Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (10 page)

I cried on the plane as it sat on the tarmac, and not even zip made it better. I just missed her, couldn’t get Bridgette out of my head.

Suddenly the whine of the transport engines died, and I saw a ramp being wheeled out to the main hatch. When it popped open, old Chesty himself burst into the plane, and the MPs who had arrested me followed him in, unable to look me in the eye.

“Goddamn it to hell!”
he said. He liked to bellow, and just hearing it made me feel a little better, like being on the good side of a war god. “Jesus, son, what happened to you?”

“Pavlodar. I was on the retreat, and these shit sacks”—I pointed at the MPs—“wouldn’t even let me shower.”

General Urqhart looked at the men and said quietly, “Get out of my sight.”

They did. Once we were the only two people on the entire transport, the general sat beside me, putting his arm around my shoulder. “What’s this about a genetic?”

I told him. I couldn’t
not
tell him; I had to get it out to keep it from eating through my gut, and by the end of it, my shirt was soaked from tears.

He just sat there quietly for a second and then grinned. “That there is some fucked-up shit, Wendell. I haven’t tried genetics, and sure as shit haven’t tried zip—is it good?”

I nodded.

“Well then, son.” He stood and lifted me to my feet. “It’s been a while since I’ve been a line Marine, but I
know one when I see one. You’ve changed. No more normal civilian life. A guy like you has a hard time reinserting into the world, and if I’m guessing right, the last thing you want is a ride back to the States. Am I right?”

Like I said, the guy was a real genius. Omniscient. I nodded again.

“Well, I may have an idea. You want another assignment, to stay in Kaz?”

“Please, General.” I wiped my nose, felt like a little kid.

“Done.”

He pushed me toward the hatch and then outside. At the bottom of the ramp, the general spoke to me quietly, his shit-eating grin getting wider by the second. “We’re counterattacking. Pops overextended and we were ready for it. Ten more factories came online a few years ago, so we’ve been building up two divisions of genetics in reserve. They were ready to jump from Uzbekistan the moment Popov hit us.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He lit what looked like a cigar, but I could smell the weed, sweet and heavy. “It means we’ll be back at the mines in a couple of weeks. And beyond. Boy, do I have a posting for someone in as fucked-up a state as you.” The general handed me a ticket. “Report to the reassignment center at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow for DOD duty as our civilian historian. I’ll make sure to get orders for your buddy Ox to join you there. You’ll be going somewhere quiet, with no women in sight, so you’ll have time to wind down and get some of that shit out of your brain.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there and did some weird sobbing thing.

“It’s OK, son. Kaz is a nasty mistress and no thanks are necessary. I’m doing it for one reason: you can’t avoid the world forever but you’re not ready to return to it. Not yet. This’ll be over someday, and if you don’t find a way to deal, nothing will work. Ever. Use the time to ease out, son, let it all go if you can.”

When he left, I collapsed on the side of the airstrip and thought about her. I could still smell Bridgette and knew that I had meant it when I had said we should have kids—wanted her that badly.

But Kaz had wanted her too.

T
hey brought in heating units that baked everything and made the smell worse; the same smell that used to make me think
Pulitzer
now brought only dysentery and sickness. Eventually I stopped noticing it. That winter was one of the most awful on record, which, ironically,
helped
us as much as it hurt, because it blunted the Russian push, forcing them to grind down and crumble in the face of our genetic counterattack. Once my assignment came in, they gave me a rack in an underground barracks, and occasionally I’d hear people talk about the topside action and how our forces hit from Uzbekistan, like Urqhart had said they would, pushing the Russians back to Pavlodar. None of these stories mattered. The concrete and rock seemed more interesting than anything else, safer than conversation. Bridgette sat next to me on the bed sometimes and smiled, nearly real enough that I felt her hand on my shoulder, and at those moments I couldn’t handle it, had to go outside and almost never bothered to suit up. The cold made me tremble. Winds blew from the north, and with nothing to block their path, they tore
through our rubble fields and flung dry snow against my face and bare chest in waves of needles. Sometimes I’d stand outside for less than a minute. Other times, if I was high, I’d last for half an hour, praying that the cold would numb all of it, even the parts that drugs couldn’t touch, until eventually I’d pass out and collapse in a pocket of snow, forgotten. Inevitably someone would find me and pull me underground. My body had gotten so used to the cold that when the summer arrived, it made me feel sick, the heat forcing me to toss in my bunk. There was no spring that year—or, at least, none worth remembering.

