Fog (24 page)

Four shots in quick succession sound from Runner’s rifle. Doesn’t he know they’ll be able to gauge his location?
 

‘Four more, then I’m moving,’ he says quietly. ‘They are yours in a moment.’

Four more booms ring through the fog, then heads and shoulders pop up in my finder, a mortar is brought in position. He’s lured them out for me. I aim and fire. After my third hit, they begin to act erratically, shelling the shit out of the woods, squeezing off undirected burst after undirected burst from their submachine guns. The rocket launcher goes off, the missile hits so far behind me that the detonation doesn’t even knock dirt off my foxhole walls.

‘Okay, douche canoes,’ I whisper. ‘Say your last prayer.’

The girl takes a step forward. She must have spotted me only a moment after I climbed out of my foxhole to change position. With features so fragile, her chest appears absurdly distended from packs of C4. A wire with a small black controller is dangling from her hand. Her face is determined, lips compressed, eyes cold, all too clear and larger than life in my finder — perversely explicit. I should have shot her a second ago, but my finger seems to be frozen to the trigger guard.
 

She comes to a halt and tips her head. A shell hits nearby; I can feel the whoosh of wind from the detonation. Unfazed, she holds her chin high.
Now!
my mind hollers. Taste of metal fills my mouth. My index finger finds the trigger and increases the pressure, but does nothing more.

I don’t know what’s holding me back. It may be the dirt staining her cinnamon skin, her matted black bangs tickling her eyes, or her long and graceful fingers holding the controller, her slim wrist with the wire snaking around it. Maybe it’s because she seems to be my age and the storms of life threw her on the other side of the battle field. Maybe it’s because she screamed
No!
when she was dragged to that side, while I eagerly said
Yes!
to mine. Maybe it’s because she could be me and I could be her. My index finger slides off the trigger; I push up from the ground and stand in full view. I know I’ll die.

Resolute calmness seems to settle on her. She gifts me a weak smile and nods. Then she raises her arm, and my survival instincts kick back in. ‘Close your hatch,’ I say, my own voice sounding machine-like. There’s an immediate rustling in my earbud. Runner asks something, but my focus is elsewhere.

As my finger presses down on the trigger, I realise it’s not the arm with the wire she’s moving, it’s the other. She reaches behind her back, lifts a strap off her shoulder, and gathers the bundle she carries on her back. She holds it out to me and I see two tiny feet sticking out at its side.

Runner’s voice grows louder, urgent. I tune it out. He’s told me about the BSA rigging bodies of dead Sequencers with explosives. You carry them home and they detonate, ripping everyone to bloody shreds. My mind pushes this absurdity aside. No one would use a baby as a booby trap.

Or would they?

My trigger finger vibrates; tremors run up my arm to my shoulder and tug at my heart. I want to scream
What the fuck?
at her. Maybe I did and neither of us heard it over the battle noise.

With a tenderness that seems entirely alien among the raging violence, she places the bundle on the forest floor, touches two fingers of her left hand to her forehead, and walks back to the camp. Warm goose bumps crawl up my neck.

I drop to my knees, unsure if it’s shock or necessity that bends them, and crouch forward. Flat on the ground I’m invisible, I remind myself.
Don’t move, don’t cry,
I beg until I reach the package, all the while its not-moving and not-crying is unsettling me deeply. My fingers brush the fabric aside, while my body shields the tiny child from what must come. As I curl my arm and shoulder around it, a
THUD
sounds, followed by a long groan, like a giant stomping one enormous foot right next to my face and hollering at the top of his lungs. Then a shockwave blows over my head and rakes the hood of my gillie aside. For a fraction of a second it’s as if a vacuum folds around me, then another shockwave hits. My ears screech, my eyes are on the small being underneath me. Its eyes blink, the mouth opens for a cry of protest. I can’t hear it. All I hear is a piercing
eeeeeehhh
. Someone’s stabbed my eardrums. The baby scrunches up its face and cries its lungs out. Yeah. What a shitty way to be awakened. What a fucked up world you’ve been born into.

