Slaughterhouse

FIVE.

Sergeant Sandra Rawlings watched as a fireball, wreathed in a halo of black smoke, climbed into the sky. The thunder of the explosion seemed to roll right through her, though the truck she rode in was well over half a mile away. Debris rocketed upward then slowly returned to earth like some dirty rain, tumbling and spinning. Rawlings didn’t know what had happened, and neither did the soldiers seated around her. Everyone was on their guns, maintaining readiness as the big M925A1, positioned somewhere in the middle of the convoy, lumbered down the Union Turnpike.

Rawlings looked at the lightfighters seated across from her on the opposite side of the M925A1’s wide bed. Like her old unit—the 164^th Transportation Battalion of the Massachusetts Army National Guard—they were a mix of young and old, a hodgepodge of races and body types. Unlike the Muleskinners, though, the composition of the 1^st Battalion, 55^th Infantry Regiment was almost entirely male. There were few women amongst the light infantrymen, and most of those were in the unit’s supply company. Rawlings didn’t have to wonder why. Though feminists and liberal-minded do-gooders had finally knocked down all the road blocks that separated women from joining the fighting ranks of The Men’s House, as the Army was occasionally known as, few females had the appetite for actual combat. To find herself floating alone in a sea of testosterone was not unexpected, especially when her new temporary duty station was with the storied 10^th Mountain Division (Light Infantry).

Virtually all of the soldiers around her had become combat-proven long before the Boston “peace-making” operation had begun. Rawlings knew that the 10^th’s units in Afghanistan had been rotated home just months ago, so the division could rest, refit, and retrain. It was called a “reset” in military parlance, where an over-optimized unit was taken off the line so it could get its collective shit squared away. New faces would fill old spaces, and old faces would rotate out to other units and share their experience or simply leave the service and enter a hopefully safer civilian society. No matter which avenue they took, it was a fool’s errand. The Bug had seen to that.

Gender aside, it was obvious she wasn’t one of them. They all wore multicam combat uniforms issued during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM in Afghanistan: advanced combat helmets, tactical rigs bulging with spare magazines and other gear pulled tight over body armor, CamelBak hydration systems, many with M9 pistols strapped to one thigh, gigantic rucks full of tactical gear, additional ammunition, Meals Ready to Eat, sleeping bags—their usual load-out exceeded a hundred pounds on a given day. Half of them were in MOPP gear, while the others had their protective paraphernalia laid out and ready to be donned in an instant. “Light infantry” had nothing to do with the weight of their equipment. Even though the 10^th didn’t have much in the way of tanks or heavy armor, they probably carried more equipment on their persons than their counterparts in the line infantry.

For her part, Rawlings was clad in a filthy Army Combat Uniform and a patrol cap. She had no armor, no hydration system, no MOPP equipment, and no rucksack full of gear. In the pockets of her uniform, she had two energy bars, four spare magazines of 5.56-millimeter full metal jacket ball ammunition, and a tire pressure gauge, the only holdover from her previous occupation as a Heavy Equipment Transportation System driver. And clipped to her waistband beneath her ACU blouse was a sheathed K-Bar knife.

Basically, she was a leaf-eater surrounded by carnivores.

She tried to imagine Scott Wade hanging out with soldiers like the ones she was currently riding with. When she’d found him, he was basically a broken kid, his platoon downed by the Bug and cut off from the rest of his battalion. She’d helped build him back up during their brief time together, and truth be told, he had done the same for her. She’d had maybe six or seven years on him, but in the situation at Harvard Stadium, the age gap didn’t seem to matter. And even though he’d looked like a kid, he’d fought like a man. Then he’d been infected and turned into a Klown. He had charged her, his crazy eyes full of murder, and she’d shot him with her M4 at a range of maybe ten feet—three times, because one hit was usually not enough.

Only death cured the Infected.

“So what’s your story?” someone asked, over the rumble of the truck’s diesel engine.

