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  Dead Nation

  Beyond the Fall: Book Two

  Joshua Guess

  © 2018 Joshua Guess

  Dedicated to everyone forced to serve in silence

  or to endure the slings and arrows

  simply for the crime of being you.

  Part One

  Subtle Moves

  Prologue

  I was mostly surrounded by dead people. Some of them didn't know it yet. Of those, two had already visibly pissed their pants.

  It's not an uncommon reaction when bad guys have to deal with me for very long.

  Look, I'm not claiming to be a bastion of moral superiority. When you get down to it, most people are the hero in their own story regardless of how fucked up their actions are. I was a SEAL, and after a long career in the Navy I was recruited into the CIA's Special Activities Division, which is way less cool than it sounds. I was SOG—Special Operations Group—which basically meant instead of copying microfilm at fancy parties while wearing a tux, I was one of the dudes sent in without ID to fuck someone's day up during high-threat military or covert ops. Not all that different from what I did in the Navy, to be honest. The mystique of modern cinema gave everyone the wrong idea about my job.

  Not that movies or TV are a concern nowadays. The zombies took care of that.

  Which brings me back to my point: I've killed a lot of people. I'm not a good guy in my own story. You do this kind of work long enough and you eventually learn that sometimes your only option is to pick your ground and make a stand, then refuse to budge from whatever lines you've drawn.

  My patch of dirt is Haven, and by extension the network of allied communities of survivors collectively known as the Union. We don't attack anyone unless our people are attacked first, generally speaking. When we do have to take a swing, though...

  “The six of you are in a bit of a situation here,” I said to the men on their knees in a line in before me. Each had hands secured tightly in front of them, with my team standing eagle-eyed, weapons drawn. The burned-out husk of the SUV the prisoners had been driving half an hour earlier sat faintly smoking in the distance. The seventh member of their crew was still in it. I've seen worse tombs.

  A few of the prisoners refused to even look at me. Can't blame them for that—of all the things I am, pretty is not on the list. I nearly died in the early years of The Fall. Thought I was going to, really. I'd taken wounds that should have killed me while out on a diplomatic mission. Wounds so badly infected that I chose to throw myself at a pack of zombies so my friends could get away.

  I had no way of knowing back then that the plague—Chimera—did more than just raise the dead. It infected all of us, every human being. Makes us better in subtle ways. I can't heal like Wolverine, but Chimera does help fight off infections and heal wounds. It was enough to keep me going through the worst of my fever and injuries until I got medical treatment.

  But it left me scarred. Most of my body is covered with them. It helps that I'm tall and built like a farm boy—I look like the kind of dude who will take a bullet just to get close enough to crush your windpipe. If that sounds oddly specific, that's because there was this little bar in Haiti back in 2001...

  Anyway.

  A couple of the assholes in question gave me the evil eye. Sometimes people who know they're probably going to die haul up an extra bucket of bravery fueled by denial or anger. It's a thing.

  “Here's what's going to happen,” I said, letting my gaze sweep across them. “I won't torture you. Not physically, anyway. I guess this could be called psychological torture. Maybe not, though, because I'm telling you exactly what's about to happen. So I guess—”

  One of my teammates cleared her throat and gave me an even look.

  “Right, sorry. Kind of went on a tangent there,” I said. “So. You were sent out here on a scouting mission. Your particular group of assholes is still holed up in your little kingdom north of us. I'm guessing you were supposed to check out whatever preparations we're making to move against you and report home. Am I close?”

  I watched the small signs, reading body language as easily as ever. The way a face twitched, the direction eyes darted, the increase in breathing rate—these and many other indicators could tell you volumes about a person if you understood the signs well enough.

  “How many of you have kids being held prisoner back there?” I asked.

  Two men jerked their heads up to stare at me before quickly looking away. Jackpot.

  Next to me, one of my teammates tightened up. She of the cleared throat, who had increasingly become my right hand in the run up to taking the fight to the Relentless Sons.

  “Tabby,” I said. “You have something to add these gentlemen should hear?”

  She stepped forward, changed in the months since she'd come back to Haven with me. Her son Logan was being held, too. We'd done this song and dance with enemy patrols a couple times before. People expected me to be a hard son of a bitch. Thanks to thousands of years of civilization, not many guys were mentally prepared for a woman to be twice as terrifying.

  “Mason here was going to tell you how we're going to deal with you,” she said, her voice perfectly level. Not cold or empty, just conversational. “I'm going to ask one of you to volunteer information about your buddies back at your camp. Something we can use. And if that person doesn't cooperate, I'll shoot them in the gut and throw them over there.”

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder toward the rest of the dead—the ones who definitely knew what they were.

  A ring of zombies surrounded us, held back by chain link stretched between posts hastily assembled in a portable framework. That's a relative term since the whole contraption filled the bed of a large pickup and took four of us an hour to construct. It was a poor substitute for the walls of a community like Haven, but it would hold long enough for our purposes.

