Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  “I know that.”

  “Good. Now, MilSim’s a game. It’s a good game — it hits all the buttons for making me feel like I’m living how I got built to, meeting challenges without hurting anybody, positive usage of aggression, teamwork, all that bullshit. I’m happy that it’s my life’s work right now.” She shrugged her shoulder, breaking eye contact. “Much as I love it, it’s only a game.”

  He watched her looking away, looking out the window, looking everywhere but at his face. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t blame you if a game isn’t enough.”

  “It’s not that the game isn’t enough,” Edane muttered. “It’s been good to me — it’s kept me going, my arm’s almost normal these days. I want to get that pro spot, I do, it’s just…”

  He frowned, palming at his face. As he pushed at his eyes, a stark sky-blue popped up in the colors behind his eyelids, unbidden.

  “Unfinished business.” Marianna clicked her jaw again. “You went to Tajikistan, expecting I don’t know what, but you got your ass blown up. I thought that was what was bugging you, that you’d been fucked up, that you couldn’t hold a rifle straight—”

  “I can do that now,” he interrupted. “I can use solid core unguided, switch off the scope and make a kill at a mile if I have to.”

  “I know.” She lifted her hand for him to stop, nodding. “I know. But that’s not what’s been eating you up, is it?”

  “Janine… We talk sometimes, and—”

  “We’ll get to that. But you didn’t leave just your arm in Tajikistan, did you?” She stared at him. “Why’d you go in the first place, kid?”

  Edane hunched in on himself, head bowed, shoulders forward. He’d spent so long arguing with his mothers, they’d tried to talk him out of it, get him back into school. He’d been twenty-one, twenty when he’d made the decision. He covered his face again. “Fuck,” he breathed.

  “They took you out on your back, but you went in there on your feet. You get me?” she slapped him, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make him look at her. “You were supposed to walk out of that country on your feet. That’s what you expected going in, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded, lamely.

  Marianna shook her head. “I don’t think you’re going to shake this until you’ve come back on your own terms, kid. When you choose to come back to civilization — not when you get dragged back.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You listen to me on this. I’ve been there.”

  “What about the team?”

  She exploded in laughter. “Kid, kid. Jesus fuck, kid. Have you not seen what the league is doing to us?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “They’re running us out as fast as they fucking can. Oh, we’re going to hold onto that nine-spot. Maybe if you and Eissen stuck around we could claw ourselves up to seventh, and we’ll probably hold our ground if we bring in a couple of substitutes… but there ain’t gonna be a team by the time you get back.” She snorted. “Hallman’s nice to us, but they ain’t stupid. No professional league for us to parade their gear in, no sponsorship.”

  Edane nodded, staring down at the van’s floor, ruined by booted feet and mud and simple brutal use. He scratched at his right wrist, fingertips questing through his fur, even if it wasn’t his wrist, really.

  “I’ve been called a lot of things in my life,” Marianna went on. “Bitch is the best of them. But doping? Cheater? Never, and you’ve seen how I pop the pills.” She shook her head slightly. It was true — Marianna took somewhere between eight and twelve of them every four hours, like clockwork. No timer, no alarm, but she always had them within a couple minutes of the hour. That’s what screwed up genes did for you — taught you how to take metabolic drugs on time so you could keep living. “Anyway. If this fight in Azerbaijan lasts past the end of the season, and they put their little get-out-of-dog-free clause into the league’s rulebook? You’ll probably see the rest of us out there. So don’t worry about leaving us behind, kid.”

  He hesitated. “Marianna?”

  “Yes, kid?”

  “How much more life experience than me do you have?”

  “Aww shit.” She slumped back, propping her head up on her fist. “Your girl.”

  He dipped his face in a brief, slight nod.

  “How long have you been broken up with her?”

  “Two and—”

  “No!” She stopped him, one finger up, and dragged out her phone. A moment, two, as she clicked through to his playing stats. “It happened just before match two in February. Right?”

