Craig DiLouie: Pandemic

There was no glory in it. The weird thing was that he enjoyed combat far more than he thought he would. It was a rush, the most exciting thing in the world. As long as everybody in his unit made it out the other end of a firefight alive, combat was even exalting. He lived more in those intense flashes of fighting than in all the rest of his nineteen years put together.

And he found something else in war.

Love.

He loved the guys he fought with. They could be hilarious and sullen, wise and ignorant, fun and grating. The Army had all kinds. Sometimes, he couldn’t stand looking at them. But he loved them enough to die for them. He knew they’d do the same for him without hesitation.

When he fought, it was for them. The worst thing that could happen out in the shit wasn’t that he died. It was letting his comrades down and getting one of them killed.

This responsibility had kept him going after carrying seventy pounds of weapons and gear across miles of mountainous terrain. Made him stay sharp while functioning on little sleep for weeks at a stretch. Kept him fighting when the ground around him exploded during an ambush.

It was why he double checked his bootlaces before leaving the wire, carefully stripped and oiled his gun, performed every single mind-numbing equipment check. He gulped water to stay hydrated and watched every single step so he didn’t break silence.

Because if he made one little mistake, people got killed, and it would be on him. They depended on each other more than they did God.

The mission sucked. Afghanistan sucked. But still, he felt that he was making a difference there, that he was doing something good.

That was all he wanted: to be tested, to prove himself and to make a difference.

As his tour of duty in Afghanistan came to an end, Wade started to recognize the price he would have to pay. It would be hard as hell to assimilate into his old life. He would finally have to process the trauma he’d experienced. He would suffer withdrawal from the adrenaline of combat. He would despair over leaving the rest of the guys on that mountain to fight without him.

War brought out the worst in man but also the best.

Then Tenth Mountain flew home to a different kind of war.

Soon after deployment in Boston, Wade called his parents to make sure they were okay.

His sister answered.

Beth told him all the things she’d done to Mom and Dad. She told him what she wanted to do to him.

He listened to all of it. He just wanted to hear her voice. By the end, he was so numb he could barely speak.

The last thing he said was that he loved her. That it wasn’t her fault. That he forgave her.

She responded with hysterical laughter. Laughter so hard he could hear her wheezing. That was when he knew the sister he loved was still in there, a prisoner of the madness.

The infected laughed when they inflicted pain.

They also laughed when they experienced it.

Wade still kept a photo of her in his helmet. He looked at it so he could remember who she was, and didn’t have to think about her smashing in their parents’ heads with one of Dad’s golf clubs.

He hated the infected. He hated them for turning her into one of them.

He shot the people in the hospital because, at that moment, he wanted to kill anything not wearing a uniform.

The hospital. The quarantine ward, now a slaughterhouse.

Wade admitted a primitive satisfaction in putting down the people that the soldiers of Bravo Company were calling Klowns, short for Killer Clowns. The crazies were so terrifying that every kill flooded him with warm cathartic relief. But then remorse came quick and hard.

He was fighting unarmed crazy people in an insane war. Every time he survived combat, he didn’t feel alive. He felt as if he were dying a little. Soon, there’d be nothing left of him but a ghost. A killing machine.

Ramos clapped him on the shoulder. “On your feet, Wade.”

As usual, there was no time for thinking, feeling, any of it.

Still, nobody moved, eyeing their grisly handiwork with dawning awareness. It had taken seconds to lose control, for the operation to turn into a massacre.

Which was more terrifying than anything. What they’d just done wasn’t about following orders. They’d completely lost it, and they knew it.

They were soldiers. Soldiers couldn’t make mistakes, but men did.

Day to day, it was becoming less about the job and the mission, and more about survival, simply staying alive.

Then even that shock wore off.

Wade hauled himself to his feet and raised his tactical goggles, which had fogged from the humidity. He detached his magazine. Empty. He slapped a new magazine into his carbine and put a round into the firing chamber. Locked and loaded. Ready to kill again.

“Well, that’s one room done,” Eraserhead said with a grin that showed his missing teeth.

“Hurray,” Williams said with obvious sarcasm. “Only a hundred to go.”

“They don’t expect us to do all of them, do they?” Ford asked.

Ramos’s squad had two fireteams: Alpha, which was Wade’s, and Bravo, which had stayed outside in the hospital parking lot with the Humvees, providing exterior security for the operation. Wade still sometimes viewed his comrades in Alpha with the social lens he’d developed over his high school years. Williams, tall and wiry, was the squad’s nerd. The only Black man in the platoon, he was a brainy kid who’d grown up in poverty in Detroit and joined the Army to gain marketable skills. The guys ribbed him for reading the articles in Playboy and called him Doctor Mist.

Ford was the jock. He was good looking enough to be an actor but was mystified by women. He constantly read books on how to seduce them. He looked at Wade as some kind of Casanova because Wade had had a steady girlfriend in high school.

And Billy Cook, the giant kid the guys called Eraserhead, was the oddball. He had crazy eyes. He said weird things, out of the blue, even during a firefight. He was built like a refrigerator. He was also the only man in the squad besides Ramos who wasn’t on psychiatric meds, who didn’t take sleeping pills to keep from jolting awake in the middle of the night at the sound of imaginary laughter.

Wade looked at Ramos. “What about the staff?”

“What about them?”

“We should evacuate them. Get them out.”

“The operation’s started,” Ramos said. “If we see somebody, we’ll tell them to pass the word along to get out. Otherwise, they’re not our problem.”

Wade sometimes wondered if they all had the disease, but it affected people on a spectrum, meaning they were all insane to one degree or another. Maybe the officer who’d given the order to exterminate the infected at the hospital was half-batshit himself.

“Is anyone playing with a full deck these days?” he asked.

Ramos shook his head. “That question is above my pay grade.”

The country was tearing itself apart, and he was taking part in it. That made him want to throw down his rifle and walk away. The situation was deteriorating by the minute with him there. Would it matter if he wasn’t?

He looked at his comrades and knew he could never do that.

“It’s not too late to get the hell out of here,” Williams said. “This is a shit mission.”

“It’ll be okay,” Ford said. “We’ll—”

“Shut your dicktraps,” Ramos growled. “Check your weapons.”

Eraserhead grinned over his SAW. “I heard Kate Upton caught the Bug.”

“Bullshit,” Williams said.

“Could you imagine her coming at you with a baseball bat?” Ford asked.