And there were no more thoughts about writing; Phil had been right to fire me. I’d fail at being a unit historian too—you could bet on it—but this mattered less, because I hadn’t been given the job to succeed; I’d been given the job as a life preserver, Urqhart’s last try at keeping me alive. And there were times I hated him for it. Who was he? He hadn’t known Bridgette, and I still smelled her if I pulled out my old undersuit, the one they had tried to confiscate but for which I’d sworn to kill if anyone took it. Eventually, that too disappeared. Lost. Time became a fog bank, and I moved through it recklessly, hoping that I’d fall off a cliff and wishing when I went to sleep that the morning wouldn’t come, but then the fog would break to give a glimpse of the barracks, of the war, of the facts that I still lived and that she was still gone.

A week before our unit officially went active, Ox lifted me from the rack, got me to my feet, and hugged me.
You
tell
me
what he said. I don’t remember. The zip had done its job, so everything looked soft and fuzzy, and one could guess that he said something about being grateful for my
having saved him, about having lost only bits of toes and fingers as a result of frostbite, but he’d make it, had just barely avoided being discharged on medical, and wasn’t that the worst luck? He grabbed my gear, shoved it into a duffel, and left with it. Then he came back a few minutes later and took me to new quarters, where we’d be bunkmates. That’s when it turned. Ox brought reality back, a little at a time, so that I started eating normally again, got dressed every once in a while, and even made it outside to see what remained of Shymkent after the snow had vanished. I remember the first day that I inserted back into reality, at least partially, and recall that it was like sticking my toe into a pool to test it because I suspected the water was way too cold. It was the day they announced our deployment.

We assembled in a makeshift training area, where a Marine captain stood at the head of the parade ground and coughed. “At ease,” he said. The field went quiet a moment later, so he continued, and I did my best to concentrate, but the words seemed strange, foreign.

“As of eighteen-thirty hours last night, allied forces have retaken the Pavlodar mines and our lines crystallized north of the city, inside Russia itself.” He paused to allow some of the men to cheer. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s mop-up time, which is where we come in. Our scouts report that some Russian genetics survived our push north and may have linked up with guerillas to harass the supply lines, somehow managing to stay out of sight. Rest time is over. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow, Task Force Karazhyngyl will be activated and deployed northward, so that we can go after the remaining genetic units. Get to your racks early and, NCOs, have
your men at the train station for embarkation at oh-seven-thirty. Dismissed.”

Even I, only half sane, operating under a mixture of drugged confusion and self-loathing, knew that calling that unit a task force was a joke. I looked at Ox, who looked back at me, and we didn’t have to say it. Something had changed since the war had started, since the Marines had engaged with Pops more than a year earlier, and over the past week we’d talked about it, because Ox had seen it too. Draftees weren’t the right age anymore. Some were old, sometimes into their forties, while others couldn’t have been more than fourteen. And “task forces” were ad hoc things, the phrase a euphemism for turd units thrown together using whatever was on hand, anything that could be spared. This one was no different. We’d be deployed with a unit that consisted of sub-rubes, old men and boys who’d had less training than I’d had in Rube-Hack, with no clue what it meant to face real Russian forces, let alone their genetics.

