“What the hell, over?” says Wyatt.
Mooney is starting to feel naked without his rifle.
“Oh, God,” he says, and runs from the room.
Wyatt chases after him, finds him retching over a wastepaper basket.
“I breathed it in,” Mooney says, spitting and trying to catch his breath. “I forgot to hold my nose for a second. It was the worst thing I ever smelled in there. Holy shit. It smelled like a rotting grave.”
“Dude, put your mask back on before you get sick,” Wyatt says nervously.
“Are you guys all right?” the Lyssa patient calls from the dark room. “Don’t leave me alone, okay? Bring me some water, please?”
“Hey, look at that,” says Wyatt, pointing at the floor.
The bloodstain begins five feet from them and ends at a pair of doors twenty feet distant. The blood is smeared, as if somebody dragged a mop soaked with blood through the doors.
“You gotta be kidding,” Mooney says as Wyatt approaches the doors.
They should be getting back. If Third Squad’s engaged outside, McGraw’s probably mustering the squad. Right about now, he is working himself into a blind rage looking for his AWOL riflemen, chewing his massive handlebar mustache and grinding the molars in that big square jaw of his.
Mooney also has no interest in seeing what’s on the other side of those doors. What did that guy say?
Awful, he said. It sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered.
“We’d better go back,” Mooney says. “McGraw’s gonna kill us.”
Wyatt grins. “I’ll just take a quick look. Dude, this place is like a haunted house. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were zombies on the other side of these doors?”
He presses a button on the wall with the palm of his hand. The doors swing open automatically.
Clear the fucking net
Jake Sherman, the platoon radio/telephone operator, sits in a janitor’s closet with his feet up on a box containing cheap toilet paper, eating a packet of instant coffee mixed with hot chocolate powder and washing it down with Red Bull while listening to the traffic on the military nets. He started mainlining caffeine after too many sleepless nights in Iraq, and hasn’t yet kicked the habit of getting completely wired while on duty.
Then the excitement is over and the company’s voice traffic quickly returns to the ongoing rhythm of units talking to each other in the night about location, condition, supply and all the other mundane communications required to keep two infantry brigades functioning on the ground in New York. Sherman switches from the company to the battalion net and listens in on the chatter. War Pig (Delta Company) continues to collect and pass around intelligence about the riot. War Hammer (Alpha Company) is requesting a medevac for a grenadier who got his ear bitten off by a Lyssa victim. Warmonger (Bravo Company) is asking the last calling station to authenticate its identity.
He switches to civilian traffic, looking for more information about the riot. The authorities provided more frequencies than normally needed based on the extreme nature of the epidemic, and he has access to everything. The police are aware of the riot but cannot scrape together enough manpower to do anything about it. A fire is also raging in a warehouse in Queens but there are not enough firefighters to respond to the call. Police units are overwhelmed with domestic disturbance calls and looting. Violence is reported inside Lyssa clinics and one of them has apparently been firebombed with Molotov cocktails. Despite several major arteries in the City being blocked off for official vehicles only, traffic has virtually ground to a standstill almost everywhere.
Sherman laughs to himself: The voices on the SINCGAR, while edgy and tense, could still make the Apocalypse sound like just another logistical foul-up. Glancing at his watch, he switches back to the company frequency for a commo check. He hears:
Sherman recognizes the man’s voice at the other end. It’s Doug Price, Captain West’s RTO. He fires back, chewing on hot chocolate powder: “War Dogs, this is War Dogs Two, I copy, over.”
He takes out a small notepad and pencil.
“Roger that. Send message, over.”
Sherman can’t hear for a moment; men are shouting in the background and it sounds like somebody is shooting a rifle.
“Negative contact, War Dogs. Say again, over.”
“That’s a good copy, War Dogs; I copy ‘Nirvana.’ Wait one, over.”
He looks up “Nirvana” on his code card, his cheat sheet for routine communications requiring encoding, but it’s not there. He digs out his mission code book and looks up the term.
It means: “Unit is under attack.”
Sherman coughs on hot chocolate powder. He takes another swig of Red Bull to clear his throat and lights a cigarette, thinking for a moment. Who would be stupid enough to attack a platoon of heavily armed U.S. infantry in Manhattan in the middle of the night? But there it is: an authentic message from the company commander, announcing that the company HQ and First Platoon is under attack.
He says, “Roger, War Dogs.”
“Standing by to copy, over.”
“War Dogs, I copy ‘Motorhead Slayer November Sierra Oscar November,’” Sherman says, scribbling the message in his notepad. “Wait one, over.”
He looks up the code, translating: “Rendezvous at our location at oh-seven-thirty.”
LT needs to hear this message right away.
“Roger that, War Dogs. Stand by. Wait, out.”
Sherman tenses for a moment, unsure how to answer this breach of protocol. Finally, he says, “Yeah, I’m here, Doug.”
“Thousands of who?”
The radio screeches, making him flinch.
A place we can hold up while the world ends
“That’s it,” says Susan, pointing at one of several rundown-looking prewar apartment buildings across the street. “Home.”
“Don’t worry,” says Boyd, trying to put on a brave face.
He cannot understand why he is so scared. He’s a soldier. He has seen men die. He’s even killed some himself. Well, at least the one that he is sure about. He has a locked and loaded carbine and should not be afraid of
