by Kali Altsoba
For the first half day heading north, the forced companions hardly speak. The youngsters stay silent, as Grün children are taught to be and usually are. They’re forced to talk only when the red Twilight skids off the narrow lane and sticks in a deep drift. Its skis angle down and forward to impale the hard snow like a Nunavut harpoon piercing a sea lion, pinning it as it thrashes red atop blue ice.
The loader-driver is an inexperienced kid. An offworlder who never even saw snow before, let alone monitored a dumb autobot in a five-ton ice truck. He’s utterly lost inside a blizzard whirl of seething sheets of gray-white ice crystals lashing the forward monitors. The blow buffets and shakes his unfamiliar ski toed vehicle until it slithers off the road, escaping control by the kid and wailing autobot alike. He’s hypnotized by swirling eddies of large crystal flakes against the windscreen that he can’t help but watch. He sets the bot’s parameters too high and misses that it goes too fast around a hard bend in the unpaved and uneven road. The rotating, laser terrain reader on the hood should’ve set off loud alarms to warn him and the dumb bot about the looming ice ditch, but it’s clogged with snow and ice because the Twilight is old and the reader’s external melter is broken.
‘The boys’ are frigid, sore and angry as they dig out the red Twilight, yelling and cursing at the stupid loader and even stupider dumb bot. They shout hot curses out of steaming mouth holes in snow packed baklavas, hurling them into an ice wind that hurls them right back. They curse at Amasia and each other, as they dig snow out of their eye and mouth holes with nearly frozen fingers. White ice forms around their parka hoods, too, trapping heavy snow that weighs on them. With open red mouths and wild arm gestures as they dig, they look almost like a troop of howler monkeys. But they can hear only the howling of a bitter, constant wind.
When they’re done digging, the sergeant decides they need a break. He says that it’s time to eat, even though it isn’t. They happily drink peach kissel and dig into the back of two of the trucks for hot food, with more enthusiasm than they dug out the stalled red Twilight. They’re happy, until they peel back air seals on Meals, Combat Individual Ration packs. Inside the long stored MCIR food packs they see, then smell, a curled up rotten mixture. It’s steaming with heat from inlaid chemical pods. The mockmeat is from Year One. It’s gone off. Gray lumps of grown protein have a nauseating blue tinge all around the edges. Two boys throw up just looking. The rest turn pale green as the utes they wear under their pressure snowsuits. The sick boys wolfed down a carton that seemed a bit off to taste, but it didn’t look or smell blue tinged. Now they feel their guts begin to rebel.
“I can’t eat this blue shit!” the tallest of the kids protests. “It’s rotten. Look! It’s moving! Ahh! There are blue grubs in mine! It’s making me sick just looking at it. God it stinks!” He kicks the round container and stinking blue contents five meters high. He’s a mercury footballer who might have reached seven meters with the kick back on his old school pitch on Daegu, but the gravity on Amasia is 30% heavier. Still, even the veteran and gunsō look on with admiration at the strength of a perfect kick that sends the offending food carton toppling and rolling on high.
The quiet one eyed boy stands with his back to a blue Troika. He’s waiting just outside the group, alone as always. He unconsciously touches his eyepatch, running a finger around its edges, over and over and over. He waits until the others move off then stoops to pick up the kicked away food box. He carefully picks out the bits of bluish meat, scrapes away a layer of soggy, sticky millet underneath where it touched the blue, then eats the rest. No one hears him complain about anything, ever. He doesn’t seek out conversation, ever. He’s a loner, so there are the usual rumors. Scuttlebutt is that he was trained for combat duty but washed out of Kolno Barracks, dismissed for cause and failure, then reassigned to 32nd Supply. No one asks him or cares about how he lost his eye, or why it’s not replaced yet. No one talks to him unless they have to, working the ski trucks or digging them out.
He’s odd.
He’s different.
He’s sorta dodgy.
No one likes odd in Rikugun.
They climb back into the idling trucks and all fall silent, again. The surefooted athlete sulks about the bad meat they ate, the rest are upset over being hungry and the disrespect that outdated, fouled rations show. The odd, one eyed boy as usual says nothing, looking out a side scuttle at a swirl of big white flakes. Ten minutes into the ride the veteran nitōhei looks up from the flashing steering monitor that programs and backs up the dumb bot, its glow soft against a dark winter night and dimly lit driving cab. He says with a gray and mocking tone, almost with a brief twinkle in his all white addict eyes: “I think a Blue Oni musta fallen inta the stew.”
He’s in the lead Troika, but the bad joke is heard by everybody in the convoy over the all coms link. The thought of a cooked Blue in their canteen breaks the tension, cracking up every lad and the dour sergeant. Even the one eyed, silent boy smiles gently to himself. They’re no longer strangers, though not yet friends. They start to talk about many things. Bad food to start, then good food that only exists offworld or deep inside Officer Country, where they can never go. They talk about girls, of course, though shyly and quietly so that the freak can’t hear. They’re companions of the moment, thrown together on a narrow serpentine lane heading north over the vastness of war. They’re starting to bond, when it’s ruined.
