Craig DiLouie

with

Stephen Knight and Joe McKinney

THE RETREAT

Episode One: Pandemic

ONE.

America. Boston. Christ Hospital.

Forty-nine days of quarantine.

At first, it was to shut the sick inside. Later, it was to keep them out.

Outside, the world was dying. The world was going to die laughing.

And the Klowns would own it all.

The sirens had stopped long ago. All day and night, the air outside the hospital filled with heavy weapons fire as the Army fought to save what was left.

The Army was losing.

TWO.

Dr. John Braddock had fought malaria, cholera, sleeping sickness, kala azar. He’d seen people bleed out of their eyes in Africa and shit themselves to death in droves in India.

He’d never seen anything like the Bug.

He eyed his watch with rising irritation. Chief Nurse Robbins was late.

It was time to get her report. Do the rounds to check the patient charts. Review their dwindling supplies.

He already knew the score. They would find some of the patients dead in their beds and supplies low across the board. But he had to take stock of everything.

Normally, the Chief of Medicine handled that stuff, but she had the Bug, so the job had fallen on him.

He closed his eyes and listened. A woman was crying in Pathology. Distant footsteps marked the progress of one of his skeleton crew.

As a young, idealistic doctor, Braddock had joined Doctors Without Borders. After several years in Asia and Africa, the horrors he witnessed began to wear on him. In Aleppo, Syria, children lined up for measles vaccinations were torn apart in a rocket attack. In southern Sudan, refugees died from malaria after rebels looted his hospital.

He’d come home but had a difficult time reintegrating. America lived in a bubble of prosperity. He regarded his colleagues as petty and competitive. Getting things done required socializing with people he didn’t understand. Hospital administrators and insurance companies constantly told him what he could and couldn’t do to save lives. He didn’t get along.

Braddock resigned from one job after another. Nobody lifted a finger to make him stay. He was a big man, too intense and culturally out of touch. He intimidated people. He started drinking to dull the anger. He had no sense of self. America, his home, began to feel like another foreign land.

Ellen White, Chief of Medicine at Boston’s Christ Hospital, visited Braddock in his shabby motel room and offered him a job: I believe in you, John. She offered him a place he could call home.

He quit the bottle. Stopped fighting the system. Spent years in trauma therapy. He practiced medicine. Over time, he again began to feel like he was making a difference. He literally owed White his life. She’d brought him back from the dead.

Then she caught the Bug. So many of the others had gone to be with their families, leaving thousands of patients in his care. It was an impossible task, but he wouldn’t let her down. He’d show them all, not least himself, what he was made of.

Shoes pounded the floor. He opened his eyes as Robbins approached.

“Dr. Braddock,” she said, her voice edged with panic.

Another crisis. Adrenaline flooded his body. He welcomed it like a drug.

“Soldiers,” she said. “They’re in the hospital.”

“The Army? Here?”

“They have guns.”

“They’re the good guys,” Braddock assured her. “It’s going to be all right.”

At the places he’d been, soldiers usually meant trouble. Guerillas, freedom fighters, Army, paramilitaries. But not in America. In America, soldiers didn’t loot hospitals.

He couldn’t help but feel hopeful. They’d been on their own for months. Maybe the soldiers were here to help. Maybe they’d brought supplies so the hospital could keep functioning.

He asked Robbins why they’d come.

“I don’t know,” she said, fighting tears. “I asked them what they were doing here.” She started crying, her voice escalating. “They said we had to evacuate. They pushed me!”

Braddock glanced over her shoulder. Another nurse watched them from a distance. “You’re Chief Nurse,” he whispered harshly. “Keep it together.”

Seven weeks ago, she’d been overweight. Now her scrubs hung on her rail-thin body. Her sister was quarantined on the fifth floor. She hadn’t heard from the rest of her family in ten days. She was under enormous stress, as they all were. But he couldn’t have her cracking up. They all needed to be at their best, or they wouldn’t get through this.

Robbins took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said in a softer tone. “Just tell me where they are. I’ll get some answers.”

“They went upstairs.”

His heart pounded. “Did they have protection? Masks, gloves—”

“No. I don’t know. They weren’t wearing any when they came in.”

“Christ. How many of them are there?”

“A lot. Ten? Fifteen?”

Braddock rubbed his eyes. He had to find them quickly. The thought of fifteen heavily armed soldiers catching the Bug horrified him to the bone. There’d be a massacre.

THREE.

Braddock parted the plastic sheeting and entered the quarantine zone. Smiling plague victims slept or stared at the ceiling. Intravenous drips fed them a barbiturate cocktail to keep them sedated. Glazed eyes followed him as he passed.

He shook his head. They shouldn’t have been awake at all.

The stale air stank of disease, sweat and neglected bedpans. It was the height of summer, and the air conditioning and ventilation had been turned off to conserve power. The hospital had become an oven. He heard the steady hiss of breath from hundreds of mouths.

On a warm night six weeks ago, Braddock had been working in the emergency room. He thrived on the pulse of the ER—the rollercoaster of boredom and crisis. Even after everything, he was still an intensity seeker. The volume of admissions was staggering. Not a single patient had a disease. They were all trauma cases—broken bones, lacerations, gunshot and knife wounds. A man with a broken bottle in his ass. A woman with a yolky pulp where her left eye had been. A man partially flayed alive. Most were in deep shock. Those who could speak told stories of horror, about how the people they loved had savaged them.

He’d never seen anything like it. When morning finally came, Braddock was sewing stitches into his ninth stab wound. The victims just kept coming. The wail of sirens filled the city—police vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks. The sky grayed with smoke.

A SWAT team wearing respirator masks brought the first diseased people in armored cars. They dragged them inside by the necks with restraint poles. The doctors sedated them, and orderlies strapped them onto gurneys. The first quarantine ward was established on the third floor. Then another and another until the hospital filled with carriers of the Bug.

After that, the police quarantined the entire hospital, enforced it at gunpoint.

The disease killed the old and the very young, while everybody else suffered from frontotemporal dementia similar to Pick’s Disease. The dementia resulted in a dysexecutive syndrome that manifested as severe aggression.

All of which was a very scientific way of saying that men and women would suddenly decide to go after their loved ones with garden shears for a few hours of torture and murder.

Nobody knew why they laughed.

Pathological laughter could be caused by tumors, drug addiction or chromosomal and neurological disorders making the nervous system go haywire. Of all the possible causes, dementia seemed the most viable.

But the laughter seemed purposeful. The infected appeared to enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. They laughed while they shoved a toilet plunger down somebody’s throat. Putting a bullet in their guts sent them into hysterics.

Otherwise, the crazies retained higher brain function. They walked and talked. They displayed a rudimentary cunning. They remembered how to load a shotgun and where they kept the rake in the garage. But they had no sense of self. They felt compelled to seek out others and hurt them until they killed or infected them. They were puppets pulled on a string by the Bug. More than that, they were partners. The Bug wasn’t evil. It only wanted to be spread. The method of spreading was up to those it infected—their memories and creativity. That was the evil part.

After a while, the Bug was categorized as a virus, but nobody knew where it had originated. It appeared to be synthetic, but if the government knew who made it, they weren’t telling. For a time, the media reported that members of an apocalyptic cult called the Four Rider Army had cooked up the Bug and had flown around the world spreading it. It boggled Braddock’s mind that a few crazy people could build a virus that could make the whole world go insane.

Transmissibility: bodily fluids, which mainlined the virus to the brain.

Infection rate: 100%.

Incubation and symptoms: ten seconds to ten minutes.

Braddock theorized that some people might not show symptoms for days. From a medical standpoint, it was fascinating. From a human standpoint, the worst horror imaginable. Humanity might not become extinct, but it might go crazy.

If the Four Rider Army wanted an apocalypse, they were sure as hell getting one.

The disease continued to spread outside the hospital. The news trucks sped off in search of other horrors. The police left with their barricades. The supplies stopped being delivered.

After that, Braddock gave the staff a choice: Stay and try to keep the patients alive, or go home to their families. Most left.

Braddock locked the doors and went to work. He avoided watching the news. Looking out the nearest window told him everything he needed to know. It was far worse out there than it was in here.

They carried on. They had to. Braddock knew how cheap life was—and how valuable. The days blurred into weeks. Eventually, they would run out of sedative, and the patients would wake up hungry and wanting to play.

After that…

He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Maybe he’d find some other place where he could do some good. Maybe he’d just give up. Nurse Robbins would stay to the end because of her sister. Braddock would likely stay with her. The hospital was his home.

On the fifth floor, Braddock found a group of heavily armed soldiers dragging his patients out of their beds and hog-tying them on the floor. The diseased opened their eyes and grinned.

FOUR.

The soldiers raised their weapons and screamed at him to get on the ground.

“What are you doing to my patients?” Braddock demanded.

“Get down on the fucking ground!”

They wore camouflage Army combat uniforms tucked into brown boots. Tactical vests stiff with armor and bulging with gear. Kevlar helmets with that slightly unsettling Wehrmacht look.

Their shoulder patches read MOUNTAIN with a symbol of two crossed swords.

One of them had stenciled TEOTWAWKI on his helmet.

“I’m not infected!” Braddock realized he probably looked it with his beard, matted hair and grimy scrubs and labcoat. He raised his hands and shut his eyes in fear.

A stocky, powerfully muscled man commanded, “Lower your weapons. He doesn’t have it.” To Braddock, he added, “I’m Sergeant Ramos, Tenth Mountain Division. We’re under orders. You need to vacate this area immediately and let us do our jobs, sir.”

The sir hung in the air, dripping with disdain. The bland, boyish faces of the squad regarded him as if they might have to shoot him anyway, just to be the safe side.

Braddock stood over six feet tall. He’d boxed as a young man and would gladly take on any of these punks in the ring. As a group, though, they unnerved him. They’d been through hell. They were exhausted and close to the edge, relying on their training to keep it together.

He tried to see them patriotically as American soldiers, men who risked their lives in defense of their country and did their jobs whether they agreed with the mission or not. But at the moment, they were invaders, and they scared the shit out of him.

Braddock counted five. Robbins had made it sound as though there was a squad in the building, maybe two. Where were the rest?

He spared a worried glance at Ellen White. She lay with her eyes closed and wearing her dreamy smile. Her long, graying hair lay neatly brushed on the pillow. He visited her often to give her status updates. He hoped she could somehow hear him and feel assured her hospital was still running. Even now, he sought her approval.

The fifth floor was special for another reason. The ward was where Braddock had initiated an experimental treatment based on the Milwaukee Protocol, used to treat rabies. The patient was loaded with midazolam and ketamine to induce a coma, and then fed amantadine and ribavirin to fight the virus. He’d just started it. Anything was worth a try.

Now these soldiers were ruining the experiment.

“May I ask what your orders are?” he asked, trying to sound polite. He still trembled from the shock of seeing guns pointed at him.

Ramos ignored his question. “Who’s in charge here?”

“I am. I’m the acting Chief of Medicine.”

“Then you’d better start evacuating the hospital. Get your staff out as fast as you can.”

“And then what? Go where?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Wherever you want. Someplace safe. There are safety shelters.”

“Who can I talk to about this? Who’s in command?”

“The lieutenant. He’s upstairs with another fireteam.”

Okay, we’re talking. This is good. We’re talking about it. “I’ll go speak to him then. Please don’t do anything until I get back. Ten minutes.”

“We’ve got our orders. You have yours. Get your staff out.”

The men smelled like smoke and fear. Their eyes were wild. They weren’t crossing the line. The whole country was. There’d been a decision at the top.

“You don’t have to do this, Sergeant.”

“Just get your people out, Doc,” Ramos said, his expression softening to reveal the man behind the mission mask. “You don’t want to see this.”

“How bad is it out there?”

“Bad enough for this. Desperate times, desperate measures. Understand?”

“You still have a choice. These are innocent people. Innocent, sick people.”

Fighting the infected out in the street was one thing. Murdering sick people in their beds in cold blood was something else. Sick civilians.

“We have our orders.”

“Shit orders,” a tall, wiry Black soldier said.

Ramos wheeled. “What did you just say, Private?”

The Black soldier nodded at Braddock. “He’s right, Sergeant.” He pronounced it Sarrunt, making it sound deferential and defiant at the same time. “We don’t have to do it.”

Braddock said nothing. He’d learned when to talk and when to shut up.

“This is bullshit,” added another soldier with a handsome, boyish face. He looked like he’d be more at home surfing some wave in California than sweating here in a combat uniform. “It’s just us, with the ammo we got, and we have to waste the whole hospital? There are thousands of people here. Where’s the rest of the company?”

“We lost our commo,” said the Black soldier. “Maybe the operation was scrubbed.”

“Maybe the rest of the company is fucking dead,” said the surfer.

A third soldier, sporting a stained bandage on his left cheek, pointed at the bodies in the beds. “You’ve seen what these people do. They killed our guys. They’re not even people. I say, kill them all.”

“Best to put them out of their misery now before they wake up, and we have to fight them on the streets,” agreed a fourth soldier. “We should put down as many as we can.”

The group was split down the middle. The sergeant was the tie-breaker.

“It’s not up for a vote,” Ramos said. He lowered his shotgun and fired a round at the middle-aged man lying in front of him.

Blood and brains sprayed across the floor. Some flew onto the legs of Braddock’s scrubs. The sound flattened his eardrums. His ears rang in the aftermath.

The soldier with the bandaged face grinned, revealing two missing front teeth. “Hooah, Sergeant.”

Ramos’s casual execution of one of the infected, which was supposed to demonstrate simplicity and resolve, backfired. The rest of the soldiers paled at the sight.

Braddock backed away in horror. One of the patients on the floor tried to take a bite out of his leg, forcing him to take another step back. The woman’s jaws clamped shut with an audible click that made him shiver.

People didn’t just wake up alert after being yanked out of a chemically induced coma. But the Bug was tough. It always wanted to play.

“Fuck this,” the surfer dude said.

“We’ve all done it,” the man with the bandaged face told him. “Lots of times.”

“Not like this. Not while they’re sleeping. They look like people.”

Braddock flinched at the sound of gunfire coming from a higher floor. No flurry—the shots were methodical. Executions. They were going to kill everybody in the hospital. The debate was pointless. The soldiers had orders. The ability of the Army to function at all depended on following orders, the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.

“The rest of the platoon is already in action,” Ramos said. “We’re doing this. Now.”

Braddock felt something inside him burst, releasing energy that threatened to go in a direction he couldn’t control and might very well get him killed. He’d worked too hard to keep those people alive to see them hamstrung and slaughtered like livestock. There was still hope. Modern medicine could cure the virus. They just needed a little more time. The world owed them a little more time.

He disconnected Ellen White’s intravenous feeding tube and restraints. He picked her up in his arms. She seemed to weigh nothing. She sucked her thumb like a child. She believed in him. He owed her his life.

“Come on, Chief,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

The sergeant said: “Sir? Sir! What the fuck are you doing?”

White’s eyes flashed open, bright and intelligent. Braddock looked at her and didn’t see the Bug. He saw the Chief of Medicine. She reached up to touch his face with trembling hands. She whimpered.

“Sir!” the sergeant roared. He raised his weapon, a monstrous shotgun.

“Ellen,” Braddock said. “It’s John. I’m here.”

She was still in there. Pleading.

The treatment. It works.

She was getting better, and the sergeant was going to kill them both.

Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t. Shoot.

“Put her down and step back! Now!”

Braddock had no choice. He was going to have to do as they asked. He kissed her on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Ellen.”

She plunged her thumbs into his eyes.

He screamed and gripped her wrists. His vision roared in mottled shades of dark and light. Searing pain stabbed through his skull. He flung her away.

Then it stopped.

He wasn’t screaming anymore.

He was laughing.

It was hilarious.

THE RETREAT

FIVE.

Fight or flight. Private First Class Scott Wade wanted to run.

Then his training took over.

He raised his M4 carbine and fired a single burst. The doctor howled with animal glee as the bullets stitched his chest and flung him against the wall in a spray of blood.

The big man sprawled, twitching and smoking. He drew a rattling breath, giggled and died.

The old woman struggled to a sitting position. She started to crawl laughing toward Wade. “Cut off your balls—”

Wade blew her away too, painting the wall with her brains.

He was following orders, completing the mission. But it was more than that.

Fucking monsters.

The excited plague victims squirmed against their restraints like giant larvae. Methodical gunshots came from the floor above and the floor below.

He saw red.

Ramos lowered his shotgun. “Nice work. Now let’s—”

Wade leveled his carbine and lit up the patients. The rest of the squad joined in. They ripped the infected to shreds. Mattress stuffing filled the air.

Wade screamed as he drained his magazine.

Then fell to his knees, retching.

From the stress, the heat, the exhaustion, the shock, all of it.

SIX.

Wade had loved to play Army as a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin. His parents didn’t let him play with toy guns, so he and his friends used sticks. His younger sister, Beth, preferred dolls and tea parties, but she sometimes joined in so she could be near him.

To him and his friends, war was wondrous play. The bad guys went down in a hail of gunfire. Sometimes, a good guy died, a noble sacrifice played out with plenty of drama.

At the end, they all went home happy and tired. They’d faced danger and fought through it. They’d looked death in the eye and walked away.

Wade would later look back on those summers as the best times in his life.

In high school, he became interested in sports and girls. He smoked a little dope and drank when he thought he could get away with it. He spent a lot of time hanging out in a bank parking lot with his friends. He had a lot of fun but had a sense of doing time until the rest of his life started.

Soldiers were leaving Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan. He wasn’t interested in war anymore because he had come to understand it as a horrifying thing. Once you died, you stayed dead. But the instincts of his childhood remained.

His high school years were winding down. He saw his whole privileged future laid out for him: college, high-paying job, marriage, house, kids, retirement, death. In many ways, he felt like an overgrown boy. There was no rite of passage for his generation. He wanted to challenge himself before catching that train. Soon, Wade would get to make his own choices. The right challenge, he knew, would make him a man.

He decided to join the Army. He expected his anti-war parents to try to talk him out of it, but they were proud of him. Even Beth, who’d long ago given up worshipping her brother, hugged him during their tearful farewell and later wrote him once a week. Those letters became his lifeline to the real world during his training and deployment.

After Basic Training, he was classified 11-B. Infantry. He ended up in the Tenth Mountain Division. His combat patch displayed two crossed swords suggesting the Roman numeral X. The Mountaineers. Lightfighters. Climb to Glory.

Wade got more than he bargained for in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

His platoon lived in a tiny outpost on an exposed mountainside. He froze in the winter and suffered in the summer. During the fighting season, Taliban fighters arrived from Pakistan and lobbed mortar rounds at them. They dropped bursts of plunging machine gun fire before disappearing over the ridges. They rigged improvised explosives on the roads. They ambushed the Americans from trees and rocks.

There was no glory in it. The weird thing was that he enjoyed combat far more than he thought he would. It was a rush, the most exciting thing in the world. As long as everybody in his unit made it out the other end of a firefight alive, combat was even exalting. He lived more in those intense flashes of fighting than in all the rest of his nineteen years put together.

And he found something else in war.

Love.

He loved the guys he fought with. They could be hilarious and sullen, wise and ignorant, fun and grating. The Army had all kinds. Sometimes, he couldn’t stand looking at them. But he loved them enough to die for them. He knew they’d do the same for him without hesitation.

When he fought, it was for them. The worst thing that could happen out in the shit wasn’t that he died. It was letting his comrades down and getting one of them killed.

This responsibility had kept him going after carrying seventy pounds of weapons and gear across miles of mountainous terrain. Made him stay sharp while functioning on little sleep for weeks at a stretch. Kept him fighting when the ground around him exploded during an ambush.

It was why he double checked his bootlaces before leaving the wire, carefully stripped and oiled his gun, performed every single mind-numbing equipment check. He gulped water to stay hydrated and watched every single step so he didn’t break silence.

Because if he made one little mistake, people got killed, and it would be on him. They depended on each other more than they did God.

The mission sucked. Afghanistan sucked. But still, he felt that he was making a difference there, that he was doing something good.

That was all he wanted: to be tested, to prove himself and to make a difference.

As his tour of duty in Afghanistan came to an end, Wade started to recognize the price he would have to pay. It would be hard as hell to assimilate into his old life. He would finally have to process the trauma he’d experienced. He would suffer withdrawal from the adrenaline of combat. He would despair over leaving the rest of the guys on that mountain to fight without him.

War brought out the worst in man but also the best.

Then Tenth Mountain flew home to a different kind of war.

SEVEN.

Soon after deployment in Boston, Wade called his parents to make sure they were okay.

His sister answered.

Beth told him all the things she’d done to Mom and Dad. She told him what she wanted to do to him.

He listened to all of it. He just wanted to hear her voice. By the end, he was so numb he could barely speak.

The last thing he said was that he loved her. That it wasn’t her fault. That he forgave her.

She responded with hysterical laughter. Laughter so hard he could hear her wheezing. That was when he knew the sister he loved was still in there, a prisoner of the madness.

The infected laughed when they inflicted pain.

They also laughed when they experienced it.

Wade still kept a photo of her in his helmet. He looked at it so he could remember who she was, and didn’t have to think about her smashing in their parents’ heads with one of Dad’s golf clubs.

He hated the infected. He hated them for turning her into one of them.

He shot the people in the hospital because, at that moment, he wanted to kill anything not wearing a uniform.

EIGHT.

The hospital. The quarantine ward, now a slaughterhouse.

Wade admitted a primitive satisfaction in putting down the people that the soldiers of Bravo Company were calling Klowns, short for Killer Clowns. The crazies were so terrifying that every kill flooded him with warm cathartic relief. But then remorse came quick and hard.

He was fighting unarmed crazy people in an insane war. Every time he survived combat, he didn’t feel alive. He felt as if he were dying a little. Soon, there’d be nothing left of him but a ghost. A killing machine.

Ramos clapped him on the shoulder. “On your feet, Wade.”

As usual, there was no time for thinking, feeling, any of it.

Still, nobody moved, eyeing their grisly handiwork with dawning awareness. It had taken seconds to lose control, for the operation to turn into a massacre.

Which was more terrifying than anything. What they’d just done wasn’t about following orders. They’d completely lost it, and they knew it.

They were soldiers. Soldiers couldn’t make mistakes, but men did.

Day to day, it was becoming less about the job and the mission, and more about survival, simply staying alive.

Then even that shock wore off.

Wade hauled himself to his feet and raised his tactical goggles, which had fogged from the humidity. He detached his magazine. Empty. He slapped a new magazine into his carbine and put a round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded. Ready to kill again.

“Well, that’s one room done,” Eraserhead said with a grin that showed his missing teeth.

“Hurray,” Williams said with obvious sarcasm. “Only a hundred to go.”

“They don’t expect us to do all of them, do they?” Ford asked.

