The Nirvana Plague (21 page)

The battle raged on and on. It was obvious the camp forces were being overwhelmed. Listening to it, Marley couldn’t make sense of the flow of time. He saw the clock display on his visor ticking off the seconds and minutes, but some minutes felt like hours, and some hours seemed to skip past in a moment. The desperate chatter on comm was unbearable to hear. He thought of something he’d heard a former prisoner of war say: being tortured isn’t the worst thing in the world — the worst thing in the world is hearing someone else being tortured. He thought about Ally, tried to work out what time it was in Chicago, what day, what she would be doing. Was the coffee shop open? He couldn’t work it out. He loved that place. They had started it together. He was in private practice then. Alt med, alt psych, alt everything. Herbs and yoga, meditation and talk therapy. But then things changed. They needed real money to keep the shop afloat. He lucked into a real job. And everything slowly came apart. And now he was going to die without telling her he knew he’d screwed it up. She wouldn’t know he died missing her. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He felt sorry for her. It wasn’t fair to her.

Peters started knocking the side of his helmet with his cramped hand.

“Jesus, they’re getting cut to pieces,” he said in a dreadful tone. “Jesus, Jesus.”

Then, a few seconds later, as if in response to his fear, from across the room, the cases uttered their first words since the team had arrived: two or three of them together started singing a little song. Softly and clearly, they began:

Jesus loves me, this I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Marley felt the song in the room, felt the sound of it around him, as if it were touching him. It seemed to press into him, unbalance him. Sitting in the absolute darkness and chill of this ancient tomb, listening to the desperate din of the battle, waiting for the direct hit that would bring the tomb down upon them — and now this strange little chorus from these strange mind-shattered zombies — he felt himself going out of his place, felt as if he might at any moment begin to float away.

Little ones to him belong.

They are weak, but he is strong!

He felt as if he couldn’t find the ground with his feet, felt himself turning inside out, losing something he couldn’t do without. The dream world was invading the real world somehow, and he in his normal mind was utterly incapable of negotiating the dreamland.

Peters got up. “Why don’t you fight!” He was yelling at the ten, the zombies, his tone all desperation and terror. “Shut up for God’s sake! Stop that fucking singing! Why don’t you get out there and fight, goddamnit! Don’t you know what’s happening to them? Can’t you fucking hear it?”

“They don’t have helmets,” Marley said, flipping his visor down so he could see.

“They don’t need helmets to hear it!” Peters yelled. “Here, take mine!”

He yanked his helmet off and threw it across the room at them, plunging himself into darkness.

The singing stopped.

“Sit down, Fred,” Delacourt said. “They can’t help it.”

Peters fumbled for the wall in the darkness and sat down again, shoulder to shoulder with Marley.

“Jesus, Jesus, oh Jesus,” he kept muttering over and over, almost sobbing.

Marley could feel him trembling.

More explosions rumbled through the earth. Loose debris skittered down the walls.

On comm, they heard Captain Solso’s voice again:

“We’re surrendering.”

“What?”

“Signal it!”

“Sir!”

“Signal it, goddamn it!”

Marley told Peters: “It’s over, Fred. We’re surrendering.”

Peters did not respond.

“Signaling,”
someone said on comm.

Then they heard the sickening flat grunt as he was hit — followed by screams of fury and fear.

“Try again!”
Solso yelled.

“Fuck that! You try again, Captain!”

“Try again,”
Benford said.

“I’ll do it.”
It sounded like Tyminsky.

“Watch it!”

The constant crackle of gunfire continued unabated.

Marley dreaded the next voice.

Muffled yelling. It was the enemy, close by someone’s live helmet.

“All right, all right,”
Tyminsky said. They were yelling at him.

Then he went off comm.

Tennover said quietly: “They took it. I think they took his helmet off.”

The gunfire slowed, became sporadic. Yelling.

Someone said,
“Weapons down! Weapons down!”

Then:
“They want our helmets off! Helmets off!”

The last voice they heard was Benford’s:

“Lieutenant Tennover, keep your people in place. Maybe they won’t find you.”

“Yes, sir!” Tennover acknowledged.

Then the comm went dead.

They sat inside the tomb waiting, eyes fixed on the stairs beyond the doorway, dreading the sound of a boot. Peters sat between Marley and Delacourt, trembling uncontrollably, knees up, forehead resting on his crossed arms, saying nothing.

Tennover told them to disable outbound comm, in case the enemy was eavesdropping with a captured helmet.

“Hopefully, we got through to Command before we surrendered,” he whispered. “In any case, comm checks have alerted them by now. They’ll do a recon, and see what’s happened. Counter-attack sometime today. We’ll just sit tight here. If we’re lucky, the enemy won’t search too thoroughly. They know we’ll counter-attack, and they’ll want to clear out of here as fast as they can.”

An hour crept by like a year. Now and then they heard an isolated explosion. Tennover said the enemy was probably destroying anything they couldn’t use.

Outside the dawn was coming. A dim grey light filtered down the stairs. Across the room, the three women and seven men of Bravo squad had stretched out on the floor, astonishingly asleep.

It was still early morning when they heard the sound of voices from up in the temple. Tennover, nearest the door, stood up, drew his weapon, and stepped carefully, soundlessly, toward the stairs, visor open.

The voices grew louder.

The ten woke from their sleep and sat up. For once, they looked uneasy.

Silhouetted against the dim grey oblong of the door, Tennover inched forward, squatted lower, and peered cautiously up the stairway.

There was a sharp pop and his boot burst open. He fell sideways, his foot shot from under him.

Everyone else in the tomb leapt up, Peters too, and the ten.

