Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  “I can try and be unhappy about it if you want, Janine, but I’m not hurt or anything. I still love you like before.”

  She kept staring at him, and shook her head ever so slightly. “You are so different to me, Edane.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah. I figured telling you about this would make me feel like a slut or something, and I do, I guess but…”

  She hugged him, and he held her close, nose buried in her hair — even if it smelled funny.

  Janine sighed against him. “You don’t make me feel dirty,” she whispered. “Everyone else makes me feel dirty, when shit like this happens.”

  “Could take a shower,” he offered, stroking her hair.

  She smiled, just a little. “You know I don’t mean it like that.”

  “Just trying to make you laugh.”

  She snorted, which was almost a laugh. “Am I forgiven?”

  “Yeah, if you need to be.”

  “Okay.” She nodded gently against his chest.

  “You’re important to me,” he said. “Real, real important to me.”

  “You’re important to me, too.”

  “Is it okay if I kiss your hair?”

  “Yeah.” She held still.

  He did, and they went down to find somewhere to eat. Eventually settled in at an automat diner, her drinking a coffee, him the same, just to fit in with her.

  They talked about what happened. The sex thing. The not living together thing. About the ways it hurt her, and, with Janine being patient as he figured it out for the first time by saying it all aloud, how it hurt him. He wasn’t used to being hurt like that. In ways people couldn’t treat with coagulants.

  He told her about how the rest of the season had been going — that Marianna had said some of his stats and scores were a little down, which made Janine smile. It took him awhile to understand why she’d be happy about his performance taking a hit, instead of being sad he wasn’t doing well. She told him a bit about the other guys she’d been with. No real details, but Janine mainly told him about how the one made her feel how she wanted to feel — pretty — right up until she went home, alone, and then she felt very not pretty. And the other one didn’t make her feel pretty, but did get her off — Edane asked her if there was a trick to doing that, because he was never sure if he was doing that part of sex right even after doing it on and off for a year, and she spluttered tiny giggles into her coffee.

  “No, Edane,” she said, dabbing up the spilled coffee with a napkin. “There’s no real trick but, God. I don’t know. There’s stuff you could do, we could talk about that, but. Not in public.”

  “Okay.” Edane shrugged. “It’s one of those things I kept wanting to ask about, but. It didn’t feel good to ask.”

  She looked at him over her coffee. “I can see that, Sweetie. I put a lot of demands on you and never really gave you time to catch up.”

  He nodded, a little.

  Janine took a sip, shoulders shrinking together. “I read the scoring rules for MilSim,” she said. “Watched one of your matches — I kind of understood what the commentators were talking about.”

  “Which one?”

  “A month ago? A Saturday, you had a…” She put the cup down, and drew rectangles with her hands. “Big thing. Big gun.”

  “The LAMW?” He said it slowly for her — Lamm-whuh.

  “No, you always have that one. It was, uhm. A gazebo? A shed, it was definitely a shed!”

  “An AT-missile launcher, with a SHED-WAP. It’s a kind of warhead for missiles. A dual warhead, with armor piercing and a soft explosive.” He nodded. “I remember that game — I picked it up off one of the friendly teams.”

  “Yeah, that.” She nodded, looking away, embarrassed. “Sorry, I don’t like looking ignorant — anyway, you did so great. It was impressive, I had you on while I was cleaning the apartment. Saw you blow up the thing on replay. You did good.”

  He smiled a little. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I don’t think you’re ignorant because you don’t understand this stuff, Janine. I think you’re smart. You understand everything I don’t.”

  She smiled back, just a little. “I know.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I like that feeling. It’s just that I’ve never had anything in my life I couldn’t pick up and understand like that,” she said, clicking her fingers. “I didn’t like struggling in front of you. I still don’t.”

  “It actually made me feel a little better,” Edane said. “Like I wasn’t the only one struggling, for a change.”

  “You’re stronger than me.” She picked up her coffee, looking at him fondly over it.

