Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  His armor had been burned in places, its helmet not completely locked down so it bobbed and clicked as he ran, and his feet moved uncertainly, as if not used to the weight of armor, or he may have allowed himself to get too soft, too weak. A patch of ice sent him onto his face. The man slid toward me, and as he got closer I heard wheezing breath, then a sob as he spoke in Korean. He tried to get his footing, but each time a grenade landed nearby the man overreacted, sending himself flying. I grabbed him as he passed and ripped his helmet off.

  General Kim screamed, and put up both hands as if trying to stave off what would happen next. You didn’t need to understand Korean to know that he was begging.

  “I don’t hate you, General,” I said in Russian.

  He lowered his hands. Dirt streaked the man’s face except for where tears had run, and his skin looked red from the exertion of sprinting.

  “Please,” he said, “don’t kill me, I didn’t mean what I said at dinner.”

  “Why did you attempt a coup?”

  “She is too old. You wouldn’t understand, because you’re new to our culture, new to humanity even. Respect toward the elderly is our way. So I would never undertake something like this lightly, especially not with someone so revered as Na-yung, not with someone I am sworn to serve, someone old enough to remember the war. But this is a different war. Soon we’ll be caught in the middle of it, and I don’t think she can navigate us through. You don’t know what she has planned for you and your friend.”

  “I want to thank you.”

  He opened his eyes all the way, maybe surprised. “For what?”

  “For everything your people have done. For me and Margaret. Even though you don’t want us here, I appreciate the collective decision to keep us; I’m sure it couldn’t have been easy for you to accept it.”

  “You will let me go?” he asked.

  It would have been cruel to answer him or to allow the conversation to continue. And by then the fires had begun around the camp, touched off by the grenade and rocket fire, so that when a group of soldiers marched in our direction the flames backlit them, their silhouettes getting larger as they approached. But it wasn’t an easy decision either—not like the ones regarding those who had died before. I had to grit my teeth and close my eyes, then find his head by touch before I twisted as hard and as quickly as I could, snapping his neck. A feeling descended on me then, a kind of weightlessness and lack of care; God had been there.

  By the time Margaret and the others reached me, along with Na-yung’s forces who had fought underground, I wasn’t hearing anymore and couldn’t see or talk. Later Margaret told me that I lay on General Kim’s body for the rest of the day and into the night, begging him for forgiveness. Crying. Na-yung had thought she understood. She knelt beside us for a while, and shed her own tears, brushing the hair back from Kim’s forehead and then cleaning his face with a handkerchief while she told me in Russian that it was never easy to kill a great man. But that wasn’t it; how could she understand? What had come to me that night, through Kim’s death, was the gift of acceptance, of finally knowing who and what I was: a killer. But not like the one who had fought her way to Kazakhstan through Iran and Uzbekistan. I would be a killer like nobody had seen before, one who saw God’s will.

  “Na-yung counts us among the trusted now,” said Yoon-sung.

  I didn’t respond to her. They had given us Chinese armor and Maxwells, and after so long in clothes, the ceramic felt heavy and confining, so that at times like now it seemed to suffocate, but not in the way it had when I once feared the helmet. Whatever had happened on the night of Kim’s death, it had restored me—removed every bit of fear so that the armor’s weight and confinement was nothing like it used to be, only a distraction. Spring had arrived in full, and Chegdomyn lay just far enough south that the snows melted fully, turning the areas surrounding the city into a swamp. We stayed helmeted, not because there was any danger, but because of mosquitoes. The insects had become so thick that, unhelmeted, if you opened your mouth for even a few seconds a hundred would fly in, catching between your teeth or inhaled into your lungs. Margaret said something in response to Yoon-sung about earning the Dear Leader’s trust by defeating the coup, but I knew that wasn’t it because I remembered more of what she had said during our time with General Kim’s corpse—when she revealed that she could speak Russian fluently. I secretly agreed with the General, Catherine, that you are an abomination. But the abomination isn’t that your kind was created in the first place; the abomination is that here you are, barely twenty, and yet you think and speak as though older than me by twenty years. I have pity for you.

