Machine Of Death (46 page)

LIEUTENANT
GRALE
CRAWLED
THROUGH
THE
ASHEN
SLOP
BENEATH
AND
BEHIND
THE
SLANTED
BILLBOARD
THAT’D
HALF-FALLEN
FROM
THE
ROOF
ABOVE
, its Arabic advert made all but illegible, even to the locals. The machinegun fire crackling through the air was background and indistinct. If one were careless, the sound would become ambient, like the bustling traffic in New York or the steady hum of a computer.

A shot kicked up dirt in front of Grale’s face. He pulled himself backward, back to the dubious protection of the fallen sign.

A sniper. “Shit.”

He looked across the road. His men hadn’t noticed yet.

“Sniper!”

Everyone moved at once, except for Paula. She was green, and waited just a second too long. She turned to face Grale, and as she did, she staggered backward, blood flying from her arm. Gearhead leapt out, grabbed her, and pulled her behind the cover of the still-standing wall of a long-destroyed hotel.

The sniper waited, silent.

Across the street from the fallen billboard, Grale’s men looked at him, pasty-faced and wide-eyed. One of the men—Simmons—signed for him to stay put.

“No shit, Simmons.”

A panic swept through the men as they crouched behind the wall. They were reacting, damn it, not thinking, and Paula’s cries of pain were rattling loose what little cohesion they had. Grale needed to cross the street and reach them, and he needed to do so before the
SNAFU
became
FUBAR
.

But those three little words on that tiny slip of paper kept him from dashing across.

The focus of the panic shifted from Paula to Grale. They knew she’d be fine, after all. But the eyes on Grale hadn’t the slightest shimmer of hope. No. They all knew Grale would die here. God damn that machine.

It’d been a week ago, back when the insurgency seemed stoppable. A couple of rookie privates had found the machine in the wreckage of a casino. (Well, Grale called it a casino. The locals insisted it wasn’t. The locals insisted a lot of things.) The machine still worked.

Grale had said to throw the damn thing out, but most of the platoon kicked up a fuss. “It’s one of the newer models,” Gearhead had said, looking at it. “Forty different languages. Takes a pinprick of blood—less than most blood-sugar machines—and it’s supposed to be the wittiest model yet. Come on, Lieutenant? What harm will it do?”

Machines weren’t infallible. That was Grale’s sole understanding of computers, and even Gearhead (reluctantly, at times) agreed with him. So let the boys (and girls, Grale, you can’t forget them) have their fun. Right?

“Says I’m going to drown.”

“That blows.”

“Paula—What’s yours?”

“Uh—car accident.”

“Oh, what the hell? Mine says ‘Killed by cow.’”

“A cow?”

“Always knew you’d amount to great things, Simmons.”

“Blow me. Hey, Lieutenant!”

“Lt. Grale! You gotta try this.”

“I really don’t,” Grale said.

“He just doesn’t want to see the words ‘old age’ in print.”

Everyone laughed. An explosion and the sound of wrenching metal pealed through the open windows, a distant and painful reality check.

“Gearhead,” Grale said, “Take ten men and go see who killed who.”

“Yes, sir!” the skinny youngster said, snapping gum that’d been in his mouth since morning.

The rest of the men kept joking about the machine’s one-line fortunes, and Simmons, with a half-smile plastered on his face, said, “Come on, Lieutenant. It won’t hurt you to see what it says.”

“Yeah, Lieutenant, come on.”

A chorus of “come ons” and “yeahs” broke out, and Grale couldn’t see the harm in a little fun.

He stepped up to the machine—it was such a humble thing—and Paula showed him how it worked. It reminded Grale of a slot machine. Maybe that was why it’d been in a casino.

A tiny slip of paper curled out.

Grale ripped it free, read it, stared at it for a moment, and then let it fall to the floor with a shrug. Like jackals, Grale’s men fell on the scrap and gaped at it, horror-struck. By nightfall, everyone on base knew how Lieutenant Grale was going to die.

