Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  He put hands on hips. “You know what happened here. They pulled us out of training to assist. We’ll search for survivors, secure property against looters, aid displaced civilians, and assist MI teams.”

  Our back-of-the-truck brain trust had guessed right about most of our mission. But MI teams? MI was Military Intelligence Branch. What was that about?

  We played hurry-up-and-wait for an hour in the cold while ash snowed down, and Jacowicz talked on the radio. Candles or lanterns lit the house windows around us. They silhouetted curious heads, grown-ups and kids peeking around curtains. These were the lucky survivors. But they had no power, no water, no heat, no groceries.

  A smaller truck pulled up, dropped its tailgate, and we unloaded boxes. C-rations. The civilian population was about to learn why war was hell. At least if our mission was to distribute food back here, that was safer than going closer to the burning city core.

  When the truck emptied, a drill motioned to me to climb in back.

  “What’s up, Drill Sergeant?”

  He shrugged. “The spooks need a warm body. You just volunteered, Wander.”

  Spooks. Why would Military Intelligence need one half-baked trainee? I bounced against the truck’s canvas sides as it lurched away from Walter and the rest of Third Platoon. As they faded away in the ashfall my throat swelled. It wasn’t fair. They weren’t much family, but they were all I had, and now I was losing them.

  I bounced along for minutes feeling sorry for myself before I realized that the light was redder, and I wasn’t shivering. The smell got worse and the fire’s roar louder.

  I snatched up the canvas side flap. Toppled wooden power poles wrapped in black cable made the streets an obstacle course. Cars lay on their sides. House windows gaped black and shattered.

  The truck stopped, and, again, I dismounted. Closer to the blast zone!

  The fire’s heat baked my exposed cheeks. It sucked air to itself, making wind that snapped at my uniform sleeves. I guessed I was a couple miles from downtown, if the Projectile had hit dead center. This neighborhood remained recognizable, brick warehouses or old offices, half-flattened. Even after a day, the flames at city center volcanoed a half mile high. Their roar shook the street so the broken glass that paved it shimmered as it reflected the orange firestorm. The truck turned back before I could blink.

  Fifty feet away, a middle-aged captain was silhouetted against the firestorm. He stood alongside a folding table, and above him rose an ash-coated canvas canopy. The canopy centered three sides of a square formed by olive drab trailers. Floodlights on poles glared down on the canopy while a portable generator buzzed somewhere.

  He shouted through cupped hands. “You’re not in hell, but you can see it from here.”

  I saluted. Instead of returning it, the captain waved me closer, with a tired hand untrained by Field Manual FM 22-5, Drill and Ceremony.

  He looked me up and down, his hands on his hips. “Ever had experience with extraterrestrials?”

  I smirked. “My drill sergeant’s pretty strange.”

  He sighed. “Well, I told them I just needed a strong back. Coffee?” He waved at an aluminum pot and stacked cups on the table.

  “I’m Howard Hibble.”

  I shook his hand. It was so thin he’d never make one dead-hang pull-up. His uniform was contemporary camouflage pattern, not like our last-century training togs. Captain’s bars hung crooked from one side of his collar and the Military Intelligence Compass-Rose-Dagger from the other.

  Captain Hibble ran a lean hand through flattop gray hair and dragged on a tobacco cigarette. “Don’t expect drill-sergeant crap from me. You’ve probably been in the army longer than I have. Until last month I was Walker Professor of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Studies at the University of Nevada. Believe it or not.”

  I believed. He’d never spent time with the likes of Drill Sergeant Ord. His uniform sagged over his scarecrow frame, as wrinkled as the skin of his face. His boots looked like he shined them with a Hershey bar.

  “All my life I hoped we weren’t alone in the universe.” He hacked and looked around at the flames. “Now I wish we were.”

  “What am I doing, here, sir?”

  “For now, bunk in that truck over there. I’m the only one in this menagerie still awake. We go when its cooler and lighter.”

  I’d been bouncing in a deuce-and-a-half since before the previous dawn. The “extraterrestrials” remark sounded ominous, but “bunk” was music to my ears.

