Pandemic r-1

by Craig DiLouie

  At that moment, he realized he’d lost faith in their ability to win this war.

  Murphy sighed and nodded as if he’d read the captain’s mind. “Yeah.”

  “We’re still here,” Lee said. “We won’t lose it all.”

  It was more a vow than a prediction.

  SIXTEEN.

  Scott Wade knew he was going to die in this hospital.

  He’d survived horrific battles against the Taliban over the past year. Only once had he truly been convinced he was going to be killed. After it became clear the Americans were pulling out to fight a new war, the Taliban, still fighting the old war, staged an all-out assault on Combat Outpost Katie. They wanted American bodies and weapons as trophies to show off. They could then claim they’d driven out the infidels.

  In a night attack, the Taliban took out the gun placements in the tower with rocket-propelled grenades. Soviet-era heavy machine guns rattled along the ridges. The red sparks of tracer rounds blurred across the rocks. A stray rocket blew up the fuel truck and drenched the compound in fire. The ammo in a burning Humvee began to cook and pop at intervals.

  The first two waves of fighters blew themselves up on the claymores. The rest raced to the walls. They threw grenades and emptied their AK-47s.

  The platoon threw everything they had at them. The air filled with hot metal flying in all directions. After Guzman toppled with a smoking hole in his helmet, Wade took over his M240 machine gun and returned fire until the barrel got so hot it began to melt.

  Apache gunships approached but didn’t engage, the soldiers afraid of killing American troops. Outpost Katie replied if the helicopters didn’t start dropping ordnance, they were going to be overrun. The Apaches opened up with their chain guns. After this pounding, the guerillas melted away into the mountains while the gunships pursued like angry wasps and mopped up the stragglers.

  Wade had been wounded in three places on his left arm. Bravo Company’s medic performed some quick field surgery and told him he didn’t rate a medevac. The next day, the company struck its colors and drove down to Kabul, which was in chaos due to the plague, then flew out of the Sandbox to Vicenza, Italy. Then to Fort Drum in New York State. Then to Boston.

  To Christ Hospital, where, ironically, he was going to die.

  As far as he knew, most of his platoon had already been wiped out. He didn’t have a weapon. Pain lanced through his ankle. His left leg could barely take his weight. His right trembled with exhaustion. He was on the fifth floor of a large building filled with thousands of homicidal maniacs. And one of the best soldiers he’d ever known wanted to stab him to death.

  Ramos lurched over the corpses. Wade wondered what was holding the man together. Half his face was gone. He moved jerkily, like a puppet.

  Wade limped down the corridor and pushed the stairwell door open. He looked down and heard echoing sounds of struggle. Stomping feet. Shouts. Laughter. From outside, he could hear the hammering of the fifty-cal machine guns mounted on the Humvees.

  Nowhere to go but up.

  He grit his teeth and pulled his body up the stairs one step at a time.

  Behind him, the door slammed open.

  “An Army of one, motherfucker!”

  Wade kept climbing. He finally came to a roof exit and prayed it was unlocked.

  The door opened with a squeak of the hinges. He cried with relief and stepped outside.

  Bright sunshine washed over him. The light flickered as a squadron of Apache gunships roared past, bristling with their low-slung chain guns. They weren’t part of his mission. He had no way to contact them.

  Wade paused to catch his breath. The view struck him. Parts of Boston were on fire. He smelled smoke. The ever-present sirens had fallen silent, replaced by a distant chorus of screams and laughter. The epidemic had reached some tipping point. After weeks of endless struggle, the military had finally lost control.

  Behind him, the door banged open. Ramos staggered from the dark opening as relentless as the Terminator. He laughed with red teeth. He still held his pig-sticker. “Get some.”

  Wade backed away until he reached the edge of the roof. Far below, he saw the fifty-cals rocking on the Humvees. The gunners stood hunched behind the heavy machine guns, blasting away at the hospital entrance.

  He had nowhere to go. He was going to have to fight. That, or jump to his death.

