Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 (26 page)

“I’m getting laid when we hit Bandar, mate,” the Brit said.

The kid nodded. “Me too.”

“Have you
ever
been laid, kid?” I asked.

“No. Got a hand job once.”

The Brit laughed. “That’s nothing. I remember this one brothel when we were stationed in Korea. The Legion actually ran its own houses on base and encouraged us to, uh, stay local, but you’d get bored of the base girls and one day on leave I discovered Don’t Tell Mama.”

“Don’t tell mama?” The kid’s speech slurred, and you could tell he wouldn’t be with us much longer.

“Don’t ask; the name says it all. I spent more money in that place than I want to remember, but when I do remember, I tell myself that every won was worth it.”

“What’s a won?”

“It’s the Korean currency.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

Despite the fact that he was drunk, the Brit jumped from the truck quickly and within a second had pulled the kid out to lay him gently on the ground. He puked. For ten minutes we listened to him before it stopped, and the Brit leaned back out the door to take a look.

“He’s out.”

We sat for a minute before I realized that the shelling had stopped. A moment later the medics appeared and slid two wounded into the truck bed, and one of the medics climbed aboard, slapping the side when he was set.

“Let’s go.”

I looked at the Brit, who jumped out of the truck and managed to manhandle the kid back inside, and when he finished, I thought he’d go back to the Legion positions, but he slipped into the passenger seat, forcing the three of us together again.

“Let’s go,” said the Brit.

“You’re not staying on the line?”

“I want to see what this job is like.”

“Let’s go,”
the medic shouted.

Nobody had told us about the latest Russian trick. When I gunned the engine and steered the truck from the tunnel, we made it about a hundred meters before the barrage started again—not the single shots they had fired at our ambulance until then, but an incredible volume of fire that made me scream as soon as it came down. It appeared as though the entire earth erupted around us. The Brit gripped the dashboard, his knuckles white, and not knowing what else to do, I slammed the gas down and steered for what I thought was a relatively clear street. We had moved about fifty meters when the truck went airborne.

The landing impact shook my jaw, and an intense heat filled the cab. A thought of burning alive made me feel as though I needed to get out as soon as I could, take a chance on running through the barrage and back to the tunnel, but the truck started to roll over, so there was nothing to do except go with it. And just before I blacked out, someone screamed.

A piercing light made me blink and someone tugged at my leg.

“That hurts,” I said.

A voice spoke in French and I didn’t catch the words, but then another one spoke, more slowly.

“At least he can feel it.”

I lifted my head and saw the French doctor—the one who had enlisted me to assist with taking care of genetics—sawing through my armor, one leg at a time. Sparks flew across the room. The sparks held my attention, because they danced over the floor in multicolored dots that hypnotized me to the point where I realized that I’d been drugged, that no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to take my eyes off them—until I noticed something else. My armor was all wrong. It had been green before but was now a deep black, and ceramic had melted along the side in gobs of material that froze in the midst of bubbling off. Even with the drugs, it registered just how much heat it took to make the material behave that way, and an image of the corpse trains flashed by. I looked away before they cracked the armor off; you just didn’t want to see what waited underneath.

“It will be fine,” the doctor said, his voice next to my ear, and then I sensed a distant pinprick. “I’m putting you back under; we’ll talk again soon.”

I wanted to tell him no and had so many questions about my truck mates, but everything went black again.

The pain flared up, forcing me to scream and arch and clench at the bedsheets with both hands. Then the surroundings came into focus. What looked like a hundred beds filled a long room, and each rack held a bandaged man who stared at me until I got my voice under control. I
looked down. Clear bandages encased both legs so that I saw the skin, which had a not-quite-right look to it and seeped blood continuously to be sucked into a machine by the bed. The skin was almost completely white. It draped loosely over my legs in folds, almost making it look like someone had covered them in a white fabric, cut too generously and badly wrinkled.

The doctor appeared out of nowhere. “You had bad burns to both legs.”

“What did you do to them?”

“Synthetic skin. Artificial only in the sense that it’s manufactured, but the same as human skin. I’ll give you a booklet when you leave, and you’re going to have to watch out for overheating for a while; it takes some time for the sweat glands to activate.”

“It looks dead.”

“The skin is bonding to blood cells and nerves, so for now it
is
dead, and the pain very real. Your muscles also sustained damage, and it’s normal as we proceed with nerve therapy that you feel the pain as they grow and attach themselves to your new covering.”

I remembered the crash and almost lost my voice. “What about the kid and the Brit? My friends.”

“I do not understand.” I explained it to him, how we got hit in the ambulance, and he nodded. “I am afraid I don’t know about the others. You’ll have to excuse me. I have other patients to monitor.”

“Doc, wait.” I grabbed his lab coat to keep him from going. “Who brought me in?”

“I do not know that either. Excuse me.”

Once he was gone, I was alone. It didn’t matter that a roomful of wounded surrounded me; these were strangers
with whom I had no connection, and to be separated from the kid felt as though I’d had an arm amputated. Who would watch out for me? It hadn’t been apparent while we’d been together the extent to which I depended on him for a grounding to reality, and as I lay there, it took only a second to convince myself that I’d die at any moment, that something would go wrong. The bandages felt tighter. A fluorescent light overhead swung gently with the vibration of artillery that pounded in the distance, and the moaning of some guy nearby sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. To make things worse, whatever medication they’d given me after the operation hadn’t been enough to help me with the current pain but had been more than enough to make me crave drugs again, drool for them. The old terror took hold, starting in my gut and working its way to my chest so that it became hard to breathe.

