In her mind, Raoul felt almost like a sacrifice.
Hours later, Fenn almost killed Willy McElroy when Willy tried to stop him from leaving the longhouse, catching him just outside one of the small doors as Fenn had tried to slink away into the dark.
“Orders,” Willy said. “Ted said no one leaves.”
And then, suddenly, Fenn was standing, legs spread, still in most of his gear, holding Willy McElroy off the ground, his hands bunched in the fabric of Willy’s filthy jumpsuit, his face nose to nose with Willy’s. Willy’s head was craning back, pressed against the wood and corrugated ribs of the outside of the longhouse as he twisted to get away from Fenn’s face like he feared being bitten. Fenn was shouting in Willy’s face, breathing the fumes of liquor and gun oil onto him. He was going to kill Willy, but he was stymied by the question of how to. With both hands twisted into Willy’s armpits, how could he get to his sidearm?
If he’d had a third arm, Willy would’ve been dead. He didn’t, so Willy remained alive. Strange, the vicissitudes of fate. Fenn dropped him instead, turned his back, and walked off.
After that, it’d been Fenn who’d tackled Ted as he ran through the camp, shouting, “Gas! Gas! Gas!” He’d hit him without knowing it was Ted. When he rolled off, Ted had said, “Told him that’s what we needed. Gas.”
“Told who?”
“Get the fuck off me, Captain. I’m still in charge here.”
Fenn had slept in the mess, amid the mess. The bodies and pieces of bodies had all been moved out. The wounded were convalescing elsewhere. He’d tried the field house first, but it was locked. No one was inside. From outside the door, he could hear the radios hissing static. No one to listen through the long reaches of the night.
He’d tried to make coffee, but all the generators were off. The pantry was well-stocked, but there was nowhere to cook anything. He wondered how long it’d been since he’d eaten, and it was long enough that the very thought of food made his stomach turn. There were crackers. Survival biscuits of compressed meal, vitamins, protein powder. He gnawed one of those like it was a bone, and he sat with his head down, cradled in the crook of one arm, waiting for dawn.
It is a terrible thing to know, well in advance of it, how your story is going to end. To harbor no illusions. To have no faith in the miraculous or trust in your own essential cosmic goodness and importance to see you through. Most men, Fenn had decided, believed in something right up until the end. And he’d seen enough endings to have worked up what he felt was a fairly robust sample.
They believed in fate, some of them, or, at least, fatality. They believed in God or some higher organizing principle. Failing that, they believed in the mission or the men or their men or the nobility of their exercise. But in almost all of them, buried deeply near the core of whatever else it was they believed, was the belief that they were somehow special. That the universe had plans for them that predicated any mean or pointless death before they’d done what it was that they, in their specialness, were meant to do.
And while most men could be merely talked out of their larger faiths, be betrayed by them, broken of them by mere age or experience or hard eureka moments, it would often take some massive shock to the system to jar that one little last nugget of belief loose. To shatter it and show it for the nakedly ridiculous conceit it truly was. Death, Fenn knew, leveled all men. Death removed all illusions.
We are none of us special. We are not loved or looked after. There are no grand designs.
In the primal dark of a primal world, Fenn slept and dreamed alone of nothing.
MORNING. The last one.
Carter woke at dawn. There was no siren, but the sun coming back seemed an abomination that needed settling. The first instinct was to kill, as though the stars could be put out just by hating them.
In his tent, Vic was gone. Fenn had never come home. Carter had an instant’s fear that everyone had died but him. Worse, that they’d all gone off and left him. That Eddie or Ted had come through with some late Christmas miracle and he’d missed the last ride there was ever going to be. The fear deepened until it became terror. A fist squeezing his heart so that he had to get up and find another human face or die right there in his bed.
So he rose, pulled his jacket on, stepped to the door, and was stunned by the diamond beauty of the breaking light over ice-frosted grass and glittering canvas gone stiff with faintly ammoniac ice. It was beautiful, fragile, gleaming, and terribly quiet. Almost hallucinatory, as though he’d been dosed by something in his sleep that brought out the hard angles and soft interior of everything on which his eyes fell. Head muzzy and full of cotton, he was afraid to step out and leave his dirty boot prints on this strange display of nature’s alien perfection.