Every rock and divot on the path taunted the repurposed ‘09 Reva Peregrine MTVR. The suspension wheezed with every bump in the terrain as it limped through the open desert kicking up a sandstorm that consumed every landmark like locusts.
Kasse was handcuffed to a post crudely welded to the tailgate, Eoran at his side. A small squad of Ossan freedom fighters were clustered near the cab, talking over the raucous beat of a hip-hop mixtape blasting through the open back window. Their rifles were at the easy. The real work was done, after all. They’d stayed the tac-team slated to overtake Lasandet, acquired the Ossan looking ones on orders, and they were heading home to debrief.
Shit was almost too easy.
A jolt snapped through the weapon Sergeant’s leg, just as a drop off rendered the contents of the truck airborne, Kasse’s head cracking against the exposed edge of a steel pipe laid out along the side of the truck bed.
“Ffffffff—” The young soldier sputtered awake, a sudden fitful recollection suppressing his vicious string of expletives. Kasse, wild eyed and bloodshot, searched for someone, anyone—vision snapping to focus on Eoran’s body laid out next to him.
“Gyaanoromuani!” One of the rebels shouted, slamming his open palm against the roof of the cab once a hailstorm of pebbles, people, and industrial detritus had settled back into the bed. Your driving sucks—a brilliant assessment from the desert rag-wrapped master of all things that were obvious.
Eoran had been up for about an hour, but was trying to make as little fuss as possible in the slow organization of his rebellion. His head swam with SERE protocol commingled with various recollections and assertions that this situation was not all bad. This wasn’t as bad as all those times he had to slog through mud lined by a razor-wired sky trying to not flood his weapon; it certainly wasn’t as bad as the time when he’d almost drowned in the rec pool because the CO bound his squad’s feet with weights, their arms with ties, and screamed at them until they were free. The engineer sergeant was flung face down, but deftly rolled to his side. Dislodged, his malleable limbs shifted to allow cuffed wrists purchase beyond tightly folded knees and boots scuffed with clay.
From that position, his eyes fell upon Kasse—one blossoming in shades of violet from where it had been viciously introduced to the butt of an outdated rifle during their capture—relieved to see him up but unable to express as much at that precarious moment in time. From a poorly secured toolbox, a wrench set loose slowly hopped towards them, larking and jaunty in its gravel-stirred dance. Eo grabbed it before it could completely go amidst his hold of 18B’s feral stare. Up front, the complaints of the passengers were not being taken lightly. Their demands for better driving had easily devolved into a salvo of curses that began to down out the mix tape.
On your mark, the boy mouthed, careful to accentuate every syllable with the curve of his lips and the silent gnashing of his teeth.
Kasse was locked up, borders elapsing the swirl and eddy of his instinct to fragment. The impulse of his energy field was ozone, scent of his thunderstorm atmosphere electric in the texture of impending rain. His 18C’s gaze held him focal, his point of convergence guiding him through the devastation he prepared to enact.
But first, Eoran’s cuffs. Kasse dissolved those before anything else. Before he even considered his own.
Without leaving the other man’s stare, he loosened the bonds that maintained the shape and form of every man in the bed of the truck. The complex interweaving of particles that rendered organs as independent entities sloughed away, a rapid degeneration of molecules turning freedom fighters into powder and gas: Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus. The arguing devolved to screaming as they fell completely apart and by the time the soldiers realized that their hostages were awake and alert, it was too late—they were reduced to the swirling of sand, the grim dust of their base elements the only evidence that men had existed there at all.
The driver started to shout as his shotgun rider suffered the same fate, a mere handful of sand blowing briskly out the window.
There were only so many trajectories their series of events could follow, and as those men dissipated into a glittered naught, Eoran became certain that this was heading toward an inevitability that was not optimal. Hands snapped free, wrench forsaken, it took all his effort to attempt stability as the truck pitched and swayed from the driver’s horror; his own subdued momentarily by the adrenaline propelling his systems to scream and scurry for safety as his face was pelted with human particulate.
