Pandemic(7)
Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”
“What about them?”
“We should evacuate them. Get them out.”
“The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”
Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.
“Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.
Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”
The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?
He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.
“It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”
“It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”
“Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”
Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”
“Bullshit,” Williams said.
“Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.
“Naked?” Williams qualified.
“It’d be worth it,” said Eraserhead. “Either way.”
The boys chuckled, careful not to laugh too loud or too hard. They passed around a can of dip.
Wade shook his head. “What’s next, Sergeant?”
“We clear the next—”
They heard a burst of laughter out in the hallway.
The fireteam bristled. They glanced at the door before settling their eyes on the hulking Ramos and his Sledgehammer, the devastating AA-12 combat shotgun. The sergeant flashed them the hand signal to prepare for action.
Wade eyed the other members of his fireteam. Nobody did anything without the others knowing about it. Nobody moved unless somebody stayed behind, scanning for threats.
More laughter came, followed by the electrifying sound of a woman screaming.
Wade guessed the staff had heard the shooting and were trying to save the patients just as the doctor had. Saving them meant disconnecting them from the barbiturate cocktail flowing into their veins.
The Klowns were waking up.
“Get ready to move,” Ramos said. “If it’s laughing, kill it.”
The boys hustled into position. They had no doubts now about what they had to do.
Kill them all or die.
NINE.
IN THE CROWDED TRAILER he was using as his headquarters, Lt. Colonel Joseph Prince studied the big electronic map and dry swallowed an Advil.
Little blue icons displayed First Battalion’s sprawling deployment around the Greater Boston area. A large blue icon indicated his headquarters at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, home to the 66th Air Base Group before it had been relocated.
Yellow icons showed live fire incidents—units in contact. There were a lot of those, more and more every day. Some never stopped being in contact. As for red icons indicating opposition forces, there were none. The enemy was everywhere. The enemy is us, as Pogo once said. The enemy included his wife and son, infected and running amok until they’d been shot down in the street like dogs.
He knocked back a second Advil and tried not to think about that.
The colonel didn’t need the big board to tell him he was losing a war against his own country. He’d made rank by following orders. He never bitched. He always took the fight to the enemy. “Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution” was his motto.
Prince wasn’t very imaginative, but he was reliable, and he usually got results. He was used to having the kind of firepower that could flatten anything that got in his way.
The current conflict defied the imagination. The enemy was American citizens, the mission objectives vague, the rules of engagement contradictory. His lightfighters had taken twenty percent losses in continuous operations, while each afternoon, the colonel met with civilian lawyers to review every after-action report and decision that affected American lives and property. He could just imagine their faces when he told them the order had come down from Regimental HQ to terminate the infected in the quarantine hospitals.
Prince was used to freedom of action with massive amounts of power. Now he felt like a spider caught in its own web.
Video monitors next to the big board rolled horrific images transmitted by aerial drones, blimps and long-range cameras. Exhausted staffers sitting in front of flat screens and stacked radios managed operations and talked to units in the field. Foam cups, water bottles and mission binders cluttered the desktops. Dead cans of Red Bull filled the trash bins. The room smelled like nervous sweat and stale coffee.