The northeastern horizon was on fire. He felt the waves of heat, the tremors in the air. A distant roar, mingled with screams and laughter, carried on the wind. Twilight would come in an hour, but the sky was already blackening as a massive wall of ash and smoke roiled over the city.
Wade had missed a few things while he was out cold. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
Helicopters roared out of the ash fall. Searchlights glared. Then they were gone.
A splash of gunfire sounded outside, somewhere close.
One of the soldiers lowered his binoculars and pointed. “I found him. There he is. See?”
The second responded, “I see him. Man, he’s either infected, or he’s lost it.”
The third turned and noticed Wade. “Who are you?”
He introduced himself. The men were Gray, Fisher and Brown. They nodded in greeting. None appeared to be physically wounded, but Wade knew something inside them had broken.
“How’s your face?” Fisher asked him. “You all right?”
Wade touched the wound. He could feel the fever heat through the bandage. His cheek tingled. As if little worms were inside. He felt as if his entire body had been crumpled up like a piece of aluminum foil and stretched out again.
He ignored the question. “What were you guys looking at?”
“Some Rambo type,” Fisher said. “Armed to the teeth. He comes out every day around this time, shoots a few crazies and yells something like, ‘Three o’clock and all’s well.’”
It was well past three o’clock.
Gray looked out the window. “The fire’s much bigger than it was this morning. Charlestown’s going up. Bunker Hill. Spreading west fast. Boston’s toast.”
“It’s on the other side of the river,” Brown said. “We’re good.”
“You think? Well, Hanscom is on the other side of the river too. If the fire spreads through Cambridge, we could get cut off. I wonder how many people it’s pushing out of the area. More crazies. All going west. They got nowhere else to go.”
Fisher nodded. “We might have to think about bugging out soon.”
“We’ll talk to Rawlings about it,” Brown said.
“Is she in charge here?” Wade asked. She wasn’t Tenth Mountain, but she had the highest rank among the survivors here.
“You think these cowboys would take orders from a Nasty Girl?”
Wade turned. The sergeant was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed.
“I see you met my posse,” she said.
Wade nodded. He wanted to ask her if they were going to bug out. He wanted to get back to his unit. Surely, some of the men in his platoon had survived, since they’d brought him there. He wanted to get back. Those guys were the only family he had left.
But he said nothing. He was still in shock and didn’t have much fight in him. His body was pretty banged up. He needed to stay here and rest for a while longer. He also didn’t want to bring the Bug home with him. He wasn’t showing symptoms, but he’d been exposed, and he still wondered if he was infected.
Besides all that, he wasn’t sure what he still owed the Army. He and his comrades had been betrayed. The rest of Bravo Company hadn’t shown up at the hospital, and Wade’s squad had been thrown alone into shit that was way over their heads. Wade still wanted to chip in and do some good, but he no longer trusted the Army to make decisions for him.
He thought of Sergeant Ramos’s family: Maria and little Thomas in their hot apartment with no electricity or running water and the furniture stacked against the door. Maybe he should go and protect them. Maybe that was the best way to honor the sergeant who’d saved his life more times than he could count. Maybe that was a mission for which he could still fight. Maybe if he saved them he might finally make a real difference in this apocalyptic war.
In any case, Wade wasn’t in any kind of mental condition to make that decision. His body sure wasn’t in physical shape to act on one. No matter. For now, he was stranded here with this broken outfit.
“Something on your mind?” Rawlings asked.
Wade shook his head.
“Not something,” she said softly. “Everything.”
He nodded.
“Take it one day at a time, okay?”
He smiled. A day was a luxury.
“Okay,” she said. “One minute at a time.”
“Hey Sergeant, come take a look at this,” Fisher said.
She accepted the binoculars and looked. She paled.
“Walking around like they own the place,” Gray said. “Goddamn scumbags.”
“It’s Boston in name only now,” Brown said. “They’re everywhere.”
“We should drop a nuke and be done with it.”
Wade couldn’t see past the others. “What’s going on?”
She handed the binoculars to him. “Take a look, Wade. There. See them?”
He did. A vast parade marched through the burned-out wrecks scattered along Western Avenue. Several hundred strong, it was an army of the mad. Some were naked and painted in blood. Others wore scalps and necklaces of ears and masks of human flesh. It was impossible to recognize them as Americans, people who just weeks ago were lawyers, bank tellers, janitors and waitresses. The Klowns looked more like an ancient tribe of cannibals. It was hard to even recognize some of these self-mutilated things as human beings except for the constant laughter. They dragged screaming men and women on leashes. They waved hatchets and torches and chainsaws and human heads.
Wade handed the binoculars to Fisher. He’d seen enough.
The crazies owned the downtown core, and they were migrating outward.
Pretty soon, it was all going to be over.
“All” as in civilization.
TWENTY-THREE.
Lt. Colonel Prince admired a framed article on the wall of his tiny office. He took it with him on every mission. The article, published in The New York Times, described his battalion’s operations in the Korengal Valley. That year, seventy percent of the fighting in Afghanistan had been in that valley near the border with Pakistan, where Taliban and foreign fighters came to shoot at the infidels. His boys took the brunt of it, but they gave more than they got. Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. The article referred to him as Fighting Joe.
He opened the door and passed the worried staff sergeants and radio operators frantically calling units in the field. He left the command trailer and was surprised to see it was dusk. He’d completely lost track of the time. Time warped inside the trailer, where crisis set the schedule and the days blurred together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in the dining facility. The trailer looked so small from the outside. Standing there, he found it difficult to believe that the air-conditioned box held so much bullshit.
Hanscom Air Force Base had been home to three thousand airmen, all of whom had been relocated south except for a token company and a military police platoon. The sprawling facility included hangars, administrative facilities, barracks and other buildings. It had been well guarded before the plague, but it was no fortress. Prince had created a new perimeter of Hescos—massive burlap sacks filled with tons of dirt—to serve as walls, their tops lined with concertina wire. Mark19s provided overwatch in wood guard towers. Machine guns behind piles of sandbags guarded the entrances. They’d all seen action in the past few days.
Prince strolled the perimeter, passing trucks and Humvees, water bladders and generators. He saw every detail with perfect clarity. The disappearance of his headache was like the lifting of a heavy siege. For the first time in weeks, he could see and think clearly without the painful red fog in the way. He felt a surge of love for all of it. He’d been a soldier his whole life. A sergeant barked at his boys to gear up and get their shit on, they had work to do. Another sergeant dressed his squad for action. Prince liked what he saw; things were humming. Apaches spooled up on the runway. One of the great beasts lunged into the hot air on thumping rotors. The wash sent a wave of litter rolling toward Prince’s feet. He frowned at an MRE wrapper fluttering past as if it were a crack in a dam; somebody was going to have to clean this shit up. A machine gun thudded in the distance. To the east, Boston burned.