Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  Nate waited until he was sure Ramirez and Roach had followed Patty before he finally gave himself a moment to let go, to relax his grip. His body shuddered, racked with sobs that seemed to come out of nowhere, the tears streaming down his face uncontrolled. He gave it a full minute, let the grief pass through and have its way, felt it flow through him and out of him.

  It was quick, a morning squall.

  It had to be. He didn’t have the time for anything more.

  Eight

  Geoff Patterson wiped his chin and spat out what was left of the vomit. It splattered across the sink and onto the bathroom floor, but he made no move to clean it up. They were evaccing the warehouse anyway.

  Maybe when the Russians come back to check on it, they’ll clean it up for me. They fucking owe me that much.

  There wasn’t even any water to rinse his mouth out. This place had no running water, at least none you wanted to drink, and they’d already hauled everything useful out onto the barge—spare parts, ammo, all the repair equipment including what had been busted in the attack, cargo cranes, personal gear, everything.

  Everything except what was left of Dix’s body. Nate had pushed the remains together with a broom and covered the bloody mess with a tarp before they’d started working. Patty and the others had stayed in their mechs as long as they could, loading gear requiring the strength of the machines while Nate had recovered what needed a gentler touch. But then the time had come to store the Hellfires on the barge and get ready to go.

  “I need a volunteer,” Nate had said, his face so carefully neutral. “I need someone to help me bring Dix on board.”

  And for some damned reason, Patty had stepped forward. Guilty conscience, maybe. But he hadn’t been able to do it. They’d intended to wrap Dix’s remains in the tarp and carry it onto the barge like that, but all it had taken was a hand slipping out, slapping wet against the concrete for Patty to lose it. He’d barely made it to the doorway before he puked the first time. It hadn’t been the last and he’d retreated to the bathroom to get away from the others. He didn’t want them to see him because he was afraid they’d know. He was afraid they’d see the guilt.

  He was glad someone had taken the bathroom’s mirror. He didn’t want to look himself in the face.

  “Patty?”

  It was Roach. She didn’t knock because the only door was an old shower curtain, so moldy and tattered they hadn’t even bothered to retrieve it. He stayed silent, hunched over the sink, hoping she’d go away.

  “Patty, are you okay?” she persisted. “Look, none of us blame you.”

  You would, if you knew, he told her silently.

  “Hell, I almost threw up myself and the only reason Mule didn’t was he puked in his mech during the fight and there wasn’t anything left.” She didn’t even chuckle at her own attempt at lightening the mood. “We got to go now, though. The barge is about to pull out. Nate wants you to come on out.”

  I should stay here. If I stay here, they won’t know where to find you. You’ll be safe from me.

  He wanted to say that, but instead he spat one last time and pulled the curtain aside. Roach waited for him, arms crossed over her breasts like she wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. She looked lost, like she didn’t want to be there but was doing it anyway because it was her duty. Roach was all about duty.

  He walked past her, past the shower curtain walls hanging in sad, molding memorial to their time in the warehouse. Out on the shop floor, where the mechs had stood, there was nothing but a pile of trash spilled out of a plastic can during the attack. And the blood. The blood was still there, clotting and drying. In a few weeks, it would be just another stain on the concrete, another story no one would be around to tell.

  “Did Dix have any family?” Patty asked Roach, hesitating before he passed through the doorway. “Kids? Parents? Anything?”

  “If he did, I never heard him talk about them,” she admitted, eyes flickering outward, upward, looking everywhere but at the blood. “All he ever talked about was his time in the Navy, like it was the only part of his life that mattered.”

  Probably divorced, Patty thought. Marriage couldn’t survive him being away all the time. Or maybe she died in the war. Lots of people from here in the East have family who died in the war.

