PETER LILLIOS tells a tale of future terrors

I’ve always been impressed by the ones who leave a note. Not just any note, mind you. I mean something along the lines of “You’ll find the key to my safe in the sock drawer,” or “Don’t forget to water my prize rose bush,” or even “Give an extra hundred to the cleaning gal for the mess.” No accusations, no justifications, no pontification—none of that. Just something simple, pragmatic, to the point. Elegant, you might even call it. Or perhaps you find that word queer in this context, even distasteful. Fair enough. There’s no point arguing matters of taste. But as for myself, I’ve always admired the ones who can write something so matter-of-fact a few moments before their brains are dripping from the ceiling.

              I had the good fortune of knowing several such men during my time in the armed forces. Quite intimately, in fact. You see, I was their superior, and it was on my orders that they carried out the acts that inspired them to pen those pithy little sign-offs. They died by bullet, buckshot, belt—and in one case band saw, if you can believe it. Though in that instance the gentleman’s civilian occupation was carpentry, so I suppose it made good sense. One returns in the end to what one knows best, after all. And though the methods were varied, the cause of death was singular, even if it eluded the coroner: to a man, they all died of a bad conscience.

              It’s the source of that bad conscience that you’ve come to hear about tonight, I gather. Unless you’ve come for the free meal, sponsored by your editors. Please extend my gratitude to them for that courtesy, by the way. I was half expecting to have to pay my own way, miserly as they are in the journalism industry nowadays. In any case, I guess we’ll see by the end of the evening whether my story earns the meal. The head chef is trained in the finest pre-Collapse French tradition, so I wager I have my work cut out for me.

              Speaking of which, I took the liberty of ordering us a few hors-d’œuvres just before you arrived.

              My pleasure. Apéritifs are on the way as well. Dry vermouth, a 2059 vintage, I think.

              That’s right, from just before the bombs fell. Supposedly there’s still a trace amount of cesium-137 in the bottles. But you needn’t fret: all the especially nasty radioisotopes decayed away ages ago. The only danger now is a hangover. Do take care, though—vermouth sneaks up on you, in my experience. Anyhow, I hope you don’t mind drinking on assignment. Alcohol is included in the reimbursement, surely?

              Splendid. I suspect you’ll need it. It’s liable to be a long night.

              I understand that you have your work cut out for you as well: winning over today’s jaded readership takes something altogether more charged than death by perforation, laceration, or asphyxiation. Don’t worry, I intend to make your job as easy as possible in that respect. And since I don’t expect muckraking to prove overly difficult here, I hope you won’t take exception if I ask something else of you, something a bit more… pressing. You might even call it a matter of life and death. But I’m getting well ahead of myself.

              Before you agree to anything, I imagine you’ll want some reassurance that I am who I claim to be: the man who’s dodged interviews for three decades now, yet on the thirtieth anniversary of the armistice finds himself knocking on a journalist’s door instead of slamming his own in her face. To remove any doubt, I’ve curated my prepared remarks to open with some as-yet-unpublished details about the anecdote that earned me my fifteen minutes of fame—or infamy, as the case may be. It’s all the same to me. No publicity is bad publicity, as they.

              So let’s start things off with a bang and get on with the fireworks, shall we?

              Brilliant!

              It was March 2143, two years into the war with the North, and I was a major stationed in the Garrisoned Zones. That’s what leadership had taken to calling the bombed-out husk of a former megacity located fifty kilometers north of our border. It had been nuked to rubble during the Firestorm of 2060 and left uninhabitable for the better part of a century—at least, for anyone who wasn’t keen on getting a sunburn in the dark or losing their teeth at age twenty-five. That is to say, anyone who didn’t wish to end up like the Zonees: the remnant population of some hundred thousand urbanites, plagued by sundry mutations and malformations resulting from congenital radiation poisoning.

              My battalion was barracked alongside a community of three hundred such holdovers, on account of a very particular task we’d been assigned. Their enclave lay in the ruins of a rail yard, with dilapidated boxcars serving as single family condominiums. It was rather quaint, as scrap heaps go. They practiced subsistence agriculture using pre-industrial techniques, supplemented by the few functional Old-World relics remaining to them.

              The first sabbath after we arrived was a local high holiday marking the vernal equinox. It was considered an auspicious day for nuptials, and several couples were to be wed at a church service. Consequently, the entire community had turned out in their Sunday finest: the broodmares with all their little sucklings in tow, widows and widowers in their stooped dignity, preening debutantes, teenagers exchanging furtive glances with their paramours, men chattering about work or the weather or God knows what. From our position on a nearby hillock, I studied them closely, as I often did, with an anthropologist’s eye. Overall, it was a veritable cross-section of humanity, just like one would encounter in the civilized world.

              I waved to several of the parishioners as they filed past, and I encouraged my subordinates to do the same. At one point, a village girl, perhaps five or six, left her mother’s side and came bounding up the slope toward us. The woman didn’t appear to notice until her daughter had almost completed the foray. She called after her, but by then the girl was already reaching up to caress the neck of my black stallion.

              I fished around in my saddlebag and retrieved a foil-wrapped chocolate and hazelnut bonbon, the kind I had regularly shipped to me from the finest confectionery in the capital. She reached up and grasped it with her chubby fingers—all six of them. I gently spun her around and nudged her back in the direction of her parent. After they were reunited, the woman raised a hand in appreciation, and a smile spread across her face. The two disappeared into their house of worship, hand in hand.

              The church was a curious edifice, a collection of what looked to be Old-World portable privies. They had been welded together with some of their walls removed, so that they formed a single large chamber with windows sizeable enough for us to observe the proceedings from our elevated vantage point. The toilets themselves had been left in place as seats for the congregants, with the tanks serving as elbow rests for the person to the rear when kneeling in prayer. Conveniently, the bowls were still connected to plumbing so that they could double as replenishable holy water receptacles.

              The structure was made almost entirely of plastic, which was no arbitrary design choice. In fact, its composition was integral to the Zonee faith, a kind of cargo cult that elevated Old-World materials and artifacts to the status of sacred relics from a mythical age. According to their eschatology, the accumulation and consecration of a threshold amount of such antiques would bring about a “return of the gods” and a restoration of twenty-first-century glory. There was just one small problem with that belief, from our perspective: we too had aims on pre-Collapse synthetics, though for a much more worldly reason.

              You’ll forgive the history lesson, but I’ve found I can’t take anything for granted with your generation, what with the state of schooling nowadays. Why, just look at our company in this very establishment, full as it is of half-naked and semi-literate libertines! Besides, I gather from the microphone you’ve affixed to my lapel and the tape machine in your purse that I’m not only addressing you. Who knows how long your little recording might survive and garner interest. So there’s posterity for me to consider as well. Therefore, I’ll save my unborn audience a trip to the library and tell the whole story, beginning to end, in its full historical context.

              Now, where was I? That’s right, the sacred cesspit. In my view, a church is still a church—whether affiliated with the Bible movement or the bowel movement—and I was determined to see that particular service through to its climax. By the time the procession of bathroom-goers tapered off, the building was filled to overflowing, a real squatting-room-only affair.

              The ceremony began somberly, as was their custom. The priest intoned a sonorous dirge, which I took to be some kind of lament over their travails as a people, or else over the sorry state of the world in general. From there the pitch increased in turns as more voices joined in—first the men, then the women, finally the children. The mood brightened and the pace quickened, building at last to a crescendo of fervent ululation as their sacred totem—a rusted old can of air freshener, I think—was revealed to the congregation.

              I couldn’t help but wonder about that. Perhaps they misunderstood “air freshener” as applying not only to the scatalogical, but the radiological as well. Perhaps they considered the relic some sort of mana from heaven that had the powers of a cure-all and was thus deserving of their adoration. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, and the can was simply the shiniest thing they had on hand. Whatever the case, it was long since empty and no good to them for purifying the air—so I figured I’d do my part and light a match instead.

              Consequently, it was in that instant—just as the priest raised the deodorizer overhead in triumph—that I gave the signal. I’m not a person devoid of a healthy sense for the theatrical, you understand. Neither am I without feeling, and it seemed to me right and proper to allow them that moment, if nothing else.

              The lead sapper glanced up at me, flipping his switch after only the briefest hesitation—and the entire assembly ascended to the heavens in a great fireball of religious ecstasy. The explosion took our breath away and rocked the enclave to its foundation, breaking windowpanes half a kilometer away. Debris from the sundered structure littered the vicinity, and the central pile of rubble began coughing up thick plumes of acrid black smoke.

              It was only after we recovered our wits and surveyed the results that we realized the townsfolk had left behind a few bodily mementos before departing on their journey skyward. You’ll have trouble believing this, I’m sure, but the head of the priest had landed directly in a toilet bowl, where it was spinning in circles as the broken mechanism flushed uncontrollably. His mouth, still agape in its final “Hallelujah,” was issuing forth a jet of toilet water three feet into the air, like a fountain cherub. That’s the God’s honest truth. From his lips to God’s ears, as they say.

              You see, it had occurred to me the night before that the engineers attached to our command happened to be in possession of several crates of dynamite, on hand for the purpose of blowing bridges or clearing obstacles. I instructed them to take the whole lot of it—two hundred kilos in all—and plant it in the church under cover of darkness, in the toilet tanks and otherwise out of sight. A curfew was in place at the time, so we could proceed with confidence that our work would go unnoticed. I could go on, but I’m sure you’ve already seen the photos. They made something of a splash when they were published after the war. Shreds of flesh dangling from tree branches like red lingerie drying on a clothesline, as I recall.

              My bluntness appears to have rankled you. I do apologize, but I’ve never been one to mince words—bodies, yes, but not words. And you must understand that I didn’t know who my dining partner would be tonight, so I prepared my remarks with a general audience in mind. That audience includes those of a gruffer breed than you—you, a twenty… five-year-old female journalist? Educated, at least by today’s standards; cultured enough to know her ristretto from her macchiato; unattached, save for maybe a cat or two; someone who’s waded through her share of muck and sludge, but still holds out hope for that elusive kernel of human goodness—perhaps even secretly yearning to land the scoop on some great “Kumbaya moment” that redeems us of everything. Right on all counts, no?   

