Chapter XXX
XXX
and while Bagger’s recoiled in shock, Veck leans down and wraps his arms around the woman, he’s taking her, same as Popkin took her, and Bagger grabs for the woman, but with only one free arm, he can only grip the blue cape until it starts to rip, and he doesn’t want her unclothed again, so, shit, he lets her go,
and the instant Veck steps from the tree line he stops, raises his nose and sniffs, which makes Bagger sniff, too, that sweet, scorched odor still there, and Veck reaches into his haversack to remove a tinfoil tube, looks like shaving cream, the guy’s lost his mind, but when Veck squirts goo into his palm, the alkaline smell tells Bagger it’s what the boys call Sag, a paste to protect from chemical burns, Bagger’s used it himself, it soaks into your uniform like bacon grease, only Veck’s not wearing a uniform,
and that’s what the stench is, fucking mustard gas, Jerry must have salted the earth with it before moving on, and Bagger locates the nearest dead bodies and sees the frost around them has melted, the kicked-up mud around them is yellow, that explains all the open collars, the men clawed for air as they died, Bagger’s seen it before on burial duty, necks ripped open all the way to tracheas,
and Bagger scrabbles for his gas mask, getting it out of the bag with one hand isn’t too bad, but strapping the two-lensed monstrosity over his head is something else, the straps snap and slide, and he cries, “Veck, help!,” and struggles, “Veck! Come on, man!,” and manages to get the mask cockeyed on his face, nowhere near airtight, he can bite down on the mouthpiece but can’t get the nose pinchers applied,
and so he’ll have to breathe strictly through his mouth, Bagger tries it and smells the charcoal filter activate, but he’s not getting enough air, could be a kink in the tube, and he unbites the mouthpiece to cry, “You’re leaving me here to die, Veck!,”
and even as Bagger shouts it, he knows that death is the whole point of what’s happening, the mask’s circular lenses abridge his view while also bringing it into a theatrical focus, and through them he watches Veck pick the woman back up and turn toward the field, and the crazy thing is, though Veck’s body is slathered in Sag, he hasn’t put on a mask,
and Veck simply walks away, carrying the woman, there’s nothing Bagger can do, so he bites back down on the respirator and hits the mud, stretching himself from shackled wrist to extended toe, but the handcuff key remains a foot away, close enough that he’ll figure out how to reach it eventually, but not soon enough, not nearly soon enough,
and Bagger’s frustrated cry is stifled by plastic, steel, and cloth, and he contorts to see over the Fahrpanzer, Veck is powering toward the dead, buttocks waxy with Sag and compressed beneath the P3’s weight, the woman’s head dipped over Veck’s right arm, her eyes visible from the hood, staring back at Bagger with a blinding beam of light,
and Veck stops, simply stops, two hundred feet away, nothing special about the spot except that it’s within a rough pentagram of corpses like cairns awaiting a final ritual, and Veck stumbles in a circle like a child who has lost his mother, kind of like Bagger lost his, except the mother Veck has lost is the planet itself, and Veck blinks against poison gas, and snorts mucus loosened by chemicals, and speaks to the angel, not loudly, but no other noises compete for Bagger’s ears, “All right. Do it. Make it go away,”
and nothing happens, except that Veck drops the woman’s lower half to rub at eyes that, even from this distance, Bagger can see grow redder, and Veck grunts in discomfort and gives the woman a shake, saying, “This is my wish. Take the whole world and end it,”
and Bagger pants so hard the insides of his lenses fog, gray cataracts that recede with each inhale, a maddening cycle of blindness that causes lapses in the action, exhale, inhale, and now the woman’s sitting up on the ground, legs curled to the side, hood dropped to her shoulders, the light of her curiosity brightening Veck’s face,
and Veck’s shouting, “Why are you just sitting there? Put an end to it! All of it! Both sides! All sides! We showed you how! We spent four years showing you! Look around! We burned it! Raped it! Killed it! Do that! Do what we did! Do it to everyone, everywhere! Wipe us out! I’m begging you!,”
and Veck hacks, his naked body inverted like a rope bridge in typhoon winds, and he drools pink before choking throttles him again and he spits a kind of ebony ejaculate, making Bagger wonder if all soldiers produce such wicked semen now, capable only of propagating an offspring of stone-hearted destroyers,
and what’s left of Bagger’s rationality tells him the gunk is Veck’s dissolving lungs, and soon the ichor is too thick to stop, it cascades from Veck’s chin as blood oozes from his sockets, which makes his eyes stand out like he’s wearing red kohl, as big and fervent as two missiles flying Bagger’s way,
and Bagger recalls that mustard gas hibernates for a few hours before it kills you, this must be chlorine, which melts your lungs into acid, but chlorine’s easy to identify, it turns your brass buttons green, all you need to do to nullify chlorine is hold a wet rag to your face, wet with anything, even urine, and Bagger looks at his groin and wonders if pissing himself might be smart, but then again, chlorine’s also highly visible, a slinking cloud of earwax green, so maybe Jerry used a cocktail of whatever chemical dregs they had left,
and a third possibility is that this isn’t gas at all, how’s that for an awful prospect, this invisible germ liquifying Veck could be the work of the woman, a wrathful reaction to being told what to do,
and Bagger has a malignant memory of his father’s final Christmas Eve sermon, four months before the Lusitania, the angel Gabriel announcing Christ’s birth to shepherds, but in the Bishop’s hands, it was no hark-the-herald-angels-sing, the old man troweled into Luke 2:9, “And, lo, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified!,” how he boomed that last word, children startled from Santa Claus reveries as the Bishop tallied all the times angels slaughtered entire populations, a reputation that would make any shepherd wonder what kind of manger monster had just been born,
and Veck looks like his old self now, terrified, there’s no way a melting man can look any other way, and though he’s got to be blind now, his hands know their way, one reaches for the P3’s block valve while the other aims the lance at the angel, the ignitor prodding her solar plexus,
and Bagger gasps like Arno used to gasp, there are still things in the world terrible enough to shock, and Bagger spits his mouthpiece and screams, “VECK, YOU FUCKING MANIAC!,” but behind a gas mask he might as well be singing dixie, and Veck starts screaming, too, through a mouth of gummy flesh, “I’M WARNING YOU!
