Sophie rested her head in my lap. “How far to Bandar?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Your helmet is scratched. Dented. Are you OK?”
“Fine. Just tired.”
“It’s gotta be a couple of days away; we haven’t even crossed into Iran yet.”
I’d been thinking about her all morning—the problem that would soon face us—and thought that maybe talking about it would help. “I don’t know how we’ll get you out yet, Sophie. Or where we’ll go.”
“It will be fine, just trust.”
“I wish I had your faith.”
“It’s not faith.” She raised herself on both elbows and leaned her head back to look at me. “It’s something else. We’re not in Bandar yet, and you said it yourself: we have days on the road. Anything could happen in that time. We’ll think of something.”
When she lowered herself to my lap again, I laughed, and Sophie punched me. “What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking what my mom would say—if I brought you home.”
“What
would
she say?”
“Not much. I think she’d have a heart attack. Hell, she’ll probably have one when I step through the door. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“You think too much, Oscar.”
The APC lurched forward and we held on again, doing our best not to think about whether we’d make it. It was too sudden. The transition from a war in which millions had been wiped—so many men that they’d had to be replaced with boys and the elderly—to the prospect of peace was almost more than you could bear. You couldn’t think about it too much. I glanced around and saw many of the guys on our APC, including the kid and the Brit, break out bottles of vodka and tilt them upward so that the morning sun glinted off glass. That was when another thought struck me. Back in Türkmenabat I’d seen those guys in the park, the ones who looked as though they were dead already.
These
guys, though, the survivors, had a different look, one that spoke of comfort in battle, or at least a pseudo understanding of its concepts and reality. But now that we were at peace, now what? If the guys in Türkmenabat had the look of death, we had a look of discomfort and malnourishment. We were so sculpted by war that imminent peace didn’t auto-register as a good thing, because it was the unknown, a change that might be for the better, but what if it was for the worse? If you hadn’t been there, that thought would sound crazy, but it was true; these were men who weren’t sure if they’d fit in anywhere
except
war, not anytime soon—maybe never.
I saw myself in them and realized something: none of them were kids anymore, and everyone looked the same. You knew that some of them
had
to be kids, because the facial features were there, but a lot of them were ancient, arching their backs in pain because someone had handed them a carbine, given them five weeks of training on how to use a suit, and ignored their protests about how the family doctor had assured them they were too old for
combat. Didn’t glaucoma make you ineligible for the draft? All of them shared a common feature that you wouldn’t recognize if you hadn’t eaten sand with them. If you hadn’t felt the mold grow against your back in those wet tunnels or nearly gone crazy whenever someone’s suit valve opened to drop turds by your feet, you couldn’t take, and unless you’d done the time, you’d be shit for recognizing that the true horror of it all wasn’t the combat—those brief moments of adrenaline and letdown, adrenaline and letdown,
there’s a dead guy,
and
wow, does it hurt to lose three fingers?
Combat, in some ways,
was a relief.
Take this: the real horror of it all was time, and how slowly it passed, giving you ticktocks to think about the millions of ways you’d buy it—slow or fast, dirty or clean—and then when the action ended, you had more time, slow days to remember everything you saw, and if you couldn’t remember it at that moment, it didn’t matter; those things popped up in nightmares so that someone had to shake you awake because in the tunnels screams are about a thousand times louder. Time had changed every one of these guys, blurring the line between sixteen and sixty, and what really started to make me want to drill into my head, to silence the part of my brain that made me think about all of it, was the memory of that corpsman from so long ago, when I made my first trip into subterrene, when I hadn’t been able to compute how a young guy talked like he was an old man. Now I knew. Now I was surrounded by those young guys, and the old men, and grasped that the corpsman hadn’t been speaking in terms of age; he had been speaking in terms of a parallel existence that nobody could explain, only experience. He had been talking about a different world, and to experience it meant you no longer
belonged in real time. And now that I had finally figured it out, I wished I hadn’t. Experience and time: both were cancers.
They were all crapholes, the cities and the towns. Mashhad. Moghaan. And then little villages not even on the map, where the local Iranians poked their heads out of mud-bricked huts to see what all the commotion was about, not sure if they should cheer that we were finally leaving or cry because maybe it meant the Russians would be coming next, and would they be any better? Some of the guys threw their empty vodka bottles at them, the glass shattering against their homes, and I understood the gesture, cheered with the others whenever someone came close to hitting a goatherd. We wanted to be left alone. It felt as though they knew everything and when the locals stared, they didn’t just look at us with passing interest; there was a sense that all your secrets had just been exposed and that if you could get them to look away, you’d be whole again and the illusion of humanity would drape itself around your shoulders once more until someone else peeked out.
Iran passed in a blur of tan and brown, and the nights were cold enough that we slept with our helmets on, even Sophie, who had started to get better. Her feet still hurt. Every once in a while, we’d pop them out of her suit to take a look or change bandages, and it struck me how clinical these things had become. Once upon a time I would have been horrified by someone who had lost so much flesh, but not anymore. Now it was normal. It was a question of ranking your wounds to decide just how bad
they were, with the loss of both legs or both arms being at the tops of everyone’s list, just below having your face melted enough to disfigure but not enough to kill. Toes were nothing. You didn’t need them to hold anything, and from the looks of things, they were healing, so in all, Sophie’s progress made me happy. She tried walking once or twice when we stopped, and I knew it would be some time before she got used to the new sense of balance, but for now she was still in one piece, and that was what mattered.
One day out from Bandar we had a close call, making me think about how far we were from getting her to safety. The column had stopped for the night, and Sophie and I retreated into the desert to be alone so I could inspect her for signs of rot. She was still suiting up when a Marine wandered over and saw everything.
