VI. ...and CircusesA Chapter by Throok MercerThe OffsetVI …and Circuses
Alic
decided that you’re never quite as aware of your lungs as you are when each
breath could be their last. The copper taste in his mouth was either from blood
or the rush of adrenaline he felt as he climbed for his life. In all
likelihood, it was both.
Here in
the Deck, a term Soldiers had come to use over the years, every move was life
or death. Its eleven walls seemed to close in on him as he scaled a cliff
slippery with moss. He felt like every time he had faced certain death, he had
managed to grab a hold of some strain of good luck and escape with his life. He
was now a man fearing that strain’s end, a termination that would result in his
very public execution.
As he worried about all the ways he could abruptly meet his end, some small
part of his consciousness noted with disgust the hover pods that floated just
beyond the arena’s perimeter. They were too far away to make out individual
faces, but he knew enough about ICEW’s marketing techniques to know that many
of the onlookers would be far younger than his nineteen years. He could
understand why full-grown adults would be allowed to watch, but children were
too young for this. They shouldn’t watch real men die and then go home to
supper like nothing had happened.
He sprinted as far as he could from the cliff’s edge in an attempt to duck out
of sight. The Deck was littered with wide-open fields placed in a seemingly
random pattern. Braving them was a death sentence for anyone running from men
with high-powered rifles and the best training money could buy.
Branches
and leaves slapped at his face and body as he worked his way through the
suddenly dense foliage before him. He had just climbed out of a field with
waist-high stalks of wheat. He shook his head in frustration. Everything about
this place was transplanted and alien, himself not least of all.
With death staved off, at least momentarily, he allowed his mind to begin
formulating again, hoping against all hope for a strategy for four against one.
The odds were impossible. He could hear Coach Landry’s voice calling out back
at camp, a million years ago, “Alright boys, this one’s done. Back to your
sides. We’re going to run this one again.” The Offsetting had at least been one
on one and even then he had barely outmaneuvered his counterpart.
He had
known, of course, that it was a possibility. Someone had to be that unlucky
eleventh. But as he had been led to the entry tube that would propel him into
the Deck by three ICEW guards, all he could think about was the horror stories
he had heard before. Soldiers in the same Army who had accidentally attacked
each other as they landed. Nervous combatants so keyed up by the possibility
that they acted without thinking. He remembered having shuddered at the
thought.
The irony was that those with unforgiving trigger fingers and firearms were
actually at a disadvantage in this regard to him with his more restrained
combat knife. Ten times out of eleven anyway. When the man you tumbled into
straight out of the gate was a disoriented Soldier like you with different
colors, everything flipped. Try as he might to focus, his mind insisted on
recalling and digesting those first terrifying moments of the War.
What he remembered most clearly was the Soldier’s hands. He’d never be sure
whether it was adrenaline or fear or a trick of his eyes, but he could swear he
had seen them shaking. In that split-second moment between life and death, his
focus had been on the man’s trembling hands. It seemed foolish now, looking
back. It was only as he processed that they were reaching for the rifle that
had tumbled away upon his entry into the arena that he finally reacted.
Relying more on his days hunting in the mountains than his days in training
camp, Alic had simultaneously unsheathed his knife and dove toward the rifle
lying on the ground. Using all of his raw animal strength, he pried the rifle
from the Soldier’s grip and dispatched of him quickly. He had stood dazed above
the man’s corpse, barely aware of the events that had just transpired. How long
had passed? Thirty seconds? Five minutes? An hour? Time had stopped making
sense. The man was his first kill. Human, anyway. If he was lucky, it wouldn’t
be his last.
“Sorry, brother. It was you or me.”
The words still floated in his mind even now. They were almost foreign, words
spoken by someone from long ago who was completely removed from all of this.
Alic wished he could kill that man. He deserved to die, to rot here on the
Hendecagon floor with the others. They would all die, one way or another.
Alic sighed a deep and desperate breath. His exhaustion was getting to him. His
thoughts weren’t making any sense. The War had been raging for what he guessed
to be around six hours. Of course, time was impossible to discern here, as the
climate was entirely artificial. He’d already been plunged into darkness twice
since he’d started. Hours in here felt like days had outside. He’d heard that
before, in camp, but it only now made any real sense to him.
He had to rest. Both mentally and physically, he was at the end of what he
could manage. Adrenaline and instinct could only take him so far. He rushed to
the nearest climbable tree and made his way up its trunk. It was a pine tree,
like from back home. He ached to be back there. The smell of the forest early
in the morning. The soft whisper of the wind through the grass. Laying on some
riverside, drowning in sunlight with the occasional sip of chilled water.
Despite his troubles back home, he had had the perfect life. He only now realized
it, far too late. What a foolish, simple idiot he had been.
He cursed
the stubborn tree as he labored up its trunk. If he never climbed again, it
would be far too soon. His fingers were marred by blood, tree sap and
scratches. From here, he could see all around him. He convinced himself that
the branches offered a limited amount of cover from hungry eyes.
His
senses were still on high alert, but he resolved to give his weary body some
rest before he decided what to do next. He had used this same technique
hundreds of times when he went on long hunting trips into the forest for food
back home. He slowly closed his eyes and forced his breathing to become even.
When he opened them a moment later, it was to the loud din of the disapproving
crowd. They were voicing their displeasure at the War having been stalled. He
wanted to shout at them that they should order another apple juice or cognac or
whatever other rare drinks they could think of. It was only a man’s life in the
balance. His life.
