Eternity and Other Stories

A WALK IN THE GARDEN

Thursday, 1435 hours

Paradise awaits.

It begins at the foot of a mountain, a slice of which has been carved away by bombardment to expose a field of yellow flowers beneath—it looks as if the entire base is hollow, an immense cave utilized for this pretty purpose. Unreal. Like a puddle of yellow blood spilled from the side of a wounded rock, spread out over a patch of dead ground. To Wilson, who hails from Colorado, where the mountains have snow on their slopes, this mountain is just a big ugly hill. He’s not sure, either, that he would classify the field of flowers as the gateway to Paradise. There seems to be a division of opinion as to what the field is. The bomb they used to open up the cave was something new. Nobody is clear about what happened. According to Wilson’s buddy, Baxter Tisdale, a corporal who’s friends with some of the tech specialists, the brainiacs are talking about paradigm shifts, changes on the quantum level. When Wilson asked what the fuck was all that, Baxter told him to do some IQ, he wasn’t going to attempt an explanation that Wilson, his intellect unamplified, couldn’t possibly comprehend. Wilson was tempted to do as Baxter said. He likes IQ, likes the rush of getting suddenly smart, the way the world fits around him differently. But he doesn’t want to be too smart to do his job. In the morning they’ll walk through the field of flowers and into the shadowy places beyond. Chances are he’ll do IQ at some point before the mission, but right now he doesn’t want to be thinking about that walk too deeply.

Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He’s shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he’s looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, “Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we’re gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!” Now he’s in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he’s not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There’s little doubt the ragheads believe it’s Paradise. If the village wasn’t cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.

Here and there among the flowers lie chunks of rock, some big as troop carriers. Wilson tells his helmet to go tight on one of the blossoms next to the big rock. It’s long and fluted like a lily, its interior petals convulsed like those of a rose. He’s never seen a flower resembling it. Not that he’s an expert. The weird thing is, there are no bugs. He scans from blossom to blossom. Nary an ant, an aphid, or a bee. Maybe Intel isn’t bullshitting; maybe the ragheads have developed a strain of flowers that don’t need bugs to fertilize them. Maybe they’re like a cool new drug source. Better than opium poppies. Wilson indulges a brief fantasy. He’s back in Greeley, at a party, in a room with Mackie and a couple of girls, and they’re about to twist one up when he produces a baggie filled with dried yellow petals and says, “Magic time.” A few minutes later he and Laura Witherspoon are screwing on the ceiling, the walls have turned to greenish blue music, the carpet is the surface of a shaggy planet far below. He wishes for things he can’t have. That Laura was with him, that he never re-upped. Most of all he wishes that he never volunteered for Special Ops. Depressed, he instructs his helmet to feed him a trippy level of downs via ocular mist. A minute drools off the lip of time. His head feels full of syrup, a warm sludge of thought. He’s got Chinese eyes, he’s nodding like the yellow flowers in the breeze… They’re so close it looks as if he could reach out and snap off a blossom, lift it to his lips and drink secret nectar from the Garden of Allah.

2018 hours

Sunsets from the perspective of the ledge are made beautiful by dust storms raging to the south. Immense swirls of crimson and gold figure the sky, transforming it into a swirling battle flag. Wilson watches the flowers redden, go purple at dusk, and finally vanish in darkness. He removes his helmet, picks up his sidearm, and strolls through the village. Narrow rocky streets; whitewashed houses lit by oil lamps; a diminutive mosque with a blue-and-white tiled dome. At the far end of the village, on a rocky shelf from which a path winds downhill toward the American compound, three teenage Iraqi boys are preparing to burn a cartoon of George Bush painted nearly life-size on a sheet of cardboard and suspended from a limb of a leafless tree. Bush has been portrayed with the body of a capering monkey. His head is a grinning pasted-on magazine photograph. The boys are dressed in jeans and T-shirts. They’re smoking cigarettes, joking around, not apparently motivated by political passion as much as by a desire to do mischief. One adds twigs to a small fire beneath the cardboard sheet. A lanky black man carrying a helmet like Wilson’s under one arm is standing off to the side, looking on.

“Hey, Baxman!” Wilson exchanges a complex handshake with his friend. “S’up?”

“Checkin’ out the rebels here.” Baxter’s face, highlighted by the flames, is a polished mask. His eyes are pointed with flickery red cores.

“We oughta clue these guys in there’s a new president,” says Wilson, and Baxter says, “They know that. They not goin’ forget ol’ George until he’s way longer gone than he is now. Man’s the embodiment of the Great Satan for these fuckers.”

Wilson notes his use of the word “embodiment” and wonders if Baxter’s working behind IQ. Hard to tell, because Baxter’s a pretty sharp guy even natural.

“Burn his monkey ass!” Baxter makes a two-handed gesture, emulating leaping flames. The boys look perplexed and fearful. “Go on! I’m not goin’ hurt you! Burn his ass!”

“Whatcha got against Bush?”

“What do you got for him? Dude was an embarrassment!”

“He chased Saddam outa town, man.”

Baxter gives him a pitying look. “Where you think Saddam’s at? He’s not dead, man. Some guys’re sayin’ the flowers might be the front of his secret hideout. I think that’s crap. Man probably had some surgery, turned himself into a woman and is right now fuckin’ his brains out on a beach in Brazil. My point bein’, all Bush did was give Saddam a goddamn golden parachute!”

Wilson knows Baxter’s just acting pissed-off at him; he’s driving away the demons of tomorrow morning the best he knows how. “So the flowers aren’t his secret palace or something… fuck, are they?”

Baxter pulls a sheaf of print-outs from his back pocket. The heading on the front page is Paradise and Hell: In the Light of the Holy Qur’an. It’s part of the library relating to Islamic culture and religion they were force-fed while on board the transport that brought them to Iraq. Wilson’s retention of the material was deemed substandard. “I’m down with the ragheads on this one,” Baxter says.

“You think it’s Paradise, huh?” Wilson examines the print-outs. “It say anything in there ’bout yellow flowers?”

“Naw, but you haven’t been hearin’ what I’m hearin’. The way the brainiacs are talkin’ about the bomb, how it maybe broke us through to some other plane. They say the whole area’s unstable, but when I ask ’em, ‘Unstable how?’ they clam up on me.” Baxter slaps the sheaf against his palm. “Paradise sounds reasonable as anything else. That’s why I’m readin’ up on it.”

Wilson’s attention has wandered, and seeing that Baxter is waiting for a response, he feels as he often did when called on in class back in high school. Unprepared, and yet compelled to say something. “We’re not fighting Saddam,” he says. “We’re fighting terror.”

“Say what?”

“We’re fighting terror. Saddam’s not the target, man.”

Baxter shakes his head ruefully. “Man, you a mess!”

The bottom of the cardboard sheet catches fire. The flames wash upward, devouring Monkey George. The teenage boys let out halfhearted whoops and glare fiercely at the Americans; then they, too, lapse into silence and watch the cardboard shriveling to ash.

As they walk together down the path, using their helmets in night-vision mode to find their way, the lights of the compound greenly visible below, illuminating tents and ranks of armored vehicles, Baxter says, “Ragheads got some weird ideas ’bout hell.”

Baxter’s voice is muffled by the helmet. Wilson asks him to repeat and then says, “Yeah? Like what kind?”

“They say most people in hell goin’ be women. Hey, call it whatever you want. Hell. Heaven. I don’t care. You can put me down in with the ladies anytime!”

“What else they say?”

“The usual shit. You drink melted brass, you get burned all over. They work your ass to death, but you never die. One weird thing: they let people out.”

“Outa hell?”

“Yeah. People in heaven intercede for people in hell and then they let ’em out. Book makes a big deal ’bout the last man gets into heaven. He has to crawl out from hell and then he sees a shade tree and after he goes through some other bullshit, he’s honored by Allah.” Baxter negotiates a tricky stretch of path banked downward from the hill over a hundred-foot drop. “’Course once he’s in heaven, he learns he’s the lowest status guy.”

