Zombie Night In Canada (Book 2): 2nd Period

by Friesen, Jamie

  Right after the convoy had pulled onto the base, all the vehicles with civilians were directed towards a small, non-descript building at its southern edge. It wasn’t until after they had stopped that Xander had noticed the razor wire topped fences and guard towers with heavily armed soldiers, all facing inwards – not outwards like the rest of the base.

  They had been forced to leave most of their possession in their vehicles, then shepherded unceremoniously into the prison and stripped of everything else and forced into communal showers and told to clean themselves thoroughly. This was all under the watchful gaze of several soldiers, though some of the women commented that it felt more like leering than watching in some cases. After that, they had been subjected to invasive medical inspections, and then escorted individually to sit in their cells.

  For Xander, the worst part had been the automatic assumption that he and everyone else were infected. Even after a more than thorough medical that had involved lots of rubber-gloved probing into sensitive areas better left alone and prodding with all sorts of sharp medical instruments to retrieve blood, skin, and even hair samples, they still quarantined everyone in spartan four by eight cells.

  Actually, the cells were two metres by three metres, which was closer to six feet by ten feet, but it still felt cramped and claustrophobic. Xander’s had a flimsy cot bolted to the wall with a paper thin mattress on top that offered no support whatsoever. After lying down on it, he wondered if the floor would be more comfortable. At the end of the bed, a locker stood, presumably for his personal effects – all of which were outside in his SUV. The other corner had a toilet and sink and an odd mirror. Closer examination revealed it to be a piece of really shiny metal, not glass.

  Probably a safety precaution so inmates didn’t break them and cut each other. Or themselves, Xander deduced.

  When he used the toilet, there was no divider and therefore no privacy. However, given that there were no cells on the other side of the hall, it didn’t really matter all that much.

  The powers that be went so far as to separate family members from each other, tossing kids into their own cells, albeit as close to Mom or Dad’s cell as possible. Still, that first night, Xander got hardly any sleep, as kids cried and wailed for their parents, while the parents tried desperately to console their terrified children from nearby cells.

  Xander didn’t cry himself to sleep that first night, but it had been somewhat frustrating for Xander to spend it alone. For the past six weeks, Xander had spent every night with Evelyn, and while they hadn’t had sex all that often, he had grown accustomed to the warmth and companionship her closeness brought. He thought of masturbating a few times, but every time the thought crossed his mind, his eyes scanned upwards to the camera mounted on the ceiling of his cell. There was no light on it, but that didn’t mean it was or wasn’t operational.

  Even all of that wasn’t a big deal, given how exhausted the ordeal had been so far.

  No, the problem was being cooped up in this cell and having nothing to do and zero freedom. For the past six weeks, Xander had been able to do whatever he wanted inside the Costco, whenever he wanted to. Sure, he had been surrounded by dozens of infected who wanted to tear him apart, he had to deal with raiders, as well as his asshole-in-law Donald, but it was a hell of a lot better than this - now he was stuck in this tiny cage with no freedom and fucking absolutely nothing to do to while away the time.

  So while he sat and stewed alone in his cell as the morning progressed, his anger rose and rose.

  It was near fever pitch when a soldier finally came by with breakfast. He accepted it grudgingly and his mood didn’t improve as he ate it. The food was total shit in his opinion. A piece of stale toast with a microscopic amount of peanut butter smeared on it and a glass of watered down juice. Compared to the selection and amount of food he had enjoyed at the Costco, the shit-on-a-shingle served to him was a far cry from the food he had grown accustomed to. Unlike most people in the Capital Region, Xander and his comrades had not experienced much in the way of deprivations. If anything, he had actually been spoiled by the food inside the Costco.

  His mood lightened when another soldier came by later with a cart stacked with books and iPods and all sorts of other gadgets. The soldier, Private Davis, had been walking down the hallway for the past twenty minutes, and had had to endure bitching from every cell he stopped at, but he was still fairly polite and friendly to everyone he spoke with. Xander had met him briefly yesterday and grew increasingly impatient as he neared his end of the cell block. He wanted something to do and he wanted it now.

