hundreds of Mad Dogs appeared and began tearing into the frantic crowd and biting everybody in sight.
The riot control unit advanced, trying to separate the Mad Dogs from the uninfected, and found themselves trapped between the two.
Only tear gas saved them.
The cops fired CS grenades, which burst in huge clouds of brilliant white gas. Mad Dogs and uninfected people alike ran blindly through the clouds, tears and mucus streaming from their eyes and noses, clawing at their clothes and burning skin. Dozens of people bent over and began choking and vomiting. The Mad Dogs suffered the most. Tear gas reacts with moisture on the skin and in the eyes, and Mad Dogs are soaked with sweat and saliva. Tear gas also burns the nose and throat, and the infected already find it enormously painful to swallow because the Mad Dog strain paralyzes the nerves in the throat to force production of saliva.
The unit was broken, the cops scattered and trying to return to their station. For this group, it has been a running fight lasting nearly a mile along a circuitous path. There were five of them in the beginning. But one was chased into a plate glass window, and the other died heroically in front of a Staples store to buy time for this friends to escape.
The man in scrubs, growling, leaps through the air—
And falls to the ground with a loud bang.
A puff of smoke rises from a nearby rooftop.
Sergeant Lewis, sitting on a stool on the school’s roof nursing a wad of Red Man dip in his cheek, sees another Mad Dog come running at the cops from the apartment building. He sizes up the man, aims center-mass at his body using his scope, and drops him with a shot between the shoulder blades.
The cops duck for a moment, glance at each other, and then begin looking around for the shooter.
This I like, he thinks, taking a quick moment to spit. Clear-cut ethics. One man, at the right place at the right time, making a difference.
Now all we need to do is put every man with a uniform, a gun and some training in the right place to wait for the right time. Break the chain of infection everywhere and roll this plague back into Pandora’s Box or wherever it came from.
Small arms fire begins cascading to the south, and he glances in that direction, wondering what kind of trouble Alpha and Bravo Companies have gotten themselves into. They should have shown up an hour ago. They stepped off late and they are meeting resistance along the way. Now they are losing the light.
He turns back just in time to see another Mad Dog, an obese woman in a jogging suit, running towards the woman cop, who braces herself and raises her truncheon to strike.
Damn.
He fires and misses.
Damn!
The M21 is a semi-automatic weapon, however, which means he gets another shot. He fires again. The woman flops to the ground, convulsing and pouring blood from a smoking hole in her back.
This is my street, he thinks, spitting tobacco juice. I give you free passage. You will be safe as long as you travel here under my protection. Next time, don’t bring a billy club to Armageddon.
He glances up at the sky. Just enough daylight to make good on this promise. Feeling magnanimous, he waves, hoping they see him.
They are not looking up at the buildings, however.
They are trying to run.
Peering into his scope, he sees one of the cops, crawling on hands and knees, while the other man staggers away, lurching on tired legs, following the woman cop who sprints ahead of them with all of her remaining strength.
“God,” he whispers in awe.
Beyond the three cops, a moving wall of Mad Dogs is advancing down the street, hair matted and disheveled, dressed in rags, filthy and trailing their own waste.
Thousands of them.
The horde tramples and grinds down the first cop like road kill without breaking its stride. The second stumbles and falls to his knees. Almost instantly, the mob plows into him with the force of a car, tosses him into the air like a doll, and quarters him neatly, spraying a cloud of blood into the air.
The woman cop stops in the middle of the street and turns around, bracing her shield and holding her truncheon over her head, her braid spilling down her back.
Lewis’ rifle bangs: A Mad Dog drops. Bangs again, and another falls. He is trying to make a hole for the woman, but he knows it is useless. He sees the faces of the infected as he kills them. Their faces have no expression, only moving when their mouths contort into snarls and yelps, while their eyes remain fixed with an alien stare.
He fires again and again, draining the magazine.
Save one bullet for her, he tells himself.
No, she can make it.
No, she’s already dead.
His rifle clicks empty.
The cop swings her truncheon once before disappearing into the throng, which swallows her whole, instantly, as if she never existed.
“God damn you bastards!” Lewis roars in a sudden blind rage, standing and shaking his fist. “I’ll kill every one of you!”
His radio crackles in his ear.
He turns and sees the officers and senior NCOs clustered on the other side of the roof, staring at him.
Lewis wipes his eyes and keys his handset.
“You’d better come see this, LT,” he says. “You’d better come right now.”
Job security
McLeod flips the girl onto her stomach so he does not have to look at her face, particularly her eyes, which are wide open and glassy and staring. He bends down, grabs her ankles using latex gloves, and begins pulling her across the street, followed by a dense cloud of flies. Her dress hikes up, exposing her bare legs, and her face drags along the ground, leaving a thick smear of coagulated blood from the bullet hole in her throat.
“Oh, God,” he says, repulsed, trying not to look, humming loudly to shut out the sound of her face rasping against the asphalt.
“Hold up, Private,” a voice says behind him.
“Roger that,” McLeod says, flinging the girl’s legs down and staggering away from the corpse.
“Here. Take this.” It’s Doc Waters, holding out a Q-Tip.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s Vicks vapor rub. Rub some under your nose and it’ll cut out the stink.”
McLeod smiles, waving flies away from his face. “Thanks, Doctor. You’re the best.”
“Not in your nose, Private. Under it. There you go. Technically, you should not even be putting it under your nose. But it should help against the smell of the dead.”
“I don’t care what it does to me, as long as it works.” McLeod begins sniffing dramatically. “How about that. It does work.”
“You know, you really shouldn’t stack corpses like that. You should have used body bags. If you need to move them again, you’ll have to use a shovel.”
“Not enough bags, I guess. Shovelers, we got lots of.”
“I see.” Doc Waters gestures at the three other soldiers dragging corpses into the fly-covered pile near the front of the building. “So you’re not the only one in the shitter, Private. Who are these guys?”
McLeod grins. “They’re the misfits from First Platoon who started fighting after the LT’s speech telling us how everybody we know is dying back home.”
Doc Waters eyes him. “When was the last time you got some shuteye?”
