Tooth And Nail

by Craig DiLouie

“What is it?”

  She shushes him, their bodies pressed together.

  Then he hears it. Mad Dogs howling in the dark.

  Two teenaged girls enter the glow of the sputtering street lamps, crossing the street. One stops and stares directly at where Boyd and the girl are hiding in the shadows, and emits a low guttural growl, shoulders slouched and trembling, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Drool drips from her clenched teeth, staining her T-shirt.

  The other girl, her long hair falling in tangles over her face, continues limping along, dragging a leg that appears to be bleeding and broken. Then she too stops and begins growling at where Boyd and Susan are hiding.

  Boyd raises his M4. The first girl growls louder. Susan is shaking, breathing in short, panicked gasps.

  “Shoot her, shoot her. . . .”

  He licks his lips as a sickening wave of horror blanks out his mind. His heart begins hammering against his ribs and he can feel his bowels turn to water. He blinks, tries to shift his mind back on his training, but he never trained for this. The fact is he has no idea what he will do if the girl charges him. In Iraq, things were never clear cut but fighting American civilians who have turned into some kind of psycho zombie is something new and beyond training. Instead, his mind begins obsessing on the theory he heard that Mad Dogs are not really growling when they make that noise, they are actually talking, but their throats have become partially paralyzed so it comes out as a creepy gurgle. Once he thinks of this, he cannot get it out of his mind.

  He wonders what they are trying to tell him.

  A mob of young, muscular Asian boys, wearing wife-beaters and jeans, emerges from the darkness and falls upon the girls with metal pipes and baseball bats. The girls’ bodies topple to the ground under the blows. Except for the scuffing of their sneakers against the street as they lay convulsing and flailing and dying, they don’t make a sound. Boyd hears the pipes and bats connecting with flesh and cracking bones when they hit, clanging off the asphalt when they miss.

  “Jesus,” he says, sick to his stomach.

  One of the boys straightens and stares in their direction.

  “Shut up,” Susan hisses beside him.

  “Why? They aren’t infected.”

  “I’ve seen those guys before,” she says. “You do not want to fuck with them.”

  Their work done, the mob moves on without a word, stretching and swinging their homemade weapons.

  “Come on, Rick,” Susan says, sighing. “We’re almost home.”

  War has rules

  In Bowman’s headquarters in the hospital facility manager’s office, the rules of engagement are changing and the non-coms are swearing.

  Bowman presses on, “You are now authorized to use deadly force against any civilian who makes a threatening gesture towards a member of this unit. Even if that civilian is unarmed.”

  Now everybody is shouting.

  “This comes straight from Battalion and presumably from Quarantine and the Old Man himself.”

  War has rules. Rules of engagement are spelled out by command authorities to describe the circumstances under which military units can use force, and to what degree.

  They are also supposed to follow the basic precepts of law.

  The LT runs his hand across his buzz cut. “Gentlemen, I’m honestly not sure what to make of it. I’m open to suggestions.”

  Kemper glances at him sharply.

  “It’s illegal,” says McGraw. “We don’t have to obey an unlawful order.”

  “Suppose we don’t pass on the new ROE to the men,” says Lewis. “What happens if we are attacked? How do we defend ourselves, and with what force?”

  “I’m not shooting American citizens,” McGraw says, his face burning. “I took an oath to defend them, not slaughter them, for Chrissakes. Even the goddamn dirty hippies.”

  “So we’re going to let the Mad Dogs here attack us and kill us or infect us,” Lewis says. “That’s your ROE?”

  McGraw snorts. “How many people are we talking about here? We can handle a few at a time without killing anybody. Not that many people go Mad Dog. It’s pretty rare.”

  “If that’s true,” says Ruiz, “then why are we getting these reports of Mad Dogs attacking Army units?”

  Nobody has an answer to that.

  “I mean, did you ever wonder why America had to pull its forces out of almost every one of its military bases around the world? We’ve got what, more than seven hundred bases? More than two hundred fifty thousand people overseas just in the Army? Think about it. Almost every one of them is home now.”

  “They’re not telling us something,” Lewis says. “That’s for damn sure. You can take that straight to the bank.”

