Craig DiLouie: Pandemic

“We lost our commo,” said the Black soldier. “Maybe the operation was scrubbed.”

“Maybe the rest of the company is fucking dead ,” said the surfer.

A third soldier, sporting a stained bandage on his left cheek, pointed at the bodies in the beds. “You’ve seen what these people do. They killed our guys. They’re not even people. I say, kill them all.”

“Best to put them out of their misery now before they wake up, and we have to fight them on the streets,” agreed a fourth soldier. “We should put down as many as we can.”

The group was split down the middle. The sergeant was the tie-breaker.

“It’s not up for a vote,” Ramos said. He lowered his shotgun and fired a round at the middle-aged man lying in front of him.

Blood and brains sprayed across the floor. Some flew onto the legs of Braddock’s scrubs. The sound flattened his eardrums. His ears rang in the aftermath.

The soldier with the bandaged face grinned, revealing two missing front teeth. “Hooah, Sergeant.”

Ramos’s casual execution of one of the infected, which was supposed to demonstrate simplicity and resolve, backfired. The rest of the soldiers paled at the sight.

Braddock backed away in horror. One of the patients on the floor tried to take a bite out of his leg, forcing him to take another step back. The woman’s jaws clamped shut with an audible click that made him shiver.

People didn’t just wake up alert after being yanked out of a chemically induced coma. But the Bug was tough. It always wanted to play.

“Fuck this,” the surfer dude said.

“We’ve all done it,” the man with the bandaged face told him. “Lots of times.”

“Not like this. Not while they’re sleeping. They look like people.”

Braddock flinched at the sound of gunfire coming from a higher floor. No flurry—the shots were methodical. Executions. They were going to kill everybody in the hospital. The debate was pointless. The soldiers had orders. The ability of the Army to function at all depended on following orders, the chain of command. Sometimes, the orders sucked.

“The rest of the platoon is already in action,” Ramos said. “We’re doing this. Now.”

Braddock felt something inside him burst, releasing energy that threatened to go in a direction he couldn’t control and might very well get him killed. He’d worked too hard to keep those people alive to see them hamstrung and slaughtered like livestock. There was still hope. Modern medicine could cure the virus. They just needed a little more time. The world owed them a little more time.

He disconnected Ellen White’s intravenous feeding tube and restraints. He picked her up in his arms. She seemed to weigh nothing. She sucked her thumb like a child. She believed in him. He owed her his life.

“Come on, Chief,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

The sergeant said: “Sir? Sir! What the fuck are you doing?”

White’s eyes flashed open, bright and intelligent. Braddock looked at her and didn’t see the Bug. He saw the Chief of Medicine. She reached up to touch his face with trembling hands. She whimpered.

“ Sir! ” the sergeant roared. He raised his weapon, a monstrous shotgun.

“Ellen,” Braddock said. “It’s John. I’m here.”

She was still in there. Pleading.

The treatment. It works.

She was getting better, and the sergeant was going to kill them both.

Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t. Shoot.

“Put her down and step back! Now!”

Braddock had no choice. He was going to have to do as they asked. He kissed her on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Ellen.”

She plunged her thumbs into his eyes.

He screamed and gripped her wrists. His vision roared in mottled shades of dark and light. Searing pain stabbed through his skull. He flung her away.

Then it stopped.

He wasn’t screaming anymore.

He was laughing.

It was hilarious .

Fight or flight. Private First Class Scott Wade wanted to run.

Then his training took over.

He raised his M4 carbine and fired a single burst. The doctor howled with animal glee as the bullets stitched his chest and flung him against the wall in a spray of blood.

The big man sprawled, twitching and smoking. He drew a rattling breath, giggled and died.

The old woman struggled to a sitting position. She started to crawl laughing toward Wade. “Cut off your balls—”

Wade blew her away too, painting the wall with her brains.

He was following orders, completing the mission. But it was more than that.

Fucking monsters.

The excited plague victims squirmed against their restraints like giant larvae. Methodical gunshots came from the floor above and the floor below.

He saw red.

Ramos lowered his shotgun. “Nice work. Now let’s—”

Wade leveled his carbine and lit up the patients. The rest of the squad joined in. They ripped the infected to shreds. Mattress stuffing filled the air.

Wade screamed as he drained his magazine.

Then fell to his knees, retching.

From the stress, the heat, the exhaustion, the shock, all of it.

Wade had loved to play Army as a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin. His parents didn’t let him play with toy guns, so he and his friends used sticks. His younger sister, Beth, preferred dolls and tea parties, but she sometimes joined in so she could be near him.

To him and his friends, war was wondrous play. The bad guys went down in a hail of gunfire. Sometimes, a good guy died, a noble sacrifice played out with plenty of drama.

At the end, they all went home happy and tired. They’d faced danger and fought through it. They’d looked death in the eye and walked away.

Wade would later look back on those summers as the best times in his life.

In high school, he became interested in sports and girls. He smoked a little dope and drank when he thought he could get away with it. He spent a lot of time hanging out in a bank parking lot with his friends. He had a lot of fun but had a sense of doing time until the rest of his life started.

Soldiers were leaving Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan. He wasn’t interested in war anymore because he had come to understand it as a horrifying thing. Once you died, you stayed dead. But the instincts of his childhood remained.

His high school years were winding down. He saw his whole privileged future laid out for him: college, high-paying job, marriage, house, kids, retirement, death. In many ways, he felt like an overgrown boy. There was no rite of passage for his generation. He wanted to challenge himself before catching that train. Soon, Wade would get to make his own choices. The right challenge, he knew, would make him a man.

He decided to join the Army. He expected his anti-war parents to try to talk him out of it, but they were proud of him. Even Beth, who’d long ago given up worshipping her brother, hugged him during their tearful farewell and later wrote him once a week. Those letters became his lifeline to the real world during his training and deployment.

After Basic Training, he was classified 11-B. Infantry. He ended up in the Tenth Mountain Division. His combat patch displayed two crossed swords suggesting the Roman numeral X. The Mountaineers. Lightfighters. Climb to Glory.

Wade got more than he bargained for in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

His platoon lived in a tiny outpost on an exposed mountainside. He froze in the winter and suffered in the summer. During the fighting season, Taliban fighters arrived from Pakistan and lobbed mortar rounds at them. They dropped bursts of plunging machine gun fire before disappearing over the ridges. They rigged improvised explosives on the roads. They ambushed the Americans from trees and rocks.