Marty nodded and shook his head, simultaneously so that he just sort of bobbled from the neck up. “Yes, but there is no way we can use that word. We’re going with infected persons.”
“Do we have proof of any of this? I mean real proof? A video or something?”
“We have a bunch of eye-witness accounts, including a National Guard general who did a personal reconnaissance in Poughkeepsie, but we don’t have a video beyond a few grainy and fleeting ATM camera shots that we can’t use. I’ve seen the pictures. They look somewhat like that Bigfoot hoax from a few years back.”
The President looked down at his socks, unable to come to a decision on which to wear. He needed his butler, just like he needed Marty. “So, what do we do?” That was the usual question he would ask after Marty’s daily briefing. The usual answer was “nothing.” The President was always “looking into it” or “conferring with world leaders” or “waiting on a comprehensive study.” And the people were always reassured that the President was ready to “tackle” the issue, whatever it might be, just as soon as he could.
Doing nothing would not work, not this time. The President had punted on Social Security reform, and welfare reform, and tax reform and pretty much everything of importance, but this wasn’t something he could leave for the next administration to clean up.
“We jump on it early,” Marty suggested. “We contain the situation and we find those responsible and hold them accountable.”
A pinched look collapsed the President’s face. The situation, if true, was unnerving, however the idea of “jumping on it” was even more so. There were so many consequences to actual action that it was mindboggling, especially to someone who couldn’t make up his mind which socks to wear.
“Do you mean we should send in the Army?” the President asked. “Because I-I don’t know about that. Is it even legal?”
Marty smiled in that benign way he had when speaking to the President, or to his four-year-old granddaughter. “Well, Sir, the Posse Comitatus Act basically keeps the military from performing any duties domestically that are normally assigned to local law enforcement. As an example, our armed forced wouldn’t be able to arrest any citizen attempting to break the quarantine. However, the National Guard can, as long as it’s not under the command of the regular Army.”
“So…so what does that mean? Do we use the army or not?”
“We should, but not yet. We can’t be too eager, especially since this is still New York’s problem.” Marty paused as he saw the President’s blank look. “It’s their problem because of the Stafford Act? You know, the act that authorizes the use of the military for disaster relief operations but only at the request of the state governor, which, as of yet, we have not been given. That being said, we should prepare for that contingency. With your permission, I would like to ready FEMA crews.”
“FEMA?” the President asked with some hesitation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was still a bit of a bugaboo around the capitol. After the fiasco of hurricane Katrina everyone was wary to invoke the agency beyond the occasional tornado or flood. It was true that FEMA’s emergency plans had been updated and the training that its members received was more thorough and detailed, but there was a specter of failure hanging over the agency.
“Yes, FEMA,” Marty said. “It’s our best tool at the moment.”
“But what if…” the President couldn’t finish the question.
“What if they screw up again? This is an entirely different situation. For one, the press is on your side and for two, we’ll put them under the jurisdiction of General Collins of the 42nd. That was one of the issues in New Orleans; too many agencies going in too many directions. In this way, you are seen acting confidently, like a true leader but you won’t be on the hook for any issues that might arise. It’ll be on Collins or Governor Stimpson.”
“I like that.”
Marty knew he would. The President’s inability to make decisions had been well established. Even as a state senator he had voted “present” on almost every vote that didn’t concern naming a bridge. It had always been up to Marty to steer him to the proper conclusions. In some ways the President was like a talking doll; you had to pull his string to get him to dance. This was why Marty always made sure to get to him first thing in the morning before anyone else could get to him and muddle up his thinking.
The Chief of Staff went on pulling the string: “Now, we should call a full cabinet meeting on this, of course, but don’t let the Sec-Def drag you into this. If he brings up the Insurrection Act you just tell him that any authority the office of the President has was nullified by the 2008 repeal.”
“2008 repeal, got it.”
“And don’t be surprised if Milt in Homeland Security gets his panties in a bunch. FEMA is technically under his jurisdiction. Just remind him that everything is under your jurisdiction.”
“I never liked that guy,” the President muttered. And that too was Marty’s doing. He was personally repelled by the idea of an entire department dedicated to “Homeland Security.” That was what the FBI and the CIA were for, not that he cared for those agencies either.
“Well, if things go to pot, he’ll be the first we hang out to dry,” Marty said. At first the President smiled at this but then a frown of worry swept his face like a rain cloud threatening to darken a picnic. Marty patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Sir, this will not get out of hand, I promise you that. The 42nd is being called up even as we speak. It’s a ten-thousand man force, equipped with the finest weapons money can buy. We have to start looking at this as an opportunity. Remember what that old Chicago guy from the last administration said: never let a crisis go to waste.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we let our enemies on the other side of the aisle hang themselves on their rhetoric. They’re always going on about de-regulating everything under the sun. They have even wanted fewer regulations on big pharmaceutical companies and this was an R &K screw up.”
“Did they break the law in some way? You said it was an accident.”
