Tooth And Nail

Williams blinks in surprise, then fires again as he was trained, putting the second bullet into the man’s face, blowing off his jaw and ear. The man spins like a top and eventually falls to the ground with a meaty sound, his hair smoking.

The soldier laughs hysterically.

“Who shot him? Was that me?”

“Give me your weapon, Private.”

Ruiz takes the M4 out of his hands, shoulders it and fires rapidly, bang bang bang, dropping three more figures at the end of the hallway.

“I’m going to make a soldier out of you yet, Private Williams,” he says, handing him back his carbine and then retrieving his shotgun.

“Roger that, Sergeant,” Williams says, blowing air out his cheeks. “Roger that.”

A familiar voice from around the corner: “You guys all right?”

“Shut up and stay in position, Private McLeod,” Ruiz yells back.

“Sergeant, look, it’s a rifle,” says Hicks, stepping forward and picking the weapon off the floor. “It’s an M4.” He wrestles with the bolt and snorts. “Jammed.”

The Sergeant nods. He was afraid that at some point they were going to begin finding the shreds of First Platoon.

“And there’s a blood trail. See it?”

The trail of blood droplets leads under a door to an administrative office. The fireteams quickly get into position, ready to take it down. Ruiz peers through the window set in the upper half of the door, which is similarly spotted and streaked with blood. The inside of the office is clean and brightly lit but otherwise appears empty.

He counts down with his fingers, Three, two, one—

The doorknob gives, but the door barely moves. Something’s blocking it.

He pushes hard until the obstruction clears.

The soldiers step into the room, clear it, and then converge on its sole occupant.

The corpse lies tangled up in his own limbs. They recognize him as Charlie Company’s RTO. He wears a crude tourniquet tied tightly around his leg, which has been mauled savagely below the knee. The top of his skull and brains are splattered up the scorched and splintered door, which he was blocking with his body.

Blocking, apparently, to keep the Mad Dogs out.

“This shit is cold,” says Williams.

“He didn’t want to become one of them,” Ruiz says.

“Sergeant?” says Hicks, puzzled.

“Nothing,” says Ruiz. “Just thinking out loud.”

The man still clutches the pistol that he used to blow his brains out. As RTOs are not issued sidearms, the pistol is not his, although the soldiers recognize it as an Army-issue nine-millimeter.

The Sergeant crouches down and tears off one of the corpse’s oval dog tags, then contacts the LT using his handheld.

“War Dogs Two-Six, this is War Dogs Two-Three, over.”

War Dogs Two-Three, this is War Dogs Two actual standing by to copy, over.

“We have cleared most of the first floor of hostiles and have located a member of Charlie Company’s headquarters staff in the admin area of the left wing, over.”

What’s his status, over?

“He’s dead, over.”

Any sign of War Dogs Six or other elements of his command, over?

“Negative. We have something positive to report, though. The man we found is the company RTO, and he has a working combat net radio. Over.”

The boys glance at each other and grin. The man’s death is horrible, the more so because this particular death, among so many, is closer to home for them as soldiers. But finding an intact SINCGAR is a stroke of luck. Communications can be as valuable as water and ammunition in the field. With a working field radio, the platoon can easily talk to Battalion. They can get things they need to live and continue functioning as a military unit in the field. Specifically, through direct communication with the chain of command, they can ask for news, orders, reinforcements, evacuation, rescue, air support, food, water, ammunition, equipment and medevac.

Outstanding, Sergeant, says the LT. Can you send it back with a runner? Over.

“Wilco, sir. Sending Private Williams now with the radio, over.”

Solid copy, out.

“Collect these weapons and any ammo you can find,” Ruiz tells the squad. “As for Doug Price here, we’ll pick him up on the way back so he can be buried with respect.”

A greater obligation

Lieutenant Bowman established his headquarters in the wide entry hallway of the school, surrounding a sprawling refugee camp of more than a hundred panicked civilians located directly adjacent to public lavatories and a water fountain.

At the end facing the main doors of the school, he placed his gun team, and at the other, facing the main stairs leading to the second floor of the trunk of the building, a SAW gunner detached from Second Squad.

This simple setup provides protection for the civilians while enabling them to access water and toilets, which he hopes will keep them calm, but not the soldiers’ rucksacks, which are stacked near the front door under the watchful eyes of his gun team.

Sherman, holding an M4 carbine, scans the crowd for signs of trouble, shrugging at their requests for food, medicine, diapers, beer and cigarettes, plastic cups, blankets, rubbing alcohol, chocolate bars, more toilet paper and paper towels and soap, and a toilet plunger. He frequently glances at Hawkeye, lying groaning and sweating on a blanket under the care of Doc Waters, the platoon’s combat medic.

Hawkeye is starting to stink.

“He’s got Lyssa bad,” the medic tells Sherman, dumbfounded. “He got bit by a Mad Dog and now he’s turning into one. In hours. Something is definitely not right here.”

“You think?” somebody mutters under his breath.

Bowman struck a deal with the civilians, allowing them to enter the platoon’s defensive perimeter, and thereby become his problem, on two conditions. First, that they would not interfere with the operations of the men under his command. Second, that they would report any of them showing Lyssa symptoms, especially Mad Dog symptoms, so that they could be removed from the security zone and banished from the building.

So far, they have ignored the first promise and kept the second.

Beyond this, he is not sure what to do with them. He has orders to link up with First Platoon and Company HQ, and he will try to complete that mission for as long as he can. These civilians are only tying him down. And yet they are American citizens, and he has a greater obligation to protect them from harm.

His highest priority at this moment, however, is securing this building and giving his boys a well-deserved rest. They simply cannot keep up this pace. Already they are exhausted and using up their supplies at an alarming rate.

And the worst, he knows, is yet to come. Days of it. Even weeks of it. It may take a superhuman effort for his boys to stay alive just during the next twenty-four hours.

Doc Waters marches up to Bowman and says, “The men need to change their masks. They’re getting caked with sweat and soot, and the men are forgetting to change them.”

Bowman blinks in surprise. The platoon has bigger issues to deal with than Lyssa prevention. But of course the combat medic is right. Bowman nods and says he’ll get on it.

“And sir,” Doc Waters adds, “some of the men aren’t wearing their masks at all anymore. This is majorly stupid, sir. We’ve had a rare morning, but the chance of infection is just as high now as it was yesterday.” He glances at the civilians. “In fact, it’s higher.”

“All right, Doc,” the LT says. “I’ll see to it.”

“Sir, we got incoming!” cries Bailey, the SAW gunner from Second Squad. He is lying on the floor, sighting down the barrel, which now rests on a bipod. “I got seven, no, eight hostiles on the main stairs.”

The LT kneels next to Bailey and studies the Mad Dogs through his close-combat optic. They are Mad Dogs, seven of them sorry-looking specimens wearing paper gowns, and one wearing hospital scrubs. Three of them grin like clowns, their mouths and gowns stained red.

He wishes he could understand what motivates them. Don’t they recognize their own friends and family? Why do they want to kill us? Why don’t they attack each other?

The Mad Dogs pause and stand motionless, fists clenching and unclenching at their sides. They are still thirty meters away.

“What are you waiting for?” one of the civilians says. “Shoot them, for Chrissakes!”

Other civilians begin clamoring for them to open fire. A baby in the crowd starts screaming.

“Shall I light ’em up, sir?” says Bailey, gently placing his finger on the trigger.

“You know the ROE, Private Bailey,” Bowman tells him. “We fire only if they threaten us. Right now they’re not hostile.”

The gunner glances up at him. “ROE, sir?”

“We’re still operating under the rules of engagement issued by Quarantine last night.”

“Well, they smell pretty threatening if you ask me, sir,” Bailey says.

Bowman smiles despite himself.

Two of the Mad Dogs leap forward, snarling. The others quickly follow, sprinting with their characteristic loping gait.

They think like animals, Bowman thinks. They hunt in packs. Look at them go. They even run like animals. Why?

“You are cleared to engage,” he says.

The SAW is a belt-fed light machine gun able to fire up to seven hundred fifty rounds per minute at an effective range of a thousand meters. It is a squad support weapon, typically used to set up a base of fire. It eats ammo fast and spits out a high volume of withering, murderous fire.

Bailey sights the first Mad Dog carefully and drops him with a single burst. He moves on to the next. Each time he shoots, the crowd emits a chorus of grating shrieks.

Bowman is starting to believe the civilians are actually trying as hard as they can to make his job irritating and complicated.

Then he tries to put himself in their shoes. As if several weeks of plague and chronic shortages weren’t bad enough, their world is ending, they are refugees in their own land, and they are defenseless in a fratricidal war, hunted by a remorseless enemy that just hours ago was their son, their mother, their doctor, their priest, their oldest friend.

Now they’re watching a SAW gunner cut some people in half.

Christ, he tells himself, the only reason you’re still sane is you have a job to do. So try to cut these people a little slack, okay?

“Good shooting,” he says.

“Sir? The Mad Dogs are a lot more aggressive than we were told, and there’s a lot more of them than they told us there were.”

“That’s a very good observation, Private Bailey.”

“I mean, is this, like, supposed to be the end of the world?”

“The Army has given me no such order,” Bowman says.

The exchange reminds him of another important task he has yet to figure out how to do: Tell his people about the way the Mad Dog strain spreads, and what this means. Many of them, like Bailey, are already starting to put two and two together.

His handset chirps and Sergeant Lewis’ voice deadpans, War Dogs Two-Six, War Dogs Two-Six, this is War Dogs Two-Two, how copy, over?

“War Dogs Two-Two, this is War Dogs Two actual, I copy, over.”

War Dogs Two-Six, message follows, break. We have found an athletic facility in the main trunk, break. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, sick people on cots here, break. Some are in bad shape. Break. I see a lot of empty IV bags. Bedpans not being emptied. Meds aren’t being passed out. Some of these people were apparently murdered in their beds. The survivors need aid. Over.

“Roger. I’ll send Doc Waters down as soon as the building is cleared. Any sign of the CO or First Platoon, over?”

Negative. There’s a lot of blood and brass. A lot of bodies who died of gunshot wounds. . . . No other sign of blue forces. Over.

“Any sign of medical staff, over?”

We see several body . . . parts that may be from the medical staff, over.

Bowman is starting to piece together what happened. First Platoon only had a squad manning the front entry. This unit was attacked from front and rear by Mad Dogs on the street and coming out of the gym. The rest of Captain West’s command and First Platoon were attacked in isolated pockets, and probably destroyed. The medical staff was either slaughtered or infected and absorbed into the Mad Dog population.

“Friendly coming in!” a voice calls out from around the corner.

“Come on in, whoever you are,” Bailey calls. “Mad Dogs can’t talk, you know.”

Bowman sees Private Williams come running up, carrying the SINCGAR. Sherman rushes to greet him and immediately begins tinkering with it.

Negative contact, War Dogs Two-Six. How copy?

“That was a solid copy, over.”

Correction: We have just found two riflemen from First Platoon. They’re dead, over.

Bowman turns and glances over the civilians, some of whom stare back at him nervously. He can sense their distrust. It is almost palpable.

Somebody’s got to survive.

“Have you discovered any provisions, such as food, blankets, medical supplies, over?”

Wait one. . . . Roger that, over.

“Continue with your mission, War Dogs Two-Two. Out.” The LT calls to Williams. “Private, how many of the enemy have you seen?”

“Four, sir. All are, um, accounted for, sir.”

“Go rejoin your unit, Private.”

“Yes, sir.”

There is no way only a few Mad Dogs overran a platoon of infantry and scattered them to the winds like this, Bowman thinks. There must be more of them, maybe hundreds. Where is the main force?

“Friendlies coming in!” a voice calls from the front doors.

“Come forward and be recognized!” Martin calls out, tensing behind his MG.

A soldier, blood splattered on his uniform and Kevlar, steps through the propped-open door and shows himself.

“Third Platoon here,” the soldier says.

“Second Platoon here, boys,” Boomer says. “Hey, looks like we beat you!”

“Hooah!” Martin yells, holding his fist in the air. “Yahoo!”

The doors open and the soldiers come staggering in. The boys of Second Platoon still in the area let up a ragged cheer. Even the civilians are grinning, hoping this means that law and order has returned to New York. But the cheers and grins fade quickly.

Some of the soldiers fall to their knees gasping, while others stare into space and walk like zombies. A few burst into tears, not even bothering to cover their faces. Several sit against the wall, light cigarettes with steel lighters, and hug their ribs.

“God, there’s only fifteen, maybe twenty of them,” Boomer hisses at Martin. “What the hell happened to the rest of their guys?”

An officer steps out in front of what is left of Third Platoon, wearing the insignia of a 2LT. Bowman instantly recognizes him as Lieutenant Stephen Knight.

Knight blinks into the fluorescent light of the hallway light fixtures. “Where’s Captain West?”

Bowman weaves through the civilians until he is close enough to exchange a salute.

“Good to see you, Steve. It really is.”

“Thank God you’re here, Todd.” His eyes widen in alarm. “Where are all your people?”

“Securing the building. Where’s the rest of your guys?”

“I’ve got to report in,” Knight tells him, shaking his head. “Can you take me to the CO?”

“He’s not here, Steve.”

Knight blinks rapidly, appearing dazed at the news. “But this is his headquarters,” he says feebly. “His orders said for us to come here.”

“We’re still gathering intel on the situation here, but the Captain’s command appears to have been overrun.”

Another notch in the belt for the killah

In the school’s east wing, Eckhardt, Mooney, Wyatt and Finnegan get in position to take down the school’s chemistry lab, while Sergeant McGraw provides security in the hall with the other three boys of First Squad.

Eckhardt goes up the middle, while Mooney breaks right, Wyatt breaks left and Finnegan stays at the door in support.

Mooney immediately surmises that the room was used as a bivouac for elements of First Platoon. He sees cots, rucksacks, personal effects, helmets, gear and crates of ammo.

The beds are unmade. There are unfinished MREs on some of the chemistry tables.

Mad Dogs have been here. His nose burns from the sour stench lingering in the air.

Some kind of fight took place in this room. His boots crunch on broken glass, scatter the pages of letters from home. A light haze of smoke still hangs in the air. One of the cots is soaked through with drying blood, the blankets barely concealing a collection of body parts. Barely enough to be able to tell that whoever they belong to was human.

On the floor next to the cot, a neatly severed child’s hand.

“Oh God,” Mooney says quietly, swallowing hard.

He steps over a broken M4 and a handful of empty shell casings.

On the other side of the cot, three dead civilians lay in a heap on top of a soldier who died grimacing in pain. His scalp has been torn ripped off his skull and is sprouting from the mouth of one of the Mad Dogs, hair and all.

“No,” Mooney says, then vomits neatly into the sink of one of the chemistry tables.

The other boys halt, waiting for him to finish. Nobody razzes him, not even Wyatt. Almost everybody has lost it at least once in the past ten hours.

Mooney rinses out his mouth and thinks for a moment. One squad, maybe two, were bivouacked here. Some got surprised while they were eating and were torn to pieces. Others got surprised in their sleep and were slaughtered in their beds. Most, however, seem to have vanished.

“It’s okay,” Mooney tells his comrades, feeling embarrassed. “I’m all right.”

“Freeze,” Eckhardt says.

The boys stop in place.

“I hear something,” he adds. “Listen.”

A wheezing sound among the cots and chemistry tables.

“I think there’s somebody in here with us.”

“One of those crazy people,” Finnegan says, glowering with rage. “I’m going to kill him slow.”

“Why would you say that?” says Mooney, spitting into the sink. “They’re not people anymore. They’re like animals. They don’t even know what they’re doing.”

“Shut up, Mooney.”

“He’s a Mad Dog lover,” says Wyatt, but nobody laughs.

“It might be one of our guys lying on the floor wounded,” says Eckhardt. “Or a non-combatant. Think before you act, Finnegan. Now go get the Sergeant.”

Finnegan signals to Sergeant McGraw that they have a possible contact, and the Sergeant enters the lab, toting his shotgun.

“All right now, let’s clear this room,” he says. “On your toes. Nice and slow.”

The boys continue weaving their way through the cots and tables.

The wheezing stops, then starts again.

Mooney’s heart is no longer in this. If McGraw were to suggest that they simply eat a bullet now and cop out on all this unreal horror, he would seriously consider it. He has not slept in more than twenty-six hours. During the last ten, he almost died after being chased by a horde of homicidal maniacs, hunted and shot down Mad Dogs during the cleanup at the hospital, reconnoitered the smoky horror show of First Avenue, marched a mile in full battle rattle, shot his way through a civilian riot, and cleared almost an entire floor of an abandoned middle school. He’s bone tired and his morale, frankly, sucks.

Mostly, he is sick of the killing.

Soldiers get sloppy when they are this tired.

He feels a hand clutch his ankle. He staggers back, almost fainting.

An old man in hospital scrubs, dragging his gnarled legs behind him, leers up at him, sniggering and drooling. The hand reaches out and grips his ankle again. The bloody mouth opens in satisfaction: Ah.

Mooney screams and bayonets the man in the forehead, then promptly drops his rifle, falls on his ass and pisses himself.

The other boys gather around.

“Hardcore, Mooney,” says Finnegan, excited. “Good on ya.”

Wyatt says, “Another notch in the belt for the killah.”

McGraw helps Mooney back onto his feet. “You okay, Private?”

“I think so, Sergeant.”

“All right. Retrieve your weapon.”

Wyatt laughs hysterically. Mooney glares at him. The noise returns. The boys instantly form a circle facing outward, establishing a defensive perimeter. Mooney pulls the bayonet out of the skull of the Mad Dog he killed, fighting back another urge to vomit and trying to ignore the unsettling sensation of wetness running down his pant leg.

McGraw signals at them to follow him across the room. Pausing at a secondary door leading into another hallway, he places his ear against it and listens.

Wheezing.

The sound electrifies them.

Mooney feels a hand on his ankle.

He looks down, his heart racing, but sees nothing there. He shakes his leg a little to free himself of the lingering feeling.

The sergeant makes a fist and punches the air several times in the direction of the door. Prepare for action. Mooney and the other boys raise their weapons, ready to fire.

McGraw opens the door.

The hall beyond is packed with Mad Dogs, many wearing paper gowns, others filthy and naked, waste running down their legs, shoving and drooling with their breath rattling in their chests. A wave of stink assails the soldiers, making them wince and their eyes fill with water. PFC Chen lowers his carbine and turns away, gagging.

The Mad Dogs begin growling.

Before either side makes a move, Mooney steps forward and kicks the door closed. Instantly, a score of hands begin clawing and banging on the door, which vibrates on its hinges.

“I didn’t get to shoot my weapon!” Wyatt complains.

“That was quick thinking,” McGraw says. “Private Mooney just saved our asses.”

