by RW Krpoun
After twenty minutes of struggling to keep Donna focused on the phone the extraction was laughably brief and easy: I pulled up under the fire escape and they scrambled onto the truck roof. I pulled out the instant they were all aboard, tumbling them into a pile, but that was the least of their worries. I ignored the ringing phone until I was back at the car lot.
Checking the monitor, I opened the door and stood, leaning my back against the inside of the door, the cut-down shotgun in hand but at my side. “OK, listen up: there’s keys on the antennas or wipers of the SUVs and pickups; choose one, find some gas, and hook it out of the zone.” I tossed a city map to Donna, who was a grimy, chunky soccer mom. “The exit points are marked. Use the ladder there to get down.”
“Can’t you take us?”
“Nope, got other people to get loose. Too many people cornered up and too few people trying to get them out.”
She looked like she was going to argue, then changed her mind. When they had gotten down I held out a plastic bag containing the unloaded Taurus, three loaded magazines, and a box of fifty. “Here.”
She looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“A pistol and ammunition.”
“We don’t believe in guns.” She crossed her arms.
I stared-I tried to say something, stammered, and then finally burst out laughing, hard. “Man,” I wiped away tears. “I needed that. OK, have it your way. Good luck.”
I closed out her request on the board and lined up the next one, using the GPS and my extensive knowledge of the area from my Patrol days to choose a target that would suit my extremely limited resources. The next grab was from an apartment complex; I dropped a couple personal alarms, whipped around the block, and extracted a guy named John, two kids, and a teen-aged girl. John hadn’t been overly chatty on the phone, and was armed with two rifles and a handgun, so the drop-off at the car lot was brief and to the point. He declined the offer of a city map, having a GPS units programmed with the necessary data. I closed out his entry and headed back in for more.
The third job was a young black couple with a four-year-old who came from a storm drain of all places-they had Net contact via a high-tech phone; they had gotten cornered by wrecks and infected, abandoned their car, got into a storm line, and worked their way north a mile or so before running out of pipe.
They accepted the Taurus and map without hesitation, yelled thanks, and hooked it to find a vehicle. Proper motivation-I gave them a five star rating: a pleasure to rescue.
I was out of maps and tired of talking to people, and frankly getting a bit stressed- I was discovering driving the rig during an extraction was a lot more emotionally wearing than sitting on the roof shooting. Shooting, no matter how close they got, was therapeutic-you were doing something, and the results were there for you to see immediately. Sitting in the truck trying to watch monitors and every direction at once ground away at my nerves. At least it didn’t strain my knee, but that was about all you could say for it.
Eleven people aided and a good tally of infected was making this a red-letter day, but there was still plenty of daylight, so I decided to take a break for my nerve’s sake and check out Plan C.
Plan C was a group on the rescue board whose leader had been bragging about their set-up, a building they were equipping for an extended stay. He didn‘t give an address but he did mention it was a beer warehouse, that they had raided an Academy Surplus for camping gear, had gotten brand-new state-owned pickups for their traveling needs, and that they were downtown. I had come across him while following the posts of a board member who was on my ‘possible recruit’ list.
I had noted they said beer warehouse, rather than distributorship; I had spent years patrolling the streets, and booze is a high-end item, easy to move in bulk. Distributorships are well-marked, but distribution warehouses are not, but the police always know where they are. The State-owned trucks were the tip-off: years ago the Highway Patrol had had twenty brand-new Cameros stolen from a central receiving facility on a Labor Day weekend, and that site wasn’t far from a warehouse used by Coors distributors and also not all that far from an Academy surplus outlet. Neither the warehouse nor the State facility would show up on a phone directory or Net search, so unless you were local law enforcement putting the clues together would be highly unlikely.
The group was Rescue Team 44, boasting an official tally of ten people extracted (Remote Control Halo’s official score stood at thirty-five, but I was unsure how that number had been generated). The thing was, RT44’s last post, yesterday night around midnight, said they were trapped in a bank by a mob of infected, with two dead and their vehicle compromised. The last post was made at zero seven hundred via cell phone, stating two members of the team were left, barricaded in the safety deposit box room; they had some food and water, but were low on ammunition and needed extraction. Apparently the portion of their team that had stayed at their base had made an effort to reach them, and now were gone, too.
Plan C was to locate and loot their base-obviously, they had done a lot of prep work, which should mean ammunition stockpiled.
On a whim I dialed the number listed in the post and was startled when someone answered, a young man.
“This team 44?” I stammered out.
“Yeah, you see our post? Can you help?” he sounded tired and was talking overloud, the sort of tone that comes from shooting indoors.
“Maybe-I’m just one guy, what’s left of team 71.” I looked at the address in the post. “I’m a couple miles from your location. What’s your situation?”
“There’s two of us, we’ve got twenty rounds apiece left, everyone else is dead or turned. Our back-up panicked and tried to come in after dark. We’re in a bank, in the safety deposit box room off the lobby, down a short hallway; we’re behind a grill that is too strong for them to break down, but there’s about thirty in the lobby. They aren’t close because we sniped at them until they moved.”
“OK,” I had it in the GPS unit and was rolling. “Both of you are healthy?”
