The Valley of Shadows - eARC

by John Ringo

  “We’ll hold the fort here,” Kaplan said. “Seems like a pretty quiet night. Still planning to pull the handle tomorrow?”

  “Bateman is on board,” Tom said. “A lot is predicated on how the remaining board votes, but with Bateman committed, I think that it’s a lock. If the Fed suspends activity, then it becomes a no-brainer. So far they are still riding it out. We can stay in the market from the alternate trading sites, and if it all goes for a ball of chalk, we’ll evacuate those too.”

  Tom looked back at the clearly skeptical intel lead and tried to reassure him.

  “No worries Paul,” Tom said, his original accent drifting in. “Safe as houses.”

  Later, Paul would reflect on his boss’s statement. He would remember everything: the chalk stripe Armani suit that he was wearing, the faint smell of the hand sanitizer that everyone was practically bathing in, even the color of the office carpet upon which they stood. He would consider Smith’s optimism, the offhand confidence and that smile.

  He would remember that feeling crawling up his spine and would then swear on his medal of Saint Joshua, patron saint of all intelligence officers, to never, ever ignore it again.

  For the moment, he limited his response to the basics. It wasn’t a CLD he was worried about. He simply recognized what Smith looked like in full “Train” mode.

  “We also serve who only stay behind and monitor the VHF,” he said with a dutiful smile. “I’ll also keep the SOC land line clear in case you need to call in. Bring back some takeout, would you?”

  * * *

  Losing an argument was not entirely an unknown to Joanna. However, failing to convince the deputy assistant mayor to even temporarily defer his intent to explore the possibility of collaborating with Overture was a clear signal. She was out. The agreement between her and the actual mayor was almost two months old and for weeks he hadn’t responded to e-mails or phone calls.

  From anyone.

  Apart from him, only a few critical OEM staff outside of Schweizer and Gauge, and of course Dominguez’s cadre of loyal Manhattan based police officers, no one else was briefed on both the origin of the vaccine and her role in producing it. However, Joanna was a master of detecting shifts in the political winds.

  And they shifted. That meant someone was going to be the designated victim. Since it wasn’t Joanna’s hand steering the new course for the City, she had to assume that she herself was at risk.

  Rather than attend the Overture-led meeting, she had moved her personal coterie out of the secure housing area and into a new apartment, even though they had to leave many of their things behind. Her own information analyst had delivered a stunning update on the situation in Washington D.C. and other capitals.

  Although there was still a federal government issuing communications, the basis for economic activity had effectively ground to halt. His sources suggested that unknown even to the banks, the Fed was going to suspend activity while major trading operations were relocated away from the large cities. The number of commercial aircraft still flying had dropped to less than five percent of normally scheduled flights. Where flights still operated, there was no Federal security apparatus visible.

  She had actually found a sliver of humor in the thought that the blue gloved goons of the Transportation Security Agency were gone.

  Tomorrow she would ask Smith to accept her remaining staff for immediate transport, right after she gave him the nonpublic information regarding the Fed’s plans.

  That should do it.

  * * *

  The desk sergeant looked up when he heard the first scream echo from the stairwell. He was well trained and decisive, so his first action was to activate external door locks, securing the physical envelope of the building from outside infiltration. The second, louder scream convinced him that this wasn’t a drill, prompting activation of the building security alarm.

  That woke everyone up.

  On the fifth floor, where groups with at least one parent shared converted offices, adults jerked awake. Off-duty cops armed themselves and looked for the source of the emergency.

  A twelve-year veteran with two small kids of his own stepped into the center hallway and, hearing screaming from the stairwell, cracked the door in order to see its origin.

  His eyes opened and he hesitated for a single, fatal moment before he raised his pistol. His wife, who had followed him as far as the lobby door watched as the door appeared to open the rest of the way by itself. Small figures, some in the remnants of pajamas, swarmed out of the stairwell, knocking the policeman down.

