Grunt Life

by Weston Ochse

  “You need to be ready.”

  “Brother, I don’t need no drama. I just need some sleep.”

  He shook his head, his eyes flint hard. “Remember the device the aliens tried to hide from us?”

  “Device? What are you talking about?”

  “You need to be ready,” he said again. He paused, then said, “You were right. We found Michelle.”

  My breath left me. “Show me,” I somehow managed to say.

  “They weren’t sure she’d survive. Mr. Pink said she’d be perfect for the mission. He said her mind was attuned...”

  I pushed past him, rounded the corner and saw the black box. Two recon scouts in EXOs cleared dead Cray from where they’d piled up all around the outside. The once black surface of the box was etched with the marks of a thousand claws. Whatever was in there, the Cray had wanted it badly. How Michelle was involved, I couldn’t fathom.

  I hurried up to the black box and looked inside.

  And my mind howled.

  Michelle.

  Or what had once been Michelle.

  “What have they done?” I wailed.

  She hung from a pod affixed to the ceiling of the box, connected by cords through which moved fluids, presumably keeping her alive. She faced me. Naked, the rivers of pain on her arms stark white reminders of who she’d once been. If only that girl was still around. But she’d been turned into a horrific marionette. A hundred multicolored wires and cables ran from her shaved head to a computer terminal. I could only imagine her horror, were she aware what had happened to her. What was it she had said? Can you imagine? Being taken over by another entity and not being able to control your own body?

  Her body shook and trembled. She took a great breath and raised her head. Her gaze met my own. For one brief moment, we were those same two people, reclining behind the generators, interlocked, the end of the world not even mattering, living only in each other’s eyes as we made each other laugh, cry and sing with pleasure. Then her face changed. She became sad, then angry.

  Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

  The thought slammed into my head, making me back away. As I fought for balance, two people I hadn’t realized were there rushed to her from the other side of the black box.

  “You get her stabilized. I have a helicopter en route. We need to get her to safety.” Mr. Pink turned towards me. He regarded me, then he shook his head. “Olivares, get him the hell out of here.”

  Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

  A technician was at Mr. Pink’s side, hurriedly unhooking Michelle from the box.

  “What—what is this?”

  Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

  Mr. Pink looked for a moment as if he’d answer, then he turned back to his task. “I don’t have time for this.”

  Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

  I stared into her eyes and knew what had to be done. They’d turned her into some kind of communications mechanism. OMBRA had figured it out, and then used Michelle as their tool. She was a person—she was my person. She was nobody’s tool.

  I found a rifle on the ground and brought it up in a single move. I sighted in on her forehead.

  Her message switched to a single feeling of goodwill as she repeated lovemelovemelovemelovemelovemekillme killmelovemekillmelovemekillme.

  Through my tears, the sighting device placed a red dot gently between her eyes. My forefinger squeezed the trigger slowly. At the last moment, I closed my eyes, unable to watch.

  As I fired, I felt my weapon lurch upward.

  Olivares’s hand was on my weapon, but I ignored him, all eyes for her.

  She glared at me, her gaze as furious as the medusa’s. I had let her down. She’d needed me to do one thing for her and I’d failed.

  Ihateyouihateyouihateyouihateyouihateyou

  Then her head sagged as Mr. Pink ripped wires free. Once she was disabled, he turned to us.

  “I thought I told you to get him out of here.”

  Olivares jerked my weapon so it spun me around.

  I was still unable to parse what had happened, her words still echoing through my mind, over and over and over, I hate you. He led me down the mound of the dead, stumbling, blank, staring. He’d taken my weapon away from me sometime during the process. So when he led me into our squad bay and I sat down, I found my empty hands were a perfect place for my head. I held it, tears falling, my chest empty, my brain caught in a loop where the girl I loved had been transformed into a cybernetic machine that hated me.