“Yeah. We lost four, and three more on the follow-up, though. We’re it for team 44.”
“Why did you hit the place after dark?”
“We didn’t, we came in during daylight, but we had to cut open a lot of boxes, and it took a lot longer than we thought. Something drew their attention-I was running the cutting torch, and all of a sudden it was a mad minute out there. Three of us got cornered here, and three didn’t make it. Only we had no commo so we made a rush towards midnight when the back-up showed, but we lost one in the lobby and had to pull back; at least we got a phone off a body.”
“Why didn’t your backup wait until daylight?”
“Our team leader’s wife was in charge of the back-up, and she freaked when we didn’t answer, finally came running. He had been dead for a long time by then.”
“While you are waiting for me, look around and see if you can rig up a ladder good enough to reach the roof. I’m not sure if we’ll do that, but it’s an option. Now gimme the layout as best you can.”
The bank was in its own parking lot on the corner of two business streets, a single-story branch serving private customers, two drive-through positions and a big glassed-in lobby which had lost a lot of glass from the gunplay inside. A couple dead infected outside, and a couple more propping the front doors open.
There was a white quad cab pickup with a pipe-carrier rack fitted with welded struts and mesh panels preventing anyone from getting close to the windows parked near the front door; a second one had hit a light post one door down from the bank; a dead woman with smashed night vision goggles embedded in her face hung out the windshield. A pudgy teen in BDUs was sprawled on the sideway in a clotted puddle, surrounded by dead infected. The rescue effort, I guessed. I didn’t see a third body.
I did a brisk drive-by on the far side of the street and then circled back to within a block. “OK, I had a look,” I told the kid when he answered. “You got a ladder?”
; “Yeah.”
“Here’s how I see it: I’m going to pull up in the street and get their attention, they ought to come at me hard. I’ll hold their interest as long as I can, but it won’t be real long. You get outside and up on the roof, and we’ll set up a pickup after they calm down.”
“Cool. I’m Jake, by the way, and Key is with me.”
“Martin. I’m rolling now-don’t move too soon, but don’t delay too long, either.”
“We got it. Thanks, man.”
“Thank me when you’re clear.”
I roared up to a skidding stop in the center of the street opposite the front door; chucking two personal alarms out onto the concrete, I stood up in the open door and saw infected pouring out the bank. As I had hoped, they were not in full charge, inhibited by the presence of the truck, but the sight of an uninfected, the strobes, and the screaming sirens were a powerful draw-they moved at what I would call an eager walk.
“Come on, you diseased pieces of straight-leg shit!” I bellowed, feeling a sudden and inexplicable surge of enthusiasm, even joy. “Show me what you can do!”
They probably couldn’t hear me over the sirens, but they definitely picked up the pace. When the first one hit the sidewalk I opened up with the AK, the slower, heavier bullet whipsawing the infected like a smack from a sledgehammer. I missed the M-4’s better handling qualities, but I had the same model holo sight on the AK (as well as a tactical light/laser and dual mag bracket) so there wasn’t any problem with my shooting.
It was too big a group in too open of ground to hope of stopping them; I dropped a half-dozen and scooted back into the divers seat, slamming the door closed seconds before the first one, a young woman in a housekeeping smock, crashed into the truck. I gave her the finger as I hit the locks and got the truck rolling. She had gotten a grip on the door handle and the stump of the rear view mirror mount, but none of the others were quick enough; I knocked her off against a stalled van in the next intersection, did a U-turn, and came back around to finish her off with a solid roll-over.
I could hear the sirens in the background when Jake answered the phone. “We’re on the roof,” he was a little out of breath. “We had to shoot a couple, but it went smooth. What are those things making the noise?”
“Personal alarms, supposed to deter muggers; they really get the infected stirred up.”
“For sure. Now what?”
“Now we wait a while, maybe an hour; you two stay out of sight, and when the infected go back inside I’ll come back around and you guys jump down onto my truck.”
“We need to get our truck-we can’t get into our firebase otherwise.”
Crap. “OK. Is it locked?”
“No, and the keys are in the ignition.”
“First we get you two clear; then we’ll come back for the truck. We have to keep it simple.”
He spoke off the phone. “OK.”
“Keep an eye out, I’ll call back in half an hour.”
This wasn’t Plan C at all, but what the hell, some infected were dead, and two uninfected were staying that way. Events were pulling me along like a dead rat in a flood, but frankly, I didn’t have much of a goal system to work with. Killing infected and mounting what rescues I could manage with my limited resources was about the extent of my ambition. Keep it simple-the unexamined life is easiest.
It was a far cry from Sunday on the overpass rescuing Tina, but I had learned the rules of the game in greater detail since, and lost some good people.
Thing was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get more people involved. I was getting weary in spirit, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to lead. That was new-I had always been a leader, in the Army, in the Department, I had always sought out greater responsibility and command. I enjoyed leading men, trained people, into tight situations and bringing them through.
The thought struck me that perhaps I had brought that attitude home with me; maybe if I had been more of a father and less a leader, my boy might have not gone the way he had.
That wasn’t a thought that sat well.
