by Jones, K. J.
“All y’all Zoners?” he asked again.
“Don’t know who those other people are,” said Jerome.
He gestured his chin to the furthest bunks, where the programmers and others hung out. His gaze met with Mullen’s, who listened in. Jerome nodded.
The slenderness and muscularity of Zoners versus non-Zoners made who’s who obvious. And there was a certain attitude. Vietnam War movies flashed through Mullen’s mind, such as Platoon. The Zoners were like long-timers in the Nam among new draftees.
4.
“What you see on the other side of that wall stays on the wall,” an Army master sergeant decreed to a group of Marine scout snipers lined up.
Ben stood beside Pez and Darsi. They were being briefed before climbing the ladder to guard the wall. Beneath their boots were lines of an interstate highway. It stretched for miles in both directions. All overhead signs and posts removed, but the mile marker signs at the grassy sides remained. The landing strip for planes converted from Interstate-77. The wall ran immediately west of it, containing this section of multi-laned highway.
“Any violation of this standing order, you will regret you ever opened your mouth. Am I clear?”
“Oorah,” they barked out together. Maybe out of habit, or perhaps to annoy the Army guy.
“You will not fire without a direct order to do so. Am I clear?”
“Oorah.”
“Dismissed. Off you go.”
As they climbed the ladder, the chorus of monstrous sounds grew. Each rung, louder and louder, until they reached the top. Pez first. He gasped and made the sign of the cross on himself as he moved to the side.
Darsi next. “Oh, crap.”
Ben’s stomach tightened. With a big inhale, he climbed the last rung and stepped onto the platform which ran the length of the wall interior.
“Oh, this is bad,” said Darsi.
The smells joined the sounds. It reminded Ben of a latrine when the plumbing backed up.
In the near distance stood a suburban neighborhood of vacated houses, worse-for-wear over the abandonment period.
Pez kept looking down along the outside of the wall, then over at other snipers, astonishment on his face. He shook his head and did it again. Finally, he wailed, “Get outta here! This is fucking ridiculous. Why ain’t we shooting ‘em?”
“Sniper,” an Army second lieutenant said. “Man your post. Quietly.”
Pez looked down, then at the second lieutenant, exasperation still on his face. “Do you got no idea about what these things are, or what? Are you crazy?”
The second lieutenant approached. Snipers had to squish themselves forward to let him pass on the walkway. Their faces showed nothing but boredom.
The second lieutenant arrived. He was younger than all three men, barely beyond college graduation.
“Do we have a problem, sniper?”
“Um, yeah.”
Darsi elbowed, and Pez added, “Sir.”
The second lieutenant cocked a thin brow.
Ben remained quiet. He stepped away to get a view of both the men and, with a head turn, down below. His rifle hot—safety off and ready to fire. This situation made him feel like he was a little dog caged at an illegal dog fight. The movement of men on the walkway told him the wall was not the most stable thing. The only appropriate wall would be a tall stone one, preferably like the stone curtain walls around medieval castles. He felt vibrations through it. A soft stomp of his boot heel told him it was wood. Even if it was titanium, it would be too dangerous.
“Why ain’t we shooting them?” Pez added, “Sir.”
“They are the unfortunates. The sick. We do not go around murdering our sick people in the United States, Gunnery Sergeant Pezzimenti.”
“We do if they’re gonna try to kill us, sir.”
“Check that attitude. Stand your post, sniper. You do not fire unless ordered.”
“If this isn’t grounds for firing, what is, sir? If a T-rex shows up?”
The second lieutenant grew pissed off. His cheeks flushed bright pink and his already thin lips disappeared as he pressed them together. “Are we gonna have a problem, sniper?”
Darsi elbowed Pez to behave himself.
“No, sir.”
“Stand your post, sniper.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer walked on; confident he’d be obeyed.
Pez rolled his eyes. “Narrow assed sonofabitch. His balls barely dropped and I gotta obey him.”
