This Broken Veil (Ran Book 2) Read online

  This Broken Veil

  Ran: Book Two

  Joshua Guess

  ©2016 Joshua Guess

  All rights reserved

  This book is dedicated to

  Every person who has suffered in silence

  Every prisoner, as Johnny Cash said, who has long paid for their crimes

  Everyone who has lost hope

  And those who have found it again

  1

  Standing in the ruined bookstore, surrounded by tattered volumes, the reality of a world destroyed by the living dead came home to me with one, ahem, stark realization.

  “I’m never going to find out how Game of Thrones ends.”

  Jem looked over at me. “Seriously? That’s what you’re worried about right now?”

  I glared at him. “What? I started watching the show, which led me to the books, and now I won’t know how either one ends. It’s going to drive me crazy.”

  Jem considered this for a moment. “You know, I kinda feel like the apocalypse gave George R.R. Martin plenty of time.”

  An idea hit me. “Hey, he might still be alive. Doesn’t he live out west somewhere, in the desert? Maybe—”

  “No, Ran,” Jem said, cutting me off. “Absolutely not.”

  “But you didn’t even let me say my idea. That’s really not cool.”

  Jem lowered his weapon, a length of reinforced steel with a knobby end. “You were going to suggest we take a road trip to find him so you can at least know how the books end, even if you can’t read them.”

  I raised an accusing finger, then let it drop. “Okay, yeah. I was gonna say that.” Another thought hit me. “I wonder if Kit Harrington is still alive. He’s probably lonely.”

  Jem snored. “Three things. One, you’ve seen that guy. He’s definitely not lonely. Two, I’m your actual boyfriend, and measuring me against Jon Snow himself is completely unfair. And three, can we shelve the rest of this discussion until we’re not being threatened by a swarm of fucking zombies?”

  I sighed. “Fine. But one of these days you’re going to have to pull that stick out of your ass.”

  Record Scratch.

  Freeze Frame.

  You’re probably wondering how I got in this situation.

  I’ve always loved it when movies do that. Yeah, it’s a tired old trope, but it’s fun.

  The book store thing? That’s a normal day at the end of the world. As for the larger context—the one where zombies are a thing and they’ve killed and eaten most of humanity—well, no one had any idea. We know a disease called the Nero virus causes the dead to rise. Whether it’s an actual virus or not, again, kind of up in the air. There are people researching it with more of a clue, and they’re looking hard for test subjects.

  Normal zombies are easy. On the day the world’s shit collided with the universe’s fan, every person on the planet with traumatic injuries greater than a bruise or minor cut died. All at the same time. Which has never sounded much like a disease to me, unless it was one that was somehow triggered by a signal of some kind. I digress.

  The reason researchers are having such a hard time finding test subjects is because Nero doesn’t only raise the dead. Or, in the case of that first wave, kill the living. Another subset of victims end up as Reavers, so named by one of my group after the cannibals from a popular but tragically short-lived television show. Reavers don’t die, but they are transformed into constantly-starving rage monsters with human intelligence, zero conscience, and a penchant for biting living people into kibble.

  Then we have Carriers, who are just normal people who have the virus but suffer no obvious effects. In the six months following the end of the world, some Carriers began to show a variety of symptoms.

  The rarest breed of infected person known were given the nickname Triggers by someone at the massive research facility that broadcasts all over creation, and it stuck. Triggers, which by the way is a name I fucking hate, initially start off with no symptoms. Then, like Reavers, some biochemical event happens that, well, triggers a change. Reavers begin the cycle slowly growing black lines through their veins, getting hungry, and losing the part of their mind that governs behavior. Triggers also get the black lines, get hungry, and lose some inhibitions, but with them it’s not a permanent state. After the first initial episode, which is so terrible and full of seizures that it got its own nickname, the Shivers, people in this group turn back into normal folk.

  Until they have to fight or run. Then an uncontrolled state of mind will cause the reaction and for a little while their metabolism and brain chemistry crank the dial up to eleven. One weird side effect of being a Trigger is a somewhat increased rate of healing, which let me tell you comes in handy as all hell in this newly violent world.

  My name is Ran Lawson, and I’m a Trigger. No, I don’t have the urge to eat people. My rage is all my own. When the Shivers hit me, it’s generally because I need to save my ass, possibly the ass of someone I care about. Rather than be filled with blinding anger, my altered state includes a mild euphoria and an even higher state of recklessness than usual. Which is saying quite a fucking lot.

  Now, where were we?

  I gestured through the barricaded doors and windows of the ruined bookstore. “There’s only ten of them, you giant baby. We can kill that many in our sleep.”

  Jem favored me with a long-suffering roll of the eyes. “I’m not just talking about the ones outside the store. Look behind them, dear.”

  I looked. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  Down the dusty, debris-strewn cobblestone road was another pack of zombies. The appearance of more didn’t surprise me. Though the initial infection only took the injured—including surgical patients, which gave me some hellishly persistent nightmares—their victims also rose up in a vicious cycle of death and undeath. Which is another way of saying that of the roughly three hundred and twenty million citizens of the United States alive on that day, something like seventy percent of them died. Best estimates suggest at least half of them came back from death.

