The War at the End of the World

by Jenn Burke

  The War at the End of the World

  The War at the End of the World

  Midpoint

  The War at the End of the World

  Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane

  Published by Storm Moon Press LLC at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2012, Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane. All rights reserved.

  Publisher's Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Cover art by Dare Empire eMedia Productions

  September 1941

  Today, I exist.

  When we were younger, whole days and nights would claw me under before I'd wink back into the world. But now that Joseph's come to this cold land on the edge of nowhere where the sun barely sets in summer, I'm with him every day. Joseph and his long shadow and me, inseparable.

  I'm never sure exactly how I feel about that. It's complicated.

  It's the way this place seems to always be lingering on the edge of winter, I think, that makes me more permanent now than I was before. Winter and death must be linked somehow, bound together in a way that can never be untangled, like you can't have one without the other. Or anyway, you can't have winter without death—bees, flowers, the grasshopper who refuses to work as hard as the ant, they all die at first frost—but you can definitely still have death without winter. Sort of like me and Joseph: there's no me without Joseph—I'm his after all—but Joseph can go years without me.

  Or maybe it's the war.

  I don't know. I'm still working this all out.

  Meanwhile, Joseph's working out one of his war stories. He's leaning up against the Finnish ambulance truck, scribbling into his notebook with his lips pressed tight in a familiar sign of furious concentration. Not even twilight yet, and mosquitoes stream through the pine trees to circle and suck at the resting convoy; Joseph brushes one off without even looking.

  I shouldn't call it a war story. It's a dispatch. He'd prefer to write stories: I've heard him say as much to his two Finnish friends. And sometimes in his dispatches he'll write phrases like this filthy waste of men or Hitler must be laughing or death is like a living thing, and then he'll cross them out and curse in English and replace them with the velvety-bland newspaper speech that his duty demands.

  The world sympathized with Finland as they beat off the Soviet Russian invasion during last year's Winter War. Using battle tactics fit to the icy cold of their homeland, they repelled Soviet forces of vastly superior numbers in order to maintain their independence. A year later, Finland seeks to reclaim the territory lost to Russia: Karelia, where pine boughs bend heavy with the spirits of the dead the land of many lakes and mighty forests.

  The Finns, lacking resources and materiel, have accepted a dangerous controversial alliance with Nazi Germany. Finland maintains a doctrine of "co-belligerence" and does not designate itself an Axis power, but Great Britain remains unassuaged, and has deemed Finland to be enemy-occupied territory. Finland still seeks American aid even as despite the fact the Wehrmacht, onward

  I can practically taste his frustration. He's a helpless observer of this war at the end of the world. He's overcompensating. Taking too many chances. He doesn't even have official permission to follow the Finnish front line into the Karelian Isthmus. He's tagging along with the ambulance trucks, relying on the goodwill of drivers and nurses he knows from the Winter War. But if the advance turns, if they have to choose between a foreign journalist and a Finnish wounded, if they have to leave him behind...

  Joseph can walk. He's fiercely, quietly proud of that. But he can't walk far, or fast. And he definitely can't run.

  I imagine I have a mouth, a tongue, lungs to breathe. I visualize them in the form I know best: Joseph's own. I try to whisper in his ear. You have enough for your story. Don't follow. Go back to Helsinki. Please, don't follow.

  The officer with the radio strides to the center of the convoy and delivers the news: "We'll press on to Lake Laatokka to set up a field hospital. Our men have already driven the Soviets back to Valkeasaari."

  The Finns have a truly fearsome war cry—when they gather to chant hakkaa päälle I shiver down to my nonexistent bones—but in other respects, they wage war as unemotionally as if the whole affair was a particularly troublesome spring housecleaning. The nurses nod solemnly and file back into the trucks. The drivers nod solemnly and start the engines.

  No one translates for Joseph. He understands well enough. He tucks his notebook into his inside coat pocket, grips his cane and climbs into the truckbed after the last nurse. His ascent is measured and graceful; his arms, left unravaged by polio, are strong. He doesn't hesitate.

  He doesn't hear me.

  The nurses smile at him somewhat less solemnly than is their habit, probably because he's a young man and a handsome man, with a coloring that strikes them as mildly exotic. He's as pale as they are, but without a trace of pink to his cheeks: pale like white smoke, pale like a talking pictures idol, and his hair is auburn and his eyes are grey as ice in twilight.

  The officer climbs into the sidecar of his motorcycle and gestures to his black-gloved driver. They pull ahead to lead the convoy off to Lake Laatokka, and as they take position, the roaring beast of a motorcycle kicks a streak of mud onto the side of Joseph's truck.

  Some mud flies through a gap in the side slats and onto the cheek of a young nurse. Joseph presses a handkerchief into her hand and offers a consolation in his competent, but awkwardly proper Finnish. She blushes. Their exchange stirs something sad in me, and I try to puzzle out why. I want Joseph to be happy—I always want him to be happy—but I also have a foreboding that nothing good can come out of this war, that anything that even hints of love will turn to ashes by the end.

