The room felt like all the blood had just been washed off the floor, a sterile hollow feel.  Outside the weather had gone from zero visibility dust storm to medium-grade flood, mud forming up in the air into crumb-sized balls that sanded the front door and drifted up the curbs and gutters. The myth of global climate change had gotten all offended about not being taken seriously, and turned itself into an angry and vengeful thing, a God that had little mercy for the plight of humanity.

We'd adapted, Joe and I.  He'd been my spotter, a sidekick and best friend.  We'd fought together, were eventually closer than brothers, closer than lovers, close as blood under skin.  Couples fight and argue because of secrets, because they cannot always honestly be themselves, but Joe and I depended on that brutal truthful total honesty, lived and died by it.  If we couldn't sort one another out in the pre-mission shakedown, if we had any doubt about intention or loyalty or honesty, we'd not have survived war.  But we clicked.  A lot of teams didn't but we did.  Same background, sort of proto-redneck, wannabe hillbilly.  Same ambitions.  Same soundtrack, similar girls back home, same make and model of pickup though mine was a year newer.

The mud-encrusted world outside of the front door, a simple pine slat affair reinforced with steel and carbon plating, was filled with enemies just beyond the haze.  Always just out of sight.  They looked like everyone else, they talked like everyone else, they smelled like everyone else, they died like everyone else.  They weren't a monster, you had to keep telling yourself they weren't a monster.  Just men, women, children sometimes.  They were out there huddled in the mud huts, the adobe walls buried and badly rebuilt by these mud storms.  The enemy fought with passion, without remorse, and they lived shoved into tiny houses, huddled over one another, writhing in fear and anger.  We rode the streets in tanks and uparmored SPAPCs, robotically controlled MPPVs, fast attack dune buggies, those LAV things that the SFO guys all whooped around in.  We invaded their homes, but could not billet there; the homes were too small, too flimsy, the mud walls too easy to breech with high explosive and evil intent.

Since the invasion, we'd pushed them all the way back to the canal in the south, but they closed in around us like sand.  At any given moment, we were surrounded by a million angry, hungry, terrified people.  Just where we wanted to be.  Surrounded by an ocean of humanity that seemed to disregard our presence in the larger view; if I were lucky enough to get 100 miles away from here, the people I met would not know what I was.  We fought for the corridor, we secured the transport of goods, but we had no interest in a flooded country filled with the teeming biomass.  We had enough problems at home, thanks.

Joe and I thought it was strange that the old Armies of the US used to have goals like: take an entire country.  Invade and, what, jail everyone?  Convert everyone to Universal Truth?  I mean, how do you do that?  Joe would say, maybe back then the population was smaller, but we looked it up and there used to be five billion people on the planet.  Joe and I both couldn't comprehend it.  Easily two billion more than we had now.  Five billion people, and you maybe want to ride in and control them?  Some number of hundreds of millions at best?  No way, Jose.  That's suicide right there.  That's just old fashioned dumb-headedness, Joe would say.  They used to believe in fire gods and television evangelists, too.

The room was being heavily pelted now by the remains of the hurricane.  Joe's body slumped in the corner, a deflated rag doll, joints out at strange angles.  I walked over to him in the flickering light, the wind screaming, the roof of the PPLU screeching against reinforced steel and nylon.  The mud storm grew into waves outside, ankle deep channels of slick black crap running fast down the road.  I pulled him by his feet, trying not to think of this body as Joe.  Joe my blood brother, Joe my road guard, Joe my angel.  Joe my only protection when I was sunk deep into The Trance, eyes and head only aware of the target.  The Target, some head of some body of some enemy who had done us wrong.  The Target, sometimes just a man or a woman or a child who managed to rise up, wise up, raise up.  Just yesterday a farmer, trying to divert a supply of sand bags that would have saved his field from the mud storm, would have given him just a little edge over his neighbors.  But would have broken the law.  The Universal Truth said, no stealing.  His head turned into a cloud of pink just as the first two rounds shook Joe's body, Joe already had been yelling at me to run, run, bug out, we'd been targeted but I was deep into it.  That first round, a 20mm anti-material round from a friendly zoomie.  The second round intended for me, but Joe's last twitching gasping move was to catch it as well, catch this gigantic slug of metal as the jet peeled by, closing the world in sound and kerosene sere.

Joe's vest held his body together long enough for me to drag him to cover, a quickly assembled PPLU left here by our placement team.  One of his arms seemed to be missing, and his chest wasn't really there anymore.

His body, a bag of vital fluids, leaking, dead before I could hear even one last word.  The trail his backpack had dug in the hill was filled with violet and too-bright red of oxygenated blood.

