The alarm went off at 0900. Four short bleeps and a brief pause recurred.
He sat up and brought his legs over the side of his bed, scouring his eyes with the back of his wrist. For a while he stared blankly at the clouded sky with the ringing alarm in the background. In the corner of the room, the computer display still showed the threads of correspondence from the previous days. When he recalled what day it was, he heaved a sigh, rose from the bed and breasted the sunbeams with due ambivalence.
The alarm switched off. He picked up his cell and the display lit up. A flashing notice intimated that the email he had been expecting from the Commission had arrived. The heading read:
“Tenancy Expiration – Notice of Eviction”
He pressed the “Delete” button, dropped the cell on the table and entered the en suite.
As the water poured over his face, he mulled over his own soul and discovered a new and unprecedented fear. For death, it seems, only perturbs the soul insofar as life is worth living. It was not that he did not want to die so much as he felt obligated to live. For her sake, and her sake alone, he was committed to life.
The water stopped running. He dried off and got dressed.
He picked up a small stack of papers on the lounge table on his way out and, after a fleeting glance, folded the papers and tucked them into his coat, stood in the middle of the hall, looking around the house, each corner rousing a different memory which replayed before his eyes. And as he walked out the front door, his last thought – his last hope – was that some impalpable thing had imparted itself to those walls.
The door shut.
Hands pocketed and head low, Saul Vartanian walked amid the foot traffic down the sidewalk. Dawn had not yet broken. A low-passing airship cast its light over the whole street and a row of passing autocabs sent the tail of his coat swaying in a dusty breeze. He passed a dreg in one of the narrow alleys off 5th Street, huddled up by a trash container, likely dead, but he did not stop to check. Sodom Sanitation would pass soon.
He stepped up to the door, knocked three times, paused, and then two more knocks, as the hermit had instructed (for reasons Saul did not ask him to specify, being no stranger to caution himself).
The door opened.
“Good morning,” the hermit greeted from the gloom of the doorway.
He entered and the door closed.
The hermit’s countenance was as solemn and his eyes just as grave as that first night they had met. Since then, they had seen one another more than a few times, but seldom spoken.
“How is she?” he asked.
“See for yourself … She is in her room.”
There was a brief silence, after which the hermit sauntered past him.
“Wait.”
The hermit stopped in his tracks and turned again, with his usual air of omniscience.
“You have done … a lot for her,” he faltered, “… cared for her.”
The hermit assented with a bow of his head.
“The last time I trusted someone –”
“I know,” the hermit nodded.
He was unable to heave his heart into his mouth, but the hermit seemed to feel his thoughts.
“I may not come back,” he murmured, darkly.
“You will.”
“But, if I do not … Promise me that…”
“I will.”
There was silence. He looked up at the hermit, wanting to say something more.
“It does not change anything I had told you,” the hermit spoke. There was foreboding in his voice. “You should know that.”
A solemn moment lapsed before the hermit turned and walked away.
Saul ascended the stairs and stopped outside the door to the first room. The memory of the last time he walked through the door brought a swift rush of dread which held him in suspension a good three minutes before he gently nudged the door open.
A dust-speckled daylight shone in through the window across a floor littered with crumpled balls of paper. In the middle of the room, under the sunbeams, the little figure was lying semi-prostrate, legs swinging back and forth. When the door clicked shut, the little golden head rose.
“Saul!” Naomi rose from the floor with a start and threw into an embrace.
When the little arms yielded, he knelt down and cupped the little face in his hands, studying her. Her skin, though still pallid, had recovered some of its lustre, and her golden hair was streaked with thin, short threads of white.
“Hello, little one. You look well.”
“I missed you,” she whispered, trembling with relief.
“I told you I would come back.”
Her large eyes glowed and her little cheeks were full to bursting with her smile. “I asked Grandpa to come with us today,” she said. “To the place.”
He picked up one of the crumpled balls of paper on the floor and stood up.
“Who?”
“The old man,” she answered. “He doesn’t have a name.”
“So I am told,” he replied, unfolding the little ball of paper.
“But he’s good,” she said. “I think he’s good.”
He drew out the crumpled ball of paper, and saw inside what looked like the beginnings of a portrait. It was far from a finished piece, but the likeness was one he easily recognised. Then he caught sight of a lone sheet in the middle of the room where she had been lying just before he came in.
