I didn’t need any encouragement. Each step felt heavy,
like my legs weren’t sure of what my brain told them, and wet soil tugged at my boots. Before I knew it, the dock was underfoot, solid and easy to negotiate, and I sprinted across the gangplank as fast as I could. The clerk was already on the boat and pushed me into a corner.
“Stay there.
Stay down.
”
Time seemed to slow down, forcing me to fight the urge to scream, to tell them to hurry up and get us the hell out of there. There is no way to describe having to wait like that. My carbine was gone, left on the shore, and a line of men had formed on the dock, pushing and shoving each other to be the next ones on board. I got the shakes then, bad. I didn’t know who was in charge. Maybe nobody was, and maybe once everyone got aboard, we’d just sit there and wait, a big fat target for one missile to take out. Easy. Maybe it was an illusion, a trick of my mind, but in the distance I heard something like the squeak of APC wheels and the rumbling of armor, only it couldn’t be that, because there was so much noise from everyone panicking that it would be impossible to hear the Russian advance.
The boat had overloaded. Water lapped at its sides, three feet below the gunwale, and I had just begun praying that the craft wouldn’t shift too far to one side or the other when a horn sounded, signaling us to pull away. That’s when it got horrible. Someone had decided they couldn’t warn the others, the ones who were about to get aboard, and the gangplank collapsed, sending men into the water, their suits—unhelmeted—rapidly filling and pulling them under. Others, still on the dock, leapt across the gap and grabbed the side, hoping to hold on or scramble over the edge, but they carried too much weight and
guys on the deck didn’t even try to help. After the first one splashed in, I stopped watching.
Halfway across Lake Balkhash, I looked back. A line of men stood on the shore, trying to shrug out of their armor and undersuits, to get ready for the swim, oblivious to what had appeared on the horizon. Dust clouds. The point defense cannons scanned back and forth but couldn’t fire at ground targets, wouldn’t provide any cover to our forces when Russian APCs got within plasma range. We were only a hundred meters from the far shore when the first rounds hit. Some of the men had already started swimming and dove under, trying to avoid the blasts, but those still on the shore had nowhere to go. The globes of plasma burst among them, and if the round hit in the right place, you could see their dark figures silhouetted against the glow, poses burned into my memory before the men collapsed into piles of black matter. As soon as I got off the boat, I ran, not caring where I’d wind up.
A Marine corporal waited near the dock, his scout car idling beside him, and it took a second for me to hear what he was shouting.
“Wendell.
Oscar Wendell!
”
I raised my arm. “That’s me.”
“Jesus.” A look of relief crossed his face. He was unarmored, in fatigues, and when I saw the staff emblem on the front bumper, I knew what he would say next. “General Urqhart sends his regards. He was in Almaty when the net reported you were here, alive, and sent his car. He’s waiting on the airstrip, so I suggest we get it on. Sir.”
I never even looked back. The mass of soldiers I had come with milled on every side, looking for a way out, and some of them had already begun moving across country,
not wanting to take the chance of waiting for a formal retreat order that might never come. Any organization that once existed had broken down into total chaos, so I got in quickly and shut the door. “Get us the hell out of here.”
“Aye, aye. You’re lucky, sir.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “I keep hearing that.”
He nodded, struggling to keep the scout car in a straight line when he gunned it. “Yep. Russian Gs have just been spotted, a whole division on the way. Ten more minutes and I woulda left you there with the stupid Army homos.”
As we drove southward, I had time to reflect on Ox and Bridgette. I looked out the window and watched the salt flats pass, wondering where the two of them were now, and feeling empty. There would be no more drugs, nothing to sandbag the wave of grief that I knew had been building, and that would slam into me without warning. For now, there was nothing at all. But Kaz had taught me many things, and one of those was that the longer you stayed, the more friends you lost, and the more ghosts you collected. You could run from them for a while, but they never got tired; they knew it was a marathon and not a sprint, and they would be more than happy to wait for you to collapse so they could catch up.
