This one won second place in the Lunar Awards Horror Contest this time last year.

I'm presently considering what kind of thing to submit for this spring's edition.

Just before dawn, after an all-night journey from the transit base, the bus dropped Redwing close enough to his house to walk home. Which was good, because he was going to have to walk anyway. No way to call for a ride way out here, and no ride to call. Just a dusty crossroads in a pine-barren wood and—glimpsed through the trees in the faint half-light—a derelict farmhouse in the slow process of its own collapse.

After Redwing stepped down off the bus, as it closed its doors and rattled away from him up the road, he saw something through the dust and the thick smoke of the diesel exhaust.

A heap of children's corpses in the ditch across the lane. Bright blood on their ashen skin, tiny limbs rigid, awkwardly pointing into the sky. The small eyes glazed, gazing at the nothing in the faces of their stiffened companions.

Just like the heaps he'd faced in those uneradicable moments before he brought his flamethrower to bear. He closed his eyes tight shut now, preparing himself for the char smell, for the furnace noise of the crackle and hiss.

Then he looked again, and it was a bush of bursting red azaleas in the roadside ditch.

Azalea: the thinking-of-home shrub, they call it. He picked up his kitbag and started heading down the dirt road, thinking of nothing at all.

Home is where the heart is. If so, then Redwing had no home. But family history and ingrained habit determined that what he called his home was a failing repair shop on the corner of a rutted dirt track and a pot-holed asphalt road.

The pine barrens became second-growth scrub forest around this place. The ground here was furrowed deep with sharp gulleys, plagued with harsh jags of scarp. His family’s repair shop was single-storey and squared, constructed of cinderblock and meager mortar, a flaking pale blue-green slab. A workshop crazed with tools and a small living quarters set off to one side, and a storm cellar lay below it all.

There was no sign for the business, and no call for one. Everybody, or everyone who needed to know, knew what went on here. Everything might be repaired at this place—cars, bikes, washing machines, TVs, toasters—everything except broken people.

He pushed open the door, and the sour smell was both comfortingly familiar and deeply repellent. It smelled of home and there was no welcome at all in it.

Reunion between the two brothers came some hours later, when Ham-Hock walked into the kitchen and saw Redwing drinking cold day-old coffee and chewing on dry bread. It was full morning now and the heat was getting up to its tricks.

Ham-Hock was naked but for a pair of stained underdrawers, scrawny and stale in his bare inadequate skin. His dank hair lanked down about his shoulders, black and greasy. He couldn't have made a greater contrast to Redwing's near-blond buzzcut and his solid muscular frame which was clad in neat demobilization-issue casual.

“Back from the war then?”
“Could say.”
“Yep. I'd say you were.”

With no more coffee available, Ham-Hock went out to walk on down to the bar. Redwing sipped his cold coffee and started to sort through Maw-Maw's reminiscences. Most of them he threw away.

Just watch where the fuck you're goin', bitch!

Full summer in town, and no respite from dust and flies anywhere in the outside heat. Outside there existed only irritants–raw scratchy grit in the throat and unending flickers of buzzing insects on her face. And these people. The townspeople were at their meanest in summer. She had never in her twenty-five years of life found herself among such sour folk as these. What on earth had made them this way?

She walked out toward her car with her arms full of groceries. There was a large man around her own age standing next to the car, arms crossed across his chest, staring nowhere. He was brawny and solid, with medium-length light brown hair. He looked down at her as she approached and spoke calmly.

“You're blocking my ATV.”
“What?”
“Your car is blocking my ATV.”

His tone was even, unlike every other tightly-wound individual in the locality who was forever edgily poised on the brink of aggression. She peered over her car and saw it, his ATV, in the corner between the parking space and the unpainted wood fence of the parking lot—a quad dirt bike, low and stripped-down, no license plates.

“I'm so sorry, I never saw it when I parked.”
“Don't matter none. You can move it now, no harm done.”

He held her bags as she opened the car and set them down for her in the hatchspace at the back. Still he had shown nothing to her, no friendliness, but at least he didn't behave like a pig as did everyone else here. She sat in the car and turned the key but there was no response.

“Your car's battery's gone flat. Dead.”
“Oh my Go... gosh. I mean, my goodness!”
“Just needs a jump to start. I could give you one from my ATV battery, but my jump cables are at home.”
“What can I do, then?”

