“We have no need for aid,” said Megan, but the words made his face go red, and the man raised his carbine to point it her.
“You’re a bunch of psychos.”
Megan’s hand blurred and slapped his weapon aside before she jumped, ramming the butt of her carbine into his windpipe.
“And
you
are distressed,” she said. “Something is wrong with you and I relieve you of command.”
“Something is wrong with me? With
me
?”
“The dead are with God,” she continued, “and they have no more worries in this life.”
But by now we had seen the same thing happen with other units, as we sped northward from Bandar Abbas, and we already knew that the nonbred looked on civilians differently so that the thought of Megan killing him seemed excessive. It didn’t feel right. This one had spoken with us as equals, always taking the time to find out how we worked, how we fought, and how we thought, and I didn’t realize that within a few weeks a plasma mine would swallow him for us anyway, because until now we
had been invincible and had not lost a single sister in the long fight north. It seemed like maybe this man would guide us through the world until our end; he was a good one, perhaps sent by Him to show us the way.
So I pulled her rifle away. “Not this one, Megan.”
“Why?”
He coughed when his breath returned, and the man spat blood onto the sand.
“Because he has been chosen. It’s not right.”
Megan yanked her helmet off and nodded.
While we watched, our advisor crawled to the far side of the hole and pulled his helmet back on, speaking in a low voice into the radio, reporting what had happened. When he finished, he turned back to us.
“Pickup is in one hour. We move southwest on the road and meet the APCs, to take up defensive positions closer to the engineers.”
“They died quickly,” I said to him, “the Red Crescents.” Other girls had begun gathering around us now, but said nothing.
“They didn’t die quickly. They died terrified.”
“But we thought they were insurgents,” said Megan, “and it would have been wrong to let them by, to let them get close to the engineers.”
“Someday you’ll get it,” he said, grabbing his carbine and reattaching the flexi so he could move out. We followed him, pushing through the sand, and headed southwest. “Someday you’ll know and by then this war will be over.”
His words changed our mood. It didn’t matter to me if he was right, that one day I’d understand how he felt, because I didn’t
believe
he was right about that, but the
thought that the war might end sent a chill through me, made me want to sit down and think. War without end—this was to be our destiny and at that early age, to think otherwise required a fundamental shift in belief, one that we had just enough experience to know could happen, but not enough experience to actually imagine, let alone handle. As we marched I prayed, and decided it then: God would grant me death before the end, because after all, who wanted the end of war?
“We want the war to end,” the boy in the bunk over me said, his head and shoulders visible as he hung down. When he saw my confusion, he frowned. “You were talking in your sleep and you asked who would want it to end. We do. In the meantime, we brought something for you to play with.”
The car had dimmed since the doctor left and on the other side of a narrow window near the closest door, snowflakes streaked past in a wall of gray that made everything darker, the only light provided by alcohol lamps lit at either end of our car. A biting wind roared down the narrow aisle. From where the boy pointed I heard the other car door slam shut, and then curses in English, so I gathered the blanket around my neck and strained to lift myself a few inches and look at a man. Human.
They dragged him forward by a rope that had been tied around his neck, and if it weren’t for the fact that he stood on two legs I wouldn’t have recognized him as man. Both arms were gone at the shoulder. What stumps remained had been charred black, cauterized so that he’d
live for a few moments longer, and his face had been beaten to the point where it ballooned into something like a bizarre collection of grapes, forcing both eyes shut so he bumped into the bunks, blind. The boys spat at him. By the time he stumbled to my side his face ran with spit, both cheeks sparkling with the boys’ hatred, and the man collapsed to his knees, grunting when he fell because he had no hands to catch himself. The boy above me handed down a knife, double edged and bright.
“We captured him after we pulled you from the river,” the boy said. “He’s the one who shot your sister.”
“How do you know?” I asked, taking the knife without thinking.
“He told us. And we saw it all.”
Megan. I remembered her then, saw her, and recalled the last moments we shared along with the feeling of hope. She had been new. Changed from a Lily into a thing that neither of us recognized, but which had embraced uncertainty, given up on control or trust because nobody could really tell the future, and this was part of what made our escape so wonderful: doubt. Responsibility. Without orders
we
would have decided what to do next, and Megan had transformed with the burden into a girl who seemed more beautiful now, dead, than she ever had in life, so that when the man coughed and said something, I ignored the pain, shifting to the side and sitting up, my legs visible for the first time. The Russians had dressed me in a gown. Both feet hung in the cold, exposed, and the toes had turned black, sending red streaks of infection upward.
“Who are you?” the man said. His words slurred and when my foot brushed his face he screamed.
“I’m a Germline unit. Catherine. You took something from me.”
“She is Ubitza,” someone else said.
The man started laughing. “She’s a whore. And so was her sister.”
I recall doing it, but not why. He said other things, words which didn’t matter, things that all of them knew because the special forces had been briefed by the white coats, the ones who picked at our minds when our minds wanted to rest along with our bodies, but there wasn’t any rest and so it made no difference how many of them knew my secrets. This one had to die. It was a clinical decision and my knife went smoothly into his eye, sliding all the way until it cracked through the back of his skull, nailing his head to the car’s floor planks; but still it wasn’t enough so I stood and grabbed one of the boy’s boots, which hung by its laces from the bunk. The heel hammered on the knife, drove it deeper into the floor so that the man jerked in reflex, his body flopping, swinging back and forth on the pivot point of its head until even the reflex left him. Empty. I remember the boys yanking the knife out and lifting his corpse while one of them lowered me back into bed, pulling the blanket up; another one cautioned to throw the body clear and make sure it didn’t derail the train, but that was in Russian so I wasn’t sure if it was actually what they said. Maybe it was my imagination. By the time the car had gotten warm again someone dimmed the lamps and a group of them gathered next to me, including the one from overhead, his good hand lifting another cigarette to my lips. The flame from a lighter turned their smiling faces orange and made me feel warm.
