"Well, if it's true, then what are we supposed to do with one lousy company?"

"Keep our heads down, if we're smart," Williams tells him.

"You got that right," some of the other boys murmur, nodding.

The other boys chime in.

"Give this thing a chance to blow over."

"Wait. We're going to be okay, aren't we? Right?"

"They're not going to airlift us out?"

"Don't count on it. Where would they land the birds-outside in the street?"

"We got good people leading us," Hicks says. "We should be okay."

"Captain Lyons was good," Rollins says. "And now Alpha's gone."

"And Reese. And Moreno. They were good, too."

"They were following orders. Kirkland and Winters told them to march and they marched."

"Exactly my point. What if they call up LT and tell him to march?"

"If I was LT, I wouldn't even answer the phone."

"I know the LT," Eckhardt says. "He'll follow his orders."

"If the Army is in this bad shape, why should he risk his neck?" Williams says.

"Why should any of us?" says Ratliff.

The boys fall into another awkward silence.

Finally, Mooney says, "You guys are going to laugh, but I'm sticking with the LT because I want to see kids go to school here again."

n.o.body laughs. The boys watch him curiously.

He says: "It's like this. . . . Billy Chen died fighting for his country. Seems to me that country is disappearing around us. If it keeps going, we might end up being all that's left of it. We walk away from our jobs, then America is gone. That's how I feel about it. So I'm going to do my job and keep America alive long enough so it can get back on its feet and be normal again some day. That's my mission."

The boys s.h.i.+ft restlessly, murmuring and nodding. Mooney has planted a seed in their minds stronger than patriotism. He is giving them a condition for victory in this war without heroes, without winners. He is reminding them of home at peace.

They are picturing picnics and pickup trucks, girlfriends and first dates, street hockey and drive-in movies, granddads playing checkers in the park, long drives on summer nights, a favorite song on the radio, arguments about politics, getting up early for church on Sunday, holding jobs and cas.h.i.+ng paychecks. Even the petty worries and needs that no longer seem important-like bills to pay and credit cards and what everybody else is wearing and the latest street slang-all of it strikes the boys deep in the soul, making them nostalgic for the mundane world that is ending.

There is a difference between going to Iraq to fight for your country and being in the situation they are in now, literally fighting for your country's survival. If they can keep even a shred of the old America alive, they feel like they will win.

Mooney wants to stay alive, and there is safety in numbers. But it is not enough to stay alive. A man must also have something for which he wants to live as well.

Chapter 11.

I want to tell my story first so you won't forget me The only thing that kept us alive so long was the small firing zones. The Maddies had to bunch up and for a while there, we were shooting fish in a barrel. They came at us in twos and threes out of doorways, around corners, out of cars-they even came flying out of windows. We had maybe sixty men when we stepped off. We were armed to the teeth and cleared hot to shoot anything that moved. No identifying targets. Just shoot and scoot. We also had a good leader. Captain Reese was a d.a.m.n good officer and I would have followed him anywhere, even after he cracked. It took us a while to get used to the fact the enemy wasn't shooting back at us. After that, we went to town.

After ten blocks of being in a meat grinder and shooting at a sustained rate of fire, though, we started to get tired. It was like being under hara.s.sing fire except it was bodies they were throwing at us, not bullets. The abandoned vehicles all over the street forced us to take it slow and screwed up our firing lanes, making us waste ammo. There were cars and trucks and gla.s.s everywhere from one abandoned traffic jam after another, and the shadows from the light poles were murder. We saw over and over again where somebody with a big truck or SUV panicked and tried to ram his way out, pus.h.i.+ng vehicles into pileups. Some of the cars were on fire and pumping out this thick, oily smoke. Civilians were screaming from windows and throwing s.h.i.+t at us to get our attention.

By the time we'd gone twenty blocks, we were down to forty, fifty men. A few guys got killed, but most of our losses were from guys who just melted away into doorways of apartment buildings. You'd turn around, and suddenly they'd be gone. Some walked away because they'd got bit and they knew this was a death sentence. Others probably just thought it was suicide to keep pus.h.i.+ng and they'd had enough. I don't think they're cowards. I really don't. This war is bigger than all of us, almost too big to even understand. People break easy when they try to get their head around something this big. A war where winning feels like losing, and losing, well, it means you're dead.

Anyhow, the Mad Dogs showed up in force from two directions. There were thousands of them out there in the dark, coming fast, all of them growling with each breath so that they sounded like a train. If you ever saw the movie Zulu with Michael Caine, it was like that-thousands and thousands of people running in waves against aimed rifle fire. No, better, I remember I once saw a crowd of a couple thousand kids stampede at a heavy metal concert. Now imagine all those people are running at you and they want to tear you to pieces with their bare hands and teeth. I saw them coming and I p.i.s.sed down my leg. There's no shame in that. It happens to a lot of guys, right? Never happened to me in Iraq, even when the bullets went buzzing right by my ear like wasps. Funny if you think about it. I had to come home to learn true fear.

