Dead File: Jungle Mud, work in progress

         Along the jungle fringe rain fell in a thick haze, drowning out the sky and turning the earth to mud. In the distance, deep in the heart of the jungle, a shrill and alien cry rang out from the darkness, gathered itself on the fringe, and echoed along the plains, plaintive but fierce. A man ran, ducking his way through the trees, rain beating at his tanned skin, running warpaint down his back in dribbles, down his face, down his naked chest. There was blood in the paint but the man ran heedless of it, his strides long and light-- like the flight of a deer. His eyes were blue, washed out with the rain to an empty gray and the paint dribbled past them, down his brow, and was the color of blood and ash.
         Something snapped behind him, half a dozen paces to his left-- he jerked as if struck, his arms flailed wildly in the air, in the rain, grasping violently at leaves, and tearing them-- and he hit the ground. The taste of mud was in his mouth, thick and earthy and primeval, the taste of rot and rebirth, of rain and dirt and blood and paint.
         Another snap behind him, closer now, and then another that went off like a gunshot in his ear. For a moment the man wondered if his arm had not broke and that the sound of it was not just now reaching him-- but shook the thought quickly and scrambled back to his feet, fighting for purchase in the mud, slogging another run forwards, chest heaving. Blood was running in a rivulet down his back, from the deep puncture there below his right shoulder blade. He gasped in air, sucked down rain, and stumbled again but managed to keep his feet.
         The rain blinded his gray eyes and choked his lungs. The mud in his mouth was grit between his teeth, slimed across his tongue and matted in his scraggly black hair. And still he ran, even when there was silence around him and silence behind him-- and silence, deep and heavy like the rain, before him and, like the rain, forcing its way into him, through his nose and ears and mouth, and eyes. A quiet that made everything else painful. And he ran. The trees and vegetation grew sparser, then ceased to grow at all-- a crude hide boot scuffed along a stone in the tall grass of a vast plain, and the man slowed his run to a hesitant, wondering jog. The rain was a drizzle; the jungle was behind him.
         He could barely breath, though the air was thinner here. The pain in his chest intensified, blood pulsed down his back from the gush below his shoulder blade, thick and red and wet. It was like paint. The man laughed, humorless and broken, and stumbled to a knee in the thick yellow grass of the plain, into the damp dirt that was not yet mud, not like the mud he tasted or the mud in his eyes, or the mud coating his hair flat to his skull. Everything hurt. Everything hurt-- and then nothing hurt. The man was empty.
         He laughed again, and it was a whimper. Bloody with paint, or painted with blood, the man sagged, his eyes went flat and dull, and he sank to the ground as if wrenched and lay there as if dead. And everything around him was silent, but for the rain and the wind, and there was peace if not comfort, and sleep without fear.
         In the heart of the jungle, a shrill and alien cry rang out from the darkness, gathered itself on the fringe, and echoed along the plains-- and the man did not stir but lay there as if dead and slept, and bled, and dreamt.



The Creation of the World

         It is said that the gods were once men. They bled as men, and died as men, and in the summer were born again as men, as men still are today. They did not live in the jungle, however, for there was no jungle-- there was only sky, and the gods who were men lived in the sky and were as numerous as the stars. They were great sailors, for the sky is like an ocean, but eternally placid and cool and windless.
         The chief and lord of the gods was Keehuck the Sailor who chases the sun and the moon and is always hungry. His mouth is black and empty and his tongue is red and all the gods are his children. Sheik, his eldest son, was the lord-king of dawn, and his eldest daughter, consort to her brother Sheik, ruled both the nightfall and night and was called Kieha. All the gods lived in Keehuck the Sailor's mouth, and he closed his lips each dawn and hid all the gods, who were as numerous as stars, and during the day when they were hidden in the mouth of the god-king, they would bicker.
