He nodded. “Popov hit us with an underground probe. They took me off ambulance duty and attached me to a Marine unit before it happened.”
“He’s right next to my unit, though.” The Brit must have seen the smile fade from my face, and I got angry with myself for having spoiled the reunion by pulling out
the topic of war. “So don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye out for him.”
“They have powered armor, Oscar. I’ve never seen anything like it. They look like monsters, and it must be made of a new composite, because most of our fléchettes don’t penetrate. I’ve never been that close. And they stealth bored, all the way into our tunnel, so we never even knew they were coming, because the guys on watch missed the thermal bloom,” the kid explained. “But eventually we pushed Pops back and then sent a team to chase and to blow their tunnels.”
“You OK?”
He nodded. “Nothing like what
you
got.”
They told me what had happened when the ambulance blew, and I was glad I’d been unconscious. After the truck had stopped flipping, the Brit found me about thirty feet away, where a plasma shell detonated, sending gas to play over my legs. He had pulled me into a hole in the rubble, where the three of us survived the barrage, but the guys in the back of the truck bought it.
“Thanks,” I said.
The Brit grinned, and I saw that his teeth had gone a dark shade of gray, with so much dirt and plaque that I couldn’t distinguish one tooth from another. “Good drugs?” he asked.
The question sparked the craving, one I’d fought since they’d taken me off painkillers. A couple of times I’d begged the doctor, almost crying, but he was too smart; “I know an addict when I see one,” he’d said, and cut me off.
“They’re OK, but the doc won’t give me anything except aspirin now. How much longer before they let me out so I can come see you guys?”
The two of them looked at each other and started laughing.
“What?”
“They didn’t tell you?” the kid asked.
“Jesus, mate,” the Brit explained, “you’re not coming back to the line. First off, you’re a civilian, so they might not have sent you back anyway, but second, you got the magic wound. They’re shipping you to Bandar with a convoy as soon as you can walk. We ran into the doctor on the way in and he told us everything; his accent is so bad, though, that I made him give it to me a second time, in French.”
My skin went numb, all of it, even the new stuff on my legs, which had hurt just moments before. How did you compute going home? I’d thought the same thing everyone else did, that I’d be stuck in the war until its end, and I’d meant what I’d told the kid, that I didn’t want to leave. The road to Bandar should have been an easy prospect: clean living,
I’ll-never-complain-about-another-thing-as-long-as-I-live,
and every other thought you should have on hearing that you were going home. Instead the news turned my stomach into a cold knot, and I had trouble looking at them because of a new and mixed bag of feelings that came over me, led by a sense of betrayal—that I’d be leaving them behind, and why did I get to be the lucky one, anyway? Fear soon eclipsed that thought: a fear of getting caught alone on the road by Russians, and surrounded by strangers I couldn’t count on in a firefight.
That
was what had happened to me, to my head, a kind of brainwashing. The memories of a normal life were just that—memories—and life on the line was the familiar, what had become so common that everything else shifted
into the slot of “unknown quantity,” a world in which anything could happen. On the line, it was simple. You stayed suited, buttoned up, and kept underground as much as possible, and everything else was out of your control. I had no idea what the real world, the peace world, held.
“You don’t seem all that pscyhed,” the kid said.
“I’m not. I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, get back on the line. I’ll talk to the doc next time I see him and get him to let me stay.”
“Like hell you will,” said the Brit. “Look, mate. Don’t give me any of this. You got a lucky hit, one that means you can go home and grab ass for every day of your life, and that you’ll
have
a life, one beyond this craphole.”
“Bullshit. I’m staying.”
“You’re crazy.” The Brit looked away before he continued. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I do know that any other guy in your position would be glad to make it out, to get an early trip southwest to the sea. You’ll die here if you stay. Like the rest of us.”
“Bullshit on that,” said the kid. “I ain’t dying; I’m invincible. I’m death in armor and Pops will shit in his pants the next time he sees me. It’s a guarantee.”
