The enormity of her plans made me sit. I rested my back against the bulkhead, trying to absorb what we had just learned. Margaret said something to me but the words didn’t penetrate my thoughts, which now swam in a sea of possibilities, its current flowing around us as the scout car crawled southward to bring us closer to whatever Yoon-sung had planned. Dealing with the North Koreans in the
forward scout cars wasn’t the issue, and eliminating that threat would be simple. I worked it out in less than a minute. The Chinese forces were the thing to worry about and there was no choice but to assume that what Yoon-sung had said, that they would take Margaret at the North Korean border, was true. There was something to admire in the scheme. This was a plan that should have worked, except that the North Koreans failed to consider our abilities to calculate and form our own plans, and I supposed that Yoon-sung had made a mistake, thought Margaret the greater threat and that I really
was
insane—incapable of sound judgment. The spoiling, in a way, had saved us both. But there was one variable I couldn’t define, and it brought back the memory of the general, the one who had winked before stopping Alderson’s experiments. Who would have paid for information about
me
? And would Americans be waiting in North Korea?
I glanced up at Margaret. “I need to know how far behind the train is; can you see it?”
Margaret punched at the small computer beside her and then looked down. “I can’t see it through the trees. But it’s about four kilometers to our rear.”
“Get down here into the driver’s seat and slow to ten kilometers an hour.”
Margaret moved quickly, not even pausing at the sight of Yoon-sung’s body, and she moved the corpse out of the way, folding down the driver’s seat. As soon as the car started to slow, I clicked into the general frequency before I remembered one problem.
“Wait, lock the car into auto.” When she had, I pulled Margaret’s hood over her head, making sure the headset speakers were on her ears. “I forgot I don’t speak Korean.
Tell everyone we have a problem with defensive systems, and that they should slow down to our speed. But tell them we don’t need help; Yoon-sung is climbing out to fix it.”
She did, and then slipped the headset off to look at me. “What are we doing?” she asked.
“Getting rid of this bitch.”
Half an hour later the lights of the train came into view, about a hundred meters behind us, before it slowed to match our pace. I opened the top hatch and got out. The wind, even at ten kilometers an hour, surprised me, almost knocking me from my feet; I waved through the hatch to Margaret. She passed me Yoon-sung’s body, feet first, and it took a minute for us to angle the corpse and get it through the narrow hole, but once it came free I leaned over and yelled down.
“Clean the inside. Use whatever you can find and get rid of all the blood. It doesn’t have to be spotless, just enough so people won’t see it if they glance in.”
By now Yoon-sung had stopped bleeding, and I thanked God that we wouldn’t also have to clean the outside once I’d pushed her off. The body thudded to the tracks, rolling. Now that it was over I breathed again and sat, cross-legged, waiting for what would happen next—the distant sound of a train whistle and screech of brakes. I dropped back into the car, finding the driver’s area still a mess.
“Aren’t you cleaning it?” I asked.
“With what?”
The humor of the situation got to both of us and we laughed, deciding in the end to let the cleanup go since if anyone was so suspicious that they had to look inside it wouldn’t matter anyway; it was more important to clean the blood off our armor.
“What will you tell everyone?” Margaret asked.
“That Yoon-sung was outside dealing with a weapons problem when she slipped and fell. She was exhausted. We would have stopped the car but we never even knew it had happened, which reminds me.” I pointed to her vision hood, which Margaret had taken off while trying to clean. “You should put that back on, the train engineers are probably panicking and telling everyone to stop; after all, they just ran over the Minster of Public Security.”
“What if someone figures it out?”
I shook my head. “I’m not worried about that. I’m more worried about what happens after we stop and whether or not you have the strength. We can’t go on unless we kill them all, take fuel cells and food, and then strike out on our own. Just do everything I tell you and we’ll make it.”
All the forward scout cars reversed to return to the train. Margaret and I watched as the Koreans leapt from their cars and into the night, joining four engineers to pull pieces of Yoon-sung from under the train as two held flashlights. I told Margaret to stay in the turret. Her gun would be trained on the armed Koreans, never leaving, a death that none of them suspected existed yet, and which would soon take everything. They didn’t deserve it, I thought. But they didn’t
not
deserve it either, and none of their screams or pleas would affect me, not like General Kim’s, because now I was a believer—a convert to a faith already professed but maybe never believed, a faith that had
already
written the fate of these men and women for whom there should be no pity because they had chosen their path so long ago. Death to them. I was a tool of God.
If their children had been there I would have ordered Margaret to slaughter them as well, and this time their spirits would have found my soul intact, impregnable to their efforts to haunt me because the answer had been there all along and just needed to be recognized. I did that with General Kim. He was my best friend, and only his and Megan’s ghost would now enter my thoughts—if I let them—because General Kim had showed me the way and allowed me to finally overcome the one thing that had threatened to force me from my path: spoiling. Already my tranq tab dose was half of what it had been. Soon I would leave the remaining doses to Margaret with a prayer, that she would find the same peace I had.
That
was the point of this journey. It hadn’t been to escape or to find freedom; it had been to show me the meaning of it all, a meaning that couldn’t be seen from the rear, but only from the front and only then after a certain amount of ground had been captured and you could look back at the journey, understand every thread of its tapestry. For that I pitied the Koreans about to die, for their ignorance, not for their imminent death. They just didn’t
see
.
The ballast crunched under foot as I moved toward the group of Koreans with my Maxwell, and they all began speaking, asking me questions, but I didn’t stop and instead marched past until I had moved beyond the last of them, the ones who had come forward from the repair vehicles at the train’s rear. Someone called out in Korean.
“They’re asking you to come back and explain what happened,” Margaret said over the radio.
“Shoot them all now. Grenades and flechettes.”
