Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1

by T. C. McCarthy

  “Good. You’ll need it. Thank God these guys all speak English.”

  I wouldn’t have known where to start. Sophie moved close to me and it wasn’t clear if she was afraid, but I figured she had to be, because this was it, and either it would work and she’d disappear and I wouldn’t know when I’d see her again, or it wouldn’t and she’d die. There was a lead weight in my gut and I wanted to run back into the desert with her, just bug and figure out a way to live in Iran with the blind kids. Instead we walked the quay and looked at the ships. Dan pointed to one that was dirtier than the rest, an old fishing vessel that had so many APCs stacked on its deck that it seemed about to founder, and the vehicles hung over the edge so that their front wheels spun slowly. The captain stood at the gangplank and pulled on a cigarette while his men prepared to cast off; he smiled as we approached, showing teeth that were somewhere between yellow and brown.

  “You headed to Korea?” Dan asked.

  He nodded. “Pusan. Long trip.”

  “Any chance you’d take a passenger?”

  “All of you?”

  Dan shook his head. “Just one. A girl.” He gestured for Sophie to take her helmet off, and when she did, the captain’s smile disappeared.

  “No way. Too risky. Bad luck.”

  “We’ll pay. A lot.”

  The captain thought for a moment and then glanced over our shoulders, back at the warships. “Anyone see you come here?”

  “No.”

  “Pusan is a hundred thousand. More for me to take her all the way to Bangkok.”

  And then she was in. As Dan haggled for us, I pulled Sophie to the side, between a pair of huge crates, and kissed her when she started crying. We stood there for a minute before she looked at me and smiled.

  “Will I get to Thailand?”

  “We’ll get you to Pusan,” I said. “And we’ll have to figure they’ll do what they promise and take you to Thailand from there.”

  “You’ll come for me. Soon.”

  “As soon as I can. I’ll head for Bangkok and the first of us to make it will find the other. I’ve been there once before and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental. Just go there every Sunday at noon and we’ll meet in the lobby.”

  Dan walked over and put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s time. Two hundred thousand, Oscar.” He handed me a slip of paper with the name of a bank and an account number, and as I phoned in the transfer, my voice trembled, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might never see her again. Everything happened quickly from there. Once the captain confirmed the transfer, he ushered Sophie onto the deck, and before she disappeared below, she glanced at me one last time, just for a second, with a look of terror that burned into my brain.

  “It’ll be OK, Oscar,” said Dan. “She’ll make it. There wasn’t any choice, anyway.” A horn sounded from the military docks and Dan pushed me toward them, breaking into a jog at the same time. “That’s for us.”

  You would have thought that Marines and Legion troops were all muscle, like heavyweight boxers with no necks, but they weren’t. Before they loaded us onto the ship, we lined up for delousing and a trim, and everyone, including me, the Brit, and the kid, had to dump his suit and undersuit into a mountainous pile at the quay’s edge and stand naked in line. Dan laughed as he watched. The Navy turned hoses on us one by one and sprayed a mixture of cold water and chemicals so that we all bellowed with pain, the water pressure great enough to make it feel like a stream of needles. From there we moved to barbers, who shaved us all down with electric razors until our skin had been exposed from scalp to cheek. There wasn’t a big guy in the whole group. All of them looked like scarecrows, with thin wiry builds and the kind of body that comes only from months on the march and a constant worry of death, the skin pale from an internal disease of the mind and near-total lack of sunlight. After the haircut, they issued us khaki uniforms, and I slid my only remaining possession, my wallet, into the front pocket. A line of clerks waved us onto a ship and we stepped aboard with uncertainty, unsure of what waited for us belowdecks.

  On our way down I passed a stainless steel cabinet, its face so shiny that it acted like a mirror, and I froze. Whoever looked back wasn’t me. Thermal gel had pockmarked his face, the right ear looked ragged where the bottom half had been removed by fléchettes, and his cheeks had become so sunken that his head looked more like a skull than anything of flesh—something resembling an old Abraham Lincoln. Dan pushed me forward so the line would keep moving, and I stumbled on, dazed.

  “That doesn’t look like me,” I said.

  “It’s you. When’s the last time you used a mirror?”

  “Months. Maybe years.”

  “Well, take it from me, Oscar—it’s you and you’ve changed.”

  We got to our berthing area, which happened to be in one of the cargo holds that had been packed with crates, each of them marked with the symbol for the metal it held. In a way, we were all rich. The kid and the Brit found flat spots to lie down, and Dan and I sat next to them, waiting for the ship to begin moving. It was my last moment of fear that we’d be attacked without any way to defend ourselves, and the thought that we couldn’t see outside made me sweat. I looked around for Sophie, panicking when I couldn’t find her.

  Dan handed me a cigarette. “She’ll be all right.”

  “Sophie make it out?” the Brit asked. I told him what had happened and he smiled. “You did well, mate. Not bad. Hell, we all did. I didn’t expect any of us to make it out, but here we are.”

