Subterrene War 02: Exogene

by T. C. McCarthy

  She stopped there, letting the car idle. “I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll have to use the scout car waste system, and dump our suits through their ports. We won’t be able to leave the car from now on.” Margaret pointed at the rad-indicator. Unlike our experience in Russia, the light stayed on, and the reading had increased slightly, showing no signs of abating.

  I scanned the northern view to check for signs of the Chinese, but couldn’t see anything of the bridge or the far side of the river. “I’ve spent time like this before. It’s no worse than the tunnels. But we should take the time now to desuit and at least enjoy the freedom of the compartment, because as soon as one of us steps from the car, we’ll track the contamination inside; I can no longer fight infections like you.”

  Margaret pulled off her helmet and laughed while she wiped sweat from her face. “I never made it to the tunnels, Catherine. They captured our train before we even had a chance to go underground.”

  “Don’t think about that, Margaret. You have different problems today.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how do we deal with getting outside and refueling when we need to, without getting too high a dose.”

  Margaret squinted and thought for a second. “How was Yoon-sung going to do it?”

  “I killed her before I thought to ask the question.” She grinned at me and I shook my head. “What, you could have done better?”

  “No!” Margaret insisted, holding her hands up. “No, I would have gotten us killed or captured for use in Chinese experiments. I’m smiling because I thought it would have been nice to have her here—to make that little human bitch fill our tanks for us.”

  The night had begun to fall and we drove south for another several kilometers along a fractured road, its surface covered with moss where the sun had hit it, and ice where the road had remained shadowed by mountains. Margaret pulled off onto the shoulder. We needed rest; although our rear camera was gone, I judged it safe enough to sleep in shifts because otherwise we might risk making a mistake out of exhaustion and I suspected we’d need all our wits to make it through this: the last leg of our flight.

  TEN

  Chollima Moments

  And you will find another sign, seven last plagues for those who deny Him, and in them will be filled up the wrath of God.

  MODERN COMBAT MANUAL REVELATIONS 15

  The view-screen defined my world’s borders. Outside, spring rains fell, washing the car with its heavy downpour and sending drops of water to form at the top of the camera that hung there for an eternity, until they dripped and the next one formed, and if you looked hard enough you became convinced that just out of range—behind the gray haze of water—an army of shadows darted back and forth. It was morning when the motion sensors tripped. I shook Margaret awake, and she fell trying to scramble over her armor into the driver’s seat before holding her shaking finger over the starter button.

  A fox came into view. It sniffed the air and crossed the road with a rat in its mouth, disappearing into the brush on the other side, and I wanted to jump from the car to chase after it. I had never seen a fox. It had taken a few seconds for me to even remember the animal’s name, and the image stayed with me long after the fox had left, burned into my retinas as something spectacular—worth remembering.

  Margaret stared at me. “Well?” she asked.

  “It was a fox. The most incredible animal you’ve ever seen.”

  “Oh.” She relaxed, leaning back into the seat and wiping her eyes from exhaustion. “Next time pipe it in; I want to see one too.”

  The rain continued, pattering on the car and making me sleepy as we sat, even though the trip called out, whispering that it was time to go and that this was no place to sit because we were still close to the Russian border, and what if the Chinese decided to chase us after all? But something kept me from moving. I didn’t want to face the road and its uncertainty, and here was a place that promised something that had been so rare throughout the course of my life: quiet. The scout car became a cocoon, closing us off from the world and keeping us safe from things seen and unseen, the gentle breeze from intake blowers doing its job, making the car smell so clean. We had begun to stink. The pair of us had been confined to the car for four days, and soon we’d be locked within suits, which offered another kind of torture, one that I hadn’t thought of until seeing the fox. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me: we’d never really experience North Korea at all. Always there would be a buffer, something in between us and it—view-screens or helmet faceplates—and through the screen, I’d caught a glimpse of its mountains, their sides almost vertical and covered with varying shades of green to rub it in; we’d get to see, but never touch. The rain was a sort of blessing. It hid much of the view and prevented for the time being, a full image of what we would soon describe as one of the most beautiful countries we’d yet experienced. After waiting to make sure nothing else came within range of our cameras, I decided it wasn’t worth waiting here anymore, and motioned for Margaret to power up. A few seconds later the car started rolling.

