The Zone Page 7

  The M-4 was up and the selector was on ‘fire’ by reflex; he wasn’t particularly big and he was unarmed, but there was a menace about him, the sort of single-minded aggression you see in really well-trained guard dogs, what you get when a professional trains a calm dog like a German Shepherd: a simple willingness to obey an ingrained directive. In the back of mind I realized I was seeing one of the rioters.

  “Hand up. Manos…” He moved. He wasn’t fast, but he was focused, and there was no hesitation.

  I didn’t hesitate, either-I had too many years of living with violence to misinterpret what he was going to do. He wasn’t emotional at all, but I had absolutely no doubt about his intent. He was without a doubt the most dispassionate person who had ever tried to hurt me.

  The first round hit the base of his sternum and the second, the muzzle rising, hit midway up and slightly to my left, his right. Boat-tailed hollow points, they should have filled his vascular cavity with bone splinters and the hydrostatic effect ought to have thrown him into cardiac arrest. Instead he staggered back, caught his balance, and bored back in. At five feet I hardly needed the holo sight; the two went in closer together, drilling the center sternum; if I didn’t get the heart I was definitely close enough to hit major blood vessels.

  He was slower recovering from the knock-back, and there was definitely a wobble to his knees, but he was still on his feet and moving with four hits, any one of which should be mortal. The human body is surprisingly tough-it can take considerable amounts of damage, and death is never as swift or sure as it is in the movies, but trauma-induced shock incapacitates fairly reliably. This guy wasn’t getting any shock effect at all; I had seen this in subjects who had taken near-fatal doses of coke or meth, and in PCP users, but this kid wasn’t wired. At least he didn’t look wired.

  His legs steadied and he came back again; I raised the sight and put the next one into his forehead, producing a momentary halo of blood spatter behind him. It was like cutting the strings on a puppet: he crashed into the asphalt without a single twitch or spasm. I watched him for a bit to make sure he wasn’t playing possum, but he was definitely gone. Two of my torso hits had produced exit wounds, and his blood looked a lot darker and thicker than normal. High oxygen content? That made blood darker, and could explain why he soaked up damage. But he could barely breathe, or at least had sounded like he was strangling, the way you get with advanced pneumonia.

  No wonder Fred had packed it in; train for years to shoot center mass, and now this. Fidmat hadn’t been kidding: skull or spine. Maybe the flu affected the glands, gave the same kind of combat charge like a mega meth dose did, made the body ignore shock. That could work.

  Standing over his body, I felt deeply unsettled: I had just shot a person, albeit a valid use of force under Chapter Nine of the Penal Code, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Digging out my phone, I called 911, but after forty rings it cut off. I did it three more times before someone picked up. “I just shot a guy, killed him,” I cut the operator off. “He was attacking me.” I gave the address, roughly.

  “Was he sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get to a place of safety.” She repeated the instructions I had gotten earlier. “Do not engage the sick people, but you can defend yourself. Get indoors.” Click. Buzz. Dial tone.

  So that’s how the legal side of the game was being played: the sick people were fair game-now I knew. Fred wasn’t kidding-they had been shooting people, and calling the body counts into the old report recording system. I wondered if the recording system had even been turned on, and wondered why that had occurred to me-I was always a company man.

  The pipes in the green briar: that’s what I had heard, sick people scuttling around. How long had this been going on? I nudged his body with the toe of my boot, but it was slack and unresponsive.

  I thought about the group chasing that woman, and the way this kid kept coming back at me with four rounds through his sternum. If they were all like him, me and my riot shotgun wouldn’t have stood a chance. One man with a weapon can face down a crowd because nobody in the crowd wants to die, and only a couple will be brave or stupid or hyped enough to risk all; shoot those and the rest run. But if they are all like him, then all that would matter would be how many rounds you had, how fast you could accurately fire them, and how good you were at head shots. Otherwise they would roll right over you.

  Getting across town was taking on an entirely new dynamic now.

