Sam and Reaper looked at him. Sarge just waited.
Reaper decided, for now, to put his outrage away and answer the question rationally. “We don’t have the marks. You can see for yourself. And we’re not behaving that way.”
“I only have your word for it that the thing infects its victims through the neck and nowhere else. Maybe — maybe not. And there might be stages of behavior in people who’re infected, Corporal Grimm…”
So now Sarge was calling him Corporal Grimm instead of Reaper — as if creating a little personal distance between them, for what had to come.
Reaper had just about had enough. “Sarge — you make a threat against my sister, or me, even a theoretical one, I’m going to do have to take it seriously. And act accordingly.”
Sarge looked narrowly at him, head tilted. At last he said, “I guess you’re the same guy — so far. But I can’t have you questioning my orders. Not the ones I’ve gotten and not the ones I give.”
“You got any new orders from anyone lately?”
“No.”
“Maybe we should call out and get some, Sarge.”
Sarge shook his head. “I got mine for this kind of situation. I just didn’t tell you every last part of it. They didn’t specify what might go wrong. But before we went to Olduvai I was told that if things go sour…” He shrugged. “We have orders to contain this facility by any means necessary.”
“But I don’t think everyone is infected!” Sam insisted. “Or even capable of being infected!”
“We have orders to contain the threat,” Sarge said, “by any means necessary.”
“We evac the uninfected survivors,” Reaper suggested, “and we blow this place back to hell.”
“…And orders to protect this facility,” Sarge said.
“We don’t have orders to kill innocent people,” Reaper persisted.
Sarge smiled thinly. “‘By any means necessary.’”
Reaper’s hand tightened on his weapon. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment, if Sarge was going to start deciding that anyone but him was infected…
He almost jumped when the door banged open. Duke came in, smiling ironically. “Look who I found under a pile of dead bodies…”
Pinky rolled in, behind him. He looked haggard, pale, scared. But also looking relieved to see Sam. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys. That thing cut through the door. I tried to use the ST grenade, but it malfunctioned. It followed right behind me through the Ark. Started killing everybody…” He swallowed. His voice became husky as he said, “It was horrible…”
Sam walked over and examined him, frowning over his neck. Nodded to herself. “He doesn’t have the wound on his neck. He’s clean.”
Sarge took ammo from his belt, began to reload his pistol. “I say who’s clean and who’s not clean.”
Pinky stared at the gun in Sarge’s hand. Those bullets going in. Did he really intend one of those — for him? “What are you doing? You shouldn’t have left me there. It wasn’t my fault…”
Sarge cocked the pistol.
Reaper looked at Pinky, then at Sarge. Was Sarge really going to shoot him? Right here and now?
“I’m not a soldier,” Pinky was saying, a hysterical edge to his voice, his hands scrabbling at his cyberchair, “you shouldn’t have left me…”
The Kid burst in then, breathing hard.
Sarge, Duke, and Reaper — all three of them nearly shot the Kid in reaction.
“There’s a storeroom to the south!” the Kid blurted. “Got like twenty people holed up in it!”
“Weren’t your orders to clear that sector?” Sarge asked him. That flatness in his voice; in his eyes…“Is it cleared?”
“I told them to stay put. They’re okay; they’re just scared shitless —”
Sarge shook his head. “We kill ’em all — let God sort ’em out.”
Seventeen
THE KID LOOKED desperately from face to face.
“Okay —” he said at last. “— I think this is wrong.” Having a hard time saying it. Wanting badly to please Sarge. But there were limits.
“Son,” Sarge said, “you don’t have to think — because you’ve been given a fucking order.”
The Kid seemed frozen with indecision.
“We are in the field, soldier,” Sarge reminded him.
Reaper said, “Sarge, if nothing’s found them yet —”
“We are in the field!” Sarge interrupted, speaking only to the Kid. “You will obey the direct order of your commanding officer!”
The Kid licked his lips. “No.”
“Now, soldier!” Sarge said. It was more than just insistence. In those two words was a warning and a guarantee:
Obey the order or you’re going to pay the ultimate price for defying a superior in combat.
The Kid was being offered a choice. He could still say Yes sir, and lead Sarge to that storage room and stand side by side with him as they cut all those people down together. All those scared, perfectly ordinary people…
He thought about those desperate faces in that room. Jenna Willits losing her husband, her baby. He seemed to see the face of his girlfriend Millie, who was a nurse — it seemed like a million years since the Kid had seen Millie, and now he imagined what she’d think if she could see him as he mowed down all those scared people. He imagined Millie looking at him — at him! — with disgust. And, worse yet, with fear.
The Kid shook his head at Sarge. He looked him in the eye. And he said it as clearly as he knew how.
“Go to hell,” the Kid said.
In one swift motion, Sarge swung his arm around toward the Kid, leveled the pistol, and fired. He shot the Kid through the neck.
The Kid spun, hit the wall, and slumped to the floor.
There was a moment of sickened silence. The Kid choked, fumbled at his ruined neck…then his whole body began to spasm.
Duke said it for all of them: “Holy shit.”
Sarge’s tone was all reason. Just…reason. “Mutinous insurrection in the field is punishable by death.”
Sam broke from her shocked paralysis and rushed to the Kid. “Oh God — someone get me a medikit!”
“It’s his first mission!” Reaper burst out.
Sarge turned toward Reaper — who realized he’d let his surprise rob him of a chance to take the initiative.
“And it’s not gonna be my last. I need soldiers, I don’t need anybody else.”
“Fuck!” Reaper swore. He and Sarge stared at each other.
The Kid’s eyes were glazing; blood was bubbling from his mouth. Duke grimaced, looked away.
Sarge swung the gun toward Reaper —
Reaper was about to fire in response —
“Drop the weapons,” Pinky said, suddenly.
They turned to see him pointing a pistol at them.
Pinky was wondering if he was a fool to give in to survival instinct this way. He didn’t like his life much, and no one seemed to really care if Sarge killed him — though maybe they hadn’t much chance to react to the threat — and they were probably all going to be killed or converted into subhumans by Carmack’s little playthings within minutes, anyway.
Maybe he should’ve let Sarge execute him. Get it over with.
But he was a survivor. “Do it,” Pinky went on. “I didn’t come all this way to be killed…drop ’em now!”
They stared…and Pinky realized it wasn’t at him. They were looking past him now. At something looming behind him…he could feel it back there, breathing, the heat of its body. Hear its knuckles cracking, claws clicking in its talons…
“Oh no,” he said, in a small voice. “Is…something behind me?”