“The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape…”
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Somewhere in a vast, dark labyrinth of concrete bunkers, amidst tanks which have never been used and missiles lying in their tubes ready to pounce, a timer trips a circuit. With mechanical clunks, harsh fluorescent lights switch on one by one, illuminating sterile white corridors that no one’s stepped foot in for at least two decades. Gradually, bright light spreads throughout the underground facility; hangar bays, armouries, garages, and the all-important missile tubes, all automated and set to engage the enemy - any enemy - at the slightest provocation. Eventually the growth of the light stops at a little door in the most remote corner of the compound, as if hesitating - if only for a moment. In place of a knock on the door, there is the hiss of hydraulics. The room lights up.
We see, lying supine on a bed, a woman - no, a girl; her expression is serene, but frozen, almost blue, as if in the moment of dying a peaceful death in her sleep. Her face is unblemished, almost like that of a doll; she can scarcely be older than twenty. Around the room, freezing cold vapour is being sucked back into hidden air vents. Beside her head are indicators of her vitals - heart rate, almost nonexistent; breathing, glacial; brain activity, likewise - and a standard-issue assault rifle. A few colour-coded plastic tubes are stuck into her arms.
Gradually, the room warms up as the icy vapour is spirited away. A thermometer by the gun shows the temperature steadily climbing, degree by degree. The tubes in the girl’s arm detach themselves, leaving little spots of blood, and her face slowly regains its colour. In a flash, her eyes jolt open, but they immediately shut just as quickly. The bright lights have almost blinded her. Gently, now. She has been in cryo-sleep for a very long time.
The girl is a soldier. And a maintenance tech. Or she was a soldier, and now she’s a tech, or - no, she was a soldier and now she’s an officer, a lieutenant, and she used to be a maintenance tech, that’s it. No, that isn’t it. She’s all three at once. Or maybe she used to be an officer…
Not that it makes any difference, in a place like this.
She does this every time. Every single time the room lights up and the freezing gas disperses, her eyes snap open. Call it fast reflexes or a soldier’s instinct. No matter what you call it, it’s not a good idea.
She breathes in, out, slowly opening and closing her mouth. After a few minutes, she opens her eyes again, this time much slower. She is fully awake, for the most part. Her intelligent blue eyes stare at the ceiling, at first intently, scanning for threats, but then blankly, as she realizes there’s nothing to look at save for the unblinking fluorescent light that stares back at her.
She tries to move her limbs, raising and lowering each finger one by one. It hurts. Next, so the procedures go, are the arms; they hurt even more, keep going, lieutenant, it’ll hurt even more later if you don’t do it right now, and she sits upright with a tremendous burst of strength biting her tongue all the while. A stabbing pain cuts through her spine and she doesn’t scream but only bites down harder even as the pain floods into the rest of her body like poison through a knife wound; she looks at her hands, dizzy, panting, as blood from her tongue drips down onto her legs and stains the sheets.
Out in the corridor now, the door slides closed behind her with a hiss. She wears short-sleeved combat fatigues covered in a grey camouflage pattern - probably, she thinks, because the facility she’s stationed in lies beneath a city: an idea she has had on numerous occasions and forgotten each time. Her shoulder-length reddish-brown hair is neatly tucked into a bun under a field cap, and she chews a little square of chocolate. As always, it energizes her, probably more than a regular chocolate bar should; then again, she hasn’t eaten a proper meal for twenty years. Holding the rifle across her chest, she barely notices its weight.
Aside from the occasional hum of electricity or the whir of distant machinery, there is no sound save for her rhythmic steps, echoing throughout the facility as she walks. Making her way through a corridor lined with windows on both sides overlooking the facility’s two hundred missile tubes - each carrying a payload equivalent to 1.2 megatons of TNT - she enters the control room, full of countless dials and displays surrounding a large central terminal, all beeping and whirring and humming as if to jostle for her attention. Ignoring them for now, she moves over to the little canteen in the corner of the room, turning on the tap and letting the clouded water run until it clears, then filling up a kettle and switching it on. It whirs behind her while she lazily flips through her maintenance checklist.