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Those are the most words you’ve spoken all month,” said Margaret, “I’d begun wondering if someone had removed your tongue.”

  Yoon-sung surveyed the rail yard. “At this rate, about two more days.”

  We stood on a gantry over the main rail line that ran through the middle of town, and looked down on the men and women who ran from one job to another while massive steam cranes swung back and forth, lowering logs and cut lumber into waiting cars. The cars were ones I had never seen. Yoon-sung told us that a Unified Korean business had developed them, and had designed the cars to open like clam shells so the lumber would be protected. Each side of the cars rested on the ground, and once full, the sides would swing upward and seal hermetically, locking out radioactive dust and biologicals that still lurked among the route we’d take through a desolate North Korea. I didn’t know what to feel. The breakdown I’d suffered during the coup had caused a shift in me, and maybe was just the thing I needed, so that now I felt comfortable with the thought of moving south. There was a kind of peace. The new warmth felt wet against my skin when I took off my helmet, and the smell of new grasses and flowers amid the swamps and forests wafted through the air, as if the season quietly promised that something good was about to happen. Even the mosquitoes didn’t bother me that day.

  “What will we face on the trip south?” I asked.

  Yoon-sung kicked a rock from the gantry, watching it land before answering. “Mostly bandits. They will have set traps along the tracks, loosened rails in spots or placed mines. We’ll move in front of the train in a series of separate, armored cars, scouting the way ahead.”

  “How do they live?” Margaret asked. “In an area so contaminated?”

  “They find a way. Many of them were people who survived during the Japanese attacks and just stayed, somehow adapted to it all. Some people can’t bring themselves to leave. The rest are Chinese who ran from their country, thinking things would be better in South Korea, but they were refused admittance at the new border. Those people couldn’t go back.”

  Margaret slapped me on the back and laughed. “I can almost see the ocean, Catherine. Smell it. I wonder how South Korea compares to Bandar Abbas and can’t stop thinking about Thailand.”

  “We may die before Thailand,” I said.

  “What is it with you? Do you have any room for optimism?”

  I smiled and clicked my helmet back into place. “I am eternally optimistic, but my will and yours are irrelevant. We can be more optimistic in Thailand.”

  The new suit linked to my Maxwell the way it was supposed to and I scanned the tree line closest to us, sighting on a pair of wolves. They stood absolutely still. Both animals watched us, their tongues hanging out and their skin stretched taut from having eaten better than ever during one of the coldest winters on record for the area, a winter in which there had been plenty of Chinese and Russian corpses. I pulled the trigger and waited. A second later the flechettes hit the wolf on the left, punching through its head so that the animal died before its tail hit the mud. Yoon-sung called out the kill and several people cheered, all of them volunteering to go out and collect it. The second one went down a moment later and I grinned. Tonight we would eat meat. But even more important, it felt good to draw blood, even from a wolf, and even if only for food.

 
“You kill animals with no problem,” Margaret said. Things had been strained between us since the day of the coup, and she no longer looked to me for guidance. “Will you be good on the trip south? You take only two tranq tabs a day.”

  “Only God knows.”

  “So,” she continued, “we’re back to God now?”

  I felt sorry for her then, wondering if she would ever see it—see the things I saw now that everything was clearer. It may have been a new form of insanity. But for now it didn’t matter because when I held up my hand the difference was obvious, should have been clear even to Margaret.

  “What?” she asked.

  “What do you see?”

  “A hand. A gauntlet.”

  I shook my head, exaggerating the twisting of my neck so she could see it. “Not just a hand. It’s a hand that isn’t shaking anymore, a hand touched by God himself.”

  Chinese suits had one advantage over American ones: the faceplate. Instead of a relatively narrow slit, or even the rounded ports on Russian models, these suits had a glass section that spanned from our forehead to our mouth, providing a better field of view, and, if you were close enough, allowing you to see the face of your fellow soldiers. Margaret was staring at me. She didn’t say anything at first, then sneered, pulling at a water tube that poked upward inside the suit, near her mouth.

