All You Need Is Kill (7 page)

The beach was deserted. The Coast Guard must have been busy evacuating this place over the past six months.

After a little less than an hour of running, I planted myself on the edge of the seawall. I’d covered about eight kilometers, putting me about halfway to Tateyama. My sand-colored shirt was dark with sweat. The gauze wrapped around my head was coming loose. A gentle sea breeze—refreshing after that hot wind that had swept across the base—caressed the back of my neck. If it weren’t for the machine guns, props stolen from some long forgotten anime, intruding on the real world, it would have been the very picture of a tropical resort.

The beach was littered with the husks of spent firework rockets— the crude kind you put together and launch with a plastic tube. No one would be crazy enough to come this close to a military base to set off fireworks. They must have been left by some bastard on the feed trying to warn the Mimics about the attack on Boso Peninsula. There were anti-war activists out there who were convinced the Mimics were intelligent creatures, and they were trying to open a line of communication with them.
Ain’t democracy grand?

Thanks to global warming, this whole strip of beach was below sea level when the tide came in. By dusk, these fucking tubes would be washed away by the sea and forgotten. No one would ever know. I kicked one of the melted tubes as hard as I could.

“Well, what’s this? A soljer?”

I spun around.

It had been a while since I’d heard anyone speak Japanese. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize anyone had come up behind me.

Two figures, an elderly man and a little girl, stood atop the embankment. The old man’s skin would have made fine pickle brine if you set it out in a jar on a bright day like today. In his left hand he clutched a three-pronged metal spear right out of a fairy tale.
What’s he doing with a trident?
The girl—she looked about the right age to be in elementary school—squeezed his right hand tightly. Half hidden behind the man’s leg, the girl looked up at me unabashedly from under her straw hat. The face beneath the hat was too white to have spent much time cooking under the sun.

“Yourn an unf’milyar face.”

“I’m from the Flower Line base.” Dammit! I’d run my mouth before my brain.

“Ah.”

“What, uh, brings you two out here?”

“Sea has fish wantin’ t’be caught. Family’s all gon’ up to Tokyo.”

“What happened to the Coast Guard?”

“Word come ’bout the whoopin’ we took down on Okinawa. Why, they all up ’n’ left. If the army kin take care them croakers for us, we’d breathe easier, that’s fer sure.”

“Yeah.” Croakers was obviously some local slang for Mimics. Ordinary people never got the chance to see a Mimic with their own eyes. At best they’d catch a glimpse of a rotting corpse washed up on the beach, or maybe one that had gotten caught in a fishing net and died. But with the conductive sand washed away by the ocean, all that would remain would be empty husks. That’s why a lot of people thought Mimics were some type of amphibian that shed its skin.

I only caught about 70 percent of what the old man said, but I heard enough to know that the Coast Guard had pulled out of the area. Our defeat at Okinawa must have been more serious than I thought. Bad enough for them to recall our combined forces up and down the Uchibo line. Everyone had been redeployed with a focus on major cities and industrial areas.

The old man smiled and nodded. The girl watched him with eyes wide as saucers, witness to some rare spectacle. He put a lot of hope in the UDF troops stationed at Flower Line Base. Not that I had signed up to defend him or anyone else for that matter. Still, it made me feel bad.

“You got any smokes, son? Since the mil’tary left, can’t hardly come by none.”

“Sorry. I don’t smoke.”

“Then don’t you worry none.” The old man stared out at the sea.

There weren’t many soldiers in the Armored Infantry who suffered from nicotine addiction. Probably because you couldn’t smoke during battle, when you needed it the most.

I stood silent. I didn’t want to do or say anything stupid. I couldn’t let him find out I was a deserter. They shot deserters. Escaping the Mimics just to be killed by the army didn’t make much sense.

The girl tugged at the man’s hand.

“She tires out real easy. Good eyes on her, though. Been born a boy, she’da been quite a fisherman.”

“Yeah.”

“Just one thing ’fore I go. Ain’t never seen anythin’ like this. Came runnin’ out my house quick as I might, found you here. What you make of it? Anythin’ to do with ’em croakers?” He raised his arm.

