Numbers (Short Story)
Its all about numbers-that’s all life is, nothing more. You get born to clocks and calendars, strings of numbers that pin down the time, the place. School, there’s the grade, the period, the credits, all the same. That’s where they teach the secrets, two plus two, two plus three, two plus four.
All numbers. When my birthdays equaled eighteen I signed up to trade a number of months for a number of dollars, and they taught me traverse and elevation, degrees and grid, numbers and more numbers, all to put steel on target. When the months served equaled term of service, they sent me home.
I got a job, so many dollars for each sixty minutes, less what the government took away. It was OK. Quiet, moving materials in a warehouse. They offered me promotions, but I said no, thanks; I liked it in there, it was quiet and alone, just me and my forklift. The boss said I was reliable and serious and said he wished he had a dozen more like me. I hit the time clock when the numbers were aligned, in and out, and stayed home when I was off, sitting in the glow of the TV, choosing numbered channels for numbered time slots, keeping to myself.
Sometimes I would just sit in the dark and feel the numbers pull back, ease away, leave me in peace for a bit. Those were the best times.
***
I don’t know when it started, exactly-I came to it later than most. You see headlines, the tail end of news programs, serious people answering questions in front of a camera. Fighting in the Third World, then riots in the more industrial states, then Oakland and Oahu are convulsed in riots and New York has serious street crime issues. Rumors and cranks and wild claims.
I went to work one day and the car radio said that martial law was being declared in eleven US cities. On the ride home they said the President would address the nation on all channels at seven.
It was a virus, he said, it was hijacking people’s brains and causing them to go insane and attack everyone. The problem was in hand, he assured us, the infected couldn’t use guns and were pretty mindless.
It wasn’t bad at first-they stomped hard and the problem would get under control, then flare up again elsewhere. I got a letter, a mass printing: the President was calling up the Inactive Ready Reserve, and was summoned to put my old training to new uses.
On the time and date indicated I was at the assigned address, where they checked the numbers for my height and weight and blood pressure, stamped the nine digits of my social security number onto two metal tags, and sent me and a number of others to a row of trucks to be handed the same number of uniforms, field gear, and finally a weapon (write the serial number and the stock number there, sign on line forty-nine, date on line fifty).
***
We dealt with the outbreaks, patrolled looking for escaped vectors, expended ammunition and soldiers and received fresh supplies of both. They cut basic and AIT down to twelve weeks, then six, then two, and finally they just shoved kids into uniforms.
Eventually we ran out of uniforms.
I led a squad, then a platoon, and at the last I was the only guy in the Company that had soldiered pre-Virus. I don’t know if the paperwork for my commission really went through, but it didn’t matter because my Company was not much more than fifty troops when I took over, and was down to seven when the radios went quiet.
***
We put down the outbreaks, but every outbreak cost us, and the replacements were not as well-trained as the troops they replaced, and after a while the number of replacements was less than the battle losses and desertions. We took down fifty for every one we lost, but as time passed it became a losing game, and eventually we stopped putting down the outbreaks and just struggled to extract the uninfected and contain the virus.
Then we just covered the withdrawals of the uninfected as they fled to safe zones, and then we just fought. Supplies and replacements dried up, so we salvaged and recruited as we could.
Eventually the orders stopped coming, and a few left, but the rest of us kept fighting-there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
***
Ironman, Sergeant Troy Gusen of Bulwark,Florida, so named because he looked like the actor in the movie, an Air Force Forward Air Controller who came to us after the jets stopped flying. He was dapper, thoughtful, and funny, and if I was the brains of the outfit he was the heart, the one who kept us all moving.
Doug, Private First Class Debra Quinn, a chunky girl with red hair and freckles and an irritating laugh who hailed from upstate New York. She liked automatic weapons, and got her nickname from a comic strip, although I was never clear which or why. The others tended to say her nickname with a particular lowered note, lots of emphasis on the ‘D’, for reasons unknown to me.
