Tooth and Nail (5 page)

“What do you say to them?” Sergeant Lewis asks. He is a giant of a man, nearly six feet and four inches tall, and was once considered the unit’s finest athlete. Back then, the soldiers called him Achilles behind his back, with admiration, but not anymore, not for some time. After his son was born and he quit smoking, he got a little soft and put on some weight. It did not dampen his natural aggression, though. If anything, he has only grown more aggressive over time. He adds, “What do you tell them to do?”

Ruiz shrugs. “To go back home and call the cops.”

“And is that all right for them?”

“They, um, say the cops aren’t answering the phone.”

Lewis gestures with his large hands and says, “We got to get out there and start helping these people.”

“Negative,” says the LT, shaking his head for emphasis.

“It’s why we’re here, ain’t it, sir?”

“It’s a no go. It’s not our mission. The Army is a weapon of last resort in civil disturbance situations. We’re not cops. We trained with the non-lethals but we don’t have any. We go out there, and we’ll end up in situations like today where civilians get killed.”

“Sounds like people are getting killed all over, and we’re sitting with our asses in the wind,” Lewis says bitterly. “What’s the Army for if not protecting the people here?”

“I don’t have the answers you’d like me to have,” Bowman tells him.

“What matters is our position here. Our orders are the same. Keep this facility safe. Out there, we’d only do more harm than good.”

Kemper nods. It makes sense. You can’t kill a fly with a hammer.

Bowman clears his throat and adds carefully: “I should add, however, that in light of recent events, the rules of engagement have changed.”

The NCOs begin swearing.

PFC Richard Boyd follows the girl down the street, both of them sticking to the shadows to avoid being seen. He had no idea things have gotten this bad out here. The streets are alive with packs of healthy and infected hunting each other in the dark.

The girl’s name is Susan. He guesses her to be about nineteen, his own age. Pretty face. Nice body, slim and athletic. A girl next door type who seems out of place in New York. Being in a Muslim country for the past ten months made Boyd forget how much skin comes out in the West when the air is warm and muggy like tonight. She is wearing a tank top and cutoff jeans and the humidity is making her sweat. He pictures droplets of sweat trickling between her breasts and feels the pull of arousal. Maybe she will kiss him for helping her out. Maybe she’ll do more than that.

Susan disappears into the doorway of a jewelry store and he follows.

“What is it?” he whispers near her ear.

They are standing close and he wonders if he should try to kiss her.

After a few moments, she says, “Nothing. They’re gone.”

She showed up at the post just after midnight, while Sergeant Ruiz was in the hospital with the LT, and asked for help. Williams said she had a junkie look and suggested some sort of quid pro quo if he could get her something tasty out of the hospital pharmacy, which got the guys excited and joking. They stopped laughing when she told them her story: Her father was sick and went Mad Dog and starting beating the crap out of her mother. Mom hid in a closet in their apartment and Dad was tearing the place apart. She called the cops but kept getting a recorded message saying all circuits are busy. That’s when Corporal Hicks showed up and told her that there was nothing they could do for her in any case. If the cops could not help her, she was on her own. The boys suddenly ached to help, although Williams hooted and said it was all BS, you white boys almost got taken.

Some of them wanted to get taken. She really is pretty, they thought. That’s when Boyd decided to go “over the hill.” AWOL. He waited a few minutes, then slipped out through the wire and joined up with her. They have been making painfully slow progress to her apartment building in the Lower East Side ever since.

His plan: Save the girl’s mom, be the hero, split for Idaho. He should be there, with his family, right now. Donna had Lyssa and Mom needed him. She said so in her letter. She said she was afraid his sister would go Mad Dog and then the Sheriff would come and shoot her and throw her body on one of the big fires outside town. The fact that everything in the letter happened a week ago does not matter to Boyd.

The only problem with this plan is he is not even sure where he is right now, much less how he is going to get to the suburbs of Boise during a plague, when all the planes are grounded and the streets, apparently, are alive with homicidal maniacs.

