A Life of Simplicity

There is a simplicity in running for your life. It's nice, not that there is anything really to like about it, but the simplicity is nice.

It's becoming difficult to remember a time before I was running. There are vague impressions of dark rooms and warm smells. There is a bright memory of being carried through the fern lot for the first time and looking up at the huge canopy of green which glowed like the stained glass in the cathedral. I can remember my brother and my little sister, the way John used to put on a scary mask and chase us squealing through our tiny house. The way Lisa used to sing silly childish songs as she played with her toys. The house was a dark safe place where Mom made food and Dad's voice echoed as he came home.

Those days seem centuries old now. The images are faded, the sounds softened, the smells diluted with the newly discovered scents which seem to burn. I remember there was a memory that I had of my mother. She had a dark red scarf that she wore sometimes when we went to church. I can remember sitting in her lap with the scent of the perfume that she doused it in wafting around me like incense, and I remember remembering it as something sweet and beautiful. I remember, remembering... Now the smell, though just as strong, is gone, replaced with the acrid scent of ozone, sulfur, burning blood, and though I look, I cannot see my mother's face, instead finding only eyes, wide and crammed with dust. Then the smell becomes overpowering and I have to flee before I remember who's eyes they are, and I hide in the present, and I don't go back again except in the dreams. The dreams always force me back to then.

The house is gone now. It was blown up when the fighting started in our city. We lived in a big valley, it was one of the original settlements in the third wave of colonization, and from our window, you could once see the big lander propped up in the middle of the valley. I felt the bomb fall on our house. We were across the street in our neighbor's basement since we didn't have anywhere else to hide. When the bombs stopped falling and we came out the only thing left of our house was the fridge standing like a tombstone amidst the rubble.

"It's all gone." John said. He'd found a chunk from the bomb and was kicking it around in the rubble. For a little while Dad just stood and looked at the house with a look as if he didn't believe that it was gone. Then his eyes set and his jaw became hard as it does when he is forcing himself to accept things, and he stomped across the tumbled house to the fridge and began to dig the rubble away from the door. John tried to help but he pushed him away and continued digging. At last, the door slid open and Dad pulled out a bottle of wine that was cracked and bleeding onto the rest of the contents of the fridge. The neighbors brought over cups and Dad poured for everyone, even me, and little Lisa.

"Drink it." He ordered, then downed his cup and poured more. The wine was sour, and dry, my first taste. Mom stopped him when he came to pour more for me and Lisa. As they drank away, the bottle Mom dug into the fridge and began to make sandwiches and other things and we made a table out of the rubble and we had a party right there, with laughter, crying, and all the food we could eat. Dad told everyone about the day he and Mom moved into the house, how hard he had worked to get it, and how it was all gone, all wasted.

For that first week, we stayed with our neighbors, collecting what we could, and getting ready to leave.

One night we heard gunfire and I came outside to find John looking up at the sky where beams from energy weapons flashed beside the little bursts of explosives. "They're OTG Marines." John said. He looked down at me. "From earth." We watched for a while as the sky where the weapons were firing became filled with glittering shrapnel and big shadows that dropped very fast like big stones.

"The soldiers are in those capsules." John said. "There will be more fighting soon. They'll want the valley to make more drops."

The next day we left.

We were going to go to the camps. There used to be some set up around the edges of the valley away from most of the fighting, but they were burned down before we got there. So, we set out to cross over the mountains into another valley where we ended up running into more fighting.

I guess that's something else to be said about running. I'd never seen the rest of Fracture. Not even the hills that surrounded our city. They're big and grey, and jagged because time hasn't had a chance to soften the rocks yet. My teacher used to say that our planet is very new, formed in the last twenty five hundred million years. Not like Earth. Earth is old so it has dirt, and plants, and animals. Fracture doesn't have most of those things, or what little it has isn't like the dirt or plants on earth, just big ferns taller than my parents rising from the sharp gravel which is the closest thing to dirt we have in the mountains.

