by Sascha Stronach
Terau Farm used to grow half the colony’s wheat. That’s what made it first an objective, then – as it changed hands again and again and again – a target. If it could not be held, it must be denied to the enemy. Fire alone wouldn’t do the job, it would merely slow down the harvest, in a year or two the farm would be useful again. The night before the Liberty Vanguard troops abandoned it, they snuck out and sprayed chemical defoliant amongst the stalks. The opalescent sheen it left behind covered the wheat, then seeped its way into the soil so anybody walking it barefoot would find their soles covered in suppurating blisters.
Abigail Terau returned to the farm a week later, and found a leaflet on the ground showing an LV soldier standing amongst a field of golden wheat. The constant artillery barrages had thrown up so much smoke into the atmosphere that the planet seemed shrouded in permanent dusk now; it was hard to breathe. She found her father under the ash-stained sky and tried to dig him a grave – first pushing against the unyielding dirt, then striking it, then smashing it while sweat streamed down her forehead – but the sheen had hardened the soil. She was a strong girl, with hands almost as hard and calloused as his, raised knowing that her labour kept her people fed, but she couldn’t make a dent. The sheen clung to the tip of the shovel. She held the tip up to her face to inspect it and the fumes stung her eyes.
She beat the shovel down into the soil, again and again, chipping away at it less like it was dirt and more like stone. As she dug, the distant thunder of artillery rattled what glass remained of the farmhouse windows. It soothed her, reminded her of the storms outside when she’d been young, when her father had told her that she was safe inside, that rain was good for the crops. When the distant explosions aligned with the tip of her shovel striking the earth she saw herself as a goddess of storm. An hour passed. There was a hollow in the earth deep enough to hold a cat, but not a father.
Father’s favourite saying had been do what you can. Are you tired? Hurt? Do what you can. Is the task in front of you too big, too scary? Do what you can. A little hole is still a hole. A little work is still work. If you can only do a little, ask whether you can do more, then do what you can.
Dozens of dead fascists lay out amongst the dead wheat. The air should’ve been thick with buzzing flies but something about this place was too toxic even for them. Abigail found an LV man half-buried in wilted stalks. He was older than her, maybe seventeen, with the peach-fuzz of a beard beginning to show. His jacket was covered in medals. All the LV men had too many medals, so they looked more dashing on parade, better models of genetic and social purity. A year ago, before things got really bad, one had stopped her in the colony market and told her he could put good genes in her, that she’d never need to work the fields again if she left with him. He’d been older, greying around the temples, and his eyes were filled with kindness, and for a moment she’d reached for his outstretched hand before her father found her and chased him away.
She raised the shovel and brought it down on the young soldier’s face. Meat and bone parted more easily than the ruined earth. It felt good, the same way it felt good to plow a furrow, to remake the world into one better for plants to grow. Abigail brought the shovel down again and again, each shuddering impact sending a trill of pleasure through her.
“I am thunder,” she said, between strikes, “and you are meat.”
The horizon lit up with a rocket strike – a dull thud then a wet crack like opening a rotten melon, a wan white light blooming through the ashen sky – and she stopped for a moment to admire it, before returning to work. When there was nothing left of the head but pulp speckled with shattered teeth she began on the hands and feet, then his arms and legs, then his body. When she was done he was unrecognisable as human, barely even as an animal. Ribs jutted up from his meat like grasping white fingers and she smashed each of them in turn with the shovel’s flat. Her arms and back ached but the pain felt good, clarifying, burning away the parts of her that didn’t do this sooner, that held back and waited for the world to change instead of standing up and changing it.
Where his blood met the sheen in the soil it clotted and formed a barrier – the two did not mix. The work had blistered her hands and torn those same blisters open, smearing the haft of the shovel with blood. She held her open palm out over a stretch of dirt and let the gentle drips strike the earth like rain. Wherever her blood fell, it clotted into little waxen lumps. She pushed one in with the tip of the shovel and it broke apart, the liquid inside it bursting out, striking the soil, clotting again. She went over to the boy’s broken body and smeared his blood as far as she could. When she was done all that was left of him was one great wound, a picked-open scar, his uniform a bandage barely covering it, his bones and medals twisted and shattered, clumps that could’ve been anything.
