There were shouts all around and I had to shove at the body to get free. As I came up, I saw that the second Afghani had clamped his teeth around the windpipe of one of the Marines. Bunny put six rounds into the Afghani: the first one knocked him loose from his victim, the second punched him in the chest to stall him, and the last four grouped like knuckles in a lead fist to strike him above the eyebrows. The man’s head exploded and his body spun backward in a sloppy pirouette. The Marine dropped to his knees, trying to staunch an arterial spray with fingers that shook with the palsy of sudden understanding. His companion crouched over him, pressing the wound with his hands, but the Marine drowned in his own blood in seconds.
Slim was in the cave mouth, his weapon sweeping quickly back and forth from target to target, not knowing whether to take a shot or not.
I dove at Amirah, who had crawled back atop the sergeant. For his part, the Marine was putting up a good fight, but it was clear that terror of the woman he had been using as a tool of interrogation was off the scale, too much for him to handle. He shot me a single, despairing glance, and I saw the moment when he gave up. It must have been one of those instantaneous moments of clarity that can either save you or kill you. His interrogation had failed. His method of interrogation was indefensible, a fact that would never have mattered if we hadn’t shown up. But we were here, and he was caught. His world had just crashed, and he knew it.
I locked my arm around Amirah’s throat and squeezed, bulging my bicep on one side to cut off her left carotid and my forearm to cut off her right. In jujutsu that puts someone out.
It didn’t do a fucking thing to her.
She bucked and writhed with more force than I would have thought possible for a woman of her size, alive or dead.
I shoved the hot barrel of the.22 against the back of her head, bent close, and whispered in her ear, speaking in Farsi.
“There is no shame to die in the service of Allah.”
Her muscles locked into sudden rigidity. The cave was instantly still. Even the Afghani and the sergeant had stopped screaming. I held her tight against my chest and my back was to the cold stone wall. She smelled of rotting meat and death, but in her dark hair there was the faintest scent of perfume. Jasmine.
“Amirah,” I said. “Listen to me.”
I whispered six more words.
“Your choice, Princess,” I said. “This…or paradise?”
I leaned on the word “this.” From the absolute stillness, I knew that she understood what I meant. The cave, these men, all this destruction. She knew. And even though she had meant to sweep the world with her pathogen, the end goal-the transformation via Generation 12 of a select portion of Islam and the total annihilation of the enemies of her people-that was impossible. All that was left to her now was to be a monster. Alone and reviled.
The moment stretched. No one moved. Then Amirah leaned her head toward me. An oddly intimate movement.
She said, “Not…this.”
I whispered, “Yarhamu-ka-llâh.”
May God have mercy on you.
And pulled the trigger.
– 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.