Tooth And Nail

We really do have our backs up against the wall, he realizes.

Bowman traces his finger across the map and stabs a red square at Battery Park.

“This here is actually what’s left of a mechanized infantry brigade of marines sent to reinforce Warlord before Command decided against it,” he says. “They’ve got two platoons at Fort Clinton and the rest are stationed in Staten Island, which used to be Twenty-Seventh Brigade’s responsibility. After the government here collapsed, Colonel Dixon declared martial law and cleared Staten Island of Mad Dogs.”

Some of the sergeants grin and nudge each other.

“They, uh, do like to take the initiative, so I hear, sir,” Kemper says, making the men laugh.

“Yeah, well, Manhattan’s got a hell of a lot more people than Staten Island,” Hooper says, reminding them that they work for a rival branch of the military and not to give the jarheads too much credit for anything.

“I could get some work done around here if I had some LAVs, too,” another sergeant says.

“Hooah,” somebody mutters.

“Give me some Bradleys and about thirty bulldozers, and I’ll unfuck this island double quick,” somebody shouts from the back, and the NCOs cheer.

“The Marines have got their own problems,” Bowman says loudly, regaining control. “The only reason the Marines are on Staten Island to begin with is it was being used as a staging point to reinforce us here in Manhattan. The boats dropped off two platoons in Battery Park, then the Brass called off the game and the units ended up stranded. Now they’re effectively cut off from their main force and they are not being resupplied.”

The NCOs stop smiling. If military units in the area stop being supplied, then eventually they will start looting to survive, and once an army crosses that line, they cease being an army and become a rabble—part of the problem, not the solution.

Bowman adds, “Meanwhile, Dixon’s low on food, ammo and fuel, he has a man down out of every four, and he’s now governor and de facto chief of police of an island with nearly five hundred thousand people on it. That’s a half a million people getting hungrier, sicker and more pissed off by the minute.”

The sergeants bury their faces in their coffee mugs, chastened. Bowman returns to the map, pointing at police stations where at least a few cops are trying to hold it together, Financial District and municipal buildings occupied by ragtag National Guard units and the Brigade’s civilian affairs unit, a bridge still held by military police and engineers, and Twenty-Six Federal Plaza, where a handful of FBI agents, immigration officials, Federal judges and their families are apparently holed up. Manhattan is riddled with islands and pockets of friendly units, but nobody is strong enough to link up with anybody else or project their power. The marines at Battery Park might as well be on the Moon. The only real estate any of these units truly controls is right under their feet.

McGraw believes there could be up to fifty, even a hundred thousand Mad Dogs in Manhattan alone. The population grew fast because the problem started mostly in the hospitals and there were thousands upon thousands of people there, lying helpless and easily infected, like tightly packed kindling awaiting a spark. The good news is the Mad Dog population does not appear to be growing as fast as it was. The hospitals have been emptied and most people are staying home, denying the virus a plentiful source of new bodies. In any case, the Mad Dogs now appear to be concentrated into sizable mobs that often end up killing anybody they come into contact with instead of infecting them. Soon, the number of Mad Dogs on the streets is going to start declining as they suffer a massive die-off. The war might end soon if everybody just stays hidden and waits.

Somebody asks about the three yellow boxes in Brooklyn and Queens.

“I was getting to them,” Bowman answers. “As far as I can tell, they’re deserters. Nothing bigger than a platoon at this point, but it’s another thing that Twenty-Fifth Brigade has to worry about that’s out there.”

The sergeants glance at each other. The country must really be on the brink of collapse if the Army is starting to fall apart.

But the real problem isn’t people leaving the Army, the LT tells them.

He adds quickly: “The real problem, it seems, is the Army leaving us.”

His finger traces along Brooklyn’s western coast, a long green smear.

“This is Second Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Brigade, commanded by Colonel Guzman. He’s in a good position.”

Another green smear along the north coast of Queens.

“This is two companies of First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Brigade, commanded by Colonel Powers. He took a real beating last night and is barely holding it together.”

He points at a red X in the South Bronx.

“This is the last known position of the other two companies of First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Brigade, commanded by Captain Marsh. We have lost all contact with his command. It is believed to have been destroyed.”

The NCOs murmur and step from foot to foot, suddenly restless and angry.

Bowman taps his finger on a blue square in midtown.

“This is us here. First Battalion, Eighth Brigade.”

He points to a blue rectangle in Jersey City, to the west.

“This is Second Battalion, commanded by Colonel Rose,” he says. “We’re what’s left of the Crazy Eights.”

“Wait, where’s Quarantine?” one of the NCOs calls out.

Bowman shakes his head. “We have lost contact with Quarantine. Colonel Winters and his command are MIA. We are now trying to. . . .” He gives up talking as the non-coms begin murmuring loudly among themselves.

Their headquarters, and all its logistics and signal units—even the brigade band—has disappeared without a trace somewhere across the Hudson River in Jersey City.

“Listen up!” Kemper roars, quieting them instantly.

“The Twenty-Fifth is being loaded onto transports to be taken down the coast to Virginia,” Bowman tells them. “Immunity is withdrawing from the region. As far as I can tell, the new strategy is to consolidate in the more rural areas of the country, where the Mad Dog population is smaller and more dispersed, particularly the bread basket—”

“What about us, LT?” McGraw says. “What are we doing here?”

Bowman shakes his head.

“That’s just the thing. I honestly don’t know. Eighth Brigade has not been issued evac orders for the time being, and Division isn’t telling us why.”

“What about Los Angeles? Is it being abandoned? I got people there, sir.”

“This is a goddamn disgrace!”

Several of the other sergeants start shouting at once.

“I already told you everything I know,” Bowman yells over them.

Sherman is pushing his way through the crowd. He reaches Kemper and hands him a piece of paper.

The LT adds: “So we’re going to hunker down here for a while and reorganize our unit. We’re also going to start training for a new mission.”

Kemper reads the note and glances sharply at the RTO, his face reddening.

Bowman continues, “We’re going to try to salvage the equipment H&S Company left when they got overrun. They had weapons, food, water, medicine in storage. An ammo dump. If we don’t get it, the locals will pick it clean. We need those supplies to remain combat effective.”

“How are we supposed to get to H&S?” says Ruiz. “They were over a mile away from here when they were overrun.”

Bowman smiles and says, “We’re going to innovate.”

Kemper approaches and says something into the LT’s ear. By the time he finishes, Bowman is visibly angry, leaving the sergeants wondering.

“Put it on the map,” says the LT.

The Platoon Sergeant draws a yellow border around Second Battalion in Jersey City. Bowman turns to the NCOs.

“Uh, Jake has just heard from Division that we are to avoid any contact with Second Battalion over in Jersey City,” he says. “Colonel Rose and his XO, Major Boyle, are reported dead. Captain Warner is in command, and he is refusing to obey orders.”

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

McLeod finishes mopping the hallway in the Asylum—what the boys call the wing where they put the soldiers turned Mad Dog—and walks slowly down the virtually empty hall, reading the names carved into the boards nailed over the doors. The visitors are all long gone, as the inmates have all turned Mad Dog.

He passes by one that reads, james lynch.

Behind the boarded up door, he can hear Maddy pacing in his boots, growling.

“If you had a longer life span, I’d join you,” McLeod says. “Seeing as your side seems to be winning this thing, and all.”

James Lynch snarls and throws his shoulder against the door, making McLeod take a step backward, almost spilling his bucket. Down the hall, Private Becker from Third Platoon, posted on sentry duty, watches and shakes his head.

McLeod grins and waves, then checks his watch. Lunch time. He decides to take his MRE onto the roof to watch Sergeant Lewis bang away at Maddy with his rifle.

He arrives to find the roof empty except for a smiling Private Williams, leading one of the female civilians by the hand. They disappear behind one of the HVAC units.

McLeod walks to the parapet, sets down his SAW, and looks out over the city.

New York.

What a view. Even dying of this horrible cancer, it’s beautiful.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” he says into the chilly air, quoting a poem he read once in English class, in what seems to him now to have been another life. “Allah akhbar.”

It has never been so quiet. There are no cars moving, no shrill sirens, no babble of voices. Smoke drifts over the looming skyline as fires rage unchecked. Garbage and sewage are tossed out of windows into streets choked with corpses.

Mercifully, the wind blows south, carrying the stench out over the ocean.

A single helicopter buzzes in the distance. McLeod recognizes it as an observation helicopter. Division’s air support is wasting no more fuel or ordnance on New York City. The sky belongs to the birds now, feasting on the dead.

He rips his MRE open and looks down at the street.

It is deserted. Nothing for Sergeant Lewis to bang away at except drifting garbage and a pack of feral dogs, even if he were here. Soon, even the dogs are gone.

Like looking at the frozen peaks of mountains, once the majesty wears off, New York’s skyline could not be more depressing for human survival. There is no money, only a barter economy with little to barter. Few people here have the skills they will need to survive for the next few months. There is no electricity, no plumbing, no sewage, no health system, and little hope for the future. And oh yeah, if you step outside for the next few weeks, you will probably be killed. Long term, your prospects are even worse.

Across the street, somebody taped a sign on the window of a private office, facing outward, that says, trapped, help. The office appears to be empty.

“Mind if I join you?”

McLeod turns and sees a middle-aged man wearing a neat suit, cardigan sweater and tie, fiddling with a transistor radio.

“Sure.” He nods at the radio. “What are you getting?”

“Nothing local, obviously,” the man says cheerfully. “But I am receiving an AM news station out of Pittsburgh. The government has a cure for Mad Dog disease, they say. It’s only a matter of time now before they fix this and we can get things back to normal.”

McLeod checks out his lunch. Pork rib. With clam chowder as a side. He rips open a packet of barbecue sauce and slathers it onto the ribs.

“You think so?” he says.

“Sure,” the man says.

“So what did you do before?”

“I am a professor at Columbia University.”

“I was going to go to college.”

“You still can, my boy. You got your whole life ahead of you.” He sets the radio down on the parapet and takes out a pipe. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Help yourself, Professor,” McLeod says, his cheek bulging with food.

“You can call me Dr. Potter.”

“Okay, Dr. Potter.”

“I’m joking, young man. You can call me Dave.”

McLeod shrugs. “Okay, Dave.”

They listen to the radio together. A reporter recaps a statement that the Secretary of Health and Human Services made earlier in the day.

Blah, blah, blah, McLeod thinks.

“Do they do any local reporting, Dave?” he asks.

The question appears to startle Potter, who finishes lighting his pipe before answering. The puffs of smoke smell like cherries.

“No,” he says. “They always report from the FEMA bunker at Mount Weather down in Virginia. Which is natural, since that’s where the government is these days. CNN and MSNBC and CBS, they’re all there. They are still operational. That’s a good sign.”

McLeod chews slower, suddenly depressed, until he can barely swallow.

The truth is the networks are not really there anymore. They are just repeating whatever the government tells them. The media, like all the other institutions Americans recognize, are being whittled down to facades. It is so obvious that even a guy like McLeod can figure it out, but so horrible that even a college professor will not acknowledge it.

“I have a feeling,” McLeod says, “I’m never going to get to go to college.”

Which means he is going to have to learn how to be a soldier after all, he realizes. He doubts there will be many other career choices for him in the near future. Soldier may not be the best profession, but it sure as hell beats “scavenger” and “serf.”

He flinches as two fighter planes scream directly overhead, briefly washing the roof in flickering shadows. USAF F16 Flying Falcons. Twenty-seven thousand pounds of thrust pushing up to fifteen hundred miles per hour.

“Look at those suckers go,” McLeod says.

The planes soar through the sky in unison until they disappear over the buildings to the southwest, appearing to slow as they bank over the East River.

“I should have joined the Air Force,” he adds. “Last I heard, Maddy can’t fly.”

Moments later, they begin their return, zooming back towards the northwest. Four black dots emerge from their torsos, drop rapidly away, and fall hurtling through the air towards the earth in a forward trajectory.

“Holy shit,” says McLeod.

Each of those dots is an unguided two-thousand-pound bomb.

“Hum? Is something wrong?” Potter says, toking on his pipe.

The dots drop out of sight. A moment later, a distant flash, followed by grating thunder. A column of black smoke rises over the cityscape of southern Manhattan.

Potter shouts over the echo, “What in God’s name was that?”

“I think the Air Force just blew a big hole in the Williamsburg Bridge, Dave,” McLeod says, shaking his head in wonder as another pair of F16s roars past, heading south. “It looks an awful lot to me like they’re sealing off Manhattan.”

The last man standing

Four days ago, First Battalion numbered more than six hundred fifty combat effectives. It now has a combat-ready strength of less than two hundred. All of the officers are dead or missing except for 2LT Todd Bowman and the other two surviving lieutenants from the four original companies of Charlie Company.

Bowman reports these numbers after Immunity, the call sign for Major General Kirkland’s divisional command, contacts War Dogs Two by radio during a sweep of units still operating in the region.

Holding the SINCGAR handset to his ear, Bowman stands ramrod straight at attention, even though he is alone in the Principal’s personal office except for Jake Sherman, who sits nearby chewing on a thumbnail. Junior officers often do this during those rare occasions when a Major General gives them a call.

Kirkland congratulates Bowman on keeping his command intact, appoints him commander of the Brigade and, in recognition of his accomplishments in the field, promotes him on the spot to the rank of Captain.

The old ways apparently die hard. After everything he has seen, this unusual field promotion surprises Bowman more than anything that has happened yet.

Kirkland says he has a mission for him.

After the call is terminated, Captain Bowman turns to Sherman and says, “The wonders never cease.”

“Congratulations on your promotion, sir,” the RTO says, beaming.

“Thank you, Jake. Even if it is for being the last man standing.”

A simple misunderstanding

Bowman leaves the office and sees the NCOs waiting for his return, nursing their coffee mugs and murmuring among themselves in the open office area.

“All right,” he says, returning to the map. “That was Immunity. I have new orders direct from General Kirkland. We have been given a mission.”

The NCOs settle down, watching him with expressions that are suddenly wary and suspicious. It suddenly strikes him in a flash of insight that Second Battalion was probably offered the mission first. Lieutenant Colonel Rose accepted it. Then his men, seeing such a mission as suicide for themselves, rebelled and shot him.

Ironically, Rose probably would have ordered First Battalion to take on the mission and kept his battalion out of it, since the mission objective is in Manhattan. But before the Colonel could delegate the mission to Bowman’s people, his men killed him.

A simple misunderstanding.

After that, Major General Kirkland turned to one 2LT Bowman and appointed him commander of the Brigade.

There’s a lesson here. He would have to tread carefully.

“Our mission involves a research facility located on the west side.” He stabs the map with his index finger. “Right about here. Can everybody see? We’re going to this facility to secure a group of scientists and help them evacuate the city.”

“Uh, LT, sir?” asks one of the sergeants from Third Platoon. “With all respect, that sounds like suicide, don’t it?”

“We’re going to make it to that facility with no casualties if I can help it,” Bowman says, looking the man in the eye. “We’re going at night, which will help. By the way, it’s Captain, not LT. I was promoted and placed in command of the Battalion.”

Actually, he was placed in command of the Brigade, but the whole thing—a 2LT being promoted to head a brigade—sounds too ridiculous even to him.

“Congratulations on your promotion, sir,” another sergeant from Third Platoon says. “But going out at night is definitely suicide. We saw that the other night. The massacre happened after the blackout.”

“Actually, the blackout probably saved what was left of the companies from being completely wiped out,” Bowman answers. “And the survivors made it all the way here, mostly unharmed, using their NVGs. We’re going to do the same for this mission.”

Some of the NCOs nod at this.

“We can’t silence our weapons, though,” another sergeant says. “You shoot off a few rounds in this town, and every Mad Dog in the place comes swarming at you from everywhere at the gallop.”

“We won’t be firing our weapons,” Bowman says.

“Sir?”

“We’ll be making our way with the bayonet.”

The NCOs guffaw and whistle in respect. The plan has balls. They just might make it.

Bishop raises his hand. “Sir? I have a question. Why are we risking our necks at all? The Army is abandoning us here. Technically, we’re on our own.”

