The Zone (25 page)

I should have said something hopeful at this point, but I didn’t have anything. I had been raised to walk the chalk, carry your load, and don’t complain. The Army pounded me with the knowledge that the mind gives out before the body, that you could gut anything out. On the street I had learned that back-up might never come and you had better be able to step up and deal with anything on your own. I wasn’t one for offering hope or comfort.

Which probably explained why my wife left, my son was in prison, and my daughter hated me. The things you learn, long after its too late to do anything about it.

The drive was quiet; Key was tired and I guessed was not much of a talker in any case, and I really didn’t have anything to say. Once again I was getting pushed around by events rather than making real choices, but to be frank, I wasn’t brimming with options. I had been part of a machine my entire life, at least until I couldn’t hack it anymore, and since then I hadn’t really done all that well. I needed a mission to function, and to be honest I didn’t really care where it came from. Anything was better than the limbo I had been in the last few months.

There was a saying: better to live as a lion for a day than as a flea for a year. Since the House I had had my year as a flea, and I wasn’t interested in going back. If I survived all this, maybe I would get some of what the House had taken from me. If I didn’t, then at least the House hadn’t beaten me. Like Charlie said, you have to be able to see the other side of a thing.

The firebase was where I had expected it; there was another modified truck parked outside, but Jake used a remote to open two garage doors.

“You can pull in, there’s room,” Key advised.

“Nobody left behind?”

“Three, Tanner’s wife and two guys who weren’t real steady, but they were the rescue effort.”

“Yeah, I saw the wreck. Only two bodies, though.”

“The third guy turned; I shot him on our way to the roof.”

“That’s one thing I haven’t had to do: shoot someone I knew.”

“It wasn’t hard, he was an asshole.” The doors rumbled down behind us and Key hopped out of the truck.

Jake gave me back the 870 and two overhead door remotes. “Welcome to the firebase. You want to hole up here?”

“If you’re comfortable here, you two stay here. I’ve got my own place. That way we can’t get cornered as a team, which happened to me yesterday-we had to hack our way through the roof to get out.”

“Cool.” He threw switches and the banks of overheads came on. The warehouse had a small office area, a mechanic’s section, and plenty of floor space for pallets of beer. There were still two stacks of beer, each as big as my truck, but there were also cots set up, a crude shower arrangement, a couple porta-johns, and a lot of equipment and supplies. Jake saw me taking it all in and laughed. “Yeah, Tanner was big on supplies-we have enough food to last a couple months. You need anything?”

“How are you fixed for ammo?”

“Plenty of 5.56, some other stuff we found when we were out getting supplies. Help yourself.”

Plenty was the word-they had cases of military-packed ammunition, 1250 rounds to the case. A lot of cases. I loaded four into the rear of the truck.

“Where did you get all the military-grade ammo?” I asked Jake, who was cleaning his and Key’s weapons; the girl was fixing a meal.

“Tanner brought it with him-he hinted it was issue, but Key ran the lot numbers, and while its military-spec, it was commercial sale, not government order. You want a bread-maker? We have ten. Tanner couldn’t pass up a sale.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Yeah. Are those generators?”

“Enough to light up a city block, top-end units, run on propane. We’ve got a lot of propane stashed outside because of the fire hazard, if you need some.”

“I’ve got some, too.” I took a high-end bread maker, a pallet of flour and the associated materials which Jake assured me could keep me in bread for weeks, around fifteen hundred rounds of 7.62mm Pact rounds for my AK, and two cases of military-spec 7.62 NATO, plus a generator.

I left once everything was loaded up-the two were wilting fast now that the rush of being rescued was wearing off. I told them I would call them at zero nine hundred tomorrow; it meant wasting daylight but after the night they had had I figured I would be lucky if they ever wanted to go out again.

