Half the Day Is Night (24 page)

His knees were aching so he eased into a sitting position. (It was hard to shake the feeling that he was going to sit on wet ground, but the treadmill was reassuringly dry.) If the enemy had seen them, they'd probably be crawling towards them now, coming up the slight rise. No lightning. Was the program monitoring? Maybe they weren't getting lightning because they needed it? Maybe the weather programming was particularly sadistic?

The sound of rain was less. It was much harder to keep track of virtual rain than of real rain. Santos sighed next to him and he wanted to shush him. If the enemy was crawling towards them they might hear.

Kill me, he thought, kill me and get it over with. Santos didn't know that fighting a war consisted of long periods of anxious boredom punctuated by intense short periods of terror.

The rain, if it was still raining, was down to a fine mist. Now what were they supposed to do? It was still too dark to see, and now they wouldn't even get lightning. And for all he knew, around them was enemy.

The sky grayed a bit, suddenly faintly luminescent. Dawn? Already? There was the feeling of movement in the sky, of wind. Then he saw edges, illuminated pale, and the clouds seemed to tear. The moon shown through a rip in the clouds, bright and defined—not dawn but moonrise—and then disappeared. Then the tatters of cloud cleared the moon again and he could see an empty landscape that seemed positively flooded with light. Below them the black shapes of enemy tents, but no soldiers around them.

His shoulders were aching with tension. Santos fumbled with the remote and David saw it blink red before Santos set it face down in the grass. Just a tiny thing, a little smaller than the palm of his hand.

Santos leaned over so he was close to David's ear. “Let's take them.”

“Shouldn't we wait?” David whispered back.

“Nah,” Santos said, pointing at the camp with his chin, “most of them will be NPC.” NPC: Non-Player-Characters. Great; even if they were fake people on automatic pilot they still outnumbered David and Santos.

Santos slung his rifle around and David felt his irritation rising. Stupid kid, always in a hurry, not thinking. He had half a mind to let Santos go running in alone, get himself killed if he wanted to.

It was a game, he told himself. They had been playing for almost half an hour without any combat. The point of this was to “go in.” He sighed, and reached back and tapped his shoulder so his weightless rifle would swing around. Once he had it in his hands it at least felt solid. No heft, just the solid feel of it. Maybe if they played some sort of space game then the weightlessness wouldn't matter.

In an hour and a half this would all be over. He could go home. Next time he would check whether the maneuvers were in daylight or at night and if they said night he'd claim he was busy.

He was a grown man. This was a game. He could separate reality from game. He should be fair to Santos, let him have his fun.

“Okay,” he said.

“Ready?” Santos said.

Not exactly, but he nodded.

Santos ran half-crouched towards the tents. Best would have been to wiggle through the grass, but that would have been stupid on a treadmill. David blindly grabbed the handlebar and tried to follow. He couldn't run crouched the way Santos had because all this sitting and kneeling and falling had his knee aching, but he hunched.

Santos lobbed a grenade and as the grenade launched through the air someone opened fire from the camp, a sharp ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat. David checked, cringing, waiting for something, and then made himself run. He was running heavily, he could feel his feet thumping on the treadmill. No element of surprise. Of course, the people in this camp had been sitting around in a thunderstorm for half an hour, waiting to be attacked.

The lights went on, the grenade exploded, and Santos lobbed another one. David tapped his belt and then he had one. (The hardest part of this whole game was remembering the gestures that accessed his weapons.) He tapped the pin and lobbed it, grateful that he had the sense to activate it before throwing it. It was true, an overhand throw from training years ago that he didn't know his arm remembered until he'd done it. The concussions were slightly staggering, but very satisfying.

Soldiers came boiling out of tents. A woman soldier with a long tail of swinging hair came out of one tent, crackling faintly with a blue glow like St. Elmo's fire. Some strange weapon from the game? A program glitch? He checked again, looked at Santos. Santos had seen her and turned his fire on her. “A PC!” he shouted.

