Fresh-Faced New User
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Out here I don’t think anyone’d care.
I remember that old chapel we used to ride out to every single seventh off highway 31 just outside of the city. St Pious was the name, if memory serves. Between the fake golden lighting rod on top and the granite statue just behind the altar that was a rundown place. Used to creak up them old wooden steps dressed our finest, me and oh about thirty of the other boys and girls whose parents figured it’d do us some good to get away from all the soot and ash being puffed out by old jenny. When I was eight they started making us do confession. Not like they do in the city where you got a booth and shade and all kinds of good things to keep confidential the bearings of your soul because Pious didn’t even have a booth, not even on a back room to use on account of how it housed the Eucharist. What Peter would do is just excuse all the parents, cause they weren’t confessing to him anyways, and have a mass confession. They’d leave us there sitting in our rotting pews just waiting to go before Peter and the Emperor to share our secrets.
Now at first this was a real disconcerting thing for all of us and especially for me cause I didn’t like speaking in front of people and El Res was always there looking like a damn angel in her blue dress and I sure as hell didn’t want to confess what was on my mind if front of her. Still we all did go kneel in front of the altar mostly cause we were all scared shitless of that menacing statue holding the sword and Old Peter’s fire and brimstone sermons. We’d go up there all contrite trying to think of the worse things we’d done that week and Peter would remind us we had to confess everything or else our souls would burn in hell. And that did it for most of us we figured we were royally screwed then and we’d kneel there for sometimes almost ten minutes dredging up all the trespasses we’d accumulated in our young lives. At the end he’d always ‘go forth and sin no more.’ We’d make the sign of the Aquila and set back down in the pews.
Few years of this went by and after a while the edge kinda went out of it. We were still scared but we were at the age we wanted to test boundaries so we started playing games with old Pete trying to think of things to confess that would make the girls blush or make him stumble. Nothing ever did though, make him stumble I mean, girls turned shades of red so vivid you’d think you were looking at a sunset. For him I guess he’d heard it all, being that he was in his seventies and from little upstarts he probably expected it. El Res was developing mighty fine and she’d taken to sitting next to me for lord knows what reason and I remember one day I had the perfect confession all planned out involving mice, nails, and little crosses. Something I knew would have to at least moderately shake the old bastard but right before I could get up James Headry strolled down the altar, fake tears in his eyes, took a knee and without even waiting for the priest said he’d been having impure thoughts about some aliens.
Well I guess this struck a chord with Old Pete. I thought it was pretty funny and I even a snickered a little bit and El Res, well she couldn’t turn red on account of being ebony but you could see it, this was a good one. Well Pete just sat there a moment in his chair switching between our giggling selves and him and suddenly he just rises out of his seat like a sun flare hollering all kinds of oaths like you’d never heard before. Made us sit up ramrod straight. Starts shouting out how all our souls are gonna be damned, especially James Headry’s, so loud our parent’s came back in from their smoking.
He took James Headry by the arm and hurries down the aisle stopping for about two seconds to tell his mom and dad he’s taking the boy to the station for heresy. Took him to his beat up Sienna slammed the door and took off down the highway kicking up dust the whole way till all you could see was just a cloud of it being blown by the wind.
Now I can’t vouch for the rest of the story but I heard from June Sanders whose dad worked at the station that the goddamn Inquisition got called in. Said they interviewed that boy for three days straight without any sleep. When he came back finally you could see that boy had the fear in him and it spread like wildfire through us. It took a while but we all recovered and I finally got with El Res out on the plains near the cattle ranch but he never laughed after that, never wanted to go smoke, no sex, no drinking, never wanted to do anything less it was read the texts or study. Eventually he just drifted from the rest of us. Never showed up at the chapel again, stopped coming to the scholam.
I thought he’d hung himself until I saw him again years later. He was in those purple red robes with the Book in his arms coming down Hue Street and I’d just come back from the bar little drunk with some spoiling groceries I’d picked up hours ago. He walked right past me like we’d never seen each other before but I grabbed his sleeve and swung him around.
I said, “James.” And he said, “That’s me.”
I stared at him and him at me and you could tell it was mostly gone but after a moment I could see an old spark go off in the corner of his eye and he said, “I remember you.”
“Well bout damn time.”
We laughed and I went down the road with him asking what had happened all those years and where’d he’d gone to. He just shook his head said his parent’s enrolled him and that was it. And that was it. Deacon Headry, I couldn’t believe it. Then he looked at me kinda strange at the clothes I was wearing and he asked what’s that about.
I told him I got drafted. He smiled and said he wished he could too.
That reminds me of another time there was this kid in my squad and right before the big drop he unstrapped himself from his seat, walked across the deck handed his rifle to me saying, “I ain’t going.”
Just like that, real calm, like he’d thought it out, weighed it over in his young mind. I didn’t know what to say just having been promoted to a corporal the day before so I nodded my head and took the rifle and laid it across my lap.
“OK.”
Now the Commissar overheard this and he got all huffed up and walked down the aisle holding onto the overhead rail for support towards where the kid had sat back down and stretched out his legs. Resting his arms behind his helmeted head like he was on a joyride. And the Commissar got right in front of him and started going, saying if he doesn’t fight he’s gonna shoot him right there. Summary execution. And that boy just smiled and this just pissed the Commissar off even more and he was reaching for that pistol when the Staff Sergeant came up and asked him what the matter was.
Boy pointed out the porthole said, “It’s too pretty to die today. Just look at how the sun comes over the ocean. It’s like a thousand floating diamonds.”
The Staff Sergeant ducked down to look out. Saw the waves crashing into each other blown by a thousand engines speeding over it. How the rays seemed to glint off each crest into all the degrees of the compass and in each brilliant like every drop was a web that light had to pass through.
Staff Sergeant said, “OK.”
And we went without him.
The men of Golf Company forded through the long yellowing weeds with calloused hands scratched by the sharpened edges of plant life. Behind them a long trail of bent grass and in front a long stretch to a ridge on the horizon where they all hoped it might clear out.
On the ridge though there was only more. They took out their machetes and started hacking at the weeds until there was a small clearing with a bed of yellow. Then they set up a perimeter and with e-tools and hands they started digging holes in the earth in which to sleep. With the weeds the camouflaged the holes so the planes wouldn’t see em and when they were done a shout went out for smokes and soon thin tendrils were rising out of the land and when night settled you could see the cherries being passed between men.
Just before dawn they rose again and Kylie could see then the sun rising over the mountains, the hills, the plains, himself. He let its warmth spread over him and when he was engulfed he got out of his hole and went to piss. Hot steam rolled off the yellow line and he could see the fog of his breath.
Jacob Miller came up beside him pulling at a hangnail with his teeth and with one hand he unzipped his trousers, whipped it out and started watering the life they’d cut down.
“Kinda cold.” He said.
“Getting colder.”
Kylie smiled, shook it then went back to his hole. Grabbed his ruck and his rifle from the hole and went to join the column already forming up at the edge of the clearing. He eased into the ranks between Saul and Cain and then Jacob snuck in between him and Cain.
The Lieutenant was calling out names and the new Commissar was going down the line getting mocked while he pointed out lapses in uniform regulation. Someone told him to shove it and they stared at each other for a minute before Sergeant Bates came over and shoved the young wiry commissar down the line. Stopped right in front of me.
“Your fly’s open.”
“My hands kinda cold could ya close it?”
“Are you disrespecting a Superior Officer, Private?”
“Well considering how many other people are I’d say it’s just peer pressure.”
“I could have you executed.”
“You could if you had the balls.”
He pulled a little notepad from his leather coat and a small pencil too. “What’s your name Private?”
“First name’s F-U-C-K last name starts with a Y.”
The pencil snapped between his fingers. He looked up from underneath his beaded cap and tries staring Kylie down but he’s just grinning watching the Sergeant creeping back down the line behind him. The Sergeant grabs the Commissar’s leather collar and hauls him back so fast he almost stumbles. Whole line breaks out laughing and you could see the shame and fury coursing through the veins in his temples.
They walked down the ridgeline until they left it for a narrow goat trail that snaked its way down the hillside into a blasted valley filled with the wasting remains of a deciduous forest unable to cope with what had been unleashed upon it. Stripped trunks hollowed out by fist sized parasites that took refuge in them. Laying a future generation this forest cannot support so that when the next is laid the parent will eat the child and the strong the weak.
Flies dart in strange algorithms around their filthy heads. Landing on such grimy skin they think they might have made a mistake taking to earth instead of flesh. Not living long enough to figure the difference as trained hands bear down upon them in such ways that their systems of flight can’t save them.
