“Boys are in a good mood, I think.” The man’s left eye
had gone almost white, its pupil more of a milky gray, and above and below it a long scar ran from the edge of his hair to his chin. The other side was worse. His good eye stared out from a pocket, around which the skin had melted into scar tissue so it looked as though someone had dropped a black marble into molten plastic, allowing the stuff to congeal around it. I let him work. The way he spoke, softly, and a glint from his good eye conveyed a sense of caring and suggested that he had found his vocation—that being a doctor was perfect for someone like him. Because he was so gentle.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“To me?” He wore a combat suit, the bulk of which made it hard to fit in the narrow space between bunk rows, forcing him to shift. “My face, you mean. Plasma. Now let’s have a look at those legs. Do they hurt?”
“When I move them.”
He lifted the blanket and spent a minute examining me, lowering the blanket softly once he’d finished. “They’re bad. Not as bad as some I’ve seen but we’ll have to get there quickly to save them.”
“Where?”
“Zeya,” he said. The boys who had been talking quietly hushed when they heard the name.
“Zeya?” one asked. He said something in Russian then and the doctor glared, silencing him with one look from that eye.
“Zeya.”
I shook my head, confused. “Where is Zeya, and what do you mean, ‘save them’? You can’t save my legs, they’re spoiling along with the rest of me.”
The doctor didn’t respond as he pulled out a box and
opened it; the Russian medical kits were similar to ours, and I watched as a droplet of gray microbots disappeared into my arm to check blood pressure and take other readings, sending the data back to his suit.
“Zeya is where we take some of your kind, and we can save you, since it looks like you are an early model. Americans. Always the first, and look at you; you’re beautiful, almost perfect, and they overlook one basic feature.”
“I
am
perfect,” I said, “better than
you
. They call me the Little Murderer.”
“Ha!” He turned and spoke in Russian to the others, and the room erupted with laughter. The doctor must have seen my face because he raised both hands to surrender. “No, no, you misunderstand. They laugh because they like the name. In Russian, you are Malenkiy Ubitza; it’s a good name for a genetic soldier.”
“Then how am I not perfect?”
“You are as perfect as they could make you. Like my boys. But the early American models lack one important thing and I do not blame them, your creators, for their lack of foresight. I mean look what they accomplished anyway. Manufacturing a human being is no easy feat; one mistimed gene activation here and a minor mistake there, and boom, your liver grows too soon, too late, or worse, it grows right out of your forehead. No, your scientists, they did OK. The only thing they got wrong were the security features, which depend on your immune system failing at exactly the right time, when it stops telling the difference between foreign matter and your own tissue. You are a ticking immuno-bomb. That is why your flesh is dying. To add insult to injury, your immune system
already destroyed the very thing that makes you fearless, perfect: your ability to block pain.”
“I know,” he went on, pulling the blanket up to my neck, “it sounds like there is no mistake but think; they didn’t take away your chromosomal repair genes. Every one of us normal humans has a set of genes whose job it is to identify and locate material that has, well… malfunctioned. So that the body can produce materials to repair the damage. A long time ago we figured out that a little dose of radiation activates these genes and the good news is that someone forgot this when they designed you. So, boom. A little radiation, and your genes kick in and there you go, most everything back to normal. Your parents never accepted the fact that there is such a thing as a
healthy
dose of radiation, and that was their mistake, one that will save you—one that has already saved many of your kind.”
“
Most
everything?” I asked.
“Your mind is what it is, there’s nothing we can do for it except give you psycho-active drugs at Zeya. And your body, well, you’ll never be as good as you
were
, Ubitza, never the same. I’m sorry. But we have a surprise, one that will take your mind off things.” He clapped his hands and the boys stared, hanging on every Russian word he spoke, before the doctor turned back to pat my shoulder. “I can’t stay for this. It’s too grotesque, even for someone as ugly as me, but you’ll be fine in Zeya. Trust an old doctor.”
As soon as he left I closed my eyes again.
The anger forced tears, which rolled down the side of my face and onto the pillow. It wasn’t a surprise; what the doctor had told me I already suspected, even knew, but his confirmation made me realize that I didn’t just hate
humans, I hated myself—for having been made. Perfection had never existed and it was true that my genes were flawed, that now I was worse than a nonbred; I was a defective who felt pain and shame, and death was once a welcome destination but now my fear of it intensified to a point where it forced me to grip the blankets as hard as I could, trying my best to ignore the fact that Megan was really gone, but worse, that maybe I
didn’t
want to join her. Hallucinations would come next. With no tranq tabs, time began to slip first as if gravity in the railcar had ceased to exist and once the sensation solidified to the point where I no longer heard the boys, one last thought occurred to me.
God had betrayed us both. Me and Megan.
“God doesn’t exist,” said our Special Forces advisor. Megan and the rest of us had been dropped into Mashhad to cover the highway north and prevent Iranian guerillas from infiltrating the city, where behind us, engineers had begun their work on widening the roads, preparing the way for a main advance into far-eastern Turkmenistan. They worked in the open, exposed, we as their only protection. The group of us had been flown in, in pairs, by carrier auto-drones that landed us along the road, which doubled as a runway so the aircraft could offload before self-destructing once we’d cleared. After the last one detonated, the night went still. It was summer and even without the sun, heat radiated from the road’s surface and gave the asphalt a gentle glow on thermal sensors so that it appeared to be magic, a white ribbon that stretched out forever; you wondered what lay at the end of the road,
maybe some forgotten place with plenty of targets, untouched and pristine, so that I had to fight the urge to stand up and run toward them. As if reading my mind, Megan put her hand on my shoulder, pulling me back to reality. A hundred of us lay invisible in the sand on either side of the highway, forming a wide L-shaped ambush, where Megan and I rested at the corner, looking straight down the road.
