Last Man Standing (Book 1): Hunger (10 page)

I chose her, like an idiot.

I get the feeling now wouldn't be a great time to say I told her so.

"OK, so where do you wanna go?" Kate finally asks. "I'll follow your lead, but I don't want to go back out there without a plan, OK?"

"Agreed," I reply, resisting the urge to rub her nose in it. The last thing I want is to have to face the apocalypse with a girlfriend in a bad mood. "We need information.
Real
information, not this rumor mill crap. Karl told me there was some colonel running the show."

"Babe?"

"If we can find out where he is maybe we can pin him down and get some intel."

"Babe."

"OK, so keep your eye out for one of the soldiers. They must know where to look."

"
Tom!
"

I finally realize she's tugging on my sleeve. "What is it?"

"Follow my finger, genius," she replies, exasperated. "Doesn't that look like somewhere a colonel might hang out?"

I look over in the direction she's pointing, out at the edge of the field. It's the park administration office, a squat gray concrete building with a cell tower climbing from its roof. The front door is wide open, and beside it a soldier stands guard, his M16 hanging from around his neck.

"OK, that looks like a good place to check out," I grudgingly concede, and start walking towards the building. I know it's dumb but my injured pride forces me to open my mouth again. "You were still wrong about gun control, though."

Kate slaps me lightly on the back of my head. "Whatever, babe. Keep walkin'."

"Woah woah woah, hold it, guys. The building is off limits." The soldier sidesteps to block the door as we approach, and reaches behind him to pull it closed.

I take a couple of steps back. I'm in no mood to have an M16 pointed at me again today, even if there's a good chance it might be loaded with blanks. "Is the lieutenant colonel inside? We just need to get some information."

"That's affirmative," replies the soldier, hiking his gun up against his chest and staring straight ahead. "And he's far too busy to deal with civilians. What do you need, kid?"

I bristle a little at the word 'kid.' This guy may not be a young cadet like Karl, but he's not all that much older than I am. Maybe mid-thirties, well built with a close cropped head of salt and pepper hair. I check the insignia on his chest and dig through my memory for his rank. "We need to know which direction is safe to get the fuck out of here, Sergeant. We want to get out of the city."

The sergeant shakes his head. "Negative. Orders are to keep civilians within the safe zone perimeter until reinforcements arrive. We need to sweep the whole area before we release anyone. Can't have folks running around the streets while we work. Just relax, OK? You're perfectly safe."

I feel my hands ball into fists at the thought of being detained. "
Safe
? You know this area isn't secure, right? We just came from the roadblock at 9th Street, and I can tell you it's been compromised. At least one of those things is on this side of the barrier. It killed one of your guys. Karl. You know him, Sergeant? He was sent out there with fucking blanks in his gun."

The sergeant's stern expression softens a little, and his shoulders slump from attention. "Karl? Jesus. He was a good kid." He tugs his radio up to his mouth. "Kilo Six, this is Alpha Niner. I have critical intel, copy? Over."

A tinny voice comes back a few seconds later. "Alpha Niner, copy. Send it."

"We have a potential breach at—" He turns to me. "You said 9th Street?" Back to the radio. "9th Street roadblock. Possible man down, possible hostiles within perimeter. Over."

"Roger that, Alpha. I'm aware of the situation. I have two friendlies down, and multiple hostiles have been taken out. Roadblock was breached, but has now been secured. Over."

"Kilo, acknowledged. Alpha out." The sergeant lowers the radio. "See? Nothing to worry about, guys. We got this. Now, I'm going to have to ask you to—"

"
Negative
, Command! We have multiple civilians on site. Confirm your last!" An angry male voice booms through the wooden door, and the sergeant falls silent and turns his head to listen.

"Request recall on those bombers, Command. I got more'n three thousand healthy, uninfected civilians here waiting for an evac route. You have to give them at least
some
chance."

"What's going on?" I ask.

