The opposing armies were fully engaged in hand-to-hand combat in a bloody battle on land.

Already, there were scattered about on the ground, soldiers wounded, dead, dying. It all came to a sudden and complete end by an explosion in the air above the fighters. Every one was blasted dead or unconscious. There was silence for a long time.

One of the uniformed bodies on the ground became conscious, fitfully.

She slowly, painfully, sat up on the ground. Her head throbbed in fierce pain; and there was a kind of rattling of parts inside her head. To herself she explained the throbbing and the rattling as expected normal consequences of hand-to-hand combat.

She clumsily unstrapped her helmet, slowly removed it, and let it fall to the ground. The throbbing eased. She probed her hairless head with her fingers. There was a thin short shallow dent. She applied gentle sustained pressure around it as she lightly massaged. She felt bits move about and explained them to herself as bits of shattered bone. The throbbing diminished to nearly nothing.

She looked around. She had completely lost all memory of why she was there. Nonetheless, she had no trouble processing facts she saw all around her.

The weather was sunny and warm. The battle had been fought in an open field of knee-high wilderness vegetation. She knew she had fought in that battle, but had difficulty recalling it as having happened recently. The many dead human bodies on the ground all around her did not help her recall.

She slowly probed along her body to test for injuries. She found no open wounds; but no place without some degree of discomfort. Internal problems in one of her upper limbs restricted her to slow and direct movements.

She used the rifle that she found near her, to help her stand. It was bent; clearly, useless as a gun.

She looked around, trying to figure out in which direction she should limp away. She limped a few steps. She stopped.

None of the bodies on the ground was in a uniform like hers.

She took a few steps in different directions. There was no change.

She stopped; closed her eyes to concentrate. She could not recall engaging in a fight, or anything about the battle.

Only enemy bodies around must mean her army fellows had survived, and left; their dead, if any, having been carried off.

She heard vocal sounds. Some of the bodies were recovering! It took her only seconds to decide. She hobbled about to locate a corpse.

She discarded some parts of her uniform and dressed herself in parts she removed from enemy corpses. She limped and hobbled away in discomfort and pain as fast as she could.

She was not surprised when she came upon a soldier on his hands and knees, and breathing noisily as he wrestled his way out of a much-torn uniform.

He was of the other side. She hesitated. She went to his aid.
She helped him. He helped her help him. She, meaninglessly, noted his bare head was as hairless as hers.

Neither spoke, nor had a clear idea of how to bare-hands grapple with belligerent ragged parts of 99% indestructible military cloth.

By the time they freed him enough within seconds, they were utterly exhausted. They let themselves lay motionless and silent on the ground for a few long minutes.

She noted that in the midst of their struggle, the thin short shallow dent in her head seemed to be on the brink of throbbing.

She sat up when she heard him moving. He was sitting up, staring about, as bewildered as she was when she had regained consciousness. He stared at her.

“Where are we?”

“Haven’t a clue. We’re soldiers. We are on a battle field. After a battle.”

“Who won?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

He slowly looked around. She recalled she, too, had stared around blankly like that.

She did not stare around blankly anymore, but that did not mean that most of what she saw around her made enough sense for her to know why or where she was.

She noted he moved as if he, too, was under stress of internal injuries. Like her, other than surface bruises here-and-there, he had no serious visible injury.

The two of them had freed his upper body from its entanglement in the battle-shredded shirt-tunic section of his uniform. Neither of them had had the strength in their fingers to rip any of the military fabric apart to discard.

All his tunic hung down from his waist. That did not bother him, and she preferred it because it meant he was less likely to notice that her army tunic did not match her army trousers. That notice was likely to cause him to notice that their army trousers did not match in style and color.

As they struggled along through the knee-high wild vegetation, they were obliged at times to support each other from falling. He was struggling more than she to maintain balance as he walked; and, so, they walked side-by-side, of necessity.

Somewhere along the way, they exchanged first names: Zera and Peru.

She noticed that at times he stopped abruptly, and seemed to be processing what he saw on the ground hidden by foliage.
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Sometimes, after such momentary pausing he would slightly adjust his direction; sometimes he would step ahead, carefully and slower. She would not have noticed it about his behaviour, had she not become aware of the urge in herself, as well, briefly a few times earlier on along the way.

He noticed that she frequently stopped to slowly tilt her head to one side. She did so to interfere with the tendency of those broken bits of bone in her head to clump up.

He noticed because he, similarly, had to, at intervals, hold an arm in a particular position in order to unknot internal bone bits deep up an armpit dislocation. There was no pain from that dislocation; only a build-up of a mild tickling sensation.

Tickling notwithstanding, the sensation was indicative of internal malfunction suffered from hand-to-hand combat.

It was sometime after they had passed their last soldier body on the ground, when they came upon a cluster of huge tall boulders. They stopped. He did not look at her when he said, “Zera, check it out.”

Without hesitation, the soldier in her obeyed. She entered the space between two boulders much taller than her and him. She discovered shaded space, with no ground vegetation.

Before returning, she found similar empty spaces between some of the other boulders. She returned to him.

Both entered the shelter of the boulders. They chose places, and sat on the ground, their backs against boulders. Both fell asleep.

She awoke at his calling out to her repeatedly in forced whispers, from his boulder, “Zera, wake up!”

“Peru?”

“Yes. Quickly, come here.” She crawled along to him. “I am hearing voices. Can you hear them?”

“No. Where are they coming from?”

He had an arm raised, the fingers pressing down on a spot at the back of his neck behind an ear. “In me. Here.”

The thin short shallow dent in her head erupted throbbing.

“I hear an engine. Approaching?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s not a sound. This lump in my neck is vibrating. It’s picking up the vibrations from an engine. It’s coming this way. Let’s go look.”

“No. I’m not picking up the vibrations. Let’s hide while we look.”

He hesitated a moment. “Okay.”  

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