  “Our situational awareness is very limited,” Bowman says.

  “What happens later, sir?” Ruiz is asking. “Suppose we do shoot some people who are honest to God trying to kill us. What happens after, when the Pandemic is over? Do we end up in court charged with murder or what? Could we get sued?”

  “They’re going to die anyway,” says Lewis.

  “I want some assurances,” says Ruiz. “About the legalities.”

  “So I say if they’re trying to kill us, we should be able to kill them first. They can’t give the whole Army a court martial, can they?”

  “I’m not shooting anybody,” McGraw says. “The question is not whether we refuse the order, but whether we tell the Captain that we’re refusing the order to make a point up the chain of command.”

  “We can’t be the only unit refusing to fire on sick people,” Ruiz says.

  “These are dangerous times,” says Lewis. “I wouldn’t go around announcing to the chain of command that you’re refusing to follow orders, know what I mean?”

  “Are we even supposed to be here?” says Ruiz. “Isn’t it against the law for the Army to be pointing guns at people at all in our own cities? You know, Posse Comitatus?”

  “We trained for this type of domestic emergency before we shipped out for Iraq,” Lewis tells him. “Why would they do that if they didn’t mean for us to use that training now?”

  “Yeah? Then where’s the non-lethal equipment?”

  Lewis glances at Kemper. “Back me up on this, Pops.”

  Kemper wants to shout them down, remind them that they are professionals and that they should shut up and listen to the LT, but Bowman is not doing anything, only sitting there with his mouth open and grumbling to himself that the whole thing does not make sense: If only three to five percent of the sick develop Mad Dog symptoms and die within a week, how can they be that big of a threat? At any given time there cannot be more than ten, maybe fifteen thousand of them in all of Manhattan. That’s a lot if you put them all together, but they are scattered far and wide.

  How can there be this many Mad Dogs?

  Kemper looks away, suddenly wondering if the Lieutenant is going to be able to get them through this in one piece. After serving together a year in Iraq, it is a disloyal feeling, and he does not like it.

  He also finds himself agreeing with Lewis: The Army is not telling them something vital. Like the LT said, their situational awareness is very, very limited, and Kemper wonders what it is going to cost them when the bill comes.

  The worst thing I ever smelled

  PFC Jon Mooney lies awake on his bunk in the dark, restless and staring and dry-mouthed from wearing an N95 mask all day and night. He plays the shooting over and over in his mind: Did they do the right thing? He can’t get the image of the Mad Dog squealing and flopping in a puddle of blood, tangled up in the wire, out of his head.

  Around him, the boys of First Squad snore gently in the dark. Collins is speaking in tongues while he slumbers, gibberish for the most part but ending with, “Fried chicken?” and a throaty chuckle. Somebody else farts and turns over. Mooney likes these guys, they are like brothers to him, he and them have gone to hell and back together, but he can’t stand them anymore and he would really, really like to be alone for
a while.

  He turns onto his side and sees PFC Joel Wyatt staring back at him, his eyes gleaming in the dark. Wyatt takes off his headphones and says, “You still awake, Mooney?”

  “Can’t sleep. You?”

  “Chillin’ like a villain, partner.”

  “All right. Well, good night, Joel.”

  “’Night.”

  Mooney closes his eyes, forces the shooting out of his mind, and tries to remember what Laura looks like. They are technically not together but he is trying to forget that. Before he left for Iraq, he told her that maybe they should break up. He still thinks that was a sound decision at the time. Plus he’d been feeling spiteful because sometimes he wondered if she is really all that good looking and that maybe he deserved better. He hadn’t anticipated, however, how hard things would be overseas, how lonely he would get, and he clings to the idea that he still loves her—a lifeline in his violent world.

  Plus she had agreed a little too readily to his suggestion of seeing other people, and it has been eating at him ever since he deployed.

  “Hey, Mooney.”

  “Yeah, Joel?”

  “I feel like some TV. They got TV upstairs in the patient rooms, right? You in or not?”

