Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [122]
I think everyone pretty much knew by that stage that the war wasn’t one we were going to win. The villagers were too tough, too unyielding. They had The Gap on their side, and the farther away you got from the point where everybody sideslipped in, the more inexplicable and terrifying it got. It was like you were going deeper and deeper into yourself, into places you were never supposed to see. Some of the people in our unit had rigged up plastic bottles of Rapt solution, and had a constant drip into their bloodstream.
But our orders were to keep on going, and so we did. We crawled, we staggered, we ran—all more or less in the same direction, farther and farther away from any-thing we recognized as real. There’d been talk of meeting up with another unit which had been sent this way, but none of us really expected that to happen anymore. We couldn’t even tell what color the air was by then; with the combination of drugs and deep strangeness around us the chances of us doing anything cohesive or deliberate were absolutely minimal. We could only look after each other. By that time that was the most we could do. Everything in that world was trying to kill us, and the only sane purpose any of us could find in it was to try to keep as many humans alive as possible.
On the day in question we were hacking through the densest forest any of us had ever seen. The trees grew so close together they were touching, and you could be confronted with solid walls of trunks which you might have to journey half a mile to go round. It was so tangled that it was even difficult to think, as if the building blocks of thought were too heavy to manipulate. It was unbearably, swelteringly hot, and we were carrying two of the unit on makeshift stretchers. They’d been injured in a firefight with villagers the week before. We’d bandaged their mouths up, so they wouldn’t scream, but I don’t think there was any one of us who couldn’t hear their agony in our head. They stank of shit and blood and skinFix, and one of them had Gap maggots in the wound in his leg. He said he could feel them eating him. Maybe he could, but we left them there, because they were eating the gangrene which would otherwise kill him even sooner than his injuries. Every one of us was cut somewhere, had ragged handmade stitches spidering over some part of our bodies. We hadn’t eaten in four days, and worse than that, we’d run out of cigarettes. Even the Rapt was getting low, and our Lieutenant was beginning to panic. He knew that none of us could go on much longer, but we were hundreds of miles away from anywhere. We were less than zombies by then, the walking dead’s walking dead. We didn’t care who won the war anymore. We didn’t really care if we were going to survive. We were just going to keep on fighting until we all dropped, and then that would be the end of it.
Mal and I were struggling along in the middle of the line carrying one of the stretchers, and so we weren’t the first to see the village. Mal was limping badly from mine wounds to his thighs, and the guy we were carrying was having a very bad time of it. He’d taken a head shot and you could see his brain. I was half delirious with hunger, exhaustion, and nicotine withdrawal, and when I first heard someone hiss that there was a village up ahead I was inclined to dismiss it as another illusion.
But soon enough we realized it was really there, and stopped. The tree cover round the village, now about two hundred yards ahead, was too thick for us to see anything even with binoculars. Faintly, carried through the thick and swirling air, we thought we could hear shouting, and even singing.
Gap villagers don’t sing. They simply don’t do it. They’re not very cheerful people.
The Lieutenant decided to leave one person with the wounded, and that the rest of us should go ahead to check out the situation. He motioned to me to lead us forward.