Sugar & Squall

by J. Round

  Through the long windows lining the walls the rain continued to fall. The idea of going back out there in the cold made me convulse.

  The courtyard statues looked monstrous and abstract from here gazing through the glass. They had no faces, no distinguishing features – nothing but blocks of black against the night.

  One in particular looked out of place, like it was moving.

  I spoke softly into Logan’s ear, pointing out through the window. “I’ve never noticed that one before.”

  Logan squinted and looked closer. His expression and composure changed.

  “That’s not a statue.”

  #

  “They haven’t seen us,” Logan said. “Quickly, go.”

  Staying low, we moved toward the auditorium doors, the rain our witness. We hadn’t even made it halfway when the door to the left began to creak open. Logan spun on the spot and herded us back toward the kitchen.

  We made it through the kitchen door just in time, Logan forcing it back closed against the audible ‘psst’ of the pneumatic tube at its hinge. I prepared to run out the back of the kitchen, but Logan pulled me down behind the bench, a solitary finger to his mouth.

  At the front of the kitchen was the serving area. Shutters were drawn down after every meal. There were tiny slits at the base, just enough to squeeze an eye against, giving a partial view of the dining hall.

  We both chose a slit and peered through. It was almost completely dark in the kitchen and thus unlikely anyone would be able to spot us from the outside.

  The soldier-like figure who had been chasing us came into view. I was sure of it. I held my breath. They were not searching any more, and stopped, bang-smack in the center of the hall. I could see the outline of their body, strong and muscular. Male.

  I heard an auditorium door open, but couldn’t see. It was out of view. More people, more soldiers, were moving towards the center of the hall. I could hear their footsteps. A boot came into view, and then I could see figures, dark blobs.

  Something about their manner sent fresh waves of fear washing over me. The way they moved was cold and calculating. Each held a gun like a choirboy might a candle, with the same green, reflective discs for eyes I’d seen in the window.

  Logan laid his hand over mine.

  They walked towards the center of the room to where our pursuer was standing. I couldn’t get a good look at them. They hung in the shadows while he stood in a strip of moonlight, looking almost angelic, innocent.

  The others gathered around him. They didn’t make any attempt to lower their weapons.

  One moved closer to him and started to speak. I couldn’t make out the words. They echoed around the room and lost form. By the time they reached our hiding place they were little more than whispers.

  I heard the voice elevate, but I couldn’t place it. The person speaking threw their right arm out wide, making a point. Their voice rose again, angry now.

  One of the soldier’s hands went out, arguing his case.

  “Why are they arguing?” I whispered to Logan, quiet as I could.

  Logan shrugged his shoulders. He put his mouth to my ear. “I don’t think he was meant to shoot at us,” he whispered back.

  The speaker stepped closer and back-handed the soldier across the face. It struck with such intensity the sound of their hand connecting with his jaw made me wince. The way his head snapped to the side was so unnatural I feared his neck had been broken.

  But it hadn’t.

  The soldier stumbled back to the speaker, more animated now, standing to his full height, shaking his gun. The speaker yelled back and then put his hands up. He laughed and stepped forward, motioning for the soldier to embrace him.

  The soldier looked surprised. Again, the speaker stepped forward. Finally, the solder laughed too, and they embraced, patting each other on the back.

  I looked to Logan and he looked just as confused as I was. I turned back.

  They were together too long. It was getting weird. The soldier went to move away, but the speaker held him tight. The speaker’s lower arm moved further down the soldier’s back, to his belt. He was pulling something out, something from a pocket, a sheath. I couldn’t see it well enough.

  It glinted in the light, and I knew. It was a knife. The soldier had no idea.

  Logan tensed up next to me. It was obvious what was about to take place, yet I could not steer my eyes away from the impending horror before them.

  The speaker brought the knife between them. Then, in a single, violent motion he thrust it into the soldier’s chest, pushing him deeper onto the blade with the hand on his back.

