Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (6 page)

Anya was satisfied that Bernie had the situation—and Baird’s mouth—under control. She’d try raising Marcus again.

“Hoffman thought you’d been killed, Bernie,” she said. “He wants to know you’re okay.”

Bernie’s face was cut and bruised. She glanced away as if she was embarrassed at Hoffman’s concern. “Not in quite those words, I’ll bet.”

“I’ll tell him you’re happy he’s okay, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bernie said.

In this game, a girl had to be multilingual. Anya could speak Hoffmanese, and she understood Bernie-speak pretty well too. She turned the APC around at the end of the lane and resumed her search.
SOUTHERN PERIMETER, ASSEMBLY AREA.

There was just enough light from his armor’s power status indicators for Dom to see the detail on the photograph. He squatted in the lee of a boulder, bent over so that his body shielded the picture from the falling snow, and went through the sequence that was now pure reflex after so many years. He studied Maria’s face—her cheek pressed to his as they posed for the camera—and recalled where they’d been when the picture was taken, then turned the print over to read what she’d written on the back. He’d done the same thing a dozen times a day for ten years. The photo was cracked and creased; Maria’s handwriting was gradually fading, the lines more smeared each time he took it from the pocket under his armor.

So you always have me with you. I love you, Dominic. Always, Maria
.

That was the Maria he had to remember: beautiful, enjoying life, not the scarred and tortured shell in the Locust detention cell. Dom tried to fix it in his memory. That was how he’d been trained. When a commando was in the worst shit imaginable, he had to be able to think his way out of it—to concentrate on survival, tell himself a whole new story, believe the best, and ignore the nagging voice that told him he’d never get out of this shit-hole alive.

Dom tried. But all he could see was her sightless eyes flickering back and forth as he tried to get her to recognize him, and a face that was only scarred and ulcerated skin stretched over a skull.
Why can’t I see the rest?

The last thing he could visualize was placing the muzzle of his sidearm to her temple as he held her. He shut his eyes at that point. He remembered lowering her carefully to the floor and taking off the necklace she still wore, the one he’d bought her when Benedicto was born, but the rest was a blank, and somehow he couldn’t see any blood in his mind’s eye.

Was it her?

You know damn well it was
.

Why didn’t I take her out of there and get her to a doctor? Wouldn’t any man do that without thinking?

Why didn’t I find her sooner, try harder, go looking down there earlier?

I had ten fucking years and I let her down
.

Dom knew the answers and that he could have done no more. But there was knowing and there was believing, and believing wasn’t much influenced by facts.

He fumbled under his chest-plate for the sheaf of photographs he kept in his shirt pocket. It was the size of a slim pack of playing cards, carefully sealed in a plastic bag, and he could visualize each of the photos at will. His life was preserved in those fragile sheets of glossy card: his brother, Carlos; his parents; his son and daughter; Malcolm Benjafield and Georg Timiou from his commando unit. There was only one person in those pictures who was still alive now, and that was Marcus.

Dom put Maria’s photo back in the pack and resealed it. He wouldn’t need to show it to anyone else again. He’d found her.

What am I going to feel like tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that?

He got to his feet and walked on, staring out into the snow, cradling his Lancer. Despite the noise from the camp—’Dill and Centaur motors, generators, the murmur of thousands of voices, occasional shouts and instructions—it was quieter here than anywhere he’d been in years. He could hear boots crunching in the snow, gradually getting closer. He didn’t need to turn and look.

“Dom.”

Marcus just appeared beside him, matching his pace as if they’d planned this patrol. He didn’t ask if Dom was all right; he knew he wasn’t. And he didn’t ask if Dom wanted to let it all out or talk it through, or why he’d gone off without telling anyone. It didn’t need saying or asking. It was simply
understood
. The two of them knew each other too well to do anything else.

“Nothing moving out there,” Dom said.

“Hoffman’s set up patrols in the camp in case the civilians get out of hand.”

“Yeah, it’s a whole new pile of shit now.”

“You said it.”

“Everyone thinks I’m a bastard, don’t they?”

