Ironhound

The accusing eyes of a police dog, gold star on his chest and cute little patrolman's cap on his head, glared at me from across the room. Cotton stuffing leaked from his burst plushy guts. I was quite sad that he’d been eviscerated this way, but drew a sharp breath and vowed to soldier on.

I'd reported as ordered to Brigade Command, set up just the night before in a ruined toystore on the north of the Brigade Area of Operations. Staff bustled here and there, treading on the crushed heads of dolls and skittering dangerously on tiny cars.

There were all the usual sounds you get in a tactical HQ: a buzz of drones overhead, the crackle of radio comms. A smell of intense urban combat drifted over the place from the south: nose-prickling ozone, cordite, fuel oil, feces, spilt souring milk.

But not the noise. It was quiet this time of the morning. The combat zone was silent over there, apart from a lone dog barking blocks away and the odd shot taken out of boredom, without purpose or real anger. Our boys hadn't had their breakfasts yet. Theirs hadn’t popped out of their tunnels to deliver their surprises. What they call a lull.

A cup of coffee handed to me by an aide, no sugar: sharp, smelling black and acrid, metallic as razor wire and thunder pricking ions from the air. I tuned out all other scents and focussed my mind on that odor alone. The bitterness became me.

The Brigade Commander strode into the Ops Room, towering as a golem, magnificent and machine-like in his buzz-cut, shoulder-holster and calf-strapped commando boots. Command of a combat unit is mostly just a matter of ruthlessness and theater, and his performance told you he would slit any throat, even yours — even, perhaps, his own — to achieve operational objectives within the designated timeframe.

I was overwhelmed by this monster of resolve, as was the intention. If it hadn't been for the coffee to reinforce my courage, I would have wept like a small child when faced by some foreboding stranger. As it was, I kept it together enough to stay silent and waited for him to initiate.

He lurched to the room's center of mass and thrust out some words at me that only repeated what I'd already seen in my written orders: attach to F.O.B. IRONHOUND, assess intel, analyze, report.

I drifted then into his eyes, pretty as a schoolgirl's, despite being set like dainty gems in a brutalist field of scar and leather. There was a sparkling loveliness in them that his bluster and callousness somehow couldn't quite conceal. I was charmed.

The brigadier was less so. "Are you by any chance tripping, major? Tripping balls?"
"Sir, pursuant to agreed doctrine for intel analysis, it's SOP to microdose with LSD when engaged in the active analysis of operational intelligence. Just before coming here, I was so engaged, sir."

Not strictly true: I'd dropped a tab while bored out of my skull at Corps HQ and was now coming down from a peak just around midnight, when witches flew on broomsticks between the drones, and dragons rode in on iron bombs to cough out their phosphorescent satisfaction in burning glitter that would melt through flesh.

"SOP or no SOP, major, I'm not having anyone attached to my unit involved in drug-abuse of any kind. There'll be no hallucinogenic use here, whether engaged in intel analysis or not. Got me, son?"
"Yes sir, no acid use, sir. Nor any other drug, sir."
"Questions...? Dismissed."

I saluted and turned, but way before I'd even thought of moving, he'd swooped on one of his aides and got to scooping handfuls of knowledge from out of his skull. I was nothing to him. I was a distraction of less import than a shred of stuffing from the guts of the plushy policedog which clung to his thick-soled commando boots.

Suddenly, thinking about the disembowelled doggie, so full of hope to rid his canine city of crime, I felt very sad indeed. It seemed victory was very far away.

F.O.B. IRONHOUND was based at the former city library, considered a secure and robust structure with good axes of approach and clear fields of fire from the roof. Positions here could dominate the local neighborhood.

The library was just about the oldest building in the city, with solid columns of classical girth and weightiness from some colonial time, now chipped away and eroded like relics of some subaquatic lost city. Inside were fine spacious reading rooms, now vandalized to shit, with all the books in their unreadable barbaric script scattered across the floor.

There was an inner atrium where a bunch of chickens wandered amid the the parched and wilting shrubbery and a marble ornamental fountain, now bone dry. A local woman had been attached to the unit to interpret, but since there were no city dwellers left alive round here, she simply tended the chickens and cooked the platoon their stew in a makeshift kitchen in the western reading room.

