“That’s my stuff!” Wyatt whines as Ratliff comes over and grabs a pack of cupcakes.
“There’s plenty for everybody,” Mooney says.
“That’s what your mom. . . .” Finnegan says, his voice trailing off. Nobody laughs. Instead, the boys stare off into some point in space and the atmosphere begins to fill with despair, like a fast-acting poison. Mooney can’t stand it anymore.
“Everybody come and get a candy bar,” he says. “Joel’s buying.”
The boys swipe at his pile, almost picking it clean. “Thanks, Joel!” they tell him.
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Wyatt tells Mooney.
“We have appointed you our new morale officer,” Mooney says.
“Why? Didn’t everybody find the LT’s speech uplifting? ‘Good day, uh, gentlemen, I’m the LT. Blah, blah, blah, uh, the world’s ending, and you’re still in the Army.’”
The boys laugh, chewing on their candy.
“You didn’t happen to find any beer in the lockers, did you, Joel?” says Finnegan.
“Or a couple of joints, maybe?” Carrillo wants to know, laughing.
“How about valium?” says Ratliff.
“Southern Comfort?”
“Codeine?”
“Heroin?”
They sound like they are horsing around, but Mooney can tell they are dead serious. They have recently learned that the road of duty now leads face first into a brick wall, presenting a choice that Billy Chen refused to continue making and that they are still trying to avoid. They are not sure what they now owe, and to whom. They do not want anything to do with Lieutenant Bowman’s total war, but they see no way out of the Army and no way home and besides, home may not even be there anymore.
A few hours of escape would be welcome.
“I had a teacher who kept a quart of whiskey in his drawer,” Finnegan says. “We’d sneak in during lunch period and take a few sips, and replace it with water.”
“I can’t believe a year and half ago I was graduating from high school,” says Carrillo, eyeing the student desks stacked against the far wall. “Man, I’ve seen a lot of shit.”
“Eighteen going on forty-five,” Ratliff says, and Mooney smiles, nodding.
“Man, I would kill for an ice cold bottle of Bud,” Finnegan says.
“Screw Bud,” says Ratliff. “Heineken’s the best.”
“I only drink the good stuff,” Carrillo boasts. “Guinness on tap.”
“Carrillo likes to eat his beers.”
“The domestics are just yellow water, you guys. You’re drinking carbonated urine.”
“I like Bud.”
“What about Corona?”
“Hey, man, what’s the difference between a half and half and a black and tan? I could never figure that out.”
Rollins finishes his Hershey’s chocolate bar, sighs and stares at the wrapper wistfully. “I just thought of something,” he says. “If things are as bad as LT says, I wonder if they’re making more of these chocolate bars or if this is all there is for a while.”
“Or movies,” says Finnegan. “Live concerts. Football games.
“PlayStation,” says Wyatt. “
“Hot chicks, dope, rock and roll, and beer,” says Ratliff.
“My old man won’t like that,” Corporal Eckhardt says across the room, scrubbing his carbine’s firing pin and bolt assembly with a toothbrush and solvent to get rid of carbon residue. “He can really put it away. He can down two six-packs a night, pass out and then wake up the next day and go to work.”
“Sounds like a swell guy,” says Wyatt, snorting.
“My old man’s a psycho. If anybody can survive this thing, he will.”
“My dad’s an accountant,” says Finnegan. “He hates violence. He almost had a heart attack when I joined the Army and he found out they were sending me to Iraq.”
“My dad’s got a basement full of guns,” says Carrillo. “He loves his AK47 more than he loves my mom. He’s a real jerk. Jerks like him always make it.”
“Kind of shows you what kind of world is going to pop out the other side of this giant asshole,” Mooney says.
“Yeah, all the pussies will be dead,” says Eckhardt.
“And all the psychos will be running the place,” Mooney says. “Think about it.”
The soldiers fall silent, trying not to think about it.
“My girl,” Ratliff says fiercely but quietly, almost to himself. “She’s tough. She’ll be okay. Her dad owns a gun. I taught her how to shoot. She’s going to make it.”
Finnegan looks out the window, squinting into the sunlight. Suddenly, he starts laughing uncontrollably. Everybody looks at him.
“You know, my dad,” he says, then stops abruptly, his laughter trailing off and his face slowly going blank.
Moments later, an air raid siren interrupts their gloom, slowly winding up somewhere in midtown Manhattan. A siren across the river begins wailing in response, then another from somewhere farther away, tinny and distant. The grating sound builds until it is almost deafening.
Mooney looks out the window. The quality of the sunlight tells him it is late afternoon. Seventeen hundred hours, to be exact.
The citywide curfew is now in effect.
The boys slowly rise to their feet. Their plan is to rustle up some supper for themselves. After that, they have a funeral to attend.
In two hours, the American sun will set, and it will be oh-dark.
One man, at the right place at the right time,
making a difference
Three police officers, clad in head-to-toe black BDUs, body armor and bulky clear-visor helmets, tread slowly down the street, newspapers scuttling around their boots and clinging to their legs. One of the cops leans on a comrade for support, while the third, a tall woman with a long braid protruding from under her helmet, brings up the rear, dragging her clear ballistic shield. They are all exhausted, but it is her turn to fight. They were going east at one time, but got turned around and are now heading west, towards the sounds of gunfire.
Gunfire means people. Security.
Night is falling. Around them, the streetlights flare to life in the dusk.
As if awaiting this signal, two Mad Dogs bolt out of a nearby apartment building, past construction scaffolding with posters plastered all over it advertising an aging pop singer’s farewell tour, and race towards the riot control police, yelping.
The woman assumes a fighting stance, raising her truncheon and shield, while her comrades sink to their knees on the asphalt behind her, panting.
She waits for the Mad Dogs to approach, taking deep breaths, then quickly sidesteps the first, a middle-aged man in hospital scrubs, who runs by and comes to a skidding halt. Moments later, the other, a large man in coveralls, comes flying at her, snarling. She body checks him with her shield, stunning him, then brings her truncheon down on his skull, killing him instantly. An instant later, she pivots and backhands the first man with her shield, making him spin until he trips over his own feet.
The woman staggers back, almost finished by the effort, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her armor and weapons, while the man scrabbles his way back onto his feet and begins pacing in front of her like a nervous cat, howling.
They were working riot control near Grand Central Station, barring thousands of people from attempting to board the trains that stopped running days ago, the station having since been converted into a Lyssa clinic. Then
