by Sean Wallace
Frank nodded and folded the letter away.
“I heard about it.” Sam clapped him on the shoulder in a reassuring way. “Those goddamn pilots. Anyone willing to ride one of those damn things should be shot on sight. Be quicker and it’d take fewer of us with them.”
Frank couldn’t quite muster a smile.
“You know what we should do?” Sam asked and Frank could see the vehemence growing in the man. “We should get one, just one of those fucking things inside that goddamn facility we’re meant to be attacking, and sit it there ’til someone blows it up. We shell that damn building all goddamn day but they’ve dug the bunkers so fucking deep we can’t touch it. But we get one of those walking time bombs just halfway in there and we blow the goddamn guts out of the place. Then . . .” Sam trailed off. There was no concept of “then” at the front. Only the bloody “now”.
“Yeah,” Frank said. He could feel the numbness seeping back into him, cutting him away from Sam. The man’s voice started to fade away. Later, when Sam was gone, Frank read Anna’s letter but the thaw didn’t seem to come. His reply felt automated, perfunctory.
But, little by little, Anna’s letters chipped away at the ice inside of him. He could not keep her from his heart and he brought that into battle with him every day. Two weeks later, in Manchester, the sight of her made the final sheets of ice slough away, taking with them the image of the soldier’s open leaking skull. Warmth flooded him and he went to her and laughed with her and kissed her and held her hand and she reminded him why, as much as he fought the Deformed, he fought to stay alive.
Later they made love and, as they did, she curled her tail around his hand. It was the first time in a year and a half that he had held it. He pulled it a little and she purred in his ear.
They lay sweaty and naked in the darkness, white-blue light outlining their curves and edges.
“What’ll we do when it’s over?” she said.
“What’s over?”
“The war.”
“I . . .” Frank paused. The idea of an end, once so present in his mind, had slipped away amongst the body parts and the blood. It seemed an impossibility now – the thought of consequences to his actions. “I don’t know.”
She paused, then spoke again, her voice quiet and quick like the beat of a hummingbird. “Do you love me, Frank?” Then immediately after, “No, don’t answer that.”
Frank felt the long length of her pressed against his side, her hand splayed on his chest. He thought of the letters she wrote him and the ones he wrote her, the way she reached inside his chest and opened it up so everything in it spilled out and how she was slowly helping him become his own man no matter how much the war tore at him.
“Yes,” he said into the silence. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
She let out a squeal and bounced astride him, her hips hugging his waist, bent down and kissed him. She kissed him again and again until his face was damp with her kisses. She lay down on top of him, her face nestled in the crook between his neck and shoulder. He could feel her eyelashes tickling his jawline and the warmth in his heart felt like it would burn him whole, a glorious, passionate conflagration. Her lips brushed his skin as she spoke.
“There’s a place in town where you can still get it done. A lot of people go there. It’s one of those secrets that almost isn’t. Very clean place. I’ve been saving up and—” her voice softened, barely audible “—I want to give you a present.”
She sat up on him, arched her back to push out her chest and pointed just below her breasts. “I’m going to get another pair of titties. I’ll have four of them. All for you.” She laughed, high and girlish. “Can you imagine? For you, pet. Four for you.”
She collapsed back down onto him, buried her head in that crook again, still giggling. Then she must have felt his body all hard and stiff beneath her because she asked, “What’s wrong, pet?” and her voice, to Frank, sounded like snow falling.
“No,” he said. “No.” His jaw worked as he tried to get the thoughts out, tried to turn the buzzing into words. “I don’t . . . Because . . . Because . . .”
He pushed her off him, roughly. She fell with a gasp. He grabbed her tail. “This . . . This . . .” He pulled it hard and she let out a shriek. There were tears on his cheeks.
“You said it was a mistake! You said you wished you didn’t have it! But if you want . . . you want . . . that—” he pointed to her chest and she pulled the sheets over her chest, and she was crying too “—then you’re no different from them.” He spat the word. “Then you’re Deformed.”
