The Zone (36 page)

“Is someone there?” It was a woman’s voice, dry and desperate, coming from behind the battered yellow panel doors. Suddenly the significance of the infected was explained-they had at least one uninfected Human cornered, and no amount of noise and pretty lights would fully distract them. I was surprised the doors had held.

Catching Strad’s eye, I jerked my head down the hall and kept going. It turned out the doors hadn’t really held-there was a segmented anti-fire wall rolled down behind them.

A trio of ex-students, now viral hosts came around the corner at a trot; I dropped them, topped off the tube, and looked through the door’s window at the stacks inside. It looked clear, and it wasn’t a large room, so with all the shooting any infected inside should have been waiting at the door. I dropped the 870 on its sling and drew the handier cut-down before unlocking the door; once inside I locked it behind me and swept the room, trying to move fast because I could hear Chuck and Pete shooting out in the stairwell.

The room was clear; digging out my cards, I turned on the LED light and started on the shelves. I found the first book quickly enough, but the second was confusing-I found two of similar names and numbers, but neither matched exactly. I checked up and down the shelves, then grabbed both and said to hell with it.

Checking out the door before opening it rewarded me with the image of an infected female student catching a load of rock salt in the face and neck. Throwing the stubbly little black knob, I jerked the door open, yelled to avoid getting peppered, and gimped back the way I came, dropping an infected janitor as I went.

Strad and Danny had dropped a half-dozen infected and extracted four filthy, haunted uninfected: one woman in her thirties and three late teens-early twenties, two girls and a boy. I suppose they had been cornered in the lab all week, but I don’t care enough at this point to ask.

“Time to go,” I announced somewhat needlessly. “Who’s with me on rearguard?”

“I got it.” Danny stepped up as I topped off the cut-down and holstered it.  Strad got the four sort of in hand and headed for the stairwell.

The initial retreat was easy-infected came down the hall in ones and twos, leaving Danny and
me enough time between shots to replace the rounds. In the stairwell things were a good deal hotter-the ones we had been killing on the third floor were just stragglers-the real attack was coming from the top floor. The woman was screaming about there being more people trapped ‘up there’, by which I interpreted the fourth floor, which would explain all the infected. They were going to have to stay trapped for another day or two until the infected shifted gears and formed the river-Chuck and Pete had just about filled the stairs with corpses and the infected were still trying. More ominously, there was pounding at the lower floor doors.

“Go with Strad!” I slapped Chuck on the back and opened fire up the stairwell. Danny alternated between the hallway and the stairs, and Pete held his post. I fired four rounds and then hit my cell phone call button-the signal for the bus to come get us. A second button-series alerted Jake, in case the bus dropped the ball.

“Danny, go!” Pete and I fired while Danny dropped back to the next turn in the stairs, then Pete fell back, and then I went; the two not moving covered the one who was.

The mass of dead was hampering the infected far more than our covering fire, but I wasn’t emotionally involved with the fight. We were pulling back, and that was the primary issue.

The second floor door was still closed when I gimped past, but it was hanging by a thread-the soft metal of the frame wasn’t going to resist the dogged if uncoordinated efforts of the infected for long.

The bus hadn’t arrived yet, which wasn’t unexpected since it had been about thirty seconds, but Strad had led the four uninfected outside and lined them up against the side of the building because the tiny foyer at ground level wasn’t big enough for our team and the people we had rescued. Chuck was outside the door but leaning in, Pete was firing up the stairwell, and Danny was eyeing the failing door as I turned the landing and headed down, thumbing rounds into the 870’s tube, hugging the glass wall to avoid Pete’s fire.

I was seething inside. Military planners console themselves with stories about horseshoes and nails, and how no plan survives contact with the enemy. I hadn’t considered that there would be uninfected trapped in the building; how I could have planned for that I am not certain, as the infected definitely consider a bird in hand to be much more important than anything else. It just rankled that a very good plan was turning to shit.

Then Danny disappeared. One second he was staring at the first floor door as it was slowly pounded out of shape, and the next he was gone. For a second it was like an optical illusion, and then Chuck yelled and started shooting down the stairway to the basement level as infected charged up the stairs.

Things were moving in that peculiar fast-slow nature of close combat. I saw Pete swing around, step forward and fire over the railing, aiming down; I heard pistol shots, rapid fire, muffled by bodies but still booming through the stairwell in comparison to our subsonic, low-velocity salt rounds-that was Danny, down on the basement landing under a pile of infected.

I stopped three steps from ground level to give me a field of fire and opened up on the infected; either Danny had them tangled up at the door, or there wasn’t very many-I was trying to shoot and figure out how we could get to Danny while holding the ground floor landing when the door to the first floor gave way.

Infected in a close-assault mode are terrible to behold-I had only seen them while sniping, or at a distance, or when elevated; they moved pretty quick but nothing special under those conditions. Seeing them at ground level close-up was terrible. They swept over Pete before he could turn, one instant he was there, the next he was at the bottom of a pile of struggling bodies.

He saved me and Chuck, as the struggling mass of limbs blocked the follow-on for the critical seconds we needed to react; otherwise the sheer suddenness of it would have left both of us to be over-run. We both fired, Chuck into the pile, me into the filled hallway beyond as I went down the steps, dropping the empty 870 onto its assault sling and pulling the cut-down as I backed through the door, alternating shots between the first floor hallway and those on the basement stairs. Behind me, Strad was firing up at the infected coming down the stairs.

Strad slammed the door shut as I backed into the open air; Chuck was yelling something about Pete but I ignored him as I fumbled out the key on its steel retractable line and turned the lock. It was a fire door, so I couldn’t completely lock it, but I wrenched the key off in the lock, jamming the mechanism. That would hold them until the bar had been hit a dozen times or so.

