All You Need Is Kill

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

  Rita Vrataski was sitting across from me, eating the same lunch for the 160th time. She examined her 160th umeboshi.

  “What is this?”

  “Umeboshi. It’s ume—people call it a plum, but it’s more like an apricot—dried in the sun, and then pickled. You eat it.”

  “What’s it taste like?”

  “Food is like war. You have to experience it for yourself.”

  She poked at it two or three times with her chopsticks, then threw caution to the wind and put the whole thing in her mouth. The sourness hit her like a body blow from a heavyweight fighter and she doubled over, grabbing at her throat and chest. I could see the muscles twitching in her back.

  “Like it?”

  Rita worked her mouth without looking up. Her neck tensed. Something went flying out of her mouth—a perfectly clean pit skidded to a halt on her tray. She wiped the edges of her mouth as she gasped for breath.

  “Not sour at all.”

  “Not at this cafeteria,” I said. “Too many people from overseas. Go to a local place if you want the real stuff.”

  I picked up the umeboshi from my tray and popped it into my mouth. I made a show of savoring the flavor. Truth be known, it was sour enough to twist my mouth as tight as a crab’s ass at low tide, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of seeing that.

  “Pretty good.” I smacked my lips.

  Rita stood, her mouth a stern line. She left me sitting at the table as she strode down the corridor between the tables, past throngs of soldiers, and up to the serving counter. There, Rachel spoke to a gorilla of a man who could reach up and touch the ceiling without so much as stretching—the same gorilla from the 4th whose fist my jaw had encountered all those loops ago. Beauty and the Beast were understandably surprised to see the subject of their conversation walk up to them. The entire cafeteria could sense that something was up; the conversations dimmed, and the banjo music stopped. Thank God.

  Rita cleared her throat. “Could I get some dried pickled plums?”

  “Umeboshi?”

  “Yeah, those.”

  “Well, sure, if you like.”

  Rachel took out a small plate and started piling it with umeboshi from a large, plastic bucket.

  “I don’t need the plate.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That thing you’re holding in your left hand. Yeah, the bucket. I’ll take all of them.”

  “Um, people don’t usually eat that many at once,” Rachel said.

  “That a problem?”

  “No, I suppose not—”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  Bucket in hand, Rita walked back triumphantly. She thunked it down in the middle of the table right in front of me.

  The container was about thirty centimeters across at the mouth— a tub big enough to serve about two hundred men, since nobody ever wanted more than one—packed halfway to the top with bright red umeboshi. Big enough to drown a small cat. The base of my tongue started to ache just looking at it. Rita went for her chopsticks.

  She singled out one of the wrinkled, reddish fruit from the bucket and popped it into her mouth. She chewed. She swallowed. Out came the pit.

  “Not sour at all.” Her eyes watered.

  Rita passed the barrel to me with a shove. My turn. I picked out the smallest one I could find and put it in my mouth. I ate it and spit out the pit.

  “Mine either.”

  We were playing our own game of gastronomic chicken. The tips of Rita’s chopsticks quivered as she plunged them back into the barrel. She tried twice to pick up another umeboshi between them before she gave up and just skewered one on a single stick, lifting it to her mouth. The fruit trailed drops of pink liquid that stained the tray where they fell.

  A crowd of onlookers had begun to gather around us. They watched in uneasy silence at first, but the excitement grew palpably with each pit spat out on the tray.

  Sweat beaded on our skin like condensation on a hot day’s beer can. The revolting pile of half-chewed pits grew. Rachel was off to the side, watching with a worried smile. I spotted my friend from the 4th in the throng, too. He was having such a good time watching me suffer. Each time Rita or I put another ume in our mouths, a wave of heckling rippled through the crowd.

  “Come on, pick up the pace!”

  “No turnin’ back now, keep ’em poppin’!”

  “You’re not gonna let this little girl show you up, are you?”

  “Fuck, you think he can beat Rita? You’re crazy!”

