Wet Work: The Definitive Edition

by Philip Nutman

  The goal was to find a helicopter and get the hell out. It had been Brion’s idea to take to the air, and Nick still felt stupid having suggested driving to northern Maryland when he’d asked the others to join him.

  “Wake up, man,” Brion had said, his expression incredulous as Nick described his plan to rendezvous with Sandy at her brother’s farm in Keaton. “Get real. You think we can make it a hundred and fifty miles across open country in a car? We’d be lucky to get beyond Baltimore.” He shook his head, looking down at the scuffed hardwood floor of the makeshift barracks in the Buchanan Rec Center on D Street.

  “Okay, what do you suggest, smartass, we walk?”

  “You’re thinking like a dick,” he replied. “We fly.”

  Tranksen looked across the room, and Nick turned his head towards Frankie Gifford who was sprawled out chain-smoking on a cot three beds away. He felt his face redden. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Man, he was burning out. He’d spent so much time plotting his escape for the past three days he hadn’t even considered asking Gifford, one of a handful of police department pilots to join him. Before he could mentally chew himself a new asshole, Brion slapped him on the back and moved towards the pilot, who was nervously fidgeting with his pack of smokes.

  Gifford, a short, wiry guy in his early thirties, had been reluctant at first. Like most of the soldiers and policemen still functioning, he had a bunker mentality. There was no escape because there was nowhere to escape to. It was stand and fight until the inevitable happened—you stopped living. Preferably for good. Either by your own hand if you couldn’t take it anymore, or by a bullet from a fellow cleanup member. That had soon become an unstated law. Once they had faced up to the fact anyone who died could get up and start moving around again, every plague victim was given the last rites of a bullet to the brain, and the team members had started taking care of their own. They were just postponing the inevitable; they were all just meat one way or another.

  It had taken nearly two hours of hushed conversation to persuade Gifford there was a point to getting out.

  “So we’re going to die,” Nick had snapped angrily after Tranksen had spoken softly, compassionately, for what had seemed forever. “You want to die here in an urban charnel house, or you want at least to see green fields again? Smell the countryside one last time?”

  “Everything smells of shit,” Gifford shot back. “What makes you think it’s going to be different elsewhere? That’s bullshit. I see it every time I go up. There’re fires as far as you can see. We’ve all heard the news—everywhere’s a fucking mess. What makes you think your wife even got out of New York City?”

  Nick lost it then, rising to hit Gifford straight in the jaw and wipe that smug, know-it-all expression from his lips. Tranksen halted him with a firm hand on his arm.

  “Chill out. You know what he’s saying is true. How do you know? How do we know that Elliot’s farm isn’t crawling with dead things?”

  “She’s alive, I know it, I can’t explain it, I can’t—”

  “We all want to think someone we loved is still alive,” Gifford replied quietly, pulling a torn photo from inside his jacket pocket. “Until we know for sure.”

  Both Nick and Tranksen knew who was in the photo. Gifford’s girlfriend, wife—it didn’t matter which, and they weren’t going to ask. Every man in the room whose family hadn’t been moved into the barracks carried the last memory of someone special in their pocket. Tranksen was one of the lucky ones. At least Ellen was there with him, her nerves worn ragged every time he went out on either a cleanup operation or a supply hunt, almost beside herself by the time he returned unscathed. It was the same for the other women and children—seventy in all—who had moved in with their husbands and lovers on Friday, safer in the fortressed barracks than left at home to wait and wonder behind locked doors. There were tears and desperate hugs before each crew departed, pacing and tension while their men were out, building to almost fever pitch as a shift drew to a close. It was even harder on the single men awaiting their next foray out into urban hell. And crushing for those who had lost their loved ones. Men like Gifford, who held themselves apart from the small social groups which had formed inside the rec center over the past few days. Men who smoked incessantly, played solitaire or read to while away the time.

  Gifford had turned his back on them, terminating the conversation. Tranksen and Nick retreated to their bunks disheartened, lost for a solution.

  Until Captain Sienkiewicz blew his brains out in the basement during the early hours of the morning.

  It was the third suicide in as many days, but the Captain’s death sent an almost palpable shock wave through the morale of the twenty-three policemen working with a platoon of National Guardsmen under the designation C.E.D.3—Cleanup East Division 3. An hour after Captain Stipe broke the news, Gifford approached Nick and Tranksen.

  “Let’s do it,” he said quietly, sitting down beside them as they played blackjack, trying to take their minds off Sienkiewicz’s suicide. “I know where there’s a chopper…”

  Tranksen skillfully maneuvered the 4 X 4 between the crashed shell of a sanitation truck and an abandoned Caddy. As they came to the end of Constitution Avenue Nick saw the approach road to the bridge. Good, Nick thought, the path appeared to be relatively clear of obstructions, and the breeze coming off the river even was mildly refreshing after the persistent assault of smoke. Lines from an R.E.M. song echoed through his mind again…Lenny Bruce and Lester Banks, birthday party, jelly bean, cheesecake - it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

  I feel fine…

  “Nearly there,” Brion said, placing a hand on Ellen’s knee and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

  She looked up, wiping a hand across her mouth.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Brion shook his head. “Don’t be.”