“Probably still be happy,” Wilson says. “Probably still beats hell.”

“Sooner later he’s goin’ think about movin’ on up the ladder. It’s human fuckin’ nature.”

They stop for a smoke, sitting on a boulder barely twenty feet above the operations tent. The sky is starless, the air thick with heat. Faint shouts and rumblings rise to them. Baxter spits down onto the tent and says, “This shit here, man, it’s not what I signed on for. I got half a mind to go for a long walk east before tomorrow.”

“I’m not listening to this crap!” Wilson says, and when Baxter starts to come back with more of the same, he talks through him. “Uh-uh, man. I don’t wanna even take this to the level of a fucking discussion. You understand?”

Baxter hits his cigarette; the brightened coal paints his face in orange glow and shadow, making him look both dangerous and defeated.

“We’re gonna kick terrorist ass tomorrow,” Wilson says.

“Mmmph.”

“Our daddy was a stick of dynamite and mama was T-Rex on the rag.”

Baxter flips his cigarette out over the tent and tracks its sparking downward arc. “I’m not playin’ that game with you. I’m not into it.”

“How do you spell Democracy?”

“You heard what I said. I’m not doin’ this with you.”

“I want to know. How do you spell it?”

“Fuck you.”

“I am a truly ignorant son-of-a-bitch! I have a deep-seated soul-need to know how to spell Democracy.” Wilson holds out his right hand to Baxter, palm up. “I need it from you, Baxman. We going hunting together in the morning. I need to get motivated.”

Baxter says, “Shit,” and laughs, like whatever, okay, I’ll play your dumbass game, but when he slaps Wilson’s palm, he does so with gung-ho force. Their hands lock strong in a gladiator grip.

“How do you spell Democracy?” Wilson asks, and Baxter, all serious now, warrior-mean and going eye-to-eye, says, “With bullets, man. With bullets.”

Friday, 0525 hours

Packed into a troop carrier with Baxter and six other soldiers dressed in camo spacesuits, Wilson listens to tunes until his helmet asks him to review his medal file. Using the computer built into the left arm of his suit, he pulls it up on-screen. The file consists of biographical data, likes and dislikes, personal observations, quotes, information that will be provided to the media should he perform a brilliant act of bravery and initiative, especially if he should die in its performance, in which case a gorgeous news slut will announce his name on television, breathe sadly and then pick a choice bit from the file to give color to his life, informing her public that Spec 4 Charles Newfield Wilson taught his kid sister to play hoops and had a taste for orange soda. The last item in the file is entitled 10 Things Specialist Fourth Class Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know. Wilson can’t recall the last time he modified the list, but some of it seems incoherent. It’s clear he was in a different head at the time, riding a mighty chemical wave, or—and this is more likely—the list is a product of several variant chemical states. He sits with a finger poised over the delete key, but thinks maybe he knew more when he modified the list than he does now and closes the file unchanged.

The things he’s learned from Baxter and others about the bomb and the field of flowers, what happened and why, drift through his thoughts. Probably none of it’s true. They float these rumors in lieu of actual explanation, let the men and media sort and combine them into a consensus lie. But there are no media this far north in Iraq, he tells himself. So maybe it’s all true, maybe all the scraps of loose talk are pieces of a truth that he isn’t smart enough to fit together. He wonders what the villagers said when asked why they thought the field of flowers was the entrance to Paradise. He wonders why the answers they gave their interrogators have been classified. Like maybe the villagers knew something command doesn’t want the rest of them to hear. It’s better not to consider these things, better to shoot some battle juice and get drooly and red-eyed. Nonetheless, he considers them. The things he does know, the things he’s heard. Fitting them together—that’s Today’s New Army Challenge. He switches off his tunes, switches on the intrasuit channel and hears Baxter say, “…I’m live in hollowed-out pearls. Each man gets two gardens of gold and two gardens of silver.”

“I ain’t hearin’ nothin’ ’bout what the women s’posed to get,” says Janet Perdue. “Though I guess I can figger it out.” She laughs, and the other woman in the patrol, Gay Roban, GRob, joins in.

The carrier stops, and the lights go red. Wilson knows they’re at the edge of the field. Time to juice up, buckle down, jack your rifle into your computer, make everything secure. Baxter drones on, now talking about the varieties of demons and angels and how people are brought out of hell burned all over, except on their faces, and are laid down on the banks of a river to recuperate. How on the day of judgment, hell will be hauled up from beneath the earth by seventy thousand ropes. Wilson punches up a drug mix on the computer, treating himself to a dry martini of God’n Country, with just a whisper of IQ. The syringe bites his forearm. Within seconds he’s gripped by a pathologically smooth feeling of competency and confidence, underscored by a stream of outrage and devotion to duty. The claustrophobic enclosure of the carrier seems like a seed pod that will soon burst open and expel them, deploying them so as to sow Democracy in its new ground. Though muted by suits and helmets, the ferocity of his comrades-in-arms radiates out around him. Their expressions, partially shielded by red reflection, are uniformly grim. Except for DeNovo, who’s turned on his privacy screen. Instead of eyes and nose and mouth, his faceplate displays a video capture from a home movie, some kids—one of them probably DeNovo himself—playing in somebody’s back yard, splashing in a plastic pool. Wilson’s privacy screen is programmed to show shots of the Rockies, but he’s been thinking about making a change.

The voice of Colonel Reese sounds over the intrasuit channel. Wilson has never met the colonel, never even laid eyes on him. He suspects that Reese does not exist, that he is a computer program, but he hearkens to the words, he lets their design control him. He pictures Reese to be a towering martial figure and not a doughy chaplain type. Standing at crisp parade rest, engaging them sternly, yet with loving familiarity.

“The idea for which you are fighting is too large to hold in the mind,” says the colonel. “If it was visible, it would be too large to see. Like the breadth of the sky or the shape of the universe. Here in this place of terror and iniquity, you are the sole expression of that idea. You represent its burning edges, you carry its flame, you are the bearers of its purifying light. You are the most dangerous men and women in the world. You kill so others may not need to kill, and there is no one better at it. If you die, you will in some form continue, because what lives in you and through you will not die. Even your death will serve to light the way.”

The colonel talks about home, God, the country in whose national interest this beautifully tailored, corporate-sponsored message of warrior religion has been created, invoked to inspire in them a zealousness comparable to that of the Enemy. He mentions each soldier by name and refers to elements of their private lives, to specific moments and people and places. The words seem like a prayer to Wilson, and he closes his eyes.

0637 hours

There are three patrols, teams of eight each, with two more such patrol groups scheduled to follow. Seventy-two soldiers in all. Now and then Wilson checks his helmet screen, which shows a digital animation of their progress, little brown figures knee-deep in yellow flowers. He can control the screen to give him whatever angle he wants, even close-ups of the helmets that reveal the expression any soldier is wearing at a particular moment, stamped-on features that are individualized, but rendered like cartoon superheroes. Sometimes he commands the screen to give him a low angle looking upward at one soldier or another, a cool point of view that makes them appear to be giants moving beneath a blank grayish blue sky. He’s looking at Baxter that way when a toylike helicopter appears in the digital sky above Baxter’s image. Flashing red words materialize on the screen, ordering them to proceed more rapidly, the patrols at their rear are ready to deploy.

The mouth of the cave excavated by the bomb is four hundred sixty-seven feet wide, but its depth reads infinite on Wilson’s instruments. Even more distressing, the cave appears to occupy the entire base of the mountain—an unimaginable tonnage is essentially hovering, supported to a height ranging from forty-one to seventy-seven feet only by thin rock walls. Thinking his helmet must be whack, Wilson checks with the others. Everyone’s readings are the same. The red words keep on flashing, telling them to advance. Baxter, who leads the patrol, asks for a confirmation from command and receives a go. The thought that he’s about to be crushed does not unnerve Wilson. Death will be quick, his drugs are good, and Colonel Reese’s words were a knife that spread his fear so thin, it has melted away into him like hot butter into a biscuit. He moves forward, swinging his rifle in an easy arc to cover his area. As he passes beneath a toothy hang of rock at the entrance to the cave, he switches to a private channel and signals Baxter.

