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A Beautiful Gesture
Now in my first year of the Guard I campaigned on a jungle world called Raiford and we were putting down a band of rebels that’d for about two years been terrorizing the local imperial populace. They’d go and maraud around the city limits killing people randomly and dragging them off into the jungle and send them back running to the outskirts without a hint of skin on them. First day earth side I saw six of their victims hung up by their ankles and with the blood dripping off their balded domes into these old rusty mop buckets. They were up in the middle of this big park and the whole battalion was there and I remember this captain telling everyone not to touch the bodies cause the rebels would sometimes when they brought em back let em fester in these piles of diseased dead and that was a whole other sight I’d as soon as not talk about. But they had these guys strung up and I remember the Major shouting out for everyone to move out. So me and my fire team struck up and started going and about two teams over those guys were walking right by the bodies and all their eyes were glued on those skinless souls and just as they passed beside them those bodies everyone just exploded.
There was pieces everywhere. And the troopers who’d been walking by at that moment had been showered in that burning viscera and some of them had caught shrapnel and I remember, it was the first time Ida laid eyes on him, that boy was standing and trembling and frozen as a statue his gun on the ground and just covered in gore and it drippin off him like some sick kind of rain.
On the twentieth day they came upon the plain. They looked like crude stencilings etched into motion across the grassless expanse and the Tau in ones and twos came to the town’s ruined limits and watched them approach in a horror mute and expressionless.
The men of Golf Co marched on the town resembling less the Guard from which they hailed and more like a band of feral nomads and were adorned with dress and trophy and a layer of dust that supported such an accusation. When the Co had come near full upon the town there was assembled an alien crowd expectant all huddled around a hab unit whose spherical dome had collapsed and lay upon a pile of rubble. An adjutant of Lieutenant Prolit departed along with the same said officer from the main body of the Co and progressed upon the aliens who upon seeing those sanguine vanguards turned amongst themselves and by some communion selected one from their numbers and sent him forth.
The two parties met each other at a wooden cattle fence that ran only ten feet and was in either direction thereof burned or cratered into the ground. They stood removed one from the other and the Tau studied the two aliens and though he held himself above petty superstitions he could not shake the feeling that these strange creatures materialized on the plain had been plucked from some fable of antiquity and that they would kill him and everything around him.
Lieutenant Prolit looked up into the sky regarding the sun which had so many months ago alighted the sky and the ground and the things which flew in the air and treaded the earth. Behind him the Co had come to a halt just shy of him and they stood like defiled statues given warrant to seek revenge on whatever party had offended them.
After a while he looked at the emissary.
Do you speak Gothic.
I do.
You know by now we don’t take prisoners.
I have heard.
Prolit sighed. He looked past the emissary to the ruined town. Near every building was reduced to its foundations and the metal framework of structures stood above everything else like skeletons as if the place were some destined graveyard where the old went to die.
Food and quarter and your town will be spared. After we leave, well it’s up to whoever comes next.
The emissary glanced back at the crowd of survivors. He wished to say nothing which might break this fragile covenant in the making of. He looked back at the officer a face of worry more so than when he had turned.
We barely have any food here. He said.
Prolit nodded his head and rubbed with a gloved hand the stubble on his face.
How many people used to live in the town.
I don’t know, maybe six hundred.
And how many of you are left.
The emissary looked upon his people once more before answering as if he’d need to calculate who was present at the gathering and who was still wondering the streets.
A hundred, maybe more.
So that means you’ve about five hundred larders not being used by anybody.
Most of the families here died during the artillery bombardment. Their homes fell on them, everything is buried.
You can’t dig them up.
It’s sacrosanct.
What is.
To rob the dead.
Polit stepped forward and rested his hands on the fence. He thought to say something than thought better of it. He ran his tongue along his chapped lips. He pulled his sidearm and pointed it at the Emissaries head.
Will you not do it.
The emissary stuttered an answer back.
Will you not.
After a few seconds more of bumbling words the emissary conceded that he would and he returned to his people with his head held in shame and relayed to them the requirements of their continued survival. There was some dissension but it was short-lived and soon they would begin ravaging the streets and the homes of the dead.
When the crowd began to disperse Prolit called back the emissary.
Are they any defectors here.
Who.
Any humans, any Gua’va.
A single family but they’re not soldiers.
Alright.
Prolit turned back to address the Co.
Corporal Kylie.
Lester Kylie looked up. Yes.
After the town is clear I want you to investigate this.
Kylie didn’t answer. He just nodded his head and turned to the men of his command. They were six and covered in blood and toting their weapons idly as if the negotiations before them were of no concern. They were bedecked with a host of grisly souvenirs, ears, scalps, bones, tongues, fingers, teeth, whole hands and heads that hung from belts or tied into the frayed hems of their sweat stained uniforms or needled above their breast pockets like gruesome awards and the teeth was stringed in braids or necklaces and amputated limbs were stored in their rucksacks and protruding from the ends and there was so much upon these few souls that they could have laid down two anatomies complete in every perception. He eyed a young Private by the name of Law. The boy was not yet twenty and already his face was marred by a piece of shrapnel that’d cut a fleshy ravine from the point of his chin up to his forehead. Law spat upon the ground and cradled his rifle in the crook of his elbow and looked on at the crowds that within the day he would be murdering for a reason none but that he could.
The negotiations now at an end Prolit resumed the Co’s march and they advanced into the town. The crowd that had gathered they searched and then herded along down the streets where they would grab any vagrants and add them to the shuffling captives. The town was not large and it did not take long to secure the area. When they were done Prolit took the emissary and assigned him to Lester’s squad. With this auxiliary and his directions they navigated through the cobblestone streets littered with shards of glass winking in the sunlight and shattered yellow brick and the broken bodies of the dead everywhere wrapped in something like muslin or composed in a measure of dignity as a man would do for another. They took half an hour reaching the traitors home and when they did Kylie pushed the emissary to the side and motioned at a gaunt man by the name of Hayes and ordered him up the splintered porch steps. He came up alongside the man and they stacked on the door. He tried the knob finding it unlocked and then he looked back at Hayes who’d produced a grenade without its pin. Kylie turned to his men. They’d all taken up positions and had sighted in on the windows of the house and the streets adjacent. Satisfied he pushed the door open slightly and was handed in that same moment the grenade which he then tossed into the building. He shut the door and backed from it. A moment passed and then the door was blown from its hinges into the street.
