The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (57 page)
Read The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Online
Authors: Christopher Golden
I folded my arms across my chest. ‘Someone,’ I said, ‘is going to get this story. It might as well be me. You’ve got some kind of secret weapon here. Something brand new. I want a full explanation. You go ahead and clear it with the Pentagon, whatever you need to do. But I want facts, I want figures and names and dates. And if those . . . those things are going out in the field, I want to go with them. I want to see what you’re doing with them. I don’t believe for a second that you’ve invented some new kind of human-shaped robot just to unload cargo.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ he admitted finally, sitting back in his chair. ‘Someone will get to tell this story. Eventually. But it won’t be you.’
‘Uh huh.’ I knew what that meant.
And then I knew what it was going to take to change his mind.
‘The story I’ve been working on,’ I said, ‘the one I spent six weeks here for - it’s going to go badly for certain people when it gets out. I can’t just bury it, of course: I have my journalist ethics to consider.’
He gave me a chilly smile. There was no doubt in my mind what he thought my professional sensibilities were worth.
‘But it doesn’t have to go out right away. I could call my editor, tell him that some of my facts didn’t line up. That I needed more time to get them straight.’
The smile on his face was frozen solid.
‘He’d be willing to wait a while. Maybe even thirty days. Which would give certain people a little more time to cover their asses.’
The smile cracked. You didn’t get to his rank in the army without knowing how to make decisions in a hurry, and he didn’t waste time arguing with me. He knew I had him over a barrel. ‘I’m personally taking out a detail to run counterinsurgency operations tomorrow. You can go with us. Under certain conditions.’
‘Like?’
‘No cameras.’
‘You already destroyed mine.’
He sneered at my ruse. ‘I mean no cameras at all. Not even the one in your cell phone. I won’t interfere with what you write. But there will be no pictures of what you see. Furthermore, I’ll accompany you at all times. If I decide that your . . . safety is in jeopardy at any time, I’ll put you on the first transport back to base.’
‘You expect me to agree to this? What’s to keep you from sending me back as soon as I start finding out something interesting?’
‘The fact that no matter what you see or don’t see, you’ll be getting access to the biggest story of your career,’ he said. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a deep, glacial blue. ‘Just the briefing I give you before we leave will probably net you a Pulitzer.’
I laughed. ‘Come on. Just because you’re field-testing a new kind of robot—’
‘Those aren’t robots, Ms Flores. Those are American citizens. Or rather, they were. Before they died.’
It was eighty degrees out when I woke up the next morning, just before dawn. It would creep over a hundred by lunchtime. I dressed, packed a few things, and slipped down to the motor pool, where I found the colonel waiting for me. He had an MP frisk me for illicit cameras, but I was clean. I had only brought along a couple bottles of water, a notebook, a pen, and a tube of sunblock. I wasn’t about to blow this scoop by failing to meet his conditions.
Once he was sure I was properly defanged, he started loading up a troop transport - an unarmored truck with an open flatbed, not even a canopy to protect the soldiers onboard from the sun.
They didn’t need that kind of protection. They didn’t feel the heat, I knew now. They didn’t feel anything.
The yellow suits they wore had their own acronym, of course, like everything the Army owns - IPWs, Insect-Proof Wrappers. They were made of very tough Mylar and designed to keep bugs from getting at the troops inside. The army couldn’t stop their animated corpses from rotting away, but they could slow the process down a little. The colonel estimated that the average member of his new battalion would last six months before its performance was degraded by decomposition.
The wrappers served another purpose, of course, which was to keep me - and the Muzhiki population - from seeing what our new soldiers looked like.
The new soldiers were dead. I still had a hard time accepting it, but the colonel wasn’t just pulling my leg. They were dead bodies, most of them the bodies of soldiers who died in other conflicts. The army had approached their families, very quietly, and gotten their permission to use the bodies for any purpose required. The families, in exchange, got enough money to send the decedent’s children to community college, or maybe enough for a down payment on a house, if they could afford the mortgage. They had not been told what the bodies would be used for but had signed waivers saying they didn’t require further information.
Considering how bad the economy was back home, I didn’t imagine they had a lot of trouble getting those waivers.
The army picked up the bodies in unmarked trucks and took them to a special facility in Baghdad. Within a week they were up and moving about again, new soldiers for a new era of warfare.
‘The current nomenclature for them is PMCs. As in PostMortem Combatants,’ the colonel told me.
‘So they’re . . . undead,’ I said, staring into the back of the truck. Fifty blank yellow faces looked back at me. ‘Zombies.’
The colonel winced at the word. ‘They’re not going to eat your brains, if that’s what you mean. They don’t eat. They don’t think or feel any pain. Their brains are completely shut down. We control them by sequential electrical stimulation of nerve fibers.’
In high school biology class I’d seen that at work. The teacher had a pair of severed frog’s legs attached to a dry-cell battery. When she flipped a switch, the legs kicked. This was the same principle. Just a little more advanced.
‘We insert a microchip in the top of the spinal column,’ the colonel said, reaching over to touch my neck just below my hairline. I flinched as if his fingers were icy cold. ‘The chip is programmed with a number of algorithms. If we want the PMC to walk, the chip activates the leg muscles in the correct sequence to lift one foot and put it in front of the other. If we want them to pick up a crate, the chip has a subroutine for that. This generation of chip has some fifty basic programs, any of which can be chosen by the controller.’
