The Infection ti-1

by Craig DiLouie

  Anne is experiencing a deep sense of contentment to be back on the road. She finds familiar comfort in the drone of the engine and the smells of fear and body odor and burning diesel. They are safe here, for now, in the Bradley’s dark and sweltering metal stomach. She opens a bottle of water, takes a long pull, and passes it on. She welcomes the road. This is where she is meant to be.

  Sitting across from her, Wendy covers a private smile with her hand.

  Anne stares at her, wondering what could possibly be worth smiling about right now.

  Wendy sees her watching and says, “Did you ever do something on crazy impulse and it turned out to be the best idea you ever had?”

  “No,” Anne says, struggling to remember a time when that might have been true.

  The cop frowns and turns away. Anne did not mean to offend her. Sometimes, she feels like she no longer knows how to be a real person and connect with other real people in a real way. Everything she thinks, feels or remembers ultimately winds up taking her to a dark place in her mind where people die over and over. She does not know how to tell Wendy that she lived most of her life obeying her impulses, and that they eventually got everybody she loved killed.

  ♦

  “Ducky’s hurt,” Steve says. “He says he’s okay, but I think he’s hurt real bad.”

  Sarge says nothing. He waits for the gunner to continue.

  “There were things in the garage, Sarge. Fucking monsters. Dark shapes that flitted around the cars, always just out of sight. Then we saw one. A giant bloated thing covered in elephant trunks that boomed like a foghorn. When it made that sound, the trunks stuck out straight, shaking. Like something out of a nightmare. It pushed cars out of its way. Made you want to puke just to look at it. Then we saw a little white, hairless monkey with thick insect legs, barely able to walk. It was sickly, diseased. It could barely see. It was in pain. It was like a newborn, Sarge. A freak of nature that somehow survived against all odds and was walking along making this bizarre clicking noise in its throat. Kind of sad, like a little kid looking for his family.

  “The little bastard jumped on Ducky. The only way I could get it off was to cut it with my knife. Ducky went down, saying he was hit. The thing had sharp teeth and had been biting around Ducky’s throat, so I assumed that’s where he was wounded, but I couldn’t find a wound. His neck was wet but there was no blood. So I asked him where he was wounded, and he said his hip. The little fucker had used his teeth like he used his arms and legs, to hold on. It was… I don’t want to say what it had been doing to Ducky’s hip, but it was unnatural. It… stabbed him, with this big stinger between its legs, like a barbed scorpion’s tail. The puncture left a massive bruised lump. He insisted on driving. I had to help him into the rig. He could barely walk.”

  Steve stops talking. Sarge takes a few moments to rub his eyes. Outside, the horde of Infected continue making noise like a house being slowly ransacked, barely audible over the loud hum of the Bradley’s engine. He hears no more gunfire.

  “Ducky,” Sarge says into the microphone attached to his helmet, “do you copy?”

  I’m okay, Sergeant, the driver answers.

  “How’s that wound?”

  I said I’m okay.

  “We’ll pull over at the nearest safe point and get it looked at.”

  By who? Who’s going to look at it?

  Sarge does not know how to answer. The fact is they have little in the way of real medical supplies, no medical knowledge, no medevac. They are completely on their own.

  I’m still fit for duty. So let me do my job while I still can.

  Sarge nods grudgingly. He does not know what to say. Perhaps he should just say thanks.

  “You sit tight,” he says, gritting his teeth. “We’re going to try to find help for you.”

  Sergeant, I just wanted to say—

  The air fills with an enormous roar of rage so pervasive that at first Sarge is convinced that it originated inside his own head.

  ♦

  The survivors flinch at the sound and stare at each other, their eyes big and watery. The roar stops as suddenly as it began, replaced by pounding footsteps and a sudden boom that makes the rig tremble like a gong. The sound rattles through their bodies and hums in their brains, knocking out every thought as effectively as high voltage. They wince and cup their ringing ears in the aftermath. Then another boom, jostling them, vibrating deep in their chests.

  The roar again, filling the air, followed by another BOOM. Something is hitting the Bradley repeatedly. The rig tries to speed up, lurches, corrects itself. Wendy sees Paul huddled with his arms wrapped around his ribs, his eyes clenched shut and his mouth working silently. She never saw the Reverend pray before. She finds it deeply disturbing, the idea that the Bradley is unsafe.

  The roar never seems to end. It cascades in waves of endless despair and rage that scrapes its nails repeatedly over the chalkboard of her nerves. It fills the air so completely she finds herself struggling to breathe it. She still has enough sense to understand that whatever is out there, it is big and powerful and angry. She has a moment to wonder about the size of its lungs. Then her mind blanks out completely as the terrible sound of the attack builds and builds. The sound finally punches its way out of the paper bag of Wendy’s mind and she screams, the sound tinny and distant and lost like a child shouting in a wind tunnel. She reaches out and Todd clasps her hand tightly before another boom jostles them violently against the boxes and each other. Todd lashes out with his other hand, pushing at the boxes in blind panic. Across from her, Anne is shouting angrily and Paul is grimacing and cupping his ears with his palms.

