On the night of the USO thing, we popped about ten pills each—ecstasy, meth, and I can’t remember what else—for what he called an on-the-town appetizer, arranged on a plate with a bottle of vodka to wash. We got beyond wasted that night. After getting there, Pete couldn’t keep his shit straight and started screaming at the performers, accusing them of stealing his cameras just before he stumbled onto the stage. That was when he puked. We had just eaten spaghetti for dinner and it came out undigested, like guts and blood, all over the comedian’s shirt and the whole place got quiet. Then Pete said, in a serious voice, “I think you’ve been shot.” Pete got more laughs than the comedian, because all the troops in the audience gave him a standing ovation as the MPs dragged him out.
He bought it the next day. I got him out of jail, and we walked past an abandoned phosphorus plant, the structures rusted and sad remnants of a time gone by. I could almost sense it a millisecond before it happened, as if my ears felt the pressure change just before picking up the sound. Boom. Kazakh insurgents touched off a bomb, probably thought we were military. The blast took off half of Pete’s head and sent me across the street, where I landed in the dirt before shaking it off to discover that my friend had been scattered across the road in about ten pieces. At the time I thought it was especially bad because I hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye. But it wasn’t. Getting to say goodbye made things worse; I just hadn’t learned that yet, wouldn’t learn it until Bridgette and I got Ox back to Shymkent.
We saw ground fighting for the first time in weeks. She carried Ox by the shoulders and I had his legs, both of us stumbling and trying to stay awake. A few klicks away from us, on either side, plasma thundered, and I saw the brilliant globes of light burst upward from the steppes, Popov trying to cut off our escape, pinching inward from the east and west so that we were moving through a narrow gap about a mile across. I was about to suggest to Bridgette that we drop Ox for a rest when a loud cheer made me look up. We had made it. A few minutes later we passed the outer observation posts, and then the ruins of Shymkent’s suburbs, home free.
A loudspeaker broadcast a continuous automated message, which got louder as we made our way into the city. “Arriving troops, report to the assignment center at Hotel Dostyk. Follow the signs marked in blue. There you will be reattached to your units and given orders. Wounded, report to the hospital at town center. Follow the markers in red. Arriving troops, report to the assignment center at Hotel Dostyk…
There were a Marine APC and a group of corpsmen on one side of the street, and we veered toward them to drop Ox at their feet.
“Take him,” said Bridgette.
“What’s wrong with him?” one asked.
“Frostbite and hypothermia,” I said. Like it mattered; the guy was hurting and it was their job. I nearly lost my shit waiting for them to move, but two of the Marines grabbed Ox and carried him to the APC.
“Move up to the relocation center, and fast,” one of them said. “Popov is only a few klicks out.”
Bridgette saw a pair of MPs approaching and dragged me into an alley, where she popped her lid and then mine. We kissed, and I couldn’t imagine that she liked it, because after spending all this time in my suit, I was rancid. But I liked it and wouldn’t let go, so she finally had to push me away to breathe. Then we did it again. It was weird, gentle; I barely felt her tongue brush against mine.
“I’m so happy to have met you,” she said.
“Me too.”
Bridgette was crying. I had an awful feeling then, like I didn’t get it but something major was about to happen. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s time for me to go. I love you.”
I remember what I said next; it will be etched in my gray matter forever. “I love you too. Let’s get married and have kids. A hundred Bridgettes, all with killer instincts and dead-on aim.”
She cracked up at that—half laughing and half crying while she wiped the tears from her eyes, unable to look at me. Then Bridgette shook her head. “I can’t have children, Scout, don’t be stupid. They didn’t design us that way.”
And that was the last thing she said. That was how she said goodbye, just before she walked over to the MPs. I stood there, in shock, unable even to move. Maybe I was too tired, but I don’t think I ever anticipated what she would do that day, not after spending all that time retreating through Kaz, keeping me together, making it in the scout car like mad teenagers. She walked over and said something, and the MPs drew down on her, put a few fléchettes right through her forehead. When she collapsed, I lost it. Screamed. I ran across the street and threw myself at them, just before one of them slammed the butt of his carbine into my head to keep his buddy from being strangled.