“What do you mean, Sergeant?”

“I think we just stumbled on an army of them,” he explains. “The mother lode.”

Payback time

The boys of First Squad exit the classroom out the other door and enter the hallway. McGraw points at his eyes with his index and middle fingers of his left hand, telling the security team to come forward. He holds his rifle over his head and points in the direction of the corner. He extends his flattened palm towards them.

The boys give him the thumbs up. They understand that the enemy has been sighted and is around the corner, and that they are to stay where they are.

The Sergeant quietly approaches the corner, peers around it, and instantly pulls his head back, holding up a finger to indicate that he guesses there are as many as a hundred hostiles occupying the hallway. He flashes several number signs and then bangs his fists together, telling them the enemy is about fifteen meters down the corridor.

Time to report this discovery to the LT.

He signals the squad to stay put in a defensive posture, and returns to the classroom. The Mad Dogs are still focused on the door, scraping at it with their nails. He gives the door the finger, and then keys his handset.

“War Dogs Two-Six, War Dogs Two-Six, this is War Dogs Two-One, how copy, over?”

War Dogs Two-One, this is War Dogs Two actual, standing by to copy, over.

“War Dogs Two, message follows, break. Be advised that we have identified a large group of Mad Dogs. Maybe two hundred of them, over.”

Roger that, War Dogs Two-One. Outstanding. Do you have sufficient strength to engage and destroy enemy force, over?

McGraw grimaces and says, “Request alternative course of action, over.”

Negative, over.

“I say again: Request alternative course of action. Over.”

That’s a no go. We have to secure this building. This has to be done or we will be forced to evac and find another building. And we’ll have to clear that one, too. These are the facts we have to deal with. We literally do or die. Do you understand?

“Affirmative, sir.”

Then complete your mission. Out.

He returns to the hallway. The boys look at him expectantly. Prepare for action, he signs to them, punching his first.

He tells First Squad’s two SAW gunners that they will move forward, occupy the T intersection ahead, and set up a base of fire. The two grenadiers, Corporal Eckhardt and PFC Rollins, will shoot grenades into the enemy force from the flanks with their M203s, wreaking havoc while buying time for the SAW gunners to set up. The rest will provide support as well as security on their flanks.

The boys give the Sergeant a thumbs-up, their eyes gleaming with excitement.

They want to do this. They want action. For them, it’s payback time.

McGraw raises his arm and does a single backstroke, telling First Squad to line up behind him in column file formation with the SAW gunners in the middle. He raises both arms and pushes his flattened palms toward each other until the boys tighten up their intervals to his satisfaction. The length of the column is now about the width of the hallway. Pumping his fist up and down, he tells them they will move at a slow run.

Finally, he does a wide forward “follow me” wave, telling them to move out.

His shooters jog into the open across the hallway, attracting the attention of the Mad Dogs, who snarl at them. A dozen immediately run towards the soldiers.

“Let ’em have it!” McGraw roars, unloading his shotgun at the closest infected and knocking them down with a single blast spraying more than twenty-five pellets of high-velocity buckshot. On his left, the boys hit the ground as Eckhardt and Rollins open up with their M203s, firing high-explosive forty-millimeter grenades over the heads of the Mad Dogs, tearing apart the infected crowded together about halfway down the hall.

Then the SAWs open up, tracers flying in blurred red sparks, knocking over Mad Dogs like bowling pins. They are far enough from the Mad Dogs that the weapons’ beaten zones—the area of ground on which the cone of fire falls—covers the width of the hallway almost perfectly with minimal shifting fire. In other words, a turkey shoot. The guns spit out hundreds of empty shell casings, which ring against the floor and roll away. The devastation is so horrible, so complete and so disorienting that many of the Mad Dogs run straight into each other and into walls. But they do not stop. They do not appear to know fear, only an endless murderous rage that is now directed at First Squad’s eight soldiers.

McGraw crouches behind one of the SAW gunners.

“You’re aiming too high, ” he says, watching the tracers. “Give them grazing fire, Ratliff.”

More come spilling out of a side hallway. McGraw realizes he was wrong. There aren’t two hundred Mad Dogs.

There are at least twice that.

A grenade becomes armed several moments early and explodes near the ceiling, bringing acoustic tile, fluorescent light fixtures, twisted metal tubing and water falling onto the heads of the onrushing horde. A severed arm flies spinning down the hallway and sails over Mooney’s head, making him flinch.

“Did you see that?” Wyatt says.

“Out of HE, switching to buckshot!” Rollins calls out, coughing on dust and smoke.

“All right, Mooney, Wyatt, Finnegan, Chen, it’s time to get in the game,” McGraw says.

“About time,” Wyatt yelps, and begins shooting with his carbine, a sustained series of metallic bangs. “Get some!”

“Rollins, you got any WP grenades?”

“I got three, Sergeant.”

“Keep them handy in case we need to get out of here in a hurry and lay down some smoke to disorient the enemy.”

“Not a problem, Sergeant.”

“Take your time,” McGraw tells his riflemen. “Choose your targets. Conserve your ammo. Make your shots count.”

Mooney lines up his carbine’s barrel using its iron sights, takes aim at the center of a woman’s torso, and fires a short metallic burst on semi-auto, pop pop.

The carbine recoil hums against his shoulder, the spent shell casings fly into the air from its eject port, and then she is down. In close quarters marksmanship training, the Army taught him to fire two to the chest and one to the head to decisively neutralize an enemy. Here, however, he does not have to stop the enemy from shooting back, only stop them from advancing. No fancy shooting is needed; he only has to throw enough lead at each target to put them on the floor with the least amount of physical energy.

In fact, it is horribly easy for the squad to massacre all of these people. They are just flesh and bone.

“Reloading!” Eckhardt cries.

Mooney aims and fires again, and a man in BDUs just like his own drops onto the growing mound of corpses and body parts.

And again. And again.

The 5.56-mm rounds are high-velocity bullets that often plow straight through the body, tumbling in their trajectory and shredding organs and tissue as they pass through.

“Reloading!”

After a while, Mooney lets the training take over his body, giving his numb brain a rest and a chance to detach from the horror.

“How do you like me now?” Wyatt yells.

A pack of children dash towards the soldiers, snarling, hands reaching.

“Oh, Lord,” Carrillo says, nearly blind with tears, and cuts them down with several bursts of his SAW.

“Reloading!” Mooney calls out.

The Mad Dogs never even get close.

Sergeant McGraw waves his hand in front of his face and yells, “Cease fire, cease fire!”

Mooney slumps against the row of metal lockers behind him and gulps air in quick gasps. The air is thick with cordite and an odor combining the rotten sour-milk stink of the infected with the sickly metallic smell of fresh blood.

The smoke hangs in the air like a shroud.

“That was starting to look a little dicey,” says Ratliff, checking his SAW’s ammo box. “I only got about ten rounds left on the belt.”

Carrillo stares at the carnage while smoke rises up from his SAW, which started to overheat at the end.

“One of those kids looked just like my sister Jenny’s boy,” he rasps quietly, as if he is losing his voice. “But they’re supposed to be in Florida. You don’t think?”

“Naw,” Ratliff says. He looks around for the Sergeant, sees that the man’s back is turned, and pulls down his mask to light a cigarette. “Couldn’t be.”

“But it looked just like him,” Carrillo says. “His name’s Robbie.”

“I can’t believe this freaking carnage,” Wyatt says. “It’s ten times bigger than the hospital. It’s mad sick, like a video game, yo.”

Nearby, Chen quietly retches against the wall, moaning and mumbling to himself.

“It’s not a game, you goddamn psycho,” Eckhardt says, his face burning with shame. “You’re not supposed to like it.”

“We paid them back for what they did, that’s all,” Finnegan says grimly, kicking at the carpet of empty shell casings on the floor. “God knows the difference between a just kill and the kind you go to Hell for.”

In Iraq, they had shot up cars, some filled with families, that disobeyed their orders to halt at a checkpoint. Men, women, children. An inevitable accident of war that filled many of the boys with regret and would stay with them for the rest of their lives. But this was intentional, against Americans, and on a colossal scale they never imagined possible.

And here was the Sergeant telling them they did a good job. That they secured the area and could rest soon. It’s like getting a medal for My Lai. This is payback, and it tastes like ashes. They wanted this, they were hot to kill a million of those things after what they saw what happened to some of the boys of First Platoon, and now they are ashamed.

“They just kept coming,” Ratliff says, shaking his head with something like admiration. “They wouldn’t stop.”

“They’re not human anymore,” Mooney says, his ears ringing and his headache returning with a vengeance.

“I’m starting to agree with you on that,” says Eckhardt. “The way they looked at us. The way they moved. Definitely not human.” He shivers. “It’s like they were possessed by demons.”

“Actually, they were possessed by a virus,” Mooney tells him. “But you’re not far off, Corporal.”

“Did you see the ones wearing BDUs?” Ratliff says. “They were Army. Are we going to catch the bug and end up like that, too?”

McGraw is surveying the wreckage, stepping carefully among the mangled carpet of flesh, blood and human waste. An old woman, bleeding from a dozen wounds, crawls towards him on her hands and knees, hissing.

“I am truly sorry, Ma’am,” he says, and shoots her in the head with his Beretta.

“Sergeant?” Finnegan says.

McGraw says, “If they can move, if they can bite, they’re hostile. And we have to get through this hallway so we can clear the rest of this wing.”

Mooney closes his eyes and wishes he were somewhere else. Instantly, his consciousness slides into black.

A bloody face lunges for his throat—

He jerks awake, adrenaline rushing through his body, and takes a deep breath.

“I am very sorry, sir,” McGraw says. Another shot rings out.

Down the hall, a door opens and a voice calls to them:

“U.S. Army down here! Hold fire!”

“Same here,” McGraw shouts back. “Howdy!”

“Is that Second Platoon?” the soldier says, stepping out of the room at the end of the hall, coughing on the smoke and stink. “Hooah, boys! First Platoon here!”

“We’ve been looking all over for you guys,” McGraw says, grinning.

“We heard all hell breaking loose and stayed down. Oh Jesus, hell, what is this?”

The soldier is surveying the walls painted with blood and the piles of body parts and bodies, some of which are still moving, like a carpet of giant bloody worms.

His eyes roll back in his head and he faints. Other soldiers come out and gaze upon the slaughter in disbelief and shock, while a few run back where they’d come from to vomit in privacy.

Private Chen pauses behind Sergeant McGraw and swallows hard. He can’t stop looking at the faces. The arms and legs, the guts and organs, the pools and streaks of blood, he can take that. But he can’t take the faces. All those eyes looking back at him.

“We’re all just meat, aren’t we,” he says.

“Maybe so,” McGraw answers.

Chen can’t take the hands, either. All those cold, open hands that feel nothing.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant.”

The Sergeant turns, squinting. “What’s that, Private?”

The feet. The hundreds of feet that will never walk again.

“That I can’t come with you.”

His voice has a shaky quality that makes everybody stop and look at him.

Chen laughs nervously as he puts the tip of his carbine into his mouth.

And promptly pulls the trigger.

Chapter 7

Can you help me?

Shivering in a ball under a desk in the Institute’s Security Command Center, Petrova dreams that Dr. Baird has burst howling through the lab door.

She has dreamed this dream continuously since she fell asleep.

It is always the same.

She flees, and at first she is able to run faster than she ever has in a dream, faster even than she can in real life, but the fluorescent hallway is endless and its brightness rapidly dims as some ominous unseen presence eats the light. Suddenly, her strength begins failing and she can barely move despite mental pushes she gives herself in her sleep.

But this time the dream is different.

A phone rings shrilly, and she turns to see Dr. Baird at the end of the hall, grinning in triumph with bloody teeth and holding a clump of hairy, mangled flesh high over his head like a primitive trophy. Black fluid begins gushing from his eyes and grin.

Just meat, he says.

His face crumbles. Faster and faster, his head and arms dissolve as his body is converted into organic black fluid.

The liquid splashes against the floor and slithers forward like a million oily snakes, probing blindly, driven by an ancient program.

The liquid is pure virus seeking its new host.

She wants to scream, but she can’t breathe.

The snakes coil and whisper in a million voices, We are life.

The phone rings again.

She turns and tries to run—

Baird bursts through a wall in front of her, broken cinderblocks flying in a cloud of dust, bellowing with rage and pain.

A phone is ringing.

I’m so cold, please don’t make me get up—

Baird roars, shaking the building, making the light fixtures blink and fall out of the ceiling, but he is already fading.

Petrova’s eyes flash open, her heart in her throat, her body clenched and gasping for air. Extricating herself carefully from under the desk, she quickly scans the operator desk and sees a phone with a red light flashing.

It rings—

She picks it up warily, still haunted by the dream and uncertain of everything.

“This is Dr. Valeriya Petrova,” she says thickly, rubbing at a lancing pain in her neck. “Who is this?”

“Dr. Petrova?” a voice asks feebly.

“This is Dr. Petrova. Who is this?”

“Can you help me?”

Get the hell out of my lab

Lucas was taken first.

He ran several yards before he seemed to become winded and simply laid down and curled up into a ball. He barely struggled when Baird fell to his knees and sank his teeth into his arm.

After Petrova and Saunders turned the corner, Saunders slowed to a stop.

“We must go, Doctor,” she said.

The scientist frowned as if trying to work out a complex math problem. “No,” he said slowly. “We have to help Dr. Lucas.”

“He has surely been bitten,” she told him. “Which means he is already dead.”

“You know, I don’t even know his first name,” Saunders laughed.

“You are ugly and I hate you,” she hissed fiercely in a sudden fit of stress, surprised at herself for saying such things, especially since they were true. “Come with me. Now. Please, William.”

“See what I mean?” His voice sounded weak and thin. “It’s ‘Bill.’ Nobody’s called me William since I was ten.”

He turned and jogged back around the corner to help Lucas, who was emitting a strange, high-pitched mewing sound, like a cat being slowly crushed.

“Please, William,” she whispered.

She heard Saunders shouting. The shouts quickly turned into bloodcurdling screams.

“Oh,” she said, and started running.

While she ran, she tried to remember how many people were trapped with her at the Institute. Hardy, Lucas, Saunders, Sims, Fuentes . . . Ten. There were ten people on this floor, and five of them were already either infected or dead.

She needed to warn the others, quickly, before Baird decided to go hunting.

And after that, what?

Find a safe place where they can hide and figure out what to do next.

She entered Laboratory East on unsteady legs and saw Dr. Sims and Sandy Cohen, a lab tech, working in gowns, masks, goggles and gloves. Sims was busy injecting reaction fluid into a strip of PCR tubes for a polymerase chain reaction test. Cohen was snapping digital pictures of Lyssa using the camera built into the lab’s fluorescence microscope.

Petrova’s eyes went straight to several glass Petri dishes on the desktop next to Sims. Each dish contained pure samples of Lyssa grown in cultured cells harvested from a dog’s kidney.

At first, she was unable to speak, her mind numbed by the violence and adrenaline, somehow dumbfounded by the sight of her coworkers performing mundane tasks as if nothing had happened.

“Listen to me,” she said shakily, then paused, suddenly out of breath.

Dr. Fred Sims, the oldest scientist on the staff at sixty-eight, turned and glared at the interruption. Giving Petrova the once-over, he quickly sized up her sweaty face, disheveled hair, spray of blood on her labcoat, and gleaming steel putter she still clutched in her hands.

“Dr. Petrova, you look unwell,” he said, peering at her over the top of his spectacles. “Don’t you think it’s a bit early in the day for . . . whatever it is you’re doing?”

“We are in serious danger.”

“Now, if you please, get the hell out of my lab.”

“Oh!” she said, blinking and stomping her right foot.

“I said, get out.”

“Dr. Sims!”

“You. Are. Contaminating. My. Work.”

“Frederick, listen to me,” she said.

Sims’ eyebrows arched with surprise. “Frederick, is it? Well. All right then, go on, tell me what’s wrong, my child.” He glanced over Petrova’s shoulder. “And what in God’s name happened to you, good sir?”

Petrova turned and watched Baird limp into the lab, his head twitching violently, smacking his lips, blood and foamy drool soaking his chin and T-shirt.

Cohen lurched to her feet and took several quick steps backwards. To Petrova, she seemed so helpless in her gown and mask and gloves, so cumbersome and slow.

“I don’t understand,” Sims said, his eyes widening with alarm. “This is very strange. What’s this all about?”

Baird’s bloodshot eyes focused on the golf club in Petrova’s hands. He suddenly stopped, glowering, and growled deep in his throat, drool pouring out of his contorted mouth.

Cohen bumped into a chair behind her, knocking it over.

As if waiting for this cue, Baird lunged with a bestial snarl.

Cohen ran out of the Lab’s other door, followed by Petrova.

Behind them, Sims emitted a single strangled cry.

The hallway was empty by the time Petrova reached it. Cohen had disappeared. She bolted down the hall as fast as she could on her heels, turned the corner, and ran directly into Stringer Jackson, making her nose sting and her eyes flood with tears. She had completely forgotten about him sitting in the Security Command Center, watching over them on the security screens.

She turned and pointed, stammering and blubbering, unable to express herself.

“I know,” said Jackson. “I’m on it. Do you know how to get to the Security Center?”

Petrova nodded.

“Then go,” he told her. “The door’s unlocked. Go in and lock it. I’ll be there soon.”

She briefly wondered how Stringer Jackson, the retired, grizzled, middle-aged and overweight cop, was going to take on Baird in a hand to hand fight and win. But she did not care. She had done her part. It was up to the professionals to take care of things from here.

She did not see what happened next.

Within moments, she entered the Security Command Center and burrowed under the operator’s desk, shaking with fear. The whirr and heat of the electronics almost instantly lulled her into a deep sleep.

Thank God he is not a Mad Dog

More like a mouse squeaking than a human voice.

Petrova grips the phone in her sweating hand. “Who is this, please?”

“I’m all alone and I need somebody to come and get me.”

For some reason, she pictures her boy Alexander in her mind, speaking into a phone in a dark, bare room in London, all alone.

“Please, please tell me who is speaking,” she says, panicking.

“Sandy. Sandy Cohen?”

“I know who you are, Sandy.”

Petrova does not know her well. The woman is a lab tech like Marsha Fuentes, and has been working at the Institute for about six months. She always wear glasses with thick black frames, making her stand out in Petrova’s memory.

“We just saw each other in the Lab.”

“Obviously. Where are you?”

“I have to speak quietly or he’ll come find me. What is happening here?”

“There are Mad Dogs in the building and they are turning other staff members into Mad Dogs by biting them,” Petrova tells her.

“I’m not following you,” says the feeble voice.

“Where are you, Sandy?”

