The Valley

by John Renehan

  “Don’t tell,” Black muttered at the ceiling. “Just go.”

  The kid turned back and squatted, muttering curses to himself. He worked Black into a sitting position, casting glances toward the chaos in the rest of the aid station.

  Black assisted as best he could, which was hardly at all, and allowed himself to be slumped across the medic’s shoulders. He watched his view of the aid station go upside down, sending a wave of dizzy nausea through him. He groaned.

  “You gonna hurl, sir?”

  “No,” he said, thinking he just might.

  The medic struggled to his feet. It was the same fireman’s carry Shannon had used, but this guy was about half Shannon’s size.

  “Gonna be loud out there, sir.”

  It was loud inside already.

  “Got it.”

  The kid did a little hop in place to shuck Black’s limp form higher on his shoulders, then he leaned forward and bounded through the doorway in a stomping half run.

  “God-daaaaaammmmnniiiit!” he bellowed as the sound and light hit them.

  —

  Goddamn lieutenant.

  He crashed upward through the dry leaves, gloving narrow tree trunks hand over hand in the steep parts, hauling himself forward, higher, closer.

  Yawning mountaintops hung above him silently, the scatterfall of dried brush and cast-off tree limbs slanting away below and behind, hearing no sound but his feet and his breathing.

  This ridge, then down the far side—no way around that draw—through the creek, then up one more and cut across the front. Good cover there, and fastest.

  Too far.

  One stomping foot in front of the other, legs pumping. Skinny branches snapping as he pushed through them. Brittle ground cover cracking. So much sound.

  “Never catch a damn thing making all that noise, Rodney.”

  It was like home, really. The dim mornings hunting with his dad and his brothers. He couldn’t get enough of it, the woods and the mountains. It was half the reason he joined the infantry. Truth was, this was damned beautiful country when you got down to it.

  Damn Corelli. Damn dumb kid.

  His heaving breaths made fog before his eyes. The other sound returned to him.

  It came from behind, past descending ridges, the thump and thud, the unending cacophony echoing dull off mountainsides, chasing him all the way from where he was supposed to be, where he needed to be right now, over the peaks to find him and torment him here where he actually was.

  Told him, told all of them, don’t listen to a stupid officer who thinks he knows something.

  He couldn’t say whether it burned him more that he was going to die amidst this beauty, or that the stupid officer had thought right.

  All this on me.

  Panting and swearing, Merrick drove higher into the mountains.

  39

  He felt as though he’d been hurled naked and flailing into a heaving ocean made of sound. The medic wasn’t kidding.

  The fire was so thick and continuous that Black could hardly tell one sound from the other, incoming or outgoing, rocket, mortar, or machine gun. It all just ran together in a shrieking continuum.

  “OURS OR THEIRS?” he shouted as the medic pounded up the breezeway that skirted the courtyard.

  “EVERYONE’S,” the kid shouted back.

  Soldiers stomped past them the other way, slugging heavy ammo cans. Everyone they passed was yelling something at everyone else, or at them.

  An impacting mortar round in the far corner of the courtyard heaved a truckbed’s worth of earth into the sky. Black’s hearing momentarily washed out. The medic staggered from the shock but didn’t drop him.

  “Hold on, sir!” he cried.

  It’s cold out here, Black thought as the kid reached the entry he’d been headed for.

  They stumped along through a corridor of blast walls and beneath a heavily sandbagged opening.

  “Make a hole!” the medic shouted at the gaggle of people in front of them. “Look out!”

  They were in a narrow barracks bay that Black hadn’t been to before. Several soldiers were in there, sweating and pointing and shouting at one another, clutching overheated weapons and jabbing fingers in every direction and unsuccessfully carrying on seven urgent, high-volume conversations at once.

  “—wer Two needs fifty-cal ammo NOW.”

  “—at the mortar pit, but I don’t kn—”

  “No, fuck that! We need to—”

  “—get there from here. You gotta go around!”

  The medic pushed his way through, soldiers turning in the midst of their shouting to see who was being carried past.

  An upside-down sergeant who Black recognized entered the far door ahead of them. One of Merrick’s junior guys. Thick built, low to the ground, commanding. An afro that was way out of regulation.

  He surveyed the ineffective scene before him.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP,” he bellowed hoarsely, bringing the room to silence.

  The soldiers all turned as he stomped toward them, sniffing their panic with contempt.

  “We’re gonna figure out who needs wh—”

  He saw Black and his chauffeur approaching.

  “Where’s he going?” he demanded.

  “Says he’s gotta get to the C.P. to use the radio,” the medic panted.

  “Hell,” the sergeant grunted, “he can’t fuck it up any worse than it already is.”

  He stomped past toward the group of soldiers, looking dubiously over his shoulder at Black. Black gave a downward thumbs-up as the medic carried him out the door and down the corridor.

  “How you doing, sir?” the medic puffed.