“The whole camp? I didn’t ask them all. But if you mean the squad—no. They don’t.”

“They know what I did.”

Dom was ready to freeze to death out here rather than go back and look Baird, Cole, or Bernie in the eye—or anyone else, come to that. It was like he’d sobered up after a crazy night and had to admit he’d been an asshole. He felt he had things buttoned down all the time he was in the Locust tunnels, but now he was safe—whatever that meant now—things were starting to come apart again. He didn’t know what the next minute would bring for him.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance
. Dom could repeat it like a litany. The well-meaning woman who’d counseled Maria after the kids died had listed it for Dom like a transport timetable, all the stations where you would stop on your way to the terminal marked Normal Life Again. But she’d never warned him that he’d feel all of it at once, or in random order, or that he’d never reach normal.

“Dom, say the word, and I’ll tell them what happened. You don’t have to.” Marcus stopped to sight up on something. The snow was easing off; the cloud cover was thinning out. “They’ll understand.”

“How can
they
understand if I can’t?”

“We’ve all lost family. Nobody’s judging you.”

“I should have saved her.”

Marcus just shook his head. They were now a couple of kilometers south of the camp, in ankle -deep snow pitted with crisscrossing animal tracks. Dom had been certain that he’d react like Tai and blow his own head off rather than live with the horror that was trapped in his mind, but it didn’t feel that way at all. He could have done it ten times over by now. He hadn’t.

Part of him had started grieving for Maria the day she really fell apart—when Benedicto and Sylvia had been killed. Whatever was happening in his head now wasn’t nice, clean, noble,
predictable
grief. It was full of other shit and debris, like the snow around here. It wasn’t as white as it seemed.

“You did save her,” Marcus said at last. “Remember Tai Toughest guy we knew, and he
wanted
to die. That was after
hours
of what the grubs did to him, not weeks or years. If anything like that happened to me, I’d want you to cap me right away, because I’d sure as shit do it for you.”

Dom didn’t know if Marcus could do it, because he hadn’t slotted Carlos when he’d begged him to. Marcus had still tried to save him. But that didn’t matter now.

“We better report in,” Dom said.

“Yeah.”

“You spoken to Anya yet?”

“No.”

“You thought she hadn’t made it. Don’t kid me that you don’t need her.”

Marcus made the usual noncommittal rumbling sound at the back of his throat. “Yeah.”

They turned back to camp, following a wide arc. Dom tried to imagine how he’d have felt if Anya had been the one to die and it had been Maria on that Raven. He was damned sure he’d have rushed to Maria’s side and never let her out of his sight again. But Marcus had been raised in a big cold house full of silence, where emotions were kept on a leash, so he probably didn’t even know where to start.

The temperature was falling fast now. The snow was turning rock hard, and the sounds it made had changed slightly. Dom strained to listen.

“Shit.” Marcus held up his hand to halt him. They covered each other’s backs automatically. “Hear that?”

Dom had to hold his breath to hear it. Whatever it was sounded a long way off, like something moving erratically through the belt of forest to their south, breaking branches as it went. It could have been an animal. There were enough varieties of hoof and paw prints on the ground to fill a zoo. But some sounds were deeply embedded in memory, and Dom wanted it to be just his tormented mind misreading everything and trying to fit it to familiar patterns.

“Corpser?” Dom said.

Corpsers were too big to manage a stealthy approach, and they had too many legs—great for excavating the grubs’ tunnels and ferrying drones around, but piss-poor at surprise attacks on open ground. Something was crashing in this direction at high speed.

“I hope his mother knows he’s out late.” Marcus pressed his radio earpiece. “Fenix to Control, enemy contact, two klicks southwest of camp, possible Corpser approaching. We’re engaging.”

“Roger that, Fenix,” Mathieson said. “You’re not rostered on patrol. Are you alone?”

“Santiago’s here. Consider it voluntary overtime. We love our work.”

“I’m tasking fire support and a KR to get some light on those grubs. Don’t hog all the fun, Fenix.”

