Plagued: The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment (Plagued States of America) (2 page)

Three

“So you’re my new man,” Captain Sanchez said as Mason entered the
office. Sanchez immediately returned Mason’s salute and held out a hand. “Glad to have you on board, son.”

“Thank you, sir,” Mason replied
sharply, shaking the offered hand.

Sanchez, Luiz. Captain, Naval operations, assigned to the U.S.S
. Delaware nuclear attack submarine for eight years. In a compression accident, he lost his hearing in one ear and was transferred to shore duty. Volunteered for both his previous and current tour on Rock Island.

“Is Chavez treating you well? Showing you the ropes?”

“So far.”

“Good. Have a seat,” the captain said, pointing at a chair across from his desk. Sanchez fell into his own chair, rubbing between his eyes.
“I have a problem with you, Jones. You’re the only Army officer on Biter’s Island. I’ve got Navy and Marine officers coming out my ass, but Army’s never sent me an officer for this post. I don’t know what to do with you, to be honest.”

“You could always send me back, sir,” Mason replied.

Captain Sanchez didn’t laugh. Instead he stared at Mason’s uniform, at the Lieutenant insignia on his collar, the medic symbol on his arm, the Airborne patch on his front pocket.

“You’re the fresh meat, Jones,” Captain Sanchez said at last. “I only have grunt jobs on graves at the moment. If I were to put you somewhere else, well, it wouldn’t look good.”

“I understand, sir. I’ve been through it before.”

“I’ll bet,” Sanchez murmured. “Your file has a few
discrepancies I’d like to ask you about.”

“Discrepancies?”

“Like where have you been for the past nine weeks? Your last tour ended abruptly. It shows you’ve been home for months.”

“I took leave, sir.”

“What?” Sanchez asked, cupping a hand over his good ear.

“Leave, sir. I took leave.”

“Nine weeks?”

“No, sir. After I got my red card I was sent for additional training.”

“What kind of training? You’ve got all the qualifications you need to guard biters.”

“I had a medical refresher
. I had to requalify for combat water survival, my fast rope, then—”

“None of that’s in here,” Sanchez replied, holding Mason’s file in the air between them. “I don’t know why you were picked for this duty, Jones. You’re going to be mopping up shit out of biter cells for the next six months. Why the fuck would they send me a lieutenant for that?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Mason said.

“Huh?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“That makes two of us. I recommend you get some R&R today. Your first shift begins at 21
:30 hours tomorrow night. Chavez will fill you in on the check-in process and uniform requirements. Dismissed.”

Four

Lieutenant
Mason Jones looked over the steel railing surrounding the wall. The young Marine manning the machine gun emplacement beside him glanced nervously toward Mason. Another Marine held a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the distance, trying to appear occupied even though he was equally curious. A lieutenant, they were probably thinking, coming to inspect things. Looking down the three story drop, Mason felt the full force of the prison complex.

Rock Island Prison Defense Facility, built by
Breckenrock Corporation immediately following the outbreak, was planned as a holding location for recently infected human subjects, initially for the purposes of study. It was designed to hold over six hundred occupants in 426 cells. It was comprised of five levels, three above ground and two below. Medical laboratory units were constructed in the sub-levels. There were no windows on any floor, only five ground-level exits, one underground exit, and three above-ground exits, one of which was a roof access point for defense and airlift support. The outer wall was built a year later to prevent free access to and from the Plagued States without passing through the prison defenses.

Chavez stepped up beside Mason and looked down
with him. The old 24
th
Street Bridge stretched over the slow moving river with its wide and vacant platform. It had several barricades in the form of steel gates that spanned its entire width. Mason thought it to be a flimsy defense to keep out the zombie horde, but with the gun at the rooftop as it was, the chances of anything making it across in one piece were slim. The road on the other side of the river disappeared, descending into abandoned buildings and overgrown forest.

Mason turned his gaze north to see the way to civilization over the 2
nd
Street Bridge, which was configured with another barricade system, this one of low concrete slabs to act as obstacles to slow crossing vehicles. The machine gun didn’t face north, though. The barricades weren’t to keep the people on the other side out. They were there to keep the people on the island in. Just to be sure, there was enough barbed wire lashed to the sides that birds made nests in the web.

Both bridges had
a guard house that looked a lot like the checkpoints in the Middle East. He expected to see the black scars of past explosions studding the concrete, stretching toward civilization, but there were no such blemishes. It was a clean, empty expanse.

