“I’m insane. I’m spoiling.”
She caught on. I heard her take a breath and it reminded me of Bridgette, who had breathed just like that when she got excited or upset, and it took me a second to gather the courage even to look at this one, and when I did, it nearly killed me. Green thermal paste coated her face, but it was her. All beauty. It was Bridgette on the train, in the old days, when things were good and we ran across the steppes, too scared to stop running but too into each other not to stop, for a second, just to screw.
“Do you know me?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I knew Bridgette. She was one of you.”
“And she was yours.” It wasn’t a question, so I just stood there. A second later she took my hand and led me to a hole, gently pulled me into it, with her, and made me lie on my back. She lay next to me. I wouldn’t let go of her hand.
“Bridgette is with Him now. It is natural, you should be happy for her.”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not natural. That’s what you’ve been taught but it’s not.” I tried to kiss her then, grabbed her face and pulled it toward me, but she backed away.
“We are not the same,” she said. “I am not her, and I don’t want you.”
For a moment we said nothing, waiting as the sun set and the sky darkened, bringing out stars for as far as we could see. I smelled her breath and pushed another wad of zip into my lip, waiting for the relief to come. My eyes started to flicker shut.
“Don’t sleep,” she said.
“If I don’t sleep, the scorpions will come back and I don’t want them to. If I close my eyes, nothing can see my face and I won’t exist and it will be as though I’m dead so that nothing more can hurt me. It’s cool, though, don’t worry about it. I’m insane.”
The chick rolled onto her side and looked at me, brushed the dirt from my cheeks and grinned. “I am glad that Bridgette got to know you before she died.”
“Where are they?” I asked. “The girls who want to live? Don’t any of you want to live?”
Her smile faded then, and she raised her head, listening. It took her less than a second to snap on her helmet. “They come.”
A party had gone wrong. The embassy set up shop in Almaty, moved south from Astana, but the funny thing was that they moved into an ancient compound, the former site of our embassy, back in the twenty-first century. All things moved in circles; this proved it. As a kind of celebration, a bunch of Marine guards threw a party, one of those don’t-ask-don’t-tell sex fests that became a thing of legends, more hookers than guys, more drugs than sense. It didn’t take long for me to become paralyzed, on Thai stick, probably dipped in something.
He was like a shimmering vision, unreal. A Special Forces guy. His Class A had been pressed, with so much fruit salad that it looked about to rip the fabric, but there was one imperfection. He had just thrown up. A large stain covered the front of his uniform and I saw the bits of hot dog that had gone undigested, like real war decorations from Kaz, proof that he had been there.
“I hate this war,” he said.
“Why?” My voice sounded like a machine, a robot’s, and I swore I wouldn’t smoke any more of that shit if only everything would go back to normal.
He frowned. “I’m out. No more line for me, no more long-range patrols.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “It looks like you’ve done enough; your bros will take care of it.”
“Bullshit.” He wouldn’t look at me and it began to freak me out; his head was turning half shark’s, half man’s. “They’re pulling us off the line, all of us.”
“That’s nuts. Why?”
“Refit. Retrain. We’re going to be cops and assassins.” He did look at me then and must have seen the cluelessness on my face. “Genetics, man. We’re going after them. Hard.”
“Their genetics? How is that any different from what you’ve been doing?”
He lit a cigarette, and I swear, every time he exhaled, dolphins swam through the smoke, jumping straight upward and diving back in. “Not theirs. Ours. We’re losing track of them, ones who don’t think that eighteen is a good time to die. So they’re sending us to hunt them, in rear areas and in other countries, and when we find them, we’re to slaughter ’em. I loved this place, man, speak the language, you know? I don’t want to leave.”
I nodded, but it was a lie. I didn’t know, hadn’t been on the line yet. Even wasted, I understood what the guy was saying, but it didn’t connect with anything I had yet experienced and the guy seemed crazy for it. A lunatic. How could anyone love Kaz, love the dust-and-sulfur smell, tinged with the odor of shit?
I handed him my pipe. “You need this more than I do.” And left.