“Is that a G?” he asked. When we didn’t answer, he stumbled down a dune face and came closer. “Are you a G? For real?”
Sophie nodded. “Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“I do not understand. What is
what
like?”
“Afterward. They teach you about death so you whack jobs want it. What’s death like?”
“It’s about glory. Acceptance. Death is a passage from this world to a seat at His right hand and a life eternal.”
“Do you have to die in combat to get it?”
She cocked her head. “No. One can be discharged.”
“Executed, you mean.”
“Or self-discharge.”
“Thanks,” the guy said, and he shook her hand. “That’s what I wanted to know.”
The Marine dropped his grenade launcher and in the fading light of dusk climbed the next dune face, using his hands to help him up the slope. I handed Sophie her helmet. Just before he made it to the top, the facts that his conversation had been so odd and that he had seemed so unconcerned by her identity finally got to me.
“Hey, pal,” I yelled. “You’re going the wrong way. The column is in the other direction.”
“I know. I’m not going back.”
“What?”
“I’m tired of all this. I want to live for a while without a suit on, take a shit in the open for once—a real shit, not one that I have to squeeze through a tube—and besides, the desert seems like a nice place to die. Watch out on the road. There’s a rumor going around that Special Forces set up inspection points outside Bandar to find and kill genetics; some of the Gs are trying to get out.”
When he disappeared over the dune, Sophie and I looked at each other. “That’s not good,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
We hit our first checkpoint at Lar, and everyone jumped off the APCs to wait for the Special Forces units to check suit computers and identification. The line barely moved. Days had turned hot now that we had moved so far south, and as our forces milled on the highway, the APCs rolled through the inspection post first, then stopped on the other side to wait for us. I heard the grumbling. Nobody was happy with waiting, having just come through the worst fighting that many of us had seen, and there was a sense of indignity about having to submit to another delay
when Bandar was so close now—close enough that those who had removed their helmets could smell the ocean. By the time the last APC passed the checkpoint and the infantry began to move up, some of the men were cursing as one by one the soldiers in front removed their helmets and submitted to questioning.
I had no idea what we’d do.
“She can head for open desert, mate,” the Brit suggested. “Just loop around and meet us on the other side somewhere.”
Sophie said, “No. There are auto-drones overhead looking for that. They’d spot me in a moment.”
It was maddening to have gotten this far only to think that I’d lose her. “This is such bullshit.”
“You’re damn right it is,” someone else said. Then another Marine started shouting toward the head of the line until everyone had begun screaming. A war cry erupted from the Legion troops, and almost the entire mass of them began pushing forward, all order disintegrating. The Special Forces units began backing away from their wire fence, leveling carbines at us. One of them opened fire. Without hesitation, the rest of us—those who still had weapons—lit up the highway with grenade and rocket fire, some of the men throwing themselves on the fence until it buckled under our onslaught, crushed underfoot as our unit moved forward. These weren’t new troops. Our guys were salted and hard, rotten on the inside from having lived through the trial of combat, and I marveled at the stupidity of the Special Forces guy who had opened fire. Four Legion troops fell on him, wrenching his helmet free and then pounding him to the ground with the butts of grenade launchers.
I grabbed Sophie and pulled her so that she stumbled. “Come on.
Now.
”
The kid and the Brit kept up as we hurried with the others, pushing through the mangled fence line and ducking at the occasional explosion, and we laughed at the calmness of it all—compared to what we had just experienced. It almost seemed fun. There was no plasma or obscurant, no Russian genetics, just a few Special Forces with carbines who only now realized their mistake and disappeared into the dunes, a few of them pausing to turn and fire a quick burst, making sure that we didn’t chase them. Who wanted to chase them? We just wanted to go home, and the mob had spoken so that nobody could stop it now as it swept upon the APCs and loaded up. The officers I saw did nothing. One of them, a French colonel, his armor torn off at the shoulder and head bare except for a bloody bandage, smiled warmly at his men while a single tear rolled off his cheek.
“I told you, Oscar,” Sophie said after our APC started moving.
“Told me what?”
“To trust.”
“We still haven’t made it to Bandar, and what then?”
“We will find a way.”
Three hours later, the convoy wound through a mountain pass, and we stopped talking to stare at the wreckage that had once been a thriving port city. I’d been to Bandar on my way in, years prior; this wasn’t it. For as far as we could see, the buildings had been leveled so that a flat plain, with spires of concrete wreckage and steel that occasionally poked up from rubble, now rested where a city had once stood. The ground had been scorched. In
the middle of it all was a huge crater, at least a hundred meters across, from which radiated black char marks, and when we got closer, our rad meters kicked in, warning us of the danger and reminding us to keep helmets on. Signs had been posted by the roadside, alerting everyone to the fact that the doses were acceptable but instructing people to keep moving toward Qeshm. A few women and children walked through the remains of the city, and they all looked for something, but then we got closer and I saw that they were blind, trying to feel their way through bricks and dust, maybe looking for something to eat, so I threw a ration pack as far as I could.
“That’s cold, dude,” someone said.
“Why?”
“They can’t see. You think one of them will ever find it, or even know that it’s food?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “This is Bandar, and it’s over.”
A few others started throwing ration packs, then more, and within a moment the air filled with them, tiny black packages that curved space and raised clouds of radioactive dust wherever they landed. I laughed. Sophie looked at me, and what could I tell her? That for me Bandar had turned into some maniacal Easter egg hunt where only the blind kids could play, and then only if they were willing to soak in radiation? If I was braver, I’d take off my armor too, and undersuit, throw it all away, because the gear felt like a toxin now, soaking into my skin so that no amount of scrubbing would take it off or make anything safe again.