by Kali Altsoba
He gives them no choice. They can’t stay if he goes first. As the porters pick up the ammo crates and cross over the woeful water, a tart smell of putrefaction fills their nostrils. It’s the odor of rotten flesh, common smell of First Trench and all the Yue ming. Clean, winter air is displaced by putrefying gases the more they advance. It’s not just the rotting woman anymore. She’s too far behind them now. The air starts to choke them. It has a whiff of poison on it, too.
A curtain lifts to reveal the timeless Stage of War, ending an Interlude of false calm men and women once called the Golden Peace of Orion. It held only as long as the players took to change costume between scenes and fresh acts of violence.
The playwright’s dead.
The war killed him.
War alone lives on.
Inferno
Before them looms a shifting, Vaporous Portal that greets all who reach the Wasteland of Battle. Eternal is this Gate, eternal as the Hate that engorges War, that War vomits back into the worlds. The wispy entrance whispers its ancient, aching, alluring warning: ‘Cross over and enter the Grief Wracked Abode. Enter into the City of Woe that men have made. Abandon all hope, ye who enter me.’
Aghast, ‘the boys’ step through with their crates, filled with crystal death for men and women they have never met and never will. For the first time, they look upon the Face of War. All they see before them is ashen chaos. Broken dugouts, caved in ramparts and black walls, empty slit trenches, brutally grotesque bunkers, burned trees with tormented, twisted limbs, a crater field pocked as Jahandar’s face. They see exploding geysers of dirt, water and oil erupting from jagged and smoking cavities. Dozens of whole or partial corpses lie or sit in oddly rigid poses. Half living souls dart from pit-to-hole-to-crater, and back again in howling agony, confusion and despair. They strain to kill or to be killed. Rising, falling, dying.
And worse, far worse. Torments of spirit and flesh beyond their ken or pity. Beyond imagining of swiftly disappearing innocence of simple boys from Daegu, who thought until this moment that they wanted to meet and thrill to War. Now they sense a brooding presence of the gray dome of Youdu the Dark Capital, far beneath the Yue ming. It’s bathed in darkness, but the Gate must be open. A flicker of torchlight from inside illuminates the arriving dead, escapes into the Region of Darkness. Is that Yamarāja trying to get out with the light? Is it the Lord of Pitrs?
This is beyond all gods, who have disappeared into the nothingness. Eaten by fiercer daemons of the Yue ming. This is beyond any nightmare vision or fearsome tale even of daemons, told in childhood. This is beyond good and evil. For no god or daemon can make this. Only men and women can conceive this thing. Not even the hairy daemons of the Yue ming can do it. Not even Ox Head or Horse Face. Not even King Yan. War’s a thing all our own, without a conscience or a king.
‘The boys’ get small. They crouch and crawl and jump like frightened mice from hole to hole, dragging rather than carrying heavy crystal ammo crates like their own dead weight of sin. They descend into the Blind World across a wide River of Detestation, without hope or repose. Ahead lies the City of Destruction.
“We can’t get through this!” one of the kids shouts. It’s the young offworld loader who ran the red Twilight off the rollbahn because he loved too much to watch the rare beauty of snow crystals that he never saw before.
“They’ll kill us, sure,” another boy agrees.
“Down, get down!”
The gunsō yells as he splays onto the ground, pulling two boys down with him. Too late. A tardy boy is hit by spinning shrapnel from an incoming round. It rips and burns a tear across his buttocks. It’s the mercury baller. He yelps and lies prone, carefully touches himself back there in bewildered shock at a bloody hand he brings back to show his gawping face.
“You’ll be OK. It’s just your ass.” The freak assures him with a small, snorting laugh. Even he’s scared, his laugh more shrill. Unsure what to do next, he helps mount a smart dressing on the wounded boy. It happily hops onto the pale buttocks and goes to work stopping the bleeding, binding torn fat.
“We move two-by-two and hole to hole,” the gunsō orders. “Get low and stay flat, or your ass will be next. Move it, now!”
They scamper in pairs over an uneven clay lip of a midsized crater, descending its clammy side then ascending the other, then make a mad dash across the small bit of flatness left on top among the holes. Hard drop into another hole, slide down its side into the greasy bowl. ‘Is that smoke, or gas down there? Don’t touch it!’ It works. So they do it again, and again and again and again. Like a gray-green caterpillar fearful of stalker birds, they inch along a painful path toward a distant, darkened blockhouse that broods above the flat horizon. They can see it from six inches height, if ever they dare to raise their heads to look. A singularity that draws them to it. A point in time and space. It becomes the center of their Universe.
‘Five hundred meters. Then refuge! Safety!’ The same thought races through every head. Almost in the same words, like a familiar communal prayer. Like the ones their mothers taught them when they were dragged as minors to Life Temple, wearing too tight clothes, to see off some withered old soul they hardly knew.
“Keep moving!”
“Right, sarg.”
‘Gods, my hands are tearing.’
‘How much farther is it?’
‘I don’t think I can do this.’
‘We’re halfway there!’