         Sheik, who was twin to Kieha, had blue eyes and wore the skin of the blue sky about his shoulders, and carried a spear of fire and iron. And Kieha, twin to Sheik, was brown-eyed and brown-haired, with a black wrap about her body and carried a bow of ebony and arrows of fire and iron, like that of her brother's spear. The twins, though kin, would bicker in their father-god's mouth and often fought one another, neither winning nor losing. Their snarls and shouts would echo across the sky-- and still echo to this day as thunder, and the lightning is the clash of Sheik's spear and Kieha's black shield, and streaking stars are the flight of her arrows, and the rain is the blood of gods, and is holy.
         One day, though, Sheik said to his sister Kieha, "You with your bow cannot hit that glimmer on the back of our father's throat, but I with my spear am stronger, and can." And Sheik drew his spear of fire and iron, and threw it hard at the glimmer-- and the spear stuck fast in the thing, which gave out a cry of pain and began to run like a plains grazer will, through the fields at leaps and bounds, bleeding out from its flank. Kieha, though, who was not to be bested by her brother nocked her bow with an arrow of iron fletched with fire and shot the running glimmer through its heart and it fell dead on their father's tongue and bled red upon it, and gasped its last breath in a choke, then lay still.
         Sheik and Kieha went to claim their kill but stopped before the bloody wet, red tongue of their father-- for the dead thing on it was another god, little Quill-Foot who was gentle and loved the most by their father-god. Sheik turned to Kieha and said, for he feared his father's wrath, "You have killed our younger brother, whom our father loved best, with your bow-- for your arrow took him through his heart. The aim was true, and faultless. The kill is yours." But Kieha shouldered her bow, still strung, and pulled the black wrap of night tighter about herself and said:
         "No, brother, you hit him first with your spear and he was dying as I took him. See, even now blood ebbs from his flank where your spear still juts-- the fault is yours, let you take what glory there is in kin-slaying." But neither Sheik nor Kieha would take the blame for killing their brother and left his corpse on their father's tongue; both waiting until night when the great mouth opened. But there came no night for Keehuck the Sailor could taste the blood of his youngest son on his tongue-- and for many years there was no night but unending day, for Keehuck would not open his mouth, and the gods grew weary and quarrelsome and fought one another, and many died.
         Many years after Quill-Foot was slain, Keehuck the Sailor opened his mouth and the blood of thousands of gods spilled into the sky and formed the earth, and Keehuck the Sailor turned to the twins Sheik and Kieha and said:
         "You have killed my joy and killed our people and this taste of blood will never be washed from my mouth. Go down to the world you have created and abide there, alone with one another for the rest of your days." And after saying this Keehuck the Sailor died, for he was weary and old and for the time of the god-men had passed.

         Sheik and Kieha went down onto the earth but there was no ground for them to stand upon, for the world was of blood. So Sheik said to his sister:
         "Let there be a place for us to rest, for I am weary."
         And he took the corpse of their father and spread it across the world and created the land and the seas, for the blood of the dead gods pooled against their father's stomach, and between his legs and under his arms. And Sheik laid down upon the land and slept, while his sister Kieha stood above him and kept watch. But Kieha grew lonely in her watch and took one eye from all the bodies of the dead gods and fastened them into the fish in the seas. Still she was not comforted, though, so she took hair from all the dead gods and made the grass of the world and made the jungle of their bones-- and of their organs made the animals of the world. Their entrails became the snakebirds and serpents, their livers the scaled jaguar cats, their kidneys the alligator beasts, the giant sloth of their stomachs. The gristle near their spine became the rodents of the jungle, the rats and mice and tapirs, and the finger bones of the dead became the birds. Contented with this, Kieha held her watch as Sheik slept.
         When Sheik awoke he stood watch and Kieha slept. He watched the sky, and watched the earth and when a sound spooked him he thrust his spear's point of fire into the sky and made the sun, and drove the iron butt of the spear into the earth and a piece of it broke off. Ashamed of his fear, Sheik pushed dirt over the broken spear shaft and buried the iron far beneath the earth. And then Sheik's watch was over and Kieha began her watch again, and a thousand years passed and each of them stood a watch over the other, and the animals of the jungle and the fish of the oceans knew not death, nor hunger, nor pain.