“Kasse, we have the upper hand,” Eo said in a deployment of reason, with a calmness whose fragility was entirely palpable. “Let’s take the driver by force.” His ID tags whipped in the wind, flashing stuttered signals noiselessly beneath the sun like a stopwatch collecting the seconds of their impending calamity.
But even before Kasse could respond, he felt the vehicle accelerate and turn a hard left, the red desert caving soft beneath its wheels. Still locked, 18B winced.
“I’m sorry—I don’t have enough.”
Kasse grabbed Eo with one hand, his left still lashed to the welded bar that supported the canvas covering of the truck bed. He kissed him—quickly, deeply—and just before the MTVR began to capsize, Kasse shoved 18C out the illusory floor of the vehicle and left him tumbling in the sand.
The Peregrine rolled, glass and metal screeching in the stillness of the sun scarred landscape.
“No! No—nono—don—!!” Eoran sputtered as his hands clawed for an impossible corporeality before he hit the desert floor and suffered through a punishment of velocity. His limbs flailed wildly, gracelessly, as the boy landed atop a trench of sand that was peacefully refilling itself, cut by rubber that had turned belly-up.
Breathless, Eoran clutched his battered shirt, chest heaving to reacquire the air necessary to refill his lungs, diaphragm burning for how empty that cavity had been knocked in the fall. A tinny shrieking shot across the sky, and though his eyes welled with tears, he fought against them and regained his footing to chase after the runaway accident.
His boots hit the sand, unsteady at first, but gaining momentum atop the difficult terrain. It was easy to follow, despite the speed at which they had left him—the gashes in the desert lead the way.
The MTVR had come to a rest upside down, battered against a stone outcropping that curled around the wreckage like a cave, amplifying the screams of the driver, legs crushed inside the cab. He was calling out for Varonian to take him—begging for the mercy of death in response to Arsaiya’s cruel gift of survival.
Kasse himself was knocked unconscious again, hanging limp from his arm dislocated at every joint.
Sliding the last few steps of his arrival, Eoran’s hands tore at the canvas that flapped in the emotionless wind, sending a large section of it skipping across the sand. Driver damned to endure his suffering alone, the young sergeant wedged himself between the crudely folded metal of the truck bed’s former canopy. His fingers hovered over the 18B’s philtrum, testing for air.
“Kasse,” he gently cooed, “Kasse, wake up, ok?” Fuck, his arm was all wrong, a parody of anatomy. “Kasse…”
The weapons sergeant cracked an eye open, smirking through a crust of sand and powdered Ossan freedom fighter that clung to the blood that trickled from his temple. “Y-yeah—I’m here. H-here…”
Kasse groaned, breathing painful despite its necessity with the bruise that blossomed across his abdomen. He tried shifting, but agony ripped through his disarticulated arm—obviously penance for kicking Eoran out of the car so unceremoniously.
“K-key. You’ve gotta get the key, Eo.”
Eoran patted his pockets to find them lacking the usual accoutrements. Of course they had taken their tools, his chaos card—a thin, credit card-sized metal sheet that collected the shapes of various keys and lockpicks. Of course, the soldier wasn’t that lucky.
“I’m on it.”
The curtness of his reply may have foretold the fact that his heart was beginning to catch up with him. His lithe body ducked out of the bed’s wreckage and moved to the smashed cab, passenger side, to slide into the open window. The man inside remained a bevy of prayer; his Ossan bravado intact, despite the accumulated handicaps of his physical form, apparent in the way his tongue rolled through every R in his afterthought of communion.
“Sirai karang,” the freedom fighter pleaded, bloodslick skin gripping Eoran’s arm as he reached for the keys attached to the mangled ignition. Please brother.
“No, fuck off,” the boy replied, pushing him away.
“Sirai karang,” again and again, misery’s restless requiem, “Sirai karang…”
“No.” Eoran’s reassurance of his commitment to the man’s anguish. “Arsaiya bless you.”
