So many fléchettes hit the box beside me that the wood disintegrated and grenades rolled to the floor. I tried to pick one up with my right hand and could not close my fingers around it. I picked it up with my left and realized I would need my injured right hand to pull the pin.
“Are you hit?” Thomer asked.
“My arm,” I said. The slurred voice in my helmet did not sound familiar to me. It sounded as if it came from a drunk man.
Bringing myself up in a sitting position, I slumped across the ledge overlooking the ramp to the next floor down. There was a ten-foot drop. I managed to thread my right pointer finger through the loop of the grenade pin, and held my right arm steady as I pulled the grenade away with my left hand. As the pin broke free, I saw men in glowing, shielded armor coming around the corner. The bastards looked like angels in the darkness. My head filled with mist and cobwebs, I bowled the grenade in their direction.
The bastards fired back at me. Fléchettes hit the rail around me, glancing off the metal in a dance of sparks and chips. One dart struck me in the leg as I swung it under the rail and rolled over the ledge. The grenade exploded. I did not see what it did to the bastards. I dropped ten feet to the concrete below, landing on my back.
I felt pain. My thoughts were disjointed. The fall must have knocked the air out of my lungs. I had to fight to breathe. My chest felt crushed.
“You’re not the toughest man in the Marines, just the luckiest,” Ava had told me the last time that I saw her. I did not feel so lucky now. When I tried to get up, my body ignored me.
I kept expecting the combat reflex to revive me, but it didn’t. I felt cold and powerless, the weight of my body holding me down. Wondering if it was shock or radiation, I managed to roll onto my left side. I tried to push myself up with no success.
The world seemed to have left me behind. I thought I heard men fighting all around me, but the gunfire and explosions seemed far away. I reminded myself that I was in a garage, but my thoughts had become a slippery stream of images that never quite came into focus.
“I’ve got you, Harris,” somebody said. Whoever had grabbed me did not give me a chance to stand up on my own. He pulled me along the ground first, and then threw me in the air.
I could feel knots twisting in my stomach. I was upside down, the blood rushing to my head.
“Harris, I’m getting you out,” the voice said. A virtual dog tag showed in my visor, but I could not focus my eyes sufficiently to read it.
Slung over the man’s shoulder, I could barely breathe. My head cleared for a moment, then I vomited. You can drown in your own vomit, I thought. Warm liquid ran into my nostrils and into my eyes.
I tried to remove my helmet, but my arms would not cooperate. They hung like ropes as I wrestled with the acrid-sawdust taste of bile in my throat.
The man carrying me came to a stop. Moving slowly, he lowered me onto my back. A moment later, my helmet came off. I tried to stand up, but my body ignored me. The world was dark and cold around me. Nobody spoke.
The last thing I remembered was an explosion, a thunderous, pulverizing sound followed by a rush of smoke and grit that choked out the last of my breath.
“Did we get them?” I asked.
Nobody answered, as the remaining shreds of my consciousness spun into nothing.
EPILOGUE
GHOSTS, GRAVES, AND DISHONOR
1
I had always prided myself on walking away from battles on the same legs that brought me in. That time, it didn’t happen.
I was already on the mend by the time I woke from an induced coma. A civilian doctor had me make a fist and curl my toes. He poked my fingers with pins and asked me if I could feel the pressure. I assured him I could.
My head hurt. From the moment I opened my eyes, it felt like someone had tried to split my skull in two with an ax.
“You, General Harris, are the pinnacle of genetic engineering. No human could have survived what you went through.”
I wanted water. I was hungry, my head ached, my entire body ached, I felt weak and dizzy and unhappy; but above all, I wanted water. “Can I have some water?” I asked, my voice a gravelly croak.
“Not just yet, General,” the doctor said. I heard the man and saw his blurry silhouette, but I could not get my eyes to focus. The light from the window made my head hurt all the more.
“We still have tests to run now that you are awake.” He sounded young and peppy, excited to run tests on a new patient who should already be dead.
As my head cleared, I became aware of the slings holding my arms and the tubes poking into my flesh. Someone had elevated the back of my bed so that it kept my head raised higher than my feet.
“I was shot,” I said.
The doctor corrected me. “You were shot five times.”
“I got hit in the arm,” I said.
“Two shots pierced your right arm, and three pierced your legs. The darts went right through.”
That accounted for why I was in the hospital, but it did not explain why I felt so sick. Maybe if I took one to the kidney. Something was wrong with me. Then I remembered that the fléchettes were made of uranium. “Am I hot?” I asked.
“You have a fever, but that’s expected after a full blood transfusion. Fortunately, finding blood supplies wasn’t a problem. You have the same blood type as every man in your command.”
“Am I radioactive?”
“Radioactive? No. The darts weren’t radioactive, but they were poisonous. The men you were fighting had a neurotoxin on their darts.
“You were the only one who survived being hit. The poison killed everyone else in a matter of minutes; but you, they hit you five times, and it still didn’t kill you. There was so much adrenaline in your blood that the poison didn’t spread the way it was supposed to.” He sounded excited as he told me this.
“How many men did we lose?” I asked.
As if he did not hear me, the doctor continued raving about my genetic engineering. Then he said, “You are going to have to be more careful next time. We damaged the gland that produced all of that adrenaline when we swapped out your blood. The gland should heal, but I’m not sure how long it will take. Until then, you will need to put up with normal mortality.”
With my eyes out of focus, I saw the world as a fuzzy mixture of bright light and dark colors. I could not see the doctor clearly, but it no longer mattered. I wanted to be alone. I felt tired. All I wanted to do was sleep.
“I need to rest,” I said.
“But we have tests …”
“Later,” I said.
“General Harris, you are not out of the woods just yet. We need to …”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep. The doctor stood mute, not knowing what to do. I felt his gaze and heard him breathing. Finally, he left the room.
What was I? If the gland that produced my combat reflex was out of commission, I was no longer a Liberator. I did not have the gland for the death reflex, so I was not a general-issue military clone. I was not a natural-born.
I turned to my old friends the philosophers for an answer, but Nietzsche, Hobbes, Plato, and Kant had nothing to say.
2
My Marines did not come to visit me while I was in the hospital, but other people did.
“Maybe I was wrong about you, Harris. It turns out you are not the luckiest man in the Marines, after all,” Ava said.
She looked beautiful but not glamorous. She wore next to no makeup.
“I don’t feel lucky,” I said. I tried to sit up. Blood rushed to my head, leaving me dizzy.
Ava gently placed her hand on my shoulder, giving it a barely perceptible squeeze. “Honey, you and I were meant for each other. We both know what it feels like to be out of luck.”