Pandemic r-1

by Craig DiLouie

  Walker reddened. “My bad, sir.”

  The colonel growled. “I’ll do it myself.” He turned and yelled at the Massachusetts Army National Guard liaison, “Hey, McDonald! What is that?”

  The young lieutenant blanched. He put down the magazine he was reading and stood at attention. “What is what, Colonel?”

  Prince stabbed his finger at the screen. “Some of your people caught the Bug and just blew up an office building on live television! Do you think you might want to do something about it?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” The pale liaison turned to his radio and worked the dials.

  “We’re supposed to be helping people,” Prince screamed at him, “not destroying their last fucking ounce of hope!”

  Across the trailer, the support personnel hunched even lower over their workstations. Prince paced in front of the TV like a lion tired of its cage. He was sick of playing defense. He wanted to take the initiative on something, anything.

  Military personnel were catching the Bug. It was bad enough soccer moms were running around hacking up their neighbors with meat cleavers. The average soldier was capable of killing large numbers of people. If America stopped believing the Army would protect them, it’d be every man for himself out there. Game over.

  On the screen, a second building was being shelled, a large hotel. They were hitting it with high-explosive incendiaries—white phosphorous. Several floors were already engulfed in chemical fire, pumping out rolling clouds of dense white smoke.

  Big Brother was going to have Prince’s head, but that no longer mattered. If there were people inside, they were being burned alive. He had to stop it.

  Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. That was his motto, and it had served him well during twenty years of service to the people and the Constitution of the United States. Though conventional thought and flawless execution had gone out the window, he still had aggressive action as a card to play. He could at least do that.

  He wanted to do something. Something real. Something with results. His exhausted, throbbing brain had stopped cooperating. It was time to make some decisions from the gut.

  “What do we have that can take out those Nasty Girls?” Prince asked, using Army slang to describe the National Guard.

  “Our air assets are all tied up,” Walker said.

  “Untie them. Get me something that can fly and shoot.”

  “Sir, are you saying we should engage a Massachusetts Army National Guard unit?”

  “An infected unit. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Major. We’ll use the Apaches to track them by radar, confirm they’re infected, and destroy them.”

  “Sir, I feel it’s my duty to point out we’re in a rather delicate situation with the Governor.”

  Prince had never wanted to punch a man so badly in his life. “Delicate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re going to protect the man and his family and ensure Massachusetts has a government next week. What’s so delicate about that?”

  “He won’t come, sir. He’s still holed up at Logan International Airport, surrounded by state police and Guard. He’s running the government from there.”

  “Did you tell him the President of the United States declared a state of emergency? That’s why we’re here helping him keep whatever he has left from washing away.”

  “He says he declared martial law, Colonel.”

  “Good! We’re all on the same page! So what’s the problem?”

  “He just declared all Federal units on Massachusetts soil to be under state control. He says our command is now subordinate to Major General Brock.”

  The news struck Prince speechless for a moment. The situation had just changed so dramatically it gave him a sense of vertigo.

  Based at Camp Edward in Cape Cod, Major General Brock commanded the Massachusetts Army National Guard, eight thousand strong. Prince considered Brock a dependable soldier and a solid brother officer. National Guard units were scattered all over Boston, and they shared communications and even staged joint operations with Prince’s battalion.

  After declaring a state of emergency, the President had nationalized all Guard units, putting them under Federal control. But with the new order, the Governor was putting Prince’s battalion under Brock.

  Prince glanced across the tactical operations center at the National Guard liaison sitting in front of a radio and talking to his counterpart. “What’s Brock going to do?”

  Walker shook his head and shrugged. “Hell of a time to secede, though.”

  The last thing Prince wanted was a shooting war against an entire brigade of National Guard. His eight hundred lightfighters were no longer in any condition for that kind of fight. And the rest of Tenth Mountain was committed. There was no help available from the outside.

  But he had his orders. That, and there was no way he was going to take orders from the Governor; his boss was the President of the United States. “Major, I want you to draw up a contingency operational plan for doing a snatch grab on the Governor. In and out and with no blood spilled. I want to know what kind of assets we have and what kind of assets he has. Last time I checked, Massachusetts was still one of the fifty states.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise, sir?”

  “I’m sure it’s an order, Major.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Outstanding attitude. Get me eyes on that arty unit and on that airport. As in now.”

  “I’ll get on it right away.”

  “And pull Harry Lee out of the field. I need my S-2.” He regarded Walker with disdain. “He’s the only officer I’ve got with a clear head and a pair of balls.”

  FOURTEEN.

  Lathered in sweat. Eyes wild. Pulse pounding at a heart attack pace.

  The soldiers screamed at each other to lower their guns.

  They were making enough noise to bring the entire hospital down on their heads. Soon, the Klowns would come howling through the doors.

  Wade scanned the faces. Nobody was infected. Yet.

  He looked at the weapons. There was enough firepower to fill the air with metal in seconds. The sergeant’s combat shotgun was fixed on Williams’s chest. The Sledgehammer was loaded with twelve-gauge shells—high-velocity buckshot. On full auto, the gun fired five rounds per second, emptying its twenty-round drum in about four seconds and destroying anything in its path.