  I don’t know what I’d been thinking. It wasn’t as if this was life as it had been. Still, the more I imagined her, the more I thought about what could have been. But the world I imagined couldn’t be. All that was gone.

  I pounded the side of my head.

  Why couldn’t she have told me? Why couldn’t she have included me in her secret? She must have talked to Mr. Pink for days before this. All the while I’d been trying to get to know her, she’d already decided to end her life, or at least her life as she’d known it. Oh, but I wanted to scream.

  I put my head between my knees. All of my injuries pulsed for attention, but I pushed the pain away. The agony in my heart was far greater. Why did this girl I barely knew make me feel this way? How had she worked her way so deeply into my soul? But even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. Michelle had been more to me than just a strong, beautiful, olive-skinned girl. She’d been more than the faraway look in her eyes. She’d been so much more than the geography of her scars. She was America. She was the smell of cotton candy at a fair. She was the warm summer breeze cooling the sweat on my brow. She was the red hot heat of the love men and women felt everywhere for each other. What we’d felt for each other.

  She was everything we’d lost.

  I heard a noise from the other side of an overturned locker, and turned. Cheap metal cabinet moved; Someone was beneath it, and might still be alive. I got to my feet and stumbled across the body of a tech and the remains of the bench we’d all once sat upon. I pulled the locker aside, but beneath it wasn’t a person. It was a Cray, trapped and prone. Perhaps its back had been broken, or maybe its legs. It reached towards me with four arms, its entire body shaking.

  I stared at it for a long minute.

  Then I straddled the creature and began to hit it. I hit it and hit it and hit it. Its proboscis cracked and bled green ichor.

  I hit it with the anger of an entire planet.

  I hit it with the anger of a single man who’d lost everything... fucking everything, including his girl, and his trust in those who were supposed to know better.

  I glared into its cluster of eyes as it stared back at me.

  “I might have tried to kill myself, my whole planet might have been trying to kill itself, for generations, but that doesn’t give you the right to come and do it for us.”

  My arms tired as the alien’s cracked, broken face became a mosaic of what it once was. One more strike and all the pain of the world would flow through my hands. I brought them down like the hammer of God, but the Cray reached up and stopped them at the last moment. It was as if it had been saving its energy until this very last moment, knowing that it would have but once chance to save itself, and this was it.

  I struggled to follow through with my swing.

  Its arms began to shake as it held me, claws gripping my wrists.

  I pressed forward with my shoulders, and it pressed back against me. And then I saw it for what it was. I released my fists and sat back, resting my weight on its abdomen.

  It kept its hands ready to block, but seemed to regard me differently from before.

  “You’re just a fucking grunt, aren’t you?”

  It blinked back at me through the eyes I hadn’t bludgeoned.

  “You’re just a dumb fucking grunt just like me, doing what you’re told.” The sudden sympathy hit me square in my patriotism. Somewhere along the line I’d ceased to care about America, or the Army, a
s much as I cared about the men and women I fought with. MacKenzie, Ohirra, Thompson, Aquinas, Olivares and even Frakess were what I fought for. I bet the Cray were the same way. I saw how they fought. I shoved the image of Michelle way, way down.

  No. The Cray weren’t our enemy. They were just grunts following orders. They’d come here and fought us at someone else’s bidding. Some master species had come along and discovered their EMP capability and found a way to harness that power to their advantage, much like OMBRA had come along and used us, maximizing our power, counting on our need to redeem ourselves, giving us a chance to make amends by playing combat guinea pigs so their company would be in a position to sell itself to the highest bidder.

  Just as the Cray had come and proved their worth by knocking us back into the Stone Age, we’d returned the favor by discovering how to best kill them. And in the end it wasn’t such a hard thing. But the damage was done. The cities were destroyed. Hundreds of millions of people were dead. Soon we’d give as good as we got and do the same to the Cray.

  But they weren’t the real enemy. Who was? That was the real question, because now that we’d been softened up, they’d be coming in force... if they weren’t already here.

