Spares (43 page)

When I came back out I felt as if the world had changed, and as if it would never be the same again. I signaled dreamily to Mal and we walked a little farther along the village path, mouths open against the smell. We could see other soldiers, half naked, wandering around some of the huts a little distance away, but that wasn’t what we were looking at.

Gap children’s bodies lay all over the ground, broken across paths and lolling out of the doorways of huts, some little more than babies, others in their early teens. Some were recently dead, others had bloated in the heat until their guts exploded. Many of the corpses seemed to have a distinctive wound, a deep slash across the throat. The dust was crusted brown with their blood.

We came upon a makeshift pen in which about ten children squatted in the dirt. Some were missing limbs, their stumps hastily cauterized. Others were bleeding to death there and then, while the remainder stared hopelessly up at the sky, flinching as they heard us approach. Most of them had been blinded.

The rest of the unit caught up with us then, grinding to a horrified halt, and as we stood staring we heard a shout, and turned to see a soldier pointing at us. He was standing in the clearing at the center of the village, and it looked as if there were others there. We left the pen and approached him, passing walls stained with splatters of blood. Yards away we stopped, and this is what we saw:

Ten soldiers, most naked and dripping with sweat, others with strange scraps of clothes still hung around them.

A small pile of children’s bodies, the clearing red with what had escaped from them.

Three live children, two girls and a boy, held down on their knees by makeshift wooden frames.

And in the middle of all this, nodding his head in
time to the song which the soldiers were chanting, stood their Lieutenant. He alone of all the soldiers was more or less still in uniform, though his pants were around his ankles. He had his cock out, and was thrusting it in and out of a gash which had been cut across the throat of the five-year-old girl who was being held down in front of him. Her head was held up so that he could see her eyes as he worked. She was still alive.

We stood there for an eternity, without moving, as the other soldiers stared back at us. It felt as if the world had stopped.

I pulled the rifle from over my shoulder and shot the Lieutenant in the head.

That moment is there every second of my life. Just as a fact, like my muscles are a fact and the weather is a fact and the color of my hair is a fact. In retrospect, and maybe at the time, the rifle seemed to swing perfectly into position, to fit so snugly into my shoulder; and as I pulled the trigger I knew, as if my soul was carrying it home, that the bullet would hit the very atom I was aiming for.

That shot is my life, and for that instant I felt like an angel, of sorts: not redeeming, because I redeemed nothing, least of all myself. I was simply under a fate that fell from the heavens and flattened me into the ground. Sometimes when I wake in the night and wonder what has startled me, I think it is an echo of that shot, of that moment, and I wonder if it will ever cease.

Nearly cried quietly in the back of the car. I wished I could reach out to her, could tell her that it was a long time ago. I was glad that Vinaldi hadn’t described, and probably didn’t know, what we’d found in all of the huts in the village. The leftovers. We did what we could with skinFix and bandages, but it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough. Then we left the soldiers there, abandoning them to the forest.

Vinaldi was quiet, and then I heard a spark and the intake of breath as he lit a cigarette.

“One more little detail,” he said. “The man Jack shot, the Lieutenant? He was Arlond Maxen’s older brother. They were in the same unit, and Arlond made it back out.”

Nearly sniffed, and looked out of the window. She was a bright girl. She’d worked it out. Then in the rearview mirror I saw her eyes looking at mine, and she asked me a question. “What are you going to do now?”

I barely heard her, because I’d finally realized the Farms’ second purpose. They hadn’t been created just for spare parts. The group of men who came to them at night hadn’t been sneaking in. One of them owned the whole deal, and the payments made to the caretakers were simply to ensure their silence. I wondered why they’d never come to my Farm. I was hired under a false name. They couldn’t have known it was me.

It didn’t matter. The answer to Nearly’s question still came easily. “I’m going to kill Maxen,” I said.

“Is that going to solve anything?” she said sadly. “Is that going to bring anyone back?”

“I’m not doing it in the hope of solving something,” I replied. “I’m going to do it because I want to.”

