by Lee Hayton
Ciaran giggled at the naughty word, and Nolan propped himself on his elbows, opening his eyes.
“Back then, it was hard to hurt yourself, and no one stayed in any pain for long. By the time I was a lad, everything had started to change.”
“Why?” The question burst from Ciaran, swept out on a wave of unfairness. “Couldn’t you get rid of the cockroaches without losing the magic altogether?”
Nolan flinched. Taken aback at a word of hatred coming from such a tender boy.
But Ciaran’s nose followed the same ski jump shape as his father’s. Duncan Helmond’s high cheekbones skulked in the softer planes of Ciaran’s face.
Until he killed himself, Nolan’s own son had born the trademark features that marked out their bloodline. Was it any wonder, the same hatred carved its way into their souls?
“The magic ones weren’t cockroaches, they were people. Hard-working people, just like your mom, just like me, just like you’ll grow up to be one day.”
“That’s not what my teacher says.” Ciaran jutted out his jaw.
“Your teacher’s barely out of school hisself. You going to trust him, or are you going to trust me, who was actually there?”
“Dad said . . .” Ciaran trailed off and leaned forward to poke a stick at the ground in front of him. Nolan placed his palm flat against the boy’s back and felt him tremble.
“When I was little,” Ciaran continued, “Dad said you’d told him they were vermin and you were proud to have wiped them off the face of the earth.”
Nolan’s face twisted. The sneer caused by the scar on his cheek, deepening into a snarl. Of course, he’d said that. Maybe at the time, it had even rung true.
“I was wrong to tell him that.” Nolan leaned forward and stared at the thick grass before him. Fed by the blood of innocents, even the ravages of fire hadn’t cleansed the stain.
“But it’s too late now, I can’t take it back.”
He lay back down, this time putting his hands over is eyes to shut out the glow of the sun. A scene played out inside his mind, clogging his throat with regret.
Once again, he saw the shadow form limply hanging through the side window of his son’s garage. The glass rendered almost opaque with cobwebs and dirt, caked with lime.
The shadow his daughter-in-law couldn’t bring herself to investigate any closer. A shadow that widened the hole in his heart until blood barely pumped around his body. His crimson life force lying sluggish in his veins.
“Physical pain is nothing,” Nolan said slowly, fighting back the hollowness the memory opened inside him. “Even if the magic is gone, painkillers take the edge off.”
Ciaran shifted on the concrete, then his feet thumped onto the dirt as he jumped off to stand in the field.
“Remember how you felt when your dad died. That’s pain.” Nolan took his hands away and squinted as he watched his grandson’s back. “If you can survive emotional pain, you can take the last beating—even a bad one—while you show the bullies it’s time to stop.”
There was more he wanted to say, but he lacked the ability to turn the abstract thoughts into concrete words.
All his life, Nolan had struggled with the inadequacy of spoken language to express his thoughts and emotions. Even now, closing in on the end of his life, he understood the knowledge and experience he wanted to impart weren’t making it through the roadblock of his tongue.
Instead of trying further, he laid his palms flat on the warm concrete. The lichen was a mix of stiffness and softness under his hand. Idly, he picked it off with his twisted fingers, ignoring the grinding glass that had replaced every joint in his body over the last two decades.
His grandson poked a stick into the soft ground with violent stabs. Like the grass was the pain of his father’s death and he was a warrior who would see it bloodied before the day was through. Staring at the boy was bittersweet. So much like himself, it filled Nolan with admiration and fear.
“Ciaran!” he shouted, knocking aside the bad thoughts. “How about some lunch?”
Nolan hitched the wicker basket toward him and pulled out a blanket. Judging from the dirt staining the back of Ciaran’s trousers, it was a task he should have performed sooner.
Next, he pulled out cold sliced meats and butter. Bread that had been pulled fresh from the baker's oven at the crack of dawn. Ciaran’s face lit up, casting the events troubling him into the shadows.
