“Let’s hurry,” Jackson said, “before that thing wakes up.”
I numbly followed after everyone. I took nothing in, my body and mind leaden and dull. Just keeping the others in sight was a chore; moving quickly was beyond me. But somehow I kept on, stumbling and tripping, picking myself up and trying to hurry along, the light around us growing deeper with shadows as the sun kept dipping further to the west. On and on, one foot in front of the other, again and again.
We finally made it back to camp.
“Welcome home,” Joe said, embracing Dolores and Jackson.
“Lyndon, Kim, it’s nice to see you both,” Simeon called, doffing an imaginary hat, “I hope you had a nice walk.”
I was too numb to know if he was being smarmy, and looked blankly at our camp. It was like leaving one dream and entering another – Joe and Simeon had set up the laboratory, and floodlights surrounded a shining-steel workspace. Simeon had donned a white lab-coat and looked every bit the semi-retired scientist, making fussy and minute adjustments to his equipment. Without breaking stride, Dolores and Jackson unpacked the samples we’d collected and told him to get to work.
A fire was already burning, warding off the approaching night, far enough from the laboratory that it wouldn’t pose a danger. Lyndon and I both collapsed next to it, slumping back against our packs. I pulled out some water, had a drink, passed the bottle to Lyndon. Neither of us spoke. I looked over at the laboratory. Simeon was watching us, his expression thoughtful, his lips turned down in a sympathetic frown. Dolores and Joe had begun assisting him, and I silently wished them luck. I turned and looked at Lyndon. His eyes were closed and he was barely moving.
“Are you guys okay?” Jackson asked, joining us by the fire.
I gestured at Lyndon. “I don’t know about him, but I’ll be okay. Eventually.”
It was true. I was still numb and overwhelmed and overwrought, but I was starting to feel something again. Hunger, thirst, a need to go to the toilet – simple things that bring all of us back from the brink. Along with them comes the realisation that you’re still alive and still ticking and tocking, and that whatever happened has happened.
“How do you do it?” I asked Jackson. “How do you get up every day and go and fight?”
He smiled sourly, almost embarrassed by my question.
“Well, some of us drink and some of us fight. Some throw themselves into a hobby. I do remember one of the docs saying that we should try meditating, of all the ridiculous bloody things. That it would help calm us down. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re soldiers. We don’t need therapy, we know exactly what we’re fighting.”
“Did you ever do that?”
“What, the meditating? Or do you mean the drinking and the fighting?”
I closed my eyes and the horror and shock returned. I guess that meant that meditating wasn’t for me.
“All of them.”
“Nope. I don’t know, I just cope. Always have. It helps knowing that tomorrow’s a brand new day, and that anything could…”
That noise, it’s back. Fuck, it’s loud, so loud. I’ve got to go, I’ll be…
The above pages were recovered by Sergeant Dolores Ng and Corporal Jackson Kartudjara, after a sudden attack on Kim Churchill’s survey team by a still unidentified UBO.
Sergeant Ng and Corporal Kartudjara were the only survivors.
Soldiering On
One autumn night in the middle of a vast desert, two soldiers sat around a campfire contemplating the end of the world. They sat together in silence, staring into the flames. Neither of them felt the need to speak – they had served together for so long that there was no such thing as an awkward silence, and a gesture, a furrow of the brow or a curl of the lip said so much more than words could.
The wind picked up, the two soldiers shivering and instinctively shuffling closer to the fire. A moment later, they turned away from it as some desert-animal howled. They looked out at the land and saw nothing. They smiled at each other. Neither humour nor happiness lived there – their smiles were gallows-grins, forged by the horrific absurdity of their lives.
“I’m getting jumpy in my old age,” the taller soldier said with a laugh.
“Dickhead,” the shorter soldier said.
