-1-
The lieutenant said to hold it.
So, we’re holding it.
Chokepoint Baker: five miles up a crooked road, fifty miles from the command post, a hundred miles from the war.
They dropped us here three days after what the radio has been calling First Night.
Couple days later, I heard a DJ out of Philly call it Last Night. But the news guys always do that hysterical shit. If it’s going to snow, they start talking about blizzards; two guys shove each other outside a Wal-Mart, and it’s rioting in the streets. Their amps are always dialed up to eleven.
Guess that sort of thing’s infectious because we got rousted and rolled before dawn’s early light.
As we climbed down off the truck, Lieutenant Bell took me aside. We’d known each other for a while and he usually called me Sally or Sal, but not that day. He was all Joe-Army. “Listen up, Corporal,” he told me. “The infection is contained to the west side of this river. There are two other bridges; closest is eight klicks downstream. We’re spread pretty thin, so I can spare one fireteam per bridge. This one’s yours.”
The bridge was rusted steel that had once been painted blue, a lane of blacktop going in each direction. No tollbooth, no nothing. Pennsylvania on one side, New Jersey on the other.
“You think you can do that, Corporal?”
I grinned. “C’mon, Loot, a couple of Cub Scouts could hold that bridge with a slingshot and a wet fart.”
I always cracked him up, drunk or sober, but now he just gave me the look. The officer look.
I straightened. “Yes, sir. We’ll hold it.”
“You are authorized to barricade this bridge. Make sure nothing gets across. Nothing and no one, do you understand?”
For what? Some dickheads rioting on the other side of the state? I wanted to laugh.
But there was something in his eyes. He lowered his voice, so it was just heard by the two of us. Everyone else was handing empty sandbags and equipment boxes down from the truck. “This is serious shit, Sally. I need you to do this.”
I gave a quick right-left look to make sure no one could hear us. “The fuck’s going down, man? You got the bug-eyes going on. This is a bunch of civilians going apeshit, right?”
Bell licked his lips. Real nervous, the way a scared dog does.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he asked. “Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the news.”
“They aren’t civilians,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“What does that—?”
A sergeant came hurrying over to tell us that everything was off-loaded. Bell stepped abruptly away from me and back into his officer role. “Are we clear on everything, Corporal Tucci?”
I played my part. “Yes, sir.”
Bell and the sergeant climbed back into the truck and we watched its taillights through a faint smudge of dust. My guys—all three of them—stood with me. We turned and looked at the bridge. It was rush hour on a Friday, but the road was empty. Both sides of the bridge.
“What the hell’s going on?” asked Joe Bob—and, yeah, his actual name on his dog tags is Joe Bob Stanton. He’s a redneck mouth-breather who joined the Reserves because nobody in the civilian world was stupid enough to let him play with guns. So, the geniuses here decided he should be an automatic rifleman. When they handed him an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, he almost came in his pants.
I shook my head.
“Join the Navy,” said Talia, “See the world.”
“That’s the Navy,” said Farris. “We’re the National damn Guard.”
“That’s my point,” she said.
“C’mon,” I said, “let’s get this shit done.”
It took us four hours to fill enough sandbags to block the western approach to the bridge. Four hours. Didn’t see a single car the whole time.
At first that was okay, made it easier to work.
Later, though, none of us liked how that felt.
-2-
I was the Team Leader for this gig. Corporal Salvatore Tucci. I’m in charge because everyone else on the team was even greener than me. Army Reserves, man. I’m in technical college working on a degree in fixing air conditioners, and I’m the most educated guy on the team. Cutting-edge, 21st century Army my ass.
A lot of the guys who enlist are dickheads like Joe Bob.
The other two? Farris is a slacker with no G.E.D. who mops up at a Taco Bell. They made him a rifleman. And our grenadier, Talia? Her arms and her thighs are a roadmap of healed-over needle scars, but she doesn’t talk about it. I think she maybe got clean and signed up to help her stay clean.
That’s Fireteam Delta. Four fuck-ups who didn’t have the sense to stay out of uniform or enough useful skills to be put somewhere that mattered.
So here we are, holding Checkpoint Baker and waiting for orders.
We opened some M.R.E.s and ate bad spaghetti and some watery stuff that was supposed to be cream of broccoli soup.
