Desertcrawler

1

Three years. It had been three years since Jake had last seen his wife and daughter. Three long years with that god damned war going on out there. People had been recruited, coerced to voluntarily join the army, but Jake was not. He was transferred from his software firm to the Gellenum Reserves in a city far away from home and was posted there as a supervisor. He had no option of leaving. He was shackled with shackles that can’t be seen with the eyes but can be felt constricting one’s hand and legs to that extent when one can’t move them even an inch. Three years he lived in that bondage, three years he had been a slave of fate. His Lily must be quite a girl now, he couldn’t wait to see her all grown up! These three years he had only one photograph of hers, a photograph where she was three years old. He had nothing else, except for the memories, to remember his family. The Masters of the Reserves saw to that, for they did not want the men to lose their homesickness. As to what purpose it served them, Jake could never quite place it in those three long years under their invisible flogs. 

But now, who's gonna stop him from meeting his darlings, now that he was out of that hellhole after the three darkest years of his thirty-year-old life? Excitement had been ignited in his frozen heart when he heard that the war had been finally over and he had been set free from the clutches of the Capitalists; no more days to spend sweating inside that stifling Gellenum Reserve, no more nights to lay awake in that creaky cot where mosquitoes had cocktail parties on his body. He was gonna go to his dear old Mary and his dear little Lily and his heart forgot the bounds which once had been keeping him inside that Reserve.

Before the war, before Lily, before Mary, before everything, when Jake was a teenage lad, riding his two hundred horsepower two-wheeler engine through the streets of Zone 10, which had been his parents’ home, he always dreamt of a future where the world was destroyed by all the hatred that bred in the chests of people. He pictured a world where cities were turned to deserts by weapons much more powerful than a thermonuclear warhead but much more precise in its operation too, much more controlled. He dreamt that he would be flying over the skies one day and look down upon these city-turned-deserts and say, “Told ya! That’s where your guns and your bombs would take you!” That was a crazy fantasy back then. He had no idea of how right he was going to be. His father sent him to Zone 13 to get that software engineering degree. “In this world of ones and zeroes, a software engineer is nothing less than God,” his father would say to him in one of his brooding moods. Jake went, but not without standing against his father’s ideas. In the end, Dan, Jake’s father, had to curtail Jake’s monetary privileges to convince him. Jake went, and he became an engineer of the software just as his father wanted him to be. He found a job in a software firm there in Zone 13 and a few years later, there he found Mary, the love of his life. She and Jake married three years later, and a year after that they had Lily. Jake was twenty-four at that time, quite young. How Mary turned him from a lad scorching the streets of Zone 10 in his 200hp beast to a man who willingly bound himself with the responsibilities of growing a family, only God knows; even Jake himself wasn’t sure. And then came the war. Jake had been married four years then and wanted a little break from the responsibilities. He saw his opportunity in the war. People were being recruited for the army in large numbers. But Jake didn’t want to be on the battlefield. That was too risky and he would have to live the rest of his life with the trauma. So he applied for the officer’s post. He got recruited as the supervisor in no time. But… just when he landed happily on the Gellenum Reserves, the Capitalists overthrew his government and took over the place. They were ruthless to the workers and Jake had to suffer too… for three long years. By the end of that year, he had the worst case of homesickness. And now, after all that pining away for his home, for his daughter and his wife, he was finally going home. The war had ended, and the Socio-colonialists won. And he was going home.

Jake was almost halfway through the route. His Solo-Jet was working as perfectly as the day he had come to the Reserves in it. With the speed that the Jet had been able to catch up, he would reach his home in Zone 13 in less than…

“Attention all flights flying over Zone 15! Turn off all your engines immediately! I repeat, flights flying over Zone 15, turn off all your engines!” the portable communicator which lay behind him on the passenger’s seat, blared at the top of its voice. But why? Jake was flying over Zone 15 and he couldn’t see any feasible explanation as to why he had to turn off all the engines of his plane. If he did that, he would hit the ground with no mercy at all. Why the heck would the control room issue such a weird and illogical comm…

Grrrrrm!!!

There was a loud explosive boom above him; Jake could hear it even with his noise-cancellation headset. It could not be thunder, no way. There was no cloud. What was it then? What the hell was it?... and then Jake knew what it was.

All the displays on the control panel of the jet went off at once. The built-in compass lost its wits and went round and round and round. The engines turned off on their own. This meant only one thing to Jake. What he had just heard wasn’t thunder for sure; it was the worst solar storm he had ever seen. He didn’t know solar storms could be that bad. But now, as the ground rapidly approached him, he had no time to think about some damned solar storm. He fastened his seat belt tightly and from the compartment beneath the control panel he pulled out a photograph of his wife and daughter, and pressed it hard against his chest, closing his eyes, waiting for the collision. 

The nose of the plane hit on the ground and ripples went up through the metal, crushing and ripping the flying beast apart. The wings tore apart from the jet as if they were made from paper and flew off to another hundred meters. The wheels too broke apart from the jet and kept rolling on and on for not less than half a kilometre. Inside the plane, the leather covers of the seats were shredded to pieces and sponges from inside of the seats came protruding out. The control panel broke in the middle and would have crushed Jake’s skull, had it not been for the elephant foam airbags. But the metal of the machinery in the nose of the jet had protruded into the cockpit and had lodged its sharp edges in the flesh of Jake’s legs. His bones had turned into powder, his legs were like sausage. He cried, ripping his throat, but his voice could be heard little above the banging and crashing of the beast. He couldn’t open his eyes, he dared not to see what he would see if he opened his eyes. When all things became still, the silence veiled over. As if it was a shroud placed over the plane. Jake’s screams died with the other noises. He wasn’t there. His self had drifted off from his body to a place of comatose. A place buried so deep inside him, that it couldn’t be said to be a part of him.