“I’m in Dr. Saunders’ office. I’m using his phone.”

“Good. Please hold for a moment.”

“Is this the security room? I was trying to call Stringer.”

“Please be quiet for a moment, Sandy.”

Petrova scans the images displayed by the digital projectors onto the large wall screens. One shows an empty hallway scarred by a long, dark smear on the floor, while the other shows an empty Laboratory East. She looks at the computer screen on the desk, which presents a series of icons used to control the security functions of the Center. The interface is fairly intuitive and within moments she is able to access images from all of the Institute’s cameras. She’d never known the place was so heavily monitored, with cameras in all of its public spaces.

Things have changed a lot since she burrowed under the operator desk and slept.

Baird is lying face down in one of the hallways at the end of a long dark smear, twitching. Probably dying by inches because of his wounds. Who knew how much damage his body had taken when she pummeled him with the golf club, or when he burst through the door, or during whatever Jackson did to him after that.

On the other screen, showing the hallway outside Laboratory West, Lucas and Fuentes are hunting together, sniffing at doors.

Petrova watches with interest.

They do not attack each other, only us, she tells herself. Is this the reason for the odor they produce? An olfactory cue that another person is already infected, and therefore “safe”? How else would they recognize each other?

They pass Saunders lying on the ground. Saunders twitches and slowly gets to his feet. One of his ears has been gnawed off, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Petrova pushes a button on her keyboard to bring up another image on the screen.

The image shows the majestic main lobby downstairs, populated by a mob of people, many of them waving at the security camera. A beautiful blonde in their midst—whom Petrova recognizes from a TV series she used to watch—is holding up a sign that says, now! or we kill the other one.

Despite her fascination with what is happening down there, it is not her immediate concern. She forces herself to continue exploring the facility on her screens.

Empty hallways.

An empty elevator lobby.

An empty auditorium.

An empty records room.

A corridor with a man’s broken body propping open the door to the east-side Men’s Room. Petrova instantly recognizes him as Dr. Sims.

Her first thought: He is dead.

She cannot prevent her second thought, which fills her with shame: Thank God. Thank God he is not a Mad Dog.

In the image produced on the other screen, Joe Hardy lies on his back in a large puddle of his own blood in Laboratory West. His eyes are open and his face is a mask of horror. Miraculously, he survived long enough to pick up his phone, which is now in his hand. She wonders if he ever answered it.

She suddenly cannot bare to look at him. She quickly brings up an image of another hallway. A pair of legs in men’s trousers are protruding from one of the offices. Another person is hurt.

“Hello? This is Sandy. Are you still there, Dr. Petrova?”

“Just one more minute, Sandy.”

“I was just thinking about Dr. Sims. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Please wait.”

“We left him there and he died, right?”

“Sandy. Please. I am working on a way to get you out of there safely.”

Petrova rapid-fires through the remaining images, all of them empty spaces, and performs a quick calculation in her mind: There are now five uninfected people at most, including Sandy Cohen and herself, cowering in their various hiding places, most likely in the offices.

Go back, a voice in her head tells her.

She cycles through the camera images in reverse order, searching randomly until she becomes frustrated. Whatever she was trying to tell herself, she’s lost it now.

“What am I looking for?” she asks out loud, feeling irritated.

“Dr. Petrova? Is there somebody there with you?”

“No, Sandy. I am alone.”

“Stringer isn’t there?”

“I am speaking to my—”

The voice in her head suddenly shouts: Stringer!

Ignoring Cohen’s questioning, she clicks to the image of Sims lying in the doorway to the Men’s Room.

“Oh,” she says quietly.

Behind Sims, in the mirror on the bathroom wall, she can see Jackson looking at himself, far enough from the camera so that the resolution is not very good, but close enough for her to see what he is doing.

He is poking very gingerly at his right eye. Or rather, his left eye, which only looks like his right eye in the mirror. Yes, he is poking at his eye.

Or rather, what is left of his eye.

Jackson, the retired, overweight, out-of-shape cop, beat Baird. But Baird bit his face and ruined his left eye.

Jackson’s clearly in shock. And almost certainly infected.

He has not yet turned, but it is only a matter of time.

Trust me

There are now four infected people in their section of the building, and two, possibly three uninfected survivors trapped inside with them.

“Sandy, listen to me,” she says into the phone. “I am looking at the security camera feeds and they are showing me the corridor outside Dr. Saunders’ office.”

“Can you see if Dr. Baird is still around?”

“It is not Dr. Baird anymore, Sandy,” Petrova says. “In any case, he is dead.”

“Oh my God.”

Petrova grips the phone, her hand and ear slick with sweat.

“Drs. Lucas and Saunders are now infected and have become Mad Dogs themselves,” she says. “And Marsha Fuentes.”

“There’s three of them now?”

“I am afraid so. Actually, four. Stringer Jackson has been bitten. He has not yet become a Mad Dog, but I believe he will transform soon, which is why it is essential you try to get to me now, where it is safe.”

“That’s not supposed to happen. You can’t become a Mad Dog if you get bitten. You only get it if the virus enters the brain. And no virus has an incubation period that short—”

Petrova sighs loudly. “I cannot get into the details, but what I am telling you is true.”

“Well, I can’t stay here forever with those things around, Dr. Petrova,” Cohen says, her voice edged with hysteria. “You have to help me. You have to make them leave.”

“I cannot do that, Sandy.”

“Make them leave. Please. Please.”

“Listen to me. I cannot make them leave, but I can see where they are by using the security cameras. That means I can tell you when it is generally safe to come to my location.”

“You want me to leave here and go out there? Are you freaking nuts?”

“Right now, Dr. Lucas and Marsha Fuentes are in the auditorium and heading towards the elevator lobby,” Petrova says, rapidly scanning the flipping images on the screens. She blinks, surprised at how fast the Mad Dogs move. “And Dr. Saunders, um, is now in Dr. Hardy’s office.”

“Saunders is too close!” Cohen hisses.

“If you go now, you can make it.”

“What if there’s another one of these Mad Dogs in one of the offices?”

Petrova admits the possibility to herself, but there is no other way to get Cohen to the safety of the Security Command Center without her eventually abandoning the relative security of her hiding place. There is no sure thing here. She has to take a chance or stay where she is, cut off from food and water and help.

“I know for a fact that there are no other Mad Dogs,” she lies. “Trust me. Do you know the way to the Command Center?”

“But after I hang up, I won’t know where they are.”

“This is a good time for you to leave Dr. Sims’ office and come here.”

She can hear Cohen taking deep breaths, getting up her nerve.

“No!” she hisses. “I can’t.”

Petrova thinks for a moment, then says, “Do you have a cell phone? If you do, then we could stay on the line together, and I can walk you here safely.”

“Yes, I have one. But all the lines are jammed, aren’t they?”

“It is possible to get through. So try. Please.” She reads Cohen the direct dial number of the phone in the Security Command Center. “Call now. Try a few times. If it doesn’t work, then call me again using the interoffice line, which we know so far is reliable.”

Before Cohen can respond, she hangs up.

The silence is startling.

Panicking, she flips through the images until she sees Baird lying on the floor. He is no longer twitching. He is dead. Really and truly dead. Thank God.

Aaa-aah-aaaahhhh

She bites her lip hard to prevent these little shrieks from sliding into uncontrollable hysteria. Wrapping her arms around her ribs, she rocks back and forth.

The phone rings, sending an electric wave of adrenaline through her body. She snatches up the phone, bathed in the glow of the screens.

“Yes?”

“I got through! I can’t believe it.”

“Keep your voice down,” Petrova hisses.

“I’m on my cell.”

“That is good. I will guide you, Sandy.”

Petrova scans the images until she confirms the positions of the Mad Dogs and Jackson, who is still at the mirror, staring dumbly at himself and probing his ruined eye.

“This is a good time,” she says. “You can go. But hurry.”

“All right, I’m up,” Cohen tells her.

Sandy Cohen appears on the left screen, dancing from foot to foot to restore her circulation. She is still wearing the white gown she had on in the lab, which flaps around her legs.

“Can you see me?” she asks.

“Go now. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Stop. Stop! Go into the office on your right. Now!”

Cohen disappears from the screen. Seconds later, Saunders appears, his hands balled into fists clasped against his chest and his head jerking like a bird’s. He stops outside the office Cohen entered, appearing to sniff the air.

“Do not move even slightly, Sandy,” Petrova whispers into the phone.

Saunders turns, runs down the hall and enters East Lab.

“Now. Go. Now.”

The lab technician darts out into the hall on tip toes, looking both ways, holding the phone against her ear.

“Turn right at the end of the hall,” Petrova tells her.

Cohen turns the corner and abruptly freezes in her tracks, putting her hand over her mouth.

Petrova curses herself. The horrors that she has already begun to digest are new to Cohen. She should have warned the woman about what she was going to see.

“That is Dr. Baird,” she says. “He is dead. He is no threat to you.”

“Oh my God,” Cohen says.

“Be quiet,” Petrova says. “Dr. Lucas and Fuentes are heading in your direction. You can make it, but you must go now.”

She sees Cohen nod vigorously, dance around Baird’s corpse, and begin walking rapidly towards the Security Center, looking over her shoulder every few steps to make sure nobody is coming up behind her.

Petrova says, “You are doing just fine. You are very close now.”

“Almost there,” Cohen huffs, already out of breath.

“You can do it,” Petrova tells her.

The digital projector blinks out, the lights shut off and Petrova is plunged into darkness and silence so total she wonders if she’s dead.

She sits in the dark, her heart pounding against her ribcage and her blood crashing in her ears.

The power has gone out.

The phone in her hand is dead.

She can hear Cohen shouting, “Hello? Hello?” out in the hall, the sound muffled and distant.

“Be quiet,” Petrova hisses at the dark. “Be quiet or they will find you.”

The woman is not far away. She’s about thirty feet down the hall, in fact.

“The power’s out, Dr. Petrova!” Cohen wails. “Help me!”

Petrova hears thuds against the wall.

“Oh, no,” she says.

“Help me, please!”

Cohen is not being attacked. She is banging against the wall with her fists, which Petrova can hear in the Command Center.

That is how close she is. Closer even than Petrova initially thought.

“Come and get me! Please!”

And if she keeps this up, she is going to get herself killed or infected.

Petrova formulates a plan on the spot. She knows where the door is and believes she can find it in the dark easily. She will open it and guide Cohen to safety using her voice before the woman’s screaming brings every Mad Dog in the place running.

Only she doesn’t move. She is literally frozen with fear.

Cohen is still shouting for help.

Petrova begins to crawl back under the operator’s desk, burrowing into the wires and the dust and the cobwebs and the residual heat of the electronics.

The last thing Petrova hears before she falls asleep is the horrible sound of a struggle that she takes into her dreams with her.

Chapter 8

We are the world’s most powerful military

and we are being beaten on our own ground

Lieutenants Bowman and Knight, joined by their platoon sergeants Kemper and Jim Vaughan, stand on the roof of the Samuel J. Tilden International Middle School, which their units have cleared and secured, and listen to the gunfire in the city.

The school is only a couple of stories tall but even this high up, they have an almost antiseptic view of the city’s Midtown district. The buildings block their view of the wholesale slaughter going on at the street level of the city. But they can hear it.

To Bowman, leaning against the parapet and gazing out into the smoky haze produced by scores of unchecked fires, it is as if New York itself were a giant body, its people healthy cells one by one being converted into virus that is beating the crap out of the body’s immune system.

And to carry this analogy further, the immune system, well, that would be two brigades of infantry of the U.S. Army, about six thousand men and women in all—each a highly trained and heavily armed lean, green fighting machine.

We are the world’s greatest military and we are being beaten on our own ground, he thinks. By the people we swore to protect, armed only with tooth and nail.

On the other side of the roof, Sergeant Lewis fires his M21 sniper rifle. He is up here fighting his own private war, shooting Mad Dogs down in the street behind the school.

“I still can’t believe it,” Knight says. “Is this really happening?”

“It’s a numbers game, Steve,” Bowman tells him. “You take five guys who develop Mad Dog symptoms. They each bite one other person and that one other person turns into a Mad Dog. Then that person bites somebody else. Every couple of hours.”

Knight whistles. “Jesus, do the math!”

“Suppose just ten percent of the population of this city becomes a Mad Dog. Just one out of ten. And then suppose we had the men and the weapons and a safe position to shoot them down from.”

Knight finishes for him. “There aren’t enough bullets.”

Bowman nods. “It’s a numbers game. There’s no way to stop this. It’s only going to get worse. In a few hours, maybe a day, ten percent becomes twenty percent. A flood.”

Across the street, a civilian in a private office has noticed them and is holding up a sign against his window that says: trapped, help.

The officers move to another part of the roof, seething with shame.

They can only help those they can without risking the security of the unit. For a moment, Bowman thinks of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which his uncle Gabe, a recovering alcoholic in AA, taught him when he was ten years old: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

“Who could pull the trigger that many times anyhow?” Knight wonders.

“Private Chen couldn’t,” Bowman murmurs. The soldier wouldn’t be the last who would rather eat a bullet than fight this war, either.

Knight continues, “One of the reasons we got chewed up so bad all the way here is some of my boys just couldn’t shoot Americans.” He glances at his platoon sergeant, then looks away. “Have you, uh, shared your discovery with your platoon?”

“They’re not dumb,” Bowman says. “They know what’s going on. It’s just that nobody’s said it out loud for them yet. They haven’t had a minute to think about it.”

“Yes,” says Knight.

“I guess we’ll have to tell them.”

They flinch as the muffled boom of an explosion reaches their ears. A large cloud of smoke and dust billows out from behind a building between them and Times Square. Even yesterday, this would have been remarkable to them. Today, they take it in stride.

Knight laughs viciously. “We’re going to tell them how their families, and everybody they know, are probably dying or being converted into those things out there.”

“We’re going to tell them to do their jobs, Steve.”

Lewis fires his rifle, which discharges with a loud bang.

“It’s getting personal, Todd. You better come up with something better than that if you want them to keep fighting for a country that’s falling apart around them.”

Bowman looks at Knight in surprise. “Why me?”

Knight smiles sadly. “You’re the one who’s in charge here, Todd.”

“We’re the same rank, but you’ve got seniority over me. You’ve got seniority over Greg Bishop of First Platoon, too. You’re in command.”

“On the way over here . . .” Knight looks at Sergeant First Class Vaughan, who stares back at him stonily, his expression inscrutable behind his N95 mask. “I was one of the people who couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t even give the order. I froze. It was Sergeant Vaughan here that got us out.”

“Damn, Steve,” Bowman says quietly.

He glances at Vaughan, but the NCO is a professional and while his face is flushed, making the diagonal scar across his face livid, his gray eyes give nothing away.

Knight says, “A lot of my boys are dead because I couldn’t tell them to shoot.”

Tears stream down the officer’s face. Vaughan lowers his eyes. Knight looks away, gazing at the skyscrapers.

“Twenty-five percent casualties,” he adds. “But you know what?” He hisses, fiercely, “If I could go back and do it all over again, I still wouldn’t give that goddamn order.”

Bowman says nothing. He had given the order to shoot. He personally not only shot Mad Dogs, he also shot down uninfected civilians who got in his way.

By any definition, he is a murderer and a war criminal. He knows it. His own platoon sergeant knows it. The two men were made from the same stuff; he saw Kemper do the same as him to get the platoon out of the riot and to safety.

And if they did not do what they did, if they were not war criminals, they might all be dead right now.

Nevertheless, he can’t shake the feeling that he is damned.

The officers hear the piercing wail of a fire engine, punctuated by the bursts of its horn. It is a plucky sound amid the rattle of small arms fire and distant screams, reminding them that somewhere, out there, people are still fighting back against the rising tide of violence and anarchy.

The sound reminds them that it is not every man for himself out there. Not yet.

Similarly, the power continues to cut in and out, but somebody is still manning the controls at the power plant, and somebody is still delivering coal to burn to make electricity. In all the jobs that matter, from cop to soldier to paramedic to power plant operator, people are still doing their duty. Bowman finds strength in this idea.

Knight wipes the tears from his face and clears his throat.

“I wouldn’t give the order,” he says. “I guess that makes me a nice guy or something. But I have no right to lead Charlie.” He sighs. “We should have stayed where we were. We were doing some good there.”

“No,” Bowman says. His eyes follow a pair of helicopters moving over the East River until they disappear behind a tall building. He takes it as a good sign that there are still birds in the air. “Captain West had the right idea trying to concentrate the Company. Warlord is spread out all over Manhattan and is vulnerable to being destroyed piecemeal. But it’s too late. We got chewed up. We should have consolidated sooner.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Knight says. “We shouldn’t have been spread out in the first place, then. It’s a mystery. I have a hard time believing that either the government or the Army didn’t know about the infection rate among the Mad Dogs.”

“Could be they were trying to avoid pushing an already panicked country into outright hysteria,” Bowman says. “Could be that they honestly didn’t know. Who knows? Right now, my situational awareness extends to what I can see with my own eyes.”

“Well, if somebody higher up knew about this and didn’t tell us, they may have just destroyed our brigade.”

Bowman stares at him intensely and says, “Hell, Steve. Forget Quarantine. If somebody higher up knew and didn’t tell us, they may have destroyed the U.S. Army.”

Gaps in the chain of command

Sherman tries again to raise Warlord, the call sign for Battalion, and Quarantine, which is Brigade’s call sign, without success.

“Warlord, Warlord, this is War Dogs, do you copy, over?”

No answer from Battalion. The Battalion net is being overloaded with chaotic messages blending together into one long screech. From what the RTO can tell, War Hammer is screaming for reinforcements and ammunition, Warmonger reports the successful occupation of the old Seventh Regiment Armory Building, and War Pig says it has three men down and where’s their goddamn medevac.

“Warlord, Warlord,” Sherman says, then stops. It’s useless.

Sherman switches to the Brigade net and tries to hail Quarantine.

Nobody answers. The only officer he can get a hold of, as they say in the ranks, is General Confusion. The voices on the Brigade net are less panicked than Charlie’s sister companies, but equally confused. There are units missing, trying to consolidate, requesting orders, demanding resupply, on the move, taking casualties. There are gaps in the chain of command. Units are disappearing or moving without their commanders knowing it.

When Quarantine’s XO finally makes an appearance on the net, it is apparently without his knowledge or consent, as he’s shouting at somebody else in the room about a story that The New York Times is writing about the Army’s sudden decision to lay waste to New York and almost every other major city in the country.

Somebody else, Sherman does not recognize the voice, says there is not going to be a New York Times tomorrow morning, and then the transmission cut out.

The civilian nets are even more ominous.

National Guard units defending City Hall have abandoned their positions and moved north, and protestors have occupied the building and are busy turning it into a fortress. The commander of the Guard unit was found dead at his post. The Mayor is missing. Right now, there is nobody running the government of New York City.