Ramos’s squad had two fireteams: Alpha, which was Wade’s, and Bravo, which had stayed outside in the hospital parking lot with the Humvees, providing exterior security for the operation. Wade still sometimes viewed his comrades in Alpha with the social lens he’d developed over his high school years. Williams, tall and wiry, was the squad’s nerd. The only Black man in the platoon, he was a brainy kid who’d grown up in poverty in Detroit and joined the Army to gain marketable skills. The guys ribbed him for reading the articles in Playboy and called him Doctor Mist.

Ford was the jock. He was good looking enough to be an actor but was mystified by women. He constantly read books on how to seduce them. He looked at Wade as some kind of Casanova because Wade had had a steady girlfriend in high school.

And Billy Cook, the giant kid the guys called Eraserhead, was the oddball. He had crazy eyes. He said weird things, out of the blue, even during a firefight. He was built like a refrigerator. He was also the only man in the squad besides Ramos who wasn’t on psychiatric meds, who didn’t take sleeping pills to keep from jolting awake in the middle of the night at the sound of imaginary laughter.

Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”

“What about them?”

“We should evacuate them. Get them out.”

“The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”

Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.

“Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.

Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”

The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?

He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.

“It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”

“It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”

“Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”

Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”

“Bullshit,” Williams said.

“Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.

“Naked?” Williams qualified.

“It’d be worth it,” said Eraserhead. “Either way.”

The boys chuckled, careful not to laugh too loud or too hard. They passed around a can of dip.

Wade shook his head. “What’s next, Sergeant?”

“We clear the next—”

They heard a burst of laughter out in the hallway.

The fireteam bristled. They glanced at the door before settling their eyes on the hulking Ramos and his Sledgehammer, the devastating AA-12 combat shotgun. The sergeant flashed them the hand signal to prepare for action.

Wade eyed the other members of his fireteam. Nobody did anything without the others knowing about it. Nobody moved unless somebody stayed behind, scanning for threats.

More laughter came, followed by the electrifying sound of a woman screaming.

Wade guessed the staff had heard the shooting and were trying to save the patients just as the doctor had. Saving them meant disconnecting them from the barbiturate cocktail flowing into their veins.

The Klowns were waking up.

“Get ready to move,” Ramos said. “If it’s laughing, kill it.”

The boys hustled into position. They had no doubts now about what they had to do.

Kill them all or die.

NINE.

In the crowded trailer he was using as his headquarters, Lt. Colonel Joseph Prince studied the big electronic map and dry swallowed an Advil.

Little blue icons displayed First Battalion’s sprawling deployment around the Greater Boston area. A large blue icon indicated his headquarters at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, home to the 66th Air Base Group before it had been relocated.

Yellow icons showed live fire incidents—units in contact. There were a lot of those, more and more every day. Some never stopped being in contact. As for red icons indicating opposition forces, there were none. The enemy was everywhere. The enemy is us, as Pogo once said. The enemy included his wife and son, infected and running amok until they’d been shot down in the street like dogs.

He knocked back a second Advil and tried not to think about that.

The colonel didn’t need the big board to tell him he was losing a war against his own country. He’d made rank by following orders. He never bitched. He always took the fight to the enemy. “Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution” was his motto.

Prince wasn’t very imaginative, but he was reliable, and he usually got results. He was used to having the kind of firepower that could flatten anything that got in his way.

The current conflict defied the imagination. The enemy was American citizens, the mission objectives vague, the rules of engagement contradictory. His lightfighters had taken twenty percent losses in continuous operations, while each afternoon, the colonel met with civilian lawyers to review every after-action report and decision that affected American lives and property. He could just imagine their faces when he told them the order had come down from Regimental HQ to terminate the infected in the quarantine hospitals.

Prince was used to freedom of action with massive amounts of power. Now he felt like a spider caught in its own web.

Video monitors next to the big board rolled horrific images transmitted by aerial drones, blimps and long-range cameras. Exhausted staffers sitting in front of flat screens and stacked radios managed operations and talked to units in the field. Foam cups, water bottles and mission binders cluttered the desktops. Dead cans of Red Bull filled the trash bins. The room smelled like nervous sweat and stale coffee.

CNN was broadcasting video of an office high-rise. A massive fireball bloomed from the side of the tower. Then another. Glass and debris rained onto the streets.

Prince recognized the landscape and its scars: Boston’s Financial District.

TEN.

Gunfire rattled. Wade felt the muffled thuds in his feet. First Squad was in action downstairs. Outside in the hall, the screaming stopped. Then it started again.

“Fix bayonets,” Ramos said quietly.

In Afghanistan, Wade hadn’t used his bayonet once. But they weren’t in Afghanistan. This was a different enemy. This enemy didn’t stop until their hands were on you or they were dead.

He gripped his carbine, weapon shouldered and pointed at the floor. The fireteam glared fiercely at Ramos, waiting for the order to step off. They wanted to move, shoot something. Get it over with. Thousands of people slept inside the hospital. If they all woke up, the squad’s only hope of survival was to rush and shoot their way to the Humvees.

Then call in an airstrike.

Ramos keyed his headset microphone to contact Lieutenant Harris, who led the team on the floor above. “Antidote Six, this is Antidote Two-Two. How copy, over?”

“Antidote Two-Two, this is Antidote Six. We have heavy contact. The hospital is compromised. Repeat. The hospital is—”

A long, sustained explosion of gunfire drowned out the rest. The soldiers glanced upward. The Klowns were on every floor, it seemed.

“Bad copy, Antidote Six. ‘Hospital compromised’ is received. Request orders. Over.”

Ramos waited for Harris’s response and got more thunder instead.

“Antidote Six, Antidote Six, this is Antidote Two-One. Over.” The sergeant leading First Squad was trying to cut in, his voice professional but edged with panic. “Antidote Six, how copy?”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Williams said.

This is getting seriously bad, Wade thought. “We’ve got to move, Sergeant.”

“And I have to find out if we’re bugging out or sticking with the original OPORD. So shut it.” Ramos repeated his request for orders into his headset.

Wade exchanged a glance with Ford. Does the LT think we’re still good to go for this shit mission? An understrength platoon against thousands of homicidal maniacs? They had to get out. Every second they delayed sealed their fate. Where the hell’s the rest of Bravo Company?

“We’ll be out of this in no time,” Ford said. “Back at the FOB for a hot and a cot.”

Wade nodded, though he didn’t believe a word of it.

A massive boom shook the building. Acoustic tiles fell from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Somebody upstairs had thrown a grenade. The screaming in the hall died, replaced by waves of howling laughter.

Wade took a deep breath and felt sudden calm wash over him. His pulse slowed, and he became intensely aware of his surroundings.

Ramos was a seasoned non-com, one of the Army’s centurions. He knew what he was doing. Wade trusted him to get them out. Otherwise, it was out of Wade’s hands. He would fight for himself and his comrades. Either he would die, or he wouldn’t.

Ramos shook his head. “All right, we’re going to—”

“All Antidote Ops, retrograde to the Humvees. Abort operation. Antidote Six, out.”

“Antidote Six, Antidote Two-Two. That’s a solid copy. Out.” The sergeant loaded a round into his shotgun’s firing chamber. “Listen up. We’re getting out of here. Hard and fast.”

“I was scheduled to go on leave two days ago,” Eraserhead muttered.

“We know, we know,” Williams said.

“I should be in a bar somewhere, getting so drunk I piss myself.”

“We know,” Williams repeated.

Another grenade went off upstairs. The lights blinked several times.

“At least you’ll still get the chance to piss yourself,” Williams added.

Downstairs, the gunfire stopped. The lack of sound was even more alarming than the grenades.

“Step off in three, two, one,” Ramos said.

“See you on the other side,” Eraserhead told them.

Wade tensed, ready to kill.

It wasn’t murder anymore. It was survival.

Ford opened the door.

ELEVEN.

Lt. Colonel Prince watched the landmark office tower get bombed on live television. It was mesmerizing in its way. Not the violence, but the fact nobody was doing a damned thing about it.

That alone told him everything he needed to know about the current situation.

Another section of the building vomited fire, smoke and glass. The camera shook. Prince recognized the building. The Federal Reserve Bank. At the bottom of the screen, triple captions scrolled public service announcements and propaganda. In the upper right: LIVE.

The United States Army had an operations manual for everything. Prince liked to say, “There’s an op for that.”

There was no op for what he was seeing. Whoever was doing the shooting was military.

“Major Walker,” he barked.

The major signed a clipboard and returned it to a staff sergeant manning the radios. He approached wearing a slight smile Prince wanted to punch off his face.

“Colonel?”

“Something amuse you, Major?”

“No, sir. Just trying to be positive in front of the men, sir.”

Walker was hiding something. Prince had never liked his executive officer. The man was a politician, a cold snake, and he sucked as a soldier. Walker was nothing more than a desk warrior. But he was a wizard at getting things done.

The colonel let it pass. He found he really didn’t care what Walker might be hiding behind that creepy little smile of his. “How’s the operation coming along?”

“Which operation, sir?”

“Mercy.” That was the name the Brass had given the operation to terminate the infected in the major quarantine hospitals. It involved three companies, most of their fighting strength.

“Forces are en route.”

“Outstanding. What about the Governor?”

“We’re still talking to his people.”

Colonel Armstrong, commander of the 55th Infantry Regiment—the “Double Nickel”—and Prince’s boss, had issued another critical operational order, or OPORD. His boys were to round up the governor of Massachusetts and other senior civilian officials and put them in a safe place, per the Federal Continuity of Government plan.

“Talk faster. Get it done. Understand?”

The major’s tall, slim body stiffened into a respectful stance. “Yes, sir.”

On CNN, another round hit the Federal Reserve Bank. Prince flinched as if he were there. The building was burning in a dozen places, pumping black smoke into the air.

According to the Army, after two to four days of little rest, an extended sleep is needed—twelve to fourteen hours. The colonel had barely slept in over a month. Exhaustion on this level was like being drunk. Leaders made mistakes when they were this tired. He needed to stay sharp.

He dry swallowed another Advil and tried not to think about that. The muscles in his face were numb. His head pounded in time with his steady heartbeat, threatening a blinding migraine.

Prince had often marveled at how much power he held commanding a light infantry battalion. Eight hundred men. Tenth Mountain. Climb to Glory. The best infantry in the world.

They were First Battalion, part of the 55th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Brigade Combat Team, Tenth Mountain Division, XVIII Airborne Corps. Six companies—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo (an attached forward support company providing logistics), and HQ (call sign, The Wizard). These forces were supplemented by the Tomcats, an attack aviation battalion; the Trailblazers, a scout platoon; Thunder, a mortar platoon; and Nightingale, a medic platoon.

When Colonel Armstrong, call sign Big Brother, had contacted Prince and explained that the Army had been called into action, Prince had responded like a dog freed from its leash.

He thought it would take days. Weeks rolled by. The division was soon spread all over New England, getting chewed up by real estate agents and housewives turned into laughing sadists and suicide bombers.

They hadn’t cleaned up the mess. They’d become part of it.

When Big Brother reached out to him, he’d had a choice. He could have gone home and protected Susan and Frankie. If he had, they wouldn’t have caught the Bug, and they wouldn’t have been shot down in the street like rabid dogs. Prince had thought he could do more for them where he was, helping to maintain order and halt the spread of infection. Over the past two months, he’d accomplished little more than slowing the tide, and even that was questionable.

The massive, constant headache he suffered had started right after he realized that.

Walker eyed him with open concern. “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Affirmative.” Prince pointed at the video image of the blazing office tower, which was still taking hits. “That’s Boston. And that’s heavy ordnance. On live television. Who the hell is doing the shooting, and why is nobody putting a stop to it?”

Walker said nothing.

“Get me some answers.”

“Right away, sir.” Walker’s enigmatic smile returned as he gave the video monitor a final lingering glance. “The apocalypse will be televised.”

TWELVE.

Ramos raised his Sledgehammer as he cleared the doorway. Wade followed, pointing his carbine the other way. Eraserhead with the SAW, the squad automatic weapon, was next, followed by Williams with his M4/203.

Grinning Klowns filled the corridor. Several stomped on the half-stripped, mangled body of a nurse lying on the floor. Others watched and roared with laughter, hands on their hips or gripping their stomachs. The nurse was laughing too.

When the infected noticed the soldiers pointing guns at them, they cheered and shrieked with glee as if the guests had finally arrived at their surprise party. Once again, Wade was disturbed by their faces. They looked like clowns with their wide glassy eyes and crazy leers.

One stumbled close to Ramos and giggled. Ramos cut him in half with a blast of buckshot.

As if they’d been waiting for a signal, the crazies charged.

Wade sighted center mass on a woman and fired a burst. The recoil hummed against his shoulder. She went down. Another took her place. Another. And another.

Spent shell casings flew from the carbine’s eject port and clattered to the floor. The metallic crack of the carbines and the roar of the sergeant’s shotgun pounded his ears.

Eraserhead got the SAW into position and fired controlled bursts. The mob disintegrated, bodies blowing apart under the withering fire. Tracer rounds streamed down the hallway.

Wade gasped. The scene was like something out of a movie.

And more kept coming.

“Reloading!” Wade pocketed an empty magazine and slapped a new one into his carbine. He pulled the charging bolt, aimed and fired.

Behind him, the Sledgehammer boomed. The infected were coming at them from the other end of the corridor.

Combat was typically unpredictable, but Wade knew their survival here was a matter of simple mathematics. Either they had enough bullets, or they didn’t. Even if they did, if there were too many infected, their guns would eventually overheat and start jamming.

That was how military units got overrun by crowds of infected: human wave attacks against small groups of soldiers who fired until their weapons jammed. Klowns didn’t take prisoners. They either killed you or made you one of them.

Wade fired. A bald man’s head erupted in a geyser of brains and blood.

“Nice shot,” Eraserhead said. “I knew you had it in you.”

“Go to hell,” Wade told him.

The SAW was rocking now, firing nine hundred rounds per minute, every fifth a blurred tracer that pulsed strobing red light. Eraserhead was grinning. “Time for some payback.”

A severed hand trailing a long rag of flesh and tissue slapped against Wade’s chest and flopped to the floor. The Klowns were throwing body parts at them.

Williams dropped an empty magazine from his carbine. “Reloading!”

Wade glanced at the hand lying on the floor. He laughed. He couldn’t stop himself. It just rolled out of him. He wasn’t infected. The whole situation was insane. He’d survived a year of combat against the Taliban, and he was going to die fighting a mob of murderous maniacs throwing arms and legs at him. He had to either laugh or scream.

But laughing was a good way to get himself killed. He half expected his comrades to train their weapons on him. Instead, Eraserhead started chuckling.

Then they were all laughing at the infected as they killed them by the dozens.

Laughter really was contagious.

The crowd was thinning. The soldiers kept the fire hot. Eraserhead put down the last of them with a few bursts. The squad ceased fire.

Wade raised his goggles, which had fogged again. The hallway was shrouded in a thick, smoky haze. Broken, bleeding bodies lay in piles in their shredded hospital gowns. The sight should have sickened him, but he could only stare in morbid fascination. He knew he shouldn’t look at all. He knew the tableau would haunt his nightmares the rest of his life.

Ramos tapped his shoulder. “Get ready to move!”

Wade blinked, surprised he was still alive. “Roger that, Sergeant.”

They reloaded. They’d burned through most of their ammunition, and they were going to have to get out of the hospital quickly.

Eraserhead opened the SAW’s feed tray, laid in a new ammo belt and slammed the tray shut. He yanked the charging bolt. “Good to go.”

Wade heard muffled reports. The gunfire on the floor below them was barely audible over the loud ringing in his ears. No sounds filtered from above.

Ramos tapped his headset. “I can’t get the LT on the radio. We’re going up.”

Nobody protested. Leave no man behind. It wasn’t just a noble idea; it motivated them to face danger, knowing their comrades would come for them.

They’d have to move fast. The building was filling up with crazies awake and dying to play.

The fireteam chased after Ramos. They flung open the stairwell door and sprinted up the stairs, gasping under the weight of gear and armor.

They banged onto the sixth floor, weapons at the ready.

Nothing. They bounded down the hall. Two men covered while the others moved.

The walls were painted in blood.

“Jesus Christ,” Ford said.

Grimacing bodies and spent brass covered the floor. Some of the bodies wore uniforms and clutched broken weapons. One soldier, his back against a wall, still held the barrel of his rifle in his mouth. A section of wall smoldered, blown out by a grenade. Wade looked up at the ceiling. A bare leg protruded from a shattered acoustic tile next to a dangling fluorescent fixture. Gunsmoke hung in the air.

Ramos called a security halt. The men stopped and formed a circle, backs to the center, guns pointed outward.

“It’s like a slaughterhouse,” Ford said.

The soldiers here had died in hand-to-hand fighting. The mob had rolled over them and moved on. Wade recognized the faces of men he knew well: Eckhardt, Jones, Hernandez, Richardson, Lopez, Cox. He didn’t see Lieutenant Harris.

Despair washed over him. His mind flashed to mountain views and firefights, freezing together in cramped bunkers at Combat Outpost Katie, patrols carrying seventy pounds of gear. Endless hours of joking, hazing, rough sports and petty squabbling.

Wade looked at his squad and knew they were remembering the same things.

“Those motherfuckers,” Eraserhead hissed.

“Our guys gave better than they got,” Wade said.

Eraserhead spit on a corpse. “How does that make it right?”

Ramos nodded. “Honorable deaths.”

Wade remembered that last horrible night at Katie, when they all almost died. These men had looked the tiger in the eye that night only to fly home to America and get ripped apart by a swarm of crazy people.

Then he pushed his feelings aside. They were still under the hammer, and they all had to stay focused if they wanted to avoid the same fate. The men raised their goggles.

Williams pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I’ll get their tags.”

Wade heard a sound and froze. Then, he heard it again—a moan.

The men readied their weapons.

“Let’s get out of here, Sergeant,” Wade said.

Ramos shook his head. They had to check for survivors.

The sergeant raised his shotgun as a soldier stumbled out of one of the patient rooms. Wade gasped. Lieutenant Harris, pale from loss of blood, had one hand shoved down his pants. His crotch was covered with a massive red stain.

Ramos lowered his gun. “It’s all good, LT. We’ll get you out of here.”

Ford looked as if he might cry. “What did they do to him?”

Wade knew. They all knew.

Eraserhead opened his medical kit. “I got this.”

Harris pulled his hand out of his pants and flung a spray of blood.

The soldiers lurched away sputtering. Harris roared with laughter and stuffed his hand down his pants again. “Hey! You want some more of the good stuff?”

Ramos shot the man in the face. He growled and spat.

Wade touched his cheek. Blood on his gloves.

Infected blood.

He raised his weapon at the same time as the others.

THIRTEEN.

The office tower was going down. Most of it, anyway. A giant piece wrenched clear and slid off in a biblical cloud of smoke and dust.

Prince ground his teeth. For him, that building symbolized everything. America’s strength reduced to rubble. His own impotence to stop it. The plague was stripping away everything that gave him a sense of self worth: his family, his command, his country.

“What did you find out?” he barked at Walker.

“I had an RTO perform a quick radio check with our special weapons and air units,” the major reported. “I don’t think that’s us.”

Prince glared at the man, his chest burning. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“That’s not us, sir. It’s not our mortars or air units doing the shooting.”

“Are you an idiot, Major? Of course it’s not us. That’s heavy artillery. Battlefield howitzers. Not mortars. It’s the National Guard. A unit from the 101st Field Artillery. I would expect even you to recognize the difference.”

Walker reddened. “My bad, sir.”

The colonel growled. “I’ll do it myself.” He turned and yelled at the Massachusetts Army National Guard liaison, “Hey, McDonald! What is that?”

The young lieutenant blanched. He put down the magazine he was reading and stood at attention. “What is what, Colonel?”

Prince stabbed his finger at the screen. “Some of your people caught the Bug and just blew up an office building on live television! Do you think you might want to do something about it?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” The pale liaison turned to his radio and worked the dials.

“We’re supposed to be helping people,” Prince screamed at him, “not destroying their last fucking ounce of hope!”

Across the trailer, the support personnel hunched even lower over their workstations. Prince paced in front of the TV like a lion tired of its cage. He was sick of playing defense. He wanted to take the initiative on something, anything.

Military personnel were catching the Bug. It was bad enough soccer moms were running around hacking up their neighbors with meat cleavers. The average soldier was capable of killing large numbers of people. If America stopped believing the Army would protect them, it’d be every man for himself out there. Game over.

On the screen, a second building was being shelled, a large hotel. They were hitting it with high-explosive incendiaries—white phosphorous. Several floors were already engulfed in chemical fire, pumping out rolling clouds of dense white smoke.

Big Brother was going to have Prince’s head, but that no longer mattered. If there were people inside, they were being burned alive. He had to stop it.

Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. That was his motto, and it had served him well during twenty years of service to the people and the Constitution of the United States. Though conventional thought and flawless execution had gone out the window, he still had aggressive action as a card to play. He could at least do that.

He wanted to do something. Something real. Something with results. His exhausted, throbbing brain had stopped cooperating. It was time to make some decisions from the gut.

“What do we have that can take out those Nasty Girls?” Prince asked, using Army slang to describe the National Guard.

“Our air assets are all tied up,” Walker said.

“Untie them. Get me something that can fly and shoot.”

“Sir, are you saying we should engage a Massachusetts Army National Guard unit?”

“An infected unit. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Major. We’ll use the Apaches to track them by radar, confirm they’re infected, and destroy them.”

“Sir, I feel it’s my duty to point out we’re in a rather delicate situation with the Governor.”

Prince had never wanted to punch a man so badly in his life. “Delicate?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to protect the man and his family and ensure Massachusetts has a government next week. What’s so delicate about that?”

“He won’t come, sir. He’s still holed up at Logan International Airport, surrounded by state police and Guard. He’s running the government from there.”

“Did you tell him the President of the United States declared a state of emergency? That’s why we’re here helping him keep whatever he has left from washing away.”

“He says he declared martial law, Colonel.”

“Good! We’re all on the same page! So what’s the problem?”

“He just declared all Federal units on Massachusetts soil to be under state control. He says our command is now subordinate to Major General Brock.”

The news struck Prince speechless for a moment. The situation had just changed so dramatically it gave him a sense of vertigo.

Based at Camp Edward in Cape Cod, Major General Brock commanded the Massachusetts Army National Guard, eight thousand strong. Prince considered Brock a dependable soldier and a solid brother officer. National Guard units were scattered all over Boston, and they shared communications and even staged joint operations with Prince’s battalion.

After declaring a state of emergency, the President had nationalized all Guard units, putting them under Federal control. But with the new order, the Governor was putting Prince’s battalion under Brock.

Prince glanced across the tactical operations center at the National Guard liaison sitting in front of a radio and talking to his counterpart. “What’s Brock going to do?”

Walker shook his head and shrugged. “Hell of a time to secede, though.”

The last thing Prince wanted was a shooting war against an entire brigade of National Guard. His eight hundred lightfighters were no longer in any condition for that kind of fight. And the rest of Tenth Mountain was committed. There was no help available from the outside.

