Grunt Life (21 page)

A shadow moved and I opened fire. The flash from the exploding rounds illuminated the limbs and wings of the drones in a jerky, stop-motion sequence. The barrels of the XM214 minigun spun madly as they hurled shells into my targets.

I began to back away as I continued firing.

“Olivares, orders,” I shouted.

After unleashing a volley of bullets beside me, he said, “Back away slowly and cover Six as they lay their devices. Aquinas, Thompson and Mason, to the left. All others to me on the right.”

For a moment there was no firing. No Vulcans. No miniguns. No missiles. Which meant that either we’d beaten back the Cray, or they were just waiting for us to turn our backs to descend upon us.

My telemetry read that the sky above was empty, but it couldn’t tell me how many Cray were waiting in the launch tubes or clinging to the outside of the mound.

I kept turning, aware that danger could come from anyplace.

Three members of Romeo Six rushed past us and hurried to the base of the mound. Each of them dropped to a knee and went through the process of activating their devices.

I saw movement high above as several Cray launched into the air. My telemetry tracked them. I sent seven missiles towards them. The slight recoil from their launch pushed my left shoulder down, turning me towards my left, where I saw a dozen drones walking towards us.

My eyes shot wide and on the display my heartbeat skyrocketed to the danger zone. I opened fire and sent my last five missiles point blank into their midst.

Still they came.

I let my minigun fall and swing back out of the way, and grabbed my harmonic blade. We’d practiced with these. We’d cut through wood like it was butter. We’d pretended to be the Three Musketeers. We’d shadow-fenced a battalion of bad guys. But this was the twenty-first century and no one used swords. No one, that is, except Task Force OMBRA. Here I was, in the most technologically-advanced battle mechanism Earth had ever constructed, and I was relegated to defending myself with a length of sharpened metal.

I screamed as my blade sang, coming down on the nearest drone. The metal slid through the alien like it wasn’t even there. I had no form. I had no style. I was hacking and slashing with little thought. They were a forest of weeds and I was a bushwhacker. My blade carved a hundred Xs in front of me, until there was nothing left to attack.

Then I heard the screaming.

“Fall back! Fall back!” It was Olivares, one hand grabbing a wing while the other sliced it free from the alien’s body.

I spun, looking for a target, and saw the ground around me littered with pieces of drone. My EXO glistened with an oily substance that could only be Cray blood.

Then I noticed the readouts on my HUD. I had red flashing all over the place. I remembered the saying,
Red Is Dead
. I turned to fall back and fell to the ground, my blade impaling the earth. On my knees, I pulled the blade free and resheathed it.

I’d fallen over an EXO. I checked my HUD and saw that it was Thompson. His systems and vitals were green.

“Get up, kid.”

I pulled myself to my feet and jerked him up. Through his mask I could see the fear in his eyes. I pointed back towards Boma Ng’ombe.

“That way! Move!”

He stumbled a moment, then took off running.

After looking around to see if there were any more members of my team on the ground, I took off after him. I’d gone about a dozen meters when I passed an EXO that had been ripped in half. The stencil on the breastplate read
SGT Neeld, Sean
. I knew him. He was from Florida and had been assigned to Romeo Six. His entrails lay on the ground amidst body fluids, soaking into the harsh African dirt. There was nothing I could do, so I continued moving as fast as I could.

Somehow I made it to the rendezvous point by the wing of the 727. All members of Romeo Three were present. Four members of Romeo Six were also there. An infantry platoon waited for us, carrying M32 grenade launchers with six revolving barrels. I watched as they fired into the air; my HUD told me they were using HEDP rounds, which exploded against the surface of the mound behind us. The others carried HK416 assault rifles, and fired carefully at their own targets. Although I was happy to see them, I was worried for their safety out in the open without an EXO.

“Everyone gather around,” shouted a sergeant, the HUD identifying him as
Donnelly, Russell, USMC (Ret), Gunnery Sergeant
. He was about sixty and had owned a fast food franchise in Sweetwater, Tennessee when the shit had hit the fan. Now he was an infantry platoon sergeant and the leader of our security forces for this mission.

