Ex-Patriots (30 page)

The dead soldiers took in a dry, shuddering
breath and spoke as one.

“IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS YOU,” said the chorus of
exes, “I’D’VE RIPPED
YOUR
HEAD OFF YESTERDAY!”

THEN

Thinking is bad. That’s the lesson of the past year.
I don’t want to think any more.

Captain Freedom told me the most fascinating
story a while ago. He was very careful about telling it. He knew it
was still a touchy subject at the time. Thin ice, as they say.

It’s been fifteen months, seven days, two and
a half hours since Eva and Madelyn went missing during the rescue
attempt. I still look at clocks and assign mental labels to every
date. One month since they vanished. Ten weeks since they were
lost. Six months since they were lost. One year since they

I mentioned it to John the other day and he
said he did the same thing for almost two years when his father
passed away.

Two years? How can I live like this for
another year? I still feel cold and empty all the time. Will it be
twice as long because I don’t know what happened to either of them?
I can’t take four years of this.

Freedom came to see me. It was almost a year
ago, now that I think of it. Three months since they’d gone
missing. He had a puzzle, of sorts. They had gone out that morning
to get the armored vehicle, the Guardian, he called it. It had been
sitting out there all that time. Ever since they were

They

I need to get more work done. I still haven’t
managed to get the Nest working and reboot the exes. They’re needed
more than ever now. I need to focus on that. Must stop my mind from
wandering so much. They weren’t here in the lab before, so it
shouldn’t be hard to work now that they’re

Now that they’re

Madelyn Sorensen. Everyone said we were so
cruel to give her rhyming names. That we were bad parents. Did she
think I was a bad father? Did she blame me? God, I hope she knows
how hard I tried. I wanted to go to them. I wanted to be with
them.

Freedom said they were going to tow the
Guardian in but they didn’t have to. It still had half a tank of
fuel. Sitting there in the sun for months and still over twenty
gallons of diesel in it. There was no reason it should’ve
stopped.

I remember at first I was very happy, because
if the armored carrier still had gas, perhaps it meant Eva and
Madelyn hadn’t... that the whole thing had been a mistake. Perhaps
they were still back at the airstrip. Maybe they never even got on
the plane.

Freedom was very good about calming me down.
He was a good man. He still is, I think. I don’t see him that
often. They leave me alone. They all have a lot on their minds.

The puzzle had been that half his soldiers
still insisted the tank was empty. He had a dozen of them look at
the gauge and only five of them saw the needle above E. Even when
they drove it in, some of them still said there was no gasoline.
Nothing the captain did could convince them otherwise. A few of
them couldn’t even start the engine.

He’d wanted to know about hallucinations. If
they were a side effect to the process I didn’t warn the Army
about. He hadn’t reported it yet, but he was very firm his soldiers
couldn’t be put at risk. “I don’t want anyone else to die,” he told
me.

I think it was a year ago today he was here.
It may have been a year ago yesterday. No, it was two days ago.
When I was talking with Freedom it had been exactly ninety-nine
days since they went missing. Since one of the super soldiers I
created tried to bring my little Madelyn across half a mile of sand
and was attacked by an army of exes that tore him apart. Since they
crawled into the armored carrier and they

I need to work. I need to think of other
things. That’s all I need these days. To work and be left
alone.

On the other side of the lab there were six
exes strapped down on gurneys. They were also handcuffed to the
rails and gagged with a wooden bit. One of the soldiers trained as
a field medic, Franklin, I think, came up with the clever idea of
using back boards and head restraints to keep them immobile.

All my attempts to return the brain to a
cogitative state had failed. This set of exes had new contacts in
place. I think they were in place. I remember I was drilling
placement holes in skulls when Captain Freedom came to talk to me.
He had a problem he was trying to work out. That was day
ninety-nine. Not yet one hundred.

I attached the Nest box to the leads and it
sent a new pattern of electricity down into the dead brain.
Nothing. No response at all. I checked each of the six subjects.
Their EEGs were all flat.

