Bag Men Read online

  “Big day, ma’am,” Bryan confirmed. He looked ready to cry or puke (or both.) We haven’t even seen anything yet, she thought. He isn’t cut out for this work. The Bureau’s attrition rate has been climbing steadily for the past decade. Statistically, this guy will probably resign in less than a year.

  “Hey, look at me,” Lilly said as the young man closed his eyes and tucked his chin down against his chest. His gaze shot back up, and when his eyes met hers she was reminded of a deer that had once frozen in the beams of her headlights. It was a cliché, but it was accurate.

  “We all have a first day,” she told him gently. “You need to get out of your head. Anyway, this could be—and probably is—a false alarm.” Bryan nodded and managed to smile. There were two other men in the truck besides Lilly and her neighbor, strapped into their seats. They talked casually to each other, not paying any attention to the nervous new recruit.

  Lilly didn’t say anything else. The man would be able to handle it or he wouldn’t. She couldn’t prime him to stay with the Bureau if it wasn’t in his constitution—nor would she want to. She wondered privately if the rising attrition rate was proportional to the rising survivability in the task-force. The SAC BPH was starting to get the hang of the job, so more of them lived long enough to realize they had to quit before they lost their sanity.

  Lillian and her team had been scrambled after a report came through the Diagnostics Department that two residents in the downtown area had failed to appear for vetting two months in a row. They were a married couple with no history of delinquency. Occasional failure to appear for VHV screening wasn’t all that rare in the general population, but because this couple had previously been highly responsible showing up for scheduled vetting, their sudden delinquency raised red flags when Diagnostic techs noticed it in the computerized records. Hence, the Bag Men were dispatched to check on the couple—Thomas and Jennifer Carlyle. Census records showed they also had a six year old daughter, much too young to legally require regular vetting.

  They have a child, Lilly thought. They have very good reason to be responsible about getting screened. So where have they been? She felt the truck come to a stop. She unbuckled herself in one motion, and her team did the same, including the new recruit. He moved efficiently to his feet by rote, remembering his drilling—but Lilly could still plainly see mental turmoil in his eyes. Lilly opened the back doors of the armored truck and hopped out onto the asphalt—getting her first look at the little single-story house they were investigating. The sun was high in the sky, and the shades were all drawn over the windows. That wasn’t so strange in itself—but Lilly could easily imagine how that fact would play on the new guy’s anxiety.

  She led the way towards the door. Only one team member walked with her—the other three, including the female agent who had been driving, hung back in the street. They were ready to move if Lilly signaled them, but unless she determined they were needed, there was no cause to look like a raiding party storming the house. Lilly climbed the front steps, crossed the porch and gave the door a loud knock. There was no answer, and she knocked again.

  “Break it down,” she said to the agent beside her, but before he could comply, the door opened. A woman stood in front of them, wearing a light sundress. She looked perplexed at the sight of two armed, armored soldiers on her doorstep, but she said nothing.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Lilly said immediately. “Are you Mrs. Jennifer Carlyle?”

  “Yes,” she said, scrunching her brow. Monosyllabic, Lillian thought. She was already evaluating the woman in front of her. There was no single, definite sign that would tell her if this individual was an VHV carrier or not. She would need to collect all possible data from her observations to either reach certainty that she was clean, or certainty that she had turned.

  “My name is Lillian Morgenstern,” she said. “I’m with the BPH, and we are here to check up on you and your husband.” Lilly smiled. She made it seem like a courtesy visit.

  “We’re fine,” Mrs. Carlyle said somewhat sharply. There was a lot of animosity towards the Bureau in general. It was something agents had to learn to deal with—no one wanted to see what would happen to the world if they stopped doing their job, but still no one forgave them for doing it. So Mrs. Carlyle’s obvious discomfort and terseness, seeing two agents from the Bureau appear on her doorstep, wasn’t unexpected.

