The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

Life on Capra II

Just as we bag that piece of shit swamp monster, the robots attack. Ricky goes down immediately, and that’s a fucking shame because he was a good guy, and also he owes me — owed me — a pack of cigarettes and had promised to introduce me to the tomato who runs the commissary, a pretty little thing named Becky who he’d known back when he was in grade school. That lady has a fine ass and has expended more T&E avoiding me than I’ve spent trying to get her attention, and Ricky was my last chance, and maybe it’s cold of me, but as I watch him fall face-first in the swamp muck, my first thought is how all those plans have just gone straight to hell.

Fucking robots, being my second thought.

I think about hoisting him up out of the muck and throwing him over my shoulder and hoofing him back to the convoy, if only to have some good story to tell Becky once we get back to the barracks, maybe make like he wasn’t killed with the first shot, that he was barely breathing but that I wouldn’t leave my good friend Ricky behind, and that he expended his last breath to tell me to keep going, to never give up, that I would someday find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman. But then I figure I don’t actually have to go through all the trouble of carrying Ricky’s deadweight body to be able to tell that same story, so I leave him where he is and start beating a hasty retreat.

That’s one of the first lessons any new cadet learns here on Capra II: Simplify your life.

Twenty minutes later and five cadets lighter, we finally make it back to the convoy. Turns out we weren’t the only battalion to be ambushed by the sonsabitches, and, unlikely as it seems, the piece of shit swamp monsters and the fucking robots made some sort of concerted play on us.

Five minutes later we’re in the air on our way back to the barracks.

I look out the window down at the wreckage. Someone set fire to the swamp muck. I squint, wondering for a minute or two if I can see Ricky, but mostly all I can see are glints of light reflecting off the robot body parts and the last few of the swamp monsters writhing in flames. Then I put my head back and close my eyes and try to catch a little sleep.

When the New Worlds Confederation started casting about for a planet to house the excess settlers, those who didn’t exactly fit the profile of the young, able-bodied, handsome folk who settled Capra I, they took their money, shipped them off, deposited them on this piece of rock, and then forgot about them, that is, until the tithing stopped, which is why we’re here.

It’s a strange planet, Capra II. Or, hell, maybe it’s not even a planet, just some rock floating through space the New Worlds Confederation decided to terraform. You can’t tell these days, and, sure, maybe there was a briefing about it all when we shipped out, but I’ll say right now, I’m not one for holding on to the finer details of an assignment. Either way, it’s a strange fucking place. For one, the colors seem off. I can’t explain how they seem off, only that when I’m looking around, the whole world looks like it’s covered in some kind of filter, or like I’m wearing a yellow-tinted visor, even when I’m not. Blues look green. Reds look orange. Everything is covered in a haze. Something about the atmosphere makes us light-headed, too, and suppresses the smell of things, which, when you’re living in a barracks with a hundred other grunts, isn’t the worst thing you could ask for.

Still. It’s a bit off-putting.

What worries me most is the emptiness of this place. Most of what we’ve got are those wild and unending swamplands, and whatever asshole decided to terraform a planet of swamps deserves a swift kick in the balls if you ask me. Practically uninhabitable, and even if you could devise some kind of structure that would survive the swamp muck, which seems to eat anything inorganic, one that could keep out the bugs and swamp rats and not allow the poisonous swamp gas to seep into your bedroom and kill you while you slept, you’d still have to contend with those piece of shit swamp monsters. You get pockets here and there, dry lands just above sea level that could pass for livable, and you’ll see structures and the signs of society — a glass-cased infirmary, a one-room schoolhouse, carbide huts that make you wonder why the hell you’d take a material as formidable as carbide and build out of it a hut like you’re part of some ancient civilization — and maybe if you squint and put your imagination to the test, you can picture how a life of sorts might’ve been obtained here, but the people are gone, and no one knows for sure why, though my money’s on the swamp monsters or the robots having some hand in all of that. And whatever the case, it’s a goddamn ghost planet out here, and to me it seems like we’re just biding our time, giving whatever evil thing resides here a chance to size us up, find out that weakest part of us, and then do to us what was done to the colonists who first gave it a go here.

