Twelve-Mile Limit

Note: this is my entry for this week’s flash fiction challenge put up by Chuck Wendig.

“We’re not getting too close, are we?”

She smirks. “Scared, Dave?”

“Yes. Yes I’m fucking scared.” You’d have to be an idiot not to be scared. They’ve just come over a hill and caught sight of the thing’s distant glow for the first time. Blue, watery light spilling up into the night sky. There, just over the horizon, something lurks in the ruins of Seattle.

“Don’t worry,” says Laura. “I’ve done this a hundred times. Treat the Exclusion Zone with respect, but don’t let fear control you. They say you need to stay fifteen miles away, but it’s really more like tweleve. As long as we don’t for a swim in the sound we should be fine.”

“Right. Right,” says Dave. This is his first run. The barbed wire and machine gun nests were easier to get through than he’d expected. Laura knows all the blind spots to skirt through, all the right officers to bribe.

Zone running is a cottage industry now. Uncle Sam says “keep out” but market forces say “come on in” and so there’s almost always a few people hunting and pecking through the ruins. There’s a huge market for salvaging from the Exclusion Zone. People will pay to get old family photos back, or a rifle in good working order recovered from one of the places where National Guard units made their final stands. And of course, there are the artifacts. The strange bits of dross fell off the thing as careened through the sky on its way down. Find a nice piece of that, and you can retire.

Dave and Laura skitter down the side of a collapse building, wary of broken glass and rusty metal. Tonight’s run is a quick one, just in and out with nothing more than a little food, a little water, an emergency beacon, and of course their rifles.

People have gone unarmed into the EZ before, but that was mostly in the desperate early days. Before everyone learned better.

“Where are we?” asks Dave as they reach street level. The road here is relatively clear, and so they walk down its center, weaving between collapsed buildings and abandoned cars. Weeds punch up through the asphalt, and crows watch them from a distance.

“We’re about to cross 180th,” says Laura. She’s got her hair cut close, almost a buzz cut. There’s a fun scar that traces the bottom of her jaw, and her eyes are on the horizon. “Shouldn’t be too much further.”

Dave is here to get some files. When the doom fell on Seattle, the survivors were evacuated. Among them, a very large, very wealthy software development firm. You have probably heard of them. There had been a project underway, millions of dollars already committed. It was so top secret that the only backups were kept in another building on the same campus. They didn’t trust the files to be saved anywhere else, and as long as the buildings weren’t close enough to be caught by the same fire, what’s the harm, right? Risk management by committee at its finest. In the headlong rush to get the hell away from that thing which landed in the Sound, everything at corporate headquarters was abandoned. Mostly, what was lost could be reconstructed or replaced. But not those files, and those files are the future of the company. And so after years of boardroom debate and backroom maneuvering and lawyers smelling blood in the water, they decided to send someone in to go get the files.

Dave is a member of the development team that was working on the project. It has to be him. He’s one of the few survivors who actually knows which physical disk it is that they need to unscrew from the racks and place carefully in the custom-fitted crash pack they’ve designed to carry it in. He was also in the Army once upon a time, and to the rest of the team that makes him a badass but the truth is that in three tours he never left the Green Zone and he barely remembers how to use a rifle.

A thumping helicopter passes them in the distance. It turns. Laura takes a knee, gestures for Dave to do the same. They huddle behind an abandoned car. Cars made of fiberglass and plastic don’t rot and rust the way older cars do. At first blush, they look like they’ve only been here for months, not years. Except there are plants sprouting from the seats.

“Think that spotted us?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s wait.”

And so they do. The helicopter passes them again, and then moves away. The Army still patrols the EZ. They’ve been known to drop troops on zone runners from time to time, but that’s not really what they’re watching for.

The wind shifts, and with it comes a new sound. Chanting in the distance.

“Shit!” hisses Dave.

Laura listens intently for a long moment. “I don’t think they’re coming closer. Let’s finish this and get the hell out of here.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Bent low and moving fast, they double time it down the road. There’s the street sign they are looking for, rusted out and leaning over. Dave knows where he is now, and with a surge of confidence he whispers at Laura to follow him and they head directly into the old campus.

As they reach the perimeter fence, Laura grabs his arm and they take a knee to watch and listen.

“These buildings look like they’re in good shape,” she says. “Could be a real attractive squat for a cult.”

“Oh.”

So they wait for a solid twenty minutes, and don’t see anything. Dave isn’t sure, but he thinks the chanting may have gotten louder.

“Okay, let’s go,” says Laura. They move into the campus at a light jog. Dave wishes the company had sprang for some night vision, because right now every shadow seems like an ambush in waiting.

Everything looks smaller than he remembers. Lesser. The memories come thick and fast. The screaming the sky, the thunderous detonations of sonic booms. The low rumble that went on and on after impact. And then the strange noises coming from the radio. The sudden outbreak of murder and madness. The way his team leader looked at him with eyes of burning blue fire and screamed with all the hate in the world. The sudden, sick realization that fell on the escaping survivors like a sandbag that they can never come back.

They find the building they need, but the keycard locks don’t have power so they hunt around for a few minutes until Laura finds a fire escape ladder on the side of the building.

“Boost me up,” she says, and he holds her up on his shoulders while she flips the catch that holds the ladder up. It comes crashing down with a terrifying bang.

“Shit, do you think they heard that?” asks Dave.

“Possibly,” says Laura. Her face is grave. “Let’s do this quick and vanish.”

They scurry up the ladder and pause for a moment while Laura booby traps it with a claymore mine.

The hallways are thick with dust and scattered paper. Their flashlights play over frozen chaos. It’s amazing how big a mess a hundred and fifty people can make when they’re fleeing a building on zero notice. They move down through the fire stairs until they get to the floor Dave’s team was secreted away on, way in the back. Another keycard lock, so Laura smashes the window with the butt of her rifle and reaches through to crank the door open.

Dave goes directly to the backup servers and unscrewing disk drives from the server racks. Tense moments later, they’re packed up and ready to go.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” says Laura with no trace of her earlier swagger.

“Right,” says Dave tightly. The drive is strapped to his back. The bonus they’re giving him for this is going to pay off his house, his car, his college debt, his credit cards, and stock him up to send all three of his kids to Stanford, and right now he’s pretty sure that he got lowballed.

They head back to the fire stairs to get up to the roof. The sound of chanting drifts down the stairs towards them.

Dave feels like he’s going to puke. His skin feels cold and clammy. “Uh, so, uh. Let’s go out the back way, okay?” he says in a shaking voice. He backs away from the fire stairs.

“Dave, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” says Laura. Her eyes are glowing. A pale, watery blue. “The first time I did this, my GPS was broken. I got a little closer than twelve miles.”

Dave turns to swing his rifle up, but by then it is far too late.