Revelation Day (The Fall Book 6) Read online

  Kell wiggled the cylinder. “No, I get that. I mean, how does it work? Where does the pressure come from to make the liquid into an aerosol?”

  Jo looked at him like he had asked how pants stay up. “By closing it like I showed you. The seal is airtight when the ring is seated. The mandrel fits in the cylinder and pushes all the air in on itself to create pressure. The way I’ve machined it, turning it to the right locks it in place and fills the valve with pressurized liquid. When you do this,” she said, pushing on an inset cutout within the cap, “it trips the valve. As soon as you let up, it sprays. Haven’t worked out a way to make it time-released, but the spray almost doesn’t matter at this point.”

  Kell blinked. “Why doesn’t it matter? The dispersal of the droplets is how it gets introduced into the system. Kind of an important part.”

  Jo shook her head. “The spray gets it on their skin, sure. But remember I’ve done two thousand tests of this stuff. Say you hit one zombie with it while ten others are too far away. That one zombie goes back to its herd. How many of them do you think are taken out by the cure?”

  The answer seemed obvious, which was exactly why Kell took his time thinking about it. The original re-purposed delivery devices were gas grenades and they still had quite a few. What Jo had created didn’t give the same vast area of effect, but could be reproduced by anyone with the right aluminum stock and a workshop. Small teams of armored scouts could use them to hit herds of zombies with the cure like raiders taking villages. The limited utility of the thing wasn’t a problem—it was meant for small-scale work.

  “I’m going to say one,” Kell finally said. “With the proviso that I’m probably wrong.”

  Jo beamed. “You’re really growing as a person, you know that? Yeah, you’re totally wrong. The factor you’re leaving out isn’t that zombies cluster together, but how they do it. They move in groups, and when they walk close they’re constantly bumping into each other. Spreads the cure by contact. After more than five years out in the elements, most zombies are naked by now. Skin to skin is perfect for what we’re using against them.”

  Kell suppressed the urge to elbow her in the ribs. “Enough foreplay, kid.”

  Jo rolled her eyes. “Fine, spoilsport. Since the cure takes a little while to work, it usually has time to spread. One infected will generally hit six to eight others. Each of those will do the same. Since every drop of this stuff has hundreds of millions of your altered Chimera cells in it, even the tiniest amount will spread like the common cold.”

  Pursing his lips, Kell nodded. “Wow. Two doctorates and I somehow forgot to account for that.”

  Jo patted him on the shoulder, which she had to reach up to do thanks to the foot of difference in their height. “It’s okay. I only had moderate respect for you to begin with, so this didn’t hurt you much.”

  He gave her a crooked smile. “Smart ass. You want to grab some lunch? I need some time away from the worker bees.”

  Jo looked around the converted hangar, which was both his lab and their home. What had once been a primarily empty space was transformed with the news of a cure. Months of other communities sending in their best and brightest in an effort to spread the knowledge made his home into a teeming hive of activity. Even here, in the private work area set aside just for him, people passed by within a foot on their way from one task to another.

  “Sure,” Jo said. “How about burgers?”

  Kell flipped the cylinder in his hand. “I was actually thinking of a field trip. Maybe a little picnic.”

  Though he knew it was an artifact of his imagination, Kell could have sworn his missing leg throbbed more intensely the farther they moved from Haven’s walls. This wasn’t his first time leaving the safety of the community since his injury, though the trip never got any easier. He thought back to the first days of the Fall, when he’d lived in the hills outside Cincinnati and fought his way into the city on a regular basis. How he’d met Laura, now dead, and Kate, estranged from him, and how they had sharpened him into a real fighter.

  For years Kell had been finely tuned by circumstance, his massive frame honed down from the pudgy homebody shaped by a desk to a lean whip ready to snap into motion at any time. The loss of the lower part of one leg hadn’t taken everything away from him, but the damage was enough. Such a relatively small part gone had a disproportionate impact on the function of the whole. Like missing genes or a broken gear, the mechanism could never be what it was again.

  He’d expressed this idea to Emily at one point, and in return she gave him a mantra. Nothing is static. Everything changes. Not every change is good, but how we deal with those changes is up to us.

  “You okay?” Jo said.

  Snapped out of his reverie, Kell glanced at her. “Yeah. Why?”

  She nodded at his knee. “You were rubbing your leg like it was hurting you.”

  “The prosthetic is starting to chafe a bit is all,” he lied.

  “Sure,” she replied agreeably, though she clearly didn’t believe this. “We’ll let the honor guard snag a test subject. You won’t have to fight.”

  He only nodded.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid to fight. Fear lost its meaning to Kell long ago. He’d coped—and if he was being honest with himself, continued to cope—with the sense of loss over his leg for months on end. He didn’t suffer the sharp emotional tugs other amputees he’d met had talked about. He wasn’t sad about it. Some people were, and that was fine. For him the major response was that general, pervasive feeling of being less than he should be, an equation with a missing number.

  But that was not why he didn’t fight.