“It was a good kill,” the one said. “Faster than he deserved, but I liked the ending.”
“The ending?”
“Every kill is a story. A tale with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
“We know the ending now. Tell us the beginning and the middle.”
“Tell us yours, Ubitza,” another one whispered, “and we’ll tell you ours.”
I shook my head, and pointed at my bunkmate. “Wait. You said that you wanted the war to end. Why? Now you say you like killing. How can you believe both at once?”
“It’s true, Ubitza. We like killing. I would kill you if they told me to but they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we want the war to go on forever.”
“She doesn’t know,” another one urged. “Tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
The boy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, wiping the knife clean on his pajamas and then placing it in my palm. He used his one good hand to curl my fingers around the grip. “We don’t die like you, in two years. They gave us a full life. And land, an open place in Siberia, hell on earth with a winter that lasts ten months and nothing but mining spoil and shit for miles around. But ours. Our brothers before us work it now, the ones who completed their duty, and they’re waiting for us, the new crop of broken soldiers to arrive and help with the work. This train stops at Zeya, for you and us. They gave us Zeya. So we rumble northward to our destination because we completed our service term and now we muster out, each of us in their own way.”
“What is your service term?”
Another one, behind him, answered. “We serve until we die or become too wounded, too broken to be of use in war. That’s how it ends for us. And now we can go home.”
I noticed it then, and thought it ironic. When the lamps were brighter it hadn’t been obvious, except for the missing hand of my bunkmate, but now that the lights were low and they surrounded me in a throng of glowing cigarettes I saw that all of them had been shattered. Each of them lacked at least one body part, and most were missing two. Yet all of them grinned. One with no eyes smiled the most and I wondered what job they would give him, what work he could do for their farm, and as if in answer one of them slapped the blind boy’s shoulder and insisted that he’d make a great snow shoveler because it didn’t matter where the snow went, there wasn’t any place to put it anyway, and although I should have felt nothing, I felt everything at once. Tears streamed from both eyes. I tried to grin but my mouth wouldn’t work that way, and instead twisted into something that I’m sure they didn’t recognize because they looked surprised and one of them asked if he’d said something wrong.
“You didn’t say anything wrong,” I said, struggling to speak around the cigarette, “it’s because I’m broken.”
My bunkmate shook his head. “You’ll be fine. Maybe lose a couple of toes or your feet, but that’s it.”
“I’m not broken there. My mind is cracked. They gave us medicine for it, but I don’t have any now. I might start telling you my story and then go blank, and you never know when they come, when the dreams take over and turn everything into nightmare. It’s called the spoiling. And I don’t even know if any of you are real or if I can
remember the beginning of my story anymore. The men in white took everything.”
“We’re real,” he said, “as real as you. And tell us any story because we’re all going to Zeya together, you and us, and we need to know our neighbors. Tell us about these men in white.”
We walked back to the main advance-force, our unit missing three girls—three who had been unlucky enough to encounter a Turkmeni anti-aircraft unit. Nobody had seen them. The men had used the hulk of a burned-out bus to conceal both their thermal signatures and an ancient auto-cannon whose chemical rounds—forty-millimeter shells—ripped the air, smashed through the girls’ ceramic armor, and shattered bones before the rounds exited the other side. The gunner walked his shells across our line. He started with the closest girl and took out two more before we slaughtered him and his loaders in place, leaving our dead where they lay. There was never a burial for the dead; we said thank-you and smiled, for they had been given a gift and we had to move out. In the wake of the battle came a quiet day, and while we pushed forward over a semi-arid landscape, scrub plants dotting it with patches of green, it had seemed there was no war, that with the exception of us and an occasional rabbit nothing else existed and that the target village was still too far to even imagine let alone see, and so might have vanished into thin air.
What remained of our patrol assignment passed uneventfully when after another hour we reached our destination, a blurred scene of moving through the village—
a house by house clearing operation in which one door seemed like the next, one wall an exact duplicate of the thousands we had broken through already, so that the only difference between this and Mashhad, Bandar, or any other town were its inhabitants. The women threw themselves at us with knives, which, in retrospect seemed more brave than stupid. Staying there had been their end. Then again, running after we arrived would have done no good, and if knives were their only weapons then they honored us with a kind of ferocity that I guessed grew from instinct: self-preservation and protecting their young. I killed as many as I could by hand, not wanting to cheapen their bravery with the use of flechettes when so many of them had earned a more honorable ending. Our clearing action took less than an hour. After we finished, we shouldered our weapons and headed south again, into the sun and for our main force, satisfied that no armored units or heavy weapons waited in ambush along our path.
Three girls short
.
The advance-column waited for us at Tejen, in a part of Turkmenistan we controlled, and the engines from thousands of tanks and APCs rumbled as they sat in the fading light, their exhaust turning the sky over town a dirty gray. We crouched by the roadside to wait. Soon our APC would pull alongside and we’d join the column at nightfall for the next phase of the push, soon we would be in combat again, maybe this time against more worthy opponents.
Megan pulled off her helmet. “I like this climate.”
“You take a risk,” I said, pointing to her helmet, “with no thermal block.”
“Risk?” One of the other girls, Jennifer, removed hers
so I saw her face; it had turned red. “Who are you to mention risk? I saw you in the village, with your hands. Any one of us could have been compromised by the chances you took. Everyone else uses their weapons but Catherine? She snaps necks instead, crushes throats.”