  By morning, the firestorm had burned itself out. The wind had died, and only scattered fires flickered.

  I stumbled, scratching, into the dawn and toward the latrine.

  Other soldiers wandered the quadrangle formed by the truck trailers. I use the term “soldier” loosely. Unlaced boots and stubble sprouted everywhere. Ord would explode if he saw this bunch. This whole unit had to be

  Intel weenies. I’d heard outfits like this existed. “Unconventional” assemblages of brainy weirdos. I eavesdropped on yawned conversations. This platoon included aerospace engineers, biologists, even psychics and aboriginal water-sniffers. As a race we were grasping every straw in the search for answers.

  Under the center canopy, Hibble scavenged through a cardboard doughnut box. He stepped away, chewing, while powdered sugar flurried onto his chest. “Help yourself. Then you and I are going into the city core to hunt Projectile fragments.”

  I spit crumbs. “In there?” The city center was still a molten, orange pit.

  “In protective suits.”

  “Protective? But the fragments—”

  “Aren’t radioactive.” He nodded. “Not even explosive. These devices are just large masses moving at high speeds. Enough kinetic energy to incinerate a city. Last century, humans bombed Dresden and Tokyo into firestorms with incendiaries. But big rocks from space work, too. Ask the dinosaurs.”

  “Why hunt fragments?”

  He rolled his eyes at the smoke. “What else have we got to study? But we pegged the enemy as extra-solar system that way. The metals were too exotic for our neighborhood.”

  I had a feeling Howard’s neighborhood and mine differed by light-years. He fitted me out with a goggled, rubber respirator mask. One of those firefighter-technology deals with the little sidepack that manufactures oxygen. Over our uniforms we each wore fire-resistant coveralls and boot covers. I also got to wear an empty backpack.

  We drove toward the city center until the rubble deepened, then left his ancient car, he called it a Jeep, and hiked.

  Smoke, flickering firelight, and my goggles blurred tipped, brick walls that towered above us, poised to crush us at every turn.

  My heart pounded. I glanced around at the debris, expecting to find a bloody, severed limb or a charred body under every drywall slab.

  “Jason, don’t expect this to be a graves-registration detail.”

  “A what?”

  “We won’t see many recognizable remains. When a skyscraper collapses on a body, a person disappears.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut at the image. Respirator or not, I breathed through my mouth and still smelled burned flesh.

  Howard held his aluminum walking stick out for balance and high-wired across a blackened girder that bridged a brick pile. I followed, knees shaking. I joined him on the other side as the girder groaned, snapped, and a ton of bricks cascaded next to Howard.

  “Watch out!”

  He waved his stick. “You’ll get used to it”

  Insulated suit notwithstanding, sweat trickled down my cheeks inside the mask. My lenses fogged. As we closed on ground zero, buildings no longer existed separately. I recognized only occasional doorframes or papered walls. A corkscrewed electrovan bumper wore a charred sticker, mt.

  LEBANON HONOR STUDENT. I swallowed.

  “How do you find things in this mess, Howard?” He shrugged. “Practice. And instinct My grandfather was a prospector.” He paused. “Did you lose family in this, Jason?” His voice buzzed through his r
espirator.

  “All of it. My mom. Indianapolis.”

  He stopped. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged. “You?”

  “My only living relative was an uncle who lived in Phoenix.”

  “So we’re both orphans.”

  “Lot of that going around, these days.” He duck-walked under a blackened wood beam angled between two rubble piles.

  “Howard! That looks shaky!”

  “I have a nose for these things.” He waved his hand without turning around, then poked ashes aside with his walking stick. “Holy Moly!”

  Definitely an Intel weenie. Any self-respecting GI would have said “fuck!”

  He bent and tugged at something. “Jason, come over—”

  The debris mound that supported one end of the beam rattled. Above Howard’s head, pulverized brick pebbles trickled.

  The beam above him teetered.

  I lunged. “Howard!”

  Whump.

  Dust swirled. Where there had been Howard there was now a wall-board-and-charred-lumber mound.

