Murder of Crows (Book One of The Icarus Trilogy) (32 page)

“You wa me to do anyding?”  Norris laughed awkwardly and motioned to Jenkins’ right glove.

“You might want to bite down on that, mate.  It’s gonna be a bit hard to deal with.”  Jenkins looked down and undid the strap around the glove.  He slid the glove in between his teeth and made sure not to breathe through his nose.  Norris put his hands close to the broken appendage and bit his lip.

“Don’t hate me too much, now,” he said before shoving Jenkins’ nose back into place.

It was more pain than Jenkins expected it would be.  He could feel his teeth meeting through the glove in his mouth and all he wanted was for the pain to stop reverberating throughout his skull.  After a few moments of intense pain it lessened until it was just a dull ache.  Jenkins reached up to touch his nose and found it in the right place, give or take a few millimeters.  The young Crow could taste metal in his mouth and turned his head to look at Norris.  The man was scratching his head and looking at him with puppy dog eyes.

“Did I mention I was sorry?” the jester asked before giving a nervous smile.  Jenkins shook his head and looked at the ground painted red by his own blood.  He shrugged and looked back at the Englishman.  In another time he might have wanted to kill the man, but it just didn’t matter anymore.  He’d already experienced much worse; he would continue to experience much worse.

“I dink… I think I’ll just stick with stargazing from now on, Norris,” Jenkins said before spitting blood at the ground.  Norris laughed and stood up.  He realized he was free from any sort of guilt.

“That’s more than fair, rookie.  I might have done the same back when I was a new recruit.  But hey, if you ever want to trade blows again, just let me know,” he said before launching into more shadow boxing antics.  Jenkins thought about laughing, but didn’t want the pain to echo through his skull again.

“Sure, I’ll do that.”

-

Jenkins couldn’t sleep like this; he had already spent an hour tossing and turning.  The young Crow didn’t want to put any pressure on his nose but he had never been able to sleep in any position other than on his side.  The breathing situation wasn’t helping, either.  Jenkins had blown his nose earlier to get out the clot but his nostrils were still plugged up with a mixture of mucus and blood.  He had given up trying to keep it clear and just let the whole area throb.  Roberts had let him grab one of his pills and that was helping, but he could still feel the dull pain bouncing around in his head.

The young Crow sat up on his bed and turned to put his feet on the ground.  He stared at the empty wall in front of him and recalled his conversation with Feldman a week before.  Jenkins wasn’t proud of himself and he wished he hadn’t unloaded on the man like that.  He wondered if the giant would ever allow himself to open up like that again.  Jenkins feared that he’d ruined their friendship with one little expression of despair.

He stood up and started to pace around the room.  It felt pointless to sit on the bed like that.  The young Crow walked over to his desk and contemplated sitting down and writing something, but quickly realized that he had no one to write to and nothing to write.  No one would read it and it wasn’t exactly like Jenkins needed to express himself.  It was a useless act for the soldier and he put it out of his mind.

Jenkins walked over to the window and looked at the ruined expanse in front of him.  It would be dark out there but for the light bouncing around between the asteroids.  It was a strange effect and once again he could see the ruined moon coming up over the horizon in front of him.  Somehow he had spent the entire night in his pain without realizing it.

The young Crow could see the shattered pieces floating around in front of the white sphere and wondered what would happen if just one of them lost its orbit and floated down to Earth.  Jenkins wondered how the people would react if another shard of the rock fell down and destroyed a hundred square kilometers, just like so many places during the Moonfall.  He wondered what the residents of Old Chicago had felt as the massive pieces of rock descended on their city.  That thought let his mind drift to his old life in New Chicago.

Jenkins realized that he didn’t miss it anymore.  He hadn’t for a long time, now, but he couldn’t quite remember when that changed.  When he had first died?  The young Crow tried to remember how he had felt after that first painful resurrection and it all seemed to escape him.  He figured that it was too early for him to lose emotions like that anyway and looked further on in his timeline.  Jenkins started looking back through all of his wasted days on the asteroid and searched for when he stopped grieving for his old life.

