I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  I split my team up into three groups with the specialised sniper on his own lying somewhere close by and picking off lone enemies as they came into range.

  I had a half smoked spliff sitting in my ashtray, so I lit it up while the mission loaded. A minute later I was sneaking around the back of the barn while my sniper picked off enemies from a far-off distance. We had to be careful not to get too brave because they had our intelligence man strapped to a chair on the barn floor and it was too easy for stray bullets to hit him and end the mission.

  With all the Russians who had been guarding the man lying on the floor in bloody heaps, we moved on to our next target: the com-house across the field where another hostage was being held.

  It took a while to get across the field – I’m not too sure why, perhaps my attention was wandering, I did feel the spliff kicking in though, but not really in a big way so most of my senses were still available to me. My sniper guy kept getting shot while I was commanding A-squad towards the building and I had to keep pushing the F7 button to reload at my last quick-save point so that I could keep the sniper through the whole mission. I managed to get A-squad to the house finally with my sniper still alive and repositioned near a window ready to shoot anybody who dared stick their heads out.

  I took another big suck of the spliff, feeling the nicotine hit my head, but the pot wasn’t really doing anything. I grabbed the bong that sits on my computer desk top shelf. The water inside was relatively clean and I hadn’t finished off the pot from last time, so it was basically ready to go. I lit the pipe end, blocked off the air-hole and took a big fat suck as smoke dragged itself down my throat and the water bubbled away. The hit wasn’t as big as I had hoped, but it was enough to start numbing my senses.

  I left C-squad crouching in the field we had crossed giving us cover from any Russians who might be heading towards the house. I commandeered the head riflemen of A-squad and entered the building picking off the first guy as he came into sight from around a corner; second guy was shot by one of the computer controlled soldiers as I passed the stairs to check the rest of the ground floor – the enemy had made it partially down the stairs, not far enough to pass across the window where the sniper outside would have shot him, but far enough for the guy behind me to see and quickly pick off. With him down we began climbing the stairs, step by step it seemed, with each step taking longer to pass than the previous one. I thought perhaps something was wrong with the game – theoretically, it shouldn’t take this long to climb just a few stairs. I don’t think it ever felt this long the other times I had played it.

  We rounded the corner of the staircase but there were more steps to climb and yet I was only going to the first floor because it was only a two story building. I looked up the stairs, amazed at what could be waiting for me up there, amazed and intrigued even though I knew because I had played this game a bunch of times before anyway, yet still I looked forward to going up there. Up there where the captured com officer was, up those stairs, up those stairs, up them, up I went, my guys following behind. I took my time, as gravity tried working against me, pulling me back down through the stairs, but I was determined to make it up. So I struggled onwards, boot by heavy boot, feeling as though I was going to fall through the steps at any moment and come crashing down in a pile of broken timber as the ground continued sucking me downwards into its heavy burdensome hole. But it didn’t, and I managed to climb the rest of the stairs until the room above came into view and I saw a Russian standing there with a gun – looking at me, real weirdly, so I shot him. He went down. Hit the ground. Made a sound, body hitting floorboards. The hostage stood up and looked at me. He looked at me for ages, expecting something, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Weird. Again. All so weird.

  I just stood there staring at this guy’s face for ages, his terribly expectant green face, but he wouldn’t look away, and it became really uncomfortable but this hostage just wouldn’t look away. I turned around looking at the guys around me, but they just stared back through their night-vision goggles with rifles pointing upwards. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. I moved to the side and turned back to the hostage but he just looked straight at me again. This was crazy! Why was he looking at me? What did he expect? I noticed a mark on his forehead. I moved closer to get a better look. It seemed to grow, and get really big, like a massive scar across his whole face. Shit it was huge, and it wouldn’t stop getting bigger. Then it seemed to grow to encompass the whole screen but I couldn’t look away. It had me in its grip. I wondered if it was some trick, but ultimately I was just really fascinated by this scar/mark thing. It was so massive and big, like a huge canal in the earth cut and ripped into the soil by the natural flow of earthquakes that jolt and tear at the world every now and then. And you could fly down those canals in an X-Wing fighter or something, maybe some crazy Martian surface skimmer but you’d have to be careful because a surface skimmer ain’t too good on rugged terrain, but the X-Wing, yeah, totally. I wondered how far it went, I mean, I couldn’t really see the end of the canal, but it was certainly wide enough to get my X-Wing down and have a look around. It was like grass though, coz it was all green. But not really like grass because it was too Martian, kinda like what Mars would be like if it were green instead of red. Like those three books I never read. Man they were big. And Mars is big too. And that’s what this canal was like. Huge! So huge that it took up my entire vision.

  Big. That’s what it was.

  Real big!

  Like looking through the porthole of your spaceship as you traverse this new found planet that you and your crew have discovered…

  “David!”

  Woah, what was that?

  “David!”

  I took my face away from the screen, not realising that I had been eyeballing the monitor up close – practically kissing the thing.