A small sigh escapes her lips as she sips on an acrid, night-black liquid - instant coffee, made with three times the powder. If it tastes bad, her face doesn’t betray it. It’s just another day on the job.
Of the highest importance - the missiles. They’re what she’s here for first and foremost. Inputting a code into the terminal, she quickly runs over to the windows with a pencil and paper. Tallying up the lights atop each missile tube as they flash one by one - green means they’re ready to launch, red means something’s wrong. Out of 200, 198 are good. This, the faded tally sheet from last time tells her, is better than before; it means the maintenance she did actually held up. A rare smile briefly flickers across her face before disappearing just as quickly.
Then, the power for the facility. It’s some kind of nuclear core. She was never told - but then again, she never needs to know anything so long as the orders are followed. She makes another mark on her checklist. Make sure the base is still hermetically sealed, sterile, climate controlled. Check, check, and check again. She scurries around the bunker network, getting lost now and again like a rat in a maze.
Finally, when all is said and done, she sits down for a proper dinner - that is, freeze-dried meal packets that she’s stockpiled in the control room’s cupboard. What time is it? She has no idea; not that it would make any difference.
So passes another day for her. How many has it been? She doesn’t keep track, and why would she? All she needs to know is what she did last time and what she’s going to do now. The latter, as of this moment, is eating. What is it? Ah, powdered mashed potatoes. Awful. But warm, she thinks, closing her eyes and chewing - nostalgic, even.
After dinner she neatly collects the mess she’s made today and tosses it all into a garbage chute. Pressing a button beside it, she listens expectantly for the distant roar of flames - an incinerator. Her day ends, as most days tend to, with bedtime. Picking up the gun from where she left it by the kettle, she meanders lazily towards the central terminal, on the right of which lies a large red button covered by a dome of translucent plastic. She takes a deep breath, lifts the cover from the button, and firmly presses down.
With the low drone of deactivating machinery, the lights go out and the control room is plunged into blackness. The mechanical clunking sounds of lights rhythmically turning off, one after another, gradually grow fainter and fainter as they fade away down the long corridors. Her steady hand finds the little flashlight mounted underneath her rifle, and switches it on with a sharp click. She walks through the windowed corridor, the little green lights of missiles ready to launch winking at her all the way.
Now retracing her earlier steps, back towards the little room she sleeps in, her gait is steady and practiced: the self-sure march, echoing down the hallway, of someone with a gun in her hands. She shifts its weight slightly, still keeping the underbarrel flashlight pointed at the floor in front of her. Her breathing is barely audible, and her lips are pressed together as she expressionlessly stares ahead. You’d never be able to tell how scared she is - yes, scared - of the dark. Whispering ghosts coalesce in the shadows, just out of sight, as if taunting her to swing the rifle around and shoot.
As the long, searching beam of the flashlight finds the little door to her room, it slides open as if on command. The same harsh light as before now seems oddly welcoming as she steps through the threshold. Changing into a fresh pair of fatigues, she neatly folds the ones she was wearing and places them beside the bed - the cold will sterilize all of it, and the bloodied sheets, too, which she replaces with fresh ones. Satisfied, she snugly secures the rifle into the rack by her head. Then, lying down, she pokes the tubes dangling beside her into her arms, wincing slightly and giving them gentle tugs to make sure they’re secure. Finally, she pushes a button on the wall next to the gun. The lights go out and she hears the beginnings of a gentle hiss.
Instinctively, as memories of suffocating poison gas flood back into her head, she tenses her chest, trying to hold her breath for as long as possible. She can’t stop the visions, so vivid - the dreadful coughing, frantic scrambles to hurriedly locate and don gas masks, the nightmarish, guttural screams from those who it’s too late for - from coming back; she can’t stop herself from tensing up every time. And every time, too, the conclusion is the same: the blue, icy vapour fills the room, dispersing into the air as the number on the thermometer rapidly drops further and further below zero. Eventually, her taut chest falls with a tired sigh, and her weary eyes shut themselves as the colour drains from her cheeks. Yes, she’s had a long day. Slowly, gently, she drifts away into a much-needed rest.