The base of the valley has been transformed into marshland from when the runoff from the flooded streams and creeks flowed into the half-moon craters of dark dust and bone. They spread out in a company wedge with Kylie on point in front of his squad with a busted las rifle. About half-way through the valley he took a step forwards and plunged beneath the waters sinking and sinking until his feet touched the bottom of the crater and he looked up and the light was gone. He propelled himself back upwards with a strong but he couldn’t reach the surface nor even close to and he sank back down. His breath was giving out and he suppressed the urge to breathe as he stripped off his ruck and kicked again. This time he got closer and he kicked and stroked until he could see a glimmer of light and the grabbing hand that interrupted it taking him by the scruff of his neck and pulling him up where more hands clasped upon his body until his head broke the surface and he rolled onto the ground sputtering trying to get breath in his burning lungs and the taste out of his mouth.
“Almost lost you there Kylie.”
He spits and shakes his head and trembles and looks up crying, “I hate this fething place! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!”
He sat in his hole that night masturbating furiously until it hurt and then he looked out and saw the world flashing and rumble every few seconds. Distant glows on the horizon leaking over the shoulders of the hill beyond them. He thought he could hear the soft puttering of rounds but it was only the approaching storm letting loose drops upon the dried up leaves that covered the ground. He cleaned his hands with them then washed them down with water from his canteen.
When the rains passed over them he held the green plastic container out so that it would fill and then he replaced it in its pouch. There were boot steps approaching from behind and he looked in time to see Jacob set down in his hole.
“You OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s alright you know.”
“I know.”
“It’s OK to lose it every once in a while. Probably does some kind of good, just letting out the stress.”
“Probably does.”
Beneath his poncho Jacob rubbed his hands together then lifted then from underneath that waterproof polyester and blew into them. Rubbed them again.
“They’re not gonna put you on point again.”
Maybe he didn’t hear over the falling rain.
“Polit said you needed some rest. They’re gonna give you Will’s R&R since he ain’t gonna be using it.”
“I don’t need any of that gak.”
“Should I tell him that?”
“Go ahead. Tell him like it’s the truth.”
He’s on point again the next day as they pass over the hill and into the battleground he’d glimpsed the night before. Graves Detail hadn’t been through here yet and bodies and pieces of bodies and men’s brains and their innards lay splayed out like a buffet for the alien insects that roamed the world. What was left of Companies A and C milled around a few burnt out Leman husks still smoldering. They had cracked lips and broken bones and their rifles had clean spots on them the width of hands and fingers. They passed a long line of dead men covered by ponchos and another line of men on stretchers attended by blood smeared physicians who looked as if they hadn’t slept their entire lives.
They stopped a while there so that the Captain could go and consult with a Gunnery Sergeant, highest ranking man. Kylie set down on an emptied ammo case and stripped his boots and socks off and set them down next to the spent las packs lying on the ground. Heavy smell of ozone, heavier smell of powder. He borrowed a can of disinfectant from Cain and sprayed his foot and put on a fresh pair of socks and then he pulled his boots back on and sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands looking out.
Plumes of smoke rose from the ground and burnt out vehicles like the furnaces of hell were blasting coke feeding into the clouds that loomed menacing overhead. Sky of slate filled with soot and flakes of steel and clay and limestone.
Goddamn beautiful. They started up a game of twenty-one waging match sticks and paychecks and sister’s virginities.
After an hour of fooling around the Commissar came up and called them over and they sat and glared at him for interrupting and then the Sergeant came up and called them and they formed up with Alpha Company from which the Gunny had come from around a pitched camo netting and they got briefed on the situation. Seemed the night before they’d been ambushed by a Tau unit, strength unknown. The Company RTO was there and while the Gunny reported disheartening statistics he worked the dials until he got the Colonel on the wire. When he did the Captain called for quiet and relayed what the Gunny had told him.
For a while the line was silent and the RTO thought maybe he’d lost the signal but then the speaker picked up and the Colonel ordered him to combine the remnants of Alpha and Charlie and pursue. There was a slight murmur between the men then and the Commissars, cause there was one left from Charlie who wasn’t a pushover, called for silence and reluctantly they quieted.
The Captain inquired about additional resources but the inquiry was denied and then the link went dead and he was left there holding the handset with almost two hundred eyes set on him. He cringed because he was a farming kid who’d harvested wheat and grain and here he was leading men who mined ferrous and pitchblende. His eyes drifted over the assembled faces trying to find one among their hard numbers that was familiar before finally settling on a private named Lester Kylie. He didn’t flinch from his gaze but then he didn’t expect any of them to. He half-smiled then called to the Lieutenant and they formulated a plan right there in front of them.
They got dismissed a few hours later and they all flaked off into their positions. Kylie set down with Cain and they shared a cigarette and a meal and a canteen filled with fruit punch. Above the sky was starting to clear but the sun had already begun its descent so there wasn’t noticeable change. They sat in a hole overlooking a scorched clearing that went right up to a battered tree line where furry mammals pledged to their young they’d survive the night and return before leaving their dens to gather food and be hunted.
Kylie sets a bit of bread in front of his hole and when a six legged rodent creeps up he skewers it on a bayonet. He holds it up so Cain can see and he lets out a short laugh. He makes a slight incision down the belly and he pulls the skin off while Cain starts a fire and they let the animal roast until someone tells them to kill the light.
That night he laid awake gazing up at the stars that had appeared. A long time ago he’d once had a star map and on nights like this he’d trace his way back home and imagine the jenny going on full and the searing winds blowing out of that stack and how the ash and soot would rain down like winter snow. And he remembered the adit and how the smell used to be carried out by the miners who poured from that hellish mouth like ants every night. He remembered ducking inside that cavernous maw, a gas masked strapped to his face and heavy work gloves protecting his hands, a pair of leather boots and pants and that was it. It used to bring him solace being able to find his home and know that somewhere she was still burning but he’d long since lost the star map and now he couldn’t find his home no more and he wondered if the furnace had cooled and mine closed down.
Sometime during the night he could hear a roaring edging closer and for a moment he thought he was standing next to the furnace again or maybe that the furnace had come to him but when he got up it was only a Vulture coasting over the tree line to collect the dead.
Thin golden rays illuminating the dust and the fines wafting through the air what he woke to next morning. Cain had been up for a while and he handed him a new rucksack taken from one of Alpha companies dead. The bodies had been policed up over night and there was little to say that a battle had occurred except for the red stains in the ground and the pieces of flesh that had been missed.
They formed up without much fuss into an echelon and they marched across the clearing into the trees. It wasn’t long before they came across the armored bodies that had been left behind and somewhere someone found a wounded Xeno put it out of its misery.
In the east storm clouds had gathered and hot white tongues coursed down to touch the earth making it shudder. They could feel the ground shake beneath them and they could feel the warm winds coursing through the thick warren of smoking trees still puffing gray smoke that vanished on growing winds that shifted the leaves and the ash and blew through the burned coats of dead animals.
They pushed on.
First contact was had almost an hour in, sporadic plasma fire that hit nothing but dirt and sand virtrifying the latter. They hit the ground and returned fire and hit nothing in return. A broken ambush one had suggested and they got up and brushed themselves off and kept moving, studying the landscape looking over the sights fixed on the ends of warm barrels.
They switched out the point men after that and Kylie volunteered and Sergeant Bates said, “OK Lester get up there.”
He double timed it to the head of the wedge and he wiped his brow and checked his rifle one last time and started walking through the forest.
All kinds of things to see on point, he thinks. And you get to see em first too and with the clarity that that affords. The lay of the land becomes apparent. How it slopes off one way into a creek and how the creek seeps instead of runs. How the branches inch this way and that on ever shifting winds. The recessions in the ground, the crevices in the rock where death from nature is bound to come and you to have be careful not to disturb what lies within. The maze that is the forest, grown and growing without pattern impressed within it the tracks of animals, the tracks of people, trailing into dark coves and disappearing into grasslands. Hiding behind every trunk, carried within any shade, lying in every ditch, and masked in every dark space, his death.
By afternoon his nerves were shot and Jacob came up to take his place.
That evening just before twilight they came across a bunker complex while crossing a filthy river. One of the scouts had spotted it just as he’d finished crossing and he stood up, probably had a death wish, and started waving everyone over. They crossed just as fast as they could to the bank but no one fired and they crept right up on the bunkers where they peered into the slits inside. Empty save for some abandoned weapons most definitely alien in nature. A few of the troopers slid inside and conducted a search but there was nothing to find except for some rigged charges which a fellow from Alpha company disarmed.
With light gone they occupied the bunker and searched through the narrow tunnels for every single entrance and posted sentries by them. A roster was made up, a sitrep given to the Colonel and then they were told to make themselves at home.
Kylie got assigned the first watch on the northern side of the hill where they’d be heading the next day. He stood in a bunker leaning against the logs that formed the slit overlooking an untouched plain where a herd of animals grazed lazily or slept, secure in their numbers. He felt secure. Like an ant in an anthill.
He waited for his shift to end, thinking of home, trying to pick out the stars and ever mindful of that storm still there like it was waiting for the right moment to break. Humid air leaked in and he sweat for the first time that month. He made grooves in the dirt floor with the toe of his boot. Wasn’t anyone with him then when he saw the lights passing over the plain towards them silent and pure. He recognized the sharp elongated sides that looked like razor blades and he went to the edge and hollered down the hall. From farther down a head stuck out.