  Nate and Ramirez were on the barge, waiting. Ramirez had an M37 carbine at his shoulder, eyes scanning the horizon as if he were some sort of fierce sentinel, as if the 6.5mm popgun would do a damned thing against a Tagan if the Russians sent more of them. The Hellfires were all strapped onto the deck, along with the other gear, covered with tarps to conceal its nature from random looters.

  “Hurry up, you two,” Nate urged them, his beat-up old Glock in his hand. “I want to be at the new location before it gets dark.”

  Which was going to be in another hour or two—the sun was low in the sky, obscured by haze.

  Roach hopped onto the barge obediently, grabbing a rifle from where it leaned against a tarp-covered case of 20mm ammo and taking up a guard position.

  Always the loyal bitch.

  “I’m not going.” He heard himself saying it, but he didn’t remember making the decision.

  Nate frowned at him. The old man always tried to look so serious, but Patty thought he just looked constipated, like there was a stick stuck up his ass, holding everything in.

  “Patty, we’re all upset right now, but…”

  “I said I’m not going,” he insisted. “I can’t. Not with…” He nodded toward the tarp at the bow of the barge, wrapped tight but still leaking blood at one end. The sight of it made him want to throw up food he hadn’t eaten yet.

  Nate squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing his fingers over them like he had a headache. Patty braced himself for an argument, but the man surprised him by nodding. He leaned over and picked up one of the M37’s and tossed it underhanded. Patty caught it, slung the weapon over his shoulder.

  “Meet us at the old Coast Guard station at Portsmouth,” Nate told him. “You can take one of the trucks.” He motioned to the other side of the warehouse. Patty couldn’t see the parking lot from here, but he knew the two old pickups were still out there, salvaged from an impound lot and repaired for short-range jaunts. “It’ll be more dangerous going overland,” Nate warned.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Patty said.

  “We’re having a memorial for Dix tonight. 2200 hours. Don’t be late.”

  Patty nodded, saying nothing, watching them as they cast off from the dock. The barge’s electric motors hummed in near silence, drowned out by the gurgling of churned water from the propellers, and the heavy, flat-top boat threaded its way through the wreckage of ancient dreams and out into the bay.

  When it was gone from sight, Patty walked to the old Ford and opened the passenger’s side, tossing the rifle into the seat. The upholstery was ripped and faded, the windows cracked. At the driver’s side, he hesitated, looking out at the pothole-strewn road away from the docks.

  I should just get on it and start driving, he told himself. Just not stop till I’m back in Kentucky.

  He snorted, sliding behind the wheel.

  And then what? Be right back where you started? Would Mom be happy to see you come back without the money you promised?

  He imagined her pinched, wrinkled face glaring at him with that patented look of disapproval she’d perfected when his father had still been around. It would serve her right if he never came back, just let her rot there with the rest of his worthless, drug-cooking relatives.

  Sheeit, he sighed, sliding into the driver’s seat and cranking the engine. If you were gonna do that, you’d never have come out here in the first place.

  He pulled out onto the road. Wherever it led, he would have to see it through.

  The desk, Nathan Stout reflected, was probably as old as the base. It was faded, puke-green metal gnawed on by rust, and one of the legs had bent in, but it weighed at least a hundred kilos and no one had bothered to salvage or steal it
in the decades it had been squatting in its lair, ruling what was left of the Coast Guard base. He imagined some officious Chief Petty Officer ruling this office like a minor noble from behind his fortress of a desk, trying to decide how he could best make the lives of his or her troops more complicated.

  The rest of the office had been bare, the walls peeled and cracked, but there’d been plenty of room for his cot and personal gear. There were no windows, which was just as well, since it meant the rain hadn’t gotten in and made the walls moldy, but it was going to get damned stuffy in here during the day and the portable lamps providing the only light gave everything an orange tint. He’d found a loose brick near a collapsed wall outside and it propped up the broken leg nicely. His folding chair went behind the desk and he leaned on its flat, expansive surface, remembering more stable days, closer to normal, where most of a military career was lived behind such desks and ninety percent of the soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines never heard a shot fired in anger.

