Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  I missed my boot. Stupid, but I did. I missed my Bronco, and my boot.

  ‘I lost my boot,’ I said, apologetic.

  The one I called Laugher passed me a pistol, an automatic with a red counter on the side. I didn’t know what to do with it, but they were serious and they had guns and I thought they were just as nuts as I must’ve seemed to them, with one boot and my charred shirt and half a red face, hair all stuck down. I didn’t tell them about the truck. The boot might be relevant, but my truck, maybe not.

  Brawler flicked her head. ‘Come on.’ Her tone was kinder than that of the other two. Her face wasn’t any kinder. She was angry, and empathy maybe wasn’t my thing because I didn’t know what she was angry about. Maybe she was angry at whatever, or whoever, knocked her teeth down her throat.

  She walked me past the tank, a big green monster with black stud tracks and twin long guns. At the truck parked slantwise on the road, she opened up the back. Army Rover, green, too, with fat wheels. Not as nice as my truck.

  There was a bloody mess in the back of the truck. I’d seen road kill before, of course. Things hit on the highway had matted fur, always. It was hot here in Minnesota, but not armadillo hot. We get some, but they were like real breasts on rich women around here, rare and didn’t like the cold. The world was getting hotter, but Minnesota kept right on freezing regular as clockwork, regular like seasons should be. This wasn’t regular. It wasn’t an armadillo. Didn’t have fur. Wasn’t a deer or a steer.

  I thought about puking but I didn’t have anything left in me to bring up, so I just gagged. It stank, and it wasn’t human. Looked like seafood. Stank like seafood.

  ‘What...’

  I didn’t get the question out and she didn’t answer because the tank barked. It was like being next to a Great Dane with a loudhailer right by your ear. The concussion wave slammed me against the truck. Whatever the tank shot out was insane – fire and death, like some kind of biblical thing, mythical. I was a lifeguard. I mostly sat in a chair, swam some. Nobody ever died. Rich women wanted me to take them in all sorts of ways, and not just quietly without their lovers. Rich women were weird.

  But then maybe I was a teacher, or a clerk in a mart.

  I liked solid. Like the woman on the hood on my Bronco. I couldn’t remember her name. I thought maybe I should be able to remember her name. She should have been more important than my truck.

  The boom hurt my ears and my thoughts hurt more. I was too close to both.

  Something blew up. A tank barks, something blows up. Tanks don’t bark without bite. I couldn’t see because Brawler’s blood was all in my face and my eyes and I was on the floor. Yellow lines, really fast wasps, hit the truck and cut holes clean through. Something else hit the tank and it flipped back about twenty yards.

  Thing is, if something can move a tank, I didn’t want to be where the resistance was.

  ‘Get up. Fucking run,’ said someone I couldn’t see, but he spat after he yanked me to my feet and dragged me toward the trees. Spitter.

  I just came from there, I thought. I want to go the other way.

  ‘Fuck, Georgina. Man.’ He was huffing, heavy on his feet.

  I wanted to spit. I had some of Georgina in my mouth. Now I had something to throw up and I couldn’t. You can’t puke and run. Just can’t. Figured. Shitty day all round.

  ‘What was that? What was that?!’

  ‘Don’t know, but they fucking killed us. Run.’

  I ran. I didn’t know where, but I knew why. Whatever the thing was in the truck it wasn’t human and its friends shot tanks and destroyed airports.

  I ran for maybe an hour. I hadn’t had a drink of water since before my truck got hit, possibly by the same thing that killed a tank.

  I’d taken my only boot off after a few minutes. When we quit running my socks were just threads covered in blood. I didn’t notice until we quit. Whatever my job was before I got blown up, it sure wasn’t a doctor. I had no idea a human could bleed so much and keep moving.

  7.

  Last Call

  Vidar Dawes

  We stopped at one of those places which sprang up after the Wide Earth Accords, when the major nations agreed to stop killing each other. It worked for the last thirty-odd years.

  It’s not working now, I thought. But I guessed those things probably hadn’t signed up to the accords.

