Plagued: The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment (Plagued States of America) (3 page)

Six

“This is
Matty,” Sergeant Phillips, the night duty officer, said as way of introductions between Mason and his trainer. Matty was a big man, bordering on overweight, with equally heavy and labored breath. “Matty, this is your new partner.”

“I thought you were fucking joking
earlier,” Matty snapped at Phillips. “You’re really giving me a West Pointer? Banks was a complainer, but at least he’d push a broom!”

Mason
stood silently, caught off guard by the outburst. Even though Phillips had said Matty might get upset at first, and based on Matty’s unorthodox dress—the only military issue piece of clothing seemed to be his boots—Mason shouldn’t have been surprised. From what Mason already knew, the big man didn’t seem to care about military bearing.

“
Matty, Lieutenant Jones was next in line. He got a red card just like everyone else.”

“Yeah, like hell. He w
as supposed to go to the Hill, I’ll bet. Sending him here instead? Why couldn’t you assign him to the wall or gate duty? What the hell kind of shit is this, giving Banks a hardship and then sending me a cad-idiot? Shit,” Matty said, shaking his head while walking out of the room.

Phillips stood behind his desk and sighed. He looked over at Mason and
smiled weakly. “He likes you.”

“I can see that,” Mason replied.

“Come on, weak dick,” Matty called from outside of the office. “Work ain’t getting done by itself!” Softer, but obviously loud enough for everyone to hear, Matty added, “It’ll probably only be me getting it done, though.”

Phillips raised a finger.
“Try not to get on his bad side right away, if you don’t mind, sir.”

Mason nodded and followed
Matty down the hallway as the big man grumbled and complained.

Matt, Curtis aka “
Matty”, Petty Officer, Second Class, second demotion. After eight years as a Navy Seal with spotty performance reviews with regard to relations with superiors, he got into a fist fight with four Air Force Combat Controllers during an all-branches field training, hospitalizing three of them. He received a demotion and four months in jail. Upon successful rehabilitation, he returned to active duty only to get into several other small altercations, such as shooting out the tires of a Hum-V because
—
as PO Matt claimed in the report filed
—
“the son of a bitch nearly got them all killed by his driving. I’m doing the service a service keeping him off the road.” PO Matt was transferred to Rock Island after an incident with a base commander’s son, which resulted in the commander’s car being pushed into the golf course pond while the boy was found tied to a tree. PO Matt was on his third consecutive eighteen-month tour on Rock Island. As far as seniority went, PO Matt beat the next nearest soldier by two years.

“So you’re the new
-fag, huh?” Matty asked angrily. “Did they give you the tour already?”

“They showed me—
”

“Good,”
Matty said. “It’s simple shit. We start on the top floor and work our way down. Biters aren’t potty trained, so we get the luxury of hosing out their cells every night. They know enough to pull down their pants, but they shit on the floor. When they have more room, they pick a spot and keep using it over and over again. That’s how hunters find them out in the world. In the prison, though, there ain’t enough room. Just like dogs in a kennel.

“So we trap them, hose them down, hose down the cell,
then squeegee it dry so they don’t injure themselves when we let them go. Nothing worse than injuring the merchandise. The hunters get all bent out of shape when their precious zombies have bumps and bruises.”

“We go in with them?” Mason asked as
Matty swiped his card at the stairwell.

Both the door and
Matty groaned. “Ah, Jesus, don’t tell me a Ranger’s afraid of a few cock-biters.” Matty tugged the door open and the fans rushed air over them. Matty stepped into the stairwell, shaking his head.

“I thought you said we start at the top,” Mason pointed out. The duty officer was on the third floor.

“Ain’t no biters on the third floor right now,” Matty told him. “Shit, hardly any biters in the pens at all. I’ve never seen inventory so low. All on account of what happened at the Hill.”

Biter’
s Hill, a township established inside the Plagued States immediately following the Flood Control Project. The city wall and waterfront had been constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in an effort to establish a controlled region for safe landing of military and scientific personnel. After the Federal Rezoning Act made it unlawful for U.S. citizens or corporations to own property within the boundaries of the Plagued States, Breckenrock Corporation filed for a long-term lease and built the below-ground prison facility. For the past eight years, Biter’s Hill had been one of three federally sanctioned zombie sales control points, until four weeks ago when it was destroyed following a major zombie prison escape, which overran the town. There were only twenty-nine survivors, eight of whom were rescued several days later from Scott Air Force Base, over 100 miles away.

