The Zone (27 page)

“Against this particular opponent, yes.”

“Dream on.”

“Do you really believe that in the thousands of years of Mankind’s existence there has not been a single discovery that is unknown to us today?”

“Yup.”

He sighed. “In any case, that was Tanner’s mission: to recover items and information from the period.”

“What is the folio?”

“Notes from a French archeologist who did a very comprehensive survey of sites and artifacts in the region in question in the 1830s.”

“Too bad he didn’t get published.”

“He did, but we know more about the language and culture now than he did, and he was inclined to apply interpretation and call it fact. If I could see his original notes and sketches I would be able to get a clearer picture than he was able to achieve in his book, at least in regards to this specific king.”

“And he worked in the area of this hero-king?”

“Yes.”

I gave it some thought. “OK, tomorrow I’ll see to it that the folio gets scanned in and e-mailed to you. That can’t hurt. But you had better come up with something very quick. I’ll check back with you tomorrow night.”

“This folio is just once piece of a complex puzzle-establishing what the weapon was may take several sources of data. Almost certainly will.”

“Look, you’ve done a good job of tying this outbreak to some oddities in the past, but the thing you haven’t explained is why all three died out. I mean two, your hero-king did for the third. In any case, I really doubt Bronze Age tech is going to be an improvement over what we’ve got; you haven’t seen these things up close and personal.”

“I could send you copies of my notes…”

“No thanks. Look over the folio and see what it says, and we’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll get you the scans around zero nine hundred tomorrow, my time.” I hung up.

What a head case. Like we’ve gonna be saved by a Bronze Age hero-king. When he gets everything sorted out the innovation the guy came up with will probably be ‘aim for the head’.

Dumping on Ted had made me feel a little better, which speaks poorly of my personality, but that’s how it goes. I headed downstairs to plug in the phone and get some sleep.

Throughout the pre-House phase of my life sleep had come easy for me, and the Army taught me that you had better rest when you can. It was only after the House that I had trouble sleeping, and it looked that that phase was coming to an end. Certainly the exertion, stress, and combat chemicals were helping.

I got up at zero seven hundred, checked the skyline, and took the time to do my upper body workout before my shower-my knee was getting plenty of activity but the rest of me wasn’t. After breakfast I sat down at the computer with the GPS unit and looked for rescue options.

I had some good news-Fred sent me an e-mail, he was holed up with family in Oklahoma, and a couple others were outside the Zone and safe, including Bet Kiess and Dane Riley, the latter a kid who had helped me a lot when I was in my Communications gig.

At zero eight thirty I was suited up and ready to walk out the door, I called Jake’s phone and he answered, a little sleepy but obviously awake before the phone rang. “How are you doing, sport?”

“OK, we got a lot of sleep. We on for today?”

“If you’re up to it.”

“Definitely.” The kid had spine.

“OK, be locked and loaded and ready to roll at zero nine hundred; full load of ammo and sack lunch, and eat a good breakfast. If you have time, open up that box you guys got at the bank and get photos and scans of the folio. I talked with the professor who was calling the shots for Tanner. I dunno if I believe him, but it can’t hurt to let him see what you guys got.”

“Tanner always it is was super-important stuff.”

“I think it would make a good History Channel program, but not much more than that. Anyway, it can’t hurt to let him see it.”

“Cool. See you at nine.”

It started to rain as I headed across town; the truck only had the driver’s side wiper, but luckily it still worked. Before long it was pounding down in long sweeping lines, sluicing trash and dirt from the roadway and damping down a big fire raging to the south.  It was the first rain we had had in a couple weeks, and I was interested in how the infected would react. The most immediate change I noticed was that I made the entire trip without a single attack at a chokepoint-that was unusual.

Jake was at the computer when I limped into the warehouse, having gotten a key for the personnel door yesterday. I didn’t like the big garage doors opening up if they didn’t have to-it was too much like a breach. “I’m about done,” he said by way of greeting. “Key’s getting dressed. You have the address we send this to?”

We added a case of 5.56mm to the truck’s load; I noticed both Jake and Key had added more magazine pouches to their gear since yesterday. I explained my methods of assisting others, and we set off. First up was a convenience store where we loaded up on city maps, which Key marked with extraction data while Jake and I filled the store’s supply of picnic coolers with ice, sodas, water, canned goods, candy, and a sampling of over-the-counter medicine from the store’s stock.

The two were certainly motivated; Charlie, Miguel, and Mick had been good men, but as a team we were a lot more laid back and disinclined to extended effort than this pair, and their energy was infectious. The first rescue was four college kids, and we dragooned them into helping us get the used car lot’s vehicles’ started, and gassing up those which were suitable, stashing one of our prepped coolers and a city map in each.

After that, it was raid and run: Key was a bit short to drive the truck comfortably so Jake and I swapped back and forth; she was perfectly content to ride the roof and shoot infected. We made a total of eight more rescues before we knocked off for lunch, bringing out twenty-three people from high-infected areas, not just the fringe jobs I had done yesterday. We dropped around eighty infected along the way which is always a viable performance of civic duty: tilting the ratio of infected to healthy one head shot at a time.

We worked well together; the pair deferred to me as a leader while feeling comfortable offering ideas and suggestions, and neither was afraid to pull a trigger. If anything, they were more aggressive than I was about killing infected. We burned through a lot of ammunition (and a lot of infected), and fired two sets of extinguishers, which lightened the truck’s load a bit, although we still had enough to make storage complicated. The truck’s body took some more battering and we lost what razor wire we had left, plus the passenger side mirror.

