No Juice: The Belly of the Beast

CHAPTER TWO

What the commander had referred to as his Rover was this huge fusion of trailer and tank. His command post was a heavily fortified trailer with a monster tank growing up around it. The ‘War-Pig’ was everything that T-Rex was in appearance: a weathered and grotesque-looking combination of stealth, tactic and violence, a looming danger and an affront to the gods. Rumor had it the thing could move like hell-fire, too.

I climbed up a ladder over the huge, man-sized tread of the beast, opened the lid and dropped into its belly. A candle burned slowly inside and the commander sat at his desk, itself a makeshift deal of two sawhorses and somebody’s front door. A candle sat on it and flickered shadows across the ceiling.

“I don’t have my camera,” I said as I settled to the chair he’d left me at the far end of the table from him. “Carmelita has it I guess. I’ve hoarded the battery on it for three years, fought for it with my life at times. Killed for it in Ireland.”

“We need the juice,” his voice rumbled thought the dark interior of the war wagon, “and we’re taking it.”

I hadn’t anticipated this, really. “You don’t understand…” I stammered. To have gone through all this and they were just going to jury-rig it into something else. “But, what about posterity?”

T-Rex laughed like it hurt him to do it. “I keep you on because the Great Oil Wars are what’s going to end up defining us as human beings, for good or ill. Nature’s great experiment with life and intelligence comes to a head when this war does. I keep you here because unlike 100% of every rag-tag collection that still claims to be a fighting force out there, we, the Dirty Rogues are still capable of accomplishing important objectives, do you understand me?”

“Like?” I asked. The pencils were useless without my pad of paper, which, truth be told, were down to the last three sheets anyways.

“What news have you of the last Nexus?” he interrupted my train of thought like a jagged blade. Supposedly Eurasia had created three Nexus class Megatankers, gargantuan beasts that roved the battlefields and stocked up their armies just as ours choke on fumes and barely adequate field moderations. That was the shape of this war, thought by many to be Man’s last; those that had the fuel to keep on going would be the champs and the others would amount to little more than decaying dinosaurs for future generations, if any, to marvel at. Historical curiosities in an earth turned museum/junkyard.

The three megatankers were spoke of as myth on the battlefields, and apparently all sides had heard tell of them. Whose the damned thing had been in the first place depended on the telling. The Asians, the Eurasians, the Continental Americas or the Russians took turns taking credit for them and then would turn around and blame it with derision on the others. It was a dubious distinction to be the creator of those crafts, for they were a feat in modern technology, carrying enough fuel that any force needed but not travelling on said fuels. Some said it was solar and turbine powered. Others said it was purely atomic. What made the distinction dubious was that whoever made the damned things supposedly lost them somewhere in the battlefield, lost in a bureaucratic affair or, as is so often the case in this war, they’d gotten stolen then lost.

Supposedly, of the original three, one was blown up by the Asians, who were about to lose it and didn’t want it to exchange hands. The second was believed to have been found by C.A. forces, dry as a midsummer Texas day. The third was rumoured to be still at large, and at this late stage in the game, a powerful chip on a battlefield full of discarded and decaying hulks. That’s if they’d ever even existed at all.

“A rumour,” I answered him, “a myth.”

“I asked what news you had of it, not your opinion!” He banged his fist on the table, shaking the candle between us. His one good eye blazed angrily at me.

“If it ever existed they haven’t found it yet,” I answered him to the best of my ability, “at least as far as I know.” He looked excited at this.

“And its location, I mean generally, any word on it?”

“Most people agree it’d have to be in the middle east somewhere,” I began, “if the thing has actually been lost.”

“And if it hasn’t been lost?” he asked me, “where then?”

“Well, others think it has been taken, flown back and dropped off to whoever made the thing, to fuel the defence against its own populace.”

“Mount up, you Dirty Rogues!” the shouting voice of Carmelita drifted through the hatch. “We leave tonight!” If she was still reticent about her troops being pushed yet further by the Thunder Lizard, her voice didn’t give it away.

“Ah yes,” T-Rex frowned, “the homefront. How is it out there? Gone to total shit yet?”

“Pretty fucked up,” I responded. If he asked me about the state of the Continental Americas as a nation right now, I wouldn’t know where to begin. When I’d left ten years ago, only the very rich and very stupid were still driving cars, rich because you had to be to get even a spritz of gas for your tank, stupid because it made you a target. And the roads were getting all thrashed anyways.

“It’s getting ugly,” I admitted. “Civil unrest,” I continued, “starvation and disease is becoming a factor on the populace as well. Power’s off more often than on.” That was what finally pulled the plug on Big Media, and with nobody left to proclaim the validity of war, the people had forgotten the evershifting face of evil foreign powers or terrorist bands that had instilled within them such all-encompassing fear for so long and awoke an anger at the powers that be on a more local scale. Can’t perpetuate fear with no juice.

“No juice,” he murmured to himself, then shouted out the hatch. “Number One!” he called out to his next in rank, before turning to me. “Now, you listen to me: what you’ve heard about the Americas, that’s the rumor. That’s the myth. And if I catch wind of you mentioning any of that to any of my troops and I’ll put one of my last bullets into the middle of your brain. My Fighting Rogues don’t need to question what they’re fighting for, or what’s going to be waiting for them when and if they ever get back, you understand me? They are alive today because they believe we can win this war.”

“Get up you filth-ridden dogs!” Thompsen called out into the night, “We’re charged and honor bound to fight the good fight in other climes, not count sheep in the comfort in the warm musk of our mother’s teats! Arise you disgusting savages, for tomorrow is today, right now in fact, and it has been for a long fucking time!”

I could hear the tread of army boots up the side of tank and quickly asked the only interview question I would get in with the platoon leader that particular day. “Can we win this war, d’you think? Is there anything to win?”

“Don’t waste my time!” he shouted angrily as Carmelita’s head appeared upside down. It was in an order to her that I would hear my fate over the next weeks and months. “Media-geek stays. He can interview who he wants as long as he carries his own weight. He learns the subtle art of nicking juice and gets on a siphon team as quick as possible. Give the battery to techie and see what he can use it for.” With each command, Carmelita nodded, and he dismissed her before turning back to me.

“Media is your hobby now. Soldiery is your life. You can’t learn to steal juice you’re dead to me,” he informed me, “and to you. Posterity or no.” With that he rolled out a map on his table and began studying it, and I gathered I was to go. I climbed up and out eh belly of the beast and hopped off the tread.

I glanced at that unnaturally big star, or where the big star ought to have been. I became aware of soft under-humming whisper that was around me and for awhile I was unable to distinguish it from the strange thing that was happening to our stars, our sky. The underhum was the sound of the camp’s voices quietly whispering amongst themselves about what we were all looking at. Where the giant star had been was now a shimmering field that appeared to make the stars behind it move and shudder. It was if some giant shimmering glob was between me and all the stars I’d ever seen. And the super star of how ever many hours ago, was breaking into smaller pieces in front of my very eyes.

*

The ejection of soupy plasma from the exploding black hole races out equally in all directions, faster even than light, though some creatures believed such a thing must be impossible, having only the most rudimentary of ideas about what was really out there, what it was all made of or how any of it actually worked. The plasma between the exploded black hole and a viewer on a nearby spinning planet creates a blurring and shaking effect, the after-image of the same type of explosion that has created and destroyed everything that ever was.