The Valley of Shadows - eARC

by John Ringo

  The bridges and tunnels that connected New Jersey ran the entire western side of New York City. The last bridge across the Hudson was the George Washington in Fort Lee.

  “The Jamaican has a very large organization, more cops, more of everything,” Oldryskya said softly. “If he isn’t pushing now, he will soon. If the zombies don’t eat us all first.”

  Both men looked at her, startled.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, sugar,” Tradittore said with a sneer. “We’re on top of this. By the time we finish containing the outbreak, this organization, the one that you work for, is going to be controlling the entire shebang. When the feds finally get around to checking on everyone, we’ll have our own mayor in the big chair, we’ll own all the cops and the city will belong to us. Only us.”

  Matricardi looked amused at the younger man’s vehemence.

  “Easy Joey,” he said, putting his hand on Tradittore’s shoulder. “It’s a reasonable fear. She’s been working with the fancy money men for a while, and their usual way of life is coming apart, so she sees that part first.”

  He turned to address her directly.

  “But you need to remember your part.”

  He tapped her shoulder with two fingers.

  “Your job’s to be ready to plant the idea in Smith’s head that he wants to work with us. Just us. His tame cop is losing it and I sincerely hope that he doesn’t really think that he can trust that harpy from city hall. She is genuinely crazy.”

  * * *

  She didn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Did Matricardi really think that Smith would just roll over for anyone? Was no one reading the bank intelligence summaries she forwarded—the military in quarantine lockdown, Asia coming apart?

  “Mr. Matricardi,” she said, just as calmly, very carefully using American diction. “I like the idea of preparing for a successful defense against the virus, but surely you don’t think that we are going to automatically beat the disease?” Her discipline held, and she smiled smoothly and then let her face shift into one of contemplation. “We’re still ready to evacuate and then rebuild, yes?”

  * * *

  “Listen to the big thinker, Boss!” Tradittore chuckled. “Look missy, we’ll keep the options open, and if…”

  “I don’t keep youse around like some kinda bank analyst, Risky,” Matricardi said. He waved a hand, silencing the younger man. “I keep you ’cause you understand your place and you’re good at it. You’re useful now because Smith clearly finds you…interesting. You’re supposed to be encouraging that. But, remember: You work for me, not the other way around.”

  He looked back at the men in the harvesting room as one lifted another dripping cord and laid it across the tray.

  “I love these guys, Joey,” Matricardi said, gesturing towards the glass divider. “They’re smooth. Watch! Watch Mikey do this bit. He has great hands. I think this is harder than when he is shaving prosciutto nice and tissue thin—that way it melts in your mouth, see? He’s an artist. Another batch almost in the can. Love it.”

  Oldryskya didn’t snort. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised they had already forgotten that this approach was her idea.

  “Is there a long-term deal?” Matricardi said. “Sure. We have a deal with GenetiCorp.

  “We already took over their security, and they seem to think that they can start mass producing a protein matrix vaccine in a couple months. One that is safer, cleaner, none of this hacking up zombies. You can give to kids. Skip the FDA bullshit and presto, we can make hundreds of thousands of doses per week. So, you see, I like Smith’s plan to keep ‘everything running.’ We aren’t just sitting on top of New York, but something a lot bigger. We’ll be able to expand our…influence. Be untouchable, again. Get back to the way things are supposed to be.”

  He turned back to Risky and twisted on hand palm up, then palm down.

  “Still, we do need Smith for the financial angle,” Matricardi admitted. “And I don’t mind having him around as a parachute. But…if it all goes grande confusione, I am not going to quietly take a few seats on a bus and leave all this behind. We’ll just use his setup, but civilized like. The whole plan just takes longer. He is a businessman and a family man, right Joey?”

  “Sure is, Boss.” Tradittore smiled. “My buddy is tight with Smith. Banker-man has a couple of nieces in the city. Heard that one got bit, so maybe only one now.”

