While his clavicle healed faster than it would have before Chimera, the process was still slower than Kell would have liked. This struck him as especially relevant given his position two nights later, which involved a low hill, a pair of binoculars, and a bad feeling he was going to have to fight one-handed.
The marauder camp was not lazy or stupid in its design. Kell had run into a few of those in the first year or so. In a world where the night came teeming with the hungry dead, the careless and idiotic were sifted by natural selection into one of two categories.
Basically, either you died or you joined up with people smart enough to live.
The camp wasn't ideal for its type, but it did the job. Like most marauders, the concern was obviously for zombies rather than living enemies. The vehicles were circled up like wagon trains, armored skirts made from scrounged materials preventing the dead from moving beneath them. Though the trucks and vans sat with bumpers touching, masses of what Kell guessed were supplies filled the empty spaces around them to keep zombies from an easy climb across.
The formation might have been useful against Kell's people had they posted more than two guards. The sight of people lounging atop their transportation in lawn chairs had become so common it was almost iconic. Much like evolution, the same solution to the same problem appeared simultaneously in many places.
He smiled to himself at the thought. His professors would have taken him to task over the comparison. Not that it was a bad one, though. Lawn chairs were common; high places gave good vantage points and required fewer personnel. Lots of people made those observations and used them accordingly. Evolution wasn't much different; when the environment called for hooves, hooves happened.
Because the camp wasn't constructed with human attacks in mind—and to be fair, Iowa wasn't exactly a population hub
before
the end civilization—it was easy for Emily to slip in close without being seen. Kell watched her move across the dark ground with such deliberate randomness that he would have thought her just another shadow if he hadn't know what to look for.
The moon was the thinnest sliver as it hid behind the clouds, casting a thin light dispersed and weakened by the overcast sky.
As Kell watched, Emily vanished behind the curve of the makeshift wall. Even knowing what was about to happen, the next ten seconds still managed to catch him off guard and make him nauseous at the same time.
The guard perched not ten feet from where Kell saw Emily last jerked suddenly. There wasn't enough light to see the thin, weighted loop of wire as it flicked out and was pulled tight around the guard's throat. All Kell could see from his vantage was the result, that being a brief and futile reflex as the guard clawed at the garrote, followed a moment later by a forward tumble off the van he had been using for his post.
A twinge of pity tugged at him as Kell watched the doomed marauder vanish into the darkness below. This was a level of cognitive dissonance Kell could live with. You could hate a marauder for what he was, despise how he chose to survive, and yet still feel bad for the pain and confusion in those last few moments of life as someone lassoed you to death with a long piece of piano wire.
The body made no sound as it fell. Emily had a partner who had approached from the other side of the camp, ready to catch the guard before he hit the tall grass.
Focused as he was on watching Emily work, Kell completely missed what happened with the other guard. Here too he could only judge by what he knew was supposed to happen, and the context of what happened in the moments following Emily's flawless execution of her part.
What should have happened: a similarly quiet killing followed by half a minute of hoping no one noticed the missing guards so the assault teams could get into position.
What actually happened: someone screamed, the garbled and wet noise loud enough to wake the dead. Or to at least let the dead, who were already nicely awakened thank you very much, know that dinner was being served.
A lot of things happened in a short time after that piercing shriek filled the night and all of them were bad. Especially for Kell.
Kell was already up and moving when sections of armor plating began to slide with ominous screeches of metal on metal. In the event things went wrong—and things went wrong often enough to justify always having a We Fucked Up plan—every able body was to converge on the camp and disable anyone they fought if possible.
Left unsaid was how rare it was to have the luxury not to kill an enemy. Kell saw the standing order as a nod to the nearly forgotten concept of optimism.
Armored windows slid open, making Kell suddenly grateful for the faces which appeared from the dark spaces behind them. He had been stupid to react without observing. Any of the groggy, confused people he was seeing could have just as easily been guns pointed at him.
Then again, his dark skin and dark gray clothing made him the same sort of moving shadow Emily had been. Even someone fully alert would have had a hard time picking him out.
Taking merciless advantage of that fact, Kell whipped the metal baton from its sheath on his belt, flipping the weapon around into a reverse grip as he closed the last few yards and lunged for the nearest open window.
Coming at it from a strongly oblique angle, the man peering out into the night only saw Kell at the last possible second, eyes widening and mouth gaping in horror as a piece of the night rushed toward him.
