Whistling Past the Graveyard (22 page)

“Couple times.”

“I get that,” she said. “I get that a lot.”

I waited.

“That’s why I need you to tell me that this is all really happening; or am I lost inside my own head?”

I turned to her and touched her arm. “I wish to Christ and the baby Jesus that I could say that you’re just tripping. Having a dry drunk, or whatever you’d call it. A flashback—whatever. But…I ain’t a drunk and I never shot up, and here I am, right with you. Right here in the middle of this shit.”

Talia closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on the backs of the hands that clung so desperately to the rail. “Ah…fuck,” she said quietly.

I felt like a total asshole for telling her the truth.

Then Talia stiffened, and I saw that she was looking past her hands. “What’s that?”

“What?”

She pointed over the rail. “In the water. Is that a log, or…?”

Something bobbed up and down as the current swept it toward the bridge. It looked black in the moonlight, but as it came closer we could see that part of it was white.

The face.

White.

We stared at it…and it stared back up at us.

Its mouth was open, working, like it was trying to bite us even as the river pulled it under the bridge and then out the other side. We hurried to the other side and stared over, watching the thing reach toward us, its white fingers clawing the air.

Then it was gone. A shape, then a dot, then nothing.

Neither of us could say a word.

Until the next one floated by. And the next.

“God, no…” whispered Talia.

We went back to the other side of the bridge.

“There’s another,” I said. “No…two…no…”

I stopped counting.

Counting didn’t matter.

Who cares how many of them floated down? Two, three hundred? A thousand?

After the first one, really, who cared how many?

Talia and I stood there all night, watching. There were ordinary civilians and people in all kinds of uniforms. Cops, firemen, paramedics. Soldiers. I wished to God that I had a needle of heroin for her. And for me.

We didn’t tell the others.

-10-

I’m not sure what time the bodies stopped floating past. The morning was humid and there was a thick mist. It covered the river, and maybe there were still bodies down there, or maybe the fog hid them.

We stood there as the fog curled gray fingers around the bridge and pulled itself up to cover everything. The wall of sandbags, Joe Bob, the sleeping figure of Farris, our gear. All of it.

Talia and I never moved from the rail, even when it got hard to see each other.

“They’ll come for us, right?” she asked. “The Lieutenant? The supply truck? They’ll come to get us, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said. She was a ghost beside me.

“You’re sure?”

“They’ll come.”

And they did.

It wasn’t long, either, but the sun was already up and the fog was starting to thin out. Talia saw them first and she stiffened.

“Sally…”

I turned to look.

At first it was only a shape. A single figure, and my heart sank. It came down the road from the direction our truck had come, walking wearily toward us from the Jersey side. In the fog it was shapeless, shambling.

Talia whimpered, just a sound of denial that didn’t have actual words.

“Fuck me,” I whispered, but before I could even bring my gun up, the fog swirled and I could see the mishmash stripes of camouflage, the curve of a helmet, the sharp angles of a rifle on its sling.

Talia grabbed my arm. “Sally? Look!”

There was movement behind the soldier, and, one by one, shapes emerged. More camos, more tin pots.

More soldiers.

They came walking down the road. Five of them. Then more.

“It’s the whole platoon,” Talia said, and laughter bubbled in her voice.

But it was more than that. As the mist thinned, I could see a lot of soldiers. A hundred at least. More.

“Damn,” I said, “they look bone-ass tired. They must have been fighting all night.”

“Is it over?” she asked. “Have we beaten this goddamn thing?”

I smiled. “I think so.”

I waved, but no one waved back. Some of them could barely walk. I could understand, I felt like I could drop where I stood. We’d been up all night watching the river.

“Talia, go wake up Farris and tell Joe Bob to look sharp.”

She grinned and spun away and vanished into the veil of fog that still covered the bridge.

I took a second to straighten my uniform and sling my rifle the right way. I straightened my posture and stepped off the bridge onto the road, looking tough, looking like someone who maybe should get some sergeant’s stripes for holding this frigging bridge. Army strong, booyah.