It was the betrayal that hurt him, not truly the revelation, because deep down, deep down in the meat of his body, he had known how she felt, known ever since he saw her in the moonlight. No, it was the betrayal of his silent duplicity, his easy self-deception, her betrayal of his ability to hold on to even that, to his ability to keep the conflicts in his soul in check. And now she forced him to choose a side. And despite it all, he still knew what the right thing to do was.
So every word from every boy he’d ever worked with, every man he’d ever fought alongside, ever seen die, ever seen have his head sliced in two; from everyone in his family; from every priest; everything he’d ever been told burned in his mind and his mouth and he spat it at her. Her soul was forfeit, he told her. She was in Satan’s thrall. She sickened him. She was filth. And all the while tears poured from his eyes because now all he was was what he’d been told to be. But there was nothing else he knew to be.
In the end, he was just quiet, his mouth a line, and her words were nothing. He got dressed, watching the work of his fingers closely so that they didn’t fumble, because he could no longer feel them.
He caught the first train back to the front, and tried to deny to himself that he would have liked what she had offered.
* * *
Despite early fluctuations, within a year the battle lines had solidified and a mile-wide strip of no-man’s-land had been etched irrevocably between a point just south of Manchester on the west coast to another, halfway between Grimsby and Skegness, on the east. There were a few notable victories and individual acts of heroism but overall the line stayed remarkably static.
My fellow historians would have you believe that these years of war have strengthened our nation, have given us souls of steel forged in the fires of war. Violence, they tell you, pushes our industry and the minds of our great thinkers, Percy and Simon, to come up with many and varied technologies that benefit our daily lives. The fact that these technologies are spin-offs from others designed to kill in as broad and indiscriminate a manner as possible is rarely mentioned. The truth is we are pouring our young into a mud-filled hole, and at the end of this debacle only a pitiable few will be able to clamber back out again.
Frank went back to the killing and the mud and the cold. He gripped his rifle with assurance and pulled its trigger with certainty. The Deformed came at him, wave after wave of indeterminate things, and all around him men fell, but he was never once injured. In almost three years he had never been touched by the war. The new recruits spoke of him in awe and vied for his attention. He gave it to none of them. He had none to give. He went through life clean, like a bullet shot askew.
She sent him letters, of course. He didn’t open them but she didn’t stop.
Days passed him in strobe flashes: himself in the dirt, gun in his hands; him washing blood from his fingernails; him lying in bed, hands shaking so damn hard he couldn’t sleep. One time he found another stripe on his epaulettes and had no idea how he’d got it. Sometimes he’d find himself lecturing the younger men, ranting about the Deformed, hatred spilling out of him and onto them.
Then, one day, he came to and found he was dragging some kid from his bunk by the scruff of his neck. The kid was so young he must have lied abut his age to the recruiting officer just to get there. His lip was bleeding. Everyone was watching them. Frank knew things he couldn’t remember learning. He knew about the girl the kid was seeing, knew th
e truth that the others rumored about. He knew why she always wore gloves, knew the way her tongue separated in two. He knew about her feet like hands.
The man’s belongings were spread across the floor, and strewn among them were brown and cream photos of the girl, the oh-so Deformed girl, naked and on display. He knew he must have scattered those pictures there, must have torn the kid’s stuff apart to find the evidence. And now, as he dragged the kid out into the mud, he knew what he had to do, what he’d always been taught to do, what he’d done before.
The first punch caught the kid under his jaw and lifted him clean off his feet, laid him out straight on the floor. The second buried itself in the kid’s guts and the kid spewed. The third sent his head snapping through mud on an awkward lateral path. Piece by piece, Frank took the kid apart. There was a crowd around them and Frank thought that they were shouting something but whether it was encouragement or dismay he couldn’t tell. He just did what he had to do, did his damn, thrice-fucked duty for God and country, until the kid’s bloody mess of a face gave way beneath his fists and he knew it was done.
