by Glynn James
“Just now, trying to radio in our status. No answer to my hails. Nothing.”
“No signal – from the top of a 24-story building?”
Handon just held his gaze. They both knew this was another very bad portent.
* * *
Parachuting right down through the skyscraper canyons of a major city was actually the extreme-sports experience of a lifetime. Wish I were in a position to give a shit, Ali considered.
She also considered the Hobson’s choice that now confronted her. On her current heading and speed, she was going in the drink. Ditching it in the Chicago River in late November would without question mean dicing with hypothermia. When she got out of the water – that’s if she could cut loose from enough gear to swim, plus find a section of embankment not too sheer for her to climb up – she’d have maybe an hour to get undressed and dried out. After that, she was a goner.
And before that, out on the street, alone, with all of her weapons and equipment gone, she was also a goner.
Even braking her forward momentum against the tailwind, and speeding her rate of descent as much as she dared, she didn’t think she could get down on the main drag. And her forward speed was too high, and her turning radius too wide, to try and just turn down a side street.
What did that leave? That left the ‘L’ – as they called the elevated train platform that circled the Loop, right near the edge of the river. It perched over the street, directly between her and the water. Normal skydiving instincts had led her to steer away from this at all costs – wildly uneven surface, dangerously high above ground, electrified. Fucking trains coming. On any normal, non-apocalyptic jump, this would be the absolute worst conceivable place to land.
Now it was looking like her only hope.
Hell, it’s actually looking pretty sweet, she amended. Up off the street. Probably no longer electrified. And certainly no trains coming.
Now – all she had to do was avoid snapping part or all of herself off in the tracks while landing.
* * *
Homer worked out what Ali was doing too late. Coming over the top of the target building with more control, he’d had time to think about avoiding both the water and the ‘L’, and to brake himself toward a street landing in front of both hazards.
And not only had he failed to mentally re-evaluate the implications of landing on the train platform. But he’d also reconciled himself to facing whatever he would find down there on the street. In his own mind, he was already dead. And now he’d already lost too much altitude to bring it back up and follow Ali.
The street was in deep darkness – the sun hadn’t cracked the horizon down here yet – and all that black space now loomed, racing up at him, with whatever it held, and all it hid.
* * *
The half of Alpha team that had actually made it to the intended landing zone now stacked up outside the rooftop-access door of the target building. This meant the four of them stood in a tight line down the side of the wall, Pope in the lead. Ordinarily a door stack and dynamic entry would mean blowing the door with a small charge, shooting it off its hinges with shotgun slugs, or bashing it in with a mechanical breaching tool. Also, a couple of flashbang grenades would precede their entry – which would then turn into a swirling maelstrom of controlled chaos. They would pour in and clear the structure, making shoot/no-shoot decisions, executing four-box shots on the shoots, and taking down and controlling the no-shoots.
That was how they’d done it back in the world.
In this after-world, though… everything they faced would (almost) definitely be a shoot; flashbangs didn’t really work; and noise just brought more of them. So Pope squatted down, withdrew two small tools from a small folding leather case, and picked the lock. He pulled the door open quickly but quietly.
The other three, NVGs seated on the fronts of their helmets again, slithered into the interior darkness. Pope followed, pulled the door shut… and locked it behind them.
* * *
In the final moment before impact, Ali saw what she hadn’t before: a blessed train station. It was two bits of roof over the platform, and looked a hell of a lot more promising as a landing surface than the bare tracks. She hauled for all she was worth, brought it around at the last instant, and executed a running, sliding landing on the tiled but nearly horizontal surface.
She skidded to a stop, well pleased with herself.
As she reached for her chute quick release, the ground (i.e. the roof) opened up from under her. She fell with a crash, right through the rotten roof, and twelve feet to the hard wooden platform below. On her way through, a spike-shaped shard of wood went in one side of her left bicep and came out the other. She landed on her back, stunned, bleeding from the arm, and vertebrae screaming. Her rifle was wedged painfully beneath her. Her leg bag came down on top of her in a spray of dust and rotted wood, knocking the remaining wind out of her.