“Sirai karang…”
Keys in hand, he flipped briefly through them to find that which would fit and returned to unlatch Kasse from the truck’s grasp, arms ready and open in an offer of support.
“Talk to me—is there anything else hurt?”
Kasse was a cauterized groan as he trusted Eoran with his dead weight, head still spinning from the barrel roll centrifuge he’d emerged from. “I don’t know. I’m okay. I think.” Yanking up his rough fatigue green and bloodrust shirt, 18B’s skin was stippled with blood pooling beneath the surface of him, impact enough to cause immediate trauma instead of eventual bruising.
“I… I think it looks worse than it is.” The slightly older boy grimaced out a weak grin, like that would prove that he wasn’t hurting—that the choice he’d made when the Peregrine had begun to capsize hadn’t come with physical repercussions that would now prove a burden on their survival prospects. “I’ll be fine.”
After helping Kasse stand once he was pulled from the crushed confinement, Eoran took a step back to look him over. Fingers brushed across his stomach in brief appraisal, then made him turn his head to and fro.
“Good, I’d hate for you to die before I’m able to tell you what a FUCKING ASSHOLE you are.” Eoran’s open palm crashed against the skin of Kasse’s cheek, stinging so much that the boy could feel it still lingering upon him when it was back down at his side. “What were you thinking?! I was going to help you, Kasse! Don’t ever do that to me again.”
The full forced slap knocked the ghost off his yearling feet and skidding into the red, rocky sand that surrounded them. Kasse just laid there, head resting on the edge of the MTVR’s detached bumper that had so kindly broken his fall, blinking feebly. He didn’t even attempt to get up again—he was content to (or unable to do anything but) linger on the ground until the stars from yet another head injury had cleared out.
“Y-yeah—I suck, I’m sorry. I think giving me more head trauma will definitely help me think on my feet real good though.” The slightly older boy and his shitty, petulant expression tilted toward Eoran’s general direction, brow knit and mouth finding its typical form in the shape of a chapped, dry pout streaked with blood. “You’re the best at taking care of me. Thanks.”
Grumble agitating the back of his throat, Eoran began to march back the direction the truck had rolled to busy his mind with something other than the anger that held him. Like a drifter combing a beach too vast to really comprehend, he picked through the baubles that had fallen out of the vehicle during its death throes, looking for anything that would be useful to them.
A few things stood out. The sand was splashed with a small selection of items that had been confiscated from them during capture—there was a canteen butt up in the distance, a knife beckoned with a languid flash of his unsheathed blade, Eo’s lensatic compass lay popped open next to it, glass cracked and flecked with earth. The engineering sergeant could have scoured more, but he didn’t want to stray too far.
He returned to Kasse with the meager haul, dropping the collection and taking a seat next to the injured boy.
“Look, I’m sorry. Drink some water, and let’s get your arm back together.” The canteen was held out in offering.
Kasse pushed himself up to an elbow, mind still lagging by about a second. Narrow eyed, the injured soldier softened with his sigh. He couldn’t stay angry—not here, not now,
not with Eo.
“I didn’t want you to get thrown out of the truck and crushed when it rolled. I panicked. I’m sorry.”
He accepted the canteen, but only drank the smallest bit. This could very well have been all they had.
“I forgive you.” A formality to cement the past behind them, an exhale to expel what was left of his temper fueled by war-exacerbated fear and stress. Eo spoke as he worked, taking the canteen back from Kasse and re-capping it, standing and gathering another bundle of shredded canvas to squish it into a makeshift pillow on which the weapons sergeant could rest his head.
“We need a plan. The radio in the cab was smashed, so I don’t think it works anymore. Rendezvous Lasandet? Do you know how long it’s been since they took us? Lay back down.”
He stood over the other, dark eyes wandering in assessment again.
“Which ones are still out of place?”
The injured soldier, bombarded and confused by the other boy’s meandering thought patterns, looked rather numbly toward the horizon, arm useless at his side.
