by J B Cantwell
Blackwell continued down the list. Our group of fifteen infantry had joined several other diggers when we first arrived, and by the time he was done listing off our leaders, I counted we had sixty infantry.
It seemed like nothing. Sixty? All I knew of the enemy was the shots they fired at us upon our arrival. Surely we would be up against more than sixty.
I gulped, my heart pounding hard in my chest.
“Follow your leaders,” Blackwell boomed. “It is our goal to take out the shooters above and, when we do, to infiltrate their camp. To do so we need to push back the boundaries that we defend here at the base. Your lenses,” he gave a tap to a small tablet he was holding, and suddenly everyone around me had a green halo, “are now altered. You will always know who the enemy is, and the interactions between your lenses will prevent friendly fire. As far as the enemy goes … well, there are no rules there. Take them out in any way possible that you can think of. Use your weapons, of course. But if it comes to one on one, do not give in to defeat. Your job is to kill. Each of you have that mandate, individually. We come back for no man wounded. There isn’t time in battle to waste on saving those who are clinging to life. Remember your orders, and your goal.”
The adrenaline was gone now, and I felt like I might be sick right there on the warehouse floor.
… waste time on saving those who are clinging …
It was wrong. Every person standing here knew it was wrong. And yet we were all under the same orders, the same command. Leave your fallen comrades behind. Kill. Kill. Kill. Do not stop killing until you, yourself have no other choice but to lay down and die.
This was how the government played their sick lottery. This was why so few survived long enough to receive the payout at the end of their tours.
My team’s leader, Fowler, spoke.
“You follow,” he said, his voice deep and husky. “And keep your mouths shut. When you get out there, don’t shoot unless you’re sure of what you see. Whoever takes the first shot begins the battle, and we want to wait as long as we can. Understand?”
“Yes, Sir!” we all boomed.
I stood, stunned. He could talk. He was so normal in that way. Did that mean that Alex, too, could still communicate?
As Folwer passed me, his hands looked fat and huge, his feet bigger than any boot I had ever seen could fit. We filed along behind him. Each team was heading for a different bore. Twenty tunnels in all had been carved out beneath the surrounding land, but we focused on just a few. Everyone assembled on the north side of the building. Each of the four tunnels had three groups of men and women waiting to enter.
They didn’t need to tell us to keep quiet as we entered our assigned tunnel. Our group was the first one in. Here the only sounds were the faint footfalls of the troops, the low breathing of anticipation. After a few minutes of walking, I saw that a hole had been carved into the ceiling, and a ladder stretched up to the world above.
Fowler went first. I was surprised that, huge as he was, he was able to maneuver his giant body up the ladder and out into the open without any trouble.
I was third to go, Avery up in front of me.
When she was up the ladder and out into the night, it was my turn.
The world behind me faded away as I took step after step. The hole was just big enough to fit a soldier with a heavy pack through it. The forms of Fowler and Avery lit up my lens, and then I stepped out of the tunnel completely. We stood on grass surrounded by trees. And in the silence of that night I realized, it was official.
I was at war.
Chapter Two
We stayed low, camouflage coverings in our hands. When everyone was out of the tunnel, Fowler signaled to put the nets over our bodies. I was relieved to find that I could still see the glowing outlines of my comrades through the material. Rifles out, we crouched over the damp ground, moving slowly. After a hundred yards or so, Fowler signaled us to stop. He knelt on the ground, motioning for us to do the same.
We waited. The other groups that had come through our tunnel had gone in different directions.
The wait seemed to last hours. My feet were falling asleep in my boots from the awkward position I was in, but I didn’t dare sit down. I shifted my weight back and forth to restore some blood flow, my feet and legs prickling.
Gradually, the sky began to lighten. Gunfire echoed somewhere in the distance. We all tensed, but didn’t stand. Shouting rang through the morning. Two soldiers, enemies, crossed our paths and climbed a couple of nearby trees.
They didn’t know that we had figured out where they were hiding during the day.
All of our weapons were equipped with silencers, but it was Fowler who took the first shot.
A shout. The sound of a body falling through branches. Bones cracking. The dull thud of it hitting the forest floor.
I stared. I had never seen a dead body before, much less killed anyone. I could see now that it was a boy, maybe a couple years younger than I was. His body lay crumpled on the ground like a discarded marionette. His eyes remained open, staring at me as though there was no mesh covering between us.
Before the other fighter had the chance to open his mouth in warning, Avery had him. Her bullet pierced his left shoulder. Was it close enough to the heart? He wasn’t as high up the tree as the boy was, and he landed without breaking bones. Then he shouted something, an order, a scream.
The man pulled a weapon from his side and aimed it carelessly into the woods, not quite knowing where to shoot.
Avery quickly got to her feet and finished him. A bullet to the heart. Then she stepped behind the man’s tree and dropped to the ground. Three more Fighters came into the clearing, checking their companions.
Fowler gestured to the rest of us, and we took aim.
