Outbreak boston, p.7
Outbreak: Boston, page 7
The sergeant nodded. “On your way, Airman.” the big man grumbled. A brief expression of embarrassment ghosted across his face. “I’m sorry for roughing you guys up. There’s been a lot of looting going on.”
“No harm, no foul Sergeant.” Amy said with a hint of empathy as she climbed back in to the Humvee. She fired up the engine and motored away from the checkpoint once everybody was back in their respective vehicles.
Eamon spared a glance at the soldiers in the side view mirror of the Humvee. “Asshole.” he muttered under his breath and busied himself with something in his pocket. “Are you okay?”
Amy spared at glance at the man sitting next to her and smiled at the concern on his face. “I’m fine.” she said quickly then turned her attention back to the road. “Keep your eyes open. The next people that surprise us like that might not be so friendly.”
At long last they made their way to the gates of the base. Amy groaned inwardly: there was a great snarl of traffic along the half mile or so of road leading from the highway separating the post from the housing section to the gate. “Geez…” she muttered and rubbed her forehead. A handful of men in uniforms were making half hearted attempts at inspecting the vehicles of people trying to get on the base. Some of them had working dogs that they used to search the cars. “Eamon, switch with me a minute. I’m going to go talk to those guys.”
A cacophony of honking horns, shouting people and crying children competed for Amy’s attention as she approached one of the airmen on gate guard. She gave the dog handlers a wide berth, eyeing the large German Shepherds they worked with a mixture of fear and suspicion. Frays would never ever admit it, but she was so terrified of dogs that she had taken advantage of her DI’s open door policy to plead with her Drill Instructors at the academy to get reassigned to a law enforcement section.
An old woman rushed to her side and clutched her arm with a frantic intensity. “Please! Please! Can you get us in?” the woman pleaded with tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “I have my grandchildren with me. Please let us in!”
Amy’s voice clogged up in her throat as she let the woman lead her to her car. “I’m sorry, ma’am.” she managed at last as the two of them stood next to a beat up Ford Fiesta. Two small, tired and scared faces gazed hopefully at her from the back window of the car. Amy took a bottle of water from her cargo pocket and handed it to the children’s grandmother. “Here, take this. It’s the best I can do for now.” she said as she peeled the old woman’s hands from her forearm. “I’m sorry.”
Frays found it very hard to not look back at the woman as she approached the airmen checking the cars. She gripped her carbine tightly, willing the image of the children’s faces out of her mind. Frays recognized three or four people from the Base Security section by sight but didn’t know them. After a brief conversation the highest ranking man agreed to let their two trucks pull around the line of civilian vehicles and onto the base. Amy hurried back to the Humvee and Five Ton and told the others what was going on. Much to the anger of the civilians waiting in line, they pulled their trucks out of the queue and went through the gate and pulled up to the supply depot set up at the southeast corner of the runways that intersected the large open field on the south side of the base.
Amy’s heart sank as they pulled up and started to unload their truck. The field was rapidly filling up with civilian cars and trucks. A great many people seemed to be wandering around lost and there did not seem to be enough food, water and other supplies at the makeshift depot to care for them all. “Great idea coming here, Frays.” Lacey grumbled under his breath as the two of them each added two cases of MREs to the base’s stores. “We had enough to see us through for awhile.”
Frays scowled at the man. “Do you have a cell phone?” she asked as she went back to the truck and hopped up into the bed. “Go call your wife. I’ll bet she’s here.”
A fit of pique overtook him and Lacey stomped after the woman. “Why are you giving up our supplies? What gives you the right?”
“This stuff isn’t ours to keep, Private.” Amy said sharply as she wheeled about and jumped down from the truck. She pointed at the dozens of civilian cars parked around them. “Take a look around you, Lacey. These people need our help. Don’t you remember what you swore when you raised your hand? ‘I will defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic’. Does that ring a bell?”
The man glowered down at her. “Don’t talk to me like that, you little bitch.” he growled as he seemed to grow a few inches in Amy’s vision.
