The Zone (22 page)

He suddenly turned and studied the roof; I causally dropped my hand to the butt of the Glock, whose laser was still on.

“I think you’re alone,” he grinned, facing me.

“Think what you want.”

“I don’t think you flushed no dope, neither.”

“OK.”

“I think being po-leece don’t mean shit here, either.”

“True enough. You talking because you’re scared?”

His eyes flashed at that. “I toasted a bunch of bugs today, man. You want to join ‘em, rattle on.”

“Whatever. The key to the store stays with me. Find another place to get dope.” 

He grinned, a grog-like smile that exposed bad teeth, and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand. “Sure. Say, how about letting me try your ride?”

The first round caught him in mid-belly; recoil put the second into his sternum, the hydro-shocks knocking him back onto his heels. A half step to my left with the Glock in a good two-hand grip showed the girl trying to get a bead on me and Phil fumbling with the safety; I put the red dot on her forehead and sprayed a red mist across the SUV’s hood.

Phil popped two rounds into the blacktop about twenty feet short of my position, goggled at the girl crumpling beside him, and took off in a waddling run; he got about fifty feet before his jeans slipped and tripped him up. He hit hard, losing the Tec-9; hopping frantically, he got the oversize pants over his ass and raced off, holding his jeans up. I let him go because he wasn’t a problem anymore.

Phil’s brother was on his back, gurgling blood while he pawed at his wounds. I kicked away the little chrome-plated Raven .25 auto he had palmed out of his sleeve when he made the gesture and pulled the pistol he had in the waistband of his jeans; said jeans were now at half-mast under the weight of the pistol and the sudden movement. It was a blued Taurus 9mm; there were two more mags jutting from a hip pocket, which I confiscated as well.

“Phil is OK,” I told him, but I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not-he was going fast. A more merciful man would have finished him, but I hadn’t reached that stage yet. I pulled the truck around to the SUV and got out, leaving it running. I grabbed the dead girl’s 870 and checked inside the vehicle, which was brand new, stickers still in place, keys in the ignition. I found some shotgun shells and 9mm ammunition which I took, a bowling ball carrier with zip lock bags of pills I set out on the blacktop, a leather purse filled with jewelry I left, and a small athletic bag full of cash, which I took. There were suitcases in the rear which I ignored; there hadn’t been a lot of shots fired, but enough to maybe draw some attention. I left the Tec-9 where it lay and the keys in the ignition; if Phil circled back he might have a chance.

I hit the bag of pills with five shotgun rounds before getting into the truck.

It was eighteen hundred by the time I pulled in front of my place; I had circled the area again about ten blocks out, looking things over. Not much signs of infected, but this had not been a heavily populated area. With the coast clear I unloaded the truck and parked it without incident. I had lost a pair of crutches somewhere, but everything else made the trip.

The lights and power were still good so I hit the shower first and then washed the clothes I had worn yet again; afterwards I stowed the Tactical shirt and laid out the unmarked pullover: a lower profile was in order. Jeans would replace the black BDU pants, too. Time to move with the times.

It was dark out by the time I stowed everything in my back room, which was filling up rapidly; I figured I had drinking water for three months, not counting sodas, plus about a hundred fifty gallons of tap water and a steadily growing number of recycled soda and water bottles filled with tap water.

The diabetic stuff and oxygen bottles and a selection of first aid kits went into a backpack for deployment to the truck; I cleaned the 870 and Taurus and added them to the ‘for the truck’ pile. I reorganized my gear bag, and broke out a folding-stock semi-auto AK in place of my M-4, switching out the magazines in my vest. This was both part of my effort to look less like a police officer, and because my supply of 5.56mm was finite and gotten hit hard over the last couple days; time to switch out weapons until I found more ammunition.

I nuked a bowl of curly fries, opened a can of corn, and headed to the roof to grill two more steaks. The street and traffic lights were off now except on the Interstate, access way, and a couple other major streets; without them the city looked like jungle hills under a quarter moon, maybe like those ruins in Mexico. It was not a cheerful thought.

Two healthy humans killed, that and some looted supplies were my afternoon’s work. Both had been trying to do me harm, so I wasn’t morally upset, but it was damned depressing that things had gone the way they had. I had spent decades resolving petty conflict, and then had let this mess escalate into killing. I could have tossed Phil’s brother the key to the store and driven off-after all, what did I care if they got stoned? Odds are they would have gotten themselves killed driving around in an unsecured vehicle popping pills anyway. Somehow it had seemed a sticking point at the time; now it seemed less valid. Part of it was Mick and Bob dying because they were saving people while those assholes were scoring dope and waddling around sagging & ragging in tribute to those in jail. And maybe part of it was my boy, who
burned up his unremarkable mind with dope and his life with dope-fueled choices.

Still, it was done, and it was time to move on. No birds in the air, no air strikes, nothing much at all. There were the glows of a couple fires, but in the time it took to grill the steaks and eat one with the side dishes I only heard three smatterings of gunfire, all far off. Apparently survivors knew to dig in deep at night. And apparently the military had better targets for the choppers.

At least, I hoped so.

Lying on top of a sheet of cardboard on the truck’s roof, the stacked gear re-arranged so I was pretty well hidden, I studied the street through binoculars. A few minutes earlier I had stopped in an intersection with cheap apartment complexes on three corners and dropped off my bait, then roared off, circling around well out of earshot to park six blocks away.

