Free Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

on. ‘You wanted to leave the room, but you couldn’t tell which of the doors was safe to use. You tried the first door, and it turned out to be a facade. The knob of the second door turned easily, but the door itself was stuck. Rather than forcing it, you went to the third door. It was cold, and it frightened you. The knob of the fourth door was made of glass and cut your hand. After that you just walked back and forth, unsure what to do.’ She waited for a reaction, and when he gave none, she said, Do you understand?’
    He kept silent, biting back anger.
    ‘I’ll interpret it for you,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t bother.’
    ‘The red room is war, and the false door is the way of your childish—’
    ‘Stop!’ He grabbed her wrist, squeezing it hard.
    She glared at him until he released her. ‘Your childish magic,’ she went on. ‘The third door, the one that frightened you, that’s Psicorps.’
    ‘Maybe I’m not frightened of it anymore.’
    ‘Bad side effects, remember?’
    ‘What is it with you?’ he asked. ‘You have some kinda quota to fill? Five deserters a month, and you get a medal?’
    She tucked her skirt down to cover her knees, fiddled with a loose thread. From the way she was acting, Mingolla wondered whether he had asked an intimate question and she was framing an answer that wouldn’t be indelicate. Finally she said, ‘Is that who you believe I am?’
    ‘Why else would you be handing me this bullshit?’
    ‘What’s the matter with you, David?’ She leaned forward, cupping his face in her hands. ‘Why …’
    He pushed her hands away. ‘What’s the matter with me? This’ – his gesture included the sky, the river, the trees – ‘that’s what’s the matter. You remind me of my parents. They ask the samesorta ignorant questions.’ Suddenly he wanted to injure her with answers, to find an answer like acid to throw in her face and watch it eat away her tranquility. Know what I do for my parents when they ask dumb-ass questions like “What’s the matter?” I tell ’em a story. A war story. You wanna hear a war story? Something happened a few days back that’ll do for an answer just fine.’
    ‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ she said, discouraged.
    ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Be my pleasure.’
    The Ant Farm was a large sugarloaf hill overlooking dense jungle on the eastern border of Fire Zone Emerald; jutting out from its summit were rocket and gun emplacements that at a distance resembled a crown of thorns jammed down over a green scalp. For several hundred yards around, the land had been cleared of all vegetation. The big guns had been lowered to maximum declension and in a mad moment had obliterated huge swaths of jungle, snapping off regiments of massive tree trunks a couple of feet above the ground, leaving a moat of blackened stumps and scorched red dirt seamed with fissures. Tangles of razor wire had replaced the trees and bushes, forming surreal blue-steel hedges, and buried beneath the wire was a variety of mines and detection devices. These did little good, however, because the Cubans possessed technology that would neutralize most of them. On clear nights there was scant likelihood of trouble; but on misty nights trouble could be expected. Under cover of the mist, Cuban and guerrilla troops would come through the wire and attempt to infiltrate the tunnels that honeycombed the interior of the hill. Occasionally one of the mines would be triggered, and a ghostly fireball would bloom in the swirling whiteness, tiny black figures being flung outward from its center. Lately some of these casualties had been found to be wearing red berets and scorpion-shaped brass pins, and from this it was known that the Cubans had sent in the Alacran Division, which had been instrumental in routing the American forces in Miskitia.
    There were nine levels of tunnels inside the hill, most lined with little round rooms that served as living quarters (the only exception being the