If you’re AWOL for more than thirty days, you are technically a deserter. If he becomes a deserter, they might even shoot him if they find him. After what he has seen tonight, he is certain they will. These are hard times and getting harder.

Maybe he will go back after he helps this girl out. The idea of being executed is starting to loom large in his imagination, and he does not like it. He did not really think things through before slipping out of the post. His plan is already falling apart.

Susan darts into another doorway, and he follows.

“What is it?”

She shushes him, their bodies pressed together.

Then he hears it. Mad Dogs howling in the dark.

Two teenaged girls enter the glow of the sputtering street lamps, crossing the street. One stops and stares directly at where Boyd and the girl are hiding in the shadows, and emits a low guttural growl, shoulders slouched and trembling, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Drool drips from her clenched teeth, staining her T-shirt.

The other girl, her long hair falling in tangles over her face, continues limping along, dragging a leg that appears to be bleeding and broken. Then she too stops and begins growling at where Boyd and Susan are hiding.

Boyd raises his M4. The first girl growls louder. Susan is shaking, breathing in short, panicked gasps.

“Shoot her, shoot her. . . .”

He licks his lips as a sickening wave of horror blanks out his mind. His heart begins hammering against his ribs and he can feel his bowels turn to water. He blinks, tries to shift his mind back on his training, but he never trained for this. The fact is he has no idea what he will do if the girl charges him. In Iraq, things were never clear cut but fighting American civilians who have turned into some kind of psycho zombie is something new and beyond training. Instead, his mind begins obsessing on the theory he heard that Mad Dogs are not really growling when they make that noise, they are actually talking, but their throats have become partially paralyzed so it comes out as a creepy gurgle. Once he thinks of this, he cannot get it out of his mind.

He wonders what they are trying to tell him.

A mob of young, muscular Asian boys, wearing wife-beaters and jeans, emerges from the darkness and falls upon the girls with metal pipes and baseball bats. The girls’ bodies topple to the ground under the blows. Except for the scuffing of their sneakers against the street as they lay convulsing and flailing and dying, they don’t make a sound. Boyd hears the pipes and bats connecting with flesh and cracking bones when they hit, clanging off the asphalt when they miss.

“Jesus,” he says, sick to his stomach.

One of the boys straightens and stares in their direction.

“Shut up,” Susan hisses beside him.

“Why? They aren’t infected.”

“I’ve seen those guys before,” she says. “You do not want to fuck with them.”

Their work done, the mob moves on without a word, stretching and swinging their homemade weapons.

“Come on, Rick,” Susan says, sighing. “We’re almost home.”

In Bowman’s headquarters in the hospital facility manager’s office, the rules of engagement are changing and the non-coms are swearing.

Bowman presses on, “You are now authorized to use deadly force against any civilian who makes a threatening gesture towards a member of this unit. Even if that civilian is unarmed.”

Now everybody is shouting.

“This comes straight from Battalion and presumably from Quarantine and the Old Man himself.”

War has rules. Rules of engagement are spelled out by command authorities to describe the circumstances under which military units can use force, and to what degree.

They are also supposed to follow the basic precepts of law.

The LT runs his hand across his buzz cut. “Gentlemen, I’m honestly not sure what to make of it. I’m open to suggestions.”

Kemper glances at him sharply.

“It’s illegal,” says McGraw. “We don’t have to obey an unlawful order.”

“Suppose we don’t pass on the new ROE to the men,” says Lewis. “What happens if we are attacked? How do we defend ourselves, and with what force?”

“I’m not shooting American citizens,” McGraw says, his face burning.

“I took an oath to defend them, not slaughter them, for Chrissakes. Even the goddamn dirty hippies.”

“So we’re going to let the Mad Dogs here attack us and kill us or infect us,” Lewis says. “That’s your ROE?”

McGraw snorts. “How many people are we talking about here? We can handle a few at a time without killing anybody. Not that many people go Mad Dog. It’s pretty rare.”

“If that’s true,” says Ruiz, “then why are we getting these reports of Mad Dogs attacking Army units?”

