suppletifs

Béliveau awoke in darkness and found that Auersperg was already rousing the men. The edge of day was bleeding about the horizon, eroding the night. Auersperg, the lanky Austrian, moved with a vivacity that reminded the lieutenant of a school matron leading a gaggle of children on a visit to a museum.

It wasn't yet four o'clock in the morning but Lieutenant Béliveau thought they may as well move out, to make good time. There was a strange quality to the sky that gave him the uncomfortable sensation of being observed, as if the heavens were a magnifying glass. He had the strange feeling that the shadows were gently breathing, and swore he could perceive something approaching a sound too low a frequency to actually hear, buzzing through his skull.

Bah.

He swallowed, and rose to find the chef already preparing the groupes of suppletifs into marching order. 

«Chef.»

«Mon lieutenant?»

«I ought to have you burned at the stake for reading my mind.»

Sergent-chef Auersperg chuckled. The man seemed proud of his apparent knack for conducting the little brown men. There was an ease about him that filled Beliveau with confidence.

They had made good progress by the time the sun fully plopped out on the blue pewter sky. This valley, whichever one it was, was gradually narrowing, and the pelt of vegetation on the karst hills flanking them reminded the Lieutenant of the stained glass of a Tiffany lamp one might see in an upscale boutique bank in Paris.

The column snaked its way along the margin of the valley, clinging to the hill-faces like ants in a tidy torrent along a nearly nonexistent track arcaded by tree canopy and bathed in dappled light.

They stopped for mess at near eleven. The suppletifs took to their meat. Chef ambled to and fro between the constituent squads of the resting section, chewing on the same peculiarly seasoned pork on which the bulk of the platoon seemingly subsisted. The other sergeants, both white and Meo, did not find the mince appetizing for reasons they could not articulate, and instead stuck to rice and biscuits. The Lieutenant, for his part, slurped on a mango, and washed it down with the last of the Kina Lillet in his flask.

After lunch, the platoon continued their march northward. The Lieutenant, feeling quite lovely for the moment, let the droning of the insects and bird-like warbling that seemed to emanate from everywhere at once, enchant him. He indulged in the nostalgia of a blessed boyhood in Shanghai. He remembered running wild as a little boy in the French Concession. He was a prince, a little lion, bounding and pouncing along the Avenue Joffre. 

The Lieutenant's reverie was broken by Chef, who had sidled up with the radioman in tow.

«Chef?»

«We should be at the border before nightfall. Have you thought about where to set down for the night?»

«There looks to be a plateau up ahead, according to the maps. We’ll make camp there,» Béliveau replied.

The platoon emerged abruptly from the forest, the canopy ending sharply like a long line of market stalls before a square, revealing the jagged demarcation line of the border; the map in Béliveau's hands seemed to mock him. The topography was wrong. The karst formations thrust out of the green earth like teeth of titan beast, slopes falling steeply in a way that did not seem natural.

The wet, suffocating heat that had pinned the men to the rocks all day vanished without warning, surrendering to a sudden, marrow-deep cold. Down in the guts of the valley, a heavy vapor began to bleed upward, hissing like steam from a ruptured boiler. This was not the innocent, drifting mist of the highlands, rather, a dense, creeping thing that caught the dying sun in an oily, sickly sheen. When it rolled over their positions, it tasted of cold iron and ozone, carrying with it the inescapable, choking stench of scorched earth.

«Set up the perimeter,» Béliveau ordered, his voice sounding thin to his ear.

The suppletifs moved, but sluggishly, their eyes tracking movement in the iridescent mist that the Lieutenant couldn't see. The sensation of the sky acting as a magnifying glass returned with a vengeance, pressing down on the back of his neck with physical weight. As the fog lapped at the edges of their camp, the shadows cast by the men seemed to stretch, fracture, and detach from their sources, lengthening toward the tree line.

Then, the earth began to vibrate. It wasn't a sound, but a sick tremor that crawled up through the soles of Béliveau's boots and settled in his bones, like the trembling of the ground before a massive, distant artillery barrage.

«Lieutenant!» The radioman was tearing at the dials of his heavy PRC-10, his face slick with panic. «Total interference. The relay is gone. There's... there's something else on the net.»

Béliveau leaned over the set. Through the harsh, tearing static came a sound that made his stomach turn over. Beneath the hiss was a low, guttural drone, like the wet, chittering whispers of a thousand insects. It pulsed in a rhythmic, mocking cadence, a grotesque imitation of the bird-like warbles that had stalked them all afternoon.

A cold sickness drained the blood from Béliveau's face. He looked up to find Sergent-chef Auersperg standing at the very edge of the creeping fog. The Austrian, a man carved from granite and decades of combat, wasn't scanning for targets. His hands hung loosely, having entirely forgotten his rifle. He was staring into the milky void with a soft, beatific smile that had no business on a soldier's face.

Slowly, Auersperg raised his arms and turned in the dirt, a slow, clumsy pirouette. Barely audible over the static and the humming earth, Béliveau heard the veteran whisper, «D'accord,» offering his surrender to the mist.

The sheer, obscene absurdity of it—a hardened NCO dancing like a broken marionette in this purgatory of fog—finally pierced the paralysis gripping the Lieutenant. This wasn't just fear; it was a sudden, cancerous rot eating away the very discipline of his command.

