Why weren’t they stopping?
My question was answered a second later, but it felt like a terribly long second.
The zombies slowed their running before coming to a standing halt. It was as if they had run out of gas. Even though there wasn’t any wind blowing, they were swaying.
What the hell’s going on?
I jogged up towards the mob to take a closer look. When I closed the distance, I heard Elgin yell to her team.
“Be cautious,” she commanded. “Take them out one at a time. Pick them off at the edge of the group, just in case.”
She and the soldiers took handguns out of their holsters. Holding them up with outstretched arms, they maneuvered carefully and covered each other as they took steps to get closer to one zombie that was ahead of the pack.
I couldn’t stop watching. Slowly, I walked closer and closer to what was unfolding until I entered the back of the crowd of monstrous zombies, slinking past the upright bodies.
Elgin stepped up to the zombie. It was dressed in dark gray runner’s tights and a forest green tank top, and running sneakers.
That used to be a woman.
Her arms—or rather, its arms—were a sickly grayish color. They were lean and muscular. She was bleeding in the back of her head, and blood had soaked the entire back of her tank top. She was stained in brown-red.
Elgin looked at the zombie for a moment, assessing whether she was going to launch a surprise attack on her. Then she examined it, looking at it all over.
“Cover me,” Elgin said to her team—or what was left of it. Then she walked around the zombie, scanning it all over with her eyes. She ended up on the right side of the zombie. Then, she lifted up her handgun and fired.
The suddenness of her action made me gasp. There was no hesitation. She assessed the zombie, and the moment she made a decision, she acted on it.
Surprisingly, the zombie didn’t moan in pain. There might’ve been a slight grunt as she hit the ground, but that was it. She didn’t stop moving though. She kept breathing, and her arms and legs were writhing slowly like worms. It looked like she was putting her palms on the floor. Maybe she was trying to get up.
Elgin frowned. She knelt down and took a closer look at where the bullet had entered the zombie’s skull. Then she stuck her finger into the side of the zombie’s head. After she removed her finger and wiped the blood off on her pants, she pressed her handgun onto the back of the zombie’s head and fired.
She got up, and when she scanned the area, she locked eyes with me.
Immediately, I threw up my hands.
“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. I froze in place.
She motioned at me to step forward, so I walked past the front of the crowd and into the clear. My face was cast in a deeply etched expression of fear. I didn’t know what was going to happen.
The few soldiers that were left formed up around me, keeping their guns trained on me. I walked up to Elgin cautiously, my rigid arms still raised.
She put up her palm, and I stopped where I was.
“You did this?” Elgin asked me.
My throat was dry and as tight as a vise. I croaked when I said, “Yes.”
Elgin eyed me suspiciously.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t shoot you,” she said. “You’re the technician, aren’t you?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. In that moment, I wished that there were dialog trees. And that I had maxed out Charisma points.
Anyway, I guess that actually led to my next thought. I remembered that they were expecting a technician. I could lie and tell them that that’s who I was. But I was afraid that they’d ask me for credentials or something like that. Then again, what would happen if I told them that I wasn’t?
I must’ve been taking too long to respond, because Elgin snapped at me.
“You’re supposed to get us out of here,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if I should correct her.
“I don’t know why they took so long to send you,” she continued saying. “How the hell is there a network problem anyway…”
Now, we didn’t know this at the time, but STESIS was half disconnected from the server farm. There was a problem with EagleShieldNet. It was dedicated information technology infrastructure that the Department of Defense had started building for the National Guard. It was part of the Army’s efforts to consolidate their data centers. Because of that, they relied on commercial cloud solutions. One of the Tier 1 telecom providers was also consolidating its own operations, so they outsourced the management of a crucial segment of the network to a company called Speed Link. They happened to have a data center up in Southeast Yonkers, at the site of the Empire City Casino—they demolished the casino and put up the data center in its place. Anyway, the data center was under attack. An employee who was pulling out of the company parking lot had suddenly died from the first virus, and his car crashed into a ditch. A few days later, he turned into a burner and wandered back into the data center where he caused havoc. It wasn’t a carefully monitored place, because that one burner killed a whole lot of employees and nobody knew about it. The whole facility burned down.
Anyway, I wasn’t sure what would happen if I told Elgin the truth about who I was. But I’d been raised to be honest, and I wasn’t a very good liar, so I just told her.
“I-I-I’m not a technician,” I said, stammering.
Elgin narrowed her eyes at me and raised her handgun, pointing at my head.
“Then who are you?” she demanded. “How did you get in here?”
There wasn’t much that I could manage to say. The words please don’t kill me were running through my mind over and over again as fast as the blood rushing through the veins in my head. At the same time that my back was chilly from all the sweat that my shirt had soaked up, new drops of sweat were sprouting all over the top of my head and around my neck like pinpricks.
I swallowed hard. “I got in using that dead guy’s login.”
Elgin frowned. Then, a look of recognition flashed across her eyes.
“Garro…” she said. The look on her face looked like a mixture of displeasure and concern. I could thank Salesplex and their AI sales coaching for recognizing her emotions.
