The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (19 page)

I’m in a warehouse. Above me and below me and on all sides of me are sounds of fighting. Robots. Again. When we arrived at this warehouse, I figured it would be the warehouse where the robots were holed up making more of themselves, as it seems that there is an almost endless supply of them swarming around us, and no one has the first goddamn idea where they came from or if there’s someone behind them all. This is not the robot warehouse, however. It’s one of our own. I didn’t know we had a warehouse, and the fact that we do—and that it’s full of crates of oranges and ammo and small wooden rocking horses—strikes me somehow as criminal.

“When the fuck did we build a warehouse?” I want to ask Ricky, but we never get any downtime, so I don’t. The place is covered in dust and grime inches thick, and it’s possible that the warehouse wasn’t built by us at all, that it was part of the human settlement we came here to defend, only to discover we had come too late and it had already been overrun by swamp monsters and robots and other unmentionables.

It should seem odd, then, that somewhere holed up in this spooky warehouse is a device that, when you flip a switch and pull a lever, activates an electromagnetic pulse, but that’s what I’ve been told, that and that it’s my job to find it and activate it.

What I don’t get, or, hell, one of the many, many things I no longer get, is why the fuck did we come to this warehouse in the first place? I can’t tell you what we eat, but we don’t eat or need oranges, nor do we suffer from a deficit of wooden rocking horses. We don’t need ammo, either, which, if I’m to believe the stenciling on the sides of these crates, is the only other thing stored in this warehouse. For as long as I can remember, I have not one time run out of ammo, or, if I have run out of ammo in, say, my semiautomatic, or charge in my DevLazer Rifle 3000, I can simply toss it aside and pick up some other weapon, fully loaded, though I cannot tell you where these come from exactly. And if worst comes to worst, and even my service pistol runs out of bullets, I always have my knife, which is a wicked and jagged-looking thing, though what help it would be against swamp monsters or robots, I can’t say. Still. It’s there.

And the armory. Don’t let’s get started on how big our armory is.

So if we don’t need oranges and we don’t need rocking horses and we don’t need ammo, there seems to be little good reason for us to be here except that there are robots roosting here—do robots roost?—and a switch somewhere in the middle of here to shut them all down. But if we hadn’t come here in the first place, would they even have roused themselves, and even if they’d already been roused, they were roused here and we were safely somewhere else, and so it wouldn’t have fucking mattered that the roosting robots had been roused.

I could go on, but what’s the point? An order’s an order, and the sooner I can find that electromagnetic pulse switch, the sooner I can get back to camp and head to the commissary to see if Becky’s there behind the desk, see if she’ll do more than roll her eyes at me when I tell her we should get together when she’s free.

As I’m mulling over what else I might say to Becky, these three things happen all at once: I turn around yet another crate of wooden rocking horses, I see on the wall opposite me the electromagnetic pulse switch, and a robot crashes through the floor. Yet even as I’m fumbling for my weapon, even as that robot comes bearing down on me, I can’t stop thinking of what I should say to Becky.

The bunker’s being attacked. This takes me by surprise, but by the looks of it, I’m the only one who didn’t see this coming.

In truth, I don’t remember being in the bunker. I don’t remember suiting up or grabbing my rifle, either, but it’s dark outside and none of us is wearing our sleep ordnance, and I’ve got a rifle in my hands—the sniper again—so it must have happened, and I must have been here when it did.

We’re being set upon by robots and these monsters I’ve only read about: three-legged sonsabitches outfitted with some kind of grotesque and unsettling stereoscopic eye mounted on a long stalk branching out of its torso. Drool and all manner of particulate bungee in thick ropes from their gaping maws. Wiry tufts of hair sprout out of their knuckles. It’s all pretty disgusting and stirs me up for a good fight.

Since all I have is a small knife and my sniper rifle, though, I figure the most I can do is aim for that eye and hope for the best.

And I figure I should move cautiously. I’m navigating down one hallway and up the next, swiveling left and right, surveying the landscape of dead soldiers and broken robot parts and the blown-to-bits alien monsters, when, streaking past me on my right, Ricky runs pell-mell into the thick of the fight, and seeing him run by like that, I’m thrown for a wild loop.

