A Place Outside The Wild

by Daniel Humphreys

He jumped as Ross placed a hand on his forearm. “No shooting,” the lieutenant said. “Not here. It could go through the window. Too much noise.”

  Miles stared at him, then nodded. “Okay. Okay.” Ross squeezed his arm and pushed past. The sentry didn’t react as the SEAL drew closer. With a quick, well-practiced motion the lieutenant drew his fighting knife, stabilized the zombie’s head with his off hand, and drove the blade into the thin bone at the temple. Infernal life departed, and the creature sagged into the restraints like the lifeless thing it should have been long before.

  Ross wiped congealed fluids off of his knife with the hoodie, then turned back to Miles and Janacek. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter 30

  The Flesh had invaded their domain.

  They had no emotions, per se, but the sudden realization of the presence of their adversary roused something that one could almost call curiosity. The earlier passage of one of the Flesh’s sky machines had not gone unnoticed, but the machine had moved on, and with it any interest They might have had for it.

  Their Eyes were no longer in that tower, but that was of little importance. There were other Eyes. They were legion, after all.

  When Pete entered the clinic, Vir and Charlie were getting ready to leave to search him out. It was a nice bit of synchronicity, as it gave them a few moments to figure out their plan of attack after filling Pete in on what they’d learned from Lizzie. Vir had been chomping at the bit, ready to kick down doors, but Pete had a different idea.

  “We don’t know if the boyfriend is actually involved. For all we know, he has lousy taste in girls. So we take a soft approach, see if we can hit him up for info. Charlie, you stay outside at the back window. If he rabbits, you’re waiting on him and none of us have to get pissed on.”

  Pete could tell Larry wasn’t anywhere close to the top of his game; the joke didn’t even get a rise out of him. We nail this drug thing down, I’m going to find our murderer and skin him alive.

  The converted barn on the back of Tom’s farm wasn’t the most popular living place in the community. Proximity to the cattle herd made for an interesting nasal experience. It wasn’t like the entire community smelled of wine and roses, of course, but there were spots where things were more tolerable.

  Pete didn’t notice it himself; the odor of farms was the odor of his childhood, and even if two hundred souls in close living quarters amplified the odor, it still didn’t hold a candle to the stench of the Sandbox.

  That stench either didn’t bother Melanie Clement and her boyfriend, Greg Mills, or they hadn’t been around enough for it to be an issue. While Melanie had been a scavenger, Mills was a gate guard on the east wall. Pete couldn’t help but think how that particular intersection of careers offered all sorts of interesting possibilities. Had Mills ever been working the gate when Buck’s crew came back through? It wasn’t like they had detailed work records, so it was impossible to know for sure. It was within the realm of reason. It would have been the simplest thing in the world for an incoming salvage crew to pass off illicit goods to a gate guard before heading to the warehouse to unload.

  Pete could tell the concept troubled Vir, and he could even understand that to some extent. The guys on the wall should be their first line of defense, not enablers for drug dealers. In a sense it was like finding out someone was a dirty cop back in the old days; the betrayal went above and beyond the normal perception.

  They’d taken a short detour out of their way to speak with Mills’ supervisor. Gary West had indicated that he was working graveyard shift this month, so he more than likely was asleep in his apartment. All the better. Get him talking while he’s still waking up, maybe he’ll give something up without realizing.

  This barn was one of the smaller ones on Gary’s property and had only yielded up enough floor space for four apartments when it had been rebuilt. If they hadn’t known which apartment they needed to check, the blankets draped over the back window were a pretty good sign.

  Charlie peeled off and leaned against the wall next to the window. He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded to Pete as he and Vir stepped toward the main entrance.

  “Remember,” Pete said under his breath as he held the door open for Vir. “Calm and friendly. We don’t want to spook him.”

  “I understand,” Vir said.