“Is he dead or alive?” she asked me.
I was still nervous as hell, but I started to find that I could manage to talk a little.
“Yeah,” I said. My mouth was hanging open like I was a dumb dog.
Elgin glared at me. I could feel the burning irritation emanating from every pore of her body.
“Yeah what?” she demanded.
I’d never felt this much hostility towards me. After I shook my head and mumbled something, I finally started speaking cohesively. Kind of.
“Yeah, he’s dead.” Then, quickly, I added, “I didn’t kill him. He was dead already when I got there.”
Elgin’s eyes darted all over my face. I could tell she was trying to figure out whether or not to believe what I had to say. My mouth finally closed to swallow again—my breath was choppy from the panic that was frying my brain, almost like I had a weird hiccup.
When Elgin’s body let some of that angry, suspicious tension loosen out of her face and shoulders, a shaky sigh of temporary relief came out of my mouth.
“Alright,” said Elgin. “So it was you who stopped the burners, right? It wasn’t part of the training exercise.”
I nodded.
“How did you do that?”
It took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. So much had happened. It felt like a week had passed since I first got into the simulation.
I started to explain what had happened to Elgin, and she and her team listened carefully. They were probably taking mental notes and really digging into whether or not I was telling the truth. Figuring out if stuff made sense.
“And that’s how I got here,” I said, finishing my explanation. It felt creepy to be standing there while there was a mob of undead milling around behind me, bumping into each
other and breathing all raspy, leaking blood onto themselves and each other. They all sounded like they were breathing with something thick and wet in their lungs. It was disgusting.
Anyway, Elgin nodded in approval. Then she made me stand off to the side while she and her team killed off the mob of zombies, one at a time.
“Save your ammo,” she said to her team. “Use your knife or baton.”
With that, the soldiers went to work. I thought it was going to be easy work for them. An enemy that stands still for you to stab? Piece of cake.
I watched them as each of them drew out a tactical pocket knife. Snapping it into the locked position, they each tried to stab the zombies in the skull.
The result wasn’t as kick-ass as I thought it’d be. The blades went through the rotting flesh easily enough. It was the hard bone of the skull that they had trouble penetrating. Their knives would hit bone and glance off.
Each soldier tried their own way to kill with a knife, but it was messy work. Some of them thrusted their blades into the eyeball. Others, holding their knife in an ice pick grip, slammed it into the ear. One of them seemed to enjoy grabbing the zombie by the back of the head and thrusting his knife up through the bottom of the chin, but it didn’t work. When he took the blade out of the zombie’s head, he looked at as if he were trying to figure out how much longer the blade needed to be to reach the brain. Then, he yelled out to Elgin.
“Boss, we need longer blades.”
Elgin was in the middle of a thrust through a zombie’s eye.
“No, Halstead,” she replied. “I’m thinking we need a different approach. These knives aren’t going to cut through bone.”
Who knew that killing zombies was going to be nasty business that needed such attention to detail. From all the zombies that I’d seen in the movies, TV, and in games, they were usually pretty easy to kill. I was expecting that just about anyone could take a baseball bat, swing at the head, and splat—dead zombie on the ground. Or maybe one headshot from a rifle or pistol—bam, you have a crumpling corpse (is it called a corpse? Technically it was already a corpse when it stood back up). But not here. These zombies were tougher to kill than I thought they’d be.
Elgin called out to her team to form up around her.
“These things aren’t going down from our knives, we’re going to have to use our sidearms.”
The team folded up their knives and took out their handguns, drawing them out of their leg holsters. Then, the team went zombie to zombie, popping off single shots into each of the zombies’ heads.
The first shot that was fired made me flinch. My eyes were forced into a surprised blink, and my calves and thighs pumped as if I were ready to break into a sprint.
It’s one thing to play games with guns. The sound of the gunshots in games was mastered by audio engineers to make it a pleasing sound. Something that gives you satisfying feedback. It was designed to fit into the soundscape of the game. But with this realistic simulation, the shots were jarring. They had a percussive pop that burst through the air and bounced off the buildings. The explosive crack of the bullet pierced my ears.
After I’d heard six to eight shots pop off, I stopped flinching. But it didn’t stop me from being scared.
Zombie after zombie fell, thudding onto the floor as still as they were supposed to be in the first place. After countless rounds of ammunition blasted their way through the skulls of the zombies and into the soft, bloody flesh of their brains, the mob was cleared—the soldiers executed them one at a time, expending extra bullets for the ones that didn’t die on the first shot. Mounds of bodies lay in the street and the sidewalk. It was a sickening sight that twisted my stomach into knots. All I wanted was to stay far away from the gory violence.
NINE
Return
Elgin brought her team and me to a small plaza in the middle of the block a few streets away. It was right in between two skyscrapers. If it weren’t for the tall manicured trees, it would’ve felt suffocating. I hated how the city felt like it would just swallow you up. I still do. I was born in New York City and never really left. I definitely wanted to get out. Nyla always told me to do something about it. And I never did. I guess that’s one of the reasons she broke up with me.
