Andrea looked around, obviously confused. “Why aren't we in our truck?”

“You were shot,” Kell said. “Remember? We had to leave the SUV behind where the fight happened.” Kate had complained about the necessity of leaving perfectly useful vehicles nearly as much as she'd done about having to move them all out of the way herself since she was the only uninjured adult. It was just her way of letting off pressure. Griping was her style. She hadn't complained about all the gear she had found in the enemy's abandoned truck and on their bodies. It evened things out.

“Yeah,” Andrea said weakly. “Yeah, I remember...do we have any water? I’m so thirsty.”

Kell fished out a canteen—his own, having left it in the RV—and opened the lid. “I need to take a look at your side,” he said. “Preferably without an audience.”

Michelle’s brows knitted together in an angry V. “I don’t want to leave her.”

Andrea didn’t even have to say anything. Like clouds on an otherwise beautiful day, she released the dreaded ‘mom look’. Evan had already begun to move for the door. Michelle followed him, still angry. Even so, the little girl took her brother’s hand, knowing he would be less comfortable away from people he knew.

“Close the door, please,” Kell said as he began gently removing Andrea’s bandage.

“I’ll get it,” a tired voice said. He looked up to find Laura on her feet. She closed the door behind her, leaving the three of them alone.

“Are you sure you should be up?” Kell asked.

“I’m fine.”

He gave her an even look. “You were hit in the head with a bullet fragment.”

“Which didn’t stop me from shooting perfectly fine, as you may have noticed from the fact you’re still breathing,” Laura said, irritated. “Besides, you wouldn’t be pulling that bandage off without a reason.”

“Half right,” he said with a sigh. “Except I have no plan to remove Andrea’s dressing. I just wanted a little privacy.”

Andrea perked up. “For what?”

Kell began stripping the tape from the bottom of his foot, which hadn’t been replaced since the day before. It was dirty from his barefoot run, but the wound was almost a week old and wasn’t in as much danger of getting infected. “I’ve been working under the idea that Chimera is helping us, making us function more efficiently. Even helping us heal.” He grunted as the tape resisted being pulled off, feeling like he was going to rip the skin away with it. “I think it’s also doing things to us beyond simple passive assistance.”

The tape came off with a distinct tearing sound, but Kell was able to suppress the—very manly—yelp which rose in his throat. He stared at the sole of his foot, expression carefully blank.

“What the hell?” Andrea said.

Laura stared, eyes full of questions.

Where a thick, dark, rough scab should have been was instead a smooth off-white patch blending together with the skin of his foot perfectly. Even with the lighter pigment of his foot, the plug of material contrasted heavily. Kell pulled the first-aid kit over and removed a pair of tweezers. He prodded the wound gently, surprised at how hard the strange white scab was. He pushed a little harder, then jabbed.

Andrea grimaced, recoiling. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Not at all,” Kell replied. “I can feel it, but it’s like wearing a glove. Sensation without value.” Pursing his lips, he glanced at Laura. “Reach behind you and hand me the little black bag on the shelf.”

She did, and from it he removed a small butane torch. Laura brought out her own version of the Mom Look. “You aren’t seriously going to do that.”

Kell heated the end of the tweezers for a five count, then brought the hot tip toward the scab. A millimeter before contact, a small circle of material blackened, the ring expanding as he brought it closer.

“Huh,” he said. “I knew heat would do it, but that's a pretty low tolerance.

“So that...” Andrea said, a look of revulsion on her face. “That's Chimera we're looking at?”

Kell nodded. “Yes. And it's working very well. I wonder how much faster I'm healing under there.”

Laura put a hand on his wrist. “Can we not find out just now? Why are you even messing with it?”

Kell put down the tweezers and began dressing the wound. “Because I've done very little research lately. And I was curious. I was thinking we could use heat to kill off big groups. People already are, but I'm thinking much, much bigger. Like using sodium chlorate and water, maybe. Though that comes with its own risks. There's enough of the stuff laying around paper mills to do it.”

Laura snapped her fingers at him. “You're wandering. How does this help you figure out a cure?”

“Sorry. It doesn't, really,” Kell said. “I've actually been thinking about that a lot since I met Andrea, and I have a few ideas. There are things I can work on with the equipment we already have. There's just one other thing I'll need.”

“What's that?” Laura asked.

“Tissue samples. A lot of them.”

An hour later, as Kell reclined in a folding chair jammed next to the fold-out bed where Andrea lay with Michelle nestled beside her, Kate yelled back.

“We'll be in New Haven in ten minutes!”

A low chill swept through him. Their new home was a virtual unknown, everything he knew about it stitched together from snippets passed to him second and third-hand. The place had electricity but not all the time. It had a fraction of North Jackson's population but was geographically larger. The leadership was supposed to be more relaxed in how it ran the place, but Kell had every reason to doubt. Survivors were by and large not the kind of people who let others tell them what to do. Making it out in the world called for toughness, independence, and a generally suspicious nature.

That, and people didn't stop being people just because the world ended.

Laura and Kate had good things to say about Will, the man in charge, so Kell did his best to keep an open mind as the last few miles rolled away beneath him. He hobbled out of the bedroom to look at Frankfort for the first time, and was taken aback by what he saw.

North Jackson and the areas around it had been deserted, looted, ransacked and piled with debris. Overgrowth was everywhere up north, whole neighborhoods vanishing in the encroaching wilderness. But the old skeleton of the world before was still visible, a reminder to those huddled in the ruins of what they'd lost.

