Tooth and Nail (31 page)

The biggest problem is picking the spot. It is during this moment of thought that the revulsion sets in. Many soldiers simply aim center-mass at the enemy’s torso. Either they do not have time to think, or they don’t want to.

Mooney pulls the stock of his M4 close to his right hip, extends his left arm, and lunges forward on his left foot with all his might, spearing the Mad Dog between the ribs and pushing him. The man shrieks, stumbling backward and almost taking the rifle with him. Mooney pulls hard and retrieves the blade, which slides out of the man’s body reluctantly with an awful sucking sound.

Maddy stumbles to the left, trips over a fallen motorcycle, and doesn’t get up.

Another Mad Dog steps out of the gloom, an old woman dressed in the rags of a hospital gown, blood splashed on her face and chest. Her toothless mouth gapes at him, gurgling a stream of bubbling drool rich with virus.

Thrust and hold, move. Withdraw and hold, move. Resume attack position, move. Take a step forward.

Next to him, Finnegan curses quietly as his carbine is wrenched out of his grasp. He chases after it and retrieves it, stumbling and gasping.

After ten minutes of this, slowly carving their way through two blocks, Corporal Eckhardt taps his shoulder and takes his place at the front of the column.

Mooney falls back in line, feeling an overwhelming compulsion to tear off his NVGs and let the world go black. The tendons in his aching arms seem to have hardened into steel and a sharp pain lances through his left wrist. Bayonet fighting is punishing work. He is dying for a drink of water.

Sergeant McGraw steps out front and holds up his hand. The boys drop to one knee with a general clatter, panting. The Mad Dogs ahead have a gleaming green halo around them, against which they wander as dark silhouettes. Apparently there is a fire ahead producing a lot of light and threatening to expose them.

Mooney wags his head to have a quick look around, and also try to clear his head of the claustrophobic sensation that he is trapped inside a horrible dream.

The infected are everywhere.

After the column grinds to a security halt, Bowman lifts his NVGs and is instantly plunged into darkness. He raises his carbine and peers into the red-dot close-combat optic, which provides night vision and also magnification.

He quickly surmises that the front half of the column has become embedded in a large force of Mad Dogs. Not one of the main bodies of thousands, but a force of several hundred at least, moaning and wheezing in the darkness. They stand in clusters, panting in sleep, or wander around aimlessly, pressing close against the column, sniffing the air and growling, lashing out when they walk blindly into the bayonets. And at the rear of the crowd, some type of fire, probably a car fire, is burning in the middle of the street.

His unit is in trouble. Maddy is blocking the street in large numbers and is now virtually surrounding one-fourth of the company like a herd of blind predators. If the column tries to push through at the point of the bayonet, they will become increasingly visible as they get closer to the fire. Then they could have a real battle on their hands, and on unequal terms.

The Captain flips his NVGs back over his eyes. Above the street, he suddenly notices, many of the windows are glowing green with candle-light. All around them in this seemingly dead city, people are still trying to survive.

You’re leaving all of them to die, he tells himself.

He forces this crushingly depressing thought out of his head with a grunt.

Keying his handset, he murmurs, “All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual. Hold position until further notice, over.”

Jogging down the line, he finds Sergeant Lewis at the back of the column, and sends him to the far left, then sends the next squad to the far right, repeating this until he has created a line of troops spanning the street.

After deploying his troops, he finds an abandoned car, gets in, and gently closes the door.

“All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual,” he whispers. “If I have taken you out of line, I name you Team A. The rest of you still in line are Team B. On my mark, Team A will charge and push Maddy back. Once we make contact, Team B will join the attack. We will carry this action with the bayonet. There will be no shooting.

“The research facility is just over eight blocks from here. A little over half a mile. After we begin our assault, we will keep moving as fast as possible. This will be the mission’s release point. After we begin, you will be responsible for getting your unit to the objective on your own.

