Whatever Gods May Be Part 3

The captain right-faced and marched out of the squadbay. Behind him, Platoon 2128's three DIs didn't bother to contain their relieved smiles.

That night, Jamie couldn't get into her rack. It had been short-sheeted. "What the h.e.l.l is this?" she protested in a high-pitched whisper.

t.i.tters-soft, almost squealy, unequivocally male-spilled out on her right, then her left, then above her.

"Jeezus, guys." But she giggled and kicked her feet free. "I'm not used to this terrible ill treatment, y'know. And now I gotta frigging pee." Since n.o.body could leave their racks for fifteen minutes after lights-out, Jamie had to wait before scampering to the F-head. "I call first dibs, fellas."

When she returned, her rack had been remade. Perfectly. For the first time on Parris Island, Jamie felt camaraderie.

* 30 *

In the days that followed, the squad drilled snap-crackle-pop to the kill hat's new, improved "No Holds Barred" jody call. Just in time for Final Drill, after which the kill hat only scowled, sign of the squad's success.

Then they faced the culmination of Marine Corps Basic Training- the Crucible, recently intensified into an arduous 102-hour test of field skills, teamwork, and endurance that included 120 kilometers of full-pack marching on little rest or sustenance.

It started with a night march and quickly intensified into a chaos of exhausting live-ammunition combat events alternated with ever more complex problem-solving tasks. They did everything except sleep, eat, and hydrate. Sixty-odd courses in all, but everyone in the squad made it through. Because failure meant having to do boot camp again. And n.o.body wanted to endure boot camp-or the Crucible-twice.

She had done it. Hungry, thirsty, sore, and very tired, Jamie mustered to attention with her squad in a chilly morning drizzle.

"Congratulations, Marine," the senior DI said when he placed the coveted Eagle, Globe, and Anchor pin in Jamie's hand. "I've got a rep for picking out winners, Gwynmorgan. I picked you out when you jumped off the bus. You had me worried there for a while, so I'm real glad to welcome you to the Corps."

"Sir-"

"Call me Staff Sergeant, Marine."

"Thank you, Staff Sergeant."

Jamie's victory was short-lived, however.

A brief textmail waiting for her back at the squadbay told her Joe was dead-killed on a road, in a car, just like they said Alby was.

Healthy and alive one instant, dead the next. It happened three days after she stepped on the bus to Parris Island and explained why Joe never answered any of her messages.

Jamie stared at the screen, absorbing the implications of this new reality. She'd thought of herself as pretty close to Joe, but she never was, not really. The textmail came from a son she didn't know Joe had, a son who wasn't aware of her until he got around to cleaning out his father's place and came across her unanswered messages in Joe's inbox.

Now she had no one at all.

The day before graduation, when almost everyone else spent the * 31 *

afternoon with family, Jamie sat at the squadbay comlink, remaking plans for her ten-day leave. Everyone else was going home, so she had pretended that she'd be going home, too. For a while early on, she'd hoped Joe would reply in some kind of okay way to one of those carefully constructed just-friends messages she sent him. And maybe he'd even decide to come down to Parris Island to see her graduate and hang out with some of his old DI buddies...

His unbroken silence suggested to her that he couldn't do just-friends, and that left her in a quandary-go back to Hyannis and at least say hi and thanks and look-I-did-it and hope he didn't try to grope her, or just-? Just what? She'd become accomplished at not thinking about it, at telling herself to just wait a little longer.

Others came through the squadbay with family members. She got introduced, she got congratulated. She smiled-heartily, she hoped, she tried-when they talked about how much they looked forward to going home, and she always said yes, it was a long way back to Ma.s.sachusetts, ain't it always like that.

She gazed at a map of the eastern seaboard, trying to decide what to do, wondering if Joe would still have been her friend if only he had not ceased to exist. It felt black, this domain where everyone but her had someone who cared about them. She tried to light the blackness with memories of Alby. But Alby slid away from her, shrinking to a tiny pinp.r.i.c.k of light that finally flickered out, leaving her with only the blackness.

Jamie graduated with honors. She had the highest marksmanship scores in the entire company and won a trophy for her platoon. This earned her a slot in Scout/Sniper School and the rank of Private First Cla.s.s. But, unlike the other new marines around her, Jamie had no interest in celebrating.

* 32 *

Chapter three.

the MaveriCK heart It'll be all right. You're doing what you have to." Jamie shot upright out of sleep and scanned the cheap motel room. What the f.u.c.k? The woman who murmured in her right ear couldn't have been more than an inch or two away, but had already disappeared. It'd been real, the voice, no question. And not merely real.

Why do I feel like I know that voice?

She checked the closet. Behind the shower curtain. Under the bed.

But she found only a wayward candy wrapper that had escaped the last vacuuming. The old-fashioned clock radio and television were both off.

She listened for sounds from beyond the room but heard nothing more than the dull white noise of morning traffic on the busy street outside.

The clock radio's display changed from 5:38 to 5:39.