“Yo, dog!” Wilson says. “Got any more good advice on the afterlife?”

Baxter doesn’t respond for a couple of beats, then says, “Yeah. Get ready.”

“Fucking command knew this all along, man. They knew this was whack.”

“You think?” says Baxter, affecting a retard voice. “Do some IQ, man. Your dumbass is showin’.”

“This here’s no time to be peaking,” Wilson says. “This here’s look-straight-ahead time. Keep-your-mind-on-the-map time.”

“IQ’s good any ol’ time. You been usin’ too drifty a mix, man. You got to burn that shit home. Straight no chaser.”

They walk without speaking for a few seconds.

“All right. I’m shuttin’ it down,” Baxter says.

“Hey, Baxter!”

“Yeah?”

Wilson wants to say something to fortify their bond, to acknowledge it, because in the midst of his lion glow, his sense of supernatural direction, there’s an unfortified part of him that needs a human affirmation, but he can’t bring the words out. Finally he says, “We cool, man?”

“Nothin’ but, man. You know that. Nothin’ but.”

“Okay… cool.”

They trudge onward, crushing the yellow blossoms underfoot, and then Baxter says, “One thing that book tells about Paradise? Said you enter Paradise in the most beautiful and perfect of forms… in the form of Adam.”

“Adam-and-Eve Adam?”

“Yeah, you enter Paradise, you be just like him. You be tall as a palm tree. Sixty cubits tall.”

“Fucking Paradise must be a seriously fucking big joint,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Can’t get any bigger’n this cave, can it? ’Least that’s what I’m readin’.”

They remain joined in silence.

“All right, man,” says Baxter. “Shuttin’ it down.”

0742 hours

There’s no apparent end to the flowers, and the deeper they walk into the cave, the light stays the same, sourceless, as if they’re moving within a bubble of pale dawn radiance, carrying it forward with them. Wilson thinks that if the cave is truly Paradise, then all of Paradise must be this light and these flowers. They can no longer see the cave walls, only the rocky ceiling. At last his digital screen registers something round and white at the edge of the display. It’s massive, a white globe measuring more than two hundred feet in diameter. Yet as they draw near this surreal-looking object, he realizes that while it’s big enough to crawl inside and walk around in—there’s an open door for that very purpose—it can’t be anywhere near as big as his instruments say. Its skin is lustrous and gleaming, like that of a pearl. Instead of being set at ground level, the door is maybe eighteen, twenty feet overhead, occupying an area on the pearl’s upper curve. A track of crushed yellow flowers leads away from it, making it appear that the thing was tossed from a careless hand and rolled to a stop. Smears of bright blood streak the inside of the door.

A babble surges over the intrasuit channel. Baxter orders everyone except Wilson to shut up, fan out, and keep watch. Wilson punches up a shot of IQ, straight no chaser. It’s time to be wise. He stares awestruck at the pearl while Baxter contacts command and, as the shot takes effect, he thinks that the pearl might well be two hundred feet in diameter. If they have, in fact, entered Paradise, then their bodies, according to the Qur’an, are twenty cubits tall, and this would place the pearl’s size in a different perspective. That’s bullshit, of course, but this is a bullshit mission. Bullshit might prove the key to survival.

“I can’t raise ’em,” Baxter says privately to Wilson. “Command channel’s dead.”

Wilson waits for an order.

“Go take a look up there.” Baxter points to the door. “Stay private when you report.”

Wilson checks the energy storage units in his magic boots. He crouches, leaps high, catches the edge of the door and swings himself over so he’s braced, perched on the doorsill, looking down into the pearl. What he sees is opulence. Draperies of peach and turquoise silk, and tapestries on the walls; dishes of silver and gold; silken couches and pillows; ornate rugs, inlaid tables and chairs. Everything torn, scattered, broken, as after a violent home invasion. An archway leads to another opulently appointed room. The oddest thing, the floor—according to the placement of the door—should be canted out of true, the furniture all slid down to one end; but though toppled and knocked around, the furniture hasn’t obeyed the laws of gravity, and if Wilson were to drop down, he would not be standing at a lean. It disorients him to see this.

He reports to Baxter, and Baxter says, “I’m coming up.”

Baxter launches himself, grabs the door. Wilson holds out a gauntleted hand, helps him swing over. They crouch together in the doorway, awkwardly balanced, clinging to one another.

“Looks clear,” Baxter says after scoping things out. “Maybe this is the way.”

“The way? The way to fucking what?” says Wilson. “That’s not the protocol, man. We’re to reconnoiter the cave and report on what we find. We’re not supposed to go climbing inside the shit we find.”

“That’s not how I understand the orders.”

Baxter’s indifference, his clipped GI tone, pisses Wilson off. “I fucking respectfully disagree. I think the goddamn corporal’s got his head up his ass.”

“Check your display, man. See what the cave’s readin’.”

The cave reads infinite in all directions except up.

“Command channel is dead,” says Baxter. “There’s no direction out. We can wander around in these fuckin’ flowers ’til we stink out our suits or we can explore this apparent goddamn habitation. I’m sayin’ that’s the way we go.”

“I understand the corporal’s logic. I admit it makes a certain degree of sense. However…”

“Cut the shit, man!”

“…I suggest it may not be the wisest course to jump down the first fucking rabbit hole we come to.”

DeNovo signals on the intrasuit channel and Baxter tells him to report.

“You gotta see this!” DeNovo says excitedly. “There’s a big drop-off. Down in it’s like a forest. Trees… all gold. Trunks and leaves, they’re all gold!”

Wilson spots DeNovo in the distance, a tiny brown figure.

“Hell you doin’ way out there? Get your ass back now!” says Baxter.

“It’s amazing, Baxman!” says DeNovo. “Fucking beautiful!”

Wilson locates the digital DeNovo on his helmet screen and goes close-up on him. His expression is one of maxed-out glee, a delirious Italian cartoon hero. Wilson shifts to an overhead view, sees the drop-off, the ranks of digitally realized yellow trees and bushes. He shifts back to a close-up on DeNovo. Baxter is yelling, ordering DeNovo to return, when something dark sweeps across the screen and he’s gone. Wilson glances toward the spot where he last saw DeNovo. Only yellow flowers. Alarmed voices chatter on the intrasuit channel. Baxter shouts them down, orders everyone back to the pearl.

“You see what it was?” he asks Wilson.

“I was watching my screen, man. It was just a blur.”

Baxter nods toward the room below. “Jump on down in there.”

“Baxman, I don’t…”

“We got nowhere else to go. I need the door clear. Go.”

Wilson jumps, makes a cushioned landing on his magic boots, dropping to a squat. He comes up, rifle ready, reading for life signs. “Still clear,” he says to Baxter.

“Stay there!” Baxter continues urging the rest of the patrol to hurry and then he goes, “Aw, shit!” and screams at them. Wilson hears bursts of small arms fire and the concussion of grenades. He checks his screen. Wolves, he thinks when he sees the figures that are closing in on the pearl. But they’re not true wolves, they’ve got human feet and hands… except the fingers have talons. They’re knuckle-draggers, their arms incredibly long, covered in reddish brown hair, the same color as the mountain. They’re long-jawed, too. Red-eyed. Their limbs are spindly and strings of drool sway from their chins as they move through the flowers, harrowing the much smaller figures who’re racing toward the pearl. Even hunched over, their heads scrape the ceiling, so they must be forty, fifty feet tall… if he’s to believe his instruments. But how can he believe, how can he accept these digital monstrosities as truth? He calls out to Baxter, asks what he’s seeing, but Baxter’s too busy shouting orders to respond. Wilson focuses on the helmet screen. Watches as the shambling gait of one werewolf carries it close to a running soldier. Janet Perdue. It snatches her up in a taloned hand and bites her in half like she was a candy bar with wriggling legs. Blood splatters as in Japanese anime. Shocked, incapable of belief, Wilson hits replay and watches it happen again.

