The War After Armageddon

TWENTY-FOUR

Their faces held him. His vision wasn’t too far gone for that. Waiting in the long and nervous line for the last of the water—one plastic two-liter bottle per family—a woman furred with moles hardly looked as if her life had been an endless joy. And yet she held her child in her arms. Some man had found her winning enough for that. The instant her eyes met his, she looked away, down, shuffling a few inches forward, as if to escape his scrutiny, a woman eternally ashamed in the eyes of the world. Behind her, an old, un-shaven man stood open-mouthed, spectacles askew on his wet-tipped nose. His eyes wandered over the world, unable to rest, as if misery might come from any direction. A baggy jacket and stained cloth cap didn’t speak of a life of triumphs. Next came a man still of fighting age, his expression hard and ready to take umbrage. Harris sensed that the man would have been glad to see him dead.

Was that reason enough to kill him in cold blood?

An almost-pretty girl with gleaming hair held her little brother by the shoulder. Still young enough to imagine that all troubles were temporary, she appeared keen for life and full of expectations. Wide as a sofa, another woman pawed the sweat off her forehead, unsettling her black scarf as she quarreled with a bald man who would have run away had he not been her husband. The next segment in the human caterpillar read a book as he bumped forward, riveted by some useless idea, a caricature of the eternal intellectual as he swept unkempt gray hair out of his face. Children scooted up and down the line, too young for patience or to take thirst seriously, ignoring the calls of worried elders afraid to step out of line and lose their place. After shouting at a boy who marched up and down in a goose step, a mother eyed Harris as if he might draw a gun and shoot the child.

Was that really what they expected now? Or just what they were used to?

Harris was unequipped to romanticize them. He wasn’t able to assign them virtues that no random assortment of humans ever possessed. He didn’t need to ponder eternal verities to understand, viscerally, that every innocent heart in the crowd was outnumbered by those given to common selfishness.

They were human. Just that.

“Remind you of anything, Pat?” Harris asked the lieutenant colonel beside him.

“Germany, sir?”

“Yes. The Turks in that dockyard. Oh, the skins are a little browner now. And the weather’s hotter. We could use a little German rain. But I see the same faces… people who woke up utterly screwed. Wondering why all this is happening to them.”

At the head of the line, where the last pallet of water bottles shrank with alarming speed, two soldiers dragged an obstreperous man from the crowd and spread-eagled him against a wall.

“I’ll check that out, sir,” Pat Cavanaugh said.

Harris smiled. “Sorry for the half-assed philosophizing.”

“It wasn’t that, sir,” the younger man said quickly. “It’s just… The troops are a little prickly. Everybody’s fuse is short. I don’t want anything getting out of hand.”

As he watched the battalion commander march off, Harris turned back to the succession of faces. There was, in the end, a quality of disbelief about the crowd. For all their fears, their worried stares at the dwindling supply of water and their caution around the foreign men with guns, the human collective believed that, somehow, everything would work out: There would be enough water and, no matter what became of the others, the breathing, feeling, sweating “I” would be spared. It was the oddest thing, how the tribulations of the group reassured the individual.

It had to be biological, Harris decided. Long before his own experience in Germany—that inexplicable country—when Jews and Gypsies and queers and stubborn priests had waited in line for the gas chamber, tidily divided by gender, they must have felt the same narcotic hope, the identical mad conviction that “I will be saved.”

Harris didn’t know what to do anymore. He had briefly contemplated leaving the city, since he saw that he was only giving Mont-fort and his ilk more ammunition to use against the Army—the wicked general who cared more about protecting Muslim fanatics than about his own countrymen.

Yes, that was how Sim would present it.

But the faces captivated him. Doubtless, there were fanatics among them. Killers who needed to be shot for the common good. Pat Cavanaugh had been nervous about more stay-behind snipers seeded in the crowd. But the faces parading in front of Harris just looked thirsty and scared.

“This can’t happen,” he told himself. “We can’t do this. Sim can’t do this.”

And then he realized that, in his own rejection of what the future held, he had joined the line of optimists at Auschwitz.

