I was awake before first light and still stiff from the long march through Hell. I'd drunk gallons of water and taken a long hot shower in one of the barracks then fallen into a restless sleep. My dreams were haunted by grisly visages, pale gray orbs that leered at me accusingly from beyond death, and bony hands clawing at my chest while a klaxon pounded and women screamed.
I found Chilli in the main brick building. He handed me a huge cup of coffee and gestured for me to sit. A map covered the desk. Outside, men were busy digging trenches and setting up defensive positions. Within the building, some men slept on the floor while a few spoke quietly to one another in small groups.
I had given Chilli a quick briefing before I collapsed into my rack, my mind pea soup.
“The enemy is in retreat,” he said. “I think our air power caught them off guard. We hammered their armor. Our tanks are advancing on Salt Lake City.”
“That's welcome news.”
“Yes it is. They are retreating too quickly for us to overtake them, though. We have to keep the supply lines open. Gideon has had success bombing our roads, so our troops are bogged down.”
“Have we gotten a hold of Gideon?”
“No. We've been calling for his surrender. Nothing. I would not expect it. This is far from over.”
“What's the bad news?”
“Gideon bombed the refinery at Sinclair. It's hopelessly ruined. And our supply of ordnance for our aircraft is depleted.”
I feared for the lives of my friends at Sinclair, people who had saved Crystal and Ryder.
“Our hope is that we can punch through to Salt Lake and end this,” Chilli said. “By the time we get there, we're going to be low on fuel, and Gideon's army will have the advantage of being dug in.” He went on to show me choke points on the map, pointing out our areas of weakness, and outlining the overall plan for the assault on Salt Lake.
“I wish I knew what he wants,” I said. “This whole thing is pointless.”
“Well, he's insane, for one thing,” Chilli said. “Who knows what's going on in that head? Revenge? Converting the world to his religion? Maybe he doesn't even know.”
“He's smart, though,” I said.
“Yes. Have you read his book?”
“No.”
“I borrowed a copy from one of your prisoners and thumbed through it this morning. You should read it.”
“You read the Book of Gideon?”
“We should have done it before. 'Know your enemy’ and all. It's his addition to the Bible.”
“Yeah, believe me, I know what it is. You're probably right, I should have read it. But he read to me from it when he was torturing me, so I kind of felt like I didn't need to look at it.”
“It's a window into his madness.”
“What did you see?”
“Hunger for power, because he believes he is God's instrument on earth. He thinks anything he does is justified. Fancies himself an Old Testament prophet with a vengeful God at his side, the Arc of the Covenant his to smite the enemies of the Lord.”
“I got that from talking to him, too. It doesn't really help.”
“If he believes that, though,” Chilli said, “he'll never surrender. He'll fight until the last man dies.”
I thought about what that meant.
“If his followers are as fanatical as they seem to be,” Chilli said thoughtfully, “that means any attack on his last stronghold is going to be a bloodbath.”
“Right.”
“That is important. That means we either have to find a way to kill Gideon, destroy every one of his followers and take catastrophic losses on the way, or find another way.”
“Such as?”
“Maybe we can starve him out. Cut off his supply lines and lay siege to the city. His people might revolt.”
“Not likely,” I said. “And if we're running on fumes we won't be able to sustain a prolonged siege.”
“Not prolonged. We cut off his fuel and water and food sources, then threaten to bomb them off the map.” He paused and clenched his jaw. “Or maybe we just nuke them.”
“We don't have the weapons,” I said. “And even if we did....”
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Chilli said. “Truman dropped the bomb because he feared Japan would inflict terrible losses on the United States if we had to invade the mainland. The bombs ended the war.”
“This isn't the same.”
“Isn't it? We were attacked. They won't surrender. We will lose many men if we try to take Salt Lake City.”
“Women and children? Innocents being killed? No.”
“It's war, William. You know it better than anyone. Heck, you were going to Anchorage to get a bomb. Better theirs than ours. Better them than us.”
“They are us,” I said, and I realized I had changed. There was a time when I would have strapped a bomb to myself and killed them all without remorse. But my hatred and thirst for blood had been burned out of me, left me altered. Perhaps it was the descent into the beating heart of darkness that had done it. I was exhausted from the killing, feeling I was losing pieces of myself in it.
“You're not turning pacifist on me now, are you?”
“You know I'll fight. We have to fight, I get it. It's just the innocents....”
“Well for now it's moot,” Chilli said. “That may change, however. Our interrogation led us to three underground missile silos in the desert. I've got teams investigating as we speak.”
“Good Lord,” I said.
“Right. Because Gideon knew about them. There could be others and he may have managed to arm them.”