  The com officer was still standing there waiting for me to secure him. There was no mark on his forehead; it was just a line in the program that had crossed over into his head. I felt my eyes dilating back to their normal state.

  And I remembered hearing a voice. “David!”

  I turned away from the screen and saw Mum standing in my doorway. She was wearing a low-cut floral dress with sneakers on her feet. The shoelaces were undone. Her hair looked scraggly and unattractive. “I need to borrow some money.”

  “What?”

  “Some money.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t doing anything, just…” I turned back to the screen trying to remember just exactly what I was doing.

  “Eyeballing the monitor?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” I turned in my chair as Mum came closer, somewhat shyly, a frown dampening her face as she glanced around the room trying not to look me in the eyes. I grabbed my wallet off the end of the bed. “Is everything alright?”

  “Yeah, its end of the month and the bills kinda sapped me.”

  “How much you want?”

  “Just forty bucks – that’s all.”

  It was alcohol money. I wished I hadn’t been stoned, I probably could have said something, but it was hard enough trying to navigate my fingers through the compartments of the wallet to get the money out, and then to find the resources of energy just to pass it over to her.

  When the money entered her hand, she folded it and tucked it into her bra. Maybe it isn’t alcohol money, haha… She certainly has solid breasts, no doubt about that. And smooth skin. I remembered smooth skin. It was always in my mind, something that lingered there; smooth to touch, accompanied by a young voice and a body that would roll away laughing every time I tried to smother her in my arms…

  “David!”

  I blinked wondering how long I had been staring at her breasts for. “Yeah?”

  “Snap out of it! For crying out loud.” She turned to the computer, frustrated more than angry. “I wish you wouldn’t play those games so much. What happened to the volunteer work? Did you e
ven try it? I bet you didn’t. I bet you just gave up and went back to playing video games.”

  I could swear she was about to burst into tears.

  “No Mum, I did try some volunteer work. It was good. Some of it made me happy.”

  “Only some of it? You used to love volunteering at your church.”

  It’s true. But I was getting a wage for what I did with the youth group. That was the difference. There was something else that counted towards any volunteer work I did on the side. “I guess some of it wasn’t making me happy. And I just felt like it wasn’t serving any purpose, anything worthwhile.”

  I instinctively gazed back at the computer screen, almost as though the happiness I found there had some kind of purpose, some kind of fulfilment that was out-playing anything else I had been involved in.

  She looked like she wanted to say something else, but just turned away looking vaguely disappointed.

  I sat down on the corner of my bed as she left the room. Tinsdale called after her from the kitchen to feel free to call in any time her son wasn’t here, but she told him to fuck off and get a life. Her car started up and she was backing with sudden urgency down the driveway, skidding onto the road and revving all the way down the street.

  I fell back onto the bed remembering what it was like to touch skin that felt so perfect. It felt awesome! The memory made me smile, and then my body began to glow as the high returned again to envelop me. I felt all the vibrations of the world pulse through me and bring happiness all over again as I relived and rejoiced in all I had once had; smiling like everything was just so fantastic, even though it was all gone, all gone… but none of that mattered now because I was so happy.

  So…

  So…

  happy!

  Part III

  – The mission –

  It was a cold, cloudy night with an occasional light shower of rain – annoying but not particularly off-putting. One of the Ghost Recon missions had rain throughout the entire thing, and other than the sound of rain constantly hitting the ground, all it did was add to the atmosphere as enemy soldiers quickly came over the horizon and there was a mad rush to get all troops behind the leftover walls of a house that had been blown to bits. I looked out the window of my car as rain clouds scattered themselves across a starless night. No enemy were advancing across the paddock …at this stage.

  Lucas wasn’t particularly impressed. “Can you feel the chill in the air?”

  “Yip.”

  He lit a cigarette and blew out the window. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  He paused while sucking on the cigarette. “Do you think Christie likes me?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You seem pretty sure.”

  “Definitely.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Christie made comments at Charge Up and it wasn’t hard to construe what she meant by them.”

  He looked at me.

  “In fact it was blatantly obvious.”

  “Shit. She’ll be gutted when she finds out that I’m not a Christian.”

  I was tempted to say something, but didn’t really want to talk about this with him. I was trying hard to stay focussed on the mission.

  “I kind of didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, but she’s so likable and easy to get along with.”

  From where we had parked the car I could just make out the lights that shone over the dumpster at the bakery. “Yeah, she is easy to get along with. I’d certainly do her. It’s one-forty, shall we get on our way.”

  “Yeah bro, lets do it.”

  We got out and grabbed our shoulder bags from the back seats. As we closed the doors and started climbing the fence into the paddock, I started wondering why he had said that he ‘didn’t want to give her the wrong idea’ if he had such little concern about others and only cared about himself.

  The grass in the paddock was slippery but neither of us fell over as we landed. I kept my head low like a member of the 1st Armoured Division, pretending I had camouflage paint on my face and canteens of water at my side. We hadn’t managed to get any camouflage pants but I was practically wearing those in my mind since we had first talked about it, so it didn’t really matter whether I had them or not.

