A muffled thud. It falls against the ground.
I look up past him, and see a bigger, taller rat walking toward me. It’s holding a gun in its hands.
I close my eyes.
“You can all have a real drink tonight,” the Drill Instructor said. He revealed a few cases of beer next to the campfire.
“What’s the occasion?” Pea asked happily. He grabbed a chicken foot out of the big bowl and gnawed on it.
“I think it’s somebody’s birthday today.”
Pea was still for a second. Then he smiled and kept on gnawing his chicken foot. In the firelight I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
The Drill Instructor was in a good mood. “Hey, Pea,” he said, handing Pea another beer, “you’re a Sagittarius. So you ought to be good at shooting. But why is your aim at rats so awful? You must be doing a lot of other kinds of shooting, am I right?”
We laughed until our stomachs cramped up. This was a side of the Drill Instructor we never knew.
The birthday boy ate his birthday noodles and made his wish. “What did you wish for?” the Drill Instructor asked.
“For all of us to be discharged as quickly as possible so that we can go home, get good jobs, and spend time with our parents.”
Everyone went quiet, thinking that the Drill Instructor was going to get mad. But he clapped, laughed, and said, “Good. Your parents didn’t waste their money on you.”
Now everyone started talking at once. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money and buy a big house. Some said they wanted to sleep with a pretty girl from every continent. One said he wanted to be the president. “If you’re going to be the president,” another said, “then I’ll have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Milky Way.”
I saw that the Drill Instructor’s expression was a bit odd. “What do you wish for, sir?”
We all got quiet.
The Drill Instructor poked at the fire with a stick.
“My home village is poor. All of us born there are stupid, not much good at schooling, not like you. As a young man, I didn’t want to work the fields or go to the cities and be a laborer. It seemed so futile. Then someone said, ‘Go join the army. At least you’ll be protecting the country. If you do well, maybe you’ll become a hero, and then you can return home and bring honor to your ancestors.’ I’d always liked war movies and thought it exciting to wear a uniform. So I signed up.
“Poor kids like me knew nothing except how to work hard. Every day, I trained the longest and practiced the most. If there was a dangerous task, I volunteered. If something dirty needed to be done, I did it. What did I do all that for? I just wanted an opportunity to be a hero on the battlefield. It was my only chance to do something with my life, you know? Even if I died, it would be worth it.”
The Drill Instructor paused, sighed. He kept on poking at the fire with his branch. The silence lasted for a long time.
Then he looked up and grinned. “Why are you all quiet? I shouldn’t have ruined the mood.” He threw away his branch. “Sorry. I’ll sing a song to apologize. It’s an old song. When I first heard it, you weren’t even born yet.”
He was not a good singer, but he sang with his whole heart. The corners of his eyes were wet.
“… Today all I have is my shell. Remember our glory days, when we embraced freedom in the storm? All life we believed we could change the future, but who ever accomplished it…?”
As he sang, the flickering shadows from the fire made him seem even taller, like a bigger-than-life hero. Our applause echoed loudly in the empty wilderness.
“Let me tell you something,” Pea said. He leaned over, sipping from a bottle. “Living is so… like a dream.”
The loud noise of the engine wakes me.
I open my eyes and see the Drill Instructor, his lips moving. But I can’t hear a word over the noise.
I try to get up, but a sharp pain in my chest makes me lie down again. Over my head is a curved metallic ceiling. Then the whole world starts to vibrate and shake, and a sense of weight pushes me against the floor. I’m in a helicopter.
“Don’t move,” the Drill Instructor shouts, leaning close to my ear. “We’re taking you to the hospital.”
My memory is a mess of random scenes from that nightmarish battle. Then I remember the last thing I saw. “That gun… was that you?”
“Tranquilizer.”
I think I’m beginning to understand. “So what happened to Black Cannon?”
The Drill Instructor is silent for a while. “The injury to his head is pretty severe. He’ll probably be a vegetable the rest of his life.”
I remember that night when I couldn’t sleep. I remember Pea, my parents, and…
“What did you see?” I ask the Drill Instructor anxiously. “What did you see on the battlefield?”
“I don’t know,” he says. Then he looks at me. “It’s probably best if you don’t know, either.”
I think about this. If the rats are now capable of chemically manipulating our perceptions, generating illusions to cause us to kill one another, then the war is going to last a long, long time. I remember the screams and the sounds of flesh being torn apart by spears.
“Look!” The Drill Instructor supports me so that I can see through the helicopter cockpit window.
Rats, millions of rats are walking out of fields, forests, hills, villages. Yes, walking. They stand erect and stroll at a steady pace, as though members of the world’s largest tour group. The scattered trickles of rats gather into streams, rivers, flowing seas. Their varicolored furs form grand patterns. There’s a sense of proportion and aesthetics.
The ocean of rats undulates over the withered, sere winter landscape and the identical, boring human buildings, like a new life force in the universe, gently flowing.
“We lost,” I say.
“No, we won,” the Drill Instructor says. “You’ll see soon.”
We land on a military hospital. Bouquets and a wheelchair welcome me, the hero. A pretty nurse pushes me inside. They triage me quickly and then give me a bath. It takes a long time before the water flows clear. Then it’s time to feed me. I eat so quickly that I throw it all up again. The nurse gently pats my back, her gaze full of empathy.
The cafeteria TV is tuned to the news. “Our country has reached preliminary agreement with the Western Alliance concerning the trade dispute. All parties have described it as a win-win…”
On TV, they’re showing the mass migration of rats I saw earlier from the helicopter.
“After thirteen months of continuous, heroic struggle by the entire nation, we have finally achieved complete success in eradicating the rodent threat!”
The camera shifts to a scene by the ocean. A gigantic multicolored carpet is moving slowly from the land into the ocean. As it touches the ocean, it breaks into millions of particles, dissolving in the water.
As the camera zooms in, the Neorats appear like soldiers in a killing frenzy. Crazed, each attacks everything and anything around itself. There’re no more sides, no more organization, no more hint of strategy or tactics. Every Neorat is fighting only for itself, tearing apart the bodies of its own kind, cruelly biting, chewing others’ heads. It’s as if some genetic switch has been flipped by an invisible hand, and their confident climb toward civilization has been turned in a moment into the rawest, most primitive instinct. They collide against one another, strike one another, so that the whole carpet of bodies squirms, tumbles into a river of blood that runs into the sea.
“See, I told you,” the Drill Instructor says.
But the victory has nothing to do with us. This had been planned from the start. Whoever had engineered the escape of the Neorats had also buried the instructions for getting rid of them when their purpose had been accomplished.