The young Crow couldn’t find that point in time and it was making him anxious.  He could remember feeling during different points, but his memories didn’t evoke the same kind of reaction that they did at the time.  He didn’t react like he would have in those situations.  It all seemed so far away and artificial when he thought back.  They didn’t seem like his feelings or his memories; it was as if it all happened to someone else.

Jenkins realized that it had.  He might have the memories, but this body was a stranger to all of those events that happened in those past lives.  He had real recollection of the events, but they didn’t trigger or evoke anything in him.  Just like his habit of pinching the bridge of his nose or the scars that he had acquired on Earth, all the remnants of his old life had fallen away.  He just had access to those events in time from a particular perspective.  Those men were genetically identical, but Jenkins didn’t feel like he was really there.  Now he had their memories but lacked the ability to interpret them correctly. 

He breathed out and thought about this new development.  The young Crow realized that he just remembered New Chicago; he had never missed it.  The only one who would have missed it died back on Earth.  He had never
left
New Chicago.  Ryan Jenkins was the one who had grown up on those dirty, dingy streets and had been sold out by his friends.  Ryan Jenkins was the one who had agreed to pay back his debts to society by fighting in an endless game of war.  Ryan Jenkins was the one who was going to miss his home town but he had never had the chance to leave it.  Ryan Jenkins had died there in a medical center after they had mapped his genetic code and his brain.  Ryan Jenkins was in the ground.

The man in the moonlit room looked at his reflection in the window.  Ryan Jenkins was looking right back at him.  Nothing had changed.  He still looked like the same person except for the broken nose.  The man looking at the glass knew Ryan Jenkins backwards and forwards. 

He just didn’t know if
he
was Ryan Jenkins.

-

The young Crow pondered his existence until the morning hours and the only thing that brought him out of his daze was the blaring of the morning alarm.  He realized that he would need to eat even if most of the food would be flavored with the blood still clotting in his nose.  Jenkins threw on some fatigues and headed towards the mess hall.

He was greeted by the all-too-familiar sight of his comrades half-heartedly shoveling food into their mouths.  Jenkins had never really had that great of an appetite and this new crisis of identity had eradicated what was left of it.  He knew that he would be sluggish during the match if he didn’t eat, especially since he hadn’t slept that night, so he went through the motions and threw random food onto his tray.  Mystery meat held little interest when compared to questioning the veracity of his existence.  The young Crow walked over to the benches and sat down where there were no other soldiers; he did not want to talk to anyone while he was trying to figure these things out.

It wasn’t long before he was joined by Norris.  The Englishman had stopped his storytelling with a pair of the newer soldiers and had quickly moved his tray to the place-setting opposite Jenkins.  The jester seemed reticent to begin the conversation, but Jenkins could tell from the man’s anxious squirming that he really wanted to say something, so the young Crow pushed his tray forward and set his elbow down on the table so that he could support his head.

“Good morning, Norris.  How are you?”  Norris laughed awkwardly and then waved a finger to point around his face.

“I’m good, how’s the nose?”  Jenkins gave him a half-hearted smile and sighed.  He felt the pressure in his nose and made a mental note not to sigh until he had a new body.

“It’s wrecked, but don’t feel bad about it.  It’s a temporary thing, after all,” Jenkins said as Norris nodded and grabbed a biscuit off his tray.  He started tearing at it before opening a package of jelly and plopping it on the largest half.

“Maybe not-so-temporary.  Did you see who you’re paired with for today’s match?”  Jenkins lazily looked at the man as he prepared his biscuit.  After his existential crisis last night the young Crow had not even considered looking at the pairings for the match.  He lifted his head off of his hand and started poking at his potatoes with his fork before shaking his head.

“I haven’t gotten a chance.  Anybody special?”  He already knew the answer.  Norris wouldn’t have come over just to check on Jenkins’ ruined nose.

“I should say so,” Norris said before laughing and popping the biscuit into his mouth.  “You get to be my spotter, buddy boy.  It’s an easy job.  You find ‘em and I pop their heads off.”  Norris smiled at his tray before grabbing his spoon and digging it into his yogurt.  Jenkins raised an eyebrow at the man’s words and put it down to normal behavior.  He’d heard the soldier say much worse.