  “Sounds right,” he sighed.

  “For what it’s worth, as your team leader, I think you need to straighten that shit out. Either get over it or get back together — your reaction times have been middling. Distracted…” Marianna grimaced, waggling her head noncommittally. “You’ve always been a little distracted, but it’s been worse lately.”

  “I don’t know what to do about her,” he murmured. “If I go to Azerbaijan…”

  Marianna watched him awhile, her voice somewhat soft. “If you go to Azerbaijan, then what?”

  “I don’t know.” Edane shook his head. “It was all going so great with her, for a year.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sex problems.”

  Marianna recoiled away, disgust pulling at her features. “Oh don’t give me that shit, kid.”

  “She wants it, and I don’t.” He waved his hands helplessly. “I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do.”

  “You’re supposed to stick it in her, champ.” Marianna bit back a laugh with a coughing snort. “Jesus, kid. Relationship advice, okay, maybe I can help you out, but sex advice? All I have to do is like a guy enough to put up with laying on my back for fifteen minutes at a time without decking him.” She squinted at him. “The hell does she want sex out of you for, anyway? There’s better fun.”

  “She thinks it is fun.” Edane kept his gaze slanted out the window, unfamiliar embarrassment heating his face. “She has all these crazy ideas about it — wants me to call her pretty, like I understand what that means.”

  “Ha! She wants you calling her pretty? Unless she’s got a face like a Kellinger-Dewy twenty-three cal, that girl’s fucked… Well, she ain’t, but you know what I mean.”

  “I like her,” he murmured. “I like her and I don’t know what to do, Marianna. I’ve never liked anyone.”

  “You like those parents of yours — the mothers.”

  “Not like this. Not this much. Putting up with the sex is worth it, but. But she needs me to want it too, and we can’t talk about it without hurting her ‘cuz she wants me to want it so badly.” Edane ground his fingers against one another. “I liked living with her. It was like we fit together,” he concluded, fingertips stacked into each other.

  Marianna grimaced. “I’ve had that. Guys taking it personal that I don’t enjoy having them tire themselves out on me. Then they get all pissy and want to fuck someone else, like I care.” She exposed her teeth. A thin, sharp white line. “Now when a guy — or a gal, I guess — tells you he just wants to be friends, if he can live up to that? That’s a fucking test of character.”

  Edane flicked his ears back and forth, staring at his laced fingers.

  Marianna watched him evenly, cheek against her palm. “You want encouraging advice or advice that helps you walk away?”

  “You’re the one with life experience.”

  “You’re the one with your artificial balls on the chopping block.”

  Her gaze was cold, when he lifted his eyes to meet it. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to, but I want to try and fix it with her,” Edane said.

  She clicked her jaw side to side, gazed out of the window at the streets outside. “I had a good thing, like your thing with your girl, once.” She lifted up her finger, counting off the single instance. Her hand drifted to cover the tip of her muzzle, as if she’d said too much. “Just once, you underst
and,” she added. “It made stupid sentimental shit fun. The sex was… enhh, but the look on his face afterward made me happy.”

  She tapped the end of her nose, thoughtfully. “A lot about it made me happy,” she concluded. “Not a better kind of happy than killing, or a worse kind, just. Different… A way I ain’t had again, so far.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Marianna glared at him. “It got to let’s just be friends, and I didn’t call him as much as I should’ve. I went away to my little la guerra, then came back from the jungle to find out he had a new friend, a girl-friend, and I couldn’t be the kind of friend I’d been with him without ruining that for him.” She lifted her shoulder in an awkward shrug, and resumed watching the streets outside. “Now we’re not so close, it’s six years later, and I still miss him.”

  Edane looked away. Something in her expression was too private for his eyes.

  “It’s not so bad, kid. Life sucks sometimes, and it was fun to have while it lasted.” She shrank down in her seat and folded her arms. “But for what it’s worth, here’s what life experience says — you do what I didn’t, and you call her before you pack for your suicide run. Just in case you can fix it. You will blame the fuck out of yourself if you don’t. You hear me?”

