by David Poyer
He fights to move his hands, to tear the foreign, sharp things out of his throat, out of his dick, out of his arm. But he can’t. At last he focuses on the dark face over his. A black woman, in the blue dim. A strange alcoholy smell about her. Wearing some kind of uniform. For a second he wonders if it’s La Planchada, the demon nurse, come for him. But at last he blinks obediently, squeezing his eyes shut. Opens them again.
And feels her hand squeezing his. “Good. Good! You’re not going to be this way for too long, and you’re going to be fine. You’re not going back to Hainan. Okay? You have all your arms and legs. Your spine’s not injured. This is just to help your lungs get better, from the gas they used on you. As soon as you can breathe on your own, we’ll take these nasty tubes out and get you something good to eat. Oh, and—and the war’s over, if you didn’t already know.”
He blinks ferociously and she pats his arm again. “Things are a little confused right now, but I’m pretty sure we won. So I’m going to turn this tap here, and in a couple of seconds you’ll feel a lot more comfortable.”
A warm tide rises, spreading all over his body, prickling and heating. A reassuring heat in his arms and legs. He’s still terrified, but the tide rises slowly, like a warm soft woolly blanket drawn up over him when he’s sleepy. A sleepy child. His mother squeezes his hand again.
“Mama,” he whispers. Or tries to. But his lips only twitch around the rigid, mucus-smeared plastic.
* * *
HE wakes up again that night. Or thinks he’s awake, though he’s not.
He’s back on Hainan. In the mask, the heavy suit. Sweating. Searching the targeting fog for the lurching things. They loom through the smoke, bodies sleek, metallic, spider-shaped, teardrop-shaped, with spiky antennas and bug-eyed oculars. Autonomous, like the Allied combat bots. Needle-thin, sporadically visible beams shoot out through the smoke, searching their surroundings.
He pushes forward, breath rasping in his ears. Rasping. Chuffing. Clicking. On and on. The squad follows him, but they keep bunching up. He has to turn and signal them furiously to spread the fuck out.
The school looms ahead. He grips his carbine, not wanting to see this. But he must. He must. He can’t stop it or direct his steps away. He’s helpless, here in the dream.
The grass between the bus and the school is carpeted. A patchwork quilt, all colors, unrolled on the dusty-gray grass.
Then he makes out the faces.
The children lie in ragged lines, as if they’d been in queues when the violet shells hit. Some still holding hands. They’re all black-haired, like his nephews. They wear colorful plastic rain slickers. The boys in blue. The girls, all in pink.
When he walks in among them the bodies crunch and give way under his boots, crackling like fried pork rinds. He steps on a plastic pencil box cartooned with a pastel-colorful cat. All the kids have the exact same pencil boxes.
The Indo with him, the big Papuan who fired the Javelin into the bunker back by the beach, is whimpering under his mask. The cicadas of the gas-warning alarm go chirrup, chirrup.
Do you hate the Chinese? The twisted, rabid face of his old boot camp DI looms in the blowing clouds. DI Brady. Do you hate the Chinese, Private Ramos?
I hate the fucking Chinese, sir.
I will stick my bayonet into them and blow their guts over my boots.
* * *
HE wakes wanting to scream but still unable to and lies in stiff helpless terror in the dim blue light for many hours as the machine clicks on and off. He can’t take this. He’s going crazy. Now the others have come to gather around him, sitting on the bed. They gaze down at him, the way they looked up from the landing craft’s wake on the way in to the beach. Oh, he knows they’re dead. Fat useless Bleckford. Titcomb. Schultz. Vincent. Orietta and Truss. Troy Whipkey and Lieutenant Hern. Pudgy little Lieutenant Ffoulk. Sergeant Clay. Patterson, Karamete … they’re yelling at him, mouths open. Or maybe chanting some kind of cadence.
He can almost make out the words, but he’s afraid to hear them.
He knows what they want.
He sings all the songs he knows but without words. He says endless Hail Marys in his head but without belief. He tries to remember the rosary but can’t. He keeps feeling someone there but when he opens his eyes again there’s no one. Not his mom. Not Mirielle. Not La Planchada. Not Jesus. Not any of his old squad. Where did they all go? Are they coming back? He almost misses them.
