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“What Is At The End of the World” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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“The Hazel Eye Club” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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“A Crime Against Humanity” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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“What Happens After Midnight” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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“Sargasso” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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“Crayon Sketch of a Cruel Paradise” #aiart by tarbox23 via #midjourney

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The Hungarian dancer Nikolska photographed at the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, 1929, by Nelly’s

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The Hungarian dancer Nikolska photographed at the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, 1929, by Nelly's

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The Carryback Out -- Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Neys and Arak

Ashby half-walked and half-rolled down the Dunes of Najaf, towards the abandoned city of Umm Ghitha. The sun was behind him, and for most of the trek down the dunes, he was in welcome shade. He would pause every few minutes, rub the sand out of his face, and peer north towards the city. As he descended to the plains, he could from time to time make out a path that weaved through sandy koppies and stony hillocks and led to what seemed to be a road that went directly to the southern gate of the city.  He tripped and rolled and scrambled his way down the hill towards that path as best he could.

He thought he must be really losing his senses, as every so often, when the wind gusted at him and spewed sand into his face, he thought he could hear a strange music wisp by. But then as quickly as he heard it, it would be gone. Perhaps it was the desert larks, singing in the distance: several seemed to be half-heartedly following him, appearing a few times an hour to check in on him, perhaps out of sheer boredom.  He had crossed snake trails, and seen the footprints of tiny animals, from scorpions to lizards.  Fortunately, he had seen no trace of any packs of varanid, those giant wicked reptiles that could move quickly and even spray venom.  Dozens at a time could surround a person and dismantle them in minutes.  

Ashby finally came upon the trail he had spied earlier, and was glad for an easier and flatter walk with less rocks and dune. He could just barely make out steady traces of camel-hooves. As a sniper spotter, he had been well-trained to distinguish markings in the sand, and for a moment he thought back to his days in his teens, at the Mahdi academy, sitting with friends for a lunch, drinking large glasses of ice water, killing time before the next class. He had barely paid attention to his instructor, bored by the many technical terms for the desert animals, and far more interested imagining what the girl seated before him might look like in the showers.  

How long ago was that?  The beginning of the war was sudden, and he remembered how he had been ordered to the academy one night, and left the next morning, and hadn’t seen or heard from his family since then, nearly ten years ago. After a few months in the academy, they had sent him north with a young sniper to disrupt Dajjal trade routes.  He had been rotated through many sniper teams since then, had slowly gone up the ranks, but was always kept on the front lines, despite his veteran status. It was why he knew that the Mahdi were desperate, because they hadn’t advanced him to officer and pulled him from the front. And Latham!  His heart sank thinking of him, abandoned and surely doomed - Latham was ten years his senior and had several serious medals, and the Mahdi were still sending him to the front. Ashby then remembered travelling back to a headquarters a few years prior, when he saw a Mahdi unit drive past him, full of infantry barely fourteen or fifteen.  

This time, Ashby definitely heard music, and not the stray sounds of the wind or the desert larks. It sounded like an instrument he had played as a child, a ney, a simple flute made from a hollow reed.  He knew the melody had swept down to him from the north, from Umm Ghitha, whose walls he could now see just several kilometers away.  The instrument was playing some song he did not recognize, something jovial and light-hearted, something completely foreign and surreal to the survivalist mindset Ashby had been immersed within. He found himself surprised to be whistling along to it, as it eased the painful trek north, he could forget the bruises and aches that plagued his sore body.

The song would stop for many minutes, and then the same song would begin again. He imagined dancers, and a feast, and dozens of city folk milling about, telling tales and laughing, but then the music would end for awhile.  And then he would be reminded of his geography lessons as a kid, and how the fabled city of Umm Ghitha was just an abandoned ruin in the middle of a remote part of the desert, long left to fade in brutal storms of sand. The sun was just setting as Ashby could see the distinct outline of the southern gate. He hoped he could get to it before it grew too dark, and he hoped whoever was playing the ney was a friend and not a foe.  

