“No!” Adam called out. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot!”
Adam hoped this would defuse the situation, assure the man he had nothing to fear.
But instead, the man fired again. Adam screamed as that infernal spoke finally released his foot from captivity, but again the man had missed. He was a foot away now, close enough Adam could see the man’s flushed cheeks, feel the terrible heat radiating from his rotting body.
“Why aren’t you sick?”
The man stood there, unsteady on his feet, as if the street was rippling beneath him, the gun tottering from side to side. He was at point-blank range; there was nowhere for Adam to go.
“Why … aren’t… you… sick?”
Then a coughing spell overcame him, and for a moment, Adam couldn’t believe his luck; he stood there, watching Medusa tear this man apart from the inside out. Finally, he made his move. He drove into the man’s midsection, shoulder-first, and the pair flopped to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Still coughing, the man pawed at Adam’s face and head, but he got up a little high, and Adam slid his hand onto the barrel of the gun. Now he had the leverage, and he began pushing the muzzle away from his torso. Next, he went for the trigger, wedging his thumb under the other man’s finger into the trigger guard; he felt the skin from his knuckle peel back.
The pain was huge and immediate, like his thumb had been dipped in fire. But he dug deeper, seeking the leverage he needed now that the muzzle was facing the other way.
Dig, dig, dig, dig!
Tears streamed from the corner of his eyes and down into his ears. Every muscle howled with pain and fatigue. He felt congestion fill his nose and throat. As his left thumb continued its quest, Adam used his right arm to block the man’s forehead. His lips were peeled back, his teeth flashing and clicking together. No words were exchanged, just a series of painful, desperate, primal grunts from both men.
Now or never, Adam, now or never. Adam pulled hard on the trigger, screaming like a banshee as he did so; the gun roared and bucked between their bodies. Immediately, the man’s body went limp and eased down on Adam like a sigh. Adam reacted with a half-gasp, half-scream. As quickly as it had begun, it was over, and Adam was alone on the street, in the middle of this deepening shitstorm.
He staggered to his feet and stumbled in a little semi-circle around the man.
He heard himself howling, a deep, guttural thing of victory, a war cry of sorts, and he could scarcely believe the sound was coming out of his own body. He began shivering, and his stomach heaved.
Ingrained habits died hard, and so he glanced up and down the street for rubberneckers, eyewitnesses, police officers. At a house just catty-corner to him, there was a little girl standing on a covered porch, wearing a bright red dress that was emblazoned with yellow flowers. She stood there holding a stuffed pig, a blank look on her face. As Adam watched her watching him, he could hear in the distance the sounds of sirens and gunfire and shouts and screams. He looked back toward the intersection where this had all started; the two cars were still engaged in their embrace, where, unbeknownst to Adam, they would remain until the rubber tires disintegrated into dust, until the cars’ metallic paint had decayed to a rusted orange.
His head hurt.
He sat down.
Right on the street.
Next to the man he’d just killed.
His mind was an empty thing, a blank notebook.
He looked back at the porch, but the little girl was gone, and he didn’t know if she’d been there at all or if he’d been hallucinating. He mounted his bike again and pedaled for home. The rain intensified as he drew closer to his house, drowning out everything else. Two minutes later, he braked at his front stoop, hopped off the bike and carried it inside. His clothes were soaked with a thin mixture of blood and rainwater, and he left a trail of pinkish spatter as he climbed up the stairs. He changed into dry clothes and crawled into bed. He turned on the news.
Outbreak, panic, blah, blah, blah.
He slept.
Outside, the rain roared.
INTERLUDE
FROM LEAFLETS AIR-DROPPED OVER CITIES IN MIDWEST & SOUTH AUGUST 15
*ATTENTION*
BY ORDER OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
All healthy individuals are ORDERED to immediately report to Busch Stadium, West Entrance, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America for examination by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You will be provided food, clean water, and shelter, and you will be generously compensated.