But he had his orders. That, and there was no way he was going to take orders from the Governor; his boss was the President of the United States. “Major, I want you to draw up a contingency operational plan for doing a snatch grab on the Governor. In and out and with no blood spilled. I want to know what kind of assets we have and what kind of assets he has. Last time I checked, Massachusetts was still one of the fifty states.”

“Are you sure that’s wise, sir?”

“I’m sure it’s an order, Major.”

“Roger that, sir.”

“Outstanding attitude. Get me eyes on that arty unit and on that airport. As in now.”

“I’ll get on it right away.”

“And pull Harry Lee out of the field. I need my S-2.” He regarded Walker with disdain. “He’s the only officer I’ve got with a clear head and a pair of balls.”

FOURTEEN.

Lathered in sweat. Eyes wild. Pulse pounding at a heart attack pace.

The soldiers screamed at each other to lower their guns.

They were making enough noise to bring the entire hospital down on their heads. Soon, the Klowns would come howling through the doors.

Wade scanned the faces. Nobody was infected. Yet.

He looked at the weapons. There was enough firepower to fill the air with metal in seconds. The sergeant’s combat shotgun was fixed on Williams’s chest. The Sledgehammer was loaded with twelve-gauge shells—high-velocity buckshot. On full auto, the gun fired five rounds per second, emptying its twenty-round drum in about four seconds and destroying anything in its path.

Wade remembered something Ramos had said to him in Afghanistan: The gun calls to be used. He lowered his carbine. “Okay, okay. Listen.”

The others ignored him.

“Come on, guys. Put them down.”

Rapid shotgun blasts caught Williams in the chest and threw him down the hall. Surprised, Wade fell backward and landed on a bloody pile of arms and legs.

Ford snapped two rounds into Eraserhead’s arm and shoulder then put another three in the ceiling. Eraserhead laughed as the impact spun him around.

Wade looked up into the Sledgehammer’s smoking barrel as Ramos took aim.

This is it. Oh fuck, this is it—

“BOOM!” the sergeant roared. Then he burst into laughter.

Ford swept his carbine toward Ramos.

The world exploded in a blinding flash of heat and light.

Grenade—

Ramos disappeared in the blast. Shrapnel ripped the walls apart. The concussion flung the bodies against the ceiling and dropped them like puzzle pieces. Wade was lifted and spun through the air. He landed hard on his side and curled into a fetal ball among the dead.

Bare feet splashed past, hairy legs. Infected looking to play.

He shut his eyes and didn’t move. His body hurt everywhere. If he had an open wound, even a cut, he was as good as dead.

Man down, he thought.

Wade sat up with a jolt. He reached for his carbine by reflex but couldn’t find it. He patted his body, checking for wounds. His armor had caught some shrapnel. He was going to have a lot of bruises, and his ears were still ringing at high volume, but he seemed to be okay.

Ramos lay a few feet away, his hands twitching and his armor pockmarked and smoking. Ford gasped from a ragged chest wound. Eraserhead was in even worse shape with one arm blown off.

Wade knew he should pinch off Eraserhead’s artery to keep him from bleeding out, lash a tourniquet around the upper part of the limb, and slap a Kerlix bandage onto the stump. He should stab Ford’s chest with an angiocatheter to release air and keep the man’s lungs from collapsing. Then get both of them a Medevac.

Wade didn’t move. The men were splattered in blood. Blood crawling with live virus.

He’d seen microscope images of the Bug in one of the endless PowerPoint presentations the Brass was always sending down to the front-line troops. The Bug looked like little worms that lived in bodily fluids, seeking out the brain and its fertile tissues, where it fed.

The men lying in that hallway were his friends. They were wounded.

I’m going to help.

He did nothing.

He would die for them. If given the chance, they would have died for him.

Still he did nothing.

Ramos pushed himself up onto one elbow and coughed blood onto the floor. Half his face grinned at Wade. The other half looked like hamburger burning on a grill.

Of all of them, Ramos had the biggest reason to walk away from all this. Go over the hill, go Elvis, desert. Boston was his hometown. The man’s sister lived not far from the Air Force facility the battalion was using as a forward operating base. She and her kid lived in constant fear with their furniture stacked against the front door of their apartment. The squad went out there regularly with Ramos to check on them and deliver groceries and water.

But Ramos had stayed. It wasn’t just that he was true blue Army, one of the gung-ho mo-fos. Wade knew the man believed that every time he put down one of the infected, Maria and little Thomas Flores were a bit safer.

The sergeant would never see his family again.

“Gonna make a hole.” Ramos held up his knife. “Make it wide.”

Wade looked around for a weapon but saw nothing that could help him.

Ramos struggled to his feet. He swayed, chuckling softly. His one good eye burned with hilarity and malice.

Wade remembered his last conversation with Beth. She’d been under the control of the Bug, but she was still in there. He could still reach her.

“Think about your family, Sergeant.”

Ramos doubled over choking with laughter. He vomited more blood.

“Thank about Maria. Think about Thomas.”

Ramos took off his helmet and dropped it among the dead. He ran his bloody hand across his crew cut and licked the edge of his knife. “I’m gonna make you one of us.”

FIFTEEN.

Captain Harry Lee had learned a lot during his tour of Boston. His Humvee had the bullet holes to prove it. The windshield had been cracked by an axe. The doors bore the scars of a run-in with a chainsaw.

He sat on the passenger side in front of a stack of radios, consulting a map that revealed the strategic situation at a glance. He used one of the radios to talk to base and the other to communicate with the escort vehicles. The map had an overlay of clear film, on which he’d drawn all known blue forces in the area with a wax pencil. Next to him, Staff Sergeant Michael Murphy, a large wad of dip tucked into his cheek, spit into a cup and kept his eyes on the road.

With his handsome face and square jaw, Captain Lee looked like a World War Two movie hero. One expected to see him charging a machine gun nest on a Pacific island in some grainy black-and-white film. The overall impression people got from him was fierce, though he rarely lost his cool. It was his eyes; when he became angry, his gray eyes bored right through you.

Two Humvees rolled in their wake, carrying a squad of handpicked shooters from HQ Company. These same guys had escorted Lee to endless parleys with village elders in Afghanistan and on more than a few field trips deep into the bush. At first, they’d bitched that he was always dragging them into the shit, but now they followed him around like a pack of loyal bloodhounds. They looked up to Lee as a father figure and imitated his cool. They would kill for him, and they would die for him. With that kind of devotion came a special kind of responsibility because for Lee, the mission always came first, and he would do anything to achieve it.

Lee was the battalion S-2, or intelligence officer. Intelligence assessment was critical to mission planning, but the situation was fluid, and he didn’t like what he’d been getting from the field. He’d toured the city in a helicopter and had seen hell below. Then he took three Humvees out into the field to see what was happening on the ground.

He’d seen, all right. He’d seen things he’d never forget. And he’d come to a disturbing realization, one that confirmed his suspicions—and worst fears—about what was happening.

Military and civilian authorities had lost control of Boston.

“A lot of cars ahead,” Foster called down from the Humvee’s cupola.

Lee saw them. The cars weren’t moving, which meant the Humvee would have to slow down and possibly stop. “Stay frosty.” He radioed the same message to his escorts.

“It’s a traffic jam,” Foster added. “No way through.”

Murphy already had a map spread across the steering wheel. “If we turn at this next intersection, it’ll take us right back to Massachusetts Avenue.”

That was a November Golf—a no go. The civilian population had lost faith in the military after the power failed and, in open defiance of the ongoing curfew, had tried to flee the city in anything that moved. A huge number of refugees had been caught out in the open; the infected must have thought it was Christmas. Most of the arteries leading out of the city had been turned into parking lots strewn with abandoned luggage and the unlucky dead.

“There’s always Garden Street,” Murphy added.

They were trying to reach the Harvard University campus. Several buildings there had been commandeered by Bravo Company as an operating base. Harvard was the last stop on Lee’s tour. Once he reached it and refueled, he’d be able to work his way onto Fresh Pond Parkway and take it to Concord Turnpike, routes that had been blocked off for military and emergency vehicle use. Those roads would get him and his boys most of the way back to Hanscom Airbase.

“Cut through the park,” Lee ordered. “Stick to the pedestrian paths.”

Murphy smirked. “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s funny, I still keep thinking this is America, and you can’t just drive a Humvee through a park without special permission.”

“Times have changed, Mike.”

Murphy turned the wheel. “Roger that.”

What started as a daytrip had turned into three, each marked by traffic jams and random attacks, with the attacks growing more frequent by the hour. The infection rate had become geometric; it wasn’t going to be long before the crazies outnumbered the rest of the population here. They already far outnumbered the military forces in the area. The only reason Boston hadn’t already become a complete madhouse was that, while the crazies enjoyed infecting their victims, they liked killing them even more.

The only answer was withdrawal. Give up Boston. Game over.

That, or extermination. Get some armor. Announce a curfew. Put Bradleys and Humvees on every street, Apaches in the air, and have them shoot everything in sight. Totally clean house.

The Colonel, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. It was against doctrine. The U.S. Army had given up the initiative early in the game. The infected had become the most dedicated, deadly enemy the Army had ever faced. But doctrine still regarded the crazies as sick civilians.

The civilian leadership and the Big Green Machine would realize what had to be done at some point, but by then, it would be too late, if it weren’t already. So instead of concentrating overwhelming force and doing what needed doing, the battalion remained dispersed in small formations, trying to maintain law and order while getting chewed up for it.

Imagine you deploy an army on a series of hills. From there, you command the region. Then a flood comes. The hills become islands, and your army commands nothing but the ground it’s standing on. And the waters keep rising…

The Humvees drove past trees from which a grisly collection of bodies hung by their necks. Men, women, children. In the distance, a group of laughing women roasted a flayed corpse on a spit over an open fire. One wore a helmet that once belonged to an infantryman.

They waved and flashed their breasts as the Humvees passed.

“Can I light them up?” Foster yelled, yanking the charging handle on his heavy machine gun.

“Don’t waste the ammo.”

“It’s time for some payback, Captain.”

Lee shook his head. With the Taliban, payback had meant something. Killing the infected for payback was like punching a shelf after you accidentally slammed your head against it. The shelf wouldn’t care, and you’d probably just hurt yourself.

Murphy growled, “Give it a rest, Foster. You’ll see more action soon enough. We need you to stay alert up there.”

“Wilco, Staff Sergeant.”

The little convoy drove the rest of the way through the park without incident.

“I got some family here,” Murphy said after a while. “Distant relatives.”

“I didn’t know,” Lee said.

The big staff sergeant shrugged.

“Are they okay? Have you heard anything?”

“No.”

“If they’re on our route, we could stop and check on them.” It was an offer Lee would not have made to anyone else.

“Right now, sir, I’m focused on getting back to Hanscom alive.” Murphy spit into his cup. “We weren’t close or anything, but I’d visit them from time to time. I liked coming here. You know, it used to be a really nice town.”

Lee knew he should say something earnest about it becoming a great city again once they completed their mission. The streets would be packed with people and traffic, and the Red Sox would play again at Fenway Park. But he couldn’t. He said nothing.

At that moment, he realized he’d lost faith in their ability to win this war.

Murphy sighed and nodded as if he’d read the captain’s mind. “Yeah.”

“We’re still here,” Lee said. “We won’t lose it all.”

It was more a vow than a prediction.

SIXTEEN.

Scott Wade knew he was going to die in this hospital.

He’d survived horrific battles against the Taliban over the past year. Only once had he truly been convinced he was going to be killed. After it became clear the Americans were pulling out to fight a new war, the Taliban, still fighting the old war, staged an all-out assault on Combat Outpost Katie. They wanted American bodies and weapons as trophies to show off. They could then claim they’d driven out the infidels.

In a night attack, the Taliban took out the gun placements in the tower with rocket-propelled grenades. Soviet-era heavy machine guns rattled along the ridges. The red sparks of tracer rounds blurred across the rocks. A stray rocket blew up the fuel truck and drenched the compound in fire. The ammo in a burning Humvee began to cook and pop at intervals.

The first two waves of fighters blew themselves up on the claymores. The rest raced to the walls. They threw grenades and emptied their AK-47s.

The platoon threw everything they had at them. The air filled with hot metal flying in all directions. After Guzman toppled with a smoking hole in his helmet, Wade took over his M240 machine gun and returned fire until the barrel got so hot it began to melt.

Apache gunships approached but didn’t engage, the soldiers afraid of killing American troops. Outpost Katie replied if the helicopters didn’t start dropping ordnance, they were going to be overrun. The Apaches opened up with their chain guns. After this pounding, the guerillas melted away into the mountains while the gunships pursued like angry wasps and mopped up the stragglers.

Wade had been wounded in three places on his left arm. Bravo Company’s medic performed some quick field surgery and told him he didn’t rate a medevac. The next day, the company struck its colors and drove down to Kabul, which was in chaos due to the plague, then flew out of the Sandbox to Vicenza, Italy. Then to Fort Drum in New York State. Then to Boston.

To Christ Hospital, where, ironically, he was going to die.

As far as he knew, most of his platoon had already been wiped out. He didn’t have a weapon. Pain lanced through his ankle. His left leg could barely take his weight. His right trembled with exhaustion. He was on the fifth floor of a large building filled with thousands of homicidal maniacs. And one of the best soldiers he’d ever known wanted to stab him to death.

Ramos lurched over the corpses. Wade wondered what was holding the man together. Half his face was gone. He moved jerkily, like a puppet.

Wade limped down the corridor and pushed the stairwell door open. He looked down and heard echoing sounds of struggle. Stomping feet. Shouts. Laughter. From outside, he could hear the hammering of the fifty-cal machine guns mounted on the Humvees.

Nowhere to go but up.

He grit his teeth and pulled his body up the stairs one step at a time.

Behind him, the door slammed open.

“An Army of one, motherfucker!”

Wade kept climbing. He finally came to a roof exit and prayed it was unlocked.

The door opened with a squeak of the hinges. He cried with relief and stepped outside.

Bright sunshine washed over him. The light flickered as a squadron of Apache gunships roared past, bristling with their low-slung chain guns. They weren’t part of his mission. He had no way to contact them.

Wade paused to catch his breath. The view struck him. Parts of Boston were on fire. He smelled smoke. The ever-present sirens had fallen silent, replaced by a distant chorus of screams and laughter. The epidemic had reached some tipping point. After weeks of endless struggle, the military had finally lost control.

Behind him, the door banged open. Ramos staggered from the dark opening as relentless as the Terminator. He laughed with red teeth. He still held his pig-sticker. “Get some.”

Wade backed away until he reached the edge of the roof. Far below, he saw the fifty-cals rocking on the Humvees. The gunners stood hunched behind the heavy machine guns, blasting away at the hospital entrance.

He had nowhere to go. He was going to have to fight. That, or jump to his death.

Then he spotted a maintenance ladder. He hoped it ran down the length of the building. It was a chance he had to take.

The pain in his foot nearly blinded him when he tried to move again. Ramos laughed, terrifyingly close. Wade didn’t look behind. Instead, he doubled his pace, crying out in pain. He gripped the ladder rails and began to climb down, favoring his right foot.

The ladder reached all the way to the ground. At the halfway point, Wade looked up and saw his sergeant’s grimacing face at the top. He resumed his downward climb. The sergeant wasn’t following. Wade knew he was going to make it.

His body tingled as the shadow fell over him. He heard rags of clothing flapping in the wind. Something was coming at him—fast.

It was Ramos. Wade hugged the ladder as the sergeant flew past. He cried out as searing pain ripped across his face.

Ramos kept falling, laughing all the way, until his body smashed against the asphalt.

Wade pulled off his glove and touched his cheek. His fingers came away red. He was wounded. His entire face hurt like a son of a bitch. Blood poured down his neck. Ramos had jumped and sliced him on the way down, cutting Wade’s cheek wide open.

Wade remembered seeing him lick the knife. I’ve got the Bug! His mind blanked out with fear. He counted the seconds.

Nothing happened.

I’m okay. I’m okay. Please let me be okay.

He knew the surviving members of the platoon would be frantically trying to contact Lieutenant Harris. The idea that they might give up and bug out, leaving him there, terrified him even more than the possibility of infection.

He hurried the rest of the way down and limped toward the vehicles, waving his arms. Halfway there, he collapsed with a groan.

A figure knelt next to him. A panicked face came into focus. Corporal McIsaac.

“Fuck, it’s Wade.”

“Goddamn. Look at him.”

“Help me get him into the Humvee.”

Wade heard the metallic crack of an M4.

“Move it! I’ll cover forward!”

Wade glimpsed a horde of gleeful men and women—naked or dressed in the rags of hospital gowns—pouring out of the entrance of the hospital. They waved and clapped as the fifties tore them apart.

He grimaced as somebody squirted antiseptic onto—

—the Bug—

—his wound and slapped a bandage onto it.

“What do you see?” Wade croaked. Worms? Little crawling worms?

McIsaac patted his chest. “It’ll need stitches.”

Hands lifted him. The sun burned into his eyes as he was half carried, half dragged across the parking lot and shoved into one of the vehicles. He couldn’t stop crying.

“Let’s move!”

“Jaworski! Mount up!”

The Humvee lurched forward. The gunner stood next to Wade, his head and shoulders above the roof so he could work the machine gun. Empty shell casings rained into the vehicle and rattled across the roof. Wade heard the whump of a Mark 19 on another Humvee as it spit grenades into the hospital emergency room. Glass sprayed across the parking lot.

The hospital entrance was obscured by smoke and dust. The lightfighters cheered.

“We’re out of here!”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Hang in there, Wade. You’re okay now.”

“What happened?” the driver yelled. “Where’s the rest of your team?”

“They’re all dead.”

“What? Are we going back?”

Wade shook his head. He felt dizzy. “They’re all dead.”

“What are the Tomcats doing here?”

“Do they see us?”

Wade glanced out the window in time to see the squadron of Apaches launch batteries of Hellfire missiles from their stub-wing pylons.

“Holy shit! Go, go, go!”

Guided by advanced radar systems, the Hellfires rocketed into the hospital with an aerosol roar and burst with a flash.

The ground trembled under the rig’s wheels. Wade felt the air around him suck toward the blast. Brilliant white light washed out his vision. His ears filled with terrifying booms. The sensation was like getting struck by lightning.

The gunner dropped into the vehicle. “Just go, just go, just go!”

They were too close to the blast. Debris rained around the Humvees.

“Just—”

Something big struck the vehicle with a CLANG. The windshield cobwebbed. The vehicle rocked and swerved. Hot oil sprayed from the crumpled hood. The engine howled. The driver fought for control. The gunner screamed.

Wade was flung into darkness.

SEVENTEEN.

Harvard University was comprised of numerous old buildings situated on a two-hundred-acre campus in Cambridge, just three and a half miles northwest of downtown Boston. Before the Bug, the institution of higher learning had been one of the most prestigious in the world. School was currently out of session. Possibly forever.

Harvard had become home to elements of Bravo Company. They occupied a cluster of buildings in the northwest corner of campus, protected from the street by an iron rail fence. Captain Marsh had established his headquarters at the center, in Holden Chapel.

The campus was Bravo’s third outpost in as many weeks. The battalion was steadily being pushed out of the downtown core as the area became virtually overrun with crazies.

It was the last stop on Captain Lee’s tour.

The Humvees pulled up to the iron pedestrian gate and parked. Lee’s shooters spilled out of the other Humvees and surrounded the vehicles, weapons at the ready.

Lee tried to see into the windows, but the shades were drawn. “See anything?”

“Nothing,” Murphy responded. “We’re driving on fumes. I hope they’re still here.”

“I hope they don’t have the Bug,” Foster called down.

“If they had the Bug, we’d be dead already,” Murphy said. “Pay attention up there.”

“Contact!” said Foster. “Target, two hundred meters.”

Lee got out of the vehicle and aimed down Massachusetts Avenue through his carbine’s close-combat optic. He couldn’t see anything past the obstacle course of smashed cars that blocked the way ahead and had turned the street beyond into a parking lot.

“I count nine, ten of them,” Foster reported. “They’re running right at us.”

Lee saw them now. Escapees from one of the fever clinics, naked or dressed in paper gowns and carrying makeshift weapons—tire irons, garden shears, kitchen knives. A woman snapped a pair of scissors in each hand. A grinning man with a hairy chest lugged a gas can and a lighter.

They were all smiling and shouting and waving at the soldiers. “Wait up! Wait for me!”

“Private Foster, once the hostiles clear those wrecks, you are cleared to engage,” Lee said.

“Now we’re talking!” Foster aimed his heavy machine gun. “Gonna kill some motherfuckers!”

Lee glanced at Murphy, who shook his head. The fifty-cal hammered. The path of the rounds, illuminated by bright tracers, flew over the mob. Foster corrected, walking his fire into the infected.

The battle was over in seconds. The torn bodies of the infected lay in the street like road kill.

“For such a gung-ho mo-fo, you can’t shoot for shit, Foster,” Murphy said.

The private said nothing. He wore a vacant smile, happy to have had the chance to use his big gun against a legitimate target.

Some of the soldiers didn’t feel remorse about killing the infected. The older generation liked to blame the younger for embracing violence due to rap songs and video games. Lee believed some people just didn’t have much in the empathy department. At the moment, he was glad people like that were on his side.

Lee felt remorse. A lot, but he buried it. The mission came first.

A voice called, “Coming out!”

Three soldiers scurried out of the one of the dormitory buildings while a fourth provided overwatch at the door. They opened the gate.

One of them waved and said, “Hurry the fuck up before we all get killed.” He noticed Lee’s rank and added quickly, “Sir!”

Lee and his men jogged through the gate and into the building.

Captain Marsh welcomed them in the dining hall with a scowl. “Captain Lee, this is a bag of dicks,” he said, using the popular Army term for a horrible situation. “It’s the mother of all bags of dicks. You’re the battalion S-2. What the hell is going on?”

Lee looked around. The soldiers of Bravo Company glared back at him. All of them were geared up in full battle rattle, as if they expected the crazies to come howling through the door at any moment. The air was tense. They were scared.

“We’re losing Boston,” Lee said. “What else do you want to know?”

Marsh nodded. “We lost contact with Second Platoon. They were assigned on a fragmentation order when we pulled back yesterday, and they’ve disappeared. Any word?”

Lee shook his head.

“Any idea why the Colonel put the nix on Operation Mercy?”

“Can’t help you there, either.”

Marsh said, “If our intelligence officer doesn’t know jack, then I guess we’re really in the dark.”

“What was the fragmentary order?” Lee asked. “You seem to be sealed up tight. What’s your mission here?”

“Staying alive, Captain. Other than that, not a lot. We were ordered to stand down, stay concealed and observe. If it looks like the neighborhood is starting to get crowded, we’re supposed to pull back again, toward Hanscom.”

“Who issued the order?”

“Major Walker.”

Walker was the XO, the Colonel’s right-hand man. The orders were legit, but it made no sense.

Lee said, “The strategy’s changed, but I’ve received no word of it.”

