The Fall (Book 4): Genesis Game (15 page)

Kell was alone in front of the Go board when Mason returned twenty minutes later. He sat down and glanced around with a deceptive casualness before slipping a folded piece of paper from beneath his bandages.

“Check this out,” he said, handing the paper to Kell.

“Whatcha got there?” Kell asked in his best impression of a curious child.

What Mason had there was a comprehensive list of guard rotations and other vital information. The list named every guard, contained a crude map of the facility and the off-sire location where the 'freed' prisoners were taken, and the rough locations of the observation posts the guard watchers used to keep an eye on the local traffic.

“Wow,” Kell said. “Rawlins gave you this?”

Mason nodded with a restrained excitement that Kell had never seen. “Yeah. Couldn't have asked for better proof he's going to go along with us.”

“How sure are you that this information is good?” Kell asked.

“Almost certain,” Mason said. “Everything I've been able to put together on my own and what Miles has given me matches it exactly. He's being straight with us.”

“Now that you have the schedule, when's our best time to strike? And have you figured out if Emily is really out there?”

Mason grimaced. “I've done a few calls while outside, but no response. We'll have to move forward assuming we're on our own. As for when, well...”

The hesitation and uncertainty in Mason's voice was unusual, enough to make Kell suspect the worst. “Soon, I'm guessing?” Kell asked.

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Tonight, actually.”

“
What?
” Kell hissed. “You can't be fucking serious. There's no way.”

“It's our best chance,” Mason said. “Rawlins already told the head guard that I'm some miracle of modern science. Logical since he examined me last night. So the head honcho is sending another guard ahead to prep the plane. That leaves them a man short until tomorrow morning.”

Kell felt his blood pressure going up. “Okay, yeah, but one guy isn't going to make that much difference.”

“No,” Mason agreed. “Normally it wouldn't. But Rawlins is also going to call me in for my antibiotics this evening after dinner, and two more guards will be waiting there to escort me somewhere else.”

“Ah,” Kell said as he got it. “Which will mean two less guards here.”

“Two less guards
period
,” Mason said with emphasis. “The second we get out of sight, I'll take them out. I even know which way they'll take me, which gives me a good idea how long it'll take to get back here.”

Kell tried not to look queasy at the casual mention of such cold killing. “Pretty high opinion of yourself there, buddy,” he said, hoping it came out light.

Mason's shrugged with one shoulder. “I know my limits, and two guards aren't close to them. Also, the doc put a scalpel in my dressings, so that'll help.”

“How many will that leave for the rest of us to deal with?” Kell asked.

“Nine,” Mason said. “But two of them will be on lookout in the hills. Two more will be off duty and asleep. That leaves five total to guard this place. Two of them will be on the door to the nave. One will be walking the perimeter. The other two will be harder to pin down, but I think once we've got weapons they'll try to get Rawlins to safety.”

Kell grunted. “You sound pretty confident this is going to work.”

“I am,” Mason said with what Kell would have called perfect honesty in anyone else. Knowing the man, it could have just as easily been a calculated effort to give Kell some extra confidence. “This will work as long as everyone is on the same page. So we've got to get Miles and his people up to speed quickly.”

“Sure,” Kell said. “Go ahead. I'll do what I can to help.”

Mason clapped him on the shoulder as he left to find the others. Kell expected to find himself twisted up about the sudden change in plans, but instead found himself looking forward to it. Afraid, sure, that was only natural when you went up against armed killers with nothing more than makeshift weapons and good—or bad, depending on how you saw it—intentions, but far outweighed by the knowledge that by this time tomorrow he'd be on his way home.

If he wasn't dead.

Not long after, Kell made his own trip to visit Rawlins. He took his medicine like a good boy, and passed along a few words from Mason that would hopefully smooth out the night's events.

Once he got back to the nave, Kell took a nap. It seemed like a good idea considering how busy the night would be.

Mason was taken from the nave shortly after dinner. The clock began as soon as the door shut behind him. Kell began humming to himself, using a song to mark the time. Before the sound of the heavy door closing had finished its echo around the room, Kell's conspirators began moving like a startled flock of birds.

All around people put themselves into a ready state as they palmed makeshift weapons and worked themselves up for the violence to follow. Kell watched it all as he marked the passing of seconds in his head. It would be at least a few minutes before they could act, and the tension in the room was palpable.

