Andrew found himself in that white room again. Padded once more, he saw visions all over the walls. Vision of him firing his machinegun into an innocent crowd, visions of him tearing limbs apart, and even one of him taking a fat bite. It was as mesmerizing as biting a steak.
“So much power in the demons…”
The voice rang from inside and outside of his head. Unfortunately, there was no exit from this noise. The door was shut without a key, let alone a handle. Andrew could only look down to find a straitjacket around his body. When had he put that on?
“You can have their power… you can have the strength to protect everyone…”
It wouldn’t be enough to say that the voice was deep. Not enough to say that the voice was demonic, or even monstrous. Hell, it wasn’t enough to say that it was from hell. It sounded like something that should not be in his head. As if some kind of divine commandment was urging him towards this horrid path.
“You won’t be able to save them… not even from themselves…”
It wasn’t a good voice to have in his head. He tried wrangling his arms free from the jacket, but they just clamped to his body even harder. He was desperate to the point of bashing his head against the wall—but bones don’t break on that much soft padding.
“Just let me into your mind and body… and the power will be yours…”
***
“Fuck!” Andrew jumped up from the couch. His face was full of sweat as his mind struggled to remember what time and place this was. “Fuck, where am I?!” he screamed.
The Sergeant was calmly sitting on her bed. “I could ask the same thing for my nightmare, except I was in too much pain to jump like that,” she chuckled. Instead of a face being covered in bandages, she had a matte-black metal eyepatch with a lens on the front of it. Meanwhile, her amputated arm was replaced with an arm made from wires almost resembling muscle tissue. “Good to see you here, Cheng.”
Andrew blinked. It took a moment for his mind to reframe what was a dream and what was reality. “Y-You have prosthetics!” he finally cried. “I can’t believe it! Did they do the procedure overnight?”
“No, they did it yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Andrew asked. “But yesterday was…” Then he realized what she was saying. Simply put, yesterday wasn’t what he thought it was. “No… you don’t mean to say that I’ve been asleep this whole time… are you?”
“You slept like a baby,” she said in her usual deep voice. “It made me think that you were the patient for a second, until Doctor Shiro showed back up with his assistant. It surprisingly didn’t take long for the procedure to take place; they had done all the measurements beforehand.”
“Wow,” Andrew muttered. “Those lab guys really work fast.”
“Yeah, they do,” she said with a dry laugh. “Maybe I should’ve listened to his advice on the railgun and the thermite-thrower. Then again though, the railgun would take too long to charge up, and the thermite wouldn’t be as effective if done on the outside. At least that’s what they said after reviewing the footage.”
The Sergeant scoffed at herself as she picked up the giftbox of cigars. “I can’t believe I said that cringy line after getting that grenade in his stomach. What was it again? Eat thermite, you fat motherfucker?”
“It was, I hope you like the taste of thermite you fat motherfucker,” Andrew recited. When Andrew had thought that his team leader was finished, that line was probably the most badass thing she could’ve said at that moment. “I didn’t think it was cringy.”
“Oh, but it was corny as all hell. I might as well scream yippee-ki-yay motherfucker at the top of my lungs,” the Sergeant chuckled before sliding a fresh cigar in her mouth. Hospital rules—she couldn’t smoke indoors—so she let it comfortably sit inside her mouth.
Andrew had seen her smoke a cigar maybe once or twice, so he knew that it must’ve pained her to not have a good smoke. “Need a light?” he asked as he pulled a lighter out from Gutierrez’s bag. That sly unc probably expected this.
“The light’s not the problem. It’s the legs,” replied the Sergeant. “Since it hasn’t been too long since my operation, and since my prosthetics directly connect to my nerves, my legs walk like jelly. I wouldn’t be able to make it outside even if I tried.”
That was definitely something Andrew didn’t expect to hear. But rather than ruminating on her discomfort, he got up and unfolded a nearby wheelchair. “Well, I think we could make it outside.”
The Sergeant gave him a funny look. It was like she hardly expected someone to ever take care of her, let alone wheel her around. It was both humiliating and humbling. “Well…” She looked down at her cigar, which rested in her still-organic left hand. Andrew could tell she really wanted to smoke it. “Fine. Just don’t patronize me.”
He placed the chair next to the bed and prepared to help her on, but she wagged her finger. “No, I think I can do this.”
Using her prosthetic arm, she gripped the side of the bed for support as she lifted herself onto the chair. It seemed easy enough—no problems when her legs slid onto the leather seat. “God, this is hard,” she grunted. “It’s like I can still feel my arm. Or at least an arm. Those new nerves must be different.”
