Weaponized

by David Wellington

  The colonel was busy giving orders. Every other living person in the camp was busy carrying them out. It was my big chance to ask the PostMortem Combatants what was going on—and I had one shot at doing it before I was shipped back to the FOB, out of harm’s way and miles from the biggest story in my career.

  So I took my chances. I didn’t know I was walking into a trap.

  “Sorry about this, guy. I hope he’s right and that you’re not even a little bit aware of what’s going on,” I said. The PMC in front of me, one of the few not even scuffed by whatever had happened to the rest, didn’t respond, of course. It couldn’t. There might be a human body inside its yellow Insect-Proof Wrapper, but for all intents and purposes it was just another, cheaper kind of robot.

  I knew that. I understood it, with my brain. My heart still jumped in my chest when I spread the last of my liquid-camera goo on my hand, then wiped it across the dead guy’s face.

  I needed to know what the PMCs were being sent into—what had damaged so many of them, and what the colonel expected them to do about it. The colonel wasn’t going to let me tag along for their mission so I would have to get the next best thing—a POV shot of the fighting.

  For the circuitry in the tube to record properly, it had to be within three meters of the liquid camera. I cut a little hole in the PMC’s wrapper with a multitool and shoved the tube inside, against his chest. I had no idea how I was going to retrieve it later when it had recorded the video I wanted, but I figured I could worry about that when the time came. Once I was safely back at the base, I would have all the time in the world to figure it out. First, though, I had to get back to my tent without being seen. If the colonel knew what I was doing—well, I didn’t want to think about it. I turned around and figured in the chaos of the corporals’ fixing up the PMCs, I could avoid detection just a little longer, if I kept my head down, if I moved quietly behind that pile of crates—

  “Interesting,” the colonel said, behind me. He tapped me on the back with a combat baton.

  It felt like he was holding an icicle and running it up and down my spine. I tried to think of a good excuse why I was skulking around the PMCs, but my brain absolutely refused to help me.

  “I could have you up on charges for tampering with army materiel,” he said, smiling. I’d never seen him look so happy. “I could have you charged with treason. Giving aid to the enemy.”

  “Maybe,” I said, because it was the best I could think of, “I could just drop that story altogether. You know, the one about the medical supplies, I mean, after all—”

  “I have a better idea,” he said, and tapped me again with his baton.

  It was one of the new models that has a military-grade taser built into the business end. It felt like I was a light switch, and someone had just flipped me to OFF.

  I woke up with yellow Mylar pressed against my face.

  I’ve spent my career describing other peoples’ pain and torment. I’ve seen things I will never, never write about, smelled things no normal girl from New Jersey should ever have had to smell.

  I’ve never been more scared than at that moment. I have nightmares about it still.

  I tried to gasp for breath, but Mylar filled my mouth and my nose. I clawed and tore at my face, trying to clear my airway, and found my hands were swathed in the yellow plastic as well, so that I couldn’t even get a good grip on the IPW covering my face. My heart raced and threatened to burst. My sweat glands went into overdrive, and every muscle in my body started to tense with a flood of adrenaline.

  I couldn’t see, smell, or hear anything. I was in total darkness. I felt my body start to shut down.

  Then a trickle of oxygen found its way to my mouth. I breathed in sweet air and realized I might live through the next thirty seconds. It helped a little to cut the fear.

  As it transpired, when I’d been sealed into my own personal IPW, the hood hadn’t been completely fused shut. Otherwise I would have asphyxiated long before I woke up. With hands like useless paws, I somehow managed to tear the hood open some more, enough to get my nose and mouth clear, then my eyes.

  I was lying on my back in the desert looking up at a trillion stars. They’ve never looked brighter or more beautiful.

  Eventually I started to think again. To think about what had happened to me. The colonel had decided to get rid of me. That much I already knew. I would have assumed that after he stunned me, he would have just shot me and had me buried somewhere far away from any sign of habitation. But no, I should have known better. He knew all about covering his ass, about always giving himself a believable excuse.

  I sat up and looked around me and saw twenty-nine PMCs sitting near me in their rest postures—heads between their knees, arms folded behind their necks. A couple of them had fallen over.

  I got up, still wearing my IPW, and scanned the horizon, looking for any sign of civilization. There was none. I had no idea where I was and no way to figure it out. Underneath the wrapper my pockets felt empty. I was unarmed, with no food or water, and the only people in the world who knew where I was were trying to kill me. It looked like they might succeed.

  I could see the cover story the colonel had worked up for my death. Ever-so-curious journalist demands to be sent into the danger zone. When the army says no, fearing for her safety, she disguises herself as one of the new anonymous soldiers and goes anyway. Tragically, she does not make it back.

  It was a pretty good plan, I had to admit. My editor might ask some uncomfortable questions when he heard the cover story, but he would have no leads, no witnesses who weren’t 100 percent loyal to the colonel. There would be nothing anyone could do.

  Without a sound or any kind of warning, the PMCs around me started to wake up. With a horrible uniformity they rose stiffly to their feet. I couldn’t see the sergeant with the controller, but I knew that he didn’t need to be anywhere nearby: He could control them via satellite from anywhere in the world. What mattered was that they were here and ready. Whatever it was they’d come to fight, it was on its way.

