Tooth And Nail

pieces with their bare hands and teeth. I saw them coming and I pissed down my leg. There’s no shame in that. It happens to a lot of guys, right? Never happened to me in Iraq, even when the bullets went buzzing right by my ear like wasps. Funny if you think about it. I had to come home to learn true fear.

It’s down there? God, this place looks like an insane asylum. Freaking stinks, too. Listen. Just let me tell the rest of my story before you put me in, please. I didn’t fight my way here all night just to get pushed into one of these rooms and forgotten about. I came because I wanted to feel something, anything, like home again, just one more time. And I want to tell my story first so you won’t forget me.

Thank you. I mean it.

So there we were, already low on ammo and with a horde of maniacs coming at us out of the darkness, and we tore them a new asshole. We unloaded everything we had on them. No more shoot and scoot. We were a mobile defense, and it was time to defend. We propped the MGs and SAWs on the hoods of cars and rained lead. They were ripped to shreds. Bodies were cut in half. Heads popped off of bodies and flew into the air. It was incredible, like being in some warped virtual reality game. You’re going to think I’m one sick puppy, but it felt good. It felt like survival. I didn’t see them as people anymore, but as a group, as a whole, like this one big monster. The more they died, the more I lived, you know? I wanted them to keep coming. I wanted them all to die.

And I still honestly thought we’d make it. At that time, despite our fatigue, our ammo situation and our losses, getting overrun was the last thing on my mind. But then rifles started jamming. One of the MGs overheated. I fired mag after mag at a rapid rate of fire until I had almost nothing left, and still they kept coming. Waves of them. Overhead, the helicopters were circling, watching us, and then when things got dicey they strafed the Mad Dogs with the chain guns and, oh Lord, entire sections of the horde just exploded and disintegrated.

Things went to hell in a hurry after that.

An Apache came in low, blinding us with his light, and started dropping rockets and now vehicles were being flipped and tossed into the air, like: Wham! Wham! Wham! Hot metal was flying everywhere, ringing off the vehicles and clattering off the walls and ripping through the bodies of the guys in my squad. In an instant the Apache screamed overhead and was gone, I was squinting through the afterglow in my eyes and shooting, and then I noticed that my entire squad had literally disappeared. It was just me and my Sergeant, who was bleeding from his ears and stone deaf and staring in a daze. It wasn’t Maddy that killed my squad; it was blue on blue fire. It was right about then that Captain Reese got a little confused because he started screaming into the radio calling for an arty strike almost on top of us to keep the Hajjis from overrunning our position. He completely freaking lost it.

That’s when I knew I was a dead man. A river of blood was literally flowing around my ankles like something out of the Bible. Moments later, the power went out and everything went black. And that’s when the real horror began.

We had no time to put on NVGs or shoot a flare. We were firing randomly in the dark on full auto, backing up until we formed a square around Captain Reese with bayonets fixed. The muzzle flashes showed glimpses of the Mad Dogs tearing Second Platoon apart, so close you wanted to puke from the stench. They were screaming in the dark. It was hand to hand and the guys were dying fast. And what was I doing? Shit, my heart was pounding like a drum and I was pissing down my leg. I could barely move, I was shaking so bad.

First Sergeant Callahan tried to pull the Captain away to the safety of a nearby building, but the man stood his ground, shooting his pistol while somebody popped smoke in a crazy try at concealing him. The Maddies swarmed around him and ripped him apart by the handful. I only barely survived after being picked up and thrown into the air by the mob—it was like getting hit by a baseball bat everywhere on my body at once—and crawled under a truck. All around me, the horde just kept coming, running past, rattling the vehicles and making the ground shake like a herd of elephants.

Maddy died by the thousand but he wiped us out and barely broke his stride doing it. And after all that, I lived to hike it back almost the entire way here before some goddamn kid pops out the back of a minivan and gives me this on my hand. But I’ll tell you, it’s just as well, because I’m so tired. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.

Is this my new home?

Any, um, other last requests?

PFC Mooney opens the door to the classroom and waits. He and Wyatt have heard the same stories told repeatedly by shell-shocked survivors trickling in since last night. Mooney does not know what to say to the soldier. What is there to say? What does one say to a man whose friends were violently torn apart right in front of him and is now doomed to die from a poison busily replicating itself in his brain?

“I don’t get a roommate or nothing?” the soldier wants to know.

“Everybody else who got bit is already starting to turn,” Mooney explains. “You could be the last one. They might attack you. We don’t know.”

“It would have been nice to talk to somebody else from Delta and cross over together.”

“Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay. I guess it doesn’t matter. You’re gonna die some day whether you get that last smoke in or not. I’m just glad the war’s over for me.”

“We left a few books in there that we got from the library. Classics. Help you pass the time. I don’t know, maybe you’ll like them. We also put the word out in case any of the survivors want to stop by and talk with you through the door. You still got a little time.”

The soldier nods. “Right. Okay. Thanks.”

Mooney notices that the soldier’s left eye is twitching.

“Any, um, other last requests?” says Wyatt.

“No, I’m good,” the soldier says, walks into the classroom, and approaches the window, looking out into the sunshine. He breathes deep and says, “I’m telling you, it sure is—”

Mooney has already begun to close the door. Wyatt passes him a handful of nails, which he hammers into the edge of the wood door to secure it to its frame.

The survivors trickled in all night and the next day, telling their horror stories. Half of them were bitten but had nowhere else to go. The LT did not want to kill them or turn them out so he came up with the idea of converting part of the school’s west wing into an asylum.

Wyatt raises the plundered surface of a desk and Mooney begins hammering until it covers the bottom half of the door and its frame. Once the door is completely covered, Mooney nails one of the soldier’s dog tags into the wood—name, rank, serial number, blood type and religious preference—while Wyatt scrawls the boy’s name with a pen knife.

Mooney waits patiently until Wyatt is done carving. He can hear the Mad Dogs in the other classrooms pacing and growling. They were soldiers once, these lost boys. This is where they turned, and this is where they will eventually die and be entombed.

Wyatt picks up his carbine and says, “Let’s get out of this freaking zoo.”

“You say that again and I will take you out, Joel.”

Wyatt smiles but says nothing.

Mooney pauses to touch the name Wyatt carved into the wood, struggling through his exhaustion to commit the boy and his paltry details to memory.

PFC James F. Lynch has blood type A and is a Christian, no denomination.

The real problem isn’t people leaving the Army. . . .

The real problem is the Army leaving us

Sergeant Pete McGraw glides his thumb over the rabbit’s foot in his pocket, his personal talisman given to him by his wife before his first tour in Iraq and her death in a car accident on an icy bridge in Maryland months later. The smooth fur of the rabbit’s foot comforts him. After everything he has seen and been through in three tours of duty in Iraq and now this bag of dicks, he firmly believes luck and Margaret’s spirit watching over him are the only things standing between him and oblivion. In his other pocket, he fingers a bent bottle cap he kept on a whim from the first beer he ever had with his girlfriend Tricia, a slim blonde beauty with braided hair down to her waist who