Kingdom Veni Kingdom
BattleBots! Kingdom Rex!
Life is long. That’s what he said to
me. Standing on the rain, the water blurred his
features, melting
them together into a blank nothingness composed of all the
millions
of fractured looks a human being is capable of attaining.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Hey, Crayola king, life is
long.” he said, and then
his features de-melted into a smile.
“But don’t chuck the bait, you’ll lose it,” he
grinned,
leaning in. His breath reeked of old, stale fish.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Yeah, Benni, no shit. Take a hike,
talk like that, it
didn’t matter. I’m the king, right? I know what
your thinking; but its not true.
I’ve read about kings. They had a
different power, the power of fantasy.
The rain drizzled down, reflecting
in
the weak sun that shone over the high, distant wall, its buildings
gleaming
whitely above on the hill.
When I was a boy,
growing up in the
South Bronx, the rats were about the only thing that could create
any
response in me, the only power life allowed me to believe in. They
lived in
trash, they scrambled according to unknown laws of
deprivation and deceit, and they
were unwanted.
It wasn’t just the kind
of response
solicited by well-meaning merchants locked into their accounting
or
those damn gun-fiends who turned in your best friends cause they were
narcs. It
was like, I knew that I should have been one of them, but
garbage was the only thing
that mattered to me. It was the raw
material of life. Now, I’ve read big name
philosopho-goers, not like
this riff-raff that surrounds me. I?ve thought about the
big
things they said. They were important men, they had big important
ideas. But
after the disintegration occurred, no one could really
handle big thoughts any more.
It all went to the level of guns,
garbage and survival.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Benni wasn’t a bad kid. His
trenchcoat supposedly had
some power or other, but it hadn’t spared
his weathered, beaten face or his gapped,
decaying teeth.
“So, what? Should I go?”
I
asked him, although it was a useless question. I knew you had to go.
Change and
opportunity are scarce resources in this world, ruled by
the endless
deprivation.
“Go? Hey, man, you want to
stay
the rest of your life down here, I got no problems with that!”
he snorted,
hawking up a big wad of the black spit.
“The
paatchen…”
“Screw the paatchen, man.
What
are they? Nothin. Like shootin at bottles with legs. The rex give you
guns,
food, an in a coupla years you get to be citizen, get one of
them big houses up in the
center. Bingo…”
“Bingo lost it,” I said.
He
didn’t know. Benni turned silent a minute. I mean, he had made it,
with honors.
Everyone knew he would, big guy like that, arms like
trees, brain of strategy. He was
the golden boy of the west 20′s
pit… everyone knew he’d make it out.
But he came to me one night,
two
months ago. I don’t know how he got out… it was even harder than
getting in,
which was impossible. Over in the teenage wasteland, I
knew he had made some friends,
they probably did him up.
He didn’t look
like I remembered at
all. He was fat. The life of a citizen. But his eyes… they
were
really messed up. It was like, they never looked out, only in. Big,
puffy,
inward-turned fish-eyes.
I don’t know why
he came to me. I
don’t think he even recognized me, he was just talking. Flailing.
I
could have been a wall. When people like that come to you, you know
they’re
lost.
“Jeeze… well, what happened?”
Benni
pulled me out of my reverie. I didn’t want to tell him, Bingo
had made me swear. So I
lied.
“Something… he got sent
out
again…”
“No, man. Bingo could
never’ve
gone out that way…”
“He just
wandered off. Got
separated.”
“How the fuck you
find out? Who
told you?”
I could see I
shouldn’t have even
brought it up. Once more, I was living in garbage, the world of
lies,
lies on top of lies. And I was king of that world. Administrator of
untruth.
Declarer of dead thoughts.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
Back in
my old hut, built into an old
junk yard, the life I was leaving flooded through my
senses, avoiding
me. Evicting me was more like it. The tubs of crayons filled
the
room with the oil waxy smell of color, pushing against my skin. In
leaves,
‘fallen like in autumn’, my drawings lay in piles against the
walls, pressed as if
by a violent sideways surge of gravity into
obscure niches.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I saw the rex coming, blocking the dim
sun from the
window, his big dog leading the way. Armed to the teeth,
his eyes hidden behind the
dirty brown leather helmet with his
numbers bar-coded on top, it was hard to see him
as another person.
