The Fall (Book 5): Exodus in Black Read online

  Exodus in Black

  Book Five of The Fall

  Joshua Guess

  ©2016 Joshua Guess

  Also by Joshua Guess

  Living With the Dead

  With Spring Comes The Fall

  The Bitter Seasons

  Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

  The Hungry Land

  The Wild Country

  This New Disease

  American Recovery

  Ever After

  The Fall

  Victim Zero

  Dead Will Rise

  War of the Living

  Genesis Game

  Exodus in Black

  The Next Chronicle

  Next

  Damage

  Black Sand

  Earthfall

  Ran

  Apocalyptica (Serialized into multiple parts)

  Misc

  Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

  Soldier Lost (Short Story)

  Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

  With James Cook

  The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

  Catch me on Facebook at my page:

  Joshua Guess, Author

  Part One

  Emily

  Emily didn’t care about scars. Whatever trick of biology made people draw back from the distortion of the normal, she didn’t have it. Scars were nothing more than twists of skin and flesh, visual evidence that a thing had happened. Kell, her partner in life, fighting, and everything else, had been scarred eight six months before by the ragged talon of a starving zombie.

  She watched him work in the training yard, the thick band of discolored skin, now a darker band of brown than the rest of his face, twisting and tugging at the lines of his features as he worked.

  “You’re raising your foot too much,” she said as Kell grunted with effort. She and a dedicated group of friends spent a few hours each day training each other. Not that anyone in their little compound was a stranger to combat or survival, but the team they’d put together couldn’t afford to have weak spots. Emily herself was an excellent fighter, armed or otherwise, owing to much practice and natural aptitude. She was lucky enough to only get the minimum time on the square of bare dirt in front of her where Kell was currently getting his ass handed to him.

  Her lessons were closer to the real meaning of the word. Where she was strong, Kell was weak. He could fight well, but it wasn’t natural for him. He had to be educated. It had taken six weeks of grinding effort to break his blocks when it came to firearms. But where she was weak, Kell was strong, too. Months spent being lectured by Kell and anyone else with a scrap of knowledge that might save their lives felt like college all over again, but with the added flavor of being life-or-death important.

  Chemistry, mechanical engineering, small engine repair, a dizzying and frustrating volume of data on what plants and animals were safe to eat, could be used as medicines, and a thousand other facts. These were Emily’s burden, and she carried the weight happily even if she complained about it.

  They had a mission, after all. One that could change the world, maybe even save it.

  The trick was staying alive to make it happen, which was why they were all training and educating themselves. Kell was dogged and laser-focused on improving, and Emily’s own irritation was smoothed somewhat by the fact that she got to sleep with the teacher at the end of the day. The person with the most trouble adapting, to her surprise, was Mason.

  Mason, the SEAL. A man with peerless talent at infiltration, mayhem, information gathering, and controlled violence of any kind. He took to most lessons easily enough, but hesitated when it came to learning more than the basic field medicine he’d picked up in the Navy.

  The idea of digging around in someone’s body unnerved him to a degree Emily wouldn’t have imagined before their education on basic surgery started.

  Mason, only an inch or two shorter than Kell and just as heavily built, slammed Kell into the dirt hard enough for Emily to feel the impact in her feet.

  “That’s enough. Any more and you’re going to break him, Mason.”

  Kell sat up slowly, a thin film of red dirt stuck to his sweaty face. “But I didn’t win,” he said somewhat dazedly. “Can’t stop now.”

  Emily stood, walked over to him, and helped him to his feet. “Sweetie, you’re not going to beat him. That’s not the point. Trying makes you better. Mason has like twenty years of experience on you.”

  Mason plucked towels from a nearby chair and tossed one to her. “She’s right, man. You’ve come along nicely. You’ve turned into a better than average grappler, but you’re not going to take me down.”

  Watching Kell slowly gather his scattered marbles and stuff them back in the bag sent a pleasant wave of contentment through her. Getting him to open up after years of quiet mourning hadn’t been easy. Not that she’d hammered away at him, far from it. The shell built around Kell’s heart was tough and thick, and was only permeable from the inside. She gave him time and compassion and effort, and the seeds had taken hold.

  The man teetering on his feet before her was a different person than the one who had taken the wound to his face. Not wholly separate from who he had been—no one short of an amnesiac was—but opened into being so much more. Eight months ago he would never have let himself be hauled off without scoring a win. What ego he had was woven into his remarkable ability to learn, and it didn’t suffer losses well.

  Before Emily, anyway.

  “Come on, big fella. Let’s get you rinsed off once you screw your head all the way back on. Then you can make me some dinner.”

  “I like cooking,” Kell said, still a little vaguely, as Emily pulled an arm over her shoulders to steady him.

  “There’s some fresh venison if you want steaks,” she said. “Personally, I could go for steak.”

