The Zone

by RW Krpoun

  I wasn’t going to have to wonder anymore.

  Chapter Eleven

  The phone ringing pulled me away from maudlin thoughts about a son I had lost a long time ago. It was the team phone, and Charlie was on the other end. “Hey, your ex tracked me down from the Web site. I wanted to see if you needed to talk.”

  That choked me up-I had known the guy just a couple days. “I’m dealing with it. It wasn’t a huge surprise.”

  “Yeah, things are turning to shit all over. Its hard, though.”

  “Yeah. How are you doing?”

  “OK, I hooked up with my kid’s family-he’s with his outfit in Oklahoma. He says the infected are coming at them like Banzai charges, you might want to think about exfil’ing while the getting is good.”

  “Naw, I picked up a couple more shooters today, took out a bunch of infected, and got eleven people loose. This is as good a spot to get at them as any.”

  “Martin, this doesn’t have to be the end.”

  “Charlie, when all is said and done, having a purpose is as good as it’s going to get for me. I’ve got a lot more ammo now, and with a little care I can thin the herd pretty well, save a few uninfected as well.”

  “That’s enough?”

  “For now.” Until they kill me. Like they killed my son. Two wrecks society had no more use for.

  “Reason I ask, is we could use another shooter out where I’m at.”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate that more than you know. But to be honest, I’m tired of my life changing. This isn’t about flag and country, I’m just sick of getting pushed around.”

  “You can’t get back what you’ve lost in life, you know that.”

  “I know. On the other hand, there comes a point where you can’t afford to lose anything else.”

  “I get you.”

  He made sure I had his number and a couple others he could get messages from, and we said so long. He was a damn good man-I wish I had met him sooner. I wish a lot of things.

  I hoped he made to the other side of this mess, him and Miguel. And Trevor, who held that group together in the long hours in that basement, and the waitress at the Wheel who waited for her boyfriend to show. Good people who stood up when it got tough. Me, I had a mission, and the dim glimmer of a hope that the mission would cure me before it killed me. Either way, I would be better off.

  The phone rang a while later, while I was sitting in the dark on the roof with the M-4 on my lap, not really thinking about anything. I started to let it ring, but it was lighting up as well, and it was the same effort to answer it as it would be to put it in my pocket. “Yeah.”

  “This is Professor Maxwell; to whom am I speaking?”

  The name meant nothing. “I’m not interested in changing my long distance carrier.”

  He hissed in exasperation. “I received an e-mail with this phone number.”

  I started to make a comment about spam and then caught myself-with all the other stuff I had forgotten about sending the e-mail. “Are you Ted?”

  “Yes, Theodore in my given name,” he admitted cautiously.

  “Who was the team leader you were exchanging e-mails with?”

  “I was in contact with Tanner. Do you know him?”

  “No. He’s dead, and got nearly his entire team killed in the process. I extracted the survivors. They said Tanner was taking orders from outside the Zone.”

  “Yes, Tanner was receiving guidance from a group whom I represent. Can I speak to one of his team members?”

  “Nope. The team phone is still on Tanner’s body, and Team 44’s account has been closed out.” I tried to remember why I had wanted to talk to this guy.

  “I see. And you are?”

  “Getting tired of this conversation.” What the hell was it?

  He was quiet for a moment. “May I ask why you are so hostile, given that Tanner was a stranger to you?”

  “Because the story I’ve gotten is that you sent Tanner into the Zone because you don’t have the balls to come in yourself; you sent in a State Guard asshole who knew just enough to get a bunch of people killed. All for loot.” Now I remembered: the sun-proof case.

  “Did they recover the folio?” He couldn’t hide the eagerness in his voice.

  “Yeah. I’m debating whether to break it open and burn it one page at a time, or just cook it case and all.”

  He gave a squeak like I had suggested a kitten casserole. “Sir, I don’t…regardless of your opinions on the cost, that folio is a crucial link to saving millions of lives.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I assure you, it is mostly certainly not bullshit.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tanner was sent into the Zone to recover several items which I believe hold the truth behind the current crisis.”

  I noticed that under pressure, talking fast, he said ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. “Sure. That why you sent an untrained asshole to recover them. The government would have sent in professionals by helicopter.”

  “Regardless of what Tanner might have claimed, this is not a government operation,” Ted admitted. “The CDC is in control of the research into the crisis, and my theory…is not one they accept.”

  “Yup. But you know better, right? Except you don’t believe it enough to risk your own ass. Tanner must have been really thick not to have spotted that.”

  “I am confined to a wheelchair,” there was ice in his voice.

  “Gosh, that’s horrible. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you confined to a wheelchair?”

  “I don’t see how that matters.”

  “Something really embarrassing, huh?”

  “Why are you being so rude?”

