The sergeant’s voice clicked in. “Everyone move due west. Stay clear of the road and make for Bo’ston from the north. Mission accomplished.”
I followed the other dots. Our group moved slowly along the southern edge of town and at one point we climbed a low rise onto what might have been a road, before descending to the other side. As soon as we got down, Ul’yanovo lit up behind us with plasma.
Someone must have called in the contact, because without warning, hundreds of rounds fell behind us, turning the snow into colored lights that sparkled with each impact. I prayed that none would fall short. There was no need for noise discipline now, and we sprinted, trying to get out from under the rain of fire that fell on anyone unlucky enough to have been caught there. You didn’t think about the fact that you’d heard women and children in town. The knowledge was there, sure, but a wave of self-preservation instincts kicked in to insist that yours was the important ass to worry about, and that for all you knew, the rounds would miraculously miss any civilians, and if they didn’t miss, screw it.
A loud roar erupted to our front and I dove, shouting to the kid to get down, but it was almost impossible to see anything through the curtain of snow. Ahead was a shadow. Before I could move, the form changed into the shape of a Popov APC as it bore down on me, bursting through low snowbanks, and there was nothing to do except bury my head in the ground and curl into a ball. The vehicle passed directly over, its belly scraping against the ceramic of my shoulder, and three blue dots blinked out on my heads-up at the same time I heard screams over the radio. When the vehicles had gone, I scrambled to my feet and resumed running, calling out to the kid to stay on my tail, to head west and keep up with everyone else. Maybe someone should have collected our dead. But that wasn’t a thought that anyone had at the moment, because it was still unknown what waited to our west, between us and Bo’ston, so whoever had just been crushed would wind up buried in the winter snow to stay there until the following spring.
“Move,” the sergeant said over the radio, but it really wasn’t necessary.
Throughout the morning we alternated between jogging and walking, eventually shifting into a single-file line to make the deepening snow easier to traverse. Being at the lead was especially awful. Over land this flat, the snow depth varied from a few inches in places, to several feet where it had accumulated in drifts and you had to push through it, lifting your feet high enough to step over or forcing them through—despite the fact that your legs screamed that all they wanted to do was stop. We took turns. After an hour of point, I rotated to the rear and shifted into the role of a walking corpse, a half-human thing whose exhaustion showed and whose mind had conjured up the memories of a similar march, when Pavlodar had first fallen.
Only the sergeant spoke during those long hours, to announce course corrections or to tell the point to move faster. But as soon as we stepped within sight of the Bo’ston perimeter, he stopped us outside the minefield, which was cruel, because all we wanted to do was get inside and go to sleep. I wanted to strangle him.
“Who called in artillery?” he asked.
“You didn’t do it, Sergeant?” the Brit asked. I was glad he had survived, and as it turned out, I hadn’t known any of the men the APCs had crushed.
“Someone hacked the secure channel, Command, and called in an artillery strike; I checked the records on our way back and it definitely came from our position. Who?”
The wind picked up again, howling over the trenches, which lay a hundred yards to our front, and nobody answered.
“Look, this is simple. I’ll find out when we get back to our post, as soon as I have artillery check their records. Who did it?”
Okonkwo chuckled then and raised his hand. “I told you to let me out of the patrol, but no. You had to force it. I called in the artillery.”
The sergeant didn’t even hesitate; he swung his carbine up and fired a short burst into Okonkwo’s chest, and the fléchettes worked their way up as far as his neck. He collapsed into the snow. When it was over, we continued through the minefield and climbed into a waiting scout car, careful to wait for the door to seal before removing our helmets.
“Why’d he call in a strike?” the kid asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The cafard,” said the Brit. “Remember the cockroach.”
I fell asleep within seconds and don’t remember how I made it from the scout car to my rack in the hospital basement; I know only that sleep felt better than I had ever remembered.
