My platoon crawled toward the northern tip of Kotoiushi Island, Jackets in sleep mode. It was five minutes before our platoon commander would give the signal for the start of the battle. No matter how many times I experienced it, this was when my tension ran highest. I could see why Yonabaru let his mouth run with whatever bullshit came out. Ferrell just let our chatter wash over him.
“I’m tellin’ ya, you gotta hook yourself up with some pussy. If you wait until you’re strapped into one of these Jackets, it’s too late.”
“Yeah.”
“What about Mad Wargarita? Y’all were talkin’ during PT, right? You’d tap that, I know you would.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a cool customer.”
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t even popped your cherry, and you’re calm as a fuckin’ whore. My first time I had butterflies beatin’ up a tornado in my stomach.”
“It’s like a standardized test.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Didn’t you take those in high school?”
“Dude, you don’t expect me to remember high school, do ya?”
“Yeah.” I’d managed to throw Yonabaru off what passed for his train of thought, but my mind was on autopilot. “Yeah.”
“Yeah what? I didn’t even say anything.” Yonabaru’s voice reached me through a fog.
I felt like I’d been fighting in this same spot for a hundred years. Half a year ago I was a kid in high school. I couldn’t have cared less about a war that was slowly drowning the earth in its own blood. I’d lived in a world of peace, one filled with family and friends. I never imagined I’d trade classrooms and the soccer field for a war zone.
“You’ve been actin’ funny since yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“Dude, don’t go losin’ it on us. Two in a row from the same platoon—how would that look? And I been meanin’ to ask: what the fuck is that hunk of metal you’re carrying? And what the fuck do you plan on doin’ with it? Tryin’ to assert your ind’viduality? Workin’ on an art project?”
“It’s for crushing.”
“Crushin’ what?”
“The enemy, mostly.”
“You get up close, that’s what your pile driver’s for. You gonna tell me you’re better off with an axe? Maybe we should fill our platoon with lumberjacks. Hi ho, hi ho!”
“That was the dwarves.”
“Good point. Well made. Point for you.”
Ferrell jumped into our conversation. “Hey, I don’t know where he learned how, but he sure as hell can use that thing. But Kiriya, only use it once they’re up in your face and you don’t have a choice. Don’t go rushin’ up askin’ for it. Modern warfare is still waged with bullets. Try not to forget.”
“Yessir.”
“Yonabaru.”
I guess the sergeant felt he needed to spread the attention around.
“Yeah?”
“Just . . . do what you always do.”
“What the hell, Sarge? Keiji gets a pep talk and I get that? A delicate soul like me needs some inspiring words of encouragement, too.”
“I might as well encourage my rifle for all the good it would do.”
“You know what this is? Discrimination, that’s what it is!”
“Every now and again you get me thinking, Yonabaru,” Ferrell said, his voice tinny over the link. “I’d give my pension to the man who invents a way to fasten your—shit, it’s started! Don’t get your balls blown off, gents!”
I sprang into battle, Doppler cranked, the usual buzzing in my helmet. Just like the other moments.
There. A target.
I fired. I ducked. A javelin whizzed past my head.
“Who’s up there? You’re too far forward! You wanna get yourself killed?”
I pretended to follow the platoon leader’s orders. I don’t care how many lives you have, if you followed the orders of every officer fresh from the academy, you’d end up getting bored of dying.
Thunder erupted from the shells crisscrossing the sky. I wiped sand from my helmet. I glanced at Ferrell and nodded. It only took an instant for him to realize the suppressing fire I’d just laid down had thwarted an enemy ambush. Somewhere deep in Ferrell’s gut, his instincts were telling him that this recruit named Keiji Kiriya, who’d never set foot in battle in his life, was a soldier he could use. He was able to see past the recklessness of what I’d just done. It was that sort of adaptability that had kept him alive for twenty years.
