Free Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 by T.C. McCarthy Page B

until the boom cracked and shook the ground, covering us in a minor avalanche that only got worse when the bombs fell, over and over. I tried digging. Wanted to get underground so badly that nothing else mattered. Eventually my gauntlets hit dirt, frozen solid into concrete with no way to get through, but I couldn’t stop and found out it was over only when Bridgette and Ox pulled me up, the tips of my gauntlets sanded flat.
    A few minutes later it started snowing again. I don’t know how many guys bought it in that attack, but we walked over them for a couple of hours, on a road paved by corpses.
    Ox went down one day out from Shymkent. At first he just looked tired, like everyone else, and I almost didn’t noticewhen he dropped his carbine. It seemed normal. I was so tired that I felt asleep on my feet, my muscles beyond screaming and at the verge of quitting, so
I
would have dropped the Maxwell ages earlier. But then I heard him laugh. Ox started hitting the buckles on his carapace, one at a time, opening them so that he could get out—until I grabbed his wrist.
    “What the shit are you doing?”
    “I’m so hot,” he said. “Gotta get out of this suit.” His words slurred and I didn’t notice that Bridgette was right next to me.
    She put her hand on my shoulder. “Hypothermia. Symptoms include lethargy, disorientation, euphoria, hallucination. Then death.”
    It had gotten dark and the column came to a halt, which was good because I had to stay there, to keep Ox from unbuttoning while she watched. But it was bad because with the night, temperatures would drop even further.
    “I’m so tired,” he said. “Just let me sleep for a while.”
    After that, he fell over, and I couldn’t wake him up.
    “What are
they
doing?” asked Bridgette, pointing.
    Several of the Marines had collected webbing, ration packs, and other flammable material and threw them into a pile. Atop this they placed several frozen corpses. Then one of the men pulled the caps off three flares and tossed them on top so that the flash overloaded my infrared.
    “Bonfire,” I said.
    Men gathered around it, jockeying for position as they loosened their armor—to enable the heat to penetrate more quickly. I was about to drag Ox closer when I heard someone shout.
    “Goddamn it!” An Army colonel pushed into the circle. “Put that shit out now, you’ll draw fire.”
    “Screw you,” someone said, a Marine. “They can’t send aircraft through this shit, and even if they could, let ’em. The weather’s killing my men.”
    “Captain, you listen to my orders or so help me God—”
    The Marine drew his fléchette pistol and fired. He pointed at two of his men, who then liberated the dead colonel of his suit, tossing the already freezing corpse onto the flames.
    Bridgette cocked her head, and I smiled. The last few days had been so bad and I was so tired that I had forgotten what she looked like, hadn’t seen her face since the scout car. That one gesture brought it back. I pulled her into the snow next to me.
    “I think that the captain was right to do that,” she said.
    “I do too.”
    “Do you want to know what else I think, Scout?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Love to know.”
    “I think that you and these men are not so different from me and my sisters. Come. We need to get your friend near the fire.”
    The closest thing I’d ever had to a real friend in Shymkent was Pete German, a freelance photographer. We went everywhere together, arrived in country at the same time. It was good, because I needed a photographer; the guy from
Stripes
had gotten appendicitis and had to leave, and they didn’t know when a replacement would arrive. So I picked up Pete.
    He was one of those shits that caused trouble. Anywhere, every time. One night we got completely wasted and decided to hit the USO show in Shymkent’s downtown rubble, a real blowout with some comedian from the States. Pete was gay, and I think he had a crush on me, because he kept