              Very good. I’ve always been a real people person, a true empath, as you’ll glean soon enough. Consequently, matters of character rarely escape me. Don’t mistake me, though: none of my observations were meant as insults. I’m well acquainted with your work, and I admire you as an impartial newswoman of the old school, in spite of your youth.

              Why, the mere fact that you didn’t put a microphone on your own lapel tells me just the kind of reporter you are: the kind who’s not infatuated with the sound of her own voice. In fact, if it weren’t for your reputation as someone who does her damnedest to keep herself out of the story, who forbids her own scruples and foibles from clouding her work, I wouldn’t be planning on asking for that personal favor I mentioned—a favor that involves me placing complete faith in your professional judgment.

              What’s more, I’m sure you understand that anecdotes of that sort are precisely why your editors sought me out for the past thirty years, and why they leapt at my invitation tonight. Your rag was the first to print the dynamiting photos—the photos that scandalized a nation—so it makes perfect sense that they’d go out of their way to land the first interview with its orchestrator.

              And aside from your bosses, I have other listeners of this recording to consider as well—listeners a hundred years hence, who may not be quite as dainty and starry-eyed as you. Indeed, if history is any guide, they may well be even more blood-thirsty and jaded than today’s lot. Perhaps even as jaded as the twenty-first-century set, before they melted each other’s faces off with atom bombs. So I hope you won’t hold it against me that in opening my story, I chose to heed an age-old newsroom adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

              I trust you’ll now allow me to explain my foray into high explosives, since some context is necessary to fully appreciate things of that… nature. Without it, I can sense that misleading first impressions are a real danger. In fact, based on how feverishly you’re scribbling in your jotter, I’d wager you’re jumping to conclusions already. And it’s easy enough to guess from your facial expression exactly what sort of conclusions they are. I’m not blind, after all. To save you from having to scratch out anything later on, I should clarify this act of mine, an altogether monstrous one, I suppose—to the untrained eye, at least. So let’s train our eyes before proceeding further.

              To accomplish that, I’d like to backtrack a little, to April of ’42. I was a freshly minted captain then, bound by rail for my initial field posting in Z-4, a northeastern Garrisoned Zone. On account of my background in jurisprudence, I’d been assigned to the Security Echelon, a paramilitary police agency tasked with safeguarding our assets in the city.

              As our steam locomotive wound alongside an urban waterway toward the central rail station, fog lay low and still over the riverbanks, undisturbed by flap of wing or stroke of oar. The water fowl had long since left those parts, or else fallen motionless from the sky. The fishermen and their boats followed close behind. The birds that remained were sickly things: flightless, often blind, they toddled in circles and pecked fruitlessly at the lifeless ground. The people, it was said, were little better. At least, according to the orientation literature I’d been reading as the train rumbled along, cutting through the fog and sending the birds perched along the tracks skittering away.

              Eventually, the wheels began to squeak as we decelerated into the station. A sergeant leapt aboard and barged into the enlisted men’s boxcar before the train had fully ground to a halt. “All right, you lot!” I heard him exclaim from my private quarters, one car over. “Welcome to the Exclusion Zones.”

              I poked my head out of my cabin to observe the spectacle through the window of the door separating our cars. The sergeant’s underling, a corporal, whispered something into his ear.

              “Garrisoned Zones, I mean!” the NCO corrected himself. “As of two weeks ago, at least. Don’t let that ‘exclusion’ bit scare you. I can guarantee you won’t get more than a healthy dose of rads here—just enough to put some hair on your virginal chests. So long as you stay within the yellow lines, of course.”

              The corporal whispered to him again.

              “Oh, you’re the ones who’ll be painting those yellow lines. Well, then… I can guarantee that if you do get more than a healthy dose, you won’t feel a thing—until your insides are a chunky pudding dribbling out your anus. And by then, you won’t have anything more to worry about anyway.”

              I cracked a smile and listened to another couple minutes of the sergeant’s theatrics. That sort of cheeky hazing—carefully orchestrated, to be sure—was exactly the reason I preferred the enlisted initiation to the officers’ briefing. But just then I caught sight of a lieutenant beckoning me insistently from across the station’s platform. I gathered my belongings and strode out to meet him. After we exchanged curt pleasantries, he ushered me into a nearby command hut, where said briefing had just begun. I claimed an unoccupied seat at the back of the room.

              A gaunt major with an exceedingly erect posture was addressing the dozen fresh officers in attendance. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there’s one thing you simply must understand about the Garrisoned Zones. This isn’t a city—not to us. It’s an oil well. Every plastic-shingled shanty-town, every bottle-laden garbage dump, every prosthetic-legged old woman—they’re all latent fuel, waiting to be tapped. Coal is history, fossil fuels are a memory, so plastic is the name of our game here. Petroleum pyrolysis, the boffins call it: going from plastic to oil to gasoline. But you don’t have to worry about that part. That’s what the civilian contractors are for.”

              He picked up a misshapen human skull perched conspicuously on his desk. I couldn’t tell whether it was a fossil or from a more recent kill. “What you do have to worry about,” he said, “are the locals, like this one. Thirteen hundred cc cranial capacity, about a hundred less than ours. They make up for it with a few extra teeth, though: many of them have thirty-four instead of thirty-two, as you can see here. That combination means they’re prone to bite first and ask questions later. We’ve only been here a month, and they’re already at our throats every time we so much as rustle a prehistoric tampon lying in a garbage heap.”

              The line elicited a few chuckles from the assembled.

              “Two weeks ago, things got out of hand and they killed a worker in Z-3. Ripped him limb from limb, I’m told. The contractors refused to continue unless they were assigned a dedicated force of gendarmes, so here we are.”

              He went on for some time, but my thoughts were elsewhere. His address was mostly a rehashing of the orientation pamphlet anyway, and I was eager to see with my own eyes what I’d only ever experienced through bedtime stories or schoolroom lessons. As soon as we’d been dismissed, I headed for the garrison stables, a short walk from the hut. Although the frontline infantry were mostly mechanized, scarcity of fuel meant that horses were still a mainstay of transportation for rear echelon troops like us. I tacked up and mounted a black stallion that seemed docile enough.

              I rode along the camp’s network of trails until my destination came into sight in the distance—the local plastic extraction hub. It was a massive earthwork, the grandest I’d ever seen in person: an open pit mine that looked about as large as the crater from the rock that ended the dinosaurs. It was situated directly atop a buried Old-World garbage dump, a relic from the days when polypropylene and PVC were waste products rather than worth their weight in gold. I took in the length and breadth of the operation, observing laborers shipped in from back home, police reservists standing guard, and the occasional officer milling about.

              “Quite the thing, isn’t it?” a voice to my right said, startling me out of my awestruck reverie. An NCO on horseback had sidled up alongside me. He introduced himself as Sergeant Meyer.

              “You’re an officer, so your parents were probably well-off, right?” he asked.

              I nodded, a bit surprised by his forwardness. In fact, my family were only upper middle class. My father was a lawyer, like me. But I wasn’t inclined to go into details with someone I’d only just met.

              “I bet yours was one of those clans that could afford pre-Collapse plastic for their fine China. Do you still remember drinking from straws?”

              I nodded again. “My mother did keep a few in the pantry for special occasions, as a matter of fact.”

              “God, I remember straws too. But only from before the re-industrialization, when plastic became a commodity. I swear milk tasted better sucked through them. The dissolved micro plastics added a little sweetness, I think. You recall the plastic drives of the ’30s, don’t you? When every family had to turn in their synthetics in exchange for government bonds? How old were you?”

              “Sixteen,” I said.

              “Heavens, only sixteen. I had already fought in my first war by then. That one was all about rubble, and this one’s about garbage. Go figure.”

              “Indeed,” I said.

              “Well, here’s to the poor bastards who died for bricks in the last war—and to the ones who’ll end up dying for disposable utensils in this one.” He removed a pocket flask from his jacket and took a swig, offering it to me afterward. I obliged him. Bad luck otherwise, I figured.

              Regardless, it wasn’t too long until someone in our battalion earned the toast. Six weeks later, one of the the sentries on night watch at the mine was ambushed and shot through the throat. His corpse was subsequently defiled—emasculated, to be precise. His testicles were found stuffed into his mouth, giving him the appearance of a chipmunk hoarding acorns for winter. We never did find his penis, which led us to surmise it was kept as a trophy. To top things off, a placard had been hung around the man’s neck with a piece of twine, on which a single word was scrawled in his blood: “Plunderer.”

              The news quickly filtered up the chain of command. As it turned out, the assassination was just what High Command had been waiting for. The week before, Zonees in Z-2 had orchestrated the sabotage of a major synthetics hub. It was a real bloody nose for the SE and a serious embarrassment for leadership. There followed some half-hearted attempts at negotiation with village elders, but High Command concluded that religious fanaticism around Old-World esoterica left little room for compromise. The only fitting solution, they determined, was an equally fanatical policy on our part. Since the farming settlements were thought to form the agricultural bedrock sustaining the budding uprising, they were seen as ideal targets of reprisal for any attacks.

              In this way, the belligerents—“bandits,” as the higher-ups disparaged them—would be “torn out root and stem” before their harassment could bloom into an insurgency proper. Though it wasn’t shared with us at the time, the tactic was also in alignment with High Command’s intention to bring about a diminution of the Zonee population by two-thirds over the course of the occupation, with an eye toward freeing up living space for post-war resettlement by our own citizens. The remaining third would be kept alive to serve as forced laborers.

              All that was lacking was a catalyst to incite the troops—a catalyst that the guard’s killing and desecration provided. The very next day, for reasons ostensibly personal but ultimately well above our pay grade, it was ordered that “any village found nourishing even a single bandit be eradicated down to the third generation, razed to the ground, and defoliant spread across its agricultural tracts, such that anyone escaping the firing line is taken by hunger.”

              Oh, and there were a few flowery addendums about “liberating the material heritage of mankind from those who blindly trample it underfoot” and “letting rubble and bone serve as a testament to our strength of will, and to the terrible but righteous judgment handed down upon the bandits and their kin, and their kin’s kin.” You get the picture.

