The Zone Read online

  From this pile-up and the van last night it was becoming very clear to me that they were cunning enough to recognize choke points and use them to take down vehicles. It was an unwelcome but important realization and proof that the rules of the game are always more complex than they initially appear.

  I hit the stacked packages with five rounds of buckshot, leaving an expensive powder cloud behind when I drove off. Some good comes of each day the Lord sends.

  I stashed one Berretta and a couple boxes of rounds for it (and the cash) in my gear bag, and combined the ammo from the truck depot with the rest of the hardware taken from the SUV in the Raiders bag.

  The Broken Wheel was a low, long concrete and timber building in the middle of a sizeable parking lot;, and like most bars of its type in Texas, it had no windows and very solid doors. There were half a dozen vehicles parked in back, mostly pickups, and a guy with a rifle on the roof behind a barricade of fifty-five-gallon drums. He must have had commo with the inside because Charlie came out as I was pulling up, wearing a brand new brown duck hunter’s vest with rows of filled shotgun shell loops, and a red ball cap with a Coors logo.

  He gave me a nod and a grin as I shut down the rig and got out with the Raider bag and the Winchesters, which I stacked on the asphalt. “Brought some hardware I picked up along the way.”

  “You are an industrious SoB, that is certain,” Charlie pulled a Beretta out of the bag and dropped the magazine before racking the slide. “This is Miguel, he’s the third shooter I came up with. Miguel, this is Martin, whom we wrongly assumed was dead yesterday.”

  Miguel was a Latino of average height and very solid build, with a shaved head and a neat mustache and connected goatee wearing a camouflage tee shirt and blue jeans; he had considerable tats on his arms, but no gang or prison ink. He didn’t look happy to see me, but then he didn’t look like a happy kind of guy so I didn’t take it personally. He did shake my hand with a hard dry grip.

  “Miguel doesn’t say much and he doesn’t love the police, but he’s a good guy to have around,” Charlie said, dumping 9mm rounds into his pockets. “Martin’s a retired cop, says he’s disabled but I don’t believe it, unless bein’ crazier than a rat stuck in a two-inch sewer line counts. You both know Mick.”

  Mick was wearing a wifebeater under an open bowling shirt; he came out as I was getting introduced to Miguel, and immediately pounced on the Desert Eagle.

  “Mick, that thing’ll knock you on yer ass,” Charlie shook his head. “You don’t weigh more’n a buck twenny.”

  Mick grinned but kept his own counsel. Miguel took the Tec 9, the Taurus, and one of the Winchesters; he already had what looked like a .38 stuffed in the back of his jeans.

  “Well, we’re your army, Martin. Sorta the broke-dick brigade.” Charlie leaned against one of the pipe supports to the roof overhang and grinned at me, his shotgun cradled across his chest. “What do you got planned for today?”

  “South of here, the Trellwood Projects, there’s six adults and an infant holed up, some being what’s left of my family. I’m in touch with them by phone. I want to get them out; after that, get anyone else out we can find. This truck can’t hold a bunch, but we can get into most places and its proof against the infected.”

  Charlie nodded. “OK. Mick says he can juice the rig up a bit, put a roof rack and a trapdoor on top, hang some wire off it; he welds, does metal work. One of his crew is the one going to fix up the bus. They’ll bring the bus back here.”

  “Can they fix up a bus? I’ve seen mesh ripped off vehicles.”

  “Gotta put in strap iron supports first, then bolt on the mesh, nothing livin’ gonna pull that apart,” Mick said, loading the Desert Eagle magazines. “Put the mesh inside, not outside. That way they got to bust out the windows first. And you cover the side windows in two-three layers of duct tape, give the safety glass some support. Take ‘em a while, beat their way through that.”

  I told them about the infected using congestion at intersections.

  “They got some smarts,” Charlie agreed. “Laying up during the day makes ‘em harder to kill; at night they get close easier and its harder to hit ‘em in the head. How do you figure we can keep them from swarming that truck long enough to load your people? I figure the Projects must be loaded with infected.”

