Breakers by Edward W. Robertson Page A

Twenty-odd other survivors sat on the truck bed, surgical masks in place, eyes bored rather than glassy or watery, no coughing or blood staining their masks. Only two of them were handcuffed. Walt sat down and leaned his back against the truck's side, glad for the shade. His stomach twisted, wringing itself like a beery old sponge.
    They sat there a long time. The soldiers brought down an old woman in a black coat and led her into the truck, then a scruffy bearded guy around Walt's age. The soldiers cracked a can of paint, splashed a bright red X across the door, and moved on to the next building.
    A woman asked to go to the bathroom. The soldiers told her to hold it. She asked again and a soldier glanced down the street, smashed in the door of Starbucks with the butt of his rifle, and gestured her in. Walt napped, woken constantly by the truck bed jostling with new arrivals, by the whirr of choppers and the sky-tearing sound of jets, by people sobbing, the crackle of radios, the squeak of tank treads, by his own headache. Sometime midafternoon—he'd left his cell beside the couch—the truck grumbled to life and weaved slowly down the street, dodging abandoned cars, sprays of glass, sometimes a body.
    Earlier, he'd asked a soldier where they were headed and gotten a vague non-answer. He didn't bother asking the other passengers. They rocked in the truck bed, staring blankly, as unresponsive to the contact of their neighbors' shoulders and knees as if they were down on a cramped 4-train to Yankee Stadium. The truck hooked south down Lafayette and rumbled through Chinatown, where shutters barred the stalls and seafood markets and t-shirt shops. Goods carpeted the sidewalks—shirts, wallets, belts, toys in cheap bubble plastic, sunglasses, squashed bananas, trampled cabbage, crushed crabs, some still waving their claws from the gutters. It stunk like old fish and rain-sodden greens. The truck turned down a street Walt didn't recognize and stopped cold. Radios squawked from up front.
    Truck doors thumped. Boots hit the sidewalk. Ahead, metal scraped asphalt. Men swore, chattered over radios.
    Out past the tailgate, three strangers wandered toward the truck, a slow shuffle punctuated by coughing jags. They wiped bloody fists on their pants and continued closer.
    "Stay where you are," a loudspeaker blared from the truck.
    "We're sick," a tall, thin man called from the trio. "We need help."
    "Wait on the corner," the soldier replied. "Help will be sent as soon as it's available."
    "You're the third truck that's told us that!"
    Windows opened from a handful of apartments. Two more people turned the corner, leaning on each other for support, and joined the trio. Up front beyond Walt's sight, something heavy and hard grated over the pavement. He took shallow breaths. He'd been thinking he might throw up for a while now. At least the truck was canvas-topped, open around the sides. Fresh air.
    Down on the corner, the crowd grew to a dozen. Five minutes later, with the soldier still struggling to clear whatever was blocking the road, and Walt wondering why they didn't just take a different street, the gathering of the sick swelled to more than thirty, shivering, coughing, spitting wads of blood on the sidewalks.
    "Where are you taking them?" a squat woman shouted. "Do you have medicine?"
    "My apartment's full of fucking corpses," a hefty guy hollered in a Brooklyn accent. "How about you show us a place to sleep that doesn't smell like a Red Lobster's Dumpster?"
    "Help is on the way," the soldier said. "Stay where you are."
    "Like hell!" The hefty guy started forward. After two steps, the crowd followed in one of those strange mass movements, muttering, shouting, crying for answers and aid.
    "This is a quarantined vehicle. Stop where you are and turn around."
    Two soldiers ran to the back of the truck and knelt, raising assault rifles to their shoulders. The hefty man sneered and limped on.
    "You're taking them to the cure!"
    "Please