“… I can tell you which way is north. And I can tell you where I feel electricity coming from. But I don’t think it’s gonna be useful—not until I get some energy back. And, uh…” Bottom lip pulled into his mouth tentatively, the weapons sergeant added: “All of it. All of it is out of place.”
“Ok.” 18C’s concise acknowledgement.
Kneeling next to his companion, Eo took Kasse’s limp arm into his lap and began the harrowing task of resetting it. Gripping the underside of his brachium, the boy used his weight to pull the humerus toward him, straining the ligaments and musculature buried beneath Kasse’s skin until he heard the satisfactory clunk of bone conceding its position of nefarious displacement, ball ready to slide back into its proper socket. Slowly releasing that set joint, Eo moved to the wrist. The fingers of his left hand curled around the base of Kasse’s hand, an image of someone who did not understand how real humans shook hands, cradling posterior with his palm and gripping anterior with a thumb and middle finger that coaxed pieces back into place, aided by the dislocating pressure he applied with his right.
Wrist and shoulder fixed, he could finally attend to the elbow. Standing again, the engineering sergeant gripped Kasse’s forearm and gave it a forceful, even tug to allow radius and ulna to reconvene with the notches at the base of his humerus.
“There,” he said, bone knocking against bone before he gave a kiss to the curve of Kasse’s fingers, before he relinquished the repaired limb back to its owner.
The first joint’s pop came bundled with a surprised yelp,
the second relocation solicited a breathless groan that only half acknowledged the pain,
the third setting came with no sound at all
just the unwavering grey-brown stare of the soldier rendered speechless by the affection that, even now, coloured their necessities, their little commonplace motions of normalcy rendered less mundane by the devotion sown in their touch,
reaped in secret.
But here, there was no one to witness the way Kasse repossessed Eoran’s hand and took the opportunity to linger.
“T-thanks.” Acute. Unmoving. Set.
The smile that curved Eoran’s lips was fleeting, stolen by a gust of hot wind that rustled his hair. Surrounded by the lonely wailing of the land accented by the cries of the dying man still inside the truck, he looked up to the horizon made uneven by the boundless hillocks that composed it, his active mind languishing in a brief otiosity from the scope of their predicament. Heat-stained blue abruptly yielded to rusted red; their new home, the open air. It seemed insurmountable.
“They have to have at least some of our stuff.” Another kiss, this time on the delicate recollection of Kasse’s wrist, atonement bestowed in part for leaving and enduring Eo’s occasionally disagreeable nature. “I’m going to go see what else is in the truck.” He prayed for pills, water, anything useful to combat that wasteland.
“I know you don’t wanna do him any favours, but can you please kill the driver? He’s not fading—it’s like he’s not even trying to die right now.”
Between nursing a migraine and trying to figure out which rock formations in the distance looked like they would yield caverns, Kasse simply didn’t have the energy for compassion. He sighed.
“I mean… I guess ask him where we are?”
“Fiiine,” delivered from a distance.
Eoran slid the top half of his body back through the open window to re-greet the shamble of the man that waited there. The driver was immediately handsy again, his shape folded crudely in the truck’s overturned state, face red from life’s incessant hold and covered in a thick cardinal gloss from having survived the accident. The boy kept himself just out of reach, tongue cataloging his Ossan heritage effortlessly in spite of his Amstead upbringing.
“Hei, espaodieun,” Eoran asked. Hey, where are we.
“Sirai karang….” Please brother…
“Hamaodieun a sutetabunta.” Tell me where we are and I will help you.
“Karang, espasujinatare…” Brother, give me your word.
“Mm, sujin a arato.” Yes, my word is my bond.
“Karang, dojisoro” the driver pointed to the glovebox, “Espanatare a espasutetabun.” Brother, there is a map. Retrieve it and I will help you.
