Tooth And Nail

by Craig DiLouie

  “Yes, sir,” McGraw says.

  “Stand back, I said!” Hawkeye barks at the crowd.

  “One last thing, gentlemen,” Bowman says. “We’re not here to reenact My Lai or Custer’s Last Stand. Regardless of what you see happening, our mission is to rejoin the Company with as few bullets and bodies as possible. That is our mission. Understood?”

  “Hooah, sir,” they say.

  “Step off as soon—”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The civilians scatter as two men and a bald woman, drooling and gurgling, step forward and latch onto Hawkeye’s limbs, pulling at them with their full strength. In an instant, he is shrieking and flailing.

  Ruiz fires his shotgun, deafening all of them, knocking both of the men to the ground. The woman loses her balance and falls backward, then comes back snarling. Ruiz clubs her senseless with a single stroke of the butt of his weapon.

  Lewis helps Hawkeye back onto his feet. The other boys look at the bleeding and dying civilians, and then Ruiz, with something like awe.

  “Did they bite you, Private?” the LT asks Hawkeye.

  “You saw what they were doing, sir,” Hawkeye says, barely concealing his irritation while he rubs his left arm. “They tried to pull my arms off. Hurt like hell, too.”

  “I’m not making fun of you, Private. Did any of them bite you?”

  “No, sir. Nobody did.”

  Bowman nods to Ruiz, then says, “All right, back to your squads. Let’s move while we still have the freedom to do so.”

  “Hooah,” they shout.

  The soldiers deploy as fast as they can through the wreckage of the abandoned vehicles choking Second Avenue, then Bowman gives them the order to step off.

  Speed is a type of security. If they can move fast enough, they can punch their way through with minimal loss of life and ammunition.

  People come running past them, screaming for their lives, hugging or dropping their food parcels. Some begin clinging to the soldiers, who shrug them off and keep moving while their sergeants howl at them to Go go go, cursing a blue streak.

  “Stay close to me, boys,” Bowman tells Martin and Boomer.

  Nearby, a man has jumped into one of the abandoned cars and is trying to close the door while a Mad Dog slowly forces it open. One of the soldiers drops the Mad Dog with a single shot. Bowman shoulders his carbine and unholsters his nine-millimeter sidearm. A woman flies by on rollerblades, shouting, “Heads up! Coming through!”

  The platoon wades into chaos.

  Exactly what you were trying to avoid

  Third Squad moves fast among the cars and approaches the intersection, which is a scene of chaos. There are people everywhere, many of them infected. Mad Dogs are fighting uninfected people, uninfected people are fighting each other around the food trucks. Nearby, incredibly, two New York City police officers have wrestled a Mad Dog to the ground and are trying to cuff him, while five feet away a man is beating a woman to death in a frenzy with a broken hairdryer. One of the officers is bleeding from bites on his arm. The police cars’ lights strobe red and blue, sparkling in the soldiers’ eyes.

  Mounted above the chaos, the intersection’s traffic signal mundanely turns from red to green as it is programmed to do.

  The air crackles with small arms fire and several people collapse to the ground. Second Squad has entered the intersection and is plowing ahead, shooting anything that looks hostile. First Squad is bogged down by civilians clinging to them for protection, their formation broken, while McGraw lays about him with the butt of his shotgun, trying to untangle his unit. The screaming is grating and endless, shredding their nerves.

  “Get off me!” McLeod shouts, shoving his way through the civilians.

  The infected appear to focus on whoever fired last, which is unnerving.

  Hicks is crying as he bayonets a Mad Dog.

  “Keep going!” he shouts.

  “Don’t make me shoot you!” McLeod is pleading, pushing against a woman’s back with the butt of his SAW. She screams and drops a television set she’s been carrying, which falls to the street with a crash.

  People are running everywhere, but the soldiers are moving into the current, forming a dam, and then it’s hand to hand.

  Bowman fires his pistol into a snarling face, which disappears.

  This is exactly what you were trying to avoid, he tells himself.

