Lament for the Afterlife

by Lisa L. Hannett

  “I’ll make us some soup in an hour or so. Holler if you need me.”

  That was a nod. The quick movement dislodges a tumble of unbearable, unspeakable thoughts, adding them to the jumble at Ann’s feet.

  In the kitchen, Jean takes one of Borys’ old boilersuits off a hook by the door and jerks it on over her khakis and blouse. The briefing in town had taken longer than expected; she’d raced home from gov’t house, hoping to arrive before Borys had woken for work—but his room was long cold when she got there, the bed empty, blankets taut with hospital corners. Another parcel left for her on the hallstand, special delivery. Another payment for her promise. Beneath the coveralls, Jean’s best downtown outfit is sweat-stained for no good reason, clammy in the folds and creases. She tightens the belt, tucks the tail into a loop to keep it from flapping. No point changing into scruffier clothes, she thinks, when the nice ones are already so dirty. No use ruining them either, just because they’re starting to stink.

  Waste not, want not, as Captain Len used to say. Jean always agreed with her dad in principle, but the expression irked—still irks—whenever she heard it. We’re all built to want, she thinks, unlatching the back door and propping it open, then grabbing a basket and trowel off the counter. Everyone dreams of something brighter. Something better.

  Leading a good life is about more than just survival.

  Bells strung on the door handle inside shout with brass tongues as Jean shuts the house up behind her. Outside, chimes jingle on the eaves and barbed wire scritches around every boarded window; but the bells are loudest, their yammering brash and insistent. The instant a grey creeper tries to sneak in—the very instant—Jean’s pistol will be out of the basket and in her hand. Firing true, the way Captain Len taught.

  Posture, Jeanie. Posture. Shoulders back. Chin lifted.

  She can still feel the pressure of her dad’s strong hands pushing, spine straightening. The knock of his boot between hers, widening her stance. Moving down the line, first to Wyatt then to Hap, correcting her brothers’ positions before letting any of them shoot.

  If you can’t keep a book balanced on your noggin ’til the clip’s empty, you’re doing it wrong. Sometimes, to prove the point, he’d fetch a set of hardbacks from the living room shelves. Nudging ’winds aside, he’d slip a volume on each of their heads then tell them to take aim. First to let it drop takes point on tonight’s sweep.

  Hours passed. Blisters formed on trigger fingers. Rage and desperation were rolled into pellets, crammed into bullet casings, shoved into clips and barrels. Wooden silhouettes set up in the yard took a pounding, the grey-painted figures reduced to kindling by day’s end. Stomachs rumbled, but the kids wouldn’t stop shooting unless Cap’s ’wind flicked them, flapping like a chequered flag. Chins up, shoulders back, they trained their thoughts, aimed, fired until they were told otherwise. Through it all books wobbled in a storm of powder and ’wind, but none fell.

  Jean chuckles, thinking back on it. It’s been ages since she’s tasted that kind of fear, since she smelled the sulphur of it. Things are no safer these days, really. She knows that. She’s seen the damage those grey bastards keep doing to her land, to her own people. Take a look at Borys, she thinks. Take a look at Peyt. But now, kneeling at the edge of the path that leads across their small, packed-dirt yard, digging into the earth, trowel rubbing the itch from her scarred palms, Jean is calm. Change is coming.

  Big—monumental—change.

  And she will make it happen.

  For the first time, Jean feels crucial. She’s in control of what’s to come. When called, she’ll go, join the marked forces, make use of her training, fight with body and ’wind—and she’ll be one of the last to die. After she’s gone, there will be no more nightly air raids, no more surprise attacks in the marketplace, no more children slaughtered in schools, no more mothers snatched from their own farmyards while hanging laundry out to dry. There will be an end. Ridiculous claims will be silenced, endless grey complaints drowned out by the singing roar of human voices.

  This land is our land …

  There will be no need for recon missions, once VERNA’s screamed her piece. No need for home searches. No need for a bunch of kids to sweep the paddocks each evening before bed, checking for grey slinkers, vainly looking for signs of returned captives.

  Greys are too greedy to release POWs, Jean thinks. They keep whatever they’ve stolen.

  Gravel gouges her knees as she digs. Jabbing the point down, uprooting hunks of clay. Setting them aside until she’s excavated a series of holes, each the depth and width of a balled fist. The trowel shunts in and out, ringing metallic, shifting dirt with a familiar rhythm. One-two, one-two, it beats the ground like her treaders used to when true-dark fell, Wyatt and Hap’s feet clomping close behind.

