Grunt Traitor (2 page)

“Mason,
get your ass over here.
”

I snapped my eyes open to a blistering desert sun lancing between breaks in the camouflage fabric above me.

“Mason? You sleeping?”

My mouth felt like cardboard. My lips felt like sandpaper.
Fuck
. I brought my hand to my face to wipe away the vestiges of the nightmare and sat up, putting my boots on the ground.

You’re not in Africa,
I reminded myself, shaking off the remnant of the nightmare.
You’re in Death Valley, near Barstow, California. The battle is over and you’re a survivor. You’re also an asshole for leaving Michelle like that. You’re a dick for not finding Thompson. You should fucking die for leaving those two behind, but instead you get three hots and a cot, you get promoted, you get to watch fucking videos of how great life used to be.

Olivares came around the corner, dressed in desert fatigues, a maroon beret on his head, sunglasses covering his eyes. “There you are.” He clapped his hands. “Come on, we got to go. This is last day of Phase I for the new recruits. They’re going to be happy to get to the physical training.”

I shook my head, not at him, but to get Michelle’s image out of my mind.

“Listen, if you’re not up for it—” Olivares began.

I stood. “Fuck that shit. I’m not a profile,” I said. Profiles were soldiers who rode illness or injury to get out of work.

“Maybe you should be.” His face was serious. He pointed to the side of his head. “You’re not handling the mental shit well. I’m no psych, but you need to get over it.”

I grunted. “You’re right, you’re no psych. You’re also not in charge of me anymore.”

We’d both been promoted to master sergeants when we’d arrived at old Fort Irwin in Death Valley. TF OMBRA required experienced non-coms to train new recruits, and had pinned the rose on us and a bunch of others from the other Cray kill sites. Ohirra had been bumped to lieutenant and was now working in intelligence. Of course Michelle was out there somewhere. I knew it because these dreams were her doing. She was making sure I felt like shit for not killing her. I’d aimed my rifle at her... I’d been ready to kill her for a moment, take her out of her misery... but I’d even failed in that. Then there was Thompson, our little drummer boy.

Never leave a man behind
. I’d sure fucked that one up.

Olivares stepped in front of me. “Depression affects us all differently, Mason. Consider going to see the psych. Let them help you. Talk to someone. Just fucking deal with it.”

I went to push past him, but he grabbed me by my collar. “You think you’re so fucking tough.”

I shook him off. “I’m not tough. I’m just unlucky enough to have survived.”

He gave me a disgusted look. “You’re a shit NCO, you know that?”

I nodded. “You always were better than me.”

“It’s not about that. It’s about the recruits. If your shit isn’t together, you’re going to put their lives in danger next time.”

Next time. That’s all Mr. Pink could talk about. Next time. Where were the other aliens? What was going to happen next? Every surviving human on the planet was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe they were here already. Maybe they were on their way. No one seemed to know the answer, but we needed to prepare the task force to combat it. How do you prepare a soldier to fight an enemy you know so little about? The same way TF OMBRA had trained me and all the others. We could only study the hypothetical. Like these recruits, we’d been locked in a cell for six months and forced to read novels and watch movies, then demonstrate our ability to critically think and understand the challenges posed by an alien invasion by completing a series of graded tasks.

We’d been given ninety-six manuscripts, forty-seven movies, and seven biographies.

The biographies included Julius Caesar, Chesty Puller, David Hackworth, and other soldiers.

Of the movies, I’d seen around half. They were the usual suspects:
Kelly’s Heroes
,
A Bridge Too Far
,
The Guns of Navarone
,
Hamburger Hill
,
They Were Expendable
,
We Were Soldiers
,
The Dirty Dozen
,
Where Eagles Dare
,
Saving Private Ryan
, and
Platoon
. But there were also some foreign films I had never heard of, like
Ivan’s Childhood
,
Kana
ł
, and
Gallipoli
. There were also some science fiction movies, such as
Starship Troopers
, the 2005 version of
War of the Worlds
,
Battleship, Battle: Los Angeles
,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
,
The Puppet Masters
,
They Live
, and
Independence Day
; I’d seen all of them except
They Live
and
The Puppet Masters
.

I’d read many of the books already. Or
thought
I’d read them; it was funny how being forced to answer questions changed the reading experience. They included
Armor
,
Starship Troopers
,
The Forever War
,
Old Man’s War
,
Ender’s Game
,
A Mote in God’s Eye
,
Legion of the Damned
,
Hammer’s Slammers
, and
Bolo
. But there were a lot I had never read, books by C. J. Cherryh, David Gerrold, Jerry Pournelle, and Robert Buettner, to name a few.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

He turned to leave, then turned back. “Listen, Mason. That was some fucked-up shit that was done to her. But she helped us defeat the Cray. She saved us. Something in our fucked-up PTSD heads, some chemical change, has enabled us to do this. I know she wanted you to kill her, but without her, we’d all be dead.”

“Which is why I owe it to her to do something.”

“Don’t go being a hero, Mason.”

“I know you don’t like heroes, Olivares, but sometimes you just got to be one.”

“Wouldn’t be necessary if everyone would do their fucking job.”

I nodded. “What are the chances of that happening? It’s why we’ve had to find heroes for as long as Christ was a corporal.”

“That’s not our job, now. We’re not training them to be heroes. Our job is to train these recruits to be soldiers.”

I snatched my beret from my pocket and adjusted it on my head. Then I snapped sunglasses out of my shirt pocket and put them on. “Come on, Olivares. Stop lollygagging. We got work to do.”