Lunch was sandwiches in the center of a big parking lot; we ate in the cab because the rain was still drizzling down. “So, what effect has the rain had on the infected?” I asked.

They pondered the question. “They seem a little less enthused,” Key ventured. “Less…I don’t know, eager? I mean, its not like they get emotional, but that’s how I would describe it.”

“They don’t care about getting wet,” Jake shrugged. “Either way. They still stayed indoors except for sentries, but they came out when we showed up or they heard the noisemakers.”

I explained my early encounters a week ago. “It still bothers me they changed their tactics. We need to watch, and avoid getting complacent, because if they changed once, they can change again.”

“It’s a virus,” Jake shook his head. “It shouldn’t be flexible.”

“You wouldn’t think so.”

The rain forced us to avoid rescues which would require us to leave the pavement because I wasn’t going to risk getting stuck, but there were plenty of targets available and so few teams actually out and working that we never crossed paths with any. The site had assigned team numbers up to one fifty six by now, but less than fifty still showed active. I didn’t bother to tally up the number of posts, e-mails, and tweeter-thingies asking for help, but it was a heart-breaking number.

By sixteen hundred we had fired off two more rows of fire extinguishers and I was down to four magazines for my AK; the pair had made a major inroad into the case of 5.56mm, and we were pretty worn out, but we had gotten thirty-one more people out, and the used car lot had given its all. I had given away the folding-stock 870, the Browning Hi-Power, and the .22 target pistol I had picked up to survivors who looked like they would put them to good use.

The rain had stopped, although it was pretty cloudy; we were standing on top of the truck on an overpass studying a strip mall containing a big hobby super store and ten smaller units arranged in a sort of U shape. There were thirty-one survivors inside, most of whom having been there since Monday. They were unarmed, but they had water and lights and some food, but not much anymore. They had the hobby store and the right side of the U barricaded and connected with holes knocked through the walls, and they had managed to get onto the roof as well.

The problem was that the place was surrounded with infected sentries, and there were a couple hundred holed up in the left side.

“The problem with the bus,” I lowered my binos and passed them to Key. “Is keeping the infected off of it with only two shooters. If we rescue someone else, we could let them drive, but how much can you trust somebody you just met? And that still gives us just three shooters. If we run in and drop off some guns, maybe they could help provide cover fire, but if they panic, they we’re out there without the cover fire we were planning on.”

“If we use the truck and try for several trips over the space of a day, we stand the risk of getting mobbed,” Jake shrugged. “At least the bus could hold the whole group.”

“It boils down to the fact that our team isn’t big enough to provide cover and control a group that size, and while they obviously have their act together to some degree, we don’t know how they will react when help shows up.”

We stood in silence, mulling it over.

“OK, how about this,” I suggested. “Jake drives the bus, Key drives one of your trucks, both buttoned up. I stay up here with my scoped AR-15. You guys whip in and take position, I take out the sentries and lay down cover fire. The survivors jump onto the roofs of the vehicles, and you guys pull out when the infected reach your vehicle or I give the word. We meet up someplace, I shoot any infected still hanging on, and we’re done. We repeat it if we don’t get everyone the first go-round.”

They thought about it. “If the survivors panic, the only ones who get hurt are them,” Jake nodded.

“Works for me,” Key shrugged.

“We’ll have to have vehicles set up where we drop them,” I took out my phone. “You two will stay inside your rigs-I don’t want anyone getting the idea that we owe them a ride or looking to trade up, vehicle-wise. We’ll do some prep work today and do the extraction tomorrow after some sleep. Good enough?”

They thought so. Both were visibly tired, and I was dragging; combat stress really takes it out of you.

The contact at the mall was Marvin Pyle, owner of a head shop who sounded like an ageing hippie. I had already talked to him twice.

“OK, we have a plan,” I announced when he answered. “But we can’t do it until tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow? Why?” He sounded indignant.

“Well, first because we do not have the vehicles and weapons on hand to make the extraction, and we do not have the preparations for your group’s evacuation from the Zone in place. If we tried to mount it today, your group would likely still be within the Zone when the sun sets. As you know, they get more aggressive at night.”

“Couldn’t you evacuate us to a secure site, and get us out of the Zone tomorrow?”

“If we had a site, sure, but we don’t.” Not one I would trust thirty-one strangers inside.

“You live in the Zone, don’t you?”

“You are in a secure site right now,” I pointed out. “They can’t get in at you, and you’ve got water. As I said, the logistics of the matter are just one problem. The other is that we are physically exhausted-we’ve been fighting infected and extracting survivors all day, all week, in fact. We’re not in the kind of shape an operation of this size requires. After a night’s sleep, sure.”

“You have to push yourself-isn’t that your job?” Marvin snarled.

“Actually, I’m retired, and the rest of the team are college students, so there’s no job involved. We’re volunteers in the purest sense. Marvin,” I cut him off. “What you need to understand is that this is not a discussion. I’m
telling
you what we are going to do, and you can either accept it or find a way out of your predicament yourself.” I hit the red button and stowed the phone. “Let’s go set up another car lot and call it a day.”

“I’ll write out and print up the evacuation directions tonight so we won’t have to find more maps,” Key volunteered as we climbed into the cab.

“Good idea.”

After the car lot we stopped off at the gas station we had hit on the way out this morning; while I fueled up the truck they broke open the propane exchange case and loaded up all the cylinders, empty or full, into the rear of the truck. I knew how to operate a propane filling station, so empties were fine by me.

The team phone ringing made me jump; it was Ted. “What’s up, Doc?”