Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [95]
Within hours a horrified dread began to fill every extremity of my body, slowly flowing toward my core. It was like the “Oh no,” moment, the moment when you realize that you’ve been caught doing something bad, when you’ve made a mistake that will have disastrous consequences, or when you hear someone close to you has died. For a moment, your mind becomes cold liquid, and a calm denial is the only thing you can feel.
That’s the way it stayed. The feeling didn’t pass. It just kept growing. That’s why my resolution lasted four days. I got respect for that, of a grudging kind. Four days was a long time to hold out, and it set me apart from some of the other men. One of the things men will fight hardest to hide from each other is fear. You just don’t show it. In The Gap it was different. Fear couldn’t be hidden, and so all the time you were surrounded by the most childlike, vulnerable, desperate part of everybody else. There were people in The Gap, and that’s whom we were supposed to be fighting; but they were the very least of our problems. The children, dead but with hydraulic frames nailed through their bones so they could scamper poison-laden toward us; the blankets of fire which appeared from your pockets and swept up to incinerate your skin; these were fears, but nothing like The Fear of The Gap itself, which was all of this and the promise of everything more.
In the end, I recognized that I was endangering the rest of the men in my unit. I was simply too terrified all the time. It felt as if each individual cell in my body were cold; as if someone were constantly running a killing knife over the hairs on the back of my neck; as if I were lying asleep, the plank of my back exposed and bare and waiting for an ax which would surely come. The fourth day I was there I followed a couple of the guys to the tent where it all happened. I’d never taken drugs at that time. I was frightened of doing it. I was frightened of not doing it. I was frightened of everything.
What Rapt did was intensify reality to the point of blindness. It pushed everything up into the stratosphere, made the light behind the leaves even darker, made height so tall it disappeared, warmth so hot it became cold. It made everything so intense you could only repress it. Every hour was a series of blackouts, of forget-tings. You’d find yourself half a mile down the track and have no recollection of having got there. You’d look at some guy you’d been talking to and realize you had no idea what the conversation was about. You’d look down at yourself and realize you were holding a man’s head by the hair, and that you’d blown it off the body with repeated rounds from your gun, and you had no idea of how it had all happened.
The mind pushed it away, blanked it in real time minute by minute, but all the while there was this voice which knew what was going on. However much Rapt you took, this voice drip-fed the truth to you second by second like a string of filthy lies told to himself by a psychopathic schizophrenic. So what did you do? You took more Rapt to shut the voice up.
You were there only three quarters of the time. The rest you were somewhere else; fucked up into oblivion by the cocktail of The Gap and heavy Rapt. We called it being “Gone Away,” and it was the only way you could get out of The Gap. You came to recognize a look in the eyes of other people, the look that said they’d just come back from being Gone Away. You envied them those moments of peace, but at the same time you were frightened of what Going Away might mean.
We didn’t get much instruction. We got guns.