My eyes followed the gnarled twigs of his fingers as he pointed. The water had turned green. Not the emerald green you’d see off the shore of some island in the South Pacific, but a frothy, turbid green, as if a supertanker filled with green tea ice cream had run aground and spilled its cargo into the bay. A dead fish floated on the waves, a bright fleck of silver.

I recognized that green. I’d seen it on the monitors during training. Mimics ate soil, just like earthworms. But unlike earthworms, the soil they passed through their bodies and excreted was toxic to other life. The land the Mimics fed on died and turned to desert. The seas turned a milky green.

“Ain’t like no red tide I e’er seen.”

A high-pitched scream filled the air. My head rang to its familiar tune.

Eyebrows still knitted, the old man’s head traced an arc as it sailed through the sky. The shattered pieces of his jaw and neck painted the girl’s straw hat a vivid red. She didn’t realize what had happened. A javelin exits a Mimic’s body at twelve hundred meters per second. The old man’s skull went flying before the sound of the javelin had even reached us. She slowly looked up.

A second round sliced through the air. Before her large, dark eyes could take in the sight of her slain grandfather, the javelin ripped through her, an act of neither mercy nor spite.

Her small body was obliterated.

Buffeted by the blast, the old man’s headless body swayed. Half his body was stained a deep scarlet. The straw hat spun on the wind. My body recoiled. I couldn’t move.

A bloated frog corpse stood at the water’s edge.

This coast was definitely within the UDF defense perimeter. I hadn’t heard reports of any patrol boats being sunk. The base on the front was alive and well. There couldn’t be any Mimics here. A claim the two corpses lying beside me would surely have contested if they could. But they were dead, right before my eyes. And I, their one hope for defense, had just deserted the only military unit in the area capable of holding back this invasion.

I was unarmed. My knife, my gun, my Jacket—they were all back at the base. When I’d walked through that gate an hour ago, I’d left my only hope for defense behind. Thirty meters to the nearest 57mm gun. Within running distance. I knew how to fire one, but there was still the tarp to deal with. I’d never have time to get it off. Insert my ID card into the platform, key in my passcode, feed in a thirty kilometer ammo belt, release the rotation lock lever or the barrel won’t move and I can’t aim, climb into the seat, crank the rusted handle—fuck it.
Fire, motherfucker! Fire!

I knew the power of a Mimic. They weighed several times as much as a fully geared Jacket jockey. Structurally they had a lot in common with a starfish. There was an endoskeleton just below the skin, and it took 50mm armor-piercing rounds or better to penetrate it. And they didn’t hold back just because a man was unarmed. They rolled right through you like a rototiller through a gopher mound.

“Fuck me.”

The first javelin pierced my thigh.

The second opened a gaping wound in my back.

I was too busy trying to keep down the organs that came gurgling up into my throat to even notice the third.

I blacked out.

7

The paperback I’d been reading was beside my pillow. Yonabaru was counting his bundle of confessions on the top bunk.

“Keiji, sign this.”

“Corporal, you have a sidearm, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Could I see it?”

“Since when are you a gun nut?”

“It’s not like that.”

His hand disappeared into the top bunk. When it returned, it clutched a glistening lump of black metal.

“It’s loaded, so watch where you point it.”

“Uh, right.”

“If you make corporal, you can bring your own toys to bed and ain’t nobody can say a thing about it. Peashooter like this ain’t no good against a Mimic anyhow. The only things a Jacket jockey needs are his 20mm and his rocket launcher, three rockets apiece. The banana he packs for a snack doesn’t count. Now would you sign this already?”

I was too busy flicking off the safety on the gun to answer.

I wrapped my mouth around the barrel, imagining that 9mm slug in the chamber, waiting to explode from the cold, hard steel.

I pulled the trigger.

8

The paperback I’d been reading was beside my pillow. I sighed.

“Keiji, sign this.” Yonabaru craned his neck down from the top bunk.

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Listen. There’s nothin’ to tomorrow’s operation. Sweat it too much, you’ll turn into a feedhead—end up losing your mind before they even get a chance to blow your brains out.”

“I’m not sweating anything.”

“Hey man, ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of. Everyone’s nervous their first time. It’s like gettin’ laid. Until you’ve done the deed, you can’t get it out of your head. All you can do is pass the time jerkin’ off.”

“I disagree.”

“Hey, you’re talkin’ to a man who’s played the game.”