There was literally no one left in charge at F.O.B. IRONHOUND. It was like an experiment in leaderlessness. The previous platoon commander had been medevacced the day before, and there was an unspoken struggle for dominance between the squad leaders, three reservist sergeants who all worked in the same tech startup back in the world. It seemed, reading between the lines, that whoever gained command of the platoon would thereby gain control of the development of a new killer app employing AI in dating platforms when they rotated back. A shitshow of an entirely normal shape and size.

The enlisted men were not startup entrepreneurs like the squad sergeants. They were tough farmers and orchard-tenders who scrubbed along in sunny valleys with automatic weapons strapped to their backs. They had hard calloused hands and similar hearts. They loved each other intensely; everything and everyone else they hated, not least the squad leaders and the now-departed platoon commander. The enemy, of course. Everyone who breathed in this place. And now me.

I saw them sitting round a fire in the eastern reading room, feeding the books stripped from the shelves one by one into their cooking fire. Breakfast was done and I'd missed it. Now they were just huddling. One of them had a guitar which he strummed tunelessly. The others just kind of squatted or lay around the flames and stared into space.

They ignored me utterly. I was just some spectacled geek from Brigade who held no mystery to them, an open book in an unreadable script which didn't merit any effort to learn. A city-boy, a dweeb. They looked away from me, or else stared with malign incuriosity through the empty space I occupied.

I was hungry, so I set about scrounging up a late breakfast. First I ran down the local woman who was tossing seed at the nonchalant chickens in the ornamental space of the atrium.

"Hey lady! Whatcha got to eat round here? Why don't you grab me one of those nice chickens to roast?" I projected my voice and it echoed nicely through the space, coursing out to the corridors and around and into the reading rooms.

Silence in the library, screw that.

"I wish I would be dead," she said in her language. The fact that I knew her own language's grammar better than she did indicated that she hadn’t been a regular user of this former center of learning.

"I wish I would be able to end it all. Be a martyr, not a slave to invaders."
"How about you fix me one of those chickens in a pot!" I yelled. "I haven't eaten since yesterday!"

Our little kerfuffle had drawn some attention, and the soldiers started to gather in the doorways from the reading rooms to the atrium. There was nothing going on. This pathetic squabble was a something. Therefore interesting. One or two raised their cellphones and started filming, contrary to standing orders. I said nothing to them.

The woman was wailing something I couldn't understand. Dialect, no doubt. I still stayed clear of her but raised my voice some more.
"You hear me, woman? I'm hungry, I need something to eat!"
"Oh God save us, God have mercy, I wish to be dead and out of it all!"

I drew my pistol and cocked it.
"You gonna get me a chicken or not?"
"Mercy on us, mercy on me, such evil times, such evil men among us..."

I walked over to where a single chicken stood pecking at nothing in particular on the white gravel, between a ficus and a tiny withered peachtree. It looked at me without interest, yet another.

I fired once. The sound was loud and resonant in that echoing space. The remaining chickens scattered, clucking madly.

I picked up the bloody remains of the chicken with its devastated chest. Probably not much white meat left on it. I thrust it into the hands of the wailing woman.

"Here. Cook that for me. And a little cus-cus to go with it."

She turned and headed back into the west wing, still calling on her God to take her from this sinful world. There was blood all over her hands, but only literally.

I looked toward the men, who now gazed on me with a different expression. The cold-blooded bit had done its work. My heart was still racing, but I breathed deep and was cool.

"Hey, mister officer, while you're waiting for that to cook, maybe you could have a little of my special hummus. Sent special by my sister."
"Yeah, come on over to the fire and warm yourself a little, major."
“Join us, sir. What’s ours is yours.”

That night I slept among these men, as we huddled together our sleeping bags for warmth against the night frost creeping into the cracking shell of the city’s only library.

I threw another book on the fire and snuggled closer to them. Together they dreamed a single dream of home, but I could dream only of burst chickens and of the blood that had seeped into my killer heart.

=========== [ IRONHOUND / END ] ==========

[With acknowledgements to Isaac Babel's great tale "My First Goose" which served as inspiration]

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