Tooth and Nail (6 page)

Plus she had agreed a little too readily to his suggestion of seeing other people, and it has been eating at him ever since he deployed.

“Hey, Mooney.”

“Yeah, Joel?”

“I feel like some TV. They got TV upstairs in the patient rooms, right? You in or not?”

Something like electric current floods Mooney’s system, jolting him out of bed. Within seconds, the boys are quietly pulling on T-shirts and pants and tip-toeing into the hallway on bare feet, trying not to laugh as they dart past the facility manager’s office where the LT, platoon sergeant and squad leaders are huddled together in a tense pow wow.

They pause to listen.

“My wife and kid are out there and I am going to protect them,” they hear somebody saying.

Lewis
? Mooney mouths to Wyatt, who shrugs.

“That’s right,” says somebody else. “She’s out there. So what happens if she becomes one of them? Do you want us to shoot her too?”

“I’ll tell you what,” says Lewis. “If I become one of those things, I want you to shoot me in the grape.”

“What the hell, over?” whispers Mooney.

“What the hell, out,” Wyatt whispers back, shrugging.

As enjoyable as the spying is, the lure of mindless entertainment is stronger, calling them back to their original mission. The hallway is dark and shrouds their movements. The hum of machinery conceals their footsteps. The whole basement stinks of ammonia and disinfectant. We are ninja, Mooney thinks, totally hidden. The thought makes him smile.

“What’s on this time of night?” Wyatt wonders as they reach the stairwell and begin climbing the stairs.

“Who cares? I just want to turn my brain off and forget who I am for an hour.”

“Better than sleep!”

“Who can sleep?” Mooney wonders.

“So where are we going, anyhow?”

“Let’s go up to the sixth floor and then walk back down, checking out each floor until we find a room that has a working TV in it. Hooah?”

“Whoop,” says Wyatt.

By the time they reach the sixth floor, the boys are panting and stop for a rest. They are in good shape but exhausted from months of hard work and lack of sleep and barely enough calories. They sit on the top step and share a cigarette. Mooney is starting to warm up to Wyatt, the tall, skinny red-haired replacement from Michigan with Army glasses who always seems to be looking over your shoulder while he’s talking to you. Most of the boys think he is a little off.

“Ready for some infomercials, cuzin?” Wyatt says. “Some
Girls Gone Wild
?”

Mooney flicks the cigarette down the stairs, where it bursts in a shower of sparks, and puts his mask back on. “OK. Let’s do this.”

Wyatt hands him some latex gloves, which Mooney pulls on. “Remember, Mooney, if a nurse or somebody sees us, we just say we were sent to find that cop. Winslow. That’ll be our cover story.”

They open the door and immediately gag as the stink assails them, the horrible sour body sweat of Lyssa victims lurking under a sickeningly sweet combination of air fresheners and perfume that the Trinity people apparently sprayed everywhere.

Mooney hears people moaning, and realizes that the walls of the darkened corridor are lined with gurneys, a Lyssa patient in each connected by a tube to an IV bag to keep them hydrated. Some snarl and struggle against restraining belts, while most simply lie moaning, their breath rattling in their chests.

Other than the Lyssa victims, there’s not a soul in sight.

Wyatt whistles at the ambiance. “Spooky.”

Mooney nods.

“I mean,” Wyatt adds, “wouldn’t it be cool if they all jumped up and attacked us?”

They turn a corner. There are no patients in this part of the corridor and the lights are on for the night. Mooney and Wyatt blink at the fluorescent light.

“We shouldn’t be here,” says Mooney. “This whole place is crawling with virus.”

“Dude, how about that smell? Every time I think I’m used to it, I get the urge to puke. And I even got a scratch-and-sniff perfume sample in my mask from an ad I tore out of a magazine.”

“Abort mission?”

“Hell, no! These are patient rooms up here, yo. There’s gotta be a TV in one of them. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they had PlayStation?”

“I’d love to play
Guitar Hero
,” Mooney admits.

Pinching their noses, they creep up to a doorway. Inside, Lyssa victims lie in the dark in their own sweat and stink. Mooney can hear their ragged breath. One of them, a young woman lying on a cot on the floor, is alternately weeping and apologizing to somebody named Ron in fevered delirium.

“Bingo,” says Wyatt. “The sound’s turned off, though. Gotta find the remote, unless you like the close captioning they’ve got on. Me, I can’t read that fast.”

“What’s on?”

“CNN, I think. Some kind of riot going on in Chicago. No, wait. Now they’re talking about Atlanta.”

“Hello?”

The raspy voice electrifies them, making them jump.

“You scared the shit out of me, whoever you are,” Wyatt hisses, and starts laughing.

“Same here,” the voice says. “Are you the cops?”

“No, sir,” Mooney answers. As his vision slowly adapts to the dark, he can now make out the figure of a man sitting up in bed. “We’re U.S. Army.”

“Somebody was screaming down the hall earlier tonight. Probably just somebody out of their head with fever, right? But it sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered. You might want to check it out. I’d tell a nurse but I haven’t seen one in hours.”

“How are you feeling, sir? It is bad?”

“A little better today, thanks. My fever’s broke, but I could use some water—”

They jump again as they hear the crackle of small arms fire coming from outside the building. Stepping carefully, the soldiers approach the window and peer through the closed blinds to see who is shooting at whom. Far below, they see muzzle flashes and hear the reports.

Third Squad is lighting somebody up.

“What the hell, over?” says Wyatt.

Mooney is starting to feel naked without his rifle.

“Oh, God,” he says, and runs from the room.

Wyatt chases after him, finds him retching over a wastepaper basket.

“I breathed it in,” Mooney says, spitting and trying to catch his breath.

