Daughter outlaw

Weird Tales, Broken Home, Insane Asylum, An Ancient Curse

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/10/26/flash-fiction-challenge-game-of-aspects-halloweenie-edition/

   “You-all come in and set at this here table with me a while. Be hours till it’s fit ter drive on again an’ I reckon I has a yarn or two in me afore work calls. Iff’n I can jest get rid o’ this darned dryness in ma throat.”

   The old trucker sat, all silent-like, until this smooth-lookin’ Northern type took the hint and up an’ bought the old-timer a cold one. An’ jest naturally he ordered a glass o’ somethin’ more expensive for hisself. Yankees have all that style but no class worth a damn.

  “’twas back in ‘46, I think, or wuz it ‘47? Darn, but I’m getting’ forgetful in my old age. Werl, no matter. I wuz haulin’ a load o’ pine from Denver over to Maryland way an’ feelin’ so far from Shreveport I fit to weep for a home I jest han’t se’ed for nigh on two months. The economy was boomin’ then after the War, an’ pine an’ all kindsa softwood wuz sellin’ at a premium. An’ iff’n them easterners knows one thing it’s they likes ter live in comfort - an’ that means timber an’ plenty uv it. Anyways, ‘twas jest after nine. No, it wuz nine-thirty in the evenin’ an’ there wuz a fine full moon risin’ when I see’d this kid setting on a rock by the I-70 an’ wavin’ her arm fit to wear it out, makin’ the universe ally accepted sign of the hitchhiker implorin’ honest workin’ men ter give a free ride.” The whole saloon laughed then as the trucker mimed opening a bottle with a pocketknife an’ chuggin’ the contents.

   “It’s sure lonesome on the roads ev a night an’ I wuz plumb missin’ my Martha an’ the kids, so I slows down a tad - the highway bein’ steep enough that a touch less gas’d do enough - an’ this little girl up and jumps right onto the footboard an’ jest nachrally pulled herself into the cab without a sound. Opened thet big ole Detroit steel door like she was flickin’ her ma’s drapes across the winder come Halloween-time. Skinny little thing she was; pale an’ shakin’ from the cold an none-too thickly dressed for the season’s cold air.

   “Thanks, Mister,” she said, all humble-like. “My name’s Salix and I’m heading back east to find my father. It’s kind of you to offer me a ride.” She spoke like that; all head-you Katy, but with thet California whine like a buzz-saw hittin’ a nail. She tole me her parents wuz divorced a whiles ago when she wuz in her teens after her daddy came back all wrong from the war an’ her Ma took her out West where her own mother’s had lived. But she passed so now she wuz seekin’ her daddy an’ hopin’ ter make a new life down ter Florida or Georgia or somewheres she fit. An’ truth be tole, she sure looked wrong ter these ole eyes. I’ve daughters myself an’ I’d hide my face in shame iff’n one o’ mine looked halfway thet hungry. After a while, (an’ the Lord knows I’ll tolerate anythin’ but this one was a-pulling on a bottle of G-ddamn beer the whole while) she tells me a bit more.

   “They locked me in a hospital away from town. Pretty gardens and lots of games and stuff to draw with and weave but the food was awful and they just wouldn’t believe my dreams about, well…” She kinda growd secretive about thet, but I have a fatherly face an’ so after a while she shakes out her long blonde hair an’ adds: “About the Evil Dead. About vampires.” The saloon was silent now, ‘cept for the Northern feller pushin’ jug after jug across to the old-timer while the saloonkeeper smiled as he added up the tab.

   “There was this one guy. Real old and with an eye-patch; all muscular but gone to fat. Bulimic, they called him. He was always joking and cracking wise and he sort of took a shine to me and never laughed about my nightmares. Never once.”

   There was a pause as a Sherriff’s deputy came in and asked if anyone had noticed any strangers of an evening hereabouts. But even the Yankee was well known; he sold air conditioning to construction companies offering comfort to their customers come pollen season. It seemed the Basement Murders were heading west again; nine slaughtered in their beds that month between the saloon and the State capital. But even Deputy McCabe wanted to hear the rest.

  “He used to come to my room after lights out and whispered outside my door, storytelling. Terrible tales. Beautiful tales. About my mother and father and the war and how they were heroes – even my father who was, well. You know.”