Cryo-sleep, as a rule, is generally much more serene than regular sleep. Usually, there is none of the fitful turning, sweating, frantic muttering, panicked screaming, or sudden awakening that once characterized a typical night for this girl. None of the old dreams - nightmares, really, filled with explosions and gunfire and incomprehensible yelling and blood, oftentimes almost impossible to tell apart from her waking hours; to say even less, of course, of surprise attacks in the dark or nighttime bombing raids.
But only usually, of course. Twenty years is a long time to sleep.
Hard-won forward positions in the heart of what was a massive industrial city, now reduced to ashes. The orange light of the setting sun reflects off of colossal smokestacks. High levels of radiation in the area are the least of her concerns, as she shifts the weight of the rifle in her hands and waits for any survivors from the latest ill-fated assault wave of a few hours ago. Mary, a cigarette already in her mouth, lights another and holds it out to her. “Magda.”
Wordlessly, Magda takes the cigarette, holding it between her chapped lips and inhaling greedily.
A pained, ragged breath from nearby draws the attention of both women. An emaciated shape covered in tattered grey camouflage and caked with dried blood that it takes a few moments to recognize as a girl.
Mary, gun slung over her shoulder, is already moving towards the newcomer when Magda roughly grabs her arm to stop her. She raises her own rifle and peers at the gaunt, terrified face in front of her. Through the scope, the girl’s close-cropped blond hair glistens with blood. “Password.”
“F-foxhound,” the girl manages to spit out before she collapses. With a swift motion Magda catches her. The unconscious girl feels almost weightless in her arms, as she carries her into a nearby building already packed to the brim with injured patients. The smell is sickening; it is death in its most visceral, ugly form, of burned or putrefying flesh and dried blood and the acrid residue of poison gas and puddles of vomit, not made any better by the gallons of isopropyl alcohol - if anything the combination of scents makes everything leagues worse. Not to mention the myriad of sounds - shrieks of agony, from those who still cling to life; low, exhausted groans that signal a drug-induced stupor; faint sniffles, coughs, muted sobs; shakily whispered words, perhaps the last they’ll ever say.
She exits the makeshift medical building and notices that Mary is glowering at her.
“God,” she mutters with a look bordering on disgust. “Do you really have to be so harsh? Second lieutenant.” She says the last two words with a particular venom.
“We can’t be too careful,” Magda replies calmly. “Orders.”
“Sometimes I forget you aren’t actually a medic.”
Magda is about to let fly a biting reply when she hears, out of nowhere, a high-pitched whine. With an explosive burst of speed, she tackles Mary to the ground moments before the cluster bomb slams into the burnt-out husk of a warehouse they’re standing beside, threading the needle through a shell hole in the wall and releasing its deadly payload into the wretched mass of mortally wounded shock troops.
Through the ringing in her ears, she can make out screams of pain, the crumbling sounds of falling rubble, and the series of small pops heralding the aftershocks of sub-munitions detonating one by one; she presses down harder against Mary’s body, trying to make the two of them as small as possible inside the hail of debris, mortally aware of their fragility. When she finally hears nothing else she jumps up to search for survivors but immediately feels a searing pain in her spine; her knees buckle and she nearly blacks out, and it’s Mary who catches her this time.
Both women are panting heavily. Magda’s back is studded with shrapnel fragments; they have ripped gaping holes into her combat fatigues, the remains of which are soaked through with blood.
“We need to find other survivors. I can hear them screaming. They’ll die if we don’t get to them.” Weakly, she struggles against Mary’s firm grasp, but only manages to redouble the sharp pain she feels.
“You’re going to die too if you move. Hold still.” Mary deftly prepares a syringe from her bandolier and swiftly plunges it into Magda’s thigh. She gives a sharp inhale of pain as the icy mixture courses through her, chilling her to the bone. “It’ll take effect in two minutes. Just stay with me until then, Magda.”
Mary pulls her closer. Smoke from countless cigarettes, fallen ash, the residue of gunpowder; tough, calloused hands feel so gentle as they press against the back of Magda’s neck. “One minute.”
