by Stacey Mac
I wonder if they can smell the difference in me. The crookedness.
We follow them. Back to the huts. Dean takes my hand on the way and I startle. He sees me look around worriedly and shakes his head. “Ignore them.”
Julie and Arlo are already asleep, their heads almost touching end-to-end. Julie’s hand is thrown over her head and lies awkwardly over Arlo’s nose.
Bryce and Omar are arguing from their beds, something about Omar being deflowered in his forties.
Adriel ducks in after Dean and I, and musses my hair. “Sleep well, guys.”
He throws himself inelegantly into a hammock, and pulls up a thick blanket.
Dean pulls me around to his bed – our bed. And sits me down. We take off our shoes, our jackets. Dean takes off his shirt, and indicates for me to take the side closest to the bare, bark wall.
Dean extinguishes the gasoline lamp hanging from highest point of the roof. Sweet darkness plunges.
The quiet, both inside and out, is disarming. Welcoming.
I feel Dean beside the bed. I feel it when the blanket over me shifts. I feel the mattress tilt as he finds a way onto it.
I feel the hesitance scintillating like sparks between our invisible bodies when he doesn’t touch me. He’s waiting. Being unassuming.
We’ve been close, Dean and I. I’ve touched him, but I haven’t actually touched him. I’ve fallen asleep on him without sleeping with him. I’ve pushed both of us to the precipice, but never over the edge. Holding back, always holding back. I could have died and all of the waiting and tip-toeing around each other could have been for nothing.
I feel his hand flutter above my hip bone, and I feel it when his skin finally connects with mine. Just a palm on my waist, the fingers creeping under the hem of my shirt, splaying across my back.
The gulf between us is uncomfortably warm, skin calling to skin.
We move at the same time. Our lips crushing together, our hands searching and possessing. His stubble against my throat hurts but not enough. His lips leave pathways along my neck and across my collarbone and I want him closer.
My hands act of their own accord. They trace the valleys between muscles on his back one second, and then tangle in his hair the next. They find his jaw and I’m pulling him back to me, back to my mouth. My useless mouth that never tells him anything useful or important, so I show him instead.
I kiss him hard, because I want to consume him, and I can’t. I feel his breath in my mouth and drink it. This boy, my boy, so real and solid and whole. We kiss like that, desperately, for a long time. The kind of kiss that fuses atoms, boils them. Burns them.
When the length of my body pushes against every point of his, he stops me. “Shit, Tessa. You have to stop,” he whispers or groans.
“But I don’t want to.”
I plant my lips to his throat, then my tongue, tasting him, and I feel him tighten.
“Not here,” he breathes. “We’re not alone.”
Shit.
The heat fizzles. For the first time since I crept under the blanket, I listen. I hear soft snoring, and nothing else.
“And I need you to keep your hands to yourself for the next few minutes while I remember my name, and why I shouldn’t undress you.”
I smile into the darkness. “Why are you so wholesome? It’s annoying.”
“You make it really fucking difficult, woman.”
I ignore his requests, and lie my head on his shoulder. Breathe in, breathe out. He smells like earth and smoke and man.
“I’m not sorry that I’m here,” I whisper to him. “I should be, but I’m not. I want to stay with you.”
His arm curls around my back, pulls me in. “So, stay.”
And here it is, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. “Dean, do you still love me?”
A pause. “Do you love me?”
I smile. “Sort of.”
I’m sure he smiles too. “Good enough.”
And then we fall asleep together, but don’t sleep together.
Chapter Thirty
I can’t know for sure, but I think Resolute probably awoke on this night together. Later, I’ll think about that, the synchronisation of eyelids snapping back, heart beats punching, feet finding the ground, and be comforted that even in those last minutes, they were one whole.
