Chapter 17: WHEN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, WELL YOU HAVE NO CHOICE (8)
Along the way, he found a little calm again and he could refocus on himself, an introspection session that previous events, chained one after the other at a pace that had almost escaped him, had preventing him from doing.
Overall, Moa was not as affected as his colleagues by the death of the commander. At the heart of an event where everything happened so quickly, the hormone surges could not give way to emotional outbursts. It was the instinct of any man who wanted to survive. On the other hand, the other officers were not putting their lives on the line. They were entitled to be overwhelmed by their emotions.
Moa had been an actor in the events and then he had related his free interpretation of them, making it that in the end, what the other officers had heard only coincided in broad outline with what had really happened. The appreciation of each side could only be different.
So the death of Commander Hacion was a tragedy for everyone, including Moa. He knew this death would affect his work. However, thinking twice about the events, he had another interpretation of these deaths.
Dekor was known as a skirt-chaser, at least, he liked costume parties where the soldiers cross-dressed as schoolgirls, nurses, kittens, etc. To speak vulgarly with a vocabulary borrowed from the lexical field of cooking, many were ready for oven and had already gone to the saucepan.
Moa, the saucepan, it was not a container where he wanted to end up and he didn't want to be braised either, especially by a cook like the commander. When Dekor had coughed and made his presence known, Moa had his pants and boy's briefs removed. Adam's outfit, it was also a disguise the commander was fond of. When moa turned around, a safe distance was certainly still respected between the two men. Dekor had not yet invaded his intimate or his personal sphere of intimacy. With a distance of 10 meters, he wasn't even in his social sphere, still in his public one. However, this possibility could not be excluded. Dekor was walking towards him, he was approaching surreptitiously and it would have been a long time before he entered successively the social, the personal, the intimate spheres and finally himself.
Before the Court, this kind of plea was called self-defense. What Moa had done was just self-defense. For now what he had told about the events had obviously convinced the other officers but it was not possible for him to be absolutely certain others would not question what the current official thesis was. If a problem came up, he could always plead self-defense. If he hadn't shot, his rectum would likely have been torn and he would have risk to develop an irritable bowel syndrome, those were facts no one could deny.
It was with a clear conscience that he arrived at the infirmary.
…
During his short walk to the infirmary, the other officers had gone up to the eighth floor and they began to get depressed. Some were bent on aperitif cookies so that there were only those with cumin seeds left, because it was not their favorite taste.
Establishing a strategy, when seeing Dekor acting, everyone thought that they too could do the same. But in fact, it was a more complex operation than it seemed. You might have spent your youth in an improvisation troupe, your theatrical techniques allowed you at best to take the floor but not to organize the putting of an entire squad to death, as it ought to be.
It was probably best to send the news about the death of their commander to the headquarters in the capital. After all, if they held the positions they were at, it meant they were intelligent, at least enough to build a network of influence propelling them to their place.
Gathering news from a front to the headquarters was no easy task.
The unconventional route was the most effective. It was enough to organize a press conference and if the news reported was deemed important enough and interesting for the audience, then the press would do its job and massively disseminate the information. However, it was not possible to predict what would be significant enough. The officers were not journalists, let alone belonged to a media editorial conference. Sometimes, what the military deemed to be prominent only made a line poorly written by a freelancer in the obituary section.
Moreover, contacting the media took time. They had to find a place to invite them to hold the conference, they would have to write the modalities, and then find the most up-to-date telephone directory to send out the invitations, and if some had been omitted, it was the promise to have a scene; the journalists in question had the power to harm the third regiment publicly. The ire of a journalist was something the department of public relations could not face up to.
They would have to go through the conventional route. The first thing they had to do was to find the right form to send back so that the information did not get stuck in an office of a dark wing of an obscure building in unclear city in a department which should not have existed anymore and that it reached its destination.
There were bureaucracy experts in all the regiments. As operating very specialized tasks, they were all senior officers. It was hard for a common officer to disturb one of them but they didn't have the choice, so a colonel was already on his way to the mess to find one.
They would then have to kowtow for a few days, let the storm and the turmoil pass, while waiting for reinforcements. They could expect to suffer during the next jousts but as long as they avoided the debacle, the situation would not be irremediable. One way or another, losing had become a habit here. The worst that could happen was just that the margin in the defeat risked increasing but this was something only the finest statistical analysts would realize.
A question remained: how long would they have to hunker down? When you knew the time it took for a soap to wash your hands in the restroom to be transported from the capital when all the procedures had been done in accordance with standard practice, it was easy to imagine the time it would take for a brand new commander to arrive.
After this remark was highlighted, the atmosphere which was beginning to get passionate fell heavily, like the fog on a steep-sided wooded valley during a humid evening, when the temperature dropped with the disappearance of the sun.
Everyone could identify with Moa, up to their neck in shit.
…
Moa had arrived at the front desk of the infirmary and was completing normal procedures when it was not a medical emergency. Decently, recovering two corpses was no longer a medical emergency. He explained briefly what had happened, without giving the identity of the dead because it did not concern the secretary.
It would take a few minutes to mobilize a team. As he had a little time ahead of him, and there was an assistant not too far away, Moa called her out and asked if Cunnie was free. The assistant explained to him that, right now, she was assisting a doctor in an operation and, with a knowing gaze everyone could understand that the intervention was actually taking place directly into Cunnie's body. Everyone could be but not Moa who was not very good at deciphering this type of allusions.
As his sweetheart was not free, he decided to wait outside the building. There, a convalescent soldier had gone out to smoke a cigarette.
