City 12

When I first came into City 12, that is, when I was fourteen years old, the world was just becoming dangerous. It was the last time, in the fifty years following, where I would have felt safe outside the confines of our barbed wire. The cities were the last safe places.

I saw calendars – before they were confiscated by the Overwatch - of the places folks like mine had lived before the Cascade. Rolling hills, golden sunset that made the sky look like island water, or like sapphires; contented wildlife. We used to call it “Normandy” – home of the Normans, of William the Conqueror, who took England for his own. After the Cascade, mother pardon me, everything went to hell. Ever seen a dog seized by a headcrab? A squirrel devoured by a larval Antlion? No. No, you haven’t.

Agriculture shifted to the cities; we ate things we could grow in our own backyards: rice, string beans, the occasional city animal. We left my dog behind, when we moved.

“There’s not enough room in the city, Juneau,” my mother chided me, as I held onto Noiralle’s collar, “You’re just going to have to forget him. I’m sorry.” We all just had to forget.


The places outside of city walls became scary, just after the Cascade.

We took up in a city that you might have called Paris, if you had been lucky enough to be in my generation. The City of Lights. The only thing that lights it anymore is gunfire.

Of course, it was New York that became Breen’s headquarters; all the brownstones deteriorated, became shacks and hovels and billets. And in our head we would imagine this perfect world; even New York, which nobody ever thought was perfect that had seen it, we dreamed about. A world where everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt, I used to hear. It was a nicer dream than the ones we had at night: white masked faces speaking breathlessly, lifelessly, wielding their shock batons and their teargas canisters and their machine guns like automatons. People made of steel, and wire, and submission. And we shivered, there, in our berth, because we knew the world would never be the same.

Our leader was Noel Nastuarre. Nastuarre… now he was a snake, of the old-fashioned kind. A hateful, vacillating man. And the reason I can no longer cross myself as I say that, as Father Comizi convinced us when we were acolytes that we should always do, sin or not.

I still do it, when I'm alone. It reminds me of my sister, who would always pray with me before I crawled beneath the covers to sleep. When the nights are chill, and I can see the pale moon - once yellow and mystical, now green and ailing - through the thin glass of the hostel they put us in when we enlisted, I still huddle beneath the covers and wrap my arms around her. I conjure the air next to me, I order it to be something other than it is; I order it to be Genevieve. It's the only comfort I have anymore.

One of the men under me in the Lambda is turning restlessly in the corner of the room. I hear the shifting of sheets, hissing and shouting in the dark, unyielding cascades of cotton. I cannot sleep with the noise tossing about in my ears.

“Hepsh,” I address the soldier. We call him Hepsh; his real name – his family name - is Epstein. Mid-thirties, mop of curly hair like a cashmere pillow. His first name is Hershel, last name Epstein. Hepsh only made sense. We have nicknames here: it’s better than the numbers the Combine gave us. You are fortunate you never had to grow up as a number, or you would never feel comfortable with a name again. I don’t.

“Hepsh,” I repeat.

Hepsh mutters something incoherent and rolls over. Carefully, I search for the soft spot just under his arm and poke it with a tired finger.

“Ngrwalkk.”

“Support Unit Brute-3, Caporal-Chef Hershel Epstein,” I command, offering his official title.

He doesn’t respond, but he seems to have stopped tossing and turning. Satisfied, I return to bed. The rustling doesn’t begin again.

[i] In my dream, I am walking barefoot beside the banks of the Orne – the shimmering black artery of Caen. Grass twines between the webbing of my exposed toes. Unwittingly, I find myself gripping it tightly, using my foot almost as a hand, and uprooting the grass. There is something behind the emerald of that grass, some hidden spirit, something wonderful; deep inside my mind, I know that I am saving this grass by uprooting it. I know that as I pick it, that delighted spirit will finally meet with air and escape, just fly away.
With a start, I realize that the midday sun is becoming oppressive; I am a fair shade of pink, as I have been since I was a child, and the scalding sun begins to redden my skin like a sizzling loin of some meat. A ruddy hue rises to the top. Everything is on fire.[/i]

A soldier coughed, and I woke very briefly. The dark encroaching, I fell back asleep within moments, diving haphazardly through the veil of consciousness.

The ground is glowing, hissing and buzzing with the drawn energy of the sun. It emits a pulse, a ripple of heat that singes my bones and makes me rattle with the force of it. I hit the ground with a thud and a pop and begin crawling forward, edging ahead hand by hand in desperation, gripping the incendiary soil in my fingers and pulling until my knuckles chap and bleed. The sun grows maliciously close, grows hotter, grows harder. Everything is alight: the world is consumed by fire and flame.

I woke, panting and sweating. Something about that dream disturbed me more than I will ever be able to place. I dreaded going back to sleep: I shivered, I shook, I wept to keep myself awake. I could not bear the thought of the dreams that could have happened if my lids had shut. There is always a risk to sleep.

Thankfully, though, I was spared from its ravages. Light had begun to creep through the silent glass of our barrack window, high and perched near the ceiling. It lighted small and incandescent portions of the faces of sleeping soldiers; it caught dust and detritus in the air and lights it like a contagious flame; it saved the room from its own slumber.

Now, I am a generous and appreciative man, if anything, and I am grateful to many things, many places, and many people, but somewhere - subconsciously, subversively, just at the fringe of alertness - I am grateful to the morning. I am grateful to the sun. I have things that I could dream poorly about.

I walked to the mess hall early.