“What’d you say?”
“I said Eldar.”
“Hell are they doing over here?”
“Just go and tell the Captain.”
The trooper swore and disappeared down the tunnel. Kylie returned to his bunker and took a pair of binoculars from his ruck and glassed the plain. The transport’s neared seeming as if they didn’t realize they’re there so he took a flare gun and loaded a round and leaning out the slit shot it off into the air. Immediately the transport veered towards him speeding straight up the hill then stopping scant feet from his bunker and he can see the cannon aim right down at him.
He laughed and swore and waved at the crew and after a brief pause the cannon locked itself back into a fixed position. Then he can hear the ramp hissing open and a moment after that a slender figure appeared, walking right up and kneeling in front of the bunker.
“I didn’t know your kind were here.”
“Well we just got here if it’s any consolation.”
Hidden by the mask Kylie can’t make out any expression but the alien cocks his head like he’s amused and he slips inside and outside the transport hovered out of sight towards the top of the hill.
The Eldar studied the tight enclosure as if he wasn’t even there. He put a hand to the earthen walls and his gentle touch let loose grains that trickled silently over each other to the floor.
“How long have you occupied this position?”
Kylie shrugged his shoulders. “Since this evening, a little earlier, we’ve scouted out everything south of here.”
“I see.”
He puts a hand to the side of his head and out on the plain a fleet of transports uncloak spooking the herd and sending them flying towards the horizon. They start coasting towards the cover of the hill. Just then the trooper appeared huffing loudly in the entrance with the Captain and the young Commissar in tow.
“Is this your commander?” He sticks a long spindly finger at the Captain.
“I am.” The captain holds out a hand but when it goes unshaked he takes the still pointing finger and shakes that instead.
“Captain Robert Kinzy and yourself?”
The Eldar pulls his finger back. “Anshyanne.”
The Captain runs a hand through his short brown hair. “Annie, got it, listen I have to ask, what’re you all doing way out here?”
“I could ask the same of you.”
“You could and you’d probably get an answer, the same from you would be nice.”
The alien twitches, almost imperceptibly but it’s still there. “We came here with the understanding that there was a sizeable Tau force approaching from the North.”
“Not that I’m complaining but I thought there were some very strict guidelines about who goes where.”
“There are.”
“So the question still stands.”
“The force broke off from our sector and we’ve been harrying them since. Small skirmishes mostly, and we’ve tracked them to this region where they have somehow…eluded us.”
“Well alright, I could ask if you consulted high command I don’t suppose it matters now. We ran into that same force you’re talking about, I think unless there’s two of em. They laid an ambush for two of our companies just south of here and we’ve been humping the forests for well two days now found this complex and some Tau weapons and that’s it.”
Anshyanne looks outside like he’s considering something and the silence goes on for so long that the Captain puts his hands in his back pockets and starts rocking on his heels. Kylie exchanges a bemused glance with him while the Commissar just glares at the alien like at any second he might just pull out the bolt pistol out of its holster and blow him away.
The winds shifted suddenly and started whistling through the cracks in the logs like a boiling kettle and the Eldar returned his attentions to them. “I think it would be in our mutual interests if we located this force quickly, perhaps a temporary combining of forces would prove beneficial to us both. We can use this complex as a base of operations for which to conduct our search.”
The Commissar’s face started squeezing together then and he grit his teeth and was about to object when the Captain spoke up.
“Well it’s big enough for us all and I’d appreciate the help. There’s a bay that could house your vehicles on the west side and I’ll have em open the doors for ya. For the moment I figure we should go and compare notes.”
“That sounds reasonable, for one of your kind.”
“Well I’d say I had to talk to higher but out this far I don’t anyone would care.”
The Eldar nodded his head and then he broadcasted something from his helm they couldn’t hear and outside the fleet started moving and the Captain turned and gestured for him to follow and then they went down the tunnel and Kylie stood in the entrance until he couldn’t their voices anymore.
All night they transferred inside and at some point just after midnight, or that world’s midnight, Cain came in and sat down beside him and took out his playing cards. He dealt a few hands of twenty-one and then some of baccarat where he lost his house to a natural nine.
“Son of a bitch.” He said and he threw the cards down into the dirt and kicked his legs out and went to sleep. He looked up suddenly. “Isn’t your shift over?”
“Yeah it probably is.”
“Well get some sleep, I’ll watch for a while.”
“That’s OK.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
When I was sixteen years old I got my Med Tech license and started riding as a third on the ambo out in five’s area all up and down the crossroads. I remember after about a year they made me a second and one time in early summer we got a call out to Pikesville to a pediatrics center. Dispatch said it was a priority two, MOI fall; for a boy about six years old. So we drove up there and got in the room and found the RN’s had him lying on one of those metal cots they do your examination on and he was thrashing around like a beetle on its back. Got closer you could see why half his face was gone. So the nurse comes up says he fell from the deck about seven feet onto his face. First thing out my mouth is why the feth ain’t he collared yet. She just looks at me dumb as hell. So they transferred care to us and we collared and back boarded the kid and put him on a stretcher and took him to the ambo. By that time we finally caught up with the parents and I asked them what happened and they said he fell and we were in a bit of a rush and I didn’t think too much of it but while we were transporting and I was doing my second check I noticed all the dirt in his face and how the skin was pulled off starting at the chin and not from above his head like it should’ve if he’d fallen. I put some fresh bandages on the poor boy and we offloaded him at Mercy and as we were talking to the nurse I looked closer to that boy and it looked like he’d been dragged. I’da put my life on it still would today.
But I didn’t say nothing. Not to the nurse, not to the driver, not to anybody.
I quit the next day and went back to the jenny.
They shut off the lights in the early morning and for a while it was pitch so that he couldn’t see the hand stuck out in front of his face. Just outlines of different blackness, obsidian beside charcoal beside slate where the dim reflection of starlight shone between his digits and then slowly as the cycle began the shades turned to shadows and those grew long as a copper light poured itself into the sky and he could see again but then a land that seemed like heated metal as if beneath that hard caliche in the hell of that world the blast stoves had started up and were blasting gas right through the cracked fissures of the land.
Too damn hot for winter, he thought, too damn hot for morning. Hell it was too damn hot for anything. He wiped the sweat from his brow uncomprehending what had changed over the night. Such a sudden one too he half-expected he’d died unknowing and something hellish had claimed his soul.
Wouldn’t have surprised him if it was true.
He rose and stretched and the sweat that had soaked through his blouse dripped down his arms and his sides and dripped from his hem and watered his belt. His scalp was hot and scratchy and damp and he attacked it with unclean nails which when he was done were dirtier than before. As he scratched he spied a white border on the edge of his vision and he turned to see a tall thing resting on its haunches leaning back in a corner.
“Morning.” He says.
The alien looked up and at him through bright red visors regarded him sourly, as if to rise in his company was somehow an insult. It said nothing and he shrugged his shoulders and looked out the slit over to the plains where the herd had returned and they grazed in peace if not in comfort.
Out there he discerned no great cuts in the crust and no winged monstrosities in the sky but hot winds blew fast and furious and he was reminded of the shaft to the mines down in the steel ranges at Appalachio where they smelted the ore right there beneath the ground and the heat would burst through the entrance in hurricane gusts that would rob the sweat from your skin. He peered outside trying to figure out what had put an end to three months cold and he saw looking out that the world had taken on a new golden intensity that lent itself to everything it touched. He tapped the logs with index and middle making loud thumping sounds then he turned away towards the alien and studied it a while. The humanoid wore the carapace armor they all wore and there was a fiery plume of hair that seemed to sprout from the back of its helm. He wasn’t sure if it was the Eldar’s hair or not so he asked but all it did was glare at him.
He sighed the sigh men let out after twenty miles hard march, a slow esoteric exasperation known only to armed ranks and huntsmen and miners. “Well you can feth yourself too then.”
He kicked Cain in the thigh and he, a man of straight corded muscle, jerked awake like he’d been caught sleeping with someone else’s beloved and breathing hard as if he’d been at it all night. He squirmed unconsciously as if somehow he could shake the hot hands that enveloped him. He looked up at Kylie and he back down at him.
“We should probably report in.”
“Yeah probably should.”
They left the alien to watch the slopes and they set off down the tunnels relishing the cool breeze that wafted through as they navigated the labyrinth like network until they arrived at its heart in the center of the hill where the Lieutenant and the Captain and Anshyanne were deliberating over a large map set down on a rotting table that somehow some breed of mold had gotten hold of.