He wasn't worried about his people pulling their weight, if for no other reason than worrying would do no good at this point in the game, but the uneasiness in the rest of the prisoners did make him pause. Sheila was one of those, a member of the majority ignorant of what was about to happen. Some of Miles's people had complained about the uninitiated essentially getting a free ride out of this, being set free through the risk of others, but it didn't bother Kell.

Sane people rarely decided to attack armed and armored men with enough firepower to kill everyone in the room twice over. It was simple math. Fortunately, Kell and Mason were just insane enough to try and have a reasonable expectation of success.

Five minutes later, Kell stood. The room seemed to hold its collective breath.

Liam strode toward the door, face resolute. Kell moved to meet him. From the other side of the room, Miles did the same. Kell could feel the eyes on him as he walked, though no one else budged.

They kept clear of the narrow line of sight through the security glass set in the door. The paranoia of their captors was an advantage Kell meant to use, and it allowed them to set up close to the exit without being seen.

Liam lowered himself to all fours, then nodded. Miles crouched next to him.

“Ready,” Liam said.

Kell glanced over his shoulder to gauge the room. So far the furtive looks among the people ignorant of what was about to happen hadn't mutated into outright alarm. He saw Steph ready to do her part, right along with Turner. The single advantage was that these people were survivors. By their very nature, they had seen violence up close and personally. Kell hoped it would be enough to keep them from raising too much of a fuss.

“Go” Kell said in a harsh whisper.

Liam began to shriek. For good measure he dragged a razor pulled from a shaving kit across his forearm and wet his hands with blood. The kid was dedicated; Kell had to give him that. The blood added a note of realism.

Kell and Miles knelt tensely, only glancing up when the door opened.

“What the hell is going on?” One of the two guards asked.

“He's hurt,” Kell shouted, fumbling at Liam in a failed attempt to grab onto the young man's blood-slicked wrists. “I don't know what happened!”

Protocol dictated that two guards be present at all times in the event they had to enter the nave. The door could be locked from both sides, and that too was protocol. Once the guards entered, they were to secure the door to keep people from rushing it.

Luckily, the second guard remembered this. Upon seeing a bleeding, screaming Liam on the floor, he turned to lock the door. Kell waited for the man to take a hand away from his submachine gun, then fish out the key, before he struck.

It happened without thought, just another piece of training drilled into Kell by people who knew far better than he how to fight. The first guard was a pace away, and probably not concerned about the man with the sling on one knee.

Kell lunged forward, keeping his body moving on the outside of the guard's gun hand. It was risky because a good shooter would instinctively track that direction, but it also made them predictable. Kell used the split second when the guard tensed his entire body in anticipation of the tackle he expected to come, and rose fully to his feet.

Then Kell slapped his left hand on the guard's extended trigger finger. From first motion to wrapping his fist around the exposed digit took less than two seconds. Kell wrenched the finger inside its glove, feeling the gristly snap as it separated at a few joints simultaneously.

The guard would have screamed—and even managed the beginnings of one—but Kell had repeated this moment in his head dozens of times. His injured arm erupted from his sling and slammed into the guard's throat.

Kell followed through, twisting his hips and knees as the punch turned into a grapple. Kate, Laura, and Lee would have been embarrassed at the poor form, but in the real world throws rarely looked pretty. Given the result, he thought they would have been equally impressed with its effectiveness.

Kell's guard, reeling from two painful injuries delivered in the space of a breath, didn't have the focus to even begin preparing for the sudden shift in orientation. He slid over Kell's hip in a flash and came down with another gut-wrenching crack as his weight drove his neck into the carpeted concrete.

The fight went out of the guard immediately. The ragged, labored breathing through a crushed trachea ceased. Kell was depressingly familiar with the set of observations that added up to another life taken.

Kell, freed from the weight of the guard, regains his balance and sought out Miles.

He needn't have worried. Miles had done well. He stood, covered from neck to crotch in blood, with his own guard still releasing gouts of arterial spray into the air. The poor bastard had forgotten all about his gun as he pawed at the red gash carelessly pumping his life away.

The room was silent but for the guard's weakening struggles. The patter of blood sounded like summer rain. Miles watched the guard die, and Kell watched Miles. Though Miles's gaze was flat and hard, Kell knew part of it was a mask. No one without serious personality problems—Kell's mind flashed to an image of Kincaid—could murder coldly. Not without conflict. The guard had been a part of the system that had stolen and killed innocents. That had fueled the act of will it had taken to do the deed.

But he was still a man. Still a person. And it still hurt. Kell knew it because Miles was, at that moment, a perfect reflection of Kell himself.