Meanwhile, operators are still calling first responder units, but units are not reporting back. The nets are going silent one by one, populated only by panicked operators asking over and over if anybody can hear them.

A cop gets on the net, says he has eyes on a group of vigilantes lynching five Lyssa victims from streetlight poles, and requests backup, but there is no help to give. Frustrated, the cop breaks protocol by asking the operator if there is a fucking plan.

Sherman senses that the government and the military are holding something back from the people who live here, but the people already know about it, and have begun to take matters into their own hands.

It is interesting, but ultimately not his concern.

He switches to Charlie Company’s net and resumes his search for Fourth Platoon, which had been on Third Platoon’s heels during the march to the school but suddenly disappeared and is now considered lost.

All of this makes for discouraging work for a radio/telephone operator, but a good RTO must have the patience of a saint, and Sherman is good at his job. He is not complaining. Even though he is not getting through to anybody, the traffic is more entertaining than he has ever heard it.

Things are bad, but like all crises, this too shall pass, he believes. He tells himself the government and the Army will fix it when those in charge finally get their heads out of their collective asses and do what needs doing. The United States survived the First and Second World Wars, Cold War, Spanish Flu Pandemic, Presidents Nixon through Obama, the Great Depression and the September Eleventh attacks. It can survive this lousy Lyssa Pandemic. Someday, he will tell his kids about how scary and exciting it all was, and he and his comrades will be called the Greatest Generation by their grandchildren.

He likes working alone so that he can take off his mask and smoke without any hassles. Lighting one up, he realizes that he is down to four packs now and after that, with all the supply problems he has been hearing about, there might not be any more cigarettes for a while. The thought fills him with panic. A lot of the boys smoke for fun, but he is an addict. He tries to put this unsettling train of thought out of his mind by throwing himself back into his work.

When he switches back to Brigade traffic, a strong, gravelly voice cuts through the babble:

This is Quarantine actual. Clear the net. Break.

The voice is calm, almost dry, but the effect is electrifying. Within moments, the chatter is reduced by more than half.

I say again: This is Quarantine actual. Clear the net. Break.

Sherman takes out his notepad and pencil, excited. He has only rarely heard Colonel Winters, the commander of the Brigade, get on the net in person.

All elements of Quarantine, this is Quarantine actual. Message follows, break.

You don’t see that every day

McLeod paces just inside the doors to the school. About ten meters down the hallway, Martin and Boomer pass a cigarette back and forth, leaning on the sandbags of their MG emplacement. McLeod strolls over, cradling his SAW.

“Salaam ’Alaykum, boys,” he says.

The gunners nod. McLeod watches in amusement as they turn away and pull down their masks to take a drag.

He adds: “You guys do realize that if one of you has Lyssa, the other now has it.”

“Go to hell, McLeod,” Boomer says.

“What do you mean?” Martin says.

“You’re sharing a smoke,” McLeod explains. Seeing their blank expressions, he shakes his head. “Never mind.”

“This is not a good time to go around scaring people,” Boomer warns him.

“What a crappy post,” McLeod says darkly. “A freaking school. Look at this poster some kid made with a bunch of crummy markers: ‘Welcome back’ in a hundred languages. Christ, I’d rather be in goddamn Baghdad getting shot at.”

“I’ll bet you were one of the most popular guys in high school,” Martin deadpans, making the AG snort with laughter. “Because you’re such a comedian.”

“Sleep deprivation makes me hilarious.” McLeod yells at the ceiling, “I need sleep!”

“Why aren’t you bunking with your squad, McLeod?” Martin says, winking at Boomer, who grins back.

“Magilla’s got it in for me. Everybody else gets to sleep a few hours, while I’m stuck doing guard duty with—no offense—you guys.”

Boomer bursts into laughter while Martin says, “You’re lucky that’s all you got.”

“Are you kidding? What’d I ever do to anybody?”

“Have you ever tried seeing what would happen if you maybe shut your big mouth, McLeod?” Boomer says.

McLeod smiles and says nothing.

Boomer adds, “Looks like you’re as popular in the Army as you were in high school, McLeod. Count yourself lucky you’re not shoveling body parts into the basement furnace with the Hajjis—I mean, the civilians.”

“Instead, you got guard duty,” Martin says, gesturing toward the front doors of the school. “Hmm. Aren’t you supposed to be like, you know, guarding?”

“Nobody’s going to come here,” McLeod tells him.

“It’s a Lyssa hospital in the middle of a Lyssa plague,” Martin says, taking off his cap and making a show of scratching his closely shorn head. “Hmm.”

“Yeah, I wonder if anybody’s coming,” the AG says, cracking up now.

“Shush, I’m thinking,” Martin says, still in character.

“Quiet for a sec,” says McLeod. “Listen.”

In the distance, they hear the roar of a diesel engine.

A large vehicle is approaching the school.

He adds, “Oh thank God, they’re starting to pick up the trash again.”

The MGR rolls his eyes and says, “Boomer, stay here, I’m going to go with McFly and check it out.”

“Roger that.”

“Lead the way, McDuff.”

“You’re a very funny guy,” McLeod says. “It must run in the family. Just the other night, your mom—hey, that sounds military, doesn’t it?”

The sound grows louder as they approach the doors and open them cautiously, peering out at the corpse-strewn street.

“Lookit, it’s an LAV,” Martin says, raising his fist. “Go, Marines! Get some!”

The armored personnel carrier, shaped like a large green boat on eight wheels, turns onto their street from several blocks away, its engine grinding.

“I want one of those,” says McLeod.

“It’s the LAV-R,” Martin says. “See the boom crane on the back? It’s got a winch so it can recover other LAVs that break down. The recovery model doesn’t have much for defense, just the single M240 and some smoke grenades.” He adds admiringly, “You should see the fighting version. It’s got an M242 Bushmaster chain gun and two M240s. I saw one once. In action, too. It was freaking cool. The Iraqis call these babies the Great Destroyers.”

“I hear she’s single, tiger,” McLeod says.

“They can go sixty miles an hour and drive underwater, man.”

“Uh oh, they got company. Check it out.”

The LAV-R has completed its turn and guns its engine to pick up speed. The vehicle is surrounded by a crowd of about twenty Mad Dogs running alongside it. A few somehow clawed their way on top and are beating on the armor with their fists.

The vehicle accelerates on the open street and the Mad Dogs begin to lag behind.

“I didn’t even know the Marines were in Manhattan,” Martin says. “We got no commo with them. Should we run out and try to tell them we’re here?”

McLeod snorts. “Be my guest.”

The LAV roars by on its eight wheels, Mad Dogs clambering over its metal body, followed by a swarm of infected, chomping at its heels.

Less than a minute later, the last Mad Dog runs by, a shredded red shirt flapping from his mouth. Then the street is quiet again except for the distant rattle of small arms fire.

“Well,” says McLeod. “You don’t see that every day.”

Every kill is a broken chain of infection

The naked obese woman chases the teenaged boy down the street, arms outstretched and breasts rolling. They pass two charred corpses that lay smoking on the sidewalk outside a burned-out convenience store. His sneakers crunch on broken glass.

With a loud bang, the woman drops to the ground, writhing and moaning.

The boy stops, grips his knees, and totters, panting, almost too tired to stand on his own. His entire body, clad in a bunny hugger and jeans, is flushed and drenched in sweat. After making sure the woman is no longer a threat, he lifts his face to scan the nearby buildings, searching for his savior.

In doing so, he reveals an inflamed and swollen bite mark on his cheek, smeared with blood and drool.

His roaming eyes find a tiny silhouette on the roof of the building across the street. His mouth spreads into a big, toothy grin. He raises his hand to wave hello.

The top of his head explodes.

On the roof of the building, a puff of smoke rises.

Sergeant Grant Lewis peers into his ranging telescopic sight, scanning the ground for additional targets. He sits on a stool he found in an art classroom, resting the rifle on a bipod on the parapet next to an unfinished MRE.

The street below opens up to him in detail.

Bowman collected the NCOs back at the hospital and explained what his scouts found: Private Boyd had gotten bitten during the night and then turned into a Mad Dog by morning, like something out of a zombie movie. It explained everything. For Lewis, it all fit—the huge number of Mad Dogs running wild attacking people, the change in mission, the new ROE. Hawkeye catching the Mad Dog strain from a bite on his face confirmed it. The rate of transmission for this disease is incredible.

And if we don’t do something about it, he tells himself, we are going to be wiped out.

As a result, Lewis has come up with his own ROE: If you are a Mad Dog, or if you are bitten and are going to become a Mad Dog, I am cleared hot to kick your ass.

The M21 is a semi-automatic adaptation of the M14 bolt action sniper rifle. The advantage of the M21 is the shooter gets a quick second shot, which is ideal for target-rich environments. A cam built into the scope mount adjusts the sight to compensate for the bullet’s trajectory. The magazine he is using holds twenty 7.62-mm bullets.

There are no targets in view. The street is empty of life. The air smells like smoke. But they are out there, close, circling. He can hear their growling and their sad, plaintive cries carried on each fresh breeze.

The longer he stays up here, the longer he can delay having to listen to Sergeant Ruiz chew his ass about alleged fratricide. Nobody wanted to kill The Newb. Nobody wanted The Newb to die. Friendly fire is a common thing in combat. Things were very confused trying to cross that intersection. Accidents happen all the time in war.

He can also avoid Sergeant McGraw, who has been moping under his own personal storm cloud, wondering how he missed the fact that PFC William Chen was cracking from the stress right under his nose. Wondering if he could have prevented the poor kid from blowing the back of his head off, which of course he couldn’t. Every soldier has a different way of reacting to stress. Every soldier has a different breaking point. If they themselves do not know what it is, how are you supposed to know?

Lewis shakes his head in wonder. The way his fellow NCOs have chosen so far to react to this crisis is making him lose a little respect for the rank of sergeant.

He leans back in his chair, stretches, and takes a swig from his canteen. He hates the taste of New York City municipal water, but like all guys with experience in the field, he is used to making do. He has food and water, which is all that counts. A grunt can burn up to four, five, six thousand calories a day on a high-stress mission like this one. You either lose weight or you eat every chance you get and replace the calories.

Across the street, two guys in suits and ties are smoking cigarettes on the roof. One of them is leaning over the parapet to take a look at Lewis’ kill. The other sees Lewis looking back at him and sheepishly holds up his index and middle finger to make a V. He is either communicating “victory” or “peace,” Lewis isn’t sure.

To a real soldier, Lewis believes, it is the same thing.

The pause in targets gives him time to reflect on Charlie’s predicament.

Bowman is going to try to consolidate Charlie with Battalion and Battalion is going to try to hook up with Brigade, Lewis guesses. It’s a big effing mistake. It is exactly the kind of smartass strategy some soulless egghead would dream up. He can picture the egghead now, showing the Brass a big color-coded map of the USA and telling them the parts they can hold with armor and the parts they are going to have to give up for a while. He will rattle off casualty estimates and label civilian casualties under his plan as “acceptable.”

And the Brass will grunt and nod. A lot of these guys served in the Cold War and believed America could fight and survive a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. This many million will die, this many million will survive. They have heard this type of language before and they speak it fluently. As long as we come out on top, right? Of course, it is not their families dying—oh no, not these rear-echelon motherfuckers.

And then the environmental nuts will come along and say how this is going to be good and very cleansing for the planet. Global population will be rewound to before the birth of Christ, and the planet will bounce back and flourish and Man will live in harmony with nature from thence forth. We are the real virus here, multiplying and consuming until we kill the host that sustains us. We must end this world to save it, right? Of course, this is all freaking fine in theory until it is your family that is doing the dying.

No, the smart thing to do, Lewis believes, is for everybody to stay where they are, make the Air Force earn its pay for a change by keeping everybody supplied, and then punch out patrols to go deep into neighborhoods and shoot down every Mad Dog they see. Every kill is a broken chain of infection, slightly improving humanity’s odds.

Meanwhile, hand out guns. Give everybody and his mother an old surplus rifle and sixty rounds, a flyer explaining how to use it, and a license to kill for a month.

But Lewis knows the Army and the Army is not going to do that. He believes the Army’s going to react to the first punch in the nose the Mad Dogs gave it by retracting all its limbs inside its shell. Instead of putting the Mad Dogs down while they are still dispersed, the Army is going to let them build an army that will wipe the human race off the face of the earth and give it back to the birds and the bees.

Movement down in the street. Lewis peers into his telescopic sight and sees a woman and child running, holding hands. They are so beautiful that he daydreams for a moment about his wife Sara and their boy Tucker, far enough away from him that they might as well be on the Moon. The woman is a young mom, in her mid twenties, with long straight blond hair and a slim, athletic body clad in a tight T-shirt and jeans, while the daughter is virtually a smaller version of her mother, maybe seven years old.

I’ll protect you, he thinks. On this one street, you will be safe. Go in peace.

He blinks, looks again.

The mother has been bitten in the arm. The wound has been hastily bandaged and a length of unraveled gauze, stained almost black with dried blood, flaps behind her.

She is already dead. All he has to do now is stop her from taking who knows how many poor saps with her to the grave.

He takes aim and prepares for the shot, but freezes on the trigger pull. If he kills the mother, the girl won’t have a protector. She won’t last five minutes on these streets.

But the mother has been bitten. If he does not kill her, she will later go Mad Dog and then kill or infect her daughter.

He can’t decide what to do. The Bible story about King Solomon enters his mind. Two women are fighting over a child and Solomon’s answer is to take a sword and cut the child in two. When one of the women says please don’t do this but instead give the child to the other, Solomon knew instantly that she was the real mother and gave her the child.

The smart move, the safest bet, is to kill both of them.

A thought pops into his head: We must end this world to save it.

His view of the mother and daughter is now blocked by the corner of the building.

Picking up the rifle and cursing a blue streak at himself for losing his concentration, he runs to the other side of the roof and quickly repositions his weapon on its bipod. He finds the pair after a cursory scan of the street, aims the barrel of his rifle at the back of the woman’s head, and exhales.

It’s all freaking fine in theory until it’s your family that’s doing the dying.

He releases the trigger. He can’t do it.

Lewis spits over the parapet in disgust.

Across the street, a man in an office is waving at him and holding a sign that says: trapped, help.

Lewis spits again.

“Welcome to the club, buddy,” he says.

The more I see her, the more I think it’s unfair that she’s

scared of me, and this makes me pissed off, and then I think

about it some more, and then I decide—

Sergeant Ruiz peeks into the classroom through the window set in the door and sees Third Squad sprawled asleep on top of their fartsacks where they’d been billeted, surrounded by leftovers from rapidly devoured MREs. One of them cries out in his sleep, making the others stop snoring long enough to frown and twitch for a few moments.

Again he thinks about his young wife and infant son in Jacksonville, Florida. Should he try to call her now?

What if she doesn’t answer the phone?

Would he go over the hill and try to get home to his family, like Richard Boyd?

Maybe, but look where that got Boyd. The LT said half his face got bitten off and he’d been transformed into a Mad Dog.

He hears footsteps, turns and sees 2LT Greg Bishop approaching from the end of the hallway, gesturing angrily at his trailing NCOs. Probably complaining again about Bowman’s order to McGraw to shoot down all those civilians. Said it was inhuman, even with the ROE. Said Bowman doesn’t deserve to take command of what’s left of Charlie Company. Said even some Nazis during WWII refused to follow orders and participate in wholesale slaughter.

Ruiz shakes his head in disgust and resumes his own walk to the gym, where a thousand people lie moaning and dying on cots arranged in nice, neat rows. Healthy civilians are moving among them changing sheets and bedpans and IV bags, supervised by three hapless, red-faced corpsmen and a handful of nurses from the day shift who made it to work. Others are disposing of corpses and disinfecting the area with mops and rags. The LT told them: We have food, water, blankets. We can protect you, feed you and shelter you. But if you stay, you work. And you work hard.

It is unpleasant labor, and there is plenty of shirking, but many of the civilians are happy to have something to do to take their minds off their problems. The ones who are working are the toughest, the ones you can count on. The others just can’t take what’s happening to them and their world. They quickly wandered off and nobody has seen them since. Many of these people have lost everything, and it was torn away bloodily in front of their very eyes. They are in shock, and many of them will never snap out of it.

It was a good idea, in any case, to give the civilians something to do. The LT is smart for an officer, Ruiz thinks. If Bowman commanded the way Bishop says he should, First Platoon would still be trapped in that classroom, under siege and starving by inches, and Second Platoon would have been scattered to the winds on Forty-Second Street.

Ruiz likes to make things simple. Here is how he sees it:

Bowman is working hard and doing what it takes to keep his boys alive.

Bishop is a douche and is complaining instead of working.

And Knight, well, word is some of his own guys want to frag his ass. Word is that when the Mad Dogs came out of the woodwork and started ripping his boys to shreds, he refused to fire, and instead told them to run for it.

Ruiz shakes his head. The reality on the ground has changed, and if we do not change with it, we will die. Those who cannot accept reality, as it is, should not command. Bishop, for example, believes Bowman should have called in units equipped with riot control gear and captured the Mad Dogs nonviolently.

The man is either insane or in denial about their predicament.

That leaves Bowman as the ideal man for the job as the guy least likely to get them all killed within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

Ruiz sees a few civilians patrolling the gym, toting M4 carbines. He exchanges a nod with one of them, a middle-aged marine with experience in Panama and the first Gulf War. Another one of Bowman’s innovations—arming those civilian volunteers having prior military experience with Charlie Company’s spare carbines. They are now Bowman’s police force, used to make sure none of the Lyssa patients goes Mad Dog and makes trouble, while giving the rest of the civilians somebody to complain to besides the soldiers.

Bowman said he is not interested in a humanitarian mission. He is trying to keep Charlie Company combat effective. He is looking at this place as hostile territory and the Mad Dogs as enemy combatants, the way he was told to do by the Brass. The guys in the rear with the gear are not right very often, but on this, they are absolutely goddamn correct.

Ruiz walks down a row of Lyssa victims lying in their cots, looking into each face. Most are in bad shape, as the Mad Dogs showed a preference for spreading infection to those lying in their beds who were closest to recovery. But a few smile back at him.

There is hope in this place. It makes him feel good. They are doing some good here. The LT said there’s plenty of supplies, including ammunition, and a lot of sick people to protect and help recover.

He also said not to get too comfortable.

If Charlie Company moves, Ruiz wonders, should I try to leave?

How would I get home?

Does it matter? If what Bowman said about Boyd is true, then the Mad Dogs are going to try to wipe this planet clean of human life. Maybe one out of twenty is now a Mad Dog, and they are already bringing the country to its knees.

