Phagocytosis

Parme, European Federation, October 2037

The Mediterranean in October has a particular stillness. In Genova, the sea stretches out like glass, gray-blue, indifferent. Tourists are gone, shutters drawn on the beachside cafés. Even the gulls seem half-hearted in their scavenging.

I followed Giuseppe Scimimi along the boardwalk, his boots and my sneekers crunching faintly on the leaves laying on the pavement. Despite it being 2037, the Carabinieri uniform remained stubbornly classic. He wore it by the book. Cap squared, jacket zipped, trousers crisp with that unmistakable red stripe catching the few glints of sun.

"Off-season, t'was madness just three month's ago, barely recognize the place" he said, not looking at me. "Summer's for the French tourists and stolen wallets. Autumn's for ghosts."

I was only here to interview him. I reminded myself of that every few minutes, like a line I had to keep rehearsing. I wasn't a carabiniere, and I wasn't from here. I was from Liège. Belgian. Northern, inland, landlocked. Yet he carries an ease, one that just makes you want to walk, talk and enjoy the moment at his pace.

"I appreciate you letting me walk with you," I said.

He shrugged. "Might as well take the scenic route."

"What'd you do in the war?" He asks, his stare not leaving the sea.

"MAG gunner," I stop myself, trying to come up with the name of the Italian equivalent.

"Ah I see, big respect for the machine gunner's." he answers.

"Naah, we had it good, one of the best rackets in the army." I answer.

"How so? I know all the rackets, never heard this do." He says as he shoots a girl on an electric scooter a look, I see the way he smiles and stands up right.

"Never asked me to plot a route, to setup the radios, to do maintenance on the vehicles. I only had to worry about my machine gun." I answer.

"Ha! That's a good one, never thought about it that way. Now I know why the machine gunner in my squad was always so quiet, always pretending to clean his MG3," he says with a smile.

"Good shooter?" I ask.

"Yeah, guy could fire a five round burst at 600m and have every bullet hit the damn crab. Be it across the mountain range or downhill. Man that placed sucked." he says as he throws his tooth pick.

"Tell me about the Alps," I said, gently. "You were shipped there, what, in 2026?"

"January 27, had just turned 18." He answers.

"I was eighteen," he said, as he takes out a cigarette with practiced ease.

"Fuck I forgot," he says before putting the cigarette back in the pack.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing, you'd laugh." He answers.

"Go on, you'd be amazed by the shit I've heard." I answer back.

"Well, now apparently we can smoke in uniform. But my girlfriend having higher authority than the defence minister smells my hands when I get back home, she has me by the balls man, three cigarettes a day she allows me. In the morning, at dinner, and after... before bed I mean." He answers with a laugh.

"Hah! Yeah well I don't even know what to answer to that." I say akwardly.

"Yeah, eighteen." He says looking back at the sea.

"Fuck me man. just eighteen. Antonio was twenty. From Napoli. Rough rough part of that city ." he continues, removing his hat to run his hand through his shaven head.

"I was wrong, guy did work allot. He knew how to dig. He used to be a construction worker. Guy knew how to swing a pick axe. And on those mountains man, you better know how to swing."

Thought that maybe patrols we'd have patrols in on the ridge lines, see Munich from far far away, maybe they'd put us in a bunker in one of the passes and just have us radio for air strikes every time a crab showed its snout. I wasn't trying to be a hero. I just wanted to do what was right you know. Shit man on the truck ride to the alps we all felt like the Spartans in 300. Couldn't bother to remember they all died in that movie."

"And instead?"

He pointed the toward the horizon as if trying to show something, though his eyes were somewhere far behind it.

"Instead, I was sleeping in an ice trench two hundred meters from the crabs. Hochkalter sector. We were holding the ridge, or what was left of it. Most of it had been bombed and chewed away before we even got there."

I let the silence stretch. He didn't seem in a hurrry to fill it.

"No wood lining, no drainage, no sandbags. Just whatever crater or half-wall we could dig into before our fingers went numb. We had these stupid little shovels, folding things, looked like toys. You'd break three trying to dig two meters. We had to beg for actual pick axes. Used those shitty shovels to cook eggs once we actual got good material."

"Worst part, the weather."

"Worst part," he said, eyes narrowing slightly.

"You can train for combat," he continued eventually. "You can prep for the terrain. You can learn to shoot, to move. But the weather? There's no training for that. No doctrine. It just grinds you down."

He rubbed his hands together unconsciously, like they still remembered.