I can’t say why, but something about seeing Ricky, seeing him running, seeing him with his head on his shoulders and not blown the fuck off, seeing him at all, feels wrong. My head swims. I careen into the wall. Something in the distance in front of me explodes, and hairy, tufted hands fly past me, and bits of gore squish against my helmet visor, and then Ricky’s head tumbles down the hall, as if it’s beating a hasty retreat and it couldn’t wait on the rest of him, which is only seconds behind, or is holding the bastards off while the head makes its escape, and I should be horrified by this, but there’s something comforting about the sight of his head rolling to a stop at my feet, as if before some piece of the world had been out of true, and now things have leveled out again.

Whatever exploded ahead of me has set off a chain reaction, and the walls ahead of me blow out as smaller explosions rocket in my direction. It’s as if the entire bunker has been layered with minicharges and the entire structure is buckling, and I wonder at the shoddiness of our base camp.

Regardless, I turn tail and run.

Left and then right and then right again and then left again. Rooms and control panels and doorways blur past as I run toward the exit. A part of me, though, feels as if I’m in a maze, as if I’ve never seen this place before, as if I don’t know where I’m going or which way is the way out. All the while, I’m keeping my eye out for Becky. I don’t know why. A fine ass is a fine ass, but nothing is worth being blown up for, and what with Ricky being headless and all, and Becky’s natural inclination to ignore my every pass at her, there’s nothing in it for me.

I know I’m a fool for looking for her, and I will be a fool if I stop for her, yet I can’t help myself. And then I see her.

I run past a doorway, and I catch sight of her out of the corner of my eye. She’s still sitting primly, beautifully, behind her desk, oblivious to the shitstorm raging around us, and I try to stop. I throw on the brakes. I reach out for the doorjamb. But nothing happens. I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I’m pushed forward. Some force—gravity, momentum, an unexpected planetary shift?—is pushing me forward. And for the first time, or maybe not the first time, maybe this isn’t the first time at all that this thought has come into my head but is only the first time I’ve considered it seriously, I wonder who is in control of me, of my legs, my eyes, my choices.

And with more effort than I have ever known myself to exert, I turn myself around.

I can’t say that it is painful, the feeling I get when I perform this trick. In truth, the word itself—
painful
—means jack shit to me, and if you were to ask me to describe what pain was, I couldn’t. But the sensation—stopping in place, standing still, turning myself around—is a queer one, for damn sure. And while I can’t say whether it hurts or not, what I can say is that when I take a step, I feel less like myself than I can begin to explain. What I can say is that I can’t help but turn my head to look at where I had been standing just to make sure that I’m not still standing there. But I’m not there. I’m here. I’m moving back to where Becky was, but it’s slow, it’s slow going and difficult, and with every step I feel like I’m leaving a piece of myself behind.

I make it, finally, to the next doorway—to what kind of room, I don’t know—and lean heavily against it, still fighting against the powerful, undeniable urge to go back to running for the exit.

But then as I try to push myself off and stand up straight again, I push myself through the door and the doorway—I don’t know how; the door doesn’t open—and my foot catches on something and I trip and I fall, and maybe it’s the sense of free fall, but even as I am falling, faster and faster, I feel light as air.

Here is what I don’t understand. Here is that question that bothers me in the swamps, in our barracks, while at the warehouse, whether fighting swamp monsters or hairy-knuckled beasts or those fucking robots, the question that burns in the back of my mind during every waking moment, and it is this: When have I ever seen Becky’s ass?

I’m not going on about her clad in her unmentionables, or even bare, at the risk of sounding crude and ungentlemanly. I’m talking about nothing more than just her backside in a pair of shorts or her commissary uniform. I’m talking about seeing her standing up or walking around or doing anything anywhere that isn’t behind that commissary desk. And I have to admit that the answer to that question is never. And yet the compulsion to say her backside is fine, the need to make her love me based on my idea of it, is so strongly felt that it will sometimes seem more real to me than anything else I have seen or done here on Capra II. I have never caught even a glimpse of it, yet I will find myself, even in the heat of battle, pining keenly for it and, by extension, her.

That fall must have addled my brain some, because when I stand up, I’m in the swamps again. Then the swamps begin to flicker, and I close my eyes and give my head a gentle shake and when I open them up, I’m in the warehouse, and then this flickers and I’m back in the bunker, surrounded by noise and fire and explosions and a bloody fucking mess of monster bits and robot pieces and the disjointed remains of my squad landing all around me as if some huge explosion just blew everything to hell.