by David Poyer
General Pei stepped up. He signed and also flipped the pen away, sneering.
Admiral Lin signed quietly, setting the pen aside on the table.
They returned to their places in silence. And the president of Australia bent to the mic once more.
“These proceedings,” she said, “are closed.”
At a command the Singaporean troops wheeled. They marched around the table and took positions behind the Chinese delegation. The military men looked uncomfortable. An officer stepped forward to confide something to them. As Chen stood alone, the soldiers led the others away.
Suddenly, as if that had been the climax, the mood broke. The floodlights died, leaving only the blue-violet tracings of the supertrees to illuminate the faces that milled and chattered below. Blair eased a breath out and staggered toward one of the just-vacated chairs.
Her hip flamed. She felt like throwing up.
The war was over. Chen and his generals had signed. But they’d done so angrily, and been humiliated to boot.
Had they all just sown the seeds for a second Pacific war?
15
The Eastern Shore, Maryland
WORKING on the old Kia is frustrating as hell. This is the third day he’s been at it, and he isn’t even getting a spark.
Bent under the open hood, Hector Ramos mops sweat off a dripping forehead with a bare forearm. He can feel he’s leaving gritty grease on his face but doesn’t care.
The heat’s terrific. He’s gotten up Corps early, at zero five, but already it’s over a hundred and four, the radio says. And airless, not even a breath of a breeze off the bay. His mom’s brown mongrel dog, Ham, lies panting in the shade of the azaleas, eyes glazed, pink tongue hanging out. Behind the garage a dry, parched field of dead yellow cornstalks stretches to distant trees, baking in the relentless heat. Their withered leaves hang motionless. Heat eddies over the road and the cornfields as if the atmosphere itself is melting. In the other direction, next door, is Mrs. Figueroa’s yard. She used to keep a brown mare, but there’s no horse there now, just an empty, rotting shed where the animal used to shelter when it rained.
If only it would rain now.
The Eastern Shore. He’s grown up here, but it doesn’t seem as wild and natural and endless as it did when he was a kid. Everything’s smaller. Shabbier. Poorer. The once-white shell drives are covered with dead grass. The decrepit old wooden houses, some of them mere shacks, that his people live in here, sag toward the earth, as if being sucked inevitably back into it.
“Me cago en la leche,” Hector mutters, kicking the front tire with a combat boot. The old car was a piece of shit before he joined the Corps, and three years under a leaky garage hasn’t improved it.
Then he looks down, puzzled. “Cago,” he mutters again.
The tire he just kicked has crumpled apart into curved shards and gray powder. It’s dry-rotted, a useless, crumbling shell of desiccated rubber.
He’ll have to bicycle down the road again.
After his release from the Wounded Warrior regiment, then his discharge, the Corps issued him a train ticket home and a wad of hundreds, since a lot of the country still doesn’t have credit connectivity.
The train stopped twice for ID checks. Troops in black uniforms threaded the aisles, facial-ID’ing everybody and matching them against red-flag lists on their phones. They looked his discharge papers over and photographed them too. “Combat vet, three wound badges,” they said, impressed. “We could use a guy like you, patriot. What was your specialty?” And when he told them 0331, machine gunner, they called a sergeant over to give him the hard sell about something called the Special Action Forces. Hector told them he was fucked up in the head, on heavy P meds. But the sergeant just shrugged. “That don’t matter, we got other Devil Dogs just as bad.”
And Hector remembered then, again, why he’d gotten out.
He just doesn’t want to see any more of his people die.
He left the train in Philly and hitchhiked south. In uniform, it wasn’t hard to get rides, though there weren’t many cars back on the road. The big driverless rigs, three and four trailers long, tore past, swerving only slightly away if their lidar picked him up standing on the berm. Sometimes, though, they didn’t, and the blast of their passage knocked him back a few steps.
The people who gave him rides never asked where he’d been. As if they either knew, or didn’t really care. Or maybe they were afraid of him. He was just as happy not to have to talk. Just to sit there silently watching the country go by, then rolling out to stand in the heat again when he’d gone as far as they could take him.
