Raised voices. Jones, arguing. Muñoz’s shout.
“Jones!” I yelled. I got to the other side of the swampy mess and crawled up the bank. I ran as fast as I could, slapping away massive leaves and snarled branches.
I heard Grandma and Jawbone behind me. I tripped. Snapped my knee on a sharp rock. I bit back a howl. I leaned against a tree as pain shimmied up my leg. Grandma went past me.
“You okay?” she said.
“Yeah, go. Don’t let him be shit.”
She went ahead.
I limped after her. I got close enough to see Muñoz and her team; their faces were filthy and exhausted. They had their rifles out. Jones stood in front of them, waving his rifle like a goddamn idiot.
“Hey!” I said. “Put the guns away!”
Grandma strode between the two parties, palms out. “Everybody’s tired. Let’s—”
A gun went off.
The sound came from Muñoz’s team; that’s what I remember. I swore and stumbled back. Jawbone bumped into me, swore, and fumbled for his own rifle.
“Don’t shoot!” I said. “Don’t—”
Everything went dark. They’d turned their lamps off. I couldn’t see a damn thing except what was directly in front of me.
“Shoot!” Jones yelled.
Two more shots, both from Muñoz’s side. I heard them crashing through the undergrowth. Jones cried out. “I’m hit! I’m hit! Shit!”
“Hold fire!” Muñoz said. “Who’s firing? Dietz, did you fire, you fuck?”
“I’m on the goddamn ground, Muñoz! Control your fucking squad.”
“We’re out. We’re out,” she said.
“Jones is hit!” I said.
“Call for evac. He probably shot himself!” And then her squad was moving away again, crashing through the bush.
I crawled over to Jones. A broken tree branch jutted from his left thigh. He was covered in shredded leaves, splinters, and blood.
“What’s all this?” I said. “Is this your—” I brought up my head. The light from my headlamp crawled across a meaty, twisted wreck just behind Jones. I recognized Grandma’s hands, short, stubby fingers tipped in callouses.
I went to Grandma’s body. Her chest was blown open. A yawning wet mouth of viscera gaped back at me. The branches of the tree behind the body glistened with blood and bits of tattered flesh. The blistered tree trunk was exposed, as if mashed by a tremendous fist. Her rifle lay a few centimeters from her outstretched hands. The wilted violets she had affixed to her bayonet were scattered across the fleshy red smear where her head should have been.
I stood over the rumpled wreck of Grandma’s body and had an irrational urge to try to put all the pieces of her back together.
Jawbone behind me, “What do we do?”
“They’ll . . . send evac.”
“You sure?” Jawbone said. “Shit. Wouldn’t we hear them already? They’re recording, right? They’d know, from her tracker. And what we saw. They’ll see that Muñoz—”
“I didn’t see who shot. You did?”
“I . . . I mean, they’ll review it.”
“Dietz! Jawbone! My . . . leg. Do you have—”
“Yeah,” I said. It felt good to have something to do. I ripped open my med kit. Yanked out the branch from Jones’s leg. Jones screamed. Blood bubbled. I shoved coagulating gel into the wound. It made contact with the blood and expanded, filling the wound, stemming the flow.
Jones palmed the pills I gave him. I shot him up with a vial labeled “For pain,” just to be sure. We had had basic CPR and medical training by then, but my mind was having a hard time recalling much of it.
Jawbone squatted across from me, rifle still out. “We can leave him and go ahead,” Jawbone said. “You stay here and I’ll hit the objective, then hump back and meet you.”
“We’d still have to hump him back, after,” I said. “It’s a team exercise. And Vargas is . . . she’s dead. Jones isn’t good.”
“I’m right here,” Jones said. “And nobody’s humping me. Leave me. I won’t get eaten by ants.”
“Vargas will be,” I said.
“They’ll send a team,” Jones said, but his voice trembled. “For her and maybe for me too. Complete the mission.”
“I wanted to win,” I said, and it sounded stupid, then, while Jones squirmed and the bugs began to crawl all over Grandma’s ruined corpse. I could almost hear her tell me, “Life isn’t fair, kid.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said aloud. Then, to Jones, “Hey, I’ll stay with you. Jawbone, you nab the objective; get it logged on the GPS. We’ll carry him back, the two of us. It won’t take long, all of us together.”