“We’re under the hammer here. We’re low on everything—ammo, food, you name it. We need rest and refit. We need a fucking plan. Fighting the crazies sucks. Hiding is worse. I need to get out there and find my missing boys.”

“I’m on my way back to HQ. I’ll try to get some answers. Something’s not right.”

“Something else isn’t right. On the other side of the Charles River is Harvard Stadium, a refugee camp with a couple thousand people. There was an MP platoon there to help keep order and distribute resources, but they were ordered out. The camp has been turned into a casualty collection point. Apparently, running the place is now the job of a mixed unit of First Battalion’s casualties. Has been for a few days. A lot of them aren’t fit for duty.”

Lee shook his head. “Get me some gas, and I’ll be on my way to find out what the hell is going on. I’ll make finding your boys my top priority once I’m back on base.”

Marsh offered his hand for a shake. “I appreciate anything you can do, Captain.”

One thing Lee knew for sure. Marsh’s men weren’t holding ground. They were waiting for a siege. It was dangerous. They weren’t projecting power onto their area of operations, and they weren’t bugging out either.

The whole thing suggested a big shift in strategy. Lee was used to increasingly erratic thinking at the top, but not from Lt. Colonel Prince. The man was predictable.

But Prince followed orders. Maybe it wasn’t his strategy.

Maybe the Brass was preparing to pull the military out of the cities.

EIGHTEEN.

The Hellfires had beautiful effect on target. The drone footage showed an aerial view of helicopters hovering in front of a large hospital, which exploded outward in a titanic blast.

Lt. Colonel Prince shook his pill bottle and heard the rattle of his last Advil. He slapped the capsule into his palm and knocked it back. He needed something stronger to dull the throbbing pain in his head. Much stronger.

The first wave of missiles ripped away the shell. The next brought it down. It was like watching a building get pounded into rubble by a giant’s fists. After that, the Apaches fired incendiary rockets to burn up anything still alive in the wreckage.

“Major Walker,” Prince said.

His XO was talking to one of the radio operators in hushed tones.

“Major!” Prince roared. “Un-ass that radio and get over here.”

The ability of the Army to function depended on following orders, explicit orders carefully designed by the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.

The alternative—to disobey—was far worse, particularly in a crisis like this. In the end, without discipline, they wouldn’t be an army. They’d turn into a rabble on a slippery slope to helping destroy what they sought to protect.

Walker stiffened and approached, looking pale and frazzled. The man was terrified of something.

Prince hesitated; he’d never seen fear wipe the smug look off his XO’s face. “Major, our aviation unit is engaging the targets designated in Operation Mercy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The OPORD specifically required boots on the ground.”

“Using the Tomcats accomplished the objective with less risk.”

“So you showed independent initiative.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Outstanding, Major.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Outstanding, Major, as in you are an outstanding fucking idiot.”

Walker flinched.

Prince continued. “Do you realize you just destroyed four civilian buildings? Deploying air assets I wanted to use against an arty unit that was doing the exact same thing? Air assets we need to bring in the Governor?”

“Sir, it was the best—”

“Are you also aware we are at the screaming edge with General Brock, who might not take kindly to wholesale destruction of city property? Do you know what the optics are on something like this? It looks like we declared war on the American people!”

“That doesn’t—”

“Did you at least evacuate any medical staff still on site, or did you just kill uninfected civilians? Doctors, for Christ’s sake—”

“We contacted each hospital and instructed them—”

“The whole world’s going to see this when CNN gets a hold of it!”

“There’s not going to be a CNN tomorrow!” Walker exploded.

All work in the command post came to a halt. The staff stared at them in wonder.

Prince blinked in surprise. For all his faults, the major thrived on order. He was loyal. He never lost his cool. He was too damned logical. He certainly never questioned Prince in front of the enlisted men under his command.

Prince tilted his head toward a corner of the room, where they could speak in relative privacy. Walker followed him there.

Prince said, “You’d better explain yourself, Major, because I’m about to land on you with both boots.”

“That city out there isn’t Boston anymore. It’s not even Afghanistan. It’s worse than Afghanistan. We need to change our thinking, or we’re done.”

Prince smoldered while the staff officers and sergeants continued to stare. He hated backtalk. He took it from Captain Lee, but he respected Lee. “Major Walker, I understand your concerns. We are overextended. But it’s not up to you. It’s not up to me. We have our orders. Having independent initiative to implement orders doesn’t mean you get to ignore them.”

“We’ve lost control of almost every single major city in the country, Colonel. We need to start thinking about taking care of ourselves.”

“What are you saying? We should mutiny?”

“I’m saying the optics don’t matter anymore. The infected artillery unit doesn’t matter. The Governor doesn’t matter. Going after them is just going to dig our hole deeper. The situation is changing by the hour now. We need to think about accomplishing our primary mission at the least amount of risk. We need to start thinking about the probability of collapse.”

Prince frowned. “Collapse.” He winced, as if the word tasted like crap. “Collapse.”

“Across the board. I’ve been in contact with other units around the—”

“Are you saying we should pull out of Boston and give it to the infected wrapped in a bow?”

Walker held his ground. “Affirmative.”

Prince growled, “We’re done here.”

“Sir, if we don’t—”

“Not another word, or I’ll relieve you. I swear to Christ, I’ll shoot you myself for cowardice. I’ll shoot you in the fucking head.”

A soldier burst into the trailer, laughing and crying. The staff sergeants leaped out of their chairs and backed away.

“I resign!” the man screamed. “I’m going Elvis!”

Prince pulled his 9mm from its holster and flicked the safety lever. Several men stood in his way. “Make a hole!”

Another enlisted man ran into the trailer, grabbed the first man, and pulled him out.

Prince, burning with rage, started to follow.

Walker blocked his path. “The man was just drunk, sir.”

For every physical casualty, there were two psychiatric ones. But it was no excuse.

“Get out of my way, Major.”

“I’ll get him squared away, sir.”

“You’re relieved. Get the fuck out of my sight.”

“Sir, there’s one more thing you need to know.”

“Be thankful I don’t throw you off the base and let the crazies have you.”

“Sir, listen to me. We’ve lost contact with Big Brother.”

The red mist dissipated. Prince’s headache returned full force. “What?”

“We’ve lost contact with Colonel Armstrong’s command.”

NINETEEN.

Sergeant Ramos, half his face turned into hamburger and billowing smoke, grinned at him with the other half and showed him the pig-sticker he kept in his boot.

Wade awoke, gasping for air.

A soldier in ragged fatigues jumped back as Wade lunged upright.

“You were screaming, bro,” the soldier said. “Bad for morale.”

“He means shut the fuck up,” another soldier barked, lying against the wall.

Wade heard the distant babble of thousands of voices. He was hot. Sweat was pouring off him. His face ached and itched. He was lying on the carpet of some type of office. From the trophies and pennants that decorated the place, he guessed the occupant to be a football coach.

A few soldiers sat smoking in chairs or on the floor. They were from Tenth Mountain, but Wade didn’t recognize anybody from Bravo Company.

He touched the bulky bandage on his face. His vision blurred. He was gone again.

Sometime later, a woman’s asked, “You want some water?”

Wade opened his eyes and drank deep from the offered canteen.

“You’re all right,” she said. The woman was slim and athletic-looking, pretty except for the black eye and massive bruise on the left side of her face.

“Who are you?” he croaked.

She smiled, displaying some broken teeth. “Sergeant Sandra Rawlings. 164th Transportation Battalion. Alpha Company, the Muleskinners. Massachusetts Guard.”

“Where’s my platoon?”

“Can’t help you there, soldier.”

“Wade. Private First Class Scott Wade. Bravo Company.”

“First Battalion, Tenth Mountain, right. You look like you were in the shit. Somebody brought you here, and now here you are.”

“What is this place?”

“I’ll give you the nickel tour.” She held up a knife. “First, the special orientation.”

Wade stared at the knife. He saw Ramos holding it, leering down with his Klown face.

Gonna make a hole. Make it wide.

“If you touch me without permission, I’ll cut off your balls,” Rawlings said. “And if you ever get the drop on me, you’d better kill me after. Understand?”

He gaped at the knife twirling in her hand.

I’m going to make you one of us.

BOOM! Ha, ha!

“Jesus, Rawlings, give the guy a break,” one of the soldiers said.

She put the knife away and studied Wade with concern. “You okay?”

He blinked. “No.”

She offered her hand. “Let’s get you that nickel tour.”

Wade let her help him up. He felt unsteady on his feet. His ankle still hurt from the fight at the hospital. He was bruised everywhere from the Humvee crash. A little dizzy, he wondered if he’d suffered a mild concussion.

Rawlings swept her hand across one of the big picture windows. “Harvard Stadium.”

The U-shaped stadium offered a majestic view of the playing field and stands. The field was covered in tents. Thousands of people milled around them. A safety shelter.

“It’s something to see, huh?” Rawlings grinned. “Home of Harvard’s football team. Janis Joplin performed her last show here in 1970. It’s where The Game is played.”

“You mean football?”

“The Game, Wade. Harvard versus Yale. You’re not from around here, are you?”

“I’m from Wisconsin.”

“Never been there.” She shook her head. “I’ve been to Iraq but not Wisconsin. Funny.”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“Down there? Nobody. You got Red Cross, some local government, charities and churches. Those people are shell shocked. Many of them are armed. And they’re really pissed off.”

“I need to report in and find my unit. Who’s in command of this unit?”

“Nobody. You want the job, Wade?”

“Who’s senior?”

Rawlings jerked her thumb toward the far corner of the room. “Him.”

Wade turned and saw a sergeant lying in a fetal ball on the floor.

She said, “Don’t know his name. He hasn’t said a word since he got here.”

“What is this? Why are we here?”

“I was guarding a truck that got thwacked. Ended up here by chance. As for you Tenth Mountain boys… Apparently, this is a casualty collection point. There are guys here from all over your battalion, some walking wounded, but mostly psychiatric casualties. Guys messed up in the head. Wounds that run deep. A few are catatonic. There are maybe thirty guys here in all.”

Wade nodded at the massive crowds below. “And the mission is to protect them?”

“Our job is to stay alive, Wade. This building is the university’s athletics department. We got views all around. We keep an eye on things. Helicopters drop food once a week. We go down there and get what we need at gunpoint. We let them sort out the rest on their own.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be distributing it or something?”

Rawlings snorted. “That sounds like a great way to get killed.”

“What’s it like down there?”

“Just what it looks like. A shithole. Every day, you got fistfights, murders, rape and shootings over women, beer, smokes. You ask me, it’s a powder keg just waiting to go off. You got a weapon, cowboy?”

He shook his head. “Lost it.”

“Ammo?”

“A few mags for my M4.”

“We’ll see about getting you armed. One more thing, Wade. Sleep every chance you get.”

“Why is that?”

“Because somebody is always screaming in their sleep and waking everybody up.” She sighed. “Those poor guys, the things they’ve seen and done… I don’t want to know.”

Wade studied her face. She really was pretty. “What happened to you, Sergeant?”

“You don’t want to know.”

TWENTY.

Lt. Colonel Prince closed the door to his private office in the command trailer and sat at his desk with his head in his hands. The migraine bloomed behind his eyes. He could hardly think. No amount of aspirin would help. What he needed was a long, long sleep.

Ignoring his desktop computer, which demanded his attention, he opened a drawer and scooped out a bottle of Jim Beam. He kept the bottle around for special occasions, to toast a promotion or observe the end of an operation. Sharing a shot always made the moment memorable. He wondered if drinking alone would have the opposite effect. What he needed now was to forget everything.

He put the bottle away without drinking. He had work to do. Still he didn’t move. What was the point? Anything he did was just pushing a broom against an avalanche.

The radio/telephone operator had contacted Harry Lee. The captain was en route back to Hanscom. He’d seen some horrible things on his recon trip. The confidential report he’d transmitted stuck to the facts, but the story was clear enough. Boston was a lost cause.

Maybe Walker was right.

Screw Walker.

They still couldn’t raise regimental HQ. Prince told them to jump the ladder and try Division at Fort Drum. Again, no response.

Prince had seen rough soldiering. He’d led his boys through some tough campaigns. But he always knew he had the full weight of the Big Green Machine behind him, a powerful military that projected American power across the planet. Not anymore.

The idea that Division headquarters had been overrun or compromised by infection was impossible to conceive. Fort Drum wasn’t near any major cities. It was in the middle of nowhere in New York State. At first, he’d thought there must be something wrong with the communications system. But they were still able to contact other Tenth Mountain units. Those field units all reported the same problems getting through to central command.

What was the next step? Go still higher up? Call the Pentagon?

The Pentagon had been evacuated. The President and the Joint Chiefs were in their underground bunker at Mount Weather, making their erratic decisions without any knowledge of what was really happening on the ground.

Prince was going to have to make his own decisions. The right course eluded him. He knew the current strategy wasn’t working, but he couldn’t just pull his boys out of Boston and give up. More than six hundred thousand people had lived in the city before the plague. Another four million lived in the Greater Boston area. The survivors were desperate. They needed help.

If his lightfighters couldn’t do anything, what good were they? Why bother?

He’d always thought the world would end suddenly. An asteroid would come, humanity would have a week to get its shit in order, and then BOOM.

He’d never imagined a plague would do the job, and with such horror. A plague in which everybody became an enemy, everything familiar became a threat, every loved one was perverted and defiled.

Like Susan and Frankie. Your own family was shot down in the street like dogs by men wearing uniforms just like yours.

Stars flared in his vision. He groaned.

He needed some creative thinking. Goddammit, he was going to have to get Walker back. But he’d get the man squared away first.

Prince was still rattled from their last encounter. Walker had the logic—and personality—of Mr. Spock and the loyalty of a bloodhound. If he’d lost enough faith to challenge a superior officer the way he had, he had to have a damned good reason. Or maybe he was just cracking under the stress. A lot of men did.

He opened the drawer and looked at the bottle. Forget everything. He closed it again.

Maybe he should appoint Lee as his XO. Lee was a straight shooter, and the man had balls. They’d destroy the rogue artillery unit that was terrorizing the Boston core and put the Governor in his place. They’d find a new strategy to check the spread of infection across the area and stop the violence.

They could do it. They still had a mission.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Prince touched the 9mm at his hip. “Come in.”

The radio/telephone operator entered the room. “Good news, Colonel.”

Prince stared at the man. He hadn’t heard good news in over a month.

The RTO added, “We’ve established contact with regimental HQ.”

“Outstanding, son.” Prince stood and followed the man into the work area. For the first time in weeks, he started to feel like things were going his way. He picked up the headset. “Wizard Six. Over.”

Armstrong roared, “WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING MALFUNCTION, JOE?”

Even though Colonel Armstrong couldn’t see him, Prince stood at attention. He’d gotten such treatment before. Armstrong wasn’t one to mince words; he called it “tough love.” Clearly, the regimental commander knew about Prince’s failures: the destruction of the hospitals, the Governor rejecting his offer of sanctuary, the infected rogue artillery unit bombing downtown, the steady losses of men and materiel…and his utter failure to achieve his mission. What could he say that would change the commander’s opinion? That he was going to appoint a new XO?

He felt his optimism wash away like sand in the surf.

“DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? ARE YOU DEAF?”

“I heard you loud and clear, sir. Over.” After a long silence, he added: “Sir?”

Armstrong exploded into insane laughter.

Prince blanched. “May I speak to your XO?”

“That might be a little tough, Joe. I ate his tongue.” Again, that explosive, shrieking laughter came through the headset.

Prince terminated the connection. He went back into his private office and closed the door. He sat at his desk and ran his hands over his crew cut. This is bad. This is really bad. The chain of command was broken. First Battalion was officially off the reservation.

Another knock came at the door.

“Come in,” he said mechanically. His head pounded to the tune of his rapid heartbeat.

Lieutenant Torres entered the room, looking pale. “Sir, I forwarded you a new PowerPoint file we just received from HQ. An advisory.”

Prince shook his head. “Not now.”

He was going to have to organize a mission to Troy to provide aid to HQ and help re-establish the chain of command. With what? We’re stretched to the breaking point.

He’d work with the commanders of the other battalions. A joint mission. Then he frowned. Why the hell was HQ sending PowerPoint presentations? Didn’t they know they had a major crisis on their hands?

“You need to see this, Colonel,” Torres insisted.

Prince looked at the man’s face. Torres was a tough son of a bitch, but he appeared to be on the verge of tears.

“This came from regimental HQ?” Prince asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Prince located the file on his computer and opened it.

TWENTY-ONE.

The first slide presented a title promising authorization guidelines for lethal use of force against armed civilians. That was bad enough, as it suggested some people had gotten so angry that they were taking shots at Army units in the field.

The second slide showed a photo of a severed head with a lit cigarette in its mouth. It wore a helmet. The eyes had been carved out and replaced with shiny pennies.

The third depicted a pile of hacked-off body parts and Tenth Mountain patches torn from uniforms.

Others displayed scenes of torture and murder. Laughing soldiers holding down their comrades and butchering them. Sodomy. A screaming head in a vise. A crying man with wires wrapped around his head, the wires leading back to a car battery. Another with a burning tire on his head.

One image showed a large crowd of infected soldiers in the dining facility, laughing and wrestling on the floor. Their uniforms were stained and ragged. Some fired their weapons into the ceiling. The leering cooks slopped chili into bowls in the chow line. A human foot protruded from one of the pots.

Prince closed the file and deleted it. He wished it was paper so he could burn it.

Then he went to call in an airstrike.

Oddly, his headache had disappeared.

TWENTY-TWO.

Wade explored the building. The other rooms, all of them offices adorned with sports paraphernalia, offered views of Boston. In one, three soldiers had opened a window to let in the air. They stood looking out at the skyline of South Boston.

The northeastern horizon was on fire. He felt the waves of heat, the tremors in the air. A distant roar, mingled with screams and laughter, carried on the wind. Twilight would come in an hour, but the sky was already blackening as a massive wall of ash and smoke roiled over the city.

Wade had missed a few things while he was out cold. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.

Helicopters roared out of the ash fall. Searchlights glared. Then they were gone.

A splash of gunfire sounded outside, somewhere close.

One of the soldiers lowered his binoculars and pointed. “I found him. There he is. See?”

The second responded, “I see him. Man, he’s either infected, or he’s lost it.”

The third turned and noticed Wade. “Who are you?”

He introduced himself. The men were Gray, Fisher and Brown. They nodded in greeting. None appeared to be physically wounded, but Wade knew something inside them had broken.

“How’s your face?” Fisher asked him. “You all right?”

Wade touched the wound. He could feel the fever heat through the bandage. His cheek tingled. As if little worms were inside. He felt as if his entire body had been crumpled up like a piece of aluminum foil and stretched out again.

He ignored the question. “What were you guys looking at?”

“Some Rambo type,” Fisher said. “Armed to the teeth. He comes out every day around this time, shoots a few crazies and yells something like, ‘Three o’clock and all’s well.’”

It was well past three o’clock.

Gray looked out the window. “The fire’s much bigger than it was this morning. Charlestown’s going up. Bunker Hill. Spreading west fast. Boston’s toast.”

“It’s on the other side of the river,” Brown said. “We’re good.”

“You think? Well, Hanscom is on the other side of the river too. If the fire spreads through Cambridge, we could get cut off. I wonder how many people it’s pushing out of the area. More crazies. All going west. They got nowhere else to go.”

Fisher nodded. “We might have to think about bugging out soon.”

“We’ll talk to Rawlings about it,” Brown said.

“Is she in charge here?” Wade asked. She wasn’t Tenth Mountain, but she had the highest rank among the survivors here.

“You think these cowboys would take orders from a Nasty Girl?”

Wade turned. The sergeant was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed.

“I see you met my posse,” she said.

Wade nodded. He wanted to ask her if they were going to bug out. He wanted to get back to his unit. Surely, some of the men in his platoon had survived, since they’d brought him there. He wanted to get back. Those guys were the only family he had left.

But he said nothing. He was still in shock and didn’t have much fight in him. His body was pretty banged up. He needed to stay here and rest for a while longer. He also didn’t want to bring the Bug home with him. He wasn’t showing symptoms, but he’d been exposed, and he still wondered if he was infected.

Besides all that, he wasn’t sure what he still owed the Army. He and his comrades had been betrayed. The rest of Bravo Company hadn’t shown up at the hospital, and Wade’s squad had been thrown alone into shit that was way over their heads. Wade still wanted to chip in and do some good, but he no longer trusted the Army to make decisions for him.

He thought of Sergeant Ramos’s family: Maria and little Thomas in their hot apartment with no electricity or running water and the furniture stacked against the door. Maybe he should go and protect them. Maybe that was the best way to honor the sergeant who’d saved his life more times than he could count. Maybe that was a mission for which he could still fight. Maybe if he saved them he might finally make a real difference in this apocalyptic war.

In any case, Wade wasn’t in any kind of mental condition to make that decision. His body sure wasn’t in physical shape to act on one. No matter. For now, he was stranded here with this broken outfit.

“Something on your mind?” Rawlings asked.

Wade shook his head.

“Not something,” she said softly. “Everything.”

He nodded.

“Take it one day at a time, okay?”

He smiled. A day was a luxury.

“Okay,” she said. “One minute at a time.”

“Hey Sergeant, come take a look at this,” Fisher said.

She accepted the binoculars and looked. She paled.

“Walking around like they own the place,” Gray said. “Goddamn scumbags.”

“It’s Boston in name only now,” Brown said. “They’re everywhere.”

“We should drop a nuke and be done with it.”

Wade couldn’t see past the others. “What’s going on?”

She handed the binoculars to him. “Take a look, Wade. There. See them?”

He did. A vast parade marched through the burned-out wrecks scattered along Western Avenue. Several hundred strong, it was an army of the mad. Some were naked and painted in blood. Others wore scalps and necklaces of ears and masks of human flesh. It was impossible to recognize them as Americans, people who just weeks ago were lawyers, bank tellers, janitors and waitresses. The Klowns looked more like an ancient tribe of cannibals. It was hard to even recognize some of these self-mutilated things as human beings except for the constant laughter. They dragged screaming men and women on leashes. They waved hatchets and torches and chainsaws and human heads.

Wade handed the binoculars to Fisher. He’d seen enough.

The crazies owned the downtown core, and they were migrating outward.

Pretty soon, it was all going to be over.

“All” as in civilization.

TWENTY-THREE.

Lt. Colonel Prince admired a framed article on the wall of his tiny office. He took it with him on every mission. The article, published in The New York Times, described his battalion’s operations in the Korengal Valley. That year, seventy percent of the fighting in Afghanistan had been in that valley near the border with Pakistan, where Taliban and foreign fighters came to shoot at the infidels. His boys took the brunt of it, but they gave more than they got. Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. The article referred to him as Fighting Joe.

He opened the door and passed the worried staff sergeants and radio operators frantically calling units in the field. He left the command trailer and was surprised to see it was dusk. He’d completely lost track of the time. Time warped inside the trailer, where crisis set the schedule and the days blurred together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in the dining facility. The trailer looked so small from the outside. Standing there, he found it difficult to believe that the air-conditioned box held so much bullshit.

