Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  Rebekah was ordered to leave the hospital, but clearly had nowhere to go. The Republic had no welfare or social services system, so she would have been completely on her own—an outsider with no education or standing. My parents, however, offered to take this strange, beautiful girl into their home. Dad knew what she meant to me, and I am so fortunate they were willing to help her.

  She kissed me good-bye with tears in her eyes, and they led me off to a cell at the police station to await my trial. I told her I would always be with her. My parents held her close, and they all waved as I was driven away.

  The cell was not nearly as nice as the hospital room. It was barren except for a very hard sleeping platform—not even a mattress. I had to ask permission to go to the one restroom at the end of the hall. The food was in tablet form: it would keep me alive, but I’d have preferred even some raw fish to keep my stomach from feeling so empty. Hunger was apparently part of the punishment for those without their enhanced forms. Two Vanguard warrior forms kept watch over the facility, and I’m sure they had disdain for me due to my responsibility in the loss of their comrades.

  I was in jail for just one day when I had a surprise visit from President Sandstrom.

  “It sounds like you’ve been quite busy,” he said, holding a digibook and scrolling through reports and photos.

  I nodded, “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “We all make mistakes,” he said, “but we all have to pay for them. That’s how our society works.”

  “The Reverend,” I said to him, “you have to stop him.”

  “We’re trying,” Sandstrom replied, “but he’s got numbers on his side. We’ve been throwing the Vanguard against him but we’re running out of soldiers. He loses five hundred for every one or two of ours, but he had a half million to start and we only had a few hundred. We can’t train ours quickly enough and he can simply spread the Plague to convert the primitives—the ones they don’t eat—into more zombies. We are ill-prepared for such an assault. We never anticipated something like this could happen.”

  He scrolled through some photos and showed me one. “This is Omaha after we brought a capital ship into orbit and fired the MAC gun at the city.”

  The city was utterly leveled…a giant crater filled with rubble compared to the ruins we had been paraded through.

  “Unfortunately we can’t hit them all, everywhere,” the president continued, “and it seems they’ve split up into smaller and smaller groups to avoid the orbital weapons. It may be a few weeks before we can recall enough of the Vanguard to Earth from their other assignments. We simply don’t have the resources to fight them and we’re concerned that all it will take is one infiltrator with a nuclear device to wipe out so much of what we’ve accomplished. It will be weeks or months before they move across the mountains, and with winter coming, we may get a slight break. I think you still might be able to help.”

  “How can I help?” I asked. “I’ve already told you everything.”

  “I feel like you may be unintentionally skipping some critical details,” he said, “things that are important to stopping this Reverend and the zombie threat. Until we get every last detail out of you,” he continued, “we can’t clear you of your involvement. I can promise you clemency for your crimes under two conditions. The first is documentation.”

  The president handed me a new digibook.

  “I need you to write everything down. Include maps and photos, where you can. This has access to the archives at the Central Library. You may also use it to video chat with your,” he checked his notes, “’Rebekah’ and your family as you see fit. You are not, under any circumstances, released from captivity or cleared on any charges until you comply with two conditions: The first is that you must provide in detail the circumstances surrounding your alleged crimes. Should you provide enough critical information, and enough evidence surrounding your motives and actions, you will be cleared of the most serious charge of treason.”

  Which is precisely why I’ve written this story down, now, and in as much detail as I can remember.

  “And the second condition?” I asked.

  “To clear the lesser charges, we’re going to need your cooperation. As I mentioned,” he replied, “we’re short on soldiers. I’m going to need to you join the fight.”

  SQUAD LEADERS

  The president had taken an interesting and very personal role in my life: his invitation to tea, his plea to turn in Semper, and now his visit in jail to ask for my help in fighting the zombies.

  “I don’t know the first thing about fighting zombies,” I laughed. “Don’t you have military commanders who train for this?”

  “I do,” he said without smiling, “but they’re in short supply. Frankly, the conflict thus far has shown me the one critical flaw in our strategy.”

  “And that is?” I asked, in a slightly disrespectful tone.

  “That is that we’re not human enough. We always thought that when war came to us, logic would be a blessing. Necessary sacrifices would be made. All efforts would be expended. No expense would be spared. Instead, we find ourselves unwilling to run away from a fight. We never trained to retreat. And now we’re unable to feel the fear that would keep us alive. Our logic is dooming us.”

  “So how do I help?”

  “At almost nineteen years old, you’re the oldest biological human in the mainstream of the Republic. The older ones are outside of our sphere of influence anymore, living under the shelter of our protection, but outside of our accepted norms. The villages on the East Slopes. The pirates in the Vancouver harbor. We need to call on them to serve, as we do every eighteen-, or close-to-eighteen, year-old adult in the nation. We’re starting a draft and building an army. Our factories are retooling machines for war. We’re churning out weapons. But we need people to fight.”

  I still didn’t understand. “Why not more enhanced-form adults? Why not have people fight who are older and stronger, and more impervious to the Hordes?”

