by RW Krpoun
Such was my shock that my first shot went wild; my second dropped sports coat, and my third was fired into the group at large as I hobbled at best speed for the trailer. On the ground I was dead meat, no doubt about it, so I dropped the shotgun onto its assault sling and high-stepped up onto the top of a set of the trailer’s tires, now helpfully horizontal.
I was stepping up onto a spring mount and scrabbling for a handhold when fingers clamped around my calf and pawed at my legs, and I knew I was dead. After all I had been through up to this point I was going to get dragged off the trailer and torn apart like a Christmas goose. A wave of despair fell on me like a shroud and I hauled upwards while kicking blindly with my free leg.
Then the air was hazed with the acrid taste of tannin, and the hands fell away. Cursing and gasping, I heaved myself up, raking the filthy under-belly of the trailer until my boots caught a projection and I was able to drag myself up to a higher hand hold and then another until I finally half-scrambled, half-jumped up onto the top of the trailer, which was actually its side.
Badly shaken and breathing hard I levered myself to my feet, shotgun at the ready. It was Phillip who saved me, I could see now: apparently he had rushed the crowd with a bucket of tannin. It had given both me and the Hamsters time to react, but he hadn’t been able to get enough into the air to fully break the mob, and had gone down under a thrashing mound of bodies. I blasted the remainder of the 870’s rounds into the pile atop him out of a sense of obligation, but it was too late for him.
Chuck was down as well, tackled as he tried to get a weapon into play-apparently his concentration on the streaming had made him slower to react. Doc was backing towards the cart and blazing away into the crowd with a pistol as Strad heaved the cannon around.
I was firing the cut-down as Doc dove into the cart and fired it up; Strad fired the cannon and the crowd sweeping in melted away under its dusty embrace. I reloaded while the tannin powder did its work, seeing no sense in wasting ammunition. When the dust settled I shot down the few stragglers while Strad, a bucket of tannin in each hand, headed for the cart.
“What the hell was that?” Strad demanded, red faced and furious. After a careful wait, I had climbed down and rejoined them at our vehicles. Neither Chuck nor Phillip had survived their attacks.
“That was someone deliberately leading a mob straight into us,” I couldn’t stay still-the icy blade down my back wouldn’t thaw. I kept sweeping the surrounding building fronts and roof-tops, turning and checking behind me, nerves jangling like the fire alarms in the University.
“The Net,” Doc observed sadly.
“Huh? Yeah,” I nodded slowly. “Chuck had us on line…they were watching.” I thought about that.
“What a messed up day,” Strad snarled to the world at large.
“Yeah,” I nodded again, thinking hard. “Look, stay off the Net, and I mean completely. Let them think we’re dead. I’ll get back with you guys tomorrow, let you know what I can find out.”
“You know who did this?” Doc cocked an eyebrow.
“No, but I think I might have a place to start. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.”
“OK. We’ll be laying low in any case. Me, I’m gonna leave the Zone. This isn’t worth it anymore.”
I called Key and told her what had happened and to lay low. At home, I tended my gear to keep my hands busy while I thought about what had happened. I couldn’t shake the icy grip on my spine-the sensation of helplessness and doom that had hit me when I saw the wave of infected coming at me. It was a vastly different situation than I had encountered before-in the buildings they had been compressed by the limitations of hallways, from atop the truck they had been largely impotent.
But at ground level, on the road, I had seen them as a lot of people must have seen them just before death or infection, and it was chilling. I did not want to die at the hands of a mob.
I doubted that I had a choice in the matter, though.
I began my investigation at my laptop; Doc had said that the cause of the attack was our videos on the Net, which made sense. If a group was attacking Rescue Teams, it would do so either by homing in on gunfire, which we were not using at that site, blind luck, or the Net.
Which got me to thinking about our site. Team 44, Jake and Key’s outfit, had posted that they were going to the bank before they headed out. The duo had been isolated in the safety deposit room so they were unsure how the infected had located them, but there had been no overt explanation. It was not conclusive, but it was an unresolved question.
Another was the near-annihilation of the original Remote Control Halo: the panicked driver had breached our building, true, and the assumption was that he had led the infected to us. What if something else had been drawing the infected in, and the driver just blundered into them? The infected did not chase vehicles unless they were going slow, and that driver had had his pedal to the floor. And just before I had met Jake and Key I had seen two other Rescue Group bolt-holes that had been over-run.
It was hard to wrap my head around the idea that someone, probably several someones, were deliberately herding infected into groups of survivors, but it certainly wasn’t an infected controlling that toy helicopter. Somebody had set that expensive gadget up to act as a mobile beacon for the sole purpose of sending a killing wave of infected down upon us.
I wasn’t great on the Net, but navigating a bulletin board did not require advanced skills, and the drudgery of investigation was extremely familiar to me.
I started with a two-fold approach: that the chopper crew was on the board, either as a Rescue Team or a solo operator. A few minutes looking over the list of teams eliminated the first option-very few Teams lasted long, and those who did were too visible and too active to be running a double game.
I made a list of the Teams who had been eliminated or decimated, and a roster of solos posting, and began to carefully review all posts on the board. Heading my list were the solo operators I had been tracking as possible recruits: blackmoon, DalmationGuy, Enigma, Ergo, SpecOp6, scared003, Stryker, and Zedbait005, all frequent posters.