At one point or another, everyone faced the dead.
Almaty was worse than the docks—almost—and we barely made it through the city. Military traffic choked the roads, or what was left of them, and everyone headed in the same direction: toward the airfield. Drones boomed constantly. I didn’t know if our air cover had engaged any incoming targets yet, but the fact that we
hadn’t seen missiles made me feel a little better, like maybe Pops was still working on getting across the lake, like maybe there was time to breathe.
An MP stopped us at one point, about a mile from the airfield. “No go,” he said.
“I’m on direct orders from General Urqhart.” The corporal handed him his ticket, but the guy didn’t even bother to insert it into his computer, and handed it back.
“Nope. We got it straight from Division. Only combat vehicles—no soft skins—beyond this point.”
“Hey, guy.” The corporal turned to me and pointed at my vision hood. “You got coms on that thing?”
It occurred to me that I had turned them off, probably during my withdrawal episode in the Tedom, and had never turned them back on. I flicked the button on my forearm and nodded. He ripped the hood from my head, leaned over so the wires would stay connected to my suit, and pushed it against his ear.
“Hit channel two-seven.” I did. The corporal gave his call sign multiple times before getting frustrated. “Screw this. Cal, answer
the fucking line
!” He must have gotten through, because he calmed down. “Yeah, listen up, we’re almost two klicks out and they’ve stopped our car. We’ll have to finish on foot. Tell the general we’re on our way, and if you leave us, I swear to God I’ll have your ass.”
The MP hammered on our hood.
“Get this thing off the road!”
“You ready?” the corporal asked me, and I nodded. “Then let’s go.”
We ditched the car where it was, still idling, and the last thing I saw was the MP having a conniption. No shit. The guy actually unslung his carbine and fired in the air,
was about to aim at us when we disappeared around a corner and hightailed it through an alley.
I had never run so fast. I knew that I’d pay for it later, that I hadn’t even begun to recover from two weeks on almost no rations, but it’s a funny thing when you’re that scared. You don’t
feel
anything. Mother adrenaline kicked in and took over, giving me everything I needed, telling me it was only a mile, a cakewalk.
By the time we reached the airfield, my fuel cell had expired. I stopped at the gate to unsuit, and thought the corporal would have a heart attack while waiting, begging me to hurry up. The smell offended even
me.
It had been over a month since I’d last showered, and sweat had made an amazing pattern of dried salt on my undersuit, the legs caked with excrement. I considered ditching the undersuit too, just showing up at the plane naked, but I doubted they would let me through the checkpoint.
By the time I finished, he had almost lost it. “Can we go now?
Please?
”
“Sure.”
But it was too late. We both heard it at the same time and then looked to see a huge transport roar down the airstrip. We caught a glimpse of it between two buildings before it drifted off the ground, barely clearing the trees at the end of the runway and banking right for its trip westward. I sunk to my knees. The ground felt unsteady and it took me a second to figure out that an awful wailing sound wasn’t coming from me; it was coming from an alarm siren that now screamed over loudspeakers. Just as I was about to lose it completely, I heard him.
“Damn, son, you smell awful. What’d you do, pass out in a pile of pig shit?”
The corporal stepped forward and took the general’s briefcase. “General, what’s going on?”
“Popov pushed south to prevent our escape to the west. To our east, they’re moving down into Uzbekistan with mountain units so that, our scouts say, by tonight we’ll be cut off. Get my car.” He slapped me on the back. “Glad to see you made it, Oscar.”
I found my voice and got up. “General, why’d you stay? You could’ve gone.”
“Simple. My boys are here. Once I saw they couldn’t make it out, there wasn’t any other option but to get off the plane. You really
do
smell horrible, son; let’s get you a new undersuit and armor, and you can tell me all about Karazhyngyl.” He lit a cigar as we turned and headed away from the airport, toward the city, where the corporal disappeared into the crowds to try to recover the vehicle we’d abandoned earlier, and I stopped to examine my new surroundings.