The two men rushed through the doorway with their weapons up. They were not there for prisoners. They didn’t take Gue’va prisoners. What greeted them when they entered the foyer was a great red stain on the floor. Bits of bone were embedded in the walls and splashes of red and chunks of smoking flesh and farther back into the kitchen a teenage boy lay in shock clutching an oblong knee that was connected by a few strands of tendon and muscle only. The boy felt no pain neither from the wound nor the bullet which ended his life. The two killers went from room to room executing any they came across and when they were done the tally was six souls given the Emperor’s mercy. When they were finished with their work Kylie had the bodies dragged out into the street and stripped and displayed as a warning.
Now there was one other boy of that family who’d two days earlier left the township and would a week from that great murdering die of thirst in a desert and the vermin that scuttled across the sandy floors would burrow into his corpse and eat him from the inside out for days before a pack of wild dogs would come and divide him up amongst themselves.
That night they feasted at the town hall on foods scrounged up by the townsfolk. Under supervision they’d also prepared a great deal of the food and when Kylie came into the hall he saw arrayed upon banquet tables a grand buffet. There was roasted pork and cold cuts and spaghettis and the Tau’s take on lasagna and steaks of Grox meat and fruits native to the land and an assortment of sweets that defied numbering. The townsfolk, all of them, were made to sit on the vast floor of the hall and they watched with a morbid fascination as the Co gorged themselves on the delicacies presented. No one bothered guarding them, they’d no weapons and the cast from which they were derived did not lend itself to war and the men of the Co knew it. Whatever efforts they might have expended towards resistance would have been futile and resulted in another great culling of their ranks the likes of which they could not bear to see again.
Kylie dismissed his squad and went to the buffet. He took up a plate and entered a long line of shuffling troopers and took in turn what he wanted. When his plate was full he left the line and went to a dim corner where Jacob Miller was sat on a wooden crate. There were a stack more of the things and he took one down and set upon it. They ate in silence watching as they did the cloistered aliens and the raucous bandits of the Co who shouted and swayed drunkenly about and wondered over to the aliens and spat upon them and kicked them and chorused old hymns repurposed with vulgar lyrics and hurling insults at one another and breaking into bloody fist fights with rival platoons and looking like their primate ancestors set against one another at a watering hole.
As he watched he felt the necklaced rune that hung around his neck. A gift, a way to find him, she said.
So did you find the guy. Asked Jacob.
Yeah we did.
Who was he.
I don’t know.
Anyone with him.
Five others.
That so.
It is.
Well gak good riddance.
Yeah.
Jacob peeked down at him.
Yeah.
What.
Sound like you’re sorry.
Well I ain’t. Kylie paused. Not too much I ain’t.
Shouldn’t feel bad for ‘em.
I don’t, not much anyways.
Just then there erupted another fight that spilled over into the seated aliens who scrambled away from the brawlers like vermin beset by hawks in an open plain. The two men they were one from Kylie’s squad and another from third. Kylie set his plate down and rose and without a word rushed over to his man and slugged the brute from third squad knocking him out cold and hauled his trooper away.
fething quit it Heppner. He said to the thrashing boy who struggled yet towards his unconscious foe. When the boy refused to stop he swung him around in his arms and slammed him into the ground.
Hey dumb feth. You want to disobey an order from a Corporal of the Guard. Huh.
He held the boy down one hand pressed upon his head and the other holding his arm across his back. The boy didn’t answer he just groaned.
I asked you a question mother fether.
No Corporal.
What.
No Corporal.
That’s what I fething thought.
He released the boy who immediately curled up and cradled his arm.
Get up Heppner.
The trooper stood.
The two men regarded each other each breathing heavy and sweating.
What’s the problem here.
Heppner glanced at his opponent who lay on his back not moving.
Nothing corporal.
Is that so.
It is.
Then what was that.
Nothing Corporal.
He was about to go on but out of the corner of his eye he saw the Commissar approach from out of the crowd. He stopped barely a foot from Kylie and him addressed.
Lester. Said the Commissar. What’s going on.
Kylie looked at his trooper who was now wearing a look of pure dread then back at the Commissar. He shook his head.
Nothing sir.
Then what was it I just saw.
Just a practice fight. He said then added, to exemplify to the aliens our physical capabilities. Isn’t that right trooper.
Heppner nodded his head quickly. Yes sir that’s correct.
If that was so why did you intervene.
He looked at the scarred face of the Commissar wizened with age. He was going to speak further but a fight, with separate origins completely removed from their own, erupted behind them and the three men turned to see a trio of fighters carry themselves over the tables spilling the platters of food on the ground. Kylie looked at the Commissar as if to imply that the man should go and deal with this new brawl but the Commissar did not move.
Your answer Corporal.
It looked like he might have needed the help.
I see. So through neglect you’ve allowed your men to become physically weak. That’s a liability to the rest of the Co. The Commissar paused to lick his lips. I’ll allow this revelation a light punishment. For the duration of our occupation you and your men will, under my or Commissar Jung’s supervision, perform three hours of physical training starting tomorrow morning.
At that the Commissar departed to deal with the new fight which was growing larger by the moment. The men parted before him creating a path through which he walked unhindered. Kylie turned to his trooper. He stood looking at the ground and then he looked at the boy. The boy looked as if he were to say something then he hooked a fist into his temple and he crumpled to the floor.
That night he would saunter up to the second floor of the hall and find his way into a bedchambers which his men had commandeered. Its possession was at that time being contested by a dozen men owing loyalty to a plethora of NCO’s none of which had showed nor was it expected for them to. He’d only stepped into the room and seen the melee going on and the bits of etched pottery and books being thrown about that he was sucker punched by an unknown party and was inextricably involved.
In the morning the combatants were strewn about the chamber some upon the massive bed and others on the carpeted floor. He lay on a long wooden vanity whose mirror had been ripped from the dresser and cast against the wall where it lay now. Though it was yet early the room was by no means quiet. Men snored and groaned in their dreams and flailed about or kicked at the floor and scratched themselves involuntarily and nursing cuts and bruises and it was none of this that woke him. It was a kick to the ribs that. He looked up through groggy bloodshot eyes and saw the Commissar. His face had been reconstructed though his jaw still was askew and mechanical and he talked with a protracted draw.
Wake up.
feth off.
The Commissar grabbed him by the collar and hauled him onto his feet where they stood each one studying the other.
How’s that jaw feeling.
The Commissar turned scarlet.
The Senior Commissar has instructed that you and your squad be assigned to three hours of physical training for each day in garrison.
I don’t think so.
You’re saying he didn’t order you to this.
I’m saying I’m not doing it. Neither are my guys.
