Bag Men

by Jackson, Silas

  Chapter 1

  BAG MEN

  Silas Jackson • J. R. Traas

  “Silent Night.”

  “Humans—what simple creatures we are, but we’re so inscrutable. So chaotic. So organized. There is nothing in the world more complex than our biological substrate. We only understand a fraction of the chemical reactions that go into maintaining life, consciousness, memory and personality. But on the flip-side it’s simple enough to figure out our psychological motivations. Food. Sex. Shelter. Our wants and needs are so predictable that anyone with a little insight can predict the movements and actions of groups, forecast the behavior of whole populations. But take one individual out of that crowd, and no one on earth can tell what they will do at any moment. Chaotic and organized. The crowd is predictable: the individual spits in the fucking eye of anyone who tries to guess what he or she will do next. It’s a contradiction and it doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it is.

  Humans are incredible. But some of the people closest to you—your grandfather, your sister, your wife, anyone—might not be human. Not anymore. We thought the plague ended years ago. We haven’t seen the infected in our settlements, and we haven’t crossed any in the wilderness. So we thought we had reason to hope. We thought the horror was over, and we could begin to rebuild. But I’m telling you now that it isn’t over. The plague isn’t over. It has just changed. It has adapted. We got too good at fighting the Shamblers. The mindless hordes of the undead that overran our cities, killed our families, murdered us through a whole generation. We got too good at fighting them. We were too much smarter than them. When their numbers started to thin out after all these years, and when those of us who were left learned too many strategies to deal with them, they weren’t dangerous anymore. That’s why the virus adapted. It could no longer propagate itself the old way—so only the most successful strains continued to pass on into the human population. The strains that were more deceptive. The strains that left victims looking more normal, acting more lucid. The virus adapted to deceive us—to keep us unaware that it was spreading through our loved ones and our neighbors. You need to understand what I’m telling you. It was goddamn natural selection. The virus evolved to be more successful as conditions changed. And what we have now is something different than what we had before. Our enemy isn’t a mass army anymore, mindlessly breaking over our cities in waves. Now our enemies are sleepers among us—people who look and act like you or me, but who are every bit as driven to kill as the zombies in the old days were.

  You can’t pick out the infected when you see them. You can’t hear it in their voices. They look like anyone else in the crowd. They act like anyone else. And when they get you alone, they will murder you. They will pass on the infection—because that is the only thing that drives them, and all their acting and charades are just to make them more effective as propagators of the virus. They don’t have personalities, they just act like they do. They don’t have memories, they just act like they do. In a world where we’re all ready to shoot the infected on sight, the infected have adapted to look normal. Too many people don’t believe this. They don’t understand that not believing it makes them incredibly vulnerable. The sleepers need nothing more than for you to doubt they exist. If you knew your daughter was infected, but she was standing in front of you acting normal, would you put her down? Would you believe she had really turned? The virus is continuing to spread because, no, you fucking wouldn’t. And you would go on not believing it right until she murdered you without a twinge of remorse, because your daughter is already dead, and the thing in front of you is a heartless mimic.”

  There was a tone that signaled the end of the pre-recorded message, and it began again from the beginning. Just like it had over and over for nearly a decade, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The signal swept off from the weather-beaten radio tower, cascading over brambly terrain, pinging through abandoned mountain ravines and radiating off into the vacant sky. The message, starting at the beginning, told of a settlement of several thousand souls who had recouped the ruins of Sacramento, California, and begun the work of rebuilding a small, self-contained civilization for themselves. It gave the coordinates of the city. It called for anyone who could hear the message, scattered people eking out existence in the wilderness, alone or in family clans, who didn’t know there was still something left of civilization.

  Then the message continued on into the second half, where the voice gravely told any poor, huddled listeners that the plague wasn’t gone. The horror that had burned the world of their parents and grandparents was still alive under the ashes they rebuilt their lives on. The horror had a new form for a new age. The lost waifs were facing more dangers than they knew in the wilds—the best chance they had at survival was seeking out the city-state of Sacramento, slipping into the fold of the bourgeoning new society.

  In the dilapidated office below the radio-tower, the two operators sat in silence monitoring the equipment, making sure the broadcast went uninterruptedly and listening intently for any reply from the outside. There hadn’t been any reply for a long time. Crisp sunlight slanted in the clean window, falling across peeling paint the color of eggshells.

  “The vet was awful last week,” one of the radio technicians said. “Line out the door. Understaffed. I should know by now not to put it off until the last of the month. Everyone puts it off to the last minute, so there’s a fucking crowd there every time.”

  Jeffrey, the other technician, nodded in commiseration as his coworker spoke. He knew how alternately boring, stressful and dehumanizing vetting could be. That was why he had skipped it last month. He looked away sheepishly, because the topic was making him profoundly nervous. Part of Jeff wanted to mention off-handedly to the other man that he had skipped vetting, but part of him was afraid what Alan might think. There was one demographic that invariably skipped vetting, and that was a demographic he didn’t want his friend to assume he had fallen in with.

