LLOYD
From the rooftop of the Biological Laboratories building, Lloyd, Denise, and numerous others had box seats to the air force's assault on the dead. Striking hotspots provided by the military's scouts, planes from Hanscom worked in conjunction with B-2s from Whiteman AFB to carpet-bomb whole neighborhoods into ash.
A triumvirate of smoke plumes rose in the still morning air. The bombers devastated the neighborhood to their south, turning Harvard Medical Clinic into a mountain of burning rubble. Similarly, Mount Auburn Hospital burned to the west, while CHA Cambridge fell to the east.
They were only the start of the pummeling that the city would endure before this long day was over. By nightfall, the fires would rekindle the blaze spreading over the city's commercial districts, igniting the eastern sky in an artificial dawn.
Every time the flames spiked, a few soldiers cheered softly. Most everyone else, Lloyd and Denise included, simply watched the surreal exhibition in stunned silence.
"Goddamn," Lloyd whispered breathlessly.
She glanced over at him. He held his swollen stomach and stared at the passing jets with a face as pale as one of their contrails. He woke up feeling nauseous for the second day in a row. Watching Boston burn to the ground wasn't helping his digestion.
"You okay?" she asked.
"I guess. Just can't believe it's come to this."
"I know what you mean. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up any minute in my bunk in Iraq."
The bruise on his ankle itched maddeningly. Lloyd stood on one leg to scratch it, without tearing his gaze from the scene of devastation to the south.
His expression soured. "Some of the men were talking. Word is that they practically had to level Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Washington," he said. "The dead were everywhere. I heard someone in power even toyed with the idea of rolling out the nukes. Can you imagine?"
"Christ. Really?" Denise asked.
Lloyd shrugged. "I'm guessing somebody with an ounce of common sense probably realized that the fallout from their treatment would've been worse than the disease."
"Good thing for us."
Feet pounded up the stairs from the opened rooftop door behind them. The couple glanced over their shoulders at the racket. Corporal Martinez and a few other soldiers rushed onto the roof, looking frantic. While the men scattered to speak to their comrades, Martinez spotted Denise and came straight over.
"Sergeant," she said in a sharp exhale of breath, "Lieutenant Kershaw sent me to find you. You're needed downstairs. We're mobilizing all our forces immediately."
"What's happening?" Denise asked.
"Our lookouts spotted a big herd of slow walkers moving in from the north. Probably drawn this way by the bombing. We're launching a counteroffensive to stop them before they get here. They're even rolling out the tanks."
Denise regarded Lloyd with a face pinched in concern. "I have to go."
"Not without me you're not," he promptly replied.
"Lloyd—"
He pointed at Martinez. "You heard her. It's all hands on deck. I'm not standing idly by while I can still fight."
"He's right, Sarge," Martinez said. "The colonel ordered us to recruit everyone combat-ready for deployment on the front lines. That includes civilians. Only a small detachment are staying behind to protect the camp and those unable to fight."
Denise took him by the hand. "You should stay here with them. You don't know—"
"We're not having this discussion, Dee," Lloyd growled. "I'm coming with you. That's all there is to it."
Denise scowled at him. "You are the most frustrating, aggravating man I've ever met."
He smiled. "I love you too."
***
Lloyd had to hand it to the army. Their constant state of readiness meant their forces were in position to face the enemy in less time than it would take him to drag his lazy ass out of bed in the morning.
In no time, they transformed the commercial district of Beacon Street into a battlefield. A pair of Abrams tanks, one carrying Lieutenant Kershaw, idled in the nearly empty parking lot of a StartMart outlet. Fire teams positioned outside the chain store hurriedly stacked sandbags for cover. Rows of snipers lined the surrounding rooftops. Mortar teams peppered front lawns. Armed soldiers, both the military and civilian variety, occupied virtually every other spot.
Colonel Hayes stood in the middle of the road at the forefront of his company. He stared at the army slowly marching towards them from the north end of the street. From his spot near the back, Lloyd gazed at the colonel's tense, motionless posture and wondered if the man had stopped breathing. He made mannequins look jittery.
"Fuck me," another armed civilian whispered nearby. Lloyd was glad to discover he wasn't the only one about ready to piss himself at the sizable horde bearing down on them.
The standoffs at Times Square and Pennsylvania Avenue during the initial days of the outbreak hadn't gone so well for the living. He couldn't imagine how tactics that had failed the military's superior numbers so spectacularly were now expected to work in their favor. He kept an eye peeled for Denise, just in case. If things got too bad, he'd grab her and run for it. No way was this going to be their Waterloo.
She was with her squad, guarding the right flank. Hayes charged them with protecting the soldiers huddled over their mortars. Artillery would provide the first salvo in this battle. God willing, it would be all the stopping power they'd need.