Covering the child with my arms and torso, I press a mute scream into the welcoming forest soil. My eyes are squeezed shut, but the image of the girl remains, how proudly she returned to the camp to blow up her enemies.

The singing in my ears lessens and Runner’s words grow louder. ‘Micka? Talk to me! What was that? Micka, are you still there? Did
you
cause the detonation? Are you okay?’

‘I’m… I’m okay,’ I answer. If I could, I’d will myself into armour. A tiny fist tugs at my ghillie. The wailing is barely audible over the noise my own ears produce. I lift my head to scan my surroundings. What I see makes me sick.

The forest is gutted. Parts of clothes, tents, huts, blankets, bodies, and gear are draped over broken trees and litter the ground. Earth drinks the blood of the dead. Air swallows the screams of the dying. There’s a crater where the camp once was. The sandbag wall is blown aside. A boy with a bloodied face races past me. I take note of the C4 packs he carries, his panicked expression, his unseeing eyes. I stick the information in the back of my head. Backing away from the camp, I tell Runner that he can open the hatch now.

‘Already did. Where are you?’

The small body feels warm against my chest. It lies safely in the cradle of my arms, while I use the other arm to inch forward, trying to take some weight off my aching leg. The child answers with meowing noises. I wonder if it’s injured and slip my hand over its skin, probing carefully for wounds, but I can’t find any. Relieved, I tuck the bundle back in the bend of my left arm and continue my retreat.

‘I’m leaving,’ I tell Runner.

‘Talk to me, Micka! Do you know what happened there?’

‘Um…’ What the heck should I tell him? ‘I’m done for today. Heading straight south.’

‘Stop this shit! What’s going on?’

I open my mouth and close it again. How does one describe the indescribable?

‘Report!’

His harsh command nudges my stupefied brain into action. ‘One of the girls walked up to me. She saw me. Then… Then she gave me her baby and blew herself up,’ comes pouring out of me. ‘Fuck. She walked back into the camp and blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up!’ My face is sobbing and my mind can’t comprehend why, or how to stop it.
 

‘Ssshhh. Calm now, Micka. Are you injured?’

‘No.’

‘Is the child okay? You said it’s one of the babies?’

‘Yeah, it’s…tiny.’

‘Okay. Now, I need you to give me your location. Are you close to the foxhole?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t…’ I want to die. I think I want to die. No, I want to sleep. Sleeping would be good enough. Have one of Ben’s drinks and drift into oblivion, forget the bodies strewn across the forest floor, forget the girl, forget this whole damned war and just go home and sleep and wake up as if everything had only been a bad dream. But Ben is dead and there’ll be no more drinks, no more funny conversations to share with him.

‘Micka, your position.’ His voice is soft but insisted enough to make me turn my head and assess the distance. ‘About four hundred metres from the foxhole, moving south.’

He’s silent for a moment. No shots are fired, no shells are detonated. All that remains are cries of pain.

‘Move. I’ll cover your back,’ he says and a
pop
sounds in my earbud. At once, the few men left alive answer by screaming louder, but no one fires. They are done for today.

‘Let me know when you are close to the stream,’ he says.

‘Okay. It will take a while, though.’

‘Are you okay? Your injuries?’

‘Yeah. Don’t worry.’

‘I’ll finish this here,’ he says.
 

The Bullshit Army is good and done for. Shouldn’t I be happy now?

‘A boy with explosives ran past me a few minutes ago — didn’t see me. He looks…crazy. Don’t get too close to him.’
Don’t try to help him,
is what I mean but can’t say.
 

I crawl another three hundred metres, then walk hunched over. No need to make myself move slowly, the pain in my leg and side force a snail’s pace on me. The child moves only once in a while. I don’t know much about babies, but this one seems too small and too subdued.
 

When I reach the riverbed, I fill my canteen, then gently push the ghillie aside. I gulp. The child is so small. How the heck did it survive until now? I dip my finger into the stream and notice how dirty my skin is. I rub it clean on my pants, and offer the child water, drop by drop. The tiny mouth greedily sucks off the liquid.

