Tooth and Nail (11 page)

“Right now you are the eyes of this platoon and you are looking at everything except the street. What’s the problem, son?”

“Well, I never been to New York before, Sergeant,” Hawkeye says shyly.

“What’s that, Private?”

“Somebody told me the United Nations was around here somewheres.”

“You were sightseeing,” Ruiz says in disbelief.

“Yes, Sergeant. Like I said before, I am sorry about it.”

“Get a good look before it’s gone, Hawkeye,” says McLeod.

The squad leader shakes his head, darkening with barely controlled rage. “Stay sharp and keep it zipped, ladies!” He turns around and sees Corporal Hicks trailing him, looking pale. “Corporal, I could use your help keeping this freakshow in line.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Ruiz lowers his voice. “You all right, Ray?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Hicks says. “I just saw. . .she looked like my. . . . Never mind, Sergeant. It doesn’t matter.” He looks dazed.

“Put it out of your mind, whatever it is,” Ruiz growls. “We got a job to do.”

“Roger that, Sarge,” says Hicks.

Hawkeye suddenly turns and extends his flattened palm for all to see. Immediately, the column stops.

The boys get behind the nearest cover and crouch, continuing to scan their sectors and provide three hundred sixty-degree security around the platoon. Within moments, Lewis’ column on their right also scatters behind cover and stops.

Hawkeye makes a throat-cutting gesture, indicating danger ahead, and then taps his chest twice, asking for the squad leader to come forward.

Keeping low to the ground, Sergeant Ruiz scurries to join Hawkeye.

“What you got?”

“Not sure, exactly. But listen, Sergeant.”

Ruiz closes his eyes. He can’t hear anything. He wonders if maybe the platoon should do a listening halt, where they all get comfortable and settle into a complete silence. Finally, he says, “I don’t hear—”

Hawkeye raises his hand, silencing him. Ruiz raises his fist for the platoon to see, telling them to freeze. Don’t move an inch.

The screams become audible, carried on the shifting breeze on an east-west street ahead of them, barely penetrating the background hum of New York City.

“Some kind of trouble up there, seems to me,” says Hawkeye. “Kind of sounds like a girl screaming for help.”

“Like a lot of people screaming,” Ruiz says. “Screaming bloody murder.”

He keys his handset and softly relays what he has learned to the LT. Bowman, about forty feet behind him, replies on the commo.

Is the sound coming from Thirty-Eighth or Thirty-Ninth Street, over?
“We think it’s Thirty-Ninth Street, over,” says Ruiz, glancing at Hawkeye, who nods.

“Turn on Thirty-Eighth. That’s a solid copy, out.”

Hawkeye looks down at his rifle wearing a sour expression. There are American civilians up ahead in trouble and the LT has ordered the platoon to march the other way.

Ruiz nudges him. “We’re not police, Hawkeye,” he says. “There’s danger all around us here. LT’s intent is to get the platoon to the objective on time and in one piece. It makes sense.”

“I guess so, Sergeant,” says Hawkeye. “I mean, it’s not my place to say.”

The Sergeant’s eyebrows lift in surprise. He has never seen his boys so uncertain and sour about a mission. “You heard the LT. Go on, then. Lead us out of here, Private.”

“Roger that, Sergeant.”

Ruiz stands and moves his arm in a wide forward-wave, giving the signal to advance.

The platoon hauls itself back onto its feet, grunting at the weight of rucksacks and armor and weapons and water, and trails after Hawkeye, making the turn onto Thirty-Eighth Street. Soon, they cross Tunnel Approach Street, where they weave their way through a pile-up of cars that crashed into each other during the night and became hopelessly ensnarled in a massive sculpture of chewed-up metal. Nearby, an ambulance is parked, its doors open and its lights still eerily flashing, a dead man lying on a gurney outside atop a glittering carpet of broken glass. His throat has been torn out.

They are moving into a residential neighborhood. As they approach the middle of the block, they hear the screams.

