Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (24 page)

Someone shook me awake and I tried to jump up, but the bag wrapped around my feet and I fell into a snowdrift before finally coming to my senses. There was at least two feet of new snow. It was still dark but I heard the flakes blow against my helmet as if they were grains of sand, and in the green haze of night vision, I saw it was the Brit who had woken me. The kid stood next to him.

“We’re moving out,” the Brit said.

“What, no breakfast?”

“Eat while you march.”

I didn’t taste the food. We resumed our trek northward and the stuff that came out of my pouch felt cold against my cheeks, because the meal pouch had become so frozen overnight that the warming pack barely managed even to
thaw it. Everything had changed. Nobody spoke now and the Legionnaires moved more cautiously than they had the previous day, even though the wind and snow kept most of our footsteps quiet. Once we reached a point about a kilometer south of Ul’yanovo, the sergeant whispered over the radio.

“Go—” and then a French word I didn’t understand.

“Chameleon,” the Brit whispered for us. “Go to stealth mode.”

In the snow, the sensation of being invisible made everything seem like a dream. Now I couldn’t see even the men closest to me, although the kid’s footprints appeared out of nowhere, and a couple of times I felt a strange vertigo because there was no horizon and the snow fell so hard that you lost the difference between ground and sky. Soon the morning came, which made everything seem more benign, and then, without warning, we reached the outskirts of Ul’yanovo—a series of low huts that looked as though they were partly underground.

“Who lives like this these days?” I whispered.

“Silence!”
someone hissed back.

A red light popped onto my heads-up, the signal to stop, and I lowered myself to the snow so I could bring my carbine to bear on the closest hut. A single blue dot crept forward. It stopped at a point that looked as though it was just inside the line of structures, and then my red light flashed green, so I rose carefully and continued on. When we passed the first buildings, we heard voices inside—a woman and some children—which made me breathe with relief, the realization that a family lived there making things easier to bear.

Beyond the huts was the town proper, and I climbed
over a low stone wall to slide forward against the side of a house before peering around a corner at the same instant the snowfall ebbed. We all froze. In the center of town, three vehicles idled, one Russian APC and two scout cars, and what looked like about thirty soldiers were there. They disappeared a second later when the wind picked up, hiding them behind a haze of blown snow.

The sergeant’s voice clicked in. “Everyone move due west. Stay clear of the road and make for Bo’ston from the north. Mission accomplished.”

I followed the other dots. Our group moved slowly along the southern edge of town and at one point we climbed a low rise onto what might have been a road, before descending to the other side. As soon as we got down, Ul’yanovo lit up behind us with plasma.

Someone must have called in the contact, because without warning, hundreds of rounds fell behind us, turning the snow into colored lights that sparkled with each impact. I prayed that none would fall short. There was no need for noise discipline now, and we sprinted, trying to get out from under the rain of fire that fell on anyone unlucky enough to have been caught there. You didn’t think about the fact that you’d heard women and children in town. The knowledge was there, sure, but a wave of self-preservation instincts kicked in to insist that
yours
was the important ass to worry about, and that for all you knew, the rounds would miraculously miss any civilians, and if they
didn’t
miss, screw it.

A loud roar erupted to our front and I dove, shouting to the kid to get down, but it was almost impossible to see anything through the curtain of snow. Ahead was a shadow. Before I could move, the form changed into the
shape of a Popov APC as it bore down on me, bursting through low snowbanks, and there was nothing to do except bury my head in the ground and curl into a ball. The vehicle passed directly over, its belly scraping against the ceramic of my shoulder, and three blue dots blinked out on my heads-up at the same time I heard screams over the radio. When the vehicles had gone, I scrambled to my feet and resumed running, calling out to the kid to stay on my tail, to head west and keep up with everyone else. Maybe someone should have collected our dead. But that wasn’t a thought that anyone had at the moment, because it was still unknown what waited to our west, between us and Bo’ston, so whoever had just been crushed would wind up buried in the winter snow to stay there until the following spring.

“Move,”
the sergeant said over the radio, but it really wasn’t necessary.

Throughout the morning we alternated between jogging and walking, eventually shifting into a single-file line to make the deepening snow easier to traverse. Being at the lead was especially awful. Over land this flat, the snow depth varied from a few inches in places, to several feet where it had accumulated in drifts and you had to push through it, lifting your feet high enough to step over or forcing them through—despite the fact that your legs screamed that all they wanted to do was stop. We took turns. After an hour of point, I rotated to the rear and shifted into the role of a walking corpse, a half-human thing whose exhaustion showed and whose mind had conjured up the memories of a similar march, when Pavlodar had first fallen.

Only the sergeant spoke during those long hours, to announce course corrections or to tell the point to move
faster. But as soon as we stepped within sight of the Bo’ston perimeter, he stopped us outside the minefield, which was cruel, because all we wanted to do was get inside and go to sleep. I wanted to strangle him.

“Who called in artillery?” he asked.

“You didn’t do it, Sergeant?” the Brit asked. I was glad he had survived, and as it turned out, I hadn’t known any of the men the APCs had crushed.

“Someone hacked the secure channel, Command, and called in an artillery strike; I checked the records on our way back and it definitely came from our position. Who?”

The wind picked up again, howling over the trenches, which lay a hundred yards to our front, and nobody answered.

“Look, this is simple. I’ll find out when we get back to our post, as soon as I have artillery check their records. Who did it?”

Okonkwo chuckled then and raised his hand. “I told you to let me out of the patrol, but no. You had to force it. I called in the artillery.”

