Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (22 page)

“You speak Russian?”

“Kind of. My mom and dad were from Lviv, Ukraine. It’s close enough so they get it. I’m surprised after all this time that they still speak Russian here.”

A new sensation of respect crept in, and I grinned. “What are you, smart? How do you know about Uzbek history, or what they should or shouldn’t be speaking?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

“Where?”

“We aren’t attached to any unit. I wanna see if there’s an airfield and check if we can get a flight out to Bandar. I’m done with this crap.”

It had only just occurred to me: neither the kid nor I belonged with the Legion, and it might be possible to get out sooner than I had hoped. The dream of escaping seemed so far-fetched that I almost didn’t want to think
about it, but at the same time, it was irresistible, and as we walked quickly toward the nearest village with a renewed sense of purpose, I thought of little else. The Legion troops, who now headed in the same direction on foot, ignored us.

Units at Tashkent had done their job of holding back Popov so well that they had given retreating engineers more than enough time to build up this, our fallback position, which really encompassed the tiny villages of Bo’ston, Pahtakor, and Jizzakh, with the city of Samarkand at its center. As soon as we passed the outer markers, I felt a sense of calmness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Nothing would get through all this. The outer ring consisted of deep concrete-lined trenches with evenly spaced—and sealed—bunkers, and police units guided everyone through a narrow path marked with tape so that we wouldn’t step on any mines. We sensed the tunnels below. And we saw the tops of sentry robots, their emplacements causing them to resemble infinite rows of mushrooms, three deep and widely spaced.

Inside the perimeter there were even more civilians. Lines of them formed at stations where French soldiers handed out food or doctors examined Uzbek children, and as we passed in a group, a long line of Legion troops falling back from Tashkent, the people stared at us. But their looks were not of hatred. The looks were empty, emotionless, as though the Uzbeks were merely curious, the same way you’d be curious about a snake while you tried to figure out whether it was poisonous.

Closer to the center of town, we passed a huge parade field that had been enclosed by dual fences, one inside the other, and each barrier had been topped with multiple
rows of razor wire and laced with electrified lines. I stopped. The kid stopped too and we watched as the girls inside knelt and prayed, or exercised, or stood motionless inside the fence, looking back. They all had hair, and unsure of what to do in the face of such beauty, I felt my insides begin to churn.

“What’s up?” the kid asked. “They’re just genetics.”

“Yeah, but the fences.”

“Maybe they’re under arrest or something.”

An engineer heading toward the outer perimeter overheard us and stopped. “They’re past their service term. Command told us not to wipe them yet, because we might need them when it comes time to fall back into Iran.”

“Which way to the airfield?” asked the kid.

The engineer pointed to the south, shouting over the Legionnaires who kept marching past, all around us now. “Keep on this road and then head south on M-39. You can’t miss it, but it’s a hike. You’ll pass through Pahtakor and it’ll be on the right.”

The kid and I pressed on south through the town, which, once I saw past the people, struck me as ancient. Our group passed an old stone structure, outside of which sat old men, Uzbeks, dressed in cloth uniforms and holding rifles while they glared. Behind them the building rose from flat ground, and a deep blue dome capped it, so colorful that it made me remember things other than the war, a time when the sky had actually mattered for something besides the threats it sometimes held. This was the east. The men and whatever building they guarded made me feel suddenly out of place and foreign, because it was clearly holy and we trespassed here, unwanted. Our column, us and all the Legion troops, fell silent and we stared
back at the men, but I didn’t know what the others were thinking, and in an instant a feeling grew that I was a guest who had overstayed his welcome; it became all the more important to get to the airfield as soon as we could, or I might shoot the Uzbeks out of fear.

Outside the village the land was still flat, and I popped my helmet to feel the cold air of late fall, to smell the dusty wind that carried a stink of ore processing. I saw the cloud, not too far away. Even in our retreat, even when we were digging graves or latrines, the rocks and dirt didn’t go to waste; they waited in huge piles to be sucked dry of trace metals, anything that might, in turn, be fed into electronics or machines back home. In the quiet I heard it. Somewhere to our west, massive grinders crushed the rock that engineers had removed in digging our tunnels, after which it would be conveyed into the leaching shed and bathed in acid solutions to coax out the important stuff before discarding a poisonous sludge. When we left, what then? I imagined the Uzbek children playing in our abandoned tunnels—some kind of I-dare-you-to-go-as-far-as-you-can game in the darkness—armed with only a candle or a flashlight, going into the deep, where some or all of them might fall into a shaft and never see the light of day again.
Screw them.
I’d paid whatever price was required to walk through this awful country, and if those old men wanted to glare at passing soldiers, they could do it all day, all year, and their children could rot in hell.

When I came back to the present, I realized that we had moved onto the closest thing Uzbekistan had to a highway, and our column of troops stayed on the shoulder, allowing huge APCs to lumber past in either direction; an occasional tank passed, with its commander
hanging lazily from the turret and waving. They were all Legion—and happy. How was it they could be happy? I had been in Kaz for longer than I could remember, and surely some of them had been there as long, but few seemed to feel the same weight I did, and most walked easily, actually chatting. Each of the Legion troopers had a white stripe around the top of his helmet, and my brain screamed that it remembered the stripe’s significance, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the reference. The memory had been trapped, immobilized in the now-crystalline structure that was once my mind. There were no more stories from the past, recollections of my days as a reporter; there was only now.

“Why does the Legion have a white stripe around their helmets?” the kid asked, and I nearly laughed.

“I have no idea.”

“How much farther to the airstrip?”

“I have no idea.”