The cries appear to come from all around them, as if a crowd of howling ghosts were passing through them, making them shiver.

Then a man shouts down at them from an open fourth floor window, “Hey, Army!”

The soldiers of Third Squad look up at him.

The man is young, with swarthy skin, long black hair and heavily muscled arms.

“There are these two guys banging on my door trying to get in and I have to go out and pick up my insulin,” he says. “Can you help me out here?”

Negative
, Ruiz hears over his handset.

“Keep it moving,” he tells his squad.

“The screaming is coming from these buildings,” Williams says. “Hardcore, dawg.”

“Hey, Army! Can you hear me down there?”

Williams glances up and sees people leaning out of other windows.

“Are you going to do something about these homicidal maniacs?” an old woman shouts down at them, immediately joined by a chorus of others.

“Isn’t there anything we can do for these people, Sarge?” says Williams.

“Keep moving,” Ruiz says.

The falling girl strikes the blue Toyota Camry on McLeod’s right with a heart-stopping crash, her face plunging through the windshield in a spray of blood and hair. The car sags for a moment at the impact, setting off its grating car alarm.

“Christ!” McLeod shrieks, almost dropping his SAW.

Three of Lewis’ boys open up on the fourth floor window, making the swarthy man flinch and duck back inside.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” Lewis is shouting. “What are you shooting at, dumbass?”

Kemper’s voice grates over the radio:
War Dogs Two-Five to all War Dogs Two squads, cease fire, over.

“Hold your fire,” Ruiz tells his squad. “Keep your cool.”

The squad is gathering around the corpse.

“Her freaking leg’s twitching,” McLeod says. “Oh, God.”

“LT says, keep moving,” Ruiz tells them, raising his voice to be heard over the car alarm. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

“LT’s got no heart,” Williams says, shaking his head. “That shit is ice cold.”

“She’s dead, Private,” the Sergeant says. “And we’re not. Let’s go. Now.”

Williams is starting to get a bad feeling about this mission, and his hunches are usually correct. He can feel the boys around him tense up, mad and powerless and itching to fire their weapons at something. He has a feeling that once they start shooting, they will all cross a threshold, and they may not like what they find on the other side.

“War Dogs Two-Three to War Dogs Two-Six. Coming up on Second Avenue now, over.”

“Affirmative. Turn onto Second Avenue, out.”

A moment later, Ruiz gets back on the commo.

“War Dogs Two-Six, this is War Dogs Two-Three. You better get up here, over.”

The intersection of Forty-Second Street and Second Avenue is dense with people fighting each other around a line of cop cars set up to block off access to Forty-Second. Several food delivery trucks are parked beyond, half unloaded.

There appears to be a pitched battle in progress.

The LT has called together the NCOs into a close huddle and tells them the situation on the ground has changed and as a result there is a new OpOrder for the unit. He speaks quickly, as the unit’s presence has begun to attract the attention of desperate civilians in the area and the platoon needs to get back on the move fast. The people stand as close to the platoon and its umbrella of protective firepower as possible, wringing their hands and begging for help, while Third Squad holds them at bay.

“I can’t contact Captain West,” he says. “We appear to be on our own.”

The non-coms glance at each other.

“Think we should take another route and go around?” says McGraw.

“Negative. We already tried that. We’re now on Third Avenue and out of time. We pushed our luck as it is. I think this is like Iraq where the bad guys sleep from four to eight and then the bullets start flying. This city is waking up and it is like an ocean rising under our feet. We’re just going to have to push through or we could be overrun before we reach our objective.”

“Roger that, sir,” the NCOs tell him.

They know as much as he does because he told them about Private Richard Boyd, the soldier who was bitten by a Mad Dog and within hours turned into a Mad Dog. The soldier who made him aware that the rules of the game had changed.

The infection is spreading at an exponential rate.

The Army gave him a big hint that this was happening with the bizarrely aggressive ROE. New York gave him a big hint with all the gunfire indicating flashpoints of Mad Dogs attacking Army and police units. And the Mad Dogs themselves gave a big hint when they began showing up everywhere in force.

