by Wick Welker
“I’ve got news for everyone,” Douglas said on the radio, “the power plant is almost directly in the middle of that sea of bodies that you’re looking at.”
“Eye of the storm,” Yen said quietly.
“Yen, you idiot, the eye of the storm is calm and quiet. We’re heading into the worst part of the entire city where they’ve all collected,” Michaels yelled at him.
“Whatever, let’s just do this!” he replied, attempting to muster the excitement he had when he first started combat training a year ago.
As the convoy went down the small hill, Dave saw that they now had become completely surrounded by the horde, on all sides. The five tank convoy was engulfed within a swarm of hundreds of thousands of infected bodies; each of them climbing, scratching, and following after the movement of the team’s footsteps and clanking sound of the treads of the tanks. Each alleyway, every yard and all buildings were bursting with the infected, which continually moved after them only to be knocked down by the EMPs that burst from the convoy at timed intervals. He felt like they were going deeper into a dark cave with only a single torch to guide them.
The convoy snaked in between cars and toppled buses. Surprisingly to Dave, it hadn’t appeared that a mass exodus of the city had happened all at once, but seemed more like a blitzkrieg of the infected that stopped everyone in their tracks. Or maybe they just gave up, he thought. As they came down the hill, the tanks continued their timed bursts, while all the ground teams fired their EMP-57s during the two-minute lapse. The entire convoy was in a continual shell of electromagnetic bursts, while the horde was kept at bay within a radius of a few hundred feet.
They turned a corner down a narrow street that was completely jammed with cars. “Captain,” Yen got on the radio, “I don’t think we can go down this way. There is no way around the traffic and bodies here.”
“Yen, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re in tanks. We’re going up and over!” Douglas yelled back. “Get your asses on top of those cars.”
Dave put his foot on the back bumper of a car and leapt onto the roof, with the rest of the front team following. They were in between a tank burst interval, and kept their rifles pointed out toward the end of the street, where they could see some movement. The roofs of all the crammed cars were littered with motionless bodies as the team moved forward from car to car. They jumped on the trunks, ran to the hoods, and then leapt to the next car. The first tank of the convoy rolled up a small car and completely crushed it beneath its weight as its treads lifted up and over to the next car. The line of shock tanks, the size of townhouses, moved over the cars and burrowed through heaps of bodies as they continued to release pulses.
With thirty seconds until the next shock tank burst, the ground teams fired continually ahead at the horde that approached at the end of the street. One by one, Douglas would report the casualties of the ground teams as their ranks began to thin. Steadily, the convoy inched its way over cars, and twisted onward toward the center of the shallow valley.
At one point, Dave realized that he hadn’t heard from Yen for a few minutes. “Hey, where the hell is Yen?”
“He got bit, so I shot him in the face,” Jacobs said tediously.
Dave didn’t reply and waited for Michaels to say something, but she only marched forward, pulling her trigger as she leapt up onto a car roof.
“I think we’re getting close to the power plant,” she said only loud enough for Dave to hear.
“Convoy, we are three quarters of a mile away from the power plant,” Douglas said into their radios.“We will approach the main building from the west end and aim at literally any large doors that we see. Front team, make sure to have C4 prepared to open up any gates or doors.”
The convoy sunk down into the writhing valley of moving bodies as the sun began to clear the eastern half of the sky, beating down on the ground team’s helmets. The stench of rotting bodies baked in the sun, permeating the air with acrid sweetness that filled their masks. They marched forward over bodies, exploded gas tanks, and every household object imaginable from lampshades to oven racks.
Inside the middle tank, Stark thought methodically, and began to see how the plan might work. He was meticulously double-checking field vector equations on the palm of his hand after all of his notepad space was filled up. This can work, he thought. I actually think this might work if all the power lines have the right capacitance. His confidence grew as he realized that maybe everything he had been able to accomplish up until this point wasn’t just his idiotic luck. He flipped on his radio. “Commander Douglas, how close are we to the power plant?”
“Sir, the front ground team has visualized it beyond a final row of neighborhood houses. I believe we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Please, stand by,” Douglas said.
“Very good, please let me know when I can get out of this tin can. We have a lot of work to do at that plant.”
“Yes, sir.”
*****
It wasn't till midday that the convoy finally reached the chain-linked gate of the power station, which was a cluster of low buildings that stretched over several city blocks. Long smoke stacks sprouted up from the plant and had ceased to pump vapors into the sky. Thousands of power lines clung to transformer arrays, spreading out from the power plant and feeding into the city.
The squad had managed to burrow their way through the heaps of the infected. The convoy was an empty island in the middle of a sea of the dead. The power station itself was stuffed full of writhing human bodies; spilling from windows and climbing up the concrete walls that enclosed a front parking lot.
"We're heading straight in until we see any access point into the building. Ground teams, report any entrance into the building whatsoever, and that will be our entry point," Douglas said.
The tanks blasted away with EMP pulses as Dave and Michaels approached the open gate that led into the parking lot. Stepping swiftly over bodies, they weaved through rows of cars, and led the convoy over to what Dave thought was a loading bay at the back end of the power plant. As he threw off a few more EMP grenades at a crowd, the tank convoy crushed cars and bodies behind them, until they all approached a row of double metal doors into the building that were left open at some point during the initial outbreak.