  It was complex. For one, he didn’t need to. The number of volunteers who supported his work once the knowledge of its existence became public was staggering. The Union had tens of thousands of citizens, Haven alone home to several thousand at any given time. Kell had his own tiny compound, a survival community in miniature, complete with guards to do his fighting for him. They were adamant about it, too. Pushy bastards.

  The reason he let them was that he hadn’t managed to truly get a feel for his artificial leg. It was that simple. He could walk and jog on it well enough, but in the constant press to manufacture as much of the cure as possible and train others to do the same, he had no time for the meticulous practice needed to relearn how to move with lethal control.

  It took a while to get far enough away from Haven to find a zombie. Between the chemical repellent—good old ammonia—and the constant patrols using the cure like a bioweapon against swarms, the area surrounding Haven was clear. You could always count on roads and paths to draw the undead, however, and highways were the richest veins.

  Kell sat in the car with its makeshift armor plating and watched as younger, healthier men worked in graceful unison to hook a zombie with a catchpole. Once it was held in place, another blasted it with a small fire extinguisher, the cryogenic carbon dioxide triggering the Chimera to hibernate. It would only last a few minutes at most, but that was more than enough time.

  He made his way to the dead man, trussed up and inert, the cylinder still clutched in his hand. The rational part of him, who he thought of uncreatively as Rational Kell, certainly wanted to test out the thing himself. Observe the dispersal pattern, see how fine the drops forced through the tiny holes in the mandrel and lid were. But as he walked, barely a limp showing in his gait even if the metal of his artificial foot clinked against the crumbling blacktop, the gesture began to feel empty. Pointless. Why waste this on a single zombie just to satisfy his curiosity?

  Kell stopped and the four heavily armed men surrounding him and Jo looked about to see if he’d spotted some danger they missed. One of them glanced at Kell. “What is it, sir?”

  After a few seconds of thought, Kell frowned. “I wonder if you’ve heard whether we have any large herds wandering close by. I think I’d like to see how far just one zombie can spread the cure.”

  Of course they were all too happy to find out for h
im.

  The weird hero complex some people had for Kell might bother him, even keep him up some nights, but it damn well came in handy now and then.

  Emily

  Emily finished her fiftieth push-up and sprang to her feet without the slightest sign of fatigue. Without breaking for even a drink of water, she moved to the heavy bag and began sets of mixed punches, elbows, and kicks. In the months since Kell was taken and his leg damaged beyond repair, Emily had changed. Not with the cataclysmic alteration of a volcanic eruption or a tsunami reshaping a coast. Even in the worst of times, sudden change was not a part of who she was.

  Emily was more controlled than that. She took the long view on almost everything. She and Kell let the size and population of Haven lull them into a false sense of security. She knew there was no blame to cast. That was also not Emily’s way. She accepted the error and worked on ways to fill the gaps in her armor.

  “You’re going to ruin your body doing that, you know,” said the other occupant of the small, private gym. “The way professional athletes ruined knees from constant overuse.”

  The gym was a luxury almost beyond compare considering the limited space inside the walls, yet one the people of Haven were happy to provide for their governor. Will Price was a young man, but the obsessive way he worked for his people left its mark on him. Perpetually tired, drawn, and with heavy worry lines on his face, he looked ten years older.

  Emily didn’t falter in her pattern of strikes. “Not according to my Kell. Chimera will keep on fixing the damage. So I can work out all I want.”

  Will said nothing as she worked through the reps on the heavy bag. When Emily was done he tossed her a towel and sat on the narrow bench nestled against one wall of the tiny space. “This isn’t healthy, Em. You’re spending, what, two hours a day doing this? Running a couple miles, weight training, pushing yourself all the time. What happened wasn’t your fault. You can stop punishing yourself.”

  Emily paused in the process of raising a bottle of water to her lips. She couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a pretty observant dude, but that’s a wide miss. I’m not the self-flagellating type. This is just practical. I’m with him the most, and he’s not as capable of running or defending himself as he used to be. So I need to be at the top of my game.”

  If anything, Will’s description of the work Emily put in understated the reality. She was not a large woman to start with, but every ounce of fat had melted from her frame. In its place were hard, flat muscles and a cardiovascular system capable of easily running ten miles with forty pounds of gear before needing to catch a break.

  She had a talent for management which took center stage in her life during the exodus from the home destroyed by Rebound agents. Now that her little group had their own personal fortress just outside Haven’s walls, Emily’s life was a swamp of dozens of little things that required her attention. She didn’t mind; it was what she was good at. Kell worked in his lab, which in her mind was the most important job in the world right now, and everyone else had their roles. If she could facilitate that work, Emily was happy to slog through boring figures and reports.

  But she’d be goddamned if life behind a desk would leave her unprepared again. Especially not considering the fact that negotiation with Rebound was now underway. Emily was pragmatic enough to realize it was the smartest move they could make, but her stomach clenched into a hard knot at the idea of extending them even the thinnest trust.

  “I just worry you’re pushing yourself so hard that when the moment comes, you’ll be tired and worn out,” Will said.

  Emily shifted her weight to one hip and fixed him with a flat stare that could have burned the rust off of old steel. “That’s a remarkably patronizing thing to say. Have you taken a look at yourself lately, Will? You’re not in a position to judge me.”