There were a few scatterings of troopers and Eldar in the chamber listening to the three voices going back and forth calm and cool planning the patrol routes for the day. Kylie and Cain found themselves a corner packed with captured Tau weapons and waited for a break in their officer’s talk and that came not too long after and when it did Kylie called the Lieutenant over and the aged ruffian with the scar on his chin walked over. They gave him a report while he sipped from a canteen and he nodded his head. He preempted them then saying he didn’t know what the heat was about but that he’d find out. He went on to say that one of them could stick around in the chamber where it was cooler but one of them would have to go back to his post then he went and returned to the map where the commanders were beginning again.
Cain scratched his thigh and started cracking his neck and said, “Look you need the sleep stick around here for a while and I’ll take this shift.”
But Kylie shook his head, no, got up and walked off down the tunnels ignoring Cain’s calling voice until it faded into a soft echo bouncing off the dry dirt walls and then stopped altogether. He walked back in to the bunker flicking the alien’s head as he went past.
“Wake up donkey-cave.”
He leaned against the logs and looked out studying the hazy vista that seemed like fury was rising from fissures in the ground. Behind him the alien was standing trying to burn holes in the back of his head with its cherry eyes. He looked over his shoulder at it then noticed the curves on its chest and he felt a grin spread ‘cross his face.
“What?”
“It’s hard to believe something as crude as your kind could survive as long as it has.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea I’m justa underachiever.”
“One would hope so.”
“I would if I cared.”
They spent the morning under a bronze sun scouring the plains for trails or signs of passing and then they sweated up along the skirt ends of the woods in the north that ran from one blistered horizon to the next and probably farther than that. Along the woods they found broken branches and bent blades and petrified tracks in the earth and Sergeant Bates made a note of it in his journal for later and then he called for a ten minute break and they sat down in the shade of a leafless tree that reminded him of the oaks at home cept thicker. They drained their canteens and fanned themselves and watched the water seep out of their pores like flood waters.
As he sat there he scanned the edges of an eye’s limit and he saw those thundering clouds still lingering off someplace in the distance seeming unaffected by the heat wave that had washed over the land. Ironic how much he’d cursed the rain in the months prior and now he’d wished they come and pour down on him and he was sure if they did his skin would steam like as if the droplets were quenching a blade.
He held his hands out in front of him and studied the lines misfortune had carved into them.
Between his fingers he saw the aliens in their suits though didn’t seem too bothered by the heat or surprised about it for that matter. He studied them a while. They’d set themselves apart in a patch of land that smelled like sagebrush and they watched the tree line and the sky passively as if they were simply appreciating the new vista. He could see the bright haired one he’d spoken to earlier and he called out to her until she got tired of hearing his nagging voice and turned to see what bothered him so.
“You know what’s with the heat?”
“Solar flare.”
“Solar flare?”
“Yes.”
“Well how long do these things last?”
“This will not last the week.” She said and looked away leaving him to look at her for a while longer before he set his sights upon that near star for as long as an eye could bare the way he’d sometimes gaze into the furnace to see if he could withstand the heat. After a full minute he jerked his head down and held his face in his hands and pulled himself into himself.
When the sun was highest and the wind the strongest it’d been all day they turned back for the complex with a thirteen mile stretch still yet to be searched. They trudged through the high grass like a band of dogs in dusty green uniforms panting hard and cursing harder. The sun beat down on their backs and soon their shirts were no longer filled with sweat but only smelled of it. Thirst was bad. Cain had taken to licking the sweat off his forearms and Kylie had taken off his blouse before it’d dried out and wrung out the sleeves and drank what the thin stream it’d produced. Then he draped it over his head like a hood and kept going.
They’d gone about two miles when one of the Eldar attached to them heard a desiccated twig snap beneath an armored boot behind them and turned just in time to see a volley of plasma bolts racing towards him. He crumpled in flames as the plasma ignited what was flammable on his self as did all but one of their number, her, and she threw herself down and started crawling away.
Sergeant Bates shouted for them to form a line and they took their positions and returned fire but there were blue bolts streaking over the tips of the grass and so dry were they and so hot the bolts that caught like gasoline catches and in a few moments time there was a wild fire raging between their two parties. Bates ordered them to peel away in something resembling an ordered withdrawal but the winds howled towards them and the fires seemed to lash out like there was a demon in the vapors. They broke ranks and scrambled away and he was about to too but he saw the white shifting against the yellow and the tonguing orange and he sprinted through the flames to her side and hauled her up by an arm and then he was running one hand around her waist the other firing blindly behind him thinking as he ran this must’ve been how the diggers in Jose felt when the coal burned and the mine collapsed.
They didn’t stop running until they were ascending the slope of the hill and they didn’t let themselves collapse from exhaustion until they were inside the bunkers proper and there they waited on their bellies and burnt backs for someone to come and help them. When someone finally came they dragged them out one by one down the tunnels to a makeshift infirmary where he was given water to drink and passed out.
The smell of the earth imposed upon sweat and urine. A glowing bulb hanging from a flyspeck cord giving off filthy light. When he awoke he was still in the antechamber in a long row of lying men recovering from dehydration and heat exhaustion. Some of them had IV tubes sticking out of the crook of their arms connected to plastic pouches on hangars above their heads. Beside them canteens. He took the one next to his own and unscrewed the cap and sipped from it. The water was cool against his parched throat. He sipped some more and set the canteen down. He pulled up a leg and peeled back the bandages from his weeping blisters and he rolled his head along his shoulders and exhaled and closed his eyes then he got up and limped to the surgeon’s table and rooted through the boxes stacked there until he found fresh gauze. He went back and changed the dressings and laid on his back and picked at the scabs on his arms.
A while passed. He sat back up again and paced the room. Another trooper was awake and he watched him go back and forth a while until he laid back down again. He lay there staring at the low ceiling feeling strangely claustrophobic. He tried to turn the feeling over in his mind like he’d an object in his hand but he couldn’t understand it’s roots and so he couldn’t understand what lay beneath it.
A medic came in then and saw that he was awake and he came over with a juice pouch and handed it to him. Kylie took the pouch and sipped the straw until he was sucking air and the pouch shriveled into itself. He put it aside. The medic put a cool hand to his forehead to check his temperature.
“Seems normal.”
“I’d hope so.”
“I’m gonna recommend you stay on light duty for another day after that you’ll be good to go just keep hydrated and stay out of the sun.”
“There’s no need for that.” He said as he propped himself up on his arms. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed the muscles.
The medic crouched down beside him then and he said, “There ain’t no rush. It’s not like you’re missing anything. Captain Kinzy ordered patrols during the day be kept to a minimum everything’s going on at night so at least get some sleep until then if you wanna roam out there?”
Kylie seemed to consider the medic’s words a moment then he waved his hand and got up. He slapped his chest, his abs, the sides of his thighs. “I’m fine and I’m gone.” And he walked out.
He kicked dirt the whole way back to his bunker where he relieved a trooper from Charlie Co and took his las rifle and leaned against the logs and peered outside where now the world seemed to be glowing as if every surface somehow gained the trait of luminosity. Or maybe it was that the light was so much that the world couldn’t hold anymore, like the underground ever yearning for darkness simply rejected the light and sent it back from whence it came.
He stared outside until his eyes grew sore and then he sat in the corner and opened up his ruck he’d left there the night before. He ate a small meal of hardtack and salted beef and he sipped from the spare canteen he kept in there.
A while later a runner stopped in the entranceway asking for volunteers for a patrol in the afternoon. It’d loop around the south side of the hill up north and then skirt the woods he’d patrolled the day before. They’d travel light and fast and not engage. All they had to do was report enemy movement to give the night patrols something to work on. The call was for ten men and they had nine and they left in an hour.
There was another time on Pochak when we were rotting in those damn flooded trenches. It’d been raining for twelve days straight after a one day break for sunshine and the ground had turned into some kind of mire that’d give if you put a feather on it. And god-forbid if you stepped in it, it’d suck you right down and if you ever managed to get your boot back it’ be filled to the brim with mud and weigh about five pounds. Most of the guys didn’t wear boots after the first month; they’d throw on a pair of socks and wrap their feet in thick plastic bags and it’d take some getting used to but it’d keep your feet dry and that was pretty damn important.
Some people actually went barefoot and he was one of them.
Now a lotta times if a guy got killed out in the mudflats he’d get sucked down into the mire and the best you might hope to see of him again is a hand or a boot heel sticking out. Sometimes though you had to pull the bodies out and that was at least a five man job. We’d all gather round and plunge our hands under that gak and grab hold of any limbs or loose straps and pull till are muscles wanted to snap. There was always that loud sucking sound whenever you did pull too; sick sound like the body itself was stretching. It’d pop out though if you tugged on it hard enough.
When it happened we weren’t looking for anybody although you’d be as liable to find somebody just going for a weekend stroll as you were if you actually were looking. We’d been trekking across the flats for about a few hours and a break got called. Him and I we went over a ways to take a piss and he stepped down and his foot sank and all of a sudden there was this putrid smell and he looked down and he was standing in someone’s stomach.
He let his head rest against the bunker wall.
