Tooth And Nail

by Craig DiLouie

  “No, Sandy. I am alone.”

  “Stringer isn’t there?”

  “I am speaking to my—”

  The voice in her head suddenly shouts: Stringer!

  Ignoring Cohen’s questioning, she clicks to the image of Sims lying in the doorway to the Men’s Room.

  “Oh,” she says quietly.

  Behind Sims, in the mirror on the bathroom wall, she can see Jackson looking at himself, far enough from the camera so that the resolution is not very good, but close enough for her to see what he is doing.

  He is poking very gingerly at his right eye. Or rather, his left eye, which only looks like his right eye in the mirror. Yes, he is poking at his eye.

  Or rather, what is left of his eye.

  Jackson, the retired, overweight, out-of-shape cop, beat Baird. But Baird bit his face and ruined his left eye.

  Jackson’s clearly in shock. And almost certainly infected.

  He has not yet turned, but it is only a matter of time.

  Trust me

  There are now four infected people in their section of the building, and two, possibly three uninfected survivors trapped inside with them.

  “Sandy, listen to me,” she says into the phone. “I am looking at the security camera feeds and they are showing me the corridor outside Dr. Saunders’ office.”

  “Can you see if Dr. Baird is still around?”

  “It is not Dr. Baird anymore, Sandy,” Petrova says. “In any case, he is dead.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Petrova grips the phone, her hand and ear slick with sweat.

  “Drs. Lucas and Saunders are now infected and have become Mad Dogs themselves,” she says. “And Marsha Fuentes.”

  “There’s three of them now?”

  “I am afraid so. Actually, four. Stringer Jackson has been bitten. He has not yet become a Mad Dog, but I believe he will transform soon, which is why it is essential you try to get to me now, where it is safe.”

  “That’s not supposed to happen. You can’t become a Mad Dog if you get bitten. You only get it if the virus enters the brain. And no virus has an incubation period that short—”

  Petrova sighs loudly. “I cannot get into the details, but what I am telling you is true.”

  “Well, I can’t stay here forever with those things around, Dr. Petrova,” Cohen says, her voice edged with hysteria. “You have to help me. You have to make them leave.”

  “I cannot do that, Sandy.”

  “Make them leave. Please. Please.”

  “Listen to me. I cannot make them leave, but I can see where they are by using the security cameras. That means I can tell you when it is generally safe to come to my location.”

  “You want me to leave here and go out there? Are you freaking nuts?”

  “Right now, Dr. Lucas and Marsha Fuentes are in the auditorium and heading towards the elevator lobby,” Petrova says, rapidly scanning the flipping images on the screens. She blinks, surprised at how fast the Mad Dogs move. “And Dr. Saunders, um, is now in Dr. Hardy’s office.”

  “Saunders is too close!” Cohen hisses.

  “If you go now, you can make it.”

  “What if there’s another one of these Mad Dogs in one of the offices?”

  Petrova admits the possibility to herself, but there is no other way to get Cohen to the safety of the Security Command Center without her eventually abandoning the relative security of her hiding place. There is no sure thing here. She has to take a chance or stay where she is, cut off from food and water and help.

  “I know for a fact that there are no other Mad Dogs,” she lies. “Trust me. Do you know the way to the Command Center?”

  “But after I hang up, I won’t know where they are.”

  “This is a good time for you to leave Dr. Sims’ office and come here.”

  She can hear Cohen taking deep breaths, getting up her nerve.

  “No!” she hisses. “I can’t.”

  Petrova thinks for a moment, then says, “Do you have a cell phone? If you do, then we could stay on the line together, and I can walk you here safely.”

  “Yes, I have one. But all the lines are jammed, aren’t they?”

  “It is possible to get through. So try. Please.” She reads Cohen the direct dial number of the phone in the Security Command Center. “Call now. Try a few times. If it doesn’t work, then call me again using the interoffice line, which we know so far is reliable.”

  Before Cohen can respond, she hangs up.

