All You Need Is Kill

To be honest, Ferrell was the only man in the platoon I could use. The other soldiers had only seen two or three battles at most. Even the ones who’d survived in the past hadn’t ever gotten killed. You can’t learn from your mistakes when they kill you. These greenhorns didn’t know what it was to walk the razor’s edge between life and death. They didn’t know that the line dividing the two, the borderland piled high with corpses, was the easiest place to survive. The fear that permeated every fiber of my being was relentless, it was cruel, and it was my best hope for getting through this.

That was the only way to fight the Mimics. I didn’t know shit about any other wars, and frankly, I didn’t care to. My enemy was humanity’s enemy. The rest didn’t matter.

The fear never left me. My body trembled with it. When I sensed the presence of an enemy just outside my field of vision, I could feel it crawling along my spine. Who had told me that fear had a way of seeping into your body? Had it been the platoon leader? Or was it Ferrell? Maybe it was something I’d heard during training.

But even as the fear racks my body, it soothes me, comforts me. Soldiers who get washed away in a rush of adrenaline don’t survive. In war, fear is the woman your mother warned you about. You knew she was no good for you, but you couldn’t shake her. You had to find a way to get along, because she wasn’t going anywhere.

The 17th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Regiment, 301st Armored Infantry Division was cannon fodder. If the frontal assault succeeded, the Mimics fleeing the siege would wash over us like a torrent of water surging through a dry gully. If it failed, we’d be a lone platoon in the middle of a sea of hostiles. Either way our odds of survival were slim. The platoon commander knew it, and Sergeant Ferrell knew it. The whole company was pieced together from soldiers who’d survived the slaughter at Okinawa. Who better to give this shit assignment to? In an operation involving twenty-five thousand Jackets, if a lone company of 146 men got wiped out, it wouldn’t even rate a memo on the desk of the brass in the Defense Ministry. We were the sacrificial lambs whose blood greased the wheels of war’s machinery.

Of course, there were only three kinds of battle to begin with: fucked up, seriously fucked up, and fucked up beyond all recognition. No use panicking about it. There’d be plenty of chaos to go around. Same Jackets. Same enemy. Same buddies. Same me, same muscles that weren’t ready for what I was asking of them screaming in protest.

My body never changed, but the OS that ran it had seen a total overhaul. I’d started as a green recruit, a paper doll swept on the winds of war. I’d become a veteran who bent the war to my will. I bore the burden of endless battle like the killing machine I’d become-a machine with blood and nerves in place of oil and wires. A machine doesn’t get distracted. A machine doesn’t cry. A machine wears the same bitter smile day in, day out. It reads the battle as it unfolds. Its eyes scan for the next enemy before it’s finished killing the first, and its mind is already thinking about the third. It wasn’t lucky, and it wasn’t unlucky. It just was. So I kept fighting. If this was going to go on forever, it would go on forever.

Shoot. Run. Plant one foot, then the other. Keep moving.

A javelin tore through the air I had occupied only a tenth of a second before. It dug into the ground before detonating, blasting dirt and sand into the air. I’d caught a break. The enemy couldn’t see through the shower of falling earth-I could. There. One, two, three. I took down the Mimics through the improvised curtain of dust.

I accidentally kicked one of my buddies-the sort of kick you used to break down a door when both of your hands were full. I had a gun in my left hand and a battle axe in my right. It was a good thing God had given us two arms and legs. If I only had three appendages to work with, I wouldn’t be able to help this soldier out, whoever he was.

As I turned, I cut down another Mimic with a single blow. I ran up to the fallen soldier. He had a wolf wearing a crown painted on his armor-4th Company. If they were here, that meant we’d met up with the main assault force. The line was giving way.

The soldier’s shoulders were trembling. He was in shock. Whether it was the Mimics or my kick that had sent him into it, I couldn’t tell. He was oblivious to the world around him. If I left him there, he’d be a corpse inside of three minutes.

I put my hand on his shoulder plate and established a contact comm.

“You remember how many points we beat you by in that game?”

He didn’t answer. “You know, the one you lost to 17th Company.”

“Wh… what?” The words rasped in his throat.

“The rugby game. Don’t you remember? It was some kind of intramural record, so I figure we musta beat you by at least ten, twenty points.”

I realized what I was doing.