Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  Bright sunlight surprised me in midthought. A new set of elevators had dumped us into a trench, and I looked up to see that the jungle canopy was gone, allowing the sun to burn down on red clay where lines of huge ants scrambled over it as rapidly as they could. I stepped into mud. A rat squeaked in anger and ran, joining a group of three others that bounded away from our group before stopping to look at us one more time and give me a chance to raise my carbine. Before I could fire all hell broke loose. Someone in the distance screamed in Thai, and Kristen said something like “incoming artillery rounds,” but I stood there like an idiot when the first shell landed a few yards to my right, outside the trench. The impact shook the ground. A wave of dirt flew over us and struck my helmet, rocks and tree roots slamming it against my head and forcing me to collapse into the red mud. Then a bright light seared my eyes before the goggles frosted over, and the suit’s temperature indicator jumped upward at the same time I screamed. Plasma. It had to be the Chinese, I thought. They’d brought plasma artillery, mixing it with the ancient guns of the Burmese. Bright tendrils of the stuff played over the trench above me at the same time chemically propelled rounds thudded all around and shook the walls, and the ants and rats knew what to do; the ants and rats had disappeared.

  Jihoon shouted over the radio. “This is crazy. Nobody can survive up here like this. We should go back until the barrage lifts.”

  “Sure they can,” I said. “Just stay low and move forward. There has to be a bunker somewhere ahead.”

  “It’s a hundred meters up, take the first left fork.” Remorro pointed ahead of us with his carbine, and we moved out.

  The crawl lasted forever. I led the way, gritting my teeth with each impact, and artillery overwhelmed my senses so that perception shifted, blurring my eyes and tricking them into seeing things. A huge banyan trunk had fallen over the trench at one point. Three Burmese artillery rounds landed on it at the same time, obliterating the tree’s remnants in a cloud of splinters that stuck into the mud around us to create a field of wooden spikes, some of them a meter long, and when I started moving again, I realized that a splinter had gone through one of the rats to nail it into the mud where the animal now tried to run as fast as it could, all four legs scraping bits of clay from the ground. It couldn’t have been real. But I stared at the thing, which fell limp while I crawled past, and I hoped that the first shell hadn’t given me a concussion because it just couldn’t have happened.

  I turned at the fork and saw the bunker entrance. A squat concrete structure rose from the clay ahead of us, and the trench sloped downward so that the enemy would only see the bunker’s narrow horizontal slit under a meter and a half of steel-reinforced concrete. Someone stood outside. His skin was dark, almost a reddish color, and he was naked except for an orange strip of woven cloth that wrapped around his waist like a sarong. The man saw me and grinned. He made no effort to avoid either the plasma or the artillery shells and, as if to show off, lifted both arms and laughed just as the barrage tapered off. The man looked back at us then, and I recognized that we had stopped moving, frozen in the mud by incredulity, and he was about to say something when we heard a series of pops in the distance followed by a screeching sound. More shells detonated. But these ones never touched the ground and instead burst overhead to blossom into a thick fog that settled over the line and draped itself around everything, hiding the bunker and the man so that for the second time I thought I’d gone crazy.

  “Did you guys see that man near the bunker?”

  “The one in the orange skirt?” Orcola asked.

  I breathed deeply, relieved that it hadn’t been an illusion. “Yeah.”

  “Karen recruit to the Gra Jaai. If anyone shows the slightest bit of fear, that’s one of their punishments; they have to stay in the trench for an hour during a barrage—”

  “Chemical agents detected,” said Kristen, interrupting. “Checking seals, Lieutenant.” She stopped talking but came back with a gentle chime. “All systems sealed, filters nominal.”

  “Can you tell what kind of agent it is?” I asked, trying to hide the sound of my fear.

  “The presence of carbon phosphorus bonds suggests nerve agent, Lieutenant.”

  I clicked back onto our group’s frequency. “Chemical weapons. Make sure you have a good seal.”

  “No shit, chemical weapons,” said Orcola. “Now would you mind moving forward so we can take cover? You’re blocking the whole freakin’ trench!”

  Chemical agents. The thought made me want to get up and run, and as I moved forward, my armor started to glisten because the fog had begun to coalesce, forming tiny droplets that stuck to the ceramic on my forearms. Just the thought of a suit breach almost drove me crazy during those last few meters because I knew that it wouldn’t take much to kill, and a microtear in the suit’s joint material could let in more than enough. The drops or their vapor would seep through and make contact with your skin so that the next thing you knew you couldn’t breathe. Training kicked in then, but not in a good way; my mind ticked off the symptoms one at a time so that by the time I reached the bunker I had traced them all the way from tunnel vision and runny nose to seizures and eventual suffocation.

  Jihoon was the first to notice the man—the one who had been standing there a few minutes before. “Look at that shit.”

  “He’s definitely a Karen. And one of the Gra Jaai,” said Orcola.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Just saying.”

  “Any chance of giving him an antidote?”

  Orcola shook his head. “He’s gone, and I’m not wasting it on the Gra Jaai.”