She drew a lungful of air with spectacular difficulty, rolled off her rifle, charged it with her right hand, and dragged both it and herself to the outside wall of the station office. She then sat still, in complete silence, and crashing waves of pain, tuning into the environment and waiting.
Waiting to see what would come for her.
* * *
Pope, Ainsley, Henno, and Handon now stacked up a second time – this time outside the emergency stairwell door on floor 18. Behind it would be the offices of NeuraDyne Neurosciences. They had encountered no resistance on the way down from the roof. This was surprising, but they didn’t show it. Their job was to be completely ready for anything. And that included when they faced absolutely nothing.
This time Pope had to jimmy the door’s one-way locking bar with a thin metal rod. It gave with a metallic pop. Ainsley pushed his way in, rifle barrel and binocular NVGs pointing ahead of him like the prow of a military spaceship. The other three slithered inside after him.
In three minutes, they had cleared the level.
There was nothing there.
No living, no dead. Just a small bit of detritus that seemed to indicate people here had cleared out in a hurry. And two years of dust on the carpet and desk surfaces.
“And no fucking computers,” Handon said, flipping up his NVGs and yanking the blinds away from the exterior windows, which let in a bit of thin early-morning light. From the large-screen LCDs and docking stations at most of the desks, it was obvious everyone here had worked off of laptops. Which were now just as gone as the people were.
Pope stepped back into the main office area. “I’ve scoured the labs. No machines, no servers. And it looks like most of the samples and slides have done a runner.”
Ainsley cursed silently under his breath. All this way, and a dry hole…
Henno called into them from the reception area. “Oi. I found some e-mail.”
Ainsley was opening his mouth to ask how the hell he could have found e-mail when there were no blighting computers for it to be on… But Henno was already walking into the room. With his gloved hand, he held out a single piece of A4 paper. Ainsley took it.
It was a one-page e-mail print-out.
DEAD CITY
After a perfect two-point landing in the dead middle of the street, Homer trotted to a halt, reeled in his chute, shrugged out of his harness, wrapped the former in the latter, and shoved the whole hairball down an open street drain. He then unslung his weapon, charged it, grabbed his leg bag by its strap with his left hand, and got the hell off the street.
This meant ducking into a recessed doorway. He immediately took a very careful gander through the glass for any sign of movement inside, then put his full attention back on the street. He pivoted from his left, to his right, to directly across the way. Nothing moved in the lightening gloom.
That’s not so bad, then. He almost smiled at his good luck so far.
But then he grimaced again. This was supposed to be a city of three million dead people. Where in God’s name were they all? He should be neck-deep right now. He felt r
eprieved. But he also felt a sense of deep foreboding. Something was very wrong. And it couldn’t, in the end, be good.
All around him, the telltale signs of a struggle for survival long lost littered the street. There were no fresh bodies. Two years of Chicago weather had seen to that, and all that remained were rag-covered bones littering the ground. A few feet away, in the next doorway along, were two adult-sized skeletons clutching each other. Homer stared at them for a moment and wondered what this place had been like the day those two huddled in that doorway for shelter.
He scanned the area, looking a second time for movement. But apart from the bits of trash that littered the street, skittering in the slight wind, nothing moved.
He pressed the transmit button built into the foregrip of his assault rifle and hailed Ali.
She hadn’t been quite so lucky in her landing, he learned in short order. She was working to keep the pain out of her voice, with some success. But the effort was costing her.
Homer told her to stay put, signed off, and immediately picked up her grid location from his forearm-mounted Blue Force Tracker. The transponder in her BFT unit was talking seamlessly with his. She was close – but not close enough, and also elevated. The moving map in his forearm-mounted display drew out a route for him.
