Grunt Life (33 page)

“Can’t help it.” He coughed.

“Sounds like you want to be a hero instead,” I argued, but time was up. He was completely out of air. He had to open the suit or he’d die.

“Don’t you get it? In the end—”

And then he jumped. He didn’t scream. He didn’t cry out. He was just gone.

I finished his sentence for him.
In the end they’re the same.
Leaders are heroes are killers. All along they were the same. Only Olivares would be able to teach me a lesson by doing something I would have done, and it pissed me off.

I clipped his pack onto mine using a spare carabiner, then continued my descent. Although I concentrated on the climb, I couldn’t help seeing my own meter creep into single digits. I fought the creeping feeling that Ohirra and I were the only ones we positively knew were alive. Although I held out hope for Michelle and Thompson, it was only hope at this point. My whole career had been like this. From Bosnia to the Middle East to the fields of Africa, I’d always watched as others had died around me. I used to curse my luck and wished I could share it among my fellow grunts.

And I still felt that way. If I could change any moment in the last two weeks it would be to change places with any of my dead friends. MacKenzie, with his ever-present smile and profane humor. Little Thompson, forever trying to overcome his time in the band. Olivares, asshole leader extraordinaire, who I’d hated since the beginning but respected more than anyone else. And, of course, Michelle. I held out little hope that there was any real love between us.

We all had stories.

We’d all seen our friends and fellow grunts die.

We’d all tried to kill ourselves, only to discover we were needed to save the planet.

And we’d all die doing it.

During the Vietnam War the average life expectancy of a grunt had been twenty-eight days. During the Korean War it had been twenty-one days. During WWII, forty-eight. And now, during the War Against the Cray, it was five days—just five. It was a sad state of events, I couldn’t help but think. After all, if we all died, who was going to save our planet?

My oxygen mix was down to two percent. I had less than ten minutes. I moved fast, but not in desperation. I knew now I was going to join Olivares. He’d tried to save me, I’ll give him that. We just hadn’t known how deep the tube was.

I was down to one percent. I glanced down. My light speared the darkness and nothing more.

Fuck that. If I was going to die it was on my own terms.

When my meter snapped to zero, I pushed off the wall. As I began to fall, I splayed out my arms and legs. I was facing down, the light guiding my way to death.

Starship Troopers
and
The Forever War
are both widely seen as anti-military books. What techniques do the authors use to disguise this, or do they? Does the sentiment of the authors change your opinion about the books? How might our opinions of other cultures change in a post-alien invasion world?

TF OMBRA Study Question

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T
HERE WAS A
ghostly image in the darkness. At first it was a speck, but it soon grew to fill my view. Then I knew who it was, and I was pleased to join Olivares in death. He reached out to me as we plummeted towards another life.

I struck bottom and the ground gave and gave and gave, sucking me in, drawing me into its bosom. Then there was nothing. No movement. No sound. Just a white light, enveloping me.

My hands scraped against the side of my helmet, searching for the release. I couldn’t find it. I felt my fingers go numb. My chest burned.

Then I was being moved, pulled backwards. I came up and up, a light spearing from my face into a blizzard of white. My helmet was jerked free and I gasped, inhaling as much ash as air. I coughed and wheezed. The ash began to fill the inside of my suit; it stuck to my face and lips. It tasted of rock and sulfur. But I didn’t care about any of that.

I was alive.

And as I turned, I spied Olivares, frowning with concentration as he fought to keep me from sinking deeper.

Olivares punched me twice in the face and I knew it was hell. Only in hell would the man I hated and loved get to punch me when I was dead.

He wrapped a rope around me. At first he tried for my throat, but it missed and he ended up hooking my arm. He pulled and I came towards him. I laughed. What had he said about heroes and killers and leaders? How special was he now, unable to even kill me? Instead of hanging me by the neck, he was hanging me by the arm.

“You can’t hang my arm!” I yelled, only it came out as
yougant hangamarm
as I spewed spittle and ash.