Lloyd wasn't sure what to expect. The similarities to Braveheart stopped once the enemy showed the pale whites of their eyes. Unlike Mel Gibson's character, Hayes skipped the entire rousing speech part of the drama and jumped straight to the issuing of orders.
A series of sharp pops clapped in Lloyd's eardrums. Seconds later, explosions engulfed the ranks of the dead. The artillery teams ran back and forth, tossing rounds into their mortars in a rapid-load barrage against the enemy's frontline. He couldn't see the effect it was having on the zombies for all the drifting smoke, but he had to assume it was nothing short of devastating.
Denise and her squad opened fire on a second threat emerging from the alley between a pair of tenement buildings. A handful of zombies from a nearby neighborhood lurched into view, drawn by their arrival and enticed by the sounds of warfare. Gunfire mowed them down like dying weeds.
Before coming here, Mueller provided every fighter with a thorough spritz of Z-Off. Watching the dead go down with looks of confusion, he realized that was the edge they didn't have in New York or those other cities. Without the scent of fresh meat urging them on, zombies had ceased to be a real threat. That was why Hayes allowed civilians to accompany them. This wasn't a battle. It was target practice.
Lloyd snickered, earning some curious glances from those around him. Now that he understood the colonel's thinking, he saw everything around him in a new light. Even the tanks that the army brought with them served a secondary purpose. That's why Hayes positioned them off to the side rather than moving them into attack position. They weren't here simply to provide support. The rattle of their engines was helping to lure the enemy.
Up the road, much of the smoke cleared from the initial barrage. Bloodied and battered corpses stumbled over the burning remains of their slain companions. The surviving mob groaned loudly, not with the bloodthirsty growls of hungry predators, but with the moans of dazed animals. They kept coming at a languid pace, more curious than hungry.
"Artillery," Hayes called out. "Hit them again."
Mortars popped again. After the smoke cleared from this volley, they repeated their attacks a third time. Beacon Street became Beacon crater. Wrecked, burning buildings looked down upon the blackened carnage of a smoldering charnel pit.
Lloyd shuffled his weight off his bruised ankle. He began to wonder if there'd be anything left for the rest of them to clean up. By the time the smoke dissipated after this final assault, only a fraction of their numbers remained standing in the rubble. Most of them were so disoriented that they couldn't decide which way to turn.
Hayes raised his hand. Lloyd didn't know what that gesture meant. He was either ordering a ceasefire or about to move in to clear out any survivors. Maybe both.
It didn't matter. As silence descended around him, the soft echo of splashing water made everyone perk up and take notice.
"You hear that?" a nearby man in a tattered winter coat and a greying beard murmured. He peered around anxiously, the shotgun he carried held protectively against his chest.
Lloyd turned. The noise was coming from somewhere behind them, and growing louder by the second. Something was closing in on them, but unless they now had to deal with ghosts, he couldn't perceive what this new threat might be.
His gaze lowered to a manhole cover. Instantly, he realized why they couldn't see anything.
"They're in the sewers," he shouted.
Lloyd aimed his rifle at the manhole. The iron plate was shifting, as if lifted from below by something trying to force its way to the surface.
He tightened his finger on the trigger. Around him, the other civilians and soldiers in his squad did the same. In spite of the chill, a bead of nervous sweat trickled down his brow.
The cover dropped back in place and stopped moving. Lloyd held his breath. An anxious hush fell over the crowd.
Lloyd almost deluded himself into thinking that whoever was down there had moved on, when the plate suddenly bounced up and fell ajar. Pale eyes glared out from the shadowy gap. The moment they spotted their prey trembling above, all hell broke loose.
A plague of undead rats vomited from the sewers, seemingly without end. Their dark bodies pooled outward in a fan of bloodstained pelts, swarming towards the civilians bringing up the rear of Hayes' army. Lloyd took a frightened step back, realizing immediately that Mueller's chemical repellent was useless against the rodents' keen senses.
Someone's nerve broke. Stray gunfire prompted everyone, including Lloyd, to commence shooting at the emerging menace. A storm of rifle reports cracked the heavens.
Bullets picked apart the tiny terrors, spraying black blood everywhere. Despite the carnage, their efforts were seemingly for naught. For every one they put down, three more spurted from the furry geyser erupting onto Beacon Street.
"Retreat! Get inside the building," Hayes shouted.
With the front and back lines now switched around, only the colonel's formerly frontline troops were in a position to obey his command. They raced to hook up with Denise's team and the artillerymen. As for Lloyd and the rest of the unfortunates bringing up the rear, the rats were upon them before they could take their third step.
