Crescent moon in cloudless night rests above endless lines and frozen piles of spent bodies now empty buried deep in the dark olive earth. Spikes of iced up mud rise above ruined soil. Boots crunch through hoarfrost. Beneath a sky of darkness on phosphorescent fields, I wait for sleep.
Lieutenant Mayfield Pike leaned forward over the raised abatis and crude muddied strands of barbwire. His cold breath drifted across the barren landscape of turned over and rotting earth. Obese and ragged haired rats scurried down the labyrinthine trenches among the hundreds of sullen soldiers absently smoking away their weekly stipend of tobacco.
He kept his eyes upward away from the ugly and unchanging ground that he had come to know intimately over the last nine months. A series of red flares lit up the sky rising meteoric above the silent corpses of horses and men that covered the endless battlefield.
“Get those masks on boys, here comes the Hun!” snapped the English Major from his perch atop of the trench wall.
Soldiers fumble stupidly pulling green plastic headgear over singed hair. Triggers aim blindly for Enemy hearts. Through the fetid mists shouting voices explode out of empty silence.
“Royal Canadians!” The English Major tried to rile up the men. It failed to produce much excitement. Neither would, “For King and Country!” or “God save the King!”
Dark green clouds blew in over the Canadian Regiments as the exchanges of artillery began to thunder barrages hard into their distant targets. The earth shook violently as the cavalcade of Huns grew louder as they ran through the wild patches of razor wire, rotting maggot-infested bodies, and randomly laid mines.
Huns with their sharp ugly helmets, bayonets fixed, scream at the top of their lungs plunging into the abyss. Relentless the hunger for blood and death grows. Souls consumed without end.
The Canadians waited for the hated Huns to cross the lines until they began the counter-attack. Pike climbed out of the hole leading his detachment of the living dead into the fray. As he dragged himself up over the trenchwall, his boots slipped awkwardly in the half-melted mud. He surfaced, raised his arms, and signaled the men to follow his lead. They charged through the isolated machine gun fire aimlessly behind Pike. Their heavy rubber gasmasks were iced over withholding their sight of the encoming Enemy.
Pike halted his trot and aimed his rifle point blank at the temple of a Hun storm trooper passing in front of him. He pulled down on the trigger. Nothing happened.
Misfire. Jammed. Trigger malfunction. I’m fucked.
“Shizer,” laughed the Hun, as he stopped in surprise. The two stood across from eachother staring ahead.
The moment passed. Pike felt a wrenching blow knock him hard into the ground. The crunch of the hoarfrost reverberated through his body as an unbroken wave exiting from his contorting face. His senses were numbed. The men exchanged missed punches and rolled over the ground struggling for the advantage.
Hearts pounding. Adrenaline flowing. Blood boiling. There is only the now.
Pike pulled his body over the Hun as he smiled in confidence as he choked the Enemy with his bare-hands.
The Hun, struggling to breathe, thrust a rusted bayonet blade upward into his throat. It seared through his skin cutting hard through the jugular vein. Pike gasped for air as the torrent of purple blood exploded from his larynx. Pike slumped over and fell onto the Hun. The Hun angrily pushed the limp body off his, threw the blood ice-covered gasmask to the ground, and continued his blind charge towards the Canadian trench. Pike watched blurred shadows and shapes run over his body.
I wait for sleep, the Sleep of Death.
The Shooter lowered his rifle and held it down letting the barrel drag against the dust covered pavement. The noise was hard yet restrained. He walked over to the limp corpse. He leaned over the corpse and placed a wooden sign over her neck that read: SHOT FOR LOOTING.
He wiped the steaming spray of dark blood off his face and cursed the woman, “Shat your britches, did you? Goddamn dog. You got what was coming to you.”
He hanged the standard issue bolt action rifle over his right shoulder and left the woman lying amongst burnt debris. Her eyes were wide open staring up at the passing constellations and planets in the clear cold night above. The heat from her wounds emanated as the vapors escaped out into the drifting snows before vanishing above the dark surface of the inner harbor and the Narrows.
