“Once we rest, we will try again,” she said.
“You really believe we’ll make it, don’t you?”
“I believe in many things. Like you. I knew when I first heard your screams that you were different and that you belonged in war.”
“See, there’s where you’re wrong. I’m a coward. I’m here because I got trapped and because I’m a drug addict whose own parents had disowned him and whose father died thinking that Oscar was a waste. A loser. The worst part about all that?” I remembered that I still had cigarettes and paused to pull one out, lighting it as I spoke. “The worst part is that he was right, and I never got the chance to tell him—even if he
was
an asshole, which he really wasn’t. He was just a dad.” Even as I finished, I felt my jaw tighten and I fought the urge to cry, turning away so she wouldn’t see it if I did.
“I think that’s wonderful.”
“What?”
“I’d love to be a drug addict—in fact, I think I am—but I don’t know enough to know if this is a bad thing or a good thing. It just is. I’d kill to have a father and mother, even bad ones. Even ones who hated me. Because then you know that you belong in this world, and I’ve listened
to enough men to know that you aren’t the only one conflicted. I used to sit outside the hospital ward and listen. I love the way men talk and hate themselves, the way they are cruel and gentle at the same time, like when one of them loses a leg and the others make jokes about how he’ll never dance again. It is so human. You have no perspective. You belong, and right now you’re alive, yet you choose instead to focus on death and things that may never come to pass.”
I pulled hard on the cigarette, holding the smoke in as long as I could, and felt the nicotine work its magic, calming every nerve. She was deadly. This was the kind of girl who got it and made me want everything, and for a moment I
forgot
about everything, including the fact that she was in such bad shape—that I might still lose her.
“You really think we’ll make it to Bandar?” I asked.
“I need you. I want you to make me your wife and show me a bad life. Or a good one, it doesn’t matter. Give me something to make it so I belong; give me you.”
“I will marry you.”
“Do you mean this?”
I nodded, then blew smoke in her face and grinned. “I want you. Yeah.”
“Then you
have
to get us to Bandar, because if we don’t get there, you will have shattered me.”
I dosed Sophie with meds at 0200 and lifted her onto my back, then struggled down the dune face until we were back on the highway, heading southwest. The crowds had disappeared by then, and men slept on either side. It gave the night, which was otherwise still, a
Night Before Christmas
quality, and as I walked, the only things I heard were my footsteps and the occasional rumble of guns ahead of us. Sophie linked to my coms so she could whisper “I love you” or that she had never been happier, so it felt as though something new had been injected into my veins, allowing me to continue when everything else said to stop.
At about three we reached a point where the road transformed from a smooth surface to one heavily cratered, and in my night vision I saw patches where plasma had scorched the concrete, which still smoldered. Empty vehicles lay scattered on every side. Some of them still burned, and the heat made their ceramic plates pop as they expanded. But I recognized where my mind went; this was the retreat from Pavlodar all over again, and the veil of exhaustion was a familiar stew that bubbled around my brain to baste it in taunting thoughts of giving up and going to sleep. Sophie’s head lolled when she passed out. Her helmet clicked against mine in a kind of rhythm that I tried to maintain, which kept me going for another kilometer.
Eventually someone hissed at us from the roadside, where three men crouched behind the remains of a burned-out APC. “Where are you going?” one asked.
“We’re looking for the front.”
“You’re there. Find some cover and shut the fuck up.”
I moved as fast as I could, heading to the left side and away from them as I looked for cover—a hole, another burned-out vehicle, anything. A shallow depression in the sand opened in front of me and I saw shapes in it: two soldiers on their stomachs, looking forward. I was about to ask if we could join them when I decided to hell with it, I’d
ask later, and placed Sophie on the ground before crawling up to one of them and slapping him on the shoulder.
“Who are you guys?” The guy didn’t answer, so I shook him. “Hey, buddy, you awake?”
He hadn’t answered because he was dead. The entire fronts of his and the other one’s helmets were shattered, what was left of their faces spilling onto the sand.
Sophie woke and took my hand. “Where are we?”
“We’re at the front. These two are gone.”
“Get their weapons.”
Once I had gathered their grenade launchers and clips, we settled in to wait for morning.
“I had the strangest dream while you were walking,” she said.
“Of what?”
“That I met Bridgette.”
The words sent a shiver up my spine, and I flinched when a pair of tanks opened fire to our front, about four hundred meters away. One of them must have hit something, because the rounds burst, then caused multiple explosions in the distance.
“She was beautiful,” I said, “but not like you.”
“How am I different?”
“Bridgette was curious about men, like you are, but she never really wanted to live.”
“Do you still love her?”
I thought for a minute, and we ducked when the entire front lit up with firing from both sides, tiny grenade flashes and plasma bursts mingling in a kind of light show that from farther away would have been interesting, like it had been in Samarkand. As it was, I wanted to bury myself in the sand.
“Yeah,” I said. “I still love her.”
Someone jumped into our hole and I almost fired on him, which would have been idiotic, because at that range the grenade might have killed us along with him. It was a Legion officer. When he saw our suits, he spoke in almost perfect English instead of French.
“I can’t sync with your suits; open a channel.” Once we had, he went on. “Good. I’ve uploaded map data, so take a look at it when you get a chance. Tomorrow we’re making the final push. When the time comes, don’t stop to gather wounded, just keep going. This will be our only chance at breaking through.”
He got up to leave and I stopped him. “Hey, pal, I’m looking for two buddies of mine. They stick together. One is a British guy with your outfit, the Legion; the other is an American kid but he’s wearing a genetic combat suit.”
“Yes, I saw them. The only reason I remember is that someone tried to shoot the one in genetic armor before he could show that he was human.”
“Where? Is he OK?”
