I decided to take matters into my own hands when part of my trench mate’s head landed in my lap. Most people don’t realize that an arrow can blow apart a man’s skull about as well as a bullet, or even as well as one of those new Pasers. The enemy was almost as poor as us, and we were fighting in a lo-fund sector, so rumor had it they raided old museums for weapons. Our bows were newer, but not that great. I had a hunch the old ones worked better.

By the time I entered the war we were fifteen years into it. Between the two armies, thirty million soldiers were fighting, not including support personnel. Weapons manufacturing just couldn’t keep up—especially the enemy’s. Both sides started to improvise. You never knew what you might get killed by: manic-gas strafed from a heli, swizzle sticks that made soup in your trench, chunks of building flung from high-power trebuchets, scorch-lights that fried your synapses, or an old arrow.

I stared at the dead guy. His cigarette was still burning. It sounds nasty, I know, but I took it and put it in my mouth. We had to earn our smokes. If we moved our line forward a quarter mile our company got a week’s rations of cigarettes. We hadn’t moved in months.

I didn’t even know the guy’s name. It was a jinx to introduce yourself. Say your name and you’re sure to get shot. Let a journie take your picture and you’ll get killed. Names and pictures gave away power, like they could control the fate of your soul or something. Weapons weren’t the only old thing we adopted during the war.

His wound steamed in the cold air. I dragged heavy on the cigarette, hoping the smoke would cover the smell of his blood. No point in scrounging further. His boots and body armor were worse than mine. I was only a year into my tour.

My sergeant poked his head in my trench, and then rolled inside and crouched down next to me. “What? Got shot?” Sarge was always one for stating the obvious.

I picked up the arrow and showed him. It had sliced through the guy’s head without breaking because it had a titanium broadhead and a carbon shaft—the kind people used for deer hunting back when there were deer.

“Got up to take a leak and got hit from the back,” I said, tossing the arrow down.

“Dumb way to go,” Sarge said, nodding sagely. “Give a smoke, Snipe.”

That’s what they called me, Snipe, because I was one of the company rifle snipers.

I gave him the cigarette. I didn’t want to, but Sarge was Sarge. You didn’t fuck with him.

Cigarette dangling from his lips, Sarge lifted his bow and nocked the bloody arrow. Then he peeked over the edge of the trench, laid his bow parallel to the ground, and shot. We were closer than I usually posed as a sniper, about thirty meters away from their trenches. I’d been providing cover while the dead guy dug.

“Gotcha.” Sarge gave me a wry grin. It had been a clean shot, no scream. “Irony, isn’t it called? Hitting a Sacred with their own bullet.”

“Arrow,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Where’d you get him?” I asked.

“Her. In the throat.”

Sending fems up to the front lines was one of the things the enemy had done on the psych front. I got over killing them pretty quick, though. We had to.

I washed the blood off my cloak with some water from my bottle and waited for him to give my cigarette back.

Sarge took the last drag and threw it down in the mud. “Get back to it. I’ll send de-con to clean up this mess.”

“Thanks.”

But I didn’t start shooting right away. I counted my bullets instead. It was one of those compulsions I got from living in a trench. We all had them. A lot of guys shined their boots. I can’t tell you how many dead guys I saw with clean boots. Some guys wrote back home like crazy, their fingers cramped from chatting on their personals until they could barely pull the strings on their bows or grip a shovel. I could give a fuck about how my boots looked, and I had traded my personal for beer, so I counted bullets. I had nine left.

And that’s what got me to thinking.

I thought about those nine bullets. I could fire them all and take out nine frontline enemy and call it day and it wouldn’t make much difference because now that they had the fems the Sacreds had no shortage of bodies to put in their trenches.

The journies wrote about all the senseless killing in “Time” and “War Weekly”. They said we hit the twenty million mark not long ago, and rehashed how they never thought we’d hit a million. I don’t remember when a million made headlines because I was just a little kid then. But still, even knowing the numbers, you sort of had to be there to get how stupid it all was.

