USNS Mercy, T-AH-19 The South China Sea
HIS chest is cast of solid pain. Each breath hurts as it’s pulled into his lungs, but he’s not taking those breaths.
Horror. Horror …
Someone has jammed a sharp stick down his throat. His eyes stream tears. Something hard slurps noisily down by his jaw, sucking drool from his scorched mouth.
Huge spidery shapes shift within the smoke, striding about. They cut writhing mucus-yellow shadows from the bloody sun. The gas-warning alarm in his mask chirrups, chirrups. A formation of silvery disks whir over a hundred feet up. He searches desperately for cover, but they hum on inland, ignoring his squad. The big Indonesian, the guy with the Javelin launcher, keeps asking a question he doesn’t understand. Far above, contrails lacerate the sky like scars.
Confused. Everything so pinche confused …
The short, dark-haired Marine only very slowly becomes aware he is not actually on the battlefield. That just now he seems to be lying motionless in a soft bunk. Unless this too is just a dream, within a dream. And that some machine is chuffing and clicking beside his head.
His name … it’s not … got it. It’s Hector. Hector Ramos.
But where the fuck is he?
He’s aboard ship, maybe? Still waiting to hit the beach? Hard to tell. But then, where’s his weapon? He’s a machine gunner. He remembers that perfectly clearly, though everything else is dim, dreamlike, muddled. The solid weight of the weapon. The king of the battlefield. The king fucks the queen … Who said that, who yelled it into his ear, on a hot day, in a hot wind choked with bitter dust … He can’t remember. It slides away, vanishes, maybe a memory, maybe a dream, maybe a nightmare.
Groans come from around him. The thing, the machine, chuffs and clicks, on and on. When he pries crusted lids painfully open at last the light is a blue dim. He can’t see much, and his head doesn’t seem to want to turn.
But there really is something jammed deep in his throat. Something hard. A bone, sticking far down his throat—
He raises himself on one arm, clawing at it. Only his arm doesn’t move. He fights with all his strength to lift a hand and jerk the foreign thing out. The bone. The stick.
But he can’t move.
Sheer terror shakes him. He’s been … taken over by some other being. A demon. An alien. He has to push it off, and get this choking, hard thing out of his chest. But he can’t move. He can’t move.
A light flashes near his head. Something hard is pinching his ear. He fights to breathe, to struggle, but he can’t. The device chuffs and clicks. He can feel his chest rising and falling in sync with the labored noise. His lungs, inflating and deflating. But he has no control over his own breath. No control over anything. It’s insane, it can’t be real. The thing keeps puffing and clicking by his head, laboring, regular, maddening.
Oh Jesus oh God get this thing out of my throat.
Ayudarme, ayudarme.
Jesus God help me.
But Jesus doesn’t come.
His brain spins dizzily down a twisting rathole of panic. Back to the beach. Back to the battlefield. Back.
He welcomes it now: the bloody sun, the mucus-yellow shadows, even the invigorating terror as the shapes shift in the murk ahead, around, behind them. At least here, he can move! He signals the squad forward, and trots toward the buildings in the distance.
Yet still, beside his head, something chuffs and wheezes, on and on.
A dark shape looms over Hector. It is the nightmare terror. His demon. He comes awake terrified all over again, struggling to move, but unable to. That’s the worst thing. He can’t fucking move.
The shadow speaks, this time in a woman’s voice, “Sergeant Ramos? It’s okay. You got to calm down, all right? Or we’re gonna have to put you out again.”
He puts a hand to his throat, gagging. Only his hand won’t. His eyes water. The blue light. He jerks his eyeballs from side to side, trying to signal whoever this is. Something sharp is burning in his dick. Ya vale madre, he’d say, if he could say anything.
“Sergeant Ramos, I’m your nurse. Nurse Donovan. We had to put a tube down into your lungs, to let a machine help you breathe. Then we had to give you something so you wouldn’t keep trying to pull it out. That’s why you can’t move. It’s temporary. A drug-induced paralysis. But everything’s going to be all right. We’ve got you. We’re taking care of you. Do you understand? Blink for me if you understand. Please.”
He fights to move his hands, to tear the foreign, sharp things out of his throat, out of his dick, out of his arm. But he can’t. At last he focuses on the dark face over his. A black woman, in the blue dim. A strange alcoholy smell about her. Wearing some kind of uniform. For a second he wonders if it’s La Planchada, the demon nurse, come for him. But at last he blinks obediently, squeezing his eyes shut. Opens them again.
And feels her hand squeezing his. “Good. Good! You’re not going to be this way for too long, and you’re going to be fine. You’re not going back to Hainan. Okay? You have all your arms and legs. Your spine’s not injured. This is just to help your lungs get better, from the gas they used on you. As soon as you can breathe on your own, we’ll take these nasty tubes out and get you something good to eat. Oh, and—and the war’s over, if you didn’t already know.”
