The Infection

by Craig DiLouie

  The soldier shook his head in wonder. His nose wrinkled and he said, “Man, that smells funny.” Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed screaming.

  “Medic!” Sarge roared, kneeling next to the man to check his vital signs. “We need some help over here!”

  But soldiers were falling everywhere onto the crushed stones, screaming.

  The Colonel came running out of the tent.

  “We’re under attack! Get to your posts!”

  The Apache veered and collided with the other Chinook, bringing them both down onto the mountain in a spectacular, hundred-yard-long eruption of dust and stones.

  The soldiers were falling and lay on the stones screaming, their bodies taut with pain.

  “Holy shit,” Sarge said, and ran for the Bradley.

  He sat in the commander’s station, panicking, his heart pounding against his ribs. What had happened to those men? Were they dead? If this were a biological or chemical attack, weren’t they all exposed? If the Taliban did this, the gloves would come off. They were begging the world’s best military for wholesale extermination, and they would get it.

  After waiting for several minutes, he shifted into the gunner’s seat, working the periscopes to scan the heights for possible enemy attack.

  The screaming stopped. Sarge almost cried with relief. After several moments of pure silence, the compound filled with shouting voices. Sarge sat for three hours, talking occasionally to the commander of the other Bradley on the radio, trying to find out what he could. Martinez and Thompson, the driver and the gunner, did not return. He assumed the worst.

  Somebody banged on the side of the Bradley.

  “You in there, Sarge?” It was Devereaux. “Answer me, goddammit!”

  Sarge popped the hatch and emerged blinking into the late afternoon air.

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m okay. How about you? Your boys okay?”

  His comrade nodded, his eyes glazed and his face pale.

  “We’re managing,” Devereaux told him.

  “Where’s my crew?”

  “They’re down, Sarge.”

  “Goddammit,” Sarge said fiercely.

  Devereaux added, “They’re still putting everybody in that big tent where they had the meeting. The base suffered twenty percent casualties from whatever the hell just happened.”

  One of five men was down. It was incredible.

  “What’s our alert status? Why is everybody walking around?”

  “The Colonel just dropped security to thirty percent,” Devereaux said. “I heard somebody say they heard the RTO tell the Colonel that this is happening everywhere, and the Colonel is figuring it’s not an attack. Right now he’s arguing with the Captain over whether to send a unit out to look for survivors at the place where those helicopters crashed. The Captain is refusing orders. He doesn’t want to go. Says we might still be attacked.”

  “What do you mean, ‘everywhere?’” said Sarge. “You mean the whole country?”

  “INCOMING!”

  Soldiers were running everywhere, seeking cover. Devereaux ran and dove into a mortar pit, leaving Sarge to look for the source of the fire. The mortar round fell short, exploding just outside the base’s timber walls in a flash followed by a giant cloud of smoke and dust. A machine gun began firing on the rocky heights, sending plunging fire into the compound. Small arms fire flashed across the distant hills. Sarge flinched as he heard the first hissing snap and twang of bullets flying past his ears.

  He climbed back onto the Bradley, lowered himself in and began working the control handles to maneuver the turret and align the rig’s cannon with the MG position at the top of the ridge.

  It’s the locals, he realized. They fell down screaming too and they think it’s us who did it to them. Christ, there are seventy thousand NATO troops in the Sandbox and nearly thirty million Afghans. Twenty percent casualties would be fourteen thousand NATO troops but six million Afghans. If they think we did it, we’re toast. They slaughtered the goddamn Red Army for a fraction of the offense.

  He fired, sending rounds arcing to crash into the heights. The MG fire stopped.

  Big Dog 1, this is Big Dog 2, come in, over, he heard over the radio.

  “I’m here, Big Dog 2, over,” he said, scanning for another target.

  “The Mark 19 is down!” somebody yelled outside.

  Mortar shells were bursting in the compound. A rocket propelled grenade hit the Bradley—an amazing shot—and glanced off before bursting in the air, raking its armor with shrapnel.