I could have you executed and this time there’d be cause.
Not that there wasn’t last time.
The Commissar stepped back and reached down to his holster and unbuttoned the strap.
Lester you have one chance.
Who the feth do you think you are boy, giving me chances.
I think I’m about to shoot you from disobeying orders.
I’m not disobeying anyone’s orders.
Is that so.
It is. Prolit done already said I’m not, nor anyone else, to go out on these dumb ass exercises.
He said that. When did he say that.
Last night.
The machine jawed man, his head twitched, and then he took Kylie by the shoulder and ushered him out of the chambers onto the second story deck which overlooked the main hall. Here were the men of the Co asleep in every position in every nook and cranny of the place. Kylie looked over the balustrade to see that the buffet tables had been overturned and the food and drink spilled onto the wooden floor. The Tau slept also on the floor like a commune of clothed apes. A few of them were dead having fallen to the predations of some drunk or another and the bodies were left in puddles of blood that those few troopers who were guarding them tip toed around in their patrolling. One of them was Prolit who was sat on a wooden stool before an appropriated desk transported there from some other place, where who knew. His rifle was disassembled and he was busy cleaning the operating rod handle with a white carbon stained cloth. The two of them walked down the length of the walkway and down the stairs stepping over the few troopers who’d made the staircase their bed and crossed the great floor their movements being studied by a dozen pairs of alien eyes. They came before the desk.
Prolit smiled. What’s he done this time.
Did you countermand the Senior Commissar’s orders.
What.
Did you rescind the Senior Commissar’s orders.
The Lieutenant had not, nor was he aware of any orders issued but he nodded his head vaguely and turned his eyes towards Kylies exhausted face as if asking for an explanation.
Remind me again Corporal what exactly it was.
Stupid gak.
Did anyone die.
Not to my knowledge.
Anyone get shot.
I couldn’t say one way or the other.
Prolit let out a weary laugh.
Lester get your ass out of here. He turned to Jung and his face suddenly became serious. Listen ain’t no cause for bringing this man up, never mind your two’s history. I don’t want ye wasting my time, anyone’s time, if you’ve got a grudge I’d suggest you lose it and that quick. What’s done is done. Ain’t no changing it. He paused and fitted the shining rod into the guide. If you really want to make yourself useful round up all the NCO’s and bring em here. He glanced at his watch. Get em here by 09:00, gives ye twenty minutes. Now go. Both of you dismissed.
Kylie turned to go catching the wicked glare of the Commissar as he awayed on his hunt. He lingered about the hall sampling some of the night old dishes and finding them still better than the rations he’d been eating for the last forever. After he was full he wondered out of the hall into a burgeoning dawn unfettered at all by any cloud. He looked westwards towards the aggregating sun whose crest was above the horizon and rising steadily. The thin veins of it bled out into the sky, carmine at first then arsenic and when the sun was revealed fully the heavens were like a Caesious ocean spilling across the void. Twenty minutes or near to it had by that time passed and he went back into the hall. Most of the NCO’s were there and both the Commissars who eyed him maliciously. He came and stood by Sergeant Bates. They nodded to each other and turned their attentions to the Lieutenant’s briefing.
The officer from somewhere had produced a map of the area and he’d set the holographic display upon the desk beside the fully assembled weapon. Little icons of red and green and blue dotted the map which was topographical in nature. He studied the map. Where they were was a township called Quinta situated in the high mountain country. It was many hundreds of miles removed from the main Imperial force and what communications they had with them was by satellite VOX only. There was some soft chatter among the men but it ceased when Prolit held up his hands and called for quiet.
He gestured at the map.
People I’ve good news. Captain Kinzy radioed in at 03:22 this morning to say that he and the rest of the CO will be joining us here shortly. Furthermore he’s proud to announce that we are no longer a rifle company but now a fully mechanized force. Seems someone finally listened to the good Captain’s petitions. He will be arriving, along with our supplies and replacements from Echo, with seven armored Chimeras and a half dozen 18 tons, so no more fething humping.
There was a roar of approval and a few men with hidden drinks toasted to the captain and it was a few moments before Prolit could get the men calmed down.
Now for the bad news. As it turns out there’s no rest for the wicked. Captain Kinzy is coming to pick us up and then we are detailing down along the central highway. We’re being tasked with taking a fortified town just south of the Mai’ese River three hundred miles from Imperial lines. We will be isolated more than we ever have but it’s nothing new. We will have air support from the base in Rezalda. So there’s at least that. And that’s it. Squad leaders get with your men and have em up and ready because we will be out of this town in the next two hours.
One of the guardsmen, a Sergeant by the name of Hag piped up.
What about the aliens.
Prolit looked past the brute at the Tau. They were most of them sitting up their ears perked to hear their conversation.
We had a deal with them, they kept their part, we’ll keep ours.
We should slaughter them all. It was the senior commissar who’d spoken.
Deals a deal.
A true man of the Emperor does not deal with Xenos.
Well you’re gonna have to take that up with him. Right now I’m calling the shots, not you. When the Captain gets here he’ll be calling the shots and it still won’t be you.
The Captain arrived earlier than expected. The vehicles parked in the street alongside the hall and the men loaded themselves and their gear and their plunder aboard. They were less than an hour getting out of the town leaving the Tau to their ruined home and never seeing them again.
The Co caravanned out along the desert plain back the way they’d come for a few hours towards imperial lines which they passed through. They stopped briefly to resupply and for the Captain to reconfirm his orders. As they waited the Co disembarked and loitered about the motor pool drawing appalled gazes from passerbyers and even those few mechanics accustomed to seeing the mechanical obscenities of the Tech Priests gawked at their primal decoration and at the bloody stench that rose off of them. By the time the Captain returned every man on base was giving those tribe like savages a wide berth as if they were carriers of plague and remarking vainly and in awe upon the vicissitude of man and its immensity and the allowances made thereof and the disparity between civilizations one against the other. The Captain called for the Co to embark and it was so and before long they were cruising along the highway in convoy with the sun raging above with all the menace of a tumor alight.
The country they traversed was pockmarked and abraded and the heat rolled from the asphalt and the savannah surrounding like oceanic waves made translucent and the flat panned stones of that broiling world, prone on the ground everywhere, if you put your hand to them it would cook the flesh from the bone. Kylie looked out over the side of the Chimera gripping with one hand a stanchion. To the west the hourglass figures of mesas rose up and at their base sprouted the only life he could see. His squad was mute as was most of the platoon and he paid little attention to them as they ate their meals or caught short naps. One of the men was busy sharpening his knife with a grindstone and as he worked he asked what was he looking at.
