Episode 2: Ghosts in the Desert
TRUE STORY is not a true story. It is a work of fiction. Similarities to any person, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
PART 1 : The Rise
Wednesday, October 6, 2001, 12:17 p.m.
Brights Gym
Boston, Massachusetts
“Afghanistan?” Bryce Mason says as he braces himself against the heavy bag.
“Yup,” Amma Portland replies as she unleashes a combination of hard punches and kicks into the bag.
“You do watch the news, right?”
“No more than I have to,” Amma says, before delivering a high roundhouse that makes the chains that attach the bag to the ceiling rattle.
“They don’t even have a U.S. embassy there anymore. When they withdrew the troops, the Taliban completely took over.”
Amma replies only with a one-two-one combo and a powerful front kick that almost knocks Bryce off his feet. He takes a breath and fixes his grip on the heavy bag.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her,” Alison Cartwright says from her behind her laptop. She’s sitting on a corner stool, using the side of the old boxing ring as a backrest.
“I mean, can you even travel there right now?”
Amma redoubles her focus and launches into a flurry of devastating side-kicks.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Alison says as she checks for flights. “Though doing so is contrary to pretty much every international travel advisory out there.”
“And just when do you intend to take this ill-advised little jaunt?” Bryce asks Amma.
“Tomorrow,” she replies, before delivering a lightning-fast spinning backfist, followed by a lethal series of elbow strikes.
“Ya gotta put more hip into them elbows, Ams,” comes the gravelly voice of Benji Brights as he enters the room carrying a box of sparring gloves and headgear. Amma pauses for a moment, watching his stocky frame wander by. He doesn’t turn his head to look at her. She’s not sure his thick neck would even allow it.
Amma shadow boxes for a moment, practicing throwing the elbows with more hip.
“You hang on his every word, dontcha?” Bryce says. “Bryce says something, it’s in one ear, out the other. But Benji Brights offers a piece of advice and it’s taken right to heart. Now, why is that?”
Amma gestures towards a huge banner on the wall. Bryce looks over to see the towering image of Benji “Lights Out” Brights in his prime, peering down at them with that infamous death stare, a gleaming, golden belt wrapped around his thick waist and three more draped over his bulging shoulders.
In the moment it takes for Bryce to get the message, Amma delivers a perfect cross-elbow into the heavy bag, knocking Bryce clean off his feet and onto his backside.
Amma wraps her arms around the bag to stop its swaying.
“Okay,” Bryce says. “I got the message.”
“Such violence,” Alison says, shaking her head. “Are you okay, Bryce?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” he says, getting gingerly to his feet. “I mean, I could use a little ice for my pride…”
He takes up his position holding the bag again and Amma begins an in-fighting sequence, working from a Maui Thai clinch and delivering piston-like knees to the bag.
“So, you’re really heading to Afghanistan tomorrow morning?” Bryce asks.
“Yup.”
“Amma,” Bryce says, placing his hands on her arms, pulling the bag closer and her along with it. “You have a fight in three weeks.”
“I know.”
“You need to train.”
“I know.”
“It’s dangerous over there. Like, really dangerous. Especially for Americans. Especially for…”
“For?”
“Well, for women.”
“That’s why she’s taking you with her,” Alison says.
“How’s that?” Bryce asks.
Amma slides her arms out from underneath Bryce’s and places her hands on his muscular arms.
Images of love and lust. Herself, reflected back. In the midst of a workout. Powerful, moving, sweating.
“I figure a strong, rugged, all-action man like yourself can help me navigate the Afghan desert.”
The two of them in the desert. Him holding her in his arms. Protecting her. Now they are naked, kissing.
Amma releases her grip.
“Okay, I can do that,” Bryce says.
“Two tickets to Kabul,” Alison says, tapping at her laptop. “You leave tomorrow morning at 6:35 a.m.”
“Wait. How long is this flight?”
“About twenty-one hours,” Alison says, gleefully. “So, you might want to take a book or something.”
Amma pushes the bag into Bryce and steps back, pulling off her gloves and unwrapping the layers of tape and gauze from her hands.
“A twenty-one-hour flight to a war-torn country under Sharia law, three weeks out from a fight?” Bryce says.
“Well, when you put it like that…” Amma teases.
“You kids have fun,” Benji says as he wanders back through the gym again without turning to look at them. “And don’t come back dead.”
Amma smiles and turns to head for the showers.
“When we get back – alive – maybe you can take Alison out on a date, Bryce,” she says, without looking back.
“Oh, I, uh… I didn’t know you…” Bryce stutters
“I didn’t! I mean, I never…” Alison says, shaking her head.
“Oh, okay. Well, I mean, we don’t have to…”
“I mean, I guess some dinner or something wouldn’t be… terrible.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, I mean, let’s do that.”
“Okay, right. Yeah, it’s like, it’s just dinner.”
“Right.”
“Just dinner, not a date. I mean a dinner date, I guess. What date? When will, um, what date would you like to go to dinner?” Alison asks, opening the calendar on her phone.
“Why don’t you make it for a week from today?” Amma says, still walking away. “Wednesday, October 16th. That’ll give Romeo here a couple of days to recover from the jet lag.”
“Sure. I’ll make the arrangements,” Alison says, her face flushed red.
“Great,” Bryce says. “That’ll be… great.”
As the door to the changing rooms creaks open, Bryce shouts after Amma.
“Hey, Amma. Why are we going to Afghanistan?”
Amma turns, halfway through the door.
“Because there are ghosts in the desert,” she says.
Friday, October 8, 2001, 4:51 p.m. (local time)
Road to Helmand Province
Afghanistan
As the jeep rattles over the rocky road, Amma marvels at how Bryce is able to sleep just about anywhere. On the packed airplane. In the busy airport. And now in the back of a jeep bouncing along a desert road.
Amma pulls the silken headscarf away from her face.
“How long?” she yells at the man in the passenger seat.
He turns to look at her. Fateh Nazari – “Naz” to his friends – is a deeply tanned man with a huge black moustache and an ever-present pearly-white smile beaming beneath it. He wears a fine white suit and a white Panama hat, in contradiction to his Afghan roots. Naz is a man of the world. A fight promotor, among other things, who calls himself “The Man Who Makes Things Happen”. Amma knew he would be the perfect connection to get them to their destination.
“Not long now,” he says. “See that hill over there?”
“Is that it?”
“That is it. ‘The Rise’.”
Amma hears the driver – a short, wiry local who’s intense eyes peer back at her in the rear-view mirror from beneath a beaten old Afghan hat – mumble something in Pashto, to which Naz responds, also in the local dialect, as though to chastise the man. The driver shrinks back behind the wheel and guides the jeep shakily forward.
Amma grabs the back of the seat to steady herself. It’s quiet out here. Desolate. The airport had been busy and there had been several armed Taliban, but they had managed to get through without issue. Out here, it feels like they’re a million miles from any threat, but the thought of an armed assailant finding them at dead of night isn’t one she’s keen to entertain.
As the vehicle passes the burned-out shell of an old Soviet tank, a couple of ramshackle buildings come into focus atop the hill, which is higher than it first appeared. ‘The Rise’. A thirty-foot dirt pile used by forces on countless sides in endless conflicts down the years, offering the perfect vantage point overlooking the low-lying poppy fields of Helmand Province.
Amma squints against the lowering sun as the ominous hill looms ever larger.
This is it. The place Kyle told me about back in New York. The place with the ghosts.
The driver brings the jeep to a halt a good half-kilometre short of the hill and has a heated exchange with Naz, who then turns cheerily to Amma in the back seat.
“This is as close as he will go,” Naz says apologetically. “The locals are… superstitious about this place. There are a lot of stories about it. But, then, I’m assuming you know that already.”
Amma just smiles thinly and slaps Bryce a couple of times on the cheek. He jumps awake.
“Wha-?”
“C’mon, sunshine. We’re here. Gotta set up camp before sundown.”
“You have… maybe an hour,” Naz says, looking thoughtfully at the sky.
They get out of the jeep and the driver helps them to retrieve their backpacks.