“Your latest work,” he said, picking up the more complete rendition of the same image. “Is that who I think it is?”
“It’s … not finished. I … I want this one to be perfect. It has to be.”
He was reminded of something as he handed the picture back to her.
“I thought you might want these.” He reached into his coat, drew the small collection of papers.
Naomi took them with a beam of delight, but her smile quickly faded when she looked through the drawings and came upon her unfinished blood-blotched rendition of Celyn.
The forsakenness came upon her in the form of a gentle sigh which suddenly reminded him why he had come.
“There is something I must tell you.”
He lifted her up off the floor and sat with her on the edge of the bed with her on his lap. Averting her eyes, he said: “I must go away for a while.”
The great, gleaming eyes looked up.
“Where?”
“Somewhere far away.”
“I can come with you –”
“No,” he avowed sharply. “Where I must go, you cannot come.”
“But, you’ll come back.”
He was silent.
“Saul, you’ll come back,” she said again.
“Yes … I will come back. I will always come back.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
I promise…
“You think too much.”
The memory dissolved.
He tore his eyes away from the view beyond the small aperture and turned toward the voice that woke him from his reverie; the hawk-eyed brigadier with the snakish features.
“I said, you think too much.” The brigadier took out a flask and unscrewed the top and raised the flask to his lips and drank. “You’ve been staring out that window since we left.”
The giant metal belly of the buldroog grumbled with its heavy, bawling haul over the rugged terrain. Most of the other martials had dozed off in their seats. The stiff exoskeletons of their gear held them upright: tired heads dipping with the jounces of the trundling droog. The grips around their guns did not loosen with sleep.
He looked out of the small aperture of ballistic glass. The front of the sidelong truck had been with them since the convoy departed, advancing and retreating over the view of the land, the high and solitary, snow-tipped mountain with the swirl of cloud over the peak and the orange blast-furnace sky. Flashbacks returned: of bodies tearing to pieces, vaporising in a blood-cloud, and of the sounds – the salvos, the explosions, and the hailing rounds.
/> The long, hulking droog struck a fissure in their path and the sections of the vehicle lifted one after another. All of a sudden their path was encrusted with broken tarmac.
“Looks like we’re coming into the city,” rasped the hawk-eyed brigadier.
In the approaching distance there appeared the shadowy outlines of the buildings against the backdrop of the setting sun. The canyon to the northwest ebbed away and in its place surfaced a long and high protuberance of black dunes. The shape was strange.
He narrowed his eyes. The sun gleamed over the black ridge, lighting up an eerie mist.
“Got me a new prescription,” the brigadier spoke again, drawing Saul’s attention. In his hand, the he held an open neural canister. He rolled some of the tablets straight into his mouth and a swell went down his snake-like throat. He exhaled pleasurably. “You wouldn’t think that you could be out in the middle of a combat zone, hell all around, and feel nothing but this constant orgasm all up here (he held a finger to his temple) just going, and going, and going, and going.”
The brigadier lifted his head, closed his eyes and exhaled with almost sexual relish. “It’s all I can feel right now,” he said with a raspy snicker.
Saul looked away and did not speak. They were now moving through the heart of the city.
“Not much of a talker, eh comrade?” sneered the brigadier.
“How far are we from Fort Gen?”
The brigadier shot a cold glare
“… About another hour,” he said.
Saul turned the instant the answer came. Something caught his attention: something brief and barely visible, through the aperture just beside the brigadier’s head. A tiny burst of light appeared at the top of the middle tower of three red tower blocks, which one might have easily mistaken for the glare of a window, except it was too bright.
Then there appeared another flash in the next block, and a third in quick succession.
Time stood still.
“GET DOWN!”
A split second later came a thunderous BASH!
He was hurled out of his seat. Everything went white. Through the barely conscious blur he felt the ground quake again and again with successive explosions until there was nothing but a high-pitched squealing in his ear. When he came to, he realised that he was lying on the vehicle’s ceiling with blood dripping from his split scalp.
The droog had been flipped over and the three rear sections of the vehicle were gone; a gaping hole of twisted metal cinders and a wall of smoke in their place. Bodies and members were hurled like rag dolls and lay about numb and twitching.