David was firing, and she was firing back at them. The air was full of noise and he wanted to fall but he was on the treadmill, so he was looking for cover, ducking behind tents as if canvas would protect him. The soldiers were all around, the NPCs, the program-generated people, they were like chaff. He aimed and sprayed, blindly firing and the three in front of him jerked and fell. So easy, he thought, not like people at all. They ran and shot and pointed and shouted but seemed ineffective. He aimed at one of them and squeezed the trigger (the trigger was a little soft on this thing) and the soldier fell, shots stitched in a seam across his chest. He ducked behind another tent, always moving, always keeping himself from being too much of a target.

The woman crackling with faint blue fire (no brighter than a gas flame in sunlight) she seemed immune to their shooting. Maybe the blue was some sort of protection? Santos kept trained on her, so David worked on her too, ducking, firing, ducking. She turned and ran, evidently not trusting her own equipment and David kept trained on her, a steady stream of bullets, there was still firing around him but he ignored it, keeping his gun on the woman, it should have been heating up, he should have at least emptied the clip by now but it kept on firing, die, you goddamn bitch—

Something huge lurched to his right, but it wasn't anything, he had lost part of his view, he could only see out of his left eye. Stupid goddamn moment for the helmet to screw up. Cheap equipment. No maintenance. He fired, the world suddenly flatter. He couldn't focus out of his left eye as well. The woman turned to fire, pausing, and he and Santos trained on her. She went down, finally, and he felt the rising surge of triumph, and the blue flickered all around her like lightning and was gone.

Santos whooped, adrenaline joy.

The rest were running, easily cut down. And then the little camp was in tatters. Bodies everywhere. It was an astounding amount of destruction for two people. Animated violence. “Great job,” Santos said, standing there, looking around. “We got to get out of here, they have reinforcements coming, you know?”

Only seeing out of one eye was really annoying. He could hear out of both ears, all right. Maybe he should exit the game and see if he could get another cube? But how would he get back in the game?

“We should go that way, I think,” Santos pointed and glanced back to confirm. “Oh shit, Lezard.”

“What?” David said.

“Why didn't you tell me you were wounded?”

“I am?” David said. Of course, he was penalized.

“Can you see?”

“With one eye.”

“Cristo,” Santos said, “you have a medikit?”

A medikit? It had never even dawned on him that they would use a medikit in virtual. “No, I don't think so.”

“I got one, wait—” Santos fumbled a moment, tapped his pocket, didn't like what came up and fumbled some more. Then he had a blue kit box in his hand. He peered at the cover in the moonlight. “Yeah, it's still all right.”

He opened the box but the gloves didn't allow fine manipulation so he took out a packet and waved it in David's face. The packet disappeared—used up, David assumed. “Okay,” Santos said, “now you won't bleed to death or die of infection.”

Die of infection? In an hour and a half? Virtual infections, like virtual weather, must be accelerated.

“I want to check the tents,” Santos said. “Only for a minute.”

He still couldn't see anything out of his right eye. Seeing out of only his left eye was strange. He looked around, trying to focus, found himself looking at a corpse. Well, there were a lot of them.

The man lay flopped on his back, his chest, abdomen and groin bloody but not ruined. His blood was black and wet in the moonlight and his fatigues looked genuinely soaked (David thought if he touched the body his fingers would come away black) but it was curiously cosmetic. He was flopped there convincingly enough, abandoned the way corpses look, but he looked bland. Features too regular, somehow. Not particularly handsome. He had an insignia on his shoulder, a chess piece. It was a knight, with an arrow superimposed, pointing forward. He had a moustache but his cheeks were mannequin smooth. David couldn't put his finger on what was missing, but maybe it was that only the minimum details were there and that wasn't enough to give him humanity.

That made sense. In a game the casualties couldn't be too real or it wouldn't be fun.

“We got to go,” Santos said.

They passed the body of the woman with the strange blue fire weapon as they left. She looked different, more real than any of the others, although her appearance was exaggerated. She had long hair that was black in the moonlight. Part of her face was shattered but her fatigues were open at the throat and she had full, perfect breasts filling her undershirt. Her skin was dark and smooth.

“What was that blue?” David said.

“What?” Santos said.

“This woman, she had some sort of weapon? Blue, like electricity? It made her hard to kill?”