Hanscom Air Force Base had been home to three thousand airmen, all of whom had been relocated south except for a token company and a military police platoon. The sprawling facility included hangars, administrative facilities, barracks and other buildings. It had been well guarded before the plague, but it was no fortress. Prince had created a new perimeter of Hescos—massive burlap sacks filled with tons of dirt—to serve as walls, their tops lined with concertina wire. Mark19s provided overwatch in wood guard towers. Machine guns behind piles of sandbags guarded the entrances. They’d all seen action in the past few days.

Prince strolled the perimeter, passing trucks and Humvees, water bladders and generators. He saw every detail with perfect clarity. The disappearance of his headache was like the lifting of a heavy siege. For the first time in weeks, he could see and think clearly without the painful red fog in the way. He felt a surge of love for all of it. He’d been a soldier his whole life. A sergeant barked at his boys to gear up and get their shit on, they had work to do. Another sergeant dressed his squad for action. Prince liked what he saw; things were humming. Apaches spooled up on the runway. One of the great beasts lunged into the hot air on thumping rotors. The wash sent a wave of litter rolling toward Prince’s feet. He frowned at an MRE wrapper fluttering past as if it were a crack in a dam; somebody was going to have to clean this shit up. A machine gun thudded in the distance. To the east, Boston burned.

At the east entrance, he passed several soldiers just returned from a patrol. One of them stood hunched over, hands on his knees, hyperventilating while the others tried to calm him. They nudged each other as their commanding officer approached.

Prince crouched in front of the gasping man. Man, hell. He was just a kid like all the rest. His boys weren’t machines. They were people. But like machines, they broke.

“You’re all right now, son.”

“Sorry,” the kid gasped, “sir.”

“No shame in it. Let it out.” Prince gripped the soldier’s shoulder. He held on for a moment, as if he could transfer his strength into the boy. When he withdrew his hand, he saw the crossed swords of the Tenth Mountain patch. Climb to Glory.

The boy’s breathing began to ease. The other soldiers watched with anxious expressions. One of them was visibly shaking, dealing with his own demons. Another’s eyelid twitched.

“I’m okay now, sir,” the kid said.

“Bad out there, is it?” Prince asked.

The soldiers nodded.

“You’ve already done far more than your country had a right to ask,” Prince told them. “I want you to know, for what it’s worth, that I’m proud of you. And that I love you all.”

“Sir?” one of the men said. “Any idea when it’s going to be over?”

Prince stood and smiled. “Everything ends. Until then, we soldier on.”

The simple, brute logic appealed to the soldiers. They saluted.

He returned it. “Get some rest, boys. Tomorrow’s another day.”

He headed back to the command trailer. The staff sergeants glared at the interruption. The air was tense and rank with fear. He ignored their questions as he passed, touching each of them lightly on the shoulder and leaving them calm but wondering.

Prince went into his office and closed the door. He took the framed New York Times article off the wall and dropped it into his wastebasket. He sat at his desk, pushed his computer aside and pulled out his bottle of Jim Beam and a clean glass. He picked up the photo of Susan and Frankie he kept on his desk. He stared at it for a long time.

For the first time in weeks, he could really see again. He saw it all with perfect clarity.

The endless blood.

Climb to Glory.

Lt. Colonel Prince removed the 9mm from his holster, put the business end between his teeth, and squeezed the trigger.

TWENTY-FOUR.

As the light of day faded, the convoy of Humvees roared down the road, scattering rubbish. The streetlights were off. Rotting corpses swung from the poles in the mounting twilight. Feasting birds scattered at the approaching diesel roar.

Captain Lee had built a career on honesty. He held nothing back in his intelligence reports. When asked, he gave his opinions without the sugar coating. He didn’t believe in putting lipstick on pigs. He’d made captain because of it. He’d been held back from further promotion because of it.

He was going to tell Prince everything. He’d already submitted a report, but even that didn’t contain half of what he’d seen. He’d shared the facts, but he had to make the Colonel see the horror. Right now, First Battalion was scattered, ineffective and losing ground by the day. They needed to pull their forces back into a defensible position and build their operations from there. They could take the city back, block by block, using overwhelming force and killing the infected without mercy. The stakes involved survival of an entire city, and there wasn’t much time. The inmates were inches away from running the asylum and putting it to the torch.

As night fell, they approached the onramp that would take them onto Concord Turnpike. The road was supposed to be reserved to official traffic, but the police and their vehicles were gone, the rows of barriers smashed and flattened. The emptiness was unnerving. The silence made Lee think of Afghanistan. The calm between attacks.

Without being told, Murphy slowed the vehicle and cut the headlights. The men put on their night vision goggles, which rendered the dark landscape in a thousand shades of phosphorescent green. Nobody in sight. In the distance, headlights moved quickly along the turnpike, too fast for military. The vast fires of Boston glowed a brilliant green on the horizon. The Humvee’s tires thudded across the smashed barriers. Lee held his carbine propped in the open window. Foster swiveled the .50-cal in the gun turret, sweeping the area for threats.

Behind them, the other two Humvees did the same.

“Do you believe in prayer, Captain?” Murphy asked.

“Not really, Mike.”

“Could you try? I really don’t want to die here.”

“I believe in good planning, but that doesn’t work either. It’s all on us.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“Really? We’ve gotten this far.”

They pulled onto the turnpike and took off their goggles. The headlights flashed on. After a mile, they passed the first flaming wreck on the side of the road. Still no visible threats.

“Your prayers seem to be working, Mike.”

Light flared in the side view mirrors.

“Way to jinx it, Captain,” Murphy said.

The headlights in their rear were approaching fast. Lee remembered the top speed of a Humvee was fifty-five miles an hour.

“We can’t outrun a civilian vehicle,” he said. “And we can’t shoot unless they’re hostile.”

“We won’t know they’re hostile until they’re right on top of us.”

“We should stop. Set up a defensive formation.”

“Fire some warning shots? If they don’t stop, we light them the fuck up.”

The light gleamed bright in the side views.

Lee shook his head. “No time.” He picked up the phone on his field radio. “Rebel Three, this is Rebel Six. What have you got, over?”

“Rebel Six, this is Rebel Three. Vehicles approaching fast. Five hundred meters. Over.”

“You are authorized to use lethal force to respond to any threats. Over.”

“That’s a solid copy, Rebel Six. Over.”

“Take no chances, Rebel Three.”

“Don’t worry about us, s—what the fuck?”

They’d misjudged how fast the vehicles could catch up to them. Lee heard the .50-cal hammer over the roar of an overstressed engine and found he wanted to pray after all. He flinched at the ear-splitting crash of metal. The car shattered against the two-ton military vehicle and burst into flames. Rebel Three lurched and rolled in a series of bangs.

He cursed himself for his stupidity. Here he was on his way back to preach to Prince, but even he didn’t get it. The rules of engagement no longer mattered, only force protection. He should have declared the highway a free-fire zone and taken the consequences.

Behind him, Rebel Two’s machine gun swung into action. Tracer rounds burst in the dark. A smoking car swung off the road. A truck raced past to catch up with Rebel One.

“We got company,” said Murphy.

Foster got off a few rounds but missed. The truck was going too fast. He walked his fire forward, guided by the tracers. The truck pulled up alongside the Humvee’s right and slowed. Lee saw naked, mutilated men swarming across the truck bed, clashing crowbars and golf clubs against the battered chassis. One of the crazies threw a colorful object that struck the rear of the Humvee.

Water balloon. Lee smelled piss. Infected piss. The Klowns lobbed grappling hooks like pirates. One hooked onto Lee’s window. Its connecting chain pulled taut. A man tried to jump onto the Humvee but missed and became road kill. A baseball struck Lee in the chest. He grit his teeth against the flash of pain and the stars that sparked in his vision.

A shrieking devil was about to throw a bright yellow water balloon straight at him. Lee sprayed the back of the truck on full auto, draining the magazine in seconds. Laughing bodies spilled and smashed against the asphalt rushing under their feet. When his rifle clicked empty, Lee pulled out his 9mm and unloaded it into the driver’s cabin.

Foster found his mark. He lit up the truck back to front with a deadly metal rain. The vehicle crumpled like tin foil, riddled with smoking holes. The figures capering along the truck bed exploded. The windshield burst with a splash of glass. The truck disintegrated.

The Humvee door wrenched off with a crack as the shattered truck spilled off the highway.

Lee blinked into the darkness. “Shit.”

“That was a little close,” Murphy said, gripping the wheel.

“Bring us alongside Rebel Two, Mike.”

Mike glared at his side view mirror. “Problem!”

Lee stood and leaned out of the vehicle. The wind howled past. He saw muzzle flashes burst in the dark. Rebel Two was demolishing a souped-up Trans Am at point blank range. On its other side, a tractor trailer roared on eighteen wheels. The truck was black. A woman had been chained to the grille like a freshly killed deer. The trailer’s flank showed a smiling family eating hot dogs.

“Fire your fifty!” Lee ordered, but Foster was already on it, sending hot metal downrange into the grille, which began to blow steam. His next rounds smashed the windshield.

The laughing driver wrenched the wheel. The giant rig swerved into Rebel Two.

“No!” Foster screamed.

The truck struck the Humvee with a metallic clap and enveloped it, jackknifing before the trailer rolled, flaring sparks and shards of metal. Rebel Two disappeared.

Murphy brought the Humvee to a stop. He was drenched in sweat.

Lee keyed his radio. “Rebel Two, this is Rebel Six. What’s your status, over?”

Nothing.

“All Rebel units, this is Rebel Six, how copy? Over.”

Dead air.

Murphy turned in his seat. “What now, Captain?”

Lee reloaded his rifle and chambered a round. His hands were shaking.

“What now?” the sergeant repeated, shouting.

Lee took a deep breath. His body was shaking from excess adrenaline. He was exhausted; he’d never been so tired. He wanted to lie down on the road and take a long, long sleep. “Now,” he said, “we go back and look for survivors.”

TWENTY-FIVE.

Rebel One approached Hanscom at a crawl.

“Nice and slow, Mike,” said Lee.

“Roger that,” Murphy said, eyeing the Mark19 tracking them from one of the guard towers.

“Foster, let go of the fifty and grab a seat. We didn’t come all this way to get killed by our own guys. They’ve got some itchy fingers over there.”

Foster dropped out of the gun turret and sat next to Philips, the only survivor they’d found among the wreckage of the escort vehicles. Philips hugged his broken ribs and moaned.

Soldiers crouched behind sandbags between the Hescos. They glared at Lee over the barrels of their rifles. Scared kids. Lee counted three M240 machine guns. Bodies littered the ground around the perimeter, drawing flies in the heat. The air smelled like death. Death and defeat.

One of the soldiers stood, rifle at his shoulder and aimed. “That’s far enough! Exit the vehicle slowly!”

Murphy parked the Humvee and cut the engine. Lee stepped out of the vehicle with his hands in the air.

“Captain Lee?”

“I’m glad you’re still here, Sergeant Diaz. We couldn’t get through on the radio.”

“We’ve had a situation here.”

“Then give me a sitrep, Sergeant.”

Diaz approached, but he didn’t lower his weapon.

Lee frowned. “Would you mind pointing that somewhere else?”

The sergeant lowered his gun as he stepped in front of Lee. “Sorry, sir, but we’re going to have to check you and your men for infection.”

“And how—” Lee started.

Diaz punched him in the stomach and retreated, rifle raised again. Lee stepped back with a gasp. Murphy and Foster stiffened but wisely didn’t move.

After several moments, the sergeant lowered his gun. “You’re clear.”

If Lee had laughed at the pain, he’d be dead. He nodded as he caught his breath. “Good to know.”

Diaz shook his hand. “Ouch. Forgot about the body armor.”

After the others were cleared, the soldiers at the checkpoint visibly relaxed.

“So what’s the situation?” Lee asked.

“The base is in lockdown. The Colonel’s dead.”

The news struck Lee like a second punch. “How?”

“Not sure, Captain. The command post is sealed up tight. The scuttlebutt is he shot himself. What the hell happened to you?”

“Concord Turnpike has been turned into an Indy 500 for homicidal maniacs. I lost good men out there.” He ground his teeth in a sudden fit of rage. His boys had survived crossing half the Afghan bush only to die on an American road. “Report to Major Walker that I’m here and need to see him ASAP. Then get my men a hot and cot. One of them needs medical attention. See to it.”

“Wilco, Captain. And by the way, uh, sorry about sucker punching you.”

“Let’s say I owe you one, Diaz.”

The sergeant saluted and grinned. “Glad you’re back safe, Captain.”

Within minutes, the Humvee rolled into the base. Soldiers milled about without orders. They passed one sitting on the ground and crying into his hands. Lee spotted two men climbing over one of the Hescos and disappearing. The Humvee parked near the command post.

“Major Walker in command,” Lee said. “Christ, this couldn’t get any worse.”

Walker was a politician. He was a fantastic administrator but a terrible soldier, and about as inspiring as white paint on a white wall.

Murphy nodded. “Embrace the Suck, Captain.”

The Suck. The Army version of SNAFU. They were pioneering new territory in Suck right now. Lee wanted to say more, but he’d already said too much. A good officer didn’t bitch down the chain of command. He bitched up. He needed to find Walker and do some bitching.

Leaving his men at the Humvee, he entered the trailer that served as the battalion command post. The place stank of fear and flop sweat. He saw the same haggard faces at their workstations, but the usual frantic pace had slowed to a crawl. The men were going through the motions. They grimaced at the sound of the door opening but otherwise ignored him.

Walker stood with his back to him, studying the big board. Lee glanced at it and noticed the tactical situation had changed. All units had left the Greater Boston core and were converging on Hanscom. All were listed as in contact with the enemy. First Battalion appeared to be in retreat. Lee had missed a hell of a lot while he was out in the field.

“Captain Lee, reporting to the commanding officer as requested, sir.”

The major turned and greeted him with an enigmatic smile. “Ah, Captain. It’s good to have you back. You’re exactly the man I wanted to see.”

Lee smelled a rat but knew better than to show it. “That’s a mutual sentiment, sir.”

Walker led him into the Colonel’s office. Though the body had been removed, the room smelled of ammonia and the tang of a recent gunshot. The major sat at Prince’s desk and motioned for Lee to grab a chair opposite. Lee noticed a large pink circle on the wall behind Walker’s head, obviously from where Prince’s blood and brains had been hastily scrubbed.

“Where’s the body?” Lee asked.

“We’ll take care of him. There will be a service at twelve-hundred.” The major opened a drawer and produced a bottle of Jim Beam and two glasses. He poured two fingers into each.

Lee was about to say it was a little early for a drink but decided, what the hell. He was still wondering what Walker’s game was. “To the Colonel,” Lee said, raising his glass. “He was a good man.” He tossed back his drink while Walker sipped at his.

“He was a good man,” Walker said. “He just couldn’t…”

“Couldn’t what?”

“He just couldn’t handle it. All of it.”

“Did you report it up the chain of command?”

Walker lit a cigarette. “Little problem with that. The chain of command is broken. Big Brother is dead. Infected and killed by an airstrike. Fort Drum has gone dark.”

Lee stiffened. “Drum’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“But we send our wounded there. We’ve been doing it from the start.”

“The incubation takes longer than we were told in some cases?”

The major shrugged. “That’s my theory. But I don’t know for sure. We’re all learning on the job here, right?”

Lee nodded. Something clicked. “That’s why you set up Harvard Stadium as a casualty collection point. Those were your orders. The Colonel had nothing to do with it.”

Walker smiled.

Lee added, “You were putting them into quarantine.”

“That’s right.”

Another epiphany struck Lee. “Keeping the ground troops out of the hospitals and destroying them by air. That was your decision, not Prince’s.”

Walker’s smile turned into a grin. “Now I’m impressed.”

“So was the withdrawal. You’ve been pulling our forces out of the theater a little at a time. Ordering them into a defensive posture. Telling the Colonel they were being forced out.”

The major stubbed out his cigarette and blew a stream of smoke across the desk. “They were forced out. Not all of them will make it back. It may be too late.”

Lee couldn’t believe Walker’s gumption. “You cut the civilians loose. You cut Boston loose. Christ, even our own wounded. The question is why.”

“Why do you think? Force protection, Captain. Extreme measures for extreme times. Consider this: We almost sent three companies of combat infantry into the city’s hospitals. Aside from what that would have done to morale, I’m not even sure we had enough bullets.”

“What would have happened if you were wrong?”

Walker shrugged again. “I would have been locked up, I suppose.”

“Locked up, hell. Prince would have had you executed.”

“The Army taught us to make decisions based on probabilities. I was probably right. If I was wrong, I would have died anyway. We all would. Better a bullet than them.”

Lee shook his head in wonder. “So what now? What do you intend to do?”

“You tell me. You’re in charge here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you’re going to have to take command.”

What Walker was proposing was impossible. “I don’t understand.”

The major refilled their glasses. “The men need a leader. The men need command. Normally, I’d be happy to do it, but I’m not cut out for this. You are.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Major, but there’s no way it would get approved.”

“You know the saying, ‘The center cannot hold’? The center’s gone, Captain. We’re in the midst of wholesale collapse here. If we don’t get somebody in charge the men will believe in and follow, they’re going to walk away. They’re going to go home.”

Lee thought of the two soldiers he saw climbing over the Hescos. Desertion in broad daylight. He picked up his glass and eyed its contents. “So I’m supposed to promote myself to the rank of Lt. Colonel?”

“You still don’t get it. In the past five weeks, almost every guideline that was sent down from the Brass, all those endless PowerPoint presentations for the officers, was about unlearning our training so we can adapt as a military force. The only way to survive this is unlearn everything and start over. Military protocols don’t matter anymore, Captain, just leadership and survival. Preserving something before it all comes apart.”

Walker opened the breast pocket of his blouse and produced two silver oak collar insignia pins. He set them on the desk. “We lost the battle, Harry. If you don’t take command, we’ll lose everything.”

Lee picked up one of the pins. He would be dishonorably discharged if he put it on, maybe even jailed. Hell, maybe even shot. But who was going to shoot him? Walker was right. The Army was falling apart. The battalion was on its own, and it was unraveling fast. The men needed leadership, even if that leadership was technically a charade.

For Harry Lee, the mission was everything. It superseded even himself.

Had he heard everything, and was it the truth? Did the major have a game? Did Walker intend to lead through him? If so, the man was going to be severely disappointed.

Lee downed his drink. He closed his hand around the pin.

Walker smiled. “How does it feel, Harry?”

“Like I’m robbing a corpse.”

Walker smirked. “It might feel different.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re saving the battalion.”

“I’ve got to get my head around it.”

“As long as your head is in the game.” After a slight pause, Walker added, “Sir.”

“All right. I’ll address the men at the funeral. We’re going to need a game plan.”

“I have some information that may help,” the major said. “I’ve been talking to my counterparts at other battalions across the Northeast and Midwest. They’re all worse off than we are. Everybody is actively engaged. Civilian authority has bled out. The military commanders are beginning to act independently. They don’t like the strategy, and they’re starting to break off on their own. Prince was one of the last die-hards.”

“Options, then. We could pull out of the city, regroup and take it back block by block. Announce a curfew to keep the citizens off the streets. Shoot everything in sight.” Lee might go down in history as another Attila the Hun, but it just might save the city.

“Problem, sir. Major General Brock wants to absorb the battalion into his command.”

Lee sighed. “And he’ll order us back into the city to do what we were doing before.” He thought about it. “The other option is to resist. We can’t take on the Massachusetts Guard.”

“Correct. I don’t think we have the men, materiel or energy to do what you’re thinking, in any case. Resupply has slowed to a trickle. I’ve been carefully shepherding what we’ve got.”

“That doesn’t give us a lot of options. We either work for Brock or fight him.”

“There is another way.”

“What’s that?”

“We could leave Massachusetts.”

Lee looked at him in surprise. Walker had told him they needed to start thinking outside the box, but it appeared the man was ready to throw away the box. “And go where?”

The major sipped his drink. “Florida.”

“What’s in Florida?”

“General Wallace. He’s cleared the peninsula of infection. He’s got air assets to keep anybody out he wants kept out. He’s got considerable strength and resources and the closest thing to a working civilian government outside of Mount Weather. I’ve been in contact with a few units that have had the same idea. If enough of the military can make it to Florida, maybe Wallace would have enough strength to take back the country.”

It was Lee’s plan for Boston but on a national scale. “Let me give it some thought, Major.”

“Very good, sir.”

Lee regarded Walker with new respect. “You know, I was wrong about you.”

Walker grinned. “I doubt that. I’m no hero. I want to stay alive, and I figure being right here, in the middle of a combat-effective battalion, is the best way to do that.”

Lee would also be the man who might get shot once they reached Florida for disobeying orders and giving up Boston. If they were going to Florida. First, they would go to Fort Drum and find out what had happened there. They needed to ensure the soldiers’ families were safe and get supplies. Maybe that would be enough.

“I think we’ll work well together in any case,” Lee said.

“I share the sentiment, sir.”

“Good, good. And, Major?”

“Sir?”

“You contravened the Colonel’s orders. If you do the same to me, I’ll have you shot. Are we clear on that?”

Again, that enigmatic smile. “Crystal, sir.”

TWENTY-SIX.

Wade hoped a passing unit would bring in more wounded so he could hit them up for news, but nobody came. They had no radio. They were cut off.

He kept to himself all morning. He nursed his banged-up ankle, his face. Something was in there, deep in his wound, tickling. Moving. Searching. He inventoried his emotions as a matter of routine. He didn’t want to hurt himself or anybody else. The truth was he felt numb.

Maybe he wasn’t infected after all. Maybe he was immune. Or maybe he was about to become a murderer in five, four, three, two—

Outside, Boston burned and smoldered. Black smoke filled the sky.

There were around thirty soldiers in the building, and only nine appeared able to function for an extended period of time. Late in the morning, those men got up off the floor and walked down the hall. Wade found himself alone with three soldiers who lay with their backs to him—in other words, totally alone. These men were gone, empty husks. The things they’d seen and done had destroyed their ability to cope.

He stood and dusted himself off. After some wandering, he found the others in one of the offices. They’d pushed the furniture against the walls and sat on the dusty carpet in a semicircle around Rawlings. She talked while she cleaned her disassembled carbine with a rod and patch.

“You’ve all been in the shit,” she said. “You know that, in combat, nobody cares who you voted for, what god you worship, the color of your skin, or where your ancestors came from. All that matters is whether your friends are going to watch your six while you watch theirs. It’s true there are no atheists in foxholes, but the soldier’s religion is his platoon. He depends on his platoon more than he does God.” She smiled. “Welcome, Private Wade.”

Wade nodded and sat with the others. “What’s this all about?”

“Boot camp for lost souls. We’re planning on how we’re going to get out of here and back to civilization. Did you get the sergeant’s carbine?”