  “Reform!” he cries, but there are too many civilians in the way, drawn to the soldiers’ uniforms like metal to magnets. The civilians hold onto the soldiers’ rucksacks, which are already heavy, and slow them to a crawl.

  Williams fires a series of warning shots into the air, without effect.

  A taxi and a delivery truck are lurching along with the flow of people in fits and starts, the drivers leaning on their horns. A woman climbs onto the roof of the cab and lies down, hugging her child close. Across the street, a man is defending his family with a baseball bat. Behind him, the plate glass front of a convenience store shatters and people begin looting. Its owner comes stumbling out, his head split open and pouring blood. The police cars’ strobing lights bathe the scene in a surreal glow.

  The stink is incredible, the dense sour-milk stench of the infected.

  Then a wave of heat and thick, oily smoke descends upon them from a burning city bus down the street, choking them as it billows through the crowd until it suddenly lifts as fast as it had come.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Third Squad passes a group of people, drunk and staggering along through the melee, laughing and shouting, “Fuck it!” while working on popping the cork on a champagne bottle.

  One of the revelers is shorn away and mauled to the asphalt.

  The Lieutenant is panicking now, breathing hard, his vision shrinking to a box. He can’t keep track of the blurred shapes around him anymore. The smoke falls upon them again like a wave, choking and blinding.

  The last reveler throws the champagne bottle into the air, screaming, “I don’t care!”

  “Why aren’t we moving?” Hicks is saying.

  SPC Martin is wrestling with an uninfected man and teenage boy for possession of his machine gun. Next to him, the RTO is trading punches with a man twice his size. People are screaming and a civilian, his shirt off and leaking blood from his eyes and ears, begins shooting people randomly with a pistol.

  Ruiz roars as a stray bullet takes off the top of the skull of a man who is running by, spraying him with blood and brains.

  Two bullets rip into Sherman’s radio pack, spinning him like a top.

  The Newb grunts and falls to his knees.

  “Sir, we can get through this,” Kemper is shouting.

  Bowman’s field of view unfolds. His stress suddenly takes an entirely different and beneficial direction. Time dilates and he calmly, almost serenely, watches the horror unravel in slow motion, able to take in every detail.

  His squad is still intact and they can get through this if they do whatever it takes. But if he chooses to live, life after today may not be worth living.

  For some reason, at this instant, he remembers Winslow telling him, “Somebody has to survive, Lieutenant.”

  As Bowman did in the hospital, again, he makes his choice.

  Loading a fresh clip, he quickly identifies the people bogging down his squad and shoots them one by one.

  “Watch out, Mike,” he says, and puts a round in a teenager’s throat.

  Slowly, the knot unravels and the squad is able to begin moving again.

  The people he shot were not infected.

  “Coming through, sir,” Kemper says.

  He racks a round in his shotgun and blasts the crowd in front of the squad.

  A hole is instantly created as people moan and fall in a tangled heap of limbs.

  “All right, move out,” Bowman roars.

  A block past the intersection, they stop, reload and set up a defensive line, panting. A woman is shrieking at them to go back and HELP THESE P
EOPLE, HELP THEM.

  “Sergeant, keep those civilians back or consider them hostile,” the LT says.

  But Ruiz isn’t listening. “Where’s Johnston?” he demands.

  Two of the boys hurry over, huffing, carrying The Newb on a makeshift stretcher.

  “He’s dead,” Corporal Wheeler tells him, sounding dazed. “Got hit by a stray bullet. It looked like friendly fire to me, Sergeant. One of our own guys shot him.”

  Ruiz spits on the ground, purple with rage.

  “Second Squad, probably,” the Sergeant says. “They were shooting everything that moved back there. Goddamnit. He was a good kid.”

  “Civilians, Sergeant,” Bowman says quietly.

  “I’m on it, sir,” Ruiz tells him, glaring. “Wheeler, get his tags.”

  “Here comes McGraw and First Squad, LT,” Kemper says.

  First Squad is limping away from the intersection, firing behind them, dropping anybody who comes close. Two bloodied cops have joined them, toting shotguns.

