by Adam Roberts
It wasn’t possible to needle you, though; you put on the hearty show once again, and beamed at me. ‘How was your chat with Donaghy? Clever man, clever man. So, you understand what it is you’ll be doing?’
‘Something to do with worms,’ I said, feeling, of a sudden, very drained.
18
It was in Twyford-Sonning, or a little downriver from there along the way to Henley-on-Thames, that we started to come together. A lot of pinging and twittering, and a sudden spike in the wiki. It was there that I first saw American troops, although the media had been full of them - of you - for weeks. The official line was that America, as an old ally, was ‘distressed by the violence and loss of life in England’ and that it was ‘doing all it could, diplomatically, to bring a swift end to the conflict’. News webs speculated ferociously, and the consensus was that the English Government (the UK Government as they continued to style themselves) could not admit, publicly, that they had been forced to go begging-bowl-in-hand to the Americans. It absolutely could not be said that the British Army needed help putting down a small insurrection in its own back yard. On the other side of the pond - you know more about this, I don’t doubt - there were large enough Gael pressure groups in the USA: the Scots, most of whom were keen to see an independent government in Edinburgh, but also the Irish. So those creaky euphemisms, ‘military advisers’, were flown to England. This was after the big push through London, I think. Certainly I didn’t see any US vehicles or ordnance in the field until we reassembled west of the Chilterns.
There were early skirmishes, but not with significant concentrations of combatants. But we saw dark green uniforms amongst the paler. That was you-guys, I do believe.
We debated, as we pulled ourselves into a striking formation. The main proposal, the one with what seemed like the greatest support, was to move south into Reading. We’d smashed through Reading once before, but there would be strategic merit in doing so again, because (as those in favour argued) the enemy wouldn’t expect it, and because it was underdefended. All our evidence suggested that large concentrations of troops had been stationed in Windsor, because of its touristy-historic and Royal connotations (as if we cared about that!), and around Heathrow, because that looked to the Feudal mind like a likely target. So we could take Reading easily, and then push east. The counterprop was to move directly east, to Maidenhead, and then through Slough, to skirt round Windsor and scare the enemy that we were heading for the airport.
We still hadn’t voted on overall strategy when the first shots were exchanged - at a place called Shiplake. A third proposal was tabled, and we forced through a guillotine discussion: pincer round Windsor, three thousand troops south through Bracknell and Staines, six thousand through Maidenhead and Slough. I, personally, had my doubts about this: but it got voted in, and so it was our strategy. The wiki prickled with updates as individuals identified themselves as north-line or south-, and then a few more as the numbers adjusted themselves.
It was still dark when I picked up new gear at Sonning, which is a tiny riverside village, a clutch of expensive, tiny commuter houses and not much else. Three trucks came in from three directions, and a couple of hundred NMA appeared from all over, as locals double bolted their front doors and watched with moon faces at their windows.
It felt strange to be readying for battle without Simic. But my right hand was starting to get some motion back in it - I taped a lightweight repeater to the cast on my right wrist. Then I fell in with a dozen or more people, most of whom I knew from before: Tucker, Fodio, Rhodes, Makouk, a few others.
So we set off to show the media that we had neither been defeated, nor driven back, and that we very much had not vanished. Rejoice not against me, o—
Boom.
The twelve of us drove north-east for a few miles in the same truck; but when the reports of combat engagement began perking on the wire we parked the truck in a National Heritage car park, in a woodland cutaway, miles from human habitation. Then we yomped for a while through the dawn - a very pleasant and invigorating way to spend your time, marching with friends through the nearly deserted English countryside in warmer months of the year. Of course, my sense of invigoration was enhanced by the knowledge that all that useless fucking jitteriness, the jumping out of my skin when somebody else’s cellphone rang, the barely contained urge to shoot fucking passers-by . . . all that was no longer an inappropriate psychosis. It was now a sensible stay-alive plan. Birdsong competed with the distant grinding sound of the M4 a couple of miles south of us. The turf bristled and twitched under the invisible finger of the breeze.