But it wasn’t much farther. We marched through Pahtakor, where the column thinned considerably as Legion sergeants—with black stripes instead of white—waved many of the men off the road and into positions, while allowing some to continue southward. It got lonely after Pahtakor. Those of us still on the road heard the wind more loudly now, and in such a flat place, without other troops surrounding you, you felt cold and exposed. But eventually we found the airfield and turned onto its access road.

On our way in, a stream of ambulances—commandeered local trucks that held wounded in their beds—roared toward us. The last one stopped and a doctor stepped from the driver’s seat.

“You two, you’re not Legion?” His accent sounded awful, French, and a cigarette barely clung to his lower lip.

“No.”

“Are you assigned to the airstrip?”

“No.”

“Come with me; we can use your help at the hospital in the city.”

I shook my head, trying to fight off the feeling that we were about to miss our chance to get out. “I’m not going to the city, Doc. The kid and I are out on the next plane.”

“No planes are taking out troops, not even wounded; we just came from there. Only airdrops for supplies from now on, and wounded will be evacuated on the ground. Help me.”

We flinched at the sounds of detonations from the strip and watched as ten huge gray clouds mushroomed into the air; it was like watching a dream demolished. Engineers, I realized. They had just blown the strip, cratered it so that once we left Uzbekistan, no Popov units would be able to use it—not without major repairs.

I glanced at the kid. “Hop in.”

“What? Why?”

“Because.” I got in the back and the doctor seemed satisfied, returning to the front seat and waiting for the kid as he climbed aboard. “We’re not getting out this way, and at least the hospital is in the right direction. South. The Marines will be here soon, after they disengage at Tashkent, and we’ll see what we can do then.”

One bit at a time, fragments of my brain put themselves back in place. I didn’t notice it at first. It was kind of like
returning from a long trip, so long that by the time you got back, you had forgotten that your apartment was
that
small or that in fact the front door wasn’t painted dark blue; it was more like an aqua color, with maybe a little purple. It was good news and bad news. The fear of Almaty passed, and I began to see things clearly again and remembered what I had done the day before or even the week before, and every once in a while, I would laugh because the kid said something stupid or funny. On the other hand, the new clarity brought Bridgette. And people reminded me of my father or of Ox, and in those moments all I wanted to do was score, dig in, and cover myself with a pile of sandbags that had been filled with drugs so that I could go back to those days when my mind consisted of little more than goo.

The kid kept me from going back, though. He’d gotten jittery—even more jittery than me—and wouldn’t go anywhere unless I went with him, because he was convinced that someone would scope in and notice that he wasn’t with his unit and try to attach him to a fighting outfit. They probably would, too. But it wasn’t like latching on to me would prevent that from happening, and I explained to the kid that we didn’t use tickets anymore, so every time we came within broadcast range of a logistical server, it checked our suit assignments and would figure it out whether I was with him or not. He’d just shake his head. “You don’t get it, man” was all he’d say, and he’d shake his head again. “You don’t get it. You’re my lucky charm.”

The doc had put us to work as soon as we got into the city, and gave us a place to sleep in the hospital basement, which was perfect. During the day, we did rounds and emptied bedpans, and one day we even got to shed our filthy
suits for clean, new blue pajamas. The doctor asked me if I wanted to shave, and I asked if it meant I’d have to use a mirror, and he looked at me like I was nuts, which I was, and he said, “Of course. How else would you shave?” I didn’t want a mirror because I was afraid of seeing how I’d changed, of being reminded that I really existed. In the end he found a local barber and brought him in to clean me up. I don’t know how it looked, but it felt new. Sparkly.

One day the doc called me into his office. The Marines had arrived the day before, and so far there had been no sign of Popov, although everyone knew he’d be on his way after consolidating in Tashkent. The kid followed me in and sat on the floor.

“I have a problem,” the doc said.

“Maybe we can help.”

“A man came to me yesterday and asked for me to handle what he called a special project. They’ve already annexed a building next door, and Marine engineers have almost finished preparing the operating rooms and laboratory so that they’ll all have adequate security.”

I took a cigarette he offered, and tried to hide the fact that as soon as he’d said “special project,” my hands had begun to shake. “Why the security?”

“Look… He paused to light it for me and then tossed the lighter to the kid. “That’s just it. In America, this wouldn’t be a problem, or in an American unit, but I’m not American and neither is my staff, half of whom are Uzbeks. You’re used to these things. We are not.”

“Maybe you better tell me what’s going on.”

“I will show you.”

The doctor stood and ushered us from his office, leading us down the front steps and into the street, where the
wind bit through our thin clothes and made me shiver. We moved quickly. The next structure over had been an apartment building of some kind, and when we stepped through the door, a pair of Marines stood and asked for identification. I didn’t have any, and neither did the kid. Ours was stored in our suit computers, but the doctor held out a card, which the two men scanned, and then he vouched for us. We headed up the stairs nearby, climbed three flights, and then pushed through a pair of double doors into a wide room that looked as though it had once been an entire floor of apartments, whose walls had been completely ripped out.

“This,” the doc said, “is my problem.”

What got me first wasn’t the sight; it was the smell. The room was filled with steel cages about ten feet by ten feet, inside of which had been placed beds, and on most of these lay a genetic. I went numb. The place smelled as though someone had died, and it had been long enough since I’d smelled anything like it that I felt sick.

“What the hell is this?” the kid asked.

The doctor looked angry. “This is what they’ve given me to handle. Command asked my staff to oversee medical for the rear-guard task force, which I gladly did. But now your Marines want to save these girls and put them on the line again—girls who have gone beyond their shelf life and who are literally rotting alive. Look.”

He pointed to the nearest cage, and I didn’t want to look but forced myself to, then wished immediately afterward that I hadn’t. Bridgette sat on a bed. Her fingers had gone black and she had a vacant look on her face, as though she wasn’t seeing anything clearly or maybe wasn’t seeing anything at all.