The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise (23 page)

“Yes, yes, I get it,” Kell said to Kate in exasperation. “You want us to go find the scouts, I get it. It isn't going to happen.”

“Kell, we just got confirmation that both of these groups are the same. Which means we're dealing with a massive threat. They have enough people to risk sending some off to hunt, others to collect the meat, and field forces capable of taking out entire communities like they were knocking over a convenience store. We
have
to get this information back home as soon as possible.”

Chris put up a hand. “Listen, we all agree with you. It's important as hell. But Nicole told us to stay here. She's going to be back in a week with the others. It can hold until then. It's not like we know where they are. We can't just pop down the road and let them know.”

Crossing her arms over her breasts, Kate scowled. “I could find them.”

“Maybe,” Kell said. “Or maybe you get caught by these people. Maybe they interrogate you. I even know your response. You'll say you'd die rather than give anything up, and I believe it. But why risk it? Why run out on a whim when waiting is safer and more likely to lead to better results?”

Kate gaped at him. “This is you saying this?
You
of all people? I spent most of the winter trying to keep you from breaking your idiot neck running after zombies and marauders. Now you want to lecture me on what's prudent?”

Kell shrugged. “I'm not arguing with you. Or letting you change the subject. I get how reckless I've been, Kate. That doesn't mean you should follow suit.”

She stared him down balefully. “Are you going to stop me?”

“Not like I could. You'd thrash all of us.”

“I'm strongly against being thrashed,” John said.

“I just think it's a bad idea,” Kell said. “Too much can go wrong, and frankly I'd feel safer heading back home with the scouts. Seven is a safer number than four.”

John, hovering at the edge of the table, leaned in. “Does that mean you're leaving me here?”

“No,” Kate said. “Not if you want to go with us.”

John smiled weakly. “In that case, I'd feel a lot better if you waited for those other women to come back.”

“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “But if they're even an hour late, we leave without them. I kept track of our route. I can get us home safely.”

Kell felt the tension drain from him. Chris and Scotty stood and stretched, glancing at the pantries. “Okay, so that's decided,” Chris said. “Don't want to impose, but do you have any food to spare? I could eat a horse.”

“Sure,” John said, rising. He pointed to the door next to the pantry. “I don't bring up much at a time. Keeps me active, going down to the storage area once a day. Just go through there, down the steps. The doors are clearly marked.”

Chris didn't need to be told twice, but Scotty hesitated as he held the door open. “You're sure? We don't want to put a dent in your supplies.”

“Unless you brought an army with you, I doubt you'll do any harm,” John said with a smile. Scotty raised an eyebrow at him and followed Chris down the stairs. Turning to Kell and Kate, John motioned toward a hallway leading from the kitchen to the portion of the building hidden underground. “You two want to see what I've been doing all this time?”

Kell shot to his feet. “Absolutely.”

Kate, on the other hand, waved them away. “I'd rather get some sleep. You have somewhere I can crash?” John directed her to empty rooms on the top floor.

Then the two of them were alone. “Come on,” John said, gesturing to the hallway once more. “Let's take a look at my research.”

Another glimmer of the man he'd been showed through, some of the old John revealed in his bearing. “Just like old times
,” Kell said. “Except now you're the expert.”

The frail man smiled sadly once more, lines creasing his face. “Not really, Kell. You were out there surviving. I hid. I worked with you long enough to know you'll take a look at my research and catch up in an hour.”

Kell laughed and followed his friend into the dim hallway, but rational Kell cracked his metaphorical knuckles.

For everyone's sake, let's hope he's right.

Kell was staring at reams of data in numb disbelief.

“You wouldn't believe the setup here,” Scotty said around a mouthful of food, eating as he stood in the doorway. “I mean, this lab is cool and all, but there's like twenty years’ worth of food down there. All dehydrated or freeze-dried, and the kitchen has a gauge for the cistern here. There's eleven thousand gallons in it right now. This place is
awesome
.”

“That's great,” Kell said distractedly.

“Hey, I didn't promise you miracles,” John said as he set down another pile of folders. “Would you rather I bring you a laptop? I've got several, and the server here can fetch up any of this stuff.”

“No, it's fine,” Kell said. “I'm not disappointed, man. I'm in awe. I mean, look at all this data. You've done, what, a hundred and fifty strain mutations? This is insane. I don't know how to even begin sorting through it. Or how we're going to take it with us.”

“For one, you don't have to search through all of it,” John said patiently. “I was in charge from the beginning, so I'm familiar with pretty much everything. I haven't stopped working since everyone else left or died. It's all I do, really. Consider me a much less vague magic 8-ball.”

Kell leaned back in his chair, rubbing a hand across his stubble. “Big question first, then. Have you managed a cure?”

Behind them, Scotty choked.

John grinned slyly. “Let's put a pin in that one. The answer is more complex than a simple yes or no. Let me show you my second-best result instead. Come with me, please.”

