The Zone

by RW Krpoun

  I stopped three steps from ground level to give me a field of fire and opened up on the infected; either Danny had them tangled up at the door, or there wasn’t very many-I was trying to shoot and figure out how we could get to Danny while holding the ground floor landing when the door to the first floor gave way.

  Infected in a close-assault mode are terrible to behold-I had only seen them while sniping, or at a distance, or when elevated; they moved pretty quick but nothing special under those conditions. Seeing them at ground level close-up was terrible. They swept over Pete before he could turn, one instant he was there, the next he was at the bottom of a pile of struggling bodies.

  He saved me and Chuck, as the struggling mass of limbs blocked the follow-on for the critical seconds we needed to react; otherwise the sheer suddenness of it would have left both of us to be over-run. We both fired, Chuck into the pile, me into the filled hallway beyond as I went down the steps, dropping the empty 870 onto its assault sling and pulling the cut-down as I backed through the door, alternating shots between the first floor hallway and those on the basement stairs. Behind me, Strad was firing up at the infected coming down the stairs.

  Strad slammed the door shut as I backed into the open air; Chuck was yelling something about Pete but I ignored him as I fumbled out the key on its steel retractable line and turned the lock. It was a fire door, so I couldn’t completely lock it, but I wrenched the key off in the lock, jamming the mechanism. That would hold them until the bar had been hit a dozen times or so.

  Hands shaking, I shoved shells into the cut-down and holstered it, then reloaded the 870; the four survivors were crouched against the wall, nearly in fetal positions, Strad was reloading, and Chuck was kicking the door, yelling about Pete. No infected were in sight around us-I could hear shooting off to the north, and the sounds of sirens, so our decoy ops were still working to some degree.

  The bus careened around the corner, Doc clinging for dear life to the roof-rails, and slid to a stop in front of us, the doors banging open. I fired at the infected trailing it as Strad dragged the computer room survivors on board and got Chuck inside. I followed, reloading the 870 yet once again. My pouches were definitely lighter-I had probably fired around eighty shells in the building. It was just a number at this point.

  I slumped against the engine housing as Phillip threw the bus into gear and radioed Jake to pull out.

  Phillip looked over his shoulder, then shot me a look as we rumbled across the lawn. “They got mobbed,” I kept my voice low. “Turns out there were people trapped in fire-proofed labs in the building, at least two groups, probably more. The infected wouldn’t leave them, and there were tons of them. We got swarmed on the way out, at the bottom of the stairwell.”

  “You get the books?”

  A chill raced through my veins, and I grabbed the dump pouch. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah, we got them.”

  The mood at the rally point was grim, as Strad and Chuck were devastated by the losses; Phillip said he and Doc would get the four survivors out of the Zone. I promised to call them when we had word from Ted.

  I wasn’t feeling too great, either. We kept losing people, and it didn’t matter how many infected we took down, they kept on coming like the freaking tides. At least I hadn’t known Pete or Danny very well. Jake and Key reported that they had shot and run over a decent collection of infected, that both patrol cars had decimated crowds as well, and that none of the actions had made a measurable dent in the numbers observed. I found it especially telling that Key, who was the most blood-thirsty of our group by a wide margin, was losing her fighting spirit. There were just too many of them-they were like killing fire ants with a hammer.

  We headed back to base while I raised Ted on the phone. So far our raids into the University had resulted in four buildings burnt to the ground, two fire-damaged, two vandalized, and one with a truck embedded in it. Plus a lot of landscape damage and a huge amount of infected corpses. Higher education is always the first to suffer in a dark age.

  Ted alerted to the developments, I stowed the phone and shifted my ammunition; as usual, the easiest pouches to reach were now empty so I moved rounds around to balance the load and get a count. I was carrying roughly a hundred rounds now, too many by about twenty, but no one ever died because they had too much ammo. I checked over the rest of my gear and weapons and drank a soda while Jake navigated the streets.