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Latham dropped into the chilly water, and did not touch bottom, and was quickly pulled away from the dimly lit railings high above him.  It was cold, but it was also a balm for his burns, a bittersweet tonic, which at once both reminded him of the burns, and yet soothed them as well.  He could barely swim, as he had never been around water much but during his military training in school, and he hadn’t swam in many years, but he could instinctively tread water, enough to keep his head up. Not that he could see anything, as it was pitch dark, and in the current that was beginning to pick up and jerk him to and fro, he could barely tell which direction was up or down.

It was so dark, and he was so exhausted, that his eyes played tricks and phantasmic images in fluorescent hues of purple and white and green danced in front of him.  Faces of bizarre creatures and fantastic beings pranced about him, disappearing and reappearing as the waves splashed into his face. His legs felt hollow, like dangling appendages, but he was glad to not have to put any weight onto them.  

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The Carryback Out --- Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Flight

Ashby’s rocket shot out of the desert floor in a long horizontal arc to the south.  Pumped full of the Incap toxin, Ashby slept soundly within it, confined inside the cockpit within an airbag cocoon, as the Zip rocket shuddered and shook low across the night sky.  It quickly traversed several hundred kilometers of desert until the rockets were exhausted, and dropped away, and the small craft began to spin out of control, when four large airbags exploded out of the sides of the capsule, considerably slowing its speed, while providing a cushion for impact.  

Beneath the moonless sky, the capsule crossed over the abandoned city of Umm Ghitha, and then towards the Dunes of Najaf, where it crashed hard into a sandy knoll near the base of the looming dunes.  It bounced off the hillside like a toy ball, careening upwards and continuing to climb the ridge.  Two of the bags had punctured and deflated, but the ruined capsule kept tumbling upwards along the rising slope, until a third bag capsized, and then the whole craft ran out of momentum and became lodged in a shallow gully near the peak of the dune.  The final bag slowly hissed and shrank until it was just an empty tatter of shrouds, and now the twisted, steaming metal cage of the capsule was visible beneath the starlight, the airbag inside the capsule still intact.

Ashby’s chemical sleep had been dreamless, and he awoke many hours later to an intense and painful white light burning his eyes, and a brutal headache that seemed to be audibly hammering his skull, and then he began to sense the innumerable bruises that littered his scrawny body.  He then noticed the smell of fuel, and the adventure of the night began to come back to him.  Spindles.  Motor-wheels.  Cackling Dajjal.  Sprinting across the tarmac.  He tried to open his eyes, but the light was only even more blinding, a pure white glare.   

Then Ashby heard the trilled, mournful peeping of a desert lark, and he knew he must be outside, and no longer in the hellish pit he had thought he would become entombed within the prior evening.   

Ashby grabbed the shroud in front of his face, and began to tug it away. He realized he had no flight suit on, then remembered throwing it to Latham.  Latham!  Where was he!  He had left Latham in the pit, left him there to fend for himself.  Sure, the suit might have helped him last a few more minutes in the inferno, but the place must have been blasted apart, and the Dajjal must have descended down and found him.  Ashby shuddered.

“And, where the hell am I?” Ashby wondered.  He finally tugged off the now-deflated capsule airbag, and extricated himself from the twisted craft, and found himself in a small depression along the side of a dune.  Thick white sheets, what had once been parts of an airbag or two, lie strewn around him, and he looked up to see the lark glide past, beneath a blue sky.  The sun had just risen, had just come up over the peak of the dune, and the intensity of it, through the white airbag, had woken him out of his intoxicated rest.  

Ashby’s lanky frame was covered in tattered beige fatigues, which were mostly darkened by deep stains from the saturated fuel oil. His olive complexion was even darker from caked on dirt, fuel oil, and bits of dust and debris.  He looked young, but the wrinkles beneath his eyes told the story of countless days and nights squinting into the distance, observing and spotting for the snipers he assisted.  

He could barely stand beneath the desert sun.  He wished for a moment he had the comfort of the flight suit, then felt guilty and looked down and then over his body, and then he felt the fuel waterlogged in his boots. The fumes conspired with the oppressive heat and nearly overwhelmed him.  He had to lower to one knee, and he ran his hand through his dark hair, and he wondered what was in his pockets.  

