– 4-

Battalion Aide Station

Now

I sat back and studied Harper for a long time.

He said, “What? You going to sit there and tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

I said nothing.

“Look,” he said, “I know that was you in the cave. What are you? Delta? SEALs?”

I said nothing.

“You know what we’re up against out there. They want us to stop the Taliban, stop the flow of opium, but our own government supports the brother of the Afghan president, and he runs half the opium in the frigging country! How the hell are we supposed to win that kind of war? This is Vietnam all over again. We’re losing a war we shouldn’t be fighting.”

I said nothing.

Harper leaned forward, anger darkening his face. He pointed at me with the index finger of his uninjured hand. “You think Abu Ghraib’s the only place where we had to do whatever it took to get some answers? It goes on all over, and it’s always gone on.”

“And look where it’s gotten us,” I said.

“Fuck you and fuck that zero tolerance bullshit. We were trying to save lives. We would have gotten something out of that man.”

“You didn’t get shit from the first two.”

Now it was his turn to say nothing. After a minute he narrowed his eyes. “When you spoke to that…that…thing. That woman. At the end, you gave her a blessing. You a Muslim?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Honestly, Sergeant, I don’t think I could explain it to you. I mean…I could explain it, but I don’t think you’d understand.”

“You think I’m a monster, don’t you?”

“Are you?”

“No, man,” he said. “I’m just trying to…” And his voice broke. At first it was just a hitch, but when he tried to catch it and hide it, his resolve broke and he put his face in his unbandaged hand and sobbed. I sat back in my chair and watched.

I looked at him. The bandages on his other hand were stained with blood that was almost black. Red lines ran in a crooked tracery from beneath the bandage and up his arms. I could see the same dark lines beginning to creep up from his collar. It was forty-eight hours since he’d been brought to the aid station. Fifty-nine since Amirah had bitten him. Strong son of a bitch. Most people would have turned by now.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked, raising a tear-streaked face.

“Nothing. It’s already happened.”

He licked his dry lips. “We…we didn’t know.”

“Yes you did. Your squad was briefed. Maybe it was all a little unreal to you, Sergeant. Horror movie stuff. But you knew. Just as you know how this ends.”

I stood and drew my sidearm, and racked the slide. The sound was enormous in that little room.

“They’re going to want to study you,” I said. “They can do that with you on a slab, or in a cage.”

“They can’t!” he said, anger flaring inside his pain. “I’m an American god damn it!”

“No,” I said. “Sergeant Andy Harper died while on a mission in Afghanistan. The report will reflect that he died while serving his country and maintaining the best traditions of the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Harper looked at me, the truth registering in his eyes.

“So I ask you,” I said, raising the pistol. “This…or paradise?”

“I…I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe at that moment he really was. Deathbed epiphanies aren’t worth the breath that carries them. Not to me. Not anymore.

“I know,” I lied.

“I did it for us, man. I did it to help!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

And raised the gun.

And the Next, and the Next by Genevieve Valentine

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Running with the Pack and in the magazines Strange Horizons, Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Escape Pod, and more. Her work can also be found in my anthology Federations and in my online magazine Lightspeed. In addition to writing fiction, Valentine is a columnist for Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine.

In Dawn of the Dead, George Romero’s follow-up to his classic, genre-defining Night of the Living Dead, we see hordes of zombies converge upon a shopping mall, bust through the doors, and proceed to shamble aimlessly up and down its halls. We are told that they remember what was important to them in life and are moved to re-enact their routines in death, and so we are moved to reflect that these mindless dead are not so very different from our own consumerist neighbors who also seem to converge on the mall and wander its tacky displays for no better reason than a kind of grim atavistic inertia and lack of conscious thought.

As terrifying as it is to imagine being bitten by a zombie and transformed into a mindless shell of your former self, even more terrifying is the idea of having to pretend to be one of them, to enact a meaningless ritualized existence while fully conscious and never giving away that you are actually wide awake. Many stories have played with this theme, from its humorous treatment in Shaun of the Dead to its more serious treatment in the 2007 film Invasion to its positively grueling treatment in Adam-Troy Castro’s “Dead Like Me,” which appeared in the first The Living Dead anthology.

Maybe you feel like you’re surrounded by mindless drones and that you have to pretend to be something you’re not just to fit in. If so, the scenario presented in our next tale may feel eerily familiar.

You know them by their milky eyes, but they’re easy to fool. If you survive the first crush of them, and can master the art of walking slowly and staring straight ahead, none of them in the packed train car will even look at you.

(Once you get their interest, it’s over. Someone in the car behind you tries to run for it near Prospect Avenue and gets swarmed. If you glance over, it will look like a glass box stuffed with maggots. Do not glance over; you must look straight ahead.)

You will do better to ignore the smell of rotting apples that’s seeping into the train car from all their open mouths hanging limp.

You need to get to open water-you’re trying to get to Coney Island, to get someplace where they haven’t devoured everything.

(You’re already too late.)

As you hit New Utrecht, two men run into the train car. They’re holding baseball bats, looking over their shoulders, smug and relieved to have escaped.

Every head turns, every milky eye in the train car fixes suddenly on them, and the slack mouths pull up into a hundred rictus grins.

The men turn and bolt. One of them gets caught in the closing doors, and as the train pulls away from the station his arm drops out of sight, and something tears.

That man is lucky.

The other man is trapped in the train car with them (with you). He gets two or three good swings in before they swarm him, and after a few seconds his screaming gets eaten up by a single, sucking, wet sound that you don’t want to think about.

(You must look straight ahead.)

All along the open-air platforms they gather, headed south, pressing themselves into the cars whenever the doors ding open. They step on in twos and threes, pulling children or parts of children, patiently grasping the little hands carrying the little arms that lead to empty shoulders.

They line the tracks all the way south, five deep, then eight, then ten, waiting for the train to stop so they can get on.

(They’re not fast, it turns out, but they’re patient, and there are more of them every minute.)