I didn’t remember the next few minutes until after I found myself in a truck, east of town. One of the task force’s Tedoms had gone untouched. It was partially covered with rubble, so it took a moment to free the vehicle, after which I loaded it with alcohol, fuel cells, and ammunition. Ox’s carbine rested on the seat next to me.
Eastward. Her words echoed in my thoughts and I tasted fear, a salt-tinged terror that made me see Russians behind every bush. Whenever the truck bounced over a rock, I flinched, thinking that I had come under attack, expecting a rocket to scream through my ear. With Karazhyngyl so far behind me that I couldn’t see it, I stopped, and the truck idled quietly, a cloud of exhaust rising to merge with airborne dust.
Drugs, I realized. There weren’t any. It wasn’t clear how long it’d take to reach Almaty, and I had left everything back in Karazhyngyl, in the hotel’s rubble and in my hole, my stash probably soaked with her blood so that
even if I went back, I wouldn’t be able to touch it. But part of me wanted to turn around, see if anything could be salvaged for one more fix, one for the road. I gunned the engine before giving in to the temptation—promised myself that I could make it to Almaty with no problem, didn’t need the drugs for now and would just do it.
I was wrong.
B
ridgette had hair now, still short, but just above her ears in some kind of bob, and she wore jeans and a white tank top. She cocked her head to the side. I reached out to touch her and she disappeared with a wink, leaving me on the cab seat with nothing but a carbine.
Outside, a storm rocked the truck. Sand and dust surrounded it in a tan blizzard so that I saw only about four feet ahead, the truck stopped in the middle of it to sway back and forth, making me wonder how strong the winds had to be to move a Tedom that way. Grit pelted the windows and I closed my eyes to imagine rain, a storm that had blown in from the ocean over Annapolis. But this wasn’t Annapolis. And my hands felt as though they had inflated to twice their normal size.
It had been less than a day since I’d left Karazhyngyl, and already I was gone. Withdrawal. Sweat poured down my forehead, stinging my eyes so that I had to blink, and in the dim light I saw a puddle of vomit on the seat next to me, dried. It was so cold there. I checked my suit temperature and saw it at eighty Fahrenheit, so I should have been
comfortable, but I wasn’t, and even though external temperatures read ninety, it felt like I would freeze.
Then Ox showed up. One second nothing, and the next he sat on the seat beside me, the back half of him bleeding everywhere. “A la canona,” he said. “Welcome to the evening, no more daytime, Oscar. Scout. Not for you.”
“Screw you.”
“You got a case of it, man, and it’s cold because you’re going through withdrawals.”
I wanted to slap or strangle him, but I was afraid. If I tried to touch him, he might leave and I didn’t want to be alone. “Help me.”
“Can’t, Scout,” he said. “You have to find your own way now. All alone.”
“I’m heading south. To Almaty.”
He shook his head. “Then where? A dealer? Drop it. Let it all go and come with us. Off yourself.”
The shakes got bad and I felt like puking, wanted to crawl out of my own skin and couldn’t stop shivering. Ox said something and it sounded like he was talking through a pipe, a mile away. Man, I was spiraling down. I was dying and knew it, and now that it was happening, I almost felt glad.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. But when I looked up, it wasn’t him anymore; it was her, and I started crying, couldn’t sit still when a new wave of chills hit, made me slide down the seat and under the steering wheel.
“Stay with me; don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Scout.” She brushed a hand through that hair and closed her eyes. “Come down with me, where it’s warm. Let’s have kids.”
And I passed out. The next time I woke she was gone,
and the dust storm had ended to leave an empty panorama in shades of brown, the air wavy in the distance. My suit temperature said one hundred. Its fuel cell had died, and I felt as though someone had trapped me in one of those old steam cabinets from the cartoons, my face getting redder by the second. After I swapped fuel cells, it took half an hour for the temperature to drop, by which time the cold sweats had returned.
