Wade turned and saw a sergeant lying in a fetal ball on the floor.
She said, “Don’t know his name. He hasn’t said a word since he got here.”
“What is this? Why are we here?”
“I was guarding a truck that got thwacked. Ended up here by chance. As for you Tenth Mountain boys… Apparently, this is a casualty collection point. There are guys here from all over your battalion, some walking wounded, but mostly psychiatric casualties. Guys messed up in the head. Wounds that run deep. A few are catatonic. There are maybe thirty guys here in all.”
Wade nodded at the massive crowds below. “And the mission is to protect them?”
“Our job is to stay alive, Wade. This building is the university’s athletics department. We got views all around. We keep an eye on things. Helicopters drop food once a week. We go down there and get what we need at gunpoint. We let them sort out the rest on their own.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be distributing it or something?”
Rawlings snorted. “That sounds like a great way to get killed.”
“What’s it like down there?”
“Just what it looks like. A shithole. Every day, you got fistfights, murders, rape and shootings over women, beer, smokes. You ask me, it’s a powder keg just waiting to go off. You got a weapon, cowboy?”
He shook his head. “Lost it.”
“Ammo?”
“A few mags for my M4.”
“We’ll see about getting you armed. One more thing, Wade. Sleep every chance you get.”
“Why is that?”
“Because somebody is always screaming in their sleep and waking everybody up.” She sighed. “Those poor guys, the things they’ve seen and done… I don’t want to know.”
Wade studied her face. She really was pretty. “What happened to you, Sergeant?”
“You don’t want to know.”
TWENTY.
LT. COLONEL PRINCE closed the door to his private office in the command trailer and sat at his desk with his head in his hands. The migraine bloomed behind his eyes. He could hardly think. No amount of aspirin would help. What he needed was a long, long sleep.
Ignoring his desktop computer, which demanded his attention, he opened a drawer and scooped out a bottle of Jim Beam. He kept the bottle around for special occasions, to toast a promotion or observe the end of an operation. Sharing a shot always made the moment memorable. He wondered if drinking alone would have the opposite effect. What he needed now was to forget everything.
He put the bottle away without drinking. He had work to do. Still he didn’t move. What was the point? Anything he did was just pushing a broom against an avalanche.
The radio/telephone operator had contacted Harry Lee. The captain was en route back to Hanscom. He’d seen some horrible things on his recon trip. The confidential report he’d transmitted stuck to the facts, but the story was clear enough. Boston was a lost cause.
Maybe Walker was right.
Screw Walker.
They still couldn’t raise regimental HQ. Prince told them to jump the ladder and try Division at Fort Drum. Again, no response.
Prince had seen rough soldiering. He’d led his boys through some tough campaigns. But he always knew he had the full weight of the Big Green Machine behind him, a powerful military that projected American power across the planet. Not anymore.
The idea that Division headquarters had been overrun or compromised by infection was impossible to conceive. Fort Drum wasn’t near any major cities. It was in the middle of nowhere in New York State. At first, he’d thought there must be something wrong with the communications system. But they were still able to contact other Tenth Mountain units. Those field units all reported the same problems getting through to central command.
What was the next step? Go still higher up? Call the Pentagon?
The Pentagon had been evacuated. The President and the Joint Chiefs were in their underground bunker at Mount Weather, making their erratic decisions without any knowledge of what was really happening on the ground.
Prince was going to have to make his own decisions. The right course eluded him. He knew the current strategy wasn’t working, but he couldn’t just pull his boys out of Boston and give up. More than six hundred thousand people had lived in the city before the plague. Another four million lived in the Greater Boston area. The survivors were desperate. They needed help.
If his lightfighters couldn’t do anything, what good were they? Why bother?
He’d always thought the world would end suddenly. An asteroid would come, humanity would have a week to get its shit in order, and then BOOM.
He’d never imagined a plague would do the job, and with such horror. A plague in which everybody became an enemy, everything familiar became a threat, every loved one was perverted and defiled.