The Fall: Victim Zero (21 page)

As it turned out, it was the home she now shared with Kate. The place had begun as the passenger section of a school bus but had been added to and built up until only the occasional flash of yellow could be seen. At first Kell tried to refuse the offer, saying it was too much, but oddly enough it was Kate who convinced him.

He hadn't seen the thin woman much since his arrival, and when he and Laura began to argue about him staying with them, Kate set aside the knife she was sharpening and sat him down, hard. Physically she was half his size and strength, but she moved like water. One foot planted behind his and a practiced twist of her body against him, and Kell found himself sitting on a ratty but amazingly comfortable couch.

Kate stood before him, slim arms crossed over her slim frame. “We owe you a debt,” she said.

Kell opened his mouth to tell her it wasn’t true, but she held up a hand.

“We do. We wouldn't have gotten free on our own. It's as simple as that.”

“
You might have found a way. You don't owe me anything.”

Kate shook her head. “Do you know why those men spent so much time with me?” she asked. “It's not because they preferred me over Laura. It wasn't about looks.”

A feral light bloomed in her eyes as she pulled up a stool and sat across from Kell. “They did it because the first time one of them came for me, I kicked him in the throat so hard it broke his neck. I spent hours working my foot out of the rope. My skin was rubbed away, I was bloody and in pain. I didn't care that I might have permanently damaged myself. All I could think about was watching my husband die. Of being taken.

“
Those men raped me, K. They chose to focus on me because I fought back first and hardest. I fought them every time, because I didn't care if they killed me. I hurt some of them, but after that first time they were more careful.”

Kell sat in silence as she gathered her thoughts. It was at the same time the emptiest quiet he had ever felt, and the most loaded.

“I'm telling you this because you need to understand we were ready to die. We tried and tried to escape, but sometimes there isn't a way out. Sometimes you need help. You gave us that chance, and the only way we can even the score is by giving you a place to live. So you're going to stay here.”

Kell stayed there.

On the couch.

Which, while comfortable, was also only five feet long. He didn't complain, having seen the conditions some people in
the Complex
had to endure, four or five people to a tiny shack, sharing heat. It wasn't a matter of the leadership not caring, but there was so much work to do that moving the citizenship beyond basic shelter, especially inside a larger shelter already, was not a priority.

In the weeks following his move into Laura and Kate's place, Kell began to understand how divorced from people he had become. Bare as the world might be of most social structures, even the simple things came back to him slowly. Saying hello to someone because they were there, or smiling because the day was nice. Isolation had put him in a sort of personal free fall, losing all reference to the world he had lived in. Loved in.

Living with two women, one almost a stranger, was far from domestic bliss. Kell slept on the couch, curled up and at best only comfortable for a few minutes at a time. He had a private space where all his gear was stored and where he could change clothes, but it was an area defined by sheets hanging from the ceiling and was three by four feet. Life with Kate and Laura was cramped, alternately freezing cold and sweltering hot, and often required one or more of them to move into an uncomfortable position just to let the other pass by.

After the first day, Kell grew to love it.

It was the little things that made it worth the discomfort. A week after he settled in, Laura began going out on scavenger missions again. She brought two jars of pickles back to their home, giving one to Kell.

Pickles, his all-time favorite food.

Kate warmed to him as September changed into October, speaking freely and treating him much as Laura did—like a dumb younger brother who couldn't keep himself out of trouble. He thought the attitude was just them being overprotective, but in October he learned their constant warnings to behave himself, that he was still seen as a newcomer, were completely valid.

That was when Phillip tried to kill him.

There were many hundreds of people in the Complex, and October had barely started when every one of them was called to fight. A swarm of zombies thousands strong came at them, and Kell found himself fighting beside people he had never even met before. It was hard to judge the number of people on the field, and Kell spent most of his time away from the general population, but an hour into that first, furious defense, he found himself spearing the undead with Phillip at his side.

It wasn't a question of whether they could fight at the wall; they could. But the first blush of the attack was vicious and unexpected.  A great deal of equipment and personnel needed to be brought behind the wall. Kell saw lines of people standing atop it, fighting the undead that managed to make it past the stakes. At one point he commented about the huge number of strangers, and he was told a friendly community that had sent visitors before came to help with the battle.

Kell stood at the far end of a gap in the wall, one of ten defenders working behind low barriers with shield and spear. More than sixty minutes of continuous butchering left him off his guard, and though he had spent a few tense seconds worrying when he saw Phillip next to him, his partner, the man's businesslike attitude soothed Kell's natural suspicion.

When a particularly dense rush of undead hit his end of the line, Kell was pushed into Phillip. As he struggled to push back on the teeming swarm in front of him, there was a peculiar pressure over his kidney. The strike plate there, which was pushing against Phillip, jammed into his lower back sharply, then again, then a third time. Kell heard the older man swear and he risked a glance down, throwing the shield up and forward as he did so.

In that split second he saw Phillip withdrawing his knife, the tip broken and discolored. It took him a moment to process the event, but it came to him.

Phillip had tried to stab him, and hit the plate designed to stop a rifle round. The rest of his torso armor would easily have allowed the man to stab him. It was just dumb luck the other man had chosen one of the few spots not vulnerable to a bladed weapon.

The attack was so stunning in its stupidity and timing that Kell couldn't respond. He continued to fight, unsure if Phillip would try again, but angling his body so he could keep the other man in sight the entire time.