My vision was blurry as I tried to make out each fighter, deciding. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see.
And I couldn’t shoot.
The bullets from my team took two of the men down.
I could see it now, see her now. My target.
Fowler’s eyes were on me. I took aim as the rest of my group did the same.
I would have to fire the weapon. He would know if I hadn’t.
The gun felt heavy in my hands, almost too much to hold, the woman’s life in the balance.
I fired first. My bullet, I know, whizzed above her head. She ducked. Then, four more guns trained on her chest, and she was pummeled until her body finally fell to the ground.
My mouth hung open, in shock, in protest. I felt tears running down my cheeks, invisible through the camouflage.
In the distance, more gunfire sounded as similar encounters were made. It was impossible to tell if the bullets came from our side, their side, or both.
I was breathing hard, and the world started to look distorted around me.
“Get it together, Pink,” Avery hissed beside me.
I put my head down and tried to calm myself. My breathing sounded loud in my ears, and I couldn’t believe that the Fighters didn’t come straight for us. Surely they could hear me.
But no. More came to inspect their dead. The third man shot, the one who had come with the girl, was still alive. The two men who came upon him crouched down to pick him up, presumably to take him back to their camp for treatment.
But Fowler had no mercy. And neither, I discovered, did any of my teammates. Six rifles pointed in the direction of the men, and six fired.
I aimed my bullets into a tree.
Nobody came to look for the dead this time. I wondered how many the other teams had killed. Seven for us. It seemed like a lot, like we had some unfair advantage. I shook myself as I had the thought. We were supposed to take and exploit any advantage. This wasn’t grade school. There were no reprimands for cheating here.
I had taken no lives yet. I wondered how the rest of my team felt about what they had done.
We stayed in one place for the remainder of the morning, unmoving. Gradually, the fear of death ebbed away. It seemed that t
he Fighters had abandoned the trees entirely. I stared through the leaves and branches above, trying to find any last enemies that might still be lurking, biding their time. But I saw no one. The trees were bare.
Fowler pressed his finger to his ear, getting a message from command. All at once, our lenses changed. A map came up of the terrain and our path through it. We were to push forward, to expand our hold on this new ground. It was time to move.
We passed by the scene of death that we had created. I nearly vomited when I saw the gaping wounds, the eyes staring wide, the occasional fly already coming to the feast. I was happy to move on from that place.
For the first few minutes my legs felt like stumps of wood, unmanageable and stiff. As we walked, we each held our camouflage netting up above the ground so that the sound of the stuff dragging across the forest floor wouldn’t give us away. The farther we went, the more slowly we walked. Fowler held a silenced GPS monitor in his hand. He was walking us straight into their camp. Was that the plan of all the other teams? Would we all be descending on the camp together? I worried that it was just us seven against them. If the others were to join us then we might have a chance.
We got closer. The smell of wood fires wafted across our path. Then, through a clearing of trees, we saw it.
All of us dropped to the ground in an instant, silent.
The camp was abandoned. The fires had been extinguished and now smoke curled into the late morning air. The tarps covering their crude dwellings were taken off their frames.
They were gone.
I scoured the trees, searching. For all we knew they could have the entire village up there, hiding out, their own weapons trained on us.
One of the other teams arrived and stationed themselves about a hundred feet away. It was Hannah’s team. I was relieved she was still alive.
My stomach unknotted a little bit. We now had fourteen. Somehow, fourteen soldiers against a group of uncounted Fighters was a little less terrifying.
Slowly the other teams began to arrive. Some had fewer than seven in their groups, their dead, or almost dead, left behind.
I looked away, unable to stare at the empty spaces in the groups who had lost soldiers. I thought I would have been brave in battle. Maybe not so ready to leave a fallen soldier behind, but at least able to fire a few rounds. But no. I had fired the rounds, but I was sure that they didn’t hit any of our targets.
My refusal didn’t matter, though. There were just as many dead as there would have been if I had joined in. I wondered how long it could last. At some point, I was bound to be in a life or death situation, and what would I do then?
Fowler and the other Primes spoke quietly into microphones connected to their ear pieces. We were all to spread out, protecting our newly acquired land. We would take turns eating and resting as the night came on. The rest of us were to stand guard.
I was stationed fifty feet away from soldiers on either side on the first watch. Slowly, as the sun rose above the horizon, the program in our lenses switched from night vision to day. Now it would be harder to tell who was who; everyone on our side still glowed green, but in the light it was harder to see. I would need to be careful.
I stood for four hours, my turn at surveillance. I searched the trees, the grounds. I didn’t stand completely still, partly because it was better to be able to look around the trees and partly from the cold.
I wondered what these people were like, the ones fighting for their land. That girl who got shot today, how old had she been? I guessed fifteen, sixteen at most.
On our side, we were an army of the young. Seventeen was the legal age that you could join the Service, and few were older than maybe twenty-four. Those older than that were working off a sentence by spending their time in the Service.
