Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

As the Bull Dog lit up the fences, the entire crowd turned as one, their white and brown faces reflecting the light like dishes. Blood gleamed on hands or bare legs where they’d fallen and hurt themselves. Then the crowd began to separate into two halves, circling in toward the brilliant corona from either side.

“Oh my God,” Ingrid said.

“Shut ‘em off! Shut ’em off!” Cam yelled. Too late. The infected people had a clear goal and began to pick up speed, shambling through the obstacles and barbed wire. Metal clanked, but they were silent, only grunting or heaving for air. Even the young apple farmer seemed to regain his bearings, stalking toward them even though he bent sideways from the light as if it was a physical force.

“Open fire!” Greg shouted, blasting the young man in the head. The boy toppled.

Cam’s eyes stung inside his goggles but he repressed the emotion, screaming against his face mask. He welcomed the noise of his M4, too, because it overrode everything else.

The carbine rattled in his arms as he dropped the skinny girl with a three-round burst. Her blood looked purple in the high-intensity lights. Cam took down the man behind her. Then a woman. Then another man. The range was too close. The M4 and the older model M16 were designed to penetrate Soviet helmets at a hundred yards, not unarmored targets at forty feet. Cam’s shots passed through the fourth man’s shoulder without knocking him down.

At the same time, Owen and Ingrid blazed at the crowd with their M16s. Two more carbines and a shotgun ripped into action from Cam’s left, farther down the perimeter.

The guns were withering. Twenty people twisted and fell. One man lay screeching on a chrome bumper, making noises that sounded almost like words before their Russian grenade launcher coughed somewhere to Cam’s right. A small rocket jumped into the field of light, splashing fire and smoke. The men and women of Jefferson had moved to reinforce Cam and the others like a well-schooled platoon, but they were downwind of the infected mob.

The carbines on Cam’s left went silent first. He was reloading his own weapon when he noticed the change, yet it wasn’t until he set his M4 against his shoulder again that he realized the delay from the other position had lasted too long. Those men weren’t reloading. They were infected.

Cam peered at the nearest hut, looking for flashlights or muzzle flashes. There was nothing. Then someone stumbled past the corner of the building. The man was not empty-handed or half clothed like the people in the crowd. In fact, he seemed to be pawing at his jacket hood as he struggled to shake his hand loose from the trigger guard of his shotgun, treating the weapon like a burden rather than a tool.

“Oh shit we gotta move!” Cam yelled at Greg. “Fall back! Fall back!” He slapped at Ingrid’s shoulder, but the older woman was too focused on controlling her M16. She fired into the west side of the crowd.

The infected people continued to advance. The guns did not frighten them, nor did the dead and wounded on the ground. They stumbled through their bleeding friends with no more attention than they gave to the fences and car parts. If anything, the muzzle blasts seemed to draw them. It was as if they were so deeply submerged in their trance that they seized on any external sensation. They walked right into the guns, which were much fewer now.

“Hold your position!” Greg shouted, but Cam pointed and yelled, “We lost everyone on our left! Every time you shoot someone—”

The floodlight teetered over and crashed as Neil fell beside them, his body hammering stiffly at the ground. The nanotech was among them.

“Run!” Cam shouted. He dragged Ingrid away from the man. Greg moved with them and suddenly Owen and another villager were there, too, retreating from the floodlight.

Owen and Greg yelled into their headsets for their wives. If the town was overrun, hiding in the sealed huts was pointless. Their air would run out. “Tricia!” Greg yelled. “Tricia!”

“—out of the buildings and run east before—”

Two infected men walked into their path, the village guards who had been on Cam’s flank. Even in the half-light, it was obvious they weren’t normal. One man had pushed his goggles sideways across his head and was struggling with his hood and mask. The other kept his right arm lifted away from his body, twitching, as his head rocked in the same palsied movements.

It was Matthew. Cam recognized his green jacket. Matthew seemed absorbed with the tremors in his arm and neck, but his face turned at the sound of their voices.

“Watch out!” Ingrid said.

Somehow they needed to get past. Cam dodged left and the others came with him, only to find themselves pinned against a truck and the front of Greenhouse 1. The fifth man, David, raised his rifle, but Cam yelled, “No, you’ll make it worse!”

Cam reversed his M4 and took the short barrel in his hands. The muzzle was hot despite his gloves. He clubbed Matthew and then whipped the carbine at the other guy. Someone else threw a pistol, knocking him down. They ducked upwind of the two men and Cam saw it was Owen who’d helped him, emptying his holster. Cam would have said something if there was time. Thank you. They were on the same side, no matter if they’d argued.

But their chance was already gone. Forty yards away, the sealed huts were opening up. In the yellow light streaming from both cabins, the other villagers staggered and twitched. Some of them collapsed. Tricia screamed with Hope in her arms before suddenly she jerked, too. The baby’s cries shut off at the same time. Tricia fell to one knee and dropped her infant daughter, who rolled halfway out of plastic sheeting her mother had fashioned into a bag around her.

They’d run straight into a drift of the plague.

The baby, Cam thought before his eyes cut left and right through the convulsing shapes. He was looking for Ruth.

“No!” Owen screamed. “No!”

Not all of them had fallen. Several people either tried to break free of the rest or turned to help the infected ones. In many cases it was hard to tell who was sick and who wasn’t. Sometimes it was the infected ones who lurched away, bouncing off their neighbors. The healthy people ran from each other or bent and dragged at a lover or a friend only to succumb themselves.

Cam grabbed Owen before the man could run to his wife.

“No! No!” Owen screamed.

His voice turned several heads among the infected. Their faces were horrible. They were identical. Dark, white, man, woman — there was only one expression in the group, a numb look that left their mouths sagging. Many of their faces rippled with spasms and tics, but those movements were like whitecaps on an empty, quiet sea, affecting only the surface. That slack expression appeared again and again. It affected their bodies, too, dulling every part of them except their eyes. Their eyes bulged with need.

“We can still make the cars,” Cam said. “Go. Run through the greenhouses.”

“No,” Owen said, no longer shouting. “No.”

“Hope,” Greg whispered. “Christ, she‘s— Hope .”

They couldn’t reach her. There were twenty villagers scattered around the baby. All of them were contagious — and they ignored the little girl. Even her mother was indifferent. Lying against a man who’d dropped dead, Hope pawed weakly at the earth with her tiny hands. The three-month-old girl was too young to crawl on her own. She lacked the motor skills and strength, but, regardless, she was exhibiting the same insistent drive they’d seen in everybody who was infected.

“There’s someone behind us,” Ingrid said.

The floodlights still shone on the north side of town, a white corona in the dark. Silhouettes walked between the square shapes of the huts.