“You can tell that just by looking?” Bryce asks.
“No. It says it right here on the weather app,” Naz replies, holding a large Smartphone in his palm.
“Right,” Bryce says.
“Thanks for the ride, Naz,” Amma says.
“No problem, my dear. For the great Amma Portland – future MFC world champion – anything. Speaking of which, if you require representation…”
“I have that covered.”
“Are you sure? I mean, Mad Max Mayers isn’t exactly a premium fight…”
“She called me out. Nobody calls me out.”
“Of course,” Naz replies, knowing when to let the topic drop. “If you change your mind…”
“I have your number.”
Naz gives a submissive nod.
“Two nights, two days. You pick us up 1700, Sunday.”
“Of course.”
Amma and Bryce secure their backpacks and begin the short hike to ‘The Rise’. They haven’t gotten more than a few steps from the jeep when they hear the driver yelling something at them again in Pashto.
Amma pauses and turns.
“What did he say?”
“He says that the spirits come at night. And, that you must not take anything from this place. Whatever you find buried up there, you just leave it be.”
“That’s all very reassuring,” Bryce mumbles. Amma gives him a sharp elbow to the ribs.
“We will be respectful,” Amma says to the man. “Mihrbhaanii,” she adds, with a small bow.”
“Mayor-who-now?” Bryce asks.
“It means ‘thank you’. I think. I did bring something to read on the plane,” she says, pointing to a local dialect book stuffed into a netted pocket of her backpack.
The man just grimaces and returns to the jeep.
“Yek-shanbeh,” Naz says with a wave. “Sunday. 1700. Watch for the spirits. And the vipers.”
With that, he joins the driver back in the jeep and they drive away in a cloud of dust.
“Vipers?” Bryce asks. “As in, snakes?”
Amma pats her companion on the shoulder and sets off up the hill.
Bryce takes a good look at the rocky sand all around him and hurries after her.
PART 2: Nightfall
Friday, October 8, 2021, 6:17 p.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“As the sun sets over the desert, it could just as easily be a deep, red sea, the great swells of its churning waves frozen in time. There’s a quiet beauty to this place that belies its violent history. Out here, far from the cities and towns that ring out with voices and gunfire, it’s easy to feel like you don’t belong to any of that. These rocks, these sands – ancient and timeless – care not for the petty squabbles of humankind, though the memory of conflicts past hangs heavy in the air on The Rise. It may not care about the blood spilled upon its sands, but it remembers.
“As I look out from atop this odd little mound in the middle of the desert, I can certainly understand its appeal as a military outpost. It affords 360-degree views that would have provided the U.S., British, Afghan, and Soviet soldiers who at various times occupied it with the perfect vantage point to spot any approaching enemies and deal with them before they had the opportunity to become a threat.
“This place may seem peaceful now, but there are reminders of its noisy past. A large, rusted out machine gun sits on a turret at the centre of the hill, flanked on one side by a makeshift operations room complete with long-defunct radio and satellite equipment. A couple more ramshackle shacks have plastic mesh on the floors, partly covered over by sand. One of these charming spaces will be our bedroom for the next two nights. Once Bryce has finished checking for deadly snakes, spiders, and scorpions, of course.
“As I look out across the frozen sea of sand, there are a couple of reminders that peace here is only ever fleeting and that generations of humans continue to fight their passing wars about its surface. Just off to the south, the decaying shell of an old soviet tank, now half reclaimed by the sand. That machine gun that used to rattle off its rounds at predators of the night. And… a feeling. An odd sensation of being watched. A feeling that we are not alone.”
“We’re not alone?” Bryce asks as he wades through the sand towards me. “Oh, shit, sorry, you’re recording.”
“That’s okay,” Amma says. “Come sit.”
Bryce kicks sand around, checking for deadly beasties, before committing to sit next to Amma at the top of The Rise.
“So, what was that about us not being alone? Did you see someone?”
Bryce strains to look out over the desert in the fading light.
“Don’t you feel it?” Amma says, shaking her head.
“Feel what? The sand in my ass crack?”
“A… presence. Kind of like we’re being watched.”
Bryce looks around at the endless miles of sand and poppy fields.
“Nope,” he says. “But I do feel like I have to go number two.”
Amma rolls her eyes and stops her recording.
“Yeah, definitely time to evacuate bowels,” Bryce says, jumping up and scampering off towards the shacks.
“Do it down at the bottom of the hill,” Amma says.
“Yup.”
“Away from the bedroom,” she yells after him.
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s TP in duffel bag.”
“Got it.”
“And don’t let anything bite or sting you on the ass,” she shouts.
“Roger that!”
“I do not plan to be sucking poison from your butt cheek,” she mumbles to herself before hitting record again.
“As the sun drowns in a sea of its own blood, a million stars and a full moon take their place above the endless desert. Suddenly, I feel very small and exposed – very fleeting in all this timeless wonder.
“Back in New York City, retired U.S. Army Sergeant Kyle Masters told me a story of being posted at The Rise in 2009. A story of things that only come out at night. Not vipers, black widows, or deadly scorpions. At least, not only those things. But memories held in rock and sand. Spirits kept beneath this hill – a place with a looping history of endless conflict. A place believed by the locals of Helmand province to be sacred and purported by countless military personnel who spent night after night here to be haunted. This is our first night at The Rise.”
Amma hits stop and clambers to her feet, collecting up the Afghan throw that she purchased from a local vendor outside the airport and cautiously dusting off the sand, checking for those nasty insects she pretends in front of Bryce not to be concerned about. Then she heads towards the shack that will be their bedroom for the night.
At the bottom of the hill, Bryce pulls up his cargo pants and kicks sand into the hole he’s reluctantly used as a desert potty.
“Three days,” he mutters to himself. “Just try not to get bitten on the ass, Mason.”
As he turns to head back up the hill, he is startled by the sudden sound of an approaching jet plane. It sounds low and close – like it’s coming right towards him. Instinctively, he hits the deck, covering his head with his hands. As the howl of jet engines passes right over him, he feels the intense backdraft of the passing jet and sand swirls all around him. Then, as suddenly as it arrived, it is gone.
“Jesus,” Bryce says to himself, spitting crunchy sand from between his teeth before remembering about the vipers and the spiders and the scorpions and jumping back to his feet. He looks all around but can see no sign of the jet in the desert night.
“Amma! Amma!”
Amma stops fiddling with the mosquito netting around their makeshift bed to see what Bryce is screaming about.
“Amma!” he says again as he barrels into the room.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You tell me. It was a jet, I guess, right?”
“What jet?”
“The one that just flew about ten feet over our heads.”
“Bryce. I didn’t hear a jet.”
* * *
Amma and Bryce don’t talk much as they finish preparing their temporary bedroom. In the pitch black of the desert night, a sense of deep foreboding settles in around The Rise.
“This is my dance space. This is yours,” Amma says as they lie down on the air mattress, surrounded by mosquito netting.
“That’s cute,” Bryce says. “Dirty Dancing, right?”
“I didn’t know you were a fan.”
“My sister made me watch that movie, like, a hundred times when we were kids.”
“Oh, she made you?”
“Yes. She forcibly made me watch it.”
“Yeah, like she forcibly made you play with her Barbies?”
“No, in fairness I did that of my own free will. My Action Men needed a love interest.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t, so respect the dance space please, Johnny Castle.”
“Geez, so presumptuous.”
“And are you sure there are no gaps in this netting?”
“Ha. Who’s afraid of the vipers now?”
“Good night, Bryce.”
“And the scorpions.”
“Good night, Bryce.”
“And the spiders.”
“Good night, Bryce.”
“Good night, Amma.”
…
“And the ghosts.”
PART 3: Zapustit’
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 3:33 a.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“Zapustit’”
Bryce Mason sucks in a sharp breath as his eyes flicker open.
Did I hear that. Or was I dreaming?
He looks at his watch. 3:33 a.m. He feels like he’d just about gotten to sleep when he’d heard the strange voice – a male voice with what sounded like a Russian accent.
Zapustit’. What the hell does that mean?
