Now we go over the whole story and 'fill in the holes'. We read it critically - not as a 'story'. We are looking at logic, flow and are there any contradictions? We don't want someone with blonde hair at the beginning having long flowing raven locks at the end!
We have not yet looked at spelling, grammar, punctuation. That comes later when it is time to 'proof read'. We might even farm that out to an editor, for example.
We now have to decide if the story is worth keeping. We have read the previous 'Blogs' so we know that we had to start at the end but does it have an end that is satisfying - to us. Does it have a middle, does the start have sufficient impact. It is important for the start to 'hook' the reader so that they want to read more.
Finally, we must look at making a title.
These thikngs are what we look at now:
A huge fist smacked me in the
left shoulder; the world spun around me just as the mass of wet leaves on the
trail came up to hit me on the face.
Pain. My world is full of pain.
The room swam around; rough hands hold my arms and feet and throw me into my
bunk. Someone said something about the enemy but my mind cannot focus on their
words, only the pain. Just for a moment I imagine I saw Sgt 598’s face,
blurred, peering at me but it wasn’t his voice. I don’t recognise the voice. It
is coarse; it tells me to try and relax, that I’ll be fine.
Someone pulls my blanket up
then there’s a sliding sound and a bright light. So bright. I cannot see
anything...
*
I was brought up in a tenement
building just north of the border. The building was sixty-five stories high but
the top three stories are just places for the machines that operate the lifts
and direct the water.
The roof is covered in ten feet
of water. If there’s a fire the detectors in the top three stories empty all
that water into the tenement that’s on fire. The rooms pretty well fill up but
the fire goes out. It happens about once a month. I suppose that people set
fires on purpose for some reason.
There’s a heli-pad sitting over
the water. That’s the law. Every high-rise has to have one. Mum said that the
architects complained at first because it limited their idea of ‘pretty’. They
had to put up with it; it’s the law.
Mum was a whore. She supposed
that she was getting to the end of her career now. She told me that age catches
up with everyone in the end. Years ago the gangs had told her to do what they
told her or they would kill her mother. They killed Granny anyway. For fun, I
think.
I don’t remember Granny. Mum
says she was really pretty but she wouldn’t go whoring for the gangs no matter
what. So, in the end, she was killed. Anybody who is of no use to the gangs
tends to die.
I started working for the gangs when I was
around ten years old. They gave me a knife and told me to go kill someone. My
schoolfriend.
I told Mum. She shrugged and told me to go
kill him. Either that or die.
They gave me a girl to play with after that.
Just for a few hours. I didn’t really know what to do with her. I had to ask
Mum. Mum explained about that so I should know what to do next time.
One of the more
senior gang members, he must have been around seventeen or eighteen, mentioned
that there was trouble in the south. There were rumours of war there but the
gangs in their tenements would sort that out; this was not our problem. We heard gunfire and occasional explosions
in the distance but it sounded no different to the gunfire close to us in our
neighbourhood. There were always battles being fought between the tenement
gangs. Our gang controlled three tenements but that could change; tomorrow we
could control four or none.
There were other
rumours, too. We knew that one of the rumours about a ‘green’ area further
north must be some sort of joke; perhaps it was ruse by enemy gangs to get us
to desert so they could move in and take over our tenements. None of us knew
what a ‘Green Area’ might be. We supposed that it was a line or group of
tenements that were painted green. Tenements that were safe, where there were
no gangs. Nobody was that gullible.
One of the rumours
concerned me. I heard, through one of the junior members, that a ganger on the
twenty-third floor wanted me dead. I don’t know why he wanted that but rumours
like that had ways of becoming true.
Around four or
five in the morning when it was really dark and raining hard, I slipped past
the lower floors. They had left only two guards on the exit at the Ground Floor
where their main office and storeroom for the drugs were. The rest of the
guards would be inside—high or asleep, no doubt.
I thought that I
should be able to ease past them but one of them seemed restless, more
observant than the other. I came up behind him, put my blade under his chin,
pushed his head forward and pulled the knife out across his throat. No blood on
me but plenty on the floor. He was busy trying to push it all back in when I
squeezed past him and slipped quietly out onto the street.
It was raining
heavily, enough to keep everyone under cover or indoors. I thought I should
head north. I wanted to see if the stories about the ‘Green Area’ were true. I
was going to die anyway, being caught out in the open by a rival gang was a
death sentence; I preferred to be killed by a stranger than one of my ‘friends’.
