Desertcrawler
-01.jpeg)
But now, who's gonna stop him from meeting his darlings, now that he was out of that hellhole after the three darkest years of his thirty-year-old life? Excitement had been ignited in his frozen heart when he heard that the war had been finally over and he had been set free from the clutches of the Capitalists; no more days to spend sweating inside that stifling Gellenum Reserve, no more nights to lay awake in that creaky cot where mosquitoes had cocktail parties on his body. He was gonna go to his dear old Mary and his dear little Lily and his heart forgot the bounds which once had been keeping him inside that Reserve.
Before the war, before Lily, before Mary, before everything, when Jake was a teenage lad, riding his two hundred horsepower two-wheeler engine through the streets of Zone 10, which had been his parents’ home, he always dreamt of a future where the world was destroyed by all the hatred that bred in the chests of people. He pictured a world where cities were turned to deserts by weapons much more powerful than a thermonuclear warhead but much more precise in its operation too, much more controlled. He dreamt that he would be flying over the skies one day and look down upon these city-turned-deserts and say, “Told ya! That’s where your guns and your bombs would take you!” That was a crazy fantasy back then. He had no idea of how right he was going to be. His father sent him to Zone 13 to get that software engineering degree. “In this world of ones and zeroes, a software engineer is nothing less than God,” his father would say to him in one of his brooding moods. Jake went, but not without standing against his father’s ideas. In the end, Dan, Jake’s father, had to curtail Jake’s monetary privileges to convince him. Jake went, and he became an engineer of the software just as his father wanted him to be. He found a job in a software firm there in Zone 13 and a few years later, there he found Mary, the love of his life. She and Jake married three years later, and a year after that they had Lily. Jake was twenty-four at that time, quite young. How Mary turned him from a lad scorching the streets of Zone 10 in his 200hp beast to a man who willingly bound himself with the responsibilities of growing a family, only God knows; even Jake himself wasn’t sure. And then came the war. Jake had been married four years then and wanted a little break from the responsibilities. He saw his opportunity in the war. People were being recruited for the army in large numbers. But Jake didn’t want to be on the battlefield. That was too risky and he would have to live the rest of his life with the trauma. So he applied for the officer’s post. He got recruited as the supervisor in no time. But… just when he landed happily on the Gellenum Reserves, the Capitalists overthrew his government and took over the place. They were ruthless to the workers and Jake had to suffer too… for three long years. By the end of that year, he had the worst case of homesickness. And now, after all that pining away for his home, for his daughter and his wife, he was finally going home. The war had ended, and the Socio-colonialists won. And he was going home.
Jake was almost halfway through the route. His Solo-Jet was working as perfectly as the day he had come to the Reserves in it. With the speed that the Jet had been able to catch up, he would reach his home in Zone 13 in less than…
“Attention all flights flying over Zone 15! Turn off all your engines immediately! I repeat, flights flying over Zone 15, turn off all your engines!” the portable communicator which lay behind him on the passenger’s seat, blared at the top of its voice. But why? Jake was flying over Zone 15 and he couldn’t see any feasible explanation as to why he had to turn off all the engines of his plane. If he did that, he would hit the ground with no mercy at all. Why the heck would the control room issue such a weird and illogical comm…
Grrrrrm!!!
There was a loud explosive boom above him; Jake could hear it even with his noise-cancellation headset. It could not be thunder, no way. There was no cloud. What was it then? What the hell was it?... and then Jake knew what it was.
All the displays on the control panel of the jet went off at once. The built-in compass lost its wits and went round and round and round. The engines turned off on their own. This meant only one thing to Jake. What he had just heard wasn’t thunder for sure; it was the worst solar storm he had ever seen. He didn’t know solar storms could be that bad. But now, as the ground rapidly approached him, he had no time to think about some damned solar storm. He fastened his seat belt tightly and from the compartment beneath the control panel he pulled out a photograph of his wife and daughter, and pressed it hard against his chest, closing his eyes, waiting for the collision.
