experienced it, this was when my tension ran highest. I could see why Yonabaru let his mouth run with whatever bullshit came out. Ferrell just let our chatter wash over him.
“I’m tellin’ ya, you gotta hook yourself up with some pussy. If you wait until you’re strapped into one of these Jackets, it’s too late.”
“Yeah.”
“What about Mad Wargarita? Y’all were talkin’ during PT, right? You’d tap that, I know you would.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a cool customer.”
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t even popped your cherry, and you’re calm as a fuckin’ whore. My first time I had butterflies beatin’ up a tornado in my stomach.”
“It’s like a standardized test.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Didn’t you take those in high school?”
“Dude, you don’t expect me to remember high school, do ya?”
“Yeah.” I’d managed to throw Yonabaru off what passed for his train of thought, but my mind was on autopilot. “Yeah.”
“Yeah what? I didn’t even say anything.” Yonabaru’s voice reached me through a fog.
I felt like I’d been fighting in this same spot for a hundred years. Half a year ago I was a kid in high school. I couldn’t have cared less about a war that was slowly drowning the earth in its own blood. I’d lived in a world of peace, one filled with family and friends. I never imagined I’d trade classrooms and the soccer field for a war zone.
“You’ve been actin’ funny since yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“Dude, don’t go losin’ it on us. Two in a row from the same platoon-how would that look? And I been meanin’ to ask: what the fuck is that hunk of metal you’re carrying? And what the fuck do you plan on doin’ with it? Tryin’ to assert your ind’viduality? Workin’ on an art project?”
“It’s for crushing.”
“Crushin’ what?”
“The enemy, mostly.”
“You get up close, that’s what your pile driver’s for. You gonna tell me you’re better off with an axe? Maybe we should fill our platoon with lumberjacks. Hi ho, hi ho!”
“That was the dwarves.”
“Good point. Well made. Point for you.”
Ferrell jumped into our conversation. “Hey, I don’t know where he learned how, but he sure as hell can use that thing. But Kiriya, only use it once they’re up in your face and you don’t have a choice. Don’t go rushin’ up askin’ for it. Modern warfare is still waged with bullets. Try not to forget.”
“Yessir.”
“Yonabaru.”
I guess the sergeant felt he needed to spread the attention around.
“Yeah?”
“Just… do what you always do.”
“What the hell, Sarge? Keiji gets a pep talk and I get that? A delicate soul like me needs some inspiring words of encouragement, too.”
“I might as well encourage my rifle for all the good it would do.”
“You know what this is? Discrimination, that’s what it is!”
“Every now and again you get me thinking, Yonabaru,” Ferrell said, his voice tinny over the link. “I’d give my pension to the man who invents a way to fasten your-shit, it’s started! Don’t get your balls blown off, gents!”
I sprang into battle, Doppler cranked, the usual buzzing in my helmet. Just like the other moments.
There. A target.
I fired. I ducked. A javelin whizzed past my head.
“Who’s up there? You’re too far forward! You wanna get yourself killed?”
I pretended to follow the platoon leader’s orders. I don’t care how many lives you have, if you followed the orders of every officer fresh from the academy, you’d end up getting bored of dying.
Thunder erupted from the shells crisscrossing the sky. I wiped sand from my helmet. I glanced at Ferrell and nodded. It only took an instant for him to realize the suppressing fire I’d just laid down had thwarted an enemy ambush. Somewhere deep in Ferrell’s gut, his instincts were telling him that this recruit named Keiji Kiriya, who’d never set foot in battle in his life, was a soldier he could use. He was able to see past the recklessness of what I’d just done. It was that sort of adaptability that had kept him alive for twenty years.
To be honest, Ferrell was the only man in the platoon I could use. The other soldiers had only seen two or three battles at most. Even the ones who’d survived in the past hadn’t ever gotten killed. You can’t learn from your mistakes when they kill you. These greenhorns didn’t know what it was to walk the razor’s edge between life and death. They didn’t know that the line dividing the two, the borderland piled high with corpses, was the easiest place to survive. The fear that permeated every fiber of my being was relentless, it was cruel, and it was my best hope for getting through this.
That was the only way to fight the Mimics. I didn’t know shit about any other wars, and frankly, I didn’t care to. My enemy was humanity’s enemy. The rest didn’t matter.
The fear never left me. My body trembled with it. When I sensed the presence of an enemy just outside my field of vision, I could feel it crawling along my spine. Who had told me that fear had a way of seeping into your body? Had it been the platoon leader? Or was it Ferrell? Maybe it was something I’d heard during training.
But even as the fear racks my body, it soothes me, comforts me. Soldiers who get washed away in a rush of adrenaline don’t survive. In war, fear is the woman your mother warned you about. You knew she was no good for you, but you couldn’t shake her. You had to find a way to get along, because she wasn’t going anywhere.
The 17th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Regiment, 301st Armored Infantry Division was cannon fodder. If the frontal assault succeeded, the Mimics fleeing the siege would wash over us like a torrent of water surging through a dry gully. If it failed, we’d be a lone platoon in the middle of a sea of hostiles. Either way our odds of survival were slim. The platoon commander knew it, and Sergeant Ferrell knew it. The whole company was pieced together from soldiers who’d survived the slaughter at Okinawa. Who better to give this shit assignment to? In an operation involving twenty-five thousand Jackets, if a lone company of 146 men got wiped out, it wouldn’t even rate a memo on the desk of the brass in the Defense Ministry. We were the sacrificial lambs whose blood greased the wheels of war’s machinery.
Of course, there were only three kinds of battle to begin with: fucked up, seriously fucked up, and fucked up beyond all recognition. No use panicking about it. There’d be plenty of chaos to go around. Same Jackets. Same enemy. Same buddies. Same me, same muscles that weren’t ready for what I was asking of them screaming in protest.
My body never changed, but the OS that ran it had seen a total overhaul. I’d started as a green recruit, a paper doll swept on the winds of war. I’d become a veteran who bent the war to my will. I bore the burden of endless battle like the killing machine I’d become-a machine with blood and nerves in place of oil and wires. A machine doesn’t get distracted. A machine doesn’t cry. A machine wears the same bitter smile day in, day out. It reads the battle as it unfolds. Its eyes scan for the next enemy before it’s finished killing the first, and its mind is already thinking about the third. It wasn’t lucky, and it wasn’t unlucky. It just was. So I kept fighting. If this was going to go on forever, it would go on forever.
Shoot. Run. Plant one foot, then the other. Keep moving.
A javelin tore through the air I had occupied only a tenth of a second before. It dug into the ground before detonating, blasting dirt and sand into the air. I’d caught a break. The enemy couldn’t see through the shower of falling earth-I could. There. One, two, three. I took down the Mimics through the improvised curtain of dust.
I accidentally kicked one of my buddies-the sort of kick you used to break down a door when both of your hands were full. I had a gun in my left hand and a battle axe in my right. It was a good thing God had given us two arms and legs. If I only had three appendages to work with, I wouldn’t be able to help this soldier out, whoever he