The grid was still up in my neighborhood so I refueled the truck at my long-suffering gas station. I restocked the cooler with ice while the pump clicked away the gallons; the truck had big tanks and got decent mileage, but I didn’t want to get caught short. I checked fluid levels, belts, and tire pressure as well. Other than the paint job, which had taken a literal beating, the truck was doing fine.

Looping through the neighborhood to make sure I was alone, I parked at my back door and wrestled my new acquisitions into the steadily-filling back room before parking the truck. My knee didn’t like the extra work, but I hadn’t made much demands of it today, and it was a bit better than yesterday.

My standard post-mission activity of cleaning, restocking, shower, and laundry followed; I lathered down my knee with icy salve and strapped on a hard brace to give it more support. An early day wouldn’t do it harm, either.

I unpacked the bread maker and generator and read each units’ owner’s manual carefully. Both were surprisingly easy to use. When the grid failed I could have electricity for months with the generator; water would be more of a problem, but not an insurmountable one.

Since I wasn’t going to lose the freezer, I gave the steaks a break and make myself a soup of bullion, rice, elbow macaroni, and bacon bits. It was still light out when I climbed up on my roof to eat my supper. I supposed I should be deeply guilty that I was knocking off early while hundreds of people huddled across the city, cornered by infected, but the fact was that one man alone was pretty helpless. Tomorrow if the kids were willing we would do some rescuing.

I watched the sun set, letting my knee relax, not thinking of anything in particular. Tomorrow was a week since I had my encounter at the pipes, and it seemed a lifetime away.

That gave me pause-a week ago. There was no doubt that what I had encountered out there were infected, laying low in the heat, more than one. But none had given that awful rally cry they used, nor had they attacked. It might have been my weapon…I thought about that: Alan had run a group of what were certainly infected off by displaying a shotgun in the same time period. I had listened to the scanner and heard a pattern of calls: violent attacks in which the attackers generally fled after an unprovoked attack.

The attackers fled
. The infected backed away from Alan and I under similar circumstances-lone, isolated men who were obviously armed. Today that wouldn’t even give them pause, they would rush and take what losses were dealt out.

What had changed? Why would infected act differently a week ago than now? Because there were fewer infected? Except that the first one I shot was alone.

Their tactics last week were hit and run, avoiding conflict with armed men. How does a virus change tactics? Animals can recognize weapons-I had encountered big dogs who knew that a firearm was a bad thing and would shy away from an armed man, but that didn’t explain this. If the Miguel Principle was valid, that a virus was in control of a body, barely operating the lower order motor functions so as to reproduce, then the tactics should remain constant. Except they had not; their current methods were different than they were last week. Could the virus be mutating? That didn’t sound right.

Gathering my dishes, I headed downstairs to check the Net and the news.

The TV wasn’t much use; they were reciting press releases which were saying the same thing as before: long term was rosy, short-term was tough. They did confirm one fact that the Net had been saying earlier: that in the Zones a few groups of infected were heading out, trying to break out, but most were staying put. They were admitting that the need to spread the virus was the infecteds’ main concern, and that this movement represented the natural action by a hunter widening its search pattern. It sounded good, at least. And undoubtedly it wasn’t untrue.

But the shift in tactics bothered me. And another thing was bugging me: the infected were heading out of the zone ‘in groups’. They weren’t wandering around in bunches as we had been seeing all week-the camera footage showed mobs of several hundred trudging down the Interstate at night. In short, they were forming up. And why were they moving? The Miguel principle, which the TV was mostly agreeing with, albeit without actually saying it, stated that this was a viral effect, control over lower-order functions. We had seen tactics of a sort, sentries on watch, crude ambushes, and the use of choke points, but that wasn’t anything special; herd animals had watchers, predators watched water holes, and the like.

But the shift last week, and now this, another shift in tactics, in direction. Before they reacted to noise or sight, and now some, not all, are forming up into mobs and heading out? The Miguel Principle was developing flaws.

