Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (16 page)

“South. General Stinson is assembling the main force to move out at three a.m.; we’re going to attempt a breakout and I want to see the front before our boys head toward trouble.” He grinned at me then and lit a new cigar. “We have wonderful boys, Oscar. The best.”

“Sir, they’re spent. Most of them are too old or too young.”

“Hell. Look at me. You think
I’m
too old?”

I thought for a moment, the urge to zip up and check out beginning to fade with a new sense of
maybe-this-will-be-all-right.
“OK. Screw it.”

“You really have changed, son. I remember when we first met, you looked like a kid, a real rube, and now look at you. Ox would be proud. You’re a new-worlder whether you want it or not, and hell, all these boys are. I know what’s in your head, their heads, and don’t let that bother you, the doubts, the fear, the inevitability. Ignore it. That stuff, it comes and goes in war, and all you have to remember is this: Popov is no different. When they see our tanks and APCs charging down their throats, they’ll shit their pants, and I guarantee you, they’ll flinch. They’ll break and run.”

The general nodded and looked away, spitting a fleck of tobacco on the floor. “We’re going home. I’m getting our boys out of here, whether they’re Marines or not. All of them.”

The mountains rose on either side as our scout car wound its way up the road south, out of the city, and we wove through massive APCs and tanks that made the scout vehicle look like a toy, a rabbit in the middle of wild rhinos. The sun had gone down. Still, Kaz’s sky glowed orange and cast an even light over everything, making it spooky, because there were neither shadows nor the appearance of depth, which, when combined with the quiet tankers who leaned against their vehicles and smoked, watching us pass without a word, made the breeze seem a little colder. Gone were the smiles from the early war, the confidence that had infused everyone. This was a battle group already spent. And I sensed it in myself too, the terror kneading my gut no less than it had before, all the worse because I had no more options—no more drugs. The general lit a joint and blew smoke over his shoulder so that I smelled it, my thoughts a mix of
Should I ask for some?
and
Should I jump out and head into the mountains, make for Uzbekistan on my own, where one man might be overlooked, missed by Russian forces?

We stopped at the entrance to a national park, maybe the only one Kazakhstan had, and I recognized the place. Much of it had already been leveled, its alpine meadows stripped of trees and brush, the ground blackened from plasma barrages and littered with armor fragments.

The general must have seen me staring after we dismounted. “Many things happened here, son.”

“When?”

“Long time ago, back when we first lost Pavlodar and had to fall back; airborne held out in the park, made their last stand until we were able to mount a full counterattack, just after I found you on the plane.”

“I’ve seen pictures of this place, I think. Maybe when the war started, and it used to be beautiful.”

The general grunted. “Not anymore. And they disbanded the one hundred first airborne after the action. Only two hundred men survived out of a full division, and they just couldn’t replace it. Come on. Battalion HQ is this way.”

The general led me into the meadow, and in the open we felt exposed, all of us crouching and buttoning helmets as we jogged forward. Eventually the corporal disappeared into the ground, next the general, and then I saw a ramp heading down into the earth. The hole swallowed me. A few seconds later I had popped my helmet, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness of combat lamps in a wide concrete vault, its space filled with computers and men. The general and corporal had already found the line commander, and Urqhart was deep in conversation, so I found a quiet corner and sat, sliding to the floor to wait.

A few hours later, the general shook me awake and whispered, “Let’s go, son.
Move it.
”

“What’s going on?”

“Popov. He’s not waiting for us to attack.”

That woke me up. We sprinted from the command bunker and headed for the road, and I had to dive to the side to avoid being run over by a tank. At least a hundred of them lumbered past to head in the direction of Russian
forces, and their treads kicked up dirt and chewed wide divots into the ground, which almost tripped me once I got to my feet. Without warning, bright light turned the meadows white. It was as if a million camera flashes had gone off. I instinctively dove, landing next to the general just as the booms arrived. An intense heat cooked the back of my scalp, through the vision hood. Someone dragged me to my feet, and before I knew it, I was in the scout car again, the corporal speeding back down the mountain road until a plasma round detonated nearby, sending the car into the air. It was strange. Your mind went into overtime when something like that occurred, and deep down you knew that it was bad, but there was a detachment, as if it was happening to someone else, and when the car impacted, I felt nothing, flying forward at first and then bouncing around inside as it tumbled over and over. We had left the road. When the car stopped, I crawled from the wreckage and looked up the slope we had just rolled down, a steep ravine at the top of which was the park entrance, backlit by plasma rounds and explosions that even from this distance ripped the air from my lungs and forced wind up the mountainside, blowing so hard that I had to lean against it.

The general grabbed my arm. “We have to get back to Almaty, Oscar. Now.”

“Does it matter anymore? If they’re coming, they’re coming.”

“Half our armor is buying us time. The rest is falling back to cut off the southern approach to the city, and we need to get inside the new perimeter. There won’t be any breakout now.”

The hopelessness of it hit me in a wave. I stumbled
after him as we clawed our way back to the road, but there was no more energy, no goal, and although my legs moved, there was no will motivating them, so my flight was more a function of autopilot than any instinct for survival. None of it mattered. A glance over my shoulder showed men firing from holes in the ground only to be swallowed by plasma, and our tanks, their cannons bucking with each round, launched a continuous barrage against an enemy that remained invisible, somewhere beyond a bend in the valley. That made it worse. With no sight of them, my mind created a scenario in which an endless mass of Russians advanced, oblivious to our fire. They were supermen. Inhuman. And as I stumbled down the road after the general, I laughed at
my
inhumanity, realizing that not only had I given up the title of Oscar Wendell, but nobody would classify me even as an animal, because didn’t animals want to survive? The general turned at one point and spoke. But the words disintegrated in my ears and may as well have been a foreign tongue, only able to convey a sense of a question, something like
What the hell is wrong with you?
but they didn’t fully register, and I laughed all the harder. Whatever was wrong with me, did it matter? What did the general think he could do if I answered? Help me? All my experience of warfare had accumulated into a critical mass of horror so that “the present” transpired outside time, in some universe that made a second an hour and an hour a week, made the road stretch and elongate so that my legs moved in slow motion and would never get me to the safety of Almaty.

