“So how is this supposed to work?” Judith asked.
Kell was carefully labeling and arranging bottles and jars of chemicals. He paused and eyed her quizzically. “How much microbiology background do you have?”
Judith gave him a level stare. “I’m a doctor. Assume I’m not an idiot.”
“Okay,” Kell said. “Generally, it’s pretty simple. The Chimera centered around the brain and in the upper spine is differentiated from the Chimera in the rest of the body. In the brain, it forms into epithelial tissue, with very specific kinds of protein filaments creating cell adhesion. The Chimera in the rest of the body tends to be more sparsely spread out in connective tissue, since it aids existing systems and doesn’t need to be as dense or complex.”
Judith, usually reserved, began to nod animatedly. “So you’ve worked out a way to break the bonds between the proteins without affecting the Chimera in the rest of the body.”
“Yes,” Kell agreed. “It’s really the only way we can be sure we aren’t going to kill people whose bodies have incorporated Chimera more heavily than others.”
She nodded. “Mason. You’re thinking of Mason, aren’t you?”
Kell hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, his tissue samples gave me the idea to look at cellular connections as an option. His skin would fall apart if the Chimera in it were killed off.”
Judith waved a hand at an open laptop nearby, which displayed neat rows of notes. “What’s going to stop the epithelial Chimera in the brain from reorganizing and forming new connections?” Then she grinned. “Oh, that’s brilliant. It won’t matter if they connect back up, because the original structure will be lost.”
“Exactly!” Kell nearly shouted. “Right now the brains of everyone infected with Chimera are filled with very delicate, very specific structures made of the stuff that mimic brain function. Disrupting those connections will destroy those functions. Not that it will matter, because we’re not leaving anything to chance. The delivery system I plan to use is Chimera itself. A stripped-down version that will target the specific proteins in the brain-related Chimera and dissolve it.”
Judith frowned. “That sounds incredibly dangerous.”
“I know,” Kell said. “John tried making a cure early on using the same idea, and it didn’t go well. But we tried this already and it worked on him. It didn’t kill him or produce any obvious ill effects. I think it’s our best bet. Not that we’re going to be stupid about it. We’ll test the hell out of it.”
Judith pulled the laptop closer and began scrolling through the data. “If you want me to be useful, you’re going to have to teach me things as we go along. This isn’t really my wheelhouse. I know the basics, but I was never a researcher.”
They spent the next hour figuring out what Judith did and didn’t know. While she had never done the sort of work Kell was expert in, neither had he been a teacher. He found he liked it, and she was a quick learner. Her grounding in general microbiology was solid, and it gave her the foundation to build concepts on.
The sound of someone unlocking the rolling door caught both of them by surprise. Kell was deep into explaining how stripping DNA from Chimera worked and hadn’t heard anyone outside. Transcription factors and downregulation would have to wait.
Greg ducked under the rising door and flipped open the latch that would allow it move past waist-height. “We got a full boat for you,” he said, waving the van back into the bay door.
“Please be careful,” Kell pleaded. “It would be really hard to replace any of this stuff.”
Greg raised a closed fist, stopping the van a safe distance from any surfaces. “No worries, doc. Where do you want ‘em?”
Kell smiled. “We have a freezer. We’ll put them in there and defrost as needed.”
“You’re going to just, like, make zombie pops out of them?” Greg asked slowly.
“Sure,” Kell said. “The freezer runs on propane. It’s an absorption fridge. It doesn’t even draw power from this place, except to light the flame.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Greg said. “I mean, will that even work? I thought they hibernated in the winter like bears. A seasonal thing.”
Kell shook his head. “They sort of shut down when it’s cold enough. And we won’t be wrestling them in there, either. Will got his people looking for the right kind of fire extinguishers, which have a shelf life of about a decade. We’ll chill them down inside the van to make them start to shut down and easier to handle, then we’ll stack them in the freezer until I need them. Simple.”
Greg stared at Kell as if he’d just sprouted a unicorn horn and began chanting in Aramaic. “You know, man, you should have hosted one of those science shows for kids. You’d have been great at it.”
It took a long time, but no one was in a rush. They closed the van off but for a cracked window, the gap taped almost shut. They could fit the nozzle of their extinguishers in. Kell had emptied four and was on his fifth when Allen leaned his face against the glass and looked in.
