[EXT. SCOTLAND, AROUND KINLOSS]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[Footsteps, on grimy, almost wet ground. In the background, wind is howling.]
[An exhale.]
MARTIN
Oh, I’m knackered.
ARCHIVIST
Are you?
MARTIN
I –
[They both stop.]
MARTIN
Hm.
[He takes another step, then stops again.]
MARTIN
Well – Okay, well, no, no; I suppose not. But I think I should be.
ARCHIVIST
Yep.
MARTIN
How long have we been walking?
ARCHIVIST
(sigh) Fourteen hours and twenty-three minutes.
[He takes a step.]
MARTIN
What, seriously?!
ARCHIVIST
Yes. I – don’t think it means much out here, though.
MARTIN
We should probably rest.
ARCHIVIST
Maybe – I don’t know, I – I don’t know if we can. Rest. It – feels more like, well – waiting.
[He sighs. They both take a few more steps.]
[Another sigh.]
MARTIN
…So. Are we going to walk all the way to London?
ARCHIVIST
(a bit of a laugh) If you know an alternative, I’d be very keen to hear it.
MARTIN
I mean – cars? You know, planes, trains, automobiles?
ARCHIVIST
(overlapping) It wouldn’t help.
MARTIN
Alright, a boat then.
ARCHIVIST
Geography doesn’t work anymore. Space, i– doesn’t work.
MARTIN
Alright. So what does that mean?
ARCHIVIST
It means the journey will be the journey, regardless of how we choose to make it.
MARTIN
Right. And you’re sure we can’t just, you know –
[Another shuffle.]
MARTIN
Speed it up a bit?
ARCHIVIST
(inhale) No.
[He exhales heavily.]
MARTIN
Right. I just – Don’t like being out here.
ARCHIVIST
(heh) You see that tower, way off in the distance?
MARTIN
(don’t like where this is going) Yeah. (beat, sigh) It’s watching us, isn’t it?
ARCHIVIST
The Panopticon and the Institute. Merged into something entirely new.
MARTIN
(splutter-scoff) Wai– what? No, there’s, there’s no way we can see it from here. We – We must still be a hundred miles from the border, never mind London!
ARCHIVIST
You could see that tower from anywhere on Earth. And it can see you. And if you walk towards it, eventually you’ll get there. But you have to go through everything in between.
[Pause.]
MARTIN
(bright) You’re being ominous again.
ARCHIVIST
(ah!) Sorry. Sorry.
MARTIN
What do you mean ‘everything?’ What’s out here?
[The Archivist inhales. As he does so, there’s a sort of creaking – and then we hear the weakest strains of bagpipes beginning to fade through.]
ARCHIVIST
Nightmares. Come on, that trench is our first.
[He starts walking.]
MARTIN
What tre–? Where did that…? Why is that here?
ARCHIVIST
In the world as was, we wouldn’t be too far from Kinloss Barracks. So instead, we get the trench.
MARTIN
How’d you know all this stuff?
ARCHIVIST
Not sure. I just do.
MARTIN
(quieter) John. I’m scared.
ARCHIVIST
Yes. (sigh) That’s the idea.
[They start walking.]
[TAPE CLICKS OFF.]
[EXT. SCOTLAND, AROUND KINLOSS, THE TRENCH, A BIT LATER]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[The bagpipes are much louder. We’re in the middle of the action. There are guns being shot and bullets flying and all around, the clattering of war. Grenades. Explosions. Any voices need to shout to be heard over the racket.]
MARTIN
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!
ARCHIVIST
Martin! Stay with me; don’t let go!
MARTIN
Oh…
ARCHIVIST
Come on!
MARTIN
Shit, shit, shit –
ARCHIVIST
It’s okay.
MARTIN
No!
ARCHIVIST
You’re okay!
MARTIN
I don’t know [unintelligible], okay? This is not okay!
ARCHIVIST
Listen, come on!
[He groans, clearly straining with effort. There’s scraping, the sound of something driving off – and they’re both left heaving breaths in the aftermath.]
[The sound of war is still present in the background; there’s still a light flute over everything.]
ARCHIVIST
(still regaining breath) Are you –
MARTIN
(still shaky, voice wet) I’m fine, fine; I’m just – How, how about you; you’re not hurt?
ARCHIVIST
Uh… (checks) No. No, I’m not.
MARTIN
(overlapping) Good. Good. (space) Good.
[He exhales, then –]
MARTIN
(!) J, J,J-John. John. We’re not alone.
ARCHIVIST
Ignore them; they’re, they’re not – Just ignore them.
[Still shouts and roars in the background. Martin’s still breathing quickly.]
MARTIN
They’re not – real?