Bowman frowns. “We’re not being abandoned. We’re going to be—”

“All I’m saying is we’re safe here and we should consider whether the risk is worth our lives.”

Bowman shakes his head. He does not want to argue with Bishop in front of the NCOs. But they have a right to know what’s at stake.

“I’ll tell you why this mission is important,” says the Captain. “This team of research scientists has found a cure to the Mad Dog disease. And there’s a helicopter ride out of here for us when the mission is completed. We’re going with the scientists.”

“With all respect, sir, that’s bullshit,” Bishop says. “I’m not buying it.”

The NCOs gasp at the breach of discipline between officers in front of enlisted men, then begin murmuring—some against Bishop, some for him.

“He’s right!” one of the sergeants from Bravo says.

“I’m not going out there again,” a sergeant from Delta mutters.

“Even if we get out of here, they’re just going to use us like cannon fodder in some other city. You know?”

“Embrace the suck, gentlemen.”

“Shut up and listen to the CO!”

“I say call a vote!”

“I’m only asking a fair question, Todd,” Bishop says. “We’ve been lied to too many times already, and it’s gotten too many good men killed.”

Kemper roars, silencing them all, “You will address him as ‘Captain’ or ‘sir,’ Lieutenant! And you will not argue with the Captain or question his orders in front of enlisted personnel. That means shut the hell up right now!”

Bowman glowers at both of them, barely containing his rage. “Both of you get out of here. Get out of my sight. Now. I’ll deal with you later.”

“Yes, sir,” Kemper says. “Sorry for my outburst, sir.”

As he passes Bowman, he winks.

Bowman is almost too stunned to understand, but then he gets it. Kemper knew that Bowman did not need a champion to defend him, that what he needed was for his people to respect his authority and obey his orders. Kemper showed the NCOs that he obeys Bowman, while also silencing Bishop by immediately ending the public debate.

“We are not a boys club,” the Captain tells the sergeants. “We do not vote. You are either in the Army and you follow orders in a chain of command that goes all the way up to the President of the United States, or you are a deserter and scum. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” the NCOs answer.

“Now listen up. This is important. If we weren’t going out on this mission, we’d still be going out to retrieve supplies from H&S, or sit here and starve. The NVGs are either going to get us there or we are returning here. After we complete the mission, the Army will lift us somewhere else that’s safer than being in the middle of the most densely populated city in the goddamn country. Not to mention a deathtrap, since the Air Force has started blowing the bridges in a crazy attempt to prevent the Mad Dogs here from migrating. Damn, in just a month or two, what you see outside the window today might be considered the good old days of peace and plenty. I think, given the facts on the ground, this mission is our best and only real option for long-term survival. Hooah?”

“Hooah,” the NCOs answer, some louder than others. Some not at all.

“We step off at zero four,” says Bowman. “Be ready, gentlemen. That is all.”

One of you is a traitor

The boys of First Squad, Second Platoon immediately start grumbling as they wake up in the darkness. By the time they get out of their sleeping bags, shivering in the night air that has grown increasingly colder over the past few days—this being the first week of October—they have progressed from bitching to full-fledged whining.

A lot of soldiers are gung ho for the cool stuff that happens here and there in the service, and constantly gripe and moan about everything else that happens in between. But this is real dissent. They were just getting comfortable here and starting to feel like they might be able to wait this thing out and come out the other end alive. They have food, water, electricity, heat, security in this place. A few of the platoon’s Casanovas even found the time, amidst the endless hard work, to strike up relationships with women in the building.

Mooney was the only one not surprised when Sergeant McGraw told them last night that they were bugging out. He had already sensed the change in the air. He saw the signs and portents and understood that nobody was going to make it out of this thing without intense suffering. The TV stations going off the air one by one. Paper money only having value as kindling. The complete breakdown of distribution systems for food, medicine and clothing. The rumors of Army units simply taking their guns and walking off the job.

It all happened so fast.

Soon, he believes, people will be burning library books to keep warm in between hunting each other for food and using the Hudson as a toilet and washing machine.

“You didn’t really think the Army was going to leave us alone, did you?” says Carrillo. “We’re one of the only units in the area that’s still obeying orders.”

“We’re one of the only units still alive,” Ratliff says.

“They at least had to try to get us killed,” Rollins says, but nobody laughs.

“Quit your bitching and gear up, boys,” McGraw says, stomping into the room. His sleeves are uncharacteristically rolled up, revealing his hairy Popeye forearms with a skull tattooed on one and crossed rifles on the other. “I want you out in the hallway, against the far wall in single file, ready to move, in fifteen. Drop your fartsack, Ratliff. Your poncho, too. We’re going light. Bring lots of ammo and otherwise only what you need. We’re leaving everything else for the Hajjis.”

The boys burst into laughter. They’ve taken to calling the Mad Dogs “Maddy” and the civilians “Hajjis” over the past few days, and hearing one of the NCOs do the same—especially their own blunt, burly Sergeant McGraw—is hilarious to them.

Many of these boys will leave their warm sleeping bags and risk their necks tonight purely out of devotion to their NCOs. They respect the non-coms. Wherever they go, the boys will follow.

“Anybody got any more glow sticks?” Rollins says. “I can’t hardly see shit in here.”

“Use your NVGs,” Mooney says. “It’ll be good practice.”

McGraw turns at the sound of Mooney’s voice, points at him, and says, “You.” He points at Wyatt. “And you.”

“I didn’t do it,” Wyatt says.

“Get your shit on, meatballs,” McGraw tells them. “You’re coming with me.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Mooney says darkly. The other boys are already tearing into MREs for breakfast. His stomach growls.

They are on the move after a few minutes. The boys of the other squads are already spilling out of the other classrooms in the wing and filling up the hallway. Most squat against the student lockers in grim silence, their carbines between their knees. Some race out of line to use the john before the company steps off. Somebody from First Platoon cranks up “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ’N Roses on a CD player to get their juices flowing and wake up the Hajjis.

At the end of the hallway, McGraw tells them to wait, his eyes on the Platoon Sergeant, who is arguing with several civilians.

Somebody calls out for fresh batteries for his NVGs. The boys here are finishing up their last smokes, dropping the butts and grinding them out with their boots. Then two soldiers from First Platoon’s Weapons Squad show up carrying a crate of ammo between them, and start passing it out.

Top up, they say. Put a mag in every spare pocket. Bring as much as you can carry.

Mooney steps closer to the Platoon Sergeant and listens in on his argument.

“You will be okay here if you keep your heads down and don’t attract attention,” Kemper is saying. “There’s plenty of food. We had crews filling up every bottle and bucket in the place with tap water. You’ve got extra gas we siphoned from the refrigerated trucks, so you’ve got a good supply of fuel for the generator.”

“Your duty is to help these people, Sergeant,” one of the civilians says.

“My duty is to follow my orders.”

“You work for us, goddamnit.”

“I work for the U.S. Army, Ma’am.”

Kemper walks away, nods to McGraw, and continues down the hall, which suddenly grows increasingly loud and chaotic as the NCOs begin ordering and dressing their squads for the movement. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the CO made some last-minute changes to the order of march, promoting some of the sergeants to the rank of LT, combining squads, and otherwise rebuilding a new overstrength company on the fly from the wreckage of a battalion. Some of the boys are shouting out names, panicked; entire squads appear to be missing.

Mooney turns around and sees Martin and Boomer tagging along with their .30-cal M240. Martin gives him a thumbs up. Mooney frowns. He never knows if Martin is being nice or an asshole. In Iraq, giving somebody a thumbs up is the same as giving them the finger.

“You know what’s going on?” he whispers.

Martin shakes his head, grinning.

“No talking,” McGraw says.

They turn the corner and enter an empty hallway. Soon, the sounds of what’s left of First Battalion recede into the gloom.

Kemper switches on the SureFire flashlight attached to his carbine.

“Turn that thing off,” a voice says in the dark. “I’m right here.”

“Yes, sir,” Kemper says.

Captain Bowman steps out of an empty, dusty-smelling classroom, a glow stick dangling from his load-bearing vest. The monochromatic light stick, like the NVG phosphor screen, is purposefully colored green since the eye can distinguish between more shades of green than other phosphor colors. He’s the only one of them who has a light source.

Kemper says to the MGR and AG, “I want you to set up the thirty-cal here, pointing that way. We’re going to the end of this hallway. If you hear shooting, you keep your cool and hold your fire. If I say shoot, you start shooting anybody with a flash light or a glow stick. But only if I tell you to shoot. Is that clear, Specialist?”

“Hooah, Sergeant,” Martin says.

“Good man.”

The Captain gives Mooney and Wyatt the once-over. Mooney stands at attention and says, “Sir, Private Mooney reports!”

Wyatt echoes the ritual.

Bowman smiles at them. “Always you two. At ease, men.”

“What are we doing here, Sarge?” says Boomer.

“It’s personal,” Kemper answers.

Martin and Boomer finish setting up the M240. The group moves down the hall.

Ahead, in the darkness, Mooney hears murmuring voices, occasionally punctuated by a strident yell. His stomach begins a series of flying leaps. He suddenly feels certain that something bad is happening. And that something very, very bad is going to happen.

The Captain is talking into his handheld.

“I’ve got a couple of the men with me, but I’ll be coming around the corner to talk to you alone,” he says into his handset. “All right?”

Mooney gave up his own radio after his recon mission, so he doesn’t hear the response. But the Captain keeps moving, so it must be all right.

“Here I come now,” Bowman says, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hold your fire. Don’t shoot. We’re just going to have a conversation.”

The Captain turns the corner and disappears.

Kemper follows closely until he reaches the corner, then squats down, listening. McGraw whispers to Mooney and Wyatt to prepare for action on his command.

Mooney drops to one knee, feeling the comforting cushion of his kneepad, sweating in his BDUs. His heart pounds against his ribs and his blood is crashing in his ears. The moment Captain Bowman disappeared around the corner, the tension began mounting until it has now become almost impossible to breathe.

“Todd, sorry we have to meet like this,” a voice says.

Lieutenant Bishop, Wyatt whispers.

“Same here,” Bowman answers.

“Well, we’re not going, as you can see. We’re going to stay here and rebuild.”

“I understand.”

“We don’t want anything to do with your war. We’re not in the Army anymore. And we’re not going to die to keep the memory of a dead country alive.”

“I understand. But I still need to talk to the men.”

“Go right ahead. There’s nothing you can say to change their minds, though. They already survived one massacre. They’re not going to walk into another.”

“Men!” Bowman says.

The Captain’s voice echoes through the hallways until it becomes a ghostly murmur.

“Men!” he repeats. “You can stay here. We’re not going to force you to come with us. What’s done is done. It’s all right.”

“That’s nice of you,” Bishop warily. “What do you want in return?”

“One of you is a traitor against the United States, and must be punished.”

“And who—what are you doing?”

A pistol bangs loudly, echoing sharply in their ears with an almost physical impact, making them flinch.

Another bang. A wave of cordite in the air, tingling the nose.

Mooney can sense McGraw tensing ahead of them. He can smell the man’s nervous sweat as he prepares to rush forward and provide cover fire for the Captain. But nothing happens. The seconds tick by. The deserters do not shoot.

The ringing in Mooney’s ears slowly fades.

“What’s done is done,” Bowman says. He calls out into the gloom, “If we are forced to return, you will be accepted back into the Battalion with no questions asked. If we don’t come back, take good care of the civilians. I am intending to tell the General that you volunteered to stay behind. There will be no dishonor for you, as long as you stay true to yourself and the people in your charge. While they remain alive and well, you are still in the United States Army.”

After a few moments of silence, Bowman adds, “Well. God be with you men.”

“Thank you, sir,” the boys whisper in the dark.

Moments later, Captain Bowman returns, his glow stick almost glaring in Mooney’s eyes. The light is trembling, and it takes Mooney a moment to realize it is the Captain who is shaking. The man just shot down a fellow officer while a dozen, two dozen—it could have been scores—of deserters aimed a variety of automatic weapons at him.

“We can’t use them if they’re broken,” Bowman says. “We have truly become a volunteer army tonight.” He looks dazed and exhausted. “Bishop was a traitor, though. That I did to fulfill my duty to the Army. Things may be falling apart, but we still are the U.S. Army.”

Kemper and McGraw nod somberly. There is no need to explain.

Bowman sees Mooney and Wyatt, takes a deep breath, and smiles. “Thanks for the backup, men.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Mooney rasps, his mouth dry.

“Now let’s see if we can get the hell off this island tonight.”

Thrust and hold, move.

Withdraw and hold, move.

Attack position, move

The boys file out of the school’s front doors two by two, a long tan line that snakes through the dark, bristling with bayonets. The first squad in the column fans out to form a wedge, making the formation look like an arrow. The NCOs walk alongside the column, keeping a tight grip on their squads. While they will be moving in company strength, each squad will be acting independently, since there is no talking and no talking means no communication up and down the chain of command.

They all know where to go, how to get there, and what the rules of engagement are. No shooting unless it is a matter of life and death. Safeties on. They will push through with the bayonet. Speed, surprise and night vision will be their allies on this mission.

Near the front of the column, Mooney marches along in his NVGs, a pair of goggles that look into an amplified electronic image of the outside world on a green phosphor screen. This allows the soldiers to see even in starlight, which is all that is available tonight, by amplifying ambient light thirty thousand times and then creating an image rendered in green. The soldiers can see Maddy, but Maddy can’t see them back.

Maddy can, however, hear them making an awful racket. The column rattles along, boots crunching glass and kicking cans and bottles, coughing on waves of stink circulating through the otherwise silent city. But despite the noise, the Mad Dogs do not attack. They appear to be dormant.

Mooney hears a scuffle on his left, followed by a hideous thunk sound and a sharp yelp. He turns just in time to see his sergeant pull his shovel out of a woman’s head and shove her corpse to the asphalt. McGraw signals to them: Don’t stop, keep moving.

The Sergeant whispers in the dark, “Sorry, Ma’am.”

Mooney cannot stop himself from wondering who she was before she crossed over and became one of them. An important movie producer? A magazine editor? A meter maid? A substitute teacher? Did she have a husband or was she single? Did she have kids? Was she planning a vacation in Mexico over the winter?

Was she a terrorist who was going to blow up New York?

Was she a scientist about to discover the cure for cancer?

We’ll never know.

Many of the infected are walking barefoot across broken glass, leaving trails of blood behind them. Others have gaping flesh wounds that are leaking pus from scores of infections, not just from the germs transmitted by bites, but because New York has become an open sewer over the past several days. Their stench is horrific, slowly winning its war against the vapor rub the soldiers have slathered under their noses. These people are scarcely human anymore.

But Mooney does not hate them. He just can’t see them as monsters. Several days ago, they were regular people. It is hard to hate slaves. They have no choice.

Ahead, he sees more infected. There are clusters of them standing listless in the dark, apparently sleeping on their feet, their shoulders rising and falling as they pant with rapid, shallow breaths. Others sob and cry out as if from deep sadness.

The stench grows in strength, making his stomach waver at the edge of a convulsion. He tells himself not to cough, not to make a sound.

He passes a Mad Dog who has sensed their presence and is trying to find them blindly, his eyes blinking in the dark. The man suddenly moves into the blind spot of Mooney’s peripheral vision. NVGs offer the advantage of night vision even in near total darkness, but have three big disadvantages that are unnerving and even dangerous.

Soldiers used to 20/20 eyesight during the day must quickly adapt to a reduction in visual acuity to 20/25 to 20/40 at best. In other words, the NVGs produce a fuzzy image. While the fact there is no moon tonight is probably saving their lives, it is also giving their NVGs very little ambient illumination to work with.

While the NVG visor is binocular, the actual lens is monocular, robbing its wearer of depth perception. The boys stumble along, adapting the way they walk so they can maintain balance. Some occasionally flinch when they see Maddies wandering around, because they are not sure how far away they are.

Meanwhile, soldiers used to having a greater than one hundred eighty-degree field of view must adapt to forty-degree tunnel vision. The soldiers must wag their heads constantly to see if Maddy is coming up on their sides, where they are virtually blind.

Mooney hears the Mad Dog sniffing the air and growling on his left. He wags his head in time to see his squad leader bash in the man’s skull with his shovel.

