The Zone (24 page)

There was a white quad cab pickup with a pipe-carrier rack fitted with welded struts and mesh panels preventing anyone from getting close to the windows parked near the front door; a second one had hit a light post one door down from the bank; a dead woman with smashed night vision goggles embedded in her face hung out the windshield. A pudgy teen in BDUs was sprawled on the sideway in a clotted puddle, surrounded by dead infected. The rescue effort, I guessed. I didn’t see a third body.

I did a brisk drive-by on the far side of the street and then circled back to within a block. “OK, I had a look,” I told the kid when he answered. “You got a ladder?”

“Yeah.”

“Here’s how I see it: I’m going to pull up in the street and get their attention, they ought to come at me hard. I’ll hold their interest as long as I can, but it won’t be real long. You get outside and up on the roof, and we’ll set up a pickup after they calm down.”

“Cool. I’m Jake, by the way, and Key is with me.”

“Martin. I’m rolling now-don’t move too soon, but don’t delay too long, either.”

“We got it. Thanks, man.”

“Thank me when you’re clear.”

I roared up to a skidding stop in the center of the street opposite the front door; chucking two personal alarms out onto the concrete, I stood up in the open door and saw infected pouring out the bank. As I had hoped, they were not in full charge, inhibited by the presence of the truck, but the sight of an uninfected, the strobes, and the screaming sirens were a powerful draw-they moved at what I would call an eager walk.

“Come on, you diseased pieces of straight-leg shit!” I bellowed, feeling a sudden and inexplicable surge of enthusiasm, even joy. “Show me what you can do!”

They probably couldn’t hear me over the sirens, but they definitely picked up the pace. When the first one hit the sidewalk I opened up with the AK, the slower, heavier bullet whipsawing the infected like a smack from a sledgehammer. I missed the M-4’s better handling qualities, but I had the same model holo sight on the AK (as well as a tactical light/laser and dual mag bracket) so there wasn’t any problem with my shooting.

It was too big a group in too open of ground to hope of stopping them; I dropped a half-dozen and scooted back into the divers seat, slamming the door closed seconds before the first one, a young woman in a housekeeping smock, crashed into the truck. I gave her the finger as I hit the locks and got the truck rolling. She had gotten a grip on the door handle and the stump of the rear view mirror mount, but none of the others were quick enough; I knocked her off against a stalled van in the next intersection, did a U-turn, and came back around to finish her off with a solid roll-over.

I could hear the sirens in the background when Jake answered the phone. “We’re on the roof,” he was a little out of breath. “We had to shoot a couple, but it went smooth. What are those things making the noise?”

“Personal alarms, supposed to deter muggers; they really get the infected stirred up.”

“For sure. Now what?”

“Now we wait a while, maybe an hour; you two stay out of sight, and when the infected go back inside I’ll come back around and you guys jump down onto my truck.”

“We need to get our truck-we can’t get into our firebase otherwise.”

Crap. “OK. Is it locked?”

“No, and the keys are in the ignition.”

“First we get you two clear; then we’ll come back for the truck. We have to keep it simple.”

He spoke off the phone. “OK.”

“Keep an eye out, I’ll call back in half an hour.”

This wasn’t Plan C at all, but what the hell, some infected were dead, and two uninfected were staying that way. Events were pulling me along like a dead rat in a flood, but frankly, I didn’t have much of a goal system to work with. Killing infected and mounting what rescues I could manage with my limited resources was about the extent of my ambition. Keep it simple-the unexamined life is easiest.

It was a far cry from Sunday on the overpass rescuing Tina, but I had learned the rules of the game in greater detail since, and lost some good people.

Thing was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get more people involved. I was getting weary in spirit, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to lead. That was new-I had always been a leader, in the Army, in the Department, I had always sought out greater responsibility and command. I enjoyed leading men, trained people, into tight situations and bringing them through.