  Wade remembered something Ramos had said to him in Afghanistan: The gun calls to be used. He lowered his carbine. “Okay, okay. Listen.”

  The others ignored him.

  “Come on, guys. Put them down.”

  Rapid shotgun blasts caught Williams in the chest and threw him down the hall. Surprised, Wade fell backward and landed on a bloody pile of arms and legs.

  Ford snapped two rounds into Eraserhead’s arm and shoulder then put another three in the ceiling. Eraserhead laughed as the impact spun him around.

  Wade looked up into the Sledgehammer’s smoking barrel as Ramos took aim.

  This is it. Oh fuck, this is it—

  “BOOM!” the sergeant roared. Then he burst into laughter.

  Ford swept his carbine toward Ramos.

  The world exploded in a blinding flash of heat and light.

  Grenade—

  Ramos disappeared in the blast. Shrapnel ripped the walls apart. The concussion flung the bodies against the ceiling and dropped them like puzzle pieces. Wade was lifted and spun through the air. He landed hard on his side and curled into a fetal ball among the dead.

  Bare feet splashed past, hairy legs. Infected looking to play.

  He shut his eyes and didn’t move. His body hurt everywhere. If he had an open wound, even a cut, he was as good as dead.

  Man down, he thought.

  Wade sat up with a jolt. He reached for his carbine by reflex but couldn’t find it. He patted his body, checking for wounds. His armor had caught some shrapnel. He was going to have a lot of bruises, and his ears were still ringi
ng at high volume, but he seemed to be okay.

  Ramos lay a few feet away, his hands twitching and his armor pockmarked and smoking. Ford gasped from a ragged chest wound. Eraserhead was in even worse shape with one arm blown off.

  Wade knew he should pinch off Eraserhead’s artery to keep him from bleeding out, lash a tourniquet around the upper part of the limb, and slap a Kerlix bandage onto the stump. He should stab Ford’s chest with an angiocatheter to release air and keep the man’s lungs from collapsing. Then get both of them a Medevac.

  Wade didn’t move. The men were splattered in blood. Blood crawling with live virus.

  He’d seen microscope images of the Bug in one of the endless PowerPoint presentations the Brass was always sending down to the front-line troops. The Bug looked like little worms that lived in bodily fluids, seeking out the brain and its fertile tissues, where it fed.

  The men lying in that hallway were his friends. They were wounded.

  I’m going to help.

  He did nothing.

  He would die for them. If given the chance, they would have died for him.

  Still he did nothing.

  Ramos pushed himself up onto one elbow and coughed blood onto the floor. Half his face grinned at Wade. The other half looked like hamburger burning on a grill.

  Of all of them, Ramos had the biggest reason to walk away from all this. Go over the hill, go Elvis, desert. Boston was his hometown. The man’s sister lived not far from the Air Force facility the battalion was using as a forward operating base. She and her kid lived in constant fear with their furniture stacked against the front door of their apartment. The squad went out there regularly with Ramos to check on them and deliver groceries and water.

  But Ramos had stayed. It wasn’t just that he was true blue Army, one of the gung-ho mo-fos. Wade knew the man believed that every time he put down one of the infected, Maria and little Thomas Flores were a bit safer.

  The sergeant would never see his family again.

  “Gonna make a hole.” Ramos held up his knife. “Make it wide.”

  Wade looked around for a weapon but saw nothing that could help him.

  Ramos struggled to his feet. He swayed, chuckling softly. His one good eye burned with hilarity and malice.

  Wade remembered his last conversation with Beth. She’d been under the control of the Bug, but she was still in there. He could still reach her.

  “Think about your family, Sergeant.”

  Ramos doubled over choking with laughter. He vomited more blood.

  “Thank about Maria. Think about Thomas.”

  Ramos took off his helmet and dropped it among the dead. He ran his bloody hand across his crew cut and licked the edge of his knife. “I’m gonna make you one of us.”

  FIFTEEN.

  Captain Harry Lee had learned a lot during his tour of Boston. His Humvee had the bullet holes to prove it. The windshield had been cracked by an axe. The doors bore the scars of a run-in with a chainsaw.

  He sat on the passenger side in front of a stack of radios, consulting a map that revealed the strategic situation at a glance. He used one of the radios to talk to base and the other to communicate with the escort vehicles. The map had an overlay of clear film, on which he’d drawn all known blue forces in the area with a wax pencil. Next to him, Staff Sergeant Michael Murphy, a large wad of dip tucked into his cheek, spit into a cup and kept his eyes on the road.

  With his handsome face and square jaw, Captain Lee looked like a World War Two movie hero. One expected to see him charging a machine gun nest on a Pacific island in some grainy black-and-white film. The overall impression people got from him was fierce, though he rarely lost his cool. It was his eyes; when he became angry, his gray eyes bored right through you.