Everyone knew what was
really
up; all you had to do was spend time in town or at the bars and it was the only thing people talked about. Both sides were hurting. Press reports from home raged about a congressional committee that had been formed to investigate lowering the draft age to sixteen and raising it to fifty-five; women chafed at government campaigns encouraging them to have children, to breed; and bonds, the administration’s only hope for financing more ateliers, more Gs, were issued. Command needed warm bodies,
any
bodies. And Pops had it just as bad. The last battles, which had raged aboveground across the entirety of Kaz, had resulted in unbelievable losses, and neither side would have new stocks of genetics
for at least six months, so the number of young men and engineered girls able to die on the line had dwindled, evaporated to the point where the word “reserves” had become the punch line to a joke.

Hence, the birth of ad hocs. A new term for “holy-shit-we-need-somebody-who-can-we-use-to-stop-the-leaking.” At least there was an upside. Nobody wanted a fight right now, and both sides, for the moment, happily stayed put behind their lines.

Ox had been made a gunnery sergeant, the unit’s senior NCO, and after the assembly, he showed me his roster; I hadn’t guessed wrong. His new men consisted of Navy cooks, Army supply troops, Marine clerks, and anyone who could be spared from rear duties, pressed into combat service and issued weapons that most had probably never fired in anger.

It was funny, I thought as we headed back to Ox’s quarters. I wasn’t a combatant. Not even a reporter anymore. But I had “the look,” same as Ox, because we’d been there and knew what to expect, while everyone else just looked terrified.

A single overhead fan spun slowly and barely made a breeze as I collapsed into my rack.

“We’re doomed,” Ox said.

I smiled and pushed in a wad of zip. “Speak for yourself, gunny. I’m just a unit historian, a civilian. I could quit anytime.”

“Yeah. You were screaming again, last night. Keep waking me up like that and I’ll wipe you.”

I knew he was kidding but felt bad anyway. “Was it about her?”

“Yeah. It’s nasty. You need to insert a morphine drip at
night or something, anything to keep that shit out of your head while you’re asleep.”

He was right. I missed her just as much now as I had five months earlier, still saw her everywhere I looked.

“I can’t get out of this.”

Ox just nodded. “To hell with it then. Maybe you should just stay high.”

Before reporters had been allowed on the line, some of them got only as close as the supply depots well south of the front. Dan Wodzinski was one of them. One day, when he got back from his third trip, he came into my hotel room. The air-conditioning had gone out, making the place steamy, and there was no breeze, so I had been lying on my bed in a wet towel, trying anything to stay cool. Dan leaned against the wall and slid to the floor, the color gone from his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Karaganda.”

I shook my head. “What?”

“I was in Karaganda,” he said, “the Third Marine supply depot, south of Pavlodar. We should go home now, Oscar. This place is gone.”

I cracked the small fridge next to my bed and tossed him a beer. He finished it in about three gulps and asked for another.

“That bad?”

He nodded. “When I got there, military investigators had discovered a camp, one set up by the Kazakhs back when we were pushing north from Iran.” Dan stopped talking and just looked at me, but I didn’t want to say anything—
it might shut him up—so I waited. When he had taken a few gulps from the second beer, he continued. “There used to be a huge Indian population there, immigrated I don’t know when, and the grunts told me that it was an Indian-staffed corporation that discovered the rhenium mine outside Pav. The company had its headquarters in Karaganda.

“Apparently the Kazakhs decided to nationalize the mines after their discovery, and when the Indians made a stink, they rounded up every single Indian in the country—from all over—and shoved them into this camp. Marines found over ten thousand of them, slaughtered, in shallow graves. Most of them had been beheaded. Kids too.”

The locals had almost disappeared during the war. You used to see the women in the streets and slums, trying to sell anything they could to make a buck, but eventually they too vanished. Dan hadn’t seen many locals either, not in Karaganda. But he had seen their work.

“We should wipe them all and do the world a favor,” he finished. “Karaganda is a no-man’s-land, frontier, but at least our troops are there. I’d hate to be posted in one of the really small towns. No support for miles. Who knows the kind of shit that goes on there? We’d never even hear about it, I bet.”