  Something like electric current floods Mooney’s system, jolting him out of bed. Within seconds, the boys are quietly pulling on T-shirts and pants and tip-toeing into the hallway on bare feet, trying not to laugh as they dart past the facility manager’s office where the LT, platoon sergeant and squad leaders are huddled together in a tense pow wow.

  They pause to listen.

  “My wife and kid are out there and I am going to protect them,” they hear somebody saying.

  Lewis? Mooney mouths to Wyatt, who shrugs.

  “That’s right,” says somebody else. “She’s out there. So what happens if she becomes one of them? Do you want us to shoot her too?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Lewis. “If I become one of those things, I want you to shoot me in the grape.”

  “What the hell, over?” whispers Mooney.

  “What the hell, out,” Wyatt whispers back, shrugging.

  As enjoyable as the spying is, the lure of mindless entertainment is stronger, calling them back to their original mission. The hallway is dark and shrouds their movements. The hum of machinery conceals their footsteps. The whole basement stinks of ammonia and disinfectant. We are ninja, Mooney thinks, totally hidden. The thought makes him smile.

  “What’s on this time of night?” Wyatt wonders as they reach the stairwell and begin climbing the stairs.

  “Who cares? I just want to turn my brain off and forget who I am for an hour.”

  “Better than sleep!”

  “Who can sleep?” Mooney wonders.

  “So where are we going, anyhow?”

  “Let’s go up to the sixth floor and then walk back down, checking out each floor until we find a room that has a working TV in it. Hooah?”

  “Whoop,” says Wyatt.

  By the time they reach the sixth floor, the boys are panting and stop for a rest. They are in good shape but exhausted from months of hard work and lack of sleep and barely enough calories. They sit on the top step and share a cigarette. Mooney is starting to warm up to Wyatt, the tall, skinny red-haired replacement from Michigan with Army glasses who always seems to be looking over your shoulder while he’s talking to you. Most of the boys think he is a little off.

  “Ready for some infomercials, cuzin?” Wyatt says. “Some Girls Gone Wild?”

  Mooney flicks the cigarette down the stairs, where it bursts in a shower of sparks, and puts his mask back on. “OK. Let’s do this.”

  Wyatt hands him some latex gloves, which Mooney pulls on.

  “Remember, Mooney, if a nurse or somebody sees us, we just say we were sent to find that cop. Winslow. That’ll be our cover story.”

  They open the door and immediately gag as the stink assails them, the horrible sour body sweat of Lyssa victims lurking under a sickeningly sweet combination of air fresheners and perfume that the Trinity people apparently sprayed everywhere.

  Mooney hears people moaning, and realizes that the walls of the darkened corridor are lined with gurneys, a Lyssa patient in each connected by a tube to an IV bag to keep them hydrated. Some snarl and struggle against restraining belts, while most simply lie moaning, their breath rattling in their chests.

  Other than the Lyssa victims, there’s not a soul in sight.

  Wyatt whistles at the ambiance. “Spooky.”

  Mooney nods.

  “I mean,” Wyatt adds, “wouldn’t it be cool if they all jumped up and attacked us?”

  They turn a corner. There are no patients in this part of the corridor and the lights are on for the night. Mooney and Wyatt blink at the fluorescent light.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” says Mooney. “This whole place is crawling with virus.”

  “Dude, how about that smell? Every time I think I’m used to it, I get the urge to puke. And I even got a scratch-and-sniff perfume sample in my mask from an ad I tore out of a magazine.”

  “Abort mission?”

  “Hell, no! These are patient rooms up here, yo. There’s gotta be a TV in one of them. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they had PlayStation?”

  “I’d love to play Guitar Hero,” Mooney admits.

  Pinching their noses, they creep up to a doorway. Inside, Lyssa victims lie in the dark in their own sweat and stink. Mooney can hear their ragged breath. One of them, a young woman lying on a cot on the floor, is alternately weeping and apologizing to somebody named Ron in fevered delirium.

  “Bingo,” says Wyatt. “The sound’s turned off, though. Gotta find the remote, unless you like the close captioning they’ve got on. Me, I can’t read that fast.”

  “What’s on?”

  “CNN, I think. Some kind of riot going on in Chicago. No, wait. Now they’re talking about Atlanta.”

