The Completionist

by Siobhan Adcock

  “We look like a fucking shooting gallery sitting here in broad sun,” someone pointed out over the hookup.

  “Skip’s orders. Find cover, stay close.”

  So they broke into teams of four and found what cover there was in the debris, which for most meant backtracking from the ridge a significant distance—so much for covering in place.

  “XO hasn’t sent a cleanup crew out to bulldoze in a while,” someone observed over the hook.

  “Lucky us. Plenty of nice, comfy rubble to snuggle into.”

  “Keep the chatter down, kids.”

  “You trying to sleep?”

  Sleep, while impossible, was actually tempting. Fighting fatigue was harder than fighting thirst, or hunger, or heat.

  He found himself covering with Chalke, Wash, and Sergeant Fine in a rusted bulk that might have once been a short bus, tipped onto its side and blown out, rubber and plastic and reddened metal weathered by dust and sun. Inside, they were partially exposed to the sky, and to the sandy broken road running north, but they spread out and found what shade they could.

  Heat crowded in with them as the sun rose higher.

  At first the sergeant had Wash sending an encrypted request for updates on fire support every quarter hour. After ninety minutes of this came a terse reply from someone high enough on the command chain that Sergeant Fine and Wash exchanged a brief look. Hold for your fucking frag order, dammit.

  “One more update request from Charlie and they’ll send us humping up the fucking mountain,” Chalke observed unnecessarily. Sergeant Fine told Wash to close up shop until command made contact. They each recorded their water levels and settled in to wait. Someone on the hook was humming tunelessly. For once nobody seemed to mind. There was nothing else to listen to out beyond the ridge but debris skittering in the wind, and the unceasing patter of particulate against their helmets, a sound like grains of sand poured into a metal bowl.

  They were accustomed to the heat, to the airborne particulate digging into their eyes and mouths and skin, to the exquisite mixture of boredom and fear, to being tired. They were experts at sharing, conserving, and reusing water. Thick tongues, burning eyes, raw and cracked membranes. Fingers curved into claws inside gloves because of broken knuckle skin. Toes clenched inside boots around a scalloped half-moon of dust, cemented in place between the fleshy forward edge of the balls of the feet, and the scraped thin skin of the undersides of the toes. You can survive anything, Sergeant Fine had told him once, by surviving it in ten-minute increments. Anyone can do anything—sweat in 110-degree heat, endure thirst, target other humans with unregulated biological weapons—for ten minutes. And when the ten minutes you’ve just survived elapse, and they will, then the next ten minutes begin, and you survive them, and survive the ones after them, and keep doing it, and one day you’ll realize you’re still alive. Don’t look forward to that day, though, Sergeant Fine had said. Don’t even think about that day.

  While thinking about the current ten minutes and how soon they’d be over with, three things happened, out of all apparent respect for temporal order. He felt a puff of air on his cheek, the infinitesimal shoving aside of millions of airborne particles, as something solid hurtled past, pushing both sound and mass before it. Then Fine, sitting opposite him in the hulk of the short bus, slumped over and was dead. And then he heard the ragged pop of molecules displaced by the bullet, snapping back into place.

  “That can’t be right, that cannot be fuckin’ RIGHT!” Wash shouted hoarsely. Parts of Fine’s eyeball and cheekbone and brain and scalp were everywhere among them, including on Wash’s comm board, a reinforced-metal-and-matte plastic tablet that was notoriously finicky and difficult to use even without the inside of someone’s head splashed over its surface.

  Into the hole of stunned silence on the hook Lance Corporal Chuck spoke, from wherever he was hunkered down in the debris fields outside the First Place: “Private Washington, get your comm board set up and send an update to command now now now—”

  Then the hook exploded with the sounds of static and mocking laughter: “Now now now, Private Washington, now now now, Private Washington, now now now.” It was like a nightmare where you hear voices in your head that no one else can hear, except that this was real life and the whole squad and all of Charlie company could hear it. Somewhere in the debris field, hidden away in the piles or in one of the shelled-out shopping centers that ringed the base all around them, the raiders had found a way to take over their channel, and to position what suddenly seemed like a goddamn battalion’s worth of snipers.

