Grunt Traitor (11 page)

“Don’t doubt yourself too quickly. It could be true.”

“That I’m crazy? No kidding.”

“No, about him being nearby.”

I stopped cold and turned to him slowly. “What are you talking about, Dupree?”

“It’s not my specialty, but I know that the plan was to place an HMID near every active hive in order to interdict communications.”

I shot to my feet and double-fisted his shirt. “How long have you known about this?”

“Weeks—months.” He gulped. “I don’t know.”

“Did Mr. Pink tell you about Michelle, too? Did he give you the whole story? Did he explain to you that I totally fucking failed her... that I couldn’t pull the trigger? Was he laughing when he told you? I bet he was laughing, wasn’t he?”

He struggled in my grasp, his eyes wide. I let go and backed away, my arms and hands shaking with adrenaline. What was I doing? Jesus.

I turned and balled my fists, watching them shake. I clasped my hands together and tried to ease my breathing. It’d been a long time since I’d had a PTSD episode. I flashed to the Mariachi band at Ports of Call in San Pedro and how I’d torn into them the day before I’d unsuccessfully tried to kill myself, foiled by the ubiquitous Mr. Pink. The three Mexicans in their over-the-top costumes hadn’t deserved my anger. I can still remember grabbing one of their guitars and smashing it repeatedly over a table until it was nothing more than toothpicks, while yelling over and over
“I fucking hate Mariachis!”

“No one ever told me about Michelle,” Dupree said slowly from behind me. “I take it she was something special to you.”

I didn’t trust myself, so I didn’t turn as I responded, “I loved her. She loved me. It’s why she did what she did. Then when she asked me to set her free, I couldn’t do it.”

“It’s a tragic irony. I think you’d feel this way regardless of what you did. Had you killed her when you had the chance, you might even feel worse.”

I finally trusted myself to turn. “Sorry, Dupree.”

He shrugged. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have brought it up.” He stuck his hand out to shake and I took it. Then he sat down.

I sat down on my cot as well.

We sat there facing each other.

I felt too awkward to speak. I’d fought people in the barracks before. Sometimes they’d deserved it. Sometimes they hadn’t. It never really mattered. Soldiers had been fighting amongst themselves since Christ was a corporal. But Dupree wasn’t a soldier. He was a civilian, a doctor. I felt uncomfortable around him. I guessed, when I looked at it, I was afraid of being judged by him. And now look at what I’d done. I’d given him the perfect opportunity to judge me as savage.

“My family survived the alien invasion,” he said. He stared at his right hand in his lap. “A wife and two daughters. Gloria took care of us, feeding us, making sure we’d survive. I was sort of out of it. Stunned, really. It was like I was sleepwalking, those first two weeks. So I never realized that after the first week, our next door neighbor was systematically raping my wife every day. Martin had been a soldier and had more guns than I could count. He told my wife that he wouldn’t kill us if she’d give herself to him. And the bastard was rough. She’d come home with black eyes and bruises on her arms. And you know what I did? Nothing. I really didn’t notice.”

He paused and as the silence widened, I felt the need to say something.

“Doctors call them the Four Fs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” I said. “Flight, Fight, Freeze and Fawn, the last being co-dependent. Freeze is a common option in the reptilian brain when neither flight nor fight is an option. With the alien invasion, we could neither run, nor could the average guy fight the Cray. We at OMBRA could only do it with our EXOs.”

He began speaking as if I hadn’t said a word, and when he did, it was with a voice so wretched it made me want to cry. “What I didn’t know was that he was also threatening to rape my daughters. Jess and Chris were nine and eleven. They deserved a world better than what the Cray had given them. They deserved something better than what Martin represented. It all came to a head one evening when he broke into my house. I’d just begun to come out of my walking stupor when he burst in, a bottle of Jack in one hand, a pistol in the other. He told me what he’d been doing to Gloria, laughing the whole time. Then he told me what he was going to do to my daughters. My wife came at him with a kitchen knife and you know what he did?”

I was afraid that I did, so I didn’t respond.

“He shot her point blank in the head. She fell like that guy Lou did. Straight to the ground. All the life gone from her. I stood there unable to move. Frozen. Fucking
frozen
. Then Martin laughed at me, grabbed Chris and took her in the other room. It wasn’t her first scream, or her fifth, or her tenth that finally got me moving.”

He looked up and caught me with a vicious stare. “It was her twenty-third scream. Know how I know that? Because I fucking counted them. I remember grabbing the knife from the floor and running into the other room only to find Chris naked and him trying to get his drunken penis into her.”

He made a fist with the hand that had been resting on his lap as if it was around a knife handle. “I stabbed him twenty-three times, once for each of her screams. I killed him, then I threw up. I didn’t hold my daughter. I didn’t try and make her feel better. I didn’t even apologize. Instead, I fell to the ground and cried, rocking myself like I was a five-year-old.”

He blew out. “The next day I buried Gloria in the back yard. Then I took Chris and Jess to my sister’s. She lived about ten miles away. Throughout the walk, no one said anything. When I got there, I turned them over to my sister, who was much more capable of taking care of them than I was. Then without saying a word, I left.”

“You didn’t say anything?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“What was there to say? I’d completely let them down. I was a complete and utter failure as a man, a husband, and a father. Which is why I left. I might be a failure at those things, but by God I will
not
be a failure at being a scientist. Do you want to know why I smile all the time? Because it takes fewer muscles to smile, and I’m tired of my face fucking hurting all the time.”

The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies.

