Authors: Wick Welker
Chapter Twenty One: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
After Stark had flipped the switch in the Bunny, the five-tank caravan of men and women armed with magnetic weapons stopped breathing for several seconds, hoping. The hunger in their stomachs was masked by the fatigue in their muscles. Their minds could only focus on the ravenous horde of human beings just outside the power plant gates. It took several seconds, but a low frequency vibration thumped underneath their feet, rattling streetlights, and rocking parked cars. Stark saw the horde slowing their movements and coming to a complete standstill. The horde stood still in the open streets.
“What?” Jacobs said, holding his hand to his brow as he looked out at the sea of motionless people.
“I wonder….” Stark muttered under his breath as he got out of the Bunny and walked out toward the parking lot where the horde had stopped.
Dave and Michaels followed after him. They saw the entire perimeter of the power plant completely absorbed by a motionless mob of hundreds of thousands of the infected swarm.
“It’s so quiet. How can that many people not make a single noise?” Michaels said.
“I think—” Stark stopped when the entire surrounding horde all at once fell to the ground. “Whoa…” He stopped walking and held Michaels and Dave back with his arm. All men, women, and children collapsed onto the streets and toppled over cars. Hundreds of bodies fell from the small shops and homes that surrounded the power plant. They fell simultaneously and remained motionless.
“Holy shit!” Jacobs yelled, running out to Dave and Michaels. “We did it!”
Stark looked out at the streets that had become carpeted with bodies. “It worked!” He yelled out. “I did it again!”
Dave quickly shot a glance to Michaels, motioning to Stark with his eyes. “So, you weren’t sure that it was going to work?” he asked.
“Just, never mind that. It worked,” Stark said, ignoring Dave and Michaels’ stares. “I wonder how much of the city it affected. If we were able to get a pulse coming from the entire power grid, the whole city of infected could have been… they could’ve been completely knocked down.” Stark started back toward the tank caravan parked outside the power plant and pulled out his satellite phone. “I’m going to tell the President that we’ve got some good news,” he said with enthusiasm.
Douglas ran out and joined Michaels, Dave, and Jacobs as they all walked together toward the parking fence gate that led out to the streets of the fallen bodies. “Let’s go check them out,” he said, sprinting past them.
They ran up to the edge of where the infected had fallen. Hundreds of half-naked men and woman were splayed about, sprawled on top of car roofs, and hanging from fences with their mouths open and with their eyes gazing toward the sky.
“Wow,” Jacobs said, nudging a man’s cheek with his boot. “It actually worked.”
Michaels looked at Dave and gave him a weak smile. “Maybe we are getting out of this city alive.”
Dave was about to respond but saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He saw a toddler that was standing alone out in the middle of the mass of people. The child looked from left to right and then over at them. The child’s face was too far away to see but they heard a single cry from his lips.
“Hey, whoa, there’s a normal little kid out there!” Jacobs yelled and ran out to the street, jumping over a heap of bodies that had stacked in a street gutter.
“Wait a minute, you idiot!” Douglas yelled after him, putting his arms out to stop Michaels and Dave from running after Jacobs.
Jacobs, ignoring Douglas’ voice, jogged over more bodies, weaved in between crashed cars, and climbed up and over a mound of bodies that had accumulated from where they had earlier fallen from a building. As he approached the child, he didn’t notice the twitching arms, and fluttering eyelids around him.
“Wait a minute…” Dave said. “Jacobs!” he yelled. “Get your ass back here!”
Jacobs made it to the child and scooped him up into his arms. As he turned to make it back to the parking lot, he stumbled as a large woman in only a bra and tattered jeans suddenly got up onto her hands and knees in front of him. Reflexively, he kicked her in the mouth and leapt over her, carrying the child in his arms. Before he could kick at a different woman in front of him, the child reached his mouth up to his neck, and sunk his teeth deep into the muscle, drawing out a large spurt of blood that oozed down his fatigues. In a panic, Jacobs dropped the small boy, and then clutched at his neck, with both hands, breathing rapidly.
