The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey (37 page)

Driving back to their mountainous compound, John thought deeply about his first run-in with a group of real deserters. Unlike the Simulator, these seemed to be true soldiers. They were trained in weapons usage and military linguistics, and they were not afraid to kill. But more importantly, there was a hole in the Sweeper community. One of their members was working against it. What was he hoping to accomplish, John wondered. What purpose was there in running?

The drive back to the base was without incident. They had not come across any more deserters, as was expected. Climbing up the steep incline, leading them to their lookout station, John watched the continuing battle of the valley out the back window of the vehicle. There were more men and women dying and fighting in that arena than all the people of Labor combined. Where could they all be coming from?

Careful to avoid slipping on the stairs, Sofia held a towel between her hand and the blood soaked rail. With a sheet wrapped over her and the child, catching the dripping flesh that fell in sticky chunks from the ceiling, she would have to wait until they were outside before throwing it off of them. With Maryanne and her child accompanying them, they exited the building, pausing for a moment at the edge of the convoy of empty transporters parked along the sidewalk.

The streets were awash in watery red fluids and pinkish-white flesh. The usual, stifling mass of women that commonly walked through them was nowhere to be found: the city was barren. Everyone was in hiding.

A transporter at the furthest visible end of the city rounded a corner. Its driver, seeing them standing in the street, began speeding in their direction, bearing down on the vehicle’s horn.

“What are we going to do, Mary?” Sofia cried, feeling her warm blood dripping down her legs, forming puddles around her feet.

Taking Sofia by the arm, she pulled her around the abandoned vehicles lining the street.

“Let’s go this way. Maybe we can lose them in the alleys.”

Entering between the buildings, Sofia doubled over again, feeling the contractions of birth once more.

“Maryanne,” she screamed.

Pulling her gown aside, Maryanne could see that in her haste, she had not cut the child’s cord, and Sofia was beginning to pass the second birth. Hearing the oncoming vehicle, Maryanne was panicked as to what to do. Sofia needed to be in a cleaner environment, and they needed something to cut the child loose that would not cause him to get an infection. She walked Sofia as delicately as she could around the corner, deeper into the filth of the alley, hoping that the Security agents had not seen them as they sneaked away.

With a rumbling stop, the transporter’s squeaking brakes brought it to a sudden end just outside their hiding place. There were no splashing explosions this time, no screaming, no opening of its metallic door accompanied by the stomping of boots. As she waited, rubbing Sofia’s back while rocking her own child to keep the silence, she heard a voice coming from inside their apartment building.

“Maryanne! Maryanne, where are you?”

It was Stephen yelling from their upstairs window! His voice brought an immediate sigh of relief. Whispering into Sofia’s ear, Maryanne said, “Wait here, I’m going to get help.”

Running out into the street, Sofia could hear her calling to her mate, “Stephen! I’m here, Stephen.”

She could hear them uniting just around the corner. Maryanne was in a terribly contradictory emotive state of happiness and fear. She was crying and babbling hysterically, while Stephen attempted to console her.

With her legs growing weaker, and the tightening contractions returning, Sofia searched for a clearing among the garbage that was piled up to her knees. Unable to find a suitably clean area, she held her child securely, sitting down in the place where she stood. Holding him up, she finally had a chance to look into his eyes. They were so blue and his cheeks so pink. His cry was sweet and tenderly soft. Under the blinding light of the Savior, she held the child close to her while the squeezing of her abdomen intensified. He was the offspring of her and John. Holding the child was like holding him. The world seemed to be falling apart around her, but nothing else mattered. What an adventure this has been, she thought.

As the years went by, John was beginning to sense that the battles with the deserters were slowly, but steadily, intensifying. Their ranks appeared to be better trained, more adept at survival, more organized and self-determined. Most of the Sweep members attributed it to an evolving state of awareness that was growing inside the bio-engineered men and women being sent into the Valley. The chief rumor floating around detailed a training facility, a secretive complex known as Planet Wasp Nest. Although that was the prevailing view on the matter in discreet conversation, it was not held in high regards within the circles of public
discourse.

Wasp Nest was not, according to the questionable information disseminated among the rank and file and those agents less privileged in regards to security clearance and classified information, a planet as such. It was believed rather, to be a hub of moon-sized asteroids where there supposedly existed the mass production of genetically altered peoples created with the sole purpose of dying in the Valley of Blood.