  Zombies are everywhere. They’re like flannel shirts, beards, and skinny jeans. Or pumpkin-flavored coffee in the fall. You can’t forage for supplies in a city or hunt food in the woods without running into them at some point.

  “So we take the roof,” I said. “We got in that way.”

  Jem chewed the inside of his mouth, his habit when turning over possibilities in his head. “We did, but I’m a little worried we stayed too long. What if the truck is surrounded when we get to it? That crowd came from the direction we parked in.”

  I grinned at him. “This is why I love you. You consider and I act. Together we’re almost a functional adult. Look at it this way, though: we don’t have a choice. We can’t walk back home, so getting to the truck is the only real option. If it’s surrounded, we’ll improvise.”

  “Your strong suit,” Jem said wryly.

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  We worked our way back to the ladder, ignoring the sounds of zombies beating on windows and frames. Had anyone asked me at the outset whether those were the kind of noises I would not only be able to tune out, but sleep during, I’d have called them insane. The human mind is powerfully adaptive, though our capacity to ignore disturbing shit is probably how sociopaths happen.

  Getting back to the roof was easy since the building the bookstore shared with several other equally destroyed storefronts had an access ladder conveniently built into the wall. Part of our routine while scavenging and exploring included mapping out places with them installed. Using them allowed us to do most of our running safely above the swarms.

  The world stretched out below the buildings was not a pleasant one
. The apocalypse, as it turns out, is really fucking dirty.

  Yeah, the shambling corpses all over the place were both terrible and gross, but the unbroken thread in every new place we went was how filthy everything became. No one picked up trash because there was no one living in those places to do it. Fallen leaves and debris simply became a part of the landscape. Without people to prevent it, the pavement cracked and broke, plants retaking the land one piece of asphalt at a time.

  Empty grocery bags and old Starbucks receipts have become the modern tumbleweed.

  Yet as Jem and I moved to the ramp spanning our roof and the next, I couldn’t help finding a strange beauty in the desolation. Yes, I know how much that sentence makes me sound like the poetry-obsessed fourteen year old you assume I once was, and no, I don’t have an obsession with death. It’s a matter of perspective, I guess. I can’t change the world as it is now. Short of time travel and some Sherlock-level investigative skills to figure out what caused this mess, it’s beyond me. What I can do, what is the only healthy and rational response, is mourn for everything we’ve lost and move forward. Doing that means finding even the slimmest of silver linings.

  The silence is one of them. I spent my childhood in a cult, our entire group housed in a relatively tiny compound. Even when I mouthed off and was thrown in the small isolation cells—which still featured heavily in my nightmares on occasion—it was never quiet. The sounds of daily life could always be heard, whether in the form of people walking on the floor above my cell or the weeping of the other prisoners.

  The experience left me with more than a few deep-seated emotional issues. Here around me was a new world, or rather an old one not experienced in the modern age born again, where the background hum of vehicles racing down distant roads was absent. There were no jumbled conversations, no honking horns, no clacking trains.

  Just the quiet sounds of nature. Oh, and the sometime moan of zombies. That kind of spoiled things.

  There were other benefits stemming from the reduction of the human population by at least ninety percent. Without the thrumming heart of industry and travel, the air was sweeter. The lack of engines, factories, power plants and everything else spewing waste into the air made for easy breathing. That purity also helped when it came to zombies—you can smell them coming if the wind is right.

  None of which is to say I was happy about it. Sometimes crippling social anxiety aside, I had nothing against the world or most of the people in it. I might have existed on the periphery, but I was still very much a part of its fabric.

  Gone now. All gone.

  The only thing for those of us left behind to do was cobble together the scraps and stitch them into something new. Hence these scouting missions, where finding resources could mean stumbling across another treasure trove like the distribution center we were still mining for supplies, or finding another survivor to invite into our slowly growing community.

  We crossed the ramp, then pulled it back behind us. Made from the parts of two short extension ladders with some clever engineering and covered with aluminum sheet metal, the ramp was a handy way of traversing the space between close buildings in new places. Back home, a little town called Wallace, the people in our community installed permanent ramps across a lot of buildings. Few of us lived in the town itself, preferring to stay safe in the walled home built around my trailer, but it was nice to have the freedom and safety to move above the zombies in town.

  In the wake of civilization’s passing, even concepts began to falter. The entire idea of a town was fading. The momentum of ingrained habit died hard, though. I still thought of our county as Lewis even if there was no government left. Our town was Wallace, though few people lived within its borders.

  But our home was Bastion. It was shabby by comparison, always changing and growing as we moved the shipping container walls around to fit our needs, but it was wholly our own. It was new.

  It was ours.

  2

  On the way back to our campsite, Jem and I got a harsh reminder of how much the Nero virus enjoys fucking around with DNA.

  What I’d taken for a stunted, stubby tree on the trip in wouldn’t have caught my eye on the outbound leg if it hadn’t moved. No the way a branch moves in a breeze—not that there was a breeze—but in the slow and deliberate way a person does. My impression was that the thing off the road was trying to wave us down.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked, pointing across Jem’s chest at the slowly-waving shape. He looked over, did a double take, and nudged the brakes until our big ass truck crunched to a halt.