  The silence is startling.

  Panicking, she flips through the images until she sees Baird lying on the floor. He is no longer twitching. He is dead. Really and truly dead. Thank God.

  Aaa-aah-aaaahhhh

  She bites her lip hard to prevent these little shrieks from sliding into uncontrollable hysteria. Wrapping her arms around her ribs, she rocks back and forth.

  The phone rings, sending an electric wave of adrenaline through her body. She snatches up the phone, bathed in the glow of the screens.

  “Yes?”

  “I got through! I can’t believe it.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Petrova hisses.

  “I’m on my cell.”

  “That is good. I will guide you, Sandy.”

  Petrova scans the images until she confirms the positions of the Mad Dogs and Jackson, who is still at the mirror, staring dumbly at himself and probing his ruined eye.

  “This is a good time,” she says. “You can go. But hurry.”

  “All right, I’m up,” Cohen tells her.

  Sandy Cohen appears on the left screen, dancing from foot to foot to restore her circulation. She is still wearing the white gown she had on in the lab, which flaps around her legs.

  “Can you see me?” she asks.

  “Go now. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Stop. Stop! Go into the office on your right. Now!”

  Cohen disappears from the screen. Seconds later, Saunders appears, his hands balled into fists clasped against his chest and his head jerking like a bird’s. He stops outside the office Cohen entered, appearing to sniff the air.

  “Do not move even slightly, Sandy,” Petrova whispers into the phone.

  Saunders turns, runs down the hall and enters East Lab.

  “Now. Go. Now.”

  The lab technician darts out into the hall on tip toes, looking both ways, holding the phone against her ear.

  “Turn right at the end of the hall,” Petrova tells her.

  Cohen turns the corner and abruptly freezes in her tracks, putting her hand over her mouth.

  Petrova curses herself. The horrors that she has already begun to digest are new to Cohen. She should have warned the woman about what she was going to see.

  “That is Dr. Baird,” she says. “He is dead. He is no threat to you.”

  “Oh my God,” Cohen says.

  “Be quiet,” Petrova says. “Dr. Lucas and Fuentes are heading in your direction. You can make it, but you must go now.”

  She sees Cohen nod vigorously, dance around Baird’s corpse, and begin walking rapidly towards the Security Center, looking over her shoulder every few steps to make sure nobody is coming up behind her.

  Petrova says, “You are doing just fine. You are very close now.”

  “Almost there,” Cohen huffs, already out of breath.

  “You can do it,” Petrova tells her.

  The digital projector blinks out, the lights shut off and Petrova is plunged into darkness and silence so total she wonders if she’s dead.

  She sits in the dark, her heart pounding against her ribcage and her blood crashing in her ears.

  The power has gone out.

  The phone in her hand is dead.

  She can hear Cohen shouting, “Hello? Hello?” out in the hall, the sound muffled and distant.

  “Be quiet,” Petrova hisses at the dark. “Be quiet or they will find you.”

  The woman is not far away. She’s about thirty feet down the hall, in fact.

&nbs
p; “The power’s out, Dr. Petrova!” Cohen wails. “Help me!”

  Petrova hears thuds against the wall.

  “Oh, no,” she says.

  “Help me, please!”

  Cohen is not being attacked. She is banging against the wall with her fists, which Petrova can hear in the Command Center.

  That is how close she is. Closer even than Petrova initially thought.

  “Come and get me! Please!”

  And if she keeps this up, she is going to get herself killed or infected.

  Petrova formulates a plan on the spot. She knows where the door is and believes she can find it in the dark easily. She will open it and guide Cohen to safety using her voice before the woman’s screaming brings every Mad Dog in the place running.

  Only she doesn’t move. She is literally frozen with fear.

  Cohen is still shouting for help.

  Petrova begins to crawl back under the operator’s desk, burrowing into the wires and the dust and the cobwebs and the residual heat of the electronics.

  The last thing Petrova hears before she falls asleep is the horrible sound of a struggle that she takes into her dreams with her.