You will provide a blood sample for use in the development of a vaccine for the Medusa virus.
Failure to comply with this directive shall constitute a federal crime pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code.
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
Signed,
Thomas Roberts, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security
Nathan Crosby, President of the United States of America
GOD BLESS AMERICA
CHAPTER TEN
Captain Sarah Wells wanted a cigarette, but the respirator covering her face, already busy giving her a bad case of claustrophobia, had made that impossible. She would have been happy with just about any distraction, a piece of gum, a goddamn Tootsie Pop would do at this point, anything that would take her mind off her current reality, walking a turn in the week-old Bronx Quarantine on August 15. She double-checked the thick canvas strap of the M4 rifle around her neck, which she hated using because of the way it chafed her skin, and set her hands on the small of her back, trying to break up some of the tightness that had drawn her muscles taut. It felt like someone had been slowly using a handcrank on her back.
Dawn was breaking in the east, the night slowly morphing into a dull grayness. A crescent moon hung low in the lightening sky like a smirk. They were in a mixed commercial/residential district near the Harlem River, fertile ground for the symbiotic relationship between the residents of the brownstones and the shopkeepers whose bodegas dotted the strip. As it had been for hours, it was drizzling, the worst kind of rain, the kind that did nothing to cool you off. Sarah kept hoping the shower would just metastasize into a downpour, perhaps break the padlock of humidity holding the city in its clutches, but the drip-drip-drip just kept on, maddeningly, infuriatingly so, against her standard-issue helmet. There must have been a hole in her rain poncho, because she could feel rainwater dampening her fatigues, and the cold squishiness of the fabric against her hip. The air stank of smoke and diesel, the smells intensified by the humidity and wrapping around her in a sweaty fog. She was tired, so tired. She’d grabbed a few hours of sleep after dinner, but it had been thin, right at the edge of waking.
Her platoon was stationed on the northeast side of the Third Avenue Bridge in the Bronx, which separated this borough from northern Manhattan. They’d blocked each of the two spurs that ran north into the neighborhood. The canopy had been removed from her truck, to make room for the Browning .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the truck’s bed. The gun was a monstrous, serpent-like thing that Sarah could not keep her eyes off, as if it might come to life and swallow her whole. It was one thing to see it overseas, but she could not imagine having to call that thing into service in the Bronx. Yet there it was, its ammunition belts draped over it like a pageant sash. The platoons had set up sawhorses with electronic displays to fill in the gaps, their orange lights blinking disinterestedly. A series of messages cycled through the digital display, leaving no doubt about the Army’s purpose here.
**QUARANTINE**
**NO ACCESS**
**DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED**
There had been twenty of them on this detail at the beginning, at the top of the southwest spur. They were down to ten now. Eight had fallen ill with Medusa in the first two days and rotated out, and two more had simply bugged out and gone AWOL. Nearly all of the others were now complaining of symptoms, but the battalion commander had told her not to expect any additional relief for ill soldiers. T
hey were just going to have to man up with ibuprofen and NyQuil. Her two other platoons, stationed farther north along the Harlem River, were reporting similar rates of attrition, but the quarantines were holding. Forget the fact that they were holding because almost everyone inside the quarantine zones was dead. Incidental, and not to cloud the success of the objective.
Sarah herself still felt fine physically, experiencing none of the symptoms the others had described. Two were laid up in the covered truck, too sick to man their posts, and honestly, Sarah didn’t know what to do for them. It was all they could do to keep the perimeter secure; things inside the quarantine zone were deteriorating by the day, pressure building up like a failing nuclear reactor. The civilians were sick, angry, and spoiling for a fight. The Bronx hospitals were overwhelmed, turning away patients now, and they’d been left to hear the pleading and the begging from the ones still feeling well enough to be up and around.
