Sleep-Deprived Writings
Before dawn, the bombing starts. Far off, the sound of thunder, the low rumble of mortar fire from miles away. As the tanks come nearer, so does the noise. No longer the throb of a distant drum, it cracks in the air, followed by the screams.
These are not screams of pain. They are the otherwordly wails of mothers whose children have been torn from thier arms. They are a different sort of pain. Those screams are what wake Nakan from sleep, and he wakes into a world of chaos.
Already the dust hangs in the air, stinging at his eyes. His breath tastes like chalk, and dark forms move about in the shadows around him. His hands, face, body, they are all covered in a thick layer of the stuff. He doesn’t know what it is, and it scares him. Somewhere past the dust, the sun is rising.
He shakes the dust from his clothes and walks along the side of the building, one hand always touching the bricks. He would not want to be lost in the dust; he is small and weak, and could be trampled on by people or animals trying to escape. In a doorway, he sees Flaky Jaik with a blanket wrapped around himself and his booze. Nakan shakes him, and a filthy hand brushes him away.
“Jaik,” Nakan pleads. “What’s going on?”
Jaik rolls over, muttering something beneath his breath. A smell like piss and whiskey rises up from him when he moves. “Fuck off,” he says, finally. “M’sleepin’.”
“Jaik,” Nakan whispers, and coughs at the dust in his throat. “Jaik, something’s happening.”
Above them, back from where Nakan came, there is a sharp crack and a sudden wind. It drives the dust away for a moment, enough to see one of the beige clay buildings explode from above them, showering chunks of rock down on the people below.
“Wossat!” Jaik yells, bolting up from his makeshift bed. “Wos iss yer on about?”
“Something’s happening,” Nakan says, and he tugs at Jaik’s coat. The old man gets up tenderly, sure to stopper the bottle he’d cradled to sleep, and rolls up his blankets. Only his face is covered in the thick dust, the rest of him having been under the quilt at the time. Nakan tugs at his jacket, pulling him along. Bleary-eyed and hung over, the old man follows. Together, they duck into a coffee shop at the corner.
They are not the only ones escaping from the chaos. Inside, a motley bunch stare out the windows at the swirling brown-grey. Most of them have it on them, only the staff having escaped through the strange providence of working early in the morning. No one is drinking coffee.
Some are sitting, but most are standing. Flaky Jaik manouver’s Nakan into a comfortable chair near the center of the room, where they can watch the bedlam safely. After a time, the sharp cracks stop, followed by more distant thunder from the horizon; it seems that they have moved on. Inside, people mill around uncomfortably. One of the employees is fiddling with a handheld radio, getting nothing but whiny static and pre-recorded country music.
When the soldiers come, no one is ready. Upon reflection, Nakan believes they should have been, but no one thought that the worst might be yet to come. They come dressed in robes that flow over ceramic plates of armor, rifles aimed at anything that moves. Their helmets are made to resemble insects, huge black visor eyes staring out of a carapace head. Their masks come to a sharp point, protrubant tubes running beneath the cloak and into a hidden place on the armor. Each soldier’s armor is painted a different color from the next, and most have patterns or sigils emblazoned on their chest plate or pauldrons. Nakan has never seen soldiers like this before.
They shout orders in a language no one seems to understand, then push people onto the floor. A man in a suit near the door is forced to the ground, his hands put onto his head. Nakan is frozen with fear. He cannot move.
“Git on the floor!” Jaik hisses at him from beneath his folded hands. “They’ll kill you like as look at you.”
Slowly, never taking his eyes from the soliders with the bug helmets, Nakan lowered himself. None of them seemed to be paying very close attention to him, but he felt like their eyes, those huge, alien eyes, were burrowing deep into his mind and pulling from it whatever secrets they wanted.
The soldiers go around the group, tying everyone’s hands with a piece of plastic. They cut into Nakan’s wrists uncomfortably, but there was no way to get them off, short of chewing through them. That would take a while, he guessed.
When the soldiers come to take them away, a few of them fight and kick and bite. One man gets in a lucky shot on his captor, and the armored man falls to his knees. He shoots the man dead, right in front of the other captives. The rest go quietly.
When they come to get him, Nakan is still mostly on his kees. They pulled him up painfully by his arm, wrenching the restraints they’d put on his wrists. He stood as well as he could as they half-pulled half-dragged him towards a troop transport outside. It was a huge flat thing with nothing but metal grating for a floor and hard metal benches to sit on. At the far side was another soldier, this one strapped into a seat, holding his rifle across his knees.
Nakan was forced to sit beside a huge woman who smelled bad and a small man who had apparently wet himself. Jaik was across from him, looking sullen and weary, his head covered in dust and his eyes puffy and bloodshot.
“Hell of a way to wake up, eh lad?” he said, a smile broadening across his emaciated face.
“What’s going on?” Nakan asked.
“My guess?” Jaik pushed his shoulder up to his face and rubbed at his ear with it. The movement made Nakan remember he was itchy. “War. Slavery. Maybe both.”
“Oh,” Nakan said. He couldn’t think of any other response. The door closed heavilly beside him. There was no light in the transport, only the sound of jets firing and the sensation of lifting impossibly high into the air. Gravity left them and they spun helplessly in the air, bumping into one another blindly.
Somewhere, there was sobbing. Nakan was fairly certain his own was too low to hear.
I wrote this on an hour or two of sleep, after a rough weekend of mostly not sleeping. I’m not sure exactly where it’s going. There’s more, but it’s terrible stuff. The next two pages read like bad fan-fiction. I’ll see if I can’t fix them when I’ve had more sleep.