To be honest, Ferrell was the only man in the platoon I could use. The other soldiers had only seen two or three battles at most. Even the ones who’d survived in the past hadn’t ever gotten killed. You can’t learn from your mistakes when they kill you. These greenhorns didn’t know what it was to walk the razor’s edge between life and death. They didn’t know that the line dividing the two, the borderland piled high with corpses, was the easiest place to survive. The fear that permeated every fiber of my being was relentless, it was cruel, and it was my best hope for getting through this.
That was the only way to fight the Mimics. I didn’t know shit about any other wars, and frankly, I didn’t care to. My enemy was humanity’s enemy. The rest didn’t matter.
The fear never left me. My body trembled with it. When I sensed the presence of an enemy just outside my field of vision, I could feel it crawling along my spine. Who had told me that fear had a way of seeping into your body? Had it been the platoon leader? Or was it Ferrell? Maybe it was something I’d heard during training.
But even as the fear racks my body, it soothes me, comforts me. Soldiers who get washed away in a rush of adrenaline don’t survive. In war, fear is the woman your mother warned you about. You knew she was no good for you, but you couldn’t shake her. You had to find a way to get along, because she wasn’t going anywhere.
The 17th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Regiment, 301st Armored Infantry Division was cannon fodder. If the frontal assault succeeded, the Mimics fleeing the siege would wash over us like a torrent of water surging through a dry gully. If it failed, we’d be a lone platoon in the middle of a sea of hostiles. Either way our odds of survival were slim. The platoon commander knew it, and Sergeant Ferrell knew it. The whole company was pieced together from soldiers who’d survived the slaughter at Okinawa. Who better to give this shit assignment to? In an operation involving twenty-five thousand Jackets, if a lone company of 146 men got wiped out, it wouldn’t even rate a memo on the desk of the brass in the Defense Ministry. We were the sacrificial lambs whose blood greased the wheels of war’s machinery.
Of course, there were only three kinds of battle to begin with: fucked up, seriously fucked up, and fucked up beyond all recognition. No use panicking about it. There’d be plenty of chaos to go around. Same Jackets. Same enemy. Same buddies. Same me, same muscles that weren’t ready for what I was asking of them screaming in protest.
My body never changed, but the OS that ran it had seen a total overhaul. I’d started as a green recruit, a paper doll swept on the winds of war. I’d become a veteran who bent the war to my will. I bore the burden of endless battle like the killing machine I’d become—a machine with blood and nerves in place of oil and wires. A machine doesn’t get distracted. A machine doesn’t cry. A machine wears the same bitter smile day in, day out. It reads the battle as it unfolds. Its eyes scan for the next enemy before it’s finished killing the first, and its mind is already thinking about the third. It wasn’t lucky, and it wasn’t unlucky. It just was. So I kept fighting. If this was going to go on forever, it would go on forever.
Shoot. Run. Plant one foot, then the other. Keep moving.
A javelin tore through the air I had occupied only a tenth of a second before. It dug into the ground before detonating, blasting dirt and sand into the air. I’d caught a break. The enemy couldn’t see through the shower of falling earth—I could. There. One, two, three. I took down the Mimics through the improvised curtain of dust.
&n
bsp; I accidentally kicked one of my buddies—the sort of kick you used to break down a door when both of your hands were full. I had a gun in my left hand and a battle axe in my right. It was a good thing God had given us two arms and legs. If I only had three appendages to work with, I wouldn’t be able to help this soldier out, whoever he was.
As I turned, I cut down another Mimic with a single blow. I ran up to the fallen soldier. He had a wolf wearing a crown painted on his armor—4th Company. If they were here, that meant we’d met up with the main assault force. The line was giving way.
The soldier’s shoulders were trembling. He was in shock. Whether it was the Mimics or my kick that had sent him into it, I couldn’t tell. He was oblivious to the world around him. If I left him there, he’d be a corpse inside of three minutes.
I put my hand on his shoulder plate and established a contact comm.
“You remember how many points we beat you by in that game?”