A soldier appears framed in the doorway above and jumps down beside him. Gay Roban, looking terrified behind her faceplate. She unlatches her helmet and removes it, rips off the skullcap that’s covered her close-cropped blond hair. She stares with dazed fixity at Wilson, then casts her eyes over the disarray of the room.

“Is it wolves up there, GRob?” Wilson asks, catching her arm. “Like werewolves?”

She pushes him away and says dully, “Fucking monsters.”

Baxter jumps down, closing the door behind him as he drops, and GRob screeches at him. “Chickenshit asshole! You can’t just leave ’em!”

“Check your screen,” he says, and when she won’t calm down, he shouts, “They’re gone, goddamn it! Check it out!”

Acting stunned, GRob puts her helmet back on. Wilson goes wide-angle on his screen. Werewolves prowling about, bending to sniff at the flowers, then hurrying with a gimpy, hunchbacked gait to another spot and sniffing again. No soldiers are visible, but the fact that the werewolves are hunting for survivors causes Wilson to think some may be alive, their suits shut down, maybe burrowed under the dirt. Three patrol groups. Seventy-two soldiers. They can’t be the only ones who made it. It was all so fast.

GRob lifts off her helmet. “Jesus!”

“Wrong fuckin’ prophet,” Baxter says flatly.

“Could be still some of our people out there,” Wilson says. “They could be shut down, they…”

“Could be?” Baxter spits out a laugh. “We ain’t goin’ back out there for ‘could be.’ Put that from your mind.”

“We can’t stay here.” GRob slaps at the wall. “Something picked this goddamn thing up and threw it. You seen the track it left. Like, y’know? They fucking threw it! You wanna be here when the son of a bitch comes back?”

“We’re not stickin’ around,” says Baxter.

“We’re not going outside, we’re not sticking around…” GRob gets in his face. “You gonna make us disappear, Baxman? You got that much mojo?”

Baxter steps away from confrontation and aims a forefinger at her. “You best slow it down, woman!”

Her cheeks flushed, GRob drills him with a furious stare, and even in the midst of fear and freakery, Wilson feels the pull of an old attraction, this long-standing thing he’s had for her. He wonders how he can think of sex, even fleetingly, even with GRob, who’s muscled up but looks like a woman, not a steroid queen like Perdue. Escape, he imagines. His hormones offering him an out. He still can’t accept that Perdue is dead. She was a mad fucking soldier.

“Punch yourself some downs,” Baxter says to GRob. “Light level.”

GRob doesn’t move to obey.

“That’s an order!” He looks to Wilson. “You, too.”

“That’s not cool, man! We can’t be doing downs, we’re in the shit!”

“Hear what I said? That’s an order!”

“I already did up. When the wolves showed,” Wilson says, not wanting to dull his edge. “I went way light, but I did up.”

Baxter eyes him with suspicion, then says wearily, “They’re shaitans, not wolves. I told you about ’em in the carrier.”

“I wasn’t all the time listening.”

“Muslim hell got some devils resemble wolves. That’s what we saw.”

“I thought this was supposed to be Paradise,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Who the fuck knows? Maybe the ragheads back in the village weren’t tellin’ it straight. Maybe they’re chumpin’ our ass. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. “We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?”

Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, “Read the pearl for her.”

The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, “You got that, GRob? Infinite. There’s this room, then another and another and another… Get the picture?”

GRob’s leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. “Naw, man. I don’t got it. How’s that possible?”

“Right! I’m goin’ explain this whole thing.”

She doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter’s voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. “This is probably the way to go,” she says.

It’s a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, understands precisely what she means.

1200 hours

They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson’s count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson’s not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding. Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he’s shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn’t believe this is a good time to rest, but he’s tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.

Wilson’s grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God’n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well be in conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always been so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He’s done his duty, and he’s way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn’t need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That’s the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what “changes on the quantum level” signifies. If the bomb caused such changes… Well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word “chaos” and finds this definition:

The place they’re in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he’s heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they’ve been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur’an, on primordial matter, and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he’s confident the truth is something close to what he’s envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It’s conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.

GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.

“Go on take a bath if you want,” Wilson says, grinning. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

She shoots him a diffident look. “Uh-huh.”

“Hey, I’ve seen your ass before.”

“That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license.”

The clear modulation of her voice and her use of the term “license” alert him. “You’re not on downs,” he says.

“I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess.”

“Yeah, same here.”

“You hit on anything?”

Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.

“We’re close,” she says, patting her face with damp hands. “But I don’t think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it’s all hell.”

“How you figure?”

“Only things we’ve seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air.” With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. “Hell.”

“Might be other doors.”

“Probably thousands, but I don’t get they’re gonna lead us anywhere good.” GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. “Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We’re infidels, man. We’re unbelievers.”

“You may be taking this all too literally.”

“Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused.” It seems she’s about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t hold back now. You got something, let’s hear it.”

“Okay.” GRob dries her right hand. “Maybe it’s BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy’s always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn’t know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound…”

“Fuck!” says Wilson.

“See what I’m saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it’s a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y’know.”

Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.

“Seventy thousand’s such a weird number,” GRob says. “I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it’s mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol’ raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong… or he received the message right and didn’t know what volts were, so he said, ‘ropes.’”

“Fuck,” says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.

“No doubt.” GRob hefts her rifle. “I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what’s on the other side.”

“Might be a big goddamn forest,” Wilson says dubiously.

“Didn’t you read it? It’s not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it reads infinite, but…” She shrugs. “What’s the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks.”

“Baxter’ll come up with something.”

GRob snorts. “Forget him! Man’s sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What’s that about?!”

“You were acting pretty crazy.”

“I saw a fifty-foot wolf that smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy.”

“He’ll bounce back.”

“Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That’s whack, man! He was right for command, we’d have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He’s over! You’n me, we gotta look to each other from now on.”

Baxter’s helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it’s no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter’s showing cracks, but he doesn’t dispute GRob’s last statement. “What’s Arizona like?” he asks.

“You live right next-door. Don’t you know?”

“I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That’s about it.”

“Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert’ll trip you out. I don’t know. It’s cool.” She gazes off into a private distance. “Running the border towns was the best. We’d start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing.” She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she’d toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered…

“Where’s your head at, man?” GRob asks. “Am I losing you, too?”

“Just a little vacation. I’m back.”

She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip. They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, “We get outa this, man… You’n me. For real.”

“Are you motivating me?”

“Fucking A! Is it working?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We’ll see how it sets up after that.”

“Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers.”

“You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing.”

Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman’s got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. “We’re not getting out of this,” he says.

She holds steady. “It’s still a promise.”

They stay locked, and then she says, “Fuck the monsters! We’re the real monsters here.”

“Fanged motherfuckers!” Wilson says. “We rule the goddamn world!”

“We’re poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they’ll crap blood and scream for their mamas.”

“They won’t eat us, we’ll eat them. We’ll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh.”

“We’re too cool to die! Too sexy!”

“We’re movie stars with mad fucking weapons!”

“We’re scrap iron…”

“We’re wild dogs!”

“…we were born for the shit!”

1323 hours

On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn’t seem to care what they do. He’s obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he’s likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can’t do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they’re thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, “Whatever.”

The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson’s ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, “Fuck you, Jim!” and then, to Wilson, says, “Keep firing!” Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently, and doesn’t react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest’s boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He’s excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter’s not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.

“Those fucking wolves are out there,” GRob says, “they’re dead for real, not just their transmitter’s down. I say we keep on going.”

“Deeper into the cave or out into the valley?” Wilson asks this of Baxter, but it’s GRob who answers. “Deeper,” she says. “Might be worse back in there, but I done enough with those wolves.”

