Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
First Person
Friday, March 13th, 2009
No matter how hard you try, you can’t see your legs. Your arms are fine and you can pick stuff up, hold it in front of you. You pull a pistol from parts unknown and adjust your grip, get familiar with the gun’s sights. Your gloved hands look a little disfigured, but you’ll get used to that.
You don’t know where you are, except on the roof. You can see the city all around you to where it disappears in the mist. It all looks the same.
You drop through a broken skylight to the warehouse floor below. You grunt when you hit the ground and your vision goes red, a bit blurry. But you’re not badly hurt, just dazed. What a distance to fall and you didn’t even drop your gun.
You hear unfamiliar music playing from the warehouse speakers, and it makes you feel somewhat safer.
You walk around, inspecting shipping containers, wooden crates, forklifts. On a whim, you aim your pistol at one of the crates and pull the trigger. Though you’ve never fired a gun in your life, your aim is dead on, and the crate shatters, parts flying. Something flashing catches your attention. You walk to to the spot and look down, find a shotgun, some shells, and a box of ammo, luckily the same caliber as your pistol. You pick up the shotgun, jack the action once to make sure it’s loaded. Where the hell did your pistol go? You decide not to think about it.
You see a medic walk into your field of view. You swear he wasn’t here before. “You don’t look so good,” you hear him say. “Take this medkit.”
You do, and your vision clears immediately followed by a suspicious “100” that appears in the upper left of your vision. You turn to ask what the hell is *in* that medicine to make you see numbers, but the medic is gone. Oh well, you get the feeling you’ll see him again if you really need him.
You continue checking the place out, amazed by the amount of supplies for the taking, including a shit-ton of ammunition. You grab as much as you can carry, which is way more than you thought humanly possible. A persistent whine in the back of your head mentions something about the laws of physics, but you ignore that.
You hear the music suddenly get louder and more urgent, so you must be running short of time before trouble shows up. There are a lot of crates, and you decide the best way to get what you need quickly is to break them.
Now grab that flashing crowbar hanging on the wall and get to work.
On The Nature of War
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
When the Elephantmen came they brought war on their heels. Their tusks tore through men. They wielded cannons like toys, fired shot that ripped through Kevlar like tissue. They understood guerrilla tactics, their skin color natural camouflage in the urban jungle man had made for himself.
But the Elephantmen were few, and men were many. Through sheer weight of numbers mankind forced a stalemate. Both sides were diminished, bloody, tattered. And so went forth the leaders of each force, the man O’Connell and the Elephantman Atok. They were battle-scarred and proud, walking into no-man’s land in the cold white sun of the day.
Hard-liners on both sides did not want the deal to pass. Hard-liners on both sides sent squads to dispatch the leaders. But the O’Connell and Atok had not attained their positions without merit. Together they fought back, the two acting as one. O’Connell’s machine gun rattling, Atok’s great arm cannon destroying the cover their attackers hid behind. In the blood of their enemies, O’Connell and Atok found what they might otherwise have never located, brotherhood, understanding.
At the ceasefire declaration, Atok told mankind, “You will see that though we can never forget, we can forgive.”
And the Elephantmen did forgive, and they opened their borders, and gave beleagured mankind all the aid they could muster. They turned their great strength from destruction to building.
However, Atok saw that his people’s largess was not met in kind. So he went to O’Connell and said, “I believe we are friends, but now it seems our friendship is one-sided. My people will not be exploited once more.” And O’Connell assured him all was well, but time proved his promises empty and once more Atok returned. But where O’Connell may have expected anger he found only sadness, for Atok had forgiven man. And O’Connell knew he held back his hand, and the sadness in Atok’s stance only angered him.
O’Connell sent trucks into the Elephantmen camps. They promised aid, but held only men with guns, only death. And the men burst from the trucks, and they caught their ally unaware, and they killed, and they slaughtered, and they butchered. And man stood victorious in a war one side had not known it still fought. For O’Connell had not forgiven, and instead had lived in fear of the day he might forget to hate.