Greater Los Angeles. They won’t call in the Air Force until then. Maybe they’ll even lock down the city and put boots on the ground. A couple hundred thousand combat troops should be able to clear it out in a year or two. Most likely, it’ll be a combined forces scenario and it’ll be over sooner than that.”
“We can’t let this happen, Lowell.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “Tell me what you need.”
“This is a race. Between the Xolos, the outfits and the sidhe, we can drop zombies faster than they can kill people. Problem is, even if I throw open the door for Oberon, we’re outnumbered.”
“We need to minimize the zombies’ reproductive efficiency,” Lowell said.
“Right. If I can get even a thousand Xolos, gangsters and sidhe together, each dropping maybe ten zombies an hour, we can get ahead of it. But we have to control how quickly civilians are getting killed. The single best way to do that is to get them out of town. Just getting them away from the dense areas will help. Spread them out. Fewer live bodies means fewer zombies get made, and more slowly.”
“I’ll try.”
“You’re a fucking sorcerer, Lowell. Juice every motherfucker in the chain of command if you have to, just make it happen.”
“Okay.”
“Other than magic, is there any good way to put down a zombie?”
“Head shots work, the more extensive the brain trauma the better. Decapitation is best-some animation remains in the corpse, but the zombie is effectively neutralized.”
“So it might lie there and twitch a little, but you won’t get eaten unless you trip and fall on a head.”
“Yeah.”
“Then I want troops, Lowell. Send in some army guys with M-16s and machetes.”
“I can bring in a black ops task force,” Lowell said. “A couple hundred combat personnel. Support elements and maybe a few Black Hawks. Anything more and we can’t keep this dark, and Domino, we really don’t want that.”
“Whatever you can get.”
“I’m just not sure how effectively I can deploy my guys. I don’t want to send my teams on house-to-house search-and-destroy missions. It’s slow, it’s dangerous and there are going to be civilian casualties, which doesn’t exactly help our cause.”
“I can find targets for you.”
“How?”
“Banshees. They’ll identify targets and coordinate our efforts.”
“They can do that?”
“I hope so.”
The next call went to Chavez. “Tell me you rescued the dogs, chola,” he said when he picked up the phone.
“Yeah, but there are only a hundred of them, Chavez. They’ll never catch up on the backlog. We have to help them out.”
“We’re doing our best. All the bosses got their outfits on zombie patrol, except Terrence and Mobley.”
“I know, and we have to keep dropping zombies. But we’ve got to protect civilians, Chavez. The best way to slow down the zombies is to keep the living away from them.”
“How you want us to do that, chola? If we’re herding civilians, that’s going to slow us down on the zombie killing.”
“I want sanctuaries. You put civilians in every juice box we’ve got-every crack house, shooting gallery, tattoo parlor and strip club. You tune up the wards on them and put enough shepherds in there to keep the wolves at bay. The rest keep sweeping the streets, dropping bodies. You put them on rotation so everyone gets a rest. Everyone except the big hitters-they all stay on the street. The banshees are going to feed you target locations.”
Chavez whistled. “That’s good, chola. How do we let people know where to go?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about it, “we can put the word on the street, but the civilians won’t know the difference between a juice box and any other business. They could walk into a joint thinking they’re safe and get eaten by a stripper.”
“We have to mark them. We could decorate the sanctuaries with marigolds.” I knew what Chavez was thinking-marigolds were traditional for the Dia de los Muertos celebrations.
“We’d need a lot of fucking flowers,” I said. “And what’s the point of getting all clever about it? These aren’t mindless zombies-they’ll clue in to the code soon enough.”
“That’s true, chola. What, then?”
“How about you just tag the juice boxes with the word sanctuary? If the zombies want to attack our strong points, I say let them come.”
“The smart zombies will set traps.”
“Oh, yeah. It has to be real tags, then-that’s the only thing a clever zombie wouldn’t be able to copy.”
“The juice boxes already got plenty of tags, chola. We can light them up, make them glow like neon. Our taggers can do that, easy-they learn that shit even before they know how to lay down a tag that can actually do something.”
“Yeah, that works. The taggers aren’t going to be any help killing zombies, anyway. Put them on it. Plus, it fits with the acid-in-the-water story Lowell’s pushing. Any reporters see that shit, they’ll just think they’re tripping.”
The line went silent for a few seconds.
“What is it, Chavez?”
“This is it,” he said. “We’re real soldiers, D. You talked about us becoming an army that could protect the civilians, but it was just talk before. Now it’s real.”
“I guess it is, Raffy. Are you ready?”
“I been waiting on you, chola. This shit feels pretty good.”
He was right. Even if no one thanked us for it, wearing the white hat for a change felt pretty damn good.
I’d encountered any number of law enforcement officers in my line of work, but only one of them knew who I was. Only one of them knew what I was. All the others got juiced and they wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a lineup even if they somehow got me into one. Detective Meadows was different. She was a sensitive-an otherwise normal human who was tuned in to the supernatural world for whatever reason. She’d tried to put a case on me back in the day. That hadn’t worked out for her, but in the course of her investigation she saw enough to realize there were far worse things than me going bump in the night. I’d decided she could be useful to us, but more than that, I’d decided I liked her. Either one would have been enough reason not to put the hoodoo on her.
“Do you know what’s happening?” I asked when she picked up.
“I’m murder police, Ms. Riley. I was at a scene and the vic got up and ran off. Is it voodoo?”
“Different kind of zombies. The voodoo kind wouldn’t be eating folks. What’s the city doing about it?”
“It’s better than ninety-two,” Meadows said. “Or at least it would be if this was just a riot. The mayor imposed a curfew. The chief declared a tactical alert and activated the Emergency Operations Center. Patrol officers are being issued tear gas and body armor. And Metro Division has been deployed. That’s SWAT.”
“Thanks, Meadows, I actually know quite a lot about you people. Are they fighting the zombies?”
“Not on purpose. B and C Platoons are on riot response and crime suppression missions. You know, they aren’t actually aware that zombies are causing most of the rioting. At least they weren’t-there have been some incidents and rumors are starting to fly. The water-supply story is good but it’s starting to get pretty thin. Otherwise, LAFD is fully mobilized and they’re getting mutual aid support from LASD. The governor called in the National Guard at the mayor’s request, but they haven’t shown up yet.”
Getting L.A.’s Fire Department and Sheriff’s Department involved sounded like a pretty efficient response to a riot. It might even have worked if the actual rioting hadn’t been occurring within the context of a full-scale zombie apocalypse. “Everyone who dies is getting back up with a hankering for brains, Meadows. That will include state and municipal government employees. I don’t know enough to say whether the response will break even or not.”
