For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

March 5, 2054

36 years after events in Tajikistan

8:52AM EST

Interview 73

Federal Bureau of Investigation – Forensic Research Division

Library of Congress Quantum Mechanic archive records

Subject:

Captain Tammy Bowlin, R.N., D.N.P. United States Army Nurse Corp Retired

Officer Specialty 66H medical-surgical nurse

Source:

First person dictation transcribed by Marcus Lillian

Begin transcription

MARCUS: OK you can begin whenever you want.

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: The history of my involvement is as follows:

In twenty thirty-one I was the Head Nurse in the Specialized Intensive Care Unit at the Valley Falls Facility. Our charter was the accelerated development and application of biotech related treatments and technologies for soldiers and citizens wounded by foreign powers.

Our mission was important because we were unable to properly counter the biomechanical weapons platforms that we encountered at Mt Sinai. We needed to find ways to protect our soldiers. Barring that, we needed to find better ways to treat their injuries and facilitate more complete recoveries. Traditional methods were taking too long and not producing sufficient results, almost all research into nanotech, cybernetics, or human genome manipulation had been banned. So measures were taken to lift restrictions on us and accelerate progress.

One of the primary reasons I was assigned to the project was because I was one of the few people left alive after that battle and I saw that weaponry in action.

I had just finished my shift and I could never go to sleep right away like some of the other girls did. I always needed an hour or two to wind down. So I would go up to this little spot on the hill behind the eastern facing part of the wall. They had an artillery battery packing TOW missile systems at the top because it had a perfect fire line on the valley. Officially no one was supposed to be on that hill at all except for that artillery unit. But we’d been out there for 15 months waiting for the Sinai rebels to make a move, and we hadn’t seen anything but goats. At night it was so quiet you could hear trucks going down the Newbasa road and that was hundreds of miles off. So we got sloppy I guess. When it was cool enough after dark you’d see people up there drinking. But no one went up there in the morning except me. At least I never saw anyone. I would sit on this big flat rock with my legs over the edge and watch the sun come up. When I did that I could feel something almost like normal for a minute or two.

MARCUS: Why didn’t you feel normal at other times?

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: It’s difficult for civilians to understand. Being in a combat zone is nothing like what you see in the movies. It’s full of long stretches where nothing at all happens. It gets incredibly monotonous and boring. Then suddenly you’re under attack, or mobilized to go on the offensive against enemy combatants. You go from boredom to sheer panic in about three seconds. You do that enough like I did in Persian Tiger, and eventually you’re on a hair trigger all the time. Someone can drop something and you dive for cover before you realize it’s not an incoming mortar. It’s difficult to relax and let go of that. So when you find a way to do it you hang onto it. That’s the lifeline that keeps you sane until you can go home.

MARCUS: Was it a mechanism for avoiding PTSD?

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: Not directly, at least not for me. It was just a coping mechanism for dealing with things at the time.

I was up there drinking my tea and thinking about my shift. I’d been partnered with Dr. Cryder that day and I always learned something when I worked with him. He was a brilliant field surgeon and a really nice person. I wish I’d had a chance to thank him. But he died when they came over the wall with those 40mm grenades. People started running around in a panic and it gave those monsters a “target rich environment”, so to speak. I think most of the deaths happened in the first minute after they got in. I saw Dr Cryder run over to someone who was down and a grenade went off right next to them both. I knew it had to be him even from where I was. He was still in his scrubs and he had this jet black hair you couldn’t hide even with a buzz cut. They sent what was left of him back home for burial, but that was a light casket. I hate to say it, but he was one of the lucky ones.

MARCUS: How did it start?

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: I’d been watching the sun rise when I heard yelling down by the east gate. So I looked down to see what was going on and I thought I was seeing things. I literally blinked twice before I was satisfied I wasn’t hallucinating. Of course I’d seen exos before; we even had a simple one in the base for moving stuff where a forklift couldn’t go. But there was no way a whole unit of those things could just waltz up to us without being seen a half hour away. Plus, they’d have to get past about six different kinds of seismic, heat, or movement sensor systems, not to mention the solar mini drones we had flying overhead. This was the hardest place in the world to sneak up on. There was literally nothing around for miles unless you counted a couple of hills, rocks, and a rusted old station wagon off the north side. We’d been in morning twilight for almost a half of an hour, and the sun was half up. We should have spotted them while they were still far enough away for us to need a high powered scope to see them.

Then I realized they weren’t exos. Even the best combat chassis models were limited in how agile they could be. Sure, they could run and jump, but it was clumsy. They weighed a couple tons at least and it took a bit to get up to speed or change direction. But not these things, they looked... cat like. The way they moved had that fluid look - like tigers or lions have when they’re running. Long, graceful moves that ate up the ground under them. If I had to guess, I’d say they hit close to fifty miles an hour at a full run. Plus, they just looked all wrong in some weird, indefinable way. It made your blood run cold. Some part of you recognized what it saw. The only things that run like that are predators.

When the guards first spotted them they were about four hundred, maybe five hundred yards to the east and a little bit south. So if the base was a clock and the east gate was at three, they came wriggling up out of the sand at about four. Corsica sat on this big block of sandstone, so I guess where they came up was as close as they could get without hitting that. They just glided up into running on all fours without any sort of transition in between, and did it again to start running on two legs. It was unnatural, and ghostly, and wickedly quick.

