Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 by T.C. McCarthy Page A

indicated thirty degrees centigrade,and I thanked God for climate control. Ox had asked me to make the rounds of the perimeter while he and his command group—two corpsmen, an armorer, and a vehicle mechanic—huddled in the hotel cellar.
    I was about to jump into the nearest hole when a flash of light overloaded my vision kit, followed a few seconds later by a rumbling boom. I ran to the hotel and down into the basement, where Ox bent over the tac-net.
    “First patrol is getting it,” the armorer said. “Gunny’s talking them through.”
    “Someone just blew the rail line, about five klicks north.”
    Ox heard me and turned. “Any movement on the perimeter?”
    I shook my head.
    “Fine. We’ll deal with it later.” He turned back to the radio. “Calm down. How many are there and what are you getting hit with?”
    There was a second of static before the guy clicked in, the popping of grenades in the background. “Hard to tell, gunny.
They’re everywhere.
Grenades and fléchettes, no plasma. I didn’t see any vehicles; they must be on foot.”
    “You have a shitload of firepower on your scout car.
Use
it.”
    I almost laughed. “Scout car” was one way to put it. The Marines had taken a bunch of abandoned cargo trucks, slapped in salvaged engines, and then welded Maxwell auto-cannons to the beds. Voilà. Supercharged coffins, also known as scout cars.
    “Scout car is out, I’ve lost half my guys. We need support.”
    “Negative, you can do this, kid. Get one of your guysinto the scout car now. Even if it’s on fire, your suits can take it for a while.
Get on that goddamn auto-cannon.
”
    We listened to static for a moment before Ox clicked in again. “Matthews?” He was gone, though, and we all knew it.
    The next morning, second patrol arrived safely, and Ox sent them out to bring back what was left of first. They returned a few hours later, empty-handed. All they’d found were drag marks and bloodstains, along with a battered scout car.
    That was the new Kaz, way spookier than the one I remembered from Pavlodar. You could get hit from any direction and never even know what wiped you. And somewhere north of us, at the front, Bridgette’s sisters got it on, so anytime I wasn’t wasted, I prayed—that some of them would make their way back to our position, just so that I could see them and get another look at her.
    Sometimes Karazhyngyl made us laugh. The train became our main source of entertainment, the thing that broke up the boredom and could be counted on, a reminder that to our north we had friends and to our south we had a place to escape to, to hope for if things went badly. The engineers would toss dirty magazines and video chits from the engine car, and we’d throw them our old ones, a commerce of sorts that kept all of us sane, up and down the rail lines. And at times my thinking turned for the better. Bridgette still dominated it, but every once in a while the train would roll through and I’d think about something else, something besides joining her. Still, “think” was a strong way of putting what I did; my mind had eroded.Before coming to Karazhyngyl, I had arranged with supply at Shymkent to have regular deliveries made, not just of zip but of anything they could get their hands on, so on any given day, you’d find me lit on straight fentanyl or one of a hundred pharmaceuticals intended for field hospitals. Mai tais all the way. But check it: I functioned OK because I had everything rigged so that if I needed to get it straight after going down on zip, there was another cocktail ready to go, able to counteract whatever I took in the first place. Still, sometimes the plan didn’t work out. I was totally gone when the white coats arrived, and Ox didn’t give me enough time to find a good antidote. Instead of taking something to counteract the zip, I took something that made it worse.
    The train actually stopped in Karazhyngyl, which was way odd, and then Ox called me to the hotel,