Craig Dilouie - Tooth And Nail

“Yeah, all the pussies will be dead,” says Eckhardt.

“And all the psychos will be running the place,” Mooney says. “Think about it.”

The soldiers fall silent, trying not to think about it.

“My girl,” Ratliff says fiercely but quietly, almost to himself. “She’s tough. She’ll be okay. Her dad owns a gun. I taught her how to shoot. She’s going to make it.”

Finnegan looks out the window, squinting into the sunlight. Suddenly, he starts laughing uncontrollably. Everybody looks at him.

“You know, my dad,” he says, then stops abruptly, his laughter trailing off and his face slowly going blank.

Moments later, an air raid siren interrupts their gloom, slowly winding up somewhere in midtown Manhattan. A siren across the river begins wailing in response, then another from somewhere farther away, tinny and distant. The grating sound builds until it is almost deafening.

Mooney looks out the window. The quality of the sunlight tells him it is late afternoon. Seventeen hundred hours, to be exact.

The citywide curfew is now in effect.

The boys slowly rise to their feet. Their plan is to rustle up some supper for themselves. After that, they have a funeral to attend.

In two hours, the American sun will set, and it will be oh-dark.

One man, at the right place at the right time,

making a difference

Three police officers, clad in head-to-toe black BDUs, body armor and bulky clear-visor helmets, tread slowly down the street, newspapers scuttling around their boots and clinging to their legs. One of the cops leans on a comrade for support, while the third, a tall woman with a long braid protruding from under her helmet, brings up the rear, dragging her clear ballistic shield. They are all exhausted, but it is her turn to fight. They were going east at one time, but got turned around and are now heading west, towards the sounds of gunfire.

Gunfire means people. Security.

Night is falling. Around them, the streetlights flare to life in the dusk.

As if awaiting this signal, two Mad Dogs bolt out of a nearby apartment building, past construction scaffolding with posters plastered all over it advertising an aging pop singer’s farewell tour, and race towards the riot control police, yelping.

The woman assumes a fighting stance, raising her truncheon and shield, while her comrades sink to their knees on the asphalt behind her, panting.

She waits for the Mad Dogs to approach, taking deep breaths, then quickly sidesteps the first, a middle-aged man in hospital scrubs, who runs by and comes to a skidding halt. Moments later, the other, a large man in coveralls, comes flying at her, snarling. She body checks him with her shield, stunning him, then brings her truncheon down on his skull, killing him instantly. An instant later, she pivots and backhands the first man with her shield, making him spin until he trips over his own feet.

The woman staggers back, almost finished by the effort, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her armor and weapons, while the man scrabbles his way back onto his feet and begins pacing in front of her like a nervous cat, howling.

They were working riot control near Grand Central Station, barring thousands of people from attempting to board the trains that stopped running days ago, the station having since been converted into a Lyssa clinic. Then hundreds of Mad Dogs appeared and began tearing into the frantic crowd and biting everybody in sight.

The riot control unit advanced, trying to separate the Mad Dogs from the uninfected, and found themselves trapped between the two.

Only tear gas saved them.

The cops fired CS grenades, which burst in huge clouds of brilliant white gas. Mad Dogs and uninfected people alike ran blindly through the clouds, tears and mucus streaming from their eyes and noses, clawing at their clothes and burning skin. Dozens of people bent over and began choking and vomiting. The Mad Dogs suffered the most. Tear gas reacts with moisture on the skin and in the eyes, and Mad Dogs are soaked with sweat and saliva. Tear gas also burns the nose and throat, and the infected already find it enormously painful to swallow because the Mad Dog strain paralyzes the nerves in the throat to force production of saliva.

The unit was broken, the cops scattered and trying to return to their station. For this group, it has been a running fight lasting nearly a mile along a circuitous path. There were five of them in the beginning. But one was chased into a plate glass window, and the other died heroically in front of a Staples store to buy time for this friends to escape.

The man in scrubs, growling, leaps through the air—

And falls to the ground with a loud bang.

A puff of smoke rises from a nearby rooftop.

Sergeant Lewis, sitting on a stool on the school’s roof nursing a wad of Red Man dip in his cheek, sees another Mad Dog come running at the cops from the apartment building. He sizes up the man, aims center-mass at his body using his scope, and drops him with a shot between the shoulder blades.

The cops duck for a moment, glance at each other, and then begin looking around for the shooter.

This I like, he thinks, taking a quick moment to spit. Clear-cut ethics. One man, at the right place at the right time, making a difference.

Now all we need to do is put every man with a uniform, a gun and some training in the right place to wait for the right time. Break the chain of infection everywhere and roll this plague back into Pandora’s Box or wherever it came from.

Small arms fire begins cascading to the south, and he glances in that direction, wondering what kind of trouble Alpha and Bravo Companies have gotten themselves into. They should have shown up an hour ago. They stepped off late and they are meeting resistance along the way. Now they are losing the light.

He turns back just in time to see another Mad Dog, an obese woman in a jogging suit, running towards the woman cop, who braces herself and raises her truncheon to strike.

Damn.

He fires and misses.

Damn!

The M21 is a semi-automatic weapon, however, which means he gets another shot. He fires again. The woman flops to the ground, convulsing and pouring blood from a smoking hole in her back.

This is my street, he thinks, spitting tobacco juice. I give you free passage. You will be safe as long as you travel here under my protection. Next time, don’t bring a billy club to Armageddon.

He glances up at the sky. Just enough daylight to make good on this promise. Feeling magnanimous, he waves, hoping they see him.

They are not looking up at the buildings, however.

They are trying to run.

Peering into his scope, he sees one of the cops, crawling on hands and knees, while the other man staggers away, lurching on tired legs, following the woman cop who sprints ahead of them with all of her remaining strength.

“God,” he whispers in awe.

Beyond the three cops, a moving wall of Mad Dogs is advancing down the street, hair matted and disheveled, dressed in rags, filthy and trailing their own waste.

Thousands of them.

The horde tramples and grinds down the first cop like road kill without breaking its stride. The second stumbles and falls to his knees. Almost instantly, the mob plows into him with the force of a car, tosses him into the air like a doll, and quarters him neatly, spraying a cloud of blood into the air.

The woman cop stops in the middle of the street and turns around, bracing her shield and holding her truncheon over her head, her braid spilling down her back.

Lewis’ rifle bangs: A Mad Dog drops. Bangs again, and another falls. He is trying to make a hole for the woman, but he knows it is useless. He sees the faces of the infected as he kills them. Their faces have no expression, only moving when their mouths contort into snarls and yelps, while their eyes remain fixed with an alien stare.