  They were passing through a stone passageway now, the thunder outside momentarily dulled to a heavy rumble.

  “Goopy.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “What’d you give me?”

  “Ain’t the drugs, sir. It’s the concussion.”

  “Oh.”

  They turned a corner. The noise was building again ahead of them.

  “But I gave you a shitload of morphine.”

  “Oh.”

  The medic turned again and a square of light appeared in front of them.

  “Gonna be loud again, sir.”

  Cold air hit them as they burst into a narrow outdoor channel between two buildings. Hessco baskets lined each side of the passage, but they were barely head high. Noise filled the universe.

  “WAIT,” Black shouted. “STOP.”

  The medic complied. With nothing else obstructing the sightlines, Black momentarily had an upside-down, nearly three-hundred-sixty-degree view of Vega’s surroundings.

  “GOTTA MOVE, SIR.”

  He looked up. Or down. Down past the medic, and saw.

  They clung to the vertex of a great cavern, its walls studded with inverted trees, its floor a gray roil of clouds, all the air within it echoing with awful sound.

  He saw what lay in every mountainslope sliding away beneath them in every direction. Saw what was brought upon Vega, and understood what was intended. He’d never seen or heard anything like it in his life.

  Not even that day.

  He felt certain in that moment that if he let go he would fall past those slopes and tumble among those clouds.

  Not even on that mountain.

  “SIR!” the medic urged.

  “KEEP GOING,” Black yelled.

  They pushed on through the next entrance, cutting left at the first intersection. They were on the same route Caine had taken with him his first night at Vega.

  “They don’t know what, sir?” the medic panted.

  “What?”

  “What was it you said you know . . .”

  He gasped and ran.

  “. . . that
the C.P. guys don’t know?”

  Slung across the kid’s shoulders, Black considered how to answer that question succinctly.

  That you’re facing more fighters than you or your headquarters ever imagined because your lieutenant murdered a kid and the Army built a wall and I thought I knew what I was doing and all of us together managed to accomplish what no one has accomplished in thousands of years, which is unite everyone in this valley in a single purpose.

  They were close to the CP.

  And we don’t have a chance of holding this post unless everyone they’ve got in the province comes to help us.

  “Just keep going.”

  The medic stomped around the final corner. The CP was just up the corridor.

  “Thank you,” Black muttered woozily.

  “Right.”

  They’d arrived at the little door to the radio room.

  “If it helps,” Black said, “I ordered you to take me here.”

  “Aw, fuck your orders, sir.”

  The medic kicked the door open with a boot and squatted sideways through the low frame, barely managing to squeeze himself and Black through it.

  He stopped short. Black turned his head upward at the upended scene before them.

  Despite the outpost being under what the tactics manual would call a complex attack from a superior and determined force preparing the battlefield for ground assault, there was only one frantic, red-faced person on duty in the command post to direct its defenses.

  Standing among the racks of radios, a taut telephone-style cord circling his body and stretching to a handset tucked under his chin, another handset in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other hand, and a raft of maps sprawled across one another and spilling from the desktop, stood the cool kid. The freckled, T-shirted punk who’d been at the desk every time Black had been to the CP before. There was nothing cool about him right now.

  “Where the fuck is everybody?” he screamed at them hysterically.

  40

  The radio nets were a cacophony of traffic, everyone from every corner of the outpost talking on top of everyone else, crosstalk clashing in the speakers, all of which appeared to have been turned on at once.

  The panicked kid had been in the CP by himself for who knows how long, trying to juggle it all. He’d been expected to monitor the radios and read his book during the quiet times, and step out of the way for his platoon leader or platoon sergeant when something real was happening. From the look of the brick-size paperback lying on the floor next to the cot, that’s exactly what he had been doing. He hadn’t been expected to do this.

  “Yeah, I know!” the kid shouted into a handset. “I’m getting it!”

  He was trying to secure ammunition for one of the guard towers that was nearly out. Every other radio was clamoring for his attention simultaneously.

  “Take them to Two!” he yelled at one walkie-talkie, shoving another under his arm.

  The medic squatted and tried without success to place his cargo carefully on the cot. Black sloughed off his shoulders and tumbled heavily onto the rack. The room upended itself and he clung to the cot rails, stomach turning, head filled to bursting.

  “Ohhhhh,” he groaned, squeezing his eyes shut.

  The medic stood, stretching his back, and surveyed the situation dubiously.

  “What the fuck, sir?” the frazzled sentinel cried between transmissions.

  He snatched up the walkie again.

  “No, take them to Two!”

  “Go,” Black said to the medic, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Get back and do your thing.”

  “You sure, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Black replied, though he wasn’t.

  “Just stay still and rest, sir,” he said. “I’ll be back to check on you, whenever I can.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Someone hurled profanities at someone else over the nets. The medic gave a last skeptical look at the two of them and disappeared.