  That it was someone else’s memories didn’t seem to matter to him this time.

  He had nothing to put in the desk drawers, though. No one used paper for much anymore, which was a good thing since there was no one left producing or shipping it anymore either. He remembered paper reports, paper notebooks, physical books you could read. You still saw those laying around in old libraries and book stores, at least where people hadn’t used them to feed their fires in the winter. He had a couple himself, for old time’s sake, despite the thousands of books he kept on his phone.

  The Prime had dim memories of a time before people could read books and watch movies and take videos with their phones, a time when phones were just for talking. He’d been a young boy then, but it had stuck with him and, for some reason, a residue of the memory had been passed along to his dupes. Maybe it had a connection to something the DoD techs had considered important.

  He stumbled on another residual memory and smiled sadly. Well, yeah, there was one thing he could put in the desk. He scooted his chair back and went to his duffle bag, the one with his name stenciled onto the side of it in black paint. He dug inside until he found the bundle wrapped in old T-shirts and pulled it out carefully. Inside was a bottle of Jack Daniels, the real stuff, not the homebrews they refilled old whiskey bottles with here in the East. He set it on the desktop, then unwrapped the two shot glasses he’d salvaged from a gift shop in DC a year ago.

  They wore the Presidential seal, which he’d always found hilarious. The President hadn’t been anywhere near DC in years. He was stuck in a bunker in Colorado along with what was left of the military, desperately trying to hold onto what was left, the slice of what had been America west of the Mississippi and just overlapping the Rocky Mountain states. The Russians had inroads into the Eastern Seaboard and controlled the Alaskan ports. The Chinese had moved into the Pacific Northwest, not that anybody in the US government cared. From what he’d heard, the Oregon and Washington State governments got along just fine with China.

  California had split into three separate nations, all three of them constantly fighting each other, while Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada were wastelands with no water and whatever cities were left controlled by the drug cartels.

  He sat back down, feeling the pain and exhaustion pulling him into the chair. He needed a cigarette, but his last pack had gotten burned up in the attack. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle of Jack and poured three fingers into each of the glasses, setting one in front of him and one across the desk as if for someone else.

  “One last drink, Dix,” he murmured, picking up his shot glass and toasting his absent friend. The whiskey was smooth, with a mule-kick at the end and he let the warmth of the shot burn inside his chest for a moment before he set the glass down.

  He stared at the other glass, wondering if he should empty it on the ground or something symbolic like that. Instead, he picked it up and downed it, figuring Dix would be pissed if he wasted good whiskey like that. Then the bottle and the glasses went into the right bottom drawer and he pushed it shut.

  “Where the fuck were you?”

  He glanced at the closed office door. It was thick metal and not much got through it from the hallways outside, but Roach had a way of pitching her voice to penetrate any wall and she sounded pissed. He pushed himself up, feeling the desk shift slightly on its makeshift stand, and yanked the door open, feeling it stick where the frame had warped from years of neglect and lack of air conditioning.

  Sound washed into the room through the open door, seeming to carry further in the darkened hallway than it would have during the day.

  “You missed the fucking funeral!” Roach was still yelling. “You think Dix would have missed your service if it had been you that bought it?”

  “I don’t like funerals,” Patty said, subdued and much more softly than anything Roach had said. “I think he’d have understood.”

  Nate followed the voices down the hall to the reception area. It was open to the night, the windows long shattered, but they’d hung mosquito netting across the vacant panes and done their best to clean out the accumulated leaves and detritus. An old table and a few ratty office chairs had been pulled into the room across from the front desk, and they’d hung lanterns from the unpowered cord for a chandelier, which gave everything a harsh, even light.

  Patty stood wearing the same greasy, stained flight suit as he had after the battle, the rifle hanging from his shoulder. Roach was inches from his face, leaning in as she yelled, finger pointing like a weapon, while Ramirez hung back, hands on his hips, happy to let her do the dirty work.

