Breakers by Edward W. Robertson Page B

don't leave us!"
    From the advancing crowd, a thin blonde woman staggered away, hugged a lamppost, and sicked blood across the gum-dotted sidewalk. Someone in the truck moaned.
    "Stop now or we will open fire," the loudspeaker blared.
    Fifty feet away, the man laughed and broke into a run. Others lurched to keep up.
    "Oh fuck," one of the kneeling soldiers said. Gunfire battered Walt's ears. The hefty man's chest puffed in three places, blood misting the people to either side of him. They fell alongside him, holes in their foreheads, chests, legs. Those in back screamed over the gunshots. One woman froze, clamping her arms to her face. Holes burst in her elbow, the back of her hand. The others turned and ran, stumbling and shrieking, disappearing around corners and through open doorways. The gunfire stopped dead. A dozen bodies lay bleeding on the pavement, some gurgling and clawing the asphalt, others as still as the streets beyond. Pale faces watched from windows. In the truck, people moaned, scrabbled their feet on the floor and pushed their backs against the walls, gagged, prayed.
    "Shit," the first soldier to fire said.
    "Hold your fire!" A man with stripes on his shoulder jogged from the side of the truck.
    The soldier stood, shouldering his rifle. "Sarge, they charged us. Another two seconds and—"
    "I know." The sergeant leaned in, grabbed the younger man by the neck. "You followed the protocol. You remember that tonight. Those people were already dead."
    "Key word people ," Walt called, dazed, tingly, jarred free from himself. "Not some goddamn zombies."
    The sergeant turned on the truck, vaulting up onto the bumper. "Who said that?"
    Walt shrunk against the side of the trunk, suddenly paternalized, pinned down by the authoritarian bark of a teacher quick with the detention. Across the truck, a dark-haired woman pointed him out. The sergeant clambered in over the tailgate and stuck a finger in Walt's face.
    "Listen up. People are dying out there. You want us to leave you with them, just say the word."
    Walt lifted his cuffed wrists. "This look like I volunteered?"
    The sergeant grabbed him by the belt and frogmarched him to the tailgate, where he shoved Walt's front half over the ledge and planted a boot on his ass. The pavement waited below. "Just say the word!"
    "At least cut my cuffs!"
    "Say the word. You know how many bodies I seen the last week? Say the word and over you go."
    "Okay," Walt said. "Please set me down. Please, officer."
    "I'm not a fucking officer."
    The man shoved him aside and jumped out the back. Walt eased himself back against the truck's side, stitches tingling. He flushed, furious. Why not jump? He was cuffed in the front; he could run home, get inside, find a knife to saw through the plastic. The truck juddered to life, pulling forward. But what if he snapped his wrist in the fall? Cracked his head? Were there any hospitals left? He hadn't kept up with the news. The city had fallen overnight, becoming a cemetery instead, its dead memorialized by the mausoleums of skyscrapers, the catacombs of the subways, the island-tomb of the unknown citizens. The military's plan, that was dead in the water. What would they do, ship everyone to Antarctica to trade stocks from their igloos? The plague had already taken the world. It had come too fast, spread too far to be stopped now. Everything else was delusion.
    If he knew that much, why hadn't he jumped?
    The truck rolled into a broad garage with red axes and thick fabric hoses strung along the walls. The soldiers waited for the doors to creak shut, then offloaded the civilians, split them by gender, and shuffled them into two locker rooms. An armed soldier ordered them to strip and deposit their clothes in a wheeled canvas cart.
    "What are you doing with them?" a chubby guy said through his thick black mustache.
    "The same thing we're about to do to you," the soldier said. "Now get in the showers."
    "Oh Jesus," said the lanky young Jewish guy next to