  Tradittore’s smile was getting entirely too nasty, in Risky’s opinion. As he kept talking, she imagined smearing it across his face with an entirely out of character palm strike.

  “But yeah, even with that, we can make deal,” the Cosa Nova lieutenant was confident. “He’ll come around. And if he doesn’t: Also, not a problem.”

  * * *

  Durante stared at Tom Smith who in turn, stared out the window at the darkening sky. Durante had been relieved by Kaplan, who was on the “Faith watch” for now. The newest head of security and notional “Faith-watcher” knew what the pending phone call was about and was grateful that it wasn’t his call to make.

  It had taken the better part of the day to run down all of the employees who hadn’t been visually screened. After Kaplan had reached him by radio, he had turned his BERT around and found Smith organizing a buildingwide screening using their stock of test kits for even the most trivial suspicion. Even though they were close to exhausting their remaining supply, it was hard to argue considering how the screening process had failed, again.

  He watched his boss stretch his neck and roll his shoulder for a moment, then grab the receiver.

  The phone rang only briefly, and although he could only hear one side of the conversation, it was pretty obvious who Smith was talking to.

  “Faith may have been infected. She’s in decontamination and we’re running a test for H7D3 right now.”…“She had the vaccine primer a week ago.”…“Steve, she was inside the building, within layers of our security. I had her delivering the mail, security everywhere, I swear.”…“Um—”…“An employee turned in an elevator, and during the struggle some blood from the infected may have contaminated an open wound on Faith before she brained it with her mail cart and—”…“Not exactly.”…“She AD’d herself with another auto-injector. But, that, that was from before—”…“The zombies in the basement.”

  There was a pause in the conversation, and then Smith continued, his voice lower.

  “No excuse, Steve. It’s on me. I fucked it up.”…“Look, Steve. You know your own daughter better than I, but…it’s Faith. Barring locking her in a cell, she will find any opportunity to get stuck in the Barney. I had my two best lads riding herd on her. Didn’t more than slow her down.”…“Right, I’ll send Durante with a boat for Stacey right away.”

  The bank had purchased two surplus ex-Navy Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats and retrofitted them with enclosed cockpits. Smith had subsequently arranged low-profile berths near Battery Park. When questioned about the expense Tom had patiently pointed out that Wall Street was located on Manhattan Island. Of late, the RHIBS had been used to ferry the Smith family to their yacht, the Mile Seven.

  Without taking his eyes from the window, Smith trained his index finger directly at Durante. Even though his boss wasn’t actually looking at him, Durante still nodded and drew his own phone to warn the boat crew as he headed for the door.

  * * *

  Oldryskya kept the searchlight mounted on the window pillar in motion, alert for any infected. Durante rode behind her because “there is less chance that you can accidentally shoot me from up there.” Now that Faith’s mom had made it to the bank to nurse her daughter, he had joined the ad hoc BERT crew, displacing the regular lead. Kaplan drove, and for the last half hour he had exchanged quips with his buddy in back.

  “I really need to kill something,” Durante said from the back seat.

  “I really need to not get killed by the boss,” Kaplan responded.

  “Credula vitam spes fovet et melius, Kap,” Durant
e sonorously opined.

  “Oh, fuck your Latin bullshit. He’d do you first.”

  She could hear Durante’s grin, even if she didn’t turn around to check.

  “Okay, what does that mean?”

  “When he comes over all philosophical, he prefers the original Latin,” Kaplan said. “You’ve got to be fluent in a language to get into SF. He got in on the basis of being fluent in Latin. That one was basically a reprise of Little Orphan Annie. ‘There’s always hope for tomorrow.’ Give us one about time flying and your fancy watch, big man.”

  Durante’s watch was a Rolex Submariner and he was inordinately fond of it. It had been the subject of a few jokes since Oldryskya had integrated with Smith’s security team. Something about a Jordanian princess, or maybe an Egyptian crime lord.

  “Cum magnum vigilia Tiberes,” Durante intoned.

