River of Night

by John Ringo

  * * *

  Eva had been hit twice, but she lived, which is more than a dozen of her team could say. Her gunshot injury was severe, but Jason personally hooked up a blood expander and disinfected the wound. The Gleaners’ surgeon might be able to save her.

  “I’m fucked,” Eva said flatly, eyeing the hole in her gut in the gray light of morning.

  “Missed the spine,” replied Jason. “Missed the great blood vessels too, or you would already be dead. Worth fixing, unless you want to stay here?”

  “Nah, not that,” the Gleaner lieutenant said from between clenched teeth. “Green. Load me up. Leave the bodies, bring the machine gun they had, maybe I can explain how I fucked this up and he’ll let me live.”

  Amazingly, Short Round had lived unscathed, despite his apparent eagerness to close with the shooters. Jason directed survivors of the attack to strip the bodies of the fallen. Intermittently, they had to shoot infected that wandered out of the treeline and followed them back to the trucks.

  The dead were left where they lay, but the severe wounds made recovering equipment messy. The fresh carrion was a draw for infected as well.

  Jason found Short Round disentangling a Franchi shotgun from the intestines of its previous bearer. This was complicated due to the additional zombie corpse that had two hands full of entrails; apparently it had been killed even as it fed.

  “So, still anxious to mix it up with these guys?” Jason inquired pleasantly.

  “Fuck that noise,” the Gleaner said as he glowered at Jason, who wore an innocent expression. “Let’s get the fuck back to camp.”

  “Taking your time, waiting things out a bit always beats staring at your own guts,” Jason replied with a glance at the tangled remains. “Even for a minute.”

  “Yeah,” Short Round said as he surveyed the littered corpses and then his ruined blue gloves. “Even for a minute.”

  * * *

  “Remember to be polite, Robbie,” Kaplan admonished. “I don’t want to have to fight our way out.”

  After crossing upstream and pondering the best way to approach the alert and well equipped defenders in Spring City, the survivors had eliminated the obvious. No defender would welcome the approach of an rag tag pseudo military convoy. Protracted daylight negotiations at the foot of the wall of the smallish compound would only result in the inevitable arrival of hungry, less civilized visitors.

  Jordan Robbins had suggested to her father that someone use a boat to approach Spring City from the river, in the daylight, unarmed. Then she volunteered.

  “Not only no, but hell no. And take a lesson from the Navy,” her father ordered. “Never Again Volunteer Yourself.”

  “She has a point,” Kaplan said, interjecting. “If all they see is military-age armed males we’ll look like a potential opponent, not an ally. If they see that we have kids and women with us they are more likely to accept our story long enough to let us talk.”

  “What part of ‘we aren’t sending my teenage daughter to negotiate’ wasn’t clear, Kap?” said Robbins Senior with a growl. “I can go.”

  “Maybe someone with better people skills?” Debbie Robbins said, cutting him off. “And someone who can run the boat.”

  * * *

  Kaplan found himself sitting with Debbie, nodding as she explained the situation to a very skeptical reception committee over welcome mugs of coffee and less welcome, but quite understandable gun muzzles. She had been persuasive enough that the convoy was permitted into Spring City at nightfall. A minor diversion attracted most of the visible infected to a point opposite the gate, and the refugees’ vehicles slipped inside after full dark. The newcomers’ convoy filled most of the open space that remained inside the CONEX shelter walls. Looking around from inside their trucks, the newcomers could see that scores, perhaps hundreds of standardized shipping containers had been adapted into as defense, stacked two high everywhere that an existing structure didn’t already provide a barrier.

  During the ensuing negotiation, Kaplan and the Robbinses made it a point to admire the security of the town, before addressing the real point of their visit. Meanwhile, the rest had been allowed out of the vehicles with the proviso that they leave weapons in the trucks and not wander out of the square.

  “Look, my boss will be along in a few days,” Kaplan said, explaining. “But, in a nutshell, he wants—we want—to find a defensible place on the river that can be used to jumpstart the regional efforts at clearing infected and reestablishing some sort of civil framework.”