He screamed something at me that sounded like
stpiting!

I laughed at him, daring him to try and hang my other arm.

But he ignored my laughter and hauled me up until I was no longer in the blizzard of ash, and found myself on a hard surface.

I suddenly felt sick. I coughed, bringing up ash and bile.

Olivares unlatched my suit and I felt a sting in my arm.

Then I felt nothing for a while. I know my eyes closed. I know I dreamed of a place where Olivares and I skied down a mountain of EXOs. I know I felt the earth tremble beneath me.

Then nothing.

Then light.

I opened my eyes. I felt like I’d been pummeled from head to tail by brass knuckles. A light came from somewhere to my left, and my mouth tasted like three miles of road. My breath was ragged. My stomach twitched like it was ready to spasm at any moment. If I’d been home, I’d have rolled over and gone back to sleep. But I wasn’t home. I had no home. I was in the bottom of a volcano in the middle of Africa, and somehow I was still alive.

“Hold on. There,” Olivares said, cradling my head. “Breathe easy. Talk about prom dates. You reminded me of Cindy. She puked all over the back of my El Camino.”

“I didn’t puke,” I managed to say after several failed attempts.

He patted me on my cheek. “That’s right. You didn’t puke. You just keep thinking that.”

Oh, yeah. I did puke.

But why was I alive?

He saw the question in my eyes. “Myo-inositol trisphyosphate,” he said. “Increases the amount of oxygen released by your hemoglobin.” He held out his hand. “And take these, too.”

I glanced down and saw two eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofens. “Seriously? Ranger candy?”

“It’ll reduce the nausea and inflammation.”

I sat up to take the pills. He handed me a water flask and I drank deeply.

“Easy now.” He sat back as I swallowed and got my bearings. “Feeling better?”

“I told you I didn’t puke,” I said, both of us knowing better.

“Then watch where you step so you don’t put your feet in the places you didn’t puke.” He stood and I realized for the first time he was in his fatigues and boots.

“How...” I asked, but I couldn’t finish. I had too many questions.

I pushed to my feet and it seemed like a hundred miles. As I looked around, it was like I was noticing the world for the first time. I felt like I’d been reborn. Never before had I reached the moment where I’d been so sure I was dead... so sure that I’d given up.

Then I saw the rope.

The incredible pile of ash.

Two dead aliens.

Our smashed suits stacked against a wall and our helmets angled to light the cavern we were in.

“There’s a pile of ash in the other room at least sixty feet high. I think the aliens were dead when they hit. I’m afraid I landed on one.”

One of the Cray looked like a bug that had been stepped on by a giant foot.

“If it wasn’t for the ash and the suits, we’d definitely be dead.”

I put a hand to my head. “We’re not dead. I feel too much like shit to be dead.”

“That’s pretty much how I feel, too.”

It was then I saw the right side of his head. It was red and purple and swollen in several places. His right eye was black and blue. His right arm hung strangely.

He saw me looking at it and raised it halfway. “This is as high as I can get it.”

“What about the side of your face?”

“Not sure. It might be because of decompression. It doesn’t hurt.”

I laughed. I was probably still a little drunk from the narcosis, but I remembered an old joke.
Does your face hurt? Well it hurts me.
But as I laughed, I felt pain in my own face, too. I felt around my eyes and they felt different.

“You got a pair of shiners and your nose is broken. You hit the inside of your faceplate so hard you cracked it.”

“Always was headstrong.”

“Very funny.”

“And the rope?”

“I was already out of my suit and couldn’t move your heavy ass. I had to rig ropes to pull you out, or you’d have suffocated.”

“I remember choking. I couldn’t breathe.”

“Part of that was because of your face,” he said with a grin. “It was a close thing. The rope kept stretching and I was afraid it would snap.”

I looked down and realized I was in my skivvies and toe shoes, but I wasn’t cold. In fact, I was pretty warm.

