Read Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 for Free Online

let go, drawing me down into the depths of subterrene so that I could never really leave.
    I popped my helmet. The smell was like nothing I had experienced before. Imagine taking everything in a house—the family, the furniture, the carpets, even the dog and cat—and shoving it all into a bonfire along with a thousand liters of fuel alcohol. That’s the smell of war in subterrene, and with every breath I inhaled some of Snyder.
    I grabbed his tin and zipped.
    “Check it,” said Ox. He popped his lid and joined me—children of Kaz. We both lay there on our backs, our heads resting on Snyder’s armor, and looked up at the ceiling as red tracers zinged overhead and flashes of brilliant grenade light went off like strobes.
    I got splashed a couple more times, and so did Ox. We both caught a few fléchettes, and a ricochet took half my right ear off, but I didn’t even feel it; I was too zipped up. Ox even pulled out his player and cranked music. He thought that Snyder had been trying to sing an old, old song, “Kids in America,” but I didn’t know the song, or any kids, and besides, it had all been so whacked that I hadn’t bothered to really try to figure out
what
he was singing. We lay there for what felt like hours, not even noticing when the firing died off.
    “Holy shit.” A corpsman looked down at us. He seemed far away and his eyes went wide, so we must have been hit worse than we thought, but there was no way to tell; we didn’t feel a thing. “Stretchers!”
    “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is the war over?”
    Ox started giggling and the corpsman just looked at uslike we were crazy. “For you guys it is. Besides, Russians pulled out. Gs pushed them back ten klicks.”
    Once they loaded us onto stretchers, Ox turned his head to look at me. “Man. You’re all bloody. I think your ear is missing.”
    “What’s that?” I said. “I can’t hear you, I lost an ear.”
    Man, did we laugh at that. So hard it hurt my stomach. Then the corpsman injected me with something and the world turned off, went black so that I couldn’t see a thing, but just before I went totally under, I had the strangest thought.
    Screw the Pulitzer.

Winter Offensive
     
    H eadaches. Hallucinations. Snyder and Burger came to see me every day and stood there all bloody and messed as they grinned because they knew there was nothing I could do, nothing to be done about phantoms in my mind, the products of withdrawal. Ox had been sent to a field hospital closer to the lines, while they’d sent me with the bad cases to Shymkent for a month in bed and recuperation. Two weeks of that was because I kept screaming, wouldn’t shut up. The doctors didn’t know about a la canona, the lack of drugs that makes your skin turn inside out, and they thought I was a psych case, so when the day for my release arrived, one of them said I was supposed to get in touch with Bandar ‘Abbas because they had called my editor’s desk
concerning my mental state.
“Great,” I’d said. “I’ll get right on that.”
    “Haloo!” the doorman to my hotel greeted me on my return. “Welcome bag, mister!”
    “Yeah, you too.”
    My suite seemed smaller. I breathed through my nose, trying to catch a whiff of Marines, alcohol, something,but all I got was Shymkent and sulfur from the coal-burning power plant. Civilization.
    I reached once more out of reflex for my tin—Snyder’s tin—and then remembered. It was at the mine. My suite melted around me and I was right back there, wallowing in the dead and shaking from the explosions. I just went with it, prayed for it to end—
God, bring me back to the real world and save me from Kaz. Or send me back to subterrene.
    When the hallucination was over, the sun had set and only the telephone message indicator lit the room.
    “I gotta get away from straight.” There wasn’t anyone there, but talking made me feel better, like the sounds of my own voice would keep me company. I’d do the phone call. Make