Jolie’s brow knitted. “Did you tell them I have an autistic son?”
“I mentioned that, yeah. Look, they’re going to try, but they’re also trying to stop those…things…from getting out of the city. You know what happens if one bites you, right?”
“No. What?”
Gartrell sighed. “You die. And then, you turn into one of them.”
Jolie stared at him for a long moment, then looked away. “Dear sweet Jesus.” She put her hands over her face. “Oh dear sweet Jesus, you mean-” Her voice broke and her shoulders shook as she sobbed. She tried to suppress it, but the emotion overwhelmed her. She wept as silently as she could, and Gartrell stepped toward her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“What’s wrong? Have you been bitten? Are you all right?”
She shook her head and pulled away from him. He let her, and stepped back so he could keep an eye on Jaden. The boy still sat in front of the DVD player, watching a cute animated dog named Blue cavort about with her human owner. Gartrell looked back at Jolie, and waited for her to get herself under control.
“What is it, ma’am? If you’ve got something to say, pull yourself together and say it.”
She reached for a roll of paper towels and tore off a sheet. She spent another moment drying her eyes, then sniffed and turned back to him. Her blue eyes gleamed in the wan light that made it past the shaded windows.
“My husband called me from downtown. He’d been bitten by one of those things, but he’d gotten away from it. They didn’t kill him. He was still making his way uptown.”
Gartrell didn’t really know how to respond to that in any meaningful way. “I’m sorry.”
She sniffed again. “So he’s one of them now?”
“I don’t know. Probably better to keep your mind on your son now.”
She looked at him, hard-faced once again. “You do know! You’ve probably got more experience with those things than anyone else in the city!”
Gartrell said nothing, and she turned away from him with a heavy sigh. She rubbed her eyes, then crossed her arms and hugged herself in the gloomy darkness.
“I’m sorry. I don’t…I don’t mean to fight with you. I’m just wrapped up a little tight right now, you know?”
Gartrell knew all about it, and he felt the same way himself. “It’s not a problem. I get where you’re coming from. But thinking about your husband right now…well look, there are other things that are more pressing.”
Jolie nodded slowly. “Yeah. There are.” She turned back to him and tried to relax, but it didn’t work. She still looked uptight. The kind of uptight where people start to fray at the edges, and that worried Gartrell a bit. He really didn’t need her melting down on him.
Jolie leaned against the stainless steel stove and regarded him for a long moment. “So tell me why you’re in New York City. Because I’m thinking you’re not really a city boy, are you?”
Gartrell smiled. “Kind of. I’m from a place called Savannah, down in Georgia. Not as big as New York, but not some hick town with a population of six, either.”
“I’ve never been there.”
Gartrell shrugged. He figured Jolie wasn’t the kind of person to leave NYC for places like Georgia.
“So tell me why you’re here,” she asked.
Gartrell looked back into the living room. The boy was still fixated on the DVD player, but had taken the straw out of his mouth and had the cup in his lap. Jolie walked toward Gartrell and looked in on her son, then turned back to the first sergeant.
“He’ll be occupied for a bit longer.”
“Good.”
“So tell me what you were doing in New York, Dave.”
“Sure.”
Gartrell wasn’t much of a story teller-his wife said that whenever he had read his once-small children stories, it sounded like he was reading from a chemistry textbook-so he didn’t embellish anything, just made a straight, unpretentious report. Working to keep the military acronyms to a minimum, he told Jolie how he was tapped to join Major McDaniels on the mission to New York City, where they linked up with Operational Detachment Alpha 331, call sign OMEN. He had known some of the Special Forces troopers from his time as an instructor, so he had gotten along well with them and had no problem inserting himself into their detachment. He also told her of his history with McDaniels, how he felt the black officer was hidebound by regulation and had only a limited ability to adapt. He had the chops to lead a Special Forces unit; but when it came time to step out of the box, he had problems with his emotions clouding his ability to focus on the mission. When he told her of what had happened in Afghanistan, of how the death of one boy might have saved the lives of five Special Forces soldiers, her eyes widened in surprise.
“You would have killed that boy?”
“If so ordered, yes.”
“Was…was that really necessary?”
“He went back and told his people where we were. They came after us with Taliban. Five of our guys went down fighting.” Gartrell smiled grimly. “Of course, we sent about two dozen of the stinking Talibs to meet Allah in the process. But that’s what we were there for. You understand what I’m saying? McDaniels had the opportunity to balance the scales, and he couldn’t do it. No one wanted to kill that boy, not really. Killing kids isn’t what we’re all about. But letting him go free got a good number of other folks killed. I don’t care about the Taliban, they’re roaches. But our guys? And the whole village, which the Air Force flattened? That didn’t have to happen. The choice was a tough one, but McDaniels called it wrong.”
Jolie nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “I see…”
Gartrell went on, relaying how the team had linked up with Wolf Safire and his daughter Regina at Safire’s office building. He had come up with a compound, some sort of vaccine, which would prevent humans from transitioning to the walking dead after they had been bitten. The discovery was obviously quite high-value, so an entire Special Forces Alpha Detachment was dispatched to ensure Safire’s safety; McDaniels and Gartrell were Special Operations Command’s appointed babysitters to ensure the Safires made it out. And they had almost done just that. They’d actually made it to their helicopters when the stenches overwhelmed the security forces at the assembly area in Central Park. They had even taken off, while the team’s second helicopter crashed as the zeds rushed it. The surviving helicopter carrying Gartrell, the Safires, McDaniels, and some other soldiers was on its way out when one of the “window divers”-what Gartrell explained were zeds who literally jumped out of buildings to try and get at food-crashed into their helicopter’s main rotor, forcing it to crash land on Lexington Avenue.
So the team took refuge in an office building and waited for aerial extraction from a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey. But the timing supremely sucked; the building storm that had lashed out at New York City during the night had caused the tiltrotor aircraft to crash as well, leaving the team stranded overnight.
And then, the zeds got inside the building.
Gartrell told her how the Coast Guard had dispatched a cutter to try and evacuate them, and he described in very plain language how the team had fought constantly to cross three city blocks just to get to the East River. It had been the stuff from which nightmares were made; an implacable, seemingly unstoppable enemy numbering in the thousands, intent on running the soldiers and civilians to ground, attacking them again and again. Even as the bodies piled up, the zeds harried them, ignoring their injuries, ignoring the firepower leveled against them, cognizant only of their insatiable hunger. They would go to any length to feed. They were totally, 100 % committed in a way that no human being could be. They stripped away the military defenders, a man here, a man there, until finally it was just McDaniels, the civilians, and Gartrell.