He had a few ID cards in his breast pocket.  He smiled as he found a mini-beacon in his right leg pocket, but it wouldn’t turn on. Maybe just a failed battery? He had a utility knife in his back pocket, which was tiny but had a bunch of handy little tools.  He found a key-card in another pocket, and just tossed it into the sand.  He wasn’t planning on ever returning to the forward outpost.

He knew he had to keep the fatigues on, because of the sun, but the fumes from the fuel were nauseating.  Fortunately, it seemed like the fuel was quickly evaporating, except in his boots.  So he took a few deep breathes, then climbed up out of the ravine, and found he was near the top of one of the dunes.  Spectacular, steep dunes, in a ridge than ran seemingly forever to the east towards the rising sun.  Had the Zip rocket succeeded, and sent him back south towards the pass to the Plains of Najaf?  He had no idea if he was really somewhere along the Dunes of Najaf, the old border between the Dajjal and the Mahdi.  But, he knew how to find out, and he turned north and peered down across the desert plains stretching out before him, and beheld the most perfect view of the abandoned ghost city of Umm Ghitha.

The city was laid out in a massive diamond pattern, framed by high walls and turrets, with gates on each of the four sides.  A river, now nearly dry, had once cut east and west through the center of the city, running beneath the fortified walls, where huge gates could swing open to allow water transport. The other two gates, north and south, went to what had once been paved roads that had traversed the Empire.

Inside the vast city lay thousands of rectangular dwellings, organized in a grid system, most about two stories in height, but haphazardly placed larger structures closer to five stories.  They said the city had once been one of the main trade centers, even at one point a capital, along the southern edge of the former Dajjal Kingdom.  But the decades had only grown more arid, the rains had stopped storming across the plains,  and the river had slowly receded until it was just a barely navigable creek. So the merchants had begun to abandon Umm Ghitha, and the trade routes no longer coursed through the desperate city and Umm Ghitha was slowly abandoned, useless and derelict, and left to slowly disintegrate in the sandstorms and sun.  

Yet, Ashby hoped, the desolate city might have some water, and it might have some shade, so he began his descent from the Dunes of Najaf, and began his miserable trek toward Umm Ghitha.

Latham woke in a panic when his suit ceased delivering oxygen to him. He was jolted out of a dream, wherein he was gasping for air, the sensation becoming more and more visceral until he awoke, and realized he was suffocating.  A great pain was sickeningly radiating from his legs. And he could not move them.  Yet, he could feel his toes, he could even wiggle them, despite each slight movement bringing about an intense sting.  All was dark, and he felt weighed down, unable to move anything.  And he felt like he was about to black out.  

He panicked, and began to thrash about, slowly able to free his arms from whatever was holding him. He reached for his face, but found it was covered in sand or dirt and so he began to unbury his head. He ripped off his face-mask and helmet and brought a massive breath of rank air deep into his lungs.  He coughed, but most of his body was still buried, and the pain in his legs and feet returned.  But he was breathing, and he could hear his heart beating, and from the agonizing sting that kept pulsing up from his legs, he knew he was alive.  

He could hear machines high above him, and occasional shouts in the far distance.  It wasn’t pitch black, but he couldn’t really see anything.  He wondered if his eyes had been injured, or if there was just not much to see here. Was he still in the Zip rocket pit?  He remembered a series of cascading explosions.  He remembered the walls falling in.  He remembered diving into the corner as everything went to hell.

Suddenly, he heard voices somewhere above him, two Dajjal talking calmly back and forth, as if they were considering something, or making a plan. He heard metallic clanking, and a third voice.  He knew he had to get himself unburied and out of there.

Pulling the rest of the dirt and stones off him was an easier task, now that he already had his arms free.  He was tilted a bit on his side, and could roll a lot of it off himself.  There was barely any light, but he could just make out that his boots were gone, and the lower half of his pants were gone.  He took off his gloves, which had rips and holes, completely tattered, and disengaged his now useless air tank and battery system at his hips. He then bent over to see his legs better, and touched his shin with his bare fingers, and almost screamed in terror.  Not only did excruciating pain shoot through him, but his finger felt something sticky, and he knew the burns must be horrific, at least second degree.  

