A Glimpse Of Decay (Book 1): Red Storm)
A Look Into The Birth Of The Zombie Age
Book One: Red Storm
Copyright © 2015 by A.J. Santiago
Published By A.J. Santiago
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by A.J. Santiago
Front cover and internal design © Joseph Pesavento and CoverDesignStudio.com
Back page image © A.J. Santiago
Edited by Mike Valentino and K.S. Allen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems – except in the case of brief quotations in articles or reviews – without the permission in writing from A.J. Santiago.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders.
All the characters in this novel are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Growing up as a child of the 80s, A.J. Santiago was influenced by the works of Peter Benchley, George A. Romero and Tom Clancy. While living in Georgia as a young teenager, he discovered the wonders of the zombie genre and he continues to enjoy anything and everything dealing with the lovable living dead.
Contents
To my Dad, for taking the time to read this mess.
To my dear friends in Georgia, true zombie fans before the dead started to walk over there.
To all those who probably grew weary of hearing me talk about this book.
To Joe McKinney, for showing me that I could do this.
And to my Mom, I love you.
Day 1
Just outside of Ozersk, Russia (formerly Chelyabinsk-65)
“Can someone please tell me what in the hell is going on over there!” barked the husky sergeant as he bounced up and down on the hard metal bench of the armored personnel carrier. “Sergeant Sokolov, is there no word from the others?” Although the summers in southern Russia were mild and temperate, this one was on track for being the hottest of the new century. With the heat turning the interior of the steel vehicle into an oven, everyone’s clothes were black with sweat. Turning things from bad to worse, the anxious driver was making no attempt to avoid the deep gouges in the dirt road.
The sergeant was fuming. Not only was he was completely in the dark about what was going on at the plant, the diesel fumes in the steamy troop transport were making the thick air almost unbreathable. The sergeant’s bones rattled with each new jolt, and he cursed as he wiped the perspiration from his stinging eyes.
Sokolov, the vehicle commander, sat in the cramped turret. He balanced himself on his perch as he apprehensively looked down at the sergeant. Fearing the man’s anger, he chose his words cautiously. He reported, “We were only able to receive a few transmissions…from one of the units out there…but…they didn’t make any sense. We couldn’t understand what they were trying to…report.” Showing bewilderment, the young commander shrugged as his brows knitted in confusion. With no response from the sergeant, he turned his head back to his scope just as the nervous driver ran over a rotting log. The teeth rattling jar was met with a flurry of curses from the men.
Sokolov’s last statement made little sense so the sergeant decided not to say anything. Instead, he chose to complain about something else. At least he would have a little more time to come up with some sort of idea on what was going on out there—in that godforsaken town. He looked up and bellowed, “And what a time for your junior lieutenant to come down with the runs! That cowardly piece of shit should be here with the rest of us.” The sergeant was referring to their missing commander: a book-smart, spectacled brat from the Crimea. Allegedly, he was having an untimely bout with diarrhea that had conveniently kept him in barracks.
Everybody in the company knew that their lieutenant was a coward, but the luxury of being a general’s son kept him insulated from all the accusations and bad mouthing. Any complaining about the brat had to be done in private. “And I couldn’t care less if that bastard is shitting all over himself! He belongs here, with the rest of us!”
The sergeant tried to steady himself in the overcrowded compartment as he yelled to the young driver to watch where he was going. “And Sokolov, what do you mean when you say that the radio reports didn’t make any sense?” He turned to his young radio operator—slapping him on top of his helmet. “Gennady, keep trying to raise Ozersk. Somebody has to be by a fucking radio!”
“I’ve tried, Senior Sergeant Pushkin, but I’m getting no response. I can’t even get a response from the Militsiya headquarters.”
“Then keep trying to reach Sergeant Kirilenko!” Pushkin barked.
I’ve tried him too, but nothing. I’ve also tried the backup frequencies, but nothing there either.”
Pushkin slammed his hand against the hull. He yelled, “How can there be nothing? “Someone has to be out there!”