Anyway, it was the first time I’d been in a park in a long time. It was a very very welcome sight to see some greenery, especially after all the disgusting slop of viscera that was everywhere just minutes before. The plaza was tiled with stone that was the color of those terra-cotta planters, giving the space some warmth compared to the cold concrete, steel, and glass that imposed itself over us. The few trees in the plaza had grown high and formed a thin canopy overhead. Its thin branches and tiny green leaves gave me a sense that it was delicate. These trees, stuck in between two gargantuan monstrosities of man’s making, managed to find its way to survive and thrive.
Elgin sat down on a red metal bench, and we all got comfortable and sat around her. She checked in on how her team was doing, then introduced each one to me.
She pointed at the short soldier with reddish-brown hair. He had a tall nose and broad chin, and that ruddiness in his skin that made me think he was from the Midwest.
“This is Halstead,” she said to me.
Instinctively, I reached out to give him an elbow bump. He shook his head though.
“Sorry,” said Halstead. He didn’t sound very apologetic. “Just a habit. I don’t do any of that greeting stuff anymore.”
Elgin introduced me to the rest of her team, and we chatted a little to break the ice. The serious white guy was Warner. Tong was the tall one with a winsome grin. And the black guy’s name was Adeyemi, but everyone just called him Addie.
Elgin explained some things to me about the way the squad operated. They were all part of Red Squad. She was the squad leader. Adeyemi and Halstead were both part of Fireteam Bravo. Tong and Warner were leftover from Fireteam Alpha, and Warner was the team leader. Since there were only the four of them, she just regrouped them as Fireteam Alpha. They’d lost their machine gunners—or, as she put it, automatic riflemen. Adeyemi was the grenadier, Halstead was the rifleman. Tong was a rifleman too. So altogether, everyone was just armed with the XM242 rifle. Adeyemi was the only one with a grenade launcher.
I started getting more comfortable around them, and curiosity was nagging at me. I had so many questions. And so I asked Elgin what was on my mind.
“So…what is this place? I think I read about something called STESIS.”
Elgin nodded. “Synthetic Training Environment, Sensory Immersion System.”
“It’s really advanced…what’s the point of it?” I asked her.
She gave me a slightly suspicious look and thought for a moment before responding.
“Training simulations,” she said.
“Can’t you guys just do it in real life?” I asked.
“We can,” she said, “but this is far more effective. As you can see, we can create completely simulated environments in far more detail than if we constructed it.”
She waved her hand around gesturing at the trees and the shrubs and the fountain.
Continuing, she said, “This is, essentially, a one-to-one realistic depiction of a place. Training in here is much better than some wooden kill house.”
In that moment, I was reminded of what Nyla told me. Soldiers were dying from the training. I wondered if there was a way for me to find data that supported that or explained why it was happening…something more than that memo. Nyla would need that for her investigation. That is, if I could even find her…there would be no news reporting if she was dead or disappeared.
Trying to get more info, I probed Elgin with a few more questions. She was getting testy though, so I knew to just back off.
“This is a lot to take in,” I said. “I’m just gonna go walk in the garden.”
“Don’t get lost,” Elgin said drily.
I chuckled to myself. I didn’t know Elgin had a sense of humor.
O
ff I went into the tiny little garden. It was small, but I admired how well designed it was. The curving path laid in pale brown brick twisted and turn on itself as it led me on a tiny winding journey, with tall hedges swooping left and right. Overhead, leafy branches intertwined together to make a series of almost magical little archways. As I passed under one, I wondered where I could find a place like this back in the real world. Am I ever gonna get a chance to take Nyla to a quiet little spot like this? Would she take me back? Would she and I ever get back together? Would I even ever see her again?
The walk in the garden was short, but I took my dandy time plodding my way through it. When I was done, I rejoined Elgin and her team.
“…but the most crucial aspect of the system is that it helps us prepare for scenarios,” said Elgin. She was talking to the team.
I eased myself back down onto the bench. “But how do you come up with those scenarios?” I asked.
“There’s a data center that simulates all kinds of scenarios that have been modeled on the real world. It’s called the Battlespace Predictive Modeling System. Bee-pee-ems. This is one of those scenarios.”
“What, when zombies attack?”
Tong laughed. He was one of those breezy kind of guys who wouldn’t blink if a bullet buzzed right past his ear.
“We call them burners,” he said. “B-E-R-N-T. Biological entity with reanimated necrotic tissue.”
“What happened to the T?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “We’re the military, how we name our stuff is crazy. We have acronyms for everything. Bee-piss, eye-vass, F-E-L, F-T-X, the list goes on.”
“What’s all that?” I asked, shaking my head in bewilderment.
Warner piped up. “Yeah man, and there’s fire-W, R-pudding, and G-bread.”
Tong laughed and hit him in the arm.
“Man, don’t fuck with the PC,” said Tong.
A half-smile crept up on my face. I wasn’t sure if I should be laughing. “What, what is all that? G-bread?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it, PC,” said Addie.
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