We walked alongside a newly ploughed field, lines cut and lined and curled like an engraving in dark metal, inked with shadow and ready to be printed. Just the top-half of a crescent-moon poked over a Berkshire hill like a shark’s fin. One car passed us - a civilian alone in his vehicle. He slowed as he drove alongside this trotting line of a dozen well-armed individuals, and then accelerated so quickly his tyres wailed, and he sped away. Probably got straight on his phone to the police. Not that it mattered.
You want that I should go into all this again?
Well, we cut through a housing estate. Commuters coming out to their cars, or householders pramming their wheelie-bins to the ends of their drives, gaped at us. Many ran back inside their houses. The rubbish van was making its rounds, and didn’t quit just because we jogged past. That metal arm tipping plastic tub after plastic tub of waste into the big metal mouth. Always eating, never satiated. Then over a small fence, and along a road that crossed (my wiki told me) the A404(M). According to the wikis some military vehicles were coming off the M4 and would be passing below us; so we set up a cannon and aimed it down, and waited as civvie car after civvie car passed through our fire zone. The army vans approached in a solid convoy, as feudal army trucks still do, and we were able to stop the first of them without difficulty. Tentacled branchings of flame, and gouts of smoke gushing upwards; then everything focused back down to fire burning through the truck and burning fuel on the tarmac. And, of course, cars screeching, weaving, and the second truck forced to brake right in behind the first. The buzz of the first explosion was such a rush that it momentarily detuned my attention. ‘Come on dozy,’ said Tucker. I daresay I was gawping a little at the chaos I had made.
‘Spread a little chaos around,’ I replied, in my best Joker voice.
Tucker came back at me with a sing-song Em Kentson voice: ‘It’s only a Monday!’
The castanets of returning fire.
We got a second missile off to blow up the second truck - the others had unloaded some of their troops and were squealing in reverse backing away from the scene. On the far side of the bridge was a roundabout; a sliproad curled ponderously round to join the motorway, and some enemy combatants were labouring up this slope. Fodio and I dropped them all with riflefire, and Tucker ran across to a nearby fuel station and grabbed an abandoned car. We all piled in - it was a Nissan Nipi, so it was a tight fit - and barrelled away through an industrial estate, and past a series of ex-council brick domiciles. Though the car was crowded, the boy with the key in his head was in there with us. I’d hardly noticed him in Cambridge, so his reappearance caught my attention. He was an omen, and I suppose he wasn’t a good one.
Priority uprate on the wiki: troops were being hurried up from Windsor, where they were barracked. Maidenhead itself was wide open.
Another general ping. It was Trooper Hesleff, with whom I used to play online chess, and whom I had never met face to face. ‘[We’re checking a few dead bodies now,]’ she announced, ‘[And they’re wired in.]’
‘[Wiki?]’ asked a soldier called Reichs.
‘[The enemy. They’re connecting up their people - they’re adapting.]’
‘[They’ve learned something from us, at any rate.]’
‘[We’re sure they haven’t hacked our wiki?]’ demanded Capa. Capa was an old friend of mine; though I’d not seen him since village fighting after Basingstoke.
‘[It’s a worry,]’agreed Reichs.
‘[We’re solid,]’ said a trooper who identified himself as Saint George, one of the Geekers. ‘[There are a million tripwires and only a dozen have even been touched.]’
At this a score of other Geekers chimed in. This was important, so although it held things up a moment it was worth logging them: Fine, Safe, Secure, attempts at hacking had passed through false walls. ‘[I’d also say,]’ said Jiggs, ‘[That if they have hacked our wiki they’re making a balls-up of using the intel. We just came through north Maidenhead like a knife through butter.]’
Somebody proposed a vote of confidence in our wiki and wifi, but that was just a waste of time. We were committed now; we could hardly unplug. If the enemy had started wiring up their troopers then that was a sign that they had acknowledged the battlefield effectiveness of the strategy. [‘Of course,]’ Capa said, ‘[though they’re linked in now, they’re still fighting as a feudal unit. It’s all top down.]’
