In the night, the soldiers made good time, bundled up in the clothing left by the men Kasse had vaporised before the accident. They were about halfway to the red limestone that rose in the distance with the snarling grey trees the pair agreed would be their landing point. Another night of travel would have them searching for caverns below ground, but for now, an hour or so before the dawn would see the heat once again rising, they came across the hollowed, rusting wreckage of an Amstead Military supply truck, half buried in the sand.
Kasse popped one of the candies Eoran had stolen from their original captors into his mouth and took a good drink from one of the three canteens he had on him. He hadn’t drunk anything for the majority of their journey, saving his water ration for a single pull that’d do his body better than tiny sips along the way. 18B was already walking around the truck, boot resting on the tailgate that remained in position from the sand boxing it in.
“Let’s check for bodies, supplies, clear it out. We can camp here for the day—until nightfall.” The boy laid tired eyes on his companion, expression softened by exhaustion.
The other soldier didn’t need to be told twice. Boots hanging out of the driver’s side door, Eoran dug through the folds of uniform covering the Amsteadian dead. He tugged the man’s ID tags away, shoving them into his pocket before trespassing further, vulture limbs combing through the immediate collection of items strewn about that man’s final surrender. Impassivity easily settled into the boy’s features despite his grim work—instances like these always took a while to establish roots. They loomed in the periphery of the mind as a haunting for later, when times are easy, when comforts are more plentiful, where being idle is a bountiful luxury opposed to a death sentence. It wasn’t important, his later was still unknown—he only fretted for the now.
The passenger only had a few worthwhile trinkets: an abandoned assemblage of ephedrine, a half-eaten breakfast bar. Eoran scoured every divot and trench of slowly fading darkness as the breaking daylight better illuminated the space between the men. It seemed like the pair might’ve already been picked over by whoever assisted their departure from that mortal coil.
“Not much up there,” Eo announced back at Kasse’s side, briefly glancing at the red fire rising against the will of the navy night. “If we’re camping here, then we can pick over the rest before we leave. Let’s just worry about securing ourselves.”
Luckily, the back of the vehicle was empty of bodies and Kasse busied himself spreading the canvas they’d ripped from the last vehicle over the sand that had crept into the truck bed over the weeks or months or years of inactivity. When he finished his makeshift nesting, he assessed some tears in the canopy, covering the large holes with articles of clothing secured from the cab along the rust blackened skeleton grid that held their sun bleached stronghold upright.
“Observe our luxurious accommodations,” Kasse said on the breath of a laugh and a sweeping gesture. “Five star finery, but WiFi is crazy expensive.”
“Ah yes. It’s so romantic,” Eoran replied with a smirk as he settled onto the crude simulacrum of a bed. “With stunning views of the furious blaze they call daylight in these parts…”
He stretched his arms over his head, pulling muscles in directions different than those they’d grown accustomed to in the pair’s perpetual motion. His cheeks were ruddy, but thankfully only from exertion—traveling at night did wonders to negate their need for sunscreen.
“I found a piece of food.” The crinkling of plastic partially muffled his words. Eoran’s fingers worked at the wrapper, splitting the dense biscuit in half with more force than should have been necessary. His lips fell into the shape of an uncertain grimace. “Ugh, it’s like… hardtack now.”
“Looks… dry.” Kasse was observant from where he was hanging their supplies along the frame, to take stock, but also to just keep them out of the sand. “Eat if you’re in pain. I’m good for now.”
The ghost was anticipating staying cool in their foxhole, the scavenger hollow they’d occupy for the next twelve hours or so, already stripped to his undershirt by the time he laid himself next to Eoran.
Eoran quietly munched on a rock-like chunk of morsel he’d chipped off, saliva slow to rehydrate the substance into something more digestible from all its baking in the Ossan desert. He reached out, contemplative with his teeth a languid grind, and lifted Kasse’s shirt to observe the bruise that colored the indents of the boy’s ribs; the injuries that defiantly blossomed beneath the conservatory of his flesh. 18C swallowed hard.