Back to the first one. It was a young man
with blond stubble and a large hole in his right cheek. I think it
was a bite, but they’d all been cleaned up before they came to me.
For the first six months they’d also all been male. I think that
was John’s doing.

I could see the young man’s teeth through the
hole. He didn’t have a single filling on this side of his jaw.
Madelyn had very good teeth, too. Freedom said he couldn’t find
their bodies. There was no trace left of them. Not even one of
Madelyn’s glittery sneakers. He was polite while he told me they
were dead. He insists on seeing the evidence that way. I tried for
weeks to tell him it could also mean they got away, but he wouldn’t
listen. Still won’t.

I’ve had dreams about those sneakers. I see
them running across the desert toward the gate. I still wake up
crying most of the time.

No, no, no. Can’t think like that. Must stay
focused.

There was something odd about the young man’s
eyes. All exes have the same gray eyes. They accumulate dust
because of the lack of tears and then get scratched. It’s a process
of refraction, the same way a scratch on clear glass looks
white.

Its eyes were gray and they were odd, but I
wasn’t sure why they were odd. I checked one of the other exes to
be sure, then I came back to the first one. I moved my head back
and forth to see if it was something about the light. Something was
wrong. I needed to focus on this better. I was missing something
obvious.

Oh. Of course. Exes always turn their heads.
They lack the fine muscle control to move their eyes. I’m still not
sure they need to move their eyes, in the same way some blind
people never move theirs.

The dead man with the hole in its cheek was
watching me. It was following me with its eyes.

I found myself very focused. I checked the
Nest again. It was still on, still sending the new pattern.

“Wehhh ahhh I?”

The ex was trying to talk. This was more than
I’d ever hoped to achieve. I was so amazed I couldn’t wait to tell
Eva and Madelyn about it, and then I was horrified I’d forgotten
they were

How could I forget? It was only fifteen
months. Since they went missing.

“Wahhh tha fugg ess thsss,” said the young
man. Its face had twisted into a scowl. I could see its jaws and
tongue working through the hole in its cheek, trying to get the bit
out.

My mind tripped over three or four different
things to say. I leaned over the ex and its gray eyes focused on
me. One of the irises had a small tear in it. “Can you understand
me?”

“Wahhh tha fugg! Gehh diss hing owdda ma
moff!”

I knew I shouldn’t take out the bit. At the
very least I should call for a few soldiers to stand guard. But
part of me was too intrigued.

And the other part... the other part didn’t
care at all.

I unstrapped the neck brace and tossed it
aside. A normal ex would be stretching its head, trying to bite me.
This one just looked annoyed. I reached behind its head and tugged
at the velcro straps which kept the bit in place.

The ex started talking as soon as the wooden
bar was out from between its teeth. “‘Bout fucking time,” it said.
“What the hell is this? What you doing to me,
pinche
?”

It was looking around. It was making
observations. It was thinking.

“What is...” I tried to think of an
appropriate question. I’d never expected to have this level of
success. “What is the last thing you remember?”

“I was in Hollywood,” it said. “Just outside
the Mount. Fighting with that metal...” The ex seemed to lose track
of its thoughts, and for a moment I wondered if I’d made a mistake.
“No,” it said. “I was in the mountains. One of those ski
towns.”

Its tone was familiar. It was uncertain.
Hesitant. I realized it sounded like me.

It also had a strong Spanish accent, which
was odd for a young blond man with Anglo features.

“I was a bunch of places,” it said. “Like
I’ve been traveling, but I don’t ...”

The head lunged up, looking down at its
torso. It turned to me and I yelped. Its expression was vicious.
“What the hell is this? What you trying to pull?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What is this? Where’s my body?”

“What... what do you mean? I don’t
under—”

“This isn’t me,” it shouted. “Where’s the
rest of me? You sew my head on a new body or...”

Its voice trailed off. It stared at me
again.

“Waitaminute,” said the ex. It ran all the
words together into a mishmash of English. “I know you. You’re the
mad doctor.”

I shivered. “What do you mean?”