He blinks ferociously and she pats his arm again. “Things are a little confused right now, but I’m pretty sure we won. So I’m going to turn this tap here, and in a couple of seconds you’ll feel a lot more comfortable.”
A warm tide rises, spreading all over his body, prickling and heating. A reassuring heat in his arms and legs. He’s still terrified, but the tide rises slowly, like a warm soft woolly blanket drawn up over him when he’s sleepy. A sleepy child. His mother squeezes his hand again.
“Mama,” he whispers. Or tries to. But his lips only twitch around the rigid, mucus-smeared plastic.
HE wakes up again that night. Or thinks he’s awake, though he’s not.
He’s back on Hainan. In the mask, the heavy suit. Sweating. Searching the targeting fog for the lurching things. They loom through the smoke, bodies sleek, metallic, spider-shaped, teardrop-shaped, with spiky antennas and bug-eyed oculars. Autonomous, like the Allied combat bots. Needle-thin, sporadically visible beams shoot out through the smoke, searching their surroundings.
He pushes forward, breath rasping in his ears. Rasping. Chuffing. Clicking. On and on. The squad follows him, but they keep bunching up. He has to turn and signal them furiously to spread the fuck out.
The school looms ahead. He grips his carbine, not wanting to see this. But he must. He must. He can’t stop it or direct his steps away. He’s helpless, here in the dream.
The grass between the bus and the school is carpeted. A patchwork quilt, all colors, unrolled on the dusty-gray grass.
Then he makes out the faces.
The children lie in ragged lines, as if they’d been in queues when the violet shells hit. Some still holding hands. They’re all black-haired, like his nephews. They wear colorful plastic rain slickers. The boys in blue. The girls, all in pink.
When he walks in among them the bodies crunch and give way under his boots, crackling like fried pork rinds. He steps on a plastic pencil box cartooned with a pastel-colorful cat. All the kids have the exact same pencil boxes.
The Indo with him, the big Papuan who fired the Javelin into the bunker back by the beach, is whimpering under his mask. The cicadas of the gas-warning alarm go chirrup, chirrup.
Do you hate the Chinese? The twisted, rabid face of his old boot camp DI looms in the blowing clouds. DI Brady. Do you hate the Chinese, Private Ramos?
I hate the fucking Chinese, sir.
I will stick my bayonet into them and blow their guts over my boots.
HE wakes wanting to scream but still unable to and lies in stiff helpless terror in the dim blue light for many hours as the machine clicks on and off. He can’t take this. He’s going crazy. Now the others have come to gather around him, sitting on the bed. They gaze down at him, the way they looked up from the landing craft’s wake on the way in to the beach. Oh, he knows they’re dead. Fat useless Bleckford. Titcomb. Schultz. Vincent. Orietta and Truss. Troy Whipkey and Lieutenant Hern. Pudgy little Lieutenant Ffoulk. Sergeant Clay. Patterson, Karamete … they’re yelling at him, mouths open. Or maybe chanting some kind of cadence.
He can almost make out the words, but he’s afraid to hear them.
He knows what they want.
He sings all the songs he knows but without words. He says endless Hail Marys in his head but without belief. He tries to remember the rosary but can’t. He keeps feeling someone there but when he opens his eyes again there’s no one. Not his mom. Not Mirielle. Not La Planchada. Not Jesus. Not any of his old squad. Where did they all go? Are they coming back? He almost misses them.
His eyes drift closed again.
He’s back at Farmer Seth’s. The Hanging Room. The Kill Room.
He’s back on the Line, with the crew. José, Mahmou’, Johu, Fernando, Sazi.
A long chain of stainless hooks sway from an I-beam, tinkling, like music. From them hang dozens of upside-down U’s of heavy, polished stainless metal, each sized just right to trap a careless hand. The chain passes through a vertical slot in the concrete-block wall. Slot, wall, and floor are spattered with a brownish-black crust inches thick.
Hector stamps heavy steel-toes, testing his footing. The men fit goggles over their eyes. They rub Vaseline over their arms, then pull on thin gloves, or women’s nylons.
“Ready?” the production foreman growls, his lone hand on the knife switch. He lost the other in an ice-grinding machine. Without waiting for an answer from the men ranged tensely along the line of glittering hooks, José jerks it down. The lights douse, then reignite a scarlet carmine. Hector sucks a deep breath, clenching his fists.
With a prolonged, grinding rattle, a clashing metallic clanging, the Line surges into motion. The chickens squawk and flutter as the crew pulls them out of their modules, fighting, pecking, spurring, but there’s only one fate awaiting them. One after the other, dangling from the shining hooks, the Line carries them off, to vanish through the wall.