I thought about it in Karazhyngyl after the betty said they were coming—knew what the Special Forces guy had meant, and knew that she had heard something. Precognitive, both of them. Bridgette and the others were just like that guy, a different kind of organism that breathed plasma and had thermal gel for blood, perfectly suited for life in battle. They could smell war on the wind.
Almost immediately after she said they would come, they did. Stealth bored, all the way into our pos, and before we knew what had happened, Russian genetics popped from the ground inside our lines and their rockets slammed into the front of the APC, which shot a ball of fire skyward while tracers flew in every direction, in every color. She rose to the edge of the hole and started firing, her carbine shifting methodically as though it was attached to a machine, ticking from side to side.
At one point she ripped a grenade from her harness and tossed it, looking for another. I grabbed one of mine and flipped it to her. Then another.
“I’m out,” I said.
“Do not fight.” She pulled a new hopper from her harness and slapped it onto her shoulder with a click. “Stay down, and do not fight. When this is over, head east first—put as much distance as you can between you and the rail line—and then south. Make for Almaty. Then on to Bandar ‘Abbas, because those of us who want to live all head there. To Bandar.”
And then it ended. A flash illuminated her face for a second, and I watched as a cloud of fléchettes buzzed overhead, through her faceplate and out the back, spraying everything with her blood. She collapsed on me, and I froze. I wanted to scream but Karazhyngyl went quiet then, and a breeze had picked up, blowing smoke over the hole like fog.
Their voices made me want to shrink, disappear. Mentally evaporate. They sounded like boys, teenagers who giggled and laughed as they ran through Karazhyngyl, looking for something. I didn’t speak Russian, didn’t understand the words, and couldn’t imagine what they meant. One of them peeked over the lip of my hole. He saw her and pumped a few more fléchettes into her head before popping his helmet off to survey the job—to grin. The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen, but several teeth were gone, knocked out so that his face resembled a round jack-o’-lantern, with glassy black eyes. He spat once and then disappeared.
I hadn’t been breathing, and let the air out slowly, scared that they’d hear the slightest noise. She saved me. The girl’s body covered mine completely, and I prayed that they wouldn’t come back to bury her. I didn’t have to look to know that everyone else was dead, that Ox wouldn’t be there when I crawled from the hole, would be shredded like the rest, an empty shell, and by the time I got the courage to move, the sky had brightened with morning light.
Karazhyngyl was gone. Everything. The hotel had burned to its foundations, and every fighting hole had been hit, sprawled bodies lying everywhere. I found Ox. His helmet was off, and he seemed to smile, staring at the sky without seeing it. He didn’t show any wounds and looked as though his body had sunk into the dirt, so I tried to lift him, surprised by how light he had gotten. I dropped him when I saw it. His entire back side was gone—he was filleted straight down the middle, leaving only the front half.
I didn’t remember the next few minutes until after I found myself in a truck, east of town. One of the task force’s Tedoms had
gone untouched. It was partially covered with rubble, so it took a moment to free the vehicle, after which I loaded it with alcohol, fuel cells, and ammunition. Ox’s carbine rested on the seat next to me.
Eastward. Her words echoed in my thoughts and I tasted fear, a salt-tinged terror that made me see Russians behind every bush. Whenever the truck bounced over a rock, I flinched, thinking that I had come under attack, expecting a rocket to scream through my ear. With Karazhyngyl so far behind me that I couldn’t see it, I stopped, and the truck idled quietly, a cloud of exhaust rising to merge with airborne dust.
Drugs, I realized. There weren’t any. It wasn’t clear how long it’d take to reach Almaty, and I had left everything back in Karazhyngyl, in the hotel’s rubble and in my hole, my stash probably soaked with her blood so that even if I went back, I wouldn’t be able to touch it. But part of me wanted to turn around, see if anything could be salvaged for one more fix, one for the road. I gunned the engine before giving in to the temptation—promised myself that I could make it to Almaty with no problem, didn’t need the drugs for now and would just do it.
I was wrong.