“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Baxter says, slurring his words.

The anger and frustration that’ve been building in Wilson, his sense of being abandoned by Baxter, betrayed by him, all this spikes, but he doesn’t act on it, he doesn’t start ranking on his best friend, and from this he realizes that, like GRob, he has given up on Baxter. Their stroll in the brass forest has confirmed her judgment. “Dog!” he says to Baxter. “You in there? You are, you better do something, man. Battle juice, God’n Country, IQ. Whatever it takes. ’Cause you are fucking slipping away.”

Baxter’s eyes find him through the faceplate, and he’s about to speak when a silent shadow sweeps over them, a massive shadow. Wilson knows before he glances up that it’s death in some form. Its chill invades him, but it’s gone so quickly, the form that imprints itself on his mind doesn’t seem the one he actually saw, a cat’s face with black wings, leathery wings and struts of cartilage, maybe a bat, an enormous bat. Incredibly fast. Like the blur that took DeNovo. He looks back along the path. Rats are gathering in the crooks of the twisted brass trees that survived their passage, thousands of glinting red eyes pointed from pockets of shadow. He hears behind him the snick of GRob slotting a fresh magazine into her rifle. “Keep going,” she says. “That’s who we are, man. We keep going.”

1655 hours

They are miles from the brass forest, the walls of the cave once again too distant to see or to read, lost in a field of yellow flowers, when they happen upon what appears to be a survivor from another patrol, a suited figure sitting among the flowers, his torso and helmeted head visible above the blooms. At a distance he looks like an element of a Zen garden. A minimalist, vaguely human sculpture of pale brown stone. His privacy screen has been engaged and the display on his faceplate is showing a clip excerpted from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. GRob bends to him, punches keys on the soldier’s computer, reads the arm display. “OD,” she says.

“Who is it?” Wilson asks.

“Gary Basknight.”

Wilson remembers him from training. The Basilisk, he called himself. Kept growing a soul patch against regs. Big, muscular kid from Tampa. A laughing skull tattooed on his neck. Wilson, himself tattooless, contemplated getting a similar one. He watches the cartoon clip. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird around a corner inside a house and screeches to a halt when he sees Tweety hovering before him. He makes a two-handed grab for the bird, but Tweety squirts up and Sylvester just misses. He makes another grab, and another. Another yet. Each time, Tweety Bird squirts higher, losing a yellow feather or two in the process, yet suffering no serious damage, continuing to hover almost within reach. Sylvester doesn’t notice that as he grabs and misses, he’s rising higher and higher off the floor. Finally he notices—oh-oh!—and realizes he can’t fly. A perplexed look comes over his face. Then down he falls, leaving a spreadeagled cat-shaped hole in the floor. The clip restarts. Wilson can’t get over the banal ugliness of the sight, this brightly animated few seconds of Oof! and Gasp! and Kapow! framed by a camo-painted combat suit, this human being reduced to a death utterance of streaming video. Nor can he connect these silly, albeit somewhat ominous, images with the surly badass who Basknight pretended to be and, in fact, was. Basknight’s choice of privacy screen might, like his own, have been hastily considered, or maybe this was Basknight’s way of flipping off the world, maybe he realized how obscenely trivial it would appear to anyone finding his body. Then again, maybe the clip embodies an absurdist view of life that he kept hidden from his peers, most of whom perceived him to have the famished appetites and clouded sensibility of a creature in a shooter game.

GRob nudges him and Wilson glances up to see that she’s pointing at Baxter, who has taken a seat among the flowers some twenty yards away. “Baxman?” he says.

“Don’t come near me,” Baxter says. “Come near me, I’ll mess you up.”

GRob puts a hand on Wilson’s arm and says, “Leave him,” but he shakes her off and screams, “Baxter, this is total bullshit!”

“Walk away,” Baxter says.

“That all you got for me? Walk away? After the shit we seen together? That’s it?”

Silence.

“You better talk to me, Baxter!”

“Devil’s loose in the world, man. Where we goin’ go? The devils, they got it all now.”

Fuming, Wilson can’t fit his feelings inside of words.

“War’s over, man,” says Baxter. “I’m shuttin’ it down.”

“Baxter! Goddamn it!”

“I’m with you, man. I hear what you sayin’. But you need to walk away. Right now.”

His words are badly slurred, almost unintelligible, and Wilson understands from this it’s too late for argument, that his own words, if he could find them, would form merely an annoying backdrop to whatever sweet ride of thought Baxter has chosen to rush away on. Tears are coming and he’s furious at Baxter. Were their good times and shared fear simply prelude to this muscle-spasm of an exit? Did people just invent each other, just imagine they were tight with one another?…

“Charlie.” GRob touches his hand and Wilson jerks it back from her angrily, saying, “Don’t call me that! I hate that fucking name!”

“I know,” she says. “Hate’s good.”

As they move off smartly across the field, Wilson glances back to see the cute yellow canary and the skuzzy black-and-white cat cavorting on Basknight’s faceplate, growing ever smaller, ever more indistinct. He doesn’t know what’s on Baxter’s privacy screen and he doesn’t want to know. Baxter’s always changing it. From an old Pong game to a photograph of a Russian meteor crater to an African mask. All stupidly announcing some sloganlike truth about the soon-to-be skull behind them. Wilson decides he’s sticking with shots of the Rockies for his screen. They don’t say diddly about him, which is better than saying one dumbass thing, and it’ll never seem as monstrously puerile as Basknight’s Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon.

The figures of Baxter and Basknight dwindle to anonymous lumps, and Wilson summons them onto his helmet display, taking an angle low to the ground and looking up, holding them both in frame so they resemble ancient statues, relics of a vanished civilization, weathered soldier-shaped monuments commemorating something, though he’s forgotten what.

1830 hours

Wilson no longer feels like scrap iron, like a wild dog, like a movie star with mad fucking weapons. He feels like Charles Newfield Wilson. Charlie. Walking through the valley of the shadow, waiting for the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch, and whatever else hell has in store. Scared shitless, even though he’s got a pretty, deadly blond at his side. He knows he should run some battle juice, but does more IQ instead. Dangerous levels. His mind’s eye wheels, encompassing fragmented images of childhood, phosphorescent flares like the explosive firings of neurons, an assortment of sense memories accumulated during the past few hours, a kaleidoscopic succession of what look to be magazine photographs, most relating to a museum display of Egyptian artifacts; these and other categories of things remembered all jumbled together, as if overloaded files are spilling their contents and causing short circuits. The insides of his eyes itch, he can’t swallow, his heart slams, and his vision has gone faintly orange. But soon the flurry and discomfort settle, and it’s as if he’s been fine-tuned, as if a bullet-smooth burnished cylinder has been slotted into place inside his twitchy self, a stabilizing presence, and he begins, for the first time, to have a grasp on the situation, to not merely react to its hopelessness, to accept it, and, by accepting it, by announcing it calmly to himself, stating its parameters, he comes to believe that all is not lost. They are in hell, maybe with a patch or two of heaven mixed in, and they cannot contact command. As with any battlefield, the situation is fluid, and, as has been the case with other battlefields, they can’t trust their instrumentation. He’s been here before. Not in so daunting a circumstance, perhaps, not on a field that—as this one seems to—was fluid to the point that it actually changed shape. But essentially they’re in the same position they were in during other covert actions, conflicts that never made the news back home. Recognizing this gives him hope. If your situation is fluid, you have to become fluid. You have to understand the unique laws of the place and moment and let them dictate the course of your survival. He switches off his instruments. He no longer wants to see things as digital cartoons or confuse the issue with readings that can’t be trusted. They’re on the right path, he thinks. Going forward. GRob nailed it. Going forward is who they are.