  “Not to mention you left us with all the work of moving our shit in,” Ramirez chimed in, apparently feeling emboldened. “You know how long that took, man?”

  “I said I was sorry,” Patty insisted.

  “Where did you sleep last night?” Nate wondered.

  Patty frowned at him as if he thought it was an odd thing to say. It was, Nate realized, a strange question for him to ask given all the other problems and worries Patty’s absence had created the last day and a half, but it was the first that came to his mind, and he was too exhausted to filter his thoughts.

  “In the truck,” the tall man answered, haltingly, grudgingly. “I pulled it into a parking garage and got a few hours’ sleep. I just needed some time to think.”

  “And did it help?”

  “Could I talk to you in private?” Patty wondered.

  Nate shrugged. “Sure. Give that rifle to Ramirez so he can stick it back with the others.”

  He didn’t really believe Patty would get pissed off enough to shoot him, but he’d been wrong before.

  Patty seemed to consider it for a moment, but he shrugged the sling off his shoulder and handed the M37 to Ramirez. It was a bulky weapon, mostly polymer, and a stray strand of memory reminded him it had once been produced by FN, a Belgian company back when there’d been a Belgium. They’d called it the SCAR-Heavy, which, he supposed, meant there’d once been a SCAR-Light, though he couldn’t recall why one was heavy and one wasn’t.

  He filed it away in the dusty archives of useless knowledge and led Patty back into the office. The Kentuckian pushed the door shut behind them, then had to turn again and shove it closed against that fraction of a centimeter of warp.

  “I’d tell you to sit down,” Nate apologized, “but I only have the one chair so far.”

  He thought about offering Patty a drink, but decided against introducing alcohol to whatever volatile mood the younger man was in.

  “It’s okay,” Patty said, shrugging it away. “I’ve been sitting in that damn truck for hours, anyway.” His hands were stuffed into his pockets and he didn’t seem to want to meet Nate’s eyes. “Look, Boss, like I told them, I’m really sorry I missed the memorial. I was thinking about Dix my own way, you know? But I…” He tilted his head back and blew out a sigh. “All this has been making me think about my family. I’m out here in the shit trying to help them, but I’m starting to feel lik
e I’ll never see them again.”

  “We’re all of us taking the same risk, Geoff.”

  “I know. But my initial contract is up in just two months.” Patty finally looked him in the eye. “The one I signed to get the free training from the military. I’d like to get out of it early. The government would approve it if you signed off on it. I’d even promise to come back and finish it up if you want, after I go spend some time with my mom and family for a while.”

  Nate slowly and carefully leaned back on the edge of the desk and it shifted precariously on the brick stuck under the one broken stand. He was so damned tired.

  “Patty, we’re down to just the four of us now. We’ve got an active Russian military presence somewhere here in Norfolk and they’ve already killed one of us. The CIA and Army Intelligence doesn’t know shit, or they aren’t telling us shit, which is all one and the same as far as I’m concerned. And now you want to just take off? You think I can troll the local bars and find a replacement who’s trained to fly a Hellfire?” He shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t even know when or if I’ll be able to find someone to replace Dix! Ramirez is the closest thing we have to a mechanic now, and he’s just barely able to maintain the guns! What happens if we get a thruster damaged?”

  “I know and I’m sorry about that,” Patty said, and Nate was pretty sure the man was grinding his teeth to keep himself under control. “But I need to see my family.”

  Nate rubbed a hand over his face, feeling sweat and grime accumulated over the last two days without a shower.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll put out a request through the DoD Contractor Recruitment Web for two new pilots. As soon as I get at least one, I can let you go. Until then, we’re just stretched too thin.” He spread his hands helplessly. “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  Patty’s face screwed up into a scowl and Nate thought for an instant he was in for a knock-down, drag-out argument, but then the man’s shoulders sagged as if in surrender.