We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [265]
He was surrounded by darkness and the noise of salvos. One moment an intense fusillade, the next a loaded silence. Who was shooting whom? Was the army firing on the strikers, and were they responding? Was it just a chaos of feral predators lurking in the dark, hissing and lashing out with their claws before withdrawing again into the shadows? Was this what revolution meant? Guns rebelling and overpowering their owners under cover of darkness, wooing men's blood, and luring it out to flood the streets?
Were they shooting at each other to celebrate that there was no longer good or evil, order or disorder, only untamed life, a town of stones splashed red with life's essence?
He started running again. His breathing was laborious, but he didn't stop; his heavy body stampeded like a raging rhinoceros through the lanes. At some point he was fired at: he heard the bullet slam into the wall behind him. Later he surprised two men hiding in a gateway. He shot at them and resumed his manic race. Who were they? Had he hit them?
He didn't care.
He spotted a division of soldiers marching toward him and found a doorway to crouch in. They'd barely gone past when he emerged, turning in mid-run to fire a shot in their direction.
Someone had built a barricade across the street, and he saw shadows moving behind it. The dark was too intense to make out what was going on, but he knew instinctively that this was revolution: the clash of guns, here to drain blood. There was a brotherhood between rebels and soldiers. They were united by a common urge to kill.
They called to him, and he answered in a sailor's broken Spanish. They invited him to join them on the barricade, and when they saw his revolver, they slapped him on the shoulder and called him compañero, a word he well understood, a gesture based on an assumption as naive as they were. He didn't care about their cause. They needed an excuse to shoot their guns. He didn't.
Shots were fired at the barricade, and they fired back into the darkness. He saw the flames at the muzzles of the revolvers and felt something warm on his cheek. Had he been hit? The man next to him slumped against his shoulder, his head resting there for a moment as if he'd fallen asleep. Then he slid gradually to the ground, his shirtsleeve soaked in blood.
The shooting intensified, the flames from the gun muzzles at the end of the street erupted into fireworks. The din was deafening. He felt a wild, dry heat burst through his skin as if his heart were on fire. He was alive!
The firing was coming closer: the soldiers had launched their attack. The men around him abandoned the barricade. As their footsteps retreated into darkness, he set off afresh, in a wild sprint. He heard a man's laugh, then realized it was his own. A prostrate body lay in front of him in the street. He leapt over it. Someone grabbed his arm and pulled him into a side street and under an archway. Together they scaled one wall, then another. Herman muttered gracias, though he felt indifferent. His whole body screamed with the ecstasy of immortality. He still had the gun in his hand.
It felt as if he'd been in this darkened town forever, as if all that had gone before had faded to insignificance. He felt it suddenly: tonight he was liberated. Here in the dark, where the only streetlights were flames from the mouths of guns and the gutters flowed red, he could exist without feeling incomplete. He was simply blood, body, instincts, and reflexes. He was his revolver, and through it, he belonged with all those like him, who moved through the night, armed. He was at one with all men, with life and death.
From the hills behind the town the huge red ball of the sun came rolling down the boulevard toward him, and all around the colors lit up, weak at first, then vivid. He met the dawn with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The sunlight seemed to tidy up the chaos of the night, and within the space of an instant, it put the houses and their inhabitants back in their rightful places.
He