  “How are we going to get through the demilitarized zone?” Margaret asked.

  I shrugged, and picked at my food: a can of mushrooms, packed at Chegdomyn’s underground factories; soon, once we cracked the car’s seals to refuel, we’d be restricted to liquid rations—the thought made me nauseous. “I don’t know.”

  “They’ll be expecting us anyway. Maybe we can go through and tell the South Korean guards not to pay any attention to us, that the train will be along shortly.”

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  We drove in silence while Margaret concentrated on staying on the road; the rain and overgrowth made it a difficult task, and more than once I grabbed the turret ring to steady myself, sure we were about to slide into a ditch.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m just wondering about how we’ll get from Korea to Thailand. Where is the DMZ?”

  “Just north of Wonsan, if we stick to the east coast. On the west coast, it’s about thirty kilometers south of Seoul. I can drive it in two days, but I wouldn’t count on it being faster if the roads are this bad all the way. Why?”

  I sighed, and finished my meal. “We need money.”

  “For what?”

  “People need money, Margaret. We’ll be in South Korea, and it’s not like we can walk around in armor if we want to stay out of trouble, so we’ll need to buy or steal clothes and food. And if we’re going to Thailand, our best bet is to find a ship, for which we’ll also need money.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. We’ve never needed any before, Catherine; it’s strange to think that we’re so close now.”

  “Hold on a second. We’re headed for the main coastal road, right?” She nodded and I switched to map view, struggling to try and read as much Korean as I could before giving up. Margaret had to stop the car and help me, flicking on the large screen behind her and folding it down into a table so we could get the battlefield view.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “A gold mine.”

  Margaret laughed. “No, really. What?”

  “I’m serious. Look for any gold mines, large enough to have a collocated refinery. North Korea was one of the few countries with plenty of shallow metallic mines before their war and we might find something since nobody was able to mine it after the war.”

  She typed on the touch screen until the view changed, symbols of picks and shovels appearing in tiny green icons, and then Margaret ran her finger down the road, tracing our path. Half way down the coast her finger stopped.

  “Here. Tanch’on. Just northwest of the main city, in the mountains, and it looks like the place wasn’t hit with nuclear weapons; but there are plenty of biological warning markers.”

  “How long before we can get there?” I asked.

  “Late in the morning of our second day.”

  I nod
ded to her, and she closed the screen, getting back into her seat. The car continued its bumpy ride southward, until Margaret made a sharp right, putting the ocean to our left, so close I wanted to get out of the hatch and feel spray on my face, the memory of Bandar still fresh. The sea had a way of washing everything off, I thought, maybe even radiation. Maybe dying slowly, burning inside and out, wouldn’t be so bad and maybe, even if it meant I’d be dead, it would be worth feeling the ocean once more. I knew without looking at the detectors that there was more than enough radiation to kill us, if not today, within a few weeks, because now all around us was nothing except blackened earth; the road had disappeared into the outskirts of a radioactive crater. And we were driving into the middle of it.

  “Catherine,” Margaret said, “I’m worried about whoever paid for information about you. About who they might be and where.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They weren’t at Tumangang, which leaves only two places they could be: at the Unified Korean border or anywhere in between it and us. All we can do is stay alert. And I suspect I know who it is.”

  Without a road, Margaret had to drive slowly, sometimes no more than five miles an hour, crawling over massive blocks of wreckage and trying to negotiate the loose dirt from years of mud and landslides that had dislodged off the mountains. In places we saw squares of concrete to mark where houses and buildings once stood—the only remaining indications that people once lived here.

