Appearance: 
  
 
Page:   
 Share It:
https://fiction.homepageofthedead.com/forum.pl?readfiction=1162H

Only the Dead
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

He had a wife and a daughter, who called me Uncle and liked to pull my moustache.

I don't suppose I'll ever know.

I wonder, though, if I'd have got away if I'd jumped out at once, instead of trying to save Jameel. Could I have been running across the desert to safety, instead of lying on my back staring up at the sky? And would it have been worth it?

Could I have lived with myself if little Bushra had asked me what had happened to her father?

These are questions without answers, questions to which there can never be answers. If I could distract my mind from them, I would. But what else do I have to think about?

Is it my family? My mother is dead, my father long since married again, to a woman I still find it impossible to tolerate. They both greeted my departure to the army with sighs of relief, and I don't think either of them has spared a moment of thought for me since. I must say that I have scarcely spared a moment for them, either.

Maybe now they'll wonder. Does it matter if they do?

I hope nobody will cry for me. It's not something that would make any difference, so why shed tears? The earth will keep turning anyway, the tides will rise and fall, and the sun will burn towards its final swollen end.

I am glad, at least, that I had never had any time for religion. I'd been told many times by many people that I would go to hell for my lack of belief, and my answer had been the same; that hell could wait. I'd a life to live. Now that life is over, and there's still no hell, or heaven, or anything else.

A flight of the enemy's ground attack aircraft flies over, so low that I can see their stubby wings and high-mounted engines, the rows of underslung missiles hanging from hardpoints. It must have been aeroplanes like this that had blown us apart the other night, and killed me. I wonder if they're going to kill somebody else now.

Yesterday, they'd been over, too, just before we'd had visitors. One of those visitors had stood over me. That was the first time I had seen a soldier of the enemy.

I'd looked at him as well as I could with my one remaining eye, while he stared down at me. He was dressed in the enemy's uniform, pinkish-yellow splashed with brown and grey, and his young pink face had been flushed with excitement and a little fear. I realised that this was probably the first time he'd seen death close up, at least violent death. To him, death had probably meant an aged grandparent in a coffin, surrounded by flowers and the scent of incense, not putrefying flesh and clouds of buzzing flies.

I was vaguely amused by this young warrior, who'd licked his lips nervously and grinned up at someone I couldn't see. Even the way he'd held his rifle, gingerly, as though it was an accessory, was funny. He'd almost certainly never used it in combat, and never would. To the enemy, war is something to be fought at a distance, with artillery and missiles, and bombers taking off from bases a quarter of the way round the world. To them, fighting means blowing apart images on a video screen, for all the world as though it were a game. And then there are pink-faced boys of this sort, to follow along in the tracks of the attack aircraft and of the tanks with bulldozer blades, to look down at the carnage and make jokes to try and pretend they aren't scared, or disturbed.

I'd watched him take out his camera and take a few pictures of the wreckage behind me. He'd gestured at someone, apparently adjusting a pose, and taken a couple more. Then he'd pointed it down at me.

It seems that I wasn't positioned satisfactorily. I'd felt his boot under my shoulder, pushing me to the side. I may have shifted suddenly, or perhaps something had fallen off, because he'd jumped back, laughing self-consciously. Then he'd bent forward, eye to viewfinder, to take his picture. The flash had made a tiny spark against the glare of the sky.

I wonder what he'll do with the pictures. Ten or fifteen years from now, when he's a store manager or a car salesman, these photographs will be an embarrassing reminder of the past, something he'd rather keep hidden. He won't want to talk to his wife and children about the blasted corpse he'd kicked around and taken pictures of. Perhaps he'll want to throw the photographs away, but probably he won't be able to bring himself to do it.

[ Continue to page 3 ]

Donate
Help keep this site online by donating and helping to cover its costs.

Information
Genre:Living Dead
Type:Short story
Rating:6.47 / 10
Rated By:28 users
Comments: 1 user
Total Hits:26200

Follow Us
 Join us on Facebook to be notified of updates
 Follow us on Twitter to be notified of updates

Forum Discussion
 the Walking Dead Empires. PC/MAC MMO S... »
 "In A Violent Nature" - trailer... »
 Helldivers 2 (video game) »
 Alien: Romulus (trailer)... »
 Could James Rhodes aka War Machine hav... »
 Could James Remar have portrayed Rhode... »
 Reacher (Amazon series) »
 SRS Cinema (Merged Threads) »
 Rate the last movie you've seen »
 Fallout (Amazon Prime series) - Based ... »
 TWD: "The Ones Who Live" (Rick/Michonn... »
 TWD: Dead City teaser... »
 Had Rhodes and the boys been inside th... »
 Shogun (TV series) »
 MZ's Movie Review Thread »
 Dune: Part 2 (film) »
 For those who have visited the Monroev... »
 Masters of the Air (Apple TV+ series)... »
 Boy Kills World (film) trailer... »
 Dawn Of The Dead (1978) - On-Set Home ... »