Take No Prisoners (35 page)

Bonus Story #1

The Hard Stuff

We saw things in Falluja that no one should be expected to see and want to carry on living. People fused together by the flames, pregnant women with their guts splayed out and the unborn child among them, infants with their limbs blown away. All the time our superior officers kept telling us it was the insurgents who'd done this with their car bombs and their mortars, and all the time we knew they didn't even believe this themselves. We'd rained high explosives and incendiaries and hell upon these people. Some of them had probably been ready to kill us; the vast majority of them were just ordinary men and women and kids who'd been caught underneath the technology we'd let fall on them; none of them deserved what we'd done to them. What made it worse was that we all of us knew by then there was no real reason for us to have done any of it. We'd been lied into this place by people who used human beings' lives as rungs on a ladder of personal greed.

We moved forward through the smoke and the stink of burning masonry and people's flesh. Some of us threw up, some of us did terrible things to the occasional survivors we encountered, all of us had no expectations that we'd ever be the same again.

I don't remember anything about the moment when the ghosts of the dead took their revenge on me. Their tool might have been a home-made incendiary that somehow hadn't detonated earlier, during the bombardment. It could have been one of our own bombs. All I knew was that one moment I was probing through the smoking hinterlands of Hell, my rifle at the ready, and the next I was ... somewhere else, a place where there was nothing to be seen or sensed except the agony that devoured me. Every cell of my body had been replaced by a flame. The whitest heat of the fire was in my arms; from there it spread to fill everything.

Then there was a time when the world was a polychromatic fan of constantly shifting images, none of which made any sense at all even though they seemed like memories I might once have had. But this time of release couldn't last for long – never long enough – before the fire returned to claim me. There was a thunder in my ears that was either the roaring flames or my own bellows of pain and terror. Occasionally I had fleeting glimpses of faces that were trying to look kindly but succeeded instead only in looking routinely resigned.

Someone told me I was lucky still to be alive, to have all my senses and my "good looks" intact, but it was only later that I was able to stitch those words together, like someone painstakingly repairing a ripped piece of lace. At the time they were just stray torn threads that didn't seem to have any relation to each other, dancing along in a gale of raw heat. Then I was told, repeatedly, that I was going home. That didn't make sense to me either. Didn't these people realize I
had
no home? That all I had was that I
was
? I had no past, unless my past was an infinity of the fire that was the present. I wasn't a human being any longer, had never been. I was just a construct woven from filaments of everlasting pain.

But one more thing I didn't have was any words with which to say any of this. So I just carried on through the tunnel of eternity until at last I noticed things were different.

~

"Your trouble, Quinn," said Tania, "is that you're forever filling your head with all the things you can't do any longer. It makes you think there's nothing you
can
do."

We were sitting on the porch watching a late-Fall sun head toward the horizon. The sky was painting the tree-splashed hills the colors of toasted bread. It was the end of another day marked by little except the fact that I'd lived through it.

I made no reply to her. Most of the time I didn't.

"You should wipe those thoughts out of your head, Quinn," she continued, nodding as if I'd said something. She was standing with her hands on the porch rail, looking out defiantly toward the sunset. There was enough of a breeze to press her dress against her legs. "If you don't, you're letting them be the bars to the prison cell you've locked yourself into."

She turned to face me, and I tried to meet her gaze. I couldn't, so instead I looked down at my own arms, what was left of them.

The months had etiolated them. They looked like empty denim shirt-sleeves hanging on a line, one of them tucked up by the wind more than the other. The people with the resigned faces had saved my left arm down as far as the wrist, my right not so far as that, only to a few inches below the elbow. Freakishly, the explosion hadn't harmed the rest of me at all beyond a few superficial shrapnel wounds that had soon healed, leaving scars that looked like nothing more serious than long pale crinkly hairs plastered by sweat to my skin. My "good looks", as the medics had called them, were still the way they'd always been, except for the waking nightmares that seethed behind my face.

I didn't have much use for mirrors, but sometimes Tania made me look into them as she shaved me, or trimmed my hair, or brushed my teeth.

