We watched movies underground while the surface burned.
Down in our rabbit holes, the sound of the bombs never reached us, but the earth shook with their impact while we sat in the dark and watched moving pictures flicker across a silver screen. We knew what kind of hell rained down over our heads: one full of heat, shrapnel, and death, worse than any atrocity long-dead, special-effects wizards had left for us on film. When enough skybusters exploded at once, they set the air on fire. We wondered what we’d find left of our home and of the Frek when we deployed up-earth, whenever our time came. Some of the guys worried that our twelve brutal weeks in boot camp and three more in psychprep would go to waste without any of us ever seeing so much as a skirmish. Other guys hoped for that. I knew better. We were weapons, and the Army didn’t make weapons it didn’t intend to use.
When the movies started, I knew we’d see action before long. All they showed us were war movies and monster movies—the blockbusters, the classics, the cult favorites, and even a few hits from the summer before the Frek dropped down and started us fighting for our lives.
The most gruesome movies ran two or three times a week. During the day, we bled out our frustrations in the gyms and training rooms, and at night we stoked them again with images of violence and alienness, of combat and heroism, of strangeness, mystery, and bloody struggle for survival. The picture shows were part of a slow burn lit to keep our rage simmering. They reinforced the narrative we’d learned in boot camp. They showed us again and again that only country and fellowship mattered and that aliens like the Frek were nothing more than slavering, man-eating, evil beasts hell-bent on raping our planet and enslaving us. We heard the message loud and clear.
One night a PFC from Kansas joked about why, if they were so hot for the “sky-fi stuff,” they never showed E.T. Without missing a beat, the guy next to him described in detail how he would shove a grenade down E.T.’s throat and “blow his fucking heartlight the fuck home and fuck needing to use the phone.” Everyone laughed so hard they stopped the movie.
The strangest part of it is when you see some of these guys from on-screen walking around in officer’s dress. Seeing them on television, like when General Eastwood and General McQueen address the nation, gives you a touch of that uncanny-valley sensation, but in person, they make your skin crawl. Colonel Connery, CO for our rabbit hole, looks exactly like the real deal, circa 1968, except you know nothing from back then still knocks around his head, only ideas of death and killing and keeping our morale high. They clone them so well, I bet even their wives and girlfriends, if they were still alive, wouldn’t know the difference. It gets the guys’ attention, sure enough. No one’s mind ever wanders when the colonel speaks in his powerful, Scottish accent, and whenever they run one of his old movies, a handful of guys always hit him up for autographs, asking how he liked shooting the love scenes.
He smirks and nods as if he knows.
It’s a hell of psyche-out.
~*~
No bombing for two days.
Our orders came through: surface clean-up for most of the men, but not for my platoon. We pulled special duty. We were to rendezvous with a Special Forces unit that had collected what our orders described as a “valuable artifact,” secure it from them, and bring it to Camp Scott, on the double-quick, of course.
Leaving our rabbit hole, however, involved a process.
First, advance teams surfaced and reported back on up-earth conditions. Then everyone got booster shots against possible contagion from Frek remains, took anti-rad pills, and equipped themselves with live ammo and full-integrity body armor to replace what we’d damaged in training. Centcom had shipped us in and tucked us away only days ahead of the campaign to sterilize the Eastern seaboard then left us down-earth for two months, like cicadas waiting to hatch from the ground when the weather turned hot, and we were eager to go. Even the guys who’d been dreading the day they’d see action looked relieved to finally do something.
Colonel Connery made the rounds while we suited up.
Captain Willis and Captain Weathers followed him.
They helped with our gear. They steadied our nerves and tried to keep us from thinking too much about the blasted wasteland that waited on the surface.
I snapped the last of my armor in place, checked my ammunition, and waited for my platoon to finish suiting up. I was their sergeant. I tried not to think about what that meant. I’d had weeks to ruminate on it. Now was time to act.