My teacher used to tell us a lot of things about the planet. Like that it's actually a small planet, that it only has about two-thirds the gravity that earth has. She said we came to Fracture almost a hundred years ago, trying to escape a history of poisoning, disease, politics, and warfare. "Of course they didn't escape any of it." She said. "Most of it they brought with them, and they found other problems here, new problems. Like clouds of carbon monoxide, and the lack of dirt for agriculture." She showed us pictures of enormous fields with big machines chewing up the gravel and spitting out a slurry of dirt behind them. "We set to work, turning our world into one exactly like the one we left, without a second thought."

She's dead now. She took care of me and some other children I'd been traveling with. She was different then. I think she's happier now.

Getting out of our valley took us several days. Dad took us to the highway and we joined a big crowd of people trying to get across the mountains before the fighting overtook us. Some of the militia had set up a barricade along the road and we got caught in the crossfire when the OTGs tried to take it from them. Dad threw us into a canyon along the road to hide, but John stayed near the mouth, watching the strobe of the lasers and listening to the rattle of coilgun fire. A few days later, we finally made it into the second valley and found a place to stay with some of Dad's old friends.

We were safe there, for a while. Dad got a job at an aeroponics warehouse, and we watched the militia's soldiers scurry into the mountains where we heard the boom of combat or watched light flash in the night. I often caught John looking out into the mountains, just watching.

There was a lot I didn't understand. Talk which my Mom and Dad, and John all seemed to talk about in hidden sorts of ways, as if they didn't agree. It made it hard to sit with them sometimes, when the disagreements were at their rawest. Then one day John left for a while, and when he returned he was wearing a militia battlesuit, and carrying a laser rifle.

Dad was angry. He tried to make John change his mind. He wanted John to help him in the aeroponics plant so we could move into a better apartment. He said John wouldn't make a difference, wouldn't make things any better except to make the whole war drag on a little longer, and he'd probably die in the process. Mom just cried.

John sat and listened as if listening to all the things he had already said himself. "It's too late." He said at last. "I've already joined. I'm leaving tomorrow, and I'm not coming back until there is peace."

"If you leave there won't be a coming back." Dad replied. "You'll be digging your grave, and it won't be I or your mother who put the stone at your head."

"You're only a boy." Mom said. "You don't have to go." They argued all night while I listened from my cot in another room.

In the morning, things were different. Mom clung to him, cried onto his shoulder, and begged him to stay. Dad shook his hand, told him to stay alive. "Don't go in for the heroics. Don't stick your head up unless you have to. Remember you have a family to take care of. Let the rest of the world sort itself out on its own. It will, inevitably. Just given time. If you ever change your mind..." They shared a look I have never forgotten, a look of two men, powerless to change the circumstances that will separate them forever.

John hugged Lisa and told her he loved her and that he would be back soon. She said nothing, but that wasn't unusual anymore. When it came my turn, he extended his hand. "I'm going now." He said. I shook his hand and then he pulled me in for a hug. "Don't worry about me." He said. "You won't understand it yet, but this is what men have to do sometimes. We have to fight to make things right. You have to promise me you'll do the same thing."

"I don't want to join the militia." I said, looking up at him. He laughed, a short choking laugh.

"You don't have to. All you have to do is promise me you'll take care of Lisa, and Mom, and Dad."

I nodded, and he hugged me again. Then he shook Dad's hand, hugged Mom again, and left. Dad seemed to become very old after that. I sometimes found him the way I'd found John, staring off into the mountains as the distant boom of combat echoed into the valley, only his eyes seemed dead, while John's had glimmered in the night.

During the short time that I stayed in the printed house with my teacher and the other children she told us that our planet received its name from the big cracks which crisscross our planet in big lines, some of them so straight it looks as if someone plunged a knife into the stone and pulled it across, others which zigzag in sharp turns like lightning spilling across the earth. She said it was from the relatively recent period of planetary cooling and at the bottom of many of the deepest, you could still find hundreds of little smoke stacks spraying noxious gasses into the air or oozing bright volcanic magma. "It's an ironic name for a planet where mankind was supposed to form some sort of harmonious endeavor, but in the end it proved prophetic, and I guess that's the best kind of name a planet can have."