“Alright.”
Kylie with a rifle in one hand stalking across the face of the plains like an ancient hunter. Ends of crispened stalks being crushed underfoot. Searing drafts shifting hot grains from hemisphere to hemisphere, slowly eroding baked soil not held now by anything. Past the charred remains of alien comrades still smoking and beyond the shadows of the woods where he kneels and puts his hand to spatterings of coagulated blood that disintegrate into tiny red flakes under the auspice of his cracked fingernails.
Kylie bounding through the woods following the trail ever continuing before and beyond him. Through a dead desert forest dodging scratching twigs lunging at the eyes. Brushing past thorny briars that rend his leggings and his legs and causing him to curse. Down onto a dry bank and across a drier bed of clay baked solid by the sun. Lone handprint on the hard flesh of a dead tree on the far shore he sees. His breath hot and wild and his vision fazing in and out with it’s unsteady rhythm. Him swaying with his hands on his knees trying to stay focused. Him drinking to quell the thirst, a phantom hand wiping his chin.
Kylie taking a knee, the ground fracturing beneath the bone.
“Kylie.” A hand taking hold his shoulder.
Kylie wiping the sweat from his brow and finding there is none.
“Kylie we have to go or we’re gonna die out here.”
He looked back at the nine men behind him ragged and beat standing in the creek bed. His chest heaving up and down like it was circulating air just to cool his lungs. The boiling blood in his veins screaming for him to stop. He looked back towards the knoll in the distance.
“Alright.” He said.
She was there when he staggered back into the bunker. She had her helmet off and it looked like she had something to say but he slumped against the wall asleep.
In his dream:
Prevaricate reprobate
Dilettante in strife
Return to your furnace
He awoke, not sure when, and she was standing over him her thin pale fingers smelling of autumn pressing softly against his forehead. He crossed his eyes focusing on the incandesced face beyond the armored limb.
“Can I help you?” he said and the fingers departed, curled away into a half-fist that hung for a moment in front of him arched back like a snake ready to strike then they fell to her side.
“I wanted to thank you.”
“Mmm you wanna thank me?” It came out like a growl.
“Yes.”
He gestured with his hand not looking at her. “Well don’t let me stop you.”
Her lip quivered and her face became inflamed. She stood over him a long moment as if she were trying to figure him out then she turned and left.
He listened to her padding footsteps until they faded and then he took his rifle and laid it across his lap. He took a cleaning kit from his ruck and from that he took a ramrod and busted out the pins that held together the upper and lower receivers. He slid the bolt out then soaked it with CLP and let it sit on his thigh. He took the other rods and assembled them and at its end screwed in the jag and punched the muzzle twice in quick succession then he exchanged the jag for the needle eye and slipped a piece of cloth in the eye and repeated the process. When that was done he blew the accumulated dust from the trigger assembly and wiped down the bolt and replaced it then he set the receivers together and tapped the pins back in.
He sat in his mad perspiring skin whilst eyeing the golden block that traversed from right to left across the wall but never varied in intensity. It was hotter than hell. All the heat blew in and never left since its only way of escape was to venture down into the tunnels and those were already scorched like a molten deluge had poured through.
He took off his shirt and stretched on the dirt floor.
A boot toe made of steel crashed into his ribs making him gasp for air.
“Sleeping on a post private?”
He ignored the voice and clutched at the point of impact with his hands trying to feel if anything was broken. Not that he figured but bruised. He looked up at the young Commissar in his black leather and for a moment he forgot himself and wondered how the hell he stood it. Then the Commissar reached down and took him by his neck and raised him to his wobbling knees.
“Dereliction of duty, putting others lives at risk, breaking all of the general orders to the sentry,” he paused and licked his lips, “gross deviation from uniform regulation.”
Kylie coughed blood oblivious to the boy’s ramblings. He wondered if maybe a lung had been punctured and he took a deep breath to see. There was some pain but nothing sharp, nothing like there was tearing.
“Oh yes the charges are steep. And I find you guilty of them all. You are hereby sentenced to summary execution.”
The commissar reached for the pistol at his side and in that short movement Kylie leapt from his knees and gave him a brutal right hook that knocked him out of the bunker against the tunnel wall. There Kylie pummeled him with his iron fists until he slumped down with blood spurting from his nose and lower lip. But Kylie didn’t let up. He flipped the Commissar on his back and brushed away his protesting arm and then he sent a white knuckled fist crashing against his face in great wet smacks that carried through the tunnels so loud were they. He punched until there weren’t any teeth to knock out. Till his nose was pulp. Till his eyes swelled shut.
And when all that was done he looked behind him at the small crowd gathered there. He shrugged his shoulders and rolled off the broken man and sat there catching his breath.
He waited on a rolling chair in a small cell scratching his leg with his heel. The guard beside him yawned and offered him a cigarette. He took it and then a lighter and stuck the butt in his mouth and cupped the flame and inhaled till the cherry glowed bright red. He took a long drag and held it in. He let the smoke leak out from between his lips like the smokestacks did when they weren’t burning anymore and he imagined the smoke was carrying out the soot of his soul and he might glimpse a part of it hanging there in the air. It accumulated beneath the low ceiling till soon there was a haze drifting through the cell like in the old jazz bars and he imagined half of himself must be up there by now but he still couldn’t see anything cept their ashen billows.
He was flanked on either side by the Captain and the Lieutenant and Sergeant Bates trailed behind their serious forms. They stopped just short of him and he let his leg find the ground again.
“Lester Kylie.”
“Yes sir.”
“You gonna stand up Private?”
“My feet hurt.”
The Captain turned to the Sergeant. “Is he always like this?”
Bates regarded his disinterested posture before addressing the Captain. “Mostly sir.”
“Hmm.” He dismissed the two of them with a wave of his hand and requisitioned the guard’s chair and sent him off too.
“You were one of the men who volunteered yesterday.”
He nodded his head, yes.
“Lester Kylie.” He said his name like trying to recall something. “I can’t say I’ve heard your name other than in passing. Which means you’re ain’t usually bashing people’s faces in.” He leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “Any reason you departed from that rather admirable mode of behavior?”
Kylie shrugged his shoulders.
The Captain leaned back sighing. “Were you the one who fell in the hole?”
“What hole?”
“Crater hole.”
“Yeah.”
“Lieutenant Polit said he ordered you not to go on point after that.”
“I don’t recall if he did or didn’t.”
“He says he did.”
“OK.”
“I talked to Paxton and he said you were supposed to be on light duty.”
“You talk to a lot of people.”
“I do. I talked to a few of the guy’s on the patrol. You want to hear what they had to say?”
“Not really.”
The Captain took a deep breath and let it out then he frowned and rubbed the deep creases etched in his tanned brow.
“I’ve heard some good things about you too you know. Sergeant Bates says you’re a damn fine soldier be’d better if you weren’t such a hard ass. And apparently you’ve known Polit since he was a corporal. And now he’s a Lieutenant.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“How old are you Lester?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“And how long in the Guard?”
“Since I was twenty.”
“You’ve been in the Guard seven years and haven’t made it past Private. gak.”
“Well when you put it like that it doesn’t sound that good.”
“It ain’t goin sound good any way I put it.” He grimaced a moment almost a happy grimace too then he slapped his thigh. “Well I think we can chalk today’s incident up as just frazzled nerves and considering yesterday’s heroics with that one alien girl, who I spoke to too by the way, and your time in service and grade I think it’d be safe to make you a corporal.”
“Sir?”
The Captain reached into his pocket and produced a pair of chevrons. He stood up and walked over and pinned them on his collar. “There.” He said as he stood back to appreciate this small work.
Kylie looked down on the small charcoal colored chevrons and sighed. “Ah gak.”
He’d just woken up and was walking down the roasting tunnels when his path crossed with Jacob’s. The old buzzard held out his wiry arms and smiled.
“Jacob.” He said as he embraced his friend.
When they parted Jacob saw the chevrons mint upon his collar.
“Ah so beat a commissar and you get promoted. Unreal.”
They shared a laugh and went down to the infirmary to visit Cain who sat up on his stretcher and squinted at the finely tuned metal and shook his head and muttered about how standards had fallen. Then he slapped him on the shoulder and let out a hearty laugh. They killed time playing cards and joking amongst themselves and in the darkness their laughter seemed out of place. They stayed until Kylie’s wristwatch chimed and he laid his hand down, a losing one, and bid his farewells.
They called after him saying he was a cheat for quitting and that Cain was still claiming his firstborn.
He worked his way into the upper tiers of the complex and came to an observation room from where one could see just beyond the dried creek bed.
Lieutenant Polit was there slacked against the wall peering out. He didn’t look but he heard him enter and when he began studying the data slates on the table and their perturbing reports he spoke up.
“Did you rest well?”
“I did.”
“Good.”
Polit held his hand outside the slit and let it stay there. When he pulled it back in it’d gone auburn and he blew on it. “It’s getting hotter.”
