This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  They were soldiers. Soldiers couldn’t make mistakes, but men did.

  Day to day, it was becoming less about the job and the mission, and more about survival, simply staying alive.

  Then even that shock wore off.

  Wade hauled himself to his feet and raised his tactical goggles, which had fogged from the humidity. He detached his magazine. Empty. He slapped a new magazine into his carbine and put a round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded. Ready to kill again.

  “Well, that’s one room done,” Eraserhead said with a grin that showed his missing teeth.

  “Hurray,” Williams said with obvious sarcasm. “Only a hundred to go.”

  “They don’t expect us to do all of them, do they?” Ford asked.

  Ramos’s squad had two fireteams: Alpha, which was Wade’s, and Bravo, which had stayed outside in the hospital parking lot with the Humvees, providing exterior security for the operation. Wade still sometimes viewed his comrades in Alpha with the social lens he’d developed over his high school years. Williams, tall and wiry, was the squad’s nerd. The only Black man in the platoon, he was a brainy kid who’d grown up in poverty in Detroit and joined the Army to gain marketable skills. The guys ribbed him for reading the articles in Playboy and called him Doctor Mist.

  Ford was the jock. He was good looking enough to be an actor but was mystified by women. He constantly read books on how to seduce them. He looked at Wade as some kind of Casanova because Wade had had a steady girlfriend in high school.

  And Billy Cook, the giant kid the guys called Eraserhead, was the oddball. He had crazy eyes. He said weird things, out of the blue, even during a firefight. He was built like a refrigerator. He was also the only man in the squad besides Ramos who wasn’t on psychiatric meds, who didn’t take sleeping pills to keep from jolting awake in the middle of the night at the sound of imaginary laughter.

  Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”

  “What about them?”

  “We should evacuate them. Get them out.”

  “The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”

  Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.

  “Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.

  Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”

  The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?

  He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.

  “It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”

  “Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”

  Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”

  “Bullshit,” Williams said.

  “Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.

  “Naked?” Williams qualified.

  “It’d be worth it,” said Eraserhead. “Either way.”

  The boys chuckled, careful not to laugh too loud or too hard. They passed around a can of dip.

  Wade shook his head. “What’s next, Sergeant?”

  “We clear the next—”

  They heard a burst of laughter out in the hallway.

  The fireteam bristled. They glanced at the door before settling their eyes on the hulking Ramos and his Sledgehammer, the devastating AA-12 combat shotgun. The sergeant flashed them the hand signal to prepare for action.

  Wade eyed the other members of his fireteam. Nobody did anything without the others knowing about it. Nobody moved unless somebody stayed behind, scanning for threats.

  More laughter came, followed by the electrifying sound of a woman screaming.

  Wade guessed the staff had heard the shooting and were trying to save the patients just as the doctor had. Saving them meant disconnecting them from the barbiturate cocktail flowing into their veins.

  The Klowns were waking up.

  “Get ready to move,” Ramos said. “If it’s laughing, kill it.”

  The boys hustled into position. They had no doubts now about what they had to do.

  Kill them all or die.

  NINE.

  In the crowded trailer he was using as his headquarters, Lt. Colonel Joseph Prince studied the big electronic map and dry swallowed an Advil.

  Little blue icons displayed First Battalion’s sprawling deployment around the Greater Boston area. A large blue icon indicated his headquarters at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, home to the 66th Air Base Group before it had been relocated.

  Yellow icons showed live fire incidents—units in contact. There were a lot of those, more and more every day. Some never stopped being in contact. As for red icons indicating opposition forces, there were none. The enemy was everywhere. The enemy is us, as Pogo once said. The enemy included his wife and son, infected and running amok until they’d been shot down in the street like dogs.

  He knocked back a second Advil and tried not to think about that.

  The colonel didn’t need the big board to tell him he was losing a war against his own country. He’d made rank by following orders. He never bitched. He always took the fight to the enemy. “Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution” was his motto.

  Prince wasn’t very imaginative, but he was reliable, and he usually got results. He was used to having the kind of firepower that could flatten anything that got in his way.

  The current conflict defied the imagination. The enemy was American citizens, the mission objectives vague, the rules of engagement contradictory. His lightfighters had taken twenty percent losses in continuous operations, while each afternoon, the colonel met with civilian lawyers to review every after-action report and decision that affected American lives and property. He could just imagine their faces when he told them the order had come down from Regimental HQ to terminate the infected in the quarantine hospitals.

  Prince was used to freedom of action with massive amounts of power. Now he felt like a spider caught in its own web.

  Video monitors next to the big board rolled horrific images transmitted by aerial drones, blimps and long-range cameras. Exhausted staffers sitting in front of flat screens and stacked radios managed operations and talked to units in the field. Foam cups, water bottles and mission binders cluttered the desktops. Dead cans of Red Bull filled the trash bins. The room smelled like nervous sweat and stale coffee.