  “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

  “Watch the doors, don’t want nobody breakin’ this up! I got ten bucks on the scrawny guy!” followed immediately by, “Twenty on Rita!” Then someone else cried out, “Where’s my fried shrimp? I lost my fried shrimp!”

  It was hot, it was loud, and in a way I can’t explain, it felt like home. There was an invisible bond that hadn’t been there my previous times through the loop. I’d had a taste of what tomorrow would bring, and suddenly all the little things that happen in our lives, the minutiae of the day, took on new importance. Just then, being surrounded by all that noise felt good.

  In the end, we ate every industrially packed umeboshi in the barrel. Rita had the last one. I argued that it was a tie, but since Rita had gone first, she insisted that she had won. When I objected, Rita grinned and offered to settle it over another barrel. It’s hard to say whether that grin meant she really could have gone on eating or if the overload of sour food had made her a little funny in the head. The gorilla from the 4th brought in another full barrel of the red fruit from Hell and placed it in the middle of the table with a thud.

  By that point, I felt like I was made of umeboshi from the waist on down. I waved the white flag.

  After that, I talked with Rita about everything—Yonabaru who never shut up, Sergeant Ferrell and his training obsession, the rivalry between our platoon and the 4th. For her part, Rita told me things she hadn’t had time to get to in the last loop. When not encased in her Jacket, the Bitch wore a shy smile that suited her well. Her fingertips smelled of machine grease, pickled plum, and a hint of coffee.

  I don’t know which flags I’d set or how, but on that 160th loop my relationship with Rita deepened as it never had before. The next morning, Corporal Jin Yonabaru didn’t wake up on the top bunk. He woke up on the floor.

  3

  I found no peace in sleep. A Mimic would snuff out my life, or I’d black out in the middle of battle. After that, nothing. Then without warning, the nothingness gave way. The finger that had been squeezing the trigger of my rifle was wedged three quarters of the way through my paperback. I’d find myself lying in bed, surrounded by its pipe frame, listening to the high-pitched voice of the DJ read the day’s weather. Clear and sunny out here on the islands, same as yesterday, with a UV warning for the afternoon. Each word wormed its way into my skull and stuck there.

  By “sunny” I had picked up the pen, by “islands” I was writing the number on my hand, and by the time she’d gotten to “UV warning” I was out of bed and on my way to the armory. That was my wake-up routine.

  Sleep on the night before the battle was an extension of training. For some reason, my body never grew fatigued. The only thing I brought with me were my memories and the skills I’d mastered. I spent the night tossing and turning, my mind replaying the movements it had learned the previous day as it burned the program into my brain. I had to be able to do what I couldn’t the last time through the loop, to kill the Mimics I couldn’t kill, to save the friends I couldn’t save. Like doing an iso push-up in my mind. My own private nightly torment.

  I awoke in battle mode. Like a pilot flipping through switches before takeoff, I inspected myself one part at a time, checking for any muscles that might have knotted up overnight. I didn’t skip so much as a pinky toe.

  Rotating ninety degrees on my ass, I sprang out of bed and opened my eyes. I blinked. My vision blurred. The room was different. The prime minister’s head wasn’t staring
out at me from atop the swimsuit model. By the time I noticed, it was too late; my foot missed a platform that wasn’t there and my inertia sent me tumbling from the bed. My head slammed into a tile-covered floor, and I finally realized where I was.

  Sunlight shone through layers of blast-resistant glass and spilled across the vast, airy room. An artificial breeze from the purifier poured over my body as I lay sprawled on the floor. The thick walls and glass completely blocked out the sounds of the base that were usually so loud in my ears.

  I was in the Sky Lounge. In a base of exposed steel and khaki-colored, fire-retardant wood, this was the one and only properly appointed room. Originally an officers’ meeting room that doubled as a reception hall, the night view of Uchibo through its multilayered glass would have fetched a good price.

  As nice as the view was, it was a lousy place to wake up, unless you were a mountain goat or a dedicated hermit with a love of heights. Or you could be Yonabaru. I’d heard he had some secret spot up here one floor higher than even the officers were allowed to go. “His love nest,” we called it.

