The strange, low pounding echoes urgently above. Fear curls up inside me. It massages my insides as it breathes, matted fur tickling raw flesh. And when I move, it digs in claws that are ice and steely pain. It feels wrong and terrible. Should I move it will rip and tear my guts, so I sit still and listen. I listen to that siren wailing over and over and over. I try not to shiver in the dark.
Around me all the black, saucer eyes blink on-off in chalk faces. These faces are waiting. Minds have not yet decided how they should react. Thinking. That's what happens first. That's all we are really: brains attached to bodies. And these bodies wait. They wait until the sounds filter through the brain into the nerves, which pull the tendons, which move the muscles.
By the end of the war it will become an automatic response. At the sound of the sirens they will cower and shake. They will run and their hearts will thrash away in their chests. The chalk stone faces will crumble and fall away.
Yet I am one of them, not separate as I had always thought, but one of the crowd. Death rumbles on overhead, stamping a callous bruise upon the city. Far, further, closer, HERE! I draw in with them that same breath as to cause a vacuum in the dirty tunnel. We hundreds together in a hot-cold panic. Under that smashing great fist our tender flesh is one, waiting in the dimness. I am no longer in possession of my voice, my shuddering breath, for both are absorbed wholly. The mass shouts the mass burbles half known prayers. And I am one of them and they are me, all of them.
Around me all the black, saucer eyes blink on-off in chalk faces. These faces are waiting. Minds have not yet decided how they should react. Thinking. That's what happens first. That's all we are really: brains attached to bodies. And these bodies wait. They wait until the sounds filter through the brain into the nerves, which pull the tendons, which move the muscles.
By the end of the war it will become an automatic response. At the sound of the sirens they will cower and shake. They will run and their hearts will thrash away in their chests. The chalk stone faces will crumble and fall away.
Yet I am one of them, not separate as I had always thought, but one of the crowd. Death rumbles on overhead, stamping a callous bruise upon the city. Far, further, closer, HERE! I draw in with them that same breath as to cause a vacuum in the dirty tunnel. We hundreds together in a hot-cold panic. Under that smashing great fist our tender flesh is one, waiting in the dimness. I am no longer in possession of my voice, my shuddering breath, for both are absorbed wholly. The mass shouts the mass burbles half known prayers. And I am one of them and they are me, all of them.