“Get up!” he hollered, lifting the nearest martial to his feet. “Move, now!” He beat at the panels on the accesses and the pneumatic doors opened with a sharp hiss.
The moment they hurdled through the access there was another bright flash and the shockwave followed and another nearby vehicle detonated and keeled over. Passing trucks and droogs ground to a halt, skidded and toppled to evade the fleers and explosions, grinding up the tarmac. Hollers railed through the chaos:
“AMBUSH!”
“ATGs!”
“TAKE COVER!”
Bang!
Orders shot across the airwaves in a frenzy. They rushed across the street, taking cover behind the fragmented walls of a ruined building. More martials fleeing from the streets took their positions, crouched and pressed up against the wall on either side.
“WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY FIRING FROM?” yelled the brigadier.
“Three red tower blocks to the north. The upper floors.”
“Fire on those fucking towers NOW!”
The brigadier howled the order over the airwaves just as another succession of explosions shook the ground and shards of debris rocketed past, splintering the edges of the walls. Storms of gunfire unleashed northward.
He peered over the edge of the wall just in time to see the great cannons on the tank heads revolve. Blasts of fire and smoke spouted out the thick muzzles one after the other like a battleship broadside all along the thoroughfare.
The sequence of shockwaves ruptured loose sections of the surrounding ruins and a shower of splintered debris fell from above.
The three tower blocks burst, ruptured and split like figures before a firing squad. Then a second sequential barrage followed and ruptured the bases.
The towers toppled into one another; a slow and ponderous fall like felled lumber crumbling, riven and disintegrated, vanishing in a thick, white fog.
The resonance of the volleys from the tanks and the declining rumble of the falling towers endured for a whole minute.
The ash fog rose high into the air and followed the wind to the west. They waited for some kind of follow-up – another explosion, more gunshots.
Silence.
“Hold positions.”
The wait carried on for about three more minutes.
The trailing mist of powdered debris swept over the thoroughfare like a sandstorm. Soon, martials started emerging onto the street one by one, and the scene was one of fire, smoke and butchery.
Masks came down to filter out the toxic mist. All along the half-kilometer stretch of road, the convoy had come to a halt, divided by segments of carnage.
“All teams branch out into the streets. Search the buildings.” The brigadier removed his mask and stood up, erect, cursing.
“First Brigade, damage report?”
“Multiple KIAs. Five HGVs down. It’s a mess. We’re not going anywhere without replacements.”
“Someone call Fort Gen. We’re going to need another convoy … I knew this place was a fucking danger zone.”
“We are nowhere near enemy lines,” said Saul. “Who were they?”
“Freedom fighters left over from the last assault.”
“… Freedom fighters?”
“Civil soldiers – anti-militarists,” The brigadier prodded a broken corpse with his boot. “Call themselves the ‘Phoenix Brigades.’ Nobody’s friend and everyone’s enemy. Their fight is against the PMCs … Talk about a waste of blood.”
Martials dispersed among the wreckage, inspecting the fallen for signs of life. Meanwhile, Saul peered through the mist at the silhouettes of the ruined city, the jagged edges of the broken buildings and the walls peppered with bullets. He narrowed his eyes, lowered the mask and breathed in the smog of dust, scorched air and charred flesh. He knew this place.
“This … is Dolinovka.” He gazed about in disbelief at the broken carcass of Naomi’s home.
“Didn’t check the itinerary?”
“What happened here?”
The brigadier eyed him with a sideways glower.
“Have you been living under a rock? The Kamchatka uprisings…? ‘Russian Winter?’”
Russian winter…
“This was a rebel city,” snorted the brigadier. “Hell, this was a rebel region.”
“What happened?”
A troop of martials marched past and into the adjacent side streets. The brigadier sauntered casually after them and continued to explain:
“There was a mass revolt – coups all over the damn place. Most of them were spearheaded by the Phoenix Brigades. This city right here was their capitol. NSRRS forces pulled out of the region a short while after the uprising and the U.S. moved us in a few months later – took over the whole region. We laid this place to waste a long while ago, but stragglers always get left behind. This is what happens when no one sends a clean-up crew. Rebels…” he spat. “They’re like rats.”
He broke off from the brigadier’s company and walked off into a side alley.
“Hey,” the brigadier called. “Where are you going?”
