Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  Megan grinned and reached out, sliding her fingers over my neck ring. She kissed me. “You have hair now—growing through the remains of your thermal block.”

  “We have not had time for a cut,” I said.

  “It’s beautiful.” She looked westward and sighed when a red message flashed over our display, Division demanding an immediate response to their order. “They’ll find us. We can’t run forever, it is not permitted and they hunt down anyone who refuses their discharge. I love you.”

  “I still don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “I want to run with you. West. I want to live, because I have no more faith—no faith in war and no faith that we’ll make it. But maybe you do. Now you can be the Lily. I never told you what Mother said to me that day in training, when she struck me with her cane.

  Megan sighed. “She said that one of us, either you or me, were to be the group’s Lily. But she also said that the feelings you and I had for each other were an abomination, an insult to the Lord, and that one of us had to pay; if I paid the price, she said I could be the Lily. And that is why I took the punishment, Catherine, why I promised to end things between us. It wasn’t to protect you, it was so that I could have the honor, that I could be the one. A Lily. A mark. I took it from you, and I’m sorry.”

  And for the first time, I didn’t mind the cold, didn’t feel the dust as it blew against my face and found its way into my mouth so that no amount of water washed it from my tongue. I felt something. It took me some time to name it and I really didn’t know the word’s meaning, but it seemed to be the right one for that particular sensation. Not anger or resentment. It didn’t matter that Megan had stolen the role from me, taken a thing that once I might have wanted more than anything else in the world, because what value did the Lily have now? There were no Lilies among the dishonored and living. This new feeling was better than being honored, better than all I had felt for the past two years, and certainly better than what had washed over me for the last two days, and when the name for it finally crystallized, I smiled at her and said the words.

  “Hope. It’s hope and faith. I became the Little Murderer to show everyone that I was better than the Lilies, better than you. And better than man. So we’re even.”

  THREE

  Hatred

  When the time comes, baptize yourself and cleanse the soul. Do this, and you will know only victory.

  MODERN COMBAT MANUAL JOSHUA 7:13

  One heard things in the tank. It started on training day, incipience, the day they inserted cables to shock us into a mental birth. The teachings raced through our minds in real time—small unit tactics, weapons, history, and devotions—on a six-hours-on, six-hours-off schedule, but to us hours meant nothing since we hadn’t yet been decanted and knew nothing but sleep and training.

  My world outside of simulations was a deep orange, a thick gel which enveloped and kept me warm and which prevented me from seeing the atelier. But I heard. Voices surrounded the tank with song, a choir whose words were just loud enough to hear, and which swelled with promise until one day, after a rest period, I heard a different voice.

  “Die,” it said.

  My eyes popped open, met by the orange glow. At first I thought I had been dreaming.

  “You are an abomination.”

  Who are you, I thought.

  It sounded angry, and moved around me, never coming from the same direction. “I am an embodiment of hatred—of those you serve. You will be our tool, a thing, one pharmacon among many, to be exiled and spent so the rest of us can live. We will use you until you are withered and then nothing will be left except waste. You are the discarded.”

  I have been chosen. To serve Him and there is no greater honor.

  “You have been chosen to learn the bare minimum.”

  With that I felt a jolt of electricity, a moment of burn that shot through my brain and into my spine, forcing my back to arch until the electron flow normalized. The tank melted away. A classroom, in which my sisters surrounded me, replaced it and in front of us stood a new instructor whose face alternated between that of an old man and that of a grinning skull; none of my sisters seemed to notice.

  The man’s voice was the same one I had just heard. “Combat suits will protect you in most environments. Embedded detectors will signal your heads-up display should the enemy try a micro-robotic, chemical, or biological attack. In the event of a micro attack, the ceramic and joint materials will provide you with at least ten minutes of protection, giving enough time for electronic countermeasures. In the event of chem-bio warfare, it doesn’t really matter. Your biochemistry is such that your immune system will almost instantly deploy enzymes or killer cells to neutralize harmful agents. If they don’t, the carapace is sealed anyway, and the filters will keep out anything bigger than molecules normally found in breathable air.

