A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  In her mind, Raoul felt almost like a sacrifice.

  Hours later, Fenn almost killed Willy McElroy when Willy tried to stop him from leaving the longhouse, catching him just outside one of the small doors as Fenn had tried to slink away into the dark.

  “Orders,” Willy said. “Ted said no one leaves.”

  And then, suddenly, Fenn was standing, legs spread, still in most of his gear, holding Willy McElroy off the ground, his hands bunched in the fabric of Willy’s filthy jumpsuit, his face nose to nose with Willy’s. Willy’s head was craning back, pressed against the wood and corrugated ribs of the outside of the longhouse as he twisted to get away from Fenn’s face like he feared being bitten. Fenn was shouting in Willy’s face, breathing the fumes of liquor and gun oil onto him. He was going to kill Willy, but he was stymied by the question of how to. With both hands twisted into Willy’s armpits, how could he get to his sidearm?

  If he’d had a third arm, Willy would’ve been dead. He didn’t, so Willy remained alive. Strange, the vicissitudes of fate. Fenn dropped him instead, turned his back, and walked off.

  After that, it’d been Fenn who’d tackled Ted as he ran through the camp, shouting, “Gas! Gas! Gas!” He’d hit him without knowing it was Ted. When he rolled off, Ted had said, “Told him that’s what we needed. Gas.”

  “Told who?”

  “Get the fuck off me, Captain. I’m still in charge here.”

  Fenn had slept in the mess, amid the mess. The bodies and pieces of bodies had all been moved out. The wounded were convalescing elsewhere. He’d tried the field house first, but it was locked. No one was inside. From outside the door, he could hear the radios hissing static. No one to listen through the long reaches of the night.

  He’d tried to make coffee, but all the generators were off. The pantry was well-stocked, but there was nowhere to cook anything. He wondered how long it’d been since he’d eaten, and it was long enough that the very thought of food made his stomach turn. There were crackers. Survival biscuits of compressed meal, vitamins, protein powder. He gnawed one of those like it was a bone, and he sat with his head down, cradled in the crook of one arm, waiting for dawn.

  It is a terrible thing to know, well in advance of it, how your story is going to end. To harbor no illusions. To have no faith in the miraculous or trust in your own essential cosmic goodness and importance to see you through. Most men, Fenn had decided, believed in something right up until the end. And he’d seen enough endings to have worked up what he felt was a fairly robust sample.

  They believed in fate, some of them, or, at least, fatality. They believed in God or some higher organizing principle. Failing that, they believed in the mission or the men or their men or the nobility of their exercise. But in almost all of them, buried deeply near the core of whatever else it was they believed, was the belief that they were somehow special. That the universe had plans for them that predicated any mean or pointless death before they’d done what it was that they, in their specialness, were meant to do.

  And while most men could be merely talked out of their larger faiths, be betrayed by them, broken of them by mere age or experience or hard eureka moments, it would often take some massive shock to the system to jar that one little last nugget of belief loose. To shatter it and show it for the nakedly ridiculous conceit it truly was. Death, Fenn knew, leveled all men. Death removed all illusions.

  We are none of us special. We are not loved or looked after. There are no grand designs.

  In the primal dark of a primal world, Fenn slept and dreamed alone of nothing.

  MORNING. The last one.

  Carter woke at dawn. There was no siren, but the sun coming back seemed an abomination that needed settling. The first instinct was to kill, as though the stars could be put out just by hating them.

  In his tent, Vic was gone. Fenn had never come home. Carter had an instant’s fear that everyone had died but him. Worse, that they’d all gone off and left him. That Eddie or Ted had come through with some late Christmas miracle and he’d missed the last ride there was ever going to be. The fear deepened until it became terror. A fist squeezing his heart so that he had to get up and find another human face or die right there in his bed.

