by Sean Wallace
At the funeral, the priest praised Dirk for building the battle suits, for helping bring, “God’s cleansing fire to the godless animals, to Satan’s deformed masses”.
It was days before Dirk’s seventeenth birthday. Frank and the boys had planned to take him up to York, to get him atrociously drunk. Out of some grief-stricken sense of loyalty they undertook the trip without him.
On the train, Frank sat next to his girl, Pam. She was beautiful to him, wrapped in black, her fine blonde curls escaping from behind the darkness of her bonnet, cropped short for practicality but still lingering on her narrow shoulders, still framing her blue eyes. Her curved frame wrapped neatly around his broad one.
They sped through well-tilled countryside. Then, with a shriek from the train’s whistle, fields collapsed into houses and factories, and brick and steel rose around them and enclosed them, and they were in the steaming, stinking heart of York.
At first they drank with the solemn fervor of the bereft, but by the time they arrived at the fourth pub their tongues were looser and anecdotes of Dirk, his foolishness, his enthusiasm, his youth, flowed between them. Frank stayed close to Pam.
The day dragged and blurred in drunkenness. Dirk’s name became a simple refrain, the meaning of their inebriation left behind in the gutter along with the contents of their stomachs.
It was as the bell for last orders clanged at the final pub that Pam spotted the man. He was sitting up at the bar, apart from the others. He still wore his hat, which was odd, and at first Frank thought that was why Pam had pointed him out. But then Pam whispered more and Frank saw that the hat was askew and that the man’s ears were those of a cat.
He was Deformed.
Charlie, his bleary eyes on Pam, said they knew what they had to do.
When the man left the bar, they all followed. Frank tried to linger back. He knew this man deserved the beating he was about to receive, everyone, every paper, every politician, every priest had told him that his whole life. He just didn’t know what the man had done to deserve it from him.
Then, somehow he was at the front of the group. The man’s exposed cat ear twitched and he turned around. Pam touched him on the back, just a little push. Charlie leered and raised a fist. Before he could strike, Frank slammed a fist into the man’s Deformed gut. The wind whistled from the Deformed man’s lungs before he even had time to call out. A couple more blows had the man dizzy. Everything moved in a swift, slick blur. They dragged the man into an alleyway and set to work on him with boots, and fists, and anything else they could find that would inflict pain.
The ground heaved below Frank. His fists seemed to move sluggishly through the air, hesitant. But Dirk had died to kill this man, to kill the Deformed, and Pam was screaming at him to just finish it. His hands hurt. But this was what you did, wasn’t it? Boys at the front were dying because of bastards like this. The Deformed man’s hands moved feebly, like a baby’s first motions, trying to fend off the blows.
“Do it!” Pam screamed, her voice the only clear thing in the fog of drink and confusion. “Do it for Dirk!”
Frank watched the man’s eyes as his fist came down. They were the palest blue, stretched to circles with fear, but fixed on Frank’s face, even as the nose beneath them gave way and shards of it fired backwards into the Deformed man’s brain. Then the eyes went blank and rolled back and away to stare at nothing evermore.
Frank staggered back and away as the others beat the dead body to pulp. His mind rattled loose in the thick meat of his body. He could feel the blood, warm on his face. He had killed a man. For all the damage the others had done it was he who had forced the man across the boundary between life and death. His knuckles ached, cut and bruised. But it had been the right thing to do.
He felt faint, his skin greasy and thin, the rules of the world pressing in on him but he knew, surely, that it had been the right thing to do.
The great sadness of the tale I will tell you is made greater by the auspicious start our two young Lordlings had in life. Both grew up in Oxfordshire in adjacent estates; went to the finest schools together, where they undeniably excelled; and, as only children, both enjoyed the full attention of their devoted parents. Both men attended Cambridge and, to all intents and purposes, both appeared poised to become excellent additions to England’s academic community.
