Bag of Bones

Author : Jessie Blues

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly

Saying, “Death to all those who would whimper and cry”

——Bob Dylan

I.

They never found Gabriel Reyes’s body.

He finally managed to get a free ride on the way out of town. It’s a military Dodge, its paint redone. It was probably once totaled and then salvaged from the back end of a chop shop. When the door opened he had no idea where it would take him. Glancing at the man-made crystal dangling off the rearview mirror, he had a feeling the trip would soon be over. He wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to hop on a stranger’s truck?” The driver said. He was a middle-aged, sturdy man with a faint western accent. He wore a tank top and a pair of jeans. There was an old gunshot wound on his neck and another on his shoulder. Inside his waistband was a semi-automatic pistol—an adapted Glock .45.

“No safer than letting a stranger hop on.” He shut the door, settled against the coarse surface of the seat and glanced at his face, which looked twisted from the rearview mirror. The scar split his face into halves like Moses did the Red Sea. He wasn’t sure which half was more appalling. “Thank you,” He finally remembered what should be said at times like this.

“I am going to Arizona,” the diver said. “Where are you heading?”

“Indiana,” he said.

“You see, it’s faster if you take the route through Nevada,” the driver said as he took a cigarette out of the carton on the dashboard and offered it to him. The man didn’t take it.

“You can drop me in Texas,” he said. “I can go north there.”

“That’s a hell of a detour,” the driver shrugged. “You seem to be in a hurry.”

“Yeah, a detour,” the man said. “It’s fine. I am not in a hurry.” He was wearing an old-fashioned jacket—a bit too old-fashioned for someone of his age—and a pair of dusty combat boots. He kept his eyes on the road surface as if some target might pop up, until he eventually ran out of patience and rubbed his eyes.

“Where are you from?” the driver asked.

“The place where I’m heading,” he said. “A small town in Indiana.”

“I won’t ask why you are going there,” the driver said. “You were a soldier.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Which unit?” the driver said.

“I dealt with the Omnics,” he said. “That was years ago.”

“Fuck the Omnics,” the driver burst out laughing. “Yeah, that was years ago. I thought we were toast, end of the world, and suddenly the news said we won. That was fucking unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable,” he said.

“You dealt with the Omnics. Ever killed any of those retarded tin cans?

“Yes,” something flickered in his eyes.

“How many battles did you fight with them?”

“Many times,” he said. “In Washington D.C., North and South Carolina, California, wherever the crisis broke out.”

“That makes you at least a captain or something,” the driver asked, surprised. “They didn’t give you enough army pension? No medals?”

“I was just a soldier,” he said, thinking maybe his jacket was too eye-catching. “Where were you posted,” he asked the driver, “when you were in the army.”

“Syria, Afghanistan, Middle-East,” the driver said. “That was years back.”

“I would say,” he said, “welcome to the age of peace.”

“Fuck the age of peace,” the driver says. “Cheer up, mate. Don’t give me that look of ‘your wife just running off with some bastard.’ Look, you are,” the driver patted on the wheel, “just like this one, not yet screwed beyond repair.”

He made a half grin, “yeah, sounds like a silver lining.”

“Ha,” the driver said, “you must’ve rubbed some big shot the wrong way, but nowadays vets are not so well compensated as those good old days.”

He agreed, “no, not at all.”

At a checkpoint, the driver rolled several notes together and slipped them through the window. The man on the inside, clearly knowing what he was doing, covered the notes with his palm and pushed a button to lift the barrier, as if letting through another group of dystopia stowaways. He did not ask what was in the back of the truck, nor looked up to check their faces.

After leaving the checkpoint, the driver and the man complained about the weather in California and exchanged some military anecdotes. In the end the driver got him to New Mexico. While passing through El Paso, he ran into a bunch of drunken hooligans, who shouted Spanish at him—a slurring reference to his deceased relatives. He managed to catch a few curse words, which he had picked up after joining the army. In the army, you not only acquire surviving techniques but also learn to speak F words in all sorts of accents. When curse words in all imaginable and unimaginable forms roll off the tip of your tongue, language is reduced to a mere vessel for venting anger. The organ for language itself is never designed to voice justice.

Anyway, he managed to get a car and some cash, in a way he would never have imagined in the good old days.

See, this is what I call the inevitable and the human nature, he suddenly recalled this piece of confusing remark, we are all waiting for the moment to see who we really are. Some are just more honest with themselves.

