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Daz managed an encouraging smile.
“That’s a start,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY
TOWN OF STEBBINS
ONE MILE INSIDE THE Q-ZONE
The three infected left the road and came splashing and slogging through the mud toward Sam Imura. Each of them ran differently. The boy’s gait was erratic, like a stroke victim trying to run. The younger man barely shuffled along, his limbs stiff and awkward. But the older man ran with an almost normal gait. Fast and with clear determination.
“Ahh, shit,” said Boxer’s voice in Sam’s earbud.
“Boss?” asked Moonshiner.
“I got this,” said Sam, and he could hear the sadness in his own voice. He raised his pistol and sighted along the black length of the Trinity sound suppressor. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard and squeezed.
A black dot appeared an inch above the right eyebrow of the bearded man, and his head snapped back. Sam used a .22 automatic. The bullet punched in through the front of the skull but it lacked the force for a through-and-through. Instead
the lead bounced around inside the man’s skull and destroyed the brain. The efficient mechanics of the infected man’s gait were destroyed in a microsecond. His legs and arms stopped pumping and instead they flopped uselessly, like a puppet whose strings had all been cut. He fell badly, landed on his face, and did not move.
The younger man was three paces behind him and only with the third of those running steps did he try to move around the obstacle. As if it took that long for whatever drove its brain to identify the obstruction and attempt a course correction. It was too little and too late, and his foot struck the dead man’s outflung leg. The younger man pitched forward, hit hard, and slid five feet through the mud.
Sam Imura ignored him for a moment and watched the boy. He was maybe eleven or twelve. A good-looking kid in a hayseed kind of way. Probably would have been a farmer when he grew up. Probably liked sports and girls and his folks. Probably a pretty good kid.
Sam shot him.
The boy fell and stopped being anything. Not a boy, not a monster. He was meat that would cool in the relentless rain.
Something ignited in Sam’s chest. He’d been in firefights before with other kinds of infected. He’d had to pull the trigger on what the military shrinks called a mercy killing and what his commanding officers filed away as a righteous shoot. However Sam knew full well that when any sane person pulls a trigger on a child—even an infected one—there was no mercy in the action. And it was in no way righteous. It was an act that made him feel complicit in a process of deception and abuse that was as old as warfare. Once, when a fellow operative made a crude joke about such kills as “collateral damage,” Sam took him outside and attempted to beat some conscience into the sonofabitch. The lesson hadn’t worked, it didn’t change the asshole and it hadn’t made Sam feel any better. Though it felt good at the time.
His shrink had a field day with that.
Now, standing in the rain and watching the boy fall, Sam thought about the pathogen. Lucifer 113. Named for a fallen angel.
He wondered how far he was falling. How far he had yet to fall.
The third infected was struggling to his knees. Sam almost shot him.
He didn’t.
It wasn’t a matter of mercy, even now.
He tapped his earbud. “Converge on me. I need a spit hood and flex cuffs.”
The man crawled like an arthritic toward Sam, and as he did so he uttered a low, terrible moan. Was it hunger? Or was it something else? Sam thought he could hear desperation in that moan. Like a person trapped in a burning building.
The rest of the Boy Scouts swarmed in, coming at the infected man from four points. Moonshiner, the biggest of the team, swept the man’s hands off the muddy ground and as the young man collapsed, the big man dropped his knee onto his back. He caught the back of the dead man’s neck and forced the pale face into the mud, keeping it there despite all of the struggling. Sam observed those struggles. There was no art to them, no plan. It was pure reaction.
Gypsy pulled a spit hood over the man’s head and the others bound his wrists with plastic flexcuffs.
“What do we do with him?” asked Gypsy. “Leave him here?”
“Pop him,” suggested Moonshiner.
“No,” Boxer said quickly. “What if the doctors can do something for him?”
Shortstop shook his head. “Intel I read says that this disease is a one-way ticket. No one comes back.”