              That was the exact text of the order as it came across the wire and subsequently seared itself into my brain, where it remains lodged to this day. It was titled the “Hardening Decree,” laden as it was with High Command’s usual penchant for machismo and sexual innuendo, or more fully, “a decree promulgated for the purpose of hardening our resolve against organized crime and banditry.”

              With the swipe of a pen, hundreds of policemen, jurists, and scholars—entirely ordinary people, all things considered—were given carte blanche to kill. Some did so reluctantly, others with great zest and enthusiasm. But all of us, with very few exceptions, dutifully took up the occupation of murderer for the better part of the next four years. Or as long as we lasted.

              The sentry’s assassins likely didn’t hail from the nearby village, a community of two-hundred-odd residents cultivating crops in the middle of a dilapidated football stadium. Most of the bandits were nomadic: they relocated their tent camps every few days to avoid being found out by our long-range patrols. In fact, they could have originated from almost anywhere in the city, realistically. But it didn’t matter. The settlement was proximate to where the outrage had taken place, so its inhabitants would have to shoulder the burden—and how!

              I won’t go into all the finer points of a reprisal action here. There’ll be plenty of time for that later on. Besides, that first one was so badly bungled that it was hardly representative of those to come. It was a real ham-fisted, amateur operation, as could be expected of men who had, for the most part, never before fired a single round at a live target of any kind, let alone a six-year-old.

              Some of the shooters broke down in tears; others fainted. Still others really lost the plot and collapsed into trembling heaps. Several pissed themselves. One even shat his pants, as I recall. Rounds fired from rifles held in tremulous hands missed the mark or struck outside center mass, necessitating follow-up shots, sometimes two or three.

              Children were shot before their mothers, wives before their husbands, leaving the strongest among them with nothing to lose. Many of the initial survivors chose to fight to the death with fingernails and teeth rather than be put down quietly. One lieutenant had a chunk bitten out of his face by a mother who had just seen her preteen daughter shot six times before finally receiving a well-placed round. When all was said and done, fully a quarter of them escaped. Our men had by that point had enough, and they were in no mood for a foot pursuit. We opted to let the survivors go.

              My own reaction to popping my cherry was somewhat more muted. I was the “thousand-yard stare” type, as I learned that day. I’d always been more inclined to introspection than exhibitionism, so it made good sense. In later actions, officers were rarely assigned to the shooting detail. But for that first one, it was decided that everyone would participate directly, regardless of rank, so as to share in the onus and culpability. I wasn’t opposed to the arrangement on principle—fair is fair—but in practice it did end up posing something of a problem for me.

              Sergeant Meyer was overseeing us younger officers on the firing line, and I can hear his words like they were spoken only yesterday. “All right, you’re up.” After I drew my sidearm, he was kind enough to rack the slide for me. I was a bundle of nerves by then and couldn’t manage to work the pistol’s action myself, especially after I had seen my target: a waiflike girl in a pretty floral dress who looked all of sixteen. She had pulled the garment’s hemline up to her thighs before kneeling on the ground, presumably to avoid dirtying it. It was the damnedest thing, looking back on it now. But somehow it made perfect sense to me in the moment, out of my wits as I was.

              Anyway, to make a long story short I blew her brains out.

              Quite literally, too. You see, my pistol had been unwittingly loaded with hollow-point rounds. The sergeant apologized and promised I’d be issued full metal jacket from then on. “With these expanding bullets,” he explained, “it’s ‘in like a pebble and out like a boulder.’ Makes a real mess of things. Entirely avoidable with FMJ, mercifully.”

              I thanked him, returned to my private quarters, and threw up my lunch into my helmet.

Chapter 2

I see that you’ve beaten me to the bottom of the glass, and you rather look like you could use another. I hope it wasn’t something I said.

              Garçon, another round for me and my honored guest, if you please!

              I’m sorry if my choice of table talk strikes you as untoward, or my delivery comes across as uncouth. We soldiers sometimes forget that civilians don’t share our acquired taste for mess hall banter. With any luck, the next drink will be a boon to my eloquence—or, failing that, at least infuse you with some liquid courage. Besides, there’s a point I’m driving at with the little romp I just related, something more instructive than pure sensationalism.

              Like I said, I’m aiming to establish my motivation for the affair with the dynamite, as you’ll grasp shortly. And aside from that, what I suppose I’m trying to communicate, however inelegantly, is that the confidence and authority I project when discussing this dirty business now was hard-won. It was earned only after many months of “putting lead on target,” so to speak. Becoming a businessman of my sort—someone whose business is death at a time when business is good—constitutes the profoundest rupture in any psychologically normal man’s life, a break with everything believed and hallowed up to that point. My bad conscience had to be ejected, violently and repeatedly, until my stomach was empty and spasming, and vomit gave way to blood-laced spittle from my excoriated trachea.

              Our second action went a bit better than the first logistically, but the rawness, the shock, were still very much at play. Nausea too, naturally. That time there were only a hundred Zonees, but far fewer of us as well: a single squad of ten men and a lieutenant under my command. The bulk of our unit was engaged in a skirmish with bandits over possession of a plastic-rich garbage dump several miles to the south. Apparently, it was something of a Zonee Mecca to which pilgrims came from far and wide to pay homage, and they weren’t prepared to surrender it without a fight.

              Back home, surface deposits like that had been thoroughly tapped during the ’30s. By the end of the decade, the easy pickings were exhausted and we’d resorted to digging for microplastics a quarter mile underground. But plastic lying undisturbed in the open was still a common sight in the Zones, where subsistence farming created little demand for petrol, and local superstitions actively encouraged its preservation. By 2140, fuel-hungry powers on both sides of the city were drawing up plans. Hence the war with the North—and the occupation, after we mobilized to seize the Zones first.

              The village nearest the pilgrimage site had been singled out for extermination, in keeping with the new policy. It was another agrarian enclave, as stipulated, but rather than soil farming, the residents had created a hydroponic system in the ruins of a five-story high-rise. The entire surface area of the building, top to bottom, was covered in edible plants of myriad types and strains. All quite healthy, from what I could tell. It struck me as an ingenious method that cleverly avoided soil and groundwater pollution—which was especially high in that area, according to our dosimeters.

              I announced our presence via loudspeaker and demanded that the inhabitants present themselves outside. “Census-taking” was the excuse I gave, which wasn’t entirely false: I merely neglected to mention that our count would be of their dead bodies.

              After a good number of occupants had exited and their egress slowed to a trickle, a five-man entry team conducted a full sweep of the tenement that netted a few stragglers. I surveyed the resulting crowd of Zonees with growing consternation: I didn’t know how we were going to dig a hole big enough for a hundred people with the ten enlisted men we had on hand—especially since those hundred people would have just as soon not gone into the hole, all things being equal. That meant there’d only be five of us digging, as anything less than five on watch was asking for trouble.

              Sergeant Meyer was with us, and I asked him how long he thought it would take. He was a veteran of the last war, twenty years prior, and things had supposedly gotten nasty during that one too. Though from what I’d heard, the summary executions back then were of enemy combatants, not civilians.

              Meyer pressed his boot into the poppy field directly adjacent the building to gauge its pliability. “In this soil, it should take about an hour.”

              “How’s that?” I balked. “Fifty people couldn’t dig a hole big enough in an hour, and we’re only twelve.”

              “There’ll be a hundred digging.”

              “You mean them?” I pointed to the pajama- and knicker-clad contingent of tenement rats dawdling in the field, ringed by my subordinates.

              The sergeant nodded.

              “Does that really work, in your experience?”

              “Better than asking them to stand around, actually,” Meyer said.

              “Unbelievable.” I removed my cap and ran my fingers through my hair.

              “Believe this.” Meyer raised his submachine gun and fired a five-round burst into the air. “Attention! Every Zonee, grab a shovel from the back of the truck until they’re gone. Then line up two by two and start digging. Women and children, dig with your hands. We’ll tell you when to stop.”

              The haggard lot did as instructed without a word of protest, trotting up to the idling armored personnel carrier and retrieving the wooden shovels. I watched in amazement as they dutifully took up their task, breaking ground in the soft earth. Fifteen minutes passed and the hole grew deeper, until their shins were no longer visible. Finally, I could take no more: I had to know. I approached a group of five women kneeling in the dirt, their hands blackened and bloody.

              “Excuse me, ladies,” I interjected. “Pardon the interruption, but do you happen to know that you’re digging your own graves?”

              They nodded.

              “May I ask why? Why are you doing that?”

              “Because he told us to,” a young woman said, gesturing to Sergeant Meyer. She was quite pretty, in a rustic sort of way—but her under-eyes were puffy, as if sodden with a deep and rising well of tears.

              “Why not refuse?” I asked.

              “Then you’d dig it yourselves, and we’d have to wait longer.” Her manner was calm, her speech measured, but I perceived a slight tremble in her lower lip, and her voice quavered on the last word.

              “Wouldn’t you rather live a little longer anyway?” I pressed, in spite of my own growing discomfort. “Are you in such a hurry to die?”

              With that, the dam burst, and her tear ducts loosed a torrent. She let out a long, piercing wail that dropped my stomach like a lead anchor and drew the rapt attention of everyone within earshot, briefly wrenching them out of their own personal hells.

              An old woman wearing a polka-dot headscarf intervened, gently stifling the girl’s sobs. “We’re already dead,” the elder declared flatly, locking eyes with me. “All that remains for us now is crossing the Styx. We may as well help the ferryman by rowing the oars ourselves.”

              I considered her words carefully. “Very well,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I won’t prolong your journey a second more, then.”

              I handed her my canteen—from which she took a healthy swig—then parted from her with a little bow of gratitude. An hour later, she was four feet below my boots. I lit a cigarette. Meyer joined me and did likewise.

              “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he remarked.

              “Hell of a thing,” I concurred.

              We stood there in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, from the direction of the Northern Front, I could hear the muffled patter of machine guns and the low rumble of artillery fire. Air bursts, I think. The horizon was bright with tracers and the orange glow of a burning skyline. I found it strangely comforting, a reminder that somewhere out there soldiers were still soldiering—instead of whatever the hell it was we were doing.