A few tenements
north was the river. I had heard about it but never seen it. It was bigger—wider,
than I thought it would be. Perhaps all this rain had swollen it up. It had
rained incessantly for months; it seemed that there were rarely times when the
sun shone on us.
Over to the east I
could see a bridge. There were a few lights on it that reflected into the
water. The bridge would be guarded. The gangs the other side would want to keep
us from the south out of their territory.
I crept along the
banks keeping to the dark parts under the road, slipping on the shiny stones
and occasionally finding sticky mud. I put some on my face to try and stop my
skin showing up in the odd light that filtered down from the streets. Not many
lights left now but those that were still lit posed a threat to me right now.
The rain soon washed off the mud, it was a stupid plan.
The bridge was
made up of steel girders. Unpainted for years the steel was now mostly rust
but, maybe, it was strong enough to hold my weight. I thought about waiting for
a while to see if a Traveller came by. Perhaps I could get a lift from one of
them; I could pretend to be their helper. I had seen Travellers from time to
time. Where they came from nobody seemed to know but they always had
foodstuffs, drugs and weapons with them. Even high up in the tenements we could
hear the clip-clop of their animals. Often there were six or seven animals tied
together with loads strapped to their backs.
They never stayed
long. Sometimes they had helpers; someone to feed the animals and carry the
stuff for trade. Maybe they would stop for an hour and then they would set off
again and disappear to some unknown, to us, destination. The last one to visit
our tenement went off with the neighbour’s daughter and one other girl—the gang
had sold her for weapons, drugs or food. Young girls were worth more than boys
especially if the girls were pretty. Not many of them are.
I decided that
waiting for a Traveller was too dangerous. Crossing the river by climbing under
the bridge to avoid detection was marginally safer even in the dark. By the
time I had made my way across under the bridge it was full light. I stopped at
the far end under a badly corroded I-Beam and watched for a while; sometimes I
let rainwater from the bridge run into my mouth.
The streets the
other side looked deserted. Deceptive. Every now and then a face would peer out
of one of the windows. They were checking the streets.
I wedged myself
into one of the cross members of the bridge and slept.
Once it was
properly dark again I crawled out and made my way through the glistening
streets, picking my way through garbage that stank in the wet air. I passed
more than twenty blocks before the countryside became quite suddenly open.
I didn’t
understand the clear area until an aircraft appeared with bright searchlights
underneath it illuminating everything on the ground. I froze, immobile hoping
that they were attuned to movement. I didn’t know about infrared. Another
aircraft appeared and landed vertically beside me. They made a terrible, loud
clattering noise but I could still hear the noise of gunfire coming from the
tenements behind me; the first aircraft responded with an ear-piercing buzzing
noise and a gout of flame from some huge gun. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw large portions
of the tenement crash to the ground. Two men with guns pointing at me half
lifted me into the aeroplane. The whole thing took only seconds; the aircraft
took off and headed north.
Men in uniform
questioned me for hours. I explained that I had been trying to escape to a
place that we were told existed north of the tenements. A place where we had
been told that we could live in peace; I explained that we were sure it was a
myth. I told them that I had been marked for execution but I had no idea why.
They told me that
I was looking for The Colony. They laughed. I don’t know why they laughed, I
had no idea what a Colony was much less where it was.
That was how, at fifteen, I joined the Army.
I thought I had escaped but, of course, I had only dodged the gangs briefly.
They killed my Mum. Mum would have said it was all right; that she was too old
for whoring anyway.
One day I should have to go
back. The Government never let you live somewhere else. Once you were
registered in the tenements then that’s where you lived forever.
*
The Army sent me out to the
Colony. There were around a thousand, probably, on the transport. We were
strapped into uncomfortable seats and fed by a sort of conveyor belt from which
we were told to take one pack each.
This happened three times a day. We sat there for almost two days taking
it in turns to go to the toilet. No windows, no information other than that
necessary to keep us in order.
We were a thousand young souls
ready to be butchered by the enemy, the Sergeant told us. He smiled. Briefly.
Coldly.
Just before we arrived at the
Colony, we had a visit from a top-brass. He was a Staff Sergeant. We all had to
stand in line, to attention, and salute him when he appeared in our group.