The sergeant didn’t even hesitate; he swung his carbine up and fired a short burst into Okonkwo’s chest, and the fléchettes worked their way up as far as his neck. He collapsed into the snow. When it was over, we continued through the minefield and climbed into a waiting scout car, careful to wait for the door to seal before removing our helmets.

“Why’d he call in a strike?” the kid asked.

“I don’t know.”

“The
cafard,
” said the Brit. “Remember the cockroach.”

I fell asleep within seconds and don’t remember how I made it from the scout car to my rack in the hospital
basement; I know only that sleep felt better than I had ever remembered.

We lost girls every day to gangrene. At first it bothered me to see them lying there confused, the dying flesh so black on some that it looked as though they’d dipped their hands in ink, and many of them woke in the middle of the night screaming, so loudly that we heard it in the basement next door. What did these chicks dream of? You couldn’t compute the difference in experiences between us and them, because you didn’t grow up in a beaker to be shoved onto a battlefield where the only thing promised was the glory of death or this: a lingering decrepitude. But like anything else, you got used to it. Soon I didn’t even notice the girls’ faces, and every once in a while, I had trouble remembering Bridgette’s name. I’d stop and think for a minute, and the kid would have to shout and pull me out of it.

Only one thing animated the girls: pills.
That
computed. The physical deterioration reflected an internal malady that wasted their heads, and sometimes I’d show up to give them the doc’s version of tranq tabs—a formula he cooked up using local resources—and would find them standing with their arms poking through the bars, all of them wanting the things. I got that, understood their need, because I had it too, and there were days when I’d stand outside the door with the kid, holding a paper bag full of the tablets. I’d wonder what the drugs were like; a voice from inside woke up when in proximity to the things and whispered that I should just grab a handful and forget everything, that I’d earned it.
Just swallow all of them.
So
far I’d resisted. But one morning we pushed through the door with a pair of Marine guards, and I knew that if this went on for much longer, I’d give in.

The whole floor was quiet. Usually they’d be ready for us, standing in their cages, but on that day nobody moved, because the whole group of them, about a hundred, hung limply from nooses they had made out of blankets. The girls could have stood up. Their feet touched the ground, which spoke to a kind of sick dedication on their part, a testament to the fact that the chicks had seen something, a common vision that fed into a calculated ending:
This just isn’t worth it anymore.

Everyone had his breaking point and I’d already reached mine on multiple occasions—in Almaty, Karazhyngyl, and places I couldn’t remember—but I’d never gone this far beyond it. The sight shattered something in my chest. I ran from cage to cage and tried to force the pills into their mouths, thinking that maybe they’d bring the girls back to life, and as I went, I called over my shoulder at the kid.

“Help me!”

“Oscar, they’re dead. Come on.”

“No they’re not.” I was about to ask the Marines to help when I noticed they had vanished. “These chicks don’t die, all we need to do is get them wired again, maybe an electrical shock or something. I’ll give them their pills, you untie the nooses and get them down, and then we’ll rig something up to shock them, Frankenstein-style. Come on.
It’ll be fun!
”

“Oscar.
They’re dead.
”

When had I told the kid my name? When had he started calling me Oscar? I screamed at him then and
threw the bag against the wall to send a hundred tablets rolling across the floor.
“Motherfucker, if you don’t help me now, so help me Christ, I will rip you heart out! You don’t know me at all!”

The doc arrived then with the two Marines, and the group started walking toward me. The doc smiled. But I knew, man, I knew that he had something in mind, and all I could think was that the kid had tricked me and I needed to escape or I’d wind up dead like the girls.

“I’m infected, Doc, stay away.”

“With what?” He glanced at the kid. “What is his name?”

“Oscar,” the kid said.

“What’s wrong Oscar? What’s infected you?”

The two Marines circled around, trying to get behind me, so I backed against the far wall, looking in either direction as fast as I could.
What was wrong with these people?

“Okonkwo, the lieutenant in the APC, they gave it to me, man. But if you leave me alone for a minute, I can figure this out. I got this one. Somehow they must have snuck in while I wasn’t looking, but I’ll get rid of them.”

“What, Oscar? What are you talking about?”

One of the Marines slammed into me from the side, and I remember thinking that I had forgotten about them, that it had been stupid of me to forget. The floor came up quickly, slamming into my nose. With the pain came a sudden clarity, as if a spell had been broken, and then I saw the girls differently, their faces calm and pretty, with short black hair that framed those chiseled features. Some of them had died smiling.

“What the fuck is this place?” I asked.

The Marine, a huge guy, bigger than Ox had ever been,
held me down but with a strange kind of gentleness. “It’s all shit. Don’t think about it, because it’s all shit.”

“No, seriously, what is this place and how did I get here?” I started crying. The tears came in a constant stream and I screamed into the floor, watching as the doc’s feet came closer.

“It’s all right,” the Marine said. “No shit. It’s all right.”

“It all got inside me.” I tried to think of a way to explain it, but the words wouldn’t come and it made me more frustrated, got in the way of my screams. “What’s wrong with everyone?”

“You have him?” the doc asked.

The Marine nodded. “Go on, Doc. I got him. He’ll be all right; we’ll talk him down before we let him go.” It seemed to satisfy the doc, because he left without another word, stopping only once to look around at the girls and shake his head.

And that’s how I made it through that one—without getting high. The kid sat on the floor next to me and lit a cigarette, the other Marine sat next to him, and the third one stayed on my back, pinning me to the floor as we all smoked in a room full of hanging corpses. The kid put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me, holding it there until I calmed down enough to smoke.

“He’s right,” said the other Marine to his friend. “You know, I get what he’s saying.”

“Shut the fuck up. Of course he’s right, so just shut the fuck up or I’ll shoot you both. Right here.”