Subterrene War 03: Chimera (39 page)

Before I finished a cone of flames erupted and seared the side of my face as it soaked the tree line next to me, igniting the wood so it cracked and spat. One of the Chinese stopped firing. Whoever was using the flame unit worked it away from me and onto the next Chinese position. The scout burst from the trees, confused, and rolled on the ground to disappear somewhere downhill in a ball of fire. Then the shooting stopped. Four of our original red dots had turned yellow, dead, and I leaped to my feet to continue downhill as I shouted for everyone to follow, but
it hadn’t been necessary; the others came after me. Ten minutes later, the last of the day’s sunlight disappeared and plunged the jungle into darkness. We slowed to a jog again, the world of infrared vision making depth perception difficult.

“Less than a kilometer to the river now, Lieutenant,” one of the girls said.

“Which one are you?”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything at first, trying to catch my breath. “Your name, what’s your name?” It would be difficult to make it without stopping. We’d been moving downhill all day, but already my knees were weak from the effort, and the pain from Margaret’s boots had turned into a burning agony so that I hated to imagine what my feet looked like since they
felt
like a pair of bloody stumps. “And let’s slow to a walk for a bit.”

“I’m Jennifer,” she said.

“How are we doing on flame units and fuel?”

She paused and then clicked back in. “Two flame units, both with only one or two shots each. Plenty of thermite grenades. And we grabbed a flame hood from one of our sisters, death and faith.”

“What the hell is that?” I asked. We’d stopped for a moment so I could slip the new hood over my vision kit, then someone handed me a pair of thermite grenades before we pushed on. “Death and faith?”

“It is one of our mantras. You wouldn’t understand.”

I laughed, then coughed from the effort of breathing; the hood smelled like whoever had last worn it. A girl. It reminded me of Bea, and for a moment my thoughts shifted to her and to Phillip, making me wonder where he was and
how he was doing. It wasn’t clear if we’d make it now. Losing even just a few of our group with so much uphill ground to cover had reduced the odds of our success, and I gripped one of the thermite grenades because at the very least killing would make everything a little better. Something moved in the jungle to our right. The sound of branches crackling pulled me from my concentration, and we froze in a line, the map showing about ten meters of spacing between us, and it was enough distance to make me think that the others may as well have been in Bangkok.

“Death,” I whispered over the general frequency, “is something I’ve resigned myself to, Jennifer. Faith is almost worthless.”

Something glowed white behind the jungle’s wall of leaves and vines. I knelt and brought my carbine up, aiming it as best I could, but it stayed behind the brush and hadn’t moved since we’d stopped, so in order to get a better shot I’d have to shift position. The ground was soft underfoot. We’d been moving quickly and for so long that my calves vibrated and my boots slipped on clay at the same moment the thing burst from the underbrush, squealing as it charged at me in a flash of dark fur and tusks. I fired and brought it down with a quick burst.

“Boar,” I said into the radio. “It’s just a boar.”

“We should keep going then,” said Jennifer.

I shrugged and watched as the boar gasped for air, then fired another shot to put it out of its misery and to release the anger from having been startled so badly. “Goddamn
thing
.”

“Why are you so angry about a boar?” asked Jihoon. Already his dot had started drifting away from me so I jogged to catch up.

“I’m hungry. It would have made a good meal. Man cannot live on ration packs and castor oil alone.”

“Castor oil?” one of the girls asked. “Why do you take castor oil?”

Jihoon’s laughter came through too loud from my speakers. “It cleans out the pipes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have death and faith,” I said. “We have regular bowel movements and Big Brother. Similar concepts if you stop and think. And we don’t want to go back to those days.”

You could almost hear their brains fry with confusion, and I thought,
Good. Fuck ’em.
Just because we now had a common enemy didn’t have to mean I’d have to like them. Ever. I just had to get back to Nu Poe and then keep the satos alive long enough to kill as many Chinese as I could—before they got
us
—and that was
if
I took Margaret’s offer.

