Thomson nodded as Soto hauled him to his feet. “A little banged up, but I’ve had worse. Fit enough to guard a bunch of geeks.”
This time we checked twice before we crossed the street, although the heap of corpses we left behind made that superfluous. Anything in the radius of three blocks must have heard the chaos we’d produced, and should consequently have come running. The fact that we were fifty yards away from the first address left a bad taste in my mouth. Was the life of one blubbering geek really worth losing one of my men?
There was movement right next to the flight of stairs leading up to the door, making us halt in our tracks. I debated with myself about not giving away our position, but again—we’d already caused enough noise to wake the dead, so why bother?
“Anyone over there?” I called out, signaling Diaz and Soto to get ready to cover me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. Nothing came hurtling my way; so far so good. “We’re with the Army. If you need help—“
A hulking figure of a bear materialized out of nowhere, but I recognized him even before he identified himself. “Burns here, with what’s left of Blue team. You here to cover our asses, Red leader?”
“More to bust them,” I called back as I eased up.
I got a quick laugh in return. “Whatever it is, sir, we’re mighty glad to see you here. Got three men down.” He paused, lowering his voice somewhat. “Not looking good.”
“What happened?” While I waited for the answer, I signaled my guys to move out to cover the street and secure the outside of the building.
“Got jumped, same as you,” the sergeant explained. “Only that we got to fight through more than just a handful. Peters underestimated just how unrelenting the fuckers are. Thought that if we killed a few, the others would turn away. We got them all, but not before they got a lot of us first. They ripped right through our gear, too. We tried radioing in, but I guess no one got our call.”
With everything as secure as it was going to get, I joined what remained of Blue team. I didn’t know most of the men hunkering down by the three soldiers prone on their backs, but I sure recognized the medic trying to treat them.
“What the hell are you doing here, Martinez? Shouldn’t you be over in…” I trailed off, long years of being sworn to secrecy tying my tongue. That likely didn’t matter anymore, either. What a fucking mess.
Martinez looked up from his patient, quickly disbanding the look of defeat on his face as he replied. Unlike Diaz, he seemed to realize that there was nothing he could do for the men fighting to hang on to the last threads of their lives. “Last minute change of plans. Got called back on Wednesday, sir. Still not sure if that was a blessing or a curse.” He paused, glancing at one of the other soldiers—his commanding officer, I presumed, but the shellshocked look on the guy’s face made me guess that he hadn’t quite caught up with reality yet. “We tried the dean already. His wife almost chewed Smith’s face off before we could cram them all in and bar the doors. I presume you’re here for the scientists?” I gave a curt nod. “Haven’t gotten to them yet, but we heard screaming coming from the house down the road. You better be quick about this.”
That was all the encouragement I needed. After a quick call to the other half of my group that they could skip the dean and move on to the other targets, I barked, “Diaz, Soto, clear the entryway. We’re going in.”
The door to the brownstone was busted, but Diaz reported all clear as he checked inside. With the grid down for hours, the staircase was the way to go. There were a few bags and suitcases sitting by the elevator, clothes strewn around them, but no sight of whoever had abandoned their precious baggage there. We quickly made our way up to the third floor, ignoring the door halfway down the corridor where dragging sounds easily filtered through the wood. Soto was already waiting at 13B, shotgun at the ready to do away with the lock. I hesitated before giving him the go, instead knocking vigorously on the wood. If nothing was alive in there anymore, no reason to let it get a jump on us as soon as we went in.
“Ms. Lewis, Ms. Powell, please open the door,” I hollered. Whatever had been behind the door we’d just passed went ballistic, scratching and screaming, but nothing in our apartment. I tried again, this time louder to be heard over the din.
“Sounds like a bust to me,” Soto offered, but shut up when a crash sounded from behind the door. Everyone was on high alert immediately, but I relaxed when I heard low muttering rather than shouting.
It took a good twenty seconds more until the mechanical clicking of a lock disengaging followed, and two more. Paranoid geeks, all right. Then again, two girls living together, made sense that they’d take precautions. Not that I was afraid to find myself staring down the barrel of a gun any second. That would have been even smarter—but then there’d likely not been anyone home to start with had that been the case.