Where the heck can I get milk? What did the girl think when she gave her child to me? That I keep a flock of goats around the corner?

The small body is wrapped in a length of fabric, barely keeping it warm. I undress it. ‘A girl,’ I huff. ‘No wonder she wanted you away from this hellhole.’
 

A chuckle rolls up my throat. I said “hell” and my stupid reflexes immediately rise up, ready to punish myself for saying a banned word. Frowning, I lower the baby into the cold stream. She squeaks while I wash her soiled bottom. There’s an angry rash between her legs, up her butt cheeks and the lower part of her back. Faint red dots cover her entire body. She feels a little too warm in my hands. I cup water into my palm and offer it to her. She sucks at my skin and I try to inch fluid in between her lips. It doesn’t work all too well.

Unhappy, her wailing rises in pitch. I open the top of my ghillie suit and tuck her in. ‘There. You’ll be warm in a second,’ I tell her.

‘I’m here,’ Runner says and for a moment I’m confused because I don’t know what “here” means, until I realise he didn’t speak through my earbud. He’s right behind me.

When he approaches, I stand. Neither of us knows what to say. He squints at the odd position of my arm, reaches out and moves the ghillie aside. His face darkens at once, his hand drops.

I stare at him, my chin set, and feet firmly planted in the dirt. He seems to try to read my mind. And then, all he says is, ‘Come,’ and hooks his arm around my waist, helping me walk.

Now that he’s here, I almost break down sobbing. I feel his hand tightening around my hip and I whisper, ‘How many left?’

‘None,’ he says and we begin walking.

He picks a fruit from a tree and hands it to me. I offer it to the child. She sucks on it, but soon spits it out.

‘We’ll get down to the coast, contact our forces, and have the child evacuated,’ he says.

I know what that means. No milk for days. And that’s when a thought creeps in, one I cannot erase, one that sticks to the inside of my skull like excrement.
Wouldn’t it be better if she’d died with her mother?

I gaze up at the treetops and breathe in the earthy scents of the forest.
Who can know?
I tell myself. Death and silence are accurate and unchanging while life wildly dances around them, one foot in the air, one on the ground, and chaos plays the tune.

This will be a long walk, and the child doesn’t seem to be comfortable in my arm with the strap of my ruck rubbing on her cheek and the ghillie tickling her nose. ‘Wait a moment,’ I say to Runner, shrug off my pack, and lay her on the soft forest floor. She blinks at nothing in particular and sticks a tiny fist into her mouth. I take a fresh shirt from my ruck and cut the lower half off, move the ghillie aside, sling the shirt bit over one shoulder and fold her into it.
 

‘I can carry her,’ Runner offers.

‘No.’ I almost take a step back. ‘Later, maybe.’

He holds out his hand. ‘Your rifle, then?’ His expression is as bewildered as I feel. I pass him my weapon, he helps me shoulder my ruck, and we march downhill. He has to point out obstacles for me, because I have problems seeing where to place my feet with the small package wrapped to my stomach.

It doesn’t take long for the wailing to begin again. I offer her my pinky and she angrily cries in return. Runner hands me a piece of fruit, but the protest grows even louder.

And so we walk unspeaking, with the bouts of hungry disapproval piercing the silence. Not even an hour into our hike, I feel warm moisture on my stomach. ‘I need to find water,’ I tell him and he changes direction at once.

Not long and we come across a stream. I toss the ruck on the ground, kneel and take the child out of the sling to dab the urine off her inflamed bottom. Seeing the poor condition she’s in, I’m left to wonder if her mother even had the energy or knowledge to take good care of her daughter. Did she give birth all alone? Did the men let her heal before she had to warm their beds again? Did she have any hope her daughter would survive this war?

When a hand touches my shoulder softly, I realise that the only hope she’d ever had came in the shape of a girl with a gun and a ghillie, just moments before she walked into her own death. Until she found me, she must have believed her daughter would die with her.