The Infection (19 page)

A noise like a foghorn stops them in their tracks, followed by a deep, rumbling, phlegmy cough. Steve and Ducky crouch behind the hood of a car and scan the area. Something big is moving through the far end of the garage, pushing vehicles out of its way with its lumbering strength.

“What is that?” Ducky says, his voice cracking. “One of those worms?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

Steve turns on the SureFire flashlight mounted on his rifle and aims it at the thing moving through the gloom. The flashlight has a red lens, making the beam barely visible to anybody not wearing night vision goggles. On NVGs, the light appears a brilliant green. The beam plays along the smooth flank of something big striding ponderously through the garage, coughing deep in its massive lungs.

“Some kind of elephant or something,” Ducky says.

“Or something. At least it’s moving away from us.”

The thing shoulders aside an SUV, setting off a car alarm.

Ducky pats Steve’s arm and says, “We’d better get moving.”

They find the Bradley where they left it in the corner. Steve pulls at the massive black plastic tarp, exposing a yellow happy face stenciled on the vehicle’s side. Moving quickly and expertly, he and Ducky begin folding the tarp.

Another sound distracts them. Something making a wet clicking sound deep in its throat.

The soldiers stop, look, listen, aiming their carbines into the darkness.

“We don’t have time for this,” Steve says.

“Forget the tarp, then,” Ducky tells him. “Just get in the rig.”

Steve ignores him, staring intently at the source of the noise, a squat, stumbling shadow. At first, he believes it is a child on a tricycle, the noise a squeaky wheel. He takes two steps forward until freezing as the shadow reveals itself.

“Oh my God,” Ducky says.

The creature looks like a little sickly albino baboon wobbling on legs articulated like a grasshopper’s, grotesque on something its size. Its little barrel chest heaves as it takes rapid, wheezing breaths. Despite its shocking appearance, it appears almost harmless, a bizarre mutation thrust into a hostile world, barely equipped to survive, a pale and hungry thing.

“Kill it,” Steve says, his skin crawling with revulsion.

At the sound of his voice, the baboon thing stops, fixes its gleaming eyes on Ducky, and roars massively, showing rows of teeth like knives. A moment later, its nose wrinkles and the elongated face shakes with a massive sneeze, spraying a cloud of mucus.

Ducky raises his carbine and fires a quick burst but the thing is already flying through the air, shrieking. It lands with a thump on the soldier’s chest, hugging his body and champing its teeth down on his Kevlar body armor.

Steve aims his weapon but hesitates. He does not have a shot. Ducky is reeling drunkenly, screaming for help, trying to push the thing off of him.

Steve drops the rifle, pulls out his knife, and closes in, slashing. The thing shrieks in pain and a jet of scalding, oily liquid shoots up his arm.

And then it is gone, vaulting into the air and landing ten feet away, where it briefly whines and hisses before disappearing into the dark in a series of long, flying leaps.

Steve races to collect his rifle until stopped cold by Ducky gasping, “I’m hit.”

♦

Sarge drops an empty magazine, pops in a fresh thirty-round mag, and chambers the first round in a single rapid, fluid motion. He fires a quick burst, cutting down an Infected racing at him with a blood-curdling howl. Sarge had gotten the automatic rifle from a dead Taliban fighter, who had probably gotten it off of a dead soldier during the Soviet occupation, long ago. More than a souvenir, he treasures the rifle for the simple fact that it almost never jams. It is rugged and reliable if a bit inaccurate, but between the close combat optic he had retrofitted onto it and the close range of less than a hundred meters, he is dropping bodies steadily.

He misses a shot and curses. He is tiring, getting sloppy. He fires again, and the snarling man goes down wearing a surprised look on his face.

Sarge knows he cannot keep up this pace. Anne must either show up with the flares and Molotovs or the Bradley must show up to get them all out of Dodge. If neither happens soon, the Infected will take him and that will be that.

His eyes continually sweep the parking lot while barely moving, absorbing every detail and instantly assessing it as a threat, an asset or nothing. The robot has taken over; he is in complete survival mode, every part of him focused on fight and the option of flight. Being under fire in Afghanistan has given him the ability to look at the world as a palette of survival. He finds it bizarrely unsettling to be in combat, firing his rifle steadily at close targets standing out in the open, without worrying about the snap of bullets flying past his ear. When he blinks, sometimes he sees insurgents running at him at a crouch, not Infected. Time is compressing and he has little idea of whether he has been out here for minutes or an hour.

No matter how many of them he kills, they never quite feel like the enemy. Even after all of the atrocities he has seen, he cannot bring himself to hate them.

The worst is when they come at him wearing military uniforms.

The flares go arcing high into the sky, landing among the derelict cars, bursting with a fierce orange glow and revealing scores of moving figures.

Anne taps his shoulder, then raises her rifle, peers into the scope, and takes down a running woman with a colossal bang and flash of light.

“It’s about time,” he grunts, still firing.

Anne is a different sort than him, he knows. Anne has enough hate for both of them.

The asphalt vibrates with stomping feet.

“Swarm!” says Wendy, standing with her Glock held ready in case any Infected get close.

“I’m on it,” Todd yells, lighting his first Molotov.

The Infected bob among the cars, blending into a howling mob racing through the night towards the six survivors.

“Molotov out!” Todd cries.

The flaming bottle soars through the air and hits one of the Infected in the chest, bursting into a wide sheet of fire that turns her and five others into staggering, screeching human torches.

“Good throw, boy,” Paul says, yelling, “Molotov!”

The flaming bottle arcs over the Infected’s heads, bursting on the roof of a station wagon. A group of Infected races through the fire, the clothing on their arms and legs suddenly igniting with flaming gasoline, and continue running at the survivors until Wendy cuts them down with her handgun. The fire flares briefly, then suddenly ebbs and begins to fizzle out.