“He said he’d cut off my balls if I took his weapon.”

Rawlings looked impressed. “You got more out of him than we did. Did he say anything else? Is he going to get back into the game?”

“I didn’t stick around to find out. I like my balls.”

The men chuckled lightly.

“All right.” Rawlings looked at Fisher and tilted her head toward Wade.

Fisher stood and gave Wade his M4. “My hands keep shaking. I can’t shoot for shit. You should have it.”

“Thanks,” Wade said, taking the weapon. He found the familiar weight of the carbine comforting. “I’ll take good care of it for you.”

“You do that, bro.”

Rawlings continued. “The problem is we’re not with our platoons. They’re dead, or they’re not here. It’s every man for himself at this post. All of us have lost friends, but we’re still here. Why? It doesn’t matter why. It just is. It hurts like hell, but that’s a good thing. The pain of losing everything, the guilt of having made it while other men, better men, didn’t. Embrace that pain. Make that guilt your friend.”

Wade thought of Ramos, Williams, Ford and Eraserhead, and the faces of other men he’d once called brother. All of them gone forever.

Rawlings put aside the cleaning rod and patch and began to reassemble her carbine. “You fought for those men, and now they’re gone. So why are you here? Why are you still fighting? What are you fighting for? We need a reason to fight. Think about that reason and hold onto it. I don’t care if it’s your mom back home or America or beer and tits, hold onto it.”

The man chuckled again.

“Whatever it is, it’s all you got right now. And once you got a hold of it, once it’s yours, you’ll be ready to fight. The people in this room, we’re going to be a new unit. You don’t need me to tell you that we have to be, or we won’t make it.”

Wade looked at the others. Gray scowled back at him. Brown wore a dreamy, vacant expression. Fisher looked pale and shaky, as always. Wade didn’t feel encouraged. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t need inspiration from a National Guard reservist to keep going. They were all damaged goods, not least of all him. Somehow, this group of shattered men was going to have to learn to work together and trust each other with their very lives.

“The Klowns are out there,” Rawlings went on, “and they know we’re in here. Some heavy shit is coming, and we’re going to be in it neck deep. Because mark my words, gentlemen, it’s only a matter of time before the Klowns get in or the civilians get pissed off enough to take a shot at us. If we want to survive, we’re going to have to work together.”

She slapped a magazine into the carbine’s well and propped the weapon against the wall next to her. “All right, then. Enough of this kumbaya shit. Let’s talk about how we’re going to get out of here alive.”

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Lt. Colonel Harry Lee’s eyes roamed across the big board and the drone footage rolling on multiple monitors. All displayed the progress of First Battalion’s scattered elements as they moved through Greater Boston’s clogged arteries and converged on Hanscom. The soldiers were fighting hard for every mile, their vehicles keeping just ahead of the mass migration of infected citizens pouring out of the burning city.

Major Walker had proven to be a slippery one, but he’d probably saved the battalion with his subversive maneuvering. Aside from the crazies, tens of thousands of dazed refugees were on the move. They were easy pickings on the street. The crazies killed or infected them, swelling their own numbers into an irresistible flood.

First Battalion was in full retreat. Lee was starting to tremble with exhaustion. He was sweating, and his body ached. He’d been standing for hours with every muscle clenched with tension. Those were his boys out there, and if they failed, it was game over. The burden of command brought a heady sense of responsibility he hadn’t anticipated.

He gratefully accepted a cup of strong coffee from a second lieutenant. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had some decent chow and sleep.

“Watch it,” he murmured as Alpha Company’s vehicles stacked up at a bottleneck. “Cover your flanks and rear until you get things squared away.”

He was about to ask for the radio when Captain Randy “Hallelujah” Hayes sent vehicles out in every direction to provide security to the main column. Lee saw the fifties rocking in the gun turrets. White particles fluttered to the ground around the gunners—ash falling from the sky as if it were snowing in high summer. Tracers zipped downrange. The big rounds chewed up people and vehicles.

Seeing the way the Alpha boys pounded their opposition made Lee consider—just for a moment—ordering them to turn around and go back into Boston. Concentrated, his lightfighters could deliver incredible firepower. They appeared almost invincible.

But appearances were deceiving. Pulling out was the right thing to do. Boston was a lost cause, its people fled or infected, its once proud buildings slowly converting into ash. Lee doubted his forces had enough bullets to do the job at this point.

“Radio,” he said.

A staff sergeant gave him the phone. Lee barked instructions to the Apaches assigned to provide top cover for Alpha. He directed cannon fire at several civilian vehicles speeding along an open stretch of road toward Alpha’s position.

He handed the radio back and sipped his coffee. On one of the video monitors, he kept watch on a speeding white Cadillac. Welded spikes protruded from its hood and roof, onto which a grisly array of severed heads had been mounted.

The vehicle wilted under chain gun fire from one of the Apaches then burst into a fireball.

Good work. Behind him, one of the staff sergeants whistled. The staff appeared to be in good spirits. The command post hummed with new energy. They were losing, but they were doing something. They had a new mission, one they could understand, one that had promise. They were getting the hell out from under the big hammer.

They weren’t retreating. No. He hadn’t put it like that during his speech at Prince’s funeral, which he’d kept short on platitudes and long on communicating the new strategy. He called it “redeployment.” They’d fought the good fight, accomplished what they could, and they were returning to Fort Drum. If there were infected at Drum, they’d clean house. If there were survivors, they’d help them.

The soldiers had looked back at him with faces lined with constant stress and fatigue. They didn’t cheer. But he saw a new gleam in their hollowed eyes. Lee hoped the men coming back from Boston felt the same way about their new mission. Together, they’d go to Fort Drum. They’d rest and refit then plan their next move.

Bravo Company approached the wire. They’d made it.

Lee heard cheering outside. “Major,” he said, “take over here. Back in five.”

Walker snapped to it. “Yes, sir.”

Lee wanted to greet Captain Marsh personally. It wasn’t going to be a pleasant meeting. He had bad news: The captain’s missing platoon had gone into one of the hospitals and had been virtually overrun. And Marsh was going to have to hand over his wounded, who would be locked up and cared for in a special quarantine facility on base.

All in all, the next few days would severely test Lee’s diplomatic skills. If he was going to succeed as the new commanding officer, he needed the support of the field officers.

He stepped out of the command post as the column of Humvees rolled through the gate and began to coil near the maintenance building. Soldiers shouted and slapped the metal hides of the vehicles as they rumbled past. The gunners smiled down at them and flashed the victory sign.

They stiffened at the sight of Lee.

One by one, they saluted him as they passed.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

Wade knew he had to come clean with Rawlings.

He’d seen a lot of zombie movies back in high school. There was always some guy who got bitten but kept it secret from everybody else. Wade could never understand the motivation. If you knew you were infected and going to die, why not tell the others in your group? He always pictured himself in that situation, thinking he’d grab the nearest weapon and go out in a blaze of glory. With nothing to lose, he’d sacrifice himself so that others might live.

The real world was not a movie. In the real world, the monsters didn’t shamble around trying to eat you; they howled with laughter while they pressed a hot iron into your face. Wade didn’t know if he was infected. If there was any chance he wasn’t, he didn’t want to be tossed out on the street to face those things alone. And if he was, he wasn’t sure he could handle being rejected and tossed out by the group. He needed them in more ways than one.

Still, he owed them the truth. If there was any chance he could be a danger to them, they should know about it. The need to come clean felt like a crushing weight.

Wade found Rawlings standing in front of one of the big picture windows overlooking the crowds boiling in the stadium.

She greeted him with a nod before returning to the view. “I was just thinking about human nature, Wade.”

“What about it?”

“Cooperate versus compete. When the shit hits the fan, most people try to do the right thing. Then some assholes go and ruin it for everybody. See those guys?” She pointed at a gang of teenagers at the eastern edge of the playing field.

He nodded. “Yeah. What about them?”

“At least once a day, they drag some girl under the stands.”

Wade frowned with disgust. “We should—”

“There isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.”

“Well,” he said. He didn’t know what to say.

“More people come in every day. Nowhere out there is safe now.”

Wade asked, “It’s safe in here?”

She offered up a grim smile. “You’re a quick study, Private Wade.”

They stood in silence for a few moments, watching the crowd. A boom box down in the camp played a rap song that pounded the air with its bass line. Wade shook his head at the stupidity. If he could hear the music up here, the Klowns could hear it out there.

After a while, Rawlings nudged him and swept her arm across the view. “One day, my son, all this will be yours.”

He smiled at her humor. Rawlings was like no other woman he’d ever known, the polar opposite of the girls back in high school, who were so insecure yet so full of themselves. With Rawlings, what you saw was what you got. He really liked her.

One more reason to come clean.

But all the more reason to fear her loathing and rejection.

“Why don’t we leave?” he asked. “It seems to me we’re sitting ducks here.”

“We’re healing, Wade. We need every minute of rest to get our fighting spirit back. Without it, we won’t last five minutes on the street. We’ll be dead meat out there.”

“We can do it,” he assured her.

“What about the other twenty guys here who are still too messed up to wipe their own asses? We need to give them every chance to come around and step up. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell am not super excited about leaving them behind to get chopped up.”

Wade nodded. She was right. But at some point, they were going to have to make a tough decision if they wanted to survive.

“You’re cutting it awfully close,” he said. If it wasn’t too late already.

“I know. I just don’t want to leave them.” She winced. “And maybe I’m a little scared, okay?”

Wade hated seeing her forced to admit that. Of course she was scared. They were all scared. They were terrified. He wanted to put his arm around her and comfort her. He patted her shoulder instead. “It’s going to be all right.”

“I grew up here. Bean Town is my home. It’s all going up in smoke. History itself. All those people…” Rawlings wiped her eyes and set her jaw. “I’ll face it when I’m ready.”

“And then what? What’s the plan?”

“You know the egress routes and the rally point. Assuming we get out of the building alive, we strike west. Travel only at night. Cross the river. Then north all the way to Hanscom.”

“You’re coming with us?”

“Camp Edwards is too far away. Think they’ll let me join your club?”

“We’ll make a mountaineer out of you in no time, Sergeant.”

“Once you’re back with the Tenth, I’ll be just another Nasty Girl to you hotshots.”

Wade smiled. “Not a chance.”

“I can’t stay with you boys anyway. I’ll find a Guard unit after we get to Hanscom. Gotta get back to my Bay Staters. No offense or anything to you mountaineers.”

“Hanscom’s pretty far too. Twenty klicks at least.”

“Then I hope you know how to hotwire a car,” she said brightly. “The only other option is to head downtown toward the sound of gunfire and hope the people doing the firing is a Guard unit.”

“Listen, I need to tell you something.” His heart suddenly pounded in his chest. His voice sounded thin. He took a deep breath. “Can I tell you something important?”

Rawlings eyed him warily and crossed her arms. “What is it? Shoot.”

“I might have the Bug.”

She looked around to make sure nobody else heard. The other men lay on the floor facing the walls. She hissed, “Why do you say that?”

“My sergeant was infected. He licked his knife and cut my face with it.”

“You’ve been here for days. The Bug incubates faster than that. You’d be a Klown by now.”

“Maybe they were wrong. Maybe it takes longer with some people.”

“That’s not what we were told. That’s all I’m saying.”

He thought about it. “Do you think I’m immune?”

“Who knows? The Bug doesn’t survive very long outside the body. Maybe it died before you got that cut. Hell, Wade, it could be anything. But the fact is you aren’t sick.”

“Okay.” He let out a long shuddering sigh. “Okay.”

She snorted. “Is this what’s had you all tied up in knots? God, most of us were wounded before we got here. We were all exposed, just like you. Private Wade, you need to think about more important things. Things like you lost people you really cared about. Like it wasn’t your fault they died. Like you need to keep fighting if you want to survive. Like how much the rest of us need you to be at your best if we’re all going to get through this.”

He nodded and studied his feet. He sighed again, but with relief. “All right.”

“Rawlings!” Fisher called. He stomped into the room, startling the men lying on the floor. He noticed her at the window. “Oh, Sergeant. The camp just let in some new people. They’re telling everybody the Army is bugging out of Boston north of the river.”

“That’s Tenth Mountain’s area of operations,” Wade said.

“It’s the fire,” Rawlings pointed out. “The fire is pushing everybody out.”

“Whatever it is, other refugees are saying the same thing. Units all over are pulling out. Word’s going around the civilians. They’re pissed off.”

Wade checked the window. The crowds down in the stadium were concentrating. Everywhere, angry men and women pointed up at the windows of the athletics department building.

Rawlings paled. “Damn. Anybody who wants to go, we’re leaving tonight. Pass the word, Fisher.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me, Fisher. I’m not an officer.”

Wade looked at her in surprise. “We’re leaving now? Just like that?”

“Just like that, Private Wade. The situation has changed. You’ve got a few hours to get your stuff together. At oh-dark-thirty, we’re bugging out.” She eyed the crowd. “If they let us.”

TWENTY-NINE.

Lt. Colonel Lee watched the captains of First Battalion file into the Air Force administrative building. It was time for a powwow.

“Ready when you are, sir,” Walker told him. “The room’s all set up.”

They followed the captains inside. Lee took a deep breath and let it go. There was a lot riding on the outcome of the upcoming meeting—everything, actually.

The men knew his character and service record. He’d served with some of them going back years. Iraq. Korengal Valley. They respected him. But would they follow him?

He let go of his worries. They either would or they wouldn’t. He’d make his case, and they’d make up their minds. That was the best he could do.

The conference room was filled with men: the captains of Alpha through Echo and HQ, the young lieutenants who served as their XOs, and the battalion sergeant major, Doug Turner, who represented the enlisted men.

At the sight of Lee, Turner stood at attention. “Gentlemen, the commanding officer.”

The officers made to stand, but Lee told them to be at ease, taking a seat at the head of the table. The captains, freshly showered and fed, powered up their iPads as they waited for him to speak. Strong java brewed in a coffeemaker in the corner.

“Gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. For the first part of our meeting, anybody below the rank of captain, please give us the room.”

Turner escorted the lieutenants into another part of the building.

Lee planted his elbows on the table. “You’ve all done an exemplary job far beyond the call of duty over the past weeks. And you got your men back safe. Now we need to talk about what comes next. As you know, I have assumed command as First Battalion CO.”

“Congratulations on your promotion, sir,” Captain Marsh of Bravo Company said.

“Thank you, Captain.”

“It’s extraordinary, to say the least,” the man added, his tone deferential but testing.

“That’s because I wasn’t actually promoted. Or appointed to command.”

The men stared at him, their mouths hanging open.

Lee went on. “The chain of command has been completely disrupted. The Bug’s incubation period in some cases appears to be longer than previously understood. Casualties sent to the rear have spread infection. There are now detection kits that can determine on the spot if somebody is infected, but they’re being prioritized to military personnel in Florida and at Mount Weather. In the case of regimental command, all of headquarters was compromised and had to be terminated via airstrike. In the case of divisional command, Fort Drum has gone dark. We’re working on getting eyes on base via satellite, but it’s chaos across the board.”

Lee paused to let all that sink in. Some of the men had families living at Drum.

Marsh glanced at Major Walker. Lee knew what Marsh was thinking. He was thinking the major should have assumed command as the senior officer, but he didn’t believe Walker could get them out of the mess they were in. Lee wondered what Marsh would say if he knew the major shared that sentiment.

“I fully support Lee taking command,” Walker said, putting the issue to bed.

“As a temporary posting,” Captain Sommers of Charlie Company pointed out, “until we get back on the reservation. Right?”

Lee nodded. So did the other men.

“Major Walker pulled you out of the core,” Lee said before they had a chance to come up with any fresh objections. “I ordered you the rest of the way here.”

Hallelujah Hayes snorted. “That didn’t come from the top, either?”

“No,” Lee told him. “That’s on me too.”

Marsh said, “You’re stretching the concept of independent initiative far beyond what’s accepted. We could all get shit-canned for this.”

Lee noted Marsh said accepted, not acceptable. An important distinction. “It’s on me,” he repeated.

“Then God help you. Sir.”

Captain Perez of Delta Company glared at the others. “Who wants to go back into Boston?”

Nobody raised his hand. They knew the city was a lost cause.

“So we’re here,” Marsh said. “Now what?”

“The first step is Fort Drum,” Lee replied. “Retake it if necessary. Make sure our families are safe. Rest and refit.”

“Wait a minute. Boston’s a write-off. We can’t hold onto the real estate. I get that. But there are still civilians here who need our protection.”

“And I have a wife and three kids at Drum,” Sommers said. “Lee’s right. Let Brock handle his people. It’s about time we took care of our own.”

“Our mission is to save Boston.”

“And we failed, Captain. That sucks. But it’s how it is.”

“Tell that to all of our guys who went through hell and died out there.”

“Our mission,” Lee said, “is to save the United States. That’s the big picture.”

“Suppose we got every civilian in one place and protected them,” Captain Johnston of Echo Company said. As a support company, Echo took care of everything from the motor pool to making sure the men got their three squares a day. “How would we feed them? Treat them when they’re sick? We don’t have the resources. We’re down to essentials just for our own boys. We barely have enough ordnance and fuel left to get us to Drum.”

“We could attach ourselves to Brock,” Marsh said, adding quickly, “It’s an option.”

“He’s got eight thousand people in the field, and he can barely keep them supplied,” Johnston told him.

“Besides that,” Sommers added, “he’d just send us back into the meat grinder.”

That appeared to settle the issue. Necessity trumped the moral considerations. They couldn’t protect the people of Boston any longer, because soon, it would simply no longer be possible.

“So what happens after Drum?” Perez asked.

“We have options,” Lee said. “We may become attached to another command that can provide the resources we need to remain combat effective. We could establish a sphere of protection for civilians. Set up refugee camps if somebody can supply them. Major Walker had another idea. It’s crazy or bold, take your pick. But the way things are going, it may be our last chance.”

“What’s that, sir?”

Lee said, “Florida.”

THIRTY.

Step off in less than two hours. A night march through a city of nightmares.

Wade entered a dark room to test the night vision goggles mounted on his helmet. His vision instantly went from 20/20 to 20/40 as the world became rendered in luminous shades of green. The monocular view provided forty-degree tunnel vision and eliminated depth perception.

In short, the NVGs sucked. But they worked, amplifying the dying daylight coming through the window thirty thousand times, turning night into day. Tonight, out on the street, being able to see would give him a critical survival edge. The Klowns were crazy, but they weren’t superhuman. They couldn’t see in the dark.

He turned them off and flipped them up from his eyes.

And saw the horde.

THIRTY-ONE.

There were hundreds of them, a maniacal army of Klowns dressed in rags and covered in fresh scars and other tribal mutilations whose significance was known only to the infected. Their laughter filled the night, drowning out the popping of distant gunfire. They came out of the dusk in a mob and filled the street, dragging their weapons and grisly trophies along the ground.

They stopped in front of the stadium and listened to the throbbing bass of multiple boom boxes turned up too loud for common sense. Bouncing on bare feet, they grinned and clawed at the air. They wanted so badly to get inside.

Across the throng, men dropped onto their backs and pulled taut powerful slingshots, their feet raised against the handles. Their brothers lovingly placed bright objects onto the leather pads. The men released. The objects sailed through the air. Some burst against the wall. The rest sailed over the top of the stadium and disappeared.

They looked like water balloons.

Wade ran into the hallway, calling for Rawlings. He found her in an office overlooking the stadium. Soldiers crowded the windows, staring down at the playing field where red, white and blue balloons fell out of the sky and splashed among the refugees.

“What the hell are they doing?” Fisher cried.

The crowds parted around the impacts, leaving people writhing on the ground.

“Some type of poison, looks like,” Gray said.

Kaffa. Wade remembered something he’d read in one of his military history books. During the Middle Ages, the Tartars laid siege to Kaffa, a Genoese trading colony established in the Crimea, but they failed to capture it after the Black Plague broke out in their camp. Before they left, they placed the bodies of their dead on catapults and launched them into the city by the hundreds. Within weeks, plague had decimated the city’s defenders. Biological warfare.

One of the bodies on the playing field lurched to his feet and ran at the nearest refugees, clawing at them. Shots rang out as more balloons rained from the sky. Thousands fled into the stands, filling the air with an endless scream. Scores of people fought across the field. Tents collapsed or burst into flames as cook fires spilled.

“It’s piss,” Wade said. “They filled the balloons with their piss. It’s infecting people.”

“The Bug can’t survive outside the body that long,” Rawlings said.

Wade touched his face, fingering the dirty bandage.

Gray smashed the window with the butt of his rifle and propped his weapon on the sill. He took aim.

Wade grabbed the barrel and yanked it up. “What are you doing?”

“There are Klowns down there!”

“You’re going to get us all killed.”

“Fuck you! We can stop it. We can hold this place.”

“We can’t. Trust me. I saw them.”

“How many?” Rawlings asked.

Wade looked her in the eye. “Too many.”

They froze as something heavy thudded in the distance.

BOOM

“Aw, shit,” Fisher said, backing away from the window. He looked around as if searching for somewhere to hide. “Aw, fuck. What is that?”

“Battering ram,” Wade said. “I saw them carrying it.”

“We’re okay here for now,” Rawlings said. “We’re in a different building.”

“Are you kidding?” Fisher asked. “It’s only a matter of time before they find us.”

“They won’t find us. We’re getting the heck out of Dodge.”

BOOM

Gray fixed his fierce glare on her. “Those people down there won’t stand a chance without our help, Sergeant. It’s our job. It’s what we signed up to do.”

“There’s nothing we can do for them, soldier.”

“The hell there isn’t. We can fight.”

“Then stay and fight. I’m bugging out. Those people down there are already dead.”

BOOM

Wade didn’t move. The battle on the playing field had spread into the stands. The screaming never seemed to break. He blinked at the gunshots. People stampeded in all directions, trying to flee the knots of fighting. Bodies rolled down the steps. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight.

“We have to move,” Rawlings pleaded. “Now.”

Wade looked at her in mute horror. All the teambuilding and planning they’d done was for nothing. They were broken. Already they were falling apart.

BOOM

“Make a hole!” The sergeant who’d lain on the floor in a stupor for the past few days staggered past them to the broken window. He rested his carbine on the windowsill and started shooting.

Wade saw figures drop. He couldn’t tell if they were infected or not.

CRASH

The Klowns flooded onto the playing field, trampling the tents. The screaming rose in pitch. In seconds, the field resembled a slaughterhouse. The Klowns raced into the stands next, hacking at anything that moved and spreading their disease to their ever-present soundtrack of shrieking laughter. Blood splashed across the bleachers. Some of the crazies blared long, random notes on trumpets and tubas. Others frolicked among the dead, collecting their grisly trophies.

“Oh my God,” Fisher said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

The sergeant dropped an empty mag and loaded a fresh one into his carbine, muttering the whole time.

“Thy kingdom come.” The sergeant fired again. “Thy will be done.”

Wade set his jaw. It was time to move. “All right, guys. We’re getting out of here right now.”