“Dude,” said Farris, “there’s a Quiznos like three miles from here. I saw it on the way in.”
“So?”
“One of us could go and get something …”
“Deserting a post in a time of crisis?” murmured Talia dryly. “I think they have a rule about that.”
“It’s not deserting,” said Farris, but he didn’t push it. I think he knew what we all thought. As soon as he was around the bend in the road, he’d fire up a blunt, and that’s all we’d need is to have the lieutenant roll up on Farris stoned and A.W.O.L. On my watch.
I gave him my version of the look.
He grinned like a kid who was caught reaching in the cookie jar.
“Hey,” said Talia, “somebody’s coming.”
And shit if we didn’t all look the wrong way first. We looked up the road, the way the truck went. Then we realized Talia was looking over the sandbags.
We turned.
There was someone on the road. Not in a car. On foot, walking along the side of the road, maybe four hundred yards away.
“Civvie,” said Talia. “Looks like a kid.”
I took out my binoculars. They’re a cheap, low-intensity pair that I bought myself. Still better than the ‘no pair’ they issued me. The civvie kid was maybe seventeen, wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt, jeans, and bare feet. He walked with his head down, stumbling a little. There were dark smears on his shirt, and I’ve been in enough bar fights to know what blood looks like when it dries on a football jersey. There was some blood on what I could see of his face and on both hands.
“Whoever he is,” I said, “someone kicked his ass.”
They took turns looking.
While Talia was looking, the guy raised his head, and she screamed. Like a horror movie scream; just a kind of yelp.
“Holy shit!”
“What?” Everyone asked it at the same time.
“His face …”
I took the binoculars back. The guy’s head was down again. He was about a hundred yards away now, coming on but not in a hurry. If he was that jacked up, then maybe he was really out of it. Maybe he got drunk and picked the wrong fight and now his head was busted, and he didn’t know where he was.
“What’s wrong with his face?” asked Farris.
When Talia didn’t answer, I lowered the glasses and looked at her. “Tal … what was wrong with his face?”
She still didn’t answer, and there was a weird light in her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
But she didn’t need to answer.
Farris said, “Holy fuck!”
I whirled around. The civvie was thirty yards away. Close enough to see him.
Close enough to see.
The kid was walking right toward the bridge, head up now. Eyes on us.
His face …
I thought it was smeared with blood.
But that wasn’t it.
He didn’t have a face.
Beside me, Joe Bob said, “Wha—wha—wha—?” He couldn’t even finish the word.
Farris made a gagging sound. Or maybe that was me.
The civvie kid kept walking straight toward us. Twenty yards. His mouth was open, and for a stupid minute, I thought he was speaking. But you need lips to speak. And a tongue. All he had was teeth. The rest of the flesh on his face was—gone.
Just gone.
Torn away. Or …
Eaten away.
“Jesus Christ, Sal,” gasped Talia. “What the fuck? I mean—what the fuck?”
Joe Bob swung his big M249 up and dropped the bipod legs on the top sandbag. “I can drop that freak right—”
“Hold your goddamn fire,” I growled, and the command in my own voice steadied my feet on the ground. “Farris, Talia—hit the line, but nobody fires a shot unless I say so.”
They all looked at me.
“Right fucking now,” I bellowed.
They jumped. Farris and Talia brought up their M4 carbines. So, did I. The kid was ten yards away now, and he didn’t look like he wanted to stop.
“How’s he even walking with all that?” asked Talia in a small voice.
I yelled at the civvie. “Hey! Sir? Sir …? I need you to stop right there.”
His head jerked up a little more. He had no nose at all. And both eyes were bloodshot and wild. He kept walking, though.
“Sir! Stop. Do not approach the barricade.”
He didn’t stop.
Then everyone was yelling at him. Ordering him to stop. Telling him to stand down, or lie down, or kneel. Confusing, loud, conflicting. We yelled at the top of our voices as the kid walked right at us.
“I can take him,” said Joe Bob in a trembling voice. Was it fear or was he getting ready to bust a nut at the thought of squeezing that trigger?
The civvie was right there. Right in our faces.
He hit the chest-high stack of sandbags and made a grab for me with his bloody fingers. I jumped back.
