The Brit turned and was about to say something when my backup suit computer kicked in, snapping the heads-up to life; the radio clicked on. Someone announced that all units were to withdraw southward immediately.
“Looks like Command agrees with you, mate,” he said.
But we all stopped talking then. The war had just transformed into something more horrible, where you’d be there one minute, gone the next—because an orbital space platform had just accelerated thousands of shielded tungsten spheres to impact on Russian positions, and Pops would be pissed, would want revenge, might even hit us with the same kinds of weapons. Then again, I thought, there were worse ways to go.
We moved through the city and local Turkmen watched at their windows, looking down at us from homes and buildings that had been constructed in concrete. In places it flaked off. The structures were clearly hundreds of years old, but they had painted them in garish colors so that bright yellows and blues contrasted with the filthy gutters, and I suspected the paint hid something rotten, making it even more important to just get the hell out.
Sophie stumbled against me, almost collapsing in the street.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“I can’t feel my feet anymore.”
“Did the doctor ever find something that would stop the spoiling—when you were in Samarkand?”
“I don’t know. He was getting close, but we left before he said anything final.”
“Come with me.” I was helping the kid carry a rocket crate and handed my end to the Brit so I could wrap one of Sophie’s arms around my shoulder, pulling her forward into the throng of soldiers.
“Where are you going?” the kid called after us.
“To find the doctor. Don’t worry, I’ll rejoin you later.”
We saw a group of military police and steered toward them. “Hey, you guys know where medical is headquartered for now? The French doctors?”
They shrugged and one of them pointed south. “Probably with the Legion, on the south side.”
We pushed back into the crowds. The combined weight of the grenade launcher, my kit and armor, and Sophie felt as though it would force my legs to crumble, made them
scream a reminder that they would no longer handle this kind of abuse. But we kept going, and at moments Sophie regained some sensation so that she could walk under her own power. It gave me time to recoup. Soldiers around us grumbled, asking what the hurry was. It was a good question, one that made me consider the possibility that I had developed an extra sense, one that felt the light dim—just slightly—at the first sign of trouble, even when it was completely unapparent to those around me. At one point we passed a park and fountain, which had been shut down for the winter, and saw groups of soldiers lounging on bare dirt with their helmets off and cigarettes dangling, or beards stained from the accumulated months of chewing tobacco that inevitably dripped its way down their chins. You saw it in their eyes: these were the ones who would soon die. They knew it and had a kind of stoned look on their faces, so I grabbed Sophie to pull her faster, to get us away from the men and their stares, which told a story of seeing fate and being so resigned to it that no fight remained. It was the same look I’d seen all over Kaz, but it didn’t matter; each time was like a revelation.
We broke out of the city and shielded our eyes until the goggles adjusted a moment later. It was still morning, so the sun hung low in the sky, forcing us to stare into it, and at first we couldn’t make out our surroundings. But as the vision kits frosted, it was clear that we’d have a hard way ahead. On either side of the highway, tall sand dunes rose, and the wind whipped their crests to send a shifting veil of grit over the concrete, making our boots crunch as we moved on. A long line of APCs and trucks idled by the roadside and we made a beeline for them, their fading red crosses familiar and dreadful at the same time.
A French medic tended to racks of troops in the back of his vehicle and I pounded on the side. “Where is the doctor?” I asked, repeating it in broken French.
“Which one?”
“The one who commanded the hospital in Samarkand.”
“First APC, front of the line.”
Sophie had begun to lean on me again, and I heard her breathing become shallow and rapid. We made it to the lead APC, and I popped my helmet.
The doctor recognized me almost at once. “It’s you! Glad to see you made it.” The back of the APC had been cleared of everything except a tall table and operating equipment. He worked on someone who had been stripped of all his clothes, and a long gash ran down his left leg, which twitched while the man screamed. “Get up here,” the doctor said. “You can help.”
“I’m not a medic,” I said.
“So what?”
“But I’m a civilian.”
“There are no civilians here, come up.”
I motioned for Sophie to sit next to the vehicle and climbed the ramp, ducking at the same time I stowed all my gear in a corner.
“Here,”
he said. “Hold his leg absolutely still but don’t bother taking off your gauntlets; there is no time. I have to reconnect his artery and this asshole keeps jumping.”
I did as he instructed and tried not to throw up, but when I looked away, the doctor laughed.
“This is not so bad. You should have seen
your
case when they brought you in. Burns like that are the worst. The outer layers of skin slough off, like when you roast a
marshmallow for too long; it becomes crispy on the outside, soft underneath, and everything slides apart.”
“What happened to this guy?”
“Tank commander. His vehicle exploded and sent a ceramic plate into his leg, so he will be lucky to keep it; I should probably give up and amputate but he is the son of my cousin.”
“I’m sorry, Doc.”
“Do not be. He really is an asshole; Phillipe burned down my sister’s house when he was sixteen. It was an accident, but the shit didn’t have the decency to even apologize, not now, not then. You hear that, Phillipe?
You are a filthy asshole.
”
The man screamed again, and inside the APC his voice was so loud it felt as though my eardrums would burst.
“Can’t you give him something for the pain or to knock him out?”
“I did. As much as I could, but he lost too much blood, so there aren’t many options.
Just so!
”
The doctor finished whatever he was doing and ordered a medic to complete the sutures. Then he dipped his hands in a tub of alcohol and pulled them out to drip pale red from all the blood that had already collected in the tub, and I ducked from the APC, not wanting to see if any had gotten on my gauntlets. He jumped down after me and laughed.
“You are so broken, American. Why did you come find me?”
“Do you remember you were tasked with finding a way to stop the deterioration in genetic troops so we could use them in the field after their normal service life?”