  It was a few hours before dinner, and the other occupants of the apartment were most likely out and about. Pete wasn’t sure if that made this easier, or harder. The lack of bystanders was one less potential check on Greg trying something, but if he was the type to do that, would he even care about bystanders? Pete mulled that over for a minute and decided he did not like this aspect of policing the community. Miles and Larry can’t be back at this soon enough.

  They stepped up to Greg’s door. Pete resisted the urge to hammer his fist on it and knocked. He hit hard enough to make them loud but kept the rhythm slow and polite. He waited and listened for any movement inside the small apartment. After a moment, he heard the rustle of covers and a faint voice. “Just a second.” Pete gave Vir a thumbs up. They didn’t have to wait long; Greg opened the door enough to stick his head out and blinked at them in the light. “Yeah?”

  “Greg, right?” Pete said, forcing the grin onto his face that he’d once worn when speaking to clueless Majors.

  “Yeah. What’s this about?”

  Pete stuck out his hand. “Don’t believe we’ve met, but I’m a bit of a hermit. Pete Matthews.” He indicated Vir. “Believe you know Vir Singh, right?”

  “Sure.” Greg glanced back at Pete. His expression was more confused than wary, and Pete chalked that up as a good sign. “Sorry, I’m on nights right now and I was sleeping. What can I do for you guys?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Larry Vance got hurt pretty bad last night. I’m helping the other deputies on an active case while he’s laid up.”

  Greg rubbed a hand across his face and yawned. “Sure, man, we all heard about that. He going to be okay?”

  “Should be,” Pete affirmed.

  “Good, good. He’s an all right dude.”

  “Right. Greg, the reason we stopped by today, we wanted to talk to you about Melanie a bit.”

  The man in the door frowned. “What about? I mean, we were a thing, and all, but, you know — she ain’t around anymore.”

  Well, aren’t you just the big softy. “Right, this isn’t about the accident, it’s about some things she involved herself in beforehand,” Pete explained. Something flashed across Greg’s face. Got you.

  “How do you mean?”

  Pete glanced at Vir and cocked an eyebrow. “The drugs, mate,” Vir said. “We have reason to believe that Melanie and some of the people on her crew were part of the supply chain for the people who’ve been cooking and selling meth.”

  Greg looked at Vir for a long moment. Does he know that Vir was on that mission? I bet he does. He looked back at Pete, and muttered, “I don’t like where this is going.”

  Pete avoided his urge to glance at Vir and focused his attention on maintaining eye contact with Greg. “I’m not sure what you mean, son. We’re not saying you did anything. We’re just thinking that you might have seen or heard something, considering your relationship with Melanie.”

  “I don’t think I should say anything. I think you guys need to leave.”

  “Greg, that isn’t how this works anymore. You don’t get to have your tears wiped away by a court-appointed lawyer who will protect you from the big bad policeman. If Vir and I decide we want to beat the ever-loving hell out of you, nobody around here would say a word. It’s our word against yours.”

  The other man shook his head in a fierce denial. “No, no, you don’t get it. I don’t want a lawyer, I don’t want to go down to the station, and you guys need to get the hell away from me before . . .” Greg caught himself and glanced behind the two of them. “Look, nobody saw you guys coming in, right? If it gets out that you wanted to talk to me, I’m a d
ead man.”

  Pete couldn’t help it; he gave Vir a look of surprise. “Greg,” Pete said. “What I said before goes the same way for whoever you’re afraid of. If you know who’s peddling this poison, we’ll take you into protective custody. After that, I’ll go and put a bullet in the bastard’s head myself. You can trust me on that. We’re not going to give him a lawyer or a cutesy little trial. He took it to the next level last night, and he’s going to reap the whirlwind.” Hanratty and the Marines wouldn’t like it, but tough. They didn’t get to show up out of the blue and start dictating legalities. That might come later if they were true to their word about working together.

  Greg gnawed on his lip. “There’s a story they tell about you. I’ve heard it a lot over the years.”

