Christopher Nuttall: The Fall of Night

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The girl was waiting for him in the darkness…

He could see her, her haunting dark eyes in her dark skin, wrapped in a purple cloth that had covered her young body. He had seen her in the refugee camp, her dark eyes pleading for the safety that the Europeans had promised her… and then withdrawn. He remembered her, dreaming — had the dream become reality or had reality become the dream? — her body charred and burnt by the fires that had consumed the camp, her body dying even as it moved sinuously towards him. He could make out her curves, slowly being washed away by the fire; her breasts and thighs consumed, leaving only her eyes to glare accusingly at him. She blamed him…

Captain Stuart Robinson woke up screaming. His body was coated in sweat; there was a body by his side. It took him long terrifying moments to remember that the body was that of his wife; he checked her pulse with one practiced hand, only to sigh in relief when he realised that she was alive. The remains of the nightmare still floated around his mind; they were not in Sudan, but in Edinburgh.

His wife looked up at him. “The nightmare?”

Robinson would have lied to Hazel if he could have done; they had lived together long enough to know that lying would be futile. Hazel had been there for him when the remains of the Sudan Deployment had returned to Europe, some of them to face charges of disobeying orders, others to quit their various armed forces in disgust, others to soldier on as best as they could. Hazel’s father, a man who was quite a powerful local businessman, had offered to take his son-in-law on, but Robinson had refused the offer; the military was his life.

“Yes,” he said. The nightmare always returned the day before a deployment. The long period of leave for his infantry company had come to an end. “I saw her again.”

Hazel placed her hand in his and they held each other. It wasn’t fair on her, Robinson thought, but there was nothing he could do about it. The girl — he had never learned her name — had been one of the teenage girls at risk of losing honour, dignity and lives to the insurgents in the Sudan, the type of people that the deployment had been intended to protect. Instead, they had merely made a bigger target for the insurgents, the bastards who killed, raped and looted across the entire region. The Rules of Engagement had made engaging them difficult… how else were they meant to prevent a massacre? General Éclair's decision to tell the politicians in Brussels to go fuck themselves and order the enemy engaged had come too late; thousands had died in the ‘safe’ refugee camps. And then…

They had been ordered home, of course, some of the British soldiers to face charges of disobeying orders. Robinson had been a young private at the time, newly married; he had been spared any formal prosecution, but morale in the armed forces had plummeted. General Éclair had killed himself, taking the blame on himself; some said that the European military tradition had died with him. There had been a time when ‘damnation to the French’ had been a British toast; now, soldiers drank to the last of the European commanding officers worth a damn. All Robinson had to worry about had been the nightmares.

Hazel’s blonde hair spilled down as she straddled him. “Do you have to go back?”

He knew what she meant; why don’t you leave the army and take up the job offer from my father ? It wasn't as if he hated George Alban; the man had been quite accommodating to the squaddie who had courted, and then married, his daughter. They might not have managed to provide him with any grandchildren yet, but Robinson was sure that they would have time for that one day; it was the thought of becoming dependent upon his father-in-law that bothered him. He loved the junior ranks of the army.

And besides, even in this times, it was far better than life as a civilian.

“I don’t have a choice,” he said, as his hands explored her breasts. Nearly a decade of living together, since they were both in their teens, had given them unmatched knowledge of one another’s body. She could draw anything from him and he could make her come for hours; nothing he had experienced before matched it. She pushed down on him, pulling him into her, and he forgot himself for nearly an hour. “Hazel…”

“Don’t you dare fall asleep,” Hazel said, afterwards. “You have to have a shower and then I think I’ll make you change your sheets.”

“That’s your job,” Robinson said, and ducked the pillow she hurled at him, running into the shower before she could find something harder to throw. He took a moment to shave, using one of the new vibrating shavers to quickly remove all of his stubble, before running through a quick exercise routine and then showering to remove all the sweat. The nightmare always made him wake up screaming; he wasn't the only one who had been to Sudan to have nightmares, but the Government had refused counselling to the soldiers who had been. They had just wanted to forget about it. It had brought down a government, after all; they would have been happier to dance across a minefield.

He dressed quickly and neatly, and then headed into the living room. They kept such a large house because of the lodgers — something that George Alban had organised to ensure that his daughter was kept in the manner to which she was accustomed — but none of them worked in the mornings. They had only two lodgers at the moment, something that Robinson was privately relieved about; the last thing he wanted was to run into them after a nightmare.

“I’ll have your breakfast out in a moment,” Hazel called, through the doorway to the kitchen. She was a pretty good cook; she had also been surprised to learn that Robinson himself could cook, something the army had bashed into his head. “Why don’t you watch telly and find out what’s going on?”

Robinson laughed and sat down, finding the remote and clicking the interactive television on. It had been a gift from his father-in-law on their wedding day, a new system that could present news to them based on their requirements, or give them an entire series of programs, if they had time to download them. He had once downloaded all ten seasons of Doctor Who and watched them, end to end; now, he put the temptation aside and turned to the news. The computer in the system knew his preferences.

“American spokesmen today informed the world that American soldiers had been dispatched to South Korea in conjunction with a division from Australia and a smaller unit from New Zealand,” the newsreader said. She was a computer-generated program with impressive vital statistics; she was also the most popular pornographic character in the world, all computer-generated. It had sparked off an entire series of studies into the human character. “Despite protest marches in a dozen European and Latin American capitals, the administration of President Joan Kirkpatrick is determined to avoid any appearance of weakness in the run-up to the forthcoming American elections. The marchers…”

“Leftist morons,” Robinson muttered, knowing that it had been the marchers who had gotten Europe into Sudan and then out of the damned country. George Alban had been really scathing about them. “Next!”

Another computer-generated face, this time vaguely French in appearance. “The leader of the French National Front yesterday called for Arab and Palestinian immigrants to be forcibly sterilized,” she said. Images of protest marches and riots spread across the scene. “Jean-Luc Barras claimed that the rising tide of immigration was permanently changing France’s demographics and insisted that the French Government take firm steps to prevent further immigration. The pronouncement was greeted by riots and protests; the European Court of Justice will meet today to decide if they should prosecute him for hate speech. Both Radio Jihad and Islamic Law stations, broadcasting from Algeria, have called for his head. The Islamic Government of Algeria has demanded that the French Government hand Barras over to them for trial.”