The first part of the plan was to have Elgin and Tong take me to the White Zone. They’d help me find Nyla. We would drive over to the hotel and park a distance away so that we could observe. None of us knew what we were up against. Were there going to be guards? Were they going to be armed? Would there be burners there already? Then, once we got on-site, we’d reformulate a plan based on what we saw. Elgin pointed out that if there were guards, neither she or Tong would be killing them. And that meant that we would need to be stealthy. And if shit hit the fan, our only option was to run.
We needed to prepare. With the reports of the viral concentration in the air going up, we were all worried about getting infected. When Tong was talking about protecting ourselves, I thought to myself, Man I really wish I had some hardcore masks right about now. Coincidentally, there was a crate in the truck that had respiratory masks with military-grade filters. There were a few other things too. A couple of bags of BPIS, a dark gray fireproof Nomex hood and matching gloves, a fresh uniform, and a bunch of other stuff. Elgin and Tong both thought it was a good idea for me to put on the uniform. It was a little baggy for my tastes—I preferred a streamlined fit for better mobility—so I improvised. I strapped an empty black drop-leg holster on both legs, nice and tight. The sleeves of my combat shirt were too long, so I rolled them up.
Tong looked me over.
“Tuck the sleeves into your gloves,” he said to me. “Better not to let your skin show. And, well, if there are any burners…”
My expandable baton was still in my other pants, so I took it out. When I shoved it into my pocket, Elgin shook her head.
“You’re gonna want that easy to reach.”
She grabbed the magazine pouch off her tactical vest and took out her utility knife to cut it up so that it would hold my baton. Then, she took it off and put it on me.
“Universal fit,” she said as she cinched the waist with a strap. She slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re all set. Lookin’ like you’re ready to rock.”
It was time to get rollin’.
SEVENTEEN
White Peach
Together, we arrived at Biocontainment Zone White.
Tong parked the truck in the parking lot of an auto shop. It looked like it hadn’t been open in ages. The metal shutters across the garage and the office had wide, spotty streaks of rust, as if the shutters were itself infected and shedding a bloody virus itself.
The hotel was across a long and expansive boulevard that was twelve lanes wide.
Elgin sent out the Fly to scan the hotel. It was a big building—six stories tall, and it took up more than half a regular city block—so the scan took a while.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise when I saw the Fly.
“I thought that stuff was only in the simulation,” I said.
Elgin shook her head.
“We’ve had the Fly for a while now. Military’s got cutting edge technology. Where do you think all those taxpayer dollars go?”
While we were waiting for the scan, Elgin pulled out her Cyclops—System Integrated Combat Optical System—and strapped it on her head.
It had two parts. The optics and the visor. Two lens tubes sat at forehead level, and the visor wrapped around the eyes and ears. The two lenses, both with night vision and infrared imaging—gave the soldier both wide-angle and magnified vision. The visor was made of a nano-matrix. Basically, a net of phosphorous nanomaterial. It was engineered so that if no current was running through it, you could see right through it as if there was nothing in front of your eyes. And since it was phosphorus, it could also display a monochromatic HUD.
The HUD could be configured by the user. It had a compass heading on the top of the display, and it could display a minimap with routes and points of interest. The Fly could communicate with it too. For example, if the Fly scanned a building, it could overlay the layout or even display a 3D model. And on top of that, the commander could communicate with the soldiers using text or audio, and place waypoints.
As Elgin observed, she told us what she saw. Through the windows, she could see that there were a lot of people locked into their rooms. And from what the Fly was sending back, it looked like there were forty rooms on each floor on each wing. With two wings, that was eighty rooms on each floor, totaling four-hundred and eighty rooms. Four-hundred and eighty people who might turn into burners. And that wasn’t counting the field hospital that was set up in the underground parking garage and the parking lot on the street level. We estimated that there were probably another two hundred people there too, not including all the National Guard soldiers who were working there.
And that was the challenge. We couldn’t just waltz in there. It was a containment zone. There were guards. Not a lot of them, but still. If any of the soldiers caught us intruding, they’d definitely sound an alarm and capture us.
Anyway, thinking of all those people and how they were stuck there…it made me feel guilty. I was there to save one person. Nyla. I wanted to save everyone else too, but I didn’t see a way. When I brought it up to Elgin, she thought about it for a moment before giving her a decision.
“Wayne,” she said, “you go and find Nyla. Once you find her, get her out safely.” Then she turned to Tong and continued. “Once he’s done, you find a way to free everyone.”
“How are we going to get them to safety?” he asked her.
“We can’t. The best we can do is just give them their freedom.”
“But won’t they spread the virus?”
“They’re unconfirmed. And besides, this is America. I didn’t ever think I’d see the day when the government was locking people into rooms without their permission.”
“Elgin, it’s a public health crisis,” Tong argued.
“There are ways to handle it. This…was not the right way.”