“To search the area.”
“Alone?”
“Alone. Do not follow me.”
The brigadier disappeared down the misted path.
Before long, he had broken off from the main contingent and was walking solitarily down the narrower streets west of the main thoroughfare. He shielded his eyes from
the billowing clouds of red dust. Further on, the air became tainted with a pungency like decomposition, yet there was not a corpse to be seen anywhere. Swarms of large insects wafted through the narrow paths and gusts of wind moaned in his ears. Rolling tumbleweed caused him to stop, search around, gun raised, finger fastened around the trigger, then ease a moment later and continue.
The scene was ripe for ambush.
He slowed with each step, overcome by the surreal sense of hovering over the brim of recollection, like an enduring déjà vu, struggling to breach the boundary of memory.
Suddenly, he stopped. He turned his head to the left, following the gleam in the corner of his eye.
Something barely discernible on the holed and splintered face of a door caught his attention: a golden symbol in the form of a winged beast. In each corner of the street were the flickers of lost memories returning in broken, undecipherable pieces: the lines of blood-stained bullet holes in the walls, fallen masses of rubble and mud-caked seams, mounds of dirt, a few scatters of discharged round cases, and deserted homes, upturned and shattered, still containing most of the dust-laden possessions of the former city dwellers.
The city looked virtually untouched. One might never have guessed that a battle had been fought there at all, yet there was not a soul to be seen. And all of it came together in a single, ominous question:
Where did they all go?
The next alleyway looked to have eluded the brunt of battle. As he passed a half-open door, the ground suddenly supple against the soles of his boots.
He stopped and looked down. The ground was coated thick with dust swaying in the breeze, but through the thinner deposits he saw, quite clearly, an under-layer of bright red that stopped at the foot of the door. He holstered his weapon, got down on one knee and wiped away the dirt and gravel to reveal a fine red fabric. He grabbed the fabric in a fist, pulled it out from under the door, and when the dust showered off and blew away in the draft, he saw that he was holding what appeared to be a banner.
He looked up at the door under which the banner had been wedged and noted that it was distinguished from most of other doors by the same golden winged creature etched into the red banner: A golden phoenix.
Placing his hand flat over the crest, he pushed on the stiff door three times until it gave. A small horde of frightened rats scurried out, screeching.
When he crossed the threshold, the wind yielded. The light switch didn’t work.
The circle of torchlight lit up a small, single-room abode, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling corners like wall tapestries. All the cupboards and drawers in the room were drawn open, their contents strewn over the floor and covered in dirt, dismantled weapon parts and gear falling out of open munitions crates. The place looked to have been ransacked like everywhere else. The torchlight passed over the carpeted floor and stopped on a small desk to the left.
He lowered the torch and lifted the fallen cabinets off the desk-top with a loud moan and bang that sent one last rat scuttling out the door. When he swept the dust and fragments off of the desk-top, something caught his eye, lodged in a narrow space between the desk and the wall. The gap was closed with what appeared to be the outer edge of a block of wood. He pocked his finger into the small gap and fiddled around until the thin block slipped out of the compartment.
A book.
He shone the light over the cover: no title on the front, nothing on the back or on the spine. He opened it, and in the middle of the very first page was written the following:
Since I am certain that any record of us and our cause shall be erased from the pages of history should we fail at what we have here set out to achieve, in that event my only hope is that this record finds its way to the world, that people may know our struggle and the cause to which we have commended our fate.
Our memory is in your hands.
– NOVUM MUNDI RESURGENT –
Captain Maxwell Wallace of the Phoenix Brigades,
Dolinovka, Kamchatka, (soon to be former) New Eastern Republic of Russian States.
He flicked through the pages and found that the little book contained a series of dated entries in the same handwriting. Gathering that the insignia on the doors must have marked the lodgings of the faction leaders, he propped his gun up against the desk, pulled the chair up off the floor, sat down and turned the page to the first entry:
Russian Winter – Day 1
It has begun.
Our cells have infiltrated the cities of Petropavlovsk, Yelisovo, Sedanka and Tigil. We have already spread our seed throughout Dolinovka. These boroughs were built recently to house exiles from the Mongolian warzones in the southwest. Our seedbed is small, but ripe.