However, the seeds of our downfall came with Lord Simon’s adoption of a religious mania in his early twenties. While the faith of men and women such as you and I is a thing to be admired, in Lord Simon it became a perverse and inflexible fundamentalism.
Who knows what catastrophe caused his sudden embracement of the religious message? All that can be certain is that it would have been far better for this country if he had remained an atheist – the detriment to his soul could be no worse.
At first, Frank blamed Pam. It had been she, after all, who had spotted the man, she who had given the order that his fist had obeyed. But, of course, she had only been telling him the right thing to do.
Next, he blamed himself for listening to Pam. But how could he not have? If he had not killed the man he would have been forgiving the man’s sin, and if God could not forgive it, who was he?
So he blamed the dead man himself.
The man had sold his soul to Satan long ago, he told himself, as he smoked alone, apart from his friends. What he had done was nothing worse than putting down a rabid dog. It wasn’t really a man that he had killed. He read pamphlets that supported this claim, listened to speeches. His conviction of the inevitability of his actions grew stronger day by day. When he could not sleep, hands shaking, sickness gnawing at his gut, he would tell himself that he brought God’s cleansing fire to the godless animals.
A week after the murder, he lied about his age to a recruitment officer and joined the Army.
His friends were quiet at the news. He couldn’t tell if they were proud of him or ashamed of themselves. Charlie in particular was notable in his silence. None of them spoke of the Deformed man in the alleyway.
Pam was tearful, had threatened to go and tell the recruitment officer his real age, and for a moment Frank’s commitment had wavered. But what sort of man would he be if he backed down now? How could he deserve the sight of his reflection in her soft eyes? So he argued with her, spoke to her about what he had been taught to believe about right and wrong, about what was worth fighting for, about what God wanted from him. It would be a betrayal to those beliefs, he said, his gut hardening as he did so, to not go to the front, to not fight. He would not compromise his morals.
When she was sure he was going, she took him to a dark place where many youths their age had been before, and let him touch her how he pleased.
Then he was off to Manchester for two days of training. He and three hundred other young men all packed into a community hall that should only have held half their number, packed together so tight they couldn’t run even if their nerve failed. Frank, caught in their solid heat, knew there was no way out. He learned how to load his rifle, fix his bayonet, and how to salute his superiors. He learned little about his enemy that he didn’t know already, drill sergeants barking about the Deformed’s deprivations of the soul and how it was reflected in their twisted flesh, shouting about the necessity of their death. He sang the national anthem, praised God, and hid his shaking hands.
The train took them all eighteen miles south, depositing them two miles short of their final destination. It was a gray day, damp but not too cold. The sun shone whitely from behind a scrim of clouds. Frank was told that he was to join the fourteenth. “Twice as lucky as the seventh,” one corporal told him with a grin.
They were led down a dirt track. The surroundings had once been fields, but now they were tramped mud, tracks and footprints scouring the wet earth. There were even the splayed marks of battle suits criss-crossing the muck.
As the new recruits marched down the track, he heard thunder coming, although he couldn’t see the signs of rain. After a while, he realized i
t was the guns. His palms began to sweat and his rifle became slippery in his hands.
About a mile from the front, the track started to descend steeply and soon mud walls rose above their heads and they walked a sunken path. Smaller, tributary trenches flowed in and out of the main pathway and occasionally groups of recruits would be led off into the filthy maze, but Frank remained tramping forwards. His route was fixed.
The thunderhead of violence before the troops was palpable in the air. Frank’s pace slowed. He walked hunched. He checked that his helmet was strapped on tightly. He saw the silhouette of a great battle suit plowing its way across the elevated horizon, spitting steam and cannonballs. He pointed to it and turned to the corporal who’d made the crack about the fourteenth.
“I used to make them,” he said, and the knowledge belied the fear that was tightening in his stomach and his balls.
“Yeah?” the corporal said, his once-friendly mouth now a harsh line. “Well don’t tell anyone else, ’cos those fucking death traps take almost as many of our boys as the goddamned Deformed.”