“I noticed.”
“It’s not stopping them though. We had contact while you were out, fourteen men dead, the entire patrol.” He pointed north past the plains. “It was where you scouted the day before. The Eldar say they’re massing somewhere out past the creek, don’t ask me how they know, it’s probably their damned witchery but we’d better believe it.”
“And what are we doing about it?”
“Well we’d call in arty but the flare’s scrambling everything. And way out here I don’t think anyone’d care enough to send air support. Not for us. Certainly not for them.”
“So there’s a plan I assume?” He paused then added looking out into the furnace, “One that doesn’t involve sending us all out there.”
Polit finally turned to regard him sighing. “There’s not a lot we can do. Their armor’s got some kind of internal cooling and they can move around in this heat without much detriment and we’re hard pressed just to keep our guy’s from passing out.”
“And the Eldar?”
“They’re sweeping the area but the vehicles they have are getting hammered out there. It’s two damn guerilla forces harrying each other, it’s really just a matter of numbers and they have more.”
“So what do we do? Stay hunkered down here?”
“That’s the plan though considering this used to be a damn Tau HQ it’s not real comforting to my mind.”
It grew silent. He scratched an itch on his hand and looked out. “There isn’t a reason you called me up here is there? I mean besides depressing me?”
“Yeah there is.” He said as he walked to the table and took a seat. “Sit down.”
Kylie took a chair and leaned back on it. Propped one leg on the other.
“You know I worked the scarfer back in the day. Started out as a day laborer making four an hour picking at the veins two miles underground at Calichine. I worked that mine for two years burrowing into that mountain. In them heavy mining suits, like something a fire fighter would wear, that’s what I wore, we’d jack rock down with pick axes like we were scraping away slate. Well somewhere along the line we passed a deposit of natural gas and we didn’t know it was there at the time and we didn’t dig towards it but there were fissures in the rock and the gas would leak in and every so often a guy would get a whiff and pass out. Now none of us had ever smelled that stuff before or even knew what it was, hell we all came from villages that didn’t even have electricity. So we complained to the heads until they gave us gasmasks and the problem seemed to go away. And that was because we were tunneling farther from the deposit.
Well one day a guy by the name of Isaac was wondering down the shaft dragging his pick axe along the walls and a bit came loose and he looked and saw a kind of sheen in the rock. Looked closer saw silver. He called us all over and we looked and started hollering happy as dogs in a field. Cause no one knew about it, silver in an iron mine. Hell we’d take it out and smelt it and split it between us and feth the heads. So we started taking down bits of it as the days went by. I think on the sixth day of us chiseling at it, the day we finally opened up a direct line to the deposit the power in the mine surged and every single bulb flashed out.
That far down it was instant pitch. Like the dark had come and swallowed us whole. It was a noise you could hear you know, that light giving out, that sudden absence. Well a few of the gas masks had NVGs built in them and a couple turned on some flashlights and we sent a few people down the tunnel to go check the generator while the rest of us kept working by flash light.
That’s when we started noticing the smell again. And it was heavy this time but we couldn’t see where it was coming from so we hollered down for those guys to hurry up. They sent me to get em and I ran into them about five minutes later coming back down and they said the generator was running again all they had to do was switch out the bulbs. So we went to the silver vein and told em and one of the guys got a step ladder and unscrewed the one and replaced it but when he sent it home there was a spark and that whole section just went up in an inferno. I was far enough away that I managed to fall on my stomach just as them flames worked over my head and if it hadn’t been for my suit I’da been kindle.
I remember trying to breathe and there not being any air. Someone came by me and put a NRB over my face and handed me the tank. I held it close underneath my chest cause another one’s safety burst in the heat and it was flying down the shaft making these loud clanking noises like a blacksmith god pounding on the sword of war.
At some point a group of us got up and dashed out fast as we could blind except for them pale white beams shining in front of us. I remember it took us an hour before we got out the shaft and the whole way you could hear em screaming behind us, just echoing up them iron lines.”
Kylie looked down. “So you did want to depress me.”
“Shut up I ain’t done yet. So the next day they started back down and found the mine had collapsed about thirty yards from where the explosion was. Took em two days to get through the rubble and by that time fifty-two were dead out of seventy.
You know where I went to work after that?”
He shook his head.
“Back down in the mines for another year before they put me in a mill. And I stayed there nine years until they shut it down.
And then I came here.”
Night was sliding in and again there was a respite from the oppressive heat and they crept out of the complex like marching ants from an anthill going hunting through the wooden blades that towered over their fragileness. For once he stayed behind in the bunker sharing lukewarm decaf with Cain who’d come up hands laden with the steaming stuff earlier. They leaned at the slit sipping out of metal canteen holders refilling from the black kettle until there was none left.
When the cups were empty Cain left and came back with an empty ammo case in either hand. They sat upon the splintered faces and played 21 until they grew bored and switched to Sut. Cain dealt the cards like a seasoned con. His knowing fingers sliding one card over the next dishing them out so that they landed almost one on top of the other.
He looked at what had been dealt and it was bad. No kings, no queens, just a black jack and a five and a red nine. He laid the cards down and Cain guffawed and slapped his knee. The con dealt again and wagered a brand new car he swore on his life and his aunt’s he still had at home.
He took the bet but when he looked at his hand it was no better than before. Cain slapped down a red king and his wife and his son. He got up and started prancing obscenely around the bunker doing some strange jig that started with him raising his legs like a dog about to piss on a hydrant and moving his shoulders back and forth and ended with him laughing so hard he couldn’t sit or breathe and heavy tears streamed down his sunken face.
Kylie watched him dance in joy and then he grabbed the canteen holder and tipped it in his mouth to get the last drop but it was empty and he set it back down.
“Wish I had something to drink.”
“Itching to lose em already eh?”
Kylie shrugged his shoulders and they kept playing. He wagered his chevrons and lost.
They were playing baccarat and he was holding two kings and a nine and an ace when the rumbling started. Like soft thunder rolling over gentle hills. They got up and walked to see and to the North there were white flashes like pale failed dawns appearing and then slipping back beneath the horizon. Every few seconds there would be a flash that would overcome the rest and this would vibrate the air around him and tiny brown grains would trickle from the ceiling. He started to climb out of the bunker ignoring Cain’s alarmed questions and he sat on the face of the hill trying to make out silhouettes in the light but this far away it was a forlorn effort he wondered why he was trying.
Cain stuck his head out between the logs and tried to talk to him but he waved him away and his head disappeared back inside. He took off his shirt and loosened his boots and laid down in the dust still warm from that vituperate star. He gazed up, an amateur astrologer searching among the others trying to find in that vast celestial expanse what yellow dwarf his home orbited. Knowing there were no constellations to guide his wavering finger as they traced across the firmament. How was it now that they were so important, he wondered. When for years the sky was coal and it ever snowed ash onto the tin roofs of shotgun shacks lining the sludge river crowded with waste and inhabited by the rust of their lives. How could things have changed so much in so short a time? Where was the fire and the lines of soot rising constant overhead? Where were the shafts that could take a man down to his soul?
He was deep in his ruminations when someone climbed out of the bunker and sat down in the dust beside him. He looked and it was her again and he felt this sudden urge to be vile but she got word in before he could.
“I spoke to your…friends.”
Everyone’s fething talking he thought sourly but didn’t say. His distorted face and furrowed brow, they closed the slits of his eyes and all the stars blurred into one thin bright mass. He knew Cain must have sent her along and before him someone else. He thought of petty vengeances.
“They say you’re always like this. So I can’t take offense for how you normally act, can I?”
“Can if you want.”
She fixed her eyes upon him not appearing at all agitated and for some reason this upset him. He sat up and grabbed his shirt and pulled it on and went about tightening his boots.
“Are you going inside?”
“feth’s it look like.”
She pursed her alabaster lips together and he could see the façade of her calm beginning to crack and just as he about to get up she laid a hand upon his shoulder as if to say, a moment more, and then she looked at the ground composing her thoughts.
He glared at the hand but he did not move.
After a while she said:
Ferrous spirit
In alloyed cavern
Choked with charcoal fog
Sojourn in world of flesh
Become malleable
She withdrew her hand. He stared at the dirt between his legs and the long brief shadows that ebbed and eddied in time with the quaking of the world. He picked up a smooth pebble between his fingers and examined it expertly. Clastic sediment deposited there by an ancient ocean once churned white and mad like a rabid dog. Slowly his head began to shake and he had to suppress a smile.
“What the hell does that even mean?”
She sighed like a teacher might when faced with a difficult pupil but she crossed her legs Indian style and a sad smile grew across her smooth features but a smile all the same.
They sat awhile listening to the sounds of war and nature mixing in a harmonious orchestra that flowed together in gentle tattooed crescendos arising out of the winds harrowing strings and the hundred thousand hollowed trunks and crackling barrels it fluted through. Haunting euphony for in truth one was merely a callous extension of the other. Metal and flesh.