His eyes drift closed again.
He’s back at Farmer Seth’s. The Hanging Room. The Kill Room.
He’s back on the Line, with the crew. José, Mahmou’, Johu, Fernando, Sazi.
A long chain of stainless hooks sway from an I-beam, tinkling, like music. From them hang dozens of upside-down U’s of heavy, polished stainless metal, each sized just right to trap a careless hand. The chain passes through a vertical slot in the concrete-block wall. Slot, wall, and floor are spattered with a brownish-black crust inches thick.
Hector stamps heavy steel-toes, testing his footing. The men fit goggles over their eyes. They rub Vaseline over their arms, then pull on thin gloves, or women’s nylons.
“Ready?” the production foreman growls, his lone hand on the knife switch. He lost the other in an ice-grinding machine. Without waiting for an answer from the men ranged tensely along the line of glittering hooks, José jerks it down. The lights douse, then reignite a scarlet carmine. Hector sucks a deep breath, clenching his fists.
With a prolonged, grinding rattle, a clashing metallic clanging, the Line surges into motion. The chickens squawk and flutter as the crew pulls them out of their modules, fighting, pecking, spurring, but there’s only one fate awaiting them. One after the other, dangling from the shining hooks, the Line carries them off, to vanish through the wall.
Then … he floats up … to
Something in his throat. Something hard, digging into his throat …
The blue dim, and him floating in it, tormented and alone …
Is this Hell already? This could well be Hell. He may really be totally fucked.
Not far from him, someone’s moaning in the dark. Sobbing, but it sounds choked. Muffled.
It takes a long time before he realizes that helpless, weeping bastard is him.
* * *
ENDLESS eons later he’s still lying awake as someone snaps the overhead lights on. So bright he can’t see. People in white coats dart past. They glide in and out of his field of view. They seem to move extremely fast. Or maybe he’s just thinking super slow. Sometimes when they do stop they discuss him in low mumbles. He can’t make out more than an occasional word. Someone else in the room keeps groaning. The machine puffs and wheezes, and now it clicks too. Now he understands what’s happening. And he’s even more terrified. Why is it clicking now? It didn’t click before. Did it? He can’t remember. He can’t remember … He’s scared it will break or the power will be interrupted. If the plug gets loose he will die. And there won’t be a damn thing he can do about it.
He’d rather land on a dozen mined beaches than lie helpless like this.
The woman from last night. Dark faced, round faced. She bends over him. “Sergeant? Sergeant Hector Ramos? I am your nurse. Do you remember? Blink once if you can hear me.”
She has a funny accent, like the Pakistanis who run the convenience store down the road from the chicken factory. He squeezes his eyes shut. Feels tears trickle down his cheek, into his ears.
“I know it’s scary, okay? But you’re going to be all right. You’re on a Navy hospital ship. The war is over, and we won. You’re one of our heroes. But they used a new gas on Hainan. It hurts your nerves so you can’t breathe on your own. Your family knows you’re alive. The Marine Corps got that word to them.
“Now, this morning we’re going to have to suction some bad stuff out of your lungs. It’s not going to hurt, but the procedure might make you feel like you’re choking. Blink those pretty brown eyes if you understand.”
She lied. It hurts,
all right. He chokes and dry vomits while they force yet another tube down his throat. The edge catches, ripping something deep inside his neck. So of course they have to suction some more. They mutter above his bed about blood and secretions. Then force more things into him. Tears leak down his cheeks. He can’t help moaning. Why are you torturing me? Just let me die, he wants to yell. But of course he can’t.
Even worse is the steady fucking patter one surgeon, or corpsman, or whatever he is, keeps up. A white guy with a sharp nose and a narrow face filled with hate. He murmurs a steady stream of “You’re a three-landing marine, they say. The hero who raised that flag in Taipei? Well, I kind of expected a little more here. Expected a big shot like you to be able to take it. Not whine and cry like a little fucking pussy girl.” Muttering close to Hector’s ear, so the others can’t hear.
Hector resolves in his heart to kill this fucking asshole as soon as he can get out of this bed. I will corner you in the fucking head and choke-hold you till it takes, motherfucker.