An hour into the resumed journey, the veteran really gets going, encouraged by their laughter. His perpetual robusto high makes everything seem the funniest thing that he’s ever seen or heard. He snorts at his own witticisms while daringly letting the dumb bot race too fast for the stormy conditions, matching its evermore frenetic steering to his own fast burning high. His bot leads the slaved bots of the convoy helter-skelter into a narrow canyon, hastily smashed by combat engineers four years ago, themselves uncaring of anything except speed though a range of low mountains covered in tall black pines. The convoy heads madcap through the canyon, overhanging black rock and tress throwing back all light, leaving boys in darkened trucks feeling like they’re plunging into a mine shaft. One sitting in the lead Troika beside the freak veteran complains that he’s aiming for every pothole in the road. He wants the indifferent gunsō to order the freak off the monitor. The veteran retorts with a big laugh from his unassailable position in the center seat.
“If you don’t like the way I’m driving, you can get out and hail another taxi. There’ll be one along soon.” The freak laughs like he just told the joke that wins the All Orion Comedy Classic.
The sergeant maintains his usual dullard’s silence from the last truck in the convoy. ‘The boys’ were bored and hungry before, and he fed the ungrateful little shits. Now they’re sick and sore from hard jolting, and complaining. He rolls over.
They’re afraid of the long plunges into blackness as they reach each big rise in the ice road, then plummet over and down the other side. They fear looming black pines and too close rock walls of the canyon that fly past the side scuttles. So they laugh nervously at the freak’s bad jokes. It’s a huge mistake. The robusto freak veteran refuses to surrender the driving pad for two more hours, long after his shift ends and they leave the dark canyon behind.
As usual, he falsely believes that he has something important to say and just won’t shut up about it. So he says nothing important, over and over. Every ten klics or so, he makes another bad food or even worse taxi joke. Like an overeager, AI bot tourist guide, he calls out famous Pusan sights and eateries and menus they all know, as they pass an odd shaped rock or isolated islet of diseased trees.
One time he says, pointing to a herd of startled, running deer in winter coats that scatter as the convoy lights expose them: “Pulling into Baeksan-gil, Jung-gu. Mind the gap. No crowding.”
Ten more klics and he says: “Smoked, raw mock oysters, our specialty.”
At the next faux station stop he announces: “626 U-Dong, Haeundae-gu: best kimchi and soft cheeses in
all Pusan. Get yours here.”
“Hey, look at the crowd lined up for this place,” he points to a second herd of bewildered deer, blinded by the convoy slit lights. “Must be moss kimchi or a big Blue Oni special on the menu.” He’s getting repetitive.
‘The boys’ are getting more agitated. He doesn’t care. They yell at him. He ignores them. They plead. He jokes. They beg. He laughs. He just won’t stop.
“Shut up!”
“Best kongbap here. Freshest beans and rice.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Hot samgyetang. Best mockchicken soup in Pusan.”
Six trucks solve the problem by shutting down the all convoy voice link, but nothing saves three lads stuck in the lead Troika with the addled, soliloquizing veteran. He keeps up the endless patter and taxi shtick for two hours after they leave the long gill. That’s 380 more klics on the far side, until they’re totally sick of him. Nauseous at his laughter and smell, fearing all white eyes that make him look like a snow daemon driving them across a frozen over Hell. They keep trying to raise the sergeant in the last truck. He never replies. His coms are shutoff, too.
One of the kids finally reaches his snapping point. He pulls down hard on the emergency brake, lurching the lead Troika to a halt and bringing the whole convoy to an accordion stop. The dull sergeant’s truck was following too close and rams the next in line, hard. It wakes up the negligent gunsō, and finally gets him on the voice link to order the freak veteran to “give it up and get some sleep.” The freak yields up monitor control at last. “Fucking robusto hound,” the sergeant mutters audibly, with the intercom still on. Everyone in the convoy hears that, too. It takes another hour before the freak stops laughing. Then he falls instantly asleep.
After that three boys in the lead Troika drive in four hour shifts, refusing to let the white eyed freak back in the center seat or near the dumb bot pad. Two try to rest when it’s their turn, one stretched over three rear seats, the other tucked into a tight niche between ammo cases in the cargo space. No one except the freak gets any sleep as the ground huggers bang and bounce over hard packed snow and iron hard ice ruts in the ‘temporary’ military road, the rollbahn. It wears everyone out physically and morally. Exhaustion, cold and confinement breaks them all down, as did the stupid cheerfulness and idiot chatter of a flaming robusto addict.
Troika
The luck of ‘the boys’ in the convoy takes a turn for the worse as they pass four much larger convoys heading the other way, south down the rollbahn. “They must be overflow from the main autobahn, ‘cause they’re too wide for this shitty little ice road. Gods, that last wrecker nearly clipped us!” They’re forced to pull off road to let the largest of the four convoys pass: 160 big military model snow trucks and halftracks, rolling by at top speed and clearly not prepared to stop for what looks like a clutch of pink and blue and red civvy trucks that have no business on a Rikugun rollbahn. Another time they pull to the side to let pass 143 slow, heavy haulers carrying recovered armtraks, Mammoths and Mastodons damaged in battle but recovered by frontline wreckers and headed back to some rear tank park for repair. One of the long haulers clips the cab of the lead Troika in Supply Convoy #75347. It’s pulled over as far to one side as it can go, but not far enough. A half meter hole is torn in the cab side, in the lower door.