  In addition to Mike and his aide Brandy there were several senior members of the community present. The most influential sat in the first rank of folding chairs that were drawn up in a circle inside the gymnasium of the elementary school. The surviving Methodist pastor, Jon Parrish, was a neatly dressed man with a drawn, wary face. Uniquely among the Spring City group, he didn’t carry a firearm. In that particular he resembled all of the representatives of the convoy who were unarmed as a condition of the meeting.

  “We can let you stay overnight, just on the basis of Christian charity,” said Parrish, gesturing to his right. “But our little council extends beyond the concerns of the church. This is Mike Stantz, our expert on defense and technical matters.”

  “Howdy folks,” Mike said, nodding amicably. “I already know the basics from our chat with Mrs. Robbins. You’ll understand that our resources are stretched just taking care of our existing population. Frankly, the idea of absorbing a few hundred more people is both electrifying and terrifying. We need people, sure, but it only makes sense if you have something to offer. We have power, water, some security. No one inside Spring City is sick. You are strangers to us; what do you have?”

  “Plenty,” Kaplan said with a glance towards Rob. Receiving a nod, he went on. “Vaccine for one thing. A wide array of pharmaceuticals, medical aid and people that know how to use them. A trained, armed cadre that can bolster defense here. Engineering talent. And a plan to start clearing the Tennessee Valley to restore our civilization.”

  “What’s the source of your vaccine, Mr. Kaplan?” the pastor asked gently.

  “Human sourced,” Kaplan said. He had expected the question and didn’t flinch. “Specifically, the neural tissue of dead infected.”

  “We are familiar with this sort of…vaccine,” Parrish said grimly, sitting back with his arms folded across his chest. “It is not my place to condemn such that use it, but as for our community, we will not.”

  “Why the f— why on earth wouldn’t you?” Kaplan said, not quite stuttering.

  “Please,” Debbie said as she laid a hand on Kaplan’s forearm and turned to face their hosts. “Surely the Lord accepts that saving life is a moral decision?”

  “Saving life, yes. Harvesting ‘tissue’ from human beings, however ill, no.”

  “So even it meant your life, your family’s life, you won’t vaccinate?” Debbie asked softly, looking around the room.

  “We do not deny that vaccines work, ma’am,” Mike said. “We’ve engineers here that understand the science, even if we can’t, won’t make that vaccine. However, we choose not to profit from the illness. We fight zombies. We know that they are dangerous, lethal. When necessary, we send them to the Lord. But we won’t harvest people.”

  “The infected aren’t just ill. They aren’t people anymore!” Kaplan expostulated. “The disease kills off the part of their brain that made them human. They’re animals. Cannibals!”

  “They are still the Lord’s children, Mr. Kaplan,” Parrish admonished. “As long as you are allowed to shelter here, you will not kill other humans for their flesh. Is that not the very cannibalism that you decry?”

  “What are we supposed to do when they attack—negotiate?” Robbins said, contributing to the dialogue.

  “Oh, we defend ourselves. And we kill zombies,” Stantz said even as he noted the fixed look that he was receiving from Parrish. “I meant to say, we have sent a lot of the infected to their eternal reward. We have a few
tricks up our sleeve and we are working on some interesting refinements. So there is a good chance that we are going to send a lot more of the undead to their final rest, soon.”

  He offered the room an electric smile.

  Kaplan looked up from his notes and quirked an eyebrow.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dave Khorbish squinted through the binoculars. His small convoy of Gleaners had not cleared infected as they proceeded, so discretion and sound discipline remained the order of the day. Green had set his team to identifying which crossings of the Tennessee river were open. Or open-ish.

  Khorbish was also to identify which dams were intact and where uninfected humans might be clustered.

  They had started below Chattanooga.

  Wheeler, Guntersville, Nickajack—Khorbish checked dam after dam from his list—either damaged by fire or entirely blockaded by large swarms of infected without any sign of recent human habitation. After a detour around the densest part of the city and despite the danger of being so close to Chattanooga, Khorbish had risked his little convoy to confirm that Chickamauga dam was also a wreck. A shift in the breeze had brought the reek of decomposing bodies, piled along the face of the upper basin, nearly stunning the Gleaner party.