Once I recovered from the MP’s butt-shot to my head, I found out that Phil Erikson at the Bandar desk had gotten my Kaz tickets yanked. The MPs actually drove me to the airfield to put me on the next transport flight out of Tashkent to the States. Apparently, the story I had sent Phil wasn’t a story at all. I swear I don’t remember doing this, but I typed “fuck you” about ten thousand times and slapped on a title: “What I Like About Doing Phil Erikson up the Ass,” by Scout. That last phone call—the one I had ignored on my way out the door—was him, calling to tell me I had been fired.
Still, having a friend in Brussels High Command helped a lot. It was even better because this guy was a Marine general, a hard charger who spent half his time in Kaz scoring dope, and the other half sniping Popovs from the front line. A military genius. General Nathan Urqhart was a small man, stout, like a midget, only bigger and with a barrel chest, and his kids, every Marine in the theater, loved him. I loved him too, because for all his shortcomings, the guy had his war bonnet on straight, knew the drill, and had subterrene in his veins.
Before I met him, one of his aides pulled me aside and gave me some advice.
“Don’t call him this at first,” he said, “but after you’ve developed rapport with the general, you should suggest that he needs a nickname.”
“A nickname?” I asked. I mean, come on. What the shit was this guy angling at?
“Yeah—the general digs them. Keeps waiting for someone to compare him to Chesty Puller.” I think the aide must have seen my blank face. Like, Uh… what? “You know, Chesty? Famous Marine from the twentieth century?”
“Nope,” I said. “Drawing a blank over here.”
The guy looked like he was about to take a dump on me, right there in the staff room. “Never mind. Who cares if you know who Chesty is? What’s important is that the general thinks you do. Just say something like he reminds you of that hard-ass in the twentieth century, blah, blah.”
Blah, blah was something I understood. Perfectly. Blah, blah I could do; I was a reporter, for Christ’s sake. “Not a problem,” I said. “And thanks.”
I should have bought him a drink, because with God as my witness, the second I actually did it, the instant I suggested to General Urqhart that he was like old Chesty, I owned the guy. When I put the comparison in one of my stories, I could have screwed his daughter and he would have asked how it was, could he get me a beer? The old son of a bitch made it a point to put me up in his Bandar HQ every time he was in the area—five star and any chick I wanted—as long as I promised to go everywhere with him, like I was writing his biography or something. Did I do it? Hell yes, I did it. Of all the self-serving prick officers I encountered in Kaz, General Urqhart was the only prick who at least reserved part of his mental energy for caring about Marines. So when he found out what that pair of Army MPs had done, he took a big verbal crap, right on their CO’s face, and came to see me himself.
I cried on the plane as it sat on the tarmac, and not even zip made it better. I just missed her, couldn’t get Bridgette out of my head.
Suddenly the whine of the transport engines died, and I saw a ramp being wheeled out to the main hatch. When it popped open, old Chesty himself burst into the plane, and the MPs who had arrested me followed him in, unable to look me
in the eye.
“Goddamn it to hell!” he said. He liked to bellow, and just hearing it made me feel a little better, like being on the good side of a war god. “Jesus, son, what happened to you?”
“Pavlodar. I was on the retreat, and these shit sacks”—I pointed at the MPs—“wouldn’t even let me shower.”
General Urqhart looked at the men and said quietly, “Get out of my sight.”
They did. Once we were the only two people on the entire transport, the general sat beside me, putting his arm around my shoulder. “What’s this about a genetic?”
I told him. I couldn’t not tell him; I had to get it out to keep it from eating through my gut, and by the end of it, my shirt was soaked from tears.
He just sat there quietly for a second and then grinned. “That there is some fucked-up shit, Wendell. I haven’t tried genetics, and sure as shit haven’t tried zip—is it good?”
