Black Tide Rising - eARC

by John Ringo

  The boardroom the meeting was held in was carpeted so deeply that is swallowed all sounds of footsteps and as well as the bottom half of the sole of Colleen’s tactical boots. The rest of her attire also clashed with the framed original art and wood paneling. The usual Herman Miller synthetic chic was not in view; rather, the room had honest to god wooden antique chairs with actual gilt, complimenting the long bookmatch walnut conference table. She enjoyed the view north across the Hudson into Jersey from the top floor of the Goldbloom building. The newest headquarters among the major banks, it had been built after 9/11, and no practical expense had been spared to make it as secure as possible against infrastructure failure and kinetic attacks. Colleen suspected that “hardened against zombie attack” was not on the official specs, however. The city paranoia about weapons persisted too. All the non law enforcement attendees had obvious holes in their various rigs. Batons, tasers and firearms were all checked downstairs in what was ostensibly a city meeting.

  She was covering her principal, the Chief Security Officer or CSO, of MetBank, despite the hosting bank’s security assurances. Colleen was dressed to impress downtown, zombie apocalypse style. Her bank’s executives were concerned about staff security looking too much like the military contractors made famous during the late Middle East war and had sprung for what they considered to be tactical attire. Both the rugged but stylish trousers which looked like dress pants and her matching business jacket were by Elite Sterling, incorporating kevlar throughout and plenty of hidden pockets. Those were topped by a tailored blouse and a functional but insanely expensive Jaeger LaCoultre watch (thank you annual MetBank bonus!) which matched the richness, if not the tone of her surroundings. The effect was spoiled by the newly mandatory plate carrier, and Danner boots, added since the bank went to high security protocols following the May breakout of H7D3—the Zombie virus.

  Colleen thought she looked like Chanel went on a date with 5.11 and they had a baby. Whatever, it was still more comfortable than perching upright on her four inch Laboutins for four hours while waiting for Mrs. Managing Director (fourth of her line) to spend her husband’s money at Bergdorf-Goodman. Having suffered through several details where she was both expected to “blend” as well as be able to accompany either the one female member of the Regional Board or more likely the spouses of the male cohort, Colleen knew well the agony of designer heels matched with long hours on her feet. She kept the smile off her face. The new daily wear wasn’t just more comfortable, it was also a lot easier to get the stains out of after a long shift performing her newest duties.

  Topping off her rig were her security credentials issued by NYPD, clipped to a MOLLE loop under which the legend NYSI was printed in four inch tall white letters. The New York Security Initiative had grown out of the original Lower Manhattan Security Initiative post 9/11. Banks, DHS and the NYPD began sharing the video take from their various systems, as well as the local intelligence from an informal network ranging from building guards and street cart vendors to the local field office of the biggest “Other Governmental Agency” or OGA, of all. LMSI had successfully maintained a high level of situational awareness through lower Manhattan at first, and gradually expanded that northward across the island and then the other burroughs. That success was the genesis of this meeting. Some of the bigger banks and re-insurance corporations as well as the Police Commissioner, the NYC detachment commander for the New York National Guard and now some…irregular forces were meeting. The unofficial goal was to share intel on the number and location of recent H7D3 outbreaks. In reality, this meeting would formally establish the boundaries of territories, within which each group would harvest infecteds in order to manufacture the vaccine.

  It had been several weeks since the initial reports of H7D3 appearing on the West Coast were officially acknowledged. Business in “the City” was proceeding, if not quite as usual, then at least it was lurching along.

