Whistling Past the Graveyard (20 page)

A lot of the guys who enlist are dickheads like Joe Bob.

The other two? Farris is a slacker with no G.E.D. who mops up at a Taco Bell. They made him a rifleman. And our grenadier, Talia? Her arms and her thighs are a roadmap of healed-over needle scars, but she doesn’t talk about it. I think she maybe got clean and signed up to help her stay clean.

That’s Fireteam Delta. Four fuck-ups who didn’t have the sense to stay out of uniform or enough useful skills to be put somewhere that mattered.

So here we are, holding Checkpoint Baker and waiting for orders.

We opened some M.R.E.s and ate bad spaghetti and some watery stuff that was supposed to be cream of broccoli soup.

“Dude,” said Farris, “there’s a Quiznos like three miles from here. I saw it on the way in.”

“So?”

“One of us could go and get something…”

“Deserting a post in a time of crisis?” murmured Talia dryly. “I think they have a rule about that.”

“It’s not deserting,” said Farris, but he didn’t push it. I think he knew what we all thought. As soon as he was around the bend in the road he’d fire up a blunt, and that’s all we’d need is to have the lieutenant roll up on Farris stoned and A.W.O.L. On my watch.

I gave him my version of the
look.

He grinned like a kid who was caught reaching in the cookie jar.

“Hey,” said Talia, “somebody’s coming.”

And shit if we didn’t all look the wrong way first. We looked up the road, the way the truck went. Then we realized Talia was looking over the sandbags.

We turned.

There was someone on the road. Not in a car. On foot, walking along the side of the road, maybe four hundred yards away.

“Civvie,” said Talia. “Looks like a kid.”

I took out my binoculars. They’re a cheap, low-intensity pair that I bought myself. Still better than the ‘no pair’ they issued me. The civvie kid was maybe seventeen, wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt, jeans, and bare feet. He walked with his head down, stumbling a little. There were dark smears on his shirt, and I’ve been in enough bar fights to know what blood looks like when it dries on a football jersey. There was some blood on what I could see of his face and on both hands.

“Whoever he is,” I said, “someone kicked his ass.”

They took turns looking.

While Talia was looking, the guy raised his head, and she screamed. Like a horror movie scream; just a kind of yelp.

“Holy shit!”

“What?” Everyone asked it at the same time.

“His face…”

I took the binoculars back. The guy’s head was down again. He was about a hundred yards away now, coming on but not in a hurry. If he was that jacked up then maybe he was really out of it. Maybe he got drunk and picked the wrong fight and now his head was busted and he didn’t know where he was.

“What’s wrong with his face?” asked Farris.

When Talia didn’t answer, I lowered the glasses and looked at her. “Tal…what was wrong with his face?”

She still didn’t answer, and there was a weird light in her eyes.

“What?” I asked.

But she didn’t need to answer.

Farris said, “Holy fuck!”

I whirled around. The civvie was thirty yards away. Close enough to see him.

Close enough to see.

The kid was walking right toward the bridge, head up now. Eyes on us.

His face…

I thought it was smeared with blood.

But that wasn’t it.

He didn’t have a face.

Beside me, Joe Bob said, “Wha—wha—wha—?” He couldn’t even finish the word.

Farris made a gagging sound. Or maybe that was me.

The civvie kid kept walking straight toward us. Twenty yards. His mouth was open, and for a stupid minute, I thought he was speaking. But you need lips to speak. And a tongue. All he had was teeth. The rest of the flesh on his face was—gone.

Just gone.

Torn away. Or…

Eaten away.

“Jesus Christ, Sal,” gasped Talia. “What the fuck? I mean—what the
fuck?
”

Joe Bob swung his big M249 up and dropped the bipod legs on the top sandbag. “I can drop that freak right—”

“Hold your goddamn fire,” I growled, and the command in my own voice steadied my feet on the ground. “Farris, Talia—hit the line, but nobody fires a shot unless I say so.”

They all looked at me.

“Right fucking now,” I bellowed.

They jumped. Farris and Talia brought up their M4 carbines. So did I. The kid was ten yards away now, and he didn’t look like he wanted to stop.