It's down there? G.o.d, this place looks like an insane asylum. Freaking stinks, too. Listen. Just let me tell the rest of my story before you put me in, please. I didn't fight my way here all night just to get pushed into one of these rooms and forgotten about. I came because I wanted to feel something, anything, like home again, just one more time. And I want to tell my story first so you won't forget me.

Thank you. I mean it.

So there we were, already low on ammo and with a horde of maniacs coming at us out of the darkness, and we tore them a new a.s.shole. We unloaded everything we had on them. No more shoot and scoot. We were a mobile defense, and it was time to defend. We propped the MGs and SAWs on the hoods of cars and rained lead. They were ripped to shreds. Bodies were cut in half. Heads popped off of bodies and flew into the air. It was incredible, like being in some warped virtual reality game. You're going to think I'm one sick puppy, but it felt good. It felt like survival. I didn't see them as people anymore, but as a group, as a whole, like this one big monster. The more they died, the more I lived, you know? I wanted them to keep coming. I wanted them all to die.

And I still honestly thought we'd make it. At that time, despite our fatigue, our ammo situation and our losses, getting overrun was the last thing on my mind. But then rifles started jamming. One of the MGs overheated. I fired mag after mag at a rapid rate of fire until I had almost nothing left, and still they kept coming. Waves of them. Overhead, the helicopters were circling, watching us, and then when things got dicey they strafed the Mad Dogs with the chain guns and, oh Lord, entire sections of the horde just exploded and disintegrated.

Things went to h.e.l.l in a hurry after that.

An Apache came in low, blinding us with his light, and started dropping rockets and now vehicles were being flipped and tossed into the air, like: Wham! Wham! Wham! Hot metal was flying everywhere, ringing off the vehicles and clattering off the walls and ripping through the bodies of the guys in my squad. In an instant the Apache screamed overhead and was gone, I was squinting through the afterglow in my eyes and shooting, and then I noticed that my entire squad had literally disappeared. It was just me and my Sergeant, who was bleeding from his ears and stone deaf and staring in a daze. It wasn't Maddy that killed my squad; it was blue on blue fire. It was right about then that Captain Reese got a little confused because he started screaming into the radio calling for an arty strike almost on top of us to keep the Hajjis from overrunning our position. He completely freaking lost it.

That's when I knew I was a dead man. A river of blood was literally flowing around my ankles like something out of the Bible. Moments later, the power went out and everything went black. And that's when the real horror began.

We had no time to put on NVGs or shoot a flare. We were firing randomly in the dark on full auto, backing up until we formed a square around Captain Reese with bayonets fixed. The muzzle flashes showed glimpses of the Mad Dogs tearing Second Platoon apart, so close you wanted to puke from the stench. They were screaming in the dark. It was hand to hand and the guys were dying fast. And what was I doing? s.h.i.+t, my heart was pounding like a drum and I was p.i.s.sing down my leg. I could barely move, I was shaking so bad.

First Sergeant Callahan tried to pull the Captain away to the safety of a nearby building, but the man stood his ground, shooting his pistol while somebody popped smoke in a crazy try at concealing him. The Maddies swarmed around him and ripped him apart by the handful. I only barely survived after being picked up and thrown into the air by the mob-it was like getting hit by a baseball bat everywhere on my body at once-and crawled under a truck. All around me, the horde just kept coming, running past, rattling the vehicles and making the ground shake like a herd of elephants.

Maddy died by the thousand but he wiped us out and barely broke his stride doing it. And after all that, I lived to hike it back almost the entire way here before some G.o.dd.a.m.n kid pops out the back of a minivan and gives me this on my hand. But I'll tell you, it's just as well, because I'm so tired. In fact, I don't think I've ever been this tired.

Is this my new home?

Any, um, other last requests?

PFC Mooney opens the door to the cla.s.sroom and waits. He and Wyatt have heard the same stories told repeatedly by sh.e.l.l-shocked survivors trickling in since last night. Mooney does not know what to say to the soldier. What is there to say? What does one say to a man whose friends were violently torn apart right in front of him and is now doomed to die from a poison busily replicating itself in his brain?

"I don't get a roommate or nothing?" the soldier wants to know.

"Everybody else who got bit is already starting to turn," Mooney explains. "You could be the last one. They might attack you. We don't know."

"It would have been nice to talk to somebody else from Delta and cross over together."

"Sorry, man."

"It's okay. I guess it doesn't matter. You're gonna die some day whether you get that last smoke in or not. I'm just glad the war's over for me."

"We left a few books in there that we got from the library. Cla.s.sics.

