Out of fuel-air grenades. Only thirty-six 20mm slugs left. The magazine would be empty in five seconds. My rocket launcher—which they gave each of us only three rockets for anyway—got itself lost before I could even fire the damn thing. My head-mounted camera was wasted, the armor on my left arm was shredded, and even at full throttle the Jacket was only outputting at 40 percent. Miraculously, the pile driver on my left shoulder had survived without a scratch.
A pile driver is a close-combat weapon that uses an explosive charge to fire tungsten carbide spikes—only good against enemies within arm’s reach. The powder cartridges it fires are each as big as a man’s fist. At a ninety-degree angle of impact, the only thing that can stand up to it is the front armor plating on a tank. When they first told me its magazine only held twenty rounds, I didn’t think anyone could live long enough to use even that many. I was wrong.
Mine had four rounds left.
I had fired sixteen times, and missed fifteen—maybe sixteen.
The heads-up display in my suit was warped. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing where it was bent. There could be an enemy standing right in front of me and I’d never know it.
They say a vet who is used to the Jacket can get a read on his surroundings without even using the camera. Takes more than eyes in battle. You have to feel the impact passing through layers of ceramic and metal and into your body. Read the pull of the trigger. Feel the ground through the soles of your boots. Take in numbers from a kaleidoscope of gauges and know the state of the field in an instant. But I couldn’t do any of that. A recruit in his first battle knows shit-all.
Breathe out. Breathe in.
My suit was rank with sweat. A terrible smell. Snot was seeping from my nose, but I couldn’t wipe it.
I checked the chronometer beside my display. Sixty-one minutes had passed since the battle started. What a load of shit. It felt like I’d been fighting for months.
I looked left, right. Up, down. I made a fist inside one glove. Can’t use too much strength, I had to remind myself. Overdo it, and my aim would drift low.
No time to check the Doppler. Time to fire and forget.
Thak thak thak thak thak!
A cloud of dust rose.
The enemy’s rounds seemed to ride the wind over my head, but mine liked to veer off after leaving the barrel, as if the enemy simply willed them away. Our drill sergeant said guns could be funny like that. You ask me, it seems only fair that the enemy should get to hear shells screeching down on them, too. We should all have our turn feeling Death’s breath on the back of our neck, friend and foe alike.
But what would Death’s approach sound like to an inhuman enemy? Did they even feel fear?
Our enemies—the enemies of the United Defense Force—are monsters. Mimics, we call them.
My gun was out of bullets.
The silhouette of a misshapen orb materialized in the clay-brown haze. It was shorter than a man. It would probably come up to the shoulder of a Jacketed soldier. If a man were a thin pole standing on end, a Mimic would be a stout barrel—a barrel with four limbs and a tail, at any rate. Something like the bloated corpse of a drowned frog, we liked to say. To hear the lab rats tell it, they have more in common with starfish, but that’s just details.
They make for a smaller target than a man, so naturally they’re harder to hit. Despite their size, they weigh more than we do. If you took one of those oversized casks, the kind Americans use to distill bourbon, and filled it with wet sand you’d have it about right. Not the kind of mass a mammal that’s 70 percent water could ever hope for. A single swipe of one of its limbs can send a man flying in a thousand little pieces. Their javelins, projectiles fired from vents in their bodies, have the power of 40mm shells.
To fight them, we use machines to make ourselves stronger. We climb into mechanized armor Jackets—science’s latest and greatest. We bundle ourselves into steel porcupine skin so tough a shotgun fired at point blank wouldn’t leave a scratch. That’s how we face off against the Mimics, and we’re still outclassed.
Mimics don’t inspire the instinctive fear you’d expect if you found yourself facing a bear protecting her cubs, or meeting the gaze of a hungry lion. Mimics don’t roar. They’re not frightening to look at. They don’t spread any wings or stand on their hind legs to make themselves look more intimidating. They simply hunt with the relentlessness of machines. I felt like a deer in the headlights, frozen in the path of an oncoming truck. I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten myself into the situation I was in.
I was out of bullets.
So long, Mom.
I’m gonna die on a fucking battlefield. On some godforsaken island with no friends, no family, no girlfriend. In pain, in fear, covered in my own shit because of the fear. And I can’t even raise the only weapon I have left to fend off the bastard racing toward me. It was like all the fire in me left with my last round of ammo.
The Mimic’s coming for me.
I can hear Death breathing in my ear.
His figure looms large in my heads-up display.
Now I see him; his body is stained a bloody red. His scythe, a two-meter-long behemoth, is the same vivid shade. It’s actually more of a battle axe than a scythe. In a world where friend and foe wear the same dust-colored camouflage, he casts a gunmetal red glow in all directions.