Grunt Traitor

by Weston Ochse

  I sighed, wishing for the love of God that she’d have something more useful to add than her inane fucking questions.

  I felt her hand on my shoulder. I tried to shrug it away but couldn’t. Instead, she pulled me backwards and turned me.

  “Lieutenant Benjamin Mason, are you under the control of an alien entity?” Her face was dead serious.

  “I can assuredly tell you that I am not under control,” I said.

  “How do we know he’s not lying?” Stranz asked.

  I turned to him, but didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe he’s doing what he’s supposed to do,” Sula offered.

  “Are you done now?” I asked Ohirra. “I need to finish.”

  “And what is it you’re finishing, Mason?” she asked.

  I thought for a moment, then pulled free my pistols. I shot her in the faceplate eight times, then spun and shot Sula in the face eight more times.

  The others were too stunned to move as I drew my harmonic blade. Stranz was bringing out his minigun. I swung with all my power and hewed down through it with the blade. Then I brought the blade back up, severing Stranz’s right arm just above the elbow, bisecting his sergeant’s stripes.

  He screamed.

  I screamed.

  Sula screamed.

  Ohirra kicked out with her leg, catching the side of the blade near the handle. The kick was so strong that I had to let go of the blade or break my wrist trying to hold it.

  My bullets hadn’t done any serious damage to their faceplates, other than to crack and pit them. Stranz, on the other hand, was down on the ground trying to keep his blood from gushing out of his arm.

  I dove for the blade and grabbed it just as Ohirra lunged for me. I was on my back, the coldness of the concrete seeping through me, chilling my bones, freezing my soul. I held the blade up using two hands, ready to skewer anyone who came near.

  Ohirra backed away from me.

  I stood unsteadily, the blade suddenly incredibly heavy. I felt my vision dim, then constrict until all I could see were my enemies down a long, thin tunnel. I heard the blade crash to the ground. Then everything turned white—white universe, white noise, white light spearing through me until I became part of the whiteness, the essence of me forever lost. Just when I thought it would never end, a metronomic noise began to leak through the whiteness. A steady, even beat.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  It came faster and faster and faster.

  Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat

  Then faster still.

  Rattltat-Rattltat-Rattltat

  Then finally it was a full on drum roll. Rattlrattlrattlrattlrattl.

  What was it?

  Who was it?

  Could it be?

  Sorry if I’m late to the fight. I had a line of code I had to deal with.

  Softer. Softer, please.

  Mason, this is Thompson. Can you hear me? His voice boomed in my head.

  Softer, I begged, my brain mush.

  Mason, this is Thompson.

  I can’t... wait, what have I done? I attacked—oh, my God!

  You were under the control of the Master. You still are.

  Then how?

  I’ve managed to partition off an area of your brain. What goes on here is for you and I only.

  Ohirra, Stranz, are they—

  They’re hurting, but I think they’ll understand.

  Understand that I tried to kill them? Understand that I was a shit leader who tried to make them dead? How the hell could you understand something like that?

  They do, Mason. They understand. They know you wouldn’t do something like that of your own free will. It’s not in your nature.

  What do you know about my nature?

  That you’re tougher on yourself than anyone could ever be to you. That you’re a born leader and that we’d all follow you into the mouth of Hell.

  I let that sink in for a moment, then asked, You say I’m still under control?

  Yes. It wants to study the nuke. It saw in your mind what it could do and wants it rendered inert.

  How the hell am I going to get out of this?

  I have a plan.

  An image began to materialize in front of me. It was Thompson, standing smartly in his Task Force OMBRA uniform, beret canted rakishly.

  That’s not how you really are.

  No. They’ve removed my arms and legs. I’m bald and wearing a skullcap connected to wires and cables.

  Lovely, I said, seeing Michelle in my mind’s eye.

  I regretted that she wanted to die, but it was her choice, Mason. You did the right thing.

  And you? Do you want to die, Thompson?

  Absolutely not. This was... is... the best thing to happen to me. I’ve always wanted to be a hero. I’ve always wanted to make a difference. At first I was too small, but when I froze in Africa, I discovered I was too scared for combat.

  You ended up making it work.

  Only because I didn’t want to disappoint you, Mason. My fear of you not liking me was greater than my fear of dying.

  And now?

  Now I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’m a modified Gen I, with the capacity of a Gen II. This stuff comes natural to me. And now that you’ve been changed by the spores, we can communicate, as I can with any of the Cray or fungees.

  Wait... you can communicate with the aliens?

  I can communicate with the Sirens and the Cray as well as each and every fungee. You should remember, inside the fungees they’re perfectly normal.

  We ran through several groups of them. We thought the master might be using them for processing power.

  Almost right. They’re my doing. I brought those fungees together. Think of each group as a remote server, or even a static IP address. Moving from one to the other keeps the Master from finding my location. I’ve been communicating with the other HMIDs, and we’re starting to work together.

  So what are we going to do?

  You’re going to deliver the nuke to the Master.

