Chapter 12: WHEN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, WELL YOU HAVE NO CHOICE (3)
To describe Moa as someone who did not know fear would be an abuse. To think he was a fearful coward subjected to all phobias would be just as much.
Moa was a man, some would say mundane and his relationship to fear was all there was in common.
On the top of a ladder, he felt dizzy so that he could never have worked in telecommunications to repair cables along the roads. He was uncomfortable in total darkness, deprived of his best performing sense, but it was the same thing for everybody who was not blind. Coffee made him sweat-cold but it was a matter of taste. He was not reassured in front of a clown, but who could be reassured by someone with such deformed feet and covered with so much makeup that likely hid something fishy?
It was only rational fears, intrinsic to human species, legacy of evolution when a danger could mean the end of a bloodline.
Phobias, irrational and thoughtless fears, these were things Moa, with his Cartesian temper, didn't want to encounter.
To be afraid and to understand why, it was normal. There was nothing to be ashamed of. In addition, a soldier who claimed to be fearless was often a soldier who died quickly.
Moa couldn't call himself exempt of phobia. If he had one, a shameful fear linked to a child traumatism, it was the phobia of snakes.
As a child, when he still lived in the family home, Moa did not particularly like snakes. Many of them are dangerous species for humans, killing people in some exotic parts of the world. Abhorrence humanity had for those animals wasn't uniquely religious; it was deeply imparted in the genome.
At that time, when his parents watched films about the attack on these reptiles, he shivered happily. At the time, nobody took parental advice seriously, thinking that a man should be a man. It was not uncommon to expose his male children to ultra-violence, pornography and bad productions with doubtful special effects where a bunch of brainless people finished eaten by mutant wild beasts. Many people even thought it was interesting from an educational point of view. The old tales naively called for children; did they not overflow with stories much more traumatic according to modern customs? If TV could provide a similar content, where was the point in reading stories to children?
It wasn't until a significant increase in the rate of psychopaths and youth crimes was noticed that people began to question themselves.
People started to wonder where this new societal phenomenon could come from. At first, the school had been implicated but since many parents could not keep their children at home and babysitting was an activity which was likely to cause the number of suicide to increase, it was decided that the school was not responsible. Then the video games were accused. The rules had difficulty renewing themselves in new releases, contenting themselves with an escalation of spectacular pictures and realism, helped by the advancement of technological progress. Some production studios were closed, and some game writers were put in jail but for such measures to show their efficiency; it would take a few years.
The arrival of the war shortly after was a boon to the well-being of society, making it possible to retrain a large part of a generation that mental hospitals and prisons could not take care of.
It was after watching such a film where a group of brainless young people visited a virgin jungle for absurd reasons and were devoured one after the other by a giant anaconda escaped from the clandestine laboratory of a mad scientist who had himself been eaten by his creature that Moa had among his worst cold sweats. For more than three months, he had to look under his bed, in his closet and in the drawers of his school-desk to see if a giant anaconda was not hiding, so that he could to slip into his bed and sleep in peace.
Could this have characterized a phobia? No, not at this stage, it was only the normal reaction of a six year old child who had difficulties differentiating reality from fiction. With a little rationality, Moa would have realized that a fifty meter anaconda could not biologically exist in this era and that such an animal would never have entered the drawers of his school-desk and closed the drawers behind him.
The best proof is that when three years later he saw an animal documentary about the reproduction of boas, he was not particularly afraid. He was not reassured, but neither was he prostrate, sweaty, in a corner of the living room as he might have been after the documentary about snake charmers projected the evening the next day of the film about the anthropophagous anaconda.
In real life, Moa had spent many years without ever having encountered a snake, at least without being certain that the piece of wood that he thought he saw moving was indeed a snake.
It was only a long time later he met his first snake.
He was already in the army. At that period, the front was crossing an area famous for its zoological park and that day, the front line had not moved excessively, leaving everyone the leisure of a free time, in place of moving of the war infrastructures. The fight would resume the next day a few dozen meters away.
Moa decided to make the most of this free time to visit this park and above all, took this opportunity to give Little Hamster a glimpse of exotic biodiversity.
The start of the visit was uneventful. Moa had avoided the big cats square so as not frighten Little Hamster.
After a while, Moa felt the need to go. It was completely normal for a human being and unlike wildlife humanity did not use urine as a means of communication and was not satisfied with a tree trunk in public areas.
According to the map, the nearest restroom was on the other side of the vivarium.