  Over the high-pitched squeal of static and the braying horrible laughter and the wails of men being found by sniper fire that had by that time all swamped the hook, Lance Corporal Chuck screamed something so stupid it didn’t even register at first. “Squad, get ready to take the ridge running, we’ve got to get over and back to the First Place, now now now!” Even if they hadn’t specifically been told to cover in place until the tower could provide fire support, running on command through a field of fire toward a ridge made of slippery, shifting, boot-eating gray sand—on unencrypted orders given over a compromised hook, no less—was suicide, plain and simple. But damned if he couldn’t see that dipshit Lance Corporal Chuck weaving through the rubble, trailed by three panicked kids from his hole, picking their way toward the ridge through a pattern of whirring bullets.

  Chalke gaped, wide-eyed, at him and at Wash. “Never happen. Never. Fucking. Happen.”

  His own croak-whisper hurt his ears. “Now now now, Private.” But they didn’t move. Neither of them could find a way to do it. His body simply was not accepting or processing any additional information, please try again later.

  Wash didn’t bother looking up at either of them. He was coding a new line in to the First Place and starting an update for command over the fresh encrypted channel. Not for the first time, Carter was grateful for his friend’s speed and expertise, even as his right forearm still throbbed from Wash’s latest demonstration. “One, this is Charlie. Multiple Coors. Heavy contact including sniper fire. Compromised hook. Need to advance to ridge with tower support.” As he said this, Wash glanced up at him, and he nodded back quickly: Permission to ventriloquize for Lance Corporal Chuck-Run-Amuck granted, by him at least. Now they just had to hope the crazy motherfucker didn’t somehow actually make it up the ridge before command came back affirmative.

  As it turned out, they needn’t have bothered worrying, because the CP’s base-wide hook had been taken out by the raiders as well, and no one could hear them; they were completely isolated, surrounded and under fire, with an inexperienced and frankly frantic second officer newly in command. It occurred to him afterward to be grateful that he didn’t know all that at the time.

  “They’re all going,” Chalke observed, again unnecessarily. Through the hole in the side of the short bus they could see the second team of their twelve-man squad emerging from cover and running in a crouch toward a low pile midway between their own hole and the base of the ridge. They could also see two of Chuck-Run-Amuck’s team: the Chuck himself, plus some other unlucky son of a bitch he couldn’t recognize from fifty yards through the particulate, but who he ardently hoped was their medical officer, known as Squiddy. They were hauling the bodies of the two other guys from their team back to cover.

  “WASH! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?” The Chuck shrieked over the compromised hook, creating a new counterpoint in the chorus of taunts, Where the fuck are you? Where the fuck are you? Now now now, Private Washington.

  Carter didn’t know how Wash wasn’t going completely insane. His friend looked terrified, they all did, that familiar pinched look around the wide eyes, and the flat rictus of mouth, but he also looked like he, perhaps alone among all of them, actually knew what the hell he was supposed to do. “I’ve got to get up there to the Chuck. He’s command now.” Communications was supposed to move with the officer in command; Carter knew that. With Sergeant Fine dead, Wash was supposed to move up the line to t
he lance corporal so that squad command could communicate with base. Base didn’t seem overly eager to reply to them, though.

  “Shouldn’t we wait to hear back from the First Place?”

  Wash shook his head. “I’ve got to move. You and Chalke have to carry Fine between you.” No man left behind. No man, ever. He and Chalke got to work.

  As they struggled out from beneath the short bus into a lethal mist of bullets and airborne particles, he and Chalke straining under Fine’s weight and Wash taking point, something happened that later he could only say probably saved his life, although at the time it seemed hell-bent on killing him where he stood. The sun was hard and fully up by then, scattering its blinding power across the particle-choked air, creating a shield made of billions of needlepoints of reflected light. But from across the valley floor that spread beneath their feet and the cursed site of the base and the H2.0 they were meant to spend their lives trying to protect rose up a dust storm, one that would have made him run for his life, if he weren’t already preparing to do just that.

