The Gone-Away World (23 page)

The oddness of it all seems to provoke oddnesses in us; the brutality calls out to our anger. The logic of un-war is strong. Certain actions demand certain responses, of which the simplest is “Shot at? Shoot back.”

Of all the groups operating here, only one seems to be able to avoid those reactions—or maybe they are simply more perverse, more determinedly and convolutedly insane than everyone else; Zaher Bey's pirates for the most part do not shoot back. They elude, taunt and tease. They also steal as a way of counting coup—they will steal anything just to demonstrate that they can. They steal the traffic cones which we use to mark out our roads, and the little shining lights which sit on top of them. They hijack truckloads of boots and steal every single right foot, leaving all the left ones. They stole a consignment of flags and a lot of subversive cakes, and returned a solitary Battenberg with a note to the effect that it was rather dry. They penetrate defence-in-depth as if it was cling film. They mince through minefields and cut razor wire for no better reason than to stencil pornographic cartoons on our tanks and pinch our booze. This gives everyone the willies, because one day they may get serious and that would be bad. All the area commanders of all the forces in the region are united in wanting to demonstrate that no one steals from them with impunity. The first person to do this will gain an infinitesimal but possibly decisive measure of kudos.

A month ago a whole load of useful stuff—fencing, tyres, fuel, tent-age and antibiotics—vanished from one of our supply dumps, so General Copsen packed me off with some soldiers to get our stuff back (I couldn't shake the image of myself knocking on a neighbour's door and asking for a miskicked football from the wreckage of their conservatory), and I chased the transponder signal from a beacon in the medical supplies pack for several miles across rough country. The trail led us to the outskirts of an abandoned industrial site five kilometres from the dump. The transponder was marching up and down a wall, trying to mate with everything it saw and kill anything which turned it down—or rather it was attached to the collar of a huge feral cat which was doing these things. I discovered this when I, intrepid detective, led my guys around the corner and ordered the cat to put its hands in the air and throw down its weapons, whereupon it jumped on my head and tried to rip my scalp off under the impression that I was a chew toy or a huge, armoured mouse. When this failed and it (thank God) did not find me physically attractive, it pissed on me and ran away.

The cat-bomb incident is important only in so far as it was the mechanism by which I met Tobemory Trent for the first time, as he sewed me up. This meeting caused me to mention, unwisely, that I thought Trent's job was admirable, and General Copsen immediately seconded me to him for a week. Tobemory Trent is a stretcherman.

Stretchermen are the doorkeepers of a hidden kingdom, a soft place where there are nurses. This makes them popular, of course, but at the same time they're gloomy people to think about, because the only way they'll let you into their kingdom is if you're in agony. No one wants to imagine they will ever make that spasmodic face and clutch at a spurting limb, or worse yet do the weird, happy thing people do when they're truly fucked and run around showing bits of bone to their friends and talking about how odd it is to have a hole in them until they bleed out.

My clock goes
beep.
That means I have to go and do this thing. I put on my flak jacket and go and do it.

T
HIS IS ME
as a stretcherman, dismounting from a hot smelly medevac transport (that's a jeep with a cover on it) with a bunch of guys who have done this before. I have not been trained, particularly. I have just been given a medic's armband and told to take the back end because the front is the more skilled position. Being the front-end man requires that you:

1) know how to run with a man's head hitting your legs from behind,

2) be able to support the weight of a man behind your own back, and

3) can navigate the battlefield while doing 1) and 2) and being shot at.

I am sweating, partly because it's what everyone else is doing and I don't want to be left out. Like Tobemory Trent, I have left my shirt on. The idea is that you sweat and keep the moisture covered, so you only have to sweat once, as it were, and you don't carry on losing water. All I know about that is that I have a puddle around the waistband of my trousers and down my arse and I hope I do not get photographed with patches of damp around the buttocks by some overeager shutterbug hoping to “convey the moment.” Becoming the posterchild for wet trousers has no appeal.

Away to the west, Green Sector is quiet and safe and there are probably guys getting bored and wondering what to do with the afternoon. They're likely doing the same at Red Gate, although we came through there a while back, and the soldiers gave me to understand they were not happy. Apparently the local commander is an idiot. I will have to remember to tell George Copsen about this when I get back. It's the kind of thing he likes to know.