That, or he was just super racist and the sight of an enormous black guy bearing down on him with a metal stick was enough to have the poor, doomed bastard clutching at his metaphorical pearls.
It made no material difference, of course. Kell brought his baton down as Lee had shown him, treating it more as he would a blade rather than a blunt weapon. It was the only way to assure contact since the window was barely larger than the face Kell targeted.
The man screamed as Kell made the only move he could, slamming the baton through the window and into the face of the still-groggy marauder.
As Kell moved to pull the baton back out a few seconds later, a sharp pressure on his side caused him to turn in shock. Someone had managed to sneak up on him. Worse, they'd gotten in an attack. By sheer idiotic luck the attacker had slashed with a killing blow right into the heavily armored right lower portion of Kell's coat. It still hurt like hell since the armor was meant to allow for flexibility and didn’t provide a rigid barrier from blades.
The baton clanged down inside the window, lost to Kell for the moment. In his surprise he'd let it go, and the slick metal had still held firm inside the face of Kell's victim by suction.
He jumped back as a cold glimmer of steel arced in the night, catching the thin light enough to give warning. Kell was careful to keep his right side toward the enemy. The sight of his restrained arm had done its job and tempted the enemy to go for the obvious attack, just as Lee had planned. Kell had been less than enthusiastic about making himself an easier target, but thought as he leaped backward that he might see if he could find Lee a bottle of good bourbon.
He fumbled at his lower back, trying to find the heavy stick Lee had correctly guessed Kell would keep as a backup weapon. The thing was too big and unwieldy to be out of the way anywhere but strapped to his back, but even with the custom sheath Laura had designed for it, the damn thing moved around.
The figure trying its best to introduce Kell's blood to the air resolved in single images as he glanced from the attack to his surroundings. His full attention fell onto the attacker when his left hand finally wised up and found the thick bottom of the wooden weapon's haft.
It was a girl. She couldn't have been older than twelve.
Seeing that round face framed by the darkness stopped Kell short. There were few things capable of putting him off his game outright, and fewer still that could manage it while his blood was up in the middle of a fight.
His pause stretched on for seconds. The girl obviously possessed the strong instincts of a survivor, because she sized up the situation and struck like a viper.
Kell tried to block, but was too slow. The slap of the baton on the girl's weapon arm lacked power and coordination, only knocking the blade off course rather than pushing it away entirely. Kell's universe went red as his clumsy defense sent the blade burrowing into his injured shoulder.
Fabric and flesh parted with equal ease, which Kell seemed to feel in slow motion. The scream ripped its way out of his throat with a will of its own, no more stoppable than the blood pumping through his veins.
Pain, so much pain, and then the worst of it was over. Panting, Kell found himself flat on his back, good hand clutching his injury. He shuddered as the memory of the knife skittering across his broken bone replayed in his head.
Someone leaned over him and tried to talk, and it was Kell's attempt to make out the words that brought him fully back to himself. Someone else screamed now, the same tone of abject, horrible agony, if at a higher pitch.
“Don't try to move,” Emily said as she knelt next to him. “We'll need to take a look at this and see if she damaged the bone, but I don't feel comfortable doing it here. She cut through one of the straps holding your arm in place, so I'm going to have to immobilize it again.”
“Who is that yelling?” Kell asked, ignoring her words. “You should be helping them.”
Emily paused as she opened her field medical kit. “That's the girl who cut you. She's not my problem.”
Kell looked up at Emily, who had begun to work with mechanical efficiency. “What did you...”
“Jumped down on her from the truck you two were fighting next to. Broke her ankle for sure, and I think I broke her arm when she tried to use that pig-sticker on me.”
The howls of pain gradually wore down as Emily worked. Not, Kell suspected, from any lessening of the girl's suffering, but judging by the breaks and cracks in the voice, from sheer exhaustion. Soon they were replaced by sobs and hoarse curses.
Someone else showed up to gingerly move Kell into a sitting position with his back against the wheel of the truck. The girl lay a dozen feet from him, broken limbs bound to healthy ones by yard-long tethers. Not enough to keep an uninjured person from removing them and escaping, but too much for the damaged child to manage.