“Oh, no. She's a PC, you know, like us. When she looked at us, she saw the blue glow, too. It's in the game.”

David shuddered, a feeling that came out of nowhere and ran through his system like lightning and was gone.

Being one-eyed was making his head hurt.

Away from camp they climbed a bit. The treadmill made him have to step different, accelerating in a way that felt a little as if he were going up. Santos tapped on his cheek and was suddenly wearing a headset. David did the same thing. The set was open, he could hear the wash of a live mic, but no one was on. Where was Amazon Lil? They were supposed to maintain com silence, but he didn't know why. Maybe Amazon Lil and the leader of the other team could trace locations through the corns. Maybe it was just the rules of this particular game.

None of it particularly made sense. He wondered how much longer until the game was over.

He sighed.

“You okay?” Santos said.

“Yeah,” David said. He could hear the lack of enthusiasm in his voice.

“It makes you kind of crazy, being wounded,” Santos said. “I get wounded all the time, you know? Only I always get it in the leg or something, then the treadmill messes you up, like to make you limp.”

“It is not that, so much. I should not be doing this,” David said.

“Why not?” Santos said. “It's just a game. Pass the time thing.”

“It is a waste of money,” David said. “I do not have a job.”

“Oh,” Santos said. They climbed a bit more and then the land seemed to level out. Some sort of plateau, David thought.

“Nothing up here,” Santos announced. “We should go back down.”

He took them down a wash where the shadows were pitch black and they had to watch their footing. The treadmill couldn't simulate climbing or rocks but it could jerk around a bit. The land around them was dry, but sometime it had rained enough to make this wash. Virtual rain. They had had a virtual thunderstorm, why wasn't this full of runoff now? Because it was a game, he told himself.

“Are you looking for a job?” Santos said.

“There is a problem,” David said. “About the work card. I lost mine.”

“Politics?” Santos said carefully.

“No,” David said, “nothing like that.”

Santos was silent. David wondered what he was thinking. Probably that David was a criminal of some sort. The whole bottom of the wash plunged into blackness ahead of them. David thought to himself that he just didn't want to do it. He didn't want to deal with it.

Santos paused, too. Studying the wash he said, “They are hiring people to do construction work at my fish farm. You ever been a fish jock?”

“No,” David said. “I did construction work.” A summer job in Blacksburg, Virginia, when he was in high school there.

“Maybe,” Santos said, “I can talk to the super, you know—”

Sharp crack. From the wash, someone opened fire.

There was nowhere to go. He unslung his rifle, backing up, but the treadmill made it hard, jerking him to unsettle his footing and he kept having to grab the handlebar, groping blindly, afraid that he would miss and fall, unable to fire, and he could either stand and fire into the shadows or back up but he couldn't do both. Grenade. He stopped and pulled a grenade. He only had four, how many had he used at the camp, one? Two? Tap the timer to arm it and wait a second, he didn't want them to toss it back. Sharp, small ta-ta-ta-ta-tat, a curiously nothing noise, and him standing there in the long blue moment, waiting to throw his grenade.

The world went dark. Cloud over the moon? He threw the grenade, blind, and crouched down. Blind. He was blind.

The grenade made a satisfying concussion and then he didn't hear anything except his own breathing. Shit, was he deaf, too? Blind while the enemy probably rushed at him, mannequin soldiers with chessmen on their shoulder patches. And him, glowing in the enemy's eyes like St. Elmo's fire. He didn't know if they had stopped firing or if he was deaf, too. Maybe he had died and the system had failed to dump him into the park—sharp crack, and someone called out
“Madre de Diós.”
He fired blindly in the direction of the sound, and someone fired, either at him, or it was Santos. Why didn't Santos say anything? If he didn't hear anything from Santos then Santos was dead. He fired again, a short sharp burst, blindman's bluff. Maybe they would kill him. Maybe they were crawling towards him. They couldn't torture him, he wasn't really here, it wasn't like the blue and whites, no virtual cell, no electrodes in the genitals, but still they might be coming for him, and he couldn't see. He couldn't stand it, couldn't, and didn't have to, so he reached up and just as he grabbed his helmet he heard Santos say, “Lezard—”