Join the new world

Another old segment being brought back here...the erepublik fiction. Going a little darker on this one. Hope you enjoy.

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The one thing I came to realise about the war was the crushing weight of loneliness that rested upon each of our shoulders. We became nothing more than shadows of our former selves, doing little but floating from one order to another. I went into that deployment with a family around me, men and women who were closer to me than my own flesh and blood. And yet one by one I had to stand and salute as a cheap wooden box draped in the flag of a country that didn’t care to know their name was walked slowly away from me.

There were so few of us left by the end of the war that the joy and laughter we once felt in the company of one another was soon replaced by the deep yearning for our family to return to us. Others came in their place but I could never bring myself to care for another person who could just so easily be gone by the morning.

When I was drafted I was but a boy, and when i was spat out I had become a man, but I was broken beyond repair.

I awaken in the night to the sound of screeching mortars coming to bring death to my doorstep, mortars that are long gone, they are years in my past and yet they remain ever constant in my present. I may have been taken from the war but it is still living inside of me, consuming me bit by little bit.

I don’t know how to find any sort of humanity anymore, I feel neither joy nor sorrow and instead I am left with a kind of numbness. I see the faces of the men I killed each night as I close my eyes and pray that for once sleep will come and claim me without taking me back to that hell.

I can still see the swarming cloud of gas coming at me once again; I can hear the screams of those poor souls trapped within its swirling depths. No actually scream is the wrong word, it’s more like a squeal, an animalistic howling that wrenches my guts just to think of.

I panic and reach for my gas mask with trembling fingers that refuse to do what I ask of them, all the while the cloud is inching its way towards me, I cannot retreat, my legs refuse to move and all I can do is stand and watch as my death approaches me, my hands hang at my side, the mask still hanging at my side, useless against the inactivity of my mind.

Just before I’m all consumed I scream awake into a small room of darkness, the only shred of light is a thick sickly orange from the flickering street lamp just outside the window of my tiny flat. I’m lying in a pool of what I always tell myself is sweat, my eyes burn from tears and the perspiration that drips from my brow.

I will sit for hours staring at my shaking hands and whisper the names of those I can no longer reach.

Alex

Jennifer

Dakota

Sam

Gary

And on and on, there’s too many to count.

I’m writing this now after one such night, the lingering fingers of that hell are becoming more sure the older I get, I thought time was supposed to heal things, to make wounds close and allow me to continue with my life. Seems time was not aware of such a pact. There’s a fist squeezing me, choking me and there’s a whispering in my eye, a seductive whispering that I am struggling to fight off.

I look to my left, the pistol is shut away but even that is beginning to whisper to me now, it’s pleading with me.

But no, I have to finish this, for everyone I left behind on that battlefield I must finish this.

My name is Sergeant Moody, and this is our story.