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

  Spend enough time as a SEAL and you developed the ability to read a situation instantly the same way an art critic could look at a painting and tell you the mood of its creator based on brush strokes. Mason knew they were looking for prisoners. It was obvious. Their vehicles carried rooftop guns, and they had the backing of Rebound, which could easily have provided rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-mounted missile launchers, or any number of other weapons.

  The blocky, heavy machine guns on the vehicles weren’t being used. Instead they picked off targets with single shots from a distance. You didn’t do that when you wanted to simply destroy. Rather than let them have the time to set up a proper camp where detaining him would be easier, Mason gave up.

  After all, the easiest way to gather information was to get yourself close to the enemy. You were way more likely to overhear something you shouldn’t when they were actively engaged in something that took most of their attention.

  Like, say, taking out a small village full of enemies.

  He had stopped at the warning shot some marksman put into the ground in front of him. He went to his knees, put hands behind his head, and waited.

  Mason wore his usual sparring attire, which also happened to be his everyday clothes. Learning to fight meant practicing as you were at any given time. If you couldn’t fight wearing regular clothes, you couldn’t fight at all.

  Heavy boots, loose BDU cargo pants in black, and a light gray t-shirt. He briefly wondered what the attackers would think of that. It was easy to underestimate an unarmed man, especially when you had a weapon and armor.

  Granted, Mason was currently zip-cuffed to a steering wheel, which made him pretty easy to underestimate.

  “Any chance I could get a drink of water?” he asked the youngish guy tasked with guarding him. The kid was in his early twenties and wore the same black clothing and armor as the other attackers, but without the same predatory comfort. Not that the kid lacked the hard-eyed gaze of a practiced survivor. Oh, no. He had that look. He clearly wasn’t a soldier. The bearing was all wrong, his reactions grown from bald-faced terror and having to kill to live rather than the regimented practice soldiers went through.

  The kid slid his restless eyes, always scanning for danger, across Mason. “No.”

  “It’s just that I was working out when this happened…”

  The kid was certainly a survivor. His discipline was of the reptile-brain variety, tuned to make him aware of obvious threats. There was no subtlety to it, none of the self-control needed to mask his instinctive responses. Mason wasn’t sure if training made him good at reading them, or if some natural aptitude was what helped him become an effective soldier, but it was almost as natural as his glance at the battlefield.

  Mason listened and watched. The kid definitely wasn’t going to let anything slip by him, but Mason saw the twitch of frustration when he had continued to speak after being refused water. Every instructor he’d ever trained under in the service taught him not just to recognize and exploit weaknesses, but to understand and utilize his own strengths.

  Just so happened Mason’s strength was exploiting weakness.

  He heard snippets of conversation between the men in charge as they discussed the attack. He read intent in the body language of the soldiers laid out in a broad semicircle as they fired on the compound. Mason’s ears perked up when, between thundering reports, someone asked if the other one had been spotted. The tall, black bad guy.

  It was maybe twenty minutes from when he’d been cuffed to the wheel, but Mason had heard enough to satisfy his curiosity.

  “Hey, kid,” he said, pitching his voice low. Conspiratorial, a little rough, a dash of desperation. “Look, I ask you something.”

  The kid’s restless eyes finally stopped and he regarded Mason with outright contempt. “Yeah? Ask me. I’m not moving from this spot.”

  Mason shrugged, the motion shaking his wrists where they were bound to the bottom left quarter of the wheel. “Was it your mom or your sister you had to kill?”

  Mason’s brain didn’t work things out the way Kell’s did. While he had plenty of mental power, a lot of education, and enough practical experience to fill several eventful and terrifying lifetimes, he rarely laid out the steps. It was more a sort of guided intuition backed by statistical likelihood.

  The kid was young enough he’d probably lived at home or close to it when The Fall came. One of the most common stories told by people needing to unburden their guilt was how they had to ace a family member. More people than not had to, so it was a safe bet.

  The difference between him and the kid, aside from the better part of two decades, was that Mason was aiming his shot based on careful observation. He was taking advantage of a reaction.

  The kid? He just reacted. No thought needed, no control possible. To his credit, Mason’s jab at his emotional button didn’t elicit a rage-fueled reaction. The kid didn’t jump forward to defend the dead sibling or parent. He didn’t have to.

  Right-handed people lead with their right foot almost all the time. Anger and fear will make you do one of two things depending on whether you’re timid or fierce.

  You attack, or you run. In the kid’s case his body reacted to the impulse to attack. He didn’t actually do it, but all Mason needed was the instinctive betrayal that caused him to take that half step forward.

  All at once, things happened. Mason lunged with his entire body, hooking his left leg behind the kid’s right knee. He pulled hard, bracing his outstretched frame with his bent right knee, and sort of flexed himself up and back toward the seat.

  The kid stumbled forward. Mason wrapped his legs around the kid and drew him against the open door like a spider reeling in its prey. The assault rifle was useless now, jammed between them and pointing vaguely off to the side.

  People rarely thought about legs and feet when it came to combat. Unless the guy in front of you was dancing around like Van Damme, the brain had a way of ignoring them. Mason used the moment of startled confusion to draw the knife from his guard’s belt, which was easy enough since they were pressed belly-to-belly, and reversed it in a smooth motion.