He nodded. “Not so important now; they all died in Samarkand. Or were captured, which is the same thing.”
I gestured at Sophie, who removed her helmet, and the doctor’s face went pale. “This is not possible. This is not OK. She should not be alive and you should not have brought her here; I will get the military police.”
I drew my fléchette pistol and placed it under his chin before forcing him around one side of the APC so we couldn’t be seen from the road. Something had snapped; it was a quick decision, almost reflexive, and although I didn’t want to shoot him, I knew I would. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know if you can fix her. She’s deteriorating. How far did you get in your research?”
“I came up with something, a combined treatment using both immunomodulating agents and gene therapy, but the subject became irrelevant when the Russians broke through and killed them all. In any case, I only produced a few vials. What are her symptoms so far?” I told him about her toes and feet and he shook his head. “If you came for my drugs, it will do no good. I could give you the perfect cocktail and it would not reverse effects that have already taken hold. Her toes will have to be removed. And this I will
not
do.”
The ground rumbled with the sound of explosions to our south but I didn’t take my eyes off him. “Then you die before she does.”
“We are at war!”
the doctor shouted. “Right now French armor is trying to break through to our south, and have been all morning. I have more wounded than I can
handle, and you want me to stop what I’m doing to take care of
a thing?
”
I pushed the barrel of my pistol against his earlobe, pointing outward toward the dunes, and fired. When the fléchette ripped off a piece of skin, he shrieked.
“
Asshole!
Fine. You,” he said, pointing at Sophie. “Get in the APC.”
I handed her the pistol and then turned to warn him. “No general anesthetics for her, only locals. When you’re finished, give us the immuno-drugs, antibiotics, painkillers, and whatever else she needs to take care of her feet.”
“You must be joking. She’ll need time to rest. You can’t take her from here once I’ve finished,
she will have no toes.
”
“Do it.”
The doctor and Sophie waited for the guy in the APC to finish suturing, after which he wheeled the previous patient out. I pushed a fresh table up the ramp and then shut the two of them in.
We moved as quickly as we could, trying to get away from the line of medical vehicles, when the doctor called after us.
“You are a pair of stupid shits! Stupid! What, do you think that you’ll get her all the way to Bandar? I have her toes,
you stupid fucking American
!”
And he was right: it
was
stupid. Almost within the first few steps, I saw that it wouldn’t work, because Sophie started sobbing and slumped to the ground, and I had to drop all our weapons. It was the only way I could carry her. Even then my legs wouldn’t hold for long, and she
almost shouted out loud at every step I took, with her piggybacked and bouncing along to my feeble attempt at running, trying to bury her head in my shoulder. We merged into the crowd of soldiers as it crept southward. For a while I slowed and it became a little easier to hold her, but then the journey degraded into a matter of counting my steps, urging myself to take another ten, just another five, and then promising to nobody in particular that if I could rest—just put her down for a second—I’d get up refreshed and ready to go. But I knew if that happened, I wouldn’t be able to pick her up again. Finally I moved to the roadside and into the dunes, where we collapsed in a pile, and she screamed when her foot slammed into the sand at an awkward angle. “I’m sorry,” I must have said, but who knew? It wasn’t a time for “I’m sorry” or anything close to it, because it had all gotten so clustered, screwed, and ambiguous, and it might have been all my fault.
She popped her helmet and looked at me. “I love you.”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“No. I love you.”
“I love you too.” And then I popped my helmet so we could kiss, and it was the best kiss I’d ever had, one colored by terror and frustration, tinted with the knowledge that I was sub-adequate. It was a
she-was-beyond-beautiful-and-to-hell-with-everything-else
kiss, because I didn’t deserve her, didn’t know how much longer she had.
“What will we do when we make it to Bandar?” she asked.
“We won’t make it to Bandar. Not like this.”
“Yes we will.”
“You
are
crazy, then, if you really think that.” She
laughed and I got angry. “Why are you laughing? There’s nothing funny here.”
“Oscar, I have never felt pain. Ever. My sisters and I are designed so that we can will our blood to stop flowing from open wounds, to not feel pain and override nerve impulses in order to stay on the field as long as possible. I can’t do that anymore. I’m more like you today than I was yesterday,
and my pain proves it.
”
“Sophie, you can’t walk. And at any minute Pops could light us up with his overhead kinetics, and even if he doesn’t, we need to get to the front and
through
it to see Bandar. How do you expect to fight if we reach the front? This is where we are and where we’ll stay. South of Türkmenabat, on a highway full of shit.”
“You’re wrong.” She kissed me again, once. “I know we’ll make it; you just have to be enough.”
I pulled her close then and wondered if anyone was watching, but the masses of troops moved by in steady thumping, all of them too self-absorbed to notice the pair of discards on the dunes. I popped her armor and slid my hand in, just wanting to feel Sophie, running my finger over her undersuit as she stared into my eyes and smiled again, opening her mouth slightly to moan.
“I wish we could marry,” she said.
“Here?”
“Why not here? If there were a priest, I would do it right now.”
“They wouldn’t let us. There must be some kind of law against me marrying you.”
“Why, because I am synthetic?”
“No, because you’re crazy.”
She laughed and then winced with pain, so I slid my
hand out and resealed her suit. It was late in the afternoon now. The sun hadn’t set, but already the moon made its appearance and was full, staring down at us as I rolled over on my back and slid against her side. The section of sky farthest from the sun was an unholy blue, so deep that it was almost black, the kind of color you got only in the desert on a clear day in the winter or early spring, and if you weren’t looking directly at it, you saw a single star begin to twinkle, invisible except in peripheral vision.