Plagued: The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment (Plagued States of America)

by Better Hero Army

  Rock Island Prison Defense Facility, built by Breckenrock Corporation immediately following the outbreak, was planned as a holding location for recently infected human subjects, initially for the purposes of study. It was designed to hold over six hundred occupants in 426 cells. It was comprised of five levels, three above ground and two below. Medical laboratory units were constructed in the sub-levels. There were no windows on any floor, only five ground-level exits, one underground exit, and three above-ground exits, one of which was a roof access point for defense and airlift support. The outer wall was built a year later to prevent free access to and from the Plagued States without passing through the prison defenses.

  Chavez stepped up beside Mason and looked down with him. The old 24th Street Bridge stretched over the slow moving river with its wide and vacant platform. It had several barricades in the form of steel gates that spanned its entire width. Mason thought it to be a flimsy defense to keep out the zombie horde, but with the gun at the rooftop as it was, the chances of anything making it across in one piece were slim. The road on the other side of the river disappeared, descending into abandoned buildings and overgrown forest.

  Mason turned his gaze north to see the way to civilization over the 2nd Street Bridge, which was configured with another barricade system, this one of low concrete slabs to act as obstacles to slow crossing vehicles. The machine gun didn’t face north, though. The barricades weren’t to keep the people on the other side out. They were there to keep the people on the island in. Just to be sure, there was enough barbed wire lashed to the sides that birds made nests in the web.

  Both bridges had a guard house that looked a lot like the checkpoints in the Middle East. He expected to see the black scars of past explosions studding the concrete, stretching toward civilization, but there were no such blemishes. It was a clean, empty expanse.

  When coming to the island, they routed everyone through x-ray machines on the civilized side and made them surrender anything remotely resembling an electronic device, including radios, cell phones, cameras, and even Mason’s electric shaver. They didn’t want photos from this side getting out.

  “At ease, Corporal,” Mason said as he came closer to the mounted machine gun.

  “What a shit hole, huh, sir?” Chavez asked and spat over the edge. “I like the other side of the island better.”

  “How do you get guard duty on the wall?” Mason asked Chavez.

  “You don’t want it, sir.” Chavez replied, shaking his head and backing away from the edge. “Hardest thing to do is stare at freedom all day knowing you aren’t allowed to go near it. It just sucks ass.”

  Mason sighed, standing straight and looking at the powder blue sky with its long streaks of gray like claws raking the atmosphere. What a shit hole indeed.

  “Have you ever fired this?” Mason asked the gunner.

  “Yes, sir,” the corporal manning the gun replied. “We test it twice per month.”

  “I meant on biters.”

  The corporal turned to look at Mason, gauging him, then looked at Chavez. Chavez nodded. “All the time, sir.”

  “How do you know they’re biters?”

  The corporal seemed confused by the question. He was a young kid, probably only a year out of high school, and on his first assignment.

  “It’s OK,” Chavez said, stepping next to the gunner. “Move over and let the lieutenant have a look through the scope. Take a look, sir. We have signs posted all along the tree line. Every week we get out there with weed whackers and cut back the growth. We have fences further back guiding anyone who stumbles into our area toward the road or the river. Look right there, sir. See that structure? It’s a phone booth. Pick up the receiver and we don’t shoot you. Everything else is fair game. And we keep it lit at night.

  “Rabbits love the chopped grass, so we get lots of them, and that attracts dogs and wolves, and they make a bloody mess back in the shadows, and the smell of blood eventually draws in a biter from time to time. If hunters are on duty, they go catch them. If not, then we get to pick them off. You should come up here and try it sometime.”

  “No thanks,” Mason replied. “I’ve had my fill of killing.”

  “What, biters?” the corporal asked as though the notion were absurd. “They ain’t people no more.”

  Mason stood and looked over the top of the gun toward the old, abandoned town in the Plague States, wondering if it would ever be possible to restore it. “Well, there’s a lot of debate about that, actually,” Mason put in, stepping away from the machine gun. “Carry on, gentlemen.”