The nose of the plane hit on the ground and ripples went up through the metal, crushing and ripping the flying beast apart. The wings tore apart from the jet as if they were made from paper and flew off to another hundred meters. The wheels too broke apart from the jet and kept rolling on and on for not less than half a kilometre. Inside the plane, the leather covers of the seats were shredded to pieces and sponges from inside of the seats came protruding out. The control panel broke in the middle and would have crushed Jake’s skull, had it not been for the elephant foam airbags. But the metal of the machinery in the nose of the jet had protruded into the cockpit and had lodged its sharp edges in the flesh of Jake’s legs. His bones had turned into powder, his legs were like sausage. He cried, ripping his throat, but his voice could be heard little above the banging and crashing of the beast. He couldn’t open his eyes, he dared not to see what he would see if he opened his eyes. When all things became still, the silence veiled over. As if it was a shroud placed over the plane. Jake’s screams died with the other noises. He wasn’t there. His self had drifted off from his body to a place of comatose. A place buried so deep inside him, that it couldn’t be said to be a part of him.
-
When his eyes opened, Jake found himself still buckled to his seat. He could not feel his legs. His back pained tremendously. It felt like his neck would snap. His eyes hurt like hell. He could smell the reek of burnt engine oil. He could taste blood. He saw flames and smoke. He felt the heat gushing. It took another minute for him to be completely aware of where he was and what had happened. He removed his seat belt. He was pinned on the seat by the nose machinery that lay crushing his legs. He pushed it with all his might. The heat was getting stronger. After much effort, he managed to push the machinery back enough to get himself out of there. He held on to the backseat and pulled himself. He moved, but a terrible pain shot up from his sausage legs. He managed to drag his legs along with his torso out of the cockpit. The plane was much larger for a lone man. It was supposed to be a family plane. It had cost Jake a fortune to buy this. His father had partly paid and part of the payment he loaned from the Zonal Bank. It had a fridge, a double-doored one. On the lower part of the fridge, he kept canned food and stuff, which was empty now; there had been no proper store in the Reserve. On the upper berth, he kept his liquor bottles. He held the handle of the fridge with his right hand and a shelf in the wall with his left to pull himself up. Opening the fridge and keeping the balance at the same time was difficult for him but he did it. He picked up a bottle of Rum and let himself down on the floor slowly. He sat there, leaning against the fridge and gulped down the rum neat. A few draughts later, his senses blurred. He had not touched liquor in the last three years. The Masters of the Reserve saw to that, just like they saw that he doesn’t get to call home. Or receive any correspondence, for that matter.
The rum made him think of Mary and Lily. They didn't know he was coming. They might already have considered him dead. Did Mary find someone else to fill his absence? No, that was so unlike Mary. He had tried calling home after he was released, with his Portable Communicator, which the overseers called PorComm. But they must have changed the number or something, the one he remembered was not available anymore. There’s no other way of getting to them. He wished he had a phone or a laptop, he could have tried emailing them. But his old ones were confiscated by the Capitalists and where they had taken them, only they know. He was lucky that the Solo-Jet was there just where he had parked it when he first went to that hellhole. And now, he was stuck in a plane crash. But where was he? As far as he can remember the way from the Gellanum Reserves to Zone 13 didn’t have a single inch of uninhabited land. So he must have crashed in some city, or a town at the least. So, why was nobody coming to get him? Well, maybe they’re afraid or something. No matter, he can wait till help arrives. He will finish the rum till then. He took another sip and placed the bottle down. His eyes fell to something lying under the passenger’s seat. It was only two arm's length, but Jake thought over a minute whether he should see what it was or not, such was his exhaustion. In the end, he crawled towards it and picked it up. It was a ball of glossy paper. He uncurled the ball. It was the photograph of Mary and Lily. He must have dropped it during the crash. He brought it closer to his face and said to the two smiling faces in the photograph, “I am coming home, girls. I am coming home.”
-
More than fifteen minutes passed and yet nobody was there to rescue him. He was getting impatient. What was the matter? Jake put the bottle of Rum by the side of the fridge and dragged himself to the emergency door. He got himself to sit up, holding the compartment by the side of the door and pulled on the red lever. The door opened outwards smoothly. A gust of hot air brushed his face. It was bright outside, he had to squint. There was no sound of any vehicles or any men; or anything else. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the brightness and he saw. He saw a desert. Bright and golden sand lay like a velvet cloth across the land as far as his eyes reached. What the hell? There was no desert on the route from the Reserve to his city. It was a route that went over overcrowded regions. So where the hell did he crash? The nearest desert he knew was in Zone 31. That was another Sector altogether, about seven hundred kilometres away from Sector Nine, across which the route lay. No matter how hard he tried to find one, there was no explanation for whatever had happened.