“Can I come?” Scotty said. “I can put this somewhere.”

“Nah, bring it with you,” John said. “I eat in the lab all the time.”

The area they were in was an office of moderate size; four desks piled with paperwork filled the space. Centered at the far end of the room was a heavy door of brushed steel. John led them through it and into a hallway, also steel. On each side were four doors, another at the end of the hallway.

“The first two on each side are standard labs,” John said. “Work spaces, with refrigeration for samples. These,” he said, pointing at last two doors on the right, “are storage. One for paper data, the other for less...traditional samples. On the left, those two are for live subjects.”

“Wait,” Scotty said. “What do you...”

Jon opened the last door on the left. Inside, strapped to a table, was a zombie. A wall of odor hit them, a combination of rot and pure human stench. Kell grimaced; Scotty retched but managed not to actually vomit.

“Sorry about that. I should have warned you,” John said. “I'm so used to it. Well, come on in. Let me show you the good stuff.”

The interior of the lab was surprisingly clean, totally at odds with the powerful smell. Aside from a few empty ration containers, the space could have been right out of the old world. The zombie struggled as they moved closer to it, straining to snap at them. Not that it could; the lower jaw was missing entirely, a plastic tube jutting from the gaping hole that had been its mouth.

“I have to feed them occasionally,” John explained. “There's another one in the lab next door, and a few more on ice in the freezer at the end of the hall. Thankfully this place was designed to be power efficient, or I'd never get anything done.”

As Kell began to look over the zombie, Scotty set his food down and leaned against the wall. “What is this?” he said. “What are you doing with this thing?”

“He's testing Chimera variants on it,” Kell said.

John nodded. “Yes.”

Kell stared at the zombie, its arms bound with wide metal bands at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. Two large spikes pierced its chest, crosspieces running through holes in the metal. The legs were bound much as the arms were, in unforgiving steel. For a moment he saw it as Scotty must; alien, torturous, maybe evil.

“The restraints look custom,” Kell noted.

“They are,” John said. “This place was built about five years ago as one of many long-term research fall back positions for the CDC. As soon as David Markwell died and came back, they started looking at everything we would need to study zombies here. They added these tables, places to secure extras, all kinds of stuff. That's why there's so much power redundancy here. They needed to be sure the freezers would stay functional so we'd be able to keep a store of subjects. One of the basement rooms is full of protein slurry in gallon jugs, which is what I feed Clarence, here.”

“Clarence?” Kell said.

John winked. “Have to call him something. Anyway, what I wanted to show you was this.”

He removed a flap of fabric from Clarence's right arm, exposing a section of raw muscle. Scotty blanched, but Kell was fascinated. “Look at that,” Kell said, finger hovering over the raw muscle as it flexed. “The entire thing is saturated with Chimera. Runs along every muscle fiber, even stands up like little hairs.”

“Put a glove on,” John said. “You can touch it—they don't feel pain, by the way—but it isn't something I'd want on my skin. What you're seeing stand up there, those little hair-like protrusions, were originally part of the skin. They're the differentiated structures for breathing. They pull oxygen from the air and feed it directly to the muscles. When I started pulling the skin away, they retracted. Kind of brilliant, in a way. It lets the arm keep working even when flayed.”

“I figured out some of that,” Kell said.

John nodded. “I figured. But this next part was all me, baby.” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and set a small burner alight, placing a thin metal probe over it to heat. After half a minute he removed the probe, slowly extending it toward the exposed muscle.

Half an inch from touching, the white threads of Chimera woven through the bicep blackened in a circle that widened as the probe approached. Kell watched, fascinated, thinking about his foot. He'd done the same thing.

“Are you telling me
you
made Chimera vulnerable to heat?” Kell asked, astonished.

John bowed.

Even Scotty was taken by surprise, forgetting his disgust in favor of curiosity. “How is that even possible? It's like science fiction.”

John laughed. “There's a man dead two years right there, looking at you like you're a hamburger. You really need me to say anything else?”

“But how on earth did you do it?” Kell asked. “I can't even begin to...”

“Well, it wasn't easy,” John said. “There were a lot of false starts and bad trials, but when I finally came across the idea, it seemed too good not to try.” From a nearby desk he produced a thin folder, tossing it to Kell. “There's the basic theory, but it's simple enough. They burn because Chimera is now heavily reliant on phosphorus as a building block.”

Kell's mouth dropped open. “You clever son of a bitch.”

“Guys,” Scotty said, clearly irritated. “English, please.”

“Sorry,” John said. “It's actually pretty simple. Chimera has a lot of genetic material from thousands of species, but very little of its own. That's why it's so easy to manipulate. With the right knowledge, you can make it do any number of things. The best way to get a result is to force it to adapt to circumstances, then alter the cell in such a way that it has no other option but to keep doing what you've programmed into it.”

Scotty nodded. “You make it change, then cut out the part that lets it change back.”

