by Bobby Adair
Brice is walking the interior perimeter, scanning up and down the rows, taking moments to scrutinize individual buckets and drums. “Industrial blasting chemicals,” he muses. “There’s a shit-ton of it here.”
“Maybe a depot for the other colonies?” I guess. And why not, the place seems to have been built as much as a service base for nearby colonies as a mine. Which is probably why the Free Army chose it for their base—infrastructure that could easily be converted to support a small fleet of warships.
Brice finishes his survey of the building and marches back to stand in front of me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Weapons?” I guess. I hadn’t been thinking anything, not until he mentioned it.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You seem kind of out of it.”
My shoulders slump at the acknowledgment. I’m tired, as tired as I’ve ever been.
Brice grabs my left arm and pulls it out while twisting so that my d-pad faces up. He points to a little green button built into one corner of the bezel. “Suit Juice. You used any yet?”
I know what some of the drugs in the cocktail are. I know how addictive they can be. “I don’t need—”
Brice pushes the button.
I feel a prick on my thigh where the suit’s inner liner houses a series of injectors, with one specifically for this purpose.
Almost immediately, I feel my fatigue melt away, and a burst of confidence radiates through every cell in my body.
I’m a god.
I’m a fucking god of war!
Bow before me lowly creatures in my universe before I smite you and your progeny to Hell!
“Stop grinning.” Brice laughs. “You look like an idiot.”
I don’t stop. I don’t care.
“First few times, you get high,” he says. “After a while, you just get a few more miles out of the tank.”
Too bad. I’m looking across the piles of buckets and barrels on the pallets, and nothing about it is familiar, no sticks of red dynamite, no Play-Doh slabs of C4. In fact, the building looks to be filled with ingredients more than finished products. “Any idea how this stuff works?”
Brice shakes his head. “I know military stuff. Not this shit.”
We both look at Graham.
Her eyes go wide. “I worked on a chicken farm before my number came up.”
Turning back to Brice. The next step is obvious, at least to me. “Tarlow. He was an explosives guy, right?”
“I think that’s what he said.”
I comm link to Blair. “Can you hear me? Do we have a signal?”
“I’ve got you in—” Blair seems lost.
Tarlow picks up for her. “The explosives bunker.”
“Is that what this is?” Blair doesn’t seem to believe him.
“It is,” he confirms. “We keep it far from the colony in case it all blows. That’s just administrator paranoia. They don’t understand the components or the chemical processes involved. It can’t spontaneously detonate. Not in a vacuum. Impossible. You can’t tell—”
“Put a plug in it,” I order Tarlow. Time to put my divine energy to work for the good of mankind before the drug wears off. “Blair, can you do without Tarlow down there?”
“Why?” She’s not pleased, not at all.
“I need him. He’s the explosives guy, right?” I scan across the trove of combustibles. “We’ve got a warehouse of goodies here, and Tarlow can make them useful.”
Chapter 26
We’re waiting again.
There’s a lot of boredom in war.
Blair is sending some of our soldiers from the control center to bring Tarlow to the explosives shed.
Graham is still lying on her back, trying to control her nausea, or napping. She hasn’t said anything in a while. It could be either.
Brice is fumbling through what I guess are blasting caps, a variety of types, in a series of translucent bins. He cocks his head toward Graham. “She gonna be alright?”
“I suppose.” I’m looking at the bin he has a hand in, realizing I have no guesses about the functions of these odd doodads, no idea how they puzzle together to form something lethal. “You know how this stuff works?”
“In theory.”
I laugh. “You mean you’d blow us all up if you tried to rig a bomb?”
“More like I’d build a dud.” Brice is one-hundred-percent serious again. “Wouldn’t matter. Failure is death out here in the ‘stroids. No room to fuck up. If your booby trap doesn’t blow, the Trogs swarm you. Death. See what I mean?”
Booby traps sound appealing, however, I’m cultivating my ideal fantasy outcomes into something that’ll pass for a plan.
Brice seems suddenly bored, impatient, as he empties his hands. “We should wait on Tarlow.”
I agree, look around at the contents of the explosives hut, and start a slow walk along the shelf-covered wall, taking in what I can see, looking for anything I might learn while killing time, and trying not to think about other soldiers out there on the surface, still dying.
“A lot of waiting,” says Brice, coming along beside me.
“What do you do to kill the time?” I ask, not wanting to spend too much time with my thoughts, afraid of what I might find in my heart if I dwell on the echoes of last gasps over the comm and vivid memories of dying faces, watching the vacuum suck blood through gaping tears in suits.
“Tell me about Phil,” says Brice.
That’s a surprising twist.
I hesitate.
I guess at a motive and realize I’ve spent too much time looking for hidden agendas throughout my life. Too many years in a Gray-ruled world. It’s shaped me in a way I didn’t realize had bent towards paranoia until just now. “The Phil thing is complicated.”
“It always is for people who think too much.” Brice smiles after setting the barb. He slaps me on the back to let me know it’s just good fun.
