The Nirvana Plague (24 page)

An hour later they still had not seen Vikas’s replacement or anyone else.

Benford decided to venture out and try to talk to the guards. She woke Marley, then got up and moved cautiously toward the blob of pale light that marked the entrance. But just as she reached the lip of their little chamber, one of the enemy soldiers suddenly materialized in front of her. She jumped back.

For a moment the narrow form of the soldier stood silently silhouetted in the entrance. The doctors could see from her figure it was a woman. Suddenly she crouched down low and darted forward into the chamber. Benford backed away from her as she came on.

The soldier continued forward till she was right up close to them. Marley was the nearest. He felt her hand reach out for him. She gripped his shoulder, and, turning, pulled him after her.

Marley started after her, whispering back to the others: “She wants us to go with her.”

“What’s happening?” Benford whispered back.

“I think it’s one of their IDDs.”

They followed her back to the lip of the entrance. She stepped out cautiously into the main chamber, and they crept after her. The guards were gone. One of the stools was upset.

She turned to the left, toward the narrowing darkness deeper back in the long chamber. They followed after her. Something was happening — but what? Glancing back, they caught glimpses of men moving away from them — down toward the mouth of the cave.

All at once the whole cave filled with a brilliant pink light. For an instant there was nothing but this painful, unaccountable flash.

But in the next instant, came the realization that something had exploded. At the far end of the long gallery, something burst from the narrow mouth of the tunnel, a great concussive belch that shook the whole cavern. The whole mountain seemed to shudder violently around them. They saw human-shaped figures tossed back like dolls from the explosion.

“Sweet Jesus!” Estrada said.

Then they all turned as one and fled. Blinded by the flash, their bare feet and hands slipping on the slick wet rocks, they scrambled after their guide deeper and deeper into the cavern, crawling and falling and pulling each other up again — while behind them the main chamber was exploding with gunfire.

The shadowless amber glow of the striplights winked out. Everything plunged into a mad darkness flashing with the light of automatic weapons fire. The doctors flung themselves forward after their guide up the narrowing channel.

A flare was fired into the cave — followed by torrents of gunfire. Crazy shadows jumped across the walls around them. Rifle fire ricocheted past them. The rocks all around them pinged and splintered.

Marley winced and shrank together, clawing forward after the strange guide, trying not to feel the bullet coming. Someone ahead of him was hit and yelped in pain. But no one went down.

The deepening chamber narrowed around them. The floor shrank to the width of the cold stream coming down from the heart of the mountain. They splashed forward, cracking their heads on the lowering roof.

Finally, they could go no further. There they found all the enemy saints sitting in a row, very still and calm, in the flashing darkness of the channel.

It was the night in the tomb all over again.

The three doctors sat down with them. There was nothing else to do. They sat down in the cold water of the narrow tunnel, and listened to the ferocious firefight below them — the blat of automatic weapons, the wump and thunder of grenades, the pathetic screaming of the wounded.

Marley sat thinking of Ally. Not thinking any particular thing, just her name. That was all he could manage amid the terrifying uproar of the battle. Just Ally, Ally, Ally.

All at once, the fight was over. Like someone had yelled “cut,” it just stopped — the gunfire stopped — but the yelling continued. So much yelling and so distorted by the reverberations of the cave that they couldn’t tell at first who had won — what language was being shouted.

Benford asked in a whisper: “Anyone hit?”

“Yes,” Estrada said. “But—”

“How bad?”

“It’s nothing.”

“All right. Let’s move down.”

There was still a little light filtering through to them from the flares in the main chamber. The doctors crept forward quietly, back toward the main chamber, walking gingerly in the cold shallow water, hands running along the sloping rock walls either side.

The saints did not follow them, did not even stir.

As they came down into the main chamber they were able to make out which language was being shouted. English.

They moved forward more quickly, Benford leading the way, calling ahead to make contact.

The units below called back and started toward them, the beams of their helmet lights dancing through the passage ahead.

“Are you Colonel Benford?” one of them said, invisible behind his head beam.

“Yes.”

“Lieutenant Reed, sir. Glad to see you made it.”

“You have wounded?” Estrada said.

“Not too bad, sir. The enemy is pretty shot up though.”

“Let’s go.”

Estrada started down into the gallery, then turned back to the lieutenant. Marley saw that Estrada was bleeding from the shoulder, but not profusely.

“And get us some boots, would you please?”

“Yes, sir.”

Estrada moved on down quickly.

“Any more of you back here?” said the lieutenant to Benford.

“Yes. There are some sick enemy personnel back there. They’re probably contagious, and they could be a valuable intelligence resource. I want to talk to you about how we’re going to get them out of here.”

