“Hey, they’re popping smoke behind us,” somebody says.
At the next intersection, their comrades in Second Platoon, the column’s advance guard, disappear behind a wall of smoke heading north, while the remains of First and Third Platoons are moving east. It is Lieutenant Knight’s crazy plan all over again.
“Prepare to withdraw on my command!” Ruiz calls out.
Fire slackens as the boys get set to break off contact and haul ass.
Time to retrograde.
I’m not afraid
Knight slowly pulls himself onto his feet, grimacing with pain at the bleeding hole in his torn and bruised calf muscle, and sees the first Mad Dogs racing toward him from only twenty meters away.
“Vaughan!” he screams. “Vaughan, help me!”
Leaning back against a car, he reaches for his carbine, but it is gone. All he has is his nine-millimeter. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he quickly unholsters it and squeezes off several shots into the approaching horde, dropping bodies onto the street.
The Mad Dogs bear down on him, their slavering jaws champing.
Knight laughs suddenly, his eyes shining, feeling lightheaded and weak from the loss of blood.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he says, and empties the rest of the clip into their snarling faces.
The infected do not know what fear is.
They rip him into pieces, ignoring his screams, and fight over what is left. They gnaw and bite even at the morsels, trying to infect his dead flesh with living virus.
The rest rush by in their thousands, pressing onward into the crashing rifles of Alpha’s lines.
One last card to play
Bowman watches his new rear guard pop smoke, concealing their retreat as First and Third Platoons head east, hoping to draw Maddy off the main column, now reduced to a pathetic twenty-five troops. Nearby, Kemper is yelling at everybody to clear the net, which has become congested with incomprehensible, screaming voices.
In less than fifteen minutes, his command has been scattered to the wind and is now entangled in a decisive engagement against a superior enemy, facing defeat in detail.
“Vaughan’s holding,” Kemper tells the CO. “He says they’re starting to swing north soon and move towards the extraction point.”
“Roger that,” Bowman says, trying to feel hopeful.
A Mad Dog runs out of a nearby building, loping with his hands splayed into claws, spittle flying as he snarls. Without thinking, the Captain shoulders his carbine and cuts him down with two rounds.
Killing Maddy has become routine, almost instinctive now, without remorse or regret.
His company is at the edge of the abyss now.
Knight, acting on his own initiative, split their force in the face of the enemy and the bastard was right. Bowman realizes that if they stuck to his original plan, the column would have been hit in the flank in several places while engaged and destroyed piecemeal. He saw no other alternative at the time. Knight was willing to sacrifice himself and the men as pawns in a game; Bowman was not. No wonder the crazy bastard kept his ideas to himself until the last possible moment.
A mark of a good commander is to roll with the punches in the field. Not only did he decide on the spot to run with Knight’s plan, he decided to implement it again when faced with an unwinnable fight against another collection of mobs converging on them. Almost all of First and Third Platoons volunteered to act as a diversionary force and hopefully Ruiz, part of the rear guard, will have the sense to join up with them instead of leading Maddy through the smoky veil that right now is their only real protection.
They are doing a good deed, but there is no need for anybody to sacrifice his life for a cause. Once things get too hot, they can simply melt away into the nearest buildings until danger passes, and gradually find their way back to the school.
Their decision was heroic, but also practical. They could all stay together and die valiantly, or break off and stay alive but give up the possibility of extraction.
“Contact left!” Corporal Alvarez calls back from the advance guard.
“Orders, sir?” Kemper says.
Bowman asks about the size of the force, and Alvarez tells him.
Christ, how many of these monsters are there?
Roll with the punches.
Another mark of a good commander: Keep one’s options open.
The problem is they are almost out of options. Bowman has one last card to play, and decides to play it.
It is his turn to go east.
Contact
Ruiz is no fool. He understands why the Captain popped smoke, and turns the corner to follow First and Third Platoons—already setting up to hit Maddy as he enters the intersection—instead of running through the smoke to rejoin the rest of Second Platoon. The other soldiers cheer as they turn the corner, happy for the extra firepower and to have a pro like Ruiz around. His combat skills are practically a legend in Charlie Company. The man has warrior spirit in his heart and ice water in his veins.
“Who’s in charge here?” Ruiz asks Sergeant Floyd, a former corporal whom Bowman promoted to take over the remnants of Third Platoon.
Floyd looks Ruiz up and down, his face pale and his eyes bulging.
“You are, Sergeant,” he says.
“All right. You’re too bunched up. I want these men here to spread out—”
“Contact!”
Ruiz screams:
The soldiers whoop as the line erupts with a volley. Instantly, the first ranks of the Mad Dogs collapse, their bodies torn and gushing blood, instantly replaced by fresh ranks. They’re all making the turn. For a second time, Maddy has taken the bait, sparing the main column.
“Where do you want my SAW, Sergeant?” McLeod shouts over the din.
“Pick your own ground, Dorothy,” Ruiz growls, racking a round into the firing chamber of his shotgun. “We’ll be on the move in less than a minute.”
McLeod deploys his bipod on the hood of a yellow cab, lines up his sights center mass on one of the leading Maddies, and fires his first burst. The gun bucks against his shoulder, making his teeth vibrate. He continues firing, empty shell casings and links popping out of the weapon’s eject port and clattering onto the hood of the car. The tracer rounds strobe, flashing and guiding his aim into torsos and faces and limbs and skulls. The stream of hot metal pulverizes everything it comes into contact with.
“Frag out!”
He notices that the Mad Dogs are close and getting closer. Floyd made a mistake: He set up too close to the intersection without giving his first lines any breathing room.
“Reloading!”
Ruiz has already seen the same problem, and is ordering the first line to withdraw. The fire slackens as the boys come off the line.
“Contact!”
“Where?”
“The mothers are behind us!” somebody screams.
At the next intersection, First Platoon has been split in half by a massive horde of Mad Dogs converging from the north and south.
In just moments, most of Ruiz’s command has become cut off and surrounded.
