They were searched, though not as thoroughly as Kell would have expected. No one bothered to dig around inside his sling, for example, leaving him in possession of both his knife and garrote. He briefly hesitated when trying to decide whether to volunteer the weapons and save himself eventual punishment when they were discovered, then gave an internal shrug.
Fuck that. If he was going to take a beating for hiding weapons, he wanted to have earned it.
Their gear was stowed in the back of the SUV they were thrown in. Mason was chained prisoner-style, heavy bracelets linked to equally heavy shackles around his ankles. Kell was only shackled, a show of mercy he hadn't expected. Not that having a free hand would be especially helpful; the SUV they were loaded into was extensively modified on the inside to prevent escape.
The seats behind them were filled with two other captives from Trenton, while Mason and Kell sat just behind the driver and front passenger behind a thick wire screen. Kell was too wired; too amped up on fear from what he now understood was a completely insane idea, to even manage to sit still. Mason, on the other hand, had fallen asleep within a few minutes.
Kell sighed.
They traveled east for a long time. They weren't roads Kell knew personally, but he tracked their progress as best he could anyway. His brain cataloged information in an expanding map to make sure he could get them home again if possible. The way was surprisingly clear, both of obstructions and of zombies. Whoever his captors were, it was obvious they had expended a lot of effort making this trip go as smoothly as possible.
“How'd you hurt your arm?” asked the guard in the passenger seat, nearly causing Kell to jump in his seat.
“Sorry?” Kell asked.
The guard turned in his seat and gestured at Kell. “Your arm, I said. How'd you hurt it?”
“Uh, I tackled somebody off a motorcycle,” he said truthfully.
The guard's eyebrows rose. “Yeah? That how you ended up dying, too?”
“Y-yeah,” Kell said, hoping his stutter came across as nerves rather than fear from having to lie on the spot. “Broke a couple ribs and the shock of the fall stopped my heart, or so they told me.”
The guard shook his head. “Goddamn. Why were you knocking someone off a bike in the first place?”
Kell smirked. “Just trying to do the right thing, believe it or not.”
“Aren't we all, brother,” the guard said in an almost meditative voice. “Aren't we all.”
The conversation trailed off, the SUV falling into easy silence. Experience taught Kell many important lessons, one of which was that context was ideal. Essentially it meant that no matter what the larger circumstance, there were conditions that allowed for things like comfort and relaxation.
Kell had gotten himself captured, making him a prisoner. He was guarded by men who would not hesitate to shoot him if he appeared to be a threat. He had no guarantees of getting free and no solid evidence that he would be able to recover helpful information from his captivity.
All that being true, circumstances like the comfortable seat, the casual friendliness of the guards, and the endless rolling landscape outside made him relax. Adrenaline and fear were a booster rocket for human survival, but eventually you had to refuel.
As he had on countless childhood road trips, Kell fell asleep without realizing it was going to happen.
He woke up disoriented and in the dark. It only took a few seconds to register where he was and why he was there, but the initial confusion was strong. Only instinct kept him from saying something out loud.
The SUV had stopped. Doors were opening and prisoners being led out, Kell last among them. Sounds of crunching gravel and human voices filtered through the air. When Kell finally stepped out, he frowned at the building revealed in the moonlight. It seemed too small to be the sort of research facility he expected to find, and utterly without light or sound.
“We're camping here tonight,” one of the guards said. “We're going to have to lock you in, but at least you'll have your own beds.”
They were surprisingly professional about it, Kell thought. The guards led the prisoners—counting Kell and Mason, there were only five—into the building and turned on a battery-powered lantern. Inside were neat rows of bunk beds complete with covers and sheets. What looked like a bathroom sat at the far end.
A wire mesh gate divided the narrow entrance space from the majority of the room. Kell glanced at a nearby guard, the question on his face.
“It was a work camp,” the guard said. “Juvenile detention center. Safe as can be, don't worry about that. We'll have people watching for biters in shifts.”
“Oh, good,” Kell said, realizing as he did that he meant it. “Is it much farther from here? I never did like long car rides.”
The guard shook his head. “Can't really talk about that.” He turned and directed two other guards who were bringing supplies in.
Five minutes later, the prisoners were secured behind the mesh and stocked up with a ten gallon jug of water, a box of ration bars, and freedom from their restraints. The last guard looked back at them as he stepped through the door.
“We'll be on the roof,” he said. “If there's an emergency, just yell. Otherwise, get some sleep. We'll be heading out at first light.”
With that, he shut the door. As soon as the lock clicked, Mason was on his feet and moving in a silent prowl.
