The Infection

Ducky Jones sits in a semi-reclined position in the driver’s station in the left front of the hull, hands on the steering yoke and foot working the pedals, eyes glued to the center periscope that offers night vision. He removes his right hand from the yoke and shifts into higher gear using the selector lever, engaging the transmission. Building speed, he scans the gauges arrayed across the dashboard with a single glance before returning his attention to the periscope. To his right, the five-hundred-horsepower Cummins engine hums loudly, with heart, propelling the heavy vehicle forward on its treads.

He is working the accelerator and brake pedals with his left foot instead of his right. His right leg is completely numb below the knee. The bruise on his hip is the size of a grapefruit now and continues to throb steadily like a drum made out of pain. The agony is incredible. He wonders if this is what it is like to be shot. To donate bone marrow. He wipes sweat from his face and stifles a moan. Deep down, he knows that he is growing weaker by the moment, that he is, in fact, dying a little at a time.

Ducky was a ten-year-old military history buff when the September 11 attacks shocked the country. He made a decision that day to become a soldier. Years later, he made good on that decision and enlisted. By that time, the ideals of fighting for freedom around the globe had deteriorated into the usual lies, betrayal and corruption. The guy who planned the attack on the Towers got away with it while big business cashed in on the wars. It was a valuable lesson in a fact of life: That which is pure is precious and easily corrupted. But he was still idealistic enough to believe that something could be pure. He loved his country and wanted to serve. Maybe he could do something good. He still believed one man could make a difference. At least he would get to see history up close and maybe make some himself instead of just reading about it.

The Army became his life. He lived on the base and had Army friends and dated women his friends introduced him to. He complained about the Army constantly but he loved it like a second mother, and would deck any civilian (or serviceman from another branch of the military) who dared criticize it. He thought about death philosophically, as young men tend to do, and accepted the fact that one day he might die for his comrades in combat. As he saw war close up in Afghanistan, his ideals faded even further. He watched as the Army built a clinic in a village and then accidentally bombed its school. But he still believed in one thing that was pure and could never be corrupted—the sacrifice of comrades for each other in combat. He believed that dying in combat, fighting for the men next to him, was a truly honorable death, which it was.

Ducky had never imagined he might die of a bizarre, enormously painful infection growing in his body, planted there by a sickly mutant, while driving out of the burning ruins of a major American city. There is no honor in this total war, this war of extermination, only futility and waste. There will be no medal for him. No historian to record his deeds. Possibly, there is not even a country anymore for which to die. Instead, he will die with people he barely knows in the ruins of a country he loves at the end of history. Not what he imagined at all.

The simple fact is Ducky is still fighting the pain and driving the vehicle because he is living on borrowed time and is willing to give that time to help these people stay alive themselves a little longer. There must be some honor in that.

♦

The Bradley rolls into a downed telephone pole, cracking it into splinters and dragging a tangle of insulated cable and chunks of wood clattering after it. The gunner and commander sit at their stations, gripping handles used to maneuver the turret and fire the weapons, the gunner using a periscope with night vision while the commander sees what the gunner sees using an optical relay.

“There’s something wrong with the ISU,” Sarge says, squinting.

Next to him in the cramped, dark compartment, the gunner shakes his head.

“I can’t see shit, Steve,” Sarge complains. “What the hell now?”

He taps the display, which accomplishes nothing. Under the familiar reticle, large, flickering pale green blobs glow brightly, which he interprets as fires. Off to the left, he can see little bursts of pale green light, which he knows from experience are muzzle flashes; there are people out there shooting. He can make out a road sign announcing route 22, 376, the Penn Lincoln Parkway. But the rest makes no sense. His visual is filled with bizarre shapes that seethe across the screen at different speeds in multiple shades of green, as if the relay were on a bad acid trip.

“I saw a sign,” Sarge says. He activates the comm and says, “Take the next exit for Parkway West, Ducky.”

Wilco, Ducky says.

They are almost home free now. Once they reach the highway, they will break west and escape the conflagration.