Colonel Connery reviewed our orders with me and said he was grateful to have a man like me in his division. I wondered how much of that came from what they’d programmed into his brain on the clone farm or if he’d thought up any of it on his own. I guess it didn’t matter one way or the other. His pep talk was protocol. When he finished, he slapped me on the back, said he’d keep a good cigar waiting for me, then walked off into the crowd of soldiers.
By then, my platoon had gathered at the elevator. The long ride to the surface passed in silence. Anticipation poured off my men in waves. They were good soldiers: Abernathy, Barnes, Champ, Foster, Itgen, Marvin, Morris, Smith, and Testa.
And me, Colin Rook.
They were my soldiers: Rook’s Raiders.
I hoped we’d all come back together.
I knew we wouldn’t.
~*~
Riding up-earth, it seemed we’d always been fighting the Frek, as if the pre-invasion world had only ever existed in movies and dreams, and no time before my first day in boot camp had been real. I couldn’t remember the day I decided to enlist or even when the Frek invasion began. Like everyone else, though, I knew their first assault had come without warning. We hadn’t even known that the Frek, or any other alien life, existed until they attacked us.
Even now, no one really understands why they invaded Earth.
I lean toward the mistake theory: the Frek thought there were no intelligent species here, and by the time they figured out otherwise, they’d gone too far to change course. If all Frek invasions are alike, they’re pretty much impossible to stop once they’re underway. Frek females the size of attack helicopters give birth to about 500 young at a time. Frek children pop out of the womb in little, curled up bundles no bigger than cantaloupes, but they grow to the size of lambs in about three days, and they’re more vicious than badgers. The first anyone knew we were under attack, pregnant Frek mothers, already in labor, dropped from the sky and popped out killing machines. They dropped about thirty mothers per continent, and within days 15,000 hungry, newborn Frek bastards shocked the world. What’s worse, about thirty Frek out of every litter are female. Those things mature, mate, and reproduce in a matter of weeks. Soon as we caught on to that, we made hunting the brood-mothers a priority. That’s when the scorched-earth campaigns began.
We started with nukes. The blasts burned the Freks to cinders, but the radiation barely slowed the survivors. It did have the benefit of sterilizing them, which made them easier to fight without worrying about picking up some Frek microbe that would blind you or turn your organs to slush. So far, the white-coat grunts have identified about thirteen separate bacterial strains the Frek brought to Earth, seven of which kill humans. They’re working on cures and vaccines, but anything better than the crude, imperfect immunization shots they give us in boot camp is a long way off. You catch a Frek death germ, you may as well throw yourself in front of a firegun for all the medics can help you. Thank God the Frek bugs haven’t mutated to airborne or human-to-human transmission yet.
Centcom switched to skybusters, which had about the same effect as nukes but without spreading so much fallout. The sterilization campaigns picked up in earnest then. Africa is clear of Freks now. The thing is, it’s also pretty much clear of humans. No one’s really sure if we won that battle. The Frek control half of Asia and all of South America. Bombing runs 24/7 keep them in check. Australia has fared pretty well, with about half the country still habitable and mostly Frek free. Europe and North America still hang in the balance. That’s where Rook’s Raiders and a million other grunts come in. We were trained in the western deserts where the Frek never came and then shipped east and north where the Frek are the densest. Now it was time to go see what we could kill.
Fighting Frek isn’t easy. The children have skin like a beetle’s carapace, and they can launch razor-sharp quills from their upper legs. Shooting the bastards five or six times usually drops them. Grenades work better. The only thing that makes it manageable is they’re stupid and impulsive. They tend to come running straight at you. They’re fast, though. Let one through, there’s not much you can do but pray somebody’s got your back.
The brood-mothers are worse. Soon as they finish giving birth, they’re back on all ten feet fighting. They spit streams of the vilest soup imaginable. It’ll burn you bad. Allergic soldiers go anaphylactic and drop dead in seconds. The worst of the germs comes from the birther spit. You might survive being doused, but you’ll spend a couple of months in D and Q, shaved hairless and having layers of skin flash-burned off you, while robot medics prick you and pop tubes into all your available orifices three times a day.