Just a removed, distant, blank figure, doing its job. Its function.
I
just didn’t like the way I was suddenly the target of that job,
that
function.
The knock on the tin door. I
reached
into my neck-bag and pulled out one of my four remaining
death-sticks. The
dog growled. I held it to my lips, hesitating,
wavering. Would this be the last sight
I ever witnessed, the last
fear of the unknown confronting me? The smell of my
crayons, the
presence lurking beyond the door… bringing the match closer.
A
perfectly illegal way to die, of course, a chance at a last hopeless
gamble whose
only outcome resolved nothing but ended the game.
Roulette sticks, death sticks… 50%
chance of death. Try as many as
you want. Quick and painless. The perfect black market
item.
The rex pounded on the door,
his
speech decoder warbling his voice. They all had their voice boxes
removed,
replaced with the voice of the authority they had sworn to.
I took a hurried last
glance around and lit the stick, inhaling
deeply.
The room spun, knocking into my brain,
into my head. My heart sped up. This
was the one, I thought, emotions
pumped by adrenaline, I was on my way to the eternal
forgetting, the
end of the pounding in my head , the beginning of a whole
new
non-life, the perfect escape attempt. I reached out, steadying myself
against a
pile of books, philosophy, comic magazines, everything…
it tumbled over me as I slid
to the floor.
The rex kicked in the door and
the
light shone in upon me.
The blur of a
huge, slobbering hound
baring its teeth, come to take me home.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I was beginning to suspect it wasn’t
true, just a
panic attack at the thought the stick might have been
the one. Old twentieth century
psychology textbook: “…and the
study concluded intensive stimulation within drug
addicts of
endomorphic activity based solely upon an imagining of the act of
drug
use…” The rex was not some heavenly figure of hell, with
his cerubus… I’ve read
enough Berkeley to know that a stone, while
it is not a stone, is still very real.
He turned me over, grinding my
face
into the old books and crayons with his foot, pinning me as he
applied
fisticuffs. I inhaled deeply, trying to embrace their smells,
hoping that it would
serve me well in the future, that it would take
me back here, make it all real. The
stick had failed, I lost. Life
won, this round. But I had three more left.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Get up. Cray 1227-36, draftee
3,237 a-6, do you
accept the terms of your registration.” His
voice was mechanical, grafted.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “No.” I said. “Let me
go.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> He didn’t even respond. Just pulled me
to my unsteady
feet and dragged me out, pushing me towards the hill,
the wall behind which I?d never
been, the castle of the other
side.
The big sign above the iron gate said
kafka-310. I had a badge-implant slid under the
skin of my arm, so
deep I couldn’t get it out. Trapped within tall spiked
walls,
hundreds waited. All around me, others pressed in, dirty,
unwashed,
fighting. They all seemed glad to have been chosen, ready for the
chance
to get out to the perimeter and prove themselves, ready for
the glorious white
house’s just waiting for them. Ready to become
citizens.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> But that was all years away. Benni
said, two years
minimum. Bingo, though, had said nothing. He had just
babbled, his eyes never meeting
mine, even in the dim light of the
karo lamp.
“King!” I turned. Jestins
was there, big muscle-bound iron man. He was from the north,
I met
him once when he bought contraband from us. northern 40′s I think…
right
on the perimeter.
“Jestins…” I nodded.
I
know I should have been happy, making alliances, maneuvering for the
future. But
I felt imposed on by his presence. I wanted to be alone.
In this realm, in this
processing tank, everything was subject to
other laws. I was subject only to myself.
King of myself. King of
garbage. And I liked it.
“You get picked up?” I
asked. I didn’t really want to know.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Fuck no, King. I told em. I told
em myself. I came up
here, two, three weeks ago, pounded on the door.
Fucked up a rex dog pretty good, told
em I wanted to go, they
couldn’t stop me. Finally let me in.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> That surprised me. Jestins was a good,
normal guy.
What could make him want to get in so bad?