The Lambda Factions refuse to embrace the Combine measurement of time. The Combine measurement of time means waking up as the Combine calls you to wake up, sleeping as the Combine bids you to sleep – adopting a Combine standard is the ultimate form of submission. A few of us recalled the allotments (latitudes, longitudes, meridians, and parallels) involved in the old time system – the Greenwich Mean System. Writing all this down, we took this system as our own. It was another way to rebel.

It may have been 4:00 AM, four-thirty at the latest, when I arrived in the mess hall. The smell of our standard fare – crepes suzettes, eggs Benedict – had not yet begun to fill the area , and Anaise was sitting mournfully in a corner at a fiberglass table. I seated myself facing her.

She looked up. Her expression was indeterminate: watery blue eyes set with resolve in a sharp, but not unattractive face. Her features were hard, but tolerable. Sadness did not look at all comfortable in her features; a subtle, upturned nose between quick, lucid eyes never seems at ease with melancholy.

“Bonjour. Ca va?”

Anaise frowned, crushing her chapped lips together.

“Mon couer…” she called me. “My dear.”

“How are you?”

“Sleeping. Waking. Eating. Eventually,” she responded, belying some complaint or another.

She set her lips, which were beginning to sour and turn viciously downwards, back into an expression of boredom, maybe even disdain.

I nodded, slowly. Understanding.

“That’s all we can do, these days. Non?”

She breathed in deeply.

“Oui.”

We sat in silence for some awkward moments. When you’ve seen as much as we had, history stifles words.

“We’re running a raid today,” I announced, hesitant.

Anaise looked up plaintively. Her eyes glimmered with expectancy and mourning.

“What? Where?”

I shouldn’t have mentioned it: the raid was on biorecycler on Street 3. I couldn’t tell her that. I could never bring that up, ever.

“Don’t ask. Anè, just don’t ask,” I replied, standing up and moving away quickly. There is no way she could find out.

“Juneau, where are you going?” She stood up and began to follow me, moving briskly, with determination. “Tell me.”

“I can’t… Just shut up. Don’t ask. I...”

There were no words that could be said.

She stared at me, her mouth agape.

“You…” she said, pointing an accusing finger at me. She shook her head and sank back on her heels. Her eyes were brimming with formative tears. Her pink lips quivered.

I looked at her for only a moment, with the sincerest sympathy, trembling on the edge of remorse and resolve. Then I began to run away, plodding heavily at first, and then moving to a sprint.

Anaise stood, silently, in the center of the mess hall. Another woman came up to her and tapped her on the shoulder, and Anaise sank down into a seat beside her, heaving with painful sobs.


ENTERPRISE PIERRE HOSPITAL, BEMECOURT, FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 – 4:13 AM

The halls of the hospital used to smell like pine and recovery, before the war. Now they reek of injury. Once a refuge for the victims of the plague, in the misted ages of human history, and the local farmers, they are now trod by heavily armed Combine guards, their faces guarded in porcelain-white. Somewhere in the hospital, an expectant mother strains brutally against the pangs of nature. Her lips contort to push forth gasping screams. The world begins and ends here.

Juneau Curielle stands nearby. His wife – or, she was before the war - is on top of wrinkled hospital sheets, delivering his child. There has been no ultrasound, no physician’s kind words to reassure them. The birth is controlled by fate and fate alone.

A forehead begins to emerge, promisingly. Juneau holds his breath. The forehead begins to advance, and shoulders follow, then arms, then hands, body, hips, legs, feet. A doctor, his forehead wracked with sweat, brusquely takes the emergent newborn, snips and clamps its umbilical cord with care as the afterbirth spills forth onto a spongy surface. A girl.
The child does not cry.

The doctor shuts his eyes and grimaces. His eyes meet Juneau’s, and Juneau understands. He holds out his arms, into which the doctor passes the child, a stillborn.

Juneau surveys the newborn with trepidation and regret. He stares for a moment at the baby’s shut eyelids, still covered in the material of childbirth, brick-red and sticky. A Citizen Patrol soldier, his eyes black and impassive in bone-white plastic, forces his way through the door. Like a funeral train, he moves slowly. He grips the father’s shoulder firmly, turning him around without care. He holds a small, black bodybag, one of many issued during the invasion and activation of the suppression field.

Without remorse, the Combine soldier wraps his armoured hands around the stillborn fetus, and tugs. Juneau tugs back. With a cry of rage, Juneau heaves back his foot and kicks the soldier in the shin. The soldier drops to his knees, and the lifeless fetus hits the floor with him.

Looking at it, Juneau is nauseated. He vomits at his side. The soldier stands up, holding the body. He slides it in the black body.

The body is destined for the biorecycler – an imposing, black-clothed building on Street 3, bedecked with smokestacks that release a vile gray-green smog - destined to become war materiel for the Combine.

Three Combine soldiers come stampeding down the hall, prepared to retaliate for Juno's attack. As they approach, he sends an elbow flying into the eyepiece of one of their masks. It cracks, as the soldier falls to the ground, writhing. His eyes are visible, and stuck with glass: bleeding.

Another soldier crouches, and delivers Juneau a painful blow to the thigh with a stun baton. Juneau reels, and kicks the guard in the groin. The soldier retreats several feet. The third soldier wraps an arm around Juneau's neck and tilts his head backward violently. Juneau's hair falls into his face. The first soldier, rising, raises his stun baton menacingly over Juneau's face, and brings it down on his forehead.

Nova Prospekt is not a pleasant place.



Juneau turns, and watches Anaise. Her head is rested on the table in a growing puddle of glittery fluid. Tears. He cannot mention anything.