In the orange and violet blaze of impending sunrise, the truck broke down.
Their journey lasted only a few quiet hours in the ragged night. Conversation had been spare, even after Kasse puked his guts out from his overzealous reunion with cigarettes, nervous chainsmoking putting him square in the midst of a short lived surrender to nicotine poisoning. He recovered quickly, downing a bottle of their now tentatively ample supply of water before they’d gotten back on the road, engine sputtering even then as their captured companion wheezed back into motion.
Stripped to the waist with the hood of the car propped up by an impromptu wedge, Kasse couldn’t make sense of what exactly was wrong but figured it was likely something he couldn’t fix. At first, there’d been steam, but then the engine belched black.
He frowned as he leaned against the grill in meager thought, only partially distracted by the logistics of engine repair.
Eoran, meanwhile, was stuffed between the bench seat and the small space separating truck cab from bed. His fingers pried open the latch of an old toolbox, metal clanking against more metal, hinges groaning through a torture of rust as the lid was lifted from the basin.
“Oh. It’s all tits.” The engineer picked up a partially rumpled photograph and observed it through the pastel lens of the coming day, dark eyes scanning over the model who presented herself between perfectly pinched arms. Her feathered hairstyle was a throwback to decades before the boy’s existence, laying long and wavy over her soft, sloping shoulders. He dropped the photo and wiggled free.
“There aren’t any tools or extra cans of oil.” Eoran looked back at Kasse from the swung open door of the passenger’s side, leaning half through the rolled down window. “What do you want to do, camp out here for a little bit and see what comes by or move on? We’re kinda vulnerable in this spot.” He turned his head, looking out into the open air.
Kasse turned, sitting on the front fender as he busied himself with the cigarettes that had already betrayed him once that evening, putting one to his lips in absentee forgiveness. He squinted up at the horizon, his labyrinthine exploration of possible futures tarnished by the tensions still lingering in their immediate past.
“I guess. It’s almost daylight.” Shoving off the bumper, Kasse rose and turned toward Eoran, lighting his cigarette as he walked toward the passenger side. “We can use the truck as bait for a new ride so we should stick close—”
Suddenly, alarum sharp, that boy straightened like he’d just been bullwhip cut, like he’d just heard the horror of an incoming trenchant raid on some alleyway grapevine, whispered from street kid to homeless youth till the imminent threat was bordering on apocalypse.
“Headlights,” he announced unmoving even as his gears spun out, emergency demanding the mental space his anxiety occupied, pushed away all the clutter of fear, of what-if, of his restless memory of their home left behind. Kasse was quick to shirk that lingering sorrow, shed it like snakeskin—it was funny how adrenaline always had him reaching for Eoran no matter their circumstance. “There are headlights coming up.”
“Good. Right on time.” 18C draped the hood of his Ossan costume over his head. He re-aligned the folds of filthy linens meant to shield skin from the desert’s searing sun over the bemired splotches of Amstead’s camouflage stained in dried blood. Nerves would have shaken him if he wasn’t so determined. Beneath his closed lips, the boy’s tongue traced over his teeth. He retrieved his knife and quickly hopped into the bed.
“I love you,” Eoran said, like losing was always on his mind.
×××
“Truck,” Dev called out from the front seat, lifting Brint’s binoculars to his eyes. “Upright, looks intact. Smoking maybe. I can’t tell if the cloudiness is darkness being burned off or if it’s a fresh breakdown.”
“Any movement?” Brint asked.
“Maybe. Maybe a person, maybe more scraps of canvas rustling. Still too far to be sure.”
The intelligence sergeant passed the glasses back and Brint pressed them to his eyes. They’d spent so much time in that barren landscape and it was still so hard to read—sand gusted like smoke, things were not always as they seemed. The outpost Brint counted on wound up being a waste of time and the continued mis-guessing was starting to wear the commander down. It wasn’t about being right or wrong, he just wanted something, anything, to come from all their searching—any signs of life, any mention of corporeality between the overabundance of spooky legend-spewing about ghosts from capricious old men that only thought about death.
“Approach with caution.” Brint knew he didn’t have to explicitly tell their driver what to do, but voice and direction took the edge off of hope’s uncertainty.
