The kid outpaced me. I watched in horror when a portion of the drone’s side cracked open, and thought that
it had begun to break apart, but it was just the door opening, and the kid slid in, turning to beckon as the craft began rolling. I was still at least twenty meters away. The next thing I knew, he had grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside, just before the door sealed shut, locking us into a narrow space that was barely wide enough for two and uncomfortably similar to a coffin.
“Are we supposed to buckle in?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I found a set of straps and lay flat on my back, struggling to get my arms through without tangling in the Maxwell. “We should have left our damn carbines on the runway.”
“Holy shit. Look out the window.”
There was a small porthole-style piece of glass near my face, and I turned to get a better view as the drone picked up speed. The ground flashed by. At first I didn’t know what the kid was talking about, but then saw it: lines of soldiers had made a break for it, hoping to get on the drone too and sprinting across the runway despite the exposure. A flash of light made me blink. When I opened my eyes, I saw the fading gas of a plasma hit and then a group of blackened bodies where a second earlier there had been about fifty guys.
“That’s really screwed,” the kid said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“They’re all going to die, how can that not matter?”
The plane began to lift off and then pulled up sharply at the same time its engines roared. It felt as though my weight had quadrupled.
“It was either you or them, that’s why it doesn’t matter. You got parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Ask them when you get home; ask them what you should have done. Screw those guys. We’re going to be OK.”
Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did; we’d make it. When the drone banked to the southwest, its maneuver was so gentle that it felt as though I’d made it aboard a passenger plane, and I risked another look out the window. Maybe it was a hallucination—one last flashback to my drugged days or a spurt of insanity that just came with the territory of being a broken toy—but I’d have sworn that someone waved to us from the airfield below, a tiny figure in dark green armor that puffed smoke every once in a while before he disappeared underground. In the distance I saw the line of Russian armor and infantry, crawling slowly over our northern trenches like a wave of ants and beetles. The drone banked violently again. I grunted, trying my best to keep from passing out as it evaded some unseen attack, and without anything to focus on, there was only one thing to do: think.
We’d made it out. The acceptance of that felt as though every muscle in my body relaxed at the same time, and without anything bearing down on me, I started crying. So many men. But I’d meant it when I’d said screw them. It wasn’t them I was crying about; it was the general and the fact that he’d made this happen—and that I hadn’t really gotten a chance to thank him. A nearby explosion rattled the aircraft and shattered my thoughts just as we went into a steep dive and began rolling. A few seconds later we came out of it. The plane leveled off and its engines settled into a constant whine, each second taking us farther from Almaty and danger.
“You OK, kid?” When he didn’t answer, I yelled,
“Hey!”
“I threw up. I don’t want to talk right now.”
“That’s all right. We’re out of that shithole.”
The trip to Tashkent took about an hour, and it wasn’t long after we’d landed that I heard what had happened. Nobody could have lasted long without a solid defense. Most of the general’s men broke and ran, but there was no place to escape, and when they got to city center, they collided with friendlies running in the opposite direction, so the Russians just stopped and pelted the city with more plasma, finishing everyone off piecemeal. Pops didn’t take any prisoners. I thought at first that maybe the general had died fighting or committed suicide, but after a while doubted that anything like that had happened, or that it mattered anyway. What mattered was that he was gone and had given us a chance to keep going.
But it wasn’t over yet. When the drone landed, a couple of colonels met us, and I could see the shock on their faces when we stepped out to reveal ourselves as a bearded freak and a dirt-faced kid. One of them wanted to shoot us on the spot, because he thought we’d taken the general’s place. But I guess the general had uploaded one last message, which the drone transmitted as soon as we got out, and it hit their computers before they could actually do anything to us. I asked one of them to send me a copy and he did.
To the Commanding Officer, Army Group Central: Decided to stay with my men, so take care of these two guys for me. Urq.
The colonels left us there and we started walking from the airfield, following them toward a line of sheds.
“Well, kid, we made it.”
“I gotta get out of this suit.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of the puke. Plus my hoses came off when the plane maneuvered. It’s a mess in here.”
“Hell.
That’s
the smell of accomplishment.”
T
he main body of Army Group Central had fallen back to Bandar a long time ago, and the forces we linked with in Tashkent formed a rear guard—elements of First Marine combined with the French Foreign Legion’s First Cavalry Regiment. The difference between Tashkent’s units and the men in Almaty was palpable. There was no sign of hunger in Tashkent, and anywhere you went, you’d hear guys joking, despite the fact that overall nothing had changed; we were still losing. Plasma artillery struck in a constant rhythm on the north side of the city, and to the south our guns answered almost every shot, like a steady and off-beat drum. You didn’t need any other reminder that things were still bad. The biggest difference was that we didn’t need to watch the air anymore, but old habits were hard to break, and I lost track of the number of times I caught myself staring at the sky or flinching at the sound of overhead drones.
The morning after our arrival, a French lieutenant kicked me and the kid awake as we slept under a concrete slab; I had trouble with the guy’s accent.
“Marines?” he asked.
“No. We’re not attached to any unit yet.”
“Good. The French and stragglers will lead our fallback on Samarkand, so get up. You’ll be with us.”
“What?” The lieutenant’s voice came through helmet speakers, and while we spoke, our combat suits danced their thing, linked up coms so that in the middle of it I started hearing him over my speakers but with a delay. That, the accent, and my exhaustion made him all but incomprehensible.
“
Samarkand.
We’re going to Samarkand. Get up and come with us.”
“Why Samarkand?”
