Craig Dilouie - The Killing Floor

“Lord, please don’t let it be jumpers,” Corporal Lynch hisses.

First Platoon’s got this, Hellraisers , Pierce’s voice buzzes in his headset. Keep moving, out .

The stairwell door opens ahead of them. Boots thunder on the metal steps. That would be Jake Morrow’s squad, Rod knows. After them, Joe Navarro, then him, then Headquarters and Weapons.

Rod leads his shooters onto the stairs with weapons cocked and locked and night vision goggles on. The stairwell has no windows and is pitch black. Their flashlights flicker across cinderblocks and handrails coated in generations of paint now rendered in their grainy, monocular vision as shades of green. The boys cut off their muttered prayers and bitching as they enter the danger zone, breathing through their noses.

Above, a door bangs open. Rod’s radio fills with chatter as Sergeant Morrow narrates what he sees and his progress toward achieving his objective.

Nobody here. Smells like sour milk, though. Stay frosty. Out, here.

Third Squad enters the elevator lobby and pauses in the hallway beyond. They made it to their objective without incident. Now all they have to do is sweep twenty-five rooms and a vending area, without getting mauled and bitten, to earn their pay for the day. Behind them, Headquarters and Weapons enter the elevator lobby and set up the machine guns.

“It’s time to earn our money, vatos ,” Rod says. He orders Corporal Davis to take Fireteam A and clear the rooms on the other side of the hall, and then gathers Fireteam B in front of a nondescript hotel door reading 6101.

“U.S. Army!” he calls out. “If you are inside this room, get down on the floor now.”

Silence.

“You’re up, Sosa,” he says.

The giant soldier grins and steps forward with the handheld battering ram. He takes pride in being the big kid, the bully. The fireteam makes way for him.

“Wilco, Sarge,” he says.

He rears back and swings the ram into the door, which bangs open. The fireteam rushes past, weapons leveled and sweeping the room. Tanner breaks left and Arnold breaks right, circling back to Rod, who provides overwatch at the door. Lynch checks the bathroom.

“Clear,” the boys sound off.

“Clear,” says Lynch.

Rod scans the room again. An open suitcase lies on the unmade bed, half packed with wrinkled clothes. He joins Lynch, who shines his flashlight at the bathroom mirror. Someone wrote a message in red lipstick.

Sorry Sean I had to leave to find Liz

The sink is filled with bloody bandages.

The corporal shakes his head. “Like one big haunted house, Sergeant. I wonder what their story was.”

Rod barely hears him. The lipstick reminds him of Gabriela.

The hopelessness of their mission feels like a sudden weight on his chest. The country is huge. How many miles, how many rooms, how many bullets until he reaches his family?

“Holy shit,” one of the boys says back in the room.

Rod and Lynch rejoin the fireteam grouped around the window, and raise their night vision goggles. Someone pulled back the curtain, filling the room with bright gray light. From this high up looking northwest, Arlington sprawls before them behind a veil of smoke. Gunships buzz over the distant buildings, covering the combat engineers. Several circle a distant point, dropping Hellfire missiles before veering away. The boom reaches their ears and shakes the window for a fraction of a second just before a fireball blooms over the spot, dissipating in a mushroom cloud.

“It almost feels like we’re winning,” Arnold says over the grinding thunder.

“Winning?” Sosa snorts. “Shit, man, this is easy. The Infected don’t shoot back, right?”

Jake Morrow reports to the Lieutenant that he has reached his objective. The constant chatter on the radio reminds Rod they have a job to do.

“All right. Enough sightseeing. Let’s get back to work.”

They have twenty-three more rooms to go.

Davis calls out from the hallway: “Contact!”

“Coming out!” Rod calls back, and rushes outside in time to see a man approaching them from the other end of the corridor. The flashlight beams converge on his face and chest.

“Sergeant, we got a civilian,” Davis tells him.

“Stop where you are, sir,” Lynch orders.

The man obeys, sniffing the air, his fists clenched against his chest.

“Some of these doors must be open,” the corporal says. “He was in one of the rooms.”

“Does he have the bug, Sergeant?” says Tanner.

Rod shrugs. He believes the man has the bug, but such speculation is pointless. The rules of engagement are clear. “If he makes a run at us, he does.”

As if hearing an invitation, the man sprints at them, growling on the exhales, closing the distance. A wave of nauseating sour stench precedes him.

“Stop where you are, sir!” Davis shouts as the soldiers aim their weapons, waiting for the order to fire.

“Sergeant?”

The man rushes at them, his pale face shining in the glare of the flashlights, teeth gleaming, feet pounding the floor.

Rod doesn’t want to shoot.

He also cannot order his boys to do something he wouldn’t.

“What do we do, Sergeant?”

Rod raises his shotgun and growls back at the Infected.

“Fuck you, Jody,” he says, and squeezes the trigger.

♦

The man’s chest explodes with a burst of smoke as the high-velocity buckshot rips through his body, filling the air with a bloody mist. His legs give out, sending him careening into the wall, where he leaves a long smear of blood and bits of flesh.

Pierce’s voice buzzes in his ear, urgent.

Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 6. Sitrep, over?

Rod realizes he was not breathing. He takes a long, shuddering breath.

Repeat, Hellraisers 3. What’s your sitrep? How copy?

Rod looks at the grinning corpse smoking on the carpeted floor at the end of a long trail of blood and guts and feels nothing but horror at himself.

The boys are laughing like crazy people.

“What the hell?” he says with disgust. “This man is dead.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” says Tanner, coughing into his fist.

“Get your shit together,” Rod snarls. He keys the push-to-talk button on his headset and reports in. “Hellraisers 6, Hellraisers 3. We engaged and eliminated one hostile, over.”

“Not just any hostile,” Sosa says, setting the boys off again.

Hellraisers 3, that’s a solid copy. Stay in touch, out.

“Roger, sir,” Rod says, glaring at his squad. “Out.”

“Sergeant,” Lynch explains, “you called him Jody just before you fired.”

Rod grunts in surprise. “I did?”

In Army folklore, Jody is the sweet, sensitive civilian man who screws your girlfriend or wife while you’re away fighting for your country. You spend months getting shot at in some bombed-out shithole where even the sand hates you, and then one day a Dear John letter comes from your old lady telling you how Jody was there for her while you were away. How his poetry speaks to her. How things sort of just happened. How she wants the uncomplicated life Jody offers.

Everyone in the Army, from the lowliest private to the Chief of Staff, hates Jody’s guts. If Rod wanted to demonize the enemy and help his boys find humor in the horror, he couldn’t do any better.

“Well, then I guess he had it coming,” he says, sending the squad into hysterics.

Everyone is looking at the corpse. None see their sergeant wincing, blinking tears.

This isn’t war. It’s murder. Genocide. And Rod is no longer a soldier. He’s an exterminator.

I’m sorry for what happened to you. I’m sorry I had to end your life, whoever you are. Please consider it a mercy and recommend me to God as a friend.