The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(16)
He wasn’t fine.
But he was alive.
He dug the bottle of water out of his jacket pocket, fumbled with the cap, and took a swig. It felt good and seemed to settle his stomach for a minute, but then it happened again, another surge of nausea.
Maybe he would pull over, just for a couple of minutes. Give himself a chance to be sick by the side of the road. Then he’d feel better.
Suddenly, there was a brilliant light behind him. Like a camera flash. He glanced in the rearview mirror, but the light hurt his eyes. He looked forward again and realized he couldn’t see much more than the echo of the light. He slowed the truck down and then stopped it so he could rub his eyes. The light outside was already fading, and whatever it had been hadn’t damaged his vision. There were ghosts of the landscape imprinted on his eyes, but they were already swimming away. And there, again, the surge of nausea. This time he didn’t think he could keep it down, and he scrambled out of the truck.
As his feet hit the ground he turned to look back toward the village, toward where the flash of light had come from. But it wasn’t a flash of light anymore. It was a lick of fire lighting the heavens.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center,
Twentynine Palms, California
Lance Corporal Kim Bock checked her rifle. Again. She knew there wasn’t any point, but this was the first time she was leading her unit in a live-fire exercise, and checking her M16 calmed her down. She’d trained with the M16A2 in basic, but she’d been issued the M16A4 once she made it out to California. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two rifles as far as she was concerned, at least not when she was out on the range. She did like that she could remove the carrying handle when they were in the middle of exercises.
She was crouching and trying to relax. The sun was a motherf*cker, but it was okay in the shade. She’d played catcher on her high school softball team, and she could stay in a crouch for a long time without getting uncomfortable, but the three men in her unit were sitting down on the concrete slab. Private First Class Elroy Trotter had his eyes closed, and for all Kim knew, Elroy might actually be sleeping. He never seemed to get excited one way or the other. The joke was that even while having sex Elroy probably looked bored. The person who first made that joke, Private Duran Edwards, was a black kid from Brooklyn who was a lot smarter than any of the other officers seemed to recognize, and Kim was glad Duran was in her unit. At first she’d had a bit of a thing for the third man, Private Hamitt “Mitts” Frank, but having him in her unit was like pouring water on a fire. Only smoke remained. She could see how the two of them might have ended up a couple in civilian life, but as part of a unit, it was different. They were a team. She was lucky. The whole crew was cool; none of them seemed to think it was a big deal that a woman was the fire team leader. She knew that early on, when the armed forces first started slotting women into combat units, there’d been some blowback. There’d been a couple of high-profile incidents in the army, but even in the Marines it hadn’t been all sweetness. Kim had still been in middle school when women were given equal status, though it was recent enough that some of the older generation still clearly hadn’t adjusted to Marines with tits in the line of fire. Elroy, Duran, and Mitts were her age, though, and they’d gone through boot camp with her. Maybe they secretly didn’t love the idea of taking combat orders from a woman in general, but since it was her, they were okay with it. They were familiar with Kim, and that made all the difference. Familiar with the fact that she was physically fit, able to compete with most of the men, familiar with the fact that she was smart and good at making quick decisions. They’d probably have accepted a different woman as their lance corporal, but it really did matter that they knew her. They trusted her to keep them safe.
Kim heard her name being called over the loudspeakers. “Okay,” she said to the unit. “We’re up in one. Remember, rifles on burst. Live fire, so extra careful here. Take your time and make good decisions. Quick action isn’t good unless it’s the right action.” The three men scrambled to their feet while Kim rose from her crouch and they all put their hands in, making a small pile of different shades of skin. “Be smart,” Kim said, “be strong, be Marines.”
She loved the sound of the four of them shouting “Oorah!” and the way their hands shot down and up. Loved the feel of the M16 in her hands, the click as she flipped the rifle from safety to burst fire. She loved the way she looked in her utility uniform, surrounded by other Marines, and as she felt the first hit of adrenaline spiking through her chest, loved the way it felt to be a Marine. Her parents had never understood her fascination with it, still didn’t understand why she was in uniform while all her friends from high school were off at college, drinking beer in dormitories and getting date-raped at frat parties. Well, Kim was pretty sure that’s not the way her parents thought her college experience would have gone, but for Kim, college was something she would do only as part of the Marines. She’d wanted to be a Marine since they first started letting women into combat units, and from the minute she first put on a uniform and laced up a pair of boots she understood the saying, “Once a Marine, Always a Marine.”
They got the green light and funneled down the chute. Duran and Elroy split left, taking cover behind a concrete barrier, while she and Mitts went right, taking cover behind the corner of a building. This was supposed to be an urban environment, and she had to hand it to whoever had built the set. It felt like being in a city. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center might be in the middle of nowhere—the going nickname for Twentynine Palms, the city adjacent to the MCAGCC, was Twentynine Stumps, for its wonderful lack of fun stuff to do—but the training was great. The talk among the other Marines was that there was a reason the training had been intensified: they’d be boots on the ground in Somalia sometime in the next couple of months. Kim believed the rumors. If the increased schedules of training had been just for her and the other green recruits, she might have dismissed the talk, but it wasn’t just the new Marines. Everybody had been gearing up.