Killers
by Vincent L. Scarsella
O |
ut of a clear blue sky, we were dropped into a nest of humans.
Sent them scattering, screaming.
We slashed through the bramble and bush in no particular hurry, stalking and blasting our prey, picking them off one by one. Not the entire tribe, mind you, but an easy fifty, sixty. A good kill. Just like that. The mission took maybe five minutes.
Back at the regroup point, some new kid fresh out of killer school; a strapping, blue-eyed, Aryan blond, came panting and laughing between Larmer and me and slapped us across the shoulders.
“Great kill, hey comrades ?” he said, panting, grinning.
I spied Larmer’s glare, felt the same way. There was no joy in killing, never was, had been, or should be. Only a sick ass like this new kid could feel pleasure killing his own kind.
Sure, in killer school, you were brainwashed to feel good about it. You killed thousands of your fellow men in simulators; you were constantly reminded that nest humans were low-life scum unworthy of existence. Pukes, they were called. Useless, mindless pukes. Pretty soon, they were pukes to you, too. Toward the end of school, there were real kills in a fenced-in chunk of forest just outside the school, where some hapless puke captives were set loose, chased, cornered and killed. Still, even that was nothing compared with killing nest humans in the wild, real people. Unlike the sick-ass kid, after my first patrol, I threw up.
Ignoring the kid, I hitched the blaster into my belt holster. Looking up, I followed our silver, cigar-shaped transport as it made a wide, soundless loop above towering evergreens before swooping down to the clearing where we were to be picked up. As the rest of the platoon gathering around us, the Sarge started his usual grousing that we had let too many pukes get away.
“You bastards are too fucking slow,” he growled.
He was constantly carping at us like that, doing his job, I guess. Like the rest of us, doing what he had to do to stay alive, though sometimes he seemed to enjoy it a tad too much.
This time, Sarge glanced my way. “How many you get, Spence?”
I frowned. I hadn’t counted. I had to squint at the read-out on my blaster which gave a fairly accurate count how many of my fellow human beings I had murdered on this particular hunt.
“Eight,” I told him.
That was pretty good on any hunt. Tribe humans were crafty, tenacious pests who slithered and hid like mice in the deep forest brush. Sarge nodded, pleased, knowing that I was a wily veteran and a good shot.
He went around the platoon and grilled some of the others. When old man Lewis said: “Four,” Sarge burst out laughing.
“You got nada, old man,” he said. “Zip.”
The Sarge snatched the old man’s blaster from his trembling hands and squinted at the read out box. After a moment, he looked up with a forced grin on his wide, hard face chipped from granite. But he did not look happy.
“You keep this up your fucking days are numbered,” he snorted and tossed the blaster back into the old man’s gut. He’d been riding Lewis hard lately for his nonexistent kill numbers. “You hear me, old man?”
Lewis nodded glumly. He was keenly aware that his days were numbered. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was either going senile or just couldn’t kill anymore. Either way, he’d be toast if he kept failing to get his quota.
We had to wait in the stifling hold of the transport while a scavenger team collected the dead or injured puke bodies and tossed them into a pile of human meat. Babies, children. Husbands and wives. Doused with gasoline and flamed, dead or alive.
We cheered as the fire roared up into the stench of a high summer wind. Had to. Meant we’d live another day.
There was no sense of acceleration as the transport rose into the cloudless sky and proceeded back to camp that bright blue summer afternoon. It was as if the thing had not even left the ground. No lift, no decline, no landing thump. But it got us to our destination somehow, by some marvelous technology years ahead of what we humans had come up with by the time the ETs came.
During the trip back, while our comrades, including the bright-eyed, blond haired new kid dozed or simply stared ahead mindlessly, Larmer turned and whispered into my ear, “Word is, they’re bringing girls tonight.”
I grunted, still thinking of the scrawny, desperate face of teenage girl whose head I had seared clean off only minutes ago.
“It’s been what, three weeks,” Larmer went on. “I could use a hump.”
I shrugged. To be honest, so could I. But still it made me sick like everything else to think of the poor little girls, some of them just beyond puberty, sent to please us.
“You sure ain’t saying much today, hombre,” Larmer commented.
Suddenly, the transport door opened. We had already returned to the small pad at the edge of our camp.
I shrugged.
“What’s to say?” I stood with the rest of the killers and waited at the uplifted wing-door. When it was my turn, I hopped out ahead of Larmer into the afternoon glare. Squinting back at him, I hissed, “What we outta do, if we had any balls, is turn the goddamn blasters on them.”
If I had been talking to anyone else, I wouldn’t have said that. As it were, Larmer stopped me with a cold stare.
“Don’t involve me in that kind of crap talk, hombre,” he said as we started double-timing it with the rest of the platoon towards the barracks. Then he smiled, and as my friend, turned to me with a quick wink. “Partner, just do what you gotta do. Okay?”
That was our mantra, our battle cry: “Do what you gotta do.” But after almost two years, and roughly five hundred kills, it was growing thin on me.
“I’m gonna run someday,” I went on anyway, panting, as we squeezed into the long dirt path that led from the transport landing pads to the barracks. “One of these goddamn days, I’m gonna run and let the collar choke the life outta me. Sear my fucking head off.”
“Now, that is silly shit talk, hombre,” Larmer huffed behind me.
