EPTThe ground around us was the color of spilled, dried coffee.
“Haha, you know why all those old Korean film stars look the same?” We’d heard this one a thousand times. The wind drowned out the answer, but we imagined it anyway. Because there are only so many good plastic surgeons in Seoul, Alan.
Our forced-laughter break over, I returned repairing the mine-clearing bots. We needed to clear twenty acres today, and with getting away from Alan’s humor as motivation, I was sure we’d finish in record time.
They’d hauled me in on two charges, about as bad as they come. Gasoline theft and murder. Guess it was my lucky day when I happened across that trucker stumbling along the side of the road with a chest full of, or rather emptied by two shells’ worth of triple-aught. Unlike the rest of the model prisoner squad, I was doomed to buy it sometime later in the year. But the warden needed a skilled network programmer for his mine-clearing bots, so he granted me a six-month stay. I had no idea how much the kickback was on this contract, but it was federal work, so our zero-labor-cost operation got the bid.
We were kept about twenty miles north of the northern limits of the ruins of Phoenix. It was a minimum security facility, designed to house white-collar criminals and the like. The reason I wasn’t kept in a max or even supermax facility is because I posed no threat to others, only to myself. You see, I’m one of those people that some call suicidal. I’ve been trying to kill myself for twenty years—incidentally, the same amount of time that this world has been beached on the shores of hell.
Yeah, I know. I’m pretty pathetic. Twenty years, well over five hundred attempts. And each time, I fail. But don’t type me a coward. I’m not afraid of death, at least not according to the citation on the medal they almost shipped home to my family. You see, when I enlisted for the Special Forces thirty years ago, I sure as heck didn’t know that I’d end up losing everything I fought for, everything I loved.
And even now they still keep me from pulling the trigger while my service Glock is in my mouth. Even now, twenty years after the war ended, twenty years after they released me from their service, twenty years after the earpiece went dead for the first and last time.
It was three months into Special Forces training when I first tried to kill myself. Nothing to fancy, with all that live ammunition it wasn’t too hard to sneak three live .45 ACPs into my Colt. Had it not been for my observant bunkmate I would have succeeded. I wanted to shoot myself because I was about to be sent off to some sand pit to waste the next five years of my life, and my girl back home didn’t want to waste five years of hers. Couldn’t blame her. Seeing as how I was a pretty fit soldier and I didn’t have a history of emotional problems, the docs recommended me for a program called Heartwood. The NYU medical research team needed a physically healthy subject for their tests, and I fit the bill perfectly. How they persuaded me to accept the program is something I will never be able to figure out since they blocked out all memories of boot camp. They also eliminated all memories starting from three years prior to boot camp, and shredded the dear-John letter that girl wrote me. I still don’t remember her name.
They put me into an airless room the first day, taped my eyelids shut, and proceeded to keep me awake through irregular cold showers for the next fifty hours. Then, the put me in a sensory deprivation tank for three days while I hallucinated, then I got to do the Gitmo box and then the waterboarding. They did everything they could to make me obey them. And along with that therapy came elimination of any suicidal tendencies, since suicide would mean failing the mission and disobeying an order.
Once the treatment was over, I felt much happier. I knew it would all be ok, and hell, they were even putting me into a new unit, fresh faces where I could reinvent myself. And then one day, we were put on a plane to fly halfway across the world to the subtropical forest of Taiwan, and right as I stepped off the plane she had to be there.
A flash of red, almond eyes, hard, angular face, that foxy smile on top of a slim body. She was everything all the guys in our unit wanted, and she was a mainland spy. From the first time we saw her on that flight to Taipei to the many times we saw her on the betel nut stand outside our base we couldn’t keep our eyes off her. And she kept her eyes on us too.
Her name was Elizabeth and she was paying her way through med school with nut sales and making porn movies. I learned more with her in two nights than I did with all my girlfriends back in the states. Eventually, when my commander ordered me to do some undercover research with the native population, I already knew who to move in with. Unfortunately, so did Langley, and they knew that Elizabeth a.k.a. Kitty a.k.a. Zelda a.k.a. Jennifer was a section 8 operative of the Ministry of State Security.
We started off just physical, her and I, but through the months she actually fell in love with me, or so I thought. I never pressed her too hard, except when she wanted it rough and hard. But one day, she came back with a positive pregnancy test and I then realized I couldn’t live without her. It was just starting to show when the order came down.
I still remember somehow managing to wire together a pound of C4, an iPhone, and the inside cover of her motorbike’s fuel tank while crying my guts out. My hands didn’t obey me, they obeyed Washington.
Later that day, when she was about to go downtown to buy maternity clothes and a wedding gown, I stood there for a good three minutes not being sure what to say to her. She just kind of went on and on about her family (which I now knew was fake) and about what we should name the kid (Andy, after our favorite film star). It was the last time I saw her before she became an anatomy lesson on Chungking Road. Of course, that anatomy lesson was also the first and last time I saw Andy.
Because I was the first subject in Heartwood, some of their techniques were not completely successful. For example, I felt extreme remorse at what I had just done whereas subject number two ended up butchering his mother for food during the post-nuclear winter.
And so for the next twenty years, I wandered the post-Apocalyptic desert, trying to get myself killed. But I couldn’t. My neural program told me to keep living, because with no mission in sight, death was an unnecessary sacrifice. And my survival reflexes were coded into subconscious. Which is why I don’t question the murder charge brought on me—because I’ve killed hundreds and hundreds of men and women due to my reflexes getting in the way, I guess I deserved it. Though technically I didn’t kill that trucker, and I sure as hell didn’t need gas.
They hired me as a mercenary, but they weren’t the government and didn’t know the codephrases. I usually intentionally fucked up their operations and then left for the next town as the entire United States broke down into very uncivil disorder. Hell, not even the sky was being civil—snowflakes in June? It never stopped snowing, sleeting, or raining, not for five months.
I made it through all of it. They’d implanted me with radioisotope flushers and implanted a permanent film of titanium dioxide on my skin. There were other implants as well—eyes that could see through walls, ears with built-in sonar imagers, hair that could harden into ballistic mesh, and of course, the requisite artificial muscle fibers, the nanotube skeleton, the nanite-augmented lungs.
I could not die. No matter how hard I tried.
