Grunt Life (38 page)

The light flashed once more from below, and then all hell broke loose as the remaining two Semtex explosives detonated, setting off the one with the broken timer in turn, blowing the mother-creature in all directions. Every Cray capable took flight, but there were too many to fly. They fought and tore at each other in the explosive light. I felt one slash at the creature attached to my back, releasing its dead-hold on me. Then everything went dark.

I bounced off several more Cray, then hit the wall. I blindly grabbed at it, scrabbling to stop my fall, and my hand struck an outcropping and somehow I held on. I dangled by one arm for a moment, then reached up with the other and pulled myself up. I believed I was on the inside of what we’d thought of as a launch tube. I scrambled as far back into it as I could and prayed the Copperhead rounds wouldn’t find me here.

The air inside the mound was a frenzy of panic. I heard more explosions, then the sounds of Hydra missiles going off. Suddenly the entire universe was filled with the rattling whine of Vulcans firing from somewhere below, the sound like the universe being unzipped and rezipped. I heard Cray falling like ducks in winter as the rounds scythed through them.

The cavalry had arrived.

The rest of the Romeos had made it inside.

I allowed myself a smile as I leaned back, put my arms behind my head, and watched the Cray die by the hundreds. In the back of my mind I was aware that a Copperhead might take me out at any moment, but I found myself unconcerned. I’d been so willing to die for nothing, that to die for something now meant everything.

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Carl Sagan

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

W
E’D DONE IT
. The massacre was complete. There wasn’t an alien left alive that hadn’t already been taken by Mr. Pink and the surviving members of his team for further study. After the battle, I’d managed to climb down the outside of the mound and cross the plain to our compound. Now I stood inside what had once been the mess hall, staring across the floor and thinking of the movie
Zulu
. Was this what the old sergeant major had felt, in the aftermath of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, his hundred and fifty men having survived a battle against five thousand Zulu warriors? Dead Cray lay whole and in pieces on every possible surface.

For every ten Cray corpses, there was one human. The tired grunts who’d served me rations lay in a cluster, as if they’d fought back-to-back, their food-serving apparel no match for the claws of the aliens. The colonel who’d hero worshipped me and had been the first officer I’d ever known to undress me with her eyes stared towards the ceiling, perhaps gone to a place where God waited to explain to her why her life had been meant to end at this moment, her torso and stomach skewered by Cray claws. The generator mechanic who’d probably seen me naked had survived and now lay on a gurney with her left arm ripped free, trauma surgeons working feverishly to save her.

Damn, but I was tired.

Was this what the Army of the North had felt at the Battle of Gettysburg? Even after winning the day, were they stunned at the immensity of the mission? D-Day? Pusan? Did we have the will to continue?

One thing we finally did have was knowledge. The Cray had had a terrific advantage with our ignorance. They’d leveraged their weaknesses by keeping them unknown. That they couldn’t see below our visible spectrum, making them effectively night-blind, would have been an incredible boon for our early battles, had we known. We would have attacked in blackout, covering all light sources, including the operational lights on the outside of our EXOs, keeping the Cray off balance and on the defensive.

I picked my way through the mess hall and into the TOC. The carefully constructed operations center was completely destroyed. Pieces of desk merged with pieces of flesh and plasma televisions. A fire had raged inside and melted the whole mass together. I couldn’t tell where a computer monitor stopped and a Cray began. I remembered wanting to kill the Italian battle captain, but even he hadn’t deserved this.

As it turned out, Olivares and I might have saved the day. I learned that the Cray had attacked thirty minutes before our scheduled assault. They’d destroyed the Howitzers first, as if they’d known the capability of the Copperheads and had feared them. Then they’d surged through the underground, engaging in hand-to-hand melee like the Earth had never before seen.

I moved on, bumping into another grunt.

We exchanged bone-tired glances, then staggered off in different directions.

I was heading towards our squad bay when I saw Olivares. His face had been bandaged, but it would leave a terrible scar.