He looked round. They were alone in the parking lot, at the far corner where the fence abutted the street. He stepped over to the streetside of the fence and punched it hard. A hole appeared, and she jumped, startled by the noise. Another crash, then a wider hole, and she felt a strange excitement come upon her.

What he was doing was technically an act of vandalism, but it was done for her sake. This destruction had a cause and a goal, and she was it. She was its purpose. He pulled out a few loose slats of wood and now there was a wide enough gap. He mounted up on the quadbike, said for her to wait there, and started it up.

The chugging blast of the quadbike and its dark black smokeclouds disappeared up the street and soon he was gone from view.

They went back to his place, the sun falling behind the scrubby trees, she following his quadbike in her compact car. She'd seen better. She'd seen worse. It was a squat cinderblock bunker on the corner of the asphalt road leading out of town and a dust road going somewhere else.

When he'd come back to the store parking lot and jumpstarted her car, she drove it on a ways and left it running in the main town square to charge up the battery, and they chatted together over by the war memorial. It was a curious monument made with spent shellcasings chained together to form a protective barrier at ground level. Above that a knobby concrete plinth and an inexpertly sculpted figure that was intended to be a soldier with a machine gun but instead resembled an imp or demon with a deficient pitchfork.

It was not a monument to the war Redwing had been drafted to fight in, he said, but the one both his grandfathers had lost their lives in. They'd both sown their seed, these grandpas, before they went away to fight, so Redwing and his brother Ham-Hock had been sired in due course, a generation later, by a father who was not destined for any war but for polio and pleurisy and an early grave.

They drove away when the battery gauge showed full charge. Now, back at his place, he offered her a beer and they settled down to talk. He impressed her by how genuine he was. Authentic. Not exactly a laugh a minute, sure, but not a bragging fool like many another young man she’d met in these parts.

“Just me and my brother here now. 'Cept my brother went away. Just me really. So... uh... what do you do?”
“I'm a schoolteacher in the local school.”
“Yeah? I used to go there years ago.”
“Yeah, so did most of the folks round these parts. How was it for you?”
“Not as bad as th’ army. But not great.”
“I hope I can make it better for the kids now I’m there.”

They chatted in the dimming light. He spoke about his time in the war, but not really–he spoke around it, giving external particulars only. She spoke about how she came here from the city because the only teaching job on offer was here. Then he spoke about his Maw-Maw who died while he was away the army.

“My brother told me: 'When Maw-Maw died she'd forgotten all about you. Forgotten about me too, even though I was wiping up her shit. Forgot all about herself too.' He resented me, my brother. Resented me goin' away. He was 4-F, otherwise he would have gone for sure, gone in my place. But he didn't know shit.”
“Terrible about your mother. Ah, forgetting is a great curse, ain't it?”
“A great relief, it is. I wish for it sometimes.”
“Forgetting?”
“Total forgetting. What do they call it? Oblivion. That’s what I crave.”

She got up to leave after the beer, and she thought he'd suggest she stay with him. But he didn't. He just looked at her as she walked out of the door toward her car. Said he had to look after some things. So she went away.

The kids in her school were strangely unconcerned when the first girl went missing. Seems like teenage kids just tend to drift away from this place from time to time. No big thing.

He turned up at school closing time around a week later–in a proper car, not his quad ATV–to invite her to take a drive with him. They went out to the creek to look at the folks there fishing but there was no water and nobody fishing, so they wandered out through the dust in the dry stream bed.

“We used to play at soldiers here. Kids. Sniper nest just under the bridge there.”
“No kids playin' here today, though.”
“They got scared off.”

They went deep into the gorge, out of the sun. It was broken and precipitous there, impossible to climb up from where the stream would run in this dusty gulch. There was a cave—underwater in wet season, a risky teen hangout in summer. Empty bottles and filled condoms scattered all around. Graffiti scrawls, impossible to read, ciphers and hieroglyphs of ancient youth now gone.

“It's kinda spooky here,” she said. “Spooky, but there's a thrill, too, you know?”
“I spent a lot of time underground,” he said. “Weren’t so thrillin’ those times.”
“Wanna tell me about it, Redwing?”

She reached out and touched a cheek. He neither flinched, nor did he lean in.