              “What did you talk to the old lady about, by the way?” Meyer finally asked.

              “Nothing important. I asked her why they agreed to do it. Dig the grave, I mean.”

              “Oh. What did she say? Anything enlightening?”

              “In a way,” I said, gazing into the distance.

              Meyer waited a moment for further elaboration, but I wasn’t prepared to offer any. “Well, here’s to her, then,” he said, flicking his cigarette butt down and grinding it into the freshly turned soil with his heel.

              After the men had finished stowing the shovels and other gear, the twelve of us climbed into our open-topped APC. One corporal manned a forward-mounted machine gun and another drove. I was in the front passenger seat. The others sat in back, singing.

              “What’s dug by a hundred and covered by ten?” their ditty went. “What swallows the young and the wives with their men? What gobbles a village but leaves every hen? What’s sure by next week to get hungry again?”

              I suddenly realized I’d lost track of my own hunger. I’d been too anxious to eat anything before the operation, and now twelve hours had passed since my last meal. I felt rumbling as blood returned to my stomach from my limbs, where it had evidently migrated during the shooting. I knew it would be at least another half hour before I could eat: it was only several miles back to camp, but the roads were treacherous. What had been smooth asphalt a hundred years prior was now a pockmarked, undulating mess, melted and warped in some places and fragmented in others. The APC crawled along at ten miles per hour, zig-zagging as it went.

              I rummaged through my pack and retrieved a small pouch of rodent jerky, a squirrel and vole mix. Despite my hunger, I stared down at the jerky with revulsion. The strips of flesh appeared remarkably similar to the flaps of scalp I had just seen dangling from the old woman’s skull, after a rifle round blew her head apart from ten paces away. And seeing those yellow polka dots smiling up at me from the pulsating leftovers of her gourd certainly didn’t help matters, either. I’m told yellow on red never goes out of fashion, but in that case I’d beg to differ.

              I hadn’t participated in any of the shooting myself. After the first reprisal, that was the purview of the enlisted men alone. Still, I had a front-row seat, which seemed to be enough to set my stomach churning.

              The driver noticed my distress. “Won’t be much longer, sir,” the young man said. “Then we’ll be able to have potatoes or beans or… anything other than meat, really.”

              I looked over at him with a twinge of embarrassment.

              “Don’t worry,” he said. “The rest of us were just as close to losing our breakfasts as you. The lads back there are putting on a good show of things, but it’s just that—a show. Can I be honest with you, sir?”

              I nodded.

              “I don’t know how we’re going to keep this up for much longer.”

              Yet somehow, we did exactly that. Nausea aside, our technical proficiency with the procedure increased rapidly. Within six months we were already old hands, and I’d been promoted to major. Being proficient at something is different from being accustomed to it, though, and I’m afraid one never grows entirely accustomed to such things.

              Those of us who know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together—or to see five hundred, or a thousand lying there—know well the invariable unease in the stomach, the shakiness in the extremities, the weakness at the knees. And we know, what’s more, the genuine mental anguish of seeing in the vacant faces of the dead the faces of our own wives, children, and parents. Whatever may differentiate us from other men—I promise you, it isn’t much—we’re still men at bottom, with all the weaknesses inherent to that condition.

              By spring of ’43, I’d witnessed the terrible toll the shootings had taken on the men. Outright shock had long since worn off, only to be replaced by a more subtle and insidious degradation, a drip torture of blood spatter from each of the many victims in a soldier’s ever-increasing personal tally.

              And indeed, attrition was mounting. More than a handful of the lads had broken down into nervous fits, leaving them gibbering idiots. Others had become documented alcoholics or permanent depressives. Even the ones who escaped the worst of it were at risk of being taken off the line for weeks at a time to convalesce in a sanatorium. I myself was at my wit’s end. Something had to be done, you understand.

              The last straw was the string of suicides in March. First a corporal, then a few privates, then a sergeant and a lieutenant all decided that they wouldn’t be returning from their furloughs after all. As the unit commander, I was responsible for investigating their deaths. That’s how I became so well acquainted with those little notes I mentioned earlier, the ones they left for their next of kin. And it’s what gave me such an affinity for those of the pragmatic variety, I think—the kind that betray no resentments, make no excuses, and most importantly, tell no tales.

              To a man, the decedents had taken the secret of our actions in the rear combat areas to their graves. Their letters gave no indication of the deeds that weighed so heavy on them, eating away at their brains like tapeworms until there was nothing left but a writhing mass of regret and shame. Call me juvenile, but I was always rather proud of that. Whatever my faults as a leader, I didn’t breed tattletales.

              And while we’re back on the subject, I’d like to pause and ponder over those notes a while longer. That way you’ll discern that I’m a reasonably well-rounded and well-adjusted individual, capable of something more than brutishness and bloodlust. You see, I’m a philosophic sort, and leaving behind something so matter-of-fact has always struck me as stoicism of the first order, an act of real philosophical power. What I mean is, it’s a veritable philosopher’s stone of a suicide note, transmuting death into something as mundane as a trip to the post office. Surely there’s power in that.

              There’s another reason, too. I can’t help but see genuine self-effacement in the decision that one’s final words on this Earth—one’s legacy and apotheosis—should be a reminder to pay the utility bill on time. It’s a little bow before the eternity of the species, an admission that the show must nonetheless go on. Instead of “After me, the deluge,” it’s “After me, the rubbish still has to be taken out to the curb.”

              But perhaps I’m wrong to admire such notes. Maybe I’m incorrect in my assessment of them as laconic masterpieces, theses in ten words or fewer, a dissertation in a fortune cookie. Maybe instead of demonstrating deep philosophical insight, they result from some particular deficiency: the inability to properly envision death as the absence of not only bodily functions, but obligations and desires as well. If you recognize that you’ll no longer have to eat, shouldn’t you recognize by the same token that it won’t make much difference to you whether your kids eat, either?

              What I’m saying is, it makes little sense to project one’s desires beyond the point in time when the physical substrates of those desires cease to exist—the point at which one’s hippocampus is passing through the digestive tract of a maggot. Why bother providing for a future that won’t ever arrive, insofar as you’re concerned? Isn’t that just as foolish as a business setting aside contingencies for an event in which it’s no longer a going concern? Nowadays we laugh at the Egyptians for leaving food in their tombs; maybe in a thousand years they’ll laugh at us for leaving wills.

              Twenty-five centuries ago in Greece, when Alexander was asked to whom he bestowed his earthly empire, he arrived at the only truly sensible answer: “To the strongest.” So much for wills! Yet even amongst that nation of thinkers, there were those who lived with an eye toward posterity: the Spartans were willing to sacrifice much in life—life itself, in fact—for the prospect of a marked grave, for something that would outlive them. They were only too happy to die on the point of a spear in exchange for the chance to leave behind the most laconic of all possible notes: their name alone.

              You might find this little more sensible than leaving behind food for a corpse. What good is an inscription if you’re not around to see it? Yet what lacks in logic for the individual often makes perfect sense for the collective. Our legacies—military, artistic, or otherwise—don’t serve us, ultimately, but rather those who come after us. “Oh you passerby, go and tell the Lacedaemonians that here, loyal to Spartan law, we lie.” Those men built a legacy for themselves and their people on the backs of twenty thousand Persian corpses, along with their own.

              And so too with my men, the clear-eyed killers who threw themselves into a moral abyss, sometimes never to return, leaving behind only a sentence or two as a testament to their strength of character. They found it within their hearts to bear an unbearable duty for as long as they were able, and then, when the time came, to end their watch with tact. I’m likely dating myself, but in my view obedience of that rarefied sort is a virtue—so long as it’s not given blindly to human authority, but in submission to the dictates of necessity. It then becomes resolve, humility, love of fate. For circumstance fated us with the duty, the moral obligation, to seize the resources necessary to rekindle the five-thousand-year-old flame of human ingenuity… even if that flame burned a hundred villages to ash. And “not even the gods fight against necessity.” What business, then, had we to?

              It remains to be seen if history will give due respect for shouldering that burden in spite of all human weakness, in spite of all revulsion and shock and horror. Regardless, one thing is certain: in a hundred years, people will read our history not on scraps of paper, like my men left behind, but on digital wonders made possible by the very plastics we hauled out of the Earth at the barrel of a gun. But there I go getting wistful and sentimental. I try my very best to avoid that. These days, such moods invariably lead me to the bottle.

              And what’s that, you say? Reading too much into it? Maybe you’re right. Maybe things are simpler than all that. Sometimes a note is just a note. Perhaps I’m giving too much credit to my fellow man. I’ve certainly been guilty of that before. Still, I’m something of an optimist, and I prefer to think the best of people, to look on the bright side—even of a suicide. I’m sure you can see that by now. Aside from the occasional opioid high, it’s the only way I’ve found to get by, to keep myself from writing a note of my own, jumping inside a meat grinder, and dissolving into a happy little puddle of blood and shit. And you can be sure that if I did, I’d leave a few coins to the restaurateurs for borrowing their equipment. I’m not a boor, after all.

              Incidentally, you really must try some of this steak tartare! The chef’s preparation is a true delight.

              Suit yourself.

              But let’s return here to ’42. There were other concerns at the time than the suicides of the shooters, certainly—namely, the agony of the victims. The long minutes awaiting their turn on the firing line, seeing their kin shot to ribbons in front of them, all the while trying to soothe their toddlers with some bogus story or other about why Nana’s head just exploded. And after the shooting was done and the death pits covered with soil, mercy still proved elusive. We often observed a distinct heaving of the earth, which couldn’t be fully explained by post-mortem off-gassing. This led us to suspect that some of the villagers had been buried alive… All in all, a real sordid affair, as you can imagine.

              Simply put, we couldn’t go on like this. It was impossible. Discipline was beginning to break down: the men were often drunk on duty, many had stopped saluting. I was risking a real crack-up if something wasn’t done. Truth be told, I too had grown liberal with the vodka, which was never a habit of mine before the war. Not that I’d ever been a teetotaler—“μηδὲν ἄγαν,” “nothing to excess,” was always my philosophy. In my career as well as in my personal life, I’d long subscribed to the middle path, to a certain Buddhist sensibility of avoiding excesses on both ends.

