The Zone Page 12

  We were silent for a bit. I finished my wings while I thought about it.

  “It would explain why the bugs and birds don’t get after the infected corpses,” Mick suggested. “You go with the Miguel Principle, they must be a mass of bad viral mojo.”

  “The Miguel Principle, I like that,” Charlie grinned. “Named for the noted squeegee expert and bowling champion who developed it.”

  Miguel gave him the finger. “What I think, anyway.”

  “I hate to say it, but it fits,” I admitted. “It really sucks for us. I wish it was July; the extra fifteen degrees would be in our favor.”

  “Up north its getting cold at night,” Charlie shook his head. “I bet moderate cold is good for these things. Not real blizzard cold, but say, forties or so, let them last longer, like veggies inna fridge.”

  “So where did this come from?” Mick asked. “There’s no zombie monkeys so it wasn’t some drunk bastard humpin’ a primate like how we got emboli.”

  “Bio weapon? It started in Turkey, and they have problems with the Kurds.”

  “Everybody has problems with the Kurds,” Charlie opened a fresh beer. “But neither side has got the capability to do anything like this. The Turks can’t figure out indoor plumbing, and they’re oppressing the Kurds, so I would say the technical base is not available in the region.”

  “End of times.”

  Mick glared at Miguel. “You hadda say it, didn’t you. Bad enough the radio’s full of doom and gloom, you hadda say it too. Look, it’s a virus, not flame ‘n sulfur from the skies.”

  “Bible doesn’t say God won’t use a virus,” Miguel pointed out. “Could be the flame and such is air strikes.”

  “If this is the end of times, why are we still moving around?” Charlie asked. “I know you two, and I’m getting a feel for Martin, so my point is that this ain’t a quorum of righteous men and the truly chosen.”

  “You sayin’ I’m not right with the Lord?” Mick turned to Charlie. “I’m a church-goin’ man, raised Baptist.”

  “Divorced and an evil-eyed little pussy hunter of a Saturday night, too,” Charlie pointed out. “I figure the Lord could find some cleaner souls even in this town, is all. I figure this is a run-of-the-mill natural disaster, like Katrina or the one that hit Haiti or rap music.” He pulled his phone out of his vest and answered it. “OK, put him on.”

  I finished my fries and soda, thinking about it. It made a lot of sense, much as anything made sense. It also made for very gloomy thinking.

  “All right, that was Bob,” Charlie announced, stowing his phone. “Well, Bob and some Colonel in the National Guard. The bus got through without a problem and everybody is handed over; Bob’s bringing it back, but the other two guys opted to depart; Bob says he’ll bring the bus back and leave with the next load, he’s done. The Colonel, he took down our names and says we’re deputized, drawing pay, that sort of thing. We’re a Rescue Team, number seventy-one, code name Remote Control Halo.”

  “Code name?” I raised my eyebrows.

  Charlie grinned. “OK, I told him it was our name. First band I had. Anyhow, we’re official heroes.”

  “Great. How about some guns and helicopters and stuff?” Mick asked.

  “You got the title-that ought to motivate you to adapt, improvise, and overcome. Although anything we do in the Zone is official business, so maybe we could hit a bank or something. The Feds have a web site up and a phone line to a recorder for people needing extraction in the city, I got the details,” he held up a napkin with notes and grease spots.

  “Damn, man couldn’t you use a clean one?”

  “I’m the commander of this unit, so bite me, Mick.” Charlie checked his napkin. “OK, they’re pulling back to open country, give them the edge when the infected try to get out. Seems to me that increases the size of the perimeter, but there you are. Anyway, I got the locations where we bring the people whom we heroically rescue, roll credits and theme song. I’ll copy this onto real paper and give one to each of you.”

  “What I want to know, is how you got to be commander,” Mick cracked another beer. “Seems to me it ought to be a vote.”

  “Yeah? You wanna talk about your tab while we’re at it?”

  “Ok, Ok, you’re in command,” Mick grinned. “What’s your plan?”