“We’re going to lose a lot of sleep,” Jawbone said, “and we aren’t going to win. Why don’t we just wait?”
“Is that what we’d say out on Mars? That we’d just wait?”
“This isn’t Mars, Dietz.”
“Not yet. Do it.”
“I’m not going alone. They shot at us.”
“Jawbone, shit!”
“Go,” Jones said. “I’m not a threat to them anymore. Why waste the firepower? I can shoot. My fingers are just fine.”
“All right,” I said. I couldn’t look at Grandma’s body again.
Me and Jawbone got Jones hopped up on some more painkillers. I left him Grandma’s water slug and rations.
“We aren’t far from the objective,” I said. “Give us a few hours.”
“Sure,” Jones said, and he gave me one of his cocky smiles, but he was sweating badly, and that smile didn’t reach his terrified eyes.
“Let’s go,” Jawbone said. “What’s the map say? We can’t be far.”
I unfolded the map. It trembled in my hands. Is there a wind? I thought, but it was my own shaking fingers.
“We’re maybe . . . another eleven or twelve k’s.”
Jawbone grabbed at my elbow. “C’mon.”
The DI. I saw his face again: angry, maybe, but disappointed, mostly, like my father’s. I wanted to win. Jawbone wanted to win. We had one man down. Another dead.
We weren’t going to win. We had already lost.
“Jawbone. We need to take Jones back.”
“They will send—”
“And if he dies?”
“We have to complete the objective.”
“This is the objective,” I said. “The team.”
Jones protested, but I’d made up my mind. As we dragged Jones between us, one painful foot in front of the other, drops of his blood made a shiny little trail behind us.
We marched, slogged, dragged, moaned, kicked, screamed, and yeah, we even stopped to cry a couple times. The jungle cover masked the sun, made sunrise come later and sunset earlier. If we just sat down, would they come for us? I imagined the DI again. His spitting, hissing contortions as he told us how worthless we were, how unfit. And me, always me: I was stupid, not two brain cells to rub together. Why did we bother coming back at all, he’d say, when we had so clearly fucked the dog?
Dusk came early to the jungle. I smelled our rally point before I saw it. The mouthwatering scent of roasting protein, real meat, even, and spicy bean mash. My stomach cramped so violently with hunger I thought I’d fall over.
We came around a bend in the trail, its width well-worn now. There was the rest of the class, sitting under the darkening sky at long tables, talking and laughing like kids at some end-of-year dance social. The flag waved above them, emblazoned with a stylized red eagle gripping a bouquet of arrows tipped in stars, flying on a blue background.
“Medic!” I yelled.
A few people looked up. Two handlers came over from the edges of the rally point and met us on the field. The flash of their heads-up displays sparked in their left eyes as they scanned us.
“Medic’s on the way,” one said. “Put him down. Dietz, Hadid, report to your DI.”
“What about Vargas?” I said. “There was live fire. She got hit. She’s . . . she died out there.”
�
��We know,” the other one said. “The body’s been retrieved.”
“You knew about Jones but didn’t come out?” Jawbone said. “The fuck?”
“Report to your DI, recruit.”
I grabbed Jawbone’s arm and led him away to the temporary barracks.
The DI was in his office, just off the rec room. He had his face turned away from us. Held a big cup of tea in his meaty left hand.
“Dietz and Hadid reporting, sir,” I said.
We saluted. I wasn’t sure how I was still standing. The little rush of adrenaline on seeing the DI’s face must have kept me mobile.
“Jones alive?”
“Sir,” I said, “yes, sir. We got him back. Sir.”
“You two fuckups were the only squad to lose a unit, you know that?”
I decided that was rhetorical, but Jawbone said, “Sir, no sir. We’re sorry, sir.”
“Sorry?” the DI said. “You know how many idiots I’ve lost on what should be a pretty basic fucking exercise?”
“No, sir,” Jawbone said.
“Sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen in the five goddamn years I’ve been trying to teach kids like you not to shoot off their own dicks.”