“You made it.”

I nodded. “You as well.” But I noted the look on his face. Something was wrong.

“What is it?”

He stared at me with sorrow in his eyes, then made a decision. “You have to see this.”

I trudged towards him, careful not to step on the remains of a human, but gleeful in the way the Cray crunched beneath my booted feet. When I got to him, he put out a hand to stop me.

“You need to be ready.”

“Brother, I don’t need no drama. I just need some sleep.”

He shook his head, his eyes flint hard. “Remember the device the aliens tried to hide from us?”

“Device? What are you talking about?”

“You need to be ready,” he said again. He paused, then said, “You were right. We found Michelle.”

My breath left me. “Show me,” I somehow managed to say.

“They weren’t sure she’d survive. Mr. Pink said she’d be perfect for the mission. He said her mind was attuned...”

I pushed past him, rounded the corner and saw the black box. Two recon scouts in EXOs cleared dead Cray from where they’d piled up all around the outside. The once black surface of the box was etched with the marks of a thousand claws. Whatever was in there, the Cray had wanted it badly. How Michelle was involved, I couldn’t fathom.

I hurried up to the black box and looked inside.

And my mind howled.

Michelle.

Or what had once been Michelle.

“What have they done?” I wailed.

She hung from a pod affixed to the ceiling of the box, connected by cords through which moved fluids, presumably keeping her alive. She faced me. Naked, the rivers of pain on her arms stark white reminders of who she’d once been. If only that girl was still around. But she’d been turned into a horrific marionette. A hundred multicolored wires and cables ran from her shaved head to a computer terminal. I could only imagine her horror, were she aware what had happened to her. What was it she had said?
Can you imagine? Being taken over by another entity and not being able to control your own body?

Her body shook and trembled. She took a great breath and raised her head. Her gaze met my own. For one brief moment, we were those same two people, reclining behind the generators, interlocked, the end of the world not even mattering, living only in each other’s eyes as we made each other laugh, cry and sing with pleasure. Then her face changed. She became sad, then angry.

Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

The thought slammed into my head, making me back away. As I fought for balance, two people I hadn’t realized were there rushed to her from the other side of the black box.

“You get her stabilized. I have a helicopter en route. We need to get her to safety.” Mr. Pink turned towards me. He regarded me, then he shook his head. “Olivares, get him the hell out of here.”

Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

A technician was at Mr. Pink’s side, hurriedly unhooking Michelle from the box.

“What—what is this?”

Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

Mr. Pink looked for a moment as if he’d answer, then he turned back to his task. “I don’t have time for this.”

Killmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillmekillme

I stared into her eyes and knew what had to be done. They’d turned her into some kind of communications mechanism. OMBRA had figured it out, and then used Michelle as their tool. She was a person—she was
my
person. She was nobody’s tool.

I found a rifle on the ground and brought it up in a single move. I sighted in on her forehead.

Her message switched to a single feeling of goodwill as she repeated
lovemelovemelovemelovemelovemekillme killmelovemekillmelovemekillme.

Through my tears, the sighting device placed a red dot gently between her eyes. My forefinger squeezed the trigger slowly. At the last moment, I closed my eyes, unable to watch.

As I fired, I felt my weapon lurch upward.

Olivares’s hand was on my weapon, but I ignored him, all eyes for her.

She glared at me, her gaze as furious as the medusa’s. I had let her down. She’d needed me to do one thing for her and I’d failed.

Ihateyouihateyouihateyouihateyouihateyou

Then her head sagged as Mr. Pink ripped wires free. Once she was disabled, he turned to us.

“I thought I told you to get him out of here.”

Olivares jerked my weapon so it spun me around.

I was still unable to parse what had happened, her words still echoing through my mind, over and over and over,
I hate you.
He led me down the mound of the dead, stumbling, blank, staring. He’d taken my weapon away from me sometime during the process. So when he led me into our squad bay and I sat down, I found my empty hands were a perfect place for my head. I held it, tears falling, my chest empty, my brain caught in a loop where the girl I loved had been transformed into a cybernetic machine that hated me.