“They got in, ten, fifteen of em.
A month ago. Took out Billi, Trez, a bunch of us.
Goddamn goin to
fuck em up… Jani. Bit her on the fuckin toe, one of the zomb’s,
she
got the fever, died. Man, I couldn’t hold her down. Hid her for
awhile, but
fuckin Jaz narced on me, they came, shot her up but
good.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> He fell silent a moment. Jani… his
partner? I think
she had a kid by him… Trez, him I knew.
“They got Trez?”
He wiped a tear away with his
huge
meaty paw.
“Trez… they were ten or
so,
came at night, it was rainin. Fuckin horrible things, man, if they
weren’t so
dead…”
I could see in his eyes a
confusion.
It was old, a memory he had that he could never really remember.
Things
didn’t used to be like this, it said: the dead, they never
came back. Like Jani,
Trez, Bingo… they never came back. But the
paatchen, nobody knows how anymore, no
one wonders why. The only
scientists we have today are weapons builders, putting
together old
computer and gun relics into new combinations. After
the
disintegration, they just appeared. Manhattan was lucky. It was
surrounded by
water. That was then. Now, there was only desert.
“Hey, its ok. Don’t get so worked
up. Be smart.” I thought he was fucking crazy, from
my point of
view. I walked away, left him there. I didn’t know what else to
say.
Every morning, this one rex by
the
gate would open up a slot and food would pour out. It was good
bread,
metal-tasting water and prot-paks. The big farms up on the north end
churned
out staples of algae and wheat. Outside, we’d gotten what we
could by raising our own
small animals, cats and dogs that bred
quickly. Our group had a small family of
rabbits. We raised em till
they breeded, ate the old. And the black market in algae
was very
plentiful.
This one guy, though, was
different
from the other rex I?d seen. He was old, thin. He sat in his
little booth
inside the gate. You could talk to him, but he wasn’t
silent like the other rex.
He’d talk, but only in strange,
meaningless sentences. I guess his program got
garbled, they put him
out here. He never gave any information, all he knew was that
it
wasn’t time yet.
I spent a lot of time
gazing through
the gate. The whitewashed walls and streets of the city rose
behind,
I could just see the tiny ants moving from house to house in the
distance.
There was some kind of order to their movements, but I
could never exactly discern
them.
When I was drawing with my
crayons, I
had noticed the same thing. But the order I could not perceive
was
coming from within me. When I put up a drawing on the wall and stared
at the
colors and shapes, it seemed to speak to me. And I heard it,
through my own voice. But
those people, beyond the gate, the
citizens; I could not understand their voice. Was
this what Bingo
experienced, living amongst them, having become one of them?
I
wondered about that sometimes.
We slept
in rough straw beds and old
mattresses along the side of one wall, under an overhang.
Hundreds of
us. I kept to myself, avoiding the jostling and machismo. There were
a
few tough women in the recruits, they protected themselves well.
The men respected
them, especially after two were found dead one
morning, Nangrin, a strong, short dark
skinned lady, sleeping
peacefully nearby, spotted in their blood. It was a
jungle.
The gatekeeper watched all of
us,
together.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
Eventually we were pulled out, one by
one, but we never went through the gate. I?d
never seen people
respond so smoothly to a process of reorganization. Lines formed,
we
were weeded out by height, size, weight. They stripped me of
everything, even my
pouch, my last three death-sticks. Even the one
I?d stashed inside my shirt.
On a big hill we camped out in various
tents.
Rex ringed the perimeter. I thought about leaving, but the
badge-plant in my arm would
lead them right to me.
Unless I cut my arm
off.
I toyed with the idea, for
awhile.
Sitting and waiting. But life without an arm was the same as life
with an
arm. Still life.
They gave us special
guns, trained us
in their use. A fight broke out, a shoot-out between old rivals
from
outside. Three dead. The Mondo-canes, the Hatfields, I had heard of
them.
Tougher, strong arm gangs from below the village. Wall Street
area. They played hard.