“You’re the one who got me out. They wanted
to court martial me and shit and you gave me a clean bill. Said all
those drugs and things were out of me and I was good to go.”

The phrases swam in my head. I knew this
should be familiar, but it was from before. The longest
conversation I’d had with anyone in a year and I was freezing
up.

“This is, whassit, Project Krypton, right?
Some Army base?”

I blinked. “Yes. You... you’re that private.
Casares. The one from the previous trials.”

“Yeah. What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“No,
stupido
, I mean what’s the
number? The date?”

“The fourteenth,” I said. “Of December.” As I
said it, I realized I hadn’t done any shopping, and Eva and Madelyn
would be so upset. I’m a very good gift-buyer. And then I
remembered I didn’t have to buy gifts this year, either. And there
still wasn’t anywhere to buy them. And they probably both hated
me.

I must stay focused on work.

He growled. “A month,” he muttered. “My boys
prolly fell apart without me.”

It wasn’t until that moment that I started
thinking of him as a he. He was conscious. Sentient. No longer an
it.

“Your mind has been reactivated,” I explained
to him. “There’s a device on the left side of your skull which I
call a Nest. It stands for neural stim—”

“Hey,
esse
,” he said. “Your gizmo
don’t do jack shit, okay? This is one-hundred percent Rodney
talking, you get me? How long have I been here?”

“Your body was brought in two weeks ago with
three other—”

“No, doc,” he said, shaking his head. “Me. My
head. Did they ship it here or something?”

“I... I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Get me a fucking mirror!”

There was a hand mirror in the scrub room. I
used it to make sure nothing splattered on me when I had to drill.
I brought it in for the ex and caught a glimpse of myself in it. I
needed a haircut. And my beard needed to be trimmed. Eva always
hates it when by beard gets too long, because it was short when we
met in grad school.

“What the fuck,” he said. The ex tilted his
head left and right. It took me a few moments to realize he was
looking for a different face. He turned his head and poked his
tongue out through the hole in his cheek. “Guess I can get in a lot
of practice for the
chicas
, eh, doc?” His mouth pulled into
a grin.

It was an eerie expression for a dead
thing.

I cleared my throat. “You... you said the
Nest wasn’t working?”

His eyes came away from the mirror. “What?”
He squinted his left eye a few times, making the Nest unit shift on
his temple. “Naw, this thing’s crap. It was keepin’ the brain warm,
that’s it. Kinda gives me a headache, too.” He lifted his chin to
his chest and let his eyes roam around the room. “So what is this
place? You still trying to make everybody be all they can be and
that shit?”

“Yes. And trying to return some of the exes
like you to a semi-cogitative state.”

“Not like me,” he said. His eyes focused past
me and flitted back and forth. It was as if he was speed-reading an
invisible book. Or in REM sleep. “Three fences,” he said. “And
you’re low on guards.” He squinted. “Fuck me, is that Colonel
Shelly? I hated that fucker.”

“How did you...”

“I’m everywhere, doc.” He looked at one of
the other test subjects. “So, what, you need to get ‘em all under
control? That’s what your thing’s supposed to do?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Well look at this. Put your left
foot in and shake it all about, eh?”

The five other exes all swung their left feet
side to side.

“Or what about this. Drumroll,
mi
amigos
.”

One of the exes was missing a hand, but nine
sets of fingers tapped against the padded gurneys. They were in
perfect unison, already like a military unit. They stopped and
their fingers went straight to the sides of their legs.

The dead man grinned again. “I’m gonna make a
deal with you, doc,” he said. “You need a bunch of exes doing what
you say. I need somewhere to lay low while I figure out what I’m
doing. You see where I’m goin’ with this?”

I didn’t.

The grin spread even wider. It pulled at the
flesh around the hole in his cheek, forming an oval crater in his
face. “Congrats, doc,” he said. “Your gizmo works.”

Now I did.

“Why?”

“Because I can,” he said. “Maybe I owe you
one and I don’t like owing people nothing. You made me into death
incarnate.”