Grunt Life (9 page)

“They know so much more about us than we do them. We’re going to bring this one back for study, but it’s really just a show-and-tell. We’ve learned all we can about the Cray. We just don’t have the technology to learn more.”

An ice cream truck rounded the corner and drove slowly down the street, musical chimes echoing from the clown-shaped speaker on the roof, returning me for a moment to my childhood. Down the block, two kids ran out of a house waving dollars in the air. Their mother came onto the porch and watched them, her arms crossed, a smile on her tired face. It took a moment for the transaction, then the kids ran back to the house, each carrying a red, white and blue Bomb Pop. They were oblivious of the alien in their midst, and that was the core of the problem. No one knew. And if they did, what would they do? Mr. Pink had said it:
we’ve learned all we can.

“You called them Cray. How do you know what they’re called?” I asked.

“You’ll get this on your tablet, but I might as well tell you now. We don’t know
what
they’re called. As you saw, we have yet to discover a way to communicate with them. They’re named after Joshua McCray from Glasgow. He was the first to discover them.”

“They’re in Scotland too?”

“As far as we know, they’re all over the world. In every country, in every city, doing whatever an alien species does before it invades.”

I thought about it for a moment, and said the only answer I could come up with: “Reconnaissance.”

“Good a term as any. Although I don’t know how much they care about our way of life. Xenobiologists from Freie Universität Berlin posited that these creatures were determining the chemical composition of our planet.”

“Like tasting the soup,” I said.

“As apt a metaphor as any, I suppose.”

I’d read about xenobiologists in an Orson Scott Card book, one of our required readings. At the time I read it, I’d romanticized the occupation, thinking of them as part Airborne Ranger, part Indiana Jones, part scientist, going to other planets to test flora and fauna and ascertain their base makeup. I hadn’t really imagined someone in Middle America checking out a house in the suburbs to try and ascertain why something was eating a family of four from the inside out.

“Is it always like this?”

“Do you mean is the family always beyond hope? Is the creature little more than a sentient puddle of muck? Or is there always a school shooting nearby?”

“Yes, yes, and yes.”

“So far, I’d say yes to the first two questions, although we have a woman who survived for sixteen hours after we pulled her free. You’ll see her video once you reach Phase III. As far as the third question, the answer is no.”

He climbed into the back seat of the SUV. I went around the other side and slid inside. He asked for my pistol and I passed it to him, along with the belt clip and the two spare magazines.

“Everyone isn’t built the same way. There are some whose brains are capable of aligning to the frequency the Cray use to broadcast. These people can hear, or rather feel, the broadcast, but they don’t understand it. We don’t know whether it’s a biological reaction or a psychological reaction, but we’ve noticed a graphic increase in violence surrounding the Cray sites. School shootings, mall shootings, and murder-suicides have become an indicator of possible Cray presence. It’s only accurate about forty percent of the time.”

“And the other times?”

“They’re either not connected, or we can’t find the connection.”

“So instead of it being a crazy person committing these vile acts, it’s someone under the influence of an alien broadcast?”

“Oh, no. These people
are
crazy. In every instance there’s been a history of mental illness in one shape or form. Perhaps that’s what makes them susceptible. Scientists are working on that right now. Maybe the broadcasts push them over the edge. Maybe they just hasten what was going to happen anyway. There’s no evidence that the alien broadcasts
create
violence in people.”

“We do a good enough job with that on our own,” I said, as much to myself as I did to Mr. Pink.

We pulled away from the curb and passed a fire truck barreling down the street past us. I turned around and watched as it pulled to stop at the house. Smoke and flames were already pouring out of the dining room window. I envisioned the family, shriveling and twisting in the fire. Like D’Ambrosio. Like a bus filled with Pakistanis hit by a VBIED motorcycle bomb, the bus tipped on its side, everyone trying to get free from the flames but unable to break through the wire mesh on the windows.

I closed my eyes and let my head soak in the coolness of the breeze until we reached the airport. When we pulled to a stop, it was clear I was the only one getting out.

He handed me my identification and a plane ticket.

