“PT? Who said anything about PT?”
“I did. Someone stepped in a knee-deep pile of pig shit in the PX last night. Now that may not have anything to do with you, but nevertheless, at oh-nine-hundred, you’re going to assemble at the No. 1 Training Field in your fourth-tier equipment for Physical Training.”
“You gotta be kidding! We’re goin’ into battle tomorrow, and you’re sending us off for PT?”
“That’s an order, Corporal.”
“Sir, we’ll report to the No. 1 Training Field at oh-nine-hundred in full fourth-tier equipment, sir! But one thing, Sarge. We been doin’ that liquor raid for years. Why give us a hard time about it now?”
“You really want to know?” Ferrell rolled his eyes.
Leaving the conversation I’d heard before behind, I escaped to the infirmary.
6
I was standing at the gate that divided the base from the outside world. The guard who checked my ID raised his eyebrows doubtfully.
There was an extra layer of security on the base thanks to the U.S. crew’s visit. Although the Japanese Corps oversaw general base security, the balance of power with the U.S. prevented them from interfering with anything under U.S. jurisdiction. Luckily, U.S. security didn’t have any interest in anyone that wasn’t one of their own.
Without leave papers from a commanding officer, Keiji Kiriya wasn’t getting off the base. But the U.S. soldiers could come and go as they pleased, and all they had to do was flash an ID. Everyone used the same gate, so if I got an American guard, he might let me through, no questions asked. All they cared about was keeping undesirables away from their precious Special Forces squad. A recruit trying to go AWOL wasn’t likely to catch their eye.
The guard must not have seen many Japanese ID cards, because he stared at mine for a long time. The machine that checked IDs just logged who passed through the gate. No need to panic. Why would they change the system up the day before an attack? The muscles in my stomach tensed. The guard was looking back and forth between me and my card, comparing the blurry picture with my face.
The cut on my temple burned. The sawbones who tended to me in the infirmary gave me three stitches without any painkiller. Now it was sending searing bolts of electricity shooting through my body. The bones in my knee creaked.
I was unarmed. I missed my knife, warm and snug under my pillow. If I had it with me, I could lock this guy in a half nelson and—thinking like that wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I stretched my back. Gotta stay cool. If he stares at you, stare right back.
Stifling a yawn, the guard pressed the button to open the gate. The doorway to freedom creaked open.
I turned slowly to look back as I slipped past the yellow bar. There, in the distance, was the training field. The sea breeze, heavy with the scent of the ocean, blew across the field toward the gate. On the other side of the fence, soldiers the size of ants performed tiny, miniature squats. They were the soldiers I’d eaten with and trained with. They were my friends in the 17th. I swallowed the nostalgia that rose up in me. I walked, unhurried, the moist wind blowing against my body. Keep walking until you’re out of sight of the guard. Don’t run. Just a little farther. Turn the corner. I broke into a sprint.
Once I started running, I didn’t stop.
It was fifteen klicks from the base to Tateyama, a nearby entertainment district. Even if I took a roundabout route, it would be twenty klicks at most. Once I was there, I could change my clothes and lay in the supplies I needed. I couldn’t risk trains or the highway, but once I hit Chiba City I would be home free. Neither the army nor the police stuck their noses in the underground malls-turned-slums there.
It was about eight hours until Squad 1830’s meeting. That’s when they’d probably figure out I’d gone AWOL. I didn’t know if they’d send cars or choppers after me, but by dusk, I planned to be just another face in the crowd. I remembered the training we’d done at the foot of Mount Fuji. Sixty-kilometer marches in full gear. Crossing the Boso Peninsula in half a day wouldn’t be a problem. By the time tomorrow’s battle started, I’d be far away from days that repeat themselves and the brutal deaths they ended in.
The sun hung high in the sky, washing me in blinding light. Fifty-seven millimeter automatic guns sat covered in white tarps at hundred-meter intervals along the seawall. Red-brown streaks of rust marred the antique steel plates at their base. The guns had been installed along the entire coastline when the Mimics reached the mainland.