The boat was where we’d left it, and Jennifer ferried the first group of girls over, promising to come back for us and leaving a flame unit in case the scouts returned; I could feel the Chinese waiting for something. The jungle had piped a warning signal straight into my gut—that the scouts were here—so I scanned the trees from the shore and searched for any sign of them, hoping to see something because the exhaustion had eroded almost every feeling, including fear, leaving nothing except for anger; the Chinese had chased me for too long. I wanted to get back to Nu Poe but not to see Phillip or reach safety; I wanted the line so I could turn and fight when they
attacked. At least on the line you had a chance to fire and hit something, even when they used their chameleon skins, and at least on the line you could watch thousands of them die. A strong breeze rustled my cloak, and hundreds of frogs croaked, but the animals hadn’t noticed anything odd, splashing and making Jihoon flinch so he bumped my arm.

“You see anything?” he asked.

“No. But they’re out there.”

“What do you mean, ‘they’re out there’? You sound more and more like a nutjob every day. I just want to get the hell out of this place and don’t care if I never see another jungle as long as I live. I’ll head to a reclamation zone if I have to; at least it’s dry there. You can see for miles in every direction.”

“Sure,” I said. “If the radiation isn’t too bad or the dust storms calm down to the point where you can
go
outside, I guess.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, and behind us I heard the regular splash of a paddle as the canoe returned. If they were going to hit us that night, I figured, they’d do it before we got on the water, and I tucked the flame unit’s tube against my shoulder to get ready, aiming at the closest trees.

“Do you
really
think they’re out there?” asked Jihoon.

“Yeah, Chong. I do.”

The boat scraped onto the bank behind us, and Jihoon jumped into the water, a little too noisy in his haste to move out, and I expected the jungle to erupt with thousands of Chinese before I calmed down and climbed into the canoe; Jennifer pushed off, and a moment later we paddled into the river’s deep current. I still watched the
bush. Even as it receded behind us the sensation of impending threat from the trees didn’t lift because although the scouts hadn’t made their move it was a near certainty they’d watched every one of ours.

“Jennifer, any sign of Chinese on the other side?”

“No,” she said. “But my sisters are searching the village now and will radio if they find anything. We haven’t heard from Nu Poe, but it’s clear now that we’re being jammed.”

I shook my head. “I hadn’t thought to check on that with all the excitement. Is that normal for them to jam radio operations in the area?”

“Not normal for the Burmese, but they lacked the equipment. God knows what’s normal for the Chinese; we can’t figure out why they haven’t had regular air patrols over the river. With such capabilities, we would never have stopped patrolling and would use constant high-altitude surveillance.”

“Jennifer,” I said, sighing.

“Yes?”

We had reached the far shore, and I jumped to the bank, handing her the flame unit when she debarked. “Shut up. And let’s just count our blessings.”

We moved through the village like ghosts, crouch-walking while I swung my carbine from side to side, ready for a scout to materialize out of the elephant grass that swayed in the wind. Someone had stacked the bodies. The people I’d wiped lay in the middle of the settlement in a pile, and I fought the urge to search through it to look for the boy. Something tugged at my chest. A sensation of regret mixed with an uneasy feeling that Jihoon had been right and that I was going crazy, but he still didn’t get it,
that out here my way of doing things was the way to survive; in the bush one’s worth was measured by his or her willingness to slaughter. The boy had been visible when I’d shot at the civilians, but I didn’t want to see his face now. It wouldn’t have fit with the way I remembered him, waving from the shore in amazement as his canoe floated away, and I had to remind myself: he was out of this shit. Better off dead. If Thailand went into the crapper like the US had—where some soulless computer who thought itself smarter than Einstein made all your decisions—and they put clamps on everyone’s brain bucket to monitor for potential malcontents, he wouldn’t be around to see it. The boy had been spared. For the dead there was no more pain and no more doubt, just the comfort of having gone out quickly—so quickly that it had to have been their time.

