Zombies

ZOMBIES

AUGUST 2021

Kabul Airport is owned by the Afghan government. Located north of the city, the airport is surrounded by concrete walls reinforced with coils of concertina wire designed to slice and dice. A single, four-mile-long runway divides the airport in two: north and south.

The civilian side is south and has three gates. Abbey Gate is tucked into the southeast corner. Nearby and east of Abbey is the aptly named East Gate. To the west of Abbey Gate is an access road leading from the city to South Gate, the airport's main entrance.

Access to the north side is limited. This is because that side is "hardened," meaning that that the barracks, buildings, hangars, etc., have been designed to withstand conventional weapons. Until the evacuation, Camp Alvarado, a complex maintained by the U.S. State Department, was located there. On that side, the only way in is through North Gate.

At least, that's what it says on paper.

No one slept on August 15 th , the day their battalion arrived. As in, seriously, no one's head hit a pillow or sandbag; no one got to stretch out for a quick forty winks. This was because, as with so much else about this operation, no one had thought to really set up a secure perimeter or provide enough Marines to keep order.

Which meant that everyone , he and Roni included, stayed up all night doing what they could to secure the airport with what they had. A CO called it Night of the Zombies .

He wasn't wrong. Even John, who was used to staying up all night on-call, was so wrecked, he could've lurched around as an extra in a low-budget Walking Dead spinoff.

On August 16th, their battalion's second day on the ground, the State Department started processing civilians. Many had been worked over by the Taliban. This meant the next stop for most was John's and Roni's medical triage and treatment down a long alley from Abbey Gate, which had been closed off to traffic by creating a bottleneck with cargo containers. Having armed Taliban hanging out on top of the containers did wonders for crowd control.

Anything really serious—an injury requiring an operation or some more complex procedure John and Roni and the other docs couldn't perform—was shipped across base to a small hospital. Although originally operated by NATO, the hospital, with its two ORs, ICU, trauma bays, CT scanner, and blood bank, was commandeered by the U.S. military. If anything truly awful rolled in or in the event of a mass casualty event requiring more intervention than the forward medical teams could handle, that hospital was their fallback.

The problem, of course, was that if push came to shove, and they were forced to use that hospital for anything more complicated than an appendix...then, the doo-doo really had hit the fan.

By 0600, they had sort of a system down: initial check by a Marine at Abbey Gate; another check—again by a more seasoned Marine—halfway down the alley; then a swing by the med tent if needed. If not, a would-be refugee was loaded onto a van and hauled across the base to a staging area behind an old civilian hangar which the State Department guys had commandeered. Another check before being allowed into that facility and then an evacuee was led down a staircase into the bowels of the building where Marines and Staties sat behind computers and went through documents one more time.

By 0700, their med tent had morphed into a proverbial beehive, what with personnel bustling from one patient to another and the constant clash of instruments, the thump of the generator powering the lights, the constant thrum of the air-conditioning, and the wail of patients—and of infants, many of whom weren't injured but being watched over, cooed at, and cradled by Marines while docs and nurses and techs worked on their parents.

By 1200, John was walking on his knuckles, he was so tired. His skin felt greasy; his mouth tasted as if something had come in, taken a crap then died. Though cooled, a heavy stink permeated the air: clotting blood, torn flesh, shattered bone, scorched skin, sweat, piss. Stripping off stained surgical gloves, he dropped these in an overflowing biohazards bin and shambled over to Roni's station, two down from his own.

"I need to get out of here and someplace where I'm breathing air that doesn't smell like the inside of a butcher shop," he said. "You about ready for a break?"

"Give me ten." Roni didn't look up from stitching a long, jagged rip that ran from the right thigh of a very thin, very quiet, very small boy all the way to his knee. "Just need to throw in the last few here."

"Sure." He watched her work. The kid really was tiny, maybe three or four, and looked as if he hadn't seen a square meal in weeks. That rip also wasn't the child's only wound. Dark roses of dried blood bloomed on the child's ragged shorts and tattered T-shirt. The poor kid looked as if someone has gone after him with a metal rake. Through one tear, though, he spotted a smiley face surrounded by three stars done in blue magic marker. This was Roni's signature, something she'd picked up working pediatric emergency rooms on nights when they ran out of cute and colorful stickers. She signed kids' and adults' bandages alike. Everyone needs a smile , she'd said, young and old. "What happened to the boy?"