I felt cold and desolate. I could see the cycle of insanity, the pattern of destruction that was the bane of Man's existence. Stones to spears, bronze to steel, swords to gunpowder, muskets to machine guns. Atomic bombs and Tarantula. It seemed that despite humanity's potential for goodness— the ability to create symphonies, art and literature, soaring cathedrals and the way we could love and help one another with noble selflessness— we were damned by our violence. The race of Shakespeare and Mozart had also given birth to Hitler and Stalin.
Over the ages, one arms race led to another until we figured out how to render ourselves extinct. The cycle had gotten smaller and it seemed to be closing in on the end, and still mankind was eating itself. As if knowledge was destined to be twisted into a weapon, wielded by dark and powerful hands bent on destruction.
We were children playing with loaded guns. A power in us we had not earned and which we lacked the discipline to control. We split the atom and smashed the planet, unleashed a scourge upon our species, and still we fought, and the cycle would continue until there would be no one left.
“Are you willing to let him win?”
Chilli was my good friend and mentor, a man whom I knew to be gentle of soul despite his lethal skills.
“No, I'm not.”
“Well then?”
“I'm not willing to let them win. But maybe I'm not willing for us to win at any cost.”
As I looked at my friend, I saw us from above, as though I were a fly on the wall listening to two people discussing the killing of tens of thousands of people. I was struck by a wave of remorse and sadness. Good must rise up against evil lest darkness consume the light. How do you defeat an enemy without becoming the very thing you oppose? How do you stop the cold steel thrusting to pierce your flesh without a sword? Must there be a kind of darkness within the light to keep a greater darkness at bay? For this was the essence of the cycle.
Elk and moose and other animals with horns will clash antlers that could easily kill a rival with a blow to the side. Amongst their own, they use their weapons with constraint. Wolves will fight until one submits, throat exposed to fang, but the killing blow is exceedingly rare. Most animals possess an instinctive abhorrence to killing others of their species, and thankfully, most humans are born with the same reluctance. We have discovered ways to overcome this, and honed our skill at the killing.
It is harder to kill a man the closer you are to him. The greater the distance, the easier it becomes to dehumanize your enemy. The general issues an order from afar, the pilot drops a bomb from the air without ever seeing his foe. He has become an enemy, a target, and no longer a person. Through the scope of a rifle you see the man and try to find a way to suppress the knowledge of that fact, to bypass the reticence. He is far enough away that you don't see the immediate results, and so you can tell yourself things to make yourself feel better.
It is less hard when they are trying to kill you. You find it invasive, these bullets coming at you, and you can justify your response.
At pistol range, it is harder, when it is impossible to deny the face and the eyes of the man whose life you are about to end. You see the blood and the pain and you know it before it happens. You know you cannot escape seeing the consequences of your decision to pull the trigger.
Harder still is the use of a blade in hand to hand combat. You invade another man’s flesh and tear into his being with steel, and he is close enough that you smell his sweat and his breath and blood, hear the coughing gasps, feel his body jerk and twitch as you take his life from him. You took it but where did it go? You don't possess it, though his life is gone, evaporated. You have not gained his life, although perhaps you have gained by the loss of his.
And that is the cycle. We have killed and composed and loved and planted for nothing. We have reaped the destruction we have sown because the seeds were all we thought we had. But I refuse to accept that, cannot abide the futility in it, and in that room, as now, a part of me raged against it.
I have seen the sun set on the Great Divide, the sky ablaze with triumphant color over singing peaks, rugged and defiant, perfect and painted in a way only an artist of divine nature could possibly conceive, and I felt a deep connection to the Creator. I looked into the eyes of my newborn children, all fathers do, as the babies wailed at the strange and frightening world, and I felt wonder and glory and a certainty of God when I gazed into those innocent eyes. These things inspire awe and change the man who listens with care. There is a message in the wind, a truth crying out in the desert, which we may choose at our peril to ignore. And that is also the cycle.
We disregard what we know is true and replace truth with lies because it suits us to do so. Black and white become shades of gray and that is the little bit of darkness within the light. We justify it because there seems to be no other way, and maybe there hasn't been. I mixed colors on the canvas of my soul after Grace was taken from me, and I saw that just a tiny amount of black will defeat the most vibrant colors. My rage and thirst for vengeance had accelerated this war, and I felt a sense of personal responsibility and guilt for it.
*
We decided I would move on to join our western forces as they advanced on Salt Lake City, and that Chilli would remain at Dugway. He was anxious to secure the underground laboratories, and planned to lead a full assault force through the air shaft. They would use flamethrowers and bombs to ensure that nothing got out.
Abraham would be flying in to Dugway, and would join Dr. Schott in the labs. She was loath to go back. Chilli made it clear she had no option.
The man who said his name was Paul had vanished without a trace. I hoped he had died underneath the earth. Dr. Schott, upon hearing my description of the man, said he had been the base commander. His real name was Saul Schiller.
“Saul is the Gestapo,” Dr. Schott had said. But she was just following orders.