Tooth And Nail

by Craig DiLouie

  Gunfire rattles just a few blocks away to the west, loud and echoing among the buildings. The seemingly constant wail of police and ambulance sirens appears to multiply in volume.

  McGraw pauses, looking west, and says, “I’ve got—”

  A deafening boom sends a brief tremor through the ground and shatters windows in nearby buildings. The soldiers break formation to look as a fireball mushrooms into the air on a plume of black smoke, rising up over the buildings across the avenue to the west. A shrill wail goes up from the civilians.

  “Holy crap!” says Wyatt. “I felt the concussion.”

  “Back in formation!” McGraw roars, his face red. “Right now!”

  “Whoa, what was that?” says Rollins. “It practically blew out my eardrums.”

  “Dude, this is seriously jacked,” Mooney whispers.

  “We got to trust the Sergeant,” Finnegan hisses at them. “He’ll get us through this. If he don’t, Pops will. Now just shut up and do what you’re told. It’s all going to be okay.”

  “No talking in the ranks, you hear?” McGraw says, then finishes his report to the LT on his handheld.

  Mooney is not listening. He is watching two men jogging towards the crowd at the wire. There is something not right about them. The way they move as they weave purposefully through the cars. A strange, loping gait with their hands splayed into claws pressed against their chests. Like they aren’t people, but some kind of animal. The thought chills him.

  “Sergeant?” he says.

  “Next man who talks is going to get my boot,” McGraw growls, fed up.

  Mooney has lost sight of the two men. One of them had no shirt on and what looked like blue pajama bottoms. The other wore a baseball cap, denim shirt and blue jeans and had a black stain on his face, around his mouth.

  The civilians are screaming. Mooney cranes his neck, trying to see past McGraw’s broad shoulders.

  Then the sergeant moves, running fast, and Mooney can see the checkpoint. The two men are there, one of them pulling the long dark hair out of a woman’s head by the handful while the other systematically bites her stomach, drawing blood and leaving a smear of drool. The other civilians are screaming and trying to get out of the area fast. The men wrestle the woman to the ground. She lets out a horrible high-pitched whine and suddenly seems to give up, her body starting to go slack, her eyes glassy and pleading.

  McGraw is shouting, stop, stop or I will shoot.

  Corporal Eckhardt takes a step forward. “Sergeant—”

  The sergeant sees what they’ve done and screams, “I’m going to kill you dead—”

  But remembers his training, fires his Beretta into the air. Warning shots. The men’s heads jerk up with a spray of blood and spittle, looking like birds startled while feasting on carrion. The one wearing pajama bottoms leaps to his feet and takes a run straight at McGraw but immediately becomes entangled in the concertina wire, thrashing and making sounds like a dog being strangled.

  Concertina wire is lined with two-inch-long razors set four inches apart. The man shreds himself until he falls to the ground, his legs soaked with blood and bleeding out from a severed femoral artery in his thigh.

  The other man jumps to his feet, runs, leaps over the wire—

  Several carbines crack and pop at once and the man twitches in mid air, lands on the ground in a heap. Instantly, a widening pool of blood begins to form under him.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

  Mooney lowers his carbine. The sharp tang of cordite hangs in the air.

  “Did you see that?” McGraw says to nobody in particular. “What was that?”

  Bowman is shouting, running towards them from the other checkpoint, demanding to know why weapons are being fired.

  The woman is still alive, lying on the ground and in the throes of some sort of convulsions. The two assailants lie still in their own blood, obviously dead.

  “Ma’am, it’s all right now,” McGraw says, holding the Beretta behind his back and extending his other hand across the wire. “Come to me. We’ll take care of you.”

  The woman stares at him in terror, panting as she pulls herself unsteadily onto her feet.

  He lowers his mask. “Look at me. Miss. You’re going to be okay.”

  She begins twitching and blinking rapidly.

  “No, don’t—”

  But she has already turned and started running. By the time the squad can make an opening in the wire enough for McGraw to give chase, she is gone.

