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He couldn’t tell. His eardrums were ruptured and his head hurt so badly he couldn’t think.
He didn’t even remember pushing off from the slope. It happened somehow and now he stood on the path, looking down at the red things that had been Teddy and the woman with the sweater. They had been right there when the mine exploded, and it had exploded them. Torn them from humanity into—what? Parts? Pieces?
Mike didn’t like putting the right word to it.
Teddy had no legs at all. He couldn’t even see the pieces of them.
His back hurt.
And his stomach.
He touched the front of his hazmat suit and tried to understand what he was touching. His eyes stung from the black blood the woman had spat at him. The itching in his mouth and throat was really bad.
But Mike wasn’t sure if he cared about that or if he was just aware of it.
He ran his fingers over his stomach, and over the thing that stood straight out from the white material of the hazmat suit. When he raised his fingers he saw that they were smeared with red.
Yeah, he thought. That’s right.
He knew on some detached level that he was hurt. Maybe hurt bad.
He heard his name again. It floated to him on the wind.
Definitely not his mother.
/> Mike took a few small steps away from the red carnage on the ground. The rain jabbed at the skin of his face. It washed more of the black goo from his eyes.
After a while, Mike looked down at his stomach. Just to see.
It took him a long time to understand what he was seeing, to construct an explanation for the long, slender white thing that seemed to be growing out of him. It was jagged and heavy.
Like polished ivory.
Except that it wasn’t ivory.
He knew what it was.
He knew where it had come from.
The woman’s legs had been totally blown away.
But not all of the parts were lost. Mike tried a word, one he thought made sense of this.
“Femur,” he said. He heard how rational his voice sounded. That was okay.
The itching in his mouth was now deeper. Inside his nose, behind his sinuses, down in his stomach. His lungs.
Itching.
Hurting.
Aching.
Mike felt something moving on his lips. Drops of blood. He touched them, looked at them. Red. Sure. But threaded through the red were lines of black. And inside the black were twisting little white things.
He said the only word that really mattered. The word that made a statement about this whole farce, from the time his unit was rolled out until now. And maybe it was a statement about how this thing would continue to unfold.
He said, “Fuck.”
