Subterrene War 02: Exogene (8 page)

Megan sighed. “She said that one of us, either you or me, were to be the group’s Lily. But she also said that the feelings you and I had for each other were an abomination, an insult to the Lord, and that one of us had to pay; if
I
paid the price, she said I could be the Lily. And that is why I took the punishment, Catherine, why I promised to end things between us. It wasn’t to protect you, it was so that I could have the honor, that I could be the one. A Lily. A mark. I took it from you, and I’m sorry.”

And for the first time, I didn’t mind the cold, didn’t feel the dust as it blew against my face and found its way
into my mouth so that no amount of water washed it from my tongue. I felt something. It took me some time to name it and I really didn’t know the word’s meaning, but it
seemed
to be the right one for that particular sensation. Not anger or resentment. It didn’t matter that Megan had stolen the role from me, taken a thing that once I might have wanted more than anything else in the world, because what value did the Lily have now? There were no Lilies among the dishonored and living. This new feeling was better than being honored, better than all I had felt for the past two years, and certainly better than what had washed over me for the last two days, and when the name for it finally crystallized, I smiled at her and said the words.

“Hope. It’s
hope
and faith. I became the Little Murderer to show everyone that I was better than the Lilies, better than you. And better than man. So we’re even.”

O
ne heard things in the tank. It started on training day, incipience, the day they inserted cables to shock us into a mental birth. The teachings raced through our minds in real time—small unit tactics, weapons, history, and devotions—on a six-hours-on, six-hours-off schedule, but to us hours meant nothing since we hadn’t yet been decanted and knew nothing but sleep and training.

My world outside of simulations was a deep orange, a thick gel which enveloped and kept me warm and which prevented me from seeing the atelier. But I
heard
. Voices surrounded the tank with song, a choir whose words were just loud enough to hear, and which swelled with promise until one day, after a rest period, I heard a different voice.

“Die,” it said.

My eyes popped open, met by the orange glow. At first I thought I had been dreaming.

“You are an abomination.”

Who are you
, I thought.

It sounded angry, and moved around me, never coming from the same direction. “I am an embodiment of hatred—of those you serve. You will be our tool, a thing, one pharmacon among many, to be exiled and spent so the rest of us can live. We will use you until you are withered and then nothing will be left except waste. You are the discarded.”

I have been chosen. To serve Him and there is no greater honor
.

“You have been chosen to learn the bare minimum.”

With that I felt a jolt of electricity, a moment of burn that shot through my brain and into my spine, forcing my back to arch until the electron flow normalized. The tank melted away. A classroom, in which my sisters surrounded me, replaced it and in front of us stood a new instructor whose face alternated between that of an old man and that of a grinning skull; none of my sisters seemed to notice.

The man’s voice was the same one I had just heard. “Combat suits will protect you in most environments. Embedded detectors will signal your heads-up display should the enemy try a micro-robotic, chemical, or biological attack. In the event of a micro attack, the ceramic and joint materials will provide you with at least ten minutes of protection, giving enough time for electronic countermeasures. In the event of chem-bio warfare, it doesn’t really matter. Your biochemistry is such that your immune system will almost instantly deploy enzymes or killer cells to neutralize harmful agents. If they don’t, the carapace is sealed anyway, and the filters will keep out anything bigger than molecules normally found in breathable air.

“That’s the good news.” The man turned from his holo-display and stared at me, a pair of horns sprouting
from the thick bone of his head. I tried turning away but something prevented it, forcing my eyes to look in his direction. “The bad news is that our intelligence reports indicate the Russians may have developed something new—an agent we haven’t yet been able to counter, and which they inject via special flechettes. It’s a full cell, synthetic, and is too big to pose an inhalation or percutaneous threat. The pathogen is capable of changing at will, overcoming any new defense your body develops, and eventually causes your flesh to rot, your internal organs to hemorrhage. So one piece of advice: try not to get shot. If you do, at the first sign of infection, amputate at least a foot above the wound site because we think for now that the organism spreads slowly.

The man smiled, and I sensed that his next message came only to me.
“If you ever run from us,”
he said,
“we will find you.”

A distant boom of thunder yanked me from the memory, pulled me back to the Uzbek reality, and I gently traced a gauntleted finger across the back of Megan’s neck. I had noticed it yesterday. She tried to hide what had happened, but during the Tamdybulak engagement, several flechettes had pierced Megan’s right hand and now it gave more trouble than it should have. When a fresh drop of blood fell from a tiny hole in her gauntlet, I worried—that maybe she had been infected.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Should we go in?”

I shrugged, fingering the zoom control outward to get a better view. “I don’t know.”

Prefab ceramic slabs and domes formed the farmhouse’s main structure, lending it an Arabic appearance. Its roof glinted white in the sun. Around the building,
tufts of tan grass swayed, and I realized as we stood there that it had already gotten warm, that for a moment spring had arrived so the grass reached a height of almost one and a half meters, rising to our chests and forcing us to stand for an unobstructed view.

Megan kept her attention on the sky while I focused on the farmhouse again, a gray trail of smoke rising from its chimney.

“It’s been days since we’ve seen any sign of our forces or theirs,” she said.

“I know.”

Megan cleared her throat. “You are worried. Why?”

“It’s not right. Everything else in the area is destroyed, why not this?” The static from my headset clicked off and on as my computer scanned the frequencies. “And who’s jamming us?”