  “Our records show that both of you have missed the vet, two months in a row,” Lilly said, trying to sound apologetic for noticing. “Is there a reason for that?” Even as she spoke, Lilly was scanning the woman up and down. She examined her clothes. She examined her posture and movements. She sniffed the air subtly, trying to get a sense of the state of her personal hygiene. Her clothes were clean. Her movements seemed normal. But she had a slight sour body odor, as if she hadn’t been bathing regularly. Her hair looked greasy, corroborating that assumption. She had a barely perceptible disfluency in her speech—that could be telling, since advanced VHV infection implied brain-damage. But with no reference, it was impossible to say the disfluency wasn’t a normal part of the woman’s speech patterns. Lilly needed to get her talking more. If she could rope her into speaking longer sentences she might display more significant aphasia.

  VHV stood for Vox Humana Virus—the evocative name of the modern plague indicating that the infected kept their human voices. They could keep talking to you like normal, so you might never know anything was wrong. But just because they had human voices, it didn’t mean they were perfect mimics when it came to using them. Abnormalities in vocal cadence and inflection were always useful cues for Lilly, sensitive and experienced, to follow. If she pressed, she could often railroad mimics into displaying a deeper inability to express or understand speech.

  “Is your husband around today for us to talk to?” Lilly asked. “It’s protocol. Just need to see him, confirm he’s all right.” Lilly kept smiling calmly. The agent beside her said nothing. Quietly chewing gum, his face was impassive behind dark sunglasses.

  “He’s not home,” Mrs. Carlyle said.

  Lilly goaded her to keep talking. “Where is he right now? We could go check on him wherever he is, and save you the trouble of having us visit again.” The woman in the sundress thought laboriously about how to answer. The hairs on Lilly’s neck were starting to stand—her instincts kicking in.

  “He’s at work,” Mrs. Carlyle pronounced carefully, a barely perceptible slurring in her words. “He won’t be home until later. You can’t go see him at work because he’s busy.”

  ‘Because he’s busy?’ Lilly thought. That’s weak.

  Lillian nodded to the silent agent beside her. He moved quickly, drawing a high-voltage stun-gun from a holster at his side, but the Sleeper moved faster. With inhuman speed and strength, she slapped the agent across the side of his head and hooked her fingers behind his outer ear—ripping the appendage clean off in the same movement. The man screamed and fell sideways, hitting the porch and sliding down the front steps.

  Lilly reacted almost instantly, training her AR rifle on the woman’s central body-mass and shooting three times in a neat triangle pattern, aiming for both lungs and the aorta. Mrs. Carlyle flopped backwards from the doorway, rolling bloodily across the entryway tiles. The other three Bag Men rushed up from the street, moving to lock Carlyle down before the the virus rebooted her. Lilly had killed the body, but it would only be a beat or two before the viral ‘brain’ recovered from the shock and got her right back on her feet. The female agent who had driven the truck hunkered down beside the man who had lost his ear, while the other two men dashed into the house, whipping out plastic flex-tie restraints and binding Carlyle’s wrists and ankles. She started to thrash only moments after they were secured: she undulated hellishly on the floor like a huge maggot, slathering blood over the light grey tiles from the gaping exit-wounds in her upper back.

  The female agent appeared in the doorway, carrying a body-bag she had just retrieved
from the truck.

  “We’ve got this, Cora,” Lilly said, taking the body-bag. “Stay with Adrian.” She nodded to the groaning man, lying at the bottom of the stairs clutching the side of his head. Blood oozed between his fingers. “Call the EMTs,” Lilly instructed quickly. She reached into her vest pocket. “And give him this.” She handed Cora a fentanyl lollipop, opioid painkiller, for the wounded agent to suck on. She turned to the thrashing thing on the floor. Laying out the body bag, she unzipped the front and instructed the two men to heave Carlyle in.

