“What the hell am I wired up to?” he asked. As he’d already gathered, he was strapped down to a tubular frame that had been set into the pod. All over his body, circular rubber pads were stuck in a pattern that looked like something you’d see at an acupuncture clinic, showing chakra points or some mumbo jumbo.
“Electro muscular stimulation,” Nurse Mallet explained. “Keeps your muscle tone while on prolonged stays in Armored Souls.”
Facts came rushing back from a closet where Reggie had stuffed them as he pretended Armored Souls was real. “Surgery. Dr. Zimmerman mentioned something about a surgery.”
Nurse Mallet drew Reggie’s attention to a gauge pad taped over his abdomen. “Without a hitch. You never noticed a thing, and the fragments came out no problem.”
As they talked, she was peeling off the electrode pads. Maybe she was afraid that if she unstrapped him first, he’d leap from the pod, tearing the electronics out of whatever machine he was connected to.
Maybe she was right.
Reggie wanted answers. He needed to see Dr. Zimmerman.
He was afraid of the answers he’d get. Reggie just wanted to wait out his death timer in Armored Souls and head back into the game.
Why didn’t he just tell her that? She could save the trouble of undoing a lot of work that she’d no doubt have to reverse once he ventured back into Armored Souls again.
The idea of going back in sped Reggie’s heart. His breath grew quick and shallow. Still hooked up to the vitals monitors, Nurse Mallet took notice.
“Everything OK?” she asked. He could hear the genuine concern in her voice. “You’re showing signs of anxiety.”
Reggie swallowed. His mouth was dry. Had he eaten? Remembering last time he’d come out of the pod, he wiggled his nose and felt the tube running into it; he’d grown so used to it being there that he’d stopping noticing it. Jostling it made him gag.
“Easy does it. Hold on. Lemme get that for you.”
Pulling on rubber gloves, Nurse Mallet gently eased the tube out of Reggie’s stomach, catching the loose, dripping end with a piece of gauze before disposing of it in the hazardous medical trash can.
“Mind undoing the straps?” Reggie asked finally. “Maybe I can help speed things along.”
“Fine. But leave the equipment to me,” Nurse Mallet agreed. “If I break something, the hospital’s insurance covers it. If you—”
The mention of insurance set Reggie’s thoughts adrift. Insurance… destroyed juggernauts… dead platoon mates… destroyed tanks… dead friends.
“Or you could just drift off into Neverland and ignore me,” Nurse Mallet continued on blithely. “I’m fine with that, too.”
“Sorry,” Reggie said. “Lot on my mind. Guess that’s a tough sell from a guy coming out of a video game.” He offered an apologetic smile.
“Oh, I’ve seen your charts,” she countered. “I believe you’ve got a lot on your mind. Let me guess: fragged in game?”
The terminology didn’t suit a nurse, even an army nurse. Contrary to the nature of the men and women they treated, army nurses liked to keep the battlefield slang out of the hospital best they could. They took life and death too seriously to give it cutesy names.
“You game, by any chance?”
Nurse Mallet raised an eyebrow and gave him a sly smile. “Game for what?”
Reggie felt a flush of embarrassment. “I’m—I’m sorry, ma’am. I meant are you a gamer. Like video games.”
By her smirk and suppressed laughter, Reggie knew he’d been had. She knew damn well what he’d meant in the first place. “Yes. Most of the staff here has at least tried Armored Souls. Call it… professional curiosity.”
As Nurse Mallet began unstrapping Reggie from the pod, he tried very hard to think about baseball.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“I just cracked out there,” Reggie admitted.
He was seated in Dr. Zimmerman’s office, watching the ceiling fan spin. The effect was almost hypnotic, and maybe that was the point of it being there.
“Why then?” Dr. Zimmerman asked. “What was different that time than all your other missions in the game?”
“I remembered fragments, impressions mostly,” Reggie said, not bothering to sugarcoat the experience. “It was like I was back there, waiting for my Abrams to take a kill shot. I knew. I knew the rocket was coming. How’d I know a thing like that?”
