Compost Traumatic Stress Read online

  Compost Traumatic Stress

  Brian Koukol

  Late Cretaceous

  December 1, 2018 Volume 9 No 2

  Compost Traumatic Stress

  by

  Brian Koukol

  * * *

  Blistering tongues of immolated fuel spewed from the dropship, sculpting the sterile mudscape into a smear of ragged sumps and ridges as it touched down. Seconds later, the rear hatch fell open and shat 2nd Platoon into the mire.

  Mort Louka stumbled into his first taste of the war, then sank straight to his knees with an audible slurp. As he struggled to unfuck himself, an enormous hand grabbed him by the back of his cammies.

  "Step to, Private," a stone-faced Corporal Pataba grumbled, liberating him from his predicament and his boots in the same motion.

  Now in his socks, Mort glanced over his shoulder in search of his waylaid shitkickers, but his view was blocked by the jostling queue of determined Marines on his soggy heels. Unwilling to be the cause of Platoon's delay, Mort abandoned his boots and crawled out of the way on his hands and knees.

  A few arduous body-lengths later, he tried standing again. His right foot immediately plunged back into the muck and he grimaced in pain as a rock sliced open the side of his sole, spilling its sanguine contents. He managed to wrench himself free and limped after the rest of his fire team, trailing blood and mud and confidence.

  "What's the name of this planet again?" he asked Pataba when he'd caught up, trying to cover for his rookie clumsiness. "Meemaw?"

  PFC Krev, tasked as force multiplier and somehow walking on top of the sludge at his left flank with the M440, snickered. "That's right, Boot," he said, his deep-set eyes slinking in the shadows of contiguous eyebrows. "They named this place after your grandma. It's wet and dirty, just like she is."

  "Limos," Corporal Pataba said. "Named for the Greek goddess of famine." His dark, weathered face wrinkled to a bitter smile. "Only thing that grows here is the casualty list."

  "Should've named it after the goddess of mud," Private Redmond muttered from ready position up front.

  Mort nodded in agreement. Other than the deploying fire teams of 2nd platoon and an occasional glimpse of the rest of Charlie Company or their emptying dropships, mud was the only thing on the menu.

  On the human one, at least.

  As it turned out, the Chokes had a menu of their own, and it featured 7th Marines as the soup du jour.

  Mort snapped out of the memory, uncertain how long he'd been lost in it. His mind did that now, dropping him without warning into a past he'd just as soon forget as punishment for the smallest of rests. It couldn't be trusted. Neither could he. That's why the Corps had sent him back.

  He gazed across the patchwork sward that undulated all around him, captivated by its tidal rhythms. Limos looked different now. Death had brought it to life.

  A crimson stalk pushed up from an inky patch of chokegrass at his bare feet, betraying the final resting place of an alien soldier. And a pretty good one, too, based on the enveloping sprays of wild garlic—the Choke bastard must've taken an entire squad of Marines with it.

  Careful to get the roots as well, Mort ripped the crimson stalk from the vivid, carmine soil and stuffed it into the incinerator-bound bag he carried over his shoulder. The offending weed, which the xeno-taxonomy binder called blood thyme, featured hair-like projections that injected a nasty toxin into anything unlucky enough to brush against it. Without his bionic arms and their self-sterilization abilities, Mort would've been in for a world of hurt.

  The chokegrass surrounding the uprooted blood thyme was still too short from his last mow to cut again, but Mort noticed aphids climbing on it, so he sprinkled some powdered tilapia fertilizer over top in the name of terrestrial progress. Another month and the dead Choke's stain on the land would be forgotten, blotted out by the inexorable march of the human race.

  Satisfied with his work, Mort moved on to the next skirmish in the war for Limos, now called Demeter thanks to some forward-thinking brainiac up the chain of command.

  The soldiers here had long since stopped hemorrhaging their blood and guts and tears into the soil, but the land remembered. Only Mort, and those like him, could make it forget.

  If only he could do the same for himself.

  Against regulations, Mort wore no boots. Such a choice was inherently dangerous, but the hyperawareness it demanded both soothed his mind and helped him spot any diminutive Choke plants that he may have otherwise missed.

  He walked on—never looking more than a yard ahead and making sure to keep the flamboyant hillock of earthly wildflowers and absurd tendrils of manwort that loomed in the hazy distance ever at his back—until he spotted something metallic in the foliage at his feet.

  Seven spent cartridges of 5.56. Primitive, yes, but also better than beam weapons at penetrating Choke armor.

  He scooped up the archaic brass from the base of an eight foot ellipse of false oat-grass and inspected it. The original shine of the cartridges had been scoured toward matte by ubiquitous Choke microbes with a taste for metal, but their shape was unmistakable.

  After stuffing the brass into his empty hip pack, Mort stretched his aching back and raised his face to Demeter's dropping sun, allowing a rare breeze of tranquility to wash over him. It had been several weeks since he'd found any metal on the forty acre parcel he'd been tasked with cleansing; this discovery was a godsend.