Frays could not have looked more shocked if the Marine had reached out and slapped her. It took her half a second to regain her composure. “Look, just calm down.” she said quickly, lowering her voice and backing away from the man. Her left arm went across her stomach while her right hand stroked her chin thoughtfully. “It’s like this. I put coming here to a vote. You agreed, so let’s not pretend like this is my idea. I know we’re all tired and scared, but we’re all going to have to stick together to get through this and to be frank I’m tired of putting up with your gas. You’re more than welcome to try and find your own unit if you don’t like the way I’m running things. Clear?”
The scrawny Marine grumbled something unintelligible under his breath then nodded. “Fine, Senior Airman.” he said in a low voice. Lacey dug his cell phone out of an ammo pouch and turned it on. It rang and rang for a few minutes then switched over to voicemail. He sighed and left a message, choking on his words the whole time, before returning to the truck. The work went quickly because a few more soldiers came over and pitched in. When they were finished they each grabbed a bottle of water from an open case and took five in the shade of the truck.
“My unit’s armory is near here.” Amy said after a little bit. “I think we should take the extra guns and ammunition over there and lock them up in the arms room.” She collected everyone’s empty bottles and put them in a trash bin marked ‘Empty Water Bottles’ a little ways from the supply depot and started towards the Humvee. “If the supply guy is still there we’ll see if we can get you guys some gear. I need to replace my stuff too, come to think of it.”
Amy drove the Humvee and Lacey followed in the Five Ton as before as they rolled through the makeshift refugee camp. She hopped out when they arrived at the back door of a long rectangular brick building. Jean and Lacey followed, leaving Eamon to watch the trucks. A narrow hall made by steel mesh coated in black rubber bolted from the floor to the ceiling divided the room with a large door like a bank vault a few feet on the left.
The lights were on but Amy’s heart sank when she saw that the arms room door was open. She frowned and crept towards it, already picturing the empty ready racks bolted to the vault’s walls and the cabinets thrown open. Much to her surprise and delight two men, one a skinny black man and the other a heavy set Latino, stood inside the cage with Mossberg 590A1 shotguns at the ready. “Tanner! Gomez!” she exclaimed with a huge grin on her face “I should have known you two would be shamming in here! Come on and help us get some stuff locked away in here.”
“Alright, alright.” Gomez muttered as he stood up with a key ring in his hand. “What you got anyway?”
“We found some M16A3s, a couple M9s, a Glock 17 or two and a couple thousand rounds of ammunition.” Amy answered as the Latino unlocked the inner door to the vault. “Oh! And a 203 grenade launcher.”
Between Tanner, Gomez and the rest of them they managed to get all the gear inside the arms room in one trip. When it was all locked up Amy brought up a subject that gnawed on her mind. “Hey, Tanner.” she asked when she set down a case of 5.56 ammunition in the corner of the arms room. “Is there anyone else here? I mean…are we it?”
The man looked at her like he was trying to think of what to say. He reached into the cargo pocket of his ABUs and pulled out a pack of Newports as he walked towards the back door. Frays followed and asked him again.
He handed the young woman a cigarette and lit it for her before lighting one of his own. “I was going to ask you the same thing, Frays.” he said at last. Something strange tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What happened out there?”
Amy took a deep breath and paused then took a long drag on her cigarette before launching in to recounting as much as she could remember of what happened after she had left the motor pool. Thankfully nobody stopped her or interrupted because she honestly did not know if she had it in her to tell that story one more time today. By the time she was done her cigarette had burned down almost to the filter. Unthinking, she took one last long drag off it, dropped it to the concrete and ground it out with the heel of her boot. Frays took her helmet off and hung it off her LCS by her remaining canteen.
“Look, Tanner, we need some gear.” Frays said quietly as she wiped her forehead with her sleeve. “Most of my loadout is either inopp or at the bottom of the Charles River or God knows where.”