The mothers are uglier than the kids too. They lumber around like octopi with stilts rammed into their tentacles. Their flat heads stretch into squares, and their five big, red eyes never blink. I’ve never seen one in person, but they showed us plenty of vid records in boot camp. Every grunt and officer receives a camera chip implanted in their skull beside their left eye, making every soldier a cameraman. That’s created a bounty of raw battlefield footage, and the top brass uses it liberally.
That shit’ll give you nightmares.
~*~
We made our rendezvous, and my first thought was someone at Centcom has a wicked sense of humor. That’s the only explanation I can muster for why they cloned Peter Lorre to lead the Special Forces team. Not only him, either. The other spooks hung back in the shadows, but I swore I saw Karloff and Price in captain’s bars, Rathbone, a major. We met them inside a dark, gloomy, blasted-out warehouse, and I had to choke back a laugh. The movies those guys made were the ones I liked best: the classic monster flicks. They were the only ones with a touch of style to them. They were gruesome, violent, and morbid, but they had real stories, romances, and none of that formulaic, jingoistic cheerleading in almost every war movie we saw. Those old fright flicks came closer to reminding me of why I fought than anything else we watched. That’s because the heroes in those movies—and yeah, sometimes the monster was the hero, like in Frankenstein or The Creature from the Black Lagoon—the heroes were almost always noble.
I could buy that in a monster movie.
Not so much in the combat pics. In those, the hero died in the end way too often. Anyway, I’d seen fifty guys wash out of boot camp for everything from cowardice to dementia to battlefield incontinence, and I knew soldiers weren’t always noble. So, it struck me funny about Peter Lorre being cloned for Special Forces. He never played the hero in the horror shows. The thing about him, he unnerved you even if you didn’t recognize him. A tic shook his head every few seconds, and his eyes looked rheumy enough to slide from their sockets. Considering the Special Forces guys fought in the dark and had little contact with anyone but the enemy, the creepier, the better, I guess. Not that the Frek cared, but I guess it mattered to someone.
With Lorre, they even got the voice right.
“Sergeant,” he said. “We have your valuable cargo, ready for transport to Camp Scott. Are you prepared to take possession?”
“Ready, willing, and able,” I told him.
“Excellent. Your papers?”
I handed him our orders. He skimmed them as he led me to the back of the huge transport truck, then he opened one of the rear doors. Inside sat a canister about twelve feet in diameter and roughly twenty feet long, spattered with mud and other dried gunk. It looked like a rusty, oversized oil drum. Sealed up tight and strapped down solid enough to stay put even if the truck rolled, it filled almost the entire cargo space. I’d never seen anything like it.
“What the hell you got in there?” I asked.
“We have captured one of the enemy’s brood-mothers before labor and have trapped it in stasis in this tank. Frek bodies are quite pliable once they’re subdued.”
I guess I made a face or didn’t speak for too long because Captain Lorre’s expression grew even more anxious. He pulled out a white handkerchief and wiped sweat from his brow. “Are you deaf, Sergeant? I tell you we have captured one of the enemy birthers and have trapped it in this tank, yet you have nothing to say.”
I’d heard him fine. No one had ever taken one of the Frek birthers alive. I thought we’d have heard the news.
“It is top secret, of course, which is why we must get the prisoner inside Camp Scott as quickly as possible. You and your men only have to drive this truck home, like good chauffeurs. Do not interfere with the canister. For God’s sake, don’t try to open it, or there will be horrible consequences. Absolutely horrible.”
“You coming with us?”
