Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  How could he say that God didn’t exist? He is here, around us, and on the highway.

  “That’s blasphemy,” Megan said to him.

  “Seriously. You chicks wouldn’t know any better, but he’s a myth. Doesn’t exist.”

  “What are our orders?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. That early in the war, orders were still transmitted to our handlers first and then disseminated to our unit, until someone later realized that if the special advisor got hit—before telling us what to do—we would take the initiative.

  He cleared his throat. “An insurgent unit regrouped in Chenaran and will hit our engineers from the north tonight, to slow our advance over the Turkmeni border. Our sources say they’ll be driving white electro-plus vans.”

  “Electro-plus?” I asked.

  “Just shoot at any vans that come down the road. But don’t shoot until I do.”

  While Megan relayed the orders to everyone the curiosity became too great to ignore and I whispered to him. “How do you know they’re regrouping? Where does this information come from, and who fights in vans? Surely they know they’ll die.”

  “Baby, you don’t know these guys. Nut jobs. But brave ones, they believe in God, just as much as you do and if you were to ask any one of them who had God on their side, they’d tell you it was them—and they’d be sure of it. They’re just as sure of him as you are. And you don’t need to know how I know they’re regrouping. I just do.”

  The wind picked up and a weather alert crawled across our heads-up, warning of a dust storm that would arrive within ten minutes. We made sure our pouches were shut, covered anything that we didn’t want filled with sand, and waited, my mind going into high gear. The storm was a sign. It could only help the insurgents since it meant that our thermal and night vision would be as useless as normal sight, and the only warning we’d get would be from the sound of their engines since we’d be unable to see the vehicles until they had drawn alongside our position. But back then I was fearless. Whatever uncertainty had begun to bud did so deep inside, too small to even make itself felt because it lay buried under hatred, a foundation of knowing that killing was my life and that it had been too long since the last engagement, the boredom in between almost too much to handle. I wanted a fight.

  Hours crawled by. By three a.m. my position had filled with so much sand that I must have looked like a dune among dunes, the road was a river of sand with curtains that blew across to pile up on either side, and the drifts threatened to block the passage of anything, which only made me angrier. I prayed they would come soon. If the road filled with too much sand the mission would be called off and we’d be forced to walk south to the city, at least a three-kilometer march through loose grit with nothing to show for our efforts.

  And the storm blinded us, filling our intake vents so that we had to clear them regularly or risk asphyxiation while ignoring gusts that made the particles hiss when they struck my ceramic helmet; after a while the noise formed nonsensical sentences like, death sleeves seem selfless. The sand triggered an irrational feeling of thirst, so that before long I had worked through half my ration of water packets, each mouthful containing tiny granules. Sand crunched between my teeth as if taunting me that no matter the precautions, no matter how fast I opened the packets and inserted the tube, there weren’t any measures that could keep the stuff out. This land belonged to the sand. It wasn’t long before my dedication eroded under the onslaught, my determination to fight shifting slowly into a desire for it to end, for the monotony to cease and the sand to leave us or die for just a moment so that I could see more than a foot away.

  I was about to shout in frustration when they came. Our forward-most position reported lights and my thoughts went still as calmness took hold, rooted in the knowledge that soon we’d be free.

  “Hold your fire,” our advisor whispered over the headset.

  We saw the first set of yellow headlights as a large van navigated slowly through the dunes, silently. Its electric engine made almost no noise. The vehicle passed our first position and had almost reached us when Megan moved beside me.

  “We should fire,” she said.

  “I can’t make out their color; we have to make sure they’re white. Hold your fire.”

  A second vehicle appeared in the distance, the first one almost past us now.

  “I’m going to open fire,” said Megan.

  “Hold your fire,” our advisor insisted. “Or so help me—”

  But Megan had already relayed the order. Instantly the first van blew into pieces when three grenades impacted on its side, forcing jets of hot gas into the interior; its doors whizzed overhead and I smiled, pulling the trigger at dark shapes that leaped from the wreckage, humans trying to escape in our direction. The second van stopped and began to reverse, but someone had snuck into the road and placed a mine so that the van jumped into the air and flipped, landing upside down on a drift. A group of grenadiers targeted it then, blowing holes in the side and turning the vehicle into a blackened pile within seconds. All night it went on. The storm’s intensity prevented the convoy members from seeing what had happened to their vehicles in the front, and one by one they crept toward our position without knowing what waited for them. Soon the road became impassable. Wrecked vans collected to form a kind of dam and we shifted our position northward, not bothering with stealth because whoever occupied the vehicles seemed incapable of resistance, and we wanted to get into position before the next one saw us and reversed. And then it started again.

