Our War

by Craig DiLouie

  The soldier returned a weak nod. “Do it now.”

  His comrade pressed down on his shoulders. “Don’t look.”

  The doctor injected anesthetic into the wound. “Ready?”

  His sweating assistant nodded.

  “Scalpel.”

  The nurse pulled the instrument from a glass of hydrogen peroxide and handed it over. She gave another to the assistant.

  They cut into the bulging flesh, straight through nerves to the bone. The soldier’s body clenched, his face turning a pale green from blood loss, fever, and sheer terror.

  Gabrielle stood transfixed by the scene, determined not to look away, to bear witness herself to the horror.

  The nurse tied off the calf with a rubber tourniquet and swabbed the area with disinfectant.

  “That’s the anterior tibial artery,” the assistant intoned.

  “Suture it.”

  Walker started cutting with a backsaw, working fast. The soldier screamed. The anesthetic worked on the wound but not the bone.

  Gabrielle fought a surge of bile and turned away. She heard the foot slide along the bloody desk and flop to the floor.

  She wasn’t as tough as Aubrey and didn’t want to be. She didn’t want to normalize emotional distance from everything. The more horrors she encountered, the more she valued her innocence. It wasn’t enough for her to survive her stay here. Gabrielle wanted to go home with her humanity intact.

  When she turned back, the doctor’s eyes locked onto hers. “Close for me,” he said. “I’ll be back after I talk to the United Nations.”

  He’d wanted her to see this. Observing this simple operation told her everything she needed to know about what conditions were like here.

  The doctor yanked off his gloves, gown, and face shield. Stooped with exhaustion, he staggered outside to light a cigarette by an overflowing dumpster.

  “We need…” The doctor took a drag as he thought. “Everything. Antibiotics, blood bags, plasma, aspirin. Ketamine for general anesthesia. It can produce hallucinations, but it’s the best we can use, seeing as we don’t have electricity.”

  Walker worked hard every day without pay to save lives doing medicine that was just one step ahead of the last American civil war. Like all wars, this one brought out the best and worst among those it touched, though the best always seemed far too little to balance out.

  She asked, “How many children do you treat per week?”

  “Too many.” Walker sighed. “You want to help the children, help me treat their community. Not just battlefield supplies but everything. Insulin, blood pressure pills, you name it. We could use another surgeon. I wrote to Doctors Without Borders, but they’re stretched to the limit. Beyond that, a lot of disease is happening because of poor basic hygiene. We need soap and toothpaste.”

  “I understand. Do you keep records?”

  “We’ll give you everything you want.” He added with sudden force, “Right now, I just want you to listen to me.”

  Gabrielle said nothing.

  “We need food,” he said. “Most people here are getting by on a subsistence diet, maybe nine hundred calories a day. In this cold, they need at least twice that. The whole city is slowly starving. And clean water. Barring that, purification tablets.”

  Walker took a final puff on his cigarette, drawing smoke until there was nothing but filter. He dropped the butt into the blackened snow. “And while you’re at it, an end to the war and a million bucks would be nice.”

  Aubrey smiled as she scribbled everything he said in her notebook.

  The doctor sighed. “I don’t even know why I’m bothering. Even if you send us everything we need, half of it will fall off a truck before it gets here and wind up on the black market. Because people are damn fools. Come on, let’s go back inside and I’ll introduce you to Jayla. She’ll get you all the info you want.”

  Walker opened the door and trudged back into the clinic. Gabrielle froze at the threshold.

  A girl in an ill-fitting uniform lay in the corridor hugging her stomach, an AK-47 propped against the wall next to her. A boy stood over her, the same weapon slung across his back, side pockets bulging with spare magazines.

  Aubrey had told her that Russia smuggled AK-47 rifles into the country in humanitarian aid shipments. The same rifles some of the rebels used. The European Union was helping Congress; Saudi Arabia and Brazil the president. Russia was helping both.

