Fever (Flu) by Wayne Simmons Page A

panicking, shooting the place up. A good soldier shows restraint. There’ll be no friendly fire on my watch. You got me?”
    Another parrot-style reply from the line.
    “A built up environment is the hardest to work in. You’ll have limited vision. An attack can come from anywhere. This exercise will have plenty of surprises: targets that you will not fire upon as well as targets that you will fire upon.”
    The Sarge stopped, smiled and looked up the line. “Now, who wants to go first?”
    He was met with deathly silence.
    The Sarge sized up to Ciaran. “What about you, soldier?” he said, gazing into the young recruit’s eyes. “Are you ready to walk the walk?”
    Ciaran thought about the Sarge’s question for a moment.
    His mind travelled back to the TV in the canteen. The riot at the hospital. The infected man being dragged out of the office block. He thought of the kitchen hand standing with his mop, sweat soaking his back as he watched it all play out in on the screen.
    Ciaran remembered how excited he was on open day, how proud he’d been when telling that girl, Julie, he’d met in the pub, about enlisting. But now he wished he’d listened to his mam. Because the Sarge wasn’t exactly selling the job of soldier to him.
    It was hot. Ciaran tugged at the collar of his khaki shirt.
    There were flies everywhere, and he swatted one across the nearby wall of the first makeshift house.
    He swore under his breath, wishing he were somewhere, anywhere else but here.
    The FIBUA, as the Sarge called it, was poorly organised, half-arsed and, frankly, pointless. It reeked of box-ticking. The Sarge had made a list, marking each recruit off on his clipboard as they performed each manoeuvre. Room clearing was the next thing on the list.
    And Ciaran was up.
    They were to move in groups of three, keeping their eyes on the streets (read: space between each wooden shack) before storming the plywood houses one at a time, clearing each, room by room. Throughout the houses, the Sarge had pinned paper targets, some representing hostiles, others meant to be civilians. The recruits were to clear each allocated room, showing quick response to hostile targets, while leaving the civilians unharmed.
    Ciaran was in a group with Ron and Grady.
    He was tired and jaded and couldn’t be arsed with any of it. His clearance of the first house was slow and pretty sloppy. He missed several key cut-outs.
    The Sarge told him he’d be a dead man, were this the real thing. That levelled Ciaran more than he thought it would. The deeper he got into this stuff, the more he realised he wasn’t the badass soldier he thought he was. It was really getting him down.
    Grady, on the other hand, was buzzing. He’d proven to be a good aim on the range and in this exercise looked just as sharp. Too much so, mind, the zealous little cunt emptying his mag into two cardboard children in the second house. The Sarge barked at him for that, but Grady didn’t seem to take anything to heart the way Ciaran did. As long as his trigger finger was clicking, the little twat seemed happy.
    It was Ron’s turn to take the lead next.
    Although visibly nervous, the Polish man surprised Ciaran, taking care as he cleared each room efficiently, his nerves seeming to sharpen his senses as opposed to dull them. Even the Sarge seemed impressed, his silence throughout Ron’s run saying it all as he shadowed the recruit through the wooden set. Looked like the Pole had some military experience after all.
    They came to the last house, Ron still taking the lead.
    Ciaran and Grady held back with the Sarge as Ron took the biggest room at the end of the corridor. Ciaran watched the Polish man glide through the doorway, his rifle aloft and ready for action. Even with the white boiler suit, Ron looked more like a soldier than Ciaran ever would, and that pissed him off.
    He was jealous. The jealousy turned to resentment, Ciaran wondering just why the Polish man was even allowed in the TA in