Outbreak: Boston (4 page)

Amy forgot about Sergeant Emery for a minute. She stared dumbly at the dump truck as it barreled down on her, smashing everything before it to pulp. Bodies flew through the air like rag dolls. Blood glinted red on its shiny chrome bumper
as a handful of .50 cal rounds peppered the truck. There was time for only one last thought before the massive vehicle crashed into the Humvee:
This is it. I'm gonna die
.

The truck slammed into the Humvee like the hammer of Thor, sending the vehicle spinning into the cement guardrail. The force of the impact threw her into the rear seat of their truck. Frays lay there in a heap against the rear passenger’s side door as little sparks floated across her vision for a minute. Grey dust and tiny chunks of debris filled the air. Amy was vaguely aware that the Marines had started
falling back as the civilians rushed forward around them. The shattered Humvee teetered, its front wheels tottering off into space. She carefully pulled herself towards the front of the Humvee and tried to get Jacobson’s attention.

“Jacobson!” she hissed as she cautiously leaned forward and shook the man's shoulder. “Jacobson! We've got to get out of here!” Jacobson's head lolled towards her, his face spider webbed with cuts, blood dribbling down his chin. He tried to tell her something, but no words seemed to come out. A few droplets of blood spattered on her face instead. “Come on, Airman! Can you open your door? Try it for me.”

The bridge groaned under the weight of the Humvee. The truck leaned farther over the edge, showing her more of the bluish-green water roiling around the bridge’s support beams. Amy struggled to keep the panic welling up in her chest out of her voice. “Come on, Jacobson.” she said quietly as Frays tried to get her hands under the man's arms.

Amy pulled as hard as she dared, hoping to extract the man from behind the steering wheel. A bloodcurdling scream in her ear made her stop. She peered over the Jacobson's shoulder. “Oh no. Oh God no.” Frays
whispered. A tangle of metal and wire had speared through Jacobson's legs from about the mid thigh down. “I’m so sorry, Jacobson.” she whispered in his ear and brushed his cheek with the palm of her hand. Amy dug in her heels, got as good a grip as she could manage on Jacobson's torso and pulled for all she was worth.

The Humvee lurched as the bridge beneath it groaned, louder this time. Pieces of cement and rebar splashed into the water below as Jacobson screamed and started clawing at the back of Frays' neck. Flesh and bone
began to separate as blood sprayed against the inside of the vehicle's windscreen. Something hot and metallic smelling stung her eyes as it ran down her face. “God, I'm so sorry.” Amy whispered as she braced herself to try again. “I’m so so so so sorry.”

The bridge squealed and crumbled. Amy's stomach launched into her throat as the Humvee finally lost its battle with gravity. She scrambled for the cupola, twisted, somehow managed to climb onto the top of the truck and jumped free. The world whirled crazily as Amy plummeted towards the water. She was only vaguely aware that she was screaming
and felt a warmth on her crotch a half second before the river slapped her in the face.

Amy crashed into the river, the cold surface of the water stinging her face and driving the air out of her lungs. The current grabbed her as Frays struggled to the surface, gasping and choking. She had always been the active, outdoorsy type and a strong swimmer but the weight of her gear threatened to drag her to the bottom.

The tail end of the Humvee jutted from the water, bobbing along in the current as it slowly started to sink. Amy made an ungainly attempt at a doggy paddle, hoping to reach it before it went under, fighting the current all the way. “Jacobson!” she gagged as water splashed into her open mouth.

More water found its way up her nose and she sputtered, coughed. The Humvee disappeared below the surface with a shuddering fart as the trapped air
inside escaped through a shattered window. Amy kicked her feet as hard as she could; trying to push herself out of the water as much as possible and hoping to see that Jacobson had somehow managed to escape. She took in a big lungful of air and dove under the surface. Frays swam as fast as she could but the Humvee's taillights vanished into the murky water as it sank out of sight.