“I’ll take first watch,” he said then, leaning in to give his companion a kiss.
18B was an apex predator, long-suffering but growing intolerant as he laid in wait. When Eoran came too close, Kasse bound his soul around the life of him, hands like teeth in this viper that needed Eoran’s body heat to survive. Every ragged breath, cool with the chill of stone from his recent drink, sought to keep the engineer subdued and apprehended to quell the weapon sergeant’s own petty solipsism.
Kasse was a greedy thing—a hungry ghost. He consumed the kiss afforded him and whatever else he could requisition with petulance and famine spurring his undue demand.
“I know it’s not protocol,” the older boy confided. “And I know we need to take turns to stay safe—but can you stay close? I’d rest better feeling you close by.”
“Yeah,” Eo’s hushed reply, “I’m here—”
The bloodwright very clearly languished in his weaknesses. His will to survive perpetually struggled to not fall victim to his will to die, ever exacerbated by nature’s cult of death that stalked those desert hills. That lonely wilderness proved itself a pertinacious impetus and made vivid enticements of the nugatory lapses of his overwrought psyche.
The slightly younger boy had a lot of will, but Kasse ground him down so efficiently. Here he was before a force of destruction, lissome-limbed and full of bite, a pale rider he would follow into any abyss, an end all be all scenario posited as purely and simply and elegantly and definitively as a piece of punctuation dotting the end of an obituary. His tongue tasted of the sweetest surrender, and yet…
It took everything Eo had to withdraw. There were other things to think about than themselves, other people interwoven into the collection of their lives that mattered as much as their trifling desires at any given moment in time. Eoran’s waffling logic came to err on their side—he knew how much his mother worried about him in the field, he could only imagine how much Brint fretted without his favorite weapon at his side.
“I’ll be here,” the navigator said, “Get some sleep.”
The predator lingered, unsure. His ravenous heart could choose to press on, if it was truly selfish—but Kasse let him go.
As conditioned to immediacy as he’d become in their covert liaison, their intimacy undisclosed and seized when no one was watching, he knew now was not the time. 18B did as he was told, docile in the shadow of a bitter wrenching in his gut he couldn’t put human words to, capitulated and amplified by his fear of losing, the desperation of any of these final breaths.
×××
They had two and a half canteens between them when they set off the next night. Kasse’s intake was minimal—he’d always had enough self control, even in his childhood, to conserve instead of replenish.
The two soldiers maintained a brisk pace despite the complaints of their empty stomachs.
“Don’t worry,” Kasse reassured in his grim way, dark history like piranha throwing their red belly bodies against the rippling glass of his easy surface smile. His calm hands trembled as he grasped Eo’s shoulder, helped him up the first limestone steppe. “The hunger pains fade after the second day. If you eat now, it’ll just restart the process.”
They spent the second day wedged under the meager shade of a tilted boulder. Kasse spent two of their bullets that day, sniping solo patrol units as he hunted for hollows in the desert karst, the soldier’s utility mapping the magnetic signature of the iron oxide tainted burrstone and yielding hints to what lay beneath. When night came, they were up two more canteens, three packs of cigarettes, a first aid kit, and whatever else the soldiers Kasse eliminated had been carrying—plus, the older boy had an idea of the path they should follow to find security in their hostile new home.
The sun had marked 18B’s skin in his effort to advance their timeline, but it was only a different shade. He took the sun in the tradition of his Ossan half and managed not to burn.
“We should go.” Kasse was close to Eoran’s ear as he roused him at sunset, touch lingering at his temples. “We’ve gotta settle in tonight.”