  We slowed at last, walking through what was little more than a prefab town. It had a few shops. It was mostly those cheap, instant buildings for people who worked at some new concern – manufacturing, medipharms, entertainment districts. I knew it, but I’d never been. It was ten miles from airport. Was I far from my home? I couldn’t quite remember my address. I searched around in my head for some kind of memory. Perhaps it was a place like this. Some pristine, perfect apartment with a cactus or maybe even an animal. I had a wallet in my back pocket. I pulled it out and found my name, which I knew anyway. There was a photo of me and a woman. She looked kind of familiar. I threw the wallet and the photo and my Bronco keys in the dirt. Figured they were weighing me down.

  Maybe I was a travelling gigolo. I guess some of the ladies I met there lived here, in this made-up name town full of plastic and concrete and bereft of heart.

  My feet hurt. I didn’t like bleeding. Bleeding didn’t seem healthy. Blood was supposed to be inside people, not outside.

  I wiped at the blood in my hair and on my face while Spitter led me on a search for something. He didn’t say much. I turned my head and looked at the bloody footprints I left behind me. I was limping heavily and hoping my escort found whatever it was he was hunting for soon, because I could only limp so much. At some point I was just going to stop moving and lay down like everyone else I saw. They were all dead. I didn’t see anyone else walking around in bloodied socks, with a stupid expression like mine. Spitter’s expression wasn’t stupid. He had a goal. I just hurt.

  Spitter was everything right then. I felt some kind of weird attachment to him. I wanted to hide in his skirt, like a little child shy of meeting strangers. I didn’t want to meet the strangers. The strangers had done this – a pretend pop-up town full of bodies and smoke. I saw walls fizzing, like they’d been hit by a gob of acid. I saw electric cars with smashed glass all around, like they’d been hit with some kind of sonic boom. Bodies, too. Lots of bodies. Some were missing limbs and were still wet in the early light, so it wasn’t hours and hours since they died. Flies buzzed around, lazy and basking in blood-pools in the sunshine. The light hurt my eyes. It was bright. The drying blood, tacky, shone.

  We heard a scream and the sound of smashing glass, and a thick thud which sounded around a block over from our position. There wasn’t any wind to carry it so the sound was as dead as the thump of the something hitting the sidewalk. It was a wet thump, though. Organic. Not a piano. Not a boulder.

  A fall? Thrown? Jumped? How could I know?

  Spitter walked faster. I wondered if it might be time to just lay down. Some of the bodies looked like they’d make a decent pillow, those were there was enough of a body left to rest my head on. I didn’t get to lay down. My throat was parched and my cheeks and eyes were wet. I licked a tear that ran down my face and tasted snot, too.

  I was shaking and bleeding and hurting, and I was scared. I was shocked and tired and hungry and thirsty. Me, in the middle of a world gone mad. I wasn’t a soldier. I was just a guy who put grommets in things for some large machine, or, maybe I had an old job. Like a cobbler. Were there still cobblers? People wore shoes, right? Not me. Most people.

  ‘Move,’ said Spitter sounding tired, something like disgust in his tone. Probably at me. He was a soldier. I didn’t know what I was. ‘Fuck. Of all the people.’

  I knew ‘stopping’ really meant ‘dead’. Move, keep living. I wasn’t sure I wanted to move. Spitter’s grip was tenacious, though.

  I didn’t think about all the other things (blood, bodies, blood, bone, blood), because my mind slid away from them.

 
Spitter flicked his head to a vehicle. It was a quad-cycle, but one for someone who couldn’t walk. 2290 A.D. and some people still couldn’t walk. Not because it couldn’t be fixed, but because it was cheaper to buy a Mobimoto like this model than it was to get new legs or spinal work. Top speed limited, with a small power unit.

  We’d passed hundreds of small economical and practical cars, but they were burned out with the smell of fried electrics. This wasn’t.

  ‘Get on,’ he said, then, ‘No, dickhead. On the back.’

