John Lanchester - The Wall

I went for my rifle and dived behind the bench, looking at the Wall. I don’t remember saying or doing anything to raise the alert, but afterwards during the debrief they played back recording of all communications that night, and the evidence is right there in the form of my voice, slightly raised but not, I’m proud to say, panicky: I sound the way you sound when you’re giving an order at the window of a drive-through fast-food place, and you speak louder than usual to make sure they get the order right. ‘Section twelve under attack, Others, code red’ – code red meaning this is not a drill, this is not a warning, they’re right here, right now. On the recording you can hear, about five seconds later, the full alert alarm go off: at this point the other shift would be waking up, running to the armoury, and then running for the Wall. I remember hearing gunfire off to my left, not far away, maybe only one post over (that would be Shoona) and I remember looking – and at this I was a little frantic, for sure – to see where the Others were, the Others who were near enough to have killed Mary but not yet in sight. I saw a glinting metal thing on top of the Wall and in that slowed-down, point-by-point analytic process, worked out what it must be. Metal object, not there before. Must belong to the Others. Don’t recognise it. Steel painted black. A claw shape, like a crab: a grapple. Others coming up Wall using grapple. I wonder, what should I do about that? I know, I’ll run to the Wall and shoot whoever is on the other side, because if I wait until they get to the top, they will shoot me instead. I heard gunfire, frantic uncontrolled gunfire, from further down the ramparts. Somebody was shooting on full automatic, not firing short bursts the way we’d been trained, but emptying the whole magazine in one go. I stepped towards the Wall and then just at the last moment, the very last moment, remembered my training, that if I suspected Others at a specific point I should go a few metres away and look from there, because they’d be waiting to see my head pop over the parapet exactly above the spot they were climbing, and would blow my head off.

I ran five metres down the Wall, knelt, and popped my head over just enough to see, for the shortest fraction of a second. The far side of the Wall was in deep shadow and I couldn’t see well but there were shapes on the Wall, one of them near the top: three of them, I thought, though it could have been four if there were two together at the bottom. I had a few seconds before the first figure would get over the Wall. I ran ten metres back the other way, so I was five metres past my post, on the other side from where I’d taken the sighting: the idea being that if they’d seen me they’d expect me to pop up and start shooting from the same spot. I took a breath, stood, and emptied half the magazine into the first figure, then the other half into the Others who were below. I was sure I’d killed the first one because, although he made no sound that I could hear over the noise of my weapon, he let go his grip and fell back into the sea. I wasn’t sure if I’d hit the other two or three. I ducked back down the Wall and ran back to the first point I’d used to look over. I loaded a second magazine. As I stood to shoot, I felt a blow like a heavy punch on the upper right of my back, just below the shoulder. I turned, this was in Shoona’s direction, and saw three Others, one of them kneeling and aiming a weapon, the closer two running towards me.

I tried to raise my rifle to shoot them but nothing happened. I was very aware of how time had slowed down, so the first thing I thought was that this was just an extreme version of the same phenomenon, that my brain had sent the command for my arm to lift, but the arm hadn’t responded yet. This thought seemed perfectly normal, as if I was in one of those video games where the protagonist can slow down time and the player has plenty of opportunity to aim, think, calibrate, during a moment which in real life would be mere hundredths of a second. My arm will be moving soon, I told myself, I’ve given the instruction, I’ve ordered it to move, so it will be raising the rifle to aiming position any moment now … and yet nothing happened, and I realised that time had not slowed down to the extent I thought it had, because the Others were still running towards me, and the one who had been kneeling to aim a weapon had now got up and was starting to run towards me too. I’d been wounded in my right arm and couldn’t raise it. I reached across to lift my rifle with my left hand, but even as I did so I was thinking, who am I kidding, these guns aren’t designed to be used one-handed, I can’t aim and shoot with one arm, it just isn’t possible, and that means I can’t defend myself and that means I’m going to die here, today, in this very minute that I’m living through right now, so this is the last night I’ll ever see, these are the last sounds I’ll ever hear, the last thing in front of my eyes in this lifetime is going to be this Other forty metres away who has stopped and steadied himself and is aiming a rifle at me, here we go, he’s aiming, I’m going to die right—

The Other’s head disappeared. No other word for it. He was standing in silhouette, aiming, then he was still standing, except his body ended at the shoulders and neck. Time slowed again and he stood still for the longest time, a grotesque statue, but while he was standing still, or the thing which used to be him was standing still, everything else was noise and movement. A huge explosion came from just below my position on the Wall, and then as I was staggering and reeling from it, another. Earlier in the fight I had had some understanding of what was happening, but by now I had lost it, and had no idea what was going on: if I’d been more aware, less disoriented and (to be fair to myself) not bleeding heavily from the wound in my shoulder and back, I might have realised that was Hifa, ignoring the rules about grenade launcher use and shooting the Others who were climbing the Wall by my post. In front of me, where the first Other had lost his head, I saw the Captain, running up the inside steps onto the ramparts, swinging a huge knife, not a standard bayonet but a giant thing, a machete, into the back of one of the two surviving Others. He had emptied his magazine into the head of the man who had been about to kill me and now his only weapon was this knife. The last Other turned towards him and started to raise his rifle. If he had been running with it in his hands, the Captain would have died; but that fraction of a second it took to raise-and-aim killed the Other. The Captain jumped towards him and swung his machete into the Other’s neck. It was not a clean cut, the huge knife stuck in the man’s throat and he staggered sideways, dropping his gun and raising his arms to his neck, apparently trying to pull the metal out of his body. I watched this with what felt like objectivity and detachment, thinking: if I were in his position, I too would attempt to remove the machete from my neck, so I understand this man’s reasoning, but I am not confident he will be able to achieve his goal. He staggered back across in the other direction, away from the Captain, and then fell forwards. He did not lie still; he writhed around on the ground. The Captain stepped over to the Other’s rifle, picked it up, moved to stand over him, and fired a short burst into him to kill him.

It was quiet, or rather, the gunfire had stopped. I could hear voices, Defenders’ voices, from down the Wall. At some point in the fight my communicator earpiece had become detached and I was cut off from the general chatter, if there was any. At some other point I had sat down and leant with my back against the Wall. I saw that I had taken my glasses off and put them down beside me. I put them back on. The attack seemed to be over. I could tell because if it had still been continuing the Captain would have run in the direction of the fighting. Instead he came over to me and bent down. He was breathing heavily but otherwise seemed calm. He reached to touch my arm then stopped.