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The Brink

Page 4

by Pass, Martyn J.


  When he reached the other side he saw the barracks where he’d been able to get a bed for himself indoors at the cost of having to bunk with five others in the converted sandwich shop. They were a good bunch but they often worked alternating shifts and that meant being woken at all hours by them coming and going. Still, looking back at the tents and shelters, Alan was glad of the luxury.

  “Hey Alan. Back so soon?” said Gary Swanson who saw him enter from his position on the bed reading a comic book. He was a tall man with a dark complexion and he wore his wiry hair in a kind of top knot that wasn’t long enough to be considered a pony tail by any stretch. He laid there in combat trousers and unlaced boots with his muscular torso on show for anyone who might be passing and be remotely female. As Alan didn’t fit this category, Gary quickly dismissed him and returned to reading his comic.

  “Did I miss anything?” he asked, setting his kit down at the foot of his bed. It was an army surplus camp bed that folded up when not in use, as were all the others in his bunk. They did the job, he supposed, but nothing else.

  In his corner of the room Alan had done his best to claim the small space. There was a thick rug for Moll on the floor near a tall cabinet where he hung his clothes and rigging and he had an upturned crate for a bedside table upon which he’d lined up several paperbacks using soup tins for bookends.

  As he lay down on the bed, Moll went straight to her rug and sat down, examining a piece of rawhide that she’d been working on for quite a while now.

  “How was it?” asked Gary without turning his attention from the comic.

  “Rough,” he replied. “Henry and his family are back though.”

  “Nice one.”

  “I also got chewed out by Teague.”

  “What for?” asked Gary.

  “Disobeying orders.”

  “Yup,” he said. “He does like people to do as they’re told. I thought you knew that by now?”

  “I did. I guess I just didn’t care.”

  “You should. Keeps the world turning. Some command, some follow. It isn’t too hard to understand once you get to grips with the basics, though I admit you never looked like the ‘following’ kind of guy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Alan, sitting up.

  “It means we all took you for that kind of guy.”

  “What kind of guy?”

  “Well,” he said, finally putting his comic down but keeping his thumb between the pages as a marker. “The rest of us put you down as a bit of a hot head, a fire brand. We had bets on how long it would be before you were ‘reassigned’.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Don’t take offence, man. We just never saw you as a team player. You and that dog seem to enjoy each other enough without the rest of the world complicating the issue.”

  “Do you think that’s a bad thing?” asked Alan, quite shocked by this revelation and sitting bolt-upright on his bed.

  “Not really but I guess what my Dad said was kind of right.”

  “What did your Dad say?”

  “That the best leaders are first the best followers. That if you want to be the head honcho anywhere you need to be the lowest guy in the room.”

  “Sounds like Zen bullshit to me,” replied Alan, sitting back down, a little more deflated.

  “It kind of makes sense if you think about it.”

  “Tell that to Teague. I don’t think he was ever the lowest guy in the room.”

  “You think?” said Gary, taking up the comic again. Alan looked at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean don’t be too quick to think you’ve understood the Captain without knowing his past.”

  “And you do?”

  “I’m not saying that,” he said, turning a page. “I’m just offering a bit of friendly advice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Alan got up and began to take off his smock and boots. “Is that your blood?”

  He woke at some point in the late afternoon and realised he’d fallen asleep whilst reading a book. The paperback was still open, face down on his chest, and Moll was laid out on her rug, snoring. It was quiet outside and there didn’t seem to be the usual amount of hustle and bustle, the roaring of engines, the shouting of children, the moving of equipment with the loud fork lift trucks, nothing. Only the odd shout here and there or the clatter of some trolley being pushed to the food hall from the kitchens next door.

  Alan stayed where he was and sighed, relaxing deeper into the blankets beneath him. It was an odd sort of moment for him. It felt like a lull or a break in the tension, like he was free from the nightmare of surviving for a tiny moment and he wanted it to last forever.

  In the bed directly opposite his own lay Reb - a woman of perhaps 33 years who’d been based in the region when the disaster struck and had joined up with Teague right from the start. He looked at her lying on her side, facing the wall with her lips parted a little and a soft, almost imperceptible breath coming and going between them like they were border checkpoints with lazy guards on them. Around her were the tokens of a life that had been left behind and like the other bunks they were so carefully arranged as to be almost shrines to long-dead household gods; each person offering sacrifices of love and heartache upon them day and night. Fragrant incense rose up from them as reminders of a lover’s perfume once worn or cologne often splashed upon the skin of a lost father. They performed the sacred duty of remembrance with such skill that no passer-by could fail to be moved by them or walk past them without presenting their own painful offerings.

  Alan had little need for such a system of atonement for the sin of surviving the disaster where others hadn’t. His parents had been dead since he and his brothers were very young and they hadn’t been on speaking terms since he’d moved out of the family home so many years ago. He often wondered if they were alive and if he should search for them but for some reason he never found the desire to begin. It wasn’t hatred or malice that he felt. It was more like a kind of reserved apathy that stopped him. Perhaps, he thought, he just didn’t care. Or that he was lying to himself and that he did care but was too afraid to admit it. Either way, the chance had never presented itself and if he saw them tomorrow in some settlement, alive and well, he’d be happy enough.