Moa did not add too much thought about it and he entered the building to quickly go to relieve his natural need.
Inside, it looked like in the panties of a nymphomaniac, hot and humid. Moa had only never traveled far enough to recognize the typical climate of a tropical forest. Trainers were feeding the animals and opposite to the terrarium of an albino python, it was there that the accident occurred.
Attracted by the smell of the rodent, the python whose terrarium was not well-closed came out and approached Moa, trying to climb his leg. Reminiscent of buried memories, his sphere of intimacy raped, constriction of his calf, why Moa was frozen did not matter then, the fact was that he had frozen.
Fortunately, Little Hamster was quick-witted. Instinctively, it knew that the python was there for him, that the python was one of its most formidable predators. Was it to relieve its master or to save its skin? Today, it was still hard to say. He had nevertheless jumped from his master's shoulder and had found refuge in a crevasse the snake could not reach.
The python had chased after Little Hamster and had released its constriction around Moa's leg but he would never forget the feeling of the warm skin of the reptile on his own skin. It was summer and Moa wore Bermuda shorts.
The incident had finally ended when the trainers had managed to control the frenzied python. Sheepish, they had explained that the snake was still a young one and it was not very familiar with his life in captivity but if Moa had taken the trouble to read the sign, he would have known that it was not recommended to enter with a rodent with him.
Moa couldn't do anything. He had been on the verge of losing Little Hamster. It was a guilt he would carry thereafter, until the death of the rodent. There was still a trauma that Moa still couldn't manage.
This was probably what characterized a phobia.
Goosebumps took over his body and sweat was starting to condense everywhere on him. Something lukewarm was sliding down his thigh, drawing on his right adductor muscle.
Rationality dictated this something was not a snake. The general morphology looked like a snake but differed in too many points. The temperature was too high for a snake given the outside temperature. The geographic location did not stick. The area was not known to harbor many snakes and during this season, they were no longer active. In addition, snakes in the region often lived in wooded areas, close to small streams with flush stones with significant thermal inertia where snakes came to rest and to increase their intern temperature. In short, a snake had no legitimate reason to be here.
Knowing all of it was one thing but fighting phobia was another matter.
Suddenly, coughs behind him brought him back to reality.
He was facing a building; he was alone, bare ass, with a smudged thigh and someone had meanwhile entered the side street and was approaching him without him noticing.
There, surprise, shame, a hodgepodge of emotions caused his gestures to go faster than his reasoning skills.
He turned around, crossbow in hand, loaded with his boy's briefs, headed straight ahead, at an angle such that he would touch the face of a man the size of Ferrash at a distance of eighteen meters, the distance that separated him from the entrance of the cultural center. Finger on the trigger, the shot went away.
The man, because the coughs came from a man was not so far away, just ten meters but he was smaller. He got hit directly in the face and stumbled back. His fall should not have been too dangerous; the celerity was low and at most, he would have had a slight head trauma accompanied by a small retrograde amnesia. This amnesia would maybe make him forget what he had just seen.
However, this was not what happened. The base of his skull was impaled on an old rusty nail, itself planted on an old wooden board treated against rotting.
At best, the man had caught tetanus if he was out of date with his vaccines, and now, it was the best case.
That short moment, Moa had taken over his emotions. He no longer thought of what was winding down his thigh. The sweat that had been beading a moment earlier had already evaporated, leaving him with a feeling of freshness that helped him understanding what had just happened.
With an expert eye, Moa looked at the rib cage of the man. It did not move. Going up to the face, his nostrils showed no activity either. The air flow around them was already perfectly stable. A little bloodstain seemed to leak from the back of his head.
By way of tetanus, it must have been a very virulent and aggressive form as his vital prognosis was engaged.
Moa came closer and jumped in fear. The man who lay was not unknown to him. He was one of those higher up of the third regiment, Commander Hacion. Moa's expertise in this field could not be challenge, there was already no more doubts; the commander was dead.
If we were talking about probability, what had just happened was probably out of the ordinary.
Some events may have been inevitable, such as the optimal distance between Moa and the commander. He was not at eighteen meters, at eighteen meters, Moa's boy's briefs would have brushed the top of his skull and would have continued his race, before their parabolic trajectory began to make them descend due to gravity and air resistance, the aerodynamic profile of the boy's briefs was such that the range of the crossbow was less compared to a conventional bolt.
