The northeastern horizon was on fire. He felt the waves of heat, the tremors in the air. A distant roar, mingled with screams and laughter, carried on the wind. Twilight would come in an hour, but the sky was already blackening as a massive wall of ash and smoke roiled over the city.
Wade had missed a few things while he was out cold. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
Helicopters roared out of the ash fall. Searchlights glared. Then they were gone.
A splash of gunfire sounded outside, somewhere close.
One of the soldiers lowered his binoculars and pointed. “I found him. There he is. See?”
The second responded, “I see him. Man, he’s either infected, or he’s lost it.”
The third turned and noticed Wade. “Who are you?”
He introduced himself. The men were Gray, Fisher and Brown. They nodded in greeting. None appeared to be physically wounded, but Wade knew something inside them had broken.
“How’s your face?” Fisher asked him. “You all right?”
Wade touched the wound. He could feel the fever heat through the bandage. His cheek tingled. As if little worms were inside. He felt as if his entire body had been crumpled up like a piece of aluminum foil and stretched out again.
He ignored the question. “What were you guys looking at?”
“Some Rambo type,” Fisher said. “Armed to the teeth. He comes out every day around this time, shoots a few crazies and yells something like, ‘Three o’clock and all’s well.’”
It was well past three o’clock.
Gray looked out the window. “The fire’s much bigger than it was this morning. Charlestown’s going up. Bunker Hill. Spreading west fast. Boston’s toast.”
“It’s on the other side of the river,” Brown said. “We’re good.”
“You think? Well, Hanscom is on the other side of the river too. If the fire spreads through Cambridge, we could get cut off. I wonder how many people it’s pushing out of the area. More crazies. All going west. They got nowhere else to go.”
Fisher nodded. “We might have to think about bugging out soon.”
“We’ll talk to Rawlings about it,” Brown said.
“Is she in charge here?” Wade asked. She wasn’t Tenth Mountain, but she had the highest rank among the survivors here.
“You think these cowboys would take orders from a Nasty Girl?”
Wade turned. The sergeant was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed.
“I see you met my posse,” she said.
Wade nodded. He wanted to ask her if they were going to bug out. He wanted to get back to his unit. Surely, some of the men in his platoon had survived, since they’d brought him there. He wanted to get back. Those guys were the only family he had left.
But he said nothing. He was still in shock and didn’t have much fight in him. His body was pretty banged up. He needed to stay here and rest for a while longer. He also didn’t want to bring the Bug home with him. He wasn’t showing symptoms, but he’d been exposed, and he still wondered if he was infected.
Besides all that, he wasn’t sure what he still owed the Army. He and his comrades had been betrayed. The rest of Bravo Company hadn’t shown up at the hospital, and Wade’s squad had been thrown alone into shit that was way over their heads. Wade still wanted to chip in and do some good, but he no longer trusted the Army to make decisions for him.
He thought of Sergeant Ramos’s family: Maria and little Thomas in their hot apartment with no electricity or running water and the furniture stacked against the door. Maybe he should go and protect them. Maybe that was the best way to honor the sergeant who’d saved his life more times than he could count. Maybe that was a mission for which he could still fight. Maybe if he saved them he might finally make a real difference in this apocalyptic war.
In any case, Wade wasn’t in any kind of mental condition to make that decision. His body sure wasn’t in physical shape to act on one. No matter. For now, he was stranded here with this broken outfit.
“Something on your mind?” Rawlings asked.
Wade shook his head.
“Not something,” she said softly. “Everything.”
He nodded.
“Take it one day at a time, okay?”
He smiled. A day was a luxury.
“Okay,” she said. “One minute at a time.”
“Hey Sergeant, come take a look at this,” Fisher said.
She accepted the binoculars and looked. She paled.
“Walking around like they own the place,” Gray said. “Goddamn scumbags.”
“It’s Boston in name only now,” Brown said. “They’re everywhere.”
“We should drop a nuke and be done with it.”
Wade couldn’t see past the others. “What’s going on?”
She handed the binoculars to him. “Take a look, Wade. There. See them?”
He did. A vast parade marched through the burned-out wrecks scattered along Western Avenue. Several hundred strong, it was an army of the mad. Some were naked and painted in blood. Others wore scalps and necklaces of ears and masks of human flesh. It was impossible to recognize them as Americans, people who just weeks ago were lawyers, bank tellers, janitors and waitresses. The Klowns looked more like an ancient tribe of cannibals. It was hard to even recognize some of these self-mutilated things as human beings except for the constant laughter. They dragged screaming men and women on leashes. They waved hatchets and torches and chainsaws and human heads.
Wade handed the binoculars to Fisher. He’d seen enough.
The crazies owned the downtown core, and they were migrating outward.
Pretty soon, it was all going to be over.
“All” as in civilization.
TWENTY-THREE.
Lt. Colonel Prince admired a framed article on the wall of his tiny office. He took it with him on every mission. The article, published in The New York Times, described his battalion’s operations in the Korengal Valley. That year, seventy percent of the fighting in Afghanistan had been in that valley near the border with Pakistan, where Taliban and foreign fighters came to shoot at the infidels. His boys took the brunt of it, but they gave more than they got. Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. The article referred to him as Fighting Joe.