Mason and
Matty emerged on the second floor. Mason felt overwhelmed by what he saw. He side-stepped and circled while moving toward the center of the room as though performing a reconnaissance of the area. He wasn’t sure what to look for first. Everything clashed for his attention. The moaning was drowned by the sheer crime of the scene. Had he stepped back into Egypt? It appeared as though a bomb had rattled off as they stepped in, his ears still ringing from the concussion, his senses not quite recovered.

The center of the room wa
s where the burning vehicle would have been if this were a street. Bodies should have been strewn around it with scorched earth and pock marks from shrapnel everywhere. Instead, he found an operating table standing at a forty-five degree angle, bloodied from end to end. The blackened earth surrounding it was instead a chaotic shower of blood, with stains that were pools in some places, smeared lengths in others as though bodies had been dragged off, with foot prints in blood everywhere.

The shock subsided and he began to hear
again. The moaning was different on this level. It wasn’t hunger like he heard everywhere else. Instead, it was the dull groan of constant pain. It sounded more like Egypt than he cared to admit.

“Fucking gruesome, huh? That Doctor Mi
ller is a drunk-ass, sloppy surgeon.”

“Do they slaughter pigs in here or something?” Mason asked
incredulously, carefully stepping around the smeared blood stains streaking the floor.

Matty
laughed. “No, this is how Doctor Miller likes it, though, the sick bastard. Thank God he’s got a job cutting up zombies, because out in the real world he’d be on a CNN manhunt, for sure.”

Even though Mason knew the salivary gland was the point of infection, and that the way zombies were neutralized for domestic labor was to surgically remove the glands, he never imagined it was done like this.

“How are we going to clean all this?” Mason asked.

“What do you mean
we
, white man?” Matty replied with a raised eyebrow. He let Mason squirm a moment before chuckling and walking toward a door that had the words JANITOR CLOSET on them. “Come on, weak dick, I’ll show you what we gotta do.”

Seven

“Hot damn, first floor,” Matty said enthusiastically as he slid his card over the door panel. It chirped and the magnetic door lock clacked to let them in. “We might actually get out of here by five or six for once. This is the easiest floor. Just shit patrol in the cells.”

Mason yanked the door open and they stepped through
a fan-blast of wind to be met with the loud moaning of the zombies held on this level. They sounded normal, that constant plea for food as though constantly starved. Both Mason and Matty stopped and stared at the three figures standing between the rows of cells ahead of them. None of them wore uniforms. Two of them were putting something into a black and red case. The third began walking toward them. He was wearing a brown leather jacket, had long hair with streaks of silver at the temples, and a fake smile.

“Gentlemen,” he said loudly, holding up his security badge to Mason.
Mason realized it was because he was the only person wearing a uniform. “I’m Marcus Holden. We’re authorized to be here tonight.”

“I don’t give a shit,”
Matty replied. “Get the fuck out of here before I shove those cameras up
all
your asses. You ain’t filming us cleaning up shit again, you got me?”

The man
named Marcus held up his hands innocently, his smile still fixed to his face. The two others stowing the camera gear had closed the lid on the black and red cargo box and began wheeling it toward the door. Both wore lab coats, and one was a woman. Mason looked her over for her badge as she approached. Matty had words for all of them, his verbal abuse hurrying them through the door, but not before Mason could read the scientist’s badge.

Kennedy, D
.

Mason stared at her as she passed. She glanced at him and her eyes registered a flicker of recognition, or maybe he had read it wrong and she was just concerned over
the intensity of his stare. She was a tall black woman with long, tightly curled hair that appeared several shades lighter than should have been natural. Her bright red lipstick stood out against her white lab coat. Beneath the coat she wore a blue top and black skirt. All civilian attire. She didn’t look back as she walked through the door, in her hand a cell phone in a pink shell.
Flaunting it
. Nobody was allowed to have a cell phone on the island.

“Who were they?” Mason asked once the door sealed shut behind them.

“Fucking government film crew. They’ve been here ever since that goddamn Senator was here. They’re filming all sorts of things for some bullshit propaganda movie they’re planning on releasing.”

“What
kind of propaganda?” Mason couldn’t help but wonder aloud.

