“This place consists not only of bricks and mortar,” Steve said.
Ramses said wearily, “Okay, Yoda. You’ll clear this up for me in the morning. I’m tired as shit.”
Steve told Ramses about how he and Vassili had been locked up in the parking lot by the scared garage attendant.
Then Steve said, “Thanks for staying alive again.”
“Happy to oblige.”
They talked for half an hour, and Ramses could see Steve was tired and said good night. He was exhausted himself.
“Remember, my friend,” Steve said as Ramses went to the door. “The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.”
Ramses frowned and thought. “Errr … Let me guess … Steven Harper Clayton?”
Steve smiled. “No, the Dalai Lama.”
Ramses smiled back. He turned the door handle but then halted. “Say, where’s Lena? The girl from the Diorama club?”
“Oh, that one,” Steve said. “You were right about her, Ramsey. She took off in the middle of the night when I refused to pay her. Then she threatened to file a report to the police. Rape and stuff.”
“Fuck, man.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Was a pretty good fuck, though.”
“Okay, buddy, have a good night,” Ramses said. “Cowabunga!”
Steve clenched his fist and shook it in the air. “Turtle power.”
On his way to his room, Ramses knocked on Ksenia’s door. No one responded. He opened the door and came in. “Hey, Ksenia,” he said in a whisper, “you okay?”
In the light coming from the hallway, he could see Ksenia was fast asleep. He closed the door as quietly as he could and left.
In about five minutes there was a knock on his door.
He opened it. Ksenia stood in the dark hallway. She was wearing a waitress’s uniform. She held a pillow and a blanket in her hands.
“Room service,” she said.
“Hey, hey,” Ramses said and whistled. “Cute outfit.”
Ksenia looked at her new clothes and smiled. “Just my size.”
She looked at him. “Please let me stay in your room. Just for one night. I’m scared to be alone.”
“All righty,” Ramses said. “My home is your home.”
“But don’t get any fancy ideas,” she said, holding up her gun.
TEN
Sitting in a military helicopter, General Petrov was looking down on the city below. He was old and gray but his sight was still keen enough to pick out burning cars and smoking buildings. Chelyabinsk was rapidly turning into a graveyard. The deadly virus had broken loose and created havoc and chaos. The Government was fast enough to assess the situation and to realize that it was grave and would not come under control easily. Drastic measures had to be taken quickly. They decided to isolate the threat and contain the virus in the city which had become the epicenter of the outbreak. The general had to take under control the territory, which was over a hundred square miles.
Today was Wednesday, and it was the fifth day of the military campaign called Operation Steel Ring, which was under General Petrov’s command. The primary goal of the operation was to seal off the city. No one was allowed to leave it. As the Russian saying goes, not even a fly should cross the border.
One of the first flies to cross the borderline was the Mayor, who had made an attempt to flee from the infected city by helicopter. One missile hit and the five million dollars budget money had been burned in the air. Together with the pilot, the Mayor, his wife, their two adorable blonde daughters, and the Mayor’s mother-in-law.
The general was leafing through documents with updates on the current situation in the city. The origin of the disease was unknown yet, but there was no doubt that it was a disease. The analysts had found links between the contagion and the meteorite fall. On a Friday morning last week, in the vicinity of the meteorite impact on Lake Chebarkul, they found a man, who was lying unconscious on the ice. There was a dog bite on his leg. They found out that the man was a local forester, Pavel Bandurov, forty years old. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing at the lake. Obviously, he was attracted by the spectacular celestial show and came to see the place where the meteorite had fallen. The police found the dog which had presumably bitten him. It was chained in the yard of the forester’s house. It was very aggressive and foaming at the mouth. These were indicators of rabies. The dog was shot dead when it tried to attack a police officer.
The forester needed urgent medical attention, but the Chebarkul hospital was really poorly equipped for critical patients. People died in the intensive care unit of this hospital like flies. So he was taken to a hospital in Chelyabinsk.
The next day the chaos began. The city residents just became berserk all of a sudden and started killing each other. The traffic in the city and the metro area collapsed and became nonexistent. Thousands of cars were stranded on the streets, curbs, and sidewalks. Even pizza delivery guys on scooters would have found it hard to maneuver around the abandoned vehicles. Hospitals were overcrowded. All police and army units were activated. Tanks were rumbling through the city streets. Battle helicopters hovered overhead.
On the first day of the crisis, the police failed to regain order in the city. The military planners too were unsure how to act. There was no protocol, no military strategy for these new circumstances. The military were unwilling to shoot unarmed civilians. They applied non-lethal weapons against the targets first. That was how General Petrov and his Headquarters Staff related to the infected ones – targets or enemy.
The general put the documents away and closed his eyes. He wanted to catch some sleep before he arrived at headquarters. For the past five days, he had only been able to sleep two hours a day. He tried to sleep but thoughts battered his mind. He recalled the Saturday’s battle at the bridge on Sverdlovsky Avenue. He was personally in the middle of the war zone. It had been carnage.
First, they tried tear gas, which proved to be useless. Then water cannons went into combat. The water supply was in abundance. They pumped the water for the cannons directly from the river Miass, which flows under the bridge. For plain human beings, a hard jet of icy water in the chest on a cold winter night would be lethal. But those were not plain human beings they were dealing with. High-pressure streams of water knocked the targets off their legs. They fell down in a pile, breaking their arms and legs, but still continued to crawl. It was a tangle of shambling and coiling creatures. More targets climbed on top of them. The water was mixed with pink dye, and the attackers were colored pink. The picture was surreal. Pink undead walking and falling but keeping coming at the soldiers, without blinking in the bright light of the searchlights. And hunger was their leader.
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