  The tip of the knife exited between the soldier’s shoulder blades, slick with blood and gristle.

  I went to put a hand over my mouth, but on the way up it knocked a plate off the shelf in my periphery. It shattered on the kitchen floor.

  The speaker’s attention snapped directly at me with the sound, focused on our hiding place, as the corpse fell out of his arms. It hit the ground, skull knocking awkwardly against the floor, gun rattling to the side.

  My hand made it to my mouth, but the damage was done. I sucked on my palm so hard it hurt, as if somehow I could pull back time and zip it away.

  But I couldn’t.

  I’d undone us.

  11. DEPRESSION

  The speaker’s attention was fixed. He’d heard us. There was no doubt.

  Soon he was joined by the others, all four of them moving toward us. I watched them come, swooping in on our position.

  “Come on!” Logan yelled, yanking me to my feet with such nonchalance and ease I could have been all but a feather. There was no point in keeping quiet since I’d let the cat so spectacularly out of the aural bag. We just had to go.

  Clarity returned and with it the awful realization of what I’d started, what they were about to do and what we might have to do now to survive. Logan was headed fast toward the back door that led out into the open, pulling me along in a frantic tug-o-war between forward momentum and my failing motor skills.

  My hip connected with a pot handle that had strayed too far from the edge as we rounded a bench, sending it oscillating off onto the floor in a jarring, cacophonous clang.

  I heard an echo of action back at the entry to the kitchen as we reached the door but was not afforded any time to dwell on it. We bore out into the open, the wet, wind and grand theatre of the heavens at war.

  “Run!” Logan’s hand slipped from mine and he let me sprint ahead for the tree line. I looked back. He was right behind me, his white shirt wet against his chest, jacket flapping behind, as he tunneled into the rain.

  I pulled my arms in tight. The wind was at our backs, hurtling us forward, which was one thing. The rain, however, was omnipresent. It defied gravity, whipping in different directions and showering my open mouth and eyes. I looked back again and Logan was a tiny pinprick of white against an oil spill of liquid black and blue. I wouldn’t have seen him at all if his jacket was done up.

  I ran as hard as I humanly could. It was freezing, but my body burned like hellfire against it; sweat, rain and fear in a muddle all over. We neared the start of the tree line. Then I was being snatched out from the open and spun up against the back of a tree, Logan, arms straight at his side, to my left. He craned his head out, around the trunk, before turning to speak to me. With the din of the storm, it wasn’t quite clear at first, but the second repetition was crystal.

  “They’re coming.”

  Against better judgment, I too moved my head out, always keeping my body firmly shielded from sight. Four persons, illuminated by a brief burst of lightning, were coming down the hill fanned out in formation. They weren’t running. If anything, their steady, paced progress only made their collective presence more fearsome. The next moment they were gone again in the rain and night, halos upon my retinas.

  Logan pulled something out of his jacket pocket before zipping it up completely. My eyes adjusted and I realized it was a gun.

/>   “What the hell?” I snapped, out of shock rather than anger.

  “I’ll explain later. Right now we’ve got to run down through the tree line where they can’t see us,” he said, raising his voice to compete with the rain and pointing to an area between two rows of trees. It almost looked man-made, a gladiatorial gauntlet.

  “After that, when we’re out of sight past the hill, run down the path until just before the rat’s nest where it narrows up. Do you know where I’m talking about?

  “I think so,” I said, wiping water from my eyes.

  “You run ahead. I’ll follow. Go,” he pointed, and I started to sprint away, ever-mindful of the death troop carefully raking the area further up the hill.

  Trees whisked past as I ran. My legs started to ache, my mind a blur. Every stride they became stiffer and heavier. I filed the pain under ‘deal with later’ and tried to mentally pep-talk myself into increasing effort. I didn’t turn back. I trusted he would be there.

  After we’d made it out of the tree line and around the bottom of the topmost hill, Logan shouted behind me.