         There came a time, though, when Kieha did not wake and Sheik lay down beside her, and none stood watch over the other and when they awoke there was a race of men between them, and this is how the first men were created. The first men had mismatched eyes-- an eye of Sheik and an eye of Kieha, and they were close to their brothers and sisters among the animals, and many of the first men took the birds or fish or cats-- even the sloth-- for their wives and husbands. From the union of the first men and their animal wives came the Shifters.
         Because Sheik and Kieha were lord and lady of the morning and night, and no longer lived in the sky but on the earth, there was no night or day-- time did not pass and things lived eternally. There was paradise on the earth during the reign of Sheik and Kieha upon it, and man did not need eat, nor sleep, nor know death.
         But Sheik grew weary and Kieha tired and longed to live in the sky again, for they were tired of the land and homesick. So both Sheik and Kieha rose up into the sky and Sheik was again lord of the morning and Kieha, lady of the night and of the nightfall. Paradise was shattered when the twins resumed their positions in the heavens. Time, stalled, began to flow again as night and day returned, bringing with it hunger and thirst and death. For though the gods could no longer die, their children would, and a hundred years after Sheik and Kieha left the earth, the first man died and the first child was born.
         The first men and women could no longer couple with their animal kin and grew apart from them-- and coupled with one another instead and created the tribes of the jungle, of the fringe-land and of the plains and mountains. And when the first men and women had all died, the Shifters, orphaned, hid themselves away from their distant brethren-- those of the tribes-- for the tribespeople hated the elder get of the children of the gods. The tribespeople feared them because they were still close to the animals, like the first people had been; so close to their animal kin that the animal blood was in them like fire.
         And this is how the world was made, the animals and fish and birds made, and how people came to be in it-- the first children, the Shifters, of the children of the gods-- and then the tribespeople who came later. This is how Sheik and Kieha, the father and mother of the world and everything in it, were exiled from the sky and how they returned to the sky-- and this is the tale of all that happened to them in the space between.
         And it is the truth.



         Morning broke; a crush of tires welled up along the track, stacked and measured-- a tar black wall. Beyond it was the meadow, uncut, and in the center of the meadow lay the hill, the grass atop it shaggy and wild and green-yellow in the orange-red sun. From over the hill, armored bodies trudged, moving downwards at a steady, marching gait, and two of the bodies carried a stretcher, and a third form, pale-naked pink, was draped across it like a scarf. Two more of the armored bodies flanked the stretcher-bearers and two went on ahead of them, with a final, bedraggled creature on point. They trudged down the hill in silence and, still silent, made their way across the meadow towards the tar-black wall of tires.
         Half-way to the wall, a shrill screech stopped the patrol dead and one by one, save for the two carrying the stretcher, the armored bodies ducked down into the grass, and lifted their heads, and stared up at the sky like fearful animals. The man on point, who now crouched with only the top of his glossy black helmet peeking above the grass, turned at the hip and looked back behind him, trying to see the others through the grass. Seeing nothing, he started to rise, murmuring cautiously into the radio-piece attached to his helmet.
         "Okay, everybody up." The words crackled in her ear as loudly as if he had spoken them to her himself, even though she was nowhere near the patrol and could only watch their return from the safety of the tower behind the wall of tires. The tower itself really wasn't even that safe, she supposed. The frame was constructed of rope-lashed wooden beams, with wooden planks nailed to the floor, and a thin iron layer riveted across that. Its sides, also riveted to the frame, were of slightly thicker iron, but iron nonetheless. The roof was tin, sloped sharply, and glinted garishly in the sun. The tower was called, simply, the Forward Post-- the last bastion of civilization before the wilderness crept in and choked the life out of everything sacred.
         She watched from the tower as the patrol rose up out of the grass, so small and pathetic and warped from the glass of the binoculars that they didn't look human at all. The man on point waved them forwards again and the march forwards began again; the stretcher-bearers who had, the entire time, been standing there like two awkward giraffes with a writhing worm between them seemed more than relieved to be moving forward. There was something wrong with the wounded man, really wrong with him, to make them hurry as they did. But the binoculars wouldn't focus that close-- she could only guess at his injuries.