“Why did you bring me here?”

He didn’t look at me, but stared at his hands resting comfortably in his lap. “You’ve felt responsible for more deaths than almost anyone we have in TF OMBRA. There’s nothing we can do, or at least want to do, to remove those images from your mind that wouldn’t leave permanent scarring and loss of cognitive function. We want you to learn. We want you to understand. We want you to be able, when the time comes, to help the world defend against the coming attack.”

“But why me?”

Mr. Pink sighed. “You sit there like a petulant child, the universe revolving around you. Have you learned nothing from all the books you’ve read? Haven’t the world’s best authors taught you that the world doesn’t revolve around you, but rather you revolve around the universe, and if you want to continue do to so, you have to protect it?” He looked at me for the first time, and I could see the anger behind the act. “You need to get over yourself. Yes, bad shit happened, and it happened to you. Yes. We know. Now get over it. You want to kill yourself, then fucking do it, but don’t fucking draw it out and cry about it. This is our world and it’s about to be attacked. We don’t know how, we don’t know why, and we don’t know when. All we know is we have to be ready. And if we have to use a brigade of lost souls to do it, then we’ll do just that. Figure out if you want to be a part of the future or a part of the past. The future you can help. The past has already happened. Now get out. You have a plane to catch.”

I got out and watched the SUV race away. When it was out of sight, I turned and went inside. I checked in, made it through security, and sat in a bar, sipping a beer and watching the aftermath on television. When the time came for my plane to leave, I paid my bill and shuffled into line. I was flying first class again. I could get used to it.

But as I was checking my seat, I saw the date. That couldn’t be right. I looked and saw the same date on the board near the gate. But that was impossible. We couldn’t have been in the facility for longer than six weeks, but according to this, we’d been gone for eight months.

But how?

Then I remembered.

The gas.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.

General Colin Powell

CHAPTER TWELVE

M
Y ARRIVAL AT
the Wyoming facility went unheralded. Everyone was still in a state of forced sleep when I returned. As far as I knew, they’d been that way the entire time I’d been gone. I don’t know what gas they were using, but they succeeded in hydrating us and keeping us from tracking the passage of time. A niggling worry in the back of my mind questioned why we had to be asleep so long. If the threat of attack was so imminent, shouldn’t we be making the most of our time? But my mind was too fogged with all I’d just learned for me to do anything other than shove the question aside for later scrutiny.

I soon found myself lying on the mattress with the same feeling I used to have after returning from a mission. It was a matter of extremes: one moment I was driving down a road in an up-armored vehicle, my butt clenched as I wondered if I might get blown up at any moment, then moving from one point to the other on foot, taking fire, returning fire, killing, dodging, running, bleeding, cursing, crying, screaming... and the next moment I’d lie back on my bunk and stare at the ceiling, listening to whatever new song was hitting the charts on my iPod and reading articles about which pop star had an eating disorder and which actor was fucking who. No matter what innocuous, meaningless thoughts I tried to sprinkle through my haggard mind, it kept attempting to relive the events of the recent past over and over and over again.

Like it was doing now, visions of the rotting family at the dinner table juxtaposed with the sweet ass of the flight attendant in first class, juxtaposed with the undulating mass of babies in the basement, juxtaposed with me shooting Mr. Pink as he’d had his own pistol pressed against his temple, juxtaposed with a first-class-cabin plate of poached salmon on rice and a glass of chardonnay, juxtaposed with the kids eating Bomb Pops, juxtaposed with fucking D’Ambrosio dancing in the fire. The images dueled with themselves, dueled with me, begged me to bring one front and center, to let it represent me. But I refused. As soon as one surfaced, I’d flick it off, the good, the bad, the happy, the sad, I didn’t want anything in my mind. I just wanted to be blank for awhile. I just wanted to think about nothing.