  Then he spotted a maintenance ladder. He hoped it ran down the length of the building. It was a chance he had to take.

  The pain in his foot nearly blinded him when he tried to move again. Ramos laughed, terrifyingly close. Wade didn’t look behind. Instead, he doubled his pace, crying out in pain. He gripped the ladder rails and began to climb down, favoring his right foot.

  The ladder reached all the way to the ground. At the halfway point, Wade looked up and saw his sergeant’s grimacing face at the top. He resumed his downward climb. The sergeant wasn’t following. Wade knew he was going to make it.

  His body tingled as the shadow fell over him. He heard rags of clothing flapping in the wind. Something was coming at him—fast.

  It was Ramos. Wade hugged the ladder as the sergeant flew past. He cried out as searing pain ripped across his face.

  Ramos kept falling, laughing all the way, until his body smashed against the asphalt.

  Wade pulled off his glove and touched his cheek. His fingers came away red. He was wounded. His entire face hurt like a son of a bitch. Blood poured down his neck. Ramos had jumped and sliced him on the way down, cutting Wade’s cheek wide open.

  Wade remembered seeing him lick the knife. I’ve got the Bug! His mind blanked out with fear. He counted the seconds.

  Nothing happened.

  I’m okay. I’m okay. Please let me be okay.

  He knew the surviving members of the platoon would be frantically trying to contact Lieutenant Harris. The idea that they might give up and bug out, leaving him there, terrified him even more than the possibility of infection.

  He hurried the rest of the way down and limped toward the vehicles, waving his arms. Halfway there, he collapsed with a groan.

  A figure knelt next to him. A panicked face came into focus. Corporal McIsaac.

  “Fuck, it’s Wade.”

  “Goddamn. Look at him.”

  “Help me get him into the Humvee.”

  Wade heard the metallic crack of an M4.

  “Move it! I’ll cover forward!”

  Wade glimpsed a horde of gleeful men and women—naked or dressed in the rags of hospital gowns—pouring out of the entrance of the hospital. They waved and clapped as the fifties tore them apart.

  He grimaced as somebody squirted antiseptic onto—

  —the Bug—

  —his wound and slapped a bandage onto it.

  “What do you see?” Wade croaked. Worms? Little crawling worms?

  McIsaac patted his chest. “It’ll need stitches.”

  Hands lifted him. The sun burned into his eyes as he was half carried, half dragged across the parking lot and shoved into one of the vehicles. He couldn’t stop crying.

  “Let’s move!”

  “Jaworski! Mount up!”

  The Humvee lurched forward. The gunner stood next to Wade, his head and shoulders above the roof so he could work the machine gun. Empty shell casings rained into the vehicle and rattled across the roof. Wade heard the whump of a Mark 19 on another Humvee as it spit grenades into the hospital emergency room. Glass sprayed across the parking lot.

  The hospital entrance was obscured by smoke and dust. The lightfighters cheered.

  “We’re out of here!”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Hang in there, Wade. You’re okay now.”

  “What happened?” the driver yelled. “Where’s the rest of your team?”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “What? Are we going back?”

  Wade shook his head. He felt dizzy. “They’re all dead.”

  “What are the Tomcats doing here?”
/>   “Do they see us?”

  Wade glanced out the window in time to see the squadron of Apaches launch batteries of Hellfire missiles from their stub-wing pylons.

  “Holy shit! Go, go, go!”

  Guided by advanced radar systems, the Hellfires rocketed into the hospital with an aerosol roar and burst with a flash.

  The ground trembled under the rig’s wheels. Wade felt the air around him suck toward the blast. Brilliant white light washed out his vision. His ears filled with terrifying booms. The sensation was like getting struck by lightning.

  The gunner dropped into the vehicle. “Just go, just go, just go!”

  They were too close to the blast. Debris rained around the Humvees.

  “Just—”

  Something big struck the vehicle with a CLANG. The windshield cobwebbed. The vehicle rocked and swerved. Hot oil sprayed from the crumpled hood. The engine howled. The driver fought for control. The gunner screamed.