The squad had gathered, all ten, geared up in full battle rattle. Wade and Rawlings raced downstairs ahead of the others and headed for the west exit. The doorway was blocked with piled office furniture and light fixtures. They frantically grabbed the nearest pieces and threw them out of the way. Gray, Fisher and Brown arrived and helped. They opened the door.

A giant wearing a loincloth made out of a leathered human face lunged at them with a bloody claw hammer. “HAW, HAW!”

Fight or flight. Wade wanted to run. Then his training took over. He fired a burst into the giant. The Klown spun around and fell hard as if his legs had been kicked out from under him. He immediately started to get back up.

Rawlings put a round in his head. The hellish screaming inside the stadium went on and on.

“We’re heading west,” Wade said. “Jungle file. Team Alpha on the left, Bravo on the right. If you see something, go to guns on it. Fire and move. While we move, we keep the initiative. Tempo, tempo, tempo. If we get separated, remember the rally points.”

He wasn’t afraid anymore. He still had a lot of things worth fighting to save. The survivors of his platoon, wherever they were. Ramos’s family, still holed up in their apartment waiting for the sergeant to come rescue them. And not least of all, Rawlings.

THIRTY-TWO.

The command post was a beehive of frantic activity as First Battalion HQ worked to prepare for the retreat back to Fort Drum.

Redeployment, Lee reminded himself. He scanned the big board. The only blue units left in Boston were National Guard, and they were clustering to the south, pushed out of the city by fires and waves of infected. Everything else was gone. Fire, police, paramedics, all of it. The only authority still active had a lot of firepower. Or, in the case of the crazies, numbers and sheer will.

CNN and the other networks were off the air. All civilian television broadcasting had been bumped. Mount Weather had taken over what was left of the national communications network. On the video monitor, an attractive blonde shared the latest Federal propaganda. Captions rolled across the bottom of the screen, advising people to stock up on food and water, stay in their homes and avoid laughing when approaching military personnel. To find the nearest safety shelter, they were supposed to call an 800 number.

Walker was right. Local civilian authority had collapsed. Central civilian authority was following suit as decisionmaking at the top became increasingly erratic and military commanders in the field ignored their orders. The military itself was breaking down due to disruptions in the chain of command. Real authority rested with local commanders trying to hold what they could with dwindling resources.

“Sergeant Major Turner, reporting as ordered.”

Lee returned the man’s salute. “Sergeant Major, how long have you been in uniform?”

“Twenty-one years next month, sir.”

Lee had to handle Turner with some caution. Not only was he the senior enlisted man left standing, he had a monumental amount of tactical and operational experience that was worth its weight in gold. While officers ran the Army, senior non-commissioned officers ran the men, and without the men behind him, any plan Lee formulated would die like a fish out of water. He needed to get on Turner’s good side, and stay there.

“Another old-timer like me,” he said. “You served Lieutenant Colonel Prince with distinction.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I expect the same honesty from you. I respect your opinion. Always give it to me straight.”

The big sergeant grinned. “I’m your man for that, sir.”

“What’s the feeling in the ranks? About leaving Boston?”

“They’re happy to be going for the most part. They need a rest. Replace the gear they’ve lost. Retrain if there’s time. They don’t like failing a mission, but the mission ain’t everything.”

“The mission is everything, Sergeant Major. But the mission is changing. That’s how they need to see it.”

“Hooah, sir.”

“Do they still have confidence? I’ll be frank with you. We’re becoming more of a volunteer army by the day. Do they want to be here, or would they rather go home to their families?”

“The older guys, their families are at Drum. So we’re itching to get there. The others, well, they’re from all over, and they know that their hometowns might as well be on Mars at this point. Nobody’s going anywhere except in force.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Major. Please give my compliments to the men for hanging tough these past weeks. They’ve gone through hell, but they’ve got to go a little farther.”

“I’ll do that.”

“We’ll be on the move at eleven hundred hours on the fifteenth. Make sure they’re ready. I don’t intend to stick around any longer than necessary.”

They saluted. Lee watched Turner leave the command post, thankful he had the man on his side. The old-timers were the battalion’s bedrock, the centurions of the Army. If they fell, they could not be replaced.

They would go to Fort Drum. After that, maybe Florida. Maybe not. What happened next didn’t really matter at the moment. Just getting to Drum was going to be hell.

First, they had to fight their way out of the Greater Boston area with its population of five million. The short hop to Route 90 was dense with crazies.

Route 90 would take them all the way across three hundred fifty kilometers of open highway through or near ten large cities and countless small towns: Framingham, Worcester, Chicopee, Springfield, Westfield, Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. Some were controlled by military, others had gone dark and were considered hostile zones.

They could make the trip in two or three days of hard driving if nothing stood in their way, but it was going to be a running battle. Nearly a million people were along the route just in the major metropolitan areas alone. Lee’s battalion didn’t have a million bullets.

The drones and Apaches were key. The drones would recon the road ahead. The Apaches would provide overwatch and security for the column. The Apaches would lay the wrath of God on any major opposition force observed out in the open. After an hour and a half in the air, though, they’d have to land on the highway for refueling and maintenance.

The urban areas would be a different story. The battalion would have to find a way around them or make a hard and fast run straight through, shooting anything that moved. From here on out, they were taking no chances.

War movies often made it seem as if soldiers charged into battle without extensive planning. Lee knew that intelligence was the key to mission planning, and planning was the key to mission success. Officers were trained to accomplish their missions at minimal risk. Heroism, the stuff of movies, was something else. Individuals had it, not organizations. And even then, heroism was only for those rare times one really needed it, and it was done without thinking.

If Lee had his way, they’d accomplish their objective with as little fighting as possible.

The problem was intelligence was never perfect. Plans often failed. And the enemy was everywhere, resourceful and determined.

Once the battalion reached Syracuse, they’d cut north on Route 80 and go about a hundred kilometers up to Fort Drum where, Lee hoped, they’d find survivors and resources.

If the soldiers found their families infected and waiting with weapons they found on base, they’d all end up exploring a new level of hell together.

And if they didn’t find resources, Florida would become a pipe dream.

They’d end up scavenging.

Once an army did that, they stopped being an army.

He wished Walker had never handed him these damned silver oak leaves.

“Colonel?”

Lee smiled. Still unused to the rank, it had taken him a moment to realize he was being addressed. “Yes, Major?”

Walker didn’t smile back. “Major General Brock is on the line, sir. He’d like a word.”

THIRTY-THREE.

A running battle on the streets of Cambridge. A single ragged squad against a city gone mad. They bounded in two groups of six, leapfrogging by sections. One fired while the other ran. They dropped bodies with a sustained rate of fire.

Wade’s M4 ran dry. He patted his vest. Two mags left. “Reloading!”

Harvard Stadium was surrounded by green space—wide open, no cover—but they’d made it to Soldier’s Field Road without contact. They crossed Eliot Bridge, the Charles River below jammed with dead bodies and boats packed with refugees and crazies. The hellish screaming and crackle of gunfire at Harvard Stadium faded to a dull roar as they jogged north into Cambridge.

Ahead, a massive hospital had been demolished by missiles. A vast wall of smoke rolled into the sky above the wreckage. Fresh Pond Parkway was carpeted with red brick, white dust and flattened vehicles. The Apaches had done their work there, just as they had at Christ Hospital.

For a while, they didn’t see any Klowns. Then their luck ran out.

The crazies came from the east. Swarms of them fleeing the big fires. They ran at the soldiers from front yards and parking lots.

The M4’s recoil hummed against his shoulder. Crack crack. Brass rang on the asphalt. A body dropped, a woman coming at them swinging a shovel. Then another.

Wade stumbled. His ankle hadn’t had time to heal, and it flared with pain at each step. Rawlings put her arm around him and took some of his weight.

The bulldozer was gaining on them, a big yellow John Deere machine with glaring headlights. The squad’s rounds pinged and sparked off its massive steel blade. Klowns hung off the sides, waving spiked bats and Molotov cocktails.

Young set up his SAW and started hammering. One of the crazies tumbled off. Otherwise, the fire had no effect.

“Cease fire!” Wade called. “Save the ammo!”

Young glared at him as if to say, Who are you to give orders? But he did as he was told.

The bulldozer was coming fast.

“Gray! Hit it with the two-oh-three!”

Gray kissed a forty-millimeter grenade and loaded it into the launcher tube attached to his carbine. He took careful aim while the squad halted to provide security. “Firing!”

The bulldozer’s cab exploded in a massive fireball. Bodies cartwheeled through the air. The smoking rig veered off the road and plowed into a cluster of abandoned vehicles with a metallic crash.

The soldiers sent up a ragged cheer. They were panting with exhaustion. At last, night had come. The men flipped their helmet-mounted NVGs over their eyes. Wade did the same. The world brightened and shrank to a bright green circle.

“Booyah,” Gray said.

“Good shooting,” Rawlings said.

Gray frowned at her and spit. “Happy now, Sergeant? We had a good position back there. We could have held that place. Instead, we’re out here holding our dicks.”

Wade and Rawlings exchanged a glance. Was he kidding?

She said, “You can always go back, Gray.”

The soldier grinned. “Why would I do that? This is my squad, Nasty Girl. You’re a fucking reservist.” He pointed at a blocky building in the distance that looked like a school. “We’ll hole up there for the night.”

“That’s a no go,” Wade told him. “We’ve got darkness on our side. We need to find a car dealership or something and get some vehicles. We’ll be back at Hanscom by morning.”

Gray grinned. “You can always go on ahead by yourselves.”

He started walking toward the school. The rest of the squad followed. They were smoked. Whether they were stopping for the night or pushing ahead, they needed a rest.

Rawlings touched Wade’s shoulder. “Let’s move.”

They had to stick together, and they had no time for a pissing contest.

Gray signaled the squad to a listening halt outside the school. They heard nothing. He smashed a window with the butt of his carbine. The squad piled into a classroom. They cleared it and the hallway beyond then barricaded the door.

Wade sat on the floor and propped his swollen ankle on his helmet to elevate it. The right side of his face felt heavy and foreign, as if his cheekbone had doubled in size and turned to rock. His disjointed muscles protested every movement. His body felt broken.

Fisher sat next to him and lay on his side with a groan, shivering.

Rawlings sat on his other side and removed her helmet with a sigh. “We’ll get some vehicles in the morning.”

“No, we won’t,” Wade murmured with his eyes closed.

“Don’t give up on me, Private Wade. We can do this. Don’t worry about Gray. His M203 made him the hero of the hour. But he can’t lead this squad. He couldn’t lead ants to a picnic.”

“We barely made it three klicks in two hours. We burned through most of our ammo. Tomorrow, we’ll be traveling again in broad daylight, fighting for our lives. There won’t be any chance to find vehicles. Besides all that, by morning, I’ll barely be able to walk.”

“We can leave tonight,” she whispered. “Rest up. Hit the road.”

“We have to stick together. Maybe Gray was right. We shouldn’t have left the stadium. We left good men to die back there.”

“We would have died with them. What would be the point of that?”

“We’re dead anyway. At least at the stadium, we could have died with some honor.”

“Screw that and screw you. You can’t put that on us. We tried to get them to leave. Staying was their choice. Their blood isn’t on our hands. Me, I’m not interested in suicide. Where’s the honor in that? I’m not interested in dying for something.” Her hand probed until it found his. “Right now, I’m a hell of a lot more interested in living for something.”

They held hands in the dark. For the first time in weeks, Wade felt a sense of calm. He’d reached a decision. He’d tell her. She deserved to know.

“Even if we make it, I’m not sure I’m going back,” he said. “All my friends are dead. Sergeant Ramos is dead. He wasn’t like a father to me because my dad was nice, but he cared. He was tough, but it was because he cared. All he cared about was keeping everybody in the squad alive. He saved my ass more times than I can count in Afghanistan.”

He paused and went on, “I remember this one time, the Taliban totally lit us up. A textbook L-shaped ambush. Men went down instantly. Our lead element was cut off from the rest of the platoon. I dove behind a log and couldn’t raise my head. A PK ripped that log to shreds. Somebody shouted, ‘They got Esposito! They got him!’ Then Sergeant Ramos ran past me. We all got up to provide cover fire. A couple of Taliban had Esposito down in the gully. He was wounded, and they were dragging him away as a prize. Ramos chased after them, shot them down, and brought Esposito back. I don’t know how he did it. But it was something to see. It was really something.”

Wade paused again, lost in the memory. “He was like that. He gave the orders, but we always came first. He has a sister and a nephew here in Boston. He wanted to protect them because they were the only family in the world he had left. He could have walked off the job, but he stayed. He put us first. He put the Army first. And now he’s dead. He died in a fucking hospital we had no business being in. Now his family is stuck in this city. I tell you, if I get out of this, I’m going to pay him back. I’ll go Elvis. I’m going to find them and protect them.”

Rawlings squeezed his hand. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. But don’t do it.”

“No?”

“We need you, Wade. I need you. Come here.” She touched his head and guided it to her shoulder. She stroked his hair.

“I’m so fucking tired,” he said. His mind began to slip away.

“Sorry to interrupt, lovebirds.”

Gray grinned down at them, still wearing his NVGs.

“Wade, you take first watch.”

“Go to hell, Gray,” Wade told him.

He closed his eyes and fell asleep in seconds.

THIRTY-FOUR.

Hanscom Air Force Base. Oh-dawn-hundred. Already hot and humid. The day was going to be a scorcher. First Battalion kicked off their fartsacks and got to their feet.

Lt. Colonel Lee searched for the big sergeant the men called John Wayne.

Sergeant Andy Muldoon, First Platoon, Delta Company. His squad was a rough bunch of bad apples. He had a reputation of taking misfits and turning them into hardened killers. He’d served seven tours on and off in Afghanistan and had been decorated three times. The Taliban knew his name, and they’d been afraid of him. The war had turned him into the type of man who knew he could never go home. He was on American soil again, but home was gone.

He and Lee had history in Afghanistan. They held no special love for each other. But Lee needed his help.

Lee found the sergeant sitting on a crate with his back against a palette of bottled water, whittling a piece of wood into what looked like a chess piece. Lee once again found himself impressed with the man’s colossal size; he was a virtual giant. His squad loitered around him with their shirts off, trading desserts from MRE pouches, lifting weights and sharpening their big knives. A boom box pounded out Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.”

“Sergeant Muldoon, a word.”

The big sergeant squinted up at him. “Captain Lee. Or is it Colonel Lee now?”

Lee crouched next to him. “Your men are fit? Ready to move?”

Muldoon grinned. “Always. You tracked me down just to check up on me?”

“They don’t look like they’re in a state of readiness.”

“They’re ready.”

“There’s a mission.”

“There always is, Colonel. The second I laid eyes on you, I knew you needed my help.”

“Believe me,” Lee said, “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

“Then it must be a real choice mission, one you wouldn’t do yourself.”

“I’d do it if ordered, and you wouldn’t see me bitch.”

“You really think you’re better than me, don’t you? Now that you’re in command, you need somebody to do your dirty work for you, so you don’t get dirty yourself.”

Lee sighed. It was like Afghanistan all over again. The mission that went wrong in every way possible. The kid. The long hours spent under the hammer. What happened between them there had turned into a never-ending pissing match that had no respect for decorum or rank. But Muldoon was the best man for the job he had in mind, and as always, the mission came first.

“No, Sergeant. We’re all just different tools for the job. And when did you start caring what I think of you? You might be surprised to know I came here for your skills, not your morality.” He paused then added, “And definitely not for your personality, in case you were wondering.”

“All right, Colonel. Fair enough. Give it to me. Straight, if you don’t mind.”

Lee took a deep breath. “Major General Brock knows we’ve pulled out of the city. He says we work for him now. And he’s pissed about us blowing up the hospitals. Real pissed. He wants us to fall in line, go back to our original positions, and hold whatever ground we can.”

“Yeah, well, he’s nuts. So?”

“So he said he’ll prevent us from leaving Massachusetts by whatever means necessary.”

“Which means what, exactly? Talk is cheap.”

“Our drones identified two companies of infantry moving west out of Newton along Route 90.”

Muldoon grunted. “That’s only like ten, twelve clicks from here.”

“Most are on foot. Fuel must be a problem for them. But they have some vehicles. Humvees. A few five-tons.”

“Armor?”

“Negative.”

The sergeant snorted. “Doesn’t sound like a fair fight to me. Let them come.”

“It’s an opening move. Brock wouldn’t have sent them if he weren’t committed. More are probably on the way. He’s got four thousand men in the Greater Boston area. Armor, airpower, arty. We can’t watch them all. In any case, it’s a fight we don’t want even if we can win it.”

“You know, there’s another way out of this.”

“What’s that?”

Muldoon grinned. “We hand you over and join the Guard.”

Lee stared the man in the eye. “Is that what you want to do?”

“Nope. Just throwing it out there. Because it sounds like what you want is for me and my boys to go down that road and risk our lives slowing them down.” He spit a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. “Fighting our own guys.”

“Like I said, I’m hoping there won’t be any fighting.”

“You want the road blocked.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s six lanes of highway.”

“I’m sending the engineers with you. They’ll handle the demolitions.”

“You’ll be blocking the route to Drum,” Muldoon noted, “if we’re going that way.”

“We’re not,” Lee told him. “Change of plans. We’ll be going west along other routes. Try to bypass some of the major cities. Fewer people, fewer problems. No National Guard.”

“Smaller roads. They’ll be blocked in places. Slow going.”

“The alternative is a pitched battle with Brock.”

“Sold. So let’s leave then.”

“We’re not ready. We’ve got stragglers coming in, and we’re still packing equipment. We can’t leave anything for the crazies. If they hoof it, the Guard may get here sooner than we’re ready to egress. We need time.”

“And you want me to buy it for you.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s doable.”

“There’s more. The drones are picking up big movement among the infected. A lot of them are coming this way. So you might have company out there.”

Lee didn’t tell him about Radio Scream. Radio Scream, the voice on the FM dial rasped, where we pay to play. An infected engineer had figured out a way to take back control of the broadcast from Mount Weather’s override. The infected DJ preached his sadist gospel between “songs” that consisted of grating laughter and the screams of tortured innocents.

Last night, the DJ told his listeners that Tenth Mountain was leaving the playpen without permission and that they should go and say bon voyage to the brave boys in uniform and personally thank them for their service to this great nation. He kept at it all night. By morning, the westward migration out of the burning Boston core began to shift. Toward Hanscom.

He also didn’t tell Muldoon that he suspected Brock had put the word out. If First Battalion wouldn’t stay in Boston, Brock would use them while he had them. He’d flush the infected out and send them all into Tenth Mountain’s guns. If true, the man was utterly ruthless. Desperate. Smart. Either way, they weren’t getting out of here without a fight.

“Great.” The sergeant leaned back and put his hands behind his head, revealing massive biceps. Lee knew Muldoon sometimes fired an M240 machine gun with one hand as a party trick at the firing range. “It’s a choice mission. All right. Convince me.”

Lee frowned. “Most real soldiers find a direct order convincing.”

The man laughed. “I’m about as much a real soldier as you are a real colonel. Sir. Times have changed. My boys and I could walk out of here anytime I say so.”

The man was right. There was no use trying to argue otherwise. “Then why don’t you?”

Muldoon leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. His eyes blazed. “Because I am a real soldier. Sir.”

Lee grinned. “That’s what I thought.”

“And we’re coming back. Don’t think we’re a bunch of Dixie cups.”

Dixie cups. Disposable. “I don’t dislike you that much, Sergeant.”

“Tell me something, Colonel. How far would you go for a mission? Where do you draw the line?”

Lee said nothing. The meeting was over. Both had gotten what they wanted. Lee had the best man he could find to screen their withdrawal, and Muldoon had a mission and his pound of flesh.

THIRTY-FIVE.

The convoy of military vehicles roared down a barren stretch of I-95—Humvees and a couple of five-tons filled with engineers and hastily packed explosives.

Sergeant Andy Muldoon rode in the point vehicle. He listened to the bang of the rig’s iron suspension, the V8 diesel engine’s grind, the hum of the big tires gripping the road. The Humvee was a perfect example of what he liked about Army life: nothing comfortable about it, no frills, everything utilitarian, designed to last and built to survive. There was a kind of Zen in it.

He’d experienced real hardship in Afghanistan: constant fighting, hunger and thirst, scorching heat and numbing cold, days and nights without sleep, scorpions and giant spiders and bugs that ate you alive. The cherries came, and he taught them war. Some got hit; most went home different men than when they’d arrived.

Muldoon couldn’t go home. Civilian life, with its comforts and niceties, kicked his ass, chewed him up, and spit him out. In the real world, he woke up with night terrors and flinched at loud noises. He drank all the time and got into fights. He’d pound some poor guy over nothing. He’d woken up in jail in Vicenza and Rome. His relationships with women tended to be stormy and short. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they called it. After some time home, he always asked to go right back into the shit. The Army psychologists kept an eye on him. But in the field, all his anxieties melted away. He grew stronger. Afghanistan was the devil he knew.

America had been turned into a war zone. Nobody was going home. It sucked for everybody, but he personally didn’t mind it. It somehow felt right. Again, the devil he knew. In the new age, war wasn’t the anomaly; the real world was. War had become the norm. And he wasn’t just surviving. He was thriving. He could puzzle over that for years.

The only problem was serving under Harry Lee.

The Tomcats dropped them into the bush outside a village in Korengal Valley near the Pakistani border. Taliban and foreign fighters crossed over from Pakistan each year to take on the American infidels. Lee had solid intel that a Taliban commander was going to be traveling along a certain route at a certain time. Muldoon’s squad was supposed to do the grab. Lee came along to see if he could get something from the man before they handed him up the ladder for interrogation. Muldoon was happy to get the mission. It was real Special Forces shit.

They lay all night and most of the next day under cover in a gully, waiting for their guy to show up. Instead, boy walked straight through their area of operations; he couldn’t have been older than ten or twelve. The soldiers hunkered down. Lee looked at Muldoon.

The kid had no business here. From the way he kept glancing around, he’d either spotted the Americans or had already known they were there.

The captain drew his finger across his throat. He wanted Muldoon to kill the kid.

Muldoon refused the order.

Thirty minutes later, a heavy machine gun thudded on the ridge above, chewing up the ground around the squad’s position. Another opened up from the west. They were surrounded. The air filled with flying metal. The Taliban threw rocks down at them, hoping the Americans would believe they were grenades and leave cover.

Captain Lee called in fire mission after fire mission on the ridges above. The big arty rounds rained down, but the Taliban didn’t quit. They smelled blood. After an hour of fighting, every weapon in the squad was suppressed. The insurgents could maneuver almost at will. They bounded down the rocks, closing in for the kill with their AKs. The Taliban didn’t take prisoners.

Apaches roared overhead, like their cavalry ancestors, in the nick of time. The gunships had to drop their ordnance practically on the squad’s heads to keep them from being overrun. The Taliban were that close.

