Craig DiLouie: Pandemic

He’d experienced real hardship in Afghanistan: constant fighting, hunger and thirst, scorching heat and numbing cold, days and nights without sleep, scorpions and giant spiders and bugs that ate you alive. The cherries came, and he taught them war. Some got hit; most went home different men than when they’d arrived.

Muldoon couldn’t go home. Civilian life, with its comforts and niceties, kicked his ass, chewed him up, and spit him out. In the real world, he woke up with night terrors and flinched at loud noises. He drank all the time and got into fights. He’d pound some poor guy over nothing. He’d woken up in jail in Vicenza and Rome. His relationships with women tended to be stormy and short. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they called it. After some time home, he always asked to go right back into the shit. The Army psychologists kept an eye on him. But in the field, all his anxieties melted away. He grew stronger. Afghanistan was the devil he knew.

America had been turned into a war zone. Nobody was going home. It sucked for everybody, but he personally didn’t mind it. It somehow felt right. Again, the devil he knew. In the new age, war wasn’t the anomaly; the real world was. War had become the norm. And he wasn’t just surviving. He was thriving. He could puzzle over that for years.

The only problem was serving under Harry Lee.

The Tomcats dropped them into the bush outside a village in Korengal Valley near the Pakistani border. Taliban and foreign fighters crossed over from Pakistan each year to take on the American infidels. Lee had solid intel that a Taliban commander was going to be traveling along a certain route at a certain time. Muldoon’s squad was supposed to do the grab. Lee came along to see if he could get something from the man before they handed him up the ladder for interrogation. Muldoon was happy to get the mission. It was real Special Forces shit.

They lay all night and most of the next day under cover in a gully, waiting for their guy to show up. Instead, boy walked straight through their area of operations; he couldn’t have been older than ten or twelve. The soldiers hunkered down. Lee looked at Muldoon.

The kid had no business here. From the way he kept glancing around, he’d either spotted the Americans or had already known they were there.

The captain drew his finger across his throat. He wanted Muldoon to kill the kid.

Muldoon refused the order.

Thirty minutes later, a heavy machine gun thudded on the ridge above, chewing up the ground around the squad’s position. Another opened up from the west. They were surrounded. The air filled with flying metal. The Taliban threw rocks down at them, hoping the Americans would believe they were grenades and leave cover.

Captain Lee called in fire mission after fire mission on the ridges above. The big arty rounds rained down, but the Taliban didn’t quit. They smelled blood. After an hour of fighting, every weapon in the squad was suppressed. The insurgents could maneuver almost at will. They bounded down the rocks, closing in for the kill with their AKs. The Taliban didn’t take prisoners.

Apaches roared overhead, like their cavalry ancestors, in the nick of time. The gunships had to drop their ordnance practically on the squad’s heads to keep them from being overrun. The Taliban were that close.

Lee blamed Muldoon for the failure of the mission. Lee thought the kid had spotted them and reported their presence to Taliban in the village.

Muldoon believed the kid hadn’t just shown up at that exact place and time by chance, not in all that wide open nothing. The Taliban had already known they were there. The kid was probably just being used to collect intel on their unit. A spotter. Besides, he didn’t kill ten-year-old kids unless they were pointing a gun at him.

But Muldoon understood why Lee had given the order. Hell, Muldoon sometimes questioned whether he’d made the right call. That was one of the fucked-up things about war—you often faced horrible moral choices that sucked no matter what you did. You ended up plagued with guilt because you didn’t cut a kid’s throat.

His problem with Lee was that the man hadn’t called off the mission, even after there was a good chance they’d been spotted. If there was any chance of the Taliban leader rolling through, Lee wanted to nab him, regardless of the risk.

Lee was a good soldier, a good officer. His intelligence work had saved lives. Muldoon respected that. But the man was a fanatic when he had a cause. Fanatics got good men killed.

Not today. Not if Muldoon could help it. He and his boys were coming back alive.

Wade awoke from a long, dreamless sleep with a start. He raised his head from Rawlings’s shoulder. She stirred.

“Rise and shine,” Gray said as he kicked the men awake.

The soldier had taken off his helmet and blouse and wore his tactical vest over his T-shirt. He had large stains around his armpits. He grinned under mirrored sunglasses, chewing gum. He looked like something out of Soldier of Fortune .

The asshole’s starting to enjoy this , Wade thought. Thinks it’s fun.

“On your feet, lovebirds. It’s oh-dawn hundred.”

Sunlight streamed through the closed blinds. The room was hot. Wade felt like crap. But he’d slept the whole night, from dusk to dawn, perhaps for the first time in weeks.

The classroom had a whiteboard and little desks. Books and art supplies filled the shelves. Posters hung on the yellow walls. School was out. He wondered if kids would ever go to school here again.

Rawlings gave him a bleary smile. “’Morning, Private Wade.”

He gave her hand one last squeeze and let go. “Thanks.”

“You should know I don’t let every guy I meet sleep on my shoulder.”

He smiled at her. “I got your back today, Sergeant.”

“Eat up,” Gray said. “We got a long day. Get your calories.”

A soldier burned up to six thousand calories a day in a combat zone. The Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, provided twelve hundred calories. They’d have to eat every chance they got. The men tore into the pouches and ate their breakfast cold. Gray turned to Wade with a big, satisfied smile.

What does he think, I’d tell the men NOT to eat? Wade was already tired of the pissing contest. If Gray wanted to be in charge, so be it.

Then he realized Gray wasn’t looking at him. As far as Gray was concerned, the pissing contest was over. He was looking at Rawlings. The soldier licked his lips. He had a thing for her, then. Love or lust, it didn’t matter. Gray was going to be a problem.

The men hauled themselves to their feet and checked their gear. They cleaned and reloaded their weapons and counted magazines.

“Let’s move,” Gray said. “We’ll stay on this side of the highway. Check out some houses and see if we can find a few working vehicles. Get the fuck out of here.”

The squad geared up and filed out the window. They moved quietly through the residential neighborhood, flashing hand signals to communicate where they were going and what they saw. Wade limped after them with Rawlings, refusing her help. He had to pull his own weight.

They found plenty of abandoned vehicles, but none of them would run. Even the vehicles still drivable and that had keys in the ignition had been drained of gas by scavengers.

The houses turned into low-rise apartment buildings with retail stores on the bottom floors. The squad filed down the middle of the street, weapons ready, faces pale and drawn. Dead bodies drew clouds of flies. Loose litter fluttered in the breeze. Most of the houses had Xs painted on the doors; the area had been ordered evacuated by the government. Graffiti invited them into some buildings and warned them out of others. The air smelled of smoke.