         By the time the patrol reached the wall of tires, they looked like a funeral procession. Everyone trailed the man on point in single file; vaulted over the low dip in the wall, and continued their trudge past the shadow of the tower itself. Only two figures remained behind, one on either side of the wall. One of the armored figures, encased entirely in matte black from head to toe, had stopped and turned after vaulting the wall and stretched its hands up-- grasped at the stretcher as it was lifted over, and tugged. The stretcher slid across the top of the wall, the canvas rasping across hot, sticky rubber, and then it cleared the wall. Its one end, unattended, seemed to hang motionless a few split seconds before it dropped, smacked down against the ground, and tipped the wounded man over.
         It broke the illusion. The wounded man screamed and blood gurgled up, choking him, and from her post above them she could see the blood-shot, red-rimmed whites of his eyes as they rolled back into his head. The pair of binoculars fell from suddenly nerveless fingers and the sound they made as they hit the floor startled her out of her stupid shock. She turned, grasped a ladder rung, and started down, relishing both the feel of the wood, splintery and damp, and the sound of it-- the clop of her iron-toed boots as they stepped down, the rasp of her hands as they followed.
         Out of superstitious habit she jumped the last rung and straightened, dusted idly at the tarnished bronze insignia pinned to her collar, then turned. The first stretcher-bearer had knelt beside the wounded man and cradled his head awkwardly; the second was still straddling the wall, rooted there with both hands placed down and gripping the hot rubber, preparing for the final jump that never came. No one seemed surprised to see her desert the tower; in fact, no one seemed to really notice her in the first place, least of all the man who shuddered and shook and dribbled frothy pink blood from his pale, bloodless lips.
         Only when she knelt down beside the wounded man did anyone seem to take notice of her. The armored stretcher-bearer looked as if about to speak, then caught sight of the iron flash on her collar and was silent. The wounded man, however, had no such compunctions and as her shadow fell across his face, screamed. She wondered, distantly, what it would be like to die without the feel of the sun on one's face-- and shivered. The dying creature before her, for that was what it had been reduced to, convulsed in sympathy and whined again. She turned her head to let a little sun touch his pale, grimy, sweat-streaked and blood-drenched hairline, then exhaled slowly through her nose. Composure.
         "What happened?" The sound of her voice surprised her; it was flat and cool, just the way it was supposed to be.
         "Uh," the second stretcher-bearer had scrambled over the wall by now and hunkered off to one side, eyes wide and unfocused and fearful and, somehow, repulsively green. "We were patrolling on the fringe and-- they hit us near the Bend. We got them all, but he'd taken off his helmet after and one of the bastards, we thought he was dead, stuck him before we could do anything else. Hiding under a pile of dead and stood right up and-- stuck him."
         Her gaze was drawn back to the face of the wounded man, morbidly fascinated. His eyes were bright blue, startlingly blue, and his face was tan, except for the angry red streaks of sunburn that had crossed his cheekbones and nose, and the tops of his ears. He wore no helmet-- his dirty blond hair had grown out from the regulation buzz most of the soldiers wore, and there was a gaping hole on the side of his neck that did not belong there. When he choked, thin dribbles of blood would leak out, and small bits of tattered, gray meat, and yellow puss. A line of red blood had traced the delicate bones of his throat, and had followed the curve of his windpipe from the hole torn in his neck to his collarbone, where it pooled in the hollow of his throat and pulsed weakly with his pulse. The man should have been dead hours ago.
         "Then?" She followed the thin trickle of blood further, where it spilled over onto his chest and bled down to his navel in a perfectly straight, perfectly red line. Her stomach tightened; she looked away, then that same horrible fascination forced her eyes back. She could hear the second stretcher-bearer's harsh exhale, and the creak of their armor as they shifted their weight, easing back onto the balls of their boots. The words came after-- halting and slow and thick.
         "It was an accident."
