Medora Wars

by Wick Welker

  Chapter Fifteen: El Paso, Texas

  A small cluster of shoebox skyscrapers nestled quietly in sprawling rows of city blocks. The neat columns of streets led straight across a small valley and inched upward into the foothills of the dusty brown mountains flanking El Paso. The soft edges of the mountain’s ridges ran in perpendicular lines above the city’s streets.

  “It’s weird,” Dave said, sitting on a desk, and looking out a window. “Seeing a city just completely empty.”

  “It’s not really that weird anymore.” Michaels looked out the window, past the streets, and up at the low lying mountains at the edge of the city.

  Dave continued. “It’s weird looking out and seeing just an empty shopping plaza on a Saturday morning. Normally there would be a bunch of moms with baby strollers and cars zigzagging all around. Kids would be walking around with gigantic pretzels just a week ago, and now it’s just some… ghost town with the entire city flooding into Albuquerque, spilling into sports stadiums, and parking lots with nowhere to go.”

  “I guess it’s pretty weird, but considering all the shit we’ve been seeing lately, I’d say this is another day at work.” Michaels rubbed her temples. “What we’re doing here,” Michaels spread her arms apart, “it’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?” Dave looked up at her as she took off her helmet, revealing a matted bun of dark hair that fell down to her shoulder.

  “We’re not going to be able to contain the infection.” She shrugged her shoulders at him and lifted her arms above her hair to reposition the bun. “It doesn’t want to be contained. It wants out.”

  “What, the virus?”

  “Yeah, it wants the center stage now. Whatever fancy weapons we have aren’t going to fully stop an army that can recruit millions of people in an instant and that are completely loyal. The infected have no families, no hopes or dreams—they don’t even have an ounce of self-preservation. How do you defend against an enemy like that?”

  “We figured it out once before…”

  “Oh yeah, you think Dr. Stark is going to come rescue the day again? Where is he right now? What is the government even doing now? We get no answers, no plans—they’re not telling us shit.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s just for the best.”

  “So we just let ourselves become them?” Dave asked.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Did you hear about the shooting in the Seattle area about… six months ago?” Michaels rose to her feet and walked slowly toward the window.

  “I don’t know, maybe. There’s always one happening in the news.”

  “Well, you’re definitely getting to my point with that. There is always some sort of shooting going on. I just happened to be at that one.”

  “Really?”

  “I was reading my son’s journal at a coffee shop.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know you had a son.”

  “Yeah. He died when he was sixteen in the Eastern outbreak.”

  Dave looked up at her silhouetted face in front of the window. “I’m sorry, I had no idea. Sixteen?”

  “I had him when I was pretty young. It was only after I started reading his journal that I realized what a talented writer he was. That kid had more insight about life than I sure as shit did when I was his age. I was out getting knocked up.” She gave a small laugh. “I had read his journal already several times, and was starting it again, when a skinny little asshole with a shotgun just walked right into the café and immediately opened fire on a bunch of people waiting in line right in front of me.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I looked up at him, and he was just smiling and laughing as he kept pulling the trigger. Of course, no one did anything but run away while he just backed a bunch of people into a corner and opened fire.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got under my table. I just stayed still, and that’s where I saw something weird. Something that made me finally understand the fundamental change that happened in our country since the first outbreak.”

  “What?”

  “I could see the faces of a bunch of other people that were hiding, and they were… utterly indifferent about what was happening. They looked bored even. Like they didn’t give a shit that a gunman had just came in and was killing people. They didn’t even care. One guy was playing with his shoe lace.”

  “Maybe they were just in shock.”

  “No, I’ve been in the military for a long time, and I know what shock looks like. Those people, just regular civilians, did not care. They were just waiting for it to be over so they could get back to their coffee. We’ve changed. We’ve all changed the last two years since the virus, and now it’s back.”

  “So just let them in, then?” Dave asked.