  He stared at the thing, at least fifty yards away, for a solid minute before looking back at me with a long-suffering expression on his face. “You’re going to want to check it out, aren’t you?”

  I batted my eyes at him innocently. “If you loved me, you’d take me over to look at that creepy and disturbing figure lurking in that field.”

  Jem gave an exaggerated shudder. “Ugh. No. Don’t do the little girl voice. Coming from you it’s almost as unnerving as whatever that thing over there is.”

  I smiled as I slugged him in the shoulder, then pointed. “Onward, Jeeves!”

  The thing in the field was—or rather had been—a person. We got out of the truck a solid thirty feet away, but slowed our approach in near lockstep when Jem and I got close. An old, familiar sensation drove the caution; the idea that a monster was in the darkness of the basement or hiding just around a corner. In the cult I’d grown up in, being snatched out up and thrown in a cell with no warning happened often enough to etch that fear in me down to the bone.

  That I felt it here, again, in a world absolutely filled with monsters said a hell of a lot.

  The thing was a zombie, but not like any victim of Nero I’d seen before. Its skin was a dark, mottled brown and gray overwhelmed by thick growths. They looked eerily like the cutaneous horns I’d had removed from my dog a year before, hard and knobby branches jutting out at angles to the plane of the skin. Except these were cancerous, overgrowth run amok. The smallest of them was as long as my spread fingers, and their wide bases at the joints seemed to have locked the zombie in place.

  “Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” I said. Jem responded by turning to one side and puking a little.

  I glanced over at him. “You okay there, princess?”

  Jem, leaning over with his hands on his knees, nodded. He raised one hand with a finger extended, telling me to give him a minute. Or that’s how I chose to interpret the gesture since it was his middle finger.

  “What the fuck is that?” Jem asked after wiping his mouth.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the thing. Its gender was impossible to determine. There were just too many growths, enough that several had interlocked at their bases. That seemed to be the cause of its immobility; the horns around its hips were nestled together in clumps. If the roots of the things went deeper than skin, I could only imagine the joint was packed with the same leathery flesh.

  I shook my head. “You kind of have to assume it’s another weird thing this fucking virus does.” I walked back to the truck and pulled out my baseball bat, a custom piece made from an incredibly heavy piece of hardwood I’d reinforced with aluminum bands and capped with small, blunt steel spikes.

  Fact: the efficient transmission of force enabled by a club is even more efficiently concentrated by focusing that force on a small point.

  My facts keep me going. Back in the day, before I made baseball bats stolen from police evidence lockups into modern morningstars, I spent my days doing odd research jobs. Made a lot of money at it, too. I did everything you could imagine, from straight research for authors writing books—you’d be amazed how many people wouldn’t Google things—to hands-on testing of arms and armor on behalf of manufacturers. I worked on textbooks, planned scientific expeditions, and learned a lot of practical skills along with the accrual of knowledge.

  I think of the facts I sometimes use to stay alive as my apocalyptica, a b
astardization of the apocrypha. Not because my facts lack authenticity as the definition of apocrypha would imply, but because they tend to be a loose cloud of information used in very specific ways. Also because the name sounded cool and I had to call it something when I started jotting useful stuff down for other people.

  Yeah, all those years as an editor spent cursing writers and now I am one. There are at least twenty copies of the little survival book I wrote floating around Bastion.

  I hefted the bat and thought again about the channeling energy into a small point. Weapons are tools, and tools make work easier. The spine to the shoulder, shoulder to elbow and hand in a whipping line. Hand to club, making the best of torque and angular momentum. Focus that through the stubby spikes on the end of the bat, and you get a hell of an effective result.

  Jem jumped back a little as I hefted the bat and brought it down in a powerful overhead swing. The zombie glanced up as a man interested in a bird or funny-shaped cloud might, seeming unaware of the consequence of the swing.

  Its skull cracked under the points of the spikes, but the bat bounced off. You have to make them wide and dull enough to avoid hanging up on what you hit.

  Little things like that are the mental equivalent of using a tool or making a weapon. Surviving means using information to solve problems and learning from every experience to make those solutions better each time.

  Even after months of living in a world populated mostly by the living dead, at that moment I still had no idea of the truth contained in that idea.

  If I seem a little blasé about the weird tree thing, consider our drive home.

  We were in a truck that could charitably be described as salvaged, though I suppose if the owner of the car lot we took it from was still alive you’d call it grand theft auto. It was a big diesel affair, because we’d begun making biodiesel. We rode in the giant, unfamiliar stolen vehicle across roads littered with the detritus of crumbled civilization, past and sometimes through zombies without counting, all the while surrounded by the ghost town the earth has become. There’s a chemical plant half an hour north of Wallace that’s been on fire for two solid months. One of its storage tanks, too long without human hands and eyes seeing to its needs, exploded and spilled its deadly contents across half a mile of ground. The dead vegetation was littered with enough skeletons to give a goth kid an instant orgasm.