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Tripwire unzipped the hitman’s parka. Beneath his thermal vest, the left-hand side of Zippo’s chest was lumpy, as if shards of broken glass had been inserted beneath the skin. The hitman shifted. Things ground inside his chest, bone against bone, bone against organ. His torso felt like it was packed full of thumbtacks.

“Yeah,” Tripwire said. “Three greensticks, maybe more. Also a dislocated shoulder.”

“Do what you do,” Oddy told him.

Tripwire cracked the M-5 kit. He loaded Zippo up on streptomycin for the pain and penicillin to stay infection. “I could give you morphine, Zippo, but you’d be fuzzed out of your mind.” The hitman shook his head, grimaced, and said, “No morphine.” Tripwire removed Zippo’s thermal vest and braced his left shoulder against the tree. Zippo’s dislocated clavicle bone pressed against the skin, the knob looking like a gold ball.

“I’m gonna pop it back in,” Tripwire said. “It’ll hurt like fuck.”

“Get to it.”

Instructing Oddy to keep a firm grip on Zippo’s right shoulder, Tripwire went behind the tree and gripped Zippo’s left shoulder from the opposite side.

“One…two…
three
.”

Jerking hard on his shoulder, Tripwire popped Zippo’s shoulder-bone back into its socket. It re-located with a crisp
pop
. Zippo screamed. Tripwire wrapped the hitman’s chest and shoulder in Ace bandages before helping him into his vest and parka.

“You going to be okay?” Oddy said.

“You lead, Sarge,” Zippo said, “and I’ll follow.”

“Let’s get at it, then.”

They cut across a steep downhill grade leading to the lake’s shore. Great Bear stretched for miles, covered in a white pane of snow. The trees of the far shore were pinprick spires. The men pulled on the snowshoes and set off. The snowshoes took some getting used to: to compensate for their width, the men were forced to adopt an awkward bowlegged gait. Their breath puffed out in great white plumes. It had been over twelve hours since they last rested.

Tripwire pulled up beside Oddy. He shook two Luckies from the pack, lit them, passed one to Oddy. “Absurd, isn’t it?”

“What’s that, son?”

“Us. Here. Life. The universe.” Tripwire exhaled smoke through his nostrils, smiling.

“Hmmm,” Oddy said. “Yeah. Absurd.”

“But don’t you also feel a bit like…I don’t know, like this feels so…”

“Right?”

“
Exactly
,” Tripwire said, clapping his hands together. “I feel
right
out here. I mean, no question I’m scared as shit—but it’s not
bad
. It’s like I belong here, and this was something I was meant to do. And it’s wrong, I know—Christ, Crosshairs is gone—but I can’t help it.” He looked away, ashamed of the admission. “You know?”

“Sure I know, son. Think about what brought us together in the first place—the fact we’re good at destroying things. The army saw it before we saw it in ourselves. We were born into this, born to fight and to kill…and, on some level, to enjoy it.” He took a long hard drag on the Lucky, inhaling so deeply its coal flared like a neon sign. “If the war hadn’t found us, we would have found the war. And if not ’Nam, then some other conflict.”

Tripwire puffed contemplatively, cigarette smoke curling around his manicured fingernails. He’d had them done a week ago at an East-LA esthetique, clipped and filed, the cuticles buffed. Now there were bits of a vampire’s face underneath them. “Some shitty birthright, isn’t it? Like we’ve been bred, bred from the
cradle
, to be what we are.” He looked at his hands, detached, as if they were not a part of him. “And isn’t it strange how we all came? None of us married, no families, all of us needing, for one reason or another, to accept Grosevoir’s proposition.”

Oddy licked his thumb and pointer finger and extinguished the cigarette’s heater between them. “You think it’s fate, son—destiny?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, I think, could be—”

“I think it’s fate. No other way to explain it.”

After a moment, Tripwire said, “Yeah. So do I.” There was a grimness to his voice, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of the inevitable. “More of us are going to die before this thing’s over, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know, son.”

Somewhere on the lake’s far side a great noise arose. The men turned their heads. In the distance, carrying over the lake’s frozen plate, the sound of snapping wood. Not twigs. Not branches, even.
Trees
. They were being broken low, near their bases, two-foot-thick trunks shattering like dandelion stalks.

“Jesus Christ…” Tripwire whispered.

A massive shape moved through the forest skirting the lake. Silhouetted against the permanent dusk, its immense frame towered above the trees. Its arms, which may or may not have been covered in matted fur, swung loosely at its sides. Its legs, each twice the size of a stabilizing support on an offshore oil rig, covered two-hundred yards in a single stride. Birds massed in a loose halo above its head; its hand occasionally rose to brush at them in an agitated manner. Although it was difficult to tell, Oddy thought he saw human-sized creatures clinging to the massive beast’s back, sides, and chest. They scuttled across its shoulders or rode the hillock-sized knobs of its spine or simply clung for dear life wherever purchase could be found. Zippo craned his neck upward in an attempt to take in the thing’s head. He saw two red pits, each the size of a swimming pool, where its eyes should be. Its smell carried across the lake: wood sap, smoke, carrion. The men stood stock-still, willing themselves invisible, until the shape ambled from view.

“Of all the times to be without a camera,” Zippo said finally. “Ripley’s would’ve paid big money for a snapshot of that thing.”

