Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  “Ebenezer, the Pirate King of Vancouver,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it gently.

  “Pirate?” she giggled. “Where’s your eye-patch and peg-leg?”

  I looked surprised.

  “We had stories out there, you know,” she scowled at me.

  “I may sadly have both my eyes and legs, my dear,” he laughed, “but I do have large amounts of rum.”

  He turned to me. “To what do I owe the honor of your return visit to my humble community? And I do promise, lad, that it will be much more hospitable than the last one.”

  “Well, I thank you for that,” I said politely. “I’m here to ask for your help. We’re at war with the zombie horde and planning a major attack.”

  “Whatever can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I need people to fight for us.”

  His wrinkled old face slackened.

  “Let’s go inside, my boy, and chat a bit.”

  We ventured from the old helipad down the stairs. Rebekah stopped and stared across the waves at a building with a saucer-shaped structure perched at the very top.

  “It’s so…strange,” she muttered. “Pretty.”

  “You’re strange and pretty,” I laughed, kissing her neck while nudging her forward into the doorway.

  We went down a few flights of stairs and took seats on the couch in Ebenezer’s parlor, with the doors flanked by his guards. Ebenezer poured himself a drink at the bar, then held a glass up toward me, but I politely waved my hand in refusal.

  “I’ll take his,” Rebekah announced.

  Ebenezer brought the glasses over and clinked his against Rebekah’s before they both took their first sip.

  “Mmm,” Rebekah moaned in pleasure. “That’s mighty fine shine, sir.”

  “We make this here, dear Rebekah. It’s actually aged in some metal casks with toasted hickory chips. Hickory! Can you believe it?”

  She sipped quickly and took the whole drink down. I remembered coughing embarrassingly when I tried to drink that stuff before.

  “So you want me to fight against zombies,” Ebenezer chuckled, flopping into an old oversized chair. A bit of dust flew up as he did.

  “Maybe not you, exactly, sir,” I said, respectfully, “but you have your own private army. And you have your young adults and children who can fight using robots they control with their minds.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Pax,” he said, licking his lips. “We may not abhor technology here, but we’re not going to plug ourselves into it.”

  “You have to join the fight,” I implored. “The Horde is coming and they won’t stop until every last human is destroyed.”

  “Until every last robot is destroyed,” the old man said sternly. “There are still humans holding out across the globe. You’ve been out there, I’ve heard. You know.”

  “Yes, but how did you know that?” I asked.

  “I am a man who prides himself on knowing what’s going on. It seems you had quite an adventure in the Plaguelands.”

  “Then you know what’s coming,” I retorted.

  “A horde of mindless zombies,” he said softly, “that will murder, eat, and rape their way across the continent until they get to the ocean and then they’ll stop.”

  “They’re coming to end the Republic.”

  “Well we’re not in the Republic, my lad. Remember?”

  “But you are surrounded by it. Your position here, between the old capital and the new one, in the bay surrounded by the Republic’s protection. No mosquitoes or plague. No zombies. You’re reaping all the benefits without paying in, and I’m just asking you to finally pay.”

  “I haven’t paid?” the Pirate King laughed. “For longer than you’ve been alive I’ve been stewing about on these rocks, trying to make a better life for my family while being outcast by the fools who raised me. I’ve paid dearly.”

  “I mean no disrespect, sir,” I pleaded, “but they’re coming to end everything. They have nuclear weapons, and probably the means to detonate them.”

  “Dear God,” he muttered. “Can you be certain?”

  “I saw them in Omaha, with my own eyes.”

  Rebekah nodded. “We both did.”

  Ebenezer stroked his chin.

  “Please, sir. Please, Mister Ebenezer. My daddy, my brothers, and most of my family and friends have been lost to that monster Reverend and his creatures. Anything you can do to help might help us turn the river against him.”

  “If what you say is true,” the old man said contemplatively, “then we need to get going. Get out of here. Far, far away. All of us.”

  “Please,” I whispered.

  “There are far too few of us here to help you, son,” he said with sorrow in his voice. “A few hundred ragged souls just trying to get by. Suffering silently. No immortality. No ultra-advanced technology. Why ask us?”

  “Because, as a man who prides himself on knowing things, you probably know how poorly the war has been going since Omaha.”

  He nodded. “It seems that this Reverend fellow is more than a match for the vaunted Republic Vanguard, eh?“

  “We never expected to have to fight a large-scale conflict against the zombies,” I said, echoing the marshal’s words. “The Republic is mobilizing divisions of enhanced forms, but that will take some time. They’ve got kids being plugged into augmented reality systems to operate warrior drones. They’ve even got a division of biologic troops being gathered from across the Eastern Slope. But the zombies have the numbers and the ferocity and the animalistic bloodlust that we just can’t match unless everyone pulls it together. And if they nuke the capital, the fallout will spread here and ruin everything you have struggled for.”

  Ebenezer stared into his glass, watching the light reflect through the liquid and split into the colors of the rainbow on his hand.