The sergeant holds up his hand to silence me. "Shhh. Hang on." He turns and pushes open the door a couple of inches with his foot, careful not to make any sound, and tilts his head to hear more clearly.

"Sergeant, what's going
on
?" I insist.

He waves me away and hisses impatiently. "Will you shut the fuck up for a minute?"

When I hear the voice through the door again it's much quieter. The anger seems to have vanished, replaced with a dejected acceptance. "Understood, Command," the man sighs. I hear the faint, tinny response, too quiet to make out the words. "No, I'll
do my duty
." Those last words are spat out, a hint of the anger returning. "May God have mercy on you all. Out."

"Fuck." The sergeant pulls his foot back and lets the door swing closed, and when he turns back to us his face has lost all color He grabs his radio and raises it to his mouth, but seems to reconsider before he holds down the button.

"What is it?" Kate demands. "What's going on?"

The sergeant ignores her, takes a deep breath and finally clicks the send button.

"Kilo Six," he mumbles. "Operation Clean Sweep is a go. Repeat: Operation Clean Sweep is a go." He closes his eyes tight and presses the radio against his forehead for a moment before continuing. "Sal, I'm bugging out. You're with me, right?"

The sergeant keeps his eyes tightly closed, as if he's silently praying until the response comes a few seconds later. "That's affirm, Alpha Niner. Will rendezvous at 5th and Prospect. Maintain radio silence. Out." He sighs with relief.

"Sergeant," I insist, "what the fuck is going on?"

The sergeant swings his rifle up to his shoulder, takes a brief look behind him at the closed door and starts to jog towards the trees, calling back over his shoulder. "If you want to live, follow me."

"What are you talking about?" I continue. "Hey,
stop
!"

The soldier doesn't break stride. "Come or stay, guys. It's all the same to me. I'm getting the hell out of here."

I turn to Kate and shrug my shoulders. "What the fuck? What do you wanna do?"

Kate chews her thumbnail for a moment, deep in thought. "I don't know," she finally replies, "but I think it might be a good idea to follow the guy with the gun."

I nod in agreement. Something about this sergeant rubs me the wrong way. I don't trust him as far as I can throw him, but the ashen look on his face makes me think that sticking around here to wait for help might be a bad career move.

"OK, sergeant, we're with you." We run to catch up with him as he vanishes into the trees, and both of us struggle to keep pace with his stride. "Now what the hell's going on?"

"What's going on, son," he says darkly, keeping up his steady pace, "is that an hour from now New York is going to have a sudden heatwave. Now keep up. There's a damned good reason I'm moving quickly."

Arnold sees the trees ahead of him. He's lost the trail. The sound stopped a while ago and he can't track down the source, but the gentle movement of the trees draws him in. Behind him the streets are silent and still. Ahead the branches sway and rustle in the breeze, and that's enough to urge him forward. Movement means life. Life means food.

He stumbles across a low chain blocking the entrance to the park, almost losing his footing, but he manages to plant his broken stump down on the other side and stay on his feet. He looks around. The others are still behind him. They don't seem quite as smart as he is. They move with less purpose, and they don't seem as driven. Maybe it's because Arnold has already taken lives. Maybe he's got more of a taste for it. Maybe he's just a little more hungry than the others. He doesn't know. Doesn't care.

He drags his ruined leg across the silent car park and out onto a patch of grass. Ahead of him he sees trees and bushes, but none of that interests him. His senses are tuned to something else, and something tells him he's not too far now. Soon he'll get to eat.

As he stumbles through the bushes and emerges onto a broad field of baseball diamonds a dim memory sparks in the slurry that used to be his mind. He remembers... something right on the edge of his memory, fighting its way through. Something about noise. Cheering. People. Right here. Something about this place means people. Maybe there are some still here, hiding somewhere.

He stumbles towards a row of white wooden bleachers. This is the place. This is where the people come, but there's nobody here. It doesn't make sense. This is where the people come, so why aren't they here?

