by Jake Elwood
“Good.” Cooper squinted. “You too.”
Tom stretched himself out on his cot, then immediately rose. Inactivity was intolerable. He tried to pace, couldn’t find room, and went outside instead. He stomped over to the gate and rattled it.
A guard in a slicker approached. “What do you want?”
“Medication. We've got men with Red Fever. And a man with an infected cut in his arm.” Tom pointed an accusing finger toward the guards' hut. “And you've got medical supplies!”
“Get away from the fence.”
“Damn it, I know you're worried about the fever. And you want us to get this stupid hole dug. Well, the best way to take care of both things is to give us access to your precious medical supplies. It's not like you can't spare it.”
The guard brought his rifle up from under his coat. “I said back away.”
Rage washed over Tom. He grabbed the wire of the gate, shook it. “God damn it, what's the matter with you? We're human beings over here, you know! These men are dying ten whole meters away from your stupid unused medicine stash that you won't-”
The rifle fired, the report like a blow to his eardrums, shocking Tom out of his anger. He stared at the guard, his brain re-running the last few seconds. He'd felt a tremor in his right foot. By the angle of the gun barrel, the man had put a warning shot in the ground no more than a finger’s breadth from his foot.
“Back away,” the guard said, and the barrel of his rifle tilted up until it pointed directly at Tom's chest. “Last warning.”
Tom twisted the wire in his fists until hot lines of pain burned across his palms. Then, one finger at a time, he made himself let go. He stepped back.
The guard didn't move. The barrel of the rifle didn't waver as Tom took another step back, then another. Finally he turned his back on the guard and trudged back to the hut. He felt powerless, useless, humiliated.
When he reached the door he glanced over his shoulder. The guard still held the rifle ready, the barrel pointing at Tom's guts.
He spat in the guard's direction and went inside.
In the morning Cooper was ill. He dragged his cot over to the sick side of the room and flopped back down.
O'Reilly claimed to feel a bit better, but he looked terrible. “Stay here,” Tom told him. “It's not like they're going to come in here and check on you.”
“I'll come outside,” O'Reilly murmured. “I don't want to stay in here.”
Tom nodded his understanding. He had no idea if O'Reilly might be immune to the disease. Men recovered so rarely, they had no data to draw on. What he knew for sure was that no one wanted to stay in the hut a moment longer than they had to.
The rain had stopped. The pit was a quagmire, with ankle-deep water over a layer of butter-soft mud that pulled off men's boots when they tried to take a step. It was miserable work, and the men with wheelbarrows traded off with the others, taking their turn wielding spades in the muck.
There wasn't much supervising to do, and Tom found himself watching, feeling guilty that he wasn't working harder, feeling guilty that he couldn't do something to spare the men.
He caught himself peering at his own reflection in puddles, trying to spot redness in his eyes. There was none so far, and he wondered how long his luck would hold.
A voice whispered away at him in the back of his mind, and at last he ran out of other distractions and began to listen. You better not get sick, it said. If you get sick, you won't be able to do anything. It will be selfish if you act to save yourself. You'll stand idle and let your men die around you rather than take an action that would save your own life.
But if you're not infected, it's easy. You can do something. You can turn on the guards and murder them in their beds and unleash a nightmare of reprisals back in Camp One. You can do it all, because it's not for you. It's for your men, and it's your duty to keep them safe.
“I can't do anything.” He murmured the words aloud, then looked around furtively. A man with a wheelbarrow was almost in earshot, but he was lost in a private world of misery. “I can't do anything,” Tom repeated in a whisper. “I really can't. The price is too high. And what will I achieve? If I give medication to my team, what good will it do?
“They're dead men. They just haven't stopped breathing yet.”
At midday two more men limped away, skin hot and eyes bloodshot. The guards told Tom to join the workers, and he spent the rest of the day with a shovel in his hands. He didn't mind. It gave him an outlet for his rising frustration. It felt like penance.