I like to think it wasn't as painful as it was.

My radio had crackled a few times, someone trying to verify our location.  The pilot had reported hitting two insurgents in our coordinates, and I heard only his end of the "Oh Shit!" moment.  He sounded cool, calm, not too badly shaken that he'd killed a fellow Marine.  When I found out who he was, I was going to kill his family.  Torture his pets in front of his kids, in front of him.  Drag his body through the streets of his hometown, tied to Joe's truck.  I was going to take my time, sweet and slow, and let the vengeance pour out of me like thick viscous acid.  This thought pleased me, relaxed me, gave me control as I secured the PPLU and started the generator.

The storm picked up again, my handheld showing the eye only a few miles south of us.  The eye would not come near us.  We would get the worst of the storm, but no relief until it passed.  The lightbulb flickered, the LEDs getting dim as the electromagnetic portion of the storm grew in size and bore down on us.  All that heat and dust and dry and all this storm all combined to make a fuckload of electricity, and God Himself would have been startled by the lightning once it crested over us, started to try and cover the landscape in earnest.  As the wind picked up, the lightning hit too fast to count or properly comprehend.

Joe had talked about the old wars, about artillery attacks and how completely random they were if you were on the receiving end.  Joe talked about when his grandfather had been killed by Palestinian artillery.  He told me the story, how they'd just sat down to dinner, his whole family living like rats in a cage in an occupied zone, and his grandfather had just said the blessing when, wham, that whole side of the room turned into the neighborhood.  Joe's dad was only six or so, and he just sat there, staring at the gaping hole in the building, staring at what used to be his father and his uncles, what was now a hole in space. I could imagine Joe's dad, running back toward the stairs as the floor collapsed.  That sudden incomprehensible shock, the world just gone all fucked up in one explosion.

I kept waiting to see the lightning break through the Faraday field, though the science guys said that it wasn't like that.  But I didn't trust them much.  They were the guys that invented things like smart targeting, and Joe was proof how well that worked.

This lightning saturated the ground, filled the air with a constant ripping explosion, a hideous and overloud sound that threatened to flatten the PPLU.  The other advantage the PPLU had over the mud huts and shacks was, it was secured into the ground with non-conductive spikes that were explosively driven fourteen feet into the earth.  Big barbed spikes.  Joe used to laugh about taking one up in a CH-450 and using it to harpoon Garcia the Warrior.  Garcia the Terrorist.  Garcia, the man who'd been at the center of all of this.  I harbored no hatred to Garcia, even if he did exist, because he was just a man.  No one man makes for this much blood.  The presidential committee had determined, though, that he and his army of poor land grabbers were guilty of attacks against the trains and trucks and barges that took the goods from point A and deposited them deep in the bowels of point B.  So Garcia was the point around which we gathered, protecting the corridor and shoving those in the easement past the point of interference.  Those poor fuckers in the easement.  Most had some ill-timed belief in a version of Universal Truth that just didn't gibe with the reality of economics.  Poor fuckers.

I diverted myself as much as possible from the horrorshow outside.  The PPLU had been hit my lightning fifty times from what I could count, the last one putting a pinpoint hole in the cieling that I had to repair with epoxy.  Though the PPLU was supposedly as lightning proof as any copper-infused Faraday cage, static filled the air, the hair on my arms was on end, and Joe looked like a goddamn frightwig attached to a bag of meat.  I laughed at how ridiculous his body looked.  It felt good to laugh.  I know he would have, he would have laughed at me had the tables been turned.  It meant that the Faraday field was interrupted somewhere, that I would probably be cooked if this pocket of lightning didn't pass soon.  The door was glowing, smoldering, giving off heat.  The mud sizzled as it hit the armor outside.  The pine in the door panel would be charcoal by this evening, and I'd be forced to reckon with the world.

I sat down hard in the dust as the last of the thunder clapped overhead, my headphones shutting out the shrill cap of it but doing nothing to the rumble.  The floor rattled, the walls rattled, and the light finally gave out.  Alone in the ozone darkness, the lightning moving down the street, I could finally think a bit.  I reached over to Joe, pulled his body into mine, and stole his cigarettes.

I groped for my lighter, and lit one of Joe's smokes. In the glow of my Zippo I could see, stuck between the cellophane and the cardboard, a picture of Joe and I in Utah during the tail end of the uprising two years previous.  We both smiled for the camera, dirty and tired, our sweat leaving clean rivulets against mud-colored skin.  Joe, his sunburned cheeks cracked into a smile, and me, my teeth the only white on my face, gave the thumbs up to the camera.