Tooth and Nail (2 page)

“So is this how you treat—?” the old man starts, then begins jogging away as Martin swivels his machine gun just enough to communicate threat. “You boys are in the right business, all right,” he calls over his shoulder as he weaves through the abandoned cars. “Because the end of the world will not come without a war!”

“Alpha Mike Foxtrot!” Martin calls after him with a grin and a friendly wave, making the assistant gunner cackle again.

“A war of fratricide!” the man calls back.

Mooney is only vaguely aware of what that word means, but it makes him shudder for some reason.

“Only in New York,” says Boomer, shaking his head.

At the south checkpoint, a small crowd is arguing with Second Platoon’s CO about whether the Army is hoarding a secret government vaccine in the hospital.

Second Lieutenant Todd Bowman of Fredericksburg, Texas has pale blue eyes and the blond, all-American good looks of a choir boy. Bowman studied history in college before joining the Army to see first-hand how it is made. Tall and lanky, he has been a competent leader but has not yet shaken his habit of glancing at Sergeant First Class Mike Kemper, a thirty-year-old veteran from Louisiana, for confirmation of his boldest orders and deepest fears. Kemper, small but with large hands and a wiry, lethal build, usually winks back. With his short-cropped hair and intense stare, his normal expression is menacing until he smiles, which dramatically changes his appearance. To the boys, the platoon sergeant is a rock. They call him Pops.

On the other side of the double line of coiled concertina wire pulled across First Avenue and weighted down by sandbags, a large woman is pleading with the LT to share whatever vaccine his troops are guarding inside the hospital.

“Ma’am,” says the LT, “if we had a vaccine, why would we be wearing these masks? Do you know how uncomfortable it is to wear these masks all day and night?”

The woman stares at him uncertainly. “Well, it could be just for show.” “That makes no sense to me whatsoever, Ma’am.”

“I told myself I was going to come down here and I’m not budging an inch until I get some vaccine for my babies. Do you understand me?”

Another man says: “Look here, officer.”

“How old are you, anyway?” the woman says. “Twelve?”

The man continues: “Look at me, officer. Thank you. The President of the United States said you have a vaccine. Why would the President say that if it weren’t true?”

Bowman answers matter-of-factly, “Sir, the Commander-in-Chief passed along no such information to his chain of command, who surely would have told me about it.”

“Hey, I asked you if you understand me,” the woman says.

Another man jumps in: “My wife’s got it and I asked her sister to come over and help but now she’s got it and I can’t control both of them. They’re back in my apartment doing God knows what, ripping the place apart. I need help. What should I do?”

“The best you can,” Bowman answers. “You can bring them here for care or try to get a neighbor to help or maybe call the police, if they have the resources. But I can’t spare a single man to leave this post to help you. I’m sorry. I really am.”

A long series of single gunshots erupts to the north, popping against the steady background roar of New York, the sound of eight million people trying to stay alive. Bowman stiffens for a moment and turns towards the gunfire’s distant echo, his instincts aroused by a vague sense of threat. Moments later, the sound is drowned out as a Blackhawk helicopter zooms overhead, skimming the rooftops.

Corporal Alvarez has meanwhile hustled up, and reports to the LT that the Trinity people want to talk to him. It’s urgent, he adds.

The man is still talking: “You’re not listening to me—”

Bowman nods vaguely, unable to shake his feeling of unease, and tells the crowd: “We’re done here.”

Dr. Linton, the hospital chief, and Winslow, one of several heavily armed city cops providing security inside the building, stand outside the city transit bus parked in front of the hospital emergency room doors, wearing N95 masks and looking worried. Behind them, the line of victims of the Hong Kong Lyssavirus and their families wait their turn to go into the bus, coughing and blowing their noses. Inside, nurses perform military-style triage to separate those infected with HK Lyssavirus from those with other infections or nothing wrong with them at all other than panic and imagination.

