Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  There appeared to be nobody in sight but he waited.

  After a few moments he crept forward to the end of the fence and crouched again.

  At the far side of the yard by the end trainshed, three guards sat on an old water tank. He could just make out the brims of their hats and the glimmer of the rifles propped up against the side.

  He slowly returned the way he had come, back along the fence to the corner of the building and down the side of the wall to the metal door and pulled it open quietly and told the kid and the men what he had seen and told them he would be back soon and whatever they did they were to stay quiet and then he left again before they could reply.

  He pushed the door closed and turned towards the back of the building and turned along the rear and passed across the gap to the next shed and then the one after that until he was at the far edge of the ringfenced compound.

  He peered around the corner to where the men were sitting a hundred feet away and stooped low and moved into the bushes. He breathed slowly and quietly through his nose and walked on his toes even though he was stooped and he made an effort to watch his footsteps on the dry ground for fear of stepping on something that would crunch or crack and give him away.

  He got to within twenty feet of the guards and stopped.

  He could hear them chatting and laughing quietly in the night. Two men sat on top of the rusty old tank with their rifles on the ground next to them and the third man was reclined back on the ground beneath them with his rifle slung across his back.

  The American squinted in the dark at the rifles and thought they may be Kalashnikovs but he couldn’t see them well enough to be sure.

  He watched.

  He ran his thoughts around in his head and settled on a plan and ran it again and tried to visualise it until he was sure of his tactic and he looked around him again and listened intently to be sure there were only those three men there.

  He prayed their weapons were loaded and he closed his eyes as he did so even though he had long lost his faith in any god.

  Then, like a flash, he leaped forward from the undergrowth and seized hold of the rifle that was still strapped to the guard’s back and heaved it backwards, dragging the man with it, and turned it in his hands and squeezed in the trigger and let out a burst of ammunition that spat across the other two soldiers before they could even stand. The man on the tank toppled backwards onto the ground below and the American pulled the rifle up and aimed it down at the soldier beneath him and squeezed the trigger again.

  The shots rang out in the quiet night and echoed beyond themselves.

  He held the rifle in one hand and squatted on the spot with the bloodsplattered guard and listened into the night but there was nothing to be heard and he waited and slowed his breath and listened more until he was completely sure nobody else was approaching.

  He moved cautiously back to the trainshed and as he did so he passed the shed with the other group trapped inside and he knew they may be there into the next day should they not have their own way of breaking the padlocks. At the side of the tracks, near where the bodies of the three men were laying, the junction box with the power switches was sitting smashed open and the little metal door hung on its hinges. He looked inside and though he didn’t know what any of the switches did he pressed the buttons regardless.

  The first one, red and bigger than the rest, did nothing at all and he pressed it again and watched the doors and the lights and listened to the cables for the hum of electrics. He pressed it on and off and on again. He pressed the two black ones underneath and still nothing. In the top corner he saw the little metal lever, rusted and bent and depressed into its fixings. He tried to flick it upwards and it wouldn’t budge and he pushed at it with the base of his hand but it dug into his skin so he rounded the gun and placed it against the bottom of the lever and then swung the rifle into it hard.

  The rusty switch flicked upwards and the little green light on the front flicked on and the box whirred.

  The kicking and banging in the second trainshed stopped.

  He looked up the tracks for any sign of more guards approaching as anyone nearby would have heard the gunshots but the night was still quiet and the sky still smoky and glowing at the horizon.

  He picked up the other two rifles and slung all three across his back and walked over the tracks through the darkness to the front of the trainshed. On the front exterior wall the cover to the control box was hanging open and the two lights inside were illuminated green.

  He pressed the biggest of the buttons and the spotlight on the front of the shed flashed on in an explosion of white that lit up the trainyard and beyond and he immediately pressed it back off again and spun around.

  “Shit” he muttered to himself.

  He waited and watched back off down the tracks.

  When he was sure there was nobody coming he turned back to the box. There were two smaller buttons, one above the other, and he pressed the top one and the motor in the shutter door clicked. He pressed it again and held it down and the metal door whirred and scraped and then started to open up.

  The people inside were quiet and as it opened he started to see the feet of those inside. They shuffled backwards away from the door and as it rose further he saw the crowd huddled together watching wide eyed and he saw the kid smiling and when they saw him they let out a mighty cheer and shouted to him and he frantically tried to quiet them and told them to move as quickly and as quietly as possible and to spread out and to run for more guards were surely on their way. Men came to him to shake his hand and thank him and the women tried to hug him but told them again of the need to run and they picked up their luggage from what remained, though the guards had taken most of it, and some didn’t bother at all and they scattered into the night and within a moment the few hundred people had gone entirely.