Marty was within a whisker of rolling his eyes. “Sure. Probably. But it doesn’t matter, either way. Now’s our chance to rein in Big Pharma. They’ve made their last penny of profit off the sick.”
“Good,” the President said, with little enthusiasm. In the last election, he had raked in a ton of dough from R & K—perfectly legal campaign contributions, of course, all except a few hundred thousand that had been funneled back door into an overseas account that not even the First Lady knew about.
He wanted to mention something concerning the legit campaign donations, but Marty was already out the door with his cell phone kissing his ear. He wasn’t calling about the state of readiness of the 42nd, nor was he talking to Milt Grodin who headed up FEMA, no, he was on the phone with the FBI. There were culprits involved in this disaster and he wanted to make sure the right people were blamed.
“Emanuel!” the President bellowed. “I need you, immediately. You have to help me choose.” In the right hand was the whimsical red and in the left was the serious black. The butler knew all about job security and thus made a show out of deliberating the choices, as if this was to be the hardest decision facing the leader of the free world that morning.
Red was chosen, while eight hundred miles north, within the slowly expanding quarantine zone, terror built on terror and the stench of fear grew to become a physical thing that coated people like crusts of ice, causing them to shiver in their hiding places. They trembled beneath their beds like children, or in closets beneath piles of clothes or in the back seats of cars in garages, slumped down low beneath the edges of the windows.
One little six-year-old, named Helena, frightened by the screams coming from her parent’s room, climbed up into her chimney where the soot turned her into shadow and the ash covered her scent. She was safe for three hours until she couldn’t hold her pee-pee for a second longer. She squirmed down and left little black footprints in the beige carpet
. Helena shouldn’t have flushed the toilet when she was done, but out of habit she did. Her mother ate her minutes later.
For the most part, hiding was pointless, the zombies could sniff people out easily. Only those who were armed and who turned their homes into fortresses and, most importantly, fought back, had a chance at survival. Even then, the odds weren’t good. Few people were equipped with enough ammo to fight off the growing hordes or they were using weapons unsuited for the killing of zombies.
Knives put a person in arm’s reach of death; bats and axes spread the deadly Com-cells around, infecting everyone. Fire was clumsy and tended to kill friend and foe alike. Sometimes even guns were practically useless. With the dark, people found themselves shooting scoped rifles from distances of ten feet or less. In these cases, the scope made the rifle less accurate. Others found out the hard way that although shotguns could blast the heads right off a zombie, they also filled the air with deadly spores.
A family might survive an attack, only to turn a couple of hours later.
Interestingly, the best weapon of the night was the .38 Smith &Wesson. In the dark, it was as accurate as any other gun and because of its manageable recoil, it remained a steady weapon to fire even by smaller individuals; women and children used it as effectively as men did. Its greatest asset was the fact that it was considerably under-powered compared to most of the weapons in the quarantine zone. There were a mere handful of weapons of a smaller caliber, simply because men liked guns more than women did and men liked them big.
Excessive stopping power was a useless characteristic against zombies, as they simply did not stop no matter what sized weapon was used against them. Only a head shot had any chance at killing them and the .38 was the least likely round to cause an exit wound.
The people in the quarantined zone fought or hid and in some desperate cases they ran. The streets were deadly. Cars seemed to attract the creatures, drawing them out of every nook and cranny in town. Cars were swarmed and people were dragged out into the streets and eaten alive. A few, like Benjamin Olski, were lucky to get out of Poughkeepsie without actually hitting a zombie. Many who made it out were forced to plow through the undead, crushing them under their tires and covering their vehicles in black blood and spores. The drivers and their families all succumbed, eventually. The disease turned most of them, but a few held on only to be riddled by bullets from law enforcement officers on the verge of full-blown panic.
All night, state troopers had trickled into the area and were directed by Courtney Shaw to fill the holes in the perimeter. The main roads were her first priority and she was stretched thin just to cover those. At 5 a.m., when her eyes were rimmed red, her task force of eight women were yawning and slumping over their keyboards, Courtney had only managed to reach 70% containment. There were simply too many firebreaks and logging roads and fishing trails that spider-webbed outward from the epicenter at Walton.
Fearing the spread of the disease, Governor Stimpson, had used the arbitrary distance of twenty miles as the radius of the quarantine zone and General Collins had tasked her with putting a cork in every road out of the area. Courtney had to use a calculator to figure the circumference of the circle she was expected to cover. “Holy shit,” she had whispered, seeing the number. “A hundred and twenty miles? Are you sure?” she had asked the general. “There’s no way we have enough troopers.”
By her count she had approximately two hundred and forty one men in and around the area, not realizing that twenty-three of them had already been infected or killed in the staging area just outside of Poughkeepsie and another fifteen had been killed or wounded in desperate shootouts with frightened and sometimes diseased citizens.
Collins sighed into the phone. He hadn’t needed a calculator to realize they were likely screwed. “You’ll find a way to do this because you don’t have any other choice. Button it up tight until I get the guardsmen in place.”
“But…”
“Just do it,” he growled, before hanging up on her.