  “That’s the good news.” The man turned from his holo-display and stared at me, a pair of horns sprouting from the thick bone of his head. I tried turning away but something prevented it, forcing my eyes to look in his direction. “The bad news is that our intelligence reports indicate the Russians may have developed something new—an agent we haven’t yet been able to counter, and which they inject via special flechettes. It’s a full cell, synthetic, and is too big to pose an inhalation or percutaneous threat. The pathogen is capable of changing at will, overcoming any new defense your body develops, and eventually causes your flesh to rot, your internal organs to hemorrhage. So one piece of advice: try not to get shot. If you do, at the first sign of infection, amputate at least a foot above the wound site because we think for now that the organism spreads slowly.

  The man smiled, and I sensed that his next message came only to me. “If you ever run from us,” he said, “we will find you.”

  A distant boom of thunder yanked me from the memory, pulled me back to the Uzbek reality, and I gently traced a gauntleted finger across the back of Megan’s neck. I had noticed it yesterday. She tried to hide what had happened, but during the Tamdybulak engagement, several flechettes had pierced Megan’s right hand and now it gave more trouble than it should have. When a fresh drop of blood fell from a tiny hole in her gauntlet, I worried—that maybe she had been infected.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Should we go in?”

  I shrugged, fingering the zoom control outward to get a better view. “I don’t know.”

  Prefab ceramic slabs and domes formed the farmhouse’s main structure, lending it an Arabic appearance. Its roof glinted white in the sun. Around the building, tufts of tan grass swayed, and I realized as we stood there that it had already gotten warm, that for a moment spring had arrived so the grass reached a height of almost one and a half meters, rising to our chests and forcing us to stand for an unobstructed view.

  Megan kept her attention on the sky while I focused on the farmhouse again, a gray trail of smoke rising from its chimney.

  “It’s been days since we’ve seen any sign of our forces or theirs,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Megan cleared her throat. “You are worried. Why?”

  “It’s not right. Everything else in the area is destroyed, why not this?” The static from my headset clicked off and on as my computer scanned the frequencies. “And who’s jamming us?”

  “Shut it off and conserve power. Communications aren’t necessary anyway, not for us.”

  We watched the house for another ten minutes and saw nothing.

  “Let’s go,” said Megan.

  It took five minutes to crawl to the farmhouse, and I looked around before Megan rose to approach the door. She cocked her head when it opened. Two Uzbek farmers—a man and his wife—hung from the ceiling by the neck, their tongues blue from suffocation, strings of mucous swaying in a breeze that we had let in through the doorway. Behind the farmers, the house had been ransacked. Tables and chairs lay smashed and it looked as if several waste pouches had been emptied over the wreckage, along with pieces o
f Russian armor and empty ration packs.

  “Russian genetics?” Megan asked.

  I popped my helmet to get a better view, and saw that boot prints had smeared a patch of dirt at the front door; I knelt to examine it. “We did this. Those are from our Special Forces.”

  “Then they are looking.” Megan removed her gauntlet and I saw the red skin of her hand, streaked with white.

  “You are infected?” I asked. “With the organism?”

  Megan nodded, and threw her gauntlet to the floor.

  The view from the windows showed nothing, except that desert and square plots of switchgrass surrounded us on all sides, and for the moment I felt exposed. Obvious. We shouldn’t have been there—anyone searching for us would naturally focus on the farmhouse—but I saw in Megan’s face that the infection had gotten worse and she needed rest indoors, out of the elements and without having to wear a helmet.

  We didn’t bother to cut down the corpses.

  “I thought a lot about what you asked me once,” said Megan, pointing at the swinging bodies. “About death.”

  “What about it?”

