Pandemic r-1

by Craig DiLouie

  “Wait a minute. Boston’s a write-off. We can’t hold onto the real estate. I get that. But there are still civilians here who need our protection.”

  “And I have a wife and three kids at Drum,” Sommers said. “Lee’s right. Let Brock handle his people. It’s about time we took care of our own.”

  “Our mission is to save Boston.”

  “And we failed, Captain. That sucks. But it’s how it is.”

  “Tell that to all of our guys who went through hell and died out there.”

  “Our mission,” Lee said, “is to save the United States. That’s the big picture.”

  “Suppose we got every civilian in one place and protected them,” Captain Johnston of Echo Company said. As a support company, Echo took care of everything from the motor pool to making sure the men got their three squares a day. “How would we feed them? Treat them when they’re sick? We don’t have the resources. We’re down to essentials just for our own boys. We barely have enough ordnance and fuel left to get us to Drum.”

  “We could attach ourselves to Brock,” Marsh said, adding quickly, “It’s an option.”

  “He’s got eight thousand people in the field, and he can barely keep them supplied,” Johnston told him.

  “Besides that,” Sommers added, “he’d just send us back into the meat grinder.”

  That appeared to settle the issue. Necessity trumped the moral considerations. They couldn’t protect the people of Boston any longer, because soon, it would simply no longer be possible.

  “So what happens after Drum?” Perez asked.

  “We have options,” Lee said. “We may become attached to another command that can provide the resources we need to remain combat effective. We could establish a sphere of protection for civilians. Set up refugee camps if somebody can supply them. Major Walker had another idea. It’s crazy or bold, take your pick. But the way things are going, it may be our last chance.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  Lee said, “Florida.”

  THIRTY.

  Step off in less than two hours. A night march through a city of nightmares.

  Wade entered a dark room to test the night vision goggles mounted on his helmet. His vision instantly went from 20/20 to 20/40 as the world became rendered in luminous shades of green. The monocular view provided forty-degree tunnel vision and eliminated depth perception.

  In short, the NVGs sucked. But they worked, amplifying the dying daylight coming through the window thirty thousand times, turning night into day. Tonight, out on the street, being able to see would give him a critical survival edge. The Klowns were crazy, but they weren’t superhuman. They couldn’t see in the dark.

  He turned them off and flipped them up from his eyes.

  And saw the horde.

  THIRTY-ONE.

  There were hundreds of them, a maniacal army of Klowns dressed in rags and covered in fresh scars and other tribal mutilations whose significance was known only to the infected. Their laughter filled the night, drowning out the popping of distant gunfire. They came out of the dusk in a mob and filled the street, dragging their weapons and grisly trophies along the ground.

  They stopped in front of the stadium and listened to the throbbing bass of multiple boom boxes turned up too loud for common sense. Bouncing on bare feet, they grinned and clawed at the air. They wanted so badly to get inside.

  Across the throng, men dropped onto their backs and pulled taut powerful slingshots, their feet raised against the handles. Their brothers lovingly placed bright objects onto the leather pads. The men released. The objects sailed through the air. Some burst against the wall. The rest sailed over the top of the stadium and disappeared.

  They looked like water balloons.

  Wade ran into the hallway, calling for Rawlings. He found her in an office overlooking the stadium. Soldiers crowded the windows, staring down at the playing field where red, white and blue balloons fell out of the sky and splashed among the refugees.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Fisher cried.

  The crowds parted around the impacts, leaving people writhing on the ground.

  “Some type of poison, looks like,” Gray said.

  Kaffa. Wade remembered something he’d read in one of his military history books. During the Middle Ages, the Tartars laid siege to Kaffa, a Genoese trading colony established in the Crimea, but they failed to capture it after the Black Plague broke out in their camp. Before they left, they placed the bodies of their dead on catapults and launched them into the city by the hundreds. Within weeks, plague had decimated the city’s defenders. Biological warfare.

  One of the bodies on the playing field lurched to his feet and ran at the nearest refugees, clawing at them. Shots rang out as more balloons rained from the sky. Thousands fled into the stands, filling the air with an endless scream. Scores of people fought across the field. Tents collapsed or burst into flames as cook fires spilled.

  “It’s piss,” Wade said. “They filled the balloons with their piss. It’s infecting people.”

  “The Bug can’t survive outside the body that long,” Rawlings said.

  Wade touched his face, fingering the dirty bandage.

  Gray smashed the window with the butt of his rifle and propped his weapon on the sill. He took aim.

  Wade grabbed the barrel and yanked it up. “What are you doing?”

  “There are Klowns down there!”

  “You’re going to get us all killed.”

  “Fuck you! We can stop it. We can hold this place.”

  “We can’t. Trust me. I saw them.”

  “How many?” Rawlings asked.

  Wade looked her in the eye. “Too many.”

  They froze as something heavy thudded in the distance.

  BOOM

  “Aw, shit,” Fisher said, backing away from the window. He looked around as if searching for somewhere to hide. “Aw, fuck. What is that?”

  “Battering ram,” Wade said. “I saw them carrying it.”