Hands shaking, I shoved shells into the cut-down and holstered it, then reloaded the 870; the four survivors were crouched against the wall, nearly in fetal positions, Strad was reloading, and Chuck was kicking the door, yelling about Pete. No infected were in sight around us-I could hear shooting off to the north, and the sounds of sirens, so our decoy ops were still working to some degree.

The bus careened around the corner, Doc clinging for dear life to the roof-rails, and slid to a stop in front of us, the doors banging open. I fired at the infected trailing it as Strad dragged the computer room survivors on board and got Chuck inside. I followed, reloading the 870 yet once again. My pouches were definitely lighter-I had probably fired around eighty shells in the building. It was just a number at this point.

I slumped against the engine housing as Phillip threw the bus into gear and radioed Jake to pull out.

Phillip looked over his shoulder, then shot me a look as we rumbled across the lawn. “They got mobbed,” I kept my voice low. “Turns out there were people trapped in fire-proofed labs in the building, at least two groups, probably more. The infected wouldn’t leave them, and there were tons of them. We got swarmed on the way out, at the bottom of the stairwell.”

“You get the books?”

A chill raced through my veins, and I grabbed the dump pouch. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah, we got them.”

The  mood at the rally point was grim, as Strad and Chuck were devastated by the losses; Phillip said he and Doc would get the four survivors out of the Zone. I promised to call them when we had word from Ted.

I wasn’t feeling too great, either. We kept losing people, and it didn’t matter how many infected we took down, they kept on coming like the freaking tides. At least I hadn’t known Pete or Danny very well. Jake and Key reported that they had shot and run over a decent collection of infected, that both patrol cars had decimated crowds as well, and that none of the actions had made a measurable dent in the numbers observed. I found it especially telling that Key, who was the most blood-thirsty of our group by a wide margin, was losing her fighting spirit. There were just too many of them-they were like killing fire ants with a hammer.

We headed back to base while I raised Ted on the phone. So far our raids into the University had resulted in four buildings burnt to the ground, two fire-damaged, two vandalized, and one with a truck embedded in it. Plus a lot of landscape damage and a huge amount of infected corpses. Higher education is always the first to suffer in a dark age.

Ted alerted to the developments, I stowed the phone and shifted my ammunition; as usual, the easiest pouches to reach were now empty so I moved rounds around to balance the load and get a count. I was carrying roughly a hundred rounds now, too many by about twenty, but no one ever died because they had too much ammo. I checked over the rest of my gear and weapons and drank a soda while Jake navigated the streets.

The floor of the truck was filthy, I noted absently: dirt, oily smudges, black streaks from boot soles, leaves, dead grass, several 5.56mm shell casings. The walls were marked with impacts from the varied cargoes I had stuffed into it over the week, and the tie-down rings were polished and shiny from use. The rungs of Mick’s bar stock ladder were polished on the treads from foot traffic, while spots of clay-colored rust bloomed elsewhere. Mick had been dead for half a week now.

When we reached the base I gave the books to the pair and found a yellow plastic chair with spindly metal legs and sat down to clean my weapons. It was work for the hands while I was busy not thinking at all. I was tired, very tired. Very tired of people following me and getting killed. People serving alongside of me and getting killed. Maybe getting tired of surviving. I was definitely getting tired of the infected.

Still, I was fighting-that was something. A lot of people were dead without even doing that much. We had gotten a lot of people out, that was something, too. We lost two, but we extracted four plus the books, and we had thinned the herd a bit. There had been a million people in the sprawl, and it was going to take a lot to break the virus.

Finished, I loaded the weapons and slung them. I was old, I reminded myself. I needed to take a moment every now and then and get my legs back under me.

The pair had gotten a golf ball-shaped camera connected to the computer and were using it so that Ted could see the books; they had him on the screen via a video link, and it was going a lot faster than scanning in pages. In fact, they were finishing up when I walked over.

“Its tannin,” Key announced, brushing a lock of hair from her eyes.

I drew a blank for a moment. “What, like you use to make leather?”

“Its used in adhesives, preventing rust, and staining wood,” Jake announced, studying something he had pulled from the Net. “Plus leather. Found in tea and wine. Industrial tannin…is a white or yellow powder normally sold in lots up to a ton.”

“Find some in this area,” I shook my head. “Powder…how the hell can we use it?”

Key made a make-up brush gesture. “Tell ’em its foundation.”

“Funny.”

Finding tannin wasn’t hard-a store in the south end of town had over fifty ten-pound plastic buckets of the stuff, and both the Net and Yellow Pages had other possible sites. The Hamster crew met me there-I had alerted them to the news, and they wanted a look at the wonder weapon of the Great Virus War. I left Jake and Key behind to scan the books and then e-mail them to the back-up academic, as well as thoroughly post the news across what remained of the Net. They had all sorts of ideas regarding tweets and facebooks and other stuff I didn’t understand.

“I don’t know how its best deployed,” I admitted, prying a lid off a bucket; inside was a plastic bag of yellow powder, a bit coarser than sand but not as dense, thicker than flour, not as thick as unmixed cement. “The king mixed it with tallow and put it on blades. I’m thinking of spike strips.”

“Spike strips?” Strad frowned.

“Sheet of plywood with nails sticking out, long ones. Spray adhesive to the nails, dust it with the powder, and lure them onto it. I’m sure as hell not going to stab anyone with it.”

He nodded. “Yeah. We got a crossbow and some wax, we can try that. Plus we grabbed a couple cannons-maybe it’s bad for them to breathe.”

The ‘cannon’ turned out to be a device for blasting confetti into crowds at concerts, using compressed air-they had located three, and an air compressor to fill the propellant tanks. We tried them with bags of flour, and it created a very impressive cloud, although it took some experimentation to determine the right load and packaging.