The room smelt coppery. An old radio was buzzing. He didn’t suppose he belonged here, nor anywhere else. He was like an age-old relic that was kept in a time-freezing capsule, a relic unearthed way ahead of the proper time. Relics like him should either be buried where it was discovered or left alone to wither away.

He planned to cross Texas on his own.

Though all he wanted to do was come home and attend to some simple business, he was not stupid enough to expect a carefree ride straight home. Nobody knew what was lurking in the next second—maybe a lucky coin or a lasso from some Taxes killer? He drove eastward along the intercity highway. He heard gunshots, screaming, and cries while passing a village. He eventually slammed on the brakes and took a U turn.

See, you are playing hero again. It was that voice again, which sounded absentminded. It was probably a hallucination or flashback. That’s what you are good at. Not a compliment, nor a mockery.

Although he had no gun or bullet-proof vest, bullets never deal much harm to him as they do ordinary people. He pulled over, grabbed the key, and made sure his money and important items remained where they should be. He thought he might need a weapon, and found an old pistol beneath the cushion.

You’ve never changed much. The ghost murmured to itself in the wind.

“Yes,” he answered as he grabbed the pistol and aimed somewhere near. Firing pin hitting the primer, the recoil felt familiar when the bullet left the bore. One is never able to suddenly thinking things through, unless a bullet pushed those things out of one’s head, along with his brain matter. All history present in that visage, some stories go on and some don’t.

He put the pistol back and got off the car bare-handed. He had no use of it. He’d avoid using weapons whenever the circumstances allow. This was once the principle they acted upon. He personally gave the order. They were not meant to inspire more fear—they were hope.

This is hypocritical. The voice said blandly, calm like a pool of dead water.

“No,” he patiently explained it to the voice, again and again. “This is loyalty.”

He woke up to a start in the deserted wilderness around midnight, cold sweat all over his neck, a faint silhouette of something becoming fuzzy in his fading nightmare. The nightmare stirred nothing in his memory.

The light in the service station was on, shining upon the Lone Star sign, which stood there like a lonely beast looming over him. He looked around before starting the engine to hit the road again. Sometimes he recollected some unimportant conversation with that voice and his absent-minded replies.

It’s three o’clock in the morning. What the hell is your problem? He couldn’t exactly recall the reason for that fight,

Where are you? He just reached a coordinate.

We ain’t going to hold this goddamn position no more. They had but to abandon that base.

Look at what you’ve done, what all of you have done to me. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He put himself together and chewed on this nightmare. Back then it was still a good dream, as they were fighting shoulder by shoulder.

You are a complete jerk, Morrison! He replied, imagining the voice and tone if Reyes had been around. “OK, Reyes, I am a jerk if you say so——as everyone ever walking the earth appears to be a jerk to you.”

You’re like one of those brainless four-star generals, who know nothing but to feed the media with eulogies and climb their way up by stamping on the dead bodies beneath their shining shoes.

“Easy,” he said. “Those politicians definitely aren’t as brainless as they appear to be.

Do you have to be so full of yourself?

“It’s you who’s determined to tear my office down.”

“Hey, are you still there? I need another 70 cents.”

He looked up and forced a smile to the cashier who was waving at him. “Sorry,” he half-grinned, knowing that the cashier had one hand on the double-barreled shotgun beneath the counter. He fished into his pocket and found a one-dollar coin. “Keep the change,” he said.

“Have a nice day,” the cashier still looked tense.

“Wait. Can I have these?” He grabbed a few coke-flavored candies out of the box and gestured towards the cashier.

The cashier looked at him.

He avoided eye contact, took his soda and crackers, and walked to his car. It was just before dawn. Daylight broke into the endless expanse of dark blue, tearing a rugged slit, from which various shades of crimson leaked out. He felt into his pocket. Everything was where it should be, nothing less, nothing more.

II

He went back to Bloomington (where Jack Morrison aka. Soldier 76 was born). Although not a religious person, he sat in a Catholic Church, listening to church goers pray. He spoke to no one, nor did he throw in a few bucks to light a candle—so that when the ill fate fell upon him he wouldn’t have God to blame, no excuses such as Jesus didn’t want me for a sunbeam or Jesus set me on the path to a narrow door. The priest was dressed in a long rope, stood decently at the pulpit.