  I got up from the alien and staggered away. I ended up in the trench we’d first stood in as we’d watched the heretofore-indestructible mound and the planes that hadn’t even hurt it. I raised my hands to pull myself out and fell twice. On the third time, I climbed out onto an overcast day on the African plain.

  I heard the sound of drums. Not like the distant sounds that had been inside my head whenever the aliens arrived—those I still attributed somehow to Thompson—but a close sound, pounding from the roots of the world, thumping through the soil of the land. It wasn’t the martial insistence of the snare, but a syncopated rhythm of the soul, conjuring a resolve and a need to gather together as one.

  I saw them near the ruins of the mound. People. Humans. The natives of this land that we’d fought and died upon. I’d thought them gone, but that was me in my ignorance. The last I’d seen of the population were the dead atop Kilimanjaro. But these thousands were far from dead. They’d been waiting, hiding, planning.

  I watched as they marched towards us, chins high, drums beating, weapons brandished. This was their victory, too, though they hadn’t fought. We’d fought for them; we’d died for them. The idea that I’d had an impact other than to feed OMBRA’s greed filled the emptiness inside of me.

  The drums sang to my spirit as the men, women and children of Tanzania strode towards me. Their faces were a mixture of rage and exultation, moods I’d shared myself too many times to count over the last few weeks.

  An ancient woman dressed in an orange and purple dress stopped next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I glanced at the hand and saw how gnarled it was, as if it had been split from the roots of a tree, something that had staked its place in the earth long ago. Then she moved her hand to my head, said a few words I couldn’t understand, and moved on with the rest of them.

  They took up my Cray and bore him above them as they left. They found more and took them too. This was a time of grieving, and to begin with in grief there’s a whole lot of rage.

  I could understand that.

  I still felt it for what had been done to Michelle.

  To Thompson, wherever he was.

  To the rest of Romeo Three.

  I stood for a time on the plain and watched the helicopters come. All shapes and sizes, all makes and models, civilian and military, with the only unifying marks on them the OMBRA logo. Without the EMP, they could once again roar through the sky. Not everywhere, but at least in this little piece of reclaimed earth.

  A group of men pushed out of the trench from behind me, carrying what looked like a metal coffin. Mr. Pink walked with them, supervising the transport.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  He ignored me.

  I yelled again.

  He turned and regarded me with tired eyes. “What is it, Corporal Mason?”

  “Is this it? Is this what we’ve been fighting for?”

  “This is only the beginning. You should know that.”

  “No. I mean is this the last time you use us to achieve your own goals?”

  He started to leave, then seemed to think better of it. “Grow up, Corporal. This is your planet. You were going to kill yourself and I convinced you not to, so you could fight for something other than yourself. I see that in your case I failed.” When I was about to respond, he added, “What is it about you grunts nowadays, I wonder? You used to fight for things because they needed fighting for. Now you need reasons. Now you need explanations. Sometimes there isn’t a good explanation. Sometimes we don’t know the reasons. And sometimes companies prosper because of their forward thinking and service to the greater good. None of these things take anything away from the victory, nor does it do anything to sully the lives men and women gave for the cause.”

  This time he did turn away. He waved his hand and called, “Until next time, Corporal Mason.”

  The last man trailing the group was Olivares. His right arm was bandaged in place to keep it from moving. His other wounds, unlike mine, had been dressed.

  He stared at me, as if waiting for me to ask what I’d been dying to know.

  I said one word. “Michelle.”

  He nodded as if he’d known what I was going to ask and spoke slowly. “She volunteered, Mason. They knew all along about her. They’d compared her brain scans to those in Minnesota and Alabama and all those other places. She was a match and they had a plan for her. Don’t you get it? She’d rather do that to herself instead of being with anyone. This isn’t about you, Mason. This is about her. Her choice.”

  “But she was begging me to kill her?”

  “That’s not your choice.”

