Hiroshi Sakurazaka - All You Need Is Kill

0630 Eat breakfast.

0730 Practice basic body movement.

0900 Visualize training during fucking PT.

1030 Borrow battle axe from Shasta.

1130 Eat lunch.

1300 Train with emphasis on correcting mistakes of previous battle. (In Jacket.)

1500 Meet Ferrell for live battle training. (In Jacket.)

1745 Eat dinner.

1830 Attend platoon meeting.

1900 Go to Yonabaru’s party.

2000 Check Jacket.

2200 Go to bed.

0112 Help Yonabaru into his bunk.

This was more or less how I spent my day.

Outside of training, everything had become routine. I’d snuck past those sentries so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I was starting to worry that I’d become a master thief before I made it as a professional soldier. Not that the ability to steal anything in a world that resets itself at the end of every other day would do much good.

The daily grind didn’t change much from one pass through the loop to the next. If I strayed really far from the routine, I could force something different to happen, but if I didn’t do anything it would play out the same as always. It was like everyone kept reading from the same script they’d been given the day before and ad-libbing was frowned upon.

It was 1136 and I was eating lunch in Cafeteria No. 2. The lunch lady served me the same amount of onion soup at the same time in the same bowl. I moved my arm to avoid the same splash as it traced the same arc through the air. Dodging calls from friends throughout the cafeteria, I sat in the same seat.

Rita was sitting three rows in front of me, her back to me as she ate. I hadn’t chosen this time to eat because it coincided with her lunch; it just worked out that way. For no particular reason, I’d gotten used to watching her eat from this same angle each day.

Cafeteria No. 2 wasn’t the sort of place a sergeant major like Rita would normally be expected to dine. It’s not that the food was bad. It was pretty good, actually. But it didn’t seem likely to impress someone who woke up in an officer’s private sky lounge each morning and had half the base at her beck and call. I’d even heard that U.S. Special Forces had brought along their own cook, which only deepened the mystery of her presence. She could have swallowed a live rat and wouldn’t have seemed more a snake in our midst. And so our savior ate alone. No one tried to talk to her, and the seats around her were always conspicuously empty.

For all her prowess in battle, Rita Vrataski ate like a child. She licked the soup from the corners of her mouth and drew pictures in her food with the tips of her chopsticks. Apparently chopsticks were something new to her. At 1143 she dropped a bean on her plate. It rolled, picking up speed, bouncing first to her tray, and then to the table. The bean flew through the air with a clockwise spin, careening toward the concrete floor. Every time, with lightning reflexes, Rita would extend her left hand, pluck the bean out of the air, and cram it into her mouth. All in under 0.11 seconds. If she’d lived back in the Old West, I imagine she’d have outdrawn Billy the Kid. If she’d been a samurai, she could have read every flash of Kojiro Sasaki’s katana. Even when she was eating, the Full Metal Bitch was the Full Metal Bitch.

Today, like every day, she was trying to eat an umeboshi pickled plum. She must have confused it for an ordinary piece of dried fruit. After two or three attempts to pick it up with her chopsticks, she put the whole thing in her mouth.

Down the hatch.

Rita doubled over as though she’d taken a 57mm round right in the gut. Her back twitched. Her rust-colored hair looked like it was about to stand on end. But she didn’t cough it back up. Tough as nails. She had swallowed the whole thing, pit and all. Rita gulped down a glass of water with a vengeance.

She must have been at least twenty-two years old, but you’d never guess it watching her. The sand-colored military uniforms didn’t flatter her, but if you dressed her up in one of those frilly numbers the girls in town were wearing, she’d be pretty cute. At least I liked to imagine so.

What’s wrong with this food? It tastes like paper.

“You enjoyin’ yourself?” The voice came from above my head.

Holding my chopsticks without moving a muscle, I looked out the corner of my eye. A prehistoric face looked down at me from beneath a flattop haircut that leveled off about two meters above sea level. His features were more dinosaur than human. Definitely some velociraptor lurking in that family tree. My spirits fell when I saw the tattoo on his shoulder: a wolf wearing a crown. He was from the 4th, the company holding a grudge against us over that rugby game. I went back to lifting food to my mouth with machinelike regularity.

He raised his eyebrows, two plump bushes that would have been the envy of the caterpillar world. “I asked if you were enjoyin’ yourself.”

“How could I not enjoy myself in such fine company?”

“So how come you’re gulpin’ down your chow like it was something you found stuck on the end of a toilet brush?”

There were only a handful of soldiers sitting at the oversized tables in the cafeteria. The smell of something sweet wafted from the kitchen. Artificial light from the fluorescents in the ceiling washed over the fried shrimp heaped onto our heavy-duty plates.

If you had to categorize the food prepared in the UDF as good or bad, it was definitely good. There were only three things a soldier in the UDF did, after all: eat, sleep, and fight. If the food wasn’t good you’d have a morale problem on your hands. And according to Yonabaru, the food on Flower Line Base was better than most.

The first time I tasted it, I thought it was delicious. That was about five subjective months ago now, maybe more. About a month into the loop, I started heavily seasoning my food. The intentionally mismatched condiments created a taste just horrible enough to remind me the food was there. And now, even that had stopped working. I don’t care if you’re eating food prepared by a four-star chef, after eighty days of the same thing, it all tastes alike. Probably because it is. By that point, it was hard for me to think of food as anything other than a source of energy.

“If the look on my face put you off your lunch, I apologize.” No use trying to start a fight.

“Hold it. You tryin’ to say this is my fault?”

“I don’t have time for this.”

I started shoveling the rest of the food on my plate into my mouth. He slammed a palm the size of a baseball glove down on the table. Onion soup splashed on my shirt, leaving a stain where the lunch lady’s best efforts had failed. I didn’t really mind. No matter how tough the stain was, it would be gone by tomorrow, and I wouldn’t even have to wash it.

“Fourth Company grunts not worth the time of the mighty 17th, that it?”

I realized I’d unwittingly set a very annoying flag. This loop had been cursed from the get-go, really. I had accidentally killed Ferrell at the end of the last loop, and that had thrown everything out of whack this time around. From where I was, it hadn’t even been five hours since he’d died vomiting blood. Of course I’d been KIA too, but that was to be expected. Ferrell had died trying to protect a fucking new recruit. It had been just the spur my migraine needed to kick into a gallop.

I’d planned to ease my mind by staring at Rita the way I always did, but my foul mood must have been more obvious than I realized. Clearly, it was bad enough to trigger something that hadn’t happened in any of the previous loops.