The War After Armageddon (47 page)

After that, the day wasn’t so bad. They weren’t ordered back to the burial detail. Instead, they were trucked down to the center of town—which was crummier than Rampart on Sunday morning—and the lieutenant told Garcia to distribute his platoon around the back of the plaza, to get up on the second or third deck of the buildings and keep an eye on the fiesta. Not that the rags were celebrating. At first, it was all men sitting down there, miserable as gangbangers caught in another gang’s hood. Garcia was down to two light squads, and he put Corporal Gallotti across the street above a couple of busted-out shops, while he put his own squad in buildings that faced north so the sun would never be in their eyes.

The day before had been ugly, with the company losing six men, including the captain. A bunch more had been sent to the rear, badly injured. The platoon’s mood toward the locals had been ugly
enough after that village girl did her thing with the grenades, but the crazy-ass bust-up with the demonstrators and snipers by the mass grave had pushed everybody to the edge. Maybe beyond it. His Marines regarded all the rags as the enemy now, and Garcia had to fight the feeling himself. Especially when he thought of Cropsey jumping on that grenade. He still couldn’t fit all the pieces of that together, and to keep himself under control he came down all the harder on any why-don’t-we-just-whack-’em-and-leave bullshit.

He prayed that the day would be quiet. They needed time to get themselves back together.

As always, he prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a last connection to his mother. But the Virgin was giving him a bad time. The tattoo on his forearm itched like crazy. By noon, when the water drop came around and the rags all popped out of the woodwork, with Army Rangers forcing them to line up and behave, Garcia had scratched the first bloody stripe above his wrist, across the Virgin’s feet. He started to worry that he’d picked up scabies or some shit like that while mixing it up with the rags.

The thought of it creeped him out.

Then Lieutenant Niedrig came by again, doing his checks but really just killing time. Garcia didn’t think much of the lieutenant, who didn’t seem crisp enough to be a Marine. He wasn’t sure that Niedrig would be able to control what remained of the company if things got bad again. Garcia figured he was on his own.

“There’s a GO in town,” Lieutenant Niedrig told him. “I heard it’s the corps commander. God only knows what he’s doing here. You need to get your Marines looking sharp, Sergeant Garcia.”

Yeah, with what? With all their rucks missing in the back of some truck that took off when the shooting started up on the hill. Probably gone forever. And every man left in the platoon filthy and bloody and stinking like a Guatemalan’s asshole.

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

“We don’t want the general to think Marines can’t keep themselves looking as sharp as those Army Rangers out there.”

“No, sir. Sir, you were saying something about nuke use this morning. Any more details?”

“The Jihadis hit the MOBIC attack pretty hard. So I’m told. I did see a couple of them headed through town the wrong way. No question about the nukes, though. I can’t believe you slept through it. They weren’t just firecrackers. The buildings were shaking.”

“I guess I was pretty tired, sir.”

“Well, don’t worry. I don’t think the Jihadis will nuke Nazareth, their own people.”

“I wasn’t worried, sir.”

The lieutenant went off to bother somebody else. When he was gone, one of the Marines mimicked him, but Garcia told him to knock it off.

“Hey, you think there’s any chance of us getting out of this shit-hole anytime soon, Sergeant Garcia?”

“You hear the lieutenant say anything about that? You heard everything I heard. Now, keep your eyes out that window like I told you. Scan for snipers. Anybody suspicious.”

“They all look suspicious.”

“You clean that rifle this morning?”

“Yes, Sergeant Garcia.”

“Well, clean it again when Pacheco gets back.”

Garcia moved on to the adjoining building, passing through a hot, still slice of the day and fending off two kids, lazy as dying flies, begging for candy like they really didn’t give a shit.

The next building’s construction was better, the walls thicker, and it was nice and cool up on the second deck.

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” he told the members of the fire team. “It sucks out there. This is the lap of luxury.”

“Heard anything about chow, Sergeant Garcia?”

“Probably later. After the Army gets the rags squared away.”

“I bet
they’re
eating right now. The Army takes care of its own.”

“Yeah? Look out that window. Like you’re supposed to. And tell me how many of those grunts you see chowing down. They’re sucking it up. And you can suck it up. And I’ll be sure to let you know when the burrito special of the day’s posted. You clean that weapon this morning?”

The building had a good diagonal view across the plaza, better
than the one next door. Before moving on to inspect Gallotti’s squad, Garcia sidled up to a window that hadn’t been claimed and looked out over the crowd. The rags looked pathetic. Dirty and whipped. He could get angry enough to kill them, but he’d found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t keep up a steady hatred toward them. They were born losers. And you could waste only so much wattage on losers.

As he watched the crowd, a break in the long, curving line showed him that the pallets of water dropped off that morning were gone. The Army grunts on distro were pulling the last bottles from nowhere.

Garcia wondered if the scene was going to get ugly when the rags figured out that there wasn’t no more where that came from.

He thought he spotted the general the lieutenant had warned him about. Across the plaza, up past the head of the line, talking to a soldier with the posture of a drill instructor. As Garcia watched, the soldier who was not a general took off his helmet, wiped down his face and the webbing inside the headgear, then put the helmet back on. Crisp as a saltine cracker. Yeah, the guy had been a hat. Officers never got it that perfect. Garcia wanted, badly, to be a DI. Next tour, if possible.

Right now, though, he pictured little bugs drilling into his arm and roaming around. You’re imagining shit, man, he told himself. But he pushed up his left sleeve and started scratching at the tattoo again. Once he started, it was hard to stop. He decided that, after checking up on Gallotti’s squad, he’d walk over and talk to the company’s last surviving corpsman. See if he had some lotion or something.