On the verge of exhaustion, Amy scrabbled to the surface and leaned back. She let the current carry her downstream while she rested and tried to look for a place to get out of the water. There was a frustratingly large amount of cement retaining walls along the river's west bank. Frays felt a little sick when she noticed that several dozen bodies kept pace with her down the river.

She finally spied a boat landing coming up. Amy gently steered herself into a position to snag one of the landing's low docks and pulled herself along it until she reached the slimy cement of the boat launch. She lay there gasping for breath and coughing for some time before Frays managed to gather the strength to try and sit up so she could look around. The world faded to grey as Amy’s eyes rolled up into her head.

**********

Private Adam Lacey, 1/8
th
3
rd
battalion United States Marine Corps Reserve, stood near his squad’s Humvee wondering for the hundredth time why he picked up the phone when it rang at six yesterday evening. He cursed himself for getting in his car and driving to his unit in the middle of this shitstorm, leaving his wife and kids alone. Only twenty six of the two hundred or so guys in his Combat Engineer unit bothered to show up. Of course Lance Corporals Reynolds and Holder, the two biggest asshats in his platoon, answered up. They were bullies who, once all the bullshit was stripped away had (at least in Lacey’s opinion) enlisted because they liked pushing others around. Private Lacey, who was physically smaller and weaker than them, was their favorite target. There were rumors making the rounds about what the two of them got up to during the unit’s last deployment as well: beating civilians, stealing, worse than that…

“Yo! Chickenshit!” Reynolds shouted as Holder waved the Air Force Humvees into position on their right flank. “Get your skinny ass up here and watch those dickheads. I gotta take a piss.”

“Roger that, Lance Corporal.” Lacey grumbled as he climbed into the cupola. He shook his head and muttered “Fucking pig.” under his breath as he watched Reynolds go to the edge of the bridge, open his fly and piss over the edge.    

There were people across the bridge and they started to get closer. Lacey glanced over his shoulder to see Reynolds and Holder talking to one another for a minute. Holder went towards the Air Force Humvee and Reynolds started ambling in the direction of the command vehicle behind them. Lacey felt his hands start to tremble as they closed around the spade grips of the fifty cal.

“Stop right there or I’ll shoot!” the scrawny Marine shouted. The mob advancing across the bridge obviously either did not hear him or just plain did not care because they did not even pause. “Shit…shit…shit…Corporal! What do I do?” he screamed. His thumbs slipped down to the trigger of the machine gun, ripping off a burst at the crowd. A big sick lump welled up in his throat when people at the front of the pack crumpled to the ground.

He looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. “Oh no.” he whispered as he scrambled out of the
cupola and ran down the street. The deep staccato of the blockade’s crew served weapons interspersed with the hollow pops of gunfire coming from the mob chased him as he leapt over the concrete barrier at the edge of the bridge and hid in the brush. The skinny man cringed at what sounded like a massive car accident and the machine guns went silent.

He crept along the riverbank, keeping to the scrubby brush that grew there for about half a mile. Thankfully the sound of gunfire died off a few minutes after he left, but this also left new doubts clawing at him. Who got hurt? How many? Did anyone die? Lacey pushed these thoughts out of his head and set about taking as a direct route as he could manage towards his house. With luck they would be too busy to look for him and he could get out of here…

**********

Amy stared at the sky for a moment. For one long crazy minute she wondered what somebody did to her dorm room, why she smelled like dead fish and why her entire body felt like one big ache. Even her
hair
hurt which was something she did not think was even
possible
. She stood slowly and stumbled tiredly towards a squat brick building perhaps two hundred meters from where she had come out of the water. The small parking lot next to the building was empty, her boots scraping on the poorly maintained blacktop as she crossed it.

The building proved to be a small convenience store that
probably sold bait and snacks to people using the boat launch. Amy was disappointed to see the closed sign hanging in the store's window. Now that the adrenaline was beginning to wear off, Frays realized that the river was still far too cold to be swimming in. A nice hot cup of coffee would have helped get rid of the shivers making her teeth knock together.

