Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Craters.pdf - Kristine Kathryn Rusch - margozap

CRATERS

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

What they don’t tell you when you sign up is that the work takes a certain amount of

trust. The driver, head covered by a half-assed turban, smiles a little too much, and

when he yes ma’ams you and no ma’ams you, you can be lulled into thinking he

actually works for you.

Then he opens the side door of his rusted jeep and nods at the dirt-covered

seat. You don’t even hesitate as you slide in, backpack filled with water bottles and

purifying pills, vitamins and six day’s dry rations.

You sit in that jeep, and you’re grateful, because you never allow yourself to

think that he could be one of them, taking you to some roadside bunker, getting paid

an advance cut of the ransom they anticipate. Or worse, getting paid to leave you

there so that they can all take turns until you’re bleeding and catatonic and don’t care

when they put the fifty-year-old pistol to your head.

You can’t think about the risks, not as you’re getting in that jeep, or letting

some so-called civilian lead you down sunlit streets that have seen war for centuries

almost non-stop.

You trust, because if you don’t you can’t do your job.

You trust, and hope you get away from this place before your luck runs out.

* * * *

I still have luck. I know it because today we pull into the camp. This camp’s just like

all the others I’ve seen in my twenty-year career. The ass-end of nowhere, damn near

unbearable heat. Barbed wire, older than God, fences in everything, and at the front,

soldiers with some kind of high tech rifle, some sort of programmable thing I don’t

understand.

My driver pulls into a long line of oil-burning cars, their engines only partly

modified to hydrogen. The air stinks of gasoline, a smell I associate with my

childhood, not with now.

We sit in the heat. Sweat pours down my face. I nurse the bottle of water I

brought from the Green Zone—a misnomer we’ve applied to the American base in

every “war” since Iraq. The Green Zone doesn’t have a lick of green in it. It just has

buildings that are theoretically protected from bombs and suicide attacks.

Finally, we pull up to the checkpoint. I clutch my bag against my lap, even

though the canvas is heavy and hot.

My driver knows the soldiers. “Reporter lady,” he tells them in English. The

English is for my benefit, to prove once again that he is my friend. I haven’t let him

know that I know parts (the dirty parts mostly) of two dozen languages. “Very

famous. She blog, she do vid, you see her on CNN, no?”

The soldiers lean in. They have young faces covered in sand and mud and

three-day-old beards. The same faces I’ve been seeing for years—skin an

indeterminate color, thanks to the sun and the dirt, eyes black or brown or covered

with shades, expressions flat—the youth visible only in the body shape, the lack of

wrinkles and sunlines, the leftover curiosity undimmed by too much death over too

much time.

I lean forward so they can see my face. They don’t recognize me. CNN pays

me, just like the New York Times News Service, just like the Voice of the European

Union. But none of them broadcast or replicate my image.

The woman everyone thinks of as me is a hired face, whose features get

digitized over mine before anything goes out into public. Too many murdered

journalists. Too many famous targets.

The military brass, they know to scan my wrist, send the code into the

Reporter Registry, and get the retinal download that they can double-check against

my eye. But foot soldiers, here on crap duty, they don’t know for nothing.

So they eyeball me, expecting a pretty face—all the studio hires are skinny and

gorgeous—and instead, getting my shoe-leather skin, my dishwater blond going on

steel gray hair, and my seen-too-much eyes. They take in the sweat and the khakis

and the pinkie jacks that look like plastic fingernails.

I wait.

They don’t even confer. The guy in charge waves the jeep forward, figuring, I

guess, that I clean up startlingly well. Before I can say anything, the jeep roars

through the barbed wire into a wide flat street filled with people.

Most cultures call them refugees, but I think of them as the dregs—unwanted

and unlucky, thrown from country to country, or locked away in undesirable land,

waiting for a bit of charity, a change of political fortune, waiting for an understanding

that will never, ever come.

* * * *

The smell hits you first: raw sewage combined with vomit and dysentery. Then the

bugs, bugs like you’ve never seen, moving in swarms, sensing fresh meat.

After your first time with those swarms, you slather illegal bug spray on your

arms, not caring that developed countries banned DDT as a poison/nerve toxin long

ago. Anything to keep those creatures off you, anything to keep yourself alive.

You get out of your jeep, and immediately, the children who aren’t dying

surround you. They don’t want sweets— what a quaint old idea that is—they want

to know what kind of tech you have, what’s buried in your skin, what you carry

under your eyes, what you record from that hollow under your chin. You give them

short answers, wrong answers, answers you’ll regret in the quiet of your hotel room

days later, after you know you’ve made it out to report once more. You remember

them, wonder how they’ll do, hope that they won’t become the ones you see farther

into the camp, sprawled outside thin government-issue tents, those bug swarms

covering their faces, their stomachs distended, their limbs pieces of scrap so thin

that they don’t even look like useful sticks.