  “Because you sent an idiot to do a job that he was obviously unqualified for, and people died. Two that almost died are pretty nice kids, and I’m willing to bet that most of the rest of the team was all right. Tanner’s wife cared enough about him to risk everything trying to get to him. So I’m inclined to tell you to piss off, hang up, and burn the folio.”

  “Please do not do that.”

  “So: why are you confined to a wheelchair?”

  For a second I didn’t think he was going to answer, and at that point I didn’t really care. “In graduate school I was part of a group protesting; we chained ourselves across a road so the police couldn’t move us, with PVC sleeves to make cutting the chain difficult. A car …hit the line. Naturally, we couldn’t get out of the way. Some died; I was…incapacitated.”

  “Wow-you idiots never considered that there might be vehicles on the road?”

  “The police were supposed to divert traffic.”

  I laughed at that. “So you counted on police support to make your criminal actions safe?”

  “It was a protest.”

  “It was obstruction of traffic flow. What were you protesting?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really, but answer or hang up.”

  “The construction of a nuclear power plant.”

  “Huh. Did they build it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still operating? I mean up to our current situation.”

  “Yes.”

  “No melt downs, no movie-of-the-week release of radiation?”

  “No.”

  “So it just produced electricity for hospitals and clean water and the lights for schools to teach the children?”

  “Yes. Are you enjoying this?”

  “Yeah, kind of. I got my knee screwed up, but at least we killed some dedicated dirt bags in the process. Did you really believe that nuclear power was evil, or were you trying to impress some cute chick?”

  “I believe that nuclear power is unsafe.”

  “Well, no doubt that’s a consolation.” I paused to study a red light in the sky.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, there’s a drone up. I hadn’t seen one in a while. So tell me, Ted, why Tanner?”

  “He seemed competent
.”

  “OK, we’ll let that stand for now. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you weren’t just trying to fill your collection with rare folios. What was Tanner supposed to accomplish?”

  “He was supposed to track down, recover, and record certain items known to be within your Exclusion Zone, and send the data to me.”

  “Record?”

  “Scan documents, photograph objects. And evacuate the items if possible, but the images were the primary mission.”

  “And the purpose of these images is what?”

  “I believe that this particular crisis has occurred in the past, and that the data on these objects and folios could help us survive the current crisis.”

  “I take it you are a history major?”

  “I teach archeology.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like what is happening, and I’ve read a fair sampling of history.”

  “It has occurred in... obscure parts of Man’s odyssey, all the more so because in most cases it resulted in the elimination of witnesses. Have you heard of Angkar?”

  “Yeah, in Cambodia. They were a sizeable empire, the city itself was huge for the era. Big even by modern standards.”

  “Yes. Before Columbus reached the Indies the mound builders in the Midwest had a city larger than any city in North America would achieve before the mid-1880s, yet it was abandoned abruptly. The entire culture vanished. One of the few legends of the place that neighboring tribes retained was that in the end, the dead walked amongst the mounds. Does that sound familiar?”

  I admitted that it did.

  “In ancient Sumeria one of the more obscure hero-kings is reported to have defeated an army of walking dead. What interests me is that the only data we have on this event makes the comment that the walking corpses breathed like men choking.”

  That sounded interesting. “OK, tell me more.”

  “There is not a great deal-the relics of the era have been pillaged several times; in the period immediately after the Coalition invasion literally tons of artifacts and records were looted by native criminals and fleeing government officials.”

  “But that stuff would have been documented.”

  “Not in the sort of detail you might think. Sumeria is not as popular or interesting as, say, Egypt, and since the Second World War the local regimes have not been terribly cooperative. What I have been able to locate is a…call it a tribute-marker where the deeds of the deceased are told. What I have is a photo of the marker and some notes dating from 1926; the marker tells of this king’s victory over the dead.”

  “Interesting, but kings were known to commission exaggerations for their tombs in every culture.”

  “True, but the account records three things that support my theory: the dead were victims of a plague, they breathed like men choking, and they are slain by attacking the head.”

  I gave that some thought. “OK, that is interesting, but in that period fighting man-to-man was common, and so was making overhand swinging or slashing attacks. Infantry of the day, equipped with shields, ought to fare pretty well against the infected if their discipline held and the numbers weren’t too lop-sided.”

  “True enough. However, the point of interest was that this hero-king was a scholar, not a warrior. He won the day because he discovered a weapon which destroyed the walking dead.”

  For a second I got excited, and then reality kicked in. “You’re saying that some Bronze Age guy came up with a weapon system that is better than what we have now?”

  “Against this particular opponent, yes.”

  “Dream on.”

  “Do you really believe that in the thousands of years of Mankind’s existence there has not been a single discovery that is unknown to us today?”

  “Yup.”

  He sighed. “In any case, that was Tanner’s mission: to recover items and information from the period.”

  “What is the folio?”

  “Notes from a French archeologist who did a very comprehensive survey of sites and artifacts in the region in question in the 1830s.”

