But to John, Falconer said, “We’re running out of time. Drive.”
He did.
12 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John rolled over bodies of spacemen—going out of his way to do it, it seemed—and rolled past the carnage of the pitched battle that had been raging just minutes ago. He knocked aside REPER vehicles and pushed through the damaged barricades on the highway. The mob in front of us fell silent, parting as we rolled slowly into town, into the blast zone of the bombs that even now were riding in the bellies of planes just over the horizon.
“That’s far enough.”
John stopped, and Falconer yanked Tennet out of the truck. He reached back into the cab and grabbed the mic for its radio and pulled it as far as the little coiled wire would let it. Falconer put his gun to Tennet’s head and said, “All right, shitbird. This is ground zero. They drop those bombs, you get flash fried just like the rest of us. Now get on this radio and tell them to abort.”
Tennet looked at him with genuine disdain. “What you are threatening me with is the best-case scenario if I fail in my task. How are you failing to understand this?”
A huge, blue, extended-cab pickup truck emerged from the crowd in front of us. It had a wood chipper in the bed, and out from the driver’s seat stepped a guy in a cowboy hat and absurdly tight pants. From the passenger seat emerged Owen, still in his quarantine-issued red jumpsuit. The cowboy had a shotgun, Owen had his pistol. They looked like the stars of an eighties’ era show about loose cannon undercover cops. Called something like O-Funk and the Cowboy. From the backseat of the pickup stepped Dr. Marconi. I tried to imagine the conversation the three of them had on the way over and my brain just spat out error messages.
To me, Marconi said, “I managed to convince them that, despite their differences, they also have a great deal in common.”
The Cowboy hurried over to Falconer and said, “Holy shit. You got the son of a bitch. I owe you a twelve-pack, detective.”
“It’s not over yet. The bombs are coming and this asshole won’t call them off.”
Owen spoke up and said, “Why don’t we start feeding his feet into the fuckin’ wood chipper, see if that changes his mind.”
Tennet said, “All right, all right. Give me the mic.”
Falconer handed it to him. Tennet yanked, ripping the wire out of the console, and tossed the mic onto the ground.
Falconer growled, smashed the butt of his gun into Tennet’s face and threw the man to the ground. Falconer followed him down, straddling his chest, punching him over and over.
I said, “Should we, uh, stop him?”
John said, “Nope.”
9 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
Marconi walked up and said, “Why do I have the feeling I am not going to receive my consultant’s fee for this project?”
I said, “Everybody is so freaking droll today. Jesus.”
John said, “Well, what the hell do we do now?”
To Amy, Marconi said, “You have one of those fancy cell phones, correct? One that can capture video?”
She said, “Yep,” and pulled it out.
“You have a signal, correct? And access to the Internet?”
“Sure, sure.”
Somebody in the crowd said, “Look! There’s a plane! To the north! They’re coming!”
I turned. There was a speck in the sky, that even from this far away I could tell was not our friendly Predator drone coming back to rescue us somehow. Not sure what it would have done anyway. This was a big bastard, with propellers on the wings, one of the big cargo planes you always saw on the news hauling troops back and forth to the Middle East.
Marconi asked, “And you can stream video? Meaning you can capture video and upload it live?”
“Yeah. What am I recording?”
Marconi sighed and said, “Our deaths.”
8 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
I said, “What? That’s your plan?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and gave me a sad look through the rain.
“What’s that around your lady friend’s neck?”
I didn’t have to look at her to answer. It was always there.
“What, her necklace? The crucifix?”
“Think about it. What I said before, back at quarantine. The—”
“The Babylonian Bureau. Yes. Goddamnit we don’t have time—”
“The sacrifice, David. That is how mankind overcomes the Babel Threshold. Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his very life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it. Unfortunately, as I feared, today that is to be us.”
The plane grew on the horizon. Two more appeared in the distance behind it. I could hear the ever-so-faint buzz of its engines. Appropriately enough, they sounded like bees. Just like Tennet had said. A swarm of bees, attacking a … hamburger I guess.
Amy was staring at me, eyes wide. Owen and Cowboy looked befuddled. Falconer was standing over an unconscious Tennet, his fists bloody, eyes defiant.
7 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John said, “Fuck that bullshit. Everybody in the truck, we’re heading out.”
Marconi said, “So we ride to safety, while the tens of thousands who remain in the city behind us burn? And then what? We drive out across the buffer zone outside those barricades, and a few miles later you will meet another, larger barricade, manned by the U.S. military. Martyrdom isn’t something you choose. It is thrust upon you.”
Amy said, “Oh! Wait! Ohmygod it’s so simple. We just—okay, we just have to get to an open area. Between us and the plane, so he sees it—the cornfield! Everybody go to the cornfield!”
To John, she said, “Get on the, uh, the speaker thing in the truck! Tell everybody to go to the cornfield!”
We didn’t need to tell anybody anything. Hundreds of people were flowing past us, through the ruined barricades, the city draining out through the highway like water.
We piled into the truck, managed to get it turned around without running over a dozen people, and rumbled off toward the cornfield.