Legs swinging from the concrete edge in unison, man and boy sat in companionable silence, munching.
As he ate, Nolan scanned the field and named the skeletons from memory.
At points throughout his life, they’d sometimes been friends, sometimes enemies. Now all those earlier memories were shadowed with the injustice of their deaths. The steaming pile of wrongdoing that lay heaped at Nolan’s door.
But not his alone.
Chapter Five
Sitting proudly astride his battle horse, Nolan crested the hill above his home village. He pulled gently at his stallion’s reins to slow him to a gradual stop. Although there was the use of a jeep available to him, Nolan chose to re-enter his hometown the same way he’d left, all those years ago. On horseback.
Like all homecomings, this one was bittersweet. Nolan was no longer the young man he’d been when he left, nor were all the changes to the good.
The sky was settling into dusk, embracing the darkness surging forth with inky fingers from the shadows. Originally, they’d planned to ride confidently through the village mid-afternoon, and like all the best plans it had been derailed. Now, they could only skulk into town under the cover of darkness. Like rats.
Nolan shivered, even inside the heavy cloak, and turned to his men. He'd left home as an eager boy, signing up to help the war effort. Each indignity he'd suffered or thrust in turn upon someone else was etched into the lines grooved deep into his forehead. Recorded in the crow’s feet scraped out by sharp claws from the corners of his eyes.
“What's your pleasure, men?” he shouted. “Camp here and rest up for the night? Or, continue onward and get the job done?
No coincidence that Nolan's hometown was also the last stage of the eradication. Once he'd been promoted to a position of power, he’d planned each battle and each killing field so that the last stage of this dragging war would begin on his old stomping ground.
The men expressed enthusiasm for the fight, but Nolan saw the layers stacked beneath it. Their enthusiasm was for this to be over. For them to return to their own towns, their own families, to settle down and pretend the slice of their life soaked in blood and mired in fear was over and gone.
Except for the ravages of their nightmares.
The battle could wait until the morning. Not that he expected this late in the day for anyone to put up much of a fight. The magic ones who’d broken their covenant to mount an attack in self-defense had long ago fallen before the army’s swords.
He gave the order, and the tents were assembled, men bedding down and falling asleep as soon as they closed their eyes. Bone-deep exhaustion had schooled them into taking rest whenever or wherever they found it.
The next morning dawned fine, weak white sunlight strengthening to a yellow glow as the early mists burned away. Nolan already knew where he wanted to head. This was his old stomping ground. He knew the persuasions of the people who inhabited it.
He led the way through the village stopping at the blacksmith. Jack Corrigan had inherited the business from his father, along with his house and twenty hectares of land. Not ever having had to work hard at something left Jack sympathetic to anyone who put in the basic effort.
Nolan dismounted his steed in one smooth motion, looping the reins back through the bridal to direct his horse to stay in place. He rapped his knuckles hard on the old wooden door.
“Open up!”
Turning his head to survey his men, Nolan stepped back a pace from the door. Inside, he heard the rustling sound of someone being squirreled into hiding. This close to the end of the w
ar he knew the sound off by heart.
The door opened upon the meek expression of Corrigan, eyebrows raised in a question even a fool like him knew the answer to.
“Where are they?” Nolan barked.
Corrigan shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. Eagerness for the day to be done had left Nolan short on patience. He slammed the door wide open, pushing Corrigan aside with it. Beckoning his men to follow, Nolan strode inside and started opening doors.
He found them hiding underneath the floorboards, a worn rug covering the tell-tale marks in the wood.
“Come on up,” he ordered and backed away to give them room. A family this time. Mother, father, and a teenage girl. All of them infected with the glow of magic.
“Okay now, either you can tell us who else in the village is hiding your kind, or we’ll start cutting strips off Jack until you do, or until he dies.”
