“I jacked the rich kids’ lockers,” Wyatt says, beaming, sifting through the candy with his hands. He adds hastily, “It’s not like they’re coming back.”
Ratliff starts to laugh, but it fades quickly.
“You keep touching other people’s stuff and you’re going to get sick, Joel,” Mooney says, then reconsiders. “OK. Screw it. Give me that Mars bar.”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Now,” Mooney says, glowering.
Wyatt grins again, his cheeks bulging with chocolate, and hands him the candy bar.
Mooney takes a bite and chews slowly. An instant later, he is wolfing the rest of it down, gnawing rapidly until his jaw muscles protest from the sudden overload. Now here is something to live for. Nothing ever tasted so good in his life. He reaches and grabs a carton of apple juice, spears it with the straw, and sucks it down in several long gulps. The sugar rings his brain like a bell.
“That’s my stuff!” Wyatt whines as Ratliff comes over and grabs a pack of cupcakes.
“There’s plenty for everybody,” Mooney says.
“That’s what your mom. . . .” Finnegan says, his voice trailing off. Nobody laughs. Instead, the boys stare off into some point in space and the atmosphere begins to fill with despair, like a fast-acting poison. Mooney can’t stand it anymore.
“Everybody come and get a candy bar,” he says. “Joel’s buying.”
The boys swipe at his pile, almost picking it clean. “Thanks, Joel!” they tell him.
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Wyatt tells Mooney.
“We have appointed you our new morale officer,” Mooney says.
“Why? Didn’t everybody find the LT’s speech uplifting? ‘Good day, uh, gentlemen, I’m the LT. Blah, blah, blah, uh, the world’s ending, and you’re still in the Army.’”
The boys laugh, chewing on their candy.
“You didn’t happen to find any beer in the lockers, did you, Joel?” says Finnegan.
“Or a couple of joints, maybe?” Carrillo wants to know, laughing.
“How about valium?” says Ratliff.
“Southern Comfort?”
“Codeine?”
“Heroin?”
They sound like they are horsing around, but Mooney can tell they are dead serious. They have recently learned that the road of duty now leads face first into a brick wall, presenting a choice that Billy Chen refused to continue making and that they are still trying to avoid. They are not sure what they now owe, and to whom. They do not want anything to do with Lieutenant Bowman’s total war, but they see no way out of the Army and no way home and besides, home may not even be there anymore.
A few hours of escape would be welcome.
“I had a teacher who kept a quart of whiskey in his drawer,” Finnegan says. “We’d sneak in during lunch period and take a few sips, and replace it with water.”
“I can’t believe a year and half ago I was graduating from high school,” says Carrillo, eyeing the student desks stacked against the far wall. “Man, I’ve seen a lot of shit.”
“Eighteen going on forty-five,” Ratliff says, and Mooney smiles, nodding.
“Man, I would kill for an ice cold bottle of Bud,” Finnegan says.
“Screw Bud,” says Ratliff. “Heineken’s the best.”
“I only drink the good stuff,” Carrillo boasts. “Guinness on tap.”
“Carrillo likes to eat his beers.”
“The domestics are just yellow water, you guys. You’re drinking carbonated urine.”
“I like Bud.”
“What about Corona?”
“Hey, man, what’s the difference between a half and half and a black and tan? I could never figure that out.”
Rollins finishes his Hershey’s chocolate bar, sighs and stares at the wrapper wistfully. “I just thought of something,” he says. “If things are as bad as LT says, I wonder if they’re making more of these chocolate bars or if this is all there is for a while.”
“Or movies,” says Finnegan. “Live concerts. Football games. Hustler.”
“PlayStation,” says Wyatt. “Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.”
“Hot chicks, dope, rock and roll, and beer,” says Ratliff.
“My old man won’t like that,” Corporal Eckhardt says across the room, scrubbing his carbine’s firing pin and bolt assembly with a toothbrush and solvent to get rid of carbon residue. “He can really put it away. He can down two six-packs a night, pass out and then wake up the next day and go to work.”