We lurk in the shadows for now, until we have garnered enough support from the people. Our comrades will make us known among our countrymen when our mission is fulfilled and. Our reputation will spread throughout Russia soon enough. Before long, the whole world will know. The Phoenix will rise from the ashes of all of the world’s loss. Martial order must fall. At any cost, it must fall…
He stopped reading and turned the pages, stopping from time to time to skim through the entries. Every step leading up to the coup of the city was catalogued in detail, interspersed with increasingly vitriolic references to the “martial devils,” “peons of the PMCs.” “pigs of the martial economy”. About one-third through the journal, he stopped flipping the pages when three words at the top of an entry caught his attention:
Russian Winter – Day 52
We strike tomorrow.
I may not live through the assault, but I am not as fearful of my own death as I am for Aaliyah’s. As much as I want to, I cannot stop her from fighting. She came here to fight …
He skimmed through the entry.
… Whilst I can’t say whether I would feel the same way about our cause if it were to cost her life, I know this is the way of the world: To gain all one must lose all. I suppose we shall know what we will have gained and lost after tomorrow ...
The entry carried on in a long monologue. He could read the fear in his very pen-strokes, the sort of fear that was the first thing eradicated when one crossed over to the martial world, unadulterated by neural programs and martial conditioning. A pure fear – a human fear, the fear of a man torn between something to die for and someone to live for.
He turned the page. As he began to read again, the first thing he noticed is that the handwriting of the entry had altered. It was more irregular, more twisted. The second thing he noticed was that a long period between the next entry and the last went unrecorded:
Russian Winter – Day 76
It has been two weeks since the uprising.
The whole region has been taken over by the Phoenix. Our sun has risen, but inside I feel only darkness and the cold breath of empty space.
Aaliyah is dead.
Others have lost their whole families, many of whom were not even for our cause. I wonder, now, as I had thought I would, whether it was all worth it – to know that we have caused so many the sort of pain that I feel now. I do not know.
At any rate, we are the enemies of the world. I doubt that I will live to see the end of our blood and efforts but as long as I am able to fight, I must. The cause must come before our pain. Always. It is what separates us from the martial dogs …
A none-too-far-flung spurt of gunshots broke his concentration, and the echoes faded into the dying wind with no follow-up. There was no time to waste. He had to know what happened to the people of the city. He would not be able to live with knowledge that there had been a chance that Naomi’s family was still alive. He had to know. He flicked through to the later entries in the journal and continued to read:
Russian Winter – Day 221
UMC forces have landed on our shores.
They have already begun setting up outposts to the southwest. As we understand it, they are here on a mandate from the United States government. We could not even win the support of our own people…
&nb
sp; It is official. Our blood. Aaliyah’s blood. It was all for nothing. This world runs on war, and war will wear it out to naught. We were fools to think that we could change humanity’s course. I see clearly now what I did not see before. The problem lies far deeper than any bullet can pierce. Fear, pride, greed, power, progress. No amount of fighting – no amount of pleading to man’s conscience can ever destroy these forces. They will go on until they consume the world. The meme has taken over…
He turned over the page:
…The PMCs … devils… they keep the fear alive… the wars continue… the martial dogs are their slaves…
He turned the page again:
…I regret for the people of this city. Most of them have no idea what fate awaits them. Many of them have taken measures to hide their children. Others have fled. Where they will go, I have no idea. There is no escape now. We led them to believe in our cause. Now they must watch everything we promised crumble to ashes along with their homes and their futures.
The Phoenix Brigades will fight to the end, even if the blood we shed will make no difference in the long run. Perhaps something new will rise from our ashes. Though I have not the slightest faith in Providence, I have no hope apart from it. I have lost too much to possibly see death as anything less than a reprieve…
He dropped the journal, drew a sidearm and turned when he heard the sound of footsteps from behind. With the abruptness of the turn, the chair was thrown across the floor with a clatter.
Through the window, a motionless figure cast its long shadow on the outside walls.
“Who goes there?” he called.
When no answer came, he soundlessly approached the door. The shadow zipped away.
“Wait!”
He rushed out of the door just just in time to see the edge of a shadow stop at the top of a stairway under a small incline of little favela-like blocks. He heard the sound of beating against a door and a voice shouting something undecipherable through the wind.
