The Nirvana Plague

by Gary Glass

  “They’d stop fighting.”

  “I’ll drink to that!” Miles said.

  They touched glasses. The cheap plastic tumblers Karen had served had no clink. They thudded.

  “I don’t believe in IDD,” Karen said. “I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with depersonalization. I’ve been doing some research today. I’ve got nothing else to do. And I had a very strange interaction with Roger this morning. Over a bowl of tomato soup. You should check out the DSM5 definition of ‘depersonalization.’ It’s just nonsensical doubletalk. I don’t think psychiatrists ever really know what’s wrong with anyone. They just settle for one description or another. I think Carl settled for ‘depersonalization’ because of all the diagnoses in the database it was the least bad description of how Roger and the others were acting.”

  “So what do you think is wrong with them?” Ally said.

  “I don’t think anything is wrong with them. Not everything that’s different is bad.”

  “See,” Miles said, “that’s what I was saying!”

  “The DSM5 definition says that in some cultures experiences of depersonalization are deliberately induced as part of a spiritual practice. I suppose it is referring to trance states, or whatever. Then it says, but those cases shouldn’t be confused with ‘true’ depersonalization. What the hell is true depersonalization then? It’s like saying if you tried to catch a cold on purpose then you don’t really have an infection. It’s just bullshit.”

  “When Carl first told me about IDD,” Ally said, “I didn’t really get the depersonalization thing either. The more he talked about it, the more it sounded like something else. If we lived in a culture that generally accepted the idea of spiritual awakening, I don’t think Roger would be in quarantine right now. He’d be on a talk show.”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said. “That kind of talk gives me the creeps.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “Spiritual awakening. Enlightenment. Nirvana. All that stuff. Sounds like a lot of hocus pocus to me.”

  “More so than the DSM5?”

  Miles laughed.

  “Carl didn’t think much of my idea either,” Ally said. “It used to be different. There was a time when he didn’t think I was … radical.”

  “Well I don’t know about enlightenment, Miss Ally,” Miles said, “but I do know these five patients a long time now, and every one of them seems better off now than they did before.”

  Ally looked away, picking a bit of lint off her skirt.

  “Did you ever see that movie about Oliver Sacks who discovered that dopamine let people awake from a catatonic state after they’d been asleep for decades? It was called The Awakening, or something like that. In a different world Carl would have made a name for himself by discovering a cure instead of a disease.”

  “But what is it a cure for?” Karen said. “I don’t see the connection between schizophrenic patients in a psychiatric hospital and soldiers on the line.”

  “Fear,” Miles said.

  He said it with such force the two women were startled.

  “Pure shit fear,” he said. “It’s terrible to be in the hospital. It’s the same routine day after day, all day long, nothing to do, except you never know what’s going to happen next. And that’s what being on the line is like. You spend your life sitting around bored out of your mind, and just hoping and praying to God Almighty that nothing interesting happens, cause if it does, you know you’re going to be scared shitless.”

  “You were in combat, Miles?” Ally said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I wish to God I never had seen some of the stuff I saw. Stuff nobody should ever have to see. Stuff you wouldn’t believe could be real. And it’s all such bullshit!”

  Miles opened his coat. He was still wearing his hospital scrubs. He pulled up his shirt. A series of pale, ragged scars splattered across the dark skin of his ribs and abdomen.

  Karen winced when she saw it.

  “Proximity mine,” he said. “My buddy tripped it. Blew his body to bits. These scars is his bones. I was in the hospital for five weeks. Course, he never knew.”

  “That’s horrible,” Ally said.

  “Plenty buddies kill each other out there. Same as my buddy almost killed me. He didn’t mean to trip that mine and blow up all over me, but he did. It’s all just the same as that. You can’t help killing each other.”

  He grew more emotional as he talked, his wide eyes glistening with feeling.

  “It’s not like what people think. It’s not like how they tell it on the news. You know, they make it sound like there’s a battlefield and a frontline and all that shit, but there ain’t. Cause it ain’t like that. There’s no front. There’s no, like, zone. There’s just a bunch of dudes hiding from each other, trying not to blow themselves up, cause everybody’s blind and deaf and scared absolutely fucking shitless. There’s no line. The fight is everywhere all the same time. And everybody got shields and fog and jamming and EM disrupters and shit like that. Even little countries got all that crap. The technology is too cheap, too easy to get.”

  He shook his head, and stomped his heel on the step. “There’s no line when you can’t find nobody. And you don’t want to find nobody, cause you have to kill em before you know who they are, else they will damn sure kill you. So what are you going to do? Only thing you can do is lay down and hide. There’s just, it’s just—”

  Ally stood up abruptly. “I have to go now, I have to get back.”

  She started down the stairs quickly.

  Miles got up, reached out toward her uncertainly. “Wait, Miss Ally. I’m sorry, I—”

  But Ally did not look back.

  “Thanks for the wine,” she called back as she rounded the landing below and disappeared.

  They heard the door downstairs close behind her.

  “That was stupid,” Miles said. “I’m stupid.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Karen said. “You didn’t mean to.”