The Dajjal would be looking for them, probably not content to end their search until they had found them alive or had found their charred remains. Latham and Ashby had sniped many dozens of Dajjal, and snipers were never forgiven in war.  They had taken easy potshots from their elevated outpost, and had effectively closed down a key roadway toward the front to the southwest.  Latham imagined teams of Dajjal were now above him, swarming over the outpost and scavenging anything they could.  And a few would probably drop down into the pits any moment to see if anything of value had survived, and to find their remains so they could call off their search.  They would surely have a high bounty placed on both of them, despite not knowing their precise identities.

Suddenly, there was an explosion above him, some kind of concussion grenade, which rained more rock and sand down upon him and whatever room he was in.  Through the thick smoke and dust, he could see daylight.  His ears rang, and he knew he had to scramble.  They were blasting open a roof that must have collapsed above him and kept the pit from being accessed.  

With the obscured daylight filling the room, he could tell he was no longer in the Zip rocket pit, but in some location beneath it.  Wires and cables were everywhere.  It must have been some access area.  But it was completely ripped apart, and there was no rhyme or reason to the pipes or ducts or boxes that littered the ground of it.  There was barely even a ground, as it was all broken apart with fissures like some earthquake had torn it all asunder.

Latham could hear someone yelling commands up above, and confident voices replying. He had no idea which direction to head in. His bootless feet were searing with pain. Why the hell had he dropped his sniper rifle the night before? Why had the first Zip rocket been missing? And what the hell was this place, some level beneath the rocket pit that they had never explained to him?

He peered into a corner, hoping for some tunnel, and he spied something that made his entire body shudder. A cabinet, or some large box, he could not tell, was turned on its side, with wires jutting out, with the odd word “USA” printed large across it. He had last seen these letters as a child in his school texts. USA: a civilization that had not existed for at least a century.  

There was no time to consider it. He pushed it aside and saw the entrance to another room, less damaged, but dark. He had no light. His flight suit had expired and was ripped apart and all he had left was part of the singed jacket which he had just not had time to remove. His feet were killing him. Each stubbed toe, each tiny rock he stepped upon, felt like someone was poking at him with a hot iron.

And then Latham heard the buzz of a mini-drone. They had practiced shooting them out of the sky in simulator training, but Latham had no weapon.  It wasn’t onto his track yet, but he knew it would be.  It would follow him until he destroyed it.  It was subtle sound, like gears turning and clacking every few seconds, accompanied by a very high-pitched buzz, almost like a mosquito. The Dajjal must have just dropped it into the pit above. Latham scrambled through the strange ancient room, scattering unknown objects with his burnt feet in the dark. The mini-drone would quickly pick up on the noise and be onto him. It could not harm him, but it would be able to see him, and the Dajjal would be alerted and then send in some mercenaries thirsty for their bounty.  

Latham knew he must continue, and stepped away from the sound of the drone, panicked like a fleeing animal, but stepped too far, and found himself unbalanced on a section of the floor that had been tilted into a steep angle, and he slid and then rolled down the slope for what must have been several floors’ height, dropping off the edge of the slab onto another floor.  He was not sure how many more bruises his bloody elbows and knees could take. His left shoulder felt like it was out of its socket.  He could no longer hear the mini-drone, but he knew it would be coming, so he just keep going, and began to crawl across whatever room he was now in.  He could see nothing at all, and just felt his way along the floor, pushing various unknown objects out the way, until he hit the far wall and could go no further.

Latham crouched against this wall in the dark room, exhausted, in pain, and beginning to realize his panicked escape was doomed. The mini-drone would find him in moments, and then it would be a matter of minutes before armed Dajjal dropped down and killed him. Or worse, they would find him and bring him back up, to be mercilessly tortured by a cheering mob of vengeful Dajjal.

He began to again hear the drone, still in the distance, but picking up his track above, as it seemed to get closer and must be descending from the pit to where Latham had lain for untold hours. It couldn’t have been more than eight or nine hours, as that was the limit of the oxygen he had been relying upon. Latham’s eyes were now adjusted again to pitch dark, and it slowly dawned on him that out of the corner of his eye, he could see a tiny glimmer of light, a thin horizontal sliver of illumination along the floor several paces from him. He scrambled over to it, and saw that it was a wafer-thin gap between the floor and wall, and he quickly realized it must be the bottom to a closed doorway of some kind. The light was not flickering, and did not seem like sunlight. He thought he was too deep underground for it to open up to anywhere that would have daylight. He knew his mind was exhausted to be pondering this at all, when he should just be finding a way to get through the door.  He stood up and searched haphazardly for some way to open it, and came across a small metal lever, and pushed it down, and the door opened outwards into a hallway that was dimly lit, by electricity of some kind.