He shook his head and wiped his brow again, and I saw why his unit had to pass the baton. Captain Lorre’s sleeve pulled back from the hem of his glove, uncovering about eight blood blisters on his wrist, a sign of Frek infection. The rest of his unit must have been contaminated too. They’d probably caught the germ while subduing the birther. Word was when Special Forces picked up a Frek bug, they didn’t bother coming in for triage. They simply ran suicide missions to kill as many Frek as possible before they expired. I felt a little sad for the captain, but in the end, he was only a clone. No doubt there were other Special Forces “monster units” running around out there. Centcom hated to waste a good clone matrix once they’d developed it. Captain Lorre handed me the keys to the truck and turned to rejoin his unit. I called him back before he disappeared into the shadows.
“Hey,” I said. “They forget Lugosi?”
The captain smiled. “Oh, no, they could never forget Lugosi, but I’m sad to have to tell you he didn’t make it. He’s in the canister with the prisoner.”
~*~
Morris drove. I rode shotgun.
In the back with the trophy were Abernathy, Champ, Marvin, and Testa. Barnes, Foster, and Smith rode the gun positions mounted behind the cab. Itgen sat between Morris and me and worked up a sweat navigating.
We had maps and GPS and high-level training in dead reckoning. Only problem was all that was keyed to geography that no longer existed. A few days of skybusters had chewed up the landscape and spit it back out in a bold, new arrangement. Even when we followed the compass, we kept coming to roads turned into craters, bridges reduced to splinters, and buildings blasted across every inch of ground, creating a litter of obstacles where the map showed clear paths. Camp Scott should’ve been a six-hour drive from our rendezvous with Special Forces, but we’d covered only a quarter of the distance in that time. Every so often, we spied the dark specks of surveillance drones coasting past the horizon. At one point, we passed a rabbit hole and thought we might stop for help, but an off-target skybuster had cracked its lid and let the Frek in. We knew what we’d find down there. We moved on, fast.
Another hour and we covered maybe fifteen more miles. We’d started in daylight. Now dusk crept in along the horizon. I debated whether we should push on or stake a defensible position in the rubble. Neither option appealed to me. Being indoors at a secure location overnight was Survival 101. While I mulled that over, Foster popped off a dozen rounds into the shadows of a broken building, and everyone snapped alert with weapons ready.
Something moved behind a pile of debris. Several other somethings followed it.
About thirty Frek bastards skittered out from beneath the rocks and charged us. How the hell they survived the skybusters, I’ll never know, but I didn’t worry too much about having an opportunity to rectify that. I climbed onto the hood of the truck and opened fire.
Barnes and Smith kicked in with the fireguns. The rest of the men started lobbing grenades from the rear of the vehicle. One of them went wild and ripped a grapefruit-sized hole in the truck’s armor. Everything turned fiery and frantic and sounded far away once explosions numbed my eardrums. Most of the Frek were dying, but the ones that made it through, instead of coming for us, tried to claw their way through the side of the truck. They must have sensed the birther in there. The truck’s armor slowed them enough to make them easy pickings, and we ended the skirmish soon enough. Not a casualty among us, but the Frek were all dead.
We regrouped and drove off.
I screamed at Morris to go faster and kept screaming until we were far from where we’d been attacked. His ears had to be as dead as mine by then, but he got the message. When the ride smoothed out, Itgen and I took up the map and tried to calculate our safest route.
The best we could do was hope we’d find the shortest.
~*~
Darkness fell, and Morris kept driving.
Barnes, Foster, and Smith popped on their night eyes.
The truck’s headlights were bright, but the dense, pervasive darkness swallowed up the light. Around midnight we passed an unexploded skybuster sitting in a crater and drove around it. Rare, but it happened. A dud igniter, or maybe someone didn’t arm it properly. Eventually, it would blow. They always did.
Half an hour later, we stopped.
Bad news.
Abernathy and Testa had found holes in the stasis tank. Something was leaking out. They refused to ride with it. I got out and climbed into the cargo space.
Shrapnel from where a stray grenade had blown a hole in our armor during the skirmish had perforated the skin of the tank. The sludge dripping out was the color of cornhusks, probably a combination of Frek blood and whatever had been pumped in there to keep the birther alive. There wasn’t much, but if it was contaminated, it was plenty.
