"Let me take the shot, sir!" Avery called.
"Shoot him! Shoot him!" Dyson bellowed, his face smothered in the smegmatic furrow between Holroyd's mammoth tits. His right-hand talons burrowed deeper, hit something that resisted, then popped and sucked his fist in after it. The air went out of 'Royd's firebell scream, and foamy lung-blood sluiced Dyson's good eye.
In less time than it takes to tell, Avery darted in the doorway and flanked 'Royd, scaled him and blew the base of his skull out with the Light 50. From point blank range, the enormous bullet should have gone through 'Royd and Dyson and into the ground, but it only cratered the fat-armored neck. 'Royd's arms stretched back to try to pick him off, but the One-One ducked them easily and shot, again and again, into the padded pipeline of 'Royd's spine.
Dyson's feet raked the floor, piling up floor planks and only marginally slowing their advance. He kicked up into the underside of 'Royd's belly and pistoned his taloned feet into the ocean of guts underneath. His efforts were rewarded when the abdominal sheath of muscle gave way and intestines burst out of their envelope like snakes out of the world's largest tin of novelty nuts. 'Royd staggered, but regrouped and smashed into the log wall of the shed.
Dyson, naturally, hit the wall first. Logs groaned and fractured, but the concrete mortar between them held, and Dyson's spine gave. His legs went wild for a split-second, then numb. His ribcage sundered and razored his lungs and sweetmeats. Blind, paralyzed, pinned on 'Royd's ruined torso by his overgrown talons, Dyson bit into the folds of fat swaddled over his face. Teeth met and he spat and bit again, determined to eat his way to 'Royd's colossal heart.
'Royd backed up, hit the wall again. The whole cabin swooned on its foundation. Dyson, a bug on the windshield, dead from the neck-down, kept eating. Avery, dug in like a tick on 'Royd's back, kept shooting. They hit the wall again. Logs exploded. The roof sagged. The entire front wall split and sprayed out, logs tumbling down the snowfield as 'Royd thundered out into the daylight.
'Royd peeled Dyson off and tossed him aside. He hit the ground chest first, limbs flapping like broken umbrellas as he rolled to a stop against the dining hall. His popped-out eye sucked back into his socket to let him see Holroyd stampeding across the compound, a runaway juggernaut tripping over its own intestines, Avery riding him like Pecos Bill and emptying his clip into his neck. 'Royd's fire-siren shriek faded on the wind.
Dyson lay still. The sound of his body rebuilding itself filled his senses. He heard crunching of boots on snow. He tried to roll over, but his left arm only flopped in front of him and something that was not blood squirted out of his shoulder.
"I couldn't stop him, sir. He's gone blood-stupid." Avery leaned over him. "You're hurt pretty bad, sir."
"I'll heal. Everything heals, Tuck."
"I never thought I'd see the day."
"He'll come back, when he's had his fill. We don't need him ghosting up this op, anyway."
Avery eyed 'Royd's entrail-strewn wake, looked back with a wry grimace. "So we go through with it, then?"
"You have doubts, now, too?"
"No, sir. You're the beaver-cleaver, the prime gonzola. But—"
"Out with it, Tuck. While I'm still too fucked up to beat you."
"It's just what you said to fat boy, back there…we're just gonna go back to the jungle?"
"I don't trust Keogh, shithead. I know he'll come for us one day, when there's nothing else left. I'm fucking counting on it."
Avery cocked his head, replaced the clip in his rifle. "I don't follow you, sir."
"I love Dr. Keogh for what he's done for us, but he's not one of us. I love him because he's the only thing on this godforsaken shitball we cannot kill, which makes him the only worthy enemy left. When he releases us from this hitch, we'll go back to the jungle, and we'll prepare for the last great fight of our lives. He'll come for us in our own backyard, and we'll join him in glorious battle, and we will know once and for all whether or not we are gods."
Avery beamed down on him with a scintilla of the naked adoration they had all felt for the Captain, and Dyson was reborn again. "Lord hasten that day, sir."
~20~
The whole thing sucked.
