Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Page 2

  At one point the streets would have been paved, but now there was enough silt and dust on the road to disguise the landmines, or just not enough asphalt anymore, making the dirt beneath accessible. These mines would have been set by hand, but the bastards could deploy an entire minefield quickly from a distance using artillery or fly-over helicopters with chutes. The Chinese could lay down a four hundred by four hundred meter minefield with one salvo using their rocket system with ten rockets per vehicle, and a four vehicle battery. But these mines were Russian supplied.

  The kids were flocking around him with their presents, each one holding up a mine, if he had an arm to hold one up with, or carting it behind him on a wagon. The ones with carts had no legs and two arms, though one of the arms might have been missing some fingers or an entire hand, and rolled forward on skateboards. They had evidently formed their own roving boarding school for youth to take care of one another. He didn’t dare give into the impulse for his eyes to water as it would dishonor them and make them feel badly about themselves, when they were so clearly determined not to.

  “Thanks, kids,” he said. “Now the next time you see a pair of tanks that can suddenly fly, you’ll know you have yourselves to thank.”

  The kids laughed and shook their prizes.

  Crumley would take the charges from each of the smaller mines and make a caseless mine with them of epic proportions. Two, judging by the bounty the kids had brought him. Nothing like found objects for fighting with, especially when they were the enemy’s found objects.

  ***

  Leon continued his stroll up the middle of the street, running late with his morning constitutional. Hearing heavy equipment rolling his direction, he raised his .50 caliber reflexively. It was a tank coming at him. “You sure about this?” he said to his .50 caliber. “Honestly, I think that’s a little too much attitude even for you.”

  Leon holstered the gun. Tried to survey his assets from his position with a wider scan of the area. “Someone comes at me with a pea shooter and they give a smack down like the hand of God. A tank takes aim at me and nobody’s to be found anywhere. When we get back, we’re going to have a serious talk about threat prioritization.”

  The noise of a shell being loaded into the tank turret forced him back on point. He swallowed hard. “That didn’t sound good.”

  The tank fired.

  He hit the ground, forced himself back up on a push-up count of one. “You made me do a pushup, like some first year grunt?!”

  He just heard a bunch of “oh, ohs” in his ear.

  With a knee bend, Leon slapped his ankles, engaging the running blades attached to the boots. He hopped after the tank that had put itself in rapid reverse to give it time to reload like a blasted kangaroo. But he could more than keep up with the tank with the blades. He could also dodge its .50 caliber machine gun a hell of a lot better. Leaping bombed out cars and every other kind of obstacle in his way, from capsized refrigerators to stoves that had no reason being in the middle of the street.

  Leon vaulted from the last jumping-off point onto the tank. With one hand Leon ripped the guy up through the portal that he should have had the sense to close and shook him. “You made me do a pushup! I hate pushups!” Leon interrupted the combatant’s rapid-fire vocalizations to bite off the guy’s larynx. He spit it out, before tossing him overboard for the still-retreating tank to finish off.

  “Damn, that was a bit primeval,” Ajax said over the COM.

  “He was mouthing a string of obscenities at him in Aramaic,” Crumley explained over the party line.

  DeWitt groaned. “Thanks for reminding me why there’s such a dearth of F-bombs around me when every other kind of bomb is flying high.”

  Ignoring the banter over the COM, Leon dropped a grenade into the tank and closed the hatch, took a seat on the door. Waited for the explosion. When the grenade went off, nearly bouncing him off his perch, he winced. “Damn, that’s one hot seat.”

  He looked up at the sounds of other tanks on the move. One to his front. One to his rear. And one to either side of the cross street he had the poor sense to bring the tank to a stop in. “All right, that’s it. You can baby me now. It’s time for a coffee break.”

  He reached for his thermos he had strapped to his back the way he should have had a rifle tethered or the way some bowmen carry their satchel of arrows. Unscrewed the cap and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Damn, that’s good coffee. This has got to be an Arabic country. They’re the only people who do coffee right. I guess that settles the question of where we are. More or less.”