ARCHIVIST
(humorless laugh) No, they’re real. They were normal people before the –
Before me. (exhale) But now they’re here, meat for the grinder. I just mean there’s no point – talking to them.
MARTIN
(overlapping) Don’t be a prick, John. (to the people) Hey, I’m – I’m sorry about him; he’s, he’s going through a lot – well, we all are, I suppose, but – hi, I guess.
[No response.]
MARTIN
Hello?
ARCHIVIST
They won’t hear you, Martin. They’re all – too busy waiting to die.
MARTIN
John…
ARCHIVIST
They sit here –
[A rumbling, deep static begins to build.]
ARCHIVIST
– the image of everyone they hold dear locked in their mind, knowing they’ll never see them again. Waiting for the order.
[As he speaks, the higher, shinier component of the Archivist’s static begins to come in, initially at a low fade but rising quickly.]
ARCHIVIST
Dreading the bullet or the drone or the barbed wire that will tear them to shreds and leave them nothing but a bloody –
MARTIN
J,John, enough – Enough!
[The static fades out. Something is fired in the background.]
MARTIN
Please don’t tell me these things.
ARCHIVIST
I – I’m sorry, I – There’s just so much.
There’s so much, Martin, and I know all of it – I can – see all of it, and I – it’s filling me up; I need to let it out!
[His voice gains in intensity as he says it; it’s also beginning to shake. Martin is firm, though:]
MARTIN
I’m sorry, but tough. Okay, th-that’s not what I’m here for.
I can’t be that for you; I, I-I just. Can’t.
ARCHIVIST
(softer) I-I know. (beat, sigh) I’ll, I’ll use the tape recorder.
[We hear the rattling of its plastic as he begins to get it out.]
ARCHIVIST
I just – (heavy sigh) You’ll probably want to wait outside.
MARTIN
(sorry, did you just lose the last remaining brain cell????) Um, no?
ARCHIVIST
(sigh) Well, put your fingers in your ears, then, I, I suppose.
[Martin pffts, then sighs.]
MARTIN
Fine, and what about them?
ARCHIVIST
They don’t even know we’re here. We’re not part of their nightmare.
[Something drips.]
MARTIN
Right.
[It drips again. Presumably Martin puts his fingers in his ears at this point. Whatever it is keeps dripping as the Archivist speaks.]
ARCHIVIST
(testing) Martin? (slightly louder) Martin? (one more test) Martin, I hate your tea, and wish you made coffee instead. (hm) Alright then.
[He sighs heavily. All at once, the static from earlier comes rushing right back in as if it had never left.]
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
There is a wound in the earth.
A bayonet gouge scored through the soft and sodden mud for uncounted miles. A trench that marks the front line of a war that has no name. It has always been raging, deep in the hearts of the powerful and those that thirst to see bodies piled high in their name.
And now it has a battleground. A thousand pointless conflicts and bitter stalemates stitched together like a triaged chest wound.
It is a butchered border, a thin and punctured membrane between the unending meat grinder and the terrified victims it longs for.
You may find this trench reaching all across the world, and it will never stop, never be satisfied, never think of peace.
Charlie stands there, waiting in a transport.
Once, it was a thin metal landing craft, drifting slowly through a fetid lake. The waters were red and black by turns with blood and oil and the floating bodies of those before them, that were pushed aside by the boat’s wake.
Next to him, Charlie saw Ryan, who he’d known since childhood, though the other details were hazy. Ryan gave him a thumbs up and an encouraging smile – before his face exploded inwards to a sniper’s bullet, peppering the boat with shards of bone and gore.
Charlie swallowed, and waited as the bullets kept coming and those around him died but did not fall, propped up as they were by the pressing mass of people around them.
He could not move, and as he waited for the shot that would take him, his legs fell away in fear.
Now he is in a helicopter, strapped in tight and unable to move. The man in the gunner’s chair is dead, bound limp in his seat harness, half his jaw gone. The thump-thump-thump of the rotors pulses through Charlie like a toothache, and he cannot hear the shouts and cries of his comrades.
He looks out of the side as a telltale line of smoke arcs up and around towards them from the scorched earth far below. He cannot hear his own scream.
He lies upon the ground, amid the twisted wreckage of whatever he was trapped in, feeling the jagged shards of broken bone dig into him.
Charlie looks up, and sees something floating there, silently. It is sleek, and merciless, its featureless carbon-fiber face regarding the shattered man dispassionately. The drone’s camera blinks once, twice as he tries desperately to crawl away, pain lancing through every part of him.
The thing makes no sound as it follows him, matching the excruciating pace of the bleeding soldier. Charlie knows when it decides to fire, he won’t even hear it.
He places his hand down and it sinks, suddenly, into the mud. He cries out as the rusted barbed wire curls itself eagerly around his wrist, digging into his skin.