He eases himself quietly over onto his back and turns his head to look at Amma beside him. She’s laid foetal with her back to him, her long, brown hair cascading down onto the sleeping bag. He reaches out a hand and considers taking a lock between his fingers, just to feel the softness, just for a moment. But he thinks better of it.
It’s cold.
It feels colder than he thought it would; colder than he thinks it really should. Amma had told him that the desert nights would get pretty cool, but not like this. He feels like he’s in a fridge and he can see his breath.
He pulls his sleeping bag tight around his shoulders and tries to ignore the stinging cold in his nose.
“Make sure you pack your sun cream, Bryce.” Yeah, right.
He flips back onto his side and curls himself into a ball in an attempt to generate some body heat, but it feels like the cold is in him, like it’s penetrated right through to his bones. He feels like he’s freezing to death.
And then the smell hits him.
It’s the most awful smell he’s every experienced, burning his nostrils like sulphur and causing his eyes to water.
“Oh, god. What the…”
Unable to stand the overpowering olfactory assault, he pulls himself free of his sleeping bag and claws at the mosquito netting in an attempt to escape.
“Bryce?” Amma says, woken by his thrashing.
“God damn, Amma. Didn’t we agree to do our pooping away from the bedroom?”
“What?”
“I mean, I understand that international travel can mess with your gastrointestinal fortitude, but seriously…”
“Bryce, what the hell are you talking about?”
“The smell, Amma.”
Sleepily, Amma sniffs the air.
“What smell?”
“What smell?! You really don’t smell that?”
“Smell what? No, I don’t smell a thing.”
Bryce gags as he struggles to get his boots on.
“You’re crazy. Urgh. I gotta get outta here.”
With that, Bryce exits the creaky old wooden door, pulling on his jacket as he goes.
Suddenly, the smell hits Amma, too.
“Oh, wow,” she says to herself before clambering up and throwing on her outdoor clothes.
It is cold. Abnormally so.
“It’s still in my nose,” Bryce says as Amma joins him outside, plugging one nostril at a time and blowing hard out of the other. “What, did you shit the bed?”
“It wasn’t me, Bryce. That’s not even the smell of… excrement. It’s more like rotting flesh.”
“Oh. Oh, great. That’s just fantastic.”
Amma makes her way to the top of The Rise and looks out over the desert night as Bryce continues to mumble to himself and attempt to clear his passageways by the stinking, freezing shack that was supposed to be their bedroom.
“Hey, Mason. When you’re done bellyaching, get up here and take a look at this.”
Bryce sluthers up the hill to join Amma, still pulling at his nose and wiping tears from his eyes.
“Look,” Amma says and Bryce peers out at the desert night.
“Wow,” he says.
The desert is still sea of sandy waves under a multicoloured pincushion sky, encrusted with a million stars and a thin waxing crescent moon. The stillness and quiet is unlike anything they have ever experienced. The feeling of distance and isolation is palpable.
“We’re a long way from home, Amma Portland,” Bryce says, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and prompting a fleeting vision in her mind.
Bryce as a child. He’s crying. On the ground. His arm hurts. It’s broken. He’s fallen from a tree. He’s far from home, waiting for his older brother to fetch help. Mom will be so mad.
“We sure are, Bryce Mason,” she replies, putting her arm around his waist as they experience a moment their minds will be able to recall until the day they die.
“You sure you didn’t shit the bed?” Bryce asks.
With minimal effort, Amma thrusts out a hip and tosses Bryce to the ground with a Judo throw before placing a boot on his chest.
As he looks up at her, flowing dark locks bracketing that sharp, pretty face, eyes reflecting a million stars, Bryce falls in love with Amma Portland for the millionth time.
“Y’know, if you wanted to get me on my back, you coulda just asked,” he says with that trademark cheeky grin.
Amma can’t help but smile.
And then they hear the static. A detuned radio bursting into life, the sound shocking in the piercing quiet of the desert.
“It’s coming from the control room,” Amma says, reaching a hand down to help Bryce to his feet.
“I thought you said that radio was defunct,” he says.
“I thought it was. Come on.”
Bryce stands for a moment and watches Amma jog over to the ramshackle shack that houses the aged communications equipment before hurrying after her.
Always chasing after her.
Inside, Amma is already speaking into the rusty old mic, fiddling with buttons and dials in an attempt to pull what sounds like a distant voice through the thick static.
“Jesus,” Bryce says. “That thing still works?”
The radio panel is speckled with rust and pocked with dents, looking more like something that should be in a museum than anything that should be functioning.
Bryce ducks to his haunches, peering underneath the beaten old metal desk that the equipment is sitting on. Underneath, frayed and severed wires hang down like the intestines of a disemboweled medieval criminal.
“Where’s this thing even gettin’ power?” he asks, as much to himself as to Amma who is in any case more concerned with contacting whoever is on the other end of the radio.
“Hey, Ams? Ams!”
“What?”
“Do you think it’s such a good idea to be talking back to… whoever that is? I mean, we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile here, right?”
“I’m not talking back, Bryce. I’m just trying to listen.”
Amma continues to fiddle with the equipment as Bryce wanders the perimeter of the small shack, still trying to identify a power source.
Then the voice breaks through and stops Bryce dead in his tracks.
“Zapustit’.”
It’s the same Russian voice that had woken him from his sleep.
“Zapustit’. Ostavlyat’. Ubiraysya. Prizraki v pustyne.”
Then, as suddenly as the radio had burst into life, it cuts out.
Bryce stares at Amma, unmoving, his face pale in the weak light.
“What’s the matter, Bryce? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
* * *
Back in the bedroom shack, the smell has abated and the temperature has returned to a bearable level. Amma and Bryce sit on the air mattress, wrapped up in their sleeping backs. Bryce shines a flashlight into the Russian phrase book while Amma taps the translations into the notes app on her phone.
“How many of these things did you bring with you anyway?” Bryce asks, fluttering the phrase book in the air.
“A couple. I figured cell reception would be sketchy, so…”
“Always prepared.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You shoulda been a friggin’ Girl Scout.”
“Dib-dib-dib,” Amma says, putting two fingers to her forehead.
“So, what do we have?”
“Zapustit’,” Bryce says. “Meaning… ‘run’.”
Amma makes a note of the translation without flinching.
“That’s run, Amma. As in, ‘get the hell outta here’.”
“Yeah, I got it. The next one is ‘ostavlyat’’.
“‘Ostavlyat’, meaning… Oh, great.”
“Meaning ‘oh, great?’”
“No, Amma, meaning ‘leave’.”
“Huh, okay. Starting to see a pattern here. Next one is ‘ubiraysya’.”
“How do you even remember this stuff?”
“Got a good memory. Look it up.”
“‘Ubiraysya. Meaning…” Bryce sighs. “Meaning, ‘get out’.”
“Get. Out. Got it. Last one. ‘Prizraki v pustyne’. You might have to look this one up one word at a time, so ‘prizraki’…”
“‘Prizraki’. Meaning…” Bryce looks at Amma over top of the phrase book.
“What? What’s it mean, Bryce?”
“‘Ghosts’. It means ‘ghosts’, Amma.”
“Okay, ‘ghosts’. Got it. Now, I’m pretty sure the ‘v’ part means ‘in’.”
“You’re pretty sure of that, eh?”
“I watched some Andrei Tarkovsky.”
“He that hockey player?”
Amma considers the question for a moment.
“Sure. He’s that hockey player, Bryce. So, look up ‘pustyne’”.
“‘Pustyne’. Meaning…” Bryce eyes Amma over top of the buckled phrase book once again. “Meaning ‘desert’.”
Amma returns the gaze before putting the words together.
“Ghosts in the desert.”
PART 4: Lies Beneath
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 9:22 a.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“So, do you think the Russians were trying to tell us something?” Bryce asks as he approaches from the shack that houses their makeshift bedroom – which they’ve nicknamed the ‘Ritz on The Rise’.
“Let me see,” says Amma from her place at the top of the hill, without turning her attention from the view through her binoculars. “‘Run, leave, get out.’ What could they have possibly be trying to say?”
