“I gotta get away from straight.” There wasn’t anyone there, but talking made me feel better, like the sounds of my own voice would keep me company. I’d do the phone call. Make the desk think that it was my injuries that messed me up, that the doc didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d lost an ear, for Christ’s sake, and the desk wouldn’t understand that I needed to be wired up, to re-submerge and escape from the sun and snow. To get loose. The Marine supply base was on the north side of the city, and that friendly supply sergeant was in there somewhere. Straight was all wrong, I thought, and I needed Pavlodar, dreamed in subterrene green—the only way. I didn’t know why, but I had this crazy thought going through my head and couldn’t get rid of it: if I didn’t get back to the line with Ox, the ghosts of Snyder and Burger would haunt me forever.
A tired voice answered the phone after I punched in. “Erikson.”
“Hey, Phil, it’s Sc… Wendell.”
“Jesus!” He sounded awake now. “My head case at the front, you going to assemble a story that makes sense for once? I hear you finally went psychotic.”
“Look, I don’t know what the docs told you but I’m fine. I got shot, and they must have given me something that was past its shelf life. I’ll have the story for you—”
He cut me off in midsentence. “Just shut up. People around here are already talking about it, and we have a pool to guess how long it’ll be before you crash. I didn’t want to send you there; Jackson or Martha should have gotten that posting. I don’t know who’s pulling strings for you up top, but I swear to shit, your ass is mine from now on. Get me the story before tomorrow morning, or you’re done.”
“I’ll have a draft emailed to you in two hours. Look, it won’t even be rough. I’ll give it to you polished.” The lie came to me then, easily, like all of them did. “You won’t be able to reach me once I send it, though. I have a chance to get back on the line.”
“Screw that,” he said. “Screw another promise from the wonder kid. I’ll believe it when I see it, so get it to me.”
Phil didn’t say goodbye; he just hung up. The laptop’s glare blinded me for a second, until my eyes adjusted, and I stared. Blank. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about what I had done, where I had been. There was a vague feeling of terror and of horrible things, but also a sense that if I sat there long enough and relaxed, it would all come back in a wave of shit. It did. I wrote the story while crying, in an hour, and, after sending it, thought about what it would take to make it all go away. I was going back to Pavlodar.
As I walked out the door, my phone started ringing. It was probably Phil, I figured, pissed off about a period I had forgotten, so I shut the door and left.
Son of two parents: reporting and subterrene. I needed the story, needed to see the war, like some psycho Peeping Tom with an addiction to scoping out unsuspecting housewives—only my addiction was watching death in its million forms. Kaz gave me clarity, focus, because it made everything simple. No ass grabbing at the watercooler, no having to worry about shitbags breaking into your computer and stealing your contacts, your research, your story. The irony of subterrene was that it provided the intangible and priceless: decency. Gestures that weren’t only gestures, like Ox’s holding Snyder’s head because it had totally mangled his state, or Snyder’s tossing me a beer because somehow I’d become one of them—worth his last can. Then, just as quickly, Kaz took it away, leaving you with its aftertaste, enough to get you hooked on guys like Snyder and Burger before ripping them from your grasp, as if to say, Ah-ah-ah, not too much, I want you coming back for more. And you would. I knew I would. Decency was like a drug to someone like me, someone who almost never got to see it and who rarely showed it except in trade to screw you over.
I remember running into a Special Forces guy sitting on the side of the road when I first got to Kaz. He didn’t even look at me. So I walked up to him and laid on my slickest rap, the one I used to hit some source, pry out the information with finesse. He looked at me then and smiled, said really quietly, “You’ll find out, Kaz will suck you in, won’t let go. And you’ll go down smiling like we all do, because there is no world anymore. Except Kaz.” I didn’t get it back then, and didn’t really take it now, but thought I did, only it never became clear until much later what the guy had really been saying. This was only the beginning of a mind trip. Call it false clarity on the way down, a misguided belief that crept in on my way out of the hotel to fool me into thinking I had it all figured out: you smiled at the war because it took war to show you good shit, to show you human beings. Back then, I thought that was the answer.