  The soldier had just stopped at the cell next to Xander’s when Xander heard a loud snarl in the hallway.

  “We’ve got infected in one-one-seven,” the soldier said into his radio. “We’ll need the clean-up crew to check it out.””

  Xander was already waiting at the bars when Davis stopped and he lunged towards the bars. Davis flinched and his hand went to his pistol instinctively, and his holster snapped as Davis prepared to draw it.

  Xander blanched and back-stepped, raising his hands, “Whoa, hold on there…”

  Davis stopped, eyeing Xander and then he slowly secured his pistol.

  “You need to be careful – I could have shot you,” Private Davis said. “Thought you turned and wanted to pounce like your neighbor. They should have told you step away from the door when we approach.”

  “I don’t remember that, but they told us way too much stuff to remember it all, I guess.”

  “Well, in the future, when you hear us coming, stay on your bunk or at least well away from the bars. You don’t want us to think you are infected. In here, there’s only one remedy for that,” Private Davis said, pointing at his pistol.

  “Well fuck. I didn’t realize we were goddamned prisoners when we came here yesterday. I thought we were being rescued,” Xander groused.

  “Do I look like I give a fuck? Or that I make policy around here? See that?” he said, pointing to the epaulet on this shoulder, “That’s the lonely little bar of a private. I don’t get to decide shit around here.”

  “Whoa touchy…” Xander replied.

  “Don’t even fucking start asshole,” Private Davis shot back. “I’m at the bottom of the totem pole and I get shit on every ten seconds here.”

  Private Davis paused for a moment and took a deep breath.

  “Anyways, do you want something to waste your time here – assuming you’re not infected and just going to get shot in the next couple of days?” Private Davis gestured at his cart.

  “What do you have over there?” Xander asked.

  “All sorts of stuff – some iPods, a few laptops, books, games. Feel free to take whatever you want, just don’t break it or there will be hell to pay.”

  “Any idea what’s on any of these?” Xander asked, pointing at the iPods.

  “Fuck if I know,” Davis replied.

  “What’s on the laptops?”

  “Some have movies, some don’t, either way, there is no wireless in here. Not that that matters very much, the ‘Net is down pretty much everywhere anyways,” Davis said.

  “I’ll take a laptop and an iPod with rock music,” Xander said.

  “Sorry, the numbers are limited, so it’s one or the other.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a laptop and hope it has some music on it.”

  “Here you go, do you want a book too?” Davis asked.

  “No thanks - what about that X-Box down there?” Xander said pointing to one on the bottom of the cart.

  “I was going to give it to one of the kids down the hall.”

  “Fair enough,” Xander replied.

  Davis turned to go to the next cell, when Xander said quietly, “Hey, what happened next door?”

  “When he had his medical inspection, he said the wounds on his arms were just that, scratches, and not bites. Guess he lied,” Private Davis trailed off. “The clean-up crew will be down shortly to deal with him.”

  “Shitty,�
�� Xander replied.

  “Could be worse…I could have to clean that mess up,” Davis turned to leave.

  Noticing the scowl still on Xander’s face, he said, “Look, I know it sucks from your side of the bars, but it’s not so bad. Quarantine lasts five days, a full day longer than any known case so far. We’ll feed you, do our best to make your stay as pleasant as possible and once it’s finished, you can go explore the base and do whatever you want. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Xander replied flatly.

  “Good, because otherwise I might just shoot your grumpy ass on general principles,” Private Davis said.

  Xander grimaced, “Really?”

  “For fuck sakes, dude, it was a joke!”

  With that, Private Davis smiled and continued onwards.

  --------

  Officer Dan Simpson was tired to the bone. He had been leading patrols into the city every day of late, sometimes twice a day, because his local knowledge of Edmonton was more valuable than ever. Huge swaths of the Internet were shut down by power outages and phonebooks were a long extinct species in this digital age. Google, when it worked at all, was spotty at best.