After having to risk their necks to scavenge half a Five Ton full of MREs and bullets, Tanner’s supply closet seemed like Christmas had come early. They each signed for a brand new rucksack, sleeping bag, poncho, GORE-TEX field jacket and wet weather gear as well as canteens and LCS for those who didn’t have them already. Eamon wrinkled his nose as Frays and Lacey showed him the best way to stuff his gear into the rucksack. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any clean clothes or anything like that?” he asked, drawing a slightly puzzled look from Frays.
She scowled at him then sniffed the sleeve of her uniform. The reek coming off it made her eyes water. It smelled a lot like the streets of the neighborhood near their FOB over in Iraq. The sewage system had gone down hard sometime in the late nineties and been replaced by a ditch where everyone tossed their refuse and dumped their chamber pots every morning.
Gomez outfitted them with fresh uniforms and sent them on their way. After a brief stop off to the post’s small PX to buy some packages of undershirts, socks and underwear as well as a few other essentials (mainly instant coffee, a big bottle of Ripped Fuel, talcum powder and all the energy drinks they could lay hands on) they made their way to the front gate.
A lieutenant colonel from the Army Reserve named Jenkins seemed to be nominally in charge of the circus. When a Navy lieutenant became aware that Frays was in the Security Forces he sent the lot of them over to a squat brick building nearby. The building contained a dozen holding cells where the soldiers were quarantining people who seemed to be infected. Despite the mess, things seemed to be going on in as much of an orderly fashion as possible at first.
At the front gate near the guard house, Lacey and Jean were among the soldiers, airmen and civilian volunteers set about giving the newcomers a once over looking for injuries and illnesses. Then Eamon and other medical personnel tended the wounded and, if the injury came from a bite or scratch, would pass them off to the Security Forces, Military Police and civilian law enforcement for quarantine in the guardhouse.
In theory, buses would be coming to take the people from the guardhouse for treatment at area hospitals and the county jail north of the base off of I-95. In practice, Amy had seen one of these buses. It was getting scary because the quarantine detail was running out of places to put all the people passed off to them. The twelve cells in the guardhouse were meant to hold between six and eight people each. They quickly ended up with at least two or three times their intended maximum capacity. In short order the whole thing kind of ran together and sort of faded into flashes of a horror movie that she could not turn off.
A few hours in Frays saw the people in a cell reach through the bars and grab a passing policeman, probably trying to get the keys to their door. A SWAT officer simply walked up, put the barrel of his MP5 submachine gun through the bars and emptied his weapon into the cell. He then reloaded and put a single round into the heads of the people lying on the floor. That policeman killed twenty three people: Frays knew because she was one of the airmen put on a detail to bag the bodies, drag them outside and then sanitize the cell. She kept count. Sometimes one or two of the people in the cells would flip out and start attacking the others. The police and soldiers ended up shooting them too. And, for some reason, they shot the people that got attacked too…
After that they started loading people into Five Tons and transporting the people in quarantine that way. Anybody who tried to make a break for it was shot. Strangely, most of the trucks returned way faster than they should have with the vehicle crews looking pale and shaken.
Some of the people on the quarantine detail started to lose it after awhile. Frays saw this policeman sitting outside the back door of the guardhouse crying and muttering in what sounded like Russian or something. While they were on a twenty minute break a female MP walked to a portable latrine outside the back door and ate her M9. She had been in charge of Frays’ detail cleaning out the cells after people had been shot.
This process went on for two grueling, heart wrenching, exhausting days. Amy found herself glad that the uniform for the personnel running the quarantine area required her to wear a full complement of protective gear despite the sweat constantly streaming down her face and pooling in her rubber overboots. There was a little comfort in the fact that the people packed like sardines in the holding cells could not see her face. Even though she could sort of understand the necessity of the whole quarantine thing, Amy couldn’t help but feel like some kind of horrible monster or a guard in a Nazi concentration camp or something.