“What if—just hypothetically—you kept repeating your first time over and over?”

“Where’d you get that shit?”

“I’m just talkin’ hypothetically is all. Like resetting all the pieces on a chess board. You take your turn, then everything goes back to how it started.”

“It depends.” Still hanging from the top bunk, his face lit up. “You talkin’ about fucking or fighting?”

“No fucking.”

“Well, if they asked me to go back and fight at Okinawa again, I’d tell ’em to shove it up their asses. They could send me to a fuckin’ firing squad if they want, but I wouldn’t go back.”

What if you didn’t have a choice? What if you had to relive your execution again and again?

At the end of the day, every man has to wipe his own ass. There’s no one to make your decisions for you, either. And whatever situation you’re in, that’s just another factor in your decision. Which isn’t to say everybody gets the same range of choices as everybody else. If there’s one guy out there with an ace in the hole, there’s sure to be another who’s been dealt a handful of shit. Sometimes you run into a dead end. But you walked each step of the road that led you there on your own. Even when they string you up on the gallows, you have the choice to meet your death with dignity or go kicking and screaming into the hereafter.

But I didn’t get that choice. There could be a giant waterfall just beyond Tateyama, the edge of the whole damn world, and I’d never know it. Day after day I go back and forth between the base and the battlefield, where I’m squashed like a bug crawling on the ground. So long as the wind blows, I’m born again, and I die. I can’t take anything with me to my next life. The only things I get to keep are my solitude, a fear that no one can understand, and the feel of the trigger against my finger.

It’s a fucked-up world, with fucked-up rules. So fuck it.

I took a pen from beside my pillow and wrote the number “5” on the back of my left hand. My battle begins with this number.

Let’s see how much I can take with me. So what if the world hands me a pile of shit? I’ll comb through it for the corn. I’ll dodge enemy bullets by a hair’s breadth. I’ll slaughter Mimics with a single blow. If Rita Vrataski is a goddess on the battlefield, I’ll watch and learn until I can match her kill for kill. I have all the time in the world.

Nothing better to do.

Who knows? Maybe something will change. Or maybe, I’ll find a way to take this fucking world and piss in its eye.

That’d be just fine by me.

1

“If a cat can catch mice,” a Chinese emperor once said, “it’s a good cat.”

Rita Vrataski was a very good cat. She killed her share and was duly rewarded. I, on the other hand, was a mangy alley cat padding listlessly through the battlefield, all ready to be skinned, gutted, and made into a tennis racquet. The brass made sure Rita stayed neatly groomed, but they didn’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of us grunts.

PT had been going on for three grueling hours, and you can be damn sure it included some fucking iso push-ups. I was so busy trying to figure out what to do next that I wasn’t paying attention to the here and now. After half an hour, U.S. Special Forces gave up on watching our tortures and went back to the barracks. I kept from staring at Rita, and she left along with the rest, which meant I was in for the long haul. It was like a software if/then routine:

If checkflag
RitajoinsPT
=true, then end.
Else continue routine:
FuckingIsoPush-Ups

Maybe this was proof that I
could
change what happened. If I stared at Rita, she’d join the PT, and they’d end it after an hour. The brass had convened this session of PT for no good reason; they could end it for the same.

If my guess were right, my cause wasn’t necessarily hopeless. A window of opportunity might present itself in tomorrow’s battle. The odds of that happening might be 0.1 percent, or even 0.01 percent, but if I could improve my combat skills even the slightest bit—if that window were to open even a crack—I’d find a way to force it open wide. If I could train to jump every hurdle this little track-meet of death threw at me, maybe someday I’d wake up in a world with a tomorrow.

Next time I’d be sure to stare at Rita during PT. I felt a little bad about bringing her into this, she who was basically a bystander in my endless one-man show. But there wasn’t really much choice. I didn’t have hours to waste building muscle that didn’t carry over into the next loop. That was time better spent programming my brain for battle.

When the training had finally finished, the men on the field fled to the barracks to escape the sun’s heat, grumbling complaints under their collective breath. I walked over to Sergeant Ferrell who was crouched down retying his shoelaces. He’d been around longer than any of us, so I decided he’d be the best place to start for help on my battle-training program. Not only was he the longest surviving member of the platoon, but it occurred to me that the 20 percent drill sergeant he had in him might just come in handy.

