The Zone (26 page)

He wasn’t an unhappy kid, other than when he was walking into things and tripping over stuff and running over his own foot with a lawnmower he was pushing-how he managed that one I never figured out. He knocked himself out cold one time trying to kill a beetle on the sidewalk with a hammer. I had his vision tested damn near every year, and twice they ran neurological tests on him because I could not believe that it was normal that he managed to fall off the porch opening a screen door.

Boys are always getting hurt in interesting ways-I staggered home bloody more than once, hell, I fell asleep riding my bike and hit a tree, and I still have powder residue embedded under my skin from poor judgment and Independence Day firecrackers. But I never saw anything like his mishaps. I never taught him to shoot or fight simply because I didn’t think he could possibly survive either attempt.

But mishaps aside he was a placid kid. His mother loved him to distraction and me, well, I tried, I really did, but it was hard to look at him and see anything. This was a kid who stuck an electric toothbrush in a nostril and then turned it, for crying out loud. At age twelve. 

And now he was gone. The last time I had seen him, he was sitting on the sofa in the TV room watching an animated sitcom. The divorce was final; I was on crutches, stopping by to pick up some papers my ex had found. I had stood in the doorway and said hello. He had said ‘hey’ like he had a thousand times before, as if his father getting shot, his parents getting divorced, and his own impending legal battles had never happened. I hadn’t seen him in months, not since the day before the shooting. If he had ignored me, shot me the finger, cursed me,
anything
, it would have been better, but just a ‘hey’ like he would say if I had walked past after stepping out for a carton of milk. I remember wondering for the millionth time what the hell was going on inside his skull.

I wasn’t going to have to wonder anymore.

Chapter Eleven

The phone ringing pulled me away from maudlin thoughts about a son I had lost a long time ago. It was the team phone, and Charlie was on the other end. “Hey, your ex tracked me down from the Web site. I wanted to see if you needed to talk.”

That choked me up-I had known the guy just a couple days. “I’m dealing with it. It wasn’t a huge surprise.”

“Yeah, things are turning to shit all over. Its hard, though.”

“Yeah. How are you doing?”

“OK, I hooked up with my kid’s family-he’s with his outfit in Oklahoma. He says the infected are coming at them like Banzai charges, you might want to think about exfil’ing while the getting is good.”

“Naw, I picked up a couple more shooters today, took out a bunch of infected, and got eleven people loose. This is as good a spot to get at them as any.”

“Martin, this doesn’t have to be the end.”

“Charlie, when all is said and done, having a purpose is as good as it’s going to get for me. I’ve got a lot more ammo now, and with a little care I can thin the herd pretty well, save a few uninfected as well.”

“That’s enough?”

“For now.” Until they kill me. Like they killed my son. Two wrecks society had no more use for.

“Reason I ask, is we could use another shooter out where I’m at.”

“Thanks, man. I appreciate that more than you know. But to be honest, I’m tired of my life changing.  This isn’t about flag and country, I’m just sick of getting pushed around.”

“You can’t get back what you’ve lost in life, you know that.”

“I know. On the other hand, there comes a point where you can’t afford to lose anything else.”

“I get you.”

He made sure I had his number and a couple others he could get messages from, and we said so long. He was a damn good man-I wish I had met him sooner. I wish a lot of things.

I hoped he made to the other side of this mess, him and Miguel. And Trevor, who held that group together in the long hours in that basement, and the waitress at the Wheel who waited for her boyfriend to show. Good people who stood up when it got tough. Me, I had a mission, and the dim glimmer of a hope that the mission would cure me before it killed me. Either way, I would be better off.

The phone rang a while later, while I was sitting in the dark on the roof with the M-4 on my lap, not really thinking about anything. I started to let it ring, but it was lighting up as well, and it was the same effort to answer it as it would be to put it in my pocket. “Yeah.”

“This is Professor Maxwell; to whom am I speaking?”

The name meant nothing. “I’m not interested in changing my long distance carrier.”

He hissed in exasperation. “I received an e-mail with this phone number.”

I started to make a comment about spam and then caught myself-with all the other stuff I had forgotten about sending the e-mail. “Are you Ted?”

“Yes, Theodore in my given name,” he admitted cautiously.

“Who was the team leader you were exchanging e-mails with?”

“I was in contact with Tanner. Do you know him?”

“No. He’s dead, and got nearly his entire team killed in the process. I extracted the survivors. They said Tanner was taking orders from outside the Zone.”

“Yes, Tanner was receiving guidance from a group whom I represent. Can I speak to one of his team members?”

“Nope. The team phone is still on Tanner’s body, and Team 44’s account has been closed out.” I tried to remember why I had wanted to talk to this guy.

“I see. And you are?”

“Getting tired of this conversation.” What the hell was it?

He was quiet for a moment. “May I ask why you are so hostile, given that Tanner was a stranger to you?”

“Because the story I’ve gotten is that you sent Tanner into the Zone because you don’t have the balls to come in yourself; you sent in a State Guard asshole who knew just enough to get a bunch of people killed. All for loot.” Now I remembered: the sun-proof case.

“Did they recover the folio?” He couldn’t hide the eagerness in his voice.

“Yeah. I’m debating whether to break it open and burn it one page at a time, or just cook it case and all.”

He gave a squeak like I had suggested a kitten casserole. “Sir, I don’t…regardless of your opinions on the cost, that folio is a crucial link to saving millions of lives.”