  By the time morning had arrived, the storm lifted and we saw the results. A mixture of sand piles and wreckage stretched out for over a kilometer, winding through the dunes, which hundreds of bodies decorated in daylight so their clothes looked like scraps of colorful paper that flapped in the breeze. Our advisor jumped from our hole. He ran from body to body, checking each one and then looked inside the vehicles that hadn’t been completely destroyed by our ambush. After an hour he returned and slid into the sand, popping his helmet.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Megan said.

  “Yep. You just took out half of the Red Crescent volunteers operating in this area.”

  “That is their name?” I asked. “The insurgent group’s?”

  “No, you stupid sack.” He threw his helmet at me, and the thing slammed into my faceplate, knocking my head back so that I almost shot him in anger. “They’re freakin’ aid workers. Do you know what those are? Aid workers? Nurses, doctors, people who go through war zones and take care of wounded civilians?”

  “We have no need for aid,” said Megan, but the words made his face go red, and the man raised his carbine to point it her.

  “You’re a bunch of psychos.”

  Megan’s hand blurred and slapped his weapon aside before she jumped, ramming the butt of her carbine into his windpipe.

  “And you are distressed,” she said. “Something is wrong with you and I relieve you of command.”

  “Something is wrong with me? With me?”

  “The dead are with God,” she continued, “and they have no more worries in this life.”

  But by now we had seen the same thing happen with other units, as we sped northward from Bandar Abbas, and we already knew that the nonbred looked on civilians differently so that the thought of Megan killing him seemed excessive. It didn’t feel right. This one had spoken with us as equals, always taking the time to find out how we worked, how we fought, and how we thought, and I didn’t realize that within a few weeks a plasma mine would swallow him for us anyway, because until now we had been invincible and had not lost a single sister in the long fight north. It seemed like maybe this man would guide us through the world until our end; he was a good one, perhaps sent by Him to show us the way.

  So I pulled her rifle away. “Not this one, Megan.”

  “Why?”

  He coughed when his breath returned, and the man spat blood onto the sand.

  “Because he has be
en chosen. It’s not right.”

  Megan yanked her helmet off and nodded.

  While we watched, our advisor crawled to the far side of the hole and pulled his helmet back on, speaking in a low voice into the radio, reporting what had happened. When he finished, he turned back to us.

  “Pickup is in one hour. We move southwest on the road and meet the APCs, to take up defensive positions closer to the engineers.”

  “They died quickly,” I said to him, “the Red Crescents.” Other girls had begun gathering around us now, but said nothing.

  “They didn’t die quickly. They died terrified.”

  “But we thought they were insurgents,” said Megan, “and it would have been wrong to let them by, to let them get close to the engineers.”

  “Someday you’ll get it,” he said, grabbing his carbine and reattaching the flexi so he could move out. We followed him, pushing through the sand, and headed southwest. “Someday you’ll know and by then this war will be over.”

  His words changed our mood. It didn’t matter to me if he was right, that one day I’d understand how he felt, because I didn’t believe he was right about that, but the thought that the war might end sent a chill through me, made me want to sit down and think. War without end—this was to be our destiny and at that early age, to think otherwise required a fundamental shift in belief, one that we had just enough experience to know could happen, but not enough experience to actually imagine, let alone handle. As we marched I prayed, and decided it then: God would grant me death before the end, because after all, who wanted the end of war?

  “We want the war to end,” the boy in the bunk over me said, his head and shoulders visible as he hung down. When he saw my confusion, he frowned. “You were talking in your sleep and you asked who would want it to end. We do. In the meantime, we brought something for you to play with.”

  The car had dimmed since the doctor left and on the other side of a narrow window near the closest door, snowflakes streaked past in a wall of gray that made everything darker, the only light provided by alcohol lamps lit at either end of our car. A biting wind roared down the narrow aisle. From where the boy pointed I heard the other car door slam shut, and then curses in English, so I gathered the blanket around my neck and strained to lift myself a few inches and look at a man. Human.

  They dragged him forward by a rope that had been tied around his neck, and if it weren’t for the fact that he stood on two legs I wouldn’t have recognized him as man. Both arms were gone at the shoulder. What stumps remained had been charred black, cauterized so that he’d live for a few moments longer, and his face had been beaten to the point where it ballooned into something like a bizarre collection of grapes, forcing both eyes shut so he bumped into the bunks, blind. The boys spat at him. By the time he stumbled to my side his face ran with spit, both cheeks sparkling with the boys’ hatred, and the man collapsed to his knees, grunting when he fell because he had no hands to catch himself. The boy above me handed down a knife, double edged and bright.

  “We captured him after we pulled you from the river,” the boy said. “He’s the one who shot your sister.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, taking the knife without thinking.

  “He told us. And we saw it all.”