The door eased open slowly, the gaunt, sweaty face of a woman in her early thirties appearing. Her skin was blotchy and several smears let me guess that she’d already started bleeding out of her nose and ears. The tangled mess at the back of her head was blond—we were looking for the redhead. “Ms. Powell?” I presumed, careful to keep my tone low now that we’d already roused half of the house.
She blinked twice at me—as if making sense of my words was a feat—before she nodded. “What’s going on?”
“Ms. Powell, are you alone? Where is your wife, Brianna Lewis?”
She grimaced, making me guess that I already had my answer, but she surprised me. “She’s not my wife, for fuck’s sake. And she’s not here.” Her eyes lost that intense shine they’d taken on for a second, making her look around us into the corridor, confusion on her face. “She left. She just left me here. Said she had to go to work.” It only then occurred to her that it was pitch black, only our flashlights illuminating the corridor. “It’s night outside already. Why isn’t she back?”
That was a question I didn’t want to answer, but protocol dictated that I didn’t give up so soon. “When was the last time you saw her? This morning?” A pause as she considered, then a nod. I took a mental note to report back that it was possible that we’d find her holed up in her workplace—nerds could turn out surprisingly crafty sometimes—but I doubted it.
“You’re here to rescue her, aren’t you?” the woman croaked, bitterness rather than hope lacing her words. “Because she’s someone useful? So the world really has gone to shit if you’re picking up second-rate lab rats.”
The remark that it wasn’t my place to judge the value of my charges lay heavy on my tongue, but instead I nodded. No reason to waste any more time. I considered offering her an easy way out—even conserving ammo, breaking a neck was quick, and a lot less painful than slowly letting the fever burn you up—but she looked like the kind who’d refuse. Instead I went for the easy question. “When did you get sick? This morning?”
The half-smirk she gave me made it plain that she knew why we were keeping our distance, but she replied anyway. “Wednesday. Morning, if you must know, for whatever epidemiological evidence you’re gathering. That’s what they are calling this, right?”
Before I could answer, Parker cleared his throat behind me. “Sir, that’s well beyond the incubation window they gave us for the full progression. She might be of interest to us.”
“Now I am, eh?” she jeered, but a hard coughing fit—that made Soto and Diaz wisely step back—stopped her from saying more. Bloody phlegm hit the floor between us, but she caught herself after a minute or two. When she looked up at me, wiping bloody spittle from her bottom lip with a tissue, the fight had left her. “I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t unload this on you. I’m sure all you’re doing is your duty.” She bit her bottom lip, tears starting to brim her eyes. “It’s bad out there, isn’t it?” From the way she kept staring at my right arm, smeared with dirt and blood, it was a rhetorical question.
I didn’t reply, but there was no need to. At my nod, Parker approached her, already reaching for the kit in his pack. “Ma’am, y
ou are sick. I don’t need to tell you that, you obviously know that already. If you’re not treated, you will die.” She didn’t even blink, taking that with the stoicism of someone who not only knew, but was welcoming death as the absolution that it was. “From what you’re saying, you appear to be one of less than a percent of the population who are showing a certain level of immunity to the virus. We have a vaccine that can help you. There are no guarantees, but you only have this one option.”
She stared at him some more, unmoving, before she looked at me. “She’s dead, right? That’s why she didn’t come home from work yet. Because she’s dead.”
I did my very best to give her the textbook answer. “We cannot confirm that until we find a body—“
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” she shouted, inhaling to gear up for more but yet another coughing fit sent her staggering against the door jamb instead. The howling started up behind the other door, and this time it wouldn’t cut off.
Parker started to get nervous. “It’s now or never, ma’am. It’s your decision, but I can guarantee you—“
“Do it,” she wheezed between coughs, clawing at her nightgown to get the fabric out of the way. Parker didn’t even bother with a cotton swab, just sent the needle into her upper arm and dropped the syringe onto the floor as soon as he was done.