“Step off on my mark. Good luck and Godspeed. Wait, out.”

Getting out of the car, he gets into position next to Sergeant Lewis, who turns and acknowledges his presence with a nod.

“Step off in five, four, three, two, one, go,” says the Captain.

Team A begins jogging forward in a bristling line. The line quickly becomes ragged as some of the boys stumble over garbage and corpses, others lag from exhaustion, and some painfully run into fire hydrants, street signs and even cars after misjudging how far away they are. Bowman can hear his breath come in short, sharp gasps.

The first Mad Dog appears. Bowman spears him, the force of the momentum of his thrust almost shocking the carbine out of his grasp. He retrieves the blade with a colossal effort and shoulders the man out of the way, knocking the wind out of both of them. The man goes down.

Another takes his place, snarling.

Ahead, the crowd continually thickens until a virtual wall of bodies appears ahead of them in the green gloom. Some of the boys, unable to help themselves, shout high-pitched war cries to amp up their courage as they rush forward into battle.

The line crashes home. Maddy reels from the shock, dozens dropping to the ground writhing with bayonet wounds. The survivors attack the soldiers, then Team B stands and begins its own assault in a line punching through the middle of the throng.

If this were any normal enemy with a healthy fear for their own lives, they would be fleeing as fast as they could run in the dark. But this is no normal enemy. It is an enemy incapable of fear or reason. To Lyssa, the human body is disposable, just a meat puppet with a five-day expiration date. Even the individual virons in each body have no real interest in self preservation, only in the overarching survival of their genetic code. The individual viron is just as much a slave to its ancient program as its infected victims are.

A flurry of small arms fire punches holes in Maddy’s ranks.

Nobody gave the order to shoot. It happened suddenly at five different places at once. There are too many Mad Dogs for them to kill in hand to hand fighting. The soldiers’ line has been broken in several places as some squads were able to push forward while other squads were stopped cold. With a broken line, the Mad Dogs’ superior numbers began to tell as they began to surround and overwhelm the soldiers.

One exhausted soldier panicked when a wounded Mad Dog on the ground sunk her teeth into his boot. He shot her in the head, blowing off several toes in the bargain.

Moments later, everyone is firing.

Above them, civilians are leaning out their windows, shouting themselves hoarse.

What’s done is done, Bowman tells himself. He thumbs off the safety on his carbine and begins shooting Mad Dogs at a nearly cyclic rate of fire, a round every few seconds, draining mags and reloading without breaking stride. The crackle of small arms fire turns into a roar as the entire company lights up the Mad Dogs. Muzzle flashes burst along the line, almost beautiful to watch on their NVGs. Tracers stream through the air. A grenade explodes, a massive green fireball erupting into sparks and fiery blobs. The air begins to fill with luminous, pale green smoke clouds.

The civilians are cheering.

“All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual,” he says into his handset.

“Keep moving. Keep moving.”

The use of live ordnance proved decisive. The company shot its way through the mob with very few casualties.

Eight blocks to go. About three quarters of a mile.

All around them, the city has begun to stir with the tramp of thousands of feet as the Mad Dogs awaken from their haunted dreams of the time before the plague.

If the soldiers move fast, and there are no other mobs between here and the research facility, they can do this.

“Go, go, go!” Bowman cries.

They make it.

Sergeant Lewis leads the first grab team up the stairs while the rest of the company pulls security down in the Institute’s lobby, waiting their turn. It is pitch black in the stairwell, robbing them of vision as NVGs are useless without some ambient light to amplify, so they turned on the SureFire flashlights mounted on their carbines, fitted with red lenses. The resulting beams appear a brilliant green on their NVGs, but are barely visible to Maddy’s naked eye.

The squad pauses on the stairs.

“It’s good and locked, Sarge,” says Corporal Jaworski, trying the door that Lewis believes leads to the labs.

“Who’s got the C4?”

“Here, Sarge.”

“Give it to me, Reed.”