The pain in his legs was getting worse. He needed a painkiller badly. There might be one in the first aid box, but painkillers won’t solve the problem. He needed to get to a doctor as soon as possible. He got the first aid box, the ProComm and even a compass and a map from the cockpit and came out of the plane. Looking at the solo-jet from the outside made him wonder how he had survived that crash. The plane was ripped apart as if it was made of plastic. Smoke was still rising from the nose. One of the engines was detached from the wing and rested on the ground a little away. He went there and sat resting against the engine. Jake tried to contact the control room with the ProComm but he only got back static. He kept trying all the numbers he remembered. None of them got connected. He had to be somewhere in an unmarked territory and only that seemed to be the possible explanation. Or else why would the calls won’t connect? Such problems existed when he was a kid. His father would come out of the house sometimes to get a clear voice over the calls. Those were problems with the outdated systems. A ProComm catching no network? He had never heard such bullshit anywhere. He stopped trying after a while. He was tired of hearing those same three beeps and the no-network message after that. He wanted to break the ProComm open. But that won’t solve his problem, will that? He opened the first aid kit, there was a little bottle of medical spirit. He dabbed the wounds on his arms and torso with a piece of cotton soaked in it, clenching his teeth every time the spirit touched the wound. He then put some clean cotton and put band-aids over all the big cuts. The small cuts, he ignored. There was little spirit left on the bottle. He put the bottle in his pocket along with the painkillers and the photograph and brought out his compass and map from the other pocket. He tried guessing his position on the map but it was worthless. There was no way he could find a desert which had somehow magically appeared in the place where there ought to be cities filled to the brim with people and pollution. Speaking of pollution, Jake noticed only then that he wasn’t able to breathe properly in the desert air. Maybe he had been keeping it off as tiredness, but it was not. There was something in the air that made it difficult for him to breathe it. Or probably it had lower levels of oxygen. For whatever reason it may be, his breaths were shorter than usual. The place was creeping him out. It felt more like a graveyard than a desert. It was nothing that Jake saw or heard that made him have that feeling. It was just intuition. It told him that something with this place is off, apart from its location.
It was no place to wait for rescue. He needed to move before anything bad happened. The eerie silence gave him an ominous vibe. He pocketed his compass and map and looked at the sun and his watch. It was four in the noon and the sun was to his right. He computed the directions and headed towards the east. That seemed to him to be the closest to any human settlements, intuitively. He couldn’t drag himself for there was no way he could get a grip on the sand. So he moved like a rattlesnake, using his whole upper body to move forward.
-
Night fell at seven o’clock, which meant he was not much farther away from his city's time-zone. But that time-zone stretched over the entire latitude so it was no relief to him. With the night came the cold. In the heat of the day, Jake had doffed his jacket and left it behind. Now he regretted it. The sand cooled off more quickly than he expected it to. He had no torch with him, only the light of the ProComm, and he didn’t want to waste the battery of the Communicator, so he travelled in the dark. Adding to his misfortunes, it was a new moon night. There was not even a speck of light that reflected off the surface. At one point, the night’s veil became so thick that Jake decided to camp there for the night. He took a little sip from the spirit bottle and made a pillow with the sand. He lay there and his tiredness soon overtook the cold and pushed him into sweet sleep.
He started in the middle of the night and looked around in panic. There was no one. He sighed. He felt as if someone was watching him and coming nearer. No, he can’t sleep in that place. The little breeze blew the sand and placed them delicately in his beard while he was asleep and now it itched. He cannot sleep. He would see that something again. He was scared of having to see it. Especially because he was sitting there in the middle of that darkness, all alone. Jake decided he had rested enough when the sky began getting lighter, although he had barely slept. Half of the night he stood on the verge of falling asleep, kept there by the cold and hunger; the other half he lay awake, fearing that some animal (though he felt that something deadlier was looking at him, he didn’t admit it for it sounded childish) might get nearer to him. And now, as the sun started to emerge from the horizon, he started crawling towards it, with unfinished sleep prickling his eyes. He took a sip of the spirit before moving and noted that it barely had more than three sips of spirit left. The day before, before the night fell, he had turned around to see how far had he travelled and saw that his crashed jet had become a tiny spot. Now, as the sun loomed directly over him, he turned once again and it was gone. Wherever he was, he was not surrounded by the desert and the desert alone. He had to stick to the route and his intuition. He had to have faith that soon he would get to where he was headed. If it was indeed Zone 15 where he had crashed, it would take him another two days to reach his city. He hoped that he would see civilization before that. But somewhere in the depth of his heart, he knew that it was a fait thing to hope for. Nevertheless, he did not stop. The photograph in his pocket gave him purpose. And he didn’t want to lose that hope that he would soon meet his family. It was what gave him the spirit to keep moving forward.