  The initial lack of information from higher authority gave way to reports that teams CDC and WHO were working on a vaccine and presumably a cure. Three weeks into the growing crisis however, the precinct system that was the NYPD had started to visibly fray due to attrition—between the increasing number of cops were not showing up to work and their casualty rates, the NYPD had been taking it on the chin. So in addition to the large banks and insurance houses, some of the larger entrepreneurs, for values of the word “entrepreneur,” that could afford to maintain a security infrastructure were increasingly policing their own “neighborhoods.” These internal turf teams initially responded by capturing the infected and isolating or killing them. However, once the CDC bright boys had figured out how to make a vaccine and distributed the instructions, that changed. That vaccine depended on access to a supply of raw material—the spinal tissue from infected victims. Lab monkeys being in short supply and the banks being possessed of a proven ability to relabel their liabilities as assets, they had decided that infecteds were assets—just so many vaccine doses running around in precursor form. The “entrepreneurs” simply followed suit.

  One of those “entrepreneurs” was making his entrance to the board room at that moment. The flashiest attendee yet merited a double take. Big Mac Overture was a figure best know for beating a racketeering rap six months earlier, only a few months before the world began to end. He was routinely cast in the role of Public Enemy Number One, New York style, in every free paper that littered the subway. Everyone just knew that he ran the Dominican mob that was competing with the Chinese and the Mexicans for the drug trade that came up from the border, across the Gulf and into Port Elizabeth just across the river in Jersey. Apparently, “everybody” was right, because here he was at the meeting that was going to formalize the participants as a sort of city council for addressing the increasing number of infected New Yorkers. And sharing them. His detail actually looked about the same as Colleen, gear wise, right down to the NYSI badges. Big Mac flourished his walking stick and swaggered over to group of bank representatives to say hello while his security man greeted Colleen.

  “Hey chica, how they hanging?”

  “One higher than the other, Ramon, same as always,” Colleen knew that the gangs from the DR operated on a level of machismo that wasn’t exactly Wall Street style. Or maybe it was, come to think of it.

  “Look, I’m sorry about rolling up on your earlier—I see that it could look a little aggressive. But there is something else.”

  “No worries about today. No blood, no foul, right?” Colleen waited the other shoe to drop.

  “Thing is, some of our boys saw your truck out the other night, well past Tunnel. You know that we take care of Midtown East and Murray Hill, right?”

  “Maybe. So?”

  “You know that those ‘zombis’ are ours, right?” Ramon finally got to the point. “You are over the line.”

  “I know that we’re not gonna wait for you to get around to responding to some EDP call when they could start making new zeds in the meantime. You know the deal that the cops set. The closest Biological Emergency Response Team responds to any call. If you can bag it and tag it, your BERT keeps the asset. Speed first of response first, everything else second.”

  Colleen wasn’t the CSO, but she knew the ROEs and the policy. If anything, the fact that it wasn’t yet “shoot on sight” was crazy, but the Commissioner wasn’t ready to go that far yet, and her boss was still “making nice” with the cops. It was an open question if her boss would make the final evacuation call off the island to the DR site before or after such an order was promulgated by the PD. Colleen had been told that she was on the evacuation list, but she knew that when the wheels came off there would be little warning and the first casualty would be their careful plans. Till then, vaccine manufacture was the priority. Keeping the rate of infection as low as possible in order to buy time was the utmost priority.

  Ramon laid a little “street” on her, “Hey, I like you chica, you did good work when we needed help a couple calls ago. But you got to stay out
of nuestro barrio—my boss ain’t gonna sit for you taking what we need to make our own medicine.”

  “Ramon, you know and I know that the only reason that you are hot to get more infected is because the street price for a unit of vaccine is actually twenty times higher than the price of street cut heroin, or a hundred times as much grass. At least we aren’t selling it to the highest bidder.”

  “Sure, sure, and maybe we are making money off the people now. We like, have something in common with you banks, no?” Ramon was unflustered that she knew of their own processing for profit operation. “I’m am giving you a, what you say, professional courtesy. But listen chica, you roll up in that fancy BERT truck in our neighborhoods again, and you might come across something special, like we used to find in Najuf.”

  Colleen frowned. The threat was no joke. Plenty of the demobbed soldiers that had been riffed from the Army during the current president’s “peace dividend” knew enough to cobble together an IED like the ones that they had dodged in Fallujah or Helmund. Or Najuf. Plenty of those vets had returned to their neighborhoods to find legitimate work scarce, and “entrepreneurs” interested in adding their experience to the portfolio.

