Thicker Than Blood
by C. Q. March
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
A militia courier on a motorbike brought a dispatch. Time’s up, Isabel read. She changed and went for a run. Told Jackson she had to keep her fitness up.
Mr. and Mrs. Cooper sat rocking across the way on their newly painted porch, their big house, the money that came with having their three kids killed doing splicer work. Isabel didn’t wave back.
Splicers got it even worse than infantry. They didn’t exactly volunteer but pulled high pay and death pensions. They ran fresh spools of tele-wire between trenches and bunkers. Bombs broke the wires, so splicers dug across to make the patches. Maybe a few made it back. And hidden deep away were stacks of shiny wireless coms. Deaf, dumb, useless. Whoever got their wireless back up would probably win all this.
A mule met Isabel on her way out of the village. It pulled a peeling four-door sedan, its seats ripped out for hauling. Old Midge held the reins from her perch on the roof. The mule should be turned over for meat, but it wasn’t worth reporting. Might get Isabel a handful of inflated cash at best. And Midge could report them for the fish. The old woman glared, daring her. Isabel saluted her off.
* * *
The road curled out of the village in crumbled asphalt and then turned to dirt. A busted-up scraggle of clouds hung a dull yellow stain in the late light of the afternoon. Isabel reached a tilted gray church, pinched between two shaded hills. Its steeple lay sheared off to one side. The fold of the hills felt shifted out of place from where Isabel remembered. A scatter of med-heads breathed slow, hunched or laid out on pews in the dirty yard of the church.
Isabel’s old schoolmate Jay-Phon ran the place, had managed to keep it clear of the commissary. The commissioners had jurisdiction over medicinals — they liked to keep their med-heads inventoried — but they couldn’t enforce everything. And Jay-Phon was generous with free samples for the right people. She came down the church steps, a hole in each of her cheeks. Looked like a bullet or shrapnel had passed clean through when she had her mouth open, because she still had her teeth. She kept a piece of towel to mop the spit that leaked out the sides. Jay-Phon grinned at Isabel. The holes pinched shut and she wiped at the little wet slits.
“Well, hey, friend. Thanks again for your service, of course.” And she pointed at Isabel’s prosthetic arm. “You going back active?”
Isabel leaned in to hear better and told her yes.
Jay-Phon tensed but stayed cool. “Who you with now anyway?” She gestured and a guy came out of the broken church with a rifle under his arm.
Isabel told her whatever faction didn’t matter. She was just here to buy. The politics were a mess. Their confederation had bent but hadn’t broken for now; that’s what mattered. A long line of fortifications had collapsed during a reshuffling of coalitions. The enemies had pushed a deep bulge in the front before their supply lines gave out. Isabel told Jay-Phon she’d got called back early and needed some stock.
Jay-Phon nodded and the guy with the rifle went back and returned with a bag strapped over his shoulder. “You got works?” Jay-Phon said. “Got to see you’re still for real, like always. No offense.” Jittery, she poked the tip of her tongue through a cheek-slit. “Everybody’s a spy lately.”
Isabel unrolled a soft leather pouch. She managed a band around her right arm. Jay-Phon’s guy cooked up a tiny bit of dope and Isabel bent to pull it up in her syringe, slow and deliberate with the prosthetic hand. She got the needle in, flexed, and told Jay-Phon she had drool on her chin, was she satisfied?
Jay-Phon took her money and said, “Yeah, how much you need?” and her guy doled out taped paper packets. He was sly and shorted her, but Isabel jumped, hooked a prosthetic finger through Jay-Phon’s cheek, and yanked her up on her toes, thrashing. She screamed, and Isabel grabbed the strap of the guy’s dope-bag with her other hand. He stumbled and tried to get at his rifle, but Isabel grabbed its stock and wrenched the barrel straight up. She hammered it flat — once, twice — against his face, crushing his nasal bones. He fell over hard, blood down his face. Isabel tossed the rifle and pulled her pistol. She put a bullet in the dirt between his sprawled knees.