The Shooter came over to Pike. Pike was in the process of vomiting bile onto his great coat. The last vestiges of his recurrent nightmare which lived in his mind as a lingering and unending poem were now gone, expelled with the contents of his empty stomach. But they would return to him the next time he closed his eyes. The blackness clung to him like the diseased beggar.
Pike had leaned his body up against the half-collapsed buttresses of the stone church. “You fell asleep on guard duty, again, Sergeant, didn’t you? I could have you court-martialed for that.”
“Shut it, Private Keane.”
Keane leaned over and helped the unshaven Pike to his feet. “Now come on, Sarge, we have to be awake even for this duty. Just because you’re some goddamn war hero doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like. Sleeping all day and night, even in a place like this one. I guess chewing on teabags or eating shoesteaks isn’t enough for you. You need to keep moving or you’ll freeze to death out—.”
Pike interjected, “Why’d you shoot that woman?” He spat the bile soaked teabag out of his mouth and wiped the frosted sweat off his brow.
“She was looting. You know the law.”
“How’d you know she was looting?”
Pike dropped his drawers and pissed on a ripped and wet newspaper sitting in the rubble of an apothecary. Steam rose from the dark yellow stream as he read the headlines of the long past day, 7 December 1917. The day after it happened.
“What you’ve never shot a woman? All those years in the war and you’ve never killed a skirt? Not even a fraulein?”
“Did I miss out on something special about the fairer sex?” Said Pike as he shook the remnant urine from his urethra and pulled up his ragged trousers back over his reddened foreskin.
“No, I suppose not, Sergeant.”
Keane became momentarily submissive, understanding that his rather brusque manners were not going to be appreciated anytime soon. He usually got the Sergeant to at least grimace, but ever since the explosion nothing got through. Pike was preoccupied with other more difficult matters.
It was his wife. She had been originally counted among the dead in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The city was unprepared for catastrophes of this scale. The inability of the civil authorities to take control was quite evident in those morning hours now nearly a fortnight ago. Things were confused. Later, after the military assumed control of the now shattered port, she was finally added to the casualty rosters in one of many triage areas. The volunteer nurses released her to her family.
The two soldiers walked down the street through the huddled masses of homeless families and piles of wreckage from the explosion the day before. For as far as the eye could see, from Sackville Street north to the Bedford Basin, lay in ruin. In an instant, the two cities on the Narrows had been thrown up thousands of feet into the air only to come crashing back down to the earth with a force unprecedented ravaging all in its wake. Unbeknownst to the survivors, it was the most powerful manmade explosion in history.
Private Keane, despite his earlier consideration, continued to talk as they wandered down the hill to the docks along the shoreline. They stood at the edge of a collapsed pier staring out across the black water to the fires still burning in Dartmouth, just east of the city. Contorted rail lines of twisted metal were strewn about like the dead in battle along the charred pylons of the naval yards. Torn ragged ruins of the King’s cruisers and convoy ships rested aground, upside down and atop crushed factories and mills that once lined the shoreline. The lone vessel in the Narrows, the fire ship Dorothy, shot a stream of pressurized water from its spout onto the razed homes.
Pike broke his silence, opening up to his subordinate. “My wife lived here. She worked at the brewery until ‘it’ happened.”
“A lot of people lost their families when it happened. How old was she?” Keane asked as he looked down at the dirt on his leather boots.
“My age, that is not important. Bonnie survived. They removed her, thankfully, back to her mother’s on Cape Breton.”
Keane lit a cigarette clumsily before he asseverated, “Damned Huns hit us with our trousers down.” He knew nothing but what the things he was told.
“You don’t actually believe it was a German conspiracy? No one is that clever.”
“I don’t know what to believe, sarge.”
Pike sat down on the warped planks of the devastated wooden pier. He pointed across the dark waters to the scattered assortments of shipwrecks and dilapidated buildings that surrounded the locus of the explosion. The damage to the two cities, Dartmouth and Halifax, was inescapable and would have haunted its residents to no end, if they weren’t already ghosts. Acceptance of the occurrence of the trauma itself had yet to pass. Their world fell to pieces and now there was little more left for them, but numbness and fear.