“You leave my ass,” said Darsi, “I’ll shoot you the next time I see you.”
Pez smirked, a small chuckle.
Darsi continued, “I’m not standing up here alone.”
“What is he?”
“Raven’s not you. No offense, Raven.”
“Couldn’t give less of a shit, Darsi,” said Ben.
“Good.”
Ben spaced out to where he was designated to stand and watch. What he was watching for, though, unclear. Apparently, if someone should give an order to fire at some point, just in case, all the snipers stood ready. But if the base chain of command saw nothing wrong with what gathered outside the wall, what could provoke a fire order? Pez was right. Maybe a T-rex.
He leaned out to see straight down the wall, wondering. As he did so, he became aware of an even worse smell than septic-issues latrines. Decomp. Death. He spotted the live infected falling over corpses. Bloated. Darkened. Flies everywhere. Tons of rotting bodies, humans and some animals. It was enough to make a hardened scout sniper vomit straight down on top of them. Their bodies strewn in haphazard piles from where they had dropped dead gave the live ones a few feet upward. He remembered the marina in Carolina Beach at the chain-link fence, piles of bodies, and the others stepping on them. Holding ground at the marina had ended with disaster. He felt pretty sure this would, too.
Turning around, he scanned the base. Unlike Carolina Beach or Parris Camp, no water to flee to. Just more land. Few of the buildings were permanent and could be used defensively. A lot of recently erected aluminum buildings and hauled-in trailers. They would not stand a chance against the horde outside.
Did they actually not know what the infected were capable of? How strong and violent they were?
He spotted water hose cannon trucks and noted their positions. Full force water was the best weapon against an infected mob. Soldiers walked around, unarmed as if this was merely another base any day of the year. The denial was insane.
A rifle fired. It was suppressed, but he recognized the whispery swoop sound.
“Pez!” Darsi’s voice reprimanded.
Semi-auto firing, Pez shot down at the zoms.
“Fuck,” said Darsi. He joined in and opened fire straight down at the live zoms, who grew riled and beat at the wall.
The young second lieutenant on his way along the walkway, beet red in the face. The other snipers began to fire as if Pez and Darsi were what they had been waiting for. The second lieutenant yelled at everyone. The master sergeant below ran to the ladder and started climbing.
“Ceasefire,” commanded from multiple directions.
Ben shrugged and opened fire. He tried to kill as many as he could before they would be inevitably shut down. It was not proper sniper shooting, but under-pressure eradication firing. To thin out the hostiles as quickly as possible, the snipers fired from all around the wall as far as Ben’s eye could see. Pez had started something.
* * *
Pez and Darsi were in trouble. They later reported back to the Marines in the barracks that they lost transfer orders for a while.
“So …,” said Brandon. “Staying here is the punishment for disobeying the no-fire order?”
“Seems so,” Pez said. He sat on a bunk, elbows on his knees, fingers interlaced, and nodded several times.
“How can I get punished like that?”
“You want to stay?” Darsi asked. He stood with his elbow resting on a top bunk.
“I do not want to leave my Emily.”
“G
ot ya.”
The rest of the snipers had been verbally wrist slapped but nothing more. The two which began the firing bore the brunt of responsibility.
The barracks were divided by gender and officer vs. enlisted. Curtains at the end of the long room marked officer area. This had grown trivial to most of them and the male officers never closed the curtains or remained in their own area. The enlisted-officer division had eroded while in the Zone. They were all brothers and equal. No one in the Zone led because of their rank in the Before.
Ben snuck up to the second floor where Mazy resided, the female Marine barracks floor. She was the only female officer. Since there weren’t a lot of female Marines, much of the room held empty bunks. A waste of space, while the male floor was crowded. The base command would not even allow Air Force officer Diane from the central North Charleston tribe in there.