With as fast as they moved, there was barely time to hit the alarms before they were almost at the wall. The tower guys had been tracking them, but swiveling those guns isn’t easy, so they were playing catch up already. But they finally got a bead on them at that point and let loose. Even as far away as I was it sounded like the wrath of God. They actually put a couple of those bastards on their knees when they walked the 50mm APRs across them. I could see the impacts punching them around pretty hard, and they looked a little confused for a second. It was like an invisible Muhammad Ali had been guarding the gate and decided to use them like a drill bag.

The heavy artillery guys followed up hard to try to put them out permanently with 80mm incendiaries, and the artillery over my head let loose with a couple of TOW missiles too. Didn’t kill them though, just pissed them off. That should give you an idea of just how tough these things were. Four of them took on concentrated fire from at least two of those fifties at the same time, and they still got up full of dents and kept coming. The rest of them dodged those missiles so fast you were barely able to follow it with your eyes. A few got a leg or arm - or both ripped off by the blowback from a TOW, or a double tap from a 50 or an 80. But they just got up and ran on those stumps almost as fast as they did on their legs.

Not all of them got up though. I saw one take a rabbit punch from an 80 right in the face and it went down. I don’t know who made that shot, but it wasn’t an accident. I heard three reports close together but isolated from the regular rhythm they make in full auto. So somebody must have flipped out of auto, and just sniped that horrible thing right in the face. That was when I saw just how vicious these things were. Because another one that was down on stumps stopped and just wrenched the first one’s legs right off. The first one had been flailing around, clawing at the hole where his face used to be when the other one pinned him down and pulled his legs off. Then the second one reached down, detached its stumps, and snapped the legs right in. The whole operation took maybe five seconds. When the battle was over, they found that first one still dragging himself around in circles by one arm. Right before he threw a grenade down its neck, Sergeant Gonzales joked that the poor guy was still trying to find his good looks.

MARCUS: Why did you stay on the ridge?

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: Well, everybody thinks they can handle real violence, real cruelty, because of what they’ve seen on TV or the net. But when you see things like that, you always picture yourself as the one that gets away, the smart one, the lucky one. You’re never the one that gets gutted because you walked through the wrong door, or moved too slow, or did something stupid.

Then when you really see it, when you see something that brutal, that animalistic for the first time it’s just so... alien. Most people have never seen the sort of merciless violence that’s out there... so it’s shocking. You stand there trying to process it. All of those civilized parts of you struggle to understand what’s happening because it just doesn’t fit in with what you’ve come to expect from life.

MARCUS: But you had seen combat before. Why was this so different?

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: Because those were men. Men are careful about how they approach. They take cover, run away from heavy artillery. They know fear. They’re human.

But with these things, you knew it from the first second you laid eyes on them. They weren’t human. They weren’t even animals. They were something else... and they didn’t know fear. They were death incarnate. You can’t reason with them, talk to them, frighten them, or fight them in any way that’s really going to matter. When you see that it freaks you out in a way that’s hard to explain. You can’t understand it unless you experience it, and I pray you never do.

So a big part of me was wondering if it was just a bad dream, but the rest of me was freaking completely out and screaming at me to run, RUN! It took everything I had to not turn around and just go as fast as my feet would take me. Forget training, forget duty, hell... forget everybody else - they can stay and die if they want, but I didn’t want to die and those things were the Reaper. But I didn’t run. I saw everybody down there in the base hustling to their stations with no idea of the hell that was coming.

They were going to get hurt, maybe die, and it was my job to save as many as I could. So I stayed. I knew I should have been sprinting for the medical center to report in. But right at that moment it took everything I had to just not move. If I had started towards the medical center, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have bolted for the west gate instead. I knew I needed a second or two to get it together.

I’m not a coward Mr. Lillian, and I wasn’t back then. I knew I was going to stay and fight. But I also knew I had to be right in my head before I moved, or I wouldn’t be any good to anyone.

That’s what it means to be a soldier and a medical professional Mr. Lillian. It means looking at that sort of death coming for you. It means hearing and feeling that screaming need to run fill up your whole soul like ice water. It means going through all of that, and deciding to stay and fight, because if you don’t then other people are going to die instead. It’s deciding to face your death, rather than live with the deaths of others who needed you.

I guess it didn’t matter though, because it was right then that one of those things pointed its left arm at the TOW emplacement about thirty yards above my head and fired three grenades into it. When they went off, it blew the top off the whole formation and it launched me right off the side of that hill. The heat burned me all down my back and set my scrubs on fire while I was still flying, but it went out as I rolled and bounced down across the rocks. When I finally hit another flat ledge about forty yards down I had seven good sized holes punched in me by pieces of metal and rock. They were mostly bits of the TOW equipment and luckily the heat from them partially cauterized the puncture wounds. I would have bled out in about five minutes if it hadn’t been for that. I also broke my right arm on impact but my left kept me from slamming my head on the rock.

Can we stop for a minute? I think I need a break.

Transcription paused by officiator

10:33AM EST

Chapter 7