We are hunting swamp monsters, and part of me wants to say that we have done this before, wants to say we are in the swamps hunting swamp monsters again, but that can’t be right, and so I shake the feeling off and do my best to keep myself steady, alert.

Ricky’s on my right flank and, to release the tension building in the back of my neck and to give us something to do while we truck through this hellhole, I’m about to ask him about Becky, ask him about what she was like when they were in grade school together. He’s made noise about how he can introduce me, make me seem like a decent enough sort of guy, that he and she go way back, and I want to know if he’s bullshitting me or if he’s serious. But then one of the swamp bastards rears up between the two of us, and it’s a monster, all right, which I know. I know these things are real monsters, that what we’re playing at here is no joke, but the sight of them, no matter how many surveillance videos I’ve watched, no matter how many pictures I’ve seen, no matter how many good men we’ve lost to these bastards, the sight of them does not fail to surprise me.

For one thing, they’re of the swamp more than they are from the swamp. It’s as if the swamp rises up, ten, fifteen feet up in the air, takes on a face with eyes and a mouth hole and swampy teeth of a sort, forms arms and clawed hands, a torso but no real legs, no legs to speak of, just a hovering jet of swamp muck that pushes these monsters up against gravity, against physics, against God. They make for a sick and unsettling sight, and this one’s looking right down on me, and I’ve got a good shot, an opportunity to take this fucker out, but for some goddamn reason I’m holding the wrong gun. I’ve got a sniper rifle in my hands, and I feel like I’m in some kind of anxiety dream, where I come to school having forgotten a major test I have to take, or my clothes, because what the fuck is a sniper rifle going to do to this thing made of swamp shit and twigs?

There’s a moment when I feel like I know what’s going to happen next.

A moment when everything is all at once familiar and uncanny — where Ricky is standing, the gassy smell of the swamp monster, the glint of sunlight glancing off the guns and armor of Johnson, Harald, and Spigs, the sound of the convoy in the distance, even these thoughts running through my mind — and in this moment, I’m struck suddenly by an all-consuming urge to shove Ricky down into the swamp, to heave myself at him with the whole of me, to shove the lot of us out of harm’s way, and it’s all I can do to stop myself, to curb this sudden and forceful urge, and then the robots attack — coming in out of nowhere — and I am surprised and I am not surprised.

Just as we bag the swamp monster, the robots attack. It’s a shock to see them there, the sun glinting off their metallic bodies, but it’s almost more of a shock that I’m staring straight at the one about to laser Ricky’s ass, as if I had some sixth sense telling me where it was going to rear up, my grenade launcher armed and ready. I blow the fucker’s head off, and I’m about to look at Ricky and say “What the hell?” but he’s off and running without even a “Thanks, dude,” and I want to yell at him that he still owes me a pack of cigarettes, but what’s the point because there are explosions all around me, all around us, and I bag another robot, and then a third, and I’m feeling pretty lucky to be carrying this grenade launcher when I could have sworn just a few minutes ago I had a sniper rifle in my hands, and before that, my service pistol.

I run through the swamps, first left and then right, looking for more swamp monsters or robots, or even anyone else from my squad, and then find myself looking at a wall of swamp trees with no way through or around. This sort of thing happens to me more frequently than I care to admit. I chalk it up to enthusiasm, the rush of adrenaline clouding my senses, so that I turn around and see that all the action is behind me, but by the time I run back to catch up to them, the swamp monsters have mostly dissolved back into the primordial muck, but I see one robot close enough that if I hustle I can tag him with my last grenade, but just as I’m honing in on him, I trip over something and land face-first in the swamp. I pull myself up. The slimy green water cascades down my helmet visor. The robot’s gone — jet pack — and I look to see what I’ve tripped over, and it’s Ricky, or the top half of him, anyway, and it’s a fucking shame. He owes me — owed me — a pack of cigarettes and had promised to introduce me to a pretty young thing who runs the commissary who he’d known back in grade school. For a second, I consider reaching down and grabbing his dog tags, though what I would do with them—“Here you go, something to remember your old grade school chum by”—I don’t have a damn clue, but then the comm in my helmet comes blaring into my ears, my commander yelling at me to hurry the fuck up unless I want to biv in the swamps tonight, and I leave Ricky, leave his tags, and hoof it to the rendezvous point.