How could he say that God didn’t exist? He is here, around us, and on the highway
.
“That’s blasphemy,” Megan said to him.
“Seriously. You chicks wouldn’t know any better, but he’s a myth. Doesn’t exist.”
“What are our orders?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. That early in the war, orders were still transmitted to our handlers first and then disseminated to our unit, until someone later realized that if the special advisor got hit—before telling us what to do—we would take the initiative.
He cleared his throat. “An insurgent unit regrouped in Chenaran and will hit our engineers from the north tonight, to slow our advance over the Turkmeni border. Our sources say they’ll be driving white electro-plus vans.”
“Electro-plus?” I asked.
“Just shoot at any vans that come down the road. But don’t shoot until I do.”
While Megan relayed the orders to everyone the curiosity became too great to ignore and I whispered to him. “How do you know they’re regrouping? Where does this information come from, and who fights in vans? Surely they know they’ll die.”
“Baby, you don’t know these guys. Nut jobs. But brave
ones, they believe in God, just as much as you do and if you were to ask any one of them who had God on their side, they’d tell you it was them—and they’d be sure of it. They’re just as sure of him as you are. And you don’t need to know how I know they’re regrouping. I just do.”
The wind picked up and a weather alert crawled across our heads-up, warning of a dust storm that would arrive within ten minutes. We made sure our pouches were shut, covered anything that we didn’t want filled with sand, and waited, my mind going into high gear. The storm was a sign. It could only help the insurgents since it meant that our thermal and night vision would be as useless as normal sight, and the only warning we’d get would be from the sound of their engines since we’d be unable to see the vehicles until they had drawn alongside our position. But back then I was fearless. Whatever uncertainty had begun to bud did so deep inside, too small to even make itself felt because it lay buried under hatred, a foundation of knowing that killing was my life and that it had been too long since the last engagement, the boredom in between almost too much to handle. I
wanted
a fight.
Hours crawled by. By three a.m. my position had filled with so much sand that I must have looked like a dune among dunes, the road was a river of sand with curtains that blew across to pile up on either side, and the drifts threatened to block the passage of anything, which only made me angrier. I prayed they would come soon. If the road filled with too much sand the mission would be called off and we’d be forced to walk south to the city, at least a three-kilometer march through loose grit with nothing to show for our efforts.
And the storm blinded us, filling our intake vents so
that we had to clear them regularly or risk asphyxiation while ignoring gusts that made the particles hiss when they struck my ceramic helmet; after a while the noise formed nonsensical sentences like,
death sleeves seem selfless
. The sand triggered an irrational feeling of thirst, so that before long I had worked through half my ration of water packets, each mouthful containing tiny granules. Sand crunched between my teeth as if taunting me that no matter the precautions, no matter how fast I opened the packets and inserted the tube, there weren’t any measures that could keep the stuff out. This land belonged to the sand. It wasn’t long before my dedication eroded under the onslaught, my determination to fight shifting slowly into a desire for it to end, for the monotony to cease and the sand to leave us or die for just a moment so that I could see more than a foot away.
I was about to shout in frustration when they came. Our forward-most position reported lights and my thoughts went still as calmness took hold, rooted in the knowledge that soon we’d be free.
“Hold your fire,” our advisor whispered over the headset.
We saw the first set of yellow headlights as a large van navigated slowly through the dunes, silently. Its electric engine made almost no noise. The vehicle passed our first position and had almost reached us when Megan moved beside me.
“We should fire,” she said.
“I can’t make out their color; we have to make sure they’re white. Hold your fire.”
A second vehicle appeared in the distance, the first one almost past us now.
“I’m going to open fire,” said Megan.
“Hold your fire,” our advisor insisted. “Or so help me—”
But Megan had already relayed the order. Instantly the first van blew into pieces when three grenades impacted on its side, forcing jets of hot gas into the interior; its doors whizzed overhead and I smiled, pulling the trigger at dark shapes that leaped from the wreckage, humans trying to escape in our direction. The second van stopped and began to reverse, but someone had snuck into the road and placed a mine so that the van jumped into the air and flipped, landing upside down on a drift. A group of grenadiers targeted it then, blowing holes in the side and turning the vehicle into a blackened pile within seconds. All night it went on. The storm’s intensity prevented the convoy members from seeing what had happened to their vehicles in the front, and one by one they crept toward our position without knowing what waited for them. Soon the road became impassable. Wrecked vans collected to form a kind of dam and we shifted our position northward, not bothering with stealth because whoever occupied the vehicles seemed incapable of resistance, and we wanted to get into position before the next one saw us and reversed. And then it started again.
By the time morning had arrived, the storm lifted and we saw the results. A mixture of sand piles and wreckage stretched out for over a kilometer, winding through the dunes, which hundreds of bodies decorated in daylight so their clothes looked like scraps of colorful paper that flapped in the breeze. Our advisor jumped from our hole. He ran from body to body, checking each one and then looked inside the vehicles that hadn’t been completely destroyed by our ambush. After an hour he returned and slid into the sand, popping his helmet.
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Megan said.
“Yep. You just took out half of the Red Crescent volunteers operating in this area.”
“That is their name?” I asked. “The insurgent group’s?”
“No, you stupid sack.” He threw his helmet at me, and the thing slammed into my faceplate, knocking my head back so that I almost shot him in anger. “They’re freakin’
aid workers
. Do you know what those are? Aid workers? Nurses, doctors, people who go through war zones and take care of wounded civilians?”