The smoke of the shockwave has settled to reveal the sunset, in its last fiery moments of dying glory; it bursts through, in all its brilliance, to fill the empty hole left by the cluster bomb where there once was a building housing a thousand souls. Illuminated are the interlocking tendrils of warped metal, so gnarled and twisted like vines in a deadly steel garden; sunbeams, so dazzling, refract and shimmer through the floating clouds of dust.
Mary’s dark, curly hair is caked in greyish-white powder almost like snow. A lock of it brushes against her eyelid, and Magda wants to flick it away like she always does but she can’t even feel her arms anymore, much less move them. Mary is moving her lips to say something, but she can’t hear it.
As she slips away into what should be the tender embrace of a drug-induced coma, she instead feels her senses acutely heightened. She can no longer notice the stabbing shards of shrapnel lodged in her back, but the sensation of coldness she felt earlier gradually becomes stronger. At first, it is a relaxing chill, like a cold compress on a wound or an ice-cream cone on a summer day. Slowly, however, the sensation begins to remind her less of that and more of a frigid winter night in a camp under a strict blackout order.
All right, she thinks to herself, that’s enough, but the feeling only grows stronger, colder and colder, until she feels it biting into her skin like a billion little needles all across her body and she realizes, finally, where she is.
She tries to open her eyes, but they don’t respond. A vicious scream builds in her chest but her lips are sealed and not a single sound escapes them; the agony is unbearable, she has to move, to get away but she can’t, she struggles in vain to get up, to squirm, to move even a muscle; thick layers of volcanic ash, she’s trapped, God, and every cell in her body ruptured again and again by a perpetual explosion that won’t stop going off; ice shards, jagged chunks of shrapnel, thousands of simultaneous syringes, rough-edged tips of arrowheads as they pierce through her skin; she writhes without writhing like a sacrificial victim, arms bound above her head in biting rope, almost like razor wire, and tied tightly to a tree; her body pockmarked again and again in innumerable wounds like clusters of distant stars dotting the night sky.
The girl’s vital signs continue to tick exactly like usual. Nothing at all indicates that something is out of the ordinary. No flashing red lights disturb her pristine, expressionless doll’s face as she slumbers; a marble statue radiating the faintest glow in the still darkness.
Twenty years is a long time to sleep. When her eyes snap open to once again be blinded by white light, she doesn’t remember a thing.
Now she’s staring at the pristine, sterile wall panels of the control room as she sips on instant coffee; imagining them camouflaging gnarled masses of tangled wiring, networks of rusted pipes that hiss and expand and contract and writhe intertwined almost like living, pulsing veins. Of course. She of all people should know better than to trust a perfect exterior, and she thinks at this moment what she’s really known all along, that her calm days in here can’t last.
But what else can she do about it? She has her orders. One day this base will surely cease to exist. Until it does, her job is to ensure it can meet an enemy attack. A job which she performs admirably.
And what’s she’s good at fixing are the obvious problems - bullets or jagged fragments of shrapnel lodged deep in a torso or leg; red indicator lights telling her something’s wrong; targets that present themselves to sharp, deadly bursts of automatic gunfire. Checklists to be filled. It’s easier to live like this.
But she often thinks - and it seems much more often these days, in the sealed little world of the bunker, when she has nothing else to think about apart from her checklist and her orders - that there’s something festering deep within. A disgusting, putrid rot lurking under the skin, bubbling pinkish flesh only waiting for the day when it’s cut open to reveal a gaping hollow. Deep within what? The bunker, slowly and invisibly aging? The orders she follows? Or herself, underneath the skin of cold marble?
Usually she only thinks about this when walking back to her room by the light of her underbarrel flashlight, so it doesn’t bother her for very long. It certainly doesn’t show in her expression.
But of course it doesn’t.
The other thing about cryo-sleep is how it affects memory, a procedure far too gradual to have been investigated in any capacity by overworked military scientists, more concerned with how to most efficiently kill people right now.
Sometimes the memories will come back to her as she’s doing her job, like a pet dog or a young child who doesn’t understand that its mother has to work. Shock troops from the past, they submerge her in their torrential tide.
