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So quick, how some fall – so narrow the border between life and death. You could trip and stumble over it. The way Fletcher lies there in the mud, his head leaking onto the ground, as if he were simply a broken milk jug, you would never have thought such a fragile object could cause so much distress.
Moses is studying the body in the sudden quiet of the battlefield when a concussion of air knocks him backwards into the mud. It is only afterwards that he hears the raucous thunder of the explosion itself – as though sound were not a herald but an afterthought.
*
Black smoke engulfs the building at the end of the row.
Moses, his ears ringing, clambers to his feet just as the second building goes and he is knocked down once more.
And now the world is muffled near to deafness. What he can hear is his own heart beating, his teeth clacking against one another. The dead, who have no concept of self-protection, remain immobile, turning their heads slowly towards the fire to gaze with mild wonder upon the shifting colours. They will stand, mesmerized, until the flame has engulfed them – Moses has seen it. And so it happens now to one dead woman standing near the second building. She catches fire, her dress melting to her flesh as a single cinder, stumbling forward, surprised, mewling, not trying to put herself out. She collapses to a sitting position, mystified finally by the abomination of her own skin fluid with flame, raising her own arm to see the way the fire enrobes it – until at last the heat boils her brain and she falls, stinking, to the ground.
Abraham, Moses says. It could be a whisper or a shout – he does not know, because he cannot hear his own words.
Hell falls on the place and Moses has not found his brother. He does not even look behind him to the hills. Escape means nothing to him. He will die here looking for his only kin. A suitable end – it’s what men wish for, finally.
There’s a third explosion – not another of the low buildings this time, but one of the gargantuan metal towers. The explosion at the base causes the tower to lean, crippled, suspended for a moment at a limping angle – then, with a strain and break of metal joints that Moses can feel in his sternum more than hear, the tower crashes to the ground.
That’s when he sees Abraham. At first it’s just a figure, on fire, running crazy from behind one of the buildings, arms waving. Then Moses recognizes the boots. The tooled leather cowboy boots his brother has always been so proud of. He would polish them at night by firelight, bring them tenderly back to full lustre with a rag and a spit shine. A man, sometimes, is told by his boots when the rest of him has got aflame.
Then Moses is running. He tackles his burning brother to the ground and rolls him in the mud till the flames go out.
Abe! Moses says. It’s me. It’s your brother. Abe!
There is no response, but Moses can see that he’s still alive. He takes a fistful of mud and slathers it as a salve over the melted and charred face and neck of his brother. He does not know what else to do, and such an act feels proper to nature.
Another building explodes now, this one very near.
Moses sees his brother’s lips move.
I can’t hear you Abe, Moses says. I can’t hear nothin. We got to get. You ready?
Moses lifts the slack body of his brother and slings it over his shoulder. Then he runs. He runs towards the tree line at the base of the hill. Another explosion shakes the earth behind him. Everything is on fire now – the heat of the valley, he can see it in the shivering air.
Then he’s climbing up through the trees, the weight of his brother’s body on his shoulder, pulling himself up on the slippery hillside, his breath coming short and ragged. Two more buildings explode behind him. How could there be anything left to destroy? A point must come when the forces of destruction must be stymied by their own completeness. Mustn’t it?
He rests, bracing himself against the trunk of a tree, only for a moment. Something collapses in the gasworks behind him, but again he does not look to see. He keeps his eyes focused on the bright snowy rim of the hilltop. Then he shifts Abraham on his shoulder and starts forwards again.
Higher he climbs until he has crested the hilltop, well above the buildings of the valley. There he stops in a small clearing in the trees and sets down his brother gently in the snow. Moses can hardly breathe, but he falls to his hands and knees to check on Abraham. His brother’s face, he sees now, is melted away – and one of the eyes is open, and he doesn’t seem to be breathing.
Moses leans down and puts his ear to Abraham’s mouth, and he takes the wrist to find the pulse. But there’s nothing.
He can’t even catch his breath long enough to curse his brother for dying.
Instead he sits back against a tree trunk and listens to the crackling inferno in the valley below – still muffled by his buffeted eardrums. The sun peers through the treetops, and he drinks in the cold air like an elixir.
He licks his lips. There are things to say and no one in the world to say them to. Not even God – who is about his business on the wonders of the world and doesn’t – should not – take time for the puny sufferings of one bereft man.