The Net was a seething mass of accusations, conspiracy, and legends. The virus was a bioweapon by the CIA, the Mafia, the corporations, the Chinese, the Nazis, and/or UFOs. US troops were ethnically cleaning Harlem, Compton, and for some reason Trenton, Ohio.  Stephen King was blamed as well, apparently for making the whole thing possible by occult codes printed in three of his books.

What I wasn’t finding was anyone who had facts they were willing to share, at least in the time I had to search. It wasn’t that there wasn’t information, the problem was that there was too much; any sort of search turned up thousands of sites and boards discussing the crisis.

I had one other option: I had gotten Team 44’s password from Jake before I left, although the team phone had been lost with Tanner. I used it to move Team 44’s status from MIA to Disbanded, listed the names of the dead on their team page, and accessed the e-mail folder. There were four unopened e-mails requesting Tanner to call, ASAP, all signed T. In the ‘read’ folder were a half-dozen, mostly urging Tanner to ‘begin recovery operations’, and one  laying out the bank job-the black box was in fact the target. These were signed ‘Ted’.

I e-mailed Ted, giving him Team 71’s phone number and suggesting he give me a call.

Digging out my address book and the old 3.5 floppy disk box I kept business cards in, I sent e-mails with my team and personal phone numbers to everyone whose e-mail I had written down, which wasn’t a huge number, but some might be in a position to check their mail. I noted my situation, listed our Team site, and asked for input.

It was probably a waste of time, but any news would be good news, as anyone live enough to respond would be a win.

After working through recent and back posts for possible recruits (adding DalmationGuy, Enigma, and Stryker to the possible candidates) it occurred me to check my personal cell.

There was voice mail-I had left it at home. A terse message from my wife informed me that she and our daughter had met up with her sister and were safe. The purpose of the call was to inform me that our son was dead; the virus had gotten loose in the minimum security facility he had been housed in, and none of the inmates had avoided infection.

So. I sat there for a while. After a bit I went into the boxes in the back room and found a photo album. Sitting on a couple cases of MREs I flipped through the pages, seeing fragments of the past trapped in colored squares imprisoned within clear plastic pockets. He was around six when this album started, a chunky little moron. There I was, home on injury leave after catching a load of buckshot in my body armor, trying to show him how to toss a ball in the air and hit it with a bat. Half the time the ball hit him on the head and he swung anyway.

I never wanted anything bad for him. I just wanted him to make a life for himself. I didn’t insist on sports, or demand A’s. Had I been too indifferent? Would tougher standards have helped him? What if I had made him play Little League? Would that have helped? Would staying in Cub Scouts made a difference? The only thing that he ever seemed to really go in for was dope. 

The album went back into the box. He had never managed to throw the ball up and hit it. I hadn’t gotten mad at him; when he had had enough, we quit. The bat and ball sat in the garage until sold at a yard sale. I wasn’t half as tough on him as my old man had been to me, but he just couldn’t cut it. He never hacked it at anything. He stumbled through life succeeding at nothing.

Until he found drugs. He never complained about them, and he got motivated fast-he conned and stole with complete abandon.

One of us was a complete screwup, and the thing that weighed so heavily on me was I wasn’t sure if it was my son, or me as a father.

Maybe if he had hated me it would have been easier, but he couldn’t even do that; even when he was getting an ass-chewing he had that slack-jawed look of incomprehension on his face, a bovine look of bewilderment.  We had him tested repeatedly for everything, and they kept saying he was of normal intelligence, just a bit immature and dreamy. If it hadn’t been for a strict policy of social promotions he would never had made it out of junior high school, middle school they call it now.

If he had tried and failed I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but he was freakin’ helpless at
everything
. He never learned to ride a bike. He never learned to read a clock that had hands instead of a digital readout, and I strongly suspect he never learned to tie his shoes, but I couldn’t prove it because he always had Velcro strap sneakers. Confronted with anything new he would attempt it a couple times and if he didn’t get it, he would sigh, shrug, and wander off, never to bother with it again. He couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to master the controls of a game platform; he was content to watch others play.