A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [64]
I prayed it was her name.
War is Hell
Let me tell you a couple things I’ve learned about war.
One, it’s hell. Nothing can describe it. I can’t tell you what it’s like because words can’t give you the real experience of war. This isn’t war like we’re used to seeing. Shit, we thought by now androids would be doing our fighting. But no, people still do it. And it’s hell because war’s not like it was on TV or in movies. In this war, you not only have to fight, you have to win. I mean, goddamn, you have to win.
There’s no second chances, no make-up exam. You go through basic and that’s nothing like the field. Simple things, like taking a dump or eating, are nerve-wracking. There’s concussions all over the place. Artie fire, mortar shelling, tank rounds, plasma fire cracking all the goddamn time, carbon-pulse mines and who knows what the fuck. Your hands shake all the time. You can’t sleep. Not soundly anyway. Used to be able to lay on your pillow and snug down into your blankets and get all toasty and shit, and before you knew it, it’s morning and you’d been off in dreamland. Not now. Not anymore.
Sleep’s scary now. If the nightmares don’t wake you, the screams of somebody having ‘em will. And in the field? Fucking forget it. Nobody sleeps with more than one eye closed. You might end up dead.
This has to be what hell is like. Frazzled nerves. Tight asshole. Shaking hands. Screams in the dark. And somewhere, the enemy lurks, waiting, stalking.
I didn’t smoke before but fuck if I don’t now. Roll ‘em myself when no one’s got any. You do what you have to when you’re in field rotation. Field rotation sucks, more than I can say. Seems like a fire’s always burning, like there’s always smoke. Then there’s rubble and burned-out vehicles, some of ‘em older than me. Dark holes in what used to be buildings along the streets hide the enemy, but which ones? Is it that building? This one? The next? Around that corner? Down the next block? Doing sweeps blows. Doing sweeps and being point is hell. It’s the hell of hell.
The enemy’s bad enough, but then there’s mistakes. When your own people fuck up and take a bunch of you out? Yeah, that’s fun, huh? Or a drooler gets one of you and you hear that horrible high-pitched scream for help when they dig in, and one after another join the banquet, and your buddy’s firing his plasma blaster blind, taking out a bunch of his teammates too. Yeah, those’re some good times right there.
I didn’t follow the news when it started, so I don’t know how it happened really. Civilian communication comes through the bands or not at all now. Spin the dial; it’s static until you find one.
I thought someone said maybe rats carried it. Nobody was sure, but it started in urban areas. In the third world, things got out of hand quick. Unprepared forces went in, put down a bunch of droolers, and figured it was over. Droolers aren’t the problem, though. Marys are. Marys carry it and it takes a while to incubate. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months. When it finally blooms, there’re waves of ‘em. They call ‘em Marys because they carry it like Typhoid Mary back in the day. I don’t know who Typhoid Mary was, but she must’ve been a bitch.
Marys don’t turn. By the time they’re detected, who knows how many infections have been spread. A Mary goes to a restaurant, and the busboy gets cut on the Mary’s knife. Six weeks later busboy, the girl he’s fucking, her parents and sister, and their nephews all turn out droolers. Then it gets fun. Who’s the first Mary? How many contacts each? Where? Fun.
Nobody ever figured out if it traveled through blood or spit or piss or cum or what. It wasn’t airborne, they knew that. But resources in most places got overrun. If anybody’s working on it now they ain’t telling us.
You know one in six is a Mary? One in fucking six. The only way you know one of you is a Mary is when someone in your platoon turns drooler. Most of the time, we get ‘em before it spreads. They get shipped off to a quarantine unit somewhere. Like Willie Laren.
He got scratched on rotation in some crappy