But he knows they are spreading infection through their bites and spreading rapidly because PFC Richard Boyd went AWOL in an almost perfect state of health and several hours later turned up bitten and a Mad Dog.

Every hour, there are more infected and fewer of everybody else. At some point, it could be hours, tomorrow or the next day, the streets of New York will likely become too dangerous to walk even for a platoon of U.S. infantry armed to the teeth.

There isn’t a military on the planet that has the force to meet this threat. Infection will keep spreading and spreading until there is simply nobody around to bite.

It’s a simple numbers game.

“Stand back,” Hawkeye says to the civilians.

“As you can see—” Bowman pauses as a civilian runs by, emptying a .38 at a pursuing Mad Dog and missing except for the last shot, which topples his assailant. The man continues on, stumbling and crying, unaware that he now has a dozen rifles trained on him. “We are facing a major open danger area ahead. The government is distributing food, and some type of riot appears to be in progress, which we are not going to try to suppress or we’ll end up with another bloodbath on our hands. Understood? Speed is going to be our ally. We will cross the intersection in a platoon V formation, with each squad acting independently once we enter the open danger area. Any questions?”

“Satisfactory, sir,” says Ruiz.

“Stand back, Ma’am,” says Hawkeye.

“The rally point is the other side, if clear, or the Company HQ, if not. The squads getting across first will set up a defensive line until the platoon is reunited. Lewis, you will take the left. Ruiz, you will be going up the middle with HQ and Weapons Squad; I want good security for our gun team as they’re going to be useless in this fight but I have a feeling we’re going to need their services later. Okay? McGraw, you’ve got the right.”

“Yes, sir,” McGraw says.

“Stand back, I said!” Hawkeye barks at the crowd.

“One last thing, gentlemen,” Bowman says. “We’re not here to reenact My Lai or Custer’s Last Stand. Regardless of what you see happening, our mission is to rejoin the Company with as few bullets and bodies as possible. That is our mission. Understood?”

“Hooah, sir,” they say.

“Step off as soon—”

“What the hell are you doing?”

The civilians scatter as two men and a bald woman, drooling and gurgling, step forward and latch onto Hawkeye’s limbs, pulling at them with their full strength. In an instant, he is shrieking and flailing.

Ruiz fires his shotgun, deafening all of them, knocking both of the men to the ground. The woman loses her balance and falls backward, then comes back snarling. Ruiz clubs her senseless with a single stroke of the butt of his weapon.

Lewis helps Hawkeye back onto his feet. The other boys look at the bleeding and dying civilians, and then Ruiz, with something like awe.

“Did they bite you, Private?” the LT asks Hawkeye.

“You saw what they were doing, sir,” Hawkeye says, barely concealing his irritation while he rubs his left arm. “They tried to pull my arms off. Hurt like hell, too.”

“I’m not making fun of you, Private. Did any of them bite you?”

“No, sir. Nobody did.”

Bowman nods to Ruiz, then says, “All right, back to your squads. Let’s move while we still have the freedom to do so.”

“Hooah,” they shout.

The soldiers deploy as fast as they can through the wreckage of the abandoned vehicles choking Second Avenue, then Bowman gives them the order to step off.

Speed is a type of security. If they can move fast enough, they can punch their way through with minimal loss of life and ammunition.

People come running past them, screaming for their lives, hugging or dropping their food parcels. Some begin clinging to the soldiers, who shrug them off and keep moving while their sergeants howl at them to
Go go go
, cursing a blue streak.

“Stay close to me, boys,” Bowman tells Martin and Boomer.

Nearby, a man has jumped into one of the abandoned cars and is trying to close the door while a Mad Dog slowly forces it open. One of the soldiers drops the Mad Dog with a single shot. Bowman shoulders his carbine and unholsters his nine-millimeter sidearm. A woman flies by on rollerblades, shouting, “Heads up! Coming through!”

The platoon wades into chaos.