by Project Itoh
“What’s up, chief?” I asked Williams.
“Something’s following us. One of the passengers came and told us. Looks like a helicopter.”
“Do we have a visual?” I asked.
“Not from our carriages. We need to get to the train’s ass for some proper recon.”
We pushed our way through the rest of the carriages until we reached the end of the line. The passengers swarmed around us, jabbing their fingers frantically toward the back of the train. We used international sign language to assure them that we understood—that is to say, we nodded our heads over and over again. When we reached the final door we swung it open. There, amid the noise, was a young boy, sitting on the roof, his legs dangling over the edge. He was pointing at the sky.
I looked up from the track.
“See anything?” Williams asked.
“No.”
I put on my combat glasses and adjusted my ARs.
Now I could see a black dot on the horizon. A helicopter. Low altitude—virtually on the train tracks. It was closing in, fast.
“Chinese,” Williams said. Just what you would expect for a civil war in a poor country. It used to be Russians who supplied arms to the Third World; now China was the go-to country of choice. A basic Chinese battle helicopter was a fraction of the price of the high-tech American or European models. Most AKs going around these days were actually Chinese rip-offs too.
In other words, a Chinese-made helicopter closing in on us could have meant any number of things. It could be the Pakistan Army, Hindu India, the New India Army, or Eugene & Krupps.
Looking closer, I could see what looked like machine guns attached to its sides.
“Calling Blue Boy, this is Jaeger One. There is an armed helicopter closing in from the rear of—”
I had already turned and started heading back into the carriage, but suddenly I was cut off by the fact that the front end of the car was speeding toward me. For some reason the whole carriage was drifting behind me. It took me a split second to realize that it had come to a sudden stop and its contents were being tossed around like clothes in a washing machine.
And then I realized that I had been out cold. For how long? A minute? An hour?
There was a high-pitched ringing in my ear, and I felt curiously dissociated from my surroundings. It reminded me of how I felt in the hospital that summer when I killed Mom. I felt a squirming sensation all over my body. No doubt it was my SmartSuit, diagnosing my injuries and adjusting accordingly to stem any open wounds and compensate for any bruising.
The passenger seats were to my right and the ceiling was to my left. I paused to consider which way gravity was.
I felt like I was trapped in a one-dimensional world, except instead of there being only one dimension, there was only one sense: sight. I could see, but I couldn’t work out my x and y axes. Most of the passengers were piled up on the side where the window was. Williams too. I could see a bloody arm protruding from the layer of people. I vaguely remembered seeing something like this in a movie once, but I couldn’t remember which one.
Presently, I could hear something that sounded like fireworks in the distance.
Ah, gunfire, I thought to myself, and tried to move my body. I’d been bruised all over, but fortunately nothing more serious than that. I knew that I’d been hurt, and I knew where I’d been hurt, but as I didn’t feel the pain I was able to move without trouble. I exited the carriage from the rear door.
The rail tracks seemed to have moved over to our right.
The carriages toward the front of the train didn’t seem to have shifted quite so much. We must have been thrown around by a centrifugal force. The coupling had broken off, and we had been slingshotted into the air. I couldn’t begin to imagine how far the people on the roof had been thrown. Our whole carriage was lying on its side. I ignored the buzzing in my ears to look over toward the train cars way in front: one was on fire. There was a black metallic vehicle skimming the ground, borne aloft by a rotary wing. And I could see figures in the distance, dancing the dance of Special Forces, moving in elegant formation.
A bullet flew in my direction and landed right in front of me.
That jerked me back to reality. I leapt for cover behind the overturned carriage. From this distance the figures up front were mere specters; I could barely even see them in their camouflage gear. I activated my ARs—any of the vanguard who had survived would be engaging with our ambushers now, so I called for a status update.
I didn’t have time to be looking at their names individually. Cardiac arrest. No response. Arm torn off. Broken legs. Having said that, my own entry showed multiple fractures and internal hemorrhaging, and I was still combat effective, so our SmartSuit injury sensors weren’t the be-all and end-all.
“Blue Boy! This is Jaeger One calling Blue Boy! Do you read me?”
No response.
Using the carriage for cover I moved toward the action as quickly as was prudent under the circumstances. The screams and groans of the passengers who were still conscious melded together to form an unearthly cacophony. This must have been what the Ligeti sounded like to the Eugene & Krupps sentinels. Some of the passengers were now crawling out through the door and stumbling away to freedom. The lucky ones were starting to recover.
And then one of the survivors who tried to run ahead of me had his face blown off. A bullet intended for me, no doubt.
I retreated back into the shadows and decided to try Leland’s team again.
“Blue Boy. Are you there, Blue Boy? Blue Boy?”
This time I was met by what seemed like an excessively cheerful reply.
“Blue Boy here! Is this Jaeger One? Over.”
Shit, I’d forgotten to state my name.
“Affirmative, this is Jaeger One. My position is currently four carriages back from yours. What’s your status there? Over.”
“The engine appears to have been blown up, sir.” Leland still sounded as cheerful as ever. “Immediately after the explosion we were attacked and surrounded by airborne assault troops. We’re currently exchanging fire with them. We’re all trapped inside the overturned carriage. They’re using their machine guns to open holes in the walls, sir! Over!”