  So he rose, pulled his jacket on, stepped to the door, and was stunned by the diamond beauty of the breaking light over ice-frosted grass and glittering canvas gone stiff with faintly ammoniac ice. It was beautiful, fragile, gleaming, and terribly quiet. Almost hallucinatory, as though he’d been dosed by something in his sleep that brought out the hard angles and soft interior of everything on which his eyes fell. Head muzzy and full of cotton, he was afraid to step out and leave his dirty boot prints on this strange display of nature’s alien perfection.

  Looking down the tent line, he didn’t see another living soul. He crouched down and ran a palm across a tuft of silvered grass, its gilding of frost melting under his hand. It seemed to him that he’d woken to a world made of glass and had been given the power to destroy it with his touch. The silence was narcotic. The sound of his breath, his heartbeat, the squelch of his pulse were the only sounds in the universe, and he was as alone as anyone had ever been until Lambert, the mechanic, came around the edge of his tent in a filthy jumpsuit and face blackened with oil.

  “God, I thought everyone else had died,” Lambert said. He had an accent that made him sound like a news commentator. Every word was a pronouncement. From his squat, Carter looked up at him and marveled, slack-jawed, as he grunted out a huff of steam. And even after Lambert had passed on in the direction of the field and the longhouse, Carter wasn’t sure that he hadn’t just imagined him.

  He’d left boot prints in the frost rime.

  Carter thought he might be imagining those as well, so he touched one—fitting his hand into the smear in the glaze of ice and considering it for a moment, feeling the odd sizzle of the sublimating ice against his palm.

  He stood. He fished a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, and the sound of the crinkling foil was like a peal of thunder. Squinting down the line, he felt something bump against his ankles and looked to see Cat butting its head against the leather of his boots, scales gone a dirty gray-brown, nails scrabbling at the dirt inside the door.

  “Cat,” Carter said.

  Cat didn’t respond. The thing never had, its name meaningless to it like the names of everything else here were meaningless to Carter.

  “I was looking for you last night, you know.”

  Carter reached down and touched the little animal, bumping the tips of suddenly terribly sensitive fingers down the soft fuzz of its scales. Crouching in the doorway, Carter smoked and he stared—watching for movement, feeling for life beyond.

  “How long did I sleep, Cat?” he asked, the words so close in the cold dawn that it sounded to him like he was whispering into his own ear. “Forever, I think.”

  Under his hand, Cat’s body was warm like a gun. Carter’s cigarette burned down to the filter, and the smell of it was like burning aircraft dope, chemical and sharp and sour, which he didn’t like at all. It reminded him of Lefty. Carter looked at the smoldering ember and wrinkled his nose at the stink. He flicked it disdainfully out into the perfect snow.

  Under his hand, he felt Cat tense—ready to bound off after it, to play its game with Carter. But then, Cat didn’t run. It relaxed instead, opened its little mouth, hissed and spit a couple of times around its bright, needle fangs, then lowered its head, turned, and slunk back to its bed of tattered rags by the door and started tearing at it with a fury.

  Carter watched. He felt there was some kind of lesson there. Some indictment or vital message that Cat was trying to get across, but he couldn’t figure out what it might be. It was just the day, he decided. Everything felt portentous. He ran a hand through his clean hair, sniffed at the stinging, astringent air, and stepped out into the beautiful, empty world alone.

  Fenn woke before dawn to a quiet like death, like he was the last man alive. He was half-frozen, so
re all over from sleeping with his head on a table, his back arched like a cat ready for a fight. There was no coffee. In the night and darkness, someone had come and thrown a musty blanket over his shoulders, but it’d slipped off to puddle around his feet on the cold ground.

  He stood and stretched and, for a minute, saw lights sparking behind his closed eyelids like the blooming flares of antiaircraft fire. He had to sit down again. Without his armor on, the cold was even more ferocious and seemed to have leaked inside him as though through a thousand pinhole wounds.

  There was just enough light to make out the frayed selvage between land and sky through windows turned into portholes by frost rime—closing apertures of ghostly diffusion, looking out upon a snow-globe world made marvelous by brief peace and the snow’s disdain for detail. His breath steamed like a soul continually fighting for escape. In his head, he imagined the smell of eggs scrambling and toast burning and ham in a pan. A pine fire. The blanket joy of comforts, dimly recalled.