Ran black-market items all the way up to the
90′s. Just waiting for the chance,
waiting for their guns. The rex
hauled the bodies off, stuck them up on poles. We
walked by them
every day on the path to the mess tents.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> After a week, school began. We learned
of the
trenches, the command, who gave and took orders. The kinds of
attacks, numbered
a10-b35. Strategy, synchronicity, efficiency, and
order, maintaining: how to, in the
midst of chaos, and under the
movements of the paatchen.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> And, of course, we studied the
paatchen, the
undead.
We studied the varieties and
types,
their relative strengths and weakness. We memorized their habits, the
way
this one wandered, that one drove in towards its target. The
danger of a bite from
this rotting denizen of the undead, the
complications of a scratch from that one.
Inside our heads, small
reference chips were planted. We could refer to visual
matchings,
taken directly from our cortical nerves. We were never
without
reference.
The implantation was
difficult. The
first couple of nights, I had electronic nightmares, gibberish
fast
forward and slo motion rewinds. After that, headaches that continued
for
weeks.
Studying the paatchen, I felt,
again,
the tiny blue spark of interest that I had felt reading all my old
books.
But this was different. I realized, they were real. They were
here, now, abstract, and
yet… not. They were like characters in a
book, the zombie, the wolfmen and
wolfwomen, the vampyric breed, all
the classes of monster derived from the human…
but they weren’t
trapped by the text. They always escaped.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I wondered about their lives, when I
lay in my bunk at
night, the snoring of the multitudes around me
lulling with the sound of oceans and
water. What did they do? Did
they have feelings? Were they alive, even in death? Did
they talk,
communicate with each other? Were they plagued by doubts,
worries,
unknowns, or were they just hungry? Driven like an animal, unaware
of
complication, of what death means, of thought; it had a desirability
around
it.
Where had they come from? I?d
heard so
many different folk-tales, so many reasons, all the way from
being sent from the
heavens, to emerging from large cracks in the
earth, to science lab experiments in the
late 20th century… it was
impossible to find a shred of truth or falsity in any of
these. On
the other hand, I had met many pragmatists, people like Benni, for
whom
thoughts of origins never plagued their brain. Acceptance, the
ability to deal with
the here and now… was this what I was also
admiring in the paatchen?
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> No. I think I was attracted to their
deadness. They
truly were not alive. I tried to gaze through the veil
which separated us, tried to
see them clearly, to perceive of the
dead as they truly are… but my vision was
obscured. I could not
recognize the voice speaking on the other side as anything but
my
own.
Perhaps I was looking for a voice
I
would recognize, that was not my own. I don’t know.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> But when sleep came, and the morning,
all my thoughts
disappeared. The days were filled with activity,
confusion and distraction.
“Cray 1227-36, stay alert.”
the rex
walked by, slapping me on the head. I was a recalcitrant
student. My mind wandered
from the texts, the diagrams. I dismantled
and assembled my gun with distance. Slower
than the others. I ate
alone.
Jespins
got divided off, split into a
smaller group. I expected he was rex material. I was too
small, thin,
footsoldier material. I was more expendable. That was fine with me.
The endless stretches of time
that
took place in the training camps were not like time had passed
outside. Every
morning was the same, and it confused the clock of
memory. Every second seemed
indistinguishable from the others. I
remembered nothing, all I had were a few dated
tests, a few papers
and scraps of notations to indicate that any time had passed at
all.
I kept them in a bag under the bunk. I never looked at them.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
The wall stretched forever, high
upon
the banks of the old Hudson. The dunes sloped down, then up again in
the
distance. At the bottom, old barges and decayed fallen bridges
were covered and
uncovered by the wind and sand. Far off, I could see
the beginnings of the
trenches.
“Cray 1227-36, transfer in
three
days.” the rex handed me papers. I set my gun down and sat
against the wall.
Flac glanced over at me. He was my patrol partner.
I could see he was somewhat glad to
get rid of me. He raised his
thick eyebrows.
“Where you going?” he said,
his voice rough and gravely.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I looked at my papers. “Brownsville
trench.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Flac looked away and spit. Didn’t say
anything
more.
After three days of staring, I
left.
Flac had already shot three paatchen on watch, I never even saw
them.
