Pestilence

31

Kyle Levitt had joined the National Guard when he was eighteen years old. The recruiter at his school had been a cool guy named Dave. He drove a Viper and would show up to the school with his sleeves rolled up, revealing muscular arms, and Kyle saw the way the girls stared at him.

Kyle had planned on becoming a veterinarian, but one meeting with Dave had changed his mind.

“Vets don’t get no pussy,” Dave had told him.

Instead of discussing it with his parents, Kyle had prayed about it and decided that the Lord wanted him to join the National Guard. He had even had a dream telling him something like that. He thought, as Dave had promised, he would be fighting for God and country against Bin Laden. But when he was shipped off to Iraq for his first tour in 2006, he didn’t see Bin Laden. He saw peasants fighting not only the terrorists, but the coalition soldiers, as well.

He’d had several close calls in Iraq. One stuck more than the others; an IED had gone off about four feet from the vehicle he was riding in. The Humvee in front of them was blown to hell, and so much shrapnel flew off that some of it burst through their windshield and hit him in the face. Luckily, he hadn’t taken any permanent damage other than a scar on his cheek.

As Kyle walked the perimeter of the huge fence, what the guardsmen had named the Cage, he felt as though he were back in Iraq, on patrol, ensuring the enemy combatants weren’t attempting to escape from custody.

But he wasn’t in Iraq. He was twenty-five miles from where he had grown up in Santa Monica. And the people inside the cage weren’t enemy combatants; they were Americans.

Some of the other soldiers fell into their roles perfectly and treated the Americans no differently from the Iraqis they had dealt with. As far as they were concerned, they followed orders, and nothing else mattered. But for Kyle, it was more complicated. He felt for these people, and his entire family was in this city. Would they be rounded up, too? Would he be expected to guard his own family with a rifle pointed at their heads?

Fuck that, he thought. He would go AWOL first and take his family with him.

But something more concerning was beginning to happen. He’d been coughing for about a day, and the night before, he’d had a fever and diarrhea. He was still hot and couldn’t stop sweating. He had dumped ice water over his head, but that didn’t feel like it did anything. A few minutes later, he would be burning up again.

His stomach convulsed, and he felt his bowels let loose. He ran to a row of nearby bushes and vomited. The vomit was clear and black, but something like dark oatmeal came up with it. The fluid spattered over the bushes and didn’t seem to stop until it decided it was done.

The vomiting alleviated the pain in his guts for a few minutes, and then the tight, aching pain returned and he had to vomit again.

He walked to the front entrance, where his buddy Mark was stationed.

“You all right, man?” Mark asked.

“No. I gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Barracks, man. I’m not feelin’ hot. Flu or somethin’.”

Mark glanced around to make sure no one else was listening. “That ain’t no damn flu, you fucking idiot. Tell me you didn’t take off your mask when you was dealin’ with these folks.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so… I can’t remember.”

Mark peered at a group of other soldiers near a tower. “Get outta here, now. I’ll cover for you. Just take a jeep and go, and don’t come back until you feel better. And you ain’t goin’ near the barracks, you hear me? You go straight to the med tent.”

“Thanks.”

He found a jeep with the keys in the ignition. He wasn’t supposed to commandeer a vehicle without permission, but Mark, who was his superior, had just given him what sounded like permission. Even though Mark probably didn’t rank high enough to give permission like that, it didn’t matter. Kyle could barely stand.

He drove off the camp and took the side streets rather than the 405 or the PCH. The streets were empty, and it felt eerie, like the zombie apocalypse he was always afraid of as a child.

He drove for at least half an hour and kept feeling worse. In that short span of time, he’d had to stop three times to vomit, and he had grown certain, considering that he hadn’t eaten or drank anything for four hours, that he was vomiting pure blood.

Driving into Burbank, a part of the city that wasn’t quarantined yet, he found a hotel on one of the streets leading to downtown. He parked in front and didn’t move for a long time, closing his eyes and tilting his face up to the sky. He turned the jeep back on and pulled away. His mind was hazy, and he wasn’t sure where he was going or what he was doing.

The streets weren’t empty there, and he had a hard time keeping up with traffic. His vision was getting blurry, and the constant vomiting had burst the blood vessels in his eyes. He could see the red strands running along the whites of his eyes in the rearview mirror. He felt it as a sharp pain in his head and eyes.

At a stoplight, he stumbled out of the jeep and over to the car next to him. The driver was a portly man with glasses, and his wife was in the passenger seat with the window down.

“Excuse me,” Kyle said, slurring his speech. “Where is the hospit-”

Vomit spurted out of his mouth and over the woman. It hit her in the face and dripped down onto her white blouse and her neck, making her look like a murder victim. Kyle’s head spun, and he tumbled backward.

He heard her screaming and the frantic voice of the husband trying to calm her down.