  His pistol sounded twice, but the first zombie to reach him fixed its teeth in his throat and started shaking back and forth hard enough to jerk the man around on the tile floor. The infected was joined by several others. His wife echoed the earlier screams as she saw her husband literally dismembered in front her. Scores of children, some keening, some growling, pelted towards the first person they saw.

  She flattened herself against the door, as though to bar it with her arms. Her own children were behind it.

  She survived her husband by less than a minute.

  The door to the next sleeping area was breached well before that.

  * * *

  The staff in the Security Operation Center for Bank of the Americas had joked among themselves that once the head of security and his nieces went to dinner, his intelligence chief would keep his hand physically on the land-line handset, the better to instantly call his boss if the security situation changed.

  That was a base canard. At some points during the evening, Paul Rune was as much as thirty feet from the command desk and its hotline to the boss. Which was the distance to the nearest bathroom.

  The truth was that duty in the darkened SOC was boring. The usual twenty-four-hour news feeds had been reporting the same slow moving zombie crisis for weeks. Even the large flatscreens that allowed watch standers to click from view point to view point within the city were boring when there wasn’t much activity to monitor.

  In addition to the shared video take from the Domain Awareness System, or DAM, Paul kept an eye on the aggregate bank building video feed and one ear cocked to the three different BERT related channels where the different units operated by the banks and contractors coordinated, reporting on collection numbers, street hazards and other routine matters.

  He paused and held his hand up as a panicked voice sounded on the desk speaker.

  “Any unit, this is MetBank Zero Three. We are at Union Square with three infected in the back. We have three Overture trucks boxing us in, and lighting us with spots. Need immediate support!”

  A few transmissions blanketed each other, but Paul heard a clear reply from another BERT as the different first responders started calling in. He turned to the watch standers.

  “You!” He stabbed at one person with a blunt forefinger. “Get Union Square up on the map screen. Get me a distance from Fattore’s. You!”

  He picked a second person.

  “Call the boss, give him a sitrep, tell him we need to extract him from midtown.”

  He leaned over the desk and pressed the intercom button for all of the security stations.

  “This is the SOC,” he grated out. “Button up the building. No one in, no one out without permission from the SOC.”

  He turned back into the radio chatter just in time to hear the Goldbloom Chief Security Officer, Smith’s peer and a personal friend, go radio dark in midtransmission.

  That was not good. Very not good. He turned back to the communicator.

  “Have you reached Smith yet?”

  * * *

  Ding clutched a small piece of bloodstained blue fabric. It was the top half of a pajama shirt. The laundry tape inside the neck read “Dominguez.” He, Tangarelli and several other cops from Manhattan precincts had fought their way from room to room.

  Clearing zombies.

  Killing their children.

  Once, there was a brief intnercine firefight when one father saw his inf
ected child shot by another cop. It had taken precious minutes to resolve the fight, which left several cops dead and as many wounded.

  During the fight to reach any dormitory areas that might have been unbreached, one of the Ajax units had arrived in response to the desperate radio calls. Six big men in complete Explosive Ordnance Disposal suits had stepped up to the front line, three carrying military issue M240 belt-fed machine guns, and three more carrying heavy satchels of linked thirty caliber ammunition, boxed in green-wrapped containers of two hundred rounds each. Each shooter was accompanied by a single ammo bearer.

  The pairs stepped up to the doors that demarcated the furthest points of advance reached by the pistol- and rifle-equipped cops and tried, as selectively as possible, to shoot only confirmed infected. Twenty horrible minutes later Dominguez was standing in the fourth-floor dormitory shared by the kids of single-parent cops.

  A lot of the cops were single parents.

  He was surrounded by a sea of his bloodied, deafened and sobbing brothers and sisters.

  Dominguez couldn’t even form the words. How could this have happened? The security was tight—all the adults and teens were vaccinated.

  In the nannies’ office he found one of the caregivers. She seemed to have died with all of her clothes on, unlike nearly all of the infected in this catastrophe, child and adult alike. Her body was only partially eaten, mostly the exposed soft tissue on the face and neck.