“Sounds like a swell guy,” says Wyatt, snorting.
“My old man’s a psycho. If anybody can survive this thing, he will.”
“My dad’s an accountant,” says Finnegan. “He hates violence. He almost had a heart attack when I joined the Army and he found out they were sending me to Iraq.”
“My dad’s got a basement full of guns,” says Carrillo. “He loves his AK47 more than he loves my mom. He’s a real jerk. Jerks like him always make it.”
“Kind of shows you what kind of world is going to pop out the other side of this giant asshole,” Mooney says.
“Yeah, all the pussies will be dead,” says Eckhardt.
“And all the psychos will be running the place,” Mooney says. “Think about it.”
The soldiers fall silent, trying not to think about it.
“My girl,” Ratliff says fiercely but quietly, almost to himself. “She’s tough. She’ll be okay. Her dad owns a gun. I taught her how to shoot. She’s going to make it.”
Finnegan looks out the window, squinting into the sunlight. Suddenly, he starts laughing uncontrollably. Everybody looks at him.
“You know, my dad,” he says, then stops abruptly, his laughter trailing off and his face slowly going blank.
Moments later, an air raid siren interrupts their gloom, slowly winding up somewhere in midtown Manhattan. A siren across the river begins wailing in response, then another from somewhere farther away, tinny and distant. The grating sound builds until it is almost deafening.
Mooney looks out the window. The quality of the sunlight tells him it is late afternoon. Seventeen hundred hours, to be exact.
The citywide curfew is now in effect.
The boys slowly rise to their feet. Their plan is to rustle up some supper for themselves. After that, they have a funeral to attend.
In two hours, the American sun will set, and it will be oh-dark.
One man, at the right place at the right time,
making a difference
Three police officers, clad in head-to-toe black BDUs, body armor and bulky clear-visor helmets, tread slowly down the street, newspapers scuttling around their boots and clinging to their legs. One of the cops leans on a comrade for support, while the third, a tall woman with a long braid protruding from under her helmet, brings up the rear, dragging her clear ballistic shield. They are all exhausted, but it is her turn to fight. They were going east at one time, but got turned around and are now heading west, towards the sounds of gunfire.
Gunfire means people. Security.
Night is falling. Around them, the streetlights flare to life in the dusk.
As if awaiting this signal, two Mad Dogs bolt out of a nearby apartment building, past construction scaffolding with posters plastered all over it advertising an aging pop singer’s farewell tour, and race towards the riot control police, yelping.
The woman assumes a fighting stance, raising her truncheon and shield, while her comrades sink to their knees on the asphalt behind her, panting.
She waits for the Mad Dogs to approach, taking deep breaths, then quickly sidesteps the first, a middle-aged man in hospital scrubs, who runs by and comes to a skidding halt. Moments later, the other, a large man in coveralls, comes flying at her, snarling. She body checks him with her shield, stunning him, then brings her truncheon down on his skull, killing him instantly. An instant later, she pivots and backhands the first man with her shield, making him spin until he trips over his own feet.
The woman staggers back, almost finished by the effort, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her armor and weapons, while the man scrabbles his way back onto his feet and begins pacing in front of her like a nervous cat, howling.
They were working riot control near Grand Central Station, barring thousands of people from attempting to board the trains that stopped running days ago, the station having since been converted into a Lyssa clinic. Then hundreds of Mad Dogs appeared and began tearing into the frantic crowd and biting everybody in sight.
The riot control unit advanced, trying to separate the Mad Dogs from the uninfected, and found themselves trapped between the two.
Only tear gas saved them.
The cops fired CS grenades, which burst in huge clouds of brilliant white gas. Mad Dogs and uninfected people alike ran blindly through the clouds, tears and mucus streaming from their eyes and noses, clawing at their clothes and burning skin. Dozens of people bent over and began choking and vomiting. The Mad Dogs suffered the most. Tear gas reacts with moisture on the skin and in the eyes, and Mad Dogs are soaked with sweat and saliva. Tear gas also burns the nose and throat, and the infected already find it enormously painful to swallow because the Mad Dog strain paralyzes the nerves in the throat to force production of saliva.
