After the Revolution, page 15
“Please sir–”
Roland stepped toward the broken, bloodied boy.
–He came back to himself, a bit disoriented but none the worse for wear. His hindbrain and a lifetime of combat memories had kept his body fighting in his mind’s absence. Now wrenchless, Roland used his bare hands to tear open doors and break faces. The gunners on the remaining technicals tried to fire back, but their maneuverability was limited by the rubble-choked streets and their own fleeing infantry. One minute after first contact, the Martyr contingent had been reduced to a dozen shell-shocked soldiers piled hastily onto the tops of their retreating drone carriers.
Roland hopped onto the last of the technicals. He disabled it by pulling the driver out through the front windshield and using the man’s body to beat the gunner into unconsciousness. Roland tore the vehicle’s 20mm cannon free from its swivel-mount and sighted in on the fleeing troops. His synapses promised him more chemical rewards, if only he’d pull the trigger.
But something in Roland’s forebrain stopped him. Under the joyous miasma of the battle drugs his conscience re-asserted itself. He lowered his weapon and watched as his enemies beat hell for leather in the opposite direction. His hands shook, and he felt the first symptoms of withdrawal as his heart-rate dropped and the adrenaline drip slowed its flow. Roland closed his eyes. He breathed in and out and centered himself.
The crash came.
Now that the fighting was done Roland had time to process the sense data he’d pulled from his enemies. He knew what the driver he’d ripped out of the windshield had eaten for breakfast. He knew which of the militia he’d crippled were fathers. He knew which had wives, or at least girlfriends. He could smell traces of football leather on some of their hands. One man he’d wrenched had smelled of rosin; a violinist.
Roland couldn’t fight a man without learning much more about him than any killer should know about their victims. That knowledge crashed down on him in a hailstorm of guilt. Roland dropped the cannon into the truck’s bed. He hopped down, pulled Sardar’s wrench free from the wreck of the second technical, and, with a heavy heart, headed back toward Bigsby and his squad.
Nadine and Azime both looked pretty seriously wounded. Bigsby was helping to carry them both back to the APC while Will handled overwatch with his grenade launcher. Roland caught up with them and fell into step. Bigsby looked over at him and grunted, “You gonna try to take my nipple now?”
Roland shrugged. He wasn’t in the mood. His brain was in the dark ugly place it always went after a bloody fight, when the raw data about all the men he’d killed or battered lingered in his brain like a fart in the back of a humvee.
They reached the APC. Sardar gasped when he saw them. Pedro vomited. Roland was confused until he realized Bigsby and Will had also started to stare. Roland looked down at himself and saw that he looked like a literal dead man walking. He’d been shot forty-seven times, by his hindbrain’s best count, and peppered with shrapnel on top of that. He had ribs showing through, holes blasted in his biceps and his belly, and the bone on his left thigh was completely exposed.
“It looks worse than it is,” Roland said.
“It looks like you should be dead about five times over,” Sardar replied.
Roland looked Sardar up and down. His hindbrain did the math.
“Eleven times, if I were you.”
“Jesus–”
He handed Sardar the wrench, now dented and bloodstained. A large clump of hair and scalp was still stuck to the heel jaw. The mechanic took his tool with one hesitant hand. He stared at the gore on it until Bigsby started to yell again.
“Oi, fuckos. In case you’ve forgotten there’s an army breathing up our asses. Sar’, you good to drive man?”
Sardar nodded.
“Then let’s get the wounded in the cab and power the fuck out of here. Will, stay on watch.”
Will grunted and jerked his head at Roland. “This fucker oughta cover us. He just took out half a company on his lonesome.”
“You trust him to watch your six?” Bigsby asked.
Roland only half-heard them. He stared off into the distance, worked his jaw, and clenched his left fist so hard his fingernails drew blood. He was lost in his head, scanning scent-memories and analyzing the men he’d just beaten. He was drawn, again and again, to the memory of one man in particular. He’d worn a tattered U.S. Army issue vest and an M16 that posed as much of a threat to Roland as a drunken hornet. He’d had the scent of a woman on him. He wasn’t alone in that, but the rich wave of oxytocin that had poured off him was intense and real. In his memory, the man’s face kept twisting and morphing into the face of Randall Wallace.
