Virgil's War- The Diseased World

by Larry Robbins

  Buck reached out a hand to help me up. I wanted to stay seated, but I grabbed the hand and let him hoist me. The pain in my ribs felt like an electric current shooting through my side.

  “Anyone else get hurt?”

  Buck nodded. “Marcus took a graze hit to the hip, nothing serious but I’m sending the both of you up top to get checked out.” He pointed over to where the dead man’s body was cooling in the weeds. “Good work tonight, Virgil. I know I give you the business sometimes and call you ‘kid’ and all but…this was good work. You went hand-to-hand and down and dirty with a big-assed enemy fighter and came out on top. Tell me; what happened to his nose?”

  I shrugged. “We were fighting over my pistol, and he put it close enough for me to bite on.”

  Buck’s face showed surprise, and he slowly shook his head from side to side while giving me a grin. “Damn, son, definitely a badass.”

  Marcus was able to drive after Isaac bandaged his wound. It wasn’t bad, but it needed to be treated and dressed. Infection was a real threat to anyone now that antibiotics were no longer being mass-produced. We disconnected the trailer and bounced up the hill in the Jeep after Buck received a report from the drone showing no additional raiders approaching from the north side. I could hear his transmission over the walkie to the Major including his account of how I sustained my injuries. I felt he was a little over the top in the way he described my actions, but I figured it might make me seem like a hero to Pepper, so I just let him talk.

  Sharon and Tashnizi were both waiting for us when we rumbled through the gate. Surprisingly, Tashnizi actually pitched in, helping Marcus out of the driver’s seat and supporting him as they made their way into the mansion.

  Sharon came around to my side and stopped me as I started to get out. She asked me about a dozen questions about where the pain was, did I have any numbness or bleeding. Sometime during this process, Pops and Pepper appeared behind her, both of them showing looks of concern.

  “Hey, I’m alright, guys, really,” I assured them. “I just got bumped around a bit, is all.”

  Pops gave me a grim smile and a trace of a nod. Pepper was trying not to cry, but a few streaks were already showing on her cheeks.

  “Dan, help me get him downstairs,” Sharon instructed. “We need an x-ray of his back and ribs.”

  Much to my chagrin, Pops leaned in and lifted me out of the Jeep like he used to do when I was a toddler. I assured him I was capable of walking and asked him to put me down, but he wasn’t paying me any attention. He and Sharon were talking back and forth about my condition and ignoring my pleas. I looked over Pops’ shoulder and could see Pepper and Mona following us. I was mortified at my lady seeing me being carried like an infant but what could I do? I tolerated it all until we reached the clinic and Pops laid me on the exam table.

  Sharon grabbed a pair of scissors and shooed the girls out before helping me out of my clothes. She had started to cut them away, but I assured her I was capable of removing them. Then I was sitting in my boxers in front of my father and his new girlfriend, feeling horribly exposed. Sharon laid me back, and Pops helped her wheel a portable x-ray machine over. It hummed and clicked then Sharon did a few things with it while standing behind a screen.

  “You have a cracked rib on the right side. Two others look bruised. You’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but you’ll live.”

  There wasn’t much she could do for me other than to wrap my ribcage in an elastic bandage. She patted me on the shoulder and said I could get dressed again then kissed Pops and told him she wanted to check on Marcus.

  Pops asked if I was sure I was alright, then departed for a meeting with the Major. Left alone, I stood up from the table and discovered I could still make my way around fairly well. I resisted the urge to swallow more of the pain pills that I had left because I didn’t want to cause myself another problem by becoming addicted to them. I decided to use them only for getting to sleep at night or when the pain grew too intense.

  Congratulating myself on the maturity of my decision regarding the pain pills, I made my way to the courtyard and saw the expected buzz of activity. We were, after all, in the middle of an attack. The attempted incursion from the north had been foiled, but we were expecting more. Dwayne was back at the drone table. The boy seemed to love the things and fought for every opportunity to operate them. The Major trusted his expertise and gave him the leeway to do so.

