After that, Braddock gave the staff a choice: Stay and try to keep the patients alive, or go home to their families. Most left.
Braddock locked the doors and went to work. He avoided watching the news. Looking out the nearest window told him everything he needed to know. It was far worse out there than it was in here.
They carried on. They had to. Braddock knew how cheap life was—and how valuable. The days blurred into weeks. Eventually, they would run out of sedative, and the patients would wake up hungry and wanting to play.
After that…
He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Maybe he’d find some other place where he could do some good. Maybe he’d just give up. Nurse Robbins would stay to the end because of her sister. Braddock would likely stay with her. The hospital was his home.
On the fifth floor, Braddock found a group of heavily armed soldiers dragging his patients out of their beds and hog-tying them on the floor. The diseased opened their eyes and grinned.
FOUR.
The soldiers raised their weapons and screamed at him to get on the ground.
“What are you doing to my patients?” Braddock demanded.
“Get down on the fucking ground!”
They wore camouflage Army combat uniforms tucked into brown boots. Tactical vests stiff with armor and bulging with gear. Kevlar helmets with that slightly unsettling Wehrmacht look.
Their shoulder patches read MOUNTAIN with a symbol of two crossed swords.
One of them had stenciled TEOTWAWKI on his helmet.
“I’m not infected!” Braddock realized he probably looked it with his beard, matted hair and grimy scrubs and labcoat. He raised his hands and shut his eyes in fear.
A stocky, powerfully muscled man commanded, “Lower your weapons. He doesn’t have it.” To Braddock, he added, “I’m Sergeant Ramos, Tenth Mountain Division. We’re under orders. You need to vacate this area immediately and let us do our jobs, sir.”
The sir hung in the air, dripping with disdain. The bland, boyish faces of the squad regarded him as if they might have to shoot him anyway, just to be the safe side.
Braddock stood over six feet tall. He’d boxed as a young man and would gladly take on any of these punks in the ring. As a group, though, they unnerved him. They’d been through hell. They were exhausted and close to the edge, relying on their training to keep it together.
He tried to see them patriotically as American soldiers, men who risked their lives in defense of their country and did their jobs whether they agreed with the mission or not. But at the moment, they were invaders, and they scared the shit out of him.
Braddock counted five. Robbins had made it sound as though there was a squad in the building, maybe two. Where were the rest?
He spared a worried glance at Ellen White. She lay with her eyes closed and wearing her dreamy smile. Her long, graying hair lay neatly brushed on the pillow. He visited her often to give her status updates. He hoped she could somehow hear him and feel assured her hospital was still running. Even now, he sought her approval.
The fifth floor was special for another reason. The ward was where Braddock had initiated an experimental treatment based on the Milwaukee Protocol, used to treat rabies. The patient was loaded with midazolam and ketamine to induce a coma, and then fed amantadine and ribavirin to fight the virus. He’d just started it. Anything was worth a try.
Now these soldiers were ruining the experiment.
“May I ask what your orders are?” he asked, trying to sound polite. He still trembled from the shock of seeing guns pointed at him.
Ramos ignored his question. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I am. I’m the acting Chief of Medicine.”
“Then you’d better start evacuating the hospital. Get your staff out as fast as you can.”
“And then what? Go where?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Wherever you want. Someplace safe. There are safety shelters.”
“Who can I talk to about this? Who’s in command?”
“The lieutenant. He’s upstairs with another fireteam.”
Okay, we’re talking. This is good. We’re talking about it. “I’ll go speak to him then. Please don’t do anything until I get back. Ten minutes.”
“We’ve got our orders. You have yours. Get your staff out.”
The men smelled like smoke and fear. Their eyes were wild. They weren’t crossing the line. The whole country was. There’d been a decision at the top.
“You don’t have to do this, Sergeant.”
“Just get your people out, Doc,” Ramos said, his expression softening to reveal the man behind the mission mask. “You don’t want to see this.”
“How bad is it out there?”
“Bad enough for this. Desperate times, desperate measures. Understand?”
“You still have a choice. These are innocent people. Innocent, sick people.”
Fighting the infected out in the street was one thing. Murdering sick people in their beds in cold blood was something else. Sick civilians.
“We have our orders.”
“Shit orders,” a tall, wiry Black soldier said.
Ramos wheeled. “What did you just say, Private?”
The Black soldier nodded at Braddock. “He’s right, Sergeant.” He pronounced it Sarrunt, making it sound deferential and defiant at the same time. “We don’t have to do it.”
Braddock said nothing. He’d learned when to talk and when to shut up.
“This is bullshit,” added another soldier with a handsome, boyish face. He looked like he’d be more at home surfing some wave in California than sweating here in a combat uniform. “It’s just us, with the ammo we got, and we have to waste the whole hospital? There are thousands of people here. Where’s the rest of the company?”
“We lost our commo,” said the Black soldier. “Maybe the operation was scrubbed.”
“Maybe the rest of the company is fucking dead,” said the surfer.
A third soldier, sporting a stained bandage on his left cheek, pointed at the bodies in the beds. “You’ve seen what these people do. They killed our guys. They’re not even people. I say, kill them all.”
“Best to put them out of their misery now before they wake up, and we have to fight them on the streets,” agreed a fourth soldier. “We should put down as many as we can.”
The group was split down the middle. The sergeant was the tie-breaker.
“It’s not up for a vote,” Ramos said. He lowered his shotgun and fired a round at the middle-aged man lying in front of him.
Blood and brains sprayed across the floor. Some flew onto the legs of Braddock’s scrubs. The sound flattened his eardrums. His ears rang in the aftermath.
The soldier with the bandaged face grinned, revealing two missing front teeth. “Hooah, Sergeant.”
Ramos’s casual execution of one of the infected, which was supposed to demonstrate simplicity and resolve, backfired. The rest of the soldiers paled at the sight.
Braddock backed away in horror. One of the patients on the floor tried to take a bite out of his leg, forcing him to take another step back. The woman’s jaws clamped shut with an audible click that made him shiver.
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.”
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.
Fight 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 sucked. 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 an
swered.
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.
This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection) Page 17