Wilson finally manages to lock onto the salamander. He opens up, but flames wash back to fill the channel. Both the tormented and their tormentors vanish, reabsorbed into the flames, once again becoming a myriad of invisible lives, as if the creation of the channel stretched their grain and made them visible for a few seconds. Wilson has no idea whether or not his bullets have struck their target. Everything is as before. The fire, the golden script beneath his feet, the intimations of movement. All his readings are infinite. He’s too shocked, too enfeebled to scream, but his mind’s clear and his mind is screaming. He can still see GRob’s blood jetting across the salamander’s snout from her severed neck arteries, an image that invokes nausea and gains in memory the luster of a vile sexuality. He wants to spend what’s left of his time seeking out the salamander, tracking it across the Word of Allah and exterminating it. He’s hot with anger, but his will is stunned, unequal to the duty, and after standing there a while, long enough to feel discomfort, he goes stumbling forward again, heartsick, trying to blot out the vision of her death, to cope with loss, an impossible chore since he’s not certain how much he’s lost. The measure of his grief seems too generous and he thinks he must be grieving for himself as well, for what he’s about to lose, though that’s the easiest route to take, to avoid looking closely at things. His faith has been shaken and restoring it’s got to be his priority. Perhaps, he thinks, GRob’s faith was to blame. Perhaps she was killed by doubt and not by chance. Perhaps it wasn’t only his protection that failed her, perhaps he didn’t preach to her enough. There’s guilt for Wilson at every turn, but justification serves him best, and he re-armors his faith with the notion that GRob simply couldn’t abandon her old preoccupations, couldn’t wrap her head around the new.
He can’t remember if he’s facing the right way, whether he spun completely around after he fired and is now walking back toward the flowers. This causes him some panic, but the dizziness he’s feeling, the pain and confusion, they trump panic, they thin it out until it’s an unimportant color in his head. Faith, he says to himself. Keep the faith. He goes another quarter-mile. The slowest quarter-mile yet. His air’s become a problem. Too hot. Baking his lungs, drying the surfaces of his eyes. Either the fire’s darkening or else a vast darkness is growing visible beyond the flames. Wilson knows if it isn’t the latter, he’s a dead man. Drugs are keeping the pain damned up, but he can feel it waiting to burst through and roll over him. The cooling unit in his helmet has done its job. His face isn’t badly burned. But the other units have been overtaxed and he doesn’t want to imagine how he looks under the suit. He’s weaving, staggering, almost falling, propping himself up with his rifle, moving like a barfly at closing time. Like he’s coming out of the desert dying of thirst, struggling toward the oasis. A shade tree, he thinks. That’s what Baxter said. First a riverbank and then a shade tree. Then Paradise. He’ll have to find the shade tree. In the dark. He can’t get a handle on his thoughts. Allah. That’s the only thought that holds and it’s scarcely a thought, more of an announcement, as if he’s some sort of fucked-up clock and every so often, irregularly, he bongs, “Allah,” a sound that gradually fades away into emotions and ideas that never quite announce themselves. Charlie. That name sputters up once in a while, too. Calling him Charlie means she must have thought of him that way… which makes the name more acceptable. But he can’t afford to care about the sweetness this implies.
More salamanders appear, first dozens, then hundreds of them, doubtless drawn by the kill. A slithering herd of identical terrors. They prowl alongside his path, crawling over one another’s tails, snapping and poking their snaky heads toward him, scuttling ahead and then peering back as if they’re saying, Come on, man! You can make it. Maybe we’ll let you make it… or maybe not. He’s afraid, but fear won’t take root in him, his mental soil’s too dried out to support it. Without the governance of fear, his courage is reborn. He begins to find a rhythm as he walks. The bongs grow more regular, aligning with the soldiering beats of his heart, until it’s like they’re overlapping, one “Allah” declining into the rise of the next, and underneath that sound—no, surrounding it!—are voices too vast to hear, spoken by people too large to see. He senses them as fluctuating pressure, the shapes of their words, like the flames, flowing around him. The intercession, he thinks. They’re singling him out, debating his worth, judging his faith. He can’t worry about their judgment, though. He’s got his job, he’s tasked to the max. Keep bonging, keep ringing out the name of God. He’s entirely self-motivating now.
2322 hours
Paradise awaits.
Somewhere far away in the absence, like a ragged hole in black cloth open onto a glowing white sky—a light, cool and promising. That’s what Wilson sees on waking. The rest is darkness. There’s a rushing in his ears that might be a faint roaring from the wall of fire, but he believes it’s a river nearby and he’s on the bank. He’s not overheated any longer. Tired, but calm. Pain is distant. The drugs are good. His helmet array is still lit, though the digital display screen is out, or else it’s showing nothing except black. He feels remote, cast down upon a foreign shore, and he gets an urge to look at his pictures, summons them up. Mom. Dad. Ol’ Mackie. Laura. They don’t hold his interest for long. They’re past considerations. He checks his medal file. It still seems incoherent—the IQ’s worn off—but nobody’s going to be reading it, anyway. Then he decides to change number 10 on his 10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know list. Just for the hell of it. Maybe they give out medals in Paradise. They give you better clothes, jewels and shit… so Baxter said. Why not a medal?
He wonders where he is, exactly. The border of hell, for sure. The shade tree, he supposes, lies between the light and the spot he’s resting in. Thinking comes hard. He keeps drifting off, hearing clicking noises, screams, the voices of ghosts. He considers doing more IQ. No, he tells himself. Let them see what they’re getting. The infidel, dumb as a stump, but janitor-smart. It’s what they expect. Lights start up behind his eyes, though not the light of heaven. That’s steady and these are actinic flashes. Phosphorous flares and rocket rounds. Some taking longer to fade against the blackness than others. As if inside him there’s a battlefield, a night engagement. He’s transfixed by their bursting flower forms. It’s time, he realizes. Time to get going—tempting as it is to lie there. He blanks out for a while and the thought of GRob brings him back. At least the thought begins with GRob. Her face. And then her face changes to Baxter’s face, to another, to another and another, the changes occurring faster and faster, imposed on the same head shape, until the faces blur together like he’s seeing the faces of everyone who was alive, the history of the world, of judgment day, of something, refined to a cool video image…