The rate of infection is unbelievable.

It is a horrible thought, but our only hope of stalling the Apocalypse, he thinks, is that the Mad Dogs kill a lot more people than they infect, reducing the rate of infection. If the infection rate is arithmetical instead of exponential, they might have a chance at stopping them through brute extermination. The way the Iraqis were doing it just before Charlie was sent home. (It is strange to think that the countries most likely to pull through this are failed states with brutal societies and lots of guns and ammo.)

In any case, if America is doomed, why should he stay? Why not at least try to get to Janisa and Emmanuel? In a contest between his family and his platoon, there would be no contest. If his love for his wife is passionate, his love for his son is primordial. He would, in fact, saw off his own arm for his kid. He would systematically kill all of his comrades. His true duty in a crisis like this, at the end of the world, lies with his family.

The only problem is he is here and they are there, and he would die before he could reach them.

A young woman hurries by, her dark eyes wide with alarm. Doc Waters, exhausted and in a fine rage now, shouts after her to bring back as much amantadine—a generic antiviral drug—as she can carry.

Even with the mask, Ruiz can tell that the girl is pretty, just like his Janisa. The idea that his wife and son are in danger fills him with grief.

He will try to call her. But first he has to check on one of his boys.

Hawkeye has been tied down to his cot with restraining belts, sweating and reeking, the bandage on his cheek stained a rusty brown, his throat beginning to swell into a mass of golf ball-sized buboes. He tries to smile upon seeing Ruiz, but the smile quickly morphs into a grimace, his skin the sickly gray color characteristic of infection.

“How are you, Hawkeye?”

“Been better, Sergeant,” he rasps, his voice underscored with a vibration that occasionally culminates in a growl when he exhales. “You come to help me?”

“I brought an extra pillow for you, like you asked.”

“I can’t swallow. I’m goddamn thirsty all the time but I can’t stand even looking at water. Just seeing an IV bag pisses me off. I’m pissed off all the time.”

“It’s unfair, Hawkeye.”

“No,” Hawkeye hisses. “It’s the germs. They’re making me pissed off. They’re putting thoughts into my head. You see that pretty girl who just walked by? The one with the big black eyes you could fall into?”

“She just walked by here,” Ruiz says. “Sure, I saw her.”

“Of course you did—she’s beautiful,” Hawkeye chuckles, then grimaces again. “She’s kind of scared of me. Every time she walks by, she looks at me real scared. And I think, don’t be scared, miss, I’m Cameron Ross, I’m a good guy, I’d never hurt you. And the more I see her, the more I think it’s unfair that she’s scared of me, and this makes me pissed off, and then I think about it some more, and then I decide I want to chew up her face so she can’t see me anymore.”

Ruiz takes a step back without thinking, gazing down in horror at the soldier.

“Everything makes me so damn pissed off, Sergeant. Every minute that goes by I can feel myself getting more pissed off. I don’t want to die hating everybody and everything.” He glances down at his hand, and Ruiz sees that he is holding a photo of his girlfriend. “I want to die while I still love them. I’m dying either way, Sergeant. That’s a fact. I’m not scared. I just don’t want to die hating my girl, or my own mother. Do you get it now, or do I have to drill it into your fucking skull?”

Ruiz nods and says softly, “I get it, Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye growls deep in his throat, then closes his eyes and sighs. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

Ruiz takes the pillow he brought, places it over the boy’s smile, and presses down.

“Bye, Hawkeye,” he says, tears streaming down his face.

The boy struggles for about a minute, then lies still.

When Ruiz is done, he notices the room is strangely silent except for the general moan of the Lyssa victims lying in their beds. He looks up and sees almost everyone staring back at him. Several of the civilians slowly nod in understanding, while others cover their faces to hide their tears.

He is not the first person to have to do this for a friend.

Feeling tired in his bones, Ruiz begins walking in the direction of the west wing, where he hopes to find an empty classroom where he can call his wife. Immediately, the people around him resume working as if nothing happened.

Corporal Alvarez approaches and salutes. He says the Lieutenant wants the entire company to muster. LT has talked to Quarantine, he says.

Quarantine has new orders for Charlie Company.

It’s us or them, gentlemen

Gentlemen, the Lyssa virus is much more of a problem than we have been led to believe. The Pandemic has taken many lives and caused severe shortages and panic. But now the game has changed and our mission has expanded. The Army is no longer simply concerned with protecting infrastructure. We are fighting for the survival of the United States. I know that sounds dramatic, but there’s really no other way to put it.

Right now, outside these walls, there is no local government. No food distribution. No medicine. There are almost no firefighters putting out fires. Only a handful of police offers are still doing their duty. Many of the hospitals have been abandoned, like this one. It’s fast becoming the law of the jungle out there.

There is a reason for this.

Warlord has suffered major losses as well. Captain West and his headquarters staff are MIA and presumed dead. Colonel Armstrong is dead, and so is the Battalion XO, Major Reynolds. Captain Lyons of Alpha is taking over Battalion.

Gentlemen, be quiet. There’s more.

As you know, I have been placed in command of Charlie. I have received new orders directly from Brigade. All units in our AO have been ordered to consolidate into the next highest level at an easily defensible location. This means Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta Companies are going to concentrate and reconstitute Warlord. Quarantine wants Battalion squared away until he needs us.

These orders make sense. They are also simple as far as we’re concerned because our current position is the rendezvous point. Everybody is coming to us. All we have to do is wait. A citywide curfew is going into effect at seventeen hundred hours. By eighteen hundred, the Battalion should be reconstituted under Captain Lyons.

Now it’s time to tell you the real problem that is behind all this. What I have to say may shock you, but at this point probably will not surprise you.

At first, we were told that Mad Dog syndrome is common only in the most severe cases of Lyssa, where the virus attacks the brain. Turns out this is wrong. Turns out the Mad Dogs apparently carry an entirely different strain of the virus in their saliva. When they bite people, those people become Mad Dogs.

In fact, once bitten, they can become a Mad Dog within hours.

Gentlemen, be quiet.

Gentlemen—

Thank you, Sergeant.

The number of Mad Dogs is increasing at a rate that we cannot understand. We have seen with our own eyes that they are dramatically growing in numbers and that they attack and seek to infect, without fear or mercy, any non-infected person that they see. The level of threat is increasing by the minute and will increase until the Mad Dogs are either all dead or they exhaust the supply of people they can infect.

Now you know why we have no choice but to concentrate Battalion or cease to be in the game helping America get through this crisis. Gentlemen, I am not kidding when I say that we are fighting for the survival of our country. Possibly the human race.

The situation is unprecedented.

All right, listen up.

Things have changed, and we need to adapt.

First, there will be no more talk of “baby killers.” If you think the Mad Dogs are still people, your sentimentality is going to get you and the man next to you killed. Mad Dogs are not people anymore. They are puppets controlled by the Mad Dog virus. The virus tells them to attack and infect, and they do it. These people probably have no knowledge of who they are, what they are, or what they’re doing.

And if they do know, but have no choice, then God help them. Either way, if you kill a Mad Dog, it is a mercy killing. It’s that simple.

Mad Dogs do not carry weapons and they look like you and me, but do not let appearances fool you. These things are the deadliest foe that America has ever faced and the most dangerous enemy you will ever meet in combat.

There will be a lot more killing. We are in a hostile country, surrounded by a hostile army, close to being cut off from resupply and medevac, and the enemy is hunting us in a war of extermination, fighting us using tactics against which we never trained.

This is an enemy that does not take prisoners. That does not negotiate. That requires no supply, knows no fear, and attacks relentlessly. The virus does not fight for land or money or politics or religion. It fights to survive by infecting, or killing, all of us.

I am telling you this so you can get your head on straight. If you want to stay alive, you’re going to have to get some fight in your gut and see this situation for what it is.

A war with unlimited spectrum. Total war.

It’s us or them, gentlemen. These are the facts on the ground.

Right now, you are probably getting very worried about your loved ones. I have family in Texas, some in Louisiana, who I think about every day. But I can’t get to them. I’d never make it. If I walked out that door, I’d be dead, or a Mad Dog, within twenty-four hours.

If you want to help your family, then do your job.

Somebody has to survive this.

Civilian law enforcement is being wiped out. That leaves us. We’re all that’s left between a rising tide of Mad Dogs and annihilation. So your family’s only hope, our country’s only hope, is that the Army stays together long enough to make a difference. From now on, once a unit is destroyed, it cannot be replaced. It’s gone.

One of you asked me if this is the end of the world. My answer was not a very good one. I thought of a new answer, and I like it better.

Whether the world is going to end or not is literally up to us.

As for me, gentlemen, I say it’s not.

Chapter 9

They do not deserve to take it all from us

The sun is shining and the streets are jammed with people enjoying the end of summer. In Central Park, hundreds lie on blankets in Sheep Meadow, sleeping or reading. Several boys with their shirts off throw an orange Frisbee back and forth, while a dog playfully barks and scampers between them. Christopher sits on a bench bouncing Alexander on his knee. They both smile eagerly as she approaches them barefoot and laughing. Alexander demands ice cream. Valeriya Petrova suggests a ride on the Merry-Go-Round instead and he shouts for joy before realizing he’s been fooled, suddenly declaring his interest in both ice cream and a ride.

What flavor, Alex? Christopher asks.

Alexander looks up at his father and cries exultantly: Vanilla!

Her eyes flicker to Christopher, deliciously aware that he is unaware of being watched, and knows they are getting older every day and that some day they will die and there will be nothing and they will never be together like this again. Instead of making her sad, the thought fills her with a strange elation that she is alive and not dead, that she still has time, that they all have time, before even just this single perfect day ends. And her son has even longer and all the world lies before him.

Tonight she will make love to her husband and whisper thank you in his ear as she does at times when she feels like this, when she cannot contain the beauty of her life and the joy her family brings her.

Harsh white light shatters the darkness.

The building groans to life as its systems reboot.

Petrova lies under the desk, shivering with her eyes clenched shut.

You must get up, she tells herself. You must not give up. You must survive for them.

No, stay and dream a little while longer. Maybe the dream is true. Maybe, outside, the world has returned to normal. People in the park, laughing and playing. Lying on the warm grass, reading a paperback—

No—

Outside, she knows, the world is dying.

Everybody she has ever known, everybody she has ever loved, everything she cherished as part of life, is being destroyed.

She knows that she is probably going to die here without ever seeing the sun again. Without ever seeing her son again.

So far away.

Mankind will not cross the Atlantic again for perhaps hundreds of years. London may as well be on another planet. Within a generation, even the word “London” may cease to be generally remembered in North America. Knowledge that there are other continents at all may slowly be forgotten as future generations struggle to survive.

All this because a tiny little biological machine simply wants to live.

If the virus could think and speak, it would say it has a right to try to multiply, to fight for dominance, to survive. Survival, in fact, is the virus’ sole purpose. It is designed to survive. That is what makes it so strong. It was virtually the first form of life on the planet, and it will be the last.

But it is not better than us, she thinks. Stronger, maybe. But not better.

Can a virus make its human puppets paint a sunset, for example, that reflects the soul of the real thing? Possessing mind but not thought, does it understand the concept of science, progress, the betterment of the species? Has it ever looked up with its borrowed eyes at the stars and wonder if there are other planets that can support life, perhaps life it can talk to? Can it understand charity or love or empathy or mercy? Has a Mad Dog, roaming the streets feverishly searching for a new host, ever felt anything in its extremely short life span beyond a toxic level of pain and rage?

They do not deserve to take it all from us. They are just machines. Living software. They will kill everyone and destroy everything, only to die off themselves and disappear as fast as they came, leaving despair and ruin behind. And this security equipment and all the other human machines will simply lie here rotting for years under layers of dust, perhaps to be picked up generations later by uncomprehending descendants.

It is unfair—

A sudden burst of anger gives her just enough strength to move her hand.

With great effort, she reaches across the carpet. Her body follows, as slow as a snail, but as determined. Fear weighs down on her with its own special gravity, and she wonders if she will make it. But soon she is standing, looking into the security screens, where she sees Sandy Cohen lying broken on the floor outside.

Dead.

We are just meat to them, she thinks. They consume us and throw away the wrapper.

Even the air feels heavy in her lungs.

If you do not want to die here, get busy doing something else, she tells herself.

Her eyes flicker to a pack of cigarettes on the desk. Jackson was a smoker. Petrova quit four years ago, before she got pregnant with Alexander. Has not touched one since.

Just one, she decides. To help me think.

Petrova ignites the tip of the cigarette and inhales deeply, feeling guilty about it in part, strangely, because she is doing it in a public place. In more ways than one, ingrained habits die hard. She coughs. She inhales again and does not cough. Like riding a bike. Within moments, the head rush assails her brain.

So much for quitting, she thinks. It was agony to quit, and she is throwing it all away for three quarters of a pack of Marlboro Lights. And not even menthol, which she prefers. On the other hand, between the epidemic and the Mad Dogs, she doubts she is going to see an abundance of cigarettes anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps forever.

She suddenly realizes that she does not have much time. The power might go out again, and if it stays off, she will have no way to survive.

She begins to take stock of her surroundings. Most of the desk drawers are stuffed with paper records, logs, office supplies and old manuals. The bottom desk drawer contains a half-full quart bottle of whiskey, an almost full carton of cigarettes, a condom, a heavily dog-eared copy of Juggs, a package of salted peanuts, and a clipboard holding some sort of training schedule. She removes the peanuts and devours them greedily.

Lovely, she thinks. The only things I have lots of are cigarettes and pornography.

One of the storage bins holds flashlights, which she removes, tests and sets aside.

But no guns or other weapons. Petrova knows that the security staff carries at least a billy club and a TASER, but Jackson either has these items on him, lost them during the fight with Baird, or discarded them afterwards. That just leaves her golf club, next to which she places a small steel fire extinguisher and a box cutter tool.

Petrova finds the bathroom adjacent to this main room and uses it, smoking a second cigarette on the toilet with the door open and the light off. For a few moments, the smoking dampens her hunger.

She snaps her fingers, stands up and flushes. Pausing at the sink, trying not to look at herself in the mirror, she hurriedly washes her face and hands, and dries them with paper towels. Then she goes back to the operator station.

The security system, she realized, must include a way to prevent the migration of airborne microbes and toxins in the event of an emergency.

After several minutes, Petrova shuts off the HVAC system with a primitive cry of triumph. Instantly, the air-conditioning stops breathing ice over her skin. Soon, the air will get stale, but at least she won’t be freezing anymore.

This small act of control gives her a sense of optimism and fuels her courage.

“I am very sorry, Sandy,” she says to the screen, then flips the image.

To get out of here, she must either escape or be rescued.

Don’t look behind you

Marsha Fuentes lies twitching and wincing on the floor in one of the aisles in the auditorium. Lucas is in the elevator lobby, blinking and sniffing the air. Saunders is in Laboratory West, pacing back and forth. Stringer Jackson is still standing at the mirror, rocking back and forth, his ruined eye weeping mucus. Drool dribbles from his lips.

He has turned.

Down in the lobby, the beautiful blonde appears to be arguing with some of the men in her mob. She holds a pistol in her hand, which she taps against her leg as she talks. The people down there have figured out that when the Institute went into lockdown, not only was the lab sealed, so was the entire building. They are upset about it.

Behind the woman, Petrova can see a group of people lying on the floor in the corner. Lyssa victims. Some of the mob are sick and getting sicker. But none of them appear to be going Mad Dog. At least, not yet. She reminds herself that with standard airborne Lyssa, the odds are very low.

The woman is now waving the pistol over her head and pointing at the sick people. The men walk away sheepishly.

Reluctantly, Petrova tears her eyes from the screen. If she is going to be rescued, she has to act fast. She gathers up the fire extinguisher, which she intends to use as a missile, and her golf club. The box cutter she puts in her pocket as a weapon of last resort. She takes a deep breath in front of the door, hesitating.

It is either this, or get back under the desk.

She takes off her shoes to make less noise while she walks, opens the door and gingerly steps outside.

The hallway is empty, except for the bodies, and dead silent. She hurries past Sandy Cohen, who lies like a marionette with her strings cut, her limbs at odd angles and her grinning head facing the wrong way. Further down, she scurries past Baird’s body, lying on its side like a downed bull. Footsteps echo down distant hallways.

Turning the corner, she creeps up to the bathroom where Sims still lies on the floor, his stiff body propping open the door. Stringer Jackson is inside.

Now for the hard part.

She darts by the open door, willing herself not to be noticed.

Immediately, Jackson begins snarling.

“Oh damn,” she says, breaking into a run.

Behind her, the door is flung open, slamming against the wall with a loud bang, and Jackson spills out of the bathroom snorting and growling, stumbling over Sims’ body.

Petrova looks over her shoulder, slowing down, and sees Jackson recover and begin loping towards her, his eye leaking yellowish-green sludge, bellowing a nasal ka ka ka sound through slavering jaws.

As a scientist, she knows all sorts of facts about the human body. For example, she knows that human jaws, clamping down to bite, can exert more than four thousand pounds per square inch.

Moments later, she comes to a sliding halt in front of her office. Slipping in, she slams the door, locks it and puts her weight against it, praying for it to hold.

But Jackson does not try to break the door down. Instead, he begins growling and pacing. She can hear him sniff at the air, sensing that she is there. She is trapped again, and this time, she has no access to the security system.

Petrova puts down the golf club and fire extinguisher and sits at her desk. The act is so familiar to her that for a moment, she feels like everything is back to normal. Her PC’s screensaver displays a screen-sized image of her, Christopher and Alexander looking up at the camera, grinning. Christopher took the photo himself, holding the camera at arm’s length over their heads. Alexander, held in Petrova’s arms, is reaching up towards the lens. The photo was snapped with a digital camera near the end of a perfect day in Central Park. The image holds her, transfixed, for several moments.

Jackson shoulders the door during his pacing, startling her.

Time to get to work. She picks up the phone, which blares a loud rat-tat-tat signal. Same with the handset to her fax. A wave of sweat breaks out on her forehead and armpits. Her first dead end.

She opens her hard drive and tests her connection to the email server, which appears to be working, giving her a connection to the outside world.

Smiling now, she opens the secure FTP site the CDC set up for them to share their work. It is also operational. She grabs everything she can find related to her discoveries, doing a broad data sweep, and dumps it all onto the server.

While it is uploading, she writes an email to her contacts at the CDC and USAMRIID, cc’ing as many people in the virology community that she can think of, summarizing her findings and stating that she has a pure sample of the Mad Dog strain. She tells them that she and her colleagues are close to producing a formula for a vaccine but a mob has entered the building’s lobby, locking them in, and they require rescue. Then she clicks send.

