Pandemic

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.