He blinked hard, trying to bring his eyes back into focus, before he realized
it had become dark all around him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he’d been
out for so long or if the Deck had dimmed its lights, but either way, he
suddenly felt very blind and very vulnerable. He had to get to a better
location. He had just begun to move to relocate when he heard the rustling of
leaves from off to his left.
This was it. The last few moments of his life were occurring and slipping away,
second by second. He wondered if food would taste better if he had it or if it’d
turn to ash in his mouth as he imagined. He kept absolutely still, trying to
will his body to come to a soft, undetectable silence. He waited, along with
the crowds, almost as one of them, to find out what his fate would be.
The night had become graveyard quiet. He remembered hearing that the Deck would
mute crowd noise to minimize any interference or unfair advantage, had been
trained to listen for the sudden absence of sound, but now, all he could focus
on was the patch of black where the noise had originated from. In it lied his
death or nothing.
After an eternity, he saw the Soldier’s head bobbing through the trees. Only
one. A scout? Alic tried desperately to recall his training and perhaps deduce
what the Soldier was thinking but the Pacific Kingdom trained on such a high
level that any similarities in their training and his would practically be
coincidental. At this point, it was just a matter of survival in the wild. The
Solder held a handgun and what appeared to be a large clearing knife for
branches and combatants, whichever its sharp edge found first. He would walk
nearby soon but not close enough to attack him from where Alic stayed hidden.
He was safe if he didn’t movie. He knew that and his self-preservation begged
to let the Soldier pass. Alic knew better. He’d never have a better chance than
this one on one opportunity. No matter the risk, it would only be more
dangerous later. He couldn’t outlast them. It had to be now.
Careful to measure every motion he made, Alic climbed down the trunk of his
sanctuary tree and crouched as he made his way toward the steadily-moving
figure, his eyes continuing to track him. He briefly considered rushing the
Soldier but instead decided to rely on his hunting experience. He bent over and
picked up two jagged rocks from the forest floor. Creeping as close as he
dared, he waited for the perfect moment and struck.
The first rock struck the Soldier in the back of his unprotected head, causing
him to double over in pain as his clamped hand filled with blood in the dark.
The second flew over his head into the brush off to his left and, as he had
hoped, drew the wild handgun fire of his disoriented enemy.
His footsteps as he ran toward the reeling figure were masked by the gunfire.
He wondered if he would ever forget the sound of his knife entering the man’s
heart through his back. With a desperate relief, he laid the man’s body down
and ensured that he was dead.
Only three left. Only three left. Only three left.
He allowed himself a forbidden moment of hope, a feeling of optimistic victory
he hadn’t experienced since the Offsetting. Maybe this was his destiny. Maybe
this is what he was supposed to do. After all, he shouldn’t have made it as far
as he had. By all rights, he should have been the first casualty of the War
moments after he entered it. Yet here he stood. Didn’t it have to mean
something?
With a renewed sense of purpose and a sudden vulnerability that he had more
than nothing to lose now, he made his way back toward his tree in order to
scout the area and determine his next move. He had made it a few steps when the
hidden Soldier dropped directly onto his shoulders and brought him crashing to
the ground.
In a confused daze, Alic thrashed beneath the man’s weight, fighting to turn on
to his back to no avail. The Soldier had his knee planted firmly between his
shoulders and was gradually increasing the pressure on his spine. He fought to
turn and look at his enemy, but the Soldier’s gloved hand shoved his face back
into the forest floor. He felt the man’s weight shift as he bent over to bring
his mouth down close to Alic’s still-ringing ears.
“You weren’t supposed to be able to kill him, you know. He was out in the open
to draw you out. I wasn’t a hundred yards away from him the entire time. He
finds you, he keeps you at bay, then me and my buddies come in and help finish
you off. But it didn’t happen that way, did it?” The man was binding his hands
behind his back as he spoke. “That little rock trick of yours, nine times out
of ten, no way it confuses a man like my brother over there. You got lucky,
kid.”
He pulled Alic up to his knees, hands still bound, and leaned over to take out
his captive’s combat knife from its holster on his vest. “This has a lot of
blood on it from men that I operated with. You’ve done a lot of damage. That
ends now.”
Alic was glad the sun had started shining again. He didn’t want to die alone in
the dark, despite the fact he had been alone now for hours. This man, his
executioner, would be the last man he ever knew. He wished he could call the
forest beautiful, as it would have been fitting, but instead he just thought of
home. He tried to recall exactly how it smelled.
“I’d wait for my friends, but I think it’s about time for a, what do you call
it, say, a ‘cessation of hostilities’.” Alic felt the point of the knife behind
his left ear, the man’s bloody sleeve filling his nose with the aroma of death.
“You don’t get the last words, kid. I do. Something my father told me people
used to say.”
The Soldier sliced across his neck in one swift motion, pushing Alic over into
the dirt and plunging the knife into the dirt beside him. “War is hell.” © 2014 Throok Mercer |
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Added on June 30, 2014 Last Updated on June 30, 2014 Tags: dystopian, political, point of view, military AuthorThrook MercerTNAboutI write in my spare time when my head seems like it will explode otherwise. I don't have a particular genre I like, though I do have several that I enjoy reading: history, alternate history, fantasy, .. more..Writing
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