  Nick cracked his window wide, allowing the relatively fresh air to blow away the smell of puke.

  “Shit,” Gifford muttered as they sped up the approach ramp. “We’ll never get past that.”

  The army had completely blocked the middle of the bridge with two school buses, several cars and a troop carrier.

  Brion slowed the 4 X 4. A makeshift checkpoint constructed out of sandbags was situated alongside the bus blocking the right side of the bridge. What looked like an M-60 was pointed in their direction, its barrel poking out from the center of the bags.

  Brion pulled the van to a stop. There was no sign of life at the checkpoint.

  “What do you think?”

  “Abandoned,” Nick replied.

  They waited for a moment, the idling engine roaring loudly in their ears as they studied the sandbags.

  Seconds slipped away.

  Nothing.

  “Keep moving,” Gifford said. “Slowly.”

  Tranksen put the van in first, easing it forward.

  Nick felt like the Subaru was crawling in slow motion, his imagination projecting what was going to happen.

  They were going to get within twenty yards of the sandbags and the M-60 would open up. It would end here in the middle of the Arlington Bridge as bullets ripped through the vehicle, and he’d never see Sandy again, and it wouldn’t matter because he’d be dead at the hands of a trigger-happy soldier steadily going mad on a barricaded bridge over the Potomac…

  Closer.

  Nothing.

  Closer still.

  Nothing.

  Beside him, Gifford lifted his pump-action shotgun from his lap.

  Closer.

  And then they saw the bloody arm lying beside the sand bags, the rest of the body concealed from sight.

  Brion stepped on the gas, accelerating quickly to close the last thirty yards between them and the blockade.

  Shotgun in hand, Gifford got out of the Subaru before he’d brought it to a complete stop.

  “Stay here,” Tranksen said to Ellen as Nick joined Gifford, .38 Special ready, the hammer cocked.

  The soldier was
dead, a hunting knife protruding from his ribs. Nick waved an all-clear to Brion and Ellen. Brion got out of the van.

  Tranksen glanced at the body then focused his attention on the structure of the blockade.

  “Not as bad as it looked. No problem.”

  The two buses were parked front-to-front with a car facing towards Arlington positioned behind each vehicle’s rear. From the approach road it had looked like the buses were wedged tight, the armored vehicle obscuring the car behind it, but all you had to do was push one of the cars out and roll on through.

  Nick looked at Gifford, who was checking the driver’s seat of one of the buses.

  “Clean,” the pilot said.

  Nick frowned.

  “It looks too simple. Figured the National Guard or the army had to have wired it to explode if anyone unauthorized tried to budge it,” Gifford explained.

  Brion walked over to a red Honda Prelude on the right. He slipped inside and found the key in the ignition. He turned over the engine. It started immediately and he wound down the window, smiling.

  “Let’s get moving!” He put the car in gear.

  The Prelude exploded.

  WASHINGTON, D.C. SUBURBS

  8:40 A.M.

  The living were hiding on the second floor of Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital.

  Corvino and the rest of the Food Detail knew they were there because of the freshly opened soup cans lying in a pile down the hallway from the maternity wing. There were other signs of habitation, too—a recently soiled blanket stinking of piss and blood, empty water bottles, a stack of torn magazines.

  Having systematically searched every room on the floor, he saw two options: either the people who had sought shelter there had left within the last couple of hours or they were hunkered down in one of the rooms.

  Corvino glanced down at the torn copy of Sports Illustrated. Bo Jackson’s face stared up at him from the floor, and he wondered absently if the sports celebrity was still alive somewhere.

  Up ahead, Skolomowski stealthily approached the closed door as the other two members of the detail took up positions behind their leader, guns held ready. The last few days had proved that however much the cattle—as Hershman referred to them—were weak, confused, scared, they were usually armed, and no one was taking any chances. And even if the cattle weren’t armed, there was always the threat of the mindless crazies, those who had not successfully made the transition and who functioned on pure instinct, perpetually hungry. The crazies were the biggest threat because there were more of them than the cattle, and they fought without rhyme or reason, unable to distinguish dead flesh from living.

  Skolomowski crept close to the door, signaling the others to get ready. Although Corvino had been designated Detail Commander, the Pole had made it clear he didn’t give a shit about orders. He was going to do things his way whether Corvino liked it or not.

  “That was then, this is now,” Skolomowski had stated to Corvino the first night he’d spent at the Farm. “The rules have changed. We can do what the fuck we like—if you’ve got the stomach for it.”

  The last comment had been a dig at Corvino’s reluctance to eat flesh. Despite the incredible hunger which had torn at his insides for over twenty-four hours, he’d tried to resist giving into the craving for human meat. He’d finally broken down when Hershman and the others dined on a freshly killed woman Skolomowski and his Food Detail had hunted down that morning.

  With one bite of plump thigh meat all rational arguments and moralistic pangs of self-disgust had melted away, and he’d gorged on the ripe, juicy flesh with the same passion as Lang, Skolomowski and Hershman.

