1 . Name: Otherhazards @ 2010-11-09 22:00

One RED Sniper's backstory.

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McKay was alive.
He wouldn’t be if he couldn’t find water within the next fourteen hours or so, but for now he still found this condition preferable to driving a delivery truck in five o-clock downtown Adelaide traffic.
He was dizzy. He KNEW this, rather than could feel it, which struck his mind as odd, in the slow way in which it could still process these things.
He could feel his hands.
His feet.
The way the flatland around him was sometimes level, and sometimes slantwise to him, without tipping anything over.

He could feel the sun.
He’d felt it at dawn across his cheek.
Felt it rise and heat through the black band of his debadged slouch hat first.
He couldn’t feel where the band was anymore, the tan closely-made felt was hot all over.
It was better than having the sun beat directly on his head, though.

McKay was a tall, well-built man, with a deeply tanned face and an incongruous red-pink shadow of sunburn across his upper lip. Two years ago in Malaysia, he’d shot the aerial off an enemy radio-tower at a distance that had made Corporal Frasier, sitting at his elbow, whistle.
He doubted he could hit the red-orange rock formation shimmering a hundred yards to his left, now. His hands weren’t steady enough.

He shut his eyes for a moment too long, and almost fell.
The back of his neck prickled with the shock of the motion, and for a moment there was a slight coolness there, of sweat. That was water he couldn’t afford to lose right now, and he swore softly in his mind, taking a deeper breath to clear his head before continuing.

Somewhere in the desert behind him was Ayers Rock, and he’d been getting steadily worse since he’d left it two days ago.
His body was in shock. Changing.
The desert was not kind to what he was now.
He was too big. Too bulky, and however reasonable the shape may have been in the Australian army, the outback was killing him for it.

McKay didn’t want to die.
He knew there were reasons why he should, like a thankless job, and a secret that wasn’t worth speaking of anymore, and most of all the way his finger wouldn’t hold steady if he held it out at arm’s length and pointed at something.
That wasn’t him. That hand couldn’t.... be his.
And it was, and he hated himself for not getting out of the army when he could have, and he hated his father for being right for the wrong reasons, and he hated civilization, and the cities that had sent him out to fight without considering the heights to which he would rise, and he hated--
--Losing. He really... really hated losing. And he didn’t want to die.

If it had to be though, he’d prefer dying out here to the sudden wrenching crash of steel on steel that accompanied an auto accident, or the way his dad’s best mate Bill had turned from tending the barbecue one day, taken three steps, and fallen down on the lawn with a heart attack.
McKay could still remember the indignation in the old man’s glassy green eyes. And the fear there, glazing with the cold sweat across Bill’s face as his breaths came shorter, and McKay’s dad had shouted his mum for an ambulance.

He stumbled, but when he looked down, there was nothing but a tuft of weeds. Cracked earth around it, and more plants that might have dried up years ago but were secretly alive. The real Australians, that had grown there in the cracks for a hundred thousand years, and would be there long after the Human race had blown itself to bits or moved on to greener pastures.
McKay was the intruder here, not them.

He walked on, he didn’t know how long. The plants thinned out entirely, and the sun passed its zenith overhead.
...He was going in the wrong direction, McKay realized with a sudden chill.
Water... was behind him.
But he couldn’t. The minute he changed direction once-
If he missed that rock-
There was supposed to be- there should be-
He felt dizzy again, and sick. He kept his eyes open, and bit through the edge of his lower lip until he tasted blood.
It cleared his head, and he breathed easier, the panic receding.
He didn’t have the time right now. Had to- have to keep moving.

The heat rose as the afternoon began. Slowly. Almost too slowly to feel.
He thought less and less.
He just... walked.
All the useful tidbits, all the men he’d served with, all those clever, shining ideas...
They weren’t coming to him now.
He was going to die out here, and with that realization came a strange sense of calm.
Australia, the land itself was taking him back, in a way not many were brave or stupid enough to try.
There was a cloudy fascination with the idea, and he couldn’t think whether he preferred one way or the other, but it-
Buzzing.
Bees.
Bees needed water.

Suddenly, McKay’s mind was working again. He forced himself to listen, to take a fix on the sound, and follow it, walking, stumbling and up again, and it was-
-Gone.
“No...” His voice was a wind-rasped curse, but the anger behind it was hot. “-Don’t you dare do this now, you- -FUCK THE LOT A’YOU, WHERE’S YOUR HIVE?!”
Silence, and the hot breath of the desert blowing a dried seed pod across the ground answered him.

McKay took as deep a breath as his lungs would stand, stood up straighter, and let it out slowly.
“...Damn.” He swore, softly.
Then he took a careful bearing on the last direction he’d heard the buzzing before it disappeared, and started walking again.
Hope tasted bitter, but like piss it was better than nothing.
He would walk until he dropped now, and there was a satisfaction in that.
He didn’t need Australium to do this.

The land rose under his feet, and McKay passed out of time, stumbling, falling, staggering, his feet following the line of stones in front of them with no further thought or conscious decision.
Bees.
Bees, and a sharp wall of rock on his left, and time lurched back into motion so sharply he fell.
He got up, and he ran, and when he fell again he felt a relative coolness as his fingers broke the top layer of streambed sand.
Streambed, but there was no water.
But there were bees, and bees-

McKay knelt on the sand, and with both hands, he began to dig. There was deeper coolness first, then a hint of dampness, and he dug faster, once falling onto his shoulder from the blood rushing to his head in the position.
At the end, he found a thin trickle of mud between his fingers, Mud that was mostly sand, and gave up a few drops of water when sucked. McKay took what he could, and felt the grit between his teeth, and the fire along the length of his parched throat extinguish.

He passed out there, and when he woke at the first pale-purple shadow of dusk, the hole had filled itself with a liter or two of cool, silty water.
McKay cupped his hands, and drank.
He drank until his head cleared, handful after handful that ran rivulets down his tanned forearms, rich red ochre mixed with water, like blood and cool, cool mercy.
He sat back at last, and shut his eyes, listening.

Bees.
Their workday was almost over, and they were returning to their hive... which was, he realized, opening his eyes, about twenty feet up the rock face above the deep-cut streambed he was lying on.
Several bees had smelt out the water McKay had splashed around as he drank, however, and were nosing around in the wet sand industriously, their wings flexing as they breathed.
One landed on McKay’s left hand, and walked across the backs of his wet, grimy fingers.
McKay held the bee up so that he could see it better.
The bee flexed its wings at him, uncertain.
“Thanks, mate,” McKay said, his grin tired but genuine.
The bee flew off as if it had been insulted, and left him there.

McKay lay back on the gritty-smooth surface of the streambed, set his hat across his chest, and watched the first stars come out, clear against the Eastern horizon.
Maybe the after-effects of the army-issued Australium medallion he’d buried at the foot of Ayer’s Rock would fade over time, and the crack-shot steadiness of his hands would return.
Maybe it wouldn’t.
Either way, Australia itself had taken McKay back...
And he was alive.

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