The thought struck me that perhaps I had brought that attitude home with me; maybe if I had been more of a father and less a leader, my boy might have not gone the way he had.

That wasn’t a thought that sat well.

Chapter Ten

Jake answered the phone on the first ring. “They went inside after those things quit howling. I can’t tell if they noticed we left or not. They have two on watch in the shade of the drive-through. If you could drop them from a distance…”

“You could get yourself killed,” I cut him off. “We do it by the numbers, nice and safe; I don’t have any pressing engagements.” Without thinking I was using the Old Sergeant tone. “I’m going to come in along the north wall in a couple minutes, there’s no windows there. You two be ready to jump-there’s a lot of junk on top of the truck, so concentrate on landing. Get a grip on the railing and hang on-I’ll do the rest. We’ll get clear and work out how to get your truck.”

“OK,” I could hear the note of relief in his voice, the kind of relief that comes when you realize you can stop scrambling for ideas and let someone else do the thinking.

I waited two minutes by my watch and then rolled, fast but not too fast. It was another low-velocity rescue, a simple drive-by pick-up.

They were ready when I skidded to a halt; watching on the monitor I saw them land and grab-the first infected was coming around the corner just in time to catch the truck’s crash guard square in the kisser. None of the others even got close.

Ten blocks away I pulled off to where I had waited, a parking lot next to a supermarket that had gone out of business a long time before the present crisis, and stopped the truck. The folding ladder clanked down as I climbed out.

Jake was around twenty, a square-faced kid with peach fuzz and hair half over his ears, an open and friendly face drawn tight around the eyes from a night facing death in an enclosed place, my height and solid in build. Key was of an age, about a head shorter, a pretty black girl with skin the color of caramel and a figure that should have stopped the infected in their tracks. Both were grimy but had been clean, wearing jeans, hiking boots, and work shirts under tactical vests. Both had Mini-14 folding-stock carbines and Sig Saur P226 pistols in thigh holsters, and dump pouches full of empty mags.

Jake shook my hand with enthusiasm. “Man, you are the greatest!” Key smiled shyly, hanging behind Jake; from the body language I put them as a couple. Both were wiped out physically, although they were fired up from getting away.

“There’s sodas and some snack food in the back,” I led them around to the rear of the truck. “Help yourself, we’ve got some time before we can go for your truck.”

“Man, I didn’t think we were going to get out of there,” Jake belched after downing half a bottle of Sprite in one draw. “We had some crazy plans.”

“You guys were breaking security boxes?” I kept my tone light.

“Not looting, we were looking for something specific; I was running the torch, and Key was covering my back. I think somebody messed with the vault or a safe and set off the outside alarm strobes, maybe. Though they aren’t on now. Anyway, we got swamped. Running the torch, I’m blind-if Key hadn’t been watching close I would have been toast.” He leaned over and gave her a big smacking kiss on the forehead. Key smiled, unwrapping a package of cheese and crackers.

“You guys are pretty well equipped.”

Jake took a cracker Key offered. “Yeah, Tanner, that was our team leader, he wanted everybody with the same weapons so you could share magazines, every weapon with a light, everybody carries first aid, water, one emergency meal, that sort of thing. He was in the State Guard. He knew stuff like that, but he was sloppy. We should have had somebody outside in the truck watching, I think.”

“Seems like,” I nodded. “From your Net entry it didn’t look like you guys were doing many rescues.”

“No, we had to set up a safe position and equip it, Tanner called it our firebase. We got a few people out when they were handy, but that was about all. Once the firebase was secure and we had achieved mobility, which was how Tanner described getting the trucks, we were supposed to start serious operations, but you see how the first op went.”

“Cutting open safety deposit boxes was a serious operation?” I kept my tone easy; it wasn’t hard-Jake was tired and distracted, and I had conducted countless interviews in my career.