The passing of time had brought John into contact with several well-placed individuals with a more intimate knowledge of the deeper aspects of the governing agencies. Through one of his sources he learned of the intricate details and behind-the-scenes functions of the military’s more secretive entities.

The Security on Raw, as John came to find out, was its own entity, left out of the loop as to what the military was engaging in. Although the top brass used them to bring certain men and women in for questioning, what was done with the prisoners afterwards was strictly a military operation.

When John first came to the understanding of the heinousness that was the underbelly of his training, he all the more resented his former “instructors”. Although he wished that he had applied more pain to Crawford before shooting him from such a non-intimate distance, Michaels, he believed, received his due reward… for the most part, anyway.

The following years in his initial function as a Sweep operator began with a state of mind full of contradictory emotion. But with the passing of time, John eventually, with the exception of a few transient moments, blocked out all the heartbreaking thoughts of Sofia and the wonderful days they had spent together.

He began by turning his sadness into hatred, his love into hatred. Everything he ever cared about was ripped away from him and annihilated. He alone was left to wallow in his guilt. With all of his emotions exchanged for the heart-searing anger that pulsated within him, John found acceptance and comfort in the open arms of the Sweeper Society and their murderous ways.

Burning under the stress from the thick, black smoke that blew across the city ruins, John’s eyes were moist with tears as his helmet’s face protector did little to filter out the polluted air. As part of a larger Sweeper force than he was used to, he and his crew kept their heads low, crouching beside the crumbling walls and waiting for their next order.

During the late morning, pre-op briefing, Sweep Command had informed all active units that a monumental breach had occurred in the Valley of Blood. In the ensuing battle, cloaked under the darkness of the early dawn, a rebel faction had staged an
uprising.

Entire formations of deserters had simultaneously fled the Valley for the first time in the history of the war, commandeering hundreds of vehicles and fleeing to different parts of the planet with an innumerable cache of weapons and ammunition. The organization with which they were operating seemed far too complex, to John’s mind, to be carried out by mere grunts thrown into a foreign war. It had to have been facilitated by someone with insider knowledge of how the Valley operated and what its surroundings held in regards to resources and vantage points.

Much to John’s chagrin, the briefing had brought more terrible news other than the uprising itself: the order to forego the use of poison gas, a primary tool in the Sweeper arsenal. The reason for its discontinuation was, to John, a blur at best, but it ran along the lines of “
safeguarding against friendly casualties
”. In order to lighten their loads, several operators, seeing their filtering masks as an added burden to their already heavy load, chose to leave them behind, contrary to John’s stance in the matter.

Splitting up and heading out into numerous parties, the Sweeper’s numbers were thin and diluted down as they pursued the deserters far from the Valley and into the ruinous, ancient environments. Outnumbered and out-gunned, their training had not prepared them for the full-scale warfare they were getting themselves
into.

Sweep-Team Alpha had begun their retreat from the buildings just ahead of John’s position. From his cover behind the concrete structure he could hear the rhythmic bouncing of the gear against their bodies. Moving to the open, rubble-strewn streets in a parade of clinking metal, John used their sounds, coupled with the tempo of the crunching rocks and debris under their boots, to judge their distance and gauge their motives.

Within a few seconds time, the Command Center’s radioman came over the earpiece confirming his suspicion: John and his men needed to lay down covering fire for the fleeting team. Lifting their rifles over the wall on his command, he ordered his men to place suppression fire towards the enemy’s lines.

There was an initial pause, a moment of confused silence as his team was unable to locate any targets that were in need of their suppressive service. But a crack from a deserter’s rifle changed everything. And within a fraction of a second the world around them exploded into a hail of small arms fire.

Before they could even squeeze off a handful of rounds, all the men under John’s command fell to the ground as a chain of explosions sent the bodies of Alpha Team’s members tearing into meaty particles. The entire crew was wiped out in a single
volley.

Lifting his reflective visor, the smell of destruction, like burning rubber, hung heavily in his nostrils. The stuffiness of the helmet’s shield was too suffocating to keep it hanging over his face. Pulling out a map from his hip pocket, John traced the assumed position of the enemy’s X-Y coordinates.

“Requesting to gas ahead of position: maploc three-one-echo! How do you copy, Command?” he spoke into his microphone.

