“Do not move even slightly, Sandy,” Petrova whispers into the phone.
Saunders turns, runs down the hall and enters East Lab.
“Now. Go. Now.”
The lab technician darts out into the hall on tip toes, looking both ways, holding the phone against her ear.
“Turn right at the end of the hall,” Petrova tells her.
Cohen turns the corner and abruptly freezes in her tracks, putting her hand over her mouth.
Petrova curses herself. The horrors that she has already begun to digest are new to Cohen. She should have warned the woman about what she was going to see.
“That is Dr. Baird,” she says. “He is dead. He is no threat to you.”
“Oh my God,” Cohen says.
“Be quiet,” Petrova says. “Dr. Lucas and Fuentes are heading in your direction. You can make it, but you must go now.”
She sees Cohen nod vigorously, dance around Baird’s corpse, and begin walking rapidly towards the Security Center, looking over her shoulder every few steps to make sure nobody is coming up behind her.
Petrova says, “You are doing just fine. You are very close now.”
“Almost there,” Cohen huffs, already out of breath.
“You can do it,” Petrova tells her.
The digital projector blinks out, the lights shut off and Petrova is plunged into darkness and silence so total she wonders if she’s dead.
She sits in the dark, her heart pounding against her ribcage and her blood crashing in her ears.
The power has gone out.
The phone in her hand is dead.
She can hear Cohen shouting, “Hello? Hello?” out in the hall, the sound muffled and distant.
“Be quiet,” Petrova hisses at the dark. “Be quiet or they will find you.”
The woman is not far away. She’s about thirty feet down the hall, in fact.
“The power’s out, Dr. Petrova!” Cohen wails. “Help me!”
Petrova hears thuds against the wall.
“Oh, no,” she says.
“Help me, please!”
Cohen is not being attacked. She is banging against the wall with her fists, which Petrova can hear in the Command Center.
That is how close she is. Closer even than Petrova initially thought.
“Come and get me! Please!”
And if she keeps this up, she is going to get herself killed or infected.
Petrova formulates a plan on the spot. She knows where the door is and believes she can find it in the dark easily. She will open it and guide Cohen to safety using her voice before the woman’s screaming brings every Mad Dog in the place running.
Only she doesn’t move. She is literally frozen with fear.
Cohen is still shouting for help.
Petrova begins to crawl back under the operator’s desk, burrowing into the wires and the dust and the cobwebs and the residual heat of the electronics.
The last thing Petrova hears before she falls asleep is the horrible sound of a struggle that she takes into her dreams with her.
Chapter 8
We are the world’s most powerful military
and we are being beaten on our own ground
Lieutenants Bowman and Knight, joined by their platoon sergeants Kemper and Jim Vaughan, stand on the roof of the Samuel J. Tilden International Middle School, which their units have cleared and secured, and listen to the gunfire in the city.
The school is only a couple of stories tall but even this high up, they have an almost antiseptic view of the city’s Midtown district. The buildings block their view of the wholesale slaughter going on at the street level of the city. But they can hear it.
To Bowman, leaning against the parapet and gazing out into the smoky haze produced by scores of unchecked fires, it is as if New York itself were a giant body, its people healthy cells one by one being converted into virus that is beating the crap out of the body’s immune system.
And to carry this analogy further, the immune system, well, that would be two brigades of infantry of the U.S. Army, about six thousand men and women in all—each a highly trained and heavily armed lean, green fighting machine.
We are the world’s greatest military and we are being beaten on our own ground, he thinks. By the people we swore to protect, armed only with tooth and nail.
On the other side of the roof, Sergeant Lewis fires his M21 sniper rifle. He is up here fighting his own private war, shooting Mad Dogs down in the street behind the school.
“I still can’t believe it,” Knight says. “Is this really happening?”
“It’s a numbers game, Steve,” Bowman tells him. “You take five guys who develop Mad Dog symptoms. They each bite one other person and that one other person turns into a Mad Dog. Then that person bites somebody else. Every couple of hours.”
Knight whistles. “Jesus, do the math!”
“Suppose just ten percent of the population of this city becomes a Mad Dog. Just one out of ten. And then suppose we had the men and the weapons and a safe position to shoot them down from.”
Knight finishes for him. “There aren’t enough bullets.”
Bowman nods. “It’s a numbers game. There’s no way to stop this. It’s only going to get worse. In a few hours, maybe a day, ten percent becomes twenty percent. A flood.”
Across the street, a civilian in a private office has noticed them and is holding up a sign against his window that says: trapped, help.
The officers move to another part of the roof, seething with shame.
They can only help those they can without risking the security of the unit. For a moment, Bowman thinks of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which his uncle Gabe, a recovering alcoholic in AA, taught him when he was ten years old:
“Who could pull the trigger that many times anyhow?” Knight wonders.
“Private Chen couldn’t,” Bowman murmurs. The soldier wouldn’t be the last who would rather eat a bullet than fight this war, either.
Knight continues, “One of the reasons we got chewed up so bad all the way here is some of my boys just couldn’t shoot Americans.” He glances at his platoon sergeant, then looks away. “Have you, uh, shared your discovery with your platoon?”
“They’re not dumb,” Bowman says. “They know what’s going on. It’s just that nobody’s said it out loud for
