Listen to him.
You turn around. The officer yells louder.
Ignore him!
Peter walks, but his head hurts again. He falls down against the snow grabbing his head.
Go away!
I never thought I would be so terrified of my younger self, and at the same time, also really fucking hate him.
I turn back towards the officer, towards the apparition yelling at me.
It’s just an illusion.
Is it Peter?
My body becomes colder than the snow beneath me. You’re, you’re—
I never left my brave little soldier. Lie down. Rest in me. See what’s below you? It’s clouds. Remember the clouds? How wonderful they are to you. I was to you?
I have to keep going. I need to—
Hush, my little soldier. Rest. You need to rest.
The snow surrounds my face. But it’s not hard and frozen. It’s soft.
There you go my little soldier. There you go.
“Peter!” Someone shakes my arms. The snow becomes hard and freezing. I can’t stop shaking. My nose is bleeding but it has already frozen over and I can’t breathe out of it.
“I can’t!” I cry. I cough and spit against the snow.
“I ca—” The officer wraps my face in his undercoat and shoots water from his camel pack up my nose. The dissolved blood gushes down my lips.
Peter, what are you doing? Come back to your Cloud!
“I can’t. I can’t,” I whisper into his chest.
He lifts me up and carries me. I see my younger self again! I stumble off the officer and he turns around to grab me. But I hold him off and get up myself.
Come back! Don’t you love me?
I take the step forward and break through the apparition. He and Cloud are gone for now.
We travel through the frozen forests and hide under our cloaks. I discover the officer’s name is Troy. On the second night Troy cries bitterly against my shoulder. We use our cloaks to wrap ourselves together. The cloaks conserve heat perfectly like a warm room. One of the few technological advances I appreciate the military for giving me. He cries, and I cry back to him. My life, where has it gone? Isaac, Isaac, Isaac, I’m so sorry. Isaac, what have I done to you?
“What troubles you?” I ask him the next morning, as we near the village and larger refugee camp next to it.
“Last night? It’s Jack. I never thought he would die… so early, and by betrayal too. He was the only one I confided in, and he to me.”
It all makes sense now. The reason why Jack trusted him so much and his loyalty back to him. They must have had a relationship before the unfolding events a few days ago.
“I’m sorry.”
We stop near the refugee town, and hide in the forest for the procedure to alter my appearance.
“Remember, you are now Jonan Straze,” says Troy placing the ID into my pocket. He hands me raggedy clothes he purchased quickly from a merchant in the town, and I switch into them. I remember the side pocket of my old ACU, the one Isaac placed something in. I grab it real quick. It’s his lighter, and the folded paper of the poem game—it was his turn too. I blink away the sadness. Later buddy. I place it inside my new clothing.
Troy offers to give me a few shots of morphine. I realize I haven’t taken any drugs since Isaac pulled the distributor out of my neck, and strangely, I have not really desired them either. I will never take them again. He mounts me tight with his legs around my chest and places the cloaks over us to hide. He hands me my torn ACU to bite into as he opens the vile.
“Are you sure about no morphine?” says Troy.
“I am sure,” I mutter, biting into the fabric with all my might.
He opens the vile and rubs it onto a sleeve and quickly spreads the residue onto my face and neck, and then tosses the clothing into the snow so as to not burn himself. I scream into the gag wishing I had taken morphine. It feels like someone is ripping the skin off of my face with their bare hands, and replacing it back on in the most painful way possible. Troy holds me from squirming as I try to kick and flair my limbs in the agony to rip at my face. Hours later the pain is still tremendous but I am able to walk.
“How do I look?” I grimace through my burnt lips.
“Fucked up,” he laughs.
At the gates are Peace Core personnel and armed Coalition soldiers. “What is his status?” says the trooper.
“Burn victim, local from the Kuplar campaign,” says Troy. “I have his refugee asylum approval papers, and I am a commanding officer of Major General Jack’s battalion.”
The guards look at each other, and instantly open the gate for us to pass. I am aided to a clinical ward and my face is plastered in cold soothing rags. That same evening I am cleared for transportation to an international space port for travel back to Earth. The journey there will take a few days as I have to go via buses and trains towards Nova Carthago.
I leave with a sack of money and supplies onto a crowded bus with other refugees. The rows are almost impossible to walk through as people and belongings are crammed everywhere possible. Troy stands watching me off from the station. “What will you do now?” I ask him through a lowered window.
“I don’t know, lie low and hopefully get off this planet too,” he says with a smirk as the bus begins to take off. “Take care!”
“You too!” I say. As the bus leaves, I see a group of Coalition troopers led by Party Reps scanning people with face recognizers, and soon they reach Troy. The grab his arms as he tries to fight back. They beat him down with their rifle butts. I am about to scream out at him, but I see his bruised face rise form the snowy concrete, and we make eye contact for the last time.
His eyes are full of pain and sadness, but also determination, and a glisten of hope that seems so out of place in this horrible world.
But yet, it is there, hope.
His eyes tell me be quiet. To continue the journey, the task I have. A rifle smacks into his head and he falls to the ground as they hogtie him.
