The Place God Forgot to Hide by Ashley Mangtani

Brick was almost asleep, his cheek against the warm glass, when the road in front of them stood up into the sky and came back down as dirt.

For a moment the world went silent. Then the sound rushed back. The engine, the men, the ringing inside his skull. Reyes had both hands locked on the wheel, saying something again and again that Brick could not turn into a word he knew.

The lead truck sat crossways, smoke pouring from it, one wheel gone. In the palms to the left, small glares flickered between the trunks, white and brief and almost pretty. Rifles. Brick was already low in his seat, shouting the men down behind him, his body a step ahead of him, the way it had learned to be.

Above them the heavy gun opened up, each round a hammer-blow through the cab. Mouse swung it toward the trees and worked it back and forth, and brass came raining hot through the hatch, ticking against the metal at their feet.

The fight ran on. The tree line kept lighting up, flash after flash between the trunks, and the boys fired back into it, barrels smoking, until a shadow crossed the road and a sound came down over everything, so vast it swallowed the rest.

Then a helicopter came down over the line, and where its guns walked through it the hiding places gave up their men. The shooting stopped, one place, then another and then everywhere. It tilted up and away, small already against the white sky. Then only smoke, and the smell of cooked sap.

Doc crossed to the burning truck, checked the boys, and came back at a walk. No one had to ask. They’d lived, and the blood on him belonged to none of them. Reyes laughed, his hands not yet off the wheel. Mouse stayed in the turret behind his gun and would not come down. And Pruitt, who had spent the whole patrol trying to trade off the parts of his lunch he didn't want, sat still now, the open packets untouched between his knees.

They hooked a chain to the wrecked truck and dragged it back, and behind them the grove stood broken. Killing was the one thing the country had taught them, and it had taught them well.

***

Three days later, they were pulled off the rotation and taken to a room no one used, with plywood walls, an air conditioner shuddering in its mount, and a single long table. A man sat at it in clean civilian clothes, no name tape, no rank, nothing to say who he was.

The photographs lay face down in a stack in front of him. He turned them over one at a time as he spoke, sliding each toward the men.

The first was taken from straight above, a narrow green valley curving through open desert, where the maps showed nothing. The next was the same location from lower down, the green deeper now, and a silver line of water. Then the photographs came faster. A trench cut into the earth. Guys in white suits kneeling in it. Something small and dark under glass with a ruler laid for scale, and last, a shard of pottery, the writing scratched into it running right to left.

"Two labs dated the wood. Same result." He let it sit. "A recon team pulled the sample two weeks back. My people think it’s the tree of life. Now we go in for the rest, and you're taking us." He said it like a man reading the lunch menu.

No one moved. Moisture ticked from the air conditioner onto the floor, and into that sound Doc said, "What happens to it. After."

"After, we close down the site." He gathered the photographs. "That's need-to-know. You don't."

Pruitt shifted in his chair as if to ask something, and Brick caught his eye, but he didn't.

"Not a cutting, not a seed, not a photograph. Understood?" He stood. "Then you bring my people home. You leave before first light."

Outside, the day was cooling. Far to the south, beyond the wire and the marshes and a night's drive of bad ground, the valley lay in the dark with the stream running through it. And the tree stood at the centre, older than the god who was supposed to have planted it, alive out there while they sat in the room and made their plans.

***

They drove out before dawn, three trucks and two more behind for the man and his scientists. Reyes, who talked through everything, drove with both hands and said nothing the whole way. On other mornings there was talk, or gum going round, or Reyes singing under his breath. Not this one. Within the hour the road gave out, the earth went soft under the wheels, and every mile carried them closer to the thing none of them would say aloud.

At the edge of the marsh the trucks stopped, and Brick went down the line checking his men one at a time, the way he did before every job. He found Pruitt's chin strap loose and tightened it. He checked their water bottles, the tape holding Mouse's gun together, the dressings folded in Doc's bag, and said something small to each man, nothing that mattered, just so they heard his voice.

The marsh opened out on both sides. The reed beds stood taller than the men, and the pools between them held the pink of the sky. Birds lifted off it in their thousands as the trucks passed, a soft roar of wings, which dropped out behind them. This was the desert they had bled in for a year, and here it was, alive. None of them had a word for it.

Doc rode beside Brick with his aid bag in his lap, his face to the window. "They flew us all the way out here for a tree."

"Doesn't matter what it is," Brick said. "We take them in, we bring them out. Same as always."