  “Only physically.” He leaned against the table, staring down at his own cup. “I didn’t realize the feeling pretty thing was hurting you so much. And for a year?”

  “Not all of the year,” she said. “Just some of it — some of the nights, really. I liked all the days.”

  “The days were pretty good,” he said, nodding.

  She hesitated. “Remember what you said, about bravery and pain?”

  “Yeah? Pain is my friend?”

  “And you can’t be brave and think pain’s the worst thing there is? Well. Wouldn’t we be better off not being in pain? Better off being together, if that’s what we both want?”

  “Maybe.” He bowed his head. “Probably. If I move back in, does the anniversary counter start over, or do we have the first one after I’m with you for a week?”

  She laughed, and they talked about that for a bit. Calendars and anniversaries and things he didn’t understand, but she did. About moving in together — she didn’t want him to, not yet, but said it might be okay after they’d talked a little more, figured some things out. Given her time to decide what she wanted to do about the other men she was sleeping with. But, of course, he couldn’t move in with her. Not then.

  “If I’m going to Azerbaijan, I have to leave for the airport by midnight.”

  Janine lifted her watch, then stared into her coffee, looking for answers there. “You’ll have to leave soon, then.”

  “Yeah. And I need to go back up and say bye to my mothers.”

  She stirred what was left of the coffee with her spoon, dumping in a packet of sugar. “Would you stay if I asked you to?”

  “Yes.”

  The clinking of metal in ceramic stopped cold. When he looked up, she was staring at him like she’d never seen him before.

  “What?” Edane asked.

  She let the spoon rest. “I thought you were just. Just going, and this was making things were okay before you left.”

  “Kind of is.”

  “I didn’t expect you to say you’d stay if I asked you to. When you called, I thought you were leaving to get away from me, Sweetie.”

  Edane shook his head. “No. It’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “The sky was blue.”

  She stared at him for a moment, searchingly. Then Janine somehow clicked, straightening up. “When you got hurt? In the marketplace? Tous?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think you’d remember me telling you.”

  “It was important to you, of course I remember. It was… last year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Going over there, to fight. It’s important to you, isn’t it?” She kept staring at Edane, until he looked away.

  “It is,” Edane said.

  Janine stirred the sugar into her coffee, staring at the spiraling liquid. “Tell me.”

  He told her. About the sky being blue, and the black smoke. About choking dust in his mouth, and pieces of little boys on the ground — Elavarasa nearly dying on the street, Thorne giving Edane advice and telling jokes. He told her about what it was like holding a LAMW, both as a child in the barracks and now. He told her about the Muslims who hated him because he was a dog, and how much he’d appreciated the few who didn’t. They ordered another coffee for her, and he stumbled over what it meant to kill someone. The differen
ce between watching someone die, and coming to the conclusion that someone had to be killed because otherwise they’d hurt other people. The feeling he had when it happened — like he’d won, like he was important, a fulcrum that the world turned on because he’d stopped the person who’d been trying to kill him — or the civilians — from achieving their goal, and killed them instead. The sick war in his own head about what that meant, if it was moral to kill.

  He told her what Marianna said.

  “I walked into Tajikistan whole. I chose to go there, Janine. But I didn’t choose to come back.”

  Tears glinted in her green eyes, her coffee held to her mouth. Staring at him.

  Janine sipped from the cup, and set it down. Gently put her hand on his, in a way that was warm, but he didn’t understand. “You need to go, Edane. And if you choose to come back — I’ll be here for you.”

  He set his hand on hers, and he didn’t understand the warmth behind his chest. “I’ll come back,” he said. “If only to visit, I’ll always come back.”

  III: Lost.

  ::/ Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

  ::/ March, 2104.

  ::/ Edane Estian.

  The warning lights on the perimeter fence flashed a dull pink, rain coming down in big drops that thudded into Tajikistan’s dry earth and were swallowed up immediately.

  Contaminated.