Before John left he and I used to sit outside and watch the columns of militia soldiers go by on their way to the mountains. He would point to vehicles, or guns, or suits of armor and tell me all about them, where they were made, what they could do. There was one called a SPIKE, it wasn't huge, but it had two racks that could deploy from the back to carry about sixteen soldiers and a big gun on the front that could alternate between energy or slugs depending upon the situation. "It makes it more versatile but less efficient." John said. "At Range it can use the slugs to bust up cover and armor and up close it can use the energy weapon to torch anything in front of it, but it's less efficient than dedicated guns. That's why the 480s have two barrels on their turrets. They were made for the same scenarios but the SPIKE is cheaper to acquire since it's the same model used by the OTGs. The supplier just sells us the surplus."

I saw one fight in real life once.

After John left it didn't take long for the OTGs to overwhelm the militia guarding the mountains. We watched the soldiers going into the mountains, and only wounded men and limping vehicles return. We might have gone back then. Pushed back across the mountains to where the OTGs kept the fighting from reaching into our old valley, where they'd set up their headquarters, but Dad said there wouldn't be any fighting if we could get out of the mountains. He was wrong, later, much later, spacecraft where torching anything that moved on the crack plains just beyond the mountains, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. So, we headed west towards the passes where the fractures tried to climb into the mountains and the ferns grew in waves of rolling hummocks.

We were in a little village. Small two and three story buildings crammed together amidst forests of ferns. We were staying in an abandoned Inn set up around a small little square. The village had been bombed a short time ago and the few people still living there had said nothing when we broke down the door to get in. I heard the SPIKE coming while the others slept, it has a sort of grumbling sound like gravel grinding beneath a giants foot, and I went to the window to watch it pass by in the little square. As it came to the center of the square, there was a loud scream and then a bright flash and a bang and one of the floaters that kept the SPIKE off the ground collapsed to the earth.

OTGs spilled from the racks as gunfire cut through the darkness in search of their heart. Pulsing laser fire set houses ablaze and the coilguns on the SPIKE's flanks screamed as they sprayed projectiles back at the militia hiding in the surrounding buildings. There was another scream and a flash of light as one of the buildings collapsed near the SPIKE, burying some of the OTGs hiding there.

The door behind me burst open as I watched and two OTGs began yelling and waving their guns for us to get in the back room. Mom grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the window while one of the OTGs swept the house and the other set up a big coilgun on the window to begin spraying fire into surrounding buildings. Bullets tore through the walls and little spots of bright fire appeared where lasers cut lines in the ceiling, then the SPIKE fired, and it seemed for a moment as if the world ended. There was a roar louder than thunder, and light poured in through the windows and underneath the doors as the floor shook. Then my ears popped and everything became silent except for the dull thumps of concussions and the low bass of weapons fire.

The fight seemed to last forever. Sometimes my hearing would start to return but the SPIKE would fire again and I would be plunged back into a the roaring silence. There was a window at the back of the room we were hiding in which admitted the flash of laser fire and the supernova light of the SPIKE. As morning approached the little piece of sky I could see through the window from Mom's arms began to glow and I got up to look out.

In the grey predawn light there were dozens of little shadows running around behind the buildings, some of them with children in tow as they fled from the battle, others carrying rifles and maneuvering heavy weaponry, scurrying about to get a better position. There was one man who had been wounded and lay on the ground while two others struggled over him, wrapping him in gauze and pumping bio-stock into him so he wouldn't die from blood loss, a black stain spreading in a pool around them as they pumped more and more into him.

The SPIKE fired as I watched, and for a moment, everything was shown into sharp relief, shadows stretching across the walls like huge skeletons. Then lightning blew through the building beside them and slashed across the street in bright fiery lines as the building collapsed and the wounded man and his friends disappeared.