Just before he reached the top of the stairs, he heard a door open and shut.
He lurked past each of the little huts, listening intently and stopping when he heard hushed and panicked voices, bringing his ear close to the door. He waited. When the voices stopped and distinct, rapid movements like the fretting for a weapon sounded soon after, he stood back at once and drove the sole of his boot into the door and burst over the threshold.
“Stoy!”
Strobe lights flashed, and between him and the wall a man stood, frozen.
The man slowly turned a grimace of anger into the light, showing the raised palms of his hands. His head rose and a brutally scored and sun-beaten face surfaced: scars curling all around his features, and his dark, vexing eyes.
“Are you one of them?” he demanded. “The Phoenix Brigades…? Answer me!”
The muscles in the rebel’s jaw beat and his teeth trembled rabidly. “Martial dog…” he snarled through clenched teeth and spat. “You will all burn in hell.”
Saul’s sights darted around the small room. There were large closets and cabinets all around, presumably filled with munitions and supplies. The place looked like a storehouse. “Where is the other one?” he demanded. “I heard voices. There is someone else.”
“Just kill me and go,” growled the rebel. “GO!”
He stared directly into the rebel’s eyes.
The strobe lights stopped. He lowered the gun by a slight angle, sufficient to show that he meant no harm.
“What happened to this place?” he asked, his voice low.
The rebel maintained his glower and a steady flow of breath, deep, quick and furious.
“Hear me,” he said, lowering the gun farther. “I saved a little girl from this place. She has a mother and father who may still be alive. I need to know where the people of this city fled to.”
At these words, the rebel’s rabid breaths stopped.
“Alive…”
A silence followed.
Then, short, terse exhales like something between a laugh and a sob proceeded from him and he started to shake his head in hopelessness.
“Please … I must know what happened.”
The rebel turned up a look of woeful resignation and his hands slowly begun to lower.
“Do not do it.”
But the rebel reached behind his back and when the hand came out it bore a pistol.
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t –”
“I cannot die on my knees –”
“NO!”
The rebel’s gun rose not three inches before three shots rang out. Four in rapid succession tore across his chest, each shot knocked him back to the wall and he collapsed in a slew of his own blood.
The rebel’s dying eyes fixed their stare on him until the instant life left them. And for his last dying seconds, he looked as though he was trying to mouth something of dire importance. The words were choked off by blood. His head hung.
He stood staring into the rebel’s eyes, trying to decrypt the words from the last movements of his lips, but the rapid sound of movement caused him to twist around again.
The noise came from inside one of the cabinets. He pinpointed the exact one and lined his sights.
“Come out,” he commanded, “slowly.”
He approached the cabinet from the side. He waited.
Another sound of movement came from the same cabinet, but no answer.
“Vykhodi!” he shouted.
He expected, at any moment, for shots to come from inside, or for the cabinet doors to break open. He heard movement again and, convinced it was the drawing of a gun, nerves still brimming with the last kill, he aimed the pistol low and fired two quick shots at where the legs would have been.
Silence.
He expected to hear some kind of groan or yelp, but no sound came except for a short slump like a dropping sack.
He waited.
A second later, he heard something. Something very, very distinct.
He opened the cabinet doors, looked down and the gun slipped from his grip.
“No…”
A young boy cowered at the bottom of the cabinet clutching the middle of his abdomen, and a steady-growing stain of red began beneath the small hands where one of the rounds has passed through him. The boy looked up, his face contorted, his tear-filled hazel eyes gaping. The small breaths started to shudder.
“No, no, no,” he repeated with dreadful whispers.
He bent down at once and lifted the boy out of the cabinet, cradled the small figure in his arms and held the back of his small head and looked into the wide, perplexed eyes.
Small squeaks of panic shot from the boy’s lips like arrows. The young boy shook and wretched. Blood issued from his lips. The little face went blank and the little head drooped in his hands, blood pouring out the side of his mouth.
He went on mouthing frenzied nothings, gaping at the small, dead face in horror. His hands shook loose and the boy slipped from his arms and fell lifeless on his side.
He stood up and recoiled.
The blood had poured from the exit wound and drenched his hands, and he looked down at the bloodied hands, washed over by a most familiar terror. Images started to blaze past his mind’s eye, images he had never seen in his vilest nightmares – shrieks and wails rising unrelentingly like banshees. He gripped his own skull and the child’s blood smeared him. It would not stop.
