“Sir! Stop. Do not approach the barricade.”
He didn’t stop.
Then everyone was yelling at him. Ordering him to stop. Telling him to stand down, or lie down, or kneel. Confusing, loud, conflicting. We yelled at the top of our voices as the kid walked right at us.
“I can take him,” said Joe Bob in a trembling voice. Was it fear or was he getting ready to bust a nut at the thought of squeezing that trigger?
The civvie was right there. Right in our faces.
He hit the chest-high stack of sandbags and made a grab for me with his bloody fingers. I jumped back.
There was a sudden, three-shot rat-a-tat-tat.
The civvie flew back from the sandbags, and the world seemed to freeze as the echoes of those three shots bounced off the bridge and the trees on either side of the river and off the flower water beneath us. Three drum-hits of sound.
I stared at the shooter.
Not Joe Bob. He was as dumbfounded as me.
Talia’s face was white with shock at what she had just done.
“Oh…god…” she said, in a voice that was almost no voice at all. Tiny, lost.
Farris and I were in motion in the next second, both of us scrambling over the barricade. Talia stood with her smoking rifle pointed at the sky. Joe Bob gaped at her.
I hit the blacktop and rushed over to where the kid lay sprawled on the ground.
The three-shot burst had caught him in the center of the chest, and the impact had picked him up and dropped him five feet back. His shirt was torn open over a ragged hole.
“Ah…Christ,” I said under my breath, and I probably said it forty times as we knelt down.
“We’re up the creek on this,” said Farris, low enough so Talia couldn’t hear.
Behind us, though, she called out, “Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay.”
You could have put a beer can in the hole in his chest. Meat and bone were ripped apart; he’d been right up against the barrel when she’d fired.
The kid’s eyes were still open.
Wide open.
Almost like they were looking right at…
The dead civvie came up off the ground and grabbed Farris by the hair.
Farris screamed and tried to pull back. I think I just blanked out for a second. I mean…this was impossible. Guy had a fucking hole in his chest and no face and…
Talia and Joe Bob screamed, too.
Then the civvie clamped his teeth on Farris’s wrist.
I don’t know what happened next. I lost it. We all lost it. One second I was kneeling there, watching Farris hammer at the teenager’s face with one fist while blood shot up from between the bastard’s teeth. I blinked, and then suddenly the kid was on the ground and the four of us—all of us—were in a circle around him, stomping the shit out of him. Kicking and stamping down and grinding on his bones.
The kid didn’t scream.
And he kept twisting and trying to grab at us. With broken fingers, and shattered bones in his arms, he kept reaching. With his teeth kicked out, he kept trying to bite. He would not stop.
We would not stop.
None of us could.
And then Farris grabbed his M4 with bloody hands and fired down at the body as the rest of us leapt back. Farris had it on three-round burst mode. His finger jerked over and over on the trigger and he burned through an entire magazine in a couple of seconds. Thirty rounds. The rounds chopped into the kid. They ruined him. They tore his chest and stomach apart. They blew off his left arm. They tore away what was left of his face.
Farris was screaming.
He dropped the magazine and went to swap in a new one and then I was in his face. I shoved him back.
“Stop it!” I yelled as loud as I could.
Farris staggered and fell against the sandbags, and I was there with him, my palms on his chest, both of us staring holes into each other, chests heaving, ears ringing from the gunfire. His rifle dropped to the blacktop and fell over with a clatter.
The whole world was suddenly quiet. We could hear the run of water in the river, but all of the birds in the trees had shut up.
Joe Bob made a small mewling sound.
I looked at him.
He was looking at the kid.
So I looked at the kid, too.
He was a ragdoll, torn and empty.
The son of a bitch was still moving.
“No,” I said.
But the day said: yes.
-3-
We stood around it.
Not him. It.
What else would you call something like this?
“He…can’t still be alive,” murmured Talia. “That’s impossible.”
It was like the fifth or sixth time she’d said that.
No one argued with her.
Except the kid was still moving. He had no lower jaw and half of his neck tendons were shot away, but he kept trying to raise his head. Like he was still trying to bite.
Farris clapped a hand to his mouth and tried not to throw up…but why should he be any different? He spun off and vomited onto the road. Joe Bob and Talia puked in the weeds.
Talia turned away and stood behind Farris, her hand on his back. She bent low to say something to him, but he kept shaking his head.
“What the hell we going to do ‘bout this?” asked Joe Bob.
When I didn’t answer, the other two looked at me.
“He’s right, Sally,” said Talia. “We have to do something. We can’t leave him like that.”
“I don’t think a Band-Aid’s going to do much frigging good,” I said.
“No,” she said, “we have to—you know—put him out of his misery.”
I gaped at her. “What, you think I’m packing Kryptonite bullets? You shot him and he didn’t die, and Farris…Christ, look at this son of a bitch. What the hell do you think I’d be able to—”
Talia got up and strode over to me and got right up in my face.