McGraw does not apologize.

Mooney’s mind races: Investment banker? Famous actor? Father of three?

He is trying not to think about his turn on the front line stabbing these people in the dark and pushing them to the ground. He has shot lots of people over the past few days, and even bayoneted the sniveling thing on the floor in the science classroom back at the school. But he did that without thinking. Shooting somebody is one thing. Intentionally putting a knife into a person’s body is another. Most soldiers hate the weapon.

Second Squad steps out of line and squats, exhausted by the fighting, waiting for the rest of the column to pass so that they rejoin it as its last section. It is now First Squad’s turn to be on point.

Mooney takes a deep breath, constantly moving and analyzing the objects swimming in a dozen shades of green in his limited view.

Ahead, floating in the gloom, the pale bodies of Mad Dogs sleep in their strange huddles and wander among the ruins of an abandoned traffic jam, stumbling over torn luggage and dead bodies.

The air is suddenly pierced by wailing, one of the infected crying out in sadness and pain.

The column is not supposed to deviate from a straight line until the first turn four blocks ahead. If Maddy blocks the column, bayonet him, push him to the side, and keep moving. Those are his orders. If he disobeys, he might get everybody killed.

The Mad Dog directly in front of him appears to be vibrating on his green phosphor screen, his large body undefined and fuzzy and his long matted beard writhing like a sizzling nest of worms. His left eye is swollen shut and leaking black fluid from an infection. His mouth yawns open. He appears to be grinning.

Mooney falls into a boxer’s stance, left foot forward, body erect, knees slightly bent, balancing on the balls of his feet.

He was trained for bayonet fighting. There are four attack movements that he learned back in Basic: Thrust, butt stroke, slash and smash. There are friendlies on his left and right, so he is limited to the thrust. The basic idea is to put the blade into any vulnerable part of your opponent’s body.

The biggest problem is picking the spot. It is during this moment of thought that the revulsion sets in. Many soldiers simply aim center-mass at the enemy’s torso. Either they do not have time to think, or they don’t want to.

Mooney pulls the stock of his M4 close to his right hip, extends his left arm, and lunges forward on his left foot with all his might, spearing the Mad Dog between the ribs and pushing him. The man shrieks, stumbling backward and almost taking the rifle with him. Mooney pulls hard and retrieves the blade, which slides out of the man’s body reluctantly with an awful sucking sound.

Maddy stumbles to the left, trips over a fallen motorcycle, and doesn’t get up.

Another Mad Dog steps out of the gloom, an old woman dressed in the rags of a hospital gown, blood splashed on her face and chest. Her toothless mouth gapes at him, gurgling a stream of bubbling drool rich with virus.

Thrust and hold, move. Withdraw and hold, move. Resume attack position, move. Take a step forward.

Next to him, Finnegan curses quietly as his carbine is wrenched out of his grasp. He chases after it and retrieves it, stumbling and gasping.

After ten minutes of this, slowly carving their way through two blocks, Corporal Eckhardt taps his shoulder and takes his place at the front of the column.

Mooney falls back in line, feeling an overwhelming compulsion to tear off his NVGs and let the world go black. The tendons in his aching arms seem to have hardened into steel and a sharp pain lances through his left wrist. Bayonet fighting is punishing work. He is dying for a drink of water.

Sergeant McGraw steps out front and holds up his hand. The boys drop to one knee with a general clatter, panting. The Mad Dogs ahead have a gleaming green halo around them, against which they wander as dark silhouettes. Apparently there is a fire ahead producing a lot of light and threatening to expose them.

Mooney wags his head to have a quick look around, and also try to clear his head of the claustrophobic sensation that he is trapped inside a horrible dream.

The infected are everywhere.

We will carry this action with the bayonet

After the column grinds to a security halt, Bowman lifts his NVGs and is instantly plunged into darkness. He raises his carbine and peers into the red-dot close-combat optic, which provides night vision and also magnification.

He quickly surmises that the front half of the column has become embedded in a large force of Mad Dogs. Not one of the main bodies of thousands, but a force of several hundred at least, moaning and wheezing in the darkness. They stand in clusters, panting in sleep, or wander around aimlessly, pressing close against the column, sniffing the air and growling, lashing out when they walk blindly into the bayonets. And at the rear of the crowd, some type of fire, probably a car fire, is burning in the middle of the street.

His unit is in trouble. Maddy is blocking the street in large numbers and is now virtually surrounding one-fourth of the company like a herd of blind predators. If the column tries to push through at the point of the bayonet, they will become increasingly visible as they get closer to the fire. Then they could have a real battle on their hands, and on unequal terms.

The Captain flips his NVGs back over his eyes. Above the street, he suddenly notices, many of the windows are glowing green with candlelight. All around them in this seemingly dead city, people are still trying to survive.

You’re leaving all of them to die, he tells himself.

He forces this crushingly depressing thought out of his head with a grunt.

Keying his handset, he murmurs, “All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual. Hold position until further notice, over.”

Jogging down the line, he finds Sergeant Lewis at the back of the column, and sends him to the far left, then sends the next squad to the far right, repeating this until he has created a line of troops spanning the street.

After deploying his troops, he finds an abandoned car, gets in, and gently closes the door.

“All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual,” he whispers. “If I have taken you out of line, I name you Team A. The rest of you still in line are Team B. On my mark, Team A will charge and push Maddy back. Once we make contact, Team B will join the attack. We will carry this action with the bayonet. There will be no shooting.

“The research facility is just over eight blocks from here. A little over half a mile. After we begin our assault, we will keep moving as fast as possible. This will be the mission’s release point. After we begin, you will be responsible for getting your unit to the objective on your own.

“Step off on my mark. Good luck and Godspeed. Wait, out.”

Getting out of the car, he gets into position next to Sergeant Lewis, who turns and acknowledges his presence with a nod.

“Step off in five, four, three, two, one, go,” says the Captain.

Team A begins jogging forward in a bristling line. The line quickly becomes ragged as some of the boys stumble over garbage and corpses, others lag from exhaustion, and some painfully run into fire hydrants, street signs and even cars after misjudging how far away they are. Bowman can hear his breath come in short, sharp gasps.

The first Mad Dog appears. Bowman spears him, the force of the momentum of his thrust almost shocking the carbine out of his grasp. He retrieves the blade with a colossal effort and shoulders the man out of the way, knocking the wind out of both of them. The man goes down.

Another takes his place, snarling.

Ahead, the crowd continually thickens until a virtual wall of bodies appears ahead of them in the green gloom. Some of the boys, unable to help themselves, shout high-pitched war cries to amp up their courage as they rush forward into battle.

The line crashes home. Maddy reels from the shock, dozens dropping to the ground writhing with bayonet wounds. The survivors attack the soldiers, then Team B stands and begins its own assault in a line punching through the middle of the throng.

If this were any normal enemy with a healthy fear for their own lives, they would be fleeing as fast as they could run in the dark. But this is no normal enemy. It is an enemy incapable of fear or reason. To Lyssa, the human body is disposable, just a meat puppet with a five-day expiration date. Even the individual virons in each body have no real interest in self preservation, only in the overarching survival of their genetic code. The individual viron is just as much a slave to its ancient program as its infected victims are.

A flurry of small arms fire punches holes in Maddy’s ranks.

Nobody gave the order to shoot. It happened suddenly at five different places at once. There are too many Mad Dogs for them to kill in hand to hand fighting. The soldiers’ line has been broken in several places as some squads were able to push forward while other squads were stopped cold. With a broken line, the Mad Dogs’ superior numbers began to tell as they began to surround and overwhelm the soldiers.

One exhausted soldier panicked when a wounded Mad Dog on the ground sunk her teeth into his boot. He shot her in the head, blowing off several toes in the bargain.

Moments later, everyone is firing.

Above them, civilians are leaning out their windows, shouting themselves hoarse.

What’s done is done, Bowman tells himself. He thumbs off the safety on his carbine and begins shooting Mad Dogs at a nearly cyclic rate of fire, a round every few seconds, draining mags and reloading without breaking stride. The crackle of small arms fire turns into a roar as the entire company lights up the Mad Dogs. Muzzle flashes burst along the line, almost beautiful to watch on their NVGs. Tracers stream through the air. A grenade explodes, a massive green fireball erupting into sparks and fiery blobs. The air begins to fill with luminous, pale green smoke clouds.

The civilians are cheering.

“All Warlord units, this is Warlord actual,” he says into his handset. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”

The use of live ordnance proved decisive. The company shot its way through the mob with very few casualties.

Eight blocks to go. About three quarters of a mile.

All around them, the city has begun to stir with the tramp of thousands of feet as the Mad Dogs awaken from their haunted dreams of the time before the plague.

If the soldiers move fast, and there are no other mobs between here and the research facility, they can do this.

“Go, go, go!” Bowman cries.

They make it.

Chapter 12

We’re the U.S. Army

Sergeant Lewis leads the first grab team up the stairs while the rest of the company pulls security down in the Institute’s lobby, waiting their turn. It is pitch black in the stairwell, robbing them of vision as NVGs are useless without some ambient light to amplify, so they turned on the SureFire flashlights mounted on their carbines, fitted with red lenses. The resulting beams appear a brilliant green on their NVGs, but are barely visible to Maddy’s naked eye.

The squad pauses on the stairs.

“It’s good and locked, Sarge,” says Corporal Jaworski, trying the door that Lewis believes leads to the labs.

“Who’s got the C4?”

“Here, Sarge.”

“Give it to me, Reed.”

Lewis takes the block of C4, sticks it onto the door and begins setting the charge while the squad retreats to a safe place down the stairs.

“Fire in the hole!” he shouts.

The boys crouch and put their heads down, cupping their ears.

The detonation roars down the stairwell with a sharp boom that they can feel from the base of their skulls to the tips of their toes. The explosion blew out the lock and buckled the door, which now rocks precariously on one hinge in a pall of tangy smoke.

“Move!”

The squad hauls itself to its feet, raises their carbines, and enters the hallway in a tightly packed diamond formation, scanning for targets.

Lewis knows Maddy has been here. Between the Vicks and the smoke, he cannot smell them, but he saw the corpses laid out in the corner in the lobby, apparently dead from disease and carpeted with flies, and the National Guardsman with a hole in his head. There is evidence of strife everywhere in this place.

He also saw, outside the doors of the research facility, the Special Forces team lying scattered on the street like road kill. Their story was easy to figure out. Immunity must have airdropped them in an initial attempt to evac the scientists. A single helicopter depositing them on the roof of a nearby building. The attempt obviously failed.

Now it is our turn, he tells himself.

His shooters move as one down the corridor, their flashlights exploring the gloom, until they reach the elevator lobby.

The corpses lay on top of each other, locked in a death grapple. Two wear labcoats, marking them as scientists, while the other eight are in street clothes. A few have the marks of Mad Dog infection. The stench of death is powerful here. Several blood trails lead away from the area to closed doors.

“What the hell happened here,” says Parsons, whistling.

“Lot of dead Hajjis, a couple dead Maddies,” says Jaworski, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from gagging. “Gunshot wounds, strangulation. This poor guy got his throat torn out.”

“This shit is ice cold, yo,” says Turner.

“Turner, talking like that only makes you sound more white,” says Perez.

“Hey, this chick looks exactly like that chick on TV,” says Bailey. “You know?”

The boys gather around.

“Yeah, that show with the robots. What’s that show?”

Nobody can remember the actress’ name or the show’s.

“Looks just like her, though,” Jaworski says. “I know exactly who you mean.”

“Contact!”

The boys fill the corridor, searching for targets. The green flashlight beams swing wildly and abruptly converge on the center torso of a Mad Dog loping at them from the far end of the corridor, her labcoat flapping around her legs and her arms outstretched in the dark, trying to find them using her sense of hearing alone.

“Put her down, Reed,” Lewis says, patting the top of the soldier’s head.

“Roger that, Sarge,” the soldier says.

He releases the safety on his weapon, aims using its iron sights, blows air out his cheeks and applies gentle pressure to the trigger. His M4 discharges with a mechanical cracking sound. The burst blows the woman’s shoulder off. She stumbles drunkenly for several steps, then falls to the floor twitching in a widening pool of blood.

“Good,” the squad leader tells him. “Now go count your coup.”

They are under a standing order from Bowman to make sure anybody who is down is actually dead, but without wasting precious ammunition. That means finishing the job with the rifle butt or bayonet. The NCOs started referring to it as counting coup to try to make it more palatable to the boys so they would actually do it. Lewis is incredibly proud of his troops for the strength they are displaying.

Reed gets up, jogs to the woman, and stabs her in the neck with his bayonet.

“She’s down,” he calls, then suddenly holds up his fist.

The squad freezes in place, listening.

Reed waves at them to move up.

“You got something?” says Lewis.

“I heard a sound in a room down there on the left, Sarge.”

“Let’s check it out,” he says.

Lewis is not hopeful, however. The mission appears to be a bust. The scientists are either dead or infected along with these other civilians who came here for God knows what reason. He is hoping this still means the Army will extract them, but he has a feeling they won’t. No scientists, no evac. If they find no survivors, they will be stuck in Manhattan.

“I heard something in there, Sarge,” Reed says, pointing at a door bearing a discrete sign that says, security.

It is locked.

“If there is somebody inside this room, open the door,” Lewis says.

He hears a muffled groan, but nothing more. The door does not open.

While he prepares some C4, the boys take a knee and pull security around him, listening to the sound of small arms fire erupting in another part of the facility. It is the second grab team, putting down another stray Mad Dog.

Lewis shouts at the door: “If you are inside and can hear me, we are going to blow the lock. Get as far back as you can and get on the floor!”

“And if your name is Maddy, stand right next to it,” Bailey says, making the boys laugh.

The squad retreats to a safe distance.

“Fire in the hole!”

The door blows and the squad pours into the smoking hole, carbines at the ready, sweeping the room.

“Clear!” the boys sound off one by one.

“Sarge, I got a survivor!” Perez calls out. “In the bathroom back here!”

“Holy shit,” Parsons drawls.

The woman lies shivering on the floor curled up under a pile of labcoats, some of them torn and darkly stained, clutching a flashlight that has stopped working, its batteries drained and dead. She lies surrounded by empty bags of snack food and candy wrappers and an odd collection of beakers, test tubes and planters, some filled with water. She apparently has been saving the toilet as a final backup water supply and using a trash can as a toilet instead, surrounded by rags torn from a labcoat for toilet paper.

Lewis is flooded with admiration. This woman somehow managed to stay alive for several days in virtual total darkness and with little food or water, while the Mad Dogs hunted her in the dark by sense of hearing and smell.

This is one tough broad, he thinks.

Her eyes searching blindly in the dark, she starts shouting.

“What’s she saying?” Perez asks.

“I think she’s talking in Russian,” Jaworski says.

“Right—but what’s she saying?”

“How the hell do I know what she’s saying? My people are Polish, not Russian, and I only speak American.”

Lewis drops down and squats on his haunches.

“Ma’am, it’s all right,” he says several times until she begins to calm down. “I am Sergeant Grant Lewis with the U.S. Army, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

The woman licks her lips and says dryly, “Army?”

He cracks a glow stick, which gleams bright against the dark, and holds it out to her. She seizes it with both hands and stares at its light intensely, tears streaming down her face.

“That’s right, Ma’am,” he says, flipping up his NVGs and grinning in the green glow. “We’re the U.S. Army.”

I survived

Feeling warm and safe in a pair of sneakers and oversized BDUs, Valeriya Petrova wolfs down the MRE that the soldiers handed her, washing it down with long pulls on a canteen. She blinks in the bright Command Center, its lighting the result of a few easy repairs of the emergency generator in the downstairs electrical room.

Petrova marvels at the dull, institutional colors in the Command Center, washed in fluorescent light. After days of darkness, even the dull is starkly beautiful.

She survived. Later, she will wonder why she alone survived among all of the people trapped in the building, both the research team and the mob; she will certainly feel survivor’s guilt. But not now. Right now, she is exultant just to exist.

The medic calling himself Doc Waters stands nearby, studying her closely with his arms crossed, making her nervous. Does he expect her to drop dead? She has lost weight and she is undernourished, but she is not starving. She was able to stay hydrated even after the power failed. She can’t run just yet, but she can walk just fine.