My mother told me shelves of stories, memories, and one of them was about a rollercoaster: giant mechanical tracks, with cars that people rode in for amusement. It was my favourite story of all, the most fantastical, the most unbelievable. Her eyes were alight whenever she described it: the sound the car made against the tracks, straining to reach the peak. The final clack as it tipped, impossibly high above the ground. She told me about the fear that explodes from your heart the second before it plunges, and then there is no fear at all. Just your stomach in your mouth, the noise so large and consuming that you feel it in every cell. Weightlessness.
That’s what it feels like now.
First, there was a smattering of sound, familiar, alarming, and upon its interruption, my eyelids lifted and I was on my feet. Just the seven of us ripping away from sleep and stumbling in the dark.
The first thought I had was that the gunfire sounded distant, that we had time.
But, of course, I’m not a good soldier.
And suddenly, the ground was fluid. Lifting and dipping, shaking. The sound of the blast hit us last, and it was just like a mechanical giant; impossibly loud and all-consuming.
*
The explosion threw us, left us strewn along the ground, and I lie there now.
The noise has blinded me. I feel it behind my eyes, in my skull. It shakes my blood, takes my breath; an apocalyptic sound.
But, I also hear nothing. I watch Dean scream, push onto his feet and burst from them, lunging across the room, but I can only hear a high keening, ringing inside my ears.
The hut is suddenly illuminated. Bryce has lit the gasoline lamp, and it swings dangerously from the roof. The room is hazy with airborne dust.
Everyone moves, runs, ducks, pulls trunks from under their beds, screaming, throwing things across to one another.
Suddenly Dean is all I see. He leans into my face.
He mouths to me but I don’t hear. He shakes my shoulders, again, again, again.
And then the sound comes rushing back in, a wave of it, small at first, and then all at once.
“TESS! Move! Get up!”
Accept, Tessa. Endure it. Obey.
My muscle memory, dormant until now, awakens.
I stand.
Dean reaches under the bed and heaves a trunk out to his feet. We open it together, our fingers rushing over the latches.
He wrenches it open and throws a rifle to me, before standing with his own.
I’d like to say that at this point all of us look around at one another, armed and waiting; that we speak words of inspiration, maybe some declarations of love, before we walk to meet our fates.
But that is not what happens next. War is fucked like that.
Dean and I look at each other for a mere second, his pleading, mine steady, and we bolt.
Gunfire still splits the night, unrelenting. It comes in spurts from several different directions. I follow Dean to the back of the hut, my rifle upright.
In the shadows, we duck, breathing hard.
“Follow me,” Dean growls. “Don’t run, unless I run.”
I nod. “We can’t win.”
But he already knows that.
“We get as many as we can, and we get out. Just don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” I tell him.
Abruptly, the ground in front of our feet rips apart. Bullets hit the ground in quick succession, missing their target: us.
“Go!”
I follow him, sprinting along the line of huts. It curves around until it meets the cover of trees. We strain for them. My upper body moves faster than my feet, reaching for safety, expecting a bullet at any second. Through the sound of my
own breaths I hear screaming, high and horrible.
Before we reach the trees, two bodies appear, running out from between two huts. They wear black and carry rifles. Necklaces of ammunition hang from their shoulders.
One of them points to Dean, shouts: “there!”
Dean turns and grabs me, throwing me sideways into a gap between huts. We fall, just as the gunfire rings out behind us.
“Get up!” Dean yells.
We run again, out the other side, out into the open.
The Base: the target of the blast, a crumbling, fiery mass, burns before us. Here, we watch my militia: Galore, blast Resolute away.
Skirmishes start and end, quick and brutal in the vast space. Black-clad Galore soldiers move in groups of three, like they’ve been trained to do since Galore’s birth. Wherever Resolutes (half-dressed, inferiorly armed or not at all) interrupt their path, the Galores shoot, the rounds coming in bursts of twenty, arching from left to right.
Everywhere, Resolutes drop, the bullets raining down upon them from too many angles. They fall upon their brothers and sisters. A sea of the dead.