“Pretty tough for all of us to shoot off our own dicks, sir. Considering.”
“Shut up, Dietz,” the DI said. “Don’t argue semantics with me. You’re the one who got Vargas’s goddamn face blown off.”
“Sir, I don’t know where the shot came from. You can check our rifles. We never fired. It was some other team.”
“And you didn’t return fire?”
“Sir, no,” I said. “They were our people, sir. If we started shooting, there would just be more shooting. You’d have two or three more bodies.”
“What if they’d been your enemy, Dietz?”
“They weren’t. Sir. There was nothing in the mission brief that said we could or should shoot one another.”
“Nothing saying you couldn’t, either.”
“Sir, I believe you are arguing semantics now, sir.”
“Goddamn right I am. Hadid, you shoot anything?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you want to?”
“I . . . sir, yes, I did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Dietz said not to.”
“And Dietz was your squad leader?”
“Sir, no, that was Jones, sir.”
“And what did Jones tell you to do?”
“Sir . . . uh . . . he said to shoot.”
“And you disobeyed your squad leader?”
“Sir . . . I, shit, I’m sorry, sir. It was . . .”
“Sorry is for your mom. Do I look like your fucking mom, Hadid?”
“No, sir.”
“Get the fuck out of here, Hadid. Dietz, you stay.”
A shiver moved up my spine. What was he going to do to me now?
When Hadid was gone, the DI fixed me with his undivided attention. “You look like shit, Dietz.”
“Sir, I feel like shit.”
“You sleep any?”
“Sir, maybe an hour. Sir.”
“We record everything that happens out there.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
“You kids are all a bunch of walking, talking, recording devices, you know. I’ve seen more kids wank off and awkwardly fuck each other than you can imagine. I don’t know how they find the fucking energy.”
I had no idea what to say to that, but luckily—or not—he kept on.
“I don’t like kids like you, Dietz. You know that. Kids like you come out here with something to prove. They put their squads in danger. They risk their lives before the goddamn corp can get any use out of them. But some kids, they get the others to follow them. You can call it dumb luck, or charisma, or some inbred talent. I don’t think you have much of that but the first. So I can do one of two things. I can pair you up with somebody you will actually fucking listen to or I can kick you the fuck out as some fuckup who will never follow orders.”
It wasn’t a question. I waited. My legs felt like two cold pillars of dead stone. My eyelids kept sinking closed.
“You listening to me, Dietz?”
“Sir. Yes, sir!”
“Get a shower. You’ve got blood all over you. Dismissed.”
I got as far as pulling off my slick and bunching it up at the end of my bed. I couldn’t make it to my bunk, so I crawled into Muñoz’s—she was still out with the others.
She woke me up some time later and offered a hard roll slathered in butter and cheese. I gulped it down gratefully before anyone caught us with food in the barracks.
“You stink,” Muñoz said. “Take a shower.”
Being physically ground down is like being drunk. Sometimes you can only process what you’re doing in hazy bursts. It’s like your lizard brain takes over, the same part of you that regulates breathing and digestion. I went through the motions on instinctual memory. MARCH TO SHOWERHEAD. WET YOUR HEAD. SOAP YOUR HEAD AND FACE. RINSE. SOAP YOUR LEFT ARM. . . .
I woke in the middle of the night to someone moaning. Everyone had racked up in the temporary barracks. In the morning, we were getting lifted out, back to Mendoza.
I rolled over. “Shut up!” I said.
“It’s Jones,” Muñoz whispered. “He’s been doing that for an hour.”
“Didn’t they give him painkillers?”
“I think he’s having nightmares.”
“Somebody should wake him up.”
“Too tired to move.”
We both lay there in the dark, surrounded by more than a hundred other snorting, snoring, whispering, shifting, sleeping bags of human blood and bone and flesh. As I closed my eyes, I saw Grandma’s burst chest again, a tortured animal, something from some awful, over-the-top immersive about parasites or aliens or wars in other corps.
“Know what gets me, Muñoz?”
“What?”
