Dialogue Essays: Private Miller

His father done so. Meanwhile, although reluctant to leave his side, James couldn't help but notice that Mr Evans was whispering to somebody or that somebody was whispering to him. There was a light source from that end too. A glass lamp with a dancing flame inside it, perhaps, if his eyes were not playing some mean trick on him. That was theirs, he concluded, as the hatch was closed, leaving the pair to stand alone in the dark.
The light from their personnel property, which his father and himself used to carry with them on foggy walks in the evening time, had somehow been attained from one of the scattered boxes amongst them and was now showing mid-sections of countless uniformed bodies.
"They're soldiers," his father explained to him, "Mr
I don't point the finger of blame at any of you for what's happened, in the least,” he continued, pressing for detail. "Do you know of his story? Private Miller – we ran into him on the hills a few hours ago. He was walking along a road. He attacked us and... I had no choice but to take him out. In his delirious, violent state there was no doubt that he'd been infected. How is it that he came to stray from the unit?"
"Because we told him to leave, as with everyone else who he'd came in contact with; who he'd infected! We took most of their rifles. Private Miller refused to be sent away with the others, God knows where they ended up, claiming that he wasn't infected, but we could see that he was. It was in his eyes, as it was with the others, this... horrid blackness that engulfs them, like an eclipse." The Welshman choked on his words. "When he refused to leave, we pelted him with every rock and stone that we could find. We couldn't shoot him but we did fire lots of warning shots into the air. We had to."
"That would explain the blood on him," Mr Evans commented, glimpsing over his shoulder at the father and son, who remained largely obscured in the darkness. "What methods did the transmission
"No. The bridge snapped on the bank, or somehow disintegrated. We don't know. At first he laid face-down on the planks and it gradually came apart in several places, like a chick breaking out of its shell. He was in the water not twenty seconds later, or whatever that horrid stuff is. The bridge soon fell in with him and for a while he floated motionlessly on the surface, staring at us but not seeing us, maybe. Then he too sunk and we lost sight of him. I must have stood for a whole hour at that bank, most of us here did, but he never came back up."
His eyes were wet but James refrained from making childish snivelling noises. A firm hand was placed on his shoulder. No doubt his father could feel him trembling, he thought. Knowing that the thing they'd jumped at the sight of, drifting along in the infected River Stour, which he'd mistaken as a charred branch, must have been the poor soldier's arm. It froze him stiff to recall the flexing and spirited, blackened fingers tapping away in the morning air.
"Okay," Mr Evans finally stated. "There is an antidote. Stuff that can clean off the bacteria and purge the virus. It was in Mr Bells'