The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 11

  “Fuck, man.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Was a pretty good fuck, though.”

  “Okay, buddy, have a good night,” Ramses said. “Cowabunga!”

  Steve clenched his fist and shook it in the air. “Turtle power.”

  On his way to his room, Ramses knocked on Ksenia’s door. No one responded. He opened the door and came in. “Hey, Ksenia,” he said in a whisper, “you okay?”

  In the light coming from the hallway, he could see Ksenia was fast asleep. He closed the door as quietly as he could and left.

  In about five minutes there was a knock on his door.

  He opened it. Ksenia stood in the dark hallway. She was wearing a waitress’s uniform. She held a pillow and a blanket in her hands.

  “Room service,” she said.

  “Hey, hey,” Ramses said and whistled. “Cute outfit.”

  Ksenia looked at her new clothes and smiled. “Just my size.”

  She looked at him. “Please let me stay in your room. Just for one night. I’m scared to be alone.”

  “All righty,” Ramses said. “My home is your home.”

  “But don’t get any fancy ideas,” she said, holding up her gun.

  TEN

  Sitting in a military helicopter, General Petrov was looking down on the city below. He was old and gray but his sight was still keen enough to pick out burning cars and smoking buildings. Chelyabinsk was rapidly turning into a graveyard. The deadly virus had broken loose and created havoc and chaos. The Government was fast enough to assess the situation and to realize that it was grave and would not come under control easily. Drastic measures had to be taken quickly. They decided to isolate the threat and contain the virus in the city which had become the epicenter of the outbreak. The general had to take under control the territory, which was over a hundred square miles.

  Today was Wednesday, and it was the fifth day of the military campaign called Operation Steel Ring, which was under General Petrov’s command. The primary goal of the operation was to seal off the city. No one was allowed to leave it. As the Russian saying goes, not even a fly should cross the border.

  One of the first flies to cross the borderline was the Mayor, who had made an attempt to flee from the infected city by helicopter. One missile hit and the 5 million dollars budget money had been burned in the air. Together with the pilot, the Mayor, his wife, their two adorable blonde daughters, and the Mayor’s mother-in-law.

  The general was leafing through documents with updates on the current situation in the city. The origin of the disease was unknown yet, but there was no doubt that it was a disease. The analysts had found links between the contagion and the meteorite fall. On a Friday morning last week, in the vicinity of the meteorite impact on Lake Chebarkul, they found a man, who was lying unconscious on the ice. There was a dog bite on his leg. They found out that the man was a local forester, Pavel Bandurov, forty years old. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing at the lake. Obviously, he was attracted by the spectacular celestial show and came to see the place where the meteorite had fallen. The police found the dog which had presumably bitten him. It was chained in the yard of the forester’s house. It was very aggressive and foaming at the mouth. These were indicators of rabies. The dog was shot dead when it tried to attack a police officer.

  The forester needed urgent medical attention, but the Chebarkul hospital was really poorly equipped for critical patients. People died in the intensive care unit of this hospital like flies. So he was taken to a hospital in Chelyabinsk.

  The next day the chaos began. The city residents just became berserk all of a sudden and started killing each other. The traffic in the city and the metro area collapsed and became nonexistent. Thousands of cars were stranded on the streets, curbs, and sidewalks. Even pizza delivery guys on scooters would have found it hard to maneuver around the abandoned vehicles. Hospitals were overcrowded. All police and army units were activated. Tanks were rumbling through the city streets. Battle helicopters hovered overhead.

  On the first day of the crisis, the police failed to regain order in the city. The military planners too were unsure how to act. There was no protocol, no military strategy for these new circumstances. The military were unwilling to shoot unarmed civilians. They applied non-lethal weapons against the targets first. That was how General Petrov and his Headquarters Staff related to the infected ones—targets or enemy.

  The general put the documents away and closed his eyes. He wanted to catch some sleep before he arrived at headquarters. For the past five days, he had only been able to sleep two hours a day. He tried to sleep but thoughts battered his mind. He recalled the Saturday’s battle at the bridge on Sverdlovsky Avenue. He was personally in the middle of the war zone. It had been carnage.

  First, they tried tear gas, which proved to be useless. Then water cannons went into combat. The water supply was in abundance. They pumped the water for the cannons directly from the river Miass, which flows under the bridge. For plain human beings, a hard jet of icy water in the chest on a cold winter night would be lethal. But those were not plain human beings they were dealing with. High-pressure streams of water knocked the targets off their legs. They fell down in a pile, breaking their arms and legs, but still continued to crawl. It was a tangle of shambling and coiling creatures. More targets climbed on top of them. The water was mixed with pink dye, and the attackers were colored pink. The picture was surreal. Pink undead walking and falling but keeping coming at the soldiers, without blinking in the bright light of the searchlights. And hunger was their leader.

  Up to the last minute, the soldiers believed that their fellow citizens would stop, look around them in surprise, dust down and go away. But that was not happening. These things were not going to stop. What could only be seen in Hollywood movies was now a morbid reality. Their friends, neighbors, kids, and relatives were coming at them to make a hearty dinner out of them. Some of the soldiers had panic attacks and abandoned their positions. The rest of them opened fire and the meat grinder was turned on.