Cold Turkey
Bridgette had hair now, still short, but just above her ears in some kind of bob, and she wore jeans and a white tank top. She cocked her head to the side. I reached out to touch her and she disappeared with a wink, leaving me on the cab seat with nothing but a carbine.
Outside, a storm rocked the truck. Sand and dust surrounded it in a tan blizzard so that I saw only about four feet ahead, the truck stopped in the middle of it to sway back and forth, making me wonder how strong the winds had to be to move a Tedom that way. Grit pelted the windows and I closed my eyes to imagine rain, a storm that had blown in from the ocean over Annapolis. But this wasn’t Annapolis. And my hands felt as though they had inflated to twice their normal size.
It had been less than a day since I’d left Karazhyngyl, and already I was gone. Withdrawal. Sweat poured down my forehead, stinging my eyes so that I had to blink, and in the dim light I saw a puddle of vomit on the seat next to me, dried. It was so cold there. I checked my suit temperature and saw it at eighty Fahrenheit, so I should have been comfortable, but I wasn’t, and even though external temperatures read ninety, it felt like I would freeze.
Then Ox showed up. One second nothing, and the next he sat on the seat beside me, the back half of him bleeding everywhere. “A la canona,” he said. “Welcome to the evening, no more daytime, Oscar. Scout. Not for you.”
“Screw you.”
“You got a case of it, man, and it’s cold because you’re going through withdrawals.”
I wanted to slap or strangle him, but I was afraid. If I tried to touch him, he might leave and I didn’t want to be alone. “Help me.”
“Can’t, Scout,” he said. “You have to find your own way now. All alone.”
“I’m heading south. To Almaty.”
He shook his head. “Then where? A dealer? Drop it. Let it all go and come with us. Off yourself.”
The shakes got bad and I felt like puking, wanted to crawl out of my own skin and couldn’t stop shivering. Ox said something and it sounded like he was talking through a pipe, a mile away. Man, I was spiraling down. I was dying and knew it, and now that it was happening, I almost felt glad.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. But when I looked up, it wasn’t him anymore; it was her, and I started crying, couldn’t sit still when a new wave of chills hit, made me slide down the seat and under the steering wheel.
“Stay with me; don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Scout.” She brushed a hand through that hair and closed her eyes. “Come down with me, where it’s warm. Let’s have kids.”
And I passed out. The next time I woke she was gone, and the dust storm had ended to leave an empty panorama in shades of brown, the air wavy in the distance. My suit temperature said one hundred. Its fuel cell had died, and I felt as though someone had trapped me in one of those old steam cabinets from the cartoons, my face getting redder by the second. After I swapped fuel cells, it took half an hour for the temperature to drop, by which time the cold sweats had returned.
I sensed it long before it came, and rolled out of the cab to land on the steppes with a thud. Come on in, I thought, right here. My carbine was dull in the sunlight and I lifted it, the reticle shaking wildly on my goggle lens as I aimed in the general direction. It came silently. A single Russian drone sped toward me, passing directly overhead until the air cracked with its boom a few seconds later, at the same moment I fired. Tracers rocketed from the barrel and chased the thing, disappearing into the blue sky as the craft banked for a second run. I dropped the carbine, stood, and then shut my eyes, hoping it would be quick.
The thing boomed again, passing only a few hundred feet overhead before speeding away.
“Kill me!”
Sobbing, I dragged the carbine and crawled back into the cab to sleep.
My suit chronometer showed two weeks had passed. I had lain in the truck the whole time, eating and drinking barely enough to keep alive while the main valve emptied my waste all over the cab and—after the valve failed—inside my suit. Standing outside the truck, I felt as though my legs would give. Their muscles had gotten so weak that I had to rest several times while doing my best to clean up the mess, and I fell asleep again, so it was noon before most of the crap lay on the ground outside. A quick turn of the key, and my truck coughed to life.