  Leon glanced up from his cup of coffee, hang-jawed. “No freaking way.” The laser beam from one of those micro-satellites he told DeWitt earlier to retarget bore a hole right through the tank to the front of him, slicing it in half and parting it like the red sea, passed through his tank—forcing him to leap out of the way, which he did—without spilling his coffee, thank you very much—before knifing its way through the tank coming up behind him. “Not bad, DeWitt. A little heads-up next time would be nice.”

  “What would be the fun in that?” DeWitt said in his ear over the COM.

  Switching the cup of coffee to his left hand, Leon pulled his desert Eagle out of its holster and performed mop up operations with it on the still-alive soldiers crawling out of the bisected tanks. Some of the dazed and disoriented men determinedly dragging the body parts severed by the laser; optimists to the end.

  Mop up completed, he returned the gun to its sheathe, and the coffee cup to his mouth.

  Leon saw Ajax and Crumley crawling out from underneath the still-intact tanks to either side of him along the cross street. As burly as Crumley was, Leon was surprised he could fit himself under a tank with its nineteen-inch clearance. His body hair alone accounted for a couple inches. Must have been holding his breath on the exhale. Even then, surely he’d have had to find a dip in the road. Seconds later, both tanks blew so high in the air that one made it to the top of the second story, while the other just made it to the top of the first.

  “Mine went higher!” Ajax shouted.

  “They’re still fully operational, you dicks,” Leon said. “They’re made to roll over landmines.”

  “Why does he always have to be like that?” Crumley said in his ear.

  “Yeah, total spoilsport,” Ajax echoed.

  “Trust me, it’ll be a while before anyone inside those tanks wakes from their little nap,” Crumley apprised them. “Enough time for…”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish the thought. The rebels were swarming the tanks, peeling open the tops and scouring the insides for unconscious soldiers. Conveying the enemy combatants out with arms held overhead like those performers riding the wake of hands at a rock concert. “…for that,” Crumley finished mumbling.

  The enterprising underdogs that the rebels were, they were already wrestling with the controls of the tanks to get them moving, up and out of the craters created by Crumley’s directed explosions. Directed enough, Leon thought, to avoid destroying the half-tracks the tanks would need for their mobility.

  A chorus of cheers from the liberated city was welling from all directions. The buildings in the vicinity were actually starting to shake and spew powder and plaster chunks from all the jumping up and down in excitement.

  The OMEGA FORCE soldiers flocked around Leon. “We done here?” Ajax said.

  “Yeah, we’re being recalled for a top priority mission.” Leon regarded the burn print in his palm from the grip of his own pistol. Felt like the sting of a thousand bees. The sun was cooking them alive out here. He was actually losing the ability to squint he’d so exhausted those muscles. Of all the absurd places to kill people when nature seemed content to do the job for them.

  “Top priority? As in?” DeWitt coaxed, unable to keep the titillation out of his voice.

  “As in babysitting some rich bastard,” Leon explained, “on his vacation of a lifetime.”

  Groans all around.

  “If i
t makes you feel any better,” Leon confessed, “I hear he’s the one that designs most of our breakthrough tech.”

  “Seriously?” DeWitt relaxed his arm on his assault rifle. “Well, I suppose we owe him one.” He managed to get out the line while sounding every bit as dejected as before.

  Ajax, trying to lift the mood in his own inimical way, sliced through the tense silence with, “What’s the difference between your wife and your job? After five years, your job will still suck.” The joke landed like a piece of ordinance that just refused to explode.

  “Maybe we should take our penance for what it is,” Crumley said. “We get to leave here feeling good about ourselves, that we made such a big difference. Yeah, for a few days we did. But their suffering goes on long after we’ve left. Which in the cosmic scheme of things means we didn’t do a damn thing but raise a flag and say, ‘Long Live the Corporate Way. Pillage and plunder and dismantle countries, bankrupt them for sport, make war in them for pleasure. You say we’re on the corporate dole now? Maybe we should take the war to them.”

