by Josh Hilden
As You Were...…
A Tale from the Shattered Earth
By Josh Hilden
Copyright © 2015 Josh Hilden
Amazon Edition
Publisher: Gorillas With Scissors Press
Literary Editor: Jennifer Dembiczak
Book Formatting: Gypsy Heart Editing
E-Mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @Josh_Hilden
www.joshhilden.com
www.gwspress.com
www.freestoryfriday.com
Facebook Author Page
Amazon Author Page
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
This book is a work of fictions. Names, characters, establishments, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously to give a sense of authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, event, or locals are entirely coincidental.
The Heartland Empire
Originally an alliance of four city states the Heartland Empire has risen to become the dominate force on the North American Continent. Birthed in war the Empire was brought into being by New Chicago’s First Alderman Micah Schultz, father of current Imperial President Keegan Schultz, during the war with the Ohio Valley Compact. In the decades since its formation the Empire has adopted many of the darker aspects of the old United States in an effort to weld the member states into a cohesive whole.
- University of New Tesla Database (Updated 300 ATC)
I’m writing this account of the last days of my life (such as it has been) from a moldy cot in the back room of a brothel in the middle of the New Chicago Fringe. In my one hundred fifty three years on this charming little world, I’ve accomplished few things of note. I’ve loved deeply, and I’ve allowed my pride to hasten a death that was inevitable. I hope one day this is read and pray someone will make this account available to others.
I don’t want to be forgotten.
The day started like any other. I walked down the street, headed toward the building that’d been my home away from home for the last twenty two years. I wasn’t aware this would be the last time I would ever make this walk. It was relatively early in the morning so the chill still bit in the October air. Frost was visible on the plastic windows, even the rare glass windows, of the hodge-podge buildings lining the hard-packed streets of the New Chicago Fringe. The smell of the open sewers was muted by the lack of humidity, and the steady breeze channeling the stench to the west.
The neighborhood was significantly more settled and organized than it’d been when I first decided to plant my stakes here in the semi-squalor surrounding the man-made mountain that was the fortress city. More than two decades ago, this area was part of the outer ring of the Fringe, and was therefore wild and lawless when compared to the venerable neighborhoods such as Lake Side and Red Basin. I took no small amount of pride in knowing I helped put a veneer of order over the chaos permeating the area back in those hectic days.
“Morning, John,” a plump jolly faced woman called to me as she opened the doors of a shop. Amanda Lynch was a matronly woman of almost one hundred years, and it was still obvious she’d been a breath taking beauty back in the day. I thought she still looked pretty damn good.
“Morning, Amanda,” I said, stopping in front of the bakery she and her husband had run together since the organizing of our little section of the Fringe. Roy Lynch died of the Black Frog Fever two winters ago. Amanda had bucked the odds and kept their shop open despite the loss of her husband. She was a strong, independent spirit.
She lifted a paper bag off a small table set just inside the bakery’s doors. The smell of fresh bread and biscuits wafted out into the street and saliva watered my mouth. She handed the bag to me and a soft smile spread across her face, a face that’d seen much and forgot nothing over the last century.
“Darling, if you keep meeting me on the street every morning, people will think you are sweet on me,” I said to her as I opened the bag and saw the blueberry muffins (the size of softballs and still steaming) inside.
“You old goat,’” she laughed at me. “You’re old enough to be my father.” But the look in her sharp green eyes said the fact that I would never see 140 again was of no matter to her.
I felt that stirring in my gut again, the same stirring that I’d been feeling for the last year. She was beautiful, and she made me laugh. But Roy had been one of my best friends, damn near a brother. The idea that I might be falling in love… no, damnit, let’s be honest… the fact that I was hopelessly in love with his wife made me feel ashamed. I was betraying the memory of the man that’d saved my life so many years ago.
But would Roy really be upset to see his wife and his best friend happy together? This was the question that’d been haunting my dreams and stalking the shadows of my waking life. Then there was the question of the mission; would it be appropriate to mix personal pleasure with the work we’d been doing for all of these years? Some of these thoughts must have bled through to my facial expressions because the light playfulness disappeared from Amanda’s voice as she spoke again.
“Are you alright. John? You look like a goose walked over your grave.” Concern wove within her simple words, and warmth gushed in my heart as she continued to speak. “Are you going to be able to drop in tonight? The kids would like to see you; they love it when you tell your stories.” She laughed at that, and to a casual listener it would seem to be the laughter of a woman remembering simple joys and nothing more. Only I (and Roy, when he had still walked this world) would have heard the sadness hidden within.
“I’m fine, Amanda and yes I’ll try to make it tonight.” I said to her closing the bag of muffins and preparing to head down the street.
“OK then,” she said a little unsurely. Then she turned and flipped the sign on the bakery door from closed to open.
