Pandemic

FOUR.

The soldiers raised their weapons and screamed at him to get on the ground.

“What are you doing to my patients?” Braddock demanded.

“Get down on the fucking ground!”

They wore camouflage Army combat uniforms tucked into brown boots. Tactical vests stiff with armor and bulging with gear. Kevlar helmets with that slightly unsettling Wehrmacht look.

Their shoulder patches read MOUNTAIN with a symbol of two crossed swords.

One of them had stenciled TEOTWAWKI on his helmet.

“I’m not infected!” Braddock realized he probably looked it with his beard, matted hair and grimy scrubs and labcoat. He raised his hands and shut his eyes in fear.

A stocky, powerfully muscled man commanded, “Lower your weapons. He doesn’t have it.” To Braddock, he added, “I’m Sergeant Ramos, Tenth Mountain Division. We’re under orders. You need to vacate this area immediately and let us do our jobs, sir.”

The sir hung in the air, dripping with disdain. The bland, boyish faces of the squad regarded him as if they might have to shoot him anyway, just to be the safe side.

Braddock stood over six feet tall. He’d boxed as a young man and would gladly take on any of these punks in the ring. As a group, though, they unnerved him. They’d been through hell. They were exhausted and close to the edge, relying on their training to keep it together.

He tried to see them patriotically as American soldiers, men who risked their lives in defense of their country and did their jobs whether they agreed with the mission or not. But at the moment, they were invaders, and they scared the shit out of him.

Braddock counted five. Robbins had made it sound as though there was a squad in the building, maybe two. Where were the rest?

He spared a worried glance at Ellen White. She lay with her eyes closed and wearing her dreamy smile. Her long, graying hair lay neatly brushed on the pillow. He visited her often to give her status updates. He hoped she could somehow hear him and feel assured her hospital was still running. Even now, he sought her approval.

The fifth floor was special for another reason. The ward was where Braddock had initiated an experimental treatment based on the Milwaukee Protocol, used to treat rabies. The patient was loaded with midazolam and ketamine to induce a coma, and then fed amantadine and ribavirin to fight the virus. He’d just started it. Anything was worth a try.

Now these soldiers were ruining the experiment.

“May I ask what your orders are?” he asked, trying to sound polite. He still trembled from the shock of seeing guns pointed at him.

Ramos ignored his question. “Who’s in charge here?”

“I am. I’m the acting Chief of Medicine.”

“Then you’d better start evacuating the hospital. Get your staff out as fast as you can.”

“And then what? Go where?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Wherever you want. Someplace safe. There are safety shelters.”

“Who can I talk to about this? Who’s in command?”

“The lieutenant. He’s upstairs with another fireteam.”

Okay, we’re talking. This is good. We’re talking about it. “I’ll go speak to him then. Please don’t do anything until I get back. Ten minutes.”

“We’ve got our orders. You have yours. Get your staff out.”

The men smelled like smoke and fear. Their eyes were wild. They weren’t crossing the line. The whole country was. There’d been a decision at the top.

“You don’t have to do this, Sergeant.”

“Just get your people out, Doc,” Ramos said, his expression softening to reveal the man behind the mission mask. “You don’t want to see this.”

“How bad is it out there?”

“Bad enough for this. Desperate times, desperate measures. Understand?”

“You still have a choice. These are innocent people. Innocent, sick people.”

Fighting the infected out in the street was one thing. Murdering sick people in their beds in cold blood was something else. Sick civilians.

“We have our orders.”

“Shit orders,” a tall, wiry Black soldier said.

Ramos wheeled. “What did you just say, Private?”

The Black soldier nodded at Braddock. “He’s right, Sergeant.” He pronounced it Sarrunt, making it sound deferential and defiant at the same time. “We don’t have to do it.”

Braddock said nothing. He’d learned when to talk and when to shut up.

“This is bullshit,” added another soldier with a handsome, boyish face. He looked like he’d be more at home surfing some wave in California than sweating here in a combat uniform. “It’s just us, with the ammo we got, and we have to waste the whole hospital? There are thousands of people here. Where’s the rest of the company?”

“We lost our commo,” said the Black soldier. “Maybe the operation was scrubbed.”

“Maybe the rest of the company is fucking dead,” said the surfer.

A third soldier, sporting a stained bandage on his left cheek, pointed at the bodies in the beds. “You’ve seen what these people do. They killed our guys. They’re not even people. I say, kill them all.”

“Best to put them out of their misery now before they wake up, and we have to fight them on the streets,” agreed a fourth soldier. “We should put down as many as we can.”

The group was split down the middle. The sergeant was the tie-breaker.

“It’s not up for a vote,” Ramos said. He lowered his shotgun and fired a round at the middle-aged man lying in front of him.

Blood and brains sprayed across the floor. Some flew onto the legs of Braddock’s scrubs. The sound flattened his eardrums. His ears rang in the aftermath.

The soldier with the bandaged face grinned, revealing two missing front teeth. “Hooah, Sergeant.”

Ramos’s casual execution of one of the infected, which was supposed to demonstrate simplicity and resolve, backfired. The rest of the soldiers paled at the sight.

Braddock backed away in horror. One of the patients on the floor tried to take a bite out of his leg, forcing him to take another step back. The woman’s jaws clamped shut with an audible click that made him shiver.

People didn’t just wake up alert after being yanked out of a chemically induced coma. But the Bug was tough. It always wanted to play.

“Fuck this,” the surfer dude said.

“We’ve all done it,” the man with the bandaged face told him. “Lots of times.”

“Not like this. Not while they’re sleeping. They look like people.”

Braddock flinched at the sound of gunfire coming from a higher floor. No flurry—the shots were methodical. Executions. They were going to kill everybody in the hospital. The debate was pointless. The soldiers had orders. The ability of the Army to function at all depended on following orders, the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.

“The rest of the platoon is already in action,” Ramos said. “We’re doing this. Now.”

Braddock felt something inside him burst, releasing energy that threatened to go in a direction he couldn’t control and might very well get him killed. He’d worked too hard to keep those people alive to see them hamstrung and slaughtered like livestock. There was still hope. Modern medicine could cure the virus. They just needed a little more time. The world owed them a little more time.

He disconnected Ellen White’s intravenous feeding tube and restraints. He picked her up in his arms. She seemed to weigh nothing. She sucked her thumb like a child. She believed in him. He owed her his life.

“Come on, Chief,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

The sergeant said: “Sir? Sir! What the fuck are you doing?”

White’s eyes flashed open, bright and intelligent. Braddock looked at her and didn’t see the Bug. He saw the Chief of Medicine. She reached up to touch his face with trembling hands. She whimpered.

“Sir!” the sergeant roared. He raised his weapon, a monstrous shotgun.

“Ellen,” Braddock said. “It’s John. I’m here.”

She was still in there. Pleading.

The treatment. It works.

She was getting better, and the sergeant was going to kill them both.

Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t. Shoot.

“Put her down and step back! Now!”

Braddock had no choice. He was going to have to do as they asked. He kissed her on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Ellen.”

She plunged her thumbs into his eyes.

He screamed and gripped her wrists. His vision roared in mottled shades of dark and light. Searing pain stabbed through his skull. He flung her away.

Then it stopped.

He wasn’t screaming anymore.

He was laughing.

It was hilarious.