The truth is she has never felt more alive.

In any case, the time of running is over. She is with the military now. She is safe. The boys around her—they strike her as incredibly young, these beefy kids—keep talking about helicopters coming to get them. Soon, she will be airlifted to a secure place where she can isolate a new sample of the Mad Dog strain and finish her work on a vaccine.

The door opens and a young man appears. The soldiers straighten their posture and stare at him in respectful silence for a few moments as he enters the room, marking him as an officer, a leader.

He sits across from her and smiles.

“I’m Captain Bowman,” he says.

“And I am Dr. Valeriya Petrova.”

“I hope you find your new clothes acceptable, Dr. Petrova.”

“After wearing the same clothing for the past several days, I am finding this uniform perfectly comfortable, Captain Bowman.”

Neither insist on familiarity, on being called by their first names. The truth is she needs him to be Captain Bowman, her savior, and he apparently needs her to be Dr. Petrova, the scientist who can stop the plague.

“Doc tells me you’re feeling well,” he continues. “That you’re fit to travel.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he nods. “Can you tell me what happened here, Dr. Petrova?”

How can she explain the nightmare? The madness, the murders, the infection, the blood. The weak and slowly dying mob intentionally infecting the Guardsman and coming up in the elevators only to be savaged and infected by a berserk Dr. Lucas and Dr. Saunders. The endless darkness with little hope for survival, staying sane only by imagining herself in Central Park, on a blanket in Sheep Meadow, reading a book while nearby her husband and child laughed and played.

The screaming in the corridors as they all died one by one.

The slowly dimming hope that rescue would come.

The darkness that began to seep into and shroud even her memories.

“I survived,” she says, shivering.

He nods again. He understands.

“We survived, too,” he tells her. “Just yesterday, I was a second lieutenant.”

Now it is her turn to nod. She is not familiar with the military, but she gets the idea. The Army chain of command in the area has sustained significant losses.

“So the world outside. . . . It is bad?”

“Dr. Petrova, it’s so bad, there may not be a world soon.”

“I do not suppose you have any news of . . . Europe.”

“Sorry. My situation awareness was once limited to New York, and is now limited pretty much to this building. I only know ground that my men can hold by force.”

She swallows hard to choke back a sob. The Army is not in command of the city. They are refugees, like her, seeking flight. And if that is true, the same must be true in all of the big cities. Washington. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. London.

He adds, “Dr. Petrova, my superiors have instructed me to secure both you and whatever projects you were working on.” His eyes look hopeful. “A cure, I understand?”

Petrova’s eyes flicker to the other soldiers in the room.

“Clear the room,” Bowman says, his eyes never leaving her face.

The boys file out reluctantly, leaving her alone with the Captain, Doc Waters and the man who is apparently Bowman’s second in command, Sergeant Kemper. This man frightens her for some reason. While the soldiers are mostly boys, quick to grin even in their desperate circumstances, the sergeants strike her as very hard men.

“The Mad Dog disease is a separate disease,” she says, then pauses.

“I’m listening,” he tells her.

“Lyssa, as you know, is bad enough, but it is a Trojan Horse for the Mad Dog strain, which revealed itself by presenting a new vector for transmission—saliva. Biting.”

The Captain exchanges a glance with Kemper.

“That matches our understanding of the situation,” he tells her. “Go on, Doctor.”

“I isolated the Mad Dog strain and produced a pure sample, but it was ruined when the power went out and we lost refrigeration in the labs. I already forwarded my work electronically to CDC and USAMRIID before the power went out for the last time. But I need to get back into a proper lab with a proper staff to produce another pure sample and finish my work on a vaccine.”

Bowman does not appear to be satisfied with the answer. He stares at her intensely and says, “You seem to be saying there is no cure, only a vaccine, and that it will be a long time before we have such a vaccine in any quantity.”

“That is correct, Captain.”

Petrova lowers her eyes. She knows they rescued her at enormous risk to themselves, and her answer is not very satisfying to them. In part, they are here because she told a white lie to push CDC and USAMRIID to rescue her. But the scientific process is not like a military process, with quick, definitive results. One cannot shoot and kill a virus with a rifle. Science is a slow, laborious, collaborative effort. A pure sample must be grown in a cell culture. Then it must be tested for susceptibility against antiviral drugs. Then it can be distilled to produce a vaccine through a painful trial and error process. Make it too weak, and the host gains no immunity. Make it too strong, and you kill the host.

Her discovery is a major breakthrough, and it is the best shot they have at defeating the virus. Not immediately, but over time.

But the Captain was obviously hoping for immediate results. The world is ending right now. Soon, there may not be an America to defend anymore, if what he told her about the outside world is true.

“I am sorry if you were looking for more definitive results,” she says. “Even if I had a vaccine in my hands right now, it would still take months to manufacture in significant quantities, assuming the biomedical factories are still working.”

“My men risked their lives coming here,” he tells her. “Obviously, we can’t tell them that you have a cure and that they can be vaccinated before we get picked up. But if you want to promote a slight fiction that it will take less than months, I wouldn’t correct you.”

“I see. . . .”

“I hope you do, Doctor. We’ll be moving out within a half hour, as soon as our birds get in the air. We may have to fight every step of the way to reach them. If the men feel like they are fighting for an important cause, it might help instead of hurt.”

She is nodding now.

“We understand each other, Captain. I will help you any way I can.”

They wanted to make a better world

Captain Bowman stares at the beautiful scientist sitting across from him and realizes that he and his men might end up dying for her today. They are risking their necks simply because she has the best theory on how to cure the disease. They will fight in the next few hours, and they might die without seeing the sun again, to get this woman back into a working laboratory so she can produce a vaccine. A vaccine that will not be ready until the Mad Dogs have virtually overrun America and destroyed everything he loves about it.

All this effort for a cure that will come too late.

It is the classic Army bull, but he should have known better. He should have known she would not deliver instant salvation. A quick fix to a global disaster like this would be highly unlikely, if not impossible. Life is so much more complex than he’d like it to be. Many soldiers complain about this, but he is mentally flexible and accepts the complexity of life as a law of nature.

In short, it figures. But he wanted to believe.

The fact is, if he were General Kirkland, he would make the same call. This woman is the only scientist who spotted the real threat. She may be the best shot America has at producing a vaccine. She is a primary asset in a war that must be won, plain and simple. Even if there is not enough time to make a difference, America must try to find a cure. Where bullets and bayonets failed, medical science might still, one day, prevail. If she dies and nobody else steps up to cure Lyssa, the virus will have won the war against mankind even as it slowly burns itself out, perhaps permanently, perhaps to rise again.

Dr. Petrova is also our ticket out of here, he tells himself. At this moment, she is more valuable than we are. Without her, we might be left behind. The situation is unstable, chaotic. The Army is apparently in a shambles during its retreat from the cities, shedding units and equipment in the confusion and constant attrition. He had to bargain with Immunity, in fact, just to get them to live up to their promise of airlifting all of them out. Immunity had taken a line that they would extract the scientist from a nearby roof, and then they would see what they could do about rounding up a few CH-47s to evacuate Bowman’s troops. Perhaps in a few days, assuming the Mad Dogs would all be dead then. For Bowman, there were too many what-ifs, assumptions and empty promises. He knows Immunity is heading south and within a few days, it will be far away and may not even exist. No Chinooks, no scientist, he told them. He will catch hell for that later, he knows. Possibly lose his command. They might even put him against a wall and shoot him. But his men will survive, if only to fight again, and perhaps even die, another day.

“I have to ask one thing, Dr. Petrova,” he says.

“Yes,” she says.

“Two things, actually.” He stumbles a bit. “Yes, two things.”

She eyes him curiously.

“Of course.”

“My first question is: How did this happen?”

“I developed a hypothesis. But a scientific hypothesis, you see, is only—”

“I understand, Doctor. What’s your theory?”

“My apologies. My theory is based on several observations. The virus is too perfect. Lyssa somehow snaps back to its Mad Dog ancestor once it enters the brain. The incubation period defies belief. It must have been bioengineered.”

Behind Bowman, Doc Waters gasps.

Kemper says, “A terrorist weapon?”

“Why produce a terrorist weapon that will kill so many people on all sides?” Doc Waters says.

“Maybe the terrorists think they’ll survive it and come out ahead,” Kemper says. “Maybe they think it will level the playing field.”

“It sounds too good, though. It must have had government sponsorship.”

Petrova says, “Actually, you are both incorrect.”

She hesitates, apparently afraid of offending them.

“In my opinion,” she adds.

“Go on, Doctor,” Bowman says. “You’re the expert here.”

“Viruses are highly proficient at penetrating human cells and inserting DNA,” the virologist tells them. “It is what they do. Because of this, viruses normally thought of as deadly have begun to be used as Trojan Horse delivery systems for genetic material or drugs that can cure other diseases. Before this happened, gene therapy was an exciting area of biomedicine with tremendous potential.”

For example, she adds, a modified and benign form of HIV, the same virus responsible for AIDS, has been studied as a delivery system for diseases such as hemophilia and Alzheimer’s. Herpes may be proficient for targeting and destroying cancer cells. Even Ebola, one of the world’s deadliest diseases, has been studied as a delivery vehicle for a benevolent retrovirus that can repair cells and help combat diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

“I believe researchers in Asia were working with a modified rabies virus as a new gene therapy asset, and something went wrong, obviously,” Petrova concludes.

“You can say that again,” Kemper says.

“The rogue experimental virus entered the community but quickly mutated into what we call Hong Kong Lyssa—a respiratory disease similar to avian influenza. Perhaps it was accidentally mixed into the experimental vaccine formula. Such mistakes have happened before at biomedical facilities.”

“How could they even tamper with nature like this?” Doc Waters demands, his face reddening. “They basically destroyed civilization.”

“Please,” Petrova says, her nose wrinkling with distaste. “You have medical training, Mr. Waters. Certainly, you can appreciate that the release and spread of the disease is an odd occurrence, a one in a million circumstance, a very small risk for incredible gain for humanity. The world took far greater risks harnessing atomic energy. This was not the product of some sinister plan. The intent was to strip the virus of those attributes that made it deadly and insert benevolent genetic material into the hollow protein shell. The virus is not supposed to replicate or attack cells. It is a very careful process. I cannot imagine what went wrong, although something certainly did go wrong.”

“You can say that again,” Kemper says.

“I can tell you gentlemen one thing positively about the people who did this. The only thing I know for certain about them and what they did. They were trying to cure diseases that claimed millions of lives. They wanted to make a better world.”

“So did Hitler,” Doc Water mutters.

“Oh,” Petrova says, obviously offended.

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Bowman says, preparing to rise. “As far as theories go, I can’t think of a better one.” He does not hold her responsible for what happened. Instead, he admires her strength and intellect. The fact of her survival over the past several days marks her as a remarkably resilient and resourceful woman. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“You said you had two questions for me, Captain.”

“I did, as a matter of fact,” Bowman says, grinning. You’ll probably find the question a little strange, possibly even improper. Aw, hell, I guess I’ll just ask flat out. If we survive this, can I take you to dinner, Dr. Petrova?”

Petrova smiles and displays the gold wedding band on her left hand.

“Captain Bowman, that is a flattering invitation,” she answers, “but as you will observe, I am a happily married woman.”

Bowman smiles and nods.

“That also figures,” he says dryly.

Time to kick my ass?

McLeod finds Sergeant Ruiz alone in the elevator lobby, leaning against the wall with his hands deep in the pockets of his BDUs, seemingly lost in thought. The CO has authorized the company to take off the N95 masks until the march, and it is strange to see Ruiz’s face again. Most of the soldiers took advantage of the fact they had to wear masks 24/7 and grew scraggly beards, but not Ruiz; he is clean shaven. A gung ho mo fo, as they say in the ranks.

McLeod says: “You, uh, wanted to see me privately, Sergeant Ruiz?”

The NCO steps away from the wall, the muscles of his bulldog torso straining against his uniform, his eyes intense and staring. As he approaches, McLeod flinches, but holds his ground. This is it, he thinks. The hour of reckoning.

Magilla is finally going to kick my ass.

Ruiz continues until he stands directly in front of McLeod, looking him up and down while the soldier stands at attention.

“Private McLeod, you are one sorry sack of shit,” he says.

“Yes, Sergeant,” McLeod answers, meaning it.

“A big greasy shit stain on my otherwise spotless record of training the world’s finest combat infantry.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“I got one question for you.”

Do you want to get punched in the face or stomach?

“The question is: Are you ready to man up, son?”

“Sergeant?”

“McLeod, this unit has been in constant danger for the past four days. Our battalion has lost about two-thirds of its strength during that time. A good number of our casualties were sustained by mobs of people who tore our guys apart with their bare hands. While all this was going on, have you fired your weapon even once?”

“Um,” says McLeod.

“Speak up, son.”

“No, Sergeant,” he says clearly.

“It’s not a test,” Ruiz tells him. “At ease.”

Just tell me when you’re going to do it. Don’t sucker punch me. That’s all I ask.

“I said relax, Private. Relax and listen good. I’m trying to teach you something.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” McLeod says, swallowing hard.

“Do you know what time it is, son?”

Time to kick my ass?

He answers, “It’s about oh-five-forty-five, Sergeant.”

“That is affirmative. Outstanding, Private. Do you know when the sun rises? I’ll tell you when. Today, the sun will rise around zero-six-twenty. Do you know what that means?”

McLeod chews his lip, sweating.

The Sergeant says, “Don’t hurt yourself, Private. It’s not a trick question. I’ll tell you what it means. It means that even if Immunity were to put birds in the air right now and we left this facility right now to meet them up in Central Park, we still wouldn’t have enough time under darkness to conceal our movements. That means we will be taking some, most or all of this trip in daylight exposed to Maddy. What would you do if you were in command?”

“Me? I guess I’d ask the General to wait until tomorrow night.”

“Outstanding, Private! But the General just told you it’s now or never, do or die. Division is pulling stakes and trucking south. In twenty-four hours, all their birds are going to be far gone, committed to other missions. There’ll be empty sky around here as far as the eye can see. So it looks like we have no choice. We’re moving out, and we’ll be walking in Maddy’s shadow.” Ruiz puts on a sad face. “How does that make you feel, Private?”

“Feel, Sergeant?” McLeod clears his throat. “Well, honestly, it makes me—”

“Do not answer that question, Private.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Get your shit together, son!”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“What’s holding you back from kicking Maddy’s ass? Are you scared?”

I just want

“Yes, Sergeant. I’m scared.”

Ruiz shakes his head, circling McLeod like a shark studying its prey.

“You got to man up, son. Fear is your bitch. Do you understand?”

to go to school

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“When Maddy hits you, you got to hit him back tenfold. Hooah?”

and read books

“Hooah, Sergeant.”

“If you survive the next one or two hours, you can survive anything. You are really and truly the baddest motherfucker in the world. Really and truly the best. Am I right?”

and be left alone.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Remember son, pain is temporary, but honor is forever. This is about how you see yourself in your old age. What you tell your grandkids about what you were doing during the plague. So are you a warrior? Or are you chickenshit?”

McLeod relaxes his stance and looks his squad leader in the eyes.

Time to be honest with this guy for once.

“Sergeant,” he says, “I never was a warrior and I doubt I’ll ever be one. You know it and I know it. But I’ll do right by you. You’ve always done right by me. You may not think I think that, but I do. So I’ll do right by you. I’ll kick ass today for the squad.”

Ruiz blinks.

“All right, then,” he says finally. “Just be aggressive with that SAW.”

“Hooah, Sergeant,” McLeod says, coming to attention and saluting.

The NCO shakes his head, regarding McLeod with his intense stare. “You really are a piece of work, Private. Anybody ever tell you that?”

McLeod grins and tells him, “Every day, Sergeant.”

“Be aggressive on this march, McLeod,” Ruiz says darkly. “I’ll be watching. Now get your shit-eating grin out of my sight before I kick your ass all over this building.”