Kylie looked. The man’s name was Job and he was a grenadier sired by a mine pit. He’d been a part of his squad since the beginning and he did not begrudge the eight dead who had previously filled out the squad.
What’d you say.
I said what ye looking at.
He squinted out into the dead land of stone.
I don’t know. He said. Hell maybe.
He for hours stood being jolted about. At length there materialized on that thin line the thinner lines of trenches that grew and he surmised that to the defenders they too appeared out of the horizon the way the horded enders of empires emerged and invoked upon those alien souls that same universal that conjoined one species to the other, and that fear.
When the company spotted the town the engines spread out in a line and rode upon the aliens like an apocryphal band of riders howling and mewling and striking upon their chests their rifles like clubs and the Tau gazed upon them and did not believe. Whatsoever they did come to terms with it was not in time and the Co opened fire with las, bolter, jacket, and stub and the sandbagged trench lines picketing the town exploded in plumes of dust and the tiny specks that were the defenders disappeared behind them whether dead or suppressed who at that moment could rightfully know. The Chimeras advance firing yet a fuselage fearsome and ungodly and when they reached the trenches they came to an abrupt halt and the Co disembarked. The troopers egressed with a speed rarely met with by their counterparts and rounded the sides of the personnel carriers and entered the trench.
He jumped in and landed upon the broken armored bodies of the fallen Tau. They were dead, the ones he kneeled upon, as were those around him and he looked about the trench to find it filled to the brim with bodies though the barrage had lasted only a few minutes. The trench was flooded with blood such that the narrow passage had turned muddy with it. The corpses lay in every attitude and they were some with massive holes through their chests and others without limbs or heads and others yet alive clutching mortal wounds spurting great jets of blood and crying out in their alien tongue for mothers or gods or whatever they might have called for or crawling aimlessly and dazed through the trench as if they might find some way out of it and holding in their gloved hands great mounds of dripping viscera and trying desperately to force them back into their bodies and a few were yet alive and upon seeing them he gunned them down, all that he saw without mercy. Other men entered the trench feet ready to kill and slipping, the majority of them, on the blood tracked corpses of wounded and dead alike. When he tried to stand the mud sucked at his boots and had it not been for some anonymous hand helping him he might have remained in the trench. The other troopers were now finishing off the wounded and taking up positions to support a further advance on the town when from somewhere there came a call to board again and they were gone. The men embarked once more and when the last of them were aboard the drivers gunned the engines and went hurtling towards the town.
And it was this town held in the grips of utter chaos whose streets were hastily blockaded with the furnishings of those pueblo like homes and where civilians scrambled about with mindless abandon seeking some place to flee to and having no place to do it and where the warriors took their quarter in the homes of their charges manning the windows and doorways and patios and too the promenades of the square and the square itself and they leveled their weaponry, those fluted barrels glinting in the sunlight and humming and channeling the hot plasma at the barbarians bearing down upon them and called over every frequency for reinforcements and looking at each other and then at the impetuous horde and knowing that they were all going to die.
A half mile from the town and the Co opened fire in time to meet their opponents own volley. Bolts of plasma seared the air around them and heated the plated armor of the vehicles till they glowed white and once a bolt penetrated the front cab and took the leg off the gunner who fell in a shower of sizzling blood patting the flaming legs of his trousers. They reached the outskirts a moment later and the armored Co paused long enough for the men to scramble out. Before the Chimera had even come to a halt Kylie had released the rear hatch and ushered his men out of the vehicle. He exited a moment after and together they rushed forwards and occupied an irrigation ditch with the rest of the platoon not far behind. They threw themselves against the opposing embankment and he crawled up its short slope so that he could peer over the yellow earthen crest at the town proper. What lay directly ahead was an empty street and bordering it was the painted brick wall of a villa and then the villa itself. The town’s main street was off to their right two blocks down and thick teeth of concrete were barring the Chimeras from moving up it. There was too a withering fire pouring out of the junction at third platoon and he could see them all stacked up against the side of an apartment complex either side of the road and one of the Chimeras had lost a tread and was trying to reverse out of the street.
He rose up to get a better view of the situation and just as he did a bolt of blue impacted not a foot in front of him and he scatted back down. As he did a half-dozen warnings rang out as men rose for short instants to fire randomly and point out reckonings of the sniper’s location. A second later though he inched up again in time to see a muzzle flash coming from the villa’s belfry. Sagitta was the AT gunner in his squad and he turned to the pale wiry marauder and pointed out the sniper in the tower. The guardsman yelled some acknowledgement and came to his knees and unslung the cumbersome weapon. He loaded a HE rocket from a pouch of such munitions and when he was done he hefted the thing onto his shoulder and peered down the sights. A smile grew on his face.
Backblast clear! Shouted Kylie.
Law and Heppner were either side of the gunner and they scooted quickly away and shouted, clear. A moment later the rocket was shrieking through the air and a moment after that the belfry exploded in a shower of bricks and dust and began to topple into the villa’s roof. Kylie didn’t waste a moment. He grabbed the man to his right whose name was Solomon Way and with the man in tow he sprinted across the street and slammed into the wall. He called for his squad to follow and they did and then too the platoon upon seeing his advance. When the platoon was in cover Bates ran over to him.
Kylie take your squad and 2nd and clear the villa I’m gonna take the rest of the platoon on their left flank. The sergeant spoke fast and before he’d even finished the order he was already trailing away. I’ll link up with you on the other side of the villa.
Kylie looked about cursing. His squad was huddled up against the wall but he didn’t know anyone in 2nd save Jacob and he looked for the man and saw him. When he did he called his friend over and explained their mission.
Alright there Corporal Lester L. Kylie whaddya wanna do.
Over the wall.
Alright over the wall.
Jacob turned and relayed the order though he was in charge of nothing and a few seconds later the troopers were peeking over the wall and then with the help of their fellows vaulting over it. He was one of the first to go and he landed hard in a courtyard and darted into the first cover he could find which was an old fashioned rope well. He scanned his surroundings for enemies seeing that it was empty and then he turned to the figures dropping down at the wall and began dispensing them about the yard. The courtyard was L shaped and ahead and to the right the gated entrance was installed in the walls and off to the left a row of granite columns separated the yard from a wide promenade that ran along a balustraded porch that spanned the length of the villa and where a series of glass doors allowed entrance into the villa. The well itself was situated off in a corner of the yard beside a shed two troopers were taking their cover in. They were under no fire though they could hear the sounds of war all about them. He could see plumes of black smoke rising up over the buildings and he could hear screams sounding out seemingly from every direction.
