Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  Day four of my pseudo-vacation was coming up more quickly than I’d imagined. I was due to report to the capital tomorrow to begin my “tour” to the Outlands, the new official term for the lands of the rejects and outcasts.

  Rebekah informed me that she wanted to go with me. I’d have a dropship and a pilot so I could cover more ground, so it really wasn’t a problem for her to come with. She might even be a good ambassador to some of the Outlands.

  On a map, I showed her all the places we’d be going. The marshal’s forces were recruiting volunteers from among the legal adults in the large, developed cities: Seattle Isles, New Vancouver, Portland Heights, Kelowna, Kamloops, Bend, Prince George, Roseburg, and so on. My area of responsibility was the Outcast towns farther east: the farming communities of Ellensburg, Yakima, Walla Walla, Pendleton, and Burns. These were ancient towns that had been slightly modernized by the Republic in the mid-2100s, and then forgotten as the focus of our society had shifted to an interstellar civilization.

  The people in those towns were still citizens of the Republic, but as my journey to Ellensburg had shown before, they weren’t too thrilled about the society that had basically run them off. I couldn’t imagine finding volunteers among them, but I had to try.

  “What’s to the east of the Outlands?” Rebekah asked, scouring the map for details.

  “The Plaguelands are everything east of…well…this line here,” I said, drawing a line approximating the boundary of the Columbia River watershed. “Just outside of the watershed is the Great Basin, and then farther east are the Rocky Mountains, with towns like Magic Valley and Colorado Springs.”

  “This map doesn’t show either of those. Or Flathead Lake or Great Falls,” she commented. “There are a lot of cities missing.”

  “You have to remember,” I replied, “that the Republic considers everyone outside the Columbia Watershed a zombie. Except for Yellowstone.”

  She looked indignant.

  “How can they lump me in with those creatures?”

  “Everyone,” I explained softly, “that was kept out of the Republic, or everyone who left, was assumed to have been afflicted by the C-virus. And since their more, uh, primitive cultural associations -“

  “Like believing in God?” she snapped.

  “Yes, like believing in God,” I continued, trying not to seem superior. “They were considered to be no better than the zombies. No smarter. No more worthy. Some of them left the Republic, and the rest never wanted to come in. Why should anyone have cared?”

  “But four hundred years of this imaginary line, Pax,” she grunted, “and they couldn’t have come and said Hi just once? Couldn’t even put us on their map?”

  “Rebekah,” I pleaded, taking her hand, “I’m sure someone knew. Just no one influential cared. In that time, we’ve stepped foot on more planets than you could ever count…seen more rare and unique phenomena than have ever been described. They could have cared less about a bunch of savages across the mountains.”

  “But they need us now,” Rebekah smirked.

  “No,” I said solemnly, “I imagine it’s the other way around. The Reverend’s army is huge. It’s going to consume everything it touches. Including those little towns.”

  Her face looked grim. Her lips pursed. She wasn’t mad at me, I sensed. She was worried for her family, and for people like them.

  “We have to go there, too,” she announced. “To Magic Valley and Flathead Lake and Great Falls and…and…all of them! They need our help.”

  “You keep saying us and our when talking about both the Republic and the Plaguelanders. Whose side are you on?”

  She paused a moment, and her face went cold.

  “Whoever’s against the Reverend.”

  RECRUITING

  We took the train to Bend, where a dropship was waiting to take us out into the Southern Wastes, as the map called it. The town of Burns was a small farming and ranching community in the middle of what used to be Oregon. Climate change had been drastic here, with rainfall decreasing in the desert but increasing in the mountains around it. Huge retention basins had been carved and dams constructed to hold the runoff for farming purposes. We could see the giant pools—kilometers across—from the air.

  Rebekah was a little motion sick from flying. I had forgotten it was only her second flight. Then I stopped to think that it was only my fifth or so. I usually took the train. I wondered why I wasn’t as affected, and then I remembered how much time I’d spent in augmented reality environments.