I looked at the dead guy next to me, who had just been trying to piss, and my mind made itself up.

I crawled out of my trench, belly dragging, keeping low. We dug gutters between the trenches, just deep enough to snake through. We weren’t supposed to do it. Trench regs said a meter deep minimum. But it saved a hell of a lot of time and labor, and got us firing quicker.

Of course, we hadn’t moved the line in months. We would have had plenty of time to dig the trenches right.

“Where you going?” Sarge asked me, as I passed by his hole. He had his personal up to his ear, talking to Topeka, probably.

“Out of bullets,” I said. Lied. Whatever.

He gave me a funny look. I’d been in his company long enough that he knew about me counting bullets. I never ran out. But he didn’t say anything.

I hung around the cache-hut for awhile. Somebody had boiled potatoes. Most days one guy would fix a whole bunch of stuff, enough for the whole company, but our rations were low since it was the end of the month. I didn’t really care what I ate, but I wished for a beer.

The other sniper was firing. It sounded like a cannon going off. He was way down the line from me, but the guy carried one big-shit gun with a piggy-back grenade canister. He was third tour so he had his pick. The line had heated up again, so everybody was busy.

Now was as good a time as any.

I had to crawl the rear gutters to get out of range. They ran about a thousand meters behind the trenches. It doesn’t sound far, but it’s a long way to go on your belly. I was used to it though. My biceps were as big as my calves because I used them so much to get around.

Once I was out of range, I just got up and started walking. The trenches were muddy from the melted snow, but the fields were pretty dry. I strapped my flasher to my chest so the checkers would know I wasn’t a hostile, and most of them didn’t give me a second glance. Guys walked back there all the time.

I passed a labyrinth left from enemy occupation days. It was an ugly thing, just a spiral of burned dirt through the dead grass. That was about the stupidest thing I’d heard of the enemy doing, as if walking in circles would keep somebody from getting shot. We should have acid-blasted it for morale, but who had the time?

Finally, about three miles out, a checker stopped me.

“Got your leave on your personal?” he asked. I could see he was all about the regs and creds.

“I don’t have a personal, sir,” I said. “It got stolen. I’m legit, though. I’m on an errand for my Sarge.”

“What’s your I.D.? I have to call you in.”

I started to panic as I thought how much trouble I’d be in if I was blown. He was alone at the checkpoint so I shot him. It wasn’t the best decision, I admit it. Stupid to waste one of my bullets. But I featured eight would be more than enough to do what I was planning. I’m a dead-on aim. That’s why Sarge liked me as a sniper. I kept track of my bullets, and I didn’t waste them.

I was well behind our lines, so I didn’t have to worry too much about getting hit. Nobody else stopped me, and by morning I was in Hutchinson.

The town didn’t have much left to it. It had been frontline for almost a year, before we shot them back and dug in seven miles to the south-east, where we were now. That had been a rush, leaping forward like that.

Now, I knew better. We hadn’t gotten out of Kansas in four years. Getting stalled out that long meant the war would just go on and on.

I put away my flasher as I walked into a little bar on the main street. Dawn was just breaking, but they kept the bars open 24/7.

“On leave?”

I shook my head and leaned on the counter to drink my beer. “Mission.”

The bartender eyed my camo cloak and my rifle, slung across my back. The barrel stuck way up over my shoulder. It was a long-range gun with a flash and noise suppressor, and I’m short.

“You’re an infantry sniper?”

“Front line, sir.” I snapped off a salute. The locals like military-speak.

“And how’s it going up there?”

I shrugged and didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? Small talk is for peace time.

“I’ve been open since occupation ended,” the bartender said, like he deserved a medal for it.

Big fucking deal. No point in disrespect, though, so I glanced around. The bar had seen better days, for sure. It was dark in there, with the blown-out windows all boarded up and the daytime power outage reg.

He featured I didn’t feel much like talking and left me alone. I drank my warm beer and ordered another, all the while thinking about what I had to do and how I could get it done.