The tone of Elgin’s voice made it clear to Tong. Her decision was final. And he’d better shut the fuck up or he’d catch an ass-whooping.
Elgin shoved the Cyclops into my arms, told me to put it on, and sent me and Tong out there, double-time. “I’ll keep an eye on the operation from here,” she said, “just in case shit hits the fan.”
Quietly, Tong and I snuck our way into the back alley of the Argentinian steakhouse next to the hotel. I climbed up the roof and helped Tong get up there, and it was from there that we took our time observing the guard’s patrols. Elgin sent me the layout of the building in the Cyclops, and I plotted a route.
First, we would need to sneak into the building. The main lobby was too heavily guarded, and there wasn’t any way to sneak in undetected anyway—the entire frontage of the hotel was glass. When I was studying the layout of the building, I was disappointed to see that the entire front of the ground floor was inset, meaning the second floor was hanging past the footprint of the first floor. It meant that there wasn’t any way for me to climb up there. After searching for a while, I found a way up. There was a utility building in the back. It was only one-story high or so, maybe a little taller. That meant I could climb my way up that, pull Tong up, and then we’d climb into the hallway through a window.
I told Tong my plan, then he asked me what my route of egress was. Fancy words. All he meant was: how the fuck are you gonna get outta here once you have Nyla? I told him I’d just wing it, but he snapped at me.
“Not good enough, Wayne. I’m risking my ass to save these people, your girlfriend included. You gotta gimme something better than that.”
So I thought about it. I figured what worked in STESIS would work here.
“I’ll take her down the nearest emergency exit and rendezvous with you back at the steakhouse.”
Tong gave me a thumbs up, and we moved out.
So that’s how we got into the hotel. It wasn’t as easy as I thought though. Climbing up the utility building took some doing. When we got there, I sized up the wall. It was maybe fifteen feet tall. I knew this before based on what I saw on the Cyclops, but I didn’t really know what fifteen feet of wall f
elt like until I was trying to get up it.
I tried to run up the wall and grab the top ledge, but after Tong had seen me fail a few times, he offered to give me a boost. It didn’t work that well though since I couldn’t get enough height. Have you ever tried jumping out of someone’s hands? Not easy. So instead of having him boost me up like that, I had him stoop down to make his back a platform for me to jump off of.
He got into position, and I backed up five long strides away from him. Then, in a loping stride, I ran towards him and jumped up off of his back.
I stretched my arms up high with my fingers straight towards the night sky. I didn’t think I was going to make it. But just as my vertical jump had slowed to a halt, I felt the ledge under my fingertips.
Immediately, I kicked my feet and caught the wall under my boots. I scrambled up over the ledge and breathed a sigh of relief before I dropped the rope down the wall.
Tong climbed up and we got in through the window.
Where we ended up was at the end of a hallway, where the ice machines usually are. Instead of ice machines, there were stacks and stacks of boxes full of PPE. Personal protective equipment, like masks and face shields. Tong joked that if it weren’t for his military-grade respirator mask, he’d take one of those boxes with him.
“Wayne,” he said. “You’re crazy for being in here without one of these.”
He was talking about his mask, which was a full-face model, the kind that covers your entire face, eyes included. Mine was the kind that only covered your nose and mouth.
After Tong said that, I did feel a little unsafe. Maybe it was just in my head, but the air really felt thick… There’d been rumors that the virus could spread through your eyes. Wild, unfounded rumors…but with what was at stake, I was having regrets. Still, there wasn’t anything I could do about it at that moment, so fuck it.
Tong and I were on the second floor, where the hotel rooms were.
“Start searching,” he told me. “I’m gonna check the doors, see if they’re locked. If shit goes down, I’m gonna pull the fire alarm and fire some shots, that’ll get the guards’ attention. You throw open the doors and tell them there’s an emergency and they gotta get home.”
“You think anyone’s really gonna listen to you?”
“Maybe…probably not. But hey, unless you got a better plan, sometimes you just gotta do the best you can and hope for the best. I’m not responsible for these people. I’m just giving them a decent chance at getting out of here.”
Then, I got an idea.
“Why don’t you find the PA system,” I suggested. “You could make an announcement.”
Tong liked the idea. Before we split up, he told me to stay in touch using our radios. There was one integrated in my Cyclops, and he had a radio of his own tucked into his ear.
We were using what was called the Ad-hoc SquadNet Radio System—ASRS. Designed for squad-level communication, it was a device comprised of two parts. One was the tiny bone-induction receiver, which was basically an earpiece that vibrated the bones in the ear so that it could transmit sounds without compromising you in a stealth situation. Imagine if you were sneaking up behind a sentry, and a radio transmission blasted off in your headphones. Not exactly ideal. It also had a passthrough mode that made sure that you could hear everything like you would with your bare ear, or even better.
