“Is it odd to find similarities between Indian mysticism and Japanese tradition?”
“Ninety-eight!”
“Ninety-eight!”
“Ninety-nine!”
“Ninety-nine!”
Staring into the ground like farmers watching rice grow, the soldiers barked in time with the drill sergeant. The shouts of the 146 men echoed in Rita’s skull. A familiar migraine sent wires of pain through her head. This was a bad one.
“Another headache?”
“None of your business.”
“I don’t see how a platoon worth of doctors can’t find a cure for one headache.”
“Neither do I. Why don’t you try to find out?” she snapped.
“They keep those guys on a pretty short leash. I can’t even get an interview.”
Murdoch raised his camera. It wasn’t clear what he intended to do with the images of the spectacle unfolding in perfect stillness before him. Maybe sell them to a tabloid with nothing better to print.
“I’m not sure that’s in very good taste.” Rita didn’t know a single soldier on the field, but she didn’t have to know them to like them better than Murdoch.
“Pictures are neither tasteful nor distasteful. If you click on a link and a picture of a corpse pops up, you might have grounds for a lawsuit. If that same picture appears on the homepage of the New York Times, it could win a Pulitzer Prize.”
“This is different.”
“Is it?”
“You’re the one who broke into the data processing center. If it weren’t for your slip-up, these men wouldn’t be here being punished, and you wouldn’t be here taking pictures of them. I’d say that qualifies as distasteful.”
“Not so fast. I’ve been wrongly accused.” The sound of his camera shutter grew more frequent, masking their conversation.
“Security here is lax compared to central command. I don’t know what you were trying to dig up out here in the boondocks, but don’t hurt anyone else doing it.”
“So you’re onto me.”
“I’d just hate to see the censors come down on you right when you land your big scoop.”
“The government can tell us any truths they please. But there are truths, and there are truths,” Murdoch said. “It’s up to the people to decide which is which. Even if it’s something the government doesn’t want reported.”
“How egotistical.”
“Name a good journalist who isn’t. You have to be to find a story. Do you know any Dreamers?”
“I’m not interested in feed religions.”
“Did you know the Mimics went on the move at almost exactly the same time you started that big operation up in Florida?”
The Dreamers were a pacifist group—civilian, of course. The emergence of the Mimics had had a tremendous impact on marine ecosystems. Organizations that had called for the protection of dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals died out. The Dreamers picked up where they left off.
Dreamers believed the Mimics were intelligent, and they insisted it was humanity’s failure to communicate with them that had led to this war. They reasoned that if Mimics could evolve so quickly into such potent weapons, with patience, they could develop the means to communicate as well. The Dreamers had begun to take in members of a war-weary public who believed humanity could never triumph over the Mimics, and in the past two to three years the size of the movement had ballooned.
“I interviewed a few before coming to Japan,” Murdoch continued.
“Sounds like hard work.”
“They all have the same dream on the same day. In that dream, humanity falls to the Mimics. They think it’s some sort of message they’re trying to send us. Not that you needed me to tell you that.” Murdoch licked his lips. His tongue was too small for his body, giving the distinct impression of a mollusk. “I did a little digging, and it turns out there are particularly high concentrations of these dreams the days before U.S. Spec Ops launch major attacks. And over the past few years, more and more people have been having the dream. It hasn’t been made public, but some of these people are even in the military.”
“You believe whatever these feed jobs tell you? Listen to them long enough and they’d have you thinking sea monkeys were regular Einsteins.”
“Academic circles are already discussing the possibility of Mimic intelligence. And if they are, it’s not far-fetched to think they would try to communicate.”
“You shouldn’t assume everything you don’t understand is a message,” Rita said. She snorted. “Keep on like that, and next thing you’ll be telling me you’ve found signs of intelligence in our government, and we both know that’s never going to happen.”
“Very funny. But there’s a science here you can’t ignore. Each step up the evolutionary ladder—from single-celled organism, to cold-blooded animal, to warm-blooded animal—has seen a tenfold increase in energy consumption.” Ralph licked his lips again. “If you look at the amount of energy a human in modern society consumes, it’s ten times greater than that of a warm-blooded animal of similar size. Yet Mimics, which are supposed to be a cold-blooded animal, consume the same amount of energy as humans.”
“That supposed to mean they’re higher than us on the ladder? That’s quite a theory. You should have it published.”
“I seem to recall you saying something about having dreams.”
“Sure I have dreams. Ordinary dreams.”
To Rita, looking for meaning in dreams was a waste of time. A nightmare was a nightmare. And the time loops she’d stumbled into in the course of the war, well, they were something else entirely. “We have an attack coming up tomorrow. Did any of the people you interviewed get a message?”
“Absolutely. I called L.A. this morning to confirm it. All three had had the dream.”
“Now I know it’s not true. That’s impossible.”
“How would you know?”
“This is only the first time through today.”
“That again? How can a day have a first time or a second time?”
“Just hope you never find out.”
Murdoch made a show of shrugging. Rita returned her gaze to the unlucky men on the field.