Dean makes a strangled noise, and rushes me. His arm grabs the sleeve of my shoulder and we run, heads lowered, seeking cover. The darkness can only hide us for so long.
We fall to our knees behind a wagon, and I gasp. My breath sounds erratic, but I feel nothing.
Dean is hurriedly loading a hand gun, passing it to me. I take it unquestioningly and shove it into the waist of my pants.
“If we are separated, run into the trees and stay hidden. If I get shot, go to the trees and keep going, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Follow me. Shoot anyone wearing black. Hit the deck if you hear them open fire.”
“Okay.”
He rises onto bent legs, looking over the edge of the wagon.
We wait until the gunfire slows and then stops, abruptly so. The final shot echoes skyward. The silence, the lack of retaliating gunfire, is worse.
No one left to return it. Except us.
The fury that has raised its head only once before drenches me, blankets me, and I feel it everywhere. Everywhere. My father once told me that wars were created by mindless men, to mindlessly kill, and he was really fucking right.
Dean counts to three, and then he says: “Now.”
We skirt the wagon, keeping low.
The night burns red from the Base’s hellfire, all of Resolute’s supplies, weapons: gone.
The light reveals the broken bodies of so many. Blood-drenched, unmoving. We move forwards quickly, and I step on someone’s hand and feel the bones snap under my bare foot.
Dean’s head snaps to the right, and his back straightens, “Right!”
I let my knee sink to the ground and swing the rifle around, close my right eye, breathe in, prep the trigger, fire. Fire again.
Two Galore soldiers, their backs turned, facing away from us, fall.
We move again, taking cover behind a log pile, smouldering slowly.
We lean against it, our rifles steadied atop the smoking wood. Movement to the left of the base catches my eye too late, and I scream: “DUCK!” but the gunfire drowns it.
Dean and I sink to the ground as the spray hits the wood. Shards rain down on us, and Dean shoves my head into the dirt.
The firing abruptly silences, and I do not dare breathe.
Dean’s hand leaves my head and his breath heats my ear, whispering. “Four of them, coming at us. Stay down, and aim. Be ready.”
Already on my stomach, I wriggle to the right, dragging my rifle around quickly and reading it on the dirt, waiting. Dean does the same, facing the opposite way.
I hear the footsteps before they round the log pile, and I prep the trigger.
I think: we are going to die.
There is a lengthy second before the Galore soldiers find us, surround us, and I feel my sweat tangle in my loose hair. I feel my heart thud against the earth.
I see the barrel of the rifle glint as it peers around the side of the log pile, and then I hear shots fire and collide.
For a moment, I try to feel where the bullets hit me, but I feel nothing. I hear groaning, and realise that it comes from a Galore soldier, mere feet from me.
I stand and aim the barrel of my rifle at his face.
The boy is pinned. His comrade, dead, lies over him, almost double the boy’s size.
Adriel, Omar and Bryce run towards me, their eyes skirting the open space, and they duck behind the log pile with me.
“Got one, at least,” Omar says.
“Got three,” Dean replies.
I look around and see that Dean is wiping blood from his hand. Two Galore soldiers lie wide-eyed at his side.
“Thank you,” I tell them, breathless.
The boy, no older than fourteen, continues to struggle under the weight of his dead partner.
And I recognise him. I don’t know him, just his face. A novice from the training compound.
“Help me,” he pleads. Not to us, but to the sky. He doesn’t shout, he just cries. Desperately so.
My rifle still aimed at his head, I find that I can’t fire. His hands, soft with youth, do not hold a weapon, they are too busy clawing at the death that holds him there.
Mindless killing.
I lower the barrel.
And Dean raises his.
Bang, bang. The boy falls.
*
“Where is Arlo, or Julie?” Dean asks. His hands keep moving, reaching to the bodies to take their firearms, their ammunition.
“Don’t know,” Adriel replies. “Sorry man, didn’t keep track of him. He picked up Julie and ran with her. Maybe they got out.”
