Gods of Anthem (17 page)

Sergeant
Nolan’s in
rare form today. “Boys, we pick new team leaders for this rotation. Missions will be solidly human; I don’t want any of you weirdos creeping around using any special anything, you hear me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Well, I’ll be damned …” he says, walking up to me. “Someone get this man a fresh one from the regular barracks, and quick. If this fuzzy isn’t scratching at a rash in three days, I’ll make hell on earth.” A few laughs flit through, but I see something different in the old man’s eye. A challenge maybe. “Wienie-man here’s gonna lead you out. How’s Team Leader sound, hero?”

“Good, sir.”

He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You don’t get it that easy. You have to take it.”

Cory turns to face me, arms crossed.

I fight my smile. “Roger.”

Sergeant Nolan grins and slams his meaty palm into my shoulder in a gesture of what I think is meant to be goodwill, before facing the formation.

“Make a circle.”

Everyone moves until we are surrounded.

I’m feeling confident, until Nolan says, “Prince, your choice.”

I mouth,
Prince?
at Vero.
Prince
is Cory’s last name.

Veronica stifles a giggle, and I turn to face my opponent.

Cory grins. “Bo staff.”

My shoulders slump. That’s not a weapon I’ve had any experience with.

Two soldiers toss sticks into the circle, and Cory grabs his, while I stare at them, wondering what exactly I’m supposed to do with a wooden staff taller than me. I pictured myself mowing him down in a wrestling match but as I watch him do an expert spin, twirl, and kick in some sort of tantric demonstration of baton twirling and martial arts, I’m aware of how short my life as team leader will actually be.

With a sigh, I reach for my stick, but Cory plants the end of his on it and rolls it away. The group laughs, surprised.

As he does another round house, stick moving in a blur, I walk over and reach for mine again.

This time I get it halfway up before Cory smacks his end against my hand, making me drop it to shake the sting out.

My chest swells with irritation, and Nolan hollers over, “No Special, Ripley!”

“Roger.” I focus on my breathing, quickly snatch up my stick, and shove the pointy end toward my foe.

Cory and I move around the circle, and he deftly pushes my weapon aside several times before a blow to my shoulder, leg, and ankle lands me flat on my back.

My roll sideways keeps me from getting poled in the face, and I’m up and moving before he can knock me down again, but it’s a near miss.

Offense is my only way out of complete embarrassment and so, with a hacking motion that’s certainly not technically sound, I aim for brute force via axing anything that moves.

Cory takes one knock before giving my ribs a couple of bruises.

In a blur, he manages to remove my stick and poke me in the gut, and I bend over with a rush of air.

“Give up?”

Cory’s moved in to ask the question, and I latch onto his little stick, wrapping both hands around it, good and tight.

He realizes his fatal mistake and yanks backwards, but I use his momentum to pop him in the mouth and then in the throat.

Cory goes down, face bloody.

I straddle him, and we wrestle a full half-minute before I get the wood up against his throat. Something in my mind flickers, a momentary loss of control, when he wheezes out, “I give.”

Soldiers clap and pat my back as I rise to my feet, but when I reach out a hand to help up the now ex-team leader, he rolls to the side and ignores me, rising on his own.

“Get your nav
out and scout around. Real bullets, real grenades, real zombies. This is go time, people!” Nolan calls out.

This isn’t my first live-fire exercise, but this
is
the first time for a lot of the fuzzys here, and that’s what makes me nervous. We clear our weapons in a barrel over by the armory, and recently one soldier blew it up, accidentally firing into it only inches from where I stood. Mistakes are common in our trial-by-fire type of training.

Missions here are like giving guns to a bunch of kids, and as I take in all of the teens around me, that’s exactly what it is. Having lived on the farm, and hunted, I’d handled guns plenty before the Army. Can’t say the same for some of these newbies. I’d put a dollar to a head that most haven’t handled a weapon before this week. “Great,” I mutter.

Cory shoves through to the front, despite my new leadership role. He doesn’t care what Sergeant Nolan says. An Army boy through-and-through, he can’t handle sharing the spotlight.

I shrug and follow. At nineteen, Cory’s the oldest on our team, and a Special. He’s got some kind of mind thing. No clue what that means. Not sure I really want to know. When he turns to grin at me, I guess I’ve just found out.

So that’s how he knew I was a virgin.

“Yup,” he says, without looking back while we march.

