18 Walls

by Teo Xue Shen

  “Ren!”

  I don’t know who shouted my name. Everyone’s yelling at the same time. But that shout probably saved my life. I manage to lift a pincer as something hard slams into my back. The pincer cracks, absorbing the impact of whatever hit me. A claw. That’s all I see as I crane my neck to search for the offending object. Two pistol shots follow, burying themselves into the pincer. Snarling, the Savage rips the claw free and swings it at my head, firing from a pistol clutched in its other hand. I intercept the claw with my stinger, block the bullets with two pincers and return fire. Click. Shit, I’m fresh out of bullets.

  A fiery red club knocks the Savage aside, caving in the ribs on its left. It’s a fatal blow. Nevertheless, I finish the job, driving my butterfly knife into its neck. A merciful end. I return my eyes to the watchtower. One Savage is dead, its corpse hanging over the railing of the watchtower. The other lunges at Fabian, the lookout. He’s in a bad shape. Blood is pouring from a wound on his head, his face just centimetres away from the Savage’s Strachea.

  “Get down,” I yell, taking aim with my reloaded rifle.

  I don’t have a clear shot. Fabian’s Extension is shoved against the Savage’s Strachea, shielding both their heads from my line of fire. He pulls out a knife and stabs the Savage repeatedly in the gut. In response, the Savage slams its Strachea against the wall of the watchtower in a final act of defiance, shattering it. We’re forced to watch in horror as the Savage throws itself off the tower, dragging Fabian with it. There’s a sickening thud when they hit the ground. Being the nearest to the watchtower, I’m the first on the scene. Fabian is dead. The impact of the fall has rammed the Savage’s Strachea into his neck.

  In stunned silence, we leave Sean as a lookout in the watchtower and return to the tent where the leader of Squad 526 is lying, still strapped to the stretcher. There’s probably no need for a lookout, since the Savages we just fought were supposed to be stragglers, but after the confrontation, no one’s taking any chances. The man hurriedly waves us over.

  “Is everyone…”

  He reads our expressions and gulps.

  “Fabian?”

  I shake my head. The man takes a deep breath, holds it for a minute before slowly letting it out.

  “He was the last member of my family,” he sighs. “The only family I’ve ever had. Squad Five-Two-Six, that is. They’re all gone now.”

  He beckons to me.

  “Could you please pass me that box at the corner of the tent?”

  I do as he asks.

  “Please give me a moment, will you? I would like to, you know…mourn.”

  Raine nods sharply and ushers us out of the room.

  “Guess I’m the only one left now, huh?” I hear him say as we leave the tent.

  Moments later, a gunshot echoes across the clearing. He’s gone. Just like that. He’s followed his squad to the other side. We never even got the chance to ask his name.

  “Shouldn’t have given him the bloody box.” Rick swallows hard, staring at the ground.

  He’s taken the previous battle pretty well, but this death seems to hit him harder than all the other ones.

  “No.” Raine shakes her head firmly. “It’s not our place to say otherwise.”

  “There were other choices he could have made,” Rick insists. “It didn’t have to be like this.”

  “That’s not…”

  “Let’s just bury them and report to Ulas, all right?” April interrupts. “We should all catch a break too. Especially after what just happened.”

  For someone who entered a fight between monsters with just a knife and her trusty M16, she’s a lot less shaken than she should be. In fact, she seems to be the calmest amongst us. Under her supervision, we bury the bodies.

  “Squad Seventy-Two, give me your status. I repeat, Squad Seventy-Two, give me your status.”

  The radio crackles. There’s shouting in the background. I guess those people back at the main camp have it tough as well, controlling so many squads at one go. I summarise the events of the past hour as quickly as I can.

  “Good work. There’s another mission for you.”

  It’s Ulas. I can recognise his voice. He doesn’t even mention Squad 526.

  “A hundred and thirty kilometres north from where you are lies the frontline of the battlefield. As the crow flies, it’s only slightly over thirty kilometres, but there are areas you have to avoid at all costs. A city we’ve been trying to retake from the Savages for months. Your target is east of that city. We’ve received word that the Savages have assembled a force to ambush and cut our supply lines to that city. You will have to pass through the city and confirm this piece of news. If it’s true, stall them as best you can and report to me instantly. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stall them. Not wipe them out or annihilate them. Stall them. He doesn’t believe we stand a chance. Yet, he’s sending us in anyway. Because there’s no one left. Because a little bit of hope is better than none. Just how much resolve does it take to personally send a group of people to their deaths for the sake of a larger cause?

  “We’ll guide you along the way. You’re the closest, undamaged and unengaged squad at the moment so you have to make it there, no matter what. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Leave the city to the squads already present there. Your goal is to protect our supply lines.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then, all the best.”

  The radio falls silent and so do we.

  “So, how the hell do we get there? Walk?”

  Raine, asking the right questions at the right time.

  “We’ll leave at dawn,” I sigh. “For now, I’ll take over Sean in the watchtower. The rest of you, get some rest.”

