Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  “Who are they?” asked Margaret.

  “Someone who has been interested in me for some time. Americans.”

  I spotted the vehicle three more times while we crept southward. It always stayed in the mountains, following dirt roads that barely even existed in spots, so that often it would climb over the ridges and out of sight before giving me a good look, but on one occasion I saw what looked like an American communications antennae, characteristic in the way it curved upward from the car’s rear and then doubled over. I didn’t tell Margaret because it hadn’t tripped our motion sensors, and because I already knew that they were after me, that whatever the Americans thought special had been enough to make them risk coming to North Korea to retrieve me, enough to pay for information. Exactly what they thought was so special wasn’t clear at all.

  “Margaret, did they ever modify you in any way, like with organic linkages to processors, like the Russians did with Exogene?”

  She kept her attention on the view-screen. “The Russians told us they removed tracking devices, but I never saw or heard of anything else. Why?”

  “Megan,” I explained, “my Lily. They installed a computer at the back of her skull. I was just thinking that they could have done anything to us in the tanks.” Fear, the thing which had left me alone for so long, began its return, nibbling at my certainty that everything would go as planned. It will go according to His plan, something in my mind whispered, and the fear subsided, a fire extinguished by a flooding calm.

  “Why?” asked Margaret.

  “I was just thinking about what Lev said,” I lied, not wanting to tell her yet about what had me worried, that it was me who they followed and Margaret would die as soon as they caught us, if they caught us. “About how strange he was, how he wanted a sample of our tissue and it still makes no sense.”

  “The nonbred often don’t make sense, Murderer. Forget it. We’re almost at Chongjin, a major city that escaped destruction; we’ll need to be careful because if there’s anyone here, Chongjin would be a logical place for them to reside.”

  “And the horned beast will rise,” I said.

  Margaret shifted into neutral when she arrived at the top of a hill, preparing to coast down. “Don’t quote the manual, Catherine. Ever. You should have seen how the Russians used it—”

  She stopped in midsentence. It was late afternoon and for the last hour we had turned west, heading away from the ocean and into rugged country where what remained of the concrete road appeared more like massive blocks that a child had lined up and then kicked so that the ends no longer met, and each block had heaved upward in odd angles from decades of freeze-thaw. Steep mountains rose on either side, making it impossible to turn around. Margaret had stopped talking because we rounded a sharp corner and stumbled on the car—the one that had been following us. It was American. A secondary road joined ours, and the car had come from it, probably hoping to move ahead of us into Chongjin, when they rolled over a mine, blowing off all three tires on their right side.

  But nobody else was there. My mind filled the void with an image: about fifty men and women, dressed in the same padded clothes we had worn in Chegdomyn, swarming over the car and working hard to dismantle it, to strip it of everything they could, anything that one or two of them could cart off down the road to trade or sell. Act, I thought. Be determined, and resolute. But before I could fire they all vanished, leaving me with the sensation that I had seen ghosts, an army of them, which had only existed in my mind and that reality consisted of a smoking American scout car, one of its wheels rotating slowly as it burned to send a pillar of greasy smoke skyward. The black contaminated my dream of perfection. I blinked, expecting the looters to return, maybe from a phantom universe, but they didn’t, and my microphone sent only the sound of popping metal, crackling rubber.

  “Can you climb the slope on the high side?” I asked. “To get around?”

  Margaret had already started forward. “Yes.” She put the car into low gear, and gunned it gently so the turbines whined as the car pushed upward and then teetered on the center two wheels. We crashed down the far side. She crept forward then while both of us scoured the road visually for any sign of disturbance, signs that another mine had been planted, before rounding a sharp curve. Maybe they would be there, I thought, again fingering the triggers. Maybe motion sensors would illuminate a line of about thirty Korean scavengers, running away from us until within a minute they’d lie dying, filled with explosive flechettes that made me grin every time they hit, each time they found a home. But the road was empty. I told her to go back, and Margaret reversed our car then, returning slowly to the scene of wreckage.

  “Why go back?” she asked. “Do you want to help the Americans? See if they’re still alive?”

  “No. But we’ll need their alcohol.”

  “Who did this? Where are they? Why haven’t we hit any mines and why are there Americans here in the first place?”