Vero elbow-nudges me on her way to her new team, fixing her helmet while walking backwards and giving me a wink before jogging off. I want to tell her to be careful, but I’m conscious of Cory’s regard. She and I had the unlucky draw of being in different platoons this last shuffle of companies. I’ll miss her, but it’s a relief not to have to watch her back. I’ve got plenty on my plate as it is, trying to keep track of Joelle.

“That’s right,” Cory says under his breath.

I ignore his woo-woo mind reading. He’ll play any game to keep me on my toes. I’m not interested in games. We’re already going to fight for our lives, for the rest of our lives. I’m not out for his job.

We come to the ridge above the jungle where, down in the thick, bombs, wires, and other teams wait with real rounds to ambush us. Hiding somewhere in the green are zombies and just about everything but the boogie man. In the center sits a small village that you can barely see out in the distance. Our mission is simple: take control of that village.

Out of habit, I roll my neck, and the popping makes Cory grimace.

We start down.

So
far, the jungle isn’t bad. Cory’s Spidey sense doesn’t reach long enough to hear the other parties, he says, plus we won’t risk being caught using any Special on a mission since it’s automatically an article fifteen. That used to mean a loss of rank and paperwork. But in Sergeant Nolan’s special army, it means they beat the hell out of you
and
take your rank, and if you live through his blasts on the pavement after that, you’ll wish you were dead anyway.

One of our guys, Defoe, is a tracker. Even without his Special he’s a real-deal Navajo who can spot wires, traps, and anything else that’s ready to blow us up. He’s checking a few directions now, head shakes for the ones that are a no-go, until he chooses the narrow one that’s gonna need us to cut back brush, of course.

We have real casualties in live-fires. I’ve seen them. And we lose a lot of good soldiers, so they keep these training sessions to a minimum. But Sergeant Nolan’s right when he says they would have died anyway. If we can’t take a small village in a somewhat controlled environment, how can we expect to take America back? We can’t. And live-fire is a saving grace for those who get to die quick with a medic on hand, rather than alone and slow in the wilds of what used to be our great country, with stiffs gnawing on them.

Defoe spots another trip wire, and he signals for us to change formation. Cory nods, and we leave the wedge (like an arrow of birds in the sky) and get into a single-file line behind him.

The deeper we go, the more stuff we run into, and Cory decides to move into the lead again. I’m not gonna argue with that. Brave. Stupid. Take your pick.

He stiffens at my thoughts.

“Well, that’s what you get for listening,” I mutter to his back. “Change your frequency.”

Defoe snorts, his M-4 bumping into me when I pull up short to avoid crashing into a pissed-off ex-team leader who’s spun around. I’m about to tell him that now’s not the time, when a grey hand snags his fatigues and pulls him into the jungle.

There’s empty space where Cory had once been, and it takes me wasted moments before I rush through the way he’d gone. When I finally catch up, the zombie’s already latched its teeth onto Cory’s sleeve, and I slam the butt of my gun into its face several times to dislodge it.

More come from every direction. As trained, the team fans out in a stagger, firing in short bursts. No wasting bullets on wild aims. Two of the zombies are men, one’s a teenage girl, and three more women stumble behind these, bluish from lack of oxygen. I’m thinking zombies don’t breathe as much, which makes sense, ‘cause they gasp and moan as if their involuntary muscles need constant reminding.

“We’ve got an eater!” someone shouts.

One of the stiffs has a nice bloody mouth from getting a dine in before seeing us. He’s the quickest, leaping forward like a grasshopper to land on Beemoushe. Bee screams and panics, flinging all over. It takes some doing to kick the fast one off of his throat in time.

Then, we all fight back-to-back in teams, cutting them down. One by one, they each take the final dirt dive. The M-4 is a handy little zombie killer.

“Ah hell, man, damn.”

I spin around to see Bee squared off with a mini-zombie in a nightgown. My stomach clenches. All this time and I can still hardly look at the little ones. She’s barely three feet tall.

“Damn,” Bee says again. “She can’t be more than, what, five? I got sisters, man! Or did. I can’t—”

Cory plugs up the last one on his side with shots to the head before walking over and, without hesitation, puts a few bullets into the tot. We all cringe as she jerks and falls backwards. Some of the team close their eyes, or glance away. But I force myself to watch.

After she’s still, Cory turns on us with a sneer. “You pussies better get over it, and quick. You think America isn’t going to be half full of these little freaks? You piss yourselves over kids, but she’ll eat your face off, same as the rest.”

He spits toward the tiny body, and Bee steps forward. I stop him with a hand on his chest. Cory’s looking down at the mini-zombie, and his face is stretched thin over the bones. Technically, he’s right about them being the same as the others. But he’s not … right.