It was like something he had seen in old videos as a child, before the war. The ceiling had many panels that each held two long sticks within. Only a few of the sticks still glowed, and faintly, and with a buzzing flicker; but to his eyes which had become so accustomed to the dark, they were nearly blinding. The walls were large blocks of stone, but perfectly hewed, with no imperfections at all.  And the floor was like one massive long stone slab, with not a single imperfection, only some recent cracks which had fractured across.  With his eyes blinded by the sudden light, Latham walked cautiously into the tunnel, then shut the door behind him quick, and made sure it was closed tight.

  At the end of the long hallway was another door, which would not open as easily as the other. But the mechanism was rusted, so he backed up, and ran forward and bashed the door with his less painful right shoulder, and the mechanism busted, and the door swung slowly ajar.  Latham pushed it open all the way, and found himself standing on a small ledge, constructed of rusty metal railings, hanging above a small underground river of some kind. He could hear splashing upstream, and right at the limit of the dim light there, he could see a contraption, a strange series of paddles, like an arcane watermill, continuously turning.  He looked down the other way, and saw only darkness as the underwater stream disappeared from view.  

Latham knew he had to pull himself over the railing, and descend into the water.  If he died, at least it would not be at the hands of the Dajjal.

[tarbox23]

The Carryback Out -- Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The Monochromatic Dark

“Crap,” coughed Ashby, “What the hell?”

“Fuel oil - don’t switch on your light,” whispered Latham.

Ashby could feel it soaking through his pant legs, and his sleeves, from where he had hit the floor and rolled.  He could hear Latham grunt in pain.

“You alright?”

Latham grimaced in the pitch dark, “Yeah, just twisted something, but I am covered in this stuff -”

Fragments from the shack high above them continued to drop down into the pit they now found themselves in, but the cacophony of weapons above was now silent.  The savage voices of the Dajjal were getting closer, barking orders amidst random cheers.  Several loud explosions echoed down into their pit, probably the enemy wheelers beginning to blast apart other portions of the outpost.  

“Where the hell is that rocket?” wondered Ashby.

“Someone took this one, but I think we can take a tunnel to the other.”

Ashby knew there wasn’t time to ponder why this rocket was missing, as there had been nobody at this outpost in weeks but them, and their lieutenant had told them they had two Zips, one for each of them.  Ashby instead was wondering how they were going to find the tunnel, and how they were going to get two people on one Zip rocket.  And, feet away, lamp-beams were now waving down from above.  In their light, Ashby could now see the foot or so of fuel oil covering the ground, and shuddered as he realized the enemies above were probably just getting a good whiff of it, and would probably any moment send one of their footmen back to a motor-wheel for a mini-flare that could be dropped into the pit to blast them all to hell.

“Ashby, the tunnel is over here -” whispered Latham.  Ashby could hear Latham swishing around in the diluted fuel oil, moving away from him.  “Just follow the pipe above you once you get into the tunnel,” urged Latham, getting louder.  There was no point in whispering now, as the noise from them sloshing around in the fuel had surely given them away, and the Dajjal were clearly onto them, shining their lamps down the pit to where they had landed.  It was hard to hear what was going on up there, but they sounded excited, and louder than before.    

It was at least a hundred paces they had gone, in a three foot high tunnel, so cramped and hard to move very quickly, still sloshing through many inches of watery fuel.  The stench was stifling, as oxygen was at a premium. Every deep breath felt like only a spoonful of good air. Odd abutments would jut out every dozen paces or so, bruising their knees and elbows.  Ashby had kept his torch off, fearful of sparking the fuel, and they had to blindly follow the tunnel walls and conduit above them, along the pipe that seemed to zigzag at random intervals.  Ashby wondered if they were just going around in a circle, but knew enough to keep his mouth shut, since Latham was leading and there were no other options anyway.  