He’s been home for a few days now, not doing much of anything yet. Getting up early, though he doesn’t seem to be logging much actual sleep. Sitting on the back porch, a warm beer in one hand, staring at the trees and vaping the cheap nicotine they sell at Dollar Tree. Popping the pills morning and night, though he doesn’t think they’re doing much good. Or maybe the dreams would be even worse if he weren’t taking them.
His Marine greens hang in the closet upstairs. His old clothes feel strange: too light, too loose. But they’re much cooler in the growing heat than a uniform would be. It seems a hell of a lot hotter here now than when he was a kid. Or maybe he’s just not used to it anymore.
His mother’s glad to see him back, but she’s warned him not to go out at night. She’s scared of the Loyalty League, mean local whites who beat up resisters and burned their homes during the war. He’s already stopped by Mirielle’s house, but there’s no one there. One of her old girlfriends who works at the NAPA store says Miri’s visiting a cousin down in Virginia. She doesn’t answer her phone, either.
So now he’s trying to get the car started, to regain some mobility. Be able to go somewhere. Salisbury, maybe. Or Dover, to the casino that just reopened.
Or else he’ll just fucking go nuts, all alone here in the house all day long.
“Cabrón,” he mutters. He kicks the tire again, knocking another piece of tread loose to hang and sway. And finally wheels his old coaster bicycle out once more, onto the baking, buckled asphalt of the one-laner that leads to town. The brown dog follows him for ten yards, tongue lolling out, then gives up and trudges very slowly, lifting one paw at a time, back to the house.
* * *
M&W has a tire his size, but Hector’s appalled at how much they want for it. He thought his back pay was generous, but it’s obvious his whole idea of what money’s worth is way off now. He offers $350, but the guy shakes his head. “No way, amigo. That’d be less than I paid for it. Four hundred, take it or leave it.” He turns away: “Plenty others need tread, my man. Good rubber’s like gold these days.”
In the end Hector has to peel off four of the flimsy, limp new hundred-dollar bills, hardly more substantial than toilet paper.
* * *
THE fucking wheel bolts are rusted solid. By the time he gets the nuts chiseled off, in the hellish heat, he’s ready to pour gasoline over the fucking car and nuke it. But finally he gets the tire fixed. He fiddles under the hood and coaxes a spark at last.
Finally the motor turns over. He lets it run for fifteen minutes to charge the battery and get the oil moving around. Should change it, but the worn-out four-cylinder burns oil so fast it makes more sense just to top it off every other day. He kicks the concrete blocks out of the way and slides in.
Inside, the front seat is still damp and feels somehow squishy. The interior stinks chokingly of mold, which has blackened the liner. Webs glitter in the sun, flecked with dead flies and the equally dead spiders who wove them. He inspects under the seats, hoping there aren’t any live ones crawling around. Spiders creep him out. Ever since Hainan …
He brushes the webs and old wrappers and dust out with a broom and saws out a piece of scrap plywood to cover the hole in the floorboards. Gets in again and guns the engine. Ta pocketa, but it runs. The car squeals as he rolls it forward and then back, listening to the transmission.
He twists i
n the seat to make sure he isn’t running over the dog, then backs out of the garage. The driver’s side door still sags, so he can’t lock it, and the brakes yield slowly, like foam pillows. But aside from a furtive rustle under the backseat and a musty smell of mouse pee, he’s back on the road. He drives a block, then remembers: discharge papers. He two-points around on the one-laner, goes back, and gets them.
He drives past Mirielle’s house again, but still no one’s around. No cars. Thistles are growing tall in the driveway. Maybe they’ve moved away? He debates stopping, knocking again, but finally drives on.
He rolls slowly through town. A lot of stores are closed, but there are two new thrift shops and a storefront church. He takes the bypass north to the highway. And pretty soon, as if magnetized, though he doesn’t remember setting out to drive here, he’s back in front of Farmer Seth’s.