“Stretcher!” The voice is somewhere else.
“Godsdamn it, where’s that stretcher?”
A loud explosion ten meters away. A few seconds delay, then another shouted plea. They hear a frantic cry but don’t move. They see two dark figures crouching low, running past the lip of the shallow crater where they shelter, huddling against howling hate that’s falling all around with a thump! thump! thump!
‘Why are they running in the open?’
‘Are they men or daemons?’
“Next crater, now!” They move, not looking back. In the next hole they drop in they find a severed arm, but no owner. They leave the arm and its missing body behind as they scramble-dash for a nearby slit trench, thence roll and fall into a slime pit. Their fingers are nearly frozen, almost lifeless. They beat them against chests and legs to persuade reluctant blood to visit constricted veins, bring warmth to exposed hands forced to clutch rope straps on heavy crystal ammo crates.
‘Another 200 meters, that’s all.’
A close hit into an adjacent crater finds a straw man hiding, and tosses him 40 meters high. At least, that’s how they think of him, as a scarecrow or stuffed toy. They watch him hurtle up like a broken, unwanted marionette thrown away by an angry, naughty child. He’s too loose, too inhuman and unvalued to be a real man. A wobbling mockery of form. He crumples down in discarded death.
‘He’s gone, probably.’
‘He has to be dead, a fall like that.’
‘If he’s not dead, he’s too hurt now to ever help me move this crate.’
“Leave him,” the gunsō orders. So they do.
A shared thought in an instant of silent guilt and relief. ‘It wasn’t me!’
They all wonder about him, but only much later.
‘Who was he, the straw man?’
‘Did he die before he landed, all twisted?’
‘Or did I leave him lying in his own broken bones?’
The straw man’s a stranger. More even than they are to each other, collected here in intimate isolation in a greasy pit. How can they care for him in this vital moment, spare him thoughts or chance an effort to help as shells fall all around, looking to make me into a straw man as well? The low blockhouse fills all sight and thought, pulls them toward it with a silent offer of salvation from oblivion. Away from the unknown man of straw and pain, who’s already headed down to Youdu.
‘Another 100 meters. No more!’
They’re nearly there. The ammo feels much heavier. Muscles are tiring and a deadweight of dark mud cakes
the crates. They drag them and themselves to the next crater, thence on to the next. They move in the short pauses between landing shells. Kinetics and plasma bombs fall in an unnatural rain that showers the crater field with muddy splatter and brilliant splotches of sudden light. Sheets of intense heat pass close overhead. They can feel it on their helmets and shoulders.
‘Another second and I’da bin roasted.’
‘They’ll havta carry my ashes home in a bucket!’
‘Mercy! Let me cross the last few meters, please!’
It’s a small barrage, if they but knew it. Just the usual Good Morning! harassment from far off artillery, throwing parabolas over the Yue ming. Squids in opposing First Trench are awake and saying hello with their guns. That’s all. Nothing more than that. Though it seems everything to terrified youths prone and fixed in slime inside the eternal shell fall. They roll into the deepest crater yet, breathing heavily as they sit or lie at its dank, stinking bottom. Steeling themselves and each other to make the final dash, before luck at last runs out.
“Last twenty meters, lads,” the gunsō pants.
There’s nothing else to say. They say nothing. They look around the violent excavation and discover they’re not alone. At least thirty corpses, whole and part, share the crater and ejecta with them. The one eyed boy turns sickly white as his hand slips inside a writhing pile of wormy guts. He pulls it out, frantically wiping clinging bits of rotten, black entrails onto his leg. He wretches and dry heaves. No vomit comes up. He already left his bilious morning meal 200 meters back.
‘New torments and tormented souls they see all around wherever they move, howsoever they turn, wherever they gaze.’ And behind, the hard way back to the ice trucks and indifferent gendarme and two waiting Daegu boys? ‘So long a train of dead, they can’t believe Death undid so many.’
They’re beyond caring about corpses. So they wait with the dead until they’re rested enough to make the final push to the looming bunker. Then they dash, crater to crater. Sideways, sometimes backwards, like confused crustaceans. More shells rock the ground and split the sky above. It’s amazing to watching infantry that ‘the boys’ aren’t all killed in the first seconds of the mad dash to the bunker. They jump and fall and crawl, rise and run, fall again, climb and slip and slither along a narrow bridge of life passing over the dying and the damned who call out to join them and the Yue ming daemons in the Dark Capital, the City of Destruction.
At last they reach the blessed refuge. They roll down a mucky rear ramp into the back entrance of the half buried blockhouse, two-by-two with crystal promises of future death held between each pair. The structure started all above ground but was remade into a bunker, less by engineers than by constant enemy shelling that covered most of the grimy superconcrete with tossed over dirt and clots of clay. Two startled guards level stub masers at the tangling mess of boys and mud and crates piling up unkempt at the ramp’s end. A single thought unites them in their tangled separation.
‘I made it! I’m alive!’
‘Please no! Don’t shoot!’
‘You can’t kill me now!’