  He smiled. “You think I don’t hear it from Kate? It’s exactly because I’m so overworked that I’m saying it. Taking a week off won’t suddenly make you incapable of fighting or running a marathon or whatever it is you’re training for. It will do you a world of good. Since Mason should be arriving at Rebound any time now, things are more likely to get interesting.”

  Emily considered that. Rebound had failed to take Kell in order to force him to make the cure for them. Rather than engage in open warfare with the Union and its allies, all of whom had a great deal of recent practice in large-scale combat, they let themselves be talked into diplomacy. Not that anyone in Haven took them at their word. The threat of kidnapping, sabotage, or some other kind of subterfuge loomed large in the mind of every citizen. That worry was the primary factor driving the decision to give the hangar its own walls and infrastructure. The security measures were layered and complex, designed by Mason to prevent the sort of snatch and grab that had almost worked before.

  Emily felt energized as she always did after her workout, but the deep weariness of overused muscles lurked just below the surface. Will made his point with his usual mild tone and as always his words managed to stick at least a little.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll take a week off. No working out.”

  Will raised a finger. “No working, period. Have your helpers run the day to day. Make Kell leave the lab to whoever won’t burn it down. Both of you take some time together and just, you know, be a couple. Enjoy yourselves. If things work out with Mason’s negotiations, I’m afraid there won’t be much time for relaxation very soon.”

  Will, at times diabolical in his trickiness, somehow managed to get the word to the hangar ahead of her. When Emily arrived a succession of people showed up to assure her that everything would be taken care of and wouldn’t you know it dinner was already sitting on the table. Kell was even at the table waiting for her, looking torn between astonishment and amusement.

  “Hi, honey, how was your day?” Emily asked with a sardonic grin. “Apparently mine was spent being wrangled into a vacation, whether I wanted it or not.”

  Kell eyed the pasta steaming on the table, still a relative delicacy in the fledgling local food industry. “Will has that effect. When he thinks he knows what’s best for you, it can be hard to avoid it. I haven’t had Alfredo sauce in like six years, though, so let’s not rise up in protest or anything.”

  Their chat over dinner was in style the same kind of pleasant small talk couples have had since the invention of the shared meal. The substance varied, of course.

  “You infected one zombie and it took out how many others, now?” Emily said, unsure whether to believe what she’d heard.

  “Fifty,” he confirmed. “Took longer since the Chimera cells were diluted among so many, but once they migrated through the skin and into a place they could feed, it went just as well as every other test. Since I designed them only to replicate when feeding on...what?”

  Emily tilted her head. “Huh?”

  “You were staring at me,” Kell said. “Kind of spaced out. Was I boring you? I know I forget this stuff isn’t always interesting to other people.”

  Emily stared at him in bewilderment. She’d been listening and interested, but realized what was different from their usual if sporadic meals together: a sense of contentment. Knowing they’d have a week of uninterrupted time together pulled levers she didn’t even know she had to relieve much of the tension she carried around all the time.

  She smiled at him. “I was just thinking about what it might be like to have this all the time. Regular schedules, time off, all the normal stuff people used to do. It’s been so long since we had anything like normality.”

  He took a sip of the homemade beer—which was not good, but it was beer—brewed in their little compound for the residents. “Even if peace broke out all across the country tomorrow and every zombie suddenly keeled over, you know we still wouldn’t get that, right? We’re just barely past subsistence level surviving. Life is going to be hard for a long time even under ideal circumstances.”

  Emily put a hand to her heart and fluttered her eyelashes. “Why, sir, you do s
ay the most romantic things.”

  Kell had the decency to look sheepish. “Sorry.”

  Emily waved the apology away. “Don’t be. You were just pointing out the truth, and that’s something I love about you. The way you look at the world doesn’t allow for any bullshit or self-delusion. But I think maybe that also means you don’t have much room for hope. That’s what you have me for. To balance out the equation.”

  They ate and drank and found small things to laugh about, and it was good. Just the time together, knowing they had no responsibilities in the morning, was almost narcotic. They slowly got a little drunk together.

  And later that night, as Kell lay on their bed with one arm thrown over his head as he slept more deeply than he had in ages, Emily went to the spot where she liked to recharge her batteries. No one bothered her as she climbed the ladder attached to the inside of the hangar wall, or so much as glanced at her when the squeaking hatch at the top of it opened under her hand.

  She wrapped herself in the tatty blanket she kept here for these infrequent jaunts and sat staring at the sky above. Haven kept its lights out at night unless absolutely necessary, leaving the area almost free of light pollution and glare. The vast band of the Milky Way stretched out before her.

  No matter how practical she had to be in her daily life, the sight never ceased to fill her with an absurdly powerful sense that anything was possible. That band in the sky represented billions of stars spread across a volume of space too large for her to comprehend.

  Faced with that, their problems seemed small and petty, as if they should be easily solved by anyone willing to take the time.

  “You’re up late,” Emily said to the thin air after a few minutes of stargazing.

  “How do you do that?” Jo asked, more curious than upset. “I put fabric over my shoes so I could sneak up on you for once.”