Amy settled for leaning against the leeward side of the building as she ripped up an empty trash bag she found on the pavement. Frays huddled under the improvised blanket for warmth in a patch of sun as she tried to piece together exactly what happened. She patted herself down and was glad to see that her recent misadventures had only seemed to do any real damage to her pride
. The left side of her face was swollen, her neck and right shoulder were painful and stiff, but other than the crust of dried blood under her nose she seemed unhurt.

Amy took a quick inventory of her gear. She dug her cell phone out and groaned when she saw the blank screen. The radio clipped to her LCS was similarly wrecked, both apparently ruined by the water
or by the crash. She broke down the M4 and M9 to clean and dry off the weapons as best she could. The map in her cargo pocket was a good news/bad news situation: the good news was that the map was somehow still there. The bad news was that the river had washed off all the reference points she had drawn on it. “Figures.” she mumbled to herself as she took in her surroundings. “I live half my life in this stupid city and never got around to seeing the sights.”

She spent the better part of an hour simply resting and trying to get her bearings. Nobody pulled in to the parking lot but then Frays reflected that going for a nice cruise on the river was probably pretty far from everybody's mind right now. Still, if the owner of the store wanted to show up, she would gladly buy a coffee and a sandwich from him. Visions of slices of hot pastrami
piled onto homemade rye bread and slathered with spicy mustard, maybe with a nice dill pickle or pickled egg on the side danced in her head as she dozed. Sergeant Emery's wife, Maria, made the
best
hot pastrami sandwiches.

This thought brought all the happy ones about food to a grinding halt as Amy curled into a tight ball. She fought back tears, knowing that she had to keep her wits about her right now. She also loathed the idea of somebody (or worse yet, one of her fellow airmen) catching her bawling her little eyes out like a kid who dropped her ice cream cone. After several minutes of sniffling she finally gave in as huge sobs wracked her torso. Above all else she found herself growing angry: to lose her best friend after all they had been through together, at the truck driver, at herself, at her fellow airmen who went AWOL and even at Jacobson for not trying harder to get out of the Humvee. 

After some time she managed to catch hold of herself. Amy wiped at her cheeks with the palms of her hands, scraped the snot away from under her nose with her sleeve and stood up. By her best guess, she had washed up about a mile and a half mile or so downstream from the checkpoint. There was about four or five miles between where she was now and the nearest staging point (or so she hoped). The most direct route would take her through what looked like a largely residential neighborhood. She made one last check of her weapons and gear before moving out; hoping that if anybody was home they had not heard about what happened on the bridge.

Amy walked quickly, keeping off to the side of the street. Her eyes scanned the sidewalk, the windows of the buildings as she mentally prepared herself to run at a moment's notice. Most of the people seemed busy packing up their belongings and trying to evacuate to look around much. Nobody seemed to be paying her much mind (which was good) until she made it about a mile or so into the city. The neighborhood slowly became a little more upscale as she left the river: the houses were a little bigger and better maintained; there was something closer to actual yards in front of some of them.

A cute little Asian girl in shorts and a Pokémon tee shirt stood by her parents' Honda, watching a twenty something white couple trying to cram everything they could into the back of the hatchback. Her eyes lit up when she saw Amy across the street. “Mommy!” the kid said excitedly and ran to the woman's side. “Mommy, look!” Now the little girl began tugging on her mother's sleeve and pointing. “Mommy! Look!” the girl pointed directly at Amy. “Look, Mommy! Army lady!” The little girl hopped around and waved with that frenetic type of energy only those under the age of six can muster. “Hi army lady!”

Amy picked up the pace, her eyes scanning for any potential threat. The neighborhood was certainly close enough that they probably heard the firefight back at Checkpoint Twelve. Heck, there might have been a news helicopter overhead showing the whole thing live on CNN for all she knew. All at once she felt very, very naked.