The Sergeant tried letting go of the bedside. Tried. Her grip didn’t budge. “New nerves…” she muttered to herself. She had to pry her fingers free with her one good hand. Something gave Andrew the feeling that rehab was gonna take a while.
***
The garden was a peaceful place on the top of the skyscraper. Fresh bamboo lined the sides of a stone path, with the only background being a mini waterfall and a sprawling city behind it. It was funny to think that modern technology allowed for a two-decade old city to grow so quickly.
The Sergeant puffed her cigar off into the air. It smelled like a dark chocolatey wood that didn’t belong in a city of glass and rebar. “Girls like flowers. I like cigars,” she coldly remarked. “God, I haven’t had a good one like this in a while. The Lieutenant knows what I like.”
Andrew had pulled a chair next to her. It was a nice pause to be away from work, while still being around his Sergeant. Maybe it was the situation, or maybe the off-duty hours, but he felt that the Sergeant didn’t have her usual coat of professionalism around her. Sometimes, that coat would be strong enough to stop bullets.
She took another puff. “The nightmares take a while before they stop.”
“What?”
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“Boot camp,” the Sergeant chuckled. “You’ll wake up with cold sweats because you think you’re late or that you fell asleep during a mandatory brief. I never did CDR bootcamp, but I know that’s true for everyone.”
Andrew couldn’t stop himself from laughing a little. It was true; sometimes he’d dream that he was getting smoked in a PT session by the CDR sergeants. The basic part of it was about twelve weeks, while tech school was about six months. After that, he was sent to his desired station: New Changan.
Another puff of thick smoke passed through the air. “You know, I was actually approached to become a CDR instructor. Whether it be in basic or in tech school, they wanted me in. The pay was actually gonna be really good, since they desperately needed some veterans of the job.”
“Really?” Honestly, if the Sergeant was one of his instructors, he’d probably be dead-terrified more than he already was. “Why didn’t you take it?”
“Same reason I left the ‘Corps: I didn’t want to be stateside looking at papers the whole time. I figured that I was already doing some instructing as a team leader, and I might as well teach you on the job.” She took another puff. She really enjoyed that cigar. “What about you? Why’d you choose this job?”
The way she worded it: this job. No matter what kind of demon they were fighting, no matter how many bodies they saw, and no matter how much lead they slung, they were still just doing a job. “Well,” Andrew replied, “I wanted to do something cool.”
“Wanted to be a knight in shining armor? Like in the advertisement?”
“Wait, you saw that advertisement too?”
She lightly nodded. “Guy in shining armor fights a demon before it cuts away to a guy in an APE. Yeah, everyone’s seen that ad. I’m surprised that decades later, that same tactic of TV commercials still gets young kids into the world’s worst jobs. But I guess I can’t judge too hard. Everyone wants a career that answers something. You answered what you wanted to do with your life, just like how I answered mine.”
The Sergeant looked off into the distance. Then pulled out a hospital-issued stressball.
“The nurse gave this to me to help speed my recovery,” she said. “The left eye is doing okay, even though it doesn’t really close or blink, but the arm is the real issue. The thing is that I aim with my right eye and shoot with my right arm. I basically have to use old nerves and new nerves together.”
She squeezed the ball. The metal muscles worked to grip it down to an airless sponge. It was obvious that in terms of strength, the new arm was an obvious upgrade from any human arm. “Now… just to let it go…”
The Sergeant strained her face, but the hand didn’t budge. It was as if it had a mind of its own. A mind that was relentless and metallic. A mind that could crush everything into a ball. A mind that just couldn’t let go.
Andrew pried her fingers from the ball. It took some effort, but once he got one free, the rest were easy. “Fuck,” the Sergeant muttered under her breath. Another good puff of her cigar relaxed her nerves enough to fully relax.
It must’ve pained the Sergeant, but Andrew knew that they had come to the same conclusion: if the Sergeant wanted to recover, she needed his help.
***
It was always common practice for a leader to expect higher than possible, so that the subordinates would be motivated to push for that unreachable standard. But in the following days, the Sergeant found that this was an impossible task for her recovery. There was hardly any progress.
Andrew would wake up at night to find her sitting up and staring at the wall. Her right eye would be closed, but the lens of her prosthetic eye would keep moving. It was as the Sergeant had said: she could never shut her new eye.