He moved out smartly, hugging the walls and building fronts. Back in the world before, this was a no-no – bullets also hugged walls, sometimes skimming along them for hundreds of feet, and making them an excellent place to get shot. But now of course, no one was shooting back – and the great thing was to stay out of sight, and silent. This was often made easier, as it was in this dead city, by the abandoned cars and garbage that lay everywhere. The streets were quiet through his short journey, as Homer skirted his way along the sidewalk, ducking behind cars, posts, and trash cans, and keeping to doorways – though only the ones that were still more or less intact. Open doorways were to be avoided at all costs, especially if the building they led to was in darkness. Which all these were.
He’d had a few close moments making that mistake back in the early days. Zombies didn’t tend to deliberately hide themselves away – they weren’t clever enough for that – but they often wandered into a building when catching the scent of the living, and then stayed there in the dark if nothing else caught their attention. With walls around them, they seemed to find it hard to navigate their way out. All of this meant that the open front of a house, shop, or other structure represented a pretty high risk of something coming sprawling out at you. And standing in the doorway, with sunlight in your eyes and low visibility into the shop, was a good way to get yourself jumped and chomped.
Homer moved swiftly from cover to cover, still wondering why the hell there weren’t any signs of the dead – signs of anything for that matter. But within a block, the silence gave way. He squatted down, frozen, making himself small, as soon as he heard it. It was just up ahead, and unmistakable – but so out of place that he struggled to comprehend it.
Finally he realized: it was music.
He blinked hard and stayed where he was, willing himself not to go mad.
* * *
“Roger that, I’m not going anywhere,” Ali said, in response to Homer’s hail. “Walk safely. Out.”
Jesus Christ, Homer… This was some damned unprofessionalism right here, following her down in her missed drop. Still, all things considered, she couldn’t say she minded the assistance. She was in a bit of a bad way.
She popped a handful of analgesics from her med kit. She’d already pulled the wood splinter – “spike” was more like it – from her arm, let it bleed freely for a bit, then disinfected and wrapped it up. It hurt like hell, and the arm felt out of commission for the duration. Luckily, sniping was mostly done one-handed – with the off hand resting across the shooting arm for stability. She followed the Diclofenac pills with a jab – full-spectrum antibiotics, also from the med kit, and directly into her impaled arm. There was no telling what disgusting shit was on that roof after two years. Pigeon crap might be the best of it.
She’d also wrenched her back badly. But outside of a hospital, or probably a sports rehab clinic, there was nothing she could do but endure it. Now that she was basically squared away, she had to decide whether to sit tight and wait for rescue – or get up and make herself useful.
Well, she thought, clenching her jaw, I guess that one answers itself.
* * *
Homer faced a decision point as well, and it was also auto-answering. However spooky the next few meters, they had to be crossed. He leg-pressed himself up out of his deep crouch, rifle at his shoulder, and started taking one padded step after another.
Dear Lord, he thought. What madness was this? Chicago was supposed to be a dead city. There was no way there was power generation still on here. Not two years later. And he figured a live band had to be out of the question.
Step by creeped-out step, he heard the music grow louder, until it was clearly audible.
“Wait ’til you’re locked in my embrace,” the velvet voice crooned. “Wait ’til I hold you near… Wait ’til you see that sunshine place…There ain’t nothin’ like it here…”
Homer knew the song well: Frank Sinatra, “The Best Is Yet To Come.” Maybe that was even more ironic than "My Kind of Town" would have been? Who could say. Not Homer.
On closer approach, he found it was floating out of a storefront jazz joint and cocktail bar. He stepped slowly through a set of swing doors that hung from the wall, broken as though someone had tried to rip them off the wall and failed. One of the doors was covered in black stains that could have been zombie or dried-up human blood. He couldn’t tell. Moving inside, he scanned all the dark spots and covered positions as he advanced. Nothing moved, but all over the floor were desiccated human remains, much of it chaotically scattered.
They really tore this place apart, he thought.