With all the twists and turns, the dim whitish light behind them had soon faded to black, when suddenly, faster than they could have imagined, a dim violet glow from behind them cast enough light so that Ashby could see his hands in front of his eyes.  Over the din of them trampling through the fuel, they could hear an odd hiss that grew in volume.  It was clear that the Dajjal had found a way to ignite the fuel.

“The rocket!” exclaimed Latham, as Ashby could hear him splashing into a deeper patch of fuel, probably up to his knees.  

The purple glow behind them in the tunnel was now bright enough so they could see each other dimly in the monochromatic dark, and behind Latham who had first entered the large room, Ashby could faintly see the outline of the Zip rocket, hanging in the air, hoisted up with wires, about the size of the motorcycles he had seen in the library screens as a kid.  It was made of pipes and valves and several large cylinders, with no wheels.  Latham was already under it, trying to pull on a rip cord to open it up.  

“Come and grab this bar!” yelled Latham.

Ashby dashed over and jumped up to a bar on the side of the rocket that Latham was pointing to.  A brighter scarlet hue was now emanating from the tunnel, and beginning to flicker the large pit they were now in, as an odd whooshing sound in the tunnel grew even louder and closer.

“Get into the cockpit,” commanded Latham, as he himself pulled up around to the other side.  Ashby hopped into a tiny compartment, large enough for one man, and quickly searched for the flight suit that he knew should be right across from the navigation console.  

“Ashby, give me the suit - and then get out of here!” urged Latham.  Ashby had the suit in his arms, and tossed it up and out to Latham, who was standing outside over one of the small rocket intakes.

“Remember the injection, and then hit the switch - and good luck,” wished Latham.  Ashby grabbed a small tube in front of him, and pulled it out from the console, and stuck it into his left arm.  It was attached to the console by a thin cable, and as it struck his arm, needles dug into his flesh and injected the fast-acting Incap toxin into his bloodstream.  In seconds, he would be unconscious, and better able to withstand any impact.  

Latham scrambled to pull the flight suit over his fuel-drenched clothing, zipping it as the orange fire began to surge out of the tunnel and into the room they were in.  He could begin to feel the air sucking out of his lungs, as he sealed the pilot helmet to his jacket and launched himself off the rocket intake to a thin ladder running up the wall of the pit.

Ashby pulled his cockpit window closed, then hit the switch, and then slumped atop the console as the three rockets surrounding him exploded in a deafening high-pitched roar, blasting fire straight down into the fuel in the pit.  The Zip rocket slowly ascended a few feet, and then seemed to instantly just zoom straight up and out of the pit, followed by thick orange flames and fireballs.

With his flight suit on, Latham had known he was safe in the most extreme heat, but he was smart enough to not chance it, or chance that he had forgotten to secure some corner of the suit or had somehow torn part of it open. And he doubted the flight suit had ever been tested with someone inside who was wearing fuel-drenched fatigues! If he had only had time, he could have ripped off the soaked clothing, but he didn’t have time. He had wondered how Ashby was going to survive without a flight suit, and which one of them had gotten the worst deal, as he had scrambled down the ladder.

Fire had seemed to pour from every direction, knocking Latham to the ground beside the ladder and the base of the rocket, though he could barely feel the heat yet; he was nearly blind and disoriented from the intensity of the furnace-like blasts, so bright - even through the thick tinted goggles in his headgear. They had trained in these suits, but never in cascading fuel explosions and rocket fire.  

“Well, Ashby is out of here,” Latham thought, as he tried to focus on just breathing while trying to figure out what was happening. He had been pushed clear across the huge pit when the rocket had lifted off, and been violently thrown into something hard, and he was no longer sure what direction he was even facing.  He had then been tossed into some hole around the edge of the pit when the walls had blasted open and crashed down around him in the firestorm. The fire seemed to then dissipate instantly, as if perhaps there was nothing else to burn, but Latham was too blinded to see anything, just knew it was suddenly darker.

He also wondered if he was deaf, because the suit should have been speaking to him right about then, giving him instructions, at least a health report.  Or had the unit been knocked out?  Was he even breathing air from the tank? Was he even alive? He clenched his teeth just to try to feel something.  He realized he could taste blood, but was unaware of any pain.

