Maybe Walker was right.
Screw Walker.
They still couldn’t raise regimental HQ. Prince told them to jump the ladder and try Division at Fort Drum. Again, no response.
Prince had seen rough soldiering. He’d led his boys through some tough campaigns. But he always knew he had the full weight of the Big Green Machine behind him, a powerful military that projected American power across the planet. Not anymore.
The idea that Division headquarters had been overrun or compromised by infection was impossible to conceive. Fort Drum wasn’t near any major cities. It was in the middle of nowhere in New York State. At first, he’d thought there must be something wrong with the communications system. But they were still able to contact other Tenth Mountain units. Those field units all reported the same problems getting through to central command.
What was the next step? Go still higher up? Call the Pentagon?
The Pentagon had been evacuated. The President and the Joint Chiefs were in their underground bunker at Mount Weather, making their erratic decisions without any knowledge of what was really happening on the ground.
Prince was going to have to make his own decisions. The right course eluded him. He knew the current strategy wasn’t working, but he couldn’t just pull his boys out of Boston and give up. More than six hundred thousand people had lived in the city before the plague. Another four million lived in the Greater Boston area. The survivors were desperate. They needed help.
If his lightfighters couldn’t do anything, what good were they? Why bother?
He’d always thought the world would end suddenly. An asteroid would come, humanity would have a week to get its shit in order, and then BOOM.
He’d never imagined a plague would do the job, and with such horror. A plague in which everybody became an enemy, everything familiar became a threat, every loved one was perverted and defiled.
Like Susan and Frankie. Your own family was shot down in the street like dogs by men wearing uniforms just like yours.
Stars flared in his vision. He groaned.
He needed some creative thinking. Goddammit, he was going to have to get Walker back. But he’d get the man squared away first.
Prince was still rattled from their last encounter. Walker had the logic—and personality—of Mr. Spock and the loyalty of a bloodhound. If he’d lost enough faith to challenge a superior officer the way he had, he had to have a damned good reason. Or maybe he was just cracking under the stress. A lot of men did.
He opened the drawer and looked at the bottle. Forget everything. He closed it again.
Maybe he should appoint Lee as his XO. Lee was a straight shooter, and the man had balls. They’d destroy the rogue artillery unit that was terrorizing the Boston core and put the Governor in his place. They’d find a new strategy to check the spread of infection across the area and stop the violence.
They could do it. They still had a mission.
Somebody knocked on the door.
Prince touched the 9mm at his hip. “Come in.”
The radio/telephone operator entered the room. “Good news, Colonel.”
Prince stared at the man. He hadn’t heard good news in over a month.
The RTO added, “We’ve established contact with regimental HQ.”
“Outstanding, son.” Prince stood and followed the man into the work area. For the first time in weeks, he started to feel like things were going his way. He picked up the headset. “Wizard Six. Over.”
Armstrong roared, “WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING MALFUNCTION, JOE?”
Even though Colonel Armstrong couldn’t see him, Prince stood at attention. He’d gotten such treatment before. Armstrong wasn’t one to mince words; he called it “tough love.” Clearly, the regimental commander knew about Prince’s failures: the destruction of the hospitals, the Governor rejecting his offer of sanctuary, the infected rogue artillery unit bombing downtown, the steady losses of men and materiel…and his utter failure to achieve his mission. What could he say that would change the commander’s opinion? That he was going to appoint a new XO?
He felt his optimism wash away like sand in the surf.
“DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? ARE YOU DEAF?”
“I heard you loud and clear, sir. Over.” After a long silence, he added: “Sir?”
Armstrong exploded into insane laughter.
Prince blanched. “May I speak to your XO?”
“That might be a little tough, Joe. I ate his tongue.” Again, that explosive, shrieking laughter came through the headset.
Prince terminated the connection. He went back into his private office and closed the door. He sat at his desk and ran his hands over his crew cut. This is bad. This is really bad. The chain of command was broken. First Battalion was officially off the reservation.
Another knock came at the door.
“Come in,” he said mechanically. His head pounded to the tune of his rapid heartbeat.
Lieutenant Torres entered the room, looking pale. “Sir, I forwarded you a new PowerPoint file we just received from HQ. An advisory.”
Prince shook his head. “Not now.”
He was going to have to organize a mission to Troy to provide aid to HQ and help re-establish the chain of command. With what? We’re stretched to the breaking point.
He’d work with the commanders of the other battalions. A joint mission. Then he frowned. Why the hell was HQ sending PowerPoint presentations? Didn’t they know they had a major crisis on their hands?
“You need to see this, Colonel,” Torres insisted.
Prince looked at the man’s face. Torres was a tough son of a bitch, but he appeared to be on the verge of tears.
“This came from regimental HQ?” Prince asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Prince located the file on his computer and opened it.
TWENTY-ONE.
The first slide presented a title promising authorization guidelines for lethal use of force against armed civilians. That was bad enough, as it suggested some people had gotten so angry that they were taking shots at Army units in the field.
The second slide showed a photo of a severed head with a lit cigarette in its mouth. It wore a helmet. The eyes had been carved out and replaced with shiny pennies.
The third depicted a pile of hacked-off body parts and Tenth Mountain patches torn from uniforms.
Others displayed scenes of torture and murder. Laughing soldiers holding down their comrades and butchering them. Sodomy. A screaming head in a vise. A crying man with wires wrapped around his head, the wires leading back to a car battery. Another with a burning tire on his head.
One image showed a large crowd of infected soldiers in the dining facility, laughing and wrestling on the floor. Their uniforms were stained and ragged. Some fired their weapons into the ceiling. The leering cooks slopped chili into bowls in the chow line. A human foot protruded from one of the pots.
Prince closed the file and deleted it. He wished it was paper so he could burn it.
Then he went to call in an airstrike.
Oddly, his headache had disappeared.
TWENTY-TWO.
Wade explored the building. The other rooms, all of them offices adorned with sports paraphernalia, offered views of Boston. In one, three soldiers had opened a window to let in the air. They stood looking out at the skyline of South Boston.
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 rolling 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.
This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection) Page 22