As the 2 of them progressed deeper into the city the buildings gradually started to grow taller. It wasn't apparent at first, just the odd building that stood a bit taller than the others, but it gradually reached the point where they were surrounded by 5 or more stories on all sides. It was around this time that Roland said it was time to take a break. They climbed a fire escape on an apartment building and entered through a 3rd-floor window. Before Roland let them rest, they checked the entire floor for any threats. There was only 1, which Roland had the kid bring down with his knife.
"That should do it," Roland said as the kid ripped the knife out of the zombie. "Area secure, we can take a break for a bit." The kid took a relieved breath as he lowered the corpse to the ground draining the cellular energy out of it as he lowered it down.
"Why do some of these zombies have more energy than others?" The kid asked before he could think about it.
"It boils down to how frequently they eat and how much energy they burn in general. With the regular zombies, this usually doesn't amount to much in the first place. "
"I tried… drawing energy off all the ones you killed on the way here, and only one had even a quarter of the energy I got from the 2 in the diner or from this one."
"That's because I drew off them first. Probably should have mentioned it, but the person who gets the kill has a claim to the energy. I left some for you so you would have something to work with because I'm nice like that."
"But I haven't seen you make anything."
"I've been making internal structures, mostly bone and muscle. Laying the groundwork for the next step."
"What's the next step?"
"Making a second skin." The kid looked at him like he was stupid. Roland smiled a little and reached into his pocket to pull out a chocolate bar. "Tell me, Greens, you like science fiction?"
"Greens?"
"You need a name."
"I have a name."
"You need a new name. You never had a chance to get debriefed, but your civilian identity has been, for all intents and purposes, killed off."
"What?"
"It's for your protection. There are plenty of people out there that consider carriers to be evil or dangerous. Attacks on carriers, and their families, aren't uncommon. If you have anyone that matters, you'll want a new identity to keep them safe. If you don't, then why does it matter if you change your name." The kid, or rather Greens, thought on that for a moment.
"I get that there's a lot I don't know, but I have a question that I need you to answer. Why me?" Greens looked up at Roland, a determined glare on his face as though he would start a fight if Roland dodged the question. "What made me special, when everyone else died?"
"Random chance," Roland answered quickly and threw half the chocolate bar at Greens. "About 20% of the population is immune to the infection, and less than .005% have the potential to become carriers. Being immune, or a carrier, doesn't mean you can't be killed. You had the luck of being exposed and surviving long enough to turn into a carrier.
"When the outbreak hit, the population sat at 401 million people in the US. It started in the northwest, up by Seattle, experts think that some medical facilities had a containment breach. The plague spread across the nation slowly, taking about 3 months to move south towards Mexico while slowly spreading east over the rocky mountains. The incubation for people who receive a secondary infection is about 2 days, but they can spread it through things like blood, spit, and sex after like an hour."
"They should have nuked the West Coast before they lost control." Greens said, shaking his head.
"They did. While official reports say that nuclear weapons weren’t used so the government could make an attempt to reclaim lost areas after the situation was under control, Washington was carpet-bombed. Large cities like Seattle, Tacoma, and others with high populations were hit with nukes. The small towns, mainly farming communities and areas of strategic importance that didn’t have high populations, were hit with a large series of non-nuclear explosives. It was very effective, but the president ordered that minimal ordinance be used to attempt to preserve as much American soil as possible. The original thought was that if their numbers were reduced enough, armed troops could move in to clear out the stragglers. But what they didn't expect was the radiation."
"They didn't expect a nuclear bomb to have radiation?"
"They didn't expect that the virus was adaptive and learned to use nuclear radiation as an energy source. Everyone assumed that the zombies were something taken straight from the movies. But what they were facing was something entirely different."
"The specials?"
"There are 5 classifications for the zombies. The shambling ones we've been dealing with are just called zombies, simple and easy. Next up are the runners. These ones are fast and strong, more so than a normal person but again not a major threat to armed forces. 3rd are the screamers, fast and strong like the runners but they also let out a call that attracts all zombies in the area. They've also got some incredible bite strength that can actually bend metal with their mouths, and a degree of intelligence that the first 2 lack. 4th are the specials. These ones are a different breed altogether, there are multiple theories as to what the specials actually are. Some say that specials are actually zombies that had the potential to be a carrier but somehow lacked immunity. It doesn't really make much sense, but know that specials appear to think and attack with much more than just blunt instincts. While we haven't seen any with human-level intelligence, it's quite possible that there are some that do exist."