“Grandma washed out cause she couldn’t break down into light. They fixed her, though, some new treatment, she said. She was going to deploy to Mars like the rest of us, beamed up in a bolt of light. They can fix all that. They can make us into goddamn sunbeams, but they can’t keep us from dying.”
“Not yet.”
I listened to Jones moaning. “I’m not sure,” I said, “if that’s good or bad.”
“I didn’t shoot her,” Muñoz said.
“You know who did?”
“No.”
“You bullshitting?”
“Doesn’t matter which one. It was my squad, and I didn’t control them. They’ll throw me out.”
“They won’t.”
“I’m not making intelligence,” she said. “They made that totally fucking clear. Now I’m not going to be anybody.”
She left the rest unsaid, but I heard it in the silence. “Now I’m nobody, just like you.”
I guess that brings us to week five. The week you want to hear about. Because in week five? We jumped.
Interview #1
SUBJECT #187799
DATE: 21|05|309
TIME: 0900
ROOM: 97
I: Interview beginning at oh-nine-hundred with Subject one-eight-seven-seven-nine-nine. This is an audio-only recording. Please note that all recordings with this subject have been classified audio-only. Subject, you will be asked a series of questions to which we require your honest answers, to the best of your recollection. Do you understand?
S: What do you think?
I: I’ll need an affirmative.
S: You’ll need a body bag.
I: For the record, I take the subject’s response to indicate that they understand my line of inquiry. When did you arrive in Saint Petersburg?
S: What?
I: Your arrival in Saint Petersburg. When was it?
S: (LAUGHTER) There is no satisfying answer to that. You have no idea what you’re asking.
I: Be unsatisfying. At what time did you arrive in Saint Petersburg?
S: Too early for dinner.
I: What specific time period did you arrive in Saint Petersburg?
S: Before dinner.
I: Who sent you to Saint Petersburg?
S: What?
I: Who was your commanding officer?
S: For what?
I: There was no outside agent?
S: That’s a good question
(SILENCE: 08 seconds)
I: Do you need to go back to your cell?
S: No, I can shit here. Sorry, talk here. Talk here, shit here. Either, or.
I: What were you doing in Saint Petersburg?
S: Following orders.
I: From who?
S: I told you.
I: You’ve said nothing.
S: You aren’t listening. But that isn’t what you’re here to do, is it?
I: What am I here to do?
S: You know what the trick is to an interrogation, Sergeant?
I: You are quite certain I’m a sergeant? Do I look so young?
S: No, I know who you are. And I know that’s likely no longer your rank, but it pleases me to piss you off. We’ve met before, though I suspect you don’t know that yet. I can’t imagine you still have access to a complete DNA database to test me against, do you? If I’m Martian, the odds that I’d be in there are slim, aren’t they? It pleases me, though. I could give you name, rank, and serial number, but that will get me straight to the next room, won’t it? And we all know confessions gained under torture are circumspect at best. I’d say anything, just to make the pain stop. I’d tell you your mother sent me to Saint Petersburg to murder your commanding officer with a bowl full of cherries, if that’s what you wanted to hear. The trick is to not offer up anything. You answer the question and only the question. Don’t start building up a story you can’t substantiate. The standard interrogation technique for TenisanaCom is PEACE: Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure and Evaluate. I have to assume you’ve done your preparation and planning. Now you’re engaging and asking me to explain and account for my actions so you can figure out how I achieved it. I know we’re starting here because you haven’t just jumped into enhanced interrogation techniques. . . . Those techniques are reserved for the very worst interrogators, the ones who will not only fail to get what they truly desire from a POW, but who will create a lifelong enemy whose goal on leaving this prison—if, indeed, they ever leave—will be to share their story and teach an entirely new generation of young people to hate the organization that captured and tortured them. It’s one of the most fascinating and heartbreaking cycles of violence, on par with parents who abuse their children. Did you know that the abuse of children by corporate bosses has been shown to create more loyal adult employees? They are told they could simply leave their home corp and become a ghoul, or sell themselves off to some other corp. They are told they have choices. If we choose to stay with a corp, we have to justify our reasons. We become complicit in our own oppression. This was referred to as Stockholm Syndrome—
The Light Brigade Page 6
