Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Denny spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.

  What a buncha fucking baloney.

  Did he give a rat’s ass if General Jones was as black as a fucking eggplant?

  Nope. All he cared about was getting his guys onto this island, and off again in one piece with whatever information they might find there. And in his opinion—even though it was just the opinion of a lowly noncom—they were that much more likely to get out of this with their asses intact because of the week he’d spent in the Zone, playing with those amazing holobloc machines. Without ever having set foot on the island, he already knew it intimately.

  And if there did turn out to be Japs hiding there, for sure they woulda built a bunch of stuff like tunnels and bunkers that weren’t on the 3-D images he’d examined back in California. Still, he knew all the bays and inlets, the major streams and valleys, indeed all the topography of the joint, and that’d come in handy for a “greenside” op like this, where they’d have to stay hidden from any hostile forces.

  As Denny rhythmically dipped his oar into the water in time with his men, he recalled with real wonder some of the things he’d seen in the Zone. They had three-dimensional images, like the ones he’d seen of his target island, for tens of thousands of other places all over the world. The uptimers had warned him that the imagery might not match up with reality. The Tokyo of his day was a hell of a lot different from the Tokyo of the future, for instance. But Denny knew that mountains and rivers and stuff like that didn’t move much in just eighty years.

  Not in backwaters like this, at any rate.

  There’d been some other stuff he’d seen out there, too. Stuff that woulda turned his shit white a few years earlier, before he got into the corps and saw a bit of the world. The little coal-mining town where he grew up didn’t run to strip joints or porno houses or “dope cafés.” And you never ever saw white folks mixing with anyone other than their own kind. Or ladies walking around with their asses hanging out of such short skirts and their tits bursting out of such tight tops.

  He’d really wanted to write his brother about it, but he knew the old man would rip up the letter as soon as he saw it. His dad was a much more formidable censor than the corps. Small-town preachers tended to be a little judgmental and censorious like that.

  A slight breeze picked up, bringing with it the unmistakable smell of landfall ahead of them. His nostrils twitched at the stench of rotting vegetation, of smoke, and—he was certain—of cooking.

  Denny brought his low-light amplification up to max and scanned the approaching shoreline. Coming in from leeward the surf was low, two feet at most, and its hissing crunch would smother the sound of their final run in. He couldn’t see anything unusual until he switched to infrared view, and suddenly two heat blossoms appeared a couple of hundred feet up the headland that dominated this side of the island.

  He turned around to face his men and used a series of hand signals to tell them that the island was occupied.

  23

  D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 0903 HOURS.

  ARDENNES PLATEAU.

  In the seconds before the bullet struck her, Julia Duffy relived whole arcs of her life. The field in which she stood, lined up with about thirty or so muddy, ragged GIs, bled into a memory of the field she played in behind her childhood home in Excelsior Springs, outside Kansas City.

  She was an only child, but she lived next door to a couple of little girls, aged twelve months on either side of her, and they’d been friends all the way through school. Even when she’d moved to France, and later lived in New York, they kept in contact via e-mail and Christmas cards. Rebecca and Susie had stayed in Missouri. Bec married a cosmetic dentist who kept offices down on the Plaza and out in Johnson County, while her sister snagged the owner of a chain of Krispy Kreme franchises. Apart from her dad, they were the only friends she cared to hold on to after leaving town.

  As the German machine gunners primed their weapons she had a flash-back so vivid it almost seemed as though she’d not only crossed back through the Transition, but returned to her five-year-old form, as well.

  She was having a sleepover at Bec and Susie’s place, but not much sleep was happening. At about two in the morning she and Bec had convinced the younger Susie to go in to the girls’ parents and ask for a drink. All that yakking under the bedcovers had made them mighty thirsty. Susie had woken her dad, telling him in a singsong voice that she needed a drink. Even though Julia hadn’t been there in the bedroom, her memory put her right there next to Susie as her father grunted something about getting a drink from the refrigerator by herself. He probably meant milk, but the girls found a two-liter bottle of Coke in the crisper and, miracle of miracles, managed to unscrew it, pour themselves three glasses full, and continue doing so until it was all gone, without spilling as much as a single drop. They were very proud of themselves.