There was a sudden, three-shot rat-a-tat-tat.
The civvie flew back from the sandbags, and the world seemed to freeze as the echoes of those three shots bounced off the bridge and the trees on either side of the river and off the flowing water beneath us. Three drum-hits of sound.
I stared at the shooter.
Not Joe Bob. He was as dumbfounded as me.
Talia’s face was white with shock at what she had just done.
“Oh … God …” she said, in a voice that was almost no voice at all. Tiny, lost.
Farris and I were in motion in the next second, both of us scrambling over the barricade. Talia stood with her smoking rifle pointed at the sky. Joe Bob gaped at her.
I hit the blacktop and rushed over to where the kid lay sprawled on the ground.
The three-shot burst had caught him in the center of the chest, and the impact had picked him up and dropped him five feet back. His shirt was torn open over a ragged hole.
“Ah … Christ,” I said under my breath, and I probably said it forty times as we knelt down.
“We’re up the creek on this,” said Farris, low enough so Talia couldn’t hear.
Behind us, though, she called out, “Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay.”
You could have put a beer can in the hole in his chest. Meat and bone were ripped apart; he’d been right up against the barrel when she’d fired.
The kid’s eyes were still open.
Wide open.
Almost like they were looking right at …
The dead civvie came up off the ground and grabbed Farris by the hair.
Farris screamed and tried to pull back. I think I just blanked out for a second. I mean … this was impossible. Guy had a fucking hole in his chest and no face and …
Talia and Joe Bob screamed, too.
Then the civvie clamped his teeth on Farris’s wrist.
I don’t know what happened next. I lost it. We all lost it. One second I was kneeling there, watching Farris hammer at the teenager’s face with one fist while blood shot out from between the bastard’s teeth. I blinked, and then suddenly the kid was on the ground and the four of us—all of us—were in a circle around him, stomping the shit out of him. Kicking and stamping down and grinding on his bones.
The kid didn’t scream.
And he kept twisting and trying to grab at us. With broken fingers, and shattered bones in his arms, he kept reaching. With his teeth kicked out, he kept trying to bite. He would not stop.
We would not stop.
None of us could.
And then Farris grabbed his M4 with bloody hands and fired down at the body as the rest of us leapt back. Farris had it on three-round burst mode. His finger jerked over and over on the trigger and he burned through an entire magazine in a couple of seconds. Thirty rounds. The rounds chopped into the kid. They ruined him. They tore his chest and stomach apart. They blew off his left arm. The tore away what was left of his face.
Farris was screaming.
He dropped the magazine and went to swap in a new one and then I was in his face. I shoved him back.
“Stop it!” I yelled as loud as I could.
Farris staggered and fell against the sandbags, and I was there with him, my palms on his chest, both of us staring holes into each other, chests heaving, ears ringing from the gunfire. His rifle dropped to the blacktop and fell over with a clatter.
The whole world was suddenly quiet. We could hear the run of water in the river, but all of the birds in the trees had shut up.
Joe Bob made a small mewling sound.
I looked at him.
He was looking at the kid.
So, I looked at the kid, too.
He was a ragdoll, torn and empty.
The son of a bitch was still moving.
“No,” I said.
But the day said: yes.
-3-
We stood around it.
Not him. It.
What else would you call something like this?
“He … can’t still be alive,” murmured Talia. “That’s impossible.”
It was like the fifth or sixth time she’d said that.
No one argued with her.
Except the kid was still moving. He had no lower jaw and half of his neck tendons were shot away, but he kept trying to raise his head. Like he was still trying to bite.
Farris clapped a hand to his mouth and tried not to throw up … but why should he be any different? He spun off and vomited onto the road. Joe Bob and Talia puked in the weeds.
Talia turned away and stood behind Farris, her hand on his back. She bent low to say something to him, but he kept shaking his head.
“What the hell we going to do ’bout this?” asked Joe Bob.
When I didn’t answer, the other two looked at me.
“He’s right, Sally,” said Talia. “We have to do something. We can’t leave him like that.”
“I don’t think a Band-Aid’s going to do much frigging good,” I said.
“No,” she said, “we have to—you know—put him out of his misery.”
