Lucid Waking

Archive for March 12th, 2010

Casualty

        Whenever I looked over the landscape, I did not like what I saw. We weren’t living on just a desert, but on a wasteland. This wasn’t just a product of greed, but one of paranoia. It only took one smart survivor to see the potential in what was left after the nuclear war. He decided to create a new Utopia. It took no time for his army to grow restless and tired of what it had. But his grasp was strong and no one escaped.
        It was at times like these when I watched the missiles, bombs, and running people through the smoke below my balcony that my mind continued to go back to the last conversation I had with the one friend I really cared about.
        The world was raining bullets, debris, and bombs. We found shelter under half a fallen tank when he turned to me and said:
        “The problem with fascism is that eventually, someone gets the guts to stand up and say how unjust it is. Inevitably, it will end.”
        “This is a funny conversation be having in the middle of a battle between rebel forces aiming for your dictator-loving heart.”
        “Come on, Cathy. I’m saying we should just wait here until the shooting stops. Either way we’ll get through this. If they find us, we can reform and turn ourselves in and if they lose, no hard feelings on our side.”
        I searched his face for some sort of weakness, but his resolve was stronger than his grip on my arm.
        “But who’s to say the rebels will take us in?” I asked.
        He smiled. “Well then, if they kill us, what would we have lost if we died fighting out here?”
        There was something logical missing in his argument, but in war, nothing is logical. I sat back and stayed silent. He took that as an answer and pulled back between the fort made of fallen concrete and tank parts.
        It seemed anti-climactic that we should have been found out by our own party and that he was killed by stray bullets. There was no purpose to any of it, but we had to run through the thickest fire to retreat and inevitably one of us would get hit. It just had to been him: a dreamer.
        And what of me?
        “Colonel Mathis, come inside. You are needed in the war room,” a lesser pion called from inside the tower.
        I had a duty to survive. Whatever that meant.

Author’s comments on post 364: Definately inspired by this: http://www.youtube.com/show/nowandthenhereandthere. I’ve been flying through the episodes that they have online. That’s about it, really. More tomorrow