  Vetting was a precaution against the spread of infection inside the city. Some people would always be exposed. That was a fact of life. Vetting was meant to quickly identify those who had been exposed and quarantine them before they could become vectors and spread the virus. At the end of quarantine, if the exposure hadn’t become full-blown infection, they were released. If the virus turned them, they were dealt with by the Sacramento Bureau of Public Health—a euphemistic title for an agency of government-sanctioned hit-men, somewhere between police and euthanasia doctors.

  Jeff kept his eyes downcast over the radio dials, avoiding Alan’s gaze. He kept thinking about friends who had gone through the awful, humiliating process of state quarantine. And he thought about those couple friends who had been diagnosed as vectors over the years. He didn’t know the exact details of how they were dealt with, but he never saw them again. It was a horrible system—but it was a system in place to prevent something even worse.

  Jeff wasn’t old enough to remember the world during the first outbreak of the plague—back when the virus was in a cruder form that left the infected like shambling mannequins, slopping off putrid flesh, thronging after their victims and killing with nothing but teeth and fingernails. He wasn’t old enough to remember—but his father had told him stories. The sixty-something man had been in his late teens when the plague first came to his home in Kansas. The “drunks” as they were called came suddenly, dragging their feet, tottering like they had been hit over the head too many times.

  A group of seven or eight had broken into the barn where Jeff’s father tried to hide with three other boys. Jeff’s father had only survived because his best friend was overweight and couldn’t run as fast. Jeff shuddered and forced himself to stop thinking about the stories. He couldn’t even imagine having to
make a decision like that. He was grateful to live in a different time, after the worst of the plague was over. Vetting is part of what keeps all that from happening again, he thought. Why did I skip? It’s like jury duty. You don’t like it, but it’s your fucking civic responsibility. So why did you skip it? He shook his head to clear his mind, grabbing his cup of coffee and taking a deep sip of the cold, bitter brew. You feel fine, is why you skipped. You skipped because being dehumanized and stressed out, letting a bunch of doctors take blood to check for abnormal protein formations is a waste of time if you already know you’re not infected.

  Alan wasn’t talking anymore, and Jeff was grateful for that. The two sat in silence for a while longer, watching the dials, listening for communications from outside the city limits that neither of them expected anymore.

  Steve Bradford

  Residential District, Old Sacramento.

  December 10th, 2069

  Steve walked across the white carpeted floor of his living room, handed a mug to his guest and sat down, casually sliding his arm along the sofa back to encircle her. The Californian winter wasn’t cold by any standard outside the West Coast, but the two of them used the mildly raw chilliness of the air outdoors as an excuse to sit more cosily together. Bright sun streamed through the banks of windows behind them, falling on rows of bookshelves against the opposite wall.

  “I’ve never seen so many books in anyone’s house,” Steve’s guest said. Owning printed volumes was increasingly unusual in a world that valued above all the conservation of limited resources. The woman seated beside Steve automatically associated text with digital media—the idea of experiencing text tactilely, through feeling paper against her fingers, and olfactorily, through the scent of leather binding, was exotic.

  An incomplete collection of The Great Books. Red leather-bound Harvard classics. Benét, Freud, Balzac. New editions of books like these were no longer produced. The volumes in Steve’s collection predated the end of the old world.

  “Yes, everything about me is interesting,” Steve said, grinning. “Including how I read literature. I’d rather have the actual print editions of books, if I can find them. It’s like holding a physical piece of our intellectual heritage.”

  Steve’s guest Abigail looked at him for a moment. “You’re way, way too educated,” she joked. He was a hard man to form a comprehensive idea about. He was charming and likable, and often the things he said would have come off as contrived and pretentious, except he always seemed genuine. He said things like “intellectual heritage” without putting on an air. He was thoughtful, generous and supportive, but he was also a cynical, arrogant asshole. Not alternately, either—he was somehow all of that at the same time. All his contradictions made him a difficult riddle to solve.

  “I feel safe,” Abbie said, shifting a little closer to Steve, “holed up here with a Bag Man.” She smiled impishly. She was teasing him. She knew he didn’t care for the slang “bag men,” a common term for Sacramento Bureau of Public Health agents. Steve laughed.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to bring the conversation around to my work,” he said. Truth be told, he was the one who didn’t want to talk about his work. But neither did he want to alter the mood in the room by shutting the subject down too directly. Abbie wasn’t so easily dissuaded.

  “I actually kind of do,” she said, putting her mug down on the glass end-table after taking taking a sip of the piping tea. She turned back to Steve. “I don’t really know anything about VHV, which is awful of me. I should know more. Especially about the modern form.” She looked at him expectantly. It was his turn to speak.

  “You have a definite morbid streak,” he said, furrowing his brow, but smiling. “I also play the violin. Do you want to talk about that instead? I’m kind of great at it.”