He was walking beside O'Reilly on the way back to the compound when he noticed a smell like rotting meat. Once they were inside the wire he sat O'Reilly down and inspected his forearm.
It was bad. The worst spot, just below the elbow, was swollen to the size of a football. The skin over the swelling was a bright angry red shot through with streaks of black, and by the smell of it, O'Reilly's flesh was putrefying.
The machete was the only knife they had. Tom washed it as best he could, then, as delicately as he could with such a clumsy tool, he sliced open the tight-stretched skin above the swelling.
Hot bloody pus gushed from the cut. The smell twisted Tom's stomach, and he turned his head away, fighting to keep his gorge down. He waited a moment for his nose to deaden a bit, then started kneading O'Reilly's forearm, working as much pus as he could out of the wound.
O'Reilly endured it all in silence, his face white, his eyes squeezed shut. He breathed in short agonized gasps, and when it was over his whole body trembled in relief.
Tom bathed the wound, then bandaged it with strips cut from a blanket. It was a pitifully inadequate treatment. He was no doctor, but he could see that the infection ran deep. If they were back at Camp One, he figured the surgeon would probably amputate the arm in an attempt to save O'Reilly's life.
Out here, without even that level of care, Tom could only make token attempts to help.
O'Reilly was going to die.
The last of the cloud cleared as the sun set. The healthy men sat around on the grass outside, talking quietly, killing time. Tom went into the hut.
Cooper and Reese sat on one cot playing chess with a board made from woven leaves. They had chess men improvised from pebbles, flowers, bits of wood, and bundles of grass. They were arguing over whether one chunk of wood was a bishop or a knight. The fading light didn't help.
The other men lay on cots. Some of them sat up as Tom approached, and he waved them down. Some of them barely looked sick, if you ignored their bloodshot eyes. The more advanced cases looked worse, listless men with sunken eyes who didn't do more than glance at him before retreating into their personal world of suffering.
Santiago was the worst. He didn't stir even when Tom put a hand on his shoulder and spoke his name. Tom sat on his bunk for a time, looking down at the stricken man, his thoughts churning in frustrated, useless circles.
He felt stuck, tangled in indecision. All the medication his men needed was right there on the other side of the wire. He figured he could get it, too. But the cost …
Santiago moaned, turned his head, and lapsed into stillness. Tom stared down at him. If you die …
What? If he dies, what? He scowled, imagining himself using Santiago's inevitable death as a goad that would finally jar him from his indecision and make him act.
But if you're going to do something, why don't you do it now, before he dies? Why don't you save Santiago?
Because it won't save him. We'll still be on this God-forsaken rock with no way off, and nothing will stop Amar from hunting us down and hanging our bodies outside the fence at Camp One as a warning to hotheaded lieutenants like me. We won't even get the chance to die of starvation in the jungle. They'll track us, and they'll shoot us, and they'll carry our corpses back as trophies. And there's nothing I can do to prevent it.
“You need to get out of here, Lieutenant.” He couldn’t tell who had spoken in the deepening gloom. “You need to quit breathing our air. Believe me
, you don't want what we've got.”
Tom stared in the direction of the voice, his mouth open, searching for something to say. He wanted to promise he'd do something, but it would be a lie.
He was going to do nothing.
Finally he stood, angry with himself, and walked out of the hut.
He lay on the grass, wrapped in a blanket, staring up at the stars. A single light burned on the wall of the guards' hut, bathing much of the compound in cold white light, but the men had put their blankets in the shadow of their own hut. There wasn't enough light to spoil his night vision. The stars pressed in, uncountable, so close he almost thought he could reach out and touch them. Will I ever travel among the stars again? Will any of us?
Do it, whispered a voice in the back of his mind. Don't just lie here watching your men die around you. Act.
But the consequences, he said to the voice. The reprisals. If I act, a bunch of innocent prisoners are going to die.
If you don't act, O'Reilly and Santiago and Cooper and a bunch of other innocent prisoners will die.