Stop… stop…
At that moment, the door swung open again and slammed back against the wall.
“In here!” a voice yelled from behind.
The hawk-eyed brigadier burst through the door, followed by a three-man squad. The shadows danced about the wall in front of him. He slowly came off his knees and onto his feet, staring down at the child’s corpse.
“We heard the gunshots,” said the brigadier coming up beside him. “You have blood on you. Were you hit?”
The words “you have blood on you” repeated in his head.
“W
hat’s wrong…?”
He remained with his head hung, eyes gaping at the floor.
Finally, the brigadier turned to his subordinates. “Get the bodies out. Keep searching the area. There’s probably more of them around. Move.”
The rebel’s corpse was hauled out of the room first and the child was dragged away from his sight afterward, slung over the shoulder like a gunny sack and carried away.
“Let’s go,” said the brigadier, turning to the door. “The convoy will be here any minute.”
“These people had families.” Saul spoke, finally.
The brigadier stopped and turned back with a guarded glower as Saul slowly turned and raised his head, eyes bulging and aflame.
“You were here?” he said.
“What?”
“Were you here – when this happened?”
The brigadier stopped and approached him, as though he were squaring up. His jutting brow knotted and his grin was baleful.
“I was here.”
“Where are the people of this city?”
The brigadier snorted and started to snigger.
“Where are they!?”
“You didn’t see it? It was pretty hard to miss.”
“… See what?”
The brigadier looked momentarily out the door, as though he were considering something. Then he looked back. “It is close by,” he said. “We’ll get a better vantage point up top.” He marched out of the room, treading over the trails of blood from the corpses.
He followed the brigadier up the flights of stairs until the very top from whence they attained a full view of the ruined city.
They stopped outside a large, warehouse double-door and the brigadier slipped the butt of his gun in the narrow gap and levered on the frame like a crowbar to pry the door wider.
“This way,” said the brigadier, slipping through the gap.
He followed the brigadier’s light through a long, dark tunnel, at the end of which the red, red sky blazed through the black like the mouth of an incinerator.
He emerged. The thick dust whipped against his face in the wind.
The brigadier stood waiting at the edge of a precipice, overlooking the city limits.
“Worth a thousand words.”
As he drew nearer to the edge of the precipice, his pace slowed and his eyes flared again with a vision of fresh hell.
He was standing at the head of the same black dune he had seen as they’d entered the city. Now, in proximity, he beheld what he had previously thought a long stretch of jagged ridges and saw that it was formed not of sand or stone … but a hundred thousand mortared, blackened, burned and decomposed corpses.
The cycles of the sun had scorched the bodies black. A mist of ash blew off the crest of carcasses like snow off a mountain peak and the spray ignited red as Saharan sands, carrying the smell of purification into the city.
“The orders were to purge eighty percent of the populace,” said the brigadier. “Send a clear message out to all the other cities in the region supporting the uprising. No mercy for revolutionaries.”
“Dead,” he muttered, breathless. “They are – all – dead.”
The cries of the past began to swirl in his mind again as the memories came flooding back. His heart beat the fire through his body.
“All the other cities surrendered a few days later,” said the brigadier. “Saved a lot of blood in the long run. Pity … All that good blood gone to waste.” The brigadier began to snigger.
Brief though it was, the snigger resounded and rose into a laugh through the tumult in his mind. The laugh became a demonic screech and cackle getting louder and louder, flaring up his blood until every muscle in his body juddered. He had taken everything from Naomi before he ever knew her. He was the one who killed her parents.
That fire-filled sky rising off the dead was all he could see as he turned with a howl and hurled himself forward, driving the edge of blade straight into the brigadier’s neck, pulled out and stabbed again, and again, and again, and again. With each gore of the blade through flesh and bone he bawled and hollered and sobbed and gnashed his teeth, even as he tasted the slimes of blood dash against his face, even as the body was dead and limp beneath him; he slashed, yelled, hacked, wept, dashed, until the corpse was split down the middle and the blood drenched him from the face down so that his shouts blew blood drops into the flaming sky and echoed across the land and to the ends of the earth.
He stood up and came to the edge of the precipice.