We abandoned the car out in the Portal, and returned to New Richmond; Vinaldi and Nearly through the front entrance, me round the back, as usual. Vinaldi returned to his empire to check that nothing untoward had happened while we’d been gone, sort through his mail, that kind of thing. I asked him to subtly spread a rumor that I’d disappeared, and he said he’d put the word out. Nearly went home to shower, and realized that she’d in effect been on an unpaid holiday for the last couple of days, so maybe she was going back to work, too. I didn’t ask her.

I went back to Howie’s, and spent a while concocting likely deaths for myself. The most convincing story I could come up with was a drug overdose, which gave me pause. That’s not a great comment on a life. I slotted Mal’s disk in and got it to hack the name Jack Randall into the pending file on the list of city dead. The death couldn’t be absolutely official because that required a confirmatory code from the coroner’s office, but I made it appear that my body had been found in the Portal. The
coroners could rarely be bothered to go out there, and I knew from experience they’d just rubber-stamp it. The notification would automatically be relayed to the Police subnet, and from there the word would spread to the few people to whom it would be interesting. It also gave me pause to realize that all of them would regard it as good news. All in all, it was a bit of a gloomy experience. I was officially a ghost.

Then I turned the computer off, ate a cheeseburger at last, and started drinking heavily. The burger was excellent, and cheered me up no end.

Say what you like, but history is shit. It’s dirty, and it smells—with good reason, because it has provided the visceral energy which brought the present moment to where it is. This present is like our bodies: They look so clean, because they’re washed every day, but they leave little piles everywhere behind them. Past presents digested, excreted, and left for posterity—and our later selves—to smell.

As I sat in Howie’s office, in the hours before dawn and alone, I felt as if I were sitting in the midst of a hundred piles of shit, the stink of each subtly different from the others. When I tried to trace where each had come from I got lost. I couldn’t remember the steps clearly enough. It was all too complicated. Time to wipe the hard disk and start again.

Howie had left me by myself for the time being, at my request. I was trying to remember when my life had stopped making sense, when the loops got nested so deep I couldn’t see beyond them. You never value simplicity as a child because you’re always leaning into the turns, wanting to become older and get your hands on all those older things. As a child, your options are limited, and as such, so simple and free. Each day is a simple progression of activities, not fractured with the demands of the future.

There are countless things you can do when you’ve grown up, so many calls upon your time. You can
smoke. You can drink. You can take drugs. You can work—in fact, you have to, because you have to pay bills. Then there are the things you
can’t
do. You have to not goof off, not sleep with other people even if they’re available. You have to be happy with where you are and what you’ve got, when the essence of childhood was the belief that there would always be something new.

The addictions and the mandates of being an adult take up so much of your time that you can never simply
be
. Every thought and every action is shaped and undermined by all the other actions or thoughts you have to forgo. You can find yourself haunted by people and events that never even existed, so surrounded by spirits that the real world shades away. You still search for Narnia, even though you’re too old to believe in it and now it doesn’t want you there.

Innocence is the freedom from having to have a cigarette every half hour, freedom from loving someone, freedom from the endless fallout of bad things which you have endured or done. Freedom from time, and ail time’s passing leaves behind it. The countless smells of shit

The melancholies of youth are to do with not being taken seriously, and the opposite sex. The desperate, biological exposure of that need; the feeling of being left behind when other boys seem to know about smoking and beer and girls—or when other girls had better clothes, a boyfriend of sorts, and tits. Not so much a feeling of being left behind, in fact, so much as a dreadful fear that you were on a subtly different and less vital curve, one which would
never
bring you into contact with these exciting, contraband substances.

And yet, when I got those things, I realized the truth in the only movie that really scared me as a child. I thought of the time when I saw
Pinocchio
on television, and I remembered the way the film spoke to me even though the animation was archaic and two-dimensional. I wonder whether my reaction then was a forerunner of what I feel now, if it was an intuitive preunderstanding
that these forbidden things really would turn you into a donkey, forever tilling someone else’s field. But you run for them with open arms anyway, because that’s what growing up is about, and only when you stand tired and wet in the rain and mud, the yoke grown so close that it is a part of your shoulders right down to the bone, do you realize what you have done.