  I can’t possibly get past all the Cray by myself. And now my team is in no shape to help.

  On the contrary, we’re going to walk right up to the Master, say hi, then poke him in the eye.

  We?

  Yep. I’m going with you.

  But how?

  Think of me as a hitchhiker of the mind.

  As easy as that?

  Oh, you have no idea how hard I’ve worked for this moment.

  Now what?

  Now you say a few last words to your team.

  The white faded, returning me once more to the Metro station platform. EXO lights formed a glow around the area, and the ground was an awful red.

  Blood.

  Too much blood.

  Oh, hell.

  Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

  Sir Winston Churchill

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  STRANZ WAS DEATHLY pale as he lay on the platform, his suit discarded, his eyes shadowed. Ohirra was out of her suit, checking the tourniquet. Any concern for the spores had gone by the wayside as she needed to attend to Stranz’s wounds. I smelled burned flesh and noted that smoke was drifting slightly from Stranz’s stump. Sula stood a few feet away, her minigun still spinning. They must have used the heat from the gun to seal the blood vessels. God, how that must have hurt.

  I stood facing them.

  Part of me wanted to still shoot them, to kill them. I recognized the Master’s will. But another part of me, the part controlled by Thompson, wanted to run to them.

  Choose your words carefully, came Thompson’s voice. I don’t know how much it can understand, and I have limited control.

  Ohirra turned towards me, fury and worry doing battle on her face.

  Sula regarded me with fear.

  The Master was keeping me from feeling the guilt I knew I should have been experiencing. Knowing that it should have been ther
e was enough to keep me grounded and realize what a terrible thing I’d done. I was the worst sort of grunt: a traitor. First I was a traitor to OMBRA, then to Dupree, then to the New United States of North America, and finally to my own grunts.

  The punishment for being a traitor used to be hanging.

  I vowed then and there that I would discover a way to pay for what I’d done. Whatever it took, I would pay.

  “Mason, why did you do it?” Ohirra said. “Stranz loved you like a father.”

  “I did what I had to,” I said. “You need to head to the stadium.”

  She regarded me for a moment. “Are you in control?” she asked.

  “The game begins in ninety minutes. You don’t want to miss the opening pitch,” I said, hoping the alien Master wouldn’t understand what I was doing... and that Ohirra would.

  “Ninety minutes,” she said, glancing at Stranz. “I’m not sure if we can make it.”

  “You have to,” I said, wishing I could go over to Ohirra and give her one last hug. “It’s bottom of the ninth and two outs.”

  “Who’s at bat?”

  “Thompson.”

  Her eyes widened slightly, then she nodded.

  I wanted to go to these people. I wanted to touch them, to hug them, apologize. Instead, I walked woodenly to the nuke, disarmed it, then resealed it inside the Faraday cage container.

  I watched as Ohirra got back into her suit. After a few moments, she picked up Stranz and held him like a child. She turned to me, her eyes unfathomable. Then she and Sula turned, leaped off the platform onto the track, and began jogging east, away from the hive and back towards Dodger Stadium where the helicopter was waiting.

  They left me in darkness. I stood there, praying silently that I hadn’t killed Stranz... that I hadn’t added his name to the list of my men who had died because of something I’d done or said. Then I turned on the flashlight, dragged the nuke to the edge of the platform, put my arms through the straps, and struggled into it. At one hundred and twenty pounds, the weight staggered me, but it wasn’t more than I’d carried before. The trick was to carry it high on the back and keep a forward lean. I struck out, heading west down the track, with Thompson as my co-pilot, and a deep understanding that I was about to pay for my sins.

  Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

  Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  WHAT’S IT LIKE, living as you live? I asked Thompson.

  It’s like being the computer instead of the operator. Remember back in the days before the alien invasion? Remember when you would sit down at a computer and go to the search engine and find all the information you could possibly need? Well that’s what it’s like for me, except I’m not the user on the computer. I am the computer. I have all the information. I have everything at my access. I have the potential computational power of every living being on earth. I can reach out and I can touch everybody who’s been infected. I can access them, I can communicate with them, and I can interact with them.

  Do you feel any pain?

  I’ve been rewired not to feel pain.

  I continued marching into the throat of the beast, vines waving in the light like worms as I passed.

  Do you feel anger?

  Yes.

  Do you want revenge?

  Yes.

  Do you feel love?

  No answer.

  I continued marching forward. My flashlight seemed to create the path rather than illuminate it. I kept between the rails, my steps uneven as I tried to hit the middle of each cross beam.

  I thought about video games and how they’d replaced playing cards for soldiers in combat. When I’d first been assigned to FOB Shank in Logar Province back in 2012 as part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, I was put in charge of the night shift perimeter patrol. There was an ISAF patrol and a US patrol, and I was part of the US patrol. My job was to ensure my two squads complemented the efforts of the ISAF forces. When we weren’t out on shift or patrolling, we were inside playing video games. Call of Duty and Halo were the favs. Having logged thousands of hours on each game, I usually sat back and watched as my men mowed down hordes of enemies and aliens without regard. There’s an addictive joy in combat action, even when it’s simulated. It’s the same joy that adrenaline junkies indulge by base jumping or free climbing. The irony was that walking night patrol with NODs, worrying that every bush or rock might hide an enemy or an IED, was far more dangerous than playing the video games... but the games were what provided the greatest rush.