  “Wait here until the bus gets here, then go rove around being heroic. The truck can’t carry many, so we’ll have to grab, deposit in the bus, and go out again. When the bus is full or sort of full, or its close to dark, we’ll deliver the people we saved and shut down for the night. Bob does TV hookups, so I figure he knows how to fix us up with some wireless Internet. We can check the help site on the move.”

  “Efficient and heroic,” Miguel observed.

  “You got an idea in your bean, put it on the table; its your ass, too,” Charlie shrugged. “We ain’t exactly going up against the SAS. The infected are dangerous but not too smart. If the Miguel Principle holds true, they aren’t going to start using weapons or stuff.”

  “You haven’t said anything,” Mick pointed to me.

  I shrugged. “Its pretty well been said; I think Miguel is onto something with his principle. We keep a barrier between us and the infected, they’re not terribly tough. The problem is when they catch you on the ground. So we work it to bring the people to us like we did at the projects, and everything should work all right.”

  I didn’t believe it, though. I thought Miguel was right, or so close to being right that it didn’t matter; it all fit. And that meant that the infected would stay active a lot longer than I expected, a time extension that meant that the danger of the Exclusion Zone being breached and the infected spilling out into the countryside would be increased. There was a lot of ground to encircle the many urban sprawls, and the US military wasn’t very large, even assuming that everyone stayed at their posts and didn’t desert to look after their own families. If the virus got loose, really unchecked, then it really was the End.

  Chapter Seven

  I managed a half-hour doze before the bus returned. Bob was a chunky young guy in his twenties with a pigtail and one of those extended ear hole things where you could stick your finger through the opening. He had a phone for Charlie and some printed guidelines and rules. With both vehicles we headed to a storage unit his outfit used where he hooked up a little dish to the increasingly cluttered roof of the truck, and another to the bus. He grabbed a spare sat set-up and activated the cards for me; with the instructions and notes he gave me, I would be able to get both satellite TV and high-speed Net at my place for a few weeks, or at least until they cut off the service entirely.

  From there we located a Radio Shack with intact windows. The city was largely deserted, just stray animals, abandoned cars, a few corpses drawing buzzards, and the odd infected standing watch for brethren cloistered in cooler shadows. It made for eerie driving, like one of those old Twilight Zone episodes, or that movie where a guy wakes up in the hospital and everyone is gone.

  Charlie came over as I was cramming a laptop into my gear bag, which was pretty full of other loot. “You like to gear up, don’t you?”

  “I’m here for the duration; never know what will come in handy. Sooner or later you guys will come to your senses.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “What did your wife mean when she mentioned picking your place?”

  “To make a stand, last bullet stuff. She did it with my son, spent every dime trying to save him.”

  “The one in the joint.”

  “Yeah. She was trying to tell me I’m going to get myself killed.”

  “She could be right.”

  “Probably is.” I glanced around, but the others were at the front of the truck bolting something to the bus’ bumper. “Look, I’m retired early on disability. This is the first time I’ve felt useful since I got shot. I take the bus out, they’ll confiscate most or all my guns and treat me like I’m helpless. I would rather stay here and take my chances.”

  “A
nybody else get hit when you did?”

  That caught me off-guard. “My whole team. Fact is, out of both sides of the cluster I’m the only one still alive. One other made it six months before he ate his gun.”

  “You know what survivor’s guilt is?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. It probably has something to do with it. How come you know so much about that sort of thing?”

  He pulled a gilt coin out of his billfold. “I had a kid brother, got himself zapped overseas. I filled his head with all the USMC stuff, and he up and enlists the first day he’s eligible, and comes home in a box. He was a pretty good Marine, they sent home a Silver Star with him. Spent a lot of time in encounter groups, sponsored a couple people, helped with AA. Music and bar business, you see plenty of substance abuse.” He stowed the coin. “You think being a hero this time will change anything?”