I nodded.
“Well then, son.” He stood and lifted me to my feet. “It’s been a while since I’ve been a line Marine, but I know one when I see one. You’ve changed. No more normal civilian life. A guy like you has a hard time reinserting into the world, and if I’m guessing right, the last thing you want is a ride back to the States. Am I right?”
Like I said, the guy was a real genius. Omniscient. I nodded again.
“Well, I may have an idea. You want another assignment, to stay in Kaz?”
“Please, General.” I wiped my nose, felt like a little kid.
“Done.”
He pushed me toward the hatch and then outside. At the bottom of the ramp, the general spoke to me quietly, his shit-eating grin getting wider by the second. “We’re counterattacking. Pops overextended and we were ready for it. Ten more factories came online a few years ago, so we’ve been building up two divisions of genetics in reserve. They were ready to jump from Uzbekistan the moment Popov hit us.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He lit what looked like a cigar, but I could smell the weed, sweet and heavy. “It means we’ll be back at the mines in a couple of weeks. And beyond. Boy, do I have a posting for someone in as fucked-up a state as you.” The general handed me a ticket. “Report to the reassignment center at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow for DOD duty as our civilian historian. I’ll make sure to get orders for your buddy Ox to join you there. You’ll be going somewhere quiet, with no women in sight, so you’ll have time to wind down and get some of that shit out of your brain.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there and did some weird sobbing thing.
“It’s OK, son. Kaz is a nasty mistress and no thanks are necessary. I’m doing it for one reason: you can’t avoid the world forever but you’re not ready to return to it. Not yet. This’ll be over someday, and if you don’t find a way to deal, nothing will work. Ever. Use the time to ease out, son, let it all go if you can.”
When he left, I collapsed on the side of the airstrip and thought about her. I could still smell Bridgette and knew that I had meant it when I had said we should have kids—wanted her that badly.
But Kaz had wanted her too.
THREE
Ad Hoc
They brought in heating units that baked everything and made the smell worse; the same smell that used to make me think Pulitzer now brought only dysentery and sickness. Eventually I stopped noticing it. That winter was one of the most awful on record, which, ironically, helped us as much as it hurt, because it blunted the Russian push, forcing them to grind down and crumble in the face of our genetic counterattack. Once my assignment came in, they gave me a rack in an underground barracks, and occasionally I’d hear people talk about the topside action and how our forces hit from Uzbekistan, like Urqhart had said they would, pushing the Russians back to Pavlodar. None of these stories mattered. The concrete and rock seemed more interesting than anything else, safer than conversation. Bridgette sat next to me on the bed sometimes and smiled, nearly real enough that I felt her hand on my shoulder, and at those moments I couldn’t handle it, had to go outside and almost never bothered to suit up. The cold made me tremble. Winds blew from the north, and with nothing to block their path, they tore through our rubble fields and flung dry snow against my face and bare chest in waves of needles. Sometimes I’d stand outside for less than a minute. Other times, if I was high, I’d last for half an hour, praying that the cold would numb all of it, even the parts that drugs couldn’t touch, until eventually I’d pass out and collapse in a pocket of snow, forgotten. Inevitably someone would find me and pull me underground. My body had gotten so used to the cold that when the summer arrived, it made me feel sick, the heat forcing me to toss in my bunk. There was no spring that year—or, at least, none worth remembering.
And there were no more thoughts about writing; Phil had been right to fire me. I’d fail at being a unit historian too—you could bet on it—but this mattered less, because I hadn’t been given the job to succeed; I’d been given the job as a life preserver, Urqhart’s last try at keeping me alive. And there were times I hated him for it. Who was he? He hadn’t known Bridgette, and I still smelled her if I pulled out my old undersuit, the one they had tried to confiscate but for which I’d sworn to kill if anyone took it. Eventually, that too disappeared. Lost. Time became a fog bank, and I moved through it recklessly, hoping that I’d fall off a cliff and wishing when I went to sleep that the morning wouldn’t come, but then the fog would break to give a glimpse of the barracks, of the war, of the facts that I still lived and that she was still gone.