  Chapter 8

  We are the world’s most powerful military

  and we are being beaten on our own ground

  Lieutenants Bowman and Knight, joined by their platoon sergeants Kemper and Jim Vaughan, stand on the roof of the Samuel J. Tilden International Middle School, which their units have cleared and secured, and listen to the gunfire in the city.

  The school is only a couple of stories tall but even this high up, they have an almost antiseptic view of the city’s Midtown district. The buildings block their view of the wholesale slaughter going on at the street level of the city. But they can hear it.

  To Bowman, leaning against the parapet and gazing out into the smoky haze produced by scores of unchecked fires, it is as if New York itself were a giant body, its people healthy cells one by one being converted into virus that is beating the crap out of the body’s immune system.

  And to carry this analogy further, the immune system, well, that would be two brigades of infantry of the U.S. Army, about six thousand men and women in all—each a highly trained and heavily armed lean, green fighting machine.

  We are the world’s greatest military and we are being beaten on our own ground, he thinks. By the people we swore to protect, armed only with tooth and nail.

  On the other side of the roof, Sergeant Lewis fires his M21 sniper rifle. He is up here fighting his own private war, shooting Mad Dogs down in the street behind the school.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Knight says. “Is this really happening?”

  “It’s a numbers game, Steve,” Bowman tells him. “You take five guys who develop Mad Dog symptoms. They each bite one other person and that one other person turns into a Mad Dog. Then that person bites somebody else. Every couple of hours.”

  Knight whistles. “Jesus, do the math!”

  “Suppose just ten percent of the population of this city becomes a Mad Dog. Just one out of ten. And then suppose we had the men and the weapons and a safe position to shoot them down from.”

  Knight finishes for him. “There aren’t enough bullets.”

  Bowman nods. “It’s a numbers game. There’s no way to stop this. It’s only going to get worse. In a few hours, maybe a day, ten percent becomes twenty percent. A flood.”

  Across the street, a civilian in a private office has noticed them and is holding up a sign against his window that says: trapped, help.

  The officers move to another part of the roof, seething with shame.

  They can only help those they can without risking the security of the unit. For a moment, Bowman thinks of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which his uncle Gabe, a recovering alcoholic in AA, taught him when he was ten years old: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

  “Who could pull the trigger that many times anyhow?” Knight wonders.

  “Private Chen couldn’t,” Bowman murmurs. The soldier wouldn’t be the last who would rather eat a bullet than fight this war, either.

  Knight continues, “One of the reasons we got chewed up so bad all the way here is some of my boys just couldn’t shoot Americans.” He glances at his platoon sergeant, then looks away. “Have you, uh, shared your discovery with your platoon?”

  “They’re not dumb,” Bowman says. “They know what’s going on. It’s just that nobody’s said it out loud for them yet. They haven’t had a minute to think about it.”

  “Yes,” says Knight.

  “I guess we’ll have to tell them.”

  They flinch as the muffled boom of an explosion reaches their ears. A large cloud of smoke and dust billows out from behind a building between them and Times Square. Even yesterday, this would have been remarkable to them. Today, they take it in stride.

  Knight laughs viciously. “We’re going to tell them how their families, and everybody they know, are probably dying or being converted into those things out there.”

  “We’re going to tell them to do their jobs, Steve.”

  Lewis fires his rifle, which discharges with a loud bang.

  “It’s getting personal, Todd. You better come up with something better than that if you want them to keep fighting for a country that’s falling apart around them.”

  Bowman looks at Knight in surprise. “Why me?”

  Knight smiles sadly. “You’re the one who’s in charge here, Todd.”

  “We’re the same rank, but you’ve got seniority over me. You’ve got seniority over Greg Bishop of First Platoon, too. You’re in command.”

  “On the way over here . . .” Knight looks at Sergeant First Class Vaughan, who stares back at him stonily, his expression inscrutable behind his N95 mask. “I was one of the people who couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t even give the order. I froze. It was Sergeant Vaughan here that got us out.”