  He looked away, even more sickened, and squeezed his eyes shut as he wrung the bloody pajama top between his hands. He could feel a scream building inside him. When it broke, the world would end. He would end it. No one should have to live in a world with this much pain.

  He opened his eyes, and found that he was staring at a blood-splashed art display.

  Pinned in the middle of large macaroni smiley face was a single, perfect white carnation.

  His eyes widened.

  * * *

  Paul was frantic but successfully maintained a professionally calm exterior.

  The cell phone network appeared to be completely down, which was impossible. The redundant systems that made up the grid in New York City was supplied by redundant, overlapping service providers. Cell towers were equipped with battery power enough to last days in the event that the grid went down. The only way that cell coverage could be interdicted was if a large-scale, very powerful military jammer operating across and on both sides of both the 3G and 4G LTE bands was stepping on all transmissions or if the city and state government implemented the antiterror protocols that suspended cell operations at the trunk level. What was more, VHF radio calls to the cars had gone unanswered, perhaps jammed.

  Only the mayor’s office, acting through OEM, and the local FBI field office, acting together, could do all that.

  The land-line call to the restaurant reached Fattore, who explained that the Smith party had left to hear some music. Something about a French philosopher or artist? Fattore didn’t know.

  Paul carefully did not tear at his hair, not that he had enough to rend, preferring a slick scalp. He calmly addressed the entire SOC staff.

  “Does anyone here know about a music performance by a French philosopher somewhere in midtown?”

  The hammering of keyboard keys announced the sudden, furious googling by some watchstanders. However, among a sea of completely puzzled looks, one hand went up, from the youngest of the crew.

  “Sir, do you mean, um, do you mean Voltaire?”

  * * *

  Tom had to admit, he had been a leetle bit optimistic. Dinner was delicious. Faith had in fact learned that some Italian dishes which she would have previously considered outré were in fact amazing. Steve had unbent enough to allow the girls a glass of red each. Stacey had been charming, and flirted gently with the maître d’. Sophia had been, well, sophisticated and thoughtful. He had even successfully steered the dinner table talk away from most mentions of the ongoing zombie apocalypse.

  However, when he succumbed to Faith’s wheedling to go to a concert in Washington Park he had probably allowed his niece too much leeway. When he assured his brother that it was going to be fine, safe even, he had definitely been overly optimistic. Touch of hubris, actually.

  On the other hand, it was his, Tom’s, family. It may not have been “safe,” but it was, probably, manageable.

  When Durante called out “Company!” and Tom saw the number of infected rushing towards the crowd in front of the stage, he didn’t automatically start shooting. Shooters he had. What he needed was the cars that they came in. It was time to depart, taking billy big steps in any direction but the zombies, which were rapidly blocking his egress route.

  A glance at his mobile phone revealed zero bars of reception.

  Joy.

  He looked at the number of infected closing on his family’s location and told Durante to go hot.

  “I’m going to go with ‘I told you so,’” his brother said.

  Steve and Stacey were back to back, using their pistols on any leakers that Durante and Faith missed, focusing mostly on the party’s flanks. As the first rounds went out, a familiar ringing started in Tom’s ears.

  Tinnitus my old friend, I’ve come to sing with you again…

  “Cell service is out,” Tom announced flatly. He looked right and saw more zombies loping towards the crowd who had been enjoying the music to that point. “Engage at will.”

  “Already on it,” Faith said, drifting right. Durante went wide to support her movement, which spread their front enough to cover Sophia, who appeared to have been arguing with a pair of grungy bohemians in skinny jeans and plaid. The concert goers appeared oblivious to any threat.

  A pair of shotgun rounds went down range with their characteristic booms. Then as clearly as if the thirteen-year-old was standing next to him, Tom heard Faith:

  “Fuck Tasers,” she said. “This is how you handle a zombie apocalypse.”

  Behind her Durante grinned and serviced targets.

