by Chris Bostic
“What’s the matter?” Leisa asked as he finally started walking.
“Got dust in my eyes.”
“Yeah, right.” She grabbed his wrist to stop him and let the other two get farther ahead. She reached up to reopen his visor and stared into his shadowed face. “It hurts to lose her. Trust me, I know.”
“I couldn’t save her,” he mumbled. “I tried.”
She remained unblinking, though Joe noticed the moisture pooling in the corners of her own eyes. “No one could’ve.”
“I should’ve. I was the closest.” It wasn’t like the time when the other two got hurt. That was a well-placed bomb no one could’ve stopped. Joe knew this death was too close, too personal, this time. He’d seen it all happen from inches away, and let his squad mate down in the worst possible way. He couldn’t bury that guilt any deeper than they’d buried Kayla.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Leisa’s voice grew stronger. “The savages had us outnumbered a hundred to one. There was no chance…”
Joe lowered his head. He felt her watch him for a moment before gently tugging his arm to get him moving again. As he put one tired foot in front of the other, he shook his head to clear the fog.
Feeling her grip still on his wrist, leading him like a petulant child, Joe felt the shame rise again. He wriggled his hand to free her grasp. Leisa released for only a split second. Before he could pull away, the palm of her hand pressed into his own.
Though startled, he found his fingers instantly linking with hers.
It was so wrong, but didn’t feel that way. He knew he shouldn’t have done that, but warmth shot through him instead. A calming heat, not the usual sticky, oppressive balminess. But it came with the understanding that this type of fraternization was dangerous, even though it was only meant as consolation. Unexpectedly welcome, but very wrong.
“Thanks,” he whispered, and refused to let go.
She squeezed his hand.
CHAPTER 7
Right before they caught up to the others, Leisa squeezed Joe’s hand again and then wisely let his drop. He hid a smile and stared straight ahead.
“Hurry up!” Connie barked. “You don’t want to spend all night here, do ya?”
“No way, sir,” Pete replied.
“Glad we’re in agreement.” Connie pointed crossways down the slope in the direction they’d come earlier in the day. “Follow me. We’re going back to our last camp.”
He paced off without waiting for a reply.
“My pack,” Joe mumbled. “My stuff’s up the hill.”
His mouthpiece worked perfectly. Connie spun back around.
“You want to go get it?”
“Not really.”
“Good. My superiors might not approve, but I’d leave it.” Connie kept walking as he asked, “How are we all doing on ammo?”
“Not great, and my battery’s weak,” Danny said, turning his coilgun to the side to check the display.
“You can have my spare,” Pete volunteered. “I’ve got a half charge.”
“That’s ‘cause you don’t use it,” Danny said.
Joe was almost too tired to argue, but he couldn’t let that crack at his friend go by unanswered. As he raised his voice, Connie cut in.
“Share your ammo, swap out power packs. Do whatever you gotta do.” He looked at the slope behind them. “Just do it quickly before the savages catch up.”
Before they had time to drop their gear and exchange provisions, the hillside all around them lit up in a laser-blur of tracer fire. Connie hit the dirt, and the others followed suit.
Explosions echoed in the distance, but not only off to their sides. Many were to the rear, back the way they were headed. Perhaps even as far as the forward base showed signs of raging battle.
“The lousy savages are everywhere,” Connie exclaimed, adding some colorful cursing to the mix.
“No wonder you can’t raise battalion,” Danny said.
A bullet whizzed past Joe’s face. He crouched lower, practically willing himself to melt into the undulating hillside.
The close call turned out to be dumb luck. As he stared up the hillside, no shadows filled his view. There were battles raging everywhere, but somehow the squad was catching a much needed reprieve. If only they could’ve rested longer.
“It’s just random shots, so move out,” Connie called. “Stay low.”
Joe didn’t need to be told the latter part. He kept hunched over, following immediately behind Pete. The girls trailed in their usual position, closely following the guys, except this time Danny covered the squad’s retreat from the rear.