  Chapter 2

  Beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq

  The night is alive with police sirens and car horns and shouting and gunfire. The warm, muggy air smells like smoke. The streetlights dim and occasionally flare up as the city juggles its power problems. Down First Avenue, past the roadblock, the traffic lights are all blinking red and the traffic is snarled and honking with fury as thousands continue their flight from Manhattan in anything that can get a little gasoline in it.

  Everybody thinks things are better somewhere else.

  The boys of Second Platoon’s Third Squad pace the wire nervously, wired on black coffee. A police helicopter roars overhead, its powerful spotlight exploring the area briefly and ruining their night vision before moving on.

  “I can’t believe this,” Corporal Hicks mutters to himself, squinting down First Avenue and listening to the deep thuds of heavy machine-gun fire. “Are those tracers?”

  “No, I’m just happy to see you,” McLeod says, strolling up with his SAW. “Sounds like a fiddy-cal. So what?”

  “Because this is New York, not Baghdad, shit-for-brains. What is somebody down there doing firing an MG in the middle of New York?” Then, as an afterthought: “Beat your face, McLeod. Give me twenty.”

  “Are you serious? We’re in the middle of a war zone here.”

  “You want thirty?”

  While McLeod counts off his pushups, Hicks raises his carbine’s telescopic close combat optic to his eye. A red dot is centered in the optic for easy targeting. The tracers form a stream of light over the hoods of cars crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the heads of people running through the cars.

  Hicks can’t see through buildings, though, so he can’t tell who is laying down this steel rain and who is getting rained on. Just a few hundred meters away, and yet even this close he feels isolated and can barely tell what is going on. He wonders where all those big bullets are ending up. A fifty-cal round can travel four miles. It can blow through vehicles and, at close range, concrete walls.

  Now imagine what it can do to a human being.

  “Six. . . . Seven. . . .”

  The firing stops. It lasted only a few seconds. Somebody screwed up big time, probably some green recruit in a Humvee who got spooked. Hopefully, nobody got killed.

  Rather you than me, he thinks.

  Hicks is about to lower his weapon when he notices two people at the periphery of his scope image and focuses on them. One is a middle-aged man wearing boxers. The other is a teenaged girl dressed in a long T-shirt that comes down to her knees. They’re staring vacantly and doing that strange, jittery neck roll that people with the Mad Dog strain of Lyssa often do and that always gives Hicks the creeps. Their hands are clenched into fists in front of their chests. They look in his direction, open their mouths, and bolt away in the direction of where the MG fire had come from.

  He mutters, “And what are all these Mad Dogs doing running around without a leash?”

  The last thing we need, he tells himself, is another bunch throwing themselves at our perimeter and getting themselves shot. Getting caught in that kind of fire incident will follow you around for life.

  The MG starts thudding again.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq,” McLeod says, then resumes counting.

  Things will be just fine, sir, if we keep right on moving

  The armored Humvees, butterbar Todd Bowman commanding, race up Haifa Street through dense smells of
burning trash and gasoline fumes. The boys in the lead vehicle bob their heads in time to Dope’s “Die Motherfucker Die” played loud enough to be heard in the mosques. A year ago, the government of Iraq tottered on the edge of collapse and the U.S. Army reentered the cities in force to prop it up, unleashing a new generation of martyrs, foot soldiers and mad bombers in a war that has no end.

  The street karma is constantly shifting, but Bowman, brand new to the country and command, is not prepared for how much hate he has to eat here on a daily basis. The walls of the high-rise apartment buildings, pockmarked with bullet holes from years of strife, radiate it. The very streets cry infidel. The very bricks want him dead.

  “Contact, right!”

  The RPG zips across the front of his Humvee and strikes a parked minivan, which explodes and rockets a spinning blur of metal against his windshield, where it bounces with a heart-stopping smash and leaves a spider web of cracks. Kemper, driving the rig, whistles through his teeth but otherwise barely even flinches at the impact.