“You sure this will work?”
“It should,” Kell said. “Fun fact: if you put a cloth bag over the end of one of these, the carbon dioxide will collect into dry ice. Which is a cryogenic solid, so pretty damn cold. Even if that doesn’t do it, we should still be good. These things might breathe through their pores, but they still need a certain level of oxygen. We’re pouring a lot of gas in there that isn’t oxygen, so it should help push them into hibernating.”
Allen gave him a frank look. “I’m not reassured by all the times you just said something
should
work in there.”
Kell shrugged. “I’m a biologist. You want definitive answers, go find a mathematician.”
It did work, however many doubts Allen might have had. The group was aided by the fact that they were many and could move each zombie individually. The carbon dioxide bath did its job remarkably well. Even if the short time didn’t allow for a full transit into hibernation, a handcuffed zombie zonked into idiocy by low oxygen and temperature was magnitudes easier to manage than the normal kind.
Kell hustled the last one into the freezer himself, where Emily helped him secure it into the restraints on the wall. Greg held the door for them, a disgusted look on his face.
“What?” Kell said. “Feel sorry for them?”
“Not really. I just can’t stop thinking what it’d be like, chained up in a fridge that way.”
“Better in there than out here where they can hurt people,” Kell said. “Once we thaw them out, they won’t last long. They’re going to be our test subjects, after all.”
They took a break for lunch. Years before, Kell would have marveled at the thought of anyone having an appetite after handling grisly walking corpses. Now people just washed their hands and dug out a snack.
Emily wolfed down a bowl of the stew cooked nearly everywhere in Haven and hopped up. She shot Kell a wink and rushed out the door.
“Where’s she going in such a hurry?” Mike asked as he joined everyone at the picnic table which served as their communal eating space.
“Picking up Mason,” Kell said, and studied the boy. Young man, technically, but he had definitive signs of boyhood still on him. Not in physical maturity, though he was still in that last desperate phase of late teen-hood during which the body broadened and thickened into its permanent shape. It was an immaturity of character, and obvious. He carried himself casually, without the wary set of shoulders and gait one developed in a world as dangerous as this. The way his eyes darted to Jo spoke volumes.
When Randy appeared right after him, Kell might have been seeing double. The boys were friends—and judging from the way Randy also stole glances, romantic rivals—but the mannerisms and even how they spoke made them seem more like brothers than Greg and Allen, who actually were.
“Emily told me you did well today,” Kell said to Jo as she pointedly ignored both boys. “Kicked serious ass was how she put it.”
The girl’s mouth quirked at the edge. Kell didn’t fight his own smile. “Hearing myself say that out loud makes me realize how old I sound. But seriously, you must have done pretty well. Emily doesn’t praise without good reason.”
“Not as well as I wanted,” she said, shaking back the cuff of her shirt to reveal a wide, shallow gash running up her forearm. “One of them left me a present.”
Judith, who was finishing up her own bowl of stew, leaned in with interest. “I can clean that up when you’re done eating.”
“Would you mind if I tried?” Kell asked Jo. “My field medicine is rusty and I’d like the practice. Judith is welcome to watch and make sure I don’t screw it up, of course.”
Judith gave him a curious look, but Jo simply shrugged and said, “Sure.”
When the three of them were alone in the lab a short time later, Kell did take out the medical kit Judith stored there. “I wanted to talk to you privately,” he admitted. “Emily also said you’ve been trying to avoid those boys.”
Jo reddened as only teenage girls can. “Yeah. They’re on my last nerve.”
“Well,” Kell said as he carefully irrigated the wound, “why don’t you work here with us? It’s not like we’ll be letting them in here to hang out while we work, and Mason has mentioned before that you’re pretty smart.”
“Yeah?” Jo said with a lopsided grin. “Could I still go out with Emily? I know she’s supposed to do some work scouting and stuff.”
“I don’t see why not,” Kell replied. “I’m just saying if you want to help out in here, it’s somewhere you can use to get away. If Emily doesn’t mind having you with her, I’m not going to keep you here.”
“Thanks, man. That would be awesome.”