  It was upon them in an instant, fully formed and howling. The bullets whirled inside it. Mindless with fear, choking, he pulled his air mask and face shield into place one-handed—he and Chalke each had one arm under Fine’s shoulders. With his shield in place, he reached out and grabbed for the back of Wash’s jacket, flailing in the direction of where he’d seen Wash crouching just a moment before. Wash hadn’t moved—he’d stopped for his mask and shield, too. He was inches away, and Carter couldn’t see him. Everything, every man and bullet and landmark and razor-sharp piece of metal sticking out of a pile of debris in the dead zone, was utterly concealed by the dark grayout of the dust storm. It had happened in less than five seconds. They were more lost now than they’d ever been.

  His hand gripped the back of Wash’s belt, and from the front, Wash gave the belt a tug. Okay. He tugged back. Okay. He could feel Chalke to his left, his arm stretched across Fine’s back, and he wiggled his fingers against Chalke on the other side of Fine’s body. Chalke wiggled his fingers in response. The men began staggering through grayout in the direction of the ridge.

  Wash had the unlucky job of detecting obstacles in the darkness and feeling his way gingerly around them. Sometimes one of them stumbled and they all fell down, clutching one another and Fine’s body madly until they were back on their feet and ready to move again. As they staggered forward, whoever was firing on them continued firing blindly, indiscriminately, into the storm. Occasionally a shot could be heard above the screech of hurtling wind and sand and decay, but more often you’d feel the whiff of the bullet flying past without a sound. Even the mad taunts of the raiders, broadcast directly into their implants through the company hook, were lost in the roar.

  They’d taken cover almost a quarter mile from the ridge and had to retake that ground an inch at a time. He heard Chalke scream once, but wherever he’d been hit, he managed to keep going. Something sharp, a nail, perhaps, pierced his boot, but he couldn’t feel any pain after the first moment. Each breath became sharp and agonizing; the oxygen in his air mask felt like it was setting his lungs on fire. The only way out was to keep going. Once, over the hook, he thought he could hear Wash sob, and felt himself wanting to weep, too, in the helpless, unmindful way of a child who is overtired. In this way an indescribable amount of time elapsed.

  The dust storms, they’d seen, could rise up out of nowhere and engulf an area the size of a city for days at a time, and just as suddenly withdraw back into the earth. Or they could last an hour, or a few minutes, or span the equivalent of just a few city blocks, or take several perceptible minutes to spin themselves back down. There was no way of telling the size of the storm they were working their way through, or when it might suddenly whistle off and disappear, leaving them exposed in the middle of the sand-coated dead zone of the debris field, targets so vulnerable they might as well be naked. He tried not to imagine what would happen then, or what could happen, what bottomless depths he would find himself capable of sinking to. Would he be the Marine who used his CO’s body as a shield? Would he be the Marine who shat himself in fear? Would he be the Marine who ran? Or would he simply be the Marine who, as seemed to be happening to him more and more now, sank into a field of flowers and blackness only he could smell and see, and let his buddies haul him along until they all died of whatever this was, whatever force kept taking him out of himself and away. His terror was all that kept it at bay now. Only when he was convinced he was going to die anyway could he keep himself from feeling death creeping toward him on its soft, sweet-smelling hands.

  When the First Place tower began laying down trigger fire across the debris field, they heard it before they felt or saw it: a high whistling keen over their heads that made them freeze in their tracks and instinctively dive to the ground. Then the unmistakable earth-hammering sound of the strikes, making the sand quake into rivulets and ornate patterns around their bellies. And then the sky was alight again, the dust storm burst wide open, the particulate forced up into the air in a spreading cloud overhead. He rolled onto his back and watched: a cloud of dust and metal, like an angel of darkness at war with itself, roiling and heavy and gray, and tearing itself to pieces in the sky.