«Auersperg!» Béliveau barked, desperate to summon the authority of his rank. But the command sounded pitifully thin, a frail human noise swallowed instantly by the thick, metallic stench of the fog. «Fall back to the perimeter! That is a direct order!»

The Austrian froze in the middle of his grotesque dance, but he did not turn around. Beside the Lieutenant, the PRC-10 suddenly shrieked—an agonizing squeal of overloaded circuitry that drowned out the wet whispers on the net. Then the scream collapsed into a heavy, mechanical throb. The dead radio had begun to pulse, beating in perfect, terrifying unison with the tremor in the earth beneath their boots.

Béliveau unfastened the leather flap of his holster, his hand resting on the grip of his MAC Mle 1950. He looked toward the rest of the men. The suppletifs had stopped moving altogether. They stood like statues in the fading, bruised light, their MAC-36 rifles pointing toward the ground, their faces turned uniformly toward the swirling fog where Auersperg stood waiting.

Auersperg turned to the lieutenant, smiling. «Mon lieutenant.»

His voice was perfectly calm, devoid of the static and the heavy humming that now seemed to vibrate right in the roots of Béliveau's teeth. It was the deferential, slightly amused tone of a man pointing out a minor error in a ledger.

«Step away from the perimeter, Sergent-chef,» Béliveau ordered, drawing the pistol. The heavy steel felt unnaturally cold in his sweating palm.

«But sir, our relief has arrived,» Auersperg said smoothly, extending an open hand toward the iridescent wall of vapor.

There was a crack, like thunder, and Béliveau found himself in the sand. His eyes stared up at the beautiful firmament of stars, blinking as the scene resolved itself into a normal, humid night. Auersperg was looming over him, his fingers pressed firmly to the lieutenant's wrist, checking his vital signs.

«Lieutenant?»

Béliveau swallowed dryly. «Auersperg.»

«Glad to have you back, sir,» Auersperg cooed softly, his hand supporting the back of Béliveau’s neck as he offered a metal canteen. The water tasted like it had been sealed for centuries, but it brought back life to his parched throat.

Auersperg hovered over him with an almost maternal fussiness, gently brushing the coarse sand from the Lieutenant's epaulettes and checking his pupils in the dim light.

«The heat, I suspect, mon lieutenant,» the Austrian murmured soothingly, his tone that of a mother comforting a feverish child. «maybe… the Nivaquine? The anti-malarials can play terrible tricks on the mind when the sun beats down on these valleys for too long. You were issuing orders for the perimeter and simply... folded. Like a bad hand of cards.»

Béliveau sat up, his head throbbing with a dull ache. The camp around him was a picture of perfect military routine. The suppletifs were quietly chewing their evening rations; a small, disciplined fire crackled cheerfully; the suffocating, iridescent fog was entirely gone, replaced by the familiar, damp breath of the jungle night and a clear canopy of stars.

«Yes,» Béliveau managed to rasp out finally. «the heat.»

«Rest for a moment. I have the perimeter well in hand,» Auersperg smiled, giving the Lieutenant's shoulder a firm pat before gliding away to organize the first watch.

Béliveau watched him go, his mind struggling to reconcile the peaceful camp with the thunderclap that still echoed in his ears. He shifted his weight to stand, reaching down instinctively to secure the leather flap of his holster.

His fingers hesitated almost on their own. The leather was warm.

Béliveau stared down at the naked steel of his magazine, a sudden, icy sweat slicking his spine. It was empty. He searched his fractured memory for the recoil, the noise, the smell of cordite, but found nothing. He hadn't fired a single round, yet the ammunition was gone. Past the dying embers of the fire, the command tent offered no salvation. The young radioman sat curled on a crate, already reduced to a hollow, shivering shell. He was staring into the black wall of the tree line, arms locked around his knees in a desperate, infantile embrace. In the dirt beside him lay the heavy PRC-10, their only lifeline to the world of the living, now just useless dead weight. Its thick battery casing had blistered and warped like melting wax, the indicator needles pinned lifelessly to the absolute bottom of the dial, sucked completely dry.

Béliveau swallowed, his tongue tasting of copper and dead ash. The brass, he told himself, clinging desperately to a final thread of tactical logic. If I fired, there must be brass.

He moved with a shameful, creeping hesitation, terrified of drawing the Sergent-chef’s gaze. He slouched, trying to project the casual posture of an officer inspecting the perimeter, but he felt utterly pathetic. The commander of men, reduced to a paranoid specter sneaking through his own camp. Crushed by the invisible weight of the fog, he kept his eyes locked downward, staring only at the mud caked around the toes of his combat boots.

Then, a dull gleam caught the dying light.

He stopped, the breath dying in his throat. There, resting on a patch of flattened elephant grass just a few paces from where he had been standing, were the casings. Nine blunt, copper-washed cylinders.

But they had not been violently ejected in the heat of combat. They were not scattered in the dirt.

They were standing perfectly upright on their flat bases. Spaced with meticulous, terrifying precision, they formed a flawless, geometric circle in the mud. It was an arrangement that required cold, deliberate time—time taken right at his feet, while he had stood there entirely blind. Staring at that mocking, impossible order, the last pillar of Béliveau's sanity quietly trembled.

Feeling the despair and fatigue weigh down on his eyelids, he stumbled back to his cot and did his best to fall sleep.