  “Howard!”

  No answer but the fire’s roar.

  I had liked Howard. He was as goofy as Walter Loren-zen but as genuine.

  I dug, flinging board and plaster and found a boot, a pant leg, then all of Howard. The beam pinned his chest.

  I brushed dust from his mask lenses.

  “Howard?”

  He opened his eyes and gasped. “Holy Moly!”

  The beam’s charcoal surface crumbled warm in my hands but on the second try I budged it, and he wriggled out.

  I dropped the beam and made an ash cloud, then faced him.

  He stood staring down at an object he turned in his gloved hands.

  “Howard, you okay?”

  “Perfect. Thank you, Jason. You saved my life. More important, you saved this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Not sure. But it’s alien.”

  He held up a prune-size twisted metal bit, so hot his insulated glove smoked. “This iridescent blue’s characteristic of a Projectile hull. Like titanium, but with trace elements rare in the solar system.”

  “It’s worth getting killed for?”

  He frowned inside his mask. “Nah. This shrapnel is all we ever find.” He waved a hand at the ruins. “We have no idea where to look for anything larger. We’ve tried every sorting and detection device and methodology.”

  We walked as he talked.

  I pointed at rubble. It looked… different “What about there?”

  Howard turned. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Something.”

  Howard shrugged, and we dug.

  Two minutes later, I touched it. Inside my suit, hair stood on my neck.

  “Howard…” I wrapped my gloved fingers around something curved, then yanked.

  It popped loose, and I stumbled back.

  The thing I held was iridescent, blue metal, dinner-plate size, and so hot it warmed my skin through my gloves.

  Howard pounced from where he had been digging and snatched it away, muttering, “Holy Moly, Holy Moly.”

  He rotated the fragment. The convex side was scorched black. “This was the exterior surface. It was coated with ceramic that friction burned away as the Projectile entered our atmosphere.”

  “It’s important?”

  “Biggest frag we’ve ever found. Most of the Projectile vaporizes.” He drew his finger along one side of the fragment. It was a round edge, like somebody had taken a bite, and silver. “But this part here is the prize.”

  “What?”

  “My educated hunch—the army puts up with me because I have good educated hunches—is this is a rocket-nozzle edge.”

  “So?”

  He punched a button on a handheld global-positioning unit, and it beeped. I supposed he was marking the location where we found this little treasure. He motioned for me to turn around, unzipped my backpack, slipped the frag into an insulated bag, and dropped it in. My light pack got heavier. Now I understood why Howard requested an infantryman. He needed a pack mule.

  “The radius of this nozzle is too small to be a main propulsion system for a vehicle that was as big as a building. It’s a maneuvering nozzle. We’ve been of two schools on how these vehicles are so accurate. One school of thought is they’re ballistic. Fire-and-forget, like a bullet. But from a range of three hundred million miles that seemed unlikely to some of us. This confirms that they make midcourse corrections.”

  “Like remote control?”

  He shook his head. “That’s what the others will say, now. But neither radio astronomy nor any other monitoring has picked up any signals to these Projectiles. And we’ve certainly been listening.”

  “What do you think, Howard?”

  He snugged my pack, spun me, and we again picked our way through debris. “You tell me, Jason.”

  Professors. The Socratic method. I was coming to appreciate the army. They just told you how it was.

  I pushed my helmet back and scratched my head through the protective suit “I dunno. I have a hard time hitting a rifle target with a bullet past three hundred meters, much less three hundred million miles. I think the Projectiles must be guided. But I wouldn’t do it by remote control. I had a radio-controlled model car once, with one of those antenna boxes? Every time our neighbor hit his automatic garage-door opener my car turned left.”

  Howard stepped over a fallen lamppost. “Great minds think alike. Why would these aliens risk signals that we could jam?”

  Well, then, how did Howard think they steered these things? I shuddered. “Pilots?”

  He nodded. “Kamikazes.”

  I shuddered. “We’re looking for alien bodies?”

  “The chances of finding one after impact are infinitesimal. But an alien corpse could teach us enough to turn this war.”