"So I take it they have carrier like abilities?"
"Yeah. At the drop of a hat, they can go from walking the street to running on walls with 6 legs. Each special has its own classifications unto itself, the mutations and abilities are just too random to group them together any further aside from assigning a threat level. Fortunately, these mutations seem to come in bursts, all of it at once in rapid growth, and because it comes on so fast the cells are unstable. That means that the freshly grown cells will die off after a while, and specials seem to require a fair bit of time to generate the energy needed for their bursts. So if you find a special you can’t fight, just run away and come back for it after some time, chances are it’ll be back to normal, or the mutations will be nonfunctional."
"Okay. I think I'm still tracking. So they think the specials are some kind of zombie carriers, and other non-shambling ones are just caused by the radiation or something."
"No. The opposite. All 4 were present during the initial outbreak, its the reason it couldn’t be suppressed by military forces. While they're physically weak, the shambling zombies have an extraordinarily high tolerance for anything else that could otherwise affect a human’s health. They can continue to operate in extreme cold and heat, poisons don't affect them, and they can survive without food or water for very long periods of time. The radiation from the bombs didn't affect them, and even fueled them. This is where the 5th designation comes in."
"Radioactive zombies?"
"No. We aren't sure exactly how it happened, but the virus turned a large number of the shamblers into a hive. Think of a bee-hive made out of human flesh, and you have a fairly close approximation. The troubling thing is that these hives birth zombies, fully grown and usually in better shape than a person who gets infected. When a hive goes active, it will spit out shamblers and a few malformed bodies that it re-absorbs most likely for raw materials. Once it's been active for a while, instead of spitting out malformed, it will start producing runners, then screamers, and potentially specials."
"Potentially?"
"By that point, they're easy to detect and are either too far away to get proper readings on or too close for comfort so we blow them away."
"Please tell me you're just messing with me. There's no way these things can feed off radiation or make hives to produce more zombies."
"I know it's hard to accept, but just think about it. Haven't you ever wondered how America fell so quickly, it took less than a year before the only survivors were behind the wall. Even if all of them were fast as the ones at the stadium, well you saw what we did to them. 2 people and a helicopter crew, and we killed hundreds. The armed forces alone would have been able to handle the situation, even if the entire civilian population turned into zombies. When they nuked Seattle, they unwittingly created an area we couldn't enter that was producing zombies faster than we could make bullets. They fed off the radiation, used it as fuel to make the city into 1 massive zombie factory that started spitting out thousands, and at the same time a large number of specials started showing up. The specials made holes in the lines, and death swarmed in after them."
"Jesus Christ." Greens lifted his hand to scratch his head, before remembering that he had a helmet on. "So how did the wall stop them?"
"It didn't, not on its own at least." Like I said before if we can take out the hives in a reasonable amount of time, they don't produce specials. We started hitting hives with artillery, and I mean a lot of artillery. We armed defensible positions, built the wall behind bodies of water that were easily patrolled by heavily armed boats. A few dozen massive detonations to connect rivers, make certain areas wider or deeper, and destroy any bridges that allowed for easy access, and you have yourself a small isolated chunk of the continent. It was hell building that wall though."
"You helped?"
"I came into the picture close to the end of the first year, when they were working on the northern sections of the wall. But that's a different story. The point I'm trying to make is that the wall is only effective if we can take out the hives. A couple of specials aren't much compared to fully armed forces, but a dozen with the right mutations can make a hole, and that's much harder to deal with."
"So as carriers, we take out hives."
"And specials."
"If we hunt specials too, then why didn't we kill that pack of them we saw earlier?"
"Because there were several of them. With the firepower we have right now, we'd be screwed trying to fight them. Unless you can kill them before they notice you, or have some really heavy guns or explosives, it's suicide without a skin."
"What's a Skin?"
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