by Unknown
Archer traced his finger over faded white letters, each the size of his index finger.
“It’s Latin.”
“What’s it say?” asked Weeks.
Archer squinted.
“Memento mori.”
“What does that mean?” said a voice.
Jenkins answered. “It means, ‘remember you will die’.”
The playful moment of children climbing a playground frame had disappeared. Jenkins thought back to his school, back in Lanchester. They had never had a climbing frame or any playground equipment. For some reason the thought made him feel melancholic. Wistful.
Jones strode over.
“Back in the trenches, lads. We’ll blow it up. Weeks, tie these grenades together. Double-time, man!”
From the trenches, they watched Sergeant Jones place the charge and scurry back to them. Moments later, a great whump shook the earth as the blast heaved the great beast over onto its side, shearing away a large swath of the starboard track. The men cheered as black smoke poured out of its open hatches.
“That’s for Philip and Richard, you dirty bastard!” boomed an angry voice.
“And Ernie and Charlie!” yelled another.
More cheers and whistles, then the pelting of loose earth raining from the sky onto tin helmets. The Beast was dead. It energised them to have slain their nemesis. Even Jones managed a rare smile beneath that thick, grey moustache.
Within an hour, they had reached their destination.
Jenkins slept the deepest sleep he had dared for several days. Dreams came to him. Dreams of home. His parents. His dog.
And the tank.
He dreamt his father was sat atop the tank as it ploughed deep furrows in their field, stomping the crop and churning the knotted ears of corn behind it in great hazy clouds. His mother wrapped her arms around him but they were ice. He turned and looked into her eyes. They were black pits of coal. Deep inside them, a fire burned. He broke free and shouldered his rifle. Shots rang out as he aimed at the tank. His father still sat atop it. He was laughing. The metal-on-metal shriek of the behemoth pierced his ears. The ground shook.
Jenkins awoke in the darkness of a bunker. Someone was shaking him. Shots echoed in the winter night. He found himself unable to breathe. The shrieking was here. It was outside the bunker. The ground was shaking. Men were screaming.
The tank had returned.
He fell out of the small wooden cot and grabbed his rifle and helmet, dashing out into the November chill, slapped hard in the face by the freezing air. He saw the light blue of dawn on the eastern horizon, still being held at bay by the darkness. The night wasn’t finished with them yet, it seemed. He bumped into Archer in the trench. It was much narrower than the one they had left yesterday.
“Jenks! Its back! We killed it but it’s bloody well back!” shouted Archer over the roar of the tank’s engine. A silhouette appeared behind Archer, over the trench wall. It rose, its blackness seeping higher and higher, mechanical servos whining a shrill banshee song.
Archer turned as the tank fell over the wall.
He was crushed beneath tonnes of mud and metal, dragged into the caterpillar track and under the beast. His cracked, pulped body was spat out the back end, onto a pile of human detritus. The ping of bullets struck the tank’s side every few seconds as the remaining men took aim at it. The wall could not support the tank’s weight. It collapsed, tipping the tank to its right. A battered and torn track – the track Jenkins had seen torn half off in the blast earlier that day - flapped around the rhomboid of the tank wheel, smacking into the mud next to his head. Jenkins stumbled back, hitting the trench wall behind him. The tank growled closer, the track dipping low towards Jenkins as he shrivelled away from it. It was inches from his face. He could feel the air being sucked away from him as the tank, seemingly beached in the trench with him, clanked louder and louder, trying to free itself, scrabbling the last inch or two to reach him, to embrace him in its icy clutch.
He screamed.
The tank screamed.
It heaved and pumped, gaining a fraction here, a fraction there. It had beached itself on the collapsed wall and could not find purchase. Jenkins stared straight into the black driver’s slits, those deep abyssal holes. They stared back. He could see an infernal glow raging and shimmering inside those eyes.
They said to him as they had said to many before: I am your end.
