revealed as wind-tremor in the branches.
They returned the next morning with an assortment of tools and set to work. Nathan waited until the others had commenced their tasks before carefully placing the frog in a tree-fork where it could observe his labours. It did so placidly, eyelids swiping the globed lenses of its eyes from time to time.
There were no games now. A tree split wide by rot caught Nathan’s eye behind the frog’s perch. Its innards immediately suggested violent rupture from laser fire or -
No, Nathan told himself. It’s just a dead tree.
The day passed quickly. They broke for a brief lunch, silent save for their situation reports. For these, they still used the term “Sector”; Nathan also caught Ian hacking away at a sapling roughly a man’s height. Save this incident, the boys’ destruction of their playground was a joyless affair.
The tunnel system proved problematic: their re-discovery by another group of kids would be heartbreaking. It was agreed that only the entrances be sealed and the work camouflaged. Ian briefly mentioned Punji pits, but this suggestion was sternly stared down by his friends.
“No-one will ever know this was here,” said Nathan.
“What will we do the rest of the Summer?” pondered Ian.
“Global Sniper,” said Jeremy.
Global Sniper was a computer game comprising many millions of players all over the world simultaneously doing their utmost to annihilate each other.
Teams of two operated within the game-space: Sniper and Observer. Jeremy was the most skilled shooter, with Nathan and Ian taking turns to act as his second.
The world they traversed was a simulacrum of a small country. Towns, factories, forests and farms were modelled down to such a level that no two of the tens of thousand of dwellings was replicated. Each seemed to have been abandoned by its digital inhabitants only moments previously. In addition, the whole zone was fully and satisfactorily destructible. A bulldozer could be commandeered and driven through a shopping centre, say, with no other object than sustained havoc. Rubble resulting from such mayhem was then able to be re-assembled into hides and firing positions. The mainframe sustaining this illusion was reputed to outsize a school bus and lie beneath a lake of liquid nitrogen.
“Global Sniper” offered a prize of one million dollars for the final surviving team. It was anticipated by the game’s publisher that twelve months would suffice for the field of competitors to be winnowed down to this stage. Five years later and the game had yet to end. Clans assembled, with dread oaths exchanged between their initiates: to hunt down their opposition, then dissolve in internecine fighting from which the rightful victor would emerge.
The boys had tracked and slain just such a coven to their last member. They spurned group-play; it seemed another manifestation of the eternal bully. They had even defended other “lone wolves” from the predation of Clans and slunk off into the digital night.
Ian agreed to this immediately. Nathan did so too, knowing it to be a lie. All he wanted was to retrieve the frog and go home, perhaps engage Scott in a samurai battle. He had no desire to see his friends for a while. He needed only to reflect upon their shared adventure to shake the memories of the Knight and Paradox.
The Summer passed quickly. Nathan did play Global Sniper, in the end, making a few desultory kills with Ian’s aid that gave him no joy. Once, he almost stayed his hand, hovering the crosshairs upon an enemy’s face overlong.
“Take the shot,” hissed Ian.
Jeremy was calmer, adding that they had watched this hide all afternoon and their patience would be for nothing.
Just before the head was lost to the gloom of the bunker, Nathan tapped the mouse. Red and black pixels showered wide and a rousing burst of martial music played. Ian clapped him on the back.
“A fine trophy, my boy,” said Jeremy in the Field Marshall’s voice. “Jolly good show.”
Nathan nodded, and hit the “Tab” button on his keyboard.
Team Ranked 4,563rd of 1,243,823.
As the boys watched, the “3” in “4,563” became a 2 and then a 1 a moment later.
“We’ve beaten most of the kids from school,” said Ian with audible pride.
“Scott said if we got to 4,000th he’d buy us all pizza,” said Nathan.
There was a tactical debrief. Jeremy gave the team his observations, including a critique of a passage of play where Nathan had crouch-run across a slagheap.
“It set up the shot, but was risky,” said Jeremy.
“It was a risk worth taking,” offered Nathan. It was, of course, a clichéd riposte from a movie; the surly sergeant defending his reckless one-man assault on a German pillbox.
Jeremy slapped his thigh for effect.