As they walk through the flowers, GRob asks him about Colorado, where he went to school, did he have a girlfriend, and all like that. By this, he realizes how scared she is. She’s never been much of a talker, just a mad fucking soldier like Perdue… and maybe, he thinks, that’s at the heart of her fear. GRob and Perdue were tighter than he and Baxter. They went on leave together, and there’s no doubt they were lovers, though Wilson knows GRob had an eye for guys. Plenty of times he caught her checking him out. But GRob and Perdue were a unit, they neutralized each other’s fear and now Perdue’s gone, GRob’s unsure of herself. In context of this, he wonders why he’s not more unsure of himself now that Baxter’s gone. He doesn’t believe it’s just that IQ is insulating him from fear, and he’s coming to accept that he and Baxter didn’t have anywhere near as strong a bond as GRob and Perdue. What purpose they served for one another is unclear. Yet even as he thinks this, he suspects that he does understand their relationship, that they weren’t really tight, they were flimsily aligned, doing big brother-little brother schtick to pass the time.

“I got this thing about flowers,” GRob says, and takes a swipe with her rifle as she tramples down the yellow blooms. “My uncle ran a funeral home in Tucson. I used to hafta come over after school because my mama was working, and my uncle would babysit me. It was like flowers all over the place. Guys would give me flowers, I’d hate it ’cause they made me think about dying.”

“They’re just flowers,” Wilson says. “Not a metaphor… right?”

She gives a salty laugh. “Yeah, I forgot.” They walk on a few paces, then she says, “Hard to believe it, though,” and this sparks something in Wilson, a flicker of comprehension, something that seems hopeful, helpful, but he doesn’t pursue it, he’s too concerned with keeping her straight.

“I’m not re-upping after this tour,” he says. “This does it for me.”

After a pause she says, “You said that after Angola.”

“Captain Wilts got me drunk and preached me a sermon. What can I say? I was a jerk.”

“I’m short. I got six weeks left. I could take it all in leave and catch a plane somewhere.”

“Tangiers, how about?”

“Y’know, I been thinking about that. Maybe not Tangiers. Somewhere away from the Arabs, man. Somewhere closer to home. Maybe Mexico.”

“Mexico’s cool.”

“My parents used to take me down when I was a kid. There was a town on the Gulf. Tecolutla. A real zero place. Palm trees, a beach, some crummy hotels. No tourists. I’d like to go there.”

“Might not be like that anymore.”

“Tecolutla’s never gonna change. A few more people… sure. But there’s nothing there. The beach isn’t even that good. Just a whole buncha nothing… and mosquitoes. I could use some nothing for a while.”

“You might get bored.”

“Well, that’d be your job, wouldn’t it? To see I didn’t.”

“Guess we better practice so I can prepare not to be boring. Get to know your ins and outs.”

She doesn’t respond right away, and Wilson wonders if she’s actually considering dropping trou and fucking in the flowers, but then she says, “I’m reading heat. Fluctuating. Like it’s a fire up ahead.”

Wilson switches on his helmet array. A wall of fire over two miles deep, maybe an hour away, extending to infinity. “The suits might handle it, we move through fast.”

“They might,” GRob says. “They might not.”

Through her faceplate he reads a grievous uncertainty, an emotion he refuses to let himself feel. He knows to his soul there’s hope, a path, a trick to all this, a secret adit, a magic door. “I’m not shutting down,” he says. “And it’s no use going back. Like Baxman said, ‘Devil’s loose in the world.’”

“You believe that?”

“You don’t?”

“I saw it, but… I don’t know.”

“What else you gonna believe?” he asks. “That we can walk back out, debrief, hit the PX? That we’re tripping? That we made this shit up? Those are the options.”

Her face hardens and she won’t meet his eyes.

“You wanna hang out?” he asks. “You wanna take a rest, sit for a while? Maybe lie down? Just chill? I’ll do it. I’ll stay with you, that’s what you want. But I’m not shutting down.”

Time inches along, five seconds, ten, twenty, becoming a memorial slowness, a graven interlude measuring her decision. She looks up at him. “I’m not shutting down.”

Wilson sees from her expression that they’re a unit now, they’ve become a function of one another’s trust in a way he and Baxter did not. They’re locked tighter, like a puzzle of plastic and metal and blood with two solid parts. They’ve made an agreement deeper than a week together after the war, one either he can’t articulate or doesn’t want to.

“Fight the fire with fire,” he says.

“Summers back in Arizona, I walked my dog in worse heat’n that.”

“Gotta burn the flames, GRob.”

“Muscle up to that motherfucker… make it hurt!”

“We trained hotter places! We breathed smoke and shit ash trays!”

“We racked out in the fiery fucking furnace!”

“Are you glad about it?”

“Damn straight I’m glad! I got some tunes I wanna play for whatever bitches live in there!”

“High caliber tunes?”

“Golden gospel hits, man!”

“Can you walk through the fire?”

“Can a little girl make a grown man cry?”

“Can we walk through the fire?”

“Aw, man! We are so motivated! We’re gonna be waltzing through it!”

1926 hours

They hear the roar of the fire before they see its glow, and once they’re close enough to see the wall itself, no end to it, reaching to the roof of the cave, a raging, reddish orange fence between them and the unknown, a fence that divides the entire world or all that remains of it… once they’re that close, the roar sounds like a thousand engines slightly mistimed, and once they’re really close, less than fifty feet, the sound is of a single mighty engine, and the cooling units in their suits kick in. GRob’s faceplate reflects the flickering light, the ghost of her face visible behind it. As they stand before the wall of fire, considering the question it’s asked of them, Wilson goes wide on his display screen, taking an angle low to the ground and from the side, looking upward at their figures. It appears they’re in partial eclipse, the front of their suits ablaze, the backs dark, their shadows joined and cast long over the yellow flowers, two tiny people dwarfed by a terrifying magic. He shifts the focus, keeping low and viewing them from the perspective of someone closer to the fire. Their figures seem larger and have acquired a heroic brightness. It’s a toss-up, he thinks, which angle is the truest. GRob says, “I can’t believe this shit,” and he’s about to say something neutral, a mild encouragement, when it hits him, the thing that’s been missing, the hidden door, the trick to all this. It’s so stunningly simple, he doubts it for a moment. It’s an answer that seems to rattle like a slug in a tin cup. But it’s so perfect, he can’t sustain doubt. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “You believe it.”

She stares at him, bewildered.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Fuck you mean?”

“Hell. We’re in hell.”

“I guess… yeah.”

“The Islamic hell.”

He runs it down for her. The induction of chaos by means of military device, the imposition of distinct form upon primordial matter, the anthropomorphic effect; the villagers believing that the flowers were the gateway to Paradise, and then there it was in its metaphorical form. But in this instance there was a truth congruent to the anthropomorphic effect; the cosmic disruption caused by the materialization of Paradise on the earthly plane brought about the day of judgment, allowed hell to be hauled up from wherever it rested on seventy thousand volts or ropes. Or maybe the villagers lied, maybe they wanted the Americans to think it was Paradise and knew it was hell all along. Maybe that’s why what they told the interrogators was classified.

“So? We been through all this,” GRob says.

“Are we in hell?”

“Yeah… I mean, I don’t know!”

“You do know!”

“Okay! I know! Fuck!”

The way she’s staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn’t dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.

“We’re in hell,” he says. “The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way.”

“The way?”

“The true religion. We’re in the middle of a verse from the Qur’an. It’s the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in.”

“You’re trashed!”

“How can you not believe it? We’re here!”

She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.

“You see? We’re not infidels… not anymore. We’re believers. We have to believe ’cause it’s happened to us.” He points at the wall of flame. “You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels… converts. That they’d be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense.”

“We’re not converts,” she said. “You hafta take classes and shit, don’tcha? To convert.”

“We been jumped into Islam, we don’t need classes.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “What’s the name of God?”

She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she’s hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, “Allah?” Then she turns away from him. “This is so whack!”

“It’s not! We been going like it wasn’t happening. Ignoring the reality of the situation. It was there for us all along… the answer. Only thing we had to do was accept where we were.”