  “No, of course not. But that’s why I think we’ve already lost. We don’t really care anymore. We don’t have passion. Rambert always looks like the most hopeless, soul-sucked bastard every time he gets on TV. People have no confidence in that guy.”

  The radio at Dave’s side grumbled with a static voice. Dave flipped a switch and held it up for Michaels to hear. “This is Tripps.”

  “Tripps, we need you and Michaels to come down to the border fence, now, and join Jacobs, Yen, and Wang at the west entrance to the aqueduct. They’ll be waiting for you there,” Douglas said.

  “Yes, sir, we’ll be right down.”

  “Move it now!” Douglas’ voice shouted out.

  Dave clicked the radio off. “Let’s go.”

  Dave lifted his EMP-57 off the office table and wrapped its strap around his shoulder, while double-checking that his blade was securely positioned diagonally across his back.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be using our blades here.” Michaels said, tapping on the handle behind his back. “At least I hope not. The minute we get into hand-to-hand combat with a horde this size, we’re all dead.”

  “I just like having it, makes me feel more in control to have a tangible weapon, rather than just a bunch of magic guns that shoot invisible death rays.” Dave walked out of the small office room where they had been stationed together. They made their way to the bottom of the vacant office building and out into the sunny parking lot.

  A quiet wind blew across the street and shook the trees lining the front of the building. They marched to the two ATVs they earlier parked behind a pair of dumpsters and climbed on top. They started the engines and shot out from the dumpsters, with Dave in the lead.

  It was difficult at first for Dave to feel comfortable flying through every streetlight. At first he slowed, unwilling to believe that a car wouldn’t come barreling through the intersection. After a while, he finally believed that the entire city was completely empty.

  They swept through the streets quickly, ignoring the small shops, and silent schools resting as monuments of a once living city. Douglas continued to angrily shout demands into their radios as they turned a long corner around a high school running track. He saw a long line of military trucks jetting out from a street corner with swarms of military personnel marching along. Dave turned the corner and sped up along the sidewalk, following the trail of cargo trucks. Behind a row of small apartments, he saw the tall antennas of the shock tanks converging on a single location at the far end of the street. The shock tanks towered over streetlights, knocking over stop signs and pushing cars aside as they squeezed their massive bodies through the city. The infantry tanks were dwarfed alongside the shock tanks as they clanked along behind.

  As Dave and Michaels approached the other end, they saw the beginning of a massive operation that was unfolding along a several mile stretch of a double layered chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

  There were thousands of soldiers amassing at the fence line with tanks, Humvees, and Strykers that ran the entire length of the fence for as far as he could see.

  A few miles from the border fence was the edge of a hurr
icane of the infected, walking and inching their way through the outer limits of Ciudad Juárez, and toward the El Paso border. From the distance of the city, the bodies were so packed together that they looked like a chaotic ant farm. Infected people infested every available rooftop and bulged from every window, constantly falling to the streets below, which were already overflowing with the sick. The look of the city skyline had completely changed: instead of the hardline edges of buildings, the entire city moved with organic fluidity. All surfaces squirmed with the oscillations of one horde after another moving over overthrown buses, cars, gas stations, and the short skyscrapers of the downtown. The massive entity of people no longer seemed to function as groups of individuals, but rather with the rhythmic movements of a beehive, responding as a whole to the stimulus of the city. The entire scene was a masterpiece of chaos.

  “Oh, my God,” Dave let the words slip from his lips as he stopped.

  Michaels stopped next to him and looked on, past the fence. “We are so fucked. That’s not just the people of Juárez, that’s the entire population of Mexico waiting to get in.”

  A new order of thoughts came crashing into Dave’s mind. Up until that very moment, he had thought that the outbreaks were just new obstacles for the world powers to contain, something from which each country would recover. Now, as he saw the countless millions of the infected dead that were bursting from Mexico’s border, he realized that he was staring at the beginning of something new and permanent. It was a steady wave of the residue of mankind, hollowed out of its humanity, and continuously marching forward with the one purpose of spewing its gospel of death.