  “Sir, yes sir,” Edane said. “I hear you.”

  *

  “It’s not a good time, Sweetie…”

  “Please, Janine. It hasn’t been a good time since I walked out. I want to talk to you.”

  In the privacy of what used to be his bedroom, pacing the familiar floor, he felt slightly more able to talk. Maybe it was being in friendly territory, visiting his mothers, maybe it was more than that.

  Janine snuffled at the phone. A wet sound, displeased — not in tears, but miserable. “You’re just gonna leave, Edane. That’s what you’re telling me, that you’re leaving for this Azerbaijan place.”

  “I don’t want to leave without talking to you first.”

  She made a petulant noise. “Why couldn’t you have called me to talk last week, huh? Or the week before?”

  “It’s the middle of the MilSim season and, and I was afraid to talk to you and I figured it could wait. Please? I don’t have much time.”

  “Fine. Where do you want to meet, my place?”

  “I’m visiting with my mothers before I go, but I’ll meet you wherever you want.”

  The connection was quiet a moment, two. Muted again, but she hadn’t been crying, her voice was too level, restrained — more likely she’d been swearing. “I’ll come meet you there. But you come down to the street to meet me, okay? Alone. I’m not doing this in front of your moms.”

  He smiled, just slightly. Janine could call them that, he couldn’t. “Okay. Thanks Janine.”

  “I’ll… I’ll see you in a bit,” she muttered, and closed the line.

  Edane turned his phone over, watching her messenger icon blink from ‘on call’ to ‘busy’. He folded the phone up and stepped out of his room, careful not to bang his knee into his mothers’ bicycles, and padded down the short hall to their bedroom.

  Cathy was laying in the dim light, back propped up with the bed’s pillows, Beth laying back against her belly, a pad in each hand. Photos on each.

  “Oh, look at this one,” Beth murmured, passing one of the pads up to Cathy.

  Cathy idly scratched Beth’s scalp with one hand, took the pad with the other. “Ohhh,” she breathed. “He was so little, then.”

  Edane leaned back, then stepped forward again. Louder, so they could hear. They always said he moved too quietly.

  Cathy looked up with a blink, smiling, holding out her arms. “Come here, Daney.”

  “Why’d you have to grow so big, baby?” Beth shuffled to one side, making space for him, hugging him tight as he sat down between them. “You were so little, and then you were just the right size, and in a heartbeat you were all grown up.”

  He accepted the pad from Cathy, looked down at a picture of himself. Hard to judge age, but he remembered the shirt. He’d have been thirteen, maybe fourteen. Not very long before he had new testicles implanted, giving him the right hormones to develop — he’d been castrated at decanting.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to grow big. I’ll do better next time.”

  Beth laughed, so did Cathy, until even Edane smiled a little.

  “And you were always so polite. Always ‘I’ll do better next time.’ Where’d you pick that up? You didn’t do that right after the Emancipation, it wasn’t the barracks, was it?”

  He shook his head. “Grandpa Jeff. I asked him what I was supposed to do if I was unable to perform well for you, one time you were both at work and he was minding me. I figured he was going to tell me to… I don’t know. Go do push-ups or something, but he said I should apologize and try to do better, so…”

  Cathy sat up. Couldn’t reach his head, to pull him down and comfort him, but she held him too. Her arms didn’t wrap around him as tightly, she couldn’t reach far enough around him to hold her own elbows anymore. “Dad was so fond of you, Edane. And proud of you too. I’m so glad you got to spend time with him.”

  Edane thumbed at the pad until he found one of the birthday pictures, the old man — he’d had Cathy when he’d been in his fifties, youngest daughter with his second wife — holding up a glass of one of the expensive kinds of alcohol he’d liked. Smiling at the camera, Edane, a little younger, staring quizzically up from under his arm.