Stragglers were inevitable. And this time, they were almost welcome. Dom had unfinished business that drowning the grub bastards hadn’t resolved. Yes, it was a Corpser. He could see its lights in the darkness now, wobbling as it worked its way through the trees.

“So, we wait here, or we go get it?”

Marcus started walking. “Manners are the bedrock of civilization. Let’s meet the asshole halfway.”

Dom was up for that. A switch flipped somewhere inside, and he wanted destruction, vengeance, some vent for the pressure building within. He was jogging some way ahead of Marcus when he heard the Raven approaching. It swooped low overhead and the brilliant blue-white searchlights lit the field up like moonlight. Dom saw movement behind the Corpser. Shit, it was a mixed bag of Locust—a dozen drones, a couple of Boomers, and a Bloodmount.

Marcus sighed. “Ahh, shit…”

“You think they’re a recon party?”

“I think that’s a bunch of grub refugees doing what we’re doing and getting the hell out. Higher ground, old eholes—they’ve kept ahead of the flood.”

Well, they weren’t coming to kiss and make up, that was for sure. Dom could already hear the noise of ’Dills behind, racing to the contact point. He dropped behind the nearest cover with Marcus, took aim, and waited. On open ground the motley band looked grotesque rather than terrifying, but if they got into the camp—no solid buildings for protection, masses of civilians who were already scared shitless—the panicked stampede alone would cost lives, let alone any damage the grubs might inflict.

Maybe the grubs didn’t realize they were on an intercept course for a human camp. They looked in complete disarray. The Bloodmount was going nuts, thrashing its head from side to side even with its rider hanging on to it for grim death. If the rider was thrown, the thing would revert to blind instinct and sniff out the nearest human flesh.

Maybe the grubs would veer away when they realized how outnumbered they were.
No. Bring it on. Come to me. Come and die
.

As far as Dom was concerned, one grub was too many. Prescott was right: it was a genocidal war. The Locust started it. But now humans had to finish it, and grub stragglers weren’t just a hazard, they were potential breeding stock. They all had to die.

This is why I’m still alive. This is what I’m meant to do. I get it now
. Dom could now see headlights playing on the hummocks in the snow from behind him as the APCs raced to their position. There was no way the grubs could miss that, not in complete darkness on open land. Dom bet on them feeling just like he did then—that they wanted to make someone pay for what had happened to their buddies and their shitty little bit of Sera, and they didn’t much care if they died doing it.

“Want to take a bet on how many Locust were down there?” Marcus said.

“No idea. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.”

“I think we’ve got about fifty or sixty heading this way.”

“Maybe some of the Lambent made it out, too, and that’s who they’re running from.”

“Like we’re the softer option?”

Dom centered his sights on a Boomer. “They got that wrong, then,” he said, and opened fire.
ARMADILLO PERSONNEL CARRIER PA-776, RESPONDING
.

“Cole, let me in.” Anya Stroud hammered her fist on the ’Dill’s hull as it revved up.
“Cole!”

Anya was only a little slip of a thing by Cole’s scale of reckoning, but she was close to putting a dent in the metal. Bernie leaned across the crew cab and went to hit the hatch control.

Baird snapped his goggles into place with a loud
thwack
of the strap. “It’s ladies’ night, Cole.”

“Anya ain’t
frontline.”
Cole would have driven off, but he couldn’t see exactly where Anya was standing and he was afraid of flattening her. “She’s gonna have to sit this one out.”

“Bollocks, her mother was my CO, and she’s coming with us,” Bernie said. She hit the switch. “Mount up, ma’am.”

Cole wasn’t sure that answer made sense. But he didn’t have time to argue, and Bernie had her killing face on. She was still mad as hell about her squad—or something. There was plenty to be mad about. Anya scrambled into the cab.

“Okay, ma’am, just be careful, that’s all.” Cole understood that rush of blood that made a Gear want to get stuck into a bunch of grubs. It was only natural, but not in a skirt and high heels. That was asking for trouble. He sent the ’Dill racing down the perimeter lane. “If I bring you back with holes in you, Hoffman’s gonna yell bad words at me.”