Craig DiLouie: Pandemic

They passed a series of tripods in the road. The crazies knew what it meant but didn’t care. A rocket streamed out of the nearby trees and struck one of their five-tons. The vehicle exploded and rolled, spilling bodies and equipment. The Klowns pointed and laughed.

Then the demolition kits detonated.

Muldoon blinked at the blinding flash. Vehicles and bodies tumbled in the blast. A wave of dirt reached for the sky and tumbled back down. A massive cloud of dust hung over the shattered road.

His Humvees emerged from concealment and rolled onto the shoulders of the highway, fifties rocking. The Mark 19 showered the wreckage with grenades.

Muldoon picked up the radio. “Sparta Ops, this is Sparta Six. Time to retrograde. Out.”

The Humvees took off the down the road. But Muldoon and his boys weren’t finished.

The vehicles pulled onto the shoulder and idled. Muldoon got out with Ramirez. They climbed the shoulder and lay on the road. Ramirez set up the machine gun. Muldoon scanned the dust cloud with his binoculars. A crowd of infantry jogged out of the dust.

“Man,” said Muldoon. “They sure are dumb.”

Ramirez looked at him. “They’re crazy.”

The Klowns passed two abandoned vehicles. Muldoon squeezed the handheld detonator. The electric pulse traveled down the length of wire to the Claymore mines placed on the ground next to the wrecks. Each had embossed on it, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. The blasting caps activated, detonating the C4 behind a matrix of seven hundred steel balls set in resin. The balls flew out of the daisy-chained mines at four thousand feet per second.

The Klown soldiers disintegrated in a massive spray of blood and body parts.

Ramirez sighted on the soldiers in the rear who’d escaped the blast, and started hammering. Tracers flashed downrange. The Klowns charged, firing as they moved.

“Some human wave shit here,” Ramirez said. “Fuckers think it’s World War One.”

The Humvees rolled out of concealment and engaged with their fifties and the Mark 19. They walked their fire into the crowd of Klowns. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Muldoon had been right. The Klown soldiers knew their tactics. They knew to lay a base of fire before you maneuvered. Fire, maneuver, fire, maneuver. Sweep the enemy’s position with grazing fire to suppress them, then flank and cut them up with enfilade fire. Tactics 101. But the virus couldn’t wait. It cared nothing for self-preservation. It didn’t understand the concept of victory or defeat. It only wanted to play. It wanted to play right now .

Muldoon and Ramirez heard a whistle and put their heads down.

WHAM!

The ground shook. Dirt pattered against their helmets. The Klowns were firing mortars. Soon, they’d have them zeroed.

A Javelin missile streamed toward one of Muldoon’s Humvees. The vehicle rocked as it flew apart in a blinding flash.

“Fuck me,” Ramirez said. “That was Burke and Zeller.”

Another mortar round crashed into the trees. Splinters rained down.

Bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of them. The Klowns had set up a machine gun.

“Time to retrograde,” Muldoon said. He radioed his men to bug out.

They got up and ran to the burning Humvee. Bullets pinged off the road around them. The heat forced them back.

“They’re dead, Sergeant,” Ramirez said.

Another mortar round blew a smoking hole in the highway as they ran to the next Humvee and piled inside it. As they drove off, the men seemed subdued but oddly jubilant. They’d finally won. They’d finally done something good in this nightmarish conflict.

Muldoon called in his situation report and requested the whirlybirds come in to mop up the Klown mortar team. He didn’t feel jubilant at all. Those were American soldiers they’d killed.

This kind of winning felt like losing. Like he’d cut the Afghan boy’s throat after all.

Gray lay in a heap on the bloody asphalt.

Wade stared down at him. What happened?

The man was alive one second, bleeding from a dozen wounds the next.

Fisher backed away from him. “Aw, no , man.”

What’s with him?

Fisher took another step. “No. Please. Please don’t.”

Wade looked down at the bloody knife he held. He looked at Fisher. “You’d better run,” he hissed.

“Why’d you do that, Wade?”

Wade laughed. “He wasn’t one of us.”

Ramos’s parting gift had taken its sweet time, but it had finally taken control. Little worms in his head. Little puppet strings.

He screamed: “ Run! ”

Fisher yelped and ran off.

Wade looked down at the body and chuckled. He’d stabbed Gray in the kidneys. He licked the blood off the blade and stabbed again. He kept stabbing and stabbing.

Just before Gray died, they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed as brothers.

There was an old saying among warriors: Make pain your friend.

He hadn’t really wanted to kill Gray, but the organism in his body demanded everything. It didn’t appreciate divided loyalties. It wanted it all.

It wanted to see the whole world burn.

That would be so very freaking hilarious .

He heard a splash of gunfire. Below him, his brothers and sisters charged into First Battalion’s guns. He wanted to join the party.

Then he remembered Ramos’s family. They still needed attention. The sergeant would have wanted it that way.

The laughing virus in his skull thought that was a very awesome idea.

“Aw, Wade,” Rawlings said.

He wheeled. At the sight of her, he burst into long, breathless peals of insane laughter.

HAAAWWWW

HAAAAAWWWWWWW

HAAAAAAAWWWWWWWW

He knew why the infected sought out those they loved. The pain was so exquisite. It hurt soooo good.

“Sorry,” he managed. “Rawlings.”

She leveled her carbine. “I’m sorry, too.”

“Shoot me.”

She shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t think I can, Private Wade.”

“Shoot me now.”

“Tell me where Ramos’s family lives.”

He doubled over laughing.

She said, “I’ll take care of them. I’ll do that for you.”

He grinned and held up his knife. “Gonna make a hole. Make it—”

He lunged.

She fired.

Sergeant Sandra Rawlings watched Boston burn.

The big fires had radiated out of South Boston and were consuming everything in sight. The South End was gone. The skyscrapers of the Financial District pumped tons of smoke and ash into the already blackened sky. Chinatown had been burned to a cinder. Back Bay-Beacon Hill was gone, as was Fenway-Kenmore. The fires were eating Dorcester and Roxbury.

Across the Charles River, Charlestown was a black, smoldering ruin, and the conflagration was spreading across Cambridge and Somerville.

The firefighters were all dead, the police department overrun. The hospitals, considered centers of infection, had been destroyed from the air. The Governor held East Boston and little else. From Newton to Quincy, Major General Brock and his struggling battalions were steadily being pushed back toward Cape Cod.

Boston, drained of life, its soul already departed, was being cremated and with it everything that had defined Rawlings as a person. It was a city no more; it was becoming an idea. A symbol. For Rawlings, a memory. She remembered growing up in Dorcester. Living in one apartment after another around the city as an adult. Jobs in various offices in the Financial District before she became a paramedic working out of Christ Hospital. Proud service in the Massachusetts Army National Guard. A tour in Iraq. Then fighting hard, one day at a time, trying to save the city from plague, a plague that had devoured the city long before fire took its turn.