Dr. Zimmerman kept tapping on his tablet as Reggie spoke. He didn’t pause or look up even as he replied. “I can’t tell you that, Reggie. Memories are funny things. I’m not a proponent of suppressed memories and early childhood trauma. I’m not here to help you piece together your past like a jigsaw consultant.”
“They have those?” Reggie asked with a chuckle.
Dr. Zimmerman snorted. “Probably not, but who knows? My point is, what actually happened back then isn’t important. What matters is how you feel about it. The experience—however you perceive it—is what matters.”
Reggie let out a seething breath to keep his cool. Doc was the last guy he needed to piss off. “So, you saying I dreamed up the ambush?”
“Not at all,” Dr. Zimmerman replied matter-of-factly. “It’s in your service record. Survivors, eyewitnesses, the medics who saved you—everyone agrees on the larger details.”
“So, I only made up the small ones.”
“‘Made up’ makes it sound like a conscious choice,” Dr. Zimmerman clarified. He made a tap with some finality to it, then set down his tablet on the desk. “I’m suggesting that you’ve legitimately forgotten most of the finer details of that encounter. Stress can do that. So can trauma, both mental and physical; you’ve suffered both. But the human mind hates puzzles, especially ones with missing pieces. Your fears, your guilt, and your imagination got together and made up a story to fill in the gaps.”
“Why would I make shit like that up, doc? Wouldn’t I lie to myself to feel better?”
“Because guilt is an asshole,” Dr. Zimmerman replied, catching Reggie off guard. It was the first time he could recall the shrink cursing. Being a soldier, the colorful side of vocabulary was front and center most of his life. Anyone who danced around it stood out like nun at a strip club.
“You didn’t dive out of that tank like some ninja who can see the future,” Dr. Zimmerman continued. “Consider it rationally. How fast does a rocket travel?”
Lying back on the couch, Reggie shrugged. “Dunno. Not my area of expertise. Couple hundred miles an hour, maybe.”
“You’ve mentioned before that you’re a baseball fan. You ever play?”
“All through high school. Varsity team for Baker Regional. I was a catcher.”
Dr. Zimmerman gave a little grunt. “Hmph. Excellent. What’s the fastest pitch you ever caught?”
“Duncan Miles,” Reggie said with a smile, bringing back memories. “Kid could thread needles with a 90-mile-an-hour heater. Got drafted by Pittsburgh out of school. Kept watching for him to make it to the bigs, but he washed out after a few years playing Double-A in Altoona.”
“So, you’re familiar with the reaction time for a baseball traveling 90 miles an hour from sixty feet away. What about the 127 to second base?”
“You a baseball geek, doc, or did you look this all up this morning like studying for a test?”
Dr. Zimmerman cocked his head. “I’ve got a Cleveland Indians hat signed by Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, and Carlos Baerga. I was never much for playing it, but I’ve been a fan my whole life. But I can tell you this much, when a pitcher throws at someone from sixty feet away—really aiming for them—there’s no time to get out of the way.”
“So what you’re saying is…”
“You didn’t dodge an anti-tank rocket like some extra from The Matrix,” Dr. Zimmerman told him. “Never happened. Maybe you wanted to. Maybe for a split second, thrown across a road by the blast, it even felt like it. But you didn’t abandon your tank just before it was destroyed by rocket fire.”
&
nbsp; That made sense if you looked at it not having been there, but it didn’t fit those flashbacks. “But I—”
“You didn’t abandon your crew.”
Reggie swallowed a lump in his throat. “But I’m here and they’re not.”
“You didn’t abandon them. You didn’t run. You didn’t sacrifice them to save yourself or whatever other story you’ve been telling yourself.”
Someone in the room sniffed. It couldn’t be Reggie, because he wasn’t crying. He didn’t cry. “That’s just not the way it happened, doc. You had to be there.”
Dr. Zimmerman opened a manila folder with stacks of pages piled inside. “I didn’t have to be. There were sixteen soldiers, including two medics, who were debriefed on the incident. Army intelligence looked into the lapse that allowed that ambush to catch your convoy off guard. From the accounts they pieced together, you were in the middle of a sentence, calling out locations of insurgents, when that rocket struck your tank.”
“I froze up,” Reggie insisted. “I got tongue-tied seeing that guy sizing me up for a coffin.”