  Cap knew how much we dreaded going first into those fields, she thinks. Being first to maybe find Ma’s body.

  Despite gov’t warnings, Len Andrews grew barley, crops thick and high enough to hide an invading army on the land round their farm—but the profit, he’d said, was worth the risk of attack. In one good season, they’d kitted Wyatt out for the war. A few years later, Hap had himself some brand new gear to replace the second-hand. And by her fifteenth birthday, Jean had wagonloads of iron in the smithy Cap had built out back. The shells she’d forged were strong but lightweight. Small enough to sit in a child’s palm. Perfectly lethal. But even armed with pistols and grenades, traipsing through rows of shadow-thick barley had been worse than nightmares. Breath was gale-loud in the darkness, rasping from open mouths. Tears had streamed from eyes too afraid to blink. Two minutes in, the boys had needed to stop and piss out their jitters. Jean had kept watch, spying greys through rippling stalks.

  Over there, she’d whispered, hammer cocked. Sifting through the rows, the greys had been impossible to get a fix on; the harder she’d stared, the more her focus had blurred. Like flare-auroras, the bastards were all a-shimmer, not a straight or clear line about them.

  That’s some camo they got on, Wyatt had said.

  You sure it’s even them?

  Hap’s eyes always were bad, Jean thinks, taking a loaded mine from her basket and lowering it into a fresh hole. Loosely packing gravel around it, she unfurls a length of tripwire and carefully loops it around the firing pin. With a deftness that would’ve made Cap proud, she smooths dry soil overtop, masking the dip in the ground. Gently, so gently, she moves to the next hollow and repeats the process, planting and stringing the first line of explosives together with a near-invisible string.

  After leaning close to tie off the last mine in the row, Jean sits back on her heels, wipes her brow. Sweat trickles down her temples and in the runnels beside her nose; green glints off droplets caught in her lashes, vision sparkling as flares arc through the darkening sky. Quick-scrubbing her eyes, she wonders how Hap managed to survive so long on the front. For five years and twice as many tours, her baby brother had laid traps for the greys without once admitting he was half-blind. Refusing to wear the specs Jean bought, Hap had sent them back wrapped in blank paper, a curt message parcelled on the Pigeon’s tongue.

  Nothing to see out here, Jeanie.

  Still, she knows he was wrong. The greys had been there all those nights in the paddocks—she’s absolutely positive—they’d been there in the mornings when she pushed the plough, blades tearing into hidden bodies, mules’ hoofs crushing buried skulls. Cap always said the bastards tunnelled shallow as well as deep; they’d win ground however they could, he’d said, from above and below. While gathering the harvest Jean had trod over them, just waiting for a hand to burst from the soil and snatch at her ankle, a sharp-toothed mouth to chew through the dirt and snare her with guttural spells. She’d felt their bones breaking as she fled the field, they were that close to the soles of her feet.

  Of the three of them, Hap was the stubborn child. Rejecting bare truth, he went to war for his own reasons. For Ma’s memory, maybe. For Len’s sake. Jean was never rea
lly sure why Hap joined the fray—he’d never had Wyatt’s passion for it. He’d never had Jean’s conviction. Five years, ten tours, without a break in between. Without once getting a clear look at the greys before they’d swept him.

  Jean had wanted to enlist. She’d been a skinny kid, but was strong from pushing the plough, stronger still from the rigours of Captain Len’s training. Her aim was solid—she could shoot the pressboard cut-out through the eye from fifty paces—and her throwing arm was unmatched. Wyatt and Hap were decent shots, but they didn’t have Jean’s feel for glowing cherries or her skill with burrowing beetles.

  Brushing dirt from her coveralls, Jean stands, twisting to ease the twinge in her back. For years, Cap had them practise with clods of earth before giving them live shells to throw. Don’t let that coin burn a hole in your pocket, he’d say, winking as he placed ’crackers behind their ears. Sparking the long fuses, Cap judged the kids’ technique in scooping ’wind, throwing fire. With the hiss of flame racing toward their faces, all three of them had learned fast.

  Smooth motions, Cap’d say. Scalp and grab, cock-and-lock, flow-and-throw.