When they finally finish and back away he lies sweating, dizzy, wanting desperately to flee. Escape. Die. Anything but go through that again.
Across the ICU another man’s staring back. A white kid. He’s festooned with tubes, like an alien life form is sucking the life out of him. A computer screen draws jagged lines above his bed. He too is on a ventilator. His eyes are filled with terror. The blanket sags flat where legs ought to be. They stare at each other across the room. Hector musters all his strength. Contorting his lips around the tubes, he tries to send him a faint smile.
* * *
STILL later another woman comes in. A white woman, but with long dark hair. His nurse addresses her as “Dr. Andrews.” She looks at him for a while and asks his nurse questions. Then starts talking to him. By now he’s fading, exhausted, but she’s saying something about how great he’s doing. How they don’t want to keep him on the ventilator. If they do, his muscles will weaken and he won’t be able to breathe on his own, ever again.
“And we don’t want that, do we?” She pauses, as if he could actually answer. “No, I didn’t think so.
“So we’re going to try weaning you off this afternoon. Discontinue the curare and see if you can breathe on your own. Could be a little uncomfortable, but it’s the way out of here. You game for that, Sergeant?”
Blink. Blink. A long, long blink. Fucking pinche yes, lady, fucking more than ready.
She goes on talking—to the nurse, he guesses—about discontinuing this drug and the antagonist that and the dosage this. But he’s not really listening.
Anything to end this.
Why didn’t they just let him die?
Hector Ramos doesn’t want to live.
But he has to. For a while. If only to get this fucking thing out of his throat.
Then he will find a way to kill them. He is a machine gunner, after all. He will find his gun again. Then he’ll kill them. All of them. Every fucking white coat La Planchada devil in here. Everyone aboard this pinche fucking torture ship.
5
Xinjiang Province, Western China
THE smoke streamed steadily upward, only to be intercepted by the hut’s roof. It slowly filtered along the ridgepole, to finally seep out through a reed-shielded hole. Shielded, in case an infrared eye peered down from the bright morning sky. In case a drone buzzed over, loitering above these crags and deep mountain valleys, missiles cocked, searching for a target.
Three stocky men sat cross-legged around a large brass serving tray steaming with heat. They scooped up clumps of soft, hand-pulled noodles with folded naan bread dipped in gravy. They picked out hot chunks of savory stir-fried camel meat, popped it into beard-fringed mouths, and followed it with hot sweet tea so strong it made their heads buzz. No chopsticks. The rebels disdained them as a foreign custom imposed by the hated Han. Women in black robes stood behind them, watching silently from the shadows. Outside, gravel crackled as a guard paced slowly back and forth before the little shepherd’s hut, built of native rocks and roofed with native brush.
The Lingxiu sat in the center. His once dirty-blond beard, graying now, did not cover the furrowed scars that radiated out over a bronzed face from a potatolike nose. He wore the same threadbare shalwar kameez as the Uighurs, the same flat cap over braided hair. But wrapped around his shoulders was a ragged gray blanket, the sort that might have been issued to a prisoner of war. A black eyepatch covered the empty socket where his left orb had been torn out. His remaining eye was a cold, remorseless blue, like sunset seen through deep ice. His left leg was thrust out awkwardly. A titanium brace glittered, buckled tight over loose wool trousers. A Makarov pistol rested on the carpet inches from his right hand, and a Claymore remote-det mine lay in a carrying pack at his other side. From his belt hung a heavy, curved Uighur blade he’d taken off an enemy, after killing him in a knife fight.
Once upon a time the stocky mujahid with the eyepatch had been Master Chief Theodore Harlett Oberg, United States Navy. But no longer. Now he was Lingxiu Oberg al-Amriki, the Leader. Of the Resistance, of the Faithful. Deep in the mountains of western China, supported now and then with guns and gold by the CIA, he’d built a guerrilla force to distract and weaken the enemy from within. The Independent Turkistan Islamic Movement harked back to an earlier resistance the Han majority had ruthlessly stamped out. ITIM fought for the union of all the Turkic peoples from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. And of course, above all, “Chinese” Turkistan.
