“What about POTUS?”
“Assign him and his staff to a private floor away from the others. But Jay, nobody leaves the plaza until Scythe is contained, and I mean nobody. Is that clear?”
“POTUS’s people may insist on getting him out of Dodge.”
Colonel Zwawa glanced out his office window at the wall of monitors and its dozen talking heads. “That option is already being debated by the Pentagon assholes who got us into this mess. Fortunately, when it comes to containment, I’m in charge, so here are my orders, for your ears only: No one leaves the UN. If POTUS’s people panic, your orders are to take out his Secret Service detail.”
“Sweetheart, they don’t call you Vicious for nothing.”
“Whatever it takes, Jay Zee. We’ll sort the bodies out at the trial. Where’s Jesse?”
“In the alleyway, searching for the attaché case.”
Jesse Zwawa and three members of Delta Team enter the alleyway. Rubber boots slogged through tire tracks crushed into patches of snow between pools of slush. Wind howled through the passage, muffled by their protective hoods. Orange Racal suits and rebreathers. Astronauts bound to Earth to fight an invisible prey. Three men carried field packs and reach poles, the oldest among them an emergency medical kit.
Dr. Arnie Kremer limped on a hip two weeks away from replacement surgery. He was too short for the assigned Racal suit, which bunched around his knees, making it difficult to walk. An hour ago, Kremer and his wife had been enjoying their breakfast at an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Tropicana Resort in Atlantic City. The beginning of a weeklong vacation — cut short by Uncle Sam. Army Reserves: the gift that keeps on giving.
The physician stumbled into the man in front of him. The team had abruptly stopped.
Captain Zwawa was fifty feet from the dumpster, a GPS in hand. The object they sought was in the trash bin but something was lying on the ground directly ahead. At first glance, the commander had assumed it to be a ragged pile of wet clothes—
— only now it was moving.
“Dr. Kremer, front and center.”
Arnie Kremer joined the captain. The wet mass was obscured by the frenzied presence of a dozen or more rats, each the size of a football. Their black fur was slick with splattered blood. Feasting… but on what?
“Is that a dead dog?”
“Let’s be sure.” Zwawa extended his reach pole. Abused the mass as he flipped the heap over, his actions barely inconveniencing the rodents.
Both men jumped back. Kremer gagged inside his hooded mask.
It had been a maintenance worker. Rats had taken the right half of the man’s face and both eyes. Two males fought over an optic nerve still protruding from a vacant eye socket like a strand of spaghetti. The rest dined on the remains of the man’s stomach like a ravaging horde of puppies suckling from their mother’s teats. Rodents were crawling over and inside the internal organs, causing the victim’s bulging belly to undulate.
When a blood-drenched rat crawled out of the dead man’s mouth, Zwawa lost it. Backing away, he wrenched his right arm free of the Racal suit’s sleeve, ran his hand up his chest to the internally attached barf bag, then shoved it over his mouth a second before he regurgitated his breakfast.
The rest of Delta team hummed and clenched their teeth and tried their best not to listen to the sickening acoustics playing over their headphones.
Ryan Glinka, Delta Team’s second-in-command, approached his commanding officer. “You okay, Captain?”
Zwawa nodded. Sealing the barf bag, he stowed it in an internal pocket, then turned to face his men. “Mr. Szeifert, I believe this is your area of expertise.”
“Yes, sir.” Gabor Szeifert stepped forward, but not too close. A veterinarian and epizootic specialist from Hungary, today’s assignment marked his first actual field experience. “Something is not right. Rats normally don’t feed like this. They appear to be stimulated.”
“Shh! Listen.” Ryan Glinka held up his hand for quiet.
Beyond the howling wind and the noise of a distant siren, they could hear rapid thumps coming from inside the steel bin. As they watched, a black rat scurried up the brown, rust-tinged metal and over the opening, leaping into the receptacle.
Dr. Kremer’s skin crawled inside his protective suit.
Captain Zwawa attached a hook to his reach pole and handed it to Szeifert. “Retrieve the case, just be gentle.”
Gabor approached the steel bin as more rats appeared, the rodents racing in and out of the trash receptacle at a frenetic pace. The Hungarian scientist leaned in closer to see over the edge of the open container. Looked inside—
“Nem értem…”
It was an orgy of dark bodies and flesh-tone tails, tearing and gnashing and scrambling atop one another in an effort to get at something buried beneath the moving pile. A kaleidoscope of the living and the dead, the wounded and the inflicted — all part of a churning rodent mass that moved like a synchronized black tide.
“Mr. Szeifert!”
“Sorry, sir. I said I don’t understand. There are so many of them. We need to—”
A lone rat leapt onto Gabor’s shoulder. The veterinarian attempted to swat the creature away as it furiously gnawed at his protective suit. Joined by two more, then another, then in threes and fours and far too many to count as the dumpster’s open ledge became a launching point to the next buffet.
The animal specialist stumbled toward Dr. Kremer. Black rats swarmed across both men’s shoulders, clinging to their backs and thighs, their clawed feet and sharp teeth tearing into the fleeing soldiers’ Racal suits—
— instantaneously falling to the ground like bags of hair, their tiny legs writhing in spasms as Ryan Glinka gassed them into submission with a cylinder of compressed carbon dioxide.
Jesse Zwawa stepped over the gasping rodents, holding a CO2 grenade in his gloved hand. “Anyone hungry for ratatouille?” He pulled the pin, tossing the canister into the trash bin.
Boom!
Rat shrapnel blasted out of the container in all directions, the hollow metallic gong echoing in their ears as a swirling cloud of CO2 escaped above the damaged trash bin.
Dr. Kremer fought a gag reflex, forcing himself to wipe matted black hairs and bloody excrement from his faceplate. “That was a bit radical, don’t you think?!”
“We need the attaché case. I’m guessing it’s buried somewhere beneath the pile.”
“If that’s true, the rats could be vectors. I’ll need live specimens to run toxicology exams.”
“You want live rats, pull ’em off Gabor. You want fillet of rat, here’s a whole dumpster filled with the sons of bitches.” Walking around the back side of the steel bin, Jesse Zwawa leveraged his two-hundred-pound frame against the smoldering container—
— sending the Dumpster crashing forward, spilling its contents across the garbage-strewn tarmac.
Ryan Glinka extended his reach pole, sifting through the moist pile of rodent remains until he hooked the open attaché case.
The rats had chewed it beyond recognition. All that remained was a piece of its handle and a seventeen-inch section of bare metal dangling a bloodied hinge.
Glinka held the scrap metal in the air for his commanding officer. “I think we’ve got problems, sir. Captain?”