Five minutes later we’re in the air on our way back to the barracks.

I look out the window down at the wreckage. Someone set fire to the swamp muck. I squint, wondering for a minute or two if I can see Ricky, but mostly all I can see are glints of light reflecting off the robot body parts and the last few of the swamp monsters writhing in flames. Then I put my head back and close my eyes and try to catch a little sleep.

I’m in a warehouse. Above me and below me and on all sides of me are sounds of fighting. Robots. Again. When we arrived at this warehouse, I figured it would be the warehouse where the robots were holed up making more of themselves, as it seems that there is an almost endless supply of them swarming around us, and no one has the first goddamn idea where they came from or if there’s someone behind them all. This is not the robot warehouse, however. It’s one of our own. I didn’t know we had a warehouse, and the fact that we do — and that it’s full of crates of oranges and ammo and small wooden rocking horses — strikes me somehow as criminal.

“When the fuck did we build a warehouse?” I want to ask Ricky, but we never get any downtime, so I don’t. The place is covered in dust and grime inches thick, and it’s possible that the warehouse wasn’t built by us at all, that it was part of the human settlement we came here to defend, only to discover we had come too late and it had already been overrun by swamp monsters and robots and other unmentionables.

It should seem odd, then, that somewhere holed up in this spooky warehouse is a device that, when you flip a switch and pull a lever, activates an electromagnetic pulse, but that’s what I’ve been told, that and that it’s my job to find it and activate it.

What I don’t get, or, hell, one of the many, many things I no longer get, is why the fuck did we come to this warehouse in the first place? I can’t tell you what we eat, but we don’t eat or need oranges, nor do we suffer from a deficit of wooden rocking horses. We don’t need ammo, either, which, if I’m to believe the stenciling on the sides of these crates, is the only other thing stored in this warehouse. For as long as I can remember, I have not one time run out of ammo, or, if I have run out of ammo in, say, my semiautomatic, or charge in my DevLazer Rifle 3000, I can simply toss it aside and pick up some other weapon, fully loaded, though I cannot tell you where these come from exactly. And if worst comes to worst, and even my service pistol runs out of bullets, I always have my knife, which is a wicked and jagged-looking thing, though what help it would be against swamp monsters or robots, I can’t say. Still. It’s there.

And the armory. Don’t let’s get started on how big our armory is.

So if we don’t need oranges and we don’t need rocking horses and we don’t need ammo, there seems to be little good reason for us to be here except that there are robots roosting here — do robots roost? — and a switch somewhere in the middle of here to shut them all down. But if we hadn’t come here in the first place, would they even have roused themselves, and even if they’d already been roused, they were roused here and we were safely somewhere else, and so it wouldn’t have fucking mattered that the roosting robots had been roused.

I could go on, but what’s the point? An order’s an order, and the sooner I can find that electromagnetic pulse switch, the sooner I can get back to camp and head to the commissary to see if Becky’s there behind the desk, see if she’ll do more than roll her eyes at me when I tell her we should get together when she’s free.

As I’m mulling over what else I might say to Becky, these three things happen all at once: I turn around yet another crate of wooden rocking horses, I see on the wall opposite me the electromagnetic pulse switch, and a robot crashes through the floor. Yet even as I’m fumbling for my weapon, even as that robot comes bearing down on me, I can’t stop thinking of what I should say to Becky.

The bunker’s being attacked. This takes me by surprise, but by the looks of it, I’m the only one who didn’t see this coming.

In truth, I don’t remember being in the bunker. I don’t remember suiting up or grabbing my rifle, either, but it’s dark outside and none of us is wearing our sleep ordnance, and I’ve got a rifle in my hands — the sniper again — so it must have happened, and I must have been here when it did.

We’re being set upon by robots and these monsters I’ve only read about: three-legged sonsabitches outfitted with some kind of grotesque and unsettling stereoscopic eye mounted on a long stalk branching out of its torso. Drool and all manner of particulate bungee in thick ropes from their gaping maws. Wiry tufts of hair sprout out of their knuckles. It’s all pretty disgusting and stirs me up for a good fight.

