I sit against the blood stained and chipped marble steps, putting my hands against my face.
Isaac sits beside me lighting an ancient, “Want one?”
“No,” I say. Just leave me alone.
“Hey,” Isaac pats my shoulder. I brush it away. “Hey,” he continues, “I fucking miss Julian too, okay. He was a good guy,” he takes a long drag and exhales through his nose. “But everyone is going to die here, get over it.” Isaac stretches his hand towards me again, the tin box of ancients already having one slightly sticking out for me to grab.
I take the ancient and light it, letting it dangle between my lips for a while as the smoke rises in tiny curls before me. “He had a family.”
“We all have families, bud.”
“But he was a father, he had a kid.” I spit the ancient out and it lands between my boots. Its red butt smoldering away as smoke exhausts from the tip. On fire like this city, with a short life, before it burns out like the rest of us.
Isaac flicks his butt away and starts on another, he is chain smoking fast. “I know. Shit is fucking tough.” He offers me a new one. I reject it and grab the one I dropped.
Rommel appears, covered in plaster and gore. Around his neck is a shoelace with human ears and Herculean appendages.
“Where the fuck have you been?” says Blake.
“I was moving around with a few other platoons till my arm pad finally picked you up and I followed the arrow,” he says.
Blake points at his crude necklace, “And what the hell is that supposed to be?”
“A little war trophy of mine, do you like it?”
“No, it’s against regulations. And how the hell did you get human ears on it? Did you kill civilians!”
“No, sir!” says Rommel now at attention. “I discovered looters raping a girl. We told them to stop and that’s when they tried killing her. So I fired. I thought I might as well add them to my collection.”
“Jesus Christ, Private,” says Blake. Then he faces us. “Get up, we’re moving out.”
“What for?” says Isaac.
“We are assigned a rescue detail,” says Blake. “Now let’s move.”
We put our sacks back on and follow behind. We are too tired and too high to complain. No one even talks about Julian or the others that died today anymore. Just doped and moving. I feel the DT high still, but it’s wearing off rather fast. When I tried talking to Isaac about Julian, he was detached from it all, like the rest of them, like me at first. There’s something wrong. Maybe my chemsack dose ratio is off. I’ll have to tell Blake later.
“Is the girl okay?” I ask Rommel.
“Yeah,” Rommel smiles, “I took care of her.”
We move down an avenue away from the square deep into the city’s infrastructure. “There men,” says Blake, as we reach a group of parked Patria APC’s. “They’ll take us to the town.”
“A town?” says Vick. “We’re leaving the city?”
“Yeah. Going to a placed called Tionem, and guess who we are relieving,” says Blake, “Rangers.”
We stand before the Patria’s with their sleek black coats, and camouflaged netting on the sides. Each Patria is equipped with a different gun platform on top to cover all the bases of war. “Giddy up boys!” says the lead Patria operator from his hatch, he gulps down a water bottle with a mysterious taint to it.
We climb onto the top of the two Patria’s instead of cramming ourselves inside, since it’s a breezy day out and were exhausted and hot. We hold the netting for support as we go, following a ravaged freeway, where a second group of carries meets us shortly after. Captain Tarnus and the remnants of Love Platoon and extras from another join our convoy. The Patria’s continue following the collapsed freeway while the destroyed city mimics it on our other side.
We round a bend as a resonating noise reaches our ears. We come around the corner onto an avenue following the highway out of the city outskirts, and are greeted by thousands of cheering locals standing on each side of the lanes. They carry and proudly wave white and blue flags of the United Nations, and toss flowers and candies at our convoy as it turtles through the crowd.
“I wasn’t expecting this!” says Vance. Kids run between the armored vehicles flying kites. Girls hop up onto the carries to hug and kiss the marines. I look over at Isaac as he plies one off, we make eye contact and he grins. The cheering, alongside the orbital bombardments and screaming jets, follows us as we leave the outskirts into the countryside till all become a memory. I look back at the city ruins, it wears a black top hat that stretches endlessly into the sky.
XIV
We are an hour into our journey when the DT wears off.
First, your clairvoyance leaves, or more accurately the ease of mind the drugs give. As things become clearer, they get fuzzier. Because the things we are coming to understanding with are things we rather not. Then our breath leaves us—a punch right into our diaphragm—but the punch goes beyond the flesh. It strikes right into our very being that leaves not only our lunges gasping, but our spirits. Déjà vu of the siege brakes open my mind like an assaulting Goliath, and it all has to flood in: Julian and Ray, the little girl, the landing. Isaac coughs bitterly, spitting out the ancient in his mouth. Marines begin to scream and cuss at each other. Oh god… oh god, I remember now. The horror on the field—all those bodies. We look at each other, do they understand now?
But others seem to be having different opinions about it. Rommel yells for more. Tommy pulls out part of his scarf and holds it tightly, thanking God that the drugs gave him the strength to fight.
“What the fuck! Why would you make us do that?” says Vick. He jumps off his Patria. “I won’t do it anymore!”
The convoy stops. Tarnus leaps off his lead vehicle. His neck lined with popping veins and knuckles white from squeezing them hard. “What the fuck do you think you are doing!”
Vick collapses onto his knees. I see the scene of myself at Jericho on replay. I bite my tongue. There will be no mercy here.
“I can’t do it!” says Vick. “It’s all wrong!”
Tarnus pulls out a metal probe and whips it downwards to extend it. “You’re one lucky bitch that no Party Rep is here. He would have wasted you.” Tarnus beats Vick down. “I’ll give you something to whine about you fucking coward!” Soon Vick is flat on the ground, his hands above his head. Blubbering and begging for his mom. Begging Tarnus to stop.
Tarnus turns around to face us. I look about. Isaac has lowered his head. In between his attempts at breathing he coughs. The operator of my Patria stares at the punishment with a fat smile, spitting into his bottle occasionally. The message is clear. Tarnus won’t have any of our emotional outcries about the drugs, about the war.
“You are fucking marines!” he says. “Now act like it! I will not have little bitches in my platoon. If you can’t handle the expectations the military and your country places onto your shoulders,” Tarnus unclips his pistol and throws it at the nearest Patria. It smacks against Vance’s leg before dropping onto the ground, “there you fucking go. Go over by Vick and finish yourself off. You can roll around in your self-pity while you rot in hell.”
Tommy and Rommel grab Vick and carry him back to their Patria, and the convoy is on the move again. We are all exhausted, but the military has an answer for that by giving us another drug that makes us fidget with artificial energy. I tap my hands against the armor while I listen to others whimper quietly. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’ve had, what, three other breakdowns today, and all of them similar to Vick. But all of them separate from the normal expiration of the doses. Why am I resistant? Am I broken? And why are we really on them?