  We all knew. There was not a head in the saloon that afternoon but nodded sadly about the men who’d gone off to do their duty but returned damaged; unable to fit into peacetime life.

   He sighed, and looked around. 

“Thet’s why I got me this. I was too sim-pathetic.” He indicated the purple and white scarring from his left temple down his cheek to one jaw and beyond to a scrawny neck too sparsely grown for the beard to hide his injuries. “She kep’ me interested in her yarns about the ancient curse an’ her Desiny an’ bein’ chosen till it was too late an’ I jest had ter take a rest. I let her sleep in the cab covered in Martha’s quilt an’ I crept up ter the day bed in back. I figger she was new to her life o’ crime an’ musta panicked an’ hightailed it into the sunshine with the job only half done.

  Outside the fattened livestock in his tractor-trailer howled and snarled in the afternoon’s deadly heat. They sang that nasty, sulky old one about the dawn’s early light.

Night watchman

   Professor Milner’s death weighed upon me as a frightened secretary ushered me down into the Chairman’s office: too late now to drive my permitted car like hell for the coast with Annie and Jasmine and sail Sea Princess to the Safety Zones of Europe. Jutland, perhaps; or Corsica.

   In earlier decades the Chairman’s moonlike hail-fellow-well-met countenance would have sported a monocle and cigar. Tonight the clubbable face smiled above an open collared casual shirt; his light bulb head fringed by a toilet seat crescent of thinning hair. If they could truly read minds I’d be dead by now, I thought. Or worse.

  “Come in Robbins, old boy. You don’t need an invitation,” Naughtie growled across a desk bereft of the previous chairman’s Newton’s Cradle and adorned instead with a Rubik’s cube like some literary land-mine. Cute. “Sorry to call you in from annual leave old chap but this Milner business needs putting to bed double quick. See here - oh, do sit down man. “Sit” I said. I don’t… Well, of course I do, but I mean to say I intend you no harm. We’re all in this together and have our duties and it’s really just the same as it always was. We put in a day’s work, take the pay and go home safe and sound to our families.”

   Consider the alternatives if you don’t, Robbins, ‘old boy’, I interpreted. Damn him.

   Too late for that, too. The banter was all Battle of Britain fighter pilot’s safely returned from stonking the Hun but this thing was Twenty-First Century managerialism incarnate. We on the Lunatic Fringe had believed and blogged endlessly that publicinterest.org.uk (motto: “Exceeding beyond belief”)was a communist front importing Marxism into the newsrooms, schools and town halls of Britain via influence peddling and entryism: leveraging European Union health-and-safety directives and environmentalism as the vectors of the disease of unfreedom; English ACORNs. We had been dead wrong. Now most of us weren’t even wrong.

  “See here Brian,” the Chairman went on, waving an ostentatiously ceramic paperknife over a Security report into the Professor’s death, “We have a huge hole in the T.O. because of the Professor’s suicide. Injecting haemotoxin into one’s Nobel Laureate arteries: such a waste. His talent will be missed. The shareholders coveted his research long before its publication forced us to scrap our timetable. Milner is chiefly responsible for where we are today; all at sixes and sevens, rushing around half a century ahead of schedule. What I need to know now is if you or anyone else in Human Resources had any inkling about the Professor’s state of mind or his intentions.” It had been called Personnel Management back when I took my degree. I hate the new title and beleive it’s one of theirs; a part of the drip, drip, drip subversion of hitherto free peoples towards Mankind’s newfound status as property.

   Be careful, lad, it’s not England any more. These days the phrase ‘human rights’ refers to cargo manifests, auctioneers’ lists and bills of sale. “Mister Naughtie, we had no idea. Our records have been kept current and thoroughly cross-referenced since 9/11 when the Company took on more defence contracts. The scientists just don’t impinge into HR territory very much. Mostly it’s squabbles about parking spaces or when employment law obliges us to order them on statutory leave. But then they simply log on from home and work the centrifuges remotely.” The Company had constructed automated laboratories under the new Administration Wing. If Al-Qaeda  or a revanchist Russia had bombed it the probability was high that the filtration plants would have continued unhindered – which was probably why our secret owners had instructed their puppet powers-that-be to design the factory back in 2003.