  He had the gun so it made sense if he took shotgun. I’d dropped the pistol the dead woman (Georgina, my brain said. I somehow turned that back into ‘Brawler’, because Brawler wasn’t have a real name and mattered less) somewhere in the woods. It wasn’t like I was going to argue. He wanted to drive and have the gun, fine. My throat was so dry I couldn’t reply. I nodded, got on, and we moved. I let my feet dangle over the side of the quad and didn’t put them on the foot rests. The wind was soothing, even at our 50kph which was as fast as the quad would move. Fast enough to be out of the town where I didn’t want to be because I still heard the occasional soft sound there, like there was something moving through those boxed up buildings.

  We moved slow enough so I could see more what’d happened while I’d been out for a night. Far more than I wanted to, but each sight etched itself into my eyes and barged through to my consciousness, seemingly even when I shut my eyes against the endless atrocities we passed.

  I wanted to talk to Spitter, to ask what I’d missed, but I didn’t know what to say.

  For five hours, headed east to wherever he decided to take me, I saw towns and city streets and highways full of dead people. Detritus littered the roads. Cars were burning, or cooling and ticking husks, or stationary coffins that filled the air with smoke so heavily I could smell the stench even at 50kph on our pathetic chariot.

  People shaped things I saw in other streets weren’t laid out entirely at random. I could tell some had been running. There weren’t any bodies sitting peacefully on a bench. If anyone died in their sleep I didn’t see them. I figured out some of it. I’d been gone overnight. There’d been some warning...but how much?

  Was everywhere dead?

  This was Minnesota. What did the sprawls look like, or the super-cities like Boston, York, Angelo?

  In five hours we must have passed thousands of dead. We passed grass and corn and dry dust bowl fields fallow for a year. We skirted the bigger towns so our progress formed a pattern. Town, country, town. Like that. Ticking by. A checkerboard landscape seen in slow motion from the back of a quad.

  I understood we were near the end when all I saw was green. Not dry sun-parched scrub green. This wasn’t natural. There were green sidings, hasty fences of chicken wire. Metal, turrets, communications arrays. There were soldiers patrolling.

  My feet were dry and crusted when Spitter and I got off. I didn’t complain when he took me by the collar and dragged me toward the gate like I was a criminal.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked when I could work up enough saliva to speak.

  ‘You’re in the army. Get some boots. And next time someone gives you gun learn what to do with it. Like, don’t fucking drop it and shit your pants.’

  I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but he was right. I had shit my pants. We’d driven all the way to wherever we were, me stinking of wet shit and then dry shit, and he hadn’t mentioned it ‘til now.

  ‘Good luck,’ he told me. Last thing I heard from him. He really was in the army. I loved Spitter, but he walked away and he went like everyone else does. He wasn’t my mother anyway. The Army was.

  8.

  The Bear

  Alante Brockner

  The Bear walked out into the yard before the men and women of 245th Armoured in North Carolina. Master Sergeant Givens passed the big old man a rolled flag. The old man was six feet six, and at sixty-five years old ready for retirement. They rolled him out because he looked impressive. He didn’t need an aid to help him shout. He’d lost some shoulder width over the years, but he was still enough of a man to be seen at the rear of his ranks, and loud enough to be heard all the way to the back, too.

  He went to the flagpole beside him while the 245th looked on. Once it reached the top that glorious flag fluttered free in hot wind blowing across a yard that would normally have held a division. This wasn’t ordinary times. Instead of Bragg’s full armoured compliment of over 10,000, they were down to brigade strength, at around 7,000 soldiers.

  In two days, thought Alante Brockner as she watched what she knew was just a show.

  ‘You know what this is?’ yelled the Major General standing proud before his troops.

  ‘Bear Rampant!’ they shouted out as one.

  The Major General, ‘The Bear’, nodded, looked at the sky, and took a deep, lung-busting breath before speaking out again.

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘The Big Bear!’

  He shook his head – just as big as it’d always been, long grey moustache hanging down, like a shit kicking hillbilly. He was a shit kicker, but never a hillbilly. No sir.

  ‘Close, boys and girls, but no…I am the Big Fucking Bear. These invaders coming down from out the sky? These long lanky aliens with their piss shooters? I’m standing here talking to you all now because near on three thousand SOLDIERS in my Death-damned army are gone. They’re dead, brothers and sisters. They were your brothers and sisters. We going to sit around and cry about it?’

