The Infection

It was a single Apache helicopter flying through a hail of fire, dropping Hellfire missiles onto the insurgents running in the open towards the flaming base. The soldiers cheered. Its missiles spent, the helicopter began to set up its first strafing run.

Every man living in this valley must be here, Sarge thought, trying to wipe us out over a horrible misunderstanding. And with the insurgents caught in the open between Bradleys in front and the Apache behind, we’re going to wipe them out over that same misunderstanding.

This was war.

The fighting raged into the night. The soldiers shot flares and exchanged fire with the insurgents in streams of tracers. Sarge spent the night in the gunner’s station, pissing into a plastic bottle and dying for a glass of water. Outside, the wounded screamed and screamed. By the time dawn finally came, the surviving insurgents had melted away into the dark. More than a hundred bodies carpeted the rocks and were stacked around the scorched and broken bunkers.

The dazed survivors stumbled among the ruins of the base. Sarge found Devereaux and the other boys of the squad, all of them miraculously unscathed, and bear hugged them. Devereaux told him the Colonel had gotten orders to shut the base down and bring everybody to Jalabad, where local American forces were consolidating. He found out that his crew was still in the tent and that they remained catatonic but were otherwise unharmed in the fighting.

“This entire country must hate us right now,” Devereaux said. “How do you come back from that?”

“Welcome to the suck,” Sarge told him, but the old Army complaint rang hollow. He started walking toward the big tent, wondering what was going to happen next. The war had suddenly changed. Quite possibly, so had the world.

Twenty yards from the Bradley, an insurgent lay dying on the ground, silently praying and choking on his own blood. It was the laughing Afghan who had waved to him from the back of the truck and translated the old man’s curses.

Looking at him, Sarge raged at the waste of life.

“We didn’t do this to you,” he said. “Before you die, I want you to know that. We didn’t do it. All of this fighting was for nothing.”

“God hates you,” the man said. Then the lights in his eyes went out.

♦

Several weeks later, as Pittsburgh burns behind him in a ruined America, Sarge will think about his comrades serving overseas. Only a fraction of the military deployed abroad had been brought home after the Screaming. He will wonder how they are doing over there, the thousands that were left behind in the wild parts of the world. He will wonder whether the boys in the Sandbox ever made it home. Whether they are now shooting at Americans instead of Afghans. If he ever sees them again, he will say, “Pa khair raghla.” Thank God you arrived safe and sound.

THE TRUCK STOP

Wendy staggers out of the Bradley’s oven heat onto a wide open parking lot under a glaring, overcast sky. The scorched air dries the sweat on her face instantly, cooling her skin while giving her the strange sensation of being baked. She breathes deep but coughs on air heavy with a tangy burning chemical smell.

A large building sprawls in front of her under a massive sign announcing gas and all you can eat bkfst and car wash. Two canopied fuel islands flank the building, one promising gas for vehicles and the other diesel for big trucks. Without power, the building appears dark and desolate. The place has been abandoned for some time. The parking lots are all empty, dotted with random litter and fluttering on the sudden hot breezes.

For a moment, she imagines truckers filling up their rigs during their long hauls in and out of the Keystone State, heading into the greasy spoon for coffee and a piss. Then the moment passes. These days, she knows, people can see ghosts. They are all around if you know how to look. All you have to do is remember the past. Conjure up some memory of the dead world.

She gasps on the smoky air. The very atmosphere has been burned. It smells like lung cancer. Impossibly, little gray snowflakes tumble gently across the barren landscape. It takes her exhausted brain several moments to understand that these flakes are hot ash. That they are, in fact, the cremated remains of Pittsburgh, drawn into the atmosphere on massive convection currents, and scattered on the winds. One twirling piece of ash lands on her shoulder and she absentmindedly tries to brush it off, leaving a smudge of gray dust.

Pittsburgh is still burning. Wendy turns and stares at the vast wall of smoke rising up from the smoldering ruins of the city in the east, surrounded by heavy particulates.

“Everything I knew was in that town,” she says hoarsely, her throat raw and dry and scratchy from the heat and the screaming. “Everything and everybody I ever knew in the world.”