As the sun came into laborious contact with the cut-out hilltops I spoke at last.

"Time for a drink," I said as I always did this time of evening. "An aperitif. Fuck the meds."

Tania slapped her hands against her cotton-covered thighs and let out a gasp of exasperation.

"Have you been listening to a single word I've been saying?"

"Yes. You've been telling me I should look on the bright side, think positive, all that."

She sighed.

It was a constant bone of contention between us, like my refusal to wear the clumsy prosthetic hands I'd been given, which lay in their box upstairs. If I wanted a more sophisticated pair we were going to have to find the money for them – a lot of money for them – from somewhere. All the government would spring for were lumps of pink plastic that looked ridiculous because of their color and chafed my stumps to agony within minutes. That was what the country could afford, they said. There were, after all, tax breaks to pay for.

"But I'm a stupid self-pitying bastard," I said, "so I just carry on wallowing in my misery and bitterness, or dreaming up crazy schemes about what I'd like to do to the fatcat fuckers who made me like this." I raised my shorter arm, the one that seemed always to be wanting to hide itself within the sleeve of my teeshirt. "The trouble is, I can't nuke Crawford, Texas, and fry Il Buce and the Stepford Wife alive because how the fuck without any fingers could I set the" – I formed the word fastidiously – "
device
? I can't strangle Rumsfeld in his own intestines, which is what I'd dearly love to do, because he hasn't left me with any hands to strangle him with. As for those fuckers Darth Cheney and Kindasleazy ... So all I have left is talking about how I'd like to do every one of those things and more, and getting my jollies by dreaming about those bastards' screams and them begging for a mercy I won't give as they choke on their own severed genitals, because every time I ask you for your help making my dreams real you just look disgusted or your face twists up in pain or you pretend you've not heard me, which is probably the worst and cruellest thing you could do to me. And somehow in the middle of all that I can't find room to cram in a Dale Carnegie course on encouraging my positive thoughts."

It wasn't one of my longer speeches. I was just getting started. I could go on for hours, when the spirit took me, detailing the medieval tortures I wanted to inflict on the shits who'd stolen my hands and put me here.

"I'll get you that beer," said Tania, heading for the screen door. "And something a bit stronger for myself," she appended under her breath, thinking I couldn't hear her.

She came back out a few minutes later and plonked the beer down on my chair arm. In her other hand she had something cheerily red and toxic-looking with a parasol sticking out the top. My beer was in a plastic beaker with a screw-on top and a straw. The condensation wouldn't form properly on the plastic sides, which looked blotchy and diseased rather than enticingly misted. Nonetheless, I bowed my head and sucked and the liquid was tart and cold, like the ice no one had been able to put on me when the fire possessed me.

Tania flopped into the other chair on the porch, and let her free hand dangle as she took a sip – a gulp – of her drink. Two chairs were all we needed out here these days because we didn't have visitors very often any more, and most of them didn't want to stay long. I thought it was because they were sickened or embarrassed by my deformity. Tania thought the same, only it was different deformities we were thinking of.

Dad didn't come here at all, now. A soldier without hands isn't a soldier any more. He'd made himself forget about me.

"I'm taking you away on a trip," she announced abruptly in an alcohol-colored voice.

"Yeah. Right. Another psych checkup by those terribly nice people at Newark General?"

"Nope." She put her glass carefully down on the armrest of her chair and stared at it. "I'm taking you to see my folks."

That caught my attention. Her folks hadn't come across from Scotland for the wedding, although they'd sent a bunch of tartaned ethnic objects for us to fill the attic with. We'd kept planning to go over to what Tania called, with a curious twist of her lip, "the old country", but somehow as the years passed we'd never gotten around to it. And then, of course, there'd come my Iraq posting, the murderer of all plans, real or otherwise.

I looked at her, questioning.

"I think I need their help," she said. She was still staring at her half-emptied glass of red stickiness. For once she seemed doubtful of her words.

"Their help with
you
, Quinn," she added, as if the glass didn't know already that this was what she meant. "I've booked us tickets for Friday. Return tickets from Newark to Glasgow. We're going for a week, just over."