Roland started to cry.
Bigsby and Sardar loaded Ryan, Nadine, and Azime into the transport. Will just stared at him. His gaze locked on Roland’s tears as if each one were the Loch Ness Monster. Roland didn’t care. His hindbrain kept up its glitchy feed of data, a mix of information on the men he’d just killed and men he’d killed years ago.
Once the wounded were loaded up, everyone filed into the Mattis APC. Will popped the top hatch and sat gunner with his grenade launcher. Inside the APC, Bigsby and Pedro did their best version of first aid on their wounded companions. There wasn’t much for them to do, though. Everyone in the squad had fairly advanced healing suites.
Roland trudged into the APC and took his seat. No one made eye contact with him. Sardar kicked it into gear, and off they went.
Waco had always been one of the worst cities in Texas. In the late 1800s, it had been a refuge for former Confederate loyalists. In the 1900s, it had developed a reputation as a haven for kooks and religious extremists. Caught between the economic powerhouse of Dallas and the relative cultural mecca of Austin, Waco was a second-rate college town at best and, at worst, a meth-filled rest stop between Texas’s good cities.
The Revolution had changed that. After the Lakewood Blast, Dallas had bled 60 percent of its population. Most of those people had fled to Austin, since constant flooding had rendered much of Houston uninhabitable. But half a million of them, ish, had swelled Waco into something resembling a worthwhile place to exist. The city had thrived in the post-revolutionary years. It was nominally controlled by the Austin Regional Government, and so it had been spared the worst of the Republic of Texas’s corruption.
But now it looked like Waco would be the next city eaten by the expanding Heavenly Kingdom. Roland could smell the stink of fear in the air when they were still a half-dozen miles out from the city limits. Once they hit the city proper, their convoy halted at a military checkpoint. Power-armored Austin Republican Guardsmen opened the side hatch of the Mattis APC and inspected the squad. Bigsby spoke for them, beamed over some credentials from the SDF, and they were waved in.
They stopped at a fueling depot with the rest of the SDF column and Roland hopped out of the APC to stretch his legs and roll another blunt. He picked a cherry-apple wrap he’d dipped in a vat of extra-strength hydrocodone syrup earlier that morning. As he rolled it tight and sealed the seam with his saliva, he watched the SDF unload hundreds of wounded warriors from half-tracks and APCs and the beds of flatbed trucks. Many of the walking men and women looked wounded too. Most of the vehicles were damaged.
Roland lit the blunt and stared off toward Dallas. It was still early morning, and the sky was streaked with red and orange. On the horizon black smoke rose to meet the sunrise. Roland was struck with a powerful sense of déjà vu. This wasn’t the first time he’d watched a great city burn in the light of the rising sun. According to his hindbrain, it was around the thirtieth time. He recalled a few of those cities—Denver, Baltimore, D.C., Richmond—but the particulars of each calamity were lost to his memory.
He wondered, not for the first time, if his broken brain might be a blessing.
“Oi.”
It was Sardar. He approached from the rear and stepped up to Roland’s right side. Roland offered the mechanic his blunt, now half-smoked, and Sardar accepted it. He drew in a deep lungful of medicated smoke, held it in his lungs for three long seconds, and then exhaled with only a small fit of coughing.
“This tastes like fucking cough syrup, man.”
“Ayep,” Roland agreed. “There’s enough opiates on that to kill a small cat.”
“That’s a weird thing to say.”
“Ayep,” Roland agreed.
Sardar took a second hit and then passed the blunt back to Roland. They stood in companionable silence for a minute and watched the distant smoke mingle with the morning light. Sardar spoke first.
“Jim’s on his way out here. He’s flying in with three more squads. Austin’s approved emergency funding to stabilize the front. Apparently a chunk of that’s coming our way.”
“Grats,” said Roland. And then, “What’s the money mean to you?”