I gaped at her. “What, you think I’m packing Kryptonite bullets? You shot him and he didn’t die, and Farris … Christ, look at this son of a bitch. What the hell do you think I’d be able to—”
Talia got up and strode over to me and got right up in my face.
“Do something,” she said coldly.
I wasn’t backing down because there was nowhere to go. “Like fucking what?”
Her eyes held mine for a moment and then she turned, unslung her rifle, put the stock to her shoulder, and fired a short burst into the civvie’s head.
If I hadn’t hurled my lunch a few minutes ago, I’d have lost it now. The kid’s head just flew apart.
Blood and gray junk splattered everyone.
Farris started to cry.
The thunder of the burst rolled past us, and the breeze off the river blew away the smoke.
The civvie lay dead.
Really dead.
I looked at Talia. “How—?”
There was no bravado on her face. She was white as a sheet, and half a step from losing her shit. “What else was there to shoot?” she demanded.
-4-
I called it in.
We were back on our side of the sandbags. The others hunkered down around me.
The kid lay where he was.
Lieutenant Bell said, “You’re sure he stopped moving after taking a headshot?”
I’m not sure what I expected the loot to say, but that wasn’t it. That was a mile down the wrong road from the right kind of answer. I think I’d have felt better if he reamed me out or threatened some kind of punishment. That, at least, would make sense.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “He, um, did not seem to respond to body shots or other damage.”
I left him a big hole so he could come back at me on this. I wanted him to.
Instead, he said, “We’re hearing this from other posts. Headshots seem to be the only thing that takes these things down.”
“Wait, wait,” I said, “What do you mean ‘these things’? This was just a kid.”
“No,” he said. There was a rustling sound, and I could tell that he was moving, and when he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “Sal, listen to me here. The shit is hitting the fan. Not just here, but everywhere.”
“What shit? What the hell’s going on?”
“They … don’t really know. All they’re saying is that it’s spreading like crazy. Western Pennsylvania, Maryland, parts of Virginia and Ohio. It’s all over, and people are acting nuts. We’ve been getting some crazy-ass reports.”
“Come on, Loot,” I said—and I didn’t like the pleading sound in my own voice. “Is this some kind of disease or something?”
“Yes,” he said, then, “Maybe. We don’t know. They don’t know, or if they do, then they’re sure as shit not telling us.”
“But—”
“The thing is, Sally, you got to keep your shit tight. You hear me? You blockade that bridge, and I don’t care who shows up—nobody gets across. I don’t care if it’s a nun with an orphan or a little girl with her puppy, you put them down.”
“Whoa, wait a frigging minute,” I barked, and everyone around me jumped. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You heard me. That kid you put down was infected.”
The others were listening to this and their faces looked sick and scared. Mine must have, too.
“Okay,” I said, “so maybe he was infected, but I’m not going to open up on everyone who comes down the road. That’s crazy.”
“It’s an order.”
“Bullshit. No one’s going to give an order like that. No disrespect here, Lieutenant, but are you fucking high?”
“That’s the order, now follow it …”
“No way. I don’t believe it. You can put me up on charges, Loot, but I am not going to—”
“Hey!” snapped Bell. “This isn’t a goddamn debate. I gave you an order and—”
“And I don’t believe it. Put the captain on the line, or come here with a signed order from him or someone higher, but I’m not going to death row because you’re suddenly losing your shit.”
The line went dead.
We sat there and stared at each other.
Ferris rubbed his fingers over the bandage Talia had used to dress his bite. His eyes were jumpy.
“What’s going on?” he asked. It sounded like a simple question, but we all knew that it wasn’t. That question was a tangle of all sorts of barbed wire and broken junk.
I got up and walked over to the wall of sandbags.
We’d stacked them two deep and chest high, but suddenly it felt as weak as a little picket fence. We still had a whole stack of empty bags we hadn’t filled yet. We didn’t think we’d need to, and they were heavy as shit. I nudged them with the toe of my boot.
I didn’t even have to ask. Suddenly we were all filling the bags and building the wall higher and deeper. In the end, we used every single bag.
-5-
“Sal,” called Talia, holding up the walkie-talkie, “the Loot’s calling.”
I took it from her, but it wasn’t Lieutenant Bell, and it wasn’t the captain, either.