  “Too bad he didn’t get published.”

  “He did, but we know more about the language and culture now than he did, and he was inclined to apply interpretation and call it fact. If I could see his original notes and sketches I would be able to get a clearer picture than he was able to achieve in his book, at least in regards to this specific king.”

  “And he worked in the area of this hero-king?”

  “Yes.”

  I gave it some thought. “OK, tomorrow I’ll see to it that the folio gets scanned in and e-mailed to you. That can’t hurt. But you had better come up with something very quick. I’ll check back with you tomorrow night.”

  “This folio is just once piece of a complex puzzle-establishing what the weapon was may take several sources of data. Almost certainly will.”

  “Look, you’ve done a good job of tying this outbreak to some oddities in the past, but the thing you haven’t explained is why all three died out. I mean two, your hero-king did for the third. In any case, I really doubt Bronze Age tech is going to be an improvement over what we’ve got; you haven’t seen these things up close and personal.”

  “I could send you copies of my notes…”

  “No thanks. Look over the folio and see what it says, and we’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll get you the scans around zero nine hundred tomorrow, my time.” I hung up.

  What a head case. Like we’ve gonna be saved by a Bronze Age hero-king. When he gets everything sorted out the innovation the guy came up with will probably be ‘aim for the head’.

  Dumping on Ted had made me feel a little better, which speaks poorly of my personality, but that’s how it goes. I headed downstairs to plug in the phone and get some sleep.

  Throughout the pre-House phase of my life sleep had come easy for me, and the Army taught me that you had better rest when you can. It was only after the House that I had trouble sleeping, and it looked that that phase was coming to an end. Certainly the exertion, stress, and combat chemicals were helping.

  I got up at zero seven hundred, checked the skyline, and took the time to do my upper body workout before my shower-my knee was getting plenty of activity but the rest of me wasn’t. After breakfast I sat down at the computer with the GPS unit and looked for rescue options.

  I had some good news-Fred sent me an e-mail, he was holed up with family in Oklahoma, and a couple others were outside the Zone and safe, including Bet Kiess and Dane Riley, the latter a kid who had helped me a lot when I was in my Communications gig.

  At zero eight thirty I was suited up and ready to walk out the door, I called Jake’s phone and he answered, a little sleepy but obviously awake before the phone rang. “How are you doing, sport?”

  “OK, we got a lot of sleep. We on for today?”

  “If you’re up to it.”

  “Definitely.” The kid had spine.

  “OK, be locked and loaded and ready to roll at zero nine hundred; full load of ammo and sack lunch, and eat a good breakfast. If you have time, open up that box you guys got at the bank and get photos and scans of the folio. I talked with the professor who was calling the shots for Tanner. I dunno if I believe him, but it can’t hurt to let him see what you guys got.”

  “Tanner always it is was super-important stuff.”

  “I think it would make a good History Channel program, but not much more than that. Anyway, it can’t hurt to let him see it.”

  “Cool. See you at nine.”

  It started to rain as I headed across town; the truck only had the driver’s side wiper, but luckily it still worked. Before long it was pounding down in long sweeping lines, sluicing trash and dirt from the roadway and damping down a big fire raging to the south. It was the first rain we had had in a couple weeks, and I was interested in how the infected would react. The most immediate change I noticed was that I made the entire trip without a single attack at a chokepoint-that was unusual.

  Jake was a
t the computer when I limped into the warehouse, having gotten a key for the personnel door yesterday. I didn’t like the big garage doors opening up if they didn’t have to-it was too much like a breach. “I’m about done,” he said by way of greeting. “Key’s getting dressed. You have the address we send this to?”

  We added a case of 5.56mm to the truck’s load; I noticed both Jake and Key had added more magazine pouches to their gear since yesterday. I explained my methods of assisting others, and we set off. First up was a convenience store where we loaded up on city maps, which Key marked with extraction data while Jake and I filled the store’s supply of picnic coolers with ice, sodas, water, canned goods, candy, and a sampling of over-the-counter medicine from the store’s stock.

  The two were certainly motivated; Charlie, Miguel, and Mick had been good men, but as a team we were a lot more laid back and disinclined to extended effort than this pair, and their energy was infectious. The first rescue was four college kids, and we dragooned them into helping us get the used car lot’s vehicles’ started, and gassing up those which were suitable, stashing one of our prepped coolers and a city map in each.

  After that, it was raid and run: Key was a bit short to drive the truck comfortably so Jake and I swapped back and forth; she was perfectly content to ride the roof and shoot infected. We made a total of eight more rescues before we knocked off for lunch, bringing out twenty-three people from high-infected areas, not just the fringe jobs I had done yesterday. We dropped around eighty infected along the way which is always a viable performance of civic duty: tilting the ratio of infected to healthy one head shot at a time.