“How’s he even walking with all that?” asked Talia in a small voice.

I yelled at the civvie. “Hey! Sir? Sir…? I need you to stop right there.”

His head jerked up a little more. He had no nose at all. And both eyes were bloodshot and wild. He kept walking, though.

“Sir! Stop. Do not approach the barricade.”

He didn’t stop.

Then everyone was yelling at him. Ordering him to stop. Telling him to stand down, or lie down, or kneel. Confusing, loud, conflicting. We yelled at the top of our voices as the kid walked right at us.

“I can take him,” said Joe Bob in a trembling voice. Was it fear or was he getting ready to bust a nut at the thought of squeezing that trigger?

The civvie was right there. Right in our faces.

He hit the chest-high stack of sandbags and made a grab for me with his bloody fingers. I jumped back.

There was a sudden, three-shot
rat-a-tat-tat
.

The civvie flew back from the sandbags, and the world seemed to freeze as the echoes of those three shots bounced off the bridge and the trees on either side of the river and off the flower water beneath us. Three drum-hits of sound.

I stared at the shooter.

Not Joe Bob. He was as dumbfounded as me.

Talia’s face was white with shock at what she had just done.

“Oh…god…” she said, in a voice that was almost no voice at all. Tiny, lost.

Farris and I were in motion in the next second, both of us scrambling over the barricade. Talia stood with her smoking rifle pointed at the sky. Joe Bob gaped at her.

I hit the blacktop and rushed over to where the kid lay sprawled on the ground.

The three-shot burst had caught him in the center of the chest, and the impact had picked him up and dropped him five feet back. His shirt was torn open over a ragged hole.

“Ah…Christ,” I said under my breath, and I probably said it forty times as we knelt down.

“We’re up the creek on this,” said Farris, low enough so Talia couldn’t hear.

Behind us, though, she called out, “Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay.”

You could have put a beer can in the hole in his chest. Meat and bone were ripped apart; he’d been right up against the barrel when she’d fired.

The kid’s eyes were still open.

Wide open.

Almost like they were looking right at…

The dead civvie came up off the ground and grabbed Farris by the hair.

Farris screamed and tried to pull back. I think I just blanked out for a second. I mean…this was impossible. Guy had a fucking hole in his chest and no face and…

Talia and Joe Bob screamed, too.

Then the civvie clamped his teeth on Farris’s wrist.

I don’t know what happened next. I lost it. We all lost it. One second I was kneeling there, watching Farris hammer at the teenager’s face with one fist while blood shot up from between the bastard’s teeth. I blinked, and then suddenly the kid was on the ground and the four of us—all of us—were in a circle around him, stomping the shit out of him. Kicking and stamping down and grinding on his bones.

The kid didn’t scream.

And he kept twisting and trying to grab at us. With broken fingers, and shattered bones in his arms, he kept reaching. With his teeth kicked out, he kept trying to bite. He would not stop.

We would not stop.

None of us could.

And then Farris grabbed his M4 with bloody hands and fired down at the body as the rest of us leapt back. Farris had it on three-round burst mode. His finger jerked over and over on the trigger and he burned through an entire magazine in a couple of seconds. Thirty rounds. The rounds chopped into the kid. They ruined him. They tore his chest and stomach apart. They blew off his left arm. They tore away what was left of his face.

Farris was screaming.

He dropped the magazine and went to swap in a new one and then I was in his face. I shoved him back.

“
Stop it!”
I yelled as loud as I could.

Farris staggered and fell against the sandbags, and I was there with him, my palms on his chest, both of us staring holes into each other, chests heaving, ears ringing from the gunfire. His rifle dropped to the blacktop and fell over with a clatter.

The whole world was suddenly quiet. We could hear the run of water in the river, but all of the birds in the trees had shut up.

Joe Bob made a small mewling sound.

I looked at him.

He was looking at the kid.

So I looked at the kid, too.

He was a ragdoll, torn and empty.

The son of a bitch was still moving.

“No,” I said.

But the day said:
yes.

-3-

We stood around it.

