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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 454
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Necessities
Yule dreams of chicken, which is his flesh, and of his family, who consume him with carion delight, fat and greasy and shoveling him into their mouths carelessly, biting their swoolen fingers. The pain is more an annoyance, a frustration to be overcome between the now and the end, to be finished with, put behind, never dwelled upon. An ache in his side drags him from the fever of his sleep into the suffocating heat which smothers him back toward oblivion, but he sludges through it, wakes to the swarms of insects biting him, burrowing into his skin, and the panic takes him as every morning and he slaps and claws and tears them away. He kicks out wildly and slams his boots into a tree; he needs something to do violence upon, physically attack, as the realization and memory return from the weeks before, that killing the bugs won't work, that it doesn't matter, that they'll always come back biting and tearing and swelling him up until he can't fit his fingers into his rifle trigger.
Jack Schatz lounges dozing in a network of roots that might as well be a hammock, his feet propped up, arms akimbo. Yule envies him, hates him, loves him for still being alive. Dark fat beetles with tissue paper wings crawl around Jack’s mouth, attracted by the smell, and he tongues them between his lips and chews them contentedly. Two days without real water, the only sustenance they can find brackish and almost black, twisting their insides. Yule forces himself to his feet and squats over a branch. He feels constipated but can manage nothing, so he collapses back into the dirt and sweats and lets the bugs swarm him. When he can’t stand the waiting any more he shoulders his rifle and throws himself at the jungle.
The paranoia cuts through the fear as soon as Jack is out of sight. The jungle is full of life and it boils around him without concern. Yule aches to be back in Kentucky where the animals know their place and you see them rarely and always with that fear of you, a twitching, reactionary flight. Here the wild life knows no better; it thinks it is King, and it is King, and possesses the jungle utterly. Yule feels like a defiler. He is a man of reason but cannot shake the pressing fear that the jungle is aware of him and dislikes him and that the heat and the disease and the thirst are its ways of expelling him. Yule is a man of reason but he wants to drop to his knees and plead with the jungle and make it understand that it doesn’t need to kill him, that he will leave, wants to leave, prays to leave, but he does not know how, or where to go. His mind screams: “Beg.”
Thirst cripples him.
A hand slaps over his mouth and a knife is at his throat, pushing up under his chin. The arms are strong and the hand that’s wrapped around the hilt is bone white. Jack waits until the message is clear then pulls Yule slowly back between two trees and guides him down to the ground. He puts a finger to his lips for silence then points at what looks to Yule like every other part of the god damn jungle and grins boyishly, beetle legs stuck in his teeth. Yule sucks in his breath and watches and slips a hand into his hip pack to fondle his last grenade.
The child appears suddenly from nowhere, strolling through the patch of jungle Jack had pointed out, and sees them immediately. Yule’s first thought is about snakes and his sister, about her vast knowledge on all things useless, about the time they’d found a nest of eggs and she’d told him, “The babies are dangerous, not like people, they can bite and kill even when they’re very small.” The child lopes easily, confident, born a brawler. His black eyes stare fearless and the fear wells up and Yule chokes on it, his grip wet on the rifle. He realizes for the first time that the bright cloth wrapped around the boy’s hips is cut from their parachutes. A bark bracelet is woven around his tiny wrist. Jack’s hand closes around Yule’s rifle hand, staying him, and he breathes again.
Jack steps from between the trees.
The boy takes a step back and lowers himself, ready to run or charge, Yule cannot tell. Jack apes him perfectly. Curious, the boy shuffles to the right and Jack mimics him like a street performer. The boy laughs and jumps on all fours; Jack complies, his grin grotesque. Yule has seen him rip smaller children to pieces with his bare hands, seen him carve them up with his knife, when gripped in the old insanity that had possessed them all in the beginning. But Jack is playing, enjoying himself, clowning. Yule cannot stand it and vomits. The boy sees this and puts his hands to his throat and makes a retching noise and mimes puking and Jack does the same thing, mocking him, and when Yule looks up by their body language and the way they stand he knows that Jack and the boy are on a side against him, that while he was wiping the sick from his lips the world turned on its edge.
Yule stumbles alone, numb, to camp. He waits an hour as the insects settle and eventually the damp heat suffocates him into sleep and he dreams of emptiness. He half-stirs when his sleeping ears detect the footsteps but his soldiers’ will forces himself back to darkness. Better to be taken asleep, unaware, better to die at the hands of the enemy, even badly, then waste away because of thirst, starve to death, which he knows he’s doing.
Yule dreams of water. It’s warm and bitter and metallic but it’s clean and it fills him and he feels Death ebb away. He dreams of Jack, who Death cannot touch, and the water flows from his hands.
Morning and the waking, the slapping and tearing and clawing, digging the insects out of his ears with a stick. Jack is asleep in his root-hammock. Two canteens of water sit at Yule’s feet. His mouth is dry but he can feel his bowels stir for the first time in days. He crawls to the canteens. The water is warm and bitter and metallic but it’s life.
Yule looks to Jack, fast asleep. His knife rests in his lap, very clean. His hands and shirt are stained with thick splatters of blood that the insects swarm over. His breathing is steady. A small bark bracelet is clutched in his hand. Yule feels the blood rush to his head but he drinks and it sinks. Yule envies him, hates him, and loves him for still being alive.
Last edited by edropus : 08-24-2007 at 05:29 PM.
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