  Wade was flung into darkness.

  SEVENTEEN.

  Harvard University was comprised of numerous old buildings situated on a two-hundred-acre campus in Cambridge, just three and a half miles northwest of downtown Boston. Before the Bug, the institution of higher learning had been one of the most prestigious in the world. School was currently out of session. Possibly forever.

  Harvard had become home to elements of Bravo Company. They occupied a cluster of buildings in the northwest corner of campus, protected from the street by an iron rail fence. Captain Marsh had established his headquarters at the center, in Holden Chapel.

  The campus was Bravo’s third outpost in as many weeks. The battalion was steadily being pushed out of the downtown core as the area became virtually overrun with crazies.

  It was the last stop on Captain Lee’s tour.

  The Humvees pulled up to the iron pedestrian gate and parked. Lee’s shooters spilled out of the other Humvees and surrounded the vehicles, weapons at the ready.

  Lee tried to see into the windows, but the shades were drawn. “See anything?”

  “Nothing,” Murphy responded. “We’re driving on fumes. I hope they’re still here.”

  “I hope they don’t have the Bug,” Foster called down.

  “If they had the Bug, we’d be dead already,” Murphy said. “Pay attention up there.”

  “Contact!” said Foster. “Target, two hundred meters.”

  Lee got out of the vehicle and aimed down Massachusetts Avenue through his carbine’s close-combat optic. He couldn’t see anything past the obstacle course of smashed cars that blocked the way ahead and had turned the street beyond into a parking lot.

  “I count nine, ten of them,” Foster reported. “They’re running right at us.”

  Lee saw them now. Escapees from one of the fever clinics, naked or dressed in paper gowns and carrying makeshift weapons—tire irons, garden shears, kitchen knives. A woman snapped a pair of scissors in each hand. A grinning man with a hairy chest lugged a gas can and a lighter.

  They were all smiling and shouting and waving at the soldiers. “Wait up! Wait for me!”

  “Private Foster, once the hostiles clear those wrecks, you are cleared to engage,” Lee said.

  “Now we’re talking!” Foster aimed his heavy machine gun. “Gonna kill some motherfuckers!”

  Lee glanced at Murphy, who shook his head. The fifty-cal hammered. The path of the rounds, illuminated by bright tracers, flew over the mob. Foster corrected, walking his fire into the infected.

  The battle was over in seconds. The torn bodies of the infected lay in the street like road kill.

  “For such a gung-ho mo-fo, you can’t shoot for shit, Foster,” Murphy said.

  The private said nothing. He wore a vacant smile, happy to have had the chance to use his big gun against a legitimate target.

  Some of the soldiers didn’t feel remorse about killing the infected. The older generation liked to blame the younger for embracing violence due to rap songs and video games. Lee believed some people just didn’t have much in the empathy department. At the moment, he was glad people like that were on his side.

  Lee felt remorse. A lot, but he buried it. The mission came first.

  A voice called, “Coming out!”

  Three soldiers scurried out of the one of the dormitory buildings while a fourth provided overwatch at the door. They opened the gate.

  One of them waved and said, “Hurry the fuck up before we all get killed.” He noticed Lee’s rank and added quickly, “Sir!”

  Lee and his men jogged through the gate and into the building.

  Captain Marsh welcomed them in the dining hall with a scowl. “Captain Lee, this is a bag of dicks,” he said, using the popular Army term for a horrible situation. “It’s the mother of all bags of dicks. You’re the battalion S-2. What the hell is going on?”

  Lee looked around. The soldiers of Bravo Company glared back at him. All of them were geared up in full battle rattle, as if they expected the crazies to come howling through the door at any moment. The air was tense. They were scared.

  “We’re losing Boston,” Lee said. “What else do you want to know?”

  Marsh nodded. “We lost contact with Second Platoon. They were assigned on a fragmentation order when we pulled back yesterday, and they’ve disappeared. Any word?”

  Lee shook his head.

  “Any idea why the Colonel put the nix on Operation Mercy?”

