“That’s about it,” the other one said, pausing to lick the end of his pencil. “Now will you help us?”
The train engine hissed in the distance, hydraulic brakes locking and unlocking as someone shunted it off the main line just in case another rolled through. I hated these men. The train had brought them here, so they had corrupted even that, the one thing we all looked forward to, and from now on its arrival would make me wonder if it carried something awful, something that feasted on the minds of people like me and then vomited on the potential of someone like Bridgette. Even with my brain melting each second, enough of me was there to realize that this was all insane; why did they need to wear lab coats in Karazhyngyl? They thought that she had been only a recreation for me, that I was perverted, and it occurred to me that all I wanted to do was get back in my hole, outside, just sink back into the dust and fossilize.
“She was wild,” I said.
They leaned forward, the quiet one taking notes again. “How so? What do you mean ‘wild’?”
“I mean that she ate rats and mice, bugs, anything she
could get her hands on. She tried eating dirt too, had lost her taste for standard rations.”
“That’s… unusual.”
I clicked into Ox’s personal channel so he could listen in. “And that’s not all. I think that she wanted to become a lawyer.”
“A what?”
“Swear to whatever, man, she wanted to make a break for it and become an entertainment lawyer for some reason, said that she could make tons of money and live in Beverly Hills, that some guy had given her and her sisters a bunch of vids of what it’s like to be rich in California. She and a few of the others had a plan to escape and become hookers to put themselves through law school in San Diego. Either that or start an all-girl rock band to keep their days free for school.”
The room went quiet again. Ox laughed in my ear and I did my best to keep from cracking a smile, but there’s not much you can do when you’re that high. It took all I had just to string the sentences together, so when the egghead one asked his next question, I lost it.
“Was she satisfying? Sexually, I mean?”
Boom.
I don’t even remember hitting the floor but there it was, right in my face, as I grinned and shrieked, unable to hold back the laughter anymore and hearing Ox crack up in my ears, louder. Both men stared. Then the quiet guy dropped his pencil so that it rolled toward me, and I grabbed it, not even noticing a transition to rage before I slammed it into his foot, through the dusty synthetic leather and down through flesh. His screams didn’t faze me. It was all so funny that when they carried him from the hotel, his partner shouting something at Ox, I passed out from lack of oxygen.
Ox poured water on my face to bring me back and I glanced at my suit clock. An hour had passed.
“They wanted me to court-martial you.”
“You can’t,” I said. “I’m not military, and they freakin’ deserved worse.”
“I know. But, Oscar, you’ve got to get a grip, man. My guys are all starting to think you’re bad luck and that I can’t control you, that you’re going to screw up and get someone killed. And they’re right. You’re fading, going way, way out there.”
“Let’s zip, Ox. Like we used to.”
He shook his head and what happened next freaked me: he started crying. Just a few tears, but it wasn’t right.
“You’re dying, Scout. I don’t want it anymore. You’re nothing but a screwup and I’ve asked for a space for you on the soonest train out to Shymkent. As soon as we get a billet, you’re gone.”
It was cold that night. My suit said otherwise, but when I tried to sleep in my hole, it felt like an ice bath. I shivered and hoped that morning—and any empty trains—wouldn’t come. As bad as Karazhyngyl was, it was all I had, and the thought of leaving Ox made me pucker.
There were no empty trains. All of them carried wounded back from the front lines, or wrecked vehicles, or mountainous piles of dead, so each time Ox tried to signal one, he got the same reply over the radio, one we all heard on our headsets. Without direct orders from headquarters, no members of ad hocs would be permitted to abandon their posts, except in the case of seriously wounded. The dead would be buried in place. After a couple of days, he gave
up. But I did my best to stay out of his way, and in my more lucid moments I really felt bad about the way I had acted and the fact that we headed in opposite directions. Ox had gone clean. He didn’t do
anything
anymore and I never even saw him drink as much as a beer, which made me feel even worse for being so weak, because deep down I knew: there was no way I would quit. I was weaker than him and it let him down.