  As I make my way up the watchtower, I notice a puddle of vomit on the ground beneath. Sean. I can’t blame him. He’s a shivering mess, huddled in a corner of the watchtower opposite the wall which the Savage broke. His pale face is buried between his knees, beads of sweat running down his unruly mop of hair. Not really the best lookout, but, hey, at least he’s trying.

  “You okay?” I ask, shaking him gently on the shoulder.

  He jumps a little, then relaxes when he realises it’s just me.

  “Yeah. Sorry, I’m not…uh…good with this. I thought I’d be fine, but…”

  “Catch a break. We’ll be leaving at dawn tomorrow.” I fill him in on the details. “Now, go get some sleep.”

  He nods gratefully and shimmies down the watchtower. I glance around. The only chair has been smashed into splinters, leaving me with no choice but to stand. Night falls. It’s cold. Or maybe I’m the one who’s cold. I think about Squad 526. About the Savages I killed. About Street 51. When someone dies, you’re supposed to be sad, especially when you’ve interacted with them. I know that much. So why? Why does nothing stir inside me when I think about them? There’s a strange emptiness enveloping me, sending tingles down my spine. The warmth I felt that night when we toured the city is gone too. I shiver involuntarily. It’s probably not the best time to be thinking about such things, but it’s been bugging me for ages.

  “Guess I’m born different?” I mutter under my breath. “At least I’ve still got emotions. Unlike the Savages.”

  “Did you say different? What’s different?”

  With a start, I spin around, rifle at my shoulder, only to find Raine’s head popping out from the ladder.

  She hauls herself onto the platform. “Hey, get that rifle out of my face, will you?”

  “Sorry.” I lower the rifle. “Why’re you even here?”

  “Can’t sleep,” she shrugs. “Looks like you can’t either.”

  “There’s a reason why I’m called a lookout.”

  She waves me off and passes over a packet of biscuits.

  “So, what was that about? Talking to yourself?”

  “Nothing. Nothing important.”

  She raises an eyebrow but does
n’t question any further.

  “Say, Ren?” she asks after a couple of minutes of silence.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you have a life goal?”

  I stare at her for a moment. She’s leaning against the railing of the watchtower, gazing out into the darkness of the night. There’s a faraway look in her eyes, as if she can see beyond the inky black of the canopy above, into the vast, mystical realm of the stars.

  “Where’d this even come from?”

  “I was just thinking, if I were to die like the members of Squad Five-Two-Six, in those last moments of my life, what would I feel like? Having never accomplished anything, having never reached out towards anything but having lost everything. I think there should be something I want to achieve, but I don’t know what it is. And I don’t want to die without knowing.”

  “Oh. I see. I guess it usually occurs to you along the way. You know, when shit happens.”

  “So you do have one?”

  “Sort of, yeah. Although I’m probably the last person you should be asking.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She reaches over and helps herself to a biscuit. “Come on, out with it.”

  I take a deep breath. Something tells me I’m not getting away from this one. And so, I tell her.

  “I want to kill a man.”

  Her head turns towards me so quickly it looks like it’s in danger of falling off her shoulders. The biscuit falls from her fingers, swallowed by the impenetrable darkness below.

  “Come again?” she asks in disbelief. “You what?”

  “There’s someone I want to kill.”

  10

  The couple at a table heard a shrill whistle and turned to see 15 guards burst into the room. The huge man in uniform opposite them leapt to his feet, his angular face stretched into a malicious grin as the guards handcuffed the husband and wife.

  “What the hell is the meaning of this?” the husband roared, watching in alarm as the guards handcuffed him and his wife. “Wasn’t this a negotiation?”

  A second whistle. A pair of guards barged in, dragging a struggling little boy. His eyes widened with recognition when he saw his parents, his frail body going limp with shock.

  “Wait, please, don’t…” the husband begged.

  Without another word, the large man struck him across the face. A tooth clattered across the floor. The woman screamed and struggled to no avail. The guards simply laughed.

  “Negotiations complete,” he grinned nastily. “Take them away.”

  The boy was tossed into a cell. Days passed. A week. A month. He didn’t know what had happened to his parents. The only things they gave him were bread and water. All he knew was the knifelike feeling of incessant hunger and thirst. He cried. He screamed. No one came for him. Eventually, the tears stopped falling.

  One day, he was forcibly dragged out of the cell and brought to what looked like a parade square. It was raining. In the middle of the square, a scaffold was set up. Four nooses hung from it, dangling threateningly in the downpour. And right below the scaffold, naked, bruised and so battered he could hardly recognise them, were his parents. Their wrists had been tied behind their backs. They’d been tortured. The boy screamed and ran towards them. Before he could embrace them, he was cruelly knocked aside by a heavily booted foot. It was the huge man from before. A large scar made its way down his scalp, marring the otherwise immaculate smoothness of his skin.

  “Hook them up!” he yelled with glee.

  Four guards tied one noose around the wrists of each captive and the other one around their necks. The father caught the boy’s eye and shook his head violently. His eyes reflected a calm acceptance.

  “Lift them up!”