  Bending over, Jean scrapes up a handful of clay. The damp coolness soothes her palms; the incisions itch, forever reopening, forever healing. Slow inhale, slow exhale. She rolls the muck into a compact ball, gaze soft, focusing on the black Xs spray-painted onto low concrete wall fencing the yard. Smooth motions, she thinks, breathing out, throwing.

  Again, she hears Cap say.

  She bends, scrapes, centres, throws—

  Again.

  Not moving left or right, staying on the firm path, she lobs lump after lump—

  Again.

  Shoulders throbbing, eyebrows and temples smooth-shining with old scars, Jean hits every target, spattering the wall until Xs become Ys or stunted Vs. She throws to keep sharp. To make her ’wind simmer. To vent suppressed frustrations.

  Jean had wanted to enlist.

  She’d had Len’s permission—no, more: she’d had his blessing. With Wyatt, she’d volunteered at the draft; Hap wasn’t yet ready, their dad had said. The bub would follow next round, maybe the round after that. Fair enough, Jean remembers thinking. Len had always been fair.

  At headquarters, the Caps took in Wyatt’s fine gear and muscular build and gave him diamond-marked infantry papers. Brow furrowed, her brother’s smile had faded when the officers directed Jean to the airfield. “But she’s an ace grenadier,” he’d started, soon stifled by high-ranking glares. “She’s light and wiry,” came the terse reply. Ticking boxes and stamping Jean’s papers with a wavy blue icon that looked, unnervingly, like a mop, the Cap had instructed: “Follow the guywires to the north end of camp. Join the other ship-monkeys.”

  But when she’d got there the flyers didn’t need any more cleaners, slim or not, so they scribbled amendments on her ID and sent her to the corrals—where the muckers took one look at her and pointed to the mess hall. “Horses’ll chomp a bit like you,” the tar-spitting stableboys had teased. “Them arms of yers’d do a fair bit of damage on the pots, mind.”

  Thinking on it now, again, gets Jean’s wordwind firing afresh. The backyard resounds with thwaps and smacksmacksmacks as she throws her anger at the wall. Decades later, it still burns that the cooks wouldn’t take her—“Nothing personal, love,” they’d said, sweating behind boiling saucepans, puff-headed in greasy shower-caps. “Got a new squad of stumpies in last week; they legs ain’t worth shit, but they sure can stir the fuck outta Barge’s gruel. Don’t need any extra limbs round here at the mo.” It still burns how there’d been nothing else for it, no other options. If Jean hadn’t wanted to just turn-tail and go home, if she was to get any time in action, time to prove her worth, time to bag some greys—she’d have to accept the only job left open. The lowest role. The most demeaning.

  Wearing mask and camo, she’d plug wounds instead of inflict them. Drive the corpse-wagon. Drag a one-man stretcher. Not fighting, but fixing up those who did. Not acting, reacting. Not leading the attack—following as a red-starred field nurse, third class, medcorps.

  Len never would’ve forgiven her, if he’d found out. His daughter, a medic. In her father’s mind, there was a hierarchy of achievement that peaked at killing and troughed at death. The Andrews, he’d thought, were like warriors of old: fighting in the high season, farming in the low. It wasn’t for them to weave bandages or set bones; their priority was to spill enough blood to justify the soppers’ existence.

  “Tag-alongs, the lot of them,” he’d explain, pointing to an illustration of stretcher-bearers in one of his many books. At night, after patrolling their acreage, Jean and her brothers would sit at Len’s feet, soak the chill from their souls with cups of hot stock, and listen, rapt as he read aloud.

  What a collection Dad had, she thinks, looking up to gauge the depth of steel in the sky, reckoning there’s still time to dig another line of defence. Ann will be needing supper soon, she thinks, moving no further than the next unworked plot. In neighbouring houses, lamps begin to set windows aglow, yellow rectangles and orange squares flickering to life in the murk of twilight. Such dull hues, Jean thinks, putting her shovel to work. This weak sunset has nothing on the pictures in Len’s precious books. Each cover was marked with bold symbols, icons with changeable meanings. Inside, pages were plastered with drawings, cuttings and slogans. Stop the Spread typed beneath a map of their country, the ragged borders blurred by grey arrows moving in from abroad. We’ll finish what they started ran alongside an advertisement for grade-A lassos and wire snares to enhance ’windlashes. Grey creatures with hooked noses and dripping red maws crept down suburban streets, carrying a froth of eyes on their backs, a whole spectrum of irises gleaming from the page. Sketched in a bungalow with one see-through wall, a little girl just like Jeanie had binoculars raised, pointed at the creeper; in a speech bubble above her daddy’s head, the slogan See Something? Say Something floated up to the triangle roof. But Jeanie’s all-time favourite had been a two-page diagram in a thin hardcover, vibrant in shades of green, instructing soldiers on effective ’wind-loading techniques. Because they won’t shoot themselves.

