"Fuck!" says Wilson.
"See what I'm saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it's a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y'know."
Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.
"Seventy thousand's such a weird number," GRob says. "I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it's mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol' raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong … or he received the message right and didn't know what volts were, so he said, 'ropes.'"
"Fuck," says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.
"No doubt." GRob hefts her rifle. "I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what's on the other side."
"Might be a big goddamn forest," Wilson says dubiously.
"Didn't you read it? It's not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it read infinite, but …" She shrugs. "What's the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks."
"Baxter'll come up with something."
GRob snorts. "Forget him! Man's sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What's that about?!"
"You were acting pretty crazy."
"I saw a fifty-foot wolf smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy."
"He'll bounce back."
"Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That's whack, man! He was right for command, we'd have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He's over! You'n me, we gotta look to each other from now on."
Baxter's helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it's no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter's showing cracks, but he doesn't dispute GRob's last statement. "What's Arizona like?" he asks.
"You live right next-door. Don't you know?"
"I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That's about it."
"Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert'll trip you out. I don't know. It's cool." She gazes off into a private distance. "Running the border towns was the best. We'd start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing." She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she'd toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered …
"Where's your head at, man?" GRob asks. "Am I losing you, too?"
"Just a little vacation. I'm back."
She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip.
They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, "We get outa this, man … You'n me. For real."
"Are you motivating me?"
"Fucking A! Is it working?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We'll see how it sets up after that."
"Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers."
"You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing."
Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman's got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. "We're not getting out of this," he says.
She holds steady. "It's still a promise."
They stay locked, and then she says, "Fuck the monsters! We're the real monsters here."
"Fanged motherfuckers!" Wilson says. "We rule the goddamn world!"
"We're poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they'll crap blood and scream for their mamas."
"They won't eat us, we'll eat them. We'll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh."
"We're too cool to die! Too sexy!"
"We're movie stars with mad fucking weapons!"
"We're scrap iron …"
"We're wild dogs!
"… we were born for the shit!"
· · · · ·
1323 hours
· · · · ·
On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn't seem to care what they do. He's obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he's likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can't do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they're thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, "Whatever."
The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson's ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, "Fuck you, Jim!" and then, to Wilson, says, "Keep firing!" Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently and doesn't react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest's boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He's excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter's not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.
"Those fucking wolves are out there," GRob says. "They're dead for real, not just their transmitter's down. I say we keep on going."
"Deeper into the cave or out into the valley?" Wilson asks this of Baxter, but it's GRob who answers. "Deeper," she says. "Might be worse back in there, but I done enough with those wolves."
"It doesn't matter one way or the other," Baxter says, slurring his words.
The anger and frustration that's been building in Wilson, his sense of being abandoned by Baxter, betrayed by him, all this spikes, but he doesn't act on it, he doesn't start ranking on his best friend, and from this he realizes that, like GRob, he has given up on Baxter. Their stroll in the brass forest has confirmed her judgment. "Dog!" he says to Baxter. "You in there? You are, you better do something, man. Battle juice, God'n Country, IQ. Whatever it takes. 'Cause you are fucking slipping away."
Baxter's eyes find him through the faceplate, and he's about to speak when a silent shadow sweeps over them, a massive shadow. Wilson knows before he glances up that it's death in some form, its chill invades him, but it's gone so quickly, the form that imprints itself on his mind doesn't seem the one he actually saw, a cat's face with black wings, leathery wings and struts of cartilage, maybe a bat, an enormous bat. Incredibly fast. Like the blur that took DeNovo. He looks back along the path. Rats have gathered and are gathering in the crooks of the twisted brass trees that survived their passage, thousands of glinting red eyes pointed from pockets of shadow. He hears behind him the snick of GRob slotting a fresh magazine into her rifle. "Keep going," she says. "That's who we are, man. We keep going."
· · · · ·
1655 hours
&n
bsp; · · · · ·
They are miles from the brass forest, the walls of the cave once again too distant to see or to read, lost in a field of yellow flowers, when they happen upon what appears to be a survivor from another patrol, a suited figure sitting among the flowers, his torso and helmeted head visible above the blooms. At a distance he looks like an element of a Zen garden. A minimalist, vaguely human sculpture of pale brown stone. His privacy screen has been engaged and the display on his faceplate is showing a clip excerpted from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. GRob bends to him, punches keys on the soldier's computer, reads the arm display. "OD," she says.