  “You don’t think racial and religious hatreds dating back thousands of years had a role to play?” Leon said.

  “The military-industrial complex is largely privatized now, you know,” Crumley crowed, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, “just another corporate profit-driven entity. You can bet they love playing all sides off one another for their benefit and are only too happy to further destabilize a region to shift even more money and control their way.”

  Leon sighed. “You’re right. Maybe babysitting this rich bastard is some form of penance.”

  “You could show a little more appreciation,” Disembodied Voice rebuffed. They all turned on the line to see the Canadian spy hobbling towards them, more accurately speaking, swinging from a pair of crutches he’d managed to come by.

  Leon smiled. “Our unit’s philosopher,” he said pointing to Crumley, “in case you were wondering.”

  “He’s right, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know he’s right. But that battle for another day. To set the world straight, it'll take someone a lot smarter who has worked a lot longer on a way better plan than anything we can come up with standing around here.”

  “Someone like this guy?” Spy said holding up the nanotech triage kit and rattling it. “Thanks to him I can still get a blow job. So if he asks me to kill the rest of you, no offense, guys, but I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  Leon smiled. “Yeah, we’ll understand.” He shook Spy’s hand. Taking stock of his boxer’s build and the Cro-Magnon plunging forehead that looked like it could easily break a fist on impact. The rest of his facial features no less skeletal. The buzz cut was nearly close enough to disguise the receding hairline. The skin color perched precariously between healthy bronze ad jaundice-yellow. “And you are?”

  “Cronos.”

  “Butch name for someone walking around with another guy’s dick,” Leon jibed.

  “Oh, so that’s gonna be a thing now, huh?”

  Leon laughed. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a thing.” He grabbed Cronos with one hand by the shoulder and shook him playfully. While the others patted him on the back or the head like a good luck charm. Leon figured he was as good a rabbit’s foot as they were likely to find in war. Anyone who bounced back like this guy was worth having rub off on you.

  They heard floors giving way in the buildings to either side of the street and people screaming. Everyone in the circle was suddenly facing outwards. “And that’s why, people,” Leon said, “you don’t jump up and down for glee in bombed out buildings.” He sighed. “Come on, guys. I guess this is another kind of rescue mission now, and we have another day to kill before we have to get back.”

  ***

  The RevoCorp robot was busy rescuing people from under a collapsed building, tossing boulder-size chunks of rubble as if he were handing out loaves of bread to the needy. He resembled a 1960’s anime version of a superhero android, Leon thought. Maybe the look had been chosen for better public relations.

  The OMEGA FORCE soldiers in Leon’s employ sat around watching the spectacle on folding patio chairs, sipping mai tais, procured for them by Crumley, their quartermaster, who could serve up oxygen, warmth, light, and Earth gravity on the dark side of the moon, if you just gave him a couple of hours.

  “Maybe we should just stick to these kinds of rescue operations from now on,” Ajax suggested.

  “Nah, my back locks up with all this sitting around.” Crumley took another sip of his drink.

  “Makes me prone to constipation,” DeWitt confessed.

  “Maybe for the couch potato years,” Leon suggested.

  There was a reprise of cheering, cat calls, whistles, and loud shouts carried on the wind from the distance.

  “Can you really liberate a city anymore?” Ajax said, responding to the hubbub. “I thought the whole point of military industrial complexes was to keep the conflict going indefinitely by whatever surreptitious methods available. It’s why I vote Republican.”

  “If you must know,” Leon sighed from the sweet taste of the mai tai and the relaxing nature of watching the robot work, “RevoCorp sent us here to demonstrate how easily a situation could be contained on a budget with its breakthrough technologies.”

  “Why would RevoCorp need to demonstrate how war can be done on a budget?” Crumley protested. “The whole point is for these guys to make a fortune on all the killing. Or did you miss my last lecture on the subject?”

