This was a school once, I guess. The rubble here might have been a chalkboard.

    The wall behind me explodes, the mortar shell bursting in and announcing its arrival with white-hot fragments of metal. I duck. The guy next to me doesn't. I'm wearing part of him on my face now.

    Another typical day in what used to be Seattle.

    Gunfire. Gunfire all over the fucking place, so much a part of the background noise that I rarely even notice it anymore. Choppers overhead; I don't bother to wonder who they belong to.

    Somebody down the hall is screaming and crying for his mother. He sounds about eight years old, but every man does when his guts are hanging out and he's about to, you know, "pass on," "cross over." "Check out."

    I call a spade a spade. He's as dead as fried chicken. He just hasn't come to terms with it yet.

    I get up, dust and plaster fragments falling off my gear. Check my M-42 to make sure it's functional after the mortar attack, because if it's not, I'm fucked. In this shit, a man without his rifle is a dead man walking.

    The M-42's okay. I guess I'll live a while longer.

    Josephs, that was his name. The guy all over me and still twitching on the floor. He's got two packs of ammo left, indicating full juice. His rifle's thrashed; I'm surprised the power core didn't go, but whatever. His radio is fucked, of course, but not like it could get through the soup of EM jamming out there. Counter-counter-counter-countermeasures. Sixteen-hundred miles away, some geek in a bunker is at "war" with some other geek in some other bunker, electronic one-upmanship, fighting for control of what no one can see, but what all of us need almost as much as our rifles and our asses: information.

    A whump and the whole goddamn building shakes. Tactical nuke, low-yield, probably up on Capitol Hill by the feel of it. Fallout's gonna be a bitch... if I ever get extracted, that is. Otherwise it doesn't fucking matter.

    Time to go to work.

    Sweep and clear of the hallway takes a few seconds. One of the other rooms is on fire; napalm or something. Fuck, I don't know. All I smell is burning hair and the copper of blood anyway. Gunpowder and the ozone of laser fire.

    Movement at the end of the corridor. My rifle reacts before I can, built-in scanners not finding the "Friendly" tranceiver, shooting first, not asking questions later, not asking questions at all. It usually happens like this now; really all I am is legs for the rifle. It's been years since a Marine has had to aim his weapon in close-quarters combat.

    I suppose I should be thankful. Whatever.

    What's left of her is still smoking when I reach the end of the hall. Seventeen, maybe. Blood and dirt caked in. No keloids. Definitely born post-Bush.

    Something drops from the ceiling behind me and hits the floor. I don't even bother with niceties; I just drop to the floor, aim backwards, and pull the trigger. Screams, wetness on my back, a thump, nothing.

    The fire's really going now. Two, maybe three minutes, this building's a memory.

    VSTOL aircraft outside. One of ours, I hope. No real choice but to find out.

    Scramble out into the LZ. Crouch down low, watch for suppressing fire from nearby buildings, wrecked cars, piles of junk, skulls, whatever. Some places, the landscape is formed by human remains. Mountains. Valleys. The valley of the shadow of death. Yeah, no shit.

    AV-14 transport hover. Lights shining down. Stupid fucking pilot is begging to get wasted with those lights. I'm not sure whether I want extraction with this asshole; better to die on the ground, where at least I have some control over it. But, whatever, fuck it. I grab the cable they've lowered down and hope for the best.

    Reeled in, some sergeant is asking me, "Where's the rest of your squad?" I point to the front of my flak jacket, bits of Josephs still runnelling down the front of me. "Oh, here and there, sarge." He nods, turns to his squad, and leaves me the hell alone for the rest of the flight.

    Down below, there it is. Somebody told me once this place used to be called the Emerald City. Ironic now, with the green flashes of laser fire arcing over it so thick now that the whole damn sky is lit up, radioactive cumulus clouds reflecting the glow. The crater where downtown used to be tops it all off.

    Chinese Shangdon tank rolls through what used to be Pike Street Market, chasing down a squad of regular Army guys. Watch the show through an almost-mint pair of Hi-Res thermo goggles.

    Fucking Army. I'd ask why we're not helping, but, you know. They wouldn't help us, either. Fuck 'em.

    Vapor trail through the sky; Air Force tac nuke out of Everett. Drops down about a block from the Shangdon. The usual; don't watch the flash, then watch the show. Five blocks gone, and Seattle has a new crater for the moonscape. The Shangdon is a smoldering pile of slag; the Army guys are nowhere in sight, but their shadows are burned into the ground. Always thought it was funny how that happened.