The other girls joined with us, and we moved east into the tall grass. I remembered what had happened there the last time; a group of scouts had sprinted through it like a pack of hyenas, and when the stuff swallowed us, I wondered if the Chinese were still there, having waited all this time for our group to arrive. Even if we hadn’t been using chameleon skins, I wouldn’t have seen the girls or Jihoon around me. The elephant grass towered over and surrounded me with an ocean of three-meter-tall blades, which glowed on infrared so I imagined the water inside as it heated in the Burmese sun, hoarding energy so that even at night the stuff was warm. Only the mountains were visible and loomed in front of me, a lighter shade of black than the sky, and already we’d started moving up a grade, my legs struggling against gravity and begging for rest. I sipped water from my tube. The stuff landed
warmly on my tongue, a body temperature liquid that for a brief moment made me panic with the thought that somehow I was drinking Margaret’s blood. My heart pounded. Inside the suit you could ignore the sounds being piped in through speakers and focus on the echo of your breathing, even the sound of your own heartbeat if it got loud enough; mine sounded as though it was on the verge of cardiac arrest.

Before I could calm myself down, the village erupted with plasma bursts behind us so I flattened myself in the grass, calling out over the radio, “Is anyone hit?” But their dots looked fine on my heads-up, and each one called in alive. “Where is that fire coming from?”

Jennifer clicked in. “I’m going back to see.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll go with you. Everyone else stay put.”

Jennifer and I moved back the way we’d come and the grass whispered over my armor as I slid forward on my stomach, heading for the village. Plasma flashed through the vegetation at the field’s edge. I pushed my carbine through and touched its trigger, activating the gun’s camera so I could see into the village as huge hemispheres of bright gas erupted on the clay and by now the huts were gone. Piles of ash marked their original location, but these disappeared in the shelling and the wind. The artillery streaked in from the mountain across the river and after zooming in to mark the distance, I estimated the location from which the barrage had originated. Jennifer and I slid back, taking a few minutes to rejoin the group.

“It’s coming from the temple,” I said into the mic. “The Chinese must have brought artillery or tanks through their tunnel.”

“Or APCs,” said Jennifer.

“Why are they hitting the village?” Jihoon asked.

I shook my head before realizing that he couldn’t see it. “Us. We’re the only targets nearby, and somebody either targeted it blindly or they have a spotter nearby who thought they saw something.”

“Now we know why the scouts didn’t hit us,” I said. “We should get—”

Before I could finish, my goggles flashed with a bright light before cutting off, and an explosion ripped the grass around us as if someone had just taken a huge scythe to the field, the blast of which tossed me to the side. Another explosion hit nearby, followed by three more; after that I lost track of the numbers because so many hit the clay and grass, and sparks fell almost straight from the sky, resembling a meteor shower that had somehow targeted us.

“Bombers,”
I yelled into the radio. “High altitude.” At the same time the plasma walked toward us, making the ground rumble even more as the blasts approached.

“They’re adjusting fire!”
Jennifer shouted.

It wouldn’t be long before we got hit. The sensation of being watched filled me with dread because this was the worst possible situation; the jungle was at least a kilometer away. Our choices had been reduced to either staying and dying or moving and maybe making it out, so the calculus was as simple as it got, and I jumped to my feet, sprinting upward toward the high mountains. There was no need to tell anyone to move; Jihoon had already started running before me and the others followed, the entire group pushing through elephant grass with no thought of motion detectors, booby traps, or that someone out there had seen us and was vectoring the attack.

Jihoon’s chameleon skin made him invisible ahead of me, but with each flash I saw him in silhouette, his carbine hanging from its flexi-belt and dragging through the clay and grass behind him. A missile hit to my right. The blast overrode my goggles again, and a sharp blow struck my shoulder so that I looked to the side, thinking someone had hit me with a club, but nobody was there. Another erupted from behind, throwing me through the air to land on my face and slide through the grass for at least ten feet before regaining my footing and running on. It was like sprinting through hell. There was no sense of time or pain, and all my exhaustion disappeared in a rush of adrenaline that kept me going for an unknown period of time. When the jungle’s leaves slapped my hood, it was a shock. I kept moving in, following Jihoon’s dot on my map, before I caught up with him and told him to stop; the barrage had left us behind, continuing to rage outside the jungle.