The Border by Kim Fielding

Author:Kim Fielding [Fielding, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

JOHN WOKE with a start. The windows were still dark and he couldn’t see the clock, but it felt like well before dawn. At first he assumed the pain must have awakened him. But then Tom, who was lying on blankets on the floor, cried out.

“No! No! I can’t stop it!” Tom’s words were very loud and clear, and his body thrashed about. “I can’t stop the bleeding! God, so much blood.” He made a strange wailing sound that caused the hairs on the back of John’s neck to stand.

“Tom?” John wasn’t sure if he should get out of bed and do something. He wasn’t sure he could get out of bed, actually. Even sitting up sent bolts of agony through his side and arm. But he couldn’t see what was wrong.

“He’s bleeding out! He’s…. Oh, fuck, his face, it’s just gone and I can’t…. Just stop the shelling for one fucking minute! God, just stop!”

John was transported. He could smell it. Blood and piss and shit, hot metal and gunpowder, sour sweat and filthy uniforms. Dust thick in his nose and throat. Screams everywhere, screams from men and screams from machinery, thudding collisions, bursts of fire and light. The rumble-crash-thump of collapsing buildings. The world so red and gray you couldn’t tell brown from blue. Copper and mud on his tongue.

“Tom?” he said. And then he yelled, “Tom!”

Sudden silence.

He heard a long breath, in and out, followed by the rustling of fabric. “Sorry,” Tom rasped.

“I have them too. Only usually I’m the one bleeding.”

Tom sat up, his body a featureless shape in the dark. “It’s stupid. We’re safe now. Nobody’s killing anyone.”

“Not now.”

“Not…. I wanted to be a farmer, John. I shouldn’t know what it feels like to stick my hand deep into a living body to try to fix a tear or pull out a chunk of metal.”

“I wanted to build houses. I shouldn’t know what it feels like to put that metal into that living body.”

Tom’s chuckle was the saddest thing John had ever heard. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”

The funny hitch in John’s chest had nothing to do with his bruises. A pair. He’d been a loner as a kid, a boy who preferred reading books and building things to playing with others. During the brief period after he became an adult and before the war started, he mostly kept to himself, doing his job silently while the other guys laughed and chatted. And even after he was drafted—when he spent nearly every minute of his life surrounded by other people—he’d somehow been as alone among them as he was in this isolated border post.

“You could take something to help you sleep,” he said gruffly. “I might have something in my med kit.”

“Tried that a long time ago. Made me feel sort of fuzzy, and I still had the goddamn nightmares. They were supposed to go away after I came here. Peace and quiet, right? But you can’t get away from the war when it lives in your… in every cell of your body.

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