From fifty feet off, they watched as Jacobs fell down, and became surrounded as the people of the horde arose, one by one. The same mass of bodies that had fallen to the ground was now standing up on wobbly knees. They clung to building walls and floppy fences. Jacobs disappeared in the massive crowd as all of the infected made it back onto their feet.
“That shit did not work,” Michaels said, grabbing Dave’s arm, and tugging at him as she moved back toward the shock tanks.
“Everybody, get back!” Douglas screamed into his radio. “They’re all waking up again! Make sure every tank is charged!”
They ran back to the tanks where Stark had hung up the phone, stepped out of the Bunny, and saw Dave and Douglas running up the parking lot toward him. Before he could ask, he saw that the masses of infected were standing back up again. “What?” he said under his breath. “What the hell happened?” Stark yelled out as the Douglas and Dave ran up to him with the rest of the squad surrounding the Bunny.
“You tell me, Dr. Stark,” Douglas said, changing the battery in his EMP-57. “This is your game.”
“I’m, I’m not sure. I don’t know why… I don’t know how they could possibly have been affected by the pulse and then…” He looked over Dave’s shoulder at the horde. “Maybe the pulse wasn’t strong enough.”
“All right, listen up,” Douglas yelled out, “everybody needs to get in their original formation, except the ground teams. They need to line up protecting the tanks as we charge the generators and get ready to get out of this city.”
“Wait, we’re leaving?” Stark put his hand on Douglas’ shoulder, who looked down at Stark’s hand and stared back at him.
“Dr. Stark, we are leaving Mexico right this minute. We’re going to tunnel our way out of here.”
“But we don’t know what has happened here, you can’t just make a unilateral decision. I’ve got to call the President. You’ve got to call… whoever it is that is giving you orders.” Stark felt like an idiot not understanding an ounce of military protocol.
Douglas gave him a smirk. “Yeah, I’ll give them a call, and they’re going to tell us to get the hell out of Mexico.”
“Wait, wait hang on. Look out again,” Michaels interrupted and pointed out toward the infected.
The horde was moving again but not in a typical, chaotic frenzy. There were small eddies of movements that rippled through the crowd and then dissipated as a new cluster of motion erupted in another section of the horde. Instead of an unrelenting wall of human bodies approaching them with every moment, the crowds were calmer, and expanded slowly with small and searching footsteps.
Dave saw several people at the front of the horde feeling up and down a pole of a chain-link fence that surrounded the power plant’s parking lot. He saw one entirely nude man who was rubbing the metal up and down with his hands, and pressing his stomach fat through the chain-linked wires.
“What are they doing?” Dave said while squinting.
“Eating Jacobs,” Michaels replied.
“No, they’re not… they’re not coming after us. They don’t even seem to notice us,” Stark said.
“I think I see a woman chewing on the fence.” Douglas looked at Stark, who was also fixated on the horde. “Dr. Stark, have you seen anything like that?”
“Um, no, no this is new behavior to me.” In his mind, Stark vividly remembered the infected Colonel Houser picking up a scalpel and shoving it down his throat, slicing his own tongue in half as it went down. He found himself suddenly missing Dr. Beckfield as he saw a man stumble into the parking lot, pick up an aluminum can, and bite down on the side. “No, this is… I don’t know what this is.”
“Everybody, just get into your positions, with ground units at the front as we prepare to mobilize the tanks,” Douglas said.
“Hey! One of them is coming over here!” A soldier’s voice shot out of a tank. They saw the same thin man who had now just finished swallowing the aluminum can shuffling over broken glass and body parts through the parking lot. The man’s eyes moved methodically, surveying the broken windshields, and open doors of the several cars that crashed days before.
