The girl smiled. “I want to live.”
“That’s going to be a problem.”
“I’m unarmed. In Turkmenistan. Look.”
She raised both hands. One was a stump that dripped blood and the skin above it had turned a deep black, boiling with infection and rot, and her one remaining hand didn’t look much better. The girl’s left eye had gone completely white and she must have flipped because she started toward me, a rotting zombie of a genetic, all of about eighteen.
“Are you here from God?”
I backed toward the entrance, centering my targeting reticle on her forehead. “Shut up. Where have you been and who helped you escape? Kristen, record this.”
“Are
you
God?”
“You’re hallucinating,” I said. “It’s the spoiling. Your mind and body are breaking down, consuming themselves because you’ve reached the end of your shelf life.
Try to keep it together. I need you to answer a couple of questions and it will all be over.”
“People don’t have shelf lives.”
“You aren’t people. We created you,
people
made you.”
“Are you God?”
“Who helped you escape?”
I screamed it, knowing that in a second she’d go for me, and when she took another step closer I decided to get it over with. The flechettes cracked through her skull and she dropped into the sewage, face first, making it easy for me to dig the tracking device from her neck. Kristen chimed when I scanned it.
“Unit one-three-two, seven-four-nine. Jennifer. Terminated post schedule. Transmitting.”
I hiked back outside, letting the scum slide down my legs, hoping it would dry quickly and dreading the smell that would hit once I took off my helmet.
The sun started to set on the horizon and from the tank farm I had a good view of it, over the Caspian so that I rested my back against a block of concrete, lay my carbine across my legs, and began to peel off my helmet—not even caring when the stink assaulted me. As soon as I lit the first cigarette, it all melted away. The mission was over. From there I’d motor across the sea into Armenia, then board transport back to the States until I got the next call, Wheezer and me grinning at each other as we ran across some tarmack and onto a waiting transport. Missions were the only reason to live, the only things worth doing, and Wheezer was a good partner to have.
It wasn’t clear how I’d make it, having to wait for the next one, because I’d been home only once in the last three years. And home didn’t work for me anymore.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?” the kitchen asked. Its computer sounded arrogant, made me want to put a fist through the wall and find its circuits, rip them out one by one to taunt the thing and let it know that the end was near. “Egg yolks contain harmful cholesterol. Medical records indicate a thirty-percent chance that your arteries could become dangerously obstructed within the next ten years.”
I shut off the voice function and sighed.
Home
. Beatrice had relocated to one of the reclamation sites, a frontier city in the west, the region hardest hit by the years of war and famine, an old city that the government was trying to repopulate. It was a second front of sorts. Fighting for peace meant fighting against nature and the after effects of nuclear war, and someone in the government thought that by plopping down a few thousand people to stake its claim that maybe things would take care of themselves. It had been three weeks since I’d first returned and already I was sliding down into my thoughts, drowning, so that when the call came at 3 a.m. I nearly laughed out loud, but that would have woken her and the kid and I didn’t want her to see me so happy—relieved that I’d be heading back out on a new mission.
You could cross our apartment in ten steps, and it had a tiny kitchen plastered with advertisements for the marvels of self-contained living—like the one above the sink, a sticker declaring that the Government Omni-Unit was smaller, more efficient and less expensive to install than other modular brands. I rinsed the measuring cup. The moisture collectors came to life, humming
like trapped hornets to remind me that in the West life existed on a knife’s edge, where re-use wasn’t just a slogan but something that could mean the difference between having enough water or not. I unbuttoned my uniform tunic and smoothed it over a chair, to make sure that I didn’t get it dirty while cooking, then I shivered, not wanting to think about water, and switched the voice back on.
“… and the use of butter for cooking is ill advised both from health and rationing perspectives. Your allotment for the month is almost gone, Sergeant Resnick.”
“I know!”
Half an hour later, the alarms went off in both racks. Phillip emerged first. He bounced out of his bed as I watched, and like a kid, the boy didn’t bother to say anything before he plopped in front of the holo station, where he swayed back and forth and ran both hands through the projections.
“Use less, want less,” he sang with a commercial. “Less waste means more for space. Opportunity is what we make of it!”
“Good morning, Master Phillip,” the kitchen said. “Today’s a big day for your father.”
I stiffened at the reminder, wondering if Phillip would know it meant I’d be leaving, and I watched Beatrice pull herself out of bed.
“Jesus.” She moved to the side and waited for the master-rack to retract into its wall. “I’m still exhausted. You’re up early.”
“I got the call last night. Deployment in an hour.”
“So that’s it.”
I flipped the last omelet, and lowered the heat on the
stove. “That’s it. You and the kid need money, Bea. It’s the only job I know.”
She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “We moved here last year. I had to lie and tell them that it was for patriotic reasons, wanting to reclaim the West, all that kind of bullshit. Really it was because they pay a hardship stipend, extra money because of the radiation danger, and what you give us isn’t enough. Not nearly.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that I don’t really care if you stay or not. I just want to know why you do it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why go out and kill like you do? Why take all those risks? It would be nice to know, so that when you’re dead and Phillip starts asking questions I can tell him why.”
It was hard to even think; an empty bottle of bourbon rested on the counter beside me, and I marveled at the fact that so little had already muddled my brain. It never used to work that fast.
“It’s good,” I said, “that you came down here. To help. Even if it was for the money, you’re still helping to make sure that we head in another direction, that we don’t go back to worse times.”
Phillip turned from the holo, just for a moment, to look at me while quoting another line. “We don’t want to go back to those days!”