When the courtyard was cleared he gestured at the two men beside the shed and issued them to one of the glass doors of which there were four. He left the cover of the well and ran across the yard selecting randomly from the men until he had two rushing towards each door. These eight souls rushed through the columns and mounted the patio and they did not even wait to stack on the doors they just breached the doors with vicious kicks or by barreling into them with muscled shoulders. Amongst a clattering of broken glass he burst into the atrium taking the door with him. He swung his rifle out searching for targets but there was no one in the hall saving for the breachers and he picked himself up and called for the rest of the squads to rally inside. When both squads had arrived he ordered 2nd to clear the first floor and then led his own men upstairs via a wide staircase made of carved stone overlooked by a walkway and which at the first landing branched into two separate cases. He split the squad up taking Law and Sagitta right. When they reached the top of the stairs he peered over the railing into the western wings main hall. The corridor was empty and he turned to order his men up into the hall and when he looked back there were now two of those yellow armored soldiers. He swore involuntarily and flinched and fired on full auto striking both of the aliens in quick succession and they crumpled silently over each other.
Ah feth. feth. Just feth.
He reordered his men up this time not bothering to look at them and together they went down the hall. Here there was no cover and they moved swift stepping over the smoking bodies until they were at the first door. In a practiced motion the three of them hugged the wall and he opened the door slightly and threw a grenade in. The blast shuddered the walls and then they rushed inside to find it empty. They then moved on to the door next and here when they stacked a burst of fire came through the wall killing Law instantly with a round that took his jaw off and splattered blood against the wall and the floor and their faces. They opened up on the wall both of them and they didn’t stop firing for almost a full ten seconds. When they finally stopped and checked the room they found a single Tau lying in pieces on the floor.
Just then Job came into the hall shouting friendlies, friendlies. The rest of the squad was with him.
East wings secure. He reported.
Alright.
Here.
Kylie looked down the hall. Two more rooms.
Ok.
Law’s dead.
Dead as they come.
Those rooms were empty. He sent Job down to the first floor to find out the situation and the situation was good. Six enemy dead, two friendly KIAs including Law. A window on the far side of the room offered a view of the street below and he peered out of it and saw Bates and the rest of the platoon. They were where Bates said they would be and he punched out the window with the stock of his rifle and called out to him.
Sergeant.
Bates looked up.
Sergeant.
Corporal.
We’re good up here. He gave a thumbs up.
Bates nodded and gestured for him to regroup.
A few minutes later they were out of the villa and in the street again. The platoon was in cover behind an overturned bus and Bates was knelt at the street corner taking council with another Corporal. He ran up and crouched beside them.
Bates regarded him.
Well nice to see you in one piece there Lester.
It’s good to be in one piece.
The sergeant smiled. Ain’t it though. Alright listen third and fourth platoon took a bit of a hammering on the main street but it’s ours. So while they consolidate us and first are gonna make the next push into the town square.
Where is first.
Block over towards the main street. Now these hoofed feths are dug in like goddamn ticks over there so we’re gonna do some quick recon and then we’re calling in the airstrike.
That sounds good.
It is good.
What about the Chimeras.
Bates leaned out of cover and pointed down the street. There were a pair of Chimeras idling there.
When we move up so will they. Alright.
Alright.
They turned to go.
Hey Lester.
Yeah.
Relax. You’re doing good. Stay safe.
For the better part of that day the platoons were fighting up the streets into the square of the town. They lost many a man by evening when they reached that cobblestoned plaza and they were reduced to almost quarter strength and they were drunk with blood and half-mad. No sooner had they reached the edge of the square that some soul called down upon the enemy the airstrike and they huddled in their holes and trenches and appropriated homes and screamed obscenities of love as the aircraft streamed overhead like metallic dragons from those old tales where the villages burned and the people were filled with horror and the knights never coming. The airstrike left a crater almost a hundred meters across in the plaza, swallowing up tree, home, trench and defender alike and flattening the houses and brining up great slabs of cobblestones the mortar still holding them together like tectonic plates upheaved out of the earth. Those closest to the blast had been vaporized or dragged along on the ground by the cyclonic swell thus created and they could see the tiny swirls of dust erupt and die and there were those Tau whose helmets had been wrenched off, head and all, and others whose lungs had been sucked out of their mouths and through their noses and hung like bulbous sacks against their chests and in the moment just after there rained a cloud of dust and fragments of rock like rhyolite from a pelean eruption and brick and pieces of the defenders, falling in wet dirt some still spraying blood in air and others so clotted up with soil that not a drop escaped.
What remained of the Co strode up like dusted bloody hounds and crossed the plaza and the crater and went to the edge of town killing everything that resisted and doubling back and putting to the sword every soul not bearing an arm, coming into their homes and butchering them like farm animals, hacking them to pieces with their bayonets and gutting them and hanging the viscera from window sills or lamp posts or piling them on street corners and hanging the disemboweled bodies from the trees and setting the trees alight and stringing them out on the streets and skinning and scalping and holding the great mends of flesh up like merchants offering wares and raping the women and the men alike all howling and barking like dogs and taking up the children and fitting them in the tracks of the Chimeras and gunning the engines until the organs and the blood poured forth from their mouths like sanguine portents from some strange nether and everywhere the screams rose and rose like a hellish choir and the predatory beasts, packs of them, all vicious and mangy and ribbed and taut of skin looked down from the barren ridges into the slaughter and in ones and twos started loping away and not towards the town but in the desert for they’d not venture the streets though they were starving.
The men went about the town and if there had been a man to stop them it was the Captain and he was dead and he stood over his blanketed form and the pool of blood leaking from under it. Everywhere men were running about, the sane ones making for the Chimeras recoiling from the massacre and those who’d succumbed were about killing everything that crossed their path. He was with Sagitta who was the only man alive in his squad and the two of them went from the corpse of the Captain into a home and appeared a few minutes later carrying some shrieking girl and they took her to the town well and dropped her in and listened to the screams echoing up out of that black pit and listening for the splash and never hearing it just the frantic wailing growing fainter and fainter until there was no sound at all.
By morning there were only twenty three men left in the town and they were slathered in blood and such that it looked as if they sweated it. They were coming down an alleyway where had been piled up the bisected bodies of nearly fifty men high as a man’s chest and blocking the alley exit such that they’d to climb over the bodies to get out. When they did they saw first the Junior Commissar and with him was Jacob.