         The wounded man moaned softly, twisted, and the hard muscles of his stomach tightened. She knew because she could see them tightening. She could see where the skin had been burnt and peeled back, and where his muscle had been exposed, and see where the muscle had been shredded and where the purple-blue coils of intestine pressed through. The only thing, she realized, that kept the man from bursting apart was a thin plastic sheet fused to his undamaged flesh. She looked up-- her jaw slack and mouth dry; her mind numb. She couldn't think of the words to say, and groped desperately for something, anything, to make up for it.
         "Name?" Again, her voice surprised her; there was only a hint of a tremor. The man before her was leaking his life out of a hole torn in his neck-- and only a hint of a tremor. She wondered why she wasn't prouder. Perhaps it was the fact that the man dying before her was real.
         "My name? His name?"
         "Yours." She realized she already recognized the voice, though, and focused on the face of the stretcher-bearer, and noticed for the first time the terrified brown eyes behind the helmet's translucent mask.
         "Tanner, John-- Private, Medic Second Class."
         "How do you explain the gut-shot, Private-Medic?" Her voice, if it had been cool and detached to begin with, was now positively hollow. It echoed how she felt; and she felt hollow. No spear thrust, that much was obvious, had made the sloppily patched belly wound. Instead she was almost certain that if she were to look hard enough, she would see brass pellets lodged deep in the muscle, beneath the warped plastic, distorted like so many pearls resting on the ocean floor. She didn't look, though, but kept her gaze steady on the armored man who hunkered nearby and would no longer meet her gaze.
         "I told you," he began quietly, reaching down to tear up a blade of grass and twist it between his fingers, "it was an accident." --And for whatever reason, she left it at that. Maybe it was the look in his eyes, or the way his knuckles jutted out when he fisted his hand about the grass, and the way his skin tightened albino-white across the bone. Or maybe it was the low, animal whine of the wounded man, the way his teeth clicked together as he swallowed, the sound his tongue made pressing to the roof of his mouth or-- maybe it was his stubborn unwillingness to die. Whatever the reason, she realized she hated them both, the man who would not die and the man who had killed him, and straightened unsteadily away from them.
         There was a heaviness in the air that had not been there before; a thickness, a silence that was palpable and humid and hot. She watched a black fly, hairy and fat, weave through the air down to perch lazily on the wounded man's chin. She watched it scamper, quick-legged, until it hung off the side of his neck and lapped, greedily, at his fading, flickering life. And then she turned and walked off, too much aware of the stagger in her step, and of the sullen, fearful eyes on her back.



         He languished in darkness, relishing the feel of the damp, dark dirt beneath him and of the cool, crisp breeze above him. Small bugs, paper-thin and almost translucent in the morning sang and leapt from grass blade to grass blade; he could feel several scratching their way across his bloody, naked and paint smeared chest. Dew clung to the side of his nose, and several more drops matted his disheveled black hair. Off in the distance, flashed and thunder rolled off the horizon, echoing across the flat, silent grasslands. The dreamer stirred, swatted at one of the bugs crawling across his chest, knocked the dew off his nose and slowly, falteringly, awoke.
         His throat was dry and it hurt; his tongue was dry and felt swollen and large, too large, in his mouth. It pressed against his teeth. The man sat up, winced, laid back down and stared up at the sky. It was a pastel, peaceful blue and clouds flocked about it in droves, like sheep, and were buffeted by the wind. The tall grasses bent over at the waist, canopying him, then straightened up as the gust tapered back to a breeze; their tips bobbed and ducked, peering down at him periodically. He smiled.
         Something shot across the grasslands suddenly; leapt straight over the man lying prone in the dirt, and ran at a bounding sprint away from the jungle. There was a hoot- the man struggled to sit up and failed, and something feathered and thin sailed over his head. There was a dry, muffled thump following it; a sound the man knew. If the flailing hooves had been the sound of the pursuit as they tore up the dirt in their haste to get away, if the stretched, creaking wood of the bow was the sound of the chase as the arrow was poised- then that soft, muffled thump was its end, the end, and it was both life and death. The man knew this and knowing, also, there would be others, tried to lie as still as he could manage and prayed to all the gods he knew that he did not look too interesting.