  I’ve got him. “Which one’s that? Lot of gossip around here.”

  “Story goes, you and a few of the other guys went out on a scavenging run. On the way back, you saw Val and a bunch of kids trapped in the school. They said you shouted to them that you’d be back to help them. And that when Pete Matthews says something, you better believe it, because sure enough, you came back and every one of those survivors made it to safety.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. But that’s not about me keeping my word.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, it’s about what’s right and wrong, Greg. And what’s going on here is wrong. If you help us, we’ll keep you safe until we take care of the situation — because that’s the right thing to do.”

  Greg stared at the ground for so long that Pete half-wondered if he hadn’t fallen back asleep. But then he raised his head, looked Pete in the eye, and told him everything.

  After the gruesome discovery on the ninth floor, the return to the server room was almost anti-climactic. They abandoned any pretense of stealth and sprinted through the office. The lack of attention the chair of the zombie sentry, if that was what it had been, had garnered indicated that the floor was either clear or that any other occupants were also immobile. Despite that, they double-timed it back to the elevator and were back up top before Miles had begun to catch his breath.

  The doors opened into a darkness that was just barely lit by the power indicators of hibernating systems. Miles kicked himself at the piercing beeps of the power supply alarms. The batteries had been old enough or underutilized to the extent that they weren’t able to keep the system running. They were going to have to switch back to panel power to complete the mission. Ross caught the issue immediately.

  “When we switch the power over, the elevator drops back down to ground, correct?”

  “Right,” Miles said. “Even if there’s power in the system to run it up and down for a bit, default setting is to go to the bottom.”

  Ross considered it for a moment, then toggled his MBITR. “Chief, you saw the evolution to switch the power over, correct?” He paused for the other man’s answer, then responded. “Good. We’re going to disembark, get the information we need, then you reverse the procedure when we’re ready to come back out.” He winked at Miles. “I’d rather play it safe on the way out than have to climb out again.” He motioned Miles and Janacek forward. As the three of them stepped into the auxiliary server room, the lieutenant concluded, “When you’re ready, Chief, we’re clear.”

  Relays clicked in the server room at the same that the elevator doors slid shut and the cab began to descend. The lights in the room flickered on, and Miles let out the breath that he hadn’t even known he was holding. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

  He removed his backpack and took his time to unlace the server blade. He didn’t want to rush things and jab a knife through the housing or something just as stupid while trying to cut the paracord holding it in place. He hummed to himself as he lifted the server and slid it into one of the open receptacles in the rack. Whoever had been in charge of putting this room together had at least had the foresight to build in expandability. He connected patch cables, double-checked his steps, and pressed the blade’s power switch. After the nerve-racking “will I boot or won’t I” delay that seemed sadistically endemic to computers, the lights on the server’s front panel began to light up.

  “Touchdown,” Miles said, and stepped over to the desk. He repeated the process to boot the NUC, inserted his badge into the reader, and tapped the desk in impatience. Finally, it was up. “Here we go.”

  In the end, it was almost anticlimactic. He entered his password. After an interminable delay as the computer consulted the authentication server, the login screen cleared to a rather vanilla desktop with the generic company wallpaper installed on all the deployment system images.

  He was only vaguely aware of Ross and Janacek standing at either shoulder as he opened up the taskbar and looked through the most recently used programs. He wasn’t sure after all this time, but it looked like this system was set up much like the machines in the research and development division. He thought he recognized the names of some of the software applications. R&D already had their own secure file archives, so why the redundancy here?

  The two most-used applications were the e-mail client and the project database software. He opened both of them and drummed his fingers as he waited for them to load. The e-mail must have been on a local mirror because it came up first. He clicked on a message and studied the header, curious about who the sender was.

  “The ‘Guidestone Project?’” Miles read, then frowned. Why did that sound familiar? The odd thing was, he didn’t think he’d heard it in a work context. For some reason it made him think of watching the History Channel with Pete. These were the times when he missed Google. He turned away from the screen. “Mean anything to you guys?”

