Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Digging.

There were better ways to do this. He had a knife and it could chop the earth better. That was reasonable. He drew the blade and used it. Tried not to listen to the sound he made. Could not bear to listen to the sounds the little undead thing made. Gurgles. Like a baby would. Like a real, normal baby would.

He chopped and stabbed the ground, widening the hole. Deepening it. Then he stopped when he realized that he was making the hole too neat, too perfect. Overdoing it.

“Fuck,” he said, and then almost apologized out loud because there were kids there. Kids. Holy fuck.

The infant squirmed and tried to reach for him with its ragged stumps of arms. The hole was deep enough but there were two logistical challenges. Lifting the child meant touching it. And then ending it.

This was not shooting three or four hundred yards from an elevated firing position. This was right here, up close and way too personal.

With a baby.

Living dead or not, it was a baby. If there was anything more clear in the rulebook of soldiering it was that soldiers were there—by their nature—to protect the innocent. All arguments about collateral damage aside, this was a certainty; to go against that was the ultimate taboo. Militarily and as a human goddamn being.

“Do your duty, soldier,” he told himself. Speaking out loud. Speaking in an ordinary tone of voice, which was way the fuck out of the ordinary, all things considered.

He paused for a moment, listening to what was going on inside his head. Is this it , he wondered. Is this me going crazy?

After hundreds of conflicts in scores of battles, after pulling the trigger on a legion of targets, Sam had always taken some rough pride in being stable. No PTSD. Snipers were practical, pragmatic. Grounded.

Except he was talking to himself in a cornfield after shooting one kid and contemplating how best to murder another. Kneeling by a hole he’d dug that was surgically neat.

Oh, yeah, no chance of mental damage here, folks. Move along, nothing to see.

The baby rolled over on its side and then flopped onto its belly. The truncated legs pushed against the dirt. The toothless mouth snapped at the air in his direction. Biting the smell of him.

“Jesus fuck,” said Sam. This time there was nothing normal or calm or controlled in his voice.

He looked away. The knife that stood straight from the mound of dirt he’d removed. Then down at the automatic in the shoulder rig he wore. Bullet or blade. Either would get it done. Which, though, would hurt less? The baby. Him. Both?

Knife was quicker. It was right there, but he couldn’t do it. Sam could not even bring himself to touch the handle. Not for something like this. Knives were too personal. They were meant for enemy flesh. He’d used that knife, and others over the years, to cut throats, puncture hearts, end lives. Those targets had been enemies. They were playing the same game of war and understood the rules. The knife, in those moments, was a tool no different than the hammer the person who’d boarded up the windows of the house had used.

Sam knew he could never use that knife on this target. This child. Never in ten million years. On himself, maybe. Sure. That even felt likely. Attractive. Comforting in its way.

Not on a baby.

The gun, though?

He drew it and held it, weighing it. The gun was a SIG Sauer P320-M17. Fully loaded, as it was now, it weighed twenty-nine-point-four ounces. Seventeen 9mm jacketed hollow point rounds. It was too much gun. A .22 would do it. And it would be appropriate because that caliber was notorious as an assassin’s gun. And was this an assassination? A murder? Certainly not an act of war.

Or, he wondered, was it?

The plague was spreading exponentially across the country, and by now almost certainly globally. It was unique in that anyone killed by the plague, or improperly killed by any other means, was recruited by design into the opposing force. A self-sustaining war of attrition. The infected were clear aggressors.

So, sure. War.

The baby kept trying to reach him. To bite him, even though it had no hands to grab, no teeth to bite. If Sam was in hell, then so was it. He bent down and looked into its eyes, wondering if there was an infant’s mind looking back. But it was a stupid thing to do, because he wasn’t sure he could even tell that with a living baby. Maybe he could have with the boy.

Do it , he told himself.

“Do it,” he said aloud.

I can’t .

The gun fired. Immediate. Unexpected. Blasting a big red hole in the world.

It was a massive sound because he was bent down close to the baby and because he had no idea his hand was going to fire. The blast punched him in the side of the head and he cried out, reeling, dropped the weapon, grabbed his head. Screamed.

The green corn stalks were painted with bad colors. Red and black. The blood hadn’t yet undergone the full biochemical change from normal to totally infected blood. Even so, he could see tiny threadlike worms wriggling in the droplets as they ran down the cornstalks.

Sam did not remember burying the child.

For the rest of that day and all through a bad night he wasn’t sure he had. But when he went out in the morning the hole was filled in, with a hump of dirt patted neatly above it. And there was a second mound next to that one. Bigger. The boy. Sam understood that he must have dug that grave, too, but there was no shred of memory anywhere in his head.

He knew that he should be worried about that. Really worried.

He went and sat on the porch steps to try and sort out exactly how worried. There was a small cloud—just one—skating across the sky. He watched it, leaning back to track its slow progress. He squinted into the sun, closed his eyes for a moment, and woke to darkness.

Crickets sang in the corn and in the grass. Fireflies danced in the air, and overhead someone had shot holes in the nighttime sky, through which cold light shone. The moon was down and the day was gone.

Gone.

Gone where, though?

Sam sat there, shivering with cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. He got slowly and painfully to his feet. Everything ached. Every muscle and tendon; every inch of his skin. The bones of his ass hurt and he knew that he must have been there all day. How long? Ten hours? Twelve? More.

It terrified him.

Then he heard the sound.

Soft. Furtive. Sneaky. Not close, but out in the cornfield. Near where…

Suddenly he was off the porch and running across the lawn, past the trees and the driveway, past the burned wreck of the pickup truck and the splintered shell of the gas pump. He reached the front wall of corn and plunged into it. The stiff, sharp leaves slashed at him, cutting his face and hands, but Sam bashed at them, slapped them aside as he ran.

There were noises in the field now. Grunts. Whispers. No… not whispers. It was more basic than that. Moans.

Then he burst through one row and collided into someone.

Some- thing .

A man. A farmer in coveralls. The man fell backward and down, landing hard. Sam rebounded and caught his heel on something, and he went down, too, crashing down on his aching buttocks, jarring his tailbone. He cried out as pain punched from his coccyx all the way up his spine.

The farmer grunted, too. But not in pain. It was a strange noise. A duller, less emphatic sound. Air jolted from lungs but absent of pain.

“I’m sorry,” said Sam.

And knew that it was not the thing to say. There was nothing he could say to make this moment work, to fix it. The man sat up and in the darkness his face was etched with blue starlight. His eyes were dull and seemed to look straight through Sam. His lips hung rubbery and slack. There was dirt on his hands from where he’d been digging.