Ratfink-his real name was Private Barry Oldsmoore from Dayton,Ohio, but he had this sticker of a deranged rat on his load-bearing vest and the name stuck. He was one of the last replacements to reach us, having had seventeen days’ service in the US Army from taking the oath to assignment to a combat unit. He was a crazy tow-headed kid who loved the Net and knew a hundred ways to modify stuff into improvised explosives, a skill which was worth more than a dozen PhDs in our brave new world.
Seth, a tall, rangy black guy from the Northwest, quiet, introspective, a wanderer we picked up in the days before the radios went silent. He never talked about the past, never expressed interest in the future, but he did well enough in the present.
Doughboy, as we called him, an overweight multi-racial kid from Phoenix who was forever footsore and a constant consumer of anything with sugar in it. We found him in a bus stop the same day we got the last draft of untrained replacements. He wasn’t much in a fight, but he was a good scrounger, and as the circle tightened we didn’t throw anyone away.
Jessa, who was a tall, plain girl with washed-out blond hair and sad eyes, too quiet to ever be noticed in the world before; a colorless native of New Orleans. She was part of a hospital we evacuated, and she stuck around after, serving as a medic since Doc Brown had off’d himself. She and I had a thing going, more need than felt, but what the hell.
***
We kept racking up the body count after the radios went silent, luring in mobs of the zeds into kill zones packed with Ratfink’s best work. We burned ‘em, blasted ‘em, and buried them in collapsed buildings. We put down hundreds across the Midwest, salvaging food, fuel, and firepower as we went, and made our fun as best we could.
Doughboy went first, might have been a heart attack, might have been a panic attack, but whatever it was it stalled him right in the face of a hungry mob at a town square southeast of Des Moines. Ratfink went next, a mis-mixed batch of explosive turning him into wet confetti in a warehouse in Red Oak, Iowa.
Doug got hers in Alliance, Nebraska making a stand to save Ironman and Seth when a car alarm tripped unexpectedly and we got swarmed before we had the kill zone fully prepped.
Without Doug on the SAW and Ratfink on the boom-boom our enthusiasm for ambushes waned, and I directed us towards McCook, down near the Kansas line, tracking a report of a group of survivors having established a colony.
There was a holding there, but something had gone wrong, and the number of zeds killed was less than the number who were attacking, so there was nothing for us. Seth shot himself a couple days into Kansas.
We got jumped while scrounging gas in Alina, Kansas, and Ironman got separated from us. He didn’t answer his radio after that, and after three days of circling back and trying to search for him Jessa and I moved on, heading south.
In Denton, Texas we found a place some survivors had set up-the people had moved on, but left a message and a fair amount of supplies. We lived there for three weeks, needing a rest after a very rough eight months.
***
On a numbered day, at a numbered hour, we were in the numbered aisle of a building with a numbered street address, scrounging food. And a number of zeds rushed us. Ironic, really: after the numerous ambushes we had mounted, the last ambush we were involved in was sprung upon us.
We were not easy meat-we fell back with the efficiency of bitter practice, one firing, the other moving, each in turn. They cut us off from the front, and we fell back into the unlit stockroom, our weapon-mounted lights making the darkness and danger surreal. Somewhere in the thirty yards between the store interior and the hard sunlight of the loading dock Jessa went. I didn’t see her go, didn’t see the flashlight moving or lying immobile on the floor. She was firing, I moved, sweeping the way ahead of me to make sure it was clear, turned to fire…and she was gone. No light, no desperate screaming, no last volley of shots, nothing.
She might have cut her light and ducked down the rows of boxed goods, her light may have failed and she had gone down under a rush of zeds-there was no telling. I had my hands very full of trying to keep them off me without a second shooter.
Coming off the loading dock I got a jolt of white-hot pain up my left leg, and was barely able to hobble to an abandoned cargo truck and drag the doors shut.
I can see through three holes in the truck body, rust-weakened patches I opened up with my knife. I have zero water, one unswollen ankle, five remaining cartridges, and at least nine zombies waiting for me to come out.
Its all about numbers.