“It’s starting to get dicey out here, Sarge,” Todd says, his voice breathless and panicky.

“Shut up, Kid,” says Sarge. “This ain’t nothing.”

Actually, they are in deep shit. The enemy is relentless and inexhaustible. His own tiny force is tired, scared and fighting with a limited supply of ammunition. In the long run, the Infected will either overrun them or force them back into the hospital, where they will be killed by the expanding fire or stuck barricaded behind some door for who knows how long.

Unless the Bradley gets here first.

He sizes up his next target, the red dot in the close combat optic hovering on the man’s chest. He squeezes the trigger, the view shakes violently, and the man drops.

And another. And another. Bankers and housewives and bakers and students and firemen.

Behind him, Wendy and Paul are firing. The Infected press in on the flanks. Somebody throws a Molotov and Sarge hears the bottle shatter dangerously close; he can feel the heat from it.

A loud metallic squealing fills the air.

“What is that?” Paul says, sweeping the parking lot with his shotgun. The gun fires with a deafening roar, cutting a howling woman almost in half.

The squealing grows louder, like a giant eagle descending on its prey.

Sarge grins. That sound, he thinks, is the cavalry arriving in the nick of time.

The Bradley slams through a row of nearby cars on its screeching treads, its main gun blazing like thunder and lightning. Sarge sees the familiar boom stick on the side of the turret. The red tracers stream toward the far end of the parking lot, where the cannon rounds rip apart Infected and cars alike and fling both into the air like confetti in a series of mushrooming fireballs. The survivors watch this incredible violence in silence until the Bradley grinds to a halt nearby.

The tail lights wink and the ramp drops, promising safety in its dark interior.

♦

Ducky Jones sits in a semi-reclined position in the driver’s station in the left front of the hull, hands on the steering yoke and foot working the pedals, eyes glued to the center periscope that offers night vision. He removes his right hand from the yoke and shifts into higher gear using the selector lever, engaging the transmission. Building speed, he scans the gauges arrayed across the dashboard with a single glance before returning his attention to the periscope. To his right, the five-hundred-horsepower Cummins engine hums loudly, with heart, propelling the heavy vehicle forward on its treads.

He is working the accelerator and brake pedals with his left foot instead of his right. His right leg is completely numb below the knee. The bruise on his hip is the size of a grapefruit now and continues to throb steadily like a drum made out of pain. The agony is incredible. He wonders if this is what it is like to be shot. To donate bone marrow. He wipes sweat from his face and stifles a moan. Deep down, he knows that he is growing weaker by the moment, that he is, in fact, dying a little at a time.

Ducky was a ten-year-old military history buff when the September 11 attacks shocked the country. He made a decision that day to become a soldier. Years later, he made good on that decision and enlisted. By that time, the ideals of fighting for freedom around the globe had deteriorated into the usual lies, betrayal and corruption. The guy who planned the attack on the Towers got away with it while big business cashed in on the wars. It was a valuable lesson in a fact of life: That which is pure is precious and easily corrupted. But he was still idealistic enough to believe that something could be pure. He loved his country and wanted to serve. Maybe he could do something good. He still believed one man could make a difference. At least he would get to see history up close and maybe make some himself instead of just reading about it.

The Army became his life. He lived on the base and had Army friends and dated women his friends introduced him to. He complained about the Army constantly but he loved it like a second mother, and would deck any civilian (or serviceman from another branch of the military) who dared criticize it. He thought about death philosophically, as young men tend to do, and accepted the fact that one day he might die for his comrades in combat. As he saw war close up in Afghanistan, his ideals faded even further. He watched as the Army built a clinic in a village and then accidentally bombed its school. But he still believed in one thing that was pure and could never be corrupted—the sacrifice of comrades for each other in combat. He believed that dying in combat, fighting for the men next to him, was a truly honorable death, which it was.

Ducky had never imagined he might die of a bizarre, enormously painful infection growing in his body, planted there by a sickly mutant, while driving out of the burning ruins of a major American city. There is no honor in this total war, this war of extermination, only futility and waste. There will be no medal for him. No historian to record his deeds. Possibly, there is not even a country anymore for which to die. Instead, he will die with people he barely knows in the ruins of a country he loves at the end of history. Not what he imagined at all.

The simple fact is Ducky is still fighting the pain and driving the vehicle because he is living on borrowed time and is willing to give that time to help these people stay alive themselves a little longer. There must be some honor in that.

♦

The Bradley rolls into a downed telephone pole, cracking it into splinters and dragging a tangle of insulated cable and chunks of wood clattering after it. The gunner and commander sit at their stations, gripping handles used to maneuver the turret and fire the weapons, the gunner using a periscope with night vision while the commander sees what the gunner sees using an optical relay.

“There’s something wrong with the ISU,” Sarge says, squinting.

Next to him in the cramped, dark compartment, the gunner shakes his head.

“I can’t see shit, Steve,” Sarge complains. “What the hell now?”

He taps the display, which accomplishes nothing. Under the familiar reticle, large, flickering pale green blobs glow brightly, which he interprets as fires. Off to the left, he can see little bursts of pale green light, which he knows from experience are muzzle flashes; there are people out there shooting. He can make out a road sign announcing route 22, 376, the Penn Lincoln Parkway. But the rest makes no sense. His visual is filled with bizarre shapes that seethe across the screen at different speeds in multiple shades of green, as if the relay were on a bad acid trip.

“I saw a sign,” Sarge says. He activates the comm and says, “Take the next exit for Parkway West, Ducky.”