Brave or stupid, take your pick

First Squad sprawls on the floor in full battle rattle, wolfing down MREs and catching last-minute smokes but otherwise ready to move. Mooney and Wyatt share the last pack of cupcakes from the rich kids’ lockers. Ratliff is hunched over a boot, finishing his repair of a broken lace. Carrillo pulls the plates out of his body armor, as the boys have been ordered to ditch the extra weight so they can move as fast as possible. Finnegan reloads the last bullets he just cleaned into a magazine, which will improve the odds that his carbine will not jam. Like Sergeant McGraw, who was spotted earlier playing pocket pool with his lucky talismans, the boys have their superstitions: Finnegan kisses the magazine before loading it into his carbine. Rollins runs off to find the chaplain after being told the man is leading a group of soldiers in prayer in another room.

Mooney sits against a wall, his carbine between his knees and his mouth blissfully full of stale cupcake, and listens to the sounds of the boys sharing stories and seeking each other out in fellowship. He is intensely aware of everything around him and his own place among them. Like the other soldiers, he has an innate knowledge that every passing minute is bringing them closer to a confrontation with Maddy in daylight. In just a half an hour, he might be dead, his body torn to shreds by a homicidal mob. Life is particularly precious to the doomed. Every moment that passes, he experiences like a snapshot. And he is filled with intense fraternal love for all of the other soldiers because they might die, too.

The thing is, if they will die, at least they won’t die alone. In the end, after all, that is all a soldier truly owns in combat—the possible comfort of dying among friends. That is why soldiers consider other soldiers their family. They look the tiger in the eye together, at the edge of oblivion.

It is sad to think, though, that for those who do die today, war will be the only thing they have every truly experienced.

“So this Hajji’s up on the roof firing an RPG—remember that guy?” Carrillo says, almost shouting as he reminisces. “Every time Second Squad shot at him, he ducked down, then popped up to fire again, only he wasn’t even firing at us.”

“Oh right, he kept shooting at that yellow station wagon parked near that factory,” Finnegan chimes in. “And we were like, ‘What’s he shooting at? Does he need glasses or is he just an idiot?’”

“They had Second Squad boxed up nice and neat in a kill zone and that dude could have done some serious damage to those guys, but he kept firing at the vehicle,” Ratliff says, laughing.

“That’s right, it was a VCIED!” Carrillo says, his eyes gleaming and slightly vacant, reliving the moment. “That car was wired up like a big brick of C4 but didn’t go off. So he tried to make it blow by hitting it with a grenade.”

“Only he couldn’t shoot for shit,” Wyatt points out.

“Some of them could,” Mooney says, instantly regretting it. The laughter dies down into a smattering of chuckles. Now they are starting to think about the rest of that horrible day fighting in the alleys, streets, courtyards, houses. By the end of that day, they were exchanging point blank fire with insurgents in the middle of people’s living rooms. They cannot remember whether the insurgents were Sunni or Shi’a, jihadist or nationalist. But they do remember how Torres died in the house to house fighting, how Simmons lost both his legs.

“Yeah,” Carrillo says softly, trying to hold onto the moment.

“Hey, what about that night, when the Tank Team showed up, and that crazy Hajji took on an M1 Abrams with an AK?” Finnegan says.

The boys howl with laughter, rekindling their mirth with fresh memories. Mooney grins. The AK47 rounds bounced harmlessly off the tank’s composite armor, already scorched and scratched by numerous RPG hits and heavy machine gun fire. At first, the tankers could not believe what they were seeing, then decided if it’s a duel the insurgent wanted, they would oblige. The tank ground to a halt in a cloud of dust, its turret swiveling, and lowered its rifled tank gun. Moments later, it fired a round that lit up the street like daytime for a moment, vaporizing the Iraqi instantly.

“Like a fly swatter squashing a gnat,” Finnegan adds.

“Brave or stupid, take your pick,” Corporal Eckhardt chimes in.

Again, the levity does not last. This time, the image of the lone Iraqi pointlessly shooting at a sixty-ton armored monster bearing down on him—its steel-clad treads squealing and its big gun lining up to belch instant death in the form of a 105-mm HE round—does not strike them as quite so darkly comical today.

The prospect of going up against Maddy again this morning, in fact, is suddenly making them identify with that plucky but seemingly suicidal insurgent.

Brave or stupid, take your pick.

And yet they too would try.

Not quite saving the world, but I’ll take it

Kemper knocks on the door with the nameplate that says joseph hardy, research director, and enters to find the CO sitting on the edge of the desk, studying his wrinkled map of Manhattan that he has thumbtacked to the wall.

Kemper places his hand over his heart and says, “Salaam ’Alaykum, sir.”

Bowman usually answers, “Hooah” to this greeting when it’s given by a fellow veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom—specifically, Operation Together Forward III, in which all soldiers learned Iraqi customs as a strategy to win hears and minds—but today he says earnestly, “Wa ’Alaykum As-Salaam, Mike.”

And unto you be peace.

Kemper’s eyes flicker to the map.

“The plan is solid, sir,” he says. “The men know what to do.”

“I have endless faith in the men,” Bowman answers. “But almost none in plans.”

Kemper laughs, lighting one of his foul-smelling cigars.

Bowman continues: “A million things could go wrong and get us all killed. It’s going to be a hard day, Mike. The ultimate test.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This will be the last military operation before America gives up on New York. Once we’re gone, the city will be ceded to the virus.”

“If Maddy lets us leave, sir.”

“And if Immunity sends us those birds.” Bowman checks his watch. “It’s already too late. We’re going to be making part of this march in broad daylight.”

“I don’t suppose you can get the General to postpone the extraction for a day.”

“I’m afraid that’s a big November Golf, Mike.”

“You don’t want to go now, while it’s dark, and wait for the birds at the Park?”

“What if they don’t show? We’d be stuck out in the open. This is a good position we’ve got here. We’ve got electricity. We may end up having to stick around.”

“Speaking of which, there is another alternative, sir, that I didn’t want to bring up in front of the other men for obvious reasons.”

“Stay here?”

“Do what everybody else is doing. Take care of number one.”

Kemper realizes that only in a crisis as bad as this are they able to even talk this openly about desertion.

“And then what?”

Kemper shrugs. “Maybe try to get back to the high school and sit this thing out until Maddy finally drops dead. Try to get the people here fed and organized somehow after it’s over. They’re going to need a government. Perhaps this is where our duty lies?”

“Yeah. You’ve seen how good we are at nation building.”

Kemper exhales a cloud of smoke and laughs again.

Bowman shakes his head.

“Seriously, Mike. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to stay in this war as long as I can. We raised our right hand to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, and if ever America needed us to fight an enemy, it’s now. In any case, we’ve got to get the scientist out. Who knows, maybe she really can cure this thing. The world can’t have a vaccine right now, but it might need one later. It’s not quite saving the world, but I’ll take it.”

The Platoon Sergeant nods. “I figured on you feeling that way, Captain.”

“That’s the mission.”

“It’s a bag of dicks, that’s for certain.”

“Hooah, Mike.”

“Anyhow, you asked to see me. What do you need?”

“Right. It’s like this, Mike: I need an officer to command Second Platoon.”

“What about Lieutenant Knight?”

“I’ve made him my XO.”

“Ah. Smart.”

“Mike, I’m offering you a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant.”

“Right. Ah, sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to say thanks but no thanks to that promotion. If you’re really feeling magnanimous, sir, you can promote me to Sergeant Major. But even First Sergeant would be a nice step up in pay grade.”

The CO grins. “Afraid all your friends would ditch you, Mike?”

“If I became an officer, sir, whose incompetence would I bitch about all day?”

Bowman laughs out loud and says, “So be it. The battalion will be reconstituting as an overstrength company, and it’s going to need a First Sergeant, so you’re it.”

He extends his hand to Kemper, who shakes it warmly.

“Congratulations,” he adds. “It’s a well deserved promotion. Although I don’t know about that rise in pay. Money’s becoming worthless. For all I know, they’re going to start paying us in MREs.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Same to you, Mike. Thanks for everything. . . . I wanted to let you know, whatever happens, that I appreciate everything you’ve taught me.”

“You’re paying me back for it. You’re starting to teach me a thing or two.”

“Well,” Bowman says, embarrassed.

“Do you mind if I take that map, sir?”

“Help yourself.”

Kemper takes it down from the wall, folds it carefully, and puts it in a pocket of his BDUs.

“Souvenir, sir,” he says.

I must be in good hands with soldiers who have a name like that

The elevator takes Petrova and a squad of gawking soldiers down to the lobby, where the rest of the company has assembled and is ready to leave the building. When they are not staring at her—the famous scientist they believe holds the secret to curing the plague—she likes to watch them work. These kids seem to know what they are doing. They move like clockwork and are well led by their NCOs, the professional warriors.

The company begins to file out of the building in sections. First, two platoons exit in a paired column, one soldier swinging left and one swinging right to provide a defensive perimeter on the street so that the rest of the company can safely exit. Then Captain Bowman, trailed by his machine gunners, whom he calls the Alamo Squad, leads the rest of the company outside.

Petrova blinks in the dim light, marveling at the sky, which she has not seen for days.

The air is chilly and the sky is gray and cloudy.

The helicopters took too long to get in the air. Dawn has come and the column will be moving in daylight. The gray sky is already filled with screaming birds, feeding on the dead.

She cannot believe the carnage. The cars smashed against each other at odd angles on a road of garbage and broken glass. The blood splashed across the ground and pooled in the potholes. She steps over random torn luggage, battered children’s books, a pattern of cracked CDs. People’s entire lives spilled onto the ground. Without its owners, it is just garbage.

The air smells like smoke.

My God, Petrova tells herself, it is not even a city anymore, but a wasteland. She was picturing a city in a crisis, not already fallen.

This was her home, and she is leaving it forever.

At last, the CO gives the order to move out. The company gets onto its feet, weapons and gear clanking, and begins its march north at a brisk pace. She feels safe being surrounded by so much legendary American firepower, and yet feels completely vulnerable in the open like this.

The Mad Dogs are out there in their armies, hunting the uninfected. Petrova can sense them. Their growling gently touches her ears as whispers on the breeze. Their marching vibrates under her feet, a deep rumble in the distance. If the Mad Dogs brought the greatest city in the world to ruin like this in days, what does this puny group of boys hope to do with their rifles and bombs and machine guns? They would shoot an ocean, hoping to kill it.

She passes the burned wreck of a Chevy Malibu. The charred, blackened skeletons of the driver and his family are still inside. The driver’s grinning jaws hang open, as if laughing silently at the fools passing him by. The horror of it slaps her in the face.

She presses her hands over her mouth and swallows hard, painfully aware that the soldiers around her are watching to see how she will react. They are not being malicious. They are visibly anxious. If she starts screaming, she could put their lives in danger.

But Petrova does not scream; she steels herself and keeps walking, passing one horror after another. Overhead, the black birds cackle, as if laughing at them all.

She turns to the soldier marching next to her, a tall, slim twenty-year-old with intelligent eyes, apparently part of a handpicked detail assigned to guard her.

“What is your name?” she says as quietly as possible.

“PFC Jon Mooney, Ma’am,” he answers earnestly, if mechanically.

She tentatively holds out her hand.

He stares at it, then takes it with his own gloved hand, gripping it firmly.

“I’ve got you, Dr. Petrova.”

“Thank you, Jon.”

The boy’s face lights up at hearing his first name.

“I’m Joel,” the soldier on her other side says. “Do you want a Kit Kat bar, lady?”

Petrova smiles and shakes her head politely. She is too nervous to eat and besides, she lived on junk food out of the vending machine for days and is now thoroughly sick of it. They’ve gone several blocks without incident but they have so far to go, and the sky continues to lighten as the sun rises above the horizon.

Above, people are waking up to the noise the column is making as it weaves its way through a street choked with cars, and begin shouting down at them from windows. Some ask for help killing a Mad Dog loose in a stairwell, public corridor or even in a neighboring room. Some ask for food and water and medicine. Everyone ask for news, any news.

Are you here to help us?

Who sent you?

Is it over?

Petrova looks down at her feet, her face burning at the thought the Army is not fighting its way into New York to save its people, but sneaking its way out to save just her alone, abandoning everybody here to a likely future of disease, starvation and death.

This city was her home. These people are the New Yorkers she shared its sidewalks, subways, restaurants, museums, parks, taxis, cafes and treasures with.

“What is your unit?” she asks Mooney, hoping to distract herself. She instinctively trusts this seemingly sensitive young man. His eyes have not died like most of the other boys’. Their eyes have seen too much killing and they’ve been turned partly into what they hate, killing machines capable of thoughtless, wholesale slaughter. Those creatures roaming the streets are, in a sense, the living dead, but some of these soldiers are the dead living. Jon Mooney is one of those who are still alive. He is still human. She can tell by looking at his eyes, where the soul shows itself.

“First Squad, Second Platoon, Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eighth Brigade, Seventy-Fifth Regiment, Sixth Infantry Division. They call our brigade the Crazy Eights, Ma’am. Technically, we’re all that’s left of it.”

“The Crazy Eights,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“I must be in good hands with soldiers who have a name like that.”

Mooney grins and says, “We’re the best at what we do. You’re safe with us.”

“So what is my special name?”

“Ma’am?”

“President Kennedy was known as Lancer. I must have a special name.”

“Actually, you do. You’re, uh, ‘Doctor Killjoy.’”

“Oh,” she says.

“The names aren’t very important, Ma’am. They’re almost pulled out of a hat.”

“It is okay,” she says. “But it is not as good as ‘Crazy Eights.’”

The soldier laughs, while the people in the windows above continue shouting.

Can I come with you?

Are you here to stay?

Do you guys need any help?

The noise has already attracted a stream of Mad Dogs, who are quickly bayoneted. Then the first shots ring out. The gunshots reverberate in the street, echo down the canyons formed by the buildings. These sounds in turn flush more Mad Dogs out of their hiding places. Snarling and snapping their jaws, they come running at the column from alleys and side streets and out of buildings, only to be speared or shot on sight.

Petrova suddenly feels her body clench with fear. She squeezes Mooney’s hand fiercely, her arm trembling. The soldier holds on and does not complain. He is looking up at the buildings, frowning at the sudden change in atmosphere. He hears it, too.

A bizarre rumbling sound, like a million cardboard boxes being punched in the distance.

The civilians in the windows are crying out to them in panicked voices, pointing south. The NCOs at the rear of the column shout into their radios.

Letting go of Mooney’s hand, Petrova climbs onto the hood and then scrambles up onto the roof of a Ford Ranger pickup truck, ignoring his protests.

Panting, she turns and looks south.

A moving wall of people races towards them, raising a colossal cloud of dust that drifts high in the air, wafting against the sides of skyscrapers.

Deep in the flood of Mad Dogs, cars and trucks appear to slide as they are jostled by the crowd, like they’re floating on water.

A million Bairds, all rushing headlong towards her in a compact, twitching mass, driven by a single mind.

She screams.

If you can’t run . . .

Captain Bowman stands on the roof of a blood-spattered yellow taxi, carbine slung over his shoulder, looking through binoculars and whistling at the horde of Maddies bearing down on his command from less than two thousand meters away. Around him, the company streams past, preparing to shed squads every block to form lines facing south.

He is faced by an overwhelming force, and has few options. He can’t run, at least not very far, because Maddy runs faster. He can’t hide because the helicopters will be recalled if the company doesn’t show up at the scheduled time, and they will be trapped here; besides, there is no guarantee Maddy will not follow them into the buildings.

If you can’t run, and you can’t hide, you have to fight.

The strategy is settled. The rest is tactics.

Maddy has numbers and speed, but Maddy can’t shoot a gun. He is only dangerous if he can get his hands on you. So if you want to live, keep your distance.

Bowman’s plan calls for deployment in depth, with the lines collapsing like a bag after contact with the enemy. Each squad will dump ordnance on the tightly packed Maddies and, once the enemy gets too close, hoof it to the rear, passing the enemy off to the next line.

As long as they do not run out of bullets or make any mistakes, they should be able to keep themselves safe.

He doubts it will work, actually, but he feels he has no other choice.