The walk to the north side of Shymkent went quickly and it took only an hour to find someone at the Marine supply depot willing to deal. Zip. I bought a month’s worth. The train station wasn’t too far, so I hit it, trying to move fast enough to keep from freezing, and on the way thought about how I would get north.
As soon as I stepped onto the station platform, a colonel slapped me on the back.
“Stripes, right?”
“Yeah, Colonel. Wendell. How’d you know?”
He lit a cigar and blew the smoke over his shoulder. “I thought I recognized you, saw you in Pavlodar. Can’t wait to see your piece on my Marines, son.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I just gave it to my bureau. Headed back to Pavlodar now.”
“That might be a problem,” he said.
“Why?”
“Only genetics are being allowed transit passes to the northern sector.” The colonel thought for a second. “But I could get you in with them.”
The idea made me shiver. I remembered what I had seen of them, innocent murderers. “Sir, I don’t have a combat suit and it’s freezing.”
“I’ll be back in a second, to bring you a suit.” He pulled me toward a passenger car and helped me get inside. “Get in, hang tight.”
I had my pack and sat on it, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, I nearly freaked.
Wall-to-wall betties, all around me—genetics—who stared at me with a vacant, I-could-kill-you-or-screw-you-and-not-care-about-either look.
The suit didn’t fit right. Getting into the undersuit in front of those chicks was another hassle, a tale of embarrassment that I’m sure would have been hilarious to Ox if he had been there. Forty of them, watching me deal with the hoses, my face red.
Horses—they were like horses or mules. It occurred to me after sealing the suit and hanging my helmet that these girls were low, way down in the order of things, lower than grunts. Draft animals. The military had taken a passenger car and ripped everything out except the steam heat and a samovar so they could cram as many bodies in as possible, stack Gs like vertical cordwood one layer thick.
I cracked my first tin, then smelled it. Like a summer vacation, the first bit went in easy, hit all the right mental spots, and I melted from the inside, grinned for the first time since leaving Shymkent—until the girl across from me grinned back. That killed it. I just wanted to zip, to ignore the fact that I had been shoved into a train full of Gs, and never thought the things would actually talk to me. Who knew they smiled?
“You wish for the line,” she said. The others glanced up then, curious.
I nodded. “Yeah. I left a friend there.”
“I left many friends there, sisters. I miss the line too. It is where we find our best selves.”
“Baby, you have no idea how much I understand that.” It took me a second to figure out why they looked so different this time. “Don’t you guys usually wear thermal block?”
She touched her face, like she wasn’t sure whether she had any on. “Some do, but we all wear helmets in combat. Time enough for thermal block, time for everything. I remember you.”
“Excuse me?”
She reached out and placed her hand on mine. It screwed me up. These things weren’t acting like I thought they would, and it became hard to reconcile that this was a killing machine with her touching my hand, makin
g small talk.
“Do not fear. You are the first man who has ever advanced with us into glory. I remember you from our last action in Pavlodar. You stared at me and I thought you were ugly.” I had to spit, so I did, on the floor in front of me.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
“It’s zip.” But I could tell she didn’t get it, because her face scrunched, so I tried something different. “Like tranq tabs.”
She got that and brushed her hand across my beard, the one I had grown on the line. “We think you are so interesting.”
That was all it took. I changed my mind on the spot, had to grin at how easy a sell I was, because it didn’t take much to get me to change my mind. Sexy, they really were. In a train and without the crap on their faces, it was different from the last time. I thought, Man, if you guys had any clue how freaky this is for me, you wouldn’t come any closer and would give me a second to normalize. Beautiful. Check it, you’d think that without hair and in a combat suit they couldn’t be beautiful, but they were. Like perfectly wired athletes, a high school track team gone bad, and all with the same chiseled face. I didn’t care that they were totally bald. It didn’t matter in Kaz.