              Aside from its philosophic appeal, I found that temperament beneficial to advancement, practically speaking. For the most part, people seem to trust and favor the man who keeps his head when everyone else is losing theirs, whether out of euphoria or despair. It was how I made major by the age of twenty-eight. More importantly, it was how I’d avoided putting a bullet through my skull, like the last major to lead the outfit before me.

              By that time, though, I wasn’t quite myself any longer. The war had brought out the extremes in me. And so it was one evening that, faced with the prospect of yet another village roundup the next day, I found an empty quart of vodka in my lap and a loaded pistol in my palm. As I felt the coolness of the aluminum muzzle dissipate against the heat of my throbbing temple, I snapped out of my stupor as out of a fever dream.

              From the depths of despair, something providential had been wrested; from somewhere in the pits of my drunkenness, the undeniable solution had stumbled forth. I holstered my sidearm, threw myself together, and roused the engineers from their bunks. They must have thought me as mad as Diogenes with his lantern, but I shrugged off their bewilderment, ordering them to gather all available explosives and make hasty preparations before dawn, exactly in the way I described.

              That brings us full circle, back to the church dynamiting—which I hope by now you’ve developed a bit more of an appreciation for, considering all the above-mentioned ugliness that it spared both us and the Zonees. Still, there’s the matter of those equally ugly photos of the aftermath. They open up a whole other can of worms, don’t they? Or perhaps a can of Spam, given the thorough emulsification of the congregants.

              Indeed, I imagine it must be difficult for someone like you, whose experience of war is limited to news articles one page removed from the Sunday funnies, to understand how turning a wedding group into wedding soup is more of a mercy than leaving them intact, save for a few holes in the head. Especially when that soup comes with all the fixings: vocal chords hanging from signposts like meat left out to cure; faces ripped from their skulls, floating in a fountain basin; filleted cocks lying on the ground like discarded banana peels… And have you ever seen a labia perched on a rose bush? With just a bit of artistic license, you might say it looks like a butterfly.

              Ah, here’s the server at last. I’m thinking of the thirty-ounce porterhouse. I’ve worked up quite an appetite with all this talk, and it’s supposed to be excellent here, a prime cut with a nice layer of adipose tissue. “A little fat on a piece of meat can be a wonderful thing.” That’s what my grandfather used to say. Back in his day, he’d tell me, guests of honor were always served the fattiest piece. Those were the days when calories were scarce, and people weren’t so soft and sated as they are now. That’s half our problem nowadays, I suspect. Anyhow, you surely want more than salad, don’t you?

              Not in the mood for fat? How about a nice rare filet, then?

              As you wish. Suum cuisine—to each her own meal.

              Now, where was I? That’s right, those photos. What bears repeating about them is that, despite the volume of bodily detritus—or rather because of it, as the case may be—the villagers felt nothing at all, save for their final moment of jubilation, immortalized forever and ever, amen. I almost envy them that, in truth… Almost. And as for the odds and ends, which proved so offensive to the squeamish here at home—what’s it to the Zonees? They had little use for ears or eyes or spleens in the afterlife. They were no Egyptians. The integrity of mortal remains is a matter of concern and handwringing for the living, not the dead. Besides, the villagers no longer had hands to wring, hands being among the most numerous detached bits we recovered.

              I jest, of course. A little humor, however dark, can brighten even the dourest subject, in my considerable experience. It’s one of many defense mechanisms I’ve acquired over the years, I suppose. In truth, I myself wasn’t immune to the same profound disgust at the disassembly of fellow humans into their raw physical components, like appliances pulled apart on a scrapyard. Nor did I escape sheer existential terror at the alacrity with which the universe allows sentient beings to be reduced to unthinking globs of meat.

              As I said, though, such things are a source of consternation only to us onlookers. Thinking rationally, they ought not factor into our decision-making whatever, as regards the disposition of the victims. To act otherwise is folly and fallacy—anthropomorphizing the dead, you might call it. And beyond not feeling a thing, let’s not forget that the congregants never suspected a thing either. It’s not death itself that’s intolerable, under the right circumstances: that’s but one fleeting moment, hardly even worth mentioning, especially if the executioner understands his craft.

              No, it’s the knowing—the knowing and the waiting—that are the worst parts of the whole business. As I learned from the insightful gravedigger at my second reprisal, it’s standing around twiddling one’s thumbs, awaiting the blow, that allows the mind to make a dragon out of a dove. I slew that dragon, I blew it apart with dynamite—certainly no small accomplishment, if you’ll forgive the boast.

              The new arrangement proved wholly satisfactory to the men as well. We were able to carry things off with only a fraction of the personnel required for a shooting action, sparing most of them involvement at all, save for employment as cordon guards to machine gun any survivors who fled the building. But the engineers had done their work expertly—a real bang-up job, you might say—and no one left the church in fewer than a dozen separate pieces. As a consequence, not a round was fired. It was an immense relief for men used to staring their quarry in the face, as you can imagine.

              But I can discern by this point that you still find me morbid and peculiar, even after my explanations, and I sense that I’m in danger of being misunderstood. Perhaps you’ve detected a certain glibness in my tone, even a flippancy. I can’t really argue with the observation, but I’ll append the following qualifier: in a life as full as mine, I’ve found that one is often confronted with the choice to either laugh or cry. Bitter experience has taught me that it’s almost always better to laugh.

              And the truth is, I’ve cried myself dry already. A river of tears is soaked into every seam of my old duty uniform. So what choice am I left with, really? Simply this: either to become, in the end, a dried-up husk of a human being—hollow, stuffed, like a taxidermied relic of times best forgotten—or to remain a generally lighthearted and jovial fellow in spite of it all. Call it an instinct for self-preservation, if you will, but I’ll choose laughter in most every case.

              Even apart from its tone, I know full well that my tale will compel any thinking person to form a judgment as to my character, and perhaps even arouse the fiercest of passions. It’s not exactly the kind of story one tells over tea and cucumber sandwiches. Indeed, I can see that you’ve already begun to form just such an opinion from what you’ve heard so far. It’s only natural, and you can hardly be faulted for it. Maybe you’ve even started to entertain the wildest fantasies about me—that I torture small animals, perhaps, or that I was myself tortured in some way as a child.

              Let me allay those suspicions right off. I had a perfectly normal upbringing. Not that everything with my family was always sunshine and roses, naturally, but it was entirely satisfactory as childhoods go. What’s more, I’ve always had a particular fondness for animals, and they seem to like me well enough too. All five of my cats died of natural causes after long and contented lives. I don’t really have the heart to take on a sixth. It breaks so easily nowadays. So I would ask that you kindly refrain from fixing any opinion about my character as a matter of established fact until you’ve heard the whole story, beginning to end. That’s simply common courtesy, and not, I think, asking too much.

              As things stand, though, I can tell that my good cheer has fallen on deaf ears, and my humor has landed about as well as flatulence at a funeral. That might pose a problem, seeing as how there’s still the matter of that small favor I keep bringing up. It’s one that involves considerable judgment on your part, and for my own sake I’d do well not to tip the scales too heavily against myself solely for the sake of a cheeky little laugh.

              So I’ll try another tack. With my next anecdote, I promise to be as sober and forthright as possible, and to refrain from any puns of the anatomical variety. As for the anecdote itself, I suppose I should try something a bit more relatable, more human. Hmm, what would serve us well in that respect?

              Let me shuffle through my papers. One moment… No, that story won’t do. Not one little bit. Especially since there’s only a single toilet in this restaurant, and we can’t be sure it’ll be available to you on demand. What else, what else… Egad, certainly not that one, either. Not with ground beef sitting on our table. There must be something here for us…

              Oh, I’ve got just the ticket! How about a love story?

Chapter 3

Very good, a love story it is. So let’s return now to April of ’42, before mass graves had become my stock in trade, to a time when my smile was still an innocent thing—not a facial contortion intended to hold back a mountain of corpses piled behind my eyes.

              And let’s return as well to fair Z-4, crown jewel of the Garrisoned Zones, whose crimson poppy fields and storied hanging gardens would have been the envy of the German romantics of yesteryear. In reality, those gardens were the carcasses of towering Old-World high-rises, undisturbed by human trespass for a hundred years and reclaimed by nature. Still, that didn’t lessen their appeal—in my eyes, at least. If anything, it amplified their majesty through an added aura of historical gravity. Standing at the feet of those mysterious, slain giants and peering up into their lofty canopies left me with a distinct awareness of how frail and fleeting are all works of man, ultimately.

              In my case, then, although I had come as an occupier, the Zones had conquered their rude conqueror, for I was well and truly smitten. At the time, I styled myself a real Schiller or Heine, and had taken to waxing poetic in my off-duty interludes. Looking back on it now, as I sometimes do, my scribblings were more kitsch than genuine craft—but show me an artist who’s capable of something greater than imitation at the age of twenty-seven, and I’ll show you someone who fizzles out equally young.

              Oh! Mind the spider that just landed on your head! Here, let me help you. I’ll keep him under this spare wine glass until we can relocate him safely outside later on. A plump fellow, isn’t he? By the look of things, he hitched a ride here from the Zones. You can tell from his web in the corner there. See? It’s not a taut, organized, symmetrical web, like we’re used to. No, it’s loose, messy, irregular, with no discernible pattern to the latticework. I guess a few dozen Sieverts of radiation per year is all it took to make abstract artists of our arachnid friends. I always did suspect those twentieth-century expressionists had something wrong with their brains, and this development seems to bear that out.

              Anyway, as for my own Zonee artistry, it wasn’t just the landscape that inspired me. I had become quite enamored of a local girl whose delicate features and fine proportions gave no indication of her people’s unfortunate legacy of intergenerational radiation poisoning. I had at first no idea whether my feelings were requited, though I liked to think so. When our eyes met sometimes in passing, at the vegetable market or near the local plastic mine, she often smiled and laughed a little before turning away.