  The absence of new finds of metal and bone and a general reduction in the Choke plant population had raised big questions of what would happen when his task was complete. Would they move him to a new parcel? Perhaps closer to the flowery hillock that he couldn't possibly face? Perhaps to the place itself?

  But the cluster of brass had given him a reprieve. Seven cartridges. Seven! A find like that had to mean that much more work remained before he needed to worry about a change.

  As per his routine, he worked until the sun sank below the horizon and the sky darkened to a deep bruise before forcing his bare feet toward his lonely CHU—a repurposed dropship dragged into place for his exclusive use and called containerized housing. Before crossing the threshold to the misery within, he headed around back to dump the day's finds.

  The 5.56 echoed as it struck the bottom of the empty scrap can, and the Choke flora—his third bag of the stuff for the day—barely filled the incinerator halfway up, rounding out a pitiful haul for the week. He wondered if Mejia would have anything to say to him when she made her pickup the next day. The work was getting thinner, no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise. At some point, somebody up the chain was going to notice.

  If he were smart, he'd take the next few days off and let the weeds grow into something formidable, but he couldn't do that to himself. To stand still was to be bombarded by horrors of both thought and memory. The forced idleness of night was bad enough—he refused to give the past room to creep in during the daylight hours as well.

  Reaching back into the scrap can, he retrieved two of the spent brass jackets. He rolled them around the palm of one of his replacement hands—a pallid, pristine facsimile that moved and looked almost normal, if one didn't notice the tanned, weathered flesh that abutted it.

  He squeezed his fingers into a fist, feeling the movement and the pressure, yet also the falsity. His new hands were imposters, consolations, memorials. They belonged to the Corps—he was but a conditional caretaker. Dischargees didn't get replacement arms—they got stumps and a work deferment waiting for them back in protected space. He'd pass.

  With a dismissive grunt, Mort threw the brass into the deepening darkness of the parcel. As long as there was something to find out there, they couldn't move him. They couldn't force him any close
r to the terrifying nosegay on the hillock. They just couldn't.

  Inside his CHU, Mort hit the switch that illuminated the end of the hollowed-out dropship that contained the kitchen and multipurpose table. There were other lights, but he liked to keep them off. They made everything too visible. Without them, he could almost forget the previous life of his home. He could almost forget the sour stench of vomit and the nervous anticipation of the condemned as they descended to their fate, and he with them.

  Mort threw himself into his tableside chair and sighed. He snatched up one of Smudge's weathered books from the small shelf of poetry and culinary tomes behind his head and glanced at the cover. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

  He leafed through the rough paper pages, disgusted by the paradoxical scent of sweet vanilla and musty decay, until he came at last to a spot of broken spine. Handwritten text crowded the margins and squeezed its way beneath underlined print. This one must've been a favorite of his predecessor.

  Mort zeroed in on a circled section near the top and read it aloud:

  * * *

  "O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

  How can you be alive you growths of spring?

  How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?

  Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?

  Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?"

  * * *

  Mort peeked over his shoulder at the rusty brown stain sullying the worn mattress of his stripped bunk.

  "Damn, Smudge," he said to it. "You had a darkness in you. No wonder you offed yourself."

  He read a little more:

  * * *

  "Now I am terrified at the earth! it is that calm and patient,

  It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,"

  * * *

  Mort massaged his furrowed brow with thumb and forefinger. Why was he doing this gardening work? Why hadn't he gone AWOL after his rehab? For hands? For purpose? For revenge? He wouldn't see any of the fruits of his efforts. By the time the Choke residue had been cleansed and fecund human settlements took hold on Demeter, he would be long gone. Or long dead. What was the point of working toward the future? He had no future. He was damaged, broken, rudderless. The best he could hope for was to pass time and keep one step ahead of his demons.

  * * *

  "Now I am terrified at the earth!"

  * * *

  He lived five minutes at a time. Where was the future in that? Once, he had lived for something more than himself. He couldn't remember what it was, but it was something. He wanted that sense of purpose back, but he knew he couldn't have it.

  * * *

  "Now I am terrified..."

  * * *

  He squeezed his hands into fists. He should be able to get over this. He should be able to concentrate. And sleep. And smile. But he couldn't.

  * * *

  "Now I am—“

  Mort stood knee-deep in sludge. He'd lost his rifle. Redmond had already split.

  A triad formation of Choke air cover screamed overhead. Seconds later, their payloads broke through the guttural tenor of pitched battle in a series of concussive detonations. Warm, comforting piss streamed down his leg.

  With his bladder empty, Mort located his weapon and turned toward Krev's overwatch position as ordered.

  The mud fought him every step of the protracted bound up the hillock, sucking at his socks and then bare toes as the muck did its best to undress him. Even at its worst, however, it could do no more than had been done to the lone figure of PFC Krev, skylining Mort's destination and flinging out all the covering fire he could muster.

  When he reached his side, Mort saw that the PFC had been stripped of his cammies and issued a new uniform of weeping wounds and cauterized scabs shellacked in drying mud.

  "About time you showed up," Krev shouted between bursts of the M440, oblivious to his injuries. "I'm about black on ammo. Thought it was gonna end up being my big, swinging cock against the whole Choke army down there." He fired off another burst. "And that wouldn't be fair for the Chokes."