The others behind him grunt impatiently. They want food, just like him. Where's the food? Where's the—

His head spins around at a sound carried on the shifting breeze. It's faint, but unmistakable. Voices.

The others pinpoint the source of the noise before he does, and they're already moving before Arnold sets off in a new direction. They all move north, more quickly now, towards a thick copse of trees.

People are somewhere on the other side. He's just sure of it.

He's excited.

"Operation Clean Sweep, that's what they call it." The sergeant shrugs his rifle to his shoulder and quickly vaults the low stone wall separating the park from Prospect Park West. I help Kate across and we jog to catch up with him. "Clean Sweep means we're royally fucked. It means we've lost control of the situation, kid."

"It's Tom," I say, scowling at him. "And this is Kate."

"Well, I'm Sergeant Laurence," he replies, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "and I'm positively
thrilled
to meet you. Now do you wanna stop and have a little tea party, or do you wanna shut the fuck up and let me explain?"

My fists ball up, but I manage to hold down my anger. "Fine. Go on."

"That's what I thought. OK, so we've got a pretty slim playbook for this kind of end of the world shit. We're not geared up for homeland defense on this scale, so we don't have many great options for a city like New York. Our first and best hope was to blow the bridges, and use our—"

"Operation Pied Piper," Kate interrupts. "Yeah, we already heard about that." Laurence gives her a surprised look. "We came in with a firefighter who was involved in the planning," she explains. "He... he didn't make it."

"Right. OK, then you know Pied Piper was designed to cut off Manhattan and clear the city of hostiles. Maybe not completely, but enough to clear the way for ground forces and Operation Dragnet."

"Dragnet?" I ask. I haven't heard of that one.

"Sweep and clear. That was supposed to come next, once Pied Piper had taken out the bulk of the hostiles. Heavy ground forces would move south from the Bronx to secure and sanitize Manhattan one block at a time. Nothing fancy. Just slow, methodical work with well equipped and well armored infantry. Would have taken weeks for them to reach Battery Park, but it would have left the city intact and ready for reoccupation." He stops beside a parked Escalade on the corner where 5th Street meets the park, looks around and nods, satisfied there are no hostiles nearby. "OK, we wait here," he says, climbing up onto the hood for a better view of the street. "Sal will be along in five, then we get the fuck out of here."

"So, Dragnet," I say. "Sounds like a good plan to me."

Laurence snorts. "Yeah, it
was
a good plan, and it might have worked if luck had gone our way." He shakes his head and spits. "Whoever started this shit, they knew exactly how dumb we can be. See, all the scenarios we gamed out to retake the city, they were all based on the idea that the shit would start in one place. We thought they'd pick a crowded, central spot and infect hundreds of people at the same time. Thousands, maybe. Get a good swarm going."

"They didn't?" I ask, trying to hurry the story along.

"Uh uh. Now, I'm not far enough up the chain of command to know all the ins and outs, but I know a couple of guys in army intel who know the score. They said the NSA keeps constant surveillance on multiple key targets across the city. You know, Times Square, Central Park, most of the subway stations, that kind of thing. Since Bangkok they've been snooping on everything from police chatter to webcams to Instagram, watching out for anything that looks like an attack at those sites. They thought they could identify an outbreak within a few minutes and set things in motion before it had time to spread. They ran drills for this shit."

I pull my cigarettes from my pocket and offer them around. Kate shakes her head, and Laurence pulls one from the pack without thanking me. He plucks my Zippo from my hand and cups it against the breeze, taking a long pull before continuing, the cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips as he speaks. "I've no idea if the fuckers who did this knew we were watching for it, but they decided to kick it all off where we didn't have eyes. The first reports that came in were from places like, I don't know, Hoboken. Red Hook. Astoria." He blows out a cloud of smoke. "We were expecting it to start with a huge riot in Times Square, you know? Not with a couple of guys attacking a cab driver in Harlem at six on a Saturday morning. I don't know Harlem well, but I'm guessing that's not all that uncommon."