“Thanks,” I said. “Interesting is better than ugly.”
Man, I was tired. I hadn’t rested since getting out of the hospital, and it began to catch up. They weren’t really human. So I didn’t care when they saw me spit the zip out, and cared even less when I realized that as I’d fallen asleep, I had said something to the girl, the one who had done the talking.
“You are beautiful. Just unreal, and thanks for being so normal this time. Like a girl.”
I dreamed. A psychotherapist sat across from me on the train and laughed while he spat out words, which landed on the wooden floor and shattered into droplets of mercury, disappearing through cracks. Only the weak-minded crumble after just one time on the line, the cowards and shit-for-brains. There is a word for people like you, but I hesitate to use it, because it implies that you are human when in fact you’ve never been anything of the sort, have you, Oscar? You’re a parasite. A mosquito that buzzes around and annoys people, sucking them dry and then moving on to the next victim, the next meal. Anyway, the word is old and perhaps overused, and there are actually several different terms for this kind of person, but I like this word: “narcissistic.”
She woke me by whispering in my ear. “My name is Bridgette.”
The train had stopped. “Are we there?”
“Pavlodar? Yes. Come. It is for death and faith.”
She had begun to stand when I noticed that we were the only ones left in the car, and I grabbed her hand. “Wait. I’ve heard that phrase before. Why do you guys say that, death and faith?”
“Because it is time. It is the end of my term. Tomorrow I turn eighteen and today I die. These are good things. Without death or faith, I am nothing; with both, everything.”
She helped me up and I was about to grab my bag when she kissed me, quick and awkward, an eighth-grade kiss from the shy girl in the front row who didn’t have clue one about holding hands. Swear to God, it was cool.
“I… she began. She shouldered her Maxwell and slid a grenade into her combat harness. “I needed to do that, before my discharge. We wonder what it is like to kiss and I can tell them now. It will help when their time comes. Follow me, because one of my sisters, Kim, acquired a Russian Maxwell for you. Without your Maxwell, you can’t be perfect.”
Those kinked-up stories we all told about the Gs and how they were crazy and all messed to hell, they were part right, but now I could see where they missed. The Gs weren’t crazy, not exactly. I hooked up for dinner once with a lieutenant colonel from the Army, a real manicure-and-polish guy, who wore a pair of old-style automatic pistols—chemically propelled rounds, which were about as useless against armor as thrown flowers. I wouldn’t have wasted time with him except for one thing. He’d been there since day one, on the trip from Bandar, the landing, and D-day. There was a story there, I figured, one for which I’d whore myself.
The guy laughed as if Bandar had been spring break in college when he was younger. “Wendell, you really should have been there, strapped it all on and gotten into the shit a little earlier. It felt like Caesar and the Rubicon, and you can quote me on that.”
“Why should I have been there, Colonel?”
He laced both hands behind his head and leaned back. “Well, all of a sudden, these APCs come out of nowhere—I mean balls out and screaming up the beach—headed straight for about a thousand enemy prisoners. Fucking things ran right over them. Those Iranian boys—what was left of them—looked like ketchup mixed with sand, spaghetti, and purple eggplant. I would have been pissed, but the APCs missed my guys entirely, so I figured… who cares?”
“Jesus.”
“Nah,” he said, raising his beer in toast. “Genetics. The APCs were filled with, and driven by, our Gs. To the wonders of science, and to hell with the Russians—along with all who stand in our way. Although without Popov, you and I would have no war. The genetics may be lunatics, but at least they’re our lunatics and God bless them.”
Kim and Bridgette stood outside the railcar waiting for me, and as soon as I dropped to the ground, Kim handed me a Maxwell and then kissed me. They all lined up after that, one after another, and did the same. Twisted. You’d think it would have been sweet, like having a huge harem, but no way; it wasn’t the same as when Bridgette did it. By the time they finished, I must have kissed a whole battalion, too many to see as they filled the rail yard, and I had to fight to keep from crying. Not cool, not after I realized what was happening.