The soldiers had broken into the root cellar. Everything edible was gone. They’d gotten into the grain too, clearly tried to cook and eat it themselves before giving up on it. Where it had fallen on the floor not even rats had gotten at it, and she wondered how long she could stay here without the sheen infecting her, choking her, turning her into meat. The soldiers hadn’t thought to spike the grain with the sheen. Father had been the one who used to carry the sacks of grain, he insisted they were too heavy for anybody else. Each of the sacks had been torn open with a knife or some other tool, and she had to carry them with aching care so none of it spilled. She got a single sack out to the field, and despite her best efforts left a trail of grain behind her, every single seed of it blighted the instant it hit the soil, an oily snail-trail that followed her up from the cellar. She took a handful of grain over to the mess that used to be a boy, and began to sow. Careful now, keeping the grains inside the blood pattern, in and around what was left of his organs, inside the ruin of his skull to feast on his brain.
Would it work? She didn’t know. She doubted it. All she knew is that if Terau Farm could not bring in a harvest come autumn, tens of thousands would starve. Her father’s words rang in her head: do what you can. If thousands starved, it was better than tens of thousands. If she saved only a single life, she had still saved a life.
Each dead fascist contained enough blood to hold a few handfuls of grain. That blood they’d valued so much, that had been so pure, hit the ground just like hers and clotted. She laughed. It was an honour they didn’t deserve, that from their vicious bodies might spring fields of wheat. Maybe they’d win the war and another fascist would stand in the field and take a lovely photo amongst the golden stalks. Maybe they’d put that man on a poster, and crop out the earth beneath him. Maybe more fascists would grind the grain into flour and even more fascists would fill their bellies with fresh hot bread.
Maybe not though. There was no way to know which way the war would go, who would win, who would eat the bread that came from her grain, whether the grain would grow at all. It didn’t matter. In the face of death, in the face of famine, in the face of every fascist pig, she went back to her father’s words: do what you can. She rolled the bodies of the dead into the furrows she and father had plowed in the spring, then she took her shovel and broke each of them down. Shovel in the joints, the throat, anywhere soft; boot on the step of the shovel. She started with simple pressure but as the hours went on the pushes turned into shoves. She shoved the tip against the throat of a grey-haired corpse and stomped on the step, driving the shovel’s blade right through. His body was soft and rubbery like butter and she didn’t know whether he was putrefying in the heat or whether the sheen was breaking him down, but his head came entirely off and she considered kicking it before she realised it would be a waste of blood.
She worked long into the night, butchering ditches filled with corpses, up to her knees in waxy clotting blood, and she whistled while she worked to distract from the aching in her muscles When rocket exhausts lit the sky she would stop for a moment, and bring her shovel down in time with each impact.
“I am the thunder,” she’d hiss through a throat raw with ash, “that comes with the storm.”
Then she’d dig, and sow, dig, and sow, falling into an easy rhythm. Her blisters burst and reformed, burst and reformed. Her shovel was almost completely red and she did not know where the blood from her hands ended and the blood from the fascists began. It didn’t matter, it would fertilise the soil either way. For all their talk, blood was blood.
She lost track of time. When there were no more bodies left, she emerged from the furrow and saw the sun, so dim through all the smoke she hadn’t even noticed dawn break. It was right above her – it must’ve been midday. The sun itself, almost gone entirely, lost to war, guttering and weak.
Not lost, though. Not yet. Abigail took a handful of grain from the sack, sowed it over the furrow, then collapsed smiling; among the dead; aching and raw; – lulled by thunder, into a long and dreamless sleep.
Sascha Stronach is a Māori author from the Kāi Tahu iwi and Kāti Huirapa Runaka Ki Puketeraki hapū. She is based in Wellington, New Zealand, and has also spent time in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, which have all inspired parts of the fictional worlds she creates. A former tech writer, she first broke out into speculative fiction by experimenting with the short form. The Dawnhounds, her debut novel, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award at Worldcon 78. The sequel, The Sunforge, is out now.
Long Trek Press 
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