It is a simple plan, but she believes it will work. By now, the world outside must know that the Mad Dog strain is the real threat. The Centers for Disease Control will want a pure sample. She has a sample, as long as the power does not fail for good and spoil it. In particular, they will want a vaccine, which is why she lied and said they were close to producing one.

So now all she has to do is wait for the government to come and rescue her. A simple plan.

Unless her contacts are all dead.

Unless there is no CDC or USAMRIID anymore.

Unless somebody else has already done the research she is offering.

Her stomach growls. Petrova opens a drawer in her desk and pulls out her purse. Rooting around inside, she produces a box of orange-flavored Tic Tacs, pours what is left into her palm, and rapidly devours them. She does the same with a pack of gum, gnawing the flavor out of it and then swallowing it whole.

There are no emails from Christopher in her in-box.

She tries the Guardian website, but there are no stories. The website is up and running, but no stories have been posted since yesterday. What could this mean?

Other news sites carry stories of riots, some with video showing Mad Dogs chasing down screaming people, dragging them to the ground and mauling them. The stories are few in number and poorly written. Other sites, such as YouTube, have either crashed or been shut down. The social networking sites are flooded with frantic pleas for help.

She cannot give up hope that her family is alive, but after several minutes, she stops her search for hard news as she is getting nowhere and only wasting time at this point. She wants to return to the Security Command Center as soon as possible, as that is where she left the flashlights. She can live without food, even water, for days, but the idea of being trapped here without light is horrifying.

If things are as bad outside as she thinks they are, the power will eventually go out.

She just has to somehow incapacitate or get past Jackson. And, if it is not too much trouble, stop by the employee lounge long enough to pick up some food out of the machine that Hardy broke open, so she does not starve to death.

She listens for a moment. Jackson has stopped pacing. The corridor is quiet.

Petrova slowly rises from her chair and tip-toes to the door. Still nothing. She gets down on the floor and tries to look under the door. Slowly rising to her feet, she gingerly places her ear against the wood to listen.

From inches away, she can hear a sudden loud, guttural snarling.

“Oh,” she whispers, backing away.

She wishes that she had planned further than sending email to CDC and USAMRIID.

But she has an idea.

You are stronger than us, she thinks, but we are smarter than you.

Going back to her computer, she brings up a letter and sets it to print a hundred copies. Within moments, the printer begins churning out pieces of paper.

For several moments, she stares at this mundane routine with something like longing, then tip-toes back to the door, holding the fire extinguisher and golf club. Putting the club down, almost without thinking, she abruptly jerks open the door and steps aside.

Jackson roars into the room, races to the desk and knocks the printer onto the floor, where it lands with a loud crash.

Petrova stands there stupidly for several moments, unable to believe her plan worked. She jumps outside and slams the door before Jackson throws himself at it, pounding and clawing and kicking and yelping in a mindless fury.

She backs away from the door, panting.

Dr. Lucas is standing almost next to her, blinking without his glasses, sniffing the air.

He begins to growl.

Petrova left the golf club inside the office. She aims the fire extinguisher and sprays him with a jet of white foam pressurized with nitrogen, hoping to blind him.

The scientist coughs and sputters for a moment, pawing at his stinging eyes and yelping, then goes berserk, waving his arms wildly around his head and biting at his hands and forearms, flinging foam in all directions. Petrova can only watch in amazement as his teeth rip cloth and tear away pieces of flesh, soaking his face and arms with blood.

More than four thousand pounds per square inch.

Backing up step by step, she finally turns and runs, leaving Lucas to howl and tear at his clothes and flesh in his blind rage. By the time she returns to the Security Commander Center, she is shaking so hard that she can barely open the door.

On the screen, the beautiful blonde is holding up a sign that says, you made me do this. Next to her, several worried-looking men are forcing the other National Guardsman, his arms still tied behind his back, to his knees.

Petrova watches, transfixed by this new drama.

Throwing the sign down, the blonde marches to one of the Lyssa victims lying on the floor, a young girl, and rubs her hand all over the girl’s face until her hand is slick with mucus. She holds the hand high over her head, showing it to the camera.

“Oh,” says Petrova. “No, no, no. Please do not do that.”

As she marches back, her mouth moving soundlessly, the soldier’s eyes go wide and he begins to struggle struggling wildly against his captors, who can barely hold him.

The blonde smears the snot over his face and lips, then begins scribbling on the piece of poster board, which she holds high for Petrova to see: only you can save him.

“We do not have a vaccine, you stupid bitch!” Petrova screams, throwing the fire extinguisher against the wall. “Stop killing people!”

The rage boils up inside her, comes pouring out. She races to the security system’s graphical interface and begins studying it.

“You want to come inside,” she mutters in disgust, her accent thickening. “This is what you want. We shall see.”

She clicks an icon on her screen, which turns from red to green.

On the screen, the crowd of people appear startled, then burst into cheers, laughing and hugging and pointing at something that is happening off screen. The blonde looks down at the soldier, who stares at the floor. Alone among the cheering mob, they are weeping.

The people are pointing at the elevator lobby. They have won against the stubborn scientists who have been hoarding a vaccine.

The elevators are coming down.

Chapter 10

You know, my dad. . . .

Mooney sits on the floor next to his sleeping bag in the classroom that First Squad has claimed as a sleeping area, airing his feet and cleaning his carbine. After a lot of firing, a good cleaning is necessary. He wants his weapon functional—not ready for parade—so he is field stripping and cleaning it fast. Around him, some of the other boys are doing the same, getting ready for action. The room stinks of sweaty socks and cleaning solvent.

Wyatt swaggers in carrying a plastic garbage bag with his left hand. Behind him, Mooney sees one of the boys from Second Squad mopping the floor out in the hallway, whistling while he works. Everybody is dying, the world is ending, but the Army likes things clean, Mooney tells himself. It will be a nice, neat, orderly Armageddon. The last man alive, please turn out the lights.

“Booty,” says Wyatt, spilling the bag’s contents onto the floor in front of Mooney—a small mountain of half-melted candy bars, cartons of juice, warm cans of soda, and pancaked Twinkies, cupcakes and donuts.

The boys whistle, eyeing the loot enviously.

“What do you think, Mooney?” Wyatt says, offering one of his lopsided grins that make his large brown Army glasses—the type the boys call BCGs, or birth control glasses, since there’s no way in hell of getting laid while wearing them—appear crooked on his face.

Mooney studies his comrade for a few moments while he swabs his gun barrel with a cleaning rod and patch. He is starting to feel like he has adopted Private Joel Wyatt, although he is not sure why, since he basically can barely stand the screwball soldier at this point. Or maybe Wyatt has adopted him, and he is not strong enough to resist: Joel Wyatt can be like a force of nature. In any case, when you feel like you are going to die soon, you tend to start feeling pretty forgiving about things. All the irritating stuff stops being real and no longer matters. Just ask Billy Chen about how much he sweated the small stuff before he ate a bullet.

“Where’d you get all that, Joel?” says Ratliff.

“I jacked the rich kids’ lockers,” Wyatt says, beaming, sifting through the candy with his hands. He adds hastily, “It’s not like they’re coming back.”

Ratliff starts to laugh, but it fades quickly.

“You keep touching other people’s stuff and you’re going to get sick, Joel,” Mooney says, then reconsiders. “OK. Screw it. Give me that Mars bar.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Now,” Mooney says, glowering.

Wyatt grins again, his cheeks bulging with chocolate, and hands him the candy bar.

Mooney takes a bite and chews slowly. An instant later, he is wolfing the rest of it down, gnawing rapidly until his jaw muscles protest from the sudden overload. Now here is something to live for. Nothing ever tasted so good in his life. He reaches and grabs a carton of apple juice, spears it with the straw, and sucks it down in several long gulps. The sugar rings his brain like a bell.

“That’s my stuff!” Wyatt whines as Ratliff comes over and grabs a pack of cupcakes.

“There’s plenty for everybody,” Mooney says.

“That’s what your mom. . . .” Finnegan says, his voice trailing off. Nobody laughs. Instead, the boys stare off into some point in space and the atmosphere begins to fill with despair, like a fast-acting poison. Mooney can’t stand it anymore.

“Everybody come and get a candy bar,” he says. “Joel’s buying.”

The boys swipe at his pile, almost picking it clean. “Thanks, Joel!” they tell him.

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Wyatt tells Mooney.

“We have appointed you our new morale officer,” Mooney says.

“Why? Didn’t everybody find the LT’s speech uplifting? ‘Good day, uh, gentlemen, I’m the LT. Blah, blah, blah, uh, the world’s ending, and you’re still in the Army.’”

The boys laugh, chewing on their candy.

“You didn’t happen to find any beer in the lockers, did you, Joel?” says Finnegan.

“Or a couple of joints, maybe?” Carrillo wants to know, laughing.

“How about valium?” says Ratliff.

“Southern Comfort?”

“Codeine?”

“Heroin?”

They sound like they are horsing around, but Mooney can tell they are dead serious. They have recently learned that the road of duty now leads face first into a brick wall, presenting a choice that Billy Chen refused to continue making and that they are still trying to avoid. They are not sure what they now owe, and to whom. They do not want anything to do with Lieutenant Bowman’s total war, but they see no way out of the Army and no way home and besides, home may not even be there anymore.

A few hours of escape would be welcome.

“I had a teacher who kept a quart of whiskey in his drawer,” Finnegan says. “We’d sneak in during lunch period and take a few sips, and replace it with water.”

“I can’t believe a year and half ago I was graduating from high school,” says Carrillo, eyeing the student desks stacked against the far wall. “Man, I’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“Eighteen going on forty-five,” Ratliff says, and Mooney smiles, nodding.

“Man, I would kill for an ice cold bottle of Bud,” Finnegan says.

“Screw Bud,” says Ratliff. “Heineken’s the best.”

“I only drink the good stuff,” Carrillo boasts. “Guinness on tap.”

“Carrillo likes to eat his beers.”

“The domestics are just yellow water, you guys. You’re drinking carbonated urine.”

“I like Bud.”

“What about Corona?”

“Hey, man, what’s the difference between a half and half and a black and tan? I could never figure that out.”

Rollins finishes his Hershey’s chocolate bar, sighs and stares at the wrapper wistfully. “I just thought of something,” he says. “If things are as bad as LT says, I wonder if they’re making more of these chocolate bars or if this is all there is for a while.”

“Or movies,” says Finnegan. “Live concerts. Football games. Hustler.”

“PlayStation,” says Wyatt. “Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.”

“Hot chicks, dope, rock and roll, and beer,” says Ratliff.

“My old man won’t like that,” Corporal Eckhardt says across the room, scrubbing his carbine’s firing pin and bolt assembly with a toothbrush and solvent to get rid of carbon residue. “He can really put it away. He can down two six-packs a night, pass out and then wake up the next day and go to work.”

“Sounds like a swell guy,” says Wyatt, snorting.

“My old man’s a psycho. If anybody can survive this thing, he will.”

“My dad’s an accountant,” says Finnegan. “He hates violence. He almost had a heart attack when I joined the Army and he found out they were sending me to Iraq.”

“My dad’s got a basement full of guns,” says Carrillo. “He loves his AK47 more than he loves my mom. He’s a real jerk. Jerks like him always make it.”

“Kind of shows you what kind of world is going to pop out the other side of this giant asshole,” Mooney says.

“Yeah, all the pussies will be dead,” says Eckhardt.

“And all the psychos will be running the place,” Mooney says. “Think about it.”

The soldiers fall silent, trying not to think about it.

“My girl,” Ratliff says fiercely but quietly, almost to himself. “She’s tough. She’ll be okay. Her dad owns a gun. I taught her how to shoot. She’s going to make it.”

Finnegan looks out the window, squinting into the sunlight. Suddenly, he starts laughing uncontrollably. Everybody looks at him.

“You know, my dad,” he says, then stops abruptly, his laughter trailing off and his face slowly going blank.

Moments later, an air raid siren interrupts their gloom, slowly winding up somewhere in midtown Manhattan. A siren across the river begins wailing in response, then another from somewhere farther away, tinny and distant. The grating sound builds until it is almost deafening.

Mooney looks out the window. The quality of the sunlight tells him it is late afternoon. Seventeen hundred hours, to be exact.

The citywide curfew is now in effect.

The boys slowly rise to their feet. Their plan is to rustle up some supper for themselves. After that, they have a funeral to attend.

In two hours, the American sun will set, and it will be oh-dark.

One man, at the right place at the right time,

making a difference

Three police officers, clad in head-to-toe black BDUs, body armor and bulky clear-visor helmets, tread slowly down the street, newspapers scuttling around their boots and clinging to their legs. One of the cops leans on a comrade for support, while the third, a tall woman with a long braid protruding from under her helmet, brings up the rear, dragging her clear ballistic shield. They are all exhausted, but it is her turn to fight. They were going east at one time, but got turned around and are now heading west, towards the sounds of gunfire.

Gunfire means people. Security.

Night is falling. Around them, the streetlights flare to life in the dusk.

As if awaiting this signal, two Mad Dogs bolt out of a nearby apartment building, past construction scaffolding with posters plastered all over it advertising an aging pop singer’s farewell tour, and race towards the riot control police, yelping.

The woman assumes a fighting stance, raising her truncheon and shield, while her comrades sink to their knees on the asphalt behind her, panting.

She waits for the Mad Dogs to approach, taking deep breaths, then quickly sidesteps the first, a middle-aged man in hospital scrubs, who runs by and comes to a skidding halt. Moments later, the other, a large man in coveralls, comes flying at her, snarling. She body checks him with her shield, stunning him, then brings her truncheon down on his skull, killing him instantly. An instant later, she pivots and backhands the first man with her shield, making him spin until he trips over his own feet.

The woman staggers back, almost finished by the effort, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her armor and weapons, while the man scrabbles his way back onto his feet and begins pacing in front of her like a nervous cat, howling.

They were working riot control near Grand Central Station, barring thousands of people from attempting to board the trains that stopped running days ago, the station having since been converted into a Lyssa clinic. Then 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.

Who are you shouting at, Sergeant?

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?”

“What is this wondrous thing you call ‘shuteye’?”

The combat medic sighs. “Sergeant Ruiz doesn’t have the authority to give you an Article 15 punishment. I’ll put in a word with him about how hard he’s riding you.”

“Why? Look at me, Doctor. I’m working outside. Exercise, sunlight, fresh air.”

The truth is he has not been this tired since Basic. He remembers sleeping on his feet all the way to some range in the middle of nowhere, stuffed into a cattle car with the rest of his training company. That was nothing compared to this. One thing he can thank the Army for: a deep appreciation for the simple things in life that are absent during combat, like a hot shower, air-conditioning, greasy burgers and fries, time for yourself, driving a car going nowhere in particular, privacy, a girlfriend. And decent sleep.

They flinch at the high-pitched crack of carbines down the street. First Platoon boys providing security for the cleanup detail, dropping Mad Dogs at the perimeter.

“And my own bodyguards,” McLeod adds, then turns and shouts, “Keep ’em coming! Get some!” He grins. “They keep killing Mad Dogs over there, and me and my new friends keep stacking them nice and neat over here so we can burn them later for public health. Do you know what I call that, Doctor? Do you?”

“No, what do you call that, Private?” Doc Waters asks, his patience suddenly exhausted.

“Job security!”

The medic chuckles despite himself, shaking his head.

A soldier calls from the front doors of the school. “We got more people coming in, Doc. You want to check them out?”

“You’re a piece of work, Private,” Doc Waters tells McLeod, and returns to the front doors of the school, where four civilians are being held at gunpoint.

“I try my best, Doctor,” McLeod mutters, bending over and grabbing the girl’s ankles. “I try my best.”

First Platoon’s Sergeant Hooper tells the detail to stop work for the day and come get some chow.

“Roger that,” says McLeod, dropping the corpse’s legs again, stripping off his gloves and walking over to the curb, where the boys from First Platoon are already washing their hands and tearing the plastic wrapping off their MREs.

The MRE provides twelve hundred calories and contains a main entrée, side dish, plastic spoon, bread or crackers and spread, sports drink or dairy shake or some other beverage, seasonings, pack of gum, candy such as Tootsie Rolls or a pastry, flameless ration heater, matches, napkins and moist toilette.

Tonight, McLeod has scored chicken and dumplings. Excellent, he tells himself. He pockets the moist toilette. He’s been saving them up and intends to take a quick whore’s bath after his work here is over.

“What’d you get?” one of the other soldiers says.

“Beef brisket,” another answers him.

“I’ll trade you chili and macaroni.”

“All right.”

“My mom used to make this incredible chili. She’d get the beef from Costco—”

“How can I eat this shit while I’m listening to you talk about your mom’s home cooking?”

“Who has Tabasco sauce?”

“Who’s got C4? Let’s make a fire and heat this shit up and eat it right.”

“No fires, boys,” Sergeant Hooper says, standing nearby with his thumbs hooked in his load-carrying vest. “Chow down that supper fast.”

Small arms fire erupts to the south.

“Stop making more work for us!” one of the grunts calls out. “We’re taking five over here.”

“That’s not our guys,” McLeod says. “It’s farther south. It’s Alpha. Or Bravo.”

“Listen to General Patton here.”

McLeod says, “The curfew is on. The new ROE says anybody they see walking the street after curfew is hostile and they are cleared hot.”

“Finally taking the gloves off,” one of the grunts says, nodding. “Second Platoon’s LT is full of crap. We take the gloves off and put these mutants down, we’ll have this city cleaned up in no time.” He glares and his face turns red. “There ain’t no world ending. My mom and sister are doing just fine.”

“Okay, peace, brother,” says one of his comrades. “I don’t feel like fighting with you about it again.”

“Next time, I won’t try to break it up,” says the third. “You dicks got me in trouble.”

“And what about you, McLeod?” the first grunt says in a menacing tone. “Is the world ending? What do you think?”

“Oh, I think whatever you think,” McLeod says cheerfully.

The soldier blinks, then says, “Well, okay, then.”

McLeod goes back to eating, tuning out the soldiers and listening to the sound of gunfire all around the city as Warlord’s companies slowly grind their way through the wreckage to consolidate. It is a disturbing sound. It is the sound of a lot of people dying.

Is the world ending? You betcha, he thinks.

He remembers feeling a perverse thrill at the LT’s speech. The end of the world. Yes, sir! No more taxes, credit card debt, dance clubs, snooty cheerleaders, asshole jocks, careers, bank accounts, retirement worries, gym class, bad TV shows, plastic surgery, stupid politicians, megachurches or the constant feeling that you are in a hole and can’t get out. No more stupid rules that hem you in from every side.

Life is about to get a whole lot simpler. Just the law of the gun, and McLeod is hanging out with the people who have the best guns. As if to lend weight to this thought, the shooting to the south suddenly intensifies.

