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“Are you able to determine if these people are infected?”
“No, sir. Though a large number of them appear to be injured. We are seeing torn clothing, what appear to be flash-burns, and—”
“Colonel, can you contain the civilians and examine them for bites? We need to make certain that—”
Before the colonel could answer, Zetter could hear sounds from her end of the line. Military personnel yelling to the oncoming wave of people. Zetter turned and looked at the satellite map and saw the outer edge of the wave of lights closing very fast on the line of larger dots—military vehicles and their crews. He heard the shouts turn to yells.
And then there was the rattle of gunfire.
A few sporadic shots at first.
Then sustained gunfire.
And screams.
Colonel Ruiz never came back on the line.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
LAUREL RIDGE STATE PARK
FAYETTE COUNTY
Demolitions specialist Mike Chrusciel liked blowing things up. After getting caught once rigging cherry bombs to the tailpipe of his high school disciplinarian, Mike was given the first of what became a series of lectures. Half the lecture focused on not playing with dangerous items and the dangers to himself and others. Once during that half of the lecture Mike had made the mistake of saying “Yeah, blah, blah, blah” out loud. He spent the next month in detention and got his ass hammered flat at home. That was ninth grade.
The second half of the lecture took a different direction. It was filled with suggestions for how he could turn his “hobby” into something useful. The military. Nobody loves blowing things up more than the army. That was the gist. Not in those words, of course, but that’s the message Mike took away with him.
Occasionally there was a third part of the lecture. More of a warning, really. The only really likely alternative for someone like him was a different institution. One with bars.
After high school, and with no adult criminal record at all and his juvie offenses sealed, he rode an administrative recommendation from the school vice principal into the National Guard. During screenings and training it became clear to everyone that Mike Chrusciel liked to blow things up. And when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a danger to his fellow Americans, they put him into the right classes and taught him everything he ever wanted to know about explosives, IEDs, mines, grenades, satchel charges, and all of those other wonderful toys. He discovered that his connection to explosives went beyond the simple pleasure of seeing things go bang—he had a real talent for it. And working in the field, being allowed to play with explosives, gradually erased the immature thrill seeker part of him in favor of a more focused and intellectual aspect. Bombs of various kinds became like puzzles. Selecting the right device for each situation, purpose, or goal. He’d earned another stripe in Afghanistan and there was already some talk about him going higher. There was talk about OCS and maybe a career in the army rather than a short hitch to keep out of jail.
In the world of military ordnance, Mike Chrusciel had found himself.
He never expected to be planting mines here on American soil. Not outside of a test range. But the orders from General Zetter had been crystal clear. The infected were breaking through the lines. There were several chokepoints, where the landscape and the presence of rivers and streams would funnel anyone on foot to routes of least resistance. He and his partner, Cyrus, were assigned to mine one of those routes. Two miles farther down the road, a checkpoint was being reinforced in case any infected got through.
Mike smiled at that thought.
Get through?
Not once he was done. No, sir.
The orders were to disable any infected. Killing them, Mike was told, was more difficult in that it required very specific damage to the brain and brain stem. Fair enough. He could rig the paths so that anything dumb or unlucky enough to step onto that path would be crippled in a hot second. That would allow Mike and his partner to finish them off with headshots, or they could be left for the roving patrols that were scheduled to check all of these hot spots.
He studied geodetic survey maps and then walked the landscape to make his own determinations about likely routes. The infected were supposed to be as close to brain dead as made no difference. Aggressive but stupid, that’s how one of the guys described them. Mike had to make some important decisions and he took a little extra time to do it, fighting the clock to get it all right.
Mike concentrated on blast mines that would be triggered by someone stepping on them. He set the tension so that anyone over sixty pounds would trigger it. A deer’s footstep wasn’t heavy enough because its weight was distributed between four legs. But a human? When a person stepped on a blast mine, the device’s charge detonated, creating a blast shock wave composed of very hot gases traveling at extremely high velocity. When the blast wave hits breaks the ground surface, it results in a massive compression force that blows a victim’s foot off.
Infected or not, they were going down.
In areas where a larger group might pass, Mike planted the bigger and heavier fragmentation mines. These were crammed with several kilogra
ms of shrapnel. A real party pleaser.
And for narrow areas where a single infected might pursue one of the patrolling soldiers, Mike positioned more than a dozen M86 Pursuit Deterrent Munitions. These PDMS were small U.S. antipersonnel mines generally used by Special Forces to deter pursuit. In function they were like small hand grenades, and each had a pin and fly-off lever. Once the pin is pulled and the lever has been ejected, a timer starts and after twenty-five seconds it launches seven tripwires with a maximum range of six meters. That creates a spiderweb effect; anyone pursuing the user trips a wire that activates the mine and a liquid propellant charge launches the mine a couple of meters into the air. The fragmentation warhead detonates, breaking the mine into six hundred flesh-rending fragments. Normally these devices deactivated themselves after a few hours, but Mike disabled the timers. To warn other soldiers, however, he tied plastic tags to tree branches. Yellow for land mines, orange for devices mounted in the trees. The tags had tiny sensors that would alert troops to their presence. Modern warfare, baby. Mike loved it.
Elsewhere, in spots where the infected were closing in on fields, Mike heard that planes were going to be dropping cluster bombs. Part of the GATOR land mine system. The Navy would drop five-hundred-pound CBU-78/Bs and the Air Force would lay down some thousand-pound CBU-89/Bs. Very heavy shit, and Mike wished he could be there to see it. Not the drop … he wanted to see what happened when a bunch of infected tried waltzing across a field of those puppies.
Ka-boom.