PFC Rich Schumate sat on the aisle seat in the back of a big green bus lumbering a little faster than walking pace up an icy mountain road. Climbing into the cold and the wind, but the higher they got, the darker it seemed to get outside. He could make out few details of the landscape past the hulking form of his sleeping seatmate–black, twisted trees, snowfields and a precipitous drop, and fog like the mountain was packed in cotton. Not that he would have recognized the terrain, but it was unsettling, as if the weather were in cahoots with the government to keep them from finding out where they were going.
Schumate didn't especially like being in the Idaho Army National Guard, but if you wanted to get anywhere at Frandsen's True Value Hardware in Idaho Falls, you enlisted. The boss was the platoon CO, and most maneuvers were like uniformed family camping trips, with bar-be-cue, snowmobile rides and, after Old Man Frandsen went to his tent, beer and buds aplenty. Not this trip. Not even Captain Frandsen knew where they were going, what they would do there, or when they'd be going home. They were rousted out of their Sunday night routines to the armory at dinner-time last night, issued their new MILES damage simulator harnesses and eye-safe laser-fitted M16's, and all the empty berths on the bus were filled with strangers. Except for a pit stop and half-assed briefing at a rest area an hour back, they had been rolling all night and into the day.
Schumate felt a fresh sting of envy for those who begged off successfully when he eyed the replacements across the aisle from him. They didn't look like National Guard, and they didn't look like they liked being here any more than he did. Regular Army observers, Capt. Frandsen explained, sitting in to coordinate their work with the Army unit already in place in the box. They also didn't look like they were going to any plain old maneuver, either. As hard, as scarred, as they were, it did nothing for PFC Schumate's confidence to see how scared they looked.
The clatter of gear in nervous hands filled the rumbling silence in the bus, that and the sporadic bleeping of a handheld video game in the seat behind him. He stole a sidewise glance at the soldiers across the aisle. One of them had his winter coat off, and wore only a flak vest underneath. His skin was olive, his features harsh and exotic, maybe Middle Eastern. He cycled through a seemingly endless supply of clips, slamming them into the breech of his rifle and clearing them. The gun: not an eye-safe laser-fitted M16 like the rest, but a shortened M4A1 with a grenade launcher snug under the unstoppered barrel. The bullets:
real
5.56mm jackets, but the bullets themselves were green, and didn't look like metal. His muscle-bound arms were a maze of tattoos—a harvest of skulls, blossoms on entwined strands of barbed wire. On the forehead of each, a name, a rank, a serial number. More skulls, more names, than Schumate could count before the soldier caught him staring. Skulls blinked at him long and slow, so Schumate could see that even his eyelids were tattooed: GAME OVER, they said. He sprained an eye looking away.
Beside Skulls, a fiftyish Latino man hunched in his buddy's shadow, face turned to the window. His close-cropped hair more silver than black, his hand knurled with scar tissue, clamped over his ear, hiding the tiny headset he whispered into. Nobody was supposed to have personal electronics, but it must be something vital to the maneuver. Nobody was supposed to have real guns, either.
At the rest stop outside Lucile, a flock of trenchcoated FBI agents had confiscated all their cellular phones, portable TV's and CD players, which, they were told, would interfere with the new damage-monitor harnesses they'd be wearing. Hobart only snuck his Gameboy through by hiding it inside his field radio.
They linked up with two other platoons to form a mixed company of what looked to be the hand-picked worst units in the state. But each platoon had with it about a dozen "regular" Army, all of whom stowed their own duffel bags and stood guard around them until they were ready to go, which took about an hour.
Standing at attention in the rest stop parking lot, they were addressed by a gray-haired black officer in unmarked winter camo. This was to be a simulated-fire civil defense exercise, conducted jointly with NTC 00-1, a National Training Center Army exercise involving operations as far south as Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Their provisional company commander, Major Ortman, stood up then and asked them what they were doing there. The officer explained that they were to move to a mountain road at the edge of the Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area and hold the road until further notice. All civilian residents on the mountain had been cleared out in advance, and an Army unit conducting a Direct Action evolution in the area would rendezvous with them and apprise them of the situation.
They fell out to use the toilets, raid the snack and soda machines, and sit on the bus. They were not allowed to call home. Total operational security had to be observed, they were told, as if they were in hostile territory under conditions of war. Who they were supposed to be simulated fighting against, or who was supposed to be simulating spying on them, they were not told.