  “There is no way we have enough military right here to stop this.” Michaels got off her ATV. “How have they not sent more units here? How did they let it get this far?”

  Dave was about to respond when the shuddering sounds of explosions ricocheted off the buildings around him, followed by flashes of light from Juárez limits. Several jets streaked by overhead as four more streamed across the sky, dropping dozens more of explosives into the city. Billows of smoke and plumes of orange fire leapt up into the sky as clouds of human beings erupted in the wake of the explosions. A barrage of jets continued flying across the sky to deliver their payload, to then fly out again for the next set to follow after. It was a several minute assault that played out in front of Dave and Michaels as they watched in silence, ignoring the increasingly angry rants of Douglas through the radio.

  “I guess we’ve got to get to our site.” Dave turned to Michaels.

  “Is this why they had the squads holed up in different buildings throughout the city? So we wouldn’t see all of… this?”

  It wasn’t cowardice that was building up inside of Dave but indifference. He had finally seen the true face of the enemy and didn’t think there was anyway of coming back from its devastation. “Let’s get going,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she gave out a forced laugh, “let’s get to work.” Rolling her eyes, she got back on the ATV, and sped off with Dave kicking into gear and following closely behind.

  As they drove, Dave purposefully surveyed the faces of the men who were preparing for battle. They looked young and shocked by what they were about to face. Each one carried the weapons of war that now seemed ancient: rifles with gunpowder bullets, a weapon that had now become obsolete against the modern infection of the nanovirus. There wasn’t enough time, Dave thought. Not enough time to develop cheap EMP weapons and get them into the hands of every marine. They had no idea another outbreak would happen like this. It was only out of morbid curiosity that Dave continued; that he followed behind Michaels down into a water aqueduct, where his team was setting up five shock tanks directly beneath the chain-link fence of the border.

  Yen ran up to them as they parked their ATVs and dismounted. “Where the hell have you two been?” he yelled over the thunder of explosions from above. “Get over here and help us. We’re going to make an assault soon.”

  “We had trouble getting around all the operations up above,” Dave muttered as he picked up his gear and slung his rifle over his shoulder. It was as Dave stepped out over the concrete of the aqueduct that he realized he was lonelier than he had ever been.

  They assembled around the back end of a shock tank and huddled into a group. Douglas stood atop the tank, which was in the middle of the five shock tanks that were being stuffed full of the special infectious operation squads. One of the tanks had a large, cylindrical pod on wheels the size of a semi-truck trailer attached to the back. As soon as Douglas looked down and saw Dave, his face crinkled up. “Tripps! Where have you been?” He yelled out, “We are deploying in ten minutes!”

  Dave looked up at the darkened face of Douglas that had blackened out from the sunny sky behind him. He couldn’t read his countenance and didn’t want to. He wanted to be baffled that they weren’t told how bad the outbreak was but decided it wasn’t worth it to be silently angry at an ambiguous bureaucratic head somewhere in D.C.

  Michaels turned around and looked at Dave, putting her hand on his shoulder. “Feel like dying today?”

  “Does it matter if we do?” He smiled, finally enjoying a sullen camaraderie with someone.

  “No, it really doesn’t. If we don’t die here, we’ll die when they come for us again, when we go back to our homes. It’s their time now.” She patted his shoulder and smiled.

  “Everybody listen up!” Douglas yelled out as dozens of squad members assembled around the middle shock tank. “The Air Force is almost done with their initial airstrikes on the city. As soon as we get the word, we are going to enter directly through the gates above us with five shock tanks. Two other SIO units will join us as we infiltrate the city. Alpha team members will be driving the tanks and charging the EMP emitters. All Beta team members will be on the ground alongside the front and flanks of the each tank corresponding to your specific squad. Beta teams must assume V formation around each tank to make sure their tank does not get compromised.