The train drudges off into the countryside. I sit squished against the window as the cold wind smacks into my face. I am now the only survivor of Love Platoon and the battalion sent to Khaf’Jadeed, of the ambush that killed everyone I came to know over this past year. I am now the only one left that can possibly reveal the truth about my demise, about my fallen brothers.
XXXII
I take a monorail across the Coalition secured territories, back to Nova Carthago from the Confederate City States. My younger self sits next to me on the train. “Why are you doing this Peter? You’re a coward, a traitor! What about my hopes and dreams Peter. I want to go to college and be a force of change like you did.” He weeps against the seat. “Now I can’t ever be that because the Herculeans will destroy my home and kill me. Because you ran away! Because you won’t got back and fight them till you die. I will die instead! I had dreams and a bright future and you ruined it. Go back Peter, go back and fight. Be a man for once! Be my hero!”
I look out the windows at the beautiful countryside that is occasionally ugly with pockets of destruction. “Go away.”
He keeps screaming.
I close my eyes. There is beauty still here. There is still hope.
I think of Alison’s gorgeous eyes.
I think of the weekends Isaac and I spent cruising around that route, talking about what we’re going to be in life. How eager we were to take it on.
I think of Mr. Martin’s genuine smile he gave me every day before class. His smile that made me feel real and excited for the great things he told me I would do and be.
I think of my little brother and the fun times I had laughing with him over something silly and stupid. But yet it was those times that are still very important to me, because they are the memories that help me carry on now. His love and the love my family gave me that I never really appreciated, not till my self-destruction here on Nova Terra.
Why, a
nd what happened to me?
“Out of the way!” says a woman. I lean over. Two combat medics carry a stretcher with a man on it, his arms hooked up to IV’s and limbs firmly strapped in. As they pass by a bag falls out: morphine. I stare at my old friend, trying to remember why I ever made its acquaintance. The medic grabs the bag and shoves it back into the stretcher.
War is the drug.
It has a different variety of highs but always the same side effects. One morning we can wake up, and shoot up a dose to get our fix and things can be great. Our platoon will set up a successful ambush for some rebels or probing Herculean unit and it’s a fucking turkey shoot. We walk away with a victory and zero casualties. Or another day we take a lighter dose, and we lazily watch atop a hill at a beautiful starlit night scene of aircraft blowing the shit out of a town, and it looks like Fourth of July.
But sometimes, we get some bad shit. And when we shoot up that impure dose it’s a nasty trip. We can spend an entire day in a minefield playing a lethal game of twister, and at the end of the day I walk away with my friend’s blood soaking me as the only reminder of what’s left of him. Or we get the shit beat out of us by a Herculean barrage and are lucky if we only get away with heavy injuries. The worst trips though, are when I watch a man, a friend I just began to love in this shithole, die. Those funny expressions he would say or make on his face that made us laugh, turned into an empty nothing, like the souls we once used to harbor.
All become lost to war.
Then the side effects. The most obvious one is that people die, and even more so blatant is that everything gets destroyed. Peoples’ old lives, the land, the towns, nature, even the fucking farms too. All ravaged and burned, littered with corpses, spent ammunition and rubble. At first it’s exciting and rewarding to blow apart an enemy position that was causing us grief. Something I can look at and say, I did that. I blew that fucker and the whole landscape around him away. It doesn’t dawn on us till later how destructive and messed up we really were. And that’s when the nightmares and our self-loathing get worse. How much we hate ourselves for what we really are. For what the drug really is. To think that we’re the cause of some innocent’s death caught in crossfire, or that the building we blew up was actually sheltering a group of civilians that never did shit to us.
And the worst side effect kicks in as we come down from our high: the withdrawal. But also the reality.
That we’ll never stop taking it.
It’s beyond addiction.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Wake up. Shoot up. Kill.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Night time. Shoot up. Kill.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Repeating the same horrible shit I did the day before.
Because it’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
The drug lasts in my system as long as I last. I can never get clean, never quit. And when I die, my blood will soak the earth and the drug will seep into the roots of plants and kill them too. It will seep into the water supply and kill those who drink it. The sun will dry up my blood and when the clouds rain, it will rain the drug and kill those who are under the storm. The sin will repeat as an endless cycle because it’s the worse addiction out there and someone will always be trying to get their fix, always finding a reason to start a war. And the drug will have different names on the street. It will be called nationalism, patriotism, self-defense, preemptive strike, morally just, in protection of the greater cause.
But it’s all the same war with all the same side effects. The truth will never change.
War is a drug, power its abuser, and the state its addict.
I may have stopped taking it for now. But its damage is already done and irreversible. The residue is still in my system and it will remain there till I die.
But maybe…I can warn others of it. I have to try. It’s the only good thing I could possibly do with what is left of me.
My only chance at maybe finding my soul again. At redemption.
The train whistle wakes me. I look out the side window to see the station approaching, the huge city of Nova Carthago in the background. It all becomes swallowed by a bright light, followed by a ringing in my ears I have become all too familiar with. The glass shatters. It rips away at my already fucked up face as I flop backwards over my seat into the lap of the people behind me. The train screeches to a halt. Next, a black blanket of smoke shoots down the train cart I am in engulfing all of us in its grasp.