Hours passed and the sky turned orange. It was five o’clock. The orange sky and the golden sand enchanted him. He was hypnotized by that play of lights. He kept moving forward but his eyes were lost. There was nothing around him except for sand and the sky, nothing at all. Not even desert plants or animals. His throat felt parched but he didn’t bring out his spirit. He had no idea how further he had to travel. He was feeling hot even in his shirt now. But he can’t leave it like his jacket. He stopped and tied it around his waist. The vest was sticking to his skin with sweat. And then something happened. The wind dropped. The silence pressed upon his ears. Jake felt like he was in a closed room. The sound of his breathing and his heart beating were the only sounds that he heard. He looked towards the sky and… it was suddenly veiled by dark clouds. The brightness of the desert was gone. In its stead was a grey ominous gloom. Something told Jake that they were not rain clouds. They were harbingers of something dark and evil. The feeling that someone was following observing him hit Jake again. He felt that whoever it was, was coming closer. Jake was frozen. He could not move. He had nothing with him to protect himself. His hands fumbled in his pockets. A bottle of spirit? It could be only used if broken, and if broken it won’t hold any more spirits. A compass? Not that he needed it that much, provided that his watch was working perfectly, but there was no way he could use it as a weapon. The map was useless too and so was ProComm. Wait. The ProComm. It had a metallic body and a collapsible metallic antenna. But the antenna could be locked. He could use it. Yes. That was the only object with him which can be used as a weapon. He would need the antenna only if he made satellite calls, and by the look of things, he won’t get to anyone with satellite calls. He need not use the whole ProComm. So he pulled it out of his pocket and detached its antenna and locked it. It was strong and sturdy enough to pierce an organ or two. He put the ProComm back and held the antenna tightly. That thing, whatever it was, was near. He could sense it. He tried to anticipate any possible course of action that could follow. But his panicking brain couldn’t anticipate much.
And then Jake heard a rustle behind him. With a frozen heart, he turned and saw it.
An undead corpse towering over him; its face decaying; a stench worse than rotting flesh emanated from it; white pus coming out of its eyes; lips curled to expose yellow sharp teeth with dark and decaying gums; skin flaking off its hands; it wore a torn rag vest which came down to the knees; it was lean, like a figure made of bamboo; its skin was black, pitch black. It leaned slowly towards Jake; slowly and slowly, ever so slowly. And it suddenly screamed! Its voice rang throughout the desert and its reverberations came back to reinforce it. Jake felt the scream piercing his eardrums. He could almost feel blood oozing out of his ears. He gripped the antenna tightly. But he couldn’t attack the… the… whatever it was. He was petrified with fear. And then he felt that the undead creature wasn’t alone. He looked around and what he saw took him to the brink of a heart attack. The entire desert was filled with thousands and thousands of creatures, the same as the one towering over him. And all of them were screaming, all at once. Blood trickled down Jake’s ears. His eyes bulged with horror and the fear constricted his throat. There was nothing that could save him, no power in the world. He held the antenna ever so tightly and with a leaping heart he thrust it forward.
There was a flash. Everything became whiter and brighter than Jake’s eyes could take and then he passed off.
-
He saw the desert stretch out as far as his eyes permitted him to see. The undead men were gone. It was only him and the desert. The pain in his legs was gone. Neither was he afraid anymore. He felt a strange sense of peace and tranquillity. It was so odd a feeling that for a moment Jake considered, “Have I died? Is this the afterlife?”