“Corporal Tucci?” said a gruff voice that I didn’t recognize.
“Yes, sir, this is Tucci.”
“This is Major Bradley.”
Farris mouthed, Oh shit.
“Sir!” I said, and actually straightened like I was snapping to attention.
“Lieutenant Bell expressed your concerns over the orders he gave you.”
Here it comes, I thought. I’m dead or I’m in Leavenworth.
“Sir, I—”
“I understand your concerns, Corporal,” he said. “Those concerns are natural; they show compassion and an honorable adherence to the spirit of who we are as soldiers of this great nation.”
Talia rolled her eyes and mimed shoveling shit, but the major’s opening salvo was scaring me. It felt like a series of jabs before an overhand right.
“But we are currently faced with extraordinary circumstances that are unique in my military experience,” continued Major Bradley. “We are confronted by a situation in which our fellow citizens are the enemy.”
“Sir, I don’t—”
He cut me off. “Let me finish, Corporal. You need to hear this.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
He cleared his throat. “We are facing a biological threat of an unknown nature. It is very likely a terrorist weapon of some kind, but quite frankly, we don’t know. What we do know is that the infected are a serious threat. They are violent, they are mentally deranged, and they will attack anyone with whom they come into contact, regardless of age, sex, or any other consideration. We have reports of small children attacking grown men. Anyone who is infected becomes violent. Old people, pregnant women … it, um … doesn’t seem to matter.” Bradley faltered for a moment, and I wondered if the first part of what he’d said was repeated from orders he got and now he was on his own. We all waited.
And waited.
Finally, I said, “Sir?”
But there was no answer.
I checked the walkie-talkie. It was functioning, but Major Bradley had stopped transmitting.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Maybe there’s interference,” suggested Joe Bob.
I looked around. “Who’s got a cell?”
We all had cell phones.
We all called.
I called my brother Vinnie in Newark.
“Sal—Christ on a stick, have you seen the news?” he growled. “Everyone’s going ape-shit.”
“SAL!”
I spun around and saw Talia pointing past the sandbags.
“They’re coming!”
They.
God. They.
-6-
The road was thick with them.
Maybe forty. Maybe fifty.
All kinds of them.
Guys in suits. Women in skirts and blouses. Kids. A diner waitress in a pink uniform. A man dressed in surgical scrubs. People.
Just people.
Them.
They didn’t rush us.
They walked down the road toward the bridge. I think that was one of the worst parts of it. I might have been able to deal with a bunch of psychos running at me. That would have felt like an attack. You see a mob running batshit at you and you switch your M4s to rock’n’roll and hope that all of them are right with Jesus.
But they walked.
Walked.
Badly. Some of them limped. I saw one guy walking on an ankle that you could see was broken from fifty yards out. It was buckled to one side, but he didn’t give a shit. There was no wince, no flicker on his face.
The whole bunch of them were like that. None of them looked right. They were bloody. They were ragged.
They were mauled.
“God almighty,” whispered Farris.
Talia began saying a Hail Mary.
I heard Joe Bob saying, “Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah.” But something in his tone didn’t sell it for me. His face was greasy with sweat and his eyes were jumpier than a speed freak’s.
The crowd kept coming to us. I’d had to hang up on Vinnie.
“They’re going to crawl right over these damn sandbags,” complained Farris. The bandage around his wrist was soaked through with blood.
“What do we do?” asked Farris.
He already knew.
When they were fifteen yards away, we opened up.
We burned through at least a mag each before we remembered about shooting them in the head.
Talia screamed it first, and then we were all screaming it. “The head! Shoot for the head!”
“Switch to semi-auto,” I hollered. “Check your targets, conserve your ammo.”
We stood in a line, our barrels flashing and smoking, spitting fire at the people as they crowded close.
They went down.
Only if we took them in the head. Only then.
At that range, though, we couldn’t miss. They walked right up to the barrels. They looked at us as we shot them.
“Jesus, Sal,” said Talia as we swapped our mags, “Their eyes. Did you see their eyes?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. When someone is walking up to you and not even ducking away from the shot, you see everything.
We burned through three-quarters of our ammunition.
The air stank of smoke and blood.