The plant’s going strong, with feathery plumes of steam rising straight up off the cooling towers. Fifty or sixty geese stand about on the grass. They look fat and stupid. The smell’s the same: a dense, eye-stinging stench of burned feathers, chickenshit, and ammonia. He applies the brake gingerly and coasts to a halt by the now rust-specked sign. DEFENSE ESSENTIAL PLANT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. DEFENSA ESENCIAL INSTALACIÓN. SOLO PERSONAL AUTORIZADO.
Jessup isn’t in the guard shack. Instead, a woman he doesn’t know peers down. “What c’n I do for you, ’migo?” she says, looking his car over with a cocked eyebrow. Taking in probably too his black T-shirt, the camo uniform pants, his dark issue glasses, the tattoos on his exposed forearms. She doesn’t look impressed.
“I’m Hec Ramos. Used to work here.”
A metallic crashing, underlain by the hum of electric motors.
Stainless hooks march steadily along, dangling from an I-beam. From them hang upside-down U’s of heavy, polished metal. The concrete floor is spattered with a brownish-black crust inches thick.
The birds fight desperately as they’re yanked out of their modules. The workers wear thin gloves or women’s nylons to protect their hands from beak and spurs. They flip bird after bird upside down and hook the claws into the loops.
And with a musical jingle, an electric hum, the Line carries them on, out of sight, through the slot in the wall.
“Hey. I ast you. So what you want, yeah?”
Hector blinks. “I’m back from the … from the war. Thought I’d see if there’s anybody around I used to run with.”
“Well, this ain’t old-home week,” she says. “Only current employees, current ID. Unless you want to see about working here again. That’d be the office, though. Out front.”
“Yeah, I know.” Hector nods. “I just wanted to go in for a minute. See if José’s here, Fernando, Sazi—”
“I don’t recognize none of those names, sir. You best go to the office.” She sets her lip and reaches for something behind the lower sill of the window, out of his sight. He tenses, suddenly at full alert; is she going for a gun? Shit, and he’s fucking unarmed here. He searches the floor for a wrench, a screwdriver, some kind of tool at least, but there’s nothing. He needs something to carry. At least a pistol. Where can he pick up a gun? Maybe then he’d sleep better.
But when she straightens all she has in her hands is a colorful puzzle book. He fights to relax, but his grip on the wheel feels like it could bend the thin metal and plastic.
Past the gate he can just see the loading ramp. A truck’s backed up to it ready to off-load. Plastic cages, crammed with perfectly still white-feathered birds. Behind it, leaning in the shade of the overhang, a heavy fortyish woman in a blood- and shit-spattered canvas apron is sucking on a cigarette with quick nervous gestures. The smoke rises, drifts, thins, mingles with the steam. Vanishes.
She takes another puff, looking off into the trees. Slumping, as if her very bones are melting. Then throws the butt away, pulls her mask back up, and turns back into the building.
“Go on, get out of here,” the guard says. And carefully, mastering his overwhelming desire to get out and beat her fucking head against her cage, Hector puts the car in reverse and backs away.
* * *
SIX hours in the VA center don’t make him happier. He’s been here before, but after a long wait they sent him home to bring back his discharge papers. Which is why he made sure to bring them this time. But apparently Veterans Administration Affairs and the Marines don’t talk to each other. They don’t have his medical records yet. He sits with growing impatience all through the morning, then to noon, as the staffers at the counters banter with one another and eat their lunches. He can’t leave, or he’ll lose his place. The flimsy paper ticket grows damp with sweat in his hand. The number fades, blears, until he has to blow on it to dry it out, lest he lose out entirely.
The center’s in Salisbury. He’s nursed the Kia here in a cloud of blue smoke, wondering as he goes how he’s going to afford his next tank of gas. Fuel is fucking astronomical, and most of the stations he used to go to are closed. Now he sits hunched over, avoiding the eyes of the others. Other vets. Some of them, probably, from the same battles and campaigns he’s survived. But he doesn’t feel like talking.
One, a black kid, wanders past, then halts. Looking at Hector’s buzz cut, at the camo pants, the furrowed scar on his scalp, the brass burns on his neck, the long blackened scars on his forearms. “Hey, amigo! Bwe-nos di-as. You Army?”