Stark’s radio garbled with Douglas’ voice. “Dr. Stark, we have arrived at the east end of the power station. It is safe for you to exit the tank and begin your preparations on the Bunny.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Stark crouched up from his seat and adjusted his pants up around his waist, checking his EMP-M9 sidearm that was clipped to his belt. I guess we’re doing this, he thought.
Outside the tank, the air was dry and the sun was above him, as Stark dropped down to the bloodied pavement below. "All right!" Stark yelled out to whoever was around him. "We need to start running a whole hell of a lot of cables out from the Bunny. No one attach any one cable to anything else. I will be doing all of that." He opened a large side door on the Bunny trailer, exposing an immense array of electronic inputs and consoles. "Okay, see all these cables here?" Stark started to unwind five-inch thick cables off of a large spool mounted inside the Bunny. "I've got them all hooked up here, so just take these cables, and start running them inside the building."
Dave and Michaels came around to the open doors of the Bunny and watched as Stark unraveled more cable.
“Here, here, take these,” Stark said, handing a few spools of thick cables to Michaels.
She stood motionless and stared at him. “You want me to take those?” she asked.
Stark looked up at her, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Yes! Of course, take these,” he said annoyed, dropping a spool at her feet.
“We just lost a lot of people getting into this hell hole while this guy sits in luxury in the middle of it,” Michaels said to Dave, but for everyone to hear.
“Michaels!” Douglas screamed, walking up to her.
“He just starts barking orders at us—” she continued.
“Michaels! Shut the fuck up, and go take those cables up to those doors!” Douglas screamed in her face.
Stark looked back at Michaels, with an empty expression, as she grabbed the cables up and walked off.
Douglas turned to Stark. "Dr. Stark, I will lead a team inside the building first with you from behind. We will need your... guidance once we are in the building."
"Well, I'm not sure I’ll know where I'm going either. Does, does anyone here speak Spanish?" Stark asked.
Douglas stared back at him. "Yes sir, I believe so."
"Is it possible we came all the way to this infected hole of millions of people in Mexico and no one here speaks or reads any Spanish?"
"It is possible, sir." Douglas looked back with a stone face.
"Holy shit. All right, let's just get going." Stark looked out of the corner of his eye at slow movement on the roof of the building.
Douglas barked out orders over the radio as several more men came out of the tanks and set up a perimeter around the convoy for defense.
Dave, Douglas, and a few others from the flank ground units met Michaels at the loading bay doors and looked into a dimly lit but vast building within. "Let's get in there," Douglas said and prodded Dave forward.
Dave stepped in, turning on a flashlight on the top of his rifle, which casted a white beam of light across dozens of rectangular boxes and several series of chain linked fences that ran along the walls. The room was wide and stretched for several hundred feet with running wires and metallic boxes housing electrical equipment. Dave looked up and saw two running pairs of catwalks suspended from the ceiling that connected to a stairwell, which led to a platform a few feet ahead.
They walked in with their footsteps echoing off the walls. Dave and Michaels fired off a couple of pulses into the darkness and paused to listen. There was a constant sloshing sound with erratic groaning that echoed faintly from the walls beyond them.
"There might not be too many in here," Michaels said as she flipped her light on and walked in toward a large wall full of tubing that ran toward the ceiling.
"Move it, soldiers," Douglas said quietly from behind. "Let's be quick."
Stark sauntered in from behind them as he unlatched his EMP-M9 and flicked its light on. The air was full with the now familiar smell of rotting bodies. "All right, let's just move in deeper, and I might be able to find the main power grid outlet to the city. It's actually pretty easy to recognize once you see it," Stark said.
Their boots moved over the concrete floor that had been showered in glass and charred bits of clothing, with several computer monitors and fire extinguishers scattered amongst motionless bodies.
Dave stepped over a woman dressed in a one-piece utility suit whose head had been severed by a large saw that remained motionless in her former neck.
Stark stepped in front of the small group that has assembled at the door. “Let’s go.” He walked forward as Dave stepped in front.
“Sorry, Dr. Stark, you’ve got to let me lead in front of you. You’re way too important to have stepping first into a building full of the infected. You just shout out where you think we should go,” Dave said.
“No problem, Special Agent...?”
“Tripps. And there’s no ‘Special Agent.’ ”
Stark squinted his eyes at him from behind his gas mask, wondering if his face was familiar to him. “Go ahead, Tripps. See that staircase to our right?” He pointed to a metal staircase that led up to a series of catwalks.
“Yeah,” Dave said, looking up.
“Let’s go see what’s up there.”
The team moved with Michaels and Douglas in the rear as several other squad members hauled in more cables from the Bunny outside. They moved up and around the staircase, attracting unwanted attention from all over the building, as shadows began to stir around them and groans echoed in from hidden hallways. The floor above trailed in one direction for what seem to be miles with cables and pipes running under their feet. Above their heads was dim auxiliary lighting that showed them numerous consoles and workstations.