When coming to the island, t
hey routed everyone through x-ray machines on the civilized side and made them surrender anything remotely resembling an electronic device, including radios, cell phones, cameras, and even Mason’s electric shaver. They didn’t want photos from this side getting out.

“At ease, Corporal,” Mason said as he came closer to the
mounted machine gun.

“What a shit hole, huh
, sir?” Chavez asked and spat over the edge. “I like the other side of the island better.”

“How do you get guard duty on the wall?” Mason asked Chavez.

“You don’t want it, sir.” Chavez replied, shaking his head and backing away from the edge. “Hardest thing to do is stare at freedom all day knowing you aren’t allowed to go near it. It just sucks ass.”

Mason sighed, standing straight and looking at the powder blue sky with its long streaks of gray like claws raking the atmosphere.
What a shit hole indeed
.

“Have you ever fired this?” Mason asked
the gunner.

“Yes, sir,” the corporal manning the gun replied. “We test it twice per month.”

“I meant on biters.”

The c
orporal turned to look at Mason, gauging him, then looked at Chavez. Chavez nodded. “All the time, sir.”

“How d
o you know they’re biters?”

The corporal seemed confused by the question. He was a young kid, probably only a year out of high school
, and on his first assignment.

“It’s OK,” Chavez said, stepping next to the gunner. “Move over and let the lieutenant have a look through the scope. Take a look, sir. We have signs posted all along the tree line. Every week we get out there with weed whackers and cut back the growth.
We have fences further back guiding anyone who stumbles into our area toward the road or the river. Look right there, sir. See that structure? It’s a phone booth. Pick up the receiver and we don’t shoot you. Everything else is fair game. And we keep it lit at night.

“
Rabbits love the chopped grass, so we get lots of them, and that attracts dogs and wolves, and they make a bloody mess back in the shadows, and the smell of blood eventually draws in a biter from time to time. If hunters are on duty, they go catch them. If not, then we get to pick them off. You should come up here and try it sometime.”

“No thanks,” Mason replied. “I’ve had my fill of killing.”

“What, biters?” the corporal asked as though the notion were absurd. “They ain’t people no more.”

Mason stood and looked over the top of the gun toward the old, abandoned town in the Plague States, wondering if it would ever be possible to restore it.
“Well, there’s a lot of debate about that, actually,” Mason put in, stepping away from the machine gun. “Carry on, gentlemen.”

Five

The rest of
Mason’s orientation had been unsettling, but uneventful. After unpacking his duffle bag, he went for a jog. Based on the stares he received from civilians and soldiers alike, he figured there wasn’t a very strict adherence to any fitness programs. It didn’t matter to Mason. He enjoyed running. It helped to clear his mind, to ground him in the reality that even though this place was foreign to everything he knew of the world, the ground beneath his feet struck with the same consistent impact as anywhere else. There was no greater weight on his shoulders here except for what he piled on in his own mind. Thankfully, running helped shed him of those pounds too.

On his approach to the Meat Market he hardly realized what was unfolding ahead of him. The roadway abruptly ended into a huge dirt lot filled with enormous trucks the size of troop transports, every one outfitted in a manner that suggested the end of the world was near.
The vehicles, generally long flatbeds with four-wheel drive, had numerous built-in pens of varied size and design. Some had large pens meant for storing several occupants, while other configurations of individual occupancy were abundant, appearing as rows of cages only about the size of a phone booth. Even the smallest of vehicles had room for ten detainees.

Mason jogged around the vehicles on the river side of the lot and around a stand of trees to find himself on a resort beach front, except instead of sand there was well
-maintained, lush green grass. Ahead of him stood a lavish, wide building that looked like a golf course clubhouse with a broad wall of glass facing the river, outside of which was an enormous patio area with tables and chairs under umbrellas, all enclosed behind a wall of clear Plexiglas.

A three-story building stood behind the clubhouse, the only hotel on Biter’s Island, complete with a casino that took up the entire first floor. This was where all the civilians were forced to stay, although most of the hunters preferred sleeping on their own rigs most nights.

This remarkable feeling of civility faded quickly. He passed behind the hotel and came upon a field of cages ringed inside of an enormous compound of chain-link fencing. Stretched high overhead was an assortment of sails laid flat to keep the majority of the interior of the marketplace shaded. Trucks backed up to a loading bay as though delivering goods, and a long line of people stood about in an orderly, although impatient fashion, waiting for names to be called and zombies to be handed over.