  He looked around, trying to understand their position. They were halfway to the ridge. Chalke was shuddering on the ground next to Fine’s body, his left pants leg red to the knee, his boot almost black with pooled blood. Wash seemed all right. He was squinting toward base, gauging the distance to the ridge. No one else from their squad seemed to be in the field.

  He found out later that the rest of the squad had made it to the base of the ridge before the storm hit and somehow managed to scramble over it through the swirling dust. His own team was all the squad left on the other side, and in zero visibility the tower held off for as long as it deemed advisable before opening fire on the raiders still firing on them through the storm. Their slowness to react to the lance corporal’s order had cost them time and possibly a few more dead raiders, and although they were commended for bringing back Sergeant Fine—and in the end, Wash—their failure to act meant Chalke and Quinn were put on point for the next two patrols. Lance Corporal Chuck eventually got a medal. He’d brought back the bodies of two men. Single-handedly, it seemed.

  But that came later. When the dust storm cleared around them, it was obvious they had about two minutes, tops, of less-than-ideal visibility to make it to the ridge and over, and with Chalke’s leg and Fine’s body, all three men understood they weren’t going to make it.

  Wash got on Chalke’s other side and they threw themselves forward like maddened animals across the debris field, crouching low when shells began whizzing overhead, this time directed at the fire squad in the tower. For the time being.

  They reached the base of the ridge in about ninety seconds, and there was no time to strategize, to plan how they would get over. They started their scrambling ascent together, a clothesline of bodies hung on each other’s shoulders, each man hauling the weight of his friends, clutching handfuls of sand, falling, pushing upward again. Their breath came in ragged heaves, their legs strained, their hearts seemed to fly open. He fell, got a mouthful of ash, and screamed with the work of surging upward, pulling Fine with all his strength. Don’t look up. Don’t look at how far you have to climb. Just push, goddammit, push.

  Chalke reached the top first, Wash hauling him over with a hoarse cry of effort, and Carter gave Fine’s body a shove that sent it rolling after Chalke, knocking him to his knees and then to his face in the gray sand on the base side of the ridge, which was shallower on the inside, like a steep-sided bowl with a thumbprint’s depth. Wash made a sound between a wheeze and a moan, and when Carter looked to his friend he saw he’d taken a round through the side of his neck. Wash fell. Backward. On the wrong side of the ridge.

  “Don’t you die! Don’t you fucking die!”

  Carter had already stumbled over the ridgetop, but he scrabbled backward in the dust anyway, kn
owing he was too late to correct his downward slide into the bowl of the base, but trying, trying to get back to the top and pull his friend over to safety. Clawing at the ash and sand, he found no purchase. He dug in with his knees and crawled until his arm found the soft, sliding, infernal sand of the ridgetop and groped blindly. Reaching one arm over the top of the ridge, his body flat in the sand on the base side of the mound, his hand found Wash’s shoulder and gripped it. He could feel Wash’s body convulsing.

  With the final team over the ridge and back in the base, the tower opened up with a layer of hellfire. Over his head, where he lay in the gray sand clutching Wash’s blood-soaked shoulder, triggers rent the day into wild flame.

  TEN

  He’s surprised to see me. That much couldn’t be clearer from his expression.

  “Your office is pretty easy to find,” I offer by way of explanation, even though it hadn’t been, not exactly. I’m leaning back against his desk, facing him as he comes through his own office door, my back to the rattling windows that overlook his view, a crumbling parking lot.

  Major Rafiq brings out the patent-pending smile and his face lights up, just a few seconds too late to be entirely genuine. I’m a lot bigger than he is. “Evidently. Or perhaps you were meant to find me!” To his credit, he doesn’t ask how I got into his office before it opened.

  I’m sure he would have been less surprised if he’d found me skulking around outside, lost and hangdog, in the brown and yellow hallways of the old VA medical building. Or if I’d picked a fight with his desk staff—the same ones who didn’t notice me walking right past them as the office opened. Or if he’d just passed me hanging out in the rundown street outside, too sheepish to walk through the building doors. There are a lot of those guys around. But I’m not that guy. At least I don’t think I am.