  America had taken a flying leap off the global stage and was now on the brink of becoming a failed state. Russia had a simple strategy. As long as the war kept going, America eliminated itself as a world power.

  The guns didn’t interest her, though. The kids did.

  Gabrielle crouched in front of them. “What’s your name?”

  The Latino boy wiped tears from his eyes. “Are you the doctor?”

  “He just came in ahead of me. I can get him for you.”

  “Yes.” He returned his fierce gaze to the girl on the floor.

  She said, “First, I just wanted to ask you—”

  “Vete a la verga,” he snarled. “Get the fucking doctor.”

  Gabrielle recoiled. Not only from his words but from a flashback arriving like a slap, which this suffering girl had triggered. For an instant, she was six years old again, driving across Canada with a man who was going to kill her.

  A hand rested on her shoulder. “You okay?”

  She flinched from Aubrey’s touch. “Don’t do that.”

  Walker returned and shot a glance at the reporter. “Is she all right?”

  “It’s her first time in the war zone.”

  Gabrielle glared at him. “You didn’t tell me the militias are using child soldiers.”

  SEVENTEEN

  In the late afternoon, the Free Women wolfed down their communal feast in the shelter’s dining hall, now warm with body heat and the smells of stew and sweat. Dozens of fighters laughed and talked at the tables. They wore shabby uniforms on their bodies and kept their hair cut short or shaped into dreadlocks, braids, and mohawks.

  Hannah sat with Maria and twelve other girls around rickety picnic tables jammed into tight rows. This was her first time attending a meeting in the communal hall, the one day each month the entire militia came together to eat and talk. After days taking her meals alone in the kitchen, she found it overwhelming.

  “And then Hannah put one right in Marsh’s big mouth,” Maria said.

  The kids laughed, their bright eyes on Hannah.

  “With a .22,” Kristy said. She was fourteen, the oldest of the girls in the militia, and the unspoken leader of their gang. “Anybody could do that.”

  “It was her first time, for crying out loud.”

  “We’ll see how she does with an AK.”

  “I was told I didn’t have to shoot anybody,” Hannah said.

  “You don’t have to,” Kristy said. “But you might want to.”

  Hannah didn’t think she’d want to either.

  Alice, who was seven, nudged Hannah from her other side. “I’m a good shot.”

  Kristy yanked up her sleeve to show off tattoos running down the length of her arm. Hannah leaned in to inspect them. An anime face, an emoticon sticking out its tongue, a four-leaf clover, and a Venus symbol with a clenched fist instead of a cross.

  The girl pulled her sleeve back down. “You learn to shoot, you’re in the gang.”

  “They’re really good,” Hannah said. “Who drew them?”

  Maria beamed, kicking the empty space under the table. “I did. It was Kristy’s idea. Every time you do something good for the gang, you get a tattoo.”

  “It’s like being awarded a medal,” Kristy said. “It shows status.”

  “It’s not permanent or anything,” Maria added. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting ink poisoning through your skin?” Hannah asked.

  “That’s just an urban legend.”

  She thought the tattoos looked cool. “Are they alwa
ys the same?”

  “It’s whatever you want.” Maria shot Kristy a look. “She’s in?”

  “If she wants to be in.”

  She turned to Hannah. “Venus sign with a fist okay with you? That’s our gang mark.”

  “Sure. I’d like that.”

  “You’ll get the hang of things,” Kristy said. “Unless you’re needing tampons. Then you just have to make do.”

  The girl was showing off her age, but Hannah blushed anyway. “Right.”

  Maria patted her shoulder. “You’re in! I’ll give you your mark after dinner.”

  “What does it mean to be in?”

  Kristy said, “We watch each other’s backs. No matter what.”

  Hannah liked the sound of that. “Do you guys know Grace Kim?”

  “Everybody knows Grace. She doesn’t talk to us much. She looks young, but she’s, like, twenty-five. She hangs out with the grown-ups.”

  Maria said, “She doesn’t hang out with anybody. She goes out a lot on her own.”

