Tooth and Nail (23 page)

But she has an idea.

You are stronger than us, she thinks, but we are smarter than you. Going back to her computer, she brings up a letter and sets it to print a hundred copies. Within moments, the printer begins churning out pieces of paper.

For several moments, she stares at this mundane routine with something like longing, then tip-toes back to the door, holding the fire extinguisher and golf club. Putting the club down, almost without thinking, she abruptly jerks open the door and steps aside.

Jackson roars into the room, races to the desk and knocks the printer onto the floor, where it lands with a loud crash.

Petrova stands there stupidly for several moments, unable to believe her plan worked. She jumps outside and slams the door before Jackson throws himself at it, pounding and clawing and kicking and yelping in a mindless fury.

She backs away from the door, panting.

Dr. Lucas is standing almost next to her, blinking without his glasses, sniffing the air.

He begins to growl.

Petrova left the golf club inside the office. She aims the fire extinguisher and sprays him with a jet of white foam pressurized with nitrogen, hoping to blind him.

The scientist coughs and sputters for a moment, pawing at his stinging eyes and yelping, then goes berserk, waving his arms wildly around his head and biting at his hands and forearms, flinging foam in all directions. Petrova can only watch in amazement as his teeth rip cloth and tear away pieces of flesh, soaking his face and arms with blood.

More than four thousand pounds per square inch.

Backing up step by step, she finally turns and runs, leaving Lucas to howl and tear at his clothes and flesh in his blind rage. By the time she returns to the Security Commander Center, she is shaking so hard that she can barely open the door.

On the screen, the beautiful blonde is holding up a sign that says,
YOU MADE ME DO THIS
. Next to her, several worried-looking men are forcing the other National Guardsman, his arms still tied behind his back, to his knees.

Petrova watches, transfixed by this new drama.

Throwing the sign down, the blonde marches to one of the Lyssa victims lying on the floor, a young girl, and rubs her hand all over the girl’s face until her hand is slick with mucus. She holds the hand high over her head, showing it to the camera.

“Oh,” says Petrova. “No, no, no. Please do not do that.”

As she marches back, her mouth moving soundlessly, the soldier’s eyes go wide and he begins to struggle struggling wildly against his captors, who can barely hold him.

The blonde smears the snot over his face and lips, then begins scribbling on the piece of poster board, which she holds high for Petrova to see:
ONLY YOU CAN SAVE HIM.

“We do not have a vaccine, you stupid bitch!” Petrova screams, throwing the fire extinguisher against the wall. “Stop killing people!”

The rage boils up inside her, comes pouring out. She races to the security system’s graphical interface and begins studying it.

“You want to come inside,” she mutters in disgust, her accent thickening. “This is what you want. We shall see.”

She clicks an icon on her screen, which turns from red to green.

On the screen, the crowd of people appear startled, then burst into cheers, laughing and hugging and pointing at something that is happening off screen. The blonde looks down at the soldier, who stares at the floor. Alone among the cheering mob, they are weeping.

The people are pointing at the elevator lobby. They have won against the stubborn scientists who have been hoarding a vaccine.

The elevators are coming down.

Mooney sits on the floor next to his sleeping bag in the classroom that First Squad has claimed as a sleeping area, airing his feet and cleaning his carbine. After a lot of firing, a good cleaning is necessary. He wants his weapon functional—not ready for parade—so he is field stripping and cleaning it fast. Around him, some of the other boys are doing the same, getting ready for action. The room stinks of sweaty socks and cleaning solvent.

Wyatt swaggers in carrying a plastic garbage bag with his left hand. Behind him, Mooney sees one of the boys from Second Squad mopping the floor out in the hallway, whistling while he works. Everybody is dying, the world is ending, but the Army likes things clean, Mooney tells himself. It will be a nice, neat, orderly Armageddon. The last man alive, please turn out the lights.

“Booty,” says Wyatt, spilling the bag’s contents onto the floor in front of Mooney—a small mountain of half-melted candy bars, cartons of juice, warm cans of soda, and pancaked Twinkies, cupcakes and donuts.

The boys whistle, eyeing the loot enviously.

“What do you think, Mooney?” Wyatt says, offering one of his lopsided grins that make his large brown Army glasses—the type the boys call BCGs, or birth control glasses, since there’s no way in hell of getting laid while wearing them—appear crooked on his face.

Mooney studies his comrade for a few moments while he swabs his gun barrel with a cleaning rod and patch. He is starting to feel like he has adopted Private Joel Wyatt, although he is not sure why, since he basically can barely stand the screwball soldier at this point. Or maybe Wyatt has adopted him, and he is not strong enough to resist: Joel Wyatt can be like a force of nature. In any case, when you feel like you are going to die soon, you tend to start feeling pretty forgiving about things. All the irritating stuff stops being real and no longer matters. Just ask Billy Chen about how much he sweated the small stuff before he ate a bullet.

“Where’d you get all that, Joel?” says Ratliff.