Not him.
It.

What else would you call something like this?

“He…can’t still be alive,” murmured Talia. “That’s impossible.”

It was like the fifth or sixth time she’d said that.

No one argued with her.

Except the kid was still moving. He had no lower jaw and half of his neck tendons were shot away, but he kept trying to raise his head. Like he was still trying to bite.

Farris clapped a hand to his mouth and tried not to throw up…but why should he be any different? He spun off and vomited onto the road. Joe Bob and Talia puked in the weeds.

Talia turned away and stood behind Farris, her hand on his back. She bent low to say something to him, but he kept shaking his head.

“What the hell we going to do ‘bout this?” asked Joe Bob.

When I didn’t answer, the other two looked at me.

“He’s right, Sally,” said Talia. “We have to do something. We can’t leave him like that.”

“I don’t think a Band-Aid’s going to do much frigging good,” I said.

“No,” she said, “we have to—you know—put him out of his misery.”

I gaped at her. “What, you think I’m packing Kryptonite bullets? You shot him and he didn’t die, and Farris…Christ, look at this son of a bitch. What the hell do you think
I’d
be able to—”

Talia got up and strode over to me and got right up in my face.

“Do something,” she said coldly.

I wasn’t backing down because there was nowhere to go. “Like fucking
what
?”

Her eyes held mine for a moment and then she turned, unslung her rifle, put the stock to her shoulder, and fired a short burst into the civvie’s head.

If I hadn’t hurled my lunch a few minutes ago, I’d have lost it now. The kid’s head just flew apart.

Blood and gray junk splattered everyone.

Farris started to cry.

The thunder of the burst rolled past us, and the breeze off the river blew away the smoke.

The civvie lay dead.

Really dead.

I looked at Talia. “How—?”

There was no bravado on her face. She was white as a sheet, and half a step from losing her shit. “What else was there to shoot?” she demanded.

-4-

I called it in.

We were back on our side of the sandbags. The others hunkered down around me.

The kid lay where he was.

Lieutenant Bell said, “You’re sure he stopped moving after taking a headshot?”

I’m not sure what I expected the loot to say, but that wasn’t it. That was a mile down the wrong road from the right kind of answer. I think I’d have felt better if he reamed me out or threatened some kind of punishment. That, at least, would make sense.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “He, um, did not seem to respond to body shots or other damage.”

I left him a big hole so he could come back at me on this. I wanted him to.

Instead, he said, “We’re hearing this from other posts. Headshots seem to be the only thing that takes these things down.”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “What do you mean ‘these things’? This was just a kid.”

“No,” he said. There was a rustling sound and I could tell that he was moving, and when he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “Sal, listen to me here. The shit is hitting the fan. Not just here, but everywhere.”

“What shit? What the hell’s going on?”

“They…don’t really know. All they’re saying is that it’s spreading like crazy. Western Pennsylvania, Maryland, parts of Virginia and Ohio. It’s all over, and people are acting nuts. We’ve been getting some crazy-ass reports.”

“Come on, Loot,” I said—and I didn’t like the pleading sound in my own voice. “Is this some kind of disease or something?”

“Yes,” he said, then, “maybe. We don’t know.
They
don’t know, or if they do, then they’re sure as shit not telling us.”

“But—”

“The thing is, Sally, you got to keep your shit tight. You hear me? You blockade that bridge and I don’t care who shows up—nobody gets across. I don’t care if it’s a nun with an orphan or a little girl with her puppy, you put them down.”

“Whoa, wait a frigging minute,” I barked, and everyone around me jumped. “What the hell are you saying?”

“You heard me. That kid you put down was infected.”

The others were listening to this and their faces looked sick and scared. Mine must have, too.

“Okay,” I said, “so maybe he was infected, but I’m not going to open up on everyone who comes down the road. That’s crazy.”

“It’s an order.”

“Bullshit. No one’s going to give an order like that. No disrespect here,
Lieutenant,
but are you fucking high?”

“That’s the order, now follow it…”

“No way. I don’t believe it. You can put me up on charges, Loot, but I am not going to—”