“Why are you still here, Oscar?”
The kid had his helmet off and looked at me with eyes that saw through, and I wondered how long it would be
before
he
cracked and a Marine wound up sitting on his back. We sat in an ambulance, in an underground hangar just north of Jizzakh, close to the front line. It had been a week since my breakdown. The doctor had decided that he didn’t want us working with the genetics, so he’d assigned us to drive one of the ambulances. We would wait in a frontline APC hangar for the French to on-load their wounded, after which the fun would begin. But first the fighting had to kick off. The truck was solid and had four-wheel drive, so we could make it over some rubble, but our job would be to make our way aboveground as fast as we could to deliver our cargo to the hospital, and then make it back. Most of the time our assignment would be cake; we’d sit underground and smoke. But during that half-hour trip there and back, we’d be exposed, aboveground, a soft target, and I wondered how long it would be before my luck ran out.
I thought about what the kid had asked, and looked at him. “What do you mean why am I here?”
“You’re a civilian. You don’t have to be here. I mean, you could probably head southwest if you wanted and make for Bandar on your own. Nobody would stop you.”
“Because I’d be alone. I don’t want to make that trip alone.”
“I’d do it. It’s worth the risk. Think about it: if you made it back, you’d be home, the States, and every step down the road would be one step away from all this crap.”
“I told you. I don’t want to be alone.” A voice broke in over the general net and said something in French, but I was too tired to translate, and let the words wash over me without really hearing them. The kid hadn’t seen Karazhyngyl and didn’t know what lived out there in the desert
or the steppes—didn’t get that I’d rather stay in Samarkand than risk a long trip with only my brain for a companion. “What will you do if someone tries to attach you to a line unit?” I asked him.
“I’ll go. I won’t want to, but there isn’t much choice, is there?”
“I guess not.”
The kid finished his cigarette and stubbed it on a boot. “So you’re telling me that you’d rather stay here through an attack and risk getting scorched instead of taking the road to Bandar on your own?”
I nodded.
“That’s whacked-out. You really are way far gone. I hope I never wind up like you.”
It wasn’t like I could explain it even if I’d wanted to. I’d been alone in the tunnels, and in countless hotel rooms over the years, and the thought of leaving the line without someone to keep me company was the one that scared me more than anything. An infinite number of things could happen when you were alone. But most of all, it was the fact that my head had become the enemy and when I was alone, my thinking took over, holding me hostage until someone happened to pass by and rescue me with a word. I’d started out thinking that I’d stay with the kid, to take care of him, but that time had passed and he’d hardened into something useful, so he didn’t really need me anymore—at least not until he went insane.
I
needed
him.
There was an old guy, an Uzbek, who manned the hangar doors, which were usually closed, and rested at the top of a long ramp. We waited at the ramp’s bottom. As we sat in the ambulance, I looked up at the doors, the tunnel lighting dim and yellow, and I saw the guy check
his watch, carefully get off his stool, and reach for the button to activate the emergency release mechanism, to make sure that it worked. Usually the hangar was controlled inside the tunnel, but the idea was that if the tunnels collapsed, you could still get out using the emergency release. It had become part of our routine. Every hour, on the hour, he performed the check like it was the most important thing in his life, and there was no reason to think that this time would be different. The doors rumbled open and we saw the moon in the distance, full and bright. But then a plasma round detonated, and another, until soon the blasts blotted out the night sky and filled the rectangular opening with a bright glow so that we had to shield our eyes. The next thing I knew, the old Uzbek doorman was at my window, pounding on it with a fist until the skin sloughed off and he slammed his bone against glass, the clicking noise loud and annoying. Then the old man lost it and collapsed next to the truck, dead.
“Holy shit,” said the kid.
“Holy shit.”
“Did you
see
that?”
I nodded and lit another cigarette.
“No, Oscar, I mean, did you
see
that, the bones and shit? I had no idea plasma could do that. I mean, his eyes were gone, man.”
There was a dark smear of blood and burned fat on my window and I did my best not to look at it. “I saw it, kid, I saw it.”
The barrage ended a few hours later and we hadn’t moved. Another ambulance driver came to my window, so I rolled it down, and he started speaking in French,
quickly, and I had to ask him to repeat himself. The guy cursed at me before he switched to English.
“They can’t shut the doors from the control station; someone wants us to go do it. Once you use the emergency release, it stays open until someone deactivates it.”
“So go shut it,” I said.
“You do it.”
“I’m not doing it, pal, sorry.”
“Why not?”
I pointed to the ground by his feet and flicked my cigarette. “I don’t want to step on the dead guy.”
Somehow he had missed the fact that the old man had died there, and hadn’t seen the corpse. When he saw that it was next to him, the guy shrieked and then sprinted from us, heading up the ramp until we could barely see him, because the moon had moved out of view, plunging the hangar into shadow. The door rumbled until it clanged shut.
“What an idiot,” the kid remarked.
“Nah, he’s all right. Just an asshole like the rest of us.”
“Where do they find these guys?”
“Where did they find us?”
The kid didn’t answer, just grunted, and I checked our supply of cigarettes. You kept waiting for someone to tell you to knock it off, because unlike in Almaty, these tunnels had real air handling, but nobody ever did and it had to be because the French held these positions and had some kind of rule that smoking was a God-given right. There were only about three packs left, and I shut my pouch, careful to make sure it sealed so that none would fall out.
“We’re running low,” I said.
“Whose turn is it to scrounge?”
“Yours.”
The kid grimaced and shook his head. “Shit, Oscar, I don’t even speak French, man, you go do it. You always get a better deal than me, anyway.”