  I saw Pops, Major Morrison and Jimmy Bronson in a huddle and wandered in their direction, hoping they would see me and invite me to join them. I was nosey about our preparations and liked being kept in the loop. Pops looked over at me and smiled but didn’t go any further than that, so I looked around and saw Pepper and Mona working on the two helo-drones, so I sauntered over to them.

  I expected a hero’s welcome, especially from Pepper but they had serious work to do, getting the drones charged up and ready for deployment. I made a show of walking stiffly, but my girlfriend was apparently too busy to notice and lavish me with sympathetic attention. Well, shoot!

  I saw Marcus come limping up out of the cargo ramp and walked over to him. He nodded when he saw me.

  “You about ready to go back?” I asked him.

  “Nope.” He seemed to be getting around okay with his wound, a little stiff like me. “The Major told me they were replacing us because the Doc wanted to keep an eye on us. They sent George to replace me and Jaime Corazon for you. They said he had experience using the M-240.”

  I found myself being disappointed but not knowing why. The conditions in the castle were much more comfortable than being in a foxhole, but I had already come to think of Buck and the others as being my team.

  “Hey, looks like your dad wants you.”

  I glanced up and saw Pops waving at me. I patted Marcus on the arm and walked over.

  “You feel like you can handle one of the drones?” Pops said without preamble.

  “Uh, yeah, sure. What’s up?”

  Pops pulled the chair back from the drone table for me so I could sit next to Dwayne. The lad ignored me, so involved was he in running the fixed wing. Pepper and Mona exited the main gate carrying one of the helo-drones between them. They took it a few feet from the wall and came back inside. Pepper gave me the code number for that particular drone, and I punched it into the laptop. In a few seconds, I began seeing the readouts for the drone. I shouted for everyone to clear the area and revved up the motor. When the device was warmed up and all of my readings looked good I pulled the lever on the control station and lifted the device into the air.

  As the whine from the electric motor faded, Pops knelt by my side. “Buck has a follow-up plan, and we want you to keep the helo right over his head so he can get real-time feedback from you. Your call sign is Prince, his is Pauper, and he’ll reverse directions in his transmissions, east for west, north for south and so on. Refer to the drones as binoculars.”

  I nodded, keeping my eyes on the laptop image. It was still dark, and I had the infrared cranked up to the maximum. “What’s Buck up to?”

  “He’s spreading a little terror.”

  Chapter 24

  Buck, Dee, and Isaac moved northward silently. They were spaced out, keeping twenty yards of separation between them to frustrate any hidden snipers intending to take them all out quickly.

  The trio stopped and knelt when their leader gave the ‘stop’ signal, a raised, clenched fist. They were able to see his gesture because all of them had on their NV goggles.

  Buck pressed the earpiece tighter into his ear and whispered into his throat mike. “Prince, Pauper. Sitrep?”

  I took a look at the screen. “Everything clear to the south. Nothing on the binoculars.”

  Buck raised his hand and pointed north. They resumed their slow, silent movement. After forty-five minutes of careful travel, they found themselves on a low rise overlooking Academy Avenue below. In the greenish glow of the NVGs, the two pickups below showed no activity.

  “Prince,
Pauper. Still clear?”

  I rechecked the laptop monitor. I had been following Buck overhead at maximum elevation and was now hovering over the two trucks. There was nothing to see in infrared, so I switched to thermal. The signal from one pickup was dark, but the other glowed, the light coming from both side windows in the front seat. I saw the shining signal of an arm resting on the edge of the passenger side window ledge. Evidently, the two drivers were waiting for the return of their incursion team and were both in the one truck, talking and smoking with the windows down. With the thermal recognition capabilities of the helo, the cigarettes made it look like they were waving flaming torches at me.

  “Pauper, just a couple of rabbits over by the easternmost hill.”

  Buck answered with two clicks of his mike. He turned to each of his team members and held up two fingers then pointed to the vehicle in which the two drivers sat.