              One day, as chance would have it, I was startled out of my flirtations by the shouts of a mine overseer. He was a contractor, one of the skilled civilians shipped in to supervise the Zonee forced laborers. A rotund man, and a rather slovenly one too. He was lambasting a whimpering ten-year-old working on the sorting line. The girl had mistakenly mixed thermoplastic and thermoset scraps into a single bucket.

              “Not like that, you ignorant bitch!” he exclaimed. “How many times will it take to get this through your radiation-addled brain: these ones get melted down and the others don’t!” He raised his right hand, preparing to strike her.

              “Hey!” I shouted. “If you hit that girl, you won’t answer to the disciplinary committee. You’ll answer to me.”

              He lowered his arm and looked at me incredulously. “What’s it to you?” he snapped.

              “Tell me,” I said, “haven’t you ever heard that there are no failed students, only failed teachers?”

              He nodded slowly, jowls jiggling.

              “What does that make you, then?” I asked.

              Apparently, he had finally noticed my rank tabs. He removed his cap and clasped his hands nervously. “Sorry, Captain. I know we ought not be too harsh with the young ones. It’s just so hard getting through to these pinheads—I mean, microcephalics, that is—without a little tongue lashing. We already stopped the actual lashings, though, just as instructed. A momentary lapse on my part was all. It won’t happen again.”

              “See that it doesn’t. Oh, and have one of your own men clean up the puddle of waste over there. The kids aren’t trained for that.” The mine was located near a melted-down nuclear reactor, and remnants of the liquified reactor core still occasionally bubbled up to the surface.

              The overseer scurried off, cap in hand. I looked back around in search of my love interest, but she was nowhere to be seen.

              I did spy her again the next day, though, and from then on I found my glances reciprocated more readily. As the weeks passed, her gaze lingered longer and drifted lower, hovering over the outline of my pectorals beneath my field tunic and the bulge in my riding breeches. Her expressions grew more serious and less coy, until one day she abandoned all pretense and failed to avert her gaze at all, daring me to do so first. Her eyes held me fast and bore me along after her, through the marketplace and into an empty pole barn nearby. She had already stripped bare by the time I entered. I quickly did likewise.

              “That was my sister,” she said after I removed my trousers.

              I regarded her with confusion.

              “The girl at the mine,” she clarified. “Three weeks ago. You protected her. Why?”

              I shrugged, unsure how to answer.

              “You’re a good man. And…” she said, looking downward, “a gifted one too.”

              I saw her there in her nakedness, skin glistening and mons swollen, and she saw me in mine, engorged and trembling, and we knew each other for the first time in a horse stall, again and again and in every arrangement, pausing only to gulp air and water, until the sun was low in the sky and the calls of her parents were rising in the distance. Throughout the whole encounter, not another word passed between us, save for her name: Claire. We parted with a long embrace and the shared, unspoken intention of repeating the act as soon and as often as possible.

              For days thereafter, I felt wild and unconstrained by duty or circumstance. I laid mad plans to wed Claire and abscond with her to our own little republic of love and harmony, somewhere unsullied by smokestacks and dead rivers and barbed wire. I longed for the war to be behind us and men the world over to become brothers once more. I even dared to write as much in my journal—in iambic pentameter, no less… Pure kitsch, as I said!

              Regardless, fate swiftly intervened to stymie universal human brotherhood, as it often seems to. The very next week came that first reprisal I told you about earlier, after issuance of the Hardening Decree and the assassination of the sentry at the plastic mine. Unfortunately, it was Claire’s community on the chopping block.

              My entire battalion was awoken pre-dawn and summoned to muster in the courtyard of the garrison fort, where our colonel read us the full text of the decree. You could have heard a pin drop—or a helmet drop, as the case may be: one stunned private actually did lose hold of his. The men were by and large shaken, anger at the sentry’s murder quickly giving way to shock at the scale of what was being asked of them. Many looked from side to side to ensure that they had heard correctly. Some fell out of attention, and a general murmur went up along the line.

              “Silence!” the commander’s adjutant shouted. “The colonel hasn’t finished!”

              “Men,” the colonel resumed after everyone had snapped back to attention, “that was the full text of the order, just as it crossed my desk. I’ve now delivered it to you, as required of me as your commander. But as a fellow human being… I cannot in good conscience demand that you carry it out.

              “Therefore, I ask only that you search your own hearts. No man who absolves himself of this duty will be subject to any official reprimand, so long as I remain in command. Neither will anyone be questioned who chooses to join the firing line and do his duty to the Director in good faith.

              “That is all. Those who wish to depart may do so now and return to their bunks. Those who prefer to stay, gather rifles and shovels. God alone knows which of us chooses rightly. Victory guide us all. Dismissed.”

              After we had fallen out, some of some men chattered in small groups, laughing nervously. Others paced back and forth alone. A few knelt in prayer, evidently looking to the heavens for guidance. One simply sat on the ground with his head in his hands, crying. Cigarette smoke was ubiquitous, and a white haze formed over the entire forlorn assembly.

              Plans were quickly drawn up by the executive officers, a conversation to which I was privy. I was only half-listening. My thoughts were fixed entirely on Claire and how best to ensure her survival. We spent a scant half hour in the briefing room. It wasn’t nearly sufficient, in hindsight, but the colonel wanted to beat first light.

              Just before dawn, we rolled into the derelict football stadium the locals called home in full force, horses whinnying and sirens blaring. The residents were ordered out of their domiciles in the stands with bullhorns. After they assembled, groggy and befuddled, they were kept under guard as we readied to dig a pit in a poppy-studded section of turf. Unlike the rest of the field, which sported a variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains in carefully cultivated lots, the poppy patch been left unsown and allowed to grow wild as a space for children’s play.

              “They mean to bury us!” came the apt cry from one of the local women, shortly after we’d broken ground with engine-powered excavation equipment. Several others shushed her, insisting she was mistaken. Now, the Zonees aren’t exactly known for their smarts, but it doesn’t take a higher mind to realize we weren’t digging for buried treasure. Still, there was no precedent for such a thing in living memory. And apparently, they found what we were preparing to do as unbelievable as we ourselves had just a few hours prior.

              Within thirty minutes, the pit had been dug to the engineers’ specifications. It was a best guess—but not nearly deep enough, as it turned out. The shooting then began posthaste. The first batch of ten Zonees were ushered to the edge of the death pit at bayonet point. The thirty riflemen of the firing squad took their positions, ten yards from the condemned. A private who doubled as a percussionist gave three quick strikes with his drumsticks, silencing the assembled.

              “Ready!” a fellow captain barked.

              The riflemen shouldered their weapons, bringing the muzzles into line with the Zonees.

              “Aim!”

              They aligned their sights with the condemned, so that three rifles were aimed at each of them—one at the head and two at the chest. The percussionist began a slow drum roll. It gained speed, steadily building to a crescendo.

              “Fire!”

              The guns let out a sharp report that cut right through me. Wisps of unburnt powder spilled out of the barrels, and in the same instant puffs of dust arose from the villagers’ shirts and blouses, along with clouds of red mist from their crania.

              The shooters immediately racked their rifle bolts, ejecting the spent cartridges. The casings fell to the ground at the same moment the victims did—all except one, who had somehow gone unscathed and remained standing.

              One of the riflemen trotted up to the man and dispatched him with a shot to the forehead, point blank. The muzzle energy blew the back of his skull off and popped his right eyeball out of its socket, leaving it dangling by the optic nerve. Some of the townsfolk began to weep. A few fainted.

              Sergeant Meyer paced up and down the line of the fallen, firing a pistol round through the head of any corpse twitching excessively. He sometimes leaned onto one foot while he did this, adopting an air of nonchalance that spoke of experience and comfort with the act. The captain signaled to the grave detail, who pushed the bodies into the ditch with their boots.

              It continued in that fashion, wave after wave, until finally the ceremonial drumrolls were abandoned and shooters were left to fire at will, choosing their aim points themselves. In several cases, three rounds penetrated a single head. Their skull caps were propelled ten feet into the air by powerful spouts of brain matter. Other crania blew out to the sides, evacuating their contents in a gentle cascade. Heads that remained intact discharged their insides forward, through the eye sockets, nose, and mouth. Even at a distance of twenty feet, one shooter received a smattering of brain to his face. He threw up immediately. That set off a vicious cycle, with five others vomiting in quick succession.

              From there it was all downhill. The shakes set in and shooters began to miss, resulting in some residents clutching wounded limbs and others left standing entirely unharmed. The men fumbled their reloads. One woman even made it past a second volley unscathed. A baby-faced private approached and shot her in the head, but his pistol round only succeeded in ripping her nose off, otherwise failing to penetrate.

              The private hesitated, then fired again. I couldn’t see where his second round went, but the woman was still standing. He began to scream, firing over and over until he had emptied his entire magazine into the oozing, quivering vestige of her head. Still she refused to fall, and suddenly it became clear that her body was being propped up by a small tree stump tangled in her dress, pressing into the small of her back.

             By then it was apparent that discipline was at risk of fracturing, so the colonel ordered a temporary halt to rest the riflemen and ply them with liquor. The pit was only halfway full. In the interim, officers were ordered to the line with pistols to do their bit. I was third in the queue—and, as I’d arranged, so was Claire.

              The lieutenant before me shared a cigarette with his victim-to-be as they awaited their turn, chatting. His Zonee was an elderly man who appeared unperturbed by the proceedings, as if he’d been ready to go for some time, and this was as good a way as any. The cigarette was still burning between his fingers when they shoveled him into the pit.

              “All right, we’re waiting on you now,” Meyer said to me soon after. He had been assigned to babysit me on the firing line in case I really lost it. It’s difficult to predict how a given individual will respond under such circumstances, as I would learn. “It only takes one moment of resolve,” he added softly, with what seemed like genuine empathy.

           I drew my sidearm but for the life of me couldn’t fully retract the slide to chamber a round. The pistol had scarcely been fired except in proofing, and its recoil spring was still exceedingly tight. I finally managed to pull it back far enough to unseat a cartridge from the magazine, but my stroke was too short and the round failed to feed properly.

