The Eternity Brigade (10 page)

Hawker estimated they’d covered about four kilometers when Connors fell and could not get to his feet again. Sitting beside his fallen companion, Hawker tried to make it sound as though stopping here had been his idea all along. “I think we’re far enough from the battle to be safe for the night. We’ll rest here till dawn, then find a place to hide during the day. We can travel some more tomorrow night.”

There was no answer; Connors had already passed out. With a sigh, Hawker moved a few meters away and found a comfortable spot where he could lean against a small boulder. He unslung his rifle from his back, set it on automatic and laid it gently on his lap, Leaning back against his rock, he closed his eyes and allowed the fatigue of the day’s tensions to wash over him; within minutes he had fallen asleep, leaving the worries and insecurities until the next morning.

***

He woke with the first light of dawn and sat still for a moment—his body stiff from a night spent on the cold ground—while the memory of the previous night came back. After looking around to make sure they were still undiscovered, Hawker stood, stretching, before making his way over to check on his still-unconscious
patient.

Satisfied that at least Connors wasn’t any worse, Hawker turned to survey their surroundings. They had made it down the mountainside during the night, and were now in a field a dozen meters from the road. Hawker couldn’t see anyone else and nothing moved except a few birds flying overhead.

The field left them no cover, but there was a drainage ditch off to the left; studying it, Hawker decided it would be their best bet for cover during the day. With great difficulty, he lifted Connors up under the arms and dragged him slowly across the ground to the ditch, easing him in before crawling in himself.

He hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime yesterday, as
his belly was loudly reminding him. There were MREs and protein tablets in the survival kit, but he was reluctant to eat them now; he didn’t know how much longer he’d be stranded out here before he could reach the base. He’d gone hungry before; he could stand another day or so.

The drainage ditch contained several large muddy puddles that didn’t look very appealing now, but might later. His canteen was still about half-full, and he noticed that Connors had his canteen, too. With any luck, they’d have enough water
to last them until they reached help.

Connors awoke shortly after sunup. He still seemed dazed and in pain, but was resolved not to show it. The two men stared silently across the ditch at one another for a long time before Connors broke the silence. “You’re the quiet one, ain’t you?”

“Guess so,” Hawker said.

Connors had a
coughing
fit, then went on: “Why’d you let them sucker you into signing up for this shit?”

Hawker shrugged. “Don’t know. Felt like the thing to do.”

“Stupid,” Connors said, shaking his head.

“If you’re so fucking smart, how come
you’re
here?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” Connors snapped, his hostility back to its normal levels.

The two men didn’t speak the rest of the morning.

By mid-afternoon, Connors’s condition became more serious. Though the sun had broken through the clouds and was warming the ground, the man was shivering uncontrollably.

Hawker moved over to his side. “Let me have a look at that.”

“I’ll be okay,” Connors insisted.

Hawker ignored the protests and bent over for a closer examination. The wound had not reopened, but the area immediately around it was inflamed and puffy. He touched the region experimentally, causing Connors to cry out in pain.

Hawker pulled back and frowned, unsure what to do now. Checking his first-aid kit, he found a packet of pills labeled “general antibiotic,” and another couple of pills labeled as strong painkillers. He gave one of each to Connors, who was by now shivering so badly he could barely swallow them. Hawker remembered reading somewhere that wrapping a person in blankets was supposed to help—but he had no blankets, only the clothes each of them was wearing, still soaked from the night before. Left with nothing else he could do, Hawker returned to his previous spot and settled down to keep an eye on Connors’s
progress.

Despite the pills, Connors only seemed to get worse. His shivering fits increased in intensity
;
his moaning grew louder. He drifted in and out of consciousness, thrashing about on the ground so violently that Hawker had to come over and restrain him to prevent the man from hurting himself. Connors began mumbling, too—quietly, at first, but as his fever mounted, his voice grew in volume until Hawker could clearly hear the delirious ravings.

“Ya gotta hide me, man,” he cried out. “I gotta get outta here!”

“We can’t move now,” Hawker said. “We’ve got to stay put
till dark.”

“No, man. Gotta keep movin’. He’ll find me.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“Her brother, man. I gotta get outta here.”

“Whose brother?”

“Susie’s. He wants to kill me.”

“Who’s Susie, and why does her
brother want to kill you?”

“He warned me, man. He told me to stay away. But Susie wouldn’t leave me. She said we could run off together. I wanted to, but I was too scared. You gotta hide me.”

“Look, whoever he is, he can’t get to you here.”

Connors’s face was sweating; his eyes were glassy, staring up at nothing while his head rolled side to side, lips moving silently. Hawker bent closer, but couldn’t hear anything. He began to back away, but then Connors started to scream.

“She’s dead, man. She’s dead.” There were tears in his eyes, and a choking sob in his voice.

Hawker began to worry that the man’s screams would alert the enemy. “Quiet.”

“How could he do that? His own sister! Now he wants me.”

“Susie’s own brother killed her?”

“President of Detroit’s Aryan Legion can’t have no nigger babies in his family. Then he blames me for killing her. Shit, man, I loved her. I’d never kill her!”

Aryan Legion. They didn’t call it Legion for nothing. No wonder Connors thought escaping into the future was his only way out. As the man
continued to thrash and rave, Hawker did his best to pacify him—with only intermittent success.

Connors’s fever broke shortly before sundown, and he was awake and coherent soon after that. He seemed to have no memory of what had happened during his delirium, and Hawker didn’t bring the subject up.

Instead, Hawker knelt beside his patient and said, “Feel like taking a little walk?”