  “Hello?”

  The raspy voice electrifies them, making them jump.

  “You scared the shit out of me, whoever you are,” Wyatt hisses, and starts laughing.

  “Same here,” the voice says. “Are you the cops?”

  “No, sir,” Mooney answers. As his vision slowly adapts to the dark, he can now make out the figure of a man sitting up in bed. “We’re U.S. Army.”

  “Somebody was screaming down the hall earlier tonight. Probably just somebody out of their head with fever, right? But it sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered. You might want to check it out. I’d tell a nurse but I haven’t seen one in hours.”

  “How are you feeling, sir? It is bad?”

  “A little better today, thanks. My fever’s broke, but I could use some water—”

  They jump again as they hear the crackle of small arms fire coming from outside the building. Stepping carefully, the soldiers approach the window and peer through the closed blinds to see who is shooting at whom. Far below, they see muzzle flashes and hear the reports.

  Third Squad is lighting somebody up.

  “What the hell, over?” says Wyatt.

  Mooney is starting to feel naked without his rifle.

  “Oh, God,” he says, and runs from the room.

  Wyatt chases after him, finds him retching over a wastepaper basket.

  “I breathed it in,” Mooney says, spitting and trying to catch his breath. “I forgot to hold my nose for a second. It was the worst thing I ever smelled in there. Holy shit. It smelled like a rotting grave.”

  “Dude, put your mask back on before you get sick,” Wyatt says nervously.

  “Are you guys all right?” the Lyssa patient calls from the dark room. “Don’t leave me alone, okay? Bring me some water, please?”

  “Hey, look at that,” says Wyatt, pointing at the floor.

  The bloodstain begins five feet from them and ends at a pair of doors twenty feet distant. The blood is smeared, as if somebody dragged a mop soaked with blood through the doors.

  “You
gotta be kidding,” Mooney says as Wyatt approaches the doors.

  They should be getting back. If Third Squad’s engaged outside, McGraw’s probably mustering the squad. Right about now, he is working himself into a blind rage looking for his AWOL riflemen, chewing his massive handlebar mustache and grinding the molars in that big square jaw of his.

  Mooney also has no interest in seeing what’s on the other side of those doors. What did that guy say?

  Awful, he said. It sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered.

  “We’d better go back,” Mooney says. “McGraw’s gonna kill us.”

  Wyatt grins. “I’ll just take a quick look. Dude, this place is like a haunted house. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were zombies on the other side of these doors?”

  He presses a button on the wall with the palm of his hand. The doors swing open automatically.

  Clear the fucking net

  Jake Sherman, the platoon radio/telephone operator, sits in a janitor’s closet with his feet up on a box containing cheap toilet paper, eating a packet of instant coffee mixed with hot chocolate powder and washing it down with Red Bull while listening to the traffic on the military nets. He started mainlining caffeine after too many sleepless nights in Iraq, and hasn’t yet kicked the habit of getting completely wired while on duty.

  Blackhawk flight, this is War Pig Three directly below you, what’s your call sign?

  War Pig Three, this is Red Baron Two.

  Red Baron Two, request flyover east of us, about three blocks. We hear a high noise level in that direction, possibly a firefight in progress. What is happening at that location? Confirm, over.

  Wait, over. . . . War Pig Three, we see multiple, uh, estimate fifty, civilians at an intersection three blocks north and two blocks east of you. Break. Riot in progress. Break. Some are armed. Break. They appear to be fighting each other. Over.

  Roger that and thanks for the eyes, Red Baron Two. Out.

  Then the excitement is over and the company’s voice traffic quickly returns to the ongoing rhythm of units talking to each other in the night about location, condition, supply and all the other mundane communications required to keep two infantry brigades functioning on the ground in New York. Sherman switches from the company to the battalion net and listens in on the chatter. War Pig (Delta Company) continues to collect and pass around intelligence about the riot. War Hammer (Alpha Company) is requesting a medevac for a grenadier who got his ear bitten off by a Lyssa victim. Warmonger (Bravo Company) is asking the last calling station to authenticate its identity.