Prologue
Afghanistan.
Some time ago.
He found it down there, in the dark; it had been waiting for him.
The concept of time had become abstract, something tenuous and strange. In his worst moments, a great dread would reach up from his belly and clutch at his throat with bony fingers made of ice, threatening to suffocate him. In his worst moments, he feared that time had abandoned this place, that where once it had been tethered to his existence with invisible chains now it was free to do as it pleased. It was pleased to leave him to his hole.
In his worst moments, he feared that he had gone insane.
Abandoned by time, the hole-thing prodded its swollen belly with imagined fingers, pondering when it had last eaten. A vague recollection of blood and sinew stained its mind's eye, a lancing pain shooting through its guts. The hole-thing knew that it was dying, that its body was being pushed against the grating of its threshold, pushed through it like meat through a grinder. The real question, however, was if it could die. It was no longer certain.
Without time, could anything truly perish? Without light, would it even recognize the arrival of darkness? In its best moments, the hole-thing imagined that death would give way to light, that dying would reunite it with time. A joyous outcome. Far too joyous to come to fruition. No, death would be denied the hole-thing, for that was the nature of its existence. It lived in the hole, and that was all.
In its worst moments, the hole-thing believed that this was just a precursor to being born. That its entire life had been a fabrication, a construct.
The hole-thing felt a giggle bubble up from its throat and quickly slapped a grimy hand over cracked lips hard enough to draw blood. The very idea of a voice in this place terrified it beyond comprehension. The idea that it was a person.
Crawling towards the corner of darkness where it drank, the hole-thing recognized the cold, rough earth that raked against its skin. It recognized the idea of those things. Of earth and skin.
It was the idea of itself that had become suspect.
As it pressed its splintered lips to the hard-packed dirt and sucked, the hole-thing wondered at the water that tickled its swollen tongue and assaulted its constricted throat like tiny razor blades. Pain had become its only reassurance that it wasn't dead, that it possessed some semblance of form. Pain, and the suffocating smell of shit.
From somewhere in the darkness, from nowhere, the hole-thing heard the stranger speak for the first time.
"It's not enough to drink, you know."
The voice was like a gunshot, louder even, so loud and intrusive that the hole-thing slapped its palms to either side of its skull, the result a far louder explosion accompanied by shrieking pain.
"You must eat to live. You must escape." A rich voice, thunderous, commanding. It was the only voice the hole-thing could ever remember hearing, the first and last, the greatest. Somehow it knew the voice predated even the hole, that the voice had known all, seen all, had been there from the beginning, had been with it here all along.
Scrabbling along the earthen floor the hole-thing felt as though a tremendous weight were pressed against its back, gaining traction near impossible, slipping in the mire of its own excrement.
"Time is here, it has not abandoned you. But it is running out, and quickly. You must act if you wish to live, you must fight. You must KILL."
A tremendous calm washed over it with that final word, the echo reverberating through its mind, its entire body. Its soul.
"Ah...now you remember, yes? Wet, sticky copper. Hot breath against your palm, a muffled scream. A final word, denied. The rifle...I know you remember the rifle. I know your hands remember."
He looked at the black void where his hands should be. Where he knew they were. He looked hard into the black...and he thought he could see them there, looking back at him. There was longing in that gaze...and a reverence.
"Time has found you again, my old friend, and there is work yet to be done. Now start digging."
He found it down there, in the dark; an understanding.
He began to dig.