Free A Private Little War by Jason Sheehan Page B

them.
    People said all sorts of things about Connelly. Bad things. Some of them probably true. Ted said lots of bad things about Connelly, too. He’d called the man every name there was. Held him up in his own head like an avatar—the embodiment of the thing he did not ever want to become.
    The clock on Ted’s bedside table now read -8,041 hours. He thought about resetting it to zero, starting a new kind of countdown, but didn’t have the energy. He was so tired.
    Thinking back, Ted wished he knew who’d made up that saying in the first place, about the papers and the mud. He wanted to find the man who’d first said that and kill him right fucking dead.

    Carter had left the tent and Cat behind and drank his bottle walking now. He listened to the night sounds: the rustle of tent canvas moving in the frigid breeze, the scrape and jingle of hoodoo charms hung around the neck of an indig sentry pacing his watch, footsteps crunching in the frozen grass, and the snort of a native post horse, the animal hitched and asleep on all six of its feet.
    Everything on Iaxo except the indigs had too many feet by some multiple of two. It was another reason why Carter didn’t like it here. Not a big one, but a reason. He took a swallow from the bottle and spit between his teeth.
    It was cold. Even in all his gear, it was cold. What he wanted was another cigarette, but there were none. He’d smoked the last of his allotment weeks ago, had won a few more gambling, then smoked those, too. The indigs all smoked stubby pipes filled with a thick, mossy black flora cut with wood shavings for flavor. It made them weird if they smoked enough of it. Weirder than normal. And lit, the mixture smelled like cedar and tasted of burning hair. Carter had tried it, of course. Everyone had. It did nothing but make him sick.
    Ted apparently had a stash of cigarettes, and Carter considered trying to find them, steal them, blame it on the natives. He contented himself by stoking the inner furnace with another pull from Fenn’s bottle instead and turning up his collar around his ears. He thought about how much of a man’s life is determined by what terrible things he chooses not to do.
    He walked south through darkness, making for the dim glow of the mess and the close-cut grass of the airfield, stepping finally off the quarter line and onto the clipped fringe of A strip. He crossed at a run out of habit, reflexively glancing skyward and listening for the grumble of a descending engine cycling down. There were lights burning in the longhouse. In the infield, generators were chugging. Once he was clear of the strip and onto the opposite apron, he slowed again, childishly kicking his toes at the frozen ground with each step, stalling as best he could while still, technically, making his way to where his presence was required.

    On the field, Fenn was organizing the unloading of the drop as best as such a thing could be organized. He’d made sure no one had been crushed by the containers coming in, had stood amid the close-pressed mass of men while they’d watched the big boxes steaming, throwing off residual heat and warming them like an invisible fire. When they were cool enough to be cracked, he’d prepared an expedition to the machine shop to fetch generators and lights and pry bars and mallets—making sure that the men were supplied with enough drink to make it there and back safely. They had, but it’d taken them almost a half hour to stagger a couple hundred yards and come back again. And they’d lost at least two men in the process who wouldn’t be found again until morning because war was hell even in the quietest of moments.
    Back in the field house, the boys had all been drinking party liquor made from dried alien fruit and antifreeze, boiled, condensed, and dripped through gas mask filters. Before Carter had left them to go and try to sleep, before Ted had come and screwed up all the fun, they’d been playing poker under the spectral glow