  Our ship’s engines swiveled to hover-mode and we landed just outside the Administrative Center in Burns. Dust blew away from the craft as it touched down on the landing pad.

  We hurried into the hall and met with the town’s Chief Administrator, an enhanced-form man named Seraphis Ross. I was surprised to see a robotic adult so far away from “civilization.”

  “I’ll admit I was surprised when I received the message from Marshal Burnham,” the dark-haired man smiled. “We don’t get a lot of visitors out here. Much less Fleet officers.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not exactly an officer.”

  “According to the marshal, you’re commanding a division,” he laughed.

  “I’m not exactly an officer,” I repeated, to his amusement. I was still puzzled, though.

  “So you’re here to recruit for the Fleet, eh?” he smirked. “Slim pickings here. Ever since the new materials have been used in the enhanced form fabrication, we haven’t been getting as many rejects here. The average age in this town is in the low fifties.”

  “Average,” he reiterated.

  “Anyone who wants to carry a gun or provide support will be welcome to help,” I proclaimed.

  “We’re having a meeting in the theatre tomorrow night for you to drum up support,” Ross said, “but I’m not optimistic that the turnout is going to be great.”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  Two people showed up the next evening. One left half-way through my presentation.

  That left one volunteer, a young, biologic man named Amirani. The darker-skinned man had a short beard and dark piercing eyes. He refused to give a last name, saying he’d abandoned his surname when his family had abandoned him because he couldn’t undergo the surgery due to abnormalities in his brain tissue. They’d left Roseburg for a new colony on Draxis, and he’d found his way to Burns to be a mechanic.

  “Maybe, just maybe,” he said, “I can make them proud of me.”

  We assured him that we’d be sending for him, and then struck north to Pendleton, a brief flight for our dropship. The meeting there was better attended, but only a handful of volunteers stayed after my presentation to sign up.

  That night in the hotel room that the administrator provided, Rebekah curled up next to me and traced her fingers on me.

  “I’m worried,” her voice wavered. “There aren’t enough folks willing to pick up a gun and fight. Don’t they understand they’re going to die if they don’t?”

  “I imagine they know they're going to die anyways. Being mortal surrounded by immortals must remind you of that every day.”

  We lay there silently for a minute.

  “Do you really think this will work?” she whispered.

  “I bet that the marshal is going to have better luck with the kids in the city. They don’t have anything to lose, and they have more reason to fight. I just can’t imagine these people are going to enjoy being eaten.”

  “Or worse,” she grumbled.

  “There’s worse?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Rebekah mumbled, trailing off. I didn’t press the issue.

  We slept for a few hours, and then my digibook started beeping. I had an incoming call from Marshal Burnham. I rubbed my eyes and swiped the screen, where I saw his face.

  “Good morning, sir,” I mumbled.

  “Good morning, Pax,” he replied, “though I’m sure it still counts as night where you’re at.”

  My tired mind got caught up in orbital phys
ics for a second. The marshal was seeing a sunrise every eighty-eight minutes or so. Determining days from nights must be really confusing.

  I drifted back to the conversation at the sound of his voice.

  “I got your message that the recruiting isn’t going well,” he said stoically, “and I can’t say I expected much better. The president is the one who seems to think the Outcasts are going to be so grateful for everything the Republic provides—he calls it welfare, but I call it indentured servitude—that they’re going to come running to help.”

  “The Biologic Division is going to need a different tack,” I agreed. “How’s the recruiting with the kids going?”

  “Better than expected,” Burnham replied. “When the announcement was placed on the Slayers in-game message center that recruits were needed to pilot actual warrior robots, our center overflowed with requests to join up. We feel like we can get the Bionics Research Facility reconfigured for about four hundred total recruits. Instead of one massive army of drones, we’ll have to do it in waves. We’re taking the top four hundred scoring players of the game, when normalized with their previous BRF scores, so they’ll be good in combat and at operating the mechs.”