“What the fuck!” Sheila shouted, though not at an unreasonable volume. “What the fuck did you just do?”

Kell didn't bother answering or even looking in her direction. He didn't need to see the horror in her eyes. Not when there was even more work to do. Instead, Steph and Turner did their part. The pair of them could be heard moving among the crowd, trying to calm the others and explaining what was happening.

Miles called over several of his people, who set to arming themselves. The guards, like most survivors, carried an alarming number of weapons. In addition to the submachine guns, each carried a pistol with extra magazines, a knife, and rods of metal about a foot long.

“Okay,” Miles said. “Ronny, Jen, you two stay on guard here.” The pair, who had been given the pistols, nodded. Their function would be to keep the prisoners safe as well as keep anyone from causing problems, as much as possible.

Kell armed himself with a rod and a knife. “The rest of you are coming with us. Miles will lead his  team toward the guard quarters. You are absolutely not to open fire unless absolutely necessary. The off-duty guards should be asleep when you get there, and we don't want to wake them up.”

There were nods all around. Kell's job was trickier. He would have one person on his team, a woman named Gretchen, who would be armed with the other SMG. She knew the score about letting the other two guards escape with Rawlins, and Miles trusted her to do the job right.

Kell had only doled out trust sparingly over the last few years, so he was taking a lot on faith. Gretchen didn't seem easily spooked based on her lack of reaction to the mayhem in front of her, but he didn't know if her restraint would hold when faced with seeing her captors in her cross hairs.

Miles opened the door slowly, keeping the noise to a minimum. While it was likely the two guards still in the building were in the small office set aside for their use, they could be anywhere. Fortunately Miles's group would have to go outside to reach the guard quarters, which were housed in an attached outbuilding. Rawlins had explained it as a precautionary measure to prevent an uprising exactly like this from being able to easily reach the place without alarms being raised.

In seconds the everybody was in the entrance lobby. Miles nodded to Kell, who nodded back. Kell fervently hoped, as they made their way outside, that Mason was as good as he claimed. If the guard walking the perimeter was still alive, it could be a problem.

If anyone was capable of killing two men in a car then running full speed back to the prison and killing a third without raising a fuss, it was Mason. Kell let it go. Nothing he could do about it. Either Mason had pulled it off, or he hadn't.

Once the front door closed behind the last of Miles's crew, Kell waved a hand forward. Gretchen stayed on his left, gun angled toward the floor. They made their way down the hallway slowly, checking each room they passed. It wasn't strictly necessary, since most of the rooms served no purpose, but there was always the chance one of the remaining guards in the building was sneaking a nap in one of the empty spaces.

Rawlins would be poking his head out and calling for the guards shortly, assuming the doctor was keeping up with his part of Mason's plan. It wouldn't do to have an armed enemy at their back when Kell and Gretchen harried them through the door.

They were halfway to the guard office when the lab door opened at the far end of the long, dim hall. Rawlins stood there, eyes wide in either genuine fear or some of the best acting Kell had ever seen.

“Help!” Rawlins screamed. “Get me out of here!”

The door to the office burst open, two guards spilling into the hallway. Kell shouldered the nearest door open, dragging Gretchen into the doorway with him for cover.

Gretchen raised the SMG to her shoulder, sighting the two men without firing. They raised their own weapons while Rawlins continued to scream from the far end of the hallway.

“Those are the last two!” Kell shouted. It might have been true and it the timing had worked out right actually was, but the words were meant to make the guards believe they had no backup coming. That their only option was to run.

Instead, they took positions on either side of the hall and fired. Kell ducked back into the small waiting room, which could have been the one he'd been sequestered in days before. Gretchen only leaned her body back, giving herself as much cover as she could. She leaned forward again and fired a short burst at an upward angle, making sure she didn't actually hit anyone.

“Stop shooting at them and come get me the fuck out of here!” Rawlins screamed. “We can't let this data go to waste!”

Kell didn't risk peeking his head out for a look, but the torrent of gunfire immediately dimmed. “Pulling back?” Kell asked between bursts of noise.

Gretchen nodded shallowly. “In stages,” she said, and then fired again.

The enemy shots became more regular, falling into a pattern. Short burst, three seconds of silence, repeat. He used one of the silences to quickly poke his head out, just a flash, and saw the guards much further back than they had been.

“They're covering each other as they retreat,” Gretchen said. “Don't do that again.”

She yanked herself back inside the room just before a section of the frame disintegrated into splinters. Kell flinched as the particles of wood dug into his face.