The glances darting back and forth between all of them told the story. Jack may have his sympathies, but shelter was as far as it went. No way in hell he was putting his own life on the line.
Jack slumped shoulders and rubbed his temple as though a headache had begun to form. “Sarah Henderson is hiding the men who helped her father. Norris Margate has a couple in exchange for helping him to get the crops in on his farm.”
With a nod, Nolan dispatched a group of soldiers. Old pros at this game, the names and addresses of everyone were already memorized or easily bought up on a smart screen with the caress of a fingertip.
“Get back there,” Nolan ordered Corrigan. “You don’t want to see what happens next.”
He threw a yoke coated with immosium over each of the captive’s necks. The glow of magic faded, immosium’s own spell turning vermin into humans.
Anger at the job he had to do directed incoherently at his victims, Nolan roughly bound the yokes together. He pushed the family harder than he needed, banging shoulders and heads as he forced them out into the street.
The crowd was already gathering, lining the streets with eager faces, kids standing on tiptoe to ensure they didn’t miss a thing.
Nolan remembered the first time he’d performed this task. Way back when they’d caged the purveyors of magic in frightful concentration camps, immosium chains holding them powerless.
His sergeant had ordered Nolan and his fellow soldiers to fire at the unarmed crowd. Nolan had turned to his superior officer, scanning his apathetic face for the sign of the upcoming punchline to the joke order he’d just issued.
When the men to his right and left began to shoot, Nolan felt as though his entire body had been plunged deep into icy water. His heart was shocked to the verge of seizing. Every organ shrank, withdrawing inward as far as they could go.
“Didn’t you hear me?” his sergeant yelled. Nolan felt the gaze of his platoon turn as one, eying him up as an outsider.
The cries and moans from the terrified wounded in front of him, made Nolan’s blood run even icier still. Although it was clear now no one was joking, his mind still refused to process what was happening as real.
The same men who’d lifted the prisoner’s collars to have them fix a boo-boo dealt out during basic training, stared at him with faces blank of sympathy, empathy, or compassion.
He’d backed up the step, breaking the line. Gazes of curiosity, transformed into anger.
The scent of cordite hanging heavy in the year, mingling with the meaty smell of salt and copper from magician’s blood overwhelmed Nolan. His mind screamed at him to run, to get out of this madness, but even the short span of training he had received at that point kept his feet glued solidly to the ground.
He looked down at the dust of the courtyard. Before his eyes, he saw the same plague circle that had roped him off from the other children now marking him as separate from the men.
The muscles in his chest constricted, squeezing tight until he couldn’t catch his breath. The blood pumping round his body quickly used up all the remaining oxygen. The world faded into black-and-white, a high-pitched squeal dug deep into his ears.
With numb fingers, Nolan felt the greasy metal of his rifle in his hand. He lifted its tonnage up to rest the butt against his shoulder, wrestling with the hundred-pound weight of the barrel to bring it up high enough to aim.
While his morality died in agonizing spasms, taking what little was left of his heart into pieces, Nolan sighted an unarmed man along the barrel and squeezed the trigger. The man fell.
Once the first kill had been performed, each one that followed grew easier. Never an event to look forward to, but the continuing horror faded into the memory of the first. The kill that, all these years after, still kept him awake at night.
He blinked back to present day, saw the children’s eager faces. If Nolan still cared, he’d yell at the parents to take up those kids and squirrel them away inside. No way that anyone should witness the revolting act that was about to follow.
But it’d been a long time since Nolan cared.
They joined up the collections of raggle-taggle magic men, Jack Corrigan’s lot mingling with the ones from Margate’s farm. They lost Sarah Henderson in the gathering, her refusal to give up those they sought earning her a bullet of her own.
Since the village had turned out, the village got a show.
Nolan scanned the assembled crowd then roared, “Awaken Iron!” His lines of men struck their swords—never used except in ceremony—against the cobblestones, striking a flash of sparks.