My men looked to me for answers.
I had no good ones.
I told them to look for a tire repair kit. When they found it, I dug out its largest self-adhesive patch and slapped it onto the canister. It held, but it barely covered the three holes, and I saw it would peel off as soon as it got too damp from the leakage.
There weren’t enough footholds outside the cargo trailer for everyone to ride on the exterior. It would’ve been too dangerous in the dark. Hit a bad bump, you could lose someone and never notice. As ugly as it sounded, some of us would have to ride with the tank.
No one liked it, but they accepted it, especially when I told them I’d be riding there with them. I ordered Abernathy and Testa to squeeze in up front, then climbed into the trailer with Champ and Marvin.
Before we closed the doors, before Morris even started the engine, I heard something buzz by overhead. Its high-pitched whine identified it as a surveillance drone. Maybe they were searching for us because we were so late. Two small orange lights circled in the black sky. Between them blinked a single red light. The drone passed over us low before it rose and began circling. I was watching it when the entire truck lurched, and I almost fell out.
It felt like we’d hit a huge bump, but we weren’t moving. The truck shook again. This time I saw why. It bounced with the tank. The metal container vibrated and shook, and every few seconds, it jolted in one direction or another like the birther inside wanted to pound its way out.
The makeshift patch popped off, and goop spurted the inside of the truck. Champ and Marvin almost knocked me over on their way out. I jumped down, and we all drew our weapons. The others came around from the front, armed and frightened. We watched the tank rock and rattle and wondered if it would hold.
~*~
They never should’ve made me a sergeant. I don’t think like most soldiers. I never bought all the way into the official story of how things are. When someone tries too hard to sell me something, it makes me suspicious, and that’s what all those movies were down our rabbit hole. A nonstop sales pitch to keep us on board with how the honchos wanted us to see things. The clones worked like a charm in that regard, tricking soldiers and civilians into believing reality was exactly like the movies and vice versa, leading us deeper into the story, distracting us from asking questions, so we would always fight the Frek with steady fervor.
Not that I doubted we were fighting for our lives; I knew we were.
Only I wasn’t sure we’d been given all the information. When a movie’s based on true events, there’s tons of stuff they leave out to make the story more exciting. For example, behind every war, people pull the strings, and sometimes they do it for their own benefit and damn the world and everyone in it. The movies never showed those people.
When the tank settled down, everyone let out the breath they’d been holding.
I hopped into the trailer, ignoring my men’s shouts for me to stay clear.
I walked up to the tank and banged on it.
Whatever was inside banged back.
That gave me a shudder. The guys got quiet.
I tapped the metal again, and again got a response.
Another two raps got me two right back.
I looked at my men. “No fucking way that’s a Frek birther in there.”
No one said a thing.
I saw in their faces that they all wanted to close the thing up, get back in the truck, and dump it at Camp Scott. Already done wouldn’t be fast enough for them.
I wanted that too, but even more, I wanted to know what the hell was in the can.
Unclipping the flashlight from my belt, I walked around the damaged side. Standing on a field box, I stepped up eye level with the holes and flashed the light in. No more had dribbled out, and what was there was drying to a crust, but the unmistakable stench of Frek came pouring out. Through the punctured metal, I saw only darkness and a yellowish shine from my light reflecting off the goop.
A shadow moved inside.
My light flashed off a patch of iridescent Frek skin.
An eye filled up one of the holes and peeped out at me.
Screaming, I stumbled backward, lost my balance, and fell. Abernathy and Barnes bolted into the trailer, grabbed me, then dragged me out, spilling me onto the ground while the rest of the men leveled their weapons toward the canister.
I told them to stand down.
I told them we’d been lied to.
I told them what I’d seen through the hole in the metal.
A human eye.
~*~
Aside from me, Barnes, and Testa, no one thought opening the tank was a good idea. After I calmed down, I figured the monster unit’s Lugosi was alive in there. It made sense, but it didn’t sit right with me. Still, I thought we should try to rescue him. The rest of the men wanted to push on to Camp Scott, and since those were our orders, we did so.
