New Title 1 (3 page)

“
There’s no getting away,” he said.

“
Oh, I know,” I panted. “I was just… powering up for the morning. I like to do that sometimes. Run, you know?”

“
You don’t look like you’ve run a day in your life. I’m Corporal Grimes.”

“
It’s very nice to meet you, Corporal Grimes. I’m Saul Dressing.”

“
Yeah, yeah. I know.”

He led me back to the helicopter, his hand clutching me the entire time. He motioned for me to sit in the back. I wondered why I couldn’t sit up front.

“
Why can’t I just sit up front?”

“
You can’t do the jump from up front.”

“
Jump?”

“
Oh yeah. I’m not landing this bird in that godless country.”

“
I’ve never…”

“
We’ll talk about it on the way. No need to worry.”

I climbed in the back and hurriedly fastened my seatbelt. The seatbelt was one more layer between me and what would eventually be the open sky. I tried to imagine falling through the open sky. I started to get a little queasy again.

“
He’s gonna need these,” Baxter said from out on the street and hurled my shoes into the copter.

I quickly put them on and the helicopter began to rise. It was very loud. I looked down toward my house and saw Baxter going back inside. Why was he going back inside my house? I didn’t think he had any right to do that but I was learning that most of my thoughts were wrong.

Eight

The helicopter listed badly to one side. I had to keep my feet pressed firmly to the floor so I didn’t roll to the other side. Now that I no longer had my talons, my shoes were way too big. I had to tie them extra tightly.

Grimes threw something over his shoulder and said, “Here. Put this on.” At least, I think that’s what he said. It was kind of hard to hear him. It landed in my lap. It looked like a headset. Something I imagined customer service people in call centers wearing. I put it on.

Grimes’s voice crackled in my ear, loud and clear. “We’ll begin your briefing now.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really want to have a briefing. It sounded very boring, official, and would probably make me more aware of the dangers that lay ahead of me.

“
Your operation is simple. I will be dropping you over a country called Grisnos. It’s an arid desert country. Earlier surveillance has revealed the country’s population to be between fifty and a thousand. They are all dangerous and are to be handled with extreme caution and dealt with in the most efficient manner. You are to continue surveying them. When the time comes, they will either have to surrender to us, or you will begin your offensive. The radio will keep you connected to Sergeant Sam Fetch. You are to wear it at all times.”

Grimes then tossed back a black machine gun.

“
This is your weapon. Besides the headset, it’s the greatest resource you have. Open up the handle and you will find various buttons for everything you need. The weapon is deceptively simple but it contains multitudes. If you need more ammunition, just press the button labeled ‘ammunition’. Likewise for food, shelter.”

It all seemed very unrealistic. I wondered if every mission was like this.

“
Questions?”

“
Where, exactly, is Grisnos?”

“
I can’t disclose that information.”

“
Shouldn’t I have the right to know where I’m going?”

“
If you wanted to know where you were going, then perhaps you should have done some research rather than drinking your evening away. Perhaps you should have turned the news on every now and then. You might have learned something.”

“
And why, exactly, are we at war with Grisnos?”

“
I thought Baxter already went over that with you.”

“
If he did, he was incredibly vague.”

“
The residents of Grisnos are threatening our way of life, our freedoms.”

“
What exactly does that mean?”

“
You’ll see when you get there.”

“
How much longer is it going to be?”

“
A few hours.”

I rolled my eyes. If I was going to be there at all, I wanted to be there now, just to get it over with.

“
You might as well relax.”

“
That’s going to be hard.” I couldn’t even sit down comfortably without feeling like I was going to fall out of the copter.

“
I’m finished talking to you,” Grimes said. “I would prefer you didn’t say anything else.”

That was the first time I’d ever had a conversation end that way. Part of me was mad and wanted to keep talking out of spite. Part of me found it refreshing. If I made it back, I’d have to try that if I ever got stuck in a horrible conversation. I sat back, cinching the seat belt as tight as it would go, closed my eyes, and tried to rest.

Nine

The deafening noise and the precarious position of the helicopter made rest impossible. I looked out the window to see if I could gain any sense of where we might be. I couldn’t see anything except a layer of cloud cover. Did helicopters fly above the clouds? I didn’t think they typically flew that high but I also didn’t really know anything about helicopters.

There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask but Grimes had forbidden me to talk to him so I guessed they would go unanswered.

My mission seemed suspect and ambiguous. Perhaps I preferred not having my questions answered. To ask questions and then have them answered could imply that I knew what I was doing. I would rather not know what I was doing and use the explanation that no one told me what I was supposed to be doing than to know what I was doing and do it poorly. I wasn’t a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant to be a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest urge to
be
a soldier. Therefore, I was pretty certain that, whatever I was about to do, whatever mission I was about to carry out, would be done as poorly as any mission in the history of Everything.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought that could be something to be proud of.

