Sergeant

The rapid explosion of machine gun shells echoed across the ruins. With every shot I heard the screams from the night before. Tracer ammunition illuminated a string from its firer to its victim, a faceless enemy hiding somewhere past the trenches and in the dark. Did they wonder what we looked like too? We told the rookie to remove those tracers rounds. It gave us away. We knew the plane had us in our sights but it was already too late. We deserved it. The rumble of the air to ground missile plunged me into darkness.

I woke up. I was on the train. The shrapnel still lodged in my side began to burn, as if reignited by the memories. The rumble of the subway made me uneasy. Oh well.

It was amazing that subway even still ran. Only two or three lines were needed. The provisional government needed them to get rations out to the distribution centers. There weren’t many. Most of those neighborhoods were empty now. Emptier even then before. There were no rations on the train today. Just me and my pain and a soldier, proudly wearing worn out fatigues a over-zealously giving me a suspicious look.

I got off at the end of the line and scrambled up the staircase to the surface. Scavengers wrapped in rags ignored me, hopelessly rummaging through piles of debris. Rations were a week behind. The sun was still up, not that it mattered much anymore. Nothing but a grey aura emanated. Ashes, swept across Jamaican Bay from Queens drifted through the air lazily looking to settle somewhere amongst the rubble that was once Rockaway Park. I wrapped my tattered jacket tightly around myself and I felt that old familiar hard steel press against my ribs. I continued the long walk down the peninsula. It was all decimated. After everything was over the storms hit us. They hit us hard. As if mother nature, not wanting to be upstaged by the destruction we inflicted upon ourselves, decided show us what destruction really was. Most of Rockaway Peninsula was leveled. The neighborhood of Breezy Point was completely washed to sea. I could hear the waves rise and fall along the beach like the breath of a sleeping beast.  

There it was. His house. Somehow it had survived. Just like us. It stood alone amongst piles of rubbles. A stubborn human growth. Like all of us.

I waded through the debris to the house and standing on the porch I looked through the window. He was sitting in an old armchair, facing away from me and out towards the ocean.

I creaked open the door and stood there. I clutched the cold steel in my pocket.

“I think we all shoulda died cause from that airstrike.”

He was silent. I went go on.

“We were the only ones who survived. Survived to keep suffering with what we’ve done and what we helped the world become. I still hear their screams, telling us to stop, while we urged on the men. We forced ourselves on those women. Who knows how old the girls were. War is war. But that…”

He was still silent. Angrily I grabbed the cold hard ugly thing in my pocket and shoved it in his face.

He’d beat me to it. Just like he always did. A bullet to the brain.

He always had a way to keep one step ahead of us.

I bit that hard steel myself, and followed his path, just like I always did.