  The access way was an eight-lane parking lot. There were some wrecks and at least one jack-knifed semi rig, but mostly it was abandoned vehicles, quite a few with loads of household goods aboard. It wasn’t bumper to bumper, there were gaps a hundred yards or more between clumps of cars, but the overall effect was parking lot. I had seen similar things when we helped evacuate the coast for Hurricane Ike: some run out of gas, but most panic and take off on foot. Something primeval: go. Don’t wait for traffic inching along, get out and move.

  You could still get through if you went slow; a semi probably would have trouble, a motorcycle none at all. It was a mess, though. From the buzzards circling, there had been killing done up here. Not my problem anymore, though. And from what Fred had said, not really much of the government’s problem either.

  Seeing all the vehicles shook my resolve because for the first time I really grasped the immensity of the task I had appointed for myself. Still, there was no harm getting a feel for the land-it may well be impossible, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I had a better look. One thing was certain: the rules of the game were new, and I did not yet understand them fully. Until I did, there was no saying what was possible.

  I saw them before they saw me; I had bounce-checked my gear to insure nothing rattled when I moved, and I am fairly light on my feet when I need to be. They were sitting on the lowered tailgate of a Ford Ranger that had run into the guard rail and lost the radiator and a tire, drinking Bud Lite long-necks from a red and white cooler open on the roadway, a couple more bottles floating in what had once been ice.

  One was a big guy, a little older than me, with graying hair worn long despite being pretty bald on top and wire-rimmed glasses; he had a leather vest with patches over a tee shirt and a chain anchoring his trucker billfold to his belt and shit-kicker boots. At a glance he looked like a biker, but the tats were wrong, and the patches on the vest were from concerts and guitar companies. A musician, roadie maybe, from the look of his hands a good man in a bar fight, but not one to start trouble. Probably bounced when he was younger. The other was a wiry black guy, maybe five six and no fat, just those stringy muscles you get from hard work every day the Lord sends, with a haircut that was fuzz fighting bald, face wrinkled by sun and smiling, wearing a white shirt with blue stripes and his name on a patch on the left (Mick) and a company logo on a patch on the right. Both had shotguns and pockets full of shells, Mick had a pump Mossburg with a pistol grip and the musician had a Remington 1100 with the barrel cut back to the foregrip by somebody who knew what he was doing and a trimmed-down stock.

  Mick saw me first as I came around the truck and started so bad he dropped his beer. “Easy,” I lifted my right hand. “Not hostile.”

  “Damn quiet, though,” Mick said, half grinning. He was the sort who grinned a lot, I guessed from the lines on his face. “Want a beer, officer?”

  “Martin, I’m retired, disabled. No beer for me, thanks.” I pulled out my water and took a swig.

  The musician lifted a hand. “Charlie. You sure don’t look retired.”

  “Out looking for family.” On closer inspection both were dusty, sweaty, and tired in a way I hadn’t seen in a while: the kind of tired that is as much emotional as physical. “Looks like you guys have been hoeing a rough row. You’ve heard about the Exclusion Zone?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie nodded thoughtfully. “It put the cherry on our day. How it is, I manage and tend bar at the Busted Wheel, you heard of it? Great music, play some myself. Guess I own it now-my cousin did, and he got b
oth the bug and a load of buckshot inna skull. Mick here is a regular, a bunch of us loaded up and started rounding up those near and dear. The Wheel’s a concrete box when you get down to it, so it’ll do for a bit, Zone or not.”

  “You get your people?”

  “Most. ‘Course, we lost some doing it. We’ve been at it all day. Nothing personal, but the police lost interest yesterday.”

  “Those that lived, yeah. Me, I’m sort of a hermit, late to the party.” I passed out my candy bars. “Just shot my first…whatever these are a little while ago. They weren’t kidding about skull or spine.”

  Mick grinned and shook his head; he hadn’t said a word since offering me a beer. He had gotten another for himself.

  “It’s true,” Charlie nodded. “We found that out the hard way, cost us a very good bass player, and Mick’s best worker, plus a couple others. You haven’t seen ‘em in a bunch?”

  “Not really. At a distance.”