Like a Clint Eastwood movie, I remembered. A movie where the side of a bus was opened up by machine-gun fire. Clint played a detective whose job it was to defend a woman who was a key witness in a case and was being targeted by crooked cops. And that made me think of the person we had been tasked to guard: John Paul.
“What about the prisoners? Over.”
“We can’t tell what’s happening in the next carriage, sir. We’re pinned down. I do know that the guys guarding the car aren’t responding. SmartSuits are reporting them dead. When I tried to leave this car to investigate my left arm was blown off my shoulder, sir! Over.”
Leland’s voice was as positive as ever as he rattled off the list of disasters. Damn him—it almost made me laugh. But I could tell he wasn’t joking. That was just the state we were in now, we who could perceive pain without feeling it. The Special Forces with our sensory masking. An arm ripped out of its socket? The SmartSuit would soon see to the blood, no worries. You could imagine the stories the guys would be telling down at the bar later. Hey guys, I was charging along without a care in the world and fuck me, I never noticed that my own head had been blown off! Whaddaya know!
“Are you hurt?” I vocalized almost unconsciously.
I suppose Leland was a bit taken aback to be asked such an irrelevant question under the circumstances. “Uh, yes, sir, I guess I am. I can tell I’ve been hurt, I mean. I can’t feel anything of course. No problem, sir. Pain’s not too much of a—motherfucker! Clavis, they got Nelson. Shit! Nelson’s down, sir! Fuck! Goddamn! Over!”
I gritted my teeth and started advancing again. The enemy had our train car surrounded in siege formation. I took a hand grenade out and threw it toward the car.
A rumble. I took advantage of the collapse in their forma
tion caused by the explosion to move closer by another carriage. From my new cover I looked out to examine the situation.
I could just about make out some figures in camouflage gear. Many of them were streaked with scarlet. I realized that these were open wounds. Stumps, even. Two soldiers standing near the point where my grenade went off had lost arms and legs. They were now moving for cover, most of their bodies camouflaged except for their newly acquired stumps that were spurting crimson blood onto the terrain. Leland’s crew took full advantage of the lull to launch a counteroffensive, throwing a grenade at the enemies on the other side and following it with a fusillade. I used the opportunity to move closer by yet another carriage. Almost there. Almost ready to link up.
I performed another quick recon. We’d managed to kill a few of them in the short time since I launched my grenade.
But the walking wounded seemed impervious to their pain. There were men who had lost arms or legs or were bleeding out but still maintained battle formation and were firing away. Who were these assailants? How far did we have to grind them down before they would die? This was like a zombie film, I thought. And not the twentieth-century sort with the shambling walking dead—these were the lean, mean, fast zombies of the early twenty-first century.
Sensory masking.
Finally it hit me. The enemy had received pain masking too. They’d had their brains messed with so that they could have their pain temporarily filtered out; they could sense when they had been hurt without really feeling it. The nightmarish vision I’d had back in the hotel while I was mowing down the children had now proved to be strikingly prescient. We were finding out what would happen when two groups met up—two groups that had both received BEAR treatment.
That’s right. None of the G9 countries had ever had cause to meet one another on the battlefield, obviously. There had never been a test case where two equally technologically advanced militaries had been pitted against each other. Modern warfare, as far as we were concerned, meant asymmetric warfare in its truest sense. It meant rich white guys invading enemy territory and blowing seven shades of shit out of poor brown guys. That was what all of our plans and missions essentially came down to.
That was why no one had predicted or planned for or trained us for a situation such as this one. A zombie shootout. Our ambushers had evidently been at the receiving end of some fairly high-tech military support treatment before coming here. Technology that made them impervious to pain and indifferent to the fact that they were losing blood and even limbs in the course of engaging the enemy.
“The enemy has received sensory masking!” I told Leland.
“Yes sir, we noticed that! We’ll just have to flatten them into hamburgers, sir! Over!”
I was lost for words. This was … grotesque. This just wasn’t war anymore.
I admit it. I lost my nerve.
The mental image of both sides standing there, firing away at each other until we were literally no more than piles of mincemeat. It shocked me to my core. The fear of death is always with you when you’re on a mission. Our job is to take that fear and link it to our desire to live. So it wasn’t the fear of death that was paralyzing me. It was the vision of a battle taken to its logical conclusion of an eternal shootout without pain or feeling.
I hadn’t yet reached the train car where Leland and the others were under siege. I wasn’t yet close enough to properly engage with the soldiers who had taken ten bullets to the belly and lost their fingers and arms and legs and ears and jaws and cheeks but were still fighting. I was out of range. And worst of all, I was glad that I was out of range.
The limits of this battle were no longer the effective firing range of the weapons, though. The limit was now how far you could imagine yourself being pushed into the realm of the grotesque, how happy you were to keep fighting even when injured to the point of permanent disfigurement. The limit was the map of the mind that showed what to do to suppress emotion and feeling.