  I introduced them finally to Dan, and we all talked for a while, until the ship got under way. The engines thrummed throughout the hold, shaking the crates underneath us, and we felt the gentle bump as the vessel pulled away from the quay. After an hour we must have made it to deeper water, where the swells rocked us back and forth, and every once in a while, a Navy guy would shout from overhead to stop smoking, and someone would shout back to go to hell. I was about to fall asleep when Dan tugged on my shirt.

  “It’s over. You’ll be home soon.”

  “I know.”

  “You haven’t been back in a while, have you? How long?”

  “A year or two.”

  Dan sighed. “It’s different, Oscar. Not bad, just… weird. Nobody even remembers that this war happened, and there’s a backlash against genetics, to the point where within a couple of years the major powers will probably sign a treaty—banning their production.”

  “That’s OK with me. I won’t be staying long. Just long enough to tie up loose ends at home, then head for Thailand.”

  “Just don’t forget that it’ll be cool no matter what.”

  “No it won’t. Nothing’s cool anymore. Never was.”

  Dan nodded, pulling on his cigarette before blowing a series of smoke rings. “I’m not going back to the States.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I met a girl in London. I think I’ll leave the ship in England.”

  “How long?” I asked. “Before we get there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Our return trip took over a month. The truth is that I don’t remember much of that trip, because the accumulated exhaustion hit me all at once, and my body released all its tension at the same time, so I slept for most of the voyage, threw up a lot when I was awake, and smoked with the kid and the Brit for the rest of the time. Dan and the Brit left us in England. The kid and I said goodbye to them and we promised we’d keep in touch, but it wasn’t true, because the fact was that I didn’t want to keep in touch with them—maybe someday but not soon. Already my mind had convinced itself that none of the war had happened and that it would be safer to stay away from the things that reminded me that it had, and that I was its product. A stillborn son of conflict. When we crossed the Atlantic, there was the added bonus of watching the kid unravel and having to hold him in the middle of the night while he screamed that he didn’t want to go home and could someone give him some armor because he didn’t want to die when we got to port. I pr
omised him that there would be armor waiting when we got there, but eventually enough guys in the hold complained about his shouting that a pair of corpsman showed up one morning to take him to sick bay, where I suppose he passed the rest of the trip on psychotropics. It was the last time I saw him.

  About a week out of Norfolk it hit me that I’d be heading home. Until then it still hadn’t felt real, and for the first time in months, I needed to get high, so I spent my days scrounging in the hold, asking everyone if they had any drugs—but they didn’t—and then working the rest of the ship with no success. My father was dead. Sophie was too, for all I knew, and although part of me missed her to the point where it felt like an ulcer eating its way slowly through my soul, another part felt terrified by the prospect of finding her. What if it had been all about the war and had nothing to do with love? What if we met in Bangkok and it hit me that she was a genetic, a thing, not real and just as disgusting as I had once thought they were, as everyone thought they were? Ox and Bridgette laughed at me in my dreams until one day a chaplain showed up, making the rounds and talking to everyone before we docked the next day. He stopped and glanced up at me as I looked down from my crate.

  “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What is, Father?”

  “The truth.”

  “I don’t know what the truth is anymore.”

  “The truth is that everything they told you, about how you were doing your country a service by going off to fight the Russians so they couldn’t steal our resources, it was all bullshit.”

  It was strange to hear a priest curse, but in a good way—a way that made you trust him. “I’m not military, Father. I’m a civilian. They didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Oh.” He paused to drink from a flask and then winked at me. “Then you don’t have anything to complain about. You should have known it all along, that the truth was nothing but a fucking joke.”

  As soon as he walked out of sight, I turned a corner. I didn’t know what the world held, but I knew that the guy had been right and that if a priest could have it wired that tight and swear like a Marine, maybe things would be OK. Not great, but not all bad either. There was still one more day before we docked, and I spent it sleeping.

  This time there weren’t any nightmares.

  Accommodations

  The maglev from Norfolk made a hissing sound that I had forgotten about, the first reminder of a world buried for years, a time capsule that seemed bigger and shinier than I had remembered. At first guys like me—men in khaki uniforms and flip-flops heading for northern destinations—filled the car, but the train stopped every once in a while to let them off and to allow civilians on board, forcing us to mix with regular people. They seemed like children. Civilians smiled at everything and had a way of laughing that made us marvel, astonished us with their ability to convince us that here were people who really didn’t have a care in the world, who felt no weight other than that of the decision of what to eat for lunch. They complained about the car’s temperature, about the food, or whined about how it was behind schedule, and more than once I looked down at the floor, ashamed because I didn’t know that you could complain about such things, because after where we had just been, the temperature seemed a silly thing to worry about, the food tasted real, and who cared if we were off schedule? At least nobody was shooting at us.

  At one stop, a girl sat in the aisle seat next to me. Her blonde hair was perfectly straight, and I smelled it from that close, barely able to keep myself from burying my nose in her neck after having been immersed for so long in only the stale air from my suit. She began putting on lipstick and I stared at her reflection in the window, terrified, because what if she talked to me? What the hell did I have to say to anyone not from the tunnels? When she finished and looked around the car, my hands started shaking again, and I pushed them under my legs, praying for them to stop.