  “You kill them or they kill you. They don’t stop. If there’s just a few and you aim at them, they fade back sometimes, but once they charge they don’t stop. They get you down, well, they rip you up. Some times you die, the rest you get real sick and eventually you’re one of them. Takes a while, half a day or so. They’re not real bright, and they don’t seem to look up unless there’s a real good attention-getter, but they’re as patient as anything. They notice light real quick. They call others when they see someone. We call them ‘infected’.”

  “So why are you sitting up here?”

  Charlie gestured to the south. “Half mile or so one of my waitresses, Tina, real nice girl, is holed up in a truck, got seven or eight waiting outside on her. She’s got three kids with her, hers and two others.”

  “Truck won’t run?”

  “Box truck, she ducked in the back when she bailed out of her car. They were chasin’ her and she clipped something, lost a tire. Ran on the rim until the engine seized. She got me on the cell, and we decided to try.”

  “She couldn’t stay in her car?”

  “Not for long-they’ll punch through safety glass. Bust up every bone in their hand, but they don’t care. They make tweakers on PCP look careful by comparison. Tina’s smart, she bailed and got into the box truck, managed to wedge the doors shut.”

  “Seven or eight doesn’t sound bad.”

  “Sure,” Charlie agreed. “Thing is, unless they’re on somebody, they don’t like the daylight so much. Mick thinks it bothers their eyes. Reason so many cars are up here is a bunch been working the access, causing panic, tearing people up. Sure as God made green apples there’s a nest of ‘em laying up in some rig waiting for sun down. We start jacking with those seven and we’re gonna have a bunch on us. There was five came to get Tina. The other three split, figure its too rough. Me and Mick, we’re havin’ a beer, trying to work it out.”

  I had night vision gear but no binoculars. “You get a good look at the layout of the area around truck Tina’s in? Good enough to sketch for me?”

  “Sure.”

  I stepped up on a bumper and looked south. “Shouldn’t be too tough. You remember what the Marines taught you?” He had the ink on his left forearm.

  Charlie chuckled and shook his head. “Man, I drove an amtrac, and Mick fixed engines in the Coast Guard.”

  “You learned something. You didn’t leave Tina.” I stood on the bumper again. “Okay, lay it out for me. And which one of you can run the fastest?”

  They were right to be concerned: there was a semi with a box trailer on its side a hundred yards south of Tina’s truck, and I agreed that it was probably a roost for a bigger group. Still, problems existed to be overcome.

  I felt good, really good-the confusion and uncertainty from earlier today had been bad, but it had also been good: a problem to investigate. Now I had what I had always enjoyed: a complex issue of resources and potential violence which needed to be resolved. And a purpose, a real, valid purpose. I hadn’t had that in a long time. It felt better than I could have imagined. I almost felt whole again.

  I left one hiker radio with them, and picked my spot. It was a good one, a luxury van about thirty yards from Tina’s truck with a clear area south of it. It even had a chromed ladder so I could climb onto the roof and belly-snake my way to a firing position behind the sunroof, which was closed but still served to break up my outline. It wasn’t really that high, but it should give me a little time before they spotted me, given the opposition’s issue with elevation.

  We couldn’t confirm how many were in place, a couple stood around the truck, heads drooping, busy drawing those rasping dry lung breaths. A couple more sat with their backs against a nearby sedan, legs straight out in front of them, motionless. They were a mixed bunch, a couple bangers, a couple commuters, a guy in a suit. All were dirty, blood-splattered, and so gray skinned it was hard to be sure of race or ethnic origin. Charlie said Mick had crept up and counted, seven or eight because he couldn’t get really close.

  It was not a great plan, just basic infantry tactics: maneuver element, cover/blocking element, flanking element; it put my survival at something of a question mark, based on my skill and a lot of unknown factors, but what the hell. I had been living like I was dead for too long- it was time to feel alive again. I had been a soldier once, an Airborne Ranger, serving in places unfriendly to Americans, a street cop in a tough city. I wanted to feel something other than useless-an opportunity to recycle what was left of my life, turn it back into something useful.

  Which was my way of rationalizing the truth, the truth being that marching to the drums was what they had drilled into me since I was a kid. A choice that wasn’t a choice.