He didn’t answer. “You know, the one you lost to 17th Company.”
“Wh . . . what?” The words rasped in his throat.
“The rugby game. Don’t you remember? It was some kind of intramural record, so I figure we musta beat you by at least ten, twenty points.”
I realized what I was doing.
“You know, it’s funny, me talkin’ to you like this. Hey, you don’t think she’d charge me for stealin’ her idea, do you? It’s not like she has a patent on it or anything.”
“What? What are you talkin’ about?”
“You’ll be fine.” He was snapping out of it pretty quick—he was no rookie like I’d been. I slapped him on the back. “You owe me, 4th Company. What’s your name?”
“Kogoro Murata, and I don’t owe you shit.”
“Keiji Kiriya.”
“That’s some attitude you got. Not sure I like it.”
“The feeling’s mutual. Let’s hope our luck holds.”
We bumped fists and parted ways.
I swept my head from left to right. I ran. I pulled my trigger. My body had long since passed exhaustion, but a part of me maintained a heightened sense of alertness impossible under normal circumstances. My mind was a conveyer belt sorting good apples from the bad—any piece of information that wasn’t vital to survival was automatically shut out.
I saw Rita Vrataski. The rumble of an explosion heralded her arrival. A laser-guided bomb fell from a plane circling overhead, far out of reach of the enemy. It covered the distance between us in under twenty seconds, detonating precisely where the Valkyrie had called it down.
Rita was headed for the spot the bomb had struck, a shattered mix of debris, equal parts living and dead. Creatures streamed from the crater toward her swinging battle axe.
Even in the midst of battle, seeing Rita’s red Jacket stirred something in me. Her mere presence had breathed new life into our broken line. Her skill was peerless, the product of U.S. Special Forces’ efforts to make a soldier to end all soldiers. But it was more than that. She really was our savior.
Just a glimpse of her Jacket on the battlefield would drive soldiers to give another ten percent, even if they didn’t have it left to spare. I’m sure there were men who’d see her and fall in love, like a man and a woman on a sinking ship spying one another between waves. Death could come at any moment on the battlefield, so why not? The wise guys who’d named her Full Metal Bitch had really fished around for that one.
I didn’t think they had it right. Or maybe I was starting to feel something for Rita Vrataski myself. That suited me fine. Trapped in this fucking loop, I had no hope of falling in love. Even if I found someone who could love me in one short day, she’d be gone the next. The loop robbed me of every moment I spent with someone.
Rita had saved me once, long ago. She had kept me calm with her random talk of green tea. She had told me she’d stay with me until I died. What better target for my unrequited love than our savior herself ?
My OS continued to respond automatically, despite the distraction my emotions were giving it. My body twisted. I planted a foot on the ground. I didn’t have to think about the battle unfolding before my eyes. Thought only got in the way. Deciding which way to move, and how, were things you did in training. If you paused to think in battle, Death would be there waiting, ready to swing his scythe.
I fought on.
It was seventy-two minutes since the battle had started. Tanaka, Maie, Ube, and Nijou were all KIA. Four dead, seven wounded, and zero missing. Nijou had hung the poster of the swimsuit model on the wall. Maie was from somewhere deep inside China. He never said a word. I didn’t know much about the other two. I etched the faces of the men I’d let die deep in my mind. In a few hours their pain would be gone, but I would remember. Like a thorn in my heart it tormented me, toughened me for the next battle.
Somehow our platoon had held together. I could hear the blades of the choppers in the distance. They hadn’t been shot out of the sky. This was the best attempt yet. The platoon leader had no words for the recruit who’d taken matters into his own hands. Every now and then Ferrell would fire a few rounds my way to help out.
And then I saw it—the Mimic I’d fought in the first battle that had trapped me in this fucking loop. I’d fired three pile driver rounds into it that day. I don’t know how, but I knew it was the one. On the outside it was the same bloated frog corpse as all the rest, but here on my 157th pass through the loop, I could still recognize the Mimic that had killed me the first time.