  Prior to his departure, Green had insisted that Khorbish study up on hydroelectric power plants in order to be able to report their condition more accurately. Despite their hasty retreat from Chickamauga, Khorbish had still noted the fire damage in the adjoining switching yard, which housed the towers and associated critical equipment such as transformers, rectifiers and regulators.

  Shit, if he’d spotted that first, they wouldn’t have had to get so close. Damage to the switching equipment was beyond their capability to repair. Any dam that they hoped to occupy and actually use had to be taken intact.

  Farther upstream, the next few bridges were clogged with wrecks and human remains. They were also well populated by scavenging infected. Away from the city, the density of zombies dropped considerably, so they were unmolested as they paused to scan the Sequoyah nuclear plant from across the river.

  Khorbish checked the map again, noting that their vantage point was appropriately named.

  Skull Island. Hell, all they needed now was a fifty-foot-tall gorilla.

  “Hey Dave,” his driver whispered in an unnecessarily low voice.

  “You can speak up a bit, asshole,” Khorbish said. “The zombies across the river can’t hear you. Whatcha want?”

  “How do we know that this place isn’t radioactive?” the driver asked. “That place is a nucular plant, right?”

  “Do you see all the live infected?” the convoy boss answered without lowering his binocs.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, then there isn’t any radioactivity to worry about, or at least not enough to kill you very fast.”

  “Oh,” the driver said, keying on the qualifier “fast.” “So we done here?”

  “Yeah, let’s cut further north,” Khorbish said, consulting his map. “We can cross this spot off the list. It’s intact, but boss said for us to check the dams. We don’t have the smarts to run this place yet. Next up is Watts Bar.”

  He tucked the compact binocs into his new vest.

  * * *

  “Careful with that pallet, Jordan!” Robbins Sr. said loudly. Despite fatigue and irritation he was trying to coordinate the contribution of the newcomers to Spring City.

  “I am being careful, Dad!” Jordan replied. This trip she was ferrying a pallet of literally priceless high voltage capacitors.

  “She’s doing all right, Robbie,” Kaplan said. “Hasn’t had a spill yet.”

  “We can’t afford a single screwup,” Rob said with a glare at Kaplan. “And I know my daughter, thank you!”

  “No need to get so crisp,” Kap replied, his hands held up placatingly as Mike Stantz approached from the other end of the TVA assembly building. Essentially a large gray cement auditorium that was adjacent to the fence transformer field, it was where Stantz was turning hoarded equipment into a new weapon.

  “Problem?”

  Robbins shook his head. “It’s all good, Mike. Just keeping an eye on the kids. Howzit on your end?”

  “Decent,” Stantz said, taking off his grimy TVA ballcap to scratch his sparse iron gray hair. “We are producing two tested coils per shift. The bottleneck is that I am personally installing and testing each one.”

  Stantz hadn’t really asked the Spring City council for permission when he had begun experimenting with Tesla coils as more lethal obstacles to infected. With Brandy’s help, he had completed several prototypes, each increasing in size. However, without the skilled assistance of the former soldiers and a few of their dependents, he could never have assembled so many in the short interval since their arrival a week earlier.

  “Is there any way to have someone else do some of that?” Robbins asked.

  “The only surviving engineer with direct experience on the dam and the plant is Brandy,” answered the short TVA engineer. “And I need her here to double-check critical steps in the assembly. Not to mention checking on our power plant, covering the positions of three people that we don’t have.”

  “Well, you got us for that, no?” retorted Robbins.

  “No offense, soldier boy, but what you don’t know about electrical engineering, generation and distribution is enough to make one of these rigs blow as soon as I put power to it,” Stantz said. “Since I’m already handicapped by doing my installs at night to avoid attracting even more infected, you’re invited to guess at my enthusiasm for the risk of lethal electrocution. So, sorry but not sorry. Brandy or I will recheck each key component and then I do the installs. The toroids that your team are fabbing have a thirty percent reject rate!”