‘[Fuck the top,]’ said somebody - Scully, his name; I knew him, a little bit.‘[We need some help here.]’ The wiki map showed us where, near the centre of town, and showed us a sudden concentration of enemy too. ‘[They’re dropping them from choppers,]’ Scully said. The sounds of battle were loud enough to make his words hard to decipher.
The wiki showed us a roadblock a little way ahead, so Tucker stopped the car and we all got out. The chugga of the copters was clearly audible, away to the east. We were a mile west of town, in amongst some plush-looking properties and gardens and gates, and not far from the river.
On to Maidenhead.
What we did was flank the roadblock: knocking down a fence and leaving tracks across a smooth expanse of glistening lawn. From there we picked a way along the river. It was back gardens for half a mile. Large detached houses with their own little piers and dinky little boats at the back. Then we hit a public footpath, and jogged easily along it. Wet summer weather. Jurassic green everywhere. We moved through woodland that came all the way up the brink of the Thames. Trees trailed their fingers in the flow. The sounds of battle, getting closer. The vibrato trill of birdsong, with gunfire like a mechanical mocking attempting at imitation. The boy with the key in his head kept pace with us, jogging with fluid strides, his loose young arms swinging at his sides. He was not looking at us. He was looking where we were going.
One jet overflew the town, low enough to show off the nodules and widgets on its underbelly, like Smaug. Then it pulled away north,
All this is very vivid in my memory. My memory stops soon afterwards, so it is doubtless especially emphasized in my mind. Or something; I don’t know how that works.
We saw a bridge up ahead, and it was made of stone. Rat-tat. Keeping low, keeping moving. Something constructed from multiple bulbs of inflated fabric, of various sizes, was floating in the river. I recognized what this was: floating face-down. There were flashes and flares. Half a dozen ducks kicked the underwater furiously to move their line upriver, away from the commotion, against the current. I checked the wiki. The path opened up into a riverside walk, and past various shuttered-up bars and shops. The wiki said there was an enemy position on the bridge, so we kinked round and found a good defilade on our side of the river. I started setting up the small cannon I was carrying, splaying the tripod legs. I was home. It wasn’t that my grief had been forgotten. It was that I had found a mode of being-in-the-world in which that grief was the sourness that added flavour to the joy of existence.
Tucker was dashed from this shop to that shop, peering in at the windows. Fodio and the others were picking firing positions, and Makouk checking the rear. ‘What are you up to Tucker,’ I shouted. ‘Are you window shopping? Stop window shopping, you whore-y consumer you.’
‘What if they’re hiding in the shops?’ he said.
The cannon was ready. Tucker came over to me. I put on a John Wayne voice: ‘Get off your horse, pilgrim, and drink your milk.’
He was checking the sight. ‘Who was that?’
‘The Joker.’
‘Why-so-serious Joker?’
‘Full Metal Jacket Joker.’
‘Full Metal - what, the 2001 guy’s film? I never did see that film.’
I aimed the cannon at the wall of sandbags that blocked the middle of the bridge. ‘Call yourself a soldier, and never saw that film?’ I said. Then I fired, and bullets large as coke-cans snapped across the intervening distance and turned into smashes of fire and flying shards of metal. The sandbags disintegrated and the shells rattled on through into the position. Fodio was on the wire calling in some people on the north bank of the river to put the squeeze on those enemy combatants. There was some desultory return of fire from the people on the bridge, and at the same time we came under fire from our right. ‘They’re quicker to react,’ Tucker said, bringing his rifle about and checking the wiki to find out who was on us.
We separated and came up through the little commercial streets towards our attackers. A jet made another pass overhead, loud as the end of the world. The end of the world wasn’t so far away, as it goes. There was a prolonged flurry of small-arms fire. Some people dashed for cover - four adult shapes, enemy combatants, heads down and running; and following them the slender silhouette of a ten-year old, running loosely and freely.