“Don’t forget about ‘ghosts in the desert’,” Bryce says as he steps up beside her.
“How could I forget?” Amma asks, still scoping out the desert. “There hasn’t been a Russian military presence in Afghanistan for twenty-five years.”
“That we know of,” says Bryce.
“You’re such a conspiracy theorist.”
“Pretty rich coming from the girl whose Daddy saw an alien.”
Amma sniffs the air, still peering through the binos.
“Is that coffee?”
“High Note Coffee – dark roast,” Bryce says. “Boston’s finest.”
Amma lowers the binoculars and turns her attention to Bryce.
“You brough High Note Coffee?”
“It’s our favourite.”
“You never went camping as a child, did you?”
“Does glamping count?”
“It’s a zillion degrees.”
“Twenty-four plus humidity.”
“Don’t you think you’d be better sticking to water?”
“Gotta have my cuppa Joe,” Bryce shrugs. “But, I mean, if you don’t want any…”
Amma snatches away one of the two cups that he’s holding and takes a long sip.
“Mmm.”
“Right?”
“Nectar of the gods.”
“Cheers.”
The two ‘clink’ plastic cups.
“So, you see anything out there?”
Amma thinks about it for a moment.
“Sand,” she replies.
“Uh-huh. Anything else?”
“Rocks.”
“Right.”
“Poppy fields.”
“I see. No armed Taliban looking to kill us dead?”
“Nope. None of that.”
The two sip their coffees for a moment, looking out over the arid land. It’s already quite hot and the light wind that blows around does little to provide relief.
“I might check out that old Soviet tank,” Amma says, peering out at the burned-out shell of the tank, half consumed by the desert sands.
“Yeah, of course. The first thing I think of after an evening spent being offered dire warnings from Russian ghosts is to go check out a place where a bunch of ‘em probably died.”
“Well, you don’t have to come.”
“Best news I’ve had all day.”
“In fact, you’re not invited.”
“Fine by me.”
Amma finishes her coffee with a loud, satiated sigh before thrusting the empty plastic cup into Bryce’s bare chest.
“But don’t think that you are completely off the hook,” she says. “I didn’t bring you along to sit around sunning yourself all day.”
“Really? I thought that’s exactly what you brought me along for,” Bryce says, finishing his own coffee and stacking the plastic cups one inside the other. “You know, to give you something to look at.” He flexes a pectoral muscle.
Amma snorts with incredulity.
“Yeah, right. You have work to do,” she says, heading back towards the Ritz. “And put a shirt on,” she yells without looking back.
* * *
“It’s quiet here. Quiet in a way you don’t quite trust. The wind blows up a fine mist of white sand while the sun bakes up a heat haze. The effect is unnerving, as though the desert dances and shimmies – never truly still and never quite content.”
Amma speaks into the desert heat, and into the mic clipped to her lapel, as she trudges towards the haunting shape of the long-abandoned Soviet tank.
“The silence – disturbed only by that ever-so-slight wind and the call of a scattered bird high above – is that of an angry parent about to chastise a naughty child, coiled and poised to explode, fixed in that agonizing moment that separates the boiling, churning emotion and the fiery release of untempered vitriol. Even in this silence, there is with it the ever-present sense… that a storm is coming.”
Amma reaches the tank, which is much bigger up close than it appeared from the vantage point of The Rise, a hulking mass of rusting metal, a fallen dinosaur cut down in the middle of the hunt. Struck by the comet it never saw coming.
Amma climbs up onto the top of the long-defunct tank and pulls at the rusted hatch. It won’t open.
“Sat here, atop this machine of death and destruction, I can almost feel the rumbling of its great treads, the whining of its turret, and the deafening boom of its gun. Even in death, this dinosaur is an intimidating sight. Even after the fight, death and destruction is all it remembers. That’s all it ever lived for.”
Amma crouches, sliding her fingers through the web of rust around the perimeter of the hatch, and braces herself. With a mighty heave and a scream of effort that rings through the desert air, she yanks the hatch open before lowering herself inside.
* * *
Shirt on, Bryce walks the perimeter of The Rise, looking, per Amma’s instructions, for ‘anything unusual’. So far, nadda. Then he hears the scream from across the desert, instinctively grabbing for his radio.
“Amma? You okay?”
Nothing.
“Amma, do you read? Amma?”
“Goddammit,” Amma barks back into the radio.
“Ams? What’s up?”
“I think I broke a nail.”
“Jesus, really?”
“What? I’d actually gotten them to grow a little. I was proud of myself.”
“Ams, you got a fight in two weeks. You woulda had to cut ‘em off anyhow.”
“Fair point. You find anything yet?”
Bryce looks around at the endless sea of sand.
“Nothing not sandy or rocky,” he sighs.
“Keep looking. Amma out.”
With a hiss of static, Bryce gets the message and returns to traipsing the perimeter one soft, sandy footfall after another. Until he steps on something more rigid. He stamps a couple of times.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says to himself, crouching to his haunches and digging at the sand with his hands until he can feel wood beneath. “Huh.” He takes a small shovel from his belt and digs away more sand to discover that he’s standing on a wooden hatch, presumably leading to some sort of bunker below. He stands and excitedly reaches for his radio.
“Hey, Ams,” he says into the device. “I think I found some…”
Before he can finish his sentence, the hatch gives way beneath him and Bryce plummets into the ground below.
PART 5: OLD BONES
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 10:44 a.m. (local time)
Burned out Soviet tank near “The Rise”
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“Ubiraysya.”
The word comes from behind Amma, not whispered this time, but fully spoken in a gruff Russian man’s voice. She turns, as best she can, within the tight confines of the tank. There is nobody there.
“Get out,” Amma says to herself, recognizing the word from the previous night’s radio messages. “I’m starting to get the feeling that these Russian ghosts don’t want us around.”
There’s nothing inside the tank, save for an array of rusted switches and long-defunct LEDs. Amma squeezes herself into the driver’s compartment and sits for a moment among the levers and pedals, trying to imagine what it must have been like to drive one of these things across the desert in the middle of a firefight.
She notices something jammed between the pedals below her feet – a curved object in the shadows – and reaches down to retrieve it.
“Huh,” she says to herself as she turns the old helmet in her hand. She recognizes it from the bit of pre-trip research she’d had time to squeeze in as an SSh-68 helmet – the standard-issue head protection for Soviet soldiers back in the Soviet-Afghan war, a steel chamber pot in dull green. This one is heavily dented and has had the leather chin strap snapped off.
As she turns the helmet in her hand, Amma pauses. There’s something inside; something aged but clearly organic. Amma holds the helmet at arm’s length as it strikes her that what’s inside the helmet may be what’s left of the head that used to occupy it.
“Ostavlyat’,” the gruff Russian voice barks at Amma and this time she feels the warmth of the soldier’s breath on her face.
“Leave,” she interprets. “That’s a good idea.”
Remembering the warnings of Naz’s driver, Amma elects to leave the helmet right where she found it. She hoists herself out of the hatch and shields her eyes from the blinding late-morning sunshine, sitting for a moment atop the rusted old tank and taking a much-needed swig from her water bottle before speaking into her lapel mic.
“There’s something mysterious here. A presence the seems… not sinister so much as longing to be left alone. Memories held in rock and sand. Old souls kept in chambers of rust. All of it dissolving imperceptibly to be reclaimed by the sand. All of it just a single grain in a timeless desert, ancient beyond comprehension.”
Amma is disturbed by the sound of static, a shocking interference in this world devoid of bustle and technology.
“Ams? You there?”
Amma reaches for her radio.
“Bryce? Go ahead.”
Bryce’s voice is weak in the cloud of static but the words Amma can make out cause her concern.
“…fallen …hole …leg …think it’s broken.”
“Stay right there,” Amma says, grabbing up her pack and bounding across the sand back towards The Rise.
“…wasn’t goin’ anywhere.”
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 11:55 a.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“Bryce? You down there?”
“What’s left of me.”