They chatted about Kell’s work and what sorts of things Jo would be doing in the lab if or when she spent time there. When he finished the job and Judith pronounced it passable, Jo flashed her teeth as she left. It was, he thought, the first time he’d seen her look happy. Giving people options out of stressful situations could do miraculous things for their outlook.
“You should have just let her beat them senseless,” Judith said. “It would drive the lesson home more effectively.”
Kell nodded as he began packing up the med kit. “She’s a good kid, and I think she’s trying hard not to make the situation worse. I’m with you, though I think it would drive the boys off. Embarrassment does weird things to judgment in boys that age.”
Judith stared at the door Jo had exited through. “They’re night and day. She looks for responsibility. For things to learn. I stopped counting the hours she spent learning to fight from Mason after the first hundred. It won’t help things to separate them, though. I’m not ignorant of teenage boys. I had three of them.”
The last word cut off in a sadly familiar way. It was the cessation of speech when a word or phrase escaped without thought, dredging up old loss and opening old wounds. Nearly everyone had a past full of pain and suffering, and those moments were common.
“I didn’t know that,” Kell said gently. “You don’t talk about yourself. Or even talk all that much.”
Judith nodded tersely. “I used to, before all this happened. I was a completely different person back then. Bubbly, you might say. I’d gab with the mailman for hours. When it happened, I lost everyone in a single day. It closes you off. Do you understand?”
“It feels like your emotions get cauterized,” Kell said. “You still care, but showing it means breaking the scars open, and you don’t know if they’d ever stop bleeding.”
“You do understand,” Judith said. “Well, my boys were fourteen, seventeen, and nineteen. My husband had to have a come-to-Jesus moment with them when it came to girls. I imagine you’ll have to do the same, or Jo will leave them bloody.”
Now Kell broke into a full grin. “Me? Oh, no. I don’t think they’d listen to me. Emily will be back any time now. Hal and Mason will be with her. I think it’s time Mason whipped Mike and Randy into shape, don’t you?”
“This is not fucking rehab!” Mike shouted from several body lengths behind Mason. Randy was so far back his labored breathing drifted forward as little more than a whisper.
Two weeks had done much to restore the function of his leg and hip. The bullet wounds were healing nicely thanks to the Chimera in his system, though he was nowhere near peak and it still hurt like hell. That pain was key; you had to stretch the tissue to keep it from scarring too tightly. Otherwise it would take years to stretch back out. If ever.
He slowed to a stop and leaned one hand against the massive pile of firewood a thousand yards north of the hangar. The clearing was perfectly free of trees, though their stumps joined in with wild brush and tall grass to make a decent obstacle course. In a moment of impulsiveness, Mason decided to get a better view and scrambled haltingly up the stacked wood.
Mike stumbled to a halt just as Mason was settling into place, bent over double with hands on his knees and taking deep, ragged breaths. He tried to say something, then waved a hand and gave it up as a bad job.
Haven rose up in the distance. It had been called, in seriousness and irony, a city on a hill. In a literal sense it was true; the original neighborhood forming its core was situated on a rolling cluster of hills. The vast expansions spread out mostly to the east, devouring other neighborhoods. When he’d left years before, the expansions had barely begun. Certainly there were no steel walls stretching so far into the distance he couldn’t see them end.
And the buildings! Some houses had taken too much damage to be livable over the course of too many battles to count and one full-on war. Their lots had been cleared and David, the master builder for the entire community, had used his expertise to make good use of the space. The gravestones of those lost homes were solid blocks of stone and concrete rising four and five stories into the air.
Small water towers dotted the hills, obviously homemade but well-maintained. Though Haven was distant, its sheer size and lack of obscuring trees made the changes clear. The buffer surrounding the place stretched black before the wall, a barrier seemingly made of strings pulled taut between stout posts. He knew they were old power lines harvested from the surrounding town. Haven’s power lines were nearly invisible; they ran from house to house as needed.
When he left, the place held hundreds. Now it was home to thousands.
Randy joined them, picking his way slowly through the last dozen yards of stumps with no pretense of running. He scowled at Mason. “You were shot like three weeks ago. How is it even possible you can limp faster than we can run?”