Waves of heat shimmered above his flattop haircut. Even after three hours of PT, he looked as though he could run a triathlon and come in first without breaking a sweat. He had a peculiar scar at the base of his thick neck, a token from the time before they’d worked all the bugs out of the Jackets and had had to implant chips to heighten soldiers’ reaction times. It had been a while since they’d had to resort to anything so crude. That scar was a medal of honor—twenty years of hard service and still kicking.

“Any blisters today?” Ferrell’s attention never left his shoes. He spoke Burst with a roll of the tongue peculiar to Brazilians.

“No.”

“Getting cold feet?”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared, but I’m not planning on running, if that’s what you mean.”

“For a greenhorn fresh out of basic, you’re shaping up just fine.”

“You still keep up with your training, don’t you, Sarge?”

“Try to.”

“Would you mind if I trained with you?”

“You attempting some kind of humor, Private?”

“Nothing funny about killing, sir.”

“Well, there’s something funny with your head if you want to stuff yourself into one of those damn Jackets the day before we head out to die. You want to work up a sweat, go find a coed’s thighs to do it in.” Ferrell’s eyes stayed on his laces. “Dismissed.”

“Sarge? With all due respect, I don’t see you running after the ladies.”

Ferrell finally looked up. His eyes were 20mm rifle barrels firing volleys at me from the bunkers set deep in the lines of his tanned, leathery face. I cooked under the glaring sun.

“You tellin’ me you think I’m some sort of faggot who’d rather be strapped into a Jacket reeking of sweat than up between a woman’s legs? That what you’re tellin’ me?”

“Tha-that’s—not what I meant, sir!”

“Right, then. Take a seat.” He ran his hand through his hair and patted the ground.

I sat down as a gust of ocean wind blew between us.

“I was on Ishigaki, you know,” Ferrell began. “Musta been at least ten years ago. Jackets back then were cheap as hell. There was this place near the crotch—right about here—where the plates didn’t meet quite right. Rubbed right through your skin. And the places that had scabbed over during training would rub through again when you got into battle. Hurt so bad some guys refused to crawl on the ground. They’d get up and walk right in the middle of a fight. You could tell ’em it would get ’em killed, but there were always a few who got up anyway. Might as well have walked around with targets painted on their chests.” Ferrell whistled like a falling shell. “Whap! Lost a bunch of men that way.”

Ferrell had a mix of Japanese and Brazilian blood in him, but he came from South America. Half that continent had been ravaged by the Mimics. Here in Japan, where high-tech was cheaper than good food, our Jackets were precision pieces of machinery. Still, there were plenty of countries where it was all they could do to send their troops off with a gas mask, a good old-fashioned rocket launcher, and a prayer. Forget about artillery or air support. Any victory they did happen to win was short-lived. Nanobots spilling from Mimic corpses would eat the lungs out of whatever soldiers that were left. And so, little by little, lifeless desert spread through the lands people once called home.

Ferrell came from a family of farmers. When their crops started to fail, they chose to abandon their land and move to one of the islands in the east, safe havens protected by the wonders of technology. Families with people serving in the UDF were given priority for immigration, which is how Ferrell came to join the Japanese Corps.

These “Immigration Soldiers,” as they were known, were common in the Armored Infantry.

“You ever hear the expression
kiri-oboeru
?”

“What?” I asked, startled to hear the Japanese.

“It’s an old samurai saying that means, ‘Strike down your enemy, and learn.’ ”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Tsukahara, Bokuden, Itou, Miyamato Musashi—all famous samurai in their day. We’re talking five hundred years ago, now.”

“I think I read a comic about Musashi once.”

“Damn kids. Wouldn’t know Bokuden from Batman.” Ferrell sighed in exasperation. There I was, pure-blooded Japanese, and he knew more about my country’s history than I did. “Samurai were warriors who earned their living fighting, just like you and me. How many people do you think the samurai I just named killed in their lifetimes?”

“I dunno. If their names are still around after five hundred years, maybe . . . ten or twenty?”

“Not even close. The records from back then are sketchy, but the number is somewhere between three and five hundred. Each. They didn’t have guns. They didn’t have bombs. Every single man they killed they cut down in hand-to-fucking-hand combat. I’d say that’d be enough to warrant a medal or two.”