We lost girls every day to gangrene. At first it bothered me to see them lying there confused, the dying flesh so black on some that it looked as though they’d dipped their hands in ink, and many of them woke in the middle of the night screaming, so loudly that we heard it in the basement next door. What did these chicks dream of? You couldn’t compute the difference in experiences between us and them, because you didn’t grow up in a beaker to be shoved onto a battlefield where the only thing promised was the glory of death or this: a lingering decrepitude. But like anything else, you got used to it. Soon I didn’t even notice the girls’ faces, and every once in a while, I had trouble remembering Bridgette’s name. I’d stop and think for a minute, and the kid would have to shout and pull me out of it.
Only one thing animated the girls: pills. That computed. The physical deterioration reflected an internal malady that wasted their heads, and sometimes I’d show up to give them the doc’s version of tranq tabs—a formula he cooked up using local resources—and would find them standing with their arms poking through the bars, all of them wanting the things. I got that, understood their need, because I had it too, and there were days when I’d stand outside the door with the kid, holding a paper bag full of the tablets. I’d wonder what the drugs were like; a voice from inside woke up when in proximity to the things and whispered that I should just grab a handful and forget everything, that I’d earned it. Just swallow all of them. So far I’d resisted. But one morning we pushed through the door with a pair of Marine guards, and I knew that if this went on for much longer, I’d give in.
The whole floor was quiet. Usually they’d be ready for us, standing in their cages, but on that day nobody moved, because the whole group of them, about a hundred, hung limply from nooses they had made out of blankets. The girls could have stood up. Their feet touched the ground, which spoke to a kind of sick dedication on their part, a testament to the fact that the chicks had seen something, a common vision that fed into a calculated ending: This just isn’t worth it anymore.
Everyone had his breaking point and I’d already reached mine on multiple occasions—in Almaty, Karazhyngyl, and places I couldn’t remember—but I’d never gone this far beyond it. The sight shattered something in my chest. I ran from cage to cage and tried to force the pills into their mouths, thinking that maybe they’d bring the girls back to life, and as I went, I called over my shoulder at the kid.
“Help me!”
“Oscar, they’re dead. Come on.”
“No they’re not.” I was about to ask the Marines to help when I noticed they had vanished. “These chicks don’t die, all we need to do is get them wired again, maybe an electrical shock or something. I’ll give them their pills, you untie the nooses and get them down, and then we’ll rig something up to shock them, Frankenstein-style. Come on. It’ll be fun!”
“Oscar. They’re dead.”
When had I told the kid my name? When had he started calling me Oscar? I screamed at him then and threw the bag against the wall to send a hundred tablets rolling across the floor. “Motherfucker, if you don’t help me now, so help me Christ, I will rip you heart out! You don’t know me at all!”
The doc arrived then with the two Marines, and the group started walking toward me. The doc smiled. But I knew, man, I knew that he had something in mind, and all I could think was that the kid had tricked me and I needed to escape or I’d wind up dead like the girls.
“I’m infected, Doc, stay away.”
�
�With what?” He glanced at the kid. “What is his name?”
“Oscar,” the kid said.
“What’s wrong Oscar? What’s infected you?”
The two Marines circled around, trying to get behind me, so I backed against the far wall, looking in either direction as fast as I could. What was wrong with these people?
“Okonkwo, the lieutenant in the APC, they gave it to me, man. But if you leave me alone for a minute, I can figure this out. I got this one. Somehow they must have snuck in while I wasn’t looking, but I’ll get rid of them.”
“What, Oscar? What are you talking about?”
One of the Marines slammed into me from the side, and I remember thinking that I had forgotten about them, that it had been stupid of me to forget. The floor came up quickly, slamming into my nose. With the pain came a sudden clarity, as if a spell had been broken, and then I saw the girls differently, their faces calm and pretty, with short black hair that framed those chiseled features. Some of them had died smiling.
“What the fuck is this place?” I asked.