“You froze up but recovered just in time to save yourself with a miraculous, acrobatic feat involving superhuman speed and agility?”
“C’mon, doc. You make it sound like—”
“You didn’t abandon your crew.”
Reggie couldn’t stop himself. He sobbed. What was happening to him? Had that rocket done more to him than lay him up in the hospital a while? Had it broken that wall his old man had taught him to put up, to hold it all in, tough it out, act like a man? “I was the tank commander. They were my responsibility. Why was I the only one to make it out alive? I should have been there with them. I’d have taken a bullet for any of them. Why’d they all have to die just so I could survive?”
A hand came down to rest on Reggie’s shoulder. “Shit happens, Reggie. The world isn’t roses and beer gardens. Army intelligence investigated the ambush and completely exonerated you. The lapse in intel had nothing to do with you. There wasn’t a single thing you did wrong.”
“But Chaz, Murray, Davis…”
“There is not a man or woman, alive or dead, who blames you for their deaths. Not Private Blackwell. Not Private Murray. Not Corporal Davis. Not any of their parents. Not your C.O. Not me. It’s just you, Reggie. That’s what you’ve got to come to terms with: the fact that you’re not to blame, and you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of for making it out of there when they didn’t.”
Reggie nodded, jerkily, still fighting to regain his composure. God damn himself for losing it in front of the doc. If he was on his way to a ticket back to active duty, he’d just shredded it and flushed the scraps.
Dr. Zimmerman patted Reggie amiably on the shoulder. “Take a few minutes to gather yourself. You’ve got a visitor stopping by in a little while.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Reggie returned to his hospital room feeling drained and with a sense of nagging trepidation. He’d splashed so much water on his face it ought to have counted as a shower. His eyes still stung, and he had a hollow pit in his stomach.
Who was waiting for him? Dr. Zimmerman hadn’t said. It was supposed to be a surprise.
Swallowing down his worries, Reggie turned the doorknob and stepped inside.
Standing at ease, staring out the window, was a brawny fireplug of an army sergeant in fatigues. At the sound of the door, the sergeant turned.
A puzzled frown drew Reggie’s brow together. “Whitten?”
“Hey, King,” Whitten replied with a grin.
Reggie would have known those crooked teeth of Kyle Whitten’s anywhere. They’d gone through basic together and ended up spending most of their service time in the same unit. Only Reggie’s dog tags had been around more than Whitten.
Reggie strode across the room and accepted a crushing handshake, matching it grip for grip as well as his current physical condition allowed. Whitten had a hand like a work glove, thick fingered and almost entirely callus.
“Man, just look at you, lounging around in civvies a welfare surfer wouldn’t be caught dead in,” Whitten replied, looking Reggie up and down.
“Me?” Reggie scoffed. “Look at you. I’ve been out of commission what, a month? You must’ve lost ten pounds.”
Whitten’s smile faltered a shade, but only for a moment. He patted his gut. “Gotta keep my girlish figure. How ‘bout you? They feedin’ you enough in here? Didn’t think to smuggle you in a steak, but…” He just chuckled without finishing the thought. It sounded forced.
This is why no one had been by to visit him. If Whitten was nervous being here, Reggie could only imagine the rest of the unit. He’d seen Whitten at age 18, fresh off the farm, chewed out by drill sergeants. He’d been under fire with Whitten more times than either of them could count. If Reggie hadn’t just seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have known that Kyle Whitten had a nervous setting.
“They’re feeding me. I was off regular food a while, but I just had a burger. This place doesn’t have a half bad cafeteria for a hospital. But enough about me; how’s the rest of the unit holding up?”
Whitten shrugged. “Oh. You know. Same old guys. Everyone’s doin’ their thing. Working hard. Patrols. Same old shit.” He swallowed. “It’s good seein’ ya, King.” Whitten cleared his throat. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about that ambush.”
Reggie’s lips twitched halfway to a smile. “Don’t say that too loud. That’s the reason I’m stuck here. Post-traumatic bullshit, they say. You’re liable to get diagnosed if you’re not careful.”
Whitten clasped his hands in front of him. “Is that what they say?”