About three weeks after the incident with the two Feds, we got a call from an ad hoc north of us, Task Force Kiik. Ox nearly blew a fuse. I was in the basement, picking tobacco out of my teeth, when he threw his helmet against the wall, startling all of us, including the doc who had been stitching up a kid who’d shot a hole in his foot by accident. It was the third “accident” that week; Ox had gotten wise to it some time before and made it a policy not to send anyone rearward unless the man had been wounded under enemy fire. This kid must have been extra stupid—or didn’t get the memo until it was too late.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He stared at me for a second and then grinned. “You’re going to Kiik.”
“Kiik? Why?”
“They’re under attack. We have two patrols out, so I can only spare thirty guys and two trucks right now, and I need you out there. Every weapon counts. Get your shit together, Martin will lead from truck one.”
I had been feeling good until then—like maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad day—but Kiik killed it. Somehow I knew it would be extra crappy. The day was especially hot—so hot that I had made it a point to wriggle my way into the basement command post and stay there, even
though I wasn’t supposed to. But that wasn’t what bothered me. Somewhere out there was Pops. I hadn’t seen him in forever, and during his absence, I’d gotten soft, terrified, and I just knew that he’d been preparing, gathering his strength all this time we’d been sitting around. The stairs felt magnetized. As I crept up them, Ox’s orders went out over the net, and by the time I stepped into the Kazakh sunlight, squinting, Karazhyngyl had come alive. Guys ran back and forth loading the two trucks with ammo, water, and food, and I pulled my vision hood on and cinched it. Tight. The goggles dimmed the sunlight, made everything a bearable bluish green, soothing in a way, despite the fact that nobody was happy about the orders. Martin saw me on the hotel steps and tossed me a Maxwell.
“Truck two.”
I just nodded; there wasn’t anything to say. You’d have been hard-pressed to hold a conversation as we all readied. By the time I climbed aboard, everyone had found a seat, leaving me a spot on the bed, just below the auto-Maxwell, where I sat, cross-legged. We set out, and still nobody said a word.
The road northward took us over low rises, but for the most part, this section of Kazakhstan was as flat as the rest of it. I’d never been to Texas. But a friend of mine had once shown me pictures of the state’s west side, near El Paso, with dry plains that stretched forever, here and there covered with a pathetic kind of scrub grass; Kaz was just like that. In the distance we saw an auto-drone every once in a while, and someone would get jumpy, calling both trucks to a halt so that we had to spill out and find cover behind the railroad tracks, but inevitably it turned out to
be ours. The monotony nearly killed me. Every once in a while Ox would check in with Martin and relay Kiik’s status reports, but that didn’t do anything to improve our mood; it made things worse. The insurgents were hammering those guys, and it sounded like we’d be too late to change anything, even though Kiik was only two hours from Karazhyngyl.
Then they hit us.
Our trucks were old Tedoms that someone had confiscated off locals in Shymkent. They should have been tossed into a junkyard. The rebuilt engines were good enough. But the frames had all but rusted out, and rudimentary ceramic armor had been fixed to all the surfaces so that they looked like hybrid nightmares, some sort of Frankenstein truck, part vehicle, part scout car, but all of it crap. Martin’s truck exploded in front of us. Our driver panicked, and instead of stopping so we could all get out and find cover, he hit the gas, slamming into the back of Martin’s flaming wreck and then bouncing over what I assumed were the bodies of our own men, but I never found out if they were alive or dead before we ran over them. Then three more rockets came out of nowhere. Two roared over our heads and disappeared in the plains beyond, but the third hit our rear wheel, and the next thing I knew, I was airborne, moving forward at roughly the same speed the truck had been. When I slammed into the dirt, everything went black.