“I jacked the rich kids’ lockers,” Wyatt says, beaming, sifting through the candy with his hands. He adds hastily, “It’s not like they’re coming back.”

Ratliff starts to laugh, but it fades quickly.

“You keep touching other people’s stuff and you’re going to get sick, Joel,” Mooney says, then reconsiders. “OK. Screw it. Give me that Mars bar.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Now,” Mooney says, glowering.

Wyatt grins again, his cheeks bulging with chocolate, and hands him the candy bar.

Mooney takes a bite and chews slowly. An instant later, he is wolfing the rest of it down, gnawing rapidly until his jaw muscles protest from the sudden overload. Now here is something to live for. Nothing ever tasted so good in his life. He reaches and grabs a carton of apple juice, spears it with the straw, and sucks it down in several long gulps. The sugar rings his brain like a bell.

“That’s my stuff!” Wyatt whines as Ratliff comes over and grabs a pack of cupcakes.

“There’s plenty for everybody,” Mooney says.

“That’s what your mom. . . .” Finnegan says, his voice trailing off.

Nobody laughs. Instead, the boys stare off into some point in space and the atmosphere begins to fill with despair, like a fast-acting poison. Mooney can’t stand it anymore.

“Everybody come and get a candy bar,” he says. “Joel’s buying.” The boys swipe at his pile, almost picking it clean. “Thanks, Joel!” they tell him.

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Wyatt tells Mooney.

“We have appointed you our new morale officer,” Mooney says.

“Why? Didn’t everybody find the LT’s speech uplifting? ‘Good day, uh, gentlemen, I’m the LT. Blah, blah, blah, uh, the world’s ending, and you’re still in the Army.’”

The boys laugh, chewing on their candy.

“You didn’t happen to find any beer in the lockers, did you, Joel?” says Finnegan.

“Or a couple of joints, maybe?” Carrillo wants to know, laughing.

“How about valium?” says Ratliff.

“Southern Comfort?”

“Codeine?”

“Heroin?”

They sound like they are horsing around, but Mooney can tell they are dead serious. They have recently learned that the road of duty now leads face first into a brick wall, presenting a choice that Billy Chen refused to continue making and that they are still trying to avoid. They are not sure what they now owe, and to whom. They do not want anything to do with Lieutenant Bowman’s total war, but they see no way out of the Army and no way home and besides, home may not even be there anymore.

A few hours of escape would be welcome.

“I had a teacher who kept a quart of whiskey in his drawer,” Finnegan says. “We’d sneak in during lunch period and take a few sips, and replace it with water.”

“I can’t believe a year and half ago I was graduating from high school,” says Carrillo, eyeing the student desks stacked against the far wall. “Man, I’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“Eighteen going on forty-five,” Ratliff says, and Mooney smiles, nodding.

“Man, I would kill for an ice cold bottle of Bud,” Finnegan says.

“Screw Bud,” says Ratliff. “Heineken’s the best.”

“I only drink the good stuff,” Carrillo boasts. “Guinness on tap.”

“Carrillo likes to eat his beers.”

“The domestics are just yellow water, you guys. You’re drinking carbonated urine.”

“I like Bud.”

“What about Corona?”

“Hey, man, what’s the difference between a half and half and a black and tan? I could never figure that out.”

Rollins finishes his Hershey’s chocolate bar, sighs and stares at the wrapper wistfully. “I just thought of something,” he says. “If things are as bad as LT says, I wonder if they’re making more of these chocolate bars or if this is all there is for a while.”

“Or movies,” says Finnegan. “Live concerts. Football games.
Hustler.
”

“PlayStation,” says Wyatt. “
Sports Illustrated
’s swimsuit issue.”

“Hot chicks, dope, rock and roll, and beer,” says Ratliff.

“My old man won’t like that,” Corporal Eckhardt says across the room, scrubbing his carbine’s firing pin and bolt assembly with a toothbrush and solvent to get rid of carbon residue. “He can really put it away. He can down two six-packs a night, pass out and then wake up the next day and go to work.”

“Sounds like a swell guy,” says Wyatt, snorting.

“My old man’s a psycho. If anybody can survive this thing, he will.”

“My dad’s an accountant,” says Finnegan. “He hates violence. He almost had a heart attack when I joined the Army and he found out they were sending me to Iraq.”

“My dad’s got a basement full of guns,” says Carrillo. “He loves his AK47 more than he loves my mom. He’s a real jerk. Jerks like him always make it.”

“Kind of shows you what kind of world is going to pop out the other side of this giant asshole,” Mooney says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The citywide curfew is now in effect.

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

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

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

Gunfire means people. Security.

Night is falling. Around them, the streetlights flare to life in the dusk. As if awaiting this signal, two Mad Dogs bolt out of a nearby apartment building, past construction scaffolding with posters plastered all over it advertising an aging pop singer’s farewell tour, and race towards the riot control police, yelping.

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

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

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

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