Grunt Life (39 page)
But they weren’t the
real
enemy. Who was? That was the real question, because now that we’d been softened up, they’d be coming in force... if they weren’t already here.
I got up from the alien and staggered away. I ended up in the trench we’d first stood in as we’d watched the heretofore-indestructible mound and the planes that hadn’t even hurt it. I raised my hands to pull myself out and fell twice. On the third time, I climbed out onto an overcast day on the African plain.
I heard the sound of drums. Not like the distant sounds that had been inside my head whenever the aliens arrived—those I still attributed somehow to Thompson—but a close sound, pounding from the roots of the world, thumping through the soil of the land. It wasn’t the martial insistence of the snare, but a syncopated rhythm of the soul, conjuring a resolve and a need to gather together as one.
I saw them near the ruins of the mound. People. Humans. The natives of this land that we’d fought and died upon. I’d thought them gone, but that was me in my ignorance. The last I’d seen of the population were the dead atop Kilimanjaro. But these thousands were far from dead. They’d been waiting, hiding, planning.
I watched as they marched towards us, chins high, drums beating, weapons brandished. This was their victory, too, though they hadn’t fought. We’d fought for them; we’d died for them. The idea that I’d had an impact other than to feed OMBRA’s greed filled the emptiness inside of me.
The drums sang to my spirit as the men, women and children of Tanzania strode towards me. Their faces were a mixture of rage and exultation, moods I’d shared myself too many times to count over the last few weeks.
An ancient woman dressed in an orange and purple dress stopped next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I glanced at the hand and saw how gnarled it was, as if it had been split from the roots of a tree, something that had staked its place in the earth long ago. Then she moved her hand to my head, said a few words I couldn’t understand, and moved on with the rest of them.
They took up my Cray and bore him above them as they left. They found more and took them too. This was a time of grieving, and to begin with in grief there’s a whole lot of rage.
I could understand that.
I still felt it for what had been done to Michelle.
To Thompson, wherever he was.
To the rest of Romeo Three.
I stood for a time on the plain and watched the helicopters come. All shapes and sizes, all makes and models, civilian and military, with the only unifying marks on them the OMBRA logo. Without the EMP, they could once again roar through the sky. Not everywhere, but at least in this little piece of reclaimed earth.
A group of men pushed out of the trench from behind me, carrying what looked like a metal coffin. Mr. Pink walked with them, supervising the transport.
“Hey!” I yelled.
He ignored me.
I yelled again.
He turned and regarded me with tired eyes. “What is it, Corporal Mason?”
“Is this it? Is this what we’ve been fighting for?”
“This is only the beginning. You should know that.”
“No. I mean is this the last time you use us to achieve your own goals?”
He started to leave, then seemed to think better of it. “Grow up, Corporal. This is your planet. You were going to kill yourself and I convinced you not to, so you could fight for something other than yourself. I see that in your case I failed.” When I was about to respond, he added, “What is it about you grunts nowadays, I wonder? You used to fight for things because they needed fighting for. Now you need reasons. Now you need explanations. Sometimes there isn’t a good explanation. Sometimes we don’t know the reasons. And sometimes companies prosper because of their forward thinking and service to the greater good. None of these things take anything away from the victory, nor does it do anything to sully the lives men and women gave for the cause.”
This time he did turn away. He waved his hand and called, “Until next time, Corporal Mason.”
The last man trailing the group was Olivares. His right arm was bandaged in place to keep it from moving. His other wounds, unlike mine, had been dressed.
He stared at me, as if waiting for me to ask what I’d been dying to know.
I said one word. “Michelle.”
He nodded as if he’d known what I was going to ask and spoke slowly. “She volunteered, Mason. They knew all along about her. They’d compared her brain scans to those in Minnesota and Alabama and all those other places. She was a match and they had a plan for her. Don’t you get it? She’d rather do that to herself instead of being with anyone. This isn’t about you, Mason. This is about her. Her choice.”
“But she was begging me to kill her?”
“That’s not your choice.”
A memory of our last moments together crashed into me: the passion, the way she’d taken charge. “Why her?”
“Mr. Pink found out about the Cray’s communications system. He discovered a way to tap into it, to disrupt it.”
“So you knew all along?” I was too tired to be angry.
“No. Just about her. We faked her suit malfunction so everyone would assume she was dead. As far as what they were going to do with her...” He stared morosely at the ground. “I didn’t know that until a few moments ago.”
I regarded him for a moment as helicopters came and went. “When did she make the decision?”
“The night before the final mission. The night before they took her and made her into...”
