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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Bleed
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I missed the mess tent, having cooks and hot meals. Before they rotated the kitchen staff back to Fort Dietrich they had them bake up a mountain of hardtack. That meant two things: that we weren’t going to eat a decent meal for a very long time, and that we weren’t going to give up Forward Operating Base Lono anytime soon, either.
Of course, nobody told the cooks how big to bake the biscuits, so we were now splitting the damned things in half. Most of the time, that meant putting the loaf at the edge of a table, holding a butter knife to it like a chisel and battering against the handle with a canteen. I don’t know if I got bumped, or wasn’t paying attention, or if the knife just slipped, but I banged my canteen hand against the edge of the table as the knife teeth raked my skin. I swore out loud, but it was just a little cut, a little scrape, the kind of thing back home you’d feel embarrassed about swearing over. Sergeant had been here longer than most, and was already standing over my shoulder by the time the knife clattered onto the floor. He pinched my middle and index fingers together and used them to pull my arm up into the air and yelled, “Medic!” Jose pushed through the line of men standing around the tables trying to break their tack apart. “Got a bleeder,” Sarge finished, letting go of my fingers and walking away, as if I was no longer his concern. “Move,” Jose said, pointing with his head to the door out. I wanted to stay paralyzed, because I knew what was going to happen, but something about Jose, in his eyes or his manner, or maybe just in the way the veins sticking out of his arms seem to pulse, I knew he didn’t need me willing to get his job done, and my legs started moving all on their own. “Clean hand,” he barked as we approached the door out, and I used my uncut hand to open it. The cool night air brought me back to some of my senses, and I turned back enough to ask him a question as we walked towards the Cage. “What do you need me to do?” “Just bleed,” he said. My head was spinning. “Couldn’t we just bandage it, some of that polymer that seals off the wound?” “You’re bloods already on the air. Time before they get here’s measured in seconds.” He shoved me inside the Cage. His arms were as big as my legs, so when he grunted shoving the big metal door shut, when he struggled to get the bolt latched, I couldn’t imagine anything getting through. Of course, we thought that about the first cage. It weighed as much as a VW Beetle, empty. I don’t think it was really his name, but the first guy they tossed in there we call “Bailey.” They made the cage big enough not a one of them could reach through if he stayed in the center, but none of us had thought about them carrying the cage off- but they did. It only took four of them, and they weren’t straining or even walking slow to do it; probably they could have done it with just a couple of them. The new cage was bigger, not just steel but concrete, really a cage within a cage, weighing a couple of semis worth. Whatever they were, they hadn’t carried the second cage off. Yet. Like a nervous tic, my bleeding hand went into my mouth, and I sucked the blood off it. Jose wasn’t even looking in my direction; he was busy prepping one of the shotguns. “Want a shotty?” he asked. I stared dumb, but I realized just in time I was still sucking on the cut to pull my hand away as he turned and handed me one. “Standard close-combat build, modeled after the under-barrels we use for domestics. You familiar with them?” I nodded, but I was still so numb that I don’t know if the gesture was perceptible. “It’s got a tight spread, but it still spreads. Try not to shoot me.” He pressed the shotgun into my palm, and hustled me through a secondary set of bars. The moment I was inside and Jose pushed the door closed behind me, the latch caught and it locked. My head smacked against something, and just as I turned to see what it was I remembered the brief: it was the only key to open the inner cage. I reached up to pull them off their hook, but they almost slipped because the dogtag chain they dangled from was still slick with blood. “Sorry about that,” Jose said, and it was the first and only time he wasn’t cold. “Medic’s job to clean up, but when the medic doesn’t make it, sometimes it falls through the cracks.” I barely heard him. My mind was onto blood, and my eyes darted around the cage interior, lingering on the bars, still splashed with red, drops of it on the cage floor. I shook and almost retched when I noticed a single chunk of meat caught in the door hinge. Survivability numbers suddenly smashed into my brain. 57% of people who entered the cage never walked back out. If you discounted the medics, it was closer to 78%. “Focus,” I heard, but it was far away, “focus, soldier.” It was Jose. “That seat in the center, that’s an Avenger cannon. It’s an anti-tank weapon, fires up to 4,000 30 mm rounds per minute. We tore it out of an A 10 the parasites downed.” “They can fly?” I asked, though I felt I’d known that. “That’s your primary. Anything standing in that doorway is yours to send back to Hell in tiny pieces.” “Can’t we just leave the door locked?” Jose almost smiled. “Wait them out? Given what we know about them, they’re a hell of a lot more likely to outlive us.” I sighed, and sat myself down in the Avenger seat. The superstitious called them vampires; officially they were parasites, which I liked better. There were a lot of theories how it started. Some people thought it was army testing, trying to perfect soldiers, Captain America gone awry, but that just seemed too comic book to me. Some said an archeological dig in Egypt had opened up a tomb full of them, and