Then there was still the issue with her arm. Even though her nerves connected to it without any healthy complication, there was the issue of literally refitting nerves to a new limb. It was like trying to live with an arm that wasn’t hers.
The main issue wasn’t so much applying force with it—she actually applied too much force when she crushed doorhandles with her grip—but more so trying to release it. Her hands just wouldn’t open back up as easily.
But at worst, Andrew had to pull her hand apart. It used up all of his energy every time. “Jesus… Christ…!” After about five seconds of effort, the fingers would finally wring open. “And this doesn’t hurt you?”
The Sergeant sighed as her hand pulled free. The stress ball bounced onto the floor, despite the obvious tears on its surface. “They made it so that I don’t feel pain, but I definitely feel the arm.”
Sitting in the garden as usual, she puffed on her cigar. “Let me give you an example.”
With her good hand, the Sergeant dug the burning end against her metal arm. Andrew immediately tried stopping her, but there wasn’t a real need. “It’s like I’m told that there’s heat, that there’s burning, and that I have a nice cigar being ruined. But I’m obviously not screaming.”
It became obvious that the Sergeant was just another breed of human. The type of person who would fight demons hand to hand, lose an arm in doing so, and then try to get right back into the fight? Not even the demons had that level of grit.
Guess it just took a monster to kill a monster.
“Cheng, what’s your distraction?”
“Sergeant?”
“You heard my question.” She bumped him on the shoulder with her metal arm. It only hurt a little bit. “Everyone needs something when it comes to life, especially one like ours. Singh has her dip. Smith has his girlfriend, or girlfriends at this point. Gutierrez obviously has his family, and Kang has world-class philosophy. Not to mention the good-old fashioned lord above.”
The Sergeant pressed another cigar into her mouth. It had become routine for Andrew to light it for her, since her metal hand could accidentally crush the poor lighter. “So,” she asked as he lit it once more, “what’s your distraction?”
That was a good question. Andrew definitely didn’t have a girlfriend—too much work—and he definitely didn’t have the care to read up on deontology or the bible. Hell, he didn’t even have much of an addiction to caffeine, let alone nicotine. To him, the only thing that mattered was the CDR team.
Finally, he shrugged and gave the second-best answer. “I used to be big on video games.”
The Sergeant chuckled. “Man, I haven’t played anything in a long time. You know, when I was in high school, I was on some big leagues e-sports team. It was funny, since my parents would’ve killed me if they found out I was playing games for money. They just wanted me to study so I could bring money to the house.”
Andrew found himself laughing with the Sergeant. “Asian parents are brutal…”
“I was the eldest daughter of five kids,” she continued with a grin. “They only thought about money, education, and money. One day, I came home, and my mom is throwing shit everywhere. She found out my dad cheated on her with some other Cantonese chick.”
“Shit…”
“The funniest part?” the Sergeant added. “Dumb bitch forgave him. She realized that she could only survive if she combined her earnings from the salon with his work at some auto repair. I think at that point, I realized that I really had to leave the house.”
“College?” Andrew asked.
“Hell no. Even with scholarships, my parents only wanted me to go to schools in our local state. No dorm, meaning I’d have to transit back home just to find my parents in another fight. Either that, or my siblings would just look at me like lost puppies. I don’t think I wanted that for the life of me. So at 17, I decided on the military.”
“Marine Corps?”
“Only when I found out that the ‘Corps was my best chance of finding my fellow crazies. Parents only let me go when I told them the guaranteed room, board, and paycheck. Easiest way to make a little bit of money while getting certifications, I told them. Also said I was gonna go to a paid-for college afterwards.”
“And?”
“And I ended up in infantry, where I stayed long enough to be a Sergeant. I got lucky; think I was about 22 when I got the rank. I thought I was lucky to have gotten the commendations, and then I thought I was unlucky when the Chinese-American shit kicked off. First wave. Rah.”
She had burned the cigar down to the bud at this point. The Sergeant chuckled as she smothered it into her metal arm. “Sorry about that, Cheng. I sure detracted from talking about video games,” she said. “Anyway, think you could get me an energy drink? I’m sure they got some in the lobby.”
“I can do that,” Andrew replied. “Would you want me to wheel you back first?”
“Nah, nah. I’ll wheel myself back to my room. I memorized the way after my third time being pushed here.” The Sergeant proceeded to move herself, even with the difficulty of her artificial arm. It was initially hard, but she managed to get the hang of it.
Now Andrew had to get her a drink.