I light my cigarette and take a drag. "So you mean we were taken by surprise?"

"Surprise? Shit, there's an understatement. Forget five minutes, they didn't figure out what was going on for fucking hours. By the time they managed to get Pied Piper in place the infection had already spread. It was in Manhattan, Brooklyn, fucking Jersey City. Everywhere, man. Game over. All Pied Piper did was save
our
asses. It cleared out most of Brooklyn, so we get to sit here on this nice quiet street and enjoy a smoke, but shit... these things are everywhere else, and they're spreading further by the minute."

I can feel an icy shard in my chest. It's been there since I first heard the colonel on the radio, but now it's grown so large it feels like it's hard to breathe. I don't want to ask the obvious question. I don't really want to know the answer, but I know I have to.

"So... Operation Clean Sweep? That's what I think it is, right? They're gonna destroy Manhattan?"

Laurence nods. "Bingo, kid. Clean Sweep is the nuclear option." He sees my shocked expression. "Not
actual
nuclear. We're not dumb enough to nuke ourselves, it's just an expression. Right now six B-2 bombers are on the way from Whiteman AFB in Missouri, loaded with a fuckton of the latest in thermobaric ordnance. Those are fuel-air bombs, kid. Nasty fuckers. 500 meter blast radius, massive damage. An hour from now they'll raze the city to the ground and rip out the lungs of everyone from Yonkers to Newark. Trust me, we
don't
want to be around when those bombers arrive."

"Jesus," I mutter. I've read about fuel-air bombs, and I know there are few worse ways to— "Wait,
what
? Newark to Yonkers?"

Laurence nods. "Of course. We have to stop these fuckers spreading, and they're not just in Manhattan. We have to make sure we get every last one. I figure they'll try to cover a ten mile radius, so long as they have enough firepower."

"But what about everyone back in the park? We're just gonna let them die?" I look over at Kate and see tears pricking her eyes. "There were
kids
back there, man."

"Hey, get off my back!" Laurence snaps. "I'm not dropping the damned bombs, am I? I didn't sign up for this shit. What do you want me to do, stick around and die with them out of solidarity? Sit in a nice little prayer circle and hope we fly right up to Heaven? Fuck that."

"We could at least warn them. Jesus, at least we could give them a fighting chance to get out before the bombs hit. How can we just leave them?"

Laurence sneers. "You really don't get it do you, kid? This is about survival of the
species,
boys and girls.
This is it. If a few thousand uninfected have to die to make sure we hold that line it's a small price to pay. Hey look, our chariot awaits."

I follow Laurence's pointed finger south, where an enormous armored vehicle decked out in desert camouflage turns from a side street onto Prospect Park West. It's so wide it clips the wing mirrors of the parked cars, and I wince at the painful screech as its armored flank scrapes along the side of a panel truck sticking out too far into the road. The thing looks like a tank, apart from its eight huge wheels. As it draws closer I notice some kind of machine gun mounted to the roof.

"What the hell is
that
?" Kate asks, mouth agape.

Laurence slides down from the hood of the car. "That, my lady, is a Stryker Interim Armored Vehicle." He turns to us with a broad grin on his face. "She's beautiful, isn't she?"

The Stryker pulls up alongside us, and Laurence pats its side as he steps to the back. "Hop in, kids," he says, tugging open the rear hatch and climbing into the compartment. "For your safety please note the location of the emergency exits, which can be found here, here and here. We'll be cruising at an altitude of around six feet, and our flight time today will be however the fuck long it takes to clear the blast radius of several dozen face melting thermobaric explosives. You stewardess will circulate the cabin shortly with a variety of refreshments, and the in-flight movie will be the laugh a minute Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day."

Kate gratefully takes his hand and climbs into the rear compartment of the Stryker. I'm about to follow, but when I reach the door I freeze.