  Sandstrom shook his head. “Our robotic forms are not as suited for full-scale combat as we had hoped or imagined. We’ve seen it in every battle since Omaha. Their numbers beat our brilliance in every contest and in every simulation. No, my commanders are suggesting we need a human element to this and that we need to start with someone who followed his gut and took a risk that we would have never taken. You have a loyalty to your lady-friend, and to your late friend Semper, that we haven’t seen in scores of decades. We want to try to harness that power and emotion…and creativity.”

  “We’re going to create a biologic division,” he continued, “to face this threat from a different angle. We’re working on a few divisions of enhanced forms as well, but we need to bring all options to the table at this point.”

  Sandstrom paused and looked at me. “Can you believe I have senators and administrators asking for a full retreat of the planet? They want to put the kids all in stasis and take them to Mars or something. Maybe even farther away than that. I’m refusing because we’ve fought so hard to rebuild the Earth, that giving in to the Horde—even temporarily—is an abhorrent thought. I won’t do it. People can do what they please, but I will not order an evacuation.”

  “Well that’s…uh,” I searched for the word in my mind, “admirable?”

  I was, admittedly, being rude to the man who held my salvation in his hands, but I didn’t trust him at all, and I didn’t think this ridiculous idea would be successful.

  “If you don’t help defend our Republic,” he said coldly, “you’re going to die. Whether it’s at our hands, or theirs, or through the slow wasting away of your life, you will die. You can choose how, and you can make a difference before you go, and just maybe find the path to your enhanced form and your future among the stars.”

  I paused for a moment to consider all of that. I had fully anticipated undergoing the surgery when I returned to the capital, but now that Rebekah was a part of my world, I couldn’t say good-bye to her, and I definitely couldn’t let anyt
hing bad happen to her.

  “Okay,” I mumbled. “I’ll join your ‘biologic’ division.”

  “No,” he retorted quickly, “I need you to lead it. You’re organic, and a lot of the organics outside of the Republic don’t trust any of the enhanced forms like us. You have a personality that people will follow, and you have ingenuity. We need you to lead the division, and we need at least two thousand soldiers. We’ll provide you an officer cadre and all the training and gear you need, but you need to fill it with bodies. The zombies are camped on the eastern slope of the Rockies for the winter, but they’ll be on the move when the snow clears in the spring and we need you ready by then.”

  “This,” he finished, “is the condition for your clemency.”

  He looked at me intently, until I nodded in agreement, bowing my head.

  President Sandstrom left the room and he was immediately replaced by a man in a military uniform. The only military people I’d ever seen were starship captains. This man wore the five-stars on his collar that I knew meant he was the Grand Marshal of the Fleet, the leader of our entire defense forces and fleet of exploratory starships.

  “I’m Marshal Burnham,” he said, without a trace of emotion in his voice, but I already knew who he was. “The president and I feel that you can use your connections to draw in the Outcasts and get them to fight for us.”

  I shrugged. “Some of them want nothing to do with you. Most of them, if I had to guess.”

  “It’s a matter of survival,” he replied. “If they want to live, they’ll kick in.”

  I wasn’t so sure about this, but I wasn’t going to abandon my chance to clear my name.

  “A lot of them are old,” I countered. “They’re not going to be able to shoot a gun or fight. It’ll be a massacre.”

  “What I’m about to tell you is classified,” he said quietly. “You know what that means and what the repercussions of releasing this information is, right?”

  I nodded, assuming those repercussions were “worst case.”

  He motioned to an adjutant, who brought over a digibook. The marshal showed me pictures of warehouses with rows and rows of warrior-form robots.

  “We have a stockpile of thousands of these machines which we planned on deploying over time as we had suitable transplant candidates. We don’t have that time anymore, and they need to be deployed now. Regrettably, the secondary extraction of the central nervous system from the enhanced form to the warrior form is very difficult for most people. The training that goes into the development of a warrior takes many months. We don’t have time, or enough candidates.”

  He paused, and then smirked as he showed me a new diagram.

  I traced out the algorithm. Essentially, the Bionics Research Facility, where I’d gone as a child to calibrate my future robotic self, was being retooled as a place where biologics could enter the remote web and control fighting robotic forms wirelessly from anywhere across the planet. If one warrior-form robot was destroyed in combat, the operator could immediately operate a new one. It was like a video game with infinite lives.

  “We won’t have to suffer another casualty,” the marshal beamed.

  “Why do we need to recruit outcast adults?” I asked. “Why not use younger children who are already familiar with the process?”

  The marshal shook his head. “No. Not only was that a politically unsupported decision, but we also need to be ready to fast-cryo all the children on-world and get them out of here if we need to. You’ll have everyone over the age of seventeen years with an organic body at your disposal.”

  “Marshal,” I pleaded, “you need to lower that service age. I need teenagers. They’ve been using the systems, and the systems are calibrated for them. I’ll still go rally the adult outcasts, but it will take them a while to get used to the interface. It takes us years. And if the zombies reach the Columbia River, you’ll still have enough time to cryo and evac the kids.”