  Distant rifle fire sounds. Smiles vanish. The truck engines still. The rifle fire grows louder.

  "We're behind the line," says a woman next to Joseph. "This can't be."

  "Partisans," whispers another.

  Joseph tightens his shoulders but displays no other sign of emotion.

  I told you not to follow.

  He feels death before he sees it. It's in the shuddering of the truck suspension, in the whine of metal against metal scraping beneath them as the driver executes a desperate three-point turn. "Get down!" Joseph shouts in English, forgetting himself, but the nurses are already hunching down, piling on top of each other, on top of Joseph. Bullets rip apart the top slats of the truck walls, scattering splinters.

  I raise my arms to cover and protect. They're wish-arms, desire-arms, but I never stop hoping that they'll be real, and what better time than in the thick of battle?

  To be real—to be hit by these bullets, but maybe to save someone from them, too.

  To save Joseph?

  No. Because that's not my damn job. Humans like Joseph, born without a distinct purpose, they can do what they like, but I'm not human. I'm tied to Joseph, but I'm not like him. I have a purpose, and my purpose is...

  My purpose...

  Finnish soldiers rush over and begin to pul
l nurses out from the truck, directing them into the next one over, one with metal sides. I know our driver is dead. Death, to me, is like the sound immediately after an ice cube falls into warm water—that irreversible moment of fracture.

  Most of the nurses slide out, hunch down, scramble away. Some have frozen in fear. The Soviet Army sometimes takes prisoners, but everyone knows their partisans have no mercy.

  Joseph pushes one of the fear-struck into the arms of a Finnish soldier. A friend pulls her down to the ground, and they're off, all three of them, leaving Joseph alone.

  A year and a half ago, he would have welcomed the chance for contact with the Soviets. To tell their story. He speaks good Russian and has more than a little sympathy for their political philosophy, having written for the Daily Worker in the past. Although the Winter War did not exactly change his beliefs, it changed his estimation of the relevancy of such beliefs.

  A bullet punches through a wooden slat not six inches from his face.

  The metal-sided truck executes a successful turn. Women scream at Joseph to join them. He launches himself out the back. His right leg gives way, as he knew it would, but he pushes to his feet with the aid of the cane, reaches out to their grasping hands—

  A fresh volley of bullets. The young woman he gave a handkerchief to—she's hanging from the back, and she's hit. There's a line of black buttons down the front of her blue dress, and a messy row of little red holes cuts across it. Another fracture in my world. I'm sorry, I want to say to her. Is there someone like me—someone nameless, disembodied, who wears the dead nurse's face—here now, watching... waiting?

  Joseph dives face down on the ground, taking cover. The truck retreats, picking up speed. Its rear wheels bite into the wet, loose earth of the forest path, spraying mud in high, frantic arcs. It fishtails and takes away, leaving Joseph behind.

  Leaving Joseph behind.

  Maybe this is why I'm here now, and have been here these past days. What I've been waiting for.

  I see the partisans now. They've ridden through the forest on horseback. Their horses trot out from cover of the verdant firs, faster, nimbler than the trucks.

  An explosion spooks the horses. The motorcycle comes roaring back through the greasy smoke-curtain. The sidecar is empty. The officer—

  "Get in!" the driver shouts as he slows to swerve around the crippled truck.

  Joseph topples in and hangs on. The motorcycle accelerates to catch the tail of the fleeing convoy. His cane falls by the wayside.

  "Take my pistol and shoot at the horses," the driver instructs, passing him a Nazi-issue Luger. Joseph knows the provenance. The wind whips his hair flat against his head, and his face is drawn tight against the bones of his skull as he takes the pistol. His mouth curves into the smallest and bitterest of smiles.

  A horse gallops through the smoke. More follow. My point of view hovers somewhere by Joseph's left shoulder. We hurtle and jounce over the terrible road, the driver fighting to keep us in a straight line while maintaining top speed. We're gaining on the convoy. Pulling away from the horses, their fluid graceful gallop no match for a BMW 750cc engine.

  Joseph aims. I don't know if he can shoot. I don't know everything about him; I have so many questions I'll never get to ask.

  Joseph, don't shoot them. I do not believe that taking a life will gain your own, not now. But even my silent warning lacks conviction. I want him to live so badly.

  Perhaps he has decided to fire into the air...

  The motorcycle rounds a curve, and yes, the convoy is right there. But there's a woman lying in the middle of the path. Brown mud on a blue dress. Black buttons.

  The driver doesn't know, or doesn't care, that she's dead. He swerves.

  The front wheel slots into a deep ditch filled with watery mud, and the motorcycle flips. The Luger flies away, unfired.

  The dead woman's eyelids spring open; a cold, pale green light flashes forth. Like glowworms shining up from the bottom of a well. She sees me. She nods. It's time.

  I'll be free.

  At last, after all these years waiting. Because it isn't supposed to be like this. Nobody told me the way these things are supposed to be, but I understand them anyway, intrinsically. Death comes on silent feet and I follow in her shadow. I am called into being and then gone again, a worker bee with one purpose and a tiny, almost utterly inconsequential existence.