So instead he talks to the charred body of his brother.
She lied, he says. She lied to me, Abe. And I almost took trust in it. Shamed to say I almost did.
There are now popping sounds down in the valley, as of a series of small tanks exploding. It will take days for the valley to burn itself out completely.
He licks his lips again.
I guess it’s lucky for you you died, Abe, he says. This world, it was too easy for you to get into trouble in.
Then he gets up and crawls to his brother’s body and takes the arms from where they are flailed wide and lays them neat and proper across his chest. And that’s when he notices something. The index finger on the left hand is gone to the second joint. He raises the hand to look close. It seems the wound is an old one, the scar healed over clean. Then he looks more closely at the melted face, pries open one of the charred eyelids.
Moses Todd sighs heavy and sits back again against the trunk of the tree.
Goddamnit, he says. You ain’t Abraham.
There is neither relief nor disappointment in his voice. It is just a statement of fact. The compass of your own self is hard to follow if the world keeps changing the direction of true north.
He sighs and squeezes his eyes shut with his grimy fingers and says:
Just when you think things’re sorted.
*
Moses walks to the edge of the clearing and looks down into the bowl of fire below him. He feels the heat blustering up into his face like a summer wind – and melting the ice in the trees for an artificial kind of rainfall. The structures are all collapsed or gutted by flame – metal twisted brutal and liquid around metal. A thick grey smoke rises into the air and clings to the trees all around, causing Moses to bend double coughing. What down there was living before is now dead and gone to ashes.
When he turns back to the clearing, he sees the burnt corpse of the boot thief stirring. He walks to the slug and gazes down on it for a moment. Then he uses his pistol to put a single bullet through the forehead, and the dead man settles back into stillness.
Moses bends down and removes the boots from the dead man’s feet. Then he leans against the trunk of a tree and looks up between the branches into the smoky sky. There is an exhaustion on him the like of which he has never felt before.
His hearing is still shot, so he wonders deafly what kind of complaint the birds must be making about the smoke that poisons their arboreal homes. He has an affinity for nature, he realizes, because it is governed by principles and laws that are clear and precise as anything.
It’s the various and mutable nonsense of man he can’t abide.
*
He follows the ridge around the valley and back to the road. There are signs of battle everywhere. Moses sees what has happened. When the explosives were d
etonated, the inhabitants of the valley fled by the main road, but they were met by the soldiers who cleaned up whoever was left. It looks like they were shot with mounted guns – some of the bodies perforated almost in half by a line of bullet holes.
But one thing about the military: they do things right. There is not a corpse left that hasn’t been neatly brain-killed. So despite the full garden of bodies, nothing stirs in the hot breeze. Rivulets of melted ice flow down the tarmac, shifting their course around the various dams of bodies.
It is quiet, so quiet. Except now there’s a ringing in Moses’ ears growing louder, and he knows this to be a portent of the return of his hearing.
He finds the car he came in, but it has been pushed onto its side into a ditch and likely wouldn’t run any more anyway. He searches for another vehicle, but the ones that remain have been shot to pieces or salvaged of their vital parts. So Moses sets off walking up the road. The clip of his pistol holds only three more rounds – and his bladed cudgel got left behind when he carried the boot thief out of the valley – so he is likely to be in trouble if he encounters any resistance.
But the road is clear, and the sun is bright. And soon his hearing returns. It seems to rush back all of a sudden, and for a moment the world seems unbearably loud – as if he can detect, for a brief second, the constant static that hisses there behind everything all the time. And he wonders how we are not all driven mad by it – and wonders if maybe we are.
About two miles down the road, he finds the ruin of a gas station with a garage attached. It looks secure enough. He tries the front door, but it is locked, so he goes around the back and climbs through an upper window.
It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness of the place, and then he sees the figure in the corner, wrapped in a tarp, shivering.
He walks over to the shaking man, whose eyes are closed in a sickly delirium, whose bootless feet obtrude from under the edge of the tarp. Moses leans down and wipes the sweat off the brow.
Hey, he says. Hey, wake up now.
The eyes open slowly, and they seem to take a long time to focus on anything. But then they see.
Hey, brother, Abraham says. I guess this means I ain’t dead yet, huh?
Huh-uh.
It’s harder to die than you think. The world, it conspires to keep you alive.