The Zone (23 page)

Quite a few posters reported that the military was focusing on containment exclusively, and that no action was being taken against the infected within the urban area, nor were any official forces mounting rescue efforts. They also warned that infected-proof vehicles and all weapons and ammunition were being confiscated at the evacuation points, even from designated Rescue Teams. That was good to know.

What wasn’t good news was that there were reports of behavior change amongst the infected: people were posting that infected were deliberately killing uninfected, not just tearing them up. There were even reports of clubs being employed. These reports were being hotly debated and challenged, but even as a rumor it was chilling.

I paid closer attention to these debates, and set up a document noting excerpts and impressions-besides getting information on conditions and events in my operations area, I was watching posters to see who were freaks, flakes, and
screw-ups, and who might be worthwhile to try and hook up with. A couple I had seen before, like Ergo and scared003 seemed OK, while SpecOps6 was clearly a BS artist. A couple more went onto my ‘to watch list’, like Zedbait005, who made reference to having been one of Uncle Sugar’s Misguided Children overseas in the recent past.

My lunch consumed, I cracked a second soda and set the GPS to my first target of opportunity. I didn’t have a lot to work with, team-wise, but I could do a bit, and every bit might help.

Using the GPS, I had plotted a zig-zag course across town; I knew it was hopeless, but I checked pawn shops and gun stores. Still, they were generally fortified, so there was a chance.

Not much of one, I discovered: more than a few had signs reporting that they had sold out of guns and ammunition, and most were obviously very looted. Still, you need to check, if nothing more than to eliminate the possibility. It wasn’t a completely fruitless drive: infected rushed me at two chokepoints and I managed to run over a total of three-you make a little here, a little there. Be smart, do your part, like some Seventies slogan about litter.

I choked a bit as I passed where a group had made a stand at a surplus store; Old Glory was still flying, and there was a carpet of dead infected for a block around and mounds at every potential breach point, but eventually a barrier had failed under the insane attacks and the position was over-run. I stopped in the street, the tires crushing dead infected beneath the weight of the truck, and took a good look. You can’t make a stand-that was the lesson here, you always had to have a retreat option.  I couldn’t tell if the people who died here had planned to make a stand, but I could say without a doubt they sold their lives dearly. I sketched a salute before I put the truck into gear; they had done their best, and that was all that could be asked of anyone.

I passed where a dozen outlaw bikers had met their end, laying behind their bikes like Custer’s troopers, shooting until they were over-run and then dying trying to take one more along for the trip. From what I could see they had been deliberately killed, not that the infected had had an easy job of it: I saw the corpse of one bearded outlaw surrounded by dead infected, a fixed-stock AK beaten to pieces as a club, the biker’s long lock-blade planted firmly in the last infected’s skull.

Some will not go quietly into that darkness; I hoped the fact that he took so many virus-hosts with him would stand the biker’s soul in good stead in the final accounting.

Plan A had unsurprisingly been a bust; Plan B was to drive-by rally points belonging to other Rescue Teams which had gone off the grid, but that didn’t work out any better than I had expected. Two had suffered the same fate as we had: panicked survivors leading infected straight to them, the third was evacuated, with that fact painted in neon yellow spray paint across the front.

I had a Plan C, but I diverted to rescue operations because the sight of so many teams and brave survivors having been taken out was depressing the crap out of me.  Step one was to rig the backing video units so one covered the roof of the truck, one covered the rear, and one covered the interior. Step Two was check used car lots; the second one suited me, and I used a 6’ pry bar that been riding on the roof since we hit Home Depot an age ago to pop the door, and then to pop the key box off the wall. I hung the keys to a half-dozen pickups and SUVs on their antennas or windshield wipers, leaned the key box against the front door in plain view, and moved on to Step Three.

Unlike our previous efforts, I chose single sites in areas without much population density, admittedly people who would need only a little help, but the fact was that being alone a little help was all I had to offer. There were a lot of people who desperately needed rescue but they would have to wait a bit longer until I found more hands. The only difference between a failed rescue and no rescue was me getting killed.

When I was about ten blocks out I pulled over and called the number they had posted on the site. A woman answered, sounding startled. “You the one who posted on the rescue site?” I asked without preamble. I was not in a good mood.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Who is this?”

“What’s left of Rescue Team 71, Remote Control Halo, about ten blocks away. You still need help?”

“My…I…yes! Yes we do!” She was talking excitedly to someone else, keeping her voice down. “You’re close?”

“Sort of. What exactly is your situation?”

It turned out that she, her two kids (ages eight and eleven), and a neighbor were holed up in a studio apartment over an auto-parts store-they didn’t live there, they had gotten chased when they blew a tire two days ago. Her name was Donna, not that I cared, the neighbor was Peg, and I cut her off before she got to the kids. They had no weapons. They were out of food and Peg needed her meds, type unspecified.

Charlie’s contribution was becoming a lot more impressive now that I had to handle this part: the woman had been cornered for days, and wanted desperately to keep talking. Getting factual data on the physical environment and infected activity was difficult and time-consuming.

After twenty minutes of struggling to keep Donna focused on the phone the extraction was laughably brief and easy: I pulled up under the fire escape and they scrambled onto the truck roof. I pulled out the instant they were all aboard, tumbling them into a pile, but that was the least of their worries. I ignored the ringing phone until I was back at the car lot.

Checking the monitor, I opened the door and stood, leaning my back against the inside of the door, the cut-down shotgun in hand but at my side. “OK, listen up: there’s keys on the antennas or wipers of the SUVs and pickups; choose one, find some gas, and hook it out of the zone.”  I tossed a city map to Donna, who was a grimy, chunky soccer mom. “The exit points are marked. Use the ladder there to get down.”

