“I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That’s about it.”
“Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert’ll trip you out. I don’t know. It’s cool.” She gazes off into a private distance. “Running the border towns was the best. We’d start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing.” She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she’d toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered…
“Where’s your head at, man?” GRob asks. “Am I losing you, too?”
“Just a little vacation. I’m back.”
She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip. They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, “We get outa this, man… You’n me. For real.”
“Are you motivating me?”
“Fucking A! Is it working?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We’ll see how it sets up after that.”
“Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers.”
“You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing.”
Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman’s got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. “We’re not getting out of this,” he says.
She holds steady. “It’s still a promise.”
They stay locked, and then she says, “Fuck the monsters! We’re the real monsters here.”
“Fanged motherfuckers!” Wilson says. “We rule the goddamn world!”
“We’re poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they’ll crap blood and scream for their mamas.”
“They won’t eat us, we’ll eat them. We’ll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh.”
“We’re too cool to die! Too sexy!”
“We’re movie stars with mad fucking weapons!”
“We’re scrap iron…”
“We’re wild dogs!”
“…we were born for the shit!”
1323 hours
On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn’t seem to care what they do. He’s obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he’s likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can’t do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they’re thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, “Whatever.”
The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson’s ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, “Fuck you, Jim!” and then, to Wilson, says, “Keep firing!” Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently, and doesn’t react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest’s boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He’s excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter’s not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.
“Those fucking wolves are out there,” GRob says, “they’re dead for real, not just their transmitter’s down. I say we keep on going.”
“Deeper into the cave or out into the valley?” Wilson asks this of Baxter, but it’s GRob who answers. “Deeper,” she says. “Might be worse back in there, but I done enough with those wolves.”
“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Baxter says, slurring his words.
The anger and frustration that’ve been building in Wilson, his sense of being abandoned by Baxter, betrayed by him, all this spikes, but he doesn’t act on it, he doesn’t start ranking on his best friend, and from this he realizes that, like GRob, he has given up on Baxter. Their stroll in the brass forest has confirmed her judgment. “Dog!” he says to Baxter. “You in there? You are, you better do something, man. Battle juice, God’n Country, IQ. Whatever it takes. ’Cause you are fucking slipping away.”
Baxter’s eyes find him through the faceplate, and he’s about to speak when a silent shadow sweeps over them, a massive shadow. Wilson knows before he glances up that it’s death in some form. Its chill invades him, but it’s gone so quickly, the form that imprints itself on his mind doesn’t seem the one he actually saw, a cat’s face with black wings, leathery wings and struts of cartilage, maybe a bat, an enormous bat. Incredibly fast. Like the blur that took DeNovo. He looks back along the path. Rats are gathering in the crooks of the twisted brass trees that survived their passage, thousands of glinting red eyes pointed from pockets of shadow. He hears behind him the snick of GRob slotting a fresh magazine into her rifle. “Keep going,” she says. “That’s who we are, man. We keep going.”
1655 hours
They are miles from the brass forest, the walls of the cave once again too distant to see or to read, lost in a field of yellow flowers, when they happen upon what appears to be a survivor from another patrol, a suited figure sitting among the flowers, his torso and helmeted head visible above the blooms. At a distance he looks like an element of a Zen garden. A minimalist, vaguely human sculpture of pale brown stone. His privacy screen has been engaged and the display on his faceplate is showing a clip excerpted from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. GRob bends to him, punches keys on the soldier’s computer, reads the arm display. “OD,” she says.
“Who is it?” Wilson asks.
“Gary Basknight.”
Wilson remembers him from training. The Basilisk, he called himself. Kept growing a soul patch against regs. Big, muscular kid from Tampa. A laughing skull tattooed on his neck. Wilson, himself tattooless, contemplated getting a similar one. He watches the cartoon clip. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird around a corner inside a house and screeches to a halt when he sees Tweety hovering before him. He makes a two-handed grab for the bird, but Tweety squirts up and Sylvester just misses. He makes another grab, and another. Another yet. Each time, Tweety Bird squirts higher, losing a yellow feather or two in the process, yet suffering no serious damage, continuing to hover almost within reach. Sylvester doesn’t notice that as he grabs and misses, he’s rising higher and higher off the floor. Finally he notices—oh-oh!—and realizes he can’t fly. A perplexed look comes over his face. Then down he falls, leaving a spreadeagled cat-shaped hole in the floor. The clip restarts. Wilson can’t get over the banal ugliness of the sight, this brightly animated few seconds of Oof! and Gasp! and Kapow! framed by a camo-painted combat suit, this human being reduced to a death utterance of streaming video. Nor can he connect these silly, albeit somewhat ominous, images with the surly badass who Basknight pretended to be and, in fact, was. Basknight’s choice of privacy screen might, like his own, have been hastily considered, or maybe this was Basknight’s way of flipping off the world, maybe he realized how obscenely trivial it would appear to anyone finding his body. Then again, maybe the clip embodies an absurdist view of life that he kept hidden from his peers, most of whom perceived him to have the famished appetites and clouded sensibility of a creature in a shooter game.