The Gone-Away World (29 page)

So Gonzo turns to the crowd (the smell of sugary oats has permeated tents and huts and fortified holes and guard turrets, and rumours of clean feet have gone even further, so there is now a crowd standing in curious contemplation of a bunch of commandos knee-deep and shoeless in pilfered oats and sugar) and sees two guys he is particularly looking for. He peers into the throng exactly where they aren't (Ma Lubitsch playing hide-and-seek:
dear me, zese old eyes of mine, I shall never find zem
) and innocently asks if anyone knows where to find Sergeant Duggan and Sergeant Crisp. No one says anything.

“Hell,” says Gonzo, big dumb ox, chewing his lip and scratching, “I could really use some help.” And he goes back to his stirring.

This puts everyone at their ease. This is not going to be some kind of weird oatsy inquisition. There will be no
auto des flapjaques.
This young man is not looking for scapegoats but for fellow flapjackers.

Sergeant Engineer Crisp and Sergeant Engineer Duggan don't say anything. That's partly because they're still kinda fuzzy on who they are; neither of them has spoken for three days, since the rest of their unit, over in Green Sector, vanished in the first retaliatory strike. Now, though, this seems to be holding up the show, and people nudge them.

That's you, mate. Man needs your help.

Oh, yes, right you are!

Score one to Gonzo: the crowd feels it has an interest in this project. The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl—not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell—and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging him on.

“Gentlemen,” says Gonzo softly, “holidays are over. I need an oven, and I need one in about twenty minutes, or these fine flapjacks will go to waste and that is
not
happening.”

And something about this statement and the voice in which he says it makes it clear that it is simply true. One way or another, this thing will get done. Under a layer of grime and horror, these two are soldiers, and more, they are productive, can-do sorts of people. Rustily but with a gratitude which is not so far short of worship, they say “Yes, sir” and are about their business.

Having a task makes them part of Gonzo's new aristocracy, and very shortly there are people offering to help them out, and people clustering around Gonzo giving helpful advice, cooking tips, recipe suggestions and all manner of assistance. Gonzo starts giving orders of a more general nature, because (clearly) we will need somewhere to eat the flapjacks and somewhere to expel them later when nature takes its course, and the mess tents have been torn to shreds and the latrines are starting to get a bit funky through lack of attention, and these things need to be remedied. George Copsen is sitting under a sunshade outside the remains of his tent. He has shown no inclination to issue orders of substance since before he shot Riley Tench. Possibly it is his intention that no one should officially take over from him, so that his forces cannot be redeployed. Possibly this affable, lethal catatonia is a shield between us and the command structure. Possibly he is just broken. I half expect him to wander over to inspect Gonzo's flapjacks, but he doesn't. He has even stopped saying “Carry on” and “Soldier” as people pass. Through the sunshade the Addeh Katir sun is burning his face. His forehead is peeling.

Crisp and Duggan and their gang return with the fuelless oven, and after some discussion and bitching and debate (in which they are gradually joined by a couple of mechanics, an ordnance technician and the quartermaster) they come to a decision. They submit plans to Gonzo and he listens, and the entire crowd listens with him, and finally he judges the plan acceptable and pleasingly insane, and sends them off to make it so. At this point he turns to the rest of the crowd and booms at them to form lines and prepare to divide the several cubic metres of flapjack into trays and cake tins and what all else. This he does in a way which suggests that they have been waiting for his order, and they are somewhat surprised to find that he is correct. Quite rapidly military discipline asserts itself, and by the time the engineers return and build a flapjack furnace, out of the old oven and a collection of flame-throwers all cobbled together to heat the radiator plates, there is a vast pile of random metalware filled and ready to cook, and shortly thereafter the furnace is fired up and does not explode.