Marley interupted: “Let me babysit them, colonel. You’ll be more help to Estrada. They don’t seem in much hurry to come down anyway.”

Benford gave him a hard look, but, as always, it was gone in a second. “All right, that works. Give him your light,” she said to the lieutenant. “Give me a shout if they try to move out.”

She moved off after Estrada, limping on her bare injured feet. The lieutenant followed her.

When Marley got back to the narrow chamber where they had left the “saints,” he found them sitting huddled close together in a few inches of water at a wider spot in the chamber. They were huddled around a man lying on his back in the pool. They were all touching him. One supported his head, keeping it out of the water; others held his hands, or had their hands lying lightly on his chest, stomach, or thighs. He had an exit wound in his upper abdomen. Marley pushed his way in and checked his carotid pulse and pupil response with his flashlight. He was dead — but only just. His skin was still warm. He had been hit in the firefight and sat there with them in the darkness and bled out. And never uttered a sound.

Marley passed his light over the faces around him, looking down at the dead man. They were each silently crying — and slightly smiling.

Flanked by gunships, a stream of transport helicopters ferried friend and foe out of the valley all day long. Wounded friendlies went first. Then wounded enemy. Then enemy combatants — what was left of them. Able-bodied personnel went last, civilians before military. It was near nightfall by the time Benford and Marley got out, Estrada with them.

Exhausted in a way he had never known before, Marley sat staring out his window watching the folds of the valley glide by. His body ached, and his guts churned. He had spent the day, once the enemy IDDs were bottled up, between mad stints of sewing human bodies back together before they died, running to the latrine to puke and defecate until there’d been nothing left in his body to purge. Now here he sat, hunched up on a thinly padded bench in a fat helicopter, watching the mountains unroll around him. They looked unreal, those sloping forests and meadows, rocky barrens and cascading streams. They made him feel unreal somehow. Perhaps he wasn’t really there. Perhaps he was really just a camera, a viewing machine, seeing whatever happened to pass in whatever direction he happened to be pointed. But between his eyes and what they saw, there stood a screen painted with the frightening memories of the day:

—A pair of sneakers, standing empty in their bloody prints, as if the person wearing them had been liquefied.

—A severed hand, palm down on the floor, as if crawling away, still wearing a cheap pewter ring.

—The metallic fecal smell of death, of spilled bowels and blood.

—Young Vikas, lying dead on the floor, sprawled like a discarded rag, his clothes and skin and muscles all in shreds.

—Even worse than the dead and the nearly dead had been the living wounded, writhing in agonies of pain.

The helicopter sailed without pausing past the brow of the ridge where just the day before the base camp had stood above an ancient mountain village and its crumbling stone temple. But now the whole area was a smoking black cinder.

Benford saw it too. “Firebombed,” she said.

“The whole village?”

“Enemy village.”

He looked away. “Not anymore.”

“We’re pulling out of this sector,” she explained. “We can’t leave anything behind.”

“Not even what was there before?”

“You don’t need me to tell you war is hell, Carl.”

He wondered when she’d started calling him by his first name. He couldn’t remember. In the midst of all that had happened, what did it matter?

Karen woke early.

She’d taken to sleeping on a pallet in front of the door so Roger couldn’t slip out at night. She sat up, shedding layers of blankets. Her back ached and her head swam. A dim predawn twilight seeped in through the open window. There were no lights on.

“Roger?”

“Yes.”

He was back in his chair — sans the cushion she used for her pallet. The cat was stretched out on the back of the chair. Without the cushion, he sat deeper in the chair than normal. He looked too small for it, like a child.

“Roger, have you been sitting there all night long?”

“Mm,” he said. “I went to the bathroom twice, and—”

“Jesus, it’s cold in here. Is the power off?”

“I put some more blankets on you.”

“You did? That was nice — Why didn’t you close the damn window?”

“I like the air.”

There was a sweet, fresh smell in the air — even with the window open.

“You like—” She stopped, wondering what seemed so strange about this conversation.

“The power is off,” he said.

“Didn’t you sleep?”

“Mm, I don’t think so.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Yes.”

She got up and crossed the room to the window. The floor under her feet was icy. She leaned out and looked up. The sky looked fair. Down the street a bright square of sky was opening toward the coming sun. She closed the window and came back to his chair, feeling uneasy.

“Still sketching?” she said.

In the dim light she could see that the white sheet of paper on his lap was quite grey — densely covered with intricate figures.

“Too dark,” he said. “I’m waiting for the light to come back on.”

She tried the table lamp beside him automatically. Nothing.

“How long have you been waiting?”

He looked up at her and shrugged.

Startled, she froze where she stood. Her hand returning from the lamp switch stopped and hung in the air.
He looked at me.