  It was not clear what further actions the military should take, and they decided to just blockade the city until further orders from Moscow. Curfews were introduced. All the roads were blocked by soldiers. They cut off all railway connections. All connection to the outer world had been severed. The airport had been closed too. With passengers trapped inside the building.

  There were block posts every two miles. Of course, there were leakages, but the military combed forests and nearby villages with a fine-tooth comb. There were posters advising villagers to report on any strangers and outsiders to the police or the military immediately because of the terrorist threat. If anyone managed to escape and break through the police and military cordons, or they found a gap in the border through the woods, they were stopped by the outer posts. They were accommodated then at one of the four ad hoc quarantine facilities set up on the city borders—in the north, in the south, in the west and in the east.

  The media were shut down. The reporters were told the city was under the terrorists’ attack. People were deprived of Internet usage within the boundaries of the city. The Government did not like the idea of someone making videos of soldiers and police officers shooting at civilians and posting them on YouTube or Facebook to show what was going on around here. On Sunday, power supply was cut off as well.

  General Petrov noticed that there were a lot of military men working on the operation who were from other parts of the country. He himself had come here from Moscow last Saturday.

  There were lots of snipers stationed in the city and along the city borders. There was a sudden demand for snipers. Even reserve snipers were mobilized for service. But still, that was not enough. They started employing civilians, mostly students of shooting schools, as snipers. The snipers had taken their positions in trees, on the ground, in abandoned apartments and on top of office buildings. They were told that there had been numerous jailbreaks all over the city, and their goal was to kill the convicts, who w
ere trying to escape from the city.

  Lots of the newly enrolled snipers were hunters from Siberia and the Far East. The perfect candidates among them were those who stated in their military questionnaires that they had no relatives among the city residents. These guys pressed the trigger without thinking twice. No regret. No remorse. They hesitated, though, when they saw children among the targets but kept doing their job. The pay was good.

  The snipers’ role was crucial at the city borders. They were the first to spot the targets. It came as a surprise to them that the targets did not try to hide or duck or take cover or drop to the ground when they were being shot at. They did not even try to run away. They just kept shambling on like drunken people coming home from a good party.

  The snipers were ordered to shoot the targets in the head. When they shot them in the chest or any other body part, they just kept on walking as if nothing had happened.

  Another order was to take no prisoners, though General Petrov’s men saw that the targets carried no weapons, and they could easily be arrested. The snipers were also forbidden to come close to the places where the dead bodies had fallen. They had to be sure that the targets had been hit in the head and lay motionless. They had to double check too—with another bullet in the head. Once in an hour guys in hazmat suits approached the bodies and dragged them to the truck, which transported the carcasses to a crematorium. General Petrov had never issued such weird orders before in his career.

  There was a series of suicides all over the city after the plague had started. Among the police and troops as well. People were denying reality. They were not ready for this and could not believe this was happening. They thought that this was all a myth, a legend, a Hollywood sci-fi movie. They were so stressed and overwhelmed that they could not find the strength to fight and survive.

  The officials were also unable to accept the reality. They could not take a dump without authorization from the Kremlin. The plague had spread all over the city before the people in the Government realized they had to do something about it.

  And now they needed General Alexander Petrov to rake this big stinking pile of dung.

  In fifteen minutes the helicopter landed in an open snow-covered field. General Petrov collected his papers together and stuffed them into his briefcase. The sun was going down on the horizon. A town was seen in the distance. The road to it had been cleared by bulldozers. He opened the door, and a cold wind rushed into the cabin. He got out of the helicopter and went to the car which was waiting for him at the roadside. It was snowing heavily, and the thumping rotor blades scattered the snowflakes whirling in the wind.

  The town of Timiryazevski was thirty miles from Lake Chebarkul and some sixty miles south-west of Chelyabinsk. The Russian route M5, also known as the Ural Highway, went through the town. There was a railway station about four miles to the north. All this made it a perfect location for the headquarters. Its population was about 3,500 residents. A quiet place but a bit boring. The only cinema was closed at the beginning of the century. Dance parties at the local club were held only on weekends. But General Petrov had not come here for entertainment.

  The headquarters was temporarily placed in the Research Institute of Agriculture. The military had built a high fence topped with razor wire around the four-storied building of the Institute. All the personnel of the Institute was laid off for a month on full pay. The director’s office became the general’s office and place for meetings.

  The car took him to the headquarters and rolled up to the gates. A soldier marched out of the sentry hut, saluted to the general and opened the gates manually letting the car go through.

  A young military officer approached the car. He had a clean-shaven face and gray innocent looking eyes set on high cheekbones.

  “Good evening, Comrade General!” the officer said.

  The general rolled down the side window. “Anything new, Lieutenant?”

  Lieutenant Nikolai Skvortsov was General Petrov’s new aide-de-camp.

  “Still waiting for the cargo,” Skvortsov said.