I had a little money saved. There isn’t much time to spend your pay when you’re trenched. I didn’t have anybody to send cash to. My whole family had died in the first San Francisco gassing, when the enemy almost won three years ago. I’d been away at Boy Scout camp.

“Are there any enemy recovery shops around?” I asked the bartender.

He nodded. “Just down the street, there, on the left.”

“I just want some souvenirs to send home,” I said, in case it was odd that I wanted to go there. “Crosses and stuff.”

“So they think you took it right off the enemy, eh?”

“Right.” I was getting to be a cred liar, which probably would come in handy.

It was a good shop because of the occupation. The enemy uniforms were a lot like ours; brown and cheap. T-shirt, pants, armor with ID patches, and snipers always got a beam-deflective camo cloak instead of a jacket, even on the enemy side. The idea was that we could lay flat on the ground with just the nose of our weapon sticking out and no one would see us, even with an LED flood on us. I didn’t care how tech the gear was; I never cached my life like that. Neither did anybody else I knew. But the cloak was warm and a cred rag.

I bought a couple of crosses to hang around my neck, some armor with their patches, and a blue t-shirt that said “Crusading for God since 1095.”

Transport was harder to arrange, but I found a repair shop and bought a GI-Tran on the sneak. They could say it was stolen easily enough, and I got it for only 2K. And the enemy used Chrysler, too, so I’d blend right in once I unscrewed the Secular Independent Army plates.

I loaded up the GI-Tran with my gun and new clothes and started driving toward Wichita, avoiding trench terra. About two miles out I stopped to put on the armor and the t-shirt and the crosses. I covered it all with my cloak. Snipe rags gave you cred in SIA no matter what your rank was, and I cached it would on the enemy side, too. Besides, the city had been under enemy occupation for so long that I figured their guards would be slack.

They stopped me outside the limits, at a barricade made of old kegs. I could have driven around it, or even through the barrels; the treads on my GI-Tran were huge. But I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

I examined the two guys as they walked up to me. They had a canister-style grenade shooter. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a church at ten meters with one of those things. I relaxed.

“Coming from enemy terra?” the guy asked me. Funny how he didn’t have an accent. I’d guessed they all had the same drawl as their General Norwood.

I nodded. “Sniper mission.”

“Got I.D.?”

I sniffed, like he was an idiot. He was; he was just barricade meat. “Can’t carry in case of capture.”

He seemed to accept that. “Mission complete?”

I nodded.

“Oh, yeah? Who’d you get?”

“NTN, I guess,” I said. Jarg for need-to-know.

He gave me an odd look. But it was pretty common jarg, right? I’d heard it on the Net before I’d ever thought of joining SIA.

“Snipes always think they’re cagey,” the other guy said, shitting me, but not quite smiling, either. He waved me through.

I felt their eyes on the back of my head for a long time after, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing them a favor. The enemy were all dying, too.

There aren’t bars in occupied towns, so I wasn’t sure where to go to get the gossip. And then it hit me like a flop-bomb: church, of course. I found the nearest and went inside. There were plenty of guys and fems around, talking. The service had just ended.

They were friendly enough when they saw my cloak.

“I’m Kelly. You’re new?” one fem asked me. She was a blonde and cute, and she filled out her rags in mostly the right ways.

I nodded. “Yeah, just back from Oklahoma City.” That was where their Basic was. Every SIA trench rat knew if we could get to Oklahoma City we’d win the war.

“See Norwood while you were there?” another guy asked. After a minute I featured he was shitting me.

“No, sir,” I said, trying to sound regulation. “Was he there? Did I miss him?”

“Still there. Been there a month.”

I played with one of my crosses and wondered what to say.

The guy reached out and touched my cross. “I like that.”

“My mom gave it to me,” I said. “I feature no one will kill me if I’ve got God’s charm on.”

“Oh, you are green.” His laugh was rough. The way he didn’t quite look at me straight made me feel itchy. He was so pale and skinny, I knew I could take him.