The Marine, a huge guy, bigger than Ox had ever been, held me down but with a strange kind of gentleness. “It’s all shit. Don’t think about it, because it’s all shit.”
“No, seriously, what is this place and how did I get here?” I started crying. The tears came in a constant stream and I screamed into the floor, watching as the doc’s feet came closer.
“It’s all right,” the Marine said. “No shit. It’s all right.”
“It all got inside me.” I tried to think of a way to explain it, but the words wouldn’t come and it made me more frustrated, got in the way of my screams. “What’s wrong with everyone?”
“You have him?” the doc asked.
The Marine nodded. “Go on, Doc. I got him. He’ll be all right; we’ll talk him down before we let him go.” It seemed to satisfy the doc, because he left without another word, stopping only once to look around at the girls and shake his head.
And that’s how I made it through that one—without getting high. The kid sat on the floor next to me and lit a cigarette, the other Marine sat next to him, and the third one stayed on my back, pinning me to the floor as we all smoked in a room full of hanging corpses. The kid put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me, holding it there until I calmed down enough to smoke.
“He’s right,” said the other Marine to his friend. “You know, I get what he’s saying.”
“Shut the fuck up. Of course he’s right, so just shut the fuck up or I’ll shoot you both. Right here.”
“Why are you still here, Oscar?”
The kid had his helmet off and looked at me with eyes that saw through, and I wondered how long it would be before he cracked and a Marine wound up sitting on his back. We sat in an ambulance, in an underground hangar just north of Jizzakh, close to the front line. It had been a week since my breakdown. The doctor had decided that he didn’t want us working with the genetics, so he’d assigned us to drive one of the ambulances. We would wait in a frontline APC hangar for the French to on-load their wounded, after which the fun would begin. But first the fighting had to kick off. The truck was solid and had four-wheel drive, so we could make it over some rubble, but our job would be to make our way aboveground as fast as we could to deliver our cargo to the hospital, and then make it back. Most of the time our assignment would be cake; we’d sit underground and smoke. But during that half-hour trip there and back, we’d be exposed, aboveground, a soft target, and I wondered how long it would be before my luck ran out.
I thought about what the kid had asked, and looked at him. “What do you mean why am I here?”
“You’re a civilian. You don’t have to be here. I mean, you could probably head southwest if you wanted and make for Bandar on your own. Nobody would stop you.”
“Because I’d be alone. I don’t want to make that trip alone.”
“I’d do it. It’s worth the risk. Think about it: if you made it back, you’d be home, the States, and every step down the road would be one step away from all this crap.”
“I told you. I don’t want to be alone.” A voice broke in over the general net and said something in French, but I was too tired to translate, and let the words wash over me without really hearing them. The kid hadn’t seen Karazhyngyl and didn’t know what lived out there in the desert or the steppes—didn’t get that I’d rather stay in Samarkand than risk a long trip with only my brain for a companion. “What will you do if someone tries to attach you to a line unit?” I asked him.
“I’ll go. I won’t want to, but there isn’t much choice, is there?”
“I guess not.”
The kid finished his cigarette and stubbed it on a boot. “So you’re telling me that you’d rather stay here through an attack and risk getting scorched instead of taking the road to Bandar on your own?”
I nodded.
“That’s whacked-out. You really are way far gone. I hope I never wind up like you.”
It wasn’t like I could explain it even if I’d wanted to. I’d been alone in the tunnels, and in countless hotel rooms over the years, and the thought of leaving the line without someone to keep me company was the one that scared me more than anything. An infinite number of things could happen when you were alone. But most of all, it was the fact that my head had become the enemy and when I was alone, my thinking took over, holding me hostage until someone happened to pass by and rescue me with a word. I’d started out thinking that I’d stay with the kid, to take care of him, but that time had passed and he’d hardened into something useful, so he didn’t really need me anymore—at least not until he went insane. I needed him.