  Five

  The rest of Mason’s orientation had been unsettling, but uneventful. After unpacking his duffle bag, he went for a jog. Based on the stares he received from civilians and soldiers alike, he figured there wasn’t a very strict adherence to any fitness programs. It didn’t matter to Mason. He enjoyed running. It helped to clear his mind, to ground him in the reality that even though this place was foreign to everything he knew of the world, the ground beneath his feet struck with the same consistent impact as anywhere else. There was no greater weight on his shoulders here except for what he piled on in his own mind. Thankfully, running helped shed him of those pounds too.

  On his approach to the Meat Market he hardly realized what was unfolding ahead of him. The roadway abruptly ended into a huge dirt lot filled with enormous trucks the size of troop transports, every one outfitted in a manner that suggested the end of the world was near. The vehicles, generally long flatbeds with four-wheel drive, had numerous built-in pens of varied size and design. Some had large pens meant for storing several occupants, while other configurations of individual occupancy were abundant, appearing as rows of cages only about the size of a phone booth. Even the smallest of vehicles had room for ten detainees.

  Mason jogged around the vehicles on the river side of the lot and around a stand of trees to find himself on a resort beach front, except instead of sand there was well-maintained, lush green grass. Ahead of him stood a lavish, wide building that looked like a golf course clubhouse with a broad wall of glass facing the river, outside of which was an enormous patio area with tables and chairs under umbrellas, all enclosed behind a wall of clear Plexiglas.

  A three-story building stood behind the clubhouse, the only hotel on Biter’s Island, complete with a casino that took up the entire first floor. This was where all the civilians were forced to stay, although most of the hunters preferred sleeping on their own rigs most nights.

  This remarkable feeling of civility faded quickly. He passed behind the hotel and came upon a field of cages ringed inside of an enormous compound of chain-link fencing. Stretched high overhead was an assortment of sails laid flat to keep the majority of the interior of the marketplace shaded. Trucks backed up to a loading bay as though delivering goods, and a long line of people stood about in an orderly, although impatient fashion, waiting for names to be called and zombies to be handed over.

  It was good that he had a chance to approach it alone rather than plunging in with an escort like Chavez. The Meat Market was the kind of place that needed to be seen several times to be believed. Aside from Biter’s Bend, there was probably no other place on Earth quite like it. Mason’s trained, stoic expression of military bearing fell prey to utter surprise. He donned the tell-tale widening to his eyes – that gawk of the uninitiated.

  That was all Mason surveyed on his first pass of the area. He kept jogging and in a few minutes passed behind the Quonset huts Chavez had pointed out earlier. He was curious about their contents, but didn’t stop to look around. They were built in the wrong configuration to be a sentry ring. If anything, blowing them all next to each other as they were configured would result in a massive crater. Their hinged roofs, however, hinted at their true design, and Mason hoped he would never see them yawning open.

  On his second loop of the island, he watched zombies being moved from a truck to their pens. The pens were like chain-link dog runs, all joined together to make an
oval ring, with four wide lanes into and out of the center of the compound. Inside the ring were kiosks and other temporary looking structures where words like Registration and Bidding Agent were displayed. Most of the biters were docile, easily moved. One struggled. It pulled from its handler, a kid of no more than eighteen. Onlookers in and around them stepped back, but didn’t seem overly concerned. The handler got a better grip on the noose pole and drove the zombie’s head downward to control it.

  “Hold your pole, new-fag,” someone shouted, and several hunters laughed. The handler was red faced as he yanked on the zombie mercilessly. The zombie snarled, its hands gripping the pole cinched below its chin. Mason kept running to avoid seeing the outcome.

  On Mason’s third pass, he slowed to listen to the nearest slaver hock his merchandise. “Fully domesticated,” the slaver shouted. “One hundred and sixty pound male, all his fingers and toes. Slab trained.”

