“Right.”
“Have you tried dropping teams in there?”
“Twice, and each time they came up against the hardened exterior of the compound, before the Zekes finally got to them.”
“That answers the question why we should even care about getting in there.”
“Right again. If they’re dead, or just surviving, why are they trying so hard to stay out of sight.”
“You already know the answer.”
“Yes. The Oregon facility is a bio-weapons lab. It’s billed as specializing in defense against biological weapons, but as you know …”
“The best defense is a good offense. Meaning …”
“Chances are they are working on either a vaccine to help us or something worse.”
“And either way, we need to know,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”
“The modern Oregon lab is built on the bones of a cold war facility that was itself designed to be impregnable to a nuclear bombardment. Part of the cold war bunker was cannibalized for the new structure, but part of it was mothballed and backfilled. And the parts that were abandoned are underneath the newer lab.”
“And they don’t know about this?”
“The military being what it is, the new plans do not include surveys of what previously existed.”
“How do we get in?”
“That’s the easy part. Since it was also over engineered, there’s a back entrance to the old structure via an abandoned mine.” Breem reached under his desk and pulled a stack of architectural sheets out, placing them on the desk. “You’ve got about a hundred yards from where the old structure ends to where you can get into the lab.”
“Can I assume you’ve got some James Bond laser shit for us to cut through that?” I said.
“No. There’s no such thing, believe it or not. You’re down to shovels and picks. You’re looking at two weeks, minimum,” Breem said.
“That’s a lot of risk, and a lot of time for something that looks like a random walk. What aren’t you telling me?”
Breem massaged the bridge of his nose. “You know you aren’t the only asset we’ve deployed in the field?”
“Uh-hunh.”
“Well, we’ve retrieved more of those so-called GPS devices you found.”
“And?”
“And they do more than just track Zeke. They appear to be able to direct the zombie to a specific location, the way you’d follow directions, but this seems to impel the zombie forward, left, right, what have you. And as you know, Zeke operates like a herd animal. All it takes is a few of them stalking with a purpose and pretty soon you’ve got a mob.”
“How do you figure that happens? The low-level intelligence we’ve seen?”
“I wish. It’s much more — sinister, is the only word I have. Apparently, these devices use a form of magnetoception to impel the Zeke’s primitive brain.”
“Magnetoception, are you kidding me?”
“Basically it’s the ability to follow or respond to the earth’s magnetic field in birds, for navigation, and other life forms, to orient themselves along the field.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re saying someone is harnessing the primitive remnant of the Zeke’s brain as a weapon.”
“Yes. This took a lot of thought, first of all, to even conceive of the notion, them to engineer and test it, then to implement it. What we’ve got, then, are human actors trying to figure out how to deploy Zeke against the survivors.”
“What do you mean?”
“As you know, we’ve still got some satellite capability left. We’ve seen instances of Zekes massing against human enclaves, and we’ve been able to locate these zombie pied pipers, if you will.”
“What happened.”
“In one case, several thousand Zekes surrounded a shopping mall that had been fortified by a couple dozen survivors. After a week of milling around, moaning and groaning, the Zekes dispersed.”
“An experiment?”
“Again, I wish. More like a demonstration. The next two instances we observed were outright attacks. One of them involved over a hundred thousand Zekes, and they overran a well-fortified public arena that was housing about five hundred survivors. Even with air support, they all perished.”
“Have you received any demands?”
“None. Whoever it is, is just fucking with us. They know that we know that they pulled these attacks off.”
“How?”
“Remember I said we had partial satellite control?”
“Whoever is doing this is able to override the satellites, and let us see through them whenever they want.”
“Who do you think it is, another faction from the old government, a inter-branch pissing match?”
“No. We may suck most of the time, but we’re always good when it counts. Whatever remains of the government and the military is together in this.”
“Except for Oregon. Then who?”
“Basically, it’s some rich dude. We know where his base is, but can’t get to him with conventional means. Probably the guy in the plane — you didn’t happen to catch his tail numbers did you?”
“No,” I said, and let go of the tension building in my neck. “Oh fuck — have you warned Peters?”
Chapter 19
“Petey — you out there, son, come on back?” Ralph Peters had one eye on Rachel, playing in the corner with a doll and a Chihuahua puppy, and one on the horizon from the conning tower they had built in the middle of the compound. He didn’t have the heart to outright take the dog from her, that she had mistakenly seen — and rescued — from the livestock pen, but considering what was coming down the pike, maybe he would never get the chance.