“We must be close to magma,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s somewhere near for sure, but we’re safe for now. If it was closer, we wouldn’t be able to breathe. Acid vapor.”

“Thank God for small miracles,” I said, going over to my pack. But the moment I began to move, all of my muscles clenched and reminded me of what my body had just done. I’d taken two ibuprofens. I wanted about fifty more. I limped on both legs and began to pick my way through my things. Everything else had been emptied from the pack except my clothes. As I pulled on my multicam uniform and boots, I asked, “Did you do an inventory?”

He moved to where he’d laid everything out and began to catalogue them. “We have nine liters of water, two first aid kits with more medicine for altitude sickness, three hundred rounds of 9mm ammunition, four kilos of Semtex with mechanical detonators, four thermite grenades, our blades, our pistols, one submachine gun, and enough rations for thirty-six hours.” He pointed to another stack. “We also have a full set of Kevlar each, including shin and forearm guards and ballistic masks.”

“Only one MP5?”

“Yours got bent to shit on impact.”

“What about the tablets?”

“They didn’t make it either,” he said.

“Shit. How are we going to navigate?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

I looked at him standing there, beaten up, one arm dangling. I know I looked even worse than he did. And we were the cavalry. We were supposed to save the day. I couldn’t help but feel that the human race had the short straw.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked, tying my boots and shoving the loose ends into the top, Ranger style.

He regarded me for a moment, then turned to look at the dead aliens. He put his hands on his hips. “So I’ve been wondering about them, and why they came to the volcano.”

That again? “Maybe it was one dragging the other and dumping him in,” I said.

“Even better. There was no way down. They had to have known that. They weren’t from inside the volcano, or else they would have climbed up from here instead of on the outside rim.”

“What are you getting at?”

“What were they trying to hide?” He gently felt the swollen side of his face. “I can’t help thinking it’s something important.”

“Well,” I began, standing and buttoning my fatigue top, “there’s one way to find out.”

“And what’s that?”

I reached down and pulled my blade free of my suit. “We operate.”

“Yeah,” he said, scratching his chin. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

I miss cheeseburgers. I miss the melted cheese and the fat popping in my mouth. I miss everything about them, even the stupid commercials back on television, when we had television. Stupid thing to get emotional about, but it’s what I think about when I’m scrabbling for rations.

Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,

Night Stalker Monologue #1113

CHAPTER FORTY

F
OR THE RECORD
, the inside of a Cray smelled like nothing else I’d ever encountered. We had both of them laid out along one wall. I wore gloves mainly because it was too gross to root around inside the thing’s body barehanded. I didn’t mind killing something, but I’d never been the type to want to play in their entrails after. The entire idea made me a little ill. Still, Olivares had a theory and we had to check it out.

We started with the one that had been carrying the device. I didn’t know jack about autopsies, but I’d seen enough television to know you had to slice them from stem to stern.

“Does anything look strange?” he asked.

I turned to him, as I held my bloodied hands up like a surgeon. “Seriously? Did you just ask if anything is strange?”

“You know what I mean.”

We searched through the body cavities and then the brains. It was in the second brain that we found something interesting. Something seemed to be attached to the rear interior wall of the skull with several wires, then implanted into the Cray’s brain. From the outside I couldn’t even tell it was there, but from the inside it was readily apparent.

“I think this might be what we’re looking for!”

He knelt and we both examined the wires. A flap of skin on the back of the head hid a triangular interface. Not having studied their anatomy other than during firefights, I wouldn’t have been able to see the flap if I hadn’t seen the wires from the inside.

I glanced at the other skull and didn’t see anything even remotely similar. My guess was that the two drones had different functions. I’d always thought of all the Cray as being the same except for the wings, but it made sense that they’d have specialties. So if this one had a brain implant, then what was its specialty?

“Think it’s for tracking?” I asked.

Olivares seemed to consider for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s a transmitter.”

“A communication device?”

“I think so. Let’s get it out of there. It might come in handy.”

“What are we going to do with it?” I began to pull the wires free.