“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, and 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.