Mal and I were struggling along in the middle of the line carrying one of the stretchers, and so we weren’t the first to see the village. Mal was limping badly from mine wounds to his thighs, and the guy we were carrying was having a very bad time of it. He’d taken a head shot and you could see his brain. I was half delirious with hunger, exhaustion, and nicotine withdrawal, and when I first heard someone hiss that there was a village up ahead I was inclined to dismiss it as another illusion.
But soon enough we realized it was really there, and stopped. The tree cover round the village, now about two hundred yards ahead, was too thick for us to see anything even with binoculars. Faintly, carried through the thick and swirling air, we thought we could hear shouting, and even singing.
Gap villagers don’t sing. They simply don’t do it. They’re not very cheerful people.
The Lieutenant decided to leave one person with the wounded, and that the rest of us should go ahead to check out the situation. He motioned to me to lead us forward. He generally did.
We crawled across the forest floor, keeping behind bushes, sliding under piles of whispering leaves. An insane level of caution had become an unthinking instinct. There was nothing we wanted to see more than some of our own kind, but nothing we needed less than another firefight. As we got closer the singing became more distinct, and finally we were able to recognize the tune. It was from a song which was getting big airplay just before we went into The Gap, though the words seemed to be different.
Either way it meant the singers were some of ours, and we hauled ourselves to our feet and walked the rest of the way, Mal and I walking point. I don’t know what Mal was thinking—about noodles, probably—but I was fantasizing about cigarettes. I could almost feel the smoke in my lungs. I thought I might try having five at once.
The village was in a large clearing, and from forty yards away we could see soldiers in the remnants of the same army fatigues we wore. They didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, seemed in fact to be wandering around with a glazed look in their eyes. There was something odd about them, and I held my hand back to the others, urging them to be quiet and keep out of direct sight.
No one wanted to be in that village more than I, but I was getting a weird feeling. Instead of going straight into the front, I led them around the side and we carefully approached the village from a different angle. The closer we got, the easier it became to distinguish another sound, beneath the guttural singing and shouting. It sounded a bit like crying, or more precisely, like a number of people crying very quietly.
You didn’t see many tears in The Gap. People were either dead or glad to still be alive. I looked at Mai. We turned to the Lieutenant and he shrugged, clearly out of his depth. Then we walked into the village.
The first thing we saw was a little girl. Both of her legs had been cut off at the knee, and she was tied to a board which was propped up against one of the houses. She was crying quietly to herself, her eyes gazing without sight past us into some inner world. As the others stared at her I ducked my head into the house. I nearly vomited when I saw what was inside, and I thought I’d seen everything by then.
When I came back out I felt as if the world had changed, and as if it would never be the same again. I signaled dreamily to Mal and we walked a little farther along the village path, mouths open against the smell. We could see other soldiers, half naked, wandering around some of the huts a little distance away, but that wasn’t what we were looking at.
Gap children’s bodies lay all over the ground, broken across paths and lolling out of the doorways of huts, some little more than babies, others in their early teens. Some were recently dead, others had bloated in the heat until their guts exploded. Many of the corpses seemed to have a distinctive wound, a deep slash across the throat. The dust was crusted brown with their blood.
We came upon a makeshift pen in which about ten children squatted in the dirt. Some were missing limbs, their stumps hastily cauterized. Others were bleeding to death there and then, while the remainder stared hopelessly up at the sky, flinching as they heard us approach. Most of them had been blinded.
The rest of the unit caught up with us then, grinding to a horrified halt, and as we stood staring we heard a shout, and turned to see a soldier pointing at us. He was standing in the clearing at the center of the village, and it looked as if there were others there. We left the pen and approached him, passing walls stained with splatters of blood. Yards away we stopped, and this is what we saw:
Ten soldiers, most naked and dripping with sweat, others with strange scraps of clothes still hung around them.
A small pile of children’s bodies, the clearing red with what had escaped from them.
Three live children, two girls and a boy, held down on their knees by makeshift wooden frames.
And in the middle of all this, nodding his head in time to the song which the soldiers were chanting, stood their Lieutenant. He alone of all the soldiers was more or less still in uniform, though his pants were around his ankles. He had his cock out, and was thrusting it in and out of a gash which had been cut across the throat of the five-year-old girl who was being held down in front of him. Her head was held up so that he could see her eyes as he worked. She was still alive.
We stood there for an eternity, without moving, as the other soldiers stared back at us. It felt as if the world had stopped.
I pulled the rifle from over my shoulder and shot the Lieutenant in the head.
That moment is there every second of my life. Just as a fact, like my muscles are a fact and the weather is a fact and the color of my hair is a fact. In retrospect, and maybe at the time, the rifle seemed to swing perfectly into position, to fit so snugly into my shoulder; and as I pulled the trigger I knew, as if my soul was carrying it home, that the bullet would hit the very atom I was aiming for.
That shot is my life, and for that instant I felt like an angel, of sorts: not redeeming, because I redeemed nothing, least of all myself. I was simply under a fate that fell from the heavens and flattened me into the ground. Sometimes when I wake in the night and wonder what has startled me, I think it is an echo of that shot, of that moment, and I wonder if it will ever cease.
Nearly cried quietly in the back of the car. I wished I could reach out to her, could tell her that it was a long time ago. I was glad that Vinaldi hadn’t described, and probably didn’t know, what we’d found in all of the huts in the village. The leftovers. We did what we could with skinFix and bandages, but it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough. Then we left the soldiers there, abandoning them to the forest.
Vinaldi was quiet, and then I heard a spark and the intake of breath as he lit a cigarette.
“One more little detail,” he said. “The man Jack shot, the Lieutenant? He was Arlond Maxen’s older brother. They were in the same unit, and Arlond made it back out.”
Nearly sniffed, and looked out of the window. She was a bright girl. She’d worked it out. Then in the rearview mirror I saw her eyes looking at mine, and she asked me a question. “What are you going to do now?”