Farris was the last one to stop shooting. He was laughing as he clicked on empty, but when he looked back at the rest of us, we could see that there were tears pouring down his cheeks.
The smoke clung to the moment, and for a while, that’s all I could see. My mouth was a thick paste of cordite and dry spit. When the breeze came up off the river, we stared into the reality of what we had just done.
“They were all sick, right?” asked Talia. “I mean … they were all infected, right? All of them?”
“Yeah,” I said, but what the hell did I know?
We stood there for a long time. None of us knew what the hell to do.
Later, when I tried to call the major again, I got nothing.
The same thing with the cells. I couldn’t even get a signal.
None of us could.
“Come on,” I said after a while, “check your ammo.”
We did. We had two magazines each, except for Farris, who had one.
Two mags each.
It didn’t feel like it was going to be enough.
Talia grabbed my sleeve. “What the hell do we do?”
They all looked at me. Like I knew what the fuck was what.
“We hold this fucking bridge,” I said.
-7-
No more of them came down the road.
Not then.
Not all afternoon.
Couple of times we heard—or thought we heard—gunfire from way upriver. Never lasted long.
The sun started to fall behind the trees, and it smeared red light over everything. Looked like the world was on fire. I saw Talia staring at the sky for almost fifteen minutes.
“What?” I asked.
“Planes,” she said.
I looked up. Way high in the sky there were some contrails, but the sky was getting too dark to see what they were. Something flying in formation, though.
Joe Bob was on watch, and he was talking to himself. Some Bible stuff. I didn’t want to hear what it was.
Instead, I went to the Jersey side of the bridge and looked up and down the road. Talia and Farris came with me, but there was nothing to see.
“Maybe they made a public service announcement,” said Talia. “Like the Emergency Broadcast Network thing. Maybe they told everyone to stay home, stay off the roads.”
“Sure,” I said in pretty much the same way you’d say ‘bullshit.’
We watched the empty road as the sky grew darker.
“We could just leave,” said Farris. “Head up the road. There’s that Quiznos. Maybe we can find a ride.”
“We can’t leave the bridge,” I said.
“Fuck the bridge.”
I got up in his face. “Really? You want to let them just stroll across the bridge? Is that your plan? Is that what you think will get the job done?”
“What job? We’re all alone out here. Might as well have been on the far side of the goddamn moon.”
“They’ll come back for us,” I said. “You watch; in the morning there’ll be a truck with supplies, maybe some hot coffee.”
“Sure,” he said, in exactly the same way I had a minute ago.
-8-
That night, there were a million stars and a bright three-quarter moon. Plenty of light to see the road. Only one of them came down the road. Talia was on watch and she took it down with a single shot to the head. She let the thing—it used to be a mailman—walk right up to the sandbags. It opened its mouth, even though it was too far away to bite, and Talia shot it in the eye.
Then she sat down and cried like a little girl for ten whole minutes. I stood her watch and let her cry. I wished I could do that. For me, it was all stuck inside and it was killing me that I couldn’t let it go.
-9-
Farris got sick in the night.
I heard him throwing up, and I came over and shined my flashlight on him. His face was slick with sweat. Joe Bob went back to the wall and Talia knelt next to me. She knew more first aid than I did, and she took Farris’s vitals as best she could.
“Wow, he’s burning up,” she said, looking at his fever-bright eyes and sweaty face, but then she put her palm on his forehead and frowned. “That’s weird. He’s cold.”
“Shock?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.
Then she examined the bite, and I heard her gasp. When I shined my light on Farris’s arm, I had to bite my lip. The wound on Farris’s wrist was bad enough, but there were weird black lines running all the way up his arm. It was like someone had used a Sharpie to outline every vein and capillary.
“It’s infection,” said Talia, but I knew that it was worse than that.
“God,” gasped Farris, “it’s blood poisoning.”
I said nothing because I thought it was worse than that, too. Even in the harsh glare of the flashlight, his color looked weird.
Talia met my eyes over the beam of the light. She didn’t say anything, but we had a whole conversation with that one look.
I patted Farris on the shoulder. “You get some sleep, man. In the morning we’ll get a medic down here to give you a shot, set you right.”
Fear was jumping up in his eyes. “You sure? They can give me something for this?”