Joe’s head swiveled front to back as he felt compelled to keep Leisa within view at all times. He planted a foot wrong and slipped as he looked back, and slid to a knee.
“Watch where you’re going,” she whispered, shaking her head as she helped lift him upright.
Though he couldn’t be sure with the static still crunching in his earpiece, it sounded like Connie said, “Keep up.”
Joe nodded and forced himself to focus on the crooked path. It was almost worse going down than climbing up to the ridge. His heels constantly felt like they wanted to give way, and he flashed back time and again to his tumble down the hill.
Joe’s back ached, which was rivaled only by his ankles as they stretched and strained on the slope.
A giant flare erupted overhead, painting the entire hillside in blazing white phosphorus. Joe was happy to have the visor to block the glare and turned to look back uphill.
The crooked trees stood starkly against the hillside, but no bulbous heads joined them. As the flare slowly burned out, Joe beat on the side of his helmet again, and was finally able to clear up the transmission temporarily.
Connie was saying, “It could be a signal. Maybe another mass charge.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Danny replied, confirming Joe’s thoughts. That still didn’t set him at ease.
“The savages are sneaky,” Connie said. “If you haven’t noticed, they’ll crawl right up on ya. That’s how they knocked out the LED-AD.”
“Then we’ll move faster than them,” Laura said, more of a question than a statement of fact.
“That’s the idea, little lady.”
After all the hurry up talk, Connie surprised Joe by stopping and looking down the slope as if he was trying to get his bearings. One minute he was preaching about speed, and the next he was standing there in the open.
Joe shared a puzzled look with Pete, who shrugged in return.
“This way,” Connie said, pointing to a flat-looking, treeless ribbon at the base of the hill. But he kept moving his finger to the right until he got to a clump of trees gathered in a narrower spot. “We’re spending the night right there.”
“That’s not where we spent last night,” Pete said.
“Plans change.” Connie started walking, and pointed much farther off to the right in the direction Joe thought they should’ve been going. A number of explosions burst on the distance horizon as if Connie created them with his fingertip like a sorcerer. “But you’re welcome to go that way back to camp. I’m gonna steer clear of there.”
“Good call,” Danny said before turning attention back to guarding their rear.
Joe was too tired to argue, not that he was going to complain about missing a firefight. His feet weren’t done complaining, but he knew they had no choice but to get off the mountain. The sooner, the better.
Boots crunched on gravel as the group went almost straight down the mountainside. Joe’s boots scuffed. That drew more than one reproachful look from Connie. He struggled harder to pick up his feet.
A few scraggly trees clung to life on the slope. Somehow their roots must have been stronger than iron, as if they were chained to the mountain like a prisoner.
Joe felt as bedraggled as the trees looked. His iron constitution, now greatly weakened, managed to keep him a short step away from unconsciousness. As the darkness pressed in all around him
, he wilted like a flower in a drought. And it was plenty hot enough at that moment even though it was the middle of the night.
He wished for a moment that he could connect with Leisa and tap into her strength. Remembering the electric touch that had been a lifeline when he needed it the most, he spun around to look at her. Leisa hiked right behind him, planting confident footsteps in the gravel.
Her visor was open, which let him stare and also know if she spotted him. But she was as focused as the robots at base camp, and showed little weakness other than moving once to wipe sweat from her nose.
Joe checked where he was going, and then looked back again to watch Leisa sip water through a plastic tube in her helmet as she hiked. Before he could inevitably trip on something and tumble down the mountain a second time, Joe turned back around. He found his own water tubing by the collar of his shirt and fished it under his chin and into his helmet like Leisa had done earlier.
Joe took his first long drink in ages. The water was disgustingly warm.
