by Rod Walker
“Yeah,” I said. “It was weird. I think it was even trying to talk to me in my dreams.”
“Was it?” said Randolph.
“I think so,” I said. “Or it was just a really weird dream.”
“You are on a lot of drugs,” Randolph observed. “Rest up, Kane. The intelligence section and the science section both want to debrief you.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “Any chance I can get a doctor’s note and get out of it?”
Both the scientists and the intelligence officers spent a lot of time talking to me, making me repeat my story and over and over until I wanted to hit them, though that would have meant getting out of bed, which wasn’t happening. They were particularly interested in the dream—evidently a dream meant more to a Listener than it did to someone without a bunch of Darkside junk in his blood. The overall consensus was that the transductor crystal, which they called a “major transductor crystal”, was sentient in some way and had been attempting to communicate with me, though no one could figure out what it had been trying to tell me. The war, after all, was obviously not over. My own theory was that it was just a command prompt, like a computer telling a user to “Press Any Key To Continue”, though I had no idea what the crystal’s version of a key was.
In between all this, I had a lot of surgery. My left leg had been more or less shattered, and my digestive tract had been badly damaged. In the end, the surgeons reassembled my leg with the help of some space age materials, and I managed to keep most of my intestines. My leg would hurt for the rest of my life, and I would have to be careful about what I ate for a while due to digestive issues, but I would live.
The physical therapy kind of made me wish that I had died. It was almost worse than being wounded.
Jack visited me soon after I woke up, and caught me up on the news. The fall of Spokane was just as big a deal as Major Randolph said it would be, and the morale at Castle Base was way up. The heads of the Mormon Church had even officially declared it proof of God’s favor in the war. However, a lot of people thought that the Global Defense Committee might declare war on us now that Las Vegas was out of the way.
“They’ve got me training some new Listeners,” said Jack. “Some of the men who were wounded during Spokane got the conversion weapon into their blood, and we got them back to Castle Base in time for them to undergo the treatment. Some of them actually survived it, so I’ve been showing them the ropes.”
“Sounds boring,” I said.
Jack shrugged. “It is. I’d rather be out in the field. Still, no one’s shooting plasma bolts at me, so that’s good.” He grinned. “They’re using you as an example, you know.”
“What?” I said.
“Of a heroic Listener who did his duty and helped win the battle of Spokane,” said Jack.
I groaned. “Great. Just so long as they don’t want me to give a speech.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone is interested in your opinion,” said Jack. “Still, I’ll bet they will make you take a picture.”
To my mild surprise, Rigger visited me as well.
I had fallen asleep, and I woke up to see Rigger standing at the foot of my bed, scowling like he had just taken a bite out of a lemon.
“Rigger,” I said.
“Kane,” he said. “You look terrible.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll get better. You’ll still be ugly,” I said.
Rigger grunted. But he smiled a little.
“You here to finish me off?” I said.
“Nah,” said Rigger. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have left you for the Dark.” He shook his head. “That was something, you know? What we did. Going in there, just the three of us. That was crazy.”
I nodded. “Thanks for not leaving me behind.”
Rigger shrugged. “I just didn’t want to touch that creepy thing. Walter would have made me carry it.”
“Glad I could help,” I said. “It was nice of you to offer to shoot me, though.”
“Heh,” said Rigger. “Figured you didn’t want to show up back here with your eyes all black.” He looked around. “Hey, you want a drink? One of the guys in Ninth Company’s got a still behind one of the supply warehouses. Sergeant doesn’t mind so long as we keep it quiet.”
“I’m on painkillers,” I said. “It’d be a terrible idea. But my liver still works. Give me a shot.”
“Good kid,” said Rigger. “Just a shot. I’ll get in trouble if I get you killed.”
“That’d be terrible,” I said. Rigger produced a pair of paper cups and a flask, and poured me maybe quarter of an inch of a brown-colored fluid.
He poured himself much more, and passed me the cup. “Here’s to your health.”
“Here’s to not getting gut-stabbed again,” I said.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Rigger, and we both drained our cups.
That stuff burned going down, let me tell you. It was like someone had distilled Dark plasma into liquid form.
“Wow,” I said, once I’d stopped coughing.
“Yeah, it’s the good stuff,” said Rigger. “Rest up, Kane.”
He left. And just like that, Rigger and I were solid. More or less. Granted, he was still a psychopath with anger management issues, but he had finally decided we were on the same side. And for my part, I owed him my life. We had done some crazy stuff together, we had survived a horrific experience that was well outside the human norm, and that made us brothers.
Oh well. Like they say, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.
Not long after that, General Culver himself visited me, flanked by a small army of staff officers. Upon review, both the intelligence section and the science sections had decided that me, Jack, and Rigger had all performed above and beyond the call of duty, and consequently we got medals. As Jack predicted, they took pictures of us each shaking hands with General Culver as he awarded us the medals, though I had to stay in bed for mine. The General then made a speech praising our efforts in mankind’s noble war against the Dark, which was recorded and played for everyone on Castle Base’s equivalent of the Internet.
