Genocidal Organ (36 page)

Like a Clint Eastwood movie, I remembered. A movie where the side of a bus was opened up by machine-gun fire. Clint played a detective whose job it was to defend a woman who was a key witness in a case and was being targeted by crooked cops. And that made me think of the person we had been tasked to guard: John Paul.

“What about the prisoners? Over.”

“
We can’t tell what’s happening in the next carriage, sir. We’re pinned down. I do know that the guys guarding the car aren’t responding. SmartSuits are reporting them dead. When I tried to leave this car to investigate my left arm was blown off my shoulder, sir! Over.”

Leland’s voice was as positive as ever as he rattled off the list of disasters. Damn him—it almost made me laugh. But I could tell he wasn’t joking. That was just the state we were in now, we who could perceive pain without feeling it. The Special Forces with our sensory masking. An arm ripped out of its socket? The SmartSuit would soon see to the blood, no worries. You could imagine the stories the guys would be telling down at the bar later.
Hey guys, I was charging along without a care in the world and fuck me, I never noticed that my own head had been blown off! Whaddaya know!

“Are you hurt?” I vocalized almost unconsciously.

I suppose Leland was a bit taken aback to be asked such an irrelevant question under the circumstances. “
Uh, yes, sir, I guess I am. I can tell I’ve been hurt, I mean. I can’t feel anything of course. No problem, sir. Pain’s not too much of a—motherfucker! Clavis, they got Nelson. Shit! Nelson’s down, sir! Fuck! Goddamn! Over!”

I gritted my teeth and started advancing again. The enemy had our train car surrounded in siege formation. I took a hand grenade out and threw it toward the car.

A rumble. I took advantage of the collapse in their formation caused by the explosion to move closer by another carriage. From my new cover I looked out to examine the situation.

I could just about make out some figures in camouflage gear. Many of them were streaked with scarlet. I realized that these were open wounds. Stumps, even. Two soldiers standing near the point where my grenade went off had lost arms and legs. They were now moving for cover, most of their bodies camouflaged except for their newly acquired stumps that were spurting crimson blood onto the terrain. Leland’s crew took full advantage of the lull to launch a counteroffensive, throwing a grenade at the enemies on the other side and following it with a fusillade. I used the opportunity to move closer by yet another carriage. Almost there. Almost ready to link up.

I performed another quick recon. We’d managed to kill a few of them in the short time since I launched my grenade.

But the walking wounded seemed impervious to their pain. There were men who had lost arms or legs or were bleeding out but still maintained battle formation and were firing away. Who were these assailants? How far did we have to grind them down before they would die? This was like a zombie film, I thought. And not the twentieth-century sort with the shambling walking dead—these were the lean, mean, fast zombies of the early twenty-first century.

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.

The coffins were full of corpses that had been fabricated just like that.

As I carried the coffins I tried to figure out if I was angry. My comrades had died. Many of them. I was allowed to be angry. I was
supposed
to be angry. I should be hating someone. The soldiers who ambushed us. Or the mastermind behind the surprise attack.

But the harsh reality was that the anger and the hatred that should have been welling up inside me was nowhere to be found.

Without turning my head I looked over to Williams, who was carrying the same coffin on the other side. There, in his face, were anger, hatred, sadness, just as they should be. Tight lips and a shining desire to kill the as-yet-unidentified mastermind. I tried copying him by stiffening my lips and squinting. After holding the face for a couple of minutes I started to think that maybe I was beginning to feel angry after all. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be hating yet, but maybe I could hate them once I found out.

I wondered if Williams’s righteous anger, his anger for his fallen comrades, could be called a manifestation of the conscience. To be angry on behalf of somebody else. To hate on behalf of people who were not yourself.

I didn’t have that feeling. I did feel sorrow, but that sorrow steadfastly refused to blossom into anger. And who was I
supposed
to hate, anyway? Our assailants? The mastermind behind the attack? John Paul?

I was empty. I had no idea who I was supposed to hate.

Not that I could share this fact with anybody. Not my buddies, not Williams, not Colonel Rockwell, not the counselors.

We had orders from above to receive post-combat counseling. To avoid developing PTSD.

Williams was angry. Really pissed, just as a real soldier should be. “Who needs that shit! Just let us at the bastards who attacked us! I’ll shove my PTSD so far up their asses—”

He didn’t feel any emotional trauma. Just anger toward the ambushers. That was what he was trying to say.

I tried to adopt the same attitude. I put on a show of being angry.
Esprit de corps
and all that. But then it was announced that any soldier who failed to turn up for his prescribed counseling session would face court martial.
You Special Forces troops are highly valued human resources,
we were told.
It’s our duty to make sure you’re properly maintained.

I didn’t need any counseling.

What I needed was punishment.

I needed someone who could punish me.

I desperately wanted to be punished for all the crimes I had committed.

“This beats any counseling bullshit.” That was what Williams said when he left his wife and daughter at home to come round to my house. What did he want? Why, the usual holy trinity, of course: Domino’s Pizza, beer, and a movie. I wasn’t really in the mood, but then I had no good reason to say no, so I let him stay.

This was what we’d done when Alex died too, I realized as I opened a Bud. And Williams wasn’t necessarily wrong when he said that this was better than any counseling. Whenever Williams or I experienced anything traumatic at work, beer and junk food and lazing around really did seem to relieve the stress.

I took a sip of my Budweiser. Definitely a different taste from the Budvar. Williams was chomping down on the pizza and choosing a movie from his own archive.

Williams didn’t have much to say for himself today. Well, not compared to his usual self. I could tell he was fed up with the counseling, tired of forcing out the emotions that were allegedly trapped inside him.

The film started. King Arthur appeared from the mist, closely followed by his squire, who was tapping a pair of coconut halves together to emulate the sound of horses trotting. It was Williams’s favorite,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. He laughed loudly at all the jokes as usual, but every once in a while he cast a glance at me as if to seek confirmation.
It’s okay to laugh at this stuff, isn’t it?

Williams had been out for the count during the whole ambush, safely out of harm’s way in the rear car. So he hadn’t been hit, and he did not take part in or even witneess the battle of the soldiers who felt no pain even though they knew it was there, the soldiers who turned one another into mincemeat. I was sure Williams couldn’t forgive himself for not being there. Not being part of the battle that saw his comrades slip away one by one. The shame and the frustration of not being part of it was hitting Williams just as hard as the reality of losing his comrades.

“
None shall pass! None shall pass!”

In the movie, the Black Knight was speaking to Arthur and his squire. The battle began.

Williams spoke. “It’s scary how much Terry Gilliam looks like a servant in this, don’t you think?”

“Well, he’s supposed to be the servant, no? He plays the squire, right?”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. You know. He’s too convincing. Makes it hard to believe he went on to be a famous director.”

I turned back to the screen to continue watching the film. King Arthur had just sliced the Black Knight’s left arm off. Orangey fake blood spurted from the stump where the arm had been.

“ ’
Tis but a scratch!”
The Black Knight continued fighting.

Just like the battle in the train, I thought, gulping back some beer. Except we had all been Black Knights, the enemy and us included.

In the movie another one of the Black Knight’s arms went flying off. “
Just a flesh wound!”
The knight carried on, kicking Arthur, hurling insults at him, bleeding from both shoulders. By the end of the scene he had lost all his limbs and was a stump on the ground, but he was still threatening to bite Arthur to death right up until the very end.