The road we took, about thirty of
us,
was almost indistinguishable from the dunes. Sand constantly blew and
drifted
over the tracks. Every now and then, trucks rumbled past us,
taking supplies and
officers back and forth. And once, a group of
five rex overtook us.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> There was another recruit that I took
a liking to on
the way. He kind of reminded me of Bingo, a friendly,
outgoing talkative guy. He had
an old book with him, a vonnegut.
“Keno.
wait up a sec.” he
slowed down, wiping the sweat off his forehead. the sun continued
its
beating from above.
“?Sup,
King.”
“Can I take a look at your
book
again?”
Keno threw his pack down with a
grunt.
“That’s the third time today.
Its
gonna get fucked up.”
“I wont fuck it
up, man. I?m
careful.”
“If you were careful,
you
wouldn’t be reading while were out in the middle of paatchen
territory,” he
said.
I watched him open his pack
in
silence, unsure exactly how to respond to that. So what, I thought,
mustering
whatever tiny scraps of dignity still existed. Its a free
world. But I knew he was
just messing with me. It was his kind of
personality.
He pulled it out and closed his pack.
We started walking again.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Here. Why ya read so much,
King?” he glanced at me
sideways as he handed me the book. I
could tell he really wondered about me.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “I don’t know. They’re about real
people, real
things… ow!”
He punched me on the arm,
almost
knocking me over.
“Sorry to crush
your fantasy,
man, but that’s real. What the fuck you think these guns’re
for?”
I tried to tell him, but I
couldn’t
figure it out myself. I knew they weren’t real, but the things
they
talked about were more real to me than even walking in the desert
right now
was.
We walked in silence. The crunch
of
boots on dry sand blew away in the wind. I looked at the book again.
The cover
had been torn off, and there were missing pages, but it was
in remarkably good
condition. The pages were only somewhat brittle,
they didn’t crumble into dust at the
slightest touch, like most of my
books had. I read them once, then they were only a
collection of tiny
words that blew away in the tiniest breeze. I opened it to the page
I
had left before.
‘Deadeye Dick,’ it
said, ‘was an
honorific often accorded to a person who was a virtuoso
with
firearms.’ I glanced over at Keno. He was an expert marksman. The
book said
he was a ‘deadeye dick’, that was probably why he kept this
book. I felt vindicated;
he felt he was more real because of it,
because of the book. I knew it, I knew it was
true in my heart. I
read on, but pages were missing. The beginning of a new chapter.
‘To the as-yet-unborn, to all
innocent
wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: watch out for life. I have
caught
life, I have come down with life.’ I thought about that. It
was true, a trueness
beyond here and now. It seemed he was saying
life was like a disease, that once you
catch it, it’s terminal. I
folded the book into my sack and continued walking,
thinking of that.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
That
afternoon, an old woman rode
by, escorted by four silent rex. She sat blankly on the
donkey,
moving as it moved. She was clothed in old rags, her wrists were
bandaged
and bloody. Her face was withered and cracked, very pale,
yet burned by the sun. Her
eyes seemed to see nothing. They were
empty, white pale pupils, albinoed and
cataracted.
We watched in silence as they
passed
us, back towards the perimeter. It was a strange encounter. None of
us had
seen anyone other than ourselves for the past three months.
Jesmins, one of the
leaders, ran back and followed them, talking to
the rex. They brushed him off, but he
kept at them, pushing and
prodding. One of them finally turned and spoke some words to
him,
then shoved him back towards us and continued on.
Keno told me later what had happened.
She had been found in a cave of one of
the vampyrs, tied captive with
three others, all dead. apparently, they had been kept
as food. The
vampyr had been killed by a scouting party, not too far from
the
trenches. They must have brought her all the way from manhattan. I
wondered if
I knew anyone who knew her. There were many people who
just disappeared, were never
heard from again.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
We
finally reached the Brownsville
trench. Just as we arrived, I heard my name called and
turned around.
Jespins sat in a truck, motioning to me.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> “King, man, you out here?”
he said, smiling at
me.
“Yeah. Just got here.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I could tell he was doing all right.
He had an
officers cap, his own truck.
