Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Read online

  Relentless Sons

  Beyond the Fall: Book One

  Joshua Guess

  © 2017 Joshua Guess

  Catch me on Facebook at my page:

  Joshua Guess, Author

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  here or visit JoshuaGuess.com. I also blog there.

  Also by Joshua Guess

  The Fall (Completed Series)

  Victim Zero

  Dead Will Rise

  War of the Living

  Genesis Game

  Exodus in Black

  Revelation Day

  Beyond The Fall

  Relentless Sons

  Cassidy Freeman

  Chosen

  The Ghost Fleet

  Cascade Point

  Borderlander

  Carter Ash

  The Saint

  The Next Chronicle

  Next

  Damage

  Living With the Dead

  With Spring Comes The Fall

  The Bitter Seasons

  Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

  The Hungry Land

  The Wild Country

  This New Disease

  American Recovery

  Ever After

  Black Sand

  Earthfall

  Ran

  Apocalyptica

  This Broken Veil

  Misc

  Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

  Soldier Lost (Short Story)

  Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

  With James Cook

  The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

  This book is dedicated to every person who ran toward the danger instead of away,

  especially those who said “Hold my beer,” as they did it.

  1

  “This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen,” said Kevin, who I never thought of as particularly bright. He was one of sixty or so people working the highway with me. Or more accurately, he was one of sixty people I was helping to protect. From what, you may be asking yourself?

  Zombies, of course. It’s usually zombies.

  A lot has happened in the years since the event we call The Fall. It’s just like that, too; capitalized. If you’re looking at human history overall, from the time we hopped out of trees and started on the path to being hunter-gatherers, there are a lot of hugely significant events. The population bottleneck when Mother Nature whittled humanity’s numbers down to around six thousand. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire. World War II and the Holocaust.

  In terms of importance, The Fall kicks every one of them in the balls and takes their lunch money.

  The long and short of it is simple. A friend of mine—in fact a fellow resident of Haven, our community—discovered an organism capable of reshaping other living creatures. He engineered it with the intention to save a lot of lives and heal a lot of injuries. Everything was going fine until his dick bosses got tired of his slow progress and let some other people work on the organism, Chimera, in violation of a bunch of contracts.

  Those dumbfucks screwed around and rushed the job, which is how we got zombies. Chimera was always meant to heal people and fix their bodies, and it ended up reanimating them into flesh-hungry monsters. It also changes the living. People like me, who have been affected more than others, are sometimes called Resets. The name is dumb, I know, but when you’ve technically died and come back, there aren’t a lot of catchy titles. I don’t have super powers or anything. Look, it’s complicated. We’ll get there.

  The important thing to know right this moment is that we’ve been at this a long time. There’s even a cure for the plague...kinda. It’s not perfect, but it does prevent people from coming back and will also kill zombies who come into contact with it after a short time. Conveniently, it can be dispersed through any aerosol system, which brings us to the highway and Kevin’s offhand comment.

  “Why is it dumb?” I asked as I drove a large screwdriver through the eye socket of a zombie that got too close.

  Kevin held up the small device he was supposed to be attaching to a post and waved a hand at it like a TV pitchman trying to sell an overpriced chamois. “This is an automatic air freshener. We’re putting air fresheners on the road to fight zombies.”

  I sighed, lashing out with a foot to break another zombie’s knee in backward. One of my fellow skirmishers stepped in for the kill, which was nice of her. “It was an air freshener,” I emphasized. “Now it has a little solar panel to recharge its battery, and the can inside is filled with the cure. Do you have any idea how long those cans last? I had one that sprayed every thirty-six minutes for a whole month. How many zombies do you think that will take down in that time?”

  Kevin made a frustrated noise in his throat but was careful not to be aggressive at all toward me. I understood it, given my reputation and appearance. Most of my body—face certainly included—was a patchwork of thick scars from that time I mentioned where I died for a little while. On top of that, it’s widely known that I was a SEAL, and more than a few people are now aware I left the Navy to work for the Special Activities Division of the CIA, which sounds much cooler in your imagination than it was in reality. You can tell people it’s basically the same work you did in the service all you want, but they’re universally set on thinking you stole state secrets at cocktail parties. Fuck you, James Bond, for giving our trade unfair standards of awesomeness.

  Point is, I have a reputation as a dangerous and scary dude. People who know me well understand that I’m not violent unless I think it’s necessary and certainly not for insults or general negativity.

  Kevin got to work putting the sprayer up on its stand, securing it with a pair of hose clamps. He kept right on bitching, though. He was reliable that way.

  “We’ve been training every day for years to fight is all I’m saying,” Kevin groused. “An hour a day adds up, and it feels like wasted time now. I don’t like the idea of relying on these things to do the work for us.”