As a kid, when I’d first laid eyes on those guns, I thought they were the coolest things I’d ever seen. The black lacquer finish of their steel instilled an unreasonable sense of confidence in me. Now that I’d seen real battle, I knew with cool certainty that weapons like these could never repel a Mimic attack. These guns moved like the dinosaurs they were. They couldn’t hope to land a hit on a Mimic. What a joke.
They still had service crews assigned to these that came out and inspected them once a week. Bureaucracy loves waste.
Maybe humanity would lose.
The thought came to me out of the blue, but I couldn’t shake it.
When I told my parents I’d enlisted, they’d wanted me to join the Coast Guard. They said I’d still get a chance to fight without going into battle. That’d I’d be performing the vital task of defending the cities where people worked and lived.
But I didn’t want to fight the Mimics to save humanity. I’d seen my fill of that in the movies. I could search my soul till my body fell to dust around it and I’d never find the desire to do great things like saving the human race. What I found instead was a wire puzzle you couldn’t solve no matter how many times you tried. Something buried under a pile of puzzle pieces that didn’t fit. It pissed me off.
I was weak. I couldn’t even get the woman I loved—the librarian—to look me in the eye. I thought the irresistible tide of war would change me, forge me into something that worked. I may have fooled myself into believing I’d find the last piece of the puzzle I needed to complete Keiji Kiriya on the battlefield. But I never wanted to be a hero, loved by millions. Not for a minute. If I could convince the few friends I had that I was someone who could do something in this world, who could leave a mark, no matter how small, that would be enough.
And look where that got me.
What had half a year of training done for me? I now possessed a handful of skills that weren’t good for shit in a real battle and six-pack abs. I was still weak, and the world was still fucked. Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. It took me this long to realize the obvious. Ironic that I had to run away from the army before I figured it out.
The beach was deserted. The Coast Guard must have been busy evacuating this place over the past six months.
After a little less than an hour of running, I planted myself on the edge of the seawall. I’d covered about eight kilometers, putting me about halfway to Tateyama. My sand-colored shirt was dark with sweat. The gauze wrapped around my head was coming loose. A gentle sea breeze—refreshing after that hot wind that had swept across the base—caressed the back of my neck. If it weren’t for the machine guns, props stolen from some long forgotten anime, intruding on the real world, it would have been the very picture of a tropical resort.
The beach was littered with the husks of spent firework rockets— the crude kind you put together and launch with a plastic tube. No one would be crazy enough to come this close to a military base to set off fireworks. They must have been left by some bastard on the feed trying to warn the Mimics about the attack on Boso Peninsula. There were anti-war activists out there who were convinced the Mimics were intelligent creatures, and they were trying to open a line of communication with them. Ain’t democracy grand?
Thanks to global warming, this whole strip of beach was below sea level when the tide came in. By dusk, these fucking tubes would be washed away by the sea and forgotten. No one would ever know. I kicked one of the melted tubes as hard as I could.
“Well, what’s this? A soljer?”
&nb
sp; I spun around.
It had been a while since I’d heard anyone speak Japanese. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize anyone had come up behind me.
Two figures, an elderly man and a little girl, stood atop the embankment. The old man’s skin would have made fine pickle brine if you set it out in a jar on a bright day like today. In his left hand he clutched a three-pronged metal spear right out of a fairy tale. What’s he doing with a trident? The girl—she looked about the right age to be in elementary school—squeezed his right hand tightly. Half hidden behind the man’s leg, the girl looked up at me unabashedly from under her straw hat. The face beneath the hat was too white to have spent much time cooking under the sun.
“Yourn an unf’milyar face.”
“I’m from the Flower Line base.” Dammit! I’d run my mouth before my brain.
“Ah.”
“What, uh, brings you two out here?”
“Sea has fish wantin’ t’be caught. Family’s all gon’ up to Tokyo.”
“What happened to the Coast Guard?”