  Many of the troops on the base hadn’t grown up in Edmonton and didn’t know much of the city beyond the places they and their families had frequented before the pandemic had erupted.

  With the help of Dan and his fellow officers, whom Dan had worked very hard to coax out of their PTSD shocked shells and back into serving the public, the base now had relatively well-stocked supplies of food; troops had located dozens of survivors over the past two weeks and had dealt with thousands more infected.

  His typical day started with a unit briefing, discussing transit routes, security, rules of engagement, and so on. To allow him to sleep just a little longer, he usually ate breakfast during the briefing. Some people had grumbled at first, citing a lack of manners of people talking and eating simultaneously. Frankly, Dan didn’t really give a flying fuck what they thought, and gradually most saw the wisdom in his line of thinking and now most people were alternating eating and talking. His oft-stated opinion was that manners were the least of their fucking worries at this stage in the game.

  How some officers can be so fucking anal is beyond me, Dan thought to himself.

  The pandemic had ravaged the Edmonton Police Service – less than five percent of its officers had survived the chaos of the past six weeks – and worst of all, those that had survived were those least experienced to deal with its effects. Scanning the assembled officers, it looked as though Dan was the only Tactical Team officer in the room, excepting a couple of senior officers that had served a decade or more ago to flesh out their resumes enroute to their positions of command.

  Their low survival rates probably had something to do with the swagger and gung ho attitude most Tactical Team officers needed to make it onto the team in the first place, Dan thought. On several occasions, he had heard of Tactical Team officers single-handedly taking on dozens of infected only to meet a gruesome end.

  Dan had been lucky because he had been grounded – although many of his former Tactical Team comrades probably would have called it hindered – by having Ed Teller as partner. Ed had been a normal traffic cop and didn’t have the macho attitude and military experience most Tactical Team members did. Consequently, Dan had been much more careful when confronting infected than he might have been had he been accompanied by Tactical Team members. Unfortunately, Ed had not survived the fall of North Division and Dan had been largely rudderless for days after he had arrived on the base.

  Dan had spent his time in quarantine largely catatonic, alternating between sobbing and staring at the walls, as he grappled with the loss of his family, his friends and his co-workers.

  Not wanting to sit on his ass, he had volunteered to lead a patrol back into the city. He led them to several different food distribution warehouses and had secured large amounts of food. Prior to that, most missions had been dismal failures, either coming back to the base empty-handed or were forced to retreat due to large numbers of infected. His knowledge of the city had made that possible, and because of his past military experience, gave him a bit of a reputation on the base.

  A Captain entered the tent, and the soldiers milling around the coffee maker suddenly stood to attention as a non-com shouted, “Attention!”

  “Gentlemen, our planned mission has been scrubbed due to an urgent situation at 742 Signals Squadron. They have reported that they are surrounded by hundreds of infected and the fence line is in danger of collapse. Our mission is simple – wipe out the infected and secure the compound,” he said. “We’ll proceed east on Valour Road, cross Highway 15, and then move in formation towards the complex.”

  “You heard him, let’s mount up and kill anything that doesn’t have a pulse!” a warrant officer at the front of the room shouted.

  With that, Dan followed the crush of bodies hurrying out of the tent and onto the grounds. More than a dozen vehicles were waiting, most with their engines already running. Dan ran to where Privates Barker and Hall had parked their G-Wagen and hopped in.

  The G-Wagen was the Canadian Army’s standard light reconnaissance vehicle and could be fitted with an armour kit for extra protection. It had originally been ordered as a replacement for the Iltis, a small and poorly built Volkswagen jeep that resembled a Suzuki Samurai and had about the same protection and durability. In Afghanistan, the Iltis had been useful because it could maneuver down narrow streets which Hummers and other larger vehicles could not, but its lack of armour had proven a deadly liability after a series of suicide bomb attacks on Canadian patrols in Kabul shortly after 9/11. The G-Wagen was a considerable improvement over the Iltis, but troops had hoped that they would get larger, more capable vehicles such as Hummers instead of the G-Wagen. Scuttlebutt was that the government of the day – a Liberal one – had deliberately chosen the G-Wagen because they had not wanted to purchase anything from a country run by George W. Bush.