Mary Brave Bird, Lakota

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
E ATE LATE
and it wasn’t until noon that we were dressed and ready to move out. Mother was definitely everyone’s spiritual leader. The rough, the dirty, and the mean, they all melted in her presence, much like a dog would to its master, no matter how mean the cur. It worried me. Never one to let someone else’s good ideas get in my way, I had no doubt that if she told them to kill us, they’d do it with a joyful alacrity.

Then, of course, there was Dupree. He was back to smiling again. Regret was perhaps the worst emotion one can have. Tie that with the shame of not lifting a finger as your wife was killed in front of you, and you’re living in an abyss of self-hate. I frankly didn’t see how he could live with himself. At least I’d tried to save the eleven men I’d lost in combat before the alien invasion, not to mention everything I’d done to try and save my recon mates at Kilimanjaro. I’d once heard a sergeant tell me,
The measure of a man is not how they react when times are good, but how they react in the face of an emergency.
It all comes down to fight, flight, or freeze, and I’d always chosen to fight.

The day was one of those Southern California fall days, with a bright blue sky that seemed to go on forever. It was somewhere near eighty degrees. The air was cleaner than I ever remembered it, probably because the four million residents weren’t stuck in vehicular Sargasso Seas on the 10, 405, and 5. It was the sort of day that would find me kayaking the Port of L.A. Harbor or biking in Rancho Palos Verdes; maybe finish it off with a cold beer and a few slices of pizza while looking down at the ocean.

Then I turned to Los Angeles and beheld the change the aliens had already wrought. The Twin Hives rose like daggers thrown through the heart of the once great city. For all of its disparagers, Los Angeles had been the cultural and social heartbeat of the world. No other city had as much effect on the hearts and minds of the citizens of Earth as Los Angeles. And all down to the electronic successor of the Stone Age campfire.

My eyes were drawn to the southern extremes of the horizon. Somewhere over there was the Vincent Thomas Bridge, where my journey with OMBRA began. I’d chosen that bridge to jump from because my favorite movie director had jumped from it.

Movies.

Television.

Hollywood.

Just when 3D movies and surround sound were the norm, it was all ripped away, replaced by a reality far uglier than even Tony Scott could have produced with his directorial genius.

Back at the Twin Hives, a black blanket of growth spread in all directions, all the way to El Monte and Montebello nearest the 605. The alien plant.

“What makes it black?” I mused.

“There are a couple of things that could contribute to that,” Dupree told me. “Black plants are extremely rare in the natural environment. They’ve demonstrated lower maximum CO2 assimilation rates, higher light saturation points, and higher quantum efficiencies of photosystem II than green plants—that’s the first protein complex in the light-dependent reactions of oxygenic photosynthesis.”

I think I almost understood what he said. Certainly enough to ask, “If they’re more efficient, then why aren’t there more black plants?”

“Black plants normally grow slower than green plants, which makes the rapid growth rate of this very interesting. I also wonder if it’s using oxygenic photosynthesis, or something else.”

“Whatever you said, it sounds bad.”

“Oh, it is. It means that the plant isn’t producing oxygen, but something else... something necessary for an alien species to exist... something that might be toxic to us.”

I shook my head. “I’m used to seeing a problem, then shooting it or blowing it up. We can rebuild our electric grid. We can make new toasters. But now they’re messing with the planet on a chemical level. How can we ever hope to deal with this—this terraforming?”

“I think once we find the interrelation between the various species being used to terraform, it will point to what we should expect from the master species that’s coordinating this. Like the Sirens and the Cray, this fungus was either engineered or curated. The Sirens reported; the Cray ruined our defenses. Now the fungus is causing the human race to turn on themselves.”

“And the plant?”

“It could have multiple functions, but the one that scares me the most is its ability to alter the oxygenation of the atmosphere.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go down there in order to find out.”

“Mother figured that’s what you’d want.” Sandi joined us, with Phil close behind. She pointed to where the route cut south, through Los Angeles all the way to Seal Beach. “I know you’ve been traveling at night, but it’s more dangerous then. We’ve gotten reports of infected animals, like those coyotes you killed last night, as well as infected persons.”

“Interesting,” Dupree said. “It could be caused by the pollination cycle of the plant. It could be nocturnal rather than diurnal.”

I’d never heard of night blooming plants. “Why would it bloom at night?”

“It would depend on the relationship with the pollinator. I suspect that whatever pollinates the flowers does so only at night. If so, it would explain why there is more activity then.”

“That’s not why we’re concerned about it being more dangerous at night,” Sandi said. When we turned to her, she explained. “We just can’t see the dangers at night. Between the fungees and the spikers, this fungus is spreading quickly. We’ve noted that they don’t attack each other, but will attack the uninfected.”

Dupree nodded. “That makes sense.”

I turned to look at him. Of course, he was grinning. “No, it doesn’t. It’s fucked up.”

He looked at me like one of my sergeants had when I’d said something stupid as a brand-new-doesn’t-know-shit private. Then he spoke. “It could be a variance in light absorption. Fungi react to light in various ways. Light has long been known to be a source of information as well as illumination. Light causes adaptation in metabolic pathways, but it can also cause the onset of reproduction. If the fungi were to somehow affect the optical acuity of the host, it could possibly tell which biological organisms are infected by the nature of light absorption.” He spread his hands. “Or not. Just a guess, I suppose.”

He turned to me. “We’re going to need environmental suits. We don’t want to be anywhere near these plants without one. I don’t know how far the fungus spores can travel.”

Sandi tapped me on the shoulder. “We have a shipping container full of them we lifted from a dive shop. They’re Viking HDS Dry Suits, which are hazmat rated. We also have oxygen tanks and an oxygen generator, so we can fill them if needed.”

Dupree and I exchanged glances.

“You all seem to have thought of everything,” I said.