MacKenzie turned to me. “Brother, what happened to you? Looks like you fought a food processor and lost.”

I glanced down at my arms and saw the scrapes and scratches from the Cray. Thankfully, I’d never let them get a good hold on me. All they could do was claw desperately at my armor.

I checked my battery level. I was sixty percent shot. Still enough to reach base, but time wasn’t on our side. We had less than an hour to return to safety and try to protect the base in case the Cray attacked.

“Okay, you grunts,” Gunny shouted through our comms. He wore only an MBITR intersquad commo set beneath his Kevlar helmet. “Double file, bounding overwatch, return to the rear. I don’t want no lollygagging and I don’t want no bullshit. The sun’s against us, so scoot and move. Clear?”

The men and women of the squad responded with
Aye Ayes
and
Yes, sirs
. I was assigned to bring up the rear of Team Two as the squad separated into two teams. Olivares was in Team One, but Aquinas was in my team and my job, other than to kill Cray, was to keep her ass safe, just as hers was to keep mine safe.

As we peeled away from the dead airplane, I set my HUD to split screen, one side displaying my goal ahead, counting down the meters, and the other the mound behind, counting up the distance.

I was still flashing red, but I was hoping that ignoring it would make it go away. I was more than halfway to my objective when my servos screeched and seized. I didn’t even have enough time to scream. I tumbled, tearing through the cracked, broken surface of the Serengeti plain. I blacked out. When I came to, I was upside down, my HUD sizzling from short circuits and my breathing labored.

A single thought owned me in that moment.
Why had they left me behind
?

Then, as if anything could possibly be worse, I watched as the HUD snapped to black. That could only mean one thing—the Faraday cage had been breached by the fall. My servos weren’t responding. And worst of all, neither was my air supply. Like so many millions before me, the aliens’ EMP burst had finally got me.

I tried to bring my arms up to remove my helmet, but without the servos, the suit was impossibly heavy. I kept trying anyway, my arms moving inches as I screamed inside my helmet, using every last breath of air that had been held inside. By the time my hands reached the catch for my helmet, I was seeing stars. I felt my fingers play past the clasp, but I didn’t have the strength to do anything with it.

For a brief moment I pictured an old science fiction movie; a man tugging at his neck as he strangled to death in the poisonous atmosphere of a dead planet. I’d seen it back when no one had known about the Cray. Back when politics was a blood sport and people actually took the words of world leaders seriously. Back when there was a Hollywood. Back when someone could fly from New York to Paris and sip White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Lattes, delivered from the manicured hands of a well-endowed flight attendant. Back when humans still ruled the planet.

Fuck it.

I’d had a good run.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been ready to die before.

Here’s a news flash: No soldier gives his life. That’s not the way it works. Most soldiers who make a conscious decision to place themselves in harm’s way do it to protect their buddies. They do it because of the bonds of friendship—and it goes so much deeper than friendship.

Eric Massa

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

S
OMEONE RIPPED MY
my helmet off and smacked me on the face, and I felt my suit coming free. I reached out for a weapon and grabbed the first thing I could. As I was pulled upright, the harmonic blade slid free.

“Whoa there, Nelly,” came a voice, followed by ten tons of weight coming down on my wrist.

I felt the blade being removed. I gasped and blinked, trying to see through the shower of stars that had filled my vision as my brain went snap, crackle and pop. How long had I been without oxygen? As I thought about it, I passed out again...

...and came to as I was being passed down the trench and into the arms of half a dozen grunts. They grabbed me, then ran down the gangway and past our squad bay. I struggled and wanted to tell them they were going the wrong way. But as I opened my mouth to speak, I embraced the darkness...

...and awoke lying on an examination table with an oxygen mask on my face. The world was a blur. My eyes weren’t ready for reality. I blinked until I could see. Olivares and Aquinas stood at the foot of my table, still in their suits but with their helmets off, holding them in the crooks of their arms. They both appeared concerned.

Aquinas especially.

I grinned and pulled the mask aside. “Come back for that ride in the back of the car?”