The sleep hadn’t gotten any better, but Eoran’s mouth offered no complaints. When the boy’s eyes opened, it was with a realization that was slow to come. His return to reality was clearly marked by the sloughing of absurdity conjured in the vivid dreamscapes of his slumber, to the irrefutability of their interstitial existences thinned by dogged transience. Eo briefly cupped Kasse’s cheek, glad to see him draped in the same pastel shades splashed across the evening sky, then rose and dressed himself in swathes of linen stolen from disintegrated men. The filthy rust-marked sheets obscured splotches of Amsteadian camouflage that didn’t quite do a good enough job of helping one blend into the crimson desert, they served to mask the homeland’s invasive intentions with a thin veneer of plausible deniability.
“How broken do you think this war is going to make us later in life?” It was an idle question given by a mind that was consumed by the ennui of rote survivalism, still struggling with the haze of his consciousness resuscitated from globs of atramentous morbidity collected in intermittent bouts of torpor. Eoran reassembled the burden of his half of their accumulated supplies on his body in preparation to set off again. He conferred with the map, then peered through the narrow window cut in the top of his compass to single out their direction from the chaff of that hellish panorama.
“I think I’ve found something promising.” The ghost was all harmonics in his affections, gentle in the way he handled his partner’s frailty. That Kasse portrayed such indifference to deprivation told more about his failure of an upbringing on the streets of an embattled Port Haven than vignettes ever could. He knew his limits, knew how to keep moving—even when his body was giving out.
The older boy rifled through one of the packs he’d pilfered and produced a plastic wrapped roll of something edible—a homemade treat, rice and sugar wrapped around a mashed root paste. He pressed it immediately into Eoran’s hand, wrapped the younger man’s fingers around it. “We’ll be able to settle in soon. If you’re energy’s low, though, eat.”
“I haven’t had one of these in years,” Eoran said, fussing with the noisy cellophane. As he ripped the confectionery in twain, he recalled the face of an elderly nana who lived at the end of the hall of his childhood apartment. It was on a monthly basis she would make these same treats, shared with the Toriet family in some ploy to coax a relationship between her nymphet niece and Eoran’s older brother. A grin split some imbalance into the placidity of his expression at the memory. “Do you want your half now or later?”
“He had two,” the older boy lied, focusing on the hollows beneath their feet, trying to judge the depths of the caverns held within the limestone, his electromagnetic sense fresh and new in an unfamiliar application. “I ate one already. I should have waited for you.”
Kasse had been living off the glove box sweets, powering through on will alone. But he knew, deeply and truly, that Eoran needed this comfort more than him. It wasn’t about calories or sustenance at this point in their game, it was about overcoming the brain’s infernal lingering on their famine, to maintain sharp focus on their continuing journey.
“I think I’ve found a path inside the limestone. I want to track it to what I think may lead to a larger cavern, see if we can make a couple openings if there’s water present.”
Still, Eoran wrapped the sweet’s remainder up and tucked it away into a fold of clothing on his person. He made a chaser out the ephedrine from the dead at their last campsite and a sip of water, and though it would take some time to kick in, he had a few hours to spare. Right now, anything was better than nothing—the stimulation was welcome regardless of whether it was natural, manufactured, fresh, or slightly expired, especially if their sunless day was to require any sort of digging.
“Ok,” he nodded, palm up to offer Kasse one of the chalky, partly eroded tablets. “Same direction, or is it divergent?”
“It winds, but I feel like it goes downhill toward the northeast. If we can track a chamber to a drop off, we can make our own openings. Better than finding an already discovered cave mouth, should be able to stay away from common patrol paths.” The weapons sergeant accepted this offering, at least, taking the tablet and chasing it with a pull from the canteen at his hip.
With his utility like a tracking beacon, the soldier made pathfinder would lead them through the dust of marine sediment mountains, lithified hills—but before he committed to this task he bore as duty, Kasse laced his tired, calloused fingers with Eoran’s own, his other hand coming to feel the reassuring beat of his collaborator’s adrenaline pulse. Forehead to forehead, 18B watched him too closely through his half glossed eyes, gloaming in the penumbra of their blind trek into the unknown.