  The man with the moustache remained there and he walked to the American with the kid.

  “Good work wrestler, you are the saviour of many people today, god is surely with you”

  The American smiled dryly and cocked his chin to one side.

  “I’m not sure god’s with any of us. Go”

  “My friend we are all in your debt now, I will help you to get away from this place. You can use a man here who speaks the language as you and your compatriot do not”

  The American shook his head.

  “No, we’ll be fine, you would do better just going. Good luck to you”

  The man stood where he stood and looked to the kid and back to the American.

  “I will not go. I will at the very least help you to get away from here. I will not accept it any other way”

  The American turned to the kid as though seeking his approval though he was not and the kid shrugged very slightly and the American nodded and agreed and thanked the man.

  The American tossed one of the assault rifles to the kid and turned to face the other train shed.

  “Let’s get those other people out of here as quickly as we can”

  As the shutter on the second shed rose up, the people inside shrunk backwards into the building and when it was above head height they saw against the darkness and the distant glowing fires on the horizon the figures of the three men armed with rifles standing facing them and none of the people moved.

  “Go” the kid shouted into the cavernous steel shed, “you’re free. Go quickly”

  They shuffled and muttered to themselves but none moved for they did know who those men were or what they wanted from that situation here in the deep of the night.

  Then from the crowd a man pushed forward out of the darkness and they saw the pale moonlight glimmer on his blonde dreadlocked hair.

  “You old dogs” he laughed moving forward from the crowd, he threw his hands up in the air, “I don’t even want to know what you’ve done”

  “Go” the American called again to the people in the shed and they slowly started to shuffle out of the building and then they moved quicker and then the
y ran and they cheered and shouted and disappeared into the blackness like birds scared from their roost.

  The American tossed the third rifle to the Dutchman.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “I couldn’t get on that train, a woman fell in front of me and I had to wait for the next one. Looks like they got them both though”

  They slapped hands with each other.

  “Where’s all the luggage gone?”

  The American shook his head.

  “Gone, man”

  The Dutchman looked at him with his mouth open and his eyes wide.

  “Goddamned criminals”

  “So called paramilitary apparently”

  The Dutchman shook his head.

  “Where the hell did you get the Kalashnikovs?” the Dutchman asked, holding the rifle up to the electric light and inspecting it.

  “From them”

  The American pointed the rifle butt away to the side of the tracks into the dark dusty undergrowth where they could just make out the three bodies piled by the water tank.

  “Ah. Fuck. We need to be going then?” he said smiling dryly.

  The American nodded.

  “You can say that again.

  Chapter Nine

  Patna

  The four men reached the edge of the city where the low buildings were rugged and rough and broken and the place was quiet and dark though there were shadows of men moving in the sidestreets. They moved quickly through the place with their rifles readied. A scrawny dog barked from inside a chain fence as they passed and a few yards away another lay dead in the road, its carcass half pulled open by something or other and its innards dried and trailed out through the dust. They passed swiftly through the streets and through the houses and headed north, though they did not know it for there was no way to follow the stars or the moon for neither showed in the dusky, smoky sky above them.

  At the end of the road they crossed the dry broken concrete behind the freight yard and came onto the open sandflats at the river. The shadows of the night had been left behind them and they could be sure they were alone there and the men relaxed though none of them knew at all what they should do next.

  Tiny lights twinkled across the water at some indeterminable distance and to the east downriver there was only darkness. To the west the mighty Ganges bent around the shoreline and on the horizon Patna glowed red and smoky like it was the underworld itself.

  They stood in silence and considered their options from that place.

  The river disappeared dark into the country to the east, back in the direction from which they had travelled.

  The fires burned to the west, a fiery blockade on their route.

  Eventually it was the kid who spoke.

  “I think we know which way we’re going, don’t you?” he asked nobody in particular.

  They all nodded.

  They followed the shoreline, staying clear of the darkened slums with the low tinroofed homes where the embers of old stovefires burned and dogs growled and shots sounded and eyes watched. The sandflats stretched out into the dark to the north and lost themselves somewhere in the deep blackness of the Ganges. An old man sat under a tree watching them, his eyes heavy but flashing like a wild animal. He didn’t get up from where he sat but he followed them with his stare until they were entirely out of his view as they were now four-strong and with rifles and the man knew that anyone outside in that place at that time would surely be able to take care of himself and should therefore be afforded his mistrust.

  They came to a road bridge spanning the black river and their passage along the shoreline came to an end and they were forced inland into the muddle of buildings and took the main road south. A group of men stood outside smashed offices and whistled through their teeth and hissed at the airmen but they continued on their way and the men let them pass.