It was good that he had a chance to
approach it alone rather than plunging in with an escort like Chavez. The Meat Market was the kind of place that needed to be seen several times to be believed. Aside from Biter’s Bend, there was probably no other place on Earth quite like it. Mason’s trained, stoic expression of military bearing fell prey to utter surprise. He donned the tell-tale widening to his eyes – that gawk of the uninitiated.

That was all Mason surveyed on his
first pass of the area. He kept jogging and in a few minutes passed behind the Quonset huts Chavez had pointed out earlier. He was curious about their contents, but didn’t stop to look around. They were built in the wrong configuration to be a sentry ring. If anything, blowing them all next to each other as they were configured would result in a massive crater. Their hinged roofs, however, hinted at their true design, and Mason hoped he would never see them yawning open.

O
n his second loop of the island, he watched zombies being moved from a truck to their pens. The pens were like chain-link dog runs, all joined together to make an oval ring, with four wide lanes into and out of the center of the compound. Inside the ring were kiosks and other temporary looking structures where words like Registration and Bidding Agent were displayed. Most of the biters were docile, easily moved. One struggled. It pulled from its handler, a kid of no more than eighteen. Onlookers in and around them stepped back, but didn’t seem overly concerned. The handler got a better grip on the noose pole and drove the zombie’s head downward to control it.

“Hold
your pole, new-fag,” someone shouted, and several hunters laughed. The handler was red faced as he yanked on the zombie mercilessly. The zombie snarled, its hands gripping the pole cinched below its chin. Mason kept running to avoid seeing the outcome.

On
Mason’s third pass, he slowed to listen to the nearest slaver hock his merchandise. “Fully domesticated,” the slaver shouted. “One hundred and sixty pound male, all his fingers and toes. Slab trained.”

Slab trained. That was the slang used to mean that the zombie could
be trained to do certain tasks using the reward system, just like a good dog, with the reward typically being small slabs of meat. It meant it knew the clicker, the sound used at feeding time.

Mason slowed and approached the fence with his hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath as quickly as possible.
Spaced at regular intervals around the pens stood a soldier in black with his rifle facing down across his chest. Behind him on the fence were two poles with nooses on the end, the kind Mason had been trained in before coming here, the kind used for catching zombies by the neck to subdue and control. Mason put his hands on the fence and stared through, fingers clutching to keep himself standing. His legs felt weak, but not from the jogging. Hard memories tried to latch onto his mind. This looked like Egypt all over again with its fences inside of fences inside of more fences, except over there the soldiers faced an angry crowd that herded young women in front of their men to advance on the consulate. There, they strapped bombs to little boys and made them run at the fence. There they did everything they could to get inside.

Here
, it was apathy. Even the biters didn’t seem to care about the chain-link barriers. What kind of degeneracy could lead to this? It had only been ten years since the zombie outbreak, nine since the containment was assured and the laws regarding the capture and sale of specimens for scientific research were passed. Then came knowledge of how to make the contagious no longer infectious, and someone had the bright idea to pass the reusability laws in order to help re-indoctrinate victims, and in no time, slave trading returned to American soil. Two states, then three, then seven. Mason came from one of those states. Ohio. One of the split-states. Part of its soil inside, the other part outside of the channel used to prevent further spread of the consumption pathogen. Ohio.
The
political battleground of American ethics.

“You’ll have to back away,” the nearest soldier said as he walked toward Mason.
The young soldier had one hand on his rifle now and was waving for Mason to step back. Just like Egypt, a futile gesture when the crowd knew they weren’t allowed to shoot. Mason felt like a foreigner, unable to decipher the soldier’s words or the purpose of all this.

“Sorry,” Mason said, taking his hands off the fence and backing away.

“Where’s your I.D.?” the young soldier asked. He was a corporal, another Ranger.

Mason dug it out of the cargo pocket of his trousers. He was only wearing a brown t-shirt on top with no insignia or markings. He could be anyone, after all. How was the corporal supposed to know? Mason held up the badge, the blue
bar of his I.D. apparent, indicating that he was an officer.

“Oh, sorry, sir,” the corporal said, although his hand didn’t budge from the grip of his rifle.

“No problem,” Mason said. “Carry on.”

Mason looked into the
compound one more time and scanned the faces. All the zombies shared an expression of vacancy. Most were backed into the corners furthest from the sun, hiding under the corrugated rooftops. Even in the shade, they were still half-blind, and maybe even afraid. He wondered if zombies knew fear – aside from the fear they fed on, that is.