The Master Plan

One of the most despicable things a human being can do is shoot a seven-year-old girl in the back of the neck. Had I never sworn an oath to the Propo Peace Initiative, I would never have indulged in such depravity.
But I had. “Sorry, kid, but there’s a war on and I’ve got orders.”
Goddammit. Clutching the laser gun with one hand, I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the other.
On her knees in the mud, the girl sobbed. “No, Mister. There is no war, I swear. Please, let me go.”
Sure thing, kiddo. Had I been alone, that’s exactly what I would have done.
But I wasn’t. I was responsible for the lives of three fellow soldiers, so I flicked the arming switch and took aim.
As the capacitors charged, a little, green dot appeared below her hairline.
I raised it a few millimeters to be sure to fry the whole brain. There was no need to make her suffer more than necessary.
“Please, mister. Ask Mother. She’ll tell you that there is no war.”
“Your mother is dead, girl. You’re the last living Jecto in this godforsaken village, and it is my unpleasant task to rectify that.”
She sprang up and scurried past me on the right.
What the fuck? I spun around, stumbled, pulled the trigger, and landed on my ass in the mud.
Twenty-five meters ahead, a concrete foundation exploded in fire and smoke.
I rolled over and buried my face in shit as the shrapnel thumped down around me.
A pebble slammed into my helmet.
I looked up.
Did I get her? No, she bounced out of a smoldering window and vanished.
I fired again from prone position, igniting the window pane in a crackling blaze.
She screamed through the flames.
Good. Doubleplus fucking great. A lump formed in my throat as I staggered toward the ruins of what had been a yellow brick house this morning. Now, it was a fumigating laser barbecue.
Breakfast bubbled in my throat.
I bent forward and retched.
For seven years had I hoped this fucking war would end. But it would always take one more battle, one more raid, one more ghoulish trip to the glue factory to finalize the implementation of the Master Plan. As if that beastly plan was ever going to be fulfilled. For every unit we fed it, it wanted more, and more, and more...fuck.
I cramped up and retched again.
As I wiped the spew from my mouth, an all too familiar capacitor hummed in my neck.
Baez the Bitch. Bless her bedrock heart. I straightened my posture and put my game face on. As I turned to face her, I shut my mouth to keep the foul breath contained.
“That bad, huh.” Private Three-Ten Baez grimaced, making the scar across her withered face look like a slithering, purple snake. “At least, you had the guts to do it yourself. Where’s the body?” Baez didn’t smoke, but she sounded like she did. Too much hollering in the field had broken her voice.
I shook my head. In the back of my mouth, something stuck in a cavity. I pried it loose with the tip of my tongue so I could taste what it was.
Her eyes darkened. “What the fuck? You mean you let her go?”
“No, Baez, I did my best to roast her but she got away.”
“Your heart wasn’t in the kill. Goddammit, I should have known.” She glanced at the sky. “Any drones up there?”
“Not to my knowledge.” Undigested ‘pork’ sausage. I spat. “That girl wouldn’t be worth a missile anyway. She’s half a unit at the most.”
“Corporal Clegg, Sir. You know she’s going to run off to the nearest Jecto camp first chance she gets. The Captain is not going to like this one bit. Not one bit. Your heart must always be in the kill.”
“Yeah, yeah. Where are Ono and Lichtenstein?”
Baez pointed to an alley flanked by charred concrete walls, enveloped in thick, gray fog. “At the rover, waiting for it to charge. While you were playing bleeding heart Jesus with your Jecto girlfriend, they loaded all the cadavers onto the truck.”
“Good. Let’s go, then.” I shouldered my weapon and began walking, sweeping back and forth along the walls.
A cauterized enemy poster warned of ‘Genocidal Propos’ in the area.
Genocidal, my ass. What do they know? I pointed. “Would you look at that shit? What are we doing out here, anyway?”
“Racking up units, Sir.”
“Yeah, but why? What’s the Master Plan? Does anyone even know?”
“Our job is not to wonder why, but to do and die.” Our Army motto sounded less ominous when Baez said it. Perhaps it was her skewed smile, reminding us that somewhere in the Universe, there had to be a place where life was precious.