A week before our unit officially went active, Ox lifted me from the rack, got me to my feet, and hugged me. You tell me what he said. I don’t remember. The zip had done its job, so everything looked soft and fuzzy, and one could guess that he said something about being grateful for my having saved him, about having lost only bits of toes and fingers as a result of frostbite, but he’d make it, had just barely avoided being discharged on medical, and wasn’t that the worst luck? He grabbed my gear, shoved it into a duffel, and left with it. Then he came back a few minutes later and took me to new quarters, where we’d be bunkmates. That’s when it turned. Ox brought reality back, a little at a time, so that I started eating normally again, got dressed every once in a while, and even made it outside to see what remained of Shymkent after the snow had vanished. I remember the first day that I inserted back into reality, at least partially, and recall that it was like sticking my toe into a pool to test it because I suspected the water was way too cold. It was the day they announced our deployment.
We assembled in a makeshift training area, where a Marine captain stood at the head of the parade ground and coughed. “At ease,” he said. The field went quiet a moment later, so he continued, and I did my best to concentrate, but the words seemed strange, foreign.
“As of eighteen-thirty hours last night, allied forces have retaken the Pavlodar mines and our lines crystallized north of the city, inside Russia itself.” He paused to allow some of the men to cheer. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s mop-up time, which is where we come in. Our scouts report that some Russian genetics survived our push north and may have linked up with guerillas to harass the supply lines, somehow managing to stay out of sight. Rest time is over. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow, Task Force Karazhyngyl will be activated and deployed northward, so that we can go after the remaining genetic units. Get to your racks early and, NCOs, have your men at the train station for embarkation at oh-seven-thirty. Dismissed.”
Even I, only half sane, operating under a mixture of drugged confusion and self-loathing, knew that calling that unit a task force was a joke. I looked at Ox, who looked back at me, and we didn’t have to say it. Something had changed since the war had started, since the Marines had engaged with Pops more than a year earlier, and over the past week we’d talked about it, because Ox had seen it too. Draftees weren’t the right age anymore. Some were old, sometimes into their forties, while others couldn’t have been more than fourteen. And “
task forces” were ad hoc things, the phrase a euphemism for turd units thrown together using whatever was on hand, anything that could be spared. This one was no different. We’d be deployed with a unit that consisted of sub-rubes, old men and boys who’d had less training than I’d had in Rube-Hack, with no clue what it meant to face real Russian forces, let alone their genetics.
Everyone knew what was really up; all you had to do was spend time in town or at the bars and it was the only thing people talked about. Both sides were hurting. Press reports from home raged about a congressional committee that had been formed to investigate lowering the draft age to sixteen and raising it to fifty-five; women chafed at government campaigns encouraging them to have children, to breed; and bonds, the administration’s only hope for financing more ateliers, more Gs, were issued. Command needed warm bodies, any bodies. And Pops had it just as bad. The last battles, which had raged aboveground across the entirety of Kaz, had resulted in unbelievable losses, and neither side would have new stocks of genetics for at least six months, so the number of young men and engineered girls able to die on the line had dwindled, evaporated to the point where the word “reserves” had become the punch line to a joke.
Hence, the birth of ad hocs. A new term for “holy-shit-we-need-somebody-who-can-we-use-to-stop-the-leaking.” At least there was an upside. Nobody wanted a fight right now, and both sides, for the moment, happily stayed put behind their lines.
Ox had been made a gunnery sergeant, the unit’s senior NCO, and after the assembly, he showed me his roster; I hadn’t guessed wrong. His new men consisted of Navy cooks, Army supply troops, Marine clerks, and anyone who could be spared from rear duties, pressed into combat service and issued weapons that most had probably never fired in anger.
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 7