“Thanks,” I said. “Interesting is better than ugly.”
Man, I was tired. I hadn’t rested since getting out of the hospital, and it began to catch up. They weren’t
really
human. So I didn’t care when they saw me spit the zip out, and cared even less when I realized that as I’d fallen asleep, I had said something to the girl, the one who had done the talking.
“You are
beautiful.
Just unreal, and thanks for being so normal this time. Like a girl.”
I dreamed. A psychotherapist sat across from me on the train and laughed while he spat out words, which landed on the wooden floor and shattered into droplets of mercury, disappearing through cracks.
Only the weak-minded crumble after just one time on the line, the cowards and shit-for-brains. There is a word for people like you, but I hesitate to use it, because it implies that you are human when in fact you’ve never been anything of the sort, have you, Oscar? You’re a parasite. A mosquito that buzzes around and annoys people, sucking them dry and then moving on to the next victim, the next meal. Anyway, the word is old and perhaps overused, and there are actually several different terms for this kind of person, but I like this word: “narcissistic.”
She woke me by whispering in my ear. “My name is Bridgette.”
The train had stopped. “Are we there?”
“Pavlodar? Yes. Come. It is for death and faith.”
She had begun to stand when I noticed that we were the only ones left in the car, and I grabbed her hand. “Wait. I’ve heard that phrase before. Why do you guys say that, death and faith?”
“Because it is time. It is the end of my term. Tomorrow I turn eighteen and today I die. These are
good
things. Without death or faith, I am nothing; with both, everything.”
She helped me up and I was about to grab my bag when she kissed me, quick and awkward, an eighth-grade kiss from the shy girl in the front row who didn’t have clue one about holding hands. Swear to
God,
it was
cool.
“I… she began. She shouldered her Maxwell and slid a grenade into her combat harness. “I needed to do that, before my discharge. We wonder what it is like to kiss and I can tell them now. It will help when their time comes. Follow me, because one of my sisters, Kim, acquired a Russian Maxwell for you. Without your Maxwell, you can’t be perfect.”
Those kinked-up stories we all told about the Gs and how they were crazy and all messed to hell, they were part right, but now I could see where they missed. The Gs
weren’t
crazy, not exactly. I hooked up for dinner once with a lieutenant colonel from the Army, a real manicure-and-polish guy, who wore a pair of old-style automatic pistols—chemically propelled rounds, which were about as useless against armor as thrown flowers. I wouldn’t have wasted time with him except for one thing. He’d been there since day one, on the trip from Bandar, the landing, and D-day. There was a story there, I figured, one for which I’d whore myself.
The guy laughed as if Bandar had been spring break in college when he was younger. “Wendell, you really should have been there, strapped it all on and gotten into the shit a little earlier. It felt like Caesar and the Rubicon, and you can quote me on that.”
“Why should I have been there, Colonel?”
He laced both hands behind his head and leaned back. “Well, all of a sudden, these APCs come out of nowhere—I mean balls out and screaming up the beach—headed straight for about a thousand enemy prisoners. Fucking things ran right over them. Those Iranian boys—what was left of them—looked like ketchup mixed with sand, spaghetti, and purple eggplant. I would have been pissed, but the APCs missed
my
guys entirely, so I figured… who cares?”
“Jesus.”
“Nah,” he said, raising his beer in toast. “Genetics. The APCs were filled with, and driven by, our Gs. To the wonders of science, and to hell with the Russians—along with all who stand in our way. Although without Popov, you and I would have no war. The genetics may be lunatics, but at least they’re
our
lunatics and God bless them.”
Kim and Bridgette stood outside the railcar waiting for me, and as soon as I dropped to the ground, Kim handed me a Maxwell and then kissed me. They all lined up after that, one after another, and did the same. Twisted. You’d think it would have been sweet, like having a huge harem, but no way; it wasn’t the same as when Bridgette did it. By the time they finished, I must have kissed a whole battalion, too many to see as they filled the rail yard, and I had to fight to keep from crying.
Not
cool, not after I realized what was happening.
The colonel had got it all wrong. They weren’t crazy,
not from their perspective. Gs just
were.
The factories designed and raised them that way, but nobody had bothered to get rid of other instincts, and now they had to deal with being part human.
Hey, Kim, I got me a hundred confirmed. How many did you kill today? I don’t know, Bridgette. I forgot because I was thinking about what it would be like to have kids.
How did they deal with that?
As soon as they broke into a trot, Bridgette waved for me to catch up. “Come, it is a nice day for combat. What is your name?”
“Scout.”
She laughed before slipping her helmet on. “Scout. We like you, Scout, and I like you especially. Hurry. We lost communications with Third Marine less than a week ago, and Division suspects something went wrong. Today, before dying, we will see about Russians.”
Pavlodar brought it back. They were funny things, memories.
General Margaret Jensen, commanding officer, First Armored Division, had set up her HQ in Aktau in a hotel that had a brothel on the ground floor and overlooked the Caspian Sea. On my first visit there, I thought I had the wrong place. I walked around the block again, just to check, because Aktau had some messed-up system—a leftover from the old Soviet Union days—where there were no street names, just block and building numbers. Turned out I’d had the right location in the first place.
The hotel was filled with hookers. Wall-to-wall, unbelievably hot betties, with skinny bodies and an Eastern sensibility when it came to makeup—that more was
always
better. But despite their smiles, you could tell they were off, just as dirty as the rest of Kaz. Most were sad, their grins concealing pitted, rotten souls, and
they
didn’t want to be there, but as long as they were, they sure as shit didn’t want
us
there, and every time I turned around, I suspected that those chicks gave me the finger.
On that particular day, the general was in her suite, which had been converted into a radio room and tracking station, stuffed with computers and holo-displays. She sat behind a huge desk with two hookers on her lap.