I smile, too. No big deal. He’s right. I don’t want to talk about Phil. “What about you? What’s your story?”
“So that’s how it works?” he asks. “You won’t tell me yours unless I tell you mine?”
“You know a lot more about me than I know about you.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” says Brice. “You already know my dirty laundry. I fragged a captain. You saw me do it.”
“So what else have you got?”
“Two years of watching people die in this war.” He tries to be hard when he says it, attempting to cover his sadness with a cavalier smile. “Three years of cush garrison duty on the moon after I joined the SDF and before the war started. Four years in construction before that.”
“Nine years in space?” It doesn’t seem possible anyone could live up here that long.
“I’ve been wearing an orange suit for a third of my life,” he answers.
“Why go that way in the first place? Everybody knows the dangers of wearing orange.”
“Same reason you got a bug in your head,” he tells me.
“My mom agreed to that before I was a week old,” I laugh. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Still, your mom had a reason for doing it, right?”
I nod.
“She ever tell you what that was? Or did she think you might grow up to be one of them?”
“That’s kind of it,” I answer. “The same for both questions. My mom was a laborer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew I wouldn’t turn into a Gray if they put a bug in my head, but she saw the writing on the wall. With the Grays in charge of the earth, my mom figured out pretty early that humans were going to become draft horses bridled to the Grays’ ambitions. Human life was going to become short and sweaty.”
“She was right about that,” observes Brice.”
“My mom didn’t want that for me.”
“You grew up and went to work in a grav factory,” Brice counters. “Still a slave, right? Roomy house? Plenty to eat?”
I pat my flat belly. “More food than most, I suppose, not as much as you’d think.”
“Phil looked like he never missed a meal,” argues Brice. “He worked in that grav factory with you, right?”
Looked? Worked?
Both past tense.
Brice rightly thinks Phil is dead.
Could he have survived that collision? Is he out there, adrift? Injured?
Lies I’m telling myself to pretend he’s not gone.
“We had privileges.” I don’t feel ashamed admitting it. The advantaged life of the bug-heads on earth isn’t a secret. “We had things to trade on the black market. Phil… I don’t know. It’s hard to blame Phil for being heavier.” I laugh, and I realize it sounds like Brice’s dark laugh. Am I picking up the habit from him, or is it something about being in the company of death that makes humor so black?
“How’s that?”
“You know, you’ve seen the old videos, right?”
“From before the siege?” Brice asks. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“People back then, in western countries especially, so many of them were overweight.”
“What?” Brice shakes his head. “I don’t know what shows you watched but I always imagined before the siege, everybody was perfect. I didn’t see many old vids, but in the ones I saw, that’s what was there. Perfect hair. Perfect teeth. Perfect clothes. Everybody drove a shiny car.”
“Not the movies and TV shows,” I clarify. “The news. Documentaries. Stuff that showed real life.”
Brice shrugs.
“America used to be the most powerful nation on the planet. Back then the people had everything they ever wanted. Their biggest problems were overeating, drinking too much, and spending all their savings.”
Brice appears perplexed.
“You never watched the old news vids?” I can’t believe it. “Never had an interest in history?”
“Never had a TV,” says Brice. “Wouldn’t matter if we did. I worked when I got home from school. I worked from sunup to sundown when they cut me loose after sixth grade.”
“No TVs in your school?”
“Some,” he answers. “We never saw anything about history. The TVs were for the kids on the high school prep track. Most of us were bound for the farms. You don’t need a TV to teach kids how to spell and count, add and subtract. Mostly school was a babysitting service, a place to keep us while our parents worked in the fields, at least until we were big enough to work ourselves. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ve seen some pictures here and there, heard stories about how things used to be, but you know, I never believed half of them, just old-timers pining for the old days. They always make things seem better than they were.”
“They were probably telling the truth.”
Brice sighs. “I suppose. All that perfect hair and those perfect teeth must have meant something. What’s that got to do with Phil?”
“I guess I don’t want you to think Phil’s problems are all his.”
“Whatever you say.”
I lean on a pallet of explosives, maybe enough to blow all of Breckenridge into orbit. I comm link to Blair. “Is Tarlow coming?”
“Not yet,” she tells me. “We’re trying to coordinate down here.”
“People are dying,” I remind her. Even I feel like an asshole for saying it.
Her response is testy. “I’m not sending my people headlong into an ambush. We’ll do this right or not at all.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
Blair huffs. “We have another two dozen or so down here. More on the way. Not nearly as many died in the bombardment as we thought.”
“Are they armed?”
“Mostly,” she tells me, “with disruptors and single-shot railguns.”
“Okay.” I figure it’s best not to push any harder. “Let me know when Tarlow leaves.”
Brice is looking at me with an odd expression on his face.
“What?”
“I’m riveted by this story of Phil’s weight problem.” He sounds vaguely sarcastic, but I’m not sure. “It might be the most interesting story I’ll hear all day.”