The blunt T-junction end of the track rolled toward them, dirt flying through the air as if it could no longer tell whether it should be beneath their feet or up with the birds. They were called to a halt a hundred yards from the line, from no-man’s-land. The sound was absolute: a blanket that smothered them.
Trying to detach himself from his fear, Frank copied the actions of the men around him – checking his rifle was loaded, that the safety was off – and his heart tried to hammer a path out of the cage of his ribs. But he had killed the Deformed man. Where else could he be but here?
Then they were running, the thunder all around them. Hands were forcing him up the ladders, keeping him moving forwards. Then he was in the pack, mindlessly following them as they charged through the filth and muck. And there was a kind of peace then, with nothing to think about, all doubts left behind in the trench, and only orders to follow. Everything around them brown and grey. The noise so all-encompassing it was almost like silence. Just the feeling of his chest rising and falling, his feet rising and falling, his fellow soldiers rising and falling. He didn’t have to worry about why he was there, if he’d done the right thing, if he would do it in what was to come.
Then, out of the mud, came the Deformed.
All around Frank, his fellow recruits were stumbling, falling to their knees, all in a desperate attempt to get away. Frank stood, silent, dumb. He stood his ground as around him the nerve of others failed.
The enemy came at frightening speed, propelled by legs that were not their own. Ostrich legs, horses’ legs, dogs’ legs, kangaroos’, the coil-unwind-coil of snakes’ bodies, vast wings heavy with mud, tentacles, all thrashing forwards bringing with them claws, and teeth, and vast jaws that snapped and slavered, and stark, furious, but terrifyingly human eyes. And every eye was the same pale blue as the man in the alleyway, every one lusting for deserved revenge.
His gun fired – a yellow white flare, a blaze of color in the monotone battlefield.
A wave of flesh – human, animal, interstitial – rolled out of the gloom and broke over Frank and the fleeing troops.
Red joined the battle’s palette.
Lord Percy did not share Lord Simon’s religious views, but the difference between the friends lay dormant until they reached their thirties. In the meantime, both continued the ascent promised by their early academic careers. Lord Percy became a medical doctor and surgeon of near preternatural skill. He pioneered several amazing techniques, and supplemented his family’s fortune with his successful experiments in the field of pharmacology. Lord Simon’s mind had been captured by engineering and he enjoyed equal success. Soon the wheels of industry were powered by his engines.
Had both men stayed in their respective fields all, I suspect, may have been well, religious differences or no. Sadly, they both chose to enter the public stage. That they chose to enter this fray through the institution of politics, a realm that was once reserved for the democratic debate of what was best for this country, cannot be used to defend their later actions. Indeed, quite the opposite, given what they have done to this once great field – their use of their financial and industrial clout to manipulate the newspapers and to forcefully grab the public ear – undoes any positive aspirations they may have held.
In the end, the Deformed were driven back by machine-gun fire. When the noise stopped, Frank stumbled back to the trenches through the bodies of his fellows, half of them slaughtered by his own side’s bullets. His clothes were torn but his wounds amazingly shallow.
He was shown to a bed in a bunker of packed earth where he lay and stared at the ceiling. From time to time he would be ordered to his feet to go and fling bullets at the writhing mass of the enemy. At other times, a different command would send him to the mess hall. Between eating and killing, he lay down and failed to sleep.
After a week’s insomnia, of inexplicable survival, static buzzing in his ears, exhaustion claimed him, and, mud-spattered and disheveled, he collapsed, unconscious into his cot. The nightmares came then (drowning in a sea of flesh, choking on fingers and eyeballs, filled with a final dreadful sense of release) and he woke screaming, but, on the whole, he felt stronger. A numbness had settled into him, static settled into silence. He found a way to function, like frozen fingers fumbling bullets into the breech of a barrel that they no longer felt.