  The worst of the mess tables was stained permanently with blood that had been scrubbed and bleached from the wood but still showed in dark smears. In the galley, he found a cleaver but felt it inadequate to the task he had in mind. He rooted around until, near an old potbellied stove, rarely used (though, had he known about it, one that would’ve made his night considerably more comfortable), he found an axe. He applied the axe to the table with some vigor. He tore up cardboard cases once used to hold bags of powdered egg. He pulled splinters from the rough wood posts used to hold up the tent canvas. By the time he was done, he’d worked up a sweat that froze against his skin every time he paused for breath, but had the makings of a decent fire. He piled his fuel, his tinder, his shredded cardboard, in the middle of a space he’d cleared on the floor and lit it with his lighter in ten places. He blew carefully on the guttering flames, coaxing them to spread, then squatted on his haunches, humming distractedly to himself, and waited to see if they would take.

  They did. He tried to lift a tin coffee urn from one of the tables at the end of the mess and, when it resisted, tore it free of the wood to which it’d been bolted. His teeth were bared, his muscles full of blood.

  He set the urn as close to the fire as he could get it. Inside, it was full of frozen coffee. No telling how many days old. Two, at least. With a stick of broken table, he pushed the fire up around the back of the urn and piled on more wood. When he saw that the smoke was not escaping, he climbed up atop another table and, with a knife from the kitchen, stabbed at the canvas until a tattered hole was born.

  “Chimney,” he said to no one in particular, then lifted the top of the urn off with his sleeve and saw that the coffee was beginning to melt. Just a few minutes more now.

  He went to find a clean mug, powdered creamer, sugar. In one of Johnny All-Around’s ice boxes, he found some native ham steaks, already cut. He stabbed one onto the end of a long barbecue fork and charred it over the flames while he waited. He ate it off the fork, pulling bites off with his teeth, burning his cheeks and his tongue. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted, and he grunted with pleasure at nearly every bite.

  With a rag wrapped around his hand, he pulled the spigot on the coffeepot. Coffee poured forth. This made Fenn smile, and he jammed his mug beneath the stream. It was terrible, tasting like smoke and burning plastic and only vaguely like coffee at all. He doctored it with powdered cream and rock sugar that he’d crushed to powder with the heel of a pan, and it was the best coffee he’d ever had. He had two cups. Then he poured a third. Then, with more rags on his hands, he wiggled the urn away from the fire, lifted it, and dumped the contents onto the flames to douse them. There were still embers remaining, however. These, he pissed on—standing at attention, with his back arched and his dick in his hand, staring out one of the windows at the slowly brightening horizon.

  This was how he was when he saw the first shooting star arcing across the morning sky. Then the second and the third. He put his penis away, zipped up, and stepped to the door with a warm coffee mug cradled between his palms.

  “Well,” he said. “Well.”

  He stepped outside into the snow, leaving virgin tracks in the oblivious whiteness. He walked a ways off across what had been the stubble field, toward the falling stars. Boots crunching the shrouded grasses, he felt the difference when he crossed onto the clipped apron of a runway, and he stopped. He sipped his coffee. He watched in silent reverence the miracles happening above and beyond him.

  Silently, men gathered around him. Tommy Hill. Davey Rice, brought back from the dead. Albert Wolfe helped Porter Vaughn hobble over, one foot in a boot of plaster. Billy Stitches, walking as though everything were a dream, asked Fenn where he’d gotten that coffee. Fenn handed the cup to him and told him to drink. Max and Johnny and Emile and Lambert. Radio operators. Controllers. Mechanics. Vic drifted in from the longhouse, her glide path still having a hunting edge to it, a stiff breeze making wings of the blue quilted engine blanket she had wrapped around herself like a cape.