  “She's not kidding,” I said. Turning to the meanest-looking of the prisoners, I spread my hands apart as if looking for common ground. “You. I think you go first.”

  “Fuck off,” the man said, spittle flecking his beard as he spat the words. “I'm not telling you shit.”

  Tabby crossed her arms. “You get that one for free since I didn't actually ask you anything yet. So, tell me what you know about the layout of the distribution center where your people are building their little empire? Where are the kids kept?”

  “I told you, bitch, I'm not telling you—FUCK!”

  The prisoner crumpled over as a booming report filled the afternoon air. Tabby slid the gun back into her leg holster and sighed. “Well, that could have gone better. Mason?”

  I didn't mind being treated like her hired muscle. I was technically in command of the growing army of specialists lent to us by other members of the Union, but rank meant nothing to me. The best person for the situation, that's my motto. And in this one, using preconceptions about women against the jackasses we'd lured to this place put Tabby at the top of the food chain.

  I grabbed beardy under one arm and by his belt as another teammate, Brandon, shouldered his rifle and did the same. We stepped over to the barrier and lifted, ducking down to get the guy on our shoulders before standing straight again. The chain link was only about five feet high, and the zombies weren't numerous enough to strain the braces holding it in place by sheer weight. The dozen or so dead men and women out there were canny enough predators to know a free meal was being delivered to their table.

  On a three count, Brandon and I hurled the bleeding man over the fence.

  The sounds that followed might have haunted my dreams if the apocalypse hadn't given me far worse nightmare fuel over the last eight years. I didn't have to look to know what was happening. Zombies always went for the soft parts first, and an open wound was
as soft as it got.

  As if the man I'd just killed meant nothing more to me than the slab of meat he was quickly becoming, I walked back over to the prisoners.

  “Now, Tabby is going to ask you some—”

  Every one of them started speaking at once.

  1

  In popular culture, the onset of the end of the world usually came with a few inescapable realities. Those in power would always be assholes, and most people would inevitably become monsters themselves because social order was always the only force keeping the worse demons of our nature in check.

  Reality is a little different. Oh, there are still occasional despots out there who somehow manage to rule by fear—though usually it doesn't start out that way. Most of the tin-pot dictators we've seen got their start because they had the best resources and the power structures, and the changes in their behavior propagated forward as power structures always have. Very few men or women managed to build power bases on pure fear alone—as someone with a degree in psychology, the reason seems obvious to me.

  When there are no laws to stop you, there is no reason not to take down the guy trying to make himself your ruler for life.

  Here's the thing: yes, this does happen. It has always happened. Powerful people, often those with the better weapons, often try to impose their will on others. Groups of wandering marauders will work together to steal, rape, and kill for those very reasons listed above. The Relentless Sons are a combination of them, and easily the most dangerous force we've ever faced for that reason. They're disciplined, smart, and know exactly how far they can push their captives and slaves before causing a revolution.

  What pop culture got wrong was that these fuckers are in the minority by a lot. The greater part of humanity's surviving population don't live in tyrannical hellscapes, being ruled by iron fists. All across the United States and the larger world, people came together in those early days and decided to watch out for each other. For every person who found themselves suddenly free to do every awful thing the darkest corners of their imagination came up with, there were ten who were the type to run into a busy street to snatch a wandering kid from danger. The sort whose first question isn't 'how can I get mine?' but is closer to 'how can we pool our effort and make something better than the sum of our parts?'

  It's not sitting around a campfire singing Kumbaya to each other. We've fought and bled, even killed each other. We disagree and snipe, argue and butt heads. That's just people. It's what we do.

  But we didn't turn on each other in an idiotic blood frenzy. Coming together to watch each other's backs wasn't just moral or ethical—it was practical. Strength in numbers works really well when aimed at a common goal and striving for the greater good.

  One thing most of a decade of the apocalypse taught us is all those shows and books and movies got some stuff wrong. The hero of those stories sometimes draws a moral line and chooses not to kill. Whether it was because they didn't want to lower themselves to the level of the enemy or from some misguided belief that the guy trying to put a knife in your jugular and kidnap your wife could be reasoned into being a better person doesn't matter. Because in the real world, this world, not killing an enemy means one of two things.

  Either your enemy comes back to try again, this time with a better idea of how to succeed, or he does it to someone else. Maybe that kind of casual disregard for consequences worked when there were more people walking the planet than had ever died, but we're a rare breed now. It's a crime against humanity to assume a marauder will be handled by someone else down the line.

  We've built a lot since those early days, but threats like the Sons are a reminder that what we have here is a precious and fragile thing. We've survived endless hordes of the dead, wars with the living, and a lack of resources to make a third world country blush in embarrassment at how bountiful their supplies looked by comparison.

  If there's any better proof that all of this could be gone in a moment, the victim of one bad decision, it's the very world itself. Humanity almost went extinct once. No reason it can't happen again.