I was with her that night. It must have been before, which meant...
Which meant she’d chosen her last moments to be with me. I turned and stared into the distance. If only we’d met some other place. But life wasn’t like a movie or a book. There were no happy endings.
“What about Thompson?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Did he make a choice, too? Was he going to be in some other special project?”
Olivares shook his head. “No. I saw him die. I’ve told you that.”
“But you have to be wrong.”
Olivares shook his head sadly. “If only I was.”
“Then what was that sound? I hear it in my dreams. I hear it in the wind. I hear it all the time. His drums.”
Olivares shrugged.
“Listen,” I insisted. “I heard it at the end of that last mission. I heard his drumming. Olivares, seriously. It was
him
.”
He looked at me with more than a little pity.
I shook my head savagely. “Don’t do that. Don’t act like I’m crazy.”
“What am I supposed to do? He’s dead. I saw it happen. He couldn’t move his legs anymore and we couldn’t move him so he opened his suit. He took two steps—two goddamned steps—and a Cray skewered him.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I did what you would have. I killed the Cray that killed him.”
“And then what?”
“Then I killed some more.” Olivares grabbed my shirt with his uninjured arm. “You have got to get over this, man.”
I latched onto his wrist and held him still. My face was an inch from his. “Did you see him die?” I asked, looking him in the eye, searching for even a hint of a lie.
“He couldn’t have survived it, Mason.”
We stared at each other for almost a full minute, then he shook my grip off.
“No one could have survived that.”
He turned and headed for the helicopter.
Then why did I hear the drumming? How had the kid saved my life? That little drummer boy with the infectious smile. He’d been the puppy among us, eager to please, forever trying to make up for his shortfalls, however real or imagined they were. But then, weren’t we all like him? Weren’t we all trying to make up for the things we’d done poorly or not done at all, hoping, praying, working to build a better future?
Olivares turned around one last time.
“Come on, you grunt. Let’s go. This shit was just the beginning.”
Then he turned and climbed into the waiting helicopter.
I closed my eyes and remembered Michelle the way she’d been on the mattress behind the generators.
Then I opened them and ran to the helicopter.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
S
PECIAL THANKS TO
Jon Oliver for giving me the opportunity to sit in the middle of the intergalactic science fiction sandbox and toss sand gleefully into the air. This has been a dream ever since a nine-year-old boy first cracked open
Have Spacesuit Will Travel
, and wondered, not only what it would be like to be a soldier, but what it would be like be a writer. Both of those dreams seemed so unreachable when I was nine. Thanks also to David Moore for his brilliant editing. Thanks to my agent Robert Fleck for doing all of his spectacular agenty things. Much appreciation for the use of Brian Gross’s brain. I think I learned more from Brian about science than I did in high school, college and graduate school combined. Thanks to all the folks at the CJIOC-A and ISAF J2x in Afghanistan who had to deal with me talking about this book as I was writing it during my six-month-all-expenses-paid vacation to the suck. Thanks to my wife Yvonne, who not only supported me, but made this a better book. Thanks to Joe Haldeman for being my inspiration both as a writer and as a citizen soldier. And last, but certainly not least, thanks to every man or woman who ever put on a uniform to fight for a cause greater than themselves. Each and every one of you are grunts and I’d follow you to the end of this earth and the next.
Weston Ochse
is the author of twenty books, most recently two
SEAL Team 666
books, which the
New York Post
called ‘required reading’ and
USA Today
placed on their ‘New and Notable’ lists.
His first novel,
Scarecrow Gods
, won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in First Novel and his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in comic books, and in magazines such as
Cemetery Dance
and
Soldier of Fortune
.
He lives in the Arizona desert, within rock throwing distance of Mexico. He is a military veteran with 29 years of military service and recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan.
LIFE AND DEATH ON THE WAVES
Kavika Kamalani is a Pali Boy, a post-plague heir to an ancient Hawai’ian warrior tradition that believes in overcoming death by embracing one’s fears and
living large
. His life on the
Nomi No Toshi
, the floating city, is turned upside down when one of his friends dies, harvested for his blood, and he sets out to find the killer.
Kidnapped himself and subjected to a terrifying transformation, Kavika must embrace the ultimate fear – death itself – if he, his loved ones, and the Pali Boys themselves are to survive.
“Weston is one of the best authors of our generation.”
– Brian Keene, author of
Take the Long Way Home
and
City of the Dead
“Weston Ochse is a mercurial writer, one of those depressingly talented people who are good at whatever they turn their hand to.”
– Conrad Williams