She'd slept a measly thirty-eight minutes past Parris Island reveille.

Shaking her head, Jamie sat on the bed. And then she remembered the dream.

In the dream, she wore cammies. Carrying a couple of weapons, bags of ammunition stacks, the myriad stuff of surviving in a wilderness, she crouched in a forest clearing. Human bodies surrounded her, but she was the only one still alive. Though she had no recollection of it, she knew she had used her weapons to kill them all.

Jamie rubbed the dream from her eyes.

Yesterday's bus ride from Parris Island to Washington, DC, took almost ten hours. By the time she retrieved her seabag, walked to the motel, and checked in, the clock radio had showed eleven-something.

She'd stripped down to her skivvies and crawled under the bed's covers into a sleep that had been deep, uninterrupted. But now her body weighed too much, like the dream had followed her into waking.

* 33 *

I locked the d.a.m.n door, right? She pushed off the bed to make sure, to slough off the sluggishness that dogged her. For this first full day of her leave, she had a plan-by G.o.d, she would visit the Smithsonian no matter how s.h.i.tty she felt.

Doesn't open 'til ten hundred hours, goober. Jamie swung her legs onto the mattress, lay back, and allowed her eyes to close. I'll just hang here a while yet. To celebrate no DIs counting me down.

Yet a moment later, she stood in front of the motel room's scruffy dresser and for the first time noticed the small round object on it. A fat, grinning four-inch buddha with, incongruously, great pendulous t.i.ts like the ones on those ancient headless Maltese statuettes. She couldn't help smiling back at its grin.

"Well, well. Where'd you come from?"

Picking it up, she discovered the lady buddha had two parts that connected at its rotund waist. And she wondered how she even knew about ancient headless Maltese statuettes with great pendulous t.i.ts.

Must've read it. Somewhere. Yet the memory eluded her.

The longer she stared at the lady buddha, the more its vibrant reds, golds, and blues distracted her. As if her hands belonged to someone else, she watched her fingers explore its waist until the two sections detached, one piece in each hand. With caution she peeked inside the piece in her left hand, not sure what to expect.

It was empty. Lined with something cloudy, milky but just slightly gray-pink. Mother-of-pearl maybe? Transfixed, Jamie stared at its shifting depths and tones. Curious how the light in here makes it look like it's actually moving...

And then she found herself up in the mountains, in a high valley surrounded by snow-covered peaks under the bluest sky she'd ever seen.

She stood in a town center. Tibetan? Nepalese? Definitely not Western. A murmuring throng of people waited on folding chairs neatly arranged on either side of a wide center aisle that led to a rough stone platform. Conversation ceased when a huge, swollen figure in an ornate blue and silver military uniform drifted up from behind the platform and floated across it.

Ah. So this is why everyone's here. To Jamie, the figure resembled one of those big balloons at New York City's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but she sensed these people were supposed to be awed by it, fearful even.

* 34 *

Instead, they laughed while the figure slowly lifted away, lighter than the thin mountain air. Soon came a second balloonish character, this one wearing a uniform of red and gold. It, too, wafted off, provoking even more merriment from the people, now impatient and ready to depart.

Jamie a.s.sumed the entertainment had ended.

Abruptly, however, an omnipotent rumble hushed the crowd.

As one, the gathering gasped at the source of this sound so deep it could only be felt, not heard. A colossal abstraction of a human face hewn out of granite rose from behind the platform. Then, as the infrasound intensified, a whole granite being of incomprehensible weight loomed over them, tall as a ten-story building. Adorned in a simple long robe, it glided across the platform and down the center aisle through the crowd. Although it moved sleekly, entirely without friction, its tenacious oscillations shook the ground.

Jamie stared up agape. Her chest, her head thrummed, claimed by an unfathomable seismic vibration that had begun to disperse every molecule in her body. Yet she had no fear, only awe.

And then the folding chairs were all askew; the crowd had left.

Slowly, slowly, Jamie turned around in her chair toward a white-haired woman in a simple, oatmeal-colored robe who sat behind her, framed by a sky grown even more intensely blue than before. Jamie talked and talked to this woman who listened and understood everything, whose benevolent eyes never left her face, whose smile embraced her. And Jamie knew she was safe.

Then she was standing again before the motel room dresser, gazing at the mother-of-pearl interior of the little lady buddha. Closing the container, Jamie realized the woman and the immense granite being were one and the same. And she realized something else, too. You're the one who whispered in my ear. You said it'd be all right.

When Jamie woke up, the numbers on the clock radio had changed. 7:53. She found nothing when she searched the room for the lady buddha. Convinced for nearly an hour that it must have been there somewhere, she looked again and again.

By the time she gave up the search, she couldn't remember what she'd said to the white-haired woman or recall the details of the woman's face. But she couldn't forget what the woman's smile, the woman's eyes had given her. Jamie hunted for the word.

Bliss.

* 35 *

v Thirty-two hours after the senior DI boomed his final "Dismissed!" Jamie still expected a banshee to blow right through the motel room door howling, "Pla-toon! Fall- IN!" Every few minutes, an echo of DI thunder clattered in on some innocent noise, especially if she dared lie down on the motel room bed.

