Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

‘May God be with you, Latif,’ he said.

Latif felt sudden anger and stepped me forward, but Faridun calmly turned away and left us standing on the road.

The other men laughed at Faridun and thumped Latif on the back. Aktar stood to one side. ‘You were right to tell me, Latif. All must know their place. It is the will of God.’

*

After what he had done to Faridun, Latif couldn’t go home and I followed the black leather boots of Aktar more closely. We crossed the countryside and Latif felt tied to this man who was ruthless and fearless.

I lived in the soil. My spores existed everywhere in the decomposing vegetable matter of the baked earth.

Something happened that meant I was suddenly inside you: meant I travelled with the soil up and through your skin, breaching the physical barrier that was designed to keep the outside out. It was an instant that compromised you completely.

I was inside your leg, deep among flesh that was torn and churned. I lived there for a week and wanted to take root, but it wasn’t easy. Some of my spores were washed away with the dirt from your wounds, others were cut out with necrotic tissue, and some were destroyed by a barrage of your white blood cells.

I struggled to survive.

Except they missed a small haematoma that had formed around a collection of mud in your calf. It was an anaerobic environment I could flourish in and I started to take hold. Your blood was mixed with eight others’, so your immune response was weakened and couldn’t counter me; there were repeated assaults on your body as anaesthetic knocked you again and again.

The balance changed. You degraded and I thrived. You became my host.

I spread out into the hypoxic and devitalised tissue of your leg. I made you feverish and feasted unseen on your insides, defeating you. I made you wish you’d never survived.

A sample of me was taken out and grown in a controlled environment. They identified me as a zygote fungus.

I was going to survive and you were not.

I was making you die, and when that happened I would die too. But I had no option, only oblivion. I had to persist and would consume you to do it.

My aperture was filled with stars. I changed the frequency of the photons that entered my vacuum tube so their signature was amplified as a noisy green image.

BA5799 shifted from one knee to the other. As he moved I wobbled on the mount that attached me to his helmet and the stars blurred as I failed to maintain resolution. He lifted a hand and slotted me into position. My green light reflected off the glassy bulge of his retina and his eyelashes flicked across the surface of my lens as he blinked.

The stars were replaced by a dark horizon and the ridges of a ploughed field. He scanned across it. The grey-green shapes of kneeling figures snaked forward into the distance, disappearing into a dark thicket.

Each figure held his weapon rested on a knee or in the crook of a shoulder and peered into the gloom, each one turned in the opposite direction to protect the single file. Their eyes glowed against pale skin.

Ahead there was the sound of coughing.

We waited. BA5799 looked out at the jumble of houses and brick walls flat in the middle distance. There was no movement. His knee ached and the straps of his day-sack pressed down through his body armour that encased him in damp heat. He was hot, but now that we had stopped he shivered.

Ahead the line moved, lifting away and extending until the man in front of us levered up and walked off. When there was a gap BA5799 stood up, turned and walked backwards holding out a thumb, and the figure behind followed.

We went onto a track covered with foliage and I struggled to enhance any light in the dark. A droplet of sweat collected off BA5799’s eyebrow, swung around my rubber cuff and dripped onto his cheek. We edged across a plank bridge above inky water and headed out over another field.

In front a figure stumbled with a stifled curse and the weight of his equipment pulled him down into a ditch. Two others helped him up. We walked on towards it, the man ahead swept his arm out to indicate the hazard and BA5799 did the same for the man behind.

We stopped regularly and the line concertinaed together and then stretched away as they moved on to each pre-decided feature. We waited near a motionless village and a dog barked and another echoed in the distance.

BA5799 adjusted a dial on my side and I increased the contrast of my output. He focused me on deep patches of shadow and then moved on to the next, looking for a silhouette or sudden flash. He knew they must be there, watching the single file of soldiers laden with weapons cross the open fields, alerted by the dogs and the shuffle of their clothes and buzz of radios that seemed so loud.

We stayed in the same place for a long time and he was frustrated by not knowing what was happening ahead. He lifted me up so I pointed at the stars again, swept his sleeve across his eyes and dropped me back into position. He yawned: his adrenaline was spent.

*

Finally, the man in front whispered that they were at the rendezvous. BA5799 understood from the plan that they would now move between two buildings and form a defensive triangle so the others could find them. He signalled the message to the man behind him and it murmured down the rest of the line.

A soldier who knelt beside the track counted us through. We passed the legs of those who were in position, lying flat behind their weapons, and dropped down. We were in a ragged triangle, all facing out. A dog started to bark again.

BA5799 was uncomfortable: a stone pushed into his ribs and my weight pulled his helmet forward so he had to arch his back painfully to see. He shifted and drank some water from a pipe protruding from the top of his day-sack.

He knew from the plan that they would appear from the direction he faced. And after his back had numbed, an infrared light emerged that he could see only through me. It bobbed up and down as a soldier walked out across the field, followed by another single file of dark figures. BA5799 lifted me and could see little through the murk without my enhancement, then dropped me back down so the line of men reappeared.

They stopped alongside an earth mound that divided two fields. A soldier left our position and went out to greet the lead figure.

The man next to us slid over and hissed in BA5799’s ear. ‘Looks like this is me then, boss,’ he said. ‘Let Lieutenant Baker know I’ll be warming his bed.’

‘Mark’ll be chuffed, I’m sure,’ BA5799 breathed back. ‘Good luck, Sarnt Collins.’

Men lifted themselves off the ground, overcoming the weight of their kit, and moved out of the triangle to join the others. Once men had arrived to replace them and the line of soldiers had disappeared, there was a soft double pat on BA5799’s day-sack and we stood and followed off between the two buildings.

*

We took a different route back and the pace quickened as we neared safety. A band of light was seeping from the horizon when we stopped for the final time a few hundred yards from a squat, silhouetted watchtower. BA5799 pushed fingers up to itch below his helmet and then adjusted me against his eye.

We entered the camp and a guard at the gate counted us in. Men broke off to different tents and buildings, the smell of cigarette smoke trailing them. BA5799 unloaded his weapon and ducked under a camouflage net into a building with aerials and a generator that rumbled outside.

A man leant against the doorframe. ‘How was that, Tom?’ he asked.

BA5799 unclipped his helmet and I swung wildly down to his side. My sensor was overloaded by light from the room in front of us. ‘Morning, Dave. Seemed to go smoothly,’ BA5799 said.