• The Beginning of the End
    The smoke burned out everything. My bare feet burned against the steaming, blackened ground, now covered with tar and blood, bombarded with smoke and littered with crumpled bodies, like the dying leaves of autumn. Except this land would never see autumn again. They had probably even assaulted the ground with their radioactive wastes so that nothing will grow here for a long, long time. The buildings were blackened, charred, gangly, the people broken, screaming, running, as if the people that they've lived around and known for all their lives mean nothing now. That no other life mattered but their own. We were just as bad as the enemy. Fires were everywhere. Screams filled the air. Bombing was the background music for all this corruption.
    And yet I couldn't bring myself to cry.
    I felt arms compounding around me, concussions of voices and cries and pleas, but I would not be shaken by anyone's reason but my own. My heart, soon, was the only thing I could hear as I was dragged down hallway after silky, white, sterilized hallway and into a shuttle.
    "Is this what you really want?" Came the words. More like a series of hisses than a sentence, more like a statement than a question, more like a warrant for death than a sign of life.
    "Is it?" came the voice again, more impatient this time.
    I couldn't recall or comprehend what the words had meant to anyone at the time, to me they were a rumble of words that I couldn't understand or find direct correlation to the situation in front of us. Nor did I know, at the age of eight, what I wanted at all. Everything had been handed to me, taught to me, re-phrased for my liking, for my understanding - I didn't think I was supposed to want anything.
    Then came a muffled cry, as if it were a suitable reply. I didn't even blink. The room around me was completely white, the walls transparent. My mind was frozen in the process of trying to understand it all.
    "It's not so much what I want...but what she needs," the thick, ruffled voice croaked. With that I was hailed away from the screaming and tears and the burning away of my home.
    The clicking of heels sounded on the stainless, white floor below me, but my feet didn't touch the ground. I was being carried at arms length, two warm, iron like hands clutching me by my armpits. The sound of the clicking stopped and I was hefted up onto a countertop.
    "This will only hurt for a moment, sweetie," a sweet voice murmured. I blinked and face came into view.
    Her skin was flawless, but in the dim lighting, was the color of wheat; the kind that used to grow here before the attacks started. Her eyes were an earnest, crystal clear blue that I found were like an oxymoron in this situation. So clear and understanding, so placid and kind. It was so different from what I had just seen it seemed wrong. But perhaps I should have counted myself lucky to have the last thing I would ever see be something beautiful, one of my last memories beautiful right after seeing such corruption.
    Before I could ask what would hurt the woman covered my eyes, and then I felt a sharp, agonizing pain in my upper arm. My voice resounded through the whole room. echoing off all the walls and smooth surfaces that were in the room. It lasted for so long - the echo - that I had started to wish I had counted all the smooth surfaces so I knew just the right amount of times my voice would have to bounce off all of them to echo so much. My screams finally faltered and all I could hear was myself weeping and all I could picture was the destruction outside. I was picked up none too gently by a pair of thin, plastic feeling arms and the heels resounded all around me, everywhere, even echoing in my mind. I tried to open myeyes but it burned.
    "Stop fidgeting, love, your appearance transformation is not complete.
    We're going to get you out of here, away from here. By the time you're my age you won't even remember the war."
    With that I stopped moving, just let the woman with her too perfect face carry me away, away from my home and then set me out into a world that was much more metal and a lot less fields, much more electric and a lot less lamps, much more grimy and not enough things I was used to. And with no good-bye or memory to hold but the ones I could carry right then and there in my small, eight year old little fingers, I left my home forever.