“Well, you gotta
be careful. Its
real bad out here.”
“Bad?” I
knew what he meant,
but I felt awkward. He was suddenly an officer and all.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> He held up his hand, talked to his
radio for a second,
gunned his engine.
“Gotta run. Take care
of
yourself, King. Ill see if I can get back to you soon.”
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I waved him off, watched the truck
disappear in the
distance, then turned and walked into the trenches.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Id seen the paatchen before. They made
their way
through the walls every now and then, in the night, when
they were most active. Their
eyes glowed red in the dim light, it was
the first thing one ever saw of them. It had
something to do with
being dead; light catching the old deflated corneas filled with
dried
blood… or the others, not so undead. The big hairy men and women
with their
white canines, the bloodless seekers of others blood, the
small disfigured hunchback
gnomes, I?d seen more variations than
most, since I lived close to the perimeter
areas. But these were
more, hordes of them, gathering beyond the walls and trenches
which
snaked off into the distance like creeping vines, obscuring the
horizon.
Over the days, I grew fascinated
with
them. Obsessed? Ffixated? Maybe those are good words. They walked,
never
talking, some stumbling, others prowling, motivated by a hunger
neither of us could
see. I looked back into the trench-post, saw the
organization, the efficiency. In
front of me, wandering figures,
moving in and through the piles of dead.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I settled down to life in the
trenches. Months passed.
We mostly slept and did busy work during the
day, digging more trenches, carrying
ammo, setting up new posts,
unloading supplies. I got intense feelings of
claustrophobia. There
was never anything to see. Just sand, dirt, boxes and men
toiling
under the ceaseless sun.
Night was
better. When I was on watch,
the stars came out, and the air was cool. I?d traded with
other
men, and had my own three books. I examined them sentence by
decaying
sentence under the dim light of my pen light.
I never shot at paatchen when I
spotted them. I woke up Keno, and he always
enjoyed the target
practice.
Once, a few
hundred feet down trench
38, some paatchen got in, killed everyone there. Keno was on
watch
and shook me awake, screaming in my ear. I woke up, just as he hit
the
spotlights. A hoarde of zomb’s walked silently towards us,
bleached in the light, and
I jumped up.
I glanced over the top of the
trench
and saw another group of about five coming at us from the top. Keno
was
frantically loading his weapon. I hit him hard and he followed my
gaze. I stood
frozen, unable to act. He let loose a burst of rounds,
hit three of them. We stumbled
back along the trench. It was another
good hundred feet to the other post. They were
almost upon us.
“Shoot em! Shoot em fer
Christ?s
sake!” Keno yelled at me, his face distorted with fear,
bursting, spitting
red. I stumbled backwards, fumbling at my gun. He
moved behind me, and I let loose
with a couple bursts. I saw one of
them fall, but I knew my shots had gone far wide. I
wasn’t even
trying to hit them.
He
grabbed my gun, swearing, yelling
at me to load his. I unlocked my ammo belt, but the
rounds fell
everywhere, scattering in the dirt. I scrambled for them, putting
them
in one by one with shaking hands.
We rounded a
corner, retreating. Keno
kneeled down, and I heard all five rounds go off, one after
the
other. The group above us were almost on top of us, the lead z
sliding down
into the trench mot five feet away from us. Keno grabbed
his gun back away from me and
blew a huge hole in its chest. There
was no blood, only greenish rotting flesh and
bone. It lay still,
slumped over.
Keno
pulled his knife out and
hesitated a moment. There were only three left. One rounded
the
corner, and he threw the knife right into its head, catching it in
its eye. It
stumbled, hesitating, before turning confusedly into the
wall and walking away,
wandering blindly, its hands outstretched.
I
reloaded my gun and held it out to
him. He took it, avoiding my eyes. We retreated
another ten feet and
sat, watching. The other two rounded the corner, and were turned
into
instant meat.
He didn’t talk to me the
rest of the
night.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
That
night, Keno slept while I was on
watch. I sat in the dark, scanning the horizon
through green binocs.
I don’t know how it happened; I feel no responsibility, I place
the
blame outside of myself. If these trenches weren’t here, if none of
this
existed.. it wouldn’t have happened.