  “Cum…what?” Risky asked.

  “Do we really want to go there?” Kaplan asked.

  Oldryskya kept her own counsel, though internally she shared the overall sense of frustration that underlay the banter. As the outsider, she intuited that she wasn’t yet accepted with the implicit trust a few of the security staff shared. She had asked questions around the periphery of the team about these two. Though clearly Smith’s stirrup men—she also guessed that they were something beyond the normal soldiers and policemen that were common in the banks. However, apart being told that they were from some special military unit, no one had shared details.

  Special military unit. That phrase resonated with Oldryskya.

  Her earliest memories were of a small village. She had been young when some vague disaster struck. There had been a fire, gunfire and men carried her with other girls to trucks. Sometime later, there had been another fight with many loud and frightening noises but her recollection of the details was hazy. Mostly gunfire, dead bodies and men in black balaclavas with strange accents sweeping through a warehouse, putting rounds into the heads of the men who had been holding her. She had been afraid they were going to kill her as well.

  They had not. They were a “special unit” of the “Georgian military” on a mission to find one girl. Instead they had found many.

  More vans and buses. Go here. Go there. A doctor. Vague memories of travel.

  Eventually, she had been settled with a new family. Her foster father had been an air force colonel in garrison before the collapse of the Soviet Union, transplanted from St. Petersburg. Unable to have children of their own, he and his wife adopted an orphan of the wreckage of central and southern Europe.

  The colonel had remained at the air base in Khanabad, after the old USSR was dissolved. The family had made it out of the increasing ethnic violence that accompanied the fracture of the former Soviet republics. The real end hadn’t come till much later. Some of the Russian officers had decided to convoy with their families north. The group fell victim to an ambush during which her father died. Older at that point she remembered, too well, her treatment at the hands of the Chechen special unit. And the years that followed.

  Her long and painful journey ended in the United States. During that journey she lost everything she had ever known, save for a few scraps of nursery songs and tears for her foster mother: the woman had not survived the first week.

  Risky’s experience of the term “special unit” was a stark choice between “very good” or “very bad.”

  She maintained her wariness of these two new “coworkers.”

  * * *

  “When do you think that Mr. Smith will tell his boss ‘enough’?” She returned to the present with a question. “Martial law now for days. We can’t secure the bank forever and most of the staff is already evacuated from the center of New York. What’s keeping him, us, in this dark place?”

  “Trade secret,” Durante replied flatly. “Besides, Tom knows about dark places.”

  “Really? We don’t get to know when we’re going to have to bug-out?”

  A silence greeted her question, and at first she thought that they were going to ignore her altogether. Then the quiet was broken by Durante.

  “A person has to decide what part of their word they are going to live up to,” Durante continued. “Tom’s vision of himself is that of a person whose word is good. If he screws up, he owns it and either fixes it or pays the price. Simple as that.”

  “How about you?” she asked Kaplan, while maintaining the scan of “her” side of the sidewalk and cross streets.

  “Like Gravy said, it’s simple.” The reply was laconic. “Train keeps his promises, pays me really well and lets me shoot stuff. Not too many places that meet that description.”

  “And shooting stuff is important?” Oldryskya wasn’t squeamish, but she knew the type of man that lived for violent excitement. Most of the ones in Cosa Nova had a habit of dying off before they actually became as good as they thought that they were.

  “Look around newbie,” Kap said with a snort. “You’re helping turn sick people into tapioca just to save your own ass. Or maybe you are doing it for a dollar. Maybe something else. But you’re still doing it. Right about now, everyone should see that life is cheap. That’s something I’ve known my whole life.”

  As they passed another alley, she picked up a flash of pale skin.

  “Target,” she said in a businesslike tone. “Right side. Back up a bit.”

  Kaplan braked to a sudden stop, chirping the wide tires on the armored six-pack truck. Despite bracing for the expected maneuver, Oldryskya was still thrown against her seatbelt, hard.