  ✽✽✽

  James Schofield was still having pain from the gunshot wound in his calf, but he had been told to drive the truck, so he had obeyed orders. Schofield had already treated himself with some Norco tablets he’d found, and the weed he was smoking and sharing with his partner was also helping. Schofield didn’t know the actual name of the other driver, only that he referred to himself as ‘Slim.’

  Slim was currently angering Schofield because he was bogarting the joint too much. He was also droning on about the poor manner in which Arlo treated the troops.

  “No, it’s like I said before; we all take the same risks, and we all could be killed. There shouldn’t be any ‘Yes Sir, No Sir’ crap. We aren’t Army anymore.”

  Schofield was tired of hearing about it. “Then who would run things, Slim? I don’t have any training in that area, do you?. I couldn’t begin to plan things like what we’re doing. Hitting these guys from the side like this? That sounds like good tactics to me.”

  The other man took yet another long draw on the joint and held it in until he was unable to repress a small cough. He exhaled, and Schofield angrily snatched the weed cigarette out of his fingers.

  “Hey!” Slim protested.

  “Hey, hell, you been suckin’ on this joint too long. You’re supposed to pass it, not make out with it.”

  “Well, I brought it, dude.”

  Schofield didn’t want to argue. “I know, man, I know. Sorry.” He took a long draw and gave it back. After keeping the lungs full of the intoxicating smoke, he released it through his nostrils and smiled at the slow spread of euphoria that was coursing through his body. The pain in his calf had now diminished to the point that it was almost nonexistent.

  Despite not wanting to argue, the weed was pushing Schofield to talk, so he pursued his point. “I’m just saying; the LT has done a pretty good job so far.” He pointed towards the hills. “These guys are tough. They would have given anyone a hard time. We just need to trust the LT and do our part. Look at me, I was shot but here I am, back in the fight.”

  Slim shook his head in an exaggerated fashion. “That didn’t have nothin’ to do with the LT. You were caught by those gang bangin’ pukes and brought back just because they wanted us to join them. Probably would have slit your throat otherwise.”

  And so the conversation went. The two drivers had started out whispering to each other but, as the night wore on and the weed relaxed their caution, they were now almost to the point of shouting.

  Staring intently through the front windshield, Schofield tried one last time to get his partner to agree to his point of view. “Well, but that fits with what I’m saying. If the LT didn’t know what he was doing, those gangster pukes wouldn’t have sought him out for help.”

  He waited for a reply, but none came. He sighed, thinking Slim was deliberately being obstinate. Schofield turned to get a response from him and frowned, then blinked his eyes twice.

  “What the...?”

  Slim looked like he had scooted down in his seat and was looking out of the side window, but there was something funny about his eyes. They were half open and not in the manner of someone who was heavily stoned. Schofield put out a hand and nudged the skinnier man but got no response. He shook him harder, and Slim’s head slowly rolled over on his neck until his eyes were pointed directly at him. It was then that he noticed something splashed over the inside of the windshield. An odor fought for dominance over the smell of weed and Scofield recognized it as blood. Lots of blood. He leaned closer to the other man and even in the darkness of the truck cab he could see that Slim’s throat had been sliced open. Blood had stopped spurting from the wound and was now seeping out rhythmically in tune with the beats of the man’s dying heart.

  Before Schofield could scream, he felt his arm, which he had been resting on the ledge of the side window, being yanked on with enough force to pull him halfway out of the truck. Schofield had cheated death just a few days earlier, but he wasn’t going to prevail against it tonight. The last thing he saw was a giant of a man holding onto his arm as a slim black woman with long arms and legs made a swiping motion in his direction. There had been no pain at first but, when it hit, it overpowered the Norco and the weed. The welling scream was never born because no air reached Schofield’s larynx, it gushed out, instead, with a sound reminiscent of a cough.

  The hemorrhaging death of James Schofield took two minutes.

  ✽✽✽

  From the drone’s position high over the two trucks, I watched, transfixed. Pops was behind me with a hand on each shoulder.