He saw the Commissar and he saw that the man was unarmed and his first instinct was to leap forward and wrap his hands around the man’s throat and set to strangling him and he did just so. He beat back the Commissar’s feeble attempts to escape his hold and then he slacked and he let go of the man’s throat and began pummeling the boy’s face in shouting every vulgarity he could think of with great abandon and above him Sagitta was yelling encouragements and Jacob competing with the man that he should quit. The Commissar’s face was shading violet and by then Jacob had drawn his sidearm and Sagitta had his out and raised it to shoot the man but Jacob was faster and he shot the gunner through the head and the bullet concaved his skull and blew out its back and the man’s pulped thoughts leaked from either hole. Jacob took hold of his collar and yanked him off the Commissar who sprung to his side coughing and crying out like a child to god and to man and to a mother he never knew and wishing loudly to be home and to never come back and he was a wretched sight indeed.
Goddamn Lester, what the hell’re you doin? Said Jacob.
Lester looked at the dead Sagitta and at the sobbing Commissar he’d straddled and then up the barrel into Jacob’s face.
I’m killin this mother fether. He said. I ain’t goin get another chance.
Kylie was crying and the tears of him ran down his face and he was wishing things in common with the Commissar and this was not lost on him.
You can’t kill him.
I can.
You shouldn’t.
I shouldn’t.
No damnit you shouldn’t.
Give me a reason.
Cause it ain’t right.
There ain’t a goddamned thing right in this place.
And ye don’t need to be adding to the wrongness of it.
Kylie didn’t say if he should or shouldn’t. I’m a kill this feth right here and now and with my bare hands and if you want you can shoot me but less I’m dead I’m a kill this man.
Jacob hadn’t taken the gun from his head. Kylie there ain’t no sense in it. What’s that goin change? It ain’t goin stop the war. It won’t change nothing but you. For God’s sake man he’s a human being.
He looked at the Commissar who was now prone on the ground and his fists balled up and crying all the louder, he couldn’t take it, not no more. He looked at Jacob.
I am changed.
Ye don’t wanna change to this.
Hell, I didn’t wanna change at all.
Well ye did and still is and it’s a damn foolish thing to think ye won’t more yet. You goin stop yourself you might as well stop the world and there ain’t but one way to do that and I know ye ain’t the type.
The man needs to die.
That man needs to change, he done already has and he’s goin do some more given time and it ain’t right to take a kid’s life just as he’s learning the ropes. Lester he ain’t but a kid. I remember you when ye was a kid.
I can’t.
Ain’t a damn soul that can but ye know it’s there same as me.
I don’t wanna go back.
Gotta go back.
Why.
Cause life’s about doin gak ye don’t wanna do. And there ain’t no way round it. Not for you. Not for any of us.
I don’t want to die here Jake.
That’s one of them things, Lester. One of them things we all gotta do. You can’t pick the place. You can’t pick the time and you can’t pick the manner. Hell they’re ain’t a damn thing about it goin care about your say. Sooner you accept that sooner ye be headin down that right path toward saving ye damn self.
They walked three pilgrims legioned from the grave out into the desert. They hadn’t spoke a word since the morning and the way he saw it there needn’t been a word told. He was with his head down staring at the asphalt he treaded and hearing the gravel beneath his boots and the vagrant breaths of his two companions that were their only authorship for they could not even lay claim to their shadows so dark it was that night. And it was a dark not unlike the void in which those souls guilty of fratricide are hurled and better so for they were grimed head to toe with blood and it flaked away with every step little coagulated falls like autumnal leaves upon the ground tracking them inexorably to that place in time to that other time, that time of massacre. They followed one of them by some manner the Chimera sipes hoping to come across one of the vehicles and another man. They walked past midnight when it grew cold and the granules of cold desert sand came in on the wind in sprays sticking to their still wet uniforms or catching in their matted and sweaty hair and stinging their bloodshot eyes or passing round them and tumbling over the inconsistencies of the world and the frosty mist afore their worn faces swam up above them as if they were exhaling their beings. And they walked at morning when that pieced sun rose and spilled upon the horizon a palette of hues having no right to be among another and no warrant to look upon them as if the authority of the universe had been undone those few dawning hours in order that some archaic gesture could be displayed heralding back to that first moment when all that could be was laid out and what came to be was chosen as if there was in those muted lines some form of contrition for the horror that they’d endured.
At the noon of that day they saw something like a deer cantering alone along the crest of a hill barren save for the dried growth that twisted out like a sinner on his knees and his hands clasping his face in some noiseless wail and they shot it. When they did it seemed to become frozen and it fell on one side like a statue and then began kicking its hind leg as if running in a dream and who could say that it was not. They took their time coming to the carcass and when they reached it it was still alive and its eyes were wide and fixed upon them and he kneeled in the blood soaked sand and took out a knife and slit the animals throat and with his index and thumb took up a fold of skin on its breast and pierced it with the tip of the blade and passed the blade down its abdomen to its anus and spread out the skin.
I don’t know what to do after that. He said.
Move over. I can skin the thing.
Not an hour later the black smoke of a fire rose and those three around it silent like those primitive beings painted on cavern walls before language came to be.
They walked eating bits of jerky and the day was much progressed. He was holding the amulet gifted to him and he was thinking of her and wondering if she was thinking of him.
On the fourth day they were lost, how, none knew. They’d been traveling in the night along the road and they must have at some point transferred to another for there was a time before dawn when the ground became sanded and broken and cluttered with little stones and clods of sand. He’d reached down into the dark and plucked one of the clods from the ground and broken it in his hand but he hadn’t thought they’d gone from the road. He thought that perhaps there’d been a battle waged along this way and the road had been sundered by shell or tread. When the sun rose however, there was no road at all and they stood dumbfounded looking about them but they couldn’t see it and Jacob suggested they might follow their tracks back but when he looked for them there were no tracks to follow as if the earth itself had no recollection of their journey to that point. As if it was trying to forget them.
They plodded along the scrabbled ground crushing and kicking the bits of scoria about like bits of shattered pottery. Around noon they came across an old impact crater and he shuffled through the nebula of black sand leaving little trails of pearl white and he came and sat on the edge of it and studied the vitrified floor, moldavite or something else as green, and the little thumb printed meteor half-buried at the center looking like a fused celestial Inukshuk placed to stand watch over the country. He watched as Jacob went half-stepping into the crater and reached out and touched the thing cautiously with his fingertips and then pulled his hand away as if it were molten.
Is it hot. He asked.