Reggie nodded. “Listen, if you can get word to Colonel Tasker, let him know I’m fine, fit for duty. Maybe if the old man can lean on these pill-pushers I can get back behind a desk, at least—something in uniform.” Reggie flicked a hand in the direction of Whitten, standing there in his combat uni smelling fresh from the laundry.
“That why they say you’re in here?” Whitten asked, neck barely moving as he scanned the room with his eyes.
Reggie’s eyes narrowed. “Why? What’ve you heard?”
“Nothing,” Whitten replied in an instant. “They don’t say nothing to us. Place isn’t exactly a field hospital. Can’t exactly just drop in and check up on a guy.”
“You take leave to come see me?” Reggie asked. “Where is this place? Any time I ask, someone with a sheepskin in Psy Ops talks me in a circle. Like if I keep asking, they’ll keep making me down as Still Crazy.”
Whitten looked both ways like he was about to cross a freeway, then strode up to Reggie and cupped a hand over his ear. “Play their game,” he whispered. “Trust me. Play along.” Then Whitten pulled away, clapped Reggie on the arm, and grinned. “I’ve gotta get back. You take care, buddy.”
Reggie muttered a reply that vanished from his mind even as he spoke it. His brain was numb.
What had Whitten wanted to tell him? Why wasn’t he able?
It had been so exciting at first to see a familiar face from the outside world. But that was only half the Kyle Whitten that Reggie remembered. Grunts in the tank corp didn’t worry about conspiracies or political games. If Whitten had stuck around longer, Reggie would have been waiting for the punch line on the gag. Whitten vanishing in such a hurry after laying a bomb like that at Reggie’s feet…
Reggie wondered what sort of place he was stuck in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When Nurse Mallet had come to fetch him the following morning, Reggie had almost refused to go back to the pod. She was part of the conspiracy Whitten had hinted at, after all. But then she’d flashed him that Hollywood smile, and his doubts about her melted away.
If Nurse Mallet could fool him so easily, that was Reggie’s issue. Until he had proof, he was going to believe that he was a good enough judge of character to know that she was looking out for him. She was about the only good reason for coming up for air from that pod, anyway.
“How was
your visit with Sgt. Whitten?” she asked as they walked side-by-side down the hall to the pod room.
“Seemed a little on edge,” Reggie replied, watching for her reaction. “Good seeing him, though. Beginning to think everyone on the outside had given up on me.”
“Never that,” Nurse Mallet assured him immediately. “I think some people just aren’t comfortable in hospitals. Especially hospitals that treat wounds they can’t see. Most soldiers can look a man in the eye if he’s got just one left. Burns, scars, missing limbs… it can be hard to look at sometimes, but they know those wounds came in the line of duty and it might be them in the bed someday. Mental injuries rank right up with contagious viruses for putting a battle-hardened tough guy on edge.”
Reggie wanted to counter that he never felt that way, but he couldn’t lie to himself even long enough to lie to Nurse Mallet. He’d known guys, mostly back stateside, who’d never been the same after seeing combat. Reggie had always chalked it up to softness, no matter what line the scientists fed to the top brass about PTSD and whatnot. There was bravery, and there was faking bravery. Reggie could respect the ones who swallowed back their fear and did their jobs. But those were the ones who cracked, not the truly brave.
Then it had happened to him.
Reggie couldn’t uncry those tears. And even if it was just Doc Zimmerman in the room, Reggie had been there, too.
Dr. Zimmerman was waiting for them in the pod room. “Good morning, Sgt. King. Feeling better this morning?”
“It was nice seeing Kyle,” Reggie said. “Thanks for setting that up.”
He allowed Nurse Mallet to lend him a hand climbing into the pod. It’s not like he couldn’t have managed on his own, but he enjoyed the feel of her hands on him, even through the cloth of his hospital-issued civvies. She’d be the last real human contact he had until coming back out.
Reggie relaxed as Nurse Mallet hooked up the gaming rig.
“We don’t allow many visitors here, as a rule,” Dr. Zimmerman said. He tapped something into his tablet, pacing the room while Nurse Mallet worked. “It generally distracts from treatment efforts, causing patients to focus on post-recovery goals at the expense of their own wellness.”
Dead Mech Walking: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 1) Page 17