  There was no way around it. To survive, he had to eat. And if raw flesh was all their systems craved—all their mutated dead bodies could stomach—there was no choice. He was a survivor, and sometimes survival required desperate measures. But still, his conscience nagged him. The others had fully embraced their inhuman condition—the Pole in particular, who clearly reveled in his new found strength and seeming immortality. But deep inside Corvino the man he’d once been—the human side—despised what he had become.

  Let the Pole feed his berserker rage. Corvino was past caring. All he wanted was to find his own peace. He knew he wasn’t going to last long in the New Order. What Skolomowski said was true—he didn’t have the stomach for it. Besides, the world they were fighting to regain control over was a vile hell beyond imagining. He wanted no part of it. But before he removed himself from the putrescent slime he needed to learn the truth.

  His train of thought halted suddenly as Skolomowski kicked in the door and opened fire.

  The burst of the M-16 ripped through the hallway, the volume increasing as McNally and Schultz leapt through the doorway behind the Pole, their guns blazing, a chorus of screams drowned out by the noise.

  Corvino ran to the door.

  The three men blasted the room apart, bullets tearing through the bodies of its occupants—four women, two children, three men—and Corvino grimaced as he saw a small boy and a girl who each looked about nine drop to the floor and die.

  One of the men—a boy barely out of his teens—tried, his hands shaking, to point a handgun at Skolomowski as bullets threw him off balance.

  McNally saw the gun coming up and twisted, firing away from the women. His aim found the young man, hurling the body against the wall.

  The Pole bellowed with pleasure as he emptied his clip into the corpse of the nearest woman.

  Corvino pulled back from the door, squeezing his eyes shut to blot out the image of the dead children.

  He was a soldier. An assassin. He killed people for a living.

  He killed people for a living—there was so much irony in that line, it made his insides hurt, a painful, indigestible truth. He—a dead man—now killed the living to survive.

  But he couldn’t justify the slaughter of innocent women and children—American women and children. Any innocent. In life he’d lived well off the deaths of others. In living death, he was feeding on the flesh of confused innocents trying to survive in the ruins of a world that had disintegrated into an infernal Disneyland for the Damned.

  If he’d denied the reality of his corrupt, hollow existence in life, he could no longer do so in living death—

  “Corvino!” the Pole screamed. “Where the fuck are you?”

  Corvino opened his eyes, twisting into the doorway, gun ready.

  “Have a present.” Skolomowski tossed a severed head towards the door.

  The woman’s head bounced once, then rolled into the corner.

  The Pole’s hands and arms were coated with gore, flecks of red dotting his face like chickenpox.

  “We’re done,” Skolomowski grinned. “Call the Bag Boys.”

  McNally chuckled. “Get the grocery cart.”

  Corvino ignored the Pole’s defiant smile, clicking on the walkie-talkie. “Alpha Two to Bag Detail, copy? Over.”

  The radio crackled.

  “Bag Detail, over.”

  “Send them up. Second floor. Right wing. Nine bodies. Over.”

  “Copy. Over and out.”

  He replaced the walkie-talkie in its belt pouch, meeting Skolomowski’s expression with indifference.

  “Get ready to move out. Third location in fifteen minutes.”

  He turned and started to walk down the hallway towards the stairs.

  It was time to end the charade.

  He stopped at the window which looked down into the courtyard beneath, observing the Bag Boys—as Lang had so quaintly named them—removing body bags from the back of the transport vehicle.

  Yes, as soon as he got off-duty he was going to find the truth. About Del Valle. About Panama. About himself.

  And then he was going to pull down the house of cards.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  8:43 A.M.

  Nick’s head hurt badly, his ears rushing like they were filled with roaring water as he tried to pull himself upright. He nearly made it to a sitting p
osition, feeling the heat of burning metal around him.

  He fell back on the tarmac, and—

  “Come on, answer me!”

  (go away)

  “Come on, you shit, move!”

  (go away…)

  “Let me be…”

  The roaring water was draining from his ears.

  He could hear sobbing.

  Rough hands shook him.

  “Leave me alone,” he mumbled. A light slap across the face jarred the soft darkness.

  “Don’t give me that shit. Come on!”

  He opened his eyes and saw Gifford’s dirt-streaked face above him through his blurred vision.

  The car had been booby-trapped. Brion had started the car and—

  “Brion?” He mumbled, trying to sit up.

  “Dead,” Gifford said, pulling Nick up.

  He managed to sit, his eyesight returning to normal as the world stopped moving.

  The top of the Prelude had been blown off, flames licking up at the blue smoke-stained sky. Then there was a smaller, secondary explosion like a giant breaking wind as the gas tank caught and the two men flinched as a hot shock wave of air buffeted them. Ellen screamed again. Chunks of flaming metal surrounded them like a field of campfires. Nick coughed, the acrid air choking his lungs.

  Gifford struggled to stay on his feet, reaching out a hand to Nick. He took it, trying to stand, stumbling and nearly pulling the two of them over.

  Take it easy. One step at a time.

  He wobbled again.

  Shit. Brion was dead.

  THE ATLANTIC—THE JERSEY SHORE.

  9:01 A.M.

  Sandy decided to go below deck as the cabin cruiser picked up speed. It was growing windy. She was cold and her throat hurt.