  “Where’s Sergeant Lewis?”

  “No sign of him,” Kemper says.

  “Try him on the commo.”

  “Friendlies coming in!” Lewis calls from behind them, running up with Second Squad.

  “Friendlies on our six!” says Corporal Hicks, then calls out, “Reloading!”

  “We made it through and set up a defensive line another block up the road,” Lewis tells the LT. “Didn’t know you wanted to rally here. Sorry, sir.”

  “It’s all good, Sergeant.”

  Ruiz glowers at Lewis and says, “You and me are going to have some words later, motherfucker.”

  Lewis says, “Go to hell, Sergeant.”

  Second Squad begins covering First Squad’s movement. The carbines pop and the bullets hum and snap through the air.

  Bowman almost does not recognize Second Squad. In Iraq, they were boys who were much older than their years because of what they had done and seen. But now they are beyond even this scale. They are ancient now. It is in their eyes, he realizes. Looking ahead with thousand-yard stares, their eyes burn like cold stones as old as war itself.

  The boys have become killing machines, like something out of myth.

  He looks at Kemper, who also has the look. He guesses that he himself might have it.

  There are two types of soldiers in the platoon now. Those who shot non-combatants, and those who did not. Those who shot uninfected people to save themselves and their comrades, and those who would have stayed in that intersection.

  Those who will in the future, and those who won’t.

  Kemper nods to Bowman. He now understands the choice that the LT made back in the hospital. The choice to be damned, as long as it saved his men. A choice that was not expedient, but necessary.

  “It was an emergency food relief operation,” one of the cops is saying, his eyes gaping. “The food trucks drew a massive crowd of people, thousands. Then a couple of gangs of Lyssa victims came at us the other way, attacking and biting people.” He’s pleading with the soldiers around him. “There was nothing we could do!”

  “You’re all right now, buddy,” one of the soldiers says to him.

  Kemper whispers near the LT’s ear, “Sir, if they’re broken, we’re it.”

  The other cop glares at Lewis’ boys and says, “We’re not staying with these murderers, Brian. We’ll find another way back to the station.”

  Bowman checks his watch. The movement across the intersection—and intervening battle—lasted all of four minutes, and left them exhausted, bloodied and dispirited.

  “You’re on, uh, fire, Jake,” he says, noticing smoke rising up from his RTO’s radio pack.

  “It’s the radio, sir,” says Sherman, sporting a black eye. “It’s toast. But who knows, maybe I can fix it.”

  Bowman nods. If the radio is broken, the platoon is now cut off from the rest of the Army. They are officially off the reservation, at least until they rejoin their company.

  “Sergeant Ruiz?” Corporal Hicks says. He is standing over Hawkeye, who sits on a curb, rocking back and forth. “He don’t look so good, Sergeant.”

  Ruiz wipes blood from his face and crouches down to face the soldier. Hawkeye shivers, sweating and pale, with his face buried in his hands. Getting the shakes is common after combat due to an excess of adrenaline.

  The Sergeant put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “You all right, son?”

  Hawkeye removes his hands from his face. His N95 mask is gone. Ruiz sees a jagged hole where a Mad Dog bit and tore away a chunk of flesh from his cheek. The skin around the wound is swollen and inflamed.

  “Sergeant,” the boy says vacantly. “I don’t feel so good, you know?”

  “Just a scratch,” says Ruiz, involuntarily jerking his hand away.

  Hicks is calling for the medic.

  They have little time to patch up their wounds and take stock of themselves. Bowman is issuing new orders. They are still shooting and using up ammunition, there are too many civilians in the area, and they are not secure. Time to move. Their objective is very close now. Within just a few blocks, they’ll be back with Charlie Company in a defensive position behind some thirty-cals. Then they can rest.

  Bowman will be happy to turn this mess over to the company CO and let him decide what to do.