  Black opened his eyes, blinking hard to clear the splotches in his vision. It was hardly quieter in here than it had been in the open air. The dissonant chorus of individual sounds outside was just buffed or dulled to sharper or rounder edges.

  The kid was shouting into his radios.

  “Where’s Sergeant Caine?” Black asked the ceiling.

  “What?”

  He juggled handsets.

  “No, to Two! I don’t fucking know, sir!”

  “Where did you last see him?”

  “I don’t know! Hours ago.”

  “So he’s still gone.”

  “He’s what?”

  “What about Sergeant Merrick?”

  “You tell me, sir!”

  “He hasn’t been by here or checked in?”

  “No, he hasn’t fucking been by here!” the kid shrieked at him. “Nobody’s been by here!”

  He craned to answer a different call.

  “Two-forty ammo, not fifty cal!”

  He tossed the handset.

  “I’ve been here by myself the whole fucking time! I don’t know where anybody is!”

  “Has there been any traffic on the patrol net?”

  “The patrol net?”

  The radio channel used by personnel when they left Vega on foot.

  “Yeah, the patrol net!”

  “I’m not monitoring the patrol net! Why would I be monitoring the—”

  Black cut him off.

  “What is Battalion headquarters saying about getting us help?”

  The kid looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Battalion ain’t saying shit, sir!”

  “Why not?”

  “The retrans!”

  The retrans.

  A pit opened in Black’s stomach.

  “We’re not talking to anybody!” the kid hollered. “We’re just talking to ourselves!”

  He’d forgotten. The antenna hadn’t been repaired yet.

  “mIRC chat!” he countered.

  “They put a rocket in the fucking dish!”

  Their attackers had done their homework.

  “The sat phone!”

  “I told you, sir, it don’t work down here!”

  “That was true?!” Black exclaimed, flabbergasted.

  “Yeah, it was true! Sat phone doesn’t do shit!”

  Black closed his eyes.

  “Where the hell is Sergeant Merrick?” the kid cried desperately.

  Battalion didn’t even know they were under attack.

  “Somebody,” the soldier spat as he snatched up a handset, “needs to get him the he—”

  “Sergeant Caine and Sergeant Merrick are not on the COP.”

  The kid gawked at him slackly. The radios, jabbering for his attention, went unanswered.

  “What?” he cried. “Where the hell are they?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Black said urgently. “You need to check the patr—”

  “Well, who the hell is in charge of this place?”

  “You are.”

  “What?!”

  In the noise and chaos of the fight, probably no one had figured out that both senior sergeants, one of whom would be expected to fill in for Lieutenant Pistone, were absent and the kid was in the CP all by himself.

  “Stay cool,” Black replied unconvincingly.

  Or things had just been too desperate for anyone to stop what they were doing and go help him.

  “Oh, we’re fucked,” the kid declared.

  All the radios clamored at once.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, ramping up. “Nobody knows.”

  Black tried to sit up. The room promptly went sideways. Back down.

  “Answer your radios,” he directed, eyes pinched shut against
the nausea.

  “Nobody knows! Nobody’s gonna come!”

  “Answer your radios!”

  The kid snatched another of his handsets suddenly.

  “No, don’t try to go to the mortar p—”

  Someone stepped on his transmission. He cursed.

  “I said don’t go to the mortar pit!” the kid hollered, kicking the desk.

  “Calm down.”

  “Fuck that, sir!” the kid yelled, his voice going shrill. “What are we gonna fucking do?”

  “Calm down.”

  “You calm down, L.T.! I’m trying to—”

  He lowered the handset and crammed the walkie-talkie full against his mouth.

  “Just hold on! I’m almost with you guys!”

  A blast nearby shook the room.

  “Goddamn it!” the kid yelled as the radio speakers doused him in feedback.

  “CALM. DOWN,” Black shouted, his voice painfully loud in his head.

  The kid threw all the handsets and walkies down onto the desktop at once. Black twisted to his side and pawed the big paperback off the floor. The kid made fists and hollered at him goggle-eyed.

  “STOP TELLING ME TO CALM D—”

  Black threw overhand. The book went splaying through the air in a straight line and made square contact with the middle of the kid’s face.

  He staggered backward, hands treading air, and gawked at Black wide-eyed.

  “What the FUCK!” he screeched.

  Black collapsed back onto the cot, dizzy from the effort of throwing.

  “What’s your name?” he asked the ceiling through squinched eyes.

  He’d never seen the kid wearing his actual coat with his name tape on it. Just a T-shirt.

  “What?”

  “What’s your name?” Black shouted, causing the kid to flinch.

  “Hubbard!” he shrieked.

  Black exhaled. The racket outside was unreal.

  “Hubbard,” he said, holding the cot rails. “Look at me.”

  His eyes were still closed against the dizziness.

  “Are you looking at me?”

  “Yes!” Hubbard retorted with all the petulance of a grounded teenager.

  “Your compound is getting breached tonight.”

  He heard the kid among his maps and radios, panting.