   “I’m placing a great deal of trust in you Brian, and hold you personally responsible for the welfare of our research staff. Observe carefully and if anyone shows the slightest sign of trouble report him immediately. The switchboard’s manned 24/7 and emails to treason@ go straight to Security here in the Basement. We’ll respond without delay.” They can’t phone or Skype but they can operate keyboards. “Don’t be so glum. This is promotion to Non-executive Director. You’re respected by the Shareholders, our partners and other stakeholders. So much so that we’re contemplating freelancing you to work the day shift permanently and see your lovely daughter at seven o’clock every evening.” Which meant she’d soon be attending an Academy where the hostage children of the janissary caste learn to administrate their fellow humans’ lives as valuable, replaceable chattels.

  “Oh, and Robbins. You haven’t seen your ruffian brother lately, have you? Such talent squandered by going into the former army. We need chaps like him minding Africa now the aid budget’s been rationalised.”

   “No, sir. I haven’t seen him since before…Before.”

   “Very well then, off you go. You have much to do.”

   Outside it almost resembled the country of my birth; moonlit walls bordering asymmetrical Norman fields. Limestone houses with high roofs. Cricket pitches and pubs and the occasional origami fuselage of a downed helicopter. Burned churches and scorched and poisoned riverbanks. Gallows everywhere.

   They’d always owned the Internet but hedges make perfect dead letterboxes and three brief blue LED flashes confirmed that my family was safely evacuated. While Yorkshire is no Himalayan sanctuary or Appalachian militia camp, it is big. As I scattered a flask of garlic pollen into the air conditioning and pulled on cricketer’s body protection and high-impact polymer helmet I glimpsed the Management car park where dark-windowed BMWs stood in oil from the auxiliary generator tanks leaking towards time delay fuses.

   I handed traditional ash wood cricket stumps to each of the others drifting in through the Company gym: we’d give Naughtie stakeholders indeed.

   I hefted a steel-tipped stump and prayed (without truly hoping) that I wasn’t promoting myself from Management’s Flavour of the Month straight to Chef’s Special.

On the doorstep

  

   Bringing eternal life to strangers is a thankless task.

   Sometimes it’s a wordless task. Type Ones half-open their doors and see the suit and the pamphlets and they slam them without a word.

   The Type Twos are little better. They notice it all and check my badge to discover which variety they are rejecting with; “No, thank you. We’re Baptists and happy about that, thank the Lord”, or “No, thank you. We’re not at all religious; we’re all Church of England in this house.” That sort shuts up with a whoosh and ‘have a good day,’ as if hoping another church’s evangelists will make a convert.

   It’s hard; this door-to-door, but no-one said it would be easy. True; on the rare occasions when someone’s interested it’s the most satisfying feeling in the world and so worthwhile. One gets an overwhelming sensation of joy when one’s in a home and there’s an opportunity to make a conversion. It doesn’t always last, of course; there are all kinds of resistance and doubts and sometimes they switch to outright hostility in the blink of an eye and one can find oneself becoming disinvited. It’s painful when one is no longer welcome.

    But even being shown the exit is better than the Type Threes. They’re the clever ones; the intellectuals; the living embodiment of ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’. On the doorstep they have to beat you down with how Genesis parallels many Creation myths or how the resurrection of the flesh and the return from Death’s kingdom is a story common to many deities: Osiris, Orpheus, Persephone, J***s C****t. And they’re right, of course; most religions address the fear of death and offer some comfort or escape. Don’t get me started on what they say about Holy Communion. Just don’t.

   But it’s the rudeness that upsets me; the attitude that because they’ve read anti-religion articles in The Guardian or New Atheist blogs they’re experts on the Church’s persecutions of heretics, witch-burnings and all that burial-at-the-crossroads nonsense. All of which happened, of course, but it’s also insulting and an example of the Devil quoting scripture to serve his ends. Even though I was perfectly aware of that stuff before my own conversion, I still hate it when they talk about the C*******n Church. It’s painful to me.

   I love Type Fours. They’re the dubious, wavering ones: the anxious, lonely hopefuls; the would-be seekers if only they had the time but ‘I’ve got dinner on the hob and I don’t want it to boil over’ brigade. One can get to them. There’s a way in with Type Fours if one’s careful and not too pushy. I usually employ humour. “I know it sounds funny in this day and age when you hear someone say ‘Let me tell you the good news of how you can find eternal life,’ but I promise you that it doesn’t hurt a bit and will only take a few moments of your time. Ten minutes, tops, if you’re interested.” 