“Bullshit.”

“I assure you, it is mostly certainly not bullshit.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tanner was sent into the Zone to recover several items which I believe hold the truth behind the current crisis.”

I noticed that under pressure, talking fast, he said ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. “Sure. That why you sent an untrained asshole to recover them. The government would have sent in professionals by helicopter.”

“Regardless of what Tanner might have claimed, this is not a government operation,” Ted admitted. “The CDC is in control of the research into the crisis, and my theory…is not one they accept.”

“Yup. But you know better, right? Except you don’t believe it enough to risk your own ass. Tanner must have been really thick not to have spotted that.”

“I am confined to a wheelchair,” there was ice in his voice.

“Gosh, that’s horrible. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you confined to a wheelchair?”

“I don’t see how that matters.”

“Something really embarrassing, huh?”

“Why are you being so rude?”

“Because you sent an idiot to do a job that he was obviously unqualified for, and people died. Two that almost died are pretty nice kids, and I’m willing to bet that most of the rest of the team was all right. Tanner’s wife cared enough about him to risk everything trying to get to him. So I’m inclined to tell you to
piss off, hang up, and burn the folio.”

“Please do not do that.”

“So: why are you confined to a wheelchair?”

For a second I didn’t think he was going to answer, and at that point I didn’t really care. “In graduate school I was part of a group protesting; we chained ourselves across a road so the police couldn’t move us, with PVC sleeves to make cutting the chain difficult. A car …hit the line. Naturally, we couldn’t get out of the way. Some died; I was…incapacitated.”

“Wow-you idiots never considered that there might be vehicles on the road?”

“The police were supposed to divert traffic.”

I laughed at that. “So you counted on police support to make your criminal actions safe?”

“It was a protest.”

“It was obstruction of traffic flow. What were you protesting?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really, but answer or hang up.”

“The construction of a nuclear power plant.”

“Huh. Did they build it?”

“Yes.”

“Still operating? I mean up to our current situation.”

“Yes.”

“No melt downs, no movie-of-the-week release of radiation?”

“No.”

“So it just produced electricity for hospitals and clean water and the lights for schools to teach the children?”

“Yes. Are you enjoying this?”

“Yeah, kind of. I got my knee screwed up, but at least we killed some dedicated dirt bags in the process. Did you really believe that nuclear power was evil, or were you trying to impress some cute chick?”

“I believe that nuclear power is unsafe.”

“Well, no doubt that’s a consolation.” I paused to study a red light in the sky.

“Are you still there?”

“Yeah, there’s a drone up. I hadn’t seen one in a while. So tell me, Ted, why Tanner?”

“He seemed competent.”

“OK, we’ll let that stand for now. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you weren’t just trying to fill your collection with rare folios. What was Tanner supposed to accomplish?”

“He was supposed to track down, recover, and record certain items known to be within your Exclusion Zone, and send the data to me.”

“Record?”

“Scan documents, photograph objects. And evacuate the items if possible, but the images were the primary mission.”

“And the purpose of these images is what?”

“I believe that this particular crisis has occurred in the past, and that the data on these objects and folios could help us survive the current crisis.”

“I take it you are a history major?”

“I teach archeology.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like what is happening, and I’ve read a fair sampling of history.”

“It has occurred in... obscure parts of Man’s odyssey, all the more so because in most cases it resulted in the elimination of witnesses. Have you heard of Angkar?”

“Yeah, in Cambodia. They were a sizeable empire, the city itself was huge for the era. Big even by modern standards.”

“Yes. Before Columbus reached the Indies the mound builders in the Midwest had a city larger than any city in North America would achieve before the mid-1880s, yet it was abandoned abruptly. The entire culture vanished. One of the few legends of the place that neighboring tribes retained was that in the end, the dead walked amongst the mounds. Does that sound familiar?”

I admitted that it did.

“In ancient Sumeria one of the more obscure hero-kings is reported to have defeated an army of walking dead. What interests me is that the only data we have on this event makes the comment that the walking corpses breathed like men choking.”

That sounded interesting. “OK, tell me more.”

“There is not a great deal-the relics of the era have been pillaged several times; in the period immediately after the Coalition invasion literally tons of artifacts and records were looted by native criminals and fleeing government officials.”

“But that stuff would have been documented.”

“Not in the sort of detail you might think. Sumeria is not as popular or interesting as, say, Egypt, and since the Second World War the local regimes have not been terribly cooperative. What I have been able to locate is a…call it a tribute-marker where the deeds of the deceased are told. What I have is a photo of the marker and some notes dating from 1926; the marker tells of this king’s victory over the dead.”

“Interesting, but kings were known to commission exaggerations for their tombs in every culture.”

“True, but the account records three things that support my theory: the dead were victims of a plague, they breathed like men choking, and they are slain by attacking the head.”

I gave that some thought. “OK, that is interesting, but in that period fighting man-to-man was common, and so was making overhand swinging or slashing attacks. Infantry of the day, equipped with shields, ought to fare pretty well against the infected if their discipline held and the numbers weren’t too lop-sided.”

“True enough. However, the point of interest was that this hero-king was a scholar, not a warrior. He won the day because he discovered a weapon which destroyed the walking dead.”

For a second I got excited, and then reality kicked in. “You’re saying that some Bronze Age guy came up with a weapon system that is better than what we have now?”