“I forgot to hold my nose for a second. It was the worst thing I ever smelled in there. Holy shit. It smelled like a rotting grave.”

“Dude, put your mask back on before you get sick,” Wyatt says nervously.

“Are you guys all right?” the Lyssa patient calls from the dark room.

“Don’t leave me alone, okay? Bring me some water, please?”

“Hey, look at that,” says Wyatt, pointing at the floor.

The bloodstain begins five feet from them and ends at a pair of doors twenty feet distant. The blood is smeared, as if somebody dragged a mop soaked with blood through the doors.

“You gotta be kidding,” Mooney says as Wyatt approaches the doors.

They should be getting back. If Third Squad’s engaged outside, McGraw’s probably mustering the squad. Right about now, he is working himself into a blind rage looking for his AWOL riflemen, chewing his massive handlebar mustache and grinding the molars in that big square jaw of his.

Mooney also has no interest in seeing what’s on the other side of those doors. What did that guy say?

Awful, he said. It sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered. “We’d better go back,” Mooney says. “McGraw’s gonna kill us.” Wyatt grins. “I’ll just take a quick look. Dude, this place is like a haunted house. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were zombies on the other side of these doors?”

He presses a button on the wall with the palm of his hand. The doors swing open automatically.

Jake Sherman, the platoon radio/telephone operator, sits in a janitor’s closet with his feet up on a box containing cheap toilet paper, eating a packet of instant coffee mixed with hot chocolate powder and washing it down with Red Bull while listening to the traffic on the military nets. He started mainlining caffeine after too many sleepless nights in Iraq, and hasn’t yet kicked the habit of getting completely wired while on duty.

Then the excitement is over and the company’s voice traffic quickly returns to the ongoing rhythm of units talking to each other in the night about location, condition, supply and all the other mundane communications required to keep two infantry brigades functioning on the ground in New York. Sherman switches from the company to the battalion net and listens in on the chatter. War Pig (Delta Company) continues to collect and pass around intelligence about the riot. War Hammer (Alpha Company) is requesting a medevac for a grenadier who got his ear bitten off by a Lyssa victim. Warmonger (Bravo Company) is asking the last calling station to authenticate its identity.

He switches to civilian traffic, looking for more information about the riot. The authorities provided more frequencies than normally needed based on the extreme nature of the epidemic, and he has access to everything. The police are aware of the riot but cannot scrape together enough manpower to do anything about it. A fire is also raging in a warehouse in Queens but there are not enough firefighters to respond to the call. Police units are overwhelmed with domestic disturbance calls and looting. Violence is reported inside Lyssa clinics and one of them has apparently been firebombed with Molotov cocktails. Despite several major arteries in the City being blocked off for official vehicles only, traffic has virtually ground to a standstill almost everywhere.

Sherman laughs to himself: The voices on the SINCGAR, while edgy and tense, could still make the Apocalypse sound like just another logistical foul-up. Glancing at his watch, he switches back to the company frequency for a commo check. He hears:

War Dogs Two, War Dogs Two, this is War Dogs, how copy, over?
Sherman recognizes the man’s voice at the other end. It’s Doug Price, Captain West’s RTO. He fires back, chewing on hot chocolate powder: “War Dogs, this is War Dogs Two, I copy, over.”

He takes out a small notepad and pencil.

“Roger that. Send message, over.”

Sherman can’t hear for a moment; men are shouting in the background and it sounds like somebody is shooting a rifle.

“Negative contact, War Dogs. Say again, over.”

“That’s a good copy, War Dogs; I copy ‘Nirvana.’ Wait one, over.” He looks up “Nirvana” on his code card, his cheat sheet for routine communications requiring encoding, but it’s not there. He digs out his mission code book and looks up the term.

It means: “Unit is under attack.”

Sherman coughs on hot chocolate powder. He takes another swig of Red Bull to clear his throat and lights a cigarette, thinking for a moment. Who would be stupid enough to attack a platoon of heavily armed U.S. infantry in Manhattan in the middle of the night? But there it is: an authentic message from the company commander, announcing that the company HQ and First Platoon is under attack.

He says, “Roger, War Dogs.”

War Dogs Two, this is War Dogs, second message follows, over.
“Standing by to copy, over.”

I send “Motorhead Slayer November Sierra Oscar November,” over.
“War Dogs, I copy ‘Motorhead Slayer November Sierra Oscar November,’” Sherman says, scribbling the message in his notepad. “Wait one, over.”

He looks up the code, translating: “Rendezvous at our location at ohseven-thirty.”

LT needs to hear this message right away.

“Roger that, War Dogs. Stand by. Wait, out.”

Sherman tenses for a moment, unsure how to answer this breach of protocol. Finally, he says, “Yeah, I’m here, Doug.”

Be careful coming over here, okay? There are thousands of them.
“Thousands of who?”

The radio screeches, making him flinch.

“That’s it,” says Susan, pointing at one of several rundown-looking prewar apartment buildings across the street. “Home.”

“Don’t worry,” says Boyd, trying to put on a brave face.

He cannot understand why he is so scared. He’s a soldier. He has seen men die. He’s even killed some himself. Well, at least the one that he is sure about. He has a locked and loaded carbine and should not be afraid of one homicidal but weaponless guy tearing apart some crummy New York apartment.

And yet he’s so scared he can barely think straight.

They enter the building, and Susan points up.

“Fourth floor.”

They walk up the stairs slowly, quietly, Boyd first, holding his carbine, Susan hugging the wall behind him, clearly terrified.

On the second floor, Boyd flinches as he hears screams behind one of the doors. A woman’s voice pleads with somebody named John not to hurt her. The screams become high-pitched until they dissolve into sounds of furniture being tossed aside and an ensuing struggle on the floor and a long, shrill peal of terror.