Post-war

The music was soft and tinny in the distance. Gregis listened anyway. It was evidence that someone somewhere still had the resources necessary to produce sound. Even if it was the enemy rolling out marches designed to intimidate. The enemy, an alien faceless force. Down here there were just people, stragglers, survivors, wounded and dying. Their tattered uniforms and swords stamped with different ensignias.

Gregis crouched so he could just make out the sky through the hole in the roof five barren bombed out floors above. Shards of dancehall floor lay charred and splintered around his feet an inch deep in the toxic ash eating away at the frayed hem of his samurai dress.

His real uniform was in mint condition. Its brown still dull, its red still bright and its solitary star still polished. It was pressed underneath a stack of film cans, tilting the pile so the top few cans slid slightly and formed a small staircase into thick, underground air.

He could stand still in two and a half minute bursts before the acid the enemy had dropped from the skies began to bubble away at his boots. The rubber of his boots started to fizzle, and he hopped up and down, shaking the ash from his soles. As he moved the faint music became inaudible, the drift of ash and the hem of his skirt swishing a chorus of lots of tiny things touching.


The music stopped, a rubber bubble popped. He straightened up slowly. This little aside to the furnaces of post-war war time life was coming to an end, and he wanted to hold on. One more blow of the trumpet, one more machine gun snare snap, one more moment of knowing that something else existed. Something other than the abyss inside. The abyss he ruled. The abyss he was.

Across the muted greylight slightly tinging the ash strewn floor directly beneath the bomb hole in the once ornate ceiling a shadow matched his movements. Sluggish re-entry of a consciousness into a body with duties and needs.

The last sigh he'd allow himself made the handmade neoprene mask across his mouth bulge. His eyelashes, lightly moistened, slid rather than scraped across the left lens of the bent wraparound sunglasses protecting his eyes from potential blizzards of ash. Artificial thermal inversions blamed on the other side but a reality of life for both could summon whipping, blistering winds.

He never acknowledged the dark presence. Their routine followed the same path everytime. Like two violent predators at the only puddle of muddy water left on a desert scar of earth, they circled, wary, working on the agreement not to attack. Neither would win.

He slipped his hand inside the left of his (samurai dress) and felt the handle of his cutlass. After the gunpowder ran out, and the factories were craters, after flints and locks and loading mechanisms and springs and oil ran out, the museums were ransacked again. Not for food this time, but for weapons. And clothes.

The other one was gone.

Gregis swished down steps, between cracks in walls three feet thick. Finally he lifted aside some corrugated metal and stepped into a room. He took off his glasses and the mask and hung them up without looking at the hook.

The door shook, the screws holding the deadbolt into the wall pulled out a quarter of a thread turn, as a microscopic avalanche sent pulverise wall drifting to the floor.

"Go away!" thought Gregis, staring at his boots.

The door rattled again. Gregis looked up and without moving pulled back the deadbolt.

A slowly strobing light punctured the darkness. A thin pale being collapsed against the doorframe.

"They’ve taken another one. It's the fourth in three days."
"Let them," replied Gregis, still groggy, still somewhere else.
"You been er, asleep again sir?"
"ye"
The messenger rustled around under a rough cloak and pulled out a torch. Pointing it straight at gregis's eyes he flashed it for a split second, not wanting to waste the battery, but needing a job done.
"itll be weeks before I can see perfectly in the dark again"
"well at least your thinking straight."
"who'd they take?"
"One of the couple who limped in yesterday."
"the boy or the girl"
"the boy"
"he was gone already. They just took him to his place"
"that’s not the point. Am I going to have to flash you again?"
"no. youre right. They are breaking the agreement. Thank's for telling me"

Gregis closed the door.