  The floor of the truck was filthy, I noted absently: dirt, oily smudges, black streaks from boot soles, leaves, dead grass, several 5.56mm shell casings. The walls were marked with impacts from the varied cargoes I had stuffed into it over the week, and the tie-down rings were polished and shiny from use. The rungs of Mick’s bar stock ladder were polished on the treads from foot traffic, while spots of clay-colored rust bloomed elsewhere. Mick had been dead for half a week now.

  When we reached the base I gave the books to the pair and found a yellow plastic chair with spindly metal legs and sat down to clean my weapons. It was work for the hands while I was busy not thinking at all. I was tired, very tired. Very tired of people following me and getting killed. People serving alongside of me and getting killed. Maybe getting tired of surviving. I was definitely getting tired of the infected.

  Still, I was fighting-that was something. A lot of people were dead without even doing that much. We had gotten a lot of people out, that was something, too. We lost two, but we extracted four plus the books, and we had thinned the herd a bit. There had been a million people in the sprawl, and it was going to take a lot to break the virus.

  Finished, I loaded the weapons and slung them. I was old, I reminded myself. I needed to take a moment every now and then and get my legs back under me.

  The pair had gotten a golf ball-shaped camera connected to the computer and were using it so that Ted could see the books; they had him on the screen via a video link, and it was going a lot faster than scanning in pages. In fact, they were finishing up when I walked over.

  “Its tannin,” Key announced, brushing a lock of hair from her eyes.

  I drew a blank for a moment. “What, like you use to make leather?”

  “Its used in adhesives, preventing rust, and staining wood,” Jake announced, studying something he had pulled from the Net. “Plus leather. Found in tea and wine. Industrial tannin…is a white or yellow powder normally sold in lots up to a ton.”

  “Find some in this area,” I shook my head. “Powder…how the hell can we use it?”

  Key made a make-up brush gesture. “Tell ’em its foundation.”

  “Funny.”

  Finding tannin wasn’t hard-a store in the south end of town had over fifty ten-pound plastic buckets of the stuff, and both the Net and Yellow Pages had other possible sites. The Hamster crew met me there-I had alerted them to the news, and they wanted a look at the wonder weapon of the Great Virus War. I left Jake and Key behind to scan the books and then e-mail them to the back-up academic, as well as thoroughly post the news across what remained of the Net. They had all sorts of ideas regarding tweets and facebooks and other stuff I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t know how its best deployed,” I admitted, prying a lid off a bucket; inside was a plastic bag of yellow powder, a bit coarser than sand but not as dense, thicker than flour, not as thick as unmixed cement. “The king mixed it with tallow and put it on blades. I’m thinking of spike strips.”

  “Spike strips?” Strad frowned.

  “Sheet of plywood with nails sticking out, long ones. Spray adhesive to the nails, dust it with the powder, and lure them onto it. I’m sure as hell not going to stab anyone with it.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. We got a crossbow and some wax, we can try that. Plus we grabbed a couple cannons-maybe it’s bad for them to breathe.”

  The ‘cannon’ turned out to be a device for blasting confetti into crowds at concerts, using compressed air-they had located three, and an air compressor to fill the propellant tanks. We tried them with bags of flour, and it created a very
impressive cloud, although it took some experimentation to determine the right load and packaging.

  “OK, up the pressure two and lock it,” Strad instructed Doc. “Tannin needs more of a kick.”

  The yellow dust cloud rolled across the floury grocery parking lot, settling on a clutter of abandoned luggage next to two mini-vans whose doors stood ajar, the scene of an infected over-run.

  Chuck was holding up his phone, one of those high-tech wonder gadgets that had more applications than NASA and more processing power than the Space Shuttle ever did, and Phil was tapping a computer pad’s screen. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Streaming real-time video to the site,” Chuck grunted sourly-his habitual grin was gone along with his friend. “That way people can see our progress. I’m adding a voice-over and Phil is backing it up with text. The truth is out here, dude.”

  “OK.” Couldn’t hurt.