"This thing is...
Jesus
, Laurence, you could fit twenty people back here. And twenty more on the roof."

Laurence sighs angrily. "What's your point, kid?"

I step back from the vehicle and throw up my hands. "My point is that you could save three dozen of those poor bastards in the park. You don't even have to warn them all. Just grab a handful from the edge of the field and sneak them out. We have to go back!"

Laurence pinches the bridge of his nose as if he's coming down with a headache, and he squats down in the rear compartment to my head height. "Look, kid, I've done my two tours. See this leg?" He tugs up his right pant leg, and I'm shocked to see there's nothing there but a carbotanium shaft surrounded by black, calf-shaped muscular mesh. "This country has already taken its pound of flesh, with fucking interest. I've given five years and a leg to the service, and now it's time for Sergeant Laurence to get his dues, understand? I got my buddy, I got my Stryker, and I got my gun."

I feel the hairs stand up on my arms as he looks down at his rifle. A grin spreads across his face, and when he looks back at me his eyes are ice cold. "See, I was gonna be a nice guy about this. I thought you two seemed like nice enough kids, and I decided to do one last good deed before the world goes completely to shit, but you just had to get on my last nerve, didn't ya? You had to peck away and make old Sergeant Laurence feel like a bad guy just for looking out for himself." He levels his M16 at my face. "Well, you just lost your ticket to the fun bus, son. Now why don't you go ahead and take a few steps back?" I shuffle back, my eyes fixed on the barrel of the rifle pointing right at my eyes. "That's right, a little further. There's a good boy."

My throat feels like it's closed up with fear, but I manage to croak out a few words. "Kate, climb down."

Kate starts to move behind Laurence, but he holds out a hand to stop her. "
Ah ah ah
, stay right there, missy. Sal, you got her?" he calls out, keeping his eyes fixed on me.

"Uh huh, I got her," comes a voice from the front of the vehicle. I look behind Laurence and see a young Hispanic guy in fatigues, leaning back from the driver's seat with a pistol pointed towards Kate.

"Please, just let me go, OK?" Kate begs quietly, her voice quavering. "Just let me get out and you guys can leave. We won't make any trouble."

Laurence chuckles and shakes his head. "No, I think you'll be better off with us," he laughs. "I'm sure we can find some use for you."

My hands bunch into fists, and my heart pounds deafeningly in my ears. I've never felt this kind of pure, cold hatred towards another human being before. I want to beat him in the face with the butt of his own gun until I feel it hit the back of his skull. I want to pin him down under the wheels of his Stryker and drive slowly forward, waiting for the weight to squeeze his guts from his mouth like toothpaste from a tube. I want to watch him
burn
.

"Let her go, Laurence," I growl, my voice hoarse. "If you take her I'll hunt you down, and my face will be the last you ever see." Even I know how ridiculous my threat sounds, directed at a trained soldier pointing an M16 at my head from the back of his armored car. I've never felt more hatred, but I've also never felt weaker. I've never felt like such a worthless, powerless pussy, unable to so much as keep my girlfriend safe from harm. I feel like a little kid trying to stand up to a bully twice my size, jutting out my chin and puffing up my chest, knowing that the result will be a fist in the face and more humiliation.

Laurence bursts out laughing "Oh, you should see your face, kid," he chuckles, reaching out for the door handle. "Red as a fucking beetroot." He shakes his head and sighs happily. "Well, we gotta go, Liam Neeson. Enjoy the fireworks, y'hear?"

With that he starts to slam the door in my face, but through the gap I see Kate launch herself at the sergeant with murder in her eyes. The door swings back open as her head reaches the guy at stomach level, and the sergeant doubles over in pain as she winds him. I grab the door and climb up as the driver yells out, his pistol waving wildly. Kate scrambles up from the floor and kicks out at Laurence as I grab her and pull her back towards the hatch.