Craig Dilouie - Tooth And Nail

What’s done is done, Bowman tells himself. He thumbs off the safety on his carbine and begins shooting Mad Dogs at a nearly cyclic rate of fire, a round every few seconds, draining mags and reloading without breaking stride. The crackle of small arms fire turns into a roar as the entire company lights up the Mad Dogs. Muzzle flashes burst along the line, almost beautiful to watch on their NVGs. Tracers stream through the air. A grenade explodes, a massive green fireball erupting into sparks and fiery blobs. The air begins to fill with luminous, pale green smoke clouds.

The civilians are cheering.

“All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual,” he says into his handset. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”

The use of live ordnance proved decisive. The company shot its way through the mob with very few casualties.

Eight blocks to go. About three quarters of a mile.

All around them, the city has begun to stir with the tramp of thousands of feet as the Mad Dogs awaken from their haunted dreams of the time before the plague.

If the soldiers move fast, and there are no other mobs between here and the research facility, they can do this.

“Go, go, go!” Bowman cries.

They make it.

Chapter 12

We’re the U.S. Army

Sergeant Lewis leads the first grab team up the stairs while the rest of the company pulls security down in the Institute’s lobby, waiting their turn. It is pitch black in the stairwell, robbing them of vision as NVGs are useless without some ambient light to amplify, so they turned on the SureFire flashlights mounted on their carbines, fitted with red lenses. The resulting beams appear a brilliant green on their NVGs, but are barely visible to Maddy’s naked eye.

The squad pauses on the stairs.

“It’s good and locked, Sarge,” says Corporal Jaworski, trying the door that Lewis believes leads to the labs.

“Who’s got the C4?”

“Here, Sarge.”

“Give it to me, Reed.”

Lewis takes the block of C4, sticks it onto the door and begins setting the charge while the squad retreats to a safe place down the stairs.

“Fire in the hole!” he shouts.

The boys crouch and put their heads down, cupping their ears.

The detonation roars down the stairwell with a sharp boom that they can feel from the base of their skulls to the tips of their toes. The explosion blew out the lock and buckled the door, which now rocks precariously on one hinge in a pall of tangy smoke.

“Move!”

The squad hauls itself to its feet, raises their carbines, and enters the hallway in a tightly packed diamond formation, scanning for targets.

Lewis knows Maddy has been here. Between the Vicks and the smoke, he cannot smell them, but he saw the corpses laid out in the corner in the lobby, apparently dead from disease and carpeted with flies, and the National Guardsman with a hole in his head. There is evidence of strife everywhere in this place.

He also saw, outside the doors of the research facility, the Special Forces team lying scattered on the street like road kill. Their story was easy to figure out. Immunity must have airdropped them in an initial attempt to evac the scientists. A single helicopter depositing them on the roof of a nearby building. The attempt obviously failed.

Now it is our turn, he tells himself.

His shooters move as one down the corridor, their flashlights exploring the gloom, until they reach the elevator lobby.

The corpses lay on top of each other, locked in a death grapple. Two wear labcoats, marking them as scientists, while the other eight are in street clothes. A few have the marks of Mad Dog infection. The stench of death is powerful here. Several blood trails lead away from the area to closed doors.

“What the hell happened here,” says Parsons, whistling.

“Lot of dead Hajjis, a couple dead Maddies,” says Jaworski, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from gagging. “Gunshot wounds, strangulation. This poor guy got his throat torn out.”

“This shit is ice cold, yo,” says Turner.

“Turner, talking like that only makes you sound more white,” says Perez.

“Hey, this chick looks exactly like that chick on TV,” says Bailey. “You know?”

The boys gather around.

“Yeah, that show with the robots. What’s that show?”

Nobody can remember the actress’ name or the show’s.

“Looks just like her, though,” Jaworski says. “I know exactly who you mean.”

“Contact!”

The boys fill the corridor, searching for targets. The green flashlight beams swing wildly and abruptly converge on the center torso of a Mad Dog loping at them from the far end of the corridor, her labcoat flapping around her legs and her arms outstretched in the dark, trying to find them using her sense of hearing alone.

“Put her down, Reed,” Lewis says, patting the top of the soldier’s head.

“Roger that, Sarge,” the soldier says.

He releases the safety on his weapon, aims using its iron sights, blows air out his cheeks and applies gentle pressure to the trigger. His M4 discharges with a mechanical cracking sound. The burst blows the woman’s shoulder off. She stumbles drunkenly for several steps, then falls to the floor twitching in a widening pool of blood.

“Good,” the squad leader tells him. “Now go count your coup.”

They are under a standing order from Bowman to make sure anybody who is down is actually dead, but without wasting precious ammunition. That means finishing the job with the rifle butt or bayonet. The NCOs started referring to it as counting coup to try to make it more palatable to the boys so they would actually do it. Lewis is incredibly proud of his troops for the strength they are displaying.

Reed gets up, jogs to the woman, and stabs her in the neck with his bayonet.

“She’s down,” he calls, then suddenly holds up his fist.

The squad freezes in place, listening.

Reed waves at them to move up.

“You got something?” says Lewis.

“I heard a sound in a room down there on the left, Sarge.”

“Let’s check it out,” he says.

Lewis is not hopeful, however. The mission appears to be a bust. The scientists are either dead or infected along with these other civilians who came here for God knows what reason. He is hoping this still means the Army will extract them, but he has a feeling they won’t. No scientists, no evac. If they find no survivors, they will be stuck in Manhattan.

“I heard something in there, Sarge,” Reed says, pointing at a door bearing a discrete sign that says, security .

It is locked.

“If there is somebody inside this room, open the door,” Lewis says.

He hears a muffled groan, but nothing more. The door does not open.

While he prepares some C4, the boys take a knee and pull security around him, listening to the sound of small arms fire erupting in another part of the facility. It is the second grab team, putting down another stray Mad Dog.

Lewis shouts at the door: “If you are inside and can hear me, we are going to blow the lock. Get as far back as you can and get on the floor!”

“And if your name is Maddy, stand right next to it,” Bailey says, making the boys laugh.

The squad retreats to a safe distance.

“Fire in the hole!”

The door blows and the squad pours into the smoking hole, carbines at the ready, sweeping the room.

“Clear!” the boys sound off one by one.

“Sarge, I got a survivor!” Perez calls out. “In the bathroom back here!”

“Holy shit,” Parsons drawls.

The woman lies shivering on the floor curled up under a pile of labcoats, some of them torn and darkly stained, clutching a flashlight that has stopped working, its batteries drained and dead. She lies surrounded by empty bags of snack food and candy wrappers and an odd collection of beakers, test tubes and planters, some filled with water. She apparently has been saving the toilet as a final backup water supply and using a trash can as a toilet instead, surrounded by rags torn from a labcoat for toilet paper.