IV. Smoking Dreams

I sit in my makeshift bunk, waiting for dawn. The night is dark and musty, with stenches of blood, piss, and God knows what else. Stirred up dirt creeps into the open tent flap, and I pull out my pack of cigarettes. Knowing this will probably get me in trouble with the duty officer, I light it, and inhale the wondrous fumes of nicotine, jacked up a hundred times for more immediate satisfaction. The reality of almost getting killed for the four hundredth time in twenty years is that it never fails to shock you. Coming nose to nose with your own demise, only to brush it away like a mosquito. But then to have it continually assault you, relentless in its pursuit of its prey, it almost gets tiring.

Which is how I feel after the kid saved my life. I realize that I actually loathed the kid for it, for sparing my life in this unceasing war. I have no more clear memories of life before the Zerg; most veterans don't. But often I find myself longing for fresh food, perhaps a grilled steak instead of this canned, pasteurized, and impounded shit. I'm tired of the same old routine.

But who isn't?

Fighting the Zerg wears the hell out of you, especially when you survive the scourge. Seeing all of the people you once knew simply devoured before your eyes while you are whisked off to safety is a terrible feeling. But it is one I feel every day. For some odd, freakish reason, I am always the one to survive. And everyone I know hates me for it.

I exhale, releasing smoke into the shadowy interior of the tent, and sigh. It hurts. It's always hurt. People tell me to quit the stuff, but I can't. It feels too good, soothes too much pain. Pain that renews each passing day.

I have only one other person joining me in the tent, somewhat conveniently, the kid. He coughs on my smoke and wakes. Looking at the cigarette between my fingers I say, "So. We're awake, are we?"

The boy covers his mouth. "Do you gotta smoke that in here?" I chuckle, not only at his response but also by his poor grammar. Already a sign of his full immersion in the corps. "Can't go outside," I reply, and exhale. "Dreams?"

The boy shrugs. "Y'know, just weird stuff."

I sigh, hating myself for what I am about to do. "Tell me."

So he tells me. He tells me that his dreams were mainly about the mission, although in his subconscious, I perish. He fails to pull the trigger when the Hydra corners me.

"That's comforting." I say, and inhale.

"Do you sleep?" He asks me.

I shake my head. "But I do dream."

"How? What do you dream?" he asks. He is persistent, true to the form of one his age.

I shake my head, correcting myself. "I do not have dreams. I have nightmares." I tell him my nightmare.

My friend of fifteen years and I are on Mar Sara during one of the first Zerg mass attacks. I am standing on a scout tower, my friend, on the ground at the wheel of a vulture. He has already set out his three spider mines. I call down to him, "Hey! How's the view down there?" It's a joke, one of many to keep us sane. He grins and shouts back. "Hey! I can see your hut from her—" But before he can finish his sentence, his head is torn off by the needle spines of a Hydralisk. Blood spurts from his neck as his arms shake wildly. His body goes into convulsions and falls off the vulture, the seat covered in dark crimson. My mouth forms an oval, my throat utters a high-pitched squeal, and I look to the source of my friend's fate. Thousands upon thousands of Hydralisks swarm from horizon to horizon. The dark orange sun illuminates them, making them seem even more murderous and deadly. I crouch under the makeshift buttresses that line my tower and roll down my visor, hoping my scent will not be caught. I slowly relive every moment of my friend's death repeatedly, in an infinite loop. The severed tendons, the cheerful look on his face, the blood-drenched grass. His esophagus sliding out of his neck and winding at the ground, like a small snake. The bike that topples onto his body, kickstand still up, so that it punctures his heart and arteries, spilling even more blood onto the ground.

And that was is the memory.

The fantasy begins when a Hydra slashes the wrought-iron supports of the tower out from under it, causing the makeshift building to fall to the ground. I open my visor and pick up my gun as it falls, but when it strikes the ground one of the buttresses breaks at the tip, causing a dagger-like tip to form. I am fully aware of this fact until I see the tip protruding from my lower midsection, just above my genitals. I am now immobilized against this army of now-millions of Zerg. A Hydra slides on top of me and I shove my gun into its mouth, and pull the trigger. I cannot feel my legs anymore, the result of heavy blood loss, but I feel the Hydra's bodily fluids seep into my clothes and in my eyes and up my nose. I snort, trying to clear my senses. But the blood clots in me. I am now mostly blind, and I cannot smell worth a damn.

I feel the next Hydra take my head in its jaws, and twist. I feel a crack, see red, and my head lands in a pool of something gooey and red. Through my foggy vision I see my headless corpse, blood spurting in droves from my severed neck, landing on me, wetness on my cheek. Then my vision darkens, and the nightmare fades.

I hate myself. The kid is scared shitless, and I can't see why not. I clearly have filled his entire life (or, at least the next few months) with waking nightmares of my most vivid memories. He soon snaps out of his trance and asks me another question. "If you don't sleep, how can you dream?"

I smile, a knowing smile, one you see in those old horror holovids, where the psychotic elderly person is telepathic or something equally far-fetched. But this is too real. "They're my smoking dreams." I say, and inhale another.