Help you pa.s.s the time. I don't know, maybe you'll like them. We also put the word out in case any of the survivors want to stop by and talk with you through the door. You still got a little time."

The soldier nods. "Right. Okay. Thanks."

Mooney notices that the soldier's left eye is twitching.

"Any, um, other last requests?" says Wyatt.

"No, I'm good," the soldier says, walks into the cla.s.sroom, and approaches the window, looking out into the suns.h.i.+ne. He breathes deep and says, "I'm telling you, it sure is-"

Mooney has already begun to close the door. Wyatt pa.s.ses him a handful of nails, which he hammers into the edge of the wood door to secure it to its frame.

The survivors trickled in all night and the next day, telling their horror stories. Half of them were bitten but had nowhere else to go. The LT did not want to kill them or turn them out so he came up with the idea of converting part of the school's west wing into an asylum.

Wyatt raises the plundered surface of a desk and Mooney begins hammering until it covers the bottom half of the door and its frame. Once the door is completely covered, Mooney nails one of the soldier's dog tags into the wood-name, rank, serial number, blood type and religious preference-while Wyatt scrawls the boy's name with a pen knife.

Mooney waits patiently until Wyatt is done carving. He can hear the Mad Dogs in the other cla.s.srooms pacing and growling. They were soldiers once, these lost boys. This is where they turned, and this is where they will eventually die and be entombed.

Wyatt picks up his carbine and says, "Let's get out of this freaking zoo."

"You say that again and I will take you out, Joel."

Wyatt smiles but says nothing.

Mooney pauses to touch the name Wyatt carved into the wood, struggling through his exhaustion to commit the boy and his paltry details to memory.

PFC James F. Lynch has blood type A and is a Christian, no denomination.

The real problem isn't people leaving the Army. . . . The real problem is the Army leaving us

Sergeant Pete McGraw glides his thumb over the rabbit's foot in his pocket, his personal talisman given to him by his wife before his first tour in Iraq and her death in a car accident on an icy bridge in Maryland months later. The smooth fur of the rabbit's foot comforts him. After everything he has seen and been through in three tours of duty in Iraq and now this bag of d.i.c.ks, he firmly believes luck and Margaret's spirit watching over him are the only things standing between him and oblivion. In his other pocket, he fingers a bent bottle cap he kept on a whim from the first beer he ever had with his girlfriend Tricia, a slim blonde beauty with braided hair down to her waist who shares his pa.s.sion for hard drinking and motorcycles, among other things. He wears a medal engraved with an image of St. Michael, patron saint of soldiers and cops, on a chain around his neck, next to his dog tags and a 7.62-mm bullet. The bullet, the type of round used in AK47 a.s.sault weapons, is the bullet that was going to kill him back in Iraq, and as long as he wore it, it couldn't fulfill its purpose.

From here on out, he is going to need all the luck he can get, seeing how the world is ending.

He falls in with the other NCOs cramming into the school princ.i.p.al's offices, an open works.p.a.ce and lobby with several adjoining private offices that Bowman established as his headquarters. The men nod to each other as they enter, smelling like sweat, gun oil and stale cigarette smoke. A sergeant that McGraw knows from First Platoon catches his eye and gives him a courteous nod, and McGraw wonders at how quickly things change. Just two days ago, the other NCOs were looking at him and his squad like they had blood on their hands and swastikas tattooed on their foreheads. Now they regard his boys with something like respect. His boys popped their cherry in this war early. But if he is getting respect, the NCOs from the other companies who survived the ma.s.sacres are looked upon with something like awe. They went to h.e.l.l and back and survived.

The non-coms gather around 2LT Bowman, who stands with his hands on his hips next to a large tourist map of Manhattan, complete with call-outs of businesses such as Barnes & n.o.ble and Burger King, thumbtacked to the wall. The RTO pushes his way through the bodies, races into one of the private offices, and slams the door. Knight and Bishop come out of one of the other offices and hustle to Bowman's side. Kemper is shading Staten Island and Battery Park red with a Magic Marker. Bowman is already greeting them in a quiet voice, and McGraw can't hear him.

The sergeants blink in the fluorescent light and sip their lukewarm coffee, bags under their eyes and carbines slung over their shoulders, murmuring to each other. Sergeant Lewis is sharing some of his chaw. As Bowman finishes his welcome, they settle down to listen. McGraw does a rough headcount; there are so many NCOs in their unit now that the crowd spills out into the hall. Some he recognizes from the other platoons of Charlie Company, others are survivors from the ma.s.sacre of Alpha, Bravo and Delta. These are the best men the Army has, McGraw thinks. The lifers. They are the bedrock of the Army, these modern-day Centurions. It takes years to make one of these men, and once they are gone, they cannot be replaced.

