Tooth and Nail (8 page)

“Hospital people?” Winslow says, looking confused.

Bowman steps forward. “Sir, are you all right?”

The cop’s voice cracks. “These monsters killed half the night shift. They tore my men to shreds. Like tissue paper.”

A wounded middle-aged woman moans at their feet, wide-eyed and panting, holding a bleeding hole in her ribs.

He adds, “Stand back, Lieutenant.”

And shoots her through the forehead.

After the mob swarmed into the lobby, the Bradley Institute of Graduate Microbiology and Virology Studies went into lockdown. The scientists couldn’t get out, and the mob couldn’t get upstairs and into the laboratories.

Most of the staff went home last night, leaving only a few diehards in the labs working on a vaccine for Hong Kong Lyssa. They are now trapped for the duration of the siege.

Bleary from lack of sleep and his large belly growling with hunger, Dr. Joe Hardy, director of research, watches the tall, beautiful blonde on the security screens and wonders where he has seen her before.

“There she goes again,” Stringer Jackson, the security guard, says next to him. “Check it out. She’s writing another message.”

The mob easily overwhelmed the two National Guardsmen posted in the lobby and took them hostage. The blonde, apparently the leader of the group, has been communicating their demands by holding up signs to the security cameras and miming shooting the soldiers in the head.

“She a tough bitch, that one,” Hardy says with respect, his hands buried in the pockets of his labcoat. “Like my ex-wife.”

Jackson grins appreciatively.

The blonde triumphantly holds up a sign. It says:
GIVE US VACCINE OR FREEZE.

Hardy snorts derisively, then blinks. “Uh, can they do that?”

Jackson says, “I’m Security, not Facilities.”

But air conditioning is blasting through the air vents and the temperature in the Security Command Center, already maintained at a chilly sixty-five degrees to keep the guards awake, is already dropping.

“Lovely. Is there anything we can do to shut it off, chief?”

“Not that I can think of, Dr. Hardy,” Jackson shrugs.

The Center is about twice the size of the scientists’ private offices, with a desk in the center of the room where Jackson is now sitting in an ergonomic chair, reeking of nervous sweat and stale cigarette smoke. The operator’s workstation contains a control console and PC with a graphical user interface, telephone, randomly scattered office supplies, and storage. A digital projector mounted on the ceiling displays the security camera images on large screens on the wall facing the workstation.

Hardy has only been in this room once before. It is strange to think that behind a random door in one of the Institute’s utilitarian, blindingly white corridors is a highly sophisticated security apparatus enabling a single operator to monitor all of the public spaces in the building on giant wall screens.

Unfortunately, while the Security Center’s equipment allows them to watch the mob downstairs, it offers nothing in the way of help to get rid of them.

This is too important, Hardy thinks. The nation is counting on us. We have grown pure samples of the virus. We are working on genetic characterization. And after that is wrapped up, we can start in earnest on a vaccine. If only you will let us.

There are so many lives at stake right now.

“Actually, there is maybe one thing we can do,” Jackson says quietly.

“What’s that?” Hardy says with interest.

“We could always, you know, give them what they want.”

“But we don’t have a vaccine yet!” Hardy explodes.

Jackson shrugs, unconvinced.

“Maybe I should go down there with some syringes and pump them full of saline,” Hardy sneers. “Then they’d leave and we could get back to, you know, trying to save millions of lives by developing a real vaccine.”

“I don’t know,” Jackson says. “I don’t think that would be very ethical.”

“Say it with me, Stringer: ‘There is no vaccine!’”

“I heard you. You don’t have to shout at me.”

“And we’re not going to get one with this mob of assholes down there, either. We’ve got maybe ten people at most working in the labs right now.”

“I mean, they really don’t pay me enough to put up with this. I used to be a cop, you know. People in my neighborhood used to show respect when I walked down the street.”