Then … he floats up … to
Something in his throat. Something hard, digging into his throat …
The blue dim, and him floating in it, tormented and alone …
Is this Hell already? This could well be Hell. He may really be totally fucked.
Not far from him, someone’s moaning in the dark. Sobbing, but it sounds choked. Muffled.
It takes a long time before he realizes that helpless, weeping bastard is him.
ENDLESS eons later he’s still lying awake as someone snaps the overhead lights on. So bright he can’t see. People in white coats dart past. They glide in and out of his field of view. They seem to move extremely fast. Or maybe he’s just thinking super slow. Sometimes when they do stop they discuss him in low mumbles. He can’t make out more than an occasional word. Someone else in the room keeps groaning. The machine puffs and wheezes, and now it clicks too. Now he understands what’s happening. And he’s even more terrified. Why is it clicking now? It didn’t click before. Did it? He can’t remember. He can’t remember … He’s scared it will break or the power will be interrupted. If the plug gets loose he will die. And there won’t be a damn thing he can do about it.
He’d rather land on a dozen mined beaches than lie helpless like this.
The woman from last night. Dark faced, round faced. She bends over him. “Sergeant? Sergeant Hector Ramos? I am your nurse. Do you remember? Blink once if you can hear me.”
She has a funny accent, like the Pakistanis who run the convenience store down the road from the chicken factory. He squeezes his eyes shut. Feels tears trickle down his cheek, into his ears.
“I know it’s scary, okay? But you’re going to be all right. You’re on a Navy hospital ship. The war is over, and we won. You’re one of our heroes. But they used a new gas on Hainan. It hurts your nerves so you can’t breathe on your own. Your family knows you’re alive. The Marine Corps got that word to them.
“Now, this morning we’re going to have to suction some bad stuff out of your lungs. It’s not going to hurt, but the procedure might make you feel like you’re choking. Blink those pretty brown eyes if you understand.”
She lied. It hurts, all right. He chokes and dry vomits while they force yet another tube down his throat. The edge catches, ripping something deep inside his neck. So of course they have to suction some more. They mutter above his bed about blood and secretions. Then force more things into him. Tears leak down his cheeks. He can’t help moaning. Why are you torturing me? Just let me die, he wants to yell. But of course he can’t.
Even worse is the steady fucking patter one surgeon, or corpsman, or whatever he is, keeps up. A white guy with a sharp nose and a narrow face filled with hate. He murmurs a steady stream of “You’re a three-landing marine, they say. The hero who raised that flag in Taipei? Well, I kind of expected a little more here. Expected a big shot like you to be able to take it. Not whine and cry like a little fucking pussy girl.” Muttering close to Hector’s ear, so the others can’t hear.
Hector resolves in his heart to kill this fucking asshole as soon as he can get out of this bed. I will corner you in the fucking head and choke-hold you till it takes, motherfucker.
When they finally finish and back away he lies sweating, dizzy, wanting desperately to flee. Escape. Die. Anything but go through that again.
Across the ICU another man’s staring back. A white kid. He’s festooned with tubes, like an alien life form is sucking the life out of him. A computer screen draws jagged lines above his bed. He too is on a ventilator. His eyes are filled with terror. The blanket sags flat where legs ought to be. They stare at each other across the room. Hector musters all his strength. Contorting his lips around the tubes, he tries to send him a faint smile.
STILL later another woman comes in. A white woman, but with long dark hair. His nurse addresses her as “Dr. Andrews.” She looks at him for a while and asks his nurse questions. Then starts talking to him. By now he’s fading, exhausted, but she’s saying something about how great he’s doing. How they don’t want to keep him on the ventilator. If they do, his muscles will weaken and he won’t be able to breathe on his own, ever again.
“And we don’t want that, do we?” She pauses, as if he could actually answer. “No, I didn’t think so.
“So we’re going to try weaning you off this afternoon. Discontinue the curare and see if you can breathe on your own. Could be a little uncomfortable, but it’s the way out of here. You game for that, Sergeant?”
Blink. Blink. A long, long blink. Fucking pinche yes, lady, fucking more than ready.
She goes on talking—to the nurse, he guesses—about discontinuing this drug and the antagonist that and the dosage this. But he’s not really listening.
Anything to end this.
Why didn’t they just let him die?
Hector Ramos doesn’t want to live.
But he has to. For a while. If only to get this fucking thing out of his throat.
Then he will find a way to kill them. He is a machine gunner, after all. He will find his gun again. Then he’ll kill them. All of them. Every fucking white coat La Planchada devil in here. Everyone aboard this pinche fucking torture ship.