Moa remembered that this soldier was a traditional member of the second squad and had taken part, two days earlier, in a fight which had turned out to be a violent one. The coalesced had lost. Of the twenty-six deaths two days ago, eighteen were during the second joust. The reason the senior officers found to explain this fiasco was the bad use of the-caterpillar-that-restarts formation, leading to a violent counterattack from the Grenati's army.
This soldier was implicated in the so called the-caterpillar-that-restarts formation with a few of his teammates. During the maneuver, he was isolated with two other guys. He was injured and he escaped. The other two did not have his chance, they died.
As soon as the doctors decided that he had recovered enough, he could go back to the battlefield and get killed again. Considering he could go out alone to smoke a cigarette, his injuries were not as severe as Moa had thought and his recovery shouldn't take much time.
Rummaging through his pockets, the convalescent soldier realized that he had no lighter or matches. He asked Moa who handed him his lighter, his name was Come-back, as it was the name of many lighters.
Moa wasn't a heavy smoker but he could smoke a cigarette from time to time. This was a simple way for anyone without asthma or a very important respiratory illness to break the ice and start a conversation with a stranger. Popular belief also made it a good appetite suppressant. Nicotine present in tobacco had the effect of activating the reward-circuits by increasing the secretion of dopamine in the brain. In the absence of tobacco, the circuit was broken and people tended to compensate with food, another major provider of pleasure and dopamine, resulting in significant gain in weight in many people in withdrawal. The appetite suppressant effect was just a saturation of the reward-circuits making the pleasure related to food unnecessary. Anyhow Moa doubted those merits attributed to tobacco; otherwise he would have lit a cigarette too. He was getting hungry and he hoped the situation would be all over quickly.
After several unsuccessful attempts from the injured soldier to start a flame, Moa remembered that his lighter was empty. Remembering Vilpers, his brows frowned.
Today was a day that had started normally. However, very quickly everything went to the dogs. Moa was dying to see this day ending quickly. However, it was not yet 12:30 pm and a day was still 24 hours long, whether he liked it or not.
The injured soldier returned the lighter to Moa. At first glance, he had remembered its name. He looked a bit angry and even if respect for a superior enshrouded his speech, he explained to Moa that he could have simply told him that he had no fire rather than handing him a defective lighter, that if he wanted to take him for a ride, there were other ways, finally hoping that he had laughed all his soul, he was going to ask another lighter to someone else.
The injured soldier had already left and hailed another passing soldier.
At least this short monologue in a level of language suggesting the poor education and instruction of the hard working class in a southern environment had distracted him from his misfortunes. These people, those from the south, were difficult to kill. They were stupid in many ways but their survival instinct, all you could expect from a peasant played the role of fully comp insurance during the jousts. It was no wonder that he had survived two days earlier when so many brilliant soldiers did not have his chance or his instinct to put them in the exact place where certain death could turn into a stay in the infirmary.
Raising his head, Mao realized that all over the coalesced camp, soldiers were busy. The first wave of soldiers had left the refectory and the effervescence surrounding this particular hour when they were still safe but when the time of the death knelled as the hour of the resumption of hostilities was approaching made the atmosphere sparkle, as the many grains of dust at the bottom of a glass for a fizzy drink.
This sight was a very normal scene for the regiment even if at this time Moa normally left the briefing and traditionally prepared to eat. All in all, it was a spectacle he did not have the opportunity to observe every day.
At first, it amused him and he observed everything around him with curiosity but the humor of the scene remained questionable and finally his mind moved away from military considerations, from the waltz of soldiers warming up, the comings and goings, the ebb and flow, the hustle and bustle, the commotion of so many little hands who were busy checking the equipment, bringing food and ammunition, or putting the uniform in order before the fateful hour.
Moa had let his brain go to an imaginary Mikado leg.
The shipment had a complex structure and the first shots were not obvious. He did not imagine an especially very strong adversary, not a beginner either, just what was necessary so that in the end he won, triumphing with peril that could bring him glory. After a few exchanges, finally, the game accelerated.
Suddenly, a lieutenant put his hand on his shoulder, interrupting the game, just after well mastered difficult shot that would have open the door to victory.
Moa was a little disappointed but he was disturbed by a lieutenant so he could not show too big of a reaction. Moreover, the lieutenant was the leader of the undertakers' team who came to find him so that he could lead the way directly to where the taking away was to take place.
For the first time of his life, Moa had the privilege of riding the hearse, which was not given to everyone. In fact, apart from the team itself, it was normally not allowed. Here, the circumstances dictated, they authorized themselves to deviate from the rules. In a usual situation, Moa would have had to run in front of the hearse to lead it, but since in the end the two people they were to pick up were already dead, no one would complain.
The hearse was a recent and spacious model. And even if they were a little tight, the seats were comfortable. These few hundred meters seemed to last only a short time. In this case, one minute and thirty seven seconds had passed from the instant the engine started to its stop at their destination.
Unlike the other officers who had half-worded complained about the presentation of Moa, no one made inappropriate comments, probably because they were used to strong smells or simply because they drove window open.
Everyone got out of the car and the lieutenant explained to Moa that from then on they were the ones handling the situation. In addition, they would call the road crew themselves, it was an oversight that customers often overlooked so there was nothing to worry about; they did it too.
As one of the undertakers went to put on security banners to condemn the street, the guard posted on the sixth floor came out of the cultural center and headed for Moa.
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ludo2776 ... to be continued in the next chapter
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