  CNN was broadcasting video of an office high-rise. A massive fireball bloomed from the side of the tower. Then another. Glass and debris rained onto the streets.

  Prince recognized the landscape and its scars: Boston’s Financial District.

  TEN.

  Gunfire rattled. Wade felt the muffled thuds in his feet. First Squad was in action downstairs. Outside in the hall, the screaming stopped. Then it started again.

  “Fix bayonets,” Ramos said quietly.

  In Afghanistan, Wade hadn’t used his bayonet once. But they weren’t in Afghanistan. This was a different enemy. This enemy didn’t stop until their hands were on you or they were dead.

  He gripped his carbine, weapon shouldered and pointed at the floor. The fireteam glared fiercely at Ramos, waiting for the order to step off. They wanted to move, shoot something. Get it over with. Thousands of people slept inside the hospital. If they all woke up, the squad’s only hope of survival was to rush and shoot their way to the Humvees.

  Then call in an airstrike.

  Ramos keyed his headset microphone to contact Lieutenant Harris
, who led the team on the floor above. “Antidote Six, this is Antidote Two-Two. How copy, over?”

  “Antidote Two-Two, this is Antidote Six. We have heavy contact. The hospital is compromised. Repeat. The hospital is—”

  A long, sustained explosion of gunfire drowned out the rest. The soldiers glanced upward. The Klowns were on every floor, it seemed.

  “Bad copy, Antidote Six. ‘Hospital compromised’ is received. Request orders. Over.”

  Ramos waited for Harris’s response and got more thunder instead.

  “Antidote Six, Antidote Six, this is Antidote Two-One. Over.” The sergeant leading First Squad was trying to cut in, his voice professional but edged with panic. “Antidote Six, how copy?”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Williams said.

  This is getting seriously bad, Wade thought. “We’ve got to move, Sergeant.”

  “And I have to find out if we’re bugging out or sticking with the original OPORD. So shut it.” Ramos repeated his request for orders into his headset.

  Wade exchanged a glance with Ford. Does the LT think we’re still good to go for this shit mission? An understrength platoon against thousands of homicidal maniacs? They had to get out. Every second they delayed sealed their fate. Where the hell’s the rest of Bravo Company?

  “We’ll be out of this in no time,” Ford said. “Back at the FOB for a hot and a cot.”

  Wade nodded, though he didn’t believe a word of it.

  A massive boom shook the building. Acoustic tiles fell from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Somebody upstairs had thrown a grenade. The screaming in the hall died, replaced by waves of howling laughter.

  Wade took a deep breath and felt sudden calm wash over him. His pulse slowed, and he became intensely aware of his surroundings.

  Ramos was a seasoned non-com, one of the Army’s centurions. He knew what he was doing. Wade trusted him to get them out. Otherwise, it was out of Wade’s hands. He would fight for himself and his comrades. Either he would die, or he wouldn’t.

  Ramos shook his head. “All right, we’re going to—”

  “All Antidote Ops, retrograde to the Humvees. Abort operation. Antidote Six, out.”

  “Antidote Six, Antidote Two-Two. That’s a solid copy. Out.” The sergeant loaded a round into his shotgun’s firing chamber. “Listen up. We’re getting out of here. Hard and fast.”

  “I was scheduled to go on leave two days ago,” Eraserhead muttered.

  “We know, we know,” Williams said.

  “I should be in a bar somewhere, getting so drunk I piss myself.”

  “We know,” Williams repeated.

  Another grenade went off upstairs. The lights blinked several times.

  “At least you’ll still get the chance to piss yourself,” Williams added.

  Downstairs, the gunfire stopped. The lack of sound was even more alarming than the grenades.

  “Step off in three, two, one,” Ramos said.

  “See you on the other side,” Eraserhead told them.

  Wade tensed, ready to kill.

  It wasn’t murder anymore. It was survival.

  Ford opened the door.

  ELEVEN.

  Lt. Colonel Prince watched the landmark office tower get bombed on live television. It was mesmerizing in its way. Not the violence, but the fact nobody was doing a damned thing about it.

  That alone told him everything he needed to know about the current situation.

  Another section of the building vomited fire, smoke and glass. The camera shook. Prince recognized the building. The Federal Reserve Bank. At the bottom of the screen, triple captions scrolled public service announcements and propaganda. In the upper right: LIVE.

  The United States Army had an operations manual for everything. Prince liked to say, “There’s an op for that.”

  There was no op for what he was seeing. Whoever was doing the shooting was military.

  “Major Walker,” he barked.

  The major signed a clipboard and returned it to a staff sergeant manning the radios. He approached wearing a slight smile Prince wanted to punch off his face.

  “Colonel?”

  “Something amuse you, Major?”

  “No, sir. Just trying to be positive in front of the men, sir.”