  “Indulge me,” Abbie said. “Isn’t it your professional opinion that people should know more about the virus?” She was teasing, but it was true. “Treat me like a layman, as if I don’t know anything. Like, if the virus is still around, why aren’t there zombies anymore?”

  Steve sighed. “Well, there are. But they don’t look or act like they used to. The change is actually pretty simple.” He gave in and started to speak plainly about the subject, as if he were lecturing on VHV to a group of students. “The virus isn't anything like other viruses. It has physical architecture and physiologic capabilities that normal viruses don’t have. For one thing, it can produce energy like a bacteria. When a living organism is infected, the virus forms bacteria-like colonies inside the host’s cells, and produces its own energy through the breakdown of host tissues. These colonies communicate using a physical network of chemical signals. No one really understands how they manage to do something so complex, but the communicating colonies create a sort of brain. The viral ‘brain’ uses the energy it produces to stimulate nerve tissue and trigger neural action potentials. It can commandeer a body that way. Think of it like this: if you hooked an amputated limb up to an electrode in a lab and shocked it, it would move. Same thing here. You get zombies when the virus uses electric impulses to stimulate dead muscles into moving.” Abbie was listening rapt and wide-eyed. Well, I guess this works, Steve thought. It isn’t quite like watching a horror movie together on a date, but it’s close enough.

  “So that’s what a zombie was,” Steve went on. “A dead body, reanimated by the virus to spread infection. They would bite and scratch to infect, not to eat. They didn’t need to eat. The bodies were dead, and the virus itself used tissue decomposition for energy. So they killed following a reproductive drive to spread the virus into new hosts.”

  “That is so horrible,” Abbie said, a chilled shiver running through her. Steve moved a little closer, shifting his arm off the back of the couch onto her shoulders.

  “So that’s what the infected were like, but now they are different. The virus has evolved over all these years. Before, it attacked the entire body, killing it and reanimating it for its own use. But we got too good at recognizing infection and dealing with the undead. Now, in order to succeed at propagating itself, the virus has to avoid detection. It no longer kills the whole body. It only attacks the brain in a very targeted way. It takes over like a parasite—the body meanwhile looks totally normal, and the infected are such good mimics that they also act totally normal. They blend in with the crowd, so that nobody knows they’re there. They can spread the virus without being recognized and destroyed.”

  Abbie shook her head in disbelief. “I knew that part, obviously. I mean, I knew that was what VHV is like now, but I didn’t know all those details about how it actually works. But now I’m confused. You said the virus evolved to be more successful. If the Sleepers” Abbie used the popular slang for the infected, “just went about their business, pretending to be normal all the time, they could keep spreading the virus secretly for years. Wouldn’t that be the most successful way? Why do they turn violent? Why do they start killing—isn’t drawing attention like that the last thing they want?” Steve maintained his usual debonair demeanor and didn’t let on how uncomfortable he was becoming, continuing to talk about this. He wanted to change the topic. But he knew Abbie was curious and focused enough that she wouldn’t move on to anything else until he had answered her questions.

  Steve said, “Do you want to have kids?”

  “No,” Abbie said, tilting her head, obviously wondering where this was going.

  “Okay. Do you want to have sex?”

  Abbie laughed. “Is that a come on?” She asked.

  “It’s an analogy,” Steve said, grinning. “Sex, of course, evolved as our biological means of reproduction. It is ingrained in the tiniest parts of our morphology, in the nucleic acid that forms the genome itself. Call it a burden of our history, if you want. A molecular fossil or a behavioral relic. But the fact is, you personally not wanting to have kids does fuck all to change your sex-drive, because sex-drive isn’t attached to personality or reason. It’s older than those cognitive d
evelopments and can supersede them. It’s the same with the Sleepers. We’ve already been over how killing, for the zombies, had nothing to do with feeding. It was a reproductive impulse to spread the infection. It was analogous to the sex-drive in a normal biological entity. So as Sleepers deteriorate further and further under the modern virus, they start to succumb to that drive that is a vestige of the evolutionary background of VHV. We’re not talking about self-aware, reasoning beings, here. We’re talking about viral pseudo-brains that are barely above reptile. They can’t resist an urge like that when it starts to surface.”

  Abbie shook her head again, processing everything Steve had told her. He was silent for a while, waiting for her to speak. “Well, that covers it,” she said. “Thanks for explaining this—I know you didn’t particularly want to.”

  Steve moved his hand from her shoulder up to touch her hair. “So, a couple minutes ago you thought I was coming onto you. But you didn’t say if that was unwelcome or not.”

  Lilian Morgenstern

  Residential District, Old Sacramento

  December 10th, 2069

  Lilian held her AR rifle close to her body out of habit, finger off of the trigger, arms relaxed. She was pulled gently to one side as the truck made a quick left turn. Looking up, she stared at the pale young man in body-armor seated across from her over the opposite wheel-well, buckled in by crisscrossing straps.

  “Big day, huh?” Lilly said to the young man. She smiled at him. His anxious frown didn’t dissipate.

  “Your name is Bryan, right?” She asked. He nodded.