He looked about as old as
anyone could possibly be without actually dying. I had never seen anyone that
old before.
He stood in front of us. Not tall
but imposing. Medals and stripes everywhere, it seemed. He was the highest rank
we would ever be likely to see, he told us. There were higher ranks than him
but they all lived in holy places because they were all ethereal, immortal.
I wanted to be one of those and
wondered how anyone would become ethereal.
The Staff Sergeant told us that
we were all expendable. He informed us that we were merely numbers and that we
no longer had names. We only existed as dots on some master plan in one of the
holy places that we should refer to as ‘The Higher Echelons’.
None of us was expected to live
very much longer. The average was three tours among the enemy before we ceased
to exist, before we ceased to be.
When we landed on the Colony it
was like being transported to paradise. Beyond the terminal we could see trees
and grass; the air was fresh and cool; people walking around us were smiling
and happy—perhaps they knew we were being sent out to die, to protect them.
Why would they care? Their
lives were not at risk unless we failed. But failed at what? We had no clue
about the enemy. We had never been briefed about them or their capabilities. At
least among the gangs we knew whom we were up against, we knew that anybody in
a Police uniform was a fair target—not that any of us had actually seen a
Police uniform. It was another legend, another myth.
Now? Who was the enemy? We had
no idea. Our training seemed incomplete. We had marched around a parade square
in the rain. At some point there had been a strange smell in the air, one of
the other recruits told us it was the smell of the sea but then he was told to
be silent and smacked around the back of the head with a flat leather whip.
Talking was not permitted. Talking led to rumours; rumours led to lack of
courage. We needed courage to die.
There was a list of our numbers
on a large board just inside the main doors. They were in sequence as you might
expect from the military mind. My number, 5794477 was one of the highest
numbers. I was new. They probably expected me to be among the first to perish.
After the number was a space
followed by a ‘T’ and another number. It seemed that the last number was a room
in the terminal. The first two digits represented the floor and the last three
were the room number.
We had some more training in
the use of firearms. Most of it was focussed on what not to do with a gun, like
point it at someone else unless you were going to kill them. We were never
actually allowed to fire a gun but we went through all the motions leading up
to it and the things to do afterwards. We even had dummy bullets with red
stripes on the side so that we could practice loading and unloading the rifles
and pistols.
We had lectures on what to do
if we were in a very cold climate and how to survive in very hot climates. None
of us knew what any of this meant. We had never been in the sort of heat and
cold that the Corporal was telling us about.
A Sergeant came and told us
about Rocket Propelled Grenades—he called them RPG’s. He said they were very
useful and proceeded to explain their use. Another Corporal came and explained
about explosives of different kinds and how to shape a charge and detonate
them.
It was all academic. Never, at
any point, were we allowed to hold anything hot or sharp. We might hurt
ourselves and that would never do until we were ready to be killed.
*
About one week after I told myself I was
officially bored I was told to report to Transmission Room 18. I asked around
the dormitory but nobody knew what a transmission room was or where it would
be.
In the corridor was a Sergeant. I stopped and
saluted him and begged his pardon but could he please tell me where Transmission
Room 18 is, as I have to report there.
He told me off for not reporting to him
correctly but then told me where to go to find the transmission room. I had, in
my confusion, forgotten to humbly submit my rank and number to him.
Transmission Room 18 turned out to be one of
many basement rooms containing white boxes. Each one was about the size and
shape of a coffin with a short cable plugged into the floor coming out of the
narrow end. At the side of each one was a flat plate on rollers with some sort
of telescopic device attached to the plate.
I introduced myself to a very
pretty nurse in the tight white uniform. She smiled and told me that just 477
would do, we were not to be so formal here.
She smiled again at me. I asked
her for her number but she giggled and said that all three of the nurses in
that room were called ‘J’.
When she told me to undress I
looked for a cubical but she chuckled and told me not to be so silly. I was
just to undress and get in the box.
It looked inside like the chest
freezer that one of my Mum’s clients had; I had peeked in it when I was waiting
for her, it was full of what looked like hard, featherless birds. Mum always
sounded as if she was enjoying herself in these places; I hope she is enjoying
herself where she is now.
‘J’ examined me minutely from
top to bottom. She told me that it was always better if someone died ‘out there’
because coming back with something not working properly was much more
expensive. She needed to check that everything worked properly. She sounded as
if she enjoyed her work, too.