I held my fire.
Tucker pinged: ‘[I’m down, I’m fucking down.]’
‘You’re hit?’
‘[Fuck - hurts.]’
‘I’m coming,’ I said.
I retraced my steps, and in doing so stumbled upon three enemy combatants, two kneeling and one standing. They were facing away from me, firing round their corner, presumably at some of ours. I jinked into a shop door, took a breath, picked my target and shot the standing one. I got him in the back of his neck, just underneath his helmet and just above his flak jacket. He jerked forward, and dropped his weapon, but remained standing, or slouching at any rate. He put his shoulder to the wall and he didn’t fall over. I nudged my aim to the left a centimetre and hit one of the kneeling guys in the back - the round didn’t go through his jacket, I’m sure, but there was enough momentum to send him sprawling forward into the line of fire from the others. He did a sort of Saint Vitus dance and collapsed on his face. The third guy was wise to what was happening, and made to run off to the left. I shot at him but missed.
I went to the corner to check the other two were dead, and dead they both were - one leaning like a drunk against the wall, the other spread-eagled awkwardly. You see a lot of dead bodies in battle, and mostly you register them as simple features of the threat/no-threat landscape. But every now and again you see one that perks a response in you. In Thin Red Line that American trooper comes upon a Japanese corpse buried in the dirt except for his face, and that brings him up short. It’s like that. It’s a fellow-feeling, I suppose. Perhaps it was the way one of them refused to lie down and take his rest, even though he was dead. But looking at them, knowing them to be both human and so my brothers, drew a long needle through my heart. I stood there for long seconds, and just stared. As the asthmatic strains the hoops of his chest and wonders, desperately, Why can’t I breathe?, so the dead man strains against his inert flesh and wonders, Why can’t I live?
We all come to it, of course.
Pull myself together.
‘I’m on my way, Tucker,’ I pinged. He didn’t reply, which was worrying.
I ducked back, and as I crossed the road and came through a side street, a burst of small-arms fire sounded out a weirdly familiar-sounding bang, bang, b’bang bang-bang rhythm, and then, freakishly, repeated it exactly: bang, bang, b’bang bang-bang. After that it settled back into the usual random clusters and stretches of cracks and bangs, but my mind got snagged on the familiarity of the rhythm it had momentarily evoked. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t think what. Man it’s annoying when that happens.
By the time I got to him Tucker was dead, sitting with his back to a wall in a large dark puddle. There was nothing I
could do about him. I put the news on the wire, found Fodior and Makouk on the wiki and made off in their direction.
An armoured car was parked in the entrance to a car park. I could see it reflected in the glass frontage of the office building opposite, and I waited until it swung its turret the other way before rushing it, bunging a sticky grenade at its side, and hauling back as fast as I could.
‘Start!’ by the Jam. That was the rhythm. Isn’t it satisfying to scratch those little mental itches? They lifted that bassline from the Beatles, you know. I couldn’t remember which Beatles song. The grenade exploded. I watched glass panels over the way breaking like ice and tumbling and pouring to the ground. Off I hurried, singing.
It doesn’t matter if we never meet again
What we have said will—
always remay yane.
I came round to the position Fodior and Makouk had established: a good perspective down Maidenhead’s pedestrianized high street. A little way down the road, enemy combatants kept sprinting across the road, left to right, or right to left, leaving their cover and braving our fire to get to the other side. If they were all going from left to right, or all from right to left, I might have understood it; but the swapping over of positions on both sides just looked illogical. Exposing themselves unnecessarily. ‘They’d be better off,’ Fodior growled, aiming his rifle again, ‘staying put.’ On put he discharged a round that sent one enemy trooper flying, midstride - lifted him up in the air and threw him away from us to land with a thud. He came down with an impact that would have knocked the breath out of his body if he’d had any breath left in his body. But his was a body that had no use for breath, any more. There were half a dozen other bodies lying round about. You know what the guy said in Tumbledown? Isn’t this fun. You know what? It is.