  Tom’s ears continued ringing, despite the foam plugs he had provided to all for the concert. He tried to spot the cars, but between the crowd and the infected there wasn’t a clear path to where he thought they had parked.

  He really didn’t want to walk all the way downtown. He rechecked his phone, which had finished rebooting, as a very hot shotshell casing bounced off his face.

  In the background, amazingly, the concert kept rolling.

  * * *

  Tradittore’s phone was still quiet when someone broke squelch on the Push To Talk handset racked against the wall. He was scanning the weekly activity summary in the Jersey office Cosa Nova conference room, reflecting on the mundane requirements of a life of crime. Paperwork, logistics, personnel reviews. Personnel reviews! The radios were his idea, though. Tradittore had persuaded Matricardi that a little communications redundancy was a good thing, and since the PTT network was served by far more than the usual carriers, it was an additional bit of insurance against ridiculous cell charges. It didn’t hurt that PTT was harder to track than cell phones too.

  “This is Nova Two. Anyone there?” The voice belonged to one of the team leads in a Cosa Nova BERT. Tradittore recognized the voice and then picked up and keyed the handset, which looked like a slightly chunky smartphone, albeit it with a monochrome screen.

  “What’s up, Tony?”

  “Ah, hey!” Tony said, sounding nervous. “Sorry to bug you on the radio Joey, but the damn cell phones are down. We’re working the Island late shift tonight, and there is a big ass road block on West Fifty-Eighth, not too far from Columbus Circle. The cops are checking every car. Anything I should know about? Over.”

  The lieutenant’s frustration almost peaked. He looked at his cell phone screen and saw the crosshatched symbol where the reception bars should have been.

  “Since when do you bother me about a roadblock?” he shot back. “The cops are probably just doing checks for infected.”

  “Well, we just watched them divert another contract
or truck into the closed lane, and throw all the riders in the back of a cop van,” Tony said. “This ain’t normal, Boss. I mean, we’re a few cars back and this sure as hell doesn’t smell right.”

  Tradittore thought for a moment.

  “Can you turn around, over?”

  “West. Fifty. Eighth. Means one-way,” Tony responded sarcastically. “Even if there wasn’t a butt-to-bumper line of cars, just where would I turn around?”

  “Show them your creds. Keep me the radio keyed so I can hear. Worst case, pass the radio to the guy in charge there.”

  Hand holding junior gangsters. As if Joey didn’t have better things to do. What he would give for decently competent subordinates.

  Although there wasn’t anyone to see it, Tradittore sighed theatrically as he walked over to Matricardi’s exclusive humidor and opened the lid, selecting a custom Cohiba with a nice maduro wrapper. He sniffed it appreciatively as he listened to the cab chatter on the other end of the line. Finally, he heard Tony again, addressing what had to be a cop.

  “Good evening officer, how can I help?”

  “Put the phone down, keep you hands where I can see them, and when I tell you, get the fuck out of the car, shithead!”

  Tradittore’s spine straightened as he kept listening.

  “Whoa, whoa, officer, please aim that somewhere else! I am talking to my boss right here, on this radio. Your boss and my boss have an arrangement. We are legit contractors, see? Here are my credentials.”

  “Keep your left hand on wheel, and give me that.”

  There was some rustling sounds and then a new voice sounded.

  “This Matricardi?”

  “Number one, that’s Mr. Matricardi to you,” the Cosa Nova man bit out. “Second, my name is Tradittore, and I handle the assholes so my boss doesn’t have to. Third, we have a deal with the deputy chief of police—do you need me to call Captain Dominguez to straighten your ass out, or are you gonna apologize and let my guys go do their job?” Tradittore relaxed his finger on the mic button.

  There was a low, mirthless chuckle from the other end.

  “Tradittore. Yeah, I remember you. You were the dickhead in the sharkskin suit who was busy fellating Matricardi every five minutes. You’ll do. My name is Dominguez, and I have a modification to our deal that I want you to run and tell your boss about as soon as I hang up. Are you ready?”