  They did not prepare Bowman for this in ROTC.

  The air hums and snaps with small arms fire while the fifty-cals on the Humvees chew up the walls of nearby buildings. Tracers flicker and zip through the air. The top of a palm tree explodes, scattering burning leaves and blistering their windshield with pieces of shrapnel.

  Bowman, wide-eyed and shouting himself hoarse, forces himself to calm down. His men are counting on him to lead them, and he doesn’t want to let them down on his first mission. They need to stop and start directing aimed fire at the insurgent positions. In an ambush, if you can’t withdraw, you assault.

  He starts to key his handset, but Kemper turns, winking, and tells him that things will be just fine, sir, if we keep right on moving.

  The cops aren’t answering the phone

  Bowman’s eyes flutter open and he looks around the facility manager’s office with a flash of panic. Had he been dreaming? For a moment, he’d thought. . . . Then he’d heard a noise. A knock? He listens to the hum of machinery in the hospital basement.

  Somebody is muttering outside his door.

  “Come in,” he says.

  Kemper enters the room, dimly lighted by a single desk lamp, followed by the squad leaders. Bowman is expecting them. He requested a squad leader meeting. The room’s smells of sweat, stale coffee and lived-in gear grows stronger.

  “Pull up a chair, gentlemen,” says the LT, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, Pete, just push that aside. Ah, coffee’s not fresh but it is hot if you want some.”

  Ruiz stands, grinning, and heads for the pot. “Don’t mind if I do, sir.” His squad will be manning the wire for the rest of the night until relieved at oh-six hundred.

  Bowman clears his throat and says, “Gentlemen, the situation has changed. Again. In fact, it’s become fluid.”

  Puzzled expressions behind their masks. “Sir?”

  “About thirty minutes ago, the RTO came to see me,” Bowman tells them. “He shared with me some interesting information about messages he’s been intercepting on the net. Gentlemen, there are units in our area of operations that are under attack by civilians.”

  The sergeants are squinting in disbelief.

  “Confirmed, sir?”

  “Captain West confirmed it.”

  “Coordinated?”

  “No,” Bowman answers. “The attacks are entirely random.”

  “Just what do they hope to gain from doing that?” says Sergeant McGraw. “Are they looking for food, vaccine or are they, you know, lashing out at the government?”

  Bowman looks him square in the eye. “We were one of the units that was attacked.”

  The men gasp. These are men not easily surprised. But they have just learned the attacks are being made by Lyssa victims suffering from Mad Dog syndrome, and it floors them.

  “We were attacked,” McGraw says slowly.

  “Yes, Sergeant. We were attacked.”

  “By unarmed Americans. American civilians. Sick people.”

  Bowman turns to the other sergeants. “As I said, the situation is changing.”

  McGraw shakes his head. “Sir. . . .”

  “Pete, you may feel that your men have something to atone for after what happened on the wire today. I don’t. Captain West agrees with my view on this. Whatever your feelings are, you’re going to have to get yourself squared away on this.”

  McGraw chews on his mustache and mutters, “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, this makes sense,” Ruiz says. “We’ve been turning away a lot of people who caught the bug, but also a lot of people asking for help controlling a Mad Dog, or saying a neighbor’s gone Mad Dog and attacking people. More than we should be hearing about.”

  “What do you say to them?” Sergeant Lewis asks. He is a giant of a man, nearly six feet and four inches tall, and was once considered the unit’s finest athlete. Back then, the soldiers called him Achilles behind his back, with admiration, but not anymore, not for some time. After his son was born and he quit smoking, he got a little soft and put on some weight. It did not dampen his natural aggression, though. If anything, he has only grown more aggressive over time. He adds, “What do you tell them to do?”

  Ruiz shrugs. “To go back home and call the cops.”

  “And is that all right for them?”

  “They, um, say the cops aren’t answering the phone.”

