Sensory masking.
Finally it hit me. The enemy had received pain masking too. They’d had their brains messed with so that they could have their pain temporarily filtered out; they could sense when they had been hurt without really feeling it. The nightmarish vision I’d had back in the hotel while I was mowing down the children had now proved to be strikingly prescient. We were finding out what would happen when two groups met up—two groups that had both received BEAR treatment.
That’s right. None of the G9 countries had ever had cause to meet one another on the battlefield, obviously. There had never been a test case where two equally technologically advanced militaries had been pitted against each other. Modern warfare, as far as we were concerned, meant asymmetric warfare in its truest sense. It meant rich white guys invading enemy territory and blowing seven shades of shit out of poor brown guys. That was what all of our plans and missions essentially came down to.
That was why no one had predicted or planned for or trained us for a situation such as this one. A zombie shootout. Our ambushers had evidently been at the receiving end of some fairly high-tech military support treatment before coming here. Technology that made them impervious to pain and indifferent to the fact that they were losing blood and even limbs in the course of engaging the enemy.
“The enemy has received sensory masking!” I told Leland.
“Yes sir, we noticed that! We’ll just have to flatten them into hamburgers, sir! Over!”
I was lost for words. This was … grotesque. This just wasn’t war anymore.
I admit it. I lost my nerve.
The mental image of both sides standing there, firing away at each other until we were literally no more than piles of mincemeat. It shocked me to my core. The fear of death is always with you when you’re on a mission. Our job is to take that fear and link it to our desire to live. So it wasn’t the fear of death that was paralyzing me. It was the vision of a battle taken to its logical conclusion of an eternal shootout without pain or feeling.
I hadn’t yet reached the train car where Leland and the others were under siege. I wasn’t yet close enough to properly engage with the soldiers who had taken ten bullets to the belly and lost their fingers and arms and legs and ears and jaws and cheeks but were still fighting. I was out of range. And worst of all, I was glad that I was out of range.
The limits of this battle were no longer the effective firing range of the weapons, though. The limit was now how far you could imagine yourself being pushed into the realm of the grotesque, how happy you were to keep fighting even when injured to the point of permanent disfigurement. The limit was the map of the mind that showed what to do to suppress emotion and feeling.
I was spurred on by guilt now—guilt that I had yet to join my comrades on the battlefield. I leapt out of my hiding place and ran full speed toward the carriage where Leland was holed up. Not a professional judgment call or a pragmatic decision, just a blind dash.
The world was a cruel place. For some reason, not a single bullet hit me during my desperado charge. I later realized that it was probably because our assailants were already retreating at that point, but at the time it felt bizarre, like I was being cheated out of my chance to take part in the battle. Why? Why couldn’t I be part of it? I was frustrated, vexed, even, that no one was shooting me.
I slipped into the carriage where Leland and what was left of the crew were making their stand.
“Jaeger One, sir, how are things outside?” was the first thing Leland said to me.
The men were collapsed across the floor. Various parts of their bodies were soaked in red. Most of them held guns in their hands and even now were ready to counterattack. I realized that a hand grenade had exploded inside the carriage, and evil-looking fragments were scattered about the place, embedded in the walls and furniture and ceiling, leaving the room glittering like a bizarre planetarium.
I looked at Leland. Jesus. It wasn’t just his arm that he’d lost.
The lower half of his body had been blown away, and his guts were dribbling out. His SmartSuit was doing its futile best to keep him alive. The floor—or, to be precise, what used to be the left wall of the train car—was covered in a slippery, half-congealed black film of the men’s blood.
I looked around to see if I could spot Leland’s legs. Nelson had an extra pair of legs in his lap and by the looks of things wouldn’t be needing them: his face had been ripped off from his jaw to his right ear. You could see right through his exposed cheek to his upper teeth, which shone pearly white, making him look like a grinning skeleton that hadn’t yet been properly cleaned of its skin. I picked up the pair of legs, and then realized that they might not have even been Leland’s.
I handed them over to Leland anyway—they would have to do for the time being. He gave a strained laugh. I realized that his consciousness was fading. Ready to disappear for good any minute now.
“What’s … happening outside … sir? The bastards … did … we get all …” Leland’s voice trailed off and was gone. He was gone. All traces of consciousness in his brain, gone.
“Who knows,” I said to Leland’s corpse.
Outside, the thrum of the helicopter engine was turning into a high-pitched whine in the distance.
There were no more gunshots or explosions. They were replaced by the wailing of the injured passengers.
A Ligeti.
1
One.
Two.
I was counting the coffins.
Three.
Four.
I stared up at the sky for a long time. A real long time. Long enough that I never wanted to have to look at the sky again. I stared so much that the motherly form of the Globemaster gradually approaching the runway was starting to look like a whale or a dolphin, or maybe some nameless prehistoric fish. A black fish swimming through the gray June skies. And I was standing at the bottom of the sea. The fish swam through the ocean of grayness and eventually touched down gently in our vicinity and opened its giant womb to the world to release the eggs it had been carrying in its belly.
The eggs emerged from the womb. The eggs of the deceased. The steel fish gave birth to eggs of death.
One, two. I counted them. The coffins emerging from the gaping womb. The eggs.
The corpses that had been scraped up, patched together, reconstructed from nearly nothing restored, draped with the Stars and Stripes, and tagged.
Five, six. I counted the coffins.
I wasn’t the only one counting. The US Armed Forces were also counting.
They counted the coffins and let the appropriate people know of their arrival. One, two, three, four. To be precise, it was IMADS doing the counting: the International Military Auxiliary Delivery Service. Using the metadata embedded in the tags in the coffins. Fedex let you know when your parcel arrived; IMADS let you know when your coffin arrived.
Soldiers carried the coffins. I carried the coffins. Williams carried the coffins. The survivors carried the coffins.
Inside them were fragments of flesh.
They had been carefully pieced together and reconstructed. I caught a glimpse of the operation back at base camp. Technicians skillfully piecing things together. They needed to have something resembling a body before they could send the remains back home to their families. The technicians used genetic markers and the tags on the fragments of clothes to match the correct pieces of flesh to the correct bodies. The correct intestines, the correct fingers, the correct skin, the correct eyeball.