Then you set the memories—the knowledge—aside. You’re good at setting

things aside. That’s a skill you acquire in this job, if you didn’t already have it when

you came in. The I’ll-think-about-it-later skill, a promise to the self that is never

fulfilled.

Because if you do think about it later, you get overwhelmed. You figure out

pretty damn quickly that if you do think about all the things you’ve seen—all the

broken bodies, all the dying children—you’ll break, and if you break you won’t be

able to work, and if you can’t work, you can no longer be.

After a while, work is all that’s left to you. Between the misplaced trust and

the sights no human should have to bear, you stand, reporting, because you believe

someone will care, someone stronger will Do Something.

Even though, deep down, you know, there is no one stronger, and nothing

ever gets done.

* * * *

5:15 PM Upload: Suicide Squadron Part I by Martha Trumante

General Amanda Pedersen tells the story as if it happened two days ago

instead of twenty years ago. She’s sitting in one of the many cafeterias in the

Louvre, this one just beneath the glass pyramid where the tourists enter. She’s an

American soldier on leave, spending a week with her student boyfriend at the

Sorbonne. He has classes. She’s seeing the sights.

She’s just resting her feet, propping them up — American-style — on the

plastic chair across from her. From her vantage, she can’t see the first round of

security in the pyramid itself, but she can see the second set of metal detectors, the

ones installed after the simultaneous attacks of ’19 that leveled half the Prado in

Madrid and the Tate in London.

She likes watching security systems — that’s what got her to enlist in the first

place, guaranteeing a sense of security in an insecure world — and she likes

watching people go through them.

The little boy and his mother are alone on the escalator coming down. They

reach the security desk, the woman opening her palm to reveal the number

embedded under the skin, her son — maybe four, maybe five — bouncing with

excitement beside her.

A guard approaches him, says something, and the boy extends his arms —

European, clearly, used to high levels of security. The guard runs his wand up the

boy’s legs, over his crotch, in front of his chest —

And the world collapses.

Thais how she describes it. The world collapses. The air smells of blood and

smoke and falling plaster. Her skin is covered in dust and goo and she has to pull

some kind of stone off her legs. Miraculously, they’re not broken, but as the day

progresses, part of her wishes they were, so she wouldn’t be carrying dead

through the ruins of the Roman area, up the back stairs, and into the thin Paris

sunlight.

She can’t go to the rebuilt pyramid, even now, nor to the Touleries Garden

or even look at the Seine without thinking of that little boy, the smile on his face as

he bounces, anticipating a day in the museum, a day with his mother, a day

without cares, like five-year-olds are supposed to have.

Were supposed to have.

Before everything changed.

* * * *

The driver has left me. He will be back in two days, he says, waiting for me near the

checkpoint, but I do not believe him. My trust only goes so far, and I will not pay

him in advance for the privilege of ferrying me out of this place. So he will forget, or

die, or think I have forgotten, or died, whatever eases his conscience if a shred of his

conscience still remains.

I walk deep into the camp, my pack slung over my shoulder. My easy walk,

my relatively clean clothing, and my pack mark me as a newcomer, as someone who

doesn’t belong.

The heat is oppressive. There’s no place out of the sun except the tents the

Red Cross and its relative out here, the Red Crescent, have put up. People sit

outside those tents, some clutching babies, other supervising children who dig in the

dirt.

Rivulets of mud run across the path. Judging by the flies and the smell, the

mud isn’t made by water. It’s overflowing sewage, or maybe it’s urine from the lack

of a good latrine system or maybe it’s blood.

There’s a lot of blood here.

I do no Miming, record no images. The Western world has seen these places

before, countless times. When I was a child, late-night television had infomercials

featuring cheerful men who walked through such places with a single well-dressed

child, selling some religious charity that purported to help people.

Charities don’t help people here. They merely stem the tide, stop the

preventable deaths, keep the worst diseases at bay. But they don’t find real homes

for these people, don’t do job training, don’t offer language lessons, and more

importantly, don’t settle the political crises or the wars that cause the problems in the

first place.

The aide worker has a harder job than I do, because the aide worker—the real

aide worker—goes from country to country from camp to camp from crisis to

crisis, knowing that for each life saved a thousand more will be lost.

I prefer my work, focused as it can be.

I have been on this assignment for six months now. Writing side pieces.

Blogging about the bigger events. Uploading pieces that give no hint of my actual

purpose.

My editors fear it will make me a target.

I know that I already am.

* * * *

Whoever called these places camps had a gift for euphemism. These are villages,

small towns with a complete and evolved social system.

You learn that early, in your first camp, when you ask the wrong person the

wrong question. Yes, violence is common here—it’s common in any human

enclave—but it is also a means of crowd control.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Craters.pdf

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