  “There’s no person I can spare,” he said softly, “and in fact, we’ll definitely be leaving this place now, probably bound for another island or another ruined city on our ships. I don’t know where yet. But I do know that I can give you one gift before I take my family far away from this danger: the gift of insight.”

  I peered at him quizzically.

  ”We monitor the low-band frequencies for any messages from enclaves of humanity left in the wilds. As you know, there are a lot of towns and farms and villages where they’ve miraculously survived not only the virus, but the rampaging of the Horde. Some of those enclaves still use ancient low-frequency or short-wave technology. We found something at the lowest end of the frequency bands. Listen to this.”

  He raised his hand and his tall assistant with the short brown beard came over to us, holding out some sort of recording device. He pressed a button, and a low rumbling sound was heard, punctuated by three higher pitched thrums, then the low rumble again. The pattern repeated over and over.

  Hrrrrummmm…thrum…thrum…thrum…hrrrrummmm.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a signal,” he smiled.

  “Whose signal, and what does it mean?”

  “You’d better see this,” Ebenezer chuckled. “Charles, bring me the digibook with the video file that the Californians sent.”

  The assistant retrieved a digibook from a shelf on the other side of the room and handed it to the old man. Ebenezer held it aloft for me to watch.

  It showed a zombie drudge in a glass room, snarling and throwing itself against the walls. Blood and pus streaked the glass, which rattled with every impact, but didn’t scratch or shatter. The zombie’s aggression peaked when another human—this one wearing a lab coat—came into view holding another recording device on the other side of the glass. As the same thrum-thrum-thrum played, the zombie calmed down. It spoke a few words in that gibberish Southern-style tongue, then moved to the opposite side of the cage and slowly pushed and nudged at the walls before curling up into a ball. When the man in the lab coat switched off the signal, the zombie resumed its previous aggression.

  Ebenezer turned o
ff the video and put down the tablet. “The Californians think that someone is using this signal to calm the zombies and push them westward. They aren’t 100 percent sure, but they think that this four-hertz signal actually syncs with the brainwaves in the zombies and helps restore some level of cognition. Like an ultra-low-frequency dose of aspirin. For whatever reason, it’s working. We haven’t been able to triangulate the signal because ULF is designed to penetrate through the earth and travel great distances. It almost seems to be coming from three different places, but that’s probably a mistake in the software we’re using.”

  “So if we can find the source of the signal,” I postulated, “then we should be able to turn it off, and the zombies will revert to the mindless mass instead of an army pushing in one direction.”

  “That’s the idea,” he nodded.

  “You keep mentioning the Californians, and these other enclaves. Who are they? And would they stand to fight against the Horde?”

  “That’s yet to be seen,” he scowled into his nearly glass.

  “Is there anyone else you know we could call upon?”

  The grey-haired man cocked an eye.

  ”Oh there’s plenty of folks out there to call upon,” he said. “You really think you’re the last government on Earth? You really think you’re the most advanced?”

  The old man laughed, swirled his whiskey in his glass, and took a sip.

  “It seems it’s time for a history lesson, Pax Faustus. There are still a few small nations—island nations, mostly—that instituted a quarantine that has never been lifted. The island nation of Iceland survived and merged with Greenland right after the Plague struck. Tristan de Cunha survived. Ascension Island. Some of the most far-flung places on the planet were able to withstand the Plague and are still in contact with us through old-time short-wave radio.”

  It was almost too much to believe.

  “We’re in contact with as many as we can find. Mostly small, subsistence nations that have reverted to pre-Industrial civilization, except for Iceland, which is surprisingly advanced. Oh, and let’s not forget about the California Republic or the Kerguelen Dominion.”

  I knew of California. It was a “state” in the old United States that dissolved at the time of the Plague.

  He stared at the floor as he spoke, almost out of respect. “Two of the independent nations on this continent—the Ozark Collective and the Kingdom of Taos—both went off the air within the last couple of weeks. We assume that as the Horde moved westward, they destroyed everyone and everything in their path.”

  He stayed silent for a moment.

  “Is there anyone left who is strong enough to be an ally? What about these Californians?”

  Ebenezer coughed. “The Californians were nearly annihilated by the disease and the climate change. All of their major sea-level cities were flooded, their mountain towns were scorched by fires, and their desert towns dried up. But they were still wealthy and ingenious and powerful. Over the last hundred years, with the stabilization of the climate and the slight retreat of the seas, they’ve expanded. New San Francisco is built on the hills south of the old city and is their capital, with over a million people. Redding has a million residents. Yosemite has half a million. Big Bear is pretty large, and they’re actually reforesting there. They have outposts as far south as Fallbrook and as far east as Mount Charleston, near Las Vegas. The California Republic, again using their ancient moniker, is an independent and powerful nation. They’ve had two small skirmishes with the Republic Vanguard over keeping the border at the Rogue River when they tried to push north toward Roseburg.”

  “How did they defeat the zombies? C-virus?” I asked, incredulously.

  “Mosquito abatement,” Ebenezer smiled. “They genetically engineered fish that primarily eat mosquito larvae, just like the Republic did. You might say that someone leaked them the information on how to do it. Anyway, along with chemical treatments and physical barriers, they’ve kept the mosquito vector minimized and they physically repelled the zombies…so they’re actually beginning to prosper. If only they could get their water distribution problems under control….”