  “Fire extinguishers, the dry CO2 kind. The radio said tear gas works, and in the initial spray dry extinguishers are bad for the eyes, bad to breathe, too. If we can figure out how to discharge several at once it should open up a little window of opportunity.”

  Mick eyed the truck. “Put wall mounts about seven feet up, with a screw-adjusted back bracket and a pulley-cable, yeah, you could fire off a dozen or so. One time, until you replace them. Sorta like the auto systems they put in boat engine compartments. I could do it at the shop.”

  “Man, we are just a bunch of amazing guys,” Charlie shook his head. “I’m gonna work on a tune for this. Call it the last charge of the four dumbasses. Infected to the right of ‘em, infected to the left, too stupid to count… put a Johnny Cash ring to it.”

  Mick and Charlie rode with me in the cab while Miguel got into the back of the truck with three roughneck guys who were the bus crew; they had their own guns and a purposeful look about them. We made a stop at a fire systems store I had located in my directory and loaded up their stock of extinguishers, sixty in all, leaving the guys in back without much room.

  The shop Mick worked at was a big windowless building surrounded by a chain link fence that looked like a barn built out of baby-shit-brown tin siding. He knew what he was doing though: he grinned all the time and spoke softly, but from the moment we got there he had the three roughnecks working hard.

  They put a six-inch-high rail around the roof of the truck with tie-down rings every two feet; it also supported coils of razor wire hanging down on the sides and rear. He cut a square hole in the roof next to the cab and fitted a hinged hatch with an inside bolt and a length of ladder. One of the roughnecks welded together a folding ladder we stored on the roof which allowed you to get up from the front so people or gear could be moved onto the roof. Mick installed eight holders for fire extinguishers on each side with a pulley system so that all the extinguishers on a side could be discharged at the same time. A sheet of rough-textured aluminum flooring was added to the roof to strengthen it and for surer footing.

  They also rigged chain link and strap iron bars over a welding truck’s windows; the roughnecks decided that was solid enough, and we parted ways with them after exchanging cell numbers. They were heading to a bus barn to rig up a bus for extracting people from the Zone.

  We hauled the spare tires and extra fire extinguishers onto the roof as a barricade and to free up the interior capacity, lashing them down with the rope I had gotten at the gas station.

  Charlie drove when we rolled out; Miguel was riding on the roof and Mick was in the back. Charlie still had the hiker radio I had given him yesterday; I had brought along the other two I had, and gave one to Miguel.

  My phone buzzed five minutes after we left the machine shop. It was my daughter, sounding a lot older than she had since I had spoken to her last. Of course, she had had a kid since then and seen everything turn to shit, too. “Mom’s asleep.”

  “Good. Anything changed?”

  “Nope.” She hadn’t had any use for me since the divorce. Too late to do anything about it now.

  “Okay, I’ve met up with some more guys, we’ve fixed up the vehicle, and we are rolling. There’s one stop for tools, and then about sixteen miles of driving to do. Call me again in an hour; we ought to be close by then.”

  “Okay.” She sounded very calm, which I didn’t doubt, as her mother and (to a lesser degree) I had been pulling her out of each crisis since she was old enough to walk, and the State had picked up the slack lately, giving her an apartment and a monthly check because she existed. It probably never really occurred to her that someone wouldn’t be there to do the heavy lifting.
r />   “You got any kids?” I asked as I stowed the phone.

  “Son in the Marines, was stationed on Okinawa, but he’s somewhere in the States at the moment. Another son in Denton, he’s at his granny’s now, out in the country. He’s got kids. You not too close with yours?”

  “Uh-uh. Girl blames me for the divorce and not keeping her brother out of prison. She might be half right. She’s with her mom where we’re going. Neither one of mine amounted to anything.”

  “It’s tough. I couldn’t stay with either of my boys’ mothers. Too much booze with the first one, just couldn’t get along with the second. The boys turned out okay, no thanks to me. Both wives re-married early, good steady guys.”