Chapter Ten
Jake answered the phone on the first ring. “They went inside after those things quit howling. I can’t tell if they noticed we left or not. They have two on watch in the shade of the drive-through. If you could drop them from a distance…”
“You could get yourself killed,” I cut him off. “We do it by the numbers, nice and safe; I don’t have any pressing engagements.” Without thinking I was using the Old Sergeant tone. “I’m going to come in along the north wall in a couple minutes, there’s no windows there. You two be ready to jump-there’s a lot of junk on top of the truck, so concentrate on landing. Get a grip on the railing and hang on-I’ll do the rest. We’ll get clear and work out how to get your truck.”
“OK,” I could hear the note of relief in his voice, the kind of relief that comes when you realize you can stop scrambling for ideas and let someone else do the thinking.
I waited two minutes by my watch and then rolled, fast but not too fast. It was another low-velocity rescue, a simple drive-by pick-up.
They were ready when I skidded to a halt; watching on the monitor I saw them land and grab-the first infected was coming around the corner just in time to catch the truck’s crash guard square in the kisser. None of the others even got close.
Ten blocks away I pulled off to where I had waited, a parking lot next to a supermarket that had gone out of business a long time before the present crisis, and stopped the truck. The folding ladder clanked down as I climbed out.
Jake was around twenty, a square-faced kid with peach fuzz and hair half over his ears, an open and friendly face drawn tight around the eyes from a night facing death in an enclosed place, my height and solid in build. Key was of an age, about a head shorter, a pretty black girl with skin the color of caramel and a figure that should have stopped the infected in their tracks. Both were grimy but had been clean, wearing jeans, hiking boots, and work shirts under tactical vests. Both had Mini-14 folding-stock carbines and Sig Saur P226 pistols in thigh holsters, and dump pouches full of empty mags.
Jake shook my hand with enthusiasm. “Man, you are the greatest!” Key smiled shyly, hanging behind Jake; from the body language I put them as a couple. Both were wiped out physically, although they were fired up from getting away.
“There’s sodas and some snack food in the back,” I led them around to the rear of the truck. “Help yourself, we’ve got some time before we can go for your truck.”
“Man, I didn’t think we were going to get out of there,” Jake belched after downing half a bottle of Sprite in one draw. “We had some crazy plans.”
“You guys were breaking security boxes?” I kept my tone light.
“Not looting, we were looking for something specific; I was running the torch, and Key was covering my back. I think somebody messed with the vault or a safe and set off the outside alarm strobes, maybe. Though they aren’t on now. Anyway, we got swamped. Running the torch, I’m blind-if Key hadn’t been watching close I would have been toast.” He leaned over and gave her a big smacking kiss on the forehead. Key smiled, unwrapping a package of cheese and crackers.
“You guys are pretty well equipped.”
Jake took a cracker Key offered. “Yeah, Tanner, that was our team leader, he wanted everybody with the same weapons so you could share magazines, every weapon with a light, everybody carries first aid, water, one emergency meal, that sort of thing. He was in the State Guard. He knew stuff like that, but he was sloppy. We should have had somebody outside in the truck watching, I think.”
“Seems like,” I nodded. “From your Net entry it didn’t look like you guys were doing many rescues.”
“No, we had to set up a safe position and equip it, Tanner called it our firebase. We got a few people out when they were handy, but that was about all. Once the firebase was secure and we had achieved mobility, which was how Tanner described getting the trucks, we were supposed to st
art serious operations, but you see how the first op went.”
“Cutting open safety deposit boxes was a serious operation?” I kept my tone easy; it wasn’t hard-Jake was tired and distracted, and I had conducted countless interviews in my career.
“Yeah, see, Tanner came into the Zone. Key and me, we were trying to get out when we ran into him on Monday. He told us first it was a government operation, made it sound like I dunno, Delta Force or something. Turns out the State Guard isn’t really military, just like volunteer firemen, sort of thing. Anyhow, Tanner was working for this guy, a professor, who says he knows something about the virus, and needed us to get some stuff from different locations. Tanner communicates with him over the Net.”
“CDC or something?”
“No, the guy’s like a historian, but I don’t see how that works-I never heard of anything like this happening before. Anyway, apparently he got Tanner to come into the Zone and get a group together to find some stuff.”
“Did you get what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” Unbidden, Key stuck the last cracker in her mouth, rolled the cellophane neatly into a ball and tucked it into her pocket, and reached behind her to fish out what looked like a box of black ballistic plastic the size of a rather thick book. Jake tapped it. “See? Sealed from the air and humidity. It’s a folio of papers, some private collection. Just the first thing we were supposed to find.”
“Huh.” I hefted it, but nothing shifted inside; there was a rubber-lipped pressure valve in one corner, and the tint would protect the contents from sunlight. “Interesting.” I handed it back. “So what are you going to do once you’ve got your truck?”
“Sleep for a couple days,” Jake grinned wearily. “Then I don’t know.” He looked at Key, who inclined her head slightly towards me. “We were thinking you might need some help.”
I rubbed my cheek. “You guys are certainly competent, but are you sure you want to stay in the game? Hanging in the Zone is a good way to end up dead. Look what happened to the rest of your team, mine too.”