Amma kneels at the side of the hole in the ground, tearing shards of dried-out wood from what remains of the hatch Bryce had plummeted through, and squinting to make him out in the darkness below.
“How bad is it?”
“Well. I’m pretty sure ankles aren’t supposed to point in that direction.”
“Oh, great.”
“Yeah. I messed up. Sorry, Ams.”
As Amma’s eyes adjust, she can make out Bryce about eight feet below, sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the bunker wall.
“Yeah, well. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Bryce tries to chuckle, but the sound soon turns to a pained whine.
“I’m comin’ down. I’ll try not to jump on ya.”
“I can think of worse things.”
Amma lowers herself legs-first into the hole and drops at Bryce’s side. It’s cool down here and the echo as she speaks gives Amma the impression that the bunker is larger than she’d first thought.
“Geez. How big is this place?” she says.
“Not sure. I didn’t get much of a chance to explore,” Bryce replies, nodding at his buckled leg. Amma squats to examine the damage.
“Yup. Ankles are definitely not supposed to point in that direction,” she says.
“Well, thank you, doctor.”
Amma places her hand lightly on the injured joint. Bryce winces.
“If it’s fractured, it isn’t compound at least.”
“Always a bonus if your bone isn’t sticking out of your skin,” Bryce mumbles.
“I’m gonna have to put this ankle joint back in place, though,” Amma says, placing her hands on either end of Bryce’s foot.
“Oh, great.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“Nice bedside manner, Doctor Portland.”
“No, I mean keep your mouth closed so you don’t bite off tour tongue.”
“Oh, we’re… doing this now?”
“On the count of three, okay?”
“Mm-mm,” Bryce nods, making sure to keep his mouth closed and his tongue the hell outta the way.
“Okay. One, two…”
Crack.
“Aaaah!” Bryce wails, reeling in pain. “What the hell happened to ‘three’?”
“Three,” Amma smiles. “Now, take off your shirt.”
“Amma, I’m flattered, but I’m not sure this is the time or…”
“Take off your shirt,” Amma repeats.
“Put on a shirt, take off your shirt,” Bryce mimics, then does as he’s told.
Amma unfolds a pocketknife and begins slashing the garment into thin strips.
“Hey!” Bryce protests. “That was new.”
Amma rolls her eyes, picks up a couple of the wood shards from the busted hatch and fashions a makeshift splint, tying it in place with the strips of fabric.
“There. That should hold you till we can do something better,” Amma says. “Can you stand?”
“I can try.”
Amma gets behind Bryce and slides her arms underneath his armpits.
“Okay,” she says. “On the count of three.”
“Two, then?”
“Right. One, two…”
With a harmony of grunts, Amma gets Bryce to his feet. He leans his back against the wall.
“Whaddya think this place is?” he asks.
“Old war bunker, I guess,” Amma replies. “Let’s get you outta here and worry about that later.”
Amma jumps up and grabs the side of the hatch, lifting herself effortlessly out of the hole.
“I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave,” Bryce mumbles.
“I heard that.”
“How?!”
Topside, Amma retrieves some rope from the Ritz on the Rise, ties a loop, and dangles it down the hole.
“Here ya go, big strong man. Grab that and hold on tight.”
“‘Kay,” Bryce says as he wraps the rope around his wrists. “Ams, you sure you’re strong enough to…”
Before he can finish the sentence, Bryce is yanked from the hole at surprising speed and dragged to lean against the nearby communications shack.
“Marry me,” he says as he tries to squint Amma into view in the blinding sunlight.
“Never,” Amma says, unravelling the rope from his wrists.
“Bryce. What the hell is that?” she says, notice he’s clutching something in his hand.
“Check it out,” he says with that cheeky Bryce grin. “It’s the bone I didn’t break.”
Bryce waves the long, narrow bone in Amma’s face as she looks at it with a grimace.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she says. “That is a human fibula.”
“Urgh!” Bryce yelps, tossing the bone into the sand.
“Yeah, Bryce. Way to respect the dead.”
Amma pulls a flashlight from her utility belt before strolling back over the hole in the ground. She crouches at its side and shines the light into the depths below.
“Bryce, this isn’t a bunker,” she says. “It’s a crypt.”
PART 6: Approaching Fate
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 2:15 p.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
“Back in dark confines of the hole, my flashlight revealed an awful truth. The bones of the dead were everywhere. Rib cages, spines, and spindly limbs lined the floors, while skulls peered out from the walls.
“The cavern that Bryce had fallen into was much larger than we had first realised – maybe ten feet by twenty, with just about enough height beyond the column leading back to the surface for me to stand. But that wasn’t all.
“A small opening at the far end of the cavern – maybe three feet high and wide – led to another, almost identical room. I tossed the flashlight to the other side and squeezed through the hole, praying that nothing venomous was lurking out of sight to welcome the crypt’s latest addition. Making it through, unscathed, I was shocked to find another room full of bones – the hollow eyes of the dead staring out at me from the walls – and another small opening, leading to another identical room. And then another. And then another. Seven caverns in all – the last one inaccessible, the hole too small to squeeze through – arranged in a circle and very much man-made, wooden beams exposed here and there through the dirt.
“As I made my way back to the first cavern and heaved myself up to the blinding desert light, the full macabre reality hit me like the searing heat: The Rise isn’t a hill. It’s a burial ground.”
“I’m glad you keep repeating that,” Bryce says from his place on the makeshift bed. “Because the more I hear it, the more okay with it I get. It kinda normalizes it, y’know?”
Amma stops the recording and unclips her lapel mic.
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Mason.”
“Yeah, but I’m the best at the lowest form of wit. And that has to be worth something.”
“You would think.”
“How do you do it?” Bryce asks.
“Do what?”
“The way you describe things. It’s like, I really feel like I was down there with you.”
“Oh, from sarcasm to flattery. Keep it going.”
“Hey – this isn’t flattery; this is sincerity. I mean it. You have a gift.”
If only he knew.
“How’s the leg?”
“Great. In fact, I was thinking of running a marathon this afternoon.”
“And we’re back to sarcasm.”
“Not at all. I mean it. One of those desert marathons you sometimes see on TV. You in?”
“Let me think about it.”
“Conditions are perfect.”
“Well, why don’t we start by getting you outside. Let a little sun shine on that pasty Bostonian body.”
“Why ya gotta be dat way, Ams?” Bryce says, laying on his Boston accent double thick.
Amma inspects his ankle – which she wrapped properly once she’d been able to get him back to the Ritz on The Rise – and helps him to his feet. With one arm wrapped around her shoulder, he is able to hobble out with her to the top of the hill, where Amma has set up a tarp and a couple of camping chairs with a view of the landscape beyond.
“Ah. Paradise,” Bryce says as Amma helps him lower himself into one of the canvas chairs. “Now all I need is a cold drink with a little umbrella in it.”
“You’ll have to make do with this,” Amma says, taking a swig from a water bottle, returning the cap, and tossing it over to him.
“Ah, lukewarm water with a hint of backwash,” he says, unscrewing the cap and pretending to sniff the bottle like he’s at a wine tasting. “This really is paradise.”
“Don’t act like that isn’t the most action you’ve gotten in months,” Amma says. “And cut it out with the sarcasm.”
The two take in the scene for a moment. The desert unfurls before them, its rocky sands dancing in a shimmering heat haze. To the west sits the burned-out shell of the old Soviet tank. To the east, red waves of poppy fields lap gently in the foreground, a range of hilly mountains providing a picture postcard backdrop. The landscape is bisected by the meandering road they had driven in on just the day before.
“Y’know, this place is kinda beautiful in its own way,” Bryce says, sipping from the drinking bottle.
“Yeah,” Amma says, rummaging through her camera bag with the intention of returning to the crypt to grab some pictures. “It really is.”
“Hey, Ams.”
“Yup?”
“Your buddy, Naz. He’s not supposed to pick us up till tomorrow, right?”
“Sunday. 1700,” Amma replies.
“Okay. So, who the hell is that?”