"You didn't think this was something we should discuss?" I said, purely for the sake of saying it. She was the one who took my decisions for me – I was happy enough about it, because it was one less thing for me to make a mess of. But that didn't mean I couldn't voice a few words of false independence from time to time.

"I knew you'd just argue about it for days, so I thought I'd pre-empt you."

She winced. "Pre-empt" wasn't the most popular of words around our house. She gave a flutter of her hand as apology, then took another swig of her drink to distract my attention.

"I think it's a good idea," I said, surprising her. "I just wish you'd asked me first."

She grinned at me, for the first time in days. For the first time in weeks or years, I managed a grin back.

"Just remember who's the boss, woman."

"Yes, boss."

My good mood was covered over by the usual black tar before she'd finished the second word. I stood nine inches taller than her, but she'd be the one carrying the baggage or struggling with the trolley. I wondered how many times during the trip I'd reach instinctively with my left arm toward my inside right jacket pocket for the tickets or the passports or the money before realizing that of course these days they resided in Tania's pocket, not mine. I wondered how many times I'd force that embarrassed little "silly me, it doesn't really matter, honestly" laugh for the benefit of the people around me.

I didn't say anything more that evening until after she'd led me inside and fed me fried chicken and microwaved sweet potatoes followed by praline caramel ice cream, and then taken me into the bathroom and unzipped my trousers and pulled them down around my knees so I could have a shit.

When I finally spoke it was just to say thank you after she'd wiped my ass for me.

The one time I wished my pride would take a holiday so I could use my cheap, wrongly colored, hated prosthetics.

~

My dad made it to be a five-star general, unlike his farm-laborer father before him. Dad wanted lots of sons who'd all make it to be five-star generals, so the family tree would glow in the night like some spiral galaxy and impress the hell out of the Hubble Telescope.

It didn't turn out that way, because my mother never properly recovered after giving birth to me. I have vague recollections of the smell of soap and soft skin and summery cloth; there are other memories, too, of the smells being not so good, but by then my father had decreed it was probably best if "his little man" were kept out of the sickroom. Clear as a color photograph in my head is what I saw when, at the age of three and a half, I was held aloft for one final look at my mother, framed by the oblong of her coffin. I gazed down at the face of a stranger who bore a casual resemblance to someone I'd once known.

Dad never married again. He had a succession of lady friends, one or two of whom he succeeded in coaxing out of their military uniforms when he thought I was asleep. But their visits were few and far between. Mainly it was just him and me.

And his ambitions for me. If he couldn't have a passel of sons, then the one son his weak vessel had borne to him should fulfil a passel's worth of his dreams. I was a soldier from even before my mother died. I could get my bedclothes as tight as a drumskin by the time I was five.

Tania shouldn't have found me, but she did. Why her eyes ever alit on the stuffy youth with the micrometer-precise haircut, whose personality was hardly more than the uniform he wore, is something I've never been able to fathom. But she bubbled up to me at my cousin's wedding and introduced herself, asking me if I agreed with her a cow had probably sneezed into the vol-au-vents. Young women were a slight mystery to me at the time, although I'd read all the usual magazines, gazing with a sort of astonished fascination at the glistening revelations; and so I didn't know quite what to do with myself during that first conversation. But she was persistent, and without my ever understanding quite how it had happened I had a date with her the following week.

The years didn't change Tania. The faint accent she had, which wasn't so much an accent as a startling lack of one, never went. She had a face you'd dismiss as nothing special, really rather plain, except that at the same time you'd find yourself thinking it was maybe the most beautiful face you'd ever seen. Around that oval hung straightish blonde or muddy-mousy hair that was either lank or ethereally fine, like the flimsy webs that billow across the blackness between the stars. Her eyes were green, or perhaps brown, or perhaps even darker than that. Her skin was pallid; her skin was deliciously porcelain-pale. I wasn't so dazed during our first meeting that I didn't notice, with the highly trained reflexes of military men everywhere, that she significantly lacked the generous frontal rations enjoyed by the women in the magazines. Curiously, this made her seem far more feminine than they were.