“I mean that she ate rats and mice, bugs, anything she could get her hands on. She tried eating dirt too, had lost her taste for standard rations.”
“That’s… unusual.”
I clicked into Ox’s personal channel so he could listen in. “And that’s not all. I think that she wanted to become a lawyer.”
“A what?”
“Swear to whatever, man, she wanted to make a break for it and become an entertainment lawyer for some reason, said that she could make tons of money and live in Beverly Hills, that some guy had given her and her sisters a bunch of vids of what it’s like to be rich in California. She and a few of the others had a plan to escape and become hookers to put themselves through law school in San Diego. Either that or start an all-girl rock band to keep their days free for school.”
The room went quiet again. Ox laughed in my ear and I did my best to keep from cracking a smile, but there’s not much you can do when you’re that high. It took all I had just to string the sentences together, so when the egghead one asked his next question, I lost it.
“Was she satisfying? Sexually, I mean?”
Boom. I don’t even remember hitting the floor but there it was, right in my face, as I grinned and shrieked, unable to hold back the laughter anymore and hearing Ox crack up in my ears, louder. Both men stared. Then the quiet guy dropped his pencil so that it rolled toward me, and I grabbed it, not even noticing a transition to rage before I slammed it into his foot, through the dusty synthetic leather and down through flesh. His screams didn’t faze me. It was all so funny that when they carried him from the hotel, his partner shouting something at Ox, I passed out from lack of oxygen.
Ox poured water on my face to bring me back and I glanced at my suit clock. An hour had passed.
“They wanted me to court-martial you.”
“You can’t,” I said. “I’m not military, and they freakin’ deserved worse.”
“I know. But, Oscar, you’ve got to get a grip, man. My guys are all starting to think you’re bad luck and that I can’t control you, that you’re going to screw up and get someone killed. And they’re right. You’re fading, going way, way out there.”
“Let’s zip, Ox. Like we used to.”
He shook his head and what happened next freaked me: he started crying. Just a few tears, but it wasn’t right.
“You’re dying, Scout. I don’t want it anymore. You’re nothing but a screwup and I’ve asked for a space for you on the soonest train out to Shymkent. As soon as we get a billet, you’re gone.”
It was cold that night. My suit said otherwise, but when I tried to sleep in my hole, it felt like an ice bath. I shivered and hoped that morning—and any empty trains—wouldn’t come. As bad as Karazhyngyl was, it was all I had, and the thought of leaving Ox made me pucker.
There were no empty trains. All of them carried wounded back from the front lines, or wrecked vehicles, or mountainous piles of dead, so each time Ox tried to signal one, he got the same reply over the radio, one we all heard on our headsets. Without direct orders from headquarters, no members of ad hocs would be permitted to abandon their posts, except in the case of seriously wounded. The dead would be buried in place. After a couple of days, he gave up. But I did my best to stay out of his way, and in my more lucid moments I really felt bad about the way I had acted and the fact that we headed in opposite directions. Ox had gone clean. He didn’t do anything anymore and I never even saw him drink as much as a beer, which made me feel even worse for being so weak, because deep down I knew: there was no way I would quit. I was weaker than him and it let him down.
About three weeks after the incident with the two Feds, we got a call from an ad hoc north of us, Task Force Kiik. Ox nearly blew a fuse. I was in the basement, picking tobacco out of my teeth, when he threw his helmet against the wall, startling all of us, including the doc who had been stitching up a kid who’d shot a hole in his foot by accident. It was the third “accident” that week; Ox had gotten wise to it some time before and made it a policy not to send anyone rearward unless the man had been wounded under enemy fire. This kid must have been extra stupid—or didn’t get the memo until it was too late.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He stared at me for a second and then grinned. “You’re going to Kiik.”
“Kiik? Why?”
“They’re under attack. We have two patrols out, so I can only spare thirty guys and two trucks right now, and I need you out there. Every weapon counts. Get your shit together, Martin will lead from truck one.”