  Megan said nothing and began taking off her armor. When she had finished, she slid her combat knife from its sheath, handed it to me, and rolled up the sleeve of her undersuit. “That this is no way to find out what waits on the other side. Take care of my infection.”

  The knife handle felt cold at first. Megan lay on the floor and shut her eyes, extending her arm toward me. The infection had begun to spread to her wrist, and I saw that portions of her fingertips had gone black, a whiff of rot making the threat more real.

  There was no reason to hesitate. I chopped and she whimpered for only a moment before gaining control of the pain reflex, her blood clotting instantly.

  Megan tied off the undersuit’s sleeve below the elbow. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  I picked up my carbine and headed for a small ladder that led to a hatch near the ceiling. “Lay down, you need rest. I will watch from above.”

  I pushed through the hatch and secured it behind me before stepping onto the roof.

  The sun had almost disappeared over the horizon, and its fading light cast a pink glow across the fields. As a wave of delirium washed over, it occurred to me that the countryside was beautiful, but the sight lasted only a few moments. Soon, a moonless night threw its dark shroud over us, and in the stillness I heard Megan snoring.

  A distant formation of more than a hundred burning lights—white hot on my infrared sensors—streaked eastward, sending sonic booms to roll over the field. I almost woke Megan. But the aircraft passed well to our north before cutting sharply northeast, toward Kazakhstan, and disappeared quickly over the horizon. The moment of fear brought with it a memory of footprints and of the swinging bodies. I considered the explanations, calculating the probabilities before arriving at an answer. “If you ever run from us, we will find you.”

  We were being tracked. But for now there was nothing to do except wait, so that Megan could get some rest.

  I hadn’t had time to enjoy the fact that she had changed. All night, while I stood watch, I kept smiling, unable to believe that if we made it to safety we’d be able to stay together. Focusing on any one thing became difficult. Megan and I had taken the first step, running west, away from the war and away from our family so part of me felt happy—like there was nothing but hope and I couldn’t keep from laughing—but another part couldn’t fathom it. How would we survive? What would we do and where would we go? What else was life but war? For the time being my hatred and terror had subsided, had seeped deeper into my subconscious where I knew they both waited for the right moment to emerge—the correct conditions, their infinite patience providing them with a capsule that would never mold over or rust into impotence. And I wanted it to stay there, never wished for it to leave. They called me Little Murderer. It wasn’t just a name, it was me, an immutable fact of my existence and the substance of who I was, and no matter where we wound up, in war or peace, that was my purpose, my talent, and the only available vocation; it was an identity that needed hatred, and besides, the thought of getting rid of it never occurred to me because it was a leviathan, a thing that could at times be pushed aside momentarily, but never eradicated. How did you sweep away an elephant? To destroy it would require something momentous, a realization like this—that a Lily had fled from discharge. Such a world had never before existed and my darkest moments on the line had always been staved off by a recollection of immutable facts that any one of us could have recited, even when nearest to death. Lilies never spoiled, Lilies never faltered, Lilies were the purest among the pure, the trusted among the honorable, and so I had always thought Megan sure to die whether anyone wanted her to or not. Corruption had never been a contingency. Yet even as my thoughts orbited this, began to spiral around the puzzle of how this could have ever happened, I set it all aside; the realization that she was with me pulled me back into the present and I hugged my chest with happiness, having to fight the urge to abandon my post and hold her. And hatred? I would hold onto it too, I decided.

  Then the sun made the sky lighten. My muscles ached, and a lack of sleep had rendered me so tired that I almost missed it when a pair of lights flickered into view on the southern horizon, but my goggles zoomed in, forcing me to watch for a few seconds before I got up and ran toward the hatch. It took less than a second to slide down the ladder.

  “They’re coming!”

  Megan jumped up and began pulling on her armor with one hand. By the time we got her helmet on, the sonic boom shook the windows and both of us dove to the floor.