  The siege lasts for years; it lasts for minutes. The thing outside suddenly appears to lose interest, lagging behind. The last tremor dissipates through the Bradley’s armor and their bones. The last roar fades, leaving behind a deafening echoing ring in their ears and a tingling vibration deep in their chests. The thing cries plaintively in the distance, as if sad to see the Bradley go and calling for its return. Wendy gasps for air, her heart clanging in her chest like a bell. She sees the terrified pale faces crying in the dark and barely recognizes them. She touches her mouth, unsure if she has stopped screaming yet.

  The Bradley crashes through an abandoned military checkpoint and then the survivors are free of Pittsburgh at last. Behind them, the city burns like an early sunrise.

  FLASHBACK: Sergeant Toby Wilson

  Combat Outpost Sawyer had all the beauty of a heavily fortified shantytown. But the mountains were breathtaking. This was the roof of the world.

  Afghanistan, land of the Afghans.

  As the Bradley topped the crest and drove along the escarpment, Sarge, sitting in his telescoped seat with the hatch open, got his first good look at the outpost that was just another island in a vast archipelago of little firebases scattered across the mountains.

  The soldiers here called it Mortaritaville.

  Sawyer lay perched on the valley’s long slope, a sprawling little compound of sandbag bunkers and huts and tents around which sturdy timber walls and rows of C-wire had been erected. From here, on the ridge, it appeared tiny and weak.

  Sarge whistled. The base had been poorly sited. A series of ridges commanded the base. From there, Afghan fighters could drop mortar rounds right into the middle of the compound and then drop behind the ridge, disappearing from view. The nearest helicopter support was at least twenty-five minutes away. No wonder the boys here were reported to be so fatalistic, living in this remote place in almost total isolation, with an enemy that could strike from anywhere at any time.

  The Bradley began to catch up to a “jingle” truck, a high-axled vehicle painted in bold and bright colors and jingling with hundreds of shiny bangles. Luridly painted female eyes stared at him from the rear bumper, as enigmatic as a cat’s. The truck was open in the back and several men sat inside wearing the baggy trousers and loose tunics typical of Afghan men.

  Smiling in the dust cloud raised in the wake
of their truck, Sarge waved.

  The men glanced at each other until one of them nodded, apparently giving permission to another man to wave back shyly.

  There we go, Sarge thought. We’re making progress now. Salaam, bud.

  Hares scattered from the road, taking refuge among the rocks.

  These men were elders and their retainers from one of the villages in the valley, on their way to attend a pow wow at the base. For several years, the Pashtuns in this wild region of Nuristan Province, so close to the Pakistan border, had welcomed the Americans. The land here was heavily forested, mostly conifers; while a majority of Afghans scratched out a living in farming and herding, the people here had been timber cutters since the days of Genghis Khan. They sold timber to Jalabad, Mehtariam, Pakistan. The jingle truck Sarge was following, in fact, was probably filled from top to bottom with firewood most days. The Taliban were oppressive and bad for business, so the people here celebrated when the Americans threw them out. Soon, however, Kabul began to enact laws restricting trade with Pakistan. The locals grumbled, but cut the Americans slack as the Americans were building roads and schools and regularly sending them gifts—school supplies, milk, prayer rugs.

  The Taliban remained active in the area. The region was a corridor for insurgents crossing over to and from Pakistan. Inevitably, the locals got caught in the crossfire. The Air Force dropped a smart bomb onto a village and missed the target, a mid-level Taliban commander, by ten minutes, instead killing thirteen civilians, including several children. As a result, the locals threw their support to the insurgents against a foreign military they now saw as infidel occupiers. Fighting raged in the valley for the past six months, accounting for thirty percent of all combat in the brigade. The Afghan National Police station in the closest village to the east had been attacked so many times that the police were permanently demoralized. Without local support, the Americans controlled nothing outside their compound.

  And so this meeting had been brokered in an attempt to stop the fighting.

  Two Bradleys loaded with heavily armed combat infantry were sent to the base as a demonstration of strength. Sarge was glad to be in the point vehicle. For most of the trip, he was able to enjoy the beautiful scenery rolling by without eating the other vehicle’s dust.

  The truth was he loved Afghanistan and had even learned to love its people. The Afghans lived close to life and death. This was one of the places of the world where it was still common to see nomads living off the land. It was a very old place. Numerous armies had marched through it—Greek, Persian, Indian, Mongol, British, Soviet. The Afghans had beaten the British and the Soviets and had nothing to show for it; centuries of warfare had impoverished the country, and many people here lived as they had for thousands of years, in ignorance and poverty.