Doc looked at him then. "Nothing about this is same as always."

Brick didn't answer that, because there was nothing to say that wasn't a lie.

Mouse spoke up from the gun. "Hope it's worth it. Whatever's out there."

Nobody told him it would be. 

Sami rode in the lead truck, watching the ground go by. He was their interpreter, and he had been with them the better part of a year. He caught things in a voice the rest of them couldn't. Once, at a checkpoint, a man walked up to the truck with his arms open and a smile on his face, and Sami went still, and pushed Brick back into the seat by the chest, and a second later the smiling man reached under his shirt for a gun. That was Sami. He was always a beat ahead of the rest.

At the foot of the ridge Sami asked them to stop. "I'm only going this far," he said.

"I need you in there," Brick said.

"You don't want me in there." He got out and nodded at the high ground. "Where I'm from, you grow up knowing not to go up there." He looked at Brick. "Its name tells you everything."

"What's the name?" Brick said.

"The place God forgot to hide." Sami shifted the bag on his shoulder and looked at the ridge like it might have moved closer. "You hide what you're afraid to lose. Allah wasn't afraid of anyone. So he left it out here, where no one would think to look, and let the desert keep it." He turned back to Brick. "And now here you are."

"I can't leave you out here alone," Brick said.

"I'm safer here than you'll be in there." Sami stepped back off the road. "I'll wait by the water. Come back, and you'll find me."

He turned and went down into the reeds, and the marsh took him, and the trucks climbed the ridge alone. They came up over it mid-morning. The valley opened below them, and the trucks slowed and stopped, no one giving the word.

It was green past all sense, moss and flooded hollows and the underside of leaves. Grass ran down both slopes to a stream, and at the near end a village stood among small fields. Houses of mud the colour of the land beneath them. A low tower. Animal pens. Smoke rose straight into air that did not stir. People had lived there before there was a country called Iraq, and from the ridge it was the last quiet place left in the world.

They had only a moment to look at it. The first rocket came up out of the village before the trucks had finished stopping. It passed over them and burst against the slope, throwing a fan of earth into the air. The second struck one of the trucks carrying the scientists, and it folded around the blast and caught fire. Men fell out of the smoke into the grass, dragging a shape between them that had stopped being a man.

After that there was only noise, and staying alive. The guns fired from a window, from the tower, from the wall of a pen, and the rounds came through the reeds, cutting them down. Mouse opened up from the turret. Brick put his men behind the trucks, behind whatever cover the land gave them. For an hour neither side moved. 

The gun in the tower found Reyes as he crossed the open stretch and cut him down and stayed on him after he fell. Mouse turned the roof gun on the tower and took the top of it clean off, and the firing stopped. Reyes lay out in the grass with the sky in his open eyes, the stream running a hand's reach from his fingers.

Then Brick sent Pruitt and two others up a dry ditch toward the pens, because the ground there would hide them, and for a while it did. A grenade came down on a short bounce. When the dirt had finished falling, Pruitt sat against the side of it with his rifle across his knees, his palms open in his lap, and the front of him gone. He had spent the day before trying to give the brown sweets from his ration away, and no one had wanted them, and now he held nothing at all.

There was no taking the position. So Brick called it in.

They pulled back to the trucks and got down and waited. It did not take long. The missile came in from somewhere they couldn't see, a sound in the air that kept rising, and then the village came apart, wall by wall, in white flashes. When it stopped, it had gone back into the dirt it was built from, the mud walls and the tower and the pens all one colour now.

A village older than the Bible, older than the Qur'an, gone in a breath. Dust lifted off the wreckage and drifted a long time in the still air, and came down over the impossible green.

Brick's men stood in the silence and would not look at each other. Two of the scientists had lived through their first fight, cases clutched to their chests, white at the knuckle. 

No one spoke. They walked past it into the reeds, because they had not come for the village. It had only been in the way.

***

They walked the last stretch, through knee-high stalks that soaked them cold, and the noise of the morning drained away behind them until there was nothing left but the water.

The stream ran clear over pale stones, and it was the only thing that moved. Birds called from the far slope, and others answered from the near one, a question and a reply, over and over, in a language none of them could ever learn. Brick breathed in, and the air was sweet, and under the sweetness the smell of earth no one had ever turned.

The tree stood by the stream at the heart of the valley.

It was not tall. For all its years, it had grown out instead of up. The trunk ran wider than a car, the bark worn smooth by weather, and the great lower limbs spread across the grass and laid their elbows on the ground. High in the branches hung the fruit, dark, round, heavy, and not one had fallen, not one bruised or taken.