  Another zombie slipped through the line of roving skirmishers keeping the thin swarm away from the work area, and I mentally paused the conversation to handle it. I moved toward the dead woman, her clothes little more than ragged scraps after years of exposure, on feet made more graceful by the Chimera wired into my nervous system. I let her paw at me with fingertips made of jagged bone, the flesh worn away by the passage of those same years. The razor-sharp claws didn’t do much to the reinforced sleeve of my armored coat, nor did the teeth she clamped onto it. Most zombies are predictable. Give ’em an easy target and they’ll latch on like a baby looking for a nipple.

  I drove the screwdriver into her eye with my free hand and let her fall. Shaking my sleeve back out, I gave Kevin an even look. “Pride is stupid, son. When it comes to survival, use the weapons you have.”

  Kevin was only a decade or so younger than me, but I felt okay using a diminutive with him. One, I really was older and more experienced, so calling him son wasn’t meant to be insulting. But even with a year of difference in ages, I’d have still done it. Kevin, like many people who hadn’t seen death and destruction before The Fall, had weird sticking points like pride and tradition. You wouldn’t think a handful of years would be long enough to develop traditions, but you’d be dead wrong. William Golding struck at the heart of who we are. People will develop structures to cope with their fear once society is out of the way.

  No one was putting heads on sticks. So far.

  Kevin wasn’t wrong about the training everyone put themselves through, however. As I left him behind to walk the line, I found myself impressed with what I s
aw. The rest of the skirmishers moved in a rough circle around the workers. People in Haven have a lot of different ways of fighting and defending. These weren’t the phalanx-forming Spartan units. We saved those for truly heavy combat. Instead the people forming the circle wore armored clothing like mine and worked with reach weapons, mostly spears and staves.

  The people of Haven learned to adapt their fighting styles based on need long before I showed up. The skirmishers kept the swarm separated and busy by turning themselves into a giant, living blender. All of them were bait—small cuts on the back of the hand would tempt any zombie with the scent of blood—and for the most part they did the job of protecting the workers brilliantly. They were some of the best Haven had to offer, which was why they were here.

  I was the backup for when zombies got through, because I’m the one they trust to handle shit alone. Three other people with something like my level of skill worked the inside of the circle, each of us taking a quadrant and staying aware of each other to maintain coverage.

  The screwdriver was a solid weapon for close quarters. It’s a versatile tool to have. You can stab a zombie in the brain with it or fix stuff, with just a bit of wiping down in between. A length of hardened tool-grade metal never steers you wrong. Most people wouldn’t try to use it for anything other than head shots, which I get. You’d need a good reason and a profound understanding of human anatomy to cripple a zombie with one.

  Yes, obviously I’m saying I could do it. I’m not being arrogant, just honest. I have those skills. Bought and paid for them with my blood, sweat, and tears over the course of decades. I am, even by the standards of a society forced to survive a violent catastrophe, an utter badass.

  This is just a fact. It might make me an asshole if I thought it made me better than anyone else. It doesn’t. That’s the lesson my dad drilled into my head from the time I could understand words and concepts. People are the same. We all have our own shit to deal with, our own baggage, and you can never truly know another person’s experience. So don’t be a dick if you can help it, because in the end you’re just the same as them and they might have had it worse.

  My dad was fucking awesome.

  I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.

  I drove my fist into the face of another zombie, this one a lumbering brute of a man at least a hundred pounds heavier than me. His head rocked back from the force if not pain, but the arms snaked out much faster than I expected. In an instant I was spun around, the dead man’s belly to my back, arms trapped at my sides.

  Instinctively, I threw my head straight back. I knew that damn bite was coming for my neck and even with the woven metal gorget around my throat, the kind of leverage he had was dangerous. My whole body shifted backward as the zombie was momentarily stunned, and I took that time to jump as hard as I could.

  Here’s the thing about combat, children: it’s all physics. Understand the mechanics of how a body works in relation to things like torque and gravity and inertia, and you too can become a living weapon.

  I curled my legs up as high and tight as I could get them, forcing the zombie off balance. As the energy of my jump traveled through us and reached an apex, I kicked my legs straight out at chest height. This changed our center of mass dramatically, and we tipped. The hard part was whipping them back under us as we toppled forward so I didn’t wreck both my knees by hyperextending them against the worn pavement of the highway.

  I managed it, but barely. The zombie essentially lurched forward as if he were a drunk hit on the back of the head with a blackjack, angular momentum fucking his shit up nicely. He didn’t let go when we hit the ground, which suited me. I jerked my head to one side as hard and far as I could, and torqued my elbow until my forearm was flat against my chest.

  The screwdriver was still clenched tightly in my fist, and the zombie’s face came right down on it as we crashed to the ground. The butt of the tool slapped the blacktop, my hand screaming in pain from the shock, and the big dead fella was stabbed right through the middle of his forehead.

  Human skulls are notoriously rugged, but in this case the math was on my side.