  But Joseph and I have had a way of outliving fate and I am become ancient.

  The motorcycle hangs upside-down in time, suspended in the air like a mist-veil shrouding a waterfall. Joseph's face is frozen in a flinch, hands clasped over his head and forearms shielding his face. It won't do him any good.

  This is it.

  The motorcycle hits the earth, its body crumpling like a tin toy. Joseph's body crumples too as he's flung from the side car. The incredible force of it slings him against a fir trunk with such violence that he bounces back into the mud of the path. And lies silent. A fracture resounds in my inner senses—twenty feet away, the driver's neck has snapped, it's not Joseph, no, that would be too easy, damn it. I must take him. Power swells in me. I am the one who walks between, the one who is charged to carry.

  The one he sees lurking in imperfect reflections, staring at him with his own eyes through darkened window panes.

  All I've ever wanted was to ease his pain. He lies on his back, mouth moving as if he means to speak. Hot blood washes over his lower lip—lungs punctured, then—and yes, his chest does look somehow deflated. Not speaking. Gasping weakly for air, too broken to fight or thrash. His brilliant grey eyes are glassy, unfocused. All around, the forest is suddenly as hushed as first snow and we are in an age before war and motorcycles, before man. Death.

  It will all be over soon. Joseph's hands, bent and bloodied, twitch and twitch and go still.

  Take him. It's time.

  His dying brain will light up in fireworks and he will see me, see himself in me, and he will know me as I have known him. We will go together into our unknowable future. I will lead him, even though I am not a guide. A fall frost will sugar his body. The war will go on. Here. All over the world. We are so small.

  But in this moment, we are massive.

  And I know that I have a choice. It's the war, maybe, a war like this earth has never known before, breaking all the old rules, feeding the maw of death like a conveyor belt, loosing chaos across land and sea and sky. Or the old magic of this forest, the residue of thousands of years of pale-skinned shamans calling to their spirits, singing them down, setting them to heal or harm.

  I have a choice, and simultaneously no choice at all. Because I love him. He is my son and my brother and my father and my lover, my creator and my destructor and my master, and I love him. Maybe my impossible age has made me wise to or resentful of my purpose, because I can't fulfill it. I can't let him die.

  My hand, in the shape of his own, clasps his. I feel his broken ring finger and his fluttering pulse. His starved blood and hungry veins.

  Live. Live.

  Death's green gaze pins us both, playing silent witness to my rebellion. Sound returns to the forest. Joseph's chest expands, strong and full. His elegant writer's hand gives mine a squeeze.

  The cold air punches my lungs. We both breathe.

  Joseph speaks.

  "I know what you are."

  June 1930

  I am a young boy.

  No. I take the form of a young boy.

  I am nothing. A disembodied nameless thing wearing a young boy's face.

  The boy is dying. That's why I'm here. His mother and father keep a deathwatch by the iron lung. The hulking coffin-shaped thing swallows up the boy's entire body except for his head, which rests on a stack of three overstuffed pillows. His tiny throat is wrapped in cotton batting, which shields his paled skin from the chafing black rubber neck of the machine. In the shadows behind him three more machines stand in a row, their rhythmic mechanical hissing playing backdrop to the murmurs of the boy's parents, w
ho are the ward's only visitors.

  I can instantly tell by their prayers that they have an uncommon marriage. She sings, in a high reedy Hebrew, the Mi Sheberakh; he mutters, in an English marked with the lilt of his home island, the Lord's Prayer. The prayers fly frantic from their mouths, beat against the metal of the iron lung, dissolve into the air. I breathe them in.

  The boy's face becomes clearer. He is very pale and struggles to breathe, even with the aid of the machine. The polio winds its way along his nerves like a mass of parasite vines, paralyzing even the most basic of functions: breathing. In, out, in, out the machine hisses, pumps, wheezes. His parents continue to pray. It's the saddest symphony in the world.

  Releasing him from this agony will be a mercy. I reach out and lay a translucent hand on his shivering, clammy forehead. Joseph. My boy. "I'm sorry," I tell him. "I'm sorry you didn't have more time. But we have to go now."

  The very second he feels my touch, time shatters into a multitude of second-fragments, minute-slivers, hour-motes. I will pull him out of life and into this inhuman realm. We will cease to exist. I realize I am far more sorry than I could have imagined.

  This is my purpose. This is my purpose. This is my purpose.

  A sad note of the Mi Sheberakh still quavers in the air, but I notice that the Lord's Prayer has ceased.

  Joseph's father crashes into me, his hands around my throat.

  This can't be happening. How can he see me?

  I will myself more immaterial, more transparent. My attacker's hands clap together. He falls through me and lands face down on the floor, howling in rage. "Fetch! Get away from my son!"

  He names me. No longer Joseph, I am my own hideous thing. Fetch.

  His wife casts her gaze wildly around. I wait, invisible. She helps her husband to his feet. He can't see me anymore, but he knows I am here. He knows death is here.