  Kell snorted. “You always want steak. You wouldn’t eat anything else if—”

  A deafening bang cut him off, bringing both of them to an abrupt stop. Across the courtyard between the front gate of the compound’s wall and the main house, the air around a young man passing in front of them turned to a fine red mist. It was only after Emily’s brain caught up that she realized the high-pitched zip she heard was the sound of a bullet narrowly missing them.

  “Attack!” she screamed, pushing Kell toward the cellar doors nestled on the side of the house.

  * * *

  They almost fell going in, but Emily kept her fist wrapped in a swathe of Kell’s shirt to steady him as they went down the short flight of stairs. Inside, John Liebowitz, Kell’s longtime research partner and friend, stood holding a pistol at them.

  He lowered the weapon when he saw who it was. “I heard shots…”

  “I need that gun,” Emily said, putting out a hand. John handed it over without hesitation. She checked the magazine and made sure there was a round in the chamber, then met John’s eyes. “I don’t know how bad this is just yet. You need to get Kell into the tunnel. We’re using the emergency exit.”

  John blinked and Kell whipped his head around to face her, all trace of fogginess gone. “I should stay and fight. John should go.”

  Emily shook her head and spoke sharply. “No. John will go, as soon as he puts you in the tunnel. He has his own exit protocol, remember? We came up with them together. You don’t get to be a cowboy this time, Kell. You’re going. End of discussion.”

  She could see the stubborn refusal bubbling up on his face, and before he could do more than twist his lips angrily, Emily cut him off. “I wasn’t asking. You’re thinking I can’t stop you from fighting. You’re mistaken.” She pointed the gun, a .40 Glock, at hi
s leg. “You’re not fighting, even if I have to make sure of it with a bullet.”

  Smart as the man was, it took him almost a full second to realize she meant it. Months of being together every day, fighting together, had shown him exactly what she was made of. Emily’s heart didn’t pick up from its already raised speed. There was no rush through her system. For her, the situation was perfectly clear and logical. She would do whatever it took to safeguard his knowledge, even if it meant harming him.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going,” Emily said bluntly. “I’m going to stay right here and shoot anyone who comes through that door I don’t recognize. No one is going to sneak up on you from behind.”

  Kell didn’t even try to argue this time. Instead he stood and bent his long frame to kiss her on the temple. “Don’t die.”

  She let a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll do my best. Stay at the rendezvous and I’ll meet you as soon as I can. Remember, if no one shows up within a day, or you see enemies coming, haul ass.”

  “Sure,” Kell said, his reply too light and easy.

  “I mean it. Don’t wait around or take risks.”

  He bobbed his head in assent, but she knew it meant nothing. There was only so much her threats could do to prod him along, and they had no power at all once he was out of her sight. In her heart she hoped a desperate hope that he would listen and do as he was told, but her head didn’t put good odds on it.

  She stood facing the door and listened as the sound of stones grating together heralded Kell’s escape. The narrow stretch of false wall was indistinguishable when closed, so a wave of relief flooded through her when she heard the hidden passage close and lock behind the men. Risking a glance, she noted no displaced dust or dirt from the excavated tunnel beyond the wall, nothing to suggest anyone had escaped.

  After a long count to thirty, Emily moved toward the cellar door again and counted to five before throwing them open.

  Several facts became clear immediately, but it took her brain a few beats to understand them as a cohesive unit.

  People were down. A lot of people. At least a dozen just in her immediate line of sight, which implied more outside the courtyard. The walls were mostly heavily reinforced chain link, which gave outside gunmen an easy way to see inside.

  While she hadn’t counted, there hadn’t been all that many shots. At any distance and through a barrier, only a trained shooter would be able to manage more than a couple kills under these conditions.

  Which implied that there were trained shooters, probably many of them, and possibly snipers.

  Emily threw herself to the side in a long arc just before a pair of distant cracking shots slammed into the wall behind her.

  “Well, fuck,” she muttered as she crawled along the side of the house, keeping herself in the narrow trench running along it to allow light to spill through the basement windows. The plants placed in regular intervals offered a little more cover, but just to be safe she kept her head down. This left her exposed, but logic told her she was safer not putting her noggin up as a target. If whoever these assholes were had managed to get inside the walls, they wouldn’t need snipers picking people off.

  Surely that meant they were using the snipers as cover to get in, but one problem at a time.

  Gun still clutched in one hand, she weighed her options. They’d put together a lot of exit strategies in case something like this happened—it was an ingrained habit among survivors. Not a single person, other than the very young, lacked training and drilling on what to do in this exact situation. Their vehicles were forever stocked with equipment, food, water, and fuel purchased at a dear cost from one of the few outfits still capable of distilling crude. She had faith in her people to save themselves, which freed her from the need to do it for them.

  It was in this way more than any other that she and Kell differed. He would always be the man with the weight of the end of the world on his shoulders, his research the cause of the apocalypse even if it wasn’t at his hand directly. He would always be driven by that inescapable fact to help everyone, to be the hero he refused to see himself being.