Jack was right. They didn’t ask me to make a speech.
Then the physical therapy began.
That really was unpleasant, let me tell you.
Many wounded veterans refer to Physical Therapy as Pain and Torture, and they are not wrong. My leg had been torn up pretty badly, and at first I could barely limp to the bathroom to relieve myself. The torturous regimen of exercises the physical therapist inflicted on me helped with that, and a few weeks later I could mostly walk with a cane, and I was transferred to one of the larger PT classes for soldiers with my kind of injuries.
General Culver joined us for those.
It was his regular practice. He didn’t get much time to exercise, but when he did, he came to the PT classes and worked out with the men who had been wounded and maimed under his command. I suppose he felt that he owed us, and I guess he did. I had been hurt pretty bad, but at least my leg was still attached. Some of the other men had suffered far worse. I met men who had lost both legs, or in one case, both hands. One man had taken bad burns to the face. He hadn’t lost his eyes, and the surgeons had repaired enough so he could eat and almost talk intelligibly, but his face would always look like a rough mask of reddish scar tissue. I wondered if he would ever find a woman who could look at him without flinching.
But General Culver didn’t hesitate to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and thank him for his service. Later, I saw him spotting the guy in the squat rack.
My dad hadn’t liked most people, but I could see why he had decided to rejoin Black Division after Invasion Day. The general was a man who could tell you to charge into the gates of Hell, and you would do it without hesitation.
After four and a half months, I was cleared for active duty, and I went back to work. It wasn’t like I could really leave Black Division. Despite what the crystal told me in my dreams, there was a war on, and Man was still
fighting for his survival. Everyone was needed, even a teenager with a bum leg and a dodgy tummy. I could have taken a desk job helping train new Listeners, but instead, I volunteered to go back into the field. There was so much need for Listeners that I was accepted without hesitation.
I guess I wanted to see this thing through to the end, either the end of the Dark or the end of me, one way or another. I had seen all the carnage and death the Dark had wreaked on us, and I was determined to see them defeated once and for all. This wasn’t like any other war in human history. All our other wars had been groups of people fighting different groups of people, and people almost always regret wars like that and wish they could have been avoided. Everyone talks about how things might have been different if someone had shot Hitler or Lenin or whatever, but the war with the Dark wasn’t like that. It wanted to annihilate us, and we had to beat it back or be destroyed.
At the time, I thought it was the first war in history where no man was responsible for starting it.
Boy, was I ever wrong about that!
Chapter 9: Rescue
I spent the seven months after my return to active duty going on a lot of patrols in both the Cascade Mountains and the deserts of Arizona.
The major transductor crystal I had taken from Spokane had kept the scientists busy. Jack was better at keeping his ear to the ground than I was, and according to him, the crystal had revolutionized the way the scientists understood the gates. Jack didn’t understand the math very well, and I understood it even less, but the scientists thought that the transductor crystals were all networked together, linked in the same way that the Darksiders themselves were linked through their hive mind. The major crystals acted as sort of a combination of anchor and targeting beacon, which was why the Dark found it so much easier to open new gates near a gate that was anchored with a major crystal.
“That makes sense,” I said as we sat in the canteen. “Our first year here we spent all that time hunting down scout gates. They would always open up around Spokane. There hasn’t been another one since we took the city.”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “But wouldn’t it be great if the scientists were right? Do you realize what that would mean? If we can close all the major gates, the Dark might not be able to find Earth again.”
I frowned. “Why not? They got here once, didn’t they?”
“Apparently the gates can open anywhere in the universe, right?” said Jack. “And the universe is infinite. If they can’t home in on a major gate, then the odds of the Dark being able to find us again are really low.”
“How did they get here in the first place?” I said. I vaguely recalled one of our training classes with Major Randolph. “I thought the nuke tests drew them here.”
“I wonder,” said Jack.
“What?” I said.
“If the nuclear tests drew their attention,” said Jack, “why didn’t they do anything about it once they got here? There are a bunch of missile silos in North and South Dakota. The Dark controlled most of the area with the silos until the Division got the Dakotas under control, but they never touched the missiles.”
“Guess they didn’t care,” I said.
“Then again, if they didn’t care about nukes,” said Jack, “how did they come across Earth in the first place? And why at that particular moment in history?”
I snorted. “Cause we’re lucky, that’s why.”
Jack laughed and returned his attention to his food.
But I think the scientists were right about the major transductor crystals acting as anchors. Now that Spokane and Las Vegas were shut down, new gates were only appearing within an observable radius around Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. That was why I spent so much time in the Cascade Mountains. The Division’s next target was going to be the Seattle gate, and we were building a forward position on the west side of the Cascades, getting ready for the final push to the city.
The reason I spent so much time in the desert was the Global Defense Committee.
