Writer's Challenge III – Call of Buffalo
It had been a long year.
December 21, 2012. The End of the World – really, the end of the Fifth Cycle of the Mayan Calendar.
F**kin' Mayans.
Well, they did call it – the world changed.
And for most of the people living in the Greater Buffalo Metropolitan Area – or as we called it, Western New York – it just plain ended.
On December 20th, 2012, there were about 800,000 people living in Western New York. On December 22nd, there were about 50,000 left alive – for some values of the word "alive".
The general assumption is that an incident happened during an experiment at the High Energy Physics Lab, at Parker Hall, on the University of Buffalo's South Campus. Doctor Joe Laubacker was doing some experiments researching the Nature of the Higgs Boson. As near as can be determined, there was no way he and his team could have known that what they were tinkering with would have such an effect.
A small mercy, was that Dr Laubacker and his team ran their experiment at 0301 AM. They drew a significant part of the output of the Robert Moses Power Complex for the experiment. It was supposed to possibly lead to the creation a high energy, non polluting power source.
It was certainly high energy.
The pollution level was pretty bad.
At 301 AM, a blast with the explosive force of 6 megatons erupted from the South Campus, pretty much obliterating most of the city of Buffalo and it's suburbs. Mercifully, Most of the inhabitants made the crossover from sleep to death with no warning.
Me? I was working at the Power Complex – the night shift production supervisor. Joey and I went to High School together. We were both geeks – but he went into High Energy Physics, while I preferred the nuts-and-bolts practical work of Power Production Electrical Engineering.
Robert Moses was built during the Cold War, and they figured it would be a target, so it was built to survive a near miss. The main control room is built 50 meters down into the Niagara Gorge, deep in the bedrock. The blast wave came roaring down on us and passed over our heads. The above ground stuff was all destroyed, but the generators and support gear was pretty much untouched.
I guess there was a whole lot of upset, and the first interpretation was that the Terrorists had obtained a nuclear weapon. NORAD and SKYWATCH confirmed that there was no inbound track, and NEST quickly verified that there was very little radiation incidental to the blast.
I found out about that stuff later on. Those first few days, I was trying to keep myself, and my team – and a few human survivors – the survivors that remained human – alive.
You see, most of those 50,000 people that survived, they became Zombies.
Not Zombies in the sense of the old Romero Movies, but "Zombies" is the name that stuck to them. They tend to shamble, they can talk in a halting fashion, but they live only to kill…and many are very good at it.
They can use weapons, and they don't tend to eat what they kill, unless there is no more normal food for them – but the term Zombies is what we call them today.
The mutants – they came later. The Pseudo-dogs, the Chimera, the Bloodsuckers, the Psychic Controllers – they all started showing up after the first few weeks. I think I hate the Burers more than most of them, with their ability to control gravity – but they are all deadly. The Tuskani – the Chee-Hamsters – are what I really hate. They remind me of nothing so much as a mutated, vicious Chihuahua – not so dangerous by themselves, but I've seen them in packs of fifty or more.
The Anomalies are the bane and the blessing of the Zone. Nobody knows why the Event caused them – but the Artifacts both puzzle and advance science by leaps and bounds. The Artifacts are found in the Anomalies after each Plasma Storm – the Emissions – and most are incredibly valuable.
Some folks say that the Event opened a wormhole into another Universe – a place where the Laws of Physics are slightly different. The "Snowflake" artifacts, for example, produce anywhere from 10-60 megawatts of electrical power out put in a seemingly inexhaustible flow – we pull thousands out of the Zone every year. They tell me that the US dependence on foreign oil is almost nothing now, and we'll probably start exporting it in the next year or so. The "Firefly" artifact can heal the sick and raise the almost dead in minutes – I hear that nobody dies of cancer anymore – and the death rate from accidents is dropping, as the Firefly artifacts are becoming more common in hospitals.
But that first year – 2013 – it really sucked.
Bad.
I was the first of the Hunters – the guys that go into the anomalies and pull out artifacts. At first, I only collected them for scientific study. When they turned out to be valuable – well, I was the guy who could survive and thrive where thousands of other guys died.
Why do I still do it?
Dunno.
I could retire now, and buy a small country or something.
But the Laubacker Event killed everyone I ever loved – my wife, my kids, my grandkids – they had all come home for Christmas. None of my family survived.
The Artifacts, though - as well as making me rich - have given me a body that is in damn near perfect health, as well as stronger than I have ever been.
So I haunt the Zone, collect artifacts, kill Bandits and Mutants….and wonder what I will do next.
One year is pretty much like the next, here in the Zone.