“I'll take you to see the sea one day.” A dugout somewhere in a vast plain marked by scores of shell craters and burnt-out tank corpses. A desolate, lifeless emptiness, buffeted by constant strong winds, stretching all the way to the horizon line. Collapsing into the corner of the control room, shutting her eyes but seeing it all nonetheless. She can hear the howl of the wind, drawing nearer and nearer until it reveals itself as the whooshing afterburners of two jets now releasing their payloads in long, deadly lines; she dives, trying to flatten herself into the trench but only smashing her face directly into the hard linoleum floor. Blood trickles from her nose as she struggles to breathe, the caustic car-exhaust odor of burning napalm blocking her airway. It’s like she’s there - but where, exactly?
More common, though, are detached sensations - the earthshaking drone of tank treads, dull thuds of shells lodging deep into their armor; the acrid smell of dark, curly hair as it burns; ballistic missiles reaching brennschluss, their burning trails in the night sky brilliant half-arcs as they fall back to earth.
Phantom sounds, voices calling for backup that echo around the corridors; vague outlines of shapes like thick lines of charcoal pencil; blinding white mushroom clouds on the distant horizon, searing themselves indelibly into her retinas, afterimages dancing where a second before there was just empty space.
Sitting very still, trying to concentrate on fixing the circuit board of a missile tube, the low rolling thunder of distant artillery fire rings in her ears; replacing its cover and watching as the light flickers back on, now a bright green, she lets out a satisfied exhale. Ready for the enemy.
Who is the enemy? The thought darts in and out of her mind like a commando raid. It’s a recurring one, been that way for God knows how long now, entering and leaving and re-entering again through the many gaps in the razor wire strung along the porous front line. A phantom unit that disappears into the shadows and reappears days later at a totally different point on the front. Always able to get what it wants - and, maybe, always wanting for more. A microcosm of the insatiable maw of war, or perhaps birthed from it. Like father, like daughter.
If you were to ask her directly, right now, just what enemy she’s waiting for, all she would do is stare. Not a single glimmer of recognition would reveal itself behind those cold, glassy eyes.
But, of course, there is no one there to ask the question. There was never anyone to ask the question, in those long downtimes in trench lines or bunker networks or aboard lumbering utility helicopters.
The enemy is omnipresent. The enemy has never been more than a moment away. At any second a high-pitched whine in the air could signal a deadly explosion in the next. A faint hiss, poison gas. A little click could be a trap tripped. The enemy is within her. She knows the enemy all too intimately - its patterns, its methods of attack, its weaknesses. She knows the lethality that can be concealed within a sudden movement. She, spring-loaded child of war, knows everything there is to know about it.
And, in the end, she knows nothing.
It’s like this that she whiles away her little eternity, day by day. Again she falls away into frigid sleep.
She shivers, bracing herself against another chilling gust of wind. It’s on nights like these that Magda realizes most acutely how thin the standard-issue winter uniforms really are.
A faint metallic click followed by a barely audible hiss; the distinctive sounds of a lighter. Mary, already puffing on one of her own, wordlessly places a lit cigarette into Magda’s open mouth. A cloud of smoke intermixes with their warm breath before being stolen away by the wind.
“Glad we’re not on a blackout order, at least.”
Magda looks back at the camp of makeshift tents parked in a nearby clearing, glowing with warm light and seemingly a world away; she listens, holding her breath, to the low mechanical rumble of portable generators. “Quiet sector.”
It’s cramped in their little foxhole, almost uncomfortably so, but as the wind continues to blow Magda is thankful for it and the two women press their bodies closer together, huddling from the cold. The shadowy silhouettes of trees loom threateningly.
She thinks she sees movement, far away, vague forms darting around the trees only beginning to coalesce into shape before they disappear again. While she’s focusing, vision tunneling as she tries to zero in on whatever it is she’s looking at, something else dashes across her field of view, much closer.
Almost immediately the gun is raised to her face to track the new target.
“A snowflake, Magda.”
Indeed there is nothing there but the wind.
“Put down the gun.” A calm voice that doesn’t seem to match her surroundings. “Second lieutenant.”
There is a faint crunching sound, the sole of a boot in the snow, and she nearly jumps, almost raises the rifle again, but it’s just a cigarette butt being snuffed out underfoot and she abandons the earlier thought almost ashamed of her own instinct; the hair-trigger heart that’s kept these two women alive for so long now metastasized into the neurosis of a paranoiac.