  “We’re okay here for now,” Rawlings said. “We’re in a different building.”

  “Are you kidding?” Fisher asked. “It’s only a matter of time before they find us.”

  “They won’t find us. We’re getting the heck out of Dodge.”

  BOOM

  Gray fixed his fierce glare on her. “Those people down there won’t stand a chance without our help, Sergeant. It’s our job. It’s what we signed up to do.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for them, soldier.”

  “The hell there isn’t. We can fight.”

  “Then stay and fight. I’m bugging out. Those people down there are already dead.”

  BOOM

  Wade didn’t move. The battle on the playing field had spread into the stands. The screaming never seemed to break. He blinked at the gunshots. People stampeded in all directions, trying to flee the knots of fighting. Bodies rolled down the steps. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight.

  “We have to move,” Rawlings pleaded. “Now.”

  Wade looked at her in mute horror. All the teambuilding and planning they’d done was for nothing. They were broken. Already they were falling apart.

  BOOM

  “Make a hole!” The sergeant who’d lain on the floor in a stupor for the past few days staggered past them to the broken window. He rested his carbine on the windowsill and started shooting.

  Wade saw figures drop. He couldn’t tell if they were infected or not.

  CRASH

  The Klowns flooded onto the playing field, trampling the tents. The screaming rose in pitch. In seconds, the field resembled a slaughterhouse. The Klowns raced into the stands next, hacking at anything that moved and spreading their disease to their ever-present soundtrack of shrieking laughter. Blood splashed across the bleachers. Some of the crazies blared long, random notes on trumpets and tubas. Others frolicked among the dead, collecting their grisly trophies.

  “Oh my God,” Fisher said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.�
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  The sergeant dropped an empty mag and loaded a fresh one into his carbine, muttering the whole time.

  “Thy kingdom come.” The sergeant fired again. “Thy will be done.”

  Wade set his jaw. It was time to move. “All right, guys. We’re getting out of here right now.”

  The squad had gathered, all ten, geared up in full battle rattle. Wade and Rawlings raced downstairs ahead of the others and headed for the west exit. The doorway was blocked with piled office furniture and light fixtures. They frantically grabbed the nearest pieces and threw them out of the way. Gray, Fisher and Brown arrived and helped. They opened the door.

  A giant wearing a loincloth made out of a leathered human face lunged at them with a bloody claw hammer. “HAW, HAW!”

  Fight or flight. Wade wanted to run. Then his training took over. He fired a burst into the giant. The Klown spun around and fell hard as if his legs had been kicked out from under him. He immediately started to get back up.

  Rawlings put a round in his head. The hellish screaming inside the stadium went on and on.

  “We’re heading west,” Wade said. “Jungle file. Team Alpha on the left, Bravo on the right. If you see something, go to guns on it. Fire and move. While we move, we keep the initiative. Tempo, tempo, tempo. If we get separated, remember the rally points.”

  He wasn’t afraid anymore. He still had a lot of things worth fighting to save. The survivors of his platoon, wherever they were. Ramos’s family, still holed up in their apartment waiting for the sergeant to come rescue them. And not least of all, Rawlings.

  THIRTY-TWO.

  The command post was a beehive of frantic activity as First Battalion HQ worked to prepare for the retreat back to Fort Drum.

  Redeployment, Lee reminded himself. He scanned the big board. The only blue units left in Boston were National Guard, and they were clustering to the south, pushed out of the city by fires and waves of infected. Everything else was gone. Fire, police, paramedics, all of it. The only authority still active had a lot of firepower. Or, in the case of the crazies, numbers and sheer will.

  CNN and the other networks were off the air. All civilian television broadcasting had been bumped. Mount Weather had taken over what was left of the national communications network. On the video monitor, an attractive blonde shared the latest Federal propaganda. Captions rolled across the bottom of the screen, advising people to stock up on food and water, stay in their homes and avoid laughing when approaching military personnel. To find the nearest safety shelter, they were supposed to call an 800 number.

  Walker was right. Local civilian authority had collapsed. Central civilian authority was following suit as decisionmaking at the top became increasingly erratic and military commanders in the field ignored their orders. The military itself was breaking down due to disruptions in the chain of command. Real authority rested with local commanders trying to hold what they could with dwindling resources.

  “Sergeant Major Turner, reporting as ordered.”

  Lee returned the man’s salute. “Sergeant Major, how long have you been in uniform?”

  “Twenty-one years next month, sir.”

  Lee had to handle Turner with some caution. Not only was he the senior enlisted man left standing, he had a monumental amount of tactical and operational experience that was worth its weight in gold. While officers ran the Army, senior non-commissioned officers ran the men, and without the men behind him, any plan Lee formulated would die like a fish out of water. He needed to get on Turner’s good side, and stay there.

  “Another old-timer like me,” he said. “You served Lieutenant Colonel Prince with distinction.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I expect the same honesty from you. I respect your opinion. Always give it to me straight.”

  The big sergeant grinned. “I’m your man for that, sir.”

  “What’s the feeling in the ranks? About leaving Boston?”