There was a series of low thuds and shrapnel crashed through the wall beside me, spraying my cheek with splinters. I turned to see Mom screaming as she gesticulated for me to return to her arms. I cried as I lay wrapped her in lap, and the dumb silence roared in my ears. I thought of the shadow men the split second before they died, the grim set of their jaw illuminated by the flash of light, the gleam of pain in the wounded man's eyes, the red of blood on the hands of the other man as he held gauze to a wound seeping blood. Then the lightning cut across them and they were erased. Gone from all of existence. As if they had never been.

As the sun began to rise, the SPIKE fell silent and my hearing returned as the gunfire receded into the distance. When we came out of our hiding place we found one of the OTGs in a pool of blood on the floor of the inn and Dad turned my eyes away, but the shot that had killed him had thrown his helmet to the other side of the room and sprayed the walls and ceiling with his brains and blood, and there was a piece of his skull still inside the helmet. For some reason I thought of the men I'd seen killed, I thought of the way they disappeared without leaving even their helmet, and I thought of John.

Outside the militia was gathered around the fallen SPIKE, silent, staring with wide hollow eyes. One of the officers stood on top of the smoking vehicle looking down at them with equally tragic eyes, but as he looked, he spoke, about the war, about bravery, about making the world right, and the cost of victory. When he saw us coming out of the house he gestured towards us and some of the soldiers looked. "We're fighting for them." He said. "Look upon the children of our generation, the victims whom we seek to free, so that they and their children will not have to suffer as we suffered. So that our world will be free from the sins of the old. Look upon them and realize the true meaning of our suffering." I would have stayed but Mom and Dad pulled us away.

That night they argued about it while we lay beneath a rock, hiding from the wind and the rain that makes running miserable most days. Dad said the militia was making things worse. "Trading poverty for slaughter." Mom blamed Earth. "If they'd help us instead of enslaving us to their money," But Dad said the planet needed the development investment, and it was only just that they profit from it. I still don't know what to think.

My teacher used to say that Fracture wasn't good for much of anything. The thing that brought humans there was the ability to live there, nothing more, but the discovery of huge metal deposits close to the surface and easy to extract turned our planet into a place worthy of investment, and with investment came rules, and government, and all the social complexities that came with having something that someone else wanted. She used to take us outside, before the war, and point up at the stars. "Some of those are spaceships." She would say. "You can tell because they move across the stars, lining up for the FTL highways that will take them to other worlds, other planets more peaceful and beautiful than ours. Planets not torn apart by war."

Sometimes when we were forced to sleep beneath the stars Mom would do the same thing. She would point up at the stars and tell us stories about earth, about how she and Dad came across the stars to settle here when they were very young. How she hadn't wanted to come, but Dad had had to come for work, and she had fallen in love with the way the sun fell on the mountains around our old home, and the tall majestic ferns that filled the valleys. Sometimes we would see one of the ships begin to move and she would tell us to make a wish before they disappeared. She used to smile when she told those stories. They were from happier times for her, when spaceships held dreams instead of death. When it was people full of fantastic stories that fell from the ships, and not explosives, or shuttles filled with weapons. I wish that I could tell stories like that. Stories full of happiness, but all the stories I know are from Fracture. All my stories are about war.

You know if there was one thing I wish though... well... if there was one thing I wish... it would be that little Lisa didn't have to die the way she did. She was so good. She didn't deserve to die like that.

Since our first house was blown up, Lisa never said much. She kept quiet, and her eyes were always wide open as if she were trying to see everything all at once, but once, while Dad was working for the big aeroponics gardens, he brought home a box of tomatoes and told us to dig in because it was the last tomato's we would probably ever see. I remember how they smelled, so sweet and musty that I just smelled mine for a while before taking my first bite. When Dad gave one to Lisa, she looked at the box for a few moment and then looked up at Dad with her big eyes.

"Can I have another one?" She asked.