They hiked for another hour before breaking for grub. The portable stove had been lost during their flight from the vampires, so they tore the dried food packets open and ate the contents with their bare hands. Dehydrated shards of beef cut the insides of their mouths, rock-hard kernels of corn shattered between their teeth like jawbreakers, bullion powder gritted on their tongues. Zippo cracked open four tins of fruit salad and passed them around. The men ate greedily, silently, hands and mouth smeared with sweet syrup.

“Sarge,” Tripwire said once they’d finished. “You tell me to, I’ll get my ass up and hoof it until I keel over dead. But I really wouldn’t mind a bit of a rest.”

Oddy glanced at Zippo out of the corner of his eye. He was looking pale and had been coughing up gobs of blood throughout the meal. “Okay. We got good sightlines here—nothing’s going to sneak up on us. Take a break.”

Answer retrieved four flares from his pack. He snapped them alight and set them around the encampment. Tripwire collected the empty fruit salad tins.

“Give me your fishing rigs,” he said.

Tripwire took the tins and the fishing line and walked out to where the flares had been set. He scooped a hole in the snow, into which he deposited a tin. He unhooked four grenades and tied fishing line to the pins. Then he placed the grenades into the tins and played line out until he was back with the others.

“A little boobytrap,” he said. “We see anything coming, I yank the line, pull the pin, and…” he placed his fist in front of his mouth, made a
pop
sound, and opened his hand. “…boom.”

“Nice idea,” Answer said. “But won’t the explosions crack the ice?”

Tripwire frowned. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

Oddy said, “Well, we can all swim.”

They stretched out on the snow. Oddy was somewhat alarmed to find he could not feel his feet: his toes felt like knobs of wood knocking against the insides of his boots. Frostbite, or just poor circulation? Fuck it. If he got out of this alive he’d have them chopped off and replaced with solid gold prosthetics.
Goldfoot
, he thought.
James Bond’s newest adversary.

“So,” he said, “what are you boys spending your take on?”

Tripwire smiled. This was a variation on a game every dogface and flyboy and ground-pounder played in ’Nam. The game was called “What Are You Gonna Do When You Get Home?” For some soldiers it was all about food: they were going to eat a garbage pail full of French fries, a rain barrel full of soft shell crab, a T-bone steak the size of a manhole cover. For others pussy was the passion: they were going to fuck homegrown bush till their jimmies waved a white flag.

For Oddy it was music. He’d just wanted to crank up the Hi-Fi, a little Chubby Checker or Ray Charles’ “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” snug on a pair of headphones and float away with the tunes. For Tripwire it was movies: sitting in the balcony Aladdin theater with a tub of hot buttered popcorn, feet cocked up on the balcony rail and some old film—
The Maltese Falcon
maybe, Bogart as Sam Spade—flickering on the screen. And, if he was lucky, perhaps there’d be some sweet young thing to throw his arm around. Heaven. The purpose of the game was simplicity itself: it provided hope. And in ’Nam, hope was the most valuable currency going—sometimes it was enough to get you through. Not always. But sometimes.

“How does this sound, Sarge,” Tripwire said. “I take that dough and make the porno to end all pornos. We’re talking A-List cast—Seka, Marilyn Chambers, Amber Lynn, Annie Sprinkle, Linda Lovelace, the whole starlet constellation.” Tripwire cracked his knuckles against his chin, warming up. “Here’s the setup: the year is 2020. The world has been ravaged by nuclear destruction. The only survivors are a group of super-hot models who’ve constructed an impregnable fallout shelter—”

“The fuck are supermodels doing building fallout shelters?” Zippo said.

“You’re watching a movie with your pants around your ankles, tugging at your pud, and you’re going to give a shit about logic?” Tripwire shot back. “Now, five years have passed since Armageddon. The chicks are down to their last can of SPAM, clean out of tampons, horny as fruit flies. They’ve been dyking it out for years and are starved for pole. Lo and behold, a knock on the door.”

Oddy said, “That pizza they ordered five years ago?”

“Better. A platoon of marines searching out any survivors. But the fallout has mutated their bodies in the most interesting way: their cocks are
massive
.”

“How fortunate for them,” Answer said.

Zippo said, “If that’s what radiation poisoning does, I’ll start hanging around nuclear test sites.”

Tripwire said, “We’re talking foot-long hogs here, thick as pop cans—”

“Ah, come on,” Zippo said. “No man’s got a hose that big.”

“You kidding?” Tripwire said. “Couple weeks ago a kid walked into my office. Face like a fucking bear trap, wicked case of acne and little niblet teeth like mongoloids got, but then he doffed his pants and—” Tripwire held his hands a jaw-dropping distance apart. “—to his
knees
. I mean, I don’t got a pussy and
I
was scared.”

“Oh,” Zippo said. His hand dropped to his crotch and gave it a self-conscious squeeze.

“So,” Tripwire continued, “the soldiers tell them Earth is uninhabitable. The chicks say no problem, ’cause they’ve built a spaceship capable of light speed—”

“A fallout shelter
and
a spaceship,” Oddy said. “These are some
super
supermodels.”

“You’d think they’d have spent their time inventing more effective vomiting techniques,” Zippo said. “Or perfecting the art of walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.”

“I’m ignoring you,” Tripwire said. “So they hop into their space shuttle, which is decorated tastefully, with a lot of lounging chaises and throw pillows and balloons—”

“But of course,” said Answer.

Oddy said, “How could it be otherwise?”

“Christian Dior eat your heart out,” Zippo said.

“—and, as the only remaining humans, their duty is to propagate the species—”