“Yeah. Antibiotics and shit.”
Talia fished in her first-aid kit. There was a morphine syrette. She showed it to me, and I nodded.
“Sweet dreams, honey,” she said as she jabbed Farris with the little needle. His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he was out.
We made sure he was comfortable and then we got up and began walking up and down the length of the bridge. Talia kept looking up at the moon.
“Pretty night,” I said.
She made a face.
“Should be a pretty night,” I amended.
We stopped for a moment and looked down at the rushing water. It was running fast and high after that big storm a couple of days ago, and each little wave-tip gleamed with silver moonlight. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes passed while we stood there, our shoulders a few inches apart, hands on the cold metal rail, watching the river do what rivers do.
“Sally?” she asked softly.
“Yeah?”
“This is all happening, right?”
I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
She used her fingers to lightly trace circles on the inside of her forearm. “You know I used to ride the spike, right? I mean, that’s not news.”
“I figured.”
“I’ve been getting high most of my life. Since … like seventh grade. Used to swipe pills from my mom’s purse. She did a lot of speed, so that’s what I started on. Rode a lot of fast waves, y’know?”
“Yeah.” I was never much of a hophead, but I lived in Newark and I’d seen a lot of my friends go down in flames.
“Until I got clean the last time, I was probably high more than I was on the ground.”
I said nothing.
“So,” she continued, “I seen a lot of weird shit. While I was jonesing for a hit, while I was high, on the way down. You lose touch, y’know?”
“Yeah.”
“People talk about pink elephants and polka-dotted lobsters and shit, but that’s not what comes out of the woodwork.” She shivered and gripped the rail with more force. Like it was holding her there. “And not a day goes by—not a fucking day—when I don’t want a fix. Even now, twenty-three months clean, I can feel it. It’s like worms crawling under my skin. That morphine? You think I haven’t dreamed about that every night?”
I nodded. “My Uncle Tony’s been in and out of twelve steps for booze. I’ve seen how he looks at Thanksgiving when the rest of us are drinking beers and watching the ball game. Like he’d take a knife to any one of us for a cold bottle of Coors.”
“Right. Did your uncle ever talk to you about having a dry drunk? About feeling stoned and even seeing the spiders come crawling out of the sofa when he hasn’t even had a drop?”
“Couple times.”
“I get that,” she said. “I get that a lot.”
I waited.
“That’s why I need you to tell me that this is all really happening; or am I lost inside my own head?”
I turned to her and touched her arm. “I wish to Christ and the baby Jesus that I could say that you’re just tripping. Having a dry drunk, or whatever you’d call it. A flashback—whatever. But … I ain’t a drunk and I never shot up, and here I am, right with you. Right here in the middle of this shit.”
Talia closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on the backs of the hands that clung so desperately to the rail. “Ah … fuck,” she said quietly.
I felt like a total asshole for telling her the truth.
Then Talia stiffened, and I saw that she was looking past her hands. “What’s that?”
“What?”
She pointed over the rail. “In the water. Is that a log, or …?”
Something bobbed up and down as the current swept it toward the bridge. It looked black in the moonlight, but as it came closer we could see that part of it was white.
The face.
White.
We stared at it … and it stared back up at us.
Its mouth was open, working, like it was trying to bite us even as the river pulled it under the bridge and then out the other side. We hurried to the other side and stared over, watching the thing reach toward us, its white fingers clawing the air.
Then it was gone. A shape, then a dot, then nothing.
Neither of us could say a word.
Until the next one floated by. And the next.
“God, no …” whispered Talia.
We went back to the other side of the bridge.
“There’s another,” I said. “No … two … no …”
I stopped counting.
Counting didn’t matter.
Who cares how many of them floated down? Two, three hundred? A thousand?
After the first one, really, who cared how many?
Talia and I stood there all night, watching. There were ordinary civilians and people in all kinds of uniforms. Cops, firemen, paramedics. Soldiers. I wished to God that I had a needle of heroin for her. And for me.
We didn’t tell the others.
-10-
I’m not sure what time the bodies stopped floating past. The morning was humid and there was a thick mist. It covered the river, and maybe there were still bodies down there, or maybe the fog hid them.