I had been feeling good until then—like maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad day—but Kiik killed it. Somehow I knew it would be extra crappy. The day was especially hot—so hot that I had made it a point to wriggle my way into the basement command post and stay there, even though I wasn’t supposed to. But that wasn’t what bothered me. Somewhere out there was Pops. I hadn’t seen him in forever, and during his absence, I’d gotten soft, terrified, and I just knew that he’d been preparing, gathering his strength all this time we’d been sitting around. The stairs felt magnetized. As I crept up them, Ox’s orders went out over the net, and by the time I stepped into the Kazakh sunlight, squinting, Karazhyngyl had come alive. Guys ran back and forth loading the two trucks with ammo, water, and food, and I pulled my vision hood on and cinched it. Tight. The goggles dimmed the sunlight, made everything a bearable bluish green, soothing in a way, despite the fact that nobody was happy about the orders. Martin saw me on the hotel steps and tossed me a Maxwell.
“Truck two.”
I just nodded; there wasn’t anything to say. You’d have been hard-pressed to hold a conversation as we all readied. By the time I climbed aboard, everyone had found a seat, leaving me a spot on the bed, just below the auto-Maxwell, where I sat, cross-legged. We set out, and still nobody said a word.
The road northward took us over low rises, but for the most part, this section of Kazakhstan was as flat as the rest of it. I’d never been to Texas. But a friend of mine had once shown me pictures of the state’s west side, near El Paso, with dry plains that stretched forever, here and there covered with a pathetic kind of scrub grass; Kaz was just like that. In the distance we saw an auto-drone every once in a while, and someone would get jumpy, calling both trucks to a halt so that we had to spill out and find cover behind the railroad tracks, but inevitably it turned out to be ours. The monotony nearly killed me. Every once in a while Ox would check in with Martin and relay Kiik’s status reports, but that didn’t do anything to improve our mood; it made things worse. The insurgents were hammering those guys, and it sounded like we’d be too late to change anything, even though Kiik was only two hours from Karazhyngyl.
Then they hit us.
Our trucks were old Tedoms that someone had confiscated off locals in Shymkent. They should have been tossed into a junkyard. The rebuilt engines were good enough. But the frames had all but rusted out, and rudimentary ceramic armor had been fixed to all the surfaces so that they looked like hybrid nightmares, some sort of Frankenstein truck, part vehicle, part scout car, but all of it crap. Martin’s truck exploded in front of us. Our driver panicked, and instead of stopping so we could all get out and find cover, he hit the gas, slamming into the back of Martin’s flaming wreck and then bouncing over what I assumed were the bodies of our own men, but I never found out if they were alive or dead before we ran over them. Then three more rockets came out of nowhere. Two roared over our heads and disappeared in the plains beyond, but the third hit our rear wheel, and the next thing I knew, I was airborne, moving forward at roughly the same speed the truck had been. When I slammed into the dirt, everything went black.
I woke to the sound of grenades. To my right a group of men in Russian armor fired at the men from my unit, who had taken cover on the other side of the railroad tracks. I was behind the Russians. The four of them moved quickly, throwing each other hoppers or grenade clips to make sure nobody ran out of ammunition, and at least two of them fired at all t
imes. I felt myself about to scream, recognizing their swiftness and efficiency immediately. These were genetics. Cables dangled from their helmets and connected to the power packs on their backs, and I tried to stay as still as possible, thinking that I could wait it out and crawl from the dust once it was over. Then one of our guys’ grenades overshot, pelting me with fléchettes.
My carbine was a few feet away and I reached for it slowly, inching my hand across the dirt so a sudden movement wouldn’t attract any attention, praying that none of my guys would fire at me by accident, mistake me for Russian. The reticle popped into sight. After I emptied my hopper, it was over, only a few seconds later, and I lay there, shaking, barely getting my helmet off in time to dry heave, trying not to think of the fact that it had been close. The last genetic had noticed me just before I squeezed the trigger, and had begun swinging his grenade launcher around. The barrel looked wide and empty, pointed at my face. Most of my fléchettes missed him, but a few passed through one of his vision ports and out the back of his helmet.