But no! It was not. He realised it before long, for everything had a vague quality like he was looking at everything through a frosted glass. It was a dream, a strangely immersive one, that too. And then the sands rose. They made all kinds of forms and shapes in his front. They rose in clouds and slowly arranged themselves in the form of buildings. Cars were being formed too and so were billboards, flyovers and roads. In no time it became a city. And actual people started to appear. The sands were sands no more. Nor the desert remained a desert. He was sitting beside a fountain. Before he could grasp what was happening, he rose. He rose in the air. No, he didn’t have to stand on his feet. This was some external force lifting him. The sound of the shifting sands was eaten up by the sound of this newborn city, teeming with life. He was flying. And he rose up and up and up. The city became smaller beneath him. He could see its borders now. There was a forest beyond its northern frontier. Towards the south, there was another city. He kept rising higher and higher and suddenly stopped. There was a loud noise. Something was roaring amongst the clouds. Roaring so loud that Jake’s ears would have bled had it not been a dream. But had they not bled already? There was only one thing that could roar this loud in the sky, a jet. It was a military jet; must have already passed till Jake reached up to that point in the sky, and so he was now hearing its roar. But no, there wasn’t only one. Three other jets appeared from the cloud to his left and darted past him so fast that he could barely catch a glimpse. They were not just military jets, they were bomber planes. And as they crossed, they dropped bombs on the city. Suddenly, the force which was keeping Jake afloat vanished, and he plunged into the sky beneath him. Panic hastened his heartbeats. He knew it was a dream but still, it was so real that he wished he would wake up soon. He was following the bombs, not intentionally, no; he had no control over his body now. Just before the bomb hit the ground, he stopped falling and saw it all. The bombs hit the city and blew it up. Not just blew it, the bomb was too powerful for that. It turned the city into dust. It cracked apart every building, vehicle, billboard or road those sands had formed and returned them all to dust. From dust we came, and dust shall we become! He dropped but felt nothing upon hitting the ground. He looked around him, the fire had engulfed the entire city. Citizens of that urban settlement cried and shouted for help in agony. There were limbs severed from bodies. Some bodies were turned to charred jelly. And then another series of bombs hit. There was nothing visible through the flames this time. But it did not affect him. Dark clouds of smoke billowed out skywards. It just went on and on and by the time the smoke and the flames receded, Jake couldn’t believe what those bombs had turned the city into; pure dust and nothing else. The city had risen from the desert and now became the desert. It was just like his teenage dream. “Told ya! That’s where your guns and your bombs would take you!” he wanted to shout. Just what he had thought. And then the sun moved quicker above his head. It was as if he was suddenly inside a timelapse video. The day became night and night became day within seconds and it went on and on and on. And then it suddenly stopped. Jake lost count of how many days passed in those few seconds. Who cares? It’s just a dream. And then that force was back. That force, which now raised him once again towards the sky. He spread his arms out to feel the air but nothing was there to feel. It was as if Jake had lost all senses except his sight and hearing. He went up and up but to the same point where he stopped before. He looked beneath him and what he saw was… desert. There was no forest towards the north, no city towards the south. All had become a vast desert. Jake had never felt this in a dream before but this dream… it was so real… it was as if this had happened in the actual world. The clouds which were clouding his vision of the city vanished. He rose higher. And higher. And higher. And stopped. He could see almost half of his country now. And now he knew where he was all that time. Zone 15. The place where his plane had crashed. And from here he could see Zone 13 and the city of the Gellenum Reserve. He couldn’t believe what he saw. His city, Zone 13 was under a transparent dome. He knew what it was. The Gellenum Reserve had it, the covering. It was an artificially supported atmosphere. He could never understand the need for it in the Gellenum Reserve but now, he could see. It wasn’t just an artificial atmosphere… It was a shield; from all the radiation that drenched the regions outside these domes, which had been turned into deserts. The thing in the air that made it so hard to breathe was nothing else, but the radiation and the dust. This was what the war had wreaked upon his country. Sure his side had won the war… but the cost? There was nothing left in his country, except for the few dome cities. Thousands of cities had been turned into dust. Billions of people were burnt down to their basic components. Jake felt loss inside him. As if the war had made a hole in him. He felt himself getting sucked into it. And then he woke up.
-
It was noon. The sun shone over his face. The loss he felt in the dream was still inside him. But the fear, it was gone. He could barely remember those undead creatures. He pulled out his bottle of spirit and gulped it all in one go. The hell with it! He had seen that the desert does not end till Zone 13. So he would meet no one in between. Fine! At least he had been going in the right direction. He removed his boots and his pants for he decided that they were useless as he could feel nothing with his legs and merely added to the load he had to pull with him. Then he threw away the bottle of spirit and the map. He pulled the photograph out and kissed the smiling faces of his daughter and wife, his girls. And put it in his breast pocket, as closer to his heart as he can. He took the ProComm in one hand and the compass in the other and started slithering towards Zone 13. He had seen, he was still far. It would take him another day or two. He had to survive. He had to see his family. He muttered under his breath, “Mary and Lily, anything for you, girls, anything for you.”