Every day now, for the past couple week or two, Zeke had been coming out of the haze, toward the compound, from all directions. Most days it was a singleton, or a pair or as many as half a dozen. And they had all been dispatched by roving crews that patrolled the thousand yard external perimeter he’d established, once he realized that letting them walk right up to the razor wire was a little too passive for his taste.
Then the scavenger crews had reported something even more disturbing — large numbers of Zekes were strolling into town, from all direction — down from Santa Fe, up from Socorro and Las Cruces, from the east and from the west, hell, plenty were coming in straight from the desert and out of the hills.
Peters had gone with the same tactic — get out there and take them down in small groups, rather than trying to police them all at the razor wire, or worse, from behind the concrete moat he had built. Even as he was directing the earth movers that were digging the pit, he knew that if a million Zekes came at them from all sides, their bodies would fill up the hole and the remaining Zekes would walk over the bodies of their undead foot soldier brethren, right into the compound that now held close to a thousand human beings. In the case of an all-out massed attack, New Petersburg would be overrun and might as well be named New Masada. And Peters was damned if he was going to allow his people to be forced into that situation.
So they had kept pushing people, from the early days of crossbow weapon and ammo manufacture, to building the dual hard perimeters, to now, exhaustively patrolling their close and long-range borders, just to keep sniping at Zeke, so he couldn’t build up the massive numbers that would make the Chinese infantry look like a Memorial Day Parade.
“Hey Dad, I’m here and not liking what I’m seeing,” Pete said over the radio.
“Whattya’ got, son?”
“Group of twenty Zekes coming down the street at us, and I’ll be godamned but if they ain’t marching like an army squad. Oh yeah, and the leader is one of them clean Zekes — no blood on him, relatively clean clothes, and you know, just recent looking.”
“Alright. ‘Member what we talked about. These groups, sooner or later, are going to be used as decoys. Don’t just bring everyone to the front and start turkey shooting, watch your rear and your flanks — and drill that into everyone’s head. The day you let y
our guard down is the day you get it in the neck.”
“Oka — WHAT? Dad, hold on, I’ll get right back to you.”
Peters had other radios on, monitoring other channels, and he already knew what his son was hearing — there were other, similar columns of Zekes being spotted marching down different streets by the other teams. Damn, what he wouldn’t give for air support. But Breem and his lackeys had actually told him the truth, which shook him up more than the usual propaganda: other survivor camps were dealing with increased massings, and there simply wasn’t enough equipment or personnel to do simple reconnaissance. They were on their own.
And that bit of news had come after Peters had already implemented his search and destroy teams, based on his own noodling through the problem. What went unsaid was that they were dealing with the second wave of the zombie outbreak, and this time it looked and felt like it was more organized than simply undead fuckers running through the streets taking random bites out of people. This time the zekes were in it to win it.
Carter had pretty much said the same thing, in that brief transmission he made, ‘before he had to go dark on another bullshit mission.’ But his advice was clear — sty alert, fight them where you find them, and start thinking about an exit strategy.
Peters watched Rachel as she pretended the doll was talking to the Chihuahua, then watched as the puppy growled at the doll, then locked its annoying little incisors around the raggedy head, and then run away with it under his desk. “Oh well, honey,” he said to the girl and shrugged his shoulders.
Peters listened as the reports came in, as the teams fought the columns of Zekes, and tried to advance, or back up, and then encounter still more groups. The smart thing for them to do would be to coordinate, team up, and blast their way through any spot. When it came to Zekes, the only thing that mattered was numbers. He listened as his son was firing his weapon while communicating that same idea to the other team leaders. Some were panicking, some were taking losses. It sounded like they were facing a couple hundred Zekes, separate columns lead by what were clearly platoon leaders.
All Peters could do was listen as some of his people died, and some kept their heads and shot their way out of trouble. His son was one of the survivors, again, and he listened as Petey fought, kept his own team together and cobbled together the rest of the squads into a unified column that finally rolled its way out of the streets of Albuquerque and headed for home.
Chapter 20
“Let’s get something straight right now — I don’t want to hear any John Henry jokes, ballads or witticisms,” Jimmy said.
“But would you take a steam-hammer,” Roy said.
“Alright, I asked for that one,” Jimmy said, “but no more.”
“Chief, you want to explain to us one more time why we’re going to spend the next two weeks digging a tunnel into a government facility,” Roy said.
“If the scientists are still alive in there, they’re either working on a cure or trying to turn Zeke into a new kind of weapon,” I said.
“As if the original recipe wasn’t tasty enough,” Jimmy said.
“What do you think the odds are they are being held hostage,” Roy said.
“Possible, but slim. These kind of science geeks do stuff that’s so esoteric they could just carry around an empty bucket all day and no one would no any better,” I said.
