get the image of the Mad Dog squealing and flopping in a puddle of blood, tangled up in the wire, out of his head.
Around him, the boys of First Squad snore gently in the dark. Collins is speaking in tongues while he slumbers, gibberish for the most part but ending with, “Fried chicken?” and a throaty chuckle. Somebody else farts and turns over. Mooney likes these guys, they are like brothers to him, he and them have gone to hell and back together, but he can’t stand them anymore and he would really, really like to be alone for a while.
He turns onto his side and sees PFC Joel Wyatt staring back at him, his eyes gleaming in the dark. Wyatt takes off his headphones and says, “You still awake, Mooney?”
“Can’t sleep. You?”
“Chillin’ like a villain, partner.”
“All right. Well, good night, Joel.”
“’Night.”
Mooney closes his eyes, forces the shooting out of his mind, and tries to remember what Laura looks like. They are technically not together but he is trying to forget that. Before he left for Iraq, he told her that maybe they should break up. He still thinks that was a sound decision at the time. Plus he’d been feeling spiteful because sometimes he wondered if she is really all that good looking and that maybe he deserved better. He hadn’t anticipated, however, how hard things would be overseas, how lonely he would get, and he clings to the idea that he still loves her—a lifeline in his violent world.
Plus she had agreed a little too readily to his suggestion of seeing other people, and it has been eating at him ever since he deployed.
“Hey, Mooney.”
“Yeah, Joel?”
“I feel like some TV. They got TV upstairs in the patient rooms, right? You in or not?”
Something like electric current floods Mooney’s system, jolting him out of bed. Within seconds, the boys are quietly pulling on T-shirts and pants and tip-toeing into the hallway on bare feet, trying not to laugh as they dart past the facility manager’s office where the LT, platoon sergeant and squad leaders are huddled together in a tense pow wow.
They pause to listen.
“My wife and kid are out there and I am going to protect them,” they hear somebody saying.
“That’s right,” says somebody else. “She’s out there. So what happens if she becomes one of them? Do you want us to shoot her too?”
“I’ll tell you what,” says Lewis. “If I become one of those things, I want you to shoot me in the grape.”
“What the hell, over?” whispers Mooney.
“What the hell, out,” Wyatt whispers back, shrugging.
As enjoyable as the spying is, the lure of mindless entertainment is stronger, calling them back to their original mission. The hallway is dark and shrouds their movements. The hum of machinery conceals their footsteps. The whole basement stinks of ammonia and disinfectant. We are ninja, Mooney thinks, totally hidden. The thought makes him smile.
“What’s on this time of night?” Wyatt wonders as they reach the stairwell and begin climbing the stairs.
“Who cares? I just want to turn my brain off and forget who I am for an hour.”
“Better than sleep!”
“Who can sleep?” Mooney wonders.
“So where are we going, anyhow?”
“Let’s go up to the sixth floor and then walk back down, checking out each floor until we find a room that has a working TV in it. Hooah?”
“Whoop,” says Wyatt.
By the time they reach the sixth floor, the boys are panting and stop for a rest. They are in good shape but exhausted from months of hard work and lack of sleep and barely enough calories. They sit on the top step and share a cigarette. Mooney is starting to warm up to Wyatt, the tall, skinny red-haired replacement from Michigan with Army glasses who always seems to be looking over your shoulder while he’s talking to you. Most of the boys think he is a little off.
“Ready for some infomercials, cuzin?” Wyatt says. “Some
Mooney flicks the cigarette down the stairs, where it bursts in a shower of sparks, and puts his mask back on. “OK. Let’s do this.”
Wyatt hands him some latex gloves, which Mooney pulls on.
“Remember, Mooney, if a nurse or somebody sees us, we just say we were sent to find that cop. Winslow. That’ll be our cover story.”
They open the door and immediately gag as the stink assails them, the horrible sour body sweat of Lyssa victims lurking under a sickeningly sweet combination of air fresheners and perfume that the Trinity people apparently sprayed everywhere.
Mooney hears people moaning, and realizes that the walls of the darkened corridor are lined with gurneys, a Lyssa patient in each connected by a tube to an IV bag to keep them hydrated. Some snarl and struggle against restraining belts, while most simply lie moaning, their breath rattling in their chests.
Other than the Lyssa victims, there’s not a soul in sight.
Wyatt whistles at the ambiance. “Spooky.”
Mooney nods.
“I mean,” Wyatt adds, “wouldn’t it be cool if they all jumped up and attacked us?”
They turn a corner. There are no patients in this part of the corridor and the lights are on for the night. Mooney and Wyatt blink at the fluorescent light.
“We shouldn’t be here,” says Mooney. “This whole place is crawling with virus.”
“Dude, how about that smell? Every time I think I’m used to it, I get the urge to puke. And I even got a scratch-and-sniff perfume sample in my mask from an ad I tore out of a magazine.”
“Abort mission?”
“Hell, no! These are patient rooms up here, yo. There’s gotta be a TV in one of them. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they had PlayStation?”
“I’d love to play
Pinching their noses, they creep up to a doorway. Inside, Lyssa victims lie in the dark in their own sweat and stink. Mooney can hear their ragged breath. One of them, a young woman lying on a cot on the floor, is alternately weeping and apologizing to somebody named Ron in fevered delirium.
“Bingo,” says Wyatt. “The sound’s turned off, though. Gotta find the remote, unless you like the close captioning they’ve got on. Me, I can’t read that fast.”
“What’s on?”
“CNN, I think. Some kind of riot going on in Chicago. No, wait. Now they’re talking about Atlanta.”
“Hello?”
The raspy voice electrifies them, making them jump.
“You scared the shit out of me, whoever you are,” Wyatt hisses, and starts laughing.
“Same here,” the voice says. “Are you the cops?”
“No, sir,” Mooney answers. As his vision slowly adapts to the dark, he can now make out the figure of a man sitting up in bed. “We’re U.S. Army.”
“Somebody was screaming down the hall earlier tonight. Probably just somebody out of their head with fever, right? But it sounded awful. Like an animal being slaughtered. You might want to check it out. I’d tell a nurse but I haven’t seen one in hours.”
“How are you feeling, sir? It is bad?”
“A little better today, thanks. My fever’s broke, but I could use some water—”
They jump again as they hear the crackle of small arms fire coming from outside the building. Stepping carefully, the soldiers approach the window and peer through the closed blinds to see who is shooting at whom. Far below, they see muzzle flashes and hear the reports.
Third Squad is lighting somebody up.