  Slab trained. That was the slang used to mean that the zombie could be trained to do certain tasks using the reward system, just like a good dog, with the reward typically being small slabs of meat. It meant it knew the clicker, the sound used at feeding time.

  Mason slowed and approached the fence with his hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath as quickly as possible. Spaced at regular intervals around the pens stood a soldier in black with his rifle facing down across his chest. Behind him on the fence were two poles with nooses on the end, the kind Mason had been trained in before coming here, the kind used for catching zombies by the neck to subdue and control. Mason put his hands on the fence and stared through, fingers clutching to keep himself standing. His legs felt weak, but not from the jogging. Hard memories tried to latch onto his mind. This looked like Egypt all over again with its fences inside of fences inside of more fences, except over there the soldiers faced an angry crowd that herded young women in front of their men to advance on the consulate. There, they strapped bombs to little boys and made them run at the fence. There they did everything they could to get inside.

  Here, it was apathy. Even the biters didn’t seem to care about the chain-link barriers. What kind of degeneracy could lead to this? It had only been ten years since the zombie outbreak, nine since the containment was assured and the laws regarding the capture and sale of specimens for scientific research were passed. Then came knowledge of how to make the contagious no longer infectious, and someone had the bright idea to pass the reusability laws in order to help re-indoctrinate victims, and in no time, slave trading returned to American soil. Two states, then three, then seven. Mason came from one of those states. Ohio. One of the split-states. Part of its soil inside, the other part outside of the channel used to prevent further spread of the consumption pathogen. Ohio. The political battleground of American ethics.

  “You’ll have to back away,” the nearest soldier said as he walked toward Mason. The young soldier had one hand on his rifle now and was waving for Mason to step back. Just like Egypt, a futile gesture when the crowd knew they weren’t allowed to shoot. Mason felt like a foreigner, unable to decipher the soldier’s words or the purpose of all this.

  “Sorry,” Mason said, taking his hands off the fence and backing away.

  “Where’s your I.D.?” the young soldier asked. He was a corporal, another Ranger.

  Mason dug it out of the cargo pocket of his trousers. He was only wearing a brown t-shirt on top with no insignia or markings. He could be anyone, after all. How was the corporal supposed to know? Mason held up the badge, the blue bar of his I.D. apparent, indicating that he was an officer.

  “Oh, sorry, sir,” the corporal said, although his hand didn’t budge from the grip of his rifle.

  “No problem,” Mason said. “Carry on.”

  Mason looked into the compound one more time and scanned the faces. All the zombies shared an expression of vacancy. Most were backed into the corners furthest from the sun, hiding under the corrugated rooftops. Even in the shade, they were still half-blind, and maybe even afraid. He wondered if zombies knew fear – aside from the fear they fed on, that is.

  Six

  “This is Matty,” Sergeant Phillips, the night duty officer, said as way of introductions between Mason and his trainer. Matty was a big man, bordering on overweight, with equally heavy and labored breath. “Matty, this is your new partner.”

  “I thought you were fucking joking earlier,” Matty snapped at Phillips. “You’re really giving me a West Pointer? Banks was a complainer, but at least he’d push a broom!”

  Mason stood silently, caught off guard by the outburst. Even though Phillips had said Matty might get upset at first, and based on Matty’s unorthodox dress—the only military issue piece of clothing seemed to be his boots—Mason shouldn’t have been surprised. From what Mason already knew, the big man didn’t seem to care about military bearing.

  “Matty, Lieutenant Jones was next in line. He got a red card just like everyone else.”

  “Yeah, like hell. He was supposed to go to the Hill, I’ll bet. Sending him here instead? Why couldn’t you assign him to the wall or gate duty? What the hell kind of shit is this, giving Banks a hardship and then sending me a cad-idiot? Shit,” Matty said, shaking his head while walking out of the room.

  Phillips stood behind his desk and sighed. He looked over at Mason and smiled weakly. “He likes you.”

  “I can see that,” Mason replied.

