Chapter 13: WHEN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, WELL YOU HAVE NO CHOICE (4)
Moa was a bit lost. And now what do I do? It was a question he never really asked himself. He had a dynamic life and he knew how to fill up the insignificant holes in his schedule.
There, he was really devoid of idea. He had idea on how he could spend his time in general; if he had the leisure, he would open a good book, he would invite random guy to a Mikado table, these ideas, he had plenty of them.
What were missing were ideas relevant to his actual circumstances.
The first idea that occurred to him was to leave the premises and go directly to the mess. After all, he was not welcome at the briefing and only his pride had kept him longer in front of the cultural center.
However, he cleared this idea from his head. There was always traffic on the main avenue and someone, even a corporal, leaving this particular street alone, it would have been suspect. Most of the simple soldiers did not that the midday meeting was taking place here. For most of the people, this street was only abandoned. If several people left it simultaneously, one could decently think that they returned from an orgy. But a single person, this was not enough for an orgy.
It would have piqued the curiosity of anyone seeing him. And if this anyone came to see what was going on here, the connection between Moa and the commander's lying body would not be difficult to establish.
In addition, at the mess, the arrival and departure times were recorded and he could not explain easily the gap of a few minutes between the signing of the report he had handed to Ferrash and his arrival at the canteen.
Furthermore Ferrash could certify on his honor, it did exact a toll on him, that Moa was the only person present when he entered the cultural center.
Ferrash's return was becoming more and more pressing. He had to save time to think of a scenario without too many inconsistencies.
Hiding the body was a possible option.
He was gifted enough to find inappropriate places to hide an individual, as evidenced by hours spent without being found during hide-and-seek parties with his friends at the training camp.
To tell the truth, it was not he was so difficult to find, even for trainees with limited intelligence and imagination. Often, his friends forgot that he was one of the participants and simply did not seek him.
In this little street, the hiding places were not missing, as long as the doors of the buildings were not all locked. It was a measure that dated back to the time when the cultural center still had its civil use. The buildings were gradually left vacant after the departure or the death of their occupiers and they were had requisitioned by the municipality. In any case, no one wanted to buy in the neighborhood anymore and politicians did not want to see the settlement of wild squats beyond their control. The neighborhood should have been burned to make way for swinging clubs, allowing the worried parents to monitor their children's activities in the cultural center while having a good time themselves. The war had ended this project. The buildings were not burnt, but their entrances were walled up.
If Moa wanted to hide the commander's corpse, he had to do it quickly and well, while taking into account the fact that the commander's dead body was not an easy load to move.
In addition to Ferrash's imminent arrival, the other officers would quickly start asking questions. The commander was a diva who knew how to keep others waiting, he was naturally always late but this delay never exceeded a few minutes.
His disappearance would quickly lead to the establishment of a research team and it was certain that the body, even if well hidden, would eventually be found. After all, Moa did not have the proper equipment to dig a hole deep enough. Even so, the earth stirred also required time to settle again. He also didn't have quicklime or caustic soda to get rid of a body or even stop its putrefaction.
From the moment the army mobilized the means, the death of the commander could not remain secret for very long.
The scenarios got tangled in Moa's head and he ended up getting lost in his thoughts, forgetting to act out.
The best thing to do was probably to go up and warn his superiors of the death of the commander. This would show his good faith, a culprit would not show himself to notify his crime. In addition, this death involved the entire third regiment. From his position, the commander was a living representation of the third regiment, someone very important, and not just in the heart of each soldier. The other officers were entitled to know.
In addition, with any luck, the commander was intimate enough with some of them to have given them an account of a potential abnormal heart condition. The best scenario would be for an officer, preferably a very high ranked one, to testify to this fact. Otherwise, he would decide of something when the time came.
He was going to contravene a direct order, Moa was aware of it but what this order was worth when the life of a man was at stake.
He had his script. Ferrash had still not come down so there was still no witness. He was still the sole holder of the truth. It was not a death he came to report. It was a rescue mission he requested. While waiting for Ferrash to return to ensure that he had successfully completed his mission, because a loafer could never be completely trusted, the commander arrived on the scene.
Without warning, he had collapsed. A little panicked about what to do, the doctors, at least the most competent were to picking up their assistants at this hour, the time to find them and mobilize them to the infirmary; it would be too late, especially since the infirmary was not the nearest facility.
So that was why he got on, hoping that a more experienced officer knew first aid.
On second thought, it could work. There were no holes in the explanation, it was credible and he did not forget to remain humble in front of his hierarchy. If moreover one of them knew some gestures of first aid, he even thought of rubbing him up the right way.
Confident, Moa entered the cultural center.
He climbed the stairs that led him to the fourth floor two by two. The adrenaline rush made the effort imperceptible even if the hormone acted on its intestines at the same time, making his self-control difficult.
On the fourth floor, he came out of the stairwell to take the corridor leading to section B. His intestines were still playing tricks on him.
At the other end of the long corridor that ran right through the building, he saw Ferrash returning from section B.
It made Moa's blood boil. He still had to punish the impudent soldier who had made fun of him.
So he returned to the stairwell. He had his modesty and what he was about to do was better to be kept secret for a better surprise effect. He calculated that with Ferrash's walking speed, slow for once, it would take him fifty-five seconds to cross the corridor. The timing was tight but it was in his strings.