He could hear Cain in the bunker rearranging its meager furnishings. The scraping of wood against sand, a ruck placed on the ground and a head falling upon it.
He noticed then for the first time the helm held in the crook of her arm. The plume of fire sheened strands jutting out. It was not hers he realized then, for hers were as vibrant as oak leaves on a fall morning with the dew still apparent upon them and a benevolent sun caressing their veins in an incandescent glow.
“Why do you wear those things?”
She smiled as if she were expecting the question and he realized she might have by her witchery.
“It’s a way of separating ourselves…from ourselves. To compartmentalize a facet of our souls if you will.”
He threw up his hands. “I don’t get it.”
She takes up the helm in both hands and studies the sockets red as hell as if for the first time. “We seem alike but we are as different as warring siblings.” She spoke to the helm and not to him. “Our species experience emotions in such a heightened intensity that it threatens to overcome us. This in all things but especially in war where the stimuli are so great a constant risk is present not just to our lives but also to our mental well being. So you see it will have a dual purpose.”
“Aye.”
She paused to formulate her thoughts. “The mask is a method of controlling those emotions. It is a simple inert material, wraithbone usually, and we channel our beings into them so that in essence we become other persons entirely. I am not she who wears the mask as she who wears the mask is not I. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“In this way we can become detached from our emotions, completely so that-
“Like machines?”
“If you want to put it that way, yes.”
“And the other purpose.”
She frowned at being cut off but she obliged him by answering. “The other purpose is as I said to protect our states of mind. There are many instances in war where necessary evils must be committed and in this universe to hesitate is to become extinct and so we must act, sometimes without thought or feeling in a manner your kind would consider cruel. At the end of a war or a battle we can take off the masks and be safe in the knowledge that those acts were carried out by others.”
“Except you carried them out.”
Her smile grew. “It is different for our kinds I don’t expect you to understand.”
“I understand perfectly. You wear the mask you’re a different person you take it off you’re another one. But you still did it. You can’t bury what you’ve done. You can’t just throw a helmet on and say well someone else did it. It was you.”
She shook her head. “No you don’t understand, as a species we have to protect ourselves.”
“No you don’t understand.” He sat up and looked hard at her scouring the recesses of his mind for words and phrases and for some reason she waited for him and when the words came out it was like a bitter recital. He said, “A man once said In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface we are implanting it and it will rise up a thousand-fold in the future.”
The sad smile remained. She uncrossed her legs and held them with her arms against her breasts. He wanted to press on then. Hurl queries incisive and cold through the warm air. He wanted to say there were two ways, the way it is and the way it is. He wanted to jump and yell and beat his fists against his chest. He sat and let the rage burn cold within until he felt hollow like the trees in the woods and then he whispered, “I want to go home.” He balled up his fists and he said it again and then again and again like a monk chanting during mass.
She slid up beside him and took his head in her arms slender arms and caressed his head like a mother would her child.
After a while she beseeched the firmament:
Illustrious orb
In impartial void
Last
And after a while he said:
I fething hate
The stars
Fitful sleep he had and though dreamless he awoke with a start. Drenched in sweat and panting loudly, feeling as if he’d just surfaced from a dive into a deep black ocean where the dim luminescent lure of benthic sea monsters had called out his name in siren song. He sat up shaking away the phantom vestiges of this non-dream and the dull ache it begot holdings his head in caked palms lent coarseness by granules embedded in his skin. When the pressure in his head subsided he looked about his cramped surroundings expecting somehow for them to have changed but there was nothing he hadn’t yet beheld.
Cain was fast gone beside him and he rose silently so as not to stir him. He went out into the tunnel where a breeze cooler than he expected chilled the mist offered by his flesh. He walked down the lightless tunnels till he arrived at a small wooden door guarded by a young sentry and the older Commissar still suited in his black leather outfit. He made a gesture like he was drinking and the sentry produced a key and unlocked the door. The commissar eyed him coldly as he entered the mess hall. A single wooden table with packaged meals and what condiments could be scavenged, an Eldar contraption not unlike a water ladle, chairs tucked beneath giant wire spools taken from Emperor knew where. A few beat troopers leaning over their meals like starved dogs in strange lands where beasts larger than they roamed free. He took one of the brown plastic packages from the table and then tossed it onto one of the spools and then he grabbed a tin cup and manipulated the cryptocrystalline ladle’s switches until it produced water. When his cup was full he sat down like a mirror and attacked his meal with a grisly voracity.
When he finished he cleaned his chin with his sleeve and he deposited the remains in a plastic trash bag hanging on the end of the table. He refilled his cup, drained it, and refilled it again and again until his stomach began to bulge.
He licked his lips and set the cup down. Then he left the mess hall and as he cleared the entrance he was stayed by a steely grip. He turned to look at the Commissar holding him. With a twitch of the neck he motioned for him to follow. He followed him down into the recesses of the hill towards the infirmary where he dismissed the medic with a jerk of the thumb. They came to the beaten man’s bedside. He wasn’t wearing his leather dress anymore and splints and gauze held him immobile and the only thing that yet moved was his lungs and that surely a painful toil.
Unconscious though the man was he hoped he still felt it.
“He would’ve learned. All he needed was time.”
Kylie turned his face to regard the Commissar in the dim light.
“Young one’s like this are always upstart it has to be expected.”
The Commissar paused as if he expected him to say something but he stood like a statue watching the rhythmic rise as if by sheer will alone he might give it perpetual pause.
“I remember when you came here Lester. Stupid little kid you were and you ain’t changed a bit. Still doing the same dumb gak that got you sent here in the first place.”
He began looking around as if he were bored. The Commissar stepped up to him until an inch separated their faces. “I’m getting those fething pins from you one way or the other and Emperor damn what Kinzy has to say about it.”
“You ain’t even in my company.”
“Doesn’t matter in the slightest.” He said it without ego or malice like stating a fact. It was just what he was going to do.
Kylie frowned and backed away head down the stale air circulating the confines suddenly unbearable. He held out his hands as if to say, then that’s that.
He turned to go.
“You don’t even care do you?”
“Of course I do. I hope that fether dies.”
Blurred figures materialized in the dawning hell light on the edge of the windblown plain choked with hot dust that sped across the scorched expanse as if a demon compelled the vicious currents they rode. He glassed the smears on that fiery horizon and saw that the patrols were returning. He watched their shambling approach until they vanished in the base of the hill. Far behind them in corrugate terrain dimpled with impact craters many and wide orange sulfur frames glinting in the intense sunlight held their positions impetuously like a herd of bridled bulls or a delayed cavalry charge.
Between those glowing vehicles he could just make out tiny silhouettes darting to and fro no doubt preparing for some crazed blow against them. He set the binoculars down and shared a worried glance with Cain and then they were donning all equipment necessary for the conduction of war.
Mad voices started echoing down the halls meant for whoever might hear them. A runner ran past and before he could disappear Kylie grabbed his sleeve and related the sulfur fleet waiting in the distance. The runner made note of it and continued on.
He rushed back to the opening to see if they’d made any move but they were still there. He turned to say something to Cain and just then hot blue bolts stitched the earth right in front of the slit filling the whole bunker with dust. They leapt back crawled on their bellies out of the bunker. They were getting back on their feet just outside when a missile slammed into the bunker in a deafening roar. Kylie was flung down the tunnel onto his back. He landed hard but he sprung to his feet and staggered through the choking dust to find his friend.
He had to wait until it all settled and when it finally did there was a dull cacophony outside and all he ever found of Cain was a boot with a bloody stump. He walked around it as if it were cursed into the open air where his bunker had been. The roof had either been blown off or collapsed upon itself which he could not tell. He risked a glance outside.
The billowing flight of missiles erupting from some locale in the direction of the creek bed coming to them in a blue streaked barrage. The loosed vehicular charge adding to the dust of the already windy plains. The baleful sun at its peak.
He left for the tunnels joining a group of men there being led by the Lieutenant who shouted for them to hit ground level and hit it fast cause they’re coming. They descended as fast as they could their ranks growing and growing with each blown out bunker they passed. Their entire journey harried by missiles impacts that quaked the hill and he wondered if he’d die in a collapse after all. Buried beneath the weight of the earth. He ran faster till he was neck and neck with the Lieutenant.
They were almost thirty strong when they burst into the vastness of the northern bay entrance to reinforce the men pinned there behind the abandoned Tau vehicles and containers and refuse. The Tau were pouring in around of the sides of a disabled Hammerhead knocked out while hovering through the wide maw of the thick slab doors that the aliens had somehow opened coming to reinforce those who’d already taken up positions inside.