“Practice,” Mason said, then pushed himself off the precarious firewood shelf. The landing was harder than he’d have liked and sent a lancing bolt of fire from his hip to his toes. He grunted.
“You were a soldier,” Mike said, finally catching his breath. “I get why you’d push yourself. But why do
we
need to?”
The question was earnest, which by itself would have pushed Mason to answer calmly. But the thick undertone of petulance beneath pushed the dangerous button in his head. The one soldiers under him whose unwillingness to do the work—and thus risk lives—had pushed from time to time.
“Have you two idiots not been paying attention for the last half decade?” The words slithered from his mouth far more coldly than intended, and with a flash of realization he knew where it came from. Back in Iowa it had been easy to write off the facts. His constant back and forth to the compound made it easy to ignore them. When he was with the boys and the rest of the group, much of his time went to training Jo, who was eager to learn.
How had he missed that Mike and Randy were utterly unprepared for the world? How had they
all
missed it? Hal and Judith knew their business, yet here before him stood two young men whose formative years should have honed them to a knife’s edge.
“What do you mean?” Mike said, his tone rebellious. Randy, to his credit, stood back looking mildly afraid. “Paying attention to what? We can shoot. We can fight, too, even if we’re not as good as Jo.”
Mason wanted to slap the defensive, petulant tone right out of the kid’s mouth. Instead he turned toward the woods behind the rise and fall of the mountains of wood and motioned for them to follow. This time he moved at a comfortable walk, or as close to comfortable as any movement could be with his injuries.
They followed. He could almost feel the discomfort radiate from the boys as they moved from open ground and into the dense, untamed trees beyond.
“Where are we going?” Randy asked. “This isn’t safe. We don’t have any armor or weapons.”
Mason shook his head. “You really are clueless.” This elicited frustrated noises but neither boy was stupid enough to say anything else. They might grumble, but they knew what he was capable of. Fear was a powerful motivator, which was why Mason was so caught off guard by the fact these two had somehow managed to lose theirs when it came to the dangers of the world.
He came to a halt two hundred yards inside the treeline, turned, and rested a hand on the knife at his waist. “You’ll notice I’m not a fucking moron who goes around unarmed,” he said in a low voice, barely loud enough to carry the body length between them.
“What are we doing out here?” Randy asked, fear etching cracks in his loud voice.
Mason shook his head again, an involuntary response to the situation. Just as softly as before, he said, “We wait.”
It didn’t take long. They heard the zombies coming long before the shambling dead could be seen.
“You really should have kept your voice down,” Mason said conversationally. “And while we’re on the subject of things you should have done, regular exercise to keep your cardio up is on the list.”
He leaned against a tree and watched the boys react. Every line of their bodies screamed at him that they were on the edge of panic. The only thing keeping them from running, in Mason’s estimation, was an equally powerful fear of the other seeing the weakness. It was why one bad seed in a group of friends could incite the worst sort of behavior. The genesis of peer pressure was found in the bedrock need for approval.
“We need weapons,” Mike hissed. “They’re getting close!” His eyes darted to Mason’s knife.
Mason shook a finger. “No, sir. You can try to take it, but I promise you’ll be jerking off with the other hand for a few months if you do.”
The moment Mason knew was coming happened then, when Mike and Randy realized he wasn’t going to jump in and take command. The balancing act failed, a the razor’s edge no longer straddled, and both of them tensed to bolt away.
“If you run, don’t bother stopping at the hangar,” Mason said. “Go on to Haven and stay there. I’ll let Will Price know you’re not to be trusted in a fight, but I’m sure there’s enough farm work to be done that they can spare you.”
The first zombie burst into view a dozen steps away. It was especially grisly, missing half its face in a jagged white crater from forehead to upper lip. Its remaining eye locked on the group as it rushed toward them.
Randy dropped low and snatched a branch from the debris-strewn ground, coming up in an awkward arc to smash the wood across the zombie’s face. The branch was brittle, however, shattering into splinters on impact and leaving Randy holding a foot-long shard. He thought quickly and jammed the thing into the zombie’s good eye a split second later.