Since all I have is a small knife and my sniper rifle, though, I figure the most I can do is aim for that eye and hope for the best.

And I figure I should move cautiously. I’m navigating down one hallway and up the next, swiveling left and right, surveying the landscape of dead soldiers and broken robot parts and the blown-to-bits alien monsters, when, streaking past me on my right, Ricky runs pell-mell into the thick of the fight, and seeing him run by like that, I’m thrown for a wild loop.

I can’t say why, but something about seeing Ricky, seeing him running, seeing him with his head on his shoulders and not blown the fuck off, seeing him at all, feels wrong. My head swims. I careen into the wall. Something in the distance in front of me explodes, and hairy, tufted hands fly past me, and bits of gore squish against my helmet visor, and then Ricky’s head tumbles down the hall, as if it’s beating a hasty retreat and it couldn’t wait on the rest of him, which is only seconds behind, or is holding the bastards off while the head makes its escape, and I should be horrified by this, but there’s something comforting about the sight of his head rolling to a stop at my feet, as if before some piece of the world had been out of true, and now things have leveled out again.

Whatever exploded ahead of me has set off a chain reaction, and the walls ahead of me blow out as smaller explosions rocket in my direction. It’s as if the entire bunker has been layered with minicharges and the entire structure is buckling, and I wonder at the shoddiness of our base camp.

Regardless, I turn tail and run.

Left and then right and then right again and then left again. Rooms and control panels and doorways blur past as I run toward the exit. A part of me, though, feels as if I’m in a maze, as if I’ve never seen this place before, as if I don’t know where I’m going or which way is the way out. All the while, I’m keeping my eye out for Becky. I don’t know why. A fine ass is a fine ass, but nothing is worth being blown up for, and what with Ricky being headless and all, and Becky’s natural inclination to ignore my every pass at her, there’s nothing in it for me.

I know I’m a fool for looking for her, and I will be a fool if I stop for her, yet I can’t help myself. And then I see her.

I run past a doorway, and I catch sight of her out of the corner of my eye. She’s still sitting primly, beautifully, behind her desk, oblivious to the shitstorm raging around us, and I try to stop. I throw on the brakes. I reach out for the doorjamb. But nothing happens. I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I’m pushed forward. Some force — gravity, momentum, an unexpected planetary shift? — is pushing me forward. And for the first time, or maybe not the first time, maybe this isn’t the first time at all that this thought has come into my head but is only the first time I’ve considered it seriously, I wonder who is in control of me, of my legs, my eyes, my choices.

And with more effort than I have ever known myself to exert, I turn myself around.

I can’t say that it is painful, the feeling I get when I perform this trick. In truth, the word itself—painful—means jack shit to me, and if you were to ask me to describe what pain was, I couldn’t. But the sensation — stopping in place, standing still, turning myself around — is a queer one, for damn sure. And while I can’t say whether it hurts or not, what I can say is that when I take a step, I feel less like myself than I can begin to explain. What I can say is that I can’t help but turn my head to look at where I had been standing just to make sure that I’m not still standing there. But I’m not there. I’m here. I’m moving back to where Becky was, but it’s slow, it’s slow going and difficult, and with every step I feel like I’m leaving a piece of myself behind.

I make it, finally, to the next doorway — to what kind of room, I don’t know — and lean heavily against it, still fighting against the powerful, undeniable urge to go back to running for the exit.

But then as I try to push myself off and stand up straight again, I push myself through the door and the doorway — I don’t know how; the door doesn’t open — and my foot catches on something and I trip and I fall, and maybe it’s the sense of free fall, but even as I am falling, faster and faster, I feel light as air.

Here is what I don’t understand. Here is that question that bothers me in the swamps, in our barracks, while at the warehouse, whether fighting swamp monsters or hairy-knuckled beasts or those fucking robots, the question that burns in the back of my mind during every waking moment, and it is this: When have I ever seen Becky’s ass?