  “That’s good news,” I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Continue your recruiting efforts,” he said, “even if they don’t bear any fruit. We’ll still need biologics to possibly augment non-essential positions.”

  “Pardon, sir,” I asked as politely as possible. “Why not use enhanced forms in direct combat roles?”

  He looked as if he was deeply searching for the answer.

  “Enhanced forms are stronger than biologic humans. Probably stronger than zombies. But with the mobbing techniques they use, they’ll overrun our positions and rip us apart. There’s no healing an enhanced form if they crack the CNS-casing, which they did to our warriors in Omaha and a few other engagements since.”

  “So we’re expendable because we might be healed?” I said, the anger boiling up inside me. “We might be eaten or turned into zombies ourselves!”

  “We’re rethinking this strategy too,” he said coldly. “The decision was a political one, made by politicians. I serve them, and carry out their orders.”

  “We’ll be in Walla Walla tonight, sir,” I snapped. “Do you have anything else for me?”

  “Pax,” he chided, “everyone is scared. We never thought this was possible. We aren’t prepared for a full-scale war. Not like this. And remember,” the marshal scolded, “to watch your tone.”

  The call ended.

  “What a jerk,” Rebekah sighed.

  “He’s following orders.”

  “What we need to do,” she said, “is to go get all the people in the Free Lands together under one flag. Give them guns. Get a big army and have them fight.”

  “FleetCom will never go for that. Creating an army of Plaguelanders—er, Freelanders—would represent a huge threat to the Republic. If they can’t contain zombies with all their technological might, how will they battle intelligent humans?”

  Rebekah rubbed her temples.

  “My head hurts,” she whimpered. “Let’s go back to sleep.”

  The next few stops throughout the Outlands were only slightly more successful. In a dozen more small towns, we ended up just short of two hundred total volunteers. It was enough for a company, not a battalion or division. And without the usefulness of being able to link to the drones through the BRF, they would be relegated to subordinate tasks. I guess it was still better than nothing. Or was it?

  Back in the capital, Fleet Command set me up with an apartment on the fifteenth floor of the beautiful Grist Tower, downtown. Rebekah, surprisingly, was permitted to stay with me. I was puzzled by the older enhanced forms’ tolerance of our relationship. For all I knew, though, it probably made them uncomfortable, but they were too polite to say anything.

  Neither of us had ever lived so high off the ground, but she reveled in it while the heights seemed dizzying to me. We settled in for a few days without much to do, and really got into playing house. She loved cooking in the kitchen, and after learning how the appliances all worked; she was making the best food I’d ever eaten. She took the basic fruits, vegetables, and meats that I’d eaten my whole life—in bland combinations—and reinvented them as glorious works of art. Tuesday’s blackened salmon pasta danced on my tongue. On Wednesday, I didn’t even want to swallow the lamb shanks drizzled with a tangy glaze, I just wanted them to rest in my mouth forever. Thursday’s bison and steak salad was beyond compare.

  “You had balsamic vinegar out in the wastelands?” I asked, my mouth stuffed full of salad that was dripping with creamy dressing.

  “No,” she smiled, heartily cutting a bison steak into pieces. “We had to scrounge whatever we could find and make it work together. You get really good at knowing what kinds of smells and tastes go together.”

  “I never knew that food could taste this good,” was my muffled reply.

  She blushed. “It’s so strange to me that the robots have such keen senses but make such lousy food.”

  “They can’t taste it,” I said, returning my attention to the last morsels of food on my plate. “You’re going to make me fat.”

  Rebekah laughed and grabbed my hand from across the table. The look in her eyes said she was hungry for something else. Her fingers traced up my arms.

  “You do have dessert, here, right?” she said, lifting herself up from the table, tugging gently at her beltline. “I still haven’t gotten used to these pants, Pax. I’m so used to dresses.”