Kell clenched his teeth as Emily finished tending him, all the while listening to the pitiful sobs coming from the wounded girl. It was twisted up in a disharmonious funeral song with the sounds of the nearby marauders being killed. The commotion died down even as Emily stood and brushed her hands across her stained pants.
His attention snapped from the girl to Emily as the scout squared her shoulders and flipped the snap on her holster. The two pieces of stamped metal holding the leather strap in place made a thin, almost nonexistent sound. To Kell it might as well have been the ringing of the headsman's axe as the whetstone glided down its length.
“What are you doing?” Kell asked carefully, though he already knew the answer. As did the girl, apparently, because broken bones or not, she went utterly still and silent. It was the physical representation of the ellipse, the pause which places emphasis and meaning on what happens next. The reaction of prey as its base instincts war between fight and flight.
Hobbled and bound, one of those was no longer a choice.
Emily stepped forward, hand casually expert as it slid the gun from its place on her thigh.
“Did you see her hurt anyone?” Kell asked, a profound desire to avoid watching an execution making him desperate.
“What?” Emily asked, not looking back at him.
“Did you actually see her hurt anyone? Or was it just the others here?”
Emily hesitated, though her hands remain rock steady as they gripped her weapon. “I saw what this group left behind, fifty miles south of here. Looked like a small band of nomads. Counted ten adults and six children, mostly pretty young.”
The words lashed into Kell, though over the years a thick weal of scar tissue had covered the loss of his own daughter. He let the momentary flash of pain pass through him before gritting his teeth and pushing himself to stand.
“She's a kid, Emily,” Kell said. “We kill marauders, but she's just a girl. We don't know that she can't be helped.”
Kell thought he heard the girl's breathing speed up just a hair, but it could have as easily been his imagination. As for Emily, it was impossible to tell whether his words were having any sort of effect. She hadn't yet begun shooting, which had to be a positive sign.
“We'll take her back with us,” Kell continued. “I don't like the idea of killing a kid who might not have had much choice about being here.” He considered for a moment. “We've seen enough of these people to know what to ask. We know what we're looking for. If it ends up that way, we can always finish the job later.”
The girl definitely made a noise at those last words.
“In deference to the many years of professionalism you've shown me, I'm going to say this as nicely as possible,” John said as he none too gently probed Kell's mangled shoulder. “You're a fucking moron.”
“Nothing I haven't told myself a bunch of times,” Kell said.
John snorted. “I figured it's important you hear it from someone else. Smart as you are, it seems like you need a little help when it comes to remembering that big old brain of yours is capable of making equally big errors of judgment.”
Kell opened his mouth, but John cut him off with a gloved and bloody finger. “If you're about to use that Dumbledore quote to say the same damn thing I
just
said, I'm gonna start disconnecting nerves.”
With more than a little chagrin, Kell pressed his lips together. Maybe the small library of books they had found when taking over the house meant he read the same two dozen novels over and over again, and maybe that meant quoting the works of J.K. Rowling when he felt applicable, but John had to have gotten lucky there. No way he had used the one about how being clever made one's mistakes 'correspondingly huger' enough to make him predictable.
Upon further thought, Kell theorized that maybe intelligence and denial were directly proportional as well. It made sense.
John continued his delicate work with immense care, whatever Kell's pain receptors might be saying, though he did keep up a constant low boil of recriminations as he worked. This too washed over Kell in a familiar wave. When they had been designing the cutting edge gene therapies and manipulation techniques that would eventually end the world, John always did his best work while babbling away. The subject wasn't important. Kell thought the constant nattering and its effect on John's brain acted as a catalyst for the creative thinking which had been so critical in making Chimera work.
As John's current task, along with two of the compound's better medics, was to reconstruct the mess that was Kell's shoulder, hearing his friend bitch about his behavior was actually rather soothing. A spot of familiarity in a world grown unrecognizable.
The group finished their work well after the weak anesthetic had metabolized out of Kell's system, but by then it was mostly cleanup. Kell forced himself to remain still as the last few stitches went in.
“What do you think?” Kell asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
John removed his gloves, gesturing with his chin for the medics to leave them alone. When the door closed, Kell could see by the look in his friend's eyes that he wasn't going to like what he heard.
A few hours later, Kell sat on the edge of the roof and looked over the compound below. The old farmhouse already had a widow's walk and a direct access when they moved in, as well as several flat sections covering some of the many additions made throughout the decades.