"Her." Without looking up, Roni tipped her head toward a young woman who stood on the other side of the gurney. The woman's dun-colored abaya was soaked from the waist down, courtesy of an open sewage canal just outside Abbey Gate. She reeked like a porta-potty left to stew all summer. "She pitched him over the barbed wire. Or tried to." Even muffled by a mask, Roni's voice betrayed no emotion whatsoever. She might have been talking about the weather. "She wasn't strong enough. When he got snagged, she made it worse by trying to shove him over. The Marines just couldn't get to him fast enough."

"She the mom?"

"Neighbor. Claims the boy's mom is dead."

"Uh-huh." He should've been shocked but wasn't. A lot of adults saw a small child as a get-the-hell-out-of-Kabul card because the Marines were helping as many children as they possibly could. "You believe her?"

"Do chickens have lips?"

"Does she have papers at least?"

"This is Afghanistan, John." Roni tied off another stitch. "What do you think?"

Pushing from the air-conditioned medical tent into the world beyond the flaps was a sucker punch. The air was shimmery with heat, the light bleaching the landscape to the color of old bone. To the north, jagged red mountains bit a cloudless bluer-than-blue sky where a bright coin of a sun burned. Throw in a ram's skull, and the scene could've been painted by Georgia O'Keefe.

There was also a lot of noise: a near-constant din of people clamoring, arguing, pleading; the grind of vehicles; the pops of gunfire beyond the gates as the Taliban, those masters of crowd control, fired randomly this way and that. Overhead, helicopters thumped, ferrying personnel and civilian employees from the various embassies. American soldiers clustered in tight, vigilant knots. Others were tasked with escorting approved civilians wanting passage out of Kabul for processing.

"Wow." John shoved on a pair of tinted ballistic wraparounds. "Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire."

"Yeah, but it's a dry heat."

"Next you're going to tell me it's no worse than Arizona."

"Never been to Arizona, but this is like all mountain deserts: frying by day, freezing by night. Anyway, the weather's the least of our problems." Roni pulled two bottles of an energy drink from a pocket of her cargo pants and handed one to John. "I expected bad, but..." She scuffed yellow dirt with the toe of a boot. "Do you know I used the last of my local on that little boy? Stores are empty."

"Just take it easy. We'll get resupplied as soon as the Moose from Doha gets here."

"Which is when, exactly? I made the mistake of asking our supply sergeant when we could count on a transport."

"Betcha no one knows."

"All the sergeant said was the plane's running on military time. "

"Ah." In the Army, that translated to a shrug. "Then, we'll just have to suck it up."

"How? Tell people to bite down on a tongue depressor when it hurts? If we're forced to use non-dissolving sutures, who's going to take them out or even understand when or that they should come out?"

"There's always duct tape." When she only stared, he added, "I'm serious."

"And where would you even have tried this out?" Before he could open his mouth, she held up a hand. "Wait. You learned in Boy Scouts."

"Why do you make that sound like a bad thing? But, as a matter of fact, yes."

"You ever done it?" When he nodded, she added, "Where?"

"Hiking the Hill Country."

"Isn't that in Texas?"

"About an hour northwest of San Antonio, yup. Big old park, something like thirty thousand acres. Anyway, my brother got hung up climbing over a bald cypress across the path, and one of the branches tore up his leg." He stopped when her eyebrows folded in a frown. "What?"

"I didn't know you had a brother or ever lived in Texas. Long way from Wisconsin."

Oh, crap. He had to watch his mouth. My God, that would stir up a hornet's nest. A certain U.S. marshal would've metaphorically slapped him upside the head for that slip. This was precisely what had forced Stan to move him from Kansas to Wisconsin. On the other hand, the boy named Danny—not John—had been a freaked-out, depressed fourteen-year-old and could be forgiven the gaff.

"Yeah, you know, family trip," he said then hurried on before she could ask anything else he would have to lie about. "Anyway, I washed out the gash with beer…"

" Beer ?"

"Yeah, my dad's." Man, he was really making a mess of this. On the other hand, hadn't Stan always said that the best lies contained a kernel of truth? "I shook it up to get, you know, the spray to clear out the dirt, and I figured the alcohol couldn't hurt. Slapped on a couple gauze pads then used duct tape to wind it up tight. ER guy was pretty impressed. He said whenever he hiked, he packed duct tape, too. I always wrap some around my water bottle, so I never forget."