The map display said it was over three hundred klicks to Almaty, most of it cross-country. Less than a day away, maybe. I shifted into gear and began the slow drive overland, hoping that I wouldn’t pass out or drive into a gully, because walking to Almaty wouldn’t work at all, I thought, but it turned out that I wouldn’t have to drive the whole way either. At times I drifted off with the gentle bouncing, only to snap awake when I ran over a rut or a log. It would take a moment for me to reorient myself and make sure that the truck still pointed in the right direction. Whatever I had once loved about Kaz was gone. You can take only so much openness, and the one thing that prevented me from going off the deep end were the screams I let out in frustration, making it clear to the landscape that it was a piece of shit and that soon I would leave it, so that Kaz wouldn’t be able to mock me with never-ending horizons and total emptiness that gave nothing but took everything.
Near the northern shore of Lake Balkhash, I ran into an outpost. The Army unit manning it fired on me, and a torrent of red tracer fire came straight at my forehead, peppering the engine block so that the cab filled with an odd pinging sound. I dove to the floor. Once the truck rolled to a stop, I kicked open the passenger door and threw out my carbine.
“Friendly!”
A face appeared at the driver-side window. “Who the hell are you?”
“Wendell. Civilian DOD, attached to Task Force Karazhyngyl. We got overrun.”
Another guy joined his buddy and opened the door, helping me sit up. “You all right?” When I nodded, he grinned. “Shit. You shoulda told us you was coming, we nearly fired a rocket up your ass. Ever hear of radio?”
“Guy says he was in Karazhyngyl when it got overrun.”
“Overrun, hell.” The second one lifted me out and handed me my carbine, helping to reattach the flexi. “Karazhyngyl was wiped.”
“Genetics,” I said.
Both of them nodded. “That’s what we heard. You’re luckier than hell to have made it out.” The first one waved for me to follow when they started walking back to their position. “Come on. We’ll see if we can get you back to civilization. Welcome to Task Force Tombstone.”
I followed them, struggling to keep up, and the first one stopped to help, draping my free arm over his shoulder. “You sure you’re OK? Not hit anywhere, are you?”
“Nah. I’ve just been sick, sleeping in the truck for two weeks and—” I dove to the ground at the sound of an explosion and saw flames rise from my Tedom.
“Easy,” he said. “We just whacked
it with a rocket, don’t want Pops to get his hands on anything when they make it this far south.”
“This far south?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Both of them looked at each other and the second one slung his carbine, the metal clicking against armor. “You must have been off-line for a good while. Pavlodar is gone, Russians hit us hard and are pushing this way. Their Gs have some new kind of suits, powered, and they’re tearing it up. Division thinks they’ll be here in a few days, maybe less, so we came up here to blow the ferry docks, make it so’s Pops has to take the long way around or risk his APCs in the water.”
“What about our genetics?”
He got quiet then and spat before answering. “Don’t know about them. From what I hear, we sent the whole bunch northward to stop the bleeding. They bought our guys a few days extra to bail southward, but most of them haven’t come back. Not this way, anyhow. A few days ago the entire Fifth Marine cruised through here, hammered all to hell, but they had their gear and I’ll be damned if they weren’t hard.”
“But it’s bad,” the other one added. “Everyone’s headed back to Shymkent, to try and hold there. Division at Almaty is bugging out, you’re lucky you came when you did. One more day and you’d been all alone out here. The second-to-last ferry is leaving in an hour, you oughta get to Almaty in time, maybe hop a ride to Shymkent from there.”
Those two didn’t show anything, seemed calm, but when we reached the rest of their unit, you could tell something was up. There was a quiet hum. Nobody said anything and lines of men handed boxes to each other, one after another, passing equipment and supplies from a depot to the docks for loading onto boats. Officers muttered their orders to hurry it up. Whisper quiet. We passed the perimeter, and most of the ones manning it didn’t have their helmets on; they just stared over the horizon to look for any sign of Popov. Everyone was watching. You’d see the guys passing ammo, and once in a while, during a pause, they’d turn to look northward, checking the sky.
A clerk sat near a field terminal at the dock and took my information after the two soldiers wished me well. His fingers moved so quickly that I couldn’t hear the individual keystrokes; they just hissed while he entered my data.
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 10