It had to die with extreme prejudice.
Somehow I knew that if I could kill it, I’d pass some sort of boundary. It may not break this loop of battle after battle after battle, but something would change, however small. I was sure of it.
Stay right there. I’m comin’ for ya.
Speaking of crossing boundaries, I still hadn’t read any further in that mystery novel. I don’t know why that occurred to me then, but it did. I’d spent some of my last precious hours reading that book. I’d stopped just as the detective was about to reveal whodunit. I’d been so preoccupied with training I hadn’t given it another thought. It must have been nearly a year now. Maybe it was time I got around to finishing that book. If I killed this Mimic and made it to the next level, I’d start on that last chapter.
I readied my battle axe. Caution to the wind, I charged.
Static crackled in my headphones. Someone was talking to me. A woman. It was our savior, the Full Metal Bitch, Valkyrie reborn, Mad Wargarita—Rita Vrataski.
“How many loops is this for you?”
1
A brilliant sun traced crisp shadows on the ground. The air was so clean you could have gotten a clear sniper shot from kilometers away. Above the field, the 17th Company’s flag snapped in a moist southerly breeze blowing off the Pacific.
The sea air held a scent that snaked its way down your nose and tickled your tongue on its way to your throat. Rita knitted her brow. It wasn’t the stench of a Mimic. More like the slightly fishy fragrance you got from those bowls of nuoc mam sauce.
Wartime tensions and the constant threat of death aside, the Far East really wasn’t so bad. The coastline, so difficult to defend, afforded beautiful sunsets. The air and water were clean. If Rita, who had about one tenth the refinement and culture of an average individual, thought it was wonderful here, an actual tourist might have considered it paradise. If there were one mark against it, it was the cloying humidity.
The weather that night would be perfect for an air strike. Once the sun had set, bombers laden with GPS-guided munitions would take to the sky in swarms to blast the island into a lifeless moonscape before the next morning’s ground assault. The beautiful atoll and the flora and fauna that called it home would all share the same fate as the enemy, if everything went according to plan.
“Beautiful day, don’t you think, Major Vrataski?” An old film camera dangled from the man’s thick neck, a redwood trunk by comparison to the average Jacket jockey’s beech-tree. Rita casually ignored him.
>
“Great lighting. Days like today can make even a steel-and-rivets airplane look like a da Vinci.”
Rita snorted. “You doing fine art photography now?”
“That’s hardly any way to speak to the only embedded photojournalist in the Japan expedition. I take great pride in the role I play conveying the truths of this war to the public. Of course, 90 percent of the truth is lighting.”
“Pretty slick talk. They must love you over at PR. How many tongues you figure you have?”
“Only the one the Lord saw fit to bestow Americans with. Though I hear Russians and Cretans have two.”
“Well I hear there’s a Japanese god who pulls out the tongues of liars. Don’t do anything to get yours in trouble.”
“Perish the thought.”
The corner of the training field Rita and the photographer were standing on caught the full force of the wind coming off the ocean. In the middle of the giant field, 146 men from the 17th Company of the 301st Japanese Armored Infantry Division were frozen in neat rows along the ground. It was a kind of training called iso push-ups. Rita hadn’t seen it before.
The rest of Rita’s squad stood a short distance away, their thick, bristly arms jutting out before them. They were busy doing what soldiers did best, which was mocking those less fortunate than themselves. Maybe this is how they practice bowing? Hey, samurai! Try picking up a sword after an hour of that!
None of Rita’s squadmates would go near her within thirty hours of an attack. It was an unspoken rule. The only people who dared approach her were a Native American engineer who couldn’t hardly see straight and the photographer, Ralph Murdoch.
“They don’t move at all?” Rita seemed doubtful.
“No, they just hold that position.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it samurai training. Looks more like yoga if you ask me.”
All You Need Is Kill Page 9