"We were up at 2,200 meters. The wind would come in from the norheast, funnel through the rocks the way the crabs did. First thing to go was your nose, then your fingertips. Not frostbite, just… numb. No feeling. Then came the moisture. Boots stayed wet, socks stayed wet, gloves froze stiff. We'd sleep on wooden pallets in rotations just to share body heat, crammed in next to each other like cordwood. One of the guys, Corrado, lost a toe without even noticing. Took his boot off one morning and it was just… there. Black. Gone."

I said nothing. The sound of the waves coming up the beach felt jarringly peaceful.

"We stopped getting proper resupply after the fourth week," he went on. "So no new gear, no hot food, no working heaters. Our squad leader, Antonini, tried to build a makeshift stove out of shit we found. It worked for about two nights before it exploded. Burned half his beard off. We used to joke it improved his chances with the mountain goats."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He gave a short, dry laugh. It didn't last long.

"But seriously, most nights, the cold did the killing. Crabs didn't even have to fire. They'd just let us rot in our holes. Wait for exposure to do the work. Fuck me man I thought those crabs hated the cold, yet here they were. Throwing themselves at us"

He paused, jaw tight, then glanced at me. "You ever hear a man cry in his sleep? Not scream, cry. Happens when the nerves in your hands start dying. You don't even notice you're making the sound. Just this broken sobbing in the dark. Happens when you've pissed in a frozen bottle and tried to warm it up against your chest. Happens when your buddy next to you's been dead three hours and you keep talking to him because it's easier than facing the quiet."

His voice had gone flat. Measured. Not dramatic. Just tired.

We walked for a few steps in silence. A group of retirees passed us going the other way, chatting in Ligurian, wrapped in scarves despite the mild air. They notice Giuseppe's tears and get quiet..

Giuseppe slowed his pace and looked toward the surf.

"Every time someone writes about the war," he said, "they talk about the tech. The drones, the missiles, the laser targeting. Nobody talks about sitting in a ditch full of freezing water, wondering if today's the day you can't warm your toes and you'll lose them."

He turned to me, a flicker of something harder behind his eyes.

"You want to write about that?" he asked. "Then write about that. Write about what the cold does to the bones."

"Still," he says, standing more upright and immitating a boxer giving punches.

"Still," he said, standing more upright and imitating a boxer throwing punches, "we gave those crabs a bloody nose. They didn't break through once. They'd throw themselves at us, sure, the TV makes it seem like we just had to wait and call in artillery. But often, we'd shoot for hours before any support arrived. And in that weather, with that terrain? Good luck having your bombs fall acccurately. Every day, they tried to claw their way up, knowing once they had that ridge, the whole sector would collapse."

He looked down at the sand, tracing an invisible line with his boot.

"Resupply was spotty, and everyone in the Alps was calling for artillery or attack helicopters at the same time it seemed. So we got creative. We collected whatever loose rocks we could find, big ones, sharp ones, and stacked them just next to us. When the crabs charged, sometimes all you had was a rock to throw."

He raised his arm, cocked back like a pitcher.

"And I'm not talking pebbles, I'm talking rocks as heavy as your MAG, 10 to 20 kilograms sometimes. We threw them with everything we had. We learned to time it so they'd crash down right when the crabs' arrived at the barbed wire. Even if we missed, often those rocks would snow ball, throw them off balance and down they went. But throwing one at them and have it just explode their bodies, ah man few things in life as good as that"

He clenched his jaw, shaking his head.

"But still," he continued, "there was some ten, twenty meters of mountain uphill behind us. Meant that if they fired their high-explosive blasters at you even if they missed you'd better drop down and protect yourself. The rockslides. One shell would hit the slope above, and if that slope was "a virgin", tons of loose stone would break free, crashing down the ridge like an avalanche. You'd hear the grinding roar long before it hit. No time to think just brace, cover your head, and hope it didn't bury you. Do, that was a double edge sword. You'd be buried alive, but your colleagues would see it happen. And as that rockslide would go down and down and drag those crabs to the bottom your friends would dig you up. Survived eight "funerals", that's how we called it."

He stops.

"Call it."

"That and snowstorms, oh man, those sucked. The snow blowing hard enough to bury a man alive. Some nights we threw more rocks than bullets, just to keep them at bay. The cold was so bad you couldn't feel your fingers, but we kept hurling. We couldn't let them get past."

"We had Saint Bernard of Menthon on our side, patron saint of mountaineers. That's what we called the Mangusta attack helicopters in our sector. When they came, you just had to sit it out. They'd do their work, just kill hundreds of them in half an hour and fly away. Sniper teams were useful too, just had to find a spot for them. Time went on and we dug in better. But no amount of HESCO walls, dug tunnels, or mattresses with comforters the Chinooks threw at us could really fix the hell we were stuck in at 2,200 feet in the air."