Lined up, bound, helpless, each cockroach was run through with their short swords. As the near-dead twitched, hanging heavy on each blade, the soldiers twisted and ripped their sharp edges upward, cutting wetly through their victim's stomach up to their chest.
As they let the magic men and women slide down their swords, each soldier wiped his weapon clean on the victim’s clothes before sliding it into his scabbard.
The stench of disembowelment swung through the air like a punching fist to the assembled villagers’ nostrils. Shit, urine, bile, blood, mixing into an odorous cloud that showering would only dampen, not clean away.
When death spasms sent one male’s heels kicking into the cobbled ground—a graceless dance—Nolan held back. He let the villagers get their eyeful before he turned the man over with one steel-tipped kick of his boot and stopped the struggle with a bullet to the base of the man’s brain. It wasn’t until he helped to swing the man’s corpse onto the back of the flatbed truck that Nolan recognized the face.
Jason. The torturer from his childhood.
A chill shook Nolan’s body to its core as he smacked his palm twice against the truck’s side, a signal for their unsightly cargo to be hauled away.
Why would anyone of his generation sign-up for the side of magic? Sure, some kids were born to parents already embroiled in its practice, that follow through was understandable. But Jason’s family hadn’t touched even tangentially on magic. Hadn’t utilized their services apart from one time at school.
Sadness and confusion dragged Nolan down like lead weights.
Once, he’d dreamed of such a happening. Conquering his bully and wielding the weapon that left him dead. A desire that had hung with him for almost a full school year, disappearing like morning mist as soon as his vengeful fist punched into Jason’s face.
Even the straggling villagers were going now. Eager faces turned to blanketed stares. Nolan shook his head as a boy of ten cried with wracked sobs in the doorway of a closed bakery. No one ever learned it was better not to watch until the decision was lost to the past.
The first time Nolan had been promoted, from private up to officer rank, he’d thought the honor had been bestowed on him due to his courage in slaying cockroaches in bulk. When officers stepped aside, unable to fulfill the task at hand, he marked them down for cowardice.
Years too late, he now acknowledged their bravery in standing up and saying no. A chance he’d let slip through his fingers.
But even if it hadn’t been Nolan, there would always have been some
one waiting in the wings, eager to take their place. Someone willing to trade their morality for another chevron on their sleeve.
This close to the end of the war, to take a stand now would be as pyrrhic as it was hypocritical. Nolan didn’t have the energy left to tackle either one of those.
As the flatbed truck returned empty to the village square, Nolan called through to the command unit, safely stationed back at the capital. With a voice descending into gravel, he gave a rundown of the events that have taken place. One casualty. In total, fourteen eradications.
He accepted their praise with the indifference born from complete mental exhaustion. The only acknowledgment Nolan wanted now, was a drink.
Chapter Six
The old inn positioned on the main drag of Nolan’s hometown was welcoming. Light spilled from its open doors out onto the cobblestones of the main street. It was positioned higher than the buildings surrounding it. Shored up foundations with two-yard-wide stepping stones led up to a double door. Still, it was an old place, Nolan had to duck his head as he walked in through the opening.
The main room was an explosion of light and noise, the chattering of tables drowning into a musical hum of conversation. It was so loud, Nolan wondered how anyone could follow the thread of a single voice.
The warm embrace of hops drifted into his nostrils, the first smile of the day creased his lips. Nolan strode across the room, straight to the bar. Marvin greeted him with an awkward hug across the counter, calling to his wife.
They were a jolly couple. Diane did most of the cooking, while Marvin tended bar. Their inn was well known and their generosity legendary. Although Nolan knew full well from reports submitted to headquarters, neither one of them could manage money. For the past three years of the war, army funds had propped up their establishment. Still, the inn was well tended, and they never ran out of wine or beer.
A pint of lager appeared in front of Nolan without him needing to place the order. No matter that it had been over a year since the last time he was close enough to home to pay a visit.