   Take this evening, for example. It was just after the teatime rush before the evening’s TV and before the soaps had started. I knocked and a lady answered. She was blonde and thirtyish and healthy-looking and lacked that happily married glow or the optimistic dating-and-still-excited Match.com aura which warns I have no chance. I started my pitch and I could see she was less than thrilled by my wholesome appearance. There was a Simpson’s umpteenth-time rerun playing in the background: the one with the three-eyed fish. She wouldn’t reject me for a mutant fish, surely? Somehow we got on to the topic of workplace stress (I’m in second-hand jewellery myself and despite the upward pressure on gold prices since 2008, reset gems just aren’t selling the way they did before Freddie Mac was valued at round about a Big Mac and fries), and then we spoke about workplace rudeness and loneliness in crowds…and at that point something from Corinthians seemed to do it and she invited me in.

   Her living room was cosy and all the photos were of nieces in Australia rather than anyone who could be anybody’s strapping sons. Her bookshelves ran to cookery, historical fiction (I like a nice Georgette Heyer myself in the dark lonely hours before dawn) and some Dark Romance which might be unfortunate, but I ignored those. No Bible. There was neither PC nor laptop so perhaps no friends would miss her on Facebook and phone her. There was no crucifix on the wall so she was probably tabula rasa theologically. No mirror to indicate vanity and hence worldliness. She wore an angora cardigan with slacks and pumps that spoke of scraping together spinsterish savings before the sale ended. She also had a nice enough pearl set that I doubted any admirer had troubled his Platinum card to lay before her. No silverware anywhere. Perfect.

    She smiled and looked a little embarrassed and a lot sheepish. “So tell me, Dennis,” she asked, “what is the Good News about finding the Path to Eternal Life?”

  “It doesn’t hurt very much at all,” I amended, smiling toothily into eyes that right at that moment saw the light just an instant too late.

Clock’s Pageant - The Dead Monkey’s Revenge.

Flash fiction again via Terrible Minds.

   “Time wounds all heels,” quoted the Archangel of the Proconsulidae, scratching his ear with an imperfectly adapted hind leg. Sitting amid throngs of spirits belonging to the Circle of Fallen Primates, the AoP gazed down at the Earth: still green; still full of life and promise; still full of Homo sapiens sapiens. Still empty of Proconsuls and a whole host of opposable-thumb types who just didn’t make the cut for The Disney Channel, the Moon landings and sub-prime mortgage bundling.

   “Nuts to dat,” growled  an orange-grey Afrotarsius whose dorsal tiger stripes and buff thorassic fur-patch the exact shape of the KFC logo no paleontologist had been able to infer from the lower jaw and handful of teeth that had so far been the sole evidence of his people in the remote, terrestrial here and now of the Twenty-first Century Earth. Gollum-like eyes resembling sulky grapes stared down at Hollywood Boulevard moodily; dreaming of dating J-Lo and cruising The Strip in a Ferrari or running bamboolike fingers through Emma Thompson’s hair, for some reason. Maybe the British accent works even in the Evolutionary Cul-de-sac neighbourhood of the Afterlife. Or maybe that should be ‘perhaps,’ dontcher know old boy? “Look at all dose stoopid Progenitor-mating biped types screwin’ it all up. I mean, seriously? Friends goes ter ten seasons an’ De Howlin’ gets six sequels an’ still dose dopes down dere expect ter colonize Outer Space fer Goodallssakes? Gimme a break! De Biohaz musta reached deir evolutional zenith wid de original series Star Trek. It’s gotta be all downhill from now, right? Am I right, guys?” 

   “ I don’t know ‘bout that, Marley,” muttered a Gigantopithecus in the back row; dividing his attention between pitching a baseball upward toward the starry firmament and popping fortune cookies between his huge, square jaws. “The reptiles must of thought they was finished back in the Permian–Triassic extinction event. Rise Of The Mammals an’ all that but then, bingo! Along comes Coelophysis a-swingin’ those dinky little hips an’ all of a sudden it’s back into the burrows for the uppity mammals for the best part of another quarter billion years. You can’t extrapolate Mankind’s imminent extinction just because Battleship followed Alien. Things can go backward for a while without it being the end for a line of evolution; look at the ‘prequel’ Star Wars movies, for example, or Alien 3 or Terminator 3. Sheesh! But then came The Matrix. Awesome. And remember when we all thought that sliced bread was the best thing since, well, unsliced bread and believed baking could never get any better but then they came up with Twinkies? How cool was that!  Not all apparent evolutionary degenerations are dead-ends; some can be loops, kind of:  are in fact just stages to something better. take Bruce Willis. Are you seriously saying that David Addison was cooler than the later, self-referential John McClane or the Special Forces guy in The Fifth Element? No way it turned out to be true, but looking at that hairline over the years you might guess he was on his way out.”