Something broke inside him then, and maybe it was the ice and maybe it was his heart and maybe it was something else, because nothing really seemed clear, but he stood, covered in mud, in the everything and nothing mix of the land, and stumbled away. Someone clapped him on the shoulder as he went. He thought someone else was crying, but no one stopped him, and he just kept on walking away. He was empty now, duty done, the right thing done, the right that had done him so much wrong.
He got to Manchester late at night, still covered in mud. His feet ached and his fist left stains on Anna’s door when he knocked. She answered it after a while, bleary-eyed, her robe clutched about her. She stared at him quietly in the moonlight, at his broad, stained face. Then she unlatched the door and pulled him in and to her, dirt and all. She bathed him, and held him, and wrapped herself around him. Her arms and her legs and her tail were three bands of heat embracing his frozen core.
She fell asleep like that, curled against him, warm and heavy, her breath moist against his neck. He lay awake watching the light and the shadow, the place where the two merged into each other.
And he saw it there: England mapped out in shadow and light across her body. And he saw the trenches in their grey meeting point – the line where two lies met and churned the world to mud. But no matter how the light lay, it was still Anna underneath it, no matter how much the shadows obscured her form, she was still there solid, and to be held.
Slowly, the moon fell and dawn came and the world became an indeterminate gray – Anna’s shape resolving as the vision of light melted away – the world changing. And Frank smiled with tears in his eyes because finally he did know the right thing to do.
He touched Anna’s arm to wake her. “That place,” he said, “where you can have it done. Let’s go there.”
We now approach the end of our pitiable tale. It is catching up with the present. England is divided, the two sides utterly opposed, no position left open for compromise. The only solution to our political and religious extremism seems to be the total destruction of either one or both sides.
Except that it is increasingly clear that things will not end this way. In creating their myth of our times, Lords Simon and Percy, the newspapermen, my fellow historians, have all forgotten something. They have forgotten you and me, the common men and women forced to live in the world they are forging.
While the so-called great thinkers of our time dig their heels into their carefully staked out political territory, we find the space between. We compromise – we smuggle food packages to our cousins on the other side of the border when we can, and gratefully receive them in return; we whisper prayers for them, even though, in public, we profess that they are bound for hell; we love in secret and hate in public. And we do this not because we are lesser beings with lesser principles, but because it is inevitable. It is necessary for us to survive. In the end rhetoric will always be vanquished by reality. The tragedy is the number of men that we must sacrifice to come by this knowledge.
Frank waited until the twilight was thick around him before he sprinted across the open stretch between the warehouses. His body screamed in pain at the movement, but he bit his tongue until it bled, and made it to the shadows noiselessly. He looked back at the distance he had covered and was amazed at his newfound speed.
The warehouse guards stood away from the building’s door. They stamped their feet and sucked warm cigarette smoke down into chill lungs. With animal grace Frank slipped past them unnoticed a creature of silence and shadow.
The warehouse’s aluminum walls were vast and cavernous. Their creaking was the only concerned voice Frank could hear. Before him stretched out two rows of hulking figures – vacant battle suits standing limp and lifeless.
He laid a hand on the steel ladder built into the leg of one suit and swung himself up to the service hatch. The movement felt unnatural but was done easily enough. The hatch opened quietly, its weight negligible compared to the strength of his arms. He was taken back to his factory days as his hand navigated the surface of the suit, finding their way easily despite the darkness. He found the button he wanted, pressed it, and a phosphorous flare ignited the kindling in the battle suit’s engine. He swung the hatch closed and watched the warehouse entrance. The guards showed no signs of having heard him yet.
They would soon enough, and his heart beat as hard as it had his first day in the trenches.