“We’ll be okay. I promise—we’re gonna be okay.”
“The possibility that there might be any moment of peace in our immediate future,” The engineering sergeant avowed, voice low and velutinous as it hit the steadily cooling air of daylight’s grave, “That will allow me even just a few brief moments to wrap myself up in your limbs and lose this uncertainty to the resolution in your bones, is what keeps me going.” He’d been watching their hands, but his line of sight rose to meet Kasse.
“I would take that confidence from your teeth if you didn’t give it so generously,” Eoran’s smile was full of famine-fueled avarice. “But you are very good to me.”
“I wish I could be better…” Kasse interrupted his words with a kiss that begged to stay, to remain in that moment when the adiabatic chill of nightfall hit their skin, rendered a shiver where fever once reigned. “But I promise. We’ll have time. And when we survive this, finish our tour—if you still want me—we’ll make a real go of this. Us.”
Bruised knuckles wrapped in strips of cloth like boxer tape brushed across a grit caked cheekbone, a hopeful comfort. “I’m gonna get you through the night. You’re gonna get me through till morning. Okay?”
“Alright…” Eoran agreed, holding the taste of the other on a bottom lip sucked between his teeth, “I’ll hold you to that.”
He sealed their pact by weaving his arms around Kasse’s ribs in an embrace unfiltered and delivered pure from the confines of Eoran’s twitterpated heart. He couldn’t hide the fact that he was smitten with that boy from the streets, but, for once in all the time they had spent in each other’s company, he didn’t have to. This solitude was their reality, where they were chipped away by the minutiae of the moments that passed them while remaining intently focused forward, to what waited ahead rather than the pieces of them that had been left behind along their arduous way. Promises of hope and normalcy did wonders to soothe long standing frustration for a world that had done each of them wrong in different ways. Of course there would always be violence between them, that bestial instinct inherent to their mammalian forms, but perhaps now there began to be a marbling of something more: the roots of a dreamy antithesis.
The time had come, again, to press on. The sun remained secure in its elsewhere orbit, blotted out by the serrated horizon that encircled them in a massive, unending yawn. Distance proved to be little more than a smokescreen deception as they walked and walked, and never seemed to move as fast as it felt their feet were shuffling. For the days the two had been cutting their path toward civilization, there were no landmarks in that massive field of sand except for those that were unreachable. Like clouds in the sky, moving to the pace set by any and every person that strolled along with them, their venture seemed to be one of unison; agonizing and boring and drawn out by some twist of overlong earthly cruelty.
Truly, the landscape of Ossa, peaceful in its capacious sections of uninhabited territory, was a beautiful sight to behold. Etched in the rise and fall of protuberant duneage, the ever-present wind made markings like waveforms of water, swirling patterns that had no definite direction nor end, and swept forth in a display of incessant perfection, a mimicry of geometries harmonious to the unheard tunings of the universe around them. The sky was welcome and watchful, splattered with far-flung fire-eyes that blinked in every direction as if engrossed by the show of recalcitrance put on by the two youths over which they obsessed.
Out there, in the open, it was hard for Eoran to not feel some degree of connectivity to the inorganic life that ticked around him. Senses heightened by the sharp chemical coursing through his blood, nerves frayed by the static resonance of a midnight silence not heard but felt, his eyes scoured the horizon for intruders intent on disrupting their evanescent armistice with nature. All the while, he remained mute and keen-eared, waiting for his companion to make a call on any point of entry into the lithified guts of the netherworld that would come to serve as a momentary abode.
Their path meandered along a thick-thin-thick invisible slithering descent, serpentine and hollow and hidden beneath their viscid step. While Kasse remained on the surface with the man he refused to let suffer, his utility mind crawled on its belly in the serried depths,
searching
searching
searching
until at long last
Kasse
fell
through.