  He slid the blade between wheel and cuffs, and rather than saw away, he simply turned it. The cuffs broke immediately. Not his first rodeo.

  The kid’s eyes went wide as Mason’s face turned scarlet. He knew that look; the kid was wondering why the guy in front of him was covered in blood all of a sudden. Then the pain hit, the line of hot agony across the slashed throat finally recognized for what it was.

  Adding insult to injury, Mason picked the kid’s pocket with his free left hand while he brought the knife down and cut the strap holding the rifle in place.

  All of this happened in fifteen seconds.

  The keys Mason grabbed looked like they belonged to this car, but he clicked the fob just to make sure. The door locks cycled. Mason slipped the key in the ignition, turned it, and watched as several soldiers nearby glanced over in surprise. He took that opportunity to fire the assault rifle at them, sending three of them dive away.

  Throwing himself into the driver’s seat, he yanked the door closed and put the armored SUV into gear. The prone shooters around him were just starting to react to his gunfire, but not fast enough. The part of Mason that felt pity, remorse, and sympathy shut off completely. He compartmentalized his compassion from what the rest of him was doing. The modified SUV was heavy enough that he barely felt it when he ran over the handful of men.

  Physically, that is. Mentally he didn’t feel it at all.

  He could have done a lot more damage, had he been willing to take a larger risk and stick around. He’d liked this place, the time he had spent with the people there some of the best he could remember. In a life spent silently invading and often escaping remote locales, it was a spot of surprising stability and calm.

  It was full of good people. That confined section of his brain wanted him to stay and paint the truck red with blood, but he ignored it, too.

&n
bsp; Having thinned the herd somewhat, he drove for freedom. The armor held up well, and his rampage created enough of a distraction that no one was currently shooting at the compound. Hopefully it would allow more people to get away clean.

  He made two stops on his way to the rendezvous. The first was only a mile on the other side of the destroyed home behind him, a small cache whose contents were checked and replaced regularly. It was a matter of twenty seconds to stop, scoop up the hidden bag, and get moving once more.

  The second was more involved. It required travel off the main road for a quarter mile, driving through an overhang of willow branches utterly concealing a long, winding driveway, and unlocking a cattle gate. Mason parked and took off at a run around the house, making his way to the large RV hidden in the grove of trees beyond.

  People spilled from the RV at his approach. They knew something was wrong from the very fact that he had come. Mason had a regular schedule for checking in, and today wasn’t on it.

  “We got hit,” he said simply. “Hard. I don’t think we’re going back.”

  The leader of this group, a huge older man named Hal, stroked a beard worthy of any fantasy wizard. “What’s the play, kid?”

  Mason smiled, the expression stretching the scars crisscrossing his face. These people had saved his life after he had lived through a suicidal run against a pack of zombies. Granted, they’d hit him with their RV first, but he’d been naked and covered in blood at the time. Hard to blame them.

  “You realize I’m forty, right?” Mason said. “I haven’t been a kid in a long time.”

  Hal harrumphed. “I was kicking the shit out of skinheads at the county lockup before you were born. You’re a goddamn kid if I say you are.”

  “What is the play, Mason?” asked Judith, a handsome woman with a husky voice, the group’s doctor. “Are we keeping watch?”

  Mason hesitated, glancing at the others.

  A pair of young men, Mike and Randy, who had been just boys when he met them. A woman of an age with them named Jo, who was potentially a better fighter than Mason himself. Two black men about Mason’s age, brothers, quiet and serious and utterly reliable. Greg and Allen might not talk much, but when they said they’d do a thing, you no longer had to think about it. It might as well be done.

  Mason closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again. “I don’t want to ask it, but I’d like two teams.” The group didn’t so much as blink at this. They split up often enough, but Mason always hated asking. They were a family. “We’re meeting at the rendezvous. I still have plenty of time to get there, but I want to move as fast as possible. There are bound to be casualties.”

  “I’ll go with you, then,” Judith said. Mason shook his head.

  “Much as I want you there, these guys are doing the more dangerous job. We can’t risk losing anyone. Without the supplies, the people meeting at the bunker don’t have a chance.”

  Judith frowned, but agreed. Mason turned to the others.

  “I need one team on supply duty. We’ll need every ounce of fuel brought to the bunker, every crumb of food you can find, everything we might need. You know the priorities.”

  “I’ll do that,” Hal said. “Me, Jo, and the boys.”

  Allen, the older of the two brothers, scratched his chin. “You want us to watch the compound, right? See what the hitters do?”

  Mason raised a hand and tilted it back and forth. “Sort of. I mean, yeah, but mostly stay back and help anyone who got away get to safety. They’ll think they’re on their own. Make sure they remember who you are. None of you visit much.”

  He swept his gaze across them again, and felt the repressed compassion rise up. He had missed these people more than words could express.

  “Most of all, stay safe. No risks you can avoid. I want all of you there when we pack it in and leave this shitty, flat state.”