“But…” GRob swings back around. “Even if you’re right, man, why would anybody intercede for us?”

“I told you! It’s the ragheads! They gotta have somebody to be sweeping up in heaven. What’s better’n a couple of ex-infidels they can rank on? Look! You can’t even question it. We survived! Out of seventy-two—out of the whole world, maybe—you’n me survived. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”

He keeps at her, explaining the obvious, the simple truth he’s excavated from the wreckage of heaven and the fires of hell. He hears himself preaching at her like how Captain Wilts preached him into re-upping, trying to convince her that a walk in the fire is just what they need, a trip to salvation, and recognizing this similarity, seeing that he’s conning her, even if it’s for her own good, even if the con is sincere, intended to instill faith, because that’s what’ll get them through, faith, the foundation of all religion… Recognizing this, he suspects he may be conning himself, and understands that, also like Captain Wilts, he’s not giving her the whole picture. He’s not sure there’s room for two infidels in heaven. Maybe only the last person allowed in can be an infidel… at least that’s the sense he has from what Baxter told them. If such is the case, he wants it to be GRob. He’s evangelical about this, he desires in his soldierly way to save her. She’s his sister in the shit, his blooded friend and ally, and possibly she’s more than that, so he continues banging words into her head, preaching up a storm, until he sees faith catch in her, a spark of understanding flaring into a flame and incinerating doubt. Watching her face glowing with reflected fire and inner fire, he feels his own doubts evaporate. There is a reason the two of them have gotten this far. They’re both going to make it.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asks, and GRob says, “Loud and clear, man!”

“Where are we going?”

“Paradise!”

“What’re we gonna do there?”

“Walk in gardens of silver and gold!”

“How we gonna get there?”

“With superior firepower!”

It’s not the answer he wants, and he repeats his question.

She falters and then says, “By the grace of God!” but she almost makes it seem another question.

“By the will of Allah!” he says.

“By the will of Allah!”

“Allah be praised!”

He pounds the message into her, motivating like he’s never done before, but it’s not his usual bullshit. He feels it; the words sing out of him like silver swords shivering from their sheaths until at last she’s singing with him, delirious and shiny-eyed, and she lifts her rifle above her head with one hand and shouts, “There is no God but Allah!”

2009 hours

They touch before they enter the fire. Not skin to skin, just resting their helmets together, acknowledging the agreement they have made, a soul contract that will cover either a few minutes, an eternity, or a week in Tecolutla. Then they walk forward into the flames. Wilson watches them on his helmet display, two silhouetted man-shaped robots slipping seamlessly inside the glaring reddish orange wall, and then there’s no time to watch, he’s moving fast, the cooling unit of his suit already beginning to labor.

The floor of hell is plated in yellow metal, at least Wilson thinks it’s yellow and thinks it’s plated. Hard to be sure of color from within the lurid, inconstant glare of the flames, and it might not be plated, it might be a vein of some perfect substance, God in mineral form. It’s neither gold nor brass, for those metals would melt from the heat and this metal is unmarred. It’s inscribed with the serpentine flourishes and squiggles of Arabic characters, each one longer than a man, and they are written everywhere he looks. The text of the Qur’an, perhaps, or of some other sacred book undelivered to the earth. In the depths of the brightness around him, he sees movement that’s not the liquid movement of fire and shapes that aren’t the shapes of flame, intimations of heavy, sluggish forms, and he swings his rifle in quick covering arcs. The rifle is a beautiful thing. Should he fall in the fire, overcome by heat, it will continue to function, lying there to be used by whatever weaponless soldier happens by, irrespective of the fact that no soldier will ever pass this way again. He keeps GRob on his left, concentrated more on her target environment than on his. The roaring of the inferno sounds different now, a river sound, a flowing, undulant rush, and the ruddy light comes to seem an expression of that rush, its flickering rhythms sinuous and almost soothing.

Half a mile in, he knows they’re in trouble. The heat. His suit, sheathing him in machinery and plastic, fitting tightly to his skin, extrudes an ointment and injects him with mild numbing agents. He hears GRob gasping over their private channel. His helmet, already dark, darkens further. According to his instrument array, they are surrounded by a myriad of invisible lives, and everything else reads infinite. He doesn’t switch off the array, but realizes he can’t trust it. Allah, he says to himself, and lets the sonority and power of the name bloom inside his head like a firework, a great inscription of cool radiance, a storm of peace that lets him ignore the pain of his blistering skin. They keep going. It’s who they are. There’s no quit in this bad blond and her sixty-rounds-per-second man, this mad-ass detonatrix and her Colorado killer… The silly lyrics of his thoughts make him gleeful, unwary, seduced by the golden rock ‘n’ roll legend he’d like to fashion of their walk, and, needing to steady himself, he boosts more IQ. Mega-dangerous levels. He’s long since maxed out, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll live or he’ll die by the will of God and by that alone.

Three-quarters of the way across, by Wilson’s estimate, and now they’re in serious trouble. Slowed by narcotic injections, their blisters evolved into burns, stumbling, veering to the side. It takes too much energy to talk, so he puts on his tunes, transmits them to GRob, and feels their connection strengthen. Her green telltale on his array blinks on and off. A signal. She feels him, too. He’d walk closer to her, but is afraid he might lurch and knock her down. A slow crawl of thought runs through his head. Images and the names that generate them. Like beads on the necklace of his life. GRob. Baxter. Home. Paradise. Allah. He understands that the nature of God is fire and ice, balm and poison, this and anti-this, all unified in a marvelous design, the design he’s treading, and if their act of faith succeeds and they reach Paradise, they will merely have stepped one inch in the eyes of God, because that’s how far the distance lies between faith and unbelief. His whole life has been spent traveling that inch, and now, able to grasp the sublimity of God’s design, the cleverness of His infinite text, Wilson is overcome with joy, his scorched awareness momentarily illuminated, made into a crystal lens through which he goes eye-to-eye with Allah, with the great golden white figure who fills the void… and then he sees something real. Not just an intimation of form, but something solid, having substance and volume. He switches off his tunes and peers at it. A long flexible limb, that’s his first thought. Black, with a mosaic pattern of some pale color. Whipping toward them out of the flames. A tail, he realizes. An immense fucking tail. He starts to bring up his rifle, but his reflexes are dulled, his fingers clumsy, and before he can lock down the target, the tip of the tail coils about GRob’s waist and snatches her high. She cries out, “Charlie!” while she’s being flipped about high overhead. Then the tail withdraws. As it does, as it whips away from Wilson, lashing GRob to and fro, the force of displacement sucks back the flame, creating a channel, and revealed in the fiery walls of the channel is an iconography of torment. Crucifixions, quarterings, flayings, eviscerations, hangings, people burdened by massive yokes. (Demons frolicking among them.) Hideous and subhuman, their skins scalded away, their striated muscles and sinews exposed. But Wilson barely notices them, staring toward the end of the channel, where resides a lizard the size of a dinosaur. A salamander with a mosaic black-and-pale skin. Its hindquarters and tail emergent, its flat head and supple neck and one powerful foreleg also emergent, the remainder of its body cloaked in flame. Its glazed yellow eye rests balefully upon him. The salamander twitches its tail toward its gaping black-gummed mouth, and, with the delicacy of a dowager nibbling a shrimp impaled on a toothpick, it nips off GRob’s head.