  That line of thought passed another half an hour and the clock on the wall ticked slowly by until Reb’s digital watch chimed from beneath her blankets and woke her. She groaned, turned onto her back and coughed. Moll sat up and looked, considering the threat to her slumber, then dismissed it and lay back down.

  “Oh,” she said as she sat up and pushed her knuckles into her eyes. “You’re back.”

  “Yeah. Can’t get rid of me that easily,” he said.

  “Don’t be so sure.” She untangled herself from under her blankets and sat on the edge of her bed, looking at the photographs pinned to the side of her cupboard. It was always the same ritual, he observed. A gentle kiss on the fingertips of her right hand, transferred to the face of her Mum and Dad. Then another for her younger brother. A third for her boyfriend. All dead. Gary had been with her the day Teague gave her permission to ‘patrol’ near her family home in search of them. All dead. Mum and Dad in a shallow plot in the garden, the brother in a fresher site next to them. Her boyfriend had stayed with them. Cared for them. Then died himself of hypothermia in her own bed with a note written in a trembling hand and sealed in a coffee tin. When Gary had moved the corpse to bury him, he’d found him clutching the container to his chest and given it to her. The note was now pinned next to the photo and all of them had been laminated in thick plastic to keep their fragile memories together.

  “I’m going to grab a brew,” she said having made her offerings. “You want one?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  She stepped into her boots and stretched, pulling on her jumper and jacket and buckling her trousers closed at the waist. Teague’s people never slept without trousers or socks on and it m
eant that they never really switched off, never relaxed enough that they weren’t ready to jump up and fight if the need be. Even when they showered, their gear was always on a chair next to the stall with their rifles propped up alongside them.

  Reb walked to Moll and scratched her belly as she lay there.

  “Has he been mean to you?” she cooed. “Has Daddy kept you out too long?”

  “Don’t,” he laughed. “You’ll make her soft. I need her to be an efficient killing machine.”

  “Like this one ever kills.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he replied. Reb looked at the smock hanging on its peg and opened her mouth to speak but Alan raised a hand. “No, for God’s sake it isn’t.”

  “That isn’t coming out, you know.” She lifted it down. “Pockets empty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll get you a new one.”

  “Thanks.”

  She was about to leave when she pulled back the duct tape and saw the entry hole. Then she shot him a glance and shook her head.

  “You really are the independent type.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should see a doctor. Get it looked at. You don’t want it to get infected, Harding.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I will. Thanks.”

  “I feel sorry for the other guy.”

  Gary had gone whilst he slept and Reb had brought him a pint-mug of tea before heading over to the food hall to get something to eat before her shift. It meant that the bunks were empty and he could get in the shower stall and deal with the lump of lead still imbedded under his skin.

  Taking his hunting knife with him, he undressed and set the water temperature to its coldest setting. He gave the blade a couple of passes on the sharpening stone mounted in the sheath and held it up to the spot where he could feel the bullet lying to the right of his sternum. Then, climbing into the shower, he forced himself under the freezing jet until he shivered and his teeth chattered. Placing a folded piece of cloth between them, he bit down and held the point of the knife to the spot.

  “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled through the gag, closing his eyes as he pressed the point into his flesh. His jaw tightened and he squeezed his eyes shut, pushing until he had to stop from the pain. His vision swam and he felt sick. There was no other way though. If he went to the Medic they’d dig, they’d want to see the entry wound and know how in hell he’d survived it without a single scar. Then he’d have to tell them the truth: he couldn’t die, that he’d been given a drug that prolonged life, healed wounds, stopped starvation and dehydration indefinitely. The same drug given to the other volunteers down in the belly of Fort Longsteel when the disaster came. Who knows what would happen if he did?

  He gripped the rail with one hand and took several deep breaths before pressing harder on the blade. He moaned in agony through the gag and felt his hot blood washing down over his cold body. He didn’t look. He kept his eyes shut tight and probed the wound with his fingers, working quickly before it closed up again. As if being pushed out by his own body, the bullet took little time in squeezing out through the opening and dropped to the floor, clattering on the wet tiles at his feet.

  He held fast to the rail, dropping the knife as his head went light and his heart thumped in his chest so loudly he thought it was about to burst. The cold water brought him round quickly and when he opened his eyes he saw the blood, now pink, running down the plug hole, but the wound was gone.

  He stooped down and, with trembling fingers, picked up the deformed slug of lead and stared at it intently.

  “So much pain for one little piece of metal,” he whispered to it.