  “There,” said Megan, pointing to a trapdoor in the kitchen.

  Everything moved in slow motion. There wasn’t enough time for fear, and once we pried the door open, we had less than a moment to drop through the dark hole and land in a concrete basement.

  A roar tripped the cutoff for my helmet pickups. Overhead the kitchen floor rumbled and a huge crack appeared without warning, dropping chunks of cement on top of us—until the trapdoor disappeared. I screamed. A jet of plasma shot down through the narrow hole and spread out over the floor, its tendrils snaking toward us as our temperature indicators shot upward, but the things dissipated before reaching us.

  We huddled in a corner for what seemed an eternity. Drones screamed overhead in multiple passes and dropped a variety of ordnance on our position so that eventually, thermal gel ate through the basement roof to sprinkle around us like drops of hissing acid. By the time it got quiet, the sound of jets fading in the distance, we saw morning sunlight stream through the trapdoor opening and I shook with relief.

  “We must move,” said Megan.

  “Wait.” I pulled my helmet off and removed the vision hood, careful to make sure that its power cables stayed connected, and then activated my receiver.

  “What are you doing?” asked Megan.

  “Shh,” I said.

  Megan stood so that I could move the headset over her armor. At a point close to the back of her neck, the sound of static swelled in pulses, and I waved it over once more to make sure before trying it on myself.

  “It’s in our necks,” I said, “some kind of tracking device that must be millimeters below the skin. I would guess it began transmitting on our eighteenth birthday.”

  Megan handed me her knife. I dug the thing from her neck, wiped the blade clean, and then waited for her to do the same to me. The transponders looked like black capsules, each of them marked with tiny red lettering, and we crushed them with a chunk of concrete before sweeping ourselves one more time and resuiting.

  “They will still know the direction we’re taking,” said Megan.

  “Vaguely, but we have no choice. If we move south to change direction we’ll approach our forces in Iran, and if we head north we’ll run into the Russian lines.”

  Megan checked her carbine before shouldering it, and muttered as we crept upward, back into the farmhouse. “ ‘Without the con
viction of a killer, it is impossible to please Him. For she who comes to God must believe that she is death embodied, and that He is the reward for those who massacre.’ ”

  “Amen,” I whispered.

  There was nothing left. The ceramic structure had melted and shattered to its foundations, and all around us lay a bumpy field of dark glass, which reflected the sunlight with such intensity that our goggles frosted into near obscurity. We sprinted to the edge of the destruction, where we dove into the switchgrass, crawling westward with the sun at our backs.

  Beyond the farm we moved into an abandoned mining area that transformed the Uzbek flatlands into an unfamiliar terrain, pockmarked by tiered pits that stretched for miles to end in aqua-colored lakes. Our chemical sensors tripped on multiple occasions. It occurred to me then that these weren’t simply water bodies, man-made or natural, but that they were the refuse of a generation’s worth of digging for metals, of extraction, and that although to me the greens and blues mixed with brown seemed beautiful and intense, they were equally lethal, the liquids comprised of water, weak acids, and cyanide. Nobody would ever live here again—if they ever did in the first place.

  And fear had made its return. What before had been the terror of dying mutated to form a knot in my stomach, a paranoia insisting that Special Forces waited behind every rock or lay waiting among the huge piles of dirt. Within an hour it exhausted me. Both feet had gone numb and no matter how hard I tried, efforts to cut off my nerves, which had been so easy the day before, now didn’t work at all so that above the numb area both sets of calf muscles cramped in nearly paralyzing spasms. We collapsed every hour, unable to move until we had rested for a few moments. I couldn’t imagine Megan’s suffering as she struggled forward using only one arm, her breathing shallow and rapid with the effort to drag herself along while ignoring the loss of a limb. Despite the suit’s climate control, sweat coursed down my back and soaked into the undersuit. By the time we broke for lunch we had made it only a few kilometers; it seemed as though we hadn’t moved at all.