"Who is it?" Wilson asks.
"Gary Basknight."
Wilson remembers him from training. The Basilisk, he called himself. Kept growing a soul patch against regs. Big, muscular kid from Tampa. A laughing skull tattooed on his neck. Wilson, himself tattooless, contemplated getting a similar one. He watches the cartoon clip. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird around a corner inside a house and screeches to a halt when he sees Tweety hovering before him. He makes a two-handed grab for the bird, but Tweety squirts up and Sylvester just misses. He makes another grab, and another. Another yet. Each time, Tweety Bird squirts higher, losing a yellow feather or two in the process, yet suffering no serious damage, continuing to hover almost within reach. Sylvester doesn't notice that as he grabs and misses, he's rising higher and higher off the floor. Finally he notices—oh-oh!—and realizes he can't fly. A perplexed look comes over his face. Then down he falls, leaving a spreadeagled cat-shaped hole in the floor. The clip restarts. Wilson can't get over the banal ugliness of the sight, this brightly animated few seconds of Oof! and Gasp! and Kapow! framed by a camo-painted combat suit, this human being reduced to a death utterance of streaming video. Nor can he connect these silly albeit somewhat ominous images with the surly badass who Basknight pretended to be and, in fact, was. Basknight's choice of privacy screen might, like his own, have been hastily considered, or maybe this was Basknight's way of flipping off the world, maybe he realized how obscenely trivial it would appear to anyone finding his body. Then again, maybe the clip embodies an absurdist view of life that he kept hidden from his peers, most of whom perceived him to have the famished appetites and clouded sensibility of a creature in a shooter game.
GRob nudges him and Wilson glances up to see that she's pointing at Baxter, who has taken a seat among the flowers some twenty yards away. "Baxman?" he says.
"Don't come near me," Baxter says. "Come near me, I'll mess you up."
GRob puts a hand on Wilson's arm and says, "Leave him," but he shakes her off and says, "Baxter, this is total bullshit!!"
"Walk away," Baxter says.
"That all you got for me? Walk away? After the shit we seen together? That's it?"
Silence.
"You better talk to me, Baxter!
"Devil's loose in the world, man. Where we goin' go? The devils, they got it all now."
Fuming, Wilson can't fit his feelings inside of words.
"War's over, man," says Baxter. "I'm shuttin' it down."
"Baxter! Goddamn it!"
"I'm with you, man. I hear what you sayin'. But you need to walk away. Right now."
His words are badly slurred, almost unintelligible, and Wilson understands from this it's too late for argument, that his own words, if he could find them, would form merely an annoying backdrop to whatever sweet ride of thought Baxter has chosen to rush away on. Tears are coming and he's furious at Baxter. Were their good times and shared fear simply prelude to this muscle-spasm of an exit? Did people just invent each other, just imagine they were tight with one another …?
"Charlie." GRob touches his hand and Wilson jerks it back from her angrily, saying, "Don't call me that! I hate that fucking name!"
"I know," she says. "Hate's good."
As they move off smartly across the field, Wilson glances back to see the cute yellow canary and the skuzzy black-and-white cat cavorting on Basknight's faceplate, growing ever smaller, ever more indistinct. He doesn't know what's on Baxter's privacy screen and he doesn't want to know. Baxter's always changing it. From an old Pong game to a photograph of a Russian meteor crater to an African mask. All stupidly announcing some sloganlike truth about the soon-to-be skull behind them. Wilson decides he's sticking with shots of the Rockies for his screen. They don't say diddly about him, which is better than saying one dumbass thing, and it'll never seem as monstrously puerile as Basknight's Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. The figures of Baxter and Basknight dwindle to anonymous lumps and Wilson summons them onto his helmet display, taking an angle low to the ground and looking up, holding them both in frame so they resemble ancient statues, relics of a vanished civilization, weathered soldier-shaped monuments commemorating something, though he's forgotten what.