It did not shine. It threw no light and asked for none in return. It stood in the plain morning sun and was, in every leaf and every limb, the exact thing the man had named back at the camp, and that was harder to stand under than any miracle would have been.

Brick took off his helmet. He had not told his hand to do it and stood with it hanging from his fingers, the sun on his bare head. Beside him, Doc did the sign of the cross, the way his mother had taught him before he was old enough to know what it meant, his lips moving on a prayer he did not say aloud. Mouse came down last, still holding the spare barrel of his gun to his chest because his hands would not let go of it, and he looked up into the branches, and what was left in him came out in a whisper.

"Jesus," Mouse said.

No one misunderstood.

It had been holding its fruit to the light since before the first man knelt to the first god, and it paid them no mind now.

The scientists did not wait to be told. They knelt at the foot of the trunk, opened their cases and went to work with blades and a small saw. A core of wood from the trunk. A length of root. Three of the fruit, brought down on a long pole and placed in grey foam. They worked fast and did not look up. Brick let them, because it was the mission, and the mission was the only thing he still had a hold on.

When the cases were full, Brick got on the radio.

His voice climbed the ridge and from there to someone further back.

"You have the samples," the voice said.

"We have them," said Brick.

"Good. Close it out."

Brick did not follow. He stood there beneath the spreading limbs, the cases at his feet, and the order made no sense.

"Say again."

"Take it down. All of it. The tree, the roots, the ground under it. Confirm."

"Sir. Are you sure?"

"Take it down, Sergeant. It comes from a long way over both of us. You're not being asked whether you agree. You're being asked to carry out a direct order."

And there it was. The man had said it three days ago in the plywood room, and Brick had taken it to mean secure the place, lock it down. It had never meant that. It had meant this, and some part of Brick had known, and he kept his eyes down. 

The water ran behind him. The birds had not stopped. Brick looked up once at the fruit the scientists had left hanging, dark against the sky. Then he looked at his men. Mouse would not turn around. Doc stood on the bank with his head bowed, and neither of them would be any help to him now.

Brick keyed the radio. He meant to say something into it, and found he had nothing, and let it go.

"Roger," he said. "Out."

He clipped the handset back to his chest, and the voice was gone, and it was just the valley now. 

"Mouse."

It took him a moment to come back from wherever he had gone. Then he went up the slope, and came back with the charges against his chest, both arms locked around them, holding them the way you hold something you'd rather drop.

***

Brick sent the scientists back over the ridge with their cases and told them not to look back. They didn't. Then it was Brick, Doc, Mouse, and the tree. 

"Give them here," Brick said. "This one's mine."

Mouse handed the charges over and went to stand with Doc. Brick set them himself, into the roots and the folds of the bark, and his palm came away each time damp from the living wood. He ran the wire between them, and it was done.

Doc paid out the wire behind him and kept his eyes down. Mouse stood by with his jaw working. There was something he needed to say, and no way left to say it, and then Brick reached for the wire, and it did not matter anymore.

Brick knelt and took the handle in both hands. He held it a moment. Then he closed his eyes and pressed.

The tree came apart in a single breath. It went up white at the root and opened outward, every limb thrown wide at once, and for a moment it hung in the air unmade. Then it fell. The limbs came down and slid into the stream, out of the light they had held their fruit up to, into the dark of the water. The ash came down after them, over the wreck and the bare heads of the men, like snow that would not melt. Brick stayed on his knees, and something came up in him that he had no words for, and it was grief.

After a while Brick stood and told the voice it was done. The voice thanked him and clicked off. The three men walked past where the village had been, and did not look back, and behind them the water ran grey with the tree, and would not run clear again. 

***

In the years that came after, the war found its reasons.

It was the oil, the borders drawn by men who had never seen the place, the money, the contracts. It was the regime toppled and the men installed to replace it. It was the weapons they swore were there and never were. It was a tower on the far side of the world, and a country too frightened to ask whether this was the answer to it. It was the dead they counted, and the dead they did not.

None of that was the real reason. The truth was simpler, and worse. The tree belonged to no one. It answered to no one. It had stood there before the first god was named, before the first border was drawn, before anyone decided what the world was allowed to contain. That was what could not be allowed. Not the threat of it, because it was no threat to anyone. Only that it was free, in a world that permitted no such thing.

The men who did it went home that night and slept.

Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. His work appears or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, BULL, Expat Press, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com