  “Time to start,” I said into the radio, and settled the plugs in my ears. In theory they would protect my hearing from the sound of shooting while allowing me to hear conversations, although in practice they were only so-so on the conversation part. I did hear Charlie, who had kept the radio when he and Mick split up, say “Going on three,” and flipped the selector switch. I suddenly realized I had the magazine in place that was five rounds short but it was too late now. Weirdness making me sloppy-a lesson for a future I may or may not have.

  Charlie crept close, then stepped out from cover and shot one of the standing sentries square in the head; he riddled another’s legs with shot and then trotted away north, not trying to take cover, just a heavy-set man trying for speed that his legs hadn’t had in a decade or more.

  One of the sitting ones gave that moaning wail I had heard before, and then all of them were after Charlie, five moving fast and one limping along after. They might not be affected by shock, but damage to muscle tissue is still damage. Immunity to pain only goes so far.

  Taking a page from Sergeant York I shot the limper first, and worked my way up from the back; I dropped three with head shots (one I hit in the jaw and had to shoot again) before they realized they were under fire, and only the last one figured out where I was, not that he enjoyed the information for long.

  Charlie was yelling on the radio, but I saw the door to Tina’s truck hanging open so Mick had reached her-good, my plan had survived contact with the enemy, which is rare. Then I saw what Charlie must have been yelling about: thirty or forty more were coming north, probably out of the semi’s trailer. A hundred twenty yard head start wasn’t going to be enough for two tired men and a woman with kids, and a half mile wouldn’t have been enough for me. I tuned out the radio and opened fire.

  The vehicles channeled them; I aimed low, trying for the pelvis and the transfer of energy from projectile to major bone structure. Knock one down, and the next three behind him piled up. Get the pelvis, and they wouldn’t move fast, although they did keep coming, and three hundred sixty feet is not terribly far.

  A tracer round leapt into a belly, meaning I was five rounds from empty. Belly, belly, missed head, belly, missed belly, reach with left hand, grab mag, thumb on grooved mag release, pull down, turn wrist slightly, thrust up, fresh mag locks in place, thumb
hits bolt release, bolt strips fresh round into chamber.

  Belly, belly, head with blood halo, belly, belly, head. Focus only on the red sighting image, the next shot, squeeze, next target, squeeze. Forget Charlie, Mick, Tina unimportant. Only the next shot. Head haloes with escaping blood. Concentrate. Slow easy breaths. Caress the trigger. Next shot.

  A tracer goes in next to a nose. Four shots, pull the mag, thrust into drop pouch on lower back, fresh mag slotted in, fire. Heads are bigger, torsos fill the sight. They’re close. Don’t think about it, focus, Belly, head, head, belly.

  Too close, a tracer leaps out into a chest, the next round splits a skull, and I roll left, catch the chrome decorative rail, and awkwardly slide down the side of the van, the fasteners on my vest squeaking as they depreciated the paint job. A rush from the side catches three rounds point blank before the bolt locks back, the impact pushing them back. The side door ajar as I had left it, I’m in and slamming it closed, hit the switch and all locks clack down, secure.

  For a second. Two fists crash into safety glass to my left, bowing it in; I pulled the Glock and when the fists hit again I double tap the half seen shape. No more blows but the glass is now a million crystals held together by habit. Bodies clamber up the short hood and pound on the windshield; I twist the control to laser sight and use the red dot and guesswork; five shots and the hood is clear but the windshield is a icy mosaic that needs one tap to empty the frame. Another struggles with the back door; I get his head after my fourth round fired through the window; the glass spider-webs but does not collapse.

  Silence marred only by crystals dropping from sagging opaque windows. That wasn’t all there had been, but Charlie said they would get cautious when their numbers were low. The windows were tinted, I noticed, explaining why they had held together so long. They couldn’t see me, I guessed, but like they had with Tina, they could wait. OK, so could I. More importantly, I could plan.

  Moving very slowly so that the suspension would not rock, I got my spare magazine and reloaded the Glock; there were only three rounds in the one I tucked away. One move at a time I shifted the empty mag from my M-4 into my drop pouch and slid a new one home. Something growled when I released the bolt, and I froze.