  “They’re happy to be going for the most part. They need a rest. Replace the gear they’ve lost. Retrain if there’s time. They don’t like failing a mission, but the mission ain’t everything.”

  “The mission is everything, Sergeant Major. But the mission is changing. That’s how they need to see it.”

  “Hooah, sir.”

  “Do they still have confidence? I’ll be frank with you. We’re becoming more of a volunteer army by the day. Do they want to be here, or would they rather go home to their families?”

  “The older guys, their families are at Drum. So we’re itching to get there. The others, well, they’re from all over, and they know that their hometowns might as well be on Mars at this point. Nobody’s going anywhere except in force.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Major. Please give my compliments to the men for hanging tough these past weeks. They’ve gone through hell, but they’ve got to go a little farther.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “We’ll be on the move at eleven hundred hours on the fifteenth. Make sure they’re ready. I don’t intend to stick around any longer than necessary.”

  They saluted. Lee watched Turner leave the command post, thankful he had the man on his side. The old-timers were the battalion’s bedrock, the centurions of the Army. If they fell, they could not be replaced.

  They would go to Fort Drum. After that, maybe Florida. Maybe not. What happened next didn’t really matter at the moment. Just getting to Drum was going to be hell.

  First, they had to fight their way out of the Greater Boston area with its population of five million. The short hop to Route 90 was dense with crazies.

  Route 90 would take them all the way across three hundred fifty kilometers of open highway through or near ten large cities and countless small towns: Framingham, Worcester, Chicopee, Springfield, Westfield, Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. Some were controlled by military, others had gone dark and were considered hostile zones.

  They could make the trip in two or three days of hard driving if nothing stood in their way, but it was going to be a running battle. Nearly a million people were along the route just in the major metropolitan areas alone. Lee’s battalion didn’t have a million bullets.

  The drones and Apaches were key. The drones would recon the road ahead. The Apaches would provide overwatch and security for the column. The Apaches would lay the wrath of God on any major opposition force observed out in the open. After an hour and a half in the air, though, they’d have to land on the highway for refueling and maintenance.

  The urban areas would be a different story. The battalion would have to find a way around them or make a hard and fast run straight through, shooting anything that moved. From here on out, they were taking no chances.

  War movies often made it seem as if soldiers charged into battle without extensive planning. Lee knew that intelligence was the key to mission planning, and planning was the key to mission success. Officers were trained to accomplish their missions at minimal risk. Heroism, the stuff of movies, was something else. Individuals had it, not organizations. And even then, heroism was only for those rare times one really needed it, and it was done without thinking.

  If Lee had his way, they’d accomplish their objective with as little fighting as possible.

  The problem was intelligence was never perfect. Plans often failed. And the enemy was everywhere, resourceful and determined.

  Once the battalion reached Syracuse, they’d cut north on Route 80 and go about a hundred kilometers up to Fort Drum where, Lee hoped, they’d find survivors and resources.

  If the soldiers found their families infected and waiting with weapons they found on base, they’d all end up exploring a new level of hell together.

  And if they didn’t find resources, Florida would become a pipe dream.

  They’d end up scavenging.

  Once an army did that, they stopped being an army.

  He wished Walker had never handed him these damned silver oak leaves.

  “Colonel?”

>   Lee smiled. Still unused to the rank, it had taken him a moment to realize he was being addressed. “Yes, Major?”

  Walker didn’t smile back. “Major General Brock is on the line, sir. He’d like a word.”

  THIRTY-THREE.

  A running battle on the streets of Cambridge. A single ragged squad against a city gone mad. They bounded in two groups of six, leapfrogging by sections. One fired while the other ran. They dropped bodies with a sustained rate of fire.

  Wade’s M4 ran dry. He patted his vest. Two mags left. “Reloading!”

  Harvard Stadium was surrounded by green space—wide open, no cover—but they’d made it to Soldier’s Field Road without contact. They crossed Eliot Bridge, the Charles River below jammed with dead bodies and boats packed with refugees and crazies. The hellish screaming and crackle of gunfire at Harvard Stadium faded to a dull roar as they jogged north into Cambridge.

  Ahead, a massive hospital had been demolished by missiles. A vast wall of smoke rolled into the sky above the wreckage. Fresh Pond Parkway was carpeted with red brick, white dust and flattened vehicles. The Apaches had done their work there, just as they had at Christ Hospital.

  For a while, they didn’t see any Klowns. Then their luck ran out.

  The crazies came from the east. Swarms of them fleeing the big fires. They ran at the soldiers from front yards and parking lots.

  The M4’s recoil hummed against his shoulder. Crack crack. Brass rang on the asphalt. A body dropped, a woman coming at them swinging a shovel. Then another.

  Wade stumbled. His ankle hadn’t had time to heal, and it flared with pain at each step. Rawlings put her arm around him and took some of his weight.

  The bulldozer was gaining on them, a big yellow John Deere machine with glaring headlights. The squad’s rounds pinged and sparked off its massive steel blade. Klowns hung off the sides, waving spiked bats and Molotov cocktails.

  Young set up his SAW and started hammering. One of the crazies tumbled off. Otherwise, the fire had no effect.