“Fuck sentry, if we’re attacked at night we would be dead anyway.”
Isaac takes out his ancients and we smoke. I silently retrieve my syringe and cradle it in my hand against my thigh. We stare at the constellations and distant suns, terribly alone and afraid. But it’s a loneliness we both share. That all of us in the unit share. We’re alone together. We stopped dreaming together. About our future, our plans, our aspirations, even just getting off this fucking planet. We stopped dreaming and hoping. The emptiness in our dreams is a reflection of the emptiness in our hearts. And in that emptiness, that once was full as we grew up as the Golden Generation back on Earth, that is going to college, getting shitty nine to five jobs, falling in love—it has all been cast away and replaced with a brooding darkness. That is why we don’t dream anymore, in the back of our minds and hearts, it has become dark. Our very souls. Dark. We have all become consumed by it.
Isaac gets up to wake the next sentry for his turn. I look out at the surrounding black jungle canopy, and its dark shadowy overcast it places onto the clearing during night. That dark jungle that I can hardly see the outline of… is brighter than me. This dark canopy is a not a shadow from the lack of light in the sky, but a projection of something else, of something in me. I am the shadow’s creator. It’s source.
I shoot up quickly. I’m almost calm. Good enough.
The jungle is still dark. The stars still shine. I still wait for her.
But she doesn’t come.
XXII
Sometime on our second week, a war journalist arrives at our foxholes with a chopper dropping off routine supplies.
“They’re sending news guys out here now?” says Vick.
“All they’re going to see, is us playing cat and mouse with the fucking locals,” gripes Isaac.
Blake crawls out of his fox hole, shaving cream still applied to his lower face, to meet the journalist.
“Are you the leading officer here?” says the journalist.
“Yes I am ,” says Blake.
“Great, I was told I could be embedded with your unit for a few days.”
“Why the hell would you want to do that?” says Blake.
“Yeah, shit is boring out here man,” says Rommel. “No Herc’s to fight, just a bunch of pissed off natives.”
“Exactly why I am here,” says the journalist, now with excitement rising in his tone. “Everyone and their goddamn mothers who is arriving to report this war, is out trying to find a way to reach the frontlines where the Herculeans and Coalition are duking it out. Obviously, for safety, most of them are being denied. So instead they just mope around the countryside taking pictures of dead aliens and other pointless filler for the night column.”
“So that’s why you ended up here?” I say.
He stares at us, his face full of energy to match his excitement. “Yes and no. I didn’t even try to get embedded with some frontline unit, because I knew it would be a waste of my time. I purposely came out here to view the part of the war no one talks about, or even knows about back on Earth.”
“You’ll probably be disappointed,” says Blake as he goes back to his foxhole to finish shaving.
We go back to our posts as well, killing time by aiming our guns at the jungle like every other day before. The journalist skitters behind me to my foxhole.
I, Vance, and Tommy slide into our hole and lie down against the earth wall to rest. Isaac stops near the edge and turns around facing the approaching journalist, and unzips his fly to begin pissing on the ground before him.
“Whoa, what the fuck?” says the journalist dodging his stream, he walks around him to reach our hole.
“You better get used to it paperboy,” says Isaac, “‘cause this is all you’re going to get coming out here. Getting pissed on like the rest of us.”
“My name isn’t paperboy, it’s Thomas,” he says as he slides down into the foxhole with us.
“What do you want?” snorts Vance, hitting his vapstick.
“You sure know how to make a guy feel welcomed,” says Thomas.
Isaac slides in knocking Thomas to the side a bit. “This is my spot.”
Thomas scoots over towards me and dusts off his camera. “Okay, I get it, you all don’t want to deal with someone like me. I’m not part of the brotherhood thing you guys got going on and whatever. So I’ll leave, I just want to ask a few questions and take a few pictures, okay?”
“I already told you all you’ll need to know about being out here a few seconds ago paperboy,” says Isaac grinning as he grabs the vapstick from Vance.
“Well I forgot to photograph it, so you’ll have to enlighten me with actual worded responses.”
“Or you could just wait a few more hours, I’m sure to piss again.”
Thomas turns to me. “The Medal of Honor recipient! What is it like fighting fellow humans, after you came freeing them from aliens?”
Straight to the point. My hands tremble slightly and I grasp my XM tightly to hide it. “I guess we had it coming,” I say.
Thomas looks at me with bright eyes as if I just revealed some hidden truth he has been searching for. “Please explain.”
Before I can reply Blake appears standing over our foxhole. “He is not at liability to answer any questions from the public. You can interview me as I am the highest ranking official here at the moment. However, you won’t get anything interesting, I can guarantee you that.”
“What does he mean, sir? You guys had it coming?” says Thomas.
Perhaps, if I wasn’t so high I’d blurt out as much of the truth as I could—but why let them bring me down? It’s already hard enough to reach Cloud, meddling in this shit will make it harder. I sit idly by, listening to them beat around the bush to nowhere. Thank god Blake took the pressure off of me, last thing I need is to someone ruining my mood.
Blake replies, “What this Private meant is that no matter what happens, as shown in all of history, some part of the native population will never like the people coming to try and liberate them.”
“What about Khaf’Jadeed? That was the start of the rebellion, what are your thoughts on it?”
A tingle shoots down through my spine as if I got a dose from my distributor. Why am I so edgy still? It’s been a few hours since my last—I guess I need more. I look around at the others in the foxhole. They too, are looking at Thomas with zoned in eyes and are fidgeting uneasily. As if Blake can sense our discomfort, he intervenes before Thomas can look around. “I think nothing of it. We are just assigned out here to fight the remnants of what happened there.”
“But the population there? What really happened to them? I was able to get a glimpse of the destroyed city from afar. What went down?”
“As I said, we are only out here to fight insurgents. This is all I know. You need to leave my marines alone, they are on guard duty. You can hang out by the depot till I inform you of anything we plan on doing.”
With that Thomas sulks out of the foxhole and back to the center of camp. Blake sits near his foxhole atop a sandbag wall staring at Thomas uneasily, occasionally glancing back at us.
“I wonder if he knows we were there,” whispers Isaac.
“I doubt it,” says Vance, “He seems clueless, to everything.”
“What, what do you guys think about it?” I say.
Tommy coughs, leaning away from his mounted MG. “I feel like the bad guy.”
We look down at our boots, our vapsticks resting tense in our fingers as the vapor trails wisp about into the air.
“Shit wasn’t right,” says Isaac.
“There was nothing we could do, we were under orders and Buzz,” says Vance.