“What are you looking for?” Kell asked as Mason peered closely at the narrow slits that served as windows.
“Anything that might be useful,” Mason replied softly.
“Thanks,” Kell said. “Glad you weren't at all cryptic just then.”
One of the other prisoners, a black woman about Kell's age, sat on the bed opposite him. “What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked. “You're not from Trenton like the rest of us.”
“Oh, shit,” Kell breathed. “You guys didn't say anything to the guards, did you?”
The three prisoners shook their heads.
“Fuck those guys,” said one of the others, a young white man with an asymmetrical jawline radiating scars. “If they ask, I've known you for years. I'm not giving up anyone to the people who took us from our home.”
“Same here,” the last prisoner said. He was older—maybe even
old
, which was a rare state of being since The Fall—and tan enough to belong to any of a few dozen ethnic groups. Though those kinds of distinctions were less important when survival was the main concern, even less when being held captive.
“What are your names?” Kell asked. The old man went by Turner, and gave no indication whether it was a first or last name. The young man, little more than a kid, was Liam. The woman who still watched Kell with a measuring gaze, introduced herself as Steph.
“That's Mason,” Kell said. “My name is Kell.”
From across the room, Mason hissed. “Do you really think that's a good idea?”
Kell shot him a withering glare. “If we're going to make it through this, I'm not going to lie, Mason.”
“Lie about what?” Steph asked. “Who the
hell
are you?”
Kell sighed. “It's a really long story. What you need to know is that I'm the scientist who was visiting Trenton to see if you could help me with my research on a cure...”
He explained the situation to them as best he could. While Turner and Liam seemed surprised at the decision to get themselves caught, Steph was less impressed.
“You boys have a death wish,” she said.
“No,” Kell insisted. “I know it's insane, but if these people have been doing research then I need to get my eyes on it. To do that, they need to think I'm a test subject for as long as we can manage.” A thought struck him. “Wait...we took three of you from Trenton, and you three are here, but I haven't met you. There were only supposed to be six...”
“Yeah, about that,” Turner said, cutting in. “Victor fed you a lot of bullshit. There were more than a dozen of us, maybe more. He kept all of us separate. Most of us are from different communities, actually. Victor found us and did everything he could to make Trenton an attractive retirement spot.”
“No idea why, though,” Liam added.
Mason appeared and lowered himself onto the bed next to Kell. “Wow,” he said. “I think I owe Kincaid an apology. Victor totally had it coming.”
Steph leaned in. “Had it coming? Victor's dead?”
Kell nodded. “Leader of our group shot him.” He turned to Mason. “What are you thinking?”
Mason sighed and ran a hand over the stubble on his head. “Sounds like Victor was stocking up on half-life people,” he said, grimacing. “We really need a better name for them. Anyway, the only reason I can think of for why he'd try to gather them from other groups
and
keep them from interacting with the larger populace and each other...”
Steph frowned. “Is to make it easier for people to overlook us being gone. Jesus. He was going to trade us?”
Kell felt sick to his stomach. Horrific as it was, the facts fit in nice, straight lines.
“Yeah, looks that way,” Kell said. “Remind me to buy Kincaid a beer when we get home.”
“
If
we get home,” Mason said. “Unless they're taking us to a supermax prison, I'm pretty confident I'll be able to escape wherever we're going. I'm pretty sure I can get you out, too. But the farther we go, the harder it's going to be to make the trip home or bring backup.”
“I'll help,” Steph said. “Whatever you need.”
Kell was about to wave her off and explain that she didn't need to make such an open-ended offer for what would certainly be a dangerous situation, but Mason spoke up before Kell could even open his mouth.
“What's your skill set?” he asked. “If I'm going to plan, I need information.”
Before she could answer, Turner and Liam chimed in to offer their help as well. Mason grinned broadly as Kell mentally threw up his hands in defeat.
“I'll do anything I can to help,” Steph said. “As long as when this is all over you can promise us a safe place to live.”
Kell blinked. “You seem awfully sure we don't have bad intentions,” he said, playing devil's advocate.
She laughed, a light and pretty sound. “Man, you got yourselves caught just to see if you could help people.” She shook her head. “If I can't take that as a sign I can trust you, then I don't know what would do the trick.”
The next morning Kell's heart fell somewhat as he watched their guards refuel the vehicles from containers they removed from a locked storage building. The place had to be used on a regular basis, probably as a way station between abductions. That alone would have been enough to depress him—the thoughtful planning behind creating infrastructure to make kidnappings easier—but it wasn't the main reason.