By deploying his troops in depth, basically spreading them out, he might wear down and destroy this very large body of Mad Dogs while leapfrogging all the way to Central Park. The problem is their formation will stretch out over a half mile, leaving the flanks vulnerable to other large bodies of the infected that he believes may be converging on his people. If this happens, his force will be cut into two or more pieces, and any units unlucky enough to be cut off will be destroyed. And the mission will certainly fail.

A thick trail of black smoke billowing from a burning dumpster begins flowing across the avenue, chased by a sudden change in wind and blocking his view. He puts his binoculars away and spares a moment to glance up at the sky, wishing he had air support. Even a single recon helicopter would be helpful.

Warlord Six, this is Warlord Seven, over.

Warlord Seven is the senior enlisted man in the battalion, Kemper.

Bowman keys his handset and says, “Go ahead, Mike, over.”

Be advised that Warlord Five is leading a detachment east, over.

“Say again, over.”

Warlord Five is leading a detachment east on Thirty-Eighth Street, over.

“Wait, out,” he says, fighting a mixture of rage and panic.

Warlord Five is the XO.

The company is moving north, and Knight is leading some of the boys east.

The man is committing some incredible blunder, completely misinterpreting his orders, and dangerously close to getting them all killed.

Bowman realizes he has seconds to fix this.

He keys his handset again.

“Warlord Five, this is Warlord Six, how copy?”

Warlord Six, this is Warlord Five, go ahead, sir.

“Steve, what are you doing? Get those people back in formation before we have a disaster on our hands.”

Negative, says his XO.

Wrong answer

Lieutenant Stephen Knight, holding a pair of binoculars and watching the turn where he led Alpha, Bravo and Delta away from the main column, grunts with satisfaction as threads of brilliant white smoke begin to drift into the intersection.

His plan is simple: He is going to hit Maddy as he enters the intersection, then leapfrog east rapidly while the rest of the column continues north.

Bowman screamed at him for several moments over the radio but quickly realized they were wasting time they did not have, and decided to adopt Knight’s plan on the spot.

Good old Todd. He has a flexible mind.

Knight is convinced his plan will succeed. Charlie’s rear guard popped smoke to conceal the company’s retreat and hauled ass north. Meanwhile, his own force will draw Maddy off of Charlie and keep them busy for a while.

Maddy is not going to make a fool out of me again, he tells himself, grinning.

Vaughan comes jogging up after issuing orders deploying the rest of their force in depth, stacking them facing west, with a strong rear guard. Around them, two squads of soldiers, their first line, have found comfortable firing positions and are waiting for the order to shoot, locked and loaded.

Knight puts his binoculars away and winks at the man who had been his platoon sergeant and is now a first lieutenant, commanding what is left of Alpha.

“I just got off the com with the CO,” Vaughan says. “I ought to shoot you in the goddamn head. You just killed us all.”

The soldiers closest to them, hunched over their weapons, raise their heads and blink, wondering what is going on.

“This is the only way to accomplish our mission,” Knight says.

“My boys died because you froze,” Vaughan roars, unholstering his nine-millimeter and chambering a round. His face is flushed, making the ugly diagonal scar appear livid on his face. “Now they have to die so you can redeem yourself!”

“What the hell?” one of the soldiers says.

“Oh man, I knew this mission was messed up,” another mutters.

“This is the right thing to do,” Knight says calmly.

“I outrank you now, Steve. You had no right to do this to me!”

He raises the pistol, takes a step forward and aims it at Knight’s forehead.

“I don’t care if you shoot me, Jim. What’s done is done.”

“You had no right to do this to these boys!”

One of the soldiers calls out: “Contact!”

Without taking his eyes off the pistol in Vaughan’s hand, Knight takes a deep breath and screams with all his might: “FIRE!”

The line erupts with a storm of gunshot, turning the first wave of Mad Dogs into flying fragments of meat and bone.

Vaughan lowers his pistol, shaking his head sourly.

More Mad Dogs turn the corner and race towards their line until stopped cold by another volley.

“They’re taking the bait,” Knight says triumphantly. “See that, Jim?” He raises his carbine, sizes up a Mad Dog in his scope, and fires his first rounds. “I knew it’d work!”

If the entire game is going to be lost, there is nothing to be lost by sacrificing a pawn, he tells himself. Because with the game lost, the pawns die anyway.

The tracers stream down the street, every fourth bullet a red streak created by a trail of burning phosphorous. A thirty-cal machine gun opens up, lacerating flesh and snapping bones. A forty-millimeter grenade falls from the sky, bounces off the roof of a car and explodes in mid-air, decapitating a dozen Mad Dogs at once.

And still they come, pouring around the corner, stumbling over the dead, their feet splashing in a lake of blood and writhing bodies and body parts.

“Reloading,” somebody calls out.

“Bring it!”

“Get some!”

One of the soldiers raises an AT4, a lightweight recoilless antitank rocket launcher good for area fire up to five hundred meters, and disengages its two safeties before cocking the mechanical firing pin. Estimating the range, he adjusts the tube-shaped weapon’s plastic sights and takes aim.

“Fire in the hole!” he screams.

He pulls the trigger and fires, producing a mushrooming, fiery back blast from the rear of the tube. The finned missile ejects and closes the distance between the soldiers and the Mad Dogs in a half-second, skimming the top of the crowd before disappearing into the building beyond. A moment later, it detonates with a blinding flash, rocking the building, which belches its flaming guts onto the street.

A wave of smoke and dust descend upon the Mad Dogs, shrouding them from view.

Knight is laughing, draining a magazine at a cyclic rate of fire, shooting randomly into the dark veil.

They must all die to wipe out his sin and pay his debt to the dead.

“Fall back!” Vaughan is shouting, waving his handgun. “Back of the line!”

As the boys stream toward the rear, the former sergeant grips Knight’s arm and shouts into his ear, “LT! Do you have a plan for getting us back to the main column?”

“Of course!” Knight grins, his eyes gleaming with their own pale light. “It’s simple. We kill them all!”

“Wrong answer, sir,” Vaughan says.

The handgun discharges in his other hand, putting a bullet through Knight’s calf. Knight screams and collapses, clawing at his leg.

Moments later, it’s raining body parts

McLeod runs across the open intersection, firing his SAW from the hip, hitting almost nothing and screaming his head off. The other boys of Third Squad run alongside, their faces red and sweaty, huffing as they lay down their own wild suppressing fire. The bullets shatter windows, punch holes and blow out tires in vehicles, rattle off walls, snap through the bodies of the Mad Dogs.

Everybody is doing more running than shooting right now. The column is still retreating north after Knight’s defection, and it is turning into a rout. The XO’s ploy helped them escape the first horde of Maddies, but thousands more are pouring into the area from the east and west, and the column is being flanked on every street.

As the rear guard, Third Squad’s only hope is to outrun Maddy before the column is broken and they are cut off.

Behind them, a soldier from Third Platoon pauses to lift a Javelin launcher to his shoulder, his aim wobbly as he gasps for air.

“Fire in the hole!”

The missile instantly strikes an SUV standing like an island in the middle of a flowing river of infected, crumpling its door like aluminum foil just before it detonates with a boom the soldiers can feel in their feet. The fireball sends half of the vehicle ripping through the crowd like a giant bowling ball before crashing through a nearby plate glass storefront, while the other half flies spinning into the air.

The soldier leans back and howls in triumph, then shouts after his fleeing comrades, “Don’t tell me you guys didn’t see that!”

He is instantly tackled to the ground by a mob of the infected coming up behind him. He shrugs them off, struggling to flee, and topples under the weight of an endless stream of Maddies. Behind them, a score of infected stagger by, on fire from head to tie and flailing blindly, screaming in agony. A moment later, the soldier is permanently obscured from view by a wave of black, oily smoke. A living flood of Maddies pours out of the smoke racing headlong after the column. They are scarcely recognizable as human anymore, filthy, hair greasy and matted, covered in bruises and open sores, gaunt and dressed in bloody rags.

They are the living dead.

“Contact left!”

Ruiz is ahead of the squad, swinging his arm like a baseball coach on third base waving his runners home for the big win, screaming, “Go, go, go!”

The boys stop firing and pour their last energy into a flat out run to get across the next intersection before they are cut off and slaughtered.

They pass Ruiz, who yells “Frag out!” and throws a grenade down the street at their pursuers. Moments later, it’s raining body parts.

Then they’re running across the next intersection as a column of Maddies bears down on them fifty meters away from the west.

“Captain says we’re clear up ahead,” Ruiz shouts when they’re halfway up the next block. “We’re walking to the next intersection.”

“Roger that!” the boys shout back, panting.

“Now give me fire while we take five, and make it hot!”

The boys yell exultantly, pouring a storm of hot metal into the approaching Mad Dogs, who disappear in a cloud of red mist. The fire immediately eases as the soldiers marvel at their incredible firepower.

“Keep firing!” Ruiz roars at them. He’s obviously tired of withdrawing under pressure, and wants to make some breathing room.

A grenade explodes near the burned-out wreck of a car in the middle of the street, flipping it. McLeod steadies his SAW against the hood of a Toyota Corolla and begins firing in controlled bursts. He will not switch to cyclic fire unless he has to do so to stay alive; he does not want to risk overheating his weapon. Once it jams, it is out of action and that’s it, he will be out of the game.

He notices an inviting door leading into an apartment building. A few minutes running up the stairs until he gets to the roof, and he can wait this whole thing out.

But he does not move.

Every time I fire my weapon, he tells himself, I consent to this freakshow.

He spares a glance at Sergeant Ruiz, then fires a burst that cuts a skinny woman in half. He is not going anywhere as long as that son of a bitch is still alive. He promised Magilla that he would do his part, and he intends to keep the promise, unsure why it is so important that he do so.

He is vaguely aware there is also a moral dilemma involved. The only way he can successfully escape into one of the buildings is if the rest of his squad—including Williams, who has put up with his crap longer than most would—stays in the street fighting while needing every gun, especially his SAW, on line.

“Hey, they’re popping smoke behind us,” somebody says.

At the next intersection, their comrades in Second Platoon, the column’s advance guard, disappear behind a wall of smoke heading north, while the remains of First and Third Platoons are moving east. It is Lieutenant Knight’s crazy plan all over again.

“Prepare to withdraw on my command!” Ruiz calls out.

Fire slackens as the boys get set to break off contact and haul ass.

Time to retrograde.

I’m not afraid

Knight slowly pulls himself onto his feet, grimacing with pain at the bleeding hole in his torn and bruised calf muscle, and sees the first Mad Dogs racing toward him from only twenty meters away.

“Vaughan!” he screams. “Vaughan, help me!”

Leaning back against a car, he reaches for his carbine, but it is gone. All he has is his nine-millimeter. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he quickly unholsters it and squeezes off several shots into the approaching horde, dropping bodies onto the street.

The Mad Dogs bear down on him, their slavering jaws champing.

Knight laughs suddenly, his eyes shining, feeling lightheaded and weak from the loss of blood.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he says, and empties the rest of the clip into their snarling faces.

The infected do not know what fear is.

They rip him into pieces, ignoring his screams, and fight over what is left. They gnaw and bite even at the morsels, trying to infect his dead flesh with living virus.

The rest rush by in their thousands, pressing onward into the crashing rifles of Alpha’s lines.

One last card to play

Bowman watches his new rear guard pop smoke, concealing their retreat as First and Third Platoons head east, hoping to draw Maddy off the main column, now reduced to a pathetic twenty-five troops. Nearby, Kemper is yelling at everybody to clear the net, which has become congested with incomprehensible, screaming voices.

In less than fifteen minutes, his command has been scattered to the wind and is now entangled in a decisive engagement against a superior enemy, facing defeat in detail.

“Vaughan’s holding,” Kemper tells the CO. “He says they’re starting to swing north soon and move towards the extraction point.”

“Roger that,” Bowman says, trying to feel hopeful.

A Mad Dog runs out of a nearby building, loping with his hands splayed into claws, spittle flying as he snarls. Without thinking, the Captain shoulders his carbine and cuts him down with two rounds.

Killing Maddy has become routine, almost instinctive now, without remorse or regret.

His company is at the edge of the abyss now.

Knight, acting on his own initiative, split their force in the face of the enemy and the bastard was right. Bowman realizes that if they stuck to his original plan, the column would have been hit in the flank in several places while engaged and destroyed piecemeal. He saw no other alternative at the time. Knight was willing to sacrifice himself and the men as pawns in a game; Bowman was not. No wonder the crazy bastard kept his ideas to himself until the last possible moment.

A mark of a good commander is to roll with the punches in the field. Not only did he decide on the spot to run with Knight’s plan, he decided to implement it again when faced with an unwinnable fight against another collection of mobs converging on them. Almost all of First and Third Platoons volunteered to act as a diversionary force and hopefully Ruiz, part of the rear guard, will have the sense to join up with them instead of leading Maddy through the smoky veil that right now is their only real protection.

They are doing a good deed, but there is no need for anybody to sacrifice his life for a cause. Once things get too hot, they can simply melt away into the nearest buildings until danger passes, and gradually find their way back to the school.

Their decision was heroic, but also practical. They could all stay together and die valiantly, or break off and stay alive but give up the possibility of extraction.

“Contact left!” Corporal Alvarez calls back from the advance guard.

“Orders, sir?” Kemper says.

Bowman asks about the size of the force, and Alvarez tells him.

Christ, how many of these monsters are there?

Roll with the punches.

Another mark of a good commander: Keep one’s options open.

The problem is they are almost out of options. Bowman has one last card to play, and decides to play it.

It is his turn to go east.

Contact

Ruiz is no fool. He understands why the Captain popped smoke, and turns the corner to follow First and Third Platoons—already setting up to hit Maddy as he enters the intersection—instead of running through the smoke to rejoin the rest of Second Platoon. The other soldiers cheer as they turn the corner, happy for the extra firepower and to have a pro like Ruiz around. His combat skills are practically a legend in Charlie Company. The man has warrior spirit in his heart and ice water in his veins.

“Who’s in charge here?” Ruiz asks Sergeant Floyd, a former corporal whom Bowman promoted to take over the remnants of Third Platoon.

Floyd looks Ruiz up and down, his face pale and his eyes bulging.

“You are, Sergeant,” he says.

“All right. You’re too bunched up. I want these men here to spread out—”

“Contact!”

Ruiz screams: “FIRE!”

The soldiers whoop as the line erupts with a volley. Instantly, the first ranks of the Mad Dogs collapse, their bodies torn and gushing blood, instantly replaced by fresh ranks. They’re all making the turn. For a second time, Maddy has taken the bait, sparing the main column.

“Where do you want my SAW, Sergeant?” McLeod shouts over the din.

“Pick your own ground, Dorothy,” Ruiz growls, racking a round into the firing chamber of his shotgun. “We’ll be on the move in less than a minute.”

McLeod deploys his bipod on the hood of a yellow cab, lines up his sights center mass on one of the leading Maddies, and fires his first burst. The gun bucks against his shoulder, making his teeth vibrate. He continues firing, empty shell casings and links popping out of the weapon’s eject port and clattering onto the hood of the car. The tracer rounds strobe, flashing and guiding his aim into torsos and faces and limbs and skulls. The stream of hot metal pulverizes everything it comes into contact with.

“Frag out!”

He notices that the Mad Dogs are close and getting closer. Floyd made a mistake: He set up too close to the intersection without giving his first lines any breathing room.

“Reloading!”

Ruiz has already seen the same problem, and is ordering the first line to withdraw. The fire slackens as the boys come off the line.

“Contact!”

“Where?”

“The mothers are behind us!” somebody screams.

At the next intersection, First Platoon has been split in half by a massive horde of Mad Dogs converging from the north and south.

In just moments, most of Ruiz’s command has become cut off and surrounded.

“Shit,” he says.

“Our father, who art in heaven,” McLeod says. He is suddenly unable to remember the rest of the prayer, his mind blank.

“Contact!”

“Man down!”

The Mad Dogs are ripping the boys apart in the intersection and pouring into the side streets, driving everything before them.

“FIRE!” Ruiz roars at anyone in earshot, then turns and blasts his shotgun into the infected coming the other way. “FIRE YOUR WEAPONS!”

Contact.