Her eyes widened and she made an exasperated sound. She frowned, turned on her heel and left.

“Smooth move, ExLax.” Olivares stepped to the side of the bed.

“What happened?” I rubbed my head. My brain felt like it had been slugged.

“Oxygen deprivation. You were dead for a bit, there.”

“Seriously?”

“Not something I’d kid about.” Noticing my frown he asked, “Why?”

“It’s just that if I was dead, I thought I’d know it.” Seeing the look on Olivares’s face, I added, “I thought there’d be a big ball of light or at least a million scrawny hands pulling my ass to hell.”

“What a grunt you are. Complaining of the quality of the afterlife instead of appreciating being alive.”

I smiled weakly. “Grunts aren’t happy unless they have something to shoot or complain about.”

“I suppose I might have exaggerated that you were really dead. Probably more
deadish
,” he said. He turned at the approach of a nurse wearing a combat uniform with Colonel birds on her collar.

She strode in and was immediately in charge. “You disturbing my patient, Staff Sergeant?”

“No, ma’am. Is he going to be ready for duty soon?”

“I can’t be sure. We need to run some more tests. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?” She moved to my side so she could take my pulse.

Olivares paused for a moment, then brought his left hand to his forehead in a mock salute.

I did the same, except with my right.

When he was out the door, I asked, “What kind of tests do you need to run?”

She smiled, warming to me. She had laugh lines I could get lost in. “No tests. We saw your battle on the screens. You were amazing.”

She saw me on the screens? Was our battle televised? I hadn’t even thought about it, but with all the video feeds available, why wouldn’t they be?

“I was just trying to survive,” I said. I wasn’t comfortable with the way she was looking at me. I could take a little appreciation, but the glow in her eyes was akin to hero worship, and I was just a damn grunt. “Do I really not need any tests?”

She shook her head. “Can I get you something? This is a good time to relax. You need to rest.”

“So there’s nothing wrong with me?”

“Nothing at all.” She shook her head. Never once had she looked away.

I slid off the bed and stood, a little wobbly, on the other side of the examination table. My boys were flying free, so I slipped the sheet off the table and wrapped it around me several times.

She seemed to realize what I was about to do and made a move towards the door, but I was one step in front of her.

“Thanks so much for all the help, but I’ll see you later.” Then I was out the door and jogging back to the squad bay.

I turned the wrong way twice. Each time I encountered someone who at first seemed as startled as I was—after all, I was a half-naked guy in a sheet. But then their eyes went wide and a smile broke across their face.

“You’re that guy.”

“Wait, I know you.”

Both times I backed away. What the hell was going on? I didn’t want to be famous. I just wanted to get back to my squad.

I finally made it back to our bay. MacKenzie and Thompson were there, playing cards on the bench. When they saw me, they both laughed.

“Look at the hero of the hour,” MacKenzie crowed, as big a smile on his face as I’d ever seen.

Thompson stood. His smile was as broad, but there was something else in it. He’d been straddling the bench and brought his leg over. He walked stiff-legged to me, favoring one of his legs a little more than the other, and then to my surprise, he threw his arms around me.

I kept a grip on my blanket with my left hand, but returned his affection with the other, as unmanly and uncomfortable as it was.

“Bro, what’s happening? Why all the love?”

He looked at me. “Don’t you remember? You saved my life.”

I shrugged. “You would have done the same.”

He stared at the ground, his smile shining only half as bright and no longer focused on me. “I only wish. I was scared. I’d fallen. I didn’t know where to go. And then you came along.”

“If you hadn’t tripped me, I wouldn’t have found you.” I disengaged and went to my locker. I let the sheet fall and began throwing on a spare uniform. “What happened, anyway?” I glanced at MacKenzie. “And why does everyone seem to know me?”

Thompson lowered his gaze and went to the end of the bench and sat down.

“You’re the guy on the box of cereal,” MacKenzie said cryptically.

“What?”

“You’re making all this shit taste better, because you’re a hero.”

“Actually, he just makes people forget about how bad it tastes,” Ohirra said, entering the bay. She was coming back from the shower in all her naked glory.