“Almaty is finished now, and the Russians move west out of Uzbekistan to flank us. They arrive tomorrow. Get up.”
As I understood it, the French had joined us for a percentage of the mining take, and I wondered how much they had gotten out of the deal, how it compared with the men and equipment they’d lost, but when the kid and I fell in, those thoughts evaporated. We loaded into the back of a medical APC and strapped in while Legionnaires pushed on board, searching for a seat. Their armor was basically the same as ours, with slight differences in structure and markings, and while I listened, I noticed the variety of accents; some men were British, and a couple spoke to each other in Chinese. The medic got on last and supervised the loading of a bank of stretchers. It resembled a rolling bunk bed with seven racks stacked on top of each other, and slid into a locking mechanism down the center of our compartment so that we had to pull our legs back and tuck our knees into our chests to make room.
You tried not to look but couldn’t
not
look. One of the wounded, a guy in the bottom rack, seemed fine; he didn’t have any bandages and rested his head on one arm while he pulled on a cigarette.
The kid elbowed me. “What’s wrong with him?”
“How should I know?”
A British Legionnaire next to us chuckled and then kicked the wounded guy’s leg, making him jump. “
Cafard.
Nothing but
cafard,
you loafing sack. No wounds, no problems, just a coward.”
“Screw you.” The one in the bottom rack stubbed out his cigarette and then buried his face in both hands before he started sobbing, mumbling something in French.
“What’s
‘cafard’
?” the kid asked.
“The cockroach,” I said, remembering the word from one of my encounters with the Legion before meeting Ox, and the Brit popped his helmet, nodding after he took it off.
“He knows. Your friend knows. Everyone here should know the cockroach; he’s a nasty little thing that slips under your skin while you’re not looking and nibbles away until one day you notice that something is missing, but you can’t quite figure it out. You know that what you’re looking for was there the day before, safe and sound. And so you start looking for it, thinking about it. Then other things go missing. But you can’t figure those out either, and it gets worse, because now you’re not missing one thing, you’re missing several, and it grows on itself, an infection that races out of control, multiplying at a geometric rate. Those are the cockroaches, you see, breeding. Infesting.
Le Cafard.
”
“Oh.” The kid thought about it for a moment, and I saw
his face go red as the guy in the rack kept sobbing. “Can’t you shut him up? Why does he have to be with us?”
The entire compartment erupted into laughter at that. Even I laughed, without knowing why. The kid had no idea what he’d said, but whatever it had been was perfect, and the Brit reached into a pouch to hand us cigarettes, patting the kid’s cheek with affection.
“Brilliant. You’re the smartest American I’ve met. No, we can’t shut him up, for the same reason I can’t scratch my head and decide that although this has been fun, I’ve got a train to catch or a previous engagement that I just can’t miss. No, we can’t get away from this one. Just ignore him. Don’t let
his
cockroaches become
your
cockroaches.”
I saw the look on the kid’s face, one of total confusion, and paused to light my cigarette before explaining. “He speaks French; he’s a native speaker.”
“So?”
“So… The Brit grinned at me, and I saw that three of his teeth were absent, the gaps noticeably black, making him look almost as crazed as the one on the bottom bunk. “Go on,” the Brit said. “Tell him. This one is young, he needs to
learn.
”
“So native Frenchmen can’t join the Legion unless they’re officers. This guy’s an officer. Which makes it worse, because he’s cracked up, and since he’s an officer, nobody here can get rid of him; they’re all enlisted.”
“Exactly!”
But before the British guy could say anything more, the APC roared to life, and its rattling shook my teeth, making it hard to concentrate on anything but keeping my head off the bulkhead so I wouldn’t shake my way into a concussion. The vehicles ran on alcohol. A plasma-based
engine sat dormant as a backup, but only to be used in emergencies, because it robbed the main gun of its ammunition. Comfort was the last thing promised by an APC, and as we began to roll slowly on eight wheels, every bump translated into a jolt that shocked my entire spine, and soon the compartment filled with the smell of fuel alcohol, making it harder to breathe—especially with all the smoke. Someone opened the main vent, which improved the air slightly, and I was about to doze off when the British guy caught my attention again.
“Where are you lads from?”
“The States.”
“Not that. I mean have you been in Tashkent the whole time?”
I shook my head. “No. We were in Almaty.”
The crazy look left his face then. While before he had worn a constant grin that seemed only to get wider with time, his face now transformed into a network of lines with a look of infinite, somber understanding.
“Bad luck, that.”
Retreating forces before us had transformed the northern outskirts of Samarkand into a defensive paradise, and I realized that over time I had become unable to see towns, and might not have recognized one for what it was. It wasn’t that I’d studied warfare. Instead it had poured over me for the past years, fully submerged my consciousness into a broth of screaming and blood so that theories had infiltrated through my pores, soaked into my DNA to the point where instead of Uzbek villages I saw fortifications, fields of fire, and cover potential. Uzbekistan even had
real people in its towns who occasionally ventured out of their basements to sell or beg. But at the same time, these
weren’t
people; they were possible insurgents or, at best, noncombatants, and nothing about them triggered pity, let alone the sensation that they and I belonged to the same species. One child approached the kid and me when we disembarked from the APC, and as I stretched, the kid started gabbing in Russian, holding out his hand so that within a few seconds word must have gotten out to the other Uzbek children that these were new faces, new pockets, a new source of handouts. Instantly a crowd of them surrounded us, and I leveled my carbine at them.
“Get the hell away from me.”
“Easy,” the kid said. He muttered something in Russian and the children scattered.