  “Come on, weak dick,” Matty called from outside of the office. “Work ain’t getting done by itself!” Softer, but obviously loud enough for everyone to hear, Matty added, “It’ll probably only be me getting it done, though.”

  Phillips raised a finger. “Try not to get on his bad side right away, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  Mason nodded and followed Matty down the hallway as the big man grumbled and complained.

  Matt, Curtis aka “Matty”, Petty Officer, Second Class, second demotion. After eight years as a Navy Seal with spotty performance reviews with regard to relations with superiors, he got into a fist fight with four Air Force Combat Controllers during an all-branches field training, hospitalizing three of them. He received a demotion and four months in jail. Upon successful rehabilitation, he returned to active duty only to get into several other small altercations, such as shooting out the tires of a Hum-V because—as PO Matt claimed in the report filed—“the son of a bitch nearly got them all killed by his driving. I’m doing the service a service keeping him off the road.” PO Matt was transferred to Rock Island after an incident with a base commander’s son, which resulted in the commander’s car being pushed into the golf course pond while the boy was found tied to a tree. PO Matt was on his third consecutive eighteen-month tour on Rock Island. As far as seniority went, PO Matt beat the next nearest soldier by two years.

  “So you’re the new-fag, huh?” Matty asked angrily. “Did they give you the tour already?”

  “They showed me—”

  “Good,” Matty said. “It’s simple shit. We start on the top floor and work our way down. Biters aren’t potty trained, so we get the luxury of hosing out their cells every night. They know enough to pull down their pants, but they shit on the floor. When they have more room, they pick a spot and keep using it over and over again. That’s how hunters find them out in the world. In the prison, though, there ain’t enough room. Just like dogs in a kennel.

  “So we trap them, hose them down, hose down the cell, then squeegee it dry so they don’t injure themselves when we let them go. Nothing worse than injuring the merchandise. The hunters get all bent out of shape when their precious zombies have bumps and bruises.”

  “We go in with them?” Mason asked as Matty swiped his card at the stairwell.

  Both the door and Matty groaned. “Ah, Jesus, don’t tell me a Ranger’s afraid of a few cock-biters.” Matty tugged the door open and the fans rushed air over them. Matty stepped into the stairwell, shaking his head.

  “I thought you said we start at the top,” Mason pointed out. The duty officer
was on the third floor.

  “Ain’t no biters on the third floor right now,” Matty told him. “Shit, hardly any biters in the pens at all. I’ve never seen inventory so low. All on account of what happened at the Hill.”

  Biter’s Hill, a township established inside the Plagued States immediately following the Flood Control Project. The city wall and waterfront had been constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in an effort to establish a controlled region for safe landing of military and scientific personnel. After the Federal Rezoning Act made it unlawful for U.S. citizens or corporations to own property within the boundaries of the Plagued States, Breckenrock Corporation filed for a long-term lease and built the below-ground prison facility. For the past eight years, Biter’s Hill had been one of three federally sanctioned zombie sales control points, until four weeks ago when it was destroyed following a major zombie prison escape, which overran the town. There were only twenty-nine survivors, eight of whom were rescued several days later from Scott Air Force Base, over 100 miles away.

  Mason and Matty emerged on the second floor. Mason felt overwhelmed by what he saw. He side-stepped and circled while moving toward the center of the room as though performing a reconnaissance of the area. He wasn’t sure what to look for first. Everything clashed for his attention. The moaning was drowned by the sheer crime of the scene. Had he stepped back into Egypt? It appeared as though a bomb had rattled off as they stepped in, his ears still ringing from the concussion, his senses not quite recovered.

  The center of the room was where the burning vehicle would have been if this were a street. Bodies should have been strewn around it with scorched earth and pock marks from shrapnel everywhere. Instead, he found an operating table standing at a forty-five degree angle, bloodied from end to end. The blackened earth surrounding it was instead a chaotic shower of blood, with stains that were pools in some places, smeared lengths in others as though bodies had been dragged off, with foot prints in blood everywhere.