  Sarge had grown up in Los Angeles searching for something he could not name. He spent his teenage years gang banging on the city’s hard streets as a corner dealer and later as muscle. He killed a boy three days before his seventeenth birthday, but they never caught him for that. A month later, his girl dumped him and he smashed windshields in a drunken, brokenhearted rage all the way up two blocks of Hillcrest until the cops finally showed up. He took a swing at one and they did a Rodney King on him. In court, he was given a choice of prison or the Army.

  Two years later, he was deployed to Afghanistan. Found himself sitting on a Bradley, watching M1 Abrams tanks drive across fields of poppies overlooked by the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush and endless blue sky.

  And that thing he’d been searching for? He’d found it.

  The column followed the jingly truck into the base in a blinding cloud of dust. The men piled out of the truck. One hoary specimen, his eyes white with cataracts and sporting a long white beard, scowled at everything. The Colonel and his staff emerged from a large tent set up for the meeting and they shook hands all around. The old man with the beard stood off to the side, refusing to shake. Noticing Sarge, he spat and said something in Pashtun, ending with Yabba dabba doo!

  Sarge knew the expression but had never heard it spoken. It was Afghan slang, roughly translating as, “falling crates that knock down houses.” During the invasion in 2001, the Americans dropped boxes of food onto the villages, and some of them landed on huts and destroyed them, a perfect little parable of the trouble with good intentions.

  One of the other Afghans, the man who had waved to him from the back of the truck, laughed and said, “Do not take it personal. He thinks you are Russian. He thinks you are all Russians.”

  “He’s got a long memory,” Sarge said. “Maybe he thinks I’m British.”

  “Ha. Perhaps. English and Russians alike died here. I hope you will do better, my friend.”

  “Inshallah,” Sarge said. If God wills it.

  The Afghan laughed with feeling. “There is a path to the top of even the highest mountain,” he exclaimed, quoting an Afghan proverb. Then it was Sarge’s turn to laugh.

  More jingle trucks pulled up to drop off more village representatives. The squad in Sarge’s Bradley dismounted in full battle rattle, showing off their firepower to the Afghans. The place was suddenly swarming with locals and heavily armed soldiers in a melee of salutations and small talk. The Colonel ushered them into the big tent for tea, and then it was quiet again in the compound.

  A dollar got you fifty afghanis, the local money. Sarge had seen a lot of Afghanistan and particularly enjoyed visiting the larger bases that had a market day where you could buy local food, crafts, anything. He loved the food, especially the rice pilau, and ate it the way the Afghans did, using naan flatbread as a utensil to scoop the food into his mouth. But in these smaller bases, there was nothing to buy. And nothing to do except duck bullets.

  Sarge talked to Devereaux about the base and its vulnerabilities for a few minutes, and then decided to join a few of the base’s soldiers sitting and smoking on buckets and ammo crates in the protective shadow of a concrete bunker. This little nook apparently passed for the base’s lounge.

  “Welcome to Mortaritaville,” one of the soldiers said. “Got any cigarettes?”

  Devereaux did, and they all got along fine trading jokes and war stories and cutting into MRE pouches looking for candy. Sarge found a comfortable spot on the ground with his back against a wooden bin holding water bottles. The soldiers were already laughing at Devereaux. The boys in the squad called him “the Afghan” because he loved to tell big stories. The smallest firefight became an epic starring him and the Bradley. Sarge loved this part of Army life. Shooting the shit and occasionally busting balls.

  “Black and white don’t matter to me, Sarge,” Devereaux was saying. “I wouldn’t mind being a black dude like you if there weren’t so many fucking douchebags. I’d rather be white because there are more white douchebags than black douchebags, and so the odds of somebody being a douchebag to me are less being white. Does that make any sense?”

  “At least you’re not a jinglie,” another soldier said to Devereaux, referring to the Afghans. “Everybody’s a douchebag to the jinglies. This place has been douchebagged since the dawn of time.”

  Sarge laughed.

  The meeting dragged on all day until the Afghan leaders piled into their jingly trucks and started the drive back to their villages. They were smiling when they left, which the soldiers took as a good sign. Word went around that the Colonel had made good progress in getting the locals back on their side. Sarge understood that he and his boys would stay the night, and then rejoin his unit near Mehtariam tomorrow morning. The valley filled with a familiar mechanical sound and he looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare with his hand, to see a pair of Chinook helicopters pounding air, escorted by a single Apache attack helicopter.

  One of the Chinooks wobbled and abruptly fell out of the sky, crashing into the mountainside moments later and breaking into pieces as it rolled into the trees.

  “Whoa,” Devereaux said to one of the base’s soldiers. “Did you see that?”
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br />   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.