  More like a love aerie.

  Looking out across the ocean I could see the gentle curve of the horizon. Uchibo beach was dimly visible through the morning mist. Triangles of waves rose, turned to foam, and faded back into the sea. Beyond those waves lay the island the Mimics had made their spawning grounds. For a moment, I thought I saw a bolt of bright green shoot through the surf. I blinked my eyes. It had only been a glint of sunlight on the water.

  “You certainly slept well last night.” Rita stood over me, having walked in from the other room.

  I looked up slowly from the tile floor. “Feels like it’s been years.”

  “Years?”

  “Since I had a good night’s sleep. I’d forgotten how good it is.”

  “That’s crazy time-loop talk.”

  “You should know.”

  Rita gave a wave of her hand in sympathy.

  Our savior, the Full Metal Bitch, looked more relaxed this morning than I had ever seen her. Her eyes were softer in the cool morning light, and the sunlight made her rust-colored hair glow orange. She gave me the sort of look she might give to a puppy who’d followed her home. She was placid as a Zen monk. She was beautiful.

  The room suddenly grew too bright, and I narrowed my eyes against the glare. “What’s that smell?”

  An unusual odor mingled with the clean air coming from the filter. It wasn’t necessarily a bad smell, but I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it pleasant. Too pungent for food, too savory for perfume. Quite frankly, I didn’t know what the hell it was.

  “All I did was open the bag. You’ve got a sharp nose.”

  “In training they told us to be wary of any unusual odors, since it could mean there was a problem with the Jacket filter—not that I’m in a Jacket right now.”

  “I’ve never met anyone who confused food with chemical weapons before,” Rita said. “Don’t you like the smell?”

  “Like isn’t the word I’d use. It smells . . . weird.”

  “No manners at all. Is that any way to thank me for boiling a morning pot of coffee for us?”

  “That’s . . . coffee?”

  “Sure is.”

  “This isn’t your way of getting back at me for the umeboshi, is it?”

  “No, this is what roasted coffee beans picked from actual coffee trees that grew in the ground smell like. Never had any?”

  “I have a cup of the artificial slop every day.”

  “Just wait till I brew it. You ain’t smelled nothin’ yet.”

  I didn’t know there were any natural coffee beans left in the world. That is, I suspected real coffee still existed, somewhere, but I didn’t know there was anyone still in the habit of drinking it.

  The beverage that passed for coffee these days was made from lab-grown beans with artificial flavoring added for taste and aroma. Substitute grounds didn’t smell as strong as the beans Rita was grinding, and they didn’t fight their way into your nose and down your entire respiratory tract like these did, either. I suppose you could extrapolate the smell of the artificial stuff and eventually approach the real thing, but the difference in impact was like the difference between a 9mm hand gun and a 120mm tank shell.

  “That must be worth a small fortune,” I said.

  “I told you we were on the line in North Africa before we came here. It was a gift from one of the villages we freed.”

  “Some gift.”

  “Being queen isn’t all bad, you know.”

  A hand-cranked coffee grinder sat in the middle of the glass table. A uniquely shaped little device—I’d seen one once in an antique shop. Beside it was some kind of ceramic funnel covered with a brown-stained cloth. I guessed you were supposed to put the ground-up coffee beans in the middle and strain the water through them.

  An army-issued portable gas stove and heavy-duty frying pan dominated the center of the table. A clear liquid bubbled noisily in the frying pan. Two mugs sat nearby, one chipped with cracked paint, and one that looked brand new. At the very edge of the table sat a resealable plastic bag filled with dark brown coffee beans.

  Rita didn’t seem to have many personal effects. There was nothing in the way of luggage save a semi-translucent sack at the foot of the table—it looked like a boxer’s heavy bag. Without the coffee-making equipment to support it, the bag had collapsed, nearly empty. Soldiers who had to be ready to ship out to the far corners of the earth at a moment’s notice weren’t permitted much cargo, but even by those standards Rita traveled light. That one of the few things she did bring was a hand-powered coffee grinder didn’t do anything to lessen the perception that she was a little odd.