Amma immediately stands rigid and turns to see a cloud of dust being kicked up by what appears to be an old jeep in the distance. She throws the camera strap around her neck and removes the lens cap, bringing the camera to her eye and using the manual zoom to bring the vehicle into focus.
The jeep is occupied by three Taliban soldiers wearing a combination of salwar kameez and camouflage. At least one of them is carrying a machine gun – an American M4 that they must have seized when U.S. troops returned home.
“That,” Amma says, “is trouble.”
Bryce returns the cap to the water bottle.
“Like, Taliban trouble?”
“Yeah,” Amma says. “Exactly like that.”
“You think they know we’re here?”
“Well, they’re heading straight for us and they don’t look like they’re out on a sightseeing adventure.
“Now who’s sarcastic?”
Bryce looks at his heavily strapped leg and back up at Amma.
“Ams, I…”
“You are in no state to defend yourself,” Amma says. “So, you’re gonna have to put your foolish man-pride to one side and let me handle this, okay?”
“You’re gonna engage with them?”
“We don’t have any choice. But they don’t have to know there are two of us. Let’s get you to the bunker…”
“You mean the crypt?”
“You can hide out down there. I’ll cover the hole with… something.”
“Na-ah. No way.”
“At least if you’re hidden, one of us will survive if they get all shooty.”
“Shooty? They have guns?”
“They’re Taliban, Bryce. Did you think they’d bring pea-shooters?”
“I ain’t goin’ down that hole.”
“Bryce…”
“Amma. I am not going back down that hole. We stand together.” Bryce looks at his leg again. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Bryce, I really think…”
“Amma. I am not going down the hole. We’re a team. Besides, there are spiders down there. And scorpions.”
“Okay.”
“And vipers.”
“Geez, I said okay already,” Amma sighs as the jeep races ever closer, the sound of its engine and the rattling of rocks in its wheel wells now audible on The Rise. “But you let me do the talking.”
“When do you not?”
PART 7: Cheetah
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 2:48 p.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
The Jeep rolls to a stop a short distance from The Rise and the three Taliban dismount the vehicle. One – seemingly the leader of the group and the only one who appears to be carrying a gun – approaches the foot of the hill and begins shouting in Pashto. The only word Amma recognizes, from her limited phrase book study, is “praikhodal”.
“Leave”. Yeah, we get that a lot.
It’s something that’s been with Amma all her life, this feeling of complete calm and focus when faced with a threat. An ability to almost slow time, to read micro-signals in the aggressor’s demeanor. An ability to predict what they will do next and, when the moment requires it, to turn that calm into a kind of focused rage.
“Praikhodal… Tajawaz!” the man shouts, holding the M4 machine gun above his head.
It was with her when she faced down the McLaughlin twins back in middle school.
For a long time, she figured everyone was that way. Then, as she got older, she began to understand that wasn’t the case. That she had a rare gift that – if honed and used right – would allow her to protect herself and others in times of conflict.
“Praikhodal! Felhall!” the man shouts, coming closer now as Amma slowly makes her way down the sandy hill towards him.
“Amma! Ams!” she hears Bryce shouting from behind her. She holds out a hand at her side to signal to him.
Relax. It’s alright. I got this.
It had been there with her in all her fights. When she’d slipped Maria Slawinski’s huge overhand left and shattered her jaw with a devastating uppercut of her own.
“Praikhodal!” the man shouts as he trains the gun on Amma.
“Amma! Back up!” comes Bryce’s voice from behind. She gives him the signal again.
Relax. It’s alright. I got this.
She thinks of her father, Graham. The retired military test pilot who’d seen action at supersonic speeds. She thinks of the Rudyard Kipling poem he used to be fond of reciting.
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
“Praikhodal! Praikhodal!”
“Amma! Ams!
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too…”
In slow motion, the man stops a few metres short of the base of The Rise. He looks momentarily to his feet, then up at the hill beyond.
He isn’t angry. He’s afraid.
She hears that poem in her father’s voice; the voice she now so rarely gets to hear. The voice she longs to hear again.
“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them…”
“Hold on,” Amma whispers to herself as she stops at the foot of the hill, just before the sand levels out, a few metres from where the armed man refuses to advance.
“Auosh! Auosh!”
“Amma!”
She looks at the man’s feet. He’s wearing a pair of “Cheetahs” – the white leather high-tops that have been the footwear of choice for Taliban fighters for multiple generations and countless conflicts. The unassuming sports shoes that have become a status symbol for these purveyors of violence.
His Cheetahs want to step forward, to come at me. He wants to attack me. But he’s afraid. He’s afraid of The Rise.
“Praikhodal!”
She sees that his hands are shaking. The Taliban aren’t generally shy when it comes to discharging a weapon upon infidels and intruders.
He won’t shoot me. Not here. Not on the hill.
And then she hears her father’s voice as plainly as if he were standing right there beside her in the desert.
“End this.”
All that calm turns to a focused rage and she sees the movements before she even performs them.
She pounces like a cheetah, disarming the man and tossing him to the ground in one seamless motion, springing up with the M4 machine gun in her hands and the fallen fighter’s throat under the sole of her boot.
She fires a burst into the desert sky, sending the other two Taliban scampering back to their jeep.
She releases her foot from the man’s throat and allows him to scurry away after them, barely managing to hang onto the jeeps’ roll bar and hoist himself gracelessly in as its wheels struggle for grip on the rocky road.
“Jen!” she hears him shout. “Shaitan!”
She watches as the jeep peels away in a cloud of sand, the tough guy’s skinny legs waving helplessly in the air.
As the dust settles, she sees a single white leather Cheetah high-top sitting in the sand.
“Woo-hoo!”
Bryce’s voice from up on the hill pulls her from her trance.
“Way to go, Amma! Woo!”
Amma steps across the invisible threshold that kept the Taliban at bay and retrieves the white high-top from the sand. Slinging the gun over her shoulder, she makes her way back up the hill towards Bryce.
“Damn, girl. I ain’t never seen you move that fast.”
“And you were worried I wouldn’t be ready for my next fight.”
“Well, I still think you could stand to do a few more push-ups. Maybe a few squats. Some lunges…”
Amma tosses the high-top at Bryce. After a bit of hot potato, he manages to grasp it in his hands.
“Put that on. It’ll be easier on your busted ankle than the boot.”
“Geez, Am,” he says, getting a whiff of the shoe. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Just put it on,” she says, sitting herself in the canvas chair at his side. The two watch as the jeep tears away at double the speed it had approached, sending great plumes of sand into the air.
“Think they’ll come back?” Bryce asks.
“Maybe,” Amma says. “But they’re afraid of this place.”
“Cuz of all the dead folks underneath the ground?”
“I would imagine that has something to do with it.” She picks up the water bottle and takes a swig of lukewarm water. “Besides,” she says and then shifts to a bad German accent. “Now we have a machine gun.”
“Ho. Ho. Ho,” Bryce says, echoing the bad German accent. “Hans Gruber, Die Hard,” he adds. “Never gets old.”
“It’s a Christmas classic,” Amma says.
PART 8: Whispers
Saturday, October 9, 2021, 5:49 p.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
An afternoon spent down the hole, taking a closer look at the macabre caverns below The Rise, reveals little other than the long, sad history of conflict seen in Helmand Province. The couple of trinkets Amma had managed to find – another Cheetah high-top, the torn remnants of Taliban military “uniforms”, even an old Soviet war medal – raised questions of just who had been buried down there. Reduced to skulls and skeletons, there were no differences now.
In death, everybody is the same.
Amma tips a little water onto her dirt-caked hands and does her best to get them clean without wasting too much of their precious water supply. She wipes them off with a rag as Bryce sits below the tarp on the top of The Rise, his Cheetah-clad broken ankle now elevated on a pile of rocks topped off with a folded blanket for comfort.
“So, whaddya think, Ams? This place haunted or what?”
Amma lowers herself into the canvas chair at Bryce’s side.
“Haunted with memories, certainly,” she says. “The locals clearly don’t want to come near this place.”
Bryce shakes his head. “No sign of Mister Shouty and his two friends since you whooped their asses,” he says.