“Can’t you take us?”

“Nope, got other people to get loose. Too many people cornered up and too few people trying to get them out.”

She looked like she was going to argue, then changed her mind. When they had gotten down I held out a plastic bag containing the unloaded Taurus, three loaded magazines, and a box of fifty. “Here.”

She looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“A pistol and ammunition.”

“We don’t believe in guns.” She crossed her arms.

I stared-I tried to say something, stammered, and then finally burst out laughing, hard. “Man,” I wiped away tears. “I needed that. OK, have it your way. Good luck.”

I closed out her request on the board and lined up the next one, using the GPS and my extensive knowledge of the area from my Patrol days to choose a target that would suit my extremely limited resources. The next grab was from an apartment complex; I dropped a couple personal alarms, whipped around the block, and extracted a guy named John, two kids, and a teen-aged girl. John hadn’t been overly chatty on the phone, and was armed with two rifles and a handgun, so the drop-off at the car lot was brief and to the point. He declined the offer of a city map, having a GPS units programmed with the necessary data. I closed out his entry and headed back in for more.

The third job was a young black couple with a four-year-old who came from a storm drain of all places-they had Net contact via a high-tech phone; they had gotten cornered by wrecks and infected, abandoned their car, got into a storm line, and worked their way north a mile or so before running out of pipe.

They accepted the Taurus and map without hesitation, yelled thanks, and hooked it to find a vehicle. Proper motivation-I gave them a five star rating: a pleasure to rescue.

I was out of maps and tired of talking to people, and frankly getting a bit stressed- I was discovering driving the rig during an extraction was a lot more emotionally wearing than sitting on the roof shooting. Shooting, no matter how close they got, was therapeutic-you were
doing
something, and the results were there for you to see immediately. Sitting in the truck trying to watch monitors and every direction at once ground away at my nerves. At least it didn’t strain my knee, but that was about all you could say for it.

Eleven people aided and a good tally of infected was making this a red-letter day, but there was still plenty of daylight, so I decided to take a break for my nerve’s sake and check out Plan C.

Plan C was a group on the rescue board whose leader had been bragging about their set-up, a building they were equipping for an extended stay. He didn‘t give an address but he did mention it was a beer warehouse, that they had raided an Academy Surplus for camping gear, had gotten brand-new state-owned pickups for their traveling needs, and that they were downtown. I had come across him while following the posts of a board member who was on my ‘possible recruit’ list.

I had noted they said beer warehouse, rather than distributorship; I had spent
years patrolling the streets, and booze is a high-end item, easy to move in bulk. Distributorships are well-marked, but distribution warehouses are not, but the police always know where they are. The State-owned trucks were the tip-off: years ago the Highway Patrol had had twenty brand-new Cameros stolen from a central receiving facility on a Labor Day weekend, and that site wasn’t far from a warehouse used by Coors distributors and also not all that far from an Academy surplus outlet. Neither the warehouse nor the State facility would show up on a phone directory or Net search, so unless you were local law enforcement putting the clues together would be highly unlikely.

The group was Rescue Team 44, boasting an official tally of ten people extracted (Remote Control Halo’s official score stood at thirty-five, but I was unsure how that number had been generated). The thing was, RT44’s last post, yesterday night around midnight, said they were trapped in a bank by a mob of infected, with two dead and their vehicle compromised. The last post was made at zero seven hundred via cell phone, stating two members of the team were left, barricaded in the safety deposit box room; they had some food and water, but were low on ammunition and needed extraction. Apparently the portion of their team that had stayed at their base had made an effort to reach them, and now were gone, too.

Plan C was to locate and loot their base-obviously, they had done a lot of prep work, which should mean ammunition stockpiled.

On a whim I dialed the number listed in the post and was startled when someone answered, a young man.

“This team 44?” I stammered out.

“Yeah, you see our post? Can you help?” he sounded tired and was talking overloud, the sort of tone that comes from shooting indoors.

“Maybe-I’m just one guy, what’s left of team 71.” I looked at the address in the post. “I’m a couple miles from your location. What’s your situation?”

“There’s two of us, we’ve got twenty rounds apiece left, everyone else is dead or turned. Our back-up panicked and tried to come in after dark. We’re in a bank, in the safety deposit box room off the lobby, down a short hallway; we’re behind a grill that is too strong for them to break down, but there’s about thirty in the lobby. They aren’t close because we sniped at them until they moved.”

“OK,” I had it in the GPS unit and was rolling. “Both of you are healthy?”

“Yeah. We lost four, and three more on the follow-up, though. We’re it for team 44.”

“Why did you hit the place after dark?”

“We didn’t, we came in during daylight, but we had to cut open a lot of boxes, and it took a lot longer than we thought. Something drew their attention-I was running the cutting torch, and all of a sudden it was a mad minute out there. Three of us got cornered here, and three didn’t make it. Only we had no commo so we made a rush towards midnight when the back-up showed, but we lost one in the lobby and had to pull back; at least we got a phone off a body.”

“Why didn’t your backup wait until daylight?”

“Our team leader’s wi
fe was in charge of the back-up, and she freaked when we didn’t answer, finally came running. He had been dead for a long time by then.”

“While you are waiting for me, look around and see if you can rig up a ladder good enough to reach the roof. I’m not sure if we’ll do that, but it’s an option. Now gimme the layout as best you can.”

The bank was in its own parking lot on the corner of two business streets, a single-story branch serving private customers, two drive-through positions and a big glassed-in lobby which had lost a lot of glass from the gunplay inside. A couple dead infected outside, and a couple more
propping the front doors open.