“Sure you don't want me to kill one of them?” Gretchen asked. “That one is really pissing me off.”

“No,” Kell said. “Just keep them from making any brave runs at us, please.”

With luck it would be over soon.

The hallway had been quiet for nearly a full minute after Gretchen told him the guards had entered the lab. Kell wasn't eager to move forward, preferring instead to give Rawlins and the guards plenty of time to escape through the lab's exterior door. There were multiple vehicles available, of course, so getting away cleanly wouldn't be a problem, but Kell worried that moving while one of the guards was still in the room watching for them would lead to problems. Such as death.

Instead he put a hand lightly on Gretchen's shoulder. “Let's give it a few more seconds, just to make sure they aren't waiting for us.

When another half minute passed without incident, Kell pulled his hand back. “Okay, let's take it slow and easy here.”

They stepped into the hall, and that was when the lab door opened wide enough to allow a man's armored hand to slip through. It flung something small and black down the hall. Something spewing smoke.

“Grenade!” Kell said, diving to the ground and pulling Gretchen with him.

Bullets tore through the smoke, leaving little streams like jet contrails just over their heads. Gretchen, even held down at the waist by Kell's arm, still managed to fire a few shots at the door. The sound of lead slapping into steel rang down the hallway in counterpoint to the deafening crack of the gun itself.

“Smoke grenade,” Gretchen groused. “Covering their exit. You can let me go, man. That sound you were hearing means the lab door is closed. No more shots coming at us.”

“Sorry,” Kell said. “Do you think they're gone?”

Gretchen worked herself into a sitting position, keeping her SMG aimed down the hall as she slithered onto a knee. “Yeah. Otherwise they would have used the cover to keep shooting, maybe come at us through the smoke.”

“Let's go make sure, then,” Kell said. Gretchen grunted what he took as agreement.

It was a stressful minute as they let the smoke clear and made their way down the hall once more. It was possible one of the guards had stayed behind and slipped into a door in the hallway, but Kell doubted it. The men were survivors, mercenaries from the look of it, and as such weren't likely prone to heroic acts or self-sacrifice.

That didn't stop Gretchen from forcing Kell to check every room on the way, however.

By the time they reached the lab, Kell was certain no one was left inside. Kell opened the door and let Gretchen slip in first, scanning the room with the barrel of her gun. The exterior door was shut, the lab empty.

“Looks clear,” Gretchen said. “What now?”

Kell walked over and slid the bar lock on the exterior door into place, ensuring no one could enter from the outside even if they had a key. “Now you make sure no one who wants to kill us comes down that hallway, while I look around.”

“You want me inside or out?” Gretchen asked.

Kell considered. “Out, if you don't mind. If Mason comes down here, please let him in.”

She nodded and slipped outside.

Kell knew he should be worried about Mason, Miles, and the rest. The part of him that had fretted over the dangers they faced tonight chided him for being so callous. He ignored that voice. Either Mason and the others had succeeded, or they hadn't. He wasn't going to make a difference if they failed. The worst-case scenario from here, only discussed with Mason, involved Kell taking all the research he could carry along with a set of car keys from the pegboard by the door.

Until events proved otherwise, he chose to believe their little revolution had been a success.

He made his way to the desk. The stacks of files were in disarray, a few scattered on the floor. The drawers and shelves lining the back half of the room stood open here and there. Rawlins had probably taken some of it with him, enough to make a good show for the people back home. Kell was a researcher at heart, and thought about what he might have done in the same situation. The idea of leaving behind all of his work was nearly unthinkable.

Kell was torn between a compulsion to start the work of cataloging the research, searching for anything Rawlins might have stumbled across that he himself had missed, and curling up on the floor to sleep. It had been a long day. The stress crash was coming now that his fight or flight response had been turned down to sane levels.

So he compromised and sat at the desk. In addition to the stacks of files there were several legal pads covered in dense writing, and a thick notebook bristling with colored page markers. Kell blinked at the last; it looked like every project bible he had created. Leafing through, he realized it was exactly that. Every major piece of data, every observation, even an index of all the files and samples.

Kell flipped to the back and found a small yellow sticky note. It had today's date on it, and a file name. Apparently Rawlins left the hard copy behind for Kell.

Another sticky note caught his eye, this one only a corner protruding from beneath the desk blotter. Kell teased it out and found the ink smeared but legible, as if it had been shoved under the blotter in a hurry.

The zombie attack got them worried,
the note said.
They're sending a strike team here.

Kell's sleepiness vanished.

“Oh, son of a bitch,” he breathed.