“Well, I’d better go find out where I’m supposed to sleep,” I said. I needed to get away before I did something stupid.

“Yeah. Come back around, anytime. You’re funny.”

Real funny. But now I had a place to go.

When I got back in the GI-Tran I was feeling pretty good about how things were working out. I had gotten across enemy lines with no hitch. But if this was the enemy, then why weren’t we winning the war? It only confirmed my suspicion that the stupidity of both sides started at the top. I started my Tran and headed south, for Oklahoma City.

The trouble started on the road. I realized my GI-Tran wasn’t quite right. I passed several of their transports, and mine was a lot newer than theirs. It even got some looks, which wasn’t good at all.

Finally, I turned off down a dirt road toward a farm. The house was all boarded up and the barn door hung open, half off its hinges. There weren’t any animals, of course.

I banged up the GI-Tran with the butt of my rifle, and threw some mud on it. When I stood back to look it over, I heard a voice from behind me.

“What are you doing to that perfectly good truck?”

I spun, shocked. I thought the farm was deserted. An older lady stood there, watching me. She still looked pretty good for being forty or something, and she held a bunch of flowers in her hands.

“It’s a disguise, ma’am,” I said. True enough, and she looked too smart to believe a lie.

“Disguise for what?”

“A mission.”

She nodded, but she still stared at me. “You look hungry. Do you have time to eat? I have soup on.”

As soon as she said it, I realized I was starving. Lots of times in the trenches I went a day without eating, so I was used to it. But the last thing I’d had were those beers, and my stomach twisted when she talked about soup.

“I’d appreciate it, ma’am,” I said and followed her into the house.

She sat me down in her kitchen. The windows hadn’t been blown out back there and they were sparkly and clean, like diamonds in the sun. Those windows might just be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I sat and stared at them while she poured the soup and put the flowers in water.

We talked about stuff I didn’t have to lie about: her windows and the cold weather and how she waited in line at Oklahoma City for the beans and how sad she was that there were no more animals on her farm. Her voice was smooth and drawly, like Norwood’s. I liked it.

“How long have you been on the Crusade?” she asked.

Something about the question put a spark of alarm in me, like an icicle shoved in my gut.

I featured I’d keep to the truth as best I could to keep my story straight. “A year. I’m halfway through my tour.”

She paused, and then nodded. “You’re young to be a sniper.”

I still had the cloak on. It was cold in the kitchen, even with the windows and her stove going. I said, even though it wasn’t a question, “I learned to shoot in Boy Scouts.”

“Where are you headed?”

I figured there was no harm in telling. She was just a farm-wife or something. “Oklahoma City.” I paused, but the quiet made me nervous. “I’m going to hear General Norwood speak.”

She didn’t seem interested in that, though, because she changed the subject. “It’s been a while since you had a haircut, huh?”

I shrugged and grinned. My hair hung to my shoulders. “There’s no barbers in the trenches, ma’am.”

“Do you want one? A haircut?”

It seemed cagey. Why would she want to give me a haircut? “I...I guess so.”

“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll go get my scissors.”

She got up and started to leave the kitchen, and added over her shoulder, “You might want to take your shirt off. It’ll be easier to clean up the hair.”

I sat there for a minute, thinking, but I couldn’t feature a hitch with letting her cut my hair. It would make me blend better with the Crusaders, anyway. Most of them kept their hair really short. So I pulled off my cloak and my t-shirt and my armor and dropped them in a pile on the floor.

It was pretty cold sitting there with no shirt on, but she came back and started right away. She even brought a little mirror. She cut it as short as they did at Basic. I stared at myself in the mirror while she brushed all the hair from my neck and shoulders and back. I felt like a different person.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now you look like a proper Crusader.”

She left to put the scissors away. I got dressed again and waited for the tingly feeling from her fingers to go away.

“Thanks for the meal,” I said when she got back. “And the haircut.”

She walked me out to the GI-Tran and I got in.

