Lou said, “You’re in the army?”
“Yes and no. I was part of the force, man. ERG. That’s Emergency Response Group. My battalion is one of dozens, so they say. Some shit comes down, we’re trained to contain it. We don’t take our orders from the army, though.” He laughed. “Nobody knows who we take our orders from. Ain’t that a rush?”
Lisa was moaning, her body shuddering with spasms.
Terra was keeping an eye on her. “She infected?”
Johnny assured him she wasn’t. “She’s coming down from her drug habit.”
“Junk?” Terra said. “Yeah, my brother was on that shit. Bad news.”
“What the hell happened here?” Lou asked, lighting a cigarette.
Terra shrugged. “I ain’t supposed to say. We’re not even supposed to talk to civilians. We’re supposed to consider ’em all infected and shoot ’em dead. Jesus H. Christ. I trained for this—nuclear, biological, chemical, NBC—for the past three years. But, oh shit, none of us ever thought—fuck, man.” He cradled his head between his knees, sobbed. Sighing, he looked at them. “They told us there was an outbreak. We thought it was another goddamn drill, a war game. But it was real. They told us an unfriendly foreign power had dumped some germs on this little town. I don’t even know what fucking state I’m in!”
“You’re in Michigan,” Johnny said. “It’s okay now, pal. Just tell us.”
Terra sat there silently for a moment, rolling the cherry of his cigar across the sole of his boot. “So, we were sent here to contain this mess, see that it didn’t spread. But, holy shit, those creepers… like zombies or vampires or something straight out of them horror movies, right? They don’t die easy.” He licked his lips, looking close to a breakdown. “We came in three, four hours back, surrounded the town. We came in by helicopter—all of us. Even the hummers and equipment came in by air. They started sending in recon teams right away, but none of ’em came back. Once we were deployed, they broke us into platoons and told us to kill everyone. Even the kids, the babies.” He started crying for real now. “All the little kids are monsters… oh, oh, oh, Jesus… we were shooting down toddlers. Oh Christ in Heaven, I’m gonna burn in Hell, I’m gonna burn in Hell…”
Johnny went to him, put an arm around him. “No, you’re not. People who created this stuff, let it loose on this town, yeah, they’re going to burn.”
It took Terra about five minutes to compose himself. “Okay, I’m all right. I’m cool. They told us to kill everyone. No exceptions. It’s what we were trained to do, so we did it. When we were done, we were to burn this town to the ground. Nothing could be left.” He motioned towards the window, the orange glow reflected on the glass. “Somebody already started that, though.”
Johnny thought it all through and still had questions. “Did they tell you what it was? What these people are contaminated with?”
He shrugged. “A virus of some kind. Spread by bites, body fluids. Supposed to be some shit they engineered from the rabies virus. Agent-X. That’s what they said. But there were rumors…”
“Yeah?”
Terra started talking in a whisper now. “Fucking-A. Guys have been saying that it ain’t fucking terrorists or any of that shit, they’re saying it’s us. Saying we created it. That we used it—”
“In Vietnam?”
Terra looked like he’d been slapped. “How the hell you know that?” He looked concerned.
“I was in Vietnam,” Johnny told him. “I saw what it did there. We called it Laughing Man because it drove people stark crazy. They told us it was a defoliant. But nobody bought it. We saw what that garbage did. My team got infected.”
Terra nodded, patting Johnny’s knee. “Yeah. My platoon, man, creepers wiped ’em all out… downstairs. Motherfucker. I got away, hid out.” His face looked like it had been sculpted from sallow wax. “Rumor says they developed it back then, but they shelved it for further study. Then, I don’t know, while back they pulled it out of the freezer and started refining it or something.”
The ash on Lou’s cigarette was an inch long. It fell onto his lap. “Why did they spray it here? What the hell were they thinking?”
“Guys were saying it wasn’t on purpose. An accident or something,” Terra told him.
Johnny felt suddenly vindicated.
After all these years of bullshit and denial, it had all come full circle now. There was no getting around the truth any longer. Oh, sure, they’d kill everyone and burn the town down, but the truth would come out… eventually.
In one form or another.
There would be too many questions.
“Why don’t you come with us?” Johnny asked Terra. “We’re making for the roof. We’re gonna hide out until dawn.”
“Yeah, fucking vampires, they don’t like the sunlight. They told us that much.” Terra looked half out of his mind. “I can hear the boys out there, can’t you? Boom, bang, boom. Mopping up this here burg. Fucking right. Flamethrowers and everything. Shit yeah. They go crazy when you crisp ’em, creepers do. Start jumping around and trying to fight the flames. Sometimes, they don’t even give a shit that they’re burning—they come right at you. Then you gotta pop ’em. Pop ’em and drop ’em. Blood and bodies and brains. I’m covered in it. Fuck if I ain’t.”
Johnny led the others back out into the corridor.
Terra took up the rear, with Johnny in front, the others in the middle.
“Let’s be careful out there,” Terra said and started giggling. He pulled something out of the ammo pouch slung around his shoulder. He hung it over his neck.
A necklace of human ears.
31
“Stone-two?”
“Johnson-four?”
“Smith-Seventeen?”
Silence. Maybe a minute, maybe two.
“Where the fuck are you guys?”
From where she hid, Ruby Sue was hearing it all.
Unlike the others, she’d come into the municipal building from the back. She’d slipped through the rear courtyard and waded through dozens of dismembered corpses dressed in red protective suits that had once been sparkling white. She’d didn’t spend too much time studying the fallen soldiers, just long enough to know they were dead, to see that they’d been mutilated, partially devoured.
Now she was in the garage.
But she wasn’t alone.
On the other side, hidden by the looming hulk of a fire truck were the soldiers. They sounded panicked and with good reason: most of their comrades had been wiped out, apparently by a large force of rabids.
Ruby Sue was crouched behind a pump truck.
The garage was huge and shadowy, lit dimly by emergency lights and moonlight seeping through tall windows set along the far wall. There were two fire trucks in there, a half dozen other city vehicles… not to mention the bodies of other soldiers, sprawled and twisted in heaps along the concrete floor. There was one a few feet away from her. He was missing his left arm and his protective hood had been ripped off, his face meticulously stripped down to the skull beneath. The grinning death mask watched her, but offered no suggestions.
What to do?
She waited there and contemplated it.
Her original mission had been to kill as many rabids as she could. Payback for Joe. Now she was starting to wonder who the real enemy was here.
She could hear the soldiers whispering amongst themselves.