Kell stole glances at him between attacks. Phillip had been cool enough about attempted murder that he hadn't a problem waiting until Kell was totally distracted to do it, or to hit the one spot on the human body guaranteed to be instantly crippling but not immediately fatal. The older man certainly wasn't so cavalier as the undead slowed their assault; the implications of his failed attempt seemed to be catching up with him.

They were all sweating, of course, but Phillip began to drip with it. His chin quivered slightly until he managed to get control of it, gritting his teeth with the effort. Kell saw his hands tremble, and in a moment of peace even caught the jackhammer of Phillip's pulse as it beat through his carotid artery, starkly visible against his ashen skin.

By the time the assault waned into cleanup, Phillip was a nervous wreck. The other people around them didn't take it as out of place. They were fighting the undead, after all, and the man was used to sitting in an office. Why wouldn't he be a pile of raw nerves?

But Kell knew better. Enough time had passed that he had control over himself, and the constant warnings by Laura and Kate not to rock the boat resonated in him. The line disengaged and moved behind the barrier. Men who had fought and bled for each other slaked their thirst with ladles of water drawn from buckets, exchanged hearty slaps on the back, and generally exalted in being alive.

Most of them kept their distance from Kell. Not through malice, but most of the people he trained with—every person holding the gate, except for Phillip—knew he didn't do much socializing. They kept a respectful distance from him, though many gave him a nod or a wave as they passed.

He stood a few feet from one of the water buckets, watching Phillip receive surprised praise from the other men in the line. Kell kept his mask of impassivity firmly in place, letting nothing show on his face or in his body language. If the man was insane enough with hate to risk his own life by attacking during a defensive maneuver, then he was too unpredictable to confront in the open. God only knew how he would react.

Besides which, Kell's relaxed but unrelenting gaze seemed to be causing Phillip no end of discomfort. Furtive glances in Kell's direction and jerky movements gave it away; the guy had no idea what to do next. He hadn't expected to fail.

It was nearly twenty minutes before Phillip was able to excuse himself from the crowd, Kell watching him the entire time. Laura appeared as Phillip was leaving, passing him as she approached Kell. Something about the way the older man looked or moved caught her attention. When she made it to him, she ladled a drink from the bucket and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

“
What's with him?” she asked.

After a brief moment of consideration, Kell smirked. “Had a rough fight out here. He's not used to it.”

“He looked like he was about to shit himself.”

“
Might have been the fact that zombies were trying to rip his face off,” Kell replied. “But I suppose he's a little worried what's going to happen since he tried to make my left kidney into a kebab.”

Laura cocked her head. “I don't follow.”

He unsnapped his vests at the shoulders and turned them around on his body, fingers easily finding the slice made by the knife. “He tried to stab me. Lucky for my renal system, there was a ceramic plate in the way.”

He said it in a matter-of-fact tone, but his eyes tightened. Laura stared at the damage to his vest as if she were looking at some alien artifact totally beyond her comprehension.

“You're telling me he tried to stab you?”

“
Well, technically he
did
stab me, he just didn't do it very well. I would call his stabbiness amateur but enthusiastic. He broke the tip of his blade in there.”

Laura punched him in the shoulder hard enough that it hurt even through the mail sandwiched between the layers of his sleeves. “This isn't a joke, K! This guy tried to kill you. In cold blood, during a fucking battle!”

The calm expression on his face cracked, the tiny smile drifting away. “I know it's not funny. But if I don't joke then I have to think about it seriously.”

Laura ran her fingers over the vest, then looked up at him. “You have to tell Jack. Right now.”

Jack was the leader of the Complex, the man who gathered people together in the first place and coordinated everyone's efforts to create a home. Kell had never seen the man, but had heard good things.

“
No. Absolutely not.”

Laura frowned at him, but it wasn't the disbelieving stare she would have given such a statement a month before.

“No argument?” he asked.

“
Not an immediate one, anyway,” she replied, studying his face. “You always have reasons for the ridiculous shit you do. I imagine you've got one this time, too.”

“
I do,” Kell said. “The last thing I want is to make a big, public scene. I don't want everyone to start looking at me, and even if we go to Jack and he sides with us, Phillip is the kind of man who has people in his corner. I'm pretty sure if anything happens between us out in the open, it will make me highly recognizable instantly, and I'll have several new enemies. This way at least I know who I'm up against.”

“
That...actually makes sense.”

A slow, dark smile spread across his face. “I don't want the attention, and he knows I'm watching him now. I like the idea that he'll have trouble sleeping.”

Laura was silent for a long time as they walked back home. It was, he thought, a companionable sort of quiet, but halfway there she broke it with a question. Her voice was soft and curiously neutral.

“
Who were you?”

The simplicity of it brought every moment of the previous year back to him at once. Jennifer's birth, breakthroughs at work, the death and destruction and guilt, the final moment when his mind shut down the parts he couldn't handle. The parts that had been reluctantly coming back online as he spent more time around people.

“I don't want...I can't tell you that. I wasn’t anyone important.”

“
Then why the secrecy?”

He found himself wanting to tell her, badly needing to explain his part in the plague. It was an urge based on a desire for absolution, but also one that hinged on the possibility that he would be punished. The guilt weighed on him so much more here among the living, and a small fraction of him wanted someone to take the load from him.

At the end of a blade or the barrel of a gun, most likely.

Laura couldn't understand that even though Phillip's attack had nothing to do with his past, the act itself didn't fill him with indignant rage. It was what he deserved, or so he thought in those low moments.