Pandemic

FOURTEEN.

Lathered in sweat. Eyes wild. Pulse pounding at a heart attack pace.

The soldiers screamed at each other to lower their guns.

They were making enough noise to bring the entire hospital down on their heads. Soon, the Klowns would come howling through the doors.

Wade scanned the faces. Nobody was infected. Yet.

He looked at the weapons. There was enough firepower to fill the air with metal in seconds. The sergeant’s combat shotgun was fixed on Williams’s chest. The Sledgehammer was loaded with twelve-gauge shells—high-velocity buckshot. On full auto, the gun fired five rounds per second, emptying its twenty-round drum in about four seconds and destroying anything in its path.

Wade remembered something Ramos had said to him in Afghanistan: The gun calls to be used. He lowered his carbine. “Okay, okay. Listen.”

The others ignored him.

“Come on, guys. Put them down.”

Rapid shotgun blasts caught Williams in the chest and threw him down the hall. Surprised, Wade fell backward and landed on a bloody pile of arms and legs.

Ford snapped two rounds into Eraserhead’s arm and shoulder then put another three in the ceiling. Eraserhead laughed as the impact spun him around.

Wade looked up into the Sledgehammer’s smoking barrel as Ramos took aim.

This is it. Oh fuck, this is it—

“BOOM!” the sergeant roared. Then he burst into laughter.

Ford swept his carbine toward Ramos.

The world exploded in a blinding flash of heat and light.

Grenade—

Ramos disappeared in the blast. Shrapnel ripped the walls apart. The concussion flung the bodies against the ceiling and dropped them like puzzle pieces. Wade was lifted and spun through the air. He landed hard on his side and curled into a fetal ball among the dead.

Bare feet splashed past, hairy legs. Infected looking to play.

He shut his eyes and didn’t move. His body hurt everywhere. If he had an open wound, even a cut, he was as good as dead.

Man down, he thought.

Wade sat up with a jolt. He reached for his carbine by reflex but couldn’t find it. He patted his body, checking for wounds. His armor had caught some shrapnel. He was going to have a lot of bruises, and his ears were still ringing at high volume, but he seemed to be okay.

Ramos lay a few feet away, his hands twitching and his armor pockmarked and smoking. Ford gasped from a ragged chest wound. Eraserhead was in even worse shape with one arm blown off.

Wade knew he should pinch off Eraserhead’s artery to keep him from bleeding out, lash a tourniquet around the upper part of the limb, and slap a Kerlix bandage onto the stump. He should stab Ford’s chest with an angiocatheter to release air and keep the man’s lungs from collapsing. Then get both of them a Medevac.

Wade didn’t move. The men were splattered in blood. Blood crawling with live virus.

He’d seen microscope images of the Bug in one of the endless PowerPoint presentations the Brass was always sending down to the front-line troops. The Bug looked like little worms that lived in bodily fluids, seeking out the brain and its fertile tissues, where it fed.

The men lying in that hallway were his friends. They were wounded.

I’m going to help.

He did nothing.

He would die for them. If given the chance, they would have died for him.

Still he did nothing.

Ramos pushed himself up onto one elbow and coughed blood onto the floor. Half his face grinned at Wade. The other half looked like hamburger burning on a grill.

Of all of them, Ramos had the biggest reason to walk away from all this. Go over the hill, go Elvis, desert. Boston was his hometown. The man’s sister lived not far from the Air Force facility the battalion was using as a forward operating base. She and her kid lived in constant fear with their furniture stacked against the front door of their apartment. The squad went out there regularly with Ramos to check on them and deliver groceries and water.

But Ramos had stayed. It wasn’t just that he was true blue Army, one of the gung-ho mo-fos. Wade knew the man believed that every time he put down one of the infected, Maria and little Thomas Flores were a bit safer.

The sergeant would never see his family again.

“Gonna make a hole.” Ramos held up his knife. “Make it wide.”

Wade looked around for a weapon but saw nothing that could help him.

Ramos struggled to his feet. He swayed, chuckling softly. His one good eye burned with hilarity and malice.

Wade remembered his last conversation with Beth. She’d been under the control of the Bug, but she was still in there. He could still reach her.

“Think about your family, Sergeant.”

Ramos doubled over choking with laughter. He vomited more blood.

“Thank about Maria. Think about Thomas.”

Ramos took off his helmet and dropped it among the dead. He ran his bloody hand across his crew cut and licked the edge of his knife. “I’m gonna make you one of us.”