The colonel had got it all wrong. They weren’t crazy, not from their perspective. Gs just were. The factories designed and raised them that way, but nobody had bothered to get rid of other instincts, and now they had to deal with being part human. Hey, Kim, I got me a hundred confirmed. How many did you kill today? I don’t know, Bridgette. I forgot because I was thinking about what it would be like to have kids. How did they deal with that?
As soon as they broke into a trot, Bridgette waved for me to catch up. “Come, it is a nice day for combat. What is your name?”
“Scout.”
She laughed before slipping her helmet on. “Scout. We like you, Scout, and I like you especially. Hurry. We lost communications with Third Marine less than a week ago, and Division suspects something went wrong. Today, before dying, we will see about Russians.”
Pavlodar brought it back. They were funny things, memories.
General Margaret Jensen, commanding officer, First Armored Division, had set up her HQ in Aktau in a hotel that had a brothel on the ground floor and overlooked the Caspian Sea. On my first visit there, I thought I had the wrong place. I walked around the block again, just to check, because Aktau had some messed-up system—a leftover from the old Soviet Union days—where there were no street names, just block and building numbers. Turned out I’d had the right location in the first place.
The hotel was filled with hookers. Wall-to-wall, unbelievably hot betties, with skinny bodies and an Eastern sensibility when it came to makeup—that more was always better. But despite their smiles, you could tell they were off, just as dirty as the rest of Kaz. Most were sad, their grins concealing pitted, rotten souls, and they didn’t want to be there, but as long as they were, they sure as shit didn’t want us there, and every time I turned around, I suspected that those chicks gave me the finger.
On that particular day, the general was in her suite, which had been converted into a radio room and tracking station, stuffed with computers and holo-displays. She sat behind a huge desk with two hookers on her lap.
“Wendell! Siddown.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“So, what do your readers want to know?” she asked. The general had a plate of Vienna sausages, which she fed to the girls, one at a time.
“Ma’am, we got a report that for the first time since this started, you’re seeing acti
on at Group West, that Popov launched a major armored offensive.”
“Probes,” she said. “That’s it. Pops knows we’ll kick his ass back to the Urals if he tries anything in force.”
The general didn’t know about my visit to her hospital. I had already interviewed her tankers, who had just been flown in from south of Saykhin near the Russian border. One of them was charred from head to toe, and assured me that the fight was on, two divisions of Russian armor headed south, and I gathered from his sobbing and attempts to chew off his own tongue that he wasn’t confident about kicking anyone back to the Urals. That wasn’t a probe.
“My sources say different. First Armored is collapsing, and you have plans to move your HQ eastward, before the Caspian sector is isolated, cut off.”
Her face went dead white and she ordered the hookers out. I had a cousin who was a cop. He always told me never to be afraid of someone who was angry and red in the face—that was normal. Only the truly whacked got pale when pissed, and you were supposed to run if you ever saw that.
She waited until the two girls left. “Shithead, whose side are you on?”
“Ma’am?”
The general pulled out a sidearm, a fléchette pistol, and pointed it at my head. “You put any of the shit in your rag and I’ll find you. Wipe your shit from here to Almaty. Get out.”
I ran. Kaz was that messed sometimes, each sector like a fiefdom where a general called the shots, got to decide what to believe, often making decisions completely disconnected from conditions at the front. With video feeds and instant coms, it was hard to imagine how that could be, but it was. Some called it the human factor. An inability to see real-time information for what it was, as if commanders’ minds had a filter that changed the data into Picasso-like pictures except with no tether to reality. Later I found out that General Jensen had been arrested for trying to send girls back to her home in the States so her girlfriend there could sell them to pimps. White slaves. That betty had way more than a screwed-up filter; Kaz had nothing to do with it. She was fucked before subterrene.
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 4