    Russian MiG 39 fighter and a vintage pre-Bush Chinese Su-27 are ganging up on an F-22 Interceptor over Lake Washington. Poor fucker doesn't have a chance; F-22's are looooong in the tooth now. He's screwed, at least until some charitable soul on the 520 bridge gives him a hand in the form of a well-placed Stinger missile up the ass of the Sukhoi jet. Pretty fireworks. No parachute. Now it's just the MiG and the F-22. I'd watch the rest, but I can't pretend to care anymore.

    Mount Rainier off in the distance; people always thought the mountain would be what killed Seattle. And yet there it sits, silent as always, laughing at us. Laughing its eons-old, granite-voiced laugh.

    Pfft. Shit. All this excitement, yeah, right. Another day at the office, is all. Five minutes on that transport, rushing through the air at nine hundred miles an hour, the thrum of the engines to either side vibrating through the deck, the sergeant barking orders for a couple of those five minutes... soon enough, it's naptime.

    Boot wakes me up; the usual impulse to kill its owner dies down in time for me to avoid an embarassing and fatal mistake. Dumb bastard ought to have known better; when you've been in the shit as long as I have, it's better to just let sleeping dogs lie.

    "We're here," some snot-nosed fifteen-year-old private tells me. Fucking kid; I'd break something of his for his stupidity, but some hunch tells me he'll be dead in a couple weeks anyway. Screw it, not worth another day in solitary, not when the "jungle" is calling me back already.

    Check: fifteen minutes. Long nap this time.

    Base camp, somewhere in Bumfuck, Washington. Some flat field of dirt that used to be a town, but probably never a very big town even pre-Bush. Landing field's shell unfurls over our heads, hatch opens to the bunker, down we go. Safe in our cocoon of metal. Best home a guy can hope for.

    Debrief with some sergeant who looks like he hasn't seen the sun since A-Day. Yeah, everyone else is dead, I tell him. Yeah, our objective was achieved. Why thank you, yes I would like reassignment to the forward area. No, I won't be needing any counselling, nor any leave time, nor medical assistance. Just put me somewhere where I can do my job. Put me somewhere where I can kill.

    All the same, he gives me a 48 hour chit to stay on-base, get showered, change of uniform, routine service on the M-42. Get some R&R, he says. It'll do me good, he says.

    Right. Soften me up and get my ass killed next time out, is more like it. Definitely can't turn down rifle maintenance, though. And a shower; haven't had one of those in, well, too damned long.

    Later. Lying on some cot that probably a hundred now-dead men have lied in before me. Stare at the ceiling, listen to the radio, listen to the reports come in- patrol ambushed in Portland, needs extraction NOW... another big Chinese nuke went off in Sacramento, and techies say it'll be at least a year before anybody can go back in... Boise got hit with Smallpox-Plus, again, source unknown, again...

    And this just in- U.S. forces in New Baghdad wiped out by a terrorist suitcase nuke. 14,000 dead, thousands more injured... maybe in another twenty years they'll build New New Baghdad, and the bastards can nuke that, too.

    Some corporal comes over. "Hey man, heard your squad got vaped. Tough break."

    Shrug. "Not the first time I've walked out of the shit alone. Probably not the last, either."

    "Fuckin' A, yeah man. Recon. You guys are the fucking hard core of the hard core."

    This kid. Fuck me... pre-Bush, this kid would be worried about prom dates and what MTV decided was popular.

    I'm too old for this shit.

    My dad always used to tell me, before the bombs dropped and the world went to shit that is, he told me, "Son, you can be anything you want to be. Anything at all. All you have to do is fight for it."

    This is, of course, the same guy who always said, "My mother told me the same thing, that I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. I just decided to be an asshole."

    Dad was out there somewhere with a citizen's group, blowing shit up in various bombed-out suburban ruins, until a combined Cuban-Korean strike team took him and his whole group out one fine July morning. Mom died on A-Day. So did my sister. My brother bought it seven years ago in a firefight with the Chinese on what was left of the Golden Gate Bridge.

    Then there's me... the lucky survivor. Five tours, from '13 to now, and the worst I've ever gotten was a broken leg, and that happened on my first leave.

    I never question why I survive. I just do my job. It's all I can do until I finally buy it, and then this fucked-up corpse world will be everyone else's problem.

    A part of me can't wait until all this is over. But not the War, no, I know that'll never be over.

    No, that part of me, what keeps me awake at night isn't the explosions or the laser fire, or even memories of a thousand faces that are in a thousand thousand pieces now... what keeps me awake at night is the certain knowledge that I want to die, and I can't, no matter how hard they try to kill me. Because I have to earn my death, and that means they have to earn it, too.

    They'll get another chance, though. Only 46 more hours to wait until I can give it to them.

    I can't wait.