  “According to the brass, I was a hero the first time,” I shrugged. “I did OK. I went down shooting, and got a couple. This time, I dunno. I’m not really responsible for anybody; hell, I got my ex out of the Zone.”

  “Reason I ask, is because there’s a strong element of don’t give a shit about you,” Charlie eyed me shrewdly. “Like maybe you want to buy a patch of ground.”

  “Not really,” I said slowly. “Thing is, this is the first time I’ve felt like I was whole since I got shot. I don’t want to go back to feeling the other way. I think, maybe, if I do well enough in this mess, then maybe I’ll get back to the way I felt before my knee was screwed up.”

  “That worth getting killed over?”

  That didn’t require any time to think. “Definitely.”

  He nodded with feeling. “Man has to put his own value on things.”

  “Ok, this is what we got,” Charlie sat on the back bumper of the truck, a city map spread out on a cardboard box on his lap. “We got an apartment complex here with three widely-scattered apartments where survivors are holed up, nine people all told. A tight squeeze, but we should manage. All three are third-story apartments, so I figure we stick with Martin’s plan: get close, and they come down. Our ladder will reach the second floor, so its their business to get that far. I’ve briefed them and gotten phone numbers so we can make contact when we are close. Problem is, we don’t really know the layout, and its one of those trendy places that have lots of trees and crap between the buildings. If we had something quick and quiet and cross-country that we could use for recon it would really help, like a protected golf cart or something, life would be a lot easier. As it is, we get in and move fast, that’s it. Ideas?”

  “Yeah.” Miguel held up a cube of neon yellow ballistic plastic with a black braided nylon wrist loop. “You pull the loop and this thing screams like hell, box says a painful decibel count, its for muggers. Got a strobe light, too. Maybe Bob drives down a street real close and drops two-three of these when we’re ready, pull the infected that way.”

  “We should send one guy with Bob if we do that, so he concentrate on his driving. And in case he gets a couple grabbing on like we did at the projects.”

  “I’ll take the truck roof again,” I wasn’t parting with my M-4.

  “Mick, you take it, me ‘n Martin know the roof drill,” Miguel suggested.

  “You just don’t want a brother showing you up,” he grinned. “OK, show me how to use those things.”

  I wired up two more propane bottles on the drive over, which with the two I had worked up on the drive to Radio Shack gave me four. At this rate someone could track us across town by the trail of empty cartridge boxes and discarded bits of electronic equipment we were leaving behind.

  The apartments were as trendy as we had been warned: Charlie had to zigzag between all sorts of unnecessary shrubbery and even a couple statutes; if we didn’t have to worry about tires we could have really wreaked havoc.

  The first stop was a young couple with their act together: before Miguel could hoist the ladder a red and green nylon rope came down the side of the building and thumped onto the roof of the truck, and a second later a young woman clambered awkwardly over the balcony and rappelled down to us using a rock-climbing rig; her husband free-roped down once she was clear, a plump canary-yellow backpack on his back.

  There were a few infected shuffling about but they weren’t reacting as fast as they had at the projects, and I held my fire lest we stir them up. Miguel was helping the woman get unclipped from the rope when I realized that the shrubbery and little trees was breaking up our outline and engine noise. Not perfectly, but it bought us nearly a full minute. Charlie was putting it in gear when we heard the first howling wail. I armed one of my decoys and tossed it atop a hedge as we started to move.

  Charlie must have tipped Mick, because we heard a sudden shrieking electronic scream a couple blocks away and easily half the infected in view took off to check it out.

  Target site number two was a couple with two kids; they had opened up the floor of their balcony and somehow dropped a kid’s box springs, mattress, and a bunch of cushions and pillows onto the second story balcony which they dropped down onto.

  I didn’t pay much attention to them as the alarm had been raised and I was shooting every infected within sight. The cluttered landscape was now an impediment to us, letting the infected get close before I had a good shot at them; I was hitting torsos, shooting for speed, knocking them down without killing, trying for the delay factor, but the trouble was that 5.56mm is not a great man-stopper, particularly in full metal jacket as the rounds tended to just zip through the torso. Two or three torsos in cases where I was shooting at a pack, but still not a good short-term solution.

