John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Eight hours. Not long. Some here have been waiting many days. Some have died here – not joking now. I am Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz, I do not joke. Pleased to meet you Melton By-the-way… Okay, that was joke. Polish joke, yes? The best kind. By Pole.’

Milosz flashed him a blindingly white grin and raised his eyebrows with such comic йlan that Melton couldn’t help laughing out loud. It hurt his shoulder dreadfully but he gave into it anyway. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed the abandon of real laughter. It seemed to loosen up Milosz’s men as well, with some of them smiling and nodding, as their own tension and stresses eased off a little.

‘We are going home soon,’ the sergeant said. ‘But you, my friend, where do you go now?’ The man’s eyes were dark pools of sympathy.

‘London, I think,’ said Melton. ‘That’s what my travel chit says, anyway. After that, well, I don’t know that there is an “after that”.’

‘No,’ agreed Milosz, nodding as though Melton had revealed some deeper truth. ‘Maybe nothing after that, no.’

Leaning back and taking in his surroundings, the reporter couldn’t help but dwell on how things were unravelling. There had to be nearly a thousand guys crammed into the baking heat of this hangar at the edge of a temporary base in the middle of nowhere. A lot of desert MARPAT, which meant Marines. Mixed in with the MARPAT were some army and air force personnel dressed in three-pattern desert BDUs like the fresh set Melton wore.

Marine, army or the few navy and air force he saw, all had the same look. The long stare, the slumped shoulders, postures crumpled in upon themselves. A few were crying openly, quietly, regardless of the severity of their wounds. Here and there, Melton would spot a soldier looking at a snapshot or a Marine watching a saved video file on his laptop. Some were by the door, chainsmoking for lack of anything better to do.

One soldier, from the 101st Airborne, had a collection of dog tags in his fist. He rocked himself back and forth until someone passed him, at which point he’d ask, ‘Who should I give these to, do you know?’ Even when he got an answer, he didn’t seem to hear it. He’d go back to rocking, back and forth, until someone else walked past.

A female Marine over by a Coke machine covered in Arabic script was smiling, flirting with a half-comatose man on a cot. ‘When I get home to see my baby girl, it’ll be all right. She lives in North Dakota with my grandma. I heard they made it.’

Oh boy, Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the Marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.

To Melton, they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple fucking ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts and something more elemental – an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn’t this bad, Melton recalled. The Rangers on the whole weren’t beaten, nor were those pogues from 10th Mountain, who’d done better than anyone ever thought they would.

Desertions, he thought. These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn’t give them their spines back real soon.

The giant metal fans droning away at the edge of the hangar merely pushed the vile atmosphere around, a gaseous slough of ill feeling and desolation. He was familiar with this. It was what happened when men faced the hopelessness of their circumstances and shrugged away any chance of redemption. It was what happened when men who were used to fighting for their lives gave up and said, ‘What’s the point?’

Milosz left him alone for a few moments. But perhaps uncomfortable with the brooding presence that had just insinuated itself into his little group, he toed Melton’s boot to regain his attention. ‘So, Melton By-the-way. You have a theory, yes?’

It was such a weird, unexpected question that Bret shook his head as if a bug had crawled into his ear. ‘Sorry. What do you mean?’

‘A theory, about the Disappearance, no?’ the sergeant elaborated. ‘I am interested in theories. Real theories with science and learning, not bugaboo magic, for explanation. Like these Muslim pigs and their stupidity about Allah’s will. So, your theory. Tell me.’

Melton opened his mouth to say something but simply shut it again, shaking his head. Fact was, he’d heard any number of bullshit explanations and crazy-talk gibberish about what might have been behind the catastrophe. He’d heard as many backwoods Christians lay it all at the foot of God as there were bug-eyed imams rejoicing in Allah’s vengeance on the infidel. He’d heard whispers of secret government experiments gone wrong, black-hole laboratories, portals to hell, and alien space-bat biology missions that had scooped up hundreds of millions of lives with something akin to a giant butterfly net. He hadn’t given any of them a second thought.

‘I don’t know, Sergeant,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even begin to know what happened, or why, or whether it can ever be reversed. I figure the best analogy is we’re like ants whose nest got hit by a lightning strike, or by a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. We’re ants - what would we know about anything? Either of those things, they’d be the end of the world to us, but you stand outside the situation, you get the context in a way that we don’t have, and it’s probably something really simple… that we’re a thousand years from understanding. Possibly we’ll never understand it. My bet is that a thousand years from now we’ll be living in caves again, banging rocks together for a living.’

The Polish non-com narrowed his eyes and dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘This is a wise man,’ he said to his troops. ‘You see, he knows what he cannot know and does not pretend otherwise. This is wisdom, Jerzy.’

Milosz pointed to a younger, black-haired youth and spoke in a rapid garble of Polish. Melton had the impression he was repeating what he’d just said. The young commando shrugged, conceding a point.

‘So what about you, Sergeant? No theories for you?’

Milosz smiled sadly. ‘It is like you say. People groping through the dark, grasping at this and that, trying to explain what cannot be understood. My question, I ask it of people because it tells me how they are now. Whether they will get through or not.’

‘You think people will “get through” based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or magic, or the will of God?’

‘No. People will survive this because of luck. If you have no food to eat, no warmth in the deep of winter, it doesn’t matter whether you think little green men or Mohammed broke your world. You will still die frozen and hungry. But if you have enough to eat, just enough, and if you have some shelter and safety – again, just enough – then maybe your living or dying might have something to do with whether you fall to madness and superstition, or whether you hold on to your rationality.’

A small, indulgent grin sketched itself onto Melton’s weathered features. ‘You’re a materialist, then? Of the dialectic school? I thought Poland was done with all that.’

‘Yes, I am a material thinker, like my father, a mathematician. And you are no boxhead, Melton.’

‘It’s foolish to assume that just because somebody puts on a uniform and takes orders, they turn off their brains. You didn’t.’