Martin nudged me with his foot. “You OK?”
“I thought you bought it.”
“Me too. We lost more than half our guys; there’s only ten of us left. You should have seen how much air you caught. And thanks for taking them out.”
Now that the fighting was over, the shakes got worse, and my neck began to feel as though it had been twisted. “I’m messed up. What do we do now?”
“One of the guys thinks he can scavenge the burned-out Tedom, use it to get the other truck back on the road. Ox wants us to come back; Kiik’s holding its own now, don’t need us, and even if they did… we’re all messed.”
I turned to look at the vehicles. One truck had burned out almost completely, and the other one had lost its rear wheel, but a group had already begun jacking up the burned one and ratcheting off a replacement. The sun had passed its zenith. In the quiet, as I sat on the rails, the breeze on my face felt peaceful—like maybe this wouldn’t have been such a bad place to visit before the war—and some of the guys even started joking as they struggled with the trucks. We’d leave our dead, pick them up the next day with a reinforced unit. But for now, Martin did the rounds and downloaded their data into his computer, to make sure that their names got recorded and sent home even if their bodies didn’t.
Twenty minutes later we had piled into the back of the Tedom and were bouncing over the dirt road and heading south toward Karazhyngyl, but this time I rode on the bench. We were less crowded. At my feet one of our corpsmen worked on someone, but I didn’t know his name and wasn’t sure if I wanted to, because the guy kept staring and reaching for me, like he recognized something on my face. Flecks of blood covered his cheeks and the corpsman cracked his armor, so we all got a look. A grenade had gone off near his side, leaving only a fist-sized hole in his carapace, but the fléchettes had ricocheted around inside the armor, which, as it turned out, had been the only thing holding him in one piece. Blood and a good portion of his intestines washed over my feet, and a Marine next to me threw up into his helmet after the guy died.
The corpsman dropped his bandage, the one he had been planning to use before his patient spilled out. “I couldn’t fix this.”
“It’s OK,” said Martin.
“I can’t do anything for this, all they gave me was a first aid kit, how am I supposed to do anything with that?”
“I said it’s OK. Just snap him shut. He’s gone now anyway.”
The corpsman’s expression changed then, to the same one I’d seen so long ago on that guy Ox had nearly wiped in the tunnels, the one who’d lost his face. “No, Martin, you don’t get it, man. I can’t do anything. What the fuck is wrong with you, are you even hearing me?”
“I said fuck it!”
All of us were getting on edge, catching whatever it was that the corpsman had, and Martin felt it. You could see in his eyes that if the guy said one more word, he’d be tossed from the truck. So I knelt. I moved the corpsman gently into my seat and began scooping up everything that had fallen out of the wounded guy, doing my best to get it all back in before snapping the armor shut, and then rubbed my hands on the truck bed, on my legs, anywhere that might let me get rid of some of the blood, exchange it for oil or dirt—anything.
The corpsman whispered when I sat back down. “They didn’t give me anything for this, swear to God they didn’t.”
“I know, they’re a bunch of nut jobs.”
“Damn right they’re nuts. I mean, did you see him? Did you get a good look at that?”
“And all they gave you was a first aid kit; doesn’t seem right.”
“You’re damn right it doesn’t. You’re damn right. What am I supposed to do with a first aid kit? You’re damn right it doesn’t…
And then I knew he’d be OK. He shook his head back and forth for the whole ride back, repeating the same thing over and over, but we didn’t care; this wasn’t the tunnels. The sun had begun to set, turning everything an orange pink, and with the noise of the truck and the wind, we couldn’t hear him except if we tried to hear him, and I knew from my own experience that he’d repeat himself as long as he needed to—maybe forever—but that it didn’t matter, and it beat the option I had chosen, the option of pharmaceutical oblivion. Getting high wasn’t on the menu that night. All my gear was where I’d left it, plenty of dope and zip, but when I crawled back into my hole and looked at it, it didn’t look back, didn’t beckon to me with its promise that everything would be better once I got lit, because I knew it was bullshit. It wouldn’t make anything better. I went to sleep that night praying for Bridgette to come back, and in the distance I heard the guy, all night.
