The Fighter (24 page)

He
woke in the backseat of Stacey Jamison's Humvee, wedged between two giant
Einsteins. The Humvee—Stacey had painted
get your jam on at jammer's
on the side—jounced down a washboard road; silver maples arched their branches
overhead.

Stacey's
hands were clad in weightlifter's gloves; his shirt read
pray for war.

Twice
a month Stacey and his Cro-Magnon gym buddies engaged in paintball warfare.
"It's serious business," Stacey had told Paul before becoming
wistful. "They've outlawed it—outlawed
war.
There'll never be a Big Three,
Paul," he'd said desolately. "Not unless those ragheads get hold of a
few more 747s." Convinced it was nothing more than an exercise in tactical
grab-ass, Paul had accepted Stacey's invite out of curiosity.

They
pulled into an open field. Sport-utes and pickup trucks, Einsteins in camo
fatigues smearing lampblack on their faces. Late afternoon sunlight glittered
on patches of unmelted snow.

Stacey
popped the trunk and doled out ordnance. Paul got a paint- ball gun and a
faceshield. He realized he'd be easy to spot: his puffy white parka made him
look, as Stacey remarked, "like a faggot cloud drifted down to
earth."

They
divvied up into teams. Paul was selected second-to-last, one ahead of Pegs, an
Einstein so nicknamed because he'd lost his feet in a childhood combine
accident. Nobody liked to play with Pegs because the hinges of his prosthetics
creaked in chilly weather and betrayed his team's position.

The
squads made their way into a forest of maple, oak, and black locust. Stacey
captained Paul's team. "Fan out," he told them, "and keep your
heads on a swivel."

Paul
found a spot behind a rotted log. An air horn went off to start the match.
Seconds later paintballs were whizzing through the air all around him, slamming
into trees with pops and splats.

Paul
spied an Einstein blundering through the brush like a crazed boar. He took aim
and fired. A
phut
of compressed gas and his paint- ball curved through the air to splatter
harmlessly in a nettle thicket. He ducked as paintballs jack-hammered the log,
pok-pok-p-pok!
His jaw and chest muscles seized up—taking heavy fire!

Paul's
hopes that the Einstein would hump off in search of less elusive quarry were
dashed when he heard, "I got all day, goat-fucker! I smell your fear, and
it
fuels
me!"

Most
Einsteins spoke the same patois of intimidation and degradation. Paul tried to
imagine them at the supper table:
Pass the
margarine, Mom, you turkey-armed weakling; Dad, make with the salad or I'll
poke your eyeballs out with a toothpick and serve them to you in a nice dry
martini...

Paul
would settle for one-for-one. He wasn't Rambo; nobody expected him to mow down
an entire regiment. He jammed two fingers under his faceshield and wiped away
the condensation; then he jumped up, unleashed a primal scream, and charged the
Einstein.

He
squeezed off a few rounds before his visor exploded orange. Once he cleared the
paint away his heart took a giddy leap: he'd hit the Einstein. Not lethally—his
left foot. Had it been Pegs, he probably would've been allowed to play on. But
he was not, and since any hit counted, he was out.

"Flesh
wound!" the Einstein cried. "If this were a real war, I'd keep
fighting."

"So
would I," said Paul, tetchily.

"What,"
the Einstein wanted to know, "with a hole through your head? Wait a
sec—what team are you on?"

"The
Log Jammers." Stacey's brainchild.

The
Einstein hurled his facemask to the ground. "We're on the same team, you
retard! Killed by friendly
fucking
fire—I should rip your
face
off
and wear
it
as a mask!"

Paul
and the other KIAs assembled back in the field. A gasoline- stoked fire raged;
a boom box played "Hatchet to the Head" by Cannibal Corpse.
Slit open crushed eyeballs dripping hanging / A life of
beheading I must have.
Einsteins walked around shirtless, flexing, their chilled flesh marbled like
Kobe beef.

Paul
kept his shirt on. Stacey had him on Androl, Winstrol, and Human Growth
Hormone—a dog's breakfast that bloated him up like a dead cow. He sloshed like
a wineskin; he could bench-press two-fifty but looked like a walrus. With his
liver values out of whack, his skin had gone the color of dried lemon rind. The
HGH, concocted from the pituitary glands of cadavers—"The best stuff,"
Stacey told him, "comes from aborted third-trimester fetuses"—had
given him the swollen forehead and elongated jaw of those giant heads on Easter
Island. "Think of it as a cocoon," Stacey had told him. "You
puff up, look disgusting for a month, then I put you on Lasix to leach the
fluid out—a whole new you."

The
boom box kicked out "Skull Full of Maggots," "Sanded
Faceless," and "Fucked With a Knife," and by the time "I
Cum Blood" hit its final note the other players had made their way back.
The Einstein sought Stacey out and started bitching about Paul's gaffe.

"Is
this true?" Stacey asked. "You killed your own man?"

Paul
glared at the Einstein, who stood behind Stacey like a tattletale behind his
headmaster. "I didn't kill anyone. It's a game."

Stacey
bristled. "Shooting your own man is the most disgraceful act a soldier can
commit."

"Nail
on the head, Stace," the Einstein spat. "He's a fucking
disgrace."

"What
were you doing in front of me?" Paul asked.

"He
was probably running an end-around flanking pattern." When Stacey sought
confirmation on this, the Einstein gave him a "what else?" look.

Paul's
teeth clenched the length of his jaw; it felt as if someone had slapped a
jellyfish on his scalp, stinging, stinging. If the Einstein bitched once more,
Paul resolved to punch his nose down his throat.