And it’s still frigid and the snow continues to fall sideways and the roaring gusts of wind seem to be picking up speed, but Magda’s never felt so warm before.
“What did you see?”
The furtive whisper feels so warm against her ear, and it’s just too easy to forget herself then and there and say “it’s nothing” as a single glove tumbles to the ground, quickly followed by a second; the hands now finding themselves pressing so firmly against her face are so warm it’s almost intoxicating, and she feels like she could live in this second forever as time seems to stand still here in the eye of the storm.
Magda hears the faint metallic click of the lighter once more but she realizes, almost too late, that Mary’s hands haven’t moved; her eyes widen in fear and the whispering voice in her head almost silenced now rears its head, screaming now: “Down!”
The two women dive and a split second later there is a loud bang as the bullet shatters the night. The second of stillness after the missed shot is rapidly interrupted by the rush of oncoming footfalls, the roar of engines, and bursts of machine-gun fire tearing into the trees, the snow, the canvas tents and the bodies inside them, kicking up clouds of splinters and powder snow. Fish in a barrel.
Instinctively, Magda flicks off the safety on her rifle and leaps into action, her body lunging forward to meet the attack as if moving on its own. She shifts the barrel of the gun left and right, firing without thinking.
And a forest like this should be impassable terrain for tanks, but Magda realizes with a start that the quiet rumble of generators has grown much, much louder as the hulking form of a cannon looms out of the darkness and with a thundering boom fires in the direction of the camp; the force of the blast, just meters away, almost knocks her out completely, as a colossal chain of explosions silences belated return fire.
It’s all your fault, someone whispers in her ear, and she whirls around wild-eyed with a burst of gunfire but there’s no one there, there’s never been anyone there; swirling around her are the sounds of sadistic laughter, screams of pain, whistling mortar fire, carried by the wind now picking up in ferocity, granular little crystals of snow and ice biting into her skin and clouding her vision.
The rapid beating of her heart is so much louder in the darkness, each pulse ringing in her ears like an explosion. To turn on the flashlight right now would be more than suicidal, she thinks, spraying blindly into the shapes that coalesce among the trees in the dark and ducking down to avoid their responses. By the light of the muzzle flashes and the deadly neon lines of the tracers she can see, in brief flashes, shadows sprinting around her in all directions, and she dives to the side just as a high-explosive shell slams into the ground and illuminates where she was standing in a cloud of fire; reload the gun now, second lieutenant, calmly, she’s not sure if her hands are just rattling like that or if the very ground underneath her is shaking, a new magazine slides into the receiver with a satisfying click and she gets up and again fires wildly at the ghosts that dart around the corners of her peripheral vision.
She doesn’t know how long the firefight lasts. At some point, hearing the gun click and mechanically reaching towards her belt, she realizes she’s out of magazines, look behind you, second lieutenant, and as she spins around the sizzling barrel of her empty rifle slams into flesh. There is a surprised cry of pain and she sees now the shape of a machine pistol tumbling in the air; her hands find it before it hits the snow, and she’s never seen a gun quite like this before but her hands find the familiar trigger all the same. The shape beside her crumples with a thud, the shot echoing loudly in the now-silent night.
Mary. Her panicked, darting glances reveal nothing. All the corpses look the same in the night.
Frantically running now, some unseen force pulls her back, and she stumbles at the edge of the little dugout that’s just the right size for a shallow grave. Save for the weakly glowing embers of cigarette butts the tomb is empty.
Finally remembering the camp, the remains of which now sit smoldering atop the snow, Magda finds her frail body propped up against a mound of sandbags, curly hair singed. In Mary’s right hand lies a syringe not yet prepared; the field medic’s rifle lies half-buried in the snow. She is unconscious but still breathing.
Someone, in the chaos, has put a rocket-propelled grenade through the thin lower side of the tank, and in the light from its burning wreckage the trees cast long, dramatic shadows.
Magda kneels, as if in prayer, the taller woman’s body delicately held across her lap.