The tear is deep, and can’t be patched in the field. Now the old, blue Troika is losing heat faster than it can make it. It leaks so badly ‘the boys’ have to take short turns watching the dumb bot strain to steer, or risk freezing to death in the exposed cab. The others huddle around a small, portable heater they keep running inside the cargo pod. The situation is getting worse by the hour, but the gunsō refuses to listen to their complaints for nearly a full day. Instead, to shut them up he orders an unscheduled maintenance stop so that all leaks can be tinker patched with crate insulation. Spare heaters from the other trucks are moved into the leaky blue cab and run flat out. It just does the trick. The crates block most of the howling winds while the heaters keep the leaking cab temperature fluctuating near -10˚. Cold, but survivable. Even so, the repairs come too late for some inside.
By the second day four of the lads come down with frost gangrene. It’s damage well beyond the frostbite everyone has on frozen ears, toes and fingers, or bits of cheek. The poison spreads through their bloodstreams until patches of dead skin appear all over their bodies. Two boys turn slate colored, taking on a zombie like, lethargic, dead eye look. Worse, the other two vomit nonstop from food poisoning from the blue tinged mockmeat. They’re getting sicker and weaker by the hour.
They search all the trucks for medical kits but can only find one, in the official green, true military halftrack. It’s starting to look like the converted Twilights and Troikas assigned to them by the fat major back at the Supply Services truck park haven’t been properly serviced or restocked with anything, in at least two years. The four gangrenes ladle on a thick orange antibiotic, a healing paste. The awful stuff sticks to their faces and hands, and to anything they touch. Finally reassigned by the negligent gunsō to two of the sealed and better heated Troikas, a comically pathetic appearance makes the other boys laugh out loud and mock mercilessly.
“You look ridiculous!”
“What is this, All Hallows Eve?”
“Trick or treat!”
They say it pointing at gobs of orange paste masking dead and dying skin. It hangs goblin like on rotting ears and the tips of black, corroded noses. The paste webs purple-black hands, and swollen toes that no longer fit in boots the four boys took off so that they could slather balm onto swollen, deathly looking feet. Soon the goblin joke wears off. It becomes as unbearable as the robusto freak’s taxi antics and bad puns. Healthy lads squeeze away from the sick boys, refuse to let the sticky orange ones sit up front in the ice truck cabs or touch any pad controls.
“You stay in the cargo pod with the extra heaters.”
“Don’t even try to come back up here with us!”
“Yeah, get out! You stink like rotting cheese.”
“Wait! Take your smelly boots with you.”
It’s true. Foul gas gangrene oozes from their boots to infest the cabs with sour, necrotic odors. So the sick ones sit in misery or curl in fetal balls in the back, like moldy wheels of Camembert. The other boys are glad to see them leave. They stop using their real names, which they hardly learned in any case, and start calling them “The Four Cheeses.” Then they cruelly compete to name the sick boys after the fanciest, stinkiest cheeses they can remember from their homeworlds. They’re careful not to let the robusto freak hear them or play the game, as the four afflicted boys called Hans, John, Kim and Njabulo become Limburger, Serra da Estrela, Valdeon, and The Stinking Bishop.
It really stops being funny on the third day, when Limburger dies. Either from gangrene or food poisoning. He had both, so they’re not sure. They leave him in a cutout snow grave off to the right side of the rollbahn, his ash gray face smeared in orange paste and bits of vomit. The ground’s too hard frozen and gnarled with tree roots to dig, even with melters, so they bury him in a filled in ditch. They cut a rectangle out of hard pack snow, lay him inside a white-on-white ersatz coffin, cover him with a slab of ice, and stuff looser snow along the sides to seal him in. As they slide the thick ice slab over top they convince themselves that he looks comfortable. They use a simple wire to attach a scroll to a grave marker they make from a piece of broken floorboard pulled out of the damaged, leaking Troika. They hammer the grave marker into an ice jam, leaving it for some Graves Registration and Cremation Unit. They’ll report the coordinates when they get back to base. They hope someone will come get the lad in the spring, but they secretly doubt it.
No one can recall his name. They only notice that they forgot to check his ID tag and chip after they bury him. Now it’s inside the snow tomb. No one wants to reopen it to poke around inside, or to search his gooey, greasy, paste covered snow suit. They’re too tired and cold and just fed up wit
h the whole thing to dig him out to look for it. They debate whether or not to bury him under his cheese name, but the three remaining sick boys object. So instead they etch on the scroll:
A young nitōhei
Known only to the Gods
RIK 32nd Supply Division
“OK boys, let’s un-ass this place.”
“Back in the trucks!”
“Let’s go, let’s go!”
As the others rush back inside the heated trucks the one eyed boy lingers at the white graveside. He places a warm food pack atop the snow cap then mumbles, almost prayer like, an old war verse he learned a long time ago, back in school:
‘No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
but he lay like a warrior taking his rest