There thus existed two windows where the commander would be hit, one at about ten meters, where he was standing and one much further at nearly thirty meters. At nearly thirty meters, the commander would certainly have enough time to dodge the by's briefs. Their aerodynamic profile could not induce a speed comparable to a conventional bolt and a hardened soldier such as the commander had reflexes above those of an average person.
However, at thirty meters, his coughs would not have been audible for Moa. No more than at eighteen or at fifteen meters. It was only when he approached the ten meters mark from Moa that this one could heard him.
Then, the sequence of events had been too rapid to influence the result in another way.
Where the probabilities made the event out of the ordinary was that it was difficult to foresee that the low inertia of the boy's briefs could induce any force resulting in the fact that the commander could be unbalanced towards his rear.
After all, the aerodynamic profile of the boy's briefs could not be compared to that of a conventional bolt. It was undoubtedly the surprise that played an important role and the surprise was what most influenced the most difficult variable to take into account in a probabilistic model: human reactions.
What the commander saw was an UFO flying towards his face. He could not distinguish what it was, the speed was too important to have a clearly printed image on the retina that the area of vision of his brain could interpret. An object that quickly reached your face, it was a danger and the reflex arcs played their role to the full, here it was what was fatal. A slight movement of the head backwards was sufficient for his whole body to leave its lift triangle.
When the boy's briefs arrived, it gave the little movement it needed to produce an imbalance from which it was impossible to escape.
As for the presence of a piece of wood with a prominent nail pointing upwards even Moa had not noticed on the path of the commander's fall so that the nail, although dulled by corrosion, penetrated directly in the commander's cerebellum, I just leave you free to calculate it, all I can say is that the number obtained is very low.
A tad and it would have been totally different. The noise level of the commander's coughing a little louder or a little weaker and the boy's briefs landed on his chest or passed over his head. If he had a better control of himself, the commander would have succeeded in restoring his imbalance. If the piece of wood was recovered with an anti-rot treatment, never the nail would have held so well anchored.
When the hands of destiny played with a man fate, this man was very small and he ended up in a dirty state.
A quick glance to the right and then to the left allowed him to verify that there had been no witness to this small scene.
The truth always belonged to whoever could tell it and he was the only one in power. It was a tragic accident but some elements were a little embarrassing to be made public. Moa had his own modesty.
He didn't have time to lament the fate of the general. He was already dead and it was always better to take care of the living first, especially when the living one was himself. People wept over a dead man, it was called mourning but there was a place and a time for it. In the army, it was called an official ceremony for someone of the rank of the commander and not a sordid street during lunch time.
At his feet was the lifeless body of one of the senior officers of the third regiment, one of the commanders-in-chief of this part of the front.
A question was bothering Moa, could he be charged for the death of the commander? In his opinion, no, it was impossible. All that had happened was an accident, annoying because it resulted in the death of a commander, but an accident. One could not accuse him of negligence. If there was negligence, it was on the part of the commander. What had he had to cough? It was the triggering event that would lead moments later to his death.
If the commander had been a loafer, it wouldn't have been a problem. In every decision the military made, there was an analysis of the target: price ratio. For a loather, mobilizing a team to investigate was clearly not a financially attractive decision. The loafer was dead but loafers were many in the army. The thesis of the heart attack, the simplest because the most important cause of death would have been privileged to close the file.
The commander was a senior officer and the military could not be satisfied with a sloppy investigation. The commander was a public figure and many would wonder. It was the kind of death that usually involved significant diligence.
Moa knew the majority of the members of the investigation team. He had to deal with them during the investigation about the misdeeds of Dr. Lingus. By tradition, they preferred to go towards the simplest thesis, provided that less than a dozen material elements contradicted this thesis.
The simplest thesis, considering the age of the commander, was stroke. Statistics supported this explanation.
The statistics, yes, the facts, it was questionable. There was no witness but Moa was still with his buttocks in the open air, standing at the side of the body of the commander.
Realizing this point, he found a surface a little damp and not too abrasive to wipe the inside of the thigh. He got his boy's briefs back, put them on and put his pants back on.
At least appearances would be saved. Ferrash would be back in a few minutes at most. He was only responsible for submitting a report, not for attending the meeting. The round trip, given his fairly athletic physique would not take him long.
Moa dared not imagine the rumor that would have followed within the regiment if Ferrash or anyone else had seen this painting. Rumors went even faster than the truth in a vacuum like the army and even if he did not particularly care about how others saw him, he held on to his reputation.
And there was this nail on the back of the commander's skull.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
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ludo2776 ... to be continued in the next chapter
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