He rinsed his mouth and opened his visor to spit exaggeratedly. But his dry throat ached for water the way his heart ached for an escape. He could only fix one of those problems and tried to ignore the temperature as he sucked down a couple quick drinks. It wouldn’t do him any good to dehydrate, even if the only safe water had assumed ambient temperature hours ago.
With all their technology, the Republic needed to make their troops a chiller, Joe thought. At least their scientists had thought to fit the water bladder under their armor. An old-school canteen, probably what the savages carried, would’ve been abandoned along with his pack high on the mountain. His water bottle had been lost in the melee. If it weren’t for the bladder, he’d really be in trouble.
A burst of static erupted in Joe’s ear, as his communicator continued to fight for its life.
“Almost there,” Connie said, along with something else Joe couldn’t make out. He beat his hand even harder against the side of his helmet and the static stopped.
“Crap, I broke it,” Joe muttered.
“Broke what?” Pete said, apparently having heard him fine.
“You okay?” Leisa asked.
“I, uhm, I guess I’m fine,” Joe said. “You guys hear all that?”
“Loud and clear,” Connie barked. “Now zip it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Connie held up a hand to stop the column. The squad members dropped to a crouch fifty yards short of the base of the hill.
“Now as I was trying to say before I was so rudely interrupted…”
Connie’s voice trailed off. Joe held back a snicker, not feeling at all bad about interrupting the sergeant. He was thrilled to finally be able to hear the others clearly, even if it was going to be mostly labored breathing and groans for a while longer. But when the earpieces worked, the reduced volume was the real benefit. Stealthy whispers were an important advantage.
With the copse of trees in the distance, the squad was entering foreign territory, and Joe’s nerves started to flare up again like match tips.
“Danny’s gonna take point,” Connie explained. “Fan out left and right in normal formation. We’ll take it slow from here. We’ll regroup in a column at the base of the hill.”
“Aye, sir.” Danny responded.
“Move out, soldier.”
Joe stayed in a crouch as Danny crept into the lead. The point man stepped cautiously on the rocks, as if testing each one out for balance like he was crossing a stream.
It’s going to take forever at this rate, Joe thought, and turned to check the hillside behind them. Still no sign of the savages, but they could have been all over the place and he wouldn’t have known it. They were quicker than lizards and more elusive than shadows.
Rocks scraped, signaling that Pete was moving out. That was Joe’s cue. He kept a low profile, heading the rest of the way down the hill toward the ribbon. A ribbon that curled and gurgled the closer he came and eventually revealed itself as a river.
As he hit the base of the slope, Joe had a sudden impulse to run the short distance to the water and jump in, letting the hopefully cool mountain stream rush over him. Maybe wash away all the aches, mental and physical.
Danny headed toward the edge of the water, his boots throwing off clacking sounds as nothing but flat river gravel remained underfoot. He slowed even more, painfully so, and Joe fell in behind Pete as their spread out squad became a single line behind the point man.
The river cobble seemed soft under Joe’s feet. The ripple of the stream a stone’s throw away was oddly serene. Joe almost got the sense he had traveled back in time, hiking some backcountry ravine with his old man, and turned around to share the story with whoever was behind him.
That whoever turned out to be Connie. Joe quickly bit his lip and faced forward when his glance met the menacing stare of his sergeant.
“Into the trees, Danny,” Connie commanded. “Take up a defensive position.”
“Aye.”
“Which direction?” Pete asked.
“Say what?” Connie asked.
“Which direction are we defending?”
Not knowing where the other squads were at, and having witnessed explosions from the surrounding hillsides, Joe assumed all four sides.
Connie was brusque, and single-minded in his reply. “The hillside, of course.”
“Where we came from, right?” Danny asked.
“Well, duh.” Connie was visibly agitated. “We’re digging a line about twenty yards back in the woods. If they hit us, they’ll be coming down that slope right on our heels.”
As Danny stealthily approached the tree cover, Connie must have grown tired of waiting. He ran on ahead and sighed loudly through the communicator. Joe expected curses along with it, but their grizzled leader managed to keep those from slipping out.