“Do something,” she said coldly.
I wasn’t backing down because there was nowhere to go. “Like fucking what?”
Her eyes held mine for a moment and then she turned, unslung her rifle, put the stock to her shoulder, and fired a short burst into the civvie’s head.
If I hadn’t hurled my lunch a few minutes ago, I’d have lost it now. The kid’s head just flew apart.
Blood and gray junk splattered everyone.
Farris started to cry.
The thunder of the burst rolled past us, and the breeze off the river blew away the smoke.
The civvie lay dead.
Really dead.
I looked at Talia. “How—?”
There was no bravado on her face. She was white as a sheet, and half a step from losing her shit. “What else was there to shoot?” she demanded.
-4-
I called it in.
We were back on our side of the sandbags. The others hunkered down around me.
The kid lay where he was.
Lieutenant Bell said, “You’re sure he stopped moving after taking a headshot?”
I’m not sure what I expected the loot to say, but that wasn’t it. That was a mile down the wrong road from the right kind of answer. I think I’d have felt better if he reamed me out or threatened some kind of punishment. That, at least, would make sense.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “He, um, did not seem to respond to body shots or other damage.”
I left him a big hole so he could come back at me on this. I wanted him to.
Instead, he said, “We’re hearing this from other posts. Headshots seem to be the only thing that takes these things down.”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “What do you mean ‘these things’? This was just a kid.”
“No,” he said. There was a rustling sound and I could tell that he was moving, and when he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “Sal, listen to me here. The shit is hitting the fan. Not just here, but everywhere.”
“What shit? What the hell’
s going on?”
“They…don’t really know. All they’re saying is that it’s spreading like crazy. Western Pennsylvania, Maryland, parts of Virginia and Ohio. It’s all over, and people are acting nuts. We’ve been getting some crazy-ass reports.”
“Come on, Loot,” I said—and I didn’t like the pleading sound in my own voice. “Is this some kind of disease or something?”
“Yes,” he said, then, “maybe. We don’t know. They don’t know, or if they do, then they’re sure as shit not telling us.”
“But—”
“The thing is, Sally, you got to keep your shit tight. You hear me? You blockade that bridge and I don’t care who shows up—nobody gets across. I don’t care if it’s a nun with an orphan or a little girl with her puppy, you put them down.”
“Whoa, wait a frigging minute,” I barked, and everyone around me jumped. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You heard me. That kid you put down was infected.”
The others were listening to this and their faces looked sick and scared. Mine must have, too.
“Okay,” I said, “so maybe he was infected, but I’m not going to open up on everyone who comes down the road. That’s crazy.”
“It’s an order.”
“Bullshit. No one’s going to give an order like that. No disrespect here, Lieutenant, but are you fucking high?”
“That’s the order, now follow it…”
“No way. I don’t believe it. You can put me up on charges, Loot, but I am not going to—”
“Hey!” snapped Bell. “This isn’t a goddamn debate. I gave you an order and—”
“And I don’t believe it. Put the captain on the line, or come here with a signed order from him or someone higher, but I’m not going to death row because you’re suddenly losing your shit.”
The line went dead.
We sat there and stared at each other.
Ferris rubbed his fingers over the bandage Talia had used to dress his bite. His eyes were jumpy.
“What’s going on?” he asked. It sounded like a simple question, but we all knew that it wasn’t. That question was a tangle of all sorts of barbed wire and broken junk.
I got up and walked over to the wall of sandbags.
We’d stacked them two deep and chest high, but suddenly it felt as weak as a little picket fence. We still had a whole stack of empty bags we hadn’t filled yet. We didn’t think we’d need to, and they were heavy as shit. I nudged them with the toe of my boot.
I didn’t even have to ask. Suddenly we were all filling the bags and building the wall higher and deeper. In the end, we used every single bag.
-5-
“Sal,” called Talia, holding up the walkie-talkie, “the Loot’s calling.”
I took it from her, but it wasn’t Lieutenant Bell, and it wasn’t the captain, either.
“Corporal Tucci?” said a gruff voice that I didn’t recognize.
“Yes, sir, this is Tucci.”
“This is Major Bradley.”
Farris mouthed, Oh shit.
“Sir!” I said, and actually straightened like I was snapping to attention.
“Lieutenant Bell expressed your concerns over the orders he gave you.”
Here it comes, I thought. I’m dead or I’m in Leavenworth.
“Sir, I—”
“I understand your concerns, Corporal,” he said. “Those concerns are natural; they show compassion and an honorable adherence to the spirit of who we are as soldiers of this great nation.”
Talia rolled her eyes and mimed shoveling shit, but the Major’s opening salvo was scaring me. It felt like a series of jabs before an overhand right.
“But we are currently faced with extraordinary circumstances that are unique in my military experience,” continued Major Bradley. “We are confronted by a situation in which our fellow citizens are the enemy.”