“So you’re not going to answer my question,” Beatrice said.
“I don’t know why you’re complaining. Wheezer called earlier. Both he and Michelle went to Canada for vacation, and things are better up there, the whole corridor from Pennsylvania to Chicago filled with industries
gearing up to process the metals we brought back from Kaz. Tell him that’s why I do it. That’s why I kill. And those factories will be ready once metals start coming in from space, once they get an engine that can handle mining missions.”
“Have you gotten your things together?” she asked.
“Stop trying to change the subject.”
“I’m not trying to change the subject!”
Phillip froze at the holo station and I could tell he was too scared to turn around. What did I feel? My mind spun in circles, looking for something that it knew should be there, some feeling of concern for the kid, maybe even a little for Beatrice, but either it wasn’t there or it had been buried so deep that I couldn’t find it anymore. I didn’t feel
anything
, nothing except the bourbon and some relief—that soon I’d be gone.
“Voice-pattern recognition,” the kitchen said, “indicates a sixty-seven percent probability of an impending domestic disturbance. Shall I notify authorities, Mrs. Resnick?”
I glared at the speaker. You could turn it off again, but that wouldn’t deactivate the apartment’s audio pickups. Nothing could shut down those and even if you wanted to deactivate them, you wouldn’t know where they all were; it was part of the new national security program. Right after the war I’d found a microphone under our rack but the entire unit was probably wired because that’s how it was supposed to work and I’d never find them all. They trusted me with a lot, but that trust only went so far. The military had already dealt with enough veterans who had gone psycho and killed their families, or who had simply put a bullet in their own brains, so the idea was that close monitoring could nip things in the bud. Of course, nobody
in DC had to worry about monitoring. The land of politicians would be safe from everything, and the last thing the government wanted was to spy on itself.
“No,” she said. “No need for the authorities.”
I grabbed my tunic, buttoned it, and then lowered the omelet to the table in front of her. “I have to go. I can’t be late for pickup.”
It was best just to leave without saying anything else, so I headed for the door, stumbling a little and catching myself on the wall when Phillip asked where I was going.
“He’s going to work,” said Bea.
I paused, thinking about turning around and giving him a hug, but it wouldn’t do any good, wouldn’t change anything. “Bye, kid.”
“Sergeant Resnick,” said the kitchen, “Your family is so proud of you!”
In the hallway, I broke into a sweat. The sun had risen and as I trudged down the stairwell, wind threatened to open rattling doors that lined each side of the corridor. I tried to avoid the dwellings, which were vacant except for lingering ghosts. Unit after unit went by, their name placards either covered with grit or swinging on one fastener, and I couldn’t help but read the names in passing, Eleanor, Gillespi, Capozzi, and O’Leary, names that meant nothing to me in terms of personal knowledge, but which hung on my shoulders because I was a soldier and so they blamed me for their deaths; each one was an additional weight, lead bricks that couldn’t be jettisoned until I burst onto the street, gasping for air.
Bea’s building was identical to the blocks of housing units that stretched for miles in either direction, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t remembered what they
looked like, despite having walked in and out every day for the past weeks, and yet for some reason they were as unfamiliar now as when I’d first arrived. Concrete and narrow windows formed a never-ending series of bunkers, and empty pigeons’ nests tucked into broken sashes fluttered, as if announcing that even birds didn’t want to live there anymore. Abandoned. This was Dhzanga again. I lowered myself to the curb and shook, cursing myself for having shown up too early for pickup because now all I could do was wait—think about what was going to happen—and do my best not to find a bar.
“You’re approximately twenty minutes early for the crawler, Sergeant Resnick.” The voice echoed in the empty street, from speakers mounted on tall poles next to cameras.
“I know.”
“It’s good to be eager.”
“How would you know?”
But the government system didn’t have an answer for that one. I lit a cigarette and blew it toward the camera.
A few minutes later it spoke again, almost at the same time the sky darkened; I looked up to see clouds of red dust on the horizon, boiling in. “Looks like the first sand storm of the season.”
“I’d say so.”
“Don’t count on it, though, Sergeant Resnick. The wind might die after all. To remain occupied I often incorporate data from stations all over the nation and make local weather predictions, which I then compare to those of dedicated semiaware weather modeling systems. Did you know that my answers are the same as theirs, within error?”
“No,” I said, wishing I could deactivate the voice on the street or somehow choke it into submission. “I suppose not.”
“My operators encourage this, as a redundancy. Weather modeling is a key to re-establishment in abandoned zones, and once successful in changing things for the better, we don’t want to go back to those days.”
“Were you around in those days?” I asked.
The thing had to think for a second. “No.”
“Then how do you know it was as bad as they say it was, and that going back would be bad?”
But again it had no answer and I grinned.
“Thought so.”
The dust storm, I figured, would hit any minute, and I watched it approach—a wall of sand that looked as high as the buildings themselves—and it threatened to force me back inside, to wait with Bea and Phillip. But something was speeding at the front of it. A speck of black grew into the shape of a crawler, its high-speed tracks kicking up twin fountains of sand as it headed toward me. It squealed to a stop, the rear hatch lowered, and a corporal hopped out, speaking at the same time he waved a hand-scanner over my wrist tattoo.
“Sergeant Resnick?”
“Yeah.”
“I carry priority orders from SOCOM. You’re to report with me to Phoenix terminal for transport and assignment.”
“Where am I headed?”
“I don’t have that information, Sarge.”