There was an old guy, an Uzbek, who manned the hangar doors, which were usually closed, and rested at the top of a long ramp. We waited at the ramp’s bottom. As we sat in the ambulance, I looked up at the doors, the tunnel lighting dim and yellow, and I saw the guy check his watch, carefully get off his stool, and reach for the button to activate the emergency release mechanism, to make sure that it worked. Usually the hangar was controlled inside the tunnel, but the idea was that if the tunnels collapsed, you could still get out using the emergency release. It had become part of our routine. Every hour, on the hour, he performed the check like it was the most important thing in his life, and there was no reason to think that this time would be different. The doors rumbled open and we saw the moon in the distance, full and bright. But then a plasma round detonated, and another, until soon the blasts blotted out the night sky and filled the rectangular opening with a bright glow so that we had to shield our eyes. The next thing I knew, the old Uzbek doorman was at my window, pounding on it with a fist until the skin sloughed off and he slammed his bone against glass, the clicking noise loud and annoying. Then the old man lost it and collapsed next to the truck, dead.
“Holy shit,” said the kid.
“Holy shit.”
“Did you see that?”
I nodded and lit another cigarette.
“No, Oscar, I mean, did you see that, the bones and shit? I had no idea plasma could do that. I mean, his eyes were gone, man.”
There was a dark smear of blood and burned fat on my window and I did my best not to look at it. “I saw it, kid, I saw it.”
The barrage ended a few hours later and we hadn’t moved. Another ambulance driver came to my window, so I rolled it down, and he started speaking in French, quickly, and I had to ask him to repeat himself. The guy cursed at me before he switched to English.
“They can’t shut the doors from the control station; someone wants us to go do it. Once you use the emergency release, it stays open until someone deactivates it.”
“So go shut it,” I said.
“You do it.”
“I’m not doing it, pal, sorry.”
“Why not?”
I pointed to the ground by his feet and flicked my cigarette. “I don’t want to step on the dead guy.”
Somehow he had missed the fact that the old man ha
d died there, and hadn’t seen the corpse. When he saw that it was next to him, the guy shrieked and then sprinted from us, heading up the ramp until we could barely see him, because the moon had moved out of view, plunging the hangar into shadow. The door rumbled until it clanged shut.
“What an idiot,” the kid remarked.
“Nah, he’s all right. Just an asshole like the rest of us.”
“Where do they find these guys?”
“Where did they find us?”
The kid didn’t answer, just grunted, and I checked our supply of cigarettes. You kept waiting for someone to tell you to knock it off, because unlike in Almaty, these tunnels had real air handling, but nobody ever did and it had to be because the French held these positions and had some kind of rule that smoking was a God-given right. There were only about three packs left, and I shut my pouch, careful to make sure it sealed so that none would fall out.
“We’re running low,” I said.
“Whose turn is it to scrounge?”
“Yours.”
The kid grimaced and shook his head. “Shit, Oscar, I don’t even speak French, man, you go do it. You always get a better deal than me, anyway.”
He was right. I grabbed my helmet and buttoned up, handing him the truck keys. The plasma meant only one thing—that Popov had definitely arrived—and at the moment I didn’t feel like staying in the truck; a walk might do me good.
“Fine, but move over so I can get out your side.”
“What? Why?”
“Because.” I climbed over him, barely able to squeeze through the tight compartment. “There’s a dead guy outside my door.”
SEVEN
Outbound
Doctors and medics treated the wounded underground in aid stations, bringing them to us only when the men needed urgent care at the Samarkand hospital. The rules of war stated that nobody was supposed to fire on ambulances, but that didn’t mean anything, and the fact that the red cross emblazoned on our roof had almost completely worn off didn’t help. We soon learned that Popov had spotters. For our first trip, medics loaded three guys into the truck bed and I cranked hard on the gas, making sure we had enough alcohol for the trip there and back, before engaging the clutch so that the tires peeled and the truck lurched forward to bring us into the sunlight.
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 18