  We made it to a ditch where I motioned Lucas to take cover with me so I could suss out the rest of the way to the bakery fence where the hole was. Lucas sat down with his back leaning against the ditch while looking up into the cloudy night. I thought this would be as good a place as any to do a quick save…

  “Lets pretend for a moment that I did go out with Christie. I mean it’s not like we couldn’t just hang out as friends or something.”

  “I don’t get why you consider it such a big deal if you’d only be doing it for yourself. It’s not like the end result would matter if you got what you wanted out of it.”

  “That’s like saying I could just rape her if sex was all I wanted.”

  It disturbed me that he could make a remark like that so casually. “Well why don’t you then?”

  “Because I don’t want to hurt her. And I’d definitely end up in prison, and prison isn’t somewhere that I want to be. In fact, having her as a friend would enhance who I am as a person more than prison would, because the hard fact of the matter is that I feel good around her, and actually feel like I can still be myself without having to defend who I am, or fight for who I am. Y’ know? I mean that’s something that inmates don’t have the luxury of; they are always trying to humiliate others, or the weaker ones are trying not to be humiliated so they can earn respect. In prison, that may keep you alive, but I have no desire to pursue those ends for myself, so will do all I can to keep myself out of prison.”

  Lucas had been right about there being a hole in the fence that lined the bakery. It looked pretty big and secluded and from where we were positioned there was no way anyone could see us as we crossed the rest of the paddock.

  “Alright Lucas, take her out on a date then.”

  “Nah I don’t wanna.”

  I shook my head. “Well, y’ know she ain’t gonna have sex before marriage, so you’re shit out of luck if that’s all you wanted.”

  “You might be right. But sex isn’t all I want from her.”

  I was at a complete loss as to what train of thought he was on – I felt like mine was doing a specific mission while trying to keep radio contact with his, which was travelling down some out-of-the-way train tracks that were nowhere near mine. “Can we just focus on the dumpster for now Lucas? If y’ wanna talk about it later, then I’ll be more than glad to sit down with you and discuss it, but right now, I just wanna do what we came here to do.”

  I could see the outline of his head nodding. But then something occurred to me and I said, “You could always convert to Christianity”.

  “Alright,” he said turning around quickly. “What’s happening here? No lights, no one at the dumpster; looks all clear.”

  “No Jim either.”

  “He’ll be somewhere. He hardly does any work at about this time.”

  I began crawling out of the ditch on my elbows, trying to keep my ass as low as possible while moving my legs stealthily like an insect stalking its prey, only I was trying to avoid being the prey of snipers who could be posted anywhere in this vicinity that we had been commanded to investigate.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “What?” I looked back at Lucas’s shadowy outline standing against the clouds behind him.

  “It’s pitch black out here for fucks sake. Just walk over to the fence, no one will see you.”

  I looked over at the fence realising that it probably was safe enough so I got up but stayed in stealth mode with my back bent low and made my way over to the fence. Lucas casually came up from behind and held the hole open for me, motioning me through with a curt hand gesture and a smile.

  We snuck through and around the edge of the fence, sneaking in behind a couple of vans, weaving our way past
some barrels and piles of crates, until we came up alongside the building and kneeled down behind it, peaking out from the corner. The coast was clear – no enemy troops, no sign of odd movements in bushes or overhead cameras. I couldn’t believe our luck. We had made it this far without being captured and were on our way to completing the mission with all present company still in the ranks alive and breathing. Brilliant. I’ll make Lieutenant Colonel yet.

  “Right,” I said. “What now?”

  “See those barrels ahead?”

  Straight down the wall near the entrance to the factory a few barrels were lined up against each other and stuck out a little from the wall. “Yes.”

  “We’ll sneak up behind them and wait there for Jim.”

  We kept close contact with the wall so the light that shone onto the driveway was nowhere near us. The barrels smelt of oil stains and rust. We knelt down behind them and in the shadow of a corrugated awning that hung overhead. The barrels looked like they had been sitting around in the rain forever. Rust covered outsides that could be pierced with a bullet without much effort. “What the hell are these for?”

  “Dunno. This part of the building is mechanic building. I thought all mechanics had random oil barrels lying around rusting in the rain. Just one of those things.”

  “Right.” It concerned me that we were sitting behind barrels that were flammable. All sorts of potentially deadly scenarios were beginning to run through my mind: What if there was a sniper in a tree somewhere that we had sneaked past but had now spotted us? One hot flare gun aimed at the barrels would be the end of this mission, and I hadn’t saved the game over in the trenches which would mean that I would have to start the whole thing all over again. What if there were tripwires set up to explode the barrels and we had unknowingly walked into the perfect trap that only had to wait for us to make our next move? Shit, we really hadn’t thought this one all the way through at all. My promotion to Lieutenant Colonel was slowly slipping away from me.