John smiled. “Turn off that part, really, but it amounts to the same thing. What I did was use a strain of Chimera from a zombie. It's already partly neutered; it can't jump species. I grew it in a culture super-rich with phosphorus, which is already an important biological building block. Short on other chemical compounds to use, it began integrating phosphorus into its own structures very heavily. Normally an organism wouldn't have adverse reactions to high levels in its system, since the element itself gets turned into compounds. Chimera, though, is a miser. Any useful nutrients are hoarded by the cells. It eats up any extra phosphorus, breaks it down into parts, and stores it along the outside of the cell. That's why the damn things don't spontaneously catch on fire, but once you hit them with heat, the thin organic membrane containing the raw material breach and the stuff goes up.”

Kell shook his head again. “That's brilliant, John. How long did it take you?”

“Thirty trial variants, eight months of work. Every day, all day. A lot of that time was figuring out a way to make it invasive to hosts already carrying Chimera, but I got there in the end. As far as I can tell, the rate of infection is total. And for some reason I can't explain, it also makes the zombies infected with it slow down when it's hot outside. Makes them act sort of drunk. Happy accident, if you ask me.”

“What's the verdict?” Kate said as she walked into the room.

It was impossible to tell time by any natural means in the windowless shelter, though there were clocks here and there. Kell didn't bother with them; everyone else had gone to sleep, which made it late in his opinion. Hours after Chris and Scotty fell into a well-earned food coma, he and John had talked, gone over data, and slowly broke the rust off a friendship both men had thought long gone. The more Kell looked at the research, putting dates and times to the variants John and his team had worked on, the more certain he became of an awful truth.

“The New Plague,” Kell said. “That disease that was hitting people? I think it was John's variant.”

“Damn,” she said.

“He had no way of knowing,” Kell said. “It's not like he could have tested it on anyone.”

“Yeah, but still. People died from that.”

“Yes, they did. But how many more lives were saved because of it? He deliberately introduced a weakness, Kate. That's nothing short of miraculous.”

She pulled up a chair and sat next to him. “Would you have done the same?”

“In a heartbeat,” Kell said without hesitation. “It's the next best thing to a cure. Which John was suspiciously ambiguous about, by the way.”

“You look beat,” Kate said. “By the power invested in me by my ability to whoop you something fierce, I order you to bed.”

He didn't even try to argue. She led him upstairs, pointing out the empty rooms. His head hit the pillow, it must have, but he was already out.

An instant later someone was shaking him awake.

“What the hell?” he mumbled.

“Sorry, man,” Chris said. “Kate said to wake you up. You were really out.”

“I just fell asleep,” Kell complained.

“Ten hours ago,” Chris said.

Oh.

“I'm getting up, jeez” Kell groused. “What's so important?”

Chris handed him a steaming plate of food. “Breakfast, for one.”

Mouth watering, Kell took the plate. “What's two?”

“Some kind of alarm went off,” Chris said. “John says it's a motion detector inside the compound. Building cameras didn't pick anything up. Kate wants us to check it out.”

“But I can eat breakfast first? That doesn't sound like her.”

Chris shrugged. “She already went out with Scotty. When I say 'we' are going to check it out, I'm more saying she's doing it herself and wanted me to distract you with food.”

Kell stared at the food. “Are these eggs?” he asked hopefully.

“They're definitely an egg-like substance. Scotty swears they're reconstituted eggs that taste great. He says they must have used the 'wet-dry' method to dehydrate them, whatever that is.”

Kell knew, but for once didn't share. The smell was too distracting. “And this is cheese. There is cheese in my eggs.”

Chris patted him on the shoulder. “It's the little things that make life worth living.”

Rather than chase after Kate in yet another failed attempt to keep her safe, he listened to rational Kell and admitted that doing so was not only pointless but would also earn him another lecture. It was surprisingly easy; all he had to do was nothing. Instead of going through the process of putting on his gear and searching in the chill air for what was probably a deer caught inside the walls, he sat in bed and had breakfast.

It was nice.

Forty minutes later, Kate and Scotty had returned. The five of them sat together in the small living room at the end of the top floor. There were squashy couches and two recliners, as well as a small television, DVD player, and an astounding collection of movies.

“Yes, smartass, it was a deer,” Kate said, eying Kell. “How many times do you want me to say it?”

John cleared his throat. “Guys, I wanted you all here for a reason. Can we get to it?”

Scotty raised a hand. “Before we do, I feel like I have to point out that you called us in for a meeting. At an actual boardroom table. Which is located inside your secret underground base.”

The silence that followed was broken by Chris. “I feel like we should get him a white cat and some dialog to threaten James Bond with.”

John pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are you done?”

Grinning, Scotty shrugged. “Sharks with lasers, man. There. I'm finished.”

With an air of great suffering, John sat. “Thanks for that. We're all awake, and there are several issues we need to hash out. The first is also the least important; we need to start working on a game plan to get all the research material out of here. There's too much to fit in your little SUV even with no passengers.”