He opened the door and passed the worried staff sergeants and radio operators frantically calling units in the field. He left the command trailer and was surprised to see it was dusk. He’d completely lost track of the time. Time warped inside the trailer, where crisis set the schedule and the days blurred together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in the dining facility. The trailer looked so small from the outside. Standing there, he found it difficult to believe that the air-conditioned box held so much bullshit.
Hanscom Air Force Base had been home to three thousand airmen, all of whom had been relocated south except for a token company and a military police platoon. The sprawling facility included hangars, administrative facilities, barracks and other buildings. It had been well guarded before the plague, but it was no fortress. Prince had created a new perimeter of Hescos—massive burlap sacks filled with tons of dirt—to serve as walls, their tops lined with concertina wire. Mark19s provided overwatch in wood guard towers. Machine guns behind piles of sandbags guarded the entrances. They’d all seen action in the past few days.
Prince strolled the perimeter, passing trucks and Humvees, water bladders and generators. He saw every detail with perfect clarity. The disappearance of his headache was like the lifting of a heavy siege. For the first time in weeks, he could see and think clearly without the painful red fog in the way. He felt a surge of love for all of it. He’d been a soldier his whole life. A sergeant barked at his boys to gear up and get their shit on, they had work to do. Another sergeant dressed his squad for action. Prince liked what he saw; things were humming. Apaches spooled up on the runway. One of the great beasts lunged into the hot air on thumping rotors. The wash sent a wave of litter r
olling toward Prince’s feet. He frowned at an MRE wrapper fluttering past as if it were a crack in a dam; somebody was going to have to clean this shit up. A machine gun thudded in the distance. To the east, Boston burned.
At the east entrance, he passed several soldiers just returned from a patrol. One of them stood hunched over, hands on his knees, hyperventilating while the others tried to calm him. They nudged each other as their commanding officer approached.
Prince crouched in front of the gasping man. Man, hell. He was just a kid like all the rest. His boys weren’t machines. They were people. But like machines, they broke.
“You’re all right now, son.”
“Sorry,” the kid gasped, “sir.”
“No shame in it. Let it out.” Prince gripped the soldier’s shoulder. He held on for a moment, as if he could transfer his strength into the boy. When he withdrew his hand, he saw the crossed swords of the Tenth Mountain patch. Climb to Glory.
The boy’s breathing began to ease. The other soldiers watched with anxious expressions. One of them was visibly shaking, dealing with his own demons. Another’s eyelid twitched.
“I’m okay now, sir,” the kid said.
“Bad out there, is it?” Prince asked.
The soldiers nodded.
“You’ve already done far more than your country had a right to ask,” Prince told them. “I want you to know, for what it’s worth, that I’m proud of you. And that I love you all.”
“Sir?” one of the men said. “Any idea when it’s going to be over?”
Prince stood and smiled. “Everything ends. Until then, we soldier on.”
The simple, brute logic appealed to the soldiers. They saluted.
He returned it. “Get some rest, boys. Tomorrow’s another day.”
He headed back to the command trailer. The staff sergeants glared at the interruption. The air was tense and rank with fear. He ignored their questions as he passed, touching each of them lightly on the shoulder and leaving them calm but wondering.
Prince went into his office and closed the door. He took the framed New York Times article off the wall and dropped it into his wastebasket. He sat at his desk, pushed his computer aside and pulled out his bottle of Jim Beam and a clean glass. He picked up the photo of Susan and Frankie he kept on his desk. He stared at it for a long time.
For the first time in weeks, he could really see again. He saw it all with perfect clarity.
The endless blood.
Climb to Glory.
Lt. Colonel Prince removed the 9mm from his holster, put the business end between his teeth, and squeezed the trigger.
TWENTY-FOUR.
As the light of day faded, the convoy of Humvees roared down the road, scattering rubbish. The streetlights were off. Rotting corpses swung from the poles in the mounting twilight. Feasting birds scattered at the approaching diesel roar.
Captain Lee had built a career on honesty. He held nothing back in his intelligence reports. When asked, he gave his opinions without the sugar coating. He didn’t believe in putting lipstick on pigs. He’d made captain because of it. He’d been held back from further promotion because of it.
He was going to tell Prince everything. He’d already submitted a report, but even that didn’t contain half of what he’d seen. He’d shared the facts, but he had to make the Colonel see the horror. Right now, First Battalion was scattered, ineffective and losing ground by the day. They needed to pull their forces back into a defensible position and build their operations from there. They could take the city back, block by block, using overwhelming force and killing the infected without mercy. The stakes involved survival of an entire city, and there wasn’t much time. The inmates were inches away from running the asylum and putting it to the torch.
As night fell, they approached the onramp that would take them onto Concord Turnpike. The road was supposed to be reserved to official traffic, but the police and their vehicles were gone, the rows of barriers smashed and flattened. The emptiness was unnerving. The silence made Lee think of Afghanistan. The calm between attacks.