  The man twitched in the mud as every muscle in his body contracted, the agent forcing his nerves to fire out of control and send signals that should never have been dispatched in the first place. He stared at the sky. Both pupils looked like pinpricks and streams of mucus ran from his nostrils until it all ended when Remorro fired a burst of fléchettes across the man’s chest.

  I stood in a crouch, making sure that my head was below the top of the trench, and reached for the bunker door. “Looks like another one gets to see God before we do.”

  Gra Jaai, most of them in flexible battle suits like the ones we’d seen Thai soldiers wear on our ride to the front, filled the bunker. Most of them sat on the floor with legs pulled up to their chests, but a few stared out the bunker’s slit to stand watch over the field; their battle suits were ill fitting, and some looked like they wore an oversized trash bag so that it took a few seconds for me to realize that these were children and that their Maxwell carbines were as long as they were tall. Instead of the gaudy colors we had seen on some of the Gra Jaai, a single Japanese character had been printed in yellow on their chests.

  “That character is Japanese for death, Lieutenant,” Kristen said.

  “Thanks. Get ready to translate and call me Bug.”

  “Yes, Bug.”

  I spoke as loudly as I could—without shouting—as Jihoon and the others crowded into the bunker behind me. “Who’s in command?”

  “Are you here to fight?” The question came from one of the Gra Jaai at the view slit, a woman who had been watching the Burmese line.

  “We’re here to go on patrol. Tonight.”

  “Lucy sent word that four nonbelievers would be going with us, but the patrol has been canceled. We will have to wait until after the Chinese attack.”

  “When will that happen?” Jihoon asked.

  “When will the sun die? When will the rats come back to feed on corpses, since their more greedy cousins hadn’t known that nerve agent is deadly? God commands the Chinese even though they don’t realize it, and God will determine these things such that they will come to us in blessing, as a holy test of our belief. Come. It is time to pray.”

  The entire group went onto their knees then, and one of them held a tiny package—a miniature battle suit—from which a baby began crying so that the woman or man holding it began rocking back and forth, shushing the inf
ant quiet. The bunker made me feel sick. When some of its occupants shifted to begin praying, they revealed piles of rats that still twitched from the chemical attack, and a mixture of mud and human waste covered the floor on which the mother held her baby. Behind me, Ji gagged, and I grabbed him.

  “Don’t throw up in your suit.”

  He looked through his faceplate, both eyes magnified by the goggles underneath to show dilated pupils. “This isn’t what I expected, Bug.”

  “Get your shit together. Throw up in that suit, and you won’t be able to clean it for days, maybe weeks, because we’d have to decon before removing our helmets. Your suit is coated with nerve agent. Don’t freakin’ throw up, or so help me, I’ll just shoot you now to get it over with.”

  “I asked for this, huh?” Jihoon’s eyes narrowed, and it took a second to realize that he was trying to smile. “We don’t want to go back to those days.”

  “Right. Just shut up. And if you have to, go back into the trenches but keep low, and whatever you do, don’t puke.”

  The Gra Jaai ignored us then as they prayed in one voice, and Kristen’s translation crackled in my ears. “I have sinned through my own fault. In my lack of conviction and through those I have failed to kill; in my actions and actions I lacked the courage to take. I ask the blessed Catherine and all the fallen before us, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for death and faith, for glory and sacrifice, to our God whose blessings bring war.”

  Now I felt like throwing up. This was my first close-up look at human converts to the satos, and it strengthened my belief that we’d be better off without genetics—not just because the ones in Thailand were past their shelf life, but because without them, people like this, who had nothing to lose and just wanted to trust in something, never would have been created. The Japanese and Karen must have been desperate if they’d reached out for Margaret. Then again, all it took were the memories of the children in Bangkok, the squalor of Khlong Toei, and the riots at the airport, and I came close to understanding how people in those situations might have chosen a faith based on madness because it promised at least one thing: a home. Maybe a family. But that still didn’t make it right, and I stepped over and through the Gra Jaai, who now prayed as I worked my way toward the bunker’s vision slit. With my back to them, I wouldn’t have to watch; I wouldn’t have to think about the fact that they’d been fighting in at least six inches of their own waste.

  A thin haze hovered over the ground as the nerve agent evaporated in the heat. But it wasn’t enough to conceal the secret of the line or hide the fact that beyond the vision slit a wide swath of ridgetop jungle had been erased for as far as I could see, leaving jagged stumps of banyan, palm, and hundreds of other trees, their trunks lying in every direction and splintered from having been struck by artillery. The line’s secret was this: it was artwork, a tapestry that described easy ways to die. Fallen trees would slow anyone who tried to work their way up a steep slope out of Burma, where they’d then have to cross five hundred meters of no-man’s-land, and every time the enemy tried to push forward they’d have to climb over the fallen trunks, exposing themselves to fire from our trenches. So many bodies had collected that you couldn’t see the clay. Men and women in loose battle suits lay between the fallen trees and had been dead long enough that decomposition and heat inflated the fabric like balloons, while artillery had burst through others and scattered parts for some distance. But for the Gra Jaai, this wasn’t enough death. In front of the bunker, and at regular intervals in either direction along the trench lines, they had impaled enemy soldiers on tall stakes to allow them to rot for everyone to see. This is nothing like the last time I had been here, I decided again; the bush had decayed even further in my absence, its constant war cry resulting in the early onset of cancer.