  Walker was hiding something. Prince had never liked his executive officer. The man was a politician, a cold snake, and he sucked as a soldier. Walker was nothing more than a desk warrior. But he was a wizard at getting things done.

  The colonel let it pass. He found he really didn’t care what Walker might be hiding behind that creepy little smile of his. “How’s the operation coming along?”

  “Which operation, sir?”

  “Mercy.” That was the name the Brass had given the operation to terminate the infected in the major quarantine hospitals. It involved three companies, most of their fighting strength.

  “Forces are en route.”

  “Outstanding. What about the Governor?”

  “We’re still talking to his people.”

  Colonel Armstrong, commander of the 55th Infantry Regiment—the “Double Nickel”—and Prince’s boss, had issued another critical operational order, or OPORD. His boys were to round up the governor of Massachusetts and other senior civilian officials and put them in a safe place, per the Federal Continuity of Government plan.

  “Talk faster. Get it done. Understand?”

  The major’s tall, slim body stiffened into a respectful stance. “Yes, sir.”

  On CNN, another round hit the Federal Reserve Bank. Prince flinched as if he were there. The building was burning in a dozen places, pumping black smoke into the air.

  According to the Army, after two to four days of little rest, an extended sleep is needed—twelve to fourteen hours. The colonel had barely slept in over a month. Exhaustion on this level was like being drunk. Leaders made mistakes when they were this tired. He needed to stay sharp.

  He dry swallowed another Advil and tried not to think about that. The muscles in his face were numb. His head pounded in time with his steady heartbeat, threatening a blinding migraine.

  Prince had often marveled at how much power he held commanding a light infantry battalion. Eight hundred men. Tenth Mountain. Climb to Glory. The best infantry in the world.

  They were First Battalion, part of the 55th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Brigade Combat Team, Tenth Mountain Division, XVIII Airborne Corps. Six companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo (an attached forward support company providing logistics), and HQ (call sign, The Wizard). These forces were supplemented by the Tomcats, an attack aviation battalion; the Trailblazers, a scout platoon; Thunder, a mortar platoon; and Nightingale, a medic platoon.

  When Colonel Armstrong, call sign Big Brother, had contacted Prince and explained that the Army had been called into action, Prince had responded like a dog freed from its leash.

  He thought it would take days. Weeks rolled by. The division was soon spread all over New England, getting chewed up by real estate agents and housewives turned into laughing sadists and suicide bombers.

  They hadn’t cleaned up the mess. They’d become part of it.

  When Big Brother reached out to him, he’d had a choice. He could have gone home and protected Susan and Frankie. If he had, they wouldn’t have caught the Bug, and they wouldn’t have been shot down in the street like rabid dogs. Prince had thought he could do more for them where he was, helping to maintain order and halt the spread of infection. Over the past two months, he’d accomplished little more than slowing the tide, and even that was questionable.

  The massive, constant headache he suffered had started right after he realized that.

  Walker eyed him with open concern. “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “Affirmative.” Prince pointed at the video image of the blazing office tower, which was still taking hits. “That’s Boston. And that’s heavy ordnance. On live television. Who the hell is doing the shooting, and why is nobody putting a stop to
it?”

  Walker said nothing.

  “Get me some answers.”

  “Right away, sir.” Walker’s enigmatic smile returned as he gave the video monitor a final lingering glance. “The apocalypse will be televised.”

  TWELVE.

  Ramos raised his Sledgehammer as he cleared the doorway. Wade followed, pointing his carbine the other way. Eraserhead with the SAW, the squad automatic weapon, was next, followed by Williams with his M4/203.

  Grinning Klowns filled the corridor. Several stomped on the half-stripped, mangled body of a nurse lying on the floor. Others watched and roared with laughter, hands on their hips or gripping their stomachs. The nurse was laughing too.

  When the infected noticed the soldiers pointing guns at them, they cheered and shrieked with glee as if the guests had finally arrived at their surprise party. Once again, Wade was disturbed by their faces. They looked like clowns with their wide glassy eyes and crazy leers.

  One stumbled close to Ramos and giggled. Ramos cut him in half with a blast of buckshot.

  As if they’d been waiting for a signal, the crazies charged.

  Wade sighted center mass on a woman and fired a burst. The recoil hummed against his shoulder. She went down. Another took her place. Another. And another.

  Spent shell casings flew from the carbine’s eject port and clattered to the floor. The metallic crack of the carbines and the roar of the sergeant’s shotgun pounded his ears.

  Eraserhead got the SAW into position and fired controlled bursts. The mob disintegrated, bodies blowing apart under the withering fire. Tracer rounds streamed down the hallway.

  Wade gasped. The scene was like something out of a movie.

  And more kept coming.

  “Reloading!” Wade pocketed an empty magazine and slapped a new one into his carbine. He pulled the charging bolt, aimed and fired.

  Behind him, the Sledgehammer boomed. The infected were coming at them from the other end of the corridor.