That she herself was standing here at all was probably prima facie evidence of sheer insanity, but it wasn’t like she’d had any choice in the matter. She didn’t want to be here, she didn’t want to be anywhere in New York, thank you very much. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about running. She could’ve run, she supposed, like Lowell and Hewitt had, it was something she was sure they’d all considered, but she never would. She would think about her brother, who had died in Afghanistan, and her dad, a retired mailman who never shut up about how proud he was of her, and she couldn’t stand to think she had let them down. And she never forgot that she was a female combat soldier, a black female combat soldier, one of the few female officers at Fort Dix.
Her dad, a widower, lived in Raleigh. She wondered how he was, what the story was down there. Fresh, reliable news had become scarce in the last twenty-four hours, nothing but platitudes from the battalion commander that the situation was under control. But if that were true, why were they hearing slices of insanity from the locals, the ones inside the quarantine zone who said the outbreak was getting worse, that the quarantines were collapsing, that no one really had any plan to bring this under control? And some of the estimated casualty figures, if they were to be believed, had made Sarah’s legs buckle. Ten million dead. Fifty million dead. Tens of millions infected. No cure.
Rolling into the Bronx had been the most bizarre experience of her life. They had come across the Third Avenue Bridge over the Harlem River, one of many Army units sealing off the bridges into and out of the Bronx. She’d felt on edge during the entire rollout, believing the slightest misstep would cut her, and the unease had grown with each passing hour. Her tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, those had been bad enough, but those were the right kind of scary, the kind she’d expected when she’d joined ROTC her freshman year at SUNY-Albany.
From the passenger seat of the Army truck, she had looked over her shoulder into the cargo area, into the respirator-covered faces of her subordinates. Their average age was about twenty, meaning that these men, boys really, were only about one Olympics removed from sprouting their first pubes. Barely boys. Babies. Many of them had still been in diapers when the Twin Towers came down.
“Captain Wells.”
The voice startled her. It seemed like hours had passed since anyone had said anything. The platoons had been pacing nonstop, carving grooves into the asphalt, nervously looking at one another as the minutes ticked by. She looked up and saw Private Qureshi jogging toward her, his arm pointed north, into the quarantine zone. He was one of the youngest in the platoon, rail thin, a sweet kid, a good soldier. He was sweating and his cheeks were flushed, but she tried to ignore that.
“Something’s going on,” he said. “Inside the Q zone.”
“What is it?”
“Not sure,” he said. “This seems organized.” He coughed twice, and Sarah’s heart broke. She didn’t understand how this could be happening, how this thing was spreading the way it was. They were wearing the masks. The fucking masks!
“You feeling OK?”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine.”
She could see the panic in his eyes; he finally had the answer to the question she’d asked herself a million times – when was she going to start coughing and roasting with fever, when would the blood start pouring from her nose and ears? If anything, she’d fully expected to be one of the first to get sick, but here she was, more than a week since this thing had blown up, and she still felt fine.
The universe, she did have a sense of humor, didn’t she?
She followed Qureshi around the truck, toward the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard, where they’d established the perimeter. As she came around the front grill of the truck, she saw a crowd forming in a parking lot to the east, swaying back and forth, buzzing with chatter. Two of her soldiers were walking toward the group, their rifles up, trying to wave them off. Within seconds, people were yelling at the troops, getting up in their covered faces, almost as if they’d been waiting for them.
An angry undercurrent rippled through the crowd, the inverse of a happy summer block party. There were hundreds of people, of all colors and ethnicities, milling about. Flushed faces, shirts dark with sweat, eyes hollow and sunken. The sidewalks were narrow and jammed, a stinking, nervous mass of humanity rippling in the virgin light of the morning. She could hear people sniffling, sneezing, coughing, deep, ripping coughs exploding like hidden land mines.
Sarah jumped back in her truck and activated the built-in megaphone.
“Return to your homes,” Sarah called out, her amplified voice laced with static and sounding far away, like it was too far away to do any good. “You are interfering with a military quarantine.”