  “They’re trying to discriminate less against more disadvantaged people who want to carry out terror from afar,” Leon said. Suddenly the drink left a sour taste in his mouth.

  “Now that I can understand,” Crumley said.

  The RevoCorp robot pulled the civilian up out of the hole he’d made for him. The local wasted no time flicking his wrist with an outstretched hand to convey, "What Do You Want?"

  Two more locals of the same gender passed in front of Leon and his men, walking hand in hand. Such intimacy would have been interpreted differently in the West. But here, it was purely a sign of friendship. They were enjoying their first tastes of freedom in a long time. They waved and smiled at the Americans as they walked by. Leon and the boys nodded back at them.

  One of the two men dropped a spent paper cup with a lid and a straw in his wake. Crumley used his foot to kick it out of the way. Several revelers took time away from their good cheer to gesture at his foot and curse at the top of their lungs before moving on.

  Leon and the boys eyed one another nodding with a sudden flash of understanding at Crumley’s cultural faux pas. “Syria!” they all said at once.

  “I told you we were in Syria,” DeWitt said.

  All eyes turned to him, eyebrows tented.

  TWO

  Natty Young fretted over the contents of a suitcase on the bed packed to the brim. Inside was the one-and-a-half-foot-diameter wall clock he enjoyed falling asleep to. Fifteen lucky rabbits feet. Where they were headed, there was no such thing as too much luck. A pair of dumbbells. Assorted whips and chains, less for an untested S&M lifestyle, and more for the tactile distraction if his skin started crawling in the anticipated hot humid weather. His grandmother Augustina’s ashes; they had always been close and now was not the time for a trial separation. Seven shrunken heads; he was thinking they could barter them if they got into trouble with any of the local clans—what tribal people didn’t go in for shrunken heads, right? His ET doll; it had been steadfastly guarding over him since he was six. Leaving him behind seemed like a betrayal of that sacred pact. His favorite “I like Pig Butts and I cannot Lie” tee shirt. Treebeard, from Lord of the Rings; a decoration for the treehouse he expected them to be living in. A helmet from King Arthur’s day that wouldn’t fit in the last three suitcases with the rest of the body armor; Natty was thinking if the incense burner didn’t work to keep the bugs off him, full battle dress might. A favorite book, I saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus, for bedtime reading if he and his wife, Laney Lock
heart—yes, she’d held on to her maiden name—were taking another hiatus from sex to fight. “I know I’m forgetting something.”

  He was talking to himself so he was surprised when Laney gave him a peck on the cheek. She must have done that preternatural thing she did of walking around the house without making a sound, like some ghost. She smelled like the air did after it rained and night-blooming jasmine. “You have a photographic memory,” she said. “You never forget anything.”

  “I'm a little stressed right now, okay!”

  Laney gave him another supportive hug from the side and peck. “The whole idea of a big adventure, darling, is not to anticipate every possible contingency.”

  “I do not do the unexpected. You know that!”

  “What do you call meeting me?”

  “A well calculated ruse, albeit with a distinctly low probability of success. I mean, look at you. You're a goddess.”

  She stifled another smile. “And since I rule, we're done here.” She zipped up the suitcase to his abject horror. “It'll take an army of Sherpas to carry what you have already.”

  “Make sure that army comes with at least a couple battalions. I don't want anyone hurting their backs on my account.”

  Together they surveyed their bedroom, done up, as with the rest of the house, like a ship’s cabin. Every surface made of polished wood, with more hidden compartments in the walls, under the bed, in the ceiling, not to mention entire hideaway rooms that could not be found on a real ship. He had a lot of treasures and he liked keeping them close for safekeeping. And with this many hidden compartments, even if he were robbed, it’d take a thief a lifetime to find them all. The sounds of the ocean and squalling gulls complemented the picture of the live-in boat thanks to the high quality sound systems in every room. He sighed. One look at where they lived—inside the largest toy chest in the world—reminded him of just how much she put up with for his benefit.