  I was left with the massive dead man’s weight trapping me against the ground. I kept hold of the screwdriver to give the corpse something to pivot on, turning it into the grossest wheel and axle in the span of human experience. I managed to slide my free hand onto the pavement, and then did a sort of twisting push with my hips. It was the same motion I would have used to put power into a throw against an opponent, the remnant of many years of Judo training. The body moved enough that its own weight helped it slide off of me. I let the screwdriver tilt with it, using the motion to allow it to pull itself free.

  I stood up and brushed the leaves and other junk from the road off the front of my coat. Some stuck anyway; sprays of bodily fluids from earlier kills left viscous dots there and caused them to adhere.

  I glanced up and saw no less than six workers staring at me, awestruck. “What?”

  “That was fucking crazy!” a young woman said. “You looked like something out of a movie.”

  I shrugged and went back to patrolling my quadrant. The deep-down truth of it, held tightly in a place no one has access to, is that I was a little embarrassed. Stuff like that always looks cooler than it really is. It came together well, but I could have just as easily snapped my knees backward and been left bedridden for months if not crippled for life.

  Thing is, every bell curve has to have a far right edge. Someone has to be the outlier, the statistic that fills the top percentage of any group. I happen to fit that niche for combat and psychological warfare. Those two things are my bread and butter.

  Just as true is that no one can maintain that kind of momentum forever. The trick is to stop playing the game before you’re too old and worn out to keep winning.

  In the job I do, winning means surviving. I bet you can figure out what the inevitable loss looks like.

  2

  While I did a lot of traveling well outside the borders of Haven and had to rely on myself, when I’m at home I have my very own mother hen.

  Kell McDonald was about six and a half feet tall, broad in the shoulders, the deep brown skin on his face almost as scarred as mine. He was also the man whose work was stolen and turned, however accidentally, into the plague that killed the world. Honestly, the guy seems to have taken it pretty well.

  I let Kell study me like a lab rat because every overgrown genius with two doctorates needs his hobbies. Since brokering peace with the people of New America a few months earlier, Kell decided to well and truly retire. Of the five or six thousand people living in Haven and its surrounding communities, only the double handful who lived in Kell’s little fortress were absolutely exempt from combat. Obviously I didn’t take advantage of that, but after years of being a nightmare on the battlefield, Kell took the chance to slow down.

  It wasn’t the missing leg, either. He’d adapted well to losing it.

  “How’d it go?” he asked as I shrugged out of my heavy armored coat.

  I lifted the knapsack he’d given me before I left that morning and gave it a shake to show it was empty. “The dispersal system is up and running. Or at least I handed out all the cans you gave me.”

  “Good, good,” Kell said absently as he started examining me. It was a familiar routine with us. I was his longest-serving test subject, and I didn’t mind the occasional half hour of letting him check me over if it meant giving him more information to work with. Of course, since the creation of the cure I wasn’t sure what the point was, but Kell was also my friend. If letting him run a few tests satisfied the data-hungry geek crouching with a bag of Cheetos in his heart, well, small price.

  To his credit, he gave me a flawless check-up on top of doing the usual tests. His degrees were in genetics and microbiology, but the handful of medical professionals in Haven had long since decided to teach regular classes for anyone interested. Kell did them years ago, but since his retirement had taken
up the study of medicine with an almost unnerving zeal.

  When he was done drawing blood and swabbing for other samples, he fixed me with a sheepish look. “It’s that time again. If you’re up for it, I mean. We can wait if you want.”

  I shook my head. “Nah, it’s fine. Have to keep up with the numbers, right?”

  My attempt to massage away his guilt failed. Something close to genuine sorrow crept into his eyes. “I hate asking you to do this. I just don’t have any other volunteers, and even if I did I’d be starting over from scratch.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Dude, I know. It’s fine. You’re going to cut me, and I’m telling you I’m okay with that. Go nuts.” To demonstrate, I raised my left arm and held it straight out from my torso. “You want breast or drumstick first?”

  Kell’s face scrunched up. “Well, I’m never eating turkey again. Thanks for that.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re not that easily grossed out.”

  “Well, no, but I was hungry and then you said that, which my brain interpreted in a weird way,” Kell explained. “Long story short, for a second there I had a mental image of carving you up like a Thanksgiving meal.”

  I pondered that for a second. “Okay, gross.”

  Kell started with my arm. I’m right-handed, so the brunt of zombie bites and other trauma I take happens to my left. Chimera does a lot of weird shit to bodies aside from reanimating them, such as building up a layer of tough, thick fibers just beneath the surface of the skin. Sometimes, anyway. No one has quite figured out what starts the process. Some zombies have thick bands of the stuff growing under their scalps, while the living people who develop it—like me—tend to do so in places where they’ve had heavy or repeated trauma. Both, in my case.