Page 2 of No Man’s Territory

***

THE LADDER TREMBLED slightly as Alistair's boots found purchase on the lower rungs. The descent took seconds. When his boots hit the mud of the trench floor, the impact sent a small spray upward, and the soggy ground accepted him as something real.

He leaned against one of the wooden support posts that held the trench wall from collapsing inward, and the wood felt solid. Real. He drew a Dunhill from the packet in his breast pocket. The matches came from a book marked with the name of some London hotel—a luxury from before, or perhaps a gift from the family solicitor.

He struck one. The flame flickered, casting a warm orange glow on his face. He was so exhausted, he could barely hold it between his lips, clenching his teeth against a fatigue that sleep no longer provided a remedy for. The cigarette caught. He drew the smoke in deeply, held it, exhaled through his nose.

For a moment, the sharp taste of tobacco felt like normalcy. It was as if a man could stand in a trench, smoke, and find some grace. He offered the packet to Wickham, who stood nearby, nervously shifting from one foot to the other.

"Sir?" Wickham asked, though his eyes stayed fixed on the parapet, on the space beyond the wire where nothing visible moved.

"Cigarette," Alistair said, and it was not a command, though his tone made it impossible for the sergeant to refuse, even as he did.

"No, sir. Thank you, sir. If I may, I'd prefer to keep my wits sharp." Wickham's jaw worked slightly, and his hand drifted toward his rifle as if seeking reassurance. "Do you hear—"

But Wickham did not finish, because the world ended.

There was no sound at first. Only motion. The soggy earth underfoot suddenly erupted. It heaved upward as if something beneath it had awakened from a long sleep and was now thrashing toward the surface. Alistair felt his legs buckle. The support post he leaned against shattered completely. It burst apart, sending splinters flying. For a moment, those shards felt more real than breath.

Then the noise finally came. It was not like the artillery fire Alistair had heard in the earlier bombardments. This was not the crack of distant guns followed by the whine of shells arriving. This was something that consumed all other sounds, a roar originating from inside his own skull. Air, heat, and mud became a ferocious plasma that overwhelmed every one of his senses.

The mud bubbled up in a sustained, rolling surge that was less an explosion and more the manifestation of the Earth's own violence. Alistair saw, without being entirely certain he was seeing anything, a section of the trench wall collapse inward.

A man was standing there. Or had been. The distinction became unclear. There was now a pile of steaming mud where a man had been, and a spreading darkness that might have been shadow or might have been the worst thing his mind could conceive.

He was thrown skyward. The impact came from above and below and sideways all at once, a blow with no origin point and no end. In the split second before he lost all thought, it felt like he was being crushed, drowned, burned, and pulled apart, all in a singular terrifying instant. His body was momentarily weightless, suspended in an element, neither air nor liquid but something that existed outside the categories by which reality could be understood. But when he landed, he landed on something solid. Very solid. Something that pressed the air from his lungs with a violence that was almost intentional in its completeness.

Darkness, absolute, and suffocating. A weight upon his chest came from the earth itself. He tried to breathe and found breathing had become theoretical. He tried to move, but the mud packed around him like cement. He thought about his legs but realized he could not feel anything.

Everything was muffled. The sounds filtering through the packed earth above him were distorted and hollow. Someone was screaming; not in pain, but with the desperation of the damned who finally grasp their fate. The screams seemed to come from both far away and remarkably close, as if distance lost all meaning. He opened his mouth, and the earth filled it, coating his tongue with its chalky, salty taste and the copper-sharp tang of blood, his own or someone else's.

He tried to scream, but there was not enough breath for a scream. There was barely enough breath for anything. The weight on his chest was immovable. He pressed his hands upward against it, not realizing it was a beam. His hands were strong and determined, but the beam resisted with its unyielding permanence.

The darkness became absolute. His eyes were open; he was almost certain they were open, but they perceived nothing. There was only the crushing pressure above him, the earth filling his mouth, and the distant, increasingly abstract sensation of pain radiating from the lower half of his body. A slow, terrible insight descended upon him: the world had indeed ended, and he had somehow survived.