He had hoped their trip might be nearly over, but the refueling crushed the thought flat. The economics of survival were simple but iron in that you didn't top off a vehicle with fuel if you weren't going to use most of it. It looked like a full day of driving, probably hundreds more miles.
Every mile meant less chance of getting home safely. Try as he might to get the nagging thought out of his head, it repeated in a ceaseless mantra.
They had been on the road for a few hours when the SUV braked suddenly, the seat belt across Kell's injured shoulder digging into him, pain lancing through him. He choked off a scream.
“You okay?” Mason asked from beside him. “Pop any stitches?”
Kell shook his head and felt the sudden sheen of sweat there move as he did. “No stitches left,” Kell croaked. “Just hurts. What's going on?”
The sound of doors opening caught their attention. Kell ducked his head to get a better look out the windows and saw four of the guards striding toward the front of the caravan with purpose. The angle wasn't the best for Kell, tall as he was, but with a little wiggling he managed to get a decent look.
It became clear immediately why they had stopped; there was a small herd of zombies in the road. In itself that wasn't surprising. Kell found himself wondering why it hadn't happened already. Maybe these men, whoever they were, kept a dedicated force of workers to clear roads and draw swarms away. Lots of survivors did, since it was the only way to ensure regular trade.
“No guns,” Kell said in a low voice.
Mason nodded without looking away. “I want to see this...”
The guards moved with confidence but with no trace of cockiness. Their motions were practiced and sure, but no less cautious than Kell or anyone back home would have been. The four men worked in unison, staying close enough to guard each other but with enough space between to use their weapons without hitting their friends.
Each wielded a piece of black metal about a foot and a half long, sharpened to a point at the business end. The weapons must have been kept in reserve where the prisoners couldn't see them, because Kell thought he'd have noticed miniature versions of his spear.
He saw the familiar movements of men using armored jackets to their advantage, striking zombies in the face with shielded knuckles or letting teeth gnash at thick material over forearms. Despite his own circumstances, Kell found himself feeling honest respect for the skill he saw as the guards let the zombies slowly push them back, drawing the swarm along while slowly thinning its numbers.
All told it took about fifteen minutes. There were no celebrations. No high-fives. You'd have thought the guards had done nothing more impressive than take out a load of garbage, from the reaction they had.
Then again, Kell thought, that's pretty much what they had done.
“Damn,” Mason breathed, too low to be heard by the guards at the front of the SUV. Kell looked at him quizzically.
Mason frowned. “They're real survivors,” he said. “I wanted to get a feel for them in a fight. They're good.”
Kell bobbed his head in agreement. “How much does that change things?”
“Not a lot,” Mason admitted. “I plan for worst-case scenarios, but I was hoping they'd be a less capable. Like all those people in the UAS who came out of the bunkers barely able to hold a gun or look at a zombie without pissing themselves.”
Kell got his meaning. “Because then you might have been able to frighten or intimidate them,” he guessed.
“Yeah,” Mason replied. “Looks like whoever these people are, they're not going to flinch if it comes to a fight.”
“Damn,” Kell said. He wasn't the tactician Mason was, nor had he seen the same sheer volume of conflicts, but neither was he naïve. The math was simple, and when it came time to tally the score, it would be bloody. “If we want to get out, we're going to have to kill a lot of people, aren't we?”
Mason nodded sadly. “Probably. I'll have a better idea once we get wherever we're going. Maybe we'll be able to get enough captives on our side that we can get everyone out with minimal bloodshed. Not likely, but not impossible.”
Kell hoped so, but for once every part of him was in agreement. His conscious mind, both the emotional part and the separate, rational aspect, sang in perfect harmony. The math here was also simple:
If it meant making progress toward a cure, those deaths would be worth it. They had to be.
Kell didn't spend the rest of the trip beating his chest over the inevitable internal struggle he would face by putting the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Mostly because he fell back asleep.
He woke up when the SUV doors slammed shut—again—but only halfway, in the muzzy sort of in-between of someone who was thoroughly enjoying a nap. Mason elbowed him to full alertness, and Kell took in the sight.
Whatever he had expected of the place, it wasn't
this
.
The vehicles sat in a gravel parking lot straight out of the world that used to be. There wasn't a weed to be found, and the stone itself gleamed almost painfully white beneath the sun. A similarly white building loomed before them. Its exterior was uniformly clad in painted corrugated metal, broken only by a set of heavy steel doors surrounded by a dark red frame.