Strong men of their own took cover behind a trolley on the far left flank and he between them. From their vantage point they could see the entrance clear and the Firewarriors hurrying through. They stood and fired into their open ranks and in a heartbeat a dozen of them were dead or injured and crawling to safety while holding cauterized wounds in their legs and bellies and necks. Return fire plastered back at them from behind a series of containers and each screaming bolt leaving a molten core where it struck. Pieces of molten trolley were flung out towards them as they whittled down their cover. They let out a sporadic volley aimed blindly and broke out from that melting cart’s diminishing cover. Two of the men bigger than he were shot as they ran and the impacts set alight their uniforms and bled dry their flesh. They fell screaming. A bolt narrowly missed him as he slid behind a blue ribbed container and groaned as he patted at the seared patch on his thigh. He pulled at the uniform until the singed threads slid out of the wound.
He laid against the container a moment catching his breath and then he switched his las rifle to max and he peaked out of cover and sighted in on a pair of Tau holed up behind a rolling tool cabinet. He fired and it punched through the plastic drawers and he saw a bloody armored leg tumble away over itself. He was about to fire on the other when he stood suddenly and then crumpled by a stray round not his own.
Then he heard a terrifying scream echo a thousand times through the bay and he dropped his rifle and pressed his hands against his ears to shut it out but it would not fade. Felt like his mind was being jabbed by a thousand needles. In his agony he managed to look up and he saw a half dozen of those elegant red haired death dealers hacking a wicked path through the Tau’s ranks. They too were affected by whatever witchery they’d enacted and those that could fled and of them their numbers were cut down too by stray bullets coming from nowhere. He looked up into the rafters and saw jade hooded snipers looking through the scopes of long rifles. Despite the pain he laughed and it helped to ease the pain.
When the last of the Firewarriors were dead the Eldar sprinted outside and Lieutenant Polit rallied them and they followed across the bay now slick with blood pooled from removed limbs and bisected corpses.
Outside it was broiling. He ran against a searing devil wind and he wondered if this was how it felt to be ore when the stoves blew their hot blast and the coke burns bright. His lungs burned as if he inhaled furnace gas. His skin tingled and he could see with the heat rolling off the cracked soil like it did on a desert highway.
The Eldar were already engaging the enemy in their strange dances that reminded him of the flight of flies, impossible to intercept unless you knew the system that guided them. There was a pair of concrete bunkers flanking either side the entrance painted in Tau colors and beyond them a short network of trenches lined by sandbags some unfortunate party had dug and filled in the last few days. There were armored figures in them too and too late did they notice their emerging numbers. They went prone and suppressed them with las fire and brave men advanced under fire and heaved grenades into the trench until the warriors were dislodged. They occupied the trench and began clearing them.
The whole network was designed for a northern or western assault and Kylie and another man from Bravo set off for the western lines beneath wooden arches. He glided down the narrow singular path walled in on either side by packed earth and as he came to a rounded corner he inched out to look. A Tau was there nursing a wound to its belly and he shot it through the eye.
The Tau were disengaging by then their elongated vehicles propelled by blue jets raced back across the plains with scattered troops hanging onto them for dear life. A few of the Eldar vehicles pursued them till the end of the plain but they returned there where it became apparent a larger beast waited.
Someone sounded trench clear and the call was echoed all down the lines. Over the dead alien leaning against the wall near spent and pouring sweat he repeated the call.
They rushed the wounded into the infirmary and when that became too crowded they cleared out the Western bay and set up a tent there. They triaged the men sending the more seriously injured to the infirmary where it was cooler and the instruments needed were ready and available and those with minor wounds to the bay where uninjured or walking wounded volunteers attended them. He was sitting on a foldout stretcher smearing the alien blood on the floor with his boot musing about feet with missing owners when Jacob strolled up with a smile that seemed out of place amongst the agonized patients around him. He set down on the empty stretcher beside him.
“So let me see it.”
Kylie undid his trousers and slid them gently down his legs. Jacob stooped to inspect whilst consulting a medical manual provided by one of the medics. He poked and prodded the wound scientifically eliciting a grunt of pain at each touch. Thermal burn three inches long and two across running horizontally from anterior to posterior. At its worst third degree, a thin leathery strip within the red blistered one. Jacob studied at the pictures in the manual eventually coming up with the same conclusion. He read the captions beneath a snapshot of a bloated and burned leg that looked like the thin strip.
“For third degree burns debridement is used to remove dead tissue. This is done by one of four methods autolytic, enzymatic, mechanical or surgical.” He pauses a moment scratching his chin then he looks up debridement in the glossary and he goes ‘ah’. He looks down at his little lifesaver kit and starts fishing through it for packages bearing words that match what he read. He finds nothing but a scalpel. “Well I don’t know what the rest means but I know surgical.” He unwrapped the packaging and held the scalpel up betwixt thumb and index.
Kylie leveled a finger at him. “You’re not touching me with that fething thing.”
Jacob laughed and set it down and held his hands up fingers splayed.
“So what does it say to do?”
“Well it says you know loose dry dressing, stay hydrated, no creams, and debridement for dead tissue.”
“You’re not debriding gak.”
“It says you gotta do it for third degree burns and you know it says it feels much better afterwards.”
“I don’t give a feth if it says I can stick my dick in Leslie Parks afterwards you still ain’t doin it.”
Jacob started laughing harder than before.
“You said there were other methods what are they?”
“I don’t know what they mean.”
“Well you didn’t know what debridement meant so look em up.”
Jacob grinned and started flipping through the pages. “Just taking all the fun out of it.”
“Yeah wait till you get burned I’ll pour salt on the damn thing.”
“OK autolytic means your body doin it itself and I don’t understand the enzymatic thing and mechanical that’s like a spray or something.”
“Well why don’t you see if they have some of that spray before you decide to cut me up and feed me to the pour eh?”
Jacob got up and then he strolled to a desk where a medic was giving out his profession’s advice. He waited in line until he got a chance to speak with him. When it was his turn he asked and the medic pointed him towards one of the cots. He went there where another volunteer was dressing a man with a burn on his chest. From him he took a spray can and returned.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a spray.”
“What’s it do?”
“It sprays.”
“Smartass.”
“Here why don’t you lie down and we’ll get this over with.”
Kylie grunted and laid carefully on his back. He sighed resigned to it all. Jacob switched cots so that he could address the proper leg.
“You ready?”
“No.”
“Alright good.”
Jacob shook the can and sprayed it over his wound and he nearly seized the pain was so great. He clenched the side rods in a white knuckle grip and his teeth set against each other and he sucked his breath through them. When it was done Jacob waved his hand over the wound like he was spreading smoke he said something but he didn’t catch it. Jacob repeated what he said but this time he just ignored him. He laid there regaining his breath quietly fuming. Jacob continued his ministrations placing a sterile dressing against the wound and taping two ends with medical tape and leaving the other two sides open so the air could circulate.
When he was done he patted his shoulder and told him to change the dressing every five hours. He got up to go and he still had that warm smile on his face so before he could escape Kylie grabbed his sleeve and told him Cain was dead.
And the smile vanished.
He was dreaming of her perfect tight pussy and his fingers probing its wet warmth during a midnight tryst on the dark metal walkway lined with mirrors affording a view of a pale moon with faked innocence. Her name was Evelyn Sapph and she moaned loudly and the moan echoed down the last bit of brick that remained in the shaft and he focused on its hollowness for lack of interest in the woman and her witch.
At morning he laid beneath a wool blanket damp from their earlier exertions appreciating the glow rising behind the clouds of soot and ash. Mesquite bleeding into droplets saturated with industrial refuse. He listened to the softness of her breath, the slow rise and fall repeated in all things past and present. A breath. A breath.
Then she joined him on the hill’s dusty slope and he released his cock and regarded her with something between annoyance and love.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again.”
“Can anyone ever be sure?”
“I suppose not.”
She came and sat beside him throwing an arm around his shoulders. For a while they watched the sunset, a haze of colors that seemed to melt into another and infect the horizon, lending itself to barren land as if a promise. Come to me, it said, I will be your mother and you will love me once more.
She said, “The flare has subsided. It will hinder us no more.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Oh?”
“I was thinking.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Maybe, but I was.”
She allowed a grin that he could not decipher and then she hugged him closer and planted a kiss against his cheek. “What were you thinking?”
He looked up at the dimming sky where stars were beginning to appear and a coolness descended which some buried part of him resented. He wished for the flames, for the unbearable heat engulfing him the way it had so many years ago.
“I was thinking of a girl in knew.”
“It would explain the…enlargement in your pants.”
“Give it a while it’ll go down.”
She giggles like a school child. “It’d not surprise me.”
“I slept with her once. Just once and I didn’t know her name till morning. I met her at a bar and she took me out to where she worked in an old pickup. She had a key to unlock the gates and we went up to where the walkway overlooked the furnace. She laid down a blanket on the path and well we…did it. She was something amazing. But I still hated her. In the morning I got up before she did and I left her lying there. I stole her keys and I took her clothes too and threw them in the furnace. Then I got in her truck and drove off.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She had a boyfriend.”
She laughed and kissed him again. “I’m taking you with me.”
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