A startled shōsa with warm, fatherly eyes looks over from a crate desk where he’s entering fire control orders on a scroll, planning a late day barrage to precede a trench raid his men will make that evening. He jumps to his feet in astonishment.
“Who the hell are you?”
They look less than human. More like piles of rags. All are covered in mud, vomit and trench shit. Two trail bits of rotten entrails from the corpse crater. Here and there it seems some mouse or shrew or mole or other timid burrow creature moves inside the rag pile, fearing to emerge into the sound and fury of a Thousand Worlds at war. They’re more thirsty than ever in their lives. They lie flat wherever they stopped rolling. Panting, sobbing, moaning to themselves. Then a brown nose twitches inside the pile, and another. They return to life.
The major recognizes a 32nd Supply flash beneath death gray mud that coats all the arrivals from hair to boots. He’s aghast. “Why would you make a simple ammo run though a bombardment? Are you mad? You should’ve waited. It’ll be over in less than 10 minutes.”
The physically drained gunsō knows enough not to volunteer that he’s the one in charge of this damned fool’s error. No one else in the muddy pile speaks either. They’re past any words, even the robusto freak, whose all white eyes look more alarming than ever, peering out from a mud plastered and clay covered face.
“My gods! You’re just children!” the shōsa exclaims. The rag lads do look at that moment like the children they are. The tall mercury baller blushes in shame. Some cry freely in relief and for the pain rushing into warming and flexing fingers, free of the crates. Others seek to conceal guilt. Two kids piss their utes, again. The major turns to his aide. The fatherly view of him that his men have is confirmed.
“See that these children are watered and fed.”
“Yes, major.”
“Let them wash and rest as well, before they go back.”
‘Go back? No!’
‘I can’t go back, not through that!’
He says to the gunsō that he’s most grateful for the crystal magazines, but he especially needs the biggest crates in the ice trucks, the ones full of larger crystals for his heavy spandaus. He says that a night raid is going over-the-top tonight, and advises the sergeant about “this sector’s shelling patterns,” so that he doesn’t get ‘the boys’ caught out in a steel rain fall again. He warns the gunsō to make all his ammo runs before the evening shelling.
“How many trips will it take to unload your convoy? I can only lend you 200 men to help. And I want every damn one of them back here on the line by dusk. Big raid tonight. Real big. Whole brigade is going up-and-over.”
“We should be able to unload in ten trips, sir.”
“Alright. You have nearly a whole day ahead to finish. Take 10 mikes to rest our children, organize the porters, and get on with it. I need that spandau crystal.”
“Yes sir.”
“Finish up well before my boys go over tonight. We can use the big crystals for the spandaus most of all,” he repeats. “Make those top priority, first trip back.”
“What happens if we get stuck here tonight, sir?’
“Two days minimum before you can leave, so don’t let it happen.”
They have to go back, or else the ice trucks will be stuck in this sector for two days at least, and they’ll be stuck here, too. The convoy is parked in the open with only light camo to hide it from seekers, drones, and maybe even rear area maquis spies. The trucks will be badly exposed, until the enemy settles back into routine daily shelling as his anger over the coming raid subsides. Worse, the gunsō knows that unit specialty doesn’t matter once a big infantry fight starts. If they stay, the kindly major will send them hurtling across the black along with all the rest.
“No way to tell,” he continues. “Things have been getting nastier every month up here. Something new is coming in the north. So you get unloaded, fast.”
***
‘The boys’ set out to recross the rear of First Trench. With just 216 porters, they have to make three priority trips before the ski trucks are emptied of spandau ammo crates. They unload all the rest into a nearby reinforced ammo dump, then ready Supply Convoy #75347 to skedaddle back to the world. The only unhappy boy is the one left to guard the ski trucks. He’s envious that the rest got to see the black. Serra da Estrela has fallen sick again. He’s unconscious, so has no opinion.
All the rest of ‘the boys’ want to get away from the kindly major with his hot food but stupid raid. Away from the eternal dialogue the dead are having with the damned. None of them are eager to see more of the war. They unload the last crate into the ammo bunker and clamber back onboard the ski trucks, urging the gunsō and the little convoy to depart. The one eyed lad says his usual nothing.
The uncommitted gendarme stands where they first met him, scratching at another biting louse inside his perfect, unmuddie
d black and silver uniform. He doesn’t notice or care that the supply boys are gone, or that the big guns start up behind the hillock. He has his own troubles. The angry hornet is back, buzzing his head, taunting him with its beating wings, darting in to sting his neck and face.
The convoy is bouncing high and empty on the east-west feeder road, heading across open tundra, back to the Nordbahn and a short run due south. Thence it will reconnect to the forest rollbahn to make 4,000 klics through dense, forested hills. Once again, it will run blacked out, under total light security protocol, steering by infrared dumb bots by day and instrument screens at night. They’ll be glad to get back on the miserable rollbahn they once despised, back to the safety of pine forest and ruts and gilly terrain. Glad to pass deep drifts where they left three dead boys.