Jacob looked up. Nah, it just doesn’t sit well, seeing something like this all the way out here.
Where else would it be.
I don’t know. Somewhere. Just seems odd is all.
They went on. They crossed desert sands to the horizons only to see more desert not unlike what they had just passed. In the North there was a range of low lying mountains and they headed for them.
They’ll be water there. Said the Commissar.
How do you know.
A man knows things.
Then how’d you come to know them.
When they reached the mountain there was indeed water. It was a seep streaming out of a crevice in a boulder and the true source they couldn’t tell and the water was florid with the iron veins coursing through the rock but it was there and they took turns kneeling before it. When their thirst was sated they looked about and it was then he noticed the aul farther up the mountain. He called their attentions to the little flat-topped houses and by consensus they decided to shelter there for the night. With their rifles in the crooks of their shoulders they clambered up the side of the mountain finding as they did a little goat trail that wound upwards and deposited them on the eastern side of the village. Behind a little outcrop they studied the houses cobbled out of breccias and slabs of xenoliths searching for any source of light or shadows not sun-wise and after nearly an hour they found there to be none. As one the shouldered their weapons and went through the earthen walkways bordered by small hedges of piled rock conducting impromptu investigations into the homes looking for food or communications or old maps or anything which might help them back to the road. There was nothing to be found though. The village had been deserted for what seemed like years and there was a layer of sienna dust on everything.
Lester had come into one such home and by now he was tired of searching the empty homes. He wandered from the path and through the doorless threshold of a hoary structure with a little ceiling propped upon two squared lengths of timber into the main room where was Job. The old rifleman was on a gaudy rug in an attitude of repose and when he spoke Lester shouted in fright as if he were hearing the voice of the dead.
Evening corporal.
Oh Throne. Job. Is that you.
It looks it. Who else it would be.
feth. I thought you were dead.
No. No. I’m much alive.
How did you get here?
I figure the same way you did.
On foot.
Did you come by this place another way.
Lester shook his head for he hadn’t.
Is there anyone else with you.
Its just me.
Well I’ve got Jacob and Torin with me.
That’s good to hear.
How long have you been here.
Not long, maybe two hours.
Throne, we were right behind you.
You must have been.
How come we didn’t see you.
I don’t know, maybe you just gotta know what you’re looking for. If you don’t know that then maybe you just gotta look.
A fire was committed to the hearth of one of the houses and the four of them sat about it absorbing the warmth. The night had become cold and it was well into it and if they’d stepped out they’d see a sheen of frost on the rocks like a pale and glossy lichen.
They were eating more of the jerky and a mash of corn and preserved steaks that Job had looted from the town and the dead. In the course of the meal the Commissar had spoken of returning to an Imperial territory. He spoke of turning ones back on the seductions of the primeval gestalt and he spoke in favor of brooking that higher ordering of man even with all its terrible folly. He argued the object of men’s toils, were they nothing else but to ensure the survival of his progeny? Did the success of such a venture, no matter the means, not constitute a validation of all prior efforts and all those yet to come? In a world so rife with horrors what safety can a man have in solitude, hiding in caves?
Beasts seek beasts. Said the Commissar.
Lester eyed him in the dying glow of the fire a raw sinew clenched in his blood smeared teeth.
The commissar went on further to say that only a few men in any generation could rely on strength or cunning alone to carry them through life. What of the countless rest who could not muster the skill of arm or the vast faculties, where did their safety lie?
Herds, he said. Like any grazing animal. Like any pack dog. Men gathered themselves together in work and huddled together in shelter and among themselves and foreigners were placed in competition. That is how it began. Men in caves, gathering themselves. In time man would become a master of his domain and as he did a hundred thousand others were accomplishing the same and inevitably one race would meet another and between them there would be a competition, a game. War is the ultimate game, said the Judge. There were dreadful sports imagined by the powerful, the cunning, for it was those few doled out in every generation that the authors of such organizations elected to be their leaders, those who did not need such protection. Those who could pass from one land to the next without encumbrance. The Commissar paused and sat forward and pulled his legs close and crossed them.
You can’t count on the incorruptibility of men. Any man is capable of anything. Those competitions were not eclogues carefully selected from the annals; they were what the annals were written in. Man pitted against man until one man is overcome and then to the next man. The fates of these first peoples were governed wholly by the whims of chance. The temperament of a man, that of his son, God in all his forms. As too were those in power at the whims of the populace. One could turn upon another in a heartbeat and devour them. So defined are the natures of these lesser orders which were justified only by the evolution for which they spurred and from which we have just emerged. So, as a tribe readies itself for war so a species gathers itself and is pitted with others in arena galactic and in every respect little different.
In such a state no species could or has lived long, they would burn out as men do, the breath passing from him in his youth. Thus these tribal affinities while appealing in their simplicity are inept to sustain a race at war, which inextricably we are and will be. The old saying goes, who was he who first forged the deadly blade, of rugged steel his savage soul was made. But what monster devised the gun? How fast did the rivers run and on the day of that murderous invention what a ship was the ferryman commissioned. No. A people could not survive. What then was left to him? Where could he find his safety? To regress was to invite all the old horrors back, to remain as one was courted annihilation. The only course to survival was yet another great binding of people, of tribes and clans into city-states and nations. Civilization, that is the key with all that is entailed: law, morality, spirituality, armies. This is the object of men’s toils even he does not realize it and his contribution to society is by its purpose the very summation of his worth: The existence of a sustainable bulwark against darker tides.
When the Commissar finished he scooted to the wall and leaned against it and gazed up at the rough mud ceiling as if he could see through it to the stars now out and glittering like jewels in the firmament. Lester studied him for a while but he didn’t say anything and in fact none replied though there were grave nods of consentience as if each man knew there’d been some governing boundary of civility that’d been crossed and they sought to retrace their steps back into its fold.
After a while Job stirred the fire with a poker and little flames jerked up from the wood. He was closest to the fire and he sat with his elbows in the crooks of his knees and his chin rested on the knuckles of one fist while the other wrapped round the poker used the fine iron point to scratch at the fire like some scoundrel scribing a gospel new in the coal.
Ӂ
When they were asleep he stood awake in the threshold of the home and looked out into a black as deep as the one in that moment before creation when what was to be was spoken out of the dark and speaks now to those it does not know and to whom it is not known.
He felt things could be different and imagined that once they were. He was holding the amulet in his hand and he ran a thumb over the cool face of the rune. Wraithbone what she called it, a place for a soul to reside, among other things. He was thinking of her now, as often he did, and he imagined her in attitudes some exotic and some endearing and he wished she was there with him in whichever way she came to be.
