and it’s going to need a First Sergeant, so you’re it.”
He extends his hand to Kemper, who shakes it warmly.
“Congratulations,” he adds. “It’s a well deserved promotion. Although I don’t know about that rise in pay. Money’s becoming worthless. For all I know, they’re going to start paying us in MREs.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Same to you, Mike. Thanks for everything. . . . I wanted to let you know, whatever happens, that I appreciate everything you’ve taught me.”
“You’re paying me back for it. You’re starting to teach me a thing or two.”
“Well,” Bowman says, embarrassed.
“Do you mind if I take that map, sir?”
“Help yourself.”
Kemper takes it down from the wall, folds it carefully, and puts it in a pocket of his BDUs.
“Souvenir, sir,” he says.
I must be in good hands with soldiers who have a name like that
The elevator takes Petrova and a squad of gawking soldiers down to the lobby, where the rest of the company has assembled and is ready to leave the building. When they are not staring at her—the famous scientist they believe holds the secret to curing the plague—she likes to watch them work. These kids seem to know what they are doing. They move like clockwork and are well led by their NCOs, the professional warriors.
The company begins to file out of the building in sections. First, two platoons exit in a paired column, one soldier swinging left and one swinging right to provide a defensive perimeter on the street so that the rest of the company can safely exit. Then Captain Bowman, trailed by his machine gunners, whom he calls the Alamo Squad, leads the rest of the company outside.
Petrova blinks in the dim light, marveling at the sky, which she has not seen for days.
The air is chilly and the sky is gray and cloudy.
The helicopters took too long to get in the air. Dawn has come and the column will be moving in daylight. The gray sky is already filled with screaming birds, feeding on the dead.
She cannot believe the carnage. The cars smashed against each other at odd angles on a road of garbage and broken glass. The blood splashed across the ground and pooled in the potholes. She steps over random torn luggage, battered children’s books, a pattern of cracked CDs. People’s entire lives spilled onto the ground. Without its owners, it is just garbage.
The air smells like smoke.
My God, Petrova tells herself, it is not even a city anymore, but a wasteland. She was picturing a city in a crisis, not already fallen.
This was her home, and she is leaving it forever.
At last, the CO gives the order to move out. The company gets onto its feet, weapons and gear clanking, and begins its march north at a brisk pace. She feels safe being surrounded by so much legendary American firepower, and yet feels completely vulnerable in the open like this.
The Mad Dogs are out there in their armies, hunting the uninfected. Petrova can sense them. Their growling gently touches her ears as whispers on the breeze. Their marching vibrates under her feet, a deep rumble in the distance. If the Mad Dogs brought the greatest city in the world to ruin like this in days, what does this puny group of boys hope to do with their rifles and bombs and machine guns? They would shoot an ocean, hoping to kill it.
She passes the burned wreck of a Chevy Malibu. The charred, blackened skeletons of the driver and his family are still inside. The driver’s grinning jaws hang open, as if laughing silently at the fools passing him by. The horror of it slaps her in the face.
She presses her hands over her mouth and swallows hard, painfully aware that the soldiers around her are watching to see how she will react. They are not being malicious. They are visibly anxious. If she starts screaming, she could put their lives in danger.
But Petrova does not scream; she steels herself and keeps walking, passing one horror after another. Overhead, the black birds cackle, as if laughing at them all.
She turns to the soldier marching next to her, a tall, slim twenty-year-old with intelligent eyes, apparently part of a handpicked detail assigned to guard her.
“What is your name?” she says as quietly as possible.
“PFC Jon Mooney, Ma’am,” he answers earnestly, if mechanically.
She tentatively holds out her hand.
He stares at it, then takes it with his own gloved hand, gripping it firmly.
“I’ve got you, Dr. Petrova.”
“Thank you, Jon.”
The boy’s face lights up at hearing his first name.
“I’m Joel,” the soldier on her other side says. “Do you want a Kit Kat bar, lady?”
Petrova smiles and shakes her head politely. She is too nervous to eat and besides, she lived on junk food out of the vending machine for days and is now thoroughly sick of it. They’ve gone several blocks without incident but they have so far to go, and the sky continues to lighten as the sun rises above the horizon.
Above, people are waking up to the noise the column is making as it weaves its way through a street choked with cars, and begin shouting down at them from windows. Some ask for help killing a Mad Dog loose in a stairwell, public corridor or even in a neighboring room. Some ask for food and water and medicine. Everyone ask for news, any news.
Petrova looks down at her feet, her face burning at the thought the Army is not fighting its way into New York to save its people, but sneaking its way out to save just her alone, abandoning everybody here to a likely future of disease, starvation and death.
This city was her home. These people are the New Yorkers she shared its sidewalks, subways, restaurants, museums, parks, taxis, cafes and treasures with.
“What is your unit?” she asks Mooney, hoping to distract herself. She instinctively trusts this seemingly sensitive young man. His eyes have not died like most of the other boys’. Their eyes have seen too much killing and they’ve been turned partly into what they hate, killing machines capable of thoughtless, wholesale slaughter. Those creatures roaming the streets are, in a sense, the living dead, but some of these soldiers are the dead living. Jon Mooney is one of those who are still alive. He is still human. She can tell by looking at his eyes, where the soul shows itself.
“First Squad, Second Platoon, Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eighth Brigade, Seventy-Fifth Regiment, Sixth Infantry Division. They call our brigade the Crazy Eights, Ma’am. Technically, we’re all that’s left of it.”
“The Crazy Eights,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“I must be in good hands with soldiers who have a name like that.”
Mooney grins and says, “We’re the best at what we do. You’re safe with us.”
“So what is my special name?”
“Ma’am?”
“President Kennedy was known as Lancer. I must have a special name.”
“Actually, you do. You’re, uh, ‘Doctor Killjoy.’”
“Oh,” she says.
“The names aren’t very important, Ma’am. They’re almost pulled out of a hat.”
“It is okay,” she says. “But it is not as good as ‘Crazy Eights.’”
The soldier laughs, while the people in the windows above continue shouting.
