patrol 1: reading Farmer Boy made me never want to read anything fictional again and this is the result

Today we liquidated a Creator Abandonment Syndrome grubhub.  Hundreds of tropes. Stand around and shoot. Etc, etc. Doesn’t matter, they’ll be back up next week.  The world needs characters. A cross-section of relatable archetypes. Characters never die. Archetypes crawl their way out of the mud.  We might die shooting at them, though. We’re not characters. We’re not archetypes. We’re nothing.  

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Walked 17 blips.  Not sure how to convert back to klicks.  0900: klicks eliminated. Everything is blips now.  No klickin’ beetles (too North), no bubblegum klicks (rations exhausted and me too), no kilo klicks (odometer on drone giving “malfunction sound”; that’s the blips).

Last fist hours is Private Jester time.  Private Jester won’t stop being stupid. @010,00 hours we were stopped at Burning Bush.  She was picking apples even though me and the Bush said not to. Crab apples too, yuck. She was doing a thing with apples to eyes where she replaced eyes with apples.  Held in place by squinting. I dunno. Jester is fucking stupid.

Fist minus four.  SAW fire. Back and forth.  Outgoing. We’re stupid lumberjack #1 in one of those cartoons that looks like Cuphead but isn’t.  Incoming. Bad Guy is stupid lumberjack #2.  Xylophone octaves that have the sound of real gunfire because I guess I’m not fucking imaginative enough go back and forth until the tree falls.  The tree is a municipal maintenance tower and it’s squirting sap or water or something. Wet dust all over us. Grid shouts “DON’T DESTROY MUNICIPAL TOWERS” (the only way I even know the word).  No one hit. Jester burned herself on a hot barrel.

Fist minus three.  Jester still moving in my periphery, living up to her callsign.  Can you believe she sounds intelligent on the comms? “Speaks so well” shit.  Turok is saying wise stuff in my ear. He’s a real solid character. We walk through a basement to the next building over.  Blankets down here so we take them. Quilts. Patchwork that could be our unit colors or our esprit de corps. Check batteries in the Literary Device.  They glow in the dark. That’s the only way I know they’re still live. It’s lying about what I say. This isn’t my voice (it’s your voice, you literate son of a bitch).  I’m a 13 year old junior officer in a fascist army.  Give me socks. Don’t give me a face, a personality or the voice of some little cunt from a UNICEF documentary.

Fist minus two.  Jester saying something about her head, and not in the abstract.  “My head is floaty.” Mia is the doc. Recommends trepanning and I say I’m not gonna auth anything stupid or that takes a long time.  He says fine. Jester is a fucking joke anyway. She’s behind me the whole time I’m talking to doc doing bunny ears. Turok singing philosophical showtunes.  “Sell the kids for food.  Weather changes moods.”  There’s a bunch of talk that overloads my care nerves.  I’ve got APD. I listen for machine gun fire or my own name.  I hear Jester say nevermind and assume she’s talking to me. No more floatiness I guess.  We sleep. Or I do anyway.  

Fist minus one.  At this point, someone is saying Jester won’t get up, Quasar I think.  Quasar is a Jester sympathizer. A damn Jester hardliner. She’s always in on her jokes.  I look over. The apples have fallen out of her eyes and she’s not breathing maybe? I put Mia on it.  Mia says as far as he can tell, Jester isn’t breathing.  Turok looks up and is crying too.  He never does that. Not a garbage-covered beach in sight.  I’m assessing the sitch, but everyone is talking and tones aren’t really anything.  Every voice is always pitch-wrong (the ups and downs of stims + normal adrenaline + vocoders that shred gender (boys turn up for Alvin & the Chipmunkz lulz, girls turn down to suppress boys’ rape instincts) + fast talk from people who always need to pee).  

Fist minus any reason to care.  I’m calling them on this one. I “check” her myself.  “She’s gone,” I say. Sit down with my back to them. Quasar is wailing.  Everyone else is surprised, disciplined or dissociating. I close my eyes and the black space looks like every cliche imagined by a special effects department trying to win an Oscar.  I’m 13 and have only seen Commando so the mise-en-scène of these shadows and phosphenes is fucking lost on me.  When I open my  eyes again, I’m smirking or something like it.  

Fist clenched around my dogtags, I try to look big, in charge.  I stand over Quasar, who is like a foot taller than I am. I point at her and Turok.  “Burial detail. Hurry up.” There’s one of those “Call 1-888-DIG-NOW BEFORE U DIG!” signs nearby, so I hand Turok the field radio and say “Better safe than sorry.”  

Fists in the air for poor Private Jester.  Fuck, it takes them like 2 hours to dig. She’s smaller than I am and only 10.  Shouldn’t have taken that long. But she lies perfectly still. Someone, I think Mia, gets the idea to put the two crab apples into her eyes.  Like the ferry man’s gonna take a bite. I wait for her to jump up out of the hole. And wait while they heave dirt and sheetrock on her. And while I’m waiting I think-but-don’t-say a certain Johnny Knoxville catchphrase.  MTV’s still imploding realities in-and-around bombed out bungalos that shadow bases where there’s nothing to do—30 foot fall off a building, drop through 2 roofs like they’re Mario platforms, on a skateboard, only sighted by two enemy team leaders who don’t follow up, gunship inbound (cowabunga dude), devil sign / take corner slowly, trigger discipline, sprayed by shrapnel, everything is fucking ARMA III, legs broken for some reason, CASEVAC—but at least we do have Spotify now.  Time passes. Jester’s not getting any less dead it seems like.  Ok.  

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Fists bloodying a man we found in the rubble.  Latest CAS sweep. Don’t you have parents, is the gist of what this shitstain is saying as we beat him.  Don’t you have ancestors I wanna yell back at him, and do. Quasar crushes his head with the butt of her rifle.  Bullets do work. He’s play.  

Someone gets my attention, all kinds of jittery.  It’s Turok. I’ve gotta see this, apparently.

In the rear, with tanks, eggheads doing trajectories so that missiles hit things, food, and other necessaries, I spot Private Jester ambling towards our position.  Apples fresh in sockets. Smirk.

Before I can ask her how long she can hold her breath, she blurts out: “I’m Johnny Knoxville, and this is Jackass.”

I pass out, bye.