Thirty meters ahead, the outline of a Volvo truck formed in the smog. With its solar panels deployed, it looked like a giant vulture, feeding on the carrion of endless war.
The sight of it calmed my stomach. I hollered. “Okay girls, mount up. Beatings will continue until morale improves. Next stop, the glue factory.”
Baez snickered. “Where our sins will be forgiven.”
Private Seven-Thirty Ono leaned out the window on the driver’s side. “Where is the glue factory now? There’s no blip on the screen, and I’ve maxed out the range.” Her childish voice fit her angular face, blue eyes and blonde hair. Ono the Nerd was the smart one. Without her, I’d still be raving around, lost in some wasteland somewhere west of Limbo.
“How the hell should I know? It’s probably moving east, towards the capital. Is the truck charged?”
“In this fog? What do you think, Corporal? There’s a transformer station five clicks south. We might get power there.”
“That’s just fucking great.” I trod along the side of the gray, muddy truck. At the back, I climbed onto the platform and pulled the tarp aside. Holding my nose against the stench of blistered body tissue I tallied today’s catch. A headless man in overalls lay across two women as if trying to protect them. Three other bodies leaned against the cabin. One appeared to have been an overweight woman, the two others looked like fleshy scarecrows with burned rags fused to their skin. Six units in total. The woman clutched a garbage bag.
I opened it and peeked inside. Seven dead cats formed a twisted, hairy lump of dead meat.
Worthless. I hopped down from the platform and yelled. “What’s with all the dead cats?”
Ono sneered. “There was this cat lady--”
“Yeah. I saw her back there, thank you very much. What I want to know is why we have to transport them to the glue factory. They’re not even worth a unit.”
“Not to the glue factory, Corporal Sir. We’ll take them home.”
“Oh. Long tail rabbit, again?”
She smiled. “Yes, Sir. It’s better than ‘pork’ sausage.”
Woof, woof. “Alright, then. Where’s the rover?”
“Dead. We’ll get stranded halfway to the transformer station if we try to tow it. Lichtenstein says she can guard it until we can get the truck fully charged and come back.”
The door hissed open on the passenger side, and a Mama Bear Lichtenstein came strolling around the front of the truck.
For the first time that day, I smiled.
Four-Twenty Lichtenstein, Mother-of-all-Mothers, was the only creature on this Earth that could carry a Proto Battle uniform with the grace of a ninety-kilo ballerina. Her warm, brown eyes gazed into mine. “Corporal, Sir. Are you okay?”
I scoffed. “What do you mean, Mama Bear? Of course, I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.” She put her arms around me and squeezed the air out of me, whispering, “You couldn’t do it, could you?”
Her words pierced into my soul. My eyes teared up. I pushed her away. “I stink, Mama Bear.”
Behind me, Baez guffawed. “Don’t we all. Can we go now? We’re not home yet.”
Mama Bear Lichtenstein grabbed my shoulders. “I’ll guard the rover until you return.”
With only six units to our credit, if we lost the rover, this day would put us in a hole that it would take months to crawl out of. If we lost Lichtenstein, I’d jump head first into the shredder at the glue factory. With a commanding voice, I shouted, “No way we’re leaving Lichtenstein behind. I’ll stay. You go.” … and fistfuck me for being such an altruistic idiot.
Mama Bear tilted her head. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Okay, then. We’ll get to the transformer, Ono will do her magic, and then we’ll come and get you.”
I gazed up at the truck. Baez’ head appeared in the trapezoidal window as Mama Bear returned to her place next to Ono. The door hissed shut.

It was going to be a lonely afternoon in Shit City.

As I watched the truck whine off into the smog and disappear, a twig snapped to my right.
I pulled down the visor, armed the laser and let the green beam flicker back and forth, searching for hostile heartbeats as I footslogged forward.
A green, pulsating blip at minus twenty-two degrees showed the location of the rover.
Like an animated cell-division, the blip split in two--one stationary, the other moving rapidly North-West.
A saboteur? I ran as fast as I could through the muck until I could see the rover without visual aid.
It was facing East. Like the truck, it too had its solar panels deployed, but it didn’t look like a vulture. With its slanted armor plating and its wheels retracted, it looked like a winged iron pyramid drowning in sewage.
Out of breath, I slunk towards the vehicle, scanning for lumps of explosives along the chassis.
A pair of tiny footsteps, annotated in my visor with a slightly elevated temperature, led from the front of the rover to a motorcycle track.
Gone. I turned towards the rover and gasped.
Scribbled on in the grime across the windshield, I read, “There is no war, mister. Believe it.”