Without saying a word, Stark walked out toward him with his EMP-M9 drawn, as Douglas screamed at him from behind. Ignoring him, Stark walked into the middle of the parking lot and approached the single infected man, who starting rubbing his hands up and down a parking sign beside a car. Stark positioned himself opposite the same car, lifted the EMP-M9, and fired it at the man. At first, Stark thought the man was falling down from the pulse but realized that he had just slipped on some shattered glass, and started clutching at the sign to prevent from falling over. The infected man got back to his feet and moved his tongue up and down the sign, completely ignoring Stark.
“Oh, no,” Stark whispered, backing away as Douglas came from up behind him.
Douglas also lifted his EMP-57 at the man and fired with no effect. “What?” Douglas looked at Stark, and then back at his gun, checking the battery charge. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t think the blast, the, the pulse we sent through the city was strong enough.”
“So what in the fuck does that mean?” Douglas said impatiently.
Stark kept his eyes on the infected man as he bit down on the side of the sign.
Douglas walked up to the infected man, removed the long blade strapped to his back, and brought it down briskly at the side of the man’s neck. The blade sliced deep into the tissue and ruptured vessels that leaked with blackened blood. Douglas brought the blade down once more into the man’s heart and looked back at Stark. “So what in the hell does that mean, Stark?”
Stark could see Beckfield’s tiny eyes looking up from the hospital bed, taunting him. “I’m not sure yet. Let’s just get back to the tanks. I’ve got to make some calls.”
“Calls? You’re going to make some calls while we’re surrounded by millions of infected people in the middle of Juárez city, who have just become resistant to our only weapons?” Douglas asked.
“Just… get your men together. Maybe we can retreat into the building?” Stark said softly as he walked back to the Bunny. “They suddenly don’t seem very aggressive…” he added as he sauntered off.
Dave saw Stark walking back toward them with Douglas standing in the distance, staring at his back. “The hell is going on over there?” Dave asked.
“I don’t know, but there’s some reason Douglas just had to hack that guy down after they both used their pulse guns on him. Something is seriously wrong,” Michaels said.
Douglas’ voice suddenly scrambled over all their radios. “Come in all units, everyone needs to take out their back-up gunpowder firearms, and have their shoulder blades ready to use. It looks like our pulses may not be effective anymore. I want all tank teams to remain in place inside each tank. All ground teams will retreat back to the loading bay of the power plant. I want all tanks to assemble in a line pattern in front of the loading bay. Everybody, move now!”
“We are so screwed,” Dave said as he unclipped a handgun from his side pocket.
“We’ve been screwed from the very beginning,” Michaels said as she walked in front of him toward the loading bay doors. “Let’s go find somewhere to relax.”
Dave looked back over his shoulder at the horde that swirled in erratic currents, stopping to chew on car doors, or to pick on sewer grates. One woman at the edge of the horde had found a screwdriver, which she shoved down her throat, with the skinny end first. The handle got caught in the back of her throat, so she pounded the back of it with the stub of her severed arm.
“Holy shit, they’re turning into a bunch of goats out there. What are they even doing?” Dave said.
“I don’t know, but for the first time ever, they don’t seem too interested in eating me, so I don’t really care right now.” Michaels hoisted herself up the concrete stoop of the loading bay and disappeared into the power plant with the rest of the ground teams following after.
*****
Stark had set up a work desk on top of a stack of wooden pallets in the corner of the warehouse. He was fidgeting with a satellite phone and a flashlight when Douglas stumbled in, shouting out orders, and setting up perimeter goals to the squad. He positioned them at open doorways and had them move metal cabinets in front of several other maintenance doors that led outside. The squad worked quickly, setting up defensive positions, and taking inventory of all gunpowder ammunition and explosive grenades that they had. Fortunately, there were few windows in their section of the power plant, with only a small amount of horizontal windows near the ceilings that Dave discovered once he climbed up into the catwalks in the ceiling above. He found Michaels sitting down on the metal grating of the catwalk floor, suspended high above the squad below, with her legs dangling in the air. She was looking out the small windows at the horde, with her forehead against a metal railing.