The change came the next morning. Some of the men wouldn’t talk to Grale unless they had to. Overnight, he’d become the most beloved and still (somehow) least-popular man on base. And anyone with something bad to say about Lt. Grale: Watch out!

Everywhere Grale went, his soldiers looked at him with wide, wet eyes and the color would swirl out of their faces. They’d utter “yes, sir,” as if the post had arrived with a thousand pounds of Dear John letters.

What harm could a little fun be? Grale snorted at the thought.

Aside from bringing morale to an all-time low? Not a goddamned thing.

“I want that damn machine turned into scrap.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hear me? If it stays on this base, it’ll be reincarnated as a locker.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now! I want to see you do it, Marine!”

That caused some grumbling. Word went out that ol’ Grale was afraid of the death machine. “And who can blame him?” they’d say.

What the hell did they know?

Grale crouched behind the billboard and watched the disaster unfold across the street. His boys (and girl), the whole lot of them, in an instant, decided that they were going to defy fate, to prove Grale’s slip of paper wrong. He couldn’t hear what they were saying over the gunfire, and they weren’t signaling anything.

A bullet sliced through the sign and sent bits of brick from the building behind Grale into the air. The damn thing almost parted his hair. He pressed himself against the ground.

He saw Gearhead on the radio. Calling an air strike. Good boy.

Simmons put a new mag in his gun and shifted his legs.

No,
damn
you,
Simmons,
stay
put.
Grale gestured for him to stay down.

He didn’t.

“No!”

But Simmons charged around the corner. Gearhead looked across the ruined street at Grale and Grale shook his head. Gearhead stopped the others from following. Good boy.

Grale ground his teeth. Once, his daughter had left at seventeen hundred hours, back at the base in Germany, and never reported for dinner. She’d come home at oh-one hundred, drunk and battered. Grale knocked a few heads in that night, that was for sure. But the time between seventeen and oh-one hundred hours? That excruciating wait? That was how Grale felt when Simmons turned the corner and charged toward the ruins of the office building.

A crack shattered the other sounds of the urban fighting and Grale knew what’d happened, even before he heard Simmons cry out. Just like he knew what happened that night, so long ago, before his daughter had opened her mouth to start crying.

Grale peered over the sign. Simmons was down, hard. The sniper had shot his leg. The bastard was hoping to draw out more.

Grale made a gesture at Gearhead.

Gearhead shook his head.

Grale made ready to spring, putting his back against the sign and shouldering his rifle. This was his job, damn it, these were his children. Screw that miserable machine and its miserable opinion.

“Covering fire!” Gearhead screamed.
NATO
rounds poured upward toward the office building. Grale turned at the edge of the sign and dashed into the street. Throughout, the sniper was silent. Good boy, Gearhead.

Grale reached Simmons, and winced. The boy’s leg was mangled badly—he’d be lucky to keep it.
Have
to
carry
him,
Grale thought.

“Lieutenant?”

“Shut up. You gotta live so that cow can kill ya.”

Grale squatted and hefted Simmons up. Boy could use a meal or two extra. Damn, it was hot out.

Grale’s eyes were glued up to the building.

He saw the sniper.

He could see into the sniper’s eyes, all the way from the ground. They were like brown glass, and the man behind them—the man behind the rifle—hated Grale, hated Simmons, and he’d hate anyone else that stepped into the street. The
NATO
rounds weren’t keeping him down anymore.

Grale knew what was going to happen. He always did. He turned away from the sniper, Simmons curled on his shoulders, and started running back to cover. If the bastard was going to shoot Grale, he’d have to do it from behind.

A puff of dirt flashed up between Grale’s legs, as if to say, “I don’t mind that.”

But Grale was almost there.

Gearhead and the others were still firing, trying to keep the sniper down. But the man behind the rifle had a pair made of brass. Another round zipped past Grale’s ear.

Ten yards to go. Not even that.

But Grale could feel it. The muzzle of the rifle may as well have been pressed against his back. The sniper, he knew, wouldn’t miss a third time.