Some of the soldiers panic and flee to nearby doors, trying to escape into the buildings lining the street. Most of the doors are metal and locked, while others are fronted with glass and easily broken with rifle butts. The soldiers cry out in fear and rage as they open the doors but find their way inside blocked by furniture stacked into crude barricades by people living in the building to keep out the infected.

There is no escape from this.

At what moment did Custer, seeing all those warriors running up the hill with murder in their eyes, realize that he was toast? McLeod wonders. What did he do about it? Did he just sit down on the grass and wait to be tomahawked, taking his last precious moments to reflect on his short life, maybe sneak in one last combat jack?

Or did he keep shooting, wasting those moments but doing it anyway just so he could prolong his life by several more seconds?

Hell, when I die, he tells himself, I want to be doing something fun, not firing a gun.

He wills himself to stop shooting, but his fingers do not obey him.

I guess that solves that mystery, he tells himself. The instinct of self preservation trumps all. Quantity is better than quality. Now is probably a good time for cyclic fire, then.

He fires the SAW in rock and roll mode, spraying death almost blindly into the crowd.

Look at me, he thinks, I’m goddamn Rambo.

“That’s the stuff, Private!” Ruiz roars, firing his shotgun and chambering another round, ejecting a smoking empty shell. “Hit him back tenfold!”

“I’m trying!” McLeod answers him.

“Reloading!” somebody calls out.

“I hate this goddamn Army,” Williams says, struggling to clear a jam in his carbine. An instant later, the Mad Dogs swarm over him, turning his scream into a sickening wet gargle as two pairs of jaws sink into his throat and rip it open.

“Our father who art in heaven!” McLeod rasps, tears streaming down his stubble, mowing down the Mad Dogs still biting frantically at his dead friend’s face, tearing away pieces of flesh and spitting them out.

Nearby, Corporal Hicks falls on his ass, one of his arms mangled and bleeding and the other holding his carbine, still shooting while the rest of the soldiers struggle to form a defensive square and fix bayonets.

A grenade flies into a second-story window and instantly detonates with a flash, ejecting glittering hot glass and flaming debris down onto the street, followed by a drifting veil of smoke and dust.

McLeod staggers and bumps into Ruiz, who is slowly retreating while rapid-firing his M4 Super 90 shotgun. The air is thick with smoke and the stench of infection. As the smoke descends upon the street, he catches glimpses of Hicks and Wheeler being torn into shreds. They reach the defensive square only to find it already gone. Back to back, McLeod and Ruiz create a three-hundred-sixty-degree zone of death for the Maddies.

The SAW grows hot in his hands, and suddenly clicks empty.

“Final protective fire,” Ruiz says, then stumbles away, dropping his smoking shotgun. He is clutching his neck, blood running through his fingers.

“Sergeant?” McLeod says, unable to believe his eyes.

Ruiz is indestructible. He can’t die.

He was not bitten; a stray bullet caught him.

“Emmanuel!” the man gasps, falling to his knees.

“Man down!” McLeod screams automatically, knowing it is useless to call for help.

He rushes forward to pull the Sergeant to safety but is suddenly shoved to the ground in the swirling melee of soldiers and infected. A Mad Dog trips over him, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Gasping for air, he sees Ruiz on his hands and knees, struggling to stand up, surrounded by Maddies hanging onto him and biting every inch of his body.

“Sergeant!” he calls out.

A knee cracks against the back of his head. The world goes black except for a few colorful sparking stars. By the time his vision clears, Ruiz has already been transformed into road kill, a headless and armless torso crushed and studded with fragments of glass.

“You motherfuckers,” he says, crying with helpless rage. “You didn’t have to do that to him. You didn’t have to do that.”

A grenade explodes nearby, sending charred and broken bodies collapsing around McLeod and soaking him in blood and smoking scraps of flesh. Another cloud of smoke and dust flows across the crowd. The high-pitched screams of the dying penetrate the loud ringing in his ears. Sobbing hysterically, he crawls between the running legs through the filth and glass until he is able to pull himself into the yellow cab and curl up shaking in a fetal ball in the backseat. The car rocks and jolts like a boat in the storm as the infected pour around him, finishing the slaughter of the doomed boys of Third Platoon.

Outside, the screams reach a crescendo.

Our father, who art in heaven

The crackle of small arms fire begins to die out. A Mad Dog runs into the side of the cab, smashing its face against the window and cobwebbing the glass. The foul-smelling corpse in the driver’s seat sways with the impact, its head rolling and grinning.

Our father who art in heaven

Our father who art in heaven

A final flurry of gunshots, then nothing but the tramp of thousands of feet and a primal, almost triumphant growl from thousands of mouths.

Our father

I had no choice

There were once ten of them. Now there are four heading north through a wasteland, dirty and tired and bloody, while infected mobs pound the garbage-strewn alleys and side streets in a never-ending hunt for fresh meat.

They are the last of the main column after Bowman took the rest of the platoon east to divert the Mad Dogs: McGraw, Mooney, Wyatt and the scientist, Dr. Petrova.

They march in single file close to the buildings, staying in the shadows. With each step, the gunfire and shouting recedes further behind them until they can see the greenery of Central Park beckoning to them and promising sanctuary.

More than once, they have had to hide to avoid bands of Maddies, all heading south towards the shooting.

A metal garbage can rolls into view from behind the next corner, trailing garbage, and comes to a halt in the gutter. Slimy rats pour out of it, scrambling for cover.

Petrova groans with revulsion, her nails digging into Mooney’s arm. She has faced every horror without faltering but his arm, the usual target of her channeled hysteria, is now covered with scratches and bruises.

Mooney accepts the abuse without complaint. He likes the attractive scientist, but that is only part of it. The pain keeps him from screaming in fear and revulsion and grief himself.

McGraw has called a security halt. Chewing on his handlebar mustache, his eyes wide behind his tinted sunglasses, he signals that he wants Mooney and Wyatt front and center.

Mooney gestures at Petrova, but the Sergeant does not care. There is nobody else. The last time they ran into a mob of infected, Carrillo, Finnegan, Ratliff, Rollins, Eckhardt and Sherman were cut off, climbed into the bed of a pickup truck and made a stand.

And now they are dead. They know this because they had to come back for the radio and found their bodies scattered like mangled, discarded puppets.

Wyatt offers Mooney one of his gimpy grins, making his big glasses crooked, and then winks. Mooney nods, wearing an expression of hopeful sadness. They’ve brought each other luck so far. They can’t die now.

McGraw punches the air, pointing.

Prepare for action.

Mooney and Wyatt creep up to the corner, weapons held ready to shoot. Other than two charred, burned-out police cars at an abandoned checkpoint, the street appears empty. Perhaps the garbage can just fell over. It happens.

He is about to signal that the area is clear. Then he sees movement.

It is a dog. A pack of them. Filthy, feral dogs, feasting on a child.

“Hey!” he says.

Wyatt hisses at him to shut up, but he cannot stand the sight of that boy being eaten.

“Git!”

One of the dogs slouches closer, its lips peeled back and its ears flat, snarling in defense of its meat.

Mooney looks down at his bayonet. He is not allowed to shoot unless it is a matter of life and death; otherwise, it is the bayonet. But he does not want to get into a knife fight with a pack of feral dogs carrying God knows what diseases.

He picks up a beer bottle off the ground and throws it at the dogs, who scatter with snarls and yelps, licking their bloody chops.

“Dude, check it out,” Wyatt says. “Hajjis on our three.”

Four teenage boys stand across the street, wearing dirty hoodies and looking at them.

Wyatt adds, “You think they’re infected?”

Mooney shakes his head, unsure. He raises his hand and waves.

The boys exchange a glance. One waves back.

“I don’t think so, Joel.”

The boys start walking towards them, glancing both ways, out of habit, before crossing the street.

They are holding baseball bats, but of course they would be armed. It would be madness to go outside without some type of protection. But Mooney is not in the mood to take chances anymore.

“That’s close enough,” his says, raising his carbine.

The boys stop in the middle of the street, their eyes vacant, and exchange a long, meaningful glance. They turn back to the soldiers. One of them grins.

As he grins, saliva leaks down his chin. He is infected, but has not turned yet.

They suddenly sprint forward, swinging their bats.

“Stop or I swear to God I’ll shoot you dead,” Mooney says.

One of the boys runs clumsily into Wyatt’s bayonet, spearing himself, while another hits him in the arm with a bat, hard enough to make him drop his carbine. They close to grapple. Moody swings his own carbine to slash at the other two boys with his bayonet, but they dodge out of reach and pause, their mouths open and laughing soundlessly.

One breaks left and the other right—

McGraw’s shotgun discharges with a deafening bang, killing one of them instantly. The two survivors flee, leaving one dead and the other trying to pull his bleeding body across the street, keening in his death throes.

“Finish him quick, Mooney,” McGraw says. “Count your coup.”

“Roger that, Sergeant.”

If the blast did not bring Maddy running, the kid’s grating death wail will. It is best to finish him quick. Mooney takes a deep breath, raises his carbine with the bayonet pointing down, and brings it down into the boy’s back.

The knife pierces the boy’s body clean through, impacting the street below with a jolt that resonates up Mooney’s arms and neck. For several moments, the boy writhes under the bayonet like a fly pinned to a wall. Then he falls still, bleeding out onto the asphalt.

“Dead now, Sergeant,” Mooney says.

“Then let’s go,” the Sergeant says.

Mooney pulls his bayonet free and stands over the corpse, exhausted. He notices Petrova staring at him, wide-eyed with horror.

“I had no choice,” he says weakly.

“Your eyes,” she whispers.

Mooney blinks. What does she see?

“Are you wounded, Private?” McGraw asks Wyatt.

Wyatt, standing aside with his hands jammed in his armpits, wags his head, looking pale and tired.

“I’m good, Sarge,” he says. Wincing, he bends to pick up his carbine.

“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Mooney demands.

But Petrova is not paying attention to him. She is looking up at the pale gray sky.

He follows her gaze and senses the change in atmosphere. Then he hears the sound coming from the southeast: the thunder of rotors. It rapidly grows in volume until three CH-47 helicopters roar over nearby rooftops at more than a hundred fifty miles per hour, red lights blinking on their bellies.

“Get on the horn with those Chinooks and tell them we’re coming,” McGraw shouts at Mooney, who has been carrying the SINCGAR since Jake Sherman died. “Tell them to hover at the rendezvous point until we reestablish radio contact!”

Mooney begins chanting into the radio, trying to contact the pilots.

Roger, War Dogs Two-One. We copy.

“I’ve made contact,” he tells the others.

The group lets out a ragged cheer. Only Wyatt looks sour, staring after the disappearing helicopters glumly and muttering something to himself.

“You see that, Joel?” he adds. “We might just make it.”

Seeing those massive birds cross the sky was one of the most beautiful things that Mooney has ever seen.

He feels like he will be home again soon, wherever that may be.

The opposite direction

McLeod opens his eyes and slowly extricates himself from the cab’s backseat, his face sticky with drying blood and his ears ringing at a deafening volume.

He stands and takes a deep breath.

The sky spins, filled with the distant echo of gunfire.

He falls to his knees, vomiting messily onto the bloody ground.

Somebody hands him a canteen and he drinks greedily, spits.

“How,” he says, and groans at the pain in his head.

The street has been turned into a nightmare landscape made up of hills of dead people and body parts and lakes of blood. Here and there, a wounded Maddy writhes on the ground, eyes and mouth gaping like a fish out of water. Civilians from nearby buildings silently pick at the dead, scavenging. The women mourn the soldiers, weeping as they search the bodies for food, blood splashed up to their elbows. The men pick up the carbines and look wistfully toward the sounds of shooting to the north. Everybody is pale with wide, panicked eyes; several people have paused in their work to vomit against a nearby wall.

McLeod shrugs off the hands trying to help him up and staggers to the place where he last saw Ruiz. His feet squish in boots filled with warm blood. He can’t find the man’s remains but knows he is there, buried in the scattered human wreckage.

“Sergeant?” he says, and breaks down coughing, his throat hoarse and sore.

Wait, he tells himself. The world does not know how to mind its own business. There are people out there who are going to try to stop you. You must be ready to fight.

He bends to pick up a carbine and pistol, load his pockets with ammo, and scavenge a few MREs and a canteen.

“Did I do right?” he says.

He bends over and coughs, spitting repeatedly.

“Did I do right by you then, Sergeant?”

The civilians gather around him as he starts moving in the opposite direction of the sounds of gunfire. They step out of his way and touch him lightly as he passes. Behind him, a woman sobs quietly.

He pauses long enough to touch his heart and say quietly to himself, “Shookran, Sergeant,” then continues on his way.

He will break into a music shop and play every instrument. He will set up house in the New York Public Library and read every one of its books. Life is short, and this is the greatest city in the world, filled with treasures.

From now on, he vows, nobody will ever tell him what to do again.

You made it this far for a reason

Mooney’s heart pounds as the double-prop Chinooks land in Sheep Meadow, the thirty-foot-long propeller blades savagely chopping the chilly air during their descent and sending waves of swirling dust and slivers of grass roaring across the field.

Each of these twelve-ton machines is nearly one hundred feet long and can transport more than fifty soldiers. Today, they will take on only four new passengers.

Next to him, Dr. Petrova is crying.

“We played here,” she says, feebly gesturing at the field. “All of us.”

He can barely hear her. The noise is incredible.

“That was my spot, under that tree,” the scientist adds.

The loading ramps at the rear of the helicopters’ fuselages drop, unloading Special Forces fireteams that fan out and establish security. Several start shooting at distant targets, dropping the first Maddies attracted to the heavy thumping of the rotors.

One of the soldiers stands and waves.

“That’s our cue,” McGraw shouts. “Let’s go!”

The wind blast is strong, tugging at their uniforms and making them cough on the waves of dust. Mooney takes Petrova’s hand to steady her as they half run, half limp to safety.

“We’re almost there,” he tells her, unable to believe they are going to make it.

The woman is pale and weak, murmuring to herself.

But this was his home, she says.

“Whose home?” he asks. “Keep moving, Ma’am!”

We ate ice cream last summer.

The soldiers rush forward to take her arms and help her onto the helicopter. Mooney starts to follow, but notices that McGraw and Wyatt are hanging back at the ramp.

“I’m not going with you boys,” the Sergeant says.

“What?”

“I’m staying behind!”

Mooney looks at him helplessly. Is the man insane, hoping to get killed, or simply freakishly loyal, willing to take the incredible risk of fighting his way back to the Captain? Does he expect Mooney to stay with him, too?

It’s not fair, he thinks.

McGraw says: “I’m quitting the Army!”

Wyatt laughs into the howling wind.

The Sergeant explains, “This was my last mission. I’m done. I’m going to keep my head down until it blows over, and then try to get home to my girl. Good luck to you boys. I wanted you to know I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Mooney says with a lump in his throat.

“Good luck, Sarge,” Wyatt says.

“Luck I got plenty of,” McGraw says, winking. He salutes quickly and then he is gone, jogging lightly past the Special Forces teams as if the world were just beginning, not ending.

“I’m staying, too, Mooney,” Wyatt tells him.

“You quitting?”

“Naw,” Wyatt says. He pauses for a quick farmer’s blow and then adds sourly, “One of those wanking wanktards back there bit me in the armpit. The infected one got me.”

“Christ, Joel,” Mooney says, too stunned to understand what he is hearing.

“Hurts like hell. I can actually feel the little mothers in my brain. Guess I’ll go somewheres and eat the rest of my chocolate bars. Maybe go swim in the pond back there. Maybe rob a bank. Who knows; a lot can happen in a few hours before I turn into a zombie.”

Mooney’s voice cracks. “But what the hell am I supposed to do without you?”

Wyatt offers up his gimpy smile. “You’ll manage okay on your own, boss. But I’ll have to find a new sidekick.”

One of the Special Forces soldiers appears at the top of the ramp and says, “Coming or going, make a choice. We got company.”

“I’ll see you around, Joel,” Mooney says, holding out his hand.

Wyatt ignores the gesture, backing away awkwardly in the raging wind, smiling and offering a comical salute with his middle finger.

“Contact!”