         "I shot that one; it is mine!" He heard a clumsy crunch and crash as someone tore through the waist-high, yellow grass, headed in his direction. He didn't try to sit up, just lay there and, after a moment of hesitation, squeezed his eyes shut. The smile faded, too. "It's mine!" The voice repeated, closer, and suddenly the reckless, pounding charge through the grasslands went quiet, the grass stopped rustling. The man's face felt feverishly hot; he tried to press himself back into the dirt and, inevitably, failed.
         "What've you found now, brother?" Another voice sounded, somewhere above the man- farther away, but growing closer, and at a much more languid, ambled pace. A shadow fell over his face, pleasant and cool, and the man stopped breathing, his chest frozen mid-way in a shallow inhale through his nose.
         "I think it is dead." Something toed disdainfully at his side and, suppressing a flinch, the man exhaled slowly, trying to keep still. Boots crunched heavily, stomping just past his head, off towards the source of the muffled thump. The words were careless, as if tossed back over someone's shoulder: "Dead, but just not stinking yet." the first voice added.
         "Oh. He doesn't look dead."
         "It's dead."
         The man listened, fascinated, to the voices: the first that grew more distant, and the second that grew closer then seemed to speak straight into his ear. The warm breath tickled him like a sneeze and the man tried his hardest not to smile, or grin, or smirk, or even twitch. He wanted to slap at the voice in his ear. It reminded him of a fly, the sort that might hang about on hot, humid days, in the mud and dampness, on blood and meat and straw, in clothing, crawling across filmy, unseeing eyes.
         Something slapped against his bare, bloodied chest and the man, who had not expected it, went rigid to keep from sitting upright and, in lieu of a yelp, only snapped open his eyes. A young boy crouched over him and gripped the splintered wood bow in both hands that, at the moment, was still pressed against his chest. The boy lifted it, and squinted down quizzically at the red welt it left behind, then narrowed a look back over a scrawny, bare shoulder.
         "He doesn't act very dead," the boy complained, then glanced back at the man- who still just lay there, startled and rigid and unbelieving. He nudged the man's blood-caked side, and shuffled backwards in his crouch when the man uttered a low, reluctant sound of pain. The boy's eyes were brown and his hair was brown, tousled into a thick mop of curls that hung at his ears. He was surprisingly pale and his pupils were large; his face unblemished. He had a slim, long neck that tapered to bony, protruding shoulders, and the knobs of his spine jutted out down his back. His fingers, too, seemed long and delicate with thick, knobbly knuckles and taut, pale skin pulled across the back of his hand.
         The man took this all in, then struggled again to sit up. He managed to prop himself up on an elbow, lean over, and stared at his bloody side. Where the boy had nudged him some blood had flaked off, revealing a round, puckering scab, red-rimmed and bruising. He touched at it, grimaced, then glanced up at the boy and worked his dry tongue about, croaking out the words:
         "Not dead," was all he could manage, and exhausted at the effort those words alone cost him, slumped back onto his back and looked past the boy, staring up at the clouds.
         "Oh, no joke." The boy rocked back on his heels and shouldered the bow, twisted his hands together and entwined his fingers, tapping rough pads at the backs of his knuckles. The gesture was bird-like and old, almost scholarly. "Well, if you aren't dead, then you're a casualty. And if you're a casualty, that means I can capture you, which makes you my prisoner." The boy straightened up violently, looked back down at the man, then extended a hand down to help him up. When the man just lay there, the boy frowned and turned and trotted back over to where his brother was.
         The other boy was older, and resembled his younger sibling with several distinctive differences. Where the younger boy was brown-eyed and had messy brown hair, the older boy had green eyes and his brown hair was cropped close to his skull. He was taller by a head, was considerably brawnier and his skin, though just as pale, was roughened and marred. A narrow scar cut across his left cheek, across his jawbone, and curled up to end near the corner of his lip. When the younger boy approached, the elder turned and lifted the severed head of the deesea and smirked.