Lloyd watched the swarm wash his way in a flurry of twitching tails and beady eyes. At some point, he began to scream. It probably started around the same time that his rifle had gone empty. He could barely hear his own voice over everyone else howling in terror.
Powerless to prevent his grisly fate, Lloyd clamped his eyes shut. He gritted his teeth and waited for the monsters' sharp fangs to begin biting into his flesh. His last thought was of Denise. He hoped she couldn't see him from where she stood. He didn't want his brutal demise to be her last memory of him.
Sounds invaded the darkness. The patter and chitter of their horrible foes grew louder in his ears, until it was overshadowed by the agonized screams of his comrades. Lloyd wailed and prayed for the nightmare to be over quickly.
Gradually, something dawned on him. Despite the bloodshed and chaos happening all around him, he was still in one piece. Lloyd stole a peek. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing.
The rats' exodus from the sewers had slowed. What filled the street now looked like several muddy rivulets flowing from a subterranean spring. With his breath caught in his lungs, Lloyd peered around in a daze. The men who stood closest to him were writhing on the ground in wailing, bloody, rat-covered clumps. Others fell, fled, or faced the enemy on their feet or on their knees. Death found them all eventually.
All of them, that is, except Lloyd.
He took a shaky step. A rat squeaked and hopped off his boot. It dropped into the unbroken tide of furry bodies flowing between his legs.
"What the fuck?"
He gaped with revulsion and horror at the diminutive monsters tearing into his squad mates. For some inexplicable reason, the reanimated rodents ignored him completely. He was standing in a pool of death and not one of their attackers showed the slightest bit of interest in him.
"Lloyd!" Denise screamed.
He searched the bedlam for his lover's face. He found her staring back at him from a safe distance next to Colonel Hayes and his men. Judging by her astonished expression, he must have looked like Jesus walking on water. With undead vermin covering every inch of ground around his feet, the miracles probably weren't all that different.
"Lloyd?" she cried. "How..?"
"I'm... I'm all right," he called back to her. "Go! You guys get to safety."
Hayes threw him a puzzled glance and nudged Denise towards the tenement building, where the other survivors were already collecting inside. Rooftop sharpshooters blasted cover fire into the thick mass of rat bodies filling the street, though it would take more than bullets to keep this enemy at bay.
Fortunately, the rats didn't pursue them. It wasn't due to their efforts to fend them off, though. There was apparently enough food already bleeding out on Beacon Street to keep the swarm satisfied for the time being.
Lloyd lowered his eyes. A rat scurried in front of him, moving to help pick apart the carcass of one of his fallen comrades. He stepped on its head, crushing it under the heel of his boot. The other rodents didn't even twitch a whisker at its violent demise.
"Seriously? What the flipping fuck?" he wondered again, trying to wrap his head around the situation. His apparent invisibility to the dead made no sense to him.
It couldn't have anything to do with Mueller's Z-Off. He received the same ration of spray before the battle as everyone else. There was something different about him. Something the rats were sensing. Something that fooled them into thinking he was one of them. Lloyd chuckled dryly at the notion.
"Right. Screw you then, you furry little shitheads," he cursed. "If I'm Lord of the Goddamn Rats, then let's see how you like these apples."
He stomped his feet, kicking and stamping on rodents like Bigfoot throwing a tantrum. Not only did they not fight back, they didn't even seem to have the common sense to dodge out of his way. He squashed dozens of them underfoot in a matter of seconds.
A glance up the road revealed more trouble on the way. Drawn by the gunfire and the scent of freshly killed prey, the surviving mob of human zombies lumbered towards him with renewed purpose. He didn't know if his protection extended to their kind or only to rats. To be honest, he really didn't care to stick around long enough to find out.
Alarmed screams from the Startmart parking lot caught his attention. The soldiers huddled behind their sandbags broke cover and raced for the safety of shelter with a mischief of rats on their heels. Their automatic weapons managed to keep the attackers at bay long enough for most of them to make it inside, save for the last two men in their group. One soldier fell under a furry blanket and didn't get back up. Another went down screaming in a frenzy of flailing hands. All their comrades could do was watch both men perish behind the safety of the storefront windows.
The tanks roared into life. Undead vermin went still as they considered this noisy new threat. Metal treads clanked on the pavement. The vehicles rolled forward, crushing the guardrail at the lot's edge and pulverizing any rats caught in their way. They pulled to a stop in the middle of the street, directly between the devils coming down the road and the demons already here.
Stepping on a few more zombie rodents along the way, Lloyd ran over to the closest Abrams and climbed up to the heavy caliber weapons mounted on top. Excited voices echoed from inside. The soldiers were probably surprised that someone was still alive out here, much less in any shape to scale the armored vehicle.
