load of shit. It felt like I’d been fighting for months.
I looked left, right. Up, down. I made a fist inside one glove. Can’t use too much strength, I had to remind myself. Overdo it, and my aim would drift low.
No time to check the Doppler. Time to fire and forget.
Thak thak thak thak thak!
A cloud of dust rose.
The enemy’s rounds seemed to ride the wind over my head, but mine liked to veer off after leaving the barrel, as if the enemy simply willed them away. Our drill sergeant said guns could be funny like that. You ask me, it seems only fair that the enemy should get to hear shells screeching down on them, too. We should all have our turn feeling Death’s breath on the back of our neck, friend and foe alike.
But what would Death’s approach sound like to an inhuman enemy? Did they even feel fear?
Our enemies-the enemies of the United Defense Force-are monsters. Mimics, we call them.
My gun was out of bullets.
The silhouette of a misshapen orb materialized in the clay-brown haze. It was shorter than a man. It would probably come up to the shoulder of a Jacketed soldier. If a man were a thin pole standing on end, a Mimic would be a stout barrel-a barrel with four limbs and a tail, at any rate. Something like the bloated corpse of a drowned frog, we liked to say. To hear the lab rats tell it, they have more in common with starfish, but that’s just details.
They make for a smaller target than a man, so naturally they’re harder to hit. Despite their size, they weigh more than we do. If you took one of those oversized casks, the kind Americans use to distill bourbon, and filled it with wet sand you’d have it about right. Not the kind of mass a mammal that’s 70 percent water could ever hope for. A single swipe of one of its limbs can send a man flying in a thousand little pieces. Their javelins, projectiles fired from vents in their bodies, have the power of 40mm shells.
To fight them, we use machines to make ourselves stronger. We climb into mechanized armor Jackets- science’s latest and greatest. We bundle ourselves into steel porcupine skin so tough a shotgun fired at point blank wouldn’t leave a scratch. That’s how we face off against the Mimics, and we’re still outclassed.
Mimics don’t inspire the instinctive fear you’d expect if you found yourself facing a bear protecting her cubs, or meeting the gaze of a hungry lion. Mimics don’t roar. They’re not frightening to look at. They don’t spread any wings or stand on their hind legs to make themselves look more intimidating. They simply hunt with the relentlessness of machines. I felt like a deer in the headlights, frozen in the path of an oncoming truck. I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten myself into the situation I was in.
I was out of bullets.
So long, Mom.
I’m gonna die on a fucking battlefield. On some godforsaken island with no friends, no family, no girlfriend. In pain, in fear, covered in my own shit because of the fear. And I can’t even raise the only weapon I have left to fend off the bastard racing toward me. It was like all the fire in me left with my last round of ammo.
The Mimic’s coming for me.
I can hear Death breathing in my ear.
His figure looms large in my heads-up display.
Now I see him; his body is stained a bloody red. His scythe, a two-meter-long behemoth, is the same vivid shade. It’s actually more of a battle axe than a scythe. In a world where friend and foe wear the same dust- colored camouflage, he casts a gunmetal red glow in all directions.
Death rushes forward, swifter than even a Mimic. A crimson leg kicks and I go flying.
My armor is crushed. I stop breathing. The sky becomes the ground. My display is drowning in red flashing warnings. I cough up blood, saving the rest of the warnings the trouble.
Then my pile driver fires. The blast throws me at least ten meters into the air. Bits of the armor plating from the back of my Jacket scatter across the ground. I land upside down.
Death swings his battle axe.
Metal screams as he cuts through the uncuttable. The axe cries out like a freight train screeching to a halt.
I see the Mimic’s carapace sailing through the air.
It only took one blow to reduce the Mimic to a motionless heap. Ashen sand poured from the gaping wound. The two halves of the creature shuddered and twitched, each keeping its own strange rhythm. A creature humanity’s greatest technological inventions could barely scratch, laid waste by a barbarian weapon from a thousand years past.
Death turned slowly to face me.
Amid the crush of red warning lights crowding my display, a sole green light winked on. An incoming friendly transmission. “… as a little… kay?” A woman’s voice. Impossible to make it out over the noise. I couldn’t stand. The Jacket was spent and so was I. It took everything I had left just to roll right side up.
Upon closer inspection, I was not, in fact, in the company of the Angel of Death. It was just another soldier in a Jacket. A Jacket not quite like my own, as it was outfitted with that massive battle axe where the regulation pile driver should have been. The insignia on the shoulder didn’t read JP but instead U.S. In place of the usual desert camouflage mix of sand and coffee grounds, the suit shone head-to-toe in metallic crimson.
The Full Metal Bitch.
I’d heard stories. A war junkie always chasing the action, no matter where it led her. Word had it she and her Special Forces squad from the U.S. Army had chalked up half of all confirmed Mimic kills ever. Maybe anyone who could see that much fighting and live to tell about it really was the Angel of Death.
Still carrying the battle axe, the blazing red Jacket started toward me. Its hand reached down and fumbled for the jack in my shoulder plate. A contact comm.
“There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to know.”
Her voice filled my suit, clear as crystal. A soft, light tone, at odds with the two-meter axe and carnage she’d just created with it.
“Is it true the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of your meal comes free?”
The conductive sand spilling out of the fallen Mimic danced away on the wind. I could hear the distant cry of shells as they flew. This was a battlefield, the scorched waste where Yonabaru, Captain Yuge, and the rest of my platoon had died. A forest of steel shells. A place where your suit fills with your own piss and shit. Where you drag yourself through a mire of blood and muck.
“I’ve gotten myself in trouble for believing everything I read. So I thought I’d play it safe, ask a local,” she continued.
Here I am, half dead, covered in shit, and you want to talk about tea?
Who walks up to someone, kicks them to the ground, and then asks about tea? What was going through her fucking head? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but the words wouldn’t come. I could think of the words I wanted to say, but my mouth had forgotten how to work-a litany of profanities stalled at the gate.
“That’s the thing with books. Half the time the author doesn’t know what the hell he’s writing about- especially not those war novelists. Now how about you ease your finger off the trigger and take a nice, deep breath.”
Good advice. It took a minute, but I started to see straight again. The sound of a woman’s voice always had a way of calming me down. The pain I’d left in battle returned to my gut. My Jacket misread the cramps in my muscles, sending the suit into a mild spasm. I thought of the dance Yonabaru’s suit did just before he died.
“Hurt much?”
“What do you think?” My reply wasn’t much more than a hoarse whisper.
The red Jacket kneeled down in front of me, examining the shredded armor plate over my stomach. I ventured a question. “How’s the battle going?”
“The 301st has been wiped out. Our main line fell back to the coast to regroup.”
“What about your squad?”
“No use worrying about them.”
“So… how do I look?”
“It pierced the front, but the back armor plate stopped it. It’s charred bad.”
“How bad?”
