Disposable Heroes

Born to Die. Reborn to Try Again.

Hidden Tracks is a series of stories inspired by heavy metal songs that meant something when I was the right age to let them all the way in. Each one takes its title from a song and finds the fiction living inside it. You don’t need to know the songs. But if you do, I hope you feel what I felt in somebody’s basement a long time ago. Someone else understood.

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The factory smelled of burnt hair and sterilized water. A low industrial hum vibrated in Arthur’s molars

He sat on a cold steel bench while a mechanical arm stapled his stripes into the meat of his shoulder. The pain stayed somewhere far away, like it belonged to the man in the next tank. Across from him, a conveyor carried glass cylinders. Inside each one, a version of him floated in amber fluid, eyes closed, lungs working at liquid.

“Forty-Two is ready,” a voice crackled over the intercom.

Arthur stared at the “39” stenciled on his wrist. Already old stock. He looked at the Sergeant, feeding a belt of ammunition into a machine. No name tag. Just a serial number cut into the soft skin of his throat.

“I remember the sun,” Arthur said.

The Sergeant stopped. He didn’t look up. “No you don’t. You remember a simulation of the sun. It’s cheaper to program the warmth than to let you actually stand in it.”

“It felt real. The heat on my neck.”

“The heat was a fever. You were dying in a trench in Sector Six.” The Sergeant’s hands didn’t pause.

“A servant ‘til I fall,” Arthur whispered, gentle as a lie.

The Sergeant finally looked at him. His eyes were milky, the color of wet slate.

“And you’re falling behind schedule,” the Sergeant said.

The back wall retracted.

Beyond it lay the fields. A carpet of gray limbs and broken rifles, discarded Arthurs with their numbers fading into mud.

His legs carried him forward anyway.

He stepped over Thirty-Eight. The torso twitched, fingers clawing at the muck, searching for a gun that wasn’t there.

The first shell whistled in. Arthur didn’t raise his rifle.