The sergeant sat back on the bench and tried to calm himself. After a few seconds of deep breathing, he managed to regain his composure. He looked at his squad through the beams of sunlight that filtered into the troop hold. They were raw recruits—young baby faced boys with wide eyes—and they were frightened. They were farm boys, factory workers and city slickers. They weren’t warriors. None of them knew a damn thing about war. They were all too young to have seen any real fighting, and amongst them Pushkin was the only one who had any real combat experience.
Peach fuzz and innocence, that’s what came to mind when he thought of his boys. He could see their fear and he could feel their uncertainty. It hung thick inside of the dark vehicle interior. He realized that his angry outbursts were manifestations of his own uncertainties—his own fears—and he knew that he could no longer show those emotions—not if he wanted his babies to follow him into whatever was going on in Ozersk.
Senior Sergeant Sergei Pushkin was riding in the lead vehicle of a column of three armored personnel carriers, APCs. They were racing towards the Antov plutonium facilities located just south of the “closed” town of Ozersk. The dirt trail that they were traveling on was a service road that snaked along the southern edge of the town, and after two years of patrolling around Ozersk, the sergeant was familiar with every turn, curve and bump the shitty little road had to offer.
Pushkin— considered one of the most experienced veterans of his company—had enlisted in the Army a year after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Although he had missed out on Afghanistan, he had seen his share of combat. He had been involved in small, “undocumented” skirmishes with the Germans as the reborn country celebrated its reunification. A few years later, he had dodged several Chinese rocket propelled grenades in the Mongolian regions, but his true baptism under fire had come on the hellish streets of Grozny.
Three Chechen bullet holes in his body, along with countless shards of shrapnel in his legs, told the story of the dedication he had for his country. Yes, he had pride in serving Mother Russia, pride that could have fueled him for another 20 years, but deep down inside, the weary sergeant knew that his military service was drawing to an end. The joints in his knees were aching as he hunched over in the troop carrier, and the discomfort he was feeling in his aging body made him think back to his wife and her recent pleas for him to leave the Army.
Sweet Alina. She had been so patient with him, watching him march off to one crisis after another—time and time again. Deep down inside, he had always felt guilty at having to leave her at home alone, but he was a career Army man and that was the life he had chosen. What else could he do? And things didn’t get any easier for her. When she had her first miscarriage, he had been deployed away from home, and after going through her second miscarriage—again alone—she realized that she no longer wanted to be a soldier’s wife.
Over the past six months Alina had been pleading with him to give up the Army and start a new life; far away from the dangers of the military. He had fought with her—and with himself—over the idea, but soldiering was the only thing he knew how to do. The thought of having to do something new and different frightened him too much and he wasn’t willing to stop being a soldier. Despite all her threats and pleadings, despite all the tears and the heartache, she eventually gave up her demands and chose to stay by his side—as long as he promised to give some serious thought to her suggestion of leaving the military behind. In the end, he just couldn’t bring himself to leave the Army—at least not yet—and he knew her loyalty to him would keep her at home…waiting on him.
With his right hand he felt down into the darkness and spun his wedding band around his finger. Somehow…someway, he was trying desperately to find some kind of reassurance from its touch. A sensation suddenly ran through his mind, and for a fleeting moment, he felt like he was in his wife’s presence. He swore that he could feel her soft skin and smell her fragrance. “I’ll be home soon enough,” he whispered to himself. “I promise.”
***
The city that the troopers were racing towards was a community that had been designed to support the nearby Antov plutonium production plant—a dark and troubled facility with a long history of accidents and disasters. Born out of the hysteria of the discovery—and use—of nuclear weapons, the town was initially christened by combining the name of the nearest largest city in the region (Chelyabinsk), and then adding the last two digits of the postal code. With the Antov churning away, the mystery town quickly became an important part of Russia’s quest to keep pace with America’s own nuclear program. Unfortunately, that effort was made with reckless abandonment when it came to Chelyabinsk-65.
In the shadows of the southern Ural Mountains, the town itself was nestled between several large bodies of water, including Lake Irtyash and Lake Kyzyltash. As research and production of nuclear material went into full swing, it was common for radioactive waste from the Chelyabinsk-65 reactors to simply be dumped into the region’s main water source: the Techa River. Out of ignorance and out of outright disregard for the people living around the plant, the dumping went unchecked.