         "A nice buck, this one, and fat as the both of us. And my kill, Johan," he crowed and released the horn he'd been holding to, letting the bloody head drop back bluntly; it hit the ground with a muted thump.
         "You're covered in it." Johan, as the younger of the two was called, murmured then stepped forward and grimaced, gesturing at the headless, leaking corpse that still twitched every so often. "She'll throw a fit. And father won't be much better for it. But it's a good kill." He paused, glanced back to his brother, then cracked a sudden, broad grin. His teeth were startlingly white. "But I've something better. I've captured that dead man back there, and I'm going to take him back and get my paint."
         "I thought he was dead." The elder boy wiped at his bare chest, which was drenched with red animal blood, then bent at the hip and hauled up the corpse, draping it unceremoniously over a shoulder. He carried the weight easily, and without another word began to move past Johan, and past the prone man, and towards the jungle.
         "No- just, hey! Wait up, would you, Pax? He's not dead, but I can't..." The younger boy had turned to follow the older, then stopped, his complaint cut short with his breath. Pax, the elder boy, had already vanished into the jungle; the red animal blood dribbling out of his kill marked his steady, straight trail through the plains to the trees. But the man was still there, and the man was standing now, weakly, and was staring at the boy.
         Johan stepped forward, uneasy, then stuck out his hand again. The man eyed it, hesitated, then stuck out his own hand, which dwarfed the boy's, and shook it. The man's hand was scarred, the palm rough, and there were black hairs on his beat up knuckles. He let go, watched the boy step back, then exhaled slowly. He lifted his hand, reached up, and massaged the side of his neck just below his jaw. His gray eyes remained narrowed on the boy- Johan, he gathered, then shut almost of their own accord.
         His side still hurt. Behind his eyelids he relived the hectic chase, the fall, the dreams- The corner of his lip twitched up in a brief, grim smile. All around him he heard the sounds of the wilderness encroaching in on his senses: the sharp, penetrating trill of the birds back in the jungle, the feel of the breeze, the smell of the grass and the smell of blood and sweat. He opened his gray eyes, noticed the boy was still staring wide-eyed at him, then shrugged weakly.
         "So I'm your prisoner?" The words were croaked out, weak and halting, but intended to be good-natured. Regardless, the boy took a half-step backwards and frowned. So the man tried again: "Where am I?" He stared expectantly at the boy, who stared back at him, and they stared at each other in silence and frustration for some time. Finally, the man held up a hand, closed it into a fist, and pressed it to his chest. He drew in a deep, pain-wracked breath and watched the boy's face blur as his own eyes watered, then spoke slowly, steadily: "My name is Carr, and I'm lost."
         The boy's face changed; the guarded look vanished and he grinned again, then hopped forwards and began an abrupt, scampering jog towards the jungle. He paused half-way, looked back, and stuck up a thumb.
         "I'm Johan. -If we're caught out here at night, the boogies will get us. Come on," Johan turned again and hopped over a rotten log, ducked his head, then adjusted the bow on his shoulder. He carried, the man named Carr realized, no quiver. Carr shifted, exhaled unsteadily, then took a cautious step forward. His legs felt like jelly, boneless and flaccid, but regardless he took another step, and then another, until he was striding fairly confidently after the boy. There was only a moment's apprehension as he saw the tree-line nearing, then forced it down and continued his walk until the trees surrounded him.
         The jungle swallowed him.



         The mess hall was cluttered and musty; half of it was stacked to the ceiling with wooden boxes, varying in size- containing everything from canned peaches to toothbrushes to batteries. The boxes littered the tables on the eastern side of the hall, blocked out the windows, grew up from the ground like weeds and tottered precariously atop one another like so many wood-brown stones. The rest of it was all card tables, stools, plastic food trays and waxed tiled flooring. At this time of night it was nearly always empty, save for a single figure or two slumped up against the bar or sprawled out atop a cleared table: those who had braved the muggy night to chain smoke in the mess's dark, cool interior, and watch blue smoke curl up until it was lost to sight, filtered silently through a dozen vents and spat back out, clear again. Tacked to one of the towering columns of wooden crates was a cardboard sign, scribbled hastily, that read ‘Officer's Mess' with an arrow pointing right, toward the cluttered eastern half of the hall. Several dozen of the boxes on the eastern side were stacked irregularly, formed a sort of wall, and there was a cleared-out space beyond the wall, with a thin, ungainly card table teetering in the center of the small hollow.