Connected to the earpiece was a throat mic, so that the operator could whisper. It used a low-power wireless connection. The system-on-chip in the earpiece also had a two-way communication protocol—either text-to-speech or speech recognition could be used to send or receive text messages. Being able to receive an incoming voice communication in the form of text was useful in situations where there was too much noise on the battlefield, and the noise cancellation wasn’t working that well. Sometimes, it’s just impossible to cancel out the unpredictable chaotic commotion of combat. I was always amazed at how tiny technology could get. All of this reminds me of how the Army was funding mining operations to feed their need for tellurium, but that’s a different story for another time…
Anyway, Tong went off to find the PA system, and I went off on my search for Nyla.
Quietly, I went from door to door, trying the doorknobs. They were open, which was what I was expecting. I’d crack open the door, peek inside. If it was clear—and it was always clear since everyone was sleeping at that time—I’d sneak into the room to see if it was Nyla.
But after a while, I realized that it was going to take forever for me to check hundreds and hundreds of rooms. Not to mention that it was risky. On my search of the second floor, I’d seen soldiers checking in on the folks in the rooms. It wasn’t like they were expecting intruders or keeping the people under heavy guard, but it was still a risk that I didn’t want to take. I might’ve known how to fight burners, but it wasn’t like I knew how to take a soldier down without making a big ruckus.
There had to be a list of all the people that were in here, I thought. It just wasn’t possible for them to keep track of all these people without some way to organize the information. And if they were being sent off to different containment zones, they definitely had to transmit that information.
So the big question was: where did they keep that information?
I radioed Elgin.
“This is gonna take forever,” I said. We were skipping the typical radio communication protocol because, hell, there was just the three of us, not a whole squad.
Elgin snapped at me.
“Don’t whine,” she said.
“I’m just saying, there’s got to be a better way. Can you help me find an office or something? They should have a list of people who are housed here, it’s gotta be somewhere.”
Elgin took a few moments to examine the 3D model of the hotel before she got back to me. She told me that on the ground floor, there was a fitness room, restaurant, manager’s office, and a meeting room. All of these places were possible locations where the officer in charge could set up. On the fourth floor, there were two large meeting rooms and a maintenance office. There was also another bigger maintenance office in the basement.
Tong and I split up the search. He’d take the ground floor since he was already scouting that area out in search of the PA. I’d take the fourth floor. And we’d rendezvous in the basement if we didn’t find anything.
When I went up to the fourth floor, I went to the maintenance office first. After I snuck in, I searched the room. It didn’t look like it was set up for anyone in charge, and I had my doubts about whether I’d find the information that I was looking in such a place. Still, I did a cursory search. And lucky I did. I found a little snake cam in an equipment locker. From the black gunk that it was caked in, it looked like it was used by the custodial staff to check vents and pipes. I wiped it down and took it with me.
Then I got to the meeting rooms. It was in the middle of a long hallway, which was good for me. It meant that I could observe from down the hall. I got a little nervous from what was going on. A handful of soldiers were moving supplies around, going in and out of the meeting rooms, and checking in on the quarantined people. Luckily, they were on the other side of the hall opposite of me.
Using the snake cam that I found, I observed the entrance of the meeting room. I tried to find a pattern to their rhythms of entry, but I couldn’t find a chance to slip in. Then, I saw a soldier stop someone to ask a question. I couldn’t hear what was said, but it was clear that the soldier was talking to a superior.
I got excited when the man in charge took out a piece of paper and ran his finger down it, like he was reading a list. He said something to the soldier, who then went off like he was doing something important. This pattern happened a few times, so I knew I had to sneak around to the other side of the hall so that I could find out where the soldiers were going.
And when I got there, my suspicions were proven correct. The soldiers were going to each of the rooms. And that meant that the list was most likely a list of the name
s of the people in the rooms.
I needed that list.
I told Tong and Elgin all of this.
“How are you gonna get it?” Elgin asked me.
“I don’t know…I need help.”
“Keep watching the head honcho,” Elgin said. “Something will come to you.”
And it did, after a while.
The man in charge gave the list to a soldier. It looked like there was a situation that came up that he had to take care of. That soldier took the list and tacked it up on the wall in front of the meeting room.
All I had to do was sneak down to the middle of the hallway and look at the list.
Watching closely and timing movements in my head, I waited until it was the right time for my approach. It was risky, for sure, but I had to find out which room Nyla was in.
In a crouch walk, I darted to the piece of paper.
Turns out that there were several pages. I ran my eyes down the first page and quickly realized Nyla would be on a different page. I flipped through and glimpsed her name.
But before could draw my eyes to the rightmost column on the page to see where she was located, a voice bellowed out.
“We got an intruder!”
A soldier had caught me red-handed.
“Tong!” I yelled over the radio. “I got caught, get on the PA!”
I tore the packet of pages off the wall and ran.
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