-
He kept on moving the entire day and rested little at night. He was no more afraid of that bizarre feeling that he sometimes felt as if someone was clocking his movements. But the next morning, when he looked down to see the time, he realized that the battery of the watch had died. Shit! He had considered bringing the solar-powered one, while in the cockpit but brought the smartwatch thinking that it would be of more use. He hadn’t even thought about the battery part. Sometimes he doubted how he had passed those three years supervising those mongrels, sticking to even the details of minute procedures. No worry, though. He had the compass. He would keep moving, no need to stop. He took off the watch and shoved it in the breast pocket. He had not even gone half a dozen meters, he stopped again. That watch in the breast pocket was hurting his chest. “Piece of junk!” he muttered under his breath and threw it away, before continuing to move again. Hours passed and he grew confused about the direction but his compass kept him on track. He was glad that he hadn’t left it thinking the watch would help him. That watch was one traitorous son of a bitch.
When the night fell, Jake realized that all these days he could have moved in the night too, with that compass in his hand. What a fool he had been! It must be the lack of oxygen and hunger and thirst. He had never been this sloppy before. He had been tight about all matters. And now even the most obvious of things started to slip off his mind. It was not a good indication. He had to reach his city as soon as possible, or else he’ll be lost in the desert forever. That forever wouldn’t last a few more days without food and water though.
He moved that night. He was dog-tired but he kept his pace. He moved that night not only for his family, he moved to survive. Thirst and hunger had started getting on his head. And if he didn’t reach the city soon…
-
The day after his watch’s battery died, he realized that the compass, which he had been using in the watch’s stead, was faulty. The electromagnetic pulse which killed off the engine, had disabled the compass too. He came to know about it when the next morning he looked at his compass and saw the sun rising in the north. Rage and sadness engulfed him then and there. He shouted and cried about his hopeless life. There was no way he could meet his family now. The hell with his family! He couldn’t even get a drop of water anymore. He had lost all hope. He lay there on the sand, crying and cursing at his fate. But had the watch been faulty too then? Had he no hope of survival from the minute he stepped out of his cockpit? But how had the watch been running? Shouldn’t it be dead in the solar storm too since it was electrical? Maybe he had kept it off during that time, or maybe such small machinery didn't get affected much by solar storms. Why was he interested in his watch though? What the hell would he think about it now? He was going mad! Asking illogical questions to himself! Ahhh! His stomach! It hurt! It hurt from hunger! His throat was like sandpaper. Each time he swallowed his saliva, it felt like a thousand pins pierced the inner lining of his throat. He had to eat something, the hunger, he could not bear it. He needed something to eat. Something to eat! Eat! EAT!
He tore open his pockets and searched. There was nothing except for the photograph. Who the hell cares about a printed piece of paper? He crumpled it and put it in his mouth and started chewing. The little saliva he secreted moistened the paper gleefully. He swallowed it and felt it moving along his oesophagus satisfyingly. Ahh! That would do. That would do for now. He needed to move. Water. He needed water. What was that there on the horizon? Was that water? He moved with all his might towards the… towards the mirage.
-
Pvt. Binny, of the 32nd infantry, Frontier Security Force, was in the watchtower of the Zone 13 frontier when it happened. He had only been home for three days from the battlefield. He had fought in the war more valiantly than any other twenty-six-year-old soldier would dare to fight. His family had been there on the port to receive him. They hadn’t got any news of him during the war; the Europeans and their fucking EMPs. Comms had been closed for civilian lines because of them. His family: his forty-year-old mother and his father of nearly the same age with greying hair and his little sister of seventeen, all of them had been waiting at the platform, uncertain if he would arrive in the uniform or wrapped up in the tricolour. When Pvt. Binny had looked out at the arrival platform from his seat in the Air Vessel, he had seen their expressionless faces. There had been a huge question pasted on them, “Where is he?” When they had seen him with his bedding strapped to his shoulder and his trolley by his right side, they had come running and embraced him. He had never been more glad to be with his family than he had been then. Three days after that he was posted in the watchtower. It was a sitting-job, now that there was nothing outside the frontier except for the desert. There was virtually no risk involved. He was kind of sad because of it too, after all the action of the war.