Thompson and I were closest to the other door, so we took up position. Soto didn’t get anywhere near to shooting the lock off when suddenly, the wood of the door cracked, and the entire thing swung into the corridor when the screamer hurled itself forward one last time. I pulled the trigger as soon as I had a good line of sight, the bullets eating into the sunken face, spraying blood everywhere. The body dropped like a sack of grain, leaving the corridor eerily silent after the howling cut off.
A whimper came from behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw the girl hunch over and puke on the floor, hugging herself. Her eyes were clear, incapable of looking away from the spectacle. I got it—to us, that had just been a raging mad and very lethal assailant. To her, likely a long-term friend and neighbor. Now that it—she—was dead, the old lady on the floor didn’t look dangerous anymore, even with her fingers curled into bloody claws from battering at the door, and the lower half of her face caked in blood. Glancing farther into the apartment, I saw the source of that gore lying on the floor, or what was left of him. Her son, judging from the half of his face that was still intact.
“Get her out of here,” I ordered to Parker, pushing the dead body back into the apartment as I closed the door. There wasn’t much I could keep from her, but she didn’t need to see this.
Back out on the street, I got the first pleasant surprise of the night—and likely the only. Burns had gathered what was left of Blue team and had extracted the other scientist. Parker was quick to shoot her up with the “vaccine”—whatever that shit was, it sure hadn’t been developed for what was going on right now. There had been contingency plans—but not for anything that had a reach like this. The girl clearly knew the scientist, readily hugging her as they met, but I could tell from the distraught look on her face that she realized that, unlike her, her friend was progressing far more rapidly. Martinez wanted to head over to check on her, but I cut that short with a quick jerk of my head, instead telling Burns to keep a very close eye on them both. I’d seen what could happen in more than one triage station over the last forty-eight hours—I was not going to let that surprise my men.
Reaching for my radio, I reported in. “This is Red leader. We picked up what’s left of Blue team and are heading over to collect the rest of our guys. En route to the extraction zone now. Stand by for further orders.”
It took a damn long time for anyone to pick up, and when he did, it was an unfamiliar voice. “Copy, Red leader. Proceed to EZ. We have a staff meeting in thirty, so if you can make it here by then, I’d be much obliged. Richards out.”
I had no fucking clue who that guy was, but didn’t give a shit, either. “Move out!” I told my guys, letting them take point as I hung back to check one last time on the members of Blue team that Martinez had been treating. All of them were dead now, their eyes closed, a few drops of blood still leaking from the pistol shots to the temple that had ultimately killed them. Damn, but Martinez didn’t need to be told what was going on. I made a mental note to recommend him for a promotion, if any of us made it out of this shithole—and right now we were losing men left and right, way more than any of us could stomach.
We picked up the rest of my team a few blocks away from campus—no additional cargo. The way back to the extraction zone was almost a walk in the park compared to the first leg of our journey. Twice we backtracked to avoid getting bogged down at a road block—this time by the more enterprising, still alive elements of our society that I would have had no qualms gunning down, but that would have taken more time than we had to waste. As soon as we reached the area that had started out as a cordoned-off FEMA camp this morning but had long since been upgraded, I made sure that our charges were taken care of, then headed toward the headquarters, my men plunking down in the middle of the road right outside the tent. As I stepped through the flap, I tried to remember when I’d last slept for an hour—or even a few minutes. Thursday afternoon when we’d caught one of the last Chinooks leaving the D.C. area. None of that mattered now. As things had been out there in the streets, I doubted that we could hold the camp much beyond the early hours of Saturday. Or today, I corrected myself, checking my watch. Only a few more hours until sunrise.
“Red leader, reporting in,” I told the first overly hectic private running through the tent who made the mistake of noticing me. “What’s left of Red and Blue team is waiting outside the door. We dropped the two civilians we picked up with the triage station.”
I must have hit the jackpot as the girl actually seemed to know what she was doing, quickly leafing through her notepad. “Who can we scratch off the VIP list?”
“One Katherine Delaney, PhD,” I rattled off from memory. “And Samantha Powells. She’s not on the list. Girlfriend of one of the other scientists who never got home last night. Parker said it was worth a shot shooting her up.”