Those who have Lyssa are separated into priority groups using colored tags. If you get green, the nurses send you back home for home care. If you get red, you are considered a high priority for the ICU if one is available. If you get yellow, you might do well in the ICU and you might not, so you are hospitalized but have to wait.

If you get black, they make you as comfortable as possible until you die.

The HK Lyssavirus’ mortality rate is high, somewhere between three and five percent of clinically ill cases, as much as twice as during the Spanish Flu of 1918-19. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are already dead and another two to three million are expected to die later. So many are dying, in fact, that corpses are being stacked in refrigerated trucks continually idling on the other side of the hospital, which, when full, drive their loads out to mass graves being dug in New Jersey.

The problem is not the number of dead, however, even though the number is horrifying.

HK Lyssa is a new airborne flulike virus—likely to have originated in Indian fruit bats, according to the CDC—that evolved to become easily transmissible between humans. It knocks you off your feet like severe flu, with additional symptoms such as twitching, rapid blinking and a powerful sour-milk body odor. Most people recover in about two weeks, but if infection is severe and the virus enters the brain, it causes dementia: The victim foams at the mouth, refuses water, becomes paranoid and prone to sudden violent movements, and eventually cannot speak except to make an unnerving growling sound like an idling motorcycle. Somebody on cable news called them Mad Dogs, and the label caught on. It fits. They are dangerous, and the soldiers know to be careful of them. Mad Dogs have hurt and killed people, even their own family members. They always get the black tag. They always die, usually within three to five days.

But the small numbers of Mad Dogs complicating an already horrifying epidemic is not even the real problem.

The biggest challenge facing the United States is simply the staggering number of people who are sick, unable to do anything except lie there and require constant help.

Because the human immune system has never encountered this virus before, it has no natural defense and almost everybody is susceptible to catching it. As a result, tens of millions of people are sick around the country, including many of the people who treat them, maintain public order, produce and distribute food and pharmaceuticals, make the water flow, and keep the lights and air conditioning and refrigerators and elevators and gas stoves working. America is already starting to come apart at the seams.

There is a proverb that says the USA is always just three days from a revolution. Stop delivering food to the supermarkets and see what a country of three hundred million citizens, with a strong sense of entitlement and more than two hundred fifty million guns, has to say about it. This is why the government declared a national emergency and recalled its military forces from overseas—to protect America from itself.

“Stay close, Mike,” Bowman tells the Platoon Sergeant. “I have a feeling I know what they’re going to want this time.”

Kemper takes off his patrol cap and runs his hand over his closely cropped skull. “It was inevitable, sir,” he says. “We knew this would happen.”

“But we couldn’t really plan for it. We’re not equipped.”

“We trained with non-lethals, but now that we have to actually use them, there’s none to be had,” says Kemper, refitting his cap. “All that training, down the drain.”

Linton foregoes the usual token effort to make some sort of friendly contact with the military men protecting his hospital, and gets right to the point.

“Lieutenant, we have no more room for new patients. No beds, no staff, nothing. We’re running out of gloves and gowns and masks. We’re shutting down and will be focusing on our current caseload for the near future.”

“I understand,” Bowman says.

The hospital chief extends a clipboard with one gloved hand. “I’ve had the addresses of several local alternative care sites written down. Last I heard, they are still in business. Hospices, too, for the Mad Dogs.” The doctor clears his throat politely at his use of the common but politically incorrect term. “I’m asking if you can tell people who come here wanting care that they should go to one of these other sites.”

Kemper takes the clipboard while Bowman says, “We’ll take care of it.”

Linton opens his mouth, closes it, then says simply, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Watching the men return to the hospital, Bowman shakes his head and Kemper nods in agreement.

“It’s a bag of dicks, sir, that’s for sure,” he says dryly.

Bowman sighs loudly. “I’ve got to report this up to Captain West. Mike, find me my RTO.”

A sudden crash of automatic weapons fire to the west, deep inside the city. The soldiers turn towards the sound, their faces wearing expressions of puzzlement. They exchange a quick glance. Every day, it seems, there is a little more gunfire. They’re thinking: This place is starting to sound like Baghdad.