And now she suddenly hears, through the ringing in her head, the whirl of spinning rotors, as the scene is flooded with light; she can see the dark silhouette of a helicopter hovering over her, its searchlight blinding as it finds her now, frozen in place, like a fox caught in a trap with nowhere to run.
The chopper kicks up a whirlwind of fluttering snow. Mary has never felt so light as she does now in her arms; her muscular body never so fragile as now, under the watchful gaze of the searchlight.
A wretched, bloodstained pietà; it could almost be beautiful.
The girl notices the ravages of time much more now, in recent days. Lights flicker or go out entirely. Memories that she barely recognizes as her own invade her waking hours with increasing frequency.
She tries to run away from them sometimes, tearing down the maze of corridors at full speed, but she knows she’ll always find herself right back where she started, brilliant half-arc burning out at the edge of space and falling back to earth, into work, into routine.
Reading the same checklist for the thousandth time she feels a hand softly come to rest on her shoulder; the swift, explosive turn is by now second nature but her outstretched, grasping fingertips only succeed in knocking the mug of coffee to the floor where it shatters.
Trained hands, hardened with scars and calluses, so dexterous as they dance to sew up a shrapnel wound, so practiced as they pull a trigger again and again. And so soft, so clumsy, as they fumble around unseen in the dark; searching, grasping, learning…
The days, though surely numbered by this point, now feel far too long. But she has her orders. So too, seemingly, do the indicator lights, glowing green, telling her what she wants to hear. She falls asleep. When she wakes up she’ll keep herself busy until it’s time to go to bed again.
“Ah, lieutenant. You’re just who I was looking for.”
Magda’s expressionless face belies her confusion. “You must be looking for someone else, captain. I’m only a second lieutenant.”
“Surprise, then,” the grinning captain says in a cheery voice. “You’ve been promoted. Come with me - special assignment.”
A command tent. Round table surrounded by high-level officers, faces concealed behind silver masks. She listens silently, hands clasped tightly behind her back, not saying a word.
Following the captain out of the tent now, orders received, she finally speaks. “What will you tell them?”
Her expressionless face betrays nothing else as he glances down at her. “KIA,” he says, matter-of-factly.
The blast of a siren jolts the girl from her sleep. The dark pink tube in her left arm swiftly injects a substance that seems to electrify her. She blinks once, twice. The light fixture directly above her bed is no longer a blinding white, but a rapidly flashing red. She sits up and grabs the rifle from beside her, where it’s always been. Her head is pounding as adrenaline courses through her blood, but she seems calm on the outside as she checks four magazines, loading one into the gun and shoving the rest into her belt. This is, after all, the very contingency that it has been her job to prepare for, for the past… God knows how many years. She expects activity - orders to give and to take, battle plans to create. Wounded to care for. But as she bursts through the door into the corridor, rifle gripped tightly across her chest, there is nobody.
There is only red - bright, violent scarlet, flashing across every light in the facility at once, accompanied by the incessant, deafening blaring of a siren. But she can still hear, through her soldier's ears, born - no, built - to hear the direction of fire, the whine of an incoming bomb or shell, the cries of pain through it all; to differentiate those who she can save from those who are long gone. Flashlight now flicked on, she listens, expecting running footsteps and the distant sounds of automated missiles roaring into action, taking flight to strike their predestined targets…
Nothing.
She walks through the corridors, gun raised, safety now off and ready to fire, but she hears no sounds save for her own footfalls and the siren that continues to scream. She quickens her pace, now scared, more scared than she’s ever been. Looking every which way for phantom targets that do not present themselves. For once, she has nothing to shoot at. She is fully sprinting now, as fast as she can, prepared at any moment to unleash a deadly volley from the rifle, panting heavily. Her blue eyes, now bloodshot, frantically scan around her like those of a wounded animal. But still nothing comes. Only the flashing lights - red, red, red - and the rhythmic sounds of her own running.
Finally, she notices something out of place. A hint of bright yellow light, caught in the darkness between the flashes of red. It’s coming from right ahead, in the direction of the control room, and she raises the gun again and rushes around the corner and whatever’s about to be caught in the blinding white beam of her flashlight is going to be torn to shreds, and -
She stops. She is standing in a pool of light. It’s warm, like a summer morning, or a hug.