Three hours of cross-referencing began to show a pattern: six Rescue Teams were taken out after posting either their base addresses or next op addresses, and eight more were badly chewed up under the same circumstances, including Team 44 at the bank and 71 at the bar. In addition, several groups of survivors awaiting rescue were overrun in the interval between posting for help and a team responding to their request, and a couple gatherings of solos had been hit, including Zedbait005 from my ‘recruit list’. It was far from a comprehensive survey, but I definitely had a pattern.
And in each case either Ergo or SpecOp6 was posting to the solos or Teams, either offering advice or asking questions. I had exchanged posts with Ergo, in fact, exchanges that upon reviewing with new eyes had a definite trend of inquiry in them: Ergo had been trying to figure out exactly where I was, or was going.
Dane Riley picked up on the ninth ring, a little out of breath. He was pleased to hear I was still alive, and I, him. After a brief exchange of situations I got down to business. “Dane, I need your super powers. Can you track down a physical address from an Internet connection?”
“Legally, no. But the Department’s gear can, if they aren’t real mobile and don’t change carriers much. Why?”
“I think we’ve got a group in the city who are killing people using information from a Zone bulletin board.”
He was silent for a bit. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Search me-why do people do a lot of things? Can you do it?”
“Sure, Lieutenant. I’ll need some details.”
“I’ll e-mail you what I have.”
“Cool. It’ll take a couple hours to set up and crack the providers, if they’re not fully mobile.”
“It will be on the way in five minutes.”
I sat on the roof with my M-4 listening to a rack of ribs sizzle on the grill, watching the skyline. One of the sk
yscrapers in the heart of the business district was burning, and there were other sizeable fires scattered around the city. A drone was circling, but otherwise there were no aircraft-resting the crews for the river hitting the Zone perimeter, I figured. And hoped.
The next move was in front of me, and I was unsure of what to do. Ted’s mission was over, the news about tannin and rock salt was out, along with our tests, for whatever good it could do. I could post on the board alerting local teams and solos of the snake in our midst and pass it on to the command structure outside the Zone-it was possible they might take an interest, but then again, they might not.
Or I could deal with it myself. It was a terrorist organization as the law defined it, a capitol offense even before the state of emergency upped the ante. As a Rescue Team leader I held very vague authority in an official sense.
Take Jake and Key into a firefight? No. That was not an option-I was not leading them into gunplay, the infected were bad enough. Too many people were dying around me to drag them into this. I wondered, and not for the first time, if I were some kind of Jonah, doomed to drag down those around me while I walked free. My family, my team, Remote Control Halo, the Hamsters…people did not fare well around me.
My father kept coming to my thoughts, stern, unyielding, a hard man to the bitter end. He wouldn’t have been plagued by doubt-he would have seen his duty and done it, simple as that. You walk the chalk, you carry your weight, you do the job and you don’t complain. That was the way he would have said it in his tobacco growl, a Winston held between his forefinger and thumb with the filter pointed for emphasis.
Flipping the ribs over, I sprinkled seasoned salt across the brown meat and resumed my seat, the metal and ballistic plastic of the carbine warm under my fingers. I was lying to myself, just mouthing justifications for the choice that wasn’t even a choice.
I had stood in that white undecorated hall listening to Cooper and thinking that the more I heard the more it sounded like a plan doomed to failure, but there hadn’t been a choice then, either. They played the drum, and people like me fall into formation.
This time, though, I wasn’t going to decide for anyone else-this time it was going to be different.
An e-mail from Dane was waiting for me-both Ergo and three other posters, including SpecOps6, had posted from the same physical location, using two different computers. The address was a residence a few miles away, an area of old tract homes. Working off the address and the PD database, plus the National Criminal Information Center, he had identified two subjects who had had been associated with that residence, pre-Virus, both fringe types. No guarantee they were part of the group, but it fit well enough.
I ate the ribs, thinking about choices that weren’t choices, about things and the way they were. Charlie said you had to see the other side, that you couldn’t just live for the mission. My father had told me to always walk the chalk, shoulder your load, don’t complain. I was alone on the roof, all obligations completed, all dues paid, and no one to tell me yea or nay. I lost my team, but saved more lives than they had comprised. I had lost my family but rescued that portion that still lived. I had continued my Department’s mission long after they had pulled back to the Zone perimeter. I was quits. Even. Done.
A free man.
It was a small, tired tract house on a street lined with others of very similar design and age. Sitting behind the wheel of the truck two blocks away, I studied the lay of the front lawn and plotted how the T-shaped steel pipe I had bolted to the crash guard would take out the front door. I couldn’t scout it closer as I was in my black Tactical uniform, body armor tight around my chest, the white POLICE down each arm and on my chest bright and clear-I would stand out like a sore thumb. But the binoculars brought it in close enough for my purposes.
Charlie was right-you have to be able to see the other side of a situation. I could see it clearly, just down the street.
Shifting the truck into gear, I reached into the bag on the seat next to me and removed a brand-new sixty-four-count box of Crayola crayons. I weighed it in my hand for a moment, the faint smell of the waxy sticks bringing a gentle memory of the early days of school, and then I wedged it into the dash over the speedometer before I stepped on the gas.
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About the Author
RW Krpoun is a native of North Dakota and a long time resident of Texas. He lives in the country with his wife Ann and a collection of ill-mannered animals. A veteran of the US Army, RW has been a Texas Peace Officer for over twenty years to date, serving in both a Sherriff’s Office and two Municipal Police Departments. His hobbies include shooting, history, and writing. The Zone is his first published novel.
Visit RW at http://thezonenovel.wordpress.com/
