CHAYA FRIEDMAN

No Grave Will Mark the Spot

It was very hot, so very hot, that he could barely breathe. He felt the sweat running down his arms and back and neck. The helmet on his head was orange, and it shone under the sun’s glare, hot, nearly melting. The earth was wet with heat and humidity, seething with heat, breathing fire. He walked slowly, sweat stained, his face burned and red, covered in stubble. Sometimes, Windy felt like the world was closing in around him, in this terribly hot foreign land. Sometimes he watched the trees, green and lush, and the vines wrapping luxuriously around each other, and he heard the call and hum of the birds, and the clicking of strange bugs deep in the green. Sometimes he felt the sweltering heat of the place and he could not breathe.

It was driving him mad.

In fact, it was driving them all mad. He had come with a boatload of men, all of them
eager for the new job, in a new place.

“Anything to leave the city,” they said. And they came, leaving families behind with a quick goodbye, feeling their hearts swinging like pendulums, filled with the thrill of seeing the world.

Windy had felt it too. He had felt the pull of seeing that ship, the way the wood shone, the way the masts stood. He had yearned to leave his life behind, watching that ship, watching the sea beneath it, cool blue and indifferent.

He sat down beside the others, remembering, and swatting at the black bugs that swooped around him. They sat on a fallen tree, all of them, and he was surprised to see that he suddenly resembled them. All of their faces were his own, red and dark with black stubble, hot, eyes dark.
“Why,” he thought uneasily, “we all look alike!”

They sat together, their machines breathing and waiting silently nearby, and they ate lunch, chewing methodically on bread and cheese, teeth working mechanically, mushing the food into paste on the tongue.

At last, Barlowe stood up. He was the leader of the group, and he was big and burly, his
muscles showing beneath his shirt, sweat beading his forehead.

“Back to work boys,” he said. “We got a job to do.”

The rest of them stood up slowly, the heat a heavy blanket on their bodies, suffocating them. The machines turned on slowly, one by one, those great big dead-alive machines, orange and rusting, hot to the touch. They moved slowly through the greenery and then suddenly they shot out with great big saws and a tree fell to its death. And again and again, the killer machines sniped with their deadly tools, and the trees fell quickly. Windy sat, maneuvering carefully, his eyes blurred suddenly, and the machine whirred, moving out of his hands, and he blinked and braked, and the enormous tractor wheels skidded and sparked in the mud. Barlowe’s voice came through on his earpiece.

“You all right?”
“I’m fine. “
“Good.”

A clicking sound, and Windy’s breathing was the only noise in the monstrous beast of a machine. The heat pushed him, choked him, and his head was heavy on his shoulders. He shut his eyes, opened them, shut them, trying to remember his own name and failing. The forest was brilliant green, and hot mist rose up from the rivers, and the boiling streams, and the ponds that bubbled over with heat.

“Who am I?” he asked himself. “Who?”

He had seen nothing but green for days, heard nothing but the buzzing sounds of green, felt nothing but the heat stuffing blackness in his ears and eyes and nose. His fingers were wild on the controls of the machine, pressing buttons, felling trees, quickly and furiously he worked, and the trees fell, more and more, with thundering crashes they fell to the ground. Suddenly he hated the trees, their leaves, the smell of them. He hated them, and the hate swelled in him in a great burst, and he knew he was going mad.

A red light blinked in the corner of his eye, and he knew he was going fast, too fast.
Burlowe’s voice rang in his ear suddenly.

“What are you doing? Slow down man, you’re heading straight for Hayes–”

The sound cut off. The monster machine sped, and suddenly Windy didn’t have control, the buttons unresponsive to his fingers, the levers and gears moving on their own accord. He smashed into the beast in front of him, another machine, glowing orange and metal, ringing with a thousand sirens.

A yell pulled itself from his throat as the two machines crashed, glass splintered and he flew through the air, his body tossing and turning. For one ridiculous moment, he thought he was flying, and joy flooded his limbs. And then he was snapped up in the green, his bones crushed, glass peppering his face, and his orange hard hat cutting into his head.

He watched, half dead, half alive, as Haye’s machine was destroyed by his own, as Haye’s body landed with a thud to the ground, as the machines fought, beasts, dead-alive breathing things. He watched as another great orange savage beast came crashing through the vines, and collided with the other two. He saw Barlowe, desperate, his arms flailing, as he too was tossed from his seat, and he watched with one eye shut and bleeding, as the machines murdered each other in cold blood, melting wrecks of orange and metal and buttons.

They had all gone mad in that place.

Days passed, and Windy Hart felt his body slowly dying. His hunger tore through him, furious, groaning. Blood dripped, and he was afraid to move, to touch his brokenness, to see how bad it all was. He was terribly afraid. The forest swelled with heat, burst with it, and it slowly began to reform, renew itself. He watched as the vines crept silently and slowly around the wreck of machines and their deadness, hiding them, growing on and around them. Trees slowly regrew, frighteningly quickly, and Windy watched in agony, his whole body comatose. After three days of no food, and drinking the rain that fell occasionally from the sky, Windy heard a shout. He recognized Burlowe’s voice, hoarse and rough, calling. His heart sped, and he began to push himself using only his arms, in the direction of the sound. Slowly, slowly, he began to move, his body scraping the dirt.

And then he stopped.

A vine had wrapped itself around his leg, and was pulling him back. Windy cried out, but the forest soon smothered him.

And he was gone.

Chaya Friedman is a young writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York.