The private nodded absentmindedly as she scribbled something on her pad. “General Morris is ready to see you over there, sir,” she told me once she was done. “And he told me to tell you to bring anyone especially competent from your team.”
From the way she enunciated that, I bet she knew what she was talking about. I couldn’t help but smirk as I turned around and hollered out of the tent. “Burns, Smith, Hill, with me.” I almost called Donald and Cooper as well, but then remembered that they were dead—and unlike with the other suckers that had bit it today, there’d been a damn good reason why we’d made sure that they stayed that way. I briefly debated including Martinez, but I knew that the powers that be could be sticklers for protocol, and that order excluded him. I was sure that the others would fill him in, considering how tight they were.
As soon as the men joined me, I marched them over to the other side of the tent, through the connective part and into the next, where the general was already waiting for us. He’d grown fat since I’d last seen him, but that didn’t seem to hold him back for a second, hunched over maps and giving orders without pausing to take a breath as he was. I was familiar with several of the men standing relaxed around the room, except for Carrot Head hovering at the general’s left side. I wisely held my tongue when I read the name tag on his uniform—Richards. So that had been the guy who’d taken over the radio when I’d phoned in.
“Glad you could finally join us,” the general barked in my direction without looking up. “Every minute counts, and here all I get are reports about delays.”
I bit my tongue, but couldn’t quite keep my trap shut. “Sir, with all due respect, you have no fucking clue what it’s like out there.”
Morris paused and looked up, his steely gaze promising swift and ruthless retribution—but much to my surprise, he smiled instead. �
�Exactly, and that’s why I need you to not twiddle your thumbs in here. How many men does your team have left?”
“Thirteen, plus six from Blue team,” I reported in. “We picked up some additional backup en route, but I left them with the camp guards. They’re not trained for this kind of situation.”
“Nobody could have trained for this,” Morris muttered, then quickly looked the men that had come with me over, without a doubt memorizing their names. “Peters didn’t make it?”
“No, Sir,” Burns confirmed. “Alvarez bit it, too.”
“A shame,” the general acknowledged, giving Richards a sidelong glance. “Where are we at the roll call?”
“Twenty-one confirmed,” Richards reported, not needing to check the papers on the desk next to him. “There should have been close to fifty in the general area, but we’re well beyond the point where we can expect anyone to report in. They’re smart enough to have done so already if they were still alive.”
Oh, I knew a couple of people that excluded, but swallowed that remark. “If they haven’t reported in, they’re dead,” I offered. “Dead, or hunkered down with their families somewhere, to tough it out on their own.” I paused, trying to gauge how much the general was letting protocol slide, but then decided that we were well beyond caring about bullshit like that. “Sir, we have lost the Eastern Seaboard. It’s time to cut our losses and head to the forward evacuation points. You know my track record. You know that I hate tucking in my tail and running as much as the next cocky bastard, but the fight is lost. You have several hundred men and women under your command here for whom it isn’t too late yet. It’s better to save them and lose a few potential allies, than risk it and end up killing us all. With respect, sir.”
“Any other day I’d court-martial you for that speech, Captain,” the general drawled, but I could tell that he didn’t mind me mouthing off to him. When the shit hit the fan, the last thing you needed were lickspittle assholes fawning all over your greatness—and subsequent demise. “I need you for something else. You are right. We will commence with the evacuation presently. But we have one final mission for you and your men, should you accept.” He briefly glanced at my compadres. “I don’t need to tell you what is going on out there. All of you have had ample experience in your lives to see it firsthand, but not on this scale. We’re outnumbered, and before long we will be outgunned as well. No one really knows what the fuck is going on, or how it happened, but fact is, it is happening. Richards here told me that in this very city there’s one of our facilities that might hold at least a clue, if not the cure. Your job is to retrieve it, and make sure it gets into the hands of people more competent than either of us at this. There’s a chance that you will miss the deadline and have to make it on foot. I wouldn’t ask you to risk your life and that of your men without proper cause.”
Beyond Green Fields | Book 3 | Lost & Found [A Post-Apocalyptic Anthology] Page 10