I told her that Mum had been a
whore so I was used to this. ‘J’ laughed and said this was also only a
professional examination. Her breathing was very heavy, she wiped a drop or two
of sweat from her brow and said that she was satisfied that I was good to go ‘out
there’.
Of course, I wanted to know
where ‘out there’ was but she said she had no idea. It is where the box sends
you. She looked down at me and ran her finger down my chest. Just for a moment
there was a sadness in her eyes but it soon went.
Straight from the shower and
into the box. The water on the skin helps the conductivity of the contacts on
the body. All the contacts are on the base of the box so that they connect as
soon as you lay down.
‘J’ kissed her finger and put
it on my lips, straightened up and pressed an unseen button.
I heard a hissing noise and
watched the lid of the box slide over me. For a few moments I felt
claustrophobic and pushed up against the lid but found I was pushing against
something else hard.
A voice complained; they told
me to go back to sleep.
The next morning I showered and
shaved, no mirrors. Nothing reflective anywhere. One of the other Troopers said
that I must be new because I looked lost. I told him that I had just arrived
from the Colony.
I received my weapon,
ammunition and clothing then formed up outside. It was hot. Really hot—and
sweaty.
The Room Sergeant told us that
we were to patrol east. If we saw something suspicious we were to shoot it and
ask questions later.
I asked him what the enemy
looked like. They all looked at me as if I had committed some terrible sin. It
was apparent that nobody knew.
Nobody knew anything. Where we
are, why we are there, even how long will we be here? Just do as you are told
and hope to survive your tour of duty.
*
I’m cold. Not shivery or
numbingly cold but my feet are far from comfortable. The blanket is on the floor,
must have kicked it off at some point this morning.
Morning? Is it morning? Who
knows? Who can tell?
A glance at the thermometer at
the end of the room tells me it is registering 23°. Centigrade. Cold.
Odd that. On our tours up in
the cold belt it was -15° outside. If it dropped to -20° it was a cold snap; if
it rose to -12° we were having a heat wave. Sort of a local joke. Perhaps only
us military people will understand that.
We kept our room heated to 17°.
If we had it warmer, more comfortable, the fuel cells would run out before the
end of the month when the resupply came in. No fuel for heating or cooking for
a day or two.
We still had communications
providing we kept the batteries warm. They had their own thermal wraps. Inside
we should still have to keep our cold weather clothing on to survive. The room
was insulated but it didn’t take long for the temperature to drop.
Outside the problem was the
wind. Constant wind that burnt the face if you didn’t secure your mask. Of
course, you had to unclip the mask to fire your rifle or risk smashing the thin
plastic with the recoil of the weapon.
Then you had to clip the mask
back on quickly to prevent frostbite on your nose and ears.
That clip was always a problem.
We had thin tactical gloves that kept the hands warm—sweaty sometimes, but they
were thick enough to hinder feel. We often told our Higher Echelons that
another type of fastener would be better. ‘Velcro’, perhaps.
We didn’t need our rifles very
much, to be honest. Only to practise at the target runners. I only ever fired
my rifle three times in anger. Each time I had to pay for the round fired. No
bodies were found so there was no evidence. “Unauthorised Expenditure of
Government Ordnance”, it said on the chit that I got every time.
I remember the first time very
clearly. We were on patrol in a blizzard. Close to the room; in those
conditions you never went farther than the rope that secured you to the room
and the next guy in line.
I saw a movement. Hazy, through
the snow. Unclipped the mask and brought the rifle up, sights ‘ON’, safety ‘OFF’
and align the sights. Nothing for a few moments.
I muttered into the throat
microphone, “Target 017°.”
Somebody, it sounded like Sgt
598, replied softly, “Check, identify, fire.”
The laser finder in the sight turned
red just as I saw the blurred shape again. I fired. Certain that I had heard a
soft thud I lowered the rifle and clipped the mask back on.
I returned the rifle to a ‘safe’
condition and confirmed ‘kill’ with the Sergeant.
“Good, Trooper 477. We will
confirm when the weather clears. Let’s get in.”
It was quiet back in the room.
My bunk was on the bottom of the four layers; I was still too junior to get a
top bunk where it was warmer up by the ceiling.
We all knew who was junior and
who was senior by our numbers. None of us had names. Maybe the Higher Echelons
knew our names but nobody else did.
