The Zone (33 page)

Which, from the impacts rattling the door at my back, was definitely the interior group’s plan. How long it could withstand the abuse was an absorbing question that suddenly lost all interest as the throb of the truck’s engine preceded the vehicle sliding to a halt at the head of the steps. I made a rapid scramble up to the back doors and threw myself in as Key banged on the cab roof and Jake popped it into first.

Slamming the door with more gusto than needful, I slumped onto the bench seat, woodenly throwing the safety on the 870 and turning off the laser sight. The roof hatch crashing open nearly ruined my jeans, but it was only Key sliding down the ladder into the truck, pausing only to shoot the hatch’s bolt.

“You OK? How did it go?”

“I’m about five pounds lighter, and only about three pounds of it was shells,” I tried to grin but couldn’t. “Two books and both picture-sets. How was your end?”

“Clean sweep,” Key announced into the intercom. “Hairy,” she replied to me. “They are thick…like you wouldn’t im
agine. We played cat and mouse, dropped all the bait, and still had to fire off both sets of extinguishers. It seemed like forever. I bet we got nearly two hundred shot or run over, and you couldn’t tell at the end that we did anything at all. I was using my SiG there at the last, fired off all my magazines for the Mini-14. We need a different plan for next time.”

“If there is a next time,” I dragged a soda from the cooler and then pushed the sweating plastic box over to Key with my foot. “Ted may have to find a new theory.”

Chapter Fourteen

After catching my breath I helped Key reload her magazines from boxed ammo. “Did the fires help?” I asked after a sudden flurry of hammering on the truck sides startled me-we had had another chokepoint ambush try and fail.

“Yeah-that’s how we knew how many there are-there’s more than I possibly imagined,” Key shook her head. “The Science lab building is really going up, complete loss. The other two lost about a floor each, but they weren’t spreading too bad. It looked like Woodstock out there-with a half-mile to build up speed I bet we couldn’t crash this truck through the crowd.” She shook her head.

“You guys did good, perfect job,” I handed her a loaded magazine and picked up another empty.  “It went as smooth as we could have hoped.”

“How many were inside?”

I thought about that. “I got two I literally walked into, then four sitting in a stairwell, then the bastard who raised the alarm, lets see, six I zapped on the stairs, there were probably sixty or seventy coming through the lobby after that. I got maybe twenty, twenty-five of that bunch. Too many, that’s for sure. The fire alarm really helped.” I passed her the loaded magazine. “I better tell Ted.”

He picked up on the first ring. “Martin?”

“Yeah. We got the pictures, the primary book, and one secondary. We’ll send it to you as soon as we get back to base.”

“Excellent.”

“That’s the good news. The bad is that this is it-you better hope what you need is in what we’re sending you, because without substantial help there is no way we can pull off another operation like this one. The target was extremely favorable in layout, and we set fire to three buildings as a distraction, and it still came a lot closer than I am willing to risk again. The density of infected is too high to hit the other target.”

He was silent. “If you get more help?”

“Maybe, if we get enough. And I come up with a plan. Its gonna mean burning down more of the University if we try again.”

“I expect enrollments are going to be down for the next few semesters,” he observed dryly. “First things first-I’ll look over the material you’ve gotten. Perhaps it will suffice.”

“I hope so. I’ll look over the plans again, but I’m not seeing even a glimmer of a chance at this point.”

“I’ll call you later tonight to report on my findings.” He hung up. He was unhappy, and not sounding well at all, but that wasn’t my problem. I was going to have nightmares of that hallway, I was certain.

At the distributorship I handed over the cameras and books and told the duo to get the data sent to Ted ASAP. Scanning the books was going to be a lengthy chore, but at the moment it was our top priority. I told them to get it done and to take the rest of the day off; I was overdue for a rest and they were looking pretty worn as well.

I kept my mind in neutral as I drove across town, taking a mild pleasure in running over an infected at a chokepoint rush. Refuel, loop the neighborhood to look for signs of infected, all the usual SOP. My loot was small, ten five-pound sacks of rock salt, but frankly, I was too tired to worry about it. I stacked them into the back room and headed upstairs for a shower with only half water pressure.

It was close to fifteen hundred by the time I had cleaned weapons and gear, washed my clothes, and reorganized my load, so I stretched out on my sofa and took a nap.

On one hand I was wasting daylight, but getting the information to Ted took priority, and in any case I needed the rest-I had been running on the ragged edge of my capability for too long. My knee was hurting, my lower back was talking to me, and my upper body was reminding me that I hadn’t humped this much gear in a very long time. And the news about the rivers of infected had pulled the urgency out of rescue operations in any case: in a couple days those still alive could exfil on their own.

My knee woke me after about ninety minutes; other than the knee I felt a lot better. I popped a couple anti-inflammatory tabs and applied a heating wrap and hard brace, which seemed to help.

I still had over a hundred sixty rounds of salt on my gear so reloading wasn’t needful; I didn’t feel like checking the news or watching a show; sitting at the laptop I had set up on a card table I was struck by the idea to tell the story of Mick and Bob and post it on the Net, a tribute to some brave men.

A journal format was the best I could handle, not being a wordsmith other than writing reports, and I had been keeping a hard copy journal for some time as a hedge against mental isolation. I decided to start with the green briar to put things in context, then threw in some details of my background, and ended up writing out a description of what happened at the House. Writing it down brought the feelings flooding back, the guilt that I survived when better men died, the impossibility of dealing with the obligations of having your life saved by someone who lost theirs in the process, the pain of having led others to their deaths.

As I hammered the keys I saw it all unfold again, the white halls of the substation, the faces of my friends, the Crayola box, the tattoos on the lead killer…all of it.