Eoran tried the latch but it was locked. A moment later, he procured the driver’s keyring from his pocket and fiddled with the mechanism to release its keep. It sprung open in a shower of small necessities—their Amstead Army-branded survival kits tumbled to the roof that was now the vehicle’s floor. Small, wrapped candies complained over a serenade of loose ammo, clanking against each other as they rolled about from the spill. To Eoran’s surprise, the map orchestrated a revolution of its own as it smacked him in the face, but the insubordination was quickly contained by a pistol that easily ripped through a seam worn into its fibers from being overfolded. The boy picked up the two halves and pieced them back together for the driver.
The explanation of their location turned meandering, but the soldier listened intently. The driver marked points that may be of interest to the pair with his fingers, leaving behind large welts of blood that obscured marbled markings of altitude and topography, key degrees and intersections of grid points in some spots. He nodded understanding as the driver suggested they head north then settled into a silence that was pregnant with expectation. Eoran folded the map and readied the weapon.
“Reigoprosonta, mishyoni?” A last request. Executioner, what is your name?
“Eoran Toriet.”
“Toriet… sereimua Varonianarang.” Toriet… thank you, servant of Varonian.
The shot cracked into the atmosphere, a violent snap that echoed impossibly as it pummeled through bone and the viscous meat of the man’s mind.
Eoran returned to Kasse. Arms cradling the busted map and their kits, pockets jingling with bullets and shimmering sweets.
“They had some candy,” he commented, “But we shouldn’t eat until we can find more water.” Eo laid the map halves out with their frenetic, death-marked paths.
Kasse rubbed his face with both—yes, both—hands now that his arm was functional and a bit less sore from his recent rearticulation. He was sitting up now, head still a bit dizzy, but the deep and dire understanding that they had to get the fuck away from the wreckage to avoid execution did wonders for the concussion(s).
“He said head North?” That aligned, to some degree, with what the weapons sergeant was grasping at. He’d already identified a couple of promising rock formations in that direction, evidenced by the jagged silhouette of trees on the skyline, birds in the air. Bumping his shoulder against the other boy’s in a silent, affectionate thank you, 18B was running eyes all over the map to take in their current state and their likelihood of surviving it.
“Yes,” Eoran’s index finger followed up the suggested course marked as a red-line river. “He said he thought there were a few outposts along the way and to be careful when the elevation is not on our side because they take cover in the crags. They were expected back to their camp soon, so scavengers are likely not far behind, but he didn’t know from what direction they would come.”
18C paused, exhaled, then looked to Kasse. “What do you think?”
“Get what we can from the debris, find a water source, build fire if we can.” Kasse was repocketing all the things that had originated with him—his survival kit, pocket knife, a few of the candies. He knew they needed to wait for water, but without any spare energy in his own body, interpreting and rechanneling the energy around him was useless, his hellscape utility lying fallow in his gut.
“We need to set up camp and lie low until our expected survival period has elapsed. We can pass a bit more undetected after that, I think.” The boy got to his knees, looking at the map—the elevations catching his attention now as he compared where they were to what lay etched in the distance. “I was thinking to head in that direction, northeast. Terrain is rocky and there’s trees, so there’s groundwater. I think that’s our best shot.”
Eoran nodded his agreement.
“I want you to take the pistol. You’re a better shot and you shouldn’t be draining yourself like this.” The engineering sergeant laid the gun out before his companion, then dug into his pockets to retrieve the loose bullets. “Three left in the magazine. How do you feel; do you need more time to rest?”
An attentive hand came to rest atop the gentle slope of Kasse’s shoulder, expressing the fondness Eoran’s worried features couldn’t quite manage just yet, affixed more to the uncertainty of their predicament.
“Yeah,” Kasse forced himself to his feet, Eoran providing his foundation. “But we gotta move.”
Dusk was beginning its slow creep over the desert—before long, the scorch of the day would give way to the chill of desert night. For now, they needed to scavenge, to begin their journey while their energy was quick, adrenal, visceral.
They needed to cross the desert before they began to die.