  “Look…” she began, only to be cut off as the meeting was called to order.

  “Look, we can talk later, right?”

  Ramon looked at her steadily. “We can always talk as long as you stay out of our turf.”

  “If we could all take seats now, please ladies and gentlemen,” called the Goldbloom managing director. “We have a quorum of interested parties and can start.”

  “Later chica,” Ramon waved over his shoulder. He wasn’t making a threat, she knew. He was just relaying his truth to her. “Come into ‘my’ areas and there is going to be a problem.” Colleen was a first-generation, American-born Chinese—she understood tribes and community obligation. She also understood fair warnings.

  There were many new faces at the table, most of the city and police representatives appeared to be deputies, or newly promoted. The meeting proceeded along the usual lines. Introductions between the various groups were standard at first, but the police delegation visibly grimaced when Big Mac genially waggled his skull topped walking stick as his name and organization was called out. They didn’t change expression when the Triad representative, predictably impassive, was named. Their scowls deepened for the Italians. Previously shrinking in relevance, Franky Matricardi’s network, affectionately named the New Thing, or Cosa Nova, had been bolstered by recent infusions of cash from a desperate but well heeled group of re-insurance firms. Recognizing that covering the data centers and vaults that were underground in Piscataway was beyond their capabillities, the company had funded Cosa Nova’s newly established effective control of much of Newark, Red Bank and Jersey City. Matricardi pulled it off by resurrecting a combination of ferocity and a reality based willingness to work with some of the existing gangs, including the ones in uniform. It also helped that the Jersey police and state troopers were, if anything, catching the Blu Flu at rates exceeding NYPD’s problems. Newark was nearly empty of cops, creating what the Cosa Nova cadre laughingly called, “white space.”

  The first documented instance of a disease response independent of the NYPD had been the Biological Response Teams or BERTs that the Aussie head of security over at Bank of the Americas has pulled together. This, in short order, turned into broader recognition of the need to discreetly harvest “assets.” Bankers and cops were capable of nothing if not hard nosed pragmatism.

  Thus the current get together.

  Anyone who had lived through Katrina, or Sandy, or Irene knew that waiting for FEMA and the CDC to start shipping a vaccine was a forlorn hope. Anyone with a tearing need had either prepared for the worst by maintaining a large investment in security and awareness, like Colleen’s employer or the German investment bank, or had enough funds to improvise a solution as they went along, absorbing the higher cost of buying what they needed at the last minute. That meant keeping “their people” safe, their businesses running and now, making their own zombie vaccine. The truly prepared were balancing the opportunity to really pad their profit margin with the belief that a cure would surely be found and if not, their preparations would get them out of the City if needed.

  Even on the precipice of a world ending disaster, bureaucracy proceeded in an orderly way. The meeting agenda points quickly devolved into why certain groups should have a greater amount of territory to patrol for infected. The banks were determined to have enough donor volume to reach their minimum safe dose levels. The police seemed torn between a relief that they didn’t have to do it alone and a deep resentment that ANYONE else could do what they did and baldly assert so. The deputy mayor, filling in for his increasingly absent boss, sparred with the leadership of various city special interest groups. Their political leaders sensed opportunity to assert more independence as the city services suffered from the disease. The commercial entrepreneurs, such as Big Mac and the Jersey crowd, were united in insistence that they could take on more than anyone else, if only others stayed out of their way.

  Colleen tuned back into the previously droning remarks as someone raised their voice. Big Mac’s deputy was losing his patience for this kind of protracted talk-talk.

  “I don’t care that you are cops and we aren’t. I don’t care that ‘the public’ isn’t comfortable with my teams coming into their brownstone neighborhoods. What I care about is that we have the most trucks, that we can handle the most volume and we are. Getting. It. Done. Unlike your precious police who are quitting because it is too dangerous.”

