This time I was met by what seemed like an excessively cheerful reply.
“Blue Boy here! Is this Jaeger One? Over.”
Shit, I’d forgotten to state my name.
“Affirmative, this is Jaeger One. My position is currently four carriages back from yours. What’s your status there? Over.”
“The engine appears to have been blown up, sir.” Leland still sounded as cheerful as ever. “Immediately after the explosion we were attacked and surrounded by airborne assault troops. We’re currently exchanging fire with them. We’re all trapped inside the overturned carriage. They’re using their machine guns to open holes in the walls, sir! Over!”
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.