The Hatching: A Novel (7 page)

That was when he stole a key to one of the trucks. That was when he filled a bottle of water and tucked an apple and some
crackers into the pockets of his jacket. He thought about packing a bag, but on the way to work, only yesterday, he saw a man beaten to death by the soldiers. The man was in a car with his family, the trunk tied down to keep the bags from spilling out, and he’d stopped at the new gate that had been installed after the army fenced off the village. The gate was the only way out now. He’d heard the man and the soldiers exchange sharp words, and then, as he tried to glance over without being terribly obvious about it, he saw the man pulled from the car and beaten down with rifle butts. Even from a distance, it was clear the soldiers kept driving the metal into the man well past the point it was necessary.

All of which was why he’d driven the truck right through the gate without slowing down. He just plowed through the metal. All during that night there had been the intermittent sound of gunfire. At one point there was something from the direction of the mine that must have been an explosion. He couldn’t sleep, and then, finally, just after four in the morning, he crept from his apartment and snuck through the night. The streets and alleys were empty and dark, and the factory was quiet. There was no fence around the parking lot where the trucks were sitting, and the key was in his hand before he even noticed something was wrong.

There was a single light on at the corner of the building, and though the yellow bulb was strong, it wasn’t enough to do more than cast shadows over the parking lot. He suddenly wished it were brighter but tried to bury the thought. He knew he was just spooked from the stories and rumors and from the influx of soldiers and the new fence, from the sound of shots and explosions in the night. He should really calm down, he thought, and then he laughed to himself. Why should he calm down? Those all seemed good reasons to be spooked. He took the last few steps to the truck and had his hand on the door handle when he heard the sound. It
was a sort of scraping. No. Something quieter than scraping. Like the sound of a leaf being blown across pavement. Or several leaves. He looked around, but there was nobody there. And then he noticed there was something wrong with the light. No, not the light, but the shadows. Over there, maybe twenty paces away, one of the shadows seemed to be moving a little, pulsing. He watched it, fascinated, and it wasn’t until a thread of black seemed to fall out of the shadow and unspool toward him that he broke from his reverie.

He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t care. Even though he’d dithered on it, he realized he’d already made his decision the moment he stole the key to the truck, and he didn’t see any value in waiting to find out what exactly it was he’d decided to run away from. He pulled himself into the cab, and as he was jumping in, he felt something brush across the back of his neck and then his neck felt all icy. He swatted at it, and something small and solid banged off his hand. Then he was inside the truck, key in the ignition, foot on the gas, leaving whatever the shadow was behind him.

He drove carefully through the village, toward his sister’s apartment. He hadn’t told her about the plan. He knew she would have told her husband, and her husband wasn’t the sort of man who could be trusted with a secret. But he also knew that if he just showed up at the apartment with the truck, his sister would be able to persuade her husband to make a break for it. He didn’t like his brother-in-law very much, but the man was not completely stupid.

But as he turned onto his sister’s street, it was clear that things were more wrong than even he had thought. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed the glow from the portable lights, but once around the corner, the brilliance of the lights showed the street in stark relief. There were five or six army trucks already parked and dozens of soldiers running with rifles. He saw somebody down on the ground, but the artificial color of the lights
meant that it took him a few seconds before he realized the black pool around the body was blood. And up ahead, was that a tank? Oh my god, he thought. It
was
a tank.

Without even thinking about it, he turned the wheel and took the truck through the alley, turned the wheel again until he was headed out of town, mashed his foot against the accelerator and smashed his way through the gate. He was lucky that the soldiers had expected him to stop. They fired at him—the back window was shattered—but the truck seemed to be running fine and he hadn’t been hit. He was fine.

