Outbreak
The streets exploded with violence after the news aired the video of a firefighter being kicked and hit with bricks as he crawled out of the burning building, his body completely consumed in flames. Crowds gathered around him, kicking him down, putting fire extinguishers in front of him then taking it away as he reached for them. When the firefighter finally fell to the ground, burning from the inside out, the crowds started to pull his uniform off and tossed his safety gear around. Someone tied a rope around his neck and they dragged his body about the streets behind a beat up Oldsmobile.
What started out as a joke had become a reality. Other veterans, like me, got together. We took over a long closed armory on an artillery base and it made for a perfect home. We wanted nothing to do with the mayhem that was brewing outside of the area. We knew violence and we understood its use more than anyone else. However, we also knew that there were people that would prey on us if they were permitted to operate in our AOR. Area of responsibility. This is an area that we can patrol in a day. Or an area within our mortars.
One day, while we were out on a supplies patrol, we received a "help" from home. We rushed back to the armory. We drove faster than we should have. We crashed into things, we hurt ourselves. And when we arrived, we found our families dead. Only members of a particular color were killed. The remaining had been raped, or beaten, or wounded. We buried our dead and resurrected our absolute darkest demons.
We sent our remaining families out of the area to a fortified bunker area that we knew they could survive in for a year or more. It also meant no direct sunlight or air. However, they needed to be protected. From all of them. And especially from us.
We spent two weeks preparing. We removed our peaceful side-the side that our mothers fostered. And we donned our darkest sins. Personalities from a time long ago. We permitted those devils to inhabit our minds and hearts. We painted our faces, we painted our uniforms. We painted our weapons. We even painted our motorcycles. This was not revenge-this was accountability.
We found the city from which the men in the black trucks had arrived. A large city on fire. This group was born from the gangs and the hate they fed every day. Funded by drugs, funded by death-we were going to even the scales here.
They woke up in the afternoons and stoked their fires. They fired guns into the air. They looked like clowns. They would drag people into their circles and beat them with stones and they would yell out over loud speakers. These people did not want a new life. They wanted a world that had long past, but that was not their world. It was ours. And we were the rulers of that dark place.
We started by cutting off their routes of escape. Streets and alleys. It took us weeks to prepare the ambushes. We watched. The demons and us. We watched them feed on the world. When the time came, we moved with purpose. We moved with such purpose. They had never experienced such rage. It was as if our bullets hated them. As if these devices of death had a will of their own and their will was set against them. We didn't stop as we moved from the buildings. Room to room, resupplying with boxes of bullets. Grenades and even RPG's. This old tech. We pushed and pushed and pushed until our hate was simmering over the top of the put. Smoke spewed from our nostrils, fire from our eyes. Our muscles moved like serpents and worms under leather. With each kill, our hate increased until our very presence set the world on fire. Even the trees died.
Those who ran were caught in burning nets of tire, rubber, and a sea of sharp glass. These nets wrapped them. Their screams were the songs of our dance and we danced all night long.
When it was done, we did not bury them or abuse their bodies. We did not rape their unarmed or their children. We simply stopped and walked away.
We were veterans of the wars before those people came to be. Our injuries left us with cybernetic limbs, our bodies broken and sometimes, our minds too. The world saw us as freaks. We were unnatural and had abilities that a human should not have. Like resurrection. We took our time and over 30 days we slowly removed these military attachments. The armor, the performance enhancing chips that contained hundreds of years of combat experience. Our thinner, stronger limbs, our weapons and clones. We put the drones back in their boxes with the armor and controls. We removed the batteries from the coil weapons and stored them. We replaced each sword with a plow and with each trade, we became what we loved. What we dreamed of being.
As I removed the last of my military program chips and just as I uploaded my original programming, I turned toward the wall and read an old piece of metal with words scratched in it.
"Master and Disciple walked side by side through a beautiful garden. The Disciple suddenly stops and asks, 'Master, you talk about and preach to me the ways of peace. Yet I have larked from you deadly techniques of combat and the tactics of war. How do you reconcile the two?' The Master gracefully squat, chooses a flower and plucks it. 'My Disciple, it is better to be a warrior tending to his garden than a gardener in a war.'"
I stopped what I was doing and looked at my team of veterans. Many of them had cybernetic limbs, some of them parts of faces. There were others with missing jaws or whole sections of their torso. Others, like me, were resurrections. Our minds removed from our bodies and uploaded into these machines. We had paid the ultimate price in life and now we wanted to tend our gardens. We wanted a peaceful life, but we were not gardeners. Maybe what we thought were demons were actually the parts of us that made us good. Maybe we had been called to defend. Had we been those warriors in the garden those months ago, our families would still be here. They must have felt it too because they had all stopped.
One by one, we put those devices back on. We plug those chips back in and we accepted our roles that the world needs warriors to push back when the enemy is at the gate. We had a garden to tend.
