by Joe McKinney
“You do that?” Kelly asked.
“Is that why we’ve never seen these aerofluyts before now?” Jacob asked. He’d risen from the cot and was standing on shaky legs.
“Jacob,” Kelly said. “Get back in bed.”
“No, no,” he said. “I’m fine. And I want to hear this. Is that why we’ve never seen the aerofluyts before now?”
Miriam nodded. “They have carefully controlled flight paths that keep them away from the established communities. The caravans, like the one you described, Chelsea, see them sometimes, but that can’t be helped. The regular communities, though, those are off-limits.”
Kelly waved her hand in the air like she wanted to dismiss all that. “What about the triune brain? You were telling me about that.”
“Yes,” Miriam said. “So for years we’ve relied on morphic field technology. But about fifteen years ago some of our medical community started noticing a simultaneous rise in children born with autism and a rapid rise in Alzheimer’s cases in people in their middle age. Both trends are accelerating, unfortunately. Some of those same researchers went back to the triune brain theory, which was first developed by a neuroscientist named Paul D. MacLean back in the 1960s.
“His idea was that the human brain was divided into three parts. You had the primitive reptilian core, the basal ganglia, which, incidentally, is the only part of the brain to still show signs of function in reanimates. Paired with that is the paleomammalian complex, or the limbic system, which consists of a number of parts of the brain and regulates things like emotion, certain types of behaviors, and how motivated a person can be. The third part of the brain is the neomammalian complex, which is only present in humans and gives us the power of speech and other higher forms of thought.”
“Okay,” Kelly said. “I got that. But how does that have anything to do with zombies?”
“MacLean’s theory was thrown out in the late twentieth century and replaced with more involved theories of how the brain functions,” Miriam said. “But zombies changed all that. As soon as people started studying reanimates, we learned that the higher cognitive functions of the brain were nonexistent. Anybody who’s ever watched a zombie try to work its way past a simple obstacle can tell you that. Researchers found that there was limited activity in the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, and the amygdalae portions of the brain—all part of MacLean’s paleomammalian complex, by the way—but in the main, only the reptilian part—actually, that’s a misnomer, because the basal ganglia is present in all vertebrates and therefore probably dates to the common ancestor of all vertebrates, long before reptiles—but anyway, only the basal ganglia showed any considerable signs of activity in reanimates. MacLean’s model of the brain seemed to explain what was going on with the reanimates, and so the model of the triune brain was dusted off and revamped.”
“And calling someone a Triune means what?” Kelly asked.
Miriam frowned deeply. “It means that a person is a follower of the Triune Theory. In most of the scientific community, it’s an insult. Like calling someone a Luddite, if you know that term.”
Kelly shook her head.
“It’s not important,” Miriam said.
“It means that believers in that tripe haven’t got a lick of common sense,” Stu said.
“Will you please put a fucking sock in it?” Miriam said.
The whole room went quiet.
“Please,” she said. “Just for a minute.” Miriam motioned to the suits along the side wall. “Stu, will you and Juliette please go make the battle suits ready? Please. I got a quick look at what we’re dealing with down there on the ground level, and I think we’re going to need them.”
“Yes, of course,” Stu said.
He shrank away without another word, and Juliette followed right behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “But as you can probably see, this issue has sharply divided Temple society.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Kelly said.
“Here’s the thing. When the first studies were done on zombies and the triune brain model, researchers found that the morphic fields acted directly on the basal ganglia. That formed the basis for our shepherding strategies, which we used to control the movements of the larger herds.”
“But . . . ?”
Miriam smiled. “You caught that. Good. Well, the problem, as I mentioned, was that no one seemed to know what to make of the limited activity still present in the limbic system. It didn’t seem to influence zombie behavior in any way, but it couldn’t be explained away, either. It still hasn’t. That’s where the Triunes come in.
“My brother, Alfred, started out as a neurosurgeon. People used to tell me all the time that he was the most brilliant man they’d ever met, and I would always have to agree. It pained me to admit it, because Alfred could be a real prick about it, but they were right. He was brilliant. Freakishly smart, actually. And, like most of the scientific community, when he first heard the Triune Theory that morphic fields were somehow changing the zombie brain by acting on the limbic system, he dismissed it as sloppy reasoning.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said, “but the brain is complex. I’ve read stories about people who suffered terrible head trauma, who nonetheless relearned things like language and how to walk. The different parts of the brain overlap and can even change function, can’t they?”
Miriam nodded. “Absolutely. Spoken like a true believer in the Triune Theory, by the way. It was that same line of thinking that led my brother to change his thoughts on the Triune Theory. About ten years ago, he flipped to the other side. He converted, if you will. He even sent me a note one day saying that he had become the Paul to MacLean’s Triune Church. I didn’t even know what he was talking about at the time, but he began speaking out publicly against morphic field technology. He claimed it was responsible for the increased incidence of autism and the rise in cases of the early onset of Alzheimer’s. I don’t know if you’ve had a girlfriend start a new diet and she gets all weird about it, and it’s all you hear from her, but that’s what he was like in those days. I couldn’t have a conversation with him that didn’t turn into a debate on morphic field technology. It put a rift in our family that never healed. He made a lot of enemies in the public sphere, as well. The same people who used to tell me how brilliant he was started calling him a crackpot.”
