(NB: I'm going to change the rating on this story up to M - M for lime :D - tomorrow when I post the last chapter, which means it won't be viewable on the main Metal Gear page unless you change the 'ratings' setting to 'All'. This is because ff.n thinks you can't be trusted to choose what to read for yourself. *sigh*)
***
Progress has to be meticulous. It's measured by precise pencil marks on her maps, by the fuel gauges on the motorcycles, by the words of the dead. You have to feel them all die, whether they're telling you about the Japanese occupiers and the Communist insurgents or whether you're just asking for directions to the next place you can go to steal some fuel. There's nobody else to ask - the living are incomprehensible, fractious and - as you inch closer to the dry lands - few.
You take your bearings from a ghost so content that you know, without asking, that she died only days ago and will be gone from the world soon. She spent her last hours surrounded by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She had become blind in her old age, and knows little of the Japanese, but there is a list of places others had told her not to walk, so that is where you will go. On the rough road northwards. Looking for the enemy and learning all you can about their strategy and capabilities.
Your basic resources are drying up. To get fuel and water, you must steal from the Japanese. And the dead don't linger near the Gobi - when you need someone to listen to, she has to find someone and kill them.
It's not the first time it's come to this. But it makes you sad.
*
It's almost midnight when you stop to make camp. You needed to get far from the wreck of the Japanese convoy, fast, and the last breakneck hour has left you weary and with a throat dry as dust. But it was good, by her reckoning - you took fuel, ammunition, precious water, and a new and significant target. She doesn't say much, but through her tiredness she seems to throb with a quiet happiness. It's the killing - that, and the answers the dead gave to you. They showed you the way to the radio base in the desert. They promised you success.
It's not success or promises that make her herself, though. Bloodshed is enough.
She eats ravenously and then crawls into her sleeping bag; she gave enough time to her gun earlier. You bank the campfire, take your boots off and follow her. It's colder up here, and you curl your limbs. The chill makes the space between you seems all the wider.
A few seconds after she settles down, she speaks, as if to no one. "It's going west."
She's not referring to her map and its spider-maze of notes and angles. It's an American saying. When something's gone wrong - or someone is dying - you say they're 'going west' because they're like the sun setting. It leaves you in night. Her satisfaction with the evening's work couldn't keep the sun above the horizon.
She also doesn't care. The mission is reconnaissance - to be the Philosophers' eyes and assess this high land where two currents flow against each other. It doesn't, can't, matter to her whether the Japanese will prove stronger than the two native factions; her mission is to know, not to fall into one stream or another, Communist or Nationalist or invading empire.
You're a Communist, but you're with her and the Philosophers and China's communists go against their ends. You're not on any side. You're mercenary, alone.
She's on every side, a light illuminating the carnage.
Russia was once a place of carnage, and there the Philosophers' interests prevailled. Here? You try another American saying: "Did they back the wrong horse?"
She grunts, sleepily. That's why they sent you here, and her only answer will be to finish her mission. She will find out. You will find out.
*
The grassland is thinning under the wheels of your motorcycle, turning into discrete patches, then tussocks, then by the time she slows on the road ahead of you, sparse and isolated clumps. Atop a slope in the far distance, you can see the radio mast.
It's too open here, with too much sky and nowhere to hide. There's no ghosts in this land, so you can't even escape to the river. She's heading off to circle the hill, but you know she won't find anywhere safe enough to leave the gear, or secluded enough to lay an ambush. You'll have to leave it to hope, and stay close to her while she kills.
She's not satisfied, but the thought of a team of dead radio operators offering up all their codes and secrets to the Philosophers is worth the risk. So you hope. You hope you abandoned the motorcycles before anyone took account of the noise. You hope they won't see your approach, two soldiers on hands and knees, like moving clumps of grass.
When you see a patrol leaving the gates of the tiny compound, there is nothing you can do but lie still. She won't kill in the open. It's not until they're out of sight that you can inch on upwards, and it's not until you're hidden under the shadow of the wall that she takes aim at the guards at the gate.
There's two of them, and two of you. She moves slightly outward, leaving you with the wall at one shoulder and her at the other, and signals for you to be ready. When her left hand drops, it will begin. You look at the guard on the right down the barrel of your Beretta, and wish you could tell him how sorry you feel.
You drop flat to the ground a moment after the two muffled shots, and you have the ghost before his heart has ceased beating. He's still dying and you can hear the storm gathering inside the compound, and her gun was the lightning, and here you are face-down on the dry ground listening to the thunder. The dying. He never saw it coming. This isn't one of those times when you look through dead eyes and see her, wild and radiant, staring at you from behind a gunbarrel.
He's not her enemy any more. He's her eyes on the inside, eyes still moist and open, and you hear yourself reciting his answers almost before you frame the questions. "Thirty. Not all here - six on patrol - ten sleeping in the barracks -" You're close to weeping because it's coming so easily. He's only just below the water - he, and one of his comrades, no - friends, no - two.
You feel her grabbing your collar and you are scrambling to your feet, making a stooping run for the gate. You're struggling to keep up with her and struggling to keep lucid. She needs you in easy earshot. They aren't coming any more, they're taking to their defences, and the dead know where they'll be hiding -
"- left, get behind the gate!" She dives across the open gate, and you follow her, propelled by sheer momentum, and you hear a crack as a bullet thuds into the steel above your head. She's rolled to a crouch by the gap and she's shooting, shooting, and you feel someone die. "You got him."
She pulls back to reload. "There's more there?"
Another bullet answers for you. "Only one -"
She's returning fire, and the words are false almost before they leave your mouth. "Where now?"
"Right, to the mast -" A little rampart of sandbags there. More cover.
"Let's move!"
She runs, and you stumble, feet catching in the rut between your mind and your fragile body, and she's taking cover ahead of you. You hear her shot pass your ear, and there's another man dead behind you and you think she must have saved your life.
You roll down beside her, heart thudding, You're facing the rough compound wall and she's leaning over you, looking for a target. You must give her a target. "There's more - ten o'clock - by the fuel tank -"
"Then get down."
That's the last you hear. There's a rumbling hiss of white noise in your ears - a sound too loud to comprehend - and then you smell scorched flesh and you can't see because your spectacles are covered in black smoke.
You can't count the dead. They're clamouring, a cloud of mud in the river - it's only by asking them that you can tell that there's not enough. She still needs you. "There's -" You're so exhausted inside that it's hard to speak. "There's another patrol - outside - they're coming back from the south -"
She calls behind her as she runs. "How many?"
"Two, both together. They -"
"Stay here."
You drop to your knees. Stay here. With the dead. It's safe with the dead. In the dark water, feeling them thrashing as they sink, and yet you remain lying on the surface, their deaths a lulling wave that keeps you afloat.
You don't know how much time passes before you feel two more strike the water beside you, dropping into the dark like heavy stones. You think they're smiling.
It's bruising pain that draws you back, one you haven't felt in months - she's kicked you in the ribs. "Sorrow." She is no longer ecstatic - the joy in her has turned tense and angry. "Sorrow, they found our bikes."
You stare at her and at the dead all around you, and all you can think is; What have you done?
"They're fucked. We're fucked."
***