“Same shit as always. ‘Look at the deplorable conditions’
. They wouldn’t know deplorable from a hot bag full of dicks. I spent time in
real
prison. These biters have it good,” Matty said, eyeing Mason closely. He had a hard glare, the kind earned in a place like this. “People don’t get it. Biters aren’t prisoners, they’re merchandise in storage. All these lab-coats should know that better than anyone, and yet they’re in here helping all them documentary makers like Smiling Marcus. Cock munching liberals.”

Matty
swore their way to the cleaning closet where they broke out the hoses and supplies, including tall rubber wader boots. Mason rolled out the cleaning cart, feeling every bit like a maid at a hotel with all the brooms, blankets, towels, and soap bottles. They both sat down on folding chairs and started pulling on the waders.

“I don’t get it,”
Matty said, looking Mason up and down. Aside from discarding his BDU top, Mason still wore only military issue clothing from his brown tee shirt to his black, polished boots.

“Get what?” Mason asked, grunting into one of his waders.

“Why you’re here scraping shit with me. What did you do to wind up here?”

“I don’t know,” Mason said with a shrug.

“Like hell. Everyone here’s done something wrong, pissed off the wrong guy, or is really a sick mother fucker that doesn’t fit in with regulars.”

“Which one are you?”

“Pissed off the wrong guy, of course.”

“Sure,” Mason said skeptically. “Are you sure you’re not one of the sickos?”

“Fuck you,” Matty sneered. “I’ll tell you what landed me here. I kicked the shit out of an Admiral’s son because he was drunk as fuck and trying to get on base with a whore. When I told him to go get a hotel, he told me he’d have me demoted. I told him to get the fuck out of here and he got out of his car and tried to pick a fight with me. So to calm him down, I zip tied his ass to a tree, but I forgot to set the parking brake on his Daddy’s car, and it rolled into the lake. Thing was, Daddy was more pissed about the car, so I got the choice—come here or go back to jail. Same fucking difference, if you ask me. At least here I get to walk around more.”

“
Jail, huh?”

“Yeah, I made a few mistakes. What’s your story?”

“Nothing. I just got home from a tour in Egypt and drew a red card,” Mason said. He didn’t like lying, but he wasn’t about to tell any part of the truth to anyone around here. If they knew why he’d been sent home in the first place, much less why he was here, they would zip tie him and shove him in a pen full of biters.

“Huh,”
Matty said, glaring at Mason.

Mason looked down
and pulled on his other wader.

“You know everyone’s saying you’re a spy, that you’re from the Inspector General’s Office or some shit like that, come here to investigate us.” He left the thought hanging. He continued to stare at Mason
, trying to get a response.

Mason sat u
p and sighed, but said nothing.

“You don’t deny it?”

“What’s the point if
everyone’s
saying it?”

“Point is I think it’s a load of shit. The IG comes in on red fucking carpet
s. They don’t send some burnt out veteran Ranger like you.”

“Who says I’
m burnt out?”

“I do. I can see it in your eyes, man.
You drew the card because of something else. You’re damaged goods, just like the rest of us. If you ask me, it’s all just a big coincidence, on account of what happened on the Hill and that zombie half-breed they brought back from Midamerica with that Senator’s kids. That bunch was here for a couple of days and stirred up all kinds of shit.”

Mason shook his head.
“I don’t think I understood a thing you said.”

“Don’t you watch television?”

“I saw the news about the Hill, yeah,” Mason said. Who hadn’t seen it? It was on every day on every channel, even though no one said anything more than they were continuing their ongoing investigation. Drone videos were all over the Internet and news stations with experts telling viewers that
with this kind of devastation, we may never know the cause
.

“Yeah,”
Matty said, pulling on his second wader. “That Senator was here a few weeks back flapping his ass, collecting his sons—the ones who survived. He was giving speeches, looking the place over, talking with a bunch of lab-coats, like the bitch we just saw. Look, if you’re really a spy, then you probably already know everything you need to know about her, but if you’re not, watch out for her. That cunt’s twat is more infectious than half of these biters and would eat you alive just the same.”

“Jesus Christ, man,” Mason breathed with disbelief
.

“You’re looking kind of pale, foreskin. I thought you were a Ranger.”
Matty stood abruptly and smiled down at Mason. “Push the cart,” he said. “I’ll hump the hoses.”