I woke to the sound of grenades. To my right a group of men in Russian armor fired at the men from my unit, who had taken cover on the other side of the railroad tracks. I was behind the Russians. The four of them moved quickly, throwing each other hoppers or grenade
clips to make sure nobody ran out of ammunition, and at least two of them fired at all times. I felt myself about to scream, recognizing their swiftness and efficiency immediately. These were genetics. Cables dangled from their helmets and connected to the power packs on their backs, and I tried to stay as still as possible, thinking that I could wait it out and crawl from the dust once it was over. Then one of our guys’ grenades overshot, pelting me with fléchettes.
My carbine was a few feet away and I reached for it slowly, inching my hand across the dirt so a sudden movement wouldn’t attract any attention, praying that none of my guys would fire at me by accident, mistake me for Russian. The reticle popped into sight. After I emptied my hopper, it was over, only a few seconds later, and I lay there, shaking, barely getting my helmet off in time to dry heave, trying not to think of the fact that it had been close. The last genetic had noticed me just before I squeezed the trigger, and had begun swinging his grenade launcher around. The barrel looked wide and empty, pointed at my face. Most of my fléchettes missed him, but a few passed through one of his vision ports and out the back of his helmet.
Martin nudged me with his foot. “You OK?”
“I thought you bought it.”
“Me too. We lost more than half our guys; there’s only ten of us left. You should have seen how much air you caught. And thanks for taking them out.”
Now that the fighting was over, the shakes got worse, and my neck began to feel as though it had been twisted. “I’m messed up. What do we do now?”
“One of the guys thinks he can scavenge the burned-out
Tedom, use it to get the other truck back on the road. Ox wants us to come back; Kiik’s holding its own now, don’t need us, and even if they did… we’re
all
messed.”
I turned to look at the vehicles. One truck had burned out almost completely, and the other one had lost its rear wheel, but a group had already begun jacking up the burned one and ratcheting off a replacement. The sun had passed its zenith. In the quiet, as I sat on the rails, the breeze on my face felt peaceful—like maybe this wouldn’t have been such a bad place to visit before the war—and some of the guys even started joking as they struggled with the trucks. We’d leave our dead, pick them up the next day with a reinforced unit. But for now, Martin did the rounds and downloaded their data into his computer, to make sure that their names got recorded and sent home even if their bodies didn’t.
Twenty minutes later we had piled into the back of the Tedom and were bouncing over the dirt road and heading south toward Karazhyngyl, but this time I rode on the bench. We were less crowded. At my feet one of our corpsmen worked on someone, but I didn’t know his name and wasn’t sure if I wanted to, because the guy kept staring and reaching for me, like he recognized something on my face. Flecks of blood covered his cheeks and the corpsman cracked his armor, so we all got a look. A grenade had gone off near his side, leaving only a fist-sized hole in his carapace, but the fléchettes had ricocheted around inside the armor, which, as it turned out, had been the only thing holding him in one piece. Blood and a good portion of his intestines washed over my feet, and a Marine next to me threw up into his helmet after the guy died.
The corpsman dropped his bandage, the one he had
been planning to use before his patient spilled out. “I couldn’t fix this.”
“It’s OK,” said Martin.
“I can’t do anything for this, all they gave me was a first aid kit, how am I supposed to do anything with that?”
“I said it’s OK. Just snap him shut. He’s gone now anyway.”
The corpsman’s expression changed then, to the same one I’d seen so long ago on that guy Ox had nearly wiped in the tunnels, the one who’d lost his face. “No, Martin, you don’t get it, man. I can’t do
anything.
What the fuck is wrong with you, are you even hearing me?”
“I said
fuck it
!”
All of us were getting on edge, catching whatever it was that the corpsman had, and Martin felt it. You could see in his eyes that if the guy said one more word, he’d be tossed from the truck. So I knelt. I moved the corpsman gently into my seat and began scooping up everything that had fallen out of the wounded guy, doing my best to get it all back in before snapping the armor shut, and then rubbed my hands on the truck bed, on my legs, anywhere that might let me get rid of some of the blood, exchange it for oil or dirt—anything.
The corpsman whispered when I sat back down. “They didn’t give me anything for this, swear to God they didn’t.”