Craig Dilouie - Tooth And Nail

“You want to come inside,” she mutters in disgust, her accent thickening. “This is what you want. We shall see.”

She clicks an icon on her screen, which turns from red to green.

On the screen, the crowd of people appear startled, then burst into cheers, laughing and hugging and pointing at something that is happening off screen. The blonde looks down at the soldier, who stares at the floor. Alone among the cheering mob, they are weeping.

The people are pointing at the elevator lobby. They have won against the stubborn scientists who have been hoarding a vaccine.

The elevators are coming down.

Chapter 10

You know, my dad. . . .

Mooney sits on the floor next to his sleeping bag in the classroom that First Squad has claimed as a sleeping area, airing his feet and cleaning his carbine. After a lot of firing, a good cleaning is necessary. He wants his weapon functional—not ready for parade—so he is field stripping and cleaning it fast. Around him, some of the other boys are doing the same, getting ready for action. The room stinks of sweaty socks and cleaning solvent.

Wyatt swaggers in carrying a plastic garbage bag with his left hand. Behind him, Mooney sees one of the boys from Second Squad mopping the floor out in the hallway, whistling while he works. Everybody is dying, the world is ending, but the Army likes things clean, Mooney tells himself. It will be a nice, neat, orderly Armageddon. The last man alive, please turn out the lights.

“Booty,” says Wyatt, spilling the bag’s contents onto the floor in front of Mooney—a small mountain of half-melted candy bars, cartons of juice, warm cans of soda, and pancaked Twinkies, cupcakes and donuts.

The boys whistle, eyeing the loot enviously.

“What do you think, Mooney?” Wyatt says, offering one of his lopsided grins that make his large brown Army glasses—the type the boys call BCGs, or birth control glasses, since there’s no way in hell of getting laid while wearing them—appear crooked on his face.

Mooney studies his comrade for a few moments while he swabs his gun barrel with a cleaning rod and patch. He is starting to feel like he has adopted Private Joel Wyatt, although he is not sure why, since he basically can barely stand the screwball soldier at this point. Or maybe Wyatt has adopted him, and he is not strong enough to resist: Joel Wyatt can be like a force of nature. In any case, when you feel like you are going to die soon, you tend to start feeling pretty forgiving about things. All the irritating stuff stops being real and no longer matters. Just ask Billy Chen about how much he sweated the small stuff before he ate a bullet.

“Where’d you get all that, Joel?” says Ratliff.

“I jacked the rich kids’ lockers,” Wyatt says, beaming, sifting through the candy with his hands. He adds hastily, “It’s not like they’re coming back.”

Ratliff starts to laugh, but it fades quickly.

“You keep touching other people’s stuff and you’re going to get sick, Joel,” Mooney says, then reconsiders. “OK. Screw it. Give me that Mars bar.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Now,” Mooney says, glowering.

Wyatt grins again, his cheeks bulging with chocolate, and hands him the candy bar.

Mooney takes a bite and chews slowly. An instant later, he is wolfing the rest of it down, gnawing rapidly until his jaw muscles protest from the sudden overload. Now here is something to live for. Nothing ever tasted so good in his life. He reaches and grabs a carton of apple juice, spears it with the straw, and sucks it down in several long gulps. The sugar rings his brain like a bell.

“That’s my stuff!” Wyatt whines as Ratliff comes over and grabs a pack of cupcakes.

“There’s plenty for everybody,” Mooney says.

“That’s what your mom. . . .” Finnegan says, his voice trailing off. Nobody laughs. Instead, the boys stare off into some point in space and the atmosphere begins to fill with despair, like a fast-acting poison. Mooney can’t stand it anymore.

“Everybody come and get a candy bar,” he says. “Joel’s buying.”

The boys swipe at his pile, almost picking it clean. “Thanks, Joel!” they tell him.

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Wyatt tells Mooney.

“We have appointed you our new morale officer,” Mooney says.

“Why? Didn’t everybody find the LT’s speech uplifting? ‘Good day, uh, gentlemen, I’m the LT. Blah, blah, blah, uh, the world’s ending, and you’re still in the Army.’”

The boys laugh, chewing on their candy.

“You didn’t happen to find any beer in the lockers, did you, Joel?” says Finnegan.

“Or a couple of joints, maybe?” Carrillo wants to know, laughing.

“How about valium?” says Ratliff.

“Southern Comfort?”

“Codeine?”

“Heroin?”

They sound like they are horsing around, but Mooney can tell they are dead serious. They have recently learned that the road of duty now leads face first into a brick wall, presenting a choice that Billy Chen refused to continue making and that they are still trying to avoid. They are not sure what they now owe, and to whom. They do not want anything to do with Lieutenant Bowman’s total war, but they see no way out of the Army and no way home and besides, home may not even be there anymore.

A few hours of escape would be welcome.

“I had a teacher who kept a quart of whiskey in his drawer,” Finnegan says. “We’d sneak in during lunch period and take a few sips, and replace it with water.”

“I can’t believe a year and half ago I was graduating from high school,” says Carrillo, eyeing the student desks stacked against the far wall. “Man, I’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“Eighteen going on forty-five,” Ratliff says, and Mooney smiles, nodding.

“Man, I would kill for an ice cold bottle of Bud,” Finnegan says.

“Screw Bud,” says Ratliff. “Heineken’s the best.”

“I only drink the good stuff,” Carrillo boasts. “Guinness on tap.”

“Carrillo likes to eat his beers.”

“The domestics are just yellow water, you guys. You’re drinking carbonated urine.”

“I like Bud.”

“What about Corona?”

“Hey, man, what’s the difference between a half and half and a black and tan? I could never figure that out.”

Rollins finishes his Hershey’s chocolate bar, sighs and stares at the wrapper wistfully. “I just thought of something,” he says. “If things are as bad as LT says, I wonder if they’re making more of these chocolate bars or if this is all there is for a while.”

“Or movies,” says Finnegan. “Live concerts. Football games. Hustler. ”

“PlayStation,” says Wyatt. “ Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.”

“Hot chicks, dope, rock and roll, and beer,” says Ratliff.

“My old man won’t like that,” Corporal Eckhardt says across the room, scrubbing his carbine’s firing pin and bolt assembly with a toothbrush and solvent to get rid of carbon residue. “He can really put it away. He can down two six-packs a night, pass out and then wake up the next day and go to work.”

“Sounds like a swell guy,” says Wyatt, snorting.

“My old man’s a psycho. If anybody can survive this thing, he will.”

“My dad’s an accountant,” says Finnegan. “He hates violence. He almost had a heart attack when I joined the Army and he found out they were sending me to Iraq.”

“My dad’s got a basement full of guns,” says Carrillo. “He loves his AK47 more than he loves my mom. He’s a real jerk. Jerks like him always make it.”

“Kind of shows you what kind of world is going to pop out the other side of this giant asshole,” Mooney says.