Flapjacks happen.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
we heal a gaping rift in international relations (at least locally) which feels pretty good. Baptiste Vasille (of the Joint Operational Task Force for Addeh Katir, and notionally an enemy) walks into camp, hands in the air, with a whole bunch of his men and announces that he has absolutely no intention of fighting us any more because our bit of the war has gone from absurd to actively silly. Vasille had no problem with absurd, but silly is something he won't stick at any price. He has had no communication from his masters and is reasonably confident that we haven't either. For all he knows, we few represent the entire surviving population of the planet, and he refuses (in a very French way) to be a bloody idiot about this and court the annihilation of the species over instructions which patently have nothing to do with today. Is that a cigarette? Baptiste Vasille will swear his eternal soul to our service for a cigarette. He has two hundred soldiers who would do more than that. For tobacco products, they will march on hell and put out the fire with their own blood. Of course they will. They are French. And Lebanese. And a couple of them are African. But no Belgians! Hah! . . .
Nom de dieu!
Flapjacks? Blood of Christ . . . Gonzo is a genius. He is almost French. Where should Vasille sign his name? Is there wine? Well, you can't have everything. Still, Vasille has some brandy. Only thirty cases, but still . . . You know that bitch? The German? She's gone mad. Completely. Psychotic. Perhaps she always was. And she has her own little war going on, and a nemesis. Like Greek. Vasille knew a Greek girl once, in Thessalonika. She was special. A contortionist,
hein
? Those were the days. It was last summer, actually . . . How time flies. Does anyone have a lighter? Kemner. That's the bitch. Not the Greek girl, of course. The German. Vasille quite likes Germans, under normal circumstances. His brother married one. Nice girl. Never could get her in the sack though, too prissy. She (the German, Kemner, a fiend from hell,
salope
. . . Mordieu, what a horrible thought! Who'd pay for that? Well, Kumar, of course, but
other
than him?) was the commander of the Addeh Defensive Initiative, yes? Bunch of crooks! Thieving weasel nations all in a row, and the Belgians at the heart of it, no doubt! Dealing with opium lords, dealing with mafias and mobski and triads and bastards and even Erwin Kumar, sure as milk. Yes,
milk
! Kumar is a stoat and a sexual deviant, and not in a good French way, but also he is a drug smuggler on an international scale, with the backing of the
merde
CIA from A-
merde
-ica. Of course, because they are the Cocaine Intelligence Agency, hah! Or was it the Russians? The Kokainum whateverthehell KGB stands for? Jesus, in the name of mercy . . .

Someone finally lights Vasille's fag. He holds it to his mouth as if he will devour it, then raises it like the head of a defeated enemy, and his men (and a couple of women) set up a roar of approval. The French have arrived, and it is a good thing, because they are different, and if nothing else was killing us, boredom was doing the trick.

Things are thus solidly ticking over on Thursday at about five in the afternoon, which is, as near as anyone can tell, when the world as we know it comes to an end. We had imagined, in so far as we had thought about this at all, that it had already taken place. We were wrong.

The guy's name is Foyle or Doyle, and he's got grit. His ribs are all bound up from some kind of blunt-force trauma, like maybe being exploded across the room, but he's out here lifting and hauling with the rest of us. We are building a reservoir, although it looks more like a beaver dam. A small river runs down from the hills and past the rear of our encampment, and where it hooks around a batch of harder rock, we are slowing it down. There will be a small lake, constantly filled at one side and constantly emptied at the other. Gonzo has decreed we should not be dependent on resources we cannot control. He is considering moving the base entire, but there are several thousand men here, and much of the equipment is not designed to be moved without air support. Air support is something we no longer have. Foyle (or Doyle) was a mechanic back home, and he thinks he could rig together a couple of the big trucks for this task, maybe one of the bridging tanks. He is telling me because I am Gonzo's Friend. Gonzo has many friends—Jim and Sally and Samuel P.—and they are also my friends, Leah's friends. But there is only one Friend here. The guy who can pledge Gonzo's word on his own. The guy who can anticipate him, who backs him, without whom he would occasionally trip over some human weakness or unseen glitch. Gonzo's practical side. His lesser half.