John had gone directly to Laura after telling Kell about the bone chips he had carefully removed from where they were embedded against several of Kell's nerves. There was visible damage to the nerves themselves, which could be made worse in any number of ways. Laura, being Laura, had immediately made it clear that Kell was on heavily restricted duty.
Not just to Kell, either. The entire population was told in crystal clear language that if they saw him working out, doing chores, or participating in any activity that even occupied the same galaxy as strenuous, they were to gently stop him and gently take him back to his room where he would be locked in. With someone inside the room to act as both helper and guard.
All that time spent trying to find a place where he could finally settle in and work on the problem of developing a cure, but he hadn't considered the idea that his value in doing so would turn him into a commodity. Something of intrinsic value to be protected whether or not he wanted it.
Even now he could feel the tense gaze of someone standing at the open window behind him, just waiting for Kell to clench his ass in just the wrong way so they could heroically leap out and save him from a stupid fall from the second story.
Then a tiny voice piped up and the world got a few shades brighter.
“What are you doing up here?” Michelle said as she glided across the roof and plopped down next to him. “You brooding?”
Kell raised an eyebrow at her. “If I say you're too young to understand the concept behind that word, please do me a favor and punch me in my good arm.”
Michelle smiled up at him, sunny as ever. “I wouldn't hit you. Mostly because you'll get better one day and then you'll get even. And I do too know what it means. Mom told me it's how you get when you think about all the sad stuff that happened to you.”
It took an effort to hold back a smile. Michelle wasn't far off the mark, but the image her words conjured in his head were of him as Batman, being all broody on a rooftop. Jesus.
“Your mom said that, huh?”
Michelle nodded sagely. “She also told me if I saw you doing it, I should make you laugh even if I have to tickle you.” The last she said with a seriousness that would have been funny to anyone but Kell. He, however, had seen what happened when Michelle was tickled. Due to what was probably a crossing of developmental wires, Michelle did indeed laugh when tickled. But she also got intensely—almost impossibly—angry at the same time. The little girl turned into a mass of shrieking giggles and tearfully furious glares, and attacked the living shit out of the person tickling her.
It should have been funny to think of the little pixie going bananas on someone trying to get a laugh out of her. It might have been if not for the aftermath, the obvious emotional toll the reaction took on her. The sobering fact was that Michelle was particular about how people interacted with her, and didn't like losing control. Being put in a situation that forced her to have an emotional reaction wasn't fun or funny. At best it bordered on assault.
So Kell understood the serious concern Andrea, Michelle's mother, must have if she would suggest her daughter do something she herself hated so deeply.
“I'm okay, kiddo,” Kell said. “I'm okay.”
“You sure?” Michelle asked and the earnestness in her cherub face brought the long-buried fatherhood out in him. He pulled her into a one-armed hug and rained light kisses down on top of her head.
“I'm sure.”
And he was. Not only for the obvious reason, which was the fact that first and foremost Chimera had been designed to repair nerve damage. It was because even if his arm, whose fragile state precluded anything beyond basic sensation and motion testing, suddenly and permanently went dead, he would still get along fine. The value which turned him into a non-replaceable asset didn't require him to have use of both hands. Or any hands, if it came down to it. There was nothing he could do in the lab that John couldn't. Even a layman with a moderate amount of training could serve as his hands.
Kell's value as a fighter wasn't trivial, but only handful of the people around him could be categorized as non-combatants. Even the little girl next to him could fight like seven kinds of hell. His skill set was useful in combat, but its loss wouldn't noticeably affect the ability of the group to defend itself.
“I'm sure,” he said again.
In times past, Kell would have been one of the central players determining what to do with the prisoner. That meeting was held without his participation, which he was okay with. The level of pain he had been in combined with the need to quickly assess the damage kept him out of the loop. Of course, it was more than a year since he handed off his part in the major decision making off to others in favor of his work. Settling into a permanent home meant a change in priorities.
Which was why, several days after the near-disastrous run at the local marauders, Kell was little more than a fly on the wall during the discussion that would decide when and how they would go about meeting the people Emily had identified using Kell's criteria.
