“What is it?”
She shushes him, their bodies pressed together.
Then he hears it. Mad Dogs howling in the dark.
Two teenaged girls enter the glow of the sputtering street lamps, crossing the street. One stops and stares directly at where Boyd and the girl are hiding in the shadows, and emits a low guttural growl, shoulders slouched and trembling, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Drool drips from her clenched teeth, staining her T- shirt.
The other girl, her long hair falling in tangles over her face, continues limping along, dragging a leg that appears to be bleeding and broken. Then she too stops and begins growling at where Boyd and Susan are hiding.
Boyd raises his M4. The first girl growls louder. Susan is shaking, breathing in short, panicked gasps.
“Shoot her, shoot her. . . .”
He licks his lips as a sickening wave of horror blanks out his mind. His heart begins hammering against his ribs and he can feel his bowels turn to water. He blinks, tries to shift his mind back on his training, but he never trained for this. The fact is he has no idea what he will do if the girl charges him. In Iraq, things were never clear cut but fighting American civilians who have turned into some kind of psycho zombie is something new and beyond training. Instead, his mind begins obsessing on the theory he heard that Mad Dogs are not really growling when they make that noise, they are actually talking, but their throats have become partially paralyzed so it comes out as a creepy gurgle. Once he thinks of this, he cannot get it out of his mind.
He wonders what they are trying to tell him.
A mob of young, muscular Asian boys, wearing wife-beaters and jeans, emerges from the darkness and falls upon the girls with metal pipes and baseball bats. The girls’ bodies topple to the ground under the blows. Except for the scuffing of their sneakers against the street as they lay convulsing and flailing and dying, they don’t make a sound. Boyd hears the pipes and bats connecting with flesh and cracking bones when they hit, clanging off the asphalt when they miss.
“Jesus,” he says, sick to his stomach.
One of the boys straightens and stares in their direction.
“Shut up,” Susan hisses beside him.
“Why? They aren’t infected.”
“I’ve seen those guys before,” she says. “You do not want to fuck with them.”
Their work done, the mob moves on without a word, stretching and swinging their homemade weapons.
“Come on, Rick,” Susan says, sighing. “We’re almost home.”
War has rules
In Bowman’s headquarters in the hospital facility manager’s office, the rules of engagement are changing and the non-coms are swearing.
Bowman presses on, “You are now authorized to use deadly force against any civilian who makes a threatening gesture towards a member of this unit. Even if that civilian is unarmed.”
Now everybody is shouting.
“This comes straight from Battalion and presumably from Quarantine and the Old Man himself.”
War has rules. Rules of engagement are spelled out by command authorities to describe the circumstances under which military units can use force, and to what degree.
They are also supposed to follow the basic precepts of law.
The LT runs his hand across his buzz cut. “Gentlemen, I’m honestly not sure what to make of it. I’m open to suggestions.”
Kemper glances at him sharply.
“It’s illegal,” says McGraw. “We don’t have to obey an unlawful order.”
“Suppose we don’t pass on the new ROE to the men,” says Lewis. “What happens if we are attacked? How do we defend ourselves, and with what force?”
“I’m not shooting American citizens,” McGraw says, his face burning. “I took an oath to defend them, not slaughter them, for Chrissakes. Even the goddamn dirty hippies.”
“So we’re going to let the Mad Dogs here attack us and kill us or infect us,” Lewis says. “That’s your ROE?”
McGraw snorts. “How many people are we talking about here? We can handle a few at a time without killing anybody. Not that many people go Mad Dog. It’s pretty rare.”
“If that’s true,” says Ruiz, “then why are we getting these reports of Mad Dogs attacking Army units?”
Nobody has an answer to that.
“I mean, did you ever wonder why America had to pull its forces out of almost every one of its military bases around the world? We’ve got what, more than seven hundred bases? More than two hundred fifty thousand people overseas just in the Army? Think about it. Almost every one of them is home now.”
“They’re not telling us something,” Lewis says. “That’s for damn sure. You can take that straight to the bank.”
“Our situational awareness is very limited,” Bowman says.
“What happens later, sir?” Ruiz is asking. “Suppose we do shoot some people who are honest to God trying to kill us. What happens after, when the Pandemic is over? Do we end up in court charged with murder or what? Could we get sued?”
“They’re going to die anyway,” says Lewis.
“I want some assurances,” says Ruiz. “About the legalities.”
“So I say if they’re trying to kill us, we should be able to kill them first. They can’t give the whole Army a court martial, can they?”
“I’m not shooting anybody,” McGraw says. “The question is not whether we refuse the order, but whether we tell the Captain that we’re refusing the order to make a point up the chain of command.”
“We can’t be the only unit refusing to fire on sick people,” Ruiz says.
“These are dangerous times,” says Lewis. “I wouldn’t go around announcing to the chain of command that you’re refusing to follow orders, know what I mean?”
“Are we even supposed to be here?” says Ruiz. “Isn’t it against the law for the Army to be pointing guns at people at all in our own cities? You know, Posse Comitatus?”
“We trained for this type of domestic emergency before we shipped out for Iraq,” Lewis tells him. “Why would they do that if they didn’t mean for us to use that training now?”
“Yeah? Then where’s the non-lethal equipment?”
Lewis glances at Kemper. “Back me up on this, Pops.”
Kemper wants to shout them down, remind them that they are professionals and that they should shut up and listen to the LT, but Bowman is not doing anything, only sitting there with his mouth open and grumbling to himself that the whole thing does not make sense: If only three to five percent of the sick develop Mad Dog symptoms and die within a week, how can they be that big of a threat? At any given time there cannot be more than ten, maybe fifteen thousand of them in all of Manhattan. That’s a lot if you put them all together, but they are scattered far and wide.
How can there be this many Mad Dogs?
Kemper looks away, suddenly wondering if the Lieutenant is going to be able to get them through this in one piece. After serving together a year in Iraq, it is a disloyal feeling, and he does not like it.
He also finds himself agreeing with Lewis: The Army is not telling them something vital. Like the LT said, their situational awareness is very, very limited, and Kemper wonders what it is going to cost them when the bill comes.
The worst thing I ever smelled
PFC Jon Mooney lies awake on his bunk in the dark, restless and staring and dry-mouthed from wearing an N95 mask all day and night. He plays the shooting over and over in his mind: Did they do the right thing? He can’t