Yes, Sim Montfort would do it. Wasn’t a people person, old Sim wasn’t.

Harris knew the arguments, beginning with: They’d do it to us if they had the chance. But the problem always unraveled when you got down to who “they” were. Would that woman whose face bore a constellation of black moles pull the trigger? The adolescent girl with the hopeful eyes? The dreamy joker with his nose in his book?

These weren’t the people who pulled any major triggers. Or precious few minor ones. It was the people like Montfort… or Harris himself… or Gui or al-Mahdi… who gave the orders to the flunkies who pressed the fatal button.

Harris had no moral qualms about killing his country’s enemies. He still believed that Washington’s impossibly legalistic treatment of terrorists back when had played into the hands not only of the terrorists themselves but also of men like Gui and Montfort. In the real world, far from the cloistered study, some men and even women were your mortal enemies, and you had to kill them first.

But you couldn’t just “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Because you weren’t God. And no God worth believing in would want you to do it.

Sometimes, in one of his funks, Harris pictured God as a slumped, disappointed old man, propping up His gray head with one hand, eyes downcast.

Anthropomorphism. Harris understood the silliness of it. God was unimaginable to any human being. But what if that lay at the heart of the problem? The need men felt to imagine a comprehensible God, to measure Him. But God was unimaginable and immeasurable. So they did what men did: They cut the problem down to size and painted a stern old man on the church’s ceiling.

Standing in the shabby heart of Nazareth, Harris wondered if Jesus—when he was the age of that young girl waiting in line—had foreseen what would take place on this day in His boyhood home. Had He seen anything beyond the cross but Heaven? Was every man and woman in that fetid line lulled by his or her own vision of paradise? Of a Heaven above the clouds, or a happy marriage, or an answer to all of life’s questions hidden in a book?

Harris could have wept. At his helplessness in the face of all before him. But he didn’t weep. Instead, he pivoted on his right heel and set off after Pat Cavanaugh. To be with his own kind.

He was going to stay in Nazareth. That was a given. He wondered if it might be useful to talk to the crowd, to get up on a vehicle and say something, anything.

He couldn’t very well reassure them.

Tell them to flee? To get out of Dodge? That was the best practical advice he could offer. Even though they had nowhere to go.

He longed for the con ve niences of his youth, the easy communications, even the scrutiny of the media. Where were the cameras now? His nation’s enemies, when they shot down every satellite they could and corrupted the rest, had only assured that their deaths would go unrecorded. They had robbed his kind of the ability to talk freely across oceans but had failed to understand the resilience and ingenuity the West applied to warfare when it sensed its back was against the wall.

When the people of Nazareth died, their epitaph would be written by their killers.

How would Sim have it done? By death squads? Einsatzkommandos, the way the Nazis did it? Another blood-orgy like Jerusalem? Or just order out the remaining American troops and start shelling and bombing? Then send in the cleanup crews to root out the woman with the moles from her hiding place in the cellar?

Harris felt a childish impulse to step up to the nearest figure in line and tell him or her, “You are not my enemy.” But he knew it would only bewilder the already frightened.

As Harris approached the head of the line, he saw that only the bottom layer of the pallet remained. And the sweat-drenched soldiers on distribution duty were breaking into that. Behind them, Pat Cavanaugh stood erect in his body armor. As if attempting to inspire a confidence he didn’t feel himself.

Yet, as Harris edged up to him, the younger man grinned. “Pardon me for saying so, sir,” he told the general, “but this is one assignment I’m not going to thank you for.”

The attempt at banter fell flat. Cavanaugh’s smile was one of despair.

“We just have to focus on the immediate problem,” Harris told him. “Do what’s doable. Right now, we need to do everything we can to prevent any further outbreaks of violence, anything that certain senior officers might be able to describe as ‘an armed rebellion’.”

Cavanaugh nodded. He was about to say something when his battalion command sergeant major marched up.

“Sir?” he said to Cavanaugh. “Division wants you. On the land line.”

Cavanaugh glanced at Harris. The general nodded: Go see what they have to say.

The sergeant major didn’t leave with his commander. Tired and mentally sluggish, Harris had to eye the man’s uniform to remind himself of his name.