  “The wife and me stuck it out over twenty years, although in retrospect the kids might have been better off with a stepfather. I was married to the job, mostly. Shift work, overtime; I was a good provider, at least. When I was around I probably yelled too much. Although my boy…he didn’t even get my brains and that ain’t saying much. Has a taste for dope, too, which is how he ended up inside.”

  “That shit eats people like I eat chips: big bunches in one sitting.”

  We rode in silence for a bit. Charlie suddenly swerved, catching an infected I hadn’t noticed with the big bumper. A second later Miguel’s shotgun thumped overhead twice as a band piled out of various hiding places and tried to swarm us. All it got them was a couple casualties-we were a tougher nut than they were used to.

  “What’s Mick’s story?”

  “Just a regular guy. Shop foreman, likes a beer of an evening. Got his family out before the Zone clamped down, stuck around to help out. Miguel is the nephew of a friend of mine, drinks hard, works hard, keeps to himself. Not a happy fellow, but not mean either. Whatever’s inside him is under control. I mostly know him from the bar.”

  “You listen to the radio this morning? I forgot.”

  “Same old same old. They widened the Zone in some places, and international news sucks; we’re not the only ones with problems. Japan is on fire from one end to another, lots of problems in other places. I think they said LA is bad off. All US military are either Stateside or en route, I mean everybody. The private military contractors have been ordered back, too, placed under military control, sorta like the draft. Anybody who knows how to shoot, I suppose.”

  “Apparently it’s the virus doing it. What do you think, terrorism or mutating super-virus, or what?”

  “Talk radio says it came out of Turkey; I recall they had riots there before anyone else. If that’s true, I figure it was some sort of accident because no way Turkey could develop a superbug. I made port liberty there once-you can’t believe how utterly Third World that place is. I mean, it gives the Third World a bad name. It makes Panama look like Ohio.” He cut through a parking lot to avoid an immobile snarl of vehicles. “You ever deploy to Panama?”

  “Jungle Warfare School. They should have made the Canal two hundred miles wide. That was the worst place I ever have seen, and that counts places I got shot at. I never saw Turkey, though; when I was in the only people went there were Special Forces guys on advisory jobs.”

  “You never said what you did in the service.”

  “Airborne Ranger. Supposed to be elite infantry, but that’s mostly hype. We did have the advantage that the standards were a little higher than regular grunts, and then you had to volunteer for jump school and the Ranger Course, but in the end we were still just grunts. More training, more field duty than regular grunts, so a little keener edge. The officers were better, guys less interested in making general than most. How long were you in?”

  “Four years. I needed somebody to kick my ass and get my head on straight. The Corps is good that way. You?”

  “Five years. Thought about going career, but every time you turn around the desk jockeys took away another tradition or aspect that made it special. It was like they wanted the Army to be just another Civil Service job, like postmen or park rangers.”

  We rode in companionable silence for a couple blocks, changing lanes to avoid the occasional abandoned or over-run car.

  “Some of those people had to have been smart,” Charlie mused. “I wonder if the virus makes ‘em all the same level? I’ve seen them mount sentries; where we got Tina, that was sort of an ambush. They definitely understand how to take down vehicles, chokepoints and such. What I’m wondering-will some get smarter over time? Stands to reason a few will recover some mental abilities.”

  I hadn’t considered that, and said so. “They seem awful dynamic for sick people, too,” I added. “I had a fever of one oh three once, and I was as weak as a kitten.”

  “Doesn’t seem natural,” Charlie agreed. “’Course, the Black Plague caused riots and such. More people, worse diseases, it stands to reason.”

  Unfortunately so.

  Chapter Six

  We circled the Home Depot superstore in the truck first, and then I checked it on foot; being the stranger I felt I had to establish my bona fides. It meant trusting them with the truck and the only means of escape, as the huge building sat in the center of a big parking lot, but I had gotten a decent feeling about Charlie.