But the mood had broken. What should have been a fun time ended flatly, with the Brit and the kid leaving before they’d meant to, and with me returning to my exercises, trying to retrain my legs to function with only 80 percent of the muscle they’d once had. I hadn’t been able to tell them the other reason I wanted to stay, because it wasn’t clear how they’d react: I wanted to find Sophie. Something had happened in the short time she’d been at my bed, so I knew staying would be worth it. Through the
windows I saw the snow fall, and thought that at least we weren’t retreating through
that.
I should have added “not yet.”
At night the city lights went out, and now that my legs had gotten to the point where I could move with a cane, I had taken to standing at the window, staring northward toward Jizzakh. Point defense towers dotted the mountains overlooking the town, and their cannons pulsed when they fired at incoming auto-drones. It was better than fireworks. Rounds burst in the sky, backlighting the mountains so they looked like cutouts, and one night as I pressed my face against the glass, Sophie showed up and leaned her forehead against the window too. It surprised me to the point where no words came, so we stood there for half an hour, watching.
“It’s beautiful,” she finally said.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Have we met before?”
“Yes. I know you, but I couldn’t convince you to want to live. They discharged you in Shymkent.”
She gasped when our artillery opened up and the horizon blossomed with colors reflecting off the snow and ice. We watched quietly some more until she looked at me.
“That was someone else. We are not all the same.”
“I know.”
Sophie moved so her hip pressed against mine. “They don’t want me here, in the recovery rooms with men.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because it is a place of honor. The wounded are those who have seen God and returned from His side. And
because one day I heard someone screaming and had to know what could be wrong in such a place, and it was you. The doctor found out about my visit, though, and forbade me from returning.”
She wore a set of hospital scrubs now, not armor, and the warmth from her leg bled into mine. “Then why did you come back?” I asked.
“I wanted to know you.”
Sophie didn’t struggle when I pulled her in. I dropped the cane and she wrapped her arms around me, the girl’s muscles so hard that they gave me the sensation of having my back wrapped in thin iron bars. She pulled me to my bed. At first it was strange, because you couldn’t ignore the fact that guys slept all around, snoring or talking in their sleep, but then it didn’t matter, because we wanted it more than anything and my legs didn’t hurt anymore. She was mine. We pulled the blanket over our heads and moved quietly but I heard her breathing in my ear and knew that it was impossible to hide all the noise, the clanking of the bed and her soft moans. Until eventually we finished. We kissed and her tongue brushed mine and all I could think was that Sophie’s skin felt charged, electrified, dangerous.
“Do you want to die?” I asked.
“I want to go back on the line. And if I die there, then it is good. But if I survive the line, then I will need
more,
and if it is possible to avoid my discharge, I will. Life interests me.”
“Why me?”
She touched her lips to my ear, and I wanted her again, moving in and pulling her legs apart while she talked. “Because your face is damaged, your legs were
shattered, and part of your ear is missing. You’ve been where I have. And when I came here for your screaming, you didn’t react like the other men. And because I
do
know you. From somewhere.”
“You don’t even know my name.”
“What is it?”
“Oscar.”
“That’s a silly name.”
When she climbed on top of me, I had gone way past caring about whether anyone saw us, and she gripped my shoulders so hard that they bruised. Sophie took her time. Near the end, she leaned over and, in a low voice I barely heard, asked me to need her. I said, “Cool.”
Later, before sunrise, she got up to leave and knelt by my head.
“When do you go home, Oscar?”
“I don’t. I convinced the doctor to let me go back to my friends in Jizzakh. I tried to get him to let me stay in the hospital, but the last time I was here, it didn’t work out so well, so it was a no-go.”
She grinned and bit my lip. “This is good. Very good. I will find you there, on the line, if I can. Don’t leave without me.”