  The chain of command appears to have figured out the Mad Dog threat as well and is trying to consolidate its forces in New York. It’s the smart thing to do, he believes: Hold what can be held and give up the rest. But the politicians are not going to want to give up anything. They are going to give the Army an impossible task. And officers do not always make smart decisions when surprised. It is going to be chaos.

  In any case, it may be too late to consolidate in a city that is already beginning to swarm with infected.

  Bowman, in fact, is now wondering how long, given a probable exponential spread of infection in the general population, Eighth Brigade will be able to remain effective as a fighting unit. He is aware that the ramifications go far beyond the Army and his tiny corner of it. He is just not ready to face them yet.

  Right now, the end of the world is simply too big to even contemplate.

  Chapter 5

  I can’t work like this!

  Dr. Joe Hardy hustles into his office with Dr. Valeriya Petrova in hot pursuit, their labcoats flapping behind them.

  “Here it is,” he says, grabbing his putter from behind his desk. “Now we’re in business.” He turns around and begins to head back out the door, but his colleague blocks his way, staring at him coldly.

  “Really, Doctor, this is no time for golf practice,” Petrova says in her Russian accent.

  “Watch me,” he says, pushing past her.

  “Are you drunk, Doctor?”

  He laughs derisively. “No, hungry,” he says, patting his enormous stomach. “Both make me irritable, so be warned.”

  She gives chase. “We need to discuss my findings.”

  “Findings!” He pauses a moment to face her. “Findings?”

  “Yes. The implications are significant.”

  “Honestly, Valeriya, do you really think anybody gives a flying shit about your findings right now?”

  “But they are significant, Doctor. Did you not agree?”

  “Agree with what? Do you realize that we’ve got some serious problems that we are dealing with here?”

  She looks surprised. “You did not get my email?”

  Hardy laughs again and keeps walking, swinging his putter. Petrova stomps her right foot in frustration, her face flushed, and hurries to catch up with him, marching along at his side. What a strange woman, he thinks. Smoky, exotic looks and foreign accent that inspire lust. A masculine, abrupt manner that inspires loathing. Half the time, he doesn’t know if he wants to buy her flowers or kill her.

  Now Dr. Lucas steps out of his office, hastily repositions his glasses on his nose, and says, “Ah, Dr. Hardy, good to see you. Are you going to do somet
hing about the air conditioning or not? You may have, ah, noticed that it’s freezing in here.”

  “He is right,” Petrova says. “It is cold in this building.”

  Hardy sighs. “People, I’m the director, not the facility manager. Who, by the way, is MIA. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Well, I can’t work like this, sir!” Lucas challenges him. “If you want me to keep at my research while we’re going to be stuck living here for the near future, you could at least try to provide decent working conditions.”

  “Tape some garbage bags over the air vents,” Hardy tells him, brushing past.

  Dr. Saunders steps out of his lab, his wide balding head gleaming under the fluorescent lights, and shouts down the hallway, “Hey Joe! Any word from CDC or USAMRIID yet on our rescue before we freeze to death and starve?”

  “No!” Hardy shouts over his shoulder, and keeps moving.

  “Five minutes, Doctor,” Petrova says. “That is all I ask. It is quite urgent.”

  They enter the employee break room. Hardy walks up to one of the vending machines and studies it for a few moments.

  “Stand back, Dr. Petrova,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Just move back two, maybe three steps.”

  “Why? You—here? Is this acceptable?”

  “Yes, that’s perfect, thank you.”

  He takes a deep breath just before swinging the putter as hard as he can at the machine. The club connects with the glass front and shatters it. The noise is startling. Glass shards spill onto the floor.

  “Wow,” he laughs. “Did you see that?”

  “You could have warned me you would do this,” Petrova tells him.

  “Believe it or not, it scared me as much as it scared you.”

  Hardy looks down at himself, half expecting to see pieces of glass sticking out of his large, round body accompanied by his mother’s voice yelling at him as a kid, See, that’s what you get for playing with things you don’t understand, Joey. Seeing himself unscathed, he pulls down his mask and reaches into the machine to plunder a package of peanut M&Ms, which he tears open with a hungry grunt.