He spoke in the half-light. Hard to see his face, but his eyes were a steel glint in shadow.
“There were whole nights when rockets come in and we’d sit huddlin' in the shelter. You know, a kinda log bunker. Useless if a direct hit come in, but you haveta go somewhere. Everything shakes, the ground shakes and your ribcage shakes and the air shakes. Your mind shuts down, it just gives up screamin' at you in the end, and it goes right away from you. Those nights shakin’ are the price you pay for the other things you done, maybe. But not the only price.”

Her other hand went up to the other cheek.

“Oh, my sweet boy. What did they do to you?”

He still didn't react in any way, but there were tears rolling onto her fingertips, warm and damp in that dry scorched heat in the place under the earth.

Now there was another child gone. A bright chatty blonde girl from her class. Unlikely to have wandered off of her own volition, she told the police. Happy in class, happy–or so she thought–at home. A search was instituted with hounds and squads of half-hearted cops bussed in from outside the town. Nothing appeared.

Some nights she went by Redwing's place. She learned that Redwing wasn't really his name, it was some kind of a military name, a callsign they called it, from his work on an army clearance team. It wasn't specified what they were clearing. Meanwhile Ham-Hock his departed brother wasn't really called that either. His name derived from the shortwave ham radio that he loved to tinker with. He would call up all hours of the night saying ‘Ham-Hock here, come on good buddies.’ But nobody else ever responded so he quit it with the radio and sold it for parts.

They became close in every way except the obvious. She was saddened, but felt in time there could be something there. She was a lonely painter. She painted passionate amateur watercolors of valleys in burnt umber and burnt sienna, she painted the high pine scarplands in khaki and olive. She was an educator with a steadily disappearing flock of pupils. She was a migrant who’d found herself in an unwelcoming exile land of snarling faces.

Redwing was something human she had found. Broken, yes, and hobbled by some unspoken pain, but human unlike any other round here.

She wandered through the cinderblock house with a beer in her hand, dabbing up the dust sometimes with a rag, picking up the plates, peeking and poking. He sat and sang along to the radio and she enjoyed hearing that human voice which she thought was all for her.

It was all very fine, this assumed intimacy. But there was a door that she couldn't go through.

“What's this door?”
“You can't go in there,” he said. “It’s private.”
“What is it?”
“Cellar.”
“And what happens in the cellar, Redwing?”

She smirked at him—smiling, joking with him. But he didn’t joke at all.

“Trials. And tribulations.”
“Trials, Redwing? Whaddaya mean? What kinda trials?”

He grinned, a terrible grim fun that crept upon his lips now all of a sudden. Not the kind of humor she’d been hoping for.

“War crimes trials,” he said. “The court’s always in session.”

On the last full moon night in July, a Saturday, three months after meeting him, he took her out in his new-old car. It looked like a salvaged wreck and probably was one. They went to the movies in the next town over. Something about zombies. He wouldn't ever go to a war film, he said. And he hated musicals. While the movie played and the zombie horde spilled out over the countryside, he kissed her.

Maybe she was too eager in response, maybe it was something else. He drew back.

“Let's go back,” he said. “I think this ain't going so well.”

They walked into his place and he got her a beer from the fridge. She sipped on it as he stood in the fluorescent light of the kitchen and stared at her evenly and calm. There was a nothingness in his gaze, a lack of any emotion at all. It was what frightened her the most, this deep nothing in him. She put down the beer.

“So, maybe I should be getting back. No need to drive me home, though. I can walk back to town from here.”
“You were asking about the cellar.”
“What?”
“My basement. Wanted to know what's in it.”
“No, I don't real...”

He stepped forward, two quick short paces, and now he held her neck in the crook of his left arm. He squeezed hard. She wanted to say there was no need for all this, that she understood his pain, but there was no time for any words. She blacked out.

Smell first, before vision, before sound.

The smell: unbelievably intense and thick, a smell somewhere between rich intense organic life and choking rotten death. A smell made of a hundred components and each of them a terror.

Vision: a dim lightbulb, bare, low-wattage, swinging slightly from the ceiling on a long cord. Swaying shadows on the wall. Slumped stiff unknown things in the dark corners.