  “Avoid the blood,” she said. Bag Man uniforms included calf-high rubber muck boots, rubber gloves and elastic sleeve closures to mitigate exposure to bio-hazards, but it still paid to be cautious. The two men forced the wriggling mass into the body-bag while Lilly watched over them, providing cover in case of attack from the other rooms. When they had the Sleeper inside, Lilly zipped the bag closed. Under the nylon fabric was a liner of 3D printed ballistic-strength plastic mesh, engineered to be stronger than steel chain-mail. Once the bag was closed, Carlyle wasn’t getting out. They left her struggling helplessly on the tiles, waiting to be collected for incineration.

  “We need to clear the rest of the building,” Lillian told her team. “The husband and the little girl are probably still here.” She had been peering into the dark house beyond the entryway as she spoke. She turned back and looked at her two agents. One, experienced and ready to proceed. The other, the nervous young man she had talked with in the truck. Bryan had performed the task of shoving the bloody, thrashing body of Mrs. Carlyle into the bag on auto-pilot, his face frozen in agony and horror. Now he was trembling, looking like he couldn’t take another step forward into the dark.

  “Hey,” Lilly said, moving towards him and gesturing for him to look at her face. “Maybe you’re having second thoughts about your career path,” she began. “That’s fine. I don’t care if you quit tomorrow, if you feel like you’re not the right man for this job. But the fact is, you’re the man who’s here right now, so we need you to do the job you’re trained for.”

  Bryan nodded abruptly. She could count on him for at least the next five minutes as they cautiously cleared the other rooms in the little house.

  Moving methodically through the building, they cleared one room after the other. Proceeding in formation, they maintained overlapping lines-of-sight and crossfire, keeping each other safe from ambush out of dark corners or the spaces behind doors as they opened them and stepped into each room. The living-room was dark and empty, requiring them to switch on the flashlights mounted on their rifles. The bathroom was empty. Lilly opened the next door and stared into the darkness of what seemed to be a small, carpeted office. There was a desk with a lamp and desktop computer, a tall cabinet and an inflatable exercise ball. Sweeping the beam of her flashlight across the cramped space, she saw a mangled dead body and a grisly pool of dried gore saturating the carpet.

  “There’s the husband,” Lilly said quietly. “His wife must have killed him.” The body looked swollen and slightly purple. “He’s been dead for about a week. The fact that he’s not undead yet means that the viral colonies in his body are still maturing. He could reanimate literally any second, so we need to hurry up and bag him.” Lilly backed out of the room. “But first, we need to find the little girl…” She didn’t have any hope left for a good ending.

  They found her in the bedroom. A faint smell drew them there. They couldn’t find any trace of a body at first apart from the odor, but soon they homed in on a large antique hope chest at the end of the bed. They broke the lock and opened it. A wave of pungent reek knocked them back like a strong wind. Inside the deep chest were the decomposing remains of a little girl in a sleeping gown. Bryan spun around and vomited in the hallway outside. Lilly hung her head and said nothing for a few moments.

  “What…the hell is this…” Bryan managed to gasp finally, wiping his mouth and choking back tears.

  “This doesn’t make sense for a Sleeper,” Lilly said. “They aren't sentimental. They wouldn’t do anything special like this with a body. No, the woman did this when she was still human.”

  Bryan stepped back into the room, careful not to look into the hope chest again.

  “What the fuck are you saying?” he demanded, looking at her accusingly—as if it was partly her fault that something so atrocious was possible in the world, simply because she understood it.

  “This had to have been her last human act,” Lilly went on. “She knew she was infected. She was already in the process of turning. Her brain wasn’t working right, anymore. She couldn’t think straight. But she knew she had to save her daughter from what was going to happen next. She locked her in the hope chest to suffocate. It was the only way she could see to save her. Of course there were a million other options. But she couldn’t think anymore.”

  Bryan strode out of the room. “I’m not doing this,” he called as he hurried away. That was his whole letter of resignation. The odds said he would resign in less than a year, Lilly thought. She closed the lid of the hope chest, not looking again into it. An old quote she had heard once, that had been carved somewhere long ago in the pit of human suffering, came back into her mind. If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness. She turned away. I don’t know who said that, but they spoke for all of us.