  “Damn, Steve,” Bowman says quietly.

  He glances at Vaughan, but the NCO is a professional and while his face is flushed, making the diagonal scar across his face livid, his gray eyes give nothing away.

  Knight says, “A lot of my boys are dead because I couldn’t tell them to shoot.”

  Tears stream down the officer’s face. Vaughan lowers his eyes. Knight looks away, gazing at the skyscrapers.

  “Twenty-five percent casualties,” he adds. “But you know what?” He hisses, fiercely, “If I could go back and do it all over again, I still wouldn’t give that goddamn order.”

  Bowman says nothing. He had given the order to shoot. He personally not only shot Mad Dogs, he also shot down uninfected civilians who got in his way.

  By any definition, he is a murderer and a war criminal. He knows it. His own platoon sergeant knows it. The two men were made from the same stuff; he saw Kemper do the same as him to get the platoon out of the riot and to safety.

  And if they did not do what they did, if they were not war criminals, they might all be dead right now.

  Nevertheless, he can’t shake the feeling that he is damned.

  The officers hear the piercing wail of a fire engine, punctuated by the bursts of its horn. It is a plucky sound amid the rattle of small arms fire and distant screams, reminding them that somewhere, out there, people are still fighting back against the rising tide of violence and anarchy.

  The sound reminds them that it is not every man for himself out there. Not yet.

  Similarly, the power continues to cut in and out, but somebody is still manning the controls at the power plant, and somebody is still delivering coal to burn to make electricity. In all the jobs that matter, from cop to soldier to paramedic to power plant operator, people are still doing their duty. Bowman finds strength in this idea.

  Knight wipes the tears from his face and clears his throat.

  “I wouldn’t give the order,” he says. “I guess that makes me a n
ice guy or something. But I have no right to lead Charlie.” He sighs. “We should have stayed where we were. We were doing some good there.”

  “No,” Bowman says. His eyes follow a pair of helicopters moving over the East River until they disappear behind a tall building. He takes it as a good sign that there are still birds in the air. “Captain West had the right idea trying to concentrate the Company. Warlord is spread out all over Manhattan and is vulnerable to being destroyed piecemeal. But it’s too late. We got chewed up. We should have consolidated sooner.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Knight says. “We shouldn’t have been spread out in the first place, then. It’s a mystery. I have a hard time believing that either the government or the Army didn’t know about the infection rate among the Mad Dogs.”

  “Could be they were trying to avoid pushing an already panicked country into outright hysteria,” Bowman says. “Could be that they honestly didn’t know. Who knows? Right now, my situational awareness extends to what I can see with my own eyes.”

  “Well, if somebody higher up knew about this and didn’t tell us, they may have just destroyed our brigade.”

  Bowman stares at him intensely and says, “Hell, Steve. Forget Quarantine. If somebody higher up knew and didn’t tell us, they may have destroyed the U.S. Army.”

  Gaps in the chain of command

  Sherman tries again to raise Warlord, the call sign for Battalion, and Quarantine, which is Brigade’s call sign, without success.

  “Warlord, Warlord, this is War Dogs, do you copy, over?”

  No answer from Battalion. The Battalion net is being overloaded with chaotic messages blending together into one long screech. From what the RTO can tell, War Hammer is screaming for reinforcements and ammunition, Warmonger reports the successful occupation of the old Seventh Regiment Armory Building, and War Pig says it has three men down and where’s their goddamn medevac.

  “Warlord, Warlord,” Sherman says, then stops. It’s useless.

  Sherman switches to the Brigade net and tries to hail Quarantine.

  Nobody answers. The only officer he can get a hold of, as they say in the ranks, is General Confusion. The voices on the Brigade net are less panicked than Charlie’s sister companies, but equally confused. There are units missing, trying to consolidate, requesting orders, demanding resupply, on the move, taking casualties. There are gaps in the chain of command. Units are disappearing or moving without their commanders knowing it.