The two-story building only held reactivated Marines. No new recruits. No other branches. Every effort seemed to be made to keep people apart. If what was on the other side of the wall and the snipers ordered to keep it a secret was any indication, then everyone was kept firewalled to not pass information and create panic … for those who would still panic. Command seemed more preoccupied with controlling the population within the wall than worrying about the population outside the wall.
5.
“If everyone would bow their heads for prayer.”
The group looked at the person standing at the front of the hangar bay. A civilian. A fellow detainee.
“What’s this?” Emily asked. “I hope it’s not mandatory.”
“Everyone.” The woman at the front clapped her hands.
Miss Glenda said, “They try this every once in a while. I’ll pray with ‘em. But those folks can be persistent towards those who don’t want to pray.” She sighed. “You can’t drag people to Jesus, I keep telling them.”
“Ah,” said Peter. “Religious fundamentalists. We’ve been missing that brand of crazy for a while.”
“Why is everybody such fucktards?” Tyler asked.
Miss Glenda gave a disapproving look for his foul mouth, but since he had not been raised properly, he didn’t recognize that’s what the look meant.
Peter said, “Well, the upside. No one is arguing politics. That’s an improvement.”
“That’s because the entire executive branch is dead,” said Phebe, laying on her cot.
“Maybe we should have done that a long time ago.”
“Argh,” she grunted.
Phebe wasn’t finding her husband humorous lately. He kept trying, though.
“How long have we been here?” he asked. “A week? A month or something?”
“Think it a day and a half, baby-blue,” Miss Glenda answered.
Peter smiled, liking that she had a nickname for him. “Miss Glenda, you’re like the Southern black grandma I never had.”
She belly laughed. “You are a mess, baby-blue. A true mess.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“Crazy, you are.”
“Still a good thing, right?”
“Yes, baby-blue. It is what it is. We all crazy.”
More raucous laughter. She was a good laugher. He liked making her laugh, especially since everyone else turned into constant grumps.
The hangar-wide prayer began. Peter remained quiet out of respect and glared at Tyler to do the same. The kid knew that look and decided to try to take a nap as hundreds of people recited the same words out loud.
Phebe pulled her pillow over her head. She was beyond exhausted and hated everyone. Her vomiting had decreased, but it was still happening, and now more complicated and socially awkward than ever. She received barf bags similar to the ones on airplanes, and Peter had to keep bringing them up to the communal trash can and requesting new ones from soldiers who couldn’t care less.
Emily was an amateur at this and only puked once. Yet, she was true morning sickness, like clockwork after she woke up. Always nice to awaken to the sound of someone yacking.
The pregnant women received nothing to help them. No saltines or soda. No mint tea or candies. Only water that had to be retrieved from the water fountain down the tunnel towards the bathrooms. The guys and Karen took buddy-paired turns at fetching water to fill the preggers ladies’ paper cups. Peter managed to get more paper cups to keep Phebe hydrated during her The Exorcist vomiting sessions. In addition to projectile vomit, there was head-spinning, speaking in tongues, and a lot of growling, “We are legion.” Funny how pregnancy and possession were so similar in her.
Peter wished he could get high now. Surrounded by people getting high on Jesus, he wondered if he was allowed to smoke pot since he could officially attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and say, “Hi, I’m Peter. I’m an addict,” and everyone would respond, “Hi, Peter.” Did a person need any proof they were an addict to go to those meetings or was it just show up and say: “Hi – insert name here – I’m an addict”?
He would love a beer. The taste of it filled his mouth. His eyes closed. Maybe a little slobber at the corner of his mouth.
Someone poked him in the side. He sat on Phebe’s cot as she tried to sleep. The proximity felt better for them both, but the cot was too narrow for him to sleep with her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Fantasizing.”
“Not a sex thing.”
He opened his eyes and scowled at her. “I do have other thoughts.”
“Really?”
“You are so sexist.”
“Am I?”
“It was beer.”
She almost laughed. He wished she would laugh.
“Go to sleep,” he said.
“Really?”
“Stop making everything you say a question.”