  The caffeine and sugar then kept them awake until sunrise, playing with the sisters’ army of Barbies in front of a TV set that was turned down and tuned to a local station running a continual loop of infomercials.

  As one of the soldiers next to her began babbling, and crying for his mother, Julia flashed forward to the last moments of her first serious relationship, with a photographer she’d met in college, a narcissist whose self-regard she mistook for sensitivity. They’d dated for three months, an intensely dislocated period in her life when she missed almost every class at school, nearly flunking out before cracking up when this idiot came back from a shoot in the Caribbean to blithely inform her that he’d gotten a Russian swimsuit model pregnant and was going to spend a year or two in Asia figuring out what this meant for him. Neither she nor the model was invited on this epic journey of self-discovery.

  Julia recalled in clinical detail how she’d stood at the foot of his carved Thai teak bed and verbally lashed him like a cart driver whipping some home truths into a particularly stupid and stubborn donkey. And how he had remained cool and almost psychopathically self-contained as she fell to pieces, eventually collapsing in a fetal ball at his feet.

  He’d stepped over her, sat down at his computer, and begun editing another photo shoot saying sorry, but it was overdue.

  These memories came not one after another, but seemingly all at once, as a single massive eruption of recall with past and present fused in a psychic tangle. As the shout of the SS officer in charge of their firing squad—Feuer!—reached her ears, she was simultaneously learning to drive in her first car, a twenty-year-old Geo Metro, bargaining for the “morning price” on a sarong in Bali, her first overseas assignment, and attending Mass—her father’s funeral—for the last time in her life.

  Forrest-fucking-Seymour of the Des Moines Register and Tribune was beating her out of first place for the Pulitzer after she’d written eight long pieces in the Times destroying Edgar-fucking-Hoover.

  She was celebrating her nomination for the prize at the Bayswater.

  She was being woken in her apartment by a phone call telling her Hoover was dead by his own hand, copies of her stories by his side, with the word LIES scrawled over them, hundreds of times.

  She was double-dating with Rosanna, back when she was first seeing Dan, and Rosie was still thinking about Wally Curtis.

  She was on the Brisbane Line in Australia, watching Artie Snider charge up that hill throwing grenades, firing from the hip.

  She was partying with Slim Jim, Maria, Sinatra, and Crosby.

  She was in Honolulu, fucking John Kennedy a few months after she’d first met him at that party up in Hyannisport and months before she formally split from Dan.

  She was shopping for Christmas presents with her daddy at the Excelsior Springs Wal-Mart, the year he’d been laid off from the Ford plant at Clay-como and they’d had to use food stamps to buy frozen Banquet turkey meat in the huge family pack.

  She was lying in bed, feeling his tears running down her cheeks as he kissed her good night and told her if she listened real hard she might hear Santa’s sleigh bells ove
r the wind howling outside, but warning her that there might not be as many toys in the sack this year.

  She was aware of how the birds fell silent in the trees behind them. Of a stone she hadn’t had time to remove from her left boot after they’d been captured. Of the smell of somebody’s bowels evacuating a few feet away. Of someone in a small voice, imploring his grandma to save him. Of the way the Germans’ helmets cast a shadow over their faces, giving them the appearance of human pillboxes. Of a woman’s face floating up from the deepest parts of her memories, her mother’s face she was sure, even though she’d run off with her boss when Julia was less than two years old, leaving her without even memories. The woman had perversely taken every photo album in the house and burned them the day before.

  A small sunburst in the black maw of the machine gun that seemed to be directly pointed at her.

  Someone screaming, “No!”

  A massive blow to her chest, lifting her feet free of the ground, spinning her over and over, turning her around in midair. The sky, the trees, the muddy grass a blur of bluish green. And the last of her living memories swirling around inside this mosaic as darkness closed in at the edge of her vision. Of Dan, her husband, her dead ex-husband, and the day he’d found out that she hadn’t had the birth control implants removed as she’d promised. And the look in his eyes when she told him she’d switched on the gene shear, terminating the pregnancy she’d only just discovered, and rendering her barren forever after. Dan fell away from her. And all she could see was his eyes, or perhaps the memory of his eyes, so full of disappointment, pain, betrayal, and the certain knowledge that she had done this on purpose, because it suited her. Without talking to him she had cut off the life they had created together, and the life they were going to lead, the children they would have raised and loved and left to the world.