Lee blamed Muldoon for the failure of the mission. Lee thought the kid had spotted them and reported their presence to Taliban in the village.

Muldoon believed the kid hadn’t just shown up at that exact place and time by chance, not in all that wide open nothing. The Taliban had already known they were there. The kid was probably just being used to collect intel on their unit. A spotter. Besides, he didn’t kill ten-year-old kids unless they were pointing a gun at him.

But Muldoon understood why Lee had given the order. Hell, Muldoon sometimes questioned whether he’d made the right call. That was one of the fucked-up things about war—you often faced horrible moral choices that sucked no matter what you did. You ended up plagued with guilt because you didn’t cut a kid’s throat.

His problem with Lee was that the man hadn’t called off the mission, even after there was a good chance they’d been spotted. If there was any chance of the Taliban leader rolling through, Lee wanted to nab him, regardless of the risk.

Lee was a good soldier, a good officer. His intelligence work had saved lives. Muldoon respected that. But the man was a fanatic when he had a cause. Fanatics got good men killed.

Not today. Not if Muldoon could help it. He and his boys were coming back alive.

THIRTY-SIX.

Wade awoke from a long, dreamless sleep with a start. He raised his head from Rawlings’s shoulder. She stirred.

“Rise and shine,” Gray said as he kicked the men awake.

The soldier had taken off his helmet and blouse and wore his tactical vest over his T-shirt. He had large stains around his armpits. He grinned under mirrored sunglasses, chewing gum. He looked like something out of Soldier of Fortune.

The asshole’s starting to enjoy this, Wade thought. Thinks it’s fun.

“On your feet, lovebirds. It’s oh-dawn hundred.”

Sunlight streamed through the closed blinds. The room was hot. Wade felt like crap. But he’d slept the whole night, from dusk to dawn, perhaps for the first time in weeks.

The classroom had a whiteboard and little desks. Books and art supplies filled the shelves. Posters hung on the yellow walls. School was out. He wondered if kids would ever go to school here again.

Rawlings gave him a bleary smile. “’Morning, Private Wade.”

He gave her hand one last squeeze and let go. “Thanks.”

“You should know I don’t let every guy I meet sleep on my shoulder.”

He smiled at her. “I got your back today, Sergeant.”

“Eat up,” Gray said. “We got a long day. Get your calories.”

A soldier burned up to six thousand calories a day in a combat zone. The Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, provided twelve hundred calories. They’d have to eat every chance they got. The men tore into the pouches and ate their breakfast cold. Gray turned to Wade with a big, satisfied smile.

What does he think, I’d tell the men NOT to eat? Wade was already tired of the pissing contest. If Gray wanted to be in charge, so be it.

Then he realized Gray wasn’t looking at him. As far as Gray was concerned, the pissing contest was over. He was looking at Rawlings. The soldier licked his lips. He had a thing for her, then. Love or lust, it didn’t matter. Gray was going to be a problem.

The men hauled themselves to their feet and checked their gear. They cleaned and reloaded their weapons and counted magazines.

“Let’s move,” Gray said. “We’ll stay on this side of the highway. Check out some houses and see if we can find a few working vehicles. Get the fuck out of here.”

The squad geared up and filed out the window. They moved quietly through the residential neighborhood, flashing hand signals to communicate where they were going and what they saw. Wade limped after them with Rawlings, refusing her help. He had to pull his own weight.

They found plenty of abandoned vehicles, but none of them would run. Even the vehicles still drivable and that had keys in the ignition had been drained of gas by scavengers.

The houses turned into low-rise apartment buildings with retail stores on the bottom floors. The squad filed down the middle of the street, weapons ready, faces pale and drawn. Dead bodies drew clouds of flies. Loose litter fluttered in the breeze. Most of the houses had Xs painted on the doors; the area had been ordered evacuated by the government. Graffiti invited them into some buildings and warned them out of others. The air smelled of smoke.

Wade and Rawlings exchanged a glance. They were going to die there, and they knew it.

The Klowns had disappeared, but they were still here. They’d gone somewhere to sleep. The sun was rising. Soon, they would wake up and come out to play.

Fisher and Brown fell out of formation and waited for Wade and Rawlings to catch up.

“He’s looking for a fight,” Fisher said. “He’s going to get us killed.”

“Dude thinks he’s Lord Humungous,” Brown added.

Wade caught up to Gray. “We should find somewhere to hole up until it gets dark.”

“Get back in line, Wade.”

“At least get out of the middle of the street. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

Gray glared at him and spit his gum onto the road. “All right.” He signaled the squad to get onto the sidewalk and keep moving.

Wade grunted with each step. They were going to need to find some vehicles soon. He doubted he’d be able to walk all the way to Hanscom.

Brown said, “We can’t shoot our way there. I got just one mag, that’s it.”

“We should break off on our own,” Fisher said. “What do you think, Sergeant?”

She said, “I think all options are on the table at this point.”

Wade opened his hand. Stop. He tapped the guy in front of him and repeated the gesture. The soldier passed the message up the line to Gray, who turned with a frown.

Wade cupped his hand to his ear. I hear something. Waved his hand to the ground. Get down. A listening halt.

The squad crouched behind the line of cars parked against the curb.

Gray looked at Wade and mouthed, What the fuck?

Then they all heard it—a distant rattle growing louder by the second.

Wade fixed his bayonet to the end of his carbine. A vehicle rolled up the road, scattering trash. The shiny BMW convertible was driven by a middle-aged couple wearing black sunglasses and smiling as if out for a pleasant Sunday drive in the city. The man wore a brown suit and tie, the woman a polka-dot dress.

The rattling sound was chains. The car was dragging dozens of bodies shredded into hamburger over miles of road. The stench of death struck the soldiers as the vehicle passed.

The car came to a halt. The V8 engine roared. The couple’s heads swiveled toward the squad’s position.

The man grinned and said, “I smell lunch.”

Gray popped up and opened fire. The Klowns jerked as blood sprayed across the windshield. They slumped in a smoking mess.

Gray turned to the squad and patted his weapon. “I’m sick of this shit. No more skulking—” He stopped and gaped up at the buildings across the street.

Wade followed his gaze. Dozens of grinning faces looked back at him from the windows.

Gray sighted on one of them. “Contact.”

Wade barely heard him over the tramp of feet on asphalt coming from all directions.

“What are we going to do?” Rawlings asked.

Wade looked at her. “We’re going to get that vehicle.”

A body landed heavily on the car in front of them, setting off its alarms.

“Christ!” Fisher screamed.

“Contact!” Gray repeated.

A few shots. Seconds later, the scattered gunfire turned into a steady roar.

The Klowns came up the street. They poured out of every building and rained from the windows like human missiles. One ran up to Wade’s group and emptied a handgun. Wright flopped backward onto the sidewalk, shot through the face. Wade returned fire, the rounds thudding into the Klown and making him do a jig before collapsing. Young propped his SAW against the hood and started hammering anything that moved.

Gray dumped a grenade into the entrance of the building on the other side of the street. It detonated with a BOOM, vomiting smoke and burning bits of wood onto the street.

Gray pumped his fist. “Booyah!”

“Fuck!” Brown sat on the ground with an arrow through his shoulder.

“Man down!” Fisher cried.

Another body fell from the sky onto Young, knocking him down. The SAW slid off the hood. A moment later, a man popped up with it and opened fire at the squad.

Three soldiers were thrown through the plate glass window behind them.

Wade sighted on the Klown, but his gun jammed. Rawlings fired, and the man dropped. Wade spared a quick look around while he cleared the two rounds stuck in the firing chamber. The street was filled with laughing maniacs falling under a rain of hot metal. Klowns in the store behind them hacked at the wounded soldiers with hatchets and machetes. Gray was shooting grenades down the street as fast as he could load them. Half the squad was out of action. The rest fired at close range or were locked in hand-to-hand combat. A Molotov cocktail burst in their midst, catching Steele’s legs on fire. If they didn’t move, they were going to die.

Brown was laughing as he tried to stand. “It hurts soooo good!”

“To the car!” Wade shouted. “Get to the car!”

Rawlings led the way, spearing Klowns with her bayonet. Fisher picked up Brown’s carbine and fired wildly. Wade hobbled after them, dropping Klowns with aimed fire.

Gray was already at the car. He yanked out the bodies and dumped them onto the sidewalk. He got in. “Hurry up!”

Wade, Rawlings and Fisher leaped inside as Gray stomped the gas pedal. The car lurched into the crowd, slamming into Klowns and hurling them down the street. A woman tumbled over the vehicle and crashed onto the road behind them.

Wade pushed Fisher off him and looked back. The last few members of the squad unloaded everything they had before the infected swarmed over them. A grenade exploded in their midst, ripping through the crowd and covering them all in a pall of smoke.

The Klowns brayed like hyenas as they closed in with knives to collect their trophies.

THIRTY-SEVEN.

Muldoon radioed the convoy to halt. His squad piled out of the Humvees to clear the area. Lee was right; there were a lot of Klowns in the neighborhood, all heading to Hanscom. The squad went to guns on them. Muldoon called out the combat engineers.

This was a good place to break the road. On the right, the ground sloped past the guardrail through some trees to the Cambridge Reservoir; on the left, a patch of thick woods. And in between, six lanes of highway dotted with abandoned vehicles and wrecks. The job was to blow some massive craters all the way across. A piece of cake for the engineers.

They placed ten M180 cratering demolition kits at regular intervals on the north and southbound lanes of the road. More on the shoulders and median.

Each kit weighed a hundred pounds. A big rocket was mounted on a tripod and aimed at the ground. A second shaped charge was attached to one of the tripod legs.

A radio signal would trigger the rockets to fire and strike the shaped charges. The explosion of the shaped charge would rip a hole in the road about six feet deep. The rocket would then propel through the back blast into the hole and detonate at the bottom.

Then BOOM.

A crater ten to twenty feet across would appear, a massive trench across I-95 that would stop any vehicles.

Muldoon’s squad pulled security. They watched their sectors but frequently glanced at the engineers like excited children waiting for Christmas. The explosion was going to be a hell of a thing to see. The boys did love their toys.

The only problem was time. The whole thing was taking way too long. The engineers were bickering over proper placement of the demolition charges. Muldoon thought Lieutenant Donald would put an end to it. Instead, he took out a tape measure.

“Lieutenant!” Muldoon called. “We’re on the clock here.”

Donald frowned. “This has to be done properly, Sergeant.”

“We’re going to have company real, real soon.”

“My orders were to do it right.”

“Contact!” Ramirez said.

Muldoon grabbed the binoculars. “What you got?”

“A whole lot of Nasty Girls, Sergeant.”

He brought the view into focus. Visibility was poor. Smoke drifted like fog across the highway from fires burning on the other side of the reservoir. A column of vehicles and soldiers emerged from the haze. Humvees. Five-tons belching exhaust. Bands of infantry hoofing it.

No armor. Good.

Still, it was going to be a close thing.

He raised the binoculars again.

A swarm of Klowns emerged from the trees next to the highway. The usual freak show of ragged clothes, self-mutilations, homemade weapons, grisly trophies and naked captives on leashes. They raced across the southbound lanes toward the National Guard.

Come on! Muldoon wanted to scream at the Guard. They’re coming right at you!

They did nothing. They didn’t even appear to notice the Klowns.

Ramirez shook his head. “What the hell are they doing?”

You’re about to be attacked, you idiots! Fire! Fire!

The Klowns ran straight at the Guard and fell into step with the column.

Muldoon felt the blood drain from his face.

Aw, shit.

THIRTY-EIGHT.

Muldoon radioed to base and requested an airstrike. The Apaches were engaged in the west. They’d get there in thirty minutes. He didn’t have thirty minutes. He terminated contact and considered his options while his squad watched him anxiously.

Donald gave him a thumbs-up. “Good to go, Sergeant!”

Apparently, the engineer didn’t have a problem cutting corners when two companies of heavily armed, homicidal maniacs were rolling up the road.

“Hooah, sir,” Muldoon said.

They could blow the road and leave. Mission accomplished. The National Guard would be slowed, and the battalion could get out of Dodge. Then Lee would send a few whirlybirds to put the Klowns out of their misery with a little precision-guided whoopass.

Only that wouldn’t happen. Lee wouldn’t spend the fuel and ordnance. He’d be totally focused on getting the battalion to Fort Drum in one piece. And that would leave two companies of infected soldiers free to wreak havoc on what was left of the Greater Boston area. Muldoon couldn’t stomach that idea.

Brock had real problems on his hands. He wasn’t going to stop Tenth Mountain from leaving the state. He apparently didn’t have enough force available to even try. When the man threatened Lee, he’d been bluffing, hoping to deter him. As if anything deterred Lee.

It was all on Muldoon. He had nine shooters plus the engineers, three Humvees with two fifty-cals, a Mark 19 grenade launcher and some explosives. It was like a puzzle. The trick was making all the pieces fit so they added up to the annihilation of two hundred infected soldiers.

“What are we going to do, Sergeant?” Ramirez asked.

His little command could put a dent in the opposition force, sure, just before it got slaughtered. Those men down the road had all the weapons and training they had before the virus got them. They were organized. The Klowns were working together in large groups. They could maybe even strategize.

“Sergeant?”

There was one thing the Klowns didn’t have, which was any interest in force protection. They didn’t care if they were killed or if their unit was destroyed. All they cared about was getting to the party. That was what made them so tough, but also, under the right circumstances, weak.

He grinned. His men relaxed and grinned back.

Muldoon said, “We’re going to fuck them up.”

THIRTY-NINE.

They drove fast. Gray grit his teeth and yanked the wheel. The car wove through mobs of infected, past scenes of madness and savagery. The Klowns turned and acknowledged them with the delighted surprise of seeing old friends.

Wade looked behind them. The crazies chased them in a laughing stampede. Ahead, men on ladders were busy crucifying a cop to a telephone pole.

“Problem,” Gray said.

Rawlings glared at the back of his head as if looks could kill.

“Jesus Christ,” Fisher said. “What the hell now?”

“Gas,” Gray barked. “We’re on the reserve tank.”

“We’re not far from Hanscom,” Wade pointed out. “Maybe a mile.”

“Might as well be a hundred,” Fisher said.

The car sputtered.

Gray pounded the wheel. “End of the road.”

They were on a residential street lined with abandoned cars and broken glass. They got out and stared at the flood of laughing maniacs pouring up the road. Nobody gave the order. They knew what to do. They started firing.

The carbines threw rounds downrange into the mob. Crazies dropped and were trampled by their fellows. Gray’s grenade launcher thumped. The grenade burst in their midst, sending bodies flying through a cloud of smoke.

“Bounding!” Gray shouted and took off.

Fisher stopped firing. He looked down at his weapon and released the empty magazine. “Shit, I’m out!”

“Move!” Wade shouted.

“Bounding!” Fisher ran.

The mob was getting closer by the second.

Rawlings shoved him. “Go! I’ll cover forward!”

No time to argue. He went, hobbling as fast as his ankle would take him.

Gray and Fisher had stopped behind an SUV lying on its side in a pile of glass in the middle of the street. Wade turned. He didn’t see Rawlings.

Gray pumped another grenade into his launcher and fired. “Come on, Wade!”

“I don’t see her!” Then he heard it—gunfire from one of the buildings. Rawlings was leading them off.

Fisher was already running. Gray tossed a smoke grenade onto the street. He grabbed the back of Wade’s blouse and pulled him along.

They stopped after a hundred meters, gasping for air, and looked behind them. None of the Klowns had followed them through the smoke.

“I don’t see Rawlings,” Wade said. He wanted to scream it.

Thunder rumbled ahead of them, the steady boom of gunfire. Hanscom.

“Let’s stay focused here,” Gray said. “We’re not home yet.”

“Fuck you!” Wade shouted. “You killed her. Just like you killed the others.”

Gray spit on the ground. “I didn’t kill anybody, and you know it.”

“If you’d listened to her, we might be out of this already.”

“She wasn’t one of us, Wade.”

Wade glared at him. He’d never wanted to kill anybody so badly in his life.

“Hey, guys!” Fisher called from ahead. He whooped. “Check it out!”

Gray turned and walked off. Wade limped after him. At the top of the rise, they saw Hanscom.

Hundreds of infected ran through the smoke surrounding the compound walls. Machine guns hammered from sandbag positions. In the guard towers, the Mark 19s thumped. Across the Hescos, the lightfighters propped their weapons and kept the fire hot.

“How do we get back to base?” Gray asked. “What do you think?”

Wade laughed. “I think it’s beautiful.”

Gray turned and frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

Wade smiled.

FORTY.

The Klown army ambled down the road. They grinned like wolves, hunting, always hunting. They saw the flare pop in the murky sky. They drooled at the sight.

Bullets pinged off the road. Men tumbled laughing to the ground. The infected looked around and saw the Humvee on the road, its fifty-cal rocking. Tracer rounds flashed in their eyes. The Humvee pulled a U-turn and sped off down the highway. The Klowns gave chase. The vehicles pulled ahead of the infantry, who jogged along, grinning at the prospect of fresh meat.

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.

FORTY-ONE.

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.

FORTY-TWO.

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.

All of it was gone. Nothing left to fight for. Only the plague lived on.

Still, she turned toward the sound of the guns. Tenth Mountain was revving up its vehicles, getting ready to move. She wondered where they were going. Was anywhere safe?

Rawlings admired that they were still willing to fight at all. Those Tenth Mountain boys didn’t know when to quit. Maybe they could use a girl like her. She had a handful of dog tags to deliver. That, and their story. As the sole survivor of the group, she was the sole witness to their end.

Once more into the breach?

Hell, no. She wanted to find a house somewhere and take off her boots. Then, she’d get some water and soak in it for a while. After that, she’d sleep the sleep of the dead.

Nonetheless, Sergeant Rawlings found herself walking down the hill toward the sounds of the gunfire, searching for something that was still worth fighting for, living for. Maybe she’d find it outside Boston. Maybe she’d become a mountaineer after all.

FORTY-THREE.

The forward operating base at Hanscom was stripped down, packed up and ready to roll at Lt. Colonel Harry Lee’s command. Fighting vehicles and their endless train of logistical vehicles, carrying everything from water to fuel to ammunition, lay coiled like a giant metal snake at rest. The big engines idled. Apaches sat spooled up on the runway. A crowd of civilian vehicles, refugees led by a group of police officers and firefighters, waited their turn at the rear.

A small column of Humvees and five-tons rolled into the compound.

“I believe that would be the prodigal son returning, sir,” Walker said.

The lead vehicle pulled up in front of Lee. Sergeant Andy Muldoon stepped out and grinned. “Miss me, Colonel?”

“Not at all,” Lee said. “But I’m glad you’re back. Outstanding results on that mission.”

“Not that outstanding. I lost Burke and Zeller.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And there’s still a mortar team back there. I requested air support.”

“That’s a no go, Sergeant. We’re about to move out here.”

“Or I could go back and do it myself. Sir.”

Muldoon wasn’t bluffing. Lee and Walker exchanged a glance. Lee nodded, and Walker went off to give the orders.

“Anything else, Muldoon?” Lee taunted. “How about a foot rub and a nice hot bath?”

Muldoon surprised him by saluting. “No thanks, sir. I hear you suck at giving foot rubs.”

Lee shook his head. “Dismissed. Get the hell out of my sight.”

As always, Lee got what he wanted, and Muldoon got his pound of flesh.

Sergeant Major Turner approached with a woman in uniform.

“We picked her up outside the wire, sir. Dead on her feet. She gave us these.” He showed Lee a handful of dog tags—Tenth Mountain. Turner added, “She and a group of our guys fought their way here all the way from Harvard Stadium. She’s the only one who made it.”

The woman saluted. “Sergeant Sandra Rawlings. Alpha Company, 164th Transportation Battalion. The Muleskinners. Massachusetts Guard.”

“Well, Sergeant Rawlings, it sounds like you got a hell of a story to tell.”

The woman blinked at him. She was obviously trying hard not to lose it.

Lee said, “I’ll bet you kicked some major Klown ass out on that road, soldier.”

Rawlings stiffened. “You got that right, sir.”

“Hooah. Here’s the deal, Sergeant. We’re moving out. You have a choice. You can stay here, or you can come with us. We’re leaving Massachusetts.”

“If it’s all right with you, I’ll tag along. There’s nothing for me here anymore.”

Turner escorted her to the medic platoon.

Walker turned to Lee. “I saw her first, sir.”

Lee shook his head. “You’re a real piece of work, Major.”

Walker smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

It was time to move out. The battalion had lost a few good men. Otherwise, it was a good day. They’d won a few small victories, they’d crawled out from under the hammer, and they had a new mission. They hadn’t saved Boston, but they were still in the game. They could still do some good. Somewhere. Maybe Florida. Maybe they’d go there after all and save America from this horrific, unending nightmare.

First, they had to get to Fort Drum.

Lee climbed into his Humvee and gave the signal.

FORTY-FOUR.

America. Boston.

The city was burning, its residents fled. The once proud metropolis had been turned into a charnel house overrun by infection.

The infected were gathering into an army. Boston belonged to them now, but they wanted it all. They wanted to make the whole world laugh.

Bedford. Hanscom Air Force Base.

First Battalion was on the move at last.

The lead vehicle crashed through the gate. The next opened fire as it exited, then the next. The giant metal snake growled and uncoiled and flowed onto the road.

West to Fort Drum. Home of Tenth Mountain Division.

All around them, the world was dying, but Tenth Mountain would go on fighting.

Their mission: to save what was left.

The retreat had begun.

COMING SOON:

THE RETREAT, EPISODE 2

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Copyright

Copyright © 2013 The Retreat Series, LLC

Kindle Edition

THE RETREAT is a work of fiction including a fictionalized portrayal of the U.S. Army Tenth Mountain Division, the Massachusetts Army National Guard and the City of Boston and its surrounding metropolitan region. It is not intended to depict actual persons, organizations or places.

Content

Craig DiLouie
with
Stephen Knight and Joe McKinney
THE RETREAT
Episode One: Pandemic

ONE.

TWO.

THREE.

FOUR.

THE RETREAT

FIVE.

SIX.

SEVEN.

EIGHT.

NINE.

TEN.

ELEVEN.

TWELVE.

THIRTEEN.

FOURTEEN.

FIFTEEN.

SIXTEEN.

SEVENTEEN.

EIGHTEEN.

NINETEEN.

TWENTY.

TWENTY-ONE.

TWENTY-TWO.

TWENTY-THREE.

TWENTY-FOUR.

TWENTY-FIVE.

TWENTY-SIX.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

TWENTY-NINE.

THIRTY.

THIRTY-ONE.

THIRTY-TWO.

THIRTY-THREE.

THIRTY-FOUR.

THIRTY-FIVE.

THIRTY-SIX.

THIRTY-SEVEN.

THIRTY-EIGHT.

THIRTY-NINE.

FORTY.

FORTY-ONE.

FORTY-TWO.

FORTY-THREE.

FORTY-FOUR.

COMING SOON:

Copyright