Read Online The Fall: Victim Zero by Joshua Guess - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joshua Guess
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he had given it a cancer it couldn't fight off. The least he owed it, just as he'd owed his wife and daughter and even David Markwell, was to keep the last vigil as it died.
Long before the sun began to fade for the day, Kell heard the sounds coming from the city begin to change. At first it was subtle, so wide and vague he couldn't understand what he was hearing. His mind went over the white noise, thunderously loud but distant, in an effort to find context. It took a few minutes of listening for the light bulb to come on, and when the understanding flashed through him it came with incandescent brightness. Knowing burned.
It was a sound not unlike what you would hear at a stadium. Kell had rarely watched sports, but he remembered a particular World Cup event one of his roommates had begged him to watch. More than a hundred thousand people crying out passionately for their team or against the other, a monstrous roar homogenized and filtered into a single sound through the magic of TV.
The sound coming from the city was raw and unedited. It was higher and less uniform, but that he could hear it from his perch on top of the hill, no matter how faint, was disturbing by itself. Below him, thousands of people screamed, like white noise on an empty channel when the last show was finally over.
Kell drifted. Exhaustion and too many days with too little sleep began to catch up with him. Even though he knew what the horrifying sound below him was, it still acted like background static; it made him sleepy. Karen had given him a machine that did the same to help him sleep years ago.
The sudden memory of her reinserted into his thoughts was a serrated blade against his woozy mind. He was awake again in an instant and trying to distract himself. Guilty for fleeing the painful memories, he fell into an old routine. He thought about work.
His unique mind recalled all the data at once. Not in perfect detail like someone with eidetic memory, but as a map he visualized. Each node on the map was a concept, a gathering of pieces that made up a whole. Kell couldn't recall a time when he didn't think that way, trying to keep as many plates spinning in his brain as possible. It wasn't precisely like thinking about a thousand things at once. It was more like examining one piece of paper while always being aware what the general contents of the book in your other hand were.
For a while he turned over all the data about David's case in his head but eventually decided there wasn't a point. He wasn't trying to alter a sample of the organism to fight the existing copies installed in one man's body. That time was gone. He set aside his preconceived notions and focused on what he had in front of him—the undead. Walking corpses, moving around like living people and killing everything he had known and loved.
Kell let his mind relax, drifting just enough below a fully conscious state to not focus on any one fact. The pain in his hand grew dull and the revulsion he felt at the sounds in the city, though they grew louder, faded. He hadn't had any time to study one of the reanimated before everything went south, but he knew more about Chimera than anyone alive. Hundreds of trials and variant strains, thousands of hours of careful research before splicing the first organism into something new guided his thoughts. Experience, he briefly reflected, is incredibly useful even without all the facts.
He was on the cusp of sleep when something occurred to him, some angle he hadn't considered before because the situation had been completely different. It wasn't a formed concept, but like a forgotten word it was right on the tip of his metaphorical tongue.
It was close to dusk, the sun streaking across the bottoms of heavy clouds in a dizzying blend of oranges and pinks and purples. Kell was still trying to work out what his subconscious realization was while he enjoyed the patina of sunset across the sky, when he finally fell into a deep and dreamless
Long before the sun began to fade for the day, Kell heard the sounds coming from the city begin to change. At first it was subtle, so wide and vague he couldn't understand what he was hearing. His mind went over the white noise, thunderously loud but distant, in an effort to find context. It took a few minutes of listening for the light bulb to come on, and when the understanding flashed through him it came with incandescent brightness. Knowing burned.
It was a sound not unlike what you would hear at a stadium. Kell had rarely watched sports, but he remembered a particular World Cup event one of his roommates had begged him to watch. More than a hundred thousand people crying out passionately for their team or against the other, a monstrous roar homogenized and filtered into a single sound through the magic of TV.
The sound coming from the city was raw and unedited. It was higher and less uniform, but that he could hear it from his perch on top of the hill, no matter how faint, was disturbing by itself. Below him, thousands of people screamed, like white noise on an empty channel when the last show was finally over.
Kell drifted. Exhaustion and too many days with too little sleep began to catch up with him. Even though he knew what the horrifying sound below him was, it still acted like background static; it made him sleepy. Karen had given him a machine that did the same to help him sleep years ago.
The sudden memory of her reinserted into his thoughts was a serrated blade against his woozy mind. He was awake again in an instant and trying to distract himself. Guilty for fleeing the painful memories, he fell into an old routine. He thought about work.
His unique mind recalled all the data at once. Not in perfect detail like someone with eidetic memory, but as a map he visualized. Each node on the map was a concept, a gathering of pieces that made up a whole. Kell couldn't recall a time when he didn't think that way, trying to keep as many plates spinning in his brain as possible. It wasn't precisely like thinking about a thousand things at once. It was more like examining one piece of paper while always being aware what the general contents of the book in your other hand were.
For a while he turned over all the data about David's case in his head but eventually decided there wasn't a point. He wasn't trying to alter a sample of the organism to fight the existing copies installed in one man's body. That time was gone. He set aside his preconceived notions and focused on what he had in front of him—the undead. Walking corpses, moving around like living people and killing everything he had known and loved.
Kell let his mind relax, drifting just enough below a fully conscious state to not focus on any one fact. The pain in his hand grew dull and the revulsion he felt at the sounds in the city, though they grew louder, faded. He hadn't had any time to study one of the reanimated before everything went south, but he knew more about Chimera than anyone alive. Hundreds of trials and variant strains, thousands of hours of careful research before splicing the first organism into something new guided his thoughts. Experience, he briefly reflected, is incredibly useful even without all the facts.
He was on the cusp of sleep when something occurred to him, some angle he hadn't considered before because the situation had been completely different. It wasn't a formed concept, but like a forgotten word it was right on the tip of his metaphorical tongue.
It was close to dusk, the sun streaking across the bottoms of heavy clouds in a dizzying blend of oranges and pinks and purples. Kell was still trying to work out what his subconscious realization was while he enjoyed the patina of sunset across the sky, when he finally fell into a deep and dreamless
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