This only antagonized the crowd, and the buzz continued to amplify. Replies mingled together to form a loud symphony of anger and frustration. Behind her, she could hear the troops yelling and cussing, the sounds of magazines being locked and loaded.
The soldiers fanned out around the truck, forming a defensive perimeter, their rifles up and pointed at their fellow citizens. Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah saw another throng approaching from the east, via a side street, hidden just so by the bodega on the corner. She didn’t like this. It appeared coordinated, as if the locals had decided they’d had just about enough of their party guests and had stayed up all night coming up with a plan to rid themselves of their company. She activated her shoulder mike.
“Echo Three to Echo Base,” Sarah said. “We need backup. A large crowd of civilians, possibly turning hostile.”
As she waited for a reply, an organized mass of young men, white, black, Asian, Latino, formed on the southwest corner, blocking their continued progress north and drawing the attention of her platoon. Two of her soldiers, the two oldest in the platoon, stepped forward.
“Negative, Echo Three. Good luck,” said Lt. Col. Craig Curwood, the commanding officer in the Bronx.
Jesus.
If Echo Base had bigger priorities than a dozen American soldiers trapped by an angry and armed mob, it was going to be a very, very long day.
A gunshot broke her out of her trance, and that was when Captain Sarah Wells knew things had changed forever and irrevocably so. Without thinking, she dropped prone, the way she had in Kandahar Province and Iraq, in tours and days gone by, the ground knocking the wind out of her. Two feet in front of her, Private First Class Wally Griffin failed to move fast enough. His big body, six-four, 220 pounds of unfulfilled dreams of life as a Division I quarterback at Alabama or Tennessee, some good SEC school, seized up for a moment, just a flash of a second, and then he fell to the ground like he’d dropped through a trap door.
“No, no, no!” Sarah groaned.
From her stomach, Sarah aimed her weapon high and squeezed off two shots. This was by instinct, years of training imprinted on her, almost like a brand. Executed like a computer program, and that was for the best because she had just fired her weapon on U.S. soil, on American citizens, and, the worst part of it was that she was defending herself and her
troops. Before the thought could overwhelm her, flood her engine, she slid up to Griffin’s side and found him still. There was a small dime-sized hole just over his left eye, and an exit wound the size of a silver dollar at the base of his skull. Blood was pooling underneath him, the dark red liquid staining the asphalt.
As Sarah tended to her dying charge, a burst of small-arms fire erupted near her – from whom, she couldn’t tell, and in the end, did it even matter? Howls of agony and terror followed as the 5.56x45mm NATO rounds in her platoon’s M4s found targets, thick, heavy thumps as the big rounds slammed into dense flesh, cutting through muscle and bone like teeth into a rare steak. Many scattered at the exchange of gunfire, but some remained, and Sarah was sickened to see the ones that stuck around were armed, intent on continuing this insanity. One of her soldiers, maybe Private Woods, was caught in a no-man’s-land, and two unseen gunmen opened up on him, raking his legs with a hail of large-caliber bullets. There was no precision to the attack, just some lunatics unloading their semi-automatic pistols. Woods dropped to the ground, writhing in pain. Two other soldiers lay down fire as they tried to recover their fallen brother.
Back to her shoulder mike. Certainly, Echo Base would want to know about American soldiers engaged in a firefight with American citizens in the fucking Bronx on a Saturday morning, right? They hadn’t seem concerned with any of the other status updates she’d called in, but this would be different, she told herself. If not, well, Echo Base could go fuck itself.
“Echo Base, Echo Three is fully engaged,” she said, tipping her head toward her shoulder mike, shouting over another staccato M4 burst. “Requesting helicopter support, goddammit!”
This time, Echo Base didn’t make her wait long, barely an instant.
“Request denied,” came the reply, sounding far away and emotionless. “Echo Three, you are ordered to maintain the quarantine by any means necessary. Acknowledge.”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 10