  And with that she flipped the button on her tight denim leggings, the zipper peeling apart. I felt excitement swelling within me.

  “You haven’t touched me in so long,” she complained. “I miss it.”

  Her pants slid to the floor, revealing a tight pair of boyshort underwear painted on the gracious curves of her butt.

  “I do, too,” I stammered.

  “You’re mine,” she said, wetting her lips and moving toward me, “and I’m yours. Have me.”

  I was full of worry. Frustration. Hormones. And then the second her lips pressed mine I couldn’t think anymore. My hands raced up and down her body. Under her shirt. Along her smooth thighs.

  My mind wandered for a brief moment. She had waxed her legs. Her accent was fading. I started noticing how “Republic” she’d become. Then all thoughts departed my mind and I gave into her desires. My desires. Our desires.

  We lay there on the rug in the dining room, with tiny sweat droplets glistening. I was surprised it lasted as long as it did. She nuzzled into the crook of my neck and whispered.

  “I want it to always be like this.”

  I wanted it, too, but couldn’t find the words. I just pulled her tighter to me. I knew I wanted to be with her forever. I knew I wanted to “make love” to her until I died. Even though I was slowly freeing myself from the societal chains my mind had been wrapped with, I was still stuck to the old ways. I worried about what others would think or say. Image was everything in our culture.

  Yet this girl, with her deeply religious beliefs and own social pressures, had given herself completely to me. I owed her the same.

  “Do you want to get bonded to me?” I asked.

  “Bonded?” she glowered indignantly. “I’m nobody’s slave.”

  Ahh, language barriers.

  “Sorry. They used to call it ‘marriage’ but that was a church thing,” I stumbled over my words.

  Her face changed. Her eyes twinkled.

  “They still do,” she cooed. “At least where I’m from, it’s a celebration before God and before the whole community. It’s one of the few happy times we have out there.”

  “Well, we don’t have marriage here,” I countered.

  “Are we going to stay ‘here’?” she asked.

  I hadn’t thought about what would happen after all this. If we defeated the zombies, or at least kept them at bay, maybe life in the Plaguelands wo
uld be more normal. Maybe the Republic could expand its borders and bring all the wastelanders into the fold. Maybe we could still live there but with the comforts and safety of here. There was still the question of what I would do. I couldn’t farm or hunt. I could maybe fish in an ocean or navigate the stars. I would be useless to her. And I definitely couldn’t undergo the surgery now, not with her by my side.

  “Nevermind,” I said softly. “Let’s talk about it later. After all this is over.”

  She traced her fingers up and down my chest, twirling them in the light hair on my pecs.

  “Pax,” she sighed, “I’ll be with you forever, wherever that is.”

  INTEL

  “Pax!” Ebenezer shouted happily as I walked across the rooftop toward him.

  The old man reached out and gave me a hug. It had been only a few months since I’d seen him, but it felt like a lifetime, and despite our last meeting having gone poorly in my mind, he apparently thought we were old friends.

  Maybe he was, actually, a friend.

  Ebenezer waved the guards to stand down, and they returned to the lower levels of the building. Rebekah ambled out of the dropship and took her place by my side, holding my hand nervously, but still smiling back at the old man.

  “And who is this?” he asked, smiling.

  “Rebekah of the tribe of Daniel,” she curtsied.

  She had always looked pretty in her dress and bonnet, but seeing her now in the common style always made me stir inside. Her body was impossibly perfect. Rebekah’s nose and jaw bone were the only angular features showing, as her long legs and womanly curves were now accentuated by a tight leather jacket, thick denim leggings, and thigh-high leather boots.

  Our clothing was actually ancient of design, but it suited our people well. When mosquitoes were the primary vector of plague transmission in the beginning, the leather and tough, double-layered denim kept the bites away. Now, with mosquitoes being all but extinct in this part of the world, we still didn’t want to take chances of being bit, and the cool Pacific Northwest climate made the layering necessary.