high-energy lasers arched out from the colossus’ spine.
The boy swept his hand downward dramatically and the barrels opened up. A pre-lightning smell of ionised air swept over them. Nathan saw a car swerving madly to avoid the strobing beams before a direct hit vaporised its front section.
Jeremy clapped his friend on the back and congratulated him. The pair looked to gauge Nathan’s reaction, but he was gone.
Nathan had Death create a vault within the war-machine proof against all attempts at outside detection. He sat there and summoned the skeleton before him.
“Death,” said Nathan, “You will take us back to the world of living things and never serve us again.” This seemed too inconsequential, somehow. The boy reconsidered, said:
“I … will release you from our service.”
Death again gave no recognition.
“No matter what Jeremy or Ian say, you won’t listen to them. I am your new and only master.”
There was nothing. A fearful thought struck Nathan: What if this was no contract at all? What if Death’s fealty to his friends remained, and they exacted a swift and terrible revenge upon him?
“You’ll make them sleep first, a real deep sleep. Then we’ll go back to the world and you’ll leave us alone.”
Nathan looked to the ground.
“Tonight,” he said firmly.
For the remainder of the day, Nathan heard Ian and Jeremy engaged in another weapons test. Even in this chamber separated by a city block’s worth of the War Machine’s hide, the detonations shifted the floor beneath Nathan’s feet. Eventually, the sounds ceased; his friends had gone to sleep. Nathan waited until he was sure of this and rose from his bunk bed.
“Now, Death,” he whispered. “Take us back.”
There was no sudden lurch in reality, no gaudy tearing of the fabric of space-time. The innards of the war-machine merely faded away to nothing. Nathan had seen this type of effect so often in TV and in movies it seemed not surprising at all; expected, somehow.
The trio were in a clearing near their trenches. Jeremy and Ian lay sleeping upon pine needles. Death approached and held out his claw.
Nathan smiled.
“It’s our frog, isn’t it?” he said.
Again, the bone-spider unclasped and the amphibian revealed. Nathan gingerly retrieved it.
“Now leave us,” he commanded. He attempted the portentous tones of a narrator in a documentary, but found his voice frail.
Nathan checked Ian and Jeremy, ensured no anthill might disperse a horde upon them. They were indeed deeply in slumber. A weak squall quavered through the branches; his friends’ clothes stirred at the wind’s touch. He knew instinctively this was the same afternoon of their departure.
Nathan ran to his bike and rode. He felt only elation and the gathering press of air at his face when his cycle found the hill’s arc. No going back now, he thought. No more war machines and Death.
A thrill of anticipation down his back, an imagined renewal of Death’s allegiance to Jeremy and Ian, a cyclone of bayonets threshing with wrathful haste through the pine trees above and behind him.
There was nothing, of course; just the flurr of his spokes in the wind. His ride home was without incident. He dropped his bike next to the back door, pushed past the fly-screen, found his bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.
Nathan awoke the next day to Scott’s insistent push of an action figure into the back of his head.
His brother proffered the phone.
“It’s Jeremy, your little buddy,” he said.
Nathan gulped and took the phone.
Jeremy was despondent, explaining how Death had abandoned them in the forest. A consoling rush of feeling accompanied Nathan’s realisation that his duplicity had been undetected.
He suffused his voice with false regret.
“I know,” Nathan said. “It sucks.”
Jeremy said that he and Ian were returning to their position and commanding Death to take them back.
“Maybe he grew tired of us,” suggested Nathan. “Like we played with him but he just got bored.”
Jeremy insisted that this could not be the case, that the rules of the game were firmly established, irrevocable. He ended their conversation with an enthused description of the improved War Machine they would create as a priority upon their return.
Nathan agreed and hung up. He drew the frog from his pocket and placed it in the centre of his bed. By shifting the blankets up, he could locate it within a furrowed land of canyons and bluffs. It regarded him impassively and blinked.
“We won’t go back there and he’ll never get you,” the boy whispered. “I promise.”
Death did not appear for them the next day. From study of Scott’s album covers, Nathan knew that a candle-draped pentagram was the most effective means for the speedy invocation of devils, succubi and other occult diaspora; this the boys duly constructed in the backyard.