They went back to staring at the fire. The wind started to drop. Another desert-animal howled; this time they ignored it. The fire crackled and hissed under a cloudless outback sky full of stars. When it started to burn down, the taller soldier broke apart one of the crates she had hauled from the wreckage of their chopper and fed the splintered boards to the glowing embers. The shorter soldier didn’t help, his bleeding leg rendering him near-crippled and useless.
The fire grew and grew, devouring the dry wood, lighting up the night.
The two soldiers hurriedly backed away from the licks of flame, the taller one helping the shorter one. He didn’t thank her. He didn’t need to. He leaned against a piece of wreckage and stared at the sky, and she stayed standing. She wasn’t really keeping watch; the way she figured it, the worst had already happened and whatever came next would be a breeze. And so she was taking the opportunity to bask in the quiet desert night and drink in the empty land surrounding them, a heady contrast to her home and the base.
She avoided looking to the north, where the wreckage of their chopper and the body of its pilot lay. She looked to the east instead, where a flickering orange glow on the horizon suddenly spluttered and disappeared. She turned away and looked to the south and then to the west, where flat plains of sand and scrub rolled on and disappeared into the darkness.
At some point, the wind picked up again. The taller soldier sat down next to the shorter soldier and shuffled a little closer to the fire.
“Sure is peaceful out here.”
“You bet.”
Never had they felt so cut-off from the rest of the world.
Their long night stretched on. Eventually, the fire started to burn down again. The taller soldier got to her feet and once again started to feed it with splintered boards.
“Hang on a sec,” the shorter soldier said.
The taller soldier lowered the broken piece of wood she’d been about to throw on the fire. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Well, we can’t just sit on our arses waiting for the cavalry to come.”
“Why not?”
The taller soldier trembled suddenly, as if she was fighting off a memory best left buried. She choked back a dark laugh that teetered on the edge of hysteria. The shorter soldier didn’t have an answer to her question, and just shrugged. This set off the taller soldier and she gave in to her panic, years of training and experience forgotten in an instant.
“Don’t you get it? Didn’t you listen to the briefing? There is no cavalry!”
“But…”
She cut him off. “That was it, we blew it, we’re done. We might as well pitch a tent right here and play happy-bloody-families.”
“Dolores, calm down.” He looked up at up her and managed to summon a smile. “Please.”
It was the first time he’d called her by her real name in months, maybe years – it was normally ‘Doll’ or ‘Dolly-Doll’ or some similar childish nickname. Hearing him say her name did something to her, wrenched at something deep inside.
“Jackson, I’m sorry…”
He waved her apology away, appreciating the fact that she had repaid the favour and called him by his name. He had never really liked ‘Whacko,’ but what can you do?
“I know that no one’s coming,” he said. “Give me some bloody credit, I’m not that thick. What I’m saying is, that’s all the more reason to get a move on.”
Dolores looked down at him, and he could once again see raw panic in her eyes. It was something he had never seen up until that night – not once in all the years they had served together had she been anything but cool-headed. This sudden change shook him deeply, leaving him cold and uncertain.
“So what do we do then?” Dolores asked,
her voice wobbly. “Where do we go? And what do we do about your leg? Have you thought about that?” She literally screamed her questions into the night, her face puffy and ugly and red. “And don’t forget that the fleet is gone and everyone else is probably dead or dying!”
She let loose a wordless cry of anger and pain then suddenly ran out of steam. The echo of her rage pierced the sky before slowly fading away. The night-time desert quiet returned. Jackson painfully got to his feet. He hobbled over to Dolores, resting his hand on her shoulder.
“Are you done?” he asked. “Have you finished acting like a spoiled kid?”
Dolores pulled herself together almost instantly, the bluntness of Jackson’s questions needling her pride, doing exactly what was intended.
“Bastard,” she said with more than a little affection.
They both knew how ridiculous it was to laugh, considering their situation. And yet they laughed nonetheless. Sometimes, that’s all you can do. It wasn’t a big laugh, a gut-buster or a side-splitter. But it was a laugh nonetheless, and the part of them that knew how absurd they must have looked just hovered in the background, keeping company with their fear and dread.