“No,” said Connors. He rolled over and got slowly to his feet under his own power. If anything, he seemed slightly stronger after his earlier ordeal, giving Hawker hope that they might cover more ground tonight.

They set off, walking at a slow but steady pace, and Connors seemed to be making a genuine effort to keep up with Hawker
,
who carefully watched the other man’s progress and insisted on rest breaks whenever he thought Connors was pushing too hard.

With their frequent stops and slow pace, Hawker estimated they had covered about ten kilometers when the sky began glowing in the east. They found their shelter this time in a bombed-out shed. This area had seen much fighting in the past few months, and was sparsely inhabited. Connors slept most of the day, and Hawker dozed fitfully off and on, waking abruptly, rifle in hand, at the slightest sound.

Connors relapsed that night. The pain of his wound, combined with the hunger and the strenuous activity, left him barely able to stand. He was in so much pain that he raised no objection when Hawker came over and slid Connors’s arm around his shoulder, letting the man lean on him as a crutch. Connors collapsed after they’d gone but three more klicks, and Hawker knew they could go no farther tonight. The fever had returned.

Hawker must have dozed, because he suddenly found himself roused by the light in his eyes. It wasn’t the light that had awakened him, though, but a sound—the distant sound of a car’s engine. He checked his rifle and rose slowly to a half-crouch. He was about forty meters from the road at this point, and he looked cautiously along its length in both directions. In the distance he could make out a small convoy of jeeps traveling slowly down the bumpy trail. They were coming from the direction of home base, and as they approached, Hawker could see the stars that marked U.S. government property.

Standing up fully, he started waving and yelling in an effort to attract their attention and flag them down. The driver of the front jeep spotted him and said something to his companion. The second man suddenly raised his rifle and fired at Hawker. The bullet whizzed just past his ear.

Cursing, Hawker dived headlong to the ground, his rifle flying out of his hands and landing a few meters away. There was a sharp pain in his left leg as a bullet hit his thigh, the pain compounded by the impact as his belly hit the earth and the breath was knocked from his lungs. The jeep had accelerated and left the road, and was almost upon him, but there had been no further shots. He crawled to retrieve his rifle.

“Hold it, corporal, he’s one of us,” Hawker heard the driver of the jeep say just as he managed to pick up his own rifle and fumble it around in his hands so that it was pointing in the jeep’s general direction. Then, to Hawker, the driver added, “Take it easy, soldier, we’re on your side.”

“Fucking great way to show it,” Hawker said through clenched teeth. Nevertheless, he lowered his rifle and relaxed on the ground. The two men leaped out of their vehicle and ran over to him.

“Sorry, buddy,” said the corporal who’d shot him. “I thought you were Ruchink. The area’s crawling with them, and we were told to look out for ambushes.”

Hawker looked into the corporal’s anxious face. The kid was barely older than he was.
How’d he get to be a corporal?
Hawker mused, despite the pain. He swallowed back the first two retorts that came to mind, and said merely, “My friend over there’s hurt pretty bad. We were in the supply convoy they overran a few days ago. Been trying to get back to base.”

Hawker remembered little of the four-hour ride. His leg was throbbing, despite the painkiller they’d given him; all the pill did was make him woozy. The fatigue from his trek and the lack of food for the past few days also contributed to his condition. He merely stared up at the sky, fading in and out of consciousness at irregular intervals.

Back at the base he was put in the hospital, where they removed the bullet from his leg and kept him in bed for a week. After that, he was permitted to walk around with a crutch for another couple of weeks while the doctors argued about when he would be fit to return to light duty. He was informed that Connors had pulled through. One of the nurses told Hawker privately that he’d been nominated for a medal for his heroic actions. Hawker wondered, cynically, whether he’d also be eligible for the Purple Heart.

The war ended the day before he was scheduled to be released from the hospital.

***

As the fighting ended, the rebel militants were left in control of the northern portions of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which the official Chinese government ended up ceding to them as an independent state, much as Outer Mongolia had been for decades. While there was still much bitterness between the two factions, the Chinese government felt the price they’d paid had secured something of value: a hostile, but still independent country to act as a buffer between themselves and Russia. The Russian conservatives were pleased to have installed a more orthodox regime in at least part of China, but the cost in Russian lives and arms had been astronomical. Their economy would be teetering for years, leaving them prey to the capitalist opposition parties in public opinion. The United States, at comparatively small cost to itself, had regained a certain uneasy stability in Asia and set the stage for the downfall of the Russian conservatives.

In short, while no one was happy with what had been done, all parties were at least satisfied with the results—for now.

Hawker, meantime, was out of a job, and viewed the peace with mixed feelings. He was right back where he’d started at the beginning of this experiment, facing a hostile world without sufficient resources or knowledge. The situation was even worse, in fact. The world was now twelve years older—and at the rate it had been changing, who could tell how different the outside world would be?

A week after the war ended he was shipped back to the States in an enormous plane—larger than any he’d ever seen—with more than a thousand other servicemen. Everyone was tired of the fighting and glad to have survived. There was singing and swapping of stories; cigarettes and joints were passed around freely. But Hawker kept apart from the rest. He wasn’t one of them; he was a stranger out of time. He’d hoped to see Symington and Green, but neither man was on this flight. Hawker had no way of knowing whether either was still alive.

Back in the United States, the troops were housed in temporary quarters while their paperwork was processed. Hawker was in no hurry. He hoped that now, with all this experience behind him, the army would strongly consider letting him go career. They’d find some position for him—after all, there was always something that needed doing in the army.