  Durante already had his feet on their seatbacks, and didn’t seemed perturbed at the violent maneuver.

  “So yeah, the money is great,” Kaplan continued, while operating the shift lever. “And I am pretty happy to have a prepared fallback. But even if I gotta wonder how long we are going to stick around, don’t matter. We go when Tom says. Not before.”

  He backed and then pulled into the narrow side street, flicking on the highbeams. The bright light pinned a single infected, who was crouching over a still form, tearing at the abdomen of the unresisting figure. It was a testament to how much carnage all three had seen that no one turned a hair at the gruesome spectacle in front of the truck.

  Play time was over.

  “Kap, leave the lights on,” Durante said, shifting modes. “On command, Khabayeva and I exit the truck together. I’ll cover with the M4, Khabayeva is on Taser and tranq. Kap, you’re on the second long-gun from the truck keeping a three-sixty. Once the bugger is down and we check the rest of the area for extras, we’ll tag and bag. On command, unass the vehicle together. And…execute.”

  The other two knew the drill, and had been unsnapping seatbelts, squaring away their gear and had a hand on the door handles before he got to the “execute.” They slid out simultaneously, as though they had practiced it.

  Which they had, dozens of times, during the training that had been required before they allowed Oldryskya to join the team. Every evening, the pre-mission brief practiced the most common team actions. Smith had coined the repetitive training “dirt diving,” initially confusing the Cosa Nova transplant. Who would dive into dirt for practice and what did that have to do with fighting infected?

  It turned out to be a term from his time in the Australian special forces, she learned. Since talking underwater during a dive was impossible, you practiced on land, on the dirt first, and then you did something for real underwater.

  Once up and on point, they approached on the infected who snarled into the truck’s lights, clearly blinded but unwilling to leave a meal. At five meters’ distance, Oldryskya felt that she could make the shot.

  “Ready to tase,” Oldryskya said.

  “Green,” Durante responded.

  Oldryskya put the two metal barbs into the infected’s naked chest, right in the x-ring, causing it to collapse across the dead body, twitching. After locking the thumbswitch in the down position, a little modification that they had made after discovering that the zombies shook
off the electrical charge much more rapidly than expected, she transferred the Taser to her left hand. She drew the tranquilizer gun.

  “Ready to move.”

  “Move,” Durante replied. The two advanced carefully as she kept the electrical leads from either tangling or pulling from the shuddering infected.

  Within touching distance, she crouched to inject the infected while Durante scanned the sides of the alley past their location. Letting up on the Taser power, she injected the infected in the back of the thigh, then hit the Taser again to keep it down.

  Durante’s weapon light was lost in the bright glare of the headlights, which washed much of the color, but unfortunately not the smell of rot, from the scene. As the infected relaxed into a familiar limpness, she called again.

  “Down and tranked.”

  “All right,” Durante replied from over her shoulder. “Let’s bag it, then you can drag it back to the truck.”

  She began the process of putting a Kevlar bag on the infected and used double zip-ties to lock its wrists and ankles together. The now flaccid infected’s breath rasped, but at this point Oldryskya had already had the full course of vaccine as a member of the BERT cadre, so an airborne infection wasn’t her worry. As she began to drag the infected, the partially consumed body shifted, revealing a Russian designed light machine gun.

  “Hey!” she exclaimed. “The dead guy has an RPK!”

  “If you like that, you’re going to love this,” Durante replied flatly.

  Concealed by the sharp shadows created by the headlights of their ride, a total of three armed corpses were revealed by Durante’s taclight. Two wore the signature dreadlocks of Big Mac Overture’s organization. Both were heavily armed, one with the Krinkov SBR that the Jamaicans preferred.

  “Whatcha got?” Kaplan called, still, several meters away, and watching rearwards onto the intersection from which Oldryskya had first spotted their target. She had dropped the unconscious infected and drawn her sidearm, covering towards the dead Jamaican gangsters.

  Durante glanced at her approvingly.