About a dozen infected had been drawn out into the early morning sunlight by the sound of the truck’s engine and were now wandering around aimlessly. Reaching down, I powered up the control unit and jammed the throttle and steering joystick. Wednesday, I had decided, would start out with culling the herd, and I had made a stop at Radio Shack around zero eight hundred. The result was my bait unit: two cinderblocks duct-taped together with two personal security alarms taped to them; the activation lanyards of the alarms were
fastened to the biggest and best remote-control vehicle the store had. When I hit the controls the little truck zipped about three feet before hitting the end of its fishing line leash hard enough to pull both lanyards.

The strobes and howling brought infected pouring out of all three complexes; settling my ear muff hearing protectors into place I set the M700’s stock into my shoulder and picked my first target. With the bipod planted on the truck roof six blocks was like shooting at sixty feet. I had grabbed two video backing units like they used for RVs at the store, running them off their rechargeable internal power cells, each facing the rear of the truck so I could glance at the monitor at my elbow between shots to see if any infected were sneaking up on me.

After a couple skulls burst the first infected started looking around, but even with more than half staring around in all directions I remained undetected; admittedly all they might have seen was a muzzle flash in a six inch gap between the spare tires on the roof. Besides being about four feet above their usual plane of vision, I was coming to realize that the Internet claim that the infecteds’ vision was breaking down with time was valid.

This was as much information gathering as culling; I was watching to see how they reacted to sniper fire, how many responded to an attraction, and anything else I could learn. What I saw was interesting: reaction to the alarms was massive, from the timing some must have been arriving from three or four blocks away, the further out possibly alerted by the wailing ‘gather call’ that they made. They noticed the sniper fire; the alarms meant they couldn’t hear the gunshots, but they understood what was happening, and without other distractions they spread out about a quarter block from the alarms in all directions and looked intently for the source. More interesting, after looking for a minute or so they headed back to where they
had come from, which wasn’t immediately obvious-if I had been in combat I wouldn’t have noticed because each infected went through the same process: arrive, examine the bait, notice a fellow infected getting scattered, move away to look, fail to find the source, then head for cover. They had taken cover at the Wheel, too, I recalled; there they had identified the location of the fire and apparently realized that they couldn’t reach it.

So: they were absolutely fearless when faced with an enemy they could reach and they would throw away their lives without hesitation. However, if they couldn’t find or reach the foe, they took cover. Interesting, and something that might be made to work in my favor.

I ran through sixty rounds, and then put some oil down the barrel and cased it. Back in the cab I hung the control unit out the window and tried another experiment: I ran a second remote-control car down the street to the infected, put it through some clumsy circles, and then drove it back to me. Quite a few obviously saw it but none tried to grab it or interfere with it in any fashion.

I set out ‘bait’ in two more locations and ran through sixty rounds at each without being spotted, and the infected dispersed as soon as they figured out there was a shooter and that they could not see him-only the influx made it look like they were a constant presence. At the third site I stayed and watched after I had fired off my three boxes of cartridges; without incoming fire the noise and light of the alarms held their interest much longer. Eventually they would lose interest and leave, and when the batteries gave out the crowd dispersed abruptly.

So, lights and noise attracted them, but eventually they figured out there was no connection to victims and departed. They really didn’t pay much attention to remote controlled cars unless lights or noise were involved. Possibly useful, possibly not. Still, the better your information, the better you could plan.

It was nearly eleven by the time I had used up my baits and finished my surveillance. I parked the truck in an empty office building parking lot with a good view of the Interstate and ate a steak sandwich. The bread was still pretty good because I kept it in the fridge, but it reminded me that every unlooted bakery in town would soon have only stale bread on the shelves, so if the power stayed on I should grab a bread maker and materials. Once the power cut off it was baked dough for the duration. That sounded like a small thing, but it hit home very hard, because fine-texture white bread and grain-fed beef were things I had always loved my entire life, and it was likely they were coming to an end. It struck me as one of the most horrible realizations of the last few days.

Ammunition needed to be a focus, I decided, dragging my thoughts from the depressing future vista. I had started the crisis with about eight thousand rounds all told, but less than half of it was in rifle calibers; the hundred-eighty rounds I had fired off this morning meant over one hundred sixty infected put down, but it also represented about twenty per cent of my supply of 7.62 NATO. I had fired off a lot of 5.56mm, and I hadn’t acquired a single round of that caliber in my scrounging.  This morning had not been wasted, but it was just the start of my day. My plan for the rest was to seek out rifle ammunition and any convenient extractions that I could manage on my own without straining my knee, which was hurting. The rest of me wasn’t in peak condition, either.

The infected had a longer life span than I had initially expected, but I bet that in the last twenty-four hours they had lost a lot more than they had infected; if we could keep that up, killing off infected while preventing further infection, this thing was still doable. They could stay in the cool all they wanted, but sooner or later cell-death would reach the point where even the reduced level of function required by the virus was unsustainable. It was a plague-cart in reverse: we would leave the dead and bring out the living.

I checked the Net while I ate, noting down requests for help and other information that seemed pertinent, consulting the GPS unit occasionally; I had never used a GPS unit before, but
it was pretty damn neat and a major asset when driving alone.

The news on the Net was pretty thin as a lot of the Net was shut down, something board posters blamed on the government. Overseas areas were screwed, and getting worse: peacetime militaries which hadn’t fired a shot in anger in over a generation or more were simply unable to contain the outbreaks, and civilian populations without firearms were just fields for the virus to graze upon. In the US the news was pretty much press releases, the pool of reporters having been decimated; the Feds were confident the long-term prospects were good, but short-term dislocation was growing in intensity. FEMA was working far better than expected, apparently having learned quite a bit from previous disasters.

On the rescue board posters disputed some government reports, but apparently the US military was still in the field and fighting, augmented by bands of civilian volunteers. It helped that we had picked up a lot of combat experience in the last decade, and the civilian populace was heavily armed.