People didn’t just wake up alert after being yanked out of a chemically induced coma. But the Bug was tough. It always wanted to play.
“Fuck this,” the surfer dude said.
“We’ve all done it,” the man with the bandaged face told him. “Lots of times.”
“Not like this. Not while they’re sleeping. They look like people.”
Braddock flinched at the sound of gunfire coming from a higher floor. No flurry—the shots were methodical. Executions. They were going to kill everybody in the hospital. The debate was pointless. The soldiers had orders. The ability of the Army to function at all depended on following orders, the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.
“The rest of the platoon is already in action,” Ramos said. “We’re doing this. Now.”
Braddock felt something inside him burst, releasing energy that threatened to go in a direction he couldn’t control and might very well get him killed. He’d worked too hard to keep those people alive to see them hamstrung and slaughtered like livestock. There was still hope. Modern medicine could cure the virus. They just needed a little more time. The world owed them a little more time.
He disconnected Ellen White’s intravenous feeding tube and restraints. He picked her up in his arms. She seemed to weigh nothing. She sucked her thumb like a child. She believed in him. He owed her his life.
“Come on, Chief,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
The sergeant said: “Sir? Sir! What the fuck are you doing?”
White’s eyes flashed open, bright and intelligent. Braddock looked at her and didn’t see the Bug. He saw the Chief of Medicine. She reached up to touch his face with trembling hands. She whimpered.
“Sir!” the sergeant roared. He raised his weapon, a monstrous shotgun.
“Ellen,” Braddock said. “It’s John. I’m here.”
She was still in there. Pleading.
The treatment. It works.
She was getting better, and the sergeant was going to kill them both.
Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t. Shoot.
“Put her down and step back! Now!”
Braddock had no choice. He was going to have to do as they asked. He kissed her on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Ellen.”
She plunged her thumbs into his eyes.
He screamed and gripped her wrists. His vision roared in mottled shades of dark and light. Searing pain stabbed through his skull. He flung her away.
Then it stopped.
He wasn’t screaming anymore.
He was laughing.
It was hilarious.
THE RETREAT
FIVE.
F ight or flight. Private First Class Scott Wade wanted to run.
Then his training took over.
He raised his M4 carbine and fired a single burst. The doctor howled with animal glee as the bullets stitched his chest and flung him against the wall in a spray of blood.
The big man sprawled, twitching and smoking. He drew a rattling breath, giggled and died.
The old woman struggled to a sitting position. She started to crawl laughing toward Wade. “Cut off your balls—”
Wade blew her away too, painting the wall with her brains.
He was following orders, completing the mission. But it was more than that.
Fucking monsters.
The excited plague victims squirmed against their restraints like giant larvae. Methodical gunshots came from the floor above and the floor below.
He saw red.
Ramos lowered his shotgun. “Nice work. Now let’s—”
Wade leveled his carbine and lit up the patients. The rest of the squad joined in. They ripped the infected to shreds. Mattress stuffing filled the air.
Wade screamed as he drained his magazine.
Then fell to his knees, retching.
From the stress, the heat, the exhaustion, the shock, all of it.
SIX.
Wade had loved to play Army as a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin. His parents didn’t let him play with toy guns, so he and his friends used sticks. His younger sister, Beth, preferred dolls and tea parties, but she sometimes joined in so she could be near him.
To him and his friends, war was wondrous play. The bad guys went down in a hail of gunfire. Sometimes, a good guy died, a noble sacrifice played out with plenty of drama.
At the end, they all went home happy and tired. They’d faced danger and fought through it. They’d looked death in the eye and walked away.
Wade would later look back on those summers as the best times in his life.
In high school, he became interested in sports and girls. He smoked a little dope and drank when he thought he could get away with it. He spent a lot of time hanging out in a bank parking lot with his friends. He had a lot of fun but had a sense of doing time until the rest of his life started.
Soldiers were leaving Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan. He wasn’t interested in war anymore because he had come to understand it as a horrifying thing. Once you died, you stayed dead. But the instincts of his childhood remained.
His high school years were winding down. He saw his whole privileged future laid out for him: college, high-paying job, marriage, house, kids, retirement, death. In many ways, he felt like an overgrown boy. There was no rite of passage for his generation. He wanted to challenge himself before catching that train. Soon, Wade would get to make his own choices. The right challenge, he knew, would make him a man.
He decided to join the Army. He expected his anti-war parents to try to talk him out of it, but they were proud of him. Even Beth, who’d long ago given up worshipping her brother, hugged him during their tearful farewell and later wrote him once a week. Those letters became his lifeline to the real world during his training and deployment.