  The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and rot and on the far side of the road the body of a man lay crooked on the stone steps of a building in a pool of blackened and congealed blood. Two motorbikes screamed behind them and the men turned and the bikes appeared from a side road and came by them with the riders dressed in leathers and wrapped in keffiyehs and a man on the back carried a rifle much like their own. A moment later a police van followed them around the corner but the bikes had already disappeared into another sideroad and the van continued on to the south where it would inevitably lose its prey.

  “You know what I’m starting to think?” the Dutchman asked as they walked, the other men around him, silent, “I think we were locked in that trainyard for our own safety”

  A thick cloud of smog and fire smoke hung low over the city, illuminated orange against the night and the buildings rose black and metal and otherworldly from the scorched earth and cut into the sky and disappeared up into the smoke like mountains into cloud. A siren wailed relentlessly in the distance.

  They walked through the havoc past buildings looted of their contents, their windows smashed and doors taken from their hinges and they kept their eyes wide and their rifles levelled and pushed west into the centre of the town.

  They lost count of the bodies they passed in the street.

  The American strode at the front of the group with the rifle tucked under his arm and the strap across his back watching everywhere at once. The kid walked behind him at a close distance holding his rifle readied in front of him like a soldier behind the enemy frontline, and the Dutchman and the man with the moustache at the back with the third Kalashnikov. The Dutchman watched behind them as they walked and they stopped and listened at any noise unnatural to that place of which there were many.

  “We need food” the Dutchman called, “I haven’t eaten a thing in nearly two days”

  The men agreed through there was no place there to buy food or anything else. The city had been condemned for some time and through there existed an underworld of rogues and crooks it was no longer a city as they would have known it and certainly nowhere to buy goods.

  A white wall wrapped around the perimeter of the school and in the courtyard there two men sat at their fire, burning inside a metal rubbish bin. They were little more than silhouettes in the night and from distance they could be mistaken for animals. They stopped when they saw the approaching party and the kid saw their eyes glisten orange in the firelight.

  Neither moved.

  The Dutchman called to them and they stopped at the wall and peered over and the men didn’t reply.

  The American put his rifle up onto the wall and then lifted himself up and dropped off the other side into the courtyard.

  Both men immediately stood.

  “It’s OK” the American called, “we ain’t here to harm ya”

  The moustachioed man repeated the message in Hindi.

  Neither man moved from their fire but both looked ready to should the moment require it.

  The American left the rifle on the wall and put both his hands in the air to show he held no weapon or otherwise.

  “Can I talk to you?” he called stepping forward.

  One of the men shouted back to them.

  “What did he say?” asked the American, turning slightly to the man with the moustache.

  The moustachioed man told him.

  “He said do not go any closer to them or they will shoot you where you stand”

  The American nodded slowly.

  “Tell them we need their help”

  The man with the moustache called to them and told them that they needed the men’s help and the men called back to him and said they had nothing that could be of help and to leave. He told them they needed food and the men called back saying that everyone there did. They said that the army had come in and moved everyone away and the place was quarantined and the army now controlled the town.

  “So why are they here?” the Dutchman asked and the man with the moustache asked them why they were there in that place and the men called back that they had no other place to be and that the question
could easily be reversed onto themselves. They said there was disease in the town and why go to some other place just to die when that was the place where they had always been and they would die regardless.

  The Dutchman nodded.

  “Ask them where we can find the army?” the kid called from the other side of the wall.

  The moustachioed man asked and the men replied.

  “He said if we continue to walk the streets with rifles they will surely soon find us”

  The kid nodded and the men called again.

  “They said that if we leave the city to the east we will find them but he said they will find us here first so why even try”

  They called their thanks to the men but neither replied and the men stood by their fire and watched them leave until they were gone from sight completely.

  The sun started to come through the smoky sky and the orange glow faded to grey. They stopped in the grounds of the museum which had once been ablaze but was extinguished and was blackened and without windows and the trees around the grounds were also black and charred and they found an alcove in the side of the building wall and sat together and slept for a short while and they looked to anyone who would pass as though they were homeless and indeed they were.

  When they woke the air was hot and the place was dead. They passed low houses made from timber and metal sheeting with windows knocked out and burned and deserted and ransacked. The Dutchman stepped in through the broken screen door of one and looked inside and went to the kitchen and checked the cupboards and there were some items there but nothing edible.

  They checked every house on the road.

  The food which they found was spoiled for the power had been off for some time there and nothing was refrigerated. In one house they stepped around the bodies of a woman and two children laying together on the floor and they were decomposing and being eaten by flies and rodents and the smell overwhelmed them but in the kitchen they found two tins of tomatoes and one of corn and a knife with which to open them and they took them from the house and ate them outside in the yard.