  “The point is,” put in a rather camp Homo heidelbergensis drinking soda and watching The Eocene Channel through a laptop Time Portal where a pair of so-far undiscovered and unclassified saber toothed caribou were sparring over the sad-looking corpse of an equally unclassified giant tree badger, “you can’t just say it’s lights out for ole Double Sap just because they elected, well, you know. They can still bounce back from their lows, and if you don’t believe me, all I’m gonna say to you is walk upstream in time from Bewitched to Pushing Daisies and just accept that a species can survive one helluva lot of lot of Golden Girls and Dukes of Hazard on the TV pageant to Buffy and South Park.

  “You Tea Party Mammoth guys always mention South Park, don’tcha? Never reference M*A*S*H or Taxi, do yez?” sulked the Afrotarsius, tossing an ectoplasmic peanut at the big hominid’s head. “You Red Ochre Cave types had it easy up in the Ice Ages. Us so-called ‘lower primates’ did all the heavy lifting long before yez came on da scene an’ took da world away from us. We scampered up into da trees once da dinosaurs was gone. We did da whole nocturnal-to-color-vision change thing. We suffered and starved and bred and survived and developed da opposable thumbs millions of years before you from da Giant Elk’s Club came along and stole all our achievements.”

  “That’s ‘Log-cabin Mammoth guys,’ if you please, Mister Occupy Madagascar” retorted heidelbergensis, mincing away to mince a ghostly cave bear.

  “Hey, why the long faces?” asked the returning Archangel of the Proconsulidae, carrying a rather batter football. “Just because you folks no longer rule the Earth, and never did in some cases, it doesn’t mean that the Creator doesn’t have a Plan for you. And the Plan is to be happy. This is supposed to be Heaven for crying out loud, so get happy. And even Mankind won’t last forever. Touch football, people? Furs versus skins this time. C’mon guys, the clock's ticking, let’s go.”

   After a while, even the resentful proto-tarsier ghost Marley the Afrotarsius cheered up. Football really was the best - especially with this particular ball. Even though the long beard was ragged by now and the frock coat torn and stained from being used in a thousand touchdowns, Marley just loved to kick and punt this very special ball. This really was Evolutionary Dead-End Heaven, he mused, kicking Charles Darwin as hard as he could for a field goal.

Twister

More flash fiction from Terrible Minds with one from each of 3 lists of required elements. I chose dieselpunk, a lover's quarrel and flying monkeys. Kinda politically incorrect, but this is war.

Twister

  “Robotnik, you’re such an ass!”

   Lieutenant Gale slapped the steel of the mech’s turret just above the white star stenciled a little aft of the Whirlwind 44’s starboard coaxial machinegun. Sergeant Robotnik looked up at her furious face; uncomprehendingly as usual.

   “What did I do wrong?” Kodak Golem irises spiraled wide to let the maximum visual information pour into a puzzled positronic brain that could generate no useful Decision Program. Also as usual. She glared down at him for a bitter moment and then disappeared into Auntie Dot to mutter barely within the android’s hearing range but outside the comprehension spectrum of his aural membranes. ‘Toks can’t sigh; not having breathing apparatus, but as he tightened off the starboard hip’s feedback assembly his frame paused as if resetting after combat or maintenance down-time. Or lovemaking.

   He scrambled up onto the mech’s top deck. He recharged a moment, staring out across the countryside. Fertile and formerly prosperous, the last untouched continent showed too many signs of newfound war. Smoke rose in five separate places north of the city where Jap night bombing had been going on for a week. On each side of Route Yoke Baker the scarecrow, skeletal water tower shapes of burned-out mechs loomed over the blood-soaked land of America’s newest ally. A pair of Zeros lay blackened and ripped apart after attracting the attention of a squadron of US Marine Hellcats.