  I clicked into Remorro’s private frequency. “You were right. Even their atrocities have atrocities.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Why? What else have they done?”

  Remorro joined me at the bunker’s view slit, but he spoke over the private frequency and kept his helmet speakers off so nobody else would hear. “Before the Chinese arrived, the Gra Jaai and Karen troops would raid behind Mimis’ lines. All the time. Sometimes they went for enemy assets—ammo dumps, you know. But most of the time they went to capture children from the Burmese villages.”

  “To make them into Gra Jaai?” I asked.

  “That would have been better. No. Whenever the Burmese attacked, they’d raise them on the stakes, alive, where they died from stray fire. And the stakes weren’t that sharp. So even if they lived through the battle the kids’ own weight would make it take hours, sometimes days to impale them; it was so painful that I saw some of the kids jerk around, forcing the stakes through themselves just to get it over with.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  Remorro’s voice sounded sharp then, angrier than I’d yet heard him. “Oh. You understand? Explain it to me then, asshole.”

  “This isn’t my first time in the bush, Remorro. And I hunted these chicks across central Asia. You get exposed to their beliefs, and they’ve been so indoctrinated in the tanks that even the ones who’ve gone insane still haven’t given up on God. They’ve just given up on the idea that dying for mankind is the only way into heaven. So to the Gra Jaai and true believers, when they kill children they probably believe two things: one, that it will make the enemy act irrationally, and two, that kids go straight to heaven when they die. To the satos, killing is an act of kindness. So I may not like it, and it might still make me sick, but yeah, I’m starting to get it.”

  “I get sicker every day.” Remorro leaned both arms on the view slit, resting the chin of his helmet on his hands. “So now that the Chinese are here, what do we do?”

  I glanced at the Gra Jaai and saw them sway back and forth, then looked onto the battlefield. “There’s nothing we can do except pray for them to attack us topside, that they won’t bore underneath us or build a road to a section of the line that’s undefended. What happened to the mining gear—the stuff that made all these tunnels?”

  “Gone. I only got here a year ago, though, so for all I know it’s around here somewhere, hidden in one of the side hangars or something.”

  Only a year. Looking at Remorro, you’d think he’d been in the bush for a lifetime, during which it had bored him from the inside and emptied his body into a thin husk that shivered within his suit. He wouldn’t last much longer. We all had our own missions, and his was to stay here because the satos had worked it so that if he left they wouldn’t allow a replacement, and the brass would figure it was better to have someone—anyone—on the inside, even if they were dying; SOCOM lived for its reports and had probably ordered him to stay put until he kicked it. On the other hand he’d made his own decision and could have told both sides to go to hell, so at first I hadn’t been sorry for him. But now that I’d seen the field…

  “Why don’t you just go back to Bangkok?” I asked. “You could get treatment there.”

  “Thought about it. But Orcola and I decided to stay put until the Chinese break through; then maybe we’ll haul ass. To tell you the truth, though, we don’t really want to leave.”

  The statement left me speechless, and I almost laughed. “What?”

  “I’m serious. Have you been back home recently? To the States?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Out here you get to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t bother the satos, and there’s nobody telling you how to take a piss so you don’t waste water, and I don’t miss being threatened by some semi-aware just for complaining about Congress or the president. And I like the people. The Gra Jaai aren’t so bad once you get used to them. If I weren’t so old and so sick, I might give their training tanks a try.”

  I did laugh then and ducked when a stream of tracer fléchettes leaped from somewhere on the enemy side of no-man’s-land to smack into the concrete over my head. We slid to the floor and
sat in the bunker’s filth.

  “You have no idea how screwed up that way of thinking is, but I agree with you.”

  “Why is it screwed up?” he asked.

  “Because these days the one way to get any privacy is to leave the States, go to war. In Thailand. In the bad bush where there are thousands of ways to die, and all of them are ugly.”

  My eyes didn’t want to stay open. The day’s action had worn me out quicker than I’d realized, and now that all the firing had stopped the jungle insects started in with a mixed orchestra of buzzes and chirps, their music shifting in some rhythm that the jungle understood. Our bunker mates still prayed in front of me. I wondered how long they’d go at it before I realized that they were mumbling something, but it was too low to pick up on my helmet mics, and Kristen hadn’t offered to translate.

  “What exactly do the satos teach them?” I asked.

  Remorro rested his carbine across his lap and began disassembling it to clean the parts. “I only know what I heard. By the time I got here, the satos were pretty much the same way you see them now, and Margaret herself came close to killing me once when I stood up to her. I’ve never seen anyone fight them like you did.”