I’m not sure I want to say anything more about it. I sit on a pallet of large metal buckets. They all sport labels covered with warnings and directions, fine print—thousands of words no one will ever read. Looking around inside the bunker for any distraction, I realize for the tenth time, there isn’t much to do while waiting. So, I talk. “He had a brother.”
“Lots of people do.”
“They were both bug-heads,” I tell Brice.
“How long have you known him?”
“We were in school together, all of the “special” kids. Pre-school, I guess. They started us young. I’ve always known Phil.”
“What’s this brother got to do with anything?” Brice wickedly smiles. “Did Phil eat him?”
I shake my head. “He died when he was six.”
Brice feels bad about his off-color joke, but I don’t make a thing of it. We don’t have vaccinations like they did before the siege. We don’t have antibiotics, not in a large enough supply for everyone. We don’t have much in the way of medicines, not for anybody who’s not Korean. Lots of babies die. Lots of kids don’t make it adulthood. Death is always around. You get used to it.
Chapter 27
“They told us the news over at the hospital.” I start, thinking of the smells in that place, like a closed-up house with no breeze where rats have been trapped with mounds of their shit and only an acrid hint of antiseptic to make it seem like the air is safe to breathe. I can taste it. I remember how the funk clung to my clothes and followed me through the rest of the day. “The doctors told his parents it was an immune reaction to the bug in his head. Like with me and Phil, they put the bug in his brother’s head when he was a baby, but it never took. His body never accepted it. Then, when his lymphocytes couldn’t kill it—got tired of trying I guess—they went insane and turned on him.”
Brice grimaces.
“The doctors had big words for it all. I’m not going to claim I understood everything.” I don’t know why the disclaimers are important, they just seem like they are. “Phil’s brother was sick all the time, as his body was eating itself up from the inside. It took years for him to die, while his organs struggled to develop into a regular person. It just failed. He grew up disproportionally. He was always small and skinny compared to other kids his age, but his head kept growing. Just the bones, not the skin. It looked like one day his face might stretch so tight it would split open when he laughed or coughed.” I take a breath, even though I’m feeling the amphetamine cocktail still coursing through my blood, the story is bringing me back to that time, unreeling like a poorly edited movie in my head, full of abstract emotions.
“I went with them to the doctor many times. I don’t know why. I was a kid. I went along because an adult brought me. It never seemed weird until the thought came back to me as a grownup.” I glance up at Brice and see he’s paying attention because this next part is important, at least to me. “I know Phil’s mom wanted to believe the doctors were trying to help his little brother but they weren’t. They were taking measurements and running tests. They wanted to understand everything about their little patient, to know what was making him tick. To them, he was nothing more than an experiment, and they weren’t going to give him any drug that might harm the bug or kill it.”
“How do you know that?” asks Brice. “Did they tell you?”
The question takes me off guard, because I realize I don’t know the answer. I never heard a doctor say those things. No one in Phil’s family ever offered up any evidence for their suspicions, yet Phil believed it strongly, and so did his dad. The old man went on about it with tinfoil hat tenacity, at least when Phil’s little brother and mother weren’t around. I answer Brice with something vague. “Things I heard.”
Brice accepts my
answer and nods to prompt me on.
“The kid died. It was the flu that finally finished him off one winter. I remember Phil crying a lot. His mom tumbled into a black mood she never recovered from. His dad took to working more, or finding ways to avoid coming home. I almost never saw the old man after that.”
“I’ve been to funerals for kids,” says Brice. “They’re never easy.”
“There wasn’t a funeral.” Even as a kid, that seemed unusual to me. “The doctors bagged up Phil’s brother and took him away, telling Phil’s parents he was the property of the MSS. Just like that. No grave. No service. Nothing.”
“Damn shame,” says Brice.
He’s right.
“An unusual thing happened after that,” I say. “The food ration for Phil’s brother never stopped coming. I know I’m exaggerating when I say it, but to me, it seemed like Phil’s mother made Phil eat every bite of it. After watching one child waste away, a skinny kid was the most horrid thing she could imagine. She blamed herself, ultimately she had to, I guess. She chose to let the Grays put the bug in her kids’ heads. She turned into love-overkill mom, stuffing Phil with every crumb she could find, protecting him from skinned knees, other kids’ meanness, bug bites, you name it. If she could have wrapped him in a papoose and carried him around on her back, I think she would have.”
“And he got bigger?” asks Brice, trying to be unusually polite.
“Chubbier with each passing year. At school, kids teased him.” I look at Brice, because I know he knows this. “You never see fat kids anywhere, anymore. You rarely see obese adults. Not enough food left on earth after we ship everything to the moon colony or orbital battle stations, or the mines in the asteroid belt, or the SDF, or the construction crews, or fucking North Korea. Not enough people left on earth to grow what’s needed.” I shrug. “People, not just kids, resented Phil for his weight. It changed him. Made him—”
“Prickly?” Brice suggests.
“Yeah.” It’s a fitting word.
At a stopping point in Phil’s history, we don’t say anything for a while.