“You know,” she said, and I waited. “My son died two years ago in the trenches near Kansas City. He had just turned nineteen.”

I stared at my steering grip and told her I was sorry.

“I’ve thought a lot about the war,” she said. “I think God hates all this killing.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had no idea what God wanted.

“Of course, you’re probably young enough that you don’t remember this country the way it was before. How old are you? Sixteen?”

I don’t know why I didn’t lie. “In May.”

She smiled, really sad-like, and I knew she was thinking I wouldn’t live long enough to turn sixteen. But I was a pretty cagey trench-rat. I knew better than to get up when I was taking a piss.

Of course, there weren’t any trenches where I was going.

“Thanks again,” I said, and I drove off.

That haircut got me into Oklahoma City, no hitch. Everyone was clean-cut there. If I’d had long hair I’d have been blown for sure.

I hung around the churches for two days, just listening. When I finally heard where Norwood would speak next, I went and scoped it. The church was huge, with two balconies. It fit hundreds of people. I wondered where I could pose without being seen and how I was going to get away afterward. Finally, I decided the light booth was the best place. I had no idea how to work the lights, but I’d just have to bully the guy in the booth into doing it while I took my shot. I left my gun on top of a ceiling tile and went to go sleep, though I couldn’t. All I did was stare at the ceiling of my GI-Tran, wishing the dry, hollow feeling in my throat would go away.

I felt better once I had my gun back in my hands. Turned out there was no lights guy—the whole thing was run by processor. Norwood got on the stage. I listened to him for a while, and it surprised me how he talked so much like our general, except for all the praying. He had black hair, really short, and he wore little rectangular glasses.

When everybody bowed their heads to pray again, I took my shot. His glasses stayed on his face, just under the hole I made. His blood splashed on the big cross that hung behind the table, and all over the floor. I’ve seen a lot of guys die, but he had a lot of blood in him.

This panicky scream went up from the people like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It made me sick to my stomach, but I climbed up through the ceiling tiles to hide without waiting to see what the crowd was doing. It smelled dusty up there, and I had to fight not to sneeze. Old rafters over the tiles went all the way across the sanctuary. I crawled along one in the dark, trying not to think how far down the ground was. I heard voices forever, first the crowd, and then investigators. Every time a door slammed I hugged my beam tighter, but no one ever lifted a ceiling tile.

I didn’t dare move for hours, until I was more tired than scared and my watch glowed four a.m. I thought I’d have to break out of the church so late at night, but who knew churches were left open all the time? I climbed down and headed for the door.

“What are you doing in here with that?”

I stopped and turned around. My heart already started pounding hard again, but it was just a bald guy in jeans and a t-shirt. No gun. No knife. “I, um...”

He tipped his head and looked at me closely. “It’s just that we usually ask that you leave your gun in the foyer rack.”

I looked down at myself and saw my gun strap across my t-shirt. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“A simple mistake.” He didn’t smile, though. “You didn’t answer my question.”

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“It’s been a difficult day. Seeking solace is natural,” he said, finally. “Never be afraid to admit you’re praying.”

Praying. I sucked in a breath, trying not to be too noisy about it. “Um, ok.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed it. “Do you want to talk about it? Might help you feel better.”

“No.” I had to fight not to twist away. “I have to get back to my company. Thanks, though.”

“Okay,” he said, and dropped his hand to his side.

I beat it out of there and got in my G-Tran and drove away. I put the heat on full blast, but I couldn’t quit shaking.

I stopped at the intersection and looked down the dirt road toward the farm, even though it was late at night. I could just make out the house. I thought of the diamond windows and how the soup had smelled. Before I knew it, I had to open the door and throw up. I stumbled out of the Tran and waited on my hands and knees for it to stop. I shouldn’t have eaten anything while I waited in the ceiling, I guess.

Getting back into SIA terra with no creds was harder than leaving. I wasted the crosses and armor and t-shirt before I got to the barricade, but they didn’t like my haircut.