  Lewis gestures with his large hands and says, “We got to get out there and start helping these people.”

  “Negative,” says the LT, shaking his head for emphasis.

  “It’s why we’re here, ain’t it, sir?”

  “It’s a no go. It’s not our mission. The Army is a weapon of last resort in civil disturbance situations. We’re not cops. We trained with the non-lethals but we don’t have any. We go out there, and we’ll end up in situations like today where civilians get killed.”

  “Sounds like people are getting killed all over, and we’re sitting with our asses in the wind,” Lewis says bitterly. “What’s the Army for if not protecting the people here?”

  “I don’t have the answers you’d like me to have,” Bowman tells him. “What matters is our position here. Our orders are the same. Keep this facility safe. Out there, we’d only do more harm than good.”

  Kemper nods. It makes sense. You can’t kill a fly with a hammer.

  Bowman clears his throat and adds carefully: “I should add, however, that in light of recent events, the rules of engagement have changed.”

  The NCOs begin swearing.

  If you’re AWOL for more than thirty days,

  you are technically a deserter

  PFC Richard Boyd follows the girl down the street, both of them sticking to the shadows to avoid being seen. He had no idea things have gotten this bad out here. The streets are alive with packs of healthy and infected hunting each other in the dark.

  The girl’s name is Susan. He guesses her to be about nineteen, his own age. Pretty face. Nice body, slim and athletic. A girl next door type who seems out of place in New York. Being in a Muslim country for the past ten months made Boyd forget how much skin comes out in the West when the air is warm and muggy like tonight. She is wearing a tank top and cutoff jeans and the humidity is making her sweat. He pictures droplets of sweat trickling between her breasts and feels the pull of arousal. Maybe she will kiss him for helping her out. Maybe she’ll do more than that.

  Susan disappears into the doorway of a jewelry store and he follows.

  “What is it?” he whispers near her ear.

  They are standing close and he wonders if he should try to kiss her.

  After a few moments, she says, “Nothing. They’re gone.”

  She showed up at the post just after midnight, while Sergeant Ruiz was in the hospital with the LT, and asked for help. Williams said she had a junkie look and suggested some sort of quid pro quo if he could get her something tasty out of the hospital pharmacy, which got the guys excited and joking. They stopped laughing when s
he told them her story: Her father was sick and went Mad Dog and starting beating the crap out of her mother. Mom hid in a closet in their apartment and Dad was tearing the place apart. She called the cops but kept getting a recorded message saying all circuits are busy. That’s when Corporal Hicks showed up and told her that there was nothing they could do for her in any case. If the cops could not help her, she was on her own. The boys suddenly ached to help, although Williams hooted and said it was all BS, you white boys almost got taken.

  Some of them wanted to get taken. She really is pretty, they thought.

  That’s when Boyd decided to go “over the hill.” AWOL. He waited a few minutes, then slipped out through the wire and joined up with her. They have been making painfully slow progress to her apartment building in the Lower East Side ever since.

  His plan: Save the girl’s mom, be the hero, split for Idaho. He should be there, with his family, right now. Donna had Lyssa and Mom needed him. She said so in her letter. She said she was afraid his sister would go Mad Dog and then the Sheriff would come and shoot her and throw her body on one of the big fires outside town. The fact that everything in the letter happened a week ago does not matter to Boyd.

  The only problem with this plan is he is not even sure where he is right now, much less how he is going to get to the suburbs of Boise during a plague, when all the planes are grounded and the streets, apparently, are alive with homicidal maniacs.

  If you’re AWOL for more than thirty days, you are technically a deserter. If he becomes a deserter, they might even shoot him if they find him. After what he has seen tonight, he is certain they will. These are hard times and getting harder.

  Maybe he will go back after he helps this girl out. The idea of being executed is starting to loom large in his imagination, and he does not like it. He did not really think things through before slipping out of the post. His plan is already falling apart.

  Susan darts into another doorway, and he follows.