You got the sense that the mining techs could tell the future, because these were guys named Buddy, or Wilson, or Tiny, and they’d immersed themselves in so much rock and sludge that they’d become part of the earth, their orange coveralls long since stained dark gray except at the armpits. These were men of dust and stone. It spoke to them and told them of shifting mantle currents, which
brought messages from the earth’s core as the men slept with one ear against the rock and as their machinery
ker-chunk
ed and vibrated its song, but never loud enough to drown out the news of what would soon happen. We
all
should have taken notice of them. One day the refineries and leaching pits went cold, the stacks no longer blowing steam and waste into the winter air, and there was the sudden coughing of massive trucks, one after another, as they ground to life. The yellow vehicles lumbered away from the underground concentrator stations carrying metallic cargo and splashing through slush, and one almost ran me down as I moved in the opposite direction, over the mountain pass. A magic must have shielded them, because although ambulances drew fire, the ore trucks didn’t, passing through and out of the beaten zone as if nothing could touch them. But I didn’t have the sense, or maybe I’d lost the touch—didn’t know that I should have jumped on board and gone along for the ride. I didn’t know to do anything except head north and link up with the kid’s unit, its position a blinking light in the heads-up display of my new armor.
It was risky to walk. But the thought of riding in an ambulance after what had happened last time made me feel sick, and besides, the ore trucks hadn’t drawn any fire, right? My legs felt wobbly after the first kilometer and I began to hate both them and the sensation that they’d never be right again, the muscles threatening to quit with every step. Eventually they got used to the exertion, and I climbed over Jizzakh’s wet rubble with minor difficulty. They
wouldn’t
ever be the same again, and I
wouldn’t
ever get the missing piece of my ear back, but none of that mattered, because I’d found Sophie and she wanted to live and soon
we’d be out of Uzbekistan forever. The only questions were how I would find her again and then how to get her out.
Halfway to the entrance ramps, an old woman surprised me when she popped from behind the only remaining wall of a half-flattened building, and I wondered if she was the same one I had almost run over earlier in the winter. This one was naked too. As I passed, the woman laughed and said something in Russian, so I moved more quickly, sensing that she knew something I didn’t and suddenly aware that I was alone—trying to ignore the chill and the disquieting thought that Sophie’s
wanting
to live might not be enough to make it happen. Even if she ran with me, it wouldn’t change the simple facts of what she was and what that implied: everyone would want her dead. Eventually I lost sight of the old woman and felt better.
“You lost?” A Marine sergeant sat on a block of concrete next to one of the ramps, its entrance half buried in rubble.
“Looking for a buddy of mine, attached to Two-Five.”
“Take this ramp and head down to the main tunnel. When you get off the elevators, hang a left and keep going.”
“What happened here?” I asked, pointing at the rubble.
“Freakin’ engineers. Probably Army.”
The man had popped his helmet and looked southward, pulling on a cigarette and blowing clouds of smoke that wafted back to his face.
“This is no place for human beings,” he said, lifting a fléchette pistol that I hadn’t noticed. He pushed it into his mouth and fired before collapsing into the dirt.
I ran. The door at the bottom of the ramp was partially open, and after I sprinted through, the Uzbek manning it
called out, “Where is Sergeant Tran?” and I called back, “He’s dead,” but I didn’t want to stay and discuss it. The image had burned into my brain. We were so close to getting out, to going home, and the guy must have known it, so it made no sense at all; why would he end it now? But the deeper I went, climbing down a ladder-tube and then stepping into an elevator, the more sense it began to make, because a re-submergence into subterrene brought it all back: the filth and decay. Mold. Past a certain point the walls sweated out their frustrations in rivulets that shimmered green in light amplification, and you heard the low throbbing of the pumping stations, fighting their own little war to keep us all from drowning. In this place, going home meant nothing. In the tunnels, death would come unannounced and instantaneously, so a promise of war’s end
next week
would have meant little, because a week might as well have been a year, and we didn’t know when the order to pull out would be given—maybe it would be in six months. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on myself, but it began to get clearer why
he
had. The cockroaches. They’d left me alone for a while, but maybe if they stayed with me as long as they had with the Marine, I’d feel differently; maybe his infestation was more than anyone could take.