“Are you there?” I asked.
“I’m here.”
“What’s wrong?”
She said nothing at first but then asked me to take off my helmet and vision hood, which I did. I scrunched down, hoping that no snipers were nearby.
“Would you let them do that to me?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Torture me like that. Cut my ear off.”
My stomach turned and I felt sick again with the thought of what had just happened. “Never. I’d die before I’d let that happen to you.”
“But you yelled. With the rest of them. I heard it.”
“He was a Russian, Sophie, a genetic.”
She slammed her fist into my jaw so hard that my head snapped back into the sand with a thud, and for a moment I thought I’d black out.
“I’m a genetic!”
I waited for someone to say something, to run over and wipe her at that very instant, but nobody moved except for the Brit and the kid, who shifted in their holes.
“You might want to keep that shit down,” the kid said. “Just sayin’.”
Sophie yanked her helmet off and spat on me before she started sobbing, and I had to pull her close, feeling as though I’d made the biggest mistake of my life and wanting to take it back. But it was too late.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” I whispered. We lay there for an hour, and in the east the sky started to turn a lighter shade, dimly illuminating the sand and wreckage.
“It’s not your fault,” Sophie finally said. “I would have done the same thing. My sisters would have. It’s not your fault.”
But something about her voice made me wonder if she meant it. At any moment, the order to move out would come, and I didn’t care. In less than a minute I’d managed to fuck up the one thing left that mattered to me, and nothing would change it. As we lay there, my mind raced, trying to figure out a way to make it better, to rationalize what I had shouted at the boy, what I had felt—anything to use to try to explain it all away so we could go back to the way it had been the day before. But nothing came to me.
When the sun rose, orders arrived, flashing on our heads-up displays at the same time someone announced them over coms. An explosion boomed in front of us. I looked up and pulled on my vision hood and helmet, watching as wave after wave of auto-drones swooped down on the Russian positions, and it made me start to feel better, knowing that we’d be getting help from somewhere despite the fact that Bandar might no longer exist. I gave Sophie the next dose of medicine and began to lift her up but she slapped my hands away.
“I can move on my own for now.”
The Brit and the kid gathered their things and waited.
“You guys ready?” I asked. They gave the word and we all moved forward. Sophie fell a couple of times and yelled when I tried to help her up, while all around us the shapes of men left their holes in the sand, forming a wave of soldiers that crept toward the line. Our tanks opened fire. Soon they too began to move, inching just in front of the infantry to give us some cover from enemy fire. Sophie was falling behind. I grabbed her then, and she screamed at me to let go, pounded on my shoulders, but I ignored the blows and forced her onto my back.
“You’re not going to fuck this up. I don’t care if you hate me now, screw it. But I won’t let you fuck this up.”
Eventually she fell limp and cried. That was how I moved into my final battle of the war: with the Brit and the kid at my side, a broken genetic on my back, and a feeling of dread that I had changed more than I’d realized. I’d become
less
than subhuman and didn’t deserve to make it out.
T
he war became a blur, my mind a singularity that sucked in on itself so that all I felt was the weight of Sophie and a vague sensation that the kid and the Brit stumbled on in front of me, their shapes sometimes getting lost behind curtains of sand and smoke. There were screaming and forms. Tanks, behind which we marched, rotated their turrets to either side and vomited plasma, but we didn’t see if they hit anything, because of the obscurants, dust clouds that defeated our infrared and laser targeting with burning ribbons of magnesium. As I pressed on, it occurred to me that we should have been high, that once upon a time it would have been cool to think that we walked through an infinite sparkler and into some fucked-up land of enchantment. You forgot more than you remembered, but you remembered more than anyone should. There was a group of Popov genetics who had gone unnoticed during the advance and sprang from the sand to ambush a few Legion soldiers to my left, but the Gs didn’t fire any weapons. They punched through the men’s armor with bare fists and ripped out handfuls of skin, and it was so unreal that I
didn’t react except to think it was a strange thing to do. Someone fired rockets at the group, killing everyone, and I thought,
Well, yeah, that’s OK, because now those guys are gone, out of it all, so it won’t hurt anymore.
And then there was a wounded Marine who begged for help because his legs were gone. He said, “Please, don’t let me die here,” and I said, “It’s not such a bad place. I can’t carry you anyway.” He started crying before I lost sight of him. There were so many scenes that I stopped processing until much later, when they shoved into my thoughts without warning. An hour into the advance, we paused in a Russian trench, popping our helmets and taking the time to recover what strength we could, grinning broadly because whatever else had happened, we hadn’t died yet, and from the radio traffic we knew that things were going well. Bandar had never felt closer.
“I love my rockets,” the kid said to me.
“They’re really good rockets.”
“No, you don’t understand, old man. Take for once. I really,
really
love them, like I’m the ultimate badass and these are magical things, rounds that never miss. I took off a G’s head this morning, hadn’t even waited for the tone and just squeezed off, so the warhead never had time to arm, it just took his head, all kinetic. I’m the reaper.”
“They’re
insanely
good rockets,” I said.
“Yeah, man, that’s more like it. Insanely good, now I get why you were a reporter, that’s a good word for them. Crazy.” He paused to take a drag off a cigarette the Brit offered him and ducked when a series of grenades cracked around our position. “Fucking Popovs. I’m ready, Oscar, ready to make it happen, like who cares if we’re up against Gs, man? These guys are like little girls, little ape-men.”
“You’re the rocket man.”
“I’m the freakin’ rocket man. And a half. Insanely good.”