  Ross let out a long burst of air. “That’ll be it,” he said, with a hint of what sounded like triumph in his voice.

  “Your source, again?” Miles guessed.

  “Need-to-know,” Ross said, his voice firm.

  “Guess I don’t.”

  Miles’ eyes started to glaze over as he glanced through one or two of the e-mails. He had a feeling that the SEALs didn’t appreciate his doing so, but neither man spoke up. Either way, it read like Sanskrit, with all sorts of medical terms that he didn’t recognize. Many of the e-mails had attached PDFs, but he didn’t push it and open any of them.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m guessing you want it all. What do you have for me?”

  Ross opened a pouch on his harness and dropped a literal fistful of thumb drives on the desk. “If you need more, we’ve got a bag upstairs.”

  Miles picked up a drive and chuckled. “All right, then.” He inserted the drive into the port on the side of the keyboard. After a few clicks, he set the e-mail program to dump its contents onto the drive. It was a top-of-the-line model for 2017, and he wondered how big they would have gotten by now if things had kept going. As it was, the drive was filling rapidly. There was a ton of data just in the e-mail program. While he was waiting, he pulled the database window up and tried to remember where the archival function was. As he looked, he noted the subject of one of the folders and stopped in mid-click.

  The folder read ‘Deployment and infection strategies’. He swallowed and glanced at a couple of the other folder headings.

  Projected spread rate.

  Viral life-cycle timeline.

  Miles lifted his hand from the mouse and swiveled in the chair to face the SEALs. The two men stared at him with impassive faces, and he thought, nonsensically, At least this chair doesn’t squeak.

  “I’m getting the feeling you guys haven’t been straight with me,” Miles said.

  “You sure you want to go down this rabbit hole, Mr. Matthews?” Ross murmured.

  “If you say something like, ‘you can’t handle the truth’, I’m going to scream,” Miles replied.

  Ross shook his head. “It’s not so much about handling it as it is being able to sleep at night.”

  “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over eight years,” Miles shot back.r />
  “Fair enough,” Ross sighed. “The first thing you have to understand is, up until recently, we were content to wait things out. Infected activity was dropping down in most areas. The remnants of the CDC calculated that no more than 36 months from now, the majority of infected in the continental United States would be non-ambulatory. We planned for Atlantic Fury to kick off right around that time. We were intent on building up our logistics train before that point, so that when we did deploy, we’d have everything we needed.”

  “But you moved up the schedule. What changed?”

  “Over the past 90 days, researchers have noticed a shift in infected behavior. This isn’t universal across the board, but it has happened at multiple, segregated sites so the thinking is the change is not due to anything the research teams themselves have done.”

  Miles frowned. “What kind of shift?” Then he thought about the legless zombie on the ninth floor, content to look out the window rather than attacking to feed, and he thought he knew.

  “Reduction of aggressive tendencies toward visual stimuli. Diversionary actions. Manipulation of environment.”

  “What Lieutenant Ross is trying to say, they look at you and it looks like they’re thinking. When they think you aren’t watching, they try to get out of their cages.” Janacek said. “We’ve got triple redundancies in our lab facilities — which are not on any manned ships — or we might have had renewed outbreaks.”

  “Shit,” Miles breathed. “They’re what, evolving?”

  “Evolving,” Ross drew the word out, sampling it. “In a way, I suppose. But that’s not the worst of it,” Ross said. “While the initial effect is not universal, it eventually spreads to all captives in an enclosure. Limited testing has shown that unaffected subjects introduced into a, well, evolving enclosure will soon exhibit the same tendencies.”

  “It’s airborne, isn’t it?”

  Ross shared a glance with Janacek. After a moment, the other SEAL shrugged. The senior man gave Miles a long, uncomfortable stare, then said, “It’s not a virus. It never was.”