The ceiling of the control room has caved in, and a bright ray of sunlight shines down through it. A massive pile of rubble is strewn across the floor, and the dust has still not yet settled. But there is no one else except her. The lights continue to flash, and the siren continues to blare, but there are no targets.
She steps forward tentatively, prodding the mound of debris with the barrel of her gun as if to make sure it’s real. Whatever chemical was in that tube to heighten her senses is wearing off now. She feels, belatedly, the little wounds in her arms like snake bites now throbbing and she lets out a tired sigh, and she can’t tell whether it’s one of relief or disappointment or God knows what else and most of all she doesn’t care anymore. The gun clatters to the floor and she slumps onto the rubble suddenly exhausted, propping herself up against a chunk of it just to stay upright.
She looks up to take in her surroundings. The red lights still flash and the siren still screams but in the light of the sun nothing else is present; the air around her filled with the crackle of crumbling concrete may as well be silent as a tomb, for she hears none of it. There’s something, she thinks, about the way the sunbeams pierce through the clouds of dust to fall upon the cratered linoleum floor so gently. What is it? Ah, of course. It’s beautiful; a word she hasn’t thought of for a long while now.
Through the siren’s incessant drone she now detects impatient little beeps and whirs. Ah, yes. The indicators that haven’t been crushed by the collapsing ceiling all show errors. Climate control, tanks, air defense, and probably the rest of it too, whatever else is on the checklist. Oh, to hell with the fucking checklist, she thinks; it’s all been for nothing.
She glances over to where the missiles are, and from her sitting position just barely glimpses the edge of the windows that peer into the vast launch chambers. She can’t bring herself to get up and check on them, already knowing what she’s bound to find. It’s no use, she thinks to herself, they’re gone.
I’m sorry, she thinks after a short while. She’s not sure to whom. She’s not sure it makes a difference anymore. She’s tired; she’s been tired, and the deep lines now showing themselves in her face betray that fact. Now more than ever, she’s sure that no matter how long she sleeps, it won’t ever be long enough.
The first thing the girl notices as she scales the mountain of rubble, gun slung over the shoulder, is how hot it is - positively scorching, especially compared to the climate-controlled chilliness back inside the facility. She begins to sweat. It’s almost unbearable. Was it always this hot, on the outside?
The second thing she notices, as she clambers over the final ledge and finds herself on the surface, is everything else. Green grass, warm sunlight, blue sky. Big, fluffy clouds lazily drift on the horizon. She’d forgotten how beautiful it all was. A salty breeze runs through her hair, and she exhales. The wind is cool and refreshing as it brushes against her skin.
There is no one around her. No snipers’ scopes to watch for; no hulking, hunting helicopter gunships to scatter from and pray as their deadly 20-millimeter cannon shells tear through the air; no low-flying, delta-winged fighter-bombers whose sonic booms deafen her as they drop cluster bombs and canisters of napalm or poison gas. The picturesque field she stands in bears none of the visible scars of war, none of its children; no tank corpses, concrete ruins, shell holes, bomb craters. It’s - God, it’s peaceful.
It does register in her mind that a minefield could be lying in wait underneath the unassuming green grass. Unexploded ordnance might sit just centimeters beneath her feet. The field could be covered in area-denial biological contaminant or simply irradiated. But those things seem strangely foreign to her now. And, she thinks as she takes another step forward no longer caring whether or not she’s blown to smithereens, it isn't as if it makes a difference anymore.
She breathes in again and closes her eyes, now listening: not for gunshots, distant footfalls drawing nearer, or the high-pitched whine of an approaching bomb - but, for once, for nothing in particular. The gentle, rhythmic sound of waves crashing against cliffs. The sea.
Magda crumples, feeling her legs finally give out underneath her after so long. She falls to her knees with a muffled thud as she lets it all wash over her; not holding her breath for once but inhaling, deeply, greedily, thin lips parted as if to imprint the taste of memories indelibly into her tongue.
How soft her voice is now, no longer straining itself to be heard above the din of combat, as she speaks for the first time in a very long while. So unsure of themselves are the fragile words that finally escape her lips, weightless whispers caught in the breeze:
“Mary, I'm here…”