  “Can’t help you there, either.”

  Marsh said, “If our intelligence officer doesn’t know jack, then I guess we’re really in the dark.”

  “What was the fragmentary order?” Lee asked. “You seem to be sealed up tight. What’s your mission here?”

  “Staying alive, Captain. Other than that, not a lot. We were ordered to stand down, stay concealed and observe. If it looks like the neighborhood is starting to get crowded, we’re supposed to pull back again, toward Hanscom.”

  “Who issued the order?”

  “Major Walker.”

  Walker was the XO, the Colonel’s right-hand man. The orders were legit, but it made no sense.

  Lee said, “The strategy’s changed, but I’ve received no word of it.”

  “We’re under the hammer here. We’re low on everything—ammo, food, you name it. We need rest and refit. We need a fucking plan. Fighting the crazies sucks. Hiding is worse. I need to get out there and find my missing boys.”

  “I’m on my way back to HQ. I’ll try to get some answers. Something’s not right.”

  “Something else isn’t right. On the other side of the Charles River is Harvard Stadium, a refugee camp with a couple thousand people. There was an MP platoon there to help keep order and distribute resources, but they were ordered out. The camp has been turned into a casualty collection point. Apparently, running the place is now the job of a mixed unit of First Battalion’s casualties. Has been for a few days. A lot of them aren’t fit for duty.”

  Lee shook his head. “Get me some gas, and I’ll be on my way to find out what the hell is going on. I’ll make finding your boys my top priority once I’m back on base.”

  Marsh offered his hand for a shake. “I appreciate anything you can do, Captain.”

  One thing Lee knew for sure. Marsh’s men weren’t holding ground. They were waiting for a siege. It was dangerous. They weren’t projecting power onto their area of operations, and they weren’t bugging out either.

  The whole thing suggested a big shift in strategy. Lee was used to increasingly erratic thinking at the top, but not from Lt. Colonel Prince. The man was predictable.

  But Prince followed orders. Maybe it wasn’t his strategy.

  Maybe the Brass was preparing to pull the military out of the cities.

  EIGHTEEN.

  The Hellfires had beautiful effect on target. The drone footage showed an aerial view of helicopters hovering in front of a large hospital, which exploded outward in a titanic blast.

  Lt. Colonel Prince shook his pill bottle and hear
d the rattle of his last Advil. He slapped the capsule into his palm and knocked it back. He needed something stronger to dull the throbbing pain in his head. Much stronger.

  The first wave of missiles ripped away the shell. The next brought it down. It was like watching a building get pounded into rubble by a giant’s fists. After that, the Apaches fired incendiary rockets to burn up anything still alive in the wreckage.

  “Major Walker,” Prince said.

  His XO was talking to one of the radio operators in hushed tones.

  “Major!” Prince roared. “Un-ass that radio and get over here.”

  The ability of the Army to function depended on following orders, explicit orders carefully designed by the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.

  The alternative—to disobey—was far worse, particularly in a crisis like this. In the end, without discipline, they wouldn’t be an army. They’d turn into a rabble on a slippery slope to helping destroy what they sought to protect.

  Walker stiffened and approached, looking pale and frazzled. The man was terrified of something.

  Prince hesitated; he’d never seen fear wipe the smug look off his XO’s face. “Major, our aviation unit is engaging the targets designated in Operation Mercy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The OPORD specifically required boots on the ground.”

  “Using the Tomcats accomplished the objective with less risk.”

  “So you showed independent initiative.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Outstanding, Major.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Outstanding, Major, as in you are an outstanding fucking idiot.”

  Walker flinched.

  Prince continued. “Do you realize you just destroyed four civilian buildings? Deploying air assets I wanted to use against an arty unit that was doing the exact same thing? Air assets we need to bring in the Governor?”

  “Sir, it was the best—”

  “Are you also aware we are at the screaming edge with General Brock, who might not take kindly to wholesale destruction of city property? Do you know what the optics are on something like this? It looks like we declared war on the American people!”