  “I think we’ve got it ready,” Strad came up, absently wiping a wrench off on his jeans leg. “We ought to try it in an ambush using the crossbow, cannons, and your spike strips,” he raised his voice to be heard over the compressor’s sudden popping hisssss. “There’s an intersection that’s clear over by the Evergreen Shopping Center that should do-we were prepping it for one of our jobs when you called us.”

  “Sounds good to me. We might want to figure a back-up plan in case this stuff doesn’t work.”

  “Guns should be fine-there’s not a lot of infected around there-mostly a business area. There’s a small bunch at a cluttered intersection down the way-we’ll aggro them with the cart and bring them in.”

  “Aggro?”

  Strad grinned mirthlessly. “Rile ‘em up.”

  “OK, this is a wrap, people,” Chuck was speaking into the camera. “We’re moving to the ambush site. Somebody cue the extras.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The ambush scene was not anything like what my training said an ambush should be, but I had been trained to kill Humans, not infected. Unlike Remote Control Halo, the Hamsters had been focused on anti-infected operations, and they had developed a simple yet effective method: they prepped both sides of a roadway and then led a mob of infected into the kill zone. This time instead of cars loaded with explosives they were simply mounting the ‘dust cannons’ and associated equipment on the curbs and laid out my tannin-coated boards across the road with a gap for the ‘aggro team’.

  Doc and Phil were tasked with driving the cart, which was one of those gas-powered utility carts you see grounds-keepers and ranchers using, with a strap-iron and chain link cage protecting the occupants. Strobe lights and ‘boom boxes’ attached to the mesh served as bait. The rest of us just climbed atop the Hamsters’ bus with the cannon controls and waited. Chuck amused himself by adding a sports play-by-play dialogue as the action developed-there was a harder tone in his voice than usual, which suggested to me that he was coping with the loss of his friend with a ‘business as usual’ front. I knew how he felt.

  Doc kept the cart just feet ahead of the front-runners of the pack of infected, maybe thirty or so in the main body and a dozen stragglers who did not have full mobility.

  The cart expertly wove between the sheets of plywood; the flanking infected hit them seconds later, and while several had footgear sufficient to protect them, most did not. The effects were gratifying: after a good flesh puncture they staggered a half dozen strides and dropped, twitching, eventually lying still.

  “Well, tannin seems to work, although either its slow or the spikes aren’t the most effective way to go,” I commented to Strad.

  “Yeah.” He leveled a scoped crossbow and squeezed off a shot. The bolt transfixed a husky infected wearing a reflective vest with the City Street and Bridge logo on the breast, who promptly dropped as if poleaxed.

  “Sonuvabitch!” I was impressed despite myself. “Try one lower and offset just to be sure you didn’t get the spine by accident.

  Grunting at the effort to recock the weapon, Strad nodded. His next shot caught an infected in a convenience store clerk’s smock just above the pelvis and definitely offset away from the spine, and she went down just as fast.

  “Not bad,” I nodded. “A spear or machete would work fine, coated with this stuff.”

  “Its still not a big deal,” Strad observed. “I bet you only get one before the coating is gone, two at most. If the cannons don’t work it won’t be even as good as the rock salt.”

  “We’ll know in a second.” I gripped the levers to the discharge controls as the cart careened towards the line of spray paint that marked what we figured was the ‘blast zone’. If our estimates were correct, the cart would not be within the dust cloud once it was past that line. Just in case, both occupants were wearing filtered dust masks and goggles.

  All three cannons belched out their clouds on cue, although we had not estimated the size quite correctly and the cart came away with a fine yellow dust coating it and the occupants.

  The same could not be said for the infected, who reacted as if it were a cloud of nerve agent. They collapsed, thrashing and clawing as if drowning, and twitched to immobility in a few seconds. The main body was mowed down en masse, and half the stragglers entered the rapidly-settling dust cloud in time to get a fatal dose.

