The Wasteland: Things to Lose

We crest the hill and surge down the slope toward the boneyard ruins of the city. White desert dust throws up in our wake, lit from within by our blue-fire exhausts. The engines scream, and the wind screams, and we scream.

The enemy has seen us. From atop our lead charger I see engines haphazard and untoward, lumbering from between the concrete carcasses to roar defiance. Their hatred plunges toward us, red and black and sickly green, all the colours of destruction shattering among us in plumes of bone-dust desert and cauterising gore. One comes toward me, yellow jaundice fire, hungering for my flesh until I bring my sword around and cut jagged rust through it and its sputtering death haloes our advance. My tattered serafuku flutters in the wind.

Aaah, this is the afterlife.

The bombardment keeps going, and we keep going. They don’t have enough. They never had a chance of having enough. We have hunted them for weeks, stalked them past settlement after ended settlement, run them down to this their last stand all for the sake of this festival. We sweep down into the shadows of the towers, the foaming crest of a wave of death that breaks around them and drowns them in its depths. Down broken streets we wash in torrents, blades and cannons flashing, draining down toward the charnel pit’s heart and the enemy’s last redoubt.

I see him there, hunched in the circle of his metal wagons, scythe held close in his robes and withered flesh shivering. The quarry, the one I have held so close in my heart these weeks of our courtship. Our spearhead sunders his shield and I leap from the hood of the wartruck to join with him at this the end.

He is still fast. My blade leaps for its kill over and over but he voids and makes the blows nothing. He has been in this void so long, made so much nothing. He knows both acts so well.

“You were a fool to follow me here.” His voice is a sepulchre of his thoughts.

“Oh yeah? How do you figure?” My voice still has that schoolgirl lilt that caught off guard so many victims.

He shakes his head and gives a sign and the world becomes afire. His men spring from their hidden positions upon us, enveloping our spearhead in a vise of violence. This was his scheme, his plan all along, to draw us here with a feigned weakness and bite down when we were in the trap. I drive in again against him, again.

“Your cause is lost.”

“It is.”

“Then why do you fight like this? Surrender and you might yet be spared.”

The cauldron of burning ashes has filled the air with dust and choking. There is nothing but the sounds and screams of the world. I drive my blade against his and him, over and over, pressing him back time and again.

“Our cause is lost,” I lock his blade and push close to his face, to his hollow shadows that pass for eyes. “But so is yours.”

We have rallied. We knew this was coming. We prepared for it and leapt into the maw eyes open. Each one of ours is bought with one of theirs and both go to the dust together. The city is collapsing at last, brought down by the destruction, entombing our armies and our selves and he asks me, with a rancid despair he will never be free from: “How can you fight like this?”

And I tell him, with a pure happiness I never found in life: “I don’t care.”

Something hits a magazine and the explosions multiply. A cancerous cataclysm that consumes the battlefield. Fire and blood and falling buildings are the last things we see.

~~

I dig out of the ground, and pull myself free. My sword is gone, the last of my uniform is gone, but blood has caked the bone dust of the desert into plaster on my body. I stagger up and look around, at the dry-blown desert with just a scatter of scrap and rubble to mark what passed. I listen for life, hear nothing, and begin to walk to whatever is over the next horizon.

I need to find some more things to lose.