But the men and women on the other side; they were protecting their way of life. We were the ones encroaching on their territory, honing in on their water like bandits.
My four hours was up, and a replacement was sent to relieve me. In the dim light I saw Lydia on her way to relieve another soldier. She nodded in my direction.
The Primes had built a large fire in the center of the camp, and those of us who had come off watch gathered around it, shivering. I took out my mylar blanket, wrapping it around myself as I sat down in the dirt. Hannah was nowhere to be found, so she must’ve been in the second round of watchers. Avery walked up beside me and sat.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound natural.
“Hey,” she said.
“Pretty intense today,” I said.
Her gaze stayed on the fire, its light flickering in her eyes. She shrugged.
I was relieved that she wasn’t wearing any swagger from the encounter this morning. It was a reminder that we were all still human. To imagine ourselves as killing machines was a lie. Even the toughest among us would be affected in some way by this whole nightmare.
“Do you think the Primes care?” I asked, my voice low. “About killing, I mean?”
She glanced up at one of the men standing guard around the fire. Her face contorted into a scowl as she regarded him. Then, unexpectedly, pity outlined her features.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That one boy, your friend … Do you think that he cares about killing the enemy?”
“I haven’t seen him out here yet, so I don’t really know.”
And I didn’t. The Alex I had known before entering the Service would have been repulsed by our battle today. He would have refused to leave a soldier behind, injured and dying. But now everything seemed to have changed. I needed more time with him. Alone. I needed to talk to him and remind him who I was. If I could do that, maybe I could remind him of the reasons we joined the Service, too.
And our reasons were as cold as the bullets we fired.
Riches.
I could feel my face burn with shame. I was out here now, alone and expected to kill people over who could drink whose water.
I lay down in the dirt. No pillow, just the mylar blanket to protect me from the elements.
If Alex and I had chosen escape, instead, we could have made a life where there was no killing involved. In that life there was no need to walk the woods covered in camouflage, no need to train a gun at an enemy’s head. We would have been poor, but we would have been safe from the abuse of our families, and our consciences clean.
The truth was, though, that there was no winning no matter what we chose to do with our lives. Would we make it through three years of this? Would we earn our prize? It was more likely that we would take bullets, ourselves, before this was through. Then we would be left to rot just like the people in that clearing today. The prize money for survival was held up like a carrot for all the poor to salivate over, but part of me was beginning to wonder if it was even real. We were an army of the desperate. Misfits, convicts, those without families to go home to. And we had fallen for the perfect con.
I let my eyes close as the hot flames warmed me. I would need to come up with a new dream now. One that was different from the one I had seen so many times on my lens. One that was real.
Chapter Three
Despite my exhaustion, I didn’t sleep well. The ground was hard and cold, and even beside the heat of the fire I still felt frozen. Lydia joined me four hours in, having finished her turn at watch. She took out her bag and shivered into it, trying to soak up the heat from the fire. She lay down next to me.
“How many?” she whispered.
I opened my eyes.
“How many what?” I asked.
“You know what,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“I got two,” she said.
She raised her hands out of the bag and put them together as if she were pointing a gun. Pow. Pow. “You’ll get used to it. Once you realize you’re fighting for your life. Those people out there don’t care about you, and there’s no reason we should care about them.”
“I guess. I never realized it would be this hard.”
Sh
e was silent for a moment.
“Yeah, killing isn’t something they advertise in those pretty promotional videos.”
It was true. Now that I was here I realized I hadn’t thought joining the Service through, not at all. I had understood that we would be trained and ready to battle, but the battling part I hadn’t really faced until now. I remembered the feeling of the gun shaking in my hands this morning. I had done well at target practice back in training. But there was a big difference between hitting a false enemy versus a real live person.
“So, what are we supposed to do now?” I lowered my voice to a whisper.
Lydia spoke, barely moving her mouth as she did so.
“I’ve heard from Chambers. We need to find someone who’s not dead yet and yank out their chip. There’s information inside about how the chip was made, how it’s different from a civilian chip, and what it can do now.”
“What’s the goal of doing that?” I asked.
She shrugged down deeper into her mylar. “I don’t know for sure,” she whispered. “There are people living in the Stilts who don’t have the trackers anymore. They don’t want to be followed or listened to.”
“Or brainwashed,” I added.
“Yes. They think if they can get their hands on a live, working chip, that they can reverse engineer it.”
I scoffed at this.
“Have you seen the people in the Stilts?” I asked. “They’re beggars, barely hanging on to life. They wouldn’t be able to—”
“That’s all you know,” she said. “It’s all anyone knows. There’s intel that says different, that those who show themselves are all part of the facade. On the inside, they have just as much technology as everyone else.”
I couldn’t believe that. I tried to imagine a room in the center of one of those buildings, cordoned off from the rest. Hidden. And full of … what? Doctors? Scientists? Hackers?
Terrorists?
I wondered. What would happen if I were to yank out Alex’s chip? Would he come back to life again? Would he even recognize me?