The unit was broken, the cops scattered and trying to return to their station. For this group, it has been a running fight lasting nearly a mile along a circuitous path. There were five of them in the beginning. But one was chased into a plate glass window, and the other died heroically in front of a Staples store to buy time for this friends to escape.
The man in scrubs, growling, leaps through the air—
And falls to the ground with a loud bang.
A puff of smoke rises from a nearby rooftop.
Sergeant Lewis, sitting on a stool on the school’s roof nursing a wad of Red Man dip in his cheek, sees another Mad Dog come running at the cops from the apartment building. He sizes up the man, aims center-mass at his body using his scope, and drops him with a shot between the shoulder blades.
The cops duck for a moment, glance at each other, and then begin looking around for the shooter.
This I like, he thinks, taking a quick moment to spit. Clear-cut ethics. One man, at the right place at the right time, making a difference.
Now all we need to do is put every man with a uniform, a gun and some training in the right place to wait for the right time. Break the chain of infection everywhere and roll this plague back into Pandora’s Box or wherever it came from.
Small arms fire begins cascading to the south, and he glances in that direction, wondering what kind of trouble Alpha and Bravo Companies have gotten themselves into. They should have shown up an hour ago. They stepped off late and they are meeting resistance along the way. Now they are losing the light.
He turns back just in time to see another Mad Dog, an obese woman in a jogging suit, running towards the woman cop, who braces herself and raises her truncheon to strike.
Damn.
He fires and misses.
Damn!
The M21 is a semi-automatic weapon, however, which means he gets another shot. He fires again. The woman flops to the ground, convulsing and pouring blood from a smoking hole in her back.
This is my street, he thinks, spitting tobacco juice. I give you free passage. You will be safe as long as you travel here under my protection. Next time, don’t bring a billy club to Armageddon.
He glances up at the sky. Just enough daylight to make good on this promise. Feeling magnanimous, he waves, hoping they see him.
They are not looking up at the buildings, however.
They are trying to run.
Peering into his scope, he sees one of the cops, crawling on hands and knees, while the other man staggers away, lurching on tired legs, following the woman cop who sprints ahead of them with all of her remaining strength.
“God,” he whispers in awe.
Beyond the three cops, a moving wall of Mad Dogs is advancing down the street, hair matted and disheveled, dressed in rags, filthy and trailing their own waste.
Thousands of them.
The horde tramples and grinds down the first cop like road kill without breaking its stride. The second stumbles and falls to his knees. Almost instantly, the mob plows into him with the force of a car, tosses him into the air like a doll, and quarters him neatly, spraying a cloud of blood into the air.
The woman cop stops in the middle of the street and turns around, bracing her shield and holding her truncheon over her head, her braid spilling down her back.
Lewis’ rifle bangs: A Mad Dog drops. Bangs again, and another falls. He is trying to make a hole for the woman, but he knows it is useless. He sees the faces of the infected as he kills them. Their faces have no expression, only moving when their mouths contort into snarls and yelps, while their eyes remain fixed with an alien stare.
He fires again and again, draining the magazine.
Save one bullet for her, he tells himself.
No, she can make it.
No, she’s already dead.
His rifle clicks empty.
The cop swings her truncheon once before disappearing into the throng, which swallows her whole, instantly, as if she never existed.
“God damn you bastards!” Lewis roars in a sudden blind rage, standing and shaking his fist. “I’ll kill every one of you!”
His radio crackles in his ear.
Who are you shouting at, Sergeant?
He turns and sees the officers and senior NCOs clustered on the other side of the roof, staring at him.
Lewis wipes his eyes and keys his handset.
“You’d better come see this, LT,” he says. “You’d better come right now.”