Sardar shrugged. “Cascadia, probably. Been saving for a couple years now. Fifty grand to buy residency, another hundred grand or so to set me up for the first year while I find work.”
Roland finished another deep pull on the blunt and offered it to Sardar. The other man declined with a polite wave of his hand.
“No thanks.”
Roland puffed again and asked, “So what’s the Pacific Northwest got that you want?”
“A future,” Sardar said. “I mean, that’s what it always meant in my head. I grew up in El Paso. Got trained up by that army, blooded in their first little civil war.”
“The Albuquerque Secession?”
Sardar nodded. “Didn’t see much action then. But I got Jim’s attention. He made me an offer when my term of service expired. The idea was I’d be with him for five years and retire with enough money to make a new start out West. I always dreamed of a life in Portland. It seems nice there.”
“It is,” Roland agreed. “Or at least, I’ve got nice memories. I met a girl out there when I was…younger. I remember watching the fog roll in with her.”
He ran a hand over the stubble on his head. It was weird to him that he’d been given so much control over his bodily functions and yet still found himself making nervous gestures. For some reason talking about her made him want to cover his face. The impulse was wired into him, deeper than the carbon fiber that laced his bones.
“That sounds tough,” Sardar said. He managed to look concerned without showing pity. “I can’t imagine having all these memories floating around with no throughline to connect them together. It must hurt.”
Roland shrugged. “What hurts most is knowing that it should hurt more. I don’t remember enough to give the pain its proper due.”
They were quiet for a bit. Roland finished the blunt and put it out on his right index finger. Sardar pulled a bronze flask out from his jacket pocket, took a belt and then offered it to Roland. It was Laphroaig whiskey. Even if he hadn’t been chromed to the gills Roland would’ve recognized that smell from three feet away. He took a gulp from the flask and passed it back. Sardar broke the silence again.
“Look, maybe I’m reading things wrong but…we’ve got some tents set up near the APC. You up for a fuck?”
Roland looked the man up and down again. Sardar was a good looking guy. Short, broad with muscular arms and a comfortable belly paunch. He had a neat-trimmed beard and curly black hair.
“Yeah, alright.”
It was pretty good sex. Nothing to blow Roland’s mind but the release provided a quantum of chill to calm the pangs of memory. Afterwards, Sardar fell asleep nuzzled into his shoulder. Roland didn’t particularly feel like cuddling but he sensed the other man needed the human contact. So he laid there with him for a couple of hours, rolled and smoked two more blunts and tried not to think about the lives he’d ended that morning.
A little after noon, Bigsby came by and knocked on the tent flap.
“Sar’, Roland, el jefe’s here. Clean up your fuckstink and meet us by the APC.”
They did. Five minutes later, the whole squad had assembled around the Mattis. Ryan looked more or less recovered from his injuries. Azime also seemed good as new. Nadine was still pretty bandaged, and her eyes were lidded and unfocused from blood loss and opiates. Will had brewed up a large French press of coffee. He busied himself pouring measures of it out into hemp-foam cups. Roland took one and drained it in a single mighty gulp. It was proper post-human strength coffee. The caffeine rush mingled with the opiates and THC already flooding his synapses and brought him to a lovely half-lucid state of quasiwareness.
“Did you guys fuck?” Pedro finally asked, after about a minute of staring at Roland and Sardar and asking the same question with his eyes.
“Yes,” Bigsby and Nadine both replied.
Sardar laughed at that. So did Roland. For one beautiful moment, he felt nice. A kind of nice he was pretty sure he hadn’t felt in a long time. And then came a familiar pattern of bootsteps, tickling Roland’s ears.
Jim.
Roland turned just as Jim walked into view. His legs were covered by a pair of armored red leather chaps. His groin was wrapped up in a thick kevlar thong but his pelvis and ass were otherwise unguarded. He wore a double-shoulder holster with a pair of bone-handled wheelguns under his arms. The snake tattoos on Jim’s chest and shoulders danced to a melody Roland eventually recognized as “La Cucaracha.”
“Your ink looks real good today, boss,” said Bigsby.