Isabel handed the bag to Jay-Phon and said to give over what she paid for. The guy in the dirt scooted and wobbled up with a whimper, then ran off crookedly in short, dizzy sprints. Isabel told Jay-Phon she was lucky Isabel was a loyal customer.
“Damn Isabel.” Jay-Phon slouched on a blown-off section of church pew. “You know I’s just seeing if you were paying attention.” She bent and let saliva drip from her cheeks into the dirt. Isabel stuffed away the dope packets.
More than dope, Isabel needed something on Jackson. She could turn over Jay-Phon, but that was small fry. There were all kinds of people selling off-market medicinals, even strong stuff like this. It wouldn’t be enough to get Isabel off the front. She couldn’t go back. And if she had to desert, that meant running and never stopping, ever.
Jay-Phon said, “Want a smoke?” offering. She lit cigarettes for both and chuckled. “Went and scared off my best helper. I bet he shit his pants, actually literally. So embarrassed he’ll prolly quit on me and take work back south. Munitions plant, or spreading manure on a commissary farm. Respectable, something with a steady stipend.”
Isabel grinned a little, and it felt weird. She smoked and said she hadn’t meant to ruin any underwear.
“Remember,” said Jay-Phon, “when we were little, in education, goddang, you hit some of the big kids so hard. Was always glad you were my friend.” She pressed her lips and blew smoke through her cheek-holes. “You’re back to the front. What’ll you do if enemies get you?”
Go down guns blazing, Isabel said. Or maybe give up and hope for a work camp instead of execution or worse. Depends how hungry she got. Maybe get sympathetic with one of the factions on the other side and shoot missiles back this way. How about Jay-Phon?
“My product don’t take sides,” she said, “so that might get me through. Better a live dog than a dead lion, right? Or they’ll string me up.” And dejection settled heavy. “Or our own side will finally shoot me for hiding out back here, not doing my part for the cause. Guess somebody’ll get me eventually.” Gloomy, she dropped her cigarette in the dirt and let saliva drip, hissing it out. “Somebody’d just win these damn wars, I wish.”
* * *
Isabel hiked back and stopped for a little hit to ride home on. She jumped down into one of a pair of blasted-out earthen troughs, deep, long furrows like a fallen bean-stalk giant had dragged itself on crawling knees. Water lay in low places and mirrored back the clay-smeared dirt of the trough’s walls against the sky. The needle went in, and the pooled reflections moved in leaning staggers. The hazy roll of the hills shifted like the bean-stalk giant turning in its sleep. She glided the needle again, and could almost see the heaped earth stoop to stumble clodden feet down the valley.
Isabel ducked through the scavenged barbed wire strung around Jackson’s house. The weather had turned, and Isabel came in damp and chilled, but warm inside with a strong soft buzz going.
Her father had the fishing gear laid out on the kitchen table. He ran an oiled rag over the graphite rods and through their metal eyelets. All things the commissary could use for the war effort.
Isabel changed clothes and joined Jackson. “Here, let me,” he said as she undid her left arm, but she swatted him away. He bent, studied a fishing rod, mumbled sorry, and wiped at his gooey eye.
One of her clasps bound up. She worked at it, cursed, almost finally asked for help but got it loose. It banged across the yellowing formica table.
Jackson kept his box of fishing gear fastidiously tidy, each drawer and compartment snapped closed until needed. He pulled pliers from a shallow drawer and slid it quickly back into place. Isabel eyed the box. She hadn’t found a way to search it. He kept it locked when stored away. Jackson caught her looking.
“You went to see Jay-Phon,” Jackson said. Isabel’s damp clothes hung steaming beside the wood stove.
Isabel took an old brush to the joints and beat-in divots of her arm. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed the surface. Isabel asked for some machine oil for the articulation points. She worked the arm and didn’t look up.
