He was quiet for a minute but she knew he wasn’t done – couldn’t stop now. We shipped over together. When it come up, they gave us that time. There was this big joke about our honeymoon cruise.
She said, You were on the Front?
Career army, Li. Part of the deal. And the brass talked about it like it was containable, like they knew what we were getting into.
What was it like. Over there? It wasn’t a fair thing to ask but she was afraid he was going to stop talking. And maybe if she could understand where he’d been, the place he was going would make more sense.
He said, It was the worst thing I ever done.
First there was the imperative to redraw borders around new oil and mineral and ore discoveries on other continents: for certain global powers to dissuade other powers from trying to keep existing deposits for themselves. Li remembered that phase from her later childhood – a distant conflict that affected them because of the supply disruptions that government insisted would be temporary, and the waves of refugees flooding into East.
The Front made it their Wars too. Their allies demanded troop support because they couldn’t keep producing the hardware, all the technology of targeted strikes. There wasn’t enough steel or copper, or silicon, aluminium, terbium, graphite, chromium, iridium, petroleum. There wasn’t enough water. All the things they were fighting for were the things they were fighting with. But you could always find metal for bullets, and there were no export restrictions on human bodies, no supply problem. Not once they brought in the ballot.
He was there for four years. A six-month tour of duty that kept rolling over because there were never enough medics.
There was never enough anything, Rich said. I mean, I had kit. You saw what Transit was producing in medical supplies – most of that gets shipped to the Front. But we were always running out of stuff. Back in training I done a whole unit on utilising plants in the field, but on the Front there wasn’t anything alive you could use. It was just mud.
He rolled onto his back and her body went with him in the confines of the sleeping bag. The intimacy seemed ordinary and familiar. Sometimes, whatever I reached for, I had it on me. And other times I’d be out there with my shears and some duct tape. And I started getting those times mixed up in my head, you know? Someone’s screaming my name and I’ve frozen up, trying to remember if I’ve got what it takes.
Soldiers weren’t just bleeding out or getting blown up either. They were dying of dysentery and frostbite and blood poisoning. They were dying of flu. Rich said, It was like, the longer I was there the worse I got at keeping people alive.
He and Rachael hadn’t been posted near each other but people higher up did what they could for them. They talked most months, got R&R together twice. Her job was more dangerous than his; when they were apart, he worried about her obsessively. But when they were together, they only talked about the past or made plans. One thing they decided, easily, was not to have a kid.
The nightmares started on his second tour. He started self-medicating. Started a list in his head, of names and circumstances, injuries, locations. Men and women he hadn’t been able to save. Kids. He came and went. The sound of a soldier snoring beside him in a base camp was also the sound of a fifteen-year-old conscript trying to breathe through blood.
Rachael’s tour ended and she got the offer to ship home. Rich tried talking her into it but she wouldn’t go without him, signed on again. They were both hospitalised, at different times: shrapnel in his legs, soft-tissue damage to her face and neck from a mine, dysentery.
Four years, he said. Luckiest bastards in the world.
They got sent back on different ships, her first. They had a phone call before she left.
She was talking about getting inside, he said. That was always her plan. Survive the Front, get lucky in the returned service ballot. Why not us?
When he got back, he couldn’t find her.
Army couldn’t tell me nothing, he said. There were too many MIAs and deserters by then, they couldn’t keep up with the filing. I logged an MP claim, nothing. They wouldn’t give me a discharge so I just pulled the pin, took off.
He searched for two years. All over East, every town, every camp. The whole time he was thinking how she’d survived four years’ active duty in the worst hell you could dream up – what was there back here that could even touch her?
And then down in Port Howell, after you took off, I ran into some ex-army fellas. One of them knew someone who shipped back with her. That ship never made it. She’d been dead the whole time I’d been looking for her.
It had started to rain lightly, drops smacking the tent. Smell of wet dust and each other. His grief its own sharper smell.
She’s still in my head, he said. I can’t get her out of me, can’t get past her. I go to sleep or I lose track for a minute and she’s going down in the dark, screaming. Not just her – there’s a whole lot of people screaming my name. It didn’t help them.
You saved my life.
No. Nuh. I done the same for you I done for hundreds of other people in Transit and most of them are dead.
She said nothing. Nothing would help.
I got so much pressure in here. He felt for her hand, pressed it against his chest. Feels like it’s boiling up and there’s nowhere for it to go that’s good. Only good thing I got