           Meyer held out an open palm. I stared at it in bewilderment. He gestured with his fingers until I realized he was inviting me to give him the gun. I handed it over, happy to be rid of the thing. He examined the pistol for a moment, then methodically cleared the jam. He drew the slide back and released it in one smooth motion, chambering a round. Finally, he retracted the slide a few centimeters to check that the cartridge was seated properly.

           “All good now, sir,” he said with a reassuring smile, returning the pistol and closing my fingers around the grip. He patted me on the back. After a few seconds, the pat turned into a gentle nudge toward the death pit.

           Claire had already taken a kneeling position on its lip, preparing to join her family and neighbors therein. She appeared serene, unflappable, her breathing steady and unlabored. It was as if she had already come to terms with her fate, despite that fate calling her to an early grave. Before raising her eyes to the horizon, she cast a final glance at me over her shoulder. Her hazel eyes were full of compassion—compassion, I imagine, for what she knew was a fate worse even than her own.

              My legs were rubber as I approached and came to a halt directly behind her. I raised my shaking pistol, centering her cascade of red locks between the sight posts. After a moment of panic-stricken indecision, a sense of tranquility came over me, quite inexplicably. My hand steadied and my heartbeat slowed. My senses seemed to heighten, and the ticking of my timepiece became the beating of a bass drum. The duration between strikes lengthened until the watch’s gears shuddered and ground to a standstill.

              Then, suddenly, everything reversed, picking up speed and gaining momentum, faster and faster, like a freight train hurtling toward a bend in the tracks, entirely out of the conductor’s control. My heart thundered against my rib cage, a prisoner pounding the bars in impotent defiance.

              Just as it felt ready to explode out of my chest, I jerked the trigger forcefully—forcefully enough to pull the entire pistol to the left, so that the shot missed wide. Claire’s hair fluttered as hot gas exited the bore and the bullet grazed her temple, lacerating the skin.

              Before the smoke had even cleared from the barrel, I kicked her on the back, hard. She lurched forward and tumbled into the pit. Her fall was broken by the body of a pregnant woman whose swollen belly, violently compressed by the impact, discharged a meter-high jet of reddened amniotic fluid through a dime-sized bullet wound.

              Meyer stepped forward a few paces, flattening red poppies under his hobnailed boots. He paused at the lip of the pit and gazed down in. Claire lay completely still. Her face and arms were smeared with blood, excrement, and bits of placenta; it was impossible to determine whose. In fact, it was difficult to tell where one body ended and the next began. Her right arm and left leg were intertwined with the limbs of the corpse beside her, a young mother with a gaping chest wound whose nipples were discharging a pinkish slurry of milk and blood.

              “Good shot,” Meyer said. “Now go wash up and hit the rack. You look exhausted.”

              I rode back to camp in a daze. Behind me, the shooting continued unabated. Rifle and pistol reports reached my ears like corn popping on a stovetop, first continuous and indistinguishable, then regular but distinct, finally sporadic. That last bit was the worst, actually. Each shot, I knew, represented a father or a brother, a woman or her infant—or perhaps both of the latter two, since mothers were allowed to hold children under three years of age to their breast on the firing line. That seemed to calm both mother and child, as well as allowing a single bullet to pass through both; a tidy cost-savings, the higher-ups figured. The engorged belly of one baby killed in this way burst like a water balloon, spraying a liter of milk in all directions.

              After I arrived at our garrison stables, I struggled to tie up and untack my horse, nauseated and trembling as I was.

              “Here, let me help you with that, sir,” a private said, jogging up to me. He was one of only several men who had elected to sit out the action, claiming stomach distress. Everyone knew it was a pretense. “It’s the least I can do,” he declared with a little bow of shame.

              “It’s I who should be bowing before you,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

              I excused myself and stumbled into my quarters, barely making it to the bunk before my legs gave out. In spite of my fatigue, sleep refused to take me. It was 6 p.m. For the next six hours, I lay awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I thought in equal measures of the last twelve hours and the next.

              At the stroke of midnight, I arose and exited the hut as quietly as I could. I fed my horse a carrot to stifle any whinnies and tacked him up. After mounting, I rode the mile back to the stadium. The death pit was covered with only a thin layer of dirt—not enough to deter the jackals that had come to scavenge by night. They fled as I approached, a few carrying off hands or feet.

              I immediately set to work, clearing the earth from one section and pulling corpses out one by one.

              “Claire,” I whispered. “Cry out if you can hear me.”

              “Here!” she sobbed at once, as if a dam had burst from her lungs. Her voice came from what sounded like a few feet below and to the right.

              “Hold on, my love. Please hold on.”

              As I hoped, the bodies had been stacked loosely enough, and the dirt shoveled on sparsely enough, to allow for air to pass through. I dug faster, dropping my shovel and switching to bare hands when I reached the last few inches of soil. After uncovering her, I brushed the dirt off her face and made certain her airway was clear. She coughed forcefully, then took deep gulps of air punctuated by sobs. I cleared the earth from the rest of her body and hoisted her out of the pregnant woman’s collapsed abdomen like a chick plucked from an egg.

              Throwing her over my shoulder, I clambered up the side of the pit. I set her down and examined her. All the blood appeared to belong to others; she had no wounds of her own. I helped her to her feet and she threw her arms around me, still wailing.

              “I’m sorry,” I said, holding back my own tears. “Ever so sorry.”

              I knew we hadn’t a moment to spare. I gave her my canteen, which she drained in one quaff, then threw a woolen blanket around her shoulders. I hoisted her onto the stallion and swung myself up. We set off into a nearby wood on the outskirts of the city, following a trail that led to parts unknown. It didn’t matter. Anywhere but that godforsaken football field would suffice.

              We rode and rode, further and further into the forest and away, I hoped, from those who would tear her from me, given the chance. The sun had already started to rise when I spied it: a small log cabin that looked to be abandoned. Perhaps an unattended hunting lodge, I thought.

              I tied up the horse outside and helped her down. The door of the cabin was unlocked, and there were two small cots inside. She was already asleep on one of them before I had even closed the door behind us. I lay down and did likewise, falling immediately into a dreamless slumber.

              Some hours later, I don’t know how many, I awoke with a jolt. Claire was gone from the other cot, which was made up neatly. I threw myself out of bed in a panic. Had I dreamt the entire thing? Was she still back in the death pit, moldering away, while I in a fit of mad grief rode alone to this place?

              No, I soon realized. Her voice was rising from just outside, soothing my stallion in spite of her own recent torments. I was equally comforted by what I didn’t hear—shouts of soldiers, screams of the dying, idling of engines or the crack of rifles. Aside from Claire’s words and the chirping of songbirds, there was only welcome silence. All was as it should be. Reassured, I left the dwelling and quietly made my way to the edge of the tree line, stepping over scores of poppies along the way.

              I hadn’t noticed the flowers when we arrived. Their vibrant red hue stood in stark contrast to the greens and browns surrounding them. But it wasn’t the flowers that interested me in the moment: my sights were set on a willow tree. I broke off a thin, pliant stem from one of its low branches, looping it several times and carefully knotting the ends to form a ring small enough to fit Claire’s finger.

              Satisfied with the result, I returned to the vicinity of the cabin, where I saw her outside. She had just finished bathing in a stream and was donning her pretty, homespun dress. The garment was clean again, free of any traces of blood or muck from her time spent below ground. After she pulled it on and wrung out her hair, she knelt in the garden, collecting a few carrots to feed the horse.

              My heart was pounding in my ears as I approached her kneeling figure from behind. I did so in silence, hoping to surprise her with the ring and declare my intentions. She didn’t notice my steps and remained turned away, her face in a rosemary bush.

              When I had come within a few feet, I raised my arm up and toward her, toward her cascade of auburn tresses, which I wanted more than anything in the world right then to stroke, to caress and let flow through my fingers like water, until she knew how dearly I loved her. In my hand was the ring, grasped between my thumb and pointer.

              I suddenly felt it slipping from my grasp, as though I were about to lose hold of it. Instinctively, I tightened my fingers to prevent it from falling—and in that instant a shot rang out. It was then that I realized: I wasn’t standing in a forest at all, but in the poppy patch. There was no cabin and no freshwater stream before me—only the death pit and the stream of blood running into it.

              No, there had been no missed shot, no clever ruse, no daring rescue, no moonlit ride to safety. Nothing of the kind. I was back in the moment of decision, from which there was no escape, then or ever. And the ring? It was no ring at all. It was the trigger guard of my pistol. The decision had been made.

              No sooner had my fantasy disintegrated than Claire’s head did likewise, exploding in a shower of gore that scattered blood, brain matter, and shards of bone in a dramatic arc onto the ground in front of her.

              The dry, thirsty soil was quick to absorb the moist bits, soon leaving only her skull fragments, which were embedded into the earth like splinters of bark from a pine tree after a lightning strike. The lifeless husk of her kneeling body remained upright until Sergeant Meyer gave it a firm shove with the sole of his boot. It tumbled end over end into the death pit, discharging the remaining contents of its braincase on the way down.

              “A messy one for your first time, sir.”

              That’s what he said. I remember that clearly.

              And then, “Sorry about that. But don’t worry, it’s not the norm. Most of the time at this distance it’s a clean through-and-through and the skull stays intact… Come to think of it, mind if I have a look at your sidearm?” Or something to that effect. He held out an upturned palm, inviting me to give him the gun.

              I handed it over. He cycled the slide, ejecting a live round and deftly catching it in mid-air. Holding it up to his face, he studied the tip of the bullet protruding from the case. Then he quipped, “Ah, there’s your problem right here, sir. Hollow point. See?” And then that line about “in like a pebble and out like a boulder.”

              Thus concluded my first punitive action, which I already mentioned previously, though perhaps in a little less intimate detail. My own participation lasted only half a minute in reality, but a bit longer in my mind’s eye, as I’ve just elucidated. The human mind is curious that way. We ourselves are our own deepest mysteries; we carry universes in our heads. If I learned nothing else from the experience, it’s exactly that.

