Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Stacey popped the trunk and doled out ordnance. Paul got a paint-ball gun and a faceshield. He realized he’d be easy to spot: his puffy white parka made him look, as Stacey remarked, “like a faggot cloud drifted down to earth.”

They divvied up into teams. Paul was selected second-to-last, one ahead of Pegs, an Einstein so nicknamed because he’d lost his feet in a childhood combine accident. Nobody liked to play with Pegs because the hinges of his prosthetics creaked in chilly weather and betrayed his team’s position.

The squads made their way into a forest of maple, oak, and black locust. Stacey captained Paul’s team. “Fan out,” he told them, “and keep your heads on a swivel.”

Paul found a spot behind a rotted log. An air horn went off to start the match.

Seconds later paintballs were whizzing through the air all around him, slamming into trees with pops and splats.

Paul spied an Einstein blundering through the brush like a crazed boar. He took aim and fired. A phut of compressed gas and his paint-ball curved through the air to splatter harmlessly in a nettle thicket. He ducked as paintballs jack-hammered the log, pok-pok-p-pok! His jaw and chest muscles seized up — taking heavy fire!

Paul’s hopes that the Einstein would hump off in search of less elusive quarry were dashed when he heard, “I got all day, goat-fucker! I smell your fear, and it fuels me!”

Most Einsteins spoke the same patois of intimidation and degradation. Paul tried to imagine them at the supper table: Pass the margarine, Mom, you turkey-armed weakling; Dad, make with the salad or I’ll poke your eyeballs out with a toothpick and serve them to you in a nice dry martini…

Paul would settle for one-for-one. He wasn’t Rambo; nobody expected him to mow down an entire regiment. He jammed two fingers under his faceshield and wiped away the condensation; then he jumped up, unleashed a primal scream, and charged the Einstein.

He squeezed off a few rounds before his visor exploded orange. Once he cleared the paint away his heart took a giddy leap: he’d hit the Einstein. Not lethally — his left foot. Had it been Pegs, he probably would’ve been allowed to play on. But he was not, and since any hit counted, he was out.

“Flesh wound!” the Einstein cried. “If this were a real war, I’d keep fighting.”

“So would I,” said Paul, tetchily.

“What,” the Einstein wanted to know, “with a hole through your head? Wait a sec — what team are you on?”

“The Log Jammers.” Stacey’s brainchild.

The Einstein hurled his facemask to the ground. “We’re on the same team, you retard! Killed by friendly fucking fire — I should rip your face off and wear it as a mask!”

Paul and the other KIAs assembled back in the field. A gasoline-stoked fire raged; a boom box played “Hatchet to the Head” by Cannibal Corpse. Slit open crushed eyeballs dripping hanging / A life of beheading I must have. Einsteins walked around shirtless, flexing, their chilled flesh marbled like Kobe beef.

Paul kept his shirt on. Stacey had him on Androl, Winstrol, and Human Growth Hormone — a dog’s breakfast that bloated him up like a dead cow. He sloshed like a wineskin; he could bench-press two-fifty but looked like a walrus. With his liver values out of whack, his skin had gone the color of dried lemon rind. The HGH, concocted from the pituitary glands of cadavers—“The best stuff,” Stacey told him, “comes from aborted third-trimester fetuses” — had given him the swollen forehead and elongated jaw of those giant heads on Easter Island. “Think of it as a cocoon,” Stacey had told him. “You puff up, look disgusting for a month, then I put you on Lasix to leach the fluid out — a whole new you.”

The boom box kicked out “Skull Full of Maggots”, “Sanded Faceless,” and “Fucked With a Knife”, and by the time “I Cum Blood” hit its final note the other players had made their way back.

The Einstein sought Stacey out and started bitching about Paul’s gaffe.

“Is this true?” Stacey asked. “You killed your own man?”

Paul glared at the Einstein, who stood behind Stacey like a tattletale behind his headmaster. “I didn’t kill anyone. It’s a game.”

Stacey bristled. “Shooting your own man is the most disgraceful act a soldier can commit.”

“Nail on the head, Stace,” the Einstein spat. “He’s a fucking disgrace.”

“What were you doing in front of me?” Paul asked.

“He was probably running an end-around flanking pattern.” When Stacey sought confirmation on this, the Einstein gave him a “what else?” look.

Paul’s teeth clenched the length of his jaw; it felt as if someone had slapped a jellyfish on his scalp, stinging, stinging. If the Einstein bitched once more, Paul resolved to punch his nose down his throat.

The players loaded up fresh paint and headed out for round two.

“Paul,” Stacey said, “you take point.”

Paul had watched enough Tour of Duty to know that point was not anywhere a soldier wanted to be. But he was sick of these over-muscled jackasses and their war games; the prospect of getting killed early wasn’t a heartbreaker.

He hunkered down behind a tree stump. The air horn sounded. Paul scanned the woods for any sign of movement, keeping his eyes sighted down the gun barrel. He spied a body crashing through the underbrush and opened fire. His target dodged and wove; Paul cursed as his shots went wide or fell short. He managed to pin him down behind a tree.

“I got all day!” he cried out. “I can—”

A paintball slammed into his head — the back of it, above the trim of fine dark hair. His skull snapped forward like he’d been donkey-punched. He’d been shot at point-blank range and expected to find the back of his head blown apart: bone fragments, spattered brains. But his fingers came away clown’s-nose red: only paint.

He turned and saw the Einstein he’d shot in the foot. The guy’s body was locked in an action-hero pose; C0 2smoke curled from his gun barrel.

“Mercy,” was all he said.

A flashpot went off inside Paul’s braincase, a tiny superheated sun that scorched the walls of bone; the light froze in thin sharp icicles that dangled, luminous, from the roof of his skull.

He clawed himself up and shot the Einstein. His gun went phut: a bright Rorschach appeared over the Einstein’s heart. The Einstein returned fire. They were less than two feet apart. Phut-phut-ph-phut . The air was alive with twisting, curiously static strings of paint.

Paul gripped his gun by the barrel and swung it at the Einstein’s head. The C0 2canister struck his jaw and the guy went down in the sedge grass.

Paul sat on his chest and rained blows. Fierce chopping punches, left-right, left-right. Dark arterial red plastered the inside of the Einstein’s faceshield; red bubbled through the mask’s airholes.

Left-right, left-right. A fist cracked the faceshield: needles of red, pulped skin.

Left-right, left-right. Things crumpled and snapped and split and tore loose. A shockingly bright ring spread across the grass. The Einstein wasn’t moving; his left leg twitched the way a sleeping dog’s will. Paul’s shoulders throbbed. His fists dripped.

He tore a bush from the ground. It came up easily, root system clumped with dirt.

He replanted it: now the bush appeared to be growing up out of the Einstein’s face.

Back in the field Paul opened car doors until he found one with keys in the ignition. His paint-splattered parka left carnival smears on the leather interior. He gunned the engine and careened through the fire and scraped up the side of Stacey’s Humvee; sparks leapt through the open window. He lined up the boom box and hit it dead center: it exploded in a spray of cheap plastic and a woofer glanced off the windshield as he accelerated out of the field howling like a banshee.