Goliath

A glorious blue sky, the sunlight twinkling against the glistening dark hull of a new Soviet Typhoon. Commander Simon Bela Covah, starched and pressed in the uniform of the Soviet Navy. A proud salute as the monstrous sub pushes out to sea.

An autumn’s chill.

A blink of time.

Simon stands on the same dock. Middle-aged. A nucleargraveyard is spread out before him. The once mighty Typhoon bleeds its toxins into the sea.

An icy winter’s wind.

Covah—lying on the floor, held down against the cold cement. The bones in one leg have been shattered, his oppressors standing over him, gloating.

Unable to watch, Anna and Nedana shut their eyes.

Covah stares into the frightened face of his youngest daughter, Dani. “Don’t cry, Dani, don’t weep, my little angel. You will be the one, the one who shall send me on my mission … a mission to stop the insanity.”

Echoes of laughter from the Red Berets, drunk with violence, as they pour the gasoline over his head.

“Sorceress, no … please—”

Anna screams. The petrol ignites …

Nothing happens.

Covah opens his eyes.

He is no longer in the basement, he is no longer in Kosovo.

It is daylight and he is wandering the scorched postnuclear outskirts of Baghdad. He moves past piles of debris and human waste, and putrid puddles of olive green glittering beneath a broiling afternoon sun.

Black smoke appears in the distance.

Bonfires blaze from a dozen funeral pyres. Workers in masks and orange environmental suits toss the scorched bodies of the dead into the flames.

To his right, a clearing.

It is a field—a field of the un-alive. There are tens of thousands of them, lined up in rows on the barren earth like human barbecues cooking beneath the glaring Iraqi sky. Hairless, featureless, with facial skin so charred and bodies so mangled that Covah cannot tell man from woman. Comatose souls—whose stillbeating pulses are all that segregates them from the fire. Wretched existence, comforted only by the flies.

“We are insane, you know—not just us, I mean our entire species …” His voice, speaking to him from a recent memory.

Ahead, a hastily erected open-air Army tent, mosquito netting serving as walls. Within, hundreds of frail life-forms, situated on cots.

A children’s ward.

Exhausted volunteers move silently among these precious angels, offering fresh I.V.s and moistened towels. There are no more tears to be shed, no more prayers that can be offered.

“Ours is a life-form that caresses violence like a forbidden lover. We taste it, smell it, overindulge our senses in it, then push it away after the deed has been done, to beg our Maker’s forgiveness.”