  Mort swallowed hard. The ammo!

  Fearing he'd lost it in the same blast that had waylaid his rifle and discombobulated the team, his hands leapt to his chest.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. Two ammo belts crisscrossed his torso.

  As Krev's M440 went dry, Mort passed him one of the belts and then surveyed the battlefield spread out before them.

  Several ranks of Choke infantry—immediately catalogued by his brain as three-legged, headless Minotaurs wrapped in obsidian shells—clustered behind an imposing line of polygonal armored skiffs gliding across the sloppy plain below as if on ice. The majority of Bravo Company engaged them. Mortar squads lobbed ineffective ordinance shoulder to shoulder with machine gunners desperately scratching the shallowest of depressions into the flat, open terrain. Under the pathetic protection of Krev and his light machine gun, Alpha Company maneuvered toward the makeshift defense, ready to fill in the flanks and support Bravo's anti-armor capability. Most of Charlie held back in reserve.

  A fresh burst from Krev's weapon drew Mort's attention back to the PFC. Nude, caked in mud, and spewing vengeance, he looked every bit the golem, born from mud to destroy man's enemies.

  Mort dropped to his belly and scratched at the muck beneath him—not to create his own golem, but to get as far away from the carnage and danger as possible. If he could only dig deep enough, perhaps there was still time to save himself.

  "That's right," Krev said to him. "Get low. They're about to take a run at us."

  Mort glanced up from his pathetic scrape just in time to witness the entire line of Choke armor vomit a simultaneous barrage of explosive shells. He drove his face straight back down into the wet muck. It seeped up his nose and into his mouth, forming a thick and suffocating seal. Only after the concussive wrath of the Choke volley had been met by return fire from PFC Krev did he raise his head.

  He should've kept his face in the mud.

  Mort threw the book across the room and leapt to his feet. He needed to get his mind on something else. But it was pitch dark outside, and would stay that way for the next ten hours.

  His stomach grumbled. Was he hungry? He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

  Hungry or not, cooking was the exact sort of busy work he needed. Over the course of his second stint planetside, he'd julienned and braised his way through all of Smudge's culinary books several times over. Kitchen work turned out to be a reliable path through the interminable night.

  From the icebox, he dug out some mutton and rabbit reared on one of Demeter's few cleansed parcels and supplemented it with vegetables grown on another. Then he started in on some hot-water pastry—banging and kneading and working the dough, relying on the repetition of movement to center his thoughts on task over tangent.

  When the meat pie he envisioned was finally ready for baking, he burned through some more time cutting intricate shapes of leaf and game out of the dough for adornment. Then he crushed them into a giant ball, which he rolled out and shaped again. Anything to bring the dawn closer.

  At last, he could delay no longer and shoved the pie into the countertop oven he'd inherited from Smudge.

  He walked the inside perimeter of the CHU ten times, loosening the iron grip of anxiety on his throat, then checked his hanging sheets on the line outside. Last night's panicked sweats were nearly dry, so he made his bed before finally returning to his chair.

  His foot tapped. His fingers drummed. He cracked his neck. Then he was back up, ready to bake a cake. Or pickles! He could make pickles! No—bread!

  He'd caught some wild yeast and had been propagating it in a jar. There was no telling whether it was human or Choke yeast, but he figured it didn't really matter. Despite the best efforts of his fellow gardeners, the ewes and hares in his pie had probably snacked on a bit of chokegrass or bittervetch at some point and the veg
gies must've grown in soil tainted by at least a ribbon of carmine. If he stayed here long enough, he just might start turning into one of the bastards himself.

  The pie came out of the oven before the bread had finished its first proof. It needed to rest for a few minutes before he dug in, so he spent the time biting at the craggy, broken skin of his chapped lips.

  When the pie was ready, he cut a thick slice and sat with it at the table. The pungent essences of marjoram and rosemary rode into his nostrils on an updraft of hot steam, complemented by the lean gaminess of the proteins and a fortifying undercurrent of grassy, pastured butter and pork fat.

  Mort broke through the crust, collecting a heaping forkful of the moist and fragrant filling and shoving it into his mouth. According to his nose, it should've been delicious.

  It wasn't.

  To be fair, it wasn't bad either—it simply didn't taste like anything. Nothing did anymore. It wasn't the food's fault. It was his.

  He chewed and chewed, but the bolus of gluten and animal protein in his mouth never seemed ready for a swallow. After finally forcing it down with a drink of water, his stomach growled, pleading for more calories and faster, but his gag reflex wouldn't cooperate. He took another bite anyway, then stood up and paced around the decommissioned dropship, chewing. Maybe the movement would make things easier.

  It didn't.

  After putting the mouthful down with another drink, he returned his barely disturbed plate to the kitchen, disgusted. Inside a cabinet sat the blender he'd acquired a few months earlier. He pulled it out and tossed the rest of his meal inside with a few cups of water, then processed it into a dun puree. It wasn't very appealing, but, then again, no food was anymore.