A blue haze hovered over the city. I’d never seen Almaty, but liked it more than the rest of Kaz, felt comfortable with the hills and low mountains flanking it to the south so that you couldn’t look out and keep looking forever to the end of the earth. Other than that, it was identical to Shymkent, or any other city. Air strikes and artillery had reduced its buildings to blocks of concrete or piles of brick, and almost all the locals had vanished except for the entrepreneurs who stayed behind to make money off the troops—whoever’s troops happened to be there. An armored column appeared out of nowhere, scattering people and bearing northward where you could barely see flashes on the horizon, and although you couldn’t yet hear it, you could almost feel it: the vibration of artillery.
The general grinned. “Well, Oscar, we’re in the shit now. So I need to get drunk.”
I’d never had the shakes so bad. This wasn’t the result of withdrawal, not the product of something with which anyone should have been familiar—least of all me. This was something entirely different, a kind of awakening, a realization that everything was real and that it all surrounded us in a panorama, the ugliness of which couldn’t be ignored. Like having my eyes taped open. A clarity descended on the world so that even through the city’s pollution I saw the outlines of our troops with a kind of crispness, the globs of mud that had caked to their boots transforming as my gaze shifted upward to see that it went from a sticky mess near their soles, faded to a medium brown at their shins, and then ended below their knees, where the mud completely dried and broke off with every step. Some of the soldiers had a purpose. As we drove carefully through the packed Almaty streets, I stared at them as if it was all a kind of freak show, and noticed the ones who still had hope because they stopped to salute as we passed, and, more importantly, marched northward or westward, toward the trouble. But this wasn’t Kaz in the war’s first year. This was Kaz aged, a Kaz within which mold had taken hold and the faces of our men showed signs of rot, caving in as the underpinnings decayed and disintegrated. Most of the men looked lost. They stood or slouched, lounged against blocks of rubble, having to move their legs at the last minute, barely avoiding being run over by the general’s vehicle. The worst ones didn’t look at us. Those didn’t see anything.
I wanted to be like them—not the ones with purpose; I connected with the ones who had already given up. The thought of crawling into a corner seemed logical, because fighting our situation was pointless given the distance to our main battle groups in Shymkent, hundreds of kilometers to the west. You could imagine the higher-ups debating it all in Bandar, and only one answer would float to the surface: abandon Almaty. That was the logical conclusion. How could retreating forces—broken themselves—rescue us from as far away as Shymkent? But a part of my mind dusted itself off in that moment, a part that hoped. I listened as the general shouted into his headset, rattling off options to his staff, and I latched on to one of his ideas, made it my life preserver. He wanted to concentrate forces and push south now, into Kyrgyzstan, where there was a chance that we could overpower the encircling forces and break through, head southwest to link up with the main retreat and on to Bandar ‘Abbas. To home. The other options chewed at my thoughts, kept tugging at them with their threat of submersing me into a pool of despair, one that whispered that no matter what happened, the outcome would be brutal. But as long as I focused on the
possibility
of breakout, gripped it tightly without letting go, I’d get by and wouldn’t hear the whispers.
In the end, it all became clear. I wanted to get high again; this was no time for reality.
“Stop the car,” the general said, and it lurched to a halt, throwing me against the front seat. He pointed at me. “Get out.”
“What? What for?”
“Change.”
A pile of discarded combat suits and undersuits lay on
the sidewalk. Many of them hadn’t been cleaned, were filled with whatever remained of the men they’d once held, and I did my best to find a set that was at least partly non-bloody and my size. There was no embarrassment this time. I changed in the open, discarding my old undersuit in favor of the new one, and did my best to shrug into armor, finishing the hose and cable connections once I was back in the car.
The general waved the corporal on. “Turn this box around, head south.”
“South?” the corporal asked.