I saw Lieutenant Bell, and he was as wrung out as the rest of them. He lumbered through the fog, shoulders slumped, and behind him were gray soldiers. Even from this distance I could tell that no one was smiling. And for a moment I wondered if maybe this was a retreat rather than a surge. Shit. Had they gotten their asses kicked and these were the survivors? If so…Bell would have his ass handed to him and I wouldn’t be going up a pay grade.

“Well, whatever,” I said to myself. “Fireteam Delta held the bridge, so fuck it and fuck you and hooray for the red, white, and blue.”

A breeze wandered out of the south and it blew past me, swirling the mist, blowing it off the bridge and pushing it away from the soldiers. The mass of gray figures changed into khaki and brown and green.

And red.

All of them.

Splashed with…

I turned and screamed at the top of my lungs. “
TALIA! Joe Bob, Farris!
Lock and load. Hostiles on the road…”

The breeze had blown all the mist off of the bridge.

Talia stood forty feet from the wall of sandbags. Her rifle hung from its sling, the sling in her hand, the stock of the weapon on the blacktop. She stood, her back to me, staring at Joe Bob.

At what was left of Joe Bob.

Farris must have heard something. Maybe a sound I made, or Talia’s first scream. He froze in the midst of lifting something from Joe Bob’s stomach. Some piece of something. I couldn’t tell what, didn’t care what.

Farris bared his teeth at us.

Then he stuffed the thing into his mouth and chewed.

Where he wasn’t covered with blood, Farris’s skin was gray-green and veined with black lines.

Behind me I heard the shuffling steps of the soldiers as the first of them left the road and stepped onto the bridge.

Talia turned toward me, and in her eyes I saw everything that had to be in my own eyes.

Her fingers twitched and the rifle dropped to the asphalt.

“Please,” she said. Her mouth trembled into a smile. “Please.”

Please.

I raised my rifle, racked the bolt, and shot her. She was never a pretty girl. Too thin, too worn by life. She had nice eyes, though, and a nice smile. The bullets took that away, and she fell back.

I heard—
felt
—someone come up behind me.

Some
thing.

Probably Bell.

I turned. I still only had two mags. Less three bullets.

There were hundreds of them.

I raised my rifle.

Author’s Note on “Clean Sweeps”

My first-ever short story was
Pegleg and Paddy Save the World,
which will be included in
The Wind Through the Fence and Other Tales
, a companion to this volume. My second story was the Sherlock Holmes tale contained herein. But
Clean Sweeps
was my third story, and it was my third genre. With short fiction you get to jump around a lot, trying new things, having fun, growing as a writer, reaching new readers, driving headlong into new territory.

The genre for this story is ‘military science fiction.’ Spaceships and combat. I had some wicked fun with this one.

-1-

Cloaking devices are
science fiction. Relics of old
Star Trek
shows from the last century. We don’t have cloaks, we never had cloaks. And we don’t have any chameleon circuits or shit retroengineered from alien craft.

What we got is stealth technology. We got LOT—Low Observability Technology. It doesn’t make our birds invisible, but it pretty much makes the radar and motion scanners look in the wrong place, or misunderstand what they’re seeing. We can look like a big black hole in the middle of the sky. We can look like space junk. Or, we can look like feedback and sensor static. I always liked LOT that makes us look like static because most of the stations have been out here so long that their systems are older than dinosaur shit. Most of what they see nine to five is static.

That works for me. It keeps us from getting shot out of the black before we can put boots on the deck.

We tune our LOT systems to read the static backwash from the sensor arrays of any ship or base we approach, and then the computers work out some kind of math wizard fluctuating algorithm that matches the normal radio wave crap the universe has been kicking out since the big balloon popped.

Surprise always helps, but we didn’t know how much of that was on our side. We were hoping to surprise the shit out of
them
. I’m a big fan of catching the bad guys with their dicks in their hands. Makes for a better raid.

Yeah, I know what the press says. WorldNews and SolarAP both have this thing for firefights—which they insist on called ‘shoot-outs’—like we’re the O.K. fucking Corral. Army PR sends them maybe six to eight mission video files a month, but do the clean sweeps ever make the Net? Nope. Not a one unless it’s a god damn slow news day in the middle of August, where they’ll report on crop growth or dig up some old celeb for a ‘where are they now?’ space filler.