I don’t know what I’d been thinking. It wasn’t as if this was life as it had been. Still, the more I imagined her, the more I thought about what
could
have been. But the world I imagined couldn’t be. All that was gone.

I pounded the side of my head.

Why couldn’t she have told me? Why couldn’t she have included me in her secret? She must have talked to Mr. Pink for days before this. All the while I’d been trying to get to know her, she’d already decided to end her life, or at least her life as she’d known it. Oh, but I wanted to scream.

I put my head between my knees. All of my injuries pulsed for attention, but I pushed the pain away. The agony in my heart was far greater. Why did this girl I barely knew make me feel this way? How had she worked her way so deeply into my soul? But even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. Michelle had been more to me than just a strong, beautiful, olive-skinned girl. She’d been more than the faraway look in her eyes. She’d been so much more than the geography of her scars. She was
America
. She was the smell of cotton candy at a fair. She was the warm summer breeze cooling the sweat on my brow. She was the red hot heat of the love men and women felt everywhere for each other. What we’d felt for each other.

She was everything we’d lost.

I heard a noise from the other side of an overturned locker, and turned. Cheap metal cabinet moved; Someone was beneath it, and might still be alive. I got to my feet and stumbled across the body of a tech and the remains of the bench we’d all once sat upon. I pulled the locker aside, but beneath it wasn’t a person. It was a Cray, trapped and prone. Perhaps its back had been broken, or maybe its legs. It reached towards me with four arms, its entire body shaking.

I stared at it for a long minute.

Then I straddled the creature and began to hit it. I hit it and hit it and hit it. Its proboscis cracked and bled green ichor.

I hit it with the anger of an entire planet.

I hit it with the anger of a single man who’d lost everything... fucking everything, including his girl, and his trust in those who were supposed to know better.

I glared into its cluster of eyes as it stared back at me.

“I might have tried to kill myself, my whole
planet
might have been trying to kill itself, for generations, but that doesn’t give you the right to come and do it for us.”

My arms tired as the alien’s cracked, broken face became a mosaic of what it once was. One more strike and all the pain of the world would flow through my hands. I brought them down like the hammer of God, but the Cray reached up and stopped them at the last moment. It was as if it had been saving its energy until this very last moment, knowing that it would have but once chance to save itself, and this was it.

I struggled to follow through with my swing.

Its arms began to shake as it held me, claws gripping my wrists.

I pressed forward with my shoulders, and it pressed back against me. And then I saw it for what it was. I released my fists and sat back, resting my weight on its abdomen.

It kept its hands ready to block, but seemed to regard me differently from before.

“You’re just a fucking grunt, aren’t you?”

It blinked back at me through the eyes I hadn’t bludgeoned.

“You’re just a dumb fucking grunt just like me, doing what you’re told.” The sudden sympathy hit me square in my patriotism. Somewhere along the line I’d ceased to care about America, or the Army, as much as I cared about the men and women I fought with. MacKenzie, Ohirra, Thompson, Aquinas, Olivares and even Frakess were what I fought for. I bet the Cray were the same way. I saw how they fought. I shoved the image of Michelle way, way down.

No. The Cray weren’t our enemy. They were just grunts following orders. They’d come here and fought us at someone else’s bidding. Some master species had come along and discovered their EMP capability and found a way to harness that power to their advantage, much like OMBRA had come along and used us, maximizing our power, counting on our need to redeem ourselves, giving us a chance to make amends by playing combat guinea pigs so their company would be in a position to sell itself to the highest bidder.

Just as the Cray had come and proved their worth by knocking us back into the Stone Age, we’d returned the favor by discovering how to best kill them. And in the end it wasn’t such a hard thing. But the damage was done. The cities were destroyed. Hundreds of millions of people were dead. Soon we’d give as good as we got and do the same to the Cray.