Zed Space Chapter 1

 

Chapter 1

I shivered. The drop zone was hot. My suit suctioned onto my skin and inserted simultaneously the catheter and the adrenal stimulant probe. The ship’s engines droned behind the bulkhead. My five squad mates donned their drop trooper helmets. I was the last to put mine on.

I stepped into my pod. The door slid shut with a pneumonic hiss and the air pressure equalized. My ears popped. The floor dropped out beneath me and I began my freefall descent into the city.

The city was burning. Fires consumed skyscrapers and explosions were up everywhere.

The civilian population had been holding on for three months without support from outside. We were fighting a war, after all.

I could now see the swarm of zombies that had been detected around the drop zone. We were tasked to land in the middle of Hyatt Stadium, a refugee crisis zone that was still, somehow, holding out against the onslaught. At least a thousand civilians were hunkered down in the green field, barricaded against the zombies.

The planet was at level one. That meant that there were few mutations and the hivemind had yet to insert itself. It wasn’t the worst place I had been inserted in the last year.

My pod streaked through the atmosphere and came closer to the drop zone. I was able to make out individual civilians. They looked up at us as we came down and spread away from the marked landing spots.

My pod smashed into the astro turf and I kicked out the door. I was the second to land. Jacob had been the first and was already unloading supplies.

The other four pods fell in quick succession. Dirt spattered the tents the civilians had been using for shelter.

About two dozen civilians approached me.

“Alice!” I said, turning to my squad mate. “Help me distribute the rations!”

“Yes, sir,” said Alice.

I was the squad’s lieutenant. That meant I was in charge. We had two months worth of rations space-packed in our pods. With the press of a button they returned to full size.

The civilians looked like they hadn’t eaten in days. We prepared meals and handed out the food with little incident.

“Who is in charge here?” I asked, surveying the eating people.

An old man stood up and approached me. “My name is Mick,” he said. “Is the army coming?”

“We are the army,” I said. “This city has been deemed low priority. Our only mission is to protect you until other objectives have been taken and some evacuation vessels can be spared.”

“How much longer until then?” said Mick.

“A week?” I said. “A month? Who knows?”

“Are we going to survive?” said a man in a tattered suit.

“As long as you don’t let any infected in here,” I said. “Before we go any further, we’re going to have to inspect everyone for bites.”

“There’s no one bitten in here!” said Mick. “We made sure of that.”

“We can never be too certain,” I said. I motioned to Ryce, my machine-gunner. “Set up the examination table.” I turned to Alice. “You’re the only girl in this squad. Check up on all the female civilians.”

“Yes sir,” said Alice.

Alice helped me set up our examination device, which had been spatially packed along with the rations. It was a scanner that took a blood biopsy and instantly told us whether or not the tested person was infected. All it required was a small prick on the finger.

Alice set up a large tent that had been spatially packed alongside everything else and had the women line up outside of it. She did their checkups, which required her to remove all their clothing. This wasn’t so much to discover infected people but to make sure that everyone was healthy.

One man refused to get his blood tested by the machine.

“Hey, you can’t do this to us,” he said, as a number of other civilians wrestled with him. “You can’t force us to give up our genetic information!”

I walked towards him. “I’m just a soldier,” I said. “I don’t know anything about the law. But right now I’m in charge. If you think we’ve wronged you, you can bring it up in court when we’ve gotten out of this mess.”

“But we won’t!” said the man. He continued to struggle. “We’re not going to make it!”

I grabbed his arm. “You have to get tested. If you’re not, we’re going to have to expel you.”

“You can’t!” said the man. “My family is here.”

I dragged him towards the testing machine. It took a bit of effort, but I got his blood sample.

It came back positive.

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning away from the console. “You’ve been infected. We’re going to have to quarantine you.” I turned to Ryce. “Bring me an isolation bunker.”

Ryce called forth the isolation bunker from spatial storage. It was about the size of a port-a-potty and heavily armored with superplastic. Garret, our engineer, grabbed the man and pushed him into the isolation bunker.

The man was crying. He didn’t fight. Ryce pushed him into the chamber and sealed it. The chamber was designed so that people could communicate with the person inside, but he was locked in there until he turned.

Two girls and a lady approached the isolation bunker, all crying. The one I presumed was the mother broke down in front of the view window and cried.

“It’s okay, honey,” said the man. “I was stupid and got bit while foraging. There’s no coming back from this.”

Indeed, the zombie virus was impossible to cure and had a one hundred percent fatality rate. There was no escaping it. Planet after planet was lost to the zombie invasion. The only thing we could do was slow it down.

We tested the rest of the two hundred and eleven people in the stadium. They all came back clear.