  Big Dog 1, we’ve got reports of fire from the police station. Can you confirm, over?”

  “Identified,” he said into the mike. “I’ve got hostile fire from the ANP station, Big Dog 2. The insurgents have taken the building, over.”

  They’re all yours, Big Dog 1. Happy hunting, out.

  He fired the cannon, dropping a score of rounds onto the building, which crumbled under the fire in a massive cloud of smoke and dust.

  “Target,” he said.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  “Big Dog 2, this is Big Dog 1, over.”

  Then he saw. The Afghans were sending plunging fire down into the tent where the fallen soldiers had been placed. The radio filled with angry voices.

  We need fire on that fucking hill!

  The human condition is to survive. When a man is just surviving, he has been carved down to the animal he once was. And animals only think of their own survival. It is all about fight or flight and a lot of times the animal in you wants to run blindly to safety. What makes a soldier a good soldier, Sarge knows, is when he is properly trained to control these impulses. What makes a soldier brave, even noble, is when he is willing to sacrifice his own safety for his fellow soldiers.

  Soldiers were running into the open to draw fire, trying to distract the insurgents away from shooting at the tent, and were getting cut down. Sarge counted three bodies writhing on the stones bleeding and a fourth lying completely still. Another soldier was standing in the open on a carpet of spent brass and links, firing steadily into the hills. It was Devereaux.

  “The Afghan” is going to have one hell of a story to tell if he survives this, Sarge thought. He continued to rain suppressing area fire onto the enemy positions along the ridge.

  The radio steadily filled with traffic.

  We got hostiles identified in the open to the north and east. They’re crossing the minefield, over.

  The insurgents were launching a full-scale attack, spending their first wave on the minefield. Two additional waves followed closely on the heels of the first. Then it would be hand to hand fighting among the hooches. There were hundreds of insurgents in the assault.

  Combat Outpost Sawyer was very close to being overrun. Sarge could hear the distant voices shouting, Yalla yalla! One of them cried Allāhu akbar, and the rest took up the shout. The volume of fire intensified. Hand grenades began bursting near the bunkers.

  Jalabad says we’re getting zero air support, over.

  “Medic!” a man was screaming.

  Enemy in the wire, we got enemy in the wire, over.

  A line of claymores exploded, sending geysers of dry earth and splinters of wood soaring into the air. The soldiers were retreating and blowing up everything behind them.

  Sarge could not move the Bradley. He was not a mobile cannon, but instead a pillbox, his own personal Alamo. He scanned his forward sectors, looking for targets, but the air was filled with smoke and dust. Small arms fire crackled around the bunkers. He saw a fireteam abandon a burning building and fall back to the next defensive line.

  Grenades began bursting around his rig. Sarge realized that the Bradleys were now in front of the Americans’ position, not behind. A Molotov cocktail streamed high into the air and landed on the rear of the turret, shattering and flaring to life.

  The first insurgents came into view, firing AK47 rifles and crouching low as they ran.

  Sarge opened up with the Bradley’s M24
0 machine gun at close range and cut them down. Small arms fire rattled off the vehicle’s armor. He saw an RPG team set up near one of the hooches, pointing at the other Bradley. He quickly switched back to the cannon and armed it.

  “On the way,” Sarge hissed, pressing the firing switch on the right control handle. The insurgents exploded in a series of bursts.

  As his visibility deteriorated, he kept it hot with the cannon, trying to stall the insurgents’ advance.

  We got air support.

  It was a single Apache helicopter flying through a hail of fire, dropping Hellfire missiles onto the insurgents running in the open towards the flaming base. The soldiers cheered. Its missiles spent, the helicopter began to set up its first strafing run.

  Every man living in this valley must be here, Sarge thought, trying to wipe us out over a horrible misunderstanding. And with the insurgents caught in the open between Bradleys in front and the Apache behind, we’re going to wipe them out over that same misunderstanding.

  This was war.