But somebody pulls a trigger and it’s a breaking story. And these news fucks don’t give a red hot flying shit if it’s a bad guy, a Federal Ranger, or one of our boys in Free-Ops that either fires the shot or takes the hit. Bullets and blood, man, that’s all they care about; and the bigger the body count the bigger the ratings.

We Free-Ops guys only ever get press if something goes wrong, so we’ve been on the news…what, maybe five times in four years? And of those, the first three were during the mine riots following the cluster-fuck with the unions. That whole thing took less than a week. Since then the only time Free-Ops made the news was back in ’93 when Captain Lisa Stanley got killed while her team was running down some pirates running the alley between Phobos and Deimos. I mean, come on, Stanley was killed when a stray shot hit an O2 tank in the airlock. I saw the official reports, and the conclusion I drew from it was that she probably tripped on one of the landing sleds the pirates used when they breeched the cargo ship. She tripped and popped off a round that bounced all over the airlock until it punched into the O2 tank. It was her bad luck that it was after they’d re-pressurized. Twenty seconds earlier there’d have been no spark, and no death, and no story.

The news jackasses made her a hero across half the Network. My guess? If Stanley hadn’t been a California blonde with yabos out to there the news people wouldn’t have run with it as long as they did. That and they’re always starved for action stories. There’s only so much mileage you can get from politicians making assholes of themselves or celebrities getting caught fucking the wrong wife.

The other time was a real firefight—excuse me, ‘shoot-out’—between my team and the Chinese hit team that tried to declare sovereignty over the New Tibet colony on Io. That one was a real ball-burner. My boys—Jigsaw Team—were on point, with Delta, Baker, and Zulu Teams on fast-follow and a squadron of Jackhammers giving close air support. The Chinese team was sharp, even I have to give them that. There were a lot of them, they were well armed, well-trained, and they weren’t afraid of us. No sir, not one little bit.

It wasn’t until we were on the ground that our forward spotters sent back the news that we were outnumbered and outgunned. Outnumbered like four to one, which can give serious pause even to a bunch of heartbreakers and life-takers like I got in Jigsaw. But by then we were in the pipe, riding the adrenaline high, breathing the helmet gas that triggered all those useful dopamine receptors. We were juiced and jazzed, and when the smoke cleared we had a whole lot of dead Chinese. And some dead Tibetans, too, but what the fuck could we do? The Chinese hid among the colonists, and they even put Tibetans in their own uniforms. We shot anyone with a red star.

Here’s how the bullshit plays out, though. First the press are up our ass all the way through the raid. They’re doing advance stories on the men and women of Free-Ops. You know, those schmaltzy human interest things where they show vidcaps of the soldiers as kids, riding horses on the farm or taking their first EVA at Disney Lunar. Then during the battle they’re getting video-only live feeds from helmet cams. The brass didn’t let them hear our team chatter during the raid.

When the battle was over they spent two days canonizing everyone from the first wave of shooters down to the cooks in the galley of the drop ship. Heroes all.

Then they find out that three colonists took fire during the raid. Suddenly we’re reckless killers who can’t tell a friendly face from an enemy’s—and remember, we’re talking Chinese and Tibetans here, and everyone dressed the same. We’re fried by the press. It’s a great story, it kept the news feeds buzzing for weeks.

Then, when that cooled down they have the big clanking balls to ask if they can go on every other raid. And the fucking brass—
our
fucking brass—says yes.

Tells you everything you need to know about why I think the whole Solar System is populated with nutcases.

And, yeah…they’re on this run with us now. At least we don’t have it as bad as the Federals who have that weekly show. FEDS. You’ve seen it, where they do the fly-alongs with the Federals, following the busts with handhelds and helmet cams. Mostly busting mouth-breathing bozo drug runners or low-level pirates who are too stupid to know how to dodge a full-lit Federal wagon broadcasting siren calls on all frequencies. I ask you.