Over to my right, in one of the contested zones, something huge is on fire, or more probably something quite small is hugely on fire. Smoke pours up and out and hides the blue sky and makes a shadow on the land below. Quite clearly it is Mordor, and there are orcs and monsters there, and the burning thing is Mount Doom. It actually looks pretty cool, in a bad way. It also looks a long way off. Tobemory Trent, the Sage of the Field Dressing Station, ordered us dropped here a few moments ago, and is now tasting the air and (more important) paying heed to some secret testicle signal known only to front-end stretchermen. No one speaks. I, at least, have nothing to say. The back-end stretcherman's code is simple: obedience to the man at the front. In my case, this is Trent himself. He reaches a decision and moves towards the smoke in a narrow ellipse which will bring us around to it from the north and the higher ground.

I follow Trent down in the direction of Mount Doom, wondering which hobbit I am, and it seems to me that we cannot possibly get anywhere near the fighting. I can hear the gunshots and even, when the wind is right, smell them. I can hear and see explosions and so on, but they are all tinny and fake. Trent has deployed too early and in the wrong place. He picks up speed, and so, perforce, do I. The noises get louder. An armoured personnel carrier passes us at great speed, shiny and new and a bit urgent. I make a note to myself to request patrol duty when next General Copsen asks me if I feel I'm pulling my weight.

“Getting there,” says Trent. He must be deeply moved to be so verbose. I do not know how he can tell. I suspect we will be running for quite a while, and wonder whether we might get the APC to pick us up and give us a lift.

When Trent demanded that the transport leave us here in the middle of nowhere, the other back-end guy seemed on the brink of committing a grave sin. He had the expression of someone about to
ask a question.
By this sign, I know that he is also new. The lieutenant in the transport, a man with exactly no hair and apparently made of ivory and parchment, just leaned over and threw him out of the door. Trent and the other front-end guy shared a look like “and this is the shit we have to work with nowadays,” and we tumbled out into the sand. The transport roared away, and everything was calm. It mostly still is, although amid the (fairly) distant banging there's now a strange, domestic noise, a noise of pets. It goes
pitter patter babubudda-boom
(but that's not pets, that's small explosive munitions).
Lollop lollop.
Quite a lot of pets (
boom,
that one was a bit closer) and they are running all around, and just maybe they are carrying bits of change in their pockets or wearing bells, because there's just a whisper of
clinktinkle.
The pets should not be here. This is a dangerous place. I should not be here either.

I carry the stretcher. I follow Tobemory Trent.

We run around a corner, come over a rise and everything is much, much louder. We run into a small town where a lot of men are killing each other in a fairly energetic and random way. The smoke is suddenly not just nearby but all around us. Things scream past me which I realise are bullets and I completely forget to duck (Ma Lubitsch would be furious) but do not get shot. Tobemory Trent also does not get shot, although why this is I have no idea because he has not as much forgotten to duck as decided that since he doesn't know where the bullets are, moving his head is a lottery he can't be bothered to play. The
pitter patter
all around us turns out to be the sound, not of several thousand kittens entering a litter tray, but of masonry falling in chips and blocks from walls peppered with gunfire. The whole town is built out of egg timers, shedding sand from the top half into the bottom, and when the top half is empty the town will basically be a floor shorter than it was and much of it will fall over, probably in about eight minutes or so.

Trent leads the way along a small road which smells of latrines and leather and cooked meat and burning rubber and something else which isn't any of those things and which my animal instincts aren't at all happy about. For no especially good reason, no one is using this road as a shooting gallery, so aside from occasional through-and-throughs, it's about as safe as this town currently gets. The houses are pretty in a doomed way: sandstone or cement, and modern but with a traditional feeling to them which says yeah, sure, we used a crane and some prefabs to make this, but it's still the same kind of house we were making when the main construction material was mud. Every now and again there's a big boxy thing which must be a factory or a hotel or an apartment block which is made of the same stuff and seems to be leaning over the houses and muttering like a gawky teen about how this place is old and tiny and nothing cool ever happens here and why oh why isn't there a mall? A couple of these even have billboards on them advertising things, but I have no idea what, and this leads me to reflect that quite a lot of signage back home is also lousy with non-relevant noise and useless without text, and then some idiot starts bombing the town.