On the way, Amy said, “The plane! Oh God I can’t believe I didn’t think of this! It’s flying low, under the clouds! We can see it! So it can see us!”
“I don’t understand how that—”
“The pilot thinks we’re zombies. We just have to show him we’re not.”
5 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
We rumbled to a stop in the field, refugees of Undisclosed scattering past us, on foot and in trucks and on bicycles, heading off toward the second military cordon that I was pretty sure most of them didn’t realize was there. What did they think they would find out there? Their out-of-town loved ones, waiting for them with a six-pack? The president, with an apology bouquet?
John took to the loudspeaker and said, “WE GOT ABOUT FIVE MINUTES TO PULL THIS SHIT OFF, SO LISTEN UP. GATHER AROUND. WE ARE GOING TO SPELL OUT A MESSAGE FOR THE PILOT OF THAT PLANE UP THERE. HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S ABOUT TO BOMB. WE ARE GONNA SHOW HIS DUMB ASS.”
We all bailed out of the truck. The pickup carrying Owen, the Cowboy and Marconi, which upon further reflection is totally a cop show I would watch, pulled up alongside.
I glanced nervously up at the plane and said, “Son of a bitch. We don’t have time, we don’t have time—”
John said, “It has to be something simple! Like ‘HE
LP’ or something!”
“WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO FORM FOUR FUCKING LETTERS, JOHN!”
Marconi said, “You don’t need letters, David. You need a symbol. One that man up there is sure to recognize.” Marconi nodded toward Amy.
John said, “Right! He’s right!” John ran off, stopped a group of women and said, “Stand in a line! Right here! Hurry! You! Over there! Stand here! COME ON, GODDAMNIT, WE NEED AT LEAST A HUNDRED PEOPLE! MOVE!”
* TRANSCRIPT OF AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN CAPTAIN PABLO VASQUEZ (SPEARHEAD), PILOT OF AN MC-130 H TALON II, LEAD AIRCRAFT IN OPERATION LEPPARD, AND COPILOT CAPTAIN LAWRENCE MCDONNEL (STALLION) AT 11:59, NOVEMBER 15TH *
Spearhead: Loadmaster, we are six-zero seconds from primary payload release. Prepare to open bay doors, on my mark—
Stallion: Hey, uh, take a look at the barricade area. On the road, the uh, highway—
Spearhead: I see it.
Stallion: We have a, uh, crowd forming, are those REPER?
Spearhead: Negative.
Stallion: Friendlies Evac should have been completed by—
Spearhead: Negative, those are not REPER.
Stallion: Jesus, are we looking at Zulus here?
Spearhead: Affirmative, I’m seeing overturned vehicles and debris, it looks like the barricade has been overrun.
Spearhead: Will the blast get them out there?
Spearhead: Affirmative. Loadmaster, we are now three-zero seconds from primary payload release. Opening bay doors now.
Stallion: Look. Down at the uh, that area to the east of the highway. In that field.
Spearhead: Copy that, there is a crowd forming in the field—
Stallion: Look. Look how they’re standing.
Spearhead: Is that—
Stallion: Look at the rows, they’re perfect rows—
Spearhead: They’re almost forming the shape of—
Stallion: It’s not almost. It’s perfect, it’s too perfect a shape—
Spearhead: All right. This is—Uh, Command, this is Spearhead, do you read me? We, uh, I don’t believe what I’m seeing here, but we are observing a crowd of Zulus less than a kilometer outside of the target area and they are standing, uh, they are standing in the shape of a human penis. I repeat, the Zulus have organized themselves into a perfect shape of a human penis in an open field below us. We are looking at this with our own eyes.
Stallion: They are not Zulus.
30 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
We stood there, in the field, shivering in the rain, in the shape of the dick John had formed us into. Dr. Marconi was to one side of me, looking disapproving. Amy was in my arms, her eyes turned upward, rain bouncing off her glasses. She was praying.
The cargo plane growled toward us, swooping lower, so low that I wondered how the thing expected to escape its own explosion.
Amy closed her eyes and buried her face in my chest and said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“It’s turning! Look!”
The hulking plane banked, making a gentle turn in the sky and veering away from the town. We nervously watched it humming off into the distance, making a wide circle to head back the way it came.
A cheer went up in the crowd around us. There were five planes in the formation, and we watched as one after another they peeled off and circled back.
Falconer walked up and said, “I just want to say right now that this is the stupidest shit I’ve ever been involved in.”
John said, “Hey, you don’t have to like our methods, but you can’t argue with the result. Everything turned out okay, right?”
10 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
Amy said, “Why isn’t that plane turning back?”
The trailing plane in the formation was not, in fact, changing its course. It growled straight through the air, swooping right over us. The crowd all watched it glide into the distance, heading toward the part of town that had become home to the quarantine.
The plane swooped lower and lower in the sky, as if it was going to attempt a landing. Only it was not slowing down, it was speeding up. It released its payload, following the bombs down until both bombs and plane met the earth. A silent, black plume instantly appeared in the distance, the boom reaching us two full seconds later. The detonation would be heard two states away.