He spoke to his fellow soldiers but tried to avoid learning their names. They seemed to die so easily. In the brief flicker of their lives they spoke to each other of their hatred of the Deformed and the canteen food. Together they hardened their hearts and souls, further cementing their reasons for having chosen this life, this form of death, even as their courage failed.
Occasionally, Frank would get letters from home. When he read them he felt the numbness come down on him. The words rattled in his head, each divorcing itself from its predecessor. The news they carried seemed utterly removed from him, completely irrelevant. He did not reply. There was nothing to say. He would kill until there were no more to kill. But there could be no end, he saw now, only an end to him and they would get that letter soon enough.
After two months, he and some of the other soldiers were promised a weekend of leave. They talked of nothing else. Many were going home. Others were going to Manchester to get blind drunk. Frank went with the latter group. When, barely coherent, eyes hooded by liquor, he fell into the whore’s arms, he thought of Pam not once.
Everything I have told you so far has been background information for the incipient event: Lord Percy’s pioneering of animalistic augmentation – the safe and effective method for the replacement of human limbs with animal ones. This technique, Lord Percy claimed, would “save the lives of many a victim of today’s industrial machinery and return him swiftly to the workforce where he will be less of a burden to both his family and the state”. The fact that he charged both an arm and a leg to replace just one of those limbs should not go unmentioned.
It was now that Lord Simon chose to take a religious and moral stand that would tear the country in two. His phrase, “Compromise of the body is compromise of the soul” became the refrain of the religious hard line. However, I suspect that had it not been for Lord Simon’s sense of self-importance and the willingly manipulated media this phrase would have gotten little further than his dining room. Certainly the world would have been a better place.
A year passed. The trench in which Frank fought had moved forward two hundred yards, and then fallen back a hundred and fifty, an oscillating fault line of power that never settled. They were told that somewhere, perhaps a mile away, there was a facility where the Deformed took their wounded to be remade and repaired. The destruction of this facility was rumored to be crucial. Even more than Frank hated the Deformed – and Frank did hate them now, true and strong, not for their offences in the eyes of God but simply for their existence which kept him, kept them all here – he hated the facility.
As the
months passed, Frank was amazed by his own capacity for survival. He watched his fellows fall, watched them break their own legs so they could be sent home, watched them be shipped to hospitals when the shakes got too bad, and still he kept returning to Manchester, like a man surfacing from sewage to gasp air.
He would spend the majority of his time in the city drunk. When he could, he would pick up city girls, and when he could not, he would pay for whores. He would sink into the blankness of flesh, grabbing what pleasures he had left to him. Occasionally, he thought of Pam, but she was unreal to him, like an amputated limb.
Then, one beer-stained night, he met Anna. He approached her, weaving. He made the same familiar overtures, parading his well-worn lines. She ignored them, but not him.
“What do you want?” she had asked him, but not harshly – openly, welcoming, and her honest desire for an answer undid his leer before it could fully form. A frown creased his brow.
“A word?” she asked. “A drink?”
“Yes.” And the certainty felt good.
“Even though you know you won’t find it there?” Anna had said.
“Find what?”
“Your way out.”
Frank looked at her, and almost walked away. He could see the mud and the trenches stretching away beyond Anna, and he did not come to Manchester to remember them. But there was still that smile. “Then what’s the point?” he asked.
“Oh, pet, I’m not saying that if you find yourself in a hard place you shouldn’t go looking for a way out, just that you won’t find it in the beer glasses, here.”
“How’d you know?” he said, gruff, on the verge of departure.
“I already looked.”
And then Frank found himself laughing, laughing pure for the first time in God knows how long.
“You got any other suggestions where to look?” he asked, still smiling.
She took a step in, towards the protective curl of his arm. “Other people,” she said.
Anna was tall, and broad, and firm – a good working-class girl come to do her bit for the boys, she told Frank as they tumbled, beer-stained and laughing, through her front door.