They were up to something, but the trouble was, no one knew what it was. After they took Las Vegas, the obvious thing for them to do would have been to turn their attention to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Except they weren’t doing that. They were probing north, into the territory controlled by the Division, though whenever confronted, they would flee and or claim they were only hunting for Darksiders. There were also reports of GDC patrols fighting each other.
The operative theory was that factions within the Committee were starting to fight it out between themselves. It appeared that one faction wanted to go to war with the Division while the other one wanted to leave us alone. Of course, it might have had nothing to do with us. A significant portion of the Committee’s armed forces were former footsoldiers for the Mexican cartels, and those cartels had been at war with each other for decades before Invasion Day. Rigger thought that now that some of the pressure was off them thanks to the fall of Las Vegas, they had decided to settle their differences. My idea was that they were just playing a waiting game and had decided to let the Division do the hard work of fighting the Dark. Once we had closed a gate, and paid the price to do so, they would swoop in and grab whatever territory and resources they could while we were regrouping.
As it turned out, none of those ideas were particularly correct.
I found out why when Rigger and I were summoned to a briefing at one of the Division’s bases in southern Utah.
“Gentlemen,” said Major Randolph when we stepped into the command tent. There were twenty other men in the tent, all of them under the command of a veteran army officer named Captain Ray Vance. Vance and his men had a good reputation as men who got the job done with minimal fuss and casualties, though Vance himself looked more like a beefy construction contractor than a military officer. “Now that we’re all here, we can begin. Kane, Rigger, take a seat.”
Rigger and I sat on the benches. Major Randolph fired up his beloved PowerPoint projector.
“Before we do start,” said Randolph as the projector warmed up, “I will say that absolutely everything you are about to hear is top secret. This isn’t to be shared with anyone outside of this tent, understand? Not your families, not your girlfriends, no one.” He looked at me. “And not even the other Listeners. Do you understand?”
A chorus of “yes, sir” filled the tent. I was a bit surprised. There wasn’t much reason for opsec when dealing with the Dark. It wasn’t like they could infiltrate spies among us, and anyone who tried to spy for them would probably get converted into a zombie for his trouble. If this mission required better opsec, that meant we were dealing with human opponents.
In other words, it looked like this mission would have something to do with our friends to the south.
“As you men all know,” said Randolph as a map appeared on the screen with the territories controlled by the Division and the Committee mapped out, “recently we have been seeing more and more run-ins with various GDC elements. From what our intelligence agents have been able to learn, it seems some of the founding members of the Committee have fallen out, and they’re about to start fighting each other.”
Vance grunted. “They do that, they’re dead. The Dark’ll break out of LA in no time and start ripping them apart.”
“I think some of them are aware of that,” said Randolph. “Which is the reason we’re out here.” He tapped his computer, and a new slide appeared, showing a row of headshot photographs. “Thanks to defectors and undercover agents, intel has worked out that there are nineteen senior members of the Global Defense Committee. We’ve been able to identify eighteen of them.” He gestured at the screen. “Most of them are cartel bosses and former Mexican army officers, two are former California state officials, and then there is the one rich guy from Silicon Valley who had the foresight to hire significant private security forces before Invasion Day.”
A man with a sergeant’s insignia on his fatigues swore.
“What, Hobb?” said Vance.
“I kn
ow that guy,” said Sergeant Hobb, pointing at the screen. “He’s the guy who invented that smartphone game about sheep farming. My ex-wife never stopped playing the stupid thing.”
“As Sergeant Hobb just pointed out,” said Randolph in a dry voice, “not every member of the Committee possesses meaningful military experience.” A low rumble of laughter went through the tent. “Anyway, we’ve identified all the Committee members except for the nineteenth man, and he seems to be the most important of the lot. He seems to have been the primary brains behind it, and been the key figure in holding these disparate parties together. We believe the reason the GDC has been as successful as it has is because of this man.”
“So what’s that got to do with us, sir?” said Vance. “The General wants us to kill him?”
“Quite the opposite,” said Randolph. “This unknown nineteenth member has requested a meeting with the General, and our job is to escort him out of GDC territory.”
Vance blinked, and then said several bad words.
“Our job,” said Randolph, “is to meet this man in southern Nevada and escort him to Castle Base for a meeting with the General here. He’ll be traveling with a convoy of GDC troops under his command, and we are to meet him here.” He tapped a map on the screen, indicating a spot close to Interstate 15 in the southeastern corner of Nevada. “Once we do, we’ll escort him to Castle Base for debriefing.”
“Sir,” I said. “You’ll be in command of the mission?”
“That’s right,” said Randolph. “Captain Vance will be charge of operations, but final responsibility will rest with me.”
“And if both Corporal Rigger and I accompany you, sir,” I said, “that’s three Listeners on a single mission.”
“Yeah,” said Vance. “That’s a lot of Listeners to lose at once if this goes sour.”
Randolph nodded. “It is. My job, and the jobs of Corporal Kane and Corporal Rigger, will be to make sure we avoid contact with any Darksiders. The extraction target indicated that he believes the Dark may be targeting him personally, and requested Listeners to help him escape.”