A few miles farther along, we reached impassable ground.
Must have been a hundred skybusters dropped there during the bombing because not an unbroken spot of earth remained as far as we could see in any direction, except back the way we came. We couldn’t raise anyone on the radio, probably due to residual radiation in the air over the blasted zone. Itgen and I scrutinized the map but found no sure way around. A river blocked our way to the south, rough hills to the north, and east was back the way we came.
While we sat on our options, the Frek came again.
Whatever survived the last bombing campaign must have tracked us most of the night. They came from behind, out of the dark. Only Abernathy keeping watch with his night eyes stopped them from overrunning us before we knew they were there.
We opened fire and scrambled for the truck.
Morris revved the engine.
Most of us made it on board. Frek bastards got Champ and Marvin and dragged them out of sight.
A rain of quills clattered against the armor. Morris floored the gas, turned us around, and drove us head-on toward the line of running Freks. They crunched under the tires and splatted against the armored sides, but a lot managed to hang on. We were covered with them, and they did their best to tear the truck open. They wanted to kill us, I’m sure, but more so, they wanted whatever the tank contained. Whether or not we ever reached Camp Scott, I couldn’t let that happen. I leaned over to Morris and told him where to go and then prayed we could hold off the Frek long enough to get there.
~*~
By the time we reached the unexploded skybuster, we’d lost Barnes, Smith, and Testa to the Frek. Morris slammed to a stop so close to the bomb, we almost bumped it. The effect was immediate: the Frek fled, scrambled back, and circled around us. They knew enough to fear the skybuster. The break from fighting brought temporary relief, but then it sunk in that I’d only achieved a standoff.
In the fleeting quiet, drones buzzed overhead. There were four of them now, orange lights hovering like eyes, red lights blinking like stars. I no longer thought they’d been sent to find and help us. They were there to watch and record. We were on; it was our big moment.
I tried the radio again. Only static, maybe due to interference from the drones.
Without help, I saw only one way out.
If we gave the Frek what they wanted, they’d slaughter us the moment they had it. I looked at Foster, Itgen, and Morris and saw they’d each concluded the same thing. We had enough ammo to hold off the enemy for a couple of hours, no more. The Frek would get us and the tank before dawn.
We couldn’t allow it.
Rook’s Raiders wound up in a war movie instead of a monster movie. We’d get to die for our mission instead of killing the monster and living to see the next dawn.
The four of us climbed into the back of the truck and untied the tank. It shook and jolted as we worked, knocking us off-balance. Whatever was inside, it wanted out. Maybe it sensed what we had in mind. Foster dropped out and examined the skybuster, locating the access panel that would allow manual detonation. He gave us the thumbs-up. With the cargo doors open, the Frek knew what we planned, and they didn’t like it. They came at us in a biting wave. We fought, but they outnumbered us. Seven Frek bastards got Foster as he pulled a grenade. He dropped it live. It exploded beneath the truck, knocking me, Morris, and Itgen to the ground and driving the Frek back. But the blast hit the exposed tank too.
The seal at the end cracked.
Fluid squirted out.
The Frek closed on us again.
The thing inside the tank pounded against the lid, shoving it upward by inches.
In the sky, eight drones circled now, each one watching from a different place, a different angle, recording us, even as we recorded everything we saw through our implanted cameras. I wondered who was watching and why they didn’t send help.
Then the lid popped off the tank and slammed against the skybuster.
From the opening, two limbs emerged: one Frek, the other human. The massive thing inside squeezed itself from the canister, pushing a wash of viscous goop with it as it came. When it unfolded, stood on its ten legs, and raised the flat disk of its body into the air, the sight sent us reeling. It throbbed and pulsated as if gasping for breath. Dangling from its underbelly were eight bodies at the end of pulpy tubes. Two were miniature Frek birthers. The other six were human. Lugosi hung there, staring down at us, and so many others: McQueen, Willis, Weathers, even Colonel Connery. Each unfinished figure awaited the breath of life and its brain to start working at full capacity. They looked frightened and half alert.