Rawlings looked up from the floorboard she’d been staring at. The big soldier sitting almost directly across from her had his hands draped around his M4/M203 combo weapon. His posture looked almost casual, but Rawlings doubted that to be the case. She was certain the man could go operational in a second’s notice, swing his rifle around, and zero any Klowns who might want to start something. He wasn’t wearing MOPP gear, but the soldiers on either side of him were. The pattern was that every other soldier was in MOPP IV, so Rawlings was also hemmed in by similarly protected soldiers. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. The nametape on his vest read MULDOON.

“Sorry?”

“I said, what’s your story?”

Rawlings thought about it. The rest of the soldiers were glancing her way, waiting for her response, even though they were all supposed to have eyes out, scanning for threats.

“No story,” Rawlings said finally.

“Really.” Muldoon’s expression didn’t change. “No story, but here you are, a beat-up Nasty Girl hitching a ride with a bunch of lightfighters. Who were you with?”

“The One Sixty-Fourth Transportation Battalion.”

“So you were what? A truck driver?”

Rawlings nodded. “Basically. Yeah.”

“What happened to your unit?”

“Overrun at Harvard Stadium. We were hauling supplies and drove into an ambush. Infected police hit us, along with a few dozen others. As far as I know, the headquarters company is still with the rest of the Guard at Logan.” The National Guard had facilities at Logan International Airport, just across the Callahan Tunnel from downtown Boston.

“And what happened to you?” Muldoon tapped his face, indicating the position of the big bruise that covered Rawling’s cheek.

“I fought my way out. Took a shot to the head.”

“Really.” If he was impressed, Muldoon didn’t allow it to show. “What happened to the dude who tapped you?”

“Shot him through the head. In through the chin, out through the crown.”

Muldoon nodded. “That’s the way to do it. How’d you find your way here?”

“Walked,” she said.

“All the way from Harvard Stadium?”

Rawlings found she didn’t have the will or desire to explain her situation any further. “Yeah. Mostly. Caught a ride with some of your guys. They didn’t make it, and was on foot after that.” She motioned toward the front of the column. “I told your XO all about it.”

“Walker?”

“Yeah.”

Muldoon grunted. “He’s a blue falcon. Stay away from him. You know what that means, Rawlings?”

“Yeah. I know what a buddy fucker is.”

“You go through rifleman training?” Muldoon asked.

“Yes, Sergeant Muldoon. National Guard BCT is the same for us as it was for you.”

Muldoon seemed to glare at her, but she couldn’t be certain because of his sunglasses. “Rawlings, you’re nothing like us. Don’t think that you are.” He looked toward the truck cab. “Well, you might be like Lieutenant Crais.”

“I’m in charge,” several of the other soldiers said in unison.

Muldoon nodded toward a pasty-skinned man in the rear of the truck. “Or maybe like Nutter.”

“Colonel Nutter, sir!” the soldiers chanted, saluting the man Muldoon had pointed out, though the salutes were delivered from crotch level. Definitely atypical, in Rawlings’s experience.

She couldn’t see Nutter’s eyes, as he was turned facing the rear, his M4 held at low ready. But he raised his left hand to acknowledge the salutes with his middle finger. Rawlings figured that was regular occurrence.

“Don’t mean to presume I’m even close to being a lightfighter, Muldoon,” she said. “But we’re all soldiers.”

“Not John Wayne,” said a reedy black lightfighter whose nametape read JOHNSON. He pointed at Muldoon. “He’s not a soldier. He’s a weapon, I’m telling you.”

With effort, Rawlings refrained from rolling her eyes. “I’ll remember that.”

“Good,” Muldoon said. “Keep that in mind. Now, you just sit back and—”

Two Apaches roared past, fast and low, drowning out the rest of his comment. Reading his lips, Rawlings was pretty sure he’d finished with “Let us take care of you.”

Great. Just great.