Murder of Crows (Book One of The Icarus Trilogy) (36 page)

“I guess that’s the lesson, then,” Jenkins said before turning to look off in the distance.  Carver knew there was something else, but he didn’t know what he was looking for, so he let it go.  The kid would speak when he was ready.

They sat there for a time and Carver tried to figure out what they were going to do.  There were more Krakens out there, for certain, but the old man didn’t really want to meet them.  He was done with death for the day and he could tell that the young soldier was in the same boat.  Carver decided they wouldn’t move unless the young soldier wanted to.  They could just stay there for the rest of the game.  It wasn’t long after he made that decision that it became obsolete.  Carver heard the klaxon blaring from within his helmet and saw the text rolling through his visor display.

“Round over.  The Krakens win.  Repeat, the Krakens win.  Make your way to your respective rendezvous points and return to your base.”  Carver sighed at the message, looked at the boy in front of him and saw the despair flickering behind his eyes.  The boy would speak soon; the old man knew it.  Carver watched as the young soldier stood up and looked down at the veteran.  Carver rose to his feet as well and scanned the horizon for the rendezvous point.  It was half a klick off to the north. 
At least it’s not too far
, he thought.

“It’s off that way,” Carver said as he nodded towards the landing zone.  Jenkins shrugged and started to walk.  Carver grunted to get the boy’s attention.  The young soldier turned and raised an eyebrow at the veteran before Carver pointed his rifle at the discarded helmet.

“I don’t want to wear that right now.”  Carver narrowed his eyes and sighed.

“At least pick it up.  They’re gonna charge you for it if you don’t bring it back.”  Jenkins gave a disgusted sigh, but stooped down and picked up the piece of equipment.  Carver watched as the boy turned towards the landing zone and walked off. 

Carver knew the boy would talk soon, but he was afraid of what he would say.

-

Jenkins could still feel echoes of the pain he had experienced in his escape, but they were much more manageable, now.  He walked vaguely to the landing zone for a while before he realized without the helmet he couldn’t tell where it would be.  The young Crow let Carver take the lead and wandered behind.  He was only somewhat paying attention to the landscape in front of him.  Jenkins had lived through the game but it didn’t feel like a victory.  Norris had died there and it had meant nothing.  All of those enemy soldiers had died and it felt like it was for no reason.  There just didn’t seem to be a point to it all.

They walked along the path for a few minutes before Jenkins broke out of his daze.  He didn’t notice how familiar it all was until he looked around.  He definitely felt like he had been there before, but as before he tried to argue it away.  The whole planet looked the same.  It was all twisted metal and trash and broken buildings; there were no real landmarks.  But yet this patch of ruined asteroid seemed to call back to an earlier time.  Now that he had noticed, it became difficult to push the thought away.

The young Crow noticed the corpse as they were nearing the transport.  He could see the rest of the Crows piling into the loading bay, but only in his periphery.  For some reason the corpse in front of him was drawing his interest.  It was face up and had its hands placed on its stomach.  It seemed so eerily familiar and Jenkins couldn’t look away.  Carver passed by the dead body without a second glance; he had seen countless corpses like that.  It didn’t matter if the bullets had stopped flying; he didn’t have the time or energy to waste on honoring each dead body.

Jenkins walked up to the corpse and looked at the body.  It had been there for weeks.  Dust and grime covered every inch of the thing; it was impossible to see the original colors of the armor like that.  The young Crow knelt down and put his hand on the body’s shoulder.  He wiped away the dirt only to find a red crow emblazoned across the upper arm. 

This used to be one of them. 

Suddenly the world disappeared around Jenkins.  The transport didn’t exist.  Carver was a distant memory.  The only thing that mattered was the dead body in front of him.

He looked the corpse over again and wondered who was inside.  There were no name tags on the pieces of armor.  The only way he was going to figure it out was to take off the helmet.  He was nervous.  He knew that the soldier inside was most likely rotten and wouldn’t look anything like it did when it was alive, but he had to know.  Jenkins had to at least see the person inside; he couldn’t control his curiosity.