  “Are you a soldier?” the girl finally asked. Our train had reached its next stop and she wasn’t really focused on me, but instead watched to see who got on.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Are all you guys soldiers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “We just got off the boat from Iran.”

  She looked at me then and I imagined that she saw through, and could she have sensed the rot in my head, smelled it faintly, even over all her perfume? I wished that I could crawl under the seat in front of me to hide. “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  “I was wounded, in battle. Well, a few battles, actually.”

  “Really? Was it scary?”

  I just stared at her. My mouth had stopped working, like somewhere between my brain and lips the nerve impulses jumped the tracks, synapses mutinying to sabotage my voice. But that couldn’t have been the case, because my jaw worked up and down, trying to talk, but the only things I could think to say were too horrible for her, because what did she know? I’d infect her. This girl was something unique, because I hadn’t seen anyone untainted by Kaz in so long that it was like looking at a snowflake, which, if I breathed on it, would melt into nothing. After a minute of silence, she rolled her eyes and looked away, and I turned back to the window to watch the cities flash by. Ten minutes later the train slowed and she got up to leave.

  “Your stop?” I asked.

  “No. I’m moving to another car.”

  Once she had left, I whispered, “Yes. It was scary.”

  Union Station in D.C. was like a mental collision, a light show that slammed into my retinas, making me blink as I stepped from the platform into the main station, where news and ad-screens, plastered to every flat surface, blinked images as quickly as you absorbed them. It was raining. I stood at the front door, staring into the street as people pushed by in a rush, and felt the panic begin in my feet, locking them in place with the thought that to move outside would mean being seen by everyone who looked at me. Instead I turned and headed for a men’s store. It had become clear that the khaki uniform—or maybe something about my face—made people stare. Maybe if I looked more like them, they wouldn’t notice the scars, wouldn’t put two and two together to realize that a ripped ear and a uniform totaled to the horrors in which I had participated, ones that I didn’t want anyone to ask me about again since my experience with the girl on the train.

  An elderly man stood behind the counter and sized me up. “Just come back from overseas?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you want clothes. Want to get out of your uniform.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have any money?”

  “I don’t know.” Somewhere in all the mess of getting Sophie out and fighting to retain my sanity on the ship, I had forgotten my bank balance, but had a vague sense that there should be plenty of money as I handed him my card. It took him a moment to run it through his computer.

  He handed it back. “You’re rich.”

  “I inherited some, earned the rest. And there’s not much to spend money on in Kazakhstan.”

  “Well, what are you in the mood for? Suit? Business casual?” He listed a bunch of other stuff and my eyes fixed on the floor; then I closed them, trying to focus on the words but failing. Finally he sighed before holding up a scanner to pulse me for measurements. “I’ve got some ideas. Come this way.”

  We got to the casual section and he started handing me shirts and pants. “Try these. And we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately; you might think about a coat. Or at least an umbrella.”

  He showed me a dressing room and, before shutting the door, patted me on the shoulder. “I was in the service too. A long time ago. How long have you been back?”

  “A day.”

  “It’s not like home anymore, is it?”

  “No. It’s not.”

  Before closing the door, he sighed. “It will be, but it’ll take time.”

  “Maybe the clothes,” I said, “normal clothes, I mean. Maybe having these will make
it a cakewalk.” But the man just shook his head.

  Styles had changed. Not in a major way, but enough that I felt odd in a shirt that seemed two sizes too large until the old man assured me that everyone wore them that way. And pants were shorter than I remembered. He handed shoes over the door, and they looked like blocks of plastic, thick-soled. How long had it been? A couple of years at the most, but it dawned on me that in all that time, I’d been cut off from the real world—no news feeds in the past year, nothing except a few emails from home, dispatches from a world for which nothing could have prepared me. The changes were subtle—so subtle that if you’d been in the peace world the whole time, there wouldn’t have been any noticeable changes—but to me it was obvious. I was a foreigner.

  When I stepped from the dressing room, he handed me a bag with the rest of the clothes and then held out an umbrella. “I’ve already charged you, gave you the employee discount.”

  “What war were you in?” I asked.

  “The last three. And you might not believe it, but I miss them.”

  “What?”

  He looked over my shoulder, not focusing on anything, and then I knew that this guy understood and wasn’t full of it, that whatever he said came from experience, because he had the look. It was faint, faded, but there. The guy’s face made me want to stay and never leave. “You’ll take, eventually. It’s not going to settle in for a while. But one day you’ll forget about everything except the good stuff, and believe me, there was good stuff, and even the ones you lost won’t be so scary to think about anymore, and then every once in a while you’ll start smiling again. I did, anyway.” He looked back at me and clasped his hands together, his face turning red as if he’d said something that embarrassed him. “Well, on your way, I guess. Good luck.”