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The target was the school.
On the screen, four M1117 armored security vehicles entered through the main gate as machine gunners behind the fence kept watch. The M1117s split and each one began rolling along one side of the school. The vehicles bounced over ragged pieces of the dead.
“Confirmed,” said the same voice. “Zero movement.”
Zetter heard several of the officers let out deep sighs.
He r
eached for a microphone and gave a string of orders for his people to expand the ground search using the modified Desert Patrol Vehicles. Lines of these dune buggy–like, two-man vehicles vanished into the surrounding woods and neighborhoods, going where the heavier and clumsier Humvees couldn’t.
Then Zetter sat back and let out his own sigh. He got to his feet and turned to the gathered officers, all of whom fell silent.
“This is a tragic and terrible day in American history,” he said. “We have all been asked to make hard decisions and to carry them out with professionalism and efficiency.”
The officers nodded.
“You are all aware of the political delicacy of what has happened today.”
More nods, but now they were careful. There were three huge elephants in the room with them, and nobody wanted to talk about any of them except the infection. That was safe ground because it was why they were there. The president and the governor of Pennsylvania had mobilized the Guard to stop the spread of an old Cold War bioweapon that had been released accidentally by a former Soviet scientist. That was, by strict military parlance, a clusterfuck. And the pathogen’s virulence was such that it spread throughout the town, infecting virtually everyone. Killing them. And then in a twist of mad science that even Zetter found hard to accept, it brought the dead back as aggressive disease vectors. The risen dead, driven by the genetically engineered parasites that made up the substance of the pathogen, attacked like sharks—mindless, endlessly hungry, and vicious.
That resulted in the second elephant in the room, the one each of them knew would haunt their lives and taint the military here on the ground and the administration in Washington. Acting under orders to sterilize the town in order to stop the spread of the infection, Zetter’s command predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich, had ordered the town’s emergency shelter—the Stebbins Little School—to be destroyed. It was filled with people, many of who were infected. Every officer understood the necessity for that kill order; most of them even agreed with it.
However, a reporter, Billy Trout from Regional Satellite News, was inside the school. Inside, but connected to the outside world via a live news feed. As the gunships opened up on the building, Trout made an impassioned plea to the world to save the uninfected children. The plea hit every single news service. The media and public outcry was immediate and massive.
Massive.
And that directly led to the ugliest part of this—at least for the officers in that command center. The reporter’s plea was broadcast to the troops outside the building via the school’s public address system.
The result?
One by one the soldiers at the fence stood up and refused to follow orders. They would not kill the children.
It was mutiny, and one officer—a young lieutenant—tried to nip it in the bud, but he was overwhelmed and, eventually, outranked as a more senior officer—Captain Rice—went to stand with the mutineers.
The president had immediately ordered General Zetter to relieve Dietrich of his post and assume overall command of the situation. Every officer there knew that it was unfair to put the blame on Dietrich, just as it was unfair that the public and the media would demonize them for their actions in Stebbins County.
Actions that, had they not been taken, would have opened the door to a massive and perhaps unstoppable pandemic.
That was the biggest elephant in the room, and nobody there dared talk about it.
Now, another chapter had been completed. Zetter had contacted the reporter and two police officers inside the school and made them a deal. If they sent out every infected person then the school would be spared.
It was a bad deal and everyone—inside and outside the school—hated it.
But it would play well in the media. As well as something like this could play.
Zetter looked at each of his officers and read variations on this story in each pair of eyes. He grunted softly and nodded.
“You all have your assignments,” he said. “Let’s finish the cleanup so we can all go home.”
The officers stood to attention—crisply, silently, and with absolutely no trace of expression or emotion on their faces. Zetter couldn’t blame them for not wanting to show anything to him. He was the hatchet man for the administration, and that administration would be looking for more scapegoats to sacrifice on the altar of public outrage. It was how the politics of warfare worked, and it was how that worked probably going back to Alexander the Great.
When he was alone, Zetter sat down and sagged into his chair, feeling all of his years and more that he hadn’t earned. He knew that once this was over he was as done as Dietrich. Done and gone.
He wasn’t even sure he minded.
Not after a day like today.