  She had let all that slip away, and let him slip away with it, because in the end she was selfish. She wanted what she wanted for herself, not for them.

  As the light went out he disappeared forever. And Julia Duffy cried out, weakly, wretchedly, and so softly that nobody could possibly hear.

  “Daddy. Help me.”

  D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 1151 HOURS.

  ARDENNES PLATEAU.

  The German front might be in complete collapse, but that didn’t make it any safer to be in this part of the world. Captain Chris Prather jumped down from the Sherman and landed on a patch of ground made boggy by the amount of blood that had soaked into the soil. He looked around for a body, but couldn’t see one nearby.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, barely able to hear himself over the rumble of the tank squadron’s idling engines. They’d pulled up at the edge of a clearing near the eastern border of the Ardennes. Nine tanks out of the twenty-two he’d started with, and a company-sized force of the Twenty-ninth Infantry, stitched together from the remains of a battalion that got chopped up crossing the Meuse River.

  “They’re our guys all right!” a corporal yelled. “Come on.”

  A couple of medics ran past Prather, hauling their kits, but he doubted they’d be of much use. This was the third execution site they’d come across, and the previous mass graves had been just that. They’d found no survivors.

  Prather walked slowly, subdued and even indifferent to what he would find. From the line of bodies it looked like a platoon had bought it. The blue diamond patch, bordered in yellow, on their uniforms marked them as Rangers. He wondered if they’d been tricked by krauts dressed up as Americans. He’d heard rumors of that happening. Most likely, they’d been grabbed up by the SS. Wehrmacht units were beginning to surrender en masse, but as things fell apart Himmler’s storm troopers seemed to become even more inhuman in the face of their imminent defeat. The last time he’d had anything like an intelligence briefing, it had stressed the need to be aware of the possibility of poison gas, even germ attacks. Apparently something like that was happening already on the Eastern Front. Although what the hell they were supposed to do about it if the Germans started lobbing shit like that at them, he had no idea.

  Neither had the briefers. When asked they’d simply repeated the mantra. Be Alert.

  Prather plucked a long, clean stalk of grass and began to chew it as he walked. It was a bleak day, with low clouds glowering at him from over the treetops. The dark forest along which they had been skirting loomed to his right. It looked like the sort of place you’d expect to find gremlins and trolls. Ahead of him, the medics were at work, methodically checking each body for signs of life. He didn’t—

  “Captain! Captain Prather. This one’s alive!”

  He spat out the stalk and hurried over. He tried to ignore the extraneous details: the promiscuous way in which many of the bodies sprawled over one another, and the thick black knots of flies that seethed around the terrible wounds. One medic continued with the hopeless task of checking the dead, but he was hurrying now as his colleague worked frantically to strip away the webbing and jacket of the critically wounded soldier.

  “Hey, shit! This is a woman!”

  Prather almost tripped over a leg gone stiff with rigor mortis. His heart leapt into his mouth. He dropped to his knees beside the body. She was covered in mud and gore, almost unrecognizable really, but still he knew it was her. The reporter.

  “What the fuck…?”

  The medic was having trouble cutting through her battle dress.

  “Don’t bother,” Prather said. “You’ve hit ballistic plate. There, under the jacket, see. You’ll just blunt your knife. Quickly, here, pull these tabs.”

  The plastic material—he forgot the name—came apart with a ripping sound.

  The second medic appeared, shook his head quickly to indicate that nobody else had made it, and kneeled down beside them. He joined in the effort, pouring water over her exposed chest to clean away some of the filth. No entry or exit wound, just massive bruising and a deep indentation below the heart. She was breathing, shallow and ragged.

