Oh boy, Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the Marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.

To Melton, they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple fucking ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts and something more elemental – an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn’t this bad, Melton recalled. The Rangers on the whole weren’t beaten, nor were those pogues from 10th Mountain, who’d done better than anyone ever thought they would.

Desertions, he thought. These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn’t give them their spines back real soon.

The giant metal fans droning away at the edge of the hangar merely pushed the vile atmosphere around, a gaseous slough of ill feeling and desolation. He was familiar with this. It was what happened when men faced the hopelessness of their circumstances and shrugged away any chance of redemption. It was what happened when men who were used to fighting for their lives gave up and said, ‘What’s the point?’

Milosz left him alone for a few moments. But perhaps uncomfortable with the brooding presence that had just insinuated itself into his little group, he toed Melton’s boot to regain his attention. ‘So, Melton By-the-way. You have a theory, yes?’

It was such a weird, unexpected question that Bret shook his head as if a bug had crawled into his ear. ‘Sorry. What do you mean?’

‘A theory, about the Disappearance, no?’ the sergeant elaborated. ‘I am interested in theories. Real theories with science and learning, not bugaboo magic, for explanation. Like these Muslim pigs and their stupidity about Allah’s will. So, your theory. Tell me.’

Melton opened his mouth to say something but simply shut it again, shaking his head. Fact was, he’d heard any number of bullshit explanations and crazy-talk gibberish about what might have been behind the catastrophe. He’d heard as many backwoods Christians lay it all at the foot of God as there were bug-eyed imams rejoicing in Allah’s vengeance on the infidel. He’d heard whispers of secret government experiments gone wrong, black-hole laboratories, portals to hell, and alien space-bat biology missions that had scooped up hundreds of millions of lives with something akin to a giant butterfly net. He hadn’t given any of them a second thought.

‘I don’t know, Sergeant,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even begin to know what happened, or why, or whether it can ever be reversed. I figure the best analogy is we’re like ants whose nest got hit by a lightning strike, or by a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. We’re ants - what would we know about anything? Either of those things, they’d be the end of the world to us, but you stand outside the situation, you get the context in a way that we don’t have, and it’s probably something really simple… that we’re a thousand years from understanding. Possibly we’ll never understand it. My bet is that a thousand years from now we’ll be living in caves again, banging rocks together for a living.’

The Polish non-com narrowed his eyes and dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘This is a wise man,’ he said to his troops. ‘You see, he knows what he cannot know and does not pretend otherwise. This is wisdom, Jerzy.’

Milosz pointed to a younger, black-haired youth and spoke in a rapid garble of Polish. Melton had the impression he was repeating what he’d just said. The young commando shrugged, conceding a point.

‘So what about you, Sergeant? No theories for you?’

Milosz smiled sadly. ‘It is like you say. People groping through the dark, grasping at this and that, trying to explain what cannot be understood. My question, I ask it of people because it tells me how they are now. Whether they will get through or not.’

‘You think people will “get through” based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or magic, or the will of God?’

‘No. People will survive this because of luck. If you have no food to eat, no warmth in the deep of winter, it doesn’t matter whether you think little green men or Mohammed broke your world. You will still die frozen and hungry. But if you have enough to eat, just enough, and if you have some shelter and safety – again, just enough – then maybe your living or dying might have something to do with whether you fall to madness and superstition, or whether you hold on to your rationality.’

A small, indulgent grin sketched itself onto Melton’s weathered features. ‘You’re a materialist, then? Of the dialectic school? I thought Poland was done with all that.’

‘Yes, I am a material thinker, like my father, a mathematician. And you are no boxhead, Melton.’

‘It’s foolish to assume that just because somebody puts on a uniform and takes orders, they turn off their brains. You didn’t.’

‘Excellent,’ beamed Milosz. ‘It is good to talk like this, Melton. So much of soldiering is crudity and ugliness, yes? But there is more to the profession of arms, and to life itself. We soldier so our children won’t. For us, guns; for them, books and easier lives.’

Melton gestured helplessly. ‘I never had any kids. Gotta say I’m real happy about that now.’

He didn’t look back over at the Marine lance corporal as he spoke. She was still talking about her daughter in North Dakota. Someone came over, checked the man on the cot, took his pulse. The orderly then pulled a blanket over the man’s head and made a note on the clipboard, but the lance corporal didn’t notice.

‘But if I had,’ he continued, ‘and they hadn’t disappeared, I don’t know that they’d be looking at an easier life than I had.’

‘Not now, no,’ conceded the Pole.

Three trucks pulled up at the vast hangar bay doors and soon able-bodied troopers began unloading more litters from their rear cabins. Corpsmen and a few nurses appeared and hurried over to help, but otherwise there was no appreciable reaction to their arrival. Men still sat and talked in low voices in their own small, closed groups. Country-and-western crooners still clashed with speed-metal shrieks and hardcore rap from dozens of portable stereos. Listless card games of hearts and spades continued without pause. The bleep-blee-bloop of Game Boy systems never faltered.

‘And what now for you guys, Sergeant? Home to your families?’

Milosz nodded, but there was a severity to his expression that belied any sense of release or deliverance. A couple of the other Poles appeared just as sombre.

‘Home, yes. We hope.’ He waved his hands in the air, a concession of helplessness. ‘If we have not been forgotten. Or abandoned. Or lost… But we may not see our families even if we do get home. There will be much work to be done. Our sort of work.’