“How’d they do it?”

“Send one man to the great beyond each week, then do the same for ten years, you’ll have your five hundred. That’s why they’re known as master swordsmen. They didn’t just kill once and call it a day. They kept going. And they got
better.
”

“Sounds like a video game. The more you kill, the stronger you get—that it? Shit, I got a lot of catching up to do.”

“Except their opponents weren’t training dummies or little digital aliens. These were living, breathing men they slaughtered. Like cattle. Men with swords. Men fighting for their lives, same as them. If they wanted to live, they had to catch their enemy off-guard, lay traps, and sometimes run away with their tail between their legs.”

Not the first image that sprang into your head when you thought of master swordsmen.

“Learning what would get you killed and how to get your enemy killed—the only way to know a thing like that is to do it. Some kid who’d been taught how to swing a sword in a dojo didn’t stand a chance against a man who’d been tested in battle. They knew it, and they kept doing it. That’s how they piled up hundreds of corpses. One swing at a time.”

“Kiri-oboeru.”

“That’s right.”

“So why do they bother training us at all?”

“Ah, right to the point. Brains like that, you’re too smart to be a soldier.”

“Whatever, Sarge.”

“If you really want to fight the Mimics, you need helicopters or tanks. But helicopters cost money, and it takes money to train the pilots, too. And tanks won’t do you a lick of good on this terrain— too many mountains and rivers. But Japan is crawling with people. So they wrap ’em in Jackets and ship ’em to the front lines. Lemons into lemonade.”

Look what happened to the lemons.

“All that shit they drum into you in training is the bare minimum. They take a bunch of recruits who don’t know their assholes from their elbows and teach ’em not to cross the street when the light’s red. Look left, look right, and keep your heads down when things get hot. Most unlucky bastards forget all that when the shit starts flying and they go down pretty quick. But if you’re lucky, you might live through it and maybe even learn something. Take your first taste of battle and make a lesson out of it, you might just have something you can call a soldier—” Ferrell cut himself off. “What’s so funny?”

“Huh?” A smirk had crept across my face while he was talking and I didn’t even notice.

“I see someone grinning like that before a battle, I start worrying about the wiring in his head.”

I’d been thinking of my first battle, when Mad Wargarita tried to help me, when my mud-stained guts were burnt to cinders, when despair and fear streamed down my face. Keiji Kiriya had been one of the unlucky bastards. Twice.

The third time, when I ran, my luck hadn’t been what you’d call good either. But for some reason, the world kept giving me another chance, challenging me to find a way to survive. Not by luck, but on my own.

If I could suppress the urge to run, I’d keep waking up to a full day of training followed by a day on the battlefield. And what could be better than that? Almost by default, I’d keep learning, one swing at a time. What took those swordsmen ten years, I could do in a day.

Ferrell stood and gave my backside a slap with his hand, bringing my train of thought to a screeching halt. “Not much point worrying about it now. Why don’t you see about finding one of them coeds?”

“I’m fine, Sarge, I was just thinking—” Ferrell looked away. I pressed on. “If I live through tomorrow’s battle, there’ll be another battle after that, right? And if I live through that battle, I’ll go on to the next one. If I take the skills I learn in each battle, and in between battles I practice in the simulators, my odds of surviving should keep going up. Right?”

“Well, if you want to overanalyze—”

“It can’t hurt to get in the habit of training now, can it?”

“You don’t give up easy, do you?”

“Nope.”

Ferrell shook his head. “To be honest, I had you figured for someone different. Maybe I’m gettin’ too old for this.”

“Different how?”

“Listen, there are three kinds of people in the UDF: junkies so strung out they’re hardly alive, people who signed up looking for a meal ticket, and people who were walking along, took a wrong step off a bridge somewhere, and just landed in it.”

“I’m guessing you had me pegged for the last group.”

“That I did.”

“Which group were you in, Sarge?”

He shrugged. “Suit up in first-tier gear. Meet back here in fifteen minutes.”

“Sir—uh, full battle dress?”

“A Jacket jockey can’t practice without his equipment. Don’t worry, I won’t use live rounds. Now suit up!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

I saluted, and I meant it.