He reached his hand towards the man’s neck and flicked at the clasps to the helmet.  It took some force since it had been closed for so long, but eventually the clasps loosened.  Jenkins took hold of the helmet and breathed in deeply; he was anxious and he didn’t really know why.  Whoever this had been had been resurrected already and Jenkins had probably talked to him.  But he couldn’t shake the feeling that this one was special.

The young Crow lifted the helmet and found the man’s head to be a little worse-for-wear, but it was still completely recognizable.  It had been untouched by the fight itself and the helmet had kept the man’s head in decent condition.  Jenkins had no problem figuring out who it had been.

He looked down at the man’s face and knew it was his own.  He reached out and touched the man’s face with his right hand.  It was soft and mushy to the touch; it was decaying, after all.  At the same time he lifted his left hand to his own face and felt the rigid bones and elastic skin.  They weren’t so different.  He felt at the man’s lips and looked at the corpse’s teeth.  He ran his tongue around his own teeth and knew they were the same.  He felt the man’s nose.  It was the same as it had always been, but when he reached to touch his own nose it was different.  It was broken and still hurt to the touch. 

With that one jarring pain, Jenkins realized that they were different.  This wasn’t him in the past; this was someone else.  He was exactly the same but he was different at the same time.  This corpse looked exactly like him but he was dead on the ground; Jenkins was up and living.  The young Crow was still breathing, even if every breath was painful.  Jenkins looked at the body and couldn’t reconcile the differences.  This man may have looked like him when he was alive, but he was not the same Jenkins.  The man standing there was Jenkins; that man lying on the ground was not.

And that’s when it hit him.  That man had been more Jenkins than he was right then.  That man lying dead on the ground was the first one on the planet.  It may not have been the first Jenkins, but he was so much closer to the original.  The man that was standing looking at his corpse was not the real Jenkins.  He was someone entirely different. 
He
was the copy. 
He
was the clone.

The young Crow was the different person; he was the “someone else.”  He held that man’s memories inside him just like all the other iterations.  The man who was called Jenkins realized that he wasn’t just the copy of one man; he was the replication of five separate men.  They were all genetically identical, and they had the same personality, but they were different men.  The man who was called Ryan Jenkins realized that he, that
he
had only been alive for two days now.  He had not lived twenty-four years on Earth.  He hadn’t been on Eris for almost two months.  He was just a clone with another man’s memories.  When he died, he wasn’t going to get a new nose.  He wasn’t going to be able to sleep better and fight with Norris in the training yard.  He was just going to die.  Another man was going to rise in his place.

It was too much for Jenkins to handle.  His entire existence fell down around him as he stood over the corpse of that first clone.  The young Crow was having difficulty standing and his eyes were wide.  He was holding the side of his head and everything was spinning.  He didn’t know how he could exist with this information.  In technical terms he was just a newborn.  And the thing was he was going to die.  He wasn’t going to get off planet.  Even if the entity known as “Jenkins” could somehow muster up enough funds to get off the damned asteroid, this clone would not.  This man who had only been alive for two days was going to die.  He had a death sentence over his head.  It was enough to shock the tears out of his eyes.

Carver was almost to the transport when he realized there were no footsteps behind him.  He turned to see Jenkins leaning over the dead body and wondered what the boy was thinking.  He had watched things unfold and when he saw the young soldier backing away from the corpse he knew something was wrong.  He had started walking, but after a few paces he realized the urgency of what was happening and broke into a light jog.  After a few paces of that he realized it wasn’t enough and started to sprint to the boy.  Something was definitely wrong here.  Jenkins had been on the asteroid long enough to see a dead body.  This was a special occasion. 

The boy was still holding his head when Carver arrived at the dead body.  It only took a second, but soon Carver realized what the boy had seen.  His heart filled with dread as he saw the abandoned corpse of the first Jenkins.

“Oh, no.  Ryan, look at me.”  Carver was desperate, now.  Whatever crisis Jenkins had been going through was nothing if not multiplied by this new event.  He knew that.  This was something that no soldier was ever meant to see and Jenkins was already in a malleable position.  “Ryan, look at me.”