  All around Dan, other troops scrambled towards their assigned vehicles and jumped onboard. The Captain twirled his hand in the air and the convoy headed off.

  The combat engineers had already deployed two of the bridges necessary to cross the intricate series of huge trenches that now surrounded the base. Once the convoy reached the third and final trench – colloquially known around the base as ‘The Moat’, two bridging tanks moved into place. One, lifted the bridge from the middle trench as a precaution, then the second tank dropped a bridge over the outside trench. The convoy inched across the bridge, careful not to damage the trench, and then formed a laager as they waited for everyone to cross.

  Once the last vehicle had crossed, the convoy pulled onto the road and roared off to the east. Behind them, the bridge was once again removed and the bridging tank began its slow retreat to the confines of the base.

  Barker gunned the engine and raced well ahead of the other vehicles.

  “Slow down lead foot,” Hall said. “We don’t want to get too far ahead or we might get cut off.”

  “Intel showed nothing between the base and 742 Signals Squadron’s outpost, but Hall is right, slow it down champ,” Dan said.

  Barker eased off the gas pedal and within a few seconds, the LAV behind them caught up. Less than a minute later, Barker slowed again as he negotiated a dogleg in the road ahead.

  Like many cities in North America built in the 19th and 20th centuries, Edmonton was laid out on a typical grid system, with streets running north and south, and avenues running east to west. However, occasionally a road ran diagonally and it created all sorts of havoc for urban planners. Highway 15, an extension of Edmonton’s old Fort Road, ran northeast to southwest – or vice versa depending on the direction you were travelling. As such, when an avenue or street intersected with it, there was often a slight dogleg to accommodate turn lanes and signaling equipment.

  Just as Barker was about to turn south to cross Highway 15, Hall yelled out, “Contact left!”

  Dan
replied, “What do you got?”

  “Twenty to thirty potential hostiles coming out of that weird building!” he shouted back.

  Dan scanned the building and saw a small group of people staggering towards the convoy.

  “Charlie Two-One, contact left. Possible infected. Permission to engage,” Dan requested over the radio.

  “Permission granted, but fire warning shots first to verify infection,” came the reply.

  “Fire a burst over their heads, Hall,” Dan said.

  “Sure thi--,” his reply was cut off by the C-9 firing a five round burst. Hall waited a second, and then triggered a second burst.

  “No reaction, probably hostile,” Hall shouted. Seconds later, he fired several bursts, knocking several over like bowling pins. Most of them got back up and continued their march towards the convoy.

  Dan noticed Barker had stopped the G-Wagen.

  “Let’s get moving Barker. We’ve still got a mission to accomplish,” Dan ordered.

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  The G-Wagen lurched slightly and sped away, crossing the highway. The E-LAV behind them let loose with its heavy machinegun and cut several of the infected to pieces, scattering limbs and body parts in several directions, then it too resumed its march eastward. As the convoy passed the temple, each vehicle slowed and fired off a burst or two and then continued onwards.

  “What the hell is that crazy place?” Barker muttered.

  “It’s a Sikh Temple, I can’t remember the correct term for it though,” Dan replied.

  “You mean like a Paki? Or do you mean an Indian?” Hall replied.

  “Sikhs are not really like either one – Pakistanis are mostly Muslim and most Indians are Hindu. Sikhs wear turbans, carry a ceremonial knife, have a separate religion and want a separate homeland. Some of them even resorted to terrorism to bring it about, but they got crushed by the Indian government.”

  “How the hell do you know so much about them?” Barker asked.

  “I knew a couple Sikhs on the Force back in the day,” Dan replied. “One of them was my mentor on the Tactical Team.”