  “I’m taking a walk,” she said.

  Once she was gone, Yoon-sung sighed. “She is younger than you.”

  “Only by a year or two.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant in mind, not in years. Margaret has started selling herself for extra food, at night, to the men in the factories, and she sees no value in herself. I didn’t want to tell her the truth about the trip, the full extent of the danger we face and I don’t think you should either. The railways are paved with the skeletons of dead North Koreans. That is the truth.”

  “I don’t care about the truth anymore, Yoon-sung, or lies. It will unfold how it unfolds.”

  Yoon-sung grinned. “You have changed since the night of the coup. I’ll ask you what you think about the truth once we head south because right now you can only imagine it. The people in contaminated zones have nothing to lose and will kill us the way we kill wolves. For food. They feed on the humans they capture.”

  “Well then there’s no problem.” I grinned back at her. “Because I’m not human.”

  And the words reminded me of my last meeting with the men in white coats.

  “You forget,” said Alderson, “that you’re not human.” It was late in the war, just before we were to make a new push for Pavlodar, our second advance, so by then he had been in long enough to become tired. Alderson lit a cigarette and blew the smoke upward. “You’re artificial.”

  He handed me a towel. I had just come off the line, where a Marine had poked his head out of the topside observation post, just to get a breath of fresh air. I had reached up to pull him down when it happened. A grenade blew off half his head, sending a spray of bone and tissue over my unhelmeted face, and there had been no time to clean off because a moment later came the order to report to the rear for another interview.

  I wiped the blood from my face and tossed the towel back. “I haven’t forgotten, Alderson. I’m proud of it. We are better than you.”

  “Your hands,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re shaking. Badly. And you’re drawing down your tranq tab inventory at an alarming rate.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. It was true. “What do you want to know, Alderson?”

  “Tell me everything. Or nothing. It doesn’t matter anymore, Catherine, this will be our last interview because once the spoiling gets this advanced, we’re not allowed to speak to you anymore—for our own safety. I asked for you to come back here so I could say good-bye. And to say I’m sorry.”

  His apology stunned me. At first I didn’t know what to say, thought it was another of his tricks. “There is no entry into His kingdom for you, Alderson. It’s too late to change. You can apologize all you want but a coward’s fate is in hell.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “with Lucifer,” and then laughed. He acted strangely. This wasn’t the arrogant Alderson of a year or even a month ago; this was an Alderson who smoked, breaking the rules, and who stared at me with no fear and with half-lidded and lined eyes as if he had seen something that aged him prematurely. “You have no idea how right you are. If you knew what the Russians and Chinese are working on now, scientists like me, and the horrors they’ve created…”

  “You should just die,” I said, not wanting to hear him finish. “And do you really want to apologize? Ask the guards to leave for one minute. Just for ten seconds to see if you have the courage to stay with me alone, to see if you could survive.”

  Alderson nodded, stubbed out his cigarette, and lit another one immediately. I noticed it then: his hands shook, too.

  “You’re perfect, Catherine. The most perfect unit I’ve ever met. So I’m assuming that the spoiling has begun? Are you having any hallucinations?”

  I didn’t say anything at first, but then nodded. “Is that what we’re here for today? So you can pick at my dreams the way Kazakh women pick at the dead, looking for anything valuable, anything that might have been left behind?”

  “That, and to tell you something else. You are the most amazing war machine, the most complex ever created and a perfect biological weapon, and I have no problem with being a part of this because we did something good, nothing to insult God. But that’s just the problem: biology and God. Your genes are essentially human. So instincts will kick in, telling you that you need to look for something else beside war and find a peaceful place in the world. I feel sorry for you. Because there is no place for you in this world.”