“CDC said they were coming to secure the facility, but so far they haven’t come. We have almost no food, no place to sleep, and no way to keep up the current level of our research effort with this skeleton crew. And that means no vaccine, okay? All these people are doing is taking a big risk of getting themselves killed when the Army shows up.”

And even if they could work without interruption, it would still take months before a vaccine is produced in any real quantity, Hardy reminds himself. After they create the formula, factories have to manufacture enough of the stuff to inoculate the health workers and then the government and then the Army and then the rest of America’s population of more than three hundred million. By the time they start inoculating the general population, it will be months after the vaccine is created.

By then, the Pandemic will be over—in North America, anyway.

But that’s not the point. The point is they have to make a vaccine to stop the virus from flaring up again months after that and starting this whole nightmare over again. Pandemics occur in two to three waves. A vaccine will stop the second wave in its tracks. It could even purge the world of Lyssa entirely.

On the five-foot-tall security screens, the blonde’s gloating smile gradually fades and she eventually tires of holding the sign. She passes it on to somebody else. The mob has become listless after a long night of doing nothing. When the facility went into lockdown, not only were they locked out of the labs, they were also locked inside the building.

It’s called Code Orange. Nobody goes in or out.

The two National Guardsmen sit on the floor looking glum, their hands tied behind their backs. Behind them, a teenaged boy turns away from his friends, takes a sandwich out of a brown paper bag, and begins wolfing it down.

Hardy watches him, his belly snarling, practically drooling with hunger. He tries to guess what kind of sandwich the kid has. Ham and cheese with mustard? Turkey with tomato and bacon? One of those Cuban sandwiches they make around the corner with ham, roasted pork, salami, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard on Cuban bread?

His belly roars.

“Well,” Jackson says, “that’s fine, but all I’m saying is there’s only about thirty people down there. If you had a vaccine, surely you could give them a little.”

Hardy feels himself start to burst, but his large shoulders deflate and he shakes his head sadly. “There’s no magic cure, Stringer,” he says. “I wish there were.”

Then he sighs loudly and begins walking towards the door.

“Where’re you going, Dr. Hardy?”

Hardy pauses at the door. “To the labs, Stringer,” he answers in as heroic tone as he can muster, like something out of a movie. “I have a lot of work to do yet if I’m going to defeat this scourge.”

Then he snorts and leaves the Security Command Center in search of something resembling breakfast.

Sergeant First Class Mike Kemper nods to Mooney and Wyatt, who are busy mopping up blood from the floor in the hallway, and enters Bowman’s makeshift office, all the while wondering if the LT is still cut out to command the platoon.

Kemper knows Bowman better than anybody in the unit, even better than Captain West does. It is his job to do so. The NCOs take care of the enlisted men in their unit. As platoon sergeant, however, part of his job is also to take care of and advise the LT.

Earlier tonight, the Lieutenant waffled over new orders and opened those orders up for debate by his NCOs. Then he ordered the platoon to fire on civilians.

Kemper showed Bowman the ropes for nearly a year in Iraq, and watched him mature into an intelligent officer who respects his men and leads from the front, not the rear. But this is an entirely new situation. In a horrifying situation like this, a commander can become indecisive, rash or both. Rash or indecisive commanders can get their men killed.

It was the right call to open fire on the civilians, given the size of the crowd attacking them. If Bowman hadn’t ordered the platoon to shoot, it would have been overrun and destroyed. But it turned out to be the right call only in hindsight. It could just have easily turned out to be a small group coming at them. In that case, the LT would now be considered an officer overeager to implement a new ROE allowing him to shoot civilians.

The point is the LT could have been wrong. Horribly wrong. And this has Kemper wondering whether Bowman made an intelligent, calculated risk or whether he panicked. He wants to believe it was a thoughtful decision, because he actually likes the man, but he isn’t sure.

He finds Bowman sitting in a pool of light from his task lamp, glaring at the radio on his desk. The LT looks up and gestures wearily. He’s not wearing a mask.