Suddenly furious at himself, Garcia stopped scratching. He looked up from the inflamed Virgin and yanked his sleeve back down. Then he picked up his carbine and scanned the scene down in the plaza. To make sure he was good to go to the next location, that everything was straight.

He spotted the general and the had-to-be-an NCO making their way along the line of rags waiting for water. As he watched, a man stepped from the crowd and threw himself at the general.

The explosion that chased the flash seemed huge, its noise trapped between the buildings crowding the plaza. Next came the screams. And burning freaks running out of the smoke. Followed by shots. Not the sound of friendly weapons.

Another bomb exploded on the other side of the road, near the water point. His own kind were shooting back now. In the next room, a machine gun opened up, sweeping the crowd.

“Cease fire!” Garcia yelled. “Cease fire!” He ran into the room, yelling, “What the fuck are you shooting at? Cease fire!”

He had to wrench the weapon, its barrel already hot, from the private wielding it. His buddy watched. With murder in his eyes.

“What do you think you’re doing? Who told you to open fire?”

“They started it.”

“You ever heard of fire discipline, Keogh? You see any clear targets out there? They’re fucking civilians, man.”

“Like that bitch who got Larsen and Cropsey?”

Garcia shook his head. Furious at the insolence. On the verge of throwing a punch. Holding himself back only by using the kind of discipline that had saved his ass on the streets of East L.A.

Firing erupted from another room.

“You,”
he told the private. He shifted his attention briefly to the man’s buddy. “And you. Just stay here. Stay at your posts. And you don’t shoot again unless you have a clear, no-bullshit target with a weapon in his hand. Do you understand me?”

The machine gunner looked at him sullenly and said nothing. The other Marine looked away.

Garcia still wanted to throw a punch. Instead, he ran to the next room and repeated the scene. With a screaming, crying world in the background. Pierced with gunfire.

“We don’t shoot women and children,” Garcia yelled. “You understand me?”

They stopped firing. But it just felt like a pause. They
didn’t
understand anymore. Garcia got it. In his guts. It had all gone too far. Too many Marines had gone down ugly.

No excuse, sir.
Leaders didn’t quit. Ricky Garcia didn’t quit.

He poked his head back into the room where the machine gunner
and his buddy stood at the windows. Vigilant. And mean. Just waiting for an excuse. Garcia didn’t say anything this time. He just wanted to let them know he was paying attention. And he took off to see if Corporal Gallotti was doing okay. Pounding down the steps, beating his anger into the dirty concrete.

The odd thing was that his mother was with him now, looking out for him. He realized what the dream had been about. His mother didn’t want him to kill kids and shit. Or people like her. That wasn’t what she wanted at all. She had come to let him know it was all right.

Before Garcia reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the machine gun open fire again.

How could I know these things? I didn’t know all of them, of course. Some had to be imagined. But I saw much myself. I am John Willing, former aide-de-camp to Lieutenant General Gary “Flintlock” Harris and the man who betrayed him. I was the one who reported all of his actions, plans, and weaknesses to General of the Order Montfort’s agents. I believed that I was a hero, doing the Lord’s work. I did my duty as an officer secretly enlisted in the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ.

I have long wondered if General Harris suspected me toward the end.

I was rewarded. For a time. I ended my career as a black-cross col o nel. Despite my good services, I had suffered too much contact with General Harris and his acolytes to be trusted with a higher rank. When I took off my uniform, I applied for a teaching position, for the young have always been dear to me. I then learned that I was not to be trusted with the education of our Christian youth. I had been contaminated by association. So I took a secondary degree in
accounting, a discipline that offered no chance of my being put down as a heretic. I kept good books. As the years went by, I consoled myself that there would be a great accounting one day.

Of course, I was far luckier than the others who had contact with General Harris. Even before III Corps redeployed to the United States, all of its officers who held the rank of col o nel or higher were taken into custody. “For their own protection,” the newspapers reported. We were assured that the good Christian people of America wanted to lynch them for their treason. One lieutenant col o nel, Patrick Cavanaugh, was also arrested. He was charged with the premeditated murder of a Christian Heritage Advance Rescue Team in Nazareth.

The old U.S. Disciplinary Barracks on Ft. Leavenworth were reopened to receive the III Corps officers. Before any of the detainees could be absolved or reeducated, an accidental fire swept the prison. The system of electronic locks short-circuited. None of the quarantined officers could be saved.

Later, their names were erased from the chronicle of the Holy War, along with any mention of III Corps, the U.S. Army, or the Marines.

General Harris’s wife, Sarah, proved to be an unreasonable woman, a menace to herself. She refused to stop making public allegations that her husband had been the victim of a plot. She had to be institutionalized. For her own good. It is said that General Mont-fort, an old acquaintance, visited her in the asylum out of Christian charity. To their enduring regret, the doctors charged with her reha-biliation made no progress, and she died, still in restraints, a few years ago. So rumor has it.

Rumor also holds that her surviving daughter became an alcoholic and an immoral woman. But no one can testify to the truth of it, nor is she known to be alive and among us.

General of the Order Montfort fared better. The hero of the first stage of the Holy War, he was chosen by President Gui to serve as his vice president and Generalissimo of the Order. Thus began a long and fruitful age, we are assured, with President Montfort succeeding President Gui when the latter’s final term ended—although
our Great Prophet continued to assist President Montfort with guidance until the prophet’s soul soared upward. In a state of grace, our Christian Congress acceded to the public’s demand that the Constitution be amended to allow President Montfort to serve an unlimited number of terms in office, with future elections to be held in church, on Sunday, by a show of hands. It was only last April, during his fifteenth year as president in Christ, that the Lord called the Dear Prophet home. We are told that he passed over in perfect peace while reading Scripture. And yet, he did not reach the four score years and ten predicted for him.