  And if there's any better proof that those of us who remain are worth fighting for, it comes in the simplest form: kids.

  In the months since our first encounter with the Sons, a lot of changes swooped into my life. The most obvious at first glance was to Haven itself. The place has been expanding constantly for eight years, with miles of walls going up in a patchwork covering a huge chunk of land. I had been living in a small, isolated compound made out of an old airplane hangar just across the road from the original neighborhood Haven was built on, but now that I had a family and a new job, we needed bigger digs.

  The new place is technically attached to Central, which is what we call the original Haven. West, formerly the westernmost annex thrown on and mostly made up of shipping containers, still holds onto its name even though the barracks are now further that direction.

  My home was in the barracks themselves. Me, my partner Bobby, and our adopted daughter Hannah lived in a pair of shipping containers welded together side by side with doors cut between them. The other recruits stayed in similar if far more crowded housing, but then none of them were here to party.

  I walked home through the massive training yard attached to the barracks. Volunteers from all over the Union worked in pairs or teams on everything from close quarters unarmed combat to knife fighting to slow infiltration using camouflage. There were originally about sixty of them and we were supposed to spend a few months training before making our move on the Sons, but we were now five months in and the number swelled to twice that.

  Every one of them came here because they wanted to. Each had some kind of military background, SWAT training, experience in the intelligence community, or other skills that made them invaluable specialists. All were survivors, which meant they'd hunted prey out in the zombie-infested wilds and killed enemies without hesitation or mercy.

  Our goal was to make them as skilled and deadly as any fighting force the world had ever seen. Thankfully, years of living past Ragnarok took care of most of the hard work for me.

  “You coming for dinner?” I asked Tabby as we approached the lines of steel boxes forming the barracks.

  “Don't want to wear out my welcome,” she said. Her own accommodations were standard for a team leader in our makeshift special ops division, which meant she shared a container with three other people. By the standards of the strike force, it was luxurious.

  I smiled. “Oh, please. You sleep over almost every night anyway. Bobby loves having you around, and Hannah just loves you, period. I don't see why you don't just haul your cot over and move in.”

  Tabby chuckled. “Oh, yeah. That'd be great, right? One of your subordinates shacking up with you and your family? Imagine what people would say, Mason.”

  I shrugged. “They already think we're in some kind of three-way relationship, so what the fuck do I care?” To a degree, that was true. Not in a physical sense, but certainly in a deeply emotional way. Tabby wanted her son back so badly she once tried to kill me to make it happen. It was an impulse I understood given the circumstances. She trusted me to make this insane mission work, to get Logan back alive and well. But in the meantime, the empty gap where he should be needed something to fill it in order to keep her sane. Hannah helped. And young as Hannah was, I think my daughter understood exactly what she was doing for Tabby's mental state.

  Tabby was part of our little family as inextricably as if she were blood. Months of seeing the shame and sorrow for what she tried to do to me mixed with the small joys of having a good meal or making Hannah laugh—it made her dear to me. To us. Family is the people you trust to have your back in a fight, and to never hurt you on purpose. That's my definition and I've never had a reason to doubt it.

  “Yeah, okay,” Tabby said, though I never had any doubt. I could understand her need to be invited every time, considering our history, though I hoped she'd eventually get over it. To say I'm not one to stand on forma
lity is an understatement on par with calling the ocean a bit wet.

  “Yo,” I said when we stepped through the door of my strange little home. There was no easy way to make the place not look like an industrial tin can on first glance, but we tried. The walls were painted white, with pictures by Hannah covering most of one of them. The strike force participated in a lot of training exercises, and since I was in charge of it I aimed one of them at a block of stores on the outskirts of Louisville, including an art supply place.

  Hey, if our governor, Will Price, was dumb enough to put me in charge, then blame him for my obvious corruption. My daughter wanted to draw and color. No apocalypse is going to stop me from making that happen.

  The floor was piled with rugs, helpfully keeping the late winter chill away from our feet. The family area consisted of a couple couches and a love seat arranged in a tight U around a table that was the perfect height to eat on, work from, or hang out around. The other side of the container held our tiny kitchen and both bedrooms; though you could barely call them that considering the beds themselves took up nearly all the space.

  It wasn't perfect, but it was home.

  “In here,” Bobby called through a doorway covered by a hanging curtain. I pulled it aside and let Tabby through first, but the smell hit me like a punch to the face.

  The kitchen area wasn't much more than a jet stove and a pair of cabinets. Bobby was watching a pot sitting on top of the mass-produced metal stove, which simmered and put out a scent like ambrosia to someone who hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast.

  “Stew?” I asked, craning my head to look at the pot. “What is that, venison?”

  Bobby gave the contents one good stir and leaned his heavy frame against the counter, arms crossed and with a satisfied look on his face. He smiled behind his gray-streaked black beard. “Nope. Beef. The farms have been doing well enough they actually needed to slaughter a few head of cattle. Lots of calves this year.”