Black Tide Rising by John Ringo & Gary Poole

Author:John Ringo & Gary Poole [Ringo, John & Poole, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476781518
Amazon: 1476781516
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Battle of the BERTs

MIKE MASSA

“Chomp!”

Colleen’s brother-in-law bred Presa Canario mastiffs just outside Austin. On her last trip to visit her sister’s family, she had fed the dogs and noted that when they snapped a thrown treat out of the air they made a distinct chompf! sound. The suspected H7D3 victim that she and Larry were struggling to control was making the exactly same chomping noise as it fought to close the distance imposed by their field expedient lasso and stick arrangement.

The electrically insulated capture stick allowed them to control the likely zombie at a safe interval while the third member of the team disabled it with a taser. That was the theory at least, and it had worked so far. The captured man slumped to the ground as the repeated current overloaded his nervous system.

A banker, she judged from the tailored suit, and a recent turn. His shoes were still polished and his clothing clean. Usually, the detainees were naked, or mostly so. Her bank’s team of lab types explained that an early symptom was profound skin sensitivity. However, some infecteds turned so fast that this step seemed to be skipped occasionally.

Once the potential infected was on the ground, the team was ready for phase two—getting a photo of the detainee and then bagging his head with a Kevlar snake sack order to prevent bites. She spied a human bite mark on one scrabbling hand—the probable infection site.

“Hold onto the stick, Lare,” she instructed. “Let me run a patch test.”

“Why bother? He is infected, plainer than shit. You’re wasting a kit.”

“One, that’s the procedure we agreed to when we started harvesting these poor fuckers. Two, there is a tiny chance that he is a vanilla EDP who is hopped up on bath salts or something and three, I am the team lead and I fucking well said so.”

Larry was a few years older than her twenty-eight, and like many in the corporate security world, had spent time in the military and later as a contractor. His second guessing wouldn’t be acceptable in the long term under normal circumstances. In the current circumstances of a slow moving zombie apocalypse, it was potentially lethal, right now.

Larry levered the capture stick down and put his weight on it, pinning the suspected infected if he should try to rise and placing the captured man in easy reach for administering the test kit. He didn’t otherwise reply.

Colleen prompted, “Larry, I need a clear affirm before I get within grabbing distance of this guy, or you are going to be kneeling on that stick for a long time.”

“Clear,” he replied curtly.

“Crystal, boss.” That was Solly, unbidden. Solly was a comfort. An Army lifer who’d retired to Long Island, he ended up driving for MetBank executives during the days of Occupy Wallstreet. He was a professional driver, easy going and the primary operator of their snatch truck—a panel-sided six-pack dually, complete with light bar and Biological Emergency Response Team labels on the front, side and rear. Solly

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