Nobody has an answer to that.

“I mean, did you ever wonder why America had to pull its forces out of almost every one of its military bases around the world? We’ve got what, more than seven hundred bases? More than two hundred fifty thousand people overseas just in the Army? Think about it. Almost every one of them is home now.”

“They’re not telling us something,” Lewis says. “That’s for damn sure.

You can take that straight to the bank.”

“Our situational awareness is very limited,” Bowman says.

“What happens later, sir?” Ruiz is asking. “Suppose we do shoot some people who are honest to God trying to kill us. What happens after, when the Pandemic is over? Do we end up in court charged with murder or what? Could we get sued?”

“They’re going to die anyway,” says Lewis.

“I want some assurances,” says Ruiz. “About the legalities.”

“So I say if they’re trying to kill us, we should be able to kill them first.

They can’t give the whole Army a court martial, can they?”

“I’m not shooting anybody,” McGraw says. “The question is not whether we refuse the order, but whether we tell the Captain that we’re refusing the order to make a point up the chain of command.”

“We can’t be the only unit refusing to fire on sick people,” Ruiz says.

“These are dangerous times,” says Lewis. “I wouldn’t go around announcing to the chain of command that you’re refusing to follow orders, know what I mean?”

“Are we even supposed to be here?” says Ruiz. “Isn’t it against the law for the Army to be pointing guns at people at all in our own cities? You know, Posse Comitatus?”

“We trained for this type of domestic emergency before we shipped out for Iraq,” Lewis tells him. “Why would they do that if they didn’t mean for us to use that training now?”

“Yeah? Then where’s the non-lethal equipment?”

Lewis glances at Kemper. “Back me up on this, Pops.”

Kemper wants to shout them down, remind them that they are professionals and that they should shut up and listen to the LT, but Bowman is not doing anything, only sitting there with his mouth open and grumbling to himself that the whole thing does not make sense: If only three to five percent of the sick develop Mad Dog symptoms and die within a week, how can they be that big of a threat? At any given time there cannot be more than ten, maybe fifteen thousand of them in all of Manhattan. That’s a lot if you put them all together, but they are scattered far and wide.

How can there be this many Mad Dogs?

Kemper looks away, suddenly wondering if the Lieutenant is going to be able to get them through this in one piece. After serving together a year in Iraq, it is a disloyal feeling, and he does not like it.

He also finds himself agreeing with Lewis: The Army is not telling them something vital. Like the LT said, their situational awareness is very, very limited, and Kemper wonders what it is going to cost them when the bill comes.

PFC Jon Mooney lies awake on his bunk in the dark, restless and staring and dry-mouthed from wearing an N95 mask all day and night. He plays the shooting over and over in his mind: Did they do the right thing? He can’t get the image of the Mad Dog squealing and flopping in a puddle of blood, tangled up in the wire, out of his head.

Around him, the boys of First Squad snore gently in the dark. Collins is speaking in tongues while he slumbers, gibberish for the most part but ending with, “Fried chicken?” and a throaty chuckle. Somebody else farts and turns over. Mooney likes these guys, they are like brothers to him, he and them have gone to hell and back together, but he can’t stand them anymore and he would really, really like to be alone for a while.

He turns onto his side and sees PFC Joel Wyatt staring back at him, his eyes gleaming in the dark. Wyatt takes off his headphones and says, “You still awake, Mooney?”

“Can’t sleep. You?”

“Chillin’ like a villain, partner.”

“All right. Well, good night, Joel.”

“’Night.”

Mooney closes his eyes, forces the shooting out of his mind, and tries to remember what Laura looks like. They are technically not together but he is trying to forget that. Before he left for Iraq, he told her that maybe they should break up. He still thinks that was a sound decision at the time. Plus he’d been feeling spiteful because sometimes he wondered if she is really all that good looking and that maybe he deserved better. He hadn’t anticipated, however, how hard things would be overseas, how lonely he would get, and he clings to the idea that he still loves her—a lifeline in his violent world.