"Why do you want a second one? You haven't even taken a bite of your first." Dad said with a Smile. She scratched the ground with her feet for a minute and then went away and thought.

"I want to give one to the boy across the street." She said when she came back, still holding her tomato. Dad gave her one and she ran across the street and knocked on the door while I watched from the window.

The house across the street was one of the printed ones. They're all the same. Nasty smelling cement sprayed onto the old foundation by a big machine, the windows and doors sealed up with rubble from the house that used to stand there. A woman came to the door. Lisa said something, and the woman disappeared. A few seconds later she came back with a little boy. One of his arms was gone, and in its place, one of the bright green fluid boxes was wrapped around the stump. A bandage covered half his face, and blood mixed with puss oozed from the patch covering his eye.

She gave him one of the tomatoes and the two of them sat on a piece of rubble and ate them together, swinging their legs in the breeze and saying nothing.

It was just me and her when she died. We were running. A few streets away a transport was hit by a scream gun. I heard it go off, and the cough that you always hear when it hits something, then the whole sky was on fire and big chunks of shrapnel started tumbling through the buildings beside us and crashing into the street. I covered my head and sped up but Lisa fell behind. I didn't realized she'd been hit until I reached the end of the road and turned around to see where she was.

Her chest had been shattered by a piece of the engine. She didn't even have time to scream, or close her eyes and she lay on her back in the middle of the road, caught between life and death, eyes watching the clouds, while blood dripped from the broken ribs poking from her t-shirt. I ran to her and cradled her, cried her name as I tried to think of something I could do.

A vehicle interrupted my thoughts as it came crashing through one of the shop fronts beside her. It was one of the ones that John said was more efficient at killing, two barrels jutting from its head, energy weapons playing across its armor in hot lines. I screamed as the house crumbled behind it and rockets soared from the top of the turret and hot exhaust blasted me and Lisa with dust. The turret swiveled as slugs burst on its side and sprayed the street with shrapnel. There was a boom as the cannon fired and a great weight seized my head like a vice and crushed me into darkness.

When I woke up, I was alone, half buried beneath one of the collapsed storefronts. With my free arm, I managed to dig myself out and then started to unbury Lisa. Her eyes were still open when the building collapsed on her, and they were choked with cement dust and rubble so that I couldn't close them. I cried as I began to unbury her chest, but stopped when the rubble began to come away red with blood, and I found one of her ribs poking up out of the stones.

After that I couldn't stay anymore, and I ran away choking on my tears with the memory of her eyes, those eyes which had been so wide and all seeing before, now choked with dust and debris, her mouth hanging open, her chest caved in and blood spilling into her concrete tomb. For a while, I hid, and I screamed, and I cried, but eventually the tears dried, and the anger and the pain all transformed into a sort of daze and I came out to wander around the city, looking for... for something. Maybe for someone to tell me why.

After the OTGs pushed over the hills into the town where Dad worked for the aeroponics place, we fled into the hills again. Out in the hills, before the SPIKE got caught in the square and I watched the men get erased by its fire, there was a big cathedral full of stained glass and filled with people trying to hide from the war. Dad insisted that we stay for a Mass and he took me and Lisa up to the front with him where the Priest gave him a little wafer of bread and gave each of us a blessing while Mom stayed behind.

Afterwards, as we were making our way across the mountains we came to a place where an OTG capsule had crashed and the four marines had been pulled from the wreckage and executed on the spot, with one of them strung up on the capsule as a display. I caught a glimpse of it as we were approaching before Dad covered my eyes.

"How can God exist in a world like this?" Mom asked as we passed, and for a while, she was angry at Dad as we walked in silence.

"God did not take away our son." He said quietly after a while. Mom hit him, and then hit him again when he did nothing.

"Don't you say that! Don't you say our son is dead! Don't you say John isn't coming back!" But she was crying. "If he is dead then God can't exist. He can't exist in a world where there is so much evil. He's abandoned us and we're all as good as dead, we're as good as dead, and he's as much as given us up to Satan."