  Still struck by the sniper’s cool at the shooting range, Hannah nodded. “Sabrina said she was an Olympic shooter.”

  Kristy scowled. “Yeah, well, she only took home the bronze.”

  “I’m just curious—”

  The girls shushed her. Alice nudged her again and stuck out her tongue.

  The commander had stood at her table. “Good afternoon, sisters.”

  “Good afternoon, Abigail,” the Free Women chanted, which ended in a laugh.

  “We’re grateful to be alive and free!”

  The fighters roared their approval.

  Abigail raised her hands. “New business. The bulletin went out today. The central committee voted on the call for volunteers for the Haughville front. We’re going.”

  Hannah stiffened in alarm as the room erupted in groans.

  “We’re going,” Abigail went on at a higher volume. “We’ll be relieving the Indy 300 so they can join the Black Bloc in the Brickyard Crossing offensive.”

  “Always a militia,” a woman growled at her table. “It’s about time the IMPD did its share of the fighting.”

  “The cause needs us there, so that’s where we’re going. The Library Collective and Fire Station 3 will watch over our building.”

  Another voice: “For how long?”

  “We don’t know. I do know if the offensive breaks the Red line, we can end the siege. Start retaking the state. On foot if that’s how we have to do it.”

  “I haven’t shot a fascist in two months,” Sabrina called out. “I say we go tonight.”

  More cheering. Hannah didn’t join in.

  Abigail smiled. “That’s the spirit. Now before we get the hootenanny started, we’ve got some new members. Trish, Lisa, and Hannah, please stand up.”

  Maria nudged Hannah. “That’s you!”

  Two gaunt women stood. Hannah did too.

  “Trish, you go first,” Abigail said. “Tell us why you’re here.”

  “I was antifa back when Nazis were marching in Atlanta,” Trish said with pride. “We believed the best way to fight these terrorists wasn’t to rely on the cops but only on ourselves. Direct confrontation. Fire with fire. We knew you can’t talk to them. You can’t ignore them either. And you can’t give them an inch. In Atlanta, they showed up with machine guns. The rest attacked us with clubs and shields. The cops were too scared to do anything.” She offered a grim smile. “We stood our ground. I’ve been fighting back ever since. We held out in Tipton as long as we could. You think this is bad? This is nothing compared to what went on there. When the city fell, I made it here. I intend to go on resisting, and I’ll never stop. Free Indy!”

  The women pounded their tables and roared.

  “Congress forever!” somebody called out.

  “Wow,” Maria said.

  “Thank you, Trish,” Abigail said. “How about you, Lisa?”

  “My story isn’t as exciting,” the woman said with a shy smile. “I was a middle-class Democrat with an office job. I believed in the New Deal, Social Security, and Medicare. If everybody did better, I would do better. Otherwise, I cared about a woman’s right to choose.” She frowned and continued in a stronger voice, “Now I’m fighting for this. A safe place for women, where we answer to nobody and live in harmony with one another. I used to want things to go back to the way they were, but not anymore. I want a revolution.”

  Hannah’s heart pounded as the crowd broke into wild cheering again.

  Abigail smiled in her direction. “Hannah?”

  She wilted under their stares. “I’m Hannah.”

  “Say it loud and proud, sister,” Abigail said. “This is a safe place.”

  “I’m Hannah,” she repeated. “I came here to find a home.”

  The women cheered even louder as she sat back down. She covered her face to hide her tears. Maria patted her back and told her she’d said just the right thing.

  The shelter had begun to feel like home. Now they were leaving. Every time she thought she stood on solid ground, it dropped out from under her.

  “We’re thankful to have you with us, sisters,” Abigail said. “Now let’s get this hootenanny started. Enjoy a little of what we’re fighting for. Meeting adjourned.”

  The women cleared the tables from the center of the room while others took out musical instruments, guitars and horns and a mix of bongo and conga drums. They launched into a salsa beat that had a rich, carefree flavor. The floor quickly filled with swaying bodies and acrid smoke. At the tables, women laughed and passed bottles and cigarettes.