He was right. I grabbed my helmet and buttoned up, handing him the truck keys. The plasma meant only one thing—that Popov had definitely arrived—and at the moment I didn’t feel like staying in the truck; a walk might do me good.
“Fine, but move over so I can get out your side.”
“What? Why?”
“Because.” I climbed over him, barely able to squeeze through the tight compartment. “There’s a dead guy outside my door.”
D
octors and medics treated the wounded underground in aid stations, bringing them to us only when the men needed urgent care at the Samarkand hospital. The rules of war stated that nobody was supposed to fire on ambulances, but that didn’t mean anything, and the fact that the red cross emblazoned on our roof had almost completely worn off didn’t help. We soon learned that Popov had spotters. For our first trip, medics loaded three guys into the truck bed and I cranked hard on the gas, making sure we had enough alcohol for the trip there and back, before engaging the clutch so that the tires peeled and the truck lurched forward to bring us into the sunlight.
I had made sure beforehand that I knew the quickest ways back to the hospital, but when we came off the ramp, the effects of the barrage made me realize that the preparation had been useless. This wasn’t the place I remembered. What had once been Jizzakh now more closely resembled Almaty, or Tashkent, or Shymkent, and the roads disappeared under fallen buildings, and in some places they had become so cratered that you had to go
around the road, through what used to be a house. An old woman stumbled in front of me, so I had to swerve. Her clothes had burned off to leave skin covered in layers of gray dust, and for a second she looked like a ghost, the walking dead of Jizzakh. Just as I passed her, the truck bounced over broken concrete and the men in back screamed when the jolting first threw them into the air and then slammed them back onto the bed; their insults forced me to slow down.
Halfway through Jizzakh, the Russians opened fire. Plasma shells fell in single rounds, chasing our progress and occasionally falling well ahead as the gunners tried to bring their rounds on target.
“Go faster,” one of the guys in back yelled.
“Last time I went fast, you screamed!”
“I don’t care, get us out of here!”
I glanced at the kid. “Why the hell didn’t they dig a connector tunnel between the lines and Samarkand?”
“They tried. But the Russians got here sooner than they expected and the engineers had to stop—so it wouldn’t mess up our seismic sensors.”
“Great.”
I gunned it again, switching to four-wheel drive so the truck could climb the piles of debris that blocked our path. Eventually we sped over the low mountains separating Jizzakh and Samarkand, and breathed more easily when the shelling fell behind us.
The rest of the drive was easier. We dropped the wounded off and turned to head back, but as soon as we got to the mountains again, I stopped and looked at the kid.
“You ready for this?”
“No.”
“I’m going to go as fast as I can, now that we don’t have wounded. Hold on.”
“I don’t want to go.”
The truck whined over the mountain pass and back into the ruins, where Popov had been waiting. We saw the flash of guns in the distance and watched with horror as the shells streaked across the sky, toward us, almost as if they came straight for my face.
“It was better in the other direction,” I said.
“Why?”
“You couldn’t
see
the firing then.”
“Only the ones that hit us are the bad ones.”
Despite the plasma, we made it back to the tunnel, and I backed into our slot, shutting down the engine and waiting for someone to fill the tank again. The kid popped his lid and grinned.
“That was really awful driving.”
I was happy—a twisted kind of re-verification that sanity had long since left me behind. Maybe the happiness came from a combination of having something useful to do during lulls in the shelling, and being grateful when shells
did
fall, because that meant we’d get to stay safe in the hangar, where every once in a while the Brit would pay us a visit. Sure, we were under attack, but this wasn’t Almaty and everyone sensed that the war was almost over. It was as if when we popped our heads from the truck, we could smell the ocean at Bandar. We talked about little else. The main focus was just to stay alive, because as soon as we got the word, everyone would head southwest and back home for good, and nobody wanted to buy it just before shipping out.
And French meal pouches helped. I had forgotten about Ox and his first experience with Legion food until I opened one in the truck, tasting wine-poached salmon as if it was
my
first time, and was barely able to stop grinning. One day the Brit came to deliver a fresh set of meals as the plasma rounds shook the rocks above, and he forced the kid to slide over so that the three of us scrunched together.
“Vodka,” he said, and produced a bottle from his pouch.
“For real?” the kid asked. “Where’d you get it?”
“Stole it from one of our supply shites. We better drink it quick before he notices. The sooner we destroy the evidence, the better, because the Legion isn’t nice to thieves.”
He offered it to me and I waved it away. Something told me it would be a bad idea, not because I was driving but because I’d come to like thinking clearly and wondered if drinking would be another easy escape that would land me in madness. My new mind was better than the old one, cleaner, but I distrusted it and got the sense that it couldn’t handle things the way it used to.
“No thanks,” I said. “Not a drinker.”
“Great! More for us.”
I mostly listened, sometimes joining the conversation, but it was more fun to observe, and watching the kid made me glad to see him get wasted. He spoke of Athens, Georgia, in the summertime, and the heat, how it melted the asphalt and made you almost appreciate Uzbekistan, but at the same time his stories made his hometown come to life because of the kudzu and cicadas. I’d never seen a cicada, but I missed the things. And the way he described them would have normally made me sick, but this was different; this was a description of something alive, an insect that despite its ugliness was beautiful compared to the tunnels and ruin, and
you knew from listening that the kid had it right, had it all. His sixteenth birthday had gone unnoticed. The kid had kept it quiet and hadn’t told even me, but I promised that I’d get him something if we ever made it to Bandar.