“Fun, travel, and adventure. Right, Sergeant Major Bratty?”

“All I can stand, sir.” He looked at the general, sizing him up, man to man. Then he added, “Don’t this suck shit, though?”

“That’s a pretty good summation.”

Bratty drew off his helmet, wiped his forehead and scalp with a rag drawn from his battle-rattle, patted the excess sweat from the helmet’s interior padding, then set it back down on his skull and snapped the chin-strap together again. He didn’t have to fuss with the headgear to resettle it: He had the drill sergeant’s gift of getting it right the first time.

Harris noticed, again, that the NCO had a bandaged hand. But he sensed that asking about it would be the wrong kind of small talk with the man standing next to him.

“I expect you’ll be getting an order to withdraw from the city,” Harris said instead.

Bratty shrugged. It was the old, standard-issue NCO shrug that attempted to deflect any suspicion of emotion. But it didn’t work this time.

“Yesterday, I would’ve been ready to go, sir. To tell you the truth, I’d just about had it. But just look at these poor buggers. A man hates to just walk away…”

“Yes,” Harris said. “A man does.”

“Well, I’m going to make the rounds, sir. Got some Marines up in those buildings across the square, watching the crowd. Don’t want ’em to feel the Army’s neglecting them.”

“Mind if I accompany you, Sergeant Major?”

“You’re the corps commander, sir.”

Harris began to tell the man, “No, I’m not. Not anymore.” But there was no point. There’d be too much else to say. He’d made the situation clear to Pat Cavanaugh, but the battalion commander had either forgotten to tell his sergeant major or just hadn’t had the opportunity. Or, Harris realized, had chosen not to tell him. Or anyone. Yet.

He was sorry that he’d gotten Cavanaugh into this. But somebody had needed to do it. And Cavanaugh had been a logical choice. You didn’t become a soldier just for the good missions.

“After you, Sergeant Major. I’ll try not to get underfoot.”

And they walked up the line, the endless line, of faces. A young woman with an infant, sensing that the water would run out before her turn, glittered with tears.

At the sight of Harris and the sergeant major, a fat man waved his arms, complaining noisily in Arabic. His neighbors in the line had been cowed, though. Instead of adding their voices to back him up, they shied away.

The fat man shouted after Harris’s back. The words were incomprehensible, but his meaning was clear: How can you do this to us? Why?

Harris stiffened his posture as he walked away. As if on a parade ground for a change of command.

When the general was halfway through the crowd, a young man with a beatific expression stepped from the line and rushed up to embrace him.

Sergeant Ricky Garcia slept four hours, deep and hard. He dreamed of his mother. She was alive and healthy and smiling like always in the old days, so full of love the supply never ran out. Garcia was a grown man in the dream, but still a boy, too, and the sun shone on a perfect L.A. day, on a city just the way it was when he was a kid, long before the bombs, when a trip across town to the beach at Santa Monica had been a journey to the other side of the world, and his old man, who hadn’t left yet, had to lay out so much cash to park they couldn’t afford to eat. But that wasn’t in the dream. The dream was just all good, only a little disconnected. The kitchen was at the front of the house, where the room with the TV should’ve been. He tried to explain, but his mother didn’t care. She just hugged him. And hugged him.

When he awoke, kicked in the sole of his boot by Lieutenant Niedrig, who was the acting company commander now and babbling about nukes, Garcia felt as if something had been stolen from him—something that he would never be able to get back. It was as if his mother had been right there, alive, happy. Just fat enough for her kids to tease her. And now she was dead again, and the way he had to remember her was lying in a crummy bed in one of those old motels they turned into what they called hospices for all those sick with radiation. And her so thin and frail he was afraid to touch her and hurt her.

After the lieutenant moved on to bother somebody else, Garcia shuffled off to take a dump. But really to be alone for a few minutes. To get a grip. To remember. To stop remembering.

