I screwed the.22’s barrel into the soft spot under his left ear, grabbed him by the collar and slow-walked him back. Slim was there and he spun the guard and put him down. I didn’t see the blow, but it sounded like a tree being felled. The guard went out without having said a word. Slim watched our backs as Bunny and I crept to the cave entrance…
…and looked into a scene from Hell.
The cave was clearly one that saw regular use. There were chairs, a card table, ammunition cases, cots, and a stove with sterno burners. A Taliban soldier was tied to a folding chair, ankles and wrists bound with plastic cuffs. His clothes had been slashed and torn away to reveal his pale chest and shoulders. His turban hung askew, one end trailing down behind him where it puddled on the rocky ground between his heels. Several Kalashnikovs stood against the wall, magazines removed.
The other three men of the Marine squad stood in a loose semicircle around the man, laughing as he screamed and begged and prayed. All of them were sweating; a couple had red and puffy knuckles that spoke to the way this session had started. If this was just a group of frustrated Marines knocking the piss out of a Taliban grunt, partly to blow off steam and partly to try and get a handle on something that might result in some real good being done, then I might have just stepped in and calmed it down. Yelled a bit, given them the appropriate ration of shit, but basically dialed it all down with no charges being filed.
But that’s not what we were seeing. These guys had taken it to a different level and in doing so had crossed the line between an attempt to gather useful intelligence and something else. Something darker that was not part of soldiering. Something that wasn’t even part of torturing or “enhanced interrogation.” Something that went beyond Abu Ghraib and into the darkest territory imaginable.
They had Amirah-scientist, designer of the Seif al Din, wife of one of the world’s most hated terrorists. There were two ropes looped around her neck, each end pulled to an opposite side by a Marine so that she could not approach either of them. All she could do was lunge forward toward the prisoner. Her wrists were bound behind her. Her ankles were hobbled by a length of rope. She couldn’t flee, couldn’t run. The men had stripped her to the waist, revealing a body that was beautifully made but which now inspired only revulsion. Her once olive skin had faded to a dusty gray-green and there were four black bullet holes-one in her stomach, three in her back-that were crusted with dried blood and wriggling with maggots.
Amirah lunged forward to bite the man, but the Marines jerked on the ropes and stopped her when her gray teeth were an inch from the Afghani’s face. Amirah snarled and then laughed. It was impossible to say whether she was enjoying this game, or if she was completely mad.
As the men struggled to keep her in check they danced and shifted around and I could see that there were two other Afghanis in the room. They lay sprawled like broken dolls. It looked like their faces had been eaten, and their throats were tangles of red junk.
“It’s getting tough to hold this bitch,” growled one of the men, though he was smiling when he said it.
“Please, in the name of God, keep her away!” begged the bound man. He was already bleeding from half a dozen bites. Thin lines of dark red spiderwebbed out from each bite. The infection was slow for some, faster for others. Snot and spit ran from his nose and mouth as he pleaded in three different languages.
A big man with sergeant’s stripes-the only one not holding a leash-bent down behind the man and spoke with sharp impatience. “We’ll fucking stop when you fucking tell us what we want to know.”
“But I don’t…I don’t…” He was filled with too much panic to complete a sentence.
The sergeant straightened and nodded, and the men slackened their holds on the rope leashes. Amirah instantly lunged forward and sank her teeth into the flesh of the man’s shoulder. Blood spurted hot and red beside her cheeks, and even from where I crouched I could see her eyes roll high and white with an erotic pleasure. The man’s piercing shrieks filled the whole cave.
“Okay, pull the bitch off him,” snapped the sergeant, and she fought them, her teeth sunk deep into muscle. It took all three men to haul her back, two pulling and the sergeant pushing. He punched Amirah in the face and that finally broke the contact, but as they dragged her away a piece of sinew was clamped between her jaws and it snapped with a wet pop.
She licked her lips. “Delicious…” she said in English, drawing the word out, tasting the soft wetness of it, savoring the way the syllables rolled between teeth and tongue and lips.
Bunny made a soft gagging sound beside me.
This was what I was afraid of. What Church had been afraid of. During that fight against El Mujahid, we’d encountered several generations of the Seif al Din pathogen. Most of the early generations transformed the infected into mindless eating machines. The walkers. But at the end, when I’d squared off against El Mujahid himself, he’d been among the dead but he still retained his intelligence. It was the result of Generation 12 of the disease. He bragged about how his princess-the name Amirah meant “princess”-had saved him, had elevated him to immortality.
That had to be what we were seeing here. Amirah had become one of her own monsters. Was it an accident or part of some twisted plan? From the way El Mujahid bragged about it-right before I gave him a ticket to paradise-I had to believe that Amirah had chosen this path.
Chosen. God almighty.
“Fuck this,” I murmured and stepped into the cave. Bunny was right beside me. I held my.22 in a two-hand shooters grip; he had his M4. Our night-vision was off but we wore black balaclava’s that showed only our eyes.
“United States Army,” I bellowed. “Stand down, stand down!”
The sergeant whirled toward me, his right hand going for his sidearm. I put the laser sight on him.
“Stand down or I will kill you!”
He believed me, and he froze.
The other Marines froze.
The man in the chair froze.
Amirah, however, did not.
With a snarl of hunger, the mad witch twisted so suddenly and violently that she tore the ropes from the hands of the startled Marines. She tore her hands free from the plastic cuffs. She screamed like some desert demon from legend, leapt into the air and slammed into the sergeant, driving him against the torture victim. They crashed to the ground amid shrieks and blood and biting teeth.
The two Marines began to move toward the sergeant, but Bunny shifted to cover them with his M4. That left me.
I stepped in and kicked Amirah in the side of the head. The blow knocked her off of the sergeant, but she had his hand clamped between her jaws. And the bound man was screaming and beating his forehead against the side of the sergeant’s head, mashing his ear.
“Holy shit, boss-on your six!”
It was Bunny. I pivoted in place in time to catch the rush as something came out of the shadows and tackled me. It was one of the other Afghanis. One of the dead Afghanis.
His teeth were bared and spit flew from cracked lips as he lunged for my throat.
I braced my forearm under his chin as I fell backward, and then clenched my abs so that my flat back fall turned into a curled back roll. The Afghani went into the tumble with me and instead of him pinning me down we ended the roll with me straddling his chest. I jammed the barrel of the.22 into his left eye-socket and fired. The bullet tore all his wiring loose and he transformed from murderously vicious to sagging dead weight in a microsecond.