The Damned Die Hard

Something random from the drawer, because I CAN’T start every novel that pushes into my head, and sometimes I write the beginning to shut it up — and now that I can go indie, I wonder “should I?”

If You Stand Before The Fires Of Hell
And Death Is at Your Back…

    I

    Night had fallen, a strange night that painted the deep, dark sky with vivid streaks of violet.  I  didn’t want to think about how night could fall in a world outside normal reality – an Earth with no sun.
            This night was not a natural thing, but a living darkness that advanced liked probing fingers, or like creeping fog.  I felt cold where it touched, as though it leached all warmth from living flesh.
    The four tents we had pitched close together on the grayish, barren ground, were covered with a brittle black frost that let out an odor like old charcoal or frozen ashes.
    As darkness overpowered light, another kind of light became visible: red, roaring, and somehow managing not to add anything to the visibility.  It shone from the East like the forest fires I remembered from when I was a very little girl.  Unlike those fires, though, it would not bring warmth, but a sort of frozen burning and eternal torment.
            If I concentrated and stopped breathing for a moment, I could hear a noise coming from that glow.  It should have been the crackle of fire, but instead it was the moans and cries of a thousand tongues in despair superimposed on the triumphant, gloating cackle that was the battle cry of the legions of hell.  Impossible to say I was not scared.  Old veterans of the legion would be scared by this.  I was terrified.
    I’d have swallowed, but my tongue was almost glued to my palate.  The water, though we’d rationed it for three days, was down to a cup or so per person, and I’d been husbanding my share so that I’d not permitted myself more than a few drops.  And so, we must die, one way or another.  Either of thirst and hunger, on this plane unsuited to human life, or mowed down by the forces of hell.  One way or another, we would die today.
    My squad huddled in a circle, talking.  They were only feet from me, but I couldn’t hear their words.  It didn’t matter, because I could hear their tone, which was almost as lost and scared as that of the damned souls.
    This is how they take us, I thought.  From the inside out.  They couldn’t any other way.
    It was my thought, formed in my mind, but I could almost hear my father’s voice in it and see him glaring at me for allowing myself to be so weak.
    I cast a look at the four tents.  Somewhere in there, Richtofen sat, gripped by a fever that should not infect any mortal.  Marlowe had disappeared on the reconnaissance this morning.  Turned or dead, he would not be back.  The sky above was dark, starless.  The squad – all six of them – looked like children lost in the night.
    I was the ranking officer here.  Right.  I tightened the grey wool cloak of the witching regiments around myself.  It had gotten ripped and burnt a little at the edges, in the last week, but it didn’t mater.  It was still the mark of all I’d learned in basic.  Such as it was.  “Squad, Attention! On your feet.” They shambled to attention, facing me, so fast that I knew they hadn’t even thought, much less realized it was me giving orders.
    A pathetic force to face the uncountable millions the other side could throw at us: a line of twelve, anchored at one end by Jeremy’s pale, too-tall body, and at the other by Dave Black’s squat, glowering figure.  They blinked at me, and I could imagine the rebellious whine forming just behind their eyes.  Particularly Dave’s.  Well, no matter then.
    “We will not sit here and wait for death and eternal damnation,” she said.  “We’re going to attack.”  The words seemed like insanity, even as I said them.

    #

    My name is Lillith Marie Elizabeth Quattermain, and I never meant to be a soldier.  I certainly never meant to volunteer for any fighting outfit.  I fully supported the right of women to fight in combat, even if it left me a little puzzled as to why they would want to.
    Perhaps it was because I was the daughter of a veteran.  Dad had fought in World War two.  Not that he talked about it much.
    I’d been born after all that, mind.  Well after.  And he never said anything to me.  Once, when I was fifteen or so, I’d asked him what it was like to be a member of The Greatest Generation, and he’d just curled his lip and shaken his head and said they’d done what they had to do and most of them were too stupid to realize what they were risking.  And that was that.
    But sometimes, when his friends came over – fewer and fewer of them as time went on – they’d sit around and drink beers and not talk about the war.  Those silences were the most eloquent thing I’d ever heard, and by themselves they gave the lie to all tales of heroism and glory.
    So I’d grown up and gone to college and studied classical music, and toured with my violin all over most of Europe and a good part of the other continents, before that telephone message reached me in a hotel in Paris, in the wee hours of a grey October morning.
    The meeping of the squat grey phone on the bedside woke me and I groped for it without waking.  I only half understood the words that came out of it, “Lilly?  Your dad died.  Funeral day after tomorrow.  Can you get back?”
            The words made no sense.  Oh, sure, I knew dad was old – he was in his late sixties when I was born.  But he never seemed to get any older, either, so that I’d come to regard him as one of those immutable features of the environment, a mountain or a shore.  I started to say “Wha– ” and stopped, because I recognized the voice.  I followed that voice, like a lifeline to the meaning.  “Uncle Mark?”
    “Yeah,” my dad’s oldest, closest friend rasped, from the other side.  “I’m sorry Lilly.”