And once Almaty, what then? Ox and Bridgette had taken the easy way out, the path of least resistance, and
didn’t have to face the war anymore, and I whooped with a new energy, the realization that it wouldn’t be long now making me happy. I’d join them. My legs carried me past the general, faster now that my feet recognized what I had just begun to suspect—that we were all dead already, and that when it happened, the moment would be one of painlessness, of emptiness. I hadn’t felt anything when our scout car crashed; it was an epiphany. The scout car had taught me that when my moment came, I’d be ready, and I knew that it would be a happy event, a festival in which all trouble would be shed, all sadness and terror. It would be a moment—if that—of pain, maybe a millisecond of incredulity, and then freedom via death.

The sight of men surprised me. Endless lines of them guided fusion borers into steep dives or dug massive holes into which tanks had begun to inch, to bury themselves in a protective mantle of earth and rock, leaving only turrets exposed. It took a moment for me to realize that someone was in my face, screaming, pointing a pistol at my forehead.

“Your suit computer won’t sync, give me the fucking call sign,”
he said.

“I don’t get it. You don’t get it.”

He slammed the butt of his handgun against my chin and knocked me to the ground. “Who are you?”

“I’m all of it, man. Do it. Take me out, and then it’ll be cool because you don’t get it but I do, you don’t matter but I do. Take it down. You didn’t know her and now I’m nothing and let’s look into the abyss because once you do that you’ll see it’s all OK, that it’s just the way it is.”

“What?” The soldier looked up and then drew to attention so that I knew before hearing the voice, knew without turning around, that he’d saved me again.

“It’s OK, he’s with me, son. Where’s General Stinson’s HQ?”

The man pointed his pistol in the opposite direction, behind him, and I felt the general lift me by the shoulders, push me down the road and back into the Almaty rubble. The bubble burst then. I started crying and hung my head, wishing that it had ended back on the mountain, in the meadows that had once looked so beautiful and calm.

The general shook his head. “I didn’t know you were so far gone, Oscar.”

“I’m not gone. I’m here.”

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

I heard the blasts again, in the distance now, but when I looked toward the mountains, it was clear that the fighting had intensified, and even more plasma lit the sky. “They’re coming. They want us all, General, even you, even our dead. You said you’d get us out.”

“Not anymore. Now I just want to kill as many as I can before they kill us.”

“Not me; I just want to die, to go. It’ll be OK then. I know it. Let the Russians come in, General. Dying won’t be so bad.”

“Son, you don’t get it at all. They might not kill you, they might capture you. And that’s a hell of a lot worse.”

Just before we arrived at the command post, I looked around. “Where’s the corporal?”

“Dead. Decapitated in the wreck.”

We jogged down a ramp and back into the earth again, but the feeling of security that subterrene had once lent me was long gone, so that now the earth felt like a prison.

We felt them closing in. There wasn’t any moment that a historian would be able to point to, declaring with certainty that
this
was the instant Popov closed the circle around us, but we all sensed it happening, a feeling that made your hair stand up, and it took everything to keep from turning to jelly. Men sat at terminals in the command post and smoked nonstop and nobody chewed them out, because air handling didn’t matter anymore. The floor rumbled with far-off detonations. A digital map unit rested on the main wall and showed Almaty with friendly forces marked in green and blue and Popov in red, but nobody needed it; you felt the perimeter and the false sense of security it lent, because all those men had a nervous energy that pulsated and expanded, keeping you warm. The command post had been dug into rock, under the city center, and our forces assembled themselves into two concentric rings with us in the middle. I breathed a sigh of relief the one time I did look at the map, recognizing that some of the forces had survived the mountains—had dug in just at the edge of the park to keep Pops out of south Almaty.

My problem wasn’t just being trapped: I was a lunatic. I wanted drugs, anything to take the edge off and let me roll into a deep hole, escape the reality of our situation and get out—even though I wouldn’t
really
be out. But juicing up wouldn’t work and I knew it, because deep down the recollection of time in the mountain meadows, the wilderness after Karazhyngyl, all of it played in a continuous loop to remind me that getting lit would be just as useless as it always had been. I’d get high and then what? The comedown would be worse, darker with the added
benefit of knowing that nothing had changed except that I’d failed again. I swear to God that at that instant, with Pops encircling us and getting ready to attack, I didn’t worry about the Russians as much as I wondered how I would get through life without drugs, which
really
was a wacky thought. Like there would
be
a life beyond Almaty. The thought of spending my days with nothing to help me get by, like a normal person, made me cringe, because it didn’t seem possible.

A voice asked for volunteers to check different sections of the perimeter and I raised my hand. Not because I wanted the job. It was clear that someone else would have been better suited; I just wanted to do something, to get out of my head for once, because the thoughts never got brighter and the only way to escape was to escape them, to do
something
that would make me stop thinking.

The general handed me a new helmet and a carbine. “Take them.”

“I didn’t know I’d lost my helmet.”

“You left it in my car on the mountain. If this were another war, I would have made you climb back up and get it, but it doesn’t matter now. Take the northern section, from areas ten through fifteen. Just make for the Premier Hotel and then north on what’s left of Dostyk Avenue from there.”