We never found a body. Perhaps
it was buried under all that snow.
I was on the top bunk now. Two
tours in the cold belt and three in the tropics had earned me the right to any
bunk I wanted.
I looked at the thermometer
again. 23°. Yet it felt cold. We were accustomed to 40° plus outside in the
tropical belt.
We were surrounded by jungle.
Hot and really humid jungle. Everything was wet. If you weren’t very careful
you got fungus and mildew everywhere. There were stories about people dying
from the mildew; they got eaten up by it. Stories. Apocryphal, no doubt.
The fence that divided North
from South ran through the middle of our room—well, not inside, obviously!
They say the fence went all
around the World. We don’t know. We were told to stop anyone going through it.
There were 2,000 Volts in the fence. We couldn’t believe anyone would go
through it. Nobody told us which direction this ‘enemy’ was supposed to come
from. Just ‘stop them’ was the order.
One of our junior members
slipped on one of the trails. His rifle touched the fence. He went limp. He was
dead. He never sparkled or jumped around, he just went limp. We looked at him
for a moment and then removed all his gear. We left the body there. The jungle
needed it more than we did.
We often found animals that had
bumped into the fence. Dead. Eyes staring at some distant horror. If they were
small enough we threw them off the track into the jungle for the jungle to eat.
We couldn’t risk eating them ourselves.
One morning we were mowing the
track for the target runners. Practise time. We had found a strip between the
trees that was, relatively, straight. We kept it clear of vegetation so we
could use the target runners there.
A target runner is the size of
a tennis ball. From the centre axle on the ball there is a rod each side, the
rods are as tall as I am. They are joined at the opposite end to the ball by a
horizontal bar. The periphery of the ball has four ‘legs’ a little shorter than
the rods. By standing the ball on the rods the ball can be rotated to wind up
the spring, letting it go means the ball will now spin the legs and go
loping off at quite a high speed. The rods stop the ball spinning.
Nobody wants to be the person
to set the ball going.
There is always a clever person
who will take a pot shot at it while the guy releasing the ball is still
holding it.
These troopers I work with are
not very bright. Some of them are mentally inert. When someone plays a really
funny joke like that he finds himself lashed to the end of the bunk beds and
the truth beaten into him.
People have died releasing the
ball. Usually they are people who have tried the joke. We’ve lost a few
troopers like that. Extra rations for us and nobody ever queries their death.
Just a number to rub off the board back at HQ.
I pull up my blanket, get snug
and rub my eyes. It is time to get out of bed and check my kit—clean the rifle.
Just feel a bit lazy this
morning. Morning? Is it morning? Maybe. There are no windows in the room.
Who is making the breakfast
today. If it’s morning we need breakfast. There was talk yesterday of beans and
eggs on toast with real coffee from the Colony.
Talk. There is always talk. The
World is full of rumour.
Most of it is generated by
stupidity. One of the Troopers said that his number is 588167, he wondered
where the other 580,000 Troopers were. I told him it was unlikely that anyone
would be number one. They all looked at me as if I had just fallen out of a tree.
I take a deep breath. More of a
sigh really, I suppose.
A sliding sound makes me open
my eyes. I feel restrained as if I’m in a box. There’s a bright light in my
eyes, I can’t see anything.
The light moves. Still I can
see nothing.
“Be calm, be still,” a gentle
voice tells me, “Just rest. It takes a while to adjust, 477.”
After a while I sit up and look
over to Sgt. 598’s box. It was still sealed.
The young lady in the tight
white uniform put her hand on my shoulder, “He didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Cpl.”
I’d been promoted, then.
She was accustomed to seeing us
all naked so there was no embarrassment at watching me dress while she wrote
down her findings.
“You are assigned two tours in
HQ,” she told me, her hand resting gently on my chest.
I smiled back.
“First? Breakfast, please.”
She grinned, “Must make sure
you are fully functional before anything else.”
This was another ‘J’. I had
never seen this one before. They were all attractive, desirable.
“Not just one week in the
Colony this time?” I asked her.
“No,” she told me, “HQ. Amongst
the Higher Echelons.”
I was inexplicably terrified.
*
I shuffled paperwork. None of
it meant anything to me. Just lists. The whole office seemed to be some sort of
stores system where we recorded things consumed and things supplied.
I never found out where the ‘enemy’
were or where I had been. That all seemed to be classified. Only the ethereals
would be allowed that sort of knowledge.