“Whoa.” Stark put his hand on Dave’s shoulder. “We’re already here.” Stark flipped on his radio to the entire squad. “Everybody, we are at the city’s main power grid input. Please bring all the designated cables up through the first stairwell at our point of entry.” Stark left the group and investigated various panels, still bewildered that no one could read Spanish as he started guessing what the different signs meant while consulting his English-Spanish dictionary in his front pocket.
One by one, Stark instructed the crew to lay down the various cables in different spots along the long runways of catwalks and tiny corridors. Over the next few hours, Stark connected cables from the Bunny to various parts of the plant’s power grids, trying to make sure that he was plugging into the power grid at even distributions across the entire city. He helped Dave wrestle one cable that was seven inches in diameter into a port that fed into an eighth of the city’s entire power supply.
“Dr. Stark, we’ve actually met before.” Dave pulled up his mask and looked at Stark.
“We did?”
“Yeah, two years ago in Richmond, Virginia, at the CDC.”
Stark immediately remembered. “You were the one who saw Lou Beckfield there. Before he… disappeared.”
Dave nodded. “I was also part of the group that found him in Mexico City. I recognized the bastard as soon as I saw him.”
“That was you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good work, son.” Stark felt slightly embarrassed at having called him “son” but decided that their age difference made it okay.
“Thanks. What kind of messed up experiments has that asshole been doing anyway? I’m guessing you’ve talked to him?”
“Well, yes, obviously I can’t… I can’t get into any of that…but…”
“No, of course.”
“The man is… he’s sick no doubt, but I think he’s a little misunderstood.” Stark fiddled with a few knobs on the wall.
“Doesn’t excuse what he did, letting the virus get out and not telling anyone or even trying to fix it.”
“It’s a shame though. He really was doing some incredible things in Mexico City.” Stark crouched to adjust a few small levers on a panel.
Dave looked back at Stark as he stood back up. “That man never did anything incredible.”
Stark continued. “But no, of course, nothing he did was excusable at all.” Stark slid his mask back down his face and called out to Douglas, as Dave continued staring at him.
“Captain Douglas, we are ready,” Stark said.
“Roger, I’ll see you back down at the Bunny.” Douglas flickered in his earpiece.
Stark and Dave walked quickly past the dozens of arms of cables and wires that were cramming the small corridors back toward the staircase that led down to the loading bay. Stark replayed his conversation with Dave and wondered about Beckfield, thin and malnourished, in some government prison in Maryland.
They made it out to the twilight sky that had come over them over the hours they had been working in the plant. Douglas yelled over at him as he approached the Bunny. “It’s a good thing you’re ready to get this show on the road, our blast tanks have been hitting the horde with EMPs non-stop for hours. See them there?” He pointed to beyond the parking lot of the plant where waves of the infected fumbled over one another.
“I think we’re all hooked up. I’ll just double check,” Stark said, moving to the Bunny as more squad members gathered around. Stark hoisted himself into the Bunny and sat down on a small stool, bringing up a keyboard and monitor mounted on the wall. He typed in a few keystrokes and carefully read the monitor while the crew stood in silent watching.
“My data is showing good connection to around… eighty percent of the city’s power grid. That is as good as we’re going to get. I’m ready to give it a surge from the Bunny.” He put his hand on a large lever inside, and looked over at Dougla
s, who nodded. “Are we all ready, Captain?”
“What’s going to happen, sir?” Douglas said with fatigue finally crackling in his strained voice.
“Just keep your eyes on the horde over there.” He pointed out toward the parking lot at the amassing crowds that surrounded them. “We’re going to be waltzing out of this city.”
Stark gripped the large lever and pushed it forward.
Chapter Nineteen: Eau Claire, Wisconsin
“Just… take a closer look at him.” The soft voice on the phone said before the line went dead.
Rambert was alone in a room furnished with only a single leather armchair. He stared intently at his cell phone in his open palm. The glossy plastic burned into his mind as he closed his eyes. He thought that the loneliness in the man’s voice was too sincere to be feigned. The man was too saddened to be going through so much trouble to just be playing a game with me, Rambert thought.
Clearing his mind of the lonely man whose voice still lingered in his ear, Rambert felt sudden shame. Earlier he had erupted at the people of the most powerful command post in the world when he found out that two entire naval fleets were attacked with the nanovirus. Not one person among them had any idea who had been flying the American helicopters. “It sure as shit wasn’t the Chinese!” He could still hear his own words echoing in his thoughts. “They’re rotting in the water along with the thousands of sailors that we just sent to their deaths!” No one looked at him, not because they were frightened but because they didn’t believe it mattered any more.
He thought about Julius Caesar. Caesar at least still had the hope of his empire living on forever when he died. Yes he was assassinated, but at least the people who killed him still loved Rome; they killed him because they wanted Rome to succeed. My country, on the other hand, simply rots from the inside. I would be happy, overjoyed even, if someone were trying to assassinate me. At least I would know that someone out there cared about something. All I have now are men and women who simply clear their throats when I ask them what we do next. All I have are scared yes-men on one end and the Sirr on the other.