  I stopped cold when I thought I saw something at the edge of the light. I turned the beam towards it and revealed a Cray facing me. A sentry, like those Olivares and I had seen in the volcanic tunnels beneath Kilimanjaro. We’d been able to sneak around those and kill them thanks to their blindness in the dark. I realized it was too late to even try and get around this one as it began to move towards me.

  I went to draw my pistol when Thompson stopped me.

  It won’t harm you.

  It was on me in a flash, face poised next to mine as it tilted its head and regarded me with its multiple eyes.

  Just as a video game separated the killer from the killed, I was aware that the EXO had separated me from the Cray, leveled the playing field. Standing here, merely human, even with a nuke strapped to my back, I felt insignificant next to the huge creature. Even as it brought its claws towards my face, I knew it could rip right through me. It took all my measure to keep from running.

  Easy, Mason. It’s just curious.

  Maybe it can be curious twenty feet away.

  Don’t like being the bug, do you?

  What the fuck does that mean?

  Under the microscope, or in the hands of a child. Didn’t you ever pick up a bug and look at it real close? Now you know how it feels.

  If I survive this I’ll never pick up a bug again.

  That’s the spirit.

  The Cray circled me and began to fiddle with the nuke. I stepped forward, then turned. I held out my hand and waggled a finger at it. “No, no, Cray.”

  It tilted its head again.

  “Bad doggie.”

  That’s almost right. They have the brain capacity similar to a dog. They’re task-oriented, much like an ant or a bee. Once a task is given, they perform it.

  What’s this one’s task, to smell my butt?

  Pretty much. Welcoming committee.

  The Cray began to move back down the track the way it had come.

  I felt the Master assert himself and felt the impulse to follow the Cray. Just a singular thought, nothing more, but it was an imperative. I tried to stop myself, pause for just a moment, but my body wouldn’t allow me.

  Fucking great, now I’m the video game and someone is playing me.

  I’m here. It’s going to work out.

  You have a plan.

  Of sorts.

  Can you break the hold on me?

  I think so.

  Think?

  Pretty confident, actually.

  Have you tried?

  Not yet.

  Why not try now?

  No answer.

  My best bud the Cray and I came to a station. The sign read Hollywood and Highland, which meant above us stood the Kodak Theater. I’d never been in it, but every Oscar ceremony for the last dozen years had been hosted there. Next to the Kodak Theater was Mann’s Chinese Theater, with all the hand- and footprints out front. I remember taking a girl named Suzie to see Matrix Reloaded at the theater. We’d joked before the film, putting our hands and feet in famous people’s castings. We’d laughed at how small Shatner’s feet were and come up with a game called What Would William Shatner Do?

  Whatever happened to Suzie, I wondered? Then I remembered. It was a deployment to Iraq. Girls like her didn’t tend to wait for grunts like me, who wanted to go to war all the time. She’d probably found a Starbucks barista or a guy who worked in the mall, trading the danger of l
iving with me for the comfort of living with someone who wouldn’t leave her to go kill something. The irony, of course, was that she’d probably died in the invasion, while I still lived. Either that or she was a fungee.

  Instead of going up the stairs into the Metro, the Cray turned left and entered a gaping hole cut into the side of the wall, revealing a tunnel that ran south.

  I wondered to myself now, as my feet moved of their own accord, WWWSD? Probably laugh his ass off.

  Why didn’t you answer my question earlier?

  Because I knew you wouldn’t like the answer, Thompson replied.

  And what’s the answer?

  That we need to see what the Master looks like. We need to get near it. We need a chance to study it.

  How long? How long did you and Mr. Pink know this would happen?

  We suspected it shortly after the cure. We knew for sure after Salinas broke the code.

  Who else knew?

  Ohirra knew.

  I thought back to how easily she’d seemed to take my treason. She must have known but couldn’t say anything.

  Why me? Why not get Ethridge to do it?

  Ethridge is dead.

  What about Olivares? Is he still alive?

  No data. All my efforts are with you now.

  What does that mean?

  I’ve loaded my primary consciousness into a mass of fungees gathered at UCLA. I’m with you for the duration.

  I hated the idea that Mr. Pink had once again used me as his pawn. Isn’t there something more important for you to be doing instead of babysitting me?

  A few seconds of silence preceded the answer.

  No.

  Ahead was a bright light. I knew what to expect. I’d been inside the bowels of a hive before. But this time, instead of sneaking around, I was about to be the guest of honor.

  May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.

  General George S. Patton Jr.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  A TUNNEL HAD been hewn from dirt and soil, leading south to the hive. Ten meters in we passed a group of sentry Cray. They were the wingless kind, but they looked no less menacing.