Spade came over and looked at the ear Saylor held in his hand. “It fuckin’ bit you and you chopped your ear off?”

“Fuck yeah, I did.” He was charged with energy with muscles tense all over his body.

“Fuck yeah!” Spade matched tempo. Had to be a military thing. Reminded me of a football team encircling each other on the sideline before the game, jumping up and down. Psyching each other up and out. Comrades. Buddies. Brothers.

They both howled. Except this time when Saylor looked to the sky like a wolf, Spade punched the heel of his hand into Saylor’s face; drove the nose bone into the brain. Saylor fell over, flat onto his back. Mud splashed out around him.

“Can’t risk it,” Spade said. Not sure he was talking to me.

I stood up. Looked around. The carnage was everywhere. The dead finally dead and we’d lost one, which was too much. The guy had cut off his own ear to live. “Now what?”

“We get back to the ship; we get the fuck out of here.”

“Lieutenant Marfione’s holed up in one of these,” I said. I used the radio on my sleeve. The bud dangled, resting on my chest. I lifted it and stuffed it back into my ear.

“Anything?”

“Nothing. But after the explosion we couldn’t hear anyone earlier, just him, Just Marf.” I tried reaching the L.T. again.

“The radios are crap. It’s that simple. Government issue. The moisture, the distance – short as it is – could be a million reasons why it doesn’t work. Ours, mine anyway, cut out right away.”

Had Allison or my kids tried reaching me or tried to find out what was going on? Where or how we were doing?

We needed to find Marf, yes, but we needed to get back to the ship. I hadn’t forgotten the shooting I’d heard earlier coming from their direction.

While I still wanted to know what happened to Vitale and Chatterton, I figured now was not the time. Guess I didn’t need an explanation. It was kind of self-explanatory. Zombies were everywhere. Explosions. There was no need to ask. My imagination worked fine. They were dead. With Spade, I had no doubt, if they’d been bitten, they would not return as a zombie, either.

I yelled into my sleeve in one last attempt. “Marf!”

“I think it was the apartment back here,” Dave said. “That one.”

The one he pointed at could very well have been the apartment Marf was in. Had it of been, he would have seen us out the window. If he saw us from the window, why didn’t he join the fight?

“Let’s check,” Spade said. He went forward and as he passed Palmeri, he hesitated long enough to touch her shoulder. Maybe there had been something between Palemeri and Saylor. More than I’d picked up on. I hadn’t seen it but Spade’s gesture revealed much, much more.

She didn’t meet my eyes as I followed Spade. Silently, she fell in behind me. I heard the sloshing sound of her boots in the mud. I wished I could think of comforting words to share. Something I could say to ease her pain.

It was a new world. A different one. I got it. Gone were the days of comforting one another, if we ever really did that before. Pain was in surplus. Kind of like you didn’t mind saying God Bless You when someone sneezed, but when the person lets out three or four in a row, you’re like, fuck man, I’ll just wait until he’s all done.

That’s where we were. In the midst of it. No point saying, “Sorry for your loss.” Not now. Not yet. Not until it we were all done.

Chapter Twenty

0554 hours

“It was this one, had to be this one.” Dave pointed at an apartment.

There were no zombies there, like last time, if it was the right one. Perhaps we’d just killed them all. Very likely. “Why didn’t he come out and fight with us?” I said.

Spade stared at the apartment. “We’ll go in and check it out. If he’s not there, the search is over. We’re done. We’re going back to the boat and leaving this shit stain harbor. Understood?”

No one argued.

Palmeri stayed behind me, I stood behind Dave, and Spade took point. He waved us on to follow.

Staying low, we crossed between apartments. We reached Marf’s and put our backs to the building. Spade held up a fist to tell us we were to wait.

My breath spewed out in visible vapor. My nose was cold, dirty and the tip was numb. I closed my eyes for a moment and sucked in a deep breath. I exhaled and looked to my left.

Crouched, Spade slid along the side of the apartment toward the door. He had his pistol in one hand, hunter’s knife in the other. He signaled with his head, so we advanced.

“Open the door on three,” he said.

Dave nodded. Hand on the knob.

It was a silent head-bob count. On the third one, Dave pulled open the door.

Spade didn’t move. Didn’t charge in, nothing.

We waited as seconds ticked by.

I counted them off with the speed of my heartbeat.

Four. Five. Six.

“Marf?” Spade said. It was the softest I’d heard him speak. “Marf?”

Nothing.

“Stay,” Spade said. He took a step up and into the apartment.

I looked right, left, right. It felt like we weren’t alone. We weren’t, just it seemed like things were all around us, closing in and encircling us. I didn’t like it.

Spade came back out and tucked the knife into the sheath on his hip. “He got out. No one is in there. Floorboards are torn up. He went out through there.”

I sighed. Good for Marfione. He’d made it out.

“So where is he?” Palmeri said. “Why didn’t he come to fight with us?”

“Might not have known,” Dave said.

That was shit. All the gunshots, Marf would have to be deaf to miss the battle that just finished. “That’s not it,” I said.

“We aren’t looking for him, we can’t,” Spade said.

I used my radio. “Marfione? Can you hear us, Marf? Over?”

“I said we’re not looking. We’ve been gone far too long as it is. We need to get back to the Coast Guard. Sun will be up soon. Very soon. We can figure out what to do next then,” Spade said.

If Marf had answered, I would have disagreed, and gone looking for the soldier, but the radio remained silent.

Spade walked away, back from where we’d just come. “We’re going to stay between rows and head straight. Gate can’t be more than sixty, seventy yards ahead. We go slowly. We stay packed together. Palmeri, you are the eyes in the back of our head. Understood? Palmeri, do you understand?”

“Roger.”

“Okay. We’re mobile.”

We walked slowly and stayed close. My mind wandered far and fast.

# # #

It had been winter. Calls that were coming into 9-1-1 were few and far between. The fire section had wheeled six of the three-drawer cabinets to the center of the circular pod. Five sat around the makeshift table with poker chips sitting in stacks and piles in front of those playing.

DeJesus shuffled cards.

Milzy, one of first platoon supervisors and the small blind, tossed a chip to the center. “It’s hold  ‘em, right?”

DeJesus nodded. “Correct.”

LaForce attempted dancing a chip over knuckles. “They always make this look so easy.”

“They practice,” Milzy said. “Nothing easy about it. It’s why they do it. Frustrates everyone who can’t. Rich guys like that probably spend hours in the bathroom mirror doing it over and over and over.”

The foghorn-like alarm indicating a new job had been entered activated, came from my terminal. There was a long line on the CAD screen. I read the job text. “HOUSE ON FIRE -- UNKN IF ANYONE INSIDE”

I entered the line of equipment and the set of their firehouse alarm tones. This way, lights and alarms would wake sleeping firemen. Then it would be followed it up with a long alert tone, called Boxing It Out. That way, firemen knew I wasn’t just sending them on an EMS run.