💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › shorts › defcon › 27 › Rearguard_-_by_darkart… captured on 2022-06-04 at 01:00:22.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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"Rearguard" by darkart
In the deserts surrounding what was once Las Vegas, a woman sits
on the burning rocks and breathes. The sun throbs and the sky is
bleached pale like cleaned bones. In the thick dry heat the air
is so still it hums. The woman is a soldier and these are her
orders. Stay here. Monitor the radio. On the ground, all
around her, are her insects. They appeared after everything
else had gone quiet. At first, there were one or two. Then five.
Then fifty, and then she gave up counting. She remembers how
they were once wary, keeping a watchful distance from her tent,
shying away from her when she stirred, but now, some years
later, they have lost all fear. In the morning when she wakes up
and switches on the big radio set they sing a chorus of chirps
and clicks, as though they are glad she is still alive. It is
unclear what sort of insects they are. They are narrow and black
and dull brown, with big wings. She likes them. Wherever she
wanders in the camp and the broken city, they follow, tumbling
over each other in their haste like puppies. She does not know
why they follow her. Once she thought they wanted to eat her,
but she has never been attacked. Possibly, she thinks, possibly
they miss us.
Stay here, she was told as the others left. That's an order.
Here is safe. The camp, and the city, and that's it. Out there,
any further, beyond the desert, there is the enemy. They will
kill you. Every afternoon she scans the horizon for some sign
of the enemy waiting to kill her. She listens intently for the
rumble of tanks or the whistle of incoming shells or the hoarse
shouts of soldiers calling out coordinates and instructions. As
though trying to help, the insects fall silent when she does
this, but there is never anything. She has a gun, of course,
but it has not been fired for many years and she has not
maintained it. Some time ago she aimed at the sky and pulled the
trigger as a test and from the gun's insides came a wheezing
sigh and then the sound of something collapsing. Since then she
has not picked the gun up or even looked at it. In a
compartment in her wallet there is a photograph of a woman and a
small child. She has some idea that this photograph once caused
her to want something, maybe desperately, but she has forgotten
what it was. In the same compartment there is another
photograph, of another woman. She thinks this might be her but
she does not look in mirrors so it is hard to know. There is an
address in the blank space underneath the photo. The address is
not where she is now and so is unimportant. Stay here, she was
told. Stay here, monitor the radio, and wait for further orders.
There have been no further orders.
At night the desert cools and the wheeling sky is salted with
stars, bitter and prehistoric. They are not something she
understands. She keeps the radio on until the calm hiss of
static makes her eyelids grow heavy, and then from her bed she
fumbles for the dial and turns it off before she falls asleep.
The insects squeak to one another for a while and then there is
silence.
In the morning she switches on the radio and smiles briefly at
the little chirrups of celebration from outside the tent. She is
alive, again. She squints at the boxes beside her bed. There is
not much food left. She will have to find more supplies.
Monitor the radio, she was told. Stay here, and monitor the
radio, for survivors. There has only been static. She puts on
her tattered uniform and over breakfast she regards the shining
towers which shiver and ripple far away. She packs the radio in
her bag and strikes out towards the city. In her wake is a
twitching shadow of insects, all vying to overtake each other,
nimbly dodging her battered boots crunching on the rocks. When
she reaches the suburbs she rests in the shade of a tree and at
her feet the insects gather round and click quietly to each
other. She looks at them and thinks she recognises a few. On
one, a peculiar jagged pattern on the waxy shell she is sure
she's seen before; another has a skipping, lopsided gait that
marks it out from the rest. It is, she knows, ridiculous to
think this way. They are insects. They are all the same. But
she catches their eyes and sees their frozen insane features and
she recognises something else. These are her orders. Stay
here. Monitor the radio. She sets the radio up under the tree.
Behind it, in her eyeline, is a small, squat house with grey
windows. A square piece of paper is taped to the glass, like a
patch of enamel scraped from a decaying tooth. She does not read
the words on the paper, just as she no longer looks at her gun
or inside the rusted corpses of cars which lie crooked across
the roads. She has nothing left in her for this, only her
orders. From the radio comes the usual blare of static, fading
to a hushed and steady crackling. She waits for a while,
listening, looking fondly at the insects playing around her, and
then she packs the radio up and continues. Behind her, the
insects rustle like leaves.
In the city the slightest sound echoes off the faces of the huge
buildings and the soaring structures that were the world. There
is an iron tower, and a castle, and a creature with the face of
a human and the body of a lion. Somewhere nearby, she vaguely
remembers, is an underground river, although she has not yet
needed to find it. She has plenty of water; she only needs food.