  “Why do the greys hate us? What did we ever do to them?” Jeanie had asked once, tone even, refusing to sound bewildered. She’d wanted facts, plain and simple. Good intel makes the best weapon, Captain Len had always said—but at night it wasn’t Captain Len who regaled them with bedtime tales; it was plain Len, their peg-legged worry-lined old man. His advice was molasses: sweet but slow in coming.

  “Depends on who’s telling the story,” Len had said. And though Jeanie had seen the set of his jaw, the that’s enough twist to his mouth, the questions had kept gushing out.

  “But what if they’ve changed their minds? What if they’re attacking now only because we’re attacking? What if they’ve surrendered, maybe offered a truce, and we missed it ’cause we don’t speak the same language? What if they’re already gone? What if we got them all without realising? What if we’re just shooting other people now, thinking they’re greys, and they’re shooting us for the same reason? What if we’re wrong, Len? What if we’re wrong.”

  “Wash that filth out yer mouth,” Len had said. Wyatt and Hap had blanched, eyes wide, breath frozen in their chests. Lightheaded, Jeanie had tried to laugh it off. Thoughts tumbling fast, full-joshing, her ’wind sketched jokes about chains being yanked, legs being pulled, knees being slapped. Wink-winks spun round the living room, feeble and pink. Nudge-nudges jabbed Len in the ribs, failing to make him smile.

  Stupid kid, she thinks. Pathetic. With moves like that, no wonder she’d been relegated to the red-stars. In hindsight, Jean can clearly see Jeanie’s weaknesses. Naïveté. Ambition. An eagerness to please. Jeanie didn’t have the control Jean now has, the power to protect her family, to give them a future.

  Jeanie had deserved Len’s scorn, although he’d never crowned her with that particular wreath of thorns. As far as Captain Len had known, his daughter had been a top-
notch grenadier for almost a year, destroying hordes of greys, diffusing their tricks and magic. And Wyatt hadn’t had a chance to disabuse him of this fancy. Oh, her big brother knew the truth all right. Jeanie’d lost count of the number of times he’d ignored her on the field, in the mess tent, at assemblies on base. Like Hap, Wyatt could see without seeing. Even when he was snagged on a grey IED, legs blown clear off and guts spilling from the canyon in his belly, even when Jeanie had loaded his half-self onto a gurney and carried him off the field—not bump-and-dragging, carrying with smooth motions—even when she’d laid him gently under a tenement’s gutted stoop, when she’d dripped water between his frothing lips, when she’d cooed, “Shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh,” and stroked his pale cheek, when she’d covered his nose and mouth with a chloroformed rag, pressing firmly down, whispering “Hush, now. You’ll give away our position,” as they waited for the greys to do their worst and move on—even then, even then, Wyatt had looked at her, eyes glazed with disappointment.

  Not that she blames him.

  It’s almost gone true-dark. Too late now for rigging mines, but Jean’s got enough pump left in her arms to turn a bit more ground. Less than a quarter of the yard is fortified; the front is good and set, but it’s the back that’s got her worried. Everyone knows the greys prefer stealth—why hadn’t she started the dig out here?—and if she gets the PM’s call before her work is finished, she’ll have to leave when the house is still vulnerable. Little Zaya has a knack with knives—but with Ann being Ann and Borys being Borys, one girl with a blade probably won’t be enough to keep them alive until VERNA can save them.

  Just a few more holes, Jean decides. In the morning I’ll fill them properly, once Borys is asleep and Ann is back at her post. As she crosses the path, a chorus of Mee-Mees screams overhead; out of habit, she crouches, grabs the pistol from her basket and jams it into her belt. Heart pounding, she counts the beats between holler and impact. One… . Two… . Three… . Four… . Five… . Once she reaches twelve without hearing thunder, she shakes the nerves from her limbs, chiding herself for acting like such a blue-head.