Before I could leave, she closed the distance between us and kissed me on the cheek. It felt warm and soft on my dry leathery skin. I looked at her, and before I could stop myself I kissed her back on the lips. It wasn’t a passionate kiss but it was a firm and deliberate kiss.
“John…” she said, her voice trailing off as she looked at me.
“I’ll talk to you later, Amanda,” I said to her before she could say anything else. This was neither the time nor the place for us to have this conversation. The sad truth of it was it may never be the time. But that’s just the way the universe works, and if anyone tries to tell me different, I tell them to piss off.
I could feel her eyes watching me as I headed down the street. Everything in me wanted to turn around and go back to her, tell her that I’d loved her for years and just give up this mess as a bad idea. But I didn’t; sometimes you just have to do what you know is right, no matter the sacrifices you have to make.
Courtney would have understood. At least that’s what I want to believe with all of my soul.
I could feel my age as I moved across the hard pack. Even over the sounds of the Fringe coming awake, I could hear the whir and whine of my bionic bits and pieces. I suppose I could have them replaced again with some better hardware, but I haven’t entered the city in more than twenty years with no plans to change that any time soon. I may have been eligible for free medical care for the rest of my life, but the price of redeeming those be
nefits was too high.
I know Courtney would have agreed with that.
My left leg and left arm had been separated from my body more than half a century ago, the price I paid for going hand-to-hand with some kind of demonic cat in the Ohio River Valley. In the end, I fed half of my limbs to that creature for nothing. That kid, (what was his name… Ronnie, I think Sanchez maybe) I thought if I could distract the hell kitty the kid would be able to get away. Damn fool just stood there. I screamed and screamed for him to run, but the little bastard just stood there. Once “Garfield” was finished with the appetizer he went for the main course.
The fool never even drew his weapon.
I spent the next six weeks in a field hospital near the front lines. Some crappy little village on the scummy banks of the Ohio River. You know you could actually see the rotted towers of the Louisville ruins looming above the tree line. The hospital wasn’t really all that bad, a dry bed and three hot meals a day. Add to that a nightly shower with honest to God hot, soapy water, it damn near would have been a vacation if it weren’t for the pain still emanating from my nonexistent limbs.
Oh yeah, I could also see Courtney damn near any time I wanted.
These days if it was discovered that an officer and an enlisted person were romantically involved, it could quite possibly mean a transfer for one to the Black Steel frontier and the other to the New Texas/Nuevo Aztlán border. Back then things were a little more relaxed than that, but not much.
I met Courtney… I’m sorry let’s do this right. I met Lieutenant Courtney Wetmore, when she arrived at the Fort Sheldon Self Defense School. She was an academic officer, a teacher, from the military academy at the city, back when it was still a real city. She’d been shipped there to learn how to defend herself with more finesse than simple basic hand-to-hand training could impart.
This was fifty three, maybe fifty two years ago, six months before the outbreak of the war, at any rate. And a year before my world was shattered and I was never the same again.
She was full of fire. It didn’t matter to her that she was different from the rest of us. She was an officer and, damnit, we were to treat her with the respect due to her rank. You had to admire the gumption that took. Here she was barely twenty years old, had never done combat field duty in her life, and she was able to get a squad of battle hardened veterans to ask “how high?” when she said jump.
She was amazing.
It was myduty to teach her unarmed combat against preternatural beings. It was (and still is, I suppose) the hardest version of hand-to-hand combat a normal, un-augmented human being can engage in. She was a fast learner though, and after two weeks of intense training and drill she had the basics down.
I guess that was when it happened; I fell in love.
She was twenty years younger than me, and an officer, but that could have been worked around. The real obstacle to a relationship with her was the fact that she was a mystic. I know most people that may one day read this will say, “Big deal; my next door neighbor is a mystic,” or something similar. But if you are reading this and you happen to be a citizen of the Heartland Empire, you need to understand that things weren’t always the way they are now.
When I was a kid and a young adult, there were magic using citizens of the New Chicago. Before the Heartland Empire, there was just the Republic of New Chicago. It was a golden time. We’d finally gotten the upper hand with the demonic hordes laying siege to humanity for more than two hundred years. Magic and psychic powers were used as tools to help keep the human race safe. For that matter, almost two percent of the New Chicago population was non-human.
Does that shock you? It should. Before the war with the Ohio Valley Compact, we were an open society. As citizens, we felt it our destiny to take back the planet from the monsters and make it a safe haven for all peaceful beings.
How the world has changed.
One night, about a week before Courtney was to be sent from Fort Sheldon on a liaison mission with friendly elements in the Kingdom of Rowling (yes, you read that right), I told her how I felt. I was terrified. , I went to her quarters, reeking of aftershave and too much cologne, and knocked on the door. When she opened it, I almost dropped the clutch of wild flowers I was crushing in my hands and ran. But her smile stopped me. It was radiant and if you were lucky enough to have it cast in your direction, you felt nothing else in the world mattered except the two of you.