  “Now that was impressive” Chuck observed, reflexively keeping his phone’s camera oriented.

  Strad grunted in agreement, raising his crossbow to drop one of the surviving stragglers. I unlimbered my 870 and waited for them to get into range. That was impressive, even if it was only useful for close-in defense. Maybe some sort of system could be rigged like we had the fire extinguishers set up, to keep them off vehicles. I doubted it was a war-winning weapon in and of itself, but crop-dusting systems could probably be modified to put some hurt on large groups. It was definitely going to be a couple percentage points in our favor in the great survival equation.

  “We should do another test,” Doc advised after reviewing the video Chuck had posted on the site. “Make sure people understand that its real and how it works.”

  “I’m game,” I shrugged. “But the spike strips aren’t worth doing again. The cloud is a much more effective method.”

  “We’ve got the projectile weapon aspect nailed as well,” Phillip agreed. “But a step-by-step of the cannons from set-up to ambush would be good.”

  “OK. Where should we do it?”

  The place we chose was an intersection near a couple old strip malls; a semi roll-over had closed one entire side from curb to curb, which would make channeling the infected much easier. We paced off and marked a bigger kill zone and positioned the cannons further apart to get better mileage out of the powder, or so we hoped.

  And by ‘we’ I meant ‘they’- while the Hamsters went about prepping the cannon and checking over the draw-cart, I walked a bit to the side to get away from the hissing air compressor and called Ted.

  When he answered he sounded like a man on his deathbed. “It works, doc. You get the powder airborne and it acts like a nerve agent. Likewise for a puncture wound. I’m not sure how much help it will be, but it definitely will make a difference to some.”

  “Good.” There was profound relief in his voice. “I am forwarding a report to the government, several agencies. I had the bulk of it written, so all that remained was to add the supporting facts and details.”

  “Its already on the Net-the group I’m with is posting video of our tests,” I glanced over at the Hamsters. “In fact, I think this one is going out live.”

  “Success.” There was a weary satisfaction in his voice. “We have done well.”

  “Yeah.” I tried to think of something to say. “You were right all along.”

  “So it would seem.” I could hear the pride. “Martin, I doubt we shall speak again, so I must say that however radically different we are in outlook, I admire your courage.”

  “You’re not short in that regard, either, doc.” I wanted to ask him if anyone could get him out of his bolt hole, bu
t decided it was pointless. He had made that choice already. “Go with God, doc.”

  It was strange to have just made what would very likely be the last contact I would ever have with a man I had never really met but who had gotten me to take more risks than anyone else in my life. He was dying half a continent away, lashing out against the virus with what were likely to be his last hours. Part of me wished I had treated him better, but it was too late now.

  The semi and trailer on its side were a wall to the north, which I was facing; to my left a half-block away were the Hamster bus and my truck, to my right the Hamsters were setting up their cannons and aggro cart. Chuck was busy recording the whole thing, ‘streaming’, he called it.

  Movement to my left caught my eye: a small, radio-controlled model helicopter, perhaps three feet long from stem to stern smoothly negotiated a turn around the far end of the semi’s trailer, the west end of the wall. It took a moment to realize that a jointed length of one-inch PVC suspended below the toy aircraft had a box attached with yellow wire ties, and then the reflection of the flash revealed that it was not a box, but a strobe light, probably a emergency beacon like they use for sea rescue or lost hikers.

  The sight of the little chopper was so surreal that the significance of its appearance and its flashing payload eluded me until the first of a mob of infected rounded the trailer in pursuit, as I had established myself some time past, of movement and bright lights.

  For a split-second I stared, trying to grasp the chain of events as the lead infected, a burly black male wearing a ruined sports coat and slacks, gave their wailing battle cry and lurched up to speed, a solid mass of his fellows hard on his heels.

  We were on foot with restricted movement and separated from our vehicles-it was amazing how swiftly that summation came home like a blade of ice being shoved down the length of my spine. I yelled a heartfelt “Oh, shit!” and unlimbered the 870.