Pandemic

EIGHT.

The hospital. The quarantine ward, now a slaughterhouse.

Wade admitted a primitive satisfaction in putting down the people that the soldiers of Bravo Company were calling Klowns, short for Killer Clowns. The crazies were so terrifying that every kill flooded him with warm cathartic relief. But then remorse came quick and hard.

He was fighting unarmed crazy people in an insane war. Every time he survived combat, he didn’t feel alive. He felt as if he were dying a little. Soon, there’d be nothing left of him but a ghost. A killing machine.

Ramos clapped him on the shoulder. “On your feet, Wade.”

As usual, there was no time for thinking, feeling, any of it.

Still, nobody moved, eyeing their grisly handiwork with dawning awareness. It had taken seconds to lose control, for the operation to turn into a massacre.

Which was more terrifying than anything. What they’d just done wasn’t about following orders. They’d completely lost it, and they knew it.

They were soldiers. Soldiers couldn’t make mistakes, but men did.

Day to day, it was becoming less about the job and the mission, and more about survival, simply staying alive.

Then even that shock wore off.

Wade hauled himself to his feet and raised his tactical goggles, which had fogged from the humidity. He detached his magazine. Empty. He slapped a new magazine into his carbine and put a round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded. Ready to kill again.

“Well, that’s one room done,” Eraserhead said with a grin that showed his missing teeth.

“Hurray,” Williams said with obvious sarcasm. “Only a hundred to go.”

“They don’t expect us to do all of them, do they?” Ford asked.

Ramos’s squad had two fireteams: Alpha, which was Wade’s, and Bravo, which had stayed outside in the hospital parking lot with the Humvees, providing exterior security for the operation. Wade still sometimes viewed his comrades in Alpha with the social lens he’d developed over his high school years. Williams, tall and wiry, was the squad’s nerd. The only Black man in the platoon, he was a brainy kid who’d grown up in poverty in Detroit and joined the Army to gain marketable skills. The guys ribbed him for reading the articles in Playboy and called him Doctor Mist.

Ford was the jock. He was good looking enough to be an actor but was mystified by women. He constantly read books on how to seduce them. He looked at Wade as some kind of Casanova because Wade had had a steady girlfriend in high school.

And Billy Cook, the giant kid the guys called Eraserhead, was the oddball. He had crazy eyes. He said weird things, out of the blue, even during a firefight. He was built like a refrigerator. He was also the only man in the squad besides Ramos who wasn’t on psychiatric meds, who didn’t take sleeping pills to keep from jolting awake in the middle of the night at the sound of imaginary laughter.

Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”

“What about them?”

“We should evacuate them. Get them out.”

“The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”

Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.

“Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.

Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”

The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?

He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.

“It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”

“It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”

“Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”

Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”

“Bullshit,” Williams said.

“Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.

“Naked?” Williams qualified.

“It’d be worth it,” said Eraserhead. “Either way.”

The boys chuckled, careful not to laugh too loud or too hard. They passed around a can of dip.

Wade shook his head. “What’s next, Sergeant?”

“We clear the next—”

They heard a burst of laughter out in the hallway.

The fireteam bristled. They glanced at the door before settling their eyes on the hulking Ramos and his Sledgehammer, the devastating AA-12 combat shotgun. The sergeant flashed them the hand signal to prepare for action.

Wade eyed the other members of his fireteam. Nobody did anything without the others knowing about it. Nobody moved unless somebody stayed behind, scanning for threats.

More laughter came, followed by the electrifying sound of a woman screaming.

Wade guessed the staff had heard the shooting and were trying to save the patients just as the doctor had. Saving them meant disconnecting them from the barbiturate cocktail flowing into their veins.

The Klowns were waking up.

“Get ready to move,” Ramos said. “If it’s laughing, kill it.”

The boys hustled into position. They had no doubts now about what they had to do.

Kill them all or die.