“Why? Because he was saying that the morphic field generators were working on living brains the same way they did on the zombies?”
“Essentially, yes. You have a better grasp on this than you think you do, young lady. Alfred’s main idea was that the living person’s brain was not all that different from the zombie brain. Take away the neomammalian complex and you have, essentially, a zombie brain. His idea was that our constant exposure to morphic fields was somehow damaging our brains.”
“Which should be easy to prove, right?”
“You would think, but no one ever could. The main problem is that morphic fields obey the laws of electromagnetism. If there was truly something to the Triune Theory, then there should have been a viable circuit working within the brain, two poles with the circuit going between them, right? But nobody, including my brilliant brain surgeon brother, could ever find that second pole. And that’s why the theory has split our society the way it has. Half the population thinks this technology is just fine. The other half thinks that it is responsible for killing us all. If Alfred’s theories turn out to be true, a lot of people will stand to lose an awful lot of money, not to mention their professional reputations. You can see why he made enemies.”
Kelly pointed to the notebooks. “Could I show you something I saw in there? Please? I think your brother may have found that second pole.”
The two women carried the notebooks off to a far corner of the room, leaving Jacob standing there.
Which was just as well. He hadn’t followed half of their conversation. Hell, he hadn’t even understood that much of it. As soon as Kelly started in on her science stuff he just
tuned it out. He’d learned enough of it to get through school, but as far as he was concerned, that was the end of his involvement with the subject. Anyway, whatever he actually needed to know, Kelly would dumb down for him later.
What really interested him were the space suits parked along the side wall. No, not space suits, he reminded himself. Miriam had called them battle suits, and after seeing her use the suit downstairs, he wondered why the term hadn’t occurred to him already.
“Did you guys build these?” he asked Stu and Juliette.
Stu glanced back over his shoulder at him. “No, these are antiques. We just keep them running.”
“Antiques? They look pretty impressive to me.”
“They’re relics from the outbreak. They used to outfit every soldier with one of these.”
“An army of these?”
“That’s what I’m told. Whole hell of a lot of good it did them, though.”
Jacob could hardly imagine that. If one of these things could level the crowd he’d faced downstairs, an army of them must have been able to make short work of a herd.
Even a huge one.
With a phalanx of battle suits taking the field, the zombies should have been rolled back into oblivion.
“The early military versions weren’t like this,” Stu said, almost as though he could read Jacob’s thoughts on his face. “We’ve made a few improvements.”
And despite the fact that Stu’s pride was still smarting from the send-off Miriam had given him, he was obviously a man proud of his work. Weird little fellow that he was, Jacob felt a sort of kinship with him at that moment. He was a fellow tinkerer.
Jacob leaned closer. “Show me,” he said.
“Look here,” Stu said, pointing to the bib that covered the front of the suit. “The suit itself is two-centimeter-thick Kevlar armor. By itself, it’ll stop everything up to and including a fifty-caliber round. But we’ve added this.” Stu thumped the bib proudly. “Five centimeters of Kevlar, micro-grafted to the base plate. You couldn’t punch through this with a truck. And don’t even get me started on the suit’s weapon’s systems.”
“I saw the gun she was firing,” Jacob said. He pulled his pistol from the small of his back. “Does it use the same ammunition as this? The same compressed-air cartridges?”
Stu stared at the weapon for a long moment, and then traded a look with Juliette. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
“I took it off one of the men who attacked us today. I’m out of ammo, though.”
“We’ve got my ammunition,” Stu said. He reached for the weapon. “May I?” he said.
“Yeah, sure.”
Jacob handed it over to him.
Stu turned the weapon over in his hands and whistled. He looked over at Juliette. “This is a real Glock.”
“No,” Jacob said. “I have a bunch of Glocks back home. There’s no logo on it, no serial number.”
“This is a Glock,” Stu said again. “A Glock 90. You have any idea how rare this is? These aren’t even available for lab testing. From what I was told, they were made especially for the Austrian Auftragskillers. How did you say you got this?”
“We were attacked earlier this morning. One of the men who attacked us had this on him.”
“And you took it from him?”
“Yes.”
“Just took it from him? Just like that?”
“We fought,” Jacob said. “I shot him in the head with it.”
Stu swallowed the lump in his throat and then handed the weapon back to Jacob. “We have ammunition for that. It uses the same round as the mini gun here. I’ll get you some.”
He went over to a nearby workbench and brought back a green metal box of ammunition. “I don’t know how many magazines you have,” Stu said, “but I think that should be enough.”
