The only thing that remained constant was the pizza.
It had existed before I was born and would probably still be doing a brisk trade when I died, whenever that would be. In a world where Domino’s was my only constant, it was hard to grasp the full mutability of all the variables of the world.
This, I suppose, was Washington’s new White Man’s Burden—to be born in America, land of the unchanging pizza chain and shopping mall, and to send people like me out into the big bad outside world to go and kill Mr. Johnny Foreigner for this-and-that reason. Whatever. I wouldn’t like to be in the position of making those sorts of decisions. Give me the Empire of the Rising Pizza Dough any day of the week.
Give me my life.
And why not? Just like Williams, I had relinquished the unwelcome responsibility of having to decide things for myself. No buck stops with me. It gets passed up the chain to … who knows?
Huh? What was I trying to say with all this philosophical musing? I guess I was trying to articulate just how utterly impossible it was for me to try and articulate what I thought or felt about the fucked-up political situation down on the ground where I was now. I knew that there was some sort of Muslim-Christian divide involved, but that in truth this probably only accounted for about five percent of the real reasons behind the hostilities. What I did know was my orders—to track down the target, the man calling himself defense minister of the rabble that was calling itself the interim government. I knew that the NSC had identified him as Public Enemy Number One for this region. I knew that he was a bigwig. And I knew that back when this region had been called a proper country, he’d been a brigadier general in the army, and so he was now armed to the teeth.
I knew that his paramilitary outfit’s MO was to go around to the far-flung villages of the country, drafting all able-bodied youths into their ranks. We were heading toward one such village right now. I knew that the paramilitary group, headed by the ex-brigadier-general-who-now-called-himself-defense-minister-of-the-interim-government, was engaged in the modern equivalent of witch-hunting: terrorist-hunting. That’s what they called it, anyway—shooting dead any signs of opposition, only leaving alive youths who might be useful if impressed into service.
I could see a town in the distance through the front windshield, and I supposed that it would have been subjected to the same “with-us-or-against-us” massacre/draft. An orange light emanating from the town lit up the undersides of the clouds in the sky. Huge chunks of the town were blazing, no doubt. Thick plumes of smoke rose into the sky, reminding me of a painting I once saw of Chinese dragons.
“Looks like we’re getting close, boys. Let’s keep it together,” Williams called out from the cargo bay.
We pulled our scarves up over our mouths. A pathetic attempt at a disguise, maybe, but all of us knew full well that it would probably be enough to get us through any checkpoints.
We entered what once must have been a picturesque little town, now reduced to rubble. The old buildings that had been built and cared for over the years were now little more than a collection of bullet-ridden empty husks, such was the double whammy from the aerial bombardment at the start of the war and the mortar shelling that came later.
Soon there were people, and we arrived at a checkpoint. The guard beckoned for us to stop. Alex, who spoke the local lingo fluently, barked out gruffly that we were on patrol and were running short of food and fuel. The guard nodded and waved his handheld wand out toward each of us in term.
The blood-covered dog tags in their protective gel coatings that were in our stomachs did their jobs. We were identified as the soldiers we had recently killed, and the guard took down our details, cross-referenced them with the data on his laptop, and, satisfied, waved us on our way.
Candy from a baby, I thought, not for the first time.
The guard couldn’t have cared less whether we were actually the people our IDs said we were. It was as if the only thing that mattered was the fact that the tags in our body said that we were someone.
Unthinkably lax security by American standards—but then, we were the most advanced capitalist nation in the world. Unlike this two-bit outfit, our data protection was enforced with sophisticated biometrics. In the States you couldn’t just “identify” yourself. You had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were who you were claiming to be. They’d built a public database for exactly this purpose. Hell, Domino’s wouldn’t even hand over your pizza until you had your thumbprint checked by their finger reader.
In comparison, the soldier back there was satisfied by the simple ID that showed up in a simple database—who knows, maybe even something as basic as Microsoft Excel. The very fact that there was some sort of computerized data seemed to be enough. As was more or less the case in all countries suffering from this sort of civil war. When your country’s falling apart at the seams, computer literacy just isn’t a priority, I guess.
We pulled up alongside the ruins of an old church and dismounted from the truck.
“Gunfire, sir,” said Alex. Sure enough, there was the intermittent sound of single shots being fired in the distance, somewhere to the east of the town. “I guess they haven’t got this town totally under control yet.”
“That’s one possibility,” said Leland as he inspected his dirty AK. A bit of mud wasn’t going to stop it from working, but I guess he missed the SOPMODs that we’d had to ditch earlier. Still, he didn’t forget to remove the first bullet from each full magazine: when the magazines were absolutely full they pressed down on the spring that released them, meaning that the bullets wouldn’t always eject smoothly. “Although if I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely they’re executing people.”
With that, we walked quietly into enemy territory. Here and there were buildings still aflame, with civilian corpses scattered about the place. There was a woman with a shapely physique, who you could have called attractive were it not for the fact that half her face had been blown off, with the light from the flames illuminating the contents of her head for all to see. She held a hand attached to the arm of a child. Her son? Her daughter? Hard to tell, as it really was only the arm of a child that she held on to; the body had been blown away.
Over there—Alex tapped my shoulder, and I looked toward where he was indicating. The town square, full of youths in civilian clothing, lined up in rows, having ID tags implanted into their shoulders. Children being transformed into armed insurgents.
Children, still pliable and malleable, abducted and turned into soldiers. In fact, some of the children might not have been abducted—plenty came forth voluntarily. If you became a soldier you were given an ID tag, after all.
Ordinary ID tags at that—no different from ones used to sort inventory in a market stall. Only now they were being subcutaneously injected into the armed insurgents and drafted children. The ID tags being used in this war—including the ones that we all had in our stomachs—were no doubt mass produced cheaply in some factory somewhere, Oklahoma or Osaka or anywhere else in the world.
In countries like this one where the government had all but disintegrated due to civil war, it wasn’t at all uncommon for family registers and birth records to be lost completely. Citizenship papers? Who was to tell whether you were even actually a citizen? Was someone going to take a census, dodging bullets as they did so? Sure, you might live here, work here, grow crops on the land, but you’re not from here anymore—how could you be, when no one knew where here was? No, all you had left was your name, and you had to hope that was enough for you to get by in what now passed for the local community.