"Stay in there," Lloyd called out to them. "It's not safe to come out. For some reason, they're not bothering with me. I intend to make them regret that."
Checking out the weapon selections available to him made him feel a little like Goldilocks. The massive turret was out of the question, as was the huge .50-caliber machine gun mounted in place behind it. However, a smaller, 7.62mm machine gun with a shitload of ammo looked just right to kick ass and take names. Denise probably knew its real designation. Personally, he was torn between calling it the Rambo Deluxe Kickass Gun and My New Best Friend. If it was half as deadly as it looked, he couldn't wait to get his hands on it and make mincemeat out of these furry buggers.
Grinning wickedly, he set himself to figuring out how to disconnect it from its fixed mount.
His earlier warning to the soldiers inside escaped the attention of the occupants of the second vehicle. Lloyd jerked his head up at the scrape of the top hatch opening atop the lead tank. Lieutenant Kershaw popped up from below to survey the situation firsthand. The officer wasn't long spotting the stray civilian futzing about with army property.
"You, there!" he shouted. "What are you doing? Get inside the tank where it's safe."
"I'm plenty safe already. You're the one in danger. Get back inside. I got this." He gazed back down at the network of clamps and doodads holding his supergun in place. "I think..."
Rather than obeying Lloyd's order, Kershaw instead followed his idea. He reached over and deftly removed the smaller gun from its mount, then readied himself to repel boarders.
"Pull the mounting pin," he shouted at the puzzled civilian.
Lloyd blinked at him, and then looked closer at the gun. Realizing what the lieutenant meant, he yanked a long pin affixing the weapon to the mount. The gun came loose in his hands. It was heavier than it looked. Lloyd figured it'd probably get lighter once he emptied it into the furry carpet covering the street.
Cackling with mad glee, Lloyd stood up and turned the huge gun on the rats below. Rocking his best Scarface impression, he shouted, "Say hello to my little friend."
Rambo did the talking after that in a thundering blast of gunfire. Sparks flew off the blood-soaked pavement as the weapon's huge bullets tore apart the vermin like confetti. Nearby, Kershaw's gun joined in the symphony of bloodshed. Their noisy duet was enough to make the dead sit up and take notice.
"Like that? You like that?" Lloyd screamed in a wild frenzy, not letting up on the trigger once. "How about you? You want some of this? Come on!"
It wasn't hard to see the difference between live rats and their mindless, undead counterparts. For one thing, the racket of the fire-belching cannon in his hands should have sent them fleeing in panic. Instead, they remained put while gorging themselves on their victims, apparently unbothered by the human punching their tickets to the big cheese wheel in the sky.
Time stopped progressing by conventional standards. Lloyd's awareness of its passing fell to how badly Rambo's heft made his arms ache. He let up on the trigger for a moment to catch his breath and to survey the damage to his miniscule enemy's forces. Fur and blood drenched the street. If a whisker twitched anywhere down there, it did so by the grace of the blowing wind.
It was in this lull that he thought to check on his co-gunner. Unfortunately, the magic cloak of invulnerability draped over him didn't extend to anyone else.
The lieutenant's cries had taken on an edge of desperation. Kershaw hopped around in his opened hatch, shooting and swatting off rats mounting the tank from all sides.
"Kershaw!" Lloyd cried. He didn't trust his aim enough with the heavy gun to risk shooting too close to the soldier, so he instead polished off the swarm racing across the ground around the tank. Rat bodies went flying in thick spurts of blood, up until the moment his ammo supply ran dry.
His efforts weren't enough. Wailing in pain and panic, Kershaw dropped his gun and dove back inside the vehicle with a pair of rats clinging to his uniform. The other occupants of the vehicle joined him in screaming as more of the undead vermin poured inside through the still-opened hatch.
Lloyd gaped at the swarm-infested tank, powerless to help them. Beyond the rats piling into the vehicle, the remnants of the zombie horde neared after their long march down Beacon Street. They were met by a flurry of bullets from the sharpshooters perched on the nearby rooftops.
"Christ," Lloyd muttered breathlessly. He couldn't believe this was happening.
An explosion erupted from inside the besieged tank, probably from one of its occupants pulling the pin on a grenade while there was still time to avoid an even worse death. Smoke and fire blossomed from the opened hatch, tossing fried rats into the air.
The shockwave blasted Lloyd from the roof of the second tank, ripping his empty gun from his hands and knocking him onto a mat of fur. The back of his head slammed the pavement. His lungs emptied in a single breath. Staring up at the sky, he watched morning fade into night.
The darkness was a reprieve from this waking nightmare. Serenaded by the crack of gunfire and the moans of the dead, Lloyd surrendered to unconsciousness atop his mattress of grimy pelts.