He looks at me with panicked eyes. I’m stressed as well, but I keep a still façade and maintain my composure, giving him an encouraging look and a pat, before placing my own helmet on with a satisfying, pressurized thunk.
The wind disappears, and all I can hear is my own breathing.
“Can you hear me?” I say to him through the short-range radio, pointing to my helmet.
“Yeah,” he replies, followed by a cough.
“Alright,” I say. “We need to get out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“To get help, same plan,” I announce.
I open the back doors of the vehicle, and we flounder our way out. I trip, feeling myself traveling through the air before landing hard on my chest in a pile of fine sand. More pain, more heaving from the hit. It feels like I’m in a dream, surrounded by vivid, illuminating colors shining down on us from a large white sun.
A hand grasps my bicep and gives a tug. I situate myself on all fours and look around before regaining my step. The ground slips under my feet, and I struggle for a moment to maintain traction in the ever-shifting sand.
“What did we hit?” Ulric questions me through the radio. I look at him in his silver armor, now covered in sand.
I shake my head.
“I don’t know.…”
We make our way slowly to the front of the smoking vehicle. The wheels rotate delicately in the air. A black, spread-out soot covers the front, along with more shattered glass. In front of it, there is a small crater. I know what we hit.
“It was a mine,” I declare, pointing a finger at the crater. “Must have…must have been planted by the Scavengers that we battled.”
“Why did it not blow us up?” Ulric asks.
I continue to cough, raising a finger for him to wait. The pain in my knee is not going away.
“Maybe…it was a smaller one…for treads…” I theorize. “Not all of them are ship killers.”
“Fuck,” Ulric curses, “shouldn’t we wait here? Wait for another Camel to come pick us up?”
“They won’t send out another Camel for at least another day,” I say. “And our armor only has energy for at a day, at most…I don’t want to risk frying out here.”
“So that means…” Ulric trails off.
“That means we have to walk. We’re already so close to the Eagle Nest. I’d say forty or so kilometers. And we’re about a two-day walk from the Howling Dark.”
“So I guess we walk then…”
“I guess we do.”
Temptation
Ulric and I wound our way across the hills and valleys of the desert, slipping and tumbling along the way. While on the ship, we cut through these sand dunes like anthills. Now we are at the mercy of them.
The cloth wrapped around me is doing its best to keep my body temperature down, yet sweat still migrates from my forehead down to my feet and everywhere in between. Welts have already formed, and we’ve only been walking for five hours. Luckily the sun has lowered in the sky, turning it a new hue of orange and purple. It will be sunset soon.
As we climb over another dune, I can see the lights of Eagle Nest #13 clearly. They turn on dot by dot across the tall towers, and the spotlights that shine on the buildings bring out the intricate details. We’re close. We’ll have to walk through the night, but we’re close.
Throbbing guilt builds up slowly inside me like a tiny flame. It’s a little voice that tells me this is all my fault. I should have listened to my brother and let him do his job. Those men who died in battle would still be alive. If we don’t survive out here in the dunes, my mistake will have cost the lives of my brother and me as well. I dragged him into this. I knew what the Kiln was like, and instead of turning him away when he wanted to join me on the ship for a journey, I pushed away any doubt in my mind.
This land is for me, but it’s not for him. I’d be willing to die, right here on top of this sandy hill, but I wouldn’t wish the same fate on him. Ulric still has more to see, yet the Kiln offers nothing more. This is all it is—towers and sand, towers and sand. The first time I saw it, I was eager to see more, but that’s all there was.
I was a fresh-faced kid, venturing out into the Kiln to serve my country. I didn’t know what I’d see. I didn’t know whether I’d die in that campaign.
“You say that I’m a savage,” I suddenly say to Ulric through the radio. “But I’ve seen true savagery. I’ve seen what non-Aryans are truly capable of.”
“You’ve told me this before, Ansel,” he replies dismissively, while attempting to make his way down the dune.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”
He gets to the bottom of the dune, turns around, and looks up at me, watching as I slowly slide down toward him.
“I was your age when I was first deployed,” I say. “Eagle Nest #7 had been attacked by the largest fleet of Scavenger ships we’d seen since the Glass Wars. Came out of nowhere.”
We march our way through the valley between two dunes, right in the middle of a long shadow from the evening sun.
“Whole Nest was overrun in a matter of hours. Any defenses were destroyed. The Scavengers, numbering in probably the thousands, just stormed the towers. They held those towers for at least a week before we were able to send in a reasonable force in to stop them.”
The wind dies down as the dunes block most of it. Sand cascades over the top like waves on the ocean.
“I was a new recruit. The only violent thing I’d ever seen in Germania was a squirrel being attacked by a dog. I didn’t know what I was going to see.”
We reach the bottom of the giant sand dune and begin our ascent. I need to crawl at times on my hands and knees to get proper traction and not slide back down.
“The initial assault was actually fairly simple. We sent in hovercraft and warships, knocked out any defenses they had outside. We were cheering as we cut down that green flag of theirs, burned it on the spot, and raised the swastika. Then we fought our way inside…”
I continue to climb my way up the dune.