In short order, he determined that the music was coming from satellite speakers along the walls – and found them all connected to a digital jukebox behind the bar. The jukebox was plugged into the same socket as a nearby fridge. Slowly pulling its door open, Homer found that it was full of beer bottles – full beer bottles, not opened ones. And the fridge was still on, even though the light bulb had long since burned out. Also plugged into the socket via a three-way adapter was something that looked like a mini vehicle battery, though it was too small to be a standard car battery. It was wired up to a standard plug, as if being recharged. Homer wondered if someone had come here after the city had fallen, or if this had been here before. He would never know. Nothing else lived in the establishment. And nothing else had power. It was just a complete mystery.
Homer paused at the front door before leaving. Not a mystery, he thought.
A miracle.
* * *
Ali cleared both train platforms, as well as the Chicago Transit Authority offices on either side, in four minutes. Her arm hurt like hell, and her back a lot worse than that, but she retained most of her mobility. She held her rifle by resting it on her left forearm. When she got back to her starting point, and her leg bag, she flipped down the rifle’s bipod, and popped the cover on the big scope.
And she had a think about where she might emplace to best effect up here.
* * *
The Miracle of St. Frank, Homer thought, back on the street now, and beyond bemused. The real miracle, of course, and as he well knew, was that the music had not drawn zombie one. It should have been like catnip for them at this point. Where were all the dead? As he moved out and forward, on a hair trigger, ready for anything… still he encountered nothing.
When he reached the ‘L’ station, only a minute or so later, he had to stop to recalibrate. All of the stairwells leading up to the platform had been destroyed. This was not unusual. Alpha had been on the scenes of very many last stands. In addition to the bullet casings, the wide splashes of blood, the broken windows and toppled doors, one great hallmark of a human last stand was destro
yed first-floor stairwells. Anyone smart enough to think of it, and with the tools or strength to manage it, did this. It was one of the best strategies for keeping the dead away the longest.
He reported the lack of access to Ali. “But be advised, I’ll find a way to climb up…” He was already up and moving along underneath the platform, looking for egress. “Just stay put.”
“Negative,” she transmitted back. “This is actually an excellent sniper’s OP. And if you can sweep and clear the street directly below me, I think we can be pretty effective.”
Homer stopped where he was, his eyes narrowing. “Effective at what?”
In answer, Ali’s suppressed rifle chugged twice from over his head.
He spun in place and took cover. He couldn’t see what she was shooting at. But it wouldn’t be nothing… “Contact, due south,” came her inevitable report. “Multiple Zulus, visual on approx one-zero, in ones and twos. And they are closing distance.”
* * *
Ainsley scanned the printed e-mail, the other three standing still in the dim and dusty room. It was addressed to roughly fifty recipients. About half the addresses sounded like other biotechs or university labs, about half perhaps personal contacts. He read it aloud:
I pray to God most or all of you receive this. If you’re still online, I don’t have to tell you how bad things are. Virtually all of my colleagues have gone now – back to their families, or their homes in the country, or to whatever fate awaits them out there.
I can actually see the fighting going on in buildings across the street. And I know it’s only a matter of time before they are here as well.
I have stayed, to continue the work. We’re so close, to either a vaccine, or an antidote, or both, so close I can taste it... the samples we have are excellent, and I know we can do it, given enough time. But I don’t think I can stay here. To do so would simply be to wait for death.
Some of you know my brother-in-law, Al, who is an IT contractor. After 9/11, they put in a bunker beneath the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, beneath the trading floor. They’ve got generator power, food and water, I don’t know how long for. Maybe weapons, too, I don’t know. I know all this because Al worked on the project, on the security and IT systems. I also know there’s a backdoor – literal, and figurative. There’s a tunnel entrance that comes out in the basement of the Hyatt, across the street from the Mercantile Exchange Center. It’s behind an unmarked steel door with a keypad, card reader, and thumbprint reader. It normally requires both a smartcard and a recognized thumbprint, in addition to a code. But Al programmed in a backdoor: if you just type 19 zeros in a row, it opens up. Obviously, I’m not supposed to know any of this. If I make it there, and I get in, maybe those already inside will shoot me. But that actually sounds much better than the remaining alternatives at this point.