A Private Little War(15)

He’d gone to his own tent instead. Distracted, looking back over his shoulder as he walked, he’d stepped on something that’d squished underfoot. He’d lit a match, crouched down to see what it was, and discovered it was a slug, big enough that his size-ten waffle-tread had split it in half with part sticking out one side of his instep, stalk eyes still wriggling, and part sticking out the other.

It’d infuriated him, this slug. What was it doing here? It was nighttime. How could it see? And it was cold—the ground frozen—so where was it going? The slug should not have been there. It made no sense. And this, he’d thought, was how it went. It wasn’t ever the big things that got you; it was the little ones. It was walking along in the night on frozen ground and stepping on a slug as long as your forearm: The plain irrationality of this place. That was what drove you crazy.

He’d shaken out the match and stabbed the smoking stub of wood down into the head half of the slug. He’d watched it squirm and writhe on the ground while his breath hissed between clenched teeth.

Welcome to the fucking war.





CARTER GOT UP. He got dressed. There was a process, an unfolding of one’s self from the calm of sleep into war, and the first hundred or so times he’d done this, it had been precisely as affecting and heavy as it was supposed to be. He’d really felt it, in his belly, balls, and his fingertips—a tingling like powerful magic. Now, it was only a drag.

He put on the catheter and strapped the piss bag to his thigh. The planes they flew here could stay up for twenty hours if needed, and everyone pissed themselves on night missions.

Dog collar next, right against the skin. The clasp in the back could be tricky if a man was drunk or scared enough that his hands shook. Carter’s hands did not shake. He wasn’t yet awake enough to be scared and wasn’t drunk either because he’d chosen to turn in early tonight—to sleep only because all other options were equally tedious and at least while sleeping there was the chance that he might dream about girls. Stupid me, he thought to himself as his fingers unerringly found the catches and latched them against the prickling stubble on the back of his neck. Stupid, stupid me.

The collar read a pilot’s biologicals, controlled the emergency gear—the pump full of oxygenated blood clotting factors, the Protenolol injector (synthetic adrenaline, hell in a very small vial). There’d been a briefing before they’d left for Iaxo where all the equipment had been explained. A small room aboard the Junholdt, sour with the smell of antifungal spray and plastics kept too long in a closed space.

Instructing them had been a small and pretty young man with crazy eyes who spoke so fast that Carter had wondered whether he was paid a bonus for the number of words he could say in a minute. When he’d gotten to explaining the dog collar and emergency gear, he’d taken out a laser pointer and stabbed it randomly at the air. A kid playing pirate with a make-believe sword. Everywhere the dot of light touched, he would shout out, “Wound! Wound! Kill! Wound!”

The pilots started twitching away from the bead of red light, started ducking and weaving, dancing where they stood because there were no chairs in which to sit and no room to run. But this only encouraged the young man, and he started yelling, “Bang! Bangbangbang!” until some of the pilots started to protest. How was it fair that this little boy with his laser was getting to kill them where they stood? To say who was wounded and who was dead? From the back of the room Carter had watched it all with a smile on his face, knowing that if the kid at the front of the room wasn’t careful, he was going to get himself killed for real.

“Not fair?” the boy had asked, voice still quick, words spilling out of him like water from a split hose, but suddenly serious. “Not fair. A machine gun isn’t fair. Flak isn’t fair. It doesn’t discriminate or play favorites. But if you wear your gear—all of it, every time you go up—you’ll live. Simple as that. Everything else will die, you’ll live, and the company won’t have to pay out death benefits to your next of kin, which we hate to do. The emergency gear will save you. When you pray, pray to Harold Bolstrood, understand?” The kid had thrown his hands into the air, palms up, eyes turned toward the heaven of the Junholdt’s smooth steel ceiling. “Say, ‘Harold, save me,’ and it will be done.”

There’d been a moment of quiet, then, “Who the fuck is Harold Bolstrood?” someone had asked. Carter thought it might’ve been Tommy Hill, but he was never sure.

And the kid, the young man with the crazy eyes and the laser pointer, had cocked his head like a dog hearing its own name. His fine, thin eyebrows had knitted together, and he’d looked, for a silent instant, so sad that he might cry.