Jacket jockeys didn’t have much use for muscle. Endurance was the order of the day, not stamina-draining burst power. To build their endurance, Rita’s squad practiced a standing technique from kung-fu known as ma bu. Ma bu consisted of spreading your legs as though you were straddling a horse and maintaining the position for an extended period of time. In addition to strengthening leg muscle, it was an extremely effective way to improve balance.
Rita wasn’t sure what benefit, if any, the iso push-ups were supposed to have. It looked more like punishment, plain and simple. The Japanese soldiers, packed together like sardines in a can, remained frozen in that one position. For them, this probably ranked among the worst experiences of their lives. Even so, Rita envied them this simple memory. Rita hadn’t shared that sort of throwaway experience with anyone in a long time.
The stifling wind tugged at her rust-red hair. Her bangs, still too long no matter how many times she cut them, made her forehead itch.
This was the world as it was at the start of the loop. What happened here only Rita would remember. The sweat of the Japanese soldiers, the whoops and jeers of the U.S. Special Forces— it would all be gone without a trace.
Maybe it would have been best not to think about it, but watching these soldiers training the day before an attack, sweat-soaked shirts sticking to their skin in the damp air, she felt sorry for them. In a way, this was her fault for bringing Murdoch along with her.
Rita decided to find a way to shorten the PT and put an end to this seemingly pointless exercise. So what if it instilled a samurai fighting spirit? They’d still wet themselves the first time they ran into a Mimic assault. She wanted to stop it, even if it was a sentimental gesture that no one but herself would ever appreciate.
Surveying the training field, Rita chanced upon a pair of defiant eyes stari
ng directly at her. She was accustomed to being looked on with awe, admiration, even fear, but she’d never seen this: a look filled with such unbridled hatred from a complete stranger. If a person could shoot lasers from their eyes, Rita would have been baked crisper than a Thanksgiving turkey in about three seconds.
She had only met one other man whose eyes even approached the same intensity. Arthur Hendricks’s deep blue eyes had known no fear. Rita had killed him, and now those blue eyes were buried deep in the cold earth.
Judging by his muscles, the soldier staring at her was a rookie not long out of boot camp. Nothing like Hendricks. He had been an American, a lieutenant, and the commander of the U.S. Special Forces squad.
The color of this soldier’s eyes was different. His hair, too. His face and body weren’t even close. Still, there was something about this Asian soldier that Rita Vrataski liked.
2
Rita had often wondered what the world would be like if there were a machine that could definitively measure the sum of a person’s potential.
If DNA determined a person’s height or the shape of their face, why not their less obvious traits too? Our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers—ultimately every individual was the product of the blood that flowed in the veins of those who came before. An impartial machine could read that information and assign a value to it, as simple as measuring height or weight.
What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don’t coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?
When Rita was young, she had a gift for two things: playing horseshoes and pretending to cry. The thought that her DNA contained the potential to become a great warrior couldn’t have been further from her mind.
Before she lost her parents when she was fifteen, she was an ordinary kid who didn’t like her carrot-top hair. She wasn’t particularly good at sports, and her grades in junior high school were average. There was nothing about her dislike of bell peppers and celery that set her apart. Only her ability to feign crying was truly exceptional. She couldn’t fool her mother, whose eagle eyes saw through her every ruse, but with anyone else she’d have them eating out of her hand after a few seconds of waterworks. Rita’s only other distinguishing feature was the red hair she’d inherited from her grandmother. Everything else about her was exactly like any other of over three hundred million Americans.
Her family lived in Pittsfield, a small town just east of the Mississippi River. Not the Pittsfield in Florida, not the Pittsfield in Massachusetts, but the Pittsfield in Illinois. Her father was the youngest child in a family of martial artists—mostly jujutsu. But Rita didn’t want to go to a military academy or play sports. She wanted to stay at home and raise pigs.
With the exception of the young men who signed up with the UDF, life for the people of Pittsfield was peaceful. It was an easy place to forget that humanity was in the middle of a war against a strange and terrible foe.
Rita didn’t mind living in a small town and never seeing anyone but the same four thousand people or so. Listening to the squeals of the pigs day in and day out could get a little tiresome, but the air was clean and the sky wide. She always had a secret spot where she could go to daydream and look for four-leaf clovers.
An old retired trader had a small general store in town. He sold everything from foodstuffs and hardware to little silver crosses that were supposed to keep the Mimics away. He carried all-natural coffee beans you couldn’t find anyplace else.
The Mimic attacks had turned most of the arable land in developing countries to desert, leaving luxury foods like natural coffee, tea, and tobacco extremely difficult to come by. They’d been replaced with substitutes or artificially flavored tastealikes that usually failed.
Rita’s town was one of many attempting to provide the produce and livestock needed by a hungry nation and its army.