With each death out there, the world’s memory is getting shorter. A man could become reborn in this struggle and rename himself. No more living in the shadow of his great politician dad and his class clown past. During every screw-up in high school, McLeod would stand before his dad with a defiant smile, but the bastard never so much as blinked at him, too sanctimonious to lose his temper or even scold him his wayward son. Over time, the screw-ups got bigger, bolder, to get a reaction, any reaction. His upper-crust mother finally broke down, but he never won against dear old Dad of Steel. When he got caught shoplifting for the second time, his dad was through cleaning up his messes quietly behind the scenes, and McLeod was given a choice of jail or the Army.

When you screw up in the Army, you get a big reaction. Guaranteed.

McLeod smiles to himself as he realizes that Dad will probably survive after all. All the bigshot politicians are probably being squirreled away to secret bunkers. Even though his dad’s side is out of power right now, all the oligarchs stick together. First thing they’ll do when they get out is nuke the Chinese and hand over everything that’s left to the rich people. Can’t come out the other side of Armageddon and make a fresh start for humanity without bringing all our old problems with us, right-right?

He’d been looking forward to college, though. He loves to read and used to fantasize about spending hours cracking open volumes in the college library, growing smarter by the minute with the knowledge of the ages in his hands. He wanted to sit on the floor with a bunch of intellectuals who would appreciate his true genius. He wanted to study philosophy and try to figure out if there is any point to all of the misery he has already seen in his young life.

But there won’t be any more of that for a long time, he thinks. By the time the human race gets through this nightmare, in a few generations we’ll be lucky to be able to read a book.

“We should elect a new leader, like Bishop,” one of the grunts is saying. “Then we could do our own thing.”

“Know what I’d do? I’d go out and get some pussy. I’m freaking horny as hell and if we’re all going to die, why aren’t we going out and getting us some chicks? Especially since most of them seem to be dying.”

“You know what happens when civilians walk up to the door and Doc Waters takes them away? He makes them strip so he can check them for bites.”

“Even that chick that came in about an hour ago?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Man, she was definitely hot.”

“You can’t elect your own leaders in the Army,” McLeod says. “If we stop following orders, there will be no more Army. We might as well all go off on our own and start looting and raping now until we’re killed a few hours later.”

“Yeah, that’s what we’re just saying, yo.”

McLeod grins. “What could you possibly steal that has any value anymore? Food, water, ammo, a safe place to sleep—these are the only things worth anything anymore. And we got them right here.”

“Oh, is there some pussy in my MRE that I missed?”

One of the other grunts chimes in, “What do you care what we do, McLeod? They sure as shit didn’t put you on this detail because you’re some super soldier.”

McLeod smiles to himself.

Then he stands up suddenly, spilling his unfinished chicken and dumplings onto the asphalt, his heart racing.

That sound—

Their security detail comes running past, heading into the school.

Like a flood—

He sees them coming.

“Into the school and down on the ground, boys!” Hooper roars.

They bolt inside, shut the doors, and throw themselves onto the floor. Hooper crouches by one of the doors, peering out of the window cut into its top half, through which the day’s final threads of sunshine are now streaming. His eyes grow wide and he jerks his head back, his chest rising and falling rapidly. His face has turned chalk white.

The first Mad Dogs run past the school. Hooper raises his fist to tell the boys to freeze, but they are scarcely even breathing. McLeod cannot see the army rushing by outside, but he sees the shadows dancing across the walls and ceiling, and he can hear them loud and clear, the tramp of their feet on the asphalt. He lays his ear to the ground and listens to the thunder. Tries to picture their pounding feet: boots, tennis shoes, broken high heels, sneakers, bare feet. The ground vibrates under his ear.

The seconds crawl by while the flood of humanity continues to flow past them. How many people is this? he wonders. A thousand? Five thousand? Ten?

It’s like a stampede of animals, he tells himself, which brings a sudden flash of insight. Animals stampede because something scares them. Are the Mad Dogs as scared of us as we are of them? Is that why they are so hostile—are they simply defending themselves?

McLeod slowly becomes aware that the Mad Dogs are growling. At first, it is like a river of individual sounds babbling in competition, but after a few moments, he begins to sense an underlying pattern. A rhythm emerges, repetitive and forceful. It is not a sound of fear. It is a sound of purpose and violence, like a religious chant or a tribal war song. The sound moves down the street like a massive locomotive and underneath it McLeod hears a constant ominous buzz that vibrates deep in his chest and makes his head ache.

Maddy is going to war.

Moaning, McLeod bites down on his sleeve and clenches his eyes shut.

The stampede gradually fades into the distance until silence returns.

“Jesus God,” one of the boys finally says. “I think I crapped my pants.”

The others crack grins, whistle, blow air out of their cheeks.

Sergeant Hooper opens one of the doors just enough to take a fast look around outside.

“Where are they going, Sergeant?” McLeod asks him shakily.

“Wait,” says Hooper, holding up his hand.

The boys fall silent, watching the NCO.

McLeod suddenly knows where the Mad Dogs are going.

To the south, the constant crackle of small arms fire is escalating.

Final protective fire

Bowman and Knight lean against the roof’s parapet and squint at the looming skyscrapers, now glittering with lights against a darkening sky. Behind the officers, Kemper and Vaughan chew on their cigars near one of the rooftop HVAC units, murmuring in a communal cloud of smoke. Sherman sits by the combat net radio, monitoring the nets, while Lewis scans the street with his sniper rifle and a fresh mag.

“The shooting’s stopped,” says Bowman.

“See anything?” Knight asks him, peering through his binoculars.

Bowman shakes his head.

The gunfire, steadily rising in volume over the past few minutes, stopped abruptly several moments ago. The vacuum was instantly filled with the clanging of a store alarm somewhere in their neighborhood, the buzz of distant helicopters and the dull roar of thousands of air conditioners, even though the evening is cool.

Bowman warned War Hammer Six by radio about the army of Mad Dogs headed his way. Captain Lyons thanked him for the intel and abruptly signed off. Alpha’s commander had few options as to what he could actually do with the information. He could either advance or retreat, and retreat at this point would mean surrender.

Lyons is a good officer, and would think things through. Bowman tried to imagine what was going through his mind. He could slow Alpha’s pace to give Bravo a chance to catch up and consolidate their firepower. But it is hard enough just to move one company through streets choked with cars and rubbish; two companies would be an unwieldy force of about a hundred and sixty men. And how much more firepower could he really bring to bear by combining their forces in firing zones that consisted of streets and doorways?

No, the LT tells himself. The Captain will not anchor Alpha’s fate to Bravo’s by waiting around in a hostile area, especially with Bravo having so much ground to cover, but instead go the other way, force marching his command to take advantage of the failing light before night fell. So he will place his boys in a formation favorable to mobile defense and move hard and fast. But how fast can he push a company of eighty men on these streets, fighting for every block?

Not very, apparently. Alpha stepped off over an hour and a half ago and is still at least a mile south of the rendezvous point.

At least he has the curfew in his favor, Bowman thinks. Right now, everybody on the street is hostile and Alpha, Bravo and Delta are cleared hot against anything that moves.

Knight glances up the sky. “He’s lost the light,” he says.

Bowman grunts, glancing at his RTO.

Sherman says, “War Hammer is reporting heavy casualties. . . . Some dead, most bitten. . . . Quarantine is turning down his request for a medevac. . . .”

Bowman and Knight glance at each other. When Charlie’s sister companies finally show up, they are going to have to quarantine or otherwise do something with soldiers who were bitten. But this will be Lyons’ decision to make, not Bowman’s.

Bowman tries to picture what is happening at Alpha’s position. Lyons’ boys are tired and probably running low on ammo after killing who knows how many Mad Dogs. Some of the soldiers are dead and have to be carried, while a larger number have been bitten and surely know they will become Mad Dogs themselves within a few hours.

Will these soldiers continue fighting for Lyons even though they know their bites are death sentences? Will some of them turn their weapons on themselves? Or will they simply wander off?

What would you do if you had a rifle in your hands in a lawless city and only had a few hours to live?

“War Hammer is telling Warmonger to pick up the pace,” Sherman says.

Bowman nods.

Small arms fire erupts in the west, quickly turns into a steady volume of fire. It is Delta Company, attempting to push its way through fresh resistance.

Lieutenant Bishop comes up from behind.

“What have you got?” he says, taking out his binoculars.

“See for yourself,” Bowman says without turning around. He is annoyed with the officer and is going to have to get him squared away. It is bad enough having Stephen Knight around. The man is clearly broken after what happened to his platoon. But Bishop is mouthing off to the NCOs like a politician, always saying what they should be doing instead of simply accepting command decisions and making the best of them.

Loud gunfire explodes to the south, close to their position. The shooting has a terrible urgency to it this time, making Bowman’s heart pound. A series of flashes like lightning illuminate the outlines of nearby buildings, followed by ear-splitting booms.

He blinks and remembers visiting his uncle’s ranch on July Fourth when he was a kid. At night, stuffed on hot dogs and birch beer, he and his cousins retreated into the pastures, alive with fireflies and the singing of the dog day cicadas, and watched the fireworks light up the sky and explode with terrifying bangs.

Knock it off, he tells himself. He has done well armoring his mind against the destruction of the past as well as the terrifying idea of future extinction. His only weakness is the escape offered by pleasant memories of home. These memories helped get him through Iraq but here, they will only slow him down and make him weak when he needs to stay sharp and focused. There is a time and place for pain. . . .

The Way of the Warrior and all that. The macho stuff the lifers talk about. It is a philosophy that tells you to embrace pain so that it makes you stronger. Well, that certainly applies here and now. He wants his feelings cauterized. In his case, there is nothing macho about it. He simply believes that a lot of his men will die if he does not stay strong, uncaring, unfeeling.

The shooting suddenly cascades into a deafening, crackling roar punctuated by flashes, pops and booms he can feel deep in his chest.

“That’s FPF,” Knight murmurs.

Final protective fire. A defensive tactic. When it is put into play, the unit fires every weapon it has to stop the enemy from advancing and save itself from being overrun. It is the option of last resort. The meaning is obvious: Alpha is in trouble.

Bowman is amazed at the number of Mad Dogs. In the past five hours, they must have doubled in population. The easy explanation is they overran the hospitals and infected thousands of people in their beds, along with a full night and day of infecting anybody who ventured outside their homes. There must be tens of thousands at this point, possibly even hundreds of thousands, running towards the sounds of the gunfire from all over the city. The average rifleman carries more than two hundred rounds. If every bullet for each of their weapons found its mark, a single company could theoretically kill twenty thousand of the enemy.

Would even that be enough?

He reminds himself that First Squad alone, burning through almost all of its ammo, killed hundreds of Mad Dogs in less than fifteen minutes. Alpha can win this fight.

Kemper, Vaughan and Sherman join the officers at the parapet, their eyes gleaming.

Eleventh Cavalry air units are buzzing over the battle, weaving around the skyscrapers. An Apache helicopter suddenly buzzes low and fires a pair of Hellfire missiles at the street.

Kemper flinches and says, “Christ, that’s close.”

A second helicopter drops a TOW missile, guides it to its target, then veers off like an angry hornet. Fireballs expand and rise above distant buildings. Heat and light.

Kemper adds, “Unless. . . .” But says nothing more.

Bowman nods. Unless the friendly units are serving a dual purpose on the march. Either they make it to the rendezvous and consolidate and therefore become an effective player in this game, or serve as bait to lure the enemy into a killing zone for the Cavalry. General Kirkland, leader of the Sixth ID, may have issued a standing order to his air units to destroy concentrations of Mad Dogs regardless of whether there are friendly units near the target.

This does not piss him off. Bowman understands its logic. Kirkland is desperate and flailing and fighting to win to save a dying country, staking everything on this one night. Bowman realizes that he would do the same thing in the General’s shoes. It is basic utilitarianism: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Military decisions in war are often based on such ethics.

Confirming Kemper’s suspicion, Sherman looks up from the radio and says, “They’re not calling in those air attacks. They’ve got men down.”

“Sir, I. . . .” Vaughan says, struggling for words.

“We need to get out there right now,” Lewis says, finishing for him.

“We will follow our orders and stay in position,” Bowman says, looking through his binoculars.

“Sir,” Lewis pleads. “Let me take out Second Squad.”

Bowman glares at him. “That’s a no go, Sergeant. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Lewis says tersely.

Bowman sounds confident, but is actually feeling anything but. In fact, he is itching to get Charlie into the game. Could this be a decisive battle? he wonders. Is Lewis right that we should spread out and shoot down every Mad Dog as early as possible before it becomes too late? Should I lead my men out there to support Alpha or Delta, and perhaps put an end to this once and for all?

Or is it already too late—for Alpha, for Delta, for all of us?

It all depends on the infection rate, Bowman knows. Manhattan has more than one and a half million people living on it. If one percent of them are now infected, that would be about sixteen thousand people. If five percent, it would be eighty thousand.

If ten percent, it would be a hundred and sixty thousand.

“Warmonger is reporting a large body of Mad Dogs from the west,” Sherman says.

Even when given clear orders, Bowman believes a field commander must act on his own initiative as facts change on the ground. On the other hand, a commander must recognize that he does not have perfect situational awareness and should never make emotional decisions. The fact is, nobody really knows what is happening. Everybody is guessing. And bucking orders to support Alpha or Delta, the two companies closest to Charlie’s position, would be a major risk to his own boys.

On the other hand, American soldiers are in trouble out there and need help.

The only way to find out would be to literally “do or die.”

As if reading his thoughts, Bishop says, “We’d never get there in time, Todd. There’s nothing we can do.”

“War Pig is calling in a danger-close fire mission,” Sherman says.

“We have arty support?” Knight says, incredulous.

Bowman shakes his head. Quarantine said nothing about artillery support. Artillery is a sledgehammer, too unwieldy for this situation. Even after everything he has seen, it would be almost too fantastic to contemplate—American artillery, planted miles way, firing HE rounds for effect into the middle of New York City.

In any case, the request itself is a bad sign. That’s Captain Reese, a good officer and a cool hand in a firefight, leading Delta. A danger-close fire mission is when an arty strike is called in within six hundred meters of your position. Practically on top of your own head. It’s another sign of desperation. Like Alpha, Delta is in trouble.

“What the hell?” Bishop shouts.

The skyscrapers are suddenly going dark in groups, as if a series of giant light switches controlling the glittering skyline of New York City were being flipped off one by one. The streetlights shut off. All of the lights shut off.

Kemper says simply, “Blackout. . . .”

The world is plunged into darkness.

The gunfire suddenly slackens, becomes haphazard.

The men gasp. The boys out there were caught flatfooted by the dark. Would they have time to put on night vision goggles or produce battlefield illumination? If they could get their NVGs on, they would have the advantage and might even turn the tables.

They see the flashes in the west and south where the companies are making their stand. The gunfire in the west sputters and slows.

Then it stops.

The men gasp again. Either Reese fought his way out, or he and his boys are dead. Surely, he got through and is back on the march. It is hard for these men to conceive of an entire company being destroyed.

In the south, a single flare rockets up into the sky and deploys a small parachute, producing a fiery, eerie glow as it begins its lazy descent to the earth.

Immediately, the gunfire intensifies, but then it too sputters, stops, flares up, dies.

The helicopters buzz in closer, firing missiles, raking the streets with devastating strafing fire. Then one by one they detach from the engagement and fly away.

The city is silent except for the ringing in their ears.

“Is that it?” Lewis asks. Tears of rage are streaming down his face. “The power goes out and Battalion gets overrun? Just because of some bad goddamn luck?”

Nobody answers him. Everybody knows there was a lot more to it than that. They know it was doubtful whether they could have fought their way through anyway. They realize now that they are facing an enemy that is stronger than they are.

And they are alone.

Bowman says quietly, “Jake, I want you to raise War Hammer for me.”

“All companies stopped broadcasting,” says the RTO. “The net is clear.”

“Try, Jake.”

“Yes, sir.”

Above, the sky opens up in a brilliant display of stars not seen in this part of the world since the Blackout of 2003. The tiny blinking light of a satellite lazily crosses the sky.

“No response, sir,” Sherman says in the dark.

The men stand in the dark in a stunned silence.

“Jake,” the LT says carefully, “I want you to raise Warmonger and War Pig and ask for a sitrep.”

Sherman blinks in the gloom. “Sir?”

“Now, Jake.”

“Yes, sir.”

The darkness bears down on them, forcing their thoughts inward. After several moments, the RTO says, “No response, sir.”

Bowman nods, feeling lightheaded.

In one night, the world just got a whole lot smaller. Much smaller, and infinitely more dangerous.

While there is life there is hope

First Squad marches down the hallway, the beams of their flashlights playing on the shiny floor, a display case filled with trophies, dull rows of lockers and acoustical ceiling tiles. Mooney, Carrillo, Rollins and Finnegan carry Private Chen in a black body bag.

After the power went out and the emergency generator restored the lights in the gym, they heard the news via Joe Radio—the rumor mill—that the other companies had been destroyed.

Mooney believed it. His comrades didn’t.

His BDUs are stiff, dirty and stained. His uniform would probably stand up on its own if he took it off. Probably run after a bone if he yelled fetch. He is exhausted from endless work, his left eye won’t stop twitching from stress, and his nerves take a flying leap every time somebody clears his throat. But the news about the slaughter of Warlord while trying to walk several miles across Manhattan has electrified him.

All of his worries have suddenly evaporated. He does not care about Laura or how he wishes he could spend a few hours listening to his favorite records. He does not care about Wyatt constantly bugging him. Deep down, he does not even care if this is the end of the world.

All he cares about, at this very minute, is whether he is going to survive and for how long.

This war, this total war as LT put it, has gotten very personal and Mooney simply can’t really think of its ramifications beyond that. He does not want to die. Nothing else matters.

After the news circulated about Warlord, the NCOs went up to the roof to find LT while the civilians either stood around in stunned silence or started bawling.

It was the perfect time to slip out for the funeral.

They were ordered to burn Chen’s body with the civilian dead, but the boys had another idea. If things were as bad as LT said they were, most of the empty classrooms would be staying empty for a long, long time.

Tonight, PFC Chen would be entombed in his very own mausoleum.

Multiple footsteps approach from behind. Mooney’s heart leaps into his throat, his left eye trembling.

Ratliff wheels, raising his rifle, and challenges: “Mets.”

“Go to hell, Ratliff,” a voice answers from the darkness.

Ghostly forms emerge from the gloom. It’s Third Squad, wearing bright green glow sticks hooked onto the front of their load-bearing vests.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Yankees,’” Ratliff says, suddenly out of breath.

“Oh, Mad Dogs can talk? Can you get that light out of my face?”