  “So you’re in contact with them,” I stated.

  “We’re alone out here,” he said, almost snarling. “How do you think we survive? It’s not by the good graces of the Cascadia Republic that we’re alive. It’s by brokering information. Our contacts around the world are what make us valuable. We wheel and deal information and technology to everyone. We take no sides.”

  “You mentioned another nation,” I said quickly. “A ‘Dominion’. Tell me more about them.”

  “Oh, the Kergueleni,” Ebenezer said solemnly. “They were the pinnacle of pre-Plague civilization. Your history courses don’t teach about them, of course, because the implications are huge. They’re the ones that built the space elevator, and they had to temporarily abandon it during the height of the Plague outbreak. They’re the ones that invented faster-than-light travel. They sent the first colony ships off into the black void of space. To say that anyone could have bested the Cascadia Republic is blasphemy these days, which is why your leaders don’t want you to know. All information concerning the Kerguelen Dominion is classified. Blacked out.”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “You can’t just make an entire country disappear. Freedom to access any information is guaranteed by our Articles of Incorporation, except in matters of national security.”

  “What’s more dangerous to national security than admitting you’re not the only super power?” Ebenezer shrugged. “In any case, no one’s heard from them in over one hundred and fifty years. They might not even still exist. The last contact, if you could call it that, was when a Republic dropship attempted to enter their airspace and was downed with all hands lost. Since the Cascadians could never confirm that the incident was an act of war and not a malfunction, they never retaliated. And they never sent anyone to investigate.”

  I was startled. “If people knew about this—”

  “People would be scared or upset. But those are ‘animal’ emotions, not pseudo-robotic intelligence and logic, my boy. And I’m sure that if any robotic adult found out, they’d justify the government’s actions in the name of protecting the Republic.”

  I shifted in my seat, leaning in toward the old man. “If I wanted to meet the Kergueleni, how would I do it?”

  He laughed and shook, almost spilling his drink. “If I knew that, I’d have another trading partner. Like I said: they’ve not been heard from in over one hundred and fifty years. And if you did actually end up on their shores…well, let’s just say they’ve no fondness for the Republic that built upon their gains and stole their greatest asset—the elevator. You’d probably never make it back alive.”

  “But they’re technologically advanced?” I asked.

  “Their pre-Plague technology was equal, and in some cases superior, to anything the known galaxy has today.”

  “One last thing,” I said, rising to my feet. “Where were those locations you found broadcasting on the ultra-low-frequency bands?”

  “In the old States,” he said, groaning as he stood, “they would have been called Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia. That’s as precise as I can determine. It may only be one of those places, or fuck…it might be all three.”

  “Thank you, Ebenezer.” I shook his hand. “I thank you for being a friend in these dark times, and look forward to seeing you again someday.”

  Handshakes were still so strange to me. I softly wiped my hand on my pant leg.

  “Godspeed, Pax Faustus. I hope we do, indeed, meet again.”

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, sir,” Rebekah curtsied. “And do you have any more of that rum?”

  SIMULATION LIMITS

  The several hundred young volunteers gathered in the auditorium of the Bionics Research Facility. There was visible excitement on their faces as Marshal Burnham took the stage. He stood there emotionless, briefing
his new troops.

  “As most of you know,” he started solemnly, “the Republic has never had a standing army. We’ve never had a fleet-scale engagement with our navy. We’ve had no need. A small, but disciplined force has provided the necessary security for over two centuries. In the wake of engagements against this new threat of the Infected, that force has been nearly expended.”

  He paused. If there was a way for an enhanced form to mentally pause and clear their throats, the marshal made that noise, before continuing.

  “As you know, this threat against the security of the Republic is unprecedented. Most of the juveniles and children are being sent to the colonies in cryostasis. You few have been selected for advanced bionics training based on your aptitude at this very center, and also your prowess with the Slayers gaming simulation. Your society thanks you for your willingness to serve.”

  He gestured to the screen.

  “Now: Major Isis Walling, of the Republic Vanguard.”

  A beautiful blonde woman in a military uniform appeared on the screen behind him. At first, she looked real, but then I realized that this was an avatar. I had met her during my rescue from Omaha, but clearly that shiny metal death machine wasn’t the gorgeous woman on the screen. I would later learn that warrior forms spent time actually inside the neural web; their giant metal bodies weren’t suited for the everyday recreational needs of the human mind, so they could willingly shut down their bodies and live in a digital sandbox with their peers. This avatar made them feel more human inside the simulation and her’s apparently represented what she would have looked like if she had never given up her organic or enhanced forms.

  “We are honored by your willingness to serve,” Major Walling started. “In the face of this new threat, it will be the responsibility of the entire human race to protect the planet we’ve tried to restore. Cleaning up the toxic chemicals and repairing the ecosystem on this world has taken longer than it’s taken to terraform other worlds entirely. But we’ve fought for this planet because it is our home, and it will always be our home.”