I am pushed into the walkway between the seats. People trip and collapse over me and each other. I try going for a window. The smoke enters my lunges. I can’t see, I can’t breathe! The ringing turns into the sirens and screams around me. I find a window. On the seat I see a kid covered in smut and blood. He screams for help. I grab him into my arms and crawl out the window. We fall onto the tracks next to the burning train. My body hurts and I lie on the ground, trash and debris raining about. All around me are the injured and dead from the explosion.
“It’s another suicide bombing!” says someone.
I look over at the child I saved. I turn his head—it’s my younger self again!
He laughs at me. The face of the apparition disappears, and it is the face of a real dead child. I lie back onto the ground.
“Why!”
“Yeah, why Peter?” you ask.
“You could have saved him,” says Peter.
“Stop! Not again! Stop!” you say. You roll over onto your knees and hands. You crawl away towards the other survivors.
Peter won’t possibly get away. “You should have stayed! Fought!” he says.
Soldiers surround you, looking confused. “Check him for injuries!” says one.
“Peter failed, Peter failed again,” I remind him.
“He’s not too bad,” says a paramedic, “He’s in shock though. I know I would be.”
Peter is taken away. The younger version of himself tagging along, reminding him he is a traitor.
There you go my little soldier. There you go.
I look around me, I’m in a room, hospital? I touch my face, the bandages are gone but I can feel the fucked up flesh of the scarring.
A young girl—candy striper—walks into my room carrying a colorful hand basket. She looks up from her basket at me and screams, dropping it. A nurse runs in after. “I’m so sorry, sir.” He bends over to pick up the basket. “She’s a new volunteer here.”
“I’m that ugly?”
He doesn’t know how to respond, and leaves the room after being called.
After spending an afternoon at the hospital, I’m allowed to leave. I rip the IV’s off as quickly as I can.
Peter, don’t…
Fuck off Cloud. You’re just like the rest.
I walk down the hallway to the exit where the nurse from earlier hands over my belongings. “Where did you get that lighter?” he says, giving it to me last after he reads the side.
“Oh, this thing…from an American GI. He left it behind as a gift.”
“The quote, who said it?”
“I never thought about that. I don’t know.”
“I would have thought it your generation as one voice.”
“That’s a lot of orphans.”
A bus takes me to the spaceport. I give my passport information to an attendant at the terminal, and wait outside at a sitting area near the boarding ramp. After hearing there will be a delay, I buy a pack of ancients, not because I am caving into my addiction again, but because there is one final thing I’ll have to temporarily break my vow for.
For Isaac.
I light the ancient with the lighter, watching as the Dream turns to flame, and take a drag. I look back at all the things he was and did. I don’t hate him at all for when I was punished—he even said sorry. I just miss him. I really fucking miss him. I keep thinking, I’ll just wake up tomorrow and there he’ll be
, sitting in the foxhole with me. But now he is dead. Dead on a planet that will never know about him. Dead from a war that will never remember him.
I will remember him. I toss the ancient onto the ground and twist my shoe over it for the last time. “Goodbye Isaac, I love you. I will carry your dreams.”
The spaceship jolts and then shakes as we take off through the atmosphere towards Hope Arc station. I look out at the heavens and see the breathtaking sphere of Nova Terra. You wouldn’t think there is a devastating war happening on its surface from here in space, where everything is magnificent and pure in its beauty.
I was on this planet for a while now. I helped liberate Jericho, won a medal at Tionem for heroic action, meet a gorgeous girl, thwarted the rebel rising of Khaf’Jadeed, and to the military and reporters, died heroically in the Kuplar province trying to save a besieged regiment. That is what the media and Party will report of me back to Earth. Of the good the Coalition has done on Nova Terra.
What did I really do? I came to this lost planet at the will of the Party and United Nations. Got the shit beat out of me assaulting Jericho. Then I was given a medal for killing a defenseless alien—his blue beautiful eyes still emanate in my mind as if he was before me right now. Next I liberated Khaf’Jadeed, by massacring every innocent there that got in the way of Hannibal’s flawless victory plans for the Party. I became a hunter, killing fellow humans, and became hated by every Terran on this planet. Finally, I somehow survived that horrible ambush where we received our turn of useless bloodshed and slaughter.
And all for what?
For what can I say I did these things? I lost the person I was when I entered Parris Island. I joined for a good cause, and they perverted it, destroyed it alongside me. I like to think sometimes, maybe if I went back to that base, and walked backwards out of the entrance and down the steps I would bump into my old self, my lost soul. And maybe, I could get it back. Hop into its shoes right there, and runaway, never looking back. But the reality is worse than that. My soul left in fragments, in pieces like petals from a rose shaken by the wind. Like this planet, parts of it disappeared from every engagement. Every narrow escape form death. Every killing of another soul. And I am convinced that all those Herculeans that died—not because they were any better than us, they fucking started the war—but because they are also living creatures, because they too have souls, helped those petals wither away, fall off, or get crushed by the marching boot. Ultimately, my soul was taken away petal by petal till only the shell, till only the dry black thorny stem of Peter remained.
Travesty (SolarSide Book 1) Page 32