Once she scrambled all the way to her feet and found herself pulling in her chin, adjusting her heels, and sending her thumbs in surrept.i.tious search of her pants seams before she realized the sound was in her head, only in her head.

s.h.i.t. I gotta calm down.

Thirty-two hours after the last of Parris Island, Jamie faced eight days and nine nights of time to fill and nothing to fill it with. So she paced the room. After a few minutes, she recognized the cadence. How many hours close-order drilling? Once she got the moves down, she liked the autopilot relief of close-order drilling.

So she paced some more. In cadence, the kill hat's favorite jody call playing in her head. Once you take the devil's card, h.e.l.l will claim you no holds barred...

It didn't help. She flopped onto the bed and turned on the TV, but five minutes later, she flicked it off again and wandered into the bathroom, to the mirror, where the face there stared back at her.

It's because you're alone, you know. Because you don't have a home to go to or anyone who gives a s.h.i.t that you're a frigging marine.

During those thirteen weeks on Parris Island, she had wished there was someone to miss, wished Joe had been clingable to. Yet she knew the truth: Being cut loose from all the world made boot camp less wretched.

Now the person in the mirror demanded a conversation-just like the old days when the person in the mirror was the only person she could really trust, really talk to.

C'mon, admit it. They got a real slick racket going. Didn't take them long to have you living minute to minute, humiliation to humiliation, trying not to beg, not to cry- "And then, after you're groveling, only then come the morsels of praise, those little cult rewards for surrendering your body, your mind.

* 36 *

They're meaningless to everyone else, but G.o.d, you wanted them, didn't you?"

There it was. Spoken.

The old Jamie Gwynmorgan took in a deep breath, forced it out again, and studied what the mirror showed her. The face there was leaner now, but yes, she could still see the skinny girl with the maverick heart who almost got out. Almost.

Jamie had to avert her eyes from the kid who'd gotten so, so close, the kid who always soothed the cramping in her stomach which she refused to think of as fear by telling herself it's okay, it's okay, she would find that safe place, that home she yearned for. It was out there somewhere on the path that began in the comlink screens at the Barnstable High School library. She just had to keep searching.

Even got herself, with the librarian's help, into the school's Special Self-Directed Study Program so she didn't have to endure cla.s.srooms where she was scorned for being way too dyky, no comlink of her own, has to wear the same clothes more than once a week, and then there's that drugged-up wh.o.r.e of a mother of hers. Instead, she searched and learned at a pace fast enough, exhilarating enough to trade despair for a long shot at a college scholarship-until Alby crashed and burned.

Until Bob Baines.

Ah h.e.l.l. At least I get to play with a real nice rifle.

"So what the f.u.c.k is wrong with you?" she defiantly demanded of the mirror. "Buy a d.a.m.n comlink!"

The store she needed was just four blocks away. She spent a hefty chunk of her pay on the best she could find-a high-performance, multi-powersource wrist/eyescreen model-so she could finally return to the Internet's many libraries and begin reading again.

While the store clerk generated a receipt, Jamie donned the comlink eyewear, activated its shadowscreen, and launched a dictionary search: fug (noun): A heavy, stale, or ill-smelling atmosphere, especially the musty air of an overcrowded or poorly ventilated room.

That's it? That's what it means?

"They can't hit you," she informed the bewildered clerk. "Can't * 37 *

even swear. But they use that Look and that Frog Voice when they say 'fug,' and we're all frigging terrified. Wizard of Oz in a Smokey the Bear hat."

The clerk smiled polite wariness. When Jamie started giggling, he grinned, then couldn't keep himself from giggling too. The sound of his laughter pealed through the store and followed her out the door.

v For six days and seven nights, Jamie read, interrupted only by the time she took for food, workouts, sleep, and basic bodily functions. At first, she tried to pick up where she'd left off before Parris Island and finish reading the ten books of Vitruvius's De Architectura. But she couldn't get past "Cla.s.sification of Temples" and began to poke around in The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

When she came upon "All warfare is based on deception," she was hooked. She consumed as much as she could. Machiavelli, Chanakya, von Clausewitz. Essays on asymmetric warfare, Fabian strategies, fourth-generation conflicts, network-centric operations, wicked problems, soft power. At least Private First Cla.s.s Cannon Fodder'll have a clue.

Then, on the eighth evening of her leave, she couldn't keep her eyes on the screen anymore. Restless memories of Alby and Joe had finally made reading impossible.

d.a.m.n. If she thought about them, she'd have to think about them not existing, which wrecked the sensation that they were out there somewhere, too busy to deal with her, but out there somewhere, able to return when they were ready.

Maybe it would've been better for her to have seen them dead instead of finding out from someone else that they no longer existed.

Jamie closed the comlink, then closed her eyes. She tried to imagine Joe's dead body, then Alby's.

Alby all burned up, sizzling like fried b.u.t.ter.