DO IT!,” and Bagger screams, “VECK! STOP!,” but Veck slaps the woman with the nozzle, which splits her flawless cheek,
and the slash forms an apple-red line through which crystalline light pours as pure as ice, not that Veck can see it, he rams the ignitor against the woman’s face, more wounds, and from those wounds, more light from within, as Veck screams, “DO IT! DO IT!” and Bagger screams, “VECK, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SHE’LL DO! ,”
and then, for their sins, the angel does it,
and angel is how Bagger will think of the woman from now on, for good, forever, he wishes he could grovel before her for having doubted, for when the angel opens her mouth at the last strike of the nozzle, Bagger realizes she’s never opened her mouth before, her cryptic smiles have always been tight-lipped, and inside are no white teeth, no pink palate, only the light that has bled through her all along, only this time in concentrate, light beyond light, a uterine passage into another realm,
and it has the effect of a detonated bomb, if Veck wasn’t blind this light would take care of that, and Bagger believes it’s only thanks to his gas mask lenses that he’s able to follow what happens,
and what Bagger first thinks is a rising mass, an earthquake upheaval that convulses tides of mud into the air, he quickly realizes is a mass rising, some two hundred German and American corpses dredged upward from hornet-yellow sludge like carcasses on slaughterhouse meat hooks, then operated like a company of marionettes,
and the limbs articulate, each cold, dead joint in creaky swivel, obliterated legs arranged in action poses, ravaged arms returned to how they were when they died, most of them gripping invisible guns, some in pitcher poses of hurling grenades, several with arms held high to beg their enemy not to shoot, others beckoning encouragement to keep fighting, a ghastly re-creation of men in the final seconds of their wasted lives,
and Bagger’s lenses stop fogging because he’s no longer breathing, it’s one thing to chuck corpses into a hole, spray quicklime, shovel in soil, and cultivate a cornfield, another thing to revisit that field and find it peopled by sentient stalks, the angel casts away the world’s funereal obfuscations, the tastefully wrapped shrouds, the carefully covered wagons, the sealed grave pits that minimize the enormity of lives lost,
and the risen corpses undulate in the wind, uniforms loose over body parts blown away, emptied sheaths of skin fluttering like the planted flags of pointless patriotism, swaths of purple muscle speckled with snow, exposed bones swaying in ways similar to how the men moved when they were industrious little death machines, it’s almost funny how much it meant to them to kill, the ones whose faces have been ripped off grin at Bagger in silent laughter, chattering teeth,
and at the center of this revenant army stands Ben Veck, who knows what’s going on by the clucks of broken bones and the slaps of bloody skin, he staggers around until a boot snags and he stumbles, left shoulder planting into one of the dangling bodies, a fellow American, it’s like swatting an outfit draped from a hanger, the corpse jiggles and its olive drabs billow, and an arm that was nearly severed finally disconnects, yet still floats midair,
and Veck must feel what Bagger feels, the scope of violence now as naked as him, the angel insisting that Veck’s wish has already been granted, the end he pleads for is already here, the Great War a wheel set in motion that’s far too heavy to halt,
and Veck appears to comprehend this so rapidly that he becomes the shrieker, caught on uncuttable barbed wire, “I’M SORRY!
NAOMI, I’M SO SORRY!” he shrieks while bumbling into this dangling doughboy, that suspended Jerry, until he falls, and Bagger doesn’t know if Veck’s own naked knee does it on purpose or not, but Bagger hears the sucking ping of impact, sharp as musket shot, followed by a whoosh, it’s the P3’s propellant tank, punctured of its pressurized gas,
and Veck explodes,
and the shock wave shreds his meat off his bones,
and in the red spritz, his tendoned finger bones wrench the valve,
and flame spews into the spouting gas,
and silver fire gouts, a throaty roar, a funeral pyre fifty feet high,
and wind punches Bagger in the chest, and he blacks out,
and he thinks he sees the dead curl back down, a litter of sleepy pups,