The War After Armageddon

Then why dump their brainpower in the path of the infidel?

Were the Jihadis really so intent on turning back the clock by centuries that they wanted their professors and doctors and scientists exterminated? If so, why not do it themselves? Why go to so much trouble? When they had a war to fight?

Of course, Hitler had made time for a similar distraction. When he had a war to fight.

Nasr knew he was on to something big. But he didn’t know what it was.

There had to be more to it.

He needed to get back to his transmitter. If the damned thing was working. Sometimes the burst transmissions got through, sometimes they didn’t. But he was anxious to send off another report and hand off what he’d seen and heard. Let the brainiacs on the staff figure out what it meant.

Insh’ Allah.

Just as Nasr placed his hands on his knees to lever himself to his feet, he saw the old man again. Pointing at him. A half-dozen Arab policemen accompanied him.

There was no point in running. The only hope was to bluff.

“I tell you, he is a spy, that one!” the old man cried.

Nasr felt his guts churn. But he kept his face under control, letting innocent bafflement spread across his features.

The police surrounded him. Artillery fire landed a valley away, but it wasn’t going to help him.

Nasr touched his hand to his robe, just above his heart. “How can I help you, my brothers?”

A policeman wearing a captain’s pips struck him with his fist. Nasr staggered. The next blow put him on the ground.

“That man is a Christian,” the old bastard said. “He’s of the Gemalia. They’re all gone from Nazareth now, Allah be praised. But this one has returned. I will always recognize a Gemalia pig. I knew him by his nose.”

“We’ll take care of his nose,” the captain said. And he kicked Nasr in the face.

MT. CARMEL RIDGES

Sergeant Garcia listened to the battle down in the plain. Somebody was serious about busting caps on the Jihadis. Garcia would’ve liked to be in on it.

Con mucho gusto.

He didn’t quite trust the way he felt as he marched down the winding road that led off the heights. He’d had an hour or so of pretend sleep, and he knew he was wasted. But he felt like Superman. No meth involved. Just a buzz he couldn’t quite figure out.

Garcia looked behind him to make sure his Marines were maintaining a combat interval as they marched along the shoulders of the road. The Army’s tanks and shit were hogging the blacktop as they rushed into the fight. Well, let them take their turn.

A Bradley tore into the pavement as it downshifted, throwing off bits of the surface and groaning like a constipated dinosaur. Up from La Brea, Garcia thought. The Dino Gang.

He replayed the scene in the house again and again: the grenades and the gunfire, the rush, and the dead Jihadis. And he just felt good. All that crap about how you were supposed to feel bad after killing people. Who made that shit up? Bigger lies than Maria Escobar told in the confessional. To that priest she was hot for. For the priest and everybody else.

Maybe he’d feel bad about it all later. Maybe all the guilt would kick in, the way they said it did. But for now, he just felt like the conquistadores must’ve felt.

It was like sex, man. You just wanted to do it again.

Did that mean he was all dicked up inside? Because all he wanted to do was kill the fuckers who made L.A. glow like a year-round Christmas decoration? And his family so hot with radioactivity you could’ve used them to cook enchiladas in Ensenada. Watching them blotch up, go bald, get skinny, and die. And his mother worrying about him all the time she was dying.

When the captain had come down to ask if the platoon needed to be pulled off the line for a day or two, Garcia had looked at him in shock, then fear, then suck-on-this annoyance. All in the space of ten seconds.

“Naw, sir. We’re, like, just getting into the motion, you know? We’re cruising.”

“Your Marines okay? You sure?”

His Marines.

“Hey, sir. They’re Marines. They’re good to go.”

“The platoon’s at sixty-five percent.”

Garcia stared at the other man. At this man who threatened to take away his platoon. Who wouldn’t say shit when battalion sent down some hotshot to take over. Staff Sergeant McCullough, maybe. Or some gunny who wanted to play lieutenant for a week.

“They’re feeling a hundred percent, sir,” Garcia told him. “We just need an ammo drop.”

He knew he wasn’t speaking for every one of his Marines. Some of them wanted to move out and mix it up, while others would’ve been glad for any excuse to go below decks and sleep until it was all over. But this was what they’d signed up for. He wasn’t going to let anybody just walk. They had business to do.

It was screwy, but he felt two ways at once. Since the fight in the village the night before, he felt closer to his Marines than ever before. And he felt apart from them, too. Separate. In a new way.

Down in the valley, some tanks were duking it out. The 155s were dropping closer in now. Garcia couldn’t see the fight as he walked, but smoke rose and thinned, veiling the horizon. His back hurt pretty bad. But you just kept on humping. His elbow was half-fucked, too. It didn’t matter. He felt like calling cadence, like singing out. Un poco loco.

Hey, ma, I wanna go,
Right back to Quantico…

Well, the platoon was too spread out to hear him. With the big boys clanking in between them. He called cadence to himself, anyway.

A wave of tiredness hit him, almost stopping him cold. Then the buzz came back. Just like that. But his damned back hurt. Too loaded down. Lugging all your stuff around, like some homeless bum back on the block. He looked, enviously for once, at the Army grunts riding by, sticking up through the hatches like Mexican kids standing behind the cab of a pickup.

Same exhaust stink, too.

Garcia just didn’t want to come out of this with any kind of injury that would put him out of the Corps. Instinctively, he lifted his forearm to kiss the Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo underneath his sleeve. But he caught himself. And just made like he was wiping the sweat from his face and resetting his helmet. Dying would be okay. He could handle that. He had what the skinny redhead instructor bitch at the community college called “Latin fatalism.” Like the name of some perfume you paid five bucks for off a street vendor. To give to some chica so new to the hood she still thought in pesos and didn’t know perfumes were all about serious labels.

Yeah, Latin fatalism. Splash it on me, dude. Just don’t let me end up a geek crapping himself in a VA hospital.

He knew now that he didn’t ever want to leave the Corps. Since the nukes came down, the Corps was his only home. He sure wasn’t going to take off his boots for very long down at his grandmother’s. If anybody else wanted to be a full-time Mexican for a living, let them. He was an Angeleno. Even without his city.

And he was a Marine.

He saw the firelit face of the Jihadi he’d shot. Clear as any photograph. Clearer. And he just wanted to pull the trigger again.

Garcia wondered if he was some kind of psycho. Were you supposed to get this buzzed?

Hand signals relayed back from the head of the column. Take ten. Garcia passed it on. But he didn’t want to