The positions of the people in the room were mostly predictable. Laura said little, choosing to instead see what the various points of logic were before nudging the conversation with a sentence here and a few words there. Lee advocated caution and preparedness by means of necessary force—which by the definition of anyone who wasn't a Marine was actually overwhelming force. It wasn't that the young man was bloodthirsty; in fact the opposite. Lee was prepared to kill and strongly supported having the tools needed to make it happen, but preferred to avoid situations that put his people in danger. One of the first lessons he taught people on the training ground was that the best fight was one you could avoid having in the first place.
There were several others participating in the discussion, but the most interesting to Kell was a man who went by the name Kincaid. He was close with Josh and Jessica, Josh's temporary death being the flash of inspiration which led Kell to ask all the scouts to find people who had clinically died and come back.
Kell had met the man before, and while the quarters inside their compound were snug bordering on uncomfortable, had only seen him in passing outside of the odd feast night.
He was certain why Kincaid was at the meeting, though Kell had no idea whether or not anyone else did. It was only because of the brief but tense days Kell spent with Josh after the man had died that he had been able to suss out what was off about Kincaid, who was rarely more than ten feet from the husband and wife.
Kell was fairly certain the man was a sociopath. Kincaid was certainly capable of some of the behaviors Kell remembered from his college years, yet didn't fit an easy definition or stereotype. Many of his colleagues in the hard sciences scoffed at the idea of psychology and psychiatry being called science, but not Kell. They fascinated him enough to keep him dabbling in the literature for years after leaving school.
The problem many scientists had with those fields could be found in the constantly shifting definitions and terminologies. Kincaid wasn't psychotic. He didn't break with reality. And he didn't fall into most of the highly granular criteria for defining a sociopath. If he was cold to most of the other members of the community, he was fiercely loyal and protective of Josh and Jessica.
They had stood up for Kincaid when the former marauder had taken an amnesty offer from New Haven. Others weren't happy that he'd come to live there, so they had made it a point to show the man trust. Add to that the fearlessness with which Kincaid fought to defend their new home, and you might miss the fact that there was a void in him not present in most people.
His moral compass was missing a direction.
When the meeting was over, Laura motioned for Kell to stay, along with Kincaid. When she asked Kincaid to voice his thoughts on the meeting, Kell knew he was right about why Laura had asked him there in the first place.
“They all had decent points,” Kincaid said, his voice just flat enough to make Kell's neck itch. “Lee wants to send an armada. Emily wants to take Kell by herself and sneak in. Perkins questioned whether bringing back samples would be worth the risks associated with the trip. Griner advocates waiting to see if other scouts fine more accessible subjects to study.”
Laura waved for him to continue. “What do you think, though?”
Kincaid chuckled. “I think you asked me here because I have no skin in the game. You know I make judgments based on logic. You want me to tell you what my take on their arguments is.” Kincaid shook his head. “Look, you know what I'm capable of. You know when it comes to keeping people I care about alive; I'll break rules and bones without batting an eye.”
Laura stared at him for a hard few seconds. Having known her for years, the look on her face made Kell want to get up and move around out of sheer nervous tension. Men had died under that gaze.
“People think you're crazy,” Laura said. “I think you're just amoral enough to not give a shit about anything else when your priorities are in danger. So what I want is for you to pretend for a minute that this trip is your priority, and tell me what you think we should do.”
“Okay,” Kincaid said. “We should do it, and as soon as possible. We have no way of knowing what will happen to the people Emily identified. From what she said, where they live is dangerous. If we're going to try for samples, it should be sooner rather than later. I know Lee wants John to go instead of Kell,” he said, glancing at Kell with a respectful nod, “but that's fucking stupid. John's a good guy, but he's never had to survive out there. He isn't a fighter. Even hurt, Kell has the experience to take care of himself and the temperament not to lose his shit when something goes wrong.”
Laura pursed her lips. “
When
something goes wrong?”
“Sure,” Kincaid said. “Something always does. When things start to turn pear-shaped, Kell won't flap his hands and run in a circle. He'll take action.” Kincaid looked at Kell again, eyes resting briefly on the mass of straps and bandages covering his shoulder. “He might do something dumb, but he'll at least do something.”
“Thanks,” Kell said.
“You're welcome,” Kincaid replied, no sarcasm in his voice. “And because things go wrong, Lee is also right. We'll need to send a team with him that won't make a fuss or pick fights, but will end them if they happen. Ideally we'd send five or six people in one vehicle capable of being as stealthy as Emily would like while being as secure enough to make Lee happy.”