Daniel Polansky - Tomorrow, the Killing

‘’Lo, Sergeant.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Adolphus.’

He raised his head up slowly, but his eyes wouldn’t stick on me, slick as the weather. ‘Hey.’

I let his lack of proper military etiquette slide. ‘Quiet night, I guess.’

‘I guess.’

‘Nothing to report?’

‘Nothing to report.’

It was a half-hour before the watch would change. ‘Why don’t you head back, try and scare up some grub.’

He nodded, but it took him a long time to stand. ‘I guess they’re gonna hit us today,’ he said, passing me the pike.

‘You never know. Maybe they’ve all gone pacifist.’

He didn’t laugh, but then again it wasn’t funny. Thirty minutes later I gave a very surprised private a spear and went to get breakfast.

There was no breakfast. Our supply wagon had been hit by artillery, or gotten lost trying to find us, or the commandant sold it on the black market and pocketed the change. I’d meant to save something from dinner the night before, a cracked biscuit or a few mouthfuls of salted meat. I hadn’t though. A line of very glum men sat on the barest nub of an incline, trying to light cigarettes beneath wet greatcoats and parceling out what remained of their liquor ration. The silver on my collar precluded my joining them, so I went back to check on the line.

Four years of being ground beneath a millstone meant that virtually the entire company consisted of replacement soldiers – besides Adolphus and I, there were barely a half dozen men remaining who could remember our defeat at Beneharnum, and the terrible days after. Still, under our circumstances, it didn’t take long to turn a recruit into a veteran – anyone left standing after a month was hard as burnt steel. I toured the main trench, nodding at men distilled away to gristle and teeth, watched them sharpening knives and cribbing smokes. Mostly they knew their business, but here and there I made a few adjustments, repositioning guards and sending the weakest-looking back behind lines – though we all looked pretty damn weak, and the support trench wouldn’t hold long if our defenses were breached. Some of them asked for extra bolts or more grenades, and I promised I’d get them as soon as I could. Some of them just wanted to grumble, and I’d listen for a while, then slap a hand on their shoulder and keep walking.

We were as solid as we could be, without supplies, without reinforcements, without there being any reason for us to be there. I figured we’d hold a diversionary attack, but anything more serious and we’d burst like a swollen corpse. Nothing to be done about it. I’d been sending runners to the back lines for two straight days, damn near begging for support and receiving increasingly curt responses. We were on our own. If Maletus was with us, the weight of the Dren thrust would fall elsewhere. But the Scarred One keeps his own counsel, and I didn’t imagine the lives of a handful of infantry figured much into them.

We’d carved the main trench through a low hillock, and if you managed to angle yourself right, there was an overhang that sort of kept the rain off. It was as good as you were going to get, at least. Beneath it I found a wooden bucket buried in the mud, and I flipped it over and sat on it.

To exist without awareness, that was what you aimed at. Memories worn to irrelevance, the future equally insubstantial. Obey orders and don’t think beyond them. Don’t think about your sweetheart back home all alone, don’t think about her pink thighs, or how lonely she must be getting. Don’t think about fresh fruit, or a seasoned chunk of pork, or a strong dark ale. Don’t think about blue skies, or the sun.

Don’t think about the men in the trenches ahead of you, skin like leather, eyes dark as coal. Don’t think about the friend you put in the ground yesterday – maybe not a friend, but acquaintance at least, and in the ground for certain. Don’t think about whether today was your day, don’t think about how many times you’d gotten lucky, whether that luck would hold.

The crack of cannon brought me to. The worst thing about artillery is there’s nothing you can do against it – the whistle of the shot gives you a few seconds’ head start, but if you moved you were as likely to run into it as escape the blast area. Best to hunker down, stay where you are. If the ball had your name on it, then you were good and fucked. Might as well meet She Who Waits Behind All Things with your dignity intact, seeing as your body wouldn’t be.

At first I figured it was a quick burst to unsettle us. The Dren loved that sort of thing – fire a few shots over to make sure you weren’t getting too comfortable. But the initial barrage was followed by another, and another. Two solid hours I spent curled up beneath that overhang, wave after wave of munitions rolling over me. Long gone were the days when artillery was a passing concern – the Dren had gotten scalpel sharp with theirs. They could drop a shell into an outhouse hole six inches round and half a mile distant. They were working against the environment though, like all of us. The one upside to the terrain meant that anything short of a direct hit did nothing more than toss mud into the air. Sometimes the artillery would stop for a minute, or two, or five – the Dren hoping to lure us out prematurely, then make us into scrap when they turned the fire back on.

It had been off for a while when it finally struck me that this was the real thing, that they’d be hitting us soon. I ducked out of cover and sent the alarm as best I could, signaling down both ends of the line to form up. It got to our bugler, who sounded off on his horn, though after the last two hours I doubt many could hear it.

Most of the company were already at the front, and those who had survived the cannon prepped themselves for what was coming. The rest joined us soon enough, slipping in from the support trench. I caught Adolphus’s ungainly bulk drop awkwardly into the mud and waved him over. Even the most haggard son of a bitch gets a shot of energy in the moments before a fight, but just the same he looked lost, battered. I hadn’t the time to worry about it, figured he’d snap awake at the smell of blood. A peek over the precipice showed lines of gray men emerging from the gray mist. I dropped back down and gave the all clear for free fire, and our bowmen, perched inside narrow barricades set above the lines, started sending bolts into the gloom. A trickle of screams made their way in our direction, gratifying if meaningless – our missilists alone wouldn’t be enough, not nearly, not even if they’d had enough bolts. This wasn’t no diversion – the Dren were playing for keeps.

The first one came over, a husky motherfucker with mud up to his hips, leaping down from the edge. He bounced his sword off mine but didn’t stop moving, heading down the line, trying to carry the trench by sheer momentum. I hoped one of our boys would set a hand-ax in his brow, spent too long hoping and missed his follow-up – there was a movement at the edge of my vision, and then I was lying face up in the muck, breathless and waiting to die.

He was big, naked from the waist up, and cooked out of his fucking skull. Word was the Dren passed out breath to their commandos, some sort of mass-produced junk. It was a source of great wonder for us, how they were able to get their hands on narcotics, given that our own commissary usually couldn’t provide us with bread. The man towering over me must have been saving up his rations. The veins in his neck pulsed, and the whites of his eyes had swallowed their irises. He carried a self-made mace in both hands, a fence post with a whittled handle and a half-dozen long nails hammered through the business end.

A spearhead peeked out suddenly from beneath his breast, a flap of skin carried along the end – one of my boys looking after his commander. The Dren failed to notice he’d just been murdered, whirling around with such force that he tore the half-pike out of its wielder’s hands, the butt passing over me. He didn’t scream, I remember – he must have been really far gone. I lifted myself out of the muck and started putting my sword into his head, and after the third or fourth time he finally caught up to the reality of the situation, and dropped to the ground.