“
Wendell!
Siddown.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“So, what do your readers want to know?” she asked. The general had a plate of Vienna sausages, which she fed to the girls, one at a time.
“Ma’am, we got a report that for the first time since this started, you’re seeing action at Group West, that Popov launched a major armored offensive.”
“Probes,” she said. “That’s it. Pops knows we’ll kick his ass back to the Urals if he tries anything in force.”
The general didn’t know about my visit to her hospital. I had already interviewed her tankers, who had just been flown in from south of Saykhin near the Russian border. One of them was charred from head to toe, and assured me that the fight was on, two divisions of Russian armor headed south, and I gathered from his sobbing and attempts to chew off his own tongue that
he
wasn’t confident about kicking
anyone
back to the Urals.
That
wasn’t a probe.
“My sources say different. First Armored is collapsing, and you have plans to move your HQ eastward, before the Caspian sector is isolated, cut off.”
Her face went dead white and she ordered the hookers
out. I had a cousin who was a cop. He always told me never to be afraid of someone who was angry and red in the face—
that
was normal. Only the truly whacked got pale when pissed, and you were supposed to run if you ever saw that.
She waited until the two girls left. “Shithead, whose side are you on?”
“Ma’am?”
The general pulled out a sidearm, a fléchette pistol, and pointed it at my head. “You put any of the shit in your rag and I’ll find you. Wipe your shit from here to Almaty. Get out.”
I ran. Kaz was that messed sometimes, each sector like a fiefdom where a general called the shots, got to decide what to believe, often making decisions completely disconnected from conditions at the front. With video feeds and instant coms, it was hard to imagine how that could be, but it was. Some called it the human factor. An inability to see real-time information for what it was, as if commanders’ minds had a filter that changed the data into Picasso-like pictures except with
no
tether to reality. Later I found out that General Jensen had been arrested for trying to send girls back to her home in the States so her girlfriend there could sell them to pimps. White slaves. That betty had way more than a screwed-up filter; Kaz had nothing to do with it. She was fucked
before
subterrene.
This time around, the Pavlodar line reminded me of that, of Aktau and the hotel, a forgotten land, disconnected from the world and isolated, left on its own to mutate into whatever it chose. The tunnel Bridgette and I moved into was part of the Marines’ sector, and men sat
on crates or lounged on the tunnel floor amid meter-high piles of ration packs, spent hoppers, and broken equipment. They had given up on pumping suit waste into wall ports. Human filth caked their legs where it had fallen from their dump valves, and piles of it collected on the floor. This wasn’t the Pavlodar I had left.
A captain greeted us, his accent foreign, but at the time it didn’t seem strange; plenty of foreigners fought with us, hoping for American citizenship. “Welcome to Pavlodar!” he said.
I let the Gs do their thing and went to talk to a sergeant.
“Top, what outfit is this?”
He looked up, barely moving. “First Battalion, Third Marine.”
“Where’s First Marine?”
“Other side of the city, about three or four klicks west. Who are you?”
“He’s not a friggin’ G,” another one said. “
That’s
good.”
I slumped against the wall and popped my lid. Needed it bad. I grabbed my tin, packed it, and scooped a massive pinch before noticing that my teeth had begun to hurt. Who cared? Soon I wouldn’t feel anything.
“Scout, civilian reporter with
Stripes.
”
“Oh man,” the sergeant said. Suddenly he was awake, animated. “You should have been here yesterday, we pushed and got our asses kicked, didn’t even have time to blow our tunnels, just plugged ’em. I lost half my guys, woulda made some story.”
I looked where he pointed. A huge circular alloy plug had been sealed into the north wall, blocking what had once been an attack tunnel, and was the only thing
between us and an empty passage—one that ran straight to the Russians.
“When did you guys lose coms?” I asked.
The sergeant and his men looked at each other like I was crazy. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s why the Gs are here, said they lost communication with Third Marine a few days ago. There’s an entire division of genetics spreading out across the lines right now.”
“Man, that’s off,” said the sergeant. “I don’t know who told you that but we’ve been in communication the whole time. I was just back at Battalion yesterday, all normal. Either someone got it backwards, or that’s just a story they told the Gs. What’re they like?”
“What?” I asked.
“The Gs. You came in with ’em?”
I nodded. The zip had kicked in by then and I grinned like a madman. “Wild.”
If I hadn’t been wired to the gills, I might have been able to figure out that everything was wrong. Didn’t fit. But I didn’t care anymore; I was back in subterrene, rock walls on every side so that nothing could hurt me.
Dan Wodzinski. Greatest reporter who ever lived. He blew a head vein when he found out that I’d got the nod for subterrene, for the line, and he didn’t try to hide it. We got piss drunk in the hotel, the bartender shaking his head until he left the bottle so he wouldn’t have to keep pouring. Dan had covered the Syrian Campaign back in ’45. He went in with the Special Forces when they first inserted behind the lines, and was practically a movie
star, the Supreme Chancellor of the Press Corps, the one we all wanted to be. We hated and loved him at the same time, because he knew he was good but was so damn generous with his experiences—handed them out like candy to anyone who wanted a taste. That made it worse. It would have been easier to handle him if he had been good
and
a total prick, but because he was gracious about it, everyone assumed that he was a world-class jerk-off, not your garden variety.
“You goddamn
rube
!” he said. “Man, I can’t believe you got the nod, serves me right for going freelance, no machine to bribe the right people anymore.”
“Are you insinuating that I had to buy my way to the line?”
“Yep. You couldn’t write your way out of a bad romance novel.
No
way. You could eat my ’puter, and you
still
wouldn’t be able to shit a sentence as good as my worst.”