He was a massive black man with a gorilla chest, thick arms and skin dark as fudge. In his former life, he had played defensive end in the National Football League. How bizarre it was to think that he was making millions tackling quarterbacks only two years ago, before the ET motherfuckers came and blew mankind away. Just like in the movies, except this time there was no Hollywood box-office happy ending.
“That…hombre,” Larmer went on in between huffs and puffs as we finally neared the barracks, and grabbing at the glimmering silver ring around his own thick neck, “is … one … gross … way … to … die.” He puffed out again: “Ever .. seen … it?”
I’d seen it. A false hit. During a routine march behind this guy, his collar had malfunctioned - the computer chip or whatever that controlled it activated, thinking that its wearer was trying to escape.
What I saw after that wasn’t pretty. Zap, just like that, the poor bastard fell in a lump to the ground, writhing and screaming, cursing, slithering and grabbing at his neck, as the collar lit up like a red-hot poker. Until he couldn’t fight it anymore, only scream, vomit last night’s dinner, piss and shit his pants, as the fucking thing got hotter and hotter and hotter around the quivering muscle and bone of his neck. Blood started oozing out of the wound, gurgling, spurting non-stop, until finally, and quite literally, his head seared off. His fucking head seared off! The poor fuck didn’t look too good after that, with his head detached from his torso, his body still twitching, his eyes bulging, his swelled tongue long and purple, licking dust off the ground.
“Yeah,” I told Larmer, “I seen it.”
I often thought that maybe it hadn’t been a malfunction. Maybe the ETs occasionally picked a killer at random, and used the collar to sear his head off, just for show. To scare us shitless into obedience like nothing else could.
Larmer let go an exaggerated shiver.
“Then how could you say you’d choose to go like that?”
I shrugged.
“There’s gotta be a way out of this crazy fucking life,” I said. “There has to fucking be.”
We finally arrived at the dirt clearing in front of the barracks, our home, a corrugated Quonset hut just like in the Marines.
“Ain’t,” Larmer answered.
And he was right. Something turned off the blaster mechanism so you couldn’t even shoot yourself. Would work the same way if you tried to kill a sarge or a fellow killer, followed by the collar going red hot, and searing your head off. Thus, no suicides, no mutiny.
Just kill, kill, kill.....
Sarge barked that after chow, there’d be another blaster inspection. Our kill ratio was down, way below quota, he yapped, worst in the battalion (though that was probably bullshit). And if it continued like that it would not only be his ass, but ours, too.
“No ladies either!” he screamed, “until you puke bastards shape up.”
Larmer swore under his breath as the Sarge stormed out of the barracks.
“Fuckin’ eh,” he moaned, as he took out his blaster and started taking it apart.
The whistle blew for chow and we quickly finished reassembling our blasters before rushing outside and getting into formation. As usual, old man Lewis marched us, though it was funny to watch him limp alongside the platoon, desperately trying to keep up and look snappy. Another reason his time was definitely short for this world. The lucky bastard, I thought, though I didn’t envy how he’d be pulverized in a puff of ash and smoke.
The mess hall was buzzing by the time we got there. Word was that Bravo Company had just returned from a patrol in which they’d bagged two hundred. Two fucking hundred. Some kind of killer record, must have been.
This caused Sarge to waltz up to our table and piss and moan over our measly take that afternoon.
“A lousy fifty,” he spat, and looked over at Bravo Company’s table.
They were in a swagger over the accomplishment, which made me even sicker. Sick fucks, all of them. Don’t you realize what you’re really doing? Killing not them, but us! I wanted to stand up and shout it out for everyone to hear and realize. But I knew that after barely a sentence of such mutinous talk, I’d be blasted by one of the sarges, pulverized. Then, quickly forgotten.
“Yeah,” continued Sarge, “go ahead, eat, fill your big fat bellies. Bravo is numero uno right now, best in the battalion, now and probably forever, and don’t you forget it!”
When I saw veins popping out of his neck, and across his stone forehead, I realized how pissed off he really was.
After glaring at us awhile longer, with our mush of food growing colder and more tasteless than it already was, Sarge about-faced and like the kiss ass that he was, strode over to the Bravo Company table. Smiling no less, he congratulated their sarge with the sharpest salute he could muster.
“Big friggin deal,” spat Curly Joe from the other end of the table. He was a tall, gangly Texan with a slow drawl. “Two hundred. Dropped into a lucky zone, is what I say. A fucking puke anthill.”
“We just let too many get away,” that new kid piped up disagreeably. He glared across the long table at Curly Joe. “It had nothing to do luck. We just got too many bad shots, or killers without the stomach for the job.”
It wasn’t right for a goddamned rookie to speak up that way. Like he owned the place.
“Shut the fuck up, Rook,” Curly-Joe drawled, returning the glare. “You speak when you’re spoken to.”
Sarge returned to interrupt the feud.
“Hurry up, fuck-ups,” he bellowed. “We got an inspection waiting.”
Somebody made a gink noise from the other end, causing Sarge to bang the table, sending plates and mush and cups flying.
“Look you fucking useless bungholes,” he snarled, “I got no time for your funny bullshit. We got numbers to reach and you ain’t holding up your end of the bargain. This keeps up and I promise I’ll be sending you away like I did the Harley Man and the Injun Chief last month. You know I can do that and I did and I will.” He drew in a breath. “So quit the bullshit horsecrap.”
The whistle blew and we re-assembled outside the mess hall. First thing I noticed was that old man Lewis was no longer our platoon leader.
In fact, he was quite gone.
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