GRAVESKIES

Chapter 25

Her boots trudge through the mud. The blood on her hands won't wash off with water. She rests her head against the rocky wall of the trench, where the days spent within have been scratched with the top of a fallen comrade's shoe. Th sounds of cannons thunder against her eardrums, duller and duller because her hearing's growing numb. Every earthquake echoes with whiplash in her body.

When the bomb drops, general panic instates itself over the Division. A soldier is blown to smithereens several inches away from her.

She doesn't remember her first battle going like this.

The speed with which the pain compounds is insane. Years over years of memories overlay into an inescapable labyrinth. She stumbles and crashes from one room to the next. The wounds pile on top of her, scratches over scratches over claws over arrows on her skin. The piles of corpses make her want to scream. She trips over them. Slays them. Mutilates them. Eats them. Is them. Walks amongst them, her legs, her footsteps, her hands that shake them—when has this happened?

Have all her friends forgotten that they are monsters first?

Ryujin scrambles through the ruins of a storage deposit for food. Battle's been going for days and she's so hungry that she kills one of her former groupmates from training. She stabs her seven times because the girl was reaching for a fallen loaf of bread and out of spite because the girl hasn't been injured yet. A few hours later she's hungry again, so she bites off her finger.

Ryu's never been to a wedding but she's seen many people rape.

What were their names? How could they...?

In the next vision she's seventeen, cowering behind the wall of a nearly demolished wall, holding a Colonel's fallen purse tightly against the gushing, oozing deep wound in her stomach. There's pills inside the bag, she doesn't remember ever being that terrified, she feels it now and it's superhuman, she is so terrified that she swallows them all down, coughing when they tangle with the blood and intestine splinters in her throat, because she'd rather be killed by the drugs than by man-driven cannons. She doesn't really know how drugs work.

Ryujn watches her sword dig into soft, squishy, pink flesh—someone's belly or someone's breast or the underside of someone's thigh. She watches it in slow-motion, then in reverse, then an endless echo of the same cursed motion, red-white blade going in, denting the flesh with languid slowness until it pops open like a balloon, and blood spurts out. Neon lights flash all around. The blood is on her hands, in her mouth, under her eyelids, plastered over the walls of her mind, flooding every nightmare she's never had. It's in her eyes but she can never touch it because she forgets.

Is this all real? Did she really witness the deaths, the bloodshed, the illness? Who lies to her every time? She visualizes it clearly now, the dam that keeps her memories from registering, the godforsaken block she's been catching glimpses of, whose existence she hadn't been aware of until now.

She slams her fist against the dam again, it shakes, cracks, and splinters fall in the form of memories of Storyteller. Every memory she's ever had of Storyteller. Storyteller rises from a soft couch, throws off a blanket and their bodies start melting; the pain is excruciating, they burn up like candles, the liquid wax of their flesh unites and makes them into sour sough cream or toothpaste. They share the same space and Ryujin wants to cry because her mother decides what she does or doesn't eat.

She's lived all these moments, she's felt every bit of suffering, yet she forgot it. She relived the misery and ratlike hunger of every battle. Each and every kill consecutively, every mission she threw herself into, never tired, never traumatized, what was there to be worried about, it's just war! It's just a slot machine, just a gamified version of post-traumatic stress disorder, it's who gets the most notches under their belt to make big boy transactions, get themselves a mansion and a radio show. Transactions of life-for-life mean nothing because that is how the food chain works and they are only the dust under the shoes of megacorporations.