Free Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh Page A

nowhere.
    “Yeah, I guess he did,” I said.
    “Motherfucker … why didn’t he say anything to us?”
    “Ask Alex.”
    Williams sighed as if to say that was exactly what he would have done, if he could. “Do you think he really was in that hell that he talked about all the time? Out in the field, in training, back at base when we sat around talking shit …”
    “Ha ha, we sat around talking shit? You talked shit and we put up with it, don’t you mean?”
    I was only joking, but Williams looked at me, surprised. “You mean you never heard any of Alex’s jokes?”
    I couldn’t help glancing away from the screen and at Williams for a second; after all, he was right. I had never heard any of Alex’s jokes.
    “They were pretty good, some of them, you know,” continued Williams. “What’s the word. Risqué.”
    “What, like when you asked him for a great novel and he gave you a Bible?”
    “Nah, that was lame compared to his good stuff about Catholic priests, the Pope, choirboys, that sort of thing. He laid into the God of the Old Testament something good too, how retarded and inconsistent many of the commandments were. Had Leland and me rolling in the aisles, so to speak.”
    Huh. Not what I’d expected. I’d always thought Alex had been such a strict Catholic. “I … never had the chance to see that side of him,” I said.
    Williams looked at me for a while. The sound of Nazi machine-gun fire filled the room. Then Williams took his empty can of Budweiser and aimed for the trash can on the other side of the room. He was a good ten feet away, but it went straight in nonetheless.
    “Damn, I’m one down on you and the pizza hasn’t even arrived yet,” I said out loud. But in reality I was still thinking about Alex. What did we use to talk about? God, mainly, I seemed to remember. I was an atheist but never felt the need to be too militant about it, and had neither the desire nor the ego to try and press my views on any believers in my vicinity. Alex was more or less the same but on the opposite side of the coin, and never felt the need to drag me into the light. It meant that we could discuss God, hell, and the nature of sin in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We had done so regularly.
    Hell is here. That night two years ago on the mission wasn’t the first time we had heard Alex use that phrase. I’d heard it from him before, lounging around at base. Then too, Alex had pointed at his forehead and said, “ Hell is here, Captain Shepherd. We’re all hard-wired to march straight to hell. It’s in our architecture.”
    I’d no idea what sort of personal hell Alex had been cultivating in his own mind, and now I never would. The one thing I did know was that Alex ended his own life in order to escape whatever hell he had been building. A preemptive strike against death, to ensure that he never fell into that hell he was so afraid of. What a fucked-up thing to do, and yet I could see the twisted logic in it, and I could imagine Alex taking himself seriously enough to go through with it.
    The doorbell rang.
    “Nice, the pizza,” Williams said, jumping up to collect it. He identified himself by pressing his thumb down on the delivery boy’s ID device. Confirmation came back from the military database that held all Williams’s (and my) personal data, and the courier thanked us for our business and left.
    “One of the perks of being Forces, huh?” said Williams, picking at the jalapeños even before he had thrown himself back down on the couch. “No need to worry about our data; it’s all taken care of. Not much fun on civvy street where you have to pay for data storage.”
    “Sure, but Medicare covers most of it, and in any case, strictly speaking it’s not the army that ‘takes care of’ our data. It’s outsourced to InfoSec, a private firm, about as civilian as you can get. The army just picks up the tab.”
    “Is that so? Well, whaddaya know. By the time I had any of my own money to play