Lewis takes the block of C4, sticks it onto the door and begins setting the charge while the squad retreats to a safe place down the stairs.

“Fire in the hole!” he shouts.

The boys crouch and put their heads down, cupping their ears.

The detonation roars down the stairwell with a sharp boom that they can feel from the base of their skulls to the tips of their toes. The explosion blew out the lock and buckled the door, which now rocks precariously on one hinge in a pall of tangy smoke.

“Move!”

The squad hauls itself to its feet, raises their carbines, and enters the hallway in a tightly packed diamond formation, scanning for targets.

Lewis knows Maddy has been here. Between the Vicks and the smoke, he cannot smell them, but he saw the corpses laid out in the corner in the lobby, apparently dead from disease and carpeted with flies, and the National Guardsman with a hole in his head. There is evidence of strife everywhere in this place.

He also saw, outside the doors of the research facility, the Special Forces team lying scattered on the street like road kill. Their story was easy to figure out. Immunity must have airdropped them in an initial attempt to evac the scientists. A single helicopter depositing them on the roof of a nearby building. The attempt obviously failed.

Now it is our turn, he tells himself.

His shooters move as one down the corridor, their flashlights exploring the gloom, until they reach the elevator lobby.

The corpses lay on top of each other, locked in a death grapple. Two wear labcoats, marking them as scientists, while the other eight are in street clothes. A few have the marks of Mad Dog infection. The stench of death is powerful here. Several blood trails lead away from the area to closed doors.

“What the hell happened here,” says Parsons, whistling.

“Lot of dead Hajjis, a couple dead Maddies,” says Jaworski, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from gagging. “Gunshot wounds, strangulation. This poor guy got his throat torn out.”

“This shit is ice cold, yo,” says Turner.

“Turner, talking like that only makes you sound more white,” says Perez.

“Hey, this chick looks exactly like that chick on TV,” says Bailey. “You know?”

The boys gather around.

“Yeah, that show with the robots. What’s that show?”

Nobody can remember the actress’ name or the show’s.

“Looks just like her, though,” Jaworski says. “I know exactly who you mean.”

“Contact!”

The boys fill the corridor, searching for targets. The green flashlight beams swing wildly and abruptly converge on the center torso of a Mad Dog loping at them from the far end of the corridor, her labcoat flapping around her legs and her arms outstretched in the dark, trying to find them using her sense of hearing alone.

“Put her down, Reed,” Lewis says, patting the top of the soldier’s head.

“Roger that, Sarge,” the soldier says.

He releases the safety on his weapon, aims using its iron sights, blows air out his cheeks and applies gentle pressure to the trigger. His M4 discharges with a mechanical cracking sound. The burst blows the woman’s shoulder off. She stumbles drunkenly for several steps, then falls to the floor twitching in a widening pool of blood.

“Good,” the squad leader tells him. “Now go count your coup.” They are under a standing order from Bowman to make sure anybody who is down is actually dead, but without wasting precious ammunition. That means finishing the job with the rifle butt or bayonet. The NCOs started referring to it as counting coup to try to make it more palatable to the boys so they would actually do it. Lewis is incredibly proud of his troops for the strength they are displaying.

Reed gets up, jogs to the woman, and stabs her in the neck with his bayonet.

“She’s down,” he calls, then suddenly holds up his fist.

The squad freezes in place, listening.

Reed waves at them to move up.

“You got something?” says Lewis.

“I heard a sound in a room down there on the left, Sarge.”

“Let’s check it out,” he says.

Lewis is not hopeful, however. The mission appears to be a bust. The scientists are either dead or infected along with these other civilians who came here for God knows what reason. He is hoping this still means the Army will extract them, but he has a feeling they won’t. No scientists, no evac. If they find no survivors, they will be stuck in Manhattan.

“I heard something in there, Sarge,” Reed says, pointing at a door bearing a discrete sign that says,
SECURITY
.