Tasting fear, more wire slithers through the churned earth towards him, stretching and gripping him tight, rough needles puncturing his legs and chest and throat, pulling him down and holding him steady as the drone lingers, its blankness giving no hint of the thoughts behind its trigger.
There is a rumbling in the earth around him as a tank speeds along its unstoppable path, and Charlie is immediately pulled under its tread.
He has a moment of shocked horror before being reduced to a smear in the mud.
Inside the tank, Ishaan screams.
Ishaan remembers the recruiters. He was promised valor, and camaraderie, and the chance to be part of something meaningful. He knew that part had been a lie, but then – so was the choice. His alternative was stagnant poverty, and that was really no choice at all.
The money would help his family, and he could spend some years in hell, if he needed to. For them.
But he didn’t know about this war, that had always been raging and would never stop. How could he have known what the trench would be?
They had taken him, dragged him from the flooded foxhole where he had sheltered for a moment’s brief respite, and taken him to the tanks, those monstrous beasts of iron that rolled forever forward, guns firing and treads leaving the earth scarred in their wake.
They pass above the trench again and again and they never turn around, pushing onward, ever onwards, the bones that stick in their gears not slowing them for a moment.
Ishaan had been afraid. Terrified that they were going to strap him to it, pin him to the Goliath’s hull like all the other flayed flags of war, striking fear into the hearts of the enemy.
But instead they fed him to it, tossed him into its burning innards and sealed the hatch behind him.
Now, his body has contorted itself to fit, his fingers clutched around the firing lever; pulling it frantically is the only thing that will reduce the impossible heat even for a moment.
From the tiny slit in the metal, he can see other soldiers: baby-faced friends and the monstrous, pig-faced enemy, both falling underneath his iron coffin’s advance.
He tries to cry, but his tears turn to steam.
He waits, craving and dreading the final kiss of the bombs, the terrible thundering guns so far away that none have ever seen them, raining their arbitrary ruin upon the endless fields of the dead and dying.
They are perhaps the only things that can fell the tanks, splitting them like rotten fruit beneath the force of their rounds.
Ishaan begs, pleading with whatever god of hatred and pain he hears piping gently on the breeze to let the bombs rain down on him. To release him from his imprisonment in a single flash of destruction.
But when his prayer is answered, the white-hot agony of melted and crumpled metal is like nothing he could dream of.
When Hasana takes him into triage, she can barely bring herself to look at him.
She wheels his stretcher to its place in the stinking, vaulted tent that serves as a field-hospital, walking through a sea of bandages and around the piles of festering gauze.
She leaves the shuddering man and approaches a nearby doctor, its long form crouched over the open chest of a patient, its many hands a frenzy of scalpel, bonesaw, and needle as it giggles beneath its surgeon’s mask.
She wants to ask about the wounded, about what to do, where to put the new ones, how to help them, but even if her voice was not drowned out by the thousand-strong chorus of moaned and pained yelling that fills the tent, the doctor doesn’t seem to notice her.
Hasana’s eyes fall on the entrance to the tent, and she sees the line of civilians, stretching away into the distance. They are no less maimed, their agonies no more bearable, but there is simply no room.
She tries to apologize, but instead she closes the tent.
As she does so, she sees the trench behind her, and, not for the first time, Hasana considers trying to run.
But there is no mercy for deserters here. On one side of the trench the hungry guns of the vile enemy wait. And on the other, the just guns of heroes will cut you down no slower, save perhaps a breath to call you coward.
So she waits there, in the middle, with the weeping, wounded, and the soon to be dead. Waiting for the enemy to overrun them.
Sometimes, in the distance, Hasana sees them. The enemy, their skin rough, dark, and scaly; their faces twisted around cruel tusks, viciously sharpened teeth, and a pair of beady red eyes. Their lips are smeared crimson with the blood of children, and their greatest delight is to pluck the eyes of the innocent with their bayonets.
To call them monsters is the simple truth. They feel no pain, no remorse, and seek nothing but carnage.
Sometimes, in the distance, Hasana can even see an enemy triage tent, almost identical in appearance to her own. She can only imagine the atrocities that must take place inside.
Far in the distance, she sees Alexei look out over the battlefield, and her stomach turns at the detestable wrongness of his face.
Alexei in turn looks out from deep in the trench. He catches sight of the enemy, their shriveled rat-like heads causing the bile to rise in his throats.
He is bored. The boredom is the worst part, the part that erodes his will and drops him to despair.
There is nothing to do, nowhere to be. The only thing to occupy his mind is the inevitability of the next attack, the next order to charge, the next dropping bomb.
There is no way to know when and where these things will come. But no one will talk of anything else.