He had seen the war breaking people apart. Soldiers lost their comrades and more often than not their entire platoons. The enemy haunted them in their dreams. The dread dissolved into them like tea from a tea bag dissolving in hot water. All their training hid behind their frozen hearts whenever they saw the enemy coming with their Kalashnikovs. Such was the battlefield. But it could not break Pvt. Binny. Because he had known and he had been ready before it happened. He had no friends in the army, he made sure to keep his attitude professional. Even when a tank came in front of him, he stood firm in his position and without a flinch he kept fighting. But now that the war was over, he kind of missed the action. He was a pure passionate fighter, fighting not for the country but for fighting’s sake. He would get no medals, he knew that. His actions had gotten half of his platoon killed in a bunker in Russia. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t fight for glory; one would be making a grave mistake if one thought so. He looked like a man from the outside, but it was only a disguise. He was an animal from within.
He was sitting that day, in the watchtower and keeping an eye towards the empty desert, hoping that some danger lurking behind the dunes would emerge. But none did… at least not from the desert. Before it happened he heard the roar of the plane from above. He looked skywards and saw it happen. A European jet dropped huge EMP charges and flew off. Suddenly the radio was blaring warning people to turn electronics off. But no message announced that fast would have had any effect. People were still confused about the military orders when the sky exploded and everything from cars to planes halted. Thanks to the fact that it was Sunday, not many planes were in the sky. Nevertheless, there was one Airbus. And it hadn’t turned the engine off in time. It plunged, like a diving eagle. Pvt. Binny saw it happening before his eyes. It hit the Bottle-opener shaped tower in Locality twelve and the building ripped apart and fell. As far Pvt. Binny’s knowledge went, there was a Gellenum depot just beneath that tower, and he was proved right when a ground-shaking explosion sent the entire city into panic. All the military personnel were suddenly on high alert. Pvt. Binny got no orders but he too was curious about the European jet. After the war had been disbanded, what the hell was this? Even if it was the kind of action Pvt. Binny would have loved on the battlefield, he was a bit worried as it was close to home… where his family was. He had no phone with him, he didn’t keep one; so he tuned the radio and listened if there was any piece of news about what the hell had just happened. The Territorial News was broadcasting about the plane.
“... and it flew over Zone 13, dropping more than a dozen EMPs. The range of the pulse went over a hundred kilometres in radius, but since most of the area covered by the EMPs was desert regions, only Zone 13 got affected. This raises the question, of whether the attack was intentional, in which case the reason for targeting Zone 13 remains elusive, or was it some kind of machinery failure? Stay tuned and we will be right back after a short commercial break with an answer…”
The question was reasonable, why would anyone attack Zone 13? It had been one of the most peaceful zones during the war. But then again, the rest three-quarters of the country, which was now desert, had been peaceful too. Why would the European Capitalists fake a surrender in an intercontinental war? The answer took three days to come, and it was, they did not. The incident over Zone 13 was just an accident. For three days they checked the black box of the flight and interrogated the pilot and the co-pilot, and the only truth they uncovered was, they were drunk. Pilots going back home after the war, drunk to the throat, had pulled the lever unconsciously and all the EMPs loaded into the plane dropped off. What was more terrifying was that the plane had thermonuclear warheads loaded into its arsenal too. One wrong button and another zone would have been turned into the desert.
Five days after the incident, Pvt. Binny and Lt. Batra were having lunch together in the army canteen. Pvt. Binny was sitting opposite Lt. Batra, facing the window behind him, through which the desert beyond the border could be seen clearly. Pvt. Binny and Lt. Batra were talking about their families; Pvt. Binny had finally decided that he should have someone in the camp who would look after his back and he found that Lt. Batra was competent for the job. Pvt. Binny was about to put his third morsel of chapati into his mouth when he saw that there was something in the desert. He told Lt. Batra and both of them peered out of the window for a very long time, trying to figure out what that could be. And then Pvt. Binny realized that it was a man. Meals were left half-eaten, as everyone in the canteen ran out to see who crawled in the desert sands. Lt. Batra told about it to Major Bansal and Major Bansal ordered to bring the man in, but with proper caution. Pvt. Binny and Lt. Batra went in the expedition party of four, into the desert. The rover sped across the sands and halted close to the man. All four soldiers descended in posture. There was no need to take unnecessary risks, if the man was hostile, they would shoot at once. They stepped nearer and nearer to the man, till they realized that the man-shaped figure in front of them was not a man. It had transformed into a beast.