  “What town was this?” I asked Margaret.

  “Unggi.”

  “Stop the car for a moment, I want to listen.”

  She stopped, and I donned my vision hood to hear whatever my microphone picked up, closing my eyes in the process. Surf. To our south, large waves pounded against a breakwater, the storm that had rained on us all night, bringing with it a massive swell, and over all of it I heard the rain and occasional gusts of wind. It was aural desolation. Nothing here sounded of men; a grin grew on my face, getting wider until it couldn’t grow anymore and until Margaret woke me from a trance.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It is nothing. No sign of man, other than what he has abandoned. If I were your generation, this is where I would stop, Margaret, this is where I would call home. Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?”

  “Sometimes you are strange, Catherine. Did losing Megan hurt you that badly?”

  The question stirred something in me, until a subtle sadness mixed with the joy of everything else and brought tears along with a chuckle. “Yes and no. I miss her and when I think of it—really stop and think, so that I remember her hair and her smell—then I get sad for what we could have had. But that’s not why I want to stay here, I was only half serious. It’s just that it’s ironic that the only places we ever call our own are ones that kill everything: the battlefield and this. An ex-battlefield, still undergoing its man-made spoiling. Let’s go.”

  It took an hour for her to move through Unggi and Sonbong, where we linked up with the railway, the one our train would have taken had those plans worked out. Before we got close to it, I noticed something and zoomed in. Every fifty meters lay a pile of armor, its green color long since bleached by what must have been years of rain and sun, so that now the piles were almost yellow, and here and there a bone lay exposed from where an animal had succeeded in breaking down ceramic to reach the suits’ occupants. We debated what it could have meant as Margaret drove. Eventually we realized that in the middle of all the destruction, someone had to have repaired the tracks. These were the ancestors of people like Yoon-sung and Na-yung, “volunteers” who had sacrificed their lives so their children could live among the trusted, so a train carrying boards and logs could make a journey, once or twice a year, to trade. I didn’t care that they were dead. But the idea of it confused both of us, and in the end neither Margaret nor I could make the calculus work. Nobody would volunteer for someone like Yoon-sung; these had to have been prisoners, like us.

  On the other side of Sonbong we entered Najin, and began to sense that the worst of the nuclear destruction was behind us. But we didn’t relax until the radiation detectors showed a steady decline. The city was nestled between two monstrous mountains, which rose on either side so they lent the place an appearance of having been placed in the arms of the earth, with a deep-water bay at its mouth. How could the North Koreans have wanted war? I wondered. The thought amazed me even as it made me shake my head, that anyone could have traded an existence like this for guaranteed destruction and exile, but I had stopped really caring about the reasons men had. There was too much to see, too much to understand to let such thoughts ruin a new experience. I was so absorbed with my view screens that the motion detector alarm almost went unnoticed.

  “Motion,” said Margaret.

  I nodded, already fingering the turret controls. “Zooming in.”

  The rain had stopped. A blinking icon on my view-screen marked a position far to the north and I magnified, scanning in either direction until I caught something. It was a flash of movement, a vehicle that sped northward on a narrow dirt track in the mountains, and which vanished, disappearing into the trees as soon as I blinked. I amplified the audio and caught the fading noise of some type of truck or car.

  “We’re not alone.”

  “What is it?” Margaret asked.

  “A vehicle, but it didn’t look Chinese or Russian. It actually looked like it was American.”

  “Should we go after it?”

  I shook my head. “No, we’ll keep our eyes open. Right now it’s more important for us to keep going and get to Tanch’on fast.”

  “We only have a quarter tank,” said Margaret, “we’ll have to stop and refuel soon.”