  Switching to the mag in the double bracket I jerked the cable to fire the driver’s side extinguishers before opening up again. I was targeting heads now with the laser sight while the white cloud was compacting them, but it was an all-too-temporary respite. Miguel was shooting over the hood as I reloaded, and hands were clawing at the razor wire on the rear.

  “Go! We’re getting over-run back here!” I yelled into the radio and put a round in the forehead of a twenty-ish female infected pulling herself up the rear of the truck. Charlie popped the clutch and we lurched forward, the extension ladder falling behind us into the infected. The truck hit something, lurched, and stalled; Miguel fired the passenger side extinguishers while I blazed away into the sea of faces clawing at the back doors of the truck.

  We were going to die. That was a fact: they were going to get on top of the truck, and even if we got inside the roof hatch would not stop them for long. I concentrated on the laser dot and the skulls; dot dot tracer dot dot dot dot, mag release, empty in the dump pouch, fresh mag into the weapon clicking home, bolt released, dot dot dot dot dot dot.

  The next shot missed because the truck lurched, and for a second I thought they were going to turn it over, but the jolt wasn’t the infected but movement: the truck lurched forward, hung with the engine racing for an eternal second as the rear tires wailed and the hands and heads came up on the wire, and then they got traction and we rolled forward, slow at first, then faster, our passage through a hedge dragging off most of those climbing to the truck, although we lost the razor wire on the driver’s side and the rear.

  Charlie veered and swerved through the ground clutter, heading for a clear shot at the street while Miguel and I clung to the roof and wasted rounds shooting at the pursuers.

  By sheer coincidence I looked up and ahead and saw two uninfected people at a shattered window on the third floor of one the buildings we were passing; I don’t know if they were the third pick-up we had planned or two survivors who had not contacted the extraction website, but the expressions on their faces as we roared past without stopping were indescribable.

  I dropped one of my decoys onto the lawn just before we hit the street-it was a feeble act of defiance at best, but it made me feel an atom’s worth better. Miguel raked shell casings from the roof with angry sweeps of his booted feet, leaving black curves on the grimy metal.

  Cha
rlie must have been communicating with Mick via radio, but I didn’t notice; we met up with the bus in a big gas station set on the edge of an expanse of parking lot.

  It was a small consolation to see that we had gotten all four from the second pickup location when we transferred our passengers to the bus; Bob gassed both vehicles and re-stocked the ice chest while the rest of Remote Control Halo gathered around Charlie’s map.

  “That was a lot closer than I want to get,” I opened the discussion. “What did we hit?”

  “Planter,” Charlie shook his head. “Didn’t see it until too late. Lucky thing it was wood, collapsed under the weight.”

  “Besides damn near getting overrun, I burned up a lot of ammunition,” I announced. “One more hot operation is all I’m good for today.”

  “Pick-ups need to be isolated from each other,” Miguel dug a soda from the fresh ice in the cooler Bob dragged up. “In and out quick. Even with distractions they pile up too fast.”

  “We need clear ground, too,” I put in. “We can get them tangled up and slow down the pack if we have some room to work with.”

  “OK,” Charlie examined some notes he had made on a receipt pad from the bar. “Do we need to find some more razor tape?”

  “No,” Miguel shook his head. “I think it gave them better handholds. They don’t care about injuries.”

  “Its four, sun goes down at seven, and we need time to get home and button up,” Charlie mused while he sketched on the cardboard from a twelve pack. “Seems the infected don’t look down, either; there’s twenty-one people holed up in the basement of the old Metro Hotel, and while the area is full of infected. I know the place, did quite a few gigs there, worked even more concerts. There’s a street entrance to the basement, coal chute they made into an emergency exit, comes up to the sidewalk. Thing is, we know the infected will swarm us. Martin, you’re the military thinker.” He held up his sketch and explained what meant what. “You see any way to do it?”