I told her how I felt in one long running sentence without even stopping to breathe. My stomach was in knots and I felt like gravity was reversing itself and I was going to be thrown sky high and then dropped to the ground. She listened to my rambling and stood there the entire time with this slightly amused expression on her face. I wanted to flee as I looked into her eyes, unable to read her emotions. She reached out with no visible hesitation and took my large, calloused hand into her small, delicate one.
She then led me into her quarters.
It was the happiest night of my life, and as I now take that long walk into the darkness, it is the memory that I will cling to. But I won’t relate it here, some things must remain personal.
A week later, Courtney was shipped up to Rowling to escort a diplomat from New Chicago. After that, I learned the talks with the leadership at Rowling helped to keep them from joining forces with the Ohio Valley Compact and assailing our city from the north. A treaty was signed, in her presence, that kept peace between the two powers for more than thirty years. When the wars between the Heartland Empire and the Kingdom of Rowling began, I wept my tears privately for the final desecration that the vultures in New Chicago had heaped on the legacy of my Courtney.
We corresponded daily; sometimes it would take several weeks for the mail to reach me, and I would get a dozen letters at once… those were wonderful days. She told me how things were in the north and about her strong belief that war was coming. I told her about my duties at the base and about how they were rushing as many new recruits through training as possible.
Eighteen days after the non-aggression treaty was signed with Rowling, the Ohio Valley Compact attacked New Chicago with one goal in mind - the destruction of the tech city and the slaughter of all her inhabitants. It was the scariest time of my life. Dark mages and their demonic minions boiled forth from secret bases in the ruins of old Chicago and the sheltered enclaves of the Ohio and central Mississippi river valleys, like wasps agitated by a child with a stick. If you view the official history films the masses are exposed to, or read the books provided to the educated elite, you learn that our victory was never in doubt and we drove them from the walls of New Chicago with the ease of hoeing a field for planting.
It is all bullshit.
The city’s walls were actually breached three times during the course of the siege. I truly believe if it hadn’t been for the heroic efforts of the Magic and Psychic Squads, the city would have been taken and we, the valiant New Chicago defense forces, would have been reduced to ragged groups of partisans, stalking the fields and forests like our ancestors after the shattering.
You have to remember, we didn’t have our invincible war machine that we now have to spread fear and terror across the continent. We had the primitive forerunners of our current gear, and a handful of pre-shattering war machines that’d been repaired and held in reserve for more than century. Most of the fighting was individual soldiers versus the magical horrors that’d been released against us.
We needed every edge we could get.
The siege itself lasted forty seven days. When it was broken, the city lay in ruins and the enemy was still strong and organized. Thus we launched a counterattack. The great General Micah Schultz lead the defense forces on the offensive. First we laid waste to the community that existed within the then revered, and semi-sacred, ruins of Chicago. I could tell you of the strange and contradictory things I saw in Chicago, of the great Mausoleum and the water tower, but those are stories that time will not allow me to tell.
After the fall of Compact f
orces in Chicago (what they called the Blue City for some damn reason), our forces advanced into the heartland of the Ohio Valley Compact.
It was the first time most of us had ever left the borders of the State of New Chicago. It was amazing and terrifying. For miles there would be nothing more than fields and unbroken acres of wild corn and wheat. And then, rising from the landscape like a child’s toy cast amongst the weeds, the pinnacles and plateaus of the ruins of the past would leer at us.
A friend of mine, Benny Mason, told us (with all sincerity) there was ten times the volume of debris below the surface. We laughed at him and told him he had been listening to too many stories told by the old duffers in the shanty towns of the Fringe.
Then we reached the banks of a river that was dwarfed in size only by the mighty Mississippi, in my experience. The Major told us this was the Ohio River. When we asked how come it was named the Ohio, he told us it wasn’t important for us to know these things and to shut up and start digging in.
For the next three months, my life consisted of nothing more than advance a mile, fight some damn monster or evil son of a bitch, sleep, advance another mile, and do it all over again. I could regale you with the horrors of the war, but the fact of the matter is we believed we were doing the right thing, and in the end we would triumph because our cause was just and our motivations pure.
I still believe we were doing the right thing.
Then we entered the ruins of the town of Harrow Mill, and I was reunited with Courtney. By the time we came to that loose ring of towns and villages surrounding the ancient city of Louisville, a combined company of Psychic and Magic troops had been added to our Battalion. As we neared the city, I’ll tell you the truth, we were damn happy to have them with us. The dark mage’s of the Ohio Valley Compact had been running rampant within our lines and the only weapons we had to counter them in those days (remember, kids, the first of the K-9’s were still more than half a century away from being a reality) were our own mages and mental warriors.