Amma takes a long swig of water. “Unless they’re waiting for nightfall,” she says. The two of them look out across the desert.
The sun is beginning to set, the sandy surface becoming an undulating still sea of black below a blood-red sky. Intermittent cirrus clouds reach into the scene like talons as the light slowly fades.
“Well,” Bryce says. “If they wanna rumble, Old Faithful will be waiting for ‘em.” He taps the M4 machine gun that Amma had pried away from the Taliban fighter earlier that day.
“If they wanna rumble, I’m not sure ‘Old Faithful’ will be enough,” Amma says, bluntly, before drinking again from her flask.
The two sit in silence for a moment.
“You gotta admit it though – that radio thing was pretty weird.”
“Could have been a looped recording from years ago,” Amma says.
“Ams. There was no power going to the radio.”
“Old equipment can be weird,” she shrugs. “Maybe there was an old battery in there. Some latent energy source come back to life when we started fiddling with the buttons.”
Bryce gives Amma an incredulous look.
“What?” she says.
“Amma Portland. The girl who saw a spaceship, now turned sceptic. What’s with all the debunking, Dana Scully?”
Amma chuckles. “Spaceships in the sky are a little different than ghosts in the desert,” she says.
Bryce watches as Amma stares thoughtfully across the desert, her hazel eyes turned a burning orange in the fading sunset.
I love you.
“What?” Amma asks.
“I… uh… I didn’t say anything,” Bryce stutters.
The two stay on the top of the hill – sometimes chatting, sometimes silent – as the sun drowns in a sea of black. The moon is bright tonight, tickling light onto the rocky details of the desert and offering some opportunity to spot any approaching aggressors.
“So, what do we do?” Bryce eventually asks, confronting the elephant on the hill.
“About what?” Amma asks, even though she knows.
“Well, ya think one of use oughta keep watch for any – y’know.” Bryce holds an imaginary machine gun, looking through the phantom sight with one eye squeezed tight, and mimics rattling off a few rounds.
“Oh. Yeah, we’re gonna need to stand guard,” Amma says, finishing her flask of water and rising to her feet. “You get first shift,” she says, tossing her binoculars onto Bryce’s lap. “It’s ten now. Sun rises around six. I know math isn’t your strong suit, but that’s eight hours we need to keep our eyes peeled. You take the first four – till two a.m. – and I’ll take the graveyard shift from two till sunrise.”
The two of them look down towards the ground.
“Pardon the expression,” Amma says.
“Roger that, Cap’n,” Bryce says, shooting Amma a salute.
“And, Bryce,” Amma says, lowering herself to her haunches beside him. “Love and lust are not the same thing.”
“Wha-? That was random!”
Amma gives Bryce a peck on his stubble-lined cheek.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she says into his ear before walking away towards the ‘Ritz on The Rise’.
“Jesus,” Bryce says to himself as he watches her walk away. When she’s out of view, he touches a hand to his cheek where the memory of her lips still lingers.
Sunday, October 10, 2021, 3:33 a.m. (local time)
Bryce is fast asleep when Amma emerges to relieve him, so she takes up ‘Old Faithful’ and pokes him awake with the muzzle. After picking him up from the floor, she helps him back to the ‘Ritz’ before taking up her position on the hill. A quick scan with the binoculars reveals no imminent threats and so she settles down in one of the canvas chairs with her phrasebooks in hand to pass the time.
A half hour or so passes uneventfully, until she reaches a familiar word in her Russian book.
Zapustit’.
Run.
She doesn’t just see it. As she reads the word on the page, she hears it, whispered into her ear. She feels the warm breath of the Russian soldier on her cheek, its vodka-laced aroma filling her nose.
Instinctively, she jumps up and looks around
Ostavlyat’.
Leave.
This time, the voice comes from behind her. She spins and looks out over the moonlit desert, bringing the binoculars that hang around her neck up to her eyes. She surveys the scene, panning slowly from left to right, seeing nothing, until…
She jumps instinctively backwards as a dark figure passes by; not in the distance, but right in front of her binoculars, which she lets drop to her chest, held in place by the strap around her neck.
She looks left and right, spins around. But no one is there.
For a moment, the silence is deafening. There isn’t a whisp of wind. No bird calls out and no animal stirs. It is as though time itself has ceased to exist in the desert.
Then comes the static. Loud. As though right there beside her. As though inside her head. Subsiding a little, becoming more distant before settling at a barely audible level to her right. Over in the old communications shack, where a subtle light now glows from within the glassless window.
She snatches up ‘Old Faithful’ and slings the gun over her shoulder before making her way cautiously over towards the ramshackle shack.
PART 9: Echoes
Sunday, October 9, 2021, 4:01 a.m. (local time)
“The Rise” former military outpost
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
The static rings out from the rusted radio console, those words – a warning spoken in Russian – struggling to force their way through the audio fog.
“Zapustit’. Ostavlyat’. Ubiraysya. Prizraki v pustyne.”
Run.
Leave.
Get out.
Ghosts in the desert.
The final phrase thrice repeated, spoken with greater and greater urgency each time, as though the owner of the voice were scared, getting more frantic, running short on time.
The static cuts out. The silence is striking. Almost unnatural.
Then another voice. Pashto this time. Faint, from out in the desert.
Amma clutches the M4 machine gun tight to her chest and refuses to breathe, her heart providing a steady countdown to hearing that voice again. Slightly louder this time, the words indecipherable, but certainly from outside, from just beyond The Rise.
Amma slowly and quietly makes her way out of the battered communications shack, treads as quietly as she can over the sand and rock to find cover behind an old machine gun position – probably U.S. military – consisting of piled sandbags, some of which lie punctured, returning the sand to whence it came.
She crouches. Listens. But there are no sounds.
Carefully, she raises the M4, feeling the stock hard against her shoulder. She places her eye against the sight and flicks it into night vision mode, a bright green interpretation of the desert appearing before her.
She waits for a moment, still and silent, to see if she will hear the voices again.
Nothing.
Slowly and meticulously, she begins scanning the desert, moving her shoulders – and with them, the gun – left to right across the landscape as presented to her in a green glow of electrically amplified infrared light.
As she slowly scans the desert, a thought occurs to her.
What I’m seeing isn’t real. This green world doesn’t really exist.
She shakes the thought from her mind and continues to scan, working her way through twelve O’clock, one O’clock, two O’clock.
Then something makes her pause.
A figure. Blurred and indistinct in glowing green, but a figure nonetheless. Human. Standing. Unmoving.
She stays completely still, gun trained on the impossibly still figure, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, fighting the temptation to breathe.
And then the figure walks away, quickly, off the right. Amma tries to follow, but it’s gone – vanished. Frantically, she scans the desert, in small motions at first, focusing on the immediate area around where the figure had been, but then in wider arcs, swinging the gun left and right, trying to locate the person she thinks she saw.
“Jen!” The voice comes from behind her, close. She spins, planting her back against the buckled wall of sandbags, the world whirling in a blur of green.
“Shaitan!” the voice – gravelly and laced with fear and fury – barks as she tilts the sight away from her eye and her mind attempts to adjust to the confusion of worlds – green and grey; electric and real.
Somewhere, some way, somehow in the optical confusion of it all, she sees him. A man in salwar kameez, looming over her, pointing at her, barking his accusations.
Witch!
Devil!
And in a couple of blinks, just as suddenly as he appeared, he is gone.
Amma clutches the gun tight, unsure of how she was able to keep herself from discharging a few rounds into the spectre, into the night.
She stays there for what feels like thirty minutes but could be more – frozen, unwilling to move, waiting to see if the ghost will return, straining to hear voices from out beyond The Rise.
But all remains silent.
Eventually, she rearranges a couple of sandbags into a makeshift seat and waits there for daylight behind the wall of sand and burlap, every sense on overdrive lest the ghosts return.
She sits like that for over two hours, as the sun peeps up over distant mountains and the emerging light puts paid to any further appearances from any world that isn’t ‘real’.
Amma hears a couple of crunching footsteps approaching from behind, but this time it’s a loud yawn that causes her to turn.