  The rainwater dripping off the rim of Edane’s wet weather cover — an oval dish of plastic, like one of the Chinese refugee traditional hats, strapped over his helmet — was theoretically awash with chemical and biological contaminants left over from the Eurasian war. Maybe one raindrop in a thousand was laced with one of those tiny killer spores, or had caught up a dust particle laced with the crop-killing caustics that got swept off the dustbowl and built up in cracks in the ground and stagnant pools over decades until it reduced fish in untended garden ponds to a thin layer of oozing scum on the surface.

  Edane eyed the rivulets of water pouring off his cover, too fast to count. One drop in a thousand was enough.

  Edane didn’t like the rain, here. Apparently the rain had been like this all over the world for a few years, just after the Eurasian War, when the out of control biowarfare agents got into the water cycle and all the wars everywhere petered out as people turned their time and attention to surviving, instead of killing each other. Here, in Tajikistan, with the dead flats of Mongolia somewhere over the mountains to the east, there were contamination warnings every few weeks.

  It’d be nice when the clouds went away again. Left the skies clear.

  Even if Thorne and the rest of his teammates working for HPC international were fully vaccinated, they didn’t take chances with the rain. They trudged back in from patrol, coming in through the north end of the highway checkpoint that marked the border between the mountains and the city of Dushanbe, crossing the line in the sand between quarantine and vaccination, between trusted local civilians and the unknown rural population.

  The HPC international team left their armored personnel carriers parked five hundred meters up the highway, in the fenced off inspection area where the vehicles would be washed clean with bleach after the rain stopped. Thorne and the other European private military contractors bounced along the highway in their rain-slicks, wearing their ricepicker tops — what they called the conical version of what Edane was wearing — with the brims bent down on the sides, sluicing water past their shoulders. They moved heads down and hunched forward.

  Edane had their personal IFFs up, the system in his goggles pinging them as he glanced over each. He handed his brother Sokolai the volatiles sniffer — theoretically to be used on pedestrians walking in and out of Dushanbe, but there would be none today — and jogged out to meet the old man.

  Edane’s tail was bound up in waterproof tape, but even waterproof it got cold when he leaned forward and the water ran off it, though the cold wasn’t as bad this month. It was mad, the safety regs here, with rain. Especially when Edane watched the civilians in it, letting it get on their bare skin — the rurals drinking it, as he’d seen out in the hinterland on patrol, thinking fresh rainwater to be safer than the standing barrels they watered cattle with.

  Thorne lifted his hand as Edane got closer. “You should see what we found,” he croaked from beneath the brim of his ricepicker, face wrapped in a filter mask, goggles up on his forehead. The corners of his eyes crinkled, partly from age, partly because he might have been smiling. “Shaw, pass up our prize trophy.”

  Shaw, a much younger soldier, gestured for his squadmate Ellings to turn around. He plucked an object from the strapping of her backpack, and brought it up, clasped in thick weatherproof gloves.

  A pinched, dirty silver cylinder. About the length of Edane’s arm. Heavy. A mortar bomb, unfired, propellant charge locked in under its tailfins, ablative shielding untouched by anti-ordnance lasers and covering the warts of its submunitions like a silver skin. Edane didn’t know the exact make, but he recognized the arming pin, still in, and the electrical firing socket, still covered with its port protector.

  “Just like the dissidents have been throwing into the city every other night,” Thorne said, proudly. “Pulled it out of a cache we found and blew the rest — this one’s our souvenir. Already cooked it,” by which he meant passed it under radio waves intense enough to burn out every scrap of circuitry in the device, “but I think we’ll ask the armorer to drill out the explosives and leave it inert before we take it home, just to be on the safe side.”

  Edane took the bomb, turning it over in his hands while he walked in with them. He’d never seen one before — only heard the rattle of fragments and submunitions bouncing off buildings, the distant boom of them airbursting at night. “This isn’t an autoloader bomb,” he said, checking again for clamping points. “This is for hand-loading. The dissidents aren’t using automatic mortars?”