After Basic Training, he was classified 11-B. Infantry. He ended up in the Tenth Mountain Division. His combat patch displayed two crossed swords suggesting the Roman numeral X. The Mountaineers. Lightfighters. Climb to Glory.
Wade got more than he bargained for in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.
His platoon lived in a tiny outpost on an exposed mountainside. He froze in the winter and suffered in the summer. During the fighting season, Taliban fighters arrived from Pakistan and lobbed mortar rounds at them. They dropped bursts of plunging machine gun fire before disappearing over the ridges. They rigged improvised explosives on the roads. They ambushed the Americans from trees and rocks.
There was no glory in it. The weird thing was that he enjoyed combat far more than he thought he would. It was a rush, the most exciting thing in the world. As long as everybody in his unit made it out the other end of a firefight alive, combat was even exalting. He lived more in those intense flashes of fighting than in all the rest of his nineteen years put together.
And he found something else in war.
Love.
He loved the guys he fought with. They could be hilarious and sullen, wise and ignorant, fun and grating. The Army had all kinds. Sometimes, he couldn’t stand looking at them. But he loved them enough to die for them. He knew they’d do the same for him without hesitation.
When he fought, it was for them. The worst thing that could happen out in the shit wasn’t that he died. It was letting his comrades down and getting one of them killed.
This responsibility had kept him going after carrying seventy pounds of weapons and gear across miles of mountainous terrain. Made him stay sharp while functioning on little sleep for weeks at a stretch. Kept him fighting when the ground around him exploded during an ambush.
It was why he double checked his bootlaces before leaving the wire, carefully stripped and oiled his gun, performed every single mind-numbing equipment check. He gulped water to stay hydrated and watched every single step so he didn’t break silence.
Because if he made one little mistake, people got killed, and it would be on him. They depended on each other more than they did God.
The mission sucked. Afghanistan suc
ked. But still, he felt that he was making a difference there, that he was doing something good.
That was all he wanted: to be tested, to prove himself and to make a difference.
As his tour of duty in Afghanistan came to an end, Wade started to recognize the price he would have to pay. It would be hard as hell to assimilate into his old life. He would finally have to process the trauma he’d experienced. He would suffer withdrawal from the adrenaline of combat. He would despair over leaving the rest of the guys on that mountain to fight without him.
War brought out the worst in man but also the best.
Then Tenth Mountain flew home to a different kind of war.
SEVEN.
Soon after deployment in Boston, Wade called his parents to make sure they were okay.
His sister answered.
Beth told him all the things she’d done to Mom and Dad. She told him what she wanted to do to him.
He listened to all of it. He just wanted to hear her voice. By the end, he was so numb he could barely speak.
The last thing he said was that he loved her. That it wasn’t her fault. That he forgave her.
She responded with hysterical laughter. Laughter so hard he could hear her wheezing. That was when he knew the sister he loved was still in there, a prisoner of the madness.
The infected laughed when they inflicted pain.
They also laughed when they experienced it.
Wade still kept a photo of her in his helmet. He looked at it so he could remember who she was, and didn’t have to think about her smashing in their parents’ heads with one of Dad’s golf clubs.
He hated the infected. He hated them for turning her into one of them.
He shot the people in the hospital because, at that moment, he wanted to kill anything not wearing a uniform.
EIGHT.
The hospital. The quarantine ward, now a slaughterhouse.
Wade admitted a primitive satisfaction in putting down the people that the soldiers of Bravo Company were calling Klowns, short for Killer Clowns. The crazies were so terrifying that every kill flooded him with warm cathartic relief. But then remorse came quick and hard.
He was fighting unarmed crazy people in an insane war. Every time he survived combat, he didn’t feel alive. He felt as if he were dying a little. Soon, there’d be nothing left of him but a ghost. A killing machine.
Ramos clapped him on the shoulder. “On your feet, Wade.”
As usual, there was no time for thinking, feeling, any of it.
Still, nobody moved, eyeing their grisly handiwork with dawning awareness. It had taken seconds to lose control, for the operation to turn into a massacre.
Which was more terrifying than anything. What they’d just done wasn’t about following orders. They’d completely lost it, and they knew it.
They were soldiers. Soldiers couldn’t make mistakes, but men did.
Day to day, it was becoming less about the job and the mission, and more about survival, simply staying alive.
Then even that shock wore off.
Wade hauled himself to his feet and raised his tactical goggles, which had fogged from the humidity. He detached his magazine. Empty. He slapped a new magazine into his carbine and put a round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded. Ready to kill again.
