thought in which he cursed the lack of a calculator and waved away all Ian’s attempts to contribute to the equation. The boys struck out then, gathering a percussion pistol each from the Arsenal. Ian also spotted a Bowie knife half as long as his arm which he back-mounted for ease of access. He kept up an incessant practice of shouting a challenge while performing a quick over-hand draw of the Bowie. In time, he co-ordinated this action with the drawing of his pistol to hold both weapons at the ready.
Jeremy favoured removing his gun in a slow fashion and bracing it with both hands. The boy then sighted a steady bead along the barrel.
“Gunfights in the Old West were won not by the quicker draw,” he pronounced as they walked. The front blade sight swung to the pillar and then to the sun. “That is a Hollywood myth. It was the man who could bring his weapon to bear and aim it carefully who would win the day. Better to fire a single killing shot than three that went all over the street.”
Ian shrugged, saying the knife and pistol “Just felt better together.”
Night crept to their heels again, and he boys had Death prepare shelter and food. A pup tent appeared ahead, alongside a fire and military ration packs. Ian announced that he would like a shower too, and the boys saw a light blink on, a short way from the fire. Under its feeble beam lay a camp shower of canvas and elastic tubing. Ian and Jeremy looked at each other. Death’s compliance was a wonder to them now, the implications of which they dare not voice. Ian studied the shower, thinking:
What if we just asked for a nuclear sub too? And for Nathan to be back with us. And then we could go back home in a mega-tank with a turret-mounted cluster bomb launcher.
Jeremy busied himself with his meal pack and his own thoughts:
We have under our power the enemy of all life, the thing that people fear the most.
He looked up. The Sergeant’s eyes said nothing, cast downwards at him from a camouflage-smeared face. His webbing was strung thick with fragmentation grenades. He sat beside the boy and began to field-strip his Thompson. The kerosene aroma of gun-oil stung his nostrils. Jeremy sighed and looked at Death. His menace was undiluted. Even now, he could not look too long at the skeleton’s wide grin without a shiver. Yet there was a cruelly ludicrous, almost comical edge to the terror now; like a torture wheel constructed from candy-canes and pink ribbon. This was a feeling that Jeremy had never encountered before in all his years.
Ian shouted glee to him at finding a banana pudding in his meal portion. Jeremy gave a thumbs up, then a trail sign meaning the tactical situation was in their favour. In the shrink-wrapped depths of his own pack he found a cup of grape jelly. Ian held this up so it caught the firelight, a glassy air bubble suspended within now a heart of sapphire. Would Death swoop behind them and cleave Paul Forster in two at their command? Would he lay waste to whole populations for them? Jeremy thought long on this before sleep and troubled dreams took him.
The next morning, the pair awoke, breakfasted and were on their way again. By mid-day the pillar was so small that Ian could obscure it with his thumb. The landscape they traversed was more desert spotted with sickly bushes. Hills lay upon the horizon, yet appeared to the boys to stay a fixed distance from them regardless of their progress. Jeremy and Ian discussed this phenomenon at great length. They could be painted scenery upon canvas sails, attached to columns of thick metal. A subterranean web of cables, wires and levers detected their movement (perhaps via magnetic bolts in their sneakers, Jeremy suggested) and triggered an opposing drift in the giant rods, shuddering the scenery away through grooved slots in the earth. Each step forced another creaking rotation of the machinery, and not even the fastest run could defeat the sail’s diminishment at land’s end.
Ian reminded Jeremy of Battlezone, a tank game at their arcade set in an arena comprising a valley floor ringed by volcanoes. If you disengaged from the combat field and drove directly at them, the volcanoes would grow no closer. Thus began a series of fruitless attempts to gain the mountainsides, a desperation attached to each “expedition”, as the computer-controlled enemy tanks still methodically lobbed shots at your vehicle’s rear. A rumour ran among them, that a boy several arcades away had successfully driven to the volcanoes. This, of course, only fuelled their determination. Many hundred of hours’ worth of chores were transmuted to coinage, a booty soon squandered in Battlezone’s clinking gullet.