“The Scavengers sent a group of civilians out as a defense, firing into the group and us as we entered the central tower. I saw an old man’s skull split open from a rifle round. By the time the fire-fight was over, most of the group, women and children mainly, were bleeding on the floor. Some stayed behind to check for survivors. But I just kept going.”
I reach the top of the dune, and look on at the towers.
“We cleared room after room. Bodies were everywhere when we entered. Girls were strung up on the walls. Men were gutted. The smell was just…something else. In the main hall, heads lined the walls.”
“Ansel…”
“I lost my arm when we entered the next room. But it was that sight, the sight of all those civilians who lived their entire lives, had families, had everything destroyed because those greedy savages wanted to plunder. That was enough motivation for me to finish that fight, metal arm and all, and gun as many down as I could.”
We stop for a moment and sit.
“You want to know why I want to keep the dams? Because the sea will just save them. They’ll line the shores. They’ll survive. I want all of them to burn in the desert. It might take a few hundred more years, but I know it will come one day. They will all be lost to the sand. And until that day comes, I will inflict as much pain on them as I can. I will never call a single Drop in my life, just so I can wrap my hands around every single one’s neck, and squeeze.”
We sit in silence for a moment. The wind and sand rush past us. My cloth rustles in the wind. The memories come flooding back. Those feelings of utter loss at the sight of bodies ripped apart by swords or bombs. Children disemboweled.
“If we didn’t have the dams,” Ulric begins, “then we wouldn’t need to worry about any more civilians being killed.”
“But we
would have to worry about the Scavengers surviving.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Ansel.”
“Don’t be—it opened my eyes to what awaits our people outside the Reich. You’ll see it too, one day.”
We walk the entire night without saying a word, simply trying to gain the most distance without the sun beating upon our backs. I cling onto my duffle bag, feeling the weight begin to make my back ache. My knee stings with every step. There’s nothing I can do about it now. Best to just bear the pain. A pool of sweat has collected in my boots. Thin layers of liquid swash about with every step into the hot sand.
As I suppress the urge to sleep, I begin thinking that my mind has started to play tricks on me. The night sky dazzles and blurs. Our armor’s flashlights appear to flicker.
My mind shuts off, focusing solely on keeping pace with my brother. It’s odd how in these moments you can become aware of every action the body makes. I notice every breath I take, every blink I make, and every dry swallow, even though I’m so thirsty no saliva really travels down my throat. The intake of air into my helmet heaves in and out, giving me a fresh supply of cold, breathable oxygen.
I wonder if this is what the colonists on Mars feel like when they walk that Red Planet. The Kiln might as well be an entire planet by itself. For a while, I even become transfixed on Ulric’s cape. The violet mast of cloth fluttering about in the wind, just like the flags from the bowsprit.
Eventually, the sky cracks with a burning paint of violet. The day has begun again in the Kiln, and the sun soon will shine down upon us.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Ulric, who turns his head toward me, “I’m sorry that I got you into this mess.”
“I knew what I was getting into,” he responds in a calm voice. “It’s the Kiln. I expected it to be dangerous.”
“When we get back to the ship, I’ll stop anybody from saying something to you about the Scavenger. If I had known earlier they were making you uncomfortable about it, I would have put a stop to it.”
“How? You can’t just order people to not be suspicious.”
“True. But I could have done…something…we never should have had the Scavenger on the ship.”
The sun appears to the east, casting our long shadows upon the winding hills. It graces the sides of the towers, creating a thin line of yellow light upon the tall, dark silhouettes. The towers’ size is deceiving, making them seem closer than they truly are.
Light hugs around every sculpture, every face carved into its façade. They are as ornate as the monuments in Germania. Statues of Aryan warriors, depictions of past battles, and even past Führers scale the side of this endless pillar. Atop every tower are four eagle statues aligned in the cardinal directions. As I scan from top to bottom, the tower gradually grows wider like the steep slope of a mountain.
“It looks like the sand dunes end a little bit from here…we’ll gather more distance when we have that flat land to walk on.” I say, pointing in front of us. Out of the corner of my eye there is something that seems off about that dune. I turn to spot a large triangular object poking out of a sand dune to our right. The sunlight just barely shines upon it in a valley of shadows. It’s a bright orange, a rusted orange that was only a shade brighter than the morning sand around it.
“What is that?” I ask, squinting down to the strange thing. Ulric turns to face where I’m examining.
“Do you think that could be a mine?” he says. “I don’t exactly know what mines look like out here.”
I squint my eyes and examine the rusted metal object. It doesn’t look like any mine that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve dug up many over the last decade in the Kiln. All I respond with is a headshake. Before I can say anything, Ulric is sliding down eagerly to see what it is.
“Ulric stop!” I yell after him, but I take a false step and tumble down the dune after him. My fall ends with a hard crunch, knocking the wind out of me. As I stumble to my feet I can see he’s already at the ship.