He pointed toward the front. “About there, with a tank hunter unit, three hundred meters away and very close to no-man’s-land, but he was fine when I last saw him. Good luck finding them, I hope you make it. I hope we all make it.”
When he left, Bridgette wrapped my hand with one of hers. “Why don’t you know their names?”
“Whose?”
“Your friends’.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel the need, maybe because names don’t matter that much anymore.”
She pulled me in closer and it drove me crazy to be with her and not be able to feel that skin, to instead have to hear ceramic against ceramic.
“I think it’s good that you still love Bridgette. She seemed like a very nice person, and I would have liked her immensely. But we shouldn’t stay here until morning.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you should find your friends. Rest. In a while I’ll wake you up, and we will move out while it’s still dark, because nobody should be separated from their friends unless they want to be.”
Sophie didn’t need help, because we crept from the hole after switching on our chameleon skins, moving toward the front on our bellies. When we got closer, incoming plasma rounds raised the temperature and I watched the suit indicator climb. Tiny lumps of molten glass spattered the sand around me, hissing when they landed, so that as I pushed forward, the landscape turned into something resembling a moonscape more than anything earthly. Whenever we passed a hole or a group of men, I hissed out, calling for the kid, because I didn’t want to risk using the general frequency, which was already busy with traffic. It was excruciatingly slow. Half an hour later we found a strongpoint, which consisted of three tanks that looked as though they’d been toys tossed into the air before landing on their sides, propped against each other; we moved in and deactivated our skins.
A group of men, protected by the walls of destroyed tanks, stood in a circle around something, and I was about to ask one of them about the kid when they all laughed. It
was the coldest laugh I’d ever heard. Their conversation played out in helmet speakers, making it impossible to tell who said what.
“You little fuck. Thought you’d get away with it.”
“Kill him.”
“To hell with that, let’s mess him up. Guy wants to play some more, don’t you, Popov?”
Then I heard a boy’s voice, which sounded even younger than the kid’s, and its slightly accented English made him sound innocent, maybe a little slow. “You will all die. Where are your sisters?”
I pushed into the circle to get a better look, leaving Sophie to sit in the sand. In the middle of the circle lay a Russian genetic. His armor had been scorched, and it looked as though it was two inches thick in places, with massive servo boxes at key joints, and tubes that must have held hydraulic systems. The outside was covered by things resembling exposed pipes. But his arms were missing. Both had been blown off and the shoulder pieces dripped what in night vision looked like blood, but I suspected it was more likely hydraulic fluid of some kind. The image of kids pulling the wings off a fly popped into my head. The guy’s helmet was off, and he looked like the one I had seen so long ago in Karazhyngyl; he was a boy who should have been in high school and who smiled at all of us, either oblivious to the danger or ignoring it.
I nudged a Marine next to me. “What’s going on? How’d he get here?”
“We caught him trying to infiltrate the lines, maybe spotting our pos.”
“Shouldn’t we hand him over to an officer, let them interrogate him?”
“What officer? You see any around?”
The Russian laughed at that, making me shiver. “Your officers are all gone. Bandar ‘Abbas is gone. How long has it been since any of you heard word from Bandar?”
“Shut up!”
one of the others yelled. He kicked the boy in the face, and I heard a sickening crunch.
“Is that true?” I asked. “Did something happen in Bandar?”
Nobody answered.
One of the men walked up to the boy and pulled out his combat knife before kneeling by his side. You’d think I would have been horrified at what I knew was about to happen. I wasn’t. I
wanted
him to be tortured, and my mind shifted into a gear that had never existed before, one where revenge overrode any scraps of decency that I had managed to maintain, and one where the need to punish this one for everything—for Bridgette, Ox, the general, and even my father—became so intense that I shouted something like “Cut his balls off,” and someone shouted back, “He doesn’t have any balls.” We all started shouting after that so the mob of us became a unified thing, a machine of retribution and God take the Russian. The man used his knife to cut one of the boy’s ears off, and the fact that the kid didn’t cry out, didn’t beg, made me angrier. We wanted him to squirm.
“My brothers will be here soon,” he said, shaking the blood off his hair. “And when they come, you will not be welcome in any world.”
The man with the knife lost it then and slammed it into the Russian’s windpipe, silencing the boy with a thud. The spell broke. My hands shook and it felt as though my suit vents had clogged. A sense of claustrophobia took hold
and I grabbed the Marine next to me to keep from falling over.
“You OK, pal?” he asked.
“I’m looking for the kid. He’s wearing genetic armor, but he’s one of us and is traveling with a Brit from the Legion.”
“Mate?” The one with the knife wiped it off in the Russian genetic’s hair and then walked over. “You made it!”
The kid, who had been standing in the circle opposite me, joined us and slapped me on the back. “Holy shit. We thought we’d never see you again!”
I should have been happy, but the circumstances of our reunion had changed things, made me wonder how it was that my friends had done this. Then I remembered what
I
had wanted to do to the Russian. It just didn’t matter.
“I’ve been looking all over for you guys. Is it true that we’re moving out tomorrow?”
“It’s true,” said the Brit. “And then on to Bandar.”
The kid said, “If Bandar is even still there.”
“Why, what have you guys heard?”
The Brit sheathed his knife with a
snick.
“Command lost contact with them two weeks ago, and rumor has it that Pops nuked it, the port and everything. It’s why your government OK’d the use of kinetics. Where is Sophie?”
We walked back to where I had left her, and Sophie lay in the sand, curled up with both knees pressed against her chest. She wouldn’t respond to me at first. The kid and the Brit dug shallow holes and lay down next to us, arranging their rockets and the launcher so they’d be ready quickly. I rested my hand against Sophie’s helmet.