  Miles sat down again, heavily. “Dr. Marley is all right. He’s a good doctor. He’s not like most of them. — I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but I hope they don’t go up. I hope they stay away from the action.”

  Chapter 16

  Marley lurched out of sleep. Found himself sitting up. Blackness. He couldn’t understand where he was. He heard a voice. Someone was very close to him.

  “Get up, sir!”

  He felt himself grabbed by the back of his shirt and hauled to his feet in the darkness.

  I’m in the mountains, he thought.

  There was a terrible uproar of sound all around him. Thudding and thumping, deep and urgent.

  Then a deep and violent spasm came through the earth. He felt dizzy.

  “What was that!” he said.

  “Follow me!” Tennover shouted, pulling Marley after him.

  But Marley couldn’t make his legs move. He was tangled up in his sleeping bag.

  Tennover pulled him off his feet.

  He fell over something, someone, on a cot.

  It was Delacourt in the cot, struggling to get out of her own bag.

  “Get off me!” she yelled.

  Suddenly Tennover’s hands were on him, yanking his sleeping bag open.

  “Come on!” he yelled.

  He heard other voices all around him, yelling.

  “Move! Move! Move!”

  Then he heard the splattering noise of automatic weapons. It sounded far away. Outside.

  He lurched forward in the darkness, stumbling after Tennover. He couldn’t see anything, and wondered how Tennover could. He’d been sleeping in his socks. Half off, the loose toes flopped under his feet across the hard floor.

  There was a tremendous crack, fantastically loud, and a blinding pink-white flash. In the flash, he saw the room around him, a freeze-frame of running figures and broken columns. It was like being hit by lightning.

  He felt that his mind was not processing the scene properly. He was in the temple. The
y were under attack.

  Tennover brought him hard against a wall. They flattened themselves against it.

  More flashes and cracks. They were being shelled.

  Marley strained to see through the darkness, his eyes sparkling from the flash. He could hear a lot of yelling in the distance, men running for their lives in the camp beyond the temple.

  Tennover shouted, “Orders, colonel!”

  Benford shouted back, not far away: “Outside! before the rest of the ceiling comes down!”

  Excited, Tennover shouted in Marley’s ear: “Stay right with me, sir!” then hauled him to his feet again and started moving fast along the wall.

  Marley thought, ridiculously, I did not come here for this! But he stayed close to Tennover, and in a few seconds they were out on the porch of the temple. On the right, the sky beyond the wall was a wild red-orange ball of flame.

  “They hit the choppers,” Tennover said.

  Marley was getting his bearings now. His thoughts cleared. He was terrified, but he could see now, and he could think.

  By the light of the fireball, Marley saw that Tennover had his helmet on. That’s how he had been able see in the darkness inside. Marley didn’t know where his own helmet was.

  Benford was there the next moment, crouching beside them, Tyminski with her.

  “Which way?” she said.

  “Can’t tell,” Tennover answered.

  “They have to be uphill or across the valley.”

  “Do they have that much range?”

  “What are they using?”

  “Can’t tell. Not RPG’s. Bigger.”

  “Real artillery?”

  Benford didn’t have her helmet either.

  “Command on comm yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tennover answered. “They’re hitting us damn hard.”

  “Orders?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.”

  Other team members were stumbling out onto the porch, looking scared.

  Debris from the explosions in camp was falling into the courtyard, pinging off the paving stones.

  Marley said, “Where are the patients?”

  “We need to get clear of this structure,” Benford said. “Move toward the back corner of the yard.”

  Tennover tugged on Marley’s shoulder, but Marley pulled back.

  “What about the patients, colonel?”

  “I’m going back in for them.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Where’s your helmet?”

  “Where’s yours?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll get them.”

  He didn’t know whether she meant the helmets or the patients, but, motioning to Tennover, she headed back inside, and they followed her. Tyminski had a flashlight, and he put the beam onto the spot where they’d been asleep on their bedrolls just a few minutes ago. They ran to it and quickly threw on their powerpacks and helmets and jacked each other in.

  Inside his helmet, Marley flipped his visor down, and the gloom around him was instantly transformed into a dull green digital geometry. He could see the pale outlines of the temple’s main room, the columns, and the warmer floor. Benford, Tyminski, and Tennover stood out more brightly, lit from within by their body heat. Blue labels with their names floated over their heads. Everyone else was outside.

  The comm was a mad roar of commands and yelling. And groans of pain. After three seconds of chaos, proximity- and rank-dampening kicked in, and Benford said:

  “Anybody see them?”

  “No, sir,” said Tennover and Tyminski together.

  “Who was on watch?”

  “I was, sir,” Tennover said.

  “Where did you see them last?”

  Tennover pointed across the way with a ghostly arm. “Standing over there, same as before.”

  “Did you see where they went?”

  “No, sir. Next time I looked that way after the first hit, they were gone. I was at the door, sir. No one went out.”

  “Pair off. Search the side chambers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dr. Marley, you stay on the lieutenant’s ass.”

  “OK,” he answered automatically.