  “As you have all observed, the infected are amassing into the several millions into a city that normally has a population of about one million. All of the infection from Mexico City has swept up north and has accumulated into Juárez. This is our final stand before the infection breaches the United States. We have to stop the infected right here, right now. We will be penetrating deep into the city limits, not just on the periphery. Now before any of you assholes starts wondering how we’re going to do that, I’m going to explain, so just shut the hell up before you even start.

  “We will be doing coordinated EMP shock tank bursts as we advance into the city. Because each tank takes about eight minutes to charge, we will be staggering the bursts so that we have a pulse ready to go at every moment that we need it. We will not be stopping. Period. Does everyone get that?”

  “Yes, sir!” the squads yelled out.

  “Does everyone understand that no shock tank will be stopping at all?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “There is no stopping. Repeat it back to me!”

  “There is no stopping, sir!”

  “The Air Force will be tracking our position and will be doing pinpoint bombings ahead of us, clearing a reasonable path for the tanks. Our target is twenty one miles inside of the city at a power plant.”

  The squad broke out in a commotion. “Twenty one fucking miles?” Wang yelled out from the squad.

  Jacobs grabbed his shoulder and swung him around. “Would you shut the hell up when the Captain is giving us orders?”

  “It’s going to be like burrowing into the core of the Earth but through human bodies! Twenty one miles? How in the hell are we supposed to do that?” Wang took his helmet off and threw it on the ground. “We’re all fucking dead!”

  “Wang!” Douglas leapt from the tank and crunched his boots onto small glass shards on the concrete. He walked straight up to Wang and put his fist directly into the middle of his nose, causing blood to gush forward. “I want you to walk out of here, you stupid piece of
shit,” Douglas said.

  “Sir…” Wang perched his face forward, gathering the flowing blood in between his two gloved hands. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Are you done, or are you going home?”

  “I’m…” Wang looked down at the spots of blood that collected on the concrete in between his feet. “I’m done, sir.”

  “We survived in Mexico City, and we will survive this. They don’t send Dr. Reginald Stark into a doomed mission,” Douglas said.

  Dave looked up at Douglas, and then back at Michaels, who only responded with a confused smile. Every head of the squad looked up as the lower hatch on the shocker tank squeaked open and a single man pulled himself out. Dave was surprised at his stature; Dr. Stark was a much larger man than what he had seen on TV, with a barrel chest and wide shoulders. As Stark hoisted himself up, Dave finally saw a small gut popping over the belt of baggy Army fatigues.

  Stark stood on the tank and took off his hat. “Thank you, Captain Douglas.” Stark looked out and saw the dozens of men and women that had assembled around the tank. Every eye was on him, including Douglas, a gigantic man whose expression was that of a child looking to his parent.

  Stark continued. “I, I would like to impress onto you fine men and women the importance of our mission at hand. I understand from President Rambert himself that you are the best of the best, and that you have had world-class training in EMP weapons and with tactical strategy against the infected. I bring my congratulations and heartfelt gratitude from the President himself for the heroic effort and results from when many of you were in Mexico City.

  “With regards to our task today, we are the first attack on the horde that lies just a few hundred feet away from us. We are only hours away from the horde breaching the United States borders. Our attack will be very precise and specific. Our destination: the city’s largest power plant, whose location is now set in all of your positioning devices. As Captain Douglas has stated, we will go as a convoy of shocker tanks. You may have noticed that attached to one of our shocker tanks is a large trailer that looks like some sort of gigantic double-A battery.” He paused to see how his joke landed and continued when he was met by total silence. “This trailer is our payload, and it is imperative that we get it to the power station. Your mission, the whole point that we are going in first, is to deliver that payload to that power station. My role will come once we get to the facility. Now, Captain Douglas,” he said turning to him, “will continue with the details, and we will be underway within the next ten minutes.”