   Robotnik calculated briefly; oblivious to the fuselage decoration of a farm girl wielding an ax hand-painted on Auntie Dot’s hatch. What had he done to offend her so? Why was a human being’s commissioning date such an important datum? What utility could its anniversary have at any time; let alone during a break for frantic repairs in this campaign across a tortured land in the spring of 1947? Was the Lieutenant’s commissioning date an occasion for a regular maintenance procedure that he should have initiated himself?

   His ruminations were interrupted by the approach along the buttery paving stones of a single-seater Chrysler Roadrunner reconnaissance bipod.

   “Ahoy there,” called the Navy Captain to Robotnik. Who are you guys and where are you bound?”

   After checking the beep-beep-jeep’s markings with his Service Identity Registry and confirming the sailor to be of the eggplant hue unavailable to Japanese recruiters, Robotnik’s probability matrix decided that it was 89% likely to be correct action to provide limited truthful data to the human. “Sir, we’re the Second Platoon, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 161st Mechanized Artillery Regiment, Kansas National Guard. We just flew here from Germany via the Philippines and this vehicle is down for repairs. The rest of the guys are heading north to support the Marines at the edge of the desert. You want I should call the Lieutenant to give you any more intel, Navy?” The manufacturers of Service model ‘toks’ had been ordered by the Pentagon to provide human-seeming voices to soften the experience for human soldiers obliged to serve alongside ‘soulless machines’ in the long, grinding war against a resurgent Japan. Robotnik’s programmer was from Kansas City.

   “That’s okay, ‘tok Sergeant. I guess the goddammned yellow monkeys’ airforce snafu’d your radio with jamming like all the others.”

   “We ain’t been able to contact higher command for three hours now, since the Battalion headed out, sir.”
   “Well you just turn it around, soldier boy, an’ hightail it back to the city ‘cause the Japs have just landed airship infantry outside the gates an’ are closin’ in on the jewel mines in the outskirts. It’s gonna be a pick an’ shovel war in the tunnels to get the gems back under Allied control. Shag it, Sergeant. There’s a counter-attack to mount.” The Roadrunner strode off towards the north.

   A meteor shower in 1945 had destroyed the city of Los Alamos, incinerated its environs and spread something like bubonic plague into the atmosphere; killing a third of the US population between Southern California and the Gulf Coast until a vaccine was discovered in 1946. Since then the Allies had been obliged to struggle on against a revitalized Japan in a war that Washington had expected to finish off by Christmas 1945. Means of reducing casualties included constructing mechanical walkers to overleap Japanese armor and using android servicemen as bunker-busters against entrenchments where fanatical Imperial soldiers would fight on until they died of thirst rather than surrender. The electronic brains of the ’toks and the walkers’ complex feedback systems were reliant on gemstones. When the Imperial forces attacked this country, the US was obliged to leave its British allies to fight alongside French  troops in Western Asia and sent the bulk of the fleet southward to defend a country ignorant of mechanized warfare but that was the Free World’s foremost supplier of diamonds, rubies and - most crucially - emeralds. If the mines were not recovered, the Pacific Fleet might have to abandon island hopping and revert to hellish foot-by-foot human-led blockbusting engagements and a butcher’s bill inspiring almost irresistible calls in Congress for peace negotiations amounting to surrender.

   “Dori, I’m sorry I forgot your birthday,” Robotnik called down to the turret’s undercabin, “but we have new orders to relieve the city.”

   The Lieutenant’s beautiful face smiled wryly up at her mechanical lover. “I wish you meant that, ‘Nik, I really do. But the ruby and emerald thing controlling your hydraulics can’t truly be called a heart. Back home, a gentleman would have made it a point of honour to remember his lady’s birthday.”

   “But, said the ‘tok, climbing into Auntie Dot’s control harness and steering it towards the City of Emeralds, “as your Auntie discovered back in that WW1 thing, we ain’t in Kansas no more.”

Picture from here.

Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch

A Chuck Wendig Flash fiction to contain the phrase: A novice revenges the rhythm

   “Black bastards!” The shiny new Lieutenant yelled out as our skirmishers took another pounding.

   Rookie officers are often like that: emotional when they need to be cool. They concentrate on the personal and the individual when their concern ought to be the tactical or the strategic. Not that I didn’t sympathize; those were our chaps out there on point taking a hit with nothing to screen them and outgunned by the enemy’s air cavalry as usual. No sign of backup.

