I've been away for a bit and am so glad to be back in my own home, my own bed, with peace as I drift to sleep at night. Long story short - I have been a bit unwell. Things are sorta on the mend, but it'll be a long and dusty road before I reach that ridge and see the world laid out before me again. In the meantime, I enjoyed reading the boards while I was away but struggled to write. Though, that said, there were some real, uh, 'characters' on the ward I was on. I will write about them later. People do astonish me, be it little things or outlandish things they do.

 

I wrote last night for the first time in a while. My writers' group meets up next week and the prompts were either 'charm' or 'havoc'. I think I've brought a little of both to this passage. Were I to include this in a story, I would expand it significantly. But, as being part of this group, I will spare them from listening to me drone on for 20+ pages. I think I'll have a punt at recording this later. I can hear Eric Serra's Noon from the film Léon, the Professional playing in my mind when I read this. If you're not familiar, it's a masterful film and the score is heart-breaking, sinister, ethereal, all manner of other fancy words.

 

Thoughts most welcome on this piece. It's a standalone, as mentioned earlier.

 

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The bunker had grown hot by noon. Heat came through the walls, through the floor, and through the bars of the narrow window cut high into the stone. It carried dust with it. Fine grit settled on the table, the lamp, the flask, the man in the chair.

 

I looked down at our guest.

 

Langkløv leather held him to the chair, wrists strapped to the arms, his ankles tied hard to the legs. His head hung low. One eye was lost in swelling, purple and black and leaking at the corner. The other watched the floor between his boots as if there were something there worth studying.

 

I let out a deep breath. “I do not want to do this to you, son.”

 

His good eye lifted. Blood and spit had dried at one corner of his mouth. Fresh blood shone in the split on his lower lip. He tried to straighten and failed. His chin dropped back to his chest.

 

I put two fingers beneath it and raised his face towards mine. “Stay with me. Tell me what is happening at Nowa Avestia and this ends. You can go home. You can go back to your people. You can see your family again.” I took out my handkerchief and wiped his mouth clean. “That is all any of us want. To go home. To see the ones who matter.”

 

He swallowed with effort. His throat worked. His tongue passed over cracked lips.

 

“Water,” I said. One of the guards handed me a flask. I held it to the prisoner’s mouth. “Drink.”

 

He tried. Most of it ran down his chin and over the front of his tunic. For a moment the fabric darkened and clung to his chest. In this heat, even wasted water gave relief.

 

I lowered the flask and studied him. “I have been patient with you,” I said. “You know that. I have kept the others from being careless. I have spoken to you plainly. I have treated you as a man ought to be treated, given the circumstances. All I need from you is the truth.”

 

His eye had drifted again. It wandered past me, to the wall, then down. He looked close to gone.

 

I set the flask aside. “What is the Resistance doing at Nowa Avestia?”

 

There it was. Strip away the soft voice, the handkerchief, the water, the talk of home, and that was all that mattered. What they were building there. What they had hidden. Who they were moving in and out of that place under our noses.

 

The sergeant’s breathing changed. Only slightly. A halting pause. Then another breath, drawn deeper than the last. His head lifted a fraction.

 

I watched him.

 

He was listening.

 

At first I heard nothing beyond the small bunker sounds. Cloth shifting. A fly at the bars. Sand scraping softly outside.

 

Then he smiled. That smile touched something raw in me. “You know the story of Bertha?” he asked.

 

I kept my face still. “No, sergeant. I do not.”

 

“She was a big girl.” His voice was hoarse. It had a tear in it. Every word seemed to drag over broken ground on the way out. “At the harvest dance, nobody asked her.” He wet his lip with the tip of his tongue and smiled again, faintly, almost to himself. “Boys wanted the little pretty things. The ones that laughed and spun and looked nice under the lanterns. Not Bertha.” I said nothing. “She was too big. Too rough. Too much.” His eye found mine. “So they left her standing.”

 

The insolence of it. The smile. The steadiness returning to him by degrees. I folded my hands behind my back. “She minded that?” I asked.

 

He gave the smallest shrug the straps would allow. “Może. Maybe not. Some things wait.”

 

The heat pressed in. Dust moved at the bars.

 

He drew another breath and held it, listening again. Then he went on. “Thing is, people only know what they know. They look at a thing once, decide what it is, and that is the end of it. Bertha got buried that way. Covered over. Forgotten. Left to the dark by people who did not know what they had.”

 

A faint sound touched the edge of the room.

 

I frowned.

 

The prisoner saw it. His smile deepened through the blood on his teeth. “But she was still Bertha,” he said softly. “Even under the sand. Even with her name half gone. Still too big. Still too rough. Still too much.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

He did not answer at once. He had heard something again.

 

So had I now, though I could not yet make sense of it. Something far off. A low pulse. A weight in the earth more than a sound in the air.

 

“When the right people found her,” he said, “they knew.”

 

I took a step nearer. “Knew what?”

 

His eye gleamed. Fever, pain, triumph. Some mixture of the three. “What she was for.”

 

I struck him. My fist caught him high on the cheekbone. His head snapped sideways. Blood flicked from his mouth and landed dark on the floor.

 

For a moment he sagged in the straps. Then he straightened again by slow degrees until he was facing me once more.

 

My knuckles throbbed. The sound outside had grown clearer. A deep, mechanical note, uneven and heavy, carrying through the sand and the stone together.

 

The prisoner laughed. It came out thin and ragged, though there was a bitter humour in it.

 

"That all you’ve got left?” I asked.

 

“No,” he said.

 

The engine note rolled nearer.

 

I turned my head towards the barred window.

 

Behind me, he spoke again. “She came back bigger than anybody remembered. Meaner too. Old things can be like that. Ignore them long enough and they start to get ideas.”

 

I moved to the window and looked out through the bars. At first I saw only the berm and the white glare beyond it. Then I heard the engine properly for the first time. A deep V12 roar, heavy and uneven, rolling through the sand and stone together.

 

Then the top of something rose into view. Armour. Sand-coloured and scarred by years of weather. More of it followed, climbing steadily, iron tracks hauling an ancient hull up from behind the berm. The engine note deepened as it came on, joined now by the harsh grind of track on packed sand and the rattle of old metal under strain. Black exhaust climbed into the sky in thick vertical plumes. Red and white markings showed through the dust in cracked patches. A number. Old unit paint. On the side of the machine, beneath sand-scoured camouflage and chipped metal, one name remained just legible.

 

BERTHA.

 

The war machine crested the rise in full and turned towards the bunker. I heard the engine idle down, waiting, a desert beast drawing breath. Cold moved through me where the heat had been.

 

Behind me, the prisoner drew in a breath that shook in his chest. “And the best part,” he said, “is I do not think she knows I am in here.”

 

I turned back to him. His head was up now. Blood on his chin. One eye swollen shut. The other bright and hard and full of hatred.

 

The ground trembled under the next movement of her tracks. Outside, metal shifted. Something large found its bearing with a slow mechanical scrape.

 

I opened my mouth.

 

“Wait-”

 

The cannon answered with a thunderous report that swallowed my word whole.

 

EDIT: Audio - https://drive.google.com/file/d/17dIHNJR8PF5yl5TkLmRPwQ2IlqXSH7e-/view?usp=sharing