“She’ll be right, Doll,” Jackson finally said.
He said it with a smile, but she knew that he was serious. After all, that’s what he called her when his mind was on the job.
“No worries, Whacko.”
This time it was her turn to smile.
They got to it. Leaving their campfire to burn down to nothing, Dolores helped Jackson to the wreck of their chopper. It sat there like an enormous broken beetle, its carapace cracked and its spine shattered. Working by starlight, Dolores started to strip it of anything useful, keeping well clear of its dead pilot. While she searched, Jackson fashioned a crutch from a rocket-harpoon that had been thrown clear of the wreck, and started teaching himself how to walk with it. After a little wandering, he stumbled upon a second rocket-harpoon and started fashioning it into an approximation of a shovel.
They did these things in silence as good soldiers do, focused on their work and oblivious to everything else.
Dolores let out a shout of triumph as she found the torch she had been looking for. She searched the wreck a second time, more thoroughly and with more diligence. She found an empty backpack and filled it with the salvage she had found before wriggling free of the wreck and dumped the backpack in front of Jackson. He wordlessly passed her the crude shovel he had made, and she turned back to the wreck. With a complete lack of solemnity, she hauled out the dead pilot and dragged him away and buried him in the sand.
While she did this, Jackson methodically sorted through the salvage, compiling a mental list of everything Dolores had collected: a few canteens of water, a rifle, two pistols, enough ammunition to back-up a threat, a compass, a couple of torches, a pair of binoculars, and very little else. It was a depressingly small collection, its most notable absences being food and a first-aid kit.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Dolores said, joining Jackson by the wreck.
“It’s done, then?”
“It’s done.”
Jackson couldn’t read anything in her expression as she led him to the pilot’s grave. She had made a simple cross from two broken branches, ramming it into the sand in lieu of a headstone. For a moment, they stared at the grave without speaking.
“Did you know his name?” Jackson finally asked.
“I never caught it. He was just ‘pilot’ – that was the first time I’d flown with him.”
“Yeah, me too.”
They fell silent again. They stared at the grave once more. Time passed.
“Fuck this,” Dolores said after a while.
She turned away and looked to the east. The flickering orange glow on the horizon had returned, faint but unmistakable. Jackson kept staring at the grave, and started saying a prayer under his breath. Dolores ignored this, getting down to it now that they had done what they had to do.
“The first priority is your leg,” she said. “And with no first-aid kit, that means we’d better start moving.”
She squatted down in the sand and pulled a weathered map from a pocket of her tattered flight-suit. She unfolded it and spread it out in front of her. She played the torch over it. It was a frayed relic, patched and repaired countless times. There was no longer a way to create anything new, not with all the printing presses, workshops, labs and factories destroyed alongside everything else.
Dolores sighed aloud, and barely even realised it.
On the map’s creased and faded surface, the names of small towns that had once been scattered across the desert had now been crossed out, roughly-pencilled Xs marking attacks or evacuations. They were tiny crosses – just scribbles, really – and yet they meant so much, each one a step in the march towards the end. Dolores traced her finger over a spread of crosses, crosses that marked the ravaged stations and homesteads lost in the centre. She wondered if anyone still lived in them, hoping that no one had been stupid enough to hole up in the crumbling ruins or foolish enough to try and make a life in the alien jungle that was slowly devouring the desert.
Dolores swore to herself when she finally figured out which piece of barren emptiness they had crash-landed into. Jackson finished his prayer before turning to look at her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yep. It’s just, well, it looks like we’ll have to head east.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. There’s nowhere else even remotely close. Unless you fancy walking all the way to Adelaide. How’s your leg? Up for a hike?”
Jackson didn’t bother to laugh. “Now look, Doll, hang on a sec. It’s just a nick, I’ll be ‘right – I’ve wrapped it and cleaned it as best I can, and I’m doing okay with this crutch.”