***

HE DRIFTED IN AND OUT of lucidity with no reliable anchor. One moment, he felt the weight on his chest and the mud in his mouth. In the next moment, he sat in the reading room at Oxford. Sunlight streamed through tall windows onto leather-bound books. He read something, maybe Catullus or Virgil. Suddenly, his father's shadow crossed the page. Without warmth, his father said, "Remember, disappointment is a poor legacy." Then, Alistair found himself back in the mud, half submerged and gasping for breath that would not come, his lungs rattling like insects in a box.

Around him, the trench continued its slow transformation into a charnel house. The screaming stopped some time ago. What persisted was worse: the moaning of men who could no longer summon the energy for screaming, faint whimpers, the wet, terrible sound of a throat filling with blood.

Someone near him—the distance impossible to judge in the darkness—was praying in Latin. The words became noise, became a kind of rhythm against which the other sounds of destruction played themselves out. The voice grew progressively weaker, less distinct, until finally it became something between a whisper and a rattle, and then it became nothing at all. The man, whoever he had been, fell silent.

Rats moved through the debris. Alistair became gradually aware of them, much like realizing a truth he had been trying to ignore. They were close. Remarkably close. He heard their claws scraping against stone, wood, and the broken remnants of the trench's contents. In a moment of clarity, or maybe delusion, he opened his eyes to see a rat's eye shining like a wet coal in the near-total darkness. The faintest glow seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The eye regarded him with an intelligence that felt almost insulting in its indifference.

He tried to move. His hands obeyed. He pushed upward against the beam and for just a moment—an eternity, really—it felt like it might move. But it did not. And when Alistair's strength gave out, which it did almost at once, the beam settled back into place with a sensation of finality.

He let out a scream, but it was not quite a scream. It was a raw, primal sound that did not belong to the species he thought he was. He screamed until his voice cracked, then pushed on through the hoarseness. Soon, the scream turned into a harsh scraping of his throat against the edges of its own failure.

Someone called out. His name, perhaps. Or a command. Or a prayer. The voice came from somewhere in the darkness, and Alistair tried to answer, but his voice was no longer his to command. What came forth was a mix of a whimper and a gasp. It was not enough. The voice calling out fell silent.

He was at Marlborough, being beaten by older boys for his size, his accent, his small hands. He was at Oxford, in a room with a girl whose name started with C or maybe K. She laughed at something he said. For the first time, he felt something like happiness or maybe relief at not being completely alone. He was marching toward the Front, his uniform pressed, his father's final words following him: "Do not disgrace the family." He stood in a trench that resembled this one, though it was from a different year, a different position. He watched a soldier take a bullet and plunge face-first into the mud, as if the earth called him home.

He was here. In the darkness. In the mud. In the heaviness of the beam. His throat was raw. When he swallowed, he tasted blood and something else—his own salt or the salt of the earth itself. The pain in his chest, where the beam rested, had become his baseline, the definition against which all other sensations were measured. The pain in his legs was almost abstract. He tried not to think. Thinking was dangerous now. Thinking led to awareness, and awareness led to the terrible clarity of his situation. It is easier to drift in the murky water of half-consciousness. Let memory and confusion blur together until it is difficult to tell what was from what is.

The darkness began to change. It was a subtle shift, so gradual Alistair was not certain it was real. But soon, the new gray light, such as it was, began to reveal the full extent of the destruction. The trench was unrecognizable. What was once a network of duckboards, posts, and reserve positions was now a hodgepodge of craters, collapsed walls, and broken timber. Bodies lay visible in places where darkness hid them. Some were moving with the faint, gradual movements of men dying slowly. Most were perfectly still.

Alistair did not believe he would be rescued. The part of him expecting stretcher-bearers or engineers or some other apparatus of the military to save him had disappeared in the darkness. Time and struggle wore it down, grain by grain, until it disappeared.