“Move!” Wade shouted.
“Bounding!” Fisher ran.
The mob was getting closer by the second.
Rawlings shoved him. “Go! I’ll cover forward!”
No time to argue. He went, hobbling as fast as his ankle would take him.
Gray and Fisher had stopped behind an SUV lying on its side in a pile of glass in the middle of the street. Wade turned. He didn’t see Rawlings.
Gray pumped another grenade into his launcher and fired. “Come on, Wade!”
“I don’t see her!” Then he heard it—gunfire from one of the buildings. Rawlings was leading them off.
Fisher was already running. Gray tossed a smoke grenade onto the street. He grabbed the back of Wade’s blouse and pulled him along.
They stopped after a hundred meters, gasping for air, and looked behind them. None of the Klowns had followed them through the smoke.
“I don’t see Rawlings,” Wade said. He wanted to scream it.
Thunder rumbled ahead of them, the steady boom of gunfire. Hanscom.
“Let’s stay focused here,” Gray said. “We’re not home yet.”
“Fuck you!” Wade shouted. “You killed her. Just like you killed the others.”
Gray spit on the ground. “I didn’t kill anybody, and you know it.”
“If you’d listened to her, we might be out of this already.”
“She wasn’t one of us, Wade.”
Wade glared at him. He’d never wanted to kill anybody so badly in his life.
“Hey, guys!” Fisher called from ahead. He whooped. “Check it out!”
Gray turned and walked off. Wade limped after him. At the top of the rise, they saw Hanscom.
Hundreds of infected ran through the smoke surrounding the compound walls. Machine guns hammered from sandbag positions. In the guard towers, the Mark 19s thumped. Across the Hescos, the lightfighters propped their weapons and kept the fire hot.
“How do we get back to base?” Gray asked. “What do you think?”
Wade laughed. “I think it’s beautiful.”
Gray turned and frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
Wade smiled.
FORTY.
The Klown army ambled down the road. They grinned like wolves, hunting, always hunting. They saw the flare pop in the murky sky. They drooled at the sight.
Bullets pinged off the road. Men tumbled laughing to the ground. The infected looked around and saw the Humvee on the road, its fifty-cal rocking. Tracer rounds flashed in their eyes. The Humvee pulled a U-turn and sped off down the highway. The Klowns gave chase. The vehicles pulled ahead of the infantry, who jogged along, grinning at the prospect of fresh meat.
They passed a series of tripods in the road. The crazies knew what it meant but didn’t care. A rocket streamed out of the nearby trees and struck one of their five-tons. The vehicle exploded and rolled, spilling bodies and equipment. The Klowns pointed and laughed.
Then the demolition kits detonated.
Muldoon blinked at the blinding flash. Vehicles and bodies tumbled in the blast. A wave of dirt reached for the sky and tumbled back down. A massive cloud of dust hung over the shattered road.
His Humvees emerged from concealment and rolled onto the shoulders of the highway, fifties rocking. The Mark 19 showered the wreckage with grenades.
Muldoon picked up the radio. “Sparta Ops, this is Sparta Six. Time to retrograde. Out.”
The Humvees took off the down the road. But Muldoon and his boys weren’t finished.
The vehicles pulled onto the shoulder and idled. Muldoon got out with Ramirez. They climbed the shoulder and lay on the road. Ramirez set up the machine gun. Muldoon scanned the dust cloud with his binoculars. A crowd of infantry jogged out of the dust.
“Man,” said Muldoon. “They sure are dumb.”
Ramirez looked at him. “They’re crazy.”
The Klowns passed two abandoned vehicles. Muldoon squeezed the handheld detonator. The electric pulse traveled down the length of wire to the Claymore mines placed on the ground next to the wrecks. Each had embossed on it, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. The blasting caps activated, detonating the C4 behind a matrix of seven hundred steel balls set in resin. The balls flew out of the daisy-chained mines at four thousand feet per second.
The Klown soldiers disintegrated in a massive spray of blood and body parts.
Ramirez sighted on the soldiers in the rear who’d escaped the blast, and started hammering. Tracers flashed downrange. The Klowns charged, firing as they moved.
“Some human wave shit here,” Ramirez said. “Fuckers think it’s World War One.”
The Humvees rolled out of concealment and engaged with their fifties and the Mark 19. They walked their fire into the crowd of Klowns. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Muldoon had been right. The Klown soldiers knew their tactics. They knew to lay a base of fire before you maneuvered. Fire, maneuver, fire, maneuver. Sweep the enemy’s position with grazing fire to suppress them, then flank and cut them up with enfilade fire. Tactics 101. But the virus couldn’t wait. It cared nothing for self-preservation. It didn’t understand the concept of victory or defeat. It only wanted to play. It wanted to play right now.
Muldoon and Ramirez heard a whistle and put their heads down.
WHAM!
The ground shook. Dirt pattered against their helmets. The Klowns were firing mortars. Soon, they’d have them zeroed.
A Javelin missile streamed toward one of Muldoon’s Humvees. The vehicle rocked as it flew apart in a blinding flash.
“Fuck me,” Ramirez said. “That was Burke and Zeller.”
Another mortar round crashed into the trees. Splinters rained down.
Bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of them. The Klowns had set up a machine gun.
“Time to retrograde,” Muldoon said. He radioed his men to bug out.
They got up and ran to the burning Humvee. Bullets pinged off the road around them. The heat forced them back.
“They’re dead, Sergeant,” Ramirez said.
Another mortar round blew a smoking hole in the highway as they ran to the next Humvee and piled inside it. As they drove off, the men seemed subdued but oddly jubilant. They’d finally won. They’d finally done something good in this nightmarish conflict.
Muldoon called in his situation report and requested the whirlybirds come in to mop up the Klown mortar team. He didn’t feel jubilant at all. Those were American soldiers they’d killed.
This kind of winning felt like losing. Like he’d cut the Afghan boy’s throat after all.
FORTY-ONE.
Gray lay in a heap on the bloody asphalt.
Wade stared down at him. What happened?
The man was alive one second, bleeding from a dozen wounds the next.
Fisher backed away from him. “Aw, no, man.”
What’s with him?
Fisher took another step. “No. Please. Please don’t.”
Wade looked down at the bloody knife he held. He looked at Fisher. “You’d better run,” he hissed.
“Why’d you do that, Wade?”
Wade laughed. “He wasn’t one of us.”
Ramos’s parting gift had taken its sweet time, but it had finally taken control. Little worms in his head. Little puppet strings.
He screamed: “Run!”
Fisher yelped and ran off.
Wade looked down at the body and chuckled. He’d stabbed Gray in the kidneys. He licked the blood off the blade and stabbed again. He kept stabbing and stabbing.
Just before Gray died, they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed as brothers.