So Doyle, who goes by the alias of Foyle, but whose name (it now seems to me, as I consider his tags and my memory more closely) may actually be Tucker, is holding a long wooden stake against his chest, sort of under his chin like a violin. He is wrapping some twine around it and another stake resting against it, so that the two stakes together will make a giant V, and combined with the other stakes also configured in this shape will form the basis of a flexible breakwater, or water trap. The water will flow through them, they will accrue grunge and grime, and gradually they will become an obstacle, and this obstacle will generate a small pool. Tucker Foyle (I'm reasonably sure, now, that this is his name) grins and twines and doesn't stop yapping the while. And then something happens which is very strange and bad.

A streak of dapple and light scuds across the open space where we are working, and for a frozen instant we are at war.

Eyeblink: sunny day, men working, calm and business-like.

Eyeblink: darkness and screaming; the smell of guns and bloody execution; something zings by, a howling wasp. A werewasp. It passes me and alights on Tucker Foyle.

Eyeblink: sunny day, men hesitating, rubbing their eyes. Combat flashback probably. Unmanly, perhaps. Not dangerous. A slow, humble recognition—we all had it. We laugh, reassured, we turn to one another to share the gag. Laughter evinces control. Mammals ho! We're conquering the world. No shadows. Just us.

Tucker Foyle slides slowly forward onto his spar. He has a bullet wound on his back, at the shoulder. This in itself would not be a terrible thing, but the impact has driven him onto the wooden spike resting under his chin. Tucker has been impaled. He is not dead. He will not die for several minutes, but die he will, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Dapple again. It comes from the same direction, and this time I can see it, rushing in across the compound, and with it the sound of incoming fire. It is a stripe of darkness, perhaps four metres deep and twenty or thirty long. All around me there is moderately ordinary life. Within the shadow, it's hell. Men duck or fling themselves flat, or die where they stand. When it has passed, they pick themselves up, emerge from cover and are afraid.

The shadow embraces us, and the world shifts. My nose gets it first: the scent of the nameless town where I was blown up. The air is filled with vaporised blood and the smell of people losing bladder control, and the rich stink of weapons fire and diesel. This is a battlefield smell. I'm already on the ground, which is good, because more wasps are buzzing by. I can feel the imprint of their passage. They come from one edge of the dapple, and they vanish at the other. From within it's hard to see out. There's fog and smoke and a lot of shouting and screaming—far too much for this little space. This is a portion of
somewhere else,
laid over
here,
except that it is unmistakably this place. I have not been transported anywhere. The world has changed around me.

Out of the fog stumbles a dying soldier. He's not wearing any uniform I recognise. It's a sort of hotchpotch of US WWII and British WWI, with just a dash of Vietnam and Gallipoli. Green trousers with braces to hold them up, but the braces are off his shoulders and he's wearing not a shirt but some kind of skivvies. He's got a helmet, but it's the wrong shape for this war, and made of steel. Must be from one of the mercenary outfits, but it can't be Vasille's—the Frenchman's men are better equipped. In any case, I can't ask this guy. He's been shot in the mouth. He stumbles away again, and disappears.

And then the war is gone, flickered away. I can see it rolling on through the camp. As it passes over our makeshift lake, the water fills with bodies and turns into a thick red jelly. The shadow passes on. The jelly stays, slick and dark and rotten. It breaks up sluggishly as fresh water piles onto it, undulating itself to pieces—but not fast enough, and the lake floods a bit before the bloody mess floats away down-stream. An unidentifiable part of someone washes up against my leg. Absurdly, Tucker Foyle is unscathed. He has not been hit. He is still dying over there. This makes me angry. And then I hear behind me a low moan of awe and fear—not a single voice, but the combination of many. More is coming; I turn to stare it down.

The sky is black from one side to the other. The sun is hidden. A wave is breaking over us, a great black wall of this awful stuff. From within, the sounds of mayhem. This is not war. It is a caricature, an idea of war. A nightmare. The wave does not fall. I turn my face upward to see the top. Looking back down, I see that it still has not reached the camp. It is huge. It breaks. Shadow envelops us and we are smothered in war.