That had been an hour or two ago. He’d lost track of time. But if anything, now that he’d put some distance between himself and the village, he was more than fine. He was great. The back of his neck was bothering him where something had hit him in the parking lot, but he couldn’t see what it was in the mirror. He could feel a small bump with his fingers, maybe a cut, but it was more numb than sore. The real problem was his stomach. He could feel it roiling. He supposed it could be the flu, but more than likely it was just anxiety. Who the hell knew what he’d just escaped from, but he was pretty sure he was never going to see his sister again, never hold his nephew or his niece. He had to choke down a sob, and then he had to choke down another round of gagging.

He wasn’t fine.

But he was alive.

He dug the bottle of water out of his jacket pocket, fumbled with the cap, and took a swig. It felt good and seemed to settle his stomach for a minute, but then it happened again, another surge of nausea.

Maybe he would pull over, just for a couple of minutes. Give himself a chance to be sick by the side of the road. Then he’d feel better.

Suddenly, there was a brilliant light behind him. Like a camera flash. He glanced in the rearview mirror, but the light hurt his eyes. He looked forward again and realized he couldn’t see much more than the echo of the light. He slowed the truck down and then stopped it so he could rub his eyes. The light outside was already fading, and whatever it had been hadn’t damaged his vision. There were ghosts of the landscape imprinted on his eyes, but they were already swimming away. And there, again, the surge of nausea. This time he didn’t think he could keep it down, and he scrambled out of the truck.

As his feet hit the ground he turned to look back toward the village, toward where the flash of light had come from. But it wasn’t a flash of light anymore. It was a lick of fire lighting the heavens.

L
ance Corporal Kim Bock checked her rifle. Again. She knew there wasn’t any point, but this was the first time she was leading her unit in a live-fire exercise, and checking her M16 calmed her down. She’d trained with the M16A2 in basic, but she’d been issued the M16A4 once she made it out to California. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two rifles as far as she was concerned, at least not when she was out on the range. She did like that she could remove the carrying handle when they were in the middle of exercises.

She was crouching and trying to relax. The sun was a motherfucker, but it was okay in the shade. She’d played catcher on her high school softball team, and she could stay in a crouch for a long time without getting uncomfortable, but the three men in her unit were sitting down on the concrete slab. Private First Class Elroy Trotter had his eyes closed, and for all Kim knew, Elroy might actually be sleeping. He never seemed to get excited one way or the other. The joke was that even while having sex Elroy probably looked bored. The person who first made that joke, Private Duran
Edwards, was a black kid from Brooklyn who was a lot smarter than any of the other officers seemed to recognize, and Kim was glad Duran was in her unit. At first she’d had a bit of a thing for the third man, Private Hamitt “Mitts” Frank, but having him in her unit was like pouring water on a fire. Only smoke remained. She could see how the two of them might have ended up a couple in civilian life, but as part of a unit, it was different. They were a team. She was lucky. The whole crew was cool; none of them seemed to think it was a big deal that a woman was the fire team leader. She knew that early on, when the armed forces first started slotting women into combat units, there’d been some blowback. There’d been a couple of high-profile incidents in the army, but even in the Marines it hadn’t been all sweetness. Kim had still been in middle school when women were given equal status, though it was recent enough that some of the older generation still clearly hadn’t adjusted to Marines with tits in the line of fire. Elroy, Duran, and Mitts were her age, though, and they’d gone through boot camp with her. Maybe they secretly didn’t love the idea of taking combat orders from a woman in general, but since it was her, they were okay with it. They were familiar with Kim, and that made all the difference. Familiar with the fact that she was physically fit, able to compete with most of the men, familiar with the fact that she was smart and good at making quick decisions. They’d probably have accepted a different woman as their lance corporal, but it really did matter that they knew her. They trusted her to keep them safe.

Kim heard her name being called over the loudspeakers. “Okay,” she said to the unit. “We’re up in one. Remember, rifles on burst. Live fire, so extra careful here. Take your time and make good decisions. Quick action isn’t good unless it’s the right action.” The three men scrambled to their feet while Kim rose from her crouch and they all put their hands in, making a small pile
of different shades of skin. “Be smart,” Kim said, “be strong, be Marines.”

