afraid).
I’ve always felt the best weapon in any battle is cowardice. Not shaking in your boots and whimpering for mummy cowardice. I mean a crafty cowardice, a sly instinct for self-preservation. Avoid the cow folk when you can, run away when you can’t. Stay upwind and in the shadows. If they can’t see you, they can’t eat you. Even if we were fully armed, what good would it do? You shoot one and you just announce your presence to a hundred more. Better not to shoot at all, I say. I had made it this far without ever firing a gun. I hadn’t killed a single one of them, and I wanted it to stay that way. So, what was I doing in this man’s army? Food, of course. And now Carol.
As McGuire paused in the middle of a lengthy gory monologue about the Battle of Skibbereen, the sergeant said something to him. Probably reminding him that we still hadn’t started the training and we were being sent off to war at five.
All the excitement about guns, ammo and whatnot evaporated when we saw what the Civil Defence Association was actually issuing us with. Most of the weapons were just old double barrelled shotguns that were meant for hunting. Many of them were older than I was.
There was much shaking of heads and grumbling. All this talk of state-of-the-art weaponry had whetted the young warriors’ appetites, but when they saw the old crud they would have to train with, eager bloodlust turned to weary cynicism. The conscripts were once again the disgruntled underclass – whiners, gougers and what my granny would call neer-do-wells. I was happy to see them back.
The captain had saved the best till last.
“Logistical supply shortfalls mean that conscripts are being paired up into buddy units. One of you will be issued with a firearm and the other will carry non-explosive ordinance: a cranium blaster (a pickaxe), a slicer (a sharpened shovel), and a battery-independent emergency communication device (a whistle).”
Carol let her guard down for a moment and looked annoyed, but I was delighted. There was a good chance I could pair myself off with Carol. The war was looking better and better, as far as I was concerned. And I wouldn’t have to carry a gun. I almost cheered.
I wasn’t the only one looking for the perfect partner. Carol was getting ogled from all angles. Brutes threw their shoulders back and Neanderthals jutted out chins. One or two looked at me, with dagger eyes, and I knew they would try to engineer a fight with me at the earliest possible opportunity. There is a certain type of man who will try to impress a certain type of woman by beating up other men. It’s as old as the caves – this primeval courting ritual. I would have to keep my wits about me, if I wasn’t to find my lovelorn face wedged under some grunt’s bovver boots. I avoided eye contact, lest I be accused of ‘startin’ smth’.
Carol insisted I went first with the rifle, but I couldn’t get the bullets into the barrels. I also got my hands covered in greasy oily gunk, so I had to go to the washroom to clean them.
“I’ll take the rifle, Fluffy,” she said. “You can carry the pickaxe, if you promise not to hurt yourself with it.”
“Does that mean you’re pairing up with me?” I asked, with a smile so wide it hurt.
“Sure, Fluffy. I’m a sucker for a shaggy mutt. Besides, you wouldn’t last five minutes without me. But remember, you keep your paws off me and you keep your wet nose out of my face. Understood?”
I nodded, quickly, like a child asked if he would like an ice cream.
“And one more thing,” she said.
“Anything!” I said. And I meant it. She could have asked me for a kidney.
“Don’t go running off and getting into trouble. You stay by my side, go where I tell you, and come back when I call. Got it?”
“Do I need to sit up and beg?” I asked, smiling.
“No, of course not… Not unless I ask you to.”
IV
Basic training grew ever more basic. For target practice, we drew large cows and stick men on cardboard boxes with felt tip markers. Latrine Breath endowed his stick man with genitalia worthy of an African statue, and I gave mine a natty bow-tie and a speech bubble that said “moo me, punk”. Carol didn’t laugh, or even notice. Her trigger finger was itchy, so I ran to the other end of the empty car park, carrying the flattened cardboard target on top of my head. I waited until the sergeant was nearby, in case one of the other conscripts might use me as target practice instead, and after dispatching my ass, claim Carol as his own. Why stop at beating men up to impress women? Why not just shoot them? “No man, no problem,” as Stalin used to say, and he wasn’t even courting.