He was surrounded by parishioners, whose faces blurry, each holding a music sheet in hand. He left before they turned things surreal. The bell-ringer had already made the warning. He wasn’t sure if this was going to be a mass. He went out. Every loss is a chance of discovery. Perhaps this is to remind them of how much they possess, or sometimes to warn them of the endless pain of having a mate who thinks differently, especially after that person is gone.

He finally threw a few bucks into the donation box. He wasn’t thinking of anything, no wishes nor disappointments.

The day it happened he was half-minute later than Reyes. He had always been a punctual man, but an emergency call from up high the command chain held him up. He was at the door, several meters further from the center of explosion. He thought people would surely find bullet holes and gunpowder residue from his Helix Rockets, but none of this mattered.

He woke up trapped between the baring wall and the rebars from the ceiling. The place was dead quiet. He could hear nothing save for the ringing in his ears——post-traumatic hearing loss, he thought, nothing he couldn’t handle. A rib bone into his right lung along with concussion-induced vertigo that was negligible so long as it was not suffocation or coma. As he tried to crawl his way out of the ruins, something from Reyes’s direction collapsed again. He kept digging, face blank, until he could no longer breathe. That night he didn’t bother checking the number of casualties. Just for once, the number replaced the faces of the dead, just the number itself. They lost multiple researchers, agents, and supporting staff. He didn’t know if their families received medals or death pensions.

He knew they didn’t recover Reyes’s entire body, nor his. There was a funeral though. He had no idea what was inside Reyes’s coffin. Once the investigation was over, construction waste was shredded and dumped into the ocean. What was left was sorted, filed away as evidence, or handed to the victims’ families.

He tried to look into it, only to find nothing.

The case didn’t become some unsolvable mystery. IA’s investigation file said causes of death were gunshots and suffocation. Very soon the ME who signed the death certificate died accidentally—it was seafood poisoning. With so many coincidences, you almost feel everything is exactly arranged this way.

He was brought back to his hometown in Indiana and buried there. He thought he might have heard someone sneering. Now it seemed like a joke was buried beneath it. He had no clue what was inside his coffin. He was there in Reye’s funeral and his own funeral. The announcement of death—a medical process originally carried out by doctors—was now taken over and executed by the press and the army. He didn’t like his epitaph. He was not lying there, and he didn’t like Reyes’s, either. Because those were sheer lies, not at all what they wanted to say in the end.

To some extent, he knew the divergence between Reyes and him are going to get one or both of them killed. However, things like this were completely unpredictable.

Just like playing Russian roulette—you never know who’s the last one standing.

Once again, he saw his own statue in the center of the town, youth looking, a smile that he would no longer make. The statue looked like an American fool who was deliberately put on an altar of idols. It’s like an over-rated American dream rising from a common village and falling into pieces when its flames were about to die out. There was a bouquet in front of the statue. When he got closer he realized it was plastic.

“Do you want to have a picture with Overwatch Commander Morrison?” A young woman holding a camera smiled at him, baring her teeth and gum. She has dark brown skin.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Every visitor wants a picture with him, but we’re having fewer and fewer of them in recent years, certainly not like when we just won the War against Omnics.

“Really?” He asked absentmindedly.

“Yes, a couple of hotels went broke and their owners ended up back on the farm. Are you looking for somewhere to stay?”

“I am not a visitor. I am from here,” he said. “Anyhow, Jack Morrison is out of date.”

“Maybe,” the young woman said. “but he’s at least a hero.”

“No,” he said. “Jack Morrison ain’t no hero. He’s a liar.”

“How could you say that?” She was upset. “He and his pals saved the world.”

“But he failed to keep his promise. That is lying.” He said.

“Hey,” she said, eyes wide open. “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it though no matter what. That is courage.”

He made no reply.

“Morrison is a courageous man,” the young woman said. “We at least should give him that.”

He went back to where they buried Jack Morrison. The place was far less visited than the statue. He half kneed and stared purposelessly at his own date of death. He finally took out what’s in his pocket.

“I’m gonna figure out what happened.” He poured out his and Reyes’s dog tags from back the service days, two for each one. As he buried them, he murmured to himself: “maybe you’re right, Gaby.” He paused and continued. “Maybe we’re both wrong.”

He waited for a long time.

“At least I owe you an explanation, Gaby,” facing his own gravestone, he thought so and said it.

In the end he stood up slowly and patted on his knees to get rid of the dust.

——END