  Her voice verged on hysterical, but there was no sense in explaining it. Not yet. The hatch popped, and I climbed out as fast as I could, shouting for Margaret to dog it behind me and man the turret. The American car was still running. Its engine forced my goggles into infrared for a second, outlining the grill in white, and on its side, ten jerry cans remained. They came off with trouble. Several of their latches had been bent shut from the rocks and it took me some time to free them, tossing the cans behind me toward our car where an additional two lay, blasted free. Men shouted from inside the car. They pounded on the hatches and begged me to open them but a boulder rested on top and even though I might have been able to dislodge it, there was no point in making the effort—calculus would have prevented me from acting. The calculus of time. Each moment I spent in the outside world, the beautiful death of radiation did its job, piercing the miniature openings between atoms of my thin lead shield, less than a millimeter’s worth, radiation knocking off an electron here, damaging a nucleic acid there. Moving the boulder would have given death more time to work on me. Besides, even if I had taken the time to free them it wouldn’t have been for their benefit, it would have been to take one out and torture him, get the man to tell me everything he knew, and I had little doubt that he would prefer to die from starvation than from my hand. Did they think they could explain anything? Be our friends? They must have eventually figured it out for themselves because the pounding gave way to curses, to the shouted “bitches” and “sluts,” the limits of their descriptive powers when it came to me and my sisters. By the time I made it back to Margaret with all the alcohol, fifteen minutes had passed; there hadn’t been time to secure it outside the car, and we did our best to store it in the interior compartment, under bags of food and ammunition.

  “Next time let me do it,” she said.

  “How much longer until Chongjin?” I asked. The sun was already approaching the tops of mountains to the west, and it wouldn’t be smart to sleep here, or in Chongjin; we needed to move as far as possible, as quickly as possible, but without hitting any mines of our own.

  “Ten minutes at our normal speed.”

  “Go slowly. Especially around corners. And don’t worry about bandits, there aren’t any. That’s just what Na-yung wants everyone to think.”

  “How do you know?”

  I gritted my teeth and banged my head against the turret ring, over and over again, trying to knock the truth out—about how I knew, about how God spoke to me and said things without my hearing them, so they would lodge in my mind unnoticed until I stumbled on them. Like landmines.

  “I know. That was probably a mine laid by Na-yung’s people. Do you think they want South Koreans to come here and scout? What do you think they do all year, Margaret, cut down trees? What would you do and what happened to your training?” My voice rose to a shout, then a scream. “You are supposed to be like me, able to breathe war and piss it, but instead you act like I’m your nursemaid and you’re a fucking baby!” I let a few minutes roll by, until my anger faded, before I tri
ed again. “The North Koreans probably booby trapped as much of the north as they could, little by little, each year, leaving skeletons behind them, the skeletons of slaves. There are no bandits, except in the legends dreamed up by Na-yung and propagated through an endless chain of lies. I know what we’ll find in the mines at Tanch’on, Margaret. I know it because I’ve already seen it, God showed me.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “More mines. Traps. And hundreds of skeletons of Russians and other prisoners that they transported here to work them while being irradiated, to extract metal and gold. Just like the Americans do in Kazakhstan. We’ll find gold in Tanch’on. And we’ll find hundreds and hundreds of skeletons, the voices of the dead which are only able to say one thing: that they’re dead. Na-yung wants people to believe that North Korea is worth nothing so that nobody will come here, so that someday she can reclaim it.”

  Margaret put her foot on the brake, slowing our descent as we rolled downward toward the city. “Who were they? The Americans, why were they here?”

  I strapped in, making sure the flechette hopper was still full, wondering if maybe I had fired at something and forgotten all about it. “They’re here for me,” I said, and told her everything—about the strange general and about what Misha had said, everything about the efforts that had been made to kill me, and that for some reason, the Americans thought me special.

  “I know why they think you’re special,” said Margaret.

  “Why?”

  She slowed, driving around an almost imperceptible lump in the road. “Because you’re better than everyone. Especially them. More than a Lily, something new and incredible.”

  Chongjin breathed us in at sunset. The car coasted a last few meters into the city’s northern suburbs, and we whined between crumbling houses and buildings that had turned half orange and half shadow in the little light remaining. To our left the remnants of a partially eaten factory rose over the walls. Somehow the spire of a smokestack had survived the years, a middle finger that refused to give into anything, and which grabbed my attention, the reddish sunlight making it seem covered with its own blood. I almost didn’t notice when Margaret tripped a mine. It blew half heartedly, a fizzle, which sent fire and smoke all around us as if we’d driven through flare, but the time and elements had degraded its components—or maybe it was never built correctly in the first place—and the thing did little more than set a jerry can on fire and melt some rubber from our tires.

  I laughed at the sight. “Boom, and the Americans die! Only a tiny Zzzt for us though, the footstep of good fortune always tiptoeing ahead of us a bit, making everything all right, neutering things in our path.”

  “It scared me to death,” said Margaret. “I thought we’d died.”

  “We did. The ‘us’ that existed a second ago is no more. It’s dead. Now it’s the us that exists this second, until it passes and kills us to give birth to the new Margaret and Catherine. A new Little Murderer with every tick. Dying isn’t what you think it is, Margaret. You think it’s the end of life, but it’s not. Death is the end of birth, the fact that time can no longer spit out a new Margaret.”

  “Should I get out and check?” she asked. “To see if anything else was damaged?”

  “No. We need to get as far as possible tonight, so we can make Tanch’on tomorrow. Maybe between now and then a different Margaret will be born, not a rebirth, but a miracle one, a Margaret born from a virgin.”