  Miguel walked my slack without saying a word; maybe he didn’t trust me, or maybe he felt he needed to prove something, too. In any case, the building was secure, so the infected weren’t using it as a daytime hideout. Since it had plenty of glass display windows, it was unlikely that any infected had been trapped inside, but caution is the byword a wise man lives by in troubled times.

  I picked the lock to the front door and cleared the building with Miguel and Mick while Charlie watched the truck and the door. We loaded up the store’s stock of fire extinguishers, two aluminum extension ladders, and some tools we thought might come in handy.

  Miguel added a bill from the garden department to the cart we were using, five feet of hickory handle topped with a curved blade, and caught me looking at it. “In case we run out of rounds.”

  It was a wicked tool, I had to agree. Me, I hoped it never came to that. “Some call it a sling blade, but I call it a Kaiser blade.” It fell flat.

  I took the store’s stock of small propane bottles, the disposable kind not much bigger than a softball, copper wire, rolls of solder, duct tape, batteries, all the timers they had that of the sort you use to turn lights on and off while you are on vacation, and a case of carbon dioxide detectors. I got some funny looks over that. The roof was pretty full when we were finished; I locked the door behind us.

  “Why do I see about half an ugly thing when I look at those?” Charlie indicated the propane bottles.

  “A little experiment; if it works, it could be a distraction.”

  “So, what’s your plan from here?”

  I passed around the sketches I had made. “These are based on second-hand information, but my plan is this: the people we are going for will get to the window leading to the fire escape on the fourth floor. We will be in phone contact with them; they will hit the fire escape as we make our approach. We wheel in under the fire escape, put up a ladder if needed; they scamper down and get in through the roof hatch. Once they’re in we haul ass. I’ll be on the roof of the truck the entire time for cover fire since I’ve got the fastest weapon, and I need one guy with me to position the ladder and help them in. If we can work it right, we pull in so the driver’s side is next to the building; the passenger opens his door and puts out support fire until they get close, then he buttons up. That’s critical, no heroics. I figure we will have some reaction time to work with plus what we can buy for ourselves with cover fire. The big risk is that the infected might get on the fire escape from the second floor- I figure that’s a low risk because their instinct ought to be to get outside, but it is a factor. If that happens we haul ass. We can’t defend from that. I hope to scout the target site on foot, but that might not be possible.”

  They were silent, studying the diagram. “Crazy,” Mick finally said. “But it could work. The guys in the cab should
be OK in any case.”

  “I’ll take the roof,” Miguel gave me a hard-eyed look I couldn’t interpret.

  “Shotgun,” Mick said and grinned broadly. “Get it?”

  Charlie sighed. “I’ve done some dumb shit in my life…so how do you make distractions?”

  “I rig a propane tank with a battery so it will blow. Put a battery in the detector, and wire the whole thing to the timer. Wrap some solder around the tank and knock some notches into it with a screwdriver. Then set the timer so it activates the detector’s test circuit after a minute or so, and lights the tank a few minutes later. The detector has a strobe light and awful screeching noisemaker. How I figure it, light and noise attract them, so they come to look at it, and bang. The timer’s too inaccurate to use them as grenades.”

  “That’s a sick mind,” Mick said to Charlie. “Might work, though. You just sit around thinking about stuff like that?’

  “Idle hands.” I shrugged.

  There was no way to get to the projects without going through residential neighborhoods, and that meant going slowly; this was an older part of the urban sprawl, with tired row houses on small lots and run-down apartment complexes, neither particularly suited to rapid maneuvering in a vehicle such as ours. Miguel and I sat in the center of the roof facing opposite sides; I was wiring up my propane tanks when the road was smooth, but it was slow work made slower by caution.

  I had thought that this area would have survived the worst better than most because nearly every place had bars over the windows and barred outer doors, but it was quickly apparent that while these deterred burglars they were no match for the frenzied assaults of the infected. The scars from bolts having been ripped out of ageing wood around windows was a common sight.