She had done her best but she knew it wasn’t good enough. Having grown up in Pleasant Valley, she was familiar with a good chunk of the land. Her father and brothers had hunted there, her uncle grazed sixty Holsteins on 20 acres there and she had tromped along half the dirt roads as a kid going to and from friends’ houses or to school. She knew there were more ways in and out of the area than that she could count.
There was only one way to button an area that big and that was simply not to. She straight up lied to Pemberton and told him they were guarding a seven mile radius. This cut in half the number of places that needed to be guarded, allowing her to double the number of men at each, and yet the line still did not hold.
The men guarding the road into Titusville stopped answering their calls at just after one in the morning. It was a scramble to replace them. Hell, it was a constant scramble all night long. When the six men holding the main highway south, ran out of ammo in the face of a colossal horde of undead, they fled, leaving the five thousand people of Wappinger Falls to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, they were almost all fast asleep and the first inkling there was something dreadfully wrong, was when they heard the screams; screams so loud that some people thought they were storm warning sirens.
For Courtney, it was hours of work without let up, directing men here and there, hoping to God they were plugging every hole.
Her little crew worked the phones and they worked them in fear. Courtney spent a good chunk of her time listening to a dozen police nets simultaneously. She was deathly afraid that there would be a suspicious call in Albany or Hartford or White Plains, somewhere outside the circle that represented the quarantined area, somewhere so far outside the circle that she would find herself stuck in a new and ever widening quarantine zone, unable to get out.
Although they didn’t have time for it, Courtney wasn’t the only one listening to these far-flung police calls. The entire staff was listening and second-guessing every domestic violence call, every drunk pulled over for crossing a yellow line, and every false alarm called in by overwrought housewives when their men were out trucking the big rigs back and forth across the state. They listened to those calls and were afraid.
“We should get out of here,” Renee Bilton whispered.
“And abandon our troopers?” Courtney shot back. “No, we stay until the National Guard shows up.” Had Courtney known the state of readiness in the 42nd Infantry Division she might have changed her mind. She had begun the call-chain for the 27th, the 50th, and the 86th infantry brigades, however without her focusing squarely on it, things had ground to a halt. The commanders of the 50thfrom New Jersey and the 86thfrom Vermont called their governors instead of instituting the call chain. With both governors completely ignorant of the situation, neither was given authorization to proceed.
The 27th, from New York had proper authorization from the governor, however three key personnel in the chain never picked up their phones; one was Lieutenant Colonel Guy Lawler, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, which just happened to be the closest infantry battalion to Walton. He was vacationing in the Bahamas and sleeping off three too many pina coladas from the night before. His executive officer, Major Renwald had let his phone’s battery die and slept through the night like a baby, and the battalion’s operation’s officer, the “S-3”, Captain Mason had simply left his phone in the car. He didn’t see the message until after five that morning when he was about to drive to work.
The 1st Battalion was the closest unit to Walton and they were one of the last to get their call-chain functioning, which meant the thin blue line was all that stood between the zombie horde exploding in size and engulfing America.
In desperation, Courtney found herself calling police stations hundreds of miles away, but what she really needed was the damned army to show up. She assumed things would get better when they finally made it, and she assumed they had been trained to handle situations like this, and she assumed they had better weapons. These assum
ptions weren’t based in reality.
Chapter 4
Her Need Fulfilled
6:41 a.m.
Anna Holloway, spread-eagle and naked as the day she was born was lashed to the bed. She had to piss like a mother, her hands were purple and numb, and she had an itch on her belly where Eng’s semen had dried, but did she complain? Hell no.
Her watchword was compliance, and it had been all night long. For two long, miserable hours she had been used in the most sexually demeaning ways imaginable by Eng. The perv had flipped her like a pancake, bent her over chairs and stuck his ridiculous thing in her in every conceivable manner and yet it was hard to call it abuse, especially since she had more than asked for it, she had begged loudly for more.
A shiver went up her spine at the memory, causing her to discover another itch in the small of her back. She tried to wriggle it away and as her only triumph of the night beyond not being killed, the itch left her.
“Hoo-fucking-ray,” she whispered. Even though she had insisted it wasn’t necessary, and that she wouldn’t try to run away, or stab him in his sleep, or take his gun and shoot him in the face, Eng had shredded up one of the sheets and had tied her in place because, of course, given the opportunity she was going to do one or all of those things. And why? She knew he would probably kill her… No, he would definitely kill her. It was just a matter of when. After all, she was a loose end. As far as she knew, she was the only person left alive who could point the finger of blame at him.
Her worries ate at her, but he seemed just fine. When he had finished living out every one of his sick fantasies with her, he fell asleep on the floor with just a pillow and blanket. It was strange and creepy as hell. For five hours he had slept, and in all that time he hadn’t moved once. Worse, for Anna, who was desperate to escape, his eyes had remained cracked. Here was a guy who couldn’t open his eyes wide enough to fit a quarter in sideways when he was awake but in sleep she could see his damned pupils.
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