Meanwhile, Mike had delved for his inner caveman and grabbed a rock about twice the size of his fist. When the second zombie—the only other one Mason could see or hear—appeared around the bole of another tree, the kid didn’t throw himself into the fray. Instead he waited, letting the enemy come to him. The second zombie was in no better shape than the first, missing its right hand below the wrist, and dragging a badly broken foot in what would have been a parody of the classic Romero zombie in other circumstances.
The lame dead woman didn’t pose much of a challenge, but both boys were shaking and breathing hard when the dust settled.
“That’s what we’re doing out here,” Mason said. “It’s partly on me and Hal and Judith for not giving you the attention you obviously needed. We protected you too much. Hid you behind us. Hell, hid you away where no zombies were likely to show up. You got soft. Distracted. That ends today.”
“You were gonna let those things kill us,” Mike gasped. “You just stood there.”
“I just stood here,” Mason agreed. “And look! You’re still alive. Unharmed, too, I’d like to point out.” He pointed to the now fully dead bodies on the ground between them. “Right here, right now, you get to pick whether you’re men or boys. Either you dedicate yourself to being men and fighting your own battles, or you get the hell out of our lives. Because once Kell is ready, we’ll be riding into danger you can’t even imagine. I won’t have you distracted and acting like children.”
Randy wiped sweat from his forehead. “We’ll be ready. Or I will, anyway.”
“Good,” Mason said. “Speaking for someone else is stupid unless you trust them with your life. If you do, you better be right. While I’m thinking about it, try to remember that speaking at all is a bad idea if there are zombies around and you’re doing it loudly. You guys have to get your shit together. I’ve seen five year old kids learn that one.”
He gave them a few seconds to gather themselves. “One other thing, and this is a deal breaker. You agree, or you’re out on your ass.”
Once their attention was firmly on him, Mason let his body tighten and hardened his voice. “As of this moment, you treat Jo like your sister. Normally I’d let her teach you a lesson, but there’s a practical reason why not; we need bodies. When we set out, I’d like to do it with you. But if Jo has to crack your heads, I don’t know I’ll be able to trust that you won’t hold a grudge and do something suicidally stupid later.”
“You can’t expect—” Randy said angrily.
Mason cut him off. “I absolutely
can
fucking expect you to obey. Jo made herself clear to both of you how things are. I shouldn’t need to have this conversation with either of you. You act like men and respect it, or we’re done. Period. If the fact that we’re on the verge of curing this plague doesn’t make you understand how very fucking little your crush means, how pointless this sad contest between the two of you is, then nothing will. I’m not offering an array of options here, kids. This is a yes/no proposition, and once we leave these woods you either agree or you don’t. What’s it going to be?”
Mike stared holes into Mason, who hadn’t flinched under enemy fire and felt no urge to do so beneath the gaze of a hormonal teenager. Randy seemed more thoughtful, which was a good sign. Letting themselves slack off by way of distraction wasn’t a mortal sin, but it also wasn’t a weakness Mason could allow on the team.
“You could have just talked to us,” Mike finally said. “You’ve been running us ragged since you got back. Instead of punishing us, you could have sat down and had a conversation.”
“That’s what this is,” Mason said, a note of sadness in his voice. “I can see you still don’t get it. I needed to know whether you could look past your own fear and shame and take in the bigger picture. I had to know if you could grasp the needs of the group and what we want to achieve and put those needs over your own wants. I don’t think you can.”
“You know what?” Mike said. “Fuck you, Mason. You were gone half the time back in Iowa, and you don’t get to judge me. You sure as hell don’t get to put me through these psychotic tests just because I might have lost focus a little. In case you haven’t noticed, I actually am a kid. And you’re an adult. If you can’t see how fucked up this is, then you need serious help.”
Mason nodded as if every word was expected. He pushed himself away from the tree and stretched his back. “You’re right, Mike. It is fucked up. You are a kid. Thing is, the world is fucked up right now. If you want to act like it isn’t and pretend everything’s the way it used to be, go to Haven. It’s big enough you might be able to manage it. Civilization is rebuilding itself, even if it has to claw for every damn inch.”
Mason took in their faces, wondering if it would be for the last time. “If you can’t understand that what we’re trying to do is bigger than us, that it’ll help make that struggle to build something new easier and keep people safe, then I don’t need you.”
And he walked away.