  Emily was more practical. She raised her head just enough to peer through the foot-tall potato plant in front of her and saw the glint of sunlight on the bumper of a black Jeep poking its nose past the other side of the barn.

  She was just about to pop up and make a run for it when someone running at a full sprint beat her to it. Emily caught saw a cloud of dust being kicked up as the person, who had a banner of golden hair splayed out behind her as she ran, pumped her legs with everything she had. A gunshot rang out, but the woman didn’t fall.

  The dust, Emily realized. It gave cover.

  She had a very bad idea.

  Kell

  The tunnel wasn’t very long, just a mostly straight line connecting the wall of the basement to the detached garage, but it wasn’t very big, either. Kell, on the other hand, was. Behind him John hyperventilated and kept one hand on Kell’s back.

  Kell’s shoulders were nearly a foot wider than the tunnel, so not only did he have to shuffle through in a crouch, he had to do it sideways. The last vestiges of haze from smacking his head on the ground a few minutes before burned away beneath the intense hate he felt for the tunnel.

  Eventually they reached the garage. Light spilled in from small strips of plexiglass that barely qualified as windows. Four inches tall and a foot wide, they sat spaced around the perimeter just below the roof. The garage had been built specifically for Kell and John, and the vehicle inside prepped for their escape.

  The cinder block walls were clad with steel plate on the inside, layers of the stuff welded together to create a safe box to store their equally armored truck. It was the sort of overkill people in the old world would have called stupid. Faced with the echoing cracks of gunshots outside, Kell considered it prudent planning at the least.

  “Probably gonna turn out to be a couple marauders, right?” John muttered, hand still twisted up in Kell’s shirt.

  “I don’t think so.” Kell was thinking of the training Mason kept heaping on him. Recognizing tactics was something they worked on often, and this didn’t have the same feel as a marauder attack. Oh, they could be organized, even meticulous. But no group of them he had ever encountered displayed the sort of cold-blooded calculation it took to wait and pick people off from a distance.

  Marauders attacked weakness with strength, and if there were enough of them out there to outnumber Kell’s people, there would have been a sky-darkening hail of bullets.

  It was possible, Kell admitted to himself. Just not very likely.

  They piled into the truck, John in the passenger seat. The pickup was one of those giant, heavy duty special edition things. It had a ridiculously overpowered engine capable of hauling practically anything. Instead of cargo, the capacity was used to make sure the armor plating protecting the occupants didn’t stop it from moving at all.

  “Ready?” Kell asked. “Did you buckle up?”

  John shot him a withering glare. “Yes, dad. I’m good to go.”

  Kell hit to button on the garage door opener, which didn’t work exactly the way it was designed. Instead of trying to raise the thick slab protecting their way out from stray bullets, the system pulled the pins holding the thing in place. He put the truck in gear as the four pieces of steel the size of his thumb popped loose, silently thanking whoever made sure the batteries powering the whole thing were charged, and nudged the door with the bumper.

  It fell forward slowly, then all at once. The air trapped beneath the thing as it toppled into the yard was no match for the sheer weight of the custom door. Kell stomped on the gas and the truck lurched into the light with a roar.

  It would have been a polite fiction for Kell to say he watched out for his fellow citizens in the short dash across the yard. He might have, were it possible, but a blinding cloud of dust billowed across the compound. That sometimes happened when
the merciless prairie winds swept across the plains, picking up the dirt reduced to the finest of powders by the feet of nearly eighty people traipsing across it every day.

  There wasn’t any wind that he could see, but the dust remained. Weird.

  The truck rocketed forward, straight as an arrow, and impacted the section of fence directly opposite the garage door. The section was designed to fail in the face of an outward-moving truck, the supports running horizontally hinged in the middle. They snapped away, the chain link layered over them pulling away from the heavy posts on either side.

  Bullets smacked into the armor around Kell. He could only see through a thin strip in the windshield, but as he tore across the field to the north of the compound, new sources of light began to appear. Several small, round holes blinked into existence as armor-piercing rounds lived up to their names.

  “Get low,” he said to John.

  When John didn’t respond, Kell risked a glance at him.

  The man was hunched over, arms clutched around his middle. Try as he might, John couldn’t stop the dark red stains from seeping across his shirt the drip through his fingers. God, it was a lot of blood.

  “Goddammit,” Kell breathed. “Stay with me, man. I’ll get us somewhere safe and patch you up.”

  John shook his head violently. “No. Get to the rendezvous. Don’t stop.”

  Fewer shots connected now, speed and relative distance creating an ever-growing safe zone. Bile rose in Kell’s throat at the unfairness of it, the sheer stupid fucking luck. John’s voice was wet, something in his chest profoundly broken.

  His spirit, however, remained unbowed. If he was determined to make it to the backup location, Kell would respect the choice.

  “Alright, man,” Kell said. “Just stay with me.”

  John died ten miles from the rendezvous.