“Pull the other one.”
Dolores pointed at his leg. He looked down and smiled a stupid and embarrassed smile, having not even realised that a fresh trickle of blood was dribbling down his thigh.
“No matter whether you got that from the chopper or the beastie, if we don’t get some meds into you soon an infection’ll set in.”
Dolores stood up and looked back to the east. The wind seemed to hold its breath as the flickering orange glow on the horizon suddenly flared brightly then subsided. Neither Jackson nor Dolores moved; neither one of them wanted to take the first step. Dolores shuddered at the thought of what lay there – the bodies of their fellow soldiers, ruined choppers, the tangled wreckage of their Mobile HQ, the beast that had brought about the end of their world. She and Jackson had missed the end of the battle when their chopper had been battered clear, and they had no idea whether the beastie was dead or dying or had shrugged them off as easily as we would swat a fly.
They both knew that there was no other choice but east if they wanted to find a first-aid kit. They didn’t need to discuss it any further.
“Shit,” Jackson said to himself.
***
The two stranded soldiers set off. Dolores let Jackson set the pace, and he tried not to let his limp slow them down too much. When the wind picked up, they ignored it. When a desert-animal howled or cried out, they ignored it. Starlight lit the way ahead, drenching the desert in a silvery sheen.
Dolores and Jackson were thankful that they didn’t need to use their torches, but they ignored the stars themselves. They were still good soldiers, fixed and focused and thinking ahead. They kept an eye on the horizon, so that they didn’t lose sight of the flickering orange glow. They trudged across the sand and dust and through occasional patches of scrub, crushing them underfoot. They crested ridges and rises, strode through rocky canyons and craters, and sometimes found themselves in shallow valleys or dry riverbeds. Pretty much every time that happened, they lost sight of the eastern horizon and Dolores would pull out the compass she had stowed and lead them on true.
They did all of these things without saying a word.
They walked for hours, being careful
to conserve some of their water. The world kept spinning, on and on and on. The whole of the eastern sky slowly changed from a star-speckled black to a mix of pale pinks and oranges and purples. Dolores and Jackson ignored its beauty and ignored the dawn, but they couldn’t ignore the blinding sunlight. They moved as one, pulling scratched and dusty sunglasses from sealed pockets of their tattered flight-suits and slipping them on without breaking stride. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been done so seriously.
They kept walking, heading for a billowing cloud of black smoke that had now replaced the flickering orange glow to the east. They did their best to ignore the daytime desert heat. They didn’t so much as blink at the mirages that danced across the dunes. Time passed. At some point, Dolores and Jackson clambered out of another shallow valley they had stumbled into, and stopped dead at a sealed road that met the valley’s edge. It stretched to the east, an arrow-straight sliver of black. In the middle-distance, it disappeared behind the thick clouds of black smoke that they had been aiming for.
“Almost there,” Jackson said under his breath. “You beauty.”
Dolores couldn’t stop herself from smiling at him.
“Time for a breather, eh?” he suggested.
“Sounds good.”
They sat down on the road. Dolores passed Jackson the backpack, and he shuffled it behind him so he could stay propped up. Dolores had a quick look at the wound on his thigh, and wasted a little water giving it a wash.
“How you holding up?” she asked him.
“I’m okay.”
He wasn’t. He was actually in a whole lot of pain, although he hid it well.
“You don’t have to be a tough guy, Whacko.”
He smiled through clenched teeth. “I’ll be okay in a minute, how about that?”
Dolores nodded at him. She passed him a canteen, and he successfully resisted guzzling the water down. She plucked a pouch of black-market tobacco from a pocket of her flight suit, and took her time knocking up a couple of hand-rolled cigarettes. She lit them both with a rusty metal lighter then passed one to Jackson. The whole act was performed almost reverentially, the product of long nights spent together on watch or out on manoeuvres.
We Call It Monster Page 18