· · · · ·
1830 hours
· · · · ·
Wilson no longer feels like scrap iron, like a wild dog, like a movie star with mad fucking weapons. He feels like Charles Newfield Wilson. Charlie. Walking through the valley of the shadow, waiting for the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch, and whatever else hell has in store. Scared shitless, even though he's got a pretty, deadly blond at his side. He knows he should run some battle juice, but does more IQ instead. Dangerous levels. His mind's eye wheels, encompassing fragmented images of childhood, phosphorescent flares like the explosive firings of neurons, an assortment of sense memories accumulated during the past few hours, a kaleidoscopic succession of what look to be magazine photographs, most relating to a museum display of Egyptian artifacts, these and other categories of things remembered all jumbled together, as if overloaded files are spilling their contents and causing short circuits. The insides of his eyes itch, he can't swallow, his heart slams, and his vision has gone faintly orange. But soon the flurry and discomfort settle, and it's as if he's been fine-tuned, as if a bullet-smooth burnished cylinder has been slotted into place inside his twitchy self, a stabilizing presence, and he begins, for the first time, to have a grasp on the situation, to not merely react to its hopelessness, to accept it, and, by accepting it, by announcing it calmly to himself, stating its parameters, he comes to believe that all is not lost. They are in hell, maybe with a patch or two of heaven mixed in, and they cannot contact command. As with any battlefield, the situation is fluid, and, as has been the case with other battlefields, they can't trust their instrumentation. He's been here before. Not in so daunting a circumstance, perhaps, not on a field that—as this one seems to—was fluid to the point that it actually changed shape. But essentially they're in the same position they were in during other covert actions, conflicts that never made the news back home. Recognizing this gives him hope. If your situation is fluid, you have to become fluid. You have to understand the unique laws of the place and moment and let them dictate the course of your survival. He switches off his instruments. He no longer wants to see things as digital cartoons or confuse the issue with readings that can't be trusted. They're on the right path, he thinks. Going forward. GRob nailed it. Going forward is who they are.
As they walk through the flowers, GRob asks him about Colorado, where he went to school, did he have a girlfriend, and all like that. By this, he realizes how scared she is. She's never been much of a talker, just a mad fucking soldier like Perdue … and maybe, he thinks, that's at the heart of her fear. GRob and Perdue were tighter than he and Baxter. They went on leave together, and there's no doubt they were lovers, though Wilson knows GRob had an eye for guys. Plenty of times he caught her checking him out. But GRob and Perdue were a unit, they neutralized each other's fear and now Perdue's gone, GRob's unsure of herself. In context of this, he wonders why he's not more unsure of himself now that Baxter's gone. He doesn't believe it's just that IQ is insulating him from fear, and he's coming to accept that he and Baxter didn't have anywhere near as strong a bond as GRob and Perdue. What purpose they served for one another is unclear. Yet even as he thinks this, he suspects that he
does understand their relationship, that they weren't really tight, they were flimsily aligned, doing big brother-little brother schtick to pass the time.
"I got this thing about flowers," GRob says, and takes a swipe with her rifle as she tramples down the yellow blooms. "My uncle ran a funeral home in Tucson. I used to hafta come over after school because my mama was working and my uncle would babysit me. It was like flowers all over the place. Guys would give me flowers, I'd hate it 'cause they made me think about dying."
"They're just flowers," Wilson says. "Not a metaphor … right?"
She gives a salty laugh. "Yeah, I forgot." They walk on a few paces, then she says, "Hard to believe it, though," and this sparks something in Wilson, a flicker of comprehension, something that seems hopeful, helpful, but he doesn't pursue it, he's too concerned with keeping her straight.
"I'm not re-upping after this tour," he says. "This does it for me."
After a pause she says, "You said that after Angola."
"Captain Wilts got me drunk and preached me a sermon. What can I say? I was a jerk."
"I'm short. I got six weeks left. I could take it all in leave and catch a plane somewhere."
"Tangiers, how about?"
"Y'know, I been thinking about that. Maybe not Tangiers. Somewhere away from the Arabs, man. Somewhere closer to home. Maybe Mexico."
"Mexico's cool."
"My parents used to take me down when I was a kid. There was a town on the Gulf. Tecolutla. A real zero place. Palm trees, a beach, some crummy hotels. No tourists. I'd like to go there."
"Might not be like that anymore."
"Tecolutla's never gonna change. A few more people … sure. But there's nothing there. The beach isn't even that good. Just a whole buncha nothing … and mosquitoes. I could use some nothing for a while."
"You might get bored."
"Well, that'd be your job, wouldn't it? To see I didn't."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 54