“Well, that’s one room done,” Eraserhead said with a grin that showed his missing teeth.
“Hurray,” Williams said with obvious sarcasm. “Only a hundred to go.”
“They don’t expect us to do all of them, do they?” Ford asked.
Ramos’s squad had two fireteams: Alpha, which was Wade’s, and Bravo, which had stayed outside in the hospital parking lot with the Humvees, providing exterior security for the operation. Wade still sometimes viewed his comrades in Alpha with the social lens he’d developed over his high school years. Williams, tall and wiry, was the squad’s nerd. The only Black man in the platoon, he was a brainy kid who’d grown up in poverty in Detroit and joined the Army to gain marketable skills. The guys ribbed him for reading the articles in Playboy and called him Doctor Mist.
Ford was the jock. He was good looking enough to be an actor but was mystified by women. He constantly read books on how to seduce them. He looked at Wade as some kind of Casanova because Wade had had a steady girlfriend in high school.
And Billy Cook, the giant kid the guys called Eraserhead, was the oddball. He had crazy eyes. He said weird things, out of the blue, even during a firefight. He was built like a refrigerator. He was also the only man in the squad besides Ramos who wasn’t on psychiatric meds, who didn’t take sleeping pills to keep from jolting awake in the middle of the night at the sound of imaginary laughter.
Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”
“What about them?”
“We should evacuate them. Get them out.”
“The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”
Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.
“Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.
Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”
The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?
He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.
“It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”
“It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”
“Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”
Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”
“Bullshit,” Williams said.
“Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.
“Naked?” Williams qualified.
“It’d be worth it,” said Eraserhead. “Either way.”
The boys chuckled, careful not to laugh too loud or too hard. They passed around a can of dip.
Wade shook his head. “What’s next, Sergeant?”
“We clear the next—”
They heard a burst of laughter out in the hallway.
The fireteam bristled. They glanced at the door before settling their eyes on the hulking Ramos and his Sledgehammer, the devastating AA-12 combat shotgun. The sergeant flashed them the hand signal to prepare for action.
Wade eyed the other members of his fireteam. Nobody did anything without the others knowing about it. Nobody moved unless somebody stayed behind, scanning for threats.
More laughter came, followed by the electrifying sound of a woman screaming.
Wade guessed the staff had heard the shooting and were trying to save the patients just as the doctor had. Saving them meant disconnecting them from the barbiturate cocktail flowing into their veins.
The Klowns were waking up.
“Get ready to move,” Ramos said. “If it’s laughing, kill it.”
The boys hustled into position. They had no doubts now about what they had to do.
Kill them all or die.
NINE.
In the crowded trailer he was using as his headquarters, Lt. Colonel Joseph Prince studied the big electronic map and dry swallowed an Advil.
Little blue icons displayed First Battalion’s sprawling deployment around the Greater Boston area. A large blue icon indicated his headquarters at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, home to the 66th Air Base Group before it had been relocated.
Yellow icons showed live fire incidents—units in contact. There were a lot of those, more and more every day. Some never stopped being in contact. As for red
icons indicating opposition forces, there were none. The enemy was everywhere. The enemy is us, as Pogo once said. The enemy included his wife and son, infected and running amok until they’d been shot down in the street like dogs.
He knocked back a second Advil and tried not to think about that.
The colonel didn’t need the big board to tell him he was losing a war against his own country. He’d made rank by following orders. He never bitched. He always took the fight to the enemy. “Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution” was his motto.
Prince wasn’t very imaginative, but he was reliable, and he usually got results. He was used to having the kind of firepower that could flatten anything that got in his way.
The current conflict defied the imagination. The enemy was American citizens, the mission objectives vague, the rules of engagement contradictory. His lightfighters had taken twenty percent losses in continuous operations, while each afternoon, the colonel met with civilian lawyers to review every after-action report and decision that affected American lives and property. He could just imagine their faces when he told them the order had come down from Regimental HQ to terminate the infected in the quarantine hospitals.
Prince was used to freedom of action with massive amounts of power. Now he felt like a spider caught in its own web.
Video monitors next to the big board rolled horrific images transmitted by aerial drones, blimps and long-range cameras. Exhausted staffers sitting in front of flat screens and stacked radios managed operations and talked to units in the field. Foam cups, water bottles and mission binders cluttered the desktops. Dead cans of Red Bull filled the trash bins. The room smelled like nervous sweat and stale coffee.
CNN was broadcasting video of an office high-rise. A massive fireball bloomed from the side of the tower. Then another. Glass and debris rained onto the streets.
Prince recognized the landscape and its scars: Boston’s Financial District.
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