  The bunker came into view hours later. He’d taken longer than intended with his crew, helping them plan and catching up. He assured them that no one would leave the bunker without them, unless all hell broke loose. Even then there were backup locations to meet at.

  To his surprise, Kell sat alone in the middle of the street. Mason wasn’t sure how long it had actually been, but the guy looked absolutely wrecked. There was no sign Kell noticed him pull up, so he was cautious when approaching on foot.

  “Kell? You okay, man?”

  Looking up at Mason, it was hard to tell. The guy had been through more than most, and it was obvious something was wrong. “What is it?”

  Kell laughed, a half-snoring, half-sobbing mess. “John died. Took a bullet to a lung. Had a rib sawing into it, from what I can tell.”

  Mason felt like someone hit him in the heart. One half of the world’s expertise in Chimera, the plague, whatever you called it. Gone. Just like that. “Jesus, man, I’m sorry.”

  The other man laughed again, running a hand over his head. “No, you don’t get it. I mean, yes, thank you. It hurts so fucking bad to lose John, but what I mean is he’s dead.”

  It took him a few seconds to figure out that no, Kell wasn’t having a break with reality. Mason just hadn’t grasped the contextual importance of the words. “Wait, you mean…?”

  “Yeah,” Kell said. “Apparently our last trial three days ago was a success. We created a cure.”

  Kell

  The bus showed up not long after Mason.

  “You’re alive,” Kell said, rushing toward Emily. He swallowed her in a bear hug, doing the same for Andrea and her kids.

  “Yeah, thanks to Andrea. We almost ran into a herd in the road. Had to lay low for a while.” Emily’s mouth tightened. “Don’t know how many more made it out. Laura…”

  He didn’t need to hear it. The awful truth was obvious. “Damn.” He tried to say something else, anything to convey the grief, but his throat almost closed completely.

  Emily put a hand on his chest. “I know. I’m sorry. She went out like a warrior, though. Probably saved a lot of lives.”

  “Of course she did,” Kell said with a half-chuckle. “Laura couldn’t let herself die like some normal person.”

  They moved everyone into the bunker and took stock of the situation. At one point the place had been home to John and a collection of other researchers. They’d left zombies inside as a sort of security measure when moving John to the house that would become their compound. Some time later they decided that a highly defensible, hidden fortress might come in handy, so the group cleaned it out in a post-apocalyptic version of a community barn-raising.

  They’d even let Mason work on the entrance to make it impossible to get inside without knowing exactly what the trick was.

  Supplies were handed out and places to sleep assigned. Andrea took charge of the administration; she knew Kell, Emily, and Mason would want to sit down for a strategy session.

  “How are we on power?” Emily asked as Kell joined them in the small rec room, one of the few spaces in the bunker without someone tucked in a corner to sleep.

  He tossed a bag of dried meat onto the tiny card table and put the pitcher of water he’d been carrying next to the food. “We’re fine. We took a lot of stuff from here, but there were a bunch of redundancies. So long as we’re not firing up any equipment, we’ll have lights.”

  Kell rubbed his face, trying to wake himself up a little. “Okay. I was doing what Emily ordered, getting away with John. I didn’t see much on my way out. Was it Rebound?”

  Emily shrugged. “Didn’t see much more than you, but that’s my guess.”

  “It was,” Mason said. “They didn’t say the name, but I’m convinced. I let them capture me.”

  Kell gaped at him. “Oh, is that all? Just a little stint as a prisoner? Easy as pie to get away, I’m sure.”

  Mason grinned. “These are skills I’m trying to pass on, young padawan. Besides, it wasn’t as spectacular as it sounds.”

  “It never is,” Kell replied. “What’s our next move? Do we hit back? Move on? How l
ong do we hang around here and hope there’s not some record of this place that Rebound dug up?”

  Kell heard the anxiety in his own voice, but didn’t care. During the months of training with Mason every day for their attempt to infiltrate Rebound territory, he’d come to recognize the scarred man as a natural leader. Their areas of expertise didn’t overlap very much, and Kell needed someone to give him a direction to point at that moment. Something to aim at.

  Emily cleared her throat. “I don’t think we can go with the original plan. If they knew where to find us, they have to know we’re the ones who hit their research facilities last summer.”

  Mason took a bite out of a piece of jerky. “They knew what I looked like, and Kell. Not sure about anyone else, but that makes getting into Rebound itself next to impossible.” He chewed for a few seconds. “But since Kell says he has a cure, I think the situation has changed a little.”

  Rather than look excited or happy about this news, Emily reached over and punched Kell in the shoulder. Really hard.

  “What the shit?” Kell yelped, rubbing his arm.

  Emily pointed a finger at his face. “You didn’t think it was important to mention this to me? Your…girlfriend or whatever we’re calling it?”

  Kell put up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, jeez. There was a lot on my mind. And it’s not like I can start cranking it out here and now. It’s going to take a lot of work to rebuild our data. I didn’t get to grab it on my way out.”

  Mason reached into his pocket and pulled out a thumb drive, put it on the table between them. “I grabbed the daily backup from the cache on my way in. It was updated yesterday, so it should have everything you need. I’d have mentioned it before, but like you said, a lot going on.”