“Roger that,” the men respond.
Ford is good people, Rod knows. As the platoon sergeant, he will take good care of Pierce. The Lieutenant is in good hands. He’ll be all right.
“Then get your men ready,” Pierce tells them. “We step off in five.”
♦
The sergeants tell the Hellraisers to form up in ranger file. The squads stack behind them, waiting for the order to advance. Captain Mack growls at First Sergeant Vinson to put the church music out of its misery, and Mozart’s ethereal “Ave Verum Corpus” abruptly dies. In the ensuring vacuum, the distant gunfire presses in a little closer. The music lingers in Rod’s mind, comforting and pure, and he finds himself humming it. One of the flamethrower units sprays a jet of fire onto the pile of burning corpses, setting them ablaze and filling the air with a nauseatingly sweet, rotten, beefy stench Rod can almost taste.
“Flashlights on, weapons hot,” he tells his squad, giving them a quick once over to make sure they’re ready to go. The boys stare back at him with wild eyes.
Pierce gives the order to step off and leads the platoon into the hotel. The anxious looks transform into professional frowns as the training takes over. Leading his squad, Rod raises his AA12 automatic shotgun with its attached SureFire flashlight and blinks in the gloom. The lobby is massive. After weeks of neglect, it smells like an old couch. Beams of white light play in the corners; that’s First Platoon doing their jobs. Someone shouts that he found a body. The boys sneeze on dust in the air. They sweep their sectors with their weapons without breaking stride, boots stomping on clothes and hairdryers and books that spill like entrails from discarded luggage. Rod aims his flashlight over his head and watches the beam sparkle along a dead chandelier.
A rifle discharges in the manager’s office with a loud bang.
“Lord, please don’t let it be jumpers,” Corporal Lynch hisses.
First Platoon’s got this, Hellraisers, Pierce’s voice buzzes in his headset. Keep moving, out.
The stairwell door opens ahead of them. Boots thunder on the metal steps. That would be Jake Morrow’s squad, Rod knows. After them, Joe Navarro, then him, then Headquarters and Weapons.
Rod leads his shooters onto the stairs with weapons cocked and locked and night vision goggles on. The stairwell has no windows and is pitch black. Their flashlights flicker across cinderblocks and handrails coated in generations of paint now rendered in their grainy, monocular vision as shades of green. The boys cut off their muttered prayers and bitching as they enter the danger zone, breathing through their noses.
Above, a door bangs open. Rod’s radio fills with chatter as Sergeant Morrow narrates what he sees and his progress toward achieving his objective.
Nobody here. Smells like sour milk, though. Stay frosty. Out, here.
Third Squad enters the elevator lobby and pauses in the hallway beyond. They made it to their objective without incident. Now all they have to do is sweep twenty-five rooms and a vending area, without getting mauled and bitten, to earn their pay for the day. Behind them, Headquarters and Weapons enter the elevator lobby and set up the machine guns.
“It’s time to earn our money, vatos,” Rod says. He orders Corporal Davis to take Fireteam A and clear the rooms on the other side of the hall, and then gathers Fireteam B in front of a nondescript hotel door reading 6101.
“U.S. Army!” he calls out. “If you are inside this room, get down on the floor now.”
Silence.
“You’re up, Sosa,” he says.
The giant soldier grins and steps forward with the handheld battering ram. He takes pride in being the big kid, the bully. The fireteam makes way for him.
“Wilco, Sarge,” he says.
He rears back and swings the ram into the door, which bangs open. The fireteam rushes past, weapons leveled and sweeping the room. Tanner breaks left and Arnold breaks right, circling back to Rod, who provides overwatch at the door. Lynch checks the bathroom.
“Clear,” the boys sound off.
“Clear,” says Lynch.
Rod scans the room again. An open suitcase lies on the unmade bed, half packed with wrinkled clothes. He joins Lynch, who shines his flashlight at the bathroom mirror. Someone wrote a message in red lipstick.
Sorry Sean I had to leave to find Liz
The sink is filled with bloody bandages.
The corporal shakes his head. “Like one big haunted house, Sergeant. I wonder what their story was.”
Rod barely hears him. The lipstick reminds him of Gabriela.
The hopelessness of their mission feels like a sudden weight on his chest. The country is huge. How many miles, how many rooms, how many bullets until he reaches his family?
“Holy shit,” one of the boys says back in the room.
Rod and Lynch rejoin the fireteam grouped around the window, and raise their night vision goggles. Someone pulled back the curtain, filling the room with bright gray light. From this high up looking northwest, Arlington sprawls before them behind a veil of smoke. Gunships buzz over the distant buildings, covering the combat engineers. Several circle a distant point, dropping Hellfire missiles before veering away. The boom reaches their ears and shakes the window for a fraction of a second just before a fireball blooms over the spot, dissipating in a mushroom cloud.
“It almost feels like we’re winning,” Arnold says over the grinding thunder.
“Winning?” Sosa snorts. “Shit, man, this is easy. The Infected don’t shoot back, right?”
Jake Morrow reports to the Lieutenant that he has reached his objective. The constant chatter on the radio reminds Rod they have a job to do.
“All right. Enough sightseeing. Let’s get back to work.”
They have twenty-three more rooms to go.
Davis calls out from the hallway: “Contact!”
“Coming out!” Rod calls back, and rushes outside in time to see a man approaching them from the other end of the corridor. The flashlight beams converge on his face and chest.
“Sergeant, we got a civilian,” Davis tells him.
“Stop where you are, sir,” Lynch orders.
The man obeys, sniffing the air, his fists clenched against his chest.
“Some of these doors must be open,” the corporal says. “He was in one of the rooms.”
“Does he have the bug, Sergeant?” says Tanner.
Rod shrugs. He believes the man has the bug, but such speculation is pointless. The rules of engagement are clear. “If he makes a run at us, he does.”
As if hearing an invitation, the man sprints at them, growling on the exhales, closing the distance. A wave of nauseating sour stench precedes him.
“Stop where you are, sir!” Davis shouts as the soldiers aim their weapons, waiting for the order to fire.
“Sergeant?”
The man rushes at them, his pale face shining in the glare of the flashlights, teeth gleaming, feet pounding the floor.
Rod doesn’t want to shoot.
He also cannot order his boys to do something he wouldn’t.
“What do we do, Sergeant?”
Rod raises his shotgun and growls back at the Infected.
“Fuck you, Jody,” he says, and squeezes the trigger.
♦
The man’s chest explodes with a burst of smoke as the high-velocity buckshot rips through his body, filling the air with a bloody mist. His legs give out, sending him careening into the wall, where he leaves a long smear of blood and bits of flesh.
Pierce’s voice buzzes in his ear, urgent.
Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 6. Sitrep, over?