Tennover fell on his back, his shattered foot unnaturally twisted under him, his head forward at the base of the stairs. He looked up, raising his weapon automatically, and fired several rounds up the stairway.

A deafening roar of gunfire blasted down the stairs. Tennover’s chest and face ripped open, spurting gouts of blood and flesh. He went limp, splayed out on his back. His hand fell dead against the stone of the bottom step and the handgun clattered out of it.

They looked at him in horror, and glanced round at each other. Some looked round the room for an escape, but there was none. The ten soldiers stood silently, bowing their heads.

Marley’s eyes met Peters’s, and he saw him change. He saw it was happening to Peters at that moment, saw his eyes go far away without really losing their focus, saw his fear-distorted face fall slack, his jaw loosen, his tense body settle.

Then and there, Peters lost his mind.

And then something small fell down the stairs — a little metal sphere, the size of a tennis ball. It bounced off Tennover’s body and rolled up onto the floor.

It’s a grenade, Marley thought. Last thing I’ll ever see is a grenade.

Lieutenant Davis jumped forward, toward the grenade, making such a graceful little leap that Marley would have smiled if there had been time, glad that this pretty movement had been his last image, glimpsing in the lithe arc of the lieutenant’s little body an echo of Ally in her long skirt dancing through the tables of the coffee shop the night before they opened for business — so happy — and then, just as Davis swung her bare foot forward to kick the grenade away, it went off.

Marley awoke paralyzed. Where was he? He tried to look around but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel his body. Were his eyes closed or was it dark? He felt the panic rising and tried to fight it with rationality. Think. Autonomic functions intact, or I’d be dead already. Motor functions disabled. Maybe I am dead. Maybe this is what death is like? This is going to be damned dull.

The darkness lifted slightly. He could see vague shapes. So his eyes were open. Had he opened them or had they already been open?

Something moved. A shape in front of him — or over him. Was he on his back? He couldn’t feel his back or his feet. Was he floating? Where was he? In the mountains. Forward operations base camp. In the Karakoram somewhere. Pakistan or India or Afghanistan. In a temple.

The thing moved again. A little more light. A human being. A woman. Suddenly a face turned toward him. Cool eyes looked at him. Bright eyes. Green eyes. Distant eyes. Dark hair. Who?

He was terrified. He felt a scream rising, but he was paralyzed. His panic was trapped inside him, killing him.

“There’s no need,” said the woman, her face coming closer, “to fear.”

Her lips were so close he felt the breath of her words brush his lips. He
felt
it. It was the only thing he
could
feel. Who was she? What was happening?

“Fighting it makes it happen,” she whispered against his lips.

He caught the scent of strawberries. Suddenly he recognized her. The little lieutenant, he thought. I’m in the temple with the cases. I’ve got it. It’s happening to me. My god, is this what it’s like?

“You’re just trying to wake up,” she said, or seemed to say.

He couldn’t see her mouth. Just her faraway eyes. The truth-taking eyes.

“Wake up, doctor!” she ordered in a whisper.

All at once he sat straight up, with a great gasp.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He felt cold and wet with sweat.

It wasn’t Davis before him. It was Benford.

“You were dreaming,” she said.

“No. No, I wasn’t.”

He wasn’t in the temple. He was outside in the courtyard. Where had Benford come from? Where was Davis? Where was the enemy? He couldn’t follow his thoughts. His head rang with pain.

“Take it easy,” Benford said. “Drink this.”

She shoved a bottle of something into his hand.

There were people lying all about him in the courtyard. Unconscious and silent, or moaning and bleeding. Around the perimeter, enemy soldiers stood guard. They had no uniforms, aside from those they’d stolen — some with bullet holes. Otherwise they were outfitted only with old T-shirts or patched-up sweaters, threadbare blue jeans or cut-off trousers, and beat-up sneakers or sandals on their feet. And they all looked bone weary.

“I need your help with the wounded, doctor,” she said. “Get your head clear.”

“What happened?”

“Concussion grenade. You’ve been out for a couple of hours.”

He felt dizzy and weak, but the water helped — or whatever it was. He rolled onto his hands and knees, then sat back on his heels, forcing himself slowly up.

“What about Lieutenant Davis?” His voice was thick.

“She’s not going to make it.”

“Anybody else?”

“We’ve got plenty of wounded,” Benford said. “But we have to treat the enemy wounded first before they’ll let us tend to our own people. They’re liable to pull us out of here any minute. So work fast.”

Estrada was nearby, cutting down on one of the enemy soldiers with a chest wound. One of his staff was attending. A nurse from Estrada’s staff was triaging.

Benford pulled Marley to his feet and pointed him toward a patient.

It had been a long time since Marley was in a surgery or emergency room, but Estrada’s people helped him along, shouting instructions over their shoulders. The conditions were anything but antiseptic, and the light was poor. The morning was grey and cold and windless. A black pall of smoke, rising from various fires throughout the camp hung over them.

The hospital, like the rest of the camp, had been shot to hell, and supplies of everything were short. But they worked liked demons to keep the enemy soldiers alive — controlling shock, stitching bleeders, stabilizing broken bones. They left most of the open surgery to Estrada.

As each patient was stabilized, they waved to the guards to come for him or her, and a couple of the enemy soldiers would carry their comrade into the temple. The dead ones they laid out along one side of the courtyard.

Marley saw in some of his patients’ eyes that they were
gone
.

“You see his eyes?” he said to Benford, as they knelt beside a young soldier with a shattered clavicle.

“What?”

“He’s got it,” Marley said. “He’s IDD.”

She glanced up from the soldier’s wound to his eyes. Glassy. Weary. Unafraid. “He’s just shocky.”

“He’s shocky
also
,” Marley said. He looked around for Peters. “What about Dr. Peters?”