“Shut it off and conserve power. Communications aren’t necessary anyway, not for us.”

We watched the house for another ten minutes and saw nothing.

“Let’s go,” said Megan.

It took five minutes to crawl to the farmhouse, and I looked around before Megan rose to approach the door. She cocked her head when it opened. Two Uzbek farmers—a man and his wife—hung from the ceiling by the neck, their tongues blue from suffocation, strings of mucous swaying in a breeze that we had let in through the doorway. Behind the farmers, the house had been ransacked. Tables and chairs lay smashed and it looked as if several waste pouches had been emptied over the wreckage, along with pieces of Russian armor and empty ration packs.

“Russian genetics?” Megan asked.

I popped my helmet to get a better view, and saw that boot prints had smeared a patch of dirt at the front door; I knelt to examine it. “We did this. Those are from our Special Forces.”

“Then they are looking.” Megan removed her gauntlet and I saw the red skin of her hand, streaked with white.

“You are infected?” I asked. “With the organism?”

Megan nodded, and threw her gauntlet to the floor.

The view from the windows showed nothing, except that desert and square plots of switchgrass surrounded us on all sides, and for the moment I felt exposed.
Obvious
. We shouldn’t have been there—anyone searching for us would naturally focus on the farmhouse—but I saw in Megan’s face that the infection had gotten worse and she needed rest indoors, out of the elements and without having to wear a helmet.

We didn’t bother to cut down the corpses.

“I thought a lot about what you asked me once,” said Megan, pointing at the swinging bodies. “About death.”

“What about it?”

Megan said nothing and began taking off her armor. When she had finished, she slid her combat knife from its sheath, handed it to me, and rolled up the sleeve of her undersuit. “That this is no way to find out what waits on the other side. Take care of my infection.”

The knife handle felt cold at first. Megan lay on the floor and shut her eyes, extending her arm toward me. The infection had begun to spread to her wrist, and I saw that portions of her fingertips had gone black, a whiff of rot making the threat more real.

There was no reason to hesitate. I chopped and she whimpered for only a moment before gaining control of the pain reflex, her blood clotting instantly.

Megan tied off the undersuit’s sleeve below the elbow. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

I picked up my carbine and headed for a small ladder that led to a hatch near the ceiling. “Lay down, you need rest. I will watch from above.”

I pushed through the hatch and secured it behind me before stepping onto the roof.

The sun had almost disappeared over the horizon, and its fading light cast a pink glow across the fields. As a wave of delirium washed over, it occurred to me that the countryside was beautiful, but the sight lasted only a few moments. Soon, a moonless night threw its dark shroud over us, and in the stillness I heard Megan snoring.

A distant formation of more than a hundred burning lights—white hot on my infrared sensors—streaked eastward, sending sonic booms to roll over the field. I almost woke Megan. But the aircraft passed well to our north before cutting sharply northeast, toward Kazakhstan, and disappeared quickly over the horizon. The moment of fear brought with it a memory of footprints and of the swinging bodies. I considered the explanations, calculating the probabilities before arriving at an answer.
“If you ever run from us, we will find you.”

We were being tracked. But for now there was nothing to do except wait, so that Megan could get some rest.

I hadn’t had time to enjoy the fact that she had changed. All night, while I stood watch, I kept smiling, unable to
believe that if we made it to safety we’d be able to stay together. Focusing on any one thing became difficult. Megan and I had taken the first step, running west, away from the war and away from our family so part of me felt happy—like there was nothing but hope and I couldn’t keep from laughing—but another part couldn’t fathom it. How would we survive? What would we do and where would we go? What else was life
but
war? For the time being my hatred and terror had subsided, had seeped deeper into my subconscious where I knew they both waited for the right moment to emerge—the correct conditions, their infinite patience providing them with a capsule that would never mold over or rust into impotence. And I wanted it to stay there, never wished for it to leave. They called me Little Murderer. It wasn’t just a name, it was me, an immutable fact of my existence and the substance of who I was, and no matter where we wound up, in war or peace, that was my purpose, my talent, and the only available vocation; it was an identity that
needed
hatred, and besides, the thought of getting rid of it never occurred to me because it was a leviathan, a thing that could at times be pushed aside momentarily, but never eradicated. How did you sweep away an elephant? To destroy it would require something momentous, a realization like this—that a Lily had fled from discharge. Such a world had never before existed and my darkest moments on the line had always been staved off by a recollection of immutable facts that any one of us could have recited, even when nearest to death. Lilies never spoiled, Lilies never faltered, Lilies were the purest among the pure, the trusted among the honorable, and so I had always thought Megan sure to die whether anyone wanted her to or not.
Corruption had never been a contingency. Yet even as my thoughts orbited this, began to spiral around the puzzle of how this could have ever happened, I set it all aside; the realization that she was with me pulled me back into the present and I hugged my chest with happiness, having to fight the urge to abandon my post and hold her. And hatred?
I would hold onto it too
, I decided.

Then the sun made the sky lighten. My muscles ached, and a lack of sleep had rendered me so tired that I almost missed it when a pair of lights flickered into view on the southern horizon, but my goggles zoomed in, forcing me to watch for a few seconds before I got up and ran toward the hatch. It took less than a second to slide down the ladder.

“They’re coming!”

Megan jumped up and began pulling on her armor with one hand. By the time we got her helmet on, the sonic boom shook the windows and both of us dove to the floor.

“There,” said Megan, pointing to a trapdoor in the kitchen.