  The boy watched, helpless, as the guards began pulling on the ropes. The ropes on the captives’ wrists were hoisted first, followed closely by the ones on their necks, just tight enough not to strangle the captives. The couple shared a look. They were in immense pain, but their faces betrayed nothing. Their child had seen enough pain. There were letters tattooed across their stomachs. AFFTP.

  Crack!

  The shoulders of the captives loudly dislocated under their own weight. As the ropes around their wrists suddenly slackened, the full weight of their bodies transferred onto the nooses. The woman, even as she choked, twisted around and stared into the boy’s, her son’s eyes.

  “We love you,” she mouthed. “Live.”

  Their faces began to distort. The boy could watch no longer. Mercifully, the rain poured down even harder, partially obscuring the gruesome sight in front of him.

  “…”

  The boy opened his mouth to scream for his parents, but nothing came out. His voice had left him. So had his tears. Only a hollow emptiness was left. He struggled to his feet and saw stars. Someone or something had hit him on the head. When the second blow came, he fell back to his knees, screaming words which would never be heard. A third blow knocked him out. The last thing he remembered, seared into his mind, was the sight of the huge man with the scar laughing horrendously while the mangled bodies of his parents hung on the scaffold, enveloped in the stillness of death.

  11

  “I’m sorry,” Raine’s voice is shaking. “Shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Nah, I don’t remember that much. After all, I was four when it happened.”

  She’s staring directly at me. For the moment, I’m grateful for the darkness. Her gaze is disconcerting.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” I turn my head slightly to face her. “I won’t get offended so just shoot away.”

  “How the hell are you still alive?”

  That’s the second time she has asked me a question like that. Not exactly a good thing.

  “No idea,” I shrug. “When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. They told me they found me lying unconscious at a pro-Savage stronghold. That was the first time I heard about the Savages.”

  “Pro-Savage?”

  “Yeah. People who think that the Savages should be integrated into society.”

  “What the heck? There are people like that?” she asks incredulously. “Why would anyone even…”

  “Beats me.”

  “All right, so this guy, the guy you’re after, he’s the one with the scar across his head, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’s a pro-Savage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re out for revenge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you even know anything else about this guy? Like his whereabouts and such?”

  “Nope.”

  She stares at me for a good ten count, swaying back and forth between laughing and crying.

  “That’s some life goal you got there,” she chuckles. “I wish you all the best.”

  The conversation moves on. Somewhere along the line, we go from leaning against the railing to sitting on the watchtower’s wooden floor. I find my eyelids growing heavy and I slip into the clutches of a deep, undisturbed slumber.

  It’s still dark when I wake. My shoulder is numb from an unnatural weight. It’s Raine’s head, her silky hair pressed against my shoulder. She looks so peaceful that I don’t want to wake her. So I sit, as still as I can possibly be, and wait for daybreak. Raine wakes before the sun rises, though. She opens her eyes slowly, then sits up with a start when she realises that she’s leaning on my shoulder.

  “Morning,” I yawn. “You have about half an hour to daybreak.”

  “Ah, I see. Not much point in sleeping any more.”

  We clamber down the watchtower and begin packing for the arduous journey ahead. As it turns out, we needn’t have bothered. Ulas has already made the necessary arrangements. A tank is here to pick us up. Yep, a freaking tank. Although we do have them, it’s rare to see a functional one as most of them have been outclassed by Extensions. The driver pops his head out and waves us on. Getting over our surprise, we cling onto the back of the tank with our Extensions and we
’re off.

  Even with the tank, the journey takes two days. As we near the location, something silver flashes towards the tank. We’re only saved by Raine, who hits it with her own Extension. It explodes, taking Raine’s Extension with it. The shock wave from the explosion sends us all reeling, despite the fact that we’ve raised our Extensions protectively over ourselves. My vision is blurry, an insistent ringing in my ears, blotting out all other forms of noise. I guess anti-tank shells are the limit to how much our Extensions can handle. When my vision starts to clear, all I see is a wall of brown. It takes me a moment to realise that I’m looking at Rick’s Extension. It mushrooms out from his shoulder blades, sheltering the rest of us from the brunt of the explosion. Then, Rick retracts his Extension and I see a seemingly endless field of rubble ahead. This is as far as we go with the tank. We disembark and push on into the city.

  If I had to choose the most apt word to describe the place, it would be “hell”. The deafening retort of gunfire echoes relentlessly, the bullets tearing the buildings and everything around them apart. Structures are reduced to empty husks, their walls crumbling even as we pass by, littering the ground with broken glass and plaster. Vehicles are burning, sending columns of acrid smoke across the city. Soldiers swarm the place like ants, engaging in close combat and often fatal battles with their Extensions. It all happens within a blink of an eye, a swift, brutal form of warfare.

  “Move!”

  I clap a stunned Sean on the back and we’re off, sprinting across the battlefield. We’re attacked, multiple times, as we navigate the area, but we don’t engage. We shield ourselves and move on. Farther east, I notice a strange building sticking out of the otherwise devastated landscape. An inverted bluish frustum mounted on a tall, cylindrical white pillar, topped off with a bright yellow sphere right in the centre of the frustum. Compared with its surroundings, it sticks out like a sore thumb.