He lay there for what felt an eternity, in total silence, unable to see much at all, only able to discern a reddish light slowly dimming.  His legs felt numb in some way, but neither leg seemed to even exist, and he couldn’t make sense of much at all.  He could not move his arms.  He began to drift into a dream, and he welcomed it.  

He could see his mother, standing over him at the edge of a crib, whispering something to him, smiling at him. He remembered how tight he would hold onto the rail of the crib, how he could feel the marks that his teeth had made into it, when he would cry at night and bite the crib and the biting would soothe him. And his mother would always come.  The light would turn on, and she would come in, and she would pick him up out of the crib, and carry him away with her.

[tarbox23]

The Carryback Out -- Chapter One

Chapter One

Spindles and Motor-Wheels

Orion hung low in the October night, straight across the sky from a setting sliver of the moon, when a sonic boom rang out and jarred the cooling desert.  Latham had been waiting for the star Saiph, anchoring Orion, to rise up from behind the hills along the eastern horizon. He had grown weary of scanning for targets in the plains beneath those distant hills, and had become quite the stargazer.  Then the air shook, and the ground shook, and Latham stopped his chewing and tilted his head back from the sniper scope. He watched with naked eye as a low jet that had seemingly come out of nowhere dropped four scarlet flares from its wings, downwards and then straight towards them.

Damn Spindles, always came without warning, buzzing down and bursting open and sending fiery mists to the ground, burning metallic dust anywhere that can burn, even onto whatever  you never thought could burn.  Latham scrambled into his spider hole, grabbed a thick foiled disk with one hand and pulled it safe over his head and secured it down, as the air above sizzled and popped like fatback dropped into a frying pan full of oil - it was completely dark in his tiny hideout, but he knew only feet away, above him, the entire bunker was blindingly bright from the scorching phosphorescent coating that was eating away at everything.  

The many quickly-stifled shrieks from whatever had been alive out there would have been terrifying, if Latham hadn’t become so used to it over the past several weeks here at this station.  When daylight broke, and there were no targets, he would often find burnt skeletons in the sand around the bunker.  He had once found what he imagined might have had been a camel, with only the cinder of charred bones laying where it had dropped right out of the exhausted air.  

“Latham!” came a muffled yell from above.  Latham pushed away the disk to find his spotter, Ashby, peering down at him, flashlight in hand, squinting into the dark hole.   

“Ashby, you are still steaming, buddy!”

“Tangos are coming over the ridge, Latham, we gotta set back up and fast.”

“You see where I dropped it?”

Ashby shook his head, “Was hoping you had it with ya.”

“Yeah, me too.”  

Ashby hoisted Latham up and out of the spider hole, and then peered out his viewfinder again.  

“Six, still at least a thousand paces out. Very bright. Probably those damn Dajjal motor-wheels - ”

Latham knew even if he found his rifle, it was probably trashed from the heat or just going to be too damn hot to hold onto for a good while. Ashby was hunched over, light in hand, his scraggy arms sweeping the floor of the embankment for it, trying to wave the lingering ground-smoke away.

“Screw it, Ashby.  We’ve gotta run.”

A month prior, they had three rifles, plenty of ammunition, and had considered the assignment to defend the outpost to be ridiculously simple, a definite holiday from the risky work of taking out insurgent snipers in the villages up north. All they had to do now was take out any small targets, always out in the open across the natural defense of the wide desert plain.  Headquarters had said to radio for support if they saw armored Dajjal units. Pick up the weekly supply drop. Take cover if you were alerted of their jets approaching.  

Days would go by with no activity.  They had never even needed to radio out for support against armor; at worst, a few small targets would try to make it across the desert plains, and be summarily handled by Latham’s trigger finger, as Ashby called out the coordinates to dial into the rifle.   

Then, one week, there was no supply drop. This was not good at all, as it was about the one  event they actually looked forward to. The first of them to scramble to the dropped supply box got the good stuff. Sweets. Gum. Stimulants. That was the deal. Anticipating the drop kept them on their toes, even when the days would stretch out with absolutely nothing of interest to mention.  