He swung round to the pilot’s seat and set about strapping himself into the suit. This was the hardest part. The straps had not been designed for someone of his shape. But without this shape he knew, he could never have got this far. His fingers fumbled with the buckles, the noise from the boiler mounting, and his surgical scars sang with pain.
Finally, though, it was done. In the failing light he could still make out the pressure dials. Almost done. He cast another look at the door. The two guards were beginning to look about, trying to pinpoint the source of the rising noise. His hands fixed themselves on the levers and he tried to remember schematics from a lifetime he’d forgotten.
Then the soldiers realized what was happening and started to run towards him, guns raised.
As Frank pulled the first lever he remembered Anna’s parting kiss, her weight pressed against his face, one hand in his hair, the other in the small of his back. He didn’t know if she’d believed him when he’d told her he would be back soon.
Frank wondered what he looked like to these soldiers, what kind of monster?
When they had first arrived at the clinic, Anna hadn’t realized what he was going to do. They had walked hand in hand through the streets, both a little breathless. He had been constantly looking for soldiers, but saw none. Anna had led him to the back of a pub and knocked on the cellar’s loading doors. A small man had appeared and ushered them down, leading them through stale-smelling kegs to a door which had opened onto a bright, white space. A doctor with an extra pair of ape’s arms had greeted them. Then Frank had explained and Anna had protested.
“Why, pet, why?” she had kept repeating.
But he had remained quiet.
She had held his hand as they put him under. When he had come to she was still holding it, as if she had never left. But his hand was different, the fingers longer and hairier. There was a lot of pain.
“I love you,” she’d told him. “I’ll always love you.”
He’d tried to reply but his jaw had not let him. Still, she understood.
Would she understand now? Now, as he hauled on the battle suit’s levers, fingers twitching with the flurry of adrenaline? As he swatted the guards away with one vast metal hand? As his steel feet pounded the ground and he charged forwards with the hiss of pneumatics and the crunch of gears? As he tore through the camp, charging out towards no-man’s-land? As he headed from light and dark, into the gray. As he went to put a stop to it all.
The mud stretched out to claim him like a lover
. He shut the suit’s headlights and made it crawl on all fours, bestial, through the muck. His new ears could already pick out the sound of the enemy beyond. He felt ready for the Deformed, ready and powerful, his body’s new flesh encased in this new steel skin.
It seemed unlikely to him that the Deformed ever knew what hit them. He leapt over their first ranks before they could start firing. His guns cut a swathe through the quickest of them, then he was past them and still running. The facility rose in the night before him. There were guards, and someone had radioed from the front, and by the time he tore the doors off the place, he was bleeding badly, one of his arms hung useless unable to grip the levers. It didn’t matter, though. There would be a resolution.
The suit banged and scraped against the facility’s corridor walls, showering sparks. Troops were lined up to meet him. But still he plunged on, working deeper and deeper, the memory of Anna’s kiss heavy on his lips.
He had left her a letter, to explain with his pen what his tongue could not.
“Of all the things people have ever told me, you have told me the truest: that there is a space between speeches. And now I know a way to tell everyone else. What I’m going to do will let people know that there isn’t just one way, that they can make their own way, that there’s always that place between, they always have it, they just need to open their eyes. You opened mine. I love you for it. I always will.”
Eventually his suit fell. It crashed face down, leaking hydraulics. He lay there, tasting blood and concrete. Both his arms were broken by then. It only seemed fitting as he used his new tail to pull the pin from the grenade.
And now, as we arrive at the present, we have the case of Sergeant Frank Plane, his story emblazoned across today’s newspapers. His heroic destruction of Lord Percy’s augmentation factory; then, days later, the photographs taken by his paramour, Ms Anna Wright, exposing the lie of glorious victory spread by Lord Simon and his generals. Only a Deformed man was able to save the un-augmented, only someone operating between the two competing philosophies of our time. He has exposed our society for the paper-thin lie it is: smoke and mirrors, light and shadow.