"I'm lying on my back now
The stars look all to near
Flowers on the razor wire
I know you're here"
-The Sisters of Mercy
Found on a portable digital audio recorder in a Midian City trash dumpster...
(*sound of a cigarette burning, followed by a rough, hissing exhalation. Background noise of a crowded bar*)
How many times you want to HEAR this, pilgrim? I’m runnin’ out of ways to TELL it.
(*the slow squeak of denim on leather and a heavy thunk as of a glass bottle meeting a tabletop*)
I grew up on the great plains. Nothin’ but the wind and the sky as far as you could care to look. Family sent me off to private school...they could afford it at the time. Ranchin’ was good...at least for US it was. Things didn’t really go to shit until I left for college, and
even then I had no real idea just how BAD it had gotten. Dad never liked to talk about it, and mom never wanted me to worry.
They were both raped and killed two weeks before graduation. I didn’t find out until after, when they didn’t show up to watch me walk. I didn’t find out about the roaming bands of redneck marauders who’d taken to killing and robbing farmsteads for food and the
agrichemicals they used for drug manufacturing.
I spent two weeks, seeing to their arrangements. Sold off most of the stock except for some breeders and bulls, and turned the place over to a cousin to run.
(*scrape of a bottle against a tabletop*)
Why? Well, it just didn’t feel much like HOME anymore, friend...that’s why.
(*pause*)
It felt like I’d wasted my life. Studying biology and psychology *snort*, what the hell was
I thinkin’? Every time I turned a corner I’d think I caught a glimpse of one of them in the house. I’d wake up at night absolutely SURE that one of them was calling to me.
I needed to get the hell away from that. I needed to get my head together.
(*cigarette sounds followed by a tapping of fingers on a tabletop*)
That’s when I joined the service.
(*laugh*)
Talk about shitty timing. Three months after basic training, and I’m up in the Urals calling down artillery strikes against Turkish armour. I turned 25 that year...in January, you know? The Atlas Campaign? That kicked off on my birthday.
(*cigarette sounds again...a longer, perhaps unsteadier exhalation follows*)
For my present...I got to kill twenty-five hundred Turks by dialing-in howitzers on their dug-in positions.
(*pause*)
Happy fuckin’ birthday.
(*pause*)
Yeah, sure I could use another...long as YOU’RE buyin’.
(*pause...and a noticeable drop in the level of background noise from the bar*)
Cheers, then, brother. Now, where was I. Right, the war.
(*sigh*)
After we set the Atlas mountains on fire, we turned north across the Med and “repatriated” greece.
They say Athens will be burning for another ten-thousand years, if you figure in the
half life of the dirty ordnance dropped there.
You KNOW that was the beginning of the end, right? When they decided to go nuclear, there was just no turning back.
Two weeks after Greece, they put my ass ashore off the coast of Tunisia in a high-speed combat hydrofoil. I crawled and wiggled on my belly for almost six miles in order to find a good hiding place in a small cave near Tunis. Two days later, the artillery was in position off to the west, and I went to work.
(*pause*)
The definition of cowardice is billeting your soldiers next to schools.
(*pause*)
Not that it would stop a ... professional ... like me.
(*The scrape of a match, cigarette sounds.*)
I was TRAINED. I was FOCUSED. After the Atlas campaign, I was GOOD.
(*pause*)
I made sure the first spread of three high-explosive shells landed directly on top of the school. Not one of those kids knew what hit them. None of them were caught by
shrapnel. None of them were...disfigured. They just...vanished.
(*pause*)
After that...the headaches started.
The rest of the war, is just a blur. No...not really a blur. Just a series of screaming,
disconnected nightmares. I remember some of it.
(*pause*)
I remember crossing the himalayas, wondering what the hell had left all those
dessicated skeletons scattered along the foothills.
I remember the bulldozers clearing the bodies stacked shoulder-high in the Khyber Pass. I remember feeling like I could never, ever get clean again...no matter how many showers I took. No matter how much I scrubbed my skin.
(*bottles clinking, more cigarette noises*)
And then...it was over. Just like that. Five years of my life just...gone. There was a crowded, bumpy series of plane rides, and then an empty stretch of tarmac and a
duffel bag on my shoulder.
(*pause*)
Afterwards? Afterwards isn’t much to tell. I stopped by the homestead, found that my cousin hadn’t fared a whole helluva lot better than my folks. He was still breathin’, though...even if it was through a tube.
(*pause*)
No, I had nothing to do with that. I was sicker than a dog for almost a week solid when those bodies were found. I was out riding fences at the time, and had to hole up in a line shack...lucky I made it that far before I started throwing up. Bad water, I think it was.
(*pause*)
Anyway, it was enough to show that there just wasn’t any home left at home anymore, if you know what I mean.
I packed up, climbed on the bike and headed west...looking for...I don’t know...
Something else.
(*long sigh*)
Japan. Yeah.
(*Fingers tapping lightly and rapidly on the table*)
After that mess in California up by Emmigrant Gap, and that other mess in North Beach, I thought it might be a good idea to put some distance between myself and people with Italian surnames. An old ... friend of mine from the Tenth Division told me there was work in the Land of the Rising Sun, and I decided that was a much better place to be than in some cheap hotel in Eureka.
Three weeks later, courtesy of a decent enough container ship captain, I was in
Okinawa. Two days after that, it was Kyoto. That’s where I hooked up with old man
Watanabe for the first time.
(*cigarette noises followed by a long pause*)
And there’s where I sorta lose track of things. Somethin’ BAD happened, I know that.
(*pause...Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” begins playing in the background from a worn and tired jukebox*)
I don’t KNOW what, friend. I remember wakin’ up on the damn beach, torn clothes, no money...and not very damn happy about any of it.
(*pause*)
No. Now I’m not sure I WANT to know. I’m tired of it, pal. I’m just fucking tired. And I’ve
seen what the rest of the world has become, friend. Midian’s as good a place to die as the rest.
(*Quiet. Enough to notice there is no longer any background noise, save for the mournful crooning of Patsy Cline. The sliding of a bottle is followed by a cigarette noise...and a long, slow exhale.*)
Now...
(*Voice so quiet it is marginally better than a murmur..*)
Seein’ as how we’re finally alone. How about you tell ME who’s so interested in my past,...
(*pause...the voice continues with icy menace*)
...”friend.”
Recording ends.
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