  “Quick, check her for bullet wounds,” Prather said. “She’s wearing twenty-first armor. She might be all right if—”

  “Captain,” said one of the medics. “They got machine-gunned from fifty yards away. At this range the impact alone would kill—”

  “No,” he insisted, shaking his head. “This is reactive matrix armor. Nanotube waffle. I’ve read about it. It can shed enormous loads of kinetic energy. If she hasn’t been punctured, she’ll need treatment for shock. It could still kill her.”

  The corpsmen began rifling through the contents of their medical kits. Prather stood back to give them room. He wondered how Julia Duffy had gotten herself into this mess. Last he’d heard, she was supposed to be “embedded” with Patton. She must have struck out again on her own and walked into the shit with these poor bastards.

  One of the medics elevated her feet by bundling up a couple of bloodied jackets and using them as pillows. The other checked her pulse and pupils.

  A couple of scouts came trotting back from the forest to report. “We got nada, Cap’n. Krauts have gone for good. They left a few signs, though. SS by the looks of things.”

  “No shit,” he said, not bothering to hide his bitterness. He’d liked Duffy. She was a good egg and, from what he’d heard, a hellcat in a fight. He’d read a couple of her pieces, here and there, when he’d found out she was coming to write about them, and he’d thought the style a bit overdone, but in herself she was a real gem. The enlisted men loved her.

  Prather levered himself up, his knees creaking painfully. He felt about fifty years old.

  How does an old fart like Patton do it?

  One of the scouts noticed Duffy’s breasts.

  “Hey, is that is a dame?”

  “Yeah,” Prather said. “Good eye. Okay, let’s get it done. Tag the site. Call in a medevac for Ms. Duffy. Mark the grid up for War Crimes and Graves registration. Then we’ll push on.”

  He turned away and walked slowly back to his tank. He was looking forward to climbing back inside
and embalming himself in the rank stew of diesel fumes, body odors, and mechanical stink. His face was contorted with disgust. It was an expression he recognized on every man he passed.

  Fucking Nazis, he thought. “I hope the Reds nuke the fucking lot of ’em.”

  D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 2134 HOURS.

  HMS TRIDENT, NORTH SEA.

  “One of ours, you say? I didn’t think we had any of ours out there at the moment?”

  “Aye, Captain. Seems to be a wee stuff-up. She’s a civvy. An embedded reporter. Ms. Duffy,” explained her XO.

  “Julia Duffy?” Halabi asked, raising her eyebrows in surprise. It was deep night outside, and she could see her reflection in the armored glass of the slit windows in the stealth destroyer’s bridge.

  “Aye, Cap’n. Embedded with the U.S. Seventh Cavalry on D-Day. But she’s still listed in Fleetnet as part of the original Multinational Force complement. So she’s been sent to us.”

  Halabi shook her head at the way clerical errors seemed to be the only constant across the multiple realities.

  “Do we have the bed space?”

  “Aye, ma’am. Three empty cots. No waiting.”

  “Oh well,” the Trident’s skipper said, “no harm done then. How is she?”

  McTeale checked his flexipad. “Four broken ribs, a small puncture of the left lung. Deep-tissue damage to the upper torso. Apparently she survived an impromptu firing squad. We can patch her up, send her on in a day or two.”

  “Sweet mother of God,” Halabi said as she sipped at a steaming mug of tea. “She’s indestructible. Is she conscious? Is she talking to anyone?”

  McTeale nodded. “Aye, ma’am. Cursing up a storm, by all reports.”

  “That’d be right,” Halabi said, grinning. “You can look after the shop for a few minutes, Mr. McTeale. I might as well pop downstairs and have a word with our celebrity contestant.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  Halabi left the bridge and headed across into the starboard hull of the trimaran. The ship was quiet, but not exactly calm. The storms of the last few days had whipped the North Sea into a bit of a washing machine, and her passage through the companionways of the stealth destroyer was a matter of lurching from one handhold to the next. She passed only a few crewmembers, however. Many of her sailors were asleep in their bunks, although the Combat Information Center was fully staffed around the clock, the sysops keeping a constant watch on the feed from the Nemesis arrays. A third of them were monitoring the Eastern Front, and the ship was full of ’temps again, as “experts” in the Soviet military had come aboard to make sense of the data stream pouring in from Poland.