And then just close to a week ago there was the first unannounced Spindle attack. Nobody from headquarters had alerted them. The radio had been silent for several days, and even outgoing calls had gone unanswered.

They had seen the jet coming, during daylight, as it turned and rolled across the sky toward their outpost.  It was no supply craft.  It descended rapidly towards them. That was how Latham lost the first rifle, to this first surprise attack. Ashby had given him shit about it for days. Latham had been a sniper for close to a decade, and knew enough to never separate himself from his weapon.

After the attack, Latham had gone back to the equipment box, and pulled out the second rifle, and aimed it out across the horizon, and then grimaced as the electronics never started up. He tapped it, then banged it against the makeshift parapet, but the scope would only work manually, close range, like in the old days.

And if the targets got that close, it would be too late. So, Latham put that weapon aside for a contingency he hoped he’d never see, and placed it in the equipment box, which was taken out the very next evening in a haphazard Spindle strike.

This night, they had started with about a dozen rounds, and the last good rifle, when the surprise strikes had hit their compound, and now they were weaponless. The advance Dajjal units had learned in the past few days to race quickly to the outpost after any Spindle attack, so Latham knew he had only minutes to flee.

Ashby led them down the back of the main bulwark, the footing down the ramp difficult as it was scattered with debris and still covered with a few inches of swirling, dense smoke. Ashby, thinner and lighter and still in his early twenties, was usually leading the decade older, and more deliberate, Latham from place to place; and it was no different in this instance, as they fled from their outpost.  

“Turn here, towards the Zip rocket,” Latham shouted ahead to Ashby, who darted rightwards off the bottom of the ramp, flashlight leading the way beneath the starry sky.  

“You serious?”

“What the hell - got a better idea?” returned Latham.  

They were now sprinting across a small tarmac, towards a small cube of a building across the way.  For the first time, they could hear the distinct sounds of the Dajjal motor-wheels, buzzing like saws, and getting louder.

“Turn off the flashlight dammit!”

“Crap,” said Ashby, as he remembered he was even holding it and powered it off.   

They were across the tarmac, dodging bits of debris strewn across the landing strip, further fractured and re-littered from earlier Spindle attacks, and they bolted to the shack where Latham knew the Zip rocket was stored.  

“Got a card?” whispered Ashby, first to the door.  

Latham could feel the blood pulsing across his temples, swooshing sounds in his ears, staring at Ashby’s face, pondering the words, then hearing the buzz-saw noise of the motor-wheels becoming uncomfortably close.  

The headlights from the approaching Dajjal began to turn around the side bastions of the outpost fortification and then quickly back across the tarmac.  

“Ashby, you have it in your jacket.”

Ashby yanked the ID card out and quickly ran it across the scanner, as the first motor-wheel to hit them with headlights raced across the landing strip, dodging the various bits of junk scattered about.  

The door opened, revealing a small room with no floor.  They could smell the heavy stench of fuel, but could see only darkness below. Above them, slivers that were shot from the motor-wheel turrets began to hit the top of the tiny building, splintering the upper shingles and wood frame.

So they both dove in, Ashby hesitating a moment after Latham, as the structure began to disintegrate under the impact of thousands of tiny slivers from the motor-wheels.  They were so close they could hear the Dajjal gunners screaming in their terrible language, and the others cackling and taunting as the building was reduced to small shards of wood and glass and shingle.  

[tarbox23]

Left Right 7" Remix

He was sober by the time he knocked on the door. Man, its five in the distance. He could see fireworks flaring up in the morning. Yeah, I’m sorry. Malthus stood weary, holding to the abandoned fort that the sky had grown dark and he knew it was a bit later than that. Yeah. You know how it is, you know how it is, you know Storey was bringing Malthus the first up. Looking around the still hazy room, there were several couples under sheets and his breathe was numb and visible. A church bell was ringing in the distance. He could see fireworks flaring up in the distance, and cross miles of water, and heard the lame explosions moments later. 

The surf on nights like this was tremendous, and drowned out all else. It made you listen to each last sweet fizzle of nothingness. It was that sound in his mind that was there all his life somehow. He needed it. 

She pulled him to her, and she heard him sigh. What’s wrong? I’m not lamenting anything, just screw up the numbers.