         She sat caped about in netting to her chin, slumped back in an old, rickety wooden chair, and had both boot heels resting on a dented, plastic red tray. A dim light swung above the table, caught part of her face with its dull glitter, then swung back gracefully to illuminate the other side of the table. The only other chair in the hollow was empty, and an old pack of playing cards had been dumped in an unorganized heap on that side of the table with its four red-and-black Pharaohs in the deck all face-up, and all the other cards face-down displaying only their fat, checkered tails.
         When the light caught her face again she looked old, much older than she was and much older than she had any right to feel. But she felt old. She fingered the brass-iron insignia still pinned to her collar, which was a good deal less starch than it had been in the morning, and watched blue smoke curl up above the tops of the wooden crates, and wondered what had been the cost of a few, white paper sticks, and what was being burnt in them. Nothing legal; legality was expensive, especially out here on the fringe.
         She shifted awkwardly in her chair, leaned further back until all legs but one hung off the ground in a great balancing act, and tried to untangle herself from the bug netting she'd worn on her run from barracks to mess hall. It came away like a second skin sloughed off and looked unfriendly and dead as she heaped it up on the card table, atop the deck of cards, as the light swung slowly back and forth over it like a ceaseless, pointless pendulum. This, First Lieutenant Alinys Marlow  decided, is more like it.
         It had been a hard day.

         The court martial had taken the better part of the morning to avoid but the rumors had reached her nonetheless: Some slick-skull from the city had drove up in the last convoy several hours before the court martial itself was due to take place, bitching about his city-boy son- who was a good deal more dead than he had been yesterday, when he'd still had his guts and his dignity. Not that it was any of her business- it shouldn't have been, but since it was the rumors rolled on regardless:
         "So this slick-skull with his scalp all oiled drives in," one of the noncoms had started in the barracks, his voice hushed as she had walked by, "and he starts asking for his boy: ‘Where's my son, my boy, my flesh-and-blood?'- You know? All that jack. So the iron bars start giving him zip and zat about how his boy died for his Pharaoh and shit, all that, and the guy gets this vein ticking in his forehead and finally he blurts out: ‘So my son's dead, yeah?' And the iron bar's like- ‘Yes, sir.' And the guy got real quiet, asking about how things gone. Iron bar didn't wanna tell him his boy got gut-shot by a friendly, though; you should've seen him squirm. So finally it comes out and I'm expecting the slick to go one on old iron bar but he doesn't do anything, just stands there like he's been struck dead too... And finally he asks who did it, and the iron bar can't tell him, see, so the guy turns off, gets in his convoy and drives straight back to the city with the canned oranges still packed in crates on ‘em and I heard two days later they get this call, and someone's ass got busted hard because now there's all this to-do about a court martial. So now- It was some greener medic too, who couldn't even rate with a shotgun. Got a little eager after he got a taste of those natives, I heard- Why the fuck's was he a medic, anyway? Sore shit like that make getting a scratch something to worry about, if they're the ones treating you for it."
         The exact details of the court martial itself were still hazy; Tanna had heard that John Tanner, unlucky medic that he was, was relieved of further military duty and reassigned to a few years soft-time in the police force in New Hope- but, seeing as the dead kid's father was rumored to be in big with the gangs, it was common speculation that Medic Tanner wouldn't live for more than six months, tops. Personally, Alinys gave him four, maybe five left to live. Cowards were even more loathed than murderers.
         The dim light swung back gently to catch, for a moment, her hand silhouetted against the cheap card table's cluttered top. She curled her fingers up into a fist and made the knuckles jut out; smiled faintly at the knobbed shadow they cast. She lifted a finger up and made it wag, and watched the shadow warp against the bug netting and the scattered deck of cards.

(unfinished)