              After confiding the vision to our field doctor, he assured me that the whole thing was the result of an antimalarial medication we’d been issued. Apparently, visual and auditory hallucinations are a well-known side effect. He took me off the drug, but I still had half a bottle left. I downed the pills in an attempt to return to the cabin in the forest, without success. I never did make it back to that place.

              Some weeks later, after the bitterest of my tears had already been shed, I was feeling inspired by the strange occurrence on the lip of the death pit, that liminal space at the edge of nothingness where wondrous possibilities abound, both exhilarating and excruciating. So I took occasion to jot down a little poem. I’ve held onto it all these years. Would you believe it? Here, let me show you.

              Still legible, yellowed from age and stained with teardrops as it is. I’ll give you a brief recitation, if you’ll pardon the lilting of a mawkish old man. Here goes.

              Claire.

              Nightly, while I lie in bed, dreaming dreams—though she be dead—

              Of freckled skin and windswept hair and all the goodness that was Claire,

              Throwing round her frame my arms, I embrace her with alarm—

              My love, you see, slips through my grasp in wisps of flesh and puffs of ash.

              Though I’m not a maudlin man, human wonts mean I still can

              Perceive the sights I used to see: the lilac, lark, and bumblebee;

              Hear, too, sounds that I once heard: her gentle laugh, the hummingbird;

              And smell what once beguiled my nose: her rain-soaked clothes, the fresh-cut rose.

              Sights and scents of yesterday serve me now to ward away

              Those that take root here today: the dirt, the grave, her sweet decay.

              Claire, in grace, returns to me in spite of how she left—You see,

              I loved so much that, ere we wed, I loved the brains out of her head.

              Très romantique, no?

Chapter 4

No publishers would bite at the poem. Odd thing, that. But there’s no accounting for taste. Besides, any artist worth a damn isn’t understood until at least a hundred years after his death, for the most part. I suppose artists and war criminals have that in common.

              Anyway, you’ll forgive the romantic interlude, but I thought it prudent to finally lay our scene properly. After all, you came to hear the story of a conscientious killer, a person who, in service to the state and in pursuit of ends not of his own design—in spiteof his own designs, in fact—set about systematically liberating human brains from their skulls. And the beginning of that story—an altogether atypical one, I’ll admit—was the precise point at which my life diverged from the typical. For it’s not every day that a man toasts his engagement with cerebral fluid, you’ll concede. Not all biographies are so clear-cut in their inflection points, but if nothing else, mine has the virtue of clarity in that respect.

              You’ll also want to know, of course, why I did it. I suppose I could tell you that had I refused, Claire and the others would have been killed all the same. I could remind you that the only one I would have saved is myself—not my love, not her family, certainly not the other poor bloke who would have had to ventilate her skull in my stead. I could insist that any morality that takes as its chief duty sparing one’s own tender sensibilities at the expense of one’s comrades is no morality at all.

              I could tell you those things, but I won’t, because the truth is they’d be nothing but fancy post-hoc rationalizations. In the moment, such thoughts were as far from my consciousness as they are from a chimpanzee’s. My mind was entirely blank; higher order thinking had abandoned me. I was an automaton acting by rote, a creature reduced to base physical impulse. And whether by training or by instinct, by fault in myself or in my stars, my hand held steady, my aim was true—and Claire, poor Claire, a mound of goo.

              So much for insight! But perhaps I’m still the wisest perpetrator of them all, in the same sense that Socrates was the wisest Athenian: I’m the only one who’ll honestly answer you, “Fuck if I know.” But as to why I kept it up and saw things through to the finish in action after action, even with my wits about me, I can only state the following: In the end, I had a job to do, and I did it to the best of my ability.

              It’s the duty that chooses the man, not the other way around. And those of us chosen by that heaviest duty became for the nation a forlorn hope, charging headlong through the breach of a moral chasm, many never to see daylight again. We did this without the expectation of fame or recompense, or even a marked grave. We knew that ours was a page in history destined either to be torn out, if the war were won, or held high for public ridicule if it were lost. No, we persevered simply because we wished to spare others the same burden.

              That was our code, our fundamental decency. And through it all, I like to think we remained decent fellows on the whole, even if the only decent thing we could offer was a cigarette, a sip of fresh water, or a bullet to the back of the head instead of the front. We offered these things not because we expected to be held to account if we didn’t, nor because we were beholden to some half-baked moral dogma like the self-righteous screamers and sensationalists of virtue back home, but simply because it pleased us to.

              That’s just the kind of men we were. That was our nature; it couldn’t be helped. And ultimately, we shouldered the burden for them too—the screamers and sensationalists who slapped us across the face with the very hands we kept clean; the fuel-drunk hypocrites who were only too happy to enjoy the bounties of our campaign while condemning its unavoidable exigencies; the effete dandies whose lifestyle of coffee-sipping malcontent was built on the backs of more stolid, uncomplaining men. Theirs was the fruit of our labors, the luxury of morality in a nation of abundance. Ours was perseverance in harder times that demanded harder hearts, a world less than a century removed from collapse. Ours was, in short, the cross, the grave, the skies. There’s nothing more to be said.

              So when they write the history of the whole godawful mess a hundred years from now, after the wounds have long scarred over and cooler heads prevail, it’ll be us, not the hypocrites, not the phony do-gooders and impotent well-wishers: we’ll be the ones unlike the rest, the kindhearted few who did what was necessary—and not a thing besides. We, the earnest killers, the men whose deeds were the terrors of the Earth: we’ll be the decent ones, we’ll be the men apart.

              But I don’t have a hundred years to wait—not even ten, in all likelihood. I need an impartial judge in the here and now, a dispassionate arbiter of my life’s work. That brings us at long last to the subject of the little favor I mentioned, the token I’ll ask of you now. A trifling thing, really. You see, I didn’t come here tonight for a disquisition, but rather a deposition. What I mean is, I had in mind not just a sharing of accounts, but a settling of them. You might even call it a trial of a sort: the same trial, in fact, that was denied to me at the end of the war, when we were granted clemency as part of the accord. And it’s you who’ll be presiding.

              You seem a bit bewildered, so allow me to explain. As I said earlier, the worst parts of this whole living business are the knowing and the waiting, and that applies equally whether one has five minutes remaining or fifty years. I spared the Zonees that, but I couldn’t spare myself. In my case, it’s knowing that after yielding the best years of my life trying to wrest some semblance of decency and order from a horror show, what remains to me now isn’t vindication or absolution—not even judgment. No, firing lines have been replaced by waiting lines at the bureau of motor vehicles, plugging skulls with plugging leaks, signing death warrants with signing pension checks. In short, the horror of the extraordinary has been displaced by the horror of the ordinary, the mind-numbing march toward oblivion.

              The real horror, you see, isn’t judgment, isn’t elevation to heaven or consignment to hell. The real horror is abeyance, purgatory, limbo. It’s the state of clemency, non-judgment, of no one caring enough to even bother putting a noose around your neck. And then, when you finally do die, someone will read about it in the newspaper while they’re on the shitter. Only it won’t say anything about whether you did good or bad, whom you loved and whom you loathed, the things you hoped for or feared or despaired of. It’ll simply say “veteran, registered war criminal, died of natural causes.” And then they’ll pinch off their loaf and close the page on your existence.

              So I hope you won’t begrudge me that, whether out of defiance or terror or simple boredom, I’ve come to you for judgment instead. Since the legal system has sworn me off, I figure you’re the next best thing. Who better than a hard-nosed, no-nonsense journalist to take a cold, disinterested look at the issue and give an honest accounting of the facts, free of any obfuscation or prevarication—even if the issue under interrogation is a human life? I need a person unafraid to sift through shit and sludge, a muckraker to rake through the muck of my existence. I need to know whether, in your eyes at least, all my dutifulness and good cheer, all my striving after decency and fair play, amounted to anything more than a piss in the wind. I need to know, in other words, whether I’ve made my case.

              Your judgment in the matter should wrap up the proceedings of my life nicely and end things with a bang rather than a whimper, as befits me. You might wonder why I don’t simply make the determination myself and settle things in the privacy of my own home, if it comes to that. The truth is, it’s clear to me that I can no longer trust my own judgment. Why, just last week I confused a child at the park for a Zonee girl whose brains I couldn’t extricate from under my fingernails for a good two weeks, thirty years ago. I suspect dementia and other cognitive maladies are fast approaching, if they haven’t taken root already.

              The time for delay and indecision is therefore at an end. I hereby recuse myself; my fate rests entirely in your hands now. Enough talk. Ten words sufficed for my men, so fifteen thousand should be more than enough for me, whether as an apologia or an epitaph. Indeed, it’s not what remains unsaid that matters now: it’s what remains undone. The time has come for me to shrug off the infirmities of old age and become a man of action once more—and maybe a trigger man too.

              You see, all this business about notes and meat grinders and band saws was no idle chatter. No, I’d like to put some skin in the game, as it were. So I brought an old friend along tonight. He’s been with me the entire time, waiting patiently, right here in my trousers. Allow me to introduce you to my old duty sidearm, freshly cleaned, lubricated, and checked for function just this morning. I figure it’s fitting that he’s here with me now to bring things full circle.

              So what’ll it be, Your Honor? Will your recording be my exoneration or my adieu? Are you prepared to absolve a war criminal—or shall I blow my fucking brains out the back of my skull, right onto that lovely young couple sitting behind me?

              I’d wager that ought to earn me a little more than an overlooked obituary in the Sunday paper, don’t you think? And if I can’t win my legacy the Spartan way, at the business end of an enemy spear, I may as well earn it like my men—at the end of my own barrel. That way I’ll restore some of the blessed simplicity I’ve foregone with all this blabber, in the form of tomorrow’s news headline. I imagine it’ll be short, to the point, but memorable enough. I’d fancy something like “Diner turns own head into bowl of soup at Le Ranch Radioactif,” if I had my druthers.

              And say, would you look at that! Here comes the waiter with our mains, right on time. I hate to rush your decision, but I’ve never been one to eat and gun. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon learn straight away whether I’ll be eating my steak or eating a bullet.

              Now tell me, will this be a full course meal—or a soup-and-salad affair?