During my first tour in the Army I’d been deployed to Bosnia. My rack was in an old Quonset hut built by the Russians back when they’d been stationed there to keep the peace. Above me on the ceiling someone had stenciled the word
antidisestablishmentarianism
. I’d lie in my rack and stare at the almost unpronounceable word, wondering what it meant. I’d eventually come to understand it was an ideology that believed in the combination of church and state, but the meaning never really mattered. It was the word. It was a puzzle. It was an alphabetical Escher that drew me in and wouldn’t let me out. I’d stare at it for hours, always wondering why someone would take the time to place the word there. It couldn’t have been easy. They must have wanted it there badly. And why in English and not Russian? Did I have a Russian soul mate, one who was drawn to the word such as myself, or was it written later, by some bored Ivy League graduate American?

Then came Cerska, where I saw my first mass grave. Up on the side of a hill, hidden from the road by a copse of trees, we smelled its sickly sweet stench half a mile down the road. At first we thought it was a barbecue. Private Adams made a remark, joking that the sergeant was taking us to a party.

Ain’t no parties in a graveyard
, he’d said, as solemn as a tombstone.

That had shut us up. The ten of us and the sergeant were in the back of an open-backed deuce-and-a-half, swaying from side to side in the deep backwoods ruts. All of our eyes were aimed ahead, wondering what it was we were getting into, wondering what the U. S. Army had volunteered us for.

When we crested the hill, we saw two United Nations vans and a bunch of men in light blue helmets and suits standing around. They watched us for a moment, then returned to staring into a pit the size of a football field, excavated by dozens of local workers dressed in old rags.

Everyone else couldn’t wait to discover what was in the pit, but I already knew. I’d seen it in the faces of the men with shovels. They couldn’t meet my gaze. They didn’t want to. They had a misery to carry. Maybe they’d known about the bodies. Maybe they’d helped bury them in the first place. No one lived in a place without knowing what went into the ground, especially Muslim men and boys, each one shot in the back of the head and pushed into a pit. So the men just stared at the earth, saying nothing, smoking as much to alleviate their nerves as to hide the smell of decay.

They gave us white hazmat suits with filtered masks. At first the filters worked, but soon they became clogged with dust and debris and we couldn’t breathe. We were forced to remove them as we moved each body, one by one, the dead laid side by side except at one end where it seemed as if their killers had been in a hurry, maybe to get back to the bar or the family dinner.

They chose us because they couldn’t trust the locals not to accidentally desecrate the bodies. So we were given the honor of packing each and every one of the one hundred and fifty corpses into body bags. Many had been shot with their hands tied behind their backs. Others had died twisted, as if the shot had turned their bodies as they fell.

But the one that stayed with me was the child with his hands over his eyes. About seven years old, he lay face down in the muck of the grave. I turned him over as gently as I could, aware that in this state of decomposition, even the most careful movement could separate bones from a body. But I still couldn’t see his face. I tried to move his hands, but they wouldn’t come free. I didn’t dare try again for fear I’d break them, but I spent the rest of the day wondering how terrified the boy had to have been, and how he probably thought if he couldn’t see what atrocity was about to be levied on him, if he wasn’t able to witness the terror, it wouldn’t affect him. He’d probably been right: by the size of the hole in the back of his head, he never felt a thing.

We were allowed to drink that night and I came back wasted, blitzed out of my fucking mind. We’d drowned our outrage in as much local hooch as we could pour down our throats, puked, then drank some more. I couldn’t remember anything, much less my name, which is probably the sole reason I was able to sleep. Because after, when I awoke and my mind was clear of the confusing effects of alcohol, I remembered what I saw and it wouldn’t go away.

But then my eyes drifted to the word on the ceiling—
antidisestablishmentarianism
. I stared at it. I pronounced it. I found myself breaking the word into its composite parts. I noticed how it could be several different words. I noted how a simple addition of a prefix could change the entire meaning. I began to make smaller words out of the larger one, words like
British
and
animal
and
shiniest
and
heal
and
shit
and
mist
and
sin
. My entire universe became that word, and in the understanding of the letters I could be safe from the images of the dead little Muslim boy with the immovable arms, just as I would the dead little boy at the dining room table, the one who’d turned to his father as if to ask why the alien had shoved something in their stomachs and taken over their bodies.