He sits down on a bench, puts his cap on his knee, and finally musters the courage to light a cigarette.

"Yeah, you earned that one, mate," I say.

He exhales slow, the smoke drifting out over the sand like fog curling over a minefield.

"The snowstorms. Or anytime visibility was null. We'd have to go to our posts anyway. Stand there until you could actually see shit. You might just see a few feet away, but that was the job."

He pauses, takes another drag.

"You'd stare into a white wall for hours. Just you, your rifle, and the wind screaming in your ears. Sometimes you'd think you saw something, movement, a shape,but you couldn't trust it. Not in that light, not with the snow in your eyes and your eyelashes freezing together."

He rubs his temple with the back of his hand, smearing a bit of ash down his cheek.

"If you saw something, you raised the alarm. If you didn't, and they came through, people died. So you stood there like an idiot, trying to be a radar dish, trying to feel the snow shift as you looked down. But you couldn't trust yourself or anyone. At first, we all thought we'd see something raise the alarm, and get everyone even more on edge than we already were. I remember that one time I was convinced there was something just ten meters ahead, only for me to realize I was looking straight across, so either it was a giraffe or maybe my brains were just fried"

He looked at me again. "You ever try to fire with frozen fingers? You pull the trigger and your hand doesn't even move. One guy had to bite his own glove off to get enough feeling back to shoot."

He taps the cigarette against the bench.

"No one wrote manuals for that. No one ever said, 'Hey, here's how to spot an enemy through a blizzard at three in the morning while your brain's half-frozen and you can't remember the last time you ate anything.' But genuinely, in those moments, you'd only know something was out there if it was right in front of you. You'd hear them at ten meters at best, right when they were on the wire.

Those moments... oh man, you don't know what adrenaline means until you've been there. Minus twenty degrees Celsius. Freezing. Standing for hours. And then all of a sudden, you'd hear a shout, then a volley of gunfire, and the lieutenant would trigger the claymores."

"You're in the trench, snow piling up around your boots, wind howling so loud it sounds like screaming. Again, thevisibility's maybe five meters. You're squinting through the scope of your rifle and it's fogging up because your breath keeps bouncing back into your face. And then, BAM. Flash of movement. You can't tell if it's real or your brain playing tricks, but the guy next to you fires, so you fire too."

He mimed gripping a rifle, exhaling smoke through his nose.

"They came uphill slow, in waves. The bastards were even worse than us on the mountains. We'd spot shadows moving between boulders, silhouettes flitting from rock to rock, you'd hear or see them stumble on the clib. A shout would go up, then muzzle flashes lit the snow like a strobe. Rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers. You couldn't see anything, but you fired because they were firing. You didn't dare stop. You saw the tracers fly downhill, that's the only colour you saw, Antonio's red tracers from his MG3. The lieutenant would be yelling orders you couldn't hear over the wind. Your fingers were so stiff you could barely reload. Fuck me I always, ALWAYS prayed it would stop before I'd have to reload. You'd lob grenades down below, just throw them down, not counting how much you had. And still, besides the tracer's you wouldn't see shit in those conditions. Maybe if they got very close, very close. And in those cases, you better not get hit. Medical evacuation was impossible"

"I remember a guy, Sergente Martelli. Took a hit just below the ribs during a night assault. Not even a bad wound, not right away. But we couldn't move him, and we couldn't get him out. We wrapped him in every spare blanket we had, put chemical warmers under his armpits. He still froze to death. Took him six hours. He was half-conscious most of it, just shivering and muttering about his dog back in Bari. Then it took them two months to evacuate his body."

"That's why we dug deep. Real deep. We had our sauna, ten meters into the mountain. Took us a month, I think, to dig it out. Just a corridor carved into the rock with four layers of blankets hung at the entrance to keep the light and warmth in. We'd heat up rocks during the day and bring them inside during the night. No one called it a sauna officially, but that's what it was to us."

His shoulders relaxed, just a little, at the memory.

"Maybe fifteen minutes every hour during day time, at night you'd sleep there if you were lucky. You'd strip off your outer layer, get your fingers working again, pass around a ration heater or a shared flask if someone had one. You'd see guys just sitting on crates, eyes closed, soaking up the warmth like lizards."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.

"Most of the time, nobody even talked. You just listened to the blankets rustle, felt the rock walls breathing heat back at you. It felt like a break from dying."