It was like in the spy movies. They did not Need To Know.
He did not need to know why the one guy had a headset, or why the guy with the skulls on his arms had a real gun with weird green bullets. He did not need to know where they were going, or whether it was really just a maneuver.
The whole thing sucked.
Schumate was not long on thinking. In fact, he was the only employee in the history of Frandsen's True Value Hardware ever to provoke the boss, through acts of sheer, transcendent ineptitude, to utter an honest-togosh profane word. But he tried to put it together. They were going into the middle of nowhere to practice holding a mountain road on the edge of federal land, in a state where even the governor was known for anti-federalist attitude. If this wasn't the beginning of the New World Order crackdown foretold in gun show pamphlets, it was certainly a pretty good simulation.
Then, as usually happened, somebody else said something and Schumate forgot what he was thinking. Corporal Waters, who qualified only by gross default for the role of platoon wit, blurted, "So, regular Army guys, how are we doing so far? Is real war this fucking boring or what?"
"Mind that language, Waters!" Frandsen shouted from the front.
Skulls looked up from his gun. He looked anything but grateful for the interruption. "What did you say, tourist?"
Something passed between Skulls and Waters so fast that no one saw it, but Schumate almost heard the air snap.
Waters buckled, but his irrepressible irritant nature resurfaced, and he held out his hand. "I'm sorry, man, I didn't mean to offend. You guys are the real deal. We just do this shit because we can't afford cable." He looked around to see no one was laughing, only watching him out of the corners of their eyes, as if he were about to be struck by lightning, or turned to salt. His hand flapped in the air, shaking only in part because of the jouncing of the bus. "I'm Corporal Leonard Waters. I'm the A squad leader, but, back home, I manage a Jiffy Lube."
Skulls cracked a smile. Most of his teeth were steel ingots. "No shit, Leonard? You change oil?"
Nervously, Waters just nodded.
"Then we're a lot alike, after all. You see, I kill people. You can see the similarity, can't you? 'Cept, for you, the pay is probably lots better."
"Shut up, Toke," the Latino soldier said in a low but unmistakable officer voice. Skulls shut up, went back to his magazines.
Schumate shrank into himself. He needed somebody to talk to, someone to convince him everything was normal. He elbowed Private Heeley in the ribs: nudged, jabbed and finally licked one finger and stuck it in his buddy's ear. This usually inspired a fierce reflexive backlash, but Heeley only stirred. His big, heavy head came up off the glass and tilted at Schumate, but his eyes were slitted. "We there yet?"
Schumate and Heeley went to the same high school, but didn't know each other until after, when Heeley came back from college with a blown-out knee. He did deliveries at the hardware store, now, and Schumate only knew him to sell speed to and nod at in the bar. But in the Guard, they became fast weekend friends. As the only black guy in the unit, Heeley stuck out less with somebody white to talk to, and nobody else wanted Schumate around, he was such a fuckup.
"Keep your voice down, dude," Schumate whispered. "There's some serious shit going down."
Heeley looked around. His sleepy eyes locked on Skulls and the Latino officer and went wide, then back out the window.
"Dude, wake up. This is serious. They've got live ammo on the bus, and there's real soldiers, dude, they're killers, and…are you alright, dude?"
Heeley did not look alright at all. His black-coffee face was ashen and sweaty, and Schumate could feel waves of heat radiating off him. When they'd stopped, Heeley went to the toilet and was gone for the whole briefing, and only came clomping up to hop on the bus as it was rolling away. Schumate suspected his buddy got stoned, and was half-disapproving, half-jealous, but Heeley had just silently squeezed into the window seat and passed out.
"It's cool, man, it's me, I'm just…sleepy, Rob…"
"Dude, it's Rich. Dude…"
Heeley looked at him. Under half-mast lids, his eyes were opaque red orbs, filled with blood. His arm shot out and caught Schumate by the jaw, muting him and twisting his head back as he tried to jump out of the seat. Heeley drew Schumate close, and nobody was looking, nobody saw or heard.
"When the shit hits the fan, just be what you are, Rich. That's all you can do. You know what you are, don't you?" The voice was not Declan Heeley's voice, and though the unblinking eyes drained of blood, they were not his eyes, either. "You're lucky…"