I’m not going on about her clad in her unmentionables, or even bare, at the risk of sounding crude and ungentlemanly. I’m talking about nothing more than just her backside in a pair of shorts or her commissary uniform. I’m talking about seeing her standing up or walking around or doing anything anywhere that isn’t behind that commissary desk. And I have to admit that the answer to that question is never. And yet the compulsion to say her backside is fine, the need to make her love me based on my idea of it, is so strongly felt that it will sometimes seem more real to me than anything else I have seen or done here on Capra II. I have never caught even a glimpse of it, yet I will find myself, even in the heat of battle, pining keenly for it and, by extension, her.

That fall must have addled my brain some, because when I stand up, I’m in the swamps again. Then the swamps begin to flicker, and I close my eyes and give my head a gentle shake and when I open them up, I’m in the warehouse, and then this flickers and I’m back in the bunker, surrounded by noise and fire and explosions and a bloody fucking mess of monster bits and robot pieces and the disjointed remains of my squad landing all around me as if some huge explosion just blew everything to hell.

I don’t know where I am or what the hell is going on, and so there’s no good reason left for pushing forward, but I lash myself to the idea that I still need to find Becky, and with that occupying my mind, I trudge on as best I can. Debris is still raining down on me, and the landscape is still shifting around me and under my feet. I’ll find myself at one moment turning down a corridor in the bunker and the next blocked by a copse of swamp trees. At one point, I come to an intersection — some piece of the warehouse by the looks of it — under heavy fire, and I wait until the shooting stops, and then I make a run for it, but I trip halfway across when the scene shifts first to the swamp and then quickly back to the bunker, and I land hard on my arms and elbows. The wind is knocked out of me, and I huff myself back onto my feet when I see a man standing in front of me, looking back at me, who I’m about to ask for help when I realize it’s me. I’m looking at me, at my reflection, and it’s an unsettling sight. It’s not that I see myself for the first time in a long time and hardly recognize the man in the reflection — created by a windowpane all but completely shattered by shrapnel and the fighting. It’s not like that at all. It’s like I’ve never seen my own self reflected before, like I never knew what I looked like at all, and so who I’m looking at is a stranger.

I lift my hand up to wave to make sure I’m looking at me when the rest of the glass is broken out by Ricky, who is thrown headfirst through it by one of the fucking robots, who then turns its red mechanical eye at me, and then I start to run again.

I don’t remember the last time I took a shower. I don’t remember waking up in the mornings or putting myself down to sleep. I don’t remember the last time I took a drink of water or drank down a beer or ate a good breakfast or ate any goddamn thing or the last time I fucked. A man can’t live without these things, or without most of them, yet here I am, trudging along, first in this bunker and then in the swamps and back to the bunker again.

To me it seems that the basic and necessary parts of my life aren’t being lived, or not by me, or not so I can remember them, and as if I’m pulled out of whatever black hole I reside in only to navigate through these maze-like halls and among the crates of some damn warehouse, through the muck of a swamp that should smell like death but that I can’t recall smelling like anything.

I’ve seen Ricky’s head blown off or his leg torn off or his guts spilled out more times than I can count now, and I’m beginning to hit on an idea about what’s going on here, but it’s an idea just out of reach, or it’s like it’s the idea of an idea, or the idea of an idea of an idea, and the harder I try to suss that idea out, the further away from it I’m pushed, or not pushed, not really that, but more like the idea itself, more and more versions of this same idea, stand in the way of my understanding it. Or it’s like I have a map that leads me to another map that turns out to be the same exact map as before with instructions that will lead me, I know, to another damn map, over and over, again and again. Or it’s like none of those things at all, and I’m just wasting my time trying to figure it all out, and so finally, in the end, what I decide is, Fuck it, and I close my eyes and blindly start shooting and blindly start running, and when my Gatling gun runs out of ammo, I toss it aside, and when my semiautomatic and my automatic rifles run out of ammo, I toss them aside, too, and this continues, on and on, I’m tossing shit behind me until, my eyes still shut, my legs still pushing me forward, I have tossed off every weapon in my personal arsenal but my knife.

And through all of this, I have been touched not one single time.

No stray bullets, no robotic arms grabbing at me, no swamp muck splashing my legs as I run, not even a shoulder of bunker wall knocking me off course. I must have run through hell and back, run in the swamps and through the warehouse and up and down one bunker corridor after another, stepped on the various pieces of my comrades in arms, and nothing has touched me, not once, and so I stop and I open my eyes, and I look around me at a world that has gone inside out.