Jackson excused himself to shuffle out to the latrine. The box’s padlock hung open. Isabel jumped across the table. Her pulse rabbited. Come on, Jackson, be up to something. One of the engineers in her unit got extra rations for a year when he found his neighbor with a stashed digital wristwatch. A fellow gunner caught her bunkmate writing sentimental poetry. Mooning over the quaint nationalism of their forebears. The gunner got moved hundreds of miles off the front to a cushy cartography division. No one ever saw her bunkmate again.
Isabel hunted through the box, but damn nothing — oil cans, rivets, tape, wire. He was coming. She felt underneath hoping for a false bottom, closed everything up, and slid it back in place.
“Isabel, you okay?” Jackson said. Isabel trembled, sweating, and fastened her arm back into place.
“Sure.” She foamed over with fear. She’d be picked up, back to the front in a day or two. She thought to forge a traitorous pamphlet and pass it off as Jackson’s. But she wasn’t much of a writer. She’d been through his drawers, under the sink, tops of cabinets, pried up floorboards, scoured the spring house. Nothing. No writing, no piece of tech he’d hoarded and failed to turn over. There had to be something. He owed it to her. Or she’d run, and they’d come for him one last time, the father of a deserter.
* * *
Isabel slept no better in the quiet here than she did on the front where they bunkered deep, clutching sidearms in their bunks, the steady whump-whump of shelling sifting dust out of the walls and ceiling. They woke each morning powdered pale and fine as the sugared doughnuts they remembered as kids.
Here in the stripped bare block and concrete of her childhood bedroom, she sought the deep sleep of oblivion, like not being. She’d rise to fill a syringe, creep back under waves of clutching dreams.
She was a ten-year-old girl with eyes full of blunt bangs, home from education. The kitchen table was strewn with Jackson’s papers, all the chairs kicked over. Her mother had been taken. The family never dared speak of her after she turned up two months later. In a ditch, shot twice precisely, covered in tiny, deliberate burns. Isabel found her father stupid drunk in the garden, sobbing and trying to piss in his pocket. Then he returned to the table, bent to his writing, and didn’t look up again.
Then she was twenty, jacked up on the wars. Adrenaline and the rhythm of battle, the reek of stress-sweat, her unit loaded rockets, 105mm and 120mm artillery. They rigged up launch tracks for old missiles and de-brained smart bombs. Fire-ready-fire-repeat, snarling grins, sometimes bleeding out the ears. Twists of flame writhed close overhead. The foundations of the earth shook, the dirt blew and hung in clouds, then misted to mud. They breathed it all in, clotted with filthy snot.
Jackson got taken too — a few months after her mother — but they just broke him a little and let him go. He limped around and tore down the house’s burnt wallpaper, plastered over bullet-latticed walls, wrote some propaganda pieces that earned enough to eat. He got picked up a couple more times, broken some more each time.
The rumors of peace agreements evaporated. The wars were just a thing that was and would be.
Other than Jay-Phon, everyone she knew as a kid was gone. Killed or just disappeared. Starved or got too sick during one of the scarcities. Some sped things along and just offed themselves. Others went over to one of the enemies. Each battle spilled into the next until they stopped naming them, just went on and on beating out the days in airless anger.
Isabel was the last of her siblings. There’d been a suicide. A couple of the little ones were lost in a rocket barrage when their village got overrun, too young to know what any of it was about. Their side recaptured the village, but then their mother was taken. Her older brother Arndt switched sides after that.
“I’m Presbyterian now,” he’d said, packing his things. “What’re you?”
Isabel said she was nothing, or everything, was what she meant. She convinced the local commander that she’d seen Arndt get blown apart clearing mines from a cornfield outside the village.
Now she turned in her half-sleep, drew her knees to her chest. It was two years ago, late in the day and quiet. Her unit went up for a smoke. They watched the day tick down to nothing, but the sun seemed to sit on the wrong part of the horizon. The abundant rats hid themselves. Something was coming.
Isabel thrashed in her bed. The penitent ghost of her mother was everywhere, apologizing, apologizing. Isabel woke coiled in the old gray sheets. She’d heard Jackson cry out. Burn scars on her neck itched. There was her father again, a throttled sobbing outside the house.
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by C. Q. March
