All You Need Is Kill

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Death comes quick, in the beat of a heart, and he ain’t picky about who he takes.

If there’s a heaven, it’s a cold place. A dark place. A lonely place.

A soldier’s spirit isn’t in his body. It’s in his weapon. The barrel warms until it glows, the heat turning fear into anger.

And more than all of ’em, fuck anything and everything aiming at me! Wield your anger like a steel fist and smash in their faces.

If it moves, fuck it!

the stench of the battlefield was fighting its way into my suit, the smell of enemy corpses like the smell of crumpled leaves.

The enemy’s rounds seemed to ride the wind over my head, but mine liked to veer off after leaving the barrel, as if the enemy simply willed them away. Our drill sergeant said guns could be funny like that. You ask me, it seems only fair that the enemy should get to hear shells screeching down on them, too. We should all have our turn feeling Death’s breath on the back of our neck, friend and foe alike.

But what would Death’s approach sound like to an inhuman enemy? Did they even feel fear?

They simply hunt with the relentlessness of machines.

I can hear Death breathing in my ear.

I stop breathing. The sky becomes the ground.

A creature humanity’s greatest technological inventions could barely scratch, laid waste by a barbarian weapon from a thousand years past.

The Full Metal Bitch.

A war junkie always chasing the action, no matter where it led her. Word had it she and her Special Forces squad from the U.S. Army had chalked up half of all confirmed Mimic kills ever. Maybe anyone who could see that much fighting and live to tell about it really was the Angel of Death.

The conductive sand spilling out of the fallen Mimic danced away on the wind.

Who walks up to someone, kicks them to the ground, and then asks about tea? What was going through her fucking head? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but the words wouldn’t come. I could think of the words I wanted to say, but my mouth had forgotten how to work—a litany of profanities

stalled at the gate.

“That’s the thing with books. Half the time the author doesn’t know what the hell he’s writing about—especially not those war novelists. Now how about you ease your finger...

My reply wasn’t much more than a hoarse whisper.

“I read you.” All business.

The sandy white ground bulged like an overcooked pancake; its surface cracked and sent darker soil the color of maple syrup spewing into the air. A hail of mud splattered on my armor.

She cut them down with the ease of a laser cutting butter. Her movements took her in a circle around me, protecting me.

Maybe proximity to death had sharpened my senses, but somehow I knew that was the one I was meant to fight.

humanity was doomed.

In battle, unless you’re sound of body and mind, you’re a liability.

A general was a being from the heavens above. A being perched on a gilded throne, higher than me, higher than Yonabaru, higher than Ferrell, higher than the lieutenant in charge of our platoon, the captain in charge of our company, the lieutenant colonel in charge of our battalion; higher than the colonel in charge of our regiment, higher even than the base commander. The generals were the gods of Flower Line and all who trained, slept, and shat within its walls. So high, they seemed distant and unreal.

One order from them and us mortals on the front lines would move like pawns across a

chessboard to our grisly fates.

The breeze coming off the water picked up their voices and dumped them on us. Even at this distance, the commentary was loud and grating. Fingernails on a chalkboard grating.

Pain and fatigue racked my body. My blood pumped slow as lead.

In training they taught us that even when you’re in excruciating pain—especially when you’re in pain—the best thing to do was to find some sort of distraction, something else to focus on other than the burning in your muscles and the sweat streaking down your forehead.

Pain and suffering were old friends to men like them. They walked up to the face of danger, smiled, and asked what took him so long to get there. They were in a whole ’nother league from a recruit like me.

We all figured she was part of some propaganda squad they were using to make inroads into enemy territory.

The sun hung high in the sky, showering its rays over us, slowly roasting our skin.

It took a Valkyrie reborn to throw a monkey wrench into a disciplinary training session planned with military precision and get away with it.

My kingdom for a trench.”

Don’t get your balls blown off, gents!”

The din of battle filled the air. I could feel the shudder of distant shells exploding.

I pinched my arm as hard as I could. The spot I pinched started to turn red. It hurt like a bitch. Tears blurred my vision.

When I was a kid, the war against the Mimics had already started. Instead of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, we fought aliens using toy guns that fired spring-loaded plastic bullets. They stung a little when they hit, but that was all. Even up close they barely hurt. I always played the hero, taking the hit for the team. I’d spring out courageously into the line of fire, absorbing one bullet after another. I did a little jump with each successive hit, performing an impromptu interpretive dance. I was really good at it. Inspired by the hero’s death, his comrades would launch a bold counterattack. With his noble sacrifice, he’d ensured humanity’s salvation. Victory would be declared, and the kids who’d been the bad guys would come back to the human side and everyone would celebrate. There was no game like it.

Some nightmares you can’t wake up from, no matter how many times you try.

I fought back panic.

Let me tell you what happens when your lungs are crushed. You drown, not in water, but in air. Gasp as hard as you like, crushed lungs can’t pass the oxygen your body needs to your bloodstream.

It didn’t matter if I never told anyone, if no one ever believed me. It would still be true. The sensation it had imprinted on my mind was proof enough of that. Pain that shoots through your body like a bolt of lightning, legs so damn heavy it feels like they’ve been stuffed with sandbags, terror so strong it crushes your heart—that’s not the stuff of imagination and dreams. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d been killed. Twice. No doubt about it.

Move first, think later. Just like they taught us in training.

The muscles in my stomach tensed.

The cut on my temple burned. The sawbones who tended to me in the infirmary gave me three stitches without any painkiller. Now it was sending searing bolts of electricity shooting through my body. The bones in my knee creaked.

The sun hung high in the sky, washing me in blinding light.

Bureaucracy loves waste. Maybe humanity would lose.

I could search my soul till my body fell to dust around it and I’d never find the desire to do great things like saving the human race. What I found instead was a wire puzzle you couldn’t solve no matter how many times you tried. Something buried under a pile of puzzle pieces that didn’t fit. It pissed me off.