He frowned, then smiled, and patted me on the back. “There you go. There’s the asshole Mason I know and love.”

“You’ve never loved me.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve never hated you either.” And with that he left.

I stepped out from beneath the camouflage awning and followed in Olivares’s steps. Staring at his back, I knew I couldn’t say the same myself. I’d once hated him terribly. It had been Michelle who had reminded me how selfish it was to hate another human when there was a whole universe of Cray to hate.

THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Hunter S. Thompson

CHAPTER TWO

T
HERE WAS A
time when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was rare, something few soldiers had, invisible for the most part but as deadly as any wound. Not just confined to the military; first responders like police officers and fire fighters, nurses, doctors, paramedics were also put in situations that resulted in PTSD. Still, even they were few and far between. So trying to fill the ranks of Task Force OMBRA before the invasion had been a monumental task.

Take America, for example. Less than one percent of Americans served in the military, but it was documented that upwards of thirty percent of Vietnam War veterans, eleven percent of Gulf War veterans, and ten percent of the War in Afghanistan veterans had PTSD. Because of the peculiarities of the brain chemistry of those suffering the syndrome, Mr. Pink and the other TF OMBRA officers had sought us out and convinced us to join, often through coercion and trickeration.

But now?

Now
everyone
had PTSD. Not a single person on this planet we call Earth was unscathed from the invasion. Not a single person was untouched. It was especially bad in the major cities where the Cray hives landed. The farther away from the hives, the less interaction civilians had with the alien monsters. But there were other monsters, human monsters, as deadly as the invading Cray.

We all shared in the realities of PTSD.

We’re all fucked in the head.

So does that make it the new normal?

These were just some of the thoughts that ticked through my head as I stood in a row of five other master sergeants while a hundred recruits walked stiff-legged out of the old ammo bunker that had been revamped into a learning prison much like the one we’d had in the old Air Force base in Wyoming. Every race and creed was represented. There
were
no nations; that way of looking at people had no place in the new world. Blinking furiously at a sun they hadn’t seen in six months, holding up their arms to block the light, every last one of them had shit-eating grins. They’d made it. They’d achieved Phase II. Now it was our turn to put them through their paces.

The wind whipped at their hair, swirling the Death Valley dust, stinging them. Tents flapped and snapped in the wilderness. Somewhere I heard an artillery shell fire. A tank went by, its treads squeaking and in much need of grease in this hot, arid piece of hell. Even in October, when the rest of the country was dusted with snow, Death Valley seethed with heat.

About halfway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Death Valley was home to Fort Irwin and America’s 11
^th
Cavalry Regiment. When the alien invasion began, the commanding general sent half of his force to Vegas, and the other half went to Los Angeles; both were decimated. Looking through the 20/20 lenses of hindsight, strategists believe that had they not split their force, they might have survived. Those the Cray hadn’t destroyed died on the road trying to return. Ultimately it was TF OMBRA who found Fort Irwin and occupied it, their intention to bring down the twin Hollywood and Santa Monica hives. The Vegas hive still existed, but with nothing of value in a city once dedicated to the ideas of pleasure and greed, even OMBRA was hesitant to waste lives.

With the fort all but empty, TF OMBRA moved in and made it their home. They brought thousands into the empty barracks, using the mess halls and motor pools as if they’d been their own. The only hitch had been the families of the deceased soldiers. With no power and limited ability to feed themselves, many were already dead or dying by the time OMBRA arrived. They were greeted like saviors instead of invaders.

I spied someone familiar coming from the direction of HQ: Ohirra. Slender and Japanese, her implacable face showed several scars which she wore like badges of honor. She gestured for me to step out of line. Curious about what she wanted, I took a step back, turned smartly, than jogged over to her.

She wore the same patch on her left shoulder I had—Mount Kilimanjaro on a red field, with a slash through it. Survivors of TF OMBRA’s first battle had taken an old tradition and revived it, sporting combat patches that inextricably linked them.

“What’s up, Ohirra?”

She raised an eyebrow. “For the recruits.”

I smirked as I saluted. “Sniper check, ma’am.”

“That’s better. How are you doing, Ben?”

“Good, Kimiko. And you?”

She gave me the same look she’d given me right before she’d made me tap out by getting my arm and head into a triangle as we wrestled. Her father had been a small circle jujitsu master and had trained her well. “Fibber.”

I shrugged. “We’re
all
fucked up.”

“Olivares says that you—”

“Olivares should keep his mouth shut.”

She frowned. “He’s right. You need to see someone who can help you work it out.”

I pinned her with my eyes. “You never saw her.”

She bit her lip. “No, I didn’t.”

“Then you can’t know. You’ll never know.”

“Listen, I didn’t come here to fight.”

“Then don’t.”

She sighed. “Listen, Mr. Pink wants to see you.”

This stopped me cold. I hadn’t spoken to the man since he’d taken Michelle away in a box. He’d been the one responsible for her transformation into a monstrous merging of human and machine—what they were now calling Human Machine Interface Devices, or HMIDs. I’d thought a hundred times what I’d say to him if I ever got the chance. Now, with the chance forthcoming, I didn’t know. Since I’d come to Death Valley I’d seen him on several occasions. He’d even nodded to me once.

He was also the reason I wasn’t floating face down in the water of the Port of Los Angeles, having given me the opportunity to live another day and capitalize on my skills. As affable as a piece of gristle, he was competent because he surrounded himself with the right people.