“It’s plenty,” Jacob said. “Thanks.”
He ejected the magazine from his weapon and studied it. The design, while sleek and streamlined, wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, and it took him back to his school days, when he got his first lessons in firearms. “This,” his instructor had said, holding up a battered-looking service pistol with a blue barrel and walnut grips, “is a Colt 1911, so named for the year it first entered production. It was one of the first semiautomatic handguns ever made. For those of you who don’t know shit about math, that was more than two hundred years ago. But you will find that this weapon is no different from any of the other weapons you will be working with in this course. It served the U.S. military faithfully through four wars. Its design has been tweaked, but it has never been improved upon. Learn this now, you lunkheads, perfection was found early in the handgun, and it’s hard to do better than perfection.”
Jacob smiled at the memory as he thumbed the first compressed-air round into the magazine. Though he’d never loaded one of these weapons before, and indeed, had never even seen one before today, it still worked almost exactly like the Colt 1911 he’d fired for the first time that day, so many years earlier. Truly, it was hard to do better than perfection.
Once it was loaded, he slapped the magazine back into his pistol.
“That is a good gun,” he said. “Now, tell me more about that battle suit. I saw when you took it off of her it made a hissing sound. Is it pressurized?”
Stu swallowed another lump in his throat.
His gaze hadn’t left the pistol in Jacob’s hand.
“Stu?” Jacob said.
“Yeah,” Stu said. “It’s pressurized. On the surface it recycles and filters air, but when submerged it can sustain the wearer for up to three hours on its stored air and carbon dioxide filters.”
Jacob was about to respond when he felt a shudder go through the floor.
He stood up, weapon at the ready.
“What is it, Jacob?” Kelly said.
“Didn’t you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“That bump.”
Beside Kelly, Miriam stood up and closed her eyes, straining her senses against the quiet. “The zombies down below,” she finally said. “They must be trying to get through the screen. You don’t have to worry about it. I sealed it.”
“No,” Jacob said. “That came from below us.”
“That’s impossible,” Miriam said. “There’s nothing below us.”
“There is now.”
Jacob listened to the sounds of the building, the mechanical groan of the air-conditioning, the wind curling around the balconies. But something didn’t seem right. Ten years of working in Arbella’s constabulary had taught him to trust his instincts. He’d learned how to recognize that sensation when the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.
“Clear the doorway,” he said. He brought his pistol up and squared off on the door. “Get back,” he said. “Get away from the door.”
Chelsea looked like she had no idea what he was talking about, but Kelly directed the girl out of Jacob’s way.
The next instant the door crashed open. Four men in dark black body armor rushed through the door, all of them armed with rifles. They came through the door using a technique that Jacob had learned during his early days at the constabulary. It was called a dynamic entry. They hit the doorway hard and fast and then rolled out along the walls, spacing out so that they maximized muzzle coverage over the entire room. Jacob had done the same entry himself back in Arbella when he and his fellow deputies had gone in after Old Man Richards the night he threatened to slash his wife’s throat.
Jacob knew what to expect, and how to beat it.
He ran to the wall to his right, keeping low and screening himself behind the furniture. The armored men were caught by surprise. They tried to track Jacob with their weapons, but he was faster. He squeezed off two quick rounds, striking the men along the right side of the room squarely in the chest.
It was much like the El Presidente exercise he’d learned back in school.
A single shooter confronted by multiple attackers is statistically more likely to
survive the assault if he first plants a round in each attacker, then doubles back to finish off the wounded.
Stay still, and you’re guaranteed to die.
Take the time to double-tap, and again, you’re guaranteed to die.
The only way to live was to move fast and shoot fast, one target one round. Put the enemy back on their heels, and then readjust to the situation.
That’s what Jacob did. He put a round to the chest into both of the men who went to the right side of the room, then ducked back behind the furniture and came up with another two shots center mass into the chests of the two men on the opposite side of the room.
Only then did he stop to look at the damage he’d caused.
Or, rather, hadn’t.
All four men were still on their feet, untouched.
Jacob raised his pistol again and shot two rounds into the helmeted figure closest to him. Both shots hit the man’s faceplate and exploded harmlessly. The man rocked back on his heels, but aside from the shock of the explosion, was none the worse for wear.
“Get him,” a man’s voice said from the doorway.
One of the armored men ran at him. Jacob tried to shoot him, but he wasn’t fast enough. The armored man tackled him to the ground. The others piled on soon after. Jacob felt knees and fists smashing into his face, and groping hands trying to pull his arms behind his back.
He twisted and kicked.
He’d been taught that you fight with everything you have. You never give them an inch. He even tried to bite one of the men who got his gloved hands too close.
But there was little he could do.
Trying to bite got him a fist in the mouth.
They finally got his hands pulled his back. He struggled again, trying to get his hands as far apart as possible, but they held him fast.
The next instant he felt something like hot wax pouring over his wrists.