“Even if it isn’t a mine. We don’t know what it is,” I say, catching my breath.
“It…it has a swastika.…” he announces, hesitantly.
I pause, and look at him with eyes wide. What did he just say? My legs drag me along toward the strange object, rejoining me with my far-too-excited brother. He points a trembling finger at a series of black lines painted just above the sand. Getting on his knees, he shovels away the dune. I can’t believe it. A black swastika reveals itself, painted on the rusting metal of this thing.
“It isn’t golden. Why isn’t it golden?” Ulric asks, “is it one of ours?”
“We need to keep moving,” I say, knowing that we need to keep continuing toward the towers. My feet take me away from the strange object, yet after a half minute of walking I realize there are no footsteps behind me. Looking back I see Ulric still at the object, his full attention on the swastika.
“I said we need to keep moving, Ulric,” I bark louder, my patience wearing thin. Still no response. I yell his name louder.
“I heard you,” Ulric says, his quiet voice coming through my radio. Sunlight fully extends into the valley. The cool break from the night air has ended, and I can feel the heat begin to beat down upon me again.
“Then how about you stop staring at that thing and we keep moving?” I reason, yet it falls on deaf ears as the armored Ulric crawls his way up the dune, getting a better vantage point on the object down below him.
“There’s a hatch door,” he analyzes.
“Stop it, it could be rigged with something, let’s just—”
“It’s a ship,” he concludes.
I ignore what he says. “I don’t care what it is, we need to go.”
Yet before I can stop him, Ulric jumps off the dune, slinks himself onto the object, and lifts the hatch-door. My heart pounds as I anticipate it exploding, or setting fire, or something else at any second. There is nothing except the sound of creaking old steel. Ulric pulls out a gun and lowers himself down, disappearing under the metal and sand.
I’m sick of him. If he wants to go exploring instead of helping the ship, fine. I whirl myself around and begin climbing up a sand dune, leaving the object in the valley behind me. As I continue walking, I think about the promise I made to him, the invitation I sent to him to come to the Kiln.
“Fuck,” I mutter to myself, feeling the pangs of guilt. I stop dead in my tracks atop the dune, the cogs turning inside my brain about which path to take. After a minute, reluctantly, I dig my hands into the sand and slide back down the dune toward the object.
I march to the ship and climb onto its rusted metal shell. My boots hit it with a loud clang. The hole in the steel is large and circular. A ladder leads down into a dark abyss. I take out my own gun as well, not taking any chances this could be home to somebody else.
Putting two feet on the ladder, with each step I go lower into the strange vessel, the echo ringing louder and louder. As I disembark, I step onto a solid, yet aged, floor. There is no sand. No evidence that this ship was in the desert. I guess the hatch-door did its job.
The flashlight from my armor shines into an open, hollow cave. It’s longer than it is tall.
“What are you doing?” I call out to Ulric, “we need to get out of here.”
“We needed a break anyway,” his voice echoes through the darkness. My temper flares.
“We can take a break when we’re actually at the towers.”
“This cave just keeps going on, and on,” he says, his voice getting fainter. I can’t see him through the darkness. As I shine a light on the walls and floor, little details slowly reveal themselves before me. Posters of proud-looking people. One has a man in a brown uniform, with short blond hair. He’s carrying a flag…with a swastika, but it’s nothing like the Reich flag. It’s red, with a white center…and a black swastika. The writing is in German.
“Th
e man on this poster looks like the Eternal Führer,” I remark, “how old is this ship?”
“Is this not one of yours?” Ulric calls out in the distance, his own light shining around as he explores.
“This isn’t anything like I’ve seen before. It…”
My eyes catch a glimpse of a series of papers on the wall. The top has a picture of a dog with brown, short fur, and at the bottom, there is a series of dates in a line. It’s a calendar. The date in intricate letters reads, February 1960.
“This…this is certainly not one of our ships…” I mutter, staring blankly at those big bold letters.
“Then what is it?” Ulric calls out somewhere in the dark.
“Something…far…far…older.”
Dearest Emma
We decided to rest inside of the ship’s hull for long enough to eat and hydrate, since it’s difficult to do so otherwise without risking sand blasting onto an unprotected face. We took our helmets off. The sand must have been blocking the heat from the sun, because it felt quite temperate inside those dusty walls.
I told Ulric we were only going to stay for thirty minutes and then it would be out to walk again. Our flashlights have such a meager range, so we’re surrounded by emptiness. There appeared to be lights above us, but I doubted this place had power in millennia. Glass litters the floor and the crates that are stacked around the room. It must have been used for some kind of storage. We take our rest on some of the smaller boxes.
“This ship has been in the desert for thousands of years, then.…” Ulric says, taking a drink of water.
“I guess so,” I respond.
“You’d imagine that in that time somebody would have found this ship by now,” Ulric asks.
“Well, in the desert the sand dunes are like waves. It was probably just under the sand this entire time, and one day…” I make a whooshing noise with my free hand, “the wind just unburied this thing.”
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