Jenkins felt himself sucked into those pits. He couldn’t fight it any more. He felt the life drain out of him as the hungry beast strained to destroy him. He screamed, a throaty, raw noise, as the stench of oil and meat and decay enveloped him. The engine whined to fever pitch. Those demonic slits beamed down on him. He could no longer hear himself screaming. Then it stopped.
The engine coughed. The noise died away. The muddy, slipping tracks clattered to a halt, the half-track flopping on the trench floor beside Jenkins. Then it lay still. The tank sat there, tilted off-centre, the only sound now the soft ticking of cooling engine parts where none existed.
Jenkins sucked in great gulps of air. What happened? he thought. Why has it stopped? How am I still alive? Then he saw.
A thin shaft of light had struck the tank’s flank. The sky was still a deep, bruised blue, but morning had broken. Morning! It had broken the bloody tank! He didn’t know why. He didn’t care either. He knew only that it lived in the dark. And it wanted them all to live with it. In its own private darkness.
He dragged himself out from the tight space, gingerly peering into the driver’s ports. It was black in there, the fire extinguished. He could make out that the hull was empty.
How is that possible?
He brought out a torch from his breast pocket, flicking it on. He strained to see deeper inside. It was empty. Gutted. No driver. No driver’s seat. No controls. No engine parts. Nothing. It was as empty as when they had scoured through it yesterday. Before they had blown it up.
“Jenkins!”
He snapped his head round in shock. It was Weeks.
“Jenkins! What did you do? You bloody stopped it!”
Jenkins pulled himself free from the beastly embrace. He ignored Weeks, dragging himself instead up to the level of the muddy field. He found his friend, Archer.
For Jenkins, the war was over.
Lanchester’s square in spring was filled with anticipation. Summer would soon be upon the village and the skies would be light and blue and last until the day had exhausted itself. The darkness of winter was almost out of sight. The sun would emerge from the east, pushing the darkness away, winter just a memory as it faded quietly into the west.
“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Jenkins,” said the schoolmistress, Dolly Chambers.
“It’s no problem at all. Since my pop passed away, I’ve no use for it any more,” he answered. Next to him, Rover lay with his tongue hanging out, his tail wagging enthusiastically.
“How will you get by on the farm without it?”
He thought about it a moment, thinking back to the mechanical horrors of his past life in the blood-and-skin-spattered fields of Europe.
“Oh, Ma and me still have the mules,” Jenkins said, a small smile passing his lips.
The sound of children laughing and scurrying floated over to where they stood. The tractor dominated the playground. Its big, thick, bright red wheels had been scrupulously cleaned. The royal green chassis gleamed in the afternoon sun. The engine had been removed, of course, but the shell sat on the freshly-cut grass of a school field awash with children. They sat in its seat. The climbed on the bonnet. They ducked under the body. They hung from the wheels. They played. They laughed. They made chugging noises.
They smiled.
Jenkins smiled too. For Jenkins, the war was truly over.
GHOST LOVE SCORE
BY PETER DAMIEN
He had zip-tied Charlotte’s ankle to the metal skeleton beneath the car seat, and she had spent all of the first day of their unending drive moving her foot back and for
th and up and down, rubbing against the little plastic strip. It was no thicker than a straw but may as well have been made of solid steel for all the good her movements did. Yet she kept wiggling and moving her foot. She rubbed the flesh raw, and then rubbed it off and blood ran down her pale ankle and left her bare foot and the zip-tie slick and red, but even that did no good. In the movies, the blood provided lubricant and the captives slipped themselves out of their bonds easily, but that was not the case here. Here, she was only getting out if she severed the bones in her foot from the bones in her leg. If she could have reached, she would have done just that, if necessary with her teeth.
If there was pain from the small equator of raw flesh and blood, she did not feel it. She went mad, that first day, a madness the pain could not penetrate. Her mind filled with rage and despair, the animalistic panic at being trapped like this, being snatched away. What was left of her mind was filled with those last few moments: the sound of scuffling, the sound of Eric shouting at her to run, goddammit, get the hell outta here, get the – and then the sound of his voice being cut off by a thunderclap explosion which left her ears ringing. A gunshot. The only sound after that had been the sick thud of dead meat hitting the asphalt. Then hands that were not Eric’s had grabbed her and shoved her into the car. The man who took her had said his name was Simon, and then he said nothing else. He drove while, beside him, she sank beneath the black waves of grief and insanity.