“Ah, ha! The empty bucket! Then you were in the military,” Jimmy said.
“Why aren’t you stripped down to your mythical chest?” I said.
The digging went pretty much as expected, hard and slow, but we made better time, almost 30 feet a day, because we all knew about the organized attacks on the survivor camps. Along the way the only levity we had was the mental wagering we did on whether or not we were going to break through into a room full of pet Zekes. And the general weirdness of using a glorified bomb shelter from a threat that never came to break into a similar facility that was probably conspiring to amplify the one we now faced.
The bomb shelter was in the same condition in which it had been abandoned — spare, clean, stocked with probably inedible, 50-year old MREs, though the guys debated on whether aging might improve the stroganoff, and most of all, spooky. It had been built to protect us against a threat of our own making, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many groups of survivor had opted for subterranean hidey-holes, that people like Ralph Peters had rejected.
For security reasons, it had been decided that we wouldn’t use power digging tools or blasting equipment, and that radio silence would be observed. We could figure on the guys above us monitoring military radio, and maybe even shortwave and sat-phones. We just didn’t know what we were up against, and since it was just the three of us, we didn’t even know what we were going to do once we got inside — beyond a quick sit-report back to Breem, we were going to take it as it came. Jimmy said our job was the same as always, ‘to do some VanDammage,’ and Roy, well, his feelings had not taken an optimistic turn.
That was likely due to our short list of options — if we felt we, or what remained of the world, faced unacceptable risks, we were authorized to use the explosive charges we did bring to cripple whatever the mad scientists were working on. And there was another option that Breem had told only to me.
So we dug, and hauled dirt, and laughed and, on some days, forgot what we were in the middle of, and just became guys doing a tough, shitty job, like in the old days, when someone was always stepping on your head while feeding you a line about what a great country we lived in. When I went to sleep those nights, I often thought about how civilization was just a dressed-up charade to make you forget about your mortality, whereas in the new and improved world of Zeke-dom, we had been thrown back on the veldt, running away from tigers during the day and reliving the terror in the night. And still, we were too exhausted to invent a mythology or a religion out of it.
When we came up against the wall of the lab, it was early afternoon, and we had already been digging since five in the am, so we decided to take a siesta and try for the element of surprise. Before withdrawing, Jimmy agreed to widen the final approach area, and Roy set about planting a few charges along the walls, in case of a hasty retreat.
The next morning, we found luck upon luck. The wall we broke down was the back area of an abandoned break room. No lights were on, and it obviously wasn’t in use and hadn’t been for some time.
“Looks like their not at full strength,” Jimmy said.
“Which was just under a hundred full-time geeks that lived here around the clock. Security and day workers came and went and it looks like most of them are MIA,” I said.
“ZIA,” Roy corrected.
“You want to lead the way, fearless leader,” Jimmy said.
I was already at the door and realized I might as well have been in Hitler’s bunker to deliver the message, ‘hey, why don’t you guys chill the fuck out?’
“Times like this, I’m glad we got uniforms,” I said.
“I thought they told you guys in the academy that the uniform is a target,” Roy said.
“Let’s put the ‘ary’ in expeditionary and see what’s going on,” Jimmy said.
I upholstered my sidearm and opened the door, just as Vinny DeMaio was coming around the corner, eating a burrito with one hand and carrying a stack of papers in the other.
“If you don’t like what’s going on here, now’s your chance to tell someone,” I said.
Chapter 21
DeMaio’s eyes scanned the ceiling before he hissed, “get back inside that room, I’ll be right there.”
Remarkably, I did what he said. Once inside I told the others, who immediately backed up to the tunnel, just in case.
DeMaio was back inside of five minutes, having lost the papers. And the burrito. “Dude, you are lucky. There’s no surveillance cams down this end, and all the testosterone is guarding the labs.”
“I’m Sergeant Zach Carter, of the Zombie Expeditionary Detail.”
“Wow. T
he fucking world as we know it has come to an end and someone had the time to come up with an inanity of that magnitude.”
“Wasn’t my idea.”
“Fair enough. After what I’ve done I make Eichmann look like a pitiful bureaucrat.”
“We’re here for information, this lab has been dark since the beginning.”
“Right, that would be thanks to our shit for brains director, who kept coming up with bright ideas that led us straight into the mouth of madness.”
“What have you guys been doing down here? Besides eating fresh burritos.”
“Very observant. Yeah, we’re getting resupplied by some rich guy who’s been pushing Sinclair, that’s the director, to come up with some answers, and maybe a cure, or maybe a weapon.”
Zach Carter, Zombie Killer Page 7