The Zone by RW Krpoun Page A

but he was still on his feet and moving with four hits, any one of which should be mortal. The human body is surprisingly tough-it can take considerable amounts of damage, and death is never as swift or sure as it is in the movies, but trauma-induced shock incapacitates fairly reliably. This guy wasn’t getting any shock effect at all; I had seen this in subjects who had taken near-fatal doses of coke or meth, and in PCP users, but this kid wasn’t wired. At least he didn’t look wired.
    His legs steadied and he came back again; I raised the sight and put the next one into his forehead, producing a momentary halo of blood spatter behind him. It was like cutting the strings on a puppet: he crashed into the asphalt without a single twitch or spasm. I watched him for a bit to make sure he wasn’t playing possum, but he was definitely gone. Two of my torso hits had produced exit wounds, and his blood looked a lot darker and thicker than normal. High oxygen content? That made blood darker, and could explain why he soaked up damage. But he could barely breathe, or at least had sounded like he was strangling, the way you get with advanced pneumonia.
    No wonder Fred had packed it in; train for years to shoot center mass, and now this. Fidmat hadn’t been kidding: skull or spine. Maybe the flu affected the glands, gave the same kind of combat charge like a mega meth dose did, made the body ignore shock. That could work.
    Standing over his body, I felt deeply unsettled: I had just shot a person, albeit a valid use of force under Chapter Nine of the Penal Code, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Digging out my phone, I called 911, but after forty rings it cut off. I did it three more times before someone picked up. “I just shot a guy, killed him,” I cut the operator off. “He was attacking me.” I gave the address, roughly.
    “Was he sick?”
    “Yes.”
    “Get to a place of safety.” She repeated the instructions I had gotten earlier. “Do not engage the sick people, but you can defend yourself. Get indoors.” Click. Buzz. Dial tone.
    So that’s how the legal side of the game was being played: the sick people were fair game-now I knew. Fred wasn’t kidding-they had been shooting people, and calling the body counts into the old report recording system. I wondered if the recording system had even been turned on, and wondered why that had occurred to me-I was always a company man.
    The pipes in the green briar: that’s what I had heard, sick people scuttling around. How long had this been going on? I nudged his body with the toe of my boot, but it was slack and unresponsive.
    I thought about the group chasing that woman, and the way this kid kept coming back at me with four rounds through his sternum. If they were all like him, me and my riot shotgun wouldn’t have stood a chance. One man with a weapon can face down a crowd because nobody in the crowd wants to die, and only a couple will be brave or stupid or hyped enough to risk all; shoot those and the rest run. But if they are all like him, then all that would matter would be how many rounds you had, how fast you could accurately fire them, and how good you were at head shots. Otherwise they would roll right over you.
    Getting across town was taking on an entirely new dynamic now.
     
    The access way was an eight-lane parking lot. There were some wrecks and at least one jack-knifed semi rig, but mostly it was abandoned vehicles, quite a few with loads of household goods aboard. It wasn’t bumper to bumper, there were gaps a hundred yards or more between clumps of cars, but the overall effect was parking lot. I had seen similar things when we helped evacuate the coast for Hurricane Ike: some run out of gas, but most panic and take off on foot. Something primeval: go . Don’t wait for traffic inching along, get out and move .
    You could still get through if you went slow; a semi probably would have trouble, a motorcycle none at all. It was a mess, though. From the