-
He was taken into Zone 13. Face recognition said that he was Jake D’Souza, a citizen of Zone 13, of Locality 13. His legs were missing, there were only the femurs protruding out of the hips. His face was blooded and his beard and hair had turned golden, getting covered by the sand. The flesh of the thumb and forefinger of his left hand were missing too. How was the man alive? The doctors had no idea. He died, however, about an hour later. The coroner was called in, and the autopsy report was written. He found Gellenum traces beneath the man’s fingernails and traces of silica in his nostrils. They sent a photograph of the man to the Gellenum Reserve which was a few hundred kilometres away from them and confirmed that the man worked there. The coroner had cut open his abdomen too, for he found traces of human flesh stuck between his teeth. What the coroner saw almost made him throw up. The man’s abdomen was filled with human blood and flesh. After running DNA tests, the coroner confirmed that the flesh and the blood were the man’s own. Finishing up the report, the coroner sewed the man close and handed the corpse to Ramakant, the morgue attendant.
Ramakant had been looking at the bizarre proceedings from a corner, as he almost always did, making sure that the coroner gets whatever he wanted during the examination. Had the body come before last week, Ramakant would have been scared as shit. As it happened, things have changed since last week. Before that EMP or something went off in the skies and killed their electronics, things had been better. Even during the war, Zone 13 had been a peaceful zone which saw no unnatural increase in dead bodies. But that EMP which, as he heard on one news channel, was supposed to kill only electronics and not human beings, had somehow annihilated entire Locality 12 and almost half of Locality 13. The EMP on its own did not cause it, as Ramakant came to know later, it was because the EMP had disabled an airbus and it collided with a skyscraper. The skyscraper tore apart on the collision and it fell on top of the Gellenum depot which was on the opposite side of the road. People had heard about Gellenum mine explosions before, but they hadn’t seen it burning before their eyes before. It burnt ten times more viciously than petrol and obliterated the entire Locality 13 within seconds. The firefighters, who went there to take control of the situation, were scorched to the bone. After the fire was controlled with air support, hundreds of unidentifiable and unclaimed bodies started to come in. It was when Ramakant faced terror. Old people, young men and women, and children of the age of his daughter came burnt and charred in hundreds. When the rescue team reached the epicentre of the fire, bodies without limbs and even without heads started to come in. Ramakant would never forget that day. He was sick of the burnt flesh smell and threw up that night in the staff washroom. Never in his half a dozen years of attending to dead bodies, had he ever been nauseated by any corpse, but that day… the smell of burnt human flesh had hit him harder than a truck on a highway. He had to call in sick for the next day. The day after that, the dead bodies had stopped coming. Ramakant was glad that it was over. But now, standing in front of the legless, two-limbed creature, he wondered if he had had enough. He had to take voluntary retirement. He would find something else, there’ll always be something else. But he had seen enough dead bodies for the images to last with him for a lifetime.
Ramakant lifted the corpse to move it to the stretcher and he was shocked by how light it was. It was as if that man was all bones and no flesh at all. He covered it with the white sheet and pushed the stretcher out of the room and through the hallways with his usual dead face, which the other attendants of the hospital dreaded. He swung the door to the mortuary open and brought the corpse in. But he halted there by the door. He looked around him, searching for an empty chamber to put the body in. But the mortuary chambers were all occupied by the recent inhabitants. He went from the beginning to the end of the unidentified section and there was no space left there. He then checked the section with the names. He hated this section. He could deal with a dead body pretty well, but a dead body with a name? It somehow made those corpses seem alive. It made Ramakant think about their lives which was the last thing he wanted to think about. He went searching and searching and then he found one. It was weird. One single chamber was left empty in the middle of all the occupied ones. Ramakant always made sure that the chambers were allotted systematically. How did he leave one empty chamber in the middle then? It must be that new boy, what was his name again? Ramakant forgot. He had joined just a month ago and was still making more mistakes than Ramakant liked to deal with. He shook his head in frustration and went to fetch the body. Before he put the corpse into the mortuary chamber, he wrote its name on the tag hanging from its hand and also wrote it on a blank placate with a removable marker to place it on the front of the chamber. He picked the body up, once again wondering how a human being can be that light, and placed it carefully in the chamber. He pushed the chamber close and put on the placate with his name. He looked at the names of the two chambers between which he lay. They shared the newbie’s surname. Somehow the right chamber had been left empty for that half-man. He stepped back and looked at the names once again and muttered under his breath, “Lily, Jake and Mary… Rest in peace, you guys,” and then he walked away.
Jake had, at last, came back to his family after three long years… in death.
*
Very Nice. Keep it up.
ReplyDelete