Sound: at first nothing beyond her own ragged breathing and what was maybe the thump of her heart. Then a clock ticking, heavy and slow. A grandfather clock, up against the right-hand wall. Impressive, a fine piece. Ornate and curlicued with decorative flourishes of gold leaf on warm oak wood. But with obscure dry dark stains splashed all across its base. Hard to get that stain out of the wood, she thought.

She was sitting on a leather armchair which had its own reek, quite distinct from the general fetid fug hanging over what she knew now was the cellar, the place she'd asked about and whose secrets she now was privy to. She knew that if she turned to the left he'd be there. There he was, sitting on a stool.

“Ham-Hock was first,” he said. “He sat once where you're sittin' now and he begged me to remember we was brothers. I remembered, though. That's why I put him there. I put him on trial then.”
“On trial?”
“War crimes trial. Told you that before.”

Redwing stood up and stood before her. “I determined he was guilty.”

He squatted before her, eye to eye in the light of the single bulb. There was nothing in those eyes: no pity, no hate, no desire. “It was me that actually did… those things, sure, but he was guilty of them. You are too. All o’ you here. Guilty of my crimes against humanity.”

The fear in the empty space at the pit of her abdomen was huge. It expanded cold and trembling all through her. Now she couldn’t breathe any more, but she simply listened.

“You all sent me in to do clearance. I cleared. I cleared up the living ones and the other ones, and I burnt 'em up and then I swept 'em away with high-pressure hoses on tanker trucks. Me and the rains washed away their lives.

He stood up again and turned away. The voice spoke from outside the small radius of lightbulb light. “The scorch marks, the soot, the ashes, all washed into the black thirsty ground and run away forever.”

She broke and she sobbed then. What she needn't have done, what she shouldn't: she pleaded with him. “But I didn't want you to go, Redwing! I protested against the war! I was at college then and I stood in the way of the police and I shouted out with the others that they shouldn't take all you boys away. I didn't want them to put you there!”

He looked at her. Even and calm, with nothing in his gaze. He spoke on.

“When Ham-Hock was gone, I brought in the other one, the first one. She said she was innocent too. In the end she pleaded guilty to war crimes and she was held accountable.

He turned and swung the lightbulb so it oscillated shadows and brightness across his memorial face. “She asked for food and drink. I pointed to Ham-Hock lyin' there on the ground. She ate and she drank what she could.

The bare lightbulb stopped swinging. The shadows on his face ceased to move. Nothing moved except his mouth and lips. His dark eyes were holes into nothingness. His voice was calm and even.

“Then there was th’ other one. She tried to make friends with me. You sat upstairs drinking beers and listening to my songs as she wailed away down here, far down under the ground where nobody could hear. You didn't hear her pleadin’, just like nobody now could hear you. She went the same way. Guilty as charged. Ate of the food of repentance too, like th’ one other before.”

He stood up and pulled out a hunting knife. Its edge glinted cold in the thick heat of the cellar. It gleamed like the knife edge itself thirsted for her. His eyes stayed locked on her and not on the sharpness. Not on the cold sharp edge.

“Now it's the hour of appeal. Court of appeal. You made your appeal and the court has heard you. It’s time for the verdict.”

She couldn't stop her retching, her wretched fear, her racking sob, though she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do in these moments. She looked down then at the straw scattered on the gray concrete floor, at its rough bubbled surface, at the dark stains polluting its grain. Looked down just as you must when the knife comes.

Then she felt warm drops of liquid on her. A drip and a drop and then a flood. She looked up and blood was pouring into her eyes. She jumped up from the chair and made for the stairway.

She looked back. He had collapsed to his knees and the handle of the knife was lodged where the meat of his neck met the clavicle on his left side. The blood, crimson and glittering in the bulblight, gushed over his left arm and onto the floor. He was smiling but not at her, at where she had been. There was a different kind of nothing in his eyes now. His body fell stiff to the right and she ran.

When she got to the top of the stairway, the cellar door was unlocked. She pushed it open, staggered through the groundfloor rooms, and was outside. Out into the fresh clean air, where the full moon swelled low in the gray predawn.

She had a long walk ahead of her from that fork between a nameless dirt track and the pitted asphalt road which trailed back into the bitter town. She left the cinderblock bunker squatting behind her and walked on with the stars disappearing all about the sky.

=========== [ PRISONERS OF WAR / END ] ===========

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