And the epidemic is only a few weeks old.

Eight days earlier, Charlie Company sat around for thirty hours surrounded by their gear on the runway in Logistical Support Area King Cobra in Iraq, alternately sweltering by day and freezing by night while waiting for a ride home. King Cobra was a virtual city of sandbagged tents and concrete bunkers sprawling for miles in all directions and surrounded by concertina wire and guard towers. The Army’s ongoing exodus from the country was a marvel in its overall speed and orderliness, but LSA King Cobra nonetheless steadily unraveled in the confusion, constant attacks by insurgents, and the massive ongoing labor of trying to provide shelter and medical care for the infected. An estimated twenty percent of the forces in Iraq caught Lyssa and were suffering in quarantine tents.

At the time, the boys thought they were being redeployed to Florida, which started a debate about the relative merits of Miami girls versus girls from every other state represented in the Company. They shouted to make themselves heard, as some POGs—people other than grunts, support troops—in a nearby motor pool company had started a musical duel, one side picking gangster rap, the other heavy metal anthems.

The second night, the boys began to worry. Nobody in charge seemed to know they were there, and they were out of food and hungry. Some snuck out to beg or steal some MREs and barely made it back alive. One couldn’t walk to the latrine without being attacked by wild dogs or shot at by nervous replacements. Dogs caught Lyssa too and you needed to bring a shotgun to the can so you didn’t get bit, and for the same reason, if you shot a dog, as a sniper from Third Platoon did, you couldn’t eat it.

A Humvee parked near the edge of the runway took a hit from an RPG and was burning, its ammo cooking off and popping. Marine Cobras roared overhead in the darkness, setting up strafing runs. In the middle of a densely populated camp with fires all around, thermal and night vision optics were useless, so the boys sent up flares and took potshots at the shadows. The swacked Humvee exploded, shooting flaming shards of metal fifty feet into the air, making the boys whoop. A SAW gunner in Second Platoon showed up laughing with a bottle of cheap Iraqi gin he’d bought from some kids at the perimeter, and the boys passed it around, savoring the slow burn on their parched throats.

A firefight broke out in the distance, then another, red tracer flashes bursting along the wire. A single mortar round whistled and burst in the center of the camp, sending pieces of tent flying. A squad of heavily armed MPs jogged by, telling everybody to keep their heads down. Buses packed with soldiers drove onto the runway as if nothing was happening, their headlights playing on the tents and Stryker vehicles lined up in neat rows while a C130 cargo plane touched down dangerously close. The headlights briefly illuminated two soldiers locked in a fist fight, then swerved away, returning them to darkness. Somebody in the quarantine tents was screaming. Shots rang out.

The boys lay on the ground shivering in their armor, using their helmets to rest their heads, dreaming of forbidden pleasures—hot showers, plates piled high with French fries and, of course, sex. Some were so exhausted they dreamed of sleep, or not at all. In the middle of the night they woke up, Iraqi dust caked in their ears and mouths and nostrils, to the sound of gunfire close by. The air stank of oily smoke and hot diesel fumes.

At least it’s not like this at home, they thought, and sighed. Soon, it will all be over.

Green tracer rounds from Russian guns streamed into the cold night sky over Baghdad. The city appeared to be tearing itself apart. Word went around that the militias were shooting Lyssa victims down in the street. People went Mad Dog and roamed the city along with animals who’d also caught it, spreading infection.

It was a disaster beyond the soldiers’ comprehension.

“We tried,” PFC Richard Boyd said, watching the distant fireworks, his voice quivering with rage. “We really did. Now they can die for all I care.”

At dawn, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer Armstrong, silver-haired and looking fierce with his arm in a bloody sling, mustered the battalion and gave everybody a rousing speech just before they boarded chartered United and Air France planes and started the long journey home.

Operation Iraqi Freedom has been scrubbed, he told them.