I know this because my legs feel like jelly and the buildings ripple and one of the billboards comes off on one side and half a smiling face rips through the roof of a dwelling place and exposes an empty kitchen with blood on the wall. And then there is a very loud noise, and Trent suggests we stop for a moment to consider our position and find out what the holy heck is going on, because the enemy here should not have artillery and any bombs falling on this town ought to be ours and they clearly ought not to be falling on it while we're in it. An old lady, or a dangerous insurgent dressed as an old lady, but probably just a middle-aged lady in rags who needs a bath and a few months spent in a place which is not a war zone, is waving pathetically at us to bugger off.

There is a flash up ahead, not a big one. It is a shell going off, clearly, between a hotel called Rick's American Casablanca (which is probably some kind of confused trademark infringement, but enough rights are being infringed here already that I'm not going to get worked up over intellectual property) and what appears to be a toyshop. Both of them have huge glass frontages which had not, until this moment, turned to sand. The flash is very bright and it stops me in my tracks, sort of fascinated, and the glass frontages bow and then collapse.

Trent hits me from one side and we fall together into the wall of a dismembered Laundromat. He counts. One. Two. Three . . . and a cloud of razors whispers by, a mist of broken glass which rakes the ground and tinkles off the awning struts and rips the fabric apart without slowing down, and the deflected splinters, some the size of fishfood and some like sideplates, drop around us from above.

“Close one,” Trent mouths, or perhaps he is shouting and I am deaf. He jumps up and picks up the stretcher, and moves on into the main square, temporarily also the Hell of Shattered Men. Aline (irrelevant Aline, of the welcoming hips and the uncertain courage, whom I miss desperately at this moment but who mysteriously turns into Elisabeth Soames the last time I saw her, back in Cricklewood Cove, before she is occluded by a dying soldier from Paxton) would be annoyed by this description, because some of the corpses and near-corpses and dear Christ ought-to-be corpses here are female. The old lady/insurgent/average woman who wanted us to go has been transformed into a dead thing made of rags and bone.

There's a burning smell, and a creaking, and I realise there's a truck on fire—no, two, but one of them is already a furnace. A big guy brushes past me, some journo who has surprisingly dropped his camera and is making for the flames. There's screaming from that direction, but then there's screaming everywhere. The journo is yelling at his crew to
give a hand here, you arseholes,
and suddenly they get the idea, and there's a kind of news strike while they risk their lives for someone else's instead of for hard copy. Most of them look scared and a bit embarrassed about this, and finally the big guy has to be hauled away because the trucks are about to explode. They explode, but hardly anyone pays any attention. The journos all stand and stare at the people they have saved from death, completely unsure about what to do with them now.

Tobemory Trent weaves through Golgotha not like someone who has just been almost blown up, but like a man come home to a terrible but familiar monstrosity. He whips open his pack and does something brutal and necessary and a man shrieks and then says “Thank you,” but then he can't stop saying it and it becomes a long burble
thankyou-thankyou-thankoo-ankooankooankoo.
Trent hits him in the head to knock him out, because drugs are precious and the guy's head isn't in any danger.

Somehow there are other stretchermen here among the pools of human juice, all long-limbed and grave and carrying, as we are, packs of bandages and basic splints and other things unmentionable to dispense relief. One of them is down, must have arrived just before us, a kid named Bobby Shank. I've seen him eating a few times, kinda waved, gotten a nod in return. Bobby Shank has a hole in the front of his head, but there is very little blood and he is still alive. That happens. On TV, if you get shot in the head, you die. Out here, sometimes you survive. Sometimes you even have a life afterwards. Bobby Shank is on his own stretcher, and his front man is strapping up a guy with a minor head wound so he can take Bobby's place at the back and carry him out. I look away. Bobby Shank will escape, but he will not be okay. Not unless a miracle happens, and the reason they're called miracles is that they don't. I glance over at Trent, who sees what I see and shakes his head to tell me I am right. And then he tells me to stop being a fucking tourist, and concentrate. He does not say it like he hates me, but more as if I've passed a test.