The first victims of the Mimic attacks were also the most vulnerable: the poorest regions of Africa and South America. The archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Countries that lacked the means to defend themselves watched as the encroaching desert devoured their land. People abandoned the cultivation of cash crops—the coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices coveted in wealthier nations—and began growing staples, beans and sorghum, anything to stave off starvation. Developed nations had generally been able to stop the Mimic advance at the coastline, but much of the produce they had taken for granted disappeared from markets and store shelves overnight.
Rita’s father, who had grown up in a world where even Midwesterners could have fresh sushi every day, was, it is no exaggeration to say, a coffee addict. He didn’t smoke or drink—coffee was his vice. Often he would take Rita by the hand and sneak off with her to the old man’s store when Rita’s mother wasn’t watching.
The old man had skin of bronze and a bushy white beard.
When he wasn’t telling stories, he chewed the stem of his hookah hose between puffs. He spent his days surrounded by exotic goods from countries most people had never heard of. There were small animals wrought in silver. Grotesque dolls. Totem poles carved with the faces of birds or stranger beasts. The air of the shop was a heady mix of the old man’s smoke, untold spices, and all-natural coffee beans still carrying a hint of the rich soil in which they grew.
“These beans are from Chile. These here are from Malawi, in Africa. And these traveled all the way down the Silk Road from Vietnam to Europe,” he’d tell Rita. The beans all looked the same to her, but she would point, and the old man would rattle off their pedigrees.
“Got any Tanzanian in today?” Her father was well versed in coffee.
“What, you finish the last batch already?”
“Now you’re starting to sound like my wife. What can I say? They’re my favorite.”
“How about these—now these are really something. Premium Kona coffee grown on the Big Island of Hawaii. Seldom find these even in New York or Washington. Just smell that aroma!”
The wrinkles on the old man’s head deepened into creases as he smiled. Rita’s father crossed his arms, clearly impressed. He was enjoying this difficult dilemma. The countertop was slightly higher than Rita’s head, so she had to stand on tiptoe to get a good look.
“They got Hawaii. I saw it on TV.”
“You’re certainly well informed, young lady.”
“You shouldn’t make fun. Kids watch way more news than grownups do. All they care about is baseball and football.”
“You’re certainly right about that.” The old man stroked his forehead. “Yes, this is the last of it. The last Kona coffee on the face of the earth. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
“Where’d you get ahold of something like that?”
“That, my dear, is a secret.”
The hempen bag was packed with cream-colored beans. They were slightly more round than most coffee beans, but they looked ordinary in all other respects.
Rita picked up one of the beans and inspected it. The unroasted specimen was cool and pleasant to the touch. She imagined the beans basking in the sun of an azure sky that spread all the way to the horizon. Her father had told her about the skies over the islands. Rita didn’t mind that the skies in Pittsfield were a thin and watery blue, but just once she wanted to see the skies that had filled those beans with the warmth of the sun.
“Do you like coffee, young lady?”
“Not really. It’s not sweet. I prefer chocolate.”
“Pity.”
“It smells nice, though. And these ones definitely smell best of all,” Rita said.
“Ah, then there’s hope for you yet. What do you say, care to take over my shop when I retire?”
Rita’s father, who until then hadn’t looked up from the coffee beans, interrupted. �
��Don’t put any ideas in her head. We need someone to carry on the farm, and she’s all we’ve got.”
“Then maybe she can find a promising young boy or girl for me to pass on my shop to, eh?”
“I don’t know, I’ll think about it,” Rita answered with indifference.
Her father set down the bag of coffee he’d been admiring and kneeled to look Rita in the eye.
“I thought you wanted to help out on the farm?”
The old man hastily interjected, “Let the child make up her own mind. It’s still a free country.”
A light flared in the young Rita’s eyes. “That’s right, Dad. I get to choose, right? Well, as long as they don’t make me join the army.”
“Don’t like the army either, eh? The UDF isn’t all bad, you know.”
Rita’s father scowled. “This is my daughter you’re talking to.”
“But anyone can enlist once they turn eighteen. We all have the right to defend our country, son and daughter alike. It’s quite the opportunity.”
“I’m just not sure I want my daughter in the military.”
“Well I don’t wanna join the army in the first place, Dad.”
“Oh, why’s that?” A look of genuine curiosity crossed the old man’s face.
“You can’t eat Mimics. I read so in a book. And you shouldn’t kill animals you can’t eat just for the sake of killing them. Our teachers and our pastor and everyone says so.”
“You’re going to be quite a handful when you grow up, aren’t you.”
“I just wanna be like everybody else.”
Rita’s father and the old man looked at each other and shared a knowing chuckle. Rita didn’t understand what was so funny.
Four years later, the Mimics would attack Pittsfield. The raid came in the middle of an unusually harsh winter. Snow fell faster than it could be cleared from the streets. The city was frozen to a halt.
No one knew this at the time, but Mimics send out something akin to a scouting party before an attack, a small, fast-moving group whose purpose is to advance as far as possible then return with information for the others. That January, three Mimics had slipped past the UDF quarantine and made their way up the Mississippi River undetected.
All You Need Is Kill Page 10