Now the tallest of the three men, a spare lanky Uighur named Guldulla, sat back from the tray and beckoned impatiently. His long face was curtained by a heavy mustache, half white, half dark-haired. A girl slave hurried to fetch a damp cloth, then stepped back, gaze downcast. His pistol lay next to him as well, an older Russian automatic chased with intricate engraving.
He muttered, “You say we cannot stop fighting, Lingxiu? Even though the cursed Han have surrendered?”
Teddy shifted his butt and farted; the greasy camel meat had that effect on his digestion. “They haven’t surrendered to us, Tokarev,” he muttered, in the crude Chinese he’d picked up as a prisoner of war.
Camp 576 had been a death camp, working politicals and POWs to death mining radioactive rare earths. Five men had made it out, up a cliff, past a guard post, and through the apron of barbed wire, lights, and machine guns. But only two had threaded the mountains to safety. By now, after months with the rebels, he understood basic Uighur, but didn’t speak it well enough to trust himself in complex negotiations.
He spread his hands. “Ever hear of Iraq? Saddam Hussein surrendered. After the Gulf War. Then used his helicopters to massacre his Shiite rebels.”
The third man was heavier than the other two, and younger. A glossy black beard brushed his chest. A strange-looking apparatus lay next to him: rifle-like, yet not a rifle. A cable led from it to a solar panel deployed outside. A second cable led in, to a monitor panel, at whose readouts he occasionally glanced. He said little, concentrating on eating, but looked searchingly from face to face as the others debated.
“Jusuf, are you getting all this?” Teddy asked him. “You understand, this ‘armistice’ doesn’t apply to us? It’s only between the infidel powers. All it means is that now the Han can shift their forces in from the coasts, to reconcentrate against us.”
Guldulla said tentatively, “The Hajji would have said—”
It was the Hajji’s curved knife Teddy wore. The Hajji he’d had to kill. Teddy barked, “The Hajji’s dead, okay? Old Imam Akhmad’s dead too. We three have to formulate a strategy, here, Tok. A way forward. Otherwise, once a peace treaty’s signed the Han are going to redeploy six Internal Security divisions and just overrun us out here.”
“What is it that you suggest, Lingxiu?” Jusuf said quietly, picking through the remains of the meal. He glanced at the others, then flickered pudgy fingers at the women. They scurried quietly about, removing the serving tray, bringing more damp heated cloths, ref
reshing the tea. A heavyset one brought a dish of sweet date-and-nut cakes and set it before Teddy. The men ignored the slaves, though Jusuf filched the smallest cake from the tray as it went by. He nibbled it, sighing, closing his eyes.
Suddenly the console emitted a faint, repetitive beep. The younger muj squinted at it, then gestured angrily to one of the women. She rushed to the fire, dragging a thick carpet of blackened wool over it. Smoke puffed around the hem as the fire suffocated. The other rebels glanced at the technician questioningly. He studied the readouts for a few seconds, then shook his head and sighed. “It will pass us, in the next valley,” he said in a soft, deferential voice. “To the north. This time. Inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” the others murmured too.
Teddy sucked a tooth glumly. He turned his head and spat a bit of gristle. “Well, keep an eye on it … You see, they’re still hunting us.”
“It is true, I understand, Lingxiu,” Guldulla said. “And I agree, they will not stop. So what is our wisest path?”
Teddy inclined his head. The older man had rescued him, when the surviving escapees had stumbled into a rebel attack on a propaganda festival. They’d soldiered together for nearly two years now. He said, trying to sound reasonable, logical, detached, “I see two roads ahead. We can approach the new Han government, using our status as allies of the Americans. It is possible the CIA will speak on our behalf. Offering to end the rebellion.”
“And what would our terms be?” Guldulla said. “Independence?”
Teddy shook his head. “We could ask for it. But the Han will never agree. They might compromise on some kind of separate status. Like Taiwan or Hong Kong, or Tibet, in this Chinese Federation the BBC radio speaks of.
“But to achieve that, we’d have to give up fighting. Surrender our weapons, and trust the Han not to break their agreement and come after us again five years down the road.”