With a combination of blind ambition and irresponsible behavior, the Antov operated with little regard for safety protocols, and in 1957, a major cooling tank failure at the plant sent radioactive material spewing out across the community. In the veils of Cold War deception, the Soviets had tried their best to keep the incident from the public eye, and for the most part, they had been successful. In an effort to avoid the risk of illuminating Russia’s ambitions for nuclear power, the plight of the poor people of Cheyyabinsk-65 had been hidden from the rest of the world.
For years Chelyabinsk-65 had existed in secrecy as its facilities churned out nuclear material for the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces. Officially, the community didn’t exist, not even showing up on maps of the country. In cold reality though, Chelyabinsk-65 did exist, and it served as the home for the tens of thousands of workers who toiled away in the plutonium plants. It was the classic state-controlled city—its workers marching to the mechanical industrial beat of communism. Barbed wire and barricades were the only evidence of the city limits, and it wasn’t until 1994 that the town was officially acknowledged as the city of “Ozersk”.
After the end of the Cold War and with the new Perestroika, production requests for nuclear material dropped substantially as the Russian economy tanked. Many of the factory employees had to be released or were relocated to other parts of the country. The population of Ozersk dwindled dramatically and just enough workers were left behind to man the remaining facilities.
As a result of the endless disarmament negotiations between the West and Russia, the Russian Federation designated Ozersk as a collection point for nuclear warheads that were slated for disassembly and destruction. Aside from the production of nuclear material, it was rumored that Antov had also been a secret research facility for chemical and biological weapons—its shroud of mystery keeping the West from validating or proving the accusation. In the end, Ozersk had earned the undignified title of being one of the world’s most polluted cities. Many of the region’s inhabitants believed that the label was well-deserved, citing all the cancer-related deaths and illnesses arising from there.
Stationed in the Kyshtym Industrial Complex, just west of Ozersk, Pushkin’s unit had been assigned to protect the plant’s reactors and storage warehouses. His unit would rotate a month at a time with the other units stationed at Kyshtym as they alternated guard duty at the facilities. This was important for the morale of the troops because the year-long assignment of protecting the dreary facilities could cause the soldiers to become disillusioned very quickly. A schedule was strictly adhered to, but even with the rotations in place, the men still found time for mischief. Alcoholism, drug abuse and the occasional suicide weren’t uncommon incidents for the soldiers guarding Ozersk.
***
As Pushkin bounced around in the armored vehicle, he attempted to recall the day’s events. Earlier that morning, his station had received a distress call from one of the other units that was pulling its month long tour at the barracks near Ozersk. The initial frantic reports indicated that some sort of “accident” or exposure had taken place in a complex just south of the main town, but as more calls for help flooded in, it was clear that something else was going on.
As the desperate radio transmissions crackled over the communication center’s speakers, the senior sergeant’s response team was ordered into action, and within moments of the initial call, they were loaded up into their antiquated APCs. Under normal circumstances, they would have been flown out to the site by transport helicopters, but the few functioning aircraft that were normally stationed at Kyshytm had been reassigned to units operating along the Georgia border. Apparently, there was some new territorial dispute brewing with the tiny country.
As their carrier sped over the dusty dirt road, the squad speculated in cautious, hushed uncertain voices.
“Sergeant, do you think it’s the separatists?” one private asked.
“There’s a good chance it is, boy,” said the sergeant in a grim tone. He looked down at his boots and shook his head. Those murdering bastards have always been looking to cause us trouble like this. Pushkin then began to play out possible scenarios in his mind. He always wanted to be one step ahead of the game when trouble was on the horizon—never wanting to be caught with his pants down. If he and his boys were going to get into a fight, he wanted to be ready for whatever was thrown their way.
“Senior Sergeant, I have Sergeant Kirilenko!” Gennady yelled as he broke Pushkin’s thoughts. “It’s hard to understand what he is saying, but he’s transmitting. There’s a lot of noise in the background. I can hear screaming and…and shooting!” Gennady paused and pressed the headset closer to his ear as he strained to listen to the confusion on the radio.
“What is he saying, boy?” Pushkin screamed in frustration. The uncertainty was tearing at his nerves and the incoherent transmissions weren’t helping any. “What in God’s name is he saying? Is it the Chechens? Is it the Muslim terrorists? Speak!”