I sensed it long before it came, and rolled out of the cab to land on the steppes with a thud.
Come on in,
I thought,
right here.
My carbine was dull in the sunlight and I lifted it, the reticle shaking wildly on my goggle lens as I aimed in the general direction. It came silently. A single Russian drone sped toward me, passing directly overhead until the air cracked with its boom a few seconds later, at the same moment I fired. Tracers rocketed from the barrel and chased the thing, disappearing into the blue sky as the craft banked for a second run. I dropped the carbine, stood, and then shut my eyes, hoping it would be quick.
The thing boomed again, passing only a few hundred feet overhead before speeding away.
“Kill me!”
Sobbing, I dragged the carbine and crawled back into the cab to sleep.
My suit chronometer showed two weeks had passed. I had lain in the truck the whole time, eating and drinking barely enough to keep alive while the main valve emptied my waste all over the cab and—after the valve failed—inside my suit. Standing outside the truck, I felt as though my legs would give. Their muscles had gotten so weak
that I had to rest several times while doing my best to clean up the mess, and I fell asleep again, so it was noon before most of the crap lay on the ground outside. A quick turn of the key, and my truck coughed to life.
The map display said it was over three hundred klicks to Almaty, most of it cross-country.
Less than a day away, maybe.
I shifted into gear and began the slow drive overland, hoping that I wouldn’t pass out or drive into a gully, because walking to Almaty wouldn’t work at all, I thought, but it turned out that I wouldn’t have to drive the whole way either. At times I drifted off with the gentle bouncing, only to snap awake when I ran over a rut or a log. It would take a moment for me to reorient myself and make sure that the truck still pointed in the right direction. Whatever I had once loved about Kaz was gone. You can take only so much openness, and the one thing that prevented me from going off the deep end were the screams I let out in frustration, making it clear to the landscape that it was a piece of shit and that soon I would leave it, so that Kaz wouldn’t be able to mock me with never-ending horizons and total emptiness that gave nothing but took everything.
Near the northern shore of Lake Balkhash, I ran into an outpost. The Army unit manning it fired on me, and a torrent of red tracer fire came straight at my forehead, peppering the engine block so that the cab filled with an odd pinging sound. I dove to the floor. Once the truck rolled to a stop, I kicked open the passenger door and threw out my carbine.
“Friendly!”
A face appeared at the driver-side window. “Who the hell are
you
?”
“Wendell. Civilian DOD, attached to Task Force Karazhyngyl. We got overrun.”
Another guy joined his buddy and opened the door, helping me sit up. “You all right?” When I nodded, he grinned. “Shit. You shoulda
told
us you was coming, we nearly fired a rocket up your ass. Ever hear of radio?”
“Guy says he was in Karazhyngyl when it got overrun.”
“Overrun,
hell.
” The second one lifted me out and handed me my carbine, helping to reattach the flexi. “Karazhyngyl was wiped.”
“Genetics,” I said.
Both of them nodded. “That’s what we heard. You’re luckier than hell to have made it out.” The first one waved for me to follow when they started walking back to their position. “Come on. We’ll see if we can get you back to civilization. Welcome to Task Force Tombstone.”
I followed them, struggling to keep up, and the first one stopped to help, draping my free arm over his shoulder. “You sure you’re OK? Not hit anywhere, are you?”
“Nah. I’ve just been sick, sleeping in the truck for two weeks and—” I dove to the ground at the sound of an explosion and saw flames rise from my Tedom.
“Easy,” he said. “We just whacked it with a rocket, don’t want Pops to get his hands on anything when they make it this far south.”
“This far south?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Both of them looked at each other and the second one slung his carbine, the metal clicking against armor. “You must have been off-line for a good while. Pavlodar is gone, Russians hit us hard and are pushing this way. Their Gs have some new kind of suits, powered, and they’re tearing it up. Division thinks they’ll be here in a few days,
maybe less, so we came up here to blow the ferry docks, make it so’s Pops has to take the long way around or risk his APCs in the water.”
