The Arms of the Almighty by Rakesh Gupta (great reads .txt) 📕

When I woke up it looked to be late afternoon;

I have no idea what happened, I opened my eyes and I saw the sand sift with each exhalation of my breath. I was lying face down in a shed ... or barn … something of that sort and for a moment I believed I was back in my hometown of Ruhe;

I smelt smoke…. Smoke from munitions; it's acid tinge was heavy.. There was death in the air.

Each step I took made me aware of my body’s highly weakened state, soon it was followed by an intense craving for food. Wearily, I stepped out of the barn into the gloominess and blinked rapidly, my jaw open. The scene outside was radically different from what I was used to in 3 years of incarceration at Sepuika bay. There was blood and bodies everywhere, somewhere in the distance echoed the sound of automatic weapons.

It took a while for my brain to comprehend that Sepuika bay had been attacked and that I was free in one sense of the word. FREEDOM; the word should have suffused me with elation but instead only filled me with a sense of nothingness, an all pervading nihilism that surprised even me after all those years of hell. I looked down at my yellow jumpsuit and at the serial IM890123 printed on my chest and the sight of the number triggered memories of the horrors of the tortures, the executions and the perversity of Sepuika bay.

Overhead, a Garuda fighter screamed and I looked skyward in a moment of panic at the prospect of an incoming bomb. Funny thing about a camp like this, optimism tended to be a rare quality in all but the staunchest of minds. Food ; my stomach screamed at me and the thought of an incoming cluster bomb was replaced by a craving for nourishment. I quickly scrambled to what I remembered used to be the cafeteria and prayed that the Alliance’s offense had spared it or that the Nagas had in their rush to escape (or before they were incinerated whichever came first, I dimly hoped it was the latter) had made it a low priority in the nature of evidence.

It was left standing…………….

I shoved open the door and was greeted by a shower of falling debris, wiping the dust from my face I stumbled to the kitchen and looked at what used to be the kitchen for us ‘Shudras’ , us ‘untouchables’ and I prayed that I could find some of the rough stale bread that was a staple of mine and my comrades diet for the last three years. I then saw with some surprise that the door to the kitchen of the camp officers was unlocked…

Could It be??? I asked myself, I did not believe in miracles even after the fact that the camp had been attacked and I was potentially free.

I walked in and saw what looked to be a cold pot of oatmeal and a plate with an omlette; I blinked twice…. This couldn't be I told myself. I ran to the table and took a big slurp of the oatmeal by the ladle; the omelets I grabbed like a tortilla and consumed 3/4th with one gigantic swallow. I kept swallowing ladlefuls of oatmeal until I remembered reading somewhere that after a period of starvation it was unwise to consume food in large quantities. Screw it!! I told myself and kept eating for what I assumed was a good one hour.

After washing down the best meal of my life with some water and tea; I felt a strange mix of renewed energy and foggy headedness. Draped over a chair was a hooded overcoat. I grabbed it and proceeded to walk out of the building.

Outside I heard explosions.. the ground vibrated; what happened here?

Birds of prey had swooped down to feed on the bodies and I looked at them with a dull detachment, Gajaman, Alexander, the annoying Rivera … they were all dead; their bodies riddled with holes. Many of the carcasses looked like they were in the process of being dragged into the 'cooker'; but something had interrupted the process. Intermingled with the bodies of my fellow 'Shudras' were the bodies of the camp guards and staff.

I should have smiled when I saw the bodies of the most savage bastards ever to live on this planet; men who shot our pregnant wives in the stomach while we pleaded with them for mercy, men who bludgeoned our elderly to death, laughing when hearing their frail bones snap. Men who used flamethrowers on the selected 'groups' to improve morale or 'remove' disease. These men were dead now and I did not give a damn…

Slowly I walked through the main gate of the camp; the sentry booth was charred, there was a lot of what looked to be semi solid blood and grey matter on the window as well as a bloody hand print. I gave it a cursory glance and continued my weary trudge outside.

I don't how long I walked the path; I just walked. There was no destination in mind, I just walked where the road took me. If I remembered correctly, Sepuika was on top of a hill and I knew eventually I would run into some sign of humanity.. Possibly our saviors.

Exhausted; I collapsed under a tree.

Saviors? Saviors for what? What was left in me to save? My family was dead, my girlfriend ….