I can't save them, he insisted. They'll die anyway.
You can give them a ghost of a chance. You can let them die like men. You can fight back, strike a blow against the Dawn Alliance. You can turn a bunch of pathetic trapped slaves back into soldiers.
But the reprisals!
How many of the prisoners back at Camp One are going to survive the war? Tom squirmed in his blanket, not liking the thought. If you allow the Dawn Alliance to control you with hostages, the war might as well already be over. The only way to victory is to refuse to give in.
And those hostages are going to die anyway.
Around and around his thoughts went, until at last he ran up against one inescapable truth. O'Reilly and the men with Red Fever were going to die in a matter of days unless he acted.
Tom sat up.
Immediately the men all around him sat up as well. Kuzyk said, “What's the plan, Lieutenant?”
“I don't know,” Tom said, violating a cardinal rule of command. “I don't know if it's the right thing to do.”
“What are they going to do?” said Barnard. “Kill us faster?”
“He's right,” said Kuzyk. “We can't just keep working for them while they murder us by degrees. Someday there'll only be two prisoners left alive, and neither one of them will fight back because it'll get the other guy killed. No one's going to act like a man until there's only one man left.”
Murmurs of assent came from the darkness. Champlain said, “We're not doing the men in Camp One any favors by keeping them alive in this shit-hole.”
“All right,” said Tom, and let his doubts fall away. “This won't be easy. But here's what we're going to do …”
“What do you think you're doing?” The voice belonged to the only guard on duty. He was speaking to O'Reilly, who had the job of keeping him distracted for the next several minutes. “Get back from the wire!”
I hope he doesn't get himself shot. Tom pushed the worry to the back of his mind as he led the rest of the healthy prisoners to the fence. O'Reilly and the guard were on the far side of the hut, O'Reilly's position carefully chosen to lure the man to the one spot where he wouldn't be able to see the escape.
“Here,” said Barnard, indicating the two posts where he had put in shortened staples. He and Kuzyk started kicking the wire close to the posts, and staples made a faint clatter as they popped loose and flew into the darkness.
Tom had expected to crawl out at ground level like he'd done in Camp One, but Kuzyk and Barnard loosened four wires at just below waist height. Then the two of them spread the wires, leaning a knee on one wire to pull down, lifting on the wire above it with their hands. “Go, quick!”
The guard hut was a dozen meters away, and this stretch of fence was well out of the shadow of the prisoners' hut. They'd be in plain sight if another guard came out. Tom shrugged inwardly. They would be lucky, or they wouldn't. He helped Kabir get unsnagged from a barb, then took his own turn climbing through the gap. Barbs caught him in several places, and he waited patiently, balanced on one leg, as the others got him free.
He and Champlain took over for Kuzyk and Barnard, holding the wires apart as Kuzyk came through. Barnard was last, muttering angrily as a barb dug into his leg.
Somewhere on the far side of the hut O'Reilly was complaining in a low, bitter voice, claiming he had a right to lean on the wire if he chose. The guard seemed to have given up on arguing back.
Barnard took the machete. Tom had wanted it for himself, but Barnard had more training in hand-to-hand combat. He also had a ruthless look in his eyes when he talked about killing, so Tom relented.
They walked away from the fence, careful to keep the hut between themselves and O'Reilly. A dozen paces was plenty. They dropped to their stomachs in the tall grass and started to crawl, moving parallel to the fence. They crawled until the light that touched the tops of the stalks around them disappeared. That meant they were past the front of the guard hut.
Still they crawled, on and on, and finally Tom pushed with his hands and lifted his head slowly above the grass. He was past the back of the guard hut. He couldn't see the guard, but if the man was moving, he might come into view at any moment.
Tom changed direction, the others following like the body of some great segmented serpent with Tom as the head. He curved toward the guard hut, lifting his head from time to time to get his bearings.
Finally the back wall of the guard hut was directly ahead, no more than a dozen meters away. He stood and hurried to the hut, the others clustering around him.