His stomach growls, the hunger pushing its sharp fingers out from his belly. There are no more rations, and what there is tastes of cordite and sand, and coats his tongue in an oily film that makes him gag.
He has heard the enemy will eat your body if they find it in the mud. They won’t even check if you’re dead first. Alexei shudders at the thought.
From far down the trench, a cry of panic cuts through the silence. A faint haze can be seen in the distance, moving with the breeze. A new weapon?
Alexei feels his knees start to buckle as he sees his comrades stagger out of the cloud. Their melting teeth flow down their faces like tears, and their limbs begin to fold and collapse as the bones within them liquefy.
He turns and starts to flee down the trench. There is no cruelty so foul the enemy will not perpetrate it.
He runs almost headfirst into a portly man in a tailored suit with a blood-red flower on his lapel. He smiles, pale skin splitting beneath his bristling white mustache, and he begins to shake Alexei by the hand.
“Good lad,” he says. “Good lad. Heroes one and all. A noble sacrifice.”
Alexei starts to speak, to say he doesn’t want to be a hero; he doesn’t want to be a sacrifice; he wants to go home. But the man with the flower reaches his hand into the soldier’s chest, and with a single, jolly motion, plucks out Alexei’s heart and places it in his wallet.
Next to his bleeding corpse, Charlie wakes from what passes for sleep in this place. A sergeant is yelling at him, screaming for him to take his gun and get into the waiting transport. There’s about to be another attack, and heavy losses are expected.
A familiar fear courses through him, but Charlie still picks up his gun, and goes back to the war.
[The Archivist sighs heavily.]
ARCHIVIST
I, um.
[He sighs heavily, mutters something garbled.]
ARCHIVIST
End recording.
[He clears his throat. From somewhere near him, Martin hms.]
MARTIN
All done?
ARCHIVIST
Yes.
[When he speaks, his voice is still a bit shaky.]
MARTIN
Good.
[TAPE CLICKS OFF.]
[EXT. SCOTLAND, SOMEWHERE FARTHER OUT FROM KINLOSS]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[The bagpipes are still playing, though they sound much further in the distance.]
[The Archivist and Martin are trying to make their way through what sounds like water.]
ARCHIVIST
(calling) Try to keep up!
MARTIN
(long-suffering) Yeah, yeah.
[He pffts out an exhale, keeps making his way forward until –]
[He notices the tape recorder.]
MARTIN
Oh! Oh, hey – John! Did you – (stops himself) No. No, he was carrying his.
[He inhales heavily.]
MARTIN
Alright! (exhale) (to the recorder) What’re you doing here? It’s dangerous. Could – get yourself blown up, like all these poor…
[He trails off. It sounds like he’s picked up the recorder by now.]
MARTIN
Who d’you think they were? Really don’t see why we couldn’t just – go ‘round, picked a better place to –
[He stomps a bit heavier in the “water.”]
MARTIN
I guess there – aren’t really any better places anymore, are there? It’s all this, or worse, or – or different.
[More splashy-stomping sounds.]
MARTIN
You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.
[And exactly at that moment, a phone rings. It’s not the tinny, electronic sound of a cellphone – no, this is a true, heavy, classic ring.]
MARTIN
Uh. (beat) (calling) John? Uh, J, John – the, uh, payphone that’s – here, for some reason – it’s ringing?
[The Archivist doesn’t respond. The phone keeps ringing.]
MARTIN
John? Is, Is that – (to the world at large) I-Is anyone gonna get that?!
[No one does. The phone keeps ringing. Martin takes a step in the water.]
MARTIN
Unless it’s for me?
[Ring.]
[Martin sighs, one that says ‘of course.’]
MARTIN
(resigned) Yeah, it’s for me. (beat of indecision) Uh –… no. (to the phone) N, no; I don’t think so, actually! Erm, thanks, but that – that sounds like – a really – terrible idea. Hm, sorry!
[We hear him in the water. The phone stops ringing.]
MARTIN
Huh. (pause) …Weeell, alright then!
[The Archivist stomps over through the water towards him.]
ARCHIVIST
Martin, you need to keep up. It’s not safe. (beat) (MORE)
Martin? You okay?
MARTIN
Uh, I – Th-th-there was a phone. That phone.
ARCHIVIST
(quiet surprise) Wh– Oh.
MARTIN
(overlapping) It – Yeah, it was ringing?
ARCHIVIST
(even more surprise) Oh. …Right. Did you answer it?
MARTIN
No.
ARCHIVIST
Hm. (beat) Probably for the best.
MARTIN
…Yeah.
[A brief beat, in which the Archivist takes a breath.]
ARCHIVIST
Let’s keep going.
MARTIN
Mm.