“If I remember correctly you haven’t been doing so well in the games lately, and neither have your spotters.  I recall a few rockets and grenades blowing up around you.”  Norris stopped lifting his spoonful of yogurt about halfway up to his mouth and gaped at the newly-ugly soldier.  Then he laughed and placed the spoon in his mouth.

“You’re a cheeky one.  Explosion’s not the worst way to go in these games, you know.  It hurts like hell but only a second before the force does that funny little thing where you explode everywhere.  Much better than bleeding out, I always say.”  He let his spoon-hand fall to the table and gave Jenkins an encouraging smile.

“C’mon, you should be happy.  I’m not all sad and depressing like those blokes you always hang around.  It’ll be a nice breath of fresh air for you.  Just make sure to breathe through your mouth,” he said before laughing and looking down at his tray.  Jenkins stopped paying attention and though the jester started heading into some story of past battles the younger soldier couldn’t hear him.  He was more focused on his own experiences, or perhaps lack thereof.  He wanted to know how much of himself was truly him.  He decided that as long as he felt it or he could taste or touch or see it then it was part of his life. 

And when he thought about it that made the jester in front of him part of his life.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was enough to lift Jenkins out of the murk of his identity crisis.  No matter what realizations he came to about his memories from his past lives, he could still identify the life in front of him.  It was his and he could experience that.  For now it was enough.  He looked around the room while Norris continued to prattle on and saw that most of the soldiers were dead quiet.  None of them talked very much on the game days.  They kept to themselves and prepared for their dance with death. 

He could see Abrams eating her muffin with a quiet resolve before he panned around and saw Cortes just looking at his food.  The soldier never ate much, but Jenkins realized now that the sorrowful Crow wasn’t eating; he was just pretending.  Jenkins wondered for a moment how long that had been going on, but then he was distracted by Warner and how he was viciously cutting into his breakfast meat with a desperate ferocity.  It was enough to make the young Crow laugh at the man’s foolish antics. 

Jenkins turned his head and saw Goldstein alone at his table.  The merchant seemed like he didn’t have a care in the world.  It didn’t even look like the middle-aged man had died recently; Goldstein had a decent amount of hair.  Jenkins chewed absent-mindedly as he watched the merchant take his time and eat his French toast.  It seemed like so long ago that he had fought and died with these people eating their breakfast. 

The young Crow lost interest in the merchant and turned to see Roberts sitting across from Templeton.  The boy soldier was acting like he always did.  If Jenkins hadn’t seen it for himself he would never have believed that the young soldier was living in constant pain; enough pain to think that death was a better option.  Jenkins watched as the boy soldier ate and winced slightly with each movement.  The newborn soldier grunted as he wondered if Hawkins ever felt guilty about his actions, but decided that the monster in a lab coat had better things to think about.  It was just another tragedy on this rotten asteroid.

Jenkins was about to look back down at his tray and convince himself to eat, but before he could he found someone staring back at him.  This wasn’t some vague glance or mistaken eye contact; the man’s blue eyes were determined and pierced through Jenkins’ soul like it was butter.  Jenkins knew that the old Crow understood.  It wasn’t so much of a stretch, considering how similar they really were.

Jenkins looked back to his tray but couldn’t get the image out of his brain.  From within his own mind Carver’s eyes were staring at him.  Even when he left the mess hall he could still feel the old man’s gaze burning through him. 

The young Crow wondered how much the old man knew.

-

Jenkins stood up after the impact and looked around his surroundings.  If not for the overly generic appearance of every landing zone he would have sworn he’d been on this patch of the asteroid before.  The young Crow heard a thud and a rustling behind him and walked over to the new arrival;   Norris had landed gracefully and rolled out the rest of his momentum.  As he stood up he patted down his armor and coughed a bit.

“Always kicks up a storm, doesn’t it?”  Jenkins knew an answer wasn’t expected from him, so he didn’t bother to provide one.  He nodded off to the east and shrugged.