Sasha! Dear Sasha.. Her large kohl streamed eyes.. Her long raven dark hair.. The gorgeous womanly scent of her that used to drive me wild …. Her laugh , full of joy and the mischievous half smile that always seemed to suggest she knew something you didn't. God I missed her; my heart lurched and I started gaining some feeling in the region, I was conscious of a stabbing pain.. like something had pierced my heart and wouldn't leave … Sasha was my everything, they had dragged her away from me and she did not cry! She didn't need to. She looked at me with those eyes, her jawbones pulsating with emotion and she kept watching until they pulled her into the transport. I remember screaming and then blacking out as a naga enforcer used his trishul to tase me into unconsciousness.

Sasha was dead; I knew it…….. False optimism was never one of my weaknesses ; The transport had been heading to Basilica and all the women there had been raped; at some point a mysterious plague had spread throughout the camp inmates and captors alike had been affected. The Nagas.. ...Ever efficient… had dropped a mini shunya bomb and killed everything within a 50 mile radius of the camp. The plague disappeared along with all souls; the news spread like wildfire in our camp.

This was one year ago; I remember that instance when I heard the news ... I was using a spade to do some unholy work for the Nagas when the news hit me; I died then….. Something collapsed in me and disintegrated into nothingness…. It was her face and the times that we spend together that had kept me going, kept me alive when the 'fever' hit our camp and wiped out about 40 % of us. It was her face that had kept me going through subzero temperatures braving frostbite and the thin pinpricks of shock all the way through my spine.

And she was dead. The vacuum in the innermost depths of my being was quickly filled with a vortex of hate; The promise of vengeance fuelled me and kept me alive now; I have always considered myself a passionate person and I could summon up emotions and keep them kindled to sustain me and give me a purpose and thus I lived. Those who weren't so adept died, either by exposure, with a bullet in their stomachs or the lucky ones took their own lives.

Me… I bided my time and I knew what I was going to do. I had managed to smuggle a list of the each camp official and their home addresses into my bunk. Once I got out; I was going to get each one of them. Kill their wives, their children, their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their sisters. There were fifty of them and I visualized the carnage I would unleash again and again. The streets would run red with their 'pureblood' ; that DNA they fought so hard to preserve and 'purify' would spill into the gutters.

In 5 months; the inferno of vengeance in my soul died; I witnessed more tortures, bizarre medical experiments, 'scientific' rituals, the Nagas at the height of their insane delusions believed that they could 'create' God and we became scientific experiments. I saw my comrades become guinea pigs and come out as hideously misshaped and grotesque apparitions, I saw them being driven insane by the nature of these experiments.

I saw one comrade implode.

And yet the Nagas lived and partied and laughed.

That was when vengeance became a dull ache and then a wispy memory. I became a zombie, there were only 60 of us left with no hope for the future. I do not know why I didn't take my own life those remaining hellish days. I have no idea what I was doing in the barn and why I was unconscious. I was a free man now , but what was there to look forward to? Why did I suffer so?

I realized I hadn't blinked for four minutes. The world was empty for me;

I started walking towards what I believed was the ridge.

There was no honor in my final walk. My head was down, my feet shuffled, my shoulders stooped and my arms were slack. I passed a field, flowers blossomed, but to me they had no color, no charm. Their smell was artificial to me and their sickly sweet odor that was somehow noxious, I couldn't care. I walked

A couple of minutes later I came upon something that froze me in my tracks.

Lying with his back to a tree, busily tapping into his PDA device was the Captain himself.

It couldn't be??? But there he was, I would never forget the steel gray eyes, the face that looked like a skull that had been seran wrapped with skin. The intelligence in those eyes not betraying a hint of the insanity that existed… It had to exist… how else would this man signed orders that sent hundreds of begging and crying souls to their dooms. How else could he authorize the 'specialized' tortures and the mass 'flaming' cleansings. He was different, he never laughed like the other guards, he never smiled. Without any emotion he picked out the ones that were to die … slowly. He did not stop the guards and their sadistic actions, to him we were roaches… the 'Shudras'…. The untouchables.

And this man was alive, his Naga uniform was blood stained and next to him lay a Tercer Assault rifle he seemed oblivious to my presence. His brows were furrowed in concentration while he examined the PDA

Something sparked in me.

Without knowing quite what I was doing, I looked around for an object…. Any object that I could use as a weapon .. There was none. He was less than 30 feet from me.

I walked silently, my shoulders and spine straightened. I expected him to hear me somehow, but I felt powerful, immortal