  Jeffrey Eckman

  Technology Park, New Sacramento

  December 10th, 2069

  Jeff sat at an open window in his apartment, looking out over the streets and buildings. Technology Park was the beating heart of innovation in the city-state. New Sacramento had sprung up around it, radiating outwards over the previous thirty years. Unlike old Sac—the section of the city with a high density of original structures recouped and refurbished from before the outbreak of the original plague—New Sac was a modern-looking showcase of the technologies and innovations in engineering that had led a resurgence of civilization after the apocalypse. A resurgence, at least, for the little enclave of several thousand who lived in the city. Outside, humanity was feral. Jeff, like the vast majority of people born in Sacramento, had never traveled outside the city-state. But in his job as radio operator, searching for communications from beyond their borders, he had been exposed to those who roamed the wilderness and wastelands. They ran a wide gamut. There were the descendants of survivalists who had weathered the first outbreak of plague battened down in cabins or homesteads, eating canned rations, hunting wild game and living with little more than a K-bar knife and a waterproof pack of matches. Now, the grandchildren of those original survivors lived in the same way, many of them unaware that there were still other humans in the world. It was for people like them that the government of Sacramento continuously broadcast their message, in the off chance some of them still had working ham radios from the old days. It was the responsibility of the new government to call the disavouched, hardbitten packs of outcasts back to civilization, and to warn them that the plague they thought was gone was still threatening them in secret.

  Jeff hadn’t been there personally to see it, but several years before, the Radio Communications Department had made contact with a religious group that survived “the end-times” by gathering together and hiding in an abandoned federal emergency bunker in Colorado. They had lived underground for seven years when the Sacramento broadcast reached them. But when they replied, establishing contact, it was already too late. VHV had already entered the community—they had found a stranger wandering the mountains outside their compound. He had carried infection into the community. The cult put two and two together when they heard the revelation in the Sacramento broadcast about the evolved virus. It explained the rash of grisly murders that had been tearing the compound apart for months. There was some talk in the Sac government at the time about staging rescue efforts, but it never came to anything. Everyone knew there would be no one alive to save by the time help got there.

  Still other people in the outside world were totally wild, like animals. I
n the decades after the collapse of society, they had reverted back to some atavistic form of tribal existence. The wild people lived, reproduced and died in a shorter timeframe than civilized people, and all the advancements of the human race since the Stone Age had been stripped away from them in a few rapid generations.

  But for those in Sacramento, at least, technology created possibilities in their world, to extend their human agency, and extend their potential beyond biological imperatives. Almost every surface Jeff could see from his window was a multi-tasking solar array. The street below him was constructed from interlocking hexagonal panels of solar roadway, with lanes marked by lines of white or yellow LEDs under the surface of the shatter-proof hardened glass. The windows of the office-block across from him were, he knew, fully translucent photovoltaic cells, harvesting energy to be channeled into the grid for use in utility, agriculture and manufacturing. His apartment, like the other modular living spaces in his complex, was small, efficient, and exhaustively engineered. A large percentage of the objects and materials around him were products of 3D printing. The coffee cup in his hand, the paneled construction of his walls. The bikes and occasional cars passing underneath his window. All were 3D printed with computer aided designs for maximum efficiency in the use of energy and resources.

  Jeff’s dark, ratlike eyes scanned the people passing by in the street, lingering on each face for half a second, no particular thoughts being sparked. I think I’m depressed, he realized. That’s what this is. It’s like I’m only half here, and I don’t know where the other half is. It was such a dull, insidious feeling that he hadn’t even identified it working in his mind before that moment.

  He touched his cup to his forehead and sighed as the coolness of the iced coffee seeped into his skin. He felt feverish—but quickly decided he had only been in the sun too long. He was just moving to rise from his chair and leave the open window when a loud sound echoed in the distance, making him freeze and look back towards the city outside.