Craig Dilouie - Tooth And Nail

“Get off me!” McLeod shouts, shoving his way through the civilians.

The infected appear to focus on whoever fired last, which is unnerving.

Hicks is crying as he bayonets a Mad Dog.

“Keep going!” he shouts.

“Don’t make me shoot you!” McLeod is pleading, pushing against a woman’s back with the butt of his SAW. She screams and drops a television set she’s been carrying, which falls to the street with a crash.

People are running everywhere, but the soldiers are moving into the current, forming a dam, and then it’s hand to hand.

Bowman fires his pistol into a snarling face, which disappears.

This is exactly what you were trying to avoid, he tells himself.

“Reform!” he cries, but there are too many civilians in the way, drawn to the soldiers’ uniforms like metal to magnets. The civilians hold onto the soldiers’ rucksacks, which are already heavy, and slow them to a crawl.

Williams fires a series of warning shots into the air, without effect.

A taxi and a delivery truck are lurching along with the flow of people in fits and starts, the drivers leaning on their horns. A woman climbs onto the roof of the cab and lies down, hugging her child close. Across the street, a man is defending his family with a baseball bat. Behind him, the plate glass front of a convenience store shatters and people begin looting. Its owner comes stumbling out, his head split open and pouring blood. The police cars’ strobing lights bathe the scene in a surreal glow.

The stink is incredible, the dense sour-milk stench of the infected.

Then a wave of heat and thick, oily smoke descends upon them from a burning city bus down the street, choking them as it billows through the crowd until it suddenly lifts as fast as it had come.

“Go, go, go!”

Third Squad passes a group of people, drunk and staggering along through the melee, laughing and shouting, “Fuck it!” while working on popping the cork on a champagne bottle.

One of the revelers is shorn away and mauled to the asphalt.

The Lieutenant is panicking now, breathing hard, his vision shrinking to a box. He can’t keep track of the blurred shapes around him anymore. The smoke falls upon them again like a wave, choking and blinding.

The last reveler throws the champagne bottle into the air, screaming, “I don’t care!”

“Why aren’t we moving?” Hicks is saying.

SPC Martin is wrestling with an uninfected man and teenage boy for possession of his machine gun. Next to him, the RTO is trading punches with a man twice his size. People are screaming and a civilian, his shirt off and leaking blood from his eyes and ears, begins shooting people randomly with a pistol.

Ruiz roars as a stray bullet takes off the top of the skull of a man who is running by, spraying him with blood and brains.

Two bullets rip into Sherman’s radio pack, spinning him like a top.

The Newb grunts and falls to his knees.

“Sir, we can get through this,” Kemper is shouting.

Bowman’s field of view unfolds. His stress suddenly takes an entirely different and beneficial direction. Time dilates and he calmly, almost serenely, watches the horror unravel in slow motion, able to take in every detail.

His squad is still intact and they can get through this if they do whatever it takes. But if he chooses to live, life after today may not be worth living.

For some reason, at this instant, he remembers Winslow telling him, “Somebody has to survive, Lieutenant.”

As Bowman did in the hospital, again, he makes his choice.

Loading a fresh clip, he quickly identifies the people bogging down his squad and shoots them one by one.

“Watch out, Mike,” he says, and puts a round in a teenager’s throat.

Slowly, the knot unravels and the squad is able to begin moving again.

The people he shot were not infected.

“Coming through, sir,” Kemper says.

He racks a round in his shotgun and blasts the crowd in front of the squad.

A hole is instantly created as people moan and fall in a tangled heap of limbs.

“All right, move out,” Bowman roars.

A block past the intersection, they stop, reload and set up a defensive line, panting. A woman is shrieking at them to go back and HELP THESE PEOPLE, HELP THEM.

“Sergeant, keep those civilians back or consider them hostile,” the LT says.

But Ruiz isn’t listening. “Where’s Johnston?” he demands.

Two of the boys hurry over, huffing, carrying The Newb on a makeshift stretcher.

“He’s dead,” Corporal Wheeler tells him, sounding dazed. “Got hit by a stray bullet. It looked like friendly fire to me, Sergeant. One of our own guys shot him.”

Ruiz spits on the ground, purple with rage.

“Second Squad, probably,” the Sergeant says. “They were shooting everything that moved back there. Goddamnit. He was a good kid.”

“Civilians, Sergeant,” Bowman says quietly.

“I’m on it, sir,” Ruiz tells him, glaring. “Wheeler, get his tags.”

“Here comes McGraw and First Squad, LT,” Kemper says.

First Squad is limping away from the intersection, firing behind them, dropping anybody who comes close. Two bloodied cops have joined them, toting shotguns.

“Where’s Sergeant Lewis?”

“No sign of him,” Kemper says.

“Try him on the commo.”

“Friendlies coming in!” Lewis calls from behind them, running up with Second Squad.

“Friendlies on our six!” says Corporal Hicks, then calls out, “Reloading!”

“We made it through and set up a defensive line another block up the road,” Lewis tells the LT. “Didn’t know you wanted to rally here. Sorry, sir.”

“It’s all good, Sergeant.”

Ruiz glowers at Lewis and says, “You and me are going to have some words later, motherfucker.”

Lewis says, “Go to hell, Sergeant.”

Second Squad begins covering First Squad’s movement. The carbines pop and the bullets hum and snap through the air.

Bowman almost does not recognize Second Squad. In Iraq, they were boys who were much older than their years because of what they had done and seen. But now they are beyond even this scale. They are ancient now. It is in their eyes, he realizes. Looking ahead with thousand-yard stares, their eyes burn like cold stones as old as war itself.

The boys have become killing machines, like something out of myth.

He looks at Kemper, who also has the look. He guesses that he himself might have it.

There are two types of soldiers in the platoon now. Those who shot non-combatants, and those who did not. Those who shot uninfected people to save themselves and their comrades, and those who would have stayed in that intersection.

Those who will in the future, and those who won’t.

Kemper nods to Bowman. He now understands the choice that the LT made back in the hospital. The choice to be damned, as long as it saved his men. A choice that was not expedient, but necessary.

“It was an emergency food relief operation,” one of the cops is saying, his eyes gaping. “The food trucks drew a massive crowd of people, thousands. Then a couple of gangs of Lyssa victims came at us the other way, attacking and biting people.” He’s pleading with the soldiers around him. “There was nothing we could do!”

“You’re all right now, buddy,” one of the soldiers says to him.

Kemper whispers near the LT’s ear, “Sir, if they’re broken, we’re it.”

The other cop glares at Lewis’ boys and says, “We’re not staying with these murderers, Brian. We’ll find another way back to the station.”

Bowman checks his watch. The movement across the intersection—and intervening battle—lasted all of four minutes, and left them exhausted, bloodied and dispirited.