The War After Armageddon

“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.