  Megan. I remembered her then, saw her, and recalled the last moments we shared along with the feeling of hope. She had been new. Changed from a Lily into a thing that neither of us recognized, but which had embraced uncertainty, given up on control or trust because nobody could really tell the future, and this was part of what made our escape so wonderful: doubt. Responsibility. Without orders we would have decided what to do next, and Megan had transformed with the burden into a girl who seemed more beautiful now, dead, than she ever had in life, so that when the man coughed and said something, I ignored the pain, shifting to the side and sitting up, my legs visible for the first time. The Russians had dressed me in a gown. Both feet hung in the cold, exposed, and the toes had turned black, sending red streaks of infection upward.

  “Who are you?” the man said. His words slurred and when my foot brushed his face he screamed.

  “I’m a Germline unit. Catherine. You took something from me.”

  “She is Ubitza,” someone else said.

  The man started laughing. “She’s a whore. And so was her sister.”

  I recall doing it, but not why. He said other things, words which didn’t matter, things that all of them knew because the special forces had been briefed by the white coats, the ones who picked at our minds when our minds wanted to rest along with our bodies, but there wasn’t any rest and so it made no difference how many of them knew my secrets. This one had to die. It was a clinical decision and my knife went smoothly into his eye, sliding all the way until it cracked through the back of his skull, nailing his head to the car’s floor planks; but still it wasn’t enough so I stood and grabbed one of the boy’s boots, which hung by its laces from the bunk. The heel hammered on the knife, drove it deeper into the floor so that the man jerked in reflex, his body flopping, swinging back and forth on the pivot point of its head until even the reflex left him. Empty. I remember the boys yanking the knife out and lifting his corpse while one of them lowered me back into bed, pulling the blanket up; another one cautioned to throw the body clear and make sure it didn’t derail the train, but that was in Russian so I wasn’t sure if it was actually what they said. Maybe it was my imagination. By the time the car had gotten warm again someone dimmed the lamps and a group of them gathered next to me, including the one from overhead, his good hand lifting another cigarette to my lips. The flame from a lighter turned their smiling faces orange and made me feel warm.

  “It was a good kill,” the one said. “Faster than he deserved, but I liked the ending.”

  “The ending?”

  “Every kill is a story. A tale with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

  “We know the ending now. Tell us the beginning and the middle.”

  “Tell us yours, Ubitza,” another one whispered, “and we’ll tell you ours.”

  I shook my head, and pointed at my bunkmate. “Wait. You said that you wanted the war to end. Why? Now you say you like killing. How can you believe both at once?”

  “It’s true, Ubitza. We like killing. I would kill you if they told me to but they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we want the war to go on forever.”

  “She doesn’t know,” another one urged. “Tell her.”

  “Tell me what?”

  The boy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, wiping the knife clean on his pajamas and then placing it in my palm. He used his one good hand to curl my fingers around the grip. “We don’t die like you, in two years. They gave us a full life. And land, an open place in Siberia, hell on earth with a winter that lasts ten months and nothing but mining spoil and shit for miles around. But ours. Our brothers before us work it now, the ones who completed their duty, and they’re waiting for us, the new crop of broken soldiers to arrive and help with the work. This train stops at Zeya, for you and us. They gave us Zeya. So we rumble northward to our destination because we completed our service term and now we muster out, each of us in their own way.”

  “What is your service term?”

  Another one, behind him, answered. “We serve until we die or become too wounded, too broken to be of use in war. That’s how it ends for us. And now we can go home.”

  I noticed it then, and thought it ironic. When the lamps were brighter it hadn’t been obvious, except for the missing hand of my bunkmate, but now that the lights were low and they surrounded me in a throng of glowing cigarettes I saw that all of them had been shattered. Each of them lacked at least one body part, and most were missing two. Yet all of them grinned. One with no eyes smiled the most and I wondered what job they would give him, what work he could do for their farm, and as if in answer one of them slapped the blind boy’s shoulder and insisted that he’d make a great snow shoveler because it didn’t matter where the
snow went, there wasn’t any place to put it anyway, and although I should have felt nothing, I felt everything at once. Tears streamed from both eyes. I tried to grin but my mouth wouldn’t work that way, and instead twisted into something that I’m sure they didn’t recognize because they looked surprised and one of them asked if he’d said something wrong.

  “You didn’t say anything wrong,” I said, struggling to speak around the cigarette, “it’s because I’m broken.”

  My bunkmate shook his head. “You’ll be fine. Maybe lose a couple of toes or your feet, but that’s it.”

  “I’m not broken there. My mind is cracked. They gave us medicine for it, but I don’t have any now. I might start telling you my story and then go blank, and you never know when they come, when the dreams take over and turn everything into nightmare. It’s called the spoiling. And I don’t even know if any of you are real or if I can remember the beginning of my story anymore. The men in white took everything.”

  “We’re real,” he said, “as real as you. And tell us any story because we’re all going to Zeya together, you and us, and we need to know our neighbors. Tell us about these men in white.”