“Okay, we got them,” Thomer said, straightening up and dusting dirt from his armor. “Where now?”
I suggested we head over the rise.
“Are you guys heading into town after this?” Philips asked. He sounded hopeful. He was still restricted to the barracks, but I mentioned that I might ask Major Burton for permission to take him out with us.
“After this detail? Man, I want to get good and drunk,” said Thomer, who seldom got drunk.
“How about you, Harris?” Philips asked. As a noncom addressing a superior officer, he was supposed to refer to me as “Lieutenant” or “sir,” but under the current circumstances …
“I’m ready to tie on a good one,” I admitted.
We crested the rise, and the massacre was suddenly laid out before us. Fatigue-clad bodies carpeted the ground ahead of us, and every last one of them had muddy white hair and brown eyes wide open and startled. They lay in intricate patterns like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle poured out of a box.
“Lord.” Thomer sighed.
“Shit,” groaned Philips. “There must be a million of them down there.”
I surveyed the scene. It was absolutely still. Even the wind had stopped, but not everything was silent.
“There’s a live one,” Thomer said. He pointed along the ridge that surrounded the clearing. There, sitting on the ridge, was an old soldier curled around an M27. He cradled it to his chest and rocked back and forth. His sobs carried across the forest floor.
“Go get the jeep,” I told Philips. “We’d better run this guy back to town.”
Thomer and I stepped over bodies and made our way around the rim of the clearing. When we came to the bottom of his hill, the old man turned and stared down at us. “The Liberator,” he said, his voice drenched with disgust. “All of these men die, and the specking Liberator makes it out alive.”
It was Glen Benson, the Liberator-hating old man who sat next to me on that flight to Mars. Even with all these men dead around him, this piece of shit could not let go of his prejudice.
“What is your name, Corporal?” Thomer asked, stepping between me and Benson.
“Benson. Corporal Glen Benson.”
“Are you hurt?” Thomer asked.
“Just my leg,” Benson said. Now that he mentioned it, I saw that it was bent at an unnatural angle.
“We’ll take you into town,” Thomer said, as Philips came driving over the ridge, his jeep bouncing as it cleared ruts in the ground. He worked a miracle, managing to drive right up to us without running over any bodies.
“Thomer, why don’t you drive Corporal Benson back to town,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.
Benson shook his head. “I’m staying here with my platoon.”
“You’re doing what with who?” Philips asked. There was no sympathy in his voice; he let his outrage show. “Listen here, you old specker, we ain’t got time to argue. We have a war to fight.”
“These men died …”
“Damn specking right they died. That’s why they’ve got all them holes in them,” Philips said.
“I belong with my platoon,” Glen protested.
“You do? You planning on killing yourself, or are you just going to sit around crying and wait for the Mudders to come back?”
I thought Benson would either shoot Philips or put a bullet in his own fool head. Instead, he climbed to his feet, wincing at the pain and obviously unsteady. Thomer grabbed him by the shoulder and helped him walk to the jeep.
“Can I drive the old bastard in?” Philips asked loud enough for Benson to hear. He had clearly taken a liking to the old fool.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Thomer said, as he arranged Benson in the back of the jeep.
As they drove away, Thomer muttered, “What an asshole.”
I nodded, then asked, “Which one?”
Over the next two days, more than ten thousand survivors found their way back to Valhalla from the forest. The rest of the two hundred and fifty thousand troops were officially listed M.I.A., though everyone knew they were deader than Caesar’s ghost. We lost another thirty-five thousand men when the Avatari rolled over the bunker. More than two hundred and seventy-five thousand men died in a single day.
It wasn’t the loss of manpower that upset the balance of power. We lost twenty-five rocket launchers when the battle reached Vista Street. With only six hundred thousand men and no working missile defenses along the western edge of Valhalla, we could no longer enforce our perimeter.
From here on out, the Avatari would be able to wage their war in town.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
There were seven of us—Thomer, Skittles, Boll, Herrington, Manning, Sharpes, and me. Manning and Sharpes were from another company in the battalion, but we could overlook that shortcoming. The numbers in our company were down after the battle for Vista Street.
I had hoped to get Philips off the shit list, so he could come with us, but no such luck. When I asked Major Burton, our battalion commander, to give Philips the night off, he had refused even to consider the idea.
I did not bother asking Burton if he wanted to come into town with us because he would have said no. He would not come to town with a pack of enlisted men. As an officer, I wasn’t supposed to fraternize with the enlisted folk either, but I did not think my fellow officers would mind. They were natural-born, I was a clone. I might have received the bars but that did not make me part of their fraternity. Knowing that I would never be counted an equal in the loyal order of officers, I fraternized with the conscripts.
We borrowed a truck and drove to the bar and restaurant district. The first time I went for a joyride downtown, trucks were reserved for officers and noncoms who could produce a requisition slip signed by an officer. This time, Corporal Manning said he could procure the truck. When I volunteered to sign for it, he said, “Don’t sweat it, I took care of it.”
Since he’d signed his life away on the truck, Manning got to drive. Herrington rode shotgun up front. The rest of us piled in the back and swapped stories as we drove up Carlson Avenue and into town. I listened to the conversations around me but did not join in.
I had become preoccupied with what I saw. We passed a park that the Corps of Engineers had turned into a city dump with a twenty-foot-tall mountain range of garbage. Birds swooped down from the sky to hop along the garbage and pick at it. Cat-sized rats scurried around the base of the garbage. Seeing the birds and the rats, I wondered how long it would take until those carrion feeders found their way to the dead soldiers in the forest.
We drove down streets along which new barricades were under construction. The brass planned to cordon these areas off. With the Vista Street bunker destroyed, these areas might soon become the new fronts.
Some places we passed showed new signs of urban decay. We drove by an L-shaped bank building in which the wind had blown huge piles of loose papers along the walls; they looked like snowdrifts. Vandals had painted signs on a couple of police stations in one part of town. Other areas of town were immaculate. We drove past a central park in which dozens of soldiers worked, picking up trash, raking leaves, and trimming hedges.
“I heard you went out on a tagging detail,” Boll said.
“Yeah,” Thomer answered.
“What was it like out there?”
“A lot of trees and shit,” I said, breaking in and hoping to stop Thomer from saying anything that might hurt company morale. That was a direct order, by the way. Officers were told to keep their men from speculating about the situation for all the good it would do. Telling Marines not to discuss the battle was like ordering someone who has been shot in the gut to stop bleeding. Stuff leaks out, no matter what you do.
“Did you find dead soldiers?” Boll asked.
Technically, I was supposed to tell them to change the subject, but they would have just fired up the conversation again a little later.
