Meridien K - Chapter 7: The Routine (Again)

Sight picture. Bone structure. Natural point of aim. Breathe in breathe out slow and steady. Loose not tense. Finger curled round the crescent-moon trigger. The long exhale of the inner workings ready to counter the recoil. All things thought and rethought.

             

Distance-figures in fatigues. A smear of brown and olive-drab. Aligned perfect in the gentle float of the crosshairs. The angled stickfigure bent near a vehicle, changing a tire or checking something or tying his shoe or whatever.

             

First time for everything.

             

Sight picture. Bone structure. Natural point of--

             

The kick against my shoulder, softened by the rubber and the recoil-damping pneumo's whisper, barely more than a light shove. All that comfort but the shot was still a shot, as loud as twenty firecrackers bursting all at once. One shot, then the volley around, no more than twenty shots fired, fired for safety, not for missed targets. We weren't trained to miss. For whatever reason, though my name was in the alphabetical middle of the roster, I had been rotated to the top of the list for the first contact op after a long string of no-contact ops. It was my call, my shot, and all shots followed after mine.

             

The crosshair hadn't even moved from two semi-auto triggerpulls. The brown figure in olive-drab fatigues was keeled on its, or his, side. Too far to see any blood. He or it wasn't moving.

             

We approached through the thicket of woods, though anyone could've heard the racket and seen damn near a dozen muzzle flashes - some partly suppressed, some fully, some not at all to get the max range - and the dark black figures picking their way through the brush, fumbling over six-hundred yards of uneven terrain and tree ruts and rocks until we all collectively thought Fuck It and walked out on The Natural Point of Drift, out on the even grass as we jogged toward the enemy vehicle.

             

The light, canvas-covered pickup was still idling when we came upon it. There was a clean hole through the red-spattered windshield, and that was the first blood I saw. We swooped in and ran all the mental checks that had been turned into reflex by training and training and more training. We busied our minds with insignificant details to redirect the shock of murdering fellow humans through the impersonality of a high-powered, scoped rifle, not that any of us would've been bothered given our collective low scores on Empathy Tests. Besides, there was a cleanliness to it. Perfect acorn-sized dual holes to the chest or one-round headshots, dead faces with eyes open, pale smiles to the sky. We scoured the bodies for documents. We found a few maps. Some were marked. We all had our quiet half-moments amid the mop-up, all of us secretly terrified we'd find a snapshot crumpled in a pocket, a pre-war soldier with wife and kids, family, happy and smiling and not short a gallon of blood. But no one found any trash like that.

             

"We're in business," said Horse as he pulled the dead driver out onto the ground and slid behind the wheel, threw the gear into neutral and watched the wheels spin on the dead dry grass.

             

Surrounded by our fresh kills, a sort of graduation after hours in Desensitization class, routine enough to abbreviate it to "Desense." Finally looking down at dead faces of dead men, taking their lives across a divide neither side would fully cross, nothing felt, that clarity to it all, a premonition of how it'd go and that vision coming full-circle. I stood over the body of the man I shot, the man I knew I shot, who I lined up in my scope and gave my AP the go-ahead to let a bullet scream from the barrel and, boom, probably dead before the sound of the shot. We all worked that way. We were quite good. Were you expecting that we weren't? And, yeah, we were prepared for survivors. Maybe someone shot in the throat, out flat but alive, and, yeah, the first of us to reach him would go over and stand at a polite distance, aim coolly at the center of their forehead, end it, smell the smoke, mentally tick down one less or three less rounds in the mag, shoulder the AP in the magnetic brace on our backs, get on with it. But no one beat our bullets that time.

             

We stripped the clean uniforms of those who had been headshot and bled out onto the ground without staining the fabric. Short brown men in their brown skin, only clad in brown underwear, harmless as rural Indians. They told us back at Tent City that stuff like uniforms were valuable. Same logic as stealing their truck. It had that diesel rumble, though, and we knew they'd have a hell of a time back at Tent City finding the gas to fill it back up and, I don't know, put some small Regs in the olive-drab uniforms and use our whole bounty to breach a checkpoint or something. We sure as hell wouldn't be given that mission. We didn't do those. They'd never put us in a situation where we'd have to, uh, Interact. In theory, anyway. On that op, that first contact, we simply happened upon the Chinese and, well, took care of it. Could've gone the other way. Just a few dogs snarling over territory, really. I don't remember exactly when that was.

             

Shit. Maybe that wasn't even the first run.

            

I just remember it must've been within the first few years because none of us had been killed yet.

             

Piling into the truck. Three in the cab and nine of us in the canvas back designed for maybe four, six at max. Gremlin and Slug hung off the side, looked like they were garbagemen. Six-Four, tall as his codename, ate his knees and looked uncomfortable as hell. But it wasn't our job to be comfortable. We rode that way back in the direction of the checkpoint and hoped the Reg Forces guarding Tent City wouldn't shoot us.

(Chapter 8 coming Friday, December 2, 2011.)