For the remainder of the afternoon, they sat in the middle of the device. Several hours of improvised chanting produced nothing.
“It’s Death, after all,” said Ian. “He might need a sacrifice.”
Jeremy thought on this.
“He might want the frog,” he offered, and turned to Nathan. “Do you still have it?”
Fear welled immediately in Nathan. His liar’s voice, however, was smooth and without tremor.
“He took it from me.”
Ian jumped up squashed a candle as he rose.
“Of course!” he shouted. “He got what he wanted and then cut us loose!”
Jeremy flashed him a dark look.
“That makes no sense at all,” the boy said. “Why not take it from us as soon as he found us? And kill us into the bargain?”
Nathan was intrigued by this thought. He knew now that the lie of the frog would have to be maintained, but his duty to his friends’ intellectual inquiry was still one he must honour.
“Because it would be awful to live forever, like the frog was going to do. Maybe Death was trying to tell us that.”
“I can’t see that at all,” said Jeremy, annoyed.
The boys argued for an hour without consensus. Nathan did not mention the Knight or the book. Finally, Ian insisted that they return to combat, in that perhaps if they enacted a battle with suitable ferocity they might once more gain Death’s favour.
They fell again to war. Jeremy invoked a penal battalion of last-chancers mounting a suicide charge against their lines. Ian mounted up an automatic grenade launcher; Nathan was responsible for the heavy machine-gun
“I have command of a small search and destroy team,” said Jeremy, “And we’ll get any stragglers that come inside the wire.”
Ian whooped and declared he was mounting a pre-emptive strike on the trees to their front. In spite of his misgivings, Nathan felt his pulse rise at the prospect of play. The coming attack would not recall Death, he knew. He glanced away from his weapon to Jeremy.
You won’t see him again, he thought, at least, not until you die.
This caused him to giggle. Ian threw a pebble in his direction and hissed for operational silence.
“They will send a human wave against us,” shouted Jeremy. “Perhaps some light armour. Nathan, I want you to target the cockpit positions and gun mountings.”
Nathan yelled back in the affirmative.
“Here they come!” Ian shouted.
Nathan squinted into his gun’s sight and spotted figures dashing for cover. He click-clacked the action rearward and ensured the belt was held tight in the breech.
The sky will lower a little now, he thought, just enough to swallow up the tops of the trees.
He caught movement to his front again and loosed a long burst in that direction. For the first time, Nathan heard not the thump of weapon-fire but his own voice stammering out the retort. The forest retained its serenity. Nathan knew the longed-for transfiguration, where the collective force of their imaginations could will an enemy into bei
ng, had failed them.
The boy looked down; his machine-gun was a stick with a roofing nail at one end.
Jeremy lamented:
“This isn’t like it was.”
Nathan regarded his friends, then loosed the weapon from his hands to skitter over the parapet.
“Let’s fill it all in,” said Nathan. “Every trench and bunker.”
Jeremy looked at the ground and sniffled. Ian stated that perhaps a change of battlefield would help. Nathan shook his head with all the gravitas he could muster. Jeremy wiped his nose with his sleeve and did the same.
They all regarded the fortifications.
“We’ll bring back shovels tomorrow,” said Jeremy.
Nathan scratched the back of his neck. “It will take a couple of days,” he said, “at least.”
A turn of fortune this monumental required oath-taking. As Ian and Jeremy believed the frog in Death’s possession, the boys spent long in deliberating the most suitable talisman upon which to swear.
“The first trench we ever dug,” said Ian.
Jeremy and Nathan agreed. This proto-embrasure had been retained for prosperity, a mere shell-scrape which barely covered their heads. Ian knelt and caught up a fistful of earth. The trio bowed their heads.
Nathan remarked that it was just like the last scene in They Fought For Freedom, a war classic on TV. The boys assented. Nathan’s vow was half-remembered from this and other movies, a short ode to forgiveness from the ground itself. Ian trailed the grains of dirt upon their sneakers. At the end of this ceremony, Jeremy spoke.
“We’ll still play war, of course,” he said. “Just not up here again.”
The other boys nodded, although they had embraced this truth from the moment their attackers were