  Two Humvees rolled in their wake, carrying a squad of handpicked shooters from HQ Company. These same guys had escorted Lee to endless parleys with village elders in Afghanistan and on more than a few field trips deep into the bush. At first, they’d bitched that he was always dragging them into the shit, but now they followed him around like a pack of loyal bloodhounds. They looked up to Lee as a father figure and imitated his cool. They would kill for him, and they would die for him. With that kind of devotion came a special kind of responsibility because for Lee, the mission always came first, and he would do anything to achieve it.

  Lee was the battalion S-2, or intelligence officer. Intelligence assessment was critical to mission planning, but the situation was fluid, and he didn’t like what he’d been getting from the field. He’d toured the city in a helicopter and had seen hell below. Then he took three Humvees out into the field to see what was happening on the ground.

  He’d seen, all right. He’d seen things he’d never forget. And he’d come to a disturbing realization, one that confirmed his suspicions—and worst fears—about what was happening.

  Military and civilian authorities had lost control of Boston.

  “A lot of cars ahead,” Foster called down from the Humvee’s cupola.

  Lee saw them. The cars weren’t moving, which meant the Humvee would have to slow down and possibly stop. “Stay frosty.” He radioed the same message to his escorts.

  “It’s a traffic jam,” Foster added. “No way through.”

  Murphy already had a map spread across the steering wheel. “If we turn at this next intersection, it’ll take us right back to Massachusetts Avenue.”

  That was a November Golf—a no go. The civilian population had lost faith in the military after the power failed and, in open defiance of the ongoing curfew, had tried to flee the city in anything that moved. A huge number of refugees had been caught out in the open; the infected must have thought it was Christmas. Most of the arteries leading out of the city had been turned into parking lots strewn with abandoned luggage and the unlucky dead.

  “There’s always Garden Street,” Murphy added.

  They were trying to reach the Harvard University campus. Several buildings there had been commandeered by Bravo Company as an operating base. Harvard was the last stop on Lee’s tour. Once he reached it and refueled, he’d be able to work his way onto Fresh Pond Parkway and take it to Concord Turnpike, routes that had been blocked off for military and emergency vehicle use. Those roads would get him and his boys most of the way back to Hanscom Airbase.

  “Cut through the park,” Lee ordered. “Stick to the pedestrian paths.”

  Murphy smirked. “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s funny, I still keep thinking this is America, and you can’t just drive a Humvee through a park without special permission.”

  “Times have changed, Mike.”

  Murphy turned the wheel. “Roger that.”

  What started as a daytrip had turned into three, each marked by traffic jams and random attacks, with the attacks growing more frequent by the hour. The infection rate had become geometric; it wasn’t going to be long before the crazies outnumbered the rest of the population here. They already far outnumbered the military forces in the area. The only reason Boston hadn’t already become a complete madhouse was that, while the crazies enjoyed infecting their victims, they liked killing them even more.

  The only answer was withdrawal. Give up Boston. Game over.

  That, or extermination. Get some armor. Announce a curfew. Put Bradleys and Humvees on every street, Apaches in the air, and have them shoot everything in sight. Totally clean house.

  The Colonel, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. It was against doctrine. The U.S. Army had given up the initiative early in the game. The infected had become the most dedicated, deadly enemy the Army had ever faced. But doctrine still regarded the crazies as sick civilians.

  The civilian leadership and the Big Green Machine would realize what had to be done at some point, but by then, it would be too late, if it weren’t already. So instead of concentrating overwhelming force and doing what needed doing, the battalion remained dispersed in small formations, trying to maintain law and order while getting chewed up for it.
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br />   Imagine you deploy an army on a series of hills. From there, you command the region. Then a flood comes. The hills become islands, and your army commands nothing but the ground it’s standing on. And the waters keep rising…

  The Humvees drove past trees from which a grisly collection of bodies hung by their necks. Men, women, children. In the distance, a group of laughing women roasted a flayed corpse on a spit over an open fire. One wore a helmet that once belonged to an infantryman.

  They waved and flashed their breasts as the Humvees passed.

  “Can I light them up?” Foster yelled, yanking the charging handle on his heavy machine gun.

  “Don’t waste the ammo.”

  “It’s time for some payback, Captain.”

  Lee shook his head. With the Taliban, payback had meant something. Killing the infected for payback was like punching a shelf after you accidentally slammed your head against it. The shelf wouldn’t care, and you’d probably just hurt yourself.

  Murphy growled, “Give it a rest, Foster. You’ll see more action soon enough. We need you to stay alert up there.”

  “Wilco, Staff Sergeant.”

  The little convoy drove the rest of the way through the park without incident.

  “I got some family here,” Murphy said after a while. “Distant relatives.”

  “I didn’t know,” Lee said.

  The big staff sergeant shrugged.

  “Are they okay? Have you heard anything?”

  “No.”

  “If they’re on our route, we could stop and check on them.” It was an offer Lee would not have made to anyone else.

  “Right now, sir, I’m focused on getting back to Hanscom alive.” Murphy spit into his cup. “We weren’t close or anything, but I’d visit them from time to time. I liked coming here. You know, it used to be a really nice town.”

  Lee knew he should say something earnest about it becoming a great city again once they completed their mission. The streets would be packed with people and traffic, and the Red Sox would play again at Fenway Park. But he couldn’t. He said nothing.