Mooney gestures at Petrova, but the Sergeant does not care. There is nobody else. The last time they ran into a mob of infected, Carrillo, Finnegan, Ratliff, Rollins, Eckhardt and Sherman were cut off, climbed into the bed of a pickup truck and made a stand.
And now they are dead. They know this because they had to come back for the radio and found their bodies scattered like mangled, discarded puppets.
Wyatt offers Mooney one of his gimpy grins, making his big glasses crooked, and then winks. Mooney nods, wearing an expression of hopeful sadness. They’ve brought each other luck so far. They can’t die now.
McGraw punches the air, pointing.
Mooney and Wyatt creep up to the corner, weapons held ready to shoot. Other than two charred, burned-out police cars at an abandoned checkpoint, the street appears empty. Perhaps the garbage can just fell over. It happens.
He is about to signal that the area is clear. Then he sees movement.
It is a dog. A pack of them. Filthy, feral dogs, feasting on a child.
“Hey!” he says.
Wyatt hisses at him to shut up, but he cannot stand the sight of that boy being eaten.
“Git!”
One of the dogs slouches closer, its lips peeled back and its ears flat, snarling in defense of its meat.
Mooney looks down at his bayonet. He is not allowed to shoot unless it is a matter of life and death; otherwise, it is the bayonet. But he does not want to get into a knife fight with a pack of feral dogs carrying God knows what diseases.
He picks up a beer bottle off the ground and throws it at the dogs, who scatter with snarls and yelps, licking their bloody chops.
“Dude, check it out,” Wyatt says. “Hajjis on our three.”
Four teenage boys stand across the street, wearing dirty hoodies and looking at them.
Wyatt adds, “You think they’re infected?”
Mooney shakes his head, unsure. He raises his hand and waves.
The boys exchange a glance. One waves back.
“I don’t think so, Joel.”
The boys start walking towards them, glancing both ways, out of habit, before crossing the street.
They are holding baseball bats, but of course they would be armed. It would be madness to go outside without some type of protection. But Mooney is not in the mood to take chances anymore.
“That’s close enough,” his says, raising his carbine.
The boys stop in the middle of the street, their eyes vacant, and exchange a long, meaningful glance. They turn back to the soldiers. One of them grins.
As he grins, saliva leaks down his chin. He is infected, but has not turned yet.
They suddenly sprint forward, swinging their bats.
“Stop or I swear to God I’ll shoot you dead,” Mooney says.
One of the boys runs clumsily into Wyatt’s bayonet, spearing himself, while another hits him in the arm with a bat, hard enough to make him drop his carbine. They close to grapple. Moody swings his own carbine to slash at the other two boys with his bayonet, but they dodge out of reach and pause, their mouths open and laughing soundlessly.
One breaks left and the other right—
McGraw’s shotgun discharges with a deafening bang, killing one of them instantly. The two survivors flee, leaving one dead and the other trying to pull his bleeding body across the street, keening in his death throes.
“Finish him quick, Mooney,” McGraw says. “Count your coup.”
“Roger that, Sergeant.”
If the blast did not bring Maddy running, the kid’s grating death wail will. It is best to finish him quick. Mooney takes a deep breath, raises his carbine with the bayonet pointing down, and brings it down into the boy’s back.
The knife pierces the boy’s body clean through, impacting the street below with a jolt that resonates up Mooney’s arms and neck. For several moments, the boy writhes under the bayonet like a fly pinned to a wall. Then he falls still, bleeding out onto the asphalt.
“Dead now, Sergeant,” Mooney says.
“Then let’s go,” the Sergeant says.
Mooney pulls his bayonet free and stands over the corpse, exhausted. He notices Petrova staring at him, wide-eyed with horror.
“I had no choice,” he says weakly.
“Your eyes,” she whispers.
Mooney blinks. What does she see?
“Are you wounded, Private?” McGraw asks Wyatt.
Wyatt, standing aside with his hands jammed in his armpits, wags his head, looking pale and tired.
“I’m good, Sarge,” he says. Wincing, he bends to pick up his carbine.
“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Mooney demands.
But Petrova is not paying attention to him. She is looking up at the pale gray sky.
He follows her gaze and senses the change in atmosphere. Then he hears the sound coming from the southeast: the thunder of rotors. It rapidly grows in volume until three CH-47 helicopters roar over nearby rooftops at more than a hundred fifty miles per hour, red lights blinking on their bellies.
“Get on the horn with those Chinooks and tell them we’re coming,” McGraw shouts at Mooney, who has been carrying the SINCGAR since Jake Sherman died. “Tell them to hover at the rendezvous point until we reestablish radio contact!”
Mooney begins chanting into the radio, trying to contact the pilots.
“I’ve made contact,” he tells the others.
The group lets out a ragged cheer. Only Wyatt looks sour, staring after the disappearing helicopters glumly and muttering something to himself.
“You see that, Joel?” he adds. “We might just make it.”
Seeing those massive birds cross the sky was one of the most beautiful things that Mooney has ever seen.
He feels like he will be home again soon, wherever that may be.
The opposite direction
McLeod opens his eyes and slowly extricates himself from the cab’s backseat, his face sticky with drying blood and his ears ringing at a deafening volume.
He stands and takes a deep breath.
The sky spins, filled with the distant echo of gunfire.
He falls to his knees, vomiting messily onto the bloody ground.
Somebody hands him a canteen and he drinks greedily, spits.
“How,” he says, and groans at the pain in his head.
The street has been turned into a nightmare landscape made up of hills of dead people and body parts and lakes of blood. Here and there, a wounded Maddy writhes on the ground, eyes and mouth gaping like a fish out of water. Civilians from nearby buildings silently pick at the dead, scavenging. The women mourn the soldiers, weeping as they search the bodies for food, blood splashed up to their elbows. The men pick up the carbines and look wistfully toward the sounds of shooting to the north. Everybody is pale with wide, panicked eyes; several people have paused in their work to vomit against a nearby wall.
McLeod shrugs off the hands trying to help him up and staggers to the place where he last saw Ruiz. His feet squish in boots filled with warm blood. He can’t find the man’s remains but knows he is there, buried in the scattered human wreckage.