“Sir, I don’t—”
He cut me off. “Let me finish, Corporal. You need to hear this.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
He cleared his throat. “We are facing a biological threat of an unknown nature. It is very likely a terrorist weapon of some kind, but quite frankly, we don’t know. What we do know is that the infected are a serious threat. They are violent, they are mentally deranged, and they will attack anyone with whom they come into contact, regardless of age, sex, or any other consideration. We have reports of small children attacking grown men. Anyone who is infected becomes violent. Old people, pregnant women…it, um…doesn’t seem to matter.” Bradley faltered for a moment, and I wondered if the first part of what he’d said was repeated from orders he got and now he was on his own. We all waited.
And waited.
Finally, I said, “Sir?”
But there was no answer.
I checked the walkie-talkie. It was functioning, but Major Bradley had stopped transmitting.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Maybe there’s interference,” suggested Joe Bob.
I looked around. “Who’s got a cell?”
We all had cell phones.
We all called.
I called my brother Vinnie in Newark.
“Sal—Christ on a stick, have you seen the news?” he growled. “Everyone’s going ape-shit.”
“SAL!”
I spun around and saw Talia pointing past the sandbags.
“They’re coming!”
They.
God. They.
-6-
The road was thick with them.
Maybe forty. Maybe fifty.
All kinds of them.
Guys in suits. Women in skirts and blouses. Kids. A diner waitress in a pink uniform. A man dressed in surgical scrubs. People.
Just people.
Them.
They didn’t rush us.
They walked down the road toward the bridge. I think that was one of the worst parts of it. I might have been able to deal with a bunch of psychos running at me. That would have felt like an attack. You see a mob running batshit at you and you switch your M4s to rock’n’roll and hope that all of them are right with Jesus.
But they walked.
Walked.
Badly. Some of them limped. I saw one guy walking on an ankle that you could see was broken from fifty yards out. It was buckled over to the side, but he didn’t give a shit. There was no wince, no flicker on his face.
The whole bunch of them were like that. None of them looked right. They were bloody. They were ragged.
They were mauled.
“God almighty,” whispered Farris.
Talia began saying a Hail Mary.
I heard Joe Bob saying, “Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah.” But something in his tone didn’t sell it for me. His face was greasy with sweat and his eyes were jumpier than a speed freak’s.
The crowd kept coming to us. I’d had to hang up on Vinnie.
“They’re going to crawl right over these damn sandbags,” complained Farris. The bandage around his wrist was soaked through with blood.
“What do we do?” asked Farris.
He already knew.
When they were fifteen yards away, we opened up.
We burned through at least a mag each before we remembered about shooting them in the head.
Talia screamed it first, and then we were all screaming it. “The head! Shoot for the head!”
“Switch to semi-auto,” I hollered. “Check your targets, conserve your ammo.”
We stood in a line, our barrels flashing and smoking, spitting fire at the people as they crowded close.
They went down.
Only if we took them in the head. Only then.
At that range, though, we couldn’t miss. They walked right up to the barrels. They looked at us as we shot them.
“Jesus, Sal,” said Talia as we swapped our mags. “Their eyes. Did you see their eyes?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. When someone is walking up to you and not even ducking awa
y from the shot, you see everything.
We burned through three-quarters of our ammunition.
The air stank of smoke and blood.
Farris was the last one to stop shooting. He was laughing as he clicked on empty, but when he looked back at the rest of us, we could see that there were tears pouring down his cheeks.
The smoke clung to the moment, and for a while, that’s all I could see. My mouth was a thick paste of cordite and dry spit. When the breeze came up off the river, we stared into the reality of what we had just done.
“They were all sick, right?” asked Talia. “I mean…they were all infected, right? All of them?”
“Yeah,” I said, but what the hell did I know?
We stood there for a long time. None of us knew what the hell to do.
Later, when I tried to call the Major again, I got nothing.
The same thing with the cells. I couldn’t even get a signal.
None of us could.
“Come on,” I said after a while, “check your ammo.”
We did. We had two magazines each, except for Farris, who had one.
Two mags each.
It didn’t feel like it was going to be enough.
Talia grabbed my sleeve. “What the hell do we do?”
They all looked at me. Like I knew what the fuck was what.
“We hold this fucking bridge,” I said.
-7-
No more of them came down the road.
Not then.
Not all afternoon.
Couple of times we heard—or thought we heard—gunfire from way upriver. Never lasted long.
The sun started to fall behind the trees, and it smeared red light over everything. Looked like the world was on fire. I saw Talia staring at the sky for almost fifteen minutes.
“What?” I asked.
“Planes,” she said.
I looked up. Way high in the sky there were some contrails, but the sky was getting too dark to see what they were. Something flying in formation, though.
Joe Bob was on watch, and he was talking to himself. Some Bible stuff. I didn’t want to hear what it was.
Instead, I went to the Jersey side of the bridge and looked up and down the road. Talia and Farris came with me, but there was nothing to see.