Six billion people didn’t know what happened in that short interval in the House, and wouldn’t give a shit if you told them about it. Even those who did know moved on. Except me. I had…what? Gotten maudlin? Tried to dramatize the gun battle between police officers and criminals? There were nearly thirteen thousand names of peace officers on the wall in Washington-why were my team any more special than that long roster of those who faced their duty and paid the price? Who was I to bitch about surviving? Any one of those on that wall would gladly trade places. I lived-was I special, lucky, or just a statistical anomaly?

I wrapped up the description and logged out-too many questions I couldn’t answer, too many questions not worth thinking about. The unexamined life is easiest.

It occurred to me that if we hadn’t gone on that operation, I would almost certainly be dead now, killed or infected trying to hold things together before anyone realized what was going on. The news said a third of my agency was dead or infected, and that would be heavily represented amongst the line officers, Patrol and Tactical. I hadn’t thought about that before; hell, if my cell phone hadn’t been dead I would have been called out with the rest of the old and infirm.

Funny how things work. The odds are very good that either scenario would only have shortened my life by two weeks or so.

Standing up, I realized it was after twenty hundred-I had been at the computer for hours; whatever value this journal had as a testimonial or as a historical viewpoint of a major event paled compared to its use as a stress relief. Even my knee felt a little better after a stretch of inactivity and the heat pack.

Hungry, I made a hoagie-sized sandwich of hard salami, hickory smoked cheddar cheese, some sad lettuce, and liberal amounts of butter on a toasted half-loaf. I didn’t bother with the roof-I decided to give my knee a break from the ladder, and there wasn’t going to be anything worth seeing anyway.

I ate the sandwich with two cans of A&W crème soda sitting in my kitchen booth, Johnny Cash singing on the kitchen boom box about Sunday morning, ghost riders, and walking the line. He had a style that suited my mood, that was certain. I should have been planning, reviewing the paperwork, but instead I just ate my supper, the two cell phones on the table where someone would sit if anyone was having dinner  with me. A couple Klondike bars for desert and a quick clean-up, and I eased down the stairs with a bottle of water and nothing particular in mind.

My ex had had the family movies put on DVDs a while back, and had given me a copy of the set when we split. I stuck one grabbed at random from the plastic sleeves into the machine and sat back and watched the past. It was years ago, a vacation someplace, New Mexico I think, up in the high pines, some park with camping. I was throwing my daughter in the air-she was around six and squealing with a mixture of fear and excitement; my boy was running around in a red ball cap with a Mack logo on it he had fallen in love with at a truck stop. My ex was running the camera and alternating between warning me to be careful and laughing at us.

Now he was dead or infected, and the other two didn’t have much use for me. What did that mean? Would it matter when my turn came, on the Zone perimeter or some minor-league firefight here in town? Stupid question. Stupid thoughts. I was getting soft, moping like a teenager without the guts to ask out the girl in his math class-
angst
, at my age. I needed to get my game face back on-the infected were out there, changing, amping up, getting ready to muster and move, to crash into the perimeter and spread their poison across Texas. I needed to build up, not soften.

I shoved the DVD back into the album and the album back into the shelf. I had picked up a couple cases of twelve gauge birdshot, and I spent the next hour pulling the shot, reducing the power charges and repacking with rock salt. The rhythm and repetition was good-it smoothed out the rough spots, broke my mind from all the crazy what-is and used-to-bes. What there was now was the infected, and that was all there was going to be. There was no going home from this one. I had one last chance to prove something to myself-that was a favor few got.

The team phone buzzed when I was about two hundred fifty shells into the process. It was Charlie. “Hey! How’s life in the service of your country?”

“Same shit, different day. Look, I’ve been thinking about your doc, talked it over with Miguel, made some calls. There’s a bunch of guys still in the Zone, real crazies, that might help you out. I know ‘em from the bands, they’re heavy metal wasteoids but serious guys these days. They said it sounded interesting.”

“Rescue team?”

“Survivors of two, Steel Buddha Boogaloo, and Atomic Hamster. Teams Fifty-one and Fifty-two. They merged and call themselves Steel Hamster Entropy. They’re off the rescue business, more into killing infected.”

“Sounds like my kind of people.”

“Yeah, they’re nuts. Their little war even got official approval, for what that’s worth. They said they could loan you a couple hours for an op.” He read off a phone number. “Call at the crack of dawn, these guys work like beavers.”

“Damn-you are a lifesaver. I about got myself killed getting the doc some materials today, and there was no way I could pull it off again.”

“He still think he’s onto a super weapon?”

“Seems to be. What the hell, he was right about the river and the rock salt, might as well play this out to the end.”

“Makes as much sense as anything, these days. You see the news?”

“No, too tired.”

“New York went river. Military blew the bridges and tunnels, so all that it amounted to was a lot of drowned infected, but the whole East Coast is gonna light up tomorrow night. Our turn Wednesday or Thursday night. Thing is, the air assets are heading east for the big showdown there, then strat-lift to the West Coast, which is going to get crazy close to the weekend-ground assets only for us.”

“BOHICA.”

“There it is.”

“The doc’s not likely going to throw the ring into Mount Doom in time, so I’ll probably catch up with you around Wednesday morning.”

“You do that. What we got is willing but green, mostly. They’ll learn some as we go, but its still gonna be like the Alamo when the river comes.”

It was good news-a handful of shooters would make all the difference; indoors with knowledge of the floor plans we could channel the infected, negate their numbers while concentrating firepower. We would still need distractions, but overall it made a second operation possible. Hopefully a second op would not be required, but I wasn’t too optimistic-our luck had definitely not been running that way.

Ted called near midnight. “I need more data.”