After that, the day wasn’t so bad. They weren’t ordered back to the burial detail. Instead, they were trucked down to the center of town—which was crummier than Rampart on Sunday morning—and the lieutenant told Garcia to distribute his platoon around the back of the plaza, to get up on the second or third deck of the buildings and keep an eye on the fiesta. Not that the rags were celebrating. At first, it was all men sitting down there, miserable as gangbangers caught in another gang’s hood. Garcia was down to two light squads, and he put Corporal Gallotti across the street above a couple of busted-out shops, while he put his own squad in buildings that faced north so the sun would never be in their eyes.

The day before had been ugly, with the company losing six men, including the captain. A bunch more had been sent to the rear, badly injured. The platoon’s mood toward the locals had been ugly enough after that village girl did her thing with the grenades, but the crazy-ass bust-up with the demonstrators and snipers by the mass grave had pushed everybody to the edge. Maybe beyond it. His Marines regarded all the rags as the enemy now, and Garcia had to fight the feeling himself. Especially when he thought of Cropsey jumping on that grenade. He still couldn’t fit all the pieces of that together, and to keep himself under control he came down all the harder on any why-don’t-we-just-whack-’em-and-leave bullshit.

He prayed that the day would be quiet. They needed time to get themselves back together.

As always, he prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a last connection to his mother. But the Virgin was giving him a bad time. The tattoo on his forearm itched like crazy. By noon, when the water drop came around and the rags all popped out of the woodwork, with Army Rangers forcing them to line up and behave, Garcia had scratched the first bloody stripe above his wrist, across the Virgin’s feet. He started to worry that he’d picked up scabies or some shit like that while mixing it up with the rags.

The thought of it creeped him out.

Then Lieutenant Niedrig came by again, doing his checks but really just killing time. Garcia didn’t think much of the lieutenant, who didn’t seem crisp enough to be a Marine. He wasn’t sure that Niedrig would be able to control what remained of the company if things got bad again. Garcia figured he was on his own.

“There’s a GO in town,” Lieutenant Niedrig told him. “I heard it’s the corps commander. God only knows what he’s doing here. You need to get your Marines looking sharp, Sergeant Garcia.”

Yeah, with what? With all their rucks missing in the back of some truck that took off when the shooting started up on the hill. Probably gone forever. And every man left in the platoon filthy and bloody and stinking like a Guatemalan’s asshole.

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

“We don’t want the general to think Marines can’t keep themselves looking as sharp as those Army Rangers out there.”

“No, sir. Sir, you were saying something about nuke use this morning. Any more details?”

“The Jihadis hit the MOBIC attack pretty hard. So I’m told. I did see a couple of them headed through town the wrong way. No question about the nukes, though. I can’t believe you slept through it. They weren’t just firecrackers. The buildings were shaking.”

“I guess I was pretty tired, sir.”

“Well, don’t worry. I don’t think the Jihadis will nuke Nazareth, their own people.”

“I wasn’t worried, sir.”

The lieutenant went off to bother somebody else. When he was gone, one of the Marines mimicked him, but Garcia told him to knock it off.

“Hey, you think there’s any chance of us getting out of this shit-hole anytime soon, Sergeant Garcia?”

“You hear the lieutenant say anything about that? You heard everything I heard. Now, keep your eyes out that window like I told you. Scan for snipers. Anybody suspicious.”

“They all look suspicious.”

“You clean that rifle this morning?”

“Yes, Sergeant Garcia.”

“Well, clean it again when Pacheco gets back.”

Garcia moved on to the adjoining building, passing through a hot, still slice of the day and fending off two kids, lazy as dying flies, begging for candy like they really didn’t give a shit.

The next building’s construction was better, the walls thicker, and it was nice and cool up on the second deck.

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” he told the members of the fire team. “It sucks out there. This is the lap of luxury.”

“Heard anything about chow, Sergeant Garcia?”

“Probably later. After the Army gets the rags squared away.”

“I bet they’re eating right now. The Army takes care of its own.”

“Yeah? Look out that window. Like you’re supposed to. And tell me how many of those grunts you see chowing down. They’re sucking it up. And you can suck it up. And I’ll be sure to let you know when the burrito special of the day’s posted. You clean that weapon this morning?”