  The fighting raged into the night. The soldiers shot flares and exchanged fire with the insurgents in streams of tracers. Sarge spent the night in the gunner’s station, pissing into a plastic bottle and dying for a glass of water. Outside, the wounded screamed and screamed. By the time dawn finally came, the surviving insurgents had melted away into the dark. More than a hundred bodies carpeted the rocks and were stacked around the scorched and broken bunkers.

  The dazed survivors stumbled among the ruins of the base. Sarge found Devereaux and the other boys of the squad, all of them miraculously unscathed, and bear hugged them. Devereaux told him the Colonel had gotten orders to shut the base down and bring everybody to Jalabad, where local American forces were consolidating. He found out that his crew was still in the tent and that they remained catatonic but were otherwise unharmed in the fighting.

  “This entire country must hate us right now,” Devereaux said. “How do you come back from that?”

  “Welcome to the suck,” Sarge told him, but the old Army complaint rang hollow. He started walking toward the big tent, wondering what was going to happen next. The war had suddenly changed. Quite possibly, so had the world.

  Twenty yards from the Bradley, an insurgent lay dying on the ground, silently praying and choking on his own blood. It was the laughing Afghan who had waved to him from the back of the truck and translated the old man’s curses.

  Looking at him, Sarge raged at the waste of life.

  “We didn’t do this to you,” he said. “Before you die, I want you to know that. We didn’t do it. All of this fighting was for nothing.”

  “God hates you,” the man said. Then the lights in his eyes went out.

  ♦

  Several weeks later, as Pittsburgh burns behind him in a ruined America, Sarge will think about his comrades serving overseas. Only a fraction of the military deployed abroad had been brought home after the Screaming. He will wonder how they are doing over there, the thousands that were left behind in the wild parts of the world. He will wonder whether the boys in the Sandbox ever made it home. Whether they are now shooting at Americans instead of Afghans. If he ever sees them again, he will say, “Pa khair raghla.” Thank God you arrived safe and sound.

  THE TRUCK STOP

  Wendy staggers out of the Bradley’s oven heat onto a wide open parking lot under a glaring, overcast sky. The scorched air dries the sweat on her face instantly, cooling her skin while giving her the strange sensation of being baked. She breathes deep but coughs on air heavy with a tangy burning chemical smell.

  A large building sprawls in front of her under a massive sign announcing gas and all you can eat bkfst and car wash. Two canopied fuel islands flank the building, one promising gas for vehicles and the other diesel for big trucks. Without power, the building appears dark and desolate. The place has been abandoned for some time. The parking lots are all empty, dotted with random litter and fluttering on the sudden hot breezes.

  For a moment, she imagines truckers filling up their rigs during their long hauls in and out of the Keystone State, heading into the greasy spoon for coffee and a piss. Then the moment passes. These days, she knows, people can see ghosts. They are all around if you know how to look. All you have to do is remember the past. Conjure up some memory of the dead world.

  She gasps on the smoky air. The very atmosphere has been burned. It smells like lung cancer. Impossibly, little gray snowflakes tumble gently across the barren landscape. It takes her exhausted brain several moments to understand that these flakes are hot ash. That they are, in fact, the cremated remains of Pittsburgh, drawn into the atmosphere on massive convection currents, and scattered on the winds. One twirling piece of ash lands on her shoulder and she absentmindedly tries to brush it off, leaving a smudge of gray dust.

  Pittsburgh is still burning. Wendy turns and stares at the vast wall of smoke rising up from the smoldering ruins of the city in the east, surrounded by heavy particulates.

  “Everything I knew was in that town,” she says hoarsely, her throat raw and dry and scratchy from the heat and the screaming. “Everything and everybody I ever knew in the world.”