“Ass-licker,” said Sardar.
“Takes one to know one.”
“I don’t lick ass,” Sardar replied haughtily. “I eat it like a starving hyena.”
More laughter, and another fleeting moment of community that was broken when Jim addressed the squad.
“Alright. So several bunks have been humped here. This Heavenly Kingdom’s got at least ten thousand effectives in-theater, with armor, artillery, drones—the works. Our new employer, Austin, has about three thousand fighters here in Waco. Plus now the fifteen of you lot. I flew in with Ajax and Florin. They’re prepping their squads now.”
Bigsby spat. “Ajax fights about as well as a drunk dog in a burlap sack.”
Will replied: “You’re just sayin’ that because he choked you out in the Blood Dome last year.”
Bigsby responded with a double middle-finger.
“Ahem,” Jim ahem’d. “Plenty of time for dick-measuring later. Time enough for the rest of you, at least. This city doesn’t have a ruler long enough for my dick.”
He paused for a laugh. No one obliged. Jim rolled his eyes.
“Assholes. So, look, we’re in a bad position, with fuck-all for reinforcements coming in. Austin might be able to scrape up a couple of battalions if they suddenly clear out the Houston front, but that don’t look likely. Enemy has another ten thousand men there.”
“Fuck.” Sardar was the only one to actually say it, but everyone else in the group mouthed the word or some equivalent curse.
“How is that even possible?” Azime’s voice was still a little slurred from the painkillers, but her eyes were focused now.
Jim shrugged. “Hard to say, exactly. Mass defections from the Republic of Texas. Intel suspects the UCS probably sent in some spec-ops guys, I dunno. Some sorta skullduggerous bullshit went down. The ‘how’ of it ain’t really our problem today. For now we’ve gotta deal with the reality.”
The snakes on Jim’s torso stopped writhing. He locked eyes with Roland, and Roland felt compelled to meet his old friend’s gaze.
“Can we count on your help?” Jim asked.
“Fuck no,” Roland said. “I’ve killed enough naive young men today. I don’t aim to kill any more.”
To his surprise, Jim nodded in acceptance.
“Understandable. This kind of fighting was a violation of our contract. I regret that, Roland. If I’d known this was going to be a meat grinder I wouldn’t have interrupted your retirement.”
Roland wasn’t sure he believed that. But he kept his mouth shut as Jim continued.
“I’d like to propose a renegotiation of our contract. In light of the changing situation on the ground.”
“I’m not blowing up anything else for you.”
“That’s fine.” Jim put his hands out in the sort of placating gesture one would use on an angry dog, “I don’t need your killyness. I need your sneakiness. You can still take faces, right?”
Roland’s memories of his time in the army were as patchy as his memories of everything else. He didn’t remember much about how they’d used him. But he knew that some of the wetware they’d installed allowed him to modify his skin and bone structure to fool facial recognition scanners, thumbprint readers, and, of course, human beings.
“Yes,” he said, “but…”
Jim cut him off, “You don’t need to kill anyone. The face you’ll need is already dead.”
“And what do you want me to do with this man’s face that isn’t more murder?”
Jim’s lips curled up into a grin. The expression sent shivers arcing down Roland’s spine. He felt like he’d seen that grin before, never preceding good things.
“Rolling Fuck is nearby, and in the City of a Wheels are six hundred or so real scary bastards. I have it on good authority that they’d be happy to throw down on our side. But it turns out some of their negotiators were captured, back at the start of all this shit. No one in the city will risk fighting until they’re pulled out safely.”
Roland raised an eyebrow, “So, a rescue mission then?”
“That’s right.” Jim grinned in a way Roland didn’t quite trust. “You’ll be saving lives.”
Roland’s gut twisted into knots. The shades of a thousand memories spoke up and warned him not to trust Jim at his word. But those shades also drove him to take Jim up on the offer. He wanted his memories back. Jim smiled that hackle-raising smile again.
“You don’t have to agree yet. Come to Rolling Fuck with me. We’ll talk things over with their elders. You can do some of their fancy space drugs. And then you can make your decision.”