“Word come ’bout the whoopin’ we took down on Okinawa. Why, they all up ’n’ left. If the army kin take care them croakers for us, we’d breathe easier, that’s fer sure.”
“Yeah.” Croakers was obviously some local slang for Mimics. Ordinary people never got the chance to see a Mimic with their own eyes. At best they’d catch a glimpse of a rotting corpse washed up on the beach, or maybe one that had gotten caught in a fishing net and died. But with the conductive sand washed away by the ocean, all that would remain would be empty husks. That’s why a lot of people thought Mimics were some type of amphibian that shed its skin.
I only caught about 70 percent of what the old man said, but I heard enough to know that the Coast Guard had pulled out of the area. Our defeat at Okinawa must have been more serious than I thought. Bad enough for them to recall our combined forces up and down the Uchibo line. Everyone had been redeployed with a focus on major cities and industrial areas.
The old man smiled and nodded. The girl watched him with eyes wide as saucers, witness to some rare spectacle. He put a lot of hope in the UDF troops stationed at Flower Line Base. Not that I had signed up to defend him or anyone else for that matter. Still, it made me feel bad.
“You got any smokes, son? Since the mil’tary left, can’t hardly come by none.”
“Sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Then don’t you worry none.” The old man stared out at the sea.
There weren’t many soldiers in the Armored Infantry who suffered from nicotine addiction. Probably because you couldn’t smoke during battle, when you needed it the most.
I stood silent. I didn’t want to do or say anything stupid. I couldn’t let him find out I was a deserter. They shot deserters. Escaping the Mimics just to be killed by the army didn’t make much sense.
The girl tugged at the man’s hand.
“She tires out real easy. Good eyes on her, though. Been born a boy, she’da been quite a fisherman.”
“Yeah.”
“Just one thing ’fore I go. Ain’t never seen anythin’ like this. Came runnin’ out my house quick as I might, found you here. What you make of it? Anythin’ to do with ’em croakers?” He raised his arm.
My eyes followed the gnarled twigs of his fingers as he pointed. The water had turned green. Not the emerald green you’d see off the shore of some island in the South Pacific, but a frothy, turbid green, as if a supertanker filled with green tea ice cream had run aground and spilled its cargo into the bay. A dead fish floated on the waves, a bright fleck of silver.
I recognized that green. I’d seen it on the monitors during training. Mimics ate soil, just like earthworms. But unlike earthworms, the soil they passed through their bodies and excreted was toxic to other life. The land the Mimics fed on died and turned to desert. The seas turned a milky green.
“Ain’t like no red tide I e’er seen.”
A high-pitched scream filled the air. My head rang to its familiar tune.
Eyebrows still knitted, the old man’s head traced an arc as it sailed through the sky. The shattered pieces of his jaw and neck painted the girl’s straw hat a vivid red. She didn’t realize what had happened. A javelin exits a Mimic’s body at twelve hundred meters per second. The old man’s skull went flying before the sound of the javelin had even reached us. She slowly looked up.
A second round sliced through the air. Before her large, dark eyes could take in the sight of her slain grandfather, the javelin ripped through her, an act of neither mercy nor spite.
Her small body was obliterated.
Buffeted by the blast, the old man’s headless body swayed. Half his body was stained a deep scarlet. The straw hat spun on the wind. My body recoiled. I couldn’t move.
A bloated frog corpse stood at the water’s edge.
This coast was definitely within the UDF defense perimeter. I hadn’t heard reports of any patrol boats being sunk. The base on the front was alive and well. There couldn’t be any Mimics here. A claim the two corpses lying beside me would surely have contested if they could. But they were dead, right before my eyes. And I, their one hope for defense, had just deserted the only military unit in the area capable of holding back this invasion.