I was spurred on by guilt now—guilt that I had yet to join my comrades on the battlefield. I leapt out of my hiding place and ran full speed toward the carriage where Leland was holed up. Not a professional judgment call or a pragmatic decision, just a blind dash.
The world was a cruel place. For some reason, not a single bullet hit me during my desperado charge. I later realized that it was probably because our assailants were already retreating at that point, but at the time it felt bizarre, like I was being cheated out of my chance to take part in the battle. Why? Why couldn’t I be part of it? I was frustrated, vexed, even, that no one was shooting me.
I slipped into the carriage where Leland and what was left of the crew were making their stand.
“Jaeger One, sir, how are things outside?” was the first thing Leland said to me.
The men were collapsed across the floor. Various parts of their bodies were soaked in red. Most of them held guns in their hands and even now were ready to counterattack. I realized that a hand grenade had exploded inside the carriage, and evil-looking fragments were scattered about the place, embedded in the walls and furniture and ceiling, leaving the room glittering like a bizarre planetarium.
I looked at Leland. Jesus. It wasn’t just his arm that he’d lost.
The lower half of his body had been blown away, and his guts were dribbling out. His SmartSuit was doing its futile best to keep him alive. The floor—or, to be precise, what used to be the left wall of the train car—was covered in a slippery, half-congealed black film of the men’s blood.
I looked around to see if I could spot Leland’s legs. Nelson had an extra pair of legs in his lap and by the looks of things wouldn’t be needing them: his face had been ripped off from his jaw to his right ear. You could see right through his exposed cheek to his upper teeth, which shone pearly white, making him look like a grinning skeleton that hadn’t yet been properly cleaned of its skin. I picked up the pair of legs, and then realized that they might not have even been Leland’s.
I handed them over to Leland anyway—they would have to do for the time being. He gave a strained laugh. I realized that his consciousness was fading. Ready to disappear for good any minute now.
“What’s … happening outside … sir? The bastards … did … we get all …” Leland’s voice trailed off and was gone. He was gone. All traces of consciousness in his brain, gone.
“Who knows,” I said to Leland’s corpse.
Outside, the thrum of the helicopter engine was turning into a high-pitched whine in the distance.
There were no more gunshots or explosions. They were replaced by the wailing of the injured passengers.
A Ligeti.
1
One.
Two.
I was counting the coffins.
Three.
Four.
I stared up at the sky for a long time. A real long time. Long enough that I never wanted to have to look at the sky again. I stared so much that the motherly form of the Globemaster gradually approaching the runway was starting to look like a whale or a dolphin, or maybe some nameless prehistoric fish. A black fish swimming through the gray June skies. And I was standing at the bottom of the sea. The fish swam through the ocean of grayness and eventually touched down gently in our vicinity and opened its giant womb to the world to release the eggs it had been carrying in its belly.
The eggs emerged from the womb. The eggs of the deceased. The steel fish gave birth to eggs of death.
One, two. I counted them. The coffins emerging from the gaping womb. The eggs.
The corpses that had been scraped up, patched together, reconstructed from nearly nothing restored, draped with the Stars and Stripes, and tagged.
Five, six. I counted the coffins.
I wasn’t the only one counting. The US Armed Forces were also counting.
They counted the coffins and let the appropriate people know of their arrival. One, two, three, four. To be precise, it was IMADS doing the counting: the International Military Auxiliary Delivery Ser
vice. Using the metadata embedded in the tags in the coffins. Fedex let you know when your parcel arrived; IMADS let you know when your coffin arrived.
Soldiers carried the coffins. I carried the coffins. Williams carried the coffins. The survivors carried the coffins.
Inside them were fragments of flesh.
They had been carefully pieced together and reconstructed. I caught a glimpse of the operation back at base camp. Technicians skillfully piecing things together. They needed to have something resembling a body before they could send the remains back home to their families. The technicians used genetic markers and the tags on the fragments of clothes to match the correct pieces of flesh to the correct bodies. The correct intestines, the correct fingers, the correct skin, the correct eyeball.
The coffins were full of corpses that had been fabricated just like that.
As I carried the coffins I tried to figure out if I was angry. My comrades had died. Many of them. I was allowed to be angry. I was supposed to be angry. I should be hating someone. The soldiers who ambushed us. Or the mastermind behind the surprise attack.
But the harsh reality was that the anger and the hatred that should have been welling up inside me was nowhere to be found.
Without turning my head I looked over to Williams, who was carrying the same coffin on the other side. There, in his face, were anger, hatred, sadness, just as they should be. Tight lips and a shining desire to kill the as-yet-unidentified mastermind. I tried copying him by stiffening my lips and squinting. After holding the face for a couple of minutes I started to think that maybe I was beginning to feel angry after all. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be hating yet, but maybe I could hate them once I found out.
I wondered if Williams’s righteous anger, his anger for his fallen comrades, could be called a manifestation of the conscience. To be angry on behalf of somebody else. To hate on behalf of people who were not yourself.
I didn’t have that feeling. I did feel sorrow, but that sorrow steadfastly refused to blossom into anger. And who was I supposed to hate, anyway? Our assailants? The mastermind behind the attack? John Paul?