  “Where the hell’s our support?” he muttered from his (slightly) safer position in the file behind me. “What on earth is Command doing advancing the left flank anyway?”

   The eternal question for frontline officers, that was: ‘What are the rear echelon, ah, people using for brains these days? Walnut?’ For us dumb grunts at the front we could afford to think - could scarcely avoid thinking - more personal-like. Our very own Great Imponderable is usually ‘Why me?’ The enemy was pouring it on against our weakened vanguard’s left. Nothing much we could do about it right now; the rhythm of modern warfare being what it is so each of us looked to his front and stood his ground like a soldier.

   One of the Royal Chaplains slid in, all sideways-like, to give us some support; offering some stuff about how God was on our side and how it was our sacred, as well as our citizen’s, duty to lay our lives down if necessary to protect our way of life and to preserve the King’s Peace. He wasn’t such a bad chap I suppose, and it’s nice to see a staff officer risking it up there alongside us so far forward, if only briefly. Though I’m damned if I can even remember what our way of life is; let alone what the King’s Peace looks like. Truth be told I’ve been serving in the ranks so long I can’t remember what it’s like back in Civvy Street. What the Yanks call ‘back in the world.’ I can’t remember much about it at all except that it was quiet and peaceful.

   Then he was off; no doubt to report on the morale of the troops and left us alone with our new officer, the oncoming enemy, and God. He never did mention that our side had started the whole thing off: that we were the aggressors. As usual.

   And what a sense of humour God has, O ladies and gentlemen here assembled! Having allowed two otherwise intelligent peoples to get into a war against each other, and then having let that war go on so long by making us almost equally matched, and next having us led (or rather directed from the rear) by the walnut-brains at Command, He then invited us lowly infantry to work out our own salvation or damnation with whatever inexperienced support the rookie standing behind me could provide. But the Lieutenant was my responsibility; I’d been assigned to get him squared away in the first place and to steady him for his duty if the course of battle finally made it necessary for him to be a hero and advance alone towards the foe, and I would bloody well do my duty so that he could do his.

    And so it went during that long afternoon of hell. We maneuvered round their right salient and then their air cavalry hopped over our skirmishers to threaten our lines of supply. Then we regrouped around our HQ and responded to their next genius tactic of full-frontal frontal assault with some bloody huge and hurtful sacrifices in a tit for tat exchange when our front lines finally met. Command send our own air cavalry towards the enemy centre but it was met with and warded off by their heavy stuff. Then their HQ relocated in a single, swift movement of assets and the battlefield dynamic was completely reversed making nonsense of our few advances to date. You can see how it was going: their assaults would almost work and only our desperate defensive tactics would save the situation and our counterattacks were invariably weaker and less effective than theirs. Each exchange cost us more casualties than it did them and with each engagement their front line grew closer to our rear areas and HQ, and our assets were being whittled away by a ratio of 2 to 1 compared to theirs.

   I suppose that breeding will show eventually and the rookie came from a long line of straight-chargers and hard-hitters. He finally did that officer and gentleman thing that they teach us about in school and recount for hours in stories that old soldiers tell about the battles of their youth or that our grandparents sing about. In a single, courageous, reckless, bloody stupid act of daring, when a gap opened up on the enemy’s left (which was our right of course), the rookie just took off on his own towards the enemy’s HQ; outflanking territory bought by the sacrifice of so many of our dead, and by so doing he completely reversing the balance and pattern of the afternoon’s ever-closer to and fro combat. I could hear the Royal Chaplain, who was with us again up from Command, reporting excitedly back to the King in that upper-class, rather poetic way of his; “A novice revenges the rhythm.” It wasn’t written down that way in the history books of course. Books never do convey the pain, tension, confusion and fear of failure that combat consists of. I finally read the formal report many, many battles later. I read it aloud: ‘White. King’s Rook to King’s Rook Eight. Check.’

Bewitched

Another Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck Wendig, combining one word each from three lists of elements to produce a cross-genre hybrid, stalking the land, stealing our women and destroying our memes.

I chose ‘Romantic Comedy’, ‘Serial Killer’, and ‘Addiction’. 

“Hi honey, I'm home.”

Darren washed the bloody knife.

Muffins must be baked.