Locke nodded, zeroing in on the shape in the distance, just off the side of the road. “We’ll stop at two-hundred yards, approach to examine on foot.”
Quietly, from his spot at Brint’s side, Adrien held his map to his chest, barely daring to breathe.
×××
Laid out nearly flat in the truck bed next to Eoran, Kasse kept watch from a narrow hollow he carved out in the truck’s shell, pilfered rearview mirror affixed in that crafted space so he could keep an eye on the incoming threat. He, with every hair on end, breathing shallow like he could go undetected if he slowed his vitals, ambush instincts always favoured when cornered.
“They’re slowing down, stopping 200 yards off,” the ghost imparted. The quiet noise of car doors opening, actively muffled when they swung to a careful close, and the shuffling of sand, sweeping feet and nervous boots crossing the headlights that continued to obscure his identification of the vehicle. “I can’t see anything still.”
Unaware, Kasse squeezed his lover’s hand tight,
always ready for their circumstances to
smother them in a cave-in.
Eoran nodded, smoothly pulling a large ripped sheet of canvas over them before he closed his eyes to focus on the sounds of their slow surrounding. His senses were not as honed as Kasse’s since his preternatural gift gave him no upper hand in most facets of his life, however, there were still things that could plainly be determined. He listened for distance; there was too much static in all the footsteps to determine concrete numbers, but whatever was coming for them was close. Closer and closer still.
×××
Rifle ready, Brint approached the popped hood of the vehicle and peered down at the engine. A tendril of smoke slithered upward at its own pace, dissipating quickly into the atmosphere.
Dev circled the cab and stuck his head inside. A bloody map was spread across the dash, marked up with arcane symbols wrought from a slapdash concoction of graphite, dust, and hemoglobin. He moved away and lingered near the truck’s bed, eyes catching Locke’s as if to say: I’ll pull this sheet, but get my back.
Locke lowered his rough chin in minute yes, rifle held at the ready, safety clicked to a crisp and harrowing off.
Nervously coming up the driver side, Adrien was pale in the face of imminent conflict. It wasn’t that he was afraid—just woefully unprepared. He’d always been at arm’s length from initial contact, his prior squad depended on his bombs to clear the way for their search and destroy cleanup missions,
but this was an unknown variable,
this broken down truck in the middle of
nowhere, doing nothing but hiding a firefight.
Adrien nodded at Brint through the open window of the cab, moving silent till he fell still just before the rear tire well,
waiting for Dev to make his move.
Dev looked at his squad. Chest rising beneath his meticulously arranged uniform, the intel sergeant struck at the height of a soundless inhale. The canvas was ripped and flung into the air, catching a thieving breeze like a kite.
But there was nothing there,
save the scuffle of boots and bodies
beneath the chassis of that disabled truck.
Regardless of how every single one of Kasse’s death shadow moments spilled like oil before him, how thin that blue-black-vile-green shimmer veneer spread and spread itself, Kasse only had so much time and none of it was capable of rethinking this moment, reassessing the scenario based on the boots he saw. It was easier to let his instinct’s assumptions run, safer than entertaining a fleeting what-if that had long ago died in the pitfire outside their avalanche.
Stolen supplies, he thought on replay till the words were a shrill fast-forward white noise warcry that drowned out any warbling reservation or reason that held men back in war, made their trigger fingers hesitate and their beating hearts flee. They must be wearing stolen supplies.
Kasse’s heart would not flee,
his breath would not cease—
not today when he was so intent
on watching a man bleed out, iron
ore droplets like an accident
in his feral mouth.
When he lashed out, he was a glitch in reality wrapped around the ankle of Brint’s coyote boots, yanking him to the ground as he pulled himself out and atop the man whose face he refused to acknowledge, his own face obscured by the rags and rage of so many soldiers long since put to sleep.
“FUCK—” Brint’s trigger clicked hollow in its circle-guard house, machine demoted to a toy in his unwitting hands long before he’d arrived at the broken down truck. He hit the sand hard, lashing out with legs that mostly conspired against his combative instincts, either scrambling or kicking at the specter surmounting him. In a split-moment switch, the lieutenant waved his rifle like a cudgel instead, weakly throttling it against the shoulder of his attacker. He was too wrapped up in its strap to gain any proper amount of momentum. He was already outnumbered.