I keep expecting something to come back to me, memories, or a deeper sense of myself, my past, those relationships I’ve had and that I left behind when I joined up with the New Worlds Army to come fight here on Capra II, but for a long time, the oldest memory I could hold on to was the memory of the moment before, and even now, when it seems as if something has shifted inside me and I’m able to hold on to things, I can only really remember back to the beginning of the attack on the bunker and nothing at all before that.

So when I look at what I’m looking at, hoping some mechanism of memory might kick into gear to give me a clue as to what the fuck this thing in front of me is and what the hell I’m supposed to do to get around it, I’m not surprised, though I’m a little disappointed, when nothing inside my ragged brain magically comes to order.

Whatever it is, it stands nearly three stories high, and the high-pitched angry drone of it drowns out every other sound. The longer I look at it, the more details come into focus, and it begins to look like some bastard monster, the likes of which I’ve never seen, and comprising all the monsters this furious planet, Capra II, has seen fit to throw at us. It rises up on the jets of the swamp muck, even though we are clearly in the bunker, and out of its undulating torso sprout robot manacles and the hairy-tufted arms of the bunker beasts. Where there should be a head there’s that stereoscopic stalk, and in the center of that pulses the cold, red eye of a robot.

Any minute now I expect to see Ricky come running past me only to get his damn fool head lasered off by that red eye and then the rest of him shoved into the open, swampy craw of that thing, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no one else around. There’s only it and only me.

I stand in front of it waiting for something to happen because I’m sure as hell not going to be the jackass who makes the first move against this thing, but all it does is pulse and undulate and sway, and after a while I get the sense that we’re two players playing at the same game. That it can wait as long as I can wait, and that nothing will happen for an eternity until one of us makes something happen. I also get the sense — or not even the sense, but the clear and certain knowledge — that on the other side of this is Becky and her fine ass and her commissary uniform and her sweet smile and a life of goodness without reproach. And while I can stand here as solid and still as stone and never risk inevitable death and dismemberment, I know, too, that in this eternity of stillness never will I find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman, and when it comes down to it, that’s the only thing I want.

Here is the future I see for us. Here is how things are going to go from this moment forward:

Things are going to go south. Between me and whatever that thing is that is between me and Becky, things will definitely go south, but not so far south as to go hopeless. I’m a trained soldier in the New Worlds Army, after all, and resourceful, and strong, and if there’s one thing I know now, it’s this: The love of a good woman will change a man, and the faintly attainable nature of that love will make him capable of implausible, death-defying acts.

Then — big bad beastie dispatched of — I will find my lovely lady, will stumble blindly toward her desk in the commissary, will crash unceremoniously, yet bravely, into the doorway, will slump down but not quite all the way down to the floor, will softly call her name, will close my eyes, will wait for her tentative, gentle touch. When she holds me in her arms and lowers me to the floor, I will open my eyes and look deep into her own and smile a rakish smile. She will say something along the lines of “You came” or “I didn’t think you’d come.” I will open my mouth to say something along the lines of “I could never leave you behind” or “I’ll always come for you,” but before I can say anything, she’ll silence me with the soft pressure of her finger against my lips, and I will pull her down to me and push her finger aside for her lips, which will crush against my own. And in that moment, nothing else will matter in even the slightest way. Then I will pull myself to my feet, buoyed by that kiss and her true love and her sympathetic heart. I will stand and pull her close to me and I will hold her in my arms and we will gaze at the unforgiving landscape laid out before us and I will say, “Let them do their worst,” and we’ll laugh and pull each other closer, and together we will root out what is evil about this place, root it out and cast it aside, and unearth that small something of goodness that must exist in every new planet, and by the power of our love, this tiny rock will flourish.

But even I know what really lies in store for us. Even I know I won’t get that far. Won’t make it five steps before that thing grabs me by my nethers and tears me in two and stuffs me down its craw and seeks out every last one of us and sunders the planet itself, but what do I care? With Becky on the other side of it, what other choice do I have but to close my eyes, throw down my knife, and make my run for it?