Occasionally I saw an ethereal
in the corridor when I was going to the mess hall or back to the accommodation
block. They never said anything; they never even looked at me. I never existed.
I was only there because I had earned the right to be spared from death for a
short while.
I tried to find out if the
fence went all the way around the world but there was no answer. I only learnt
that there were rumoured to be thousands of rooms along the fence in the
tropics and around the cold belts both north and south. Ten Troopers per room
plus those on leave from the enemy meant there were close to half a million men
deployed out there. Only guessing. What do I know?
The resupplies went out in a
constant stream. Sometimes there would be equipment but mostly it was
batteries, fuel cells, food and ammunition. Huge quantities of ammunition.
What could they be shooting at?
It could not possibly be all for target runners.
Now we were sending explosives.
More people were being specially trained in blowing things up. The war was
escalating.
Where? I had never seen
anything approaching an enemy other than three vague glimpses through the snow.
What were we protecting out there?
My time at HQ came to an end.
I went back to see the ‘J’s and
automatically stripped off. This ‘J’ was familiar, I had seen her before but I
couldn’t place her exactly. She was soft and gentle, warm, yielding. Bliss.
She said I was fit for
transfer, smiled and pressed the button. The lid hissed shut and I was back in
the bunk.
It takes a short while to
acclimatise. Even after five tours over three years it was still unnerving to
be sent somewhere unknown to do something—we had no idea what that ‘something’
was.
The Sergeant called me over. He
asked if I was the new Corporal. He instructed me to get all the Troopers
fallen in outside in line.
It was raining. Cold, driving
rain that soaked through everything immediately.
I asked the Sergeant where we
are, this is new for me, I told him, “Aye, Lad,” he nodded, “New for you. You’ve
just been on the practice camps playing with target runners, you have. This is
real now.”
I turned to face the Troopers.
They were, all of them, older than me, or looked it. Past them there was a
fence. In the fence was a large grill door. There were signs, they warned of
high voltages.
Beyond the fence were
buildings. They were sixty plus stories high.
“Atten... SHUN!” I roared.
The Troopers all came to
attention. I did a smart about turn to face the Sergeant.
He coughed lightly, “Some of
you know that I have been on this tour for some time. Some of you know that few
of us are likely to survive a full tour. We will do our best to complete the
objective.
“Objective one: Destroy those
vermin filled buildings behind you.
“Objective two: Survive.
“Objective two is hard. Why?
Because the vermin are better armed than we are; they have more money to buy
weapons than the Government does and because the High Echelons don’t give rat’s
arse if you live or die just as long as, eventually, that lot is cleared. Then
the next lot. After that? The lot behind that one until they are all gone.
Until we, those that have God on our side and righteousness in our pockets, are
all that is left on this green and pleasant land.
“The bit that is behind me is
green and pleasant because that much has been cleared by our dead comrades of
yesteryear, it has been watered by their blood. That which is behind you is now
our job.
Good luck. I’ll see you when
you get back. If you get back.”
The gate swung open, we marched
through and immediately broke formation, scattering into a loose line abreast.
“Does it ever stop raining?” I
asked myself and then recognised the building to my front left. It had a huge
faded ‘K’ on the side. Memories of Mum flooded back.
The Trooper carrying the radio fell forward
on his face into the mud. As he was falling I heard a ‘crack-slap’, the noise a
high velocity round makes. The rest of us also pitched forward, we tried to
bury ourselves in the mud to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible.
Gradually, inch-by-inch, we crept forward
until we reached a mound of rubble. It was all that remained of a tenement
block.
Whoever was shooting was good. He was
probably a senior ganger who had been trusted with a sniper rifle. I often
wondered, when I was young, where the Travellers bought all these weapons and
ammunition.
I scanned the floors going from left to right
until the end and then up a floor to scan from right to left. I followed this
zig-zag pattern until the seventh floor, third window from the right. The
muzzle of a rifle was protruding from it.
I called softly over to the Trooper on my
left, “Do you think you can lob a RPG into that window?”
He grinned at me, “No sweat.”
Rolling to his left to take advantage of two
large blocks of rubble, he sighted along the barrel of his rifle; the recoil
moved him backwards a couple of inches. He grinned again as he watched the
familiar spiral of smoke from the grenade.