The building had a good diagonal view across the plaza, better than the one next door. Before moving on to inspect Gallotti’s squad, Garcia sidled up to a window that hadn’t been claimed and looked out over the crowd. The rags looked pathetic. Dirty and whipped. He could get angry enough to kill them, but he’d found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t keep up a steady hatred toward them. They were born losers. And you could waste only so much wattage on losers.

As he watched the crowd, a break in the long, curving line showed him that the pallets of water dropped off that morning were gone. The Army grunts on distro were pulling the last bottles from nowhere.

Garcia wondered if the scene was going to get ugly when the rags figured out that there wasn’t no more where that came from.

He thought he spotted the general the lieutenant had warned him about. Across the plaza, up past the head of the line, talking to a soldier with the posture of a drill instructor. As Garcia watched, the soldier who was not a general took off his helmet, wiped down his face and the webbing inside the headgear, then put the helmet back on. Crisp as a saltine cracker. Yeah, the guy had been a hat. Officers never got it that perfect. Garcia wanted, badly, to be a DI. Next tour, if possible.

Right now, though, he pictured little bugs drilling into his arm and roaming around. You’re imagining shit, man, he told himself. But he pushed up his left sleeve and started scratching at the tattoo again. Once he started, it was hard to stop. He decided that, after checking up on Gallotti’s squad, he’d walk over and talk to the company’s last surviving corpsman. See if he had some lotion or something.

Suddenly furious at himself, Garcia stopped scratching. He looked up from the inflamed Virgin and yanked his sleeve back down. Then he picked up his carbine and scanned the scene down in the plaza. To make sure he was good to go to the next location, that everything was straight.

He spotted the general and the had-to-be-an NCO making their way along the line of rags waiting for water. As he watched, a man stepped from the crowd and threw himself at the general.

The explosion that chased the flash seemed huge, its noise trapped between the buildings crowding the plaza. Next came the screams. And burning freaks running out of the smoke. Followed by shots. Not the sound of friendly weapons.

Another bomb exploded on the other side of the road, near the water point. His own kind were shooting back now. In the next room, a machine gun opened up, sweeping the crowd.

“Cease fire!” Garcia yelled. “Cease fire!” He ran into the room, yelling, “What the fuck are you shooting at? Cease fire!”

He had to wrench the weapon, its barrel already hot, from the private wielding it. His buddy watched. With murder in his eyes.

“What do you think you’re doing? Who told you to open fire?”

“They started it.”

“You ever heard of fire discipline, Keogh? You see any clear targets out there? They’re fucking civilians, man.”

“Like that bitch who got Larsen and Cropsey?”

Garcia shook his head. Furious at the insolence. On the verge of throwing a punch. Holding himself back only by using the kind of discipline that had saved his ass on the streets of East L.A.

Firing erupted from another room.

“You,” he told the private. He shifted his attention briefly to the man’s buddy. “And you. Just stay here. Stay at your posts. And you don’t shoot again unless you have a clear, no-bullshit target with a weapon in his hand. Do you understand me?”

The machine gunner looked at him sullenly and said nothing. The other Marine looked away.

Garcia still wanted to throw a punch. Instead, he ran to the next room and repeated the scene. With a screaming, crying world in the background. Pierced with gunfire.

“We don’t shoot women and children,” Garcia yelled. “You understand me?”

They stopped firing. But it just felt like a pause. They didn’t understand anymore. Garcia got it. In his guts. It had all gone too far. Too many Marines had gone down ugly.

No excuse, sir. Leaders didn’t quit. Ricky Garcia didn’t quit.

He poked his head back into the room where the machine gunner and his buddy stood at the windows. Vigilant. And mean. Just waiting for an excuse. Garcia didn’t say anything this time. He just wanted to let them know he was paying attention. And he took off to see if Corporal Gallotti was doing okay. Pounding down the steps, beating his anger into the dirty concrete.

The odd thing was that his mother was with him now, looking out for him. He realized what the dream had been about. His mother didn’t want him to kill kids and shit. Or people like her. That wasn’t what she wanted at all. She had come to let him know it was all right.

Before Garcia reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the machine gun open fire again.