Jenkins looked over to the veteran but still held his hand near the side of his head.  He needed the support that the contact gave him.  His world was falling around him and he needed that concrete touch.  Carver unclasped his helmet and threw it away.  He wasn’t going to talk the boy down with that face mask in between them.

“Ryan, listen.  That’s not you.  That’s just a corpse.  You are you.  This doesn’t make you any less of a person.  That’s just the game, Ryan.  We all know this.  You can move past this.  You can forget about it.  You can get through this.”  Carver wanted to say the right words.  He wanted to talk the boy back from the edge of insanity.  He didn’t want the boy to fall apart like this.  Not like Washington.  Jenkins let his hand fall to his side and regained his full height.  For a moment Carver thought he had succeeded and breathed out a sigh of relief.  It was far too early for that.

“I don’t want to forget it, Carver.  This is part of the game, right?  I have to know this.  That,” the young soldier said as he pointed at the corpse with his rifle, “is not me.  I get that.”  Carver was wary about the boy’s behavior.  He knew something was about to happen.  The boy was finally ready to talk.

“Just like I am not him.  I am not the man before me who died blowing himself up on a mech.  I am not the man who died in the clinic because our owners didn’t want to wait for him to heal.  I’m not even the man who died by your side in sudden death,” he said before tears started to fill his eyes.  He laughed weakly and continued.

“Just like I’m not the boy who grew up on the streets of New Chicago.  I’m not the guy whose friends gave him up to the cops.  I’m not the guy who sold himself and all his clones into slavery,” he said before turning around and pacing around the corpse.

“But the thing is he’s dead.  He died on Earth.  I’ve never met him, but I know everything about him.  And I do mean everything.  I know his entire life.  And though I’ve only been alive for a couple days I even have a few months-worth of memories from a few other guys who lived here.  Who died here.”  Carver was shocked at the man’s words.  He knew this kind of talk.  He’d only heard it once before, but that was a long time ago.  He cleared his throat and was about to interrupt, but Jenkins whipped around and waved his gun towards the old man.

“No, Carver, I’m talking.  I’m going to just go ahead and do that.  See, that’s not even the big problem.  I’m alive right now and that’s something to be thankful for, I guess.  All things considered I had a good time with Norris, today, before he killed himself in a blaze of glory.  You know what he told me?”  Carver looked at the deranged soldier and kept his mouth shut.  This speech wasn’t for him; it was for the man saying it.

“He told me to live my life.  He said we shouldn’t worry about our next death or how it was going to happen.  There’s power in that.  We can live our lives even when we’re trapped down here.  We can enjoy ourselves and skip to our heart’s content.”  Jenkins turned around and looked at the corpse on the ground.  He scratched his nose with his right hand and looked back at the veteran.

“But that’s the thing, old man.  I don’t enjoy this.  I’ve only been alive two days and I’ve experienced more pain than some have in their whole lives.  My nose was completely destroyed and I’ve had to fight for my life.  I had to watch a good man die just because he broke his ankle.  This life is misery.  Why would I want to stay like this?  Why would I want to wait for the death sentence to finally come?  I’ve only been alive two days and I know this is hell.”  Carver knew what the man was thinking; what he had already decided.  The old Crow knew how this would end and he knew he had no right words to change the outcome; he didn’t have them last time.  Jenkins was looking at the corpse again and did nothing to stop the tears streaming down his face.

“You know what they say about freedom, Carver?”   Carver kept quiet.  He knew the boy already had his answer.

“It’s choosing your way to die.  And this… this is my choice,” Jenkins said before grabbing his sidearm with his right hand and bringing it up under his chin.  He breathed out deeply and closed his eyes.  He was done with this world.

Jenkins pulled the trigger and the world vanished for him. 

Carver watched as the new corpse fell on top of the old and couldn’t help the tears springing from his own eyes.  He had hoped this would never happen again.  He was surprised at himself for crying; it had been four years, but he reveled in it.  He had denied himself this kind of emotion for far too long.  He walked over to Jenkins’ body and rolled it off of the old corpse.  Blood was leaking from under the man’s chin and from the top of his head, but Carver ignored it.  He laid the corpse out just like the other and folded the man’s hands above his midsection.