And look where that got me.
What had half a year of training done for me? I now possessed a handful of skills that weren’t good for shit in a real battle and six-pack abs. I was still weak, and the world was still fucked. Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. It took me this long to realize the obvious. Ironic that I had to run away from the army before I figured it out.
The beach was deserted. The Coast Guard must have been busy evacuating this place over the past six months.
After a little less than an hour of running, I planted myself on the edge of the seawall. I’d covered about eight kilometers, putting me about halfway to Tateyama. My sand-colored shirt was dark with sweat. The gauze wrapped around my head was coming loose. A gentle sea breeze-refreshing after that hot wind that had swept across the base-caressed the back of my neck. If it weren’t for the machine guns, props stolen from some long forgotten anime, intruding on the real world, it would have been the very picture of a tropical resort.
The beach was littered with the husks of spent firework rockets- the crude kind you put together and launch with a plastic tube. No one would be crazy enough to come this close to a military base to set off fireworks. They must have been left by some bastard on the feed trying to warn the Mimics about the attack on Boso Peninsula. There were anti-war activists out there who were convinced the Mimics were intelligent creatures, and they were trying to open a line of communication with them. Ain’t democracy grand?
Thanks to global warming, this whole strip of beach was below sea level when the tide came in. By dusk, these fucking tubes would be washed away by the sea and forgotten. No one would ever know. I kicked one of the melted tubes as hard as I could.
“Well, what’s this? A soljer?”
I spun around.
It had been a while since I’d heard anyone speak Japanese. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize anyone had come up behind me.
Two figures, an elderly man and a little girl, stood atop the embankment. The old man’s skin would have made fine pickle brine if you set it out in a jar on a bright day like today. In his left hand he clutched a three- pronged metal spear right out of a fairy tale. What’s he doing with a trident? The girl-she looked about the right age to be in elementary school-squeezed his right hand tightly. Half hidden behind the man’s leg, the girl looked up at me unabashedly from under her straw hat. The face beneath the hat was too white to have spent much time cooking under the sun.
“Yourn an unf’milyar face.”
“I’m from the Flower Line base.” Dammit! I’d run my mouth before my brain.
“Ah.”
“What, uh, brings you two out here?”
“Sea has fish wantin’ t’be caught. Family’s all gon’ up to Tokyo.”
“What happened to the Coast Guard?”
“Word come ’bout the whoopin’ we took down on Okinawa. Why, they all up ’n’ left. If the army kin take care them croakers for us, we’d breathe easier, that’s fer sure.”
“Yeah.” Croakers was obviously some local slang for Mimics. Ordinary people never got the chance to see a Mimic with their own eyes. At best they’d catch a glimpse of a rotting corpse washed up on the beach, or maybe one that had gotten caught in a fishing net and died. But with the conductive sand washed away by the ocean, all that would remain would be empty husks. That’s why a lot of people thought Mimics were some type of amphibian that shed its skin.
I only caught about 70 percent of what the old man said, but I heard enough to know that the Coast Guard had pulled out of the area. Our defeat at Okinawa must have been more serious than I thought. Bad enough for them to recall our combined forces up and down the Uchibo line. Everyone had been redeployed with a focus on major cities and industrial areas.
The old man smiled and nodded. The girl watched him with eyes wide as saucers, witness to some rare spectacle. He put a lot of hope in the UDF troops stationed at Flower Line Base. Not that I had signed up to defend him or anyone else for that matter. Still, it made me feel bad.
“You got any smokes, son? Since the mil’tary left, can’t hardly come by none.”
“Sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Then don’t you worry none.” The old man stared out at the sea.
There weren’t many soldiers in the Armored Infantry who suffered from nicotine addiction. Probably because you couldn’t smoke during battle, when you needed it the most.
I stood silent. I didn’t want to do or say anything stupid. I couldn’t let him find out I was a deserter. They shot deserters. Escaping the Mimics just to be killed by the army didn’t make much sense.
The girl tugged at the man’s hand.
“She tires out real easy. Good eyes on her, though. Been born a boy, she’da been quite a fisherman.”
“Yeah.”
“Just one thing ’fore I go. Ain’t never seen anythin’ like this. Came runnin’ out my house quick as I might, found you here. What you make of it? Anythin’ to do with ’em croakers?” He raised his arm.
My eyes followed the gnarled twigs of his fingers as he pointed. The water had turned green. Not the emerald green you’d see off the shore of some island in the South Pacific, but a frothy, turbid green, as if a supertanker filled with green tea ice cream had run aground and spilled its cargo into the bay. A dead fish floated on the waves, a bright fleck of silver.
I recognized that green. I’d seen it on the monitors during training. Mimics ate soil, just like earthworms. But unlike earthworms, the soil they passed through their bodies and excreted was toxic to other life. The land the Mimics fed on died and turned to desert. The seas turned a milky green.
“Ain’t like no red tide I e’er seen.”
A high-pitched scream filled the air. My head rang to its familiar tune.
Eyebrows still knitted, the old man’s head traced an arc as it sailed through the sky. The shattered pieces of his jaw and neck painted the girl’s straw hat a vivid red. She didn’t realize what had happened. A javelin exits a Mimic’s body at twelve hundred meters per second. The old man’s skull went flying before the sound of the javelin had even reached us. She slowly looked up.
A second round sliced through the air. Before her large, dark eyes could take in the sight of her slain grandfather, the javelin ripped through her, an act of neither mercy nor spite.
Her small body was obliterated.
Buffeted by the blast, the old man’s headless body swayed. Half his body was stained a deep scarlet. The straw hat spun on the wind. My body recoiled. I couldn’t move.
A bloated frog corpse stood at the water’s edge.
This coast was definitely within the UDF defense perimeter. I hadn’t heard reports of any patrol boats being sunk. The base on the front was alive and well. There couldn’t be any Mimics here. A claim the two corpses lying beside me would surely have contested if they could. But they were dead, right before my eyes. And I, their one hope for defense, had just deserted the only military unit in the area capable of holding back this invasion.
I was unarmed. My knife, my gun, my Jacket-they were all back at the base. When I’d walked through that gate an hour ago, I’d left my only hope for defense behind. Thirty meters to the nearest 57mm gun. Within running distance. I knew how to fire one, but there was still the tarp to deal with. I’d never have time to get it off. Insert my ID card into the platform, key in my passcode, feed in a thirty kilometer ammo belt, release the rotation lock lever or the barrel won’t move and I can’t aim, climb into the seat, crank the rusted handle-fuck it. Fire, motherfucker! Fire!
I knew the power of a Mimic. They weighed several times as much as a fully geared Jacket jockey. Structurally they had a lot in common with a starfish. There was an endoskeleton just below the skin, and it took 50mm armor-piercing rounds or better to penetrate it. And they didn’t hold back just because a man was unarmed. They rolled right through you like a rototiller through a gopher mound.
“Fuck me.”
The first javelin pierced my thigh.
The second opened a gaping wound in my back.
I was too busy trying to keep down the organs that came gurgling up into my throat to even notice the third.