  “I can’t – see them. Keep – running!” I didn’t need his encouragement. I was already moving as fast as possible.

  I could make out where the path narrowed ahead. It was bordered by trees either side.

  Logan ran around me, off the path and fell in behind a mound of rock and dirt to the side. I followed, ducking in on his left. From here we were invisible. It was a kind of hollow in the ground and on a fairly sharp slope. I had to dig my feet in to stop myself sliding further down. I drew my left shoulder up as close as I could to the actual wall of dirt itself. Logan did the same. Was this his plan? Were we going to hide here while they raced past?

  “We don’t have much time.” He threw the backpack on the ground and started burrowing through it, carefully withdrawing a small, round object.

  “That can’t be what I think it is,” I exclaimed.

  “Not quite. It’s a flashbang.”

  “A what?”

  “A stun grenade. They’re wearing night-vision goggles. It’ll blind them, buying me time to shoot.”

  To shoot? What the hell was going on?

  I’d no idea what was in the backpack. When Logan said it was stuff we might need I’d assumed he meant first-aid supplies or a flare – something to help us survive in hiding or sail off for help on driftwood. It scared me to learn that it was, instead, full of weapons – real, kill people kind of weapons.

  “We can’t hide,” he continued, reading me. “We don’t have any food, we can’t get back to the kitchen and wherever we go they will find us. It’s still a good two days before the ferry comes, so they’ll have all the time in the world to hunt us down.” He was racing along his words so much they started to meld together. “We have to attack first.”

  “We can’t actually fight them!” I was surprised at my conviction.

  “We have to. There’s no point arguing. They shot at us. I don’t know why, but they did. For some reason, they’re after us. Now it’s us or them.”

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew the stakes and what was at risk if we didn’t act. I had computed it all very fast as we’d fled out here, but I was also a realist and knew together, as just two teenagers, we stood little chance against what appeared to be trained soldiers.

  Logan placed the grenade on the ground to his left between us. I instantly had an urge to move away.

  “Do you even know how to use that thing?” I asked.

  “Yes.” His answer was short. Time was running out.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to pull, throw, then shoot. Take out as many hostiles as I can.”

  Hostiles? I was taken aback. It was such a remote word to me, heavy with military overtones and completely at a tangent to the Logan I’d come to know.

  He reached into his jacket pocket, handing me a table knife. “Take this. It’s all I could grab, sorry,” he said, anticipating my question.

  “I can’t–”

  “Slide it down the back of your pants,” he interrupted, “just in case.”

  He thrust it into my hands, where it burned, blasphemous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held one. But it was done. There was no point arguing, and it would do no good to drop it. I slid it down the back of my underpants, the wide hipster waistband holding it in place. It was corpse cold against the bare flesh there. I loathed the feeling. We weren’t kids playing cowboys and Indians.

  While Logan watched over the top of the mound, I remained still and silent. Time was getting away. It’d been too long. They’d changed direction. I stared into the haze of wind and rain towards the ocean and pictured their green eyes emerging, firing from the fog.

  “I’ve only got ten seconds. I’ll have to pull the pin, cook it off and throw it with three or four seconds left. Timing’s everything.” Logan stared into the distance, talking more to himself than me, planning it out.

  A few seconds didn’t sound like a lot of time. I knew how grenades worked. I’d seen the movies. They were volatile. They’d blow up in your hand if you weren’t careful. Non-lethal or not, we’d be burnt or worse at such close proximity.

  Selfishly, I started to consider the life I’d led. It seemed like such a waste. Finally I’d been woken up, shaken to action, yet everything might come to an end here in a short few moments. I didn’t want to die here in the dirt, a virgin. God, how stupid that sounded now.

  I wanted to reach out to Logan, but he was fixed in concentration. There was the matter of the grenade lying between us, too, and I started to develop a complex that, like a camp-fire, I had to keep it from the elements lest it go out, or off.