Wilson finally manages to lock onto the salamander. He opens up, but flames wash back to fill the channel. Both the tormented and their tormentors vanish, reabsorbed into the flames, once again becoming a myriad of invisible lives, as if the creation of the channel stretched their grain and made them visible for a few seconds. Wilson has no idea whether or not his bullets have struck their target. Everything is as before. The fire, the golden script beneath his feet, the intimations of movement. All his readings are infinite. He’s too shocked, too enfeebled to scream, but his mind’s clear and his mind is screaming. He can still see GRob’s blood jetting across the salamander’s snout from her severed neck arteries, an image that invokes nausea and gains in memory the luster of a vile sexuality. He wants to spend what’s left of his time seeking out the salamander, tracking it across the Word of Allah and exterminating it. He’s hot with anger, but his will is stunned, unequal to the duty, and after standing there a while, long enough to feel discomfort, he goes stumbling forward again, heartsick, trying to blot out the vision of her death, to cope with loss, an impossible chore since he’s not certain how much he’s lost. The measure of his grief seems too generous and he thinks he must be grieving for himself as well, for what he’s about to lose, though that’s the easiest route to take, to avoid looking closely at things. His faith has been shaken and restoring it’s got to be his priority. Perhaps, he thinks, GRob’s faith was to blame. Perhaps she was killed by doubt and not by chance. Perhaps it wasn’t only his protection that failed her, perhaps he didn’t preach to her enough. There’s guilt for Wilson at every turn, but justification serves him best, and he re-armors his faith with the notion that GRob simply couldn’t abandon her old preoccupations, couldn’t wrap her head around the new.

He can’t remember if he’s facing the right way, whether he spun completely around after he fired and is now walking back toward the flowers. This causes him some panic, but the dizziness he’s feeling, the pain and confusion, they trump panic, they thin it out until it’s an unimportant color in his head. Faith, he says to himself. Keep the faith. He goes another quarter-mile. The slowest quarter-mile yet. His air’s become a problem. Too hot. Baking his lungs, drying the surfaces of his eyes. Either the fire’s darkening or else a vast darkness is growing visible beyond the flames. Wilson knows if it isn’t the latter, he’s a dead man. Drugs are keeping the pain damned up, but he can feel it waiting to burst through and roll over him. The cooling unit in his helmet has done its job. His face isn’t badly burned. But the other units have been overtaxed and he doesn’t want to imagine how he looks under the suit. He’s weaving, staggering, almost falling, propping himself up with his rifle, moving like a barfly at closing time. Like he’s coming out of the desert dying of thirst, struggling toward the oasis. A shade tree, he thinks. That’s what Baxter said. First a riverbank and then a shade tree. Then Paradise. He’ll have to find the shade tree. In the dark. He can’t get a handle on his thoughts. Allah. That’s the only thought that holds and it’s scarcely a thought, more of an announcement, as if he’s some sort of fucked-up clock and every so often, irregularly, he bongs, “Allah,” a sound that gradually fades away into emotions and ideas that never quite announce themselves. Charlie. That name sputters up once in a while, too. Calling him Charlie means she must have thought of him that way… which makes the name more acceptable. But he can’t afford to care about the sweetness this implies.

More salamanders appear, first dozens, then hundreds of them, doubtless drawn by the kill. A slithering herd of identical terrors. They prowl alongside his path, crawling over one another’s tails, snapping and poking their snaky heads toward him, scuttling ahead and then peering back as if they’re saying, Come on, man! You can make it. Maybe we’ll let you make it… or maybe not. He’s afraid, but fear won’t take root in him, his mental soil’s too dried out to support it. Without the governance of fear, his courage is reborn. He begins to find a rhythm as he walks. The bongs grow more regular, aligning with the soldiering beats of his heart, until it’s like they’re overlapping, one “Allah” declining into the rise of the next, and underneath that sound—no, surrounding it!—are voices too vast to hear, spoken by people too large to see. He senses them as fluctuating pressure, the shapes of their words, like the flames, flowing around him. The intercession, he thinks. They’re singling him out, debating his worth, judging his faith. He can’t worry about their judgment, though. He’s got his job, he’s tasked to the max. Keep bonging, keep ringing out the name of God. He’s entirely self-motivating now.

2322 hours

Paradise awaits.

Somewhere far away in the absence, like a ragged hole in black cloth open onto a glowing white sky—a light, cool and promising. That’s what Wilson sees on waking. The rest is darkness. There’s a rushing in his ears that might be a faint roaring from the wall of fire, but he believes it’s a river nearby and he’s on the bank. He’s not overheated any longer. Tired, but calm. Pain is distant. The drugs are good. His helmet array is still lit, though the digital display screen is out, or else it’s showing nothing except black. He feels remote, cast down upon a foreign shore, and he gets an urge to look at his pictures, summons them up. Mom. Dad. Ol’ Mackie. Laura. They don’t hold his interest for long. They’re past considerations. He checks his medal file. It still seems incoherent—the IQ’s worn off—but nobody’s going to be reading it, anyway. Then he decides to change number 10 on his 10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know list. Just for the hell of it. Maybe they give out medals in Paradise. They give you better clothes, jewels and shit… so Baxter said. Why not a medal?

He wonders where he is, exactly. The border of hell, for sure. The shade tree, he supposes, lies between the light and the spot he’s resting in. Thinking comes hard. He keeps drifting off, hearing clicking noises, screams, the voices of ghosts. He considers doing more IQ. No, he tells himself. Let them see what they’re getting. The infidel, dumb as a stump, but janitor-smart. It’s what they expect. Lights start up behind his eyes, though not the light of heaven. That’s steady and these are actinic flashes. Phosphorous flares and rocket rounds. Some taking longer to fade against the blackness than others. As if inside him there’s a battlefield, a night engagement. He’s transfixed by their bursting flower forms. It’s time, he realizes. Time to get going—tempting as it is to lie there. He blanks out for a while and the thought of GRob brings him back. At least the thought begins with GRob. Her face. And then her face changes to Baxter’s face, to another, to another and another, the changes occurring faster and faster, imposed on the same head shape, until the faces blur together like he’s seeing the faces of everyone who was alive, the history of the world, of judgment day, of something, refined to a cool video image…

He’s got to get up.

That’s an order, Wilson! Move your ass!

Yes, sir! Fuck you, sir!

Charlie! You’re going to miss the bus!

Damn it, Charlie! Do I have to do this every morning?

All right! I’m up! Jesus Christ!

The Lord’s name in vain, Charlie. Every time you say it, He takes a note, he writes it down on the floor of hell in golden letters you can’t read…

You dumb little fucker! I swear to God, man! Stand up again, I’m not gonna knock you down, I’m gon’ fuck you up!

Charlie!

This last voice, a woman’s scream, does the trick. It’s an effort, but he makes it, he’s up. On his hands and knees. He can’t stand, his knees won’t lock. His arms are trembly, but he’s okay for strength and only mildly dizzy. He can’t feel much at all, not even the ground beneath him. It’s like he’s resting on something as solid and as insubstantial as an idea, and because the idea is without form or void, it’s impossible to get his bearings. But he knows what to do. Find the tree. Trust to faith that you’ll find it. Throw a move on the world before it throws one on you. Here we go. Left hand forward. Drag the right knee. Right hand forward. Drag the left knee. Breathe. You repeat that ten thousand times, Wilson, you just might get to be a soldier. Alternate method. Sliding both hands forward and then dragging the haunches. Slower, but more stable. It’s a tough choice, but he’ll work it out, he’ll devise a pattern of alternation, a system by which he can rest different muscles at different times and thus maximize his stamina. He knows how to do this shit. It’s all he’s ever done, really. Going forward against the crush of force and logic. Moving smartly when smart movement is called for. Crawling through shadow, looking for shade.

10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know

1. Everything I’ve ever known has been no more than a powerful conviction.

2. Nothing motivates like sex and death and sound effects.

3. Politics is the Enemy.

4. Jesus and Mohammed would probably hang out together.

5. GRob is a hottie, maybe not as cute as Laura Witherspoon, but a woman who can kick ass is a definite turn-on.

6. Love is all there is, but there ain’t enough to go around.

7. War is the geometry of chaos.

8. Only in the grip of fear can I appreciate the purity of my life’s disguise.

9. Survival as an occupation: I am the worker bee. Survival as religion: I am its revenant priest.

10. My pink-and-black skateboard with the design of the demon gleaming the cube, it is the bomb!