  The precinct captain from the 10th stood up, red faced. “You already got all of the Bronx, most of Queens east of the 678 and now you want to take everything north of 116th? Fuck you!”

  Big Mac’s belly laugh was more shocking than more yelling. It quickly overcame the angry responses that were starting from half a dozen mouths. He motioned casually to his deputy, shutting him up.

  “Mon, I don’t have to ask you for ev’ting above hunned and sixteenth. I already got it. You can just smile and make it official. Sho, Big Mac is already protec’in da Bronx, and let’s face it, most of Queens too. Why? Because no one else is.”

  “That’s absurd! We have patrols all over Queens, keepi…” another city official tried to inject.

  The Dominican kingpin shut that down.

  “No, no. Your ‘patrols’ look good. Hell, Big Mac like your patrols. Keeps the civilians calm, makes them feel safe. My boys, we really be keeping dem safe. You know how many trucks I running? Fifty.”

  Gasps from around the table revealed that most had no idea of the scale of the operations that Big Mac ran. Colleen kept her mouth shut, even though she was as surprised as everyone else. Ramon looked a little smug.

  “We taking more dan hunderd fifty zombis off the street every day. More dan I can, heh heh, process into da special medicine. We are holding back monsters, see? Maybe you think we are bad, maybe we are too dangerous, right? Well, sometimes little monsters that you know are better than big monster dat ends world. I running de trucks wherever I have to, keeping zombi from getting too big, too fast.”

  He paused to let the others absorb the size of his “take.”

  “You doan unnerstand. Big Mac’s grandmere, she come from old school DR. She unnerstands about zombi—zombi is old news in Carribean, mon.”

  Big Mac looked around the group at the conference table.

  “We comfortable with a little zombi. You all done made da big mistake, inventing way to make even more zombi. Now old school from the D.R. is gonna help put da zombi back in box, maybe find a cure, see? So know you know what Big Mac really want? Really need?”

  The deputy major was getting over being gobsmacked, even if the police chief was still visibly stewing next to him.

  “Ok. I give. What do you really want?”

  “Big Mac want a hospital. An doctors. An techs. An equipment. I make all da medicine that everyone needs. You d
oan worry about how I get the zombis, or where I get the zombis. Big Mac do a better job than Eli Lilly, or J and J, eh? Do it quicker, quieter, that for sho’. Docs I try to hire, dey a little nervous about working with da Big Mac, maybe get dirty, maybe worried about how it looks be turning ‘patients’ into medicine.”

  He looked over at the groups of bank representatives.

  “My friends from da banks, they unnerstand, they make their own medicine, a little bit. So. Maybe I help. Maybe after, we talk about a little IPO for da best newest, biggest pharma company, da one that saves world.”

  Colleen wasn’t surprised that some of the bankers actually looked like they were taking it seriously.

  The cops were having none of it. The acting police chief stood up, and his immediate staff with him.

  “No. Hell, no. We’ll get more cops. We will process the infected humanely. We will keep order, we…”

  His strong voice was drowned out by a very high pitched, piercing scream.

  “No, no, no, no get it off, off. Get it off meeee!”

  Colleen as well as everyone in the room snapped their heads around to look at a younger admin, part of the bank contingents support. It appeared that she had been trying to make it to the bathroom as the first sensations of the disease manifested. Consequently, she was between most of the meeting attendees and the door.

  There were two immediate surges of movement in the room. Most of the principals at the table jumped away from the woman, some pulled by their details, some moving with an alacrity belied by rich suits and doughy bodies. A few circles of relative calm remained, the detail covering Tom Smith from Bank of the Americas and guards for Big Mac, headed by Ramon. Colleen’s principal was already standing and she moved forward between the still screaming admin and her group.

  “No shooting!” Colleen wasn’t sure if the police chief was talking to his men who had already unholstered, or to the group at large. “Don’t just stand there, just immobilize her, quick!” No one moved forward. There didn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm in the room to wrestle with a zombie.