All of them now report to a young second lieutenant who happens to be the most senior officer alive in the entire battalion. McGraw watches him and thinks: We're lucky the man's competent. It could be much worse. They could have Knight, who is only nominally still in command of Third Platoon, or Bishop, the type of officer who risks lives to advance his career. McGraw has been hearing rumors that Bishop has been telling some of the NCOs that he wanted to lead a party out to try to help the other companies during the ma.s.sacre. The sooner LT gets him squared away, the better.

"Jake has been combing the nets to come up with a list of a.s.sets and threats," Bowman says. "Mike has been marking them on this map. If we're going to survive, gentlemen, we need information."

The NCOs periodically stand on tip toe to improve their view, squinting at the map. McGraw sees a series of colored circles, squares, long smears and triangles littering the length of Manhattan and the river coasts of the boroughs and neighboring states. It is pathetic. In just a few days, the Army has lost control of most of New York City and its population of more than eight million. The color-coded geometric shapes float on the map like islands in an ocean.

We really do have our backs up against the wall, he realizes. Bowman traces his finger across the map and stabs a red square at Battery Park.

"This here is actually what's left of a mechanized infantry brigade of marines sent to reinforce Warlord before Command decided against it," he says. "They've got two platoons at Fort Clinton and the rest are stationed in Staten Island, which used to be Twenty-Seventh Brigade's responsibility. After the government here collapsed, Colonel Dixon declared martial law and cleared Staten Island of Mad Dogs."

Some of the sergeants grin and nudge each other.

"They, uh, do like to take the initiative, so I hear, sir," Kemper says, making the men laugh.

"Yeah, well, Manhattan's got a h.e.l.l of a lot more people than Staten Island," Hooper says, reminding them that they work for a rival branch of the military and not to give the jarheads too much credit for anything.

"I could get some work done around here if I had some LAVs, too," another sergeant says.

"Hooah," somebody mutters.

"Give me some Bradleys and about thirty bulldozers, and I'll unf.u.c.k this island double quick," somebody shouts from the back, and the NCOs cheer.

"The Marines have got their own problems," Bowman says loudly, regaining control. "The only reason the Marines are on Staten Island to begin with is it was being used as a staging point to reinforce us here in Manhattan. The boats dropped off two platoons in Battery Park, then the Bra.s.s called off the game and the units ended up stranded. Now they're effectively cut off from their main force and they are not being resupplied."

The NCOs stop smiling. If military units in the area stop being supplied, then eventually they will start looting to survive, and once an army crosses that line, they cease being an army and become a rabble-part of the problem, not the solution.

Bowman adds, "Meanwhile, Dixon's low on food, ammo and fuel, he has a man down out of every four, and he's now governor and de facto chief of police of an island with nearly five hundred thousand people on it. That's a half a million people getting hungrier, sicker and more p.i.s.sed off by the minute."

The sergeants bury their faces in their coffee mugs, chastened. Bowman returns to the map, pointing at police stations where at least a few cops are trying to hold it together, Financial District and munic.i.p.al buildings occupied by ragtag National Guard units and the Brigade's civilian affairs unit, a bridge still held by military police and engineers, and Twenty-Six Federal Plaza, where a handful of FBI agents, immigration officials, Federal judges and their families are apparently holed up. Manhattan is riddled with islands and pockets of friendly units, but n.o.body is strong enough to link up with anybody else or project their power. The marines at Battery Park might as well be on the Moon. The only real estate any of these units truly controls is right under their feet.

McGraw believes there could be up to fifty, even a hundred thousand Mad Dogs in Manhattan alone. The population grew fast because the problem started mostly in the hospitals and there were thousands upon thousands of people there, lying helpless and easily infected, like tightly packed kindling awaiting a spark. The good news is the Mad Dog population does not appear to be growing as fast as it was. The hospitals have been emptied and most people are staying home, denying the virus a plentiful source of new bodies. In any case, the Mad Dogs now appear to be concentrated into sizable mobs that often end up killing anybody they come into contact with instead of infecting them. Soon, the number of Mad Dogs on the streets is going to start declining as they suffer a ma.s.sive die-off. The war might end soon if everybody just stays hidden and waits.

Somebody asks about the three yellow boxes in Brooklyn and Queens. "I was getting to them," Bowman answers. "As far as I can tell, they're deserters. Nothing bigger than a platoon at this point, but it's another thing that Twenty-Fifth Brigade has to worry about that's out there."

The sergeants glance at each other. The country must really be on the brink of collapse if the Army is starting to fall apart.

But the real problem isn't people leaving the Army, the LT tells them. He adds quickly: "The real problem, it seems, is the Army leaving us." His finger traces along Brooklyn's western coast, a long green smear. "This is Second Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Brigade, commanded by Colonel Guzman. He's in a good position."

Another green smear along the north coast of Queens.