Village of Dveri — Eastern Slav Republic Exclusion Zone | December 27, 2010 | 18:00
The cargo train from the border crossing was three hours late, which was eight hours faster than scheduled, which told him something useful about the current operational status of the ESR railway system and therefore the government's logistical capacity in the eastern region.
He stepped off the platform wearing the parka and the battered camera bag and the specific walk of Foma Kiniaev, which was the walk of a man who had been cold for a long time and had made peace with it. The military checkpoint was staffed by two soldiers whose attention was directed mainly at staying warm. He gave them American cigarettes and a weary press-of-duty expression and they stamped his accreditation without reading it.
The exclusion zone started four kilometers east. He walked into it.
The Dveri road had been a road within living memory. Now it was a frozen scar of churned earth and tank track impressions under a shallow layer of new snow. On either side: pine forest, the specific deep quiet of trees in winter, broken at intervals by the remains of things that had been structures before the artillery found them. A farmhouse. A barn, the roof collapsed inward. A vehicle that had been armored once and was now a shape half-buried by snowfall that had clearly been accumulating for weeks.
No recent vehicle tracks. The military had not been here since the shelling. Whatever was in Dveri, the government was letting it sit without oversight, which was either negligence or confidence, and Belikova's government did not project negligence.
"Hunnigan," he said, low, the wind pulling the words. "Perimeter."
"Copy," she said in his ear, clear and immediate. "Satellite coverage is degraded by the storm system moving in from the north — I have intermittent windows. Thermal imaging shows two heat sources active in the village: the underground installation and something moving in the village square. One signature. Could be an infected host or a survivor." A pause. "Proceed to the church. That's the center of the installation's thermal output."
Dveri was fifteen buildings arranged around a central square. It had been a village in the Soviet-era administrative sense — functional, unremarkable, the kind of place that existed to house the people who maintained the region's agricultural output. Now it was a ruin of a specific kind: not the ruin of neglect but the ruin of one targeted event followed by months of untouched aftermath. The burn pattern on the building facades was from the direction of the ridge to the north. The broken windows had been broken by blast concussive force, not by time.
He could smell it before the square opened up. Old blood — the copper note of it, flat and cold, which was how blood smelled when it had been in the open air long enough to lose its warmth. And underneath it, the sweet-rotting undertone that he had learned to associate with biological presence at the advanced stage of Plaga infection: the host's cellular chemistry shifting as the parasite's metabolic requirements increased.
One host in the square. He had been told. One signature.
The man who stepped from behind the frozen fountain was wearing the remnants of civilian clothing — heavy coat, work boots, the practical dress of rural ESR in winter. His grip on the pitchfork was too tight. The tendons in his forearm were standing against the skin in a way that indicated involuntary muscular contraction, which was the Plaga's interference with the voluntary motor system. His head moved with the specific twitching motion of a nervous system in conflict with itself.
"Stoy," Alen said. Russian. Hands up. The journalist play, in case cognition was still present at any level.
The man looked at him.
The eyes were wrong — not the blank gray film of T-Virus infection, which destroyed the visual cortex along with everything else. These had the opposite quality: the whites were intact but the pupils were wrong, enlarged beyond what any light level would produce, and the dark fluid visible in the scleral veins around them was the Plaga's vascular signature, the parasite integrating itself into the host's circulatory system. Partial cognition retained. Motor function significantly compromised. The host was in there, somewhere, but the something using his body had different priorities.
The pitchfork came up. Then the man lunged.
He moved fast — the Plaga's enhancement of muscular output was documented but the documentation consistently underestimated what it felt like in practice. Alen stepped inside the arc of the swing, which put him close enough to feel the wind of the tines passing. He drove his palm into the underside of the jaw — the standard technique for a standing opponent, designed to interrupt the spinal signal chain at the atlas vertebra — and felt the impact transmit through the jaw into the skull and into the neck and produce absolutely nothing.
The host did not flinch.
That was information. The Plaga had altered the pain response along with everything else. He stepped back, drew the suppressed P226, and placed two rounds center mass. The host stumbled — the physical mass impact registered even if the pain did not — but kept forward motion.
Third round: eye socket. The Plaga's primary neural cluster in the brain stem was severed by the penetration. The host's legs lost their structure and he went into the snow.
Alen stood over him for one second. Then he heard the doors.
Twelve doors. Six buildings. The sounds staggered by approximately half a second each, which was coordination — not the random individual response of isolated infected hosts, but organized response. The Plaga enabled this: subordinate-strain hosts with a dominant-strain controller in proximity moved with the collective intelligence of the parasite itself rather than the fragmented cognition of the individual hosts.
There was a dominant-strain host somewhere. Directing this.
"Hunnigan," he said, dropping the camera bag and lifting the submachine gun it had been concealing. "Compromised. Twelve hostiles, organized movement. There's a dominant-strain controller in proximity — someone is running this."
"Confirmed, I'm reading the signatures now," she said, controlled but sharp. "The coordination pattern is consistent with dominant-Plaga influence. Alen — don't let them surround you. The church is sixty meters northeast. Move."
He moved.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chapter Twenty-Eight follows...