“Look,” I said. “I was on a mission. I can’t take creds into enemy terra.”

“A mission, he says,” the guard said. “Next he’s gonna be saying he’s the one who shot Norwood.”

I tightened all over. I really didn’t like his attitude. “What if I did? You got a hitch with it?”

The guard rolled his eyes. “You snipes think you are some cagey shit, with your fancy haircuts and NTN ops. You’re nothing but a glorified trench-rat.”

I shouldn’t have been insulted by that, but something in me snapped. “At least I’m not working barricade instead of really fight—”

Two guys dragged him off me, but not before he’d ripped me pretty good. He broke my nose because I started bleeding worse than the guy who got shot next to me in the trench.

“Go on,” one of the guys said to me. “Get out of here.”

I drove through the barricade, even though my nose hurt so much I could barely see. My stomach flipped over again, and I gagged until I shook, but there was nothing left. Somehow it all didn’t seem worth it.

The second piece of bad luck I got was that our general was in Seattle and had no plans to come to Kansas or the Midwest anytime soon. I found out in Hutchinson. There was no way I was driving all the way to Washington just to kill the guy.

The third was that my line had heated up and might get pushed back again. Norwood dying had riled the Sacreds.

I went back to the bar and cleaned myself up in the bathroom as best I could.

“Mission accomplished?” the bartender asked.

I shrugged and took a drink of my beer.

“Looks like you took a beating,” he said. Real observational-like.

“I’m all right.”

“Going back to the trenches?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”

“How long you got left on your tour?” he asked.

“Half-way through. I got a year left.”

“Aren’t you glad you aren’t fighting on the other side? Their tours are three years long.”

The farm lady had questioned me about my tour.

The air went out of my chest like when the crowd had screamed. I had to swallow hard to keep my beer down.

She’d known. She’d known, and she’d helped me anyway.

“You all right?” he asked. “You look sick or something.”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly. “I’m glad I’m not fighting on the other side.”

It took me the whole walk back to calm down, and by the time I quit shaking I could barely keep my eyes open. I found Sarge in the cache-hut when I got there.

“Where have you been? Get in a fight?”

I was too tired to lie. “I went to Oklahoma City and shot Norwood.”

“Oh, yeah?” He didn’t believe me, but he was willing to play along. “Why would you want to do that?”

“To stop the war.”

He laughed until his eyes watered and he rubbed my short hair, hard. “Cagey rat. You think there isn’t somebody who will come right behind Norwood and keep the whole thing going?”

Everything sort of stopped right then. I heard the other sniper banging away, the twang of the bowstrings, a shell that landed way down at the end of our line, and a deep scream when somebody got hit, but it sounded like it was a recording on a personal. It didn’t sound real.

“I didn’t… I didn’t think of that.”

Sarge stopped laughing. After looking at me for a minute, his voice went steady, like he was explaining something hard to understand. “Look, kid, it seems like it’s all for nothing when you’re stuck in a trench and the enemy keeps refilling in front of you. But it’s not. It’s for freedom.”

I looked up at him. Sarge was a pretty tall guy. He was older, too, like twenty-seven. I’d heard a rumor that he was married and had kids. I wondered if that was true.

“The Sacreds think it’s for God,” I said.

Sarge nodded, still quiet and gentle. “But, God doesn’t hold with killing, so they’re wrong.”

“You believe in God, Sarge?”

“Fuck yeah, I believe.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I felt really stupid all the sudden. My head ached, like I was coming down with something. Or maybe it was from getting my bells rung by that barricade guard. “You gonna report me?”

Sarge shook his head. “Get back to your trench and do your job.”

I started to walk out of the cache-hut, but he stopped me.

“How many bullets you got?” he asked.

I answered without thinking. “Seven.”

“I thought you said you were out.” He grabbed a box and tossed it to me. “Whatever. You’re gonna need some more.”

 

# # #

To Stop A War by Betsy Dornbusch
originally published December 28, 2009