Corporal Eckhardt lowers his rifle and says, “Next time, say ‘Yankees’ and you won’t get shot, Private. What you got there?”

Corporal Hicks says, “We heard what you were doing for Billy Chen.”

“Whatever you heard, you heard wrong,” Eckhardt says defiantly.

“It’s not like that. We’d like to do the same for two of ours.” Hicks gestures behind him. “This is The Newb. The other is Hawkeye. We don’t want them burned up in a pile. We want them to cross over to the other side whole, with honors.”

Eckhardt glances at the other boys of First Squad. Mooney nods. There is plenty of room where Chen is going.

“Where’s the class clown?” he says, obviously referring to McLeod.

“Sarge gave him sack time,” says Hicks.

“All right,” Eckhardt says. “We scoped out the last classroom on the left and got everything set up there. We found an American flag. You got something to cover up your guys?”

“We’ll make do,” Hicks tells him. “You lead. We’ll follow you.”

Together, they bring the bodies into the classroom. All of the desks have been pushed against the walls, which are adorned with posters of animals, a human skeleton with all of his bones labeled, and a skinless man with all of his muscles labeled.

Earlier in the day, one of the boys wrote on the chalkboard:

here lies pfc william chen. he was a good soldier and loyal friend. he will be missed. may his death be a lesson to us that while there is life there is hope.

RIP

Mooney and the other boys pause for a moment to read the message. They grunt, impressed. They set down the body bag and unzip it.

The boys stagger back, gagging.

“Like rotten cheese and eggs,” says Finnegan, retching.

“Is he alive?” says Rollins. “He’s moving!”

“Quiet, he’s trying to say something. . . .”

“Jesus,” Mooney says, swallowing hard to force back his bile. “Some flies got on him before we zipped him up and laid eggs in him. His face is moving because it’s filled with maggots.”

“Damn,” says Rollins, paling.

“Zip him up, Mooney, goddamnit,” Eckhardt orders.

Mooney closes the bag.

“Still stinks in here,” says Corporal Wheeler.

“Not as bad, though,” Eckhardt points out.

“Smells like one of my farts after I get the MRE with chili and beans,” says Wyatt.

“Joel, shut up,” Mooney says, feeling light headed at the mention of food. “Just stop talking.”

The boys push several of the student desks together and lay the bodies on top of them.

“Check this out,” says Williams. “Somebody carved into this desk, ‘screw mr. schermerhorn.’ That’s all right.”

Nobody laughs. Eckhardt drapes the American flag over the three body bags.

The carvings on the desks give Mooney the creeps. The memory of the normal world haunts this school in a very real way. It is too easy to close one’s eyes and picture thirty bored teenagers trying to stay awake so they can figure out what their biology teacher is telling them.

Standing here in this classroom makes him feel like he is in a museum.

Eckhardt and Hicks eulogize the boys who were killed while everybody else says their own farewells by placing their right hands over their hearts, a gesture of respect they learned from the Iraqis. Eckhardt says he didn’t know Billy Chen well, apparently nobody did, but Chen was Army and that made him family. Hicks describes Hawkeye’s uncanny marksmanship, which very likely would have destined him to become a sniper if he wanted to make the Army a career. Tells how Hawkeye always got stuck on point and never complained about that or anything else. Wheeler and Williams make them laugh by describing jokes McLeod would play on The Newb while he was asleep—tying his shoelaces together, dunking his hand in warm water—the usual barracks pranks. Eckhardt says each of these men died for their country.

The boys glance at each other, uncomfortable. What does that mean anymore? They know what dying means, they’ve seen enough of it, and it is not hard to imagine themselves rotting inside those body bags instead of their friends, infested with maggots. But what country? Most of them are in a state of flat denial but even they know America is going through a crisis from which it will emerge looking entirely different. What comes out the other side, in fact, may no longer be recognizable anymore as “America.”

An awkward silence descends upon the funeral. Nobody knows what to say.

“What if it’s true?” Ratliff says hesitantly, obviously afraid he will be ridiculed for saying something this honest.

“How can it be true?” Wyatt says. “A bunch of unarmed Hajjis can’t just wipe out a battalion.”

“Why would they be making that shit up for, dawg?” Williams says. “To boost your morale? You all know it’s true but you just don’t want to face it.”

Nobody answers him.

“Well, if it’s true, then what are we supposed to do with one lousy company?”

“Keep our heads down, if we’re smart,” Williams tells him.

“You got that right,” some of the other boys murmur, nodding.

The other boys chime in.

“Give this thing a chance to blow over.”

“Wait. We’re going to be okay, aren’t we? Right?”

“They’re not going to airlift us out?”

“Don’t count on it. Where would they land the birds—outside in the street?”

“We got good people leading us,” Hicks says. “We should be okay.”

“Captain Lyons was good,” Rollins says. “And now Alpha’s gone.”

“And Reese. And Moreno. They were good, too.”

“They were following orders. Kirkland and Winters told them to march and they marched.”

“Exactly my point. What if they call up LT and tell him to march?”

“If I was LT, I wouldn’t even answer the phone.”

“I know the LT,” Eckhardt says. “He’ll follow his orders.”

“If the Army is in this bad shape, why should he risk his neck?” Williams says.

“Why should any of us?” says Ratliff.

The boys fall into another awkward silence.

Finally, Mooney says, “You guys are going to laugh, but I’m sticking with the LT because I want to see kids go to school here again.”

Nobody laughs. The boys watch him curiously.

He says: “It’s like this. . . . Billy Chen died fighting for his country. Seems to me that country is disappearing around us. If it keeps going, we might end up being all that’s left of it. We walk away from our jobs, then America is gone. That’s how I feel about it. So I’m going to do my job and keep America alive long enough so it can get back on its feet and be normal again some day. That’s my mission.”

The boys shift restlessly, murmuring and nodding. Mooney has planted a seed in their minds stronger than patriotism. He is giving them a condition for victory in this war without heroes, without winners. He is reminding them of home at peace.

They are picturing picnics and pickup trucks, girlfriends and first dates, street hockey and drive-in movies, granddads playing checkers in the park, long drives on summer nights, a favorite song on the radio, arguments about politics, getting up early for church on Sunday, holding jobs and cashing paychecks. Even the petty worries and needs that no longer seem important—like bills to pay and credit cards and what everybody else is wearing and the latest street slang—all of it strikes the boys deep in the soul, making them nostalgic for the mundane world that is ending.

There is a difference between going to Iraq to fight for your country and being in the situation they are in now, literally fighting for your country’s survival. If they can keep even a shred of the old America alive, they feel like they will win.

Mooney wants to stay alive, and there is safety in numbers. But it is not enough to stay alive. A man must also have something for which he wants to live as well.

Chapter 11

I want to tell my story first so you won’t forget me

The only thing that kept us alive so long was the small firing zones. The Maddies had to bunch up and for a while there, we were shooting fish in a barrel. They came at us in twos and threes out of doorways, around corners, out of cars—they even came flying out of windows. We had maybe sixty men when we stepped off. We were armed to the teeth and cleared hot to shoot anything that moved. No identifying targets. Just shoot and scoot. We also had a good leader. Captain Reese was a damn good officer and I would have followed him anywhere, even after he cracked. It took us a while to get used to the fact the enemy wasn’t shooting back at us. After that, we went to town.

After ten blocks of being in a meat grinder and shooting at a sustained rate of fire, though, we started to get tired. It was like being under harassing fire except it was bodies they were throwing at us, not bullets. The abandoned vehicles all over the street forced us to take it slow and screwed up our firing lanes, making us waste ammo. There were cars and trucks and glass everywhere from one abandoned traffic jam after another, and the shadows from the light poles were murder. We saw over and over again where somebody with a big truck or SUV panicked and tried to ram his way out, pushing vehicles into pileups. Some of the cars were on fire and pumping out this thick, oily smoke. Civilians were screaming from windows and throwing shit at us to get our attention.

By the time we’d gone twenty blocks, we were down to forty, fifty men. A few guys got killed, but most of our losses were from guys who just melted away into doorways of apartment buildings. You’d turn around, and suddenly they’d be gone. Some walked away because they’d got bit and they knew this was a death sentence. Others probably just thought it was suicide to keep pushing and they’d had enough. I don’t think they’re cowards. I really don’t. This war is bigger than all of us, almost too big to even understand. People break easy when they try to get their head around something this big. A war where winning feels like losing, and losing, well, it means you’re dead.

Anyhow, the Mad Dogs showed up in force from two directions. There were thousands of them out there in the dark, coming fast, all of them growling with each breath so that they sounded like a train. If you ever saw the movie Zulu with Michael Caine, it was like that—thousands and thousands of people running in waves against aimed rifle fire. No, better, I remember I once saw a crowd of a couple thousand kids stampede at a heavy metal concert. Now imagine all those people are running at you and they want to tear you to pieces with their bare hands and teeth. I saw them coming and I pissed down my leg. There’s no shame in that. It happens to a lot of guys, right? Never happened to me in Iraq, even when the bullets went buzzing right by my ear like wasps. Funny if you think about it. I had to come home to learn true fear.

It’s down there? God, this place looks like an insane asylum. Freaking stinks, too. Listen. Just let me tell the rest of my story before you put me in, please. I didn’t fight my way here all night just to get pushed into one of these rooms and forgotten about. I came because I wanted to feel something, anything, like home again, just one more time. And I want to tell my story first so you won’t forget me.

Thank you. I mean it.

So there we were, already low on ammo and with a horde of maniacs coming at us out of the darkness, and we tore them a new asshole. We unloaded everything we had on them. No more shoot and scoot. We were a mobile defense, and it was time to defend. We propped the MGs and SAWs on the hoods of cars and rained lead. They were ripped to shreds. Bodies were cut in half. Heads popped off of bodies and flew into the air. It was incredible, like being in some warped virtual reality game. You’re going to think I’m one sick puppy, but it felt good. It felt like survival. I didn’t see them as people anymore, but as a group, as a whole, like this one big monster. The more they died, the more I lived, you know? I wanted them to keep coming. I wanted them all to die.

And I still honestly thought we’d make it. At that time, despite our fatigue, our ammo situation and our losses, getting overrun was the last thing on my mind. But then rifles started jamming. One of the MGs overheated. I fired mag after mag at a rapid rate of fire until I had almost nothing left, and still they kept coming. Waves of them. Overhead, the helicopters were circling, watching us, and then when things got dicey they strafed the Mad Dogs with the chain guns and, oh Lord, entire sections of the horde just exploded and disintegrated.

Things went to hell in a hurry after that.

An Apache came in low, blinding us with his light, and started dropping rockets and now vehicles were being flipped and tossed into the air, like: Wham! Wham! Wham! Hot metal was flying everywhere, ringing off the vehicles and clattering off the walls and ripping through the bodies of the guys in my squad. In an instant the Apache screamed overhead and was gone, I was squinting through the afterglow in my eyes and shooting, and then I noticed that my entire squad had literally disappeared. It was just me and my Sergeant, who was bleeding from his ears and stone deaf and staring in a daze. It wasn’t Maddy that killed my squad; it was blue on blue fire. It was right about then that Captain Reese got a little confused because he started screaming into the radio calling for an arty strike almost on top of us to keep the Hajjis from overrunning our position. He completely freaking lost it.

That’s when I knew I was a dead man. A river of blood was literally flowing around my ankles like something out of the Bible. Moments later, the power went out and everything went black. And that’s when the real horror began.

We had no time to put on NVGs or shoot a flare. We were firing randomly in the dark on full auto, backing up until we formed a square around Captain Reese with bayonets fixed. The muzzle flashes showed glimpses of the Mad Dogs tearing Second Platoon apart, so close you wanted to puke from the stench. They were screaming in the dark. It was hand to hand and the guys were dying fast. And what was I doing? Shit, my heart was pounding like a drum and I was pissing down my leg. I could barely move, I was shaking so bad.

First Sergeant Callahan tried to pull the Captain away to the safety of a nearby building, but the man stood his ground, shooting his pistol while somebody popped smoke in a crazy try at concealing him. The Maddies swarmed around him and ripped him apart by the handful. I only barely survived after being picked up and thrown into the air by the mob—it was like getting hit by a baseball bat everywhere on my body at once—and crawled under a truck. All around me, the horde just kept coming, running past, rattling the vehicles and making the ground shake like a herd of elephants.

Maddy died by the thousand but he wiped us out and barely broke his stride doing it. And after all that, I lived to hike it back almost the entire way here before some goddamn kid pops out the back of a minivan and gives me this on my hand. But I’ll tell you, it’s just as well, because I’m so tired. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.

Is this my new home?

Any, um, other last requests?

PFC Mooney opens the door to the classroom and waits. He and Wyatt have heard the same stories told repeatedly by shell-shocked survivors trickling in since last night. Mooney does not know what to say to the soldier. What is there to say? What does one say to a man whose friends were violently torn apart right in front of him and is now doomed to die from a poison busily replicating itself in his brain?

“I don’t get a roommate or nothing?” the soldier wants to know.

“Everybody else who got bit is already starting to turn,” Mooney explains. “You could be the last one. They might attack you. We don’t know.”

“It would have been nice to talk to somebody else from Delta and cross over together.”

“Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay. I guess it doesn’t matter. You’re gonna die some day whether you get that last smoke in or not. I’m just glad the war’s over for me.”

“We left a few books in there that we got from the library. Classics. Help you pass the time. I don’t know, maybe you’ll like them. We also put the word out in case any of the survivors want to stop by and talk with you through the door. You still got a little time.”

The soldier nods. “Right. Okay. Thanks.”

Mooney notices that the soldier’s left eye is twitching.

“Any, um, other last requests?” says Wyatt.

“No, I’m good,” the soldier says, walks into the classroom, and approaches the window, looking out into the sunshine. He breathes deep and says, “I’m telling you, it sure is—”

Mooney has already begun to close the door. Wyatt passes him a handful of nails, which he hammers into the edge of the wood door to secure it to its frame.

The survivors trickled in all night and the next day, telling their horror stories. Half of them were bitten but had nowhere else to go. The LT did not want to kill them or turn them out so he came up with the idea of converting part of the school’s west wing into an asylum.

Wyatt raises the plundered surface of a desk and Mooney begins hammering until it covers the bottom half of the door and its frame. Once the door is completely covered, Mooney nails one of the soldier’s dog tags into the wood—name, rank, serial number, blood type and religious preference—while Wyatt scrawls the boy’s name with a pen knife.

Mooney waits patiently until Wyatt is done carving. He can hear the Mad Dogs in the other classrooms pacing and growling. They were soldiers once, these lost boys. This is where they turned, and this is where they will eventually die and be entombed.

Wyatt picks up his carbine and says, “Let’s get out of this freaking zoo.”

“You say that again and I will take you out, Joel.”

Wyatt smiles but says nothing.

Mooney pauses to touch the name Wyatt carved into the wood, struggling through his exhaustion to commit the boy and his paltry details to memory.

PFC James F. Lynch has blood type A and is a Christian, no denomination.

The real problem isn’t people leaving the Army. . . .

The real problem is the Army leaving us

Sergeant Pete McGraw glides his thumb over the rabbit’s foot in his pocket, his personal talisman given to him by his wife before his first tour in Iraq and her death in a car accident on an icy bridge in Maryland months later. The smooth fur of the rabbit’s foot comforts him. After everything he has seen and been through in three tours of duty in Iraq and now this bag of dicks, he firmly believes luck and Margaret’s spirit watching over him are the only things standing between him and oblivion. In his other pocket, he fingers a bent bottle cap he kept on a whim from the first beer he ever had with his girlfriend Tricia, a slim blonde beauty with braided hair down to her waist who shares his passion for hard drinking and motorcycles, among other things. He wears a medal engraved with an image of St. Michael, patron saint of soldiers and cops, on a chain around his neck, next to his dog tags and a 7.62-mm bullet. The bullet, the type of round used in AK47 assault weapons, is the bullet that was going to kill him back in Iraq, and as long as he wore it, it couldn’t fulfill its purpose.

From here on out, he is going to need all the luck he can get, seeing how the world is ending.

He falls in with the other NCOs cramming into the school principal’s offices, an open workspace and lobby with several adjoining private offices that Bowman established as his headquarters. The men nod to each other as they enter, smelling like sweat, gun oil and stale cigarette smoke. A sergeant that McGraw knows from First Platoon catches his eye and gives him a courteous nod, and McGraw wonders at how quickly things change. Just two days ago, the other NCOs were looking at him and his squad like they had blood on their hands and swastikas tattooed on their foreheads. Now they regard his boys with something like respect. His boys popped their cherry in this war early. But if he is getting respect, the NCOs from the other companies who survived the massacres are looked upon with something like awe. They went to hell and back and survived.

The non-coms gather around 2LT Bowman, who stands with his hands on his hips next to a large tourist map of Manhattan, complete with callouts of businesses such as Barnes & Noble and Burger King, thumbtacked to the wall. The RTO pushes his way through the bodies, races into one of the private offices, and slams the door. Knight and Bishop come out of one of the other offices and hustle to Bowman’s side. Kemper is shading Staten Island and Battery Park red with a Magic Marker. Bowman is already greeting them in a quiet voice, and McGraw can’t hear him.

The sergeants blink in the fluorescent light and sip their lukewarm coffee, bags under their eyes and carbines slung over their shoulders, murmuring to each other. Sergeant Lewis is sharing some of his chaw. As Bowman finishes his welcome, they settle down to listen. McGraw does a rough headcount; there are so many NCOs in their unit now that the crowd spills out into the hall. Some he recognizes from the other platoons of Charlie Company, others are survivors from the massacre of Alpha, Bravo and Delta. These are the best men the Army has, McGraw thinks. The lifers. They are the bedrock of the Army, these modern-day Centurions. It takes years to make one of these men, and once they are gone, they cannot be replaced.

All of them now report to a young second lieutenant who happens to be the most senior officer alive in the entire battalion. McGraw watches him and thinks: We’re lucky the man’s competent. It could be much worse. They could have Knight, who is only nominally still in command of Third Platoon, or Bishop, the type of officer who risks lives to advance his career. McGraw has been hearing rumors that Bishop has been telling some of the NCOs that he wanted to lead a party out to try to help the other companies during the massacre. The sooner LT gets him squared away, the better.

“Jake has been combing the nets to come up with a list of assets and threats,” Bowman says. “Mike has been marking them on this map. If we’re going to survive, gentlemen, we need information.”

The NCOs periodically stand on tip toe to improve their view, squinting at the map. McGraw sees a series of colored circles, squares, long smears and triangles littering the length of Manhattan and the river coasts of the boroughs and neighboring states. It is pathetic. In just a few days, the Army has lost control of most of New York City and its population of more than eight million. The color-coded geometric shapes float on the map like islands in an ocean.