The only answer was static.

“Request repeat: gas ahead of position maploc: three-one-echo!” Do you copy, Command?”

After a few seconds of radio silence, John looked up the line at the battle-hardened faces that existed through the open facial coverings of his team members. Shaking their heads and cursing the Command, they silenced themselves as a voice aired through their ears, “We copy loud and clear.”

There was another static-filled moment of silence, followed by, “That’s a negative. Do not smoke them out. Repeat. Do not smoke them out. How do you copy? Over.”

Clearing his throat, he spit on the ground.

“Roger that,” he grumbled.

A unit from the rear line crouch-walked their way to John’s team. They were a Sweeper party of three. A unit similar to the one John was commonly assigned to. The team’s leader, Sergeant Carlson, yelled as he closed in on them, “I think they want them captured alive. What do you think, John?”

“Alive?” He responded, panning his eyes across his men. “Nobody’s getting out of here alive.”

The great star-of-the-sky’s brightness reflected off the crystalline water of the contrails that were pinned high in the atmosphere. By the purpling haze of light filling up at the horizon, every man knew that the daylight of Red was only a few more hours short of giving way to the darkness. Without any night vision devices on hand, John understood the severity of their predicament, the advantage they would be giving to the enemy if they did not move quickly to secure a base of operation closer to the area in which they were holding out.

With the order to commence, his and Carlson’s teams expedited their transition into the ruins. Divided into several two-man groups, John ordered his teams to move cautiously under the watchful cover of every other member. Heavily organized and methodically advancing, they headed towards the towers of the city’s central hub, visibly peeking over the ruinous heaps and crumbling, skeletal frames of their surroundings.

John considered the distance on his map. If they did not run into anything to hinder them, they would arrive at the first of the great towers by last light at best, or in the early darkness at worst.

As the light of the sky was beginning to dim, the Sweepers reached the border of the inner city. Constantly slowed down throughout the day by intermittent shots fired from the distant buildings, John was relieved that they had made the journey in such a short span of time, and without any casualties to boot. Each member of his team was feeling the exhaustion of the trek. Dehydrated and parched with thirst, under duress from their weariness, they had to take extra precautions with silence and motion due to the close proximity of the enemy, as they searched for a secure place to pass the night away.

The darkness had unfolded itself over them like a hostile sheet of fabricated nightmares. John sat with his rifle on his lap leaning behind the cover of a wall, just below a blown out window frame. Listening to the radio chatter through his earpiece, he began cursing the Command for letting his men get into such a plight. Gassing the deserters would have brought the whole fiasco to a closure long ago, he thought.

Central Command had discounted the enemy’s size and strength during the morning’s battle analysis, resulting in every Sweep teams’ overconfidence and lack of preparedness with regards to their posturing and necessary equipment. As far as John was concerned, the blood of Sweep members was on their hands.

Over the airwaves, the screams and mutilating deaths of his comrades fighting the deserters in other, distant parts of the planet poured through in volleys of mentally torturous waves. They were a constant reminder for all the men of his command to keep themselves vigilant, even with the grueling heat and nagging desire to rest tugging at their minds and tearing down their bodies.

After listening to the minute-by-minute updates on the open channel for several hours, dozens of raging gun battles and countless skirmishes had yielded nothing of significance: no Sweeper teams were able to report the capture of a single Valley fighter, but the casualties were mounting up among those of John’s own
community.

Having no idea as to the size of the enemy force they were soon to be facing, he was beginning to feel the nudge of anxiety in his gut. Was it a whole formation waiting for them out there? Or, was it merely a single unit with a strong, well-informed leader? There was no way he could tell, and Command was not helping them in any way.
Turn the fear into hate
, the motto rang in his ears. He followed it hard. He hated the deserters with a passion. Killing them would be a joy, if only he could find them. He was doing it for Sofia, after all, if he remembered correctly. That was the reason, he thought to himself, wasn’t it? She had been his love, his life, his… like coals of fire, so the baser emotions fueled his anger. He pushed the thought from his mind, another morsel of that past life that had somehow managed to remain hidden in the cracks and crevices of his brain. He despised it. It made him soft and weak. Weakness needed to be dealt with. It was an energy that needed to be refocused into a new form: hatred towards the enemy. It was the guiding factor that had kept him alive for so long… if his existence could be called
living
at all.