He went down to the seep and sat in the dust. He untied his boots and pulled them off one after the other and then stripped from himself the wet pus sogged socks and felt the raw flesh underneath. If it had been light he would have seen the blisters upon his foot like little sucking hills and at the base of his heel he dug a nail into the calloused dermis and came up holding little strands of yellow rotten skin that peeled away in circlets. He wedged his hand into the seep and let the water pool in his palm. When it was full he poured the water over his feet and washed away what vileness he could and once so he cleaned his socks and took them and went barefoot back to the house.
Job was awake now and staring into the fire.
Where did you go. Said Job.
Clean my feet, things were like agony.
Were they.
Yes.
Men used to do that once for another.
Did what.
Clean each other’s feet.
Lester smiled. If a man touched my feet I’d be right to kill him.
Even so it was done.
I don’t know what was done before this time, hell I couldn’t even tell you what my father did in his time. And I sure don’t see what difference it makes. What men did to another or for another.
In earlier times.
In earlier times.
Job sighed long and loud. Men served another in times earlier.
We serve each other now.
It isn’t like he says.
Like who says.
Him. Torin.
Lester turned to the Commissar asleep now against the wall.
Not the whole world can be the way one man says. But enough of it can. I might not like him but he made sense to me.
A man can barely know the context of history with himself bein in it. He knows what he sees and that’s at his very best. How’s he goin know a thousand years before. Ten thousand. A hundred. He don’t know what he’s talkin about. The people who make the world work now came from the people who made the world work before. The latter doesn’t hold much influence over the former.
Maybe so.
Ain’t no maybe about it. Once a man is in his ways he’s set in them and nothing will change it. How’d your father die.
Bad.
Is there another way.
I don’t know. Maybe for others.
Other what.
Other people.
You’re an other person Lester.
To other people I guess.
What’s that. Said Job pointing at the amulet.
It’s a gift from her.
From her.
It is.
He’s talking about a unifying of the peoples. Us against them. Ain’t that so.
I reckon it is.
Ain’t no reckoning those’re his very words.
So they are.
But we’re at war ain’t we.
We are.
And it ain’t changed ten thousand years against a hundred thousand.
They say once it wasn’t like this.
Who says.
I don’t know. People.
People. People are god. So they say it, it must be true.
I’m not following ye.
You’re following her.
I don’t understand.
He said only one thing that was true. Every great binding of people leads to a peace. But the wars don’t stop, he didn’t say that, the wars are bigger wars. Now it’s one alliance turned on another. It don’t matter if you’re fighting against a tribe or an empire for the man. When a man dies his world ends and the world around him is bereft one more perspective and it is a narrowing of existence a death.
If ye says.
I say.
Well there’s the Emperor, he ain’t dead.
To us he is.
Says you and you said yourself there can’t be no man knows all.
You’re right but neither can he. If he did we wouldn’t be here. He’s what. A god. No. He’s a man before a deity. He’s lived a heartbeat longer than us. He ain’t got nothing we ain’t have by the time we go.
So what he’s a false god.
All gods are false gods.
That’s blasphemy.
Coming from you.
I haven’t ever done that.
bs. You’re fething that alien.
I ain’t slept with her.
Ever.
Ever.
Would you.
I don’t know, does it matter.
Fear the alien.
I don’t fear gak.
Fear those dark powers.
I ain’t afraid of nothing I’ve seen.
Job laughed hackling like some carrion before a carcass. bs.
The next morning they set out to the edge of the mountain and gazed out. They were trying the country for a path with which to navigate the barren desert plain but they couldn’t see anything. No tracks in the ground or drag marks or the drifting of stones. Even the wind, and a stiller one than this he’d not known before, even those loose drafts didn’t seem to disturb the ground much as if where they were was apart of the world as if it were the last bit of template for what had been crossed before had been modeled after and could be altered not at all.
They wanted to leave, none more than the Commissar, and he sat on one of the outcrops tossing the small rough pebbles down the face of the mountain. The sun wasn’t past the dust line and already the sweat was rolling down his face. He soaked it up with his sleeve and he turned in the direction of the seep and thought to go there.
You think were dead. Said Jacob.
If we’re not and we become it, I reckon we’ll be well acclimatized.
It ain’t been this hot since I can’t remember when.
The flare was this hot. Said the Commissar.
That would just kill ya this, he spread a hand to encompass all he spoke of, this’ll cook ya alive right on the soil no need for the stone.
He spat on the ground and watched the spittle hiss and curve up in a tendril of steam.
Now that is a damn shame.
How far away is winter.
A couple months. But all we got here is water. We’d starve.
People used to live here; there must have been food, hell there’s water. All this heat something has to come to drink from it.
You see people living here now. They ain’t for a reason.
I’m just saying.
He swore at the heat. We need to go, we can’t stay here were gonna starve and so what if winter comes. Then it’ll just be cold and we still won’t have nothin to live on.
So we go wandering in all that.
I don’t see what else we can do.
I hate to admit this but the Corporal is right. Staying here means slow death. I’d rather not have ya’ll eating my gut to make it to winter.
We wouldn’t eat you Torin. Not by choice anyways. Ye’s lean as feth.
They went about the aul taking up old potted jars and the scratchy animal hide pouches and they took them to the seep and filled them and when all brimmed with water they gathered in the house and waited till night and then set out. They went what they thought was east and he walked naked save for his footwear. During the daylight hours they’d make tents of their clothes and rest under them and when night fell they’d depart again and they were a week in this routine before they came upon shade. Just a boulder in whose lee they sat like a pack of pale and hairless apes gazing out into the desert as if it were a creation made for their torment.
On the sixth day they came across a stain of blood in the sand and they no sooner laid eyes upon it than those four souls set to conjecturing its origins and what manner of beast might have died there. It looked like a bloodletting but there were no bodies or tracks of any kinds. There was a blood trail that led from the scene and they followed the streak of coagulated blood to a pyre of ghostly bodies whose bones smoked a white mist near blinding in the sun. They rounded the pyre like wolves eyeing the twisted alien skeletons not yet charred and likely never to be and they saw the jaws ajar and the claw like fingers outstretched and scratching at the dirt and they saw the bits of sizzling flesh dripping from the bone like a scoured mucous. Here they found too the sipes of a chimera or some similar tracked vehicle and a day more along its path they came upon the road again where they staggered like drunks for no more than an hour along the blistering tar before a column of lemans drove by and collected them.
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