The morning sky was darker now as thunderheads fumed like chimney smoke. Ian drew his pistol and knife and waved them menacingly at the cloud. Thinking then that the likelihood of close combat was remote, he returned the Bowie to its scabbard and aimed the pistol with both hands. The boys halted, for the clouds coalesced to a single front and strode Westward in black rank. Sunrays arched there, streaming ghost-white from heavens to desert. The storm slid implacably on to shear them. Beginning again, the boys kept their faces trained skywards in awe. A pre-lightning smell was upon the air of copper and dried flowers.
Ian felt as he always did before a storm, as if his muscles were gapped from his skin by a thin film of static. Without his medication this sensation would arrive at his throat unbidden. His toes and head would form the contacts of this circuit. In this condition he had devastated an art classroom one July afternoon. A battery of testing resulted in a small pill the colour of their frog’s underbelly. Its name sounded to Ian like the gargling of Lego. This feeling, when described to Jeremy, was given the name Subdermal HD-Fluxus, or SHF for short. This neatly incorporated a kernel of Ian’s true diagnosis with words the boys found “Kick-ass.”
Jeremy sniffed now and commented that he could smell the negative ionization of the air. A thunderchild glutted on charge stirred in the air. Ian noted a pyramid upon the horizon. Light washed upon its heights of dull stone. Jeremy noted that the structure seemed more Aztec than Egyptian. Ian said he wished they could launch an airstrike against the position to soften it up before assaulting. Jeremy stopped, imagining his Sergeant standing atop the pyramid, his hand in Death’s. He shook the image away. He had the sudden fear that Ian’s next words would be to their dark benefactor.
I won’t stop him, Jeremy decided. The boy would submit to the will of blast and flame. Ian mumbled “airstrike” distractedly all the way to the pyramid’s lower steps. These were free of moss or lichen, the blocks fresh-hewn. Steps ascended its steep sides, and a gleeful Jeremy informed Ian that these would run red with the blood of sacrificial victims.
“Their hearts were torn out while they were – ”
Ian cut him off, in SHF’s full thrall.
“Draw your weapons,” he said.
“I will get off two or three quick shots before they reach me,” he continued. “Maybe bash them in the head with my gun as a distraction while pushing the knife up –” he mimed the action gingerly – “into their guts.” Ian decided that, if required, he could then release the knife handle and draw his other pistol to fire point-blank at his assailant.
“They won’t take us, Jeremy,” said Ian. “Not the two of us. And especially not with our weapons.”
Jeremy started to pant from the climb. Lightning came then, a quiver of bolts bursting within the cloud-belly. Their glow tremored briefly upon the pyramid’s summit. The boys were now just below.
“If it is Olmec priests,” whispered Jeremy, “They will be armed with long knives of razor-sharp obsidian.”
Ian nodded, and patted his pistol. Jeremy did the same and smiled.
“Obsid … obis … that stuff is no good against a bullet,” said Ian.
“We will wait until just after the next big burst of lightning,” said Jeremy, frowning immediately at the inadequacy of “burst” in this context.
He explained briefly the concept of electricity to Ian, how it took time for the charge to build up between stormcloud and earth.
“Once the target area is denied compromising illumination, we will go.”
He considered using the Field Marshal’s voice, but the Sergeant was at his side, his face swathed in a disrupti
ve pattern of black and olive green. The man checked the ejection port of his carbine, smudging away a speck of dirt with a thumb. Their burst of lightning came and the boys rose in unison, gaining the platform in a few bounding steps. Ian kept his finger outside the trigger guard as he knew real soldiers did. He had slung his Bowie to his hip in a reluctant concession to tactical necessity.
A shadow lay within the cloud-mass. Ian knelt and aimed where he imagined a person’s chest might be; he heard Jeremy issue a curt challenge and an announced his intention to fire. The boys’ vision pulsed patterns of light and dark around the shape. Ian’s clasp tightened upon the pistol until his trigger finger threatened to leap from the safe position upon the ring of iron. He whispered to Jeremy.
“Fire a warning shot.”
Jeremy pictured an Olmec priest, dagger poised tip-down, arm raised in a throwing stance. The boy raised his weapon and levelled its blade sight. A shameful and wondrous thought came to the boy.
“Death,” he said. “I want light here.”
And a 10 millimetre submachine gun with custom grips and extended magazine, he thought. Light did come then, a saturation of crisp white. Death himself was revealed there, facing away from the boys.
Ian jumped. “You bastard! You scared the shit out of