  Kevin. He came from the tent line to stand beside Fenn and amid the coterie, the huddled remains of the Flyboy Inc. Carpenter 7 Epsilon mission. To stand and watch the gleaming traceries of fire in the sky; to watch with the same mute amalgam of horror, fascination, dread, and sickly, fatalist joy that their arrival had likely inspired in so many lesser creatures before them; to watch as the dropships spiraled down, standing on tongues of flame, and as the cargo containers, like bombs, fell and left their comet trails of smoke and brilliant friction across the bluing bowl of sky that once had been their sole preserve. No need to hide now, to muffle their shining arrival in the sun’s cloaking radiance. No fear. No shame. No time left for pussyfooting around.

  They watched the bold fireworks of their impending future coming to Earth, and not a man among them wasn’t overawed by the display. Not a man didn’t shudder and cower slightly—cringing closer to the man beside or behind him—when the sky was split and the dignified silence was shattered by the shriek of jet engines overhead, a wing of aircraft flying in close formation, howling directly past them.

  “CB-30 transports,” Carter said when it was possible to speak again. “Hundred men or ten thousand pounds. VTOL engines. Good application here. Smart.”

  Fenn turned to look at his friend. “Kev,” he said, “what did you do before you joined the company?”

  “I flew those,” he said without hesitation, without looking away—shading his eyes and turning to watch the transports recede, to drop their men and machinery somewhere behind the Flyboy encampment. “For NRI. You?”

  “I buried my wife and son,” Fenn said.

  Carter nodded. He said nothing in reply. One of the CB-30s was altering its flight path, executing a long, screaming hook a hundred feet above tree level, skittering across the brightening sky, then standing in the air, reorienting. Carter turned full around to watch it, setting his jaw and staring daggers at it as its blunt, black nose seemed to search for him, sniffing for his scent on the frozen air.

  “Fuck you,” he said under his breath. “Come get me.”

  The scramble siren started to blow. The men standing, watching, tensed at the sound, but they did not run. They’d lost the want, but not the reflex. Behind them, in among the tents, there was some action. Bodies moving. Sounds of activity. The camp waking to a new reality.

  Ted appeared around the corner of the mess tent, stalking toward the knot of men in his perfectly pressed uniform blues, cleanly shaved, his eyes hard as flint. After finally getting around to some long-overdue business last night, he’d slept like a baby—not long, but deeply and with peace like a stone. His dreams had not been haunted. He’d done the things he needed to do. And when he’d woken, the entire world had taken on the cold, pure aspect of his imaginary white room. That was his gift. When he shouted, his voice carried the entire length of the field.

  “You all gone deaf? That’s the fucking siren.”

  No one moved. As Ted drew closer, they could see that he wa
s smiling. Among certain of the men, this inspired more panic than anything else on that strange morning.

  “Into the longhouse. Everyone. Now.”

  No one moved. The lingering CB-30 began to make a slow approach toward the infield of the Flyboy camp. Prowling. In the distance, booming could be heard. Followed shortly by whistling that became shrieking. Followed shortly by the beautiful, perfect, frozen ground some distance from the standing men and their ramshackle tents and misery erupting as though being vomited upward explosively.

  “Longhouse!”

  Now, the men moved. The CB-30 dropped its nose and laid on speed. The pilots, the mechanics, the controllers, and Ted all ran. Fenn ran. Carter ran. It became a race between them. By the end of it, they were laughing, and together they both slapped hands to the corrugated skin of the longhouse.

  “We’re bugging out,” Ted shouted. “We’re going home.”

  The transport was bucking up, its nose rising, engines howling, its assault ramps dropping even before it began to settle to the earth. More explosions shook the ground. They were closer, but still not close.

  “Those guns are ranging,” Ted said.

  “Whose guns?” someone asked.

  “Does it matter? Everyone pick a friend. No one gets forgotten. No one gets left behind. The minute that bird touches ground, we get on.”

  Carter grabbed Ted’s sleeve. “That’s an NRI transport,” he shouted.

  Ted pushed Carter away. He stumbled back but did not fall. “No, idiot. That’s a mercenary transport that just happens to be under contract to NRI. I offered him a better deal.”