Ferrash had indeed entered the corridor and he hadn't realized that Moa was now waiting for him at its other end. Oblivious to the situation, he was advancing quietly, at a much lower rate than the regulatory pace in force in the army.
It seemed like he had gone in trance. In the hall on the eighth floor, he had met all the highest officers of the regiment. It was an honor for him. He already had the opportunity to cut the hair of some of them, but to see them there, reunited; this was not the same thing. He was like a kid meeting his idols. He even received the congratulations from a captain. He had to restrain himself from asking them to sign his uniform. It wouldn't have taken much for him, and if a briefing was not the place where the fate of the regiment was played out, he would have allowed himself to ask permission to stay in a corner to observe. But he had not allowed himself, knowing his place in front of this panel of stripes decorating the shoulders of these men and women. He felt he was so small. Well, he did not know that in fact this meeting was useless and that the most important subject dealt with today would be whether to change supplier for mustard at the officers' mess.
He was looking out of the window at the increasingly clear sky. A herringbone formation of migratory birds was heading south. Ferrash ignored it because he was not well-versed in ornithology, but it was a massive group of gray goose accompanied by gray cranes which gave the start of the migration season. This group although one of the first of the year was not particularly precocious with regard to the observations of recent years.
In the stairwell, Moa had removed his pants which he had put there, without taking the trouble to fold them because he had no time and he was holding his boy's briefs in his right hand.
Ferrash was going to have to eat these boy's briefs.
Ferrash was still ten meters away from the staircase in section A, namely an about fifteen second journey when Moa came up abruptly. The latter had miscalculated. Ferrash had been slower than in his prediction. The flight of wild geese had captivated him and it caught his attention, hence the asynchronous meeting.
Moa wanted to take advantage of the element of surprise to physically take over his opponent and compensate for his morphological inferiority.
They stood ten meters from each other. One was no longer wearing his pants and was holding smudged boy's briefs in his hand. The other wore all the pieces of his uniform and held in his hand a pen with which he played, passing it from one inter-finger to the other, from the thumb to the little finger and from the little finger to the thumb.
The surprise attack had failed, but the surprise effect had worked. Ferrash was indeed surprised to meet Moa here when once his report transmitted the latter should naturally have gone to eat. Equally surprising was the corporal's outfit.
Realizing Ferrash's hesitation, Moa still didn't bother to sport his mean smile. He contented himself with throwing his body towards Ferrash, determined to accomplish the mission he had assigned himself.
A rag-pickers' fight ensued. There were several observations to make from this: a) whatever his build, Moa was finally good at this game, b) an advantage of size and length as could at first glance benefit Ferrash was not an advantage while fighting in a cramped place, c) the determination of a superior to punish a soldier who had disrespected him depended directly on that superior's temper, and Moa was not the most convenient, d) when we were fighting right next to windows with simple glazing, it was not good for soundproofing and for the energy balance of the building, but in addition it was very dangerous.
Take the street level as the altitude zero in a new reference frame. Everywhere at a higher altitude, there was a danger called the law of universal attraction. If it was under an apple tree, the associated risk was to get an apple on the head. There would be little consequence during the spring because the apples hadn't had time to ripen, maybe a little pain, but no more. Later in the summer, as the fruit began to ripen, the consequences could be more serious, ranging from subdural hematoma to concussion, including delirium, which led you to write equations to explain how the world worked.
The further from this zero someone was, the more the risks this someone was exposed to were subject to consequences.
The two men were fighting fairly close to emptiness. The corridor ran along the facade of the building. What isolated them from the outer compartment was only a thin layer of poor quality glass because at the time of construction of the building, standards did not require special efforts to be made on this item.
In the circle of gambling, the event which followed would have benefited from interesting odds. Many informed players could have make it rich putting a ticket on the fact that one of the two men would cross the glass to get some fresh air, especially with the assistance of his opponent in this business.
Moa would not have been the hero of this story if he so stupidly died in the first chapters, so what the need in maintaining a false suspense is...
It is obvious that the unfortunate who fell was Ferrash. And four floors were not small matter in a building with standard floors; it was still a drop of fifteen meters high.
At this height, the consequences associated with the danger of the universal law of gravity were at best quadriplegia, possibly associated with various cuts related to glass shards that crossing the window would produce.
In his misfortune, Ferrash was lucky. The impact had been absorbed by the commander's body below. In his misfortune, he also had bad luck. He was not a cat and his control over his large body during the free fall did not allow him to place himself in a position that would have permitted his survival. His head, the first to touch the ground, had missed the body of the commander, slamming dryly on the granite pavers. From a hardness point of view, granite had the upper hand over a man's bone, and indeed, the fractures all around Ferrash's skull let out a mixture of blood and other cerebral substances.
About fifteen meters below Moa lay the body of Ferrash overhanging the lying body of Commander Hacion.
At this distance and point of view, it was child's play for a death counter as experienced as Moa to determine that Ferrash would not come back from the dead, even if emergency physicians were pursuing him.
Alas, it was already the third victim the war had caused today, at a time when normally everyone ate quietly and should not die, except from food poisoning in the refectory.
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ludo2776 ... to be continued in the next chapter
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