“What about
our
genetics?”
He got quiet then and spat before answering. “Don’t know about them. From what I hear, we sent the whole bunch northward to stop the bleeding. They bought our guys a few days extra to bail southward, but most of them haven’t come back. Not this way, anyhow. A few days ago the entire Fifth Marine cruised through here, hammered all to hell, but they had their gear and I’ll be damned if they weren’t hard.”
“But it’s bad,” the other one added. “Everyone’s headed back to Shymkent, to try and hold there. Division at Almaty is bugging out, you’re lucky you came when you did. One more day and you’d been all alone out here. The second-to-last ferry is leaving in an hour, you oughta get to Almaty in time, maybe hop a ride to Shymkent from there.”
Those two didn’t show anything, seemed calm, but when we reached the rest of their unit, you could tell something was up. There was a quiet hum. Nobody said anything and lines of men handed boxes to each other, one after another, passing equipment and supplies from a depot to the docks for loading onto boats. Officers muttered their orders to hurry it up.
Whisper
quiet. We passed the perimeter, and most of the ones manning it didn’t have their helmets on; they just stared over the horizon to look for any sign of Popov.
Everyone
was watching. You’d see the guys passing ammo, and once in a while, during a pause, they’d turn to look northward, checking the sky.
A clerk sat near a field terminal at the dock and took my information after the two soldiers wished me well. His fingers moved so quickly that I couldn’t hear the individual keystrokes; they just hissed while he entered my data.
“You’re dead,” he said. “Oscar Wendell, civilian historian attached to Task Force Karazhyngyl?”
“Yep.” I showed him my ticket.
The clerk shook his head. “Dead. Welcome back to the living. Get out of the way and stay clear of the docks so we can on-load. I’ll call your name when it’s time.”
A group of engineers were the only ones building something while everything else got torn down. Point defenses. Four towers were already in place and linked to portable reactors, the fifth one almost complete.
“Come on,” one of them said.
“Speed it up.”
The worst of my physical withdrawal was over, but I agreed with the engineer that everyone needed to hurry, and thought that I could really use something right then.
To take the edge off.
You couldn’t see Pops yet, but he’d be there. I just hoped that the Russians didn’t decide to hit us on the water, and willed the engineers once more to hurry it up, to give us some
cover,
because didn’t they know how scared I was?
Popov came before the clerk called my name. I heard the whine from the tower servos and a roar when plasma transferred from the reactors into the gun coils, telegraphing what would happen next. I hit the dirt. Guys ran around me, shouting at each other, and to their credit, the ones manning the lines for transferring equipment didn’t budge. They moved faster. As soon as the guns
started pounding, though, sending vibrations through the dirt, the men broke for cover and left the crates where they lay.
I never even saw the aircraft. Missiles shrieked in from the north and slammed into any target they could find, the overpressure from detonations hitting me like a hurricane. A deep kind of groaning noise caught my attention, and I looked up, just in time to see one of the five towers collapse slowly, and when the plasma coil ruptured, it sent a jet of hot gas into one of the fighting positions, turning a group of soldiers into instant charcoal. They didn’t even scream.
Someone dove to the ground next to me, one of the engineers.
“Where the hell is our air cover?” I asked.
“Got none.” We both ducked when a missile impacted behind us, near the water. “It’s all reserved for the pullback from Almaty.”
He stood then and sprinted to join the team, who had already shut down one of the reactors to stop the gas flow, and who were now trying to fix the plasma line—so they could erect the tower more quickly after the attack ended. A final missile homed on their movement and slammed into the group, sending body parts in every direction, just before a cluster bomb detonated far to my left. It cracked and scattered its bomblets to the wind so that they sounded like a string of firecrackers, after which the area went quiet again.
Someone blew a whistle over the dock loudspeaker.
“
Everyone out.
Blow the remaining stockpile and board the ferry now, we’re pushing off. Pass the word.”