  “No, son, no.” Thorne shook his head emphatically. “It’s tubes in the hillsides. Not even real mortars — just some half-buried piping angled at the city, and a phone cabled into the bomb. Bloody impossible to find once it’s in, and they just telephone up with some coordinates, and the fin guidance does the rest.”

  Edane didn’t know whether or not he liked the mortar bomb. Automatic installations were one thing, with a gimballed turret and autoloader — an actual weapon. Weapons could be misused, but they were supposed to be for fighting with. Buried mortars in the mountains, aimed so you could only hit Dushanbe, all you could do with that was try and blow up civilians. This was something different to a weapon of war. Something that felt wrong, just holding it.

  He gave back the bomb, but helped when Shaw struggled to put it back on Ellings’s backpack, and walked Thorne and the rest through the wire cage of the checkpoints.

  “You going to put it in your house?” Edane asked. “For your grandchildren to look at?”

  Thorne shook his head a little. “No. Down at the Cockerel and Hound, I think. It’d look fine on the wall, wouldn’t it Shaw?”

  Shaw nodded, smiling. Not dutifully — glad to be going back home.

  “What’s the Cockerel and Hound?” Edane asked.

  “Our regular pub at home. Just down from the Kent office.”

  Kent was a district of London, Edane thought. Kind of like the Esplanade back home, but greener. “You’re really leaving?”

  “We have to, son. When the government ramps up their internet censorship at the end of the week, we don’t have enough exempt bandwidth to send our telemetry home. It wouldn’t be legal to work here, I’ve told you this before.”

  “You could get re-registered. Military Contractors registered in the MACP don’t need the monitoring telemetry, just combatant licensing. K-Level licensing is a five day intensive workshop — you could be back by the end of the month.”

  “And what happens when I shoot someone without a live-linked feed to verify it was all nice and legal, hmm? Then Her Majesty’s government put me under a mercenary’s investigation the moment I
step back home — no thank you.”

  “Andercom’s lawyers…”

  Thorne laughed. “You know what the tabloids at home say about Andercom West?”

  “No?”

  “Call them the bloody SS thugs of the corporate Nazi Reich.”

  Edane flattened his ears back against his helmet. “The who?”

  “Nazi?” Thorne glanced back, eyebrow raised. “Don’t they teach you anything in South America? The Second World War, son — Britain’s finest hour!”

  Edane shrugged. “Middle American Corporate Preserve,” he said, lamely. “We didn’t get a lot of wars in history class.”

  “Got Coke and McDonalds and Disney, I bet.”

  “Disney,” Edane agreed. “We had that in media class. I don’t know McDonalds.”

  “Bless him. A dog who doesn’t know about McDonalds.” Thorne’s teammates laughed. “Then again, perhaps that’s for the best!” They laughed harder.

  “Was that lifting a corner?” Edane asked, glancing back. “Derailing the conversation by making people laugh?”

  “In a way. But for it to work I’d need to make you laugh.” Thorne stopped at the inner checkpoint, looking at Edane, but the corners of his eyes were crinkled in a different way, this time. “I’m not sure what makes you laugh.”

  “Me either,” Edane said. “Please stay, Thorne. I can’t talk to the locals like you can — you’ve seen how they look at me and my brothers. With you gone it’s almost only going to be us left.”

  “I can’t.” The old man patted Edane’s shoulder, the thump of it warm, even if it was deadened by layers of protective uniform fabric. “But it’s a hell of a thing, this. Never had a dog tell me to stay, before. Always the other way around.”

  Edane bobbed his head, the once, looking down at Throne’s hand. “I get that joke,” he said, smiling just to show willing.

  “Good. But it’s no joke when I tell you not to stay, Edane.” Thorne let his hand drop to the butt of his rifle, hanging off his shoulder sling. “Censorship’s the last resort of tyrants before everything falls to hell. This country’s going nowhere good.”

  “I know,” Edane replied. “But where else can I be a soldier, Thorne? It’s either here or Ecuador, and the weather’s never this nice in Ecuador.”