“Yeah, see, Tanner came
into
the Zone. Key and me, we were trying to get out when we ran into him on Monday. He told us first it was a government operation, made it sound like I dunno, Delta Force or something. Turns out the State Guard isn’t really military, just like volunteer firemen, sort of thing. Anyhow, Tanner was working for this guy, a professor, who says he knows something about the virus, and needed us to get some stuff from different locations. Tanner communicates with him over the Net.”

“CDC or something?”

“No, the guy’s like a historian, but I don’t see how that works-I never heard of anything like this happening before. Anyway, apparently he got Tanner to come into the Zone and get a group together to find some stuff.”

“Did you get what you were looking for?”

“Yeah.” Unbidden, Key stuck the last cracker in her mouth, rolled the cellophane neatly into a ball and tucked it into her pocket, and reached behind her to fish out what looked like a box of black ballistic plastic the size of a rather thick book. Jake tapped it. “See? Sealed from the air and humidity. It’s a folio of papers, some private collection. Just the first thing we were supposed to find.”

“Huh.” I hefted it, but nothing shifted inside; there was a rubber-lipped pressure valve in one corner, and the tint would protect the contents from sunlight. “Interesting.” I handed it back. “So what are you going to do once you’ve got your truck?”

“Sleep for a couple days,” Jake grinned wearily. “Then I don’t know.” He looked at Key, who inclined her head slightly towards me. “We were thinking you might need some help.”

I rubbed my cheek. “You guys are certainly competent, but are you sure you want to stay in the game? Hanging in the Zone is a good way to end up dead. Look what happened to the rest of your team, mine too.”

“Look what happened to our families,” Key said. Her voice was low and silky, but there was fire in her eyes and steel in her words.

“OK. Welcome to team seventy-one, better known as Remote Control Halo. We lost two dead yesterday, and two more who wised up and left the Zone; before that we pulled about forty people out of tough extractions. Me, I’m a retired police officer with a bad knee. Besides this truck, we have a school bus which is infected-proof. Tomorrow, if you’re still game, we’ll get some people out and kill some infected-I like to cull the herd while I’m out and about.”

Key smiled. “Good.”

Getting the truck wasn’t hard: I loaned Jake the 870 and a bandolier of shells since he was almost dry, and made a speed run into the parking lot alongside the truck. He bailed and rushed to the driver’s door while Key took out the sentries and I pounded away at the surge spilling out of the bank. He was in and had it fired up before an infected cleared the doors-we could have saved ammo.

I dropped into the truck after popping three infected but Key kept pounding away until I leaned over and slapped her hip. “Get in!”

Rolling out after the truck she pulled the magazine from the carbine and checked her load-Jake had given her his remaining rounds. “Sorry-Tanner didn’t like tangling with the infected. We didn’t get to shoot much.”

I shot her a glance-this one had body count on the brain. “I dropped around a hundred-sixty this morning, sniping from a distance using noisemakers as bait. Our team got easily that many over the last couple days. I’ve got no problem mixing it up with infected, but the thing you have to remember is that you always have to have a plan, and a backup plan. There’s always more infected. Its better to get a couple here and a couple there all day long than make a stand and get killed taking down twenty. Hit and run.”

“Cool. We’ll learn.”

“Why didn’t Tanner want to kill infected?”

She took down the GPS and began programming in an address. “He said we had a stealth mission, but I think he was afraid. Jake liked him, and he
was
a nice guy, but he was…he used military words and stuff, he knew about load-outs and setting up a secure base, but all that can come out of a book. When we went out he was nervous, really nervous, and he didn’t keep an eye on everybody-some of the others were a bit sketchy. There, the firebase is in your memory under ‘firebase’.”

“Thanks. So Jake can handle a torch?”

“He can cut or weld pretty good; he was going for mechanical engineering with practical stuff on the side. I was a phys ed major. We were freshmen.” She was describing the distant past, a time dead to her. She was a lot more in tune with today than I was; maybe it was because she was young-I was running off old Army instincts and career inclinations and just reflex, mostly. She knew that college was over, and was busy learning new skills.