Verdant eyes wide, Brint was looking death straight in his argent eyes.
On the passenger’s side of the truck, Eoran was attuned to his lover’s feral cadence—the boys spent enough time in each other’s company to become accustomed to beats, to operate in concurrent signatures of time. He was a heartrace-quick jab at Adrien’s legs, his thighs, a desperate scramble of starved limbs so hungry to draw blood along the nasty edge of the knife rapidly thrust toward new flesh. Eoran came like a pit of spikes that wouldn’t quit advancing, like a fencer made blind by his body’s repetitious command to kill, kill, kill. He didn’t know that face, and therefore, no one else would either.
“Kasse?” Brint dropped his weapon across his chest and snatched at the boy’s wrists, attempting to hold him. “Kasse! KASSE!” Tears were already making his vision bleary, his arms shaky.
Kasse was a dog without a name. Kasse Kasse Kasse—over and over, repeated syllable so foreign he heard it like a threat, grasped the barrel of the weapon abandoned and used it like a platform, his full weight bearing down like a stack of stones on Brint’s struggling chest.
Knife drawn up, he finally connected his grey to those green and found himself unable to move, his wild unrest tamed for long enough to be overtaken by a single thought, croaked in disbelief:
“You… you came looking?”
His arm was still raised guillotine high, a static executioner frozen astride Brint’s chest, completely unaware of how this moment had come to be. There was a tremble in that boy who’d already accepted abandonment. He didn’t know what this was, how to process the man pinned to the ground under his knees.
Adrien, on the other hand, was not having such a pleasant reunion.
“Holy—”
The newcomer to that squad so scattered fell back with Eoran’s attack, sending them both cartwheeling down a short embankment, perforating the sand in their tumble of bone sharp limbs and shouts. Their flailing scrawl left Adrien’s blood in their wake, defensive wounds on his arms and wrists protecting from a more fatal maiming.
“—Fuck!! Eo!!” Locke shouted, tugging Dev into a run toward their 18Cs and the howling life or death scramble they engaged, lean frames like starving wolves.
Yanking his attacker around once more with his continued velocity, Adrien had him on the ground when they finally came to a halt at the bottom of that low slope. The blue-eyed bomber scrambled to a foot and a knee, using his momentum to bring his cut and bleeding fist across Eoran’s veiled features with a sharp crack.
Eoran was stunned to stillness, face forced aside by velocity, rushed breath kicking up a small cloud of sand. In a feeble moment, he drew a cloth-draped arm over the bottom half of his scorned face. The boy’s eyes snapped to meet Adrien’s blue, lightless and sharp and thickly lined in the colors of his sleeplessness like an alluring bohemian, a dervish made sick from all their ceaseless spinning to appease a blasphemous God.
Eoran flipped the knife in his hand, icepick grip lunging straight for the other boy’s throat.
“NOPE, NOT TODAY—“ Dev intervened, catching up to the knot of limbs and bodies. He yanked the valuable engineer’s whole frame off of the one who’d turned savage, muscular arms twisting Adrien away while he pushed Eoran back into the dirt with his boot’s toe. “Toriet, chill man—breathe, you gotta breathe!”
Eoran hit the ground again and stayed down, chest heaving in the remnants of the dead night’s grave-chill air.
At the top of the embankment, Brint laid his palms up beside his head, flat against the earth in full surrender. “Yeah, of course we came looking. We’re not just going to let a pack of assholes come and steal you away. We don’t fucking operate like that.”
There was more to be said; there were shades of anguish and relief between all of Brint’s lines as he focused on the free roaming boy’s features. His emotions were mostly undercurrents, but the softness in his eyes betrayed the stranglehold of their rip tide grip.
“You came looking,” the boy repeated in shock. “You came looking—”
Kasse faltered atop his CO, quaking tremor like surrender, the inevitable conclusion of his and Eo’s decision having come to a final pass. No more discussions on absconding North, no more returning to the wild, no more choices: there was just their squad who’d risked life and limb to recover them and, beyond them, an Amsteadean machine poised to rip the pair apart.