  “You can wait in bed if you like.”

  “I’d rather watch,” I said. “This is interesting.”

  “Then I guess I’ll get grinding.”

  Rita started turning the handle on the coffee grinder. A gravelly crunching sound filled the room and the glass table shook. Rita’s curls quaked atop her head.

  “When the war’s over, I’m gonna treat you to the best green tea you ever had—in return for the coffee.”

  “I thought green tea came from China.”

  “It may have started there, but it was perfected here. It was a long time before they’d even allow it to be exported. I wonder what kind we should have.”

  “They serve it for free in restaurants?”

  “That’s right.”

  “After the war . . .” Rita sounded just a little sad.

  “Hey, this war will be over someday. No doubt about it. You and I’ll see to that.”

  “You’re right. I’m sure you will.” Rita took the ground beans and spread them on the cloth covering the funnel. “You have to steam them first.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Completely changes the flavor. Something an old friend once taught me. Don’t know how it works, but he was right.”

  She moistened the freshly ground beans with a little not-quite boiling water. Cream-colored bubbles hissed to life where the water touched the grounds. A striking aroma woven of threads bitter, sweet, and sour filled the air surrounding the

  table.

  “Still smell weird?”

  “It smells wonderful.”

  Using a circular motion, Rita carefully poured in the water. Drop by drop, a glistening brown liquid began filling the steel mug waiting beneath.

  A thin line of steam had begun to rise from the mug when an earsplitting sound pierced the thick walls and blast-hardened glass of the Sky Lounge. The tile floor shook. Rita and I were on the ground in a heartbeat. Our eyes met.

  There was no chandelier tinkle of shattered glass, only a sharp concussive sound, as though someone had thrown a thick telephone book onto the ground. Spiderweb fractures spread through the window glass, a sand-colored javelin sticking from the middle of the web. Deep purple liquid crystal seeped from the cracks and onto the floor below.

  Too late, sirens began
to blare across the base. Three plumes of smoke rose outside the window. The water off the coast had turned a livid green.

  “An—an attack?” My voice was shaking. Probably my body too. In all 159 loops there had never been a surprise attack. The battle was supposed to start after we landed on Kotoiushi Island.

  A second and third round impacted the window. The entire glass pane bulged inward but somehow held. Cracks crisscrossed the window. Pinpricks of light swam before my eyes.

  Rita had gotten to her feet and was calmly returning the frying pan to the top of the portable gas stove. She killed the flame with a practiced hand.

  “This glass is really something. You never know if it’s all just talk,” Rita mused.

  “We have to hit back—no, I’ve got to find the sergeant—wait, our Jackets!”

  “You should start by calming down.”

  “But, what’s happening!” I hadn’t meant to shout, but couldn’t help it. None of this was in the script. I’d been looped so long that the idea of novel events terrified me. That the novel event in question happened to involve Mimic javelins exploding against the windows of the room I was standing in didn’t help.

  “The Mimics use the loops to win the war. You’re not the only one who remembers what’s happened in each loop.”

  “Then this is all because I screwed up the last time?”

  “The Mimics must have decided this was the only way they could win. That’s all.”

  “But . . . the base,” I said. “How did they even get here?”

  “They came inland up the Mississippi to attack Illinois once. They’re aquatic creatures. It’s not surprising they found a way through a quarantine line created by a bunch of land-dwelling humans.” Rita was calm.

  “I guess.”

  “Leave the worrying to the brass. For you and me, this just means we fight here instead of Kotoiushi.”

  Rita held out her hand. I clasped it and she helped me to my feet. Her fingers were callused at the bases—rub marks from the Jacket contact plates. The palm of the hand she’d been holding the frying pan with was much warmer than my own. I could feel the tight apprehension in my chest begin to ebb.