She loved the sound of the four of them shouting “Oorah!” and the way their hands shot down and up. Loved the feel of the M16 in her hands, the click as she flipped the rifle from safety to burst fire. She loved the way she looked in her utility uniform, surrounded by other Marines, and as she felt the first hit of adrenaline spiking through her chest, loved the way it felt to be a Marine. Her parents had never understood her fascination with it, still didn’t understand why she was in uniform while all her friends from high school were off at college, drinking beer in dormitories and getting date-raped at frat parties. Well, Kim was pretty sure that’s not the way her parents thought her college experience would have gone, but for Kim, college was something she would do only as part of the Marines. She’d wanted to be a Marine since they first started letting women into combat units, and from the minute she first put on a uniform and laced up a pair of boots she understood the saying, “Once a Marine, Always a Marine.”

They got the green light and funneled down the chute. Duran and Elroy split left, taking cover behind a concrete barrier, while she and Mitts went right, taking cover behind the corner of a building. This was supposed to be an urban environment, and she had to hand it to whoever had built the set. It felt like being in a city. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center might be in the middle of nowhere—the going nickname for Twentynine Palms, the city adjacent to the MCAGCC, was Twentynine Stumps, for its wonderful lack of fun stuff to do—but the training was great. The talk among the other Marines was that there was a reason the training had been intensified: they’d be boots on the ground in Somalia sometime in the next couple of months. Kim believed the rumors. If the increased schedules of training had been just for her
and the other green recruits, she might have dismissed the talk, but it wasn’t just the new Marines. Everybody had been gearing up.

She signaled for Duran and Elroy to cover, and she and Mitts hauled ass to the next barrier. Two civilian silhouettes popped up, and though she started to squeeze, she laid off the trigger. Then, as she saw Duran and Elroy leapfrogging past them, a target showed in the window of a building up ahead. Mitts didn’t see it—he was scanning low—but Kim swiveled and fingered the trigger. Set to “burst,” her rifle sent out three bullets with a single pull of the trigger, and she saw the target splinter and fall. Ahead of them, Duran and Elroy were already crouching and raising their weapons, but as she and Mitts started to rise to run forward, there was a voice over the loudspeaker.

“Cease fire. All Marines, cease fire. Lower weapons. Exercise terminated. Cease fire.”

Kim hesitated. Was this part of the exercise? She knew they occasionally liked to throw wrinkles in to simulate the unpredictability of real life in the field, but this seemed a little too self-referential for the Marines. Besides, the guys in her unit were already standing up and flicking their M16s to safe.

She rose, put her rifle on safe, and then looked at Mitts. “What the fuck?”

Mitts shrugged. “Who knows? I thought it was going well. We were moving nice. Good job with the shooting. Things were clean. Maybe somebody was still in the arena, one of the techs not all the way out before we started the exercise?”

Elroy and Duran wandered over, and though Duran had a dour look on his face, Elroy was his usual unflappable self. “Suppose we’ll have to start over,” Elroy said.

Kim sighed, because Mitts was right, they’d been doing a good job, and it was going to be hard to get themselves psyched up for
another go. She started to tell the unit to head back to the chute when the loudspeaker crackled on again. This time it let out a long, piercing siren. This wasn’t just for the arena. This was for the whole base. And then, when the voice announced that all units were ordered to report immediately, when it said “This is not a drill,” she got concerned. Not because of what “This is not a drill” might mean or not mean, but because, for the first time she could remember, Private First Class Elroy Trotter looked worried.

S
he was tired of the prospectors. Occasionally they’d come to visit her and ask her for information about the area, though she wasn’t sure exactly what they were looking to find. Other times they’d trade with her for one of her sheep, and once they invited her to share a meal. But they’d mostly left her alone. That had changed since she’d shown them the rocks that she brought down from the old cave she sometimes sheltered in if she was caught up on the pass.