  “Like you?”

  I started crying then, and knew why. There was nothing to emulate in me, and the fact that someone could think I was worth following made me sick, as though in a moment the bile would run from my pores, filling my armor until it suffocated, but even then it wouldn’t stop, would continue until it killed Margaret and everyone nearby. Margaret didn’t know what she had said. I forgave her for that. If she had known that there was nothing special, that whatever the Americans saw to make them follow, whatever my sisters saw to make them believe in me, had been placed in my genes by men—those who created me and therefore who were responsible—she should have pitied me. But then so much had happened since my creation that deep down I knew something else had taken over and it was all from inside, all me. At a point, late in the war when Megan and I had run, the decisions had become mine, the growth mine, the changes mine. All mine. And I didn’t want the responsibility, just like I had never wanted to be a Lily. I wanted to be a fluke, someone else’s mistake. Everyone would laugh, I was sure, when they realized that it had all been a big mistake, and I was just like my sisters.

  But I wasn’t and there was no denying it.

  We waited on another road remnant, positive that we now rested among ghosts. Evidence was all around. Piles and piles of skeletons lay scattered everywhere, none of them whole since they had been ripped to pieces and we had to drive over them, the crunching sound coming clearly through the microphone and reverberating through my thoughts. The skeletons traced a path all the way along the road and led straight to a refinery’s gate, the machinery beyond it still gleaming as if Na-yung had replaced it yesterday and oiled it with the fat stripped from corpses. It was new machinery, maybe from Korea, a compact unit that took up less than a few hundred square meters and around which had been erected a wall and tall guard towers with green leaded-glass windows. Guards were worth shielding. Armed men and women would have been among the trusted, worth protecting from radiation. But for now the fortress was vacant, and autocannons hung loosely from their tower ports, barrels covered in canvas and pointing at the sky as if angered by their own impotence. Only the skeletons were here; they had won, simply by waiting until Na-yung had left, but they didn’t know that as soon as she needed more metal she’d return, driving over them with as little concern as we had. But it was morning now, and the mineshaft couldn’t wait for us any longer; I silently praised the dead for their temporary victory. They had found a home in Tanch’on.

  “How much of a dose have I gotten?”

  Margaret checked the computer. “About eighty thousand millirem. A hundred thousand more, Catherine, and you’re in trouble. But the readings here aren’t so bad; it would take about an hour to get that dose.”

  “We can count on the mine giving me some cover, too,” I said.

  “What are you planning?”

  “To find some ore carts. I have to assume that these people died in the middle of their job, probably from the exposure of making hundreds of trips outside on the surface. I’m guessing they left unprocessed ore. It looks from here like the plant itself is automated.”

  “You want me to go start it up?”

  I thought for a second, before climbing out the hatch and flicking on my internal helmet blower to defog its faceplate. “No. Man the guns. I’m bringing relays with me to drop if we start losing communications, so when I talk make sure to respond.”

  Wind howled through pine trees that climbed every slope, their trunks bent and twisted from the constant battle with elements, but even misshapen they amazed me. The needles were dark green. Each one held a different shade, and then between them I saw tiny birds flitting in and out silently. But when I got to the mouth of the main shaft everything stopped. The air became heavy, even inside my suit, and when I glanced back it seemed that nothing moved, as if local wildlife had put two and two together, that the presence of people at the mine meant something bad would happen, meant it was time to hide. A long line of ore carts rested on two sets of narrow rails, the ones to my left filled with chunks of rock and gravel, the ones on the right empty. Car after car stretched into darkness.

  “This should be easy,” I said. “I don’t know how much gold the ore contains, but there’s already a line of full cars going as far as I can see.”

  Margaret clicked in. “So all you should have to do is turn the thing on and we’ll just wait.”

  “Is everything clear?” I asked.

  “No sign of movement.”

  I turned away from the shaft and headed
toward the refinery. The main gate, a solid steel panel almost eight feet tall that linked to a concrete wall topped with an electrified set of wires, was locked. The wires hummed overhead. Working electricity surprised me, suggesting that refinery contained a micro-reactor. What other surprises were here? Blowing open the door would be easy but knowing Na-yung and Yoon-sung, it seemed too easy; and intrusion was something they would have thought of; I peered through a crack between the door and wall to find three wires, stretched tight on the other side.

  “Booby traps,” I said into the radio.

  “What have you got?”

  “Wires. Taut, on the other side of door to the refinery yard. I’m cutting them.”

  “Why take the chance?” Margaret asked. “If you release tension they could go off.”

  “What else is there to do? The door opens inward, and these must be designed to function on an increase in tension, not its release.”

  I pulled out a pair of wire cutters, and slipped them through the crack, clipping the wires one at a time before waiting for something to happen. Nothing. So I jogged back and took cover inside the mineshaft.

  “Give it a couple of grenades,” I said, “Just blow the lock.”