  The enemies came over the nearest hilltop a few minutes later, picking their way very carefully down the loose rocky slope. I had no idea what kind of armaments they might be packing—enough to smash PMCs to bits, I knew. That meant they’d be carrying heavier stuff than just AK-47s. Maybe they were insurgents with RPGs and hand grenades, maybe just a mortar team. I braced myself for the first explosions.

  There were no explosions. Instead, the enemy just kept coming, one step at a time, with a slowness that made me want to scream. It wasn’t the only strange thing about them. For one thing they were mostly naked. Each of them had no more than a blanket to cover himself. And they all wore them the same strange way—draped over their heads, obscuring their faces completely.

  As completely as the hoods of the IPWs around me.

  The problem with waging warfare on the cheap is that anybody can do it. The chips that transformed our dead soldiers into PMCs cost less than ten dollars and required no special equipment to implant—the colonel had been quite clear on this. The thing is, in the more urbanized parts of Muzhikistan, an AK-47 would cost fifteen dollars. For the insurgents, making their own zombified troops would actually save them money.

  They did not carry weapons any more than our PMCs did. Poking out from under their blankets, their fingers were withered and spindly and looked like claws. Very quickly I realized that that was exactly what they’d become.

  When the two groups of undead soldiers met in battle, they slammed into each other with all the strength they possessed. There was no concern for taking cover, for flanking the enemy, for any of the small-unit tactics modern soldiers have had drilled into them. This was like a war of chimpanzees, with brute strength the only thing that mattered. PMCs grappled and slapped at the insurgent dead. The insurgents tore and pulled at the IPWs our troops wore. Bones snapped. Limbs were torn free and cast aside without thought.

  It was a massacre—for both sides. The colonel had said
he wouldn’t let his PMCs lose this struggle, and it looked like he intended to expend every last one of his troops if he needed to. I saw them being trampled by the insurgents, sometimes a dozen or more insurgents piling on top of a PMC, holding it down until they could tear it to shreds. Others were clawed at and beaten until they were tangled up in the shreds of their own IPWs, too constricted to move or fight.

  For a while I just stood there watching, struck immobile by the horror of what I saw. It couldn’t last, though. I’d been sent here to die, after all, and I was still wearing most of an IPW.

  An insurgent caught me unaware, grabbing at my legs with emaciated arms. Its—his—blanket had fallen away in the melee, and his mummified face stared up at me unseeing. I shrieked and tried to kick him off, but his undead strength was far too much for me, and I began to fall. The only thing that kept me from being dragged down and torn to bits was that another insurgent came up by my side and grabbed my arm. Then he started to pull, until I felt my bones twisting in my shoulder.

  The pain was intense. I clamped my eyes shut and started to pray, something I hadn’t done since I was a schoolgirl. I don’t think it was God who saved me, though.

  It was a PMC.

  I don’t know if they are programmed to come to each other’s aid. Maybe the one who saved me was just looking for fresh targets and saw the two insurgents who were pulling me in opposite directions. But a figure in bright yellow came out of nowhere then and smashed into the insurgent holding my arm, knocking him loose. Somehow I managed to slip out of the grasp of the one holding my legs. My IPW slid off of me as I struggled free, and I think the dead insurgent may have wanted to kill the wrapper more than it wanted to kill me.

  Once I was free I just ran. Ran as far and as fast as I could. A couple of the insurgents pursued me, but I had one distinct advantage over them—my desperation. I still had something to lose.

  I didn’t go back until hours later. Even then I took my time about it, hiding in the rocky debris of a hillside until I was sure, absolutely sure, that all of the insurgent dead were gone. It took all my courage to approach the place again, but I had to do it.

  On the battlefield only one figure was moving, and it didn’t look very dangerous. It had only one functioning arm and was using it to try to dig its own grave. To carry out program fifty. It wasn’t making much progress.

  I helped it as best I could, digging at the loose earth with my bare fingers. I didn’t know—I’ll never know—if it was the PMC that saved me when I should have died. I owed that dead man at least as much.

  I hadn’t come back to bury the unquiet dead but for a task almost as grisly. It took me a long time to search all the bodies that lay motionless on that field. The whole time I was convinced that the colonel was going to come rolling over the hill in his troop transport, that he knew I was still alive and was coming to finish the job himself if he had to. But I had one last thing I had to do. Then I could flee once more. I could head over the hill, up toward higher ground, where maybe I could see some sign of the pipeline. I could follow it to some compound full of friendly engineers and maintenance crews, or maybe just to the nearest Muzhik village. Anywhere I could get some water, and after that, start my long journey home.

  But not quite yet. First, I studied the bodies and pieces of bodies all around me, looking for one particular corpse. There was no distinguishing mark on any of the IPWs, nothing to tell me I’d found the right one. Nothing—until—there.

  I bent over one dismembered PMC and saw a slightly greasy sheen on the front of its featureless hood. It had to be the one, the one I’d slathered with my liquid camera. I tore open its IPW with shaky fingers and found the tube of fake sunblock still pressed against its chest.

  The world had to see the images it held.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WEAPONIZED. Copyright © 2010 by David Wellington. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Previously published in The New Dead. ISBN: 978-0-312-55971-7. St. Martin’s Griffin edition/February 2010.

  www.stmartins.com

  e-ISBN 9781429959131