  He washed and dried and put on fresh trousers before lying back down on his bunk, sipping the luke-warm brew. His thoughts wandered and he found himself reading the same line of the book over and over again without digesting a single syllable. What would it take to kill him? He wondered. He hated this line of thinking because it almost inevitably led to thoughts of torture and suffering without end, of being captured and, upon realising he couldn’t die, becoming a hideous play-thing for a sick and twisted sadist. It was his primary reason for keeping his secret safe and so far he’d run too many risks with it already. The smock. The blood. Why hadn’t he burned the thing before returning? Why bring it back?

  Other thoughts crowded in and he determined there and then to take fewer risks with the truth. If it happened again he’d be more careful. Failing that, he’d have no choice but to leave Teague’s company and set out alone. He didn’t even know what would happen in the future. Would he get old? Would people begin to wonder why he never aged? There was so much he hadn’t been told in Longsteel, so much he still didn’t know about the drug he’d been given. Would he live forever?

  “Yo, Harding - the Captain asks if you’re up for a patrol?” It was Gary at the door and his question shook Alan from his thoughts with enough force to make him jump.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied. “When?”

  “Night-op. Meeting room at twenty-two-hundred.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You need to see Smythe. Apparently your rifle’s being decommissioned.”

  “What? It was fine when I came in,” he cried, getting off the bed.

  “The lens is scratched and it won’t pass a field test. You’re getting an old-school shooter instead.”

  “What the hell is that?” Gary shrugged.

  “Beats me. I’ll be getting one next so let me know what it’s like. It was great having this tech before the disaster but now...” He shook his head. “Anyway, catch you later. Me and Reb are in the squad.”

  “Who else?”

  “Steve, but he’s just pulled a long guard duty so he’s not too happy about it.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you then.”

  When Gary had gone, Alan got dressed and left Moll sleeping on her rug. She had a knack of finding him anywhere in the camp so he didn’t need her to follow. That was another source of worry for him. They’d never been apart since leaving the South and sharing this strange immortality meant sharing the same fears as well. He’d seen her riddled with bullets and shrug them off. She’d been speared twice and been running about moments later. Once a laser blast had taken off her hind legs and they’d regrown by themselves. And still she never left him, never wandered off without him; she stayed with him despite the risk and the suffering. She knew where he was. Where to find him. When he was hungry. When he was lost. Whatever the drug had done for him it seemed to have done more for her and the thought was both a comfort and a deep rooted, gnawing fear.

  With this on his mind he reached the door and was about to leave when he turned and saw her standing beside him. His heart almost broke and he knelt down to nuzzle her face with his own.

  “Just you and me, girl. Always,” he whispered as she licked his face and seemed to carry some of that worry away with her.

  3

  Smythe worked out of the warehouses and was a short, wiry man of about 40 years with a shining head haloed by a thin line of grey stubble. He wore thick lenses and oil-streaked overalls even though maintaining the weapons of Teague’s company was a relatively clean job.

  As Alan and Moll entered, Smythe was bending over just such a rifle suspended in a system of clamps and racks that allowed him to work on the intricate parts and still fire the weapon at a target that stood near the far wall. He had a pair of delicate long-nosed pliers in one hand and a probe in the other, linked to a computer on the rolling table beside him.

  “You wanted to see me?” asked Alan as he stood there, watching him tinker with the rifle as if he were a watch maker merely adjusting a cog here and there. With the pliers he removed the central lens and held it up to the light for inspection.

  “Another one scratched and no replacements anywhere. They’re falling apart faster than we can find parts to repair them with. Things were so much easier with projectiles,” he said to himself. “Alan Harding, isn’t it? You just came back.”
<
br />   “Yes,” he replied. “I’ve been told you decommissioned my weapon for the same problem.”

  “Yes, yes. Have a seat.” Smythe looked at Moll and shook his head, turning away to put down his tools and deactivate the rifle upon the rack. It hissed as the open cooling ports closed and the faint blue glow dimmed on its display meter. “Thankfully, the Captain has finally decided to follow my advice and begin issuing XC10 Carbines to your team. You’ll be the first to test them in the field but you can be confident that we’ve put them through their paces in the workshop.”

  Smythe walked with a limp that Alan felt was slightly exaggerated to win some kind of sympathy from anyone unfortunate enough to witness it. He suspected that it had to do with his unwillingness to take part in the more manual labours Teague demanded of most of his team and a strong desire to stay in a humid workshop. In fact, the heating was so high that so many spare gas bottles had been piled near the door to his spacious workspace that the empty ones were almost as numerous. There were ration packs and bottles of fruit juice that Alan believed to be part of some kind of bribe or persuasion technique to keep him working on perhaps the most important part of the operation - the continual maintenance of their firearms. Was it justified? He wondered. He’d met people like Smythe before and they were somewhere on his table, near the bottom perhaps, alongside the willingly jobless masses and the persistent moaners. Either one believed that life owed them more than they got and never acknowledged that which they were given with any sense of gratitude.

  Smythe returned with the XC10 in his arms, wrapped in a clean white cloth and giving the impression that the powerful 7.62mm carbine had just been born and was in need of breast feeding. He laid it in Alan’s open arms with the delicacy of a mid-wife and the faintest gleam of a smile on his cracked lips.

 

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