  “What’s taking them so long?” General Petrov grumbled and got out of the car.

  The men went past the statue of Kliment Timiryazev, a Russian botanist and physiologist and a major proponent of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in Russia. The town and the Institute were named in his honor.

  “How’s my new residence, Nikolai?” the general asked as they entered the building.

  “The house is ready,” Skvortsov said.

  “Is it the one near the pond?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s been redecorated. The lease is paid for. And yes, the billiards table has been installed.”

  The general nodded. “Good. Do you like playing billiards?”

  “I think it’s fun.”

  “Nice. Then we’ll sink a couple of balls one of these days.”

  The general looked out the window at the winter scene outside. “I wish it were summer, though. I miss my dacha in Sochi. I go fishing there every summer. Do you like fishing?”

  “Honestly, I’ve never tried,” said Skvortsov. “But I’d like to.”

  The general stopped in front of an elevator and sighed. “Why are you so boring, Skvortsov? It’s written all over your face that you don’t give a shit about what I’m talking about. Can you have an opinion of yours for a change?”

  The officer looked at the tips of his boots. “I’ll do my best, Comrade General.”

  “All right. I like that you’re focused on business, though. I guess it’s not the right type of conversation under the circumstances.” He took out a file and handed it to his aide-de-camp. “Have these documents signed with the local administration first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, Comrade General.” Skvortsov clicked his heels. “Have a nice evening, Comrade General.”

  The officer saluted and went away.

  “Damn place-hunter,” the general muttered with contempt as he entered the elevator.

  He envied the young and energetic. His own career was declining. In about five years he would be replaced by someone more capable and more intelligent. After he had returned from a campaign in Afghanistan, heavily wounded and depressed, all he got from his country was a medal and a certificate for it. They offered him a month’s stay at a Georgian resort to heal his wounds, though. He decided that if the Government turned their back on him, he would do likewise. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when he became a major, he started illegally selling weapons to anyone with a thick wad of cash. Including the Chechen terrorists. These deals bought him a flat in Moscow and a dacha in Sochi and sent his children to European colleges. He quickly understood that during a war there is money to be made, shitloads of money.

  He had supper in his office and then worked for an hour. At 9:00 p.m. he called his chauffeur and asked him to drive him home. The general went straight to bed. He saw his dacha in his dream. Overrun by the living dead.

  ***

  At 7:00 a.m. next morning General Petrov and Lieutenant Skvortsov entered the biochemical laboratory. Captain Mikhailov was sitting in a chair and looking into the electron microscope. He was wearing a white lab coat over his tunic. Spectacles were on his forehead, and his face was concentrated. Being absorbed with his work, he did not see the general coming in.

  “So, Captain,” General Petrov said in a loud voice, “how is it going?”

  The captain shuddered and looked at the general. “Good morning, Comrade General.” Then he pointed at the microscope. “This is all plain crazy.”

  “These words don’t sound good on paper. Are you ready to make an official report?”

  The captain hesitated. “It’s a genetic tweak we’re dealing here with.”

  “Can you say that in Russian?”

  The medical officer cleared his throat. “The virus is spread through a bite, saliva or a scratch by an infected person, or an animal. We’ve finally received new samples. The cargo arrived at night.”

  “All righ
t. How is our girl down there?”

  The captain turned on a CCTV monitor on his desk. “Dr. Yekaterina Obukhova is already up.”

  In the display, they saw people in lab coats working in the basement. There were two long rows of stainless steel tables. People lying on them. Their hands and legs were chained. Ropes ran over their chests. A bespectacled woman in her forties was standing in front of a bound man. Her long hair was in a bunch. She was thin like a match. She took a syringe, placed her gloved hand on the man’s forehead and inserted the syringe into his nose. The patient’s body twitched in convulsions. The woman extracted the syringe, put its contents into a test tube, corked it and placed it on a steel tray.

  General Petrov winced. “What’s her name again?”

  “Dr. Yekaterina Pavlovna Obukhova, the leading rabiologist in the Chelyabinsk region.”

  “That lady doctor is pretty brave around those creatures,” the general said. “I’d like to have a word with her.”

  “Right away,” Captain Mikhailov turned on the intercom to invite Dr. Obukhova to pick up the receiver.

  “No,” the general said. “I want to talk to her in person. I’d like to go down there.”

  “But, Comrade General, it’s too dangerous.”

  “I’m going down,” General Petrov said. He turned to Lieutenant Skvortsov. “You’re coming too.”

  The young officer looked at the general silently and gulped.

  “Put these on,” Captain Mikhailov said, offering them respirators.

  “Can the virus be spread through the aerial route?” Skvortsov said.

  “No, the dust masks wouldn’t protect you either way,” Captain Mikhailov said. “But you’ll need them. You’ll see for yourself.”

  In a couple minutes, the general and his aide-de-camp understood what the captain meant. As they were descending into the basement, moaning filled their ears, and a terrible stench assaulted their nostrils. The respirators were of little help against the smell of shit and rotten flesh. Lieutenant Skvortsov gagged on the horrible odor and fought the vomit back.