“See that ship there, with the hole in her, was the Mont Blanc. She was carrying explosives, TNT, benzoil and gunpowder up from New York. She had her red flags up, going under five knots, adhering to all the harbor rules.”
Through the abscess in the hull of the crippled cargo ship, the ghosts milled about trying to catch a closer glimpse of the damage dealt to their home. Many gathered spoiled food and garbage from the rubble, eating whatever they could find. It did not matter if they became sick. The dictates of survival are not picky. Just live. Forget everything else. It will only get in the way.
Pike pointed northward to Tuft’s cove, “That hulk there with Belgian Relief plastered all over her side was the Imo. She slammed into the bow of the Mont Blanc at full steam. Who do you think would actually set something like that up? The Germans? Even they are not that evil.
“What you don’t know Keane is that bad shit can happen without malice. Without a plan. Without a purpose. Get used to it. Shit happens.”
Nihilist rot, Pike thought to himself.
Pike turned away from the derelict harbor to look west. His eyes were transfixed up on the high granite parapets of the star shaped Citadelle. The fortress was the symbolic guardian commanding the treacherous approaches of Halifax through the underwater reefs among the swift and powerful tides and currents. Since the explosion, the Citadelle became a shelter for the survivors, well as a base for the green detachments of soldiers called in to preserve the order. Pike was among the few who had seen real combat, let alone fire his rifle at the faceless Enemy.
Keane let out a puff from his cigarette and interrupted his intercession.
“Hey, Sarge, did you hear why Calvinists are opposed to fucking standing up?” Keane waited for Pike to return from his specious reverie for the punch line. “Cause it might lead to dancing.”
Pike laughed heartily, nearly choking on his breath, and responded, “My wife tells a joke like that, though, it’s funnier when she tells it.”
He turned away from Keane, walking with a slow gait into the darkness of the comatose city. From the sheath beyond the firelight, he saw Keane drop his cigarette on the ground before he stamped it out with his boots. The Private’s face was illuminated, revealing its perfect condition without scars, age lines, or the worries of the world outside his grasp.
Light ephemeral flakes of snow began to fall down upon the hellish ruin. After another long midnight rest, Pike and Keane continued their patrol. They circled slowly around the Citadelle and back through what was left of the Richmond District watching for looters, the unfound bodies of the dead, and the newly homeless masses.
This aimless routine had become second-nature to Pike. His life was trapped in a continous loop of nightmare and ugly reality. The same day of desperate boredom never ended. Sleep was the illusion.
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The morning sun came through the gossamer window shades directly on the black eyepatches that covered over her orbital cavity. Her eyes were gone. In normal circumstances, the heat and light of the sun would have woken her from sleep, but that was before the explosion and the accompanying darkness. She felt the warmth against her face, smelled the newly arrived Christmas tree, and listened to the movements of her mother working in the kitchen. Something was boiling.
This is not so bad, she thought to herself. Mayfield loves me. He always has and always will remain devoted. I will wait for his return. He will love me. Her mind drifted back to the first time she had spread her legs for him. The warmth inside her and the grass swaying in the summer breeze above them filled her head with better days. She smiled happily.
Bonnie opened the front door. She threw her tartan scarf over her shoulder as she checked to make sure that her coat was buttoned. Pressing on her head, she felt her winter cap among the strands of her dark hair. She walked outside through the snowdrifts. She remembered the way.
The sun followed her as she descended the bluffs down to the rocky shoreline. Tranquil waves of cold water lapped against the stones pulling the looser material and snow out to sea. These sounds were underneath the whipping of the wind, unheard by those deafened by life in the cities, mines, and countless wars.
She was there. The blood of her hands and feet had retreated into her body. Her face was red, turning purple and black. She felt the wind in her hair buried underneath a thick wool cap.
Bonnie sat down in the snow beside a large exposed rock, marked by a rusted bronze plate with unreadable words and unknown royal seals. She did not know heraldry, nor did such trivial things matter to her. This rock was here when John Cabot landed on the island four centuries ago. It was here that England first laid her claim to the New World.
She remembered this bit of local history quite well. She prayed to herself and instead of the customary amen she asked, “For what have we suffered for?” And this was her last thought before she dove headfirst into the water and swam out into the bay.
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