Sure, she might have pointed her M9 and thumbed the hammer back once or twice or shoved a prisoner a little too hard, but she was just so terrified and frustrated and thirsty and exhausted that she just could not help but lash out. She never shot anyone but on the other hand she did not try to stop the ones doing the shooting either…
She could not get the look on this one boy’s face out of her head. He could not have been more than four or five and she had pulled him out of his mother’s arms and carried him to a cell, the screams of the child’s mother chasing her into the guardhouse. The medics had said the boy’s father had bitten him on the arm. Frays held the squirming boy tight and stroked his hair, trying to comfort the child as she carried him inside. He was just so small and scared, screaming for his mommy…
Amy ducked into the latrine where she peeled off her rubber gloves and gas mask. She splashed a little cold water on her face, leaned against the sink and gripped the porcelain till her knuckles turned white. Frays squeezed her eyes shut and took deep breaths. “This isn’t happening. This is not happening.” she told herself over and over again, hoping that she would eventually believe it.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder and Frays yelped as she leapt away, her hand instinctively going to the butt of her pistol. Jean stood a few feet away with her hands up and a nervous half smile on her face. “An army sergeant said we can have the next ten hours off.” said the older woman. She slowly lowered her hands and gave Amy an apologetic look. “Sorry I startled you.”
After a forty five minute wait the four of them sat lumped together around the end of a long table in the corner of the dining room. Lacey snored like a chainsaw next to Jean, the skinny Marine’s arm wrapped protectively around his tray. Amy plunked down next to Eamon with a groan as she pulled off her Kevlar. She interlaced her fingers behind her head and pulled her chin to her chest. “Cripes, hungry Amy?” the EMT asked with an astonished look on his face. Frays had two cheeseburgers, a dozen chicken nuggets and a small mountain of fries as well as a brownie with a massive scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and two big glasses of chocolate milk on her tray.
She smiled and stuck out her tongue then crossed herself and bowed her head in prayer. Frays picked up one of the cheeseburgers and took a bite. Her eyes rolled with pleasure. “Best. Cheeseburger. Ever.” she pronounced and then set about surrounding and destroying the burgers and chicken nuggets, pausing only to gulp down the milk.
Jean smiled and shook her head. “It’s alright but I don’t know about the best.” the older woman said as she eyed her plate suspiciously. “I mean I think I’ve seen this liver before.”
“Hey I don’t know about you, lady.” Amy said after hurriedly swallowing a chicken nugget “I almost died like six times in the past week or so and I haven’t had anything to eat in about three days. BEST. CHEESEBURGER. EVER.”
Eamon and Jean laughed, startling Lacey. “I’m not asleep, sir! I swear!” the Marine shouted as he tried to jump to his feet. He recovered, but it only made his companions laugh harder. Amy made a snorting, gagging sort of noise then grabbed a napkin and covered her mouth. “I just squirted milk out of my nose!”
That did it. All four of them lost whatever sort of marbles they might have had left. People walking by and sitting next to them started to look at them like they might be cracking. A few shook their heads in disgust when they saw Frays’ armband. “Okay…okay.” Amy said once she was able to breathe. Her chest actually hurt a little bit, but it was a good kind of hurt for once. “Let’s hurry up and get out of here. Other people are waiting to eat.”
Once they were out of the dining facility Amy grabbed Eamon’s arm. “Can I bug you for a minute?” she asked carefully.
“Sure, what’s up?” he asked. He frowned at the concerned look on the young woman’s face. He looked around, watching Lacey and Jean walking towards the hangar where they were going to spend the night.
Amy paused, took a deep breath and said “I’d like you to check me out.”
“I’ve been checking you out since you ran in to us.” the young man said with a cockeyed grin and moved a little closer to the woman’s side.
Frays stepped back and scowled harshly at the man. “I was in a car accident a couple days ago, you jerk!” she grumbled as she slapped his arm. “A Mack truck hit my Humvee and knocked it into the river. I nearly drowned to boot! Get your mind out of the gutter!”
“Alright! Alright!” Eamon shouted as shied away from the woman, grinning as he raised his hands to ward off any further blows. His shoulders heaved with an exaggerated sigh. “Come on, spoilsport. You’re no fun, you know that?”