Job security
McLeod flips the girl onto her stomach so he does not have to look at her face, particularly her eyes, which are wide open and glassy and staring. He bends down, grabs her ankles using latex gloves, and begins pulling her across the street, followed by a dense cloud of flies. Her dress hikes up, exposing her bare legs, and her face drags along the ground, leaving a thick smear of coagulated blood from the bullet hole in her throat.
“Oh, God,” he says, repulsed, trying not to look, humming loudly to shut out the sound of her face rasping against the asphalt.
“Hold up, Private,” a voice says behind him.
“Roger that,” McLeod says, flinging the girl’s legs down and staggering away from the corpse.
“Here. Take this.” It’s Doc Waters, holding out a Q-Tip.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s Vicks vapor rub. Rub some under your nose and it’ll cut out the stink.”
McLeod smiles, waving flies away from his face. “Thanks, Doctor. You’re the best.”
“Not in your nose, Private. Under it. There you go. Technically, you should not even be putting it under your nose. But it should help against the smell of the dead.”
“I don’t care what it does to me, as long as it works.” McLeod begins sniffing dramatically. “How about that. It does work.”
“You know, you really shouldn’t stack corpses like that. You should have used body bags. If you need to move them again, you’ll have to use a shovel.”
“Not enough bags, I guess. Shovelers, we got lots of.”
“I see.” Doc Waters gestures at the three other soldiers dragging corpses into the fly-covered pile near the front of the building. “So you’re not the only one in the shitter, Private. Who are these guys?”
McLeod grins. “They’re the misfits from First Platoon who started fighting after the LT’s speech telling us how everybody we know is dying back home.”
Doc Waters eyes him. “When was the last time you got some shuteye?”
“What is this wondrous thing you call ‘shuteye’?”
The combat medic sighs. “Sergeant Ruiz doesn’t have the authority to give you an Article 15 punishment. I’ll put in a word with him about how hard he�
��s riding you.”
“Why? Look at me, Doctor. I’m working outside. Exercise, sunlight, fresh air.”
The truth is he has not been this tired since Basic. He remembers sleeping on his feet all the way to some range in the middle of nowhere, stuffed into a cattle car with the rest of his training company. That was nothing compared to this. One thing he can thank the Army for: a deep appreciation for the simple things in life that are absent during combat, like a hot shower, air-conditioning, greasy burgers and fries, time for yourself, driving a car going nowhere in particular, privacy, a girlfriend. And decent sleep.
They flinch at the high-pitched crack of carbines down the street. First Platoon boys providing security for the cleanup detail, dropping Mad Dogs at the perimeter.
“And my own bodyguards,” McLeod adds, then turns and shouts, “Keep ’em coming! Get some!” He grins. “They keep killing Mad Dogs over there, and me and my new friends keep stacking them nice and neat over here so we can burn them later for public health. Do you know what I call that, Doctor? Do you?”
“No, what do you call that, Private?” Doc Waters asks, his patience suddenly exhausted.
“Job security!”
The medic chuckles despite himself, shaking his head.
A soldier calls from the front doors of the school. “We got more people coming in, Doc. You want to check them out?”
“You’re a piece of work, Private,” Doc Waters tells McLeod, and returns to the front doors of the school, where four civilians are being held at gunpoint.
“I try my best, Doctor,” McLeod mutters, bending over and grabbing the girl’s ankles. “I try my best.”
First Platoon’s Sergeant Hooper tells the detail to stop work for the day and come get some chow.
“Roger that,” says McLeod, dropping the corpse’s legs again, stripping off his gloves and walking over to the curb, where the boys from First Platoon are already washing their hands and tearing the plastic wrapping off their MREs.
The MRE provides twelve hundred calories and contains a main entrée, side dish, plastic spoon, bread or crackers and spread, sports drink or dairy shake or some other beverage, seasonings, pack of gum, candy such as Tootsie Rolls or a pastry, flameless ration heater, matches, napkins and moist toilette.
Tooth And Nail Page 18