Without anything to counter the insanity, I cried. Tears rolled from the corners of my eyes, making it hard to see, and they pattered on the sheets until I reached up and wiped them away. I
should
have been happy. Nobody had told me what had happened out there after I’d blacked out, but the last memories were fresh, of the plasma barrage and the truck; anyone who’d survived the initial strike, the subsequent unconsciousness in the open, under fire, should have been grateful. A normal guy would have thanked some god for another chance. Not me. Everything had gotten so messed that I began wishing I’d died in the ruins of Jizzakh, where plasma could have charred me into a mixed lump of ceramic and flesh. Pain was too much; emptiness was better. Although the artillery was far away, you just knew it was looking for you, aimed at
you, like each round was alive and could sense exactly where you’d chosen to hide, and the only thing keeping it from getting into the ward was a little limitation called effective range. Popov wasn’t fighting us; he was fighting
me.
In the stillness of the ward, it was easy to do, easy to convince myself that none of these men mattered, because hadn’t I already proven it? Hadn’t my ambulance been chased by artillery every time it poked its nose out of the tunnel, until, finally, Pops decided to send everything he had at once—just to make sure
I
was gone?

I screamed again and a soldier nearby said, “Shut the fuck up. I’m dying too, you know,” which meant he was a Marine, because he spoke English. And then another yelled something in French, but I didn’t care, because the screams meant that I was still alive, not that I was in pain. So I yelled back, “Go to hell,” and then a bunch of them threatened to come over and piss on my legs, so I said, “I just need something more, something for the pain.” Someone put a hand on my shoulder, and it was warm. So warm.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Bridgette?”

“No, Sophie.”

And it was Bridgette
and
it was Sophie, one of the genetics we had all seen in the pen outside Jizzakh so long ago, only she stood right next to me in armor, her helmet hanging from the belt. She knelt so her face was next to mine.

“What is wrong?” Sophie asked.

“I am. I’m all wrong; they almost got my legs.”

“Jesus Christ,” one of the Marines said, “we can’t even get away from genetics while we’re dying.” And I wanted to kill him.

“It’s going to be just fine,” she said, and then smiled.

I grinned back. Sophie glanced at the machine and hit a button, and I watched as a few drops of amber fluid dripped into my IV, disappearing as soon as they mixed with the saline so that in a few seconds the pain vanished altogether.

“That’s righter,” I said.

“Good.”

“I missed you, Sophie.”

She cocked her head and then pulled on her hood, shattering the vision by transforming into just another one, another bug-eyed war thing, and I started crying again.

“I do not know you,” said Sophie.

“Yes. Yes you do.” The drugs carried me away despite the fact that now I didn’t want to go, now I wanted to stay with her. The last thing I remember is hearing one of the Marines say “Let’s strangle him while he’s asleep.”

The next time I woke, she had vanished. “Hey,” I said, “did anyone see a genetic here earlier, the one who gave me more juice?” But nobody answered. It was the dead of night. I kept waiting for night vision to kick in, until I realized that I’d have to experience the
real
night, without the kid, and with a not-so-complete darkness because a medic sat by the door and stared at a computer screen. My beard itched like mad. I reached up to scratch it and found it gone, the lack of it making me realize what those others had felt so long ago, when I was a green reporter and didn’t take, didn’t get. Maybe my beard was on the pillow. By the time I’d looked under the bed, the pain from my
legs had returned, forcing me to lie back and breathe, trying not to move an inch, to keep the agony in check.

Little by little, the windows got lighter. Popov met the day with a fresh barrage that rattled the frames in place, so I took the pillow and placed it over my face, blotting out the world. I fell asleep. It wasn’t clear how much time had elapsed before I woke up again, but light filled the room and some of the men spoke to each other quietly, a few, ones who could sit up, playing cards. That was how my days passed. Without a chronometer, there was no way of telling if a week had elapsed or a year, and then one day the doctor came by and checked my bandages before he smiled.

“Today,” he said.

“Today what?”

He pulled a scalpel from a nearby station and returned to the bed, then carefully sliced off the tape that kept the bandages sealed. First one, then the other fell. The air hit the skin on my legs and I winced with the pain, barely able to stand the sudden sensation of cold that ran up them.

“They’re cold.”

“It’s winter. Try pulling your knees up to your chest.”

I did my best. Both legs trembled with the strain of flexing muscles, until little by little they bent, but I gave up before my knees made much progress.

“The skin feels tight.” They weren’t white anymore; they were more like the color of someone who hasn’t seen the sun in months, a pale pink, and the doctor seemed pleased.

“Good enough. We’ll get you started with therapy tomorrow.”

“Therapy?”

“You will find out.” He adjusted the machine and sent another bolus of meds into my veins, and I grinned—no complaints—wondering how much longer I’d be there. Before I passed out, I remembered something.

“Doc, where did the genetic go, the one named Sophie?”

“Sophie is a special case. An anomaly. We’re studying her because her decay seems much slower than what we’ve observed in the others. Rest.”

I was halfway down a set of parallel bars when they jumped me.

“Get the fuck off!”
I screamed.

The kid got up and laughed. “Jesus, you look like you need a tan.”

“I think,” said the Brit, “that I just broke my arse.”

He got up slowly and I stared. The Brit looked the same as ever but the kid’s hair had grown longer and his beard fuller, so that he was almost unrecognizable, maybe part man but certainly less boy. I’d never been happier than when it hit me that he was alive. His armor showed the wear of war, and I noticed the tiny patches where someone had quick-pasted a series of tiny holes, which could mean only one thing.

“You get shot, kid?”