Margaret sounded shocked. “What? What if there are still some in the scout cars?”
“They all left the cars, I counted, and these nonbred chose their own fate. Kill them with faith and make sure to let none escape; don’t let anyone past you. Do it now.”
The thudding of her grenade launcher opened up, followed by explosions and the snaps of her flechettes; I fell to the ground as I spun, firing into the thick of the Koreans and swinging left and right. One of them ran toward me. She was screaming and I centered my reticle on her head, ending her approach quickly. Once they had all fallen I stood again, sprinting toward the train’s rear.
“Keep your aim on them. If any move, kill them.”
“Where are you going?” Margaret asked.
My breath was short, and I didn’t answer right away. “To the support vehicles, to make sure none remain to radio out.”
It took five minutes to run the entire distance, and my sprinting soon reduced to a jog. There were ten support vehicles. Two Koreans had gathered to smoke, looking up when they heard me approach, and both died before they realized what was happening. Ten minutes later I had searched the tractors and cranes, and began working my way back to the train’s engines. Margaret hadn’t moved.
“Nothing,” she said. “They’re still down.”
“Let’s make sure.” Grenades and flechettes had torn apart the Koreans, shattered their helmets and armor, but I ignored the evidence and pulled my pistol, firing twice into each head and changing clips twice before it ended. The train’s engines were empty.
“Almost finished here,” I said.
“What next?”
“Watch. Cover me.”
All of the scout cars to our front had returned and sat
close to each other, almost bumper to bumper, their guns hanging down toward the ground. I pulled myself up on the first. Its hatch was open and I sprayed into it, firing three bursts before moving down the line and repeating the procedure until I was confident that nobody living remained.
“Come out,” I said to Margaret. “It’s time to get ready.”
She climbed out and leapt from vehicle to vehicle until she stood next to me. “What do we do now?”
“Move our scout car to the very rear and send the train, the sniffers, and the scout cars south ahead of us to the border where we’re expected; everything is already automated; all we have to do is activate control from our car. We can leave the support vehicles here. If any fighting breaks out, we’ll leave the tracks and find a way through. In the meantime we transfer all the ammunition, fuel cells, and alcohol that we can to our car.”
“How long do we have?”
“We’ll work for twenty minutes and then go, we’ve already delayed our arrival to the point where they might be suspicious.”
While we worked the night grew colder. The moon set and my muscles started aching as we transferred belts of grenades and hoppers full of flechettes, moving back and forth from the other vehicles to ours. We found drums of alcohol in one of the support cars and rolled them up the tracks before decanting fuel into all the jerry cans we could, which we then clipped to the sides of our car, along with fuel cell-filled duffels. My motion detector went off. Almost finished, Margaret and I fell to the ground, pointing Maxwells in the direction of the movement, but it was just a wolf, alone at the edge of the trees who watched us with curiosity. I was about to fire. But something held my
finger and I grinned at the thing, saying a quick prayer that he would find something on his hunt. We were ready.
“This won’t be easy,” said Margaret.
“How do you know?”
“If we lose the car, there’s no way we’ll move through North Korea without getting a fatal dose.”
I grinned and slapped her on the shoulder before climbing onto the car. “Everything kills. Time is killing us right now.”
“I’ve always avoided the spoiling,” said Margaret. “But not anymore. I started having nightmares, which bleed over into the day, and the fear won’t leave me.”
Margaret’s foot slipped as she climbed up. I grabbed her shoulder, pulling until she stood on the car. We dropped through the hatch. After we had linked up with the vehicle and powered up, the engine thrummed in front of us, making the floor vibrate with what felt like promise and energy, so that I grinned, not caring anymore if things worked as planned or not, only a little sad with the fact that Margaret hadn’t seen it yet, didn’t understand enough to leave terror behind. For a moment it felt like it had at the beginning; I wished for more Koreans to kill, having been granted another chance to function the way I had been designed, but then decided that, as harder targets, the Chinese would be even better.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Spoiling is from within, it’s part of growing into what you should have been all along, a curious defect that, in order to fix, you have to experience. Enjoy the hallucinations.”
Margaret smiled while I wriggled up into my turret seat, her finger poised over a button, the one that would set everything in motion. I closed my eyes.
“Do it. At forty kilometers an hour we should be at the border in less than twelve hours.”
“What was it like?” Margaret asked.
The view-screen captured my attention for the moment and I wanted to pop my helmet. Outside, to the left of the tracks, the ocean pounded against the shore as a storm flickered lightning far out to sea, and the camera’s lens fogged every once in a while until systems kicked in to remove the haze. There was a quality to the ocean that made it call out. If you swam into it, tasting the salt no matter how tightly you closed your mouth, there was a hope there, a chance to swim under the waves and keep swimming down into darkness where an infinite number of things might be possible. Up here there were only two possibilities: either we’d make it or not.
We were just north of Lebedinoye and the trickiest part of our journey was about to begin. Margaret would soon have to stop our car, lower the wheels, and take us onto the road. It ran parallel to the tracks and would eventually bring us to the same place as the rail, to the border crossing, so if we timed it correctly we would arrive at the exact instant, just as the Chinese opened fire upon the lead scout cars that refused orders to stop. I looked at her. Margaret had her back to me, both knees drawn up to her chest, barely fitting in the driver’s alcove.
“What was what like?”
“Fighting,” she said. “For two solid years.”
“You’ve never asked about it before, why now?”
Margaret tapped her helmet against the bulkhead and I knew what she was doing. With a flick of her head, she
had just taken another tranq tab. “I could go out like this,” she said, “if it weren’t for biochemistry. Enough tranq and nothing happens, but too much and automatically my body metabolizes the stuff, neutralizing it so it won’t damage my organs or cause my heart to stop. I can’t even kill myself in the good ways.”