  Buck’s voice came over the radio. “Rabbits are gone.”

  The whole thing was mesmerizing to see. I almost forgot I was controlling the drone but I recovered before I let something stupid happen. Before I could discuss the event with Pops, the Major was pointing over my shoulder at the laptop showing the video feed from the fixed-wing.

  I glanced over and saw another two pickup trucks, also bristling with people and guns, move from the main gate area on Academy heading south. I wondered aloud whether they would be stupid enough to try the same thing from a different direction.

  The Major answered me. “Maybe. We don’t know whether they are even aware of what has happened to their first incursion team. Being ex-military, they should know to schedule radio reports at regular intervals.” He pushed the ball cap he was wearing high on his head and wiped at his moist forehead with a sleeve. “However, these guys aren’t really sticking to military protocol here. They’ve let themselves grow sloppy. Could be that their original intention here was to put teams on both sides of us and hit us all night, back and forth, first one side then the other. It’s not a bad tactic, but it puts their people at risk.” He sighed loudly. “Let’s hope they’re reckless enough to keep making mistakes. Their last master plan just cost them twenty-one people.”

  The Major cut his eyes over to Dwayne. “How much time do you have left on that fixed-wing, son?”

  Dwayne checked his readouts. “At least four hours, sir. Closer to five.”

  “Okay, swing it over to the south and keep it high, we don’t want them to know we have eyes in the sky. Those drones are saving lives up here.”

  ✽✽✽

  Arlo clenched his teeth, refusing to give any indication of the pain he was experiencing as Dolores again changed the bandages on his legs. As soon as she left, he intended to swallow a double portion of pain meds but, for now, he didn’t want her to see him in distress. He didn’t care about her reaction but the troops talked to each other, and he didn’t want them thinking that their commander wasn’t one hundred percent ready to fight. The burns to his legs had helped him a bit with the troops after he floated the story that he’d received his injuries by single-handedly attacking the man with the grenade launcher.

  Whatever the case, he was getting a vibe that the troops were not certain that attacking the Hilltop Group was wise. He’d been filled in by his spies on who was talking and what they were saying. Arlo was already composing a list with the intention of sending the most vocal of his critics on the riskiest assignments
when they began their final push against their enemies.

  Dolores finished her ministrations and gathered her bandages and ointments. Before leaving, she bent down and kissed him on the forehead. He saw the sad smile on her face as the woman powered down the rear gate on the Stryker where they had been alone for the last fifteen minutes. Dolores walked down the ramp and disappeared without a look back. Arlo watched her leave, aware that she was in love with him but not feeling any compulsion to act on it. For Arlo, if a girl was over the age of sixteen, he just wasn’t interested. He’d been that way for his entire life but had been unable to do anything about it without risking prison. Now, in this new world, the only rules he had to follow were those that he, himself, had imposed.

  Arlo stood and tested his legs, wincing a little. He jiggled out four white pills and used a half-empty bottle of water to wash them down, shaking his head as he waited for the headache to wane. The former Lieutenant knew he was getting addicted to the Tramadol tablets, but he would worry about that later. Right now, the restless legs and sleeplessness he was experiencing were less concerning than holding together his command.

  He heard a high pitched, nasally voice approaching the Stryker and saw Lobo and his hulking aide striding up the ramp without waiting to be invited. Arlo gritted his teeth, looking forward to the time when he could have them both shot, or maybe just Lobo. Arturo could be an asset to his organization. His loyalty to his friend was clear but loyalties can change as conditions change. It would be nice to have such a man standing between him and Barrett.

  “Hey, G.I. Joe,” Lobo shouted with a wave. “How they hangin’?”

  Arlo sighed quietly and waved back.

  Arturo nodded respectfully and took a seat on one of the side racks. Lobo went over to a small monitor mounted in the main body of the vehicle and started fiddling with the switches on it.

  “That device is already calibrated, Lobo. Please don’t mess with it.”

  The Mojados leader didn’t cease his actions as he replied. “What does it do?”