Dean scrubs a hand over his face, but his palm is specked in blood, and instead of looking like my knight he looks like a demon.
“We have to check,” Dean says, and the others nod. “Omar, up front with me. Bryce behind us, then Tessa, then Adriel.”
I don’t argue. I’m not a good soldier.
“Stick to the dark, and call them as you see them.”
In the distance, gunfire spatters in waves once more. My blood quickens.
“Fuck,” Bryce whimpers.
But Dean rises. “Go.”
We stay within inches of each other, never lowering the Galore assault rifles in our unfamiliar hands, never blinking.
We walk between a row of huts, sticking to one side, and Dean checks each one.
I make the sorry mistake of peeking into an open curtain. Inside, a woman lies face down across her bed, her back reddened with gore.
I ignore the bodies we see every so often, but Dean doesn’t. He nudges each one, checking for life, but there’s none left.
The gunfire continues as we creep forwards, each shot echoing off the nearby trees, making us listen to it again, again.
“Left!”
Adriel’s rifle fires, smattering bullets into the Galore man and woman who fall quickly.
We keep moving.
Rounding the end of the row, Dean signals us to stop, and we crouch.
The gates to Resolute lie ahead, around the corner, where the shadows run out. The gunfire, bursting systematically every few seconds, is much closer now.
Dean gestures for us to move with him. We do.
We crouch-walk around the last hut, keeping its wall to our back. And from here we watch it all.
By that, I mean we only watch, because nothing could possibly stop this.
Galore soldiers, hundreds of them, line the fence, the gates. They stand in ordered groupings in front of the decaying chapel.
But closest to us, in the lamplight, are Resolutes. Alive, but waiting to be dead.
They kneel, men and women and kids, in a line, their thighs and hips and shoulders touching. Unarmed, in some cases undressed.
There are so little of them.
Trey is standing in front of a man at the end of the line. We watch the back of his balding head glisten with sweat.
“Your turn now,” Trey says. “Will you join us?”
Without a beat, the man begins shaking his head wildly, uncontrollably.
A Galore soldier walks forwards, aims, and fires.
With twenty holes in his chest, the man flies backwards, his body flaccid before it hits the earth.
“What about you?” Trey leers, approaching the next Resolute in line. This time a girl, maybe my age. “Want to join the team?”
Her head juts up. “No, asshole, I don’t.”
Trey laughs heartily, and then she dies.
Omar taps Dean, leaning in to whisper, frantic. “Man, we’ve gotta go. There’s nothing we can do.”
But Dean’s face is frozen, eyes glazed, zeroed. I follow them.
Trey’s voice rings out as he sizes up the next in line. “And you, big guy? You look tough. What do you say?”
Kneeled before him, his hands uselessly empty, is Arlo.
“No,” Dean says.
“Fuck you,” Arlo says.
And the Galore soldier raises his gun.
I clamp my hand over Dean’s mouth at the same time he lunges. Omar’s arms encase him, and as the shots slice through his brother, we drag Dean away.
*
There’s nothing left. No one left; so we run.
Dean and Omar make us hide between huts while they pillage the nearest one. They are in and out within a minute, packs thrown hastily across their backs.
We move again. Collectively we flinch with every gun shot. Another Resolute dead, only a few to go.
“Ahead!”
Dean and Omar fire simultaneously, and so do the three Galore’s ahead of us.
I hear the bullet collide with flesh, Dean’s grunt of pain.
And all three of the Galore Soldiers collapse.
“Dean!” I shout, watching blood spread along his arm.
“I’m fine,” he pants. “Keep going.”
He’s alive. We’re still alive.
We pass the group of insurgents, and Bryce stomps on the chest of the Galore man at our feet without looking at his face.
“Almost there,” I hear Dean huff.
Our pace quickens. I step on something sharp and ignore it, though the flesh on my naked foot tears. Adriel puts a hand on my back and urges me on.