A rocket streaked through the heavens. Half of the sniper’s building caved in. As Grale turned the corner and set Simmons down, he heard Gearhead yelling into the radio.

“Kill confirmed. Repeat, kill confirmed. You got the bastard!”

Simmons looked up at Grale, his eyes beaming with gratitude and admiration.

“But, sir, your paper said—”

“Some other sniper, son. Some other war.”

Story by Bartholomew von Klick

Illustration by John Keogh

I
MET
MAGGIE
AT A
KEG
PARTY
IN
THE
BACK
YARD
OF
THE
HEAD
CHEERLEADER’S
HOUSE
. The cheerleader didn’t know I was there, and probably would have objected to my presence. I was a nerd. I didn’t earn acceptance from my peers until we were too old and too jaded about high school cliques to care. 

Maggie and I had been at the same school since junior high, but we had never really met each other before. She was a name on a roster, another face in the background noise. She was tall for her age, and had knobby knees and a flat chest, and a nose that was a little too big, but I thought she was beautiful. Seeing her at the party again, in different and unusual circumstances, was like waking up and everything seeming smaller than it was before. I had seen Maggie every day for years, but suddenly she was the most wonderful girl I had ever seen. Before that moment, before I saw her laughing over the rim of a red plastic cup, I don’t think I even noticed girls. 

We got off to a good start. We talked awhile, and shared a drink or two in the freshly-cut grass, giggling. Later, I held her hair back while she puked in the kitchen sink. Maggie had too much Jagermeister, drawn by its sweet smell and licorice taste. She had always liked licorice. Between bouts of gut-twisting heaves, Maggie cursed the liquor companies for making the stuff taste exactly like her favorite candy. Childhood to adulthood, things don’t change as much as they used to. Maggie blames commercialism and the corporations. I think I agree with Stephen Hawking. 

I read his book during my sophomore year. The other kids would have made fun of me if they hadn’t gotten that out of their collective system in junior high. They were too busy getting laid and trying to get laid, and trying to get into good colleges. I had already been accepted with a big scholarship because I’d discovered a new kind of algae in the stream near my grandparents’ house. It was just a science project to me, but to college admissions departments, it was as if I had rushed for a million yards last football season. 

I had scholarship offers, and ended up going to the school that Maggie was going to. I told my parents that I had picked the state university because I had read that graduate programs matter much more than undergraduate programs, and that I should go to a big state school for undergrad because I needed the social acculturation that happens at those kinds of places. They agreed with me, or at least let me have my way, because that new kind of algae made them think I was smarter than they were. 

I’m not as smart as everybody thinks I am. When I tell people that I’m not as smart as they think I am, they think I’m being modest. I keep expecting to wake up one day and know that I’m that smart and be comfortable with it, and be able to think my way through any problem and come to the right conclusion every time, like there’s a door locked in my mind and if I could unlock it, everything would be fine, and I would be a modern-day Mozart. I’ll never be Mozart, though. I played the baritone tuba in junior high band, and faked my way through it. I never even learned how to key or read the music. I just pretended. I wonder if Stephen Hawking tells people that he’s not as smart as people think he is. 

According to Hawking, all this certainty is going to be bad for us. We spent the first few billion years of our collective existence scrabbling through a random universe full of uncertainty, pain, suffering, and unpredictability. Hawking thought that if you put a little bit of order in the chaotic soup of human existence, then the order will crystallize and spread itself throughout the whole human experience. Life will either get very boring or very interesting, in the Chinese sense. There’s some debate about what this would look like, because nothing like it has ever happened. Some people think Hawking is wrong and that a little bit of order in a whole lot of chaos is no more effective than an ice cube dropped in a lava flow. Others believe that it’s going to be the social equivalent of metal fatigue, simultaneous across the whole planet. Civilization will shatter like an icicle. Too much order is worse than too much chaos. We evolved in chaos. We survived chaos. Life thrives in chaos.