  The place where she was born and the place where she was raised. The house where she smoked weed for the first time and the house where she lost her virginity. The school where they educated her about the basics and the school where they taught her to be a cop. The station house where she worked and all of the neighborhoods she patrolled and the mall where she shopped for clothes and the supermarket where she picked up her groceries and bars where she drank a few beers on the weekends. The theater near her house where she watched dozens of movies with various friends and dates, the hospice where her parents died, the hospital where her niece was born, the restaurant where she fell in love with Dave Carver, the squad car that was like a second home to her.

  These places, and all the people who filled them with their lives and played a part in hers both large and small, all burned into ash. All lost in the fire. And all of her past lost with it. It is too much to comprehend, too horrifying to even imagine.

  “I can’t believe it’s gone,” she says, swallowing hard.

  She turns to see if anybody is listening to her, but nobody is there. Each of the other survivors has wandered alone and dazed across the empty lot and stopped as if straining against an invisible leash tying them to the vehicle. They have gone as far as they can from each other without being completely alone. She wants to go even further.

  Patting the Glock on her hip to feel its reassuring weight, Wendy begins marching towards the highway.

  ♦

  Ethan wakes up on warm asphalt with a splitting headache. He feels like a piece of chicken left in the oven too long. He opens one eye blearily and clenches it shut as the glaring silver sky painfully blinds him. Blinking tears, he tries again. Slowly, his eyes adapt to the light and he can make out figures on a wide parking area in front of a simple shoebox-shaped building. Truck stop, he thinks. Woods and hills beyond. They have not only left the hospital, they have abandoned Pittsburgh entirely. Just what the hell happened last night?

  The last thing he remembers is the sharp prick of the needle sliding into his arm.

  He tries to bring the dark figures into focus. His glasses are missing and he has trouble seeing distances. The blurry figures slowly coalesce into the other survivors, scattered around the asphalt. Anne is at the Bradley, ransacking it. The soldiers are dragging the struggling driver into the shelter of one of the fuel islands. Ethan notices their body language and wonders if they are Infected. His immediate instinct is to play possum. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore his aching bladder.

  “Where are we going to go?” somebody asks. “Is anywhere safe?”

  Ethan knows the voice; it was Paul speaking. He suffers a sudden sense of déjà vu, a flashback to one of the endless nightmares he dreamed last night. Again, that strange sense of disorientation, of not knowing who he is or why he is here. At least h
e knows now that the others are not Infected; the Infected do not talk. He opens his eyes and tries to sit up. The air is hot and tinged with smoke, stinging his eyes. His shirt is covered with a dried red crust. Not blood; vomit. The acid smell triggers the dry heaves. He groans on his hands and knees, his vision blurred with tears, spitting repeatedly into the dust. He wipes his eyes and notices the other survivors watching him.

  “Water,” he croaks. His voice sounds alien to his ears. His tongue feels like a piece of leather.

  Anne comes out of the Bradley and drops a box onto the ground, where it bursts open, spilling cans across the asphalt. She unholsters one of her handguns and begins marching towards him. The other survivors drift closer.

  “Can I have some water?” he says.

  Anne kicks him in the ribs, pushing him back down onto the warm hard ground.

  “Motherfucker,” she says.

  The sudden stress makes his stomach lurch again. His body writhes in the soot, struggling to breathe, retching.

  Anne kneels next to him, grabs his curly hair in one first, and shoves the barrel of her pistol into the soft flesh under his chin. The sky darkens as the winds shift.

  “We were attacked,” she hisses close to his ear. “We were attacked and you weren’t with us. We had to carry you out of there. We had to carry you. You let us down, Ethan.”

  “Don’t you do it, Anne,” Paul says, his deep voice angry and commanding.

  Ethan regains control of his stomach and breathing and glares up at Anne.

  “Yes, do it,” he says.

  Anne recoils in surprise.

  “Are you trying to die? Is that it?”

  “I don’t care anymore.”

  “You want me to do it because you can’t do it yourself. You’re a coward. I could do worse. I could leave you here for them.”

  He hesitates before answering, struck by the realization that she is right. He has no hope of finding his family and without his family he has no hope at all. But he does not know how to die.