Connie bulled his way through heavy brush lining the edge of the woods and kept charging forward like a bulldozer with Danny on his heels.
Joe slowed to pick his way carefully through the thorny underbrush, while Connie bellowed, “Start digging here. This is Danny’s hole.”
“Hold up…we’re coming,” Pete said, drawing a derisive comment from Connie.
“Is Danny the only one who can listen? You ladies get the heck up here.”
“We’re trying,” Joe said, and took a whippy branch from Pete’s hand. Joe examined it and shuddered at the wicked two inch long spikes spaced at random intervals along the branch. He lowered his visor to protect his eyes, and held it up for the girls to see.
Laura grimaced as she followed his eyes to the spike and nudged Leisa. They lowered their visors too, and Joe nodded approving. He waved with his coilgun for Laura and Leisa to get underneath while he continued holding the spiked branch back.
Leisa tapped him on the shoulder as she slipped past, and slid deeper into the woods. The underbrush didn’t open as quickly as Joe assumed. Rather than a thick canopy quickly choking out brambles, the forest was filled with vines crisscrossed between trees like a jungle. It reminded him of the ropes course he had not been able to try when his almost non-existent training had been cut even shorter.
Joe shook off the memory and hurriedly brought up the rear, figuring that was sure to bring another snide remark from Connie. Instead, as he wound around a tree trunk thicker than two men and stepped under a pair of ropelike vines, he nearly bumped into the stocky man as he pointed out a foxhole for Pete.
“I want you here, then shorty.”
Joe didn’t think he was that short for a guy, though he was barely taller than the two girls. “Me?”
Connie grunted. “The fragile flowers can scoot down that way,” he said, gesturing with his hand for the two girls to continue farther down a narrow dirt path carved between the thick greenery.
Joe wanted to point out that they’d been tougher than him, and less likely to be the first to complain. But he wouldn’t risk getting on Connie’s bad side. There was no benefit to be had. Besides, everyone had a b
ad side when they’d been up half the night getting overrun, shot at, and losing a comrade. Sleep couldn’t come soon enough, though Joe knew he wasn’t out of the danger zone yet.
CHAPTER 8
Pete tossed his helmet to the side and stopped shoveling to look at Joe.
“I don’t see the point in digging,” he said.
“Me, either.” Joe gestured to the thick green growth on the forest floor that practically reached up to his waist. “Good thing I lost my shovel.”
“We could hide here a long time.”
“That’s an idea,” Joe said, taking a moment to wonder what it might be like to get out of his soldiering duties for a while. Preferably forever.
He wasn’t one to romanticize the idea of going back home. There wasn’t anything to go back to other than a life of labor once tech school was done. Probably safer labor, though being a common citizen wasn’t exactly the safest occupation either. Despite the overwhelming police presence, life in the cities was dangerous. And that was partly due to the overzealous enforcement of the laws of the land.
What Joe wanted more than anything was a break from Republic life in general. A few days of peace and quiet would have been a good start. Maybe a warm bath, or even a cool dip in the river gurgling behind their position. A book to read or a meaningless show to watch. But entertainment was a luxury not fit for members of his caste.
But if he worked harder and endured more hardships, he could hope to live out his later years in peace. Or not. Life was a lottery, and he had fewer chances than the elites. The elites who weren’t out on the front lines, though Joe had to admit that some of their children were.
It made it seem more palatable for the politicians to offer up their kids to service in the Regulator’s ranks. But Joe had seen those kids. Those with the right last names were assigned cushy positions back in safe base camps, surrounded with armed escorts and soaking up all the glory for the hard-won battles that guys like Joe had achieved with blood, sweat and tears. And he had all three of those at that moment.
The blood was nothing to be worried about. His skin burned where the thorny vines had ripped into his unprotected hands like the sharpened teeth of the savages. But his armor had stopped everything else, even the bayonets.