But it
did.
I must have been thinking of the
book,
lulled into the pattern of my own thoughts. I must have drifted off
into
sleep, for I remembered a strange dream.
The old woman was coming towards me on
the donkey. I recognized her, though I also
knew I had never seen her
before. the donkey was dead, I could see, but it also
carried her
well. And when she came up close to me, she looked at me, as she
had
before.
The desert was still, and there
was no
sign of the breezes. only the hot sun washed us, and seemed to cause
the
stillness.
Her eyes glanced at me, into me.
They
were the eyes of everyone I had ever met, and I saw also my own eyes
in there,
gazing back at me.
She opened her mouth, an
old, withered
toothless hole of blackness. It was filled with black dust,
dust
which sucked light into it. And though no wind or breath or sound
issued from
it, I could feel the pull, the tug of its power. It
sucked at the edges of my body,
and I felt myself disintegrating from
the edges. My clothes shredded and took with
them my skin, and the
muscles separated from each other, following. My body crumbled,
and I
was
rolled into a small comforting ball.
I
felt myself enter the blackness and diffusion, and I found a
home
there.
Then she started snorting, and
I
couldn’t figure out why. the breeze returned, trying to force me out
of my home.
I resisted, but they were too strong. I cried out, I
wanted it to stop, I wanted to
stay there, but I could not.
I was suddenly
back in my body,
leaning against the cool trench wall. Keno was making a strange
noise
in the dark. I turned my flash on, and gagged. A wolf-thing was bent
over
him, chewing on his throat. It was completely ripped open, blood
flowing everywhere,
and there was still breath coming from his lungs.
His hands struggled feebly against
the huge furry thing, but it did
not even feel the blows.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> Its face turned into the light, and I
saw the huge
canines, glistening with blood, its nose, eyes and mouth
spattered with flesh and red.
It bared its lips, grinning at me, but
its eyes… they were small, cold and hard,
glowing yellow and red.
There was nothing behind them except cold hard
steel.
I stuttered, trying to call out,
but
the words halted in my throat. I felt behind me for my gun, and fell
backward,
away from the scene before me. The gun was heavy, but I
lifted it up, forced the bile
down in my throat, choked back the
sobs. I shot at it once, twice, missed both times.
It turned away
from Keno, crouched down, and leapt.
I aimed straight at its approaching
form and pulled the trigger. I shot all
the rounds, I just kept
shooting. It was torn apart in the air, but its momentum
caught me
full in the chest, knocking me down. I felt my arm buckle under
its
weight, I heard the snap.
I lay under it,
not moving, feeling
the warm sticky blood flow over me, smelling the strong musky
scent
of the beast. It did not breathe.
I
must have lain there for hours.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">
I woke in
a bed, whiteness all around.
Rex stood around, watching the medic-bots perform their
function. My
arm was bandaged, unmovable.
I
don’t remember much else aside from
the hourly injections which brought
sleep.
In two weeks or so, I was given
back
my gun and uniform. Sent back out into the trench. I had a new
partner, Johnny
b., but we never talked.
One morning, I awoke to
the sun on my
face. Johnny b. was still asleep, curled into a protective
ball.
I peered over the edge of the
trench,
straight into the blinding ball of sun.
I took a step up out of the trenches.
It was a strange feeling. somewhat like what I
imagined dying to be.
Layers of oldness shed from my shoulders, dropped back into
the
graves of the trenches, falling behind me, out of my sight, out
of
memory.
Elation pulsed through my blood.
The
wind seemed musical, brushing over and through the loose clothing.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I took a step forward, and another.
And every step, I
felt, I was writing my own path. I had a plot, a
purpose, and I could see ahead a
network of trails, leading through
and around the piles of dead, the soldiers and
paatchen entwined in
the brotherhood of decay.
I
thought I heard a voice, and turned
my head in that direction. Off to the north, away
from the trenches.
In the direction of the paatchen camps.
STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"> I smiled to myself. It had seemed as
if I had heard a
cool inviting whisper on the dry desert breezes.
I
had heard it, and I had recognized
it.