  She found the road again, south of Najin, and we sped up. I searched for the feeling of newness and wonder that I had had earlier; the sun finally broke free and the ocean crashed barely a meter to the left while seas of wildflowers and trees covered the hills and mountain slopes on our right, as if nature sent a message, see what I can do if you leave me alone for a while. But none of the feeling returned. Instead, my head ticked through the tactical concerns of being followed, and each time the road passed close to a cliff or a narrow point between hills and forest, I scanned for targets, waiting for the imminent ambush. It was training. The need overrode everything else, and I saw it in Margaret too while she kept her attention glued to the driving controls, calling out rad-detector readings even though I could see them myself, or announcing the remaining liters of fuel in our last tank. Finally, we had to stop. Margaret picked a spot in the open, with the railway and a wide lagoon to our right, the ocean and beach to our left; if anyone came, we’d see them long before they arrived.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, and we both suited up.

  Margaret ran the numbers through the tactical computer. “If you can do it in ten minutes, you’ll absorb about twenty thousand millirems—a four-year dose. That’s including the shielding limit of your armor.”

  “What if I take my helmet off?”

  “What?” Margaret stared at me, her helmet half on.

  I smiled. “I just want to feel the ocean. Look, you can see where the waves have washed over the beach and onto the road, spreading the sand in patterns. The ocean will take this road in a few years. And the rails. I just want to feel it for a few seconds.”

  Margaret shook her head. “Don’t do this, Catherine. Just put your helmet on.” She finished locking hers, and then helped with mine, making sure that she clicked it shut. “I can’t handle this entire trip by myself.”

  As soon as I threw the hatch, the warning lights and buzzing alarms started, an automated voice calling out in Korean, listing the number of invisible dangers that flooded into the compartment. I climbed out. As soon as I secured the hatch and stood, a strong wind buffeted my side and I stared out over the ocean, watching the sunlight blink against distant swells. I stayed there for a minute, ignoring Margaret’s pleas to start working. This meant something. God had never spoken to
me directly, but if you imagined his voice, this is what it would have been like, a visual language combined with the pounding surf and the wind whistling through gaps in my armor. I sighed and got to work. The fuel ports fought me and it took a few minutes to loosen the first one, finally angling the jerry-can upward and letting its entire contents slosh into the near-empty tank. It took eight cans to finish the first tank. By the time I finished the second, there was a vague sense that Margaret was screaming at me, yelling something over my ear-pieces, but none of it mattered, the job would be done when it was done. I used half our reserve to refuel. Only sixteen cans remained, strapped to the car’s side, and if we lost it or the diversion at Tanch’on took too much time, we might find ourselves walking before we reached the DMZ. I dropped back inside, locking the hatch behind me.

  “Why didn’t you answer?” asked Margaret. “I was shouting at you.”

  “For what?”

  “You took twenty minutes and absorbed more than forty-thousand millirems.”

  I sighed, the sound echoing inside my helmet, and the urge to take it off and slam its curved ceramic into the bulkhead over and over until the thing cracked almost won out. “I used to be afraid to put my helmet on,” I said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” asked Margaret.

  “Everything. It used to terrify me, so that by the time of my discharge I’d go into battle with only thermal block on my head—if Megan would permit it. I was sure the helmet would kill me. Now? Now I see a helmet for what it is: a coffin. It’s a thing often associated with death, but not its cause, a tool whose purpose is to block reality and erect a barrier between myself and God, another layer of control for the men who created us. Knowing this makes everything better, erases the terror. I still hate the helmet. But now it’s no longer something to fear.” I turned away from Margaret then and arranged myself in the turret seat, strapping in tightly before continuing. “Forty-thousand or forty-million, neither number matters. I will decide how much exposure I get, Margaret. Not some chart written by and for the nonbred. Now, let’s go. Coast when you can, do anything to conserve fuel and reduce consumption; there is barely enough alcohol to get us to Wonsan, and that’s without the detour at Tanch’on. And deactivate those fucking alarms, we know about the radiation and biological threats. We should be more concerned with the vehicle we saw.”