that they’d spread like a plague from there. There were even wilder fantasies than that, aliens, nanotech, that it was a new mutation of AIDS. But really it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except surviving. And we were doing that badly. It was arrogance, or ignorance, but we shipped half our armed forces into Eastern Europe, thinking we could contain whatever they were there. But the parasites went guerilla, broke into a thousand factions and hit us everywhere at once, clusters in New York and LA, Mexico City, Rio. Any city with a population of more than a million was suddenly compromised. Their numbers grew to the point where even the military couldn’t operate outside of fortified bases. Brass don’t tell us the numbers anymore, but one of my bunkmates said he got bored, and came up with some figures of his own. Basically, the way he figured we’d lost most every civilian stronghold, and about 3/5 of all the military ones. “So?” I asked Jose. My initial panic was subsiding, and now I was getting antsy. If I was going to die, I didn’t want it to be from boredom. “They wait for us to make the first move. Once the parasites get here, we open up, then the rest of the trench lights up.” I remembered it all from my briefing. Normally I worked the day shift, so I slept through most the bleed runs, or was on standby. But outside the cage was a trench flanked on either side by concrete bunkers full of mounted light machine guns. The entire thing was designed to maximize the kill zone but eliminate interlocking fire. There was a heavy thud against the door, then a pause. “Ready?” Jose asked? I didn’t say anything, but he unbolted the door. The door came open so fast I assumed there must have been an explosion, and instinctively covered my eyes, until I noticed a man standing in the doorway. Jose moved faster than I’d ever seen a person move, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him around inside, smashing his head into the outer row of bars, then snapped his neck and slashed his throat with the knife Velcroed across his chest. The parasite fell to the ground, twitching. Another was already walking through the open doorway, too fast for Jose to turn around, and I wanted to yell, like I was watching a horror movie and didn’t want my favorite character to die, but my hands remembered their duty and squeezed the Avenger’s trigger. The parasite disappeared in a cloud of pink mist as bullets too big for a body popped him like a balloon, and sent chunks of what was left flying backwards. Suddenly the trench was illuminated with gunfire, and I could see another dozen parasites, mostly in dark colors, standing around what remained of the corpse I’d shot. The smaller caliber rounds of the LMGs made them jerk about like spastics at a rave. “Fire!” yelled Jose over the clattering o gunfire. I squeezed the Avenger’s trigger again, and fire leapt from its ten-foot barrel. The parasites in my sights shattered like overripe fruit, leaving those out of my range to be torn to pieces by the rest of the LMGs. Jose looked up, at the roof. “Shi-” The parasite seemed to be almost liquid, and poured sidewise through the door, along the ceiling, where it stopped being a cloud of black things and solidified into a man. Jose fired the shotgun into the center of the blackness, and blood mushroomed out its back and onto the ceiling, but its gravity drove it down onto him like a sack of bricks. Jose managed to get his sidearm out and fired, stabbing with his other hand. The parasite had its hands around Jose’s throat, and drove sharp fingernails through skin, through blood, through meat, until their was a wet hiss as it pierced his esophagus. I pulled my own sidearm and cursed its 9 tiny millimeters as I emptied it into the parasite. It was too close to Jose for the shotgun, and really too far away for it to do too much good. But kneeled like it was, the Avenger wouldn’t touch him. It stared at Jose coldly, then stood. It took a moment to smile at me, and for the first time I realized that whatever they were, they were no longer fully human, in the same way that a drug addict at the height of his addiction isn’t, either. The Avenger tore through him like tissue. I waited a half of a second before I unlocked the cage. The gunfire from the trench was dying back, the last kernels of a microwave popcorn bag nearly done. The first aid cabinet was next to the shotguns, and I piled a surgery kit beside Jose. He put his hand over his throat and shook his head, then pointed back to the inner cage. I pulled his hand away from his neck, but he pushed it back in, trying to keep me from it. “Hands at your sides or I’ll suture them there.” He eyed me, then his hand fell back down, as he realized dying for principal was a stupid idea. There were two tears in his esophagus the width of a thumbnail. “This is going to be messy,” I told him. The needles were pre-threaded, so all I had to do was force it through the rough cartilage of the esophagus. I gave each cut three stitches, then wrapped his throat in gauze. “Keep pressure up.” I helped him to his feet, and he leaned against me as we walked to the door. “Reload your sidearm,” he said, holding his throat and talking with a wheeze like a throat cancer survivor. I did. “Now hand it to me.” I hesitated, but I realized that if I was holding him up he’d have a better chance at firing, so I gave it to him. “Now back in the cage, soldier.” I looked at him. “They may not be done. Throat can’t wait, but you’ve risked enough already. Back inside, lock the door.” He stood in the doorway, blood already soaking through the gauze at his throat, until I was safely locked away in the inner cage. And then he took a step off the concrete floor and disappeared into the darkness outside the cage. |
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