We were too far away to realize it at the time, but both buildings of the old Ffirth Asylum had been reduced to a crater full of thousands of tons of shattered concrete and brick. All of it was cooking in a furnace fueled by aviation fuel, floorboards, old furniture and tons of other flammable debris that would still be smoldering ten days later. Somewhere, at the bottom of it all, rooms full of malformed inmates were vaporized in a fraction of a second. In the old administrative building next door, a single basement room full of computers and gigabytes of incriminating data on hard drives, all melted into a bubbling, black stew.
The Soy Sauce, Redux
John said, “Now there’s a shitty bomber pilot.”
The rain was starting to let up. I took a deep breath of morning air and said, “The town is still there, Tennet. You played your hand, and you lost—wait, where is he?”
Falconer said, “Oh, son of a bitch!”
The blue pickup, which Tennet had apparently stolen while we were all standing in the shape of a dong and waiting to die, was barreling north up the highway.
I said, “Who cares? He’s going to run smack into the Army’s cordon. Hopefully they’ll arrest his stupid ass.”
But Falconer was already sprinting toward the monster truck. He was damned if he was going to let somebody else get his collar after all this. I was about to bid him good hunting, when John brushed past me and jumped into the passenger seat. And then Amy was running toward the truck and I realized that nobody else was going to be happy until they saw a proper end to this. I ran and jumped into the backseat, my shoe dragging on pavement as the truck almost took off without me.
* * *
The sight of the Army’s airtight cordon operation instantly ruined every zombie movie for me. These people weren’t stupid. Strategy was their thing. They assessed the enemy, and adjusted their plan accordingly. If it was zombies, so be it.
Thus, there was not a single soldier visible, not a single exposed face or neck available to be bitten and zombified. Instead, there was a row of armored vehicles full of soldiers—Bradley Fighting Vehicles, I would later learn—arranged in a formation that would give them clear shots from their gun ports and from the turrets mounted at the top of each vehicle. They sat well back from concrete barricades that would stop any suicide vehicles in their tracks. Coils of razor wire were strung along the ground on both sides of the barrier. A horde of five thousand zombies—even fast zombies—could rush the formation and they would be easily blown to pieces by a crisscross hail of large-caliber rounds. These men were told they were staring into the ravenous maw of a zombie outbreak, and they were prepared to mow that shit down like dead grass.
After having followed him the five miles across the Dead Zone, we thought Tennet’s truck was going to just keep going and plow right into that green wall of death, at which point I assumed he would find his weight in lead rushing through his windshield at the speed of sound. Was this a suicide-by-armored-vehicle? For what, just to spite Falconer? Goddamn this guy was a dick.
Instead, Tennet’s truck skidded to a stop short of the barbed wire. We stopped behind him, watching. Tennet jumped out, and walked toward the soldiers, waving his arms in the air. It wasn’t like he was signaling surrender, it was more like he was waving them away, screaming and pointing and acting like a crazy person.
Then, he was tackled and ripped to pieces by a monster in a black space suit.
I said, “Well, that worked out.”
We all watched Tennet’s well-deserved and awesomely ironic death, when we heard the first thud of heavy machine guns erupt from the line of vehicles ahead.
To our right, d
escending down from the water tower construction site, was a nightmare horde of shambling, malformed, infected REPER personnel. They crawled and howled and shrieked and sprouted snapping appendages. Then it hit me that this was, in fact, Tennet’s dying plan. Tennet had thrown his personal horde of infected at the army cordon, giving them their zombie apocalypse, and every reason in the world to unleash hell on the city beyond, regardless of what one airplane pilot claimed he saw.
* * *
I screamed, “GET US OUT OF HERE!”
The infected were washing in from our right, swarming toward us and the line of armored vehicles in front of us. More and more of the vehicles were going weapons free on the horde, the turrets and machine guns punching fire and lead into the air.
Falconer was already throwing the monster truck into reverse, cranking the wheel and getting us perpendicular to the highway, then cranking it the other way to get the big bastard of a vehicle heading the other direction. The roar of the big guns outside was like the finale of a fireworks display. I couldn’t hear myself think.
The truck shook. Amy screamed. Something had hit us.
Falconer growled and fought with the wheel. We weren’t moving. I smelled smoke. Another shell smacked the front of the truck, knocking the hood askew.
Flames flew up in front of the windshield.
“GET OUT! GET OUT AND GET FLAT!”
Falconer threw open his door and ducked out. John was messing with something in his lap. The furgun had fallen to the floorboard. I grabbed it, then climbed over Amy and threw open the door. The sound of monster shrieks and cannon fire filled the air. My shoes hit the pavement and I heard Falconer scream, “THE DITCH, GET TO THE DITCH.”
I saw where he was going—the deep drainage ditch along the west side of the road, no more than ten feet in front of us. John spilled out behind me, all of us now using the burning truck as cover against the barrage of gunfire. Falconer sprinted forward, making himself as low to the ground as he could, and dove into the ditch.