While I was testing the people, James and Jacob, two private first class squad members, were checking up on the barricades. The stadium had metal doors that locked shut on every entrance. They wouldn’t stop a bull but they were good enough against level one infected.

Jacob returned from his patrol. “Everything is in place,” he said, saluting. “There are no breaches. The civilians did a good job of securing the stadium.”

“Are we going to save more people?” asked a woman, who approached me from behind.

I turned instinctively and pointed my service pistol at her.

“Oh,” I said, returning my pistol to its holster. “Ahem, yes. We are going to try and save as many people as we can, before the infection level increases and we start seeing mutants. After that it will be too dangerous to be out there without armored support.”

“But the army is coming for us, right?” said the woman.

“I can’t say I know when they’ll come,” I said. “Like I mentioned before. We could be here for weeks or even months. We have prepared for that and have plenty of food and tools in spatial storage.”

“So we’ll be here for a bit,” said Alice. She saluted to me. “Everything seems to be in order.”

“Good,” I said. “It’s time to start training.”

“Already?” said Jacob.

“We don’t have any time to spare,” I said. “We need these civilians to become soldiers.” I turned to Mick. “With your permission, we’re going to start arming and training you and your people to fight.”

“We will do everything you say,” said Mick. “We had lost all hope. Now we have it.”

A transmission came though my suit communicator. “This is Salamander squad. We’re in need of immediate assistance. Two hundred civvies are about to be lost along with this squad. Our location is—” The caller noted out a place not too far from our drop zone.

“Looks like it’s time for our first mission,” I said. I turned the Mick. “I need twenty strong individuals who can handle guns.”

Mick looked around at the civilians gathered in front of us. “I can do that.”

He took five minutes to single out twenty people, mostly men.

I took twenty guns from spatial storage and handed them out. “We’re going to rescue another squad and about two hundred people,” I said. “Without our resources we can handle twice that for a month.”

“What about after?” said a woman.

“We’ll figure that out,” I said. “If the army or navy can spare resources, we may get a supply drop. Just wait and do what you’re told.”

“Okay,” said the woman.

“Alice, Ryce,” I said, turning to my squad. “You stay here and protect the base. Also, set up the comm tower and start the selection process for training.”

I took Jacob, Garret, and James with me. We walked to the unloading bay. I poked a camera out of a small barred window. There were about a dozen zombies behind the metal screen, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle. I motioned to the two strongest-looking civvies.

“Open that door when I tell you to,” I said. “When they come, we shoot. Then we make haste to the rescue point.”

“What about vehicles?” said Jacob.

“We can’t be driving around out there,” I said. “The roads are clogged and we don’t have any that would fit two hundred plus people. We’re going to have to do this on foot.”

The twenty civvies prepared, aiming their guns at the door. Jacob and I knelt next to the chain and unlocked it.

“One,” I said. “Two, three.” We lifted the truck door and backed away as the civvies started shooting. Two minutes later all twenty dead heads were on the ground.

I looked both ways. There were only a couple zombies here and there, attracted by the gunshots. No herds, no hoards, no mutants.  A good day to be rescuing a squad and two hundred civvies.

I led the group through the streets, with Jacob holding down the back and James and Garret in the middle. We walked for ten minutes until we came to a nondescript high rise. I held up my hand and used my camera to look behind the corner. There were at least a thousand of them, including two first level mutants. I could take them, perhaps, but with all those dead heads clogging up my line of fire I didn’t know if I could make the shots.

These mutants were of the jump/grab phenotype. They had powerful frog-like legs and long arms for grabbing a tearing into their victims. I was, of course, lucky to be encountering only these and at these low numbers.

I signaled to my squad. James took a number of civvies out another way and I called up Jacob to set up a sniper position.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “We’re going to lure the bulk of the dead away from the building. While they’re distracted, we take out the mutants and save the people in the building. We good?”

The civvies nodded. At that moment the distraction began. Fireworks exploded from across the street, taking the attention of the zombies with it. Jacob fired his sniper rifle and took out the first mutant. The second mutant locked onto me and I took it out with a headshot before it could jump.

We rushed past the gap made by the distracted zombies and knocked on the door. The leader of Salamander squad jumped out and surveyed the scene.

“Textbook,” he said, as he began waving. Civilians streamed out of the opening.

“Go, go,” I said, also waving the civilians along. Two members of Salamander squad brought their spatial storage cubes with them. We retreated through the streets leading the civvies like a herd of cattle.

When we returned to the safe zone we got behind the truck gate, waited until everyone was through, and then locked it shut.

Tess, the leader of Salamander squad, began a head count.

A woman approached me. “I can’t find my son,” she said. “I think he’s still out there.”

“Oh boy,” I said, looking through a peephole at the crowd of zombies approaching the gate. “This is going to be difficult.”