Ten

Time was nebulous inside the helicopter. I got tired of staring at the back of Grimes’s head and the cloud cover below was extremely monotonous. I thought about my days at the library. I had worked there for the past ten years and had grown relatively comfortable with it. At first I enjoyed the strange mix of people who came in to borrow or steal books. As the book supply dwindled, never to be replaced, I began to enjoy the solitude of it. Only a few people came in every day. Mapes stayed sequestered in his office for the most part. I was able to read and listen to music. Or simply wander around the library, picking up that occasional book too unpopular to steal. Anything to take my mind off this same solitude that would follow me home and there, in the darkness of the evening, the neighborhood asleep, that solitude would leak slowly from my head and down my spine, spreading out through all my bones and manifest as something that could probably be called depression. And, just before sleep, I would have to convince myself this was life. And these things—loneliness, solitude, depression—were my life’s obstacles just as some people’s obstacles were health issues or poverty or addiction.

Did all of these things lead to a singular path of insanity? Or was it the realization of this path that makes certain people veer off in another direction and find something that appears as enlightenment?

Damn it. I wished I had my music or a book now. Those were what kept thoughts like that away.

Eleven

My stomach lurched as the helicopter began its rapid descent. For a brief and panicked moment, I thought we were crashing.

Now angled forward, the helicopter dived down through the clouds and I could once again see the earth below. It was a mind numbing expanse of brown the color of mocha. Somber, dingy, depressing.

Grimes stood up from his seat and faced me. He wore aviator sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to see his eyes. I hoped the helicopter had some sort of automatic pilot setting on it. He grabbed my shirt and pulled me to my feet. It was hard to stand up. The ceiling of the helicopter was too low to straighten out and I was wildly off balance. Grimes grabbed the machine gun up from the floor and pressed it against my chest until I grabbed onto it.

“
This is where you get out, Dressing.”

I was seized with fear. This was real. It was happening. And I was the most pathetic man for the job.

“
I’ve never done this. I don’t even have a parachute.”

“
The gun is all you need. I told you that earlier. You could have been exploring instead of wasting your time on soft thoughts.”

How did he know my thoughts were soft? What constituted a soft thought?

He opened up the door on the side of the helicopter and began pushing me toward it. I fumbled with the gun. I thought about shooting him but then I would somehow have to figure out how to land the helicopter and couldn’t imagine I would be at all successful with that. One half of the stock flipped open. There were a bunch of bright orange buttons. Grimes stood behind me and gave me a strong push. I was out in the open air.

When you watch people parachute on television, it never looks like they’re falling that fast. I felt like a stone, rocketing toward the ground. My eyes were watering and I didn’t know if it was from the air stinging them or if I was crying. Could have been a little of both. I tried to read the minute text above the orange buttons but everything was blurry. I started pressing them. Nothing happened.

Then something began spooling from the butt of the gun. I grabbed onto the gun even harder.

The parachute opened with a pop and I almost lost it. The parachute wanted to stay there, the wind holding it up, and my body wanted to keep diving toward the ground. I wrapped my hands around the very end of the stock and my wild sense of panic calmed somewhat. I didn’t want to look down. I looked up, searching for the helicopter, but I didn’t see it.

I hit the ground and my knees buckled and slammed into my collar bones. Off balance, I rolled to my right, the hot ground scraping at my arms.

Calmly, oblivious to my fear, the parachute drifted down over top of me and covered me like a funeral shroud. I lay flat on my back and tried to breathe regularly, amazed I was still alive.

In the distance, I heard a loud crash. I crawled out from under the parachute and saw the tail end of the helicopter jutting up from the ground at an unnatural angle.

I spoke into my headphones. “Grimes?”

Flames and smoke barreled up from the downed copter.

“
Saul Dressing?” a voice came through the headphones.

“
Yes?”

“
This is Sergeant Sam Fetch. Congratulations on your safe landing. You’ll be taking orders from me now.”

“
I think Grimes crashed the helicopter.”

“
It’s all part of the mission, Private Dressing.”

“
But why would he do that?”

“
Don’t ask questions.”

Smoke continued to billow up from the helicopter. I backed further away from it. A loud boom shook the ground as the helicopter exploded in a final ball of flame.

I backed into something.

I turned around and faced the enemy.

Twelve

I yelped.

The thing in front of me took off running across the cracked earth.

My heart hammered in my chest. I had only faced him for a minute and my brain struggled to process what my eyes had seen.

I guessed it was a person. It was built like a person. I was thinking it was male because it wore a small leather loin cloth type thing and didn’t appear to have breasts. The most remarkable thing about him was his skin. It looked like a lizard’s skin. Actually, it looked a lot like the ground, only covering a human.

“
What was that?” Fetch barked into my ears.

“
What was what?”

“
That sound.”

“
That was me.”

“
Are you okay? Did something startle you?”

“
Yes. I think I just saw the enemy. I think I bumped into him.”

“
Did you declare war?”

“
I didn’t really have the chance.”

“
What did they look like? Were there a lot of them? Did they get a good look at you? My God, man, you’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“
He looked like a lizard. And like a man. Like a man lizard. There was only one. I don’t know if he got a good look at me or not. I backed into him. I’m not sure how long he’d been standing there.”

“
Okay. Don’t panic. This is a good beginning.”

I looked all around. Except for the smoking heap of the helicopter, I couldn’t see anything. There was the brown, cracked ground and the deep blue sky. That was all.

“
I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do.”

“
First we’ll need you to do some reconnaissance.”