  Each coil relied on a large aluminum-coated donut-shaped toroid with a foam core. Installed at the top of each tower, they were the surface from which the lethal electrical streamers discharged. Gross imperfections in the toroids dramatically reduced the length of the streamers from each electrical discharge, and therefore the hypothetical kill radius of each coil.

  “Detkovic is busting his ass, Mike,” replied Kaplan. “The crew’s getting better, but a lot of them are kids. Still, we’ll get them done—hell, we’ll even have some spares in case the bad guys figure out how to disable a few.”

  Many of the Tesla coil parts could be readily adapted from stores that Stantz had laid in before infected began to mob the perimeter. Some things had to be hand made, among them the metal donuts.

  And they were fragile.

  “No way to make them bulletproof,” Stantz replied. “We’re gonna need spares for sure. As soon as these things fire up, any sane opposition is going to try to shoot them.”

  A few test runs using the first models of the Tesla coils had been mixed successes. Kaplan was surprised at the extremely loud snarling generated by the coils when they fired. The gossamer webs of energy were visible even in daylight, but the nighttime test had really been a visual treat. The down side was that the testing tended to attract more infected. As a result, they only fired them for very brief bursts.

  Stantz had been finishing the assemblies during daylight hours but performing the actual installs at night, carefully screening the small amount of illumination required to connect the coils.

  The existing design demonstrated the tendency of the coils, over time, to ionize a single pathway through the air. The more that the coil fired, the smaller the area of effect became.

  But the coils worked.

  Infected tended to simply drop to the ground in jerking piles while their nervous systems were interrupted by the powerful current. Even if the initial electrocution wasn’t lethal, it was disabling and either subsequent discharges or gunfire would finish off the wounded. For a medium sized group of infected, the growing daisy chain of Tesla coils deployed near Spring City and the dam presented an impassable defense.

  A bigger problem was dealing with the number of dead.

&nbs
p; Stantz used heavy equipment to push bodies into the river below the dam, relying on the current to move the offal a safe distance downstream. It was a messy and ugly business, but the amount of carrion presented a significant risk of disease to the living.

  “All right!” A squeal of tracks accompanied the feminine shout. “Check me out!”

  Jordan had successfully drifted the unladen skip loader around a corner, gymkhana style. Her audience of younger teens oohed and ah’ed.

  Stantz watched, amused, as the elder Robbins stalked towards his daughter, who in turn immediately moderated her speed and scooted around the corner and out of sight.

  * * *

  “Well, ain’t that some shit,” Khorbish said.

  They were on yet another scenic overlook. But unlike the rest whose vistas leaned towards burnt out buildings and dead people, this one was different.

  “No holes in the fence,” commented his helper. “And we aren’t the first ones here. There are some car tracks fresher than a couple weeks back where we moved our trucks.”

  “Keep the spotters awake,” Khorbish replied. “This place is virgin. They don’t know that we’re here yet.”

  The dirty water below the dam foamed brownish green, but it was moving steadily away from the spillways. The chain-link fence was still up as far as he could follow it with his binoculars. Farther along the cement buildings alongside the switchyard were still closed, and like the electrical equipment visible outside, nothing was blackened by fire.

  As the head of the little expedition continued his scan, he identified a boat on the beach, a few infected well outside the fenced area and a series of curious looking constructs, roughly resembling outdoor space heaters.

  “I think we’re in business,” Khorbish told his subordinate. “We’ll get closer after dark. Let’s just perch here a bit and see what we can see.”

  * * *

  “I don’t care if you can’t see!” Khorbish ordered, albeit very quietly to his companion. “Watch where you put your hands!”

  The Gleaner lieutenant was leading one of his least tactically incompetent men towards the most recently added “space heater.” After full dark, he had spotted very small and brief light leaks created when the group of survivors inside the wire, unaware of their audience, worked on another one of the mystery assemblies. They looked like fat umbrellas or space heaters and formed a line stretching towards but not reaching the river.