Tooth and Nail (17 page)

“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.

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?”

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.

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.