The controller - meaning anyone, like the sergeant I’d seen at the FOB - had the right equipment to send the right signals to those chips. The controller could give a general order, and the PMCs would act as a group, or he could choose a certain PMC, identified by serial number, and give it specific commands.
‘And this is cheaper than robots?’ I asked.
The colonel favored me with one of his chilly smiles. ‘The chips are made in China for under ten dollars. They can be inserted without surgical equipment: all it takes is a syringe and a strong, wide-bore needle. The Mylar for the wrappers costs us pennies for the square yard. Ms Flores, it will cost us more to feed and house you on this trip than it did to activate my new troops.’
He looked especially proud of that fact.
‘But they’re not . . . intelligent on their own. They can’t make decisions for themselves,’ I said. ‘They can’t be the equivalent of real troops.’
‘Let’s find out together, shall we?’ He helped me up into the back of the truck. In a few minutes we were rolling deep into disputed territory.
We passed through scattered villages as the truck bumped and bounced over smoothed-out stretches of desert that could barely be called roads. The Muzhiks came out of their houses to watch us pass by, shepherds and store owners in wool vests despite the heat, old women draped from head to toe in modest garments that looked dusty and uncomfortable even first thing in the morning. They were Asian Muslims, almost uniformly belonging to a very old, very quiet Sufi sect, though their genes had been passed down from Genghis Khan and his many wives. They did not wave or smile. They stared at the yellow men in the truck and hurried back to their business.
Muzhikistan is a very old country and one of the poorest on Earth. The people there have nothing to offer the world that it can’t get more cheaply or more efficiently somewhere else. The only thing even vaguely important about the country is that if you want to get oil from Russia down to Baghdad, or vice versa, you have to go through Muzhikistan. Russia and the U.S. had joined forces in the early 2010s to build a super-high-tech and strategically vital pipeline that managed to cut Muzhikistan in half.
And of course some of the locals had taken exception to that.
They claimed that the pipeline infringed on ancestral nomadic herding grounds that had been passed down from father to son since before the fall of the Roman Empire. They claimed that the foreign workers who came in to install and then service the pipeline were stealing Muzhiki jobs, corrupting Muzhiki youth with their outsider culture, and wrecking the Muzhiki environment with spills and industrial waste products. In all of these things they were 100 percent correct. The Muzhikis took their case to the UN. The Western world, which these days doesn’t even bother pretending we’re here for anything but the oil, gave a collective shrug.
So some Muzhikis - the young, the bored, the inevitable dead-enders - started blowing up sections of pipeline and killing oil workers at lonely, isolated maintenance stations. That’s when the army came in.
It was police work that was needed. But in the last fifteen years, the army has gotten very good at a certain kind of brutal police work. I’d seen it in Syria, in Palestine, in Afghan istan (against the Taliban, the anti-Taliban militias, and the resurgent Taliban in 2014, when I had to wear a burka in public or risk being picked off by snipers). It worked. A small group of soldiers would identify the village where a suspected terrorist lived. They would go door-to-door, demanding to know where the perp was hiding. Some old men would get beaten up. A lot of women would run into the street screaming. And then a soldier from Missouri wearing a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of body armor and electronics would haul a shriveled old farmer in a tattered robe out of a spider hole, and nobody would ever see the old guy again.
While no one was watching me, I took the tube of sunscreen out of my bag and smeared the thick goo all over my cheeks and throat. No one noticed that it was my first application of the day. The living men around me were in their zone, ready for a confrontation. The PMCs couldn’t see what I was doing.
When our truck pulled into the main square of a village about seventy kilometers from the FOB, I knew what to expect. Of course, I wasn’t prepared for how the new soldiers - the PMCs - would be different.
The colonel raised one hand in the air, and the sergeant controlling the PMCs started pressing buttons. In perfect synchrony the yellow suits clambered up from where they’d been sitting totally motionless for the whole ride and leaped down into the dusty square. They brushed past me one after the other, and I had a chance to realize they didn’t smell like anything but plastic before they were deployed.
The colonel stood up on the roof of the truck’s cab with a bullhorn and a poster-sized photograph of a kid with crazy eyes. It didn’t look like a class picture or a formal portrait - more like a grainy blow-up of a satellite photo, maybe taken while the kid was enrolled in a terrorist training camp over in Waziristan. The colonel started shouting through the bullhorn in the local dialect of Arabic. I understood maybe one word in five, but I had heard such announcements often enough before: ‘We are looking for this person. He is wanted for insurgency and is an enemy of all freedom-loving people. If he is surrendered immediately we will leave you in peace. You have five minutes to comply.’
Except this time they didn’t get the five minutes. That had always been a problem, that waiting period: in five minutes a trained insurgent could be halfway across town, halfway up into the hills that loomed over the village like the sheltering arms of Allah Himself. Or he could be arming himself, his family, his neighbors - getting ready for a draw down with the U.S. military.
This time he wasn’t given the chance. The sergeant bent over his controller and tapped a few keys, pulled a few trigger buttons. And the PMCs went to work.
They didn’t canvass the village, knocking on doors, asking questions. They couldn’t talk, and I guess maybe knocking wasn’t one of their fifty programmed behaviors. They didn’t move through the village like police at all. They dismantled it.
The little houses were made out of corrugated tin or of wood so rare and so old and dry it snapped when they pulled at it. Some of the houses were little more than tents with one cinder-block wall, and those came down with almost comical ease.
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