Firing Squad

If you knew what people really thought, you would be just like me.

You don’t really exist when you’re just a receiver for everyone’s bitterness, everyone’s misery, everyone’s hate. When you can hear everyone else’s thoughts, it’s impossible to tell which ones are your own. It never takes long for them to start hating you. It only takes them finding out what you are.

Infil is successful-- we make our way onto the beach and into cover without even seeing anyone. They must have sentries posted out here because if we know that the surrounding terrain makes this the best place to make land, they do too. We’ve all had the same training. We’ve all been inducted into the same truths from the same book.

We fan out along the rocks. Establish a perimeter: inside this space you are safe, danger only comes from the outside. Your job is to make this space expand outwards. How far it needs to expand depends on your orders.

We don’t take orders anymore. They lied to us.

This space will expand to contain the whole world. That’s why we’re here on this island.

Our dominion begins here.

Ahead of us there is only darkness. The wind whips against us.

Briar is less composed than he looks. Moose is the kind of tired that sleep alone can do nothing to fix.

Colt is silent and watchful, inside and out.

We’ve been together so long that I don’t need to hear their thoughts to know what they’re thinking. I do, anyway. People that wish they were capable of the things we are never think their wish all the way through. They don’t realize that you can’t turn off something that’s always a part of you.

“Sentries, North,” Briar murmurs from his cover over to my left. The rest of us shift to establish line-of-sight while staying concealed. I don’t see anything.

I tune-in to Moose-chatter: 300 yards two lightly equipped haven’t seen us return fire after I take the first non-optimal need to--

Moose thinks in squashed-together staccato, a percussive rhythm of bitten-off phrases that fills every available spot on the stave. Compensate for the wind because of the distance but he’s going to lay down fire then rabbit no point risking them knowing we’re here--

Everything is a tactical problem, a scenario with parameters that can be quantified that has an exact, mathematical solution. Like every other sniper, Moose doesn’t line-up the shot in the real world, he takes aim in his logbook, carving his way to the correct adjustments with shorthand notation scrawled across white paper with weather-eaten edges. Moose doesn’t kill when he looks through the scope, he kills before, and the kill is only a data point for making more adjustments afterwards. A sniper’s job is to solve a series of geometry problems-- everything around them is math. Not that Moose’s aptitude had anything to do with that.

“Colt,” Briar says.

The killer’s mind is blank as he does what Briar says. We are all soldiers, but Colt is the only one of us that sees no difference between the living and the dead. There is nothing beyond the surface for Colt. There is no vessel that empties when the skin is breached, the flesh is torn, because there is nothing for a vessel to hold. When there is only emptiness, there are no vessels, no inner and no outer. For Colt, silence is in everything.

That Briar knows what Colt is troubles him much less than I have ever understood. A soldier follows orders; a murderer commits the act for its own sake. Briar has seen too much not to believe and any belief for Colt would be an unnecessary extravagance— far exceeding what was required for him to keep doing the things he did. Briar saw the world as chaos to be bent to the will of the most powerful. Chaos and order weren’t distinctions that factored into Colt’s outlook. There was only what it felt better to do and everything else was confusion.

Keep him covered in case they spot him Briar will let me know can you hear them from here?

The last is for me. “No,” I whisper to Moose.

The sentries’ thoughts are too vague, too murky at this distance for me to make any sense of them. Before I refined my aptitude, this is how everyone’s thoughts sounded to me. I knew they were communicating more than they meant to because I could always feel the smile behind the frown, the frown behind the smile, even before I could hear the thought that attended it. I knew that people were liars before I could speak. I learned how tightly they held on to their lies, even their lies to themselves, not long afterwards.

No one wants to know themselves and I can’t stop myself from knowing them. Everything I ever did for anyone was just so I could stop feeling their pain.

Colt’s almost level with them now, slipping from rock to rock, a shadow among shadows. I can feel the anticipation in him. It turns my stomach.

Getting close Briar better make sure that--

If I could choose to make the noise stop, to pick any other aptitude in place of my own, I think any aptitude would be better than Colt’s. I need to believe he’s the way he is because of it. If I didn’t, I’d have to accept there were parts of Colt that he couldn’t turn off that were only human. I’d have to accept that anyone could be like Colt, aptitude or not.

I’d have to accept that the emptiness could be anywhere.

--guard duty when the roster doesn’t even say--

Most thoughts are like this. When the closer of the two sentries finally comes in range, I’m not surprised to hear the same mundane gripes that make up most human interactions.

Everyone is treated unfairly.

Everyone is misunderstood.

Everyone would feel so much better if other people cared about them more.

Colt is getting closer and the last thing the sentry will think about is how he pulled a duty that he wasn’t supposed to. A lifetime of stories about heroic deeds and tragic last stands teach us that death is the punctuation at the end of sentence, giving meaning and weight to everything that came before it.

Sometimes, death is someone like Colt sneaking up on you while you complain to yourself in your head. Sometimes there’s no meaning to the finality, just the finality itself.

Spike of adrenaline from Moose: Engaging.

I can’t see what happens in the dark up ahead. I make out a picture as best I can from the overlapping chatter I get from Moose and Briar:

--freezes for a second while it takes effect-- other one keeps moving closing distance to 250 yards-- that strange unlocking of muscles as Colt worms his way inside-- follows after the other one with what’s left inside tries to fight back take control stop drowning-- glad it’s never happened to me-- moving like a puppet with some of its strings cut-- hate how he makes them move-- closing to the other one-- knife is out-- looks clean silent-- twice three times--

None of us talk about it: there’s no way of unknowing what you know. Colt is our most dangerous weapon. If we knew what it was like for the people whose minds he breaks his way into, we might never be able to work alongside him again. If we don’t ask, we don’t know. If we don’t know, we aren’t responsible. That doesn’t mean that wanting to know ever goes away.

Colt’s aptitude defines who he is far more than the rest of ours do. Maybe the world wasn’t always an empty place for Colt. Just because there’s nothing recognizable human in him now doesn’t mean there didn’t used to be. I can access what’s in other people minds but I can’t enter them completely. The process is one-way: I never leave anything of myself behind.

Maybe that’s what happened to Colt, gradually, one possession at a time until there was nothing left.

Colt’s aptitude doesn’t make it so that violence is something he does, it makes it so that violence is something he is. As far as we know, Colt can do this at any time, to anyone, regardless of whether they want him to or not.

I don’t know which sentry has it worse. I don’t know if the one holding the knife can see what he’s doing to other one. If what Colt does takes them over completely, so that there is nothing but oblivion while he takes control of their bodies, he is the lucky one. I can’t tell what happens because every time I try to read Colt’s mind afterwards, it is completely blank.

--wonder why never lets us see it-- wonder if he feels it--

Colt, turning the knife on himself/the other person who he is and is not. I wonder too. Why does he never let us see what he turns the violence on himself? Is it shame? Is there some final confrontation between parasite and host that he won’t allow anyone else to be party to?

With Colt, it’s always better not to ask. There’s no one there to answer, anyway.

I feel tension dissipate, a held breath release. “Clear,” Briar says.

Moose grunts agreement.

I listen to the blankness of Colt’s mind as he makes his way back over to us, himself again, as much as he ever is.

We’ve finally drawn first blood.

There’s no turning back now.