  Edane put the pad down, gently. “I liked Grandpa Jeff.”

  “We know, Daney.”

  “I don’t think Grandpa Jeff would’ve been happy that I went to Tajikistan, though,” he said, voice stretched. “Or that I’m going to Azerbaijan, or that I killed anybody.”

  Cathy frowned, a complicated expression. “Probably not,” she agreed. “But he’d be happy that you were trying to help people, both times.”

  Beth got up, bending down to kiss his cheek. “I’ll go make tea.” She smiled, and walked down the hall. It was funny, how much noise she made doing it, even though she was much smaller than Edane.

  Thinking about Grandpa Jeff was hard. But Edane made himself do it anyway. “He probably would’ve liked MilSim, though. He liked sports.”

  Cathy laughed. “Probably would have, if you could get him to stop watching tennis.”

  Edane nodded quietly, and picked the pad back up.

  It was filled with his life before Tajikistan. He searched back and forth, eventually found one solitary picture from after he came back — before the graft, but after he’d healed enough to be able to sit up on his own. He was up on a hospital bed, right side turned away from the camera, talking to Beth. He almost looked whole — the only reason he could tell his shoulder was missing was because of how the hospital gown sagged on his chest.

  “I’m sorry I went away,” he said, softly. “I’m sorry we fought — I should have listened.”

  Cathy just smiled at him, softly. “We should have listened, Daney.”

  They joined Beth in the kitchen, and Edane just drank hot water instead of tea. When Janine arrived, calling him, his mothers were softly turning in each other’s arms, bare feet skimming over the tiles, softly humming the music together as they danced.

  *

  Janine smelled funny. Not humorous, but strange. He didn’t understand why she smelled like that. Not right away — why would anyone smell like other people? But then he remembered, sex. And she looked miserable, hair tied back loosely instead of brushed, her fur standing up all over her face like she’d just washed it, not shampooed it.

  At least, Edane thought, he hadn’t been stupid enough to ask her why she smelled like that.

  “I’m such an idiot,” she muttered.

  He stepped along beside her, wandering along the square, right-angled pathways that gradually cut down underground to the little row of night time cafes from his mothers’ apartment. “You’re not stupid.”

  “Yeah I am. Goddammit, Sw
eetie.” She shook her head. “We should have talked before — I saw that thing on the news. God, it’s so horrible.”

  Edane nodded gently. “They want me to go and, uhm. Fight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tonight,” he clarified. “So I can be deployed before local sunset there, tomorrow.”

  “Fuck,” she breathed, shuddering next to him.

  “I wanted to talk to you, first.”

  She stopped in her tracks, abruptly enough he had to turn back to face her. Janine held up her hands. “Edane. Before this conversation goes any further, I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’ve been sleeping with other men. In fact I just got out of a hook-up to come and see you, okay?” She looked at him as if this meant something. “You understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “I fucked other men, Edane.”

  “Okay.”

  “Doesn’t that matter to you?” she asked, voice high pitched, almost squeaky.

  Edane carefully tilted his ears forward, to be attentive. to let her know he was listening. “Uh.”

  “Oh God. I was hoping you’d forgive me,” she went on. “I’m sorry, Sweetie. It was just easier for me than being alone, y’know? It’s just, it’s just casual stuff, it doesn’t mean anything…”

  He did the Cathy and Beth thing. Held her, his arms gentle on her back. Waited until she paused for breath, “Can you explain this to me?”

  “What?” She looked up, eyes damp.

  “I’m not mad or anything but, I just don’t understand. Is you having sex with other people something that’s supposed to make me unhappy?”

  “Well, yeah. Unless you don’t want to get back together.”

  He frowned, ears splayed. “Oh.” Cleared his throat. “Well I want to get back together with you, but I don’t understand why I’d be sad if you had sex with other people.”

  “Edane, sex is special, it’s important to people, it’s—”

  She blinked wetly up at him, and he shrugged, a little helplessly.