And here is the white statue. Half of it is missing; only the
legs remain. She once knew a poem about a statue. She is a
traveller in an antique land. She enters the building behind
the statue. A faded red sign triumphantly declares the building
as a palace, but she thinks it was a hotel of some kind. She is
cautious and slow as she walks inside; long ago, on one of her
first expeditions to the city, she strode in to one of these
buildings too quickly, stamping her feet, and then screamed as a
stream of rats surged past her. In the dark and silent kitchens
she finds several tins of food. She loads them into her backpack
and winces at the extra weight on her shoulders. The insects
wait patiently. On her way out she sees one of the insects
pulling at something in the corner of the lobby. A gleam of
silver catches her eye. Other than food, she has never taken
anything from the city. She is dimly aware that once there was
money here, and cameras and computers and clothes, may still be,
but she is limited to a single backpack and she has no need for
these things. She only takes what is necessary to fulfil her
duties. It strikes her that maybe this, too, was once an order.
Yet the gleam intrigues her. With the back of her hand she
brushes away the insect, which chirps chidingly in protest, and
she picks the object up. It is a clip on a half-rotted lanyard.
On the lanyard itself are designs, drawings she cannot make out.
Hanging from the lanyard is a plastic badge. She wipes away the
dust and a smiley face looks back at her, two bones crossed
underneath. She looks at it and frowns. The symbol has no
meaning for her, is of no use to her in this place, and she lets
it fall to the floor. She pushes open the scratched doors into
the sunlight and is about to start back to the camp when she
realises something is wrong. She looks back. The insects are
still inside; they are no longer following her. Tutting,
irritated, she goes back. The insects have arranged themselves
in a rough semicircle around the freshly disturbed badge.
Usually, she thinks, they are all movement, all trembles and
jerks and little sounds. Now they are perfectly still. Not even
their antennae waver in the stale air. She shrugs and picks up
the badge and puts it around her neck. She has no reason not to,
if it will make her insects happy. It will not stop her
following her orders. The insects judder and confer amongst
themselves and, apparently placated, start to move once more.
Some of them flip over in clumsy rolls and then hurriedly
skitter to catch up with her as she walks.
The woman is a soldier and these are her orders. Stay here.
Monitor the radio. Over the years she has done exactly that and
no harm has ever come to her, although the deeper reasons behind
these orders have clouded with age. But if she remembers them,
she thinks, there must be a reason for remembering. She does
not recall if, or when, the others will be coming back. She does
not know what she would do if someone spoke to her through the
radio. She can listen. She wonders if she would still be able
to speak. Perhaps her larynx has atrophied. She will worry about
that when the time comes.
Night, and she turns the radio off and rolls over and closes her
eyes. The badge is still around her neck. It smells of dust and
age and the sun. Outside the insects call to each other in the
dark and for the first time she hears words in their inhuman
sounds. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.
When the morning comes she switches the radio on and waits for
the noises from outside, ready to smile. There is no sound from
the insects. Puzzled, she steps out of the tent and looks.
There is nothing there. Only the desert, stretching far away.
She searches everywhere in the tiny camp, in the smallest gaps,
even under her bed and inside her boots. Every time she lifts an
object or disturbs a rock she expects to see a flash of brown
and black and hear a high-pitched squeak as one of the insects
scurries away. She does not. They have gone. She sits down
heavily on the hot sand and the badge thumps against her
stomach. She lifts it to her face, gazing at the grinning face
above the bones. Just you and me, she thinks. She is crying.
It's just you and me left. After a time she lifts her head to
the washed-out sky and screams. Her larynx is still working.
The day passes slowly. She does not feel hungry, or thirsty, or
tired. Usually she listens to the static of the radio intently,
meticulously, her fingers creeping up the frequencies and then
back down, straining to hear ghosts of voices in the signals.
These are her orders. Stay here. Monitor the radio. But
without the insects she is disconsolate. She misses them, and
she does not pay attention to the radio. Her fingers tweak its
dial in erratic, random spasms, back and forth, causing the
static to warp and snap. Her eyes flicker over the dull ground,
willing a dark glint to appear shyly from somewhere. Everything
is as motionless as everything else. Occasionally, her free
hand wanders to the ancient badge around her neck and
absent-mindedly caresses the plastic. She hopes if she does this
for long enough her fingers will sense its meaning. Now and
again an image comes to her of a crowd. There are other images.
Over lunch, she takes out her wallet and for a long time she
stares at the two photographs. She is a soldier and these are
her orders. An echo of a life. The reflection of a pulse. The
world shrinking as it exhaled for the last time. The sun
glares, raw and heavy with heat. She stands up. She gazes once
more at the smiley face and the crossbones, gently stroking the
pitted laminate surface. In one of the crates in the camp is an
old tube of glue. She places a delicate dab on the back of each
photograph and tenderly presses them to the back of the badge,
so they face inwards, towards her heart. She fetches her
backpack and fills it with the tins she took from the city
yesterday. She turns her back on the buildings glittering in the
distance. She picks the radio up and places it carefully on the
ground. She chooses a large rock. The radio makes a sickening
crack as she swings the rock down against its casing. The static
stutters and cuts off for the last time. The badge twirls and
dances against her body. The desert shimmers with a new and
violent strangeness. A light gutters deep in a nest of ruined
synapses. Too little and too late for almost everything. As she
walks out into the desert, away from here, towards an immense
and open sea, the meaning of the badge comes to her as well, and
she smiles.
Disobey.
END.