Several soldiers rush down the ramp and begin firing at a horde of Mad Dogs breaking from the trees and streaming into the back of one of the other Chinooks parked across the lawn, overrunning its guards in hand to hand fighting. The distant bodies flop onto the grass, while others disappear inside the massive helicopter, which suddenly lurches into the air.

One of the soldiers grabs Mooney and shoves him roughly inside, where he lands on the floor shouting in panic. He scrambles into the seat next to Petrova, who screams at the sound of the gunfire, covering her face in her hands.

“No more killing,” she pleads.

An NCO runs down the aisle towards the pilots, roaring a command to get the bird into the air right now.

“You’re going to be okay, Dr. Petrova,” Mooney says. “You made it this far for a reason. You had all those chances to die and you didn’t. You can’t die now.”

The helicopter suddenly lifts hard, rising at a speed of twenty-five feet per second. Gravity sucks at his stomach and toes.

A Special Forces medic works his way down the aisle until he reaches Petrova and begins shouting questions at her: Has she been bitten? Is she otherwise injured? Does she have any other medical conditions affecting her well being? Does she want water?

Turning away, Mooney hops frequencies on the combat net radio, searching for Charlie’s net. The air whistles through the cabin, making it difficult to hear. Then his ears pop and the voices come through clear as a bell.

That’s our ride up

We can’t

Man down!

Can the birds give us cover?

If anybody’s got an MG, we need

He finds the sounds of their voices, even describing a losing fight, strangely comforting. They are still alive down there, and as long as they are still alive, there is hope.

We got contact

Could use fire support on the left

Establish a base of fire

Then break off with the other assault team

Clear the net, morons!

Mooney notices that the Special Forces guys are staring intently out the windows of one side of the helicopter, swearing. Turning in his seat, he sees the Chinook that was infested with Maddies flying erratically in the sky, its tail swinging back and forth, the loading ramp still open and spilling bodies that fall hundreds of feet to the ground below.

“Come on, come on,” one of the soldiers says. “Keep control.”

Mooney knows how they feel. Their friends are dying in the other helicopter, and there is nothing they can do about it.

The distressed helicopter roars west, veering towards the majestic, castlelike towers of the San Remo Towers building with the others pursuing at a safe distance. The men suck in their breath, expecting to see it crash and dissolve in a fireball inside one of the towers, but it pulls back, lurching and trying to stabilize. It is still too close, however: The props suddenly break against the side of the building and the violent stresses rip the Chinook in half with a burst of fire and smoke. The two pieces flop over and fall like stones to the earth, where they crash into pieces.

But while Mooney cannot tear his eyes away, he is only partly continuing to pay attention to this drama.

On the radio, the voices are screaming.

A fool’s errand

Second Platoon pauses to fire a ragged volley against the pursuing Mad Dogs, then starts running again, leaving a trail of brass and links and Maddy corpses.

Bowman lingers for a few moments, providing cover fire. He knows he is going to have to give his exhausted boys a rest soon. The platoon is starting to shed stragglers and everybody’s aim is getting wild. Maddy, meanwhile, does not seem to get tired. Plenty of the infected suddenly stop and keel over, their hearts bursting in their chests from the severe exertion, but the rest keep coming. They are the strongest and the fittest and there are always more to replace the fallen, it seems.

The same could be said of us, he tells himself, only when one of us falls, there are no replacements. There is nobody else. These men are the best but they are also the last.

He lobs a grenade into the endless horde and starts running again, flinching at the explosion that he hopes will buy them seconds.

The objective was to reach the rendezvous location at Sheep Meadow, but then Private Mooney radioed to tell him that the birds were back in the air with Dr. Valeriya Petrova safely aboard.

Their mission is now over. It was complex, extremely dangerous and partially successful. Now they have a new mission, simple but even more challenging: Stay alive.

Six blocks ahead, Vaughan’s force was stopped cold at Columbus Circle, a wide traffic area at the southwest edge of Central Park, and set up a defensive position at its center, around the statue of Christopher Columbus. He is barely holding and is screaming for reinforcements. Bowman is taking Second Platoon there. Everybody else is dead. There is nobody else. Between him and Vaughan, the unit has maybe seventy shooters left.

Vaughan picked the spot for his stand well. As a junction for Broadway Central Park West, Fifty-Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue, Columbus Circle was kept clear of civilian traffic and there are no vehicles around, offering beautiful open firing lanes with good kill zones. They have too few guns and are virtually surrounded; both units now need to rejoin to concentrate their firepower.

After that, it is either them or Maddy in a classic showdown.

The only other option is to disperse his command: Everybody break into the nearest building, find a safe place to hide, and pray Maddy does not come in looking for you. But then what? Only the NCOs have communications. Everybody would be spread out and stranded in different buildings, possibly already filled with Maddies, with little food and water. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say. Their only ultimate hope for surviving is to somehow get everybody into a safe place or defeat Maddy here. Now.

Ahead, the boys are slowing their pace.

Trouble ahead, Lewis says over the radio.

Bowman doubles his effort, sprinting to the head of the column, where Lewis and Kemper are observing another large body of Maddies blocking the road ahead.

A grisly parade of Mad Dogs, loping along in a ragged column, tall and short, skinny and fat, naked and clothed, bald and hairy, black and white and yellow, are pouring out of a street ahead and turning to move north along Eighth Avenue towards the sounds of Vaughan’s guns. It’s strange, but they look almost cheerful.

Second Platoon’s situation, meanwhile, is dire. There is a huge enemy force directly in their path and another right behind them, and Bowman has seconds to make a decision.

One final rule of command: A good leader must do whatever it takes.

“Who’s holding M203s?”

The boys come forward while Martin and Boomer deploy the M240 machine gun against their pursuers to buy some time. The air fills with the thirty-cal’s staccato bark.

He tells them: “Load up with Willy Pete.”

The boys do what they’re told, loading their grenade launchers with WP grenades. White phosphorous burns fast and produces an instant cloud of smoke, making good smoke grenades. But it also ferociously consumes anything combustible and the only way to stop it burning is to smother it.

As a result, it is one of the most controversial potential anti-personnel weapons available, but ideal for the Captain’s purpose. The grenades will kill and maim many of the Mad Dogs directly and produce so much smoke that the platoon will have a chance of blasting its way through while the enemy is confused and partially blinded.

“Satisfactory, sir,” Kemper says, nodding, then issues his own orders.

The boys break apart, some going forward and some back to the rear.

They shoot.

The grenades arc high into the air and land in the midst of the Maddy column moving into its right turn onto Eighth Avenue. The WP rounds burst, burning fiercely amid the tightly packed Mad Dogs, setting many of them on fire and turning them into screeching human torches while blinding others with instant banks of smoke.

“Go, go, go!” Kemper roars.

“We get through these Maddies, and we’ve reached the Circle!” Bowman promises.

“Hooah!” the boys shout, rushing forward in a line bristling with bayonets, firing as they move, dropping Mad Dogs by the dozen.

“We’re coming in, Vaughan!” Bowman shouts into his mike.

Roger that, out.

Blasting their way past the intersection, they sprint the last block, gasping for air, finally catching sight of Vaughan’s boys formed up in a square formation ahead.

“HOOAH!” Vaughan’s boys cheer, some of them breaking off firing to stand and make a hole, raising their caps and weapons as Second Platoon joins forces with them.

“Boy, are we glad to see you guys,” Bailey yells, coming to a stop and coughing a massive wad of phlegm onto the ground. “Now where do you need my SAW?”

Bowman approaches Lieutenant Vaughan, who stands scowling at the battle with his cheek bulging with Copenhagen dip. The men salute, then shake hands warmly.

“Vaughan, this is your show. Where do you want us?”

The LT shrugs. “We’re pretty much surrounded, so pick your own ground, sir.”

Bowman nods and raises an eyebrow. “Mike?”

“We’ll take the east and get in this game if you can hold the other sides,” Kemper says. “The men are tired of running and they’re itching to kick Maddy’s ass.”

“Roger that, First Sergeant,” Vaughan says, and then they part ways to give their orders and place their squads.

Bowman deeply admires the LT. Getting his unit out of the grave Knight dug for them was nothing short of incredible. The other newly promoted lieutenants immediately named him their leader to create a unified command. Leapfrogging east, he found a building they could pass through. As each squad fell back from the front in the collapsing bag, they entered the building, cut through, and came out the other side, rallying in an empty street a block away from danger. Even the last squad got out without casualties. That was before almost every street in the area became jammed with snarling Mad Dogs.

Only Knight died, giving his life for his men. Or at least that is how Vaughan put it. All sorts of things happen in the field. You take a bunch of boys armed to the teeth and put them in an extreme situation where they are desperate to stay alive, and all sorts of things happen, Bowman knows. He knows all too well.

The soldiers deploy quickly, the formation shifting and growing larger as Second Platoon takes over the eastern edge of the square, with the MG rocking at the northeast corner and two of the SAWs at the other. The Mad Dogs continue pressing in, coming in waves. The square lights up with muzzle flashes, coughing clouds of smoke into the air.

“Reloading!”

“Frag out!”

Several soldiers scramble out of the way of the back blast of an AT4.

“Fire in the hole!”

Lewis is pacing behind his squad, observing their fire, offering suggestions to his boys. Kemper stands nearby, shouting, “Don’t waste your ammo! One bullet per Maddy, in the chest! Put him down and move on! Make every bullet count!”

This is it, Bowman tells himself. The Alamo. The final battle.

We can do this.

“Reloading!”

The Mad Dogs come out of the smoke drifts, their legs splashing through an apocalyptic sea of blood and writhing limbs, their eyes burning with hatred and their mouths contorted with pain and rage.

An endless tide of gray faces.

The boys pour fire into their unprotected bodies without mercy, knowing they are fighting a war of extermination.

Empty shell casings fly into the air and clatter to the concrete, rolling away to form piles around the feet of the formation. Tracers stream through the clouds of smoke. Grenades explode in fireballs and plumes of smoke, flinging torn and broken bodies to the ground. An anti-tank missile bursts in a blinding flash, sweeping the southeastern quadrant of the Circle clear of life for several seconds, leaving a thick smoky haze.

The final battle.

We can do this. . . .

This is Bowman’s mantra—his prayer.

It only takes minutes, however, for the battle to turn against them.

One by one, the boys lower their weapons and cry, “I’m out!”

The fire begins to slacken. Anti-tank rocket launchers are discarded after they fire their last missiles. Grenades begin to run out. Magazines are passed from hand to hand. Some of the boys curse and struggle with jammed weapons. Others stand stoically, carbine held in the ready position for bayonet fighting, waiting for the end. Many turn to their Captain with pale faces, looking for an answer, any answer, other than death. They are afraid to die.

“It’s like Steve said once,” Bowman says. “There just aren’t enough bullets.”

He leans his empty carbine against the base of the statue and blows air out of his cheeks.

“This is going to hurt a lot,” he mutters, shivering a little despite himself. He unholsters his two nine-millimeters, holding one in each fist, and waits for the end.

He finds himself fixating on tiny details: Broken windows in one of the buildings across the street. Pale faces looking down. The trembling leaves of the skinny trees planted around the statue. The inviting green of the Park across the street to the northeast, where the massive Maine monument stands, honoring the valiant seamen who perished in the maine by fate unwarned, in death unafraid. Time dilates: The minutes appear to stretch into hours.

The Mad Dogs continue to die like flies but they are closer now, pushing through the haze, waiting patiently for their moment.

Bowman calls out: “Lieutenant Vaughan!”

“Sir?”

“See that building directly to the west of our position. The Time Warner Center?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the rally point. Perhaps some of us can make it through. Pass the word.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kemper and Lewis join him, and he tells them the plan. The building looks so close. It’s right across the street.

“I can get my boys there,” Lewis says, his eyes blazing. “I know I can.”

“Then see to your men, Sergeant.”

Kemper lights one of his foul-smelling cigars and sighs.

“My last one,” he says.

Bowman watches the wall of Mad Dogs steadily inching towards their perimeter as the fire continues to slacken, and waits for Vaughan to tell him the boys are ready to charge. He leans back against the cool stone of the statue, taking a deep breath, willing his racing heart to slow down.

It is a fool’s errand, he knows. They can charge, and maybe somebody will survive, but not all of them, and maybe not even some of them.

The Captain damned himself to save his men days ago and then sacrificed their lives for this mission. The mission is everything, and yet even a mission as noble as this one, saving a scientist who might save the world, doesn’t seem worth the price. When these boys are gone, there will be none like them ever again.

So they will charge and finish it.

A fool’s errand, yes. But if even one man survives, it will be worth it.

He says, “What did I do wrong, Mike?”

“This still ain’t about you, sir,” Kemper says.

Bowman grins. Then he laughs out loud.

He says, “You can’t win ’em all, Mike.”

“It’s a bag of dicks, sir.”

“The men are ready to move,” Vaughan says.

Bowman tells him to give the order and lead the boys across.

As for him, he has decided that he will stick around for a while. He doesn’t want to run anymore. Suppose he did and somehow survived. To where? To do what then? To survive how? For what tomorrow?

Better to die fighting, on your feet, like a man, for a country you love, before it disappears forever.

Kemper says, “Sir, I’m proud—”

Who will inherit the earth?

Petrova looks out the window and briefly says farewell to her home and all of the parts of her that she is leaving behind.

After hovering near the base of the San Remo Towers searching for survivors, the Chinooks climb the air and head southwest, suddenly offering a bird’s view of Columbus Circle.

“Oh,” she says, sucking in her breath and touching her chest, feeling her heart pound against her ribs.

It is here that Captain Bowman’s dying company, a single ragged square barely visible through drifting currents of gun smoke, has chosen to make its last stand.

She sobs, seeing what they cannot—endless legions of infected pouring into the Circle and choking the streets beyond, their march raising clouds of dust over the city.

Hopeless.

The square suddenly moves, breaking towards the Time Warner Center, crossing a short distance before slowly dissolving in waves of smoke and infected. Some of the soldiers break off and run in all directions, flailing as they are caught and torn to pieces. Moments later, it is impossible to tell the soldiers and infected apart.

A last flurry of muzzle flashes in the haze. A plume of smoke rising from a burst grenade. A blinding flash, fire and dust. Then nothing.

The infected fill the Circle, wandering aimlessly, as if the soldiers never existed. In fact, the Mad Dogs have probably already forgotten about them.

Petrova cries for the boys, hot tears flooding her cheeks.

The Crazy Eights, people called them.

I will remember you, she vows to herself. And I will repay you.

“Oh God,” Mooney sobs in sudden anguish, looking like a broken old man at the age of twenty. In a single morning, all of his friends have died and he has probably never felt more alone. Seeing him like this, Petrova remembers lying curled in a ball under the desk in the security room of the Institute, wishing she were somebody else, somebody without so much fear and pain. Now it is her turn to offer comfort. She takes his hand in hers, and they share tears over the death of his comrades.

As the helicopter continues to lift into the cold gray sky, she sees more and more of the dark crowds circulating through the city’s arteries. New York belongs to them now, the insane, the mad, the infected. They will die like flies over the coming days and make the city a graveyard, leaving a nightmare of disease and starvation for the survivors. Civilization will recede as the virus does, leaving the survivors forever afraid of its return. Their descendants will virtually worship the virus and its power.

She wipes her face and turns in her seat, still holding Mooney’s hand but emotionally turning inward, trying to stay strong so she can continue fighting this war. She is suddenly painfully aware that the Special Forces, buckled into their seats, are casting fierce, hopeful glances at her, wondering if she, and what she represents, was worth the lives of their friends.

What she can promise them, just as she is now promising the lost boys of Eighth Brigade in her heart, is that she will kill this virus. There will be other viruses, other plagues, but the Mad Dog strain will never again return to threaten extinction. When she is done with the virus, humanity will be able to return to its rightful place on the earth.

She will also honor the soldiers with her memory. Integrity, courage, loyalty—these and the other Army values seemed cute, even corny, to her several weeks ago, but will be in all too short supply in America’s future, she knows. Such men from the past will not easily be replaced by the next savage generation shaped by the plague.

Petrova believes with her whole heart that humanity will survive this apocalypse. But with men like Captain Todd Bowman dead and gone, who will inherit the earth?