“Marine,” Hector says unwillingly.
“Oh yeah? In any fighting?”
Hector glances away. “Some.”
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I never got overseas. Riot duty, LA, the Big Island. Got this in a rollover.” He pulls up a pant leg above ragged Nikes to show a faded patch of skin. “A real bad scrape. Still hurts sometimes.”
Hector gives him the hard look. “It would behoove you to go sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, jackass.”
Two women sitting across from him halt their conversation and avert their eyes.
The room quiets. The kid, who looks to be about nineteen, wavers, opens his mouth as if to bluster, but finally decides not to push it. He stalks away.
Hector folds his arms and stares straight ahead. Fucking pogue. What a waste of time. Shoot him between the fucking eyes and do the world a service.
He takes out the phone he bought at Dollar Tree. Plays with it some, but there’s still no wifi here and it doesn’t seem to connect to anything very well, or only occasionally.
“Now serving: four hundred and sixty-three,” the PA system rasps. He looks at his tab again. 458. For a moment he wanders, confused. Has he missed being called? Gone UA in his head? He looks around, counting the people, loses track, counts again.
Then gets up and approaches the counters, stepping in front of a woman so old she couldn’t be a vet, or maybe just not from this war. “Hey,” he says, trying to keep his voice down but not doing a great job of it. “I been here since eight and you’re calling numbers after mine. But you never called mine.”
“If you left, sir, you’ll have to take another number. Over by the door.”
“I din’t leave. I been fucking sitting right here.”
“No need to curse at me, sir. If you do so again I’ll have to ask you to come back another day.” A short tubby black woman, she wields a glare like a drill sergeant. Like Sergeant Brady, back at boot camp. No. Like little Lieutenant Ffoulk’s. So withering, and that’s such a bad memory, recalling what happened to Ffoulk, that he shuts up and starts back to his seat.
But he recovers and wheels back. No way is he going to take another number. Like some fucking baa-baa sheep. He draws a breath, anger welling. The fat cop at the door glances over. He straightens, and lays a hand on his gun.
But the old woman he pushed aside steps back and gestures him ahead. “You can take this boy ahead o’ me,” she says to the clerk. “Look like he done been through a lot. You go ahead, son. I’ll just wait an’ go after you.”
The clerk acquiesces, but he can tell she doesn’t like it. She reviews his in
formation on her screen, scans his DD 214 and discharge and his civilian driver’s license, though he thinks surely they have to have him in the system by now. Finally she points him to a back room. “The counselor will see you soon,” she says. Then, to the old woman, “Now tell me what you need, honey.”
More plastic chairs in a dingy hallway. A half hour later the door opens and a weary voice calls, “Next, please.”
The counselor’s white, super fat, bald. Wearing a suit that even to Hector’s untrained eye looks like it doesn’t fit. Half-moon glasses are pushed down on a fleshy nose. A window unit whines cold air. “Okay, hello, Sergeant Ramos. Have a seat. First, thank you for your service. Looks like you went through a lot over there.” His accent sounds like he’s from up north, maybe Philly.
“Thanks,” he mutters.
“Let’s see what we can do for you … What are your plans? I see your civilian occupation was factory worker.”
“I worked on the kill line at Seth’s.”
“I see. Well. Law says your employer has to offer you your old job back. At the now-prevailing rate of pay. If you still want it. But let’s look at your service record first.” A keyboard tap; a prolonged pause. “Okay. What’s an MRAP license?”
“Mine resistant vehicle driver.”
“Uh-huh. Any other qualifications? I’m not too clear on some of these.”
“I was a 31. Uh, MOS 0331. Machine gunner. Also I hold rifleman and assault. That’s an 0311.”
The guy pushes his lips out, like a fat duck. Like that wasn’t what he was hoping to hear. “Any computer skills? Maintenance skills? Welding?”
Hector drops his eyes and mutters, “No, just the … I was just infantry.”
“Well, Farmer Seth’s has openings advertised.”
Hector says, keeping himself calm, “I didn’t plan on goin’ back there.”