On the second day, her ankle hurt badly and she felt it with every pulse of blood that her heart pushed through her body, which it did at jackhammer pace since the panic had not left, even if the madness had abated. The meaty thud and the gunshot still looped through her mind, and she began to sob brokenly.
In the seat next to her, Simon eventually told her to stop. He said it with disinterest, as if he had been expecting this and found it a chore. When she did not stop, when more hours had passed, he reached over and grabbed a handful of her long, black hair, yanking her head back. She didn’t see his hand coming, of course. The pain was staggering and she gasped, shocked into silence.
“Seriously, shut up,” he said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded annoyed. It was the tone of voice someone might use to scold a small dog who wouldn’t stop barking. Then his hand was gone.
That second night, Simon stopped the car and got out, locking it behind him. She heard his footsteps crunch away, and then nothing but silence. For a long time, Charlotte just sat there, still trying not to cry. Then she began fumbling around the inside of the car, looking for any way to escape, anything she could use to kill him … or herself. But there was nothing. The door had no handle, the lock had been filed away into the depth of the door. The floor was bare, and so was every compartment she jammed her hand into. Each time she tried to move, she was reminded that her ankle was trapped and a piercing pain shot up her leg. She was so well anchored, she couldn’t even put a finger on his door. Claustrophobia threatened to roll over her and smother her. Madness lurked nearby, waiting to come back.
She didn’t know where she was, either, and that was just as maddening. Where had they stopped? Where had he gone? Had he simply stopped the car on the side of the road, somewhere in the Nevada desert and walked away? Leaving her to starvation and insanity? To cook in the heat like a side of meat in an oven? Where had he gone?
She wondered if she would be going less mad, if she would be able to escape, if she had her eyesight. If only she could see. It had been decades since her eyesight had gone, and plenty of years since she had accepted the blindness. It had been so long since she had missed it as badly as she did now. But the world was as black and featureless now, in this nightmare, as it had been during the good years, the happy years, with Eric.
She cried a little. It was the only sound in the car. She hid her mouth with her hand and wiped away tears the moment they formed. She didn’t know who she was hiding her crying from, but hid it anyway.
A sound of crunching gravel, then the door opened and Simon dropped into the driver’s seat. He reeked of hamburger and fries, cigarette smoke, cheap beer. A small bag fell into her lap and she grasped at it. It was smooth and it crinkled.
“Chips,” he said. “Eat up. Long drive ahead of us, so you gotta keep some strength up.”
She didn’t eat them. She let them slip to the floor a little while later. Simon made no comment. He just drove on, through the night.
On the third day, she went away. Simple as that.
It was something she had learned from Eric; something he had taught her how to do. Eric had loved to teach. Except that didn’t quite convey his wild enthusiasm. He’d delighted in things and shared them and enjoyed the reactions of others. Whether it was booze, TV shows, stupid pictures on the internet, fine cuisine or baffling flavors of potato chips, he’d loved to try things and bring others along for the adventure. Sporadic. That’s what his mom had called him, but Charlotte had loved it. There were never dull moments, only electric ones and the restful spaces between them.
He had taught her to go away, and she did.
It was a meditation technique, one of his few interests that had lasted longer than a few weeks (other long-term interests had been tea, good books, running … and her). She focused, she really focused on putting away the world around her: the endless, burning pain in her ankle, the hot and dusty car rattling around her. She visualized herself walking down little stone steps, and she felt the roughness of each stone under bare feet. She stepped into a small pool of cold water, and she felt it against her ankles, forced herself to feel it. And then, breathing and calm and settled, she pictured where she wanted to be.
And then she opened her eyes.