“Am I?” A small smirk.
He laughed. “You are such a pain in the ass, wifey.”
Phebe’s eyelids slid shut. He watched her face for a while, then raised his gaze towards the back of the building, where he saw the emergency exit door. While everyone prayed, it would be too noticeable for him to get up and happen to wander to the back and happen to check out an escape door. A plan struck.
* * *
A soldier yelled at Tyler, despite the communal praying. The kid was spotted checking out the back door. Seemed less suspicious for a kid to be doing it than a grown man. Peter was right. Tyler received a verbal reprimand as a naughty, restless child, and no suspicion. He came back and reported everything he observed about the emergency exit door. Since it had the red emergency bar, it was probably unlocked that way, which was a good thing. An alarm would go off, sure, but if a bug-out was necessary, who cared about an alarm.
Peter rested his hand on Phebe’s back and said, “We’re safe, babe.” Her mounting nightmare sounds calmed. They did this for each other, the whole night through and any napping. Tossing and turning, yelling out in their sleep, throwing punches into the air. They were a cot row away from the wall. Too bad, as a wall would give some sense of security. Instead, they were right out in the open.
Back in the Before, when Dock Cat had vivid dreaming motions, he’d whispered in her ear, “Get ‘em, girl. Get ‘em.” It didn’t work as well on a cat as it did a dog, he observed. He definitely wasn’t going to say it to his wife, aka The Beheader. Her get ‘em was by far worse than any dog.
He imagined them as an old couple. Grandchildren running around. Phebe wrinkly and white-haired, and called Grandma Beheader. A machete attached to her walker by a D-ring. He hoped he had one of those motorized buggies. He’d put spikes on the sides and mount a fifty-cal on the front. Would that be the world when they were old, fifty-cal machine guns on grandpa buggies?
He decided it was all wrong. Could not happen.
There was no way to mount a fifty-cal machine gun on a grandpa buggy. The reverberation during rapid-fire would probably tip over the buggy or make it bounce backwards – something would go wrong. He wished he could find out, though. They used to do
crazy quasi-scientific things like that back when they were in Georgia. The side of his garage once blew out. A huge hole through which he could wave at the alarmed neighbors.
What about a golf cart? Do some golfing. Shoot some zoms. A whole new game of golf. Bring the kids along for a family outing. He’d pack a picnic basket since Phebe wasn’t allowed to prepare foods he had to eat. A bunch of golf carts so he could play with the guys. Extra points for shooting the ball.
The prayer ended. It had gone on for ages. Everyone went to their usual sounds and activities. His golf fantasy faded for his grim reality.
Phebe jerked awake. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing, babe. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
He wondered if the baby would come out nervous and hyper-alert.
Chapter Two
1.
Brandon was determined to find Emily. Orders were specific on where they could go on base, but he ignored this. The area occupied by military personnel seemed to have no civilians, which meant they were on the other side of the base. Watching helicopters and small planes flying in and out, he determined there was a landing strip on the other side.
He set out, trying to behave casual and confident as if he belonged where he was. Soldiers patrolled. Most were Army MPs, but every now and again, they were black patches. They were like grim reapers in digital camouflage.
Reaching a main interior road, which looked like a road in a town, he stopped at the curb while tan, slopped-back Humvees passed. A veer off in direction, he followed where the Humvees went. Casual and confident under a lovely blue sky and puffy white clouds, he strolled to a parking lot. The vehicles were kept behind a tall, chain-link fence with razor wire at the top. No code or card pass to get in. A guard posted at the gate. The gate was currently open and a chain hung down on the chain-link panel. Presumably, a chain meant a padlock attached to it. A padlock was easy to bust open by a determined man.
Brandon found some of the vehicles interesting for their oddity. Ambulance Humvees with .50 cal machine guns mounted on their very high tops. The front ends of the vehicles were normal Humvee. Behind the front doors was all square ambulance with a red cross in a white field on the sides.