  Hannah stood and crossed the room to Abigail’s table.

  The commander smiled. “So you decided to stay after all.”

  “I was waiting for you to ask like you said.”

  “It was up to you,” Abigail said. “You had a few days to see what we’re about. When you came to today’s meeting, you told me you wanted to be a part of it.”

  “But why do we have to leave?”

  “We go where the cause needs us. The central committee voted on it. We’re all volunteers, but while you’re here, we expect total commitment.”

  “I wanted this to be my home.”

  The commander smiled. “You’re Free Women now, sister. Whenever you’re with us, you’re home.”

  Maria appeared at her side and pulled on her arm. “Come on!”

  Hannah followed her into the dance area. The other girls were already dancing, faces flushed and grinning. The music flowed through her, then picked her up and carried her along. She closed her eyes and swayed until she became lost in the rhythm.

  While she danced, she allowed herself to remember everything she’d lost. Mom babying her while she stayed home from school with the flu. Dad explaining how the tomato plants in their garden grew. Alex messing up her hair to distract her from crying after she crashed her bike. Talking to friends at lunch, comparing likes and dislikes, subjecting one another to merciless teasing about their crushes.

  She missed all these things and said goodbye to them one by one, tears streaming down her face while she danced surrounded by women who would fight to protect her, women she’d help to win their war, because from each according to her ability, to each according to her need.

  She opened her eyes. The dance area thinned then crowded again as the song changed but never ended. Hannah bounced on the changes and flowed with each new direction. The music keeps changing, but I’m still here. Her heart swelled to bursting as she sensed a profound truth she couldn’t put into words.

  At last, sweaty and tired, Hannah left the girls on the floor to get some space and air. Pulling on her coat, she mounted the stairs and walked up to the roof access door.

  The late afternoon sun glared across the buildings, producing startling contrasts of light and dark. The tip of a burning cigarette flared at the other side of the roof.

  “Hi,” Hannah said.

  A militiawoman was sitting on the ground with her back against the parapet. “You sh
ould probably stay low.”

  “Oh. Right.” She crouched and scurried over to sit next to her. “I saw you at the shooting range. You’re a sniper.”

  “I’m Grace,” the woman said with clarity, as if correcting her.

  “I’m Hannah. Don’t you want to join the party?”

  The cigarette tip flared again. “Maybe I will, one of these days. What about you? Taking a break?”

  Hannah didn’t know how to put it into words. “I was feeling something and wanted to think about it. Something really big. It’s good.”

  “It’s love,” the sniper said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I used to shoot for sport. Now I kill men I don’t even know.”

  “They’re bad men,” Hannah offered.

  “I don’t hate them. I hate killing. Do you know why I do it anyway?”

  Hannah had heard the rebel snipers killed for money. Grace Kim didn’t strike her as somebody who’d kill for a paycheck.

  “You kill them so they stop killing us.”

  “That’s what I do, not why I do it.”

  Hannah tried to remember all the rhetoric she’d been told. “The billionaires want all the money. The fascists want to make laws that are mean. That’s the cause.”

  Grace smiled. “Close but no cigar.”

  “What then?”

  “Love.”

  The idea sent a shiver through her. “Love?”

  “I do what I hate for what I love,” Grace told her. “These women, this city. People I don’t even know. So they can live in a safe, just world. That’s the cause.”

  “Wow,” Hannah said.

  “That’s the cause for me. You have to decide for yourself what it means to you. Do you fight for others out of love, do you fight against the rebels out of hate, or do you fight for yourself just to survive?”

  “I was fighting for me, I guess,” Hannah said. “Now I don’t know.”

  “‘You are what your deep, driving desire is.’ That’s a quote from one of the oldest books in the world. ‘As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.’”

  “I like it. What’s it mean?”

  “What you want most will make you the woman you will become.”