"I wondered why you do that. Didn't Driver make some remark about you and your duct tape? Before one of our marches, I think."

He nodded. "One of the rare times he had something good to say about me." He changed the subject. "I like what you did for that boy back there. Your smiley face? Nice touch."

"He's a little boy. I felt sorry for him. I feel sorry for all these poor people." She sighed. "Look, let's head out to the flight line and get away from this for a couple minutes."

"I'll drink to that," he said, tapping his bottle to hers. "Enough doom and gloom."

"Right." She let go a humorless laugh. "Betcha we never run out of that."

As they ambled for the tarmac, she said, "Tell me more about the Boy Scouts."

"For starters," he said, holding up his bottle of orange drink, "I can tell you that this stuff reminds me of that orangeade crap they gave us at Scout camp."

"How far did you go?"

"High as I could. Eagle."

She snorted. "Figures. Do a lot of good deeds?"

"I guess? We once had a couple kids come over from Russia on an exchange program. I didn't get to go over there, but our troop hosted some guys who came here. This was after Putin but before things got tense."

Her eyebrows arched. "There are Russian Boy Scouts?"

"Oh, yeah. Been around a long time. When it was the Soviet Union, they were called Young Pioneers. These days they're ARSA, the All-Russian Scout Association."

"What did you guys do together? Did they speak English?"

"Oh yeah, and way better than my Russian. We did Scout things. Played baseball. Taught a couple guys how to pitch."

"Baseball."

"Yes, baseball. I even played in college."

"Get out of town. You?"

He gave her a mock scowl. "You say that as if you can't believe I might be good at something other than surgery."

"I can't. Although..." She put on a thinking face then brightened. "You do know more movie and television trivia than can possibly be good for a person."

"Ah," he said, slipping her a wink, "but think of the possibilities if I'm ever on Jeopardy ."

"I'll try to restrain my imagination. Finish the story about the Russian Scouts."

"There's not lots to tell. Nu, they played. Too American a game, I guess. I mean, I was lousy at soccer. Anyway, being ambidextrous, I showed guys how to pitch?—"

"Wait, you're ambidextrous? I've never seen you use anything but your right..." Then her face cleared, and she snapped her fingers. "Wait, all those nights on-call, when you were practicing one-handed knots?—"

"I practiced with both hands." He nodded. "I like my right more than my left. Just more dexterous, but I can use both, and I had a pretty mean sidearm. Less chance of hurting your shoulder that way, and it's great for off-speed breaking stuff. Keeps the batter always guessing. These days, it's all about fastballs and home runs. No one knows how to play slow ball..." He stopped at the expression on her face. "You have no idea what I'm talking about."

"Not really. But I think you missed your calling."

He shook his head. "No offense intended to players, but I met a couple guys in the minors, and all they're interested in is playing ball. Anyway, the Russian kids loved the game. That's how I learned some Russian, too. Like up, down, right, left."

"Seriously?" Roni slid him a dubious look. "What's up in Russian?"

He thought a second. "Vverkh." He pronounced it vee-year-ch. "It's easier, actually, if you're Jewish like me, because the kh is pronounced pretty much the same as the chet . Like in l'chaim ."

"And down ?"

"Vniz," he said, pronouncing it v'NEES. "Accent's on the second syllable. But don't ask me anything complicated. I can read a bit, but Russian's a tough language. "

"I'm still impressed. What other surprises lurk in your Boy Scout past?"

"There might be some grandmothers still around whom I escorted across the street. I'm sure there must be a grateful cat I rescued—" He stopped talking, the rest evaporating on his tongue as he heard a new sound: a powerful guttural whirr.

In the air. Over Roni's shoulder, he saw other soldiers, heads tipped, turning slow circles as they searched the sky for that low rumble. An engine. "Roni, do you?—"

"Yeah." Her eyes were wide, jade pools. "I think?—"

"Me, too." Please be what I think you are. "Roni, you hear that, right?"

"Yeah." She let out a shaky laugh as soldiers jogged past, all looking almost stupidly joyful—and then held out her hand. "Come on. Come on !"

He let her drag him, laughing, all the way to the tarmac—and why not? They were saved, weren't they?

He made it twenty feet before realizing just how wrong they all were.