Sophie didn’t say anything, and when it came time to leave, I lifted her onto my back again, and we moved out, returning into the haze. The tank commanders waved us on. Something told me that as long I was in a cloud, nothing could touch us, so I positioned myself as close to a tank as I could, walking within the backwash of sand that it kicked up, and catching only glimpses of the battle as it unfolded on either side. I flinched when the vehicle suddenly blew into a cone of plasma because a Russian rocket had streaked out of nowhere and slammed into its reactor section, and I watched as something arched overhead trailing a thin line of white smoke. It thudded to the ground next to me. Once I recognized what the thing was, I pushed on, trying to figure out how the tank commander’s head could dislodge from his torso and fly that high, hit the sand, and still have a look of surprise on it as if the guy had been freeze-dried at the moment of death.
We stopped again an hour later and ate lunch underneath the shell of an APC, shoving in as much food and water as we could before our stomachs stopped working out of fear. Exhaustion only masked so much. Once you got used to the walking and dead, fear always found a way back in; adrenaline could keep flowing for only so long and then it hit you again—that you didn’t want to die, but that this was the worst possible place for someone with a death phobia.
“I can’t taste my food,” the Brit said.
I nodded. “I know, this shit is awful.”
“No, I mean I can’t taste it, can’t taste anything, mate.”
He ripped off his vision hood and there it was—that look. The Brit was augering in. I just knew that in a few minutes, maybe seconds, he’d lose it, so I glanced at Sophie in the hope that she’d say something to make it stop, but she looked away.
“Bandar,” I said.
“What about Bandar?”
“I bet they have good food in Bandar. Better than this crap. I bet by the time we get there, everything nuked will have been fixed, rebuilt, and that we’ll get the good stuff as soon as we make it in.”
“It’s all in Bandar?”
“It’s all in Bandar.”
The Brit smiled then and shook his head. “Shit.”
“You should relax,” the kid said. “Just trust in the rocket man and everything will be waxy.”
“Hey, kid,” I said, and he stopped eating to look at me. “They’ll make you give up your rockets in Bandar, you know. You can’t take them home.”
“That’s messed,” he said with a genuine look of disappointment. He tossed his pouch to the side and rebuttoned his helmet. “Maybe the war won’t end, then. Maybe we’ll come back and keep going, push back north.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Our heads-up displays kept us on course, and we had linked with a Legion armored unit, which meant we stopped when they did and pressed on when they said to. So we had a sense of where we were. But the image of a map and the reality of the battlefield were always two different things, and after lunch, when we moved out again, I became lost in a sensation of futility, thinking that maybe in all that time, we’d moved only a few hundred yards and
would have to fight like this for months, maybe years. It didn’t help that we couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction. Popov armor continuously pelted the battlefield with obscurant shells, adding to a confusion that would have been there anyway and forced you to wonder if at any moment you’d drop off the edge of the earth, step into a chasm that someone had forgotten to map and that you couldn’t see because of all the shit in the air. At one point I tripped on something and fell, dropping Sophie so that she rolled a few feet to the side and screamed, and I got up cursing, looking at my feet for what had snagged me. It was a Legion guy. An APC wheel had been blown off one of our vehicles and pinned him to the ground, half buried in sand so that all he could do was wave one arm in the air and ask for water.
“That’s messed up,” said the kid.
“No shit.” I gave the guy some water but he died before drinking it. Sophie waited for me on the ground and I lifted her again, trying to ignore the burning pain in my lower back. “Are you OK, Sophie?”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry for getting mad at you, Oscar.”
“It’s OK.”
“I had forgotten.”
“About what?”
“About what it’s like. The cumulative effects of watching your family die and what it makes you want. And I was wrong when I said that my sisters would have done the same thing to the Russian genetic. They would have done much worse.” She rested her head on my shoulder after that, and everything felt better.
By mid-afternoon, the advance had halted. It wasn’t a question of our just giving a little more and continuing the
attack, because from the radio traffic, we knew that Popov had pulled off some magic of his own, had set up his defenses so that as soon as we crashed one position, he fell back a kilometer to the next one, wearing us out a little at a time. Our tanks and infantry had become scattered, and whatever remained of Command needed a breather to regroup and get everyone back into order before we made for the next Russian position. We had arranged the bodies of dead Russian genetics, stacked three layers high, so that we could lie behind them and take off our helmets. The firing had died off, and once Pops pulled back, the air cleared; for once we saw sky.
“I like the desert,” the kid said.
“It’s winter,” I pointed out. “Maybe early spring, I don’t know. The point is, deserts aren’t so bad as long as it’s not summer.”
“I served in Africa before all this,” the Brit said. “God, what a hellhole—at least, that’s what I used to say. Now I don’t know. The bush wars weren’t like this, weren’t this bad and didn’t make you want to disappear.”
“Relax,” the kid said. “You’re with rocket—”
Before he could finish, the Brit leapt on him, smashing his fist into the kid’s face and breaking his nose. The kid scrambled backward in shock. A few seconds later he started crying.
“You’re just a fucking kid!”
the Brit shouted. “I swear to God, if you say rocket man one more time, I’ll cut your fingers off. Don’t. Just don’t. I’m tired and I just want to smoke cigarettes for a few minutes so I can imagine that I’m back in the bush, maybe back in Korea. What the fuck
do you even know
?”
Once the Brit turned and lit his cigarette, he lay on
his back and stared at the sky, so I moved closer to the kid.
“Don’t sweat it.”
“I’m cool.”
“Well, then stop crying. It’ll be cool, just hang.”
“I can’t stop crying.”
“Why not?”
The kid whispered in my ear that back in Türkmenabat he’d stopped off at a brothel with the Brit, after Sophie and I had gone to find the doctor. One of the girls had given him something. “And it hurts, man. I’m way sick.”
I laughed then and felt bad for the kid, really, but it was so funny, because he had no idea how cool he was, and it was always cool when someone didn’t
know
he was cool.