  A memory of our last moments together crashed into me: the passion, the way she’d taken charge. “Why her?”

  “Mr. Pink found out about the Cray’s communications system. He discovered a way to tap into it, to disrupt it.”

  “So you knew all along?” I was too tired to be angry.

  “No. Just about her. We faked her suit malfunction so everyone would assume she was dead. As far as what they were going to do with her...” He stared morosely at the ground. “I didn’t know that until a few moments ago.”

  I regarded him for a moment as helicopters came and went. “When did she make the decision?”

  “The night before the final mission. The night before they took her and made her into...”

  I was with her that night. It must have been before, which meant...

  Which meant she’d chosen her last moments to be with me. I turned and stared into the distance. If only we’d met some other place. But life wasn’t like a movie or a book. There were no happy endings.

  “What about Thompson?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Did he make a choice, too? Was he going to be in some other special project?”

  Olivares shook his head. “No. I saw him die. I’ve told you that.”

  “But you have to be wrong.”

  Olivares shook his head sadly. “If only I was.”

  “Then what was that sound? I hear it in my dreams. I hear it in the wind. I hear it all the time. His drums.”

  Olivares shrugged.

  “Listen,” I insisted. “I heard it at the end of that last mission. I heard his drumming. Olivares, seriously. It was him.”

  He looked at me with more than a little pity.

  I shook my head savagely. “Don’t do that. Don’t act like I’m crazy.”

  “What am I supposed to do? He’s dead. I saw it happen. He couldn’t move his legs anymore and we couldn’t move him so he opened his suit. He took two steps—two goddamned steps—and a Cray skewered him.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I did what you would have. I killed the Cray that killed him.”

  “And then what?”

&
nbsp; “Then I killed some more.” Olivares grabbed my shirt with his uninjured arm. “You have got to get over this, man.”

  I latched onto his wrist and held him still. My face was an inch from his. “Did you see him die?” I asked, looking him in the eye, searching for even a hint of a lie.

  “He couldn’t have survived it, Mason.”

  We stared at each other for almost a full minute, then he shook my grip off.

  “No one could have survived that.”

  He turned and headed for the helicopter.

  Then why did I hear the drumming? How had the kid saved my life? That little drummer boy with the infectious smile. He’d been the puppy among us, eager to please, forever trying to make up for his shortfalls, however real or imagined they were. But then, weren’t we all like him? Weren’t we all trying to make up for the things we’d done poorly or not done at all, hoping, praying, working to build a better future?

  Olivares turned around one last time.

  “Come on, you grunt. Let’s go. This shit was just the beginning.”

  Then he turned and climbed into the waiting helicopter.

  I closed my eyes and remembered Michelle the way she’d been on the mattress behind the generators.

  Then I opened them and ran to the helicopter.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SPECIAL THANKS TO Jon Oliver for giving me the opportunity to sit in the middle of the intergalactic science fiction sandbox and toss sand gleefully into the air. This has been a dream ever since a nine-year-old boy first cracked open Have Spacesuit Will Travel, and wondered, not only what it would be like to be a soldier, but what it would be like be a writer. Both of those dreams seemed so unreachable when I was nine. Thanks also to David Moore for his brilliant editing. Thanks to my agent Robert Fleck for doing all of his spectacular agenty things. Much appreciation for the use of Brian Gross’s brain. I think I learned more from Brian about science than I did in high school, college and graduate school combined. Thanks to all the folks at the CJIOC-A and ISAF J2x in Afghanistan who had to deal with me talking about this book as I was writing it during my six-month-all-expenses-paid vacation to the suck. Thanks to my wife Yvonne, who not only supported me, but made this a better book. Thanks to Joe Haldeman for being my inspiration both as a writer and as a citizen soldier. And last, but certainly not least, thanks to every man or woman who ever put on a uniform to fight for a cause greater than themselves. Each and every one of you are grunts and I’d follow you to the end of this earth and the next.