I was unarmed. My knife, my gun, my Jacket—they were all back at the base. When I’d walked through that gate an hour ago, I’d left my only hope for defense behind. Thirty meters to the nearest 57mm gun. Within running distance. I knew how to fire one, but there was still the tarp to deal with. I’d never have time to get it off. Insert my ID card into the platform, key in my passcode, feed in a thirty kilometer ammo belt, release the rotation lock lever or the barrel won’t move and I can’t aim, climb into the seat, crank the rusted handle—fuck it. Fire, motherfucker! Fire!
I knew the power of a Mimic. They weighed several times as much as a fully geared Jacket jockey. Structurally they had a lot in common with a starfish. There was an endoskeleton just below the skin, and it took 50mm armor-piercing rounds or better to penetrate it. And they didn’t hold back just because a man was unarmed. They rolled right through you like a rototiller through a gopher mound.
“Fuck me.”
The first javelin pierced my thigh.
The second opened a gaping wound in my back.
I was too busy trying to keep down the organs that came gurgling up into my throat to even notice the third.
I blacked out.
7
The paperback I’d been reading was beside my pillow. Yonabaru was counting his bundle of confessions on the top bunk.
“Keiji, sign this.”
“Corporal, you have a sidearm, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Could I see it?”
“Since when are you a gun nut?”
“It’s not like that.”
His hand disappeared into the top bunk. When it returned, it clutched a glistening lump of black metal.
“It’s loaded, so watch where you point it.”
“Uh, right.”
“If you make corporal, you can bring your own toys to bed and ain’t nobody can say a thing about it. Peashooter like this ain’t no good against a Mimic anyhow. The only things a Jacket jockey needs are his 20mm and his rocket launcher, three rockets apiece. The banana he packs for a snack doesn’t count. Now would you sign this already?”
I was too busy flicking off the safety on the gun to answer.
I wrapped my mouth around the barrel, imagining that 9mm slug in the chamber, waiting to explode from the cold, hard steel.
I pulled the trigger.
8
The paperback I’d been reading was beside my pillow. I sighed.
“Keiji, sign this.” Yonabaru craned his neck down from the top bunk.
“Sir, yes sir.”
“Listen. There’s nothin’ to tomorrow’s operation. Sweat it too much, you’ll turn into a feedhead—end up losing your mind before they even get a chance to b
low your brains out.”
“I’m not sweating anything.”
“Hey man, ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of. Everyone’s nervous their first time. It’s like gettin’ laid. Until you’ve done the deed, you can’t get it out of your head. All you can do is pass the time jerkin’ off.”
“I disagree.”
“Hey, you’re talkin’ to a man who’s played the game.”
“What if—just hypothetically—you kept repeating your first time over and over?”
“Where’d you get that shit?”
“I’m just talkin’ hypothetically is all. Like resetting all the pieces on a chess board. You take your turn, then everything goes back to how it started.”
“It depends.” Still hanging from the top bunk, his face lit up. “You talkin’ about fucking or fighting?”
“No fucking.”
“Well, if they asked me to go back and fight at Okinawa again, I’d tell ’em to shove it up their asses. They could send me to a fuckin’ firing squad if they want, but I wouldn’t go back.”
What if you didn’t have a choice? What if you had to relive your execution again and again?
At the end of the day, every man has to wipe his own ass. There’s no one to make your decisions for you, either. And whatever situation you’re in, that’s just another factor in your decision. Which isn’t to say everybody gets the same range of choices as everybody else. If there’s one guy out there with an ace in the hole, there’s sure to be another who’s been dealt a handful of shit. Sometimes you run into a dead end. But you walked each step of the road that led you there on your own. Even when they string you up on the gallows, you have the choice to meet your death with dignity or go kicking and screaming into the hereafter.
But I didn’t get that choice. There could be a giant waterfall just beyond Tateyama, the edge of the whole damn world, and I’d never know it. Day after day I go back and forth between the base and the battlefield, where I’m squashed like a bug crawling on the ground. So long as the wind blows, I’m born again, and I die. I can’t take anything with me to my next life. The only things I get to keep are my solitude, a fear that no one can understand, and the feel of the trigger against my finger.
All You Need Is Kill Page 5