The
players loaded up fresh paint and headed out for round two.

"Paul,"
Stacey said, "you take point."

Paul
had watched enough
Tour of Duty
to know that point was not
anywhere a soldier wanted to be. But he was sick of these over-muscled
jackasses and their war games; the prospect of getting killed early wasn't a
heartbreaker.

He
hunkered down behind a tree stump. The air horn sounded. Paul scanned the woods
for any sign of movement, keeping his eyes sighted down the gun barrel. He
spied a body crashing through the underbrush and opened fire. His target dodged
and wove; Paul cursed as his shots went wide or fell short. He managed to pin
him down behind a tree.

"I
got all day!" he cried out. "I can—"

A
paintball slammed into his head—the
back
of it, above the trim of fine
dark hair. His skull snapped forward like he'd been donkey-punched. He'd been
shot at point-blank range and expected to find the back of his head blown
apart: bone fragments, spattered brains. But his fingers came away clown's-nose
red: only paint.

He
turned and saw the Einstein he'd shot in the foot. The guy's body was locked in
an action-hero pose; C0
₂
smoke curled from his gun barrel.

"Mercy,"
was all he said.

A
flashpot went off inside Paul's braincase, a tiny superheated sun that scorched
the walls of bone; the light froze in thin sharp icicles that dangled,
luminous, from the roof of his skull.

He
clawed himself up and shot the Einstein. His gun went
phut:
a
bright Rorschach appeared over the Einstein's heart. The Einstein returned
fire. They were less than two feet apart.
Phut-phut-ph-
phut.
The air
was alive with twisting, curiously static strings of paint.

Paul
gripped his gun by the barrel and swung it at the Einstein's head. The C0
₂
canister struck his jaw and the guy went down in the sedge grass.

Paul
sat on his chest and rained blows. Fierce chopping punches, left-right,
left-right. Dark arterial red plastered the inside of the Einstein's
faceshield; red bubbled through the mask's airholes.

Left-right,
left-right. A fist cracked the faceshield: needles of red, pulped skin.
Left-right, left-right. Things crumpled and snapped and split and tore loose. A
shockingly bright ring spread across the grass. The Einstein wasn't moving; his
left leg twitched the way a sleeping dog's will. Paul's shoulders throbbed. His
fists dripped.

He
tore a bush from the ground. It came up easily, root system clumped with dirt.
He replanted it: now the bush appeared to be growing up out of the Einstein's
face.

Back
in the field Paul opened car doors until he found one with keys in the
ignition. His paint-splattered parka left carnival smears on the leather
interior. He gunned the engine and careened through the fire and scraped up the
side of Stacey's Humvee; sparks leapt through the open window. He lined up the
boom box and hit it dead center: it exploded in a spray of cheap plastic and a
woofer glanced off the windshield as he accelerated out of the field howling
like a banshee.

He
kept an eye on the rearview and even pulled over, idling at the roadside for a
minute. Nobody came after him.

Paul
dropped the vehicle at Jammer's, where he'd left his own car, and grabbed a
tire iron from the Micra's trunk.

The
gym was empty save for an old guy on a treadmill plodding along like a prisoner
on the Bataan death march. Paul took the tire iron to the locked drawer behind
the front desk. He filled his pockets with Deca, HGH, two 500-count jars of
Dianabol. He was amused to find that the drawer also held Polaroids of Stacey
in naked bodybuilding poses. He sported a boner in one shot: the thing looked
like a whippet's backbone. Paul emptied out his locker and departed Jammer's
for the last time.

Back
in the Micra he wiped his face with fast-food napkins; red paint was still
grimed into the creases at his eyes. He gobbled a handful of Dianabol and a
live-wire jolt thundered up his spine. His skin was yellow and tight and
infested with a bone-deep itch, as if his skeletal system were constructed of
pink fiberglass insulation.

He
drove down Geneva to Queenston then on to Glendale past a stretch of shipyards.
He got the little car up to eighty, sparks hopping off the muffler like flaming
crickets. Popping the cap off an HGH syrette and plunging it into the
hard-packed muscles of his trapezium, he wondered if he'd shot himself with
quality fetal brain tissue or run- of-the-mill cadaver.

Had
he killed that guy? The silly fucker who shot him—was he dead? Paul pictured
the Einstein on the frosty earth with that fucking shrub growing up out of his
face. Had he been breathing? Probably. Human organisms are tough and it's hard
for them to die. He tried to concentrate—had the guy's lungs been pumping, even
a little?—but the image dissolved, his mind unraveling in messy loops.

People
were jogging and dog-walking along the canal. He thought how easy it would be
to skip the curb, accelerate across the greenbelt, slam into one of them. He
pictured bodies crumpling over the hood or rupturing under the tires with red
goo spewing from mouths and ears and assholes; he saw smashed headlight glass
embedded in faces, saw windshield wipers flying at murderous velocity to sever
arms and legs.

He
was doing sixty-five when he wrenched the wheel and sent the Micra over the
curb. His skull hit the roof and the seatbelt cut into his porcine,
fluid-filled body.

His
target was riding one of those idiotic recumbent bicycles. He wore a shiny
metal-flake helmet, royal purple, like the paint job on a custom roadster. Paul
figured he'd hit him broadside and crush him against a dock pillar, or else
clip his wheel and launch him into the ice-cold sky, a flailing purple mortar
crashing through the canal ice. The Micra shimmy-shook as he gunned it over the
greenbelt; a tree branch tore the side-view mirror off. The cyclist caught
sight of the car barreling down and pumped his pedals as if to outrun it. Paul
had a hearty laugh—what bravado!