“If you’ve come to arrest me, I’ve already tried,” he says.

The Platoon Sergeant blinks. “Arrest you?”

“For violating Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Mike.”

“Murder?”

The LT nods and says, “For turning my men into a bunch of baby killers.”

“Hell, I was just coming to see if you wanted to do an After Action Review.”

Bowman says, “In a way. . . .”

Kemper sits, takes off his own mask, lights the stub of a foul-smelling cigar and sighs, exhaling a long stream of smoke.

“You want to know what I think?”

“Yeah, Mike. I do.”

It is a hard thing to explain, but Kemper is not concerned right now about the morality of shooting those people. Morality is a luxury in a situation like this. What worries him instead is the open question of the Lieutenant’s judgment.

A question to which he may never learn the answer.

“LT, what happened here tonight was a terrible thing, but you were acting within the ROE and had only a few seconds to make a decision to protect the platoon,” he says truthfully. “While a man’s conscience is one thing, the Army will say you made the right call.”

“That’s what Captain West said.”

“You told him what happened? What’d he say?”

“He said his own hands are full and that I should follow my fucking orders. End quote.”

Kemper leans back in his chair, absorbing this information.

“All this. . . . It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“It makes no sense at all.”

“Have you talked to any of the other platoon leaders?”

“That’s just the thing, Mike. Quarantine is restricting the net to emergency traffic only. Something big is happening, and we’re isolated. I’ve got no intel. No big picture.”

Kemper is beginning to understand what is going on inside the LT’s brain. The situation has changed and with it, the ROE, and Bowman is trying to figure out why. If he understands why, he can make good decisions and, perhaps, justify to himself why he ordered his men to shoot down more than forty civilians in cold blood.

“Everybody’s feeling like crap right now and unfit to wear the uniform. Morale is shit. But we’re the professionals. We can’t appear indecisive in front of the boys. They need us to lead them.”

Bowman stiffens, then smiles shyly. “So this isn’t all about me then, is it.”

“No, sir, it ain’t,” Kemper says quietly.

“What’s so weird about this whole mess is it’s like this is a foreign country and we’re the enemy. I feel like we’re in this
Twilight Zone
episode where we did something terrible in Iraq so God warps reality and turns America into Iraq. And we have to figure out what we did wrong or repeat the same mistakes against our own people.”

“Sir, with all due respect, you think way too goddamn much.” Bowman smiles grimly. “Mike, I just saw a cop shoot a wounded American citizen in the head. A cop who watched his best friends get ripped apart by a crazed mob in a rare terminal stage of a new disease. I’d say anything is on the table at this point.”

“We’re all tired.” The NCO exhales another cloud of smoke and grinds his cigar against his boot heel. “We’re wiped out. In any case, New York has always seemed like a foreign country to me.”

The LT regards him for a moment, then laughs out loud.

“It gives me an idea,” he says. “The situation demands that we treat the city as hostile. So we do just that. If your force is isolated in hostile country and you need to move from a place of security to a new AO, what’s the first thing you do?”

Kemper suddenly smiles.

“You reconnoiter,” he says.

“Right. We have just enough time to do a recon mission before we have to be on the move. It might give us the answers we need so we know what we’re facing here.”

“Satisfactory,” says Kemper. This is the Todd Bowman that the platoon sergeant trained to be a commander in Iraq, and it is good to have him back. “I know just the men for this mission.”

Morning brings a cool, dewy feel to the air. The windows on the taller buildings gleam in the first light. Several buildings near the site of yesterday’s explosion are still smoldering, and a sudden change in wind rains ash and the acrid stench of burning furniture. The boys check their rucksacks and top up their ammo, coughing into their fists. They’re getting ready to move.

Second Platoon is exhausted. They spent hours clearing out the hospital and cleaning up the mess. Small groups of infected attacked the wire through the night and had to be shot down, their bodies left out in the open until dawn among the ruins of the cars.