Bryce Mason stands, shirtless but with a blanket draped over his shoulders, one hand on his makeshift crutch, the other stretched into the air as he tries to shake off sleep. His ruffled cargo pants settle on an odd pairing of shoes – on one foot a modern military boot, on the other a white Cheetah high-top sneaker.
“Morning,” he says, trying to take in the scene. He looks at Amma and the gun and the sandbag wall. “Uh… any visitors last night?” he asks.
Amma looks at him and wonders if he would have slept through even if she had fired the M4.
“Just some little green man,” she says, pulling the strap of the M4 over her head and laying the weapon against the sandbags, where it will remain until someone dare set foot on The Rise again.
“O…kay,” Bryce replies.
“C’mon,” Amma says. “Let’s get packed up and ready for Naz.”
“Let’s get some coffee,” Bryce says.
Always with the coffee.
Sunday, October 9, 2021, 7:25 p.m. (local time)
Emirates Airliner
Somewhere over Afghanistan
As the plane takes off from the sandy runway, Bryce has already fallen into a deep, open-mouthed slumber. Beside him, Amma clips the mic to her lapel and taps the ‘record’ button.
“In Helmand Province, we witnessed beauty and horror. We saw the sun rise over golden sands and drown in a blood-red sea. We witnessed things that are hard to explain. Echoes of violence past and repetition of it in the present.
“Are there ghosts in the desert? There are skeletons, that’s for sure. The remains of conflict. Stories of soldiers who refuse to be forgotten, who fought for some cause they felt was worth dying for – and who did just that, right there, in the middle of nowhere.
“But the real spectres of the sands are all too present, clad in a confusion of salwar kameez and American-inspired white high-top sneakers, stalking, fighting, repeating. Like a looped warning doused in static, ever calling out into the void. Set to be ignored for time interminable.”
PART 10: Visions
Saturday, October 24, 2021, 11:11 p.m.
Madison Square Garden
New York, New York
“Mad” Maxine Mayers has a shock of spiky, pink hair and a look in her eye like she wants to kill Amma Portland. She looks mildly less intimidating without all the facial piercings that she would probably leave in to fight if it was left up to her, but with both arms fully sleeved with ghoulish tattoos, those crazed eyes, and bright red cheeks, the sight of the Scotswoman bearing down is enough to rattle even the most seasoned of fighters.
Not Amma.
She sees past all the piercings, tattoos, and bravado. She sees something else. Something deeper. She feels it when they grapple against the cage. The roar of the baying crowd sinks away and flashes of a hard, impoverished childhood flash across her mind.
She was ignored. She was never praised. She was abused.
Three sharp knees to the ribs pull Amma from her trance, the crowd’s roar flooding back into her ears as she breaks from the clinch and takes a sharp jab to the nose on her way out.
That stung.
Amma wiggles her nose, touches it with her glove. It isn’t broken.
She flutters her eyelids, Mayers a blur of pink and red, rushing forward, sensing the opportunity.
Amma closes her eyes and feels her opponent’s movements.
She’s rushing in. She’s desperate for the finish. That’s her inexperience. That’s her weakness.
Amma doesn’t see the wild haymaker coming in over the top; she senses it.
All things are energy, vibrating at a certain frequency. That’s what Amma senses. Mad Max Mayers is the kinetic energy of quarks and the binding energy of gluons. Her sloppy overhand right arcs towards Amma in slow motion, allowing Amma to slip left and watch it fly by like a comet racing towards the Earth, a fiery, golden trail in its wake.
As she watches the light show, Amma instinctively raises her right arm, fist clenched, elbow folded to ninety degrees. She thrusts her hip left, sending a tidal wave of energy through her core, via her chest and shoulders, and into her upper arm, firing her elbow like a piston into the unguarded face of her opponent.
Amma feels her arm push through the wall of energy, her own flow disrupting that bearing down upon her. In her mind, the sound of a thousand glass windows being smashed, the millions of shards being sucked into a vacuum.
As she steadies herself, there is momentary silence. All is calm and dark. And then a flash of something else. Her father, Graham, in his fighter jet, wearing his helmet. The helmet is red with black stripes and there’s something written above the visor.
The Porter.
His face is covered with a black-tinted visor. He’s looking to his left, a bright, golden streak beginning to flash along the dark surface of the visor in slow motion. It looks like a comet, a golden trail of energy spraying in its wake. The source of the energy turns, comes towards him, slowly filling the black visor with blinding golden light. Amma’s periphery is filled with the visor – with the golden light. And then, just before the moment is over, she sees her father’s eyes beyond the glass – wide, unbelieving, swirling with vortices of golden energy.
Then the moment ends. The riotous crowd noise returns, almost causing Amma to cover her ears, such is its ferocity. She is pulled back into reality, Bryce and Milo hopping the cage and running towards her as Alison and Benji make their way in through the cage door.
Bryce grabs her around the hips and hoists her into the air. As he spins her around, she sees the medical team rushing over to the prone, unmoving Mad Max Mayers, her face buried into the canvas where she fell, blood beginning to pool beneath her chin.
The arena whirls around, fans jumping up and down under flickering strobe lights as it dawns on her what just happened.
I slipped the uppercut, caught her clean in the face with a cross-elbow.
Lots of hip.
I won!
Amma hoists her arms in the air and takes in the reverence of the crowd. All that energy, bubbling like a golden sea. Washing over her in waves and waves. There’s no question about it. Winning feels good!
But as Bryce puts her down and plants a kiss on her cheek, her attention returns to the still-unmoving Max Mayers. Amma watches as the medics roll her into the recovery position, her body twitching a little, her face a bloody mess.
Amma pushes away from Bryce and the rest of the crew and heads to the opposite side of the cage, sitting herself on the canvas, cross-legged, facing her fallen opponent in a show of respect.
She closes her eyes to see only energy once again, zoning in on the slowly bubbling radiance of Max Mayers. She sees through her, within her. Sees her heart beating fast. She sees the disrupted connectivity in her brain and modularity, creating an environment inhospitable to the kind of information transfer required for consciousness.
Then something else.
A flash through the layers of energy.
Her father again. Younger this time. Happy. Holding her as a newborn. She feels the love pour in from his energy field to her own, filling her heart. Her mother is there, too, laying on the hospital bed to her side, barely in her periphery. But her energy is different. Contained. No love pouring in.
The image shifts. The golden energy is grey now. She sees her father in a distant place. It’s dark and there is consternation in his eyes. He’s been brought here. He doesn’t belong here.
Forms move in the shadows. Humanlike, but not human. Narrow and slight. A pair of large, black eyes blink at her, an unseen light casting white flecks on their glossy surface.
With a huge intake of breath, all the energy is sucked away, and with it the scene – the distant place, the strange figures – as she is pulled back into reality. It’s Mad Max Mayers’ breath, her lungs gasping for oxygen as she regains consciousness, her energy still somehow bonded to Amma’s, who, despite the crowd of concerned bodies around her fallen opponent, sees her body take in the breath; sees her internal systems reignite, her brain again making the connections required for consciousness, like a computer rebooting and starting up.
The noise of the crowd comes flooding back and Amma is again fully in the room as Mayers’ people help her slowly onto a stool, clean her bloodied face, and offer her water to drink.
Amma climbs to her feet and goes over to check on her opponent.
“You fought well,” Amma says.
“Not as well as you,” Mayers manages to mumble, with a small bow of respect.
Amma pauses and takes one of Mayers’ hands in hers.
“I see you,” she says. “You are a great competitor. You are a survivor.”
Mayers nods, clearly touched by the words.
Amma turns to see her team again coming towards her, led by a beaming Bryce.
“One more for the ‘W’ column, Amma baby!” he says, hugging her tightly.
“I need to see Dad,” Amma says in his ear.
End of TRUE STORY, Episode 2: GHOSTS IN THE DESERT.
Look out for an ALL NEW EPISODE – starting Friday, February 4, 2022!
Never miss the next part of TRUE STORY! Sign up for my newsletter, below.
Like what you see? Show your support on Patreon. (It is very much appreciated.)