O'Reilly had long since gone silent. That meant the guard could be anywhere. Tom crept to the corner of the hut and peeked around.
Nothing moved. The guard was nowhere in sight.
“I see him.” The low whisper came from Champlain, who was peering around the other side of the hut. “He's going around the – okay, he's on the far side of our hut.”
Tom reacted without thought, stepping around the corner and moving to the light mounted high on the wall of the hut. He'd helped install the thing, so he knew exactly how to disable it. He grabbed the circular base of the light with both hands, pulling and twisting, and heard the glue give with a low tearing sound. The light was self-contained, and continued to glow in his hands. He slammed it against the ground, and the world went dark.
He had to find his way back around the corner by touch. He stared into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust, listening to the quiet breathing of the men around him and the buzz of insects in the grass.
Footsteps rustled in the distance, growing louder with decreasing distance. The guard, coming to check on the light. Would he be suspicious? If he advanced slowly, rifle in hand, this would not go well.
By the sound of his feet, though, he was walking like a man unconcerned. And why shouldn't he? As far as he knew the prisoners were trapped behind barbed wire, and why would they do something as crazy as attempting escape?
Tom peered up at the sky, saw only a handful of stars, and shook his head. He'd have to trust the men to deal with the guard. They'd all been behind the hut. They still had their night vision.
“Now!” The cry was a sharp whisper, and it triggered a rush of feet running through the grass. Tom followed, heart in his throat, and saw a confused blur of dark shapes as five men converged on the luckless guard. Someone grunted, and the machete made a sickly crunching sound as it struck. And then there was silence, except for the sound of men panting for breath.
“Don't touch the rifle,” Tom said, pushing his way through the cluster of prisoners. He'd learned a few things since his first day in the jungle when he'd seen a prisoner take a rifle from a guard. “There's a filament running to his belt. If it pops loose the gun won't fire.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Kuzyk. “He's right. I can feel it. Damn thing's invisible.”
“There's not much holding it in place,” Tom said, “so don't fiddle with it. It might even set o
ff an alarm in there if it loses contact.” He pointed at the guard hut.
“So what do we do?” Kuzyk said. “Leave it here?”
“Someone stays with the guard and holds the rifle,” Tom said. “Don't stand up. Just kneel beside the body. If you're careful you should still be able to shoot.”
“Got it,” Kuzyk said, planting one knee in the dead man's stomach. He took aim at the door to the hut, then touched the stock of the rifle. “Filament's still in place.”
“You're the reserve force,” Tom told him. “Stay here and cover the door. The rest of you, come with me. We're heading inside.” He looked at Barnard, who held the bloody machete. “Are you good to lead the way?”
“You bet, Lieutenant.”
“All right. Let's go.”
They poured into the hut in a rush. By the time Tom made it through the doorway the room was a chaotic jumble of struggling bodies. A shape lunged out of the darkness, a man's bare shoulder slammed into Tom's chest, and he staggered back, tumbling through the door to land on his back on the ground outside. A foot landed in his stomach, driving out what little breath remained in his lungs, as someone fled. A gunshot rang out, deafeningly loud, and Tom struggled to sit up.
A light came on inside the hut. Petersen and Champlain had a guard pinned face-down on the floor, his arms pulled tight behind his back. A second guard was a bloody mess in a doorway, hacked down by the machete.
Kabir appeared in the doorway, grimacing as he stepped over the corpse. “I got one,” he said, and held up a blast pistol. “He was going for this.”
“One got past me,” Tom wheezed. He clambered to his feet and looked outside.
Kuzyk still knelt on the corpse of the first guard they'd killed. He lowered the rifle, unclipped a small object from the dead man's belt, and pointed into the darkness. A beam of light appeared. Tom looked in that direction and saw the engineer, wearing only underpants, flopping in the grass a dozen meters away.
Tom took another look inside the hut. The men clearly had things under control. He plodded wearily toward the engineer, weighing options, weighing consequences.