  “Like why they hate us enough to exterminate us.”

  He stirred bricks with his walking stick. “Hate us? We didn’t hate the AIDS virus. We eradicated it because it was killing us. Maybe I Love Lucy reruns we broadcast into space last century cause birth defects in their young.”

  For the next six hours I jumped every time Howard poked rubble with his stick, expecting to see ET’s charred carcass. We had no more narrow escapes. We made no more Holy Moly-provoking discoveries. But we collected enough scrap to restore an antique Buick. My pack clanked with every step.

  Dusk fell as we returned to spook camp. Howard actually whistled behind his mask, pleased with the day’s loot. Of course, he wasn’t carrying the Buick.

  In a trailer, Howard helped me out of the pack. “Jason, why did you dig there? Where we found the big hull fragment?”

  I shrugged. “Seemed right.”

  “Very right.”

  We shed our protective suits, now soot-blackened. He caught one foot in a leg. As he pogoed for balance, he asked. “You’re in Basic, now?”

  I nodded.

  He stared at my pack on the trailer floor. “You have a permanent assignment when you finish?”

  “If I finish. I’m kind of a fuck-up.”

  Evening chow was over by the time the spooks released me back to Third Platoon. Civilians trickled away with the last of the distributed C-rations. Walter asked, “Whadja do, Jason?”

  “Same ole‘, same ole’.” I shrugged. The last thing that happened before Howard released me was a Judge Advo-cate General’s Corps major made me sign in triplicate a paper that said I’d never tell that Howard’s outfit existed. Hell, after I read it I wasn’t sure I could admit that Pittsburgh existed or I existed.

  Walter had scrounged me a bacon-and-scrambled-eggs C-ration meal and even a plasti of Coke. My mouth watered, even at the prospect of C-rations.

  My back ached from humping Hibble’s war souvenirs, my face blistered from blast-furnace heat where the mask hadn’t reached. I ate seated with my back against a deuce-and-a-hatf tire. The day with Howard Hibble taught me that, quietly, humanity hadn’t quit. If
I hung in, maybe the army and I could make a difference.

  Chapter Eight

  After we convoyed back from Pittsburgh, the battalion commander gave us a day off. Most people slept. I went to the day room and discovered books. Not Chip-books. Paper books.

  Every company area has a day room. It’s a lounge for soldiers to spend their free time. Of which there normally is none in Basic. I think the army named it because an hour there feels like a day.

  Ours had a manual Foosball table with one of the little men broken off, a tray of yesterday’s mess-hall cookies, coffee, and ancient orange furniture covered in the skin of animals so extinct I’d never heard of them. Really. I read the labels. “Naugahyde.”

  Shelved books lined the walls, the way libraries used to be. Not exactly the New York Times most-downloaded list, of course. There were yellowed field manuals on everything from first aid to the ever-popular FM-22-5 Drill and Ceremony. Better were The Art of War by Sun

  Tzu and General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe. Whole shelves held histories of the campaigns of Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander the Great, complete with color maps that folded out just like a wide-screen you could actually touch.

  Books aren’t like chips. You feel them and smell their age.

  Some have a life of their own. Inside one’s cover was handwritten, “DaNang, Vietnam, May 2, 1966— To a short-timer who won’t have to study war no more.” Another read, “Tor Captain A. R. Johns, KIA Normandy, France, July 9, 1944.” It didn’t say if he had a family. He could have been orphaned, like me. But he had an outfit forever. The First Infantry Division.

  I devoured the books shelf by shelf and just made it back to barracks by lights-out. I persuaded myself my obsession was just because I was starved for intellectual stimulation after Basic’s moribund mud. The alternative was that Ord and Judge March foresaw that the army and I were a predestined match, a notion too bent and knobby to contemplate. I snuck Benton’s The Sino-Indian Conflict: Winter Campaign 2022 back with me and skimmed it while my free hand scrubbed commodes with Ord’s brush.

  The nights that followed, for me, were stolen moments to read the day-room library. The days we spent in the woods learning small-unit tactics.