Without being told, Murphy slowed the vehicle and cut the headlights. The men put on their night vision goggles, which rendered the dark landscape in a thousand shades of phosphorescent green. Nobody in sight. In the distance, headlights moved quickly along the turnpike, too fast for military. The vast fires of Boston glowed a brilliant green on the horizon. The Humvee’s tires thudded across the smashed barriers. Lee held his carbine propped in the open window. Foster swiveled the .50-cal in the gun turret, sweeping the area for threats.
Behind them, the other two Humvees did the same.
“Do you believe in prayer, Captain?” Murphy asked.
“Not really, Mike.”
“Could you try? I really don’t want to die here.”
“I believe in good planning, but that doesn’t work either. It’s all on us.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“Really? We’ve gotten this far.”
They pulled onto the turnpike and took off their goggles. The headlights flashed on. After a mile, they passed the first flaming wreck on the side of the road. Still no visible threats.
“Your prayers seem to be working, Mike.”
Light flared in the side view mirrors.
“Way to jinx it, Captain,” Murphy said.
The headlights in their rear were approaching fast. Lee remembered the top speed of a Humvee was fifty-five miles an hour.
“We can’t outrun a civilian vehicle,” he said. “And we can’t shoot unless they’re hostile.”
“We won’t know they’re hostile until they’re right on top of us.”
“We should stop. Set up a defensive formation.”
“Fire some warning shots? If they don’t stop, we light them the fuck up.”
The light gleamed bright in the side views.
Lee shook his head. “No time.” He picked up the phone on his field radio. “Rebel Three, this is Rebel Six. What have you got, over?”
“Rebel Six, this is Rebel Three. Vehicles approaching fast. Five hundred meters. Over.”
“You are authorized to use lethal force to respond to any threats. Over.”
“That’s a solid copy, Rebel Six. Over.”
“Take no chances, Rebel Three.”
“Don’t worry about us, s—what the fuck?”
They’d misjudged how fast the vehicles could catch up to them. Lee heard the .50-cal hammer over the roar of an overstressed engine and found he wanted to pray after all. He flinched at the ear-splitting crash of metal. The car shattered against the two-ton military vehicle and burst into flames. Rebel Three lurched and rolled in a series of bangs.
He cursed himself for his stupidity. Here he was on his way back to preach to Prince, but even he didn’t get it. The rules of engagement no longer mattered, only force protection. He should have declared the highway a free-fire zone and taken the consequences.
Behind him, Rebel Two’s machine gun swung into action. Tracer rounds burst in the dark. A smoking car swung off the road. A truck raced past to catch up with Rebel One.
“We got company,” said Murphy.
Foster got off a few rounds but missed. The truck was going too fast. He walked his fire forward, guided by the tracers. The truck pulled up alongside the Humvee’s right and slowed. Lee saw naked, mutilated men swarming across the truck bed, clashing crowbars and golf clubs against the battered chassis. One of the crazies threw a colorful object that struck the rear of the Humvee.
Water balloon. Lee smelled piss. Infected piss. The Klowns lobbed grappling hooks like pirates. One hooked onto Lee’s window. Its connecting chain pulled taut. A man tried to jump onto the Humvee but missed and became road kill. A baseball struck Lee in the chest. He grit his teeth against the flash of pain and the stars that sparked in his vision.
A shrieking devil was about to throw a bright yellow water balloon straight at him. Lee sprayed the back of the truck on full auto, draining
the magazine in seconds. Laughing bodies spilled and smashed against the asphalt rushing under their feet. When his rifle clicked empty, Lee pulled out his 9mm and unloaded it into the driver’s cabin.
Foster found his mark. He lit up the truck back to front with a deadly metal rain. The vehicle crumpled like tin foil, riddled with smoking holes. The figures capering along the truck bed exploded. The windshield burst with a splash of glass. The truck disintegrated.
The Humvee door wrenched off with a crack as the shattered truck spilled off the highway.
Lee blinked into the darkness. “Shit.”
“That was a little close,” Murphy said, gripping the wheel.
“Bring us alongside Rebel Two, Mike.”
Mike glared at his side view mirror. “Problem!”
Lee stood and leaned out of the vehicle. The wind howled past. He saw muzzle flashes burst in the dark. Rebel Two was demolishing a souped-up Trans Am at point blank range. On its other side, a tractor trailer roared on eighteen wheels. The truck was black. A woman had been chained to the grille like a freshly killed deer. The trailer’s flank showed a smiling family eating hot dogs.
“Fire your fifty!” Lee ordered, but Foster was already on it, sending hot metal downrange into the grille, which began to blow steam. His next rounds smashed the windshield.
The laughing driver wrenched the wheel. The giant rig swerved into Rebel Two.
“No!” Foster screamed.
The truck struck the Humvee with a metallic clap and enveloped it, jackknifing before the trailer rolled, flaring sparks and shards of metal. Rebel Two disappeared.
Murphy brought the Humvee to a stop. He was drenched in sweat.
Lee keyed his radio. “Rebel Two, this is Rebel Six. What’s your status, over?”
Nothing.
“All Rebel units, this is Rebel Six, how copy? Over.”
Dead air.
Murphy turned in his seat. “What now, Captain?”
Lee reloaded his rifle and chambered a round. His hands were shaking.
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