“You’re damn right it doesn’t. What do they expect me to do with a first aid kit? I can’t do anything.”
My prayers were answered a month later. I had walked outside the perimeter to take a leak when on the horizon a dust cloud appeared, growing. We had taken to powering down everything except climate controls—to conserve fuel cells—and it took me a moment to remember how to activate my vision hood. I was so high. A group of Marines had laughed when I’d shuffled past; I was barely able to stand, so finding the forearm controls and the right sequence of buttons seemed impossible. Finally I got it. The cloud zoomed in, nearly making me puke, and eventually the goggles focused so that I saw a single APC, dust-colored, cruising northward along the rail line in our direction.
Ox came out to see it. “Friendlies,” he said. “Let’s find out what gives.”
It took the APC about ten minutes to reach us, and the bottom hatches opened, disgorging a group of them, genetics, who took up positions around the vehicle while one of them approached.
“Task Force Karazhyngyl?” she asked. The voice made me flinch, brought back all sorts of memories. I had to helmet up—in case I freaked.
Ox nodded. “Yeah. What’s going on?”
“You sent a distress call. We’re here to help with the town’s defense.”
“What?” Ox looked around before clicking onto the net. “Everyone into their holes. Any patrols out right now?”
A voice responded immediately. “Negative.”
“You did not send a distress call?” she asked.
“No. We didn’t.”
I shit you not. The chick popped her lid then, so that I could see that grin, and I wanted to run up and grab her, swore that it was Bridgette.
“This is good. Maybe it’s a trap. Russian genetics are operating in this area and we will meet them. With your permission, my sisters will evaluate the town’s defenses and determine what changes should be made, where to put our APC as a pillbox. We’re out of fuel alcohol and have been running the secondary plasma engine, but now we’ll need the reactor for firing and can’t spare any plasma.”
Ox nodded. “OK. Cool.”
“Yes.” She grinned again and then resealed her helmet. “Death and faith.”
One of the guys nearest to me cursed. “Screw death and faith. Come on, man, let’s b
olt. This is for shit. I’m an IT guy, for shit’s sake. I worked on computers.” He scrambled out of his hole, almost making it before one of his buddies pulled him back in.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“I gotta get outta here. Come on.” The guy pulled his helmet off then and began popping his seals to unsuit. “I can’t breathe.”
But before he could finish getting out of his suit, the man just slid to the bottom of the hole and curled into a ball. He cried. We all heard the sobs, punctuated by some kind of moaning, and it made the skin on my neck crawl, but nobody did anything to him—just let him keep going. We all knew how he felt, and it was OK, because everyone realized that the next day you could be the one cracked up and balling because there was nothing you could do with a computer or a first aid kit; they were the same damn thing in Kaz.
I watched as the girls formed up to walk the perimeter, Ox’s voice clicking in again. “Anything these betties say, you do. That’s an order.”
An hour later it was ready. The girls had our guys dig deeper holes, laid out additional sentry bots, and rigged a hundred meters of remote-detonated fléchette and gel mines, directional like the old claymores but specifically designed for Kaz—to look like grubby rocks. The girls concealed their APC near the hotel, checked its field of fire, and smiled.
Standing next to a hole and staring southward, I hadn’t moved since they’d come, and didn’t hear her when one of the girls approached.
“You should take cover.”
I smiled. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Why are you out of your hole? You’re exposed.”
“I’m insane.”
“You need to take cover. We don’t know what they plan, but you must get into a hole, stay still.”
“I missed you. A lot. But I can’t get back in my hole, it’s full of scorpions.”
She checked it, saw that it was empty, and then cocked her head. “Your hole is empty.”
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 9