The little Ford Focus was blue and it hummed along the interstate. The world outside was mountainous and full of thick snow, she saw. She was sitting in the passenger seat. She looked over, and there was Eric, driving the car and drumming his thumbs on the center of the steering wheel. He watched the road in the absent way one does on a long drive. Then he glanced over at her.
“Hey, you’re awake,” he said with a wide, handsome grin. He gestured out the windows. “Can you believe this snow? I’m amazed the roads are open.”
The snow was heavy and enveloping. The road they were on wound through sloping hills and sharp cuts through mountains. Trees and walls of rock surrounded them, all covered in snow. The trees bent under the weight of it, whether they had evergreen needles or were simply black skeletons waiting for the spring. Snow buried the fields and level areas, it encroached on the road wherever it had found finger holds, where the cars had not pushed it back. Snow had turned the world white and the sky gray, it had transformed the world into a black and white TV show with a strange, bright-blue car rolling through the middle of it.
She stretched, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. His cheek was rough with a day’s worth of stubble and it pricked her lips.
“How much longer?” Charlotte said, bending down to rub her hands along the length of her legs. She created friction against her denims, stirring life back into tired and inert limbs.
“I’m not gonna tell you,” Eric said, with the coy glee of a child with a secret. “But it won’t be very much longer now, so chill out, huh? Eat some junk food.”
There was a ton of junk food - little bags of a million kinds of chips, all in the footwell of her seat, around her feet. She shifted and they crinkled and crunched. “That stuff’ll kill you. I don’t want any part of that. Come on, why won’t you just tell me where we’re going?” She switched to a cute, petulant tone of voice and pouted at him. “Why’s a big, strong, handsome man like you got to keep secrets from little, delicate me?”
He snickered at her, and she socked him in the arm.
Eric looked at her, his face suddenly contorted into a gargoyle expression of fury. His hand blurred across the space between them and slapped her, hard, so unbelievably hard, across the cheek, that her head snapped away and her forehead smacked into the window beside her. The impact mad
e her shut her eyes, and she kept them shut. The pain in her cheek was a crimson blossom, beginning as a single brilliant white point of pain that soaked outward until her whole face ached. She cradled it, tears cresting in her eyes.
“Don’t try that again, you dumb bitch,” Simon snapped at her. “I got plenty of experience with bitches who start fightin’ back, an’ lemme tell you, all it’ll get you is stuffed in the trunk for the rest of the ride home. You get me?”
She nodded, frantically, so that he wouldn’t hit her again. Her cheek was on fire and it was spreading. Simon said nothing else, just sighed deeply and went back to driving. The car rattled and bumped down the desert roads. She leaned against the doorframe. If there were anything but blackness, she would have peered out the window.
The car was hot and dusty, but Charlotte shivered, just a little, despite the heat. She held onto that feeling, like she held onto the images of a snow-covered landscape, a little blue car, and Eric grinning. No gargoyle-leer, no hitting. Grinning. Loving. A day’s worth of stubble rasping against her lips. The staccato drum beat on the wheel. The heartbeat of tires thudding down the road. All the dead trees in their wintry shrouds…
Blackness around her and a head full of images? It was easy to go back. She just had to be still, that was all, to visualize a pool of water and then calm it until it was a mirror in which she could see herself if she looked down. Once all was still, well, all she had to do was open her eyes.
Eric drove on. The landscape had changed only in that they were driving the long downward slope of a mountain, nothing but white stretched out for miles and miles ahead of them, with only the thin vein of the black road to break up the snow tracts.
Coming down a mountain like this wasn’t so hard for the little car, which was relatively light, but there were all sorts of big yellow signs which warned of exactly how difficult it was for big trucks to get down these steep sections, and how small cars should keep a close eye out for trucks that had no brakes. At regular intervals on the long slope, single lanes branched off from the road and ran for a few hundred feet, full of gravel, with big metal barriers at the end. If the trucks went out of control, they could veer into those and, physics willing, grind to a halt before shooting off the road entirely and into the trees or the side of the mountain.