  ‘No SIR!’

  The Big Bear nodded. ‘Good, then. Suit up and mount up. We got some killing to go I reckon, but if it starts, it’ll end. Everything does.’ The old man shook his head for effect, took a few paces before he turned back his full glare on his soldiers. ‘We got news they’re unloading a bucket full of sorry-ass mermaid army down the road in Fayetteville. This here’s Fort Bragg. It’s our yard. Not York or Angelo. Our yard. We like mermaids?’

  ‘No SIR!’

  ‘Get on, then,’ said Major General Dwight Washington in his huge, void-filling voice full of confidence and fury. ‘Death’s hungry.’

  *

  At twenty-seven, career army all the way, Alante Brockner was a Gunnery Sergeant. There was no one out there could move a D-Guard like her. She’d cut her teeth on the KES – the Kinetic Exoskeleton Suit. The D-Guard wasn’t an upgrade. It was a different beast. A soldier in a KES looked kind of like a praying mantis. Long limbed and quick, but with just four limbs and four cannons. Two heavy cannons sat on the shoulders of the lighter suit, and two on the forearms, or sometimes instead of the twin forearm guns they boasted powered chain blades or a punch-gun, which would fire a hard bolt a short distance on contact. Short, because if one of those KES goons punched something, the bolt jabbed out and that thing stayed punched – sometimes pinned to something else. With a punch, you could hardly miss. Hit, score.

  It took muscle to get the kinetic suit moving. It was more physical than the D-Guard but it was faster, too, once the servos wound up, and extremely hard to stop. But running a KES didn’t take much in the way of a brain. It was an extension of a body and not much more. Hardware inside a KES was limited to power storage, not power cells, and munitions were lighter because getting the suit moving was one thing, but moving the thing with heavy cannons loaded up, or the mortar-packs and launchers a D-Guard boasted? No way. Not the biggest, strongest of the monsters who wore them.

  The D-Guard was Alante’s favourite, almost to the point of wearing it being a passion. The Armoured Quad Mobile Tactical Unit.

  A beautiful thing, thought Alante, moving out toward the front of her troops, making the Dog howl for her. The D-Guard had four legs instead of a KES’ two, so it was more stable. It ran off Polonium and the cells gave it a ton of raw power, more than enough to carry the harder munitions and the heavier guns it came equipped with. It had arms, too, so all together it was a six-limbed beast more akin to a centaur than its common nickname ‘dog’.

  She’d never t
aken one to war. She didn’t know many of those who’d died in those first insane hours, and the days since. She knew people who’d lost family, lovers. Even so, when she settled into the Dog and let it loose on the parade ground alongside her battalion of dogs and KES, the Bears truly rampant, Alante smiled. They weren’t afraid of Death. Death just was. Death wasn’t afraid of them.

  He’d be proud, she figured. Look at us.

  ‘Comms up,’ said her Lt. Colonel.

  She flicked her switches, lighting up four out of a possible fifteen displays, switched at her command by reading her eye movement. Her vision was augmented by the suit, too, highlighting her own forces by radiation signature from the power cells, and the KES with a radiation marker, all filtered by processing on a hard-shell hump on the rear of her Dog where the technical things happened.

  She flexed her arms and her legs, the rear acting in concert with the forelegs wrapped round her own legs. Even with the heavy hump at her back, and the wider legs at the rear, and the six cannons and three personnel mines stored where the beast’s guts were, it was no harder on her than wearing a combat suit like an infantry soldier might.

  ‘Go live,’ she heard, and grinned as she flicked her eyes to her left, third screen, blinked to switch to live. Running a dog was still work, but the rear took the brunt of the effort, so effective range was greater than a KES, because the rear legs doubled the effort of walking. The Po84 power cell in the dog’s guts could last around two days without replacing and sending for recycling.

  Thing was, a KES suit, once it got going, was damn hard to stop. The dog did the work, sure, but when it came to ramming into a line? The KES unit had it covered.

  She had them covered.

  She was practically beaming when she moved out alongside over two thousand Dogs and five thousand KES units on their way to Fayetteville, and to war.