Off to the right side of the building stood a fence—or rather, fences. They stood as high as those back at the compound, and it took Kell a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Layers of chain link had been sandwiched together and raised on thick square timbers. A broad walkway sat between the exterior fence and the one behind it.
Past that he saw the prisoners. They could be no one else based on the number of them, and the two dozen or so in his immediate field of view worked rows of vegetables. There were no overseers barking orders, no guards watching disdainfully. Just people working. The only sign that the place was anything but a normal community were the uniforms they wore, surgical scrubs in the same shade of pale blue-green.
“Hmm,” Mason said. “They look fairly happy.”
“Yeah, they do. I guess that's something,” Kell said.
Mason grimaced. “No, it's not. Not anything good, at least. Pretty hard to push for rebellion if the prisoners are happy about being prisoners.”
Kell's eyebrows shot up. “You say that like it's easy, otherwise.”
Mason gave a tiny shrug. “Won't be my first insurrection.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment. “Before they pull us out of here, give me the weapons in your sling. We can't risk you getting caught with them.”
Kell didn't argue as he once might have done. He wasn't afraid to be unarmed. Having a weapon when faced with such overwhelming odds would only be helpful if it came with launch codes. The knife and garrote might be of use in Mason's hands, given that he at least had two functional ones.
In short order they were removed from the SUV and escorted through the thick front doors. The interior was as neat and clean as the exterior, though with more signs of use. Beyond the small foyer lay tight networks of hallways branching off in several directions. Kell got barely a glance at them before being herded down the hall farthest left.
Kell was ushered into a small room, alone. As the door closed he expected the sunlight from the hallway—piped in through numerous but thin skylights—would vanish. Here he was surprised again. A dim tube of light hung from the ceiling, looping back on itself and vanishing into the tile overhead again. Kell stared at what appeared to be a faintly glowing rope for a solid minute until he realized it was a section of fiber optic cable.
The room wasn't bare, but it was sparse. A chair sat in one corner, a spindly wooden thing Kell suspected had never been meant to support men tall enough to smack their heads on door frames. He lowered himself to the ground instead; careful not to jostle his arm as he did so.
No sooner had he leaned against the wall than someone knocked politely on the door. When the handle didn't turn, Kell bemusedly realized the jailer on the other side was actually waiting for permission to enter.
Shaking his head, Kell said, “Come in.”
An older man entered the room, a messenger bag slung across his hip and a folding chair in his hands. The pale light gleamed on his bald pate and splintered across the thin fringe running around his head in what Kell's father had called an 'old guy donut' hairstyle. He was average in every way, with pale skin that hung a little too loosely, something Kell knew came from the rapid weight loss heavier people went through after the end of the world. The skin was stretched, and that was that. It didn't have anywhere to go, without surgery.
“Hello,” the man said with a curious tilt to his head. “They told me you had a shoulder injury, but is there something wrong with your back or legs?”
Kell blinked. “Uh, no. Just my collarbone. Why?”
“You're not using the chair,” the man said, pointing.
Kell smiled, then worked himself to his feet. He took a small measure of satisfaction as the smaller man grew visibly nervous when Kell unfolded to his full height. Kell gestured at himself. “I figured it would be splinters if I put all my weight on it...” he let the sentence trail, his tone of voice the unused and unique blend people once used on public officials and people in the service industry every day of their lives.
It was one of those things most people knew how to do, a way of modulating your words to get a particular response. In this case it was an implied question, and the smaller man did not disappoint.
“Ah, sorry, my name is Bruce,” he said, putting out his right hand.
Kell glanced at it and shook it with his left, eliciting an embarrassed smile from Bruce. “I'm Kevin,” Kell said, using the name he and Mason had agreed upon.
“And what's your last name, Kevin?” Bruce asked as he removed a clipboard, a pen, and a small LED lantern from the messenger bag. Kell gave him time to set up the chair and get comfortable, then met Bruce's eyes.
“Just Kevin,” Kell said, keeping his voice neutral. “I'm not inclined to be cooperative with people who took me prisoner. You seem like a decent enough guy, but you work for whoever they are.”
He expected Bruce to blanch but was surprised. Instead the older man nodded sadly.
“Yeah, a lot of people react that way. I wish I could say I did, but I'm pushing sixty and wasn't in good enough shape to be brave.”
Kell opened his mouth but the words died when Bruce tugged the neck of his t-shirt down to reveal the end of a twisted scar climbing his chest.
“Huh,” Kell said in a noncommittal grunt.
The inmates weren't just docile, they were actively helping.
Mason was going to
hate
this.