“We’re a team, Nathan. We should act like one.”
Nathan had the peculiar feeling of curiosity alloyed with anger’s molten flow: What film had featured this particular exchange?
Jeremy began to speak again, and there was something about the turn of his mouth, the way his words fell upon his ears like wasps.
“Shut up,” he told his friend. “Stop telling me what to do.”
Jeremy began to talk and his Nathan was upon him, both boys crashing to the carpet. Nathan pinned his friend’s arms; fixed Ian to his chair with a blood-thick stare.
“The Doomed Battalion,” said Nathan triumphantly.
Jeremy snuffled away tears.
“That part in The Doomed Battalion,” he continued, “Where they come back from the raid.”
Ian nodded, saying:
“Just after he takes out the MG-42 nest.”
Jeremy said that his arms were hurting. Nathan made his friend promise to forswear all retribution before he would release him. Ian stepped in to broker the peace. The negotiations were brief, and included the removal of all nearby weapons of opportunity, should tempers re-ignite.
Finally, Jeremy was freed.
“I’m not apologizing for that,” said Nathan. “Not ever.”
Jeremy was defiant, arguing that this was the type of act that ended combat teams, the dissolution of trust into bickering and recrimination.
“You killed the Knight!” shouted Nathan. “You didn’t wait or check with me, you just killed him. For real, Jeremy, not like in Global Sniper.”
“Was it a man? Or was it just some slave-monster of Death’s?” asked Jeremy.
“We’ll never know,” said Ian sagely.
Nathan saw now that the duo stood literally side by side. He wanted to reveal his secret, his awful duplicity in the removal from the realm of Death, but found he could not.
“I’m not friends with you guys any more,” said the boy finally.
He had seen a movie where a kid was trapped under ice, fists banging impotently against that glassy ceiling as the current grabbed his ankles. A frigid barrier constrained his feelings at this second no less effectively; this time there were no tears. A second image came to him of the frog with its front digits balled into a tiny fist slamming the ice, and he giggled.
Apparently this sound convinced his friends of impending violence and shied away. Nathan felt immediately stronger and he affected more laughter.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “We’re done.”
Jeremy nodded.
“We’re not enemies, though,” said Ian hopefully.
“No,” said Nathan. “Not enemies. Just never friends again.”
Jeremy and Ian nodded. After they left, Nathan sat down and walked their sniper into the wasteland. He ran around in circles, jumping, until he caught the attention of another marksman who cast him down.
At home that evening he drew a map of the Land of Death and a short history of everything he could remember. He kept this in a box under his bed next to the frog’s home, a disused aquarium filled with moss and rocks. At night he left the animal to roam his room.
Every morning he found the frog sitting exactly where he had left it.
That year passed. Their schism was resolute, yet
bereft of the enmity that might have salved the incident in their collective memory and re-cast it as mere childish spat. Nathan kept thoughts of the Knight close when rapprochement threatened. This lent his refusals gravitas far beyond his years. Nathan made every spurned détente a minor victory, the Knight’s Revenge, as he increasingly thought of it.
Nathan’s father found a well-paying job just after Christmas and he and Scott moved interstate.
For his Art project in the final year of high school, Nathan constructed an intricate replica of the clockwork book. He could not bring himself to repeat any of the Knight’s words in text, and told all who asked this was a copy of an obscure medieval tome dealing with sea monsters. He drew pages and pages of nonsense Latin in narrow gothic script, interrupted here and there with a diagram of a kraken or mermaid.
He loved the way the book delighted children at a public showing, the crab’s steady reveal speaking to them in a way adults seemed oblivious to. Several collectors showed interest, but Nathan could not bring himself to part with it.
The boys grew and made their way in the world as men.
Their next meeting was at a school reunion many years hence. Nathan drove there with the frog placed on his dashboard.
“They’ll have forgotten you, I bet,” he told it.
Nathan often imagined that the frog was the embodiment of a universal consciousness. Other times, such as when he fished it oven-hot from a tumble-dried jeans pocket, he thought it merely unkillable as he had declared so long ago. At these times, he imagined its stoic stare was the auto-response of neurons long since scoured of any evolutionary purpose; the