The worst part of it hit me the moment Itgen and Morris turned their guns on me.
One of those dangling, dripping horrors possessed my face.
I ran toward the skybuster even as my men opened fire.
I felt the punch of the slugs and started to go numb, but my fingers were already clutching the wires. I pressed them together and clicked the switch.
The skybuster turned the world to fire.
~*~
Down the rabbit holes, soldiers watch movies while the surface burns.
I take no interest in them now that I wear captain’s bars. On the nights they show my movies, I stay in my quarters and read technical manuals. Centcom told me that with time the memories should fade. They haven’t, though. There’s something about me, a flaw in my matrix that keeps me from forgetting.
They never should’ve made me a captain.
General Eastwood was there to hand me my bars and congratulate me when I came back online at the clone farm.
“You’ve done good, son, and we got it all on film,” he said. “The folks at home loved it around the world. You’re international now.”
They told me intelligence suspected the existence of the Frek in the canister but had never seen one up close. It grew clones of captured soldiers. Once the Frek realized how clones helped sustain our war efforts, they decided to use them against us. They had captured several clone farms in South America, which gave them all the data they needed. They couldn’t master our technology, but they found an organic way to create clones. Then they set out to infiltrate our troops by sending decoys into the field. They’d started with Special Forces. Captain Lorre and the rest of his monster unit had been bogus, infected with Frek germs to self-destruct. They had given us a Trojan horse and trusted us to ferry it inside Camp Scott. I’d been among the decoys only because the Frek had captured the clone farm where I’d been brought online. Our real cargo had been the recovered torch from the Statue of Liberty, a “valuable artifact” like our orders had said. Now it was gone, and we had a whole new front on which to fight the Frek. I guess they hadn’t counted on their stray bastards fouling up their plot by trying to rescue what their senses told them was a brood-mother.
Me and all my “others” got bucked up to captain for my “quick thinking and decisive action in the field.” I hadn’t known until then that I was a clone.
“It’s better that way,” General Eastwood had said. “You had some popular movies before the Frek landed, but we had to test run your matrix. Make sure you were functional, see what kind of ratings you got. You start out a sergeant for a couple of runs, and we see if you break out into a more popular role. We’re at war, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t entertain people to keep their spirits high. You passed with flying colors. Now we’ll start reaping the cumulative benefits of your experience. That’s how we’ll beat the Frek. Sooner or later, we’ll find the way to a decisive victory. But it’s a hell of an adventure getting there, and we’ve got to keep the populace on board with the war. If it sinks in how dire things really are, it would be too demoralizing. People might want to surrender. We won’t let that happen.”
I asked him when I would see my men again, if they would keep my unit together. A puzzled look came over General Eastwood’s face, and he smiled like a patient father as he told me, “They were extras, kid. Extras don’t come back. Extras get recast.”
He saluted me and walked away.
Before he stepped through the door, I asked, “General, are we winning?”
Without looking back, he said, “Of course, we’re winning. We’re the heroes, son.”
He seemed so certain.
I remember a lot of things I’m not supposed to, but I don’t remember how long we’ve really been fighting the Frek. I think of how easily it came to me to sacrifice myself and my men by blowing the skybuster. It reminds me that sometimes Frankenstein’s monster was the hero too. Now the whole world feels like a haunted house: not everything here is what it seems, and ghosts are everywhere.
That’s why I don’t watch the movies anymore.
I can’t sit down there in the dark while the ground rumbles and shakes above us, sit there with the good men who are winning the war against the Frek, but who won’t come back when they die, won’t ever see victory, won’t ever be known for their sacrifice. I can’t sit there in the dark with the extras. They’re heroes too, but they’re trapped in a war movie, and I’m trapped in a horror show.