The Infection (22 page)

“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 M240 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 he 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.

“I’m sorry I let you down,” he says. “If you want to scapegoat me, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t matter anymore. So do it, if that’s what you want.”

“He knows what he did, Anne,” Paul says. “What’s done is done.”

“Who trusts him?” Anne says, glaring at the other survivors. “Who here trusts him now? This is not about justice, Paul. It is about survival.”

“We all know what’s at stake here. You think we don’t know?”

“Leave him alone,” Todd says shrilly, his voice cracking.

“It could have been any of us,” Paul adds.

He stands over Ethan, holding his shotgun. Ethan realizes these people are not his friends and that he does not really know them.

“Do you want to live or not, boy?” Paul asks him.

“I want to live,” Ethan says through gritted teeth. “But I’m sick of surviving.”

“That’s not an answer,” Paul tells him. “We’ve got to know we can count on you or Anne’s right, we’ve got to part ways right now. It’s a simple question. Can we count on you?”

“Yes,” Ethan says.

“He’s mine,” a commanding voice booms.

Sarge pushes his way into the ring of survivors, his helmet off and holding his automatic rifle in his right hand. The soldier glares down at him.

“You come with me,” he says.

♦

Anne returns her large handgun to its leather shoulder holster and heads back to the Bradley. The supplies she left on the ground are already gray with a light coating of soot, a depressing sight. She feels an overwhelming urge to hit the road. Paul suddenly blocks her path, cradling the shotgun, glaring down at her from his large, grizzled head. The gesture would be enough to intimidate anybody except her. She sidesteps him and continues to the vehicle.

“We need to talk, Anne,” he says. “I have something I need to say to you.”

She ignores him, rummaging through the boxes until she finds a battered PHILLIES cap, red paisley bandana and bottle of water. After fitting the cap on her head, she unscrews the cap of the bottle and soaks the bandana before tying it over her face to cover her mouth.