  Memories of returning home from family trips into the woods came to me in a bundle of color. I’d be there muddy and damp, dirt in my hair and under my nails. Stepping into that hot shower at home was the best feeling in the world. It was so cathartic. All that dirt and worry just washed down the drain. There was something liberating about being naked as well. Without clothes you were unbound to the world outside, the world of decisions and worry that always required action. I drew myself back to the night at the pool with Logan, trying to be anywhere but in the present.

  I couldn’t work out how we’d come to be here, how things had suddenly gone so wrong. The mass disappearance was terrifying, true, yet it had been so nice there for a while, the two of us, that any ominous clouds that had been hovering around simply floated out to sea. Had I been so blind?

  The temperature fell further with another gust of wind. I edged closer to Logan. He said nothing, looking into my eyes. His head came closer and we kissed.

  Maybe it was the imminent danger, some sub-primal thrill in coming death, but we locked together with such wild abandon that it left no doubt in my mind as to our connection. Even as I went to part, Logan lingered. He reached for the back of my head and held me there. Within that there was something entirely new compared to the kiss on the rooftop. I felt such a magnetic bond I was sure even if we were to be captured right now no human force would be able to pull us apart. The rejection I’d felt at the garden fell away.

  With the taste of him on my lips, we waited. Things grew quieter. Whether that was because I was subconsciously trying to block everything out, I couldn’t tell. My thoughts were becoming increasingly more disjointed and random as the night went on. I didn’t feel myself. I didn’t feel like this was even my body. I was a stranger to all around me. The only thing that had some semblance of reality was Logan beside me, eyes projected deep into the darkness.

  “They’re coming,” he whispered, a ghostly echo. “Get down, close your eyes and cover your ears. It’s going to be loud.”

  I went to wish him luck, but thought better of it.

  This is what it must feel like to be at war, I thought, waiting, always waiting, in the mud and dirt like some six-limbed insect about to spring up and devour your prey.

  I folded myself tightly into the nook, keeping my ey
es trained on Logan’s.

  It was taking forever. Logan was a statue in wait. The cold started to bite down now we had been motionless for a few minutes. My pants were wet through and water streamed down my back. I started to shake.

  I saw something change in Logan’s expression. He locked his feet into the ground and raised himself up. Then he pulled the pin.

  His lips began rounding out each number precisely.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  A freakish vision came to me. He’d miscounted, doubled up. The grenade had gone off and he’d simply evaporated into light in front of me. I slapped myself on the face. It was such an odd thing to do. It so easily could have thrown Logan off the count, but it worked. My mind went back to nullity.

  I continued to watch Logan’s lips. The whole universe, every particle, drew inward as the count narrowed into the final numbers.

  Six.

  Five.

  Four.

  On three he stood fully upright, took another second to draw his arm back and threw. It was odd with my ears covered. Without sound, with the rain obscuring my vision, it was as if I were seated on the bottom of a pool looking out. It was peaceful for the remaining second. I closed my eyes.

  I was glad I’d covered my ears when the sound came. My eardrums strained against the sheer volume and pressure of it like each was a balloon at breaking point. My head felt like it was stuck in a vice, such were the forces at work. My eyes were closed, but they lit up with light. The pain ran right into my temples as I opened them to realize it was raining not just water, but dirt.

  I saw Logan above bracing himself, one blast from the nozzle of the gun, his arm jerking back, and then again, another shot, eyes locked, his face alight.

  I released my ears and at first thought I was deaf. Logan had come down to me. His hands cupped my face. He shouted in silence.

  Words began to form. My hearing returned. He lifted me from the ground by the arm and we started to run to the left through the trees. I didn’t look back. That much I could spare myself. What I couldn’t escape from was the smell, unmistakably metallic. I could taste it in my mouth, and neither the collected rain nor the raking of my teeth could rid it from my tongue as we ran.