  He stood and left through the door at the back of the room, while the four guards motioned for me to leave in the other direction, and I headed back to the tunnels. My head felt light. Not a good kind of light-headed feeling, but the kind in which you sense that you’ve just stepped into an alternate reality, where the first question you ask is, did I really just experience that? Megan noticed something was wrong as soon as I got back and asked if I was all right. I told her what happened.

  “They pay attention to you,” she said. “Even when I or the others go for interviews they ask about you, not me or the other girls. They all want to know about Little Murderer.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “It should. It should make you feel like your life has a greater purpose, and like maybe Alderson was just delivering God’s message.”

  “God’s message to me,” said Margaret, “was that I and my sisters were a joke.”

  I was still on the gantry, holding on to the railing, and I pulled off my helmet and shook my head, trying to clear it of the last remnants of memories, of Alderson. Margaret had returned and was talking to Yoon-sung. The cranes finished loading one of the cars below us and we listened as hydraulic pistons hissed, lifting the huge car sides with a whine until they slammed closed to create a sleek container, its seams almost invisible from our vantage. The train cars extended almost a kilometer in either direction and I counted the remaining empty ones, losing interest before I finished.

  “Yoon-sung,” I asked, “where are our scout vehicles?”

  She shouldered her Maxwell. “At the front of the train. Come, I’ll show you. We can justify leaving our post by calling it a patrol.”

  We moved off the gantry and through the running groups of Koreans; I saw their faces, former factory workers who had once been among the trusted now humiliated and forced into labor units because they had supported General Kim. Some of them cried as they worked. Yoon-sung said things to them, and without seeing her face, I tried imagining the feeling of hatred that must have showed but I couldn’t, almost stopping in my tracks with the realization that I still couldn’t recall my own hatred. It had vanished. We sauntered through slush and mud along the sides
of the tracks and neither Margaret nor Yoon-sung knew the numbness I felt, the shock of having lost something that had been so long a comfort, and which I sensed was gone forever. It felt like losing a friend. But by the time we arrived at the train’s diesel engines my smile had returned, and my feet felt light despite the caked mud; the hatred that had been so heavy, an infinite weight, no longer resided in my chest. No more fear. No hatred. Their absence made everything warp in my mind, yielding a new point of view with which I had yet to become accustomed, and one for which I occasionally doubted what I knew to be the real explanation—the one given to me by Heather. All I did was kill a man, I thought, and in doing so overcame an obstacle, moved closer to His side?

  Yoon-sung showed us the twenty scout cars. They were small, and had six large off-road wheels that just cleared the railroad ties so that steel train-wheels could ride the tracks. A turret with an automatic grenade launcher, coaxial Maxwell autocannon, and thick ceramic plates covering the cars from front to back completed the vehicles, made them lethal to anything less armored.

  “The cars ride the rails unless we need to leave the tracks,” Yoon-sung explained. “And then we can lower the wheels, so they lift the cars and allow us to go off-road. Behind the train will travel similar vehicles, but outfitted with bulldozer blades and cranes for making repairs.”

  “How do we find mines?” I asked.

  She pointed to the front-most scout cars. “Those have detection equipment. We’ll move slowly, about twenty kilometers per hour, so slowly that the old ones named these trips ‘the Arduous March.’ Any faster than that and our detection equipment is useless. If we lose the detection cars…” But she didn’t need to finish.

  The eagerness to go south had left, maybe with my hatred. But I didn’t want to stay either. Instead I stared at the cars with satisfaction, a kind of serenity born of knowing that soon we would have new experiences to add to our old—whatever those experiences were. Everything was out of my hands. That was the explanation, I realized, why things had changed with Kim’s death. I hadn’t wanted to kill him but he had needed to die because it was all part of a greater plan and my actions would have been carried out regardless, by Na-yung or one of the others, and it had been like breaking through a glass wall for me. Killing was no longer to be enjoyed. But nor would I hesitate to do it, or fear that my actions could result in death for anyone, because finally, for the first time, I saw the path and was on it. People would die, some at my hands, but there was no more honor in it.