We all saw the flash inside the room followed
a couple of seconds later by a dull thud.
Just to be safe, I scanned the rest of the
windows but none of them were open.
I spoke quietly to the guys either side of
me, “That will have woken them up. They will have spoken to the people in the
next tenement, too. They know they are under attack, they know that they must
kill us or die themselves.”
I paused for a few moments and then
continued, “I used to live here. These people have no mercy, no compassion.
They are not to be thought of as human. At all. Our job is to wipe them out.
Let’s do that. Pass that along the line.”
A young Trooper looked over the shoulder of
the man on my right, “Some of them might be innocent, Corporal.”
“Innocence does not exist here. For them life
is a disease, it clings tenaciously to them; we shall put them out of their
misery by providing a cure,” I patted my weapon, “These are the tablets they
need.”
We moved forward carefully. At last we were close
to the first tenement. Two Troopers went forward and placed charges; neither of
them made it back to our lines.
A few gangers, young boys, came out and
crawled around the base of the tenement, hiding behind wrecked vehicles but we
were able to pick a couple of them off; the third one was just about to remove
the detonator when I triggered it. He turned into a fine mist for a split
second and then disappeared into the dust and debris from the base of the
building. The rest of the tenement followed downwards.
We cowered under our protection of the old
tenement and waited for it all to die down.
Strangely, when we got our heads up again
there were some people wandering around in the dust cloud. They were staggering
and coughing until we dropped them with a few rounds out of our sense of
compassion.
I told the boys to wait until dark before we
moved again. Four of them had night vision glasses; they stayed on watch as it
became darker. By the time it was full dark the rain had turned from being a
downpour to torrential.
We snuck out to the second tenement on our
list. This was the one with the huge ‘K’ on the side.
There had been no intelligence as to the
capabilities of the gangs. My knowledge was old and sketchy at best. My skill
had been with a knife but I knew they had better weapons somewhere. Whether
they had IR or night vision I had no idea. We just had to risk it; perhaps the
rain would cool us down and mask us a bit.
This time it was my turn to go up to the
tenement with the explosives. Myself and the young lad who had asked me about ‘innocents’
went up to the building with the rest of the Troop watching and covering. In
truth there was little they could do, they were unlikely to see anything in
these conditions—we just hoped the rats in their nests would be the same.
We set the charges around five in the
morning. I knew that most of the enemy would be asleep or drunk on chemicals by
that time. The whores would be tired and sleeping, we just had to watch for the
odd guard and, maybe, the occasional one who had got up to use the toilet.
I heard a sharp crack from behind me. Nothing
from above but I automatically looked right towards the doorway in case a guard
decided to get wet and come out to investigate. Nothing. I relaxed and set the
rest of the charges.
It was all strangely quiet. Nobody moved
anywhere around the tenement. Somebody reported to me that they had seen a
window open and someone had stood in it, urinating. They finished emptying
their bladder inside where they lay dying.
We moved back towards the fence. When we were
clear of the rubble line I detonated the charges. We all turned and ran, using
the dust cloud as cover. We dodged the mounds of rubble until we hit the line of
bracken and bushes. The path was slippery with mud and wet leaves.
We were less than fifty metres from the fence
when automatic fire from one or more of the tenements opened up. Rounds were
smacking into the ground and whining off rocks and old concrete all around us.
I turned to give covering fire although I was never quite sure from where the fusillade
was coming.
I had only loosed off a few rounds to where I
fancied I saw the sparkling of muzzle flashes when a giant fist smacked me on
the shoulder.
*
I woke up lying on a soft bed. One of the ‘J’s
was taking my temperature. All the ‘J’s were tanned with strange features. They
were all beautiful. One of them had told me that ‘J’ was short for ‘Jururuwat’,
or something, in their language; I think it meant ‘nurse’ but I’m not sure.
‘J’ was speaking, “You will be
all right now, 477. You are with us. We will bring you back to health.”
“We got them. We brought down
two rat’s nests and slaughtered the gangs,” I tried to tell her. Perhaps I was
boasting, perhaps I just wanted to let her know that what she was doing was
worth it—to us, if not for her.
“Now they’ve got you. Rest.
When you are feeling better we will test you,” she smiled and stroked me
gently. Already I felt much better.
I dreamt of Mum and wondered
how many innocents we had killed when the two tenements came down.
I bet they were grateful to us.