We stood there as the fog curled gray fingers around the bridge and pulled itself up to cover everything. The wall of sandbags, Joe Bob, the sleeping figure of Farris, our gear. All of it.
Talia and I never moved from the rail, even when it got hard to see each other.
“They’ll come for us, right?” she asked. “The lieutenant? The supply truck? They’ll come to get us, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. She was a ghost beside me.
“You’re sure?”
“They’ll come.”
And they did.
It wasn’t long, either, but the sun was already up and the fog was starting to thin out. Talia saw them first and she stiffened.
“Sally …”
I turned to look.
At first it was only a shape. A single figure, and my heart sank. It came down the road from the direction our truck had come, walking wearily toward us from the Jersey side. In the fog it was shapeless, shambling.
Talia whimpered, just a sound of denial that didn’t have actual words.
“Fuck me,” I whispered, but before I could even bring my gun up, the fog swirled and I could see the mishmash stripes of camouflage, the curve of a helmet, the sharp angles of a rifle on its sling.
Talia grabbed my arm. “Sally? Look!”
There was movement behind the soldier, and, one by one, shapes emerged. More camos, more tin pots.
More soldiers.
They came walking down the road. Five of them. Then more.
“It’s the whole platoon,” Talia said, and laughter bubbled in her voice.
But it was more than that. As the mist thinned, I could see a lot of soldiers. A hundred at least. More.
“Damn,” I said, “they look bone-ass tired. They must have been fighting all night.”
“Is it over?” she asked. “Have we beaten this goddamn thing?”
I smiled. “I think so.”
I waved, but no one waved back. Some of them could barely walk. I could understand, I felt like I could drop where I stood. We’d been up all night watching the river.
“Talia, go wake up Farris and tell Joe Bob to look sharp.”
She grinned and spun away and vanished into the veil of fog that still covered the bridge.
I took a second to straighten my uniform and sling my rifle the right way. I straightened my posture and stepped off the bridge onto the road, looking tough, looking like someone who maybe should get some sergeant’s stripes for holding this frigging bridge. Army strong, booyah.
I saw Lieutenant Bell, and he was as wrung out as the rest of them. He lumbered through the fog, shoulders slumped, and behind him were gray soldiers. Even from this distance I could tell that no one was smiling. And for a moment I wondered if maybe this was a retreat rather than a surge. Shit. Had they gotten their asses kicked and these were the survivors? If so … Bell would have his ass handed to him and I wouldn’t be going up a pay grade.
“Well, whatever,” I said to myself. “Fireteam Delta held the bridge, so fuck it and fuck you and hooray for the red, white, and blue.”
A breeze wandered out of the south and it blew past me, swirling the mist, blowing it off the bridge and pushing it away from the soldiers. The mass of gray figures changed into khaki and brown and green.
And red.
All of them.
Splashed with …
I turned and screamed at the top of my lungs. “TALIA! Joe Bob, Farris! Lock and load. Hostiles on the road …”
The breeze had blown all the mist off of the bridge.
Talia stood forty feet from the wall of sandbags. Her rifle hung from its sling, the sling in her hand, the stock of the weapon on the blacktop. She stood, her back to me, staring at Joe Bob.
At what was left of Joe Bob.
Farris must have heard something. Maybe a sound I made, or Talia’s first scream. He froze in the midst of lifting something from Joe Bob’s stomach. Some piece of something. I couldn’t tell what, didn’t care what.
Farris bared his teeth at us.
Then he stuffed the thing into his mouth and chewed.
Where he wasn’t covered with blood, Farris’s skin was gray-green and veined with black lines.
Behind me I heard the shuffling steps of the soldiers as the first of them left the road and stepped onto the bridge.
Talia turned toward me, and in her eyes, I saw everything that had to be in my own eyes.
Her fingers twitched and the rifle dropped to the asphalt.
“Please,” she said. Her mouth trembled into a smile. “Please.”
Please.
I raised my rifle, racked the bolt, and shot her. She was never a pretty girl. Too thin, too worn by life. She had nice eyes, though, and a nice smile. The bullets took that away, and she fell back.
I heard—felt—someone come up behind me.
Something.
Probably Bell.
I turned. I still only had two mags. Less three bullets.
There were hundreds of them.
I raised my rifle.