  The marshal stared for a while with that blank stare that adult robots had while they were thinking.

  “I’ll talk to the president. For the moment, you’re free to go. I’ve informed your parents you’ll be heading back to Valhalla on the train tonight, and they’ll meet you at the station. You have four days to prepare, and then I need you on the road. Continue documenting everything that’s already happened and everything that happens from now on.”

  He stood up and saluted me in by crossing his right fist to his heart as he would to our military and expeditionary elites, and in the manner of the Roman legions so many centuries before. I stood and returned the salute as he left the room. The door remained open.

  I walked to the door frame and peered into the hall. The warrior forms guarding the end of the hall had departed. I hadn’t been “free” in weeks, and the concept of being able to leave was unsettling. After ensuring that this meant I was really able to go, I grabbed my new digibook and walked quietly to the end of the hall to the booking desk. The lady working the desk stood up, and without saying a word, grabbed a discharge paper and slid it across the desk to me.

  It felt strange to walk out onto the street. I stopped to smell the fresh air. It had been weeks since I’d been outside. The fresh clean scent of a recent rain was refreshing and invigorating. It meant I was home…but not for long. I didn’t have anything with me except my new digibook and the clothes on my back—my other belongings were under the pulverized ruins of Omaha.

  The central train station was a few blocks away and it didn’t take long to get there—mostly because I sprinted. I was going to see my family, and see Rebekah.

  The normally short train ride seemed to last for days. We whizzed north over the giant bridge across the Squamish Inlet. I was in the spacious passenger compartment surrounded by government officials and businessmen, all of whom were whispering about the coming onslaught of zombies. A man and woman behind me spoke of sending their child to stasis aboard a starship for a few months. A uniformed man at the front of the car talked about deploying enhanced forms to the front lines. I’d never heard fear in the voices of adults before, but I guess that at its very core, fear is rational and just amplified by hormones and physical bodies.

  MAP WINDOW

  Rebekah threw her arms around me the second I stepped off the train and pressed her lips to mine. The adults around me stared awkwardly. Rebekah had never known a world where physical expressions of love were unseen in public, and almost considered improper.

  Before I could protest, I was amazed by her transformation. Her hair was straight and clean. Her clothes were modern and tight. She wore tight leggings and boots instead of a dress. She could have blended in with anyone in the capital.

  I removed her arms from around me and held both her hands in my left hand, while putting my right arm around first my mother, then my father, in a hug that warmed and calmed me. We walked to the car and piled in for the quick drive home to the house overlooking the harbor.

  Stepping through the front door was gloriously invigorating. I had been gone for months. It felt weird to be home, but it at least still felt like home.

  Rebekah had been living at my parents’ house for weeks, and was still amazed at things like driverless cars and automated cleaning robots. She loved watching the ground speed by as the car glided down the road. She would stare at the household machines while they performed their tasks. Everything I’d taken for granted my whole life was new and interesting to her. She had so many questions about the things she saw, and my parents had exhibited infinite patience with her. Rebekah was a quick study, cramming in decades worth of education. She even began to understand relatively advanced concepts like the mechanics of evolution and stellar physics. I loved when she asked “why?” She was very intelligent, and everyone could see it.

  “Pax,” my father said, pulling me aside. “I know you’ve had a physical relationship with her.”

  I started to protest, but he placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m not upset, son,” he whispe
red. “She told us you made love. Just remember that it’s not legal for two biologics to do that in our society. Genes and reproduction are to be strictly controlled. And as you know, mating results in offspring.”

  I stopped to consider that. My father then began to have a talk with me that I would recognize from some ancient novels as “the birds and the bees.” He also told me that no one could know about our affair, and if we continued it, she could end up bearing a child, which would pose a lot of difficulties for both of us. While young males received vasectomies at birth, adolescence was known to sometimes heal “the plumbing” as my dad called it.

  There were books in the library about the subject of human reproduction. It’s not like the information was secret: it was just buried under the mountains of other information that our society deemed more important for educational purposes. Like my discovery of the term “brothers” that had seemingly started this whirlwind journey.

  After the talk with my dad, and a little bit of research, I had to sit down with Rebekah and explain that though I loved her and wanted to be physical with her, I just couldn’t imagine us having children at this point in our lives, especially with everything that was looming before us. We agreed to still be close, but not mate or make love—or whatever—until much later.

  We still took every opportunity to hold hands, cuddle, and kiss. Her presence filled me with strength and gave me every reason to smile. My parents didn’t seem to mind at all. By the third day, I even noticed that my parents started being closer….I could only remember a handful of times in my whole life where they’d held hands or hugged, and now they were regularly kissing. I imagined that kissing someone who doesn’t produce saliva might feel dry or weird, but they seemed to enjoy it and seeing them express their love—physically—made me smile.