This place was different. There were old cars on the road, but purposeful in their location, slanted in pairs on the embankments so they could be pushed forward to create an angled barrier with the tip of the V pointing toward incoming enemies. Where most places were burdened with unchecked growth, the road leading to New Haven was dotted with stumps on either side. One enormous metal telephone pole loomed, highlighting the lack of smaller wooden ones and the familiar black lines of power and communications wire. The sky seemed oddly empty without them.

The closer to New Haven they came, the tamer the landscape grew. There were low trenches lined with tarps and plastic, most filled with rain water. One of them was being emptied by a bored-looking crew manning a stripped-down fire truck. They waved at the RV as it passed.

Where Kell expected the ubiquitous tall grass, he found bare earth sprinkled with the first sprouts of something bright green. When he commented on it, Evan tilted his head as if Kell were the dumbest person alive. “Clover,” the boy said.

The RV chugged up a slow incline and crested the hill, and New Haven appeared before them. The first impression was that this couldn't have been built since The Fall. A second assessment made him think the place couldn't withstand more than a sparse group of zombies. But as they moved closer, the stark reality of the place set in.

A wall made of stones held together with concrete surrounded the place. The west end had a bevy of shipping containers stacked against the wall, large enough that Kell suspected they formed a hollow square. Sentries patrolled the wall, walking either atop it—unlikely, as it would have to be four or five feet thick to manage the deed—or on catwalks attached to it. Unlike North Jackson, where people rarely left the confines of the main complex and its fences, people could be seen all over the grounds. Some were spreading seed on the dirt surrounding the place. Others were hand-pouring concrete into forms placed up against the wall, perhaps fixing damage.

Then Kell saw where the telephone poles and power lines had gone. A massive stack of uprooted poles lay higher than the houses near it, and behind it several more. A few patches of wall yet to be replaced with stone were made of the things, but that wasn't what caught his attention.

Several dozen workers were sawing the poles into sections and planting them in the ground again. Much like before, the wooden rods held lengths of cable, but instead of carrying electricity, the lines were strung in a dense web from ground level to the height of a tall man. There was a space between the makeshift barrier and the wall, but none of the people working on the defensive measures stepped in it. Trapped, most likely.

What he could see of New Haven itself over the top of the wall looked like an older neighborhood. Other than the several watchtowers, tiny figures atop them, the shingled tops of single-story homes looked fantastically normal.

A wide gate made of heavy steel bars roughly welded together opened as the RV approached. Again, Kell was surprised, expecting some kind of security check and the need to leave the RV outside the gate. Instead the guards waved them through, pointing to a small gravel lot next to the road inside the gate. A man in scrubs waited there with an idling ambulance, stretcher ready to move.

“Did you radio ahead?” Kell asked Kate.

She shook her head. “Nope. They had someone waiting here when we showed up, too. Well, a bunch more people, but our last group was bigger.”

Kell helped load Andrea onto the stretcher, and turned to walk away when the man grabbed his arm. “I'm Phil,” the man said. “I'm one of the doctors here, and I'd like all of you to come with me.”

“It's okay,” Kell said. “Take Andrea and the others. I'll be fine until you have time for me.”

Phil gave him a sheepish smile. “That's very noble of you, but I wasn't asking,” he said. “And before you start protesting, we have more than enough staff to take care of all of you.”

Laura and Michelle approached with Evan in tow. Kell helped them into the ambulance, then sat. Kate jogged up and gave him a wink. “I'll take the RV back where it belongs. I'll be by to visit later.” She threw the doors closed and thumped the back of the truck twice.

The clinic was comfortable and overstaffed, at least for the number of patients in it at the moment. Which amounted to Kell, Michelle, Andrea, Laura, and an irritated man with a length of wood jutting out of his leg.

Both doctors—Phil and an older man with a mane of silvery-white hair named Evans—were on duty. Though the older man was gruff and short with his patients, upon meeting Evan and making a joke about the similarity of their names, he managed to make the boy smile. Phil took care of Kell and the rest of the group while Evans led a flurry of students downstairs, Andrea in tow.

Over the first eight hours, Kell saw shifts change three times. The last was well after midnight, and he'd yet to see the same person twice outside of the core staff. Phil and Evans had gone to bed long before. Kell was the only person awake when the night shift manager did her rounds.

“New guy,” the short woman said as she glanced at the hand-written chart next to his bed. “I'm Gabrielle. Nurse practitioner, wound specialist, and while I'm on duty, generally the boss of you.”

“I'm K,” Kell said. “This is...way more than I expected to find here.”

Gabrielle smiled. “The clinic? Or New Haven? Or beautiful women come down to heal thy wounds?”

“Yes.”

Laughing, she put his chart back. “Well, I appreciate the compliment. We've put a lot of time and effort into building this place into something more than just a camp. That means decent medical care. As for the rest, well, if I explain it all to you it won't be any fun trying to find out our secret origin, will it?”

“I suppose not.”

Gabrielle took a bottle from her pocket and shook out two pills. “Take these, and get some sleep. You've had a long day.” Kell obeyed, downing the pills with a gulp of water. “And so help me god
, if you make a joke about calling in the morning, I'll break your legs.”

It was a joke, but it brought him a strange sense of comfort. North Jackson had been the kind of place he'd been happy to leave behind for weeks at a time on scout missions. The sense of dislike and mistrust was familiar. In the short time he and the others had been in New Haven, they had been shown nothing but kindness and compassion. A little fatalistic humor felt like home.

Tomorrow might bring with it some horrible but entirely expected reality about the place he'd moved to. Maybe they were actually serial killers. Or an enormous camp of marauders. Possibly
Twilight
fans.

For once, he didn't care. For the first time in years, Kell relaxed and simply enjoyed at least the appearance of peace.