  Inside the helmet, he felt more distant from the firestorm outside. The dark world turned an electronic green, the yelling and blasting filtered by the noise dampeners, everyone around him properly labeled, the universe seemed more under control. And he had a purpose to distract him from the violence of the assault.

  Tennover headed right, toward the side chambers nearby. Benford and Tyminski sprinted across the room toward the opposite chambers.

  Marley chased Tennover through the columns into the first little room. Nothing.

  They ran on to the next one. Nothing.

  They worked their way from room to room to the back of the hall, where a double row of columns stood across the entrance to a second smaller hall, really a wide corridor. They stopped, crouching between the column bases.

  “Nothing our side,” Tennover said on comm. “No sign of them.”

  Benford and Tyminski ran up, blue labels chasing them, and crouched down.

  “Nothing our side either,” Benford said, breathing heavy. “Anybody outside on comm?”

  No answer.

  “Damnit. Nobody picked up a helmet?”

  “Everyone was asleep,” Tennover said.

  Another brilliant pink flash and thunderclap blasted through the room. They all flattened to the floor instinctively.

  “Was that in the courtyard?” Benford said. “No. Couldn’t be. But close.”

  “That’s some serious ordnance,” Tyminski said.

  “Dave, grab all the helmets you can find and get them outside to the others. Northwest corner of the wall.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Tyminski ran off across the hall.

  Benford tapped Marley on the shoulder.

  “Let’s find these people and get the hell out of here.”

  Benford ran down the wide corridor, hugging the wall, and Tennover and Marley followed. At the end of it, a post and lintel door opened at the head of a stone stairway. They plunged down it, the cold walls getting darker around them. The steps were wet and slippery. At the bottom of the flight, the landing turned and opened into a larger chamber, pitch black. The floor crackled under their boots.

  And there they were, floating in the blackness of his nightvision like emerald ghosts, their eyes burning like bright coals. Marley started when he saw them. They were sitting all in a row along one wall, crossed arms resting on their drawn-up knees, like glowing gargoyles, or jack-o-lanterns along a dark porch.

  Benford flipped her visor up so they could hear her clearly. “Let’s go, people!”

  None of them moved.

  Benford bent down close to Davis.

  “Lieutenant Davis, follow me out with your squad!”

  Davis gave no reaction.

  “That’s an order, Lieutenant! All of you! Let’s go.”

  None of them responded.

  “Colonel,” Marley said.

  “What?”

  “This room must be underground. It must go back into the hill behind the temple. It’s a natural bomb shelter.”

  Benford glanced around the dark room. No windows.

  “Yes. It would be safer. — You two stay here with them. I’ll send the others back. Lieutenant, don’t let them leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The walls were so evenly cool that with nightvision it looked like they were floating inside a dim cobblestone sphere. Without nightvision it was just featureless blackness, as dizzying as freefall.

  “We need a flashlight,” Marley said.

  “Yes, sir.” In fact, Tennover had his, still clipped to his vest. He snapped it on and flipped his visor up— “Holy shit!”

  Marley jumped like he’d been shot. “What! What is it!”

  “Look!”

  Marley flipped his visor up and looked at the spot of light on the wall. Despite himse
lf he stepped back from what he saw.

  “Bones,” Tennover said.

  “Human bones.”

  The walls were all made of bones. Skulls and hands, ribs and spines, arms and legs, feet and hips.

  “It’s a tomb,” Marley said.

  Long dead centuries of bones stood round them, packed together and daubed with mud. There were no intact skeletons. The bones were all mixed up together. Some had fallen out of the walls and been kicked into the corners.

  Tennover tried to shrug it off. “Find a place to sit, sir, so we can cut the light.”

  Marley sat down on the floor against the wall opposite the ten. It was not comfortable. The bones pressed into his back. The broken bits of trampled bone on the floor made an unpleasant seat.

  Tennover sat down beside him. He shone his light quickly over the ten, making them blink, then snapped it off.

  Marley took note of the blinks. They were recovering their senses. They had deliberately moved in here.

  The darkness was absolute, but the earth rumbled around them. The comm roared with the fury of the fight in the camp above. With every explosive rumble, bits of mud and bone shook lose from the wall and ticked off his helmet and shoulders.

  On comm, a new voice:

  “Colonel Benford! Where are you?”

  It was Dr. Estrada. He was angry.

  “Near the temple,” they heard Benford answer. “Where’s Reiser?”

  “Reiser’s dead,” he said. “We’re pinned down in the surgery. You’re ranking officer, colonel.”

  “I’m not a field officer. I’m not even part of your unit. Who else is up there?”

  Another voice: “Captain Solso here, sir.”

  He sounded scared.

  “Captain. Where are you?”

  “Between you and the Major, sir, I think. Trying to find some cover.”

  “Anybody else? Officers?”

  Nobody else spoke up.

  “It’s a mess up here, sir,” Solso said.

  “Situation?”

  “Sir, Colonel Reiser sent out two squads an hour ago. Attack came when the birds came back, as soon as they put down. Hit the choppers first, and the fuel dump. Charlie squad was onboard. Bastards, couldn’t have timed it better.”

  “Enemy position?”

  “Artillery appears to be coming from across the valley.”