"Or we've abandoned God." Dad said in his quiet way, as if mourning what he could not change.

"God is dead." Mom said, "Or he was never alive in the first place." and Dad was silent.

Sometimes I think about it when I see the piles of dead, or as I cover my ears against the roar of combat. The world used to be so complicated. So full of those questions, those problems. If you gave an opinion people would become full of rhetoric. They would spray words like bullets, drop phrases like explosives, and try to tear you from the truth with the violence of their words or their hatred. When that didn't work, they would swap words for weapons, arguments for killing. I've watched men lined up for holding to some ideal, watched other men come down the line with a laser rifle and watched the heads evaporate from the beam of energy before their bodies were kicked into the stream. Dozens of them killed by men who were filled with rhetoric. Arguments are simpler with a gun, less difficult to understand, less complicated to contend with. The substance of the disagreement no longer important.

I wandered for a while after I left Lisa. Over tumbled bricks and shattered cement walls, all spilled out into the road as hover craft growled over them and soldiers ran in disordered columns through the streets. There was still fighting in the city. Bombs burst in the distance and aircraft screamed across the sky. The wounded and the dead lay littered about like garbage tossed aside in the search for some fundamental truth hidden in the shattered homes.

Dad found me after a while. He held a spitter, which he'd taken from a dead soldier, and he limped from a wound which bled across his leg.

"Where is Lisa?" He asked, but I was silent and he understood.

"You're mother is dead." He said, and he seemed to die with the announcement. "Do you want to see her?"

I hesitated, and the clarity of details wavered as choking emotion tried to make its way to the surface. I shook my head quickly and the feelings subsided. He nodded and took my hand to lead me away.

I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd gone to see her. Just to close my memories of her. Now when I sit in her lap, and the memories of her overwhelm me her face is always gone, and I have to search for it. I see bodies in the street facing away from me and I have to turn them over, just to see, to make sure they do not haunt my dreams. She's in my dreams now, but it's not her face that I see. Instead, it is Lisa's, her eyes choked with cement dust so that they will not close and she follows me as I try to run away.

I was sitting alone, a few days after she died, and all of the emotions, of watching Lisa, and hearing about Mom, Die. I was in a half barrel which was sitting beside a little creek in one of the canyons and I began to rock back and forth as the hot ball of emotions grew to a blaze and suddenly I was carried back to the day when she was rocking me and Lisa together, and singing us a song to put us to sleep. I started to hum the song then, and the tears burst forth and I sobbed until I could cry no more.

I never told Dad how Lisa died. He never told me how Mom died. We didn't talk after that day. Rain began to fall as we made it to the hills where dirt was spread like a quilt to cover the sharp stones of our planet. We climbed into one of the huge dirt tractors and we sat in the cab as the rain drummed upon the glass. In the watery light, which made its way through the rain, Dad's face looked ashen and pale, and his breath rattled in his chest.

"I'm dying, son." He said while I sat on his lap and he held me loosely in his arms. I could hear the rapid thumping of his heart beneath his skin. He shifted and I wrapped my arms around him to hold him tight, tell him through my grip that I would never let him go.

"I love you." He said, just before he closed his eyes.

"I love you too." I whispered.

"I'm going to rest for a while." He said. "When I wake up, we're going to go to your grandparent's house. You've never met them... but they're good people. They helped us get to Fracture, they made it possible. We'll go there when I wake up. We'll get there. Somehow."

His breathing grew steadier as he began to fall asleep.

"I'm so thirsty." He said. "I wonder if it will ever be nice out."

When I woke up the next day the rain had stopped, and my father was dead.

There is a simplicity to running for your life. There isn't much to say for it really. Except that, the simplicity. There is nothing left to understand when there is nothing left. No argument to be made against destruction, no reasoning with the violence. Only wide eyes. Wide eyes, and the truth.

THE END

Bio: This is Mr. Fortier's first published story, but he's been trying for a long time. Welcome to the clubhouse.

E-mail: Emerson Fortier

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