Knight finishes for him. “There aren’t enough bullets.”
Bowman nods. “It’s a numbers game. There’s no way to stop this. It’s only going to get worse. In a few hours, maybe a day, ten percent becomes twenty percent. A flood.”
Across the street, a civilian in a private office has noticed them and is holding up a sign against his window that says: trapped, help.
The officers move to another part of the roof, seething with shame.
They can only help those they can without risking the security of the unit. For a moment, Bowman thinks of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which his uncle Gabe, a recovering alcoholic in AA, taught him when he was ten years old: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
“Who could pull the trigger that many times anyhow?” Knight wonders.
“Private Chen couldn’t,” Bowman murmurs. The soldier wouldn’t be the last who would rather eat a bullet than fight this war, either.
Knight continues, “One of the reasons we got chewed up so bad all the way here is some of my boys just couldn’t shoot Americans.” He glances at his platoon sergeant, then looks away. “Have you, uh, shared your discovery with your platoon?”
“They’re not dumb,” Bowman says. “They know what’s going on. It’s just that nobody’s said it out loud for them yet. They haven’t had a minute to think about it.”
“Yes,” says Knight.
“I guess we’ll have to tell them.”
They flinch as the muffled boom of an explosion reaches their ears. A large cloud of smoke and dust billows out from behind a building between them and Times Square. Even yesterday, this would have been remarkable to them. Today, they take it in stride.
Knight laughs viciously. “We’re going to tell them how their families, and everybody they know, are probably dying or being converted into those things out there.”
“We’re going to tell them to do their jobs, Steve.”
Lewis fires his rifle, which discharges with a loud bang.
“It’s getting personal, Todd. You better come up with something better than that if you want them to keep fighting for a country that’s falling apart around them.”
Bowman looks at Knight in surprise. “Why me?”
Knight smiles sadly. “You’re the one who’s in charge here, Todd.”
“We’re the same rank, but you’ve got seniority over me. You’ve got seniority over Greg Bishop of First Platoon, too. You’re in command.”
“On the way over here . . .” Knight looks at Sergeant First Class Vaughan, who stares back at him stonily, his expression inscrutable behind his N95 mask. “I was one of the people who couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t even give the order. I froze. It was Sergeant Vaughan here that got us out.”
“Damn, Steve,” Bowman says quietly.
He glances at Vaughan, but the NCO is a professional and while his face is flushed, making the diagonal scar across his face livid, his gray eyes give nothing away.
Knight says, “A lot of my boys are dead because I couldn’t tell them to shoot.”
Tears stream down the officer’s face. Vaughan lowers his eyes. Knight looks away, gazing at the skyscrapers.
“Twenty-five percent casualties,” he adds. “But you know what?” He hisses, fiercely, “If I could go back and do it all over again, I still wouldn’t give that goddamn order.”
Bowman says nothing. He had given the order to shoot. He personally not only shot Mad Dogs, he also shot down uninfected civilians who got in his way.
By any definition, he is a murderer and a war criminal. He knows it. His own platoon sergeant knows it. The two men were made from the same stuff; he saw Kemper do the same as him to get the platoon out of the riot and to safety.
And if they did not do what they did, if they were not war criminals, they might all be dead right now.
Nevertheless, he can’t shake the feeling that he is damned.
The officers hear the piercing wail of a fire engine, punctuated by the bursts of its horn. It is a plucky sound amid the rattle of small arms fire and distant screams, reminding them that somewhere, out there, people are still fighting back against the rising tide of violence and anarchy.
The sound reminds them that it is not every man for himself out there. Not yet.
Similarly, the power continues to cut in and out, but somebody is still manning the controls at the power plant, and somebody is still delivering coal to burn to make electricity. In all the jobs that matter, from cop to soldier to paramedic to power plant operator, people are still doing their duty. Bowman finds strength in this idea.
Knight wipes the tears from his face and clears his throat.
“I wouldn’t give the order,” he says. “I guess that makes me a nice guy or something. But I have no right to lead Charlie.” He sighs. “We should have stayed where we were. We were doing some good there.”
“No,” Bowman says. His eyes follow a pair of helicopters moving over the East River until they disappear behind a tall building. He takes it as a good sign that there are still birds in the air. “Captain West had the right idea trying to concentrate the Company. Warlord is spread out all over Manhattan and is vulnerable to being destroyed piecemeal. But it’s too late. We got chewed up. We should have consolidated sooner.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Knight says. “We shouldn’t have been spread out in the first place, then. It’s a mystery. I have a hard time believing that either the government or the Army didn’t know about the infection rate among the Mad Dogs.”
“Could be they were trying to avoid pushing an already panicked country into outright hysteria,” Bowman says. “Could be that they honestly didn’t know. Who knows? Right now, my situational awareness extends to what I can see with my own eyes.”
“Well, if somebody higher up knew about this and didn’t tell us, they may have just destroyed our brigade.”
Bowman stares at him intensely and says, “Hell, Steve. Forget Quarantine. If somebody higher up knew and didn’t tell us, they may have destroyed the U.S. Army.”
Gaps in the chain of command
Sherman tries again to raise Warlord, the call sign for Battalion, and Quarantine, which is Brigade’s call sign, without success.
“Warlord, Warlord, this is War Dogs, do you copy, over?”
No answer from Battalion. The Battalion net is being overloaded with chaotic messages blending together into one long screech. From what the RTO can tell, War Hammer is screaming for reinforcements and ammunition, Warmonger reports the successful occupation of the old Seventh Regiment Armory Building, and War Pig says it has three men down and where’s their goddamn medevac.
“Warlord, Warlord,” Sherman says, then stops. It’s useless.
Sherman switches to the Brigade net and tries to hail Quarantine.
Nobody answers. The only officer he can get a hold of, as they say in the ranks, is General Confusion. The voices on the Brigade net are less panicked than Charlie’s sister companies, but equally confused. There are units missing, trying to consolidate, requesting orders, demanding resupply, on the move, taking casualties. There are gaps in the chain of command. Units are disappearing or moving without their commanders knowing it.
When Quarantine’s XO finally makes an appearance on the net, it is apparently without his knowledge or consent, as he’s shouting at somebody else in the room about a story that The New York Times is writing about the Army’s sudden decision to lay waste to New York and almost every other major city in the country.
Somebody else, Sherman does not recognize the voice, says there is not going to be a New York Times tomorrow morning, and then the transmission cut out.