When I got back I stood behind Carol and watched her take aim. She looked like she had done this before. A lot. There was a precision to her movements, a certainty to her actions. A coldness that almost made me shiver.
She pulled the trigger and our blunderbuss came as near as it could to firing. It certainly made a lot of noise and produced a lot of smoke.
“Well done, Carol. You’re one hell of a shot,” I said, feeling that was the right thing to say. “Scared me shitless!” I added, realising a nanosecond too late that this wasn’t the right thing to say.
I toyed with the idea of slapping her on the back, in that manly, butch way the other conscripts were doing. A month ago these kids were dole bird skivers, but after ten minutes holding a gun, they were all acting like characters from The Deer Hunter. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and so my hand kind of hovered in the air behind her.
“This gun might scare the enemy, but there’s no way it’s going to hit them,” she said.
“What’s its range?” I asked her, hoping range meant what I thought it meant.
“It’s accurate to about five metres,” she said.
“I can fart further than that!”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” she said.
We only had five rounds each to practise with. Carol took mine, after I asked what a safety catch was and pointed the gun in the wrong direction. That was fine by me. Apart from the almighty racket it made, our rifle had something called “a ferocious kickback” and I didn’t want to experience it. Target practice confirmed what I already knew about guns. They’re dangerous, they kill people, and it’s best to keep as far away from them as possible.
With all our practise bullets gone, it was time to hone our skills with the IED’s, or Improvised Extermination Devices. Captain McGuire promised to make us “pickaxe-wielding killing machines”.
“Couldn’t he make me a sandwich instead?” I said to Carol, but she just shushed me.
“Stick it to ‘em right between the eyes,” the captain said, in an accent altogether different from his official officer accent; and for my money, one altogether closer to his real self. “Your second best bet is a swift up thrust to the groin, or a side swipe down the anus. That’ll do the trick.”
“Bugger me bollix,” Latrine Breath heckled.
“And your bollocks is exactly what a zombov will bite into first, Private,” the captain said. “Remember that.”
I’d certainly remember it. The image wouldn’t leave me all day.
The captain warned us that “there are no Queensbury Rules when it comes to Heifferfolk. Blood and gore is all they know. Kill ‘em. Kill ‘em all. Let me here you say it, troops. Kill ‘em, kill ‘em all!”
To my surprise, most of the conscripts chanted it right back at him, even Carol.
“Kill ‘em, kill ‘em all!”
The captain held up a pickaxe, looking for all the world like one of the leather-clad gorillas from that 70’s TV show.
“Now go get ‘em troops. It won’t be cardboard cut outs this time tomorrow. Get that swing down. Charge!”
I gulped and looked at the captain. What did he mean “this time, tomorrow”? We were conscripts, for Christ’s sake. We didn’t go anywhere near the front lines. They knew we’d just run away. Real combat was for the real army.
I turned to raise my concerns with Carol but she was charging ahead, a Boadicea with a pickaxe. They all were.
“Run, damn you, run!” the captai
n shouted at me, so I ran. It was the one thing I could do well.
I caught up with Carol just as she was swinging the pickaxe into the eye of the five-foot five stickman I had drawn earlier. I winced and felt sorry for him. He was born, he was shot at and now he had a demonic maniac -- with red hair, perfect teeth and a beautiful figure – slashing a pickaxe into every felt-tipped orifice. It’s a hard life being a stick man for target practice.
“Nasty, brutish, and short,” I said, but Carol didn’t hear me. I looked down the line and saw a score of others, each hacking their heart out, and each one oblivious to anything but the desire to slash and burn and maim and kill.
I lifted my eyes to the dead suburb to the north of the industrial estate, beyond the rusting railing. A quote from of Hobbes’ Leviathan swam over my brain, blotting out the grunting, the yelling and sound of cardboard being torn apart. I hadn’t thought about it since I left secondary school, but I swear I actually heard the words in my head then, with a voice that was not my own. A projected memory, perhaps, or some kind of LSD flashback, more likely. From four hundred years ago, the ghost of Hobbes travelled through time to warn me what was to come.
"… a time of Warre, no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent