(no subject)
this is incomplete.
translated from paper to the screen.
5 pages left to type.
Grey.
A veil of grey now suffocated his world. The war that they had told him and all his people was all but over had found its way inside their homes. Rooting itself like an apocalyptic weed deep within the heart of their homeland, it now worked to drain everything of life. Not a soul had expected such devastating doom to descend upon the earth but in a snap, it all happened. Over night everything had changed, but no one really knew anything; phone lines died, the television stopped broadcasting and all signals ceased. For a day before the bombings took place, his hometown had become a vacuum of silence. People woke up and turned on their television sets to the sight of stray electromagnetic fields, cosmic background radiation, and flickers of light broadcasting as luminance signals.
Ominous television snow.
Silence filled the airwaves.
There was no new news to tell, only the whisper of electricity beaming into living rooms and through car radios across the country. A country full of answerless questions.
All was quiet on all fronts.
Crushing the hush and solitude of uncertainty came calamity in the killing form of cannonade. It was as if they'd left his world in one long moment of reflection. They'd given the people chance to say their last good-byes, cross their t’s and dot their i's. After that day of silence everything changed.
Before the bombings, he gathered as many of his friends as possible. Each one of them felt as if they were standing in the eye of hurricane, waiting for the weather to worsen. He remembered coming home that night after meeting up with several friends, they'd tried to make sense of the silence. Messages had made it through and they'd heard enough so that they knew that this was no blackout. The silence reached as far as the West Coast, but nothing but nothingness had been transmitted from the East. Hypothesis flew about proclaiming an Electromagnetic Pulse had blacked out all forms of electricity. You know the kind of pulse that comes after a nuclear explosion kisses the earth in a long tongue in mouth kiss of destruction. Others believed terrorists had specifically targeted communication stations and cut off any messaging services before a warning could be broadcast. Still others blamed little green men come back for the human life they'd planted on earth so long ago.
Nothing made sense. What about the AM broadcasts? Why were those stations silent? Even the transistor radios spoke in silent syllables.
To no avail they argued and discussed the dead silence of the airwaves. Then they drank until there fear sobered them up. Then they drank some more. It was the least they could do. They all went home that night, expecting to wake the next day to television sets explaining the whole ordeal as a hoax. Dreaming like Christmas time children, they locked themselves in a slumber of denial.
The first blast came at four in the morning with his mind halfway through a dream. His home was pulled from its foundation like a magician pulling a sheet out from under a set dinner table. When he woke, there was an immense ringing in his ears. It was as if his head was inside an amplifier screeching feedback at the highest notch on the volume knob. Something had knocked him clear across his bedroom and smashed him straight into a wall before he landed heavy as a wet bag of bricks. He was a helpless human being immersed in a world beyond his own comprehension. A certain deer-in-the-headlights effect came over him as he tried to clear the silence from his head. This was when he noticed the numbness in his left arm. He was pinned under his mattress but something heavier yet was shoving his arm into the ground. As his mind returned he began to fight the mattress off his body. It must have been the headboard that kept his arm from moving. He hadn't even begun to think about why or how he was under his mattress, torn from sleep like a fish ripped straight from the sea. The ringing in his ears persisted, though fading minute by minute. Now his mind began to wander. What the hell had happened?
De-railing his train of thought was another rumble which grew louder and louder with each passing second. He stopped fighting his futile battle against gravity and waited for anything to happen. He laid there on the ground listening to the rumble grow louder. It was the sound of the belly of a war machine, growing hungry for death. The rumbling turned into drum beats, pulsating and pounding. His body twitched with each beat, the pain in his arm grew as the booms began to increase in volume.
The booms grew so loud that he couldn't hear himself screaming in agony as he tried to kick the headboard and mattress from his body. His screams were muffled by the destruction happening all around him. As he finally managed to get the mattress from off himself a blast kicked the wall out from behind him. His arm bent under the headboard as he was pried from the ground with tremendous velocity.
He came to with his mattress on top of him once again but his left arm free. He wiggled his toes and moved every limb in his body before attempting to stand. There was a sickening silence floating about his bedroom. His intuition, though shaken, whispered to him that there would be more destruction yet. He moved the mattress from his body with his right arm, still weary about using his left. As he stood, he looked up to the heavens and was startled by the sight of the open sky peering back down into his room. His roof had been whisked away like some child’s play toy. It was still dark enough for the stars to be playing about the night sky but a dark haze skewed his view. The only thing inside his room that was still remotely intact was his mattress and its headboard. All else was rubble.
He remembered being a child, too scared to go back to sleep from a terrible dream and too frightened to leave the security of his bedroom.
Staggering across his room, he moved to open his door. As he turned the knob, it fell off its hinges and landed with the crash of falling timber. The rest of his house was gone. His older brother's bedroom had disappeared. His parent's bedroom was nowhere to be found.
For some reason he remembered the first time he got kicked in the nuts. And just as he did at that exact moment in time, he vomited all over his shoes.
As he dry heaved invisible vomit, a few more explosions went off in the distance. Everything around him glowed with the blinding red of fire. Smoke inhabited his lungs and his eyes welled with tears. His mind slowly crawled down his leg in a stream of piss. His heart and soul evacuated in a hurry, leaving his shaky knees to try to hold him steady.
His body without the permission of his brain began running at a full sprint.
A dog whimpered beneath the weight of a once standing wall two blocks away. For about an hour the dog had been kicking with its hind legs furiously to try and free itself. Though its efforts were lessened by now, the dog still whimpered and pushed to move itself from the wreckage. Its dark eyes searched the horizon for its master but all that was there was the nothingness born from the destruction. It's tail wagged behind, though covered by rubble, as the sound of approaching footsteps grew louder. The dog's white fur stood on end. It hiccupped a yelp and winced at the pain of excess weight pinning it down. The dog smelled a human, a human dripping with fear. The approaching footsteps crescendo in sound and the dog began to wheeze a whine. Could it be that its master had come back to save it from this trap?
In a panicked frenzy the dog began barking loud with the strength of every dog now quieted by the bomb blasts in the town. The boy heard the dog barking between the explosions trailing behind him. The explosions followed after his footsteps like rabid animals seeking their prey. He ran past the sound of the barking pretending as if he couldn't hear it but his conscience pulled his feet to a stop. His breath filtered out through his body in long spells as he stood firmly in place. He turned his head and his eyes directed him to the sound of distress. The dog then began to whimper and plead with the boy's conscience.
"Fucking dog," he said. He turned and ran in the general direction of the noise.
With each of the boy's steps the dog regained its will to fight. Its hind legs pushed once again at the rubble holding itself down. The boy kneeled beside the dog and looked it in the eyes. They stare at each other momentarily; both fearful of what the other may be capable of. Its dog tags read "Dookie" and the address read from a neighborhood a mile down the way. The bombings in the distance moved east and away from the two for the moment. They had but moments to spare. Gripping the wall with both hands, he used the strength of his legs to help bring the wall upward. Licking the boys face, the dog realized exactly what was happening as the weight of the wall was slightly lifted from its torso. Together with the strength of the dog still fighting to stay alive, the two managed to create enough space for the dog to squeeze out.
The dog crawled forth from the wreckage and immediately began to bark at the sound of the bombings. The fire in the sky began to sweep back west, headed straight at the two. For the boy, its like watching Hell running at a dead sprint straight at him.
"C'mon boy, lets go," he said as he took flight down the bombarded street. Dookie followed right after with no hesitation.
They ran in unison, both fearful of losing each other to the increasing sound of destruction. The boy decided to head North but the dog split left and made a turn South. Realizing that he's lost his only companion, the boy stopped running and momentarily caught his breath. Across what was once an alleyway, the dog barked for his friend to come follow.
"What's this dog know that I don't?" he said. His hands clutched his knees as he breathed deeply. The dog continued its barking from across the way, whimpering at its friend to give in to trust.
WHIIIIIIISSSSSHHHHHHHH.
A bright light tore across the sky above the boys head and even the dog stopped barking to see what’s made everything so bright. The boy guessed at it being a jet plane but a loud boom and a flash of light made the night sky turn to day for a moment.
A gust of wind blew the boy's hair back as the light from the explosion slowly became engulfed in the darkness.
The dog barked at the boy standing frozen by the sight of the blast but the boy didn't budge. In a panic, the dog ran up to the boy and with teeth began to tug at his jeans. The boy then turned his eyes to the dog, his face veiled in shock.
"Why is this all happening?," he said looking straight into the dog's eyes.
Whimpering first at the sight of this human's saddened face, the dog then let out a bark as if it were trying to speak a human tongue. Though the boy couldn't understand, the message was clear. The two had to keep moving.
In tandem, they ran. Six legs running steady together with no destination whatsoever.
Down the alleyway they disappeared into a wide spaced backyard.
This was when the Earth was taken out from under them. They were fine china and the ground beneath them a tablecloth being crudely pulled. The explosion didn't hit their ears until they were mid-air.
The only thing inside the boy's mind was the beauty of the night sky. He lost his mind somewhere in the milk way as his legs waved in front of his eyes.
He was awakened from his thought, as he and the dog were both embraced by water. They had landed in a swimming pool filled with water and swimming with computer pieces and networking devices. As he looked straight up, the boy saw the flames from the explosions, which had removed him from the ground. The fire screamed above the ceiling of water and immediately warmed the water temperature.
The brain inside his head was as a blank as a new-born baby’s.
So lost inside his shock, his eyes couldn’t relay the sight of a huge military truck screeching to a halt right in front of him.
“Get in the truck, now!” a voice demanded but the words bounced right out of his ears.
“Wake up, sunshine! We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here!” the voice persisted. In a daze, he lifted his head to see a woman dressed in army camouflage sitting behind the wheel of a heavily armored truck. Several soldiers reached out and pulled him up and inside the vehicle whereupon he sat staring like a blind man.
About 20 soldiers sat huddled in the back of the truck, all of them with their eyes wide. They had no fear in their eyes, just astoundment, bewilderment. This was the first living person they’d encountered in the wreckage thus far.
“Do you know how lucky you are to be alive, man?” a soldier next to him said. He was awake enough to hear his words but in denial enough to believe he was still dreaming.
The truck rattled as a loud booming sound grew louder and louder, waking the boy up from his daydream.
“Hold on back there!” the woman’s voice shouted from up front. An explosion went off on the truck’s left side rocking it off balance and shoving several soldiers off their seats. The driver corrected the truck’s equilibrium before stepping her foot on the accelerator once again.
“I tell you what, man. She ain’t exactly pretty, hell, she ain’t exactly ugly either. But that woman can fucking drive,” another soldier said as the rest of his compatriots scrambled back to their seats.
As the sun began to peer over the horizon, the realization of the situation finally dawned on him.
This was a war.
“Where are we headed?” he asked the soldier next to him.
“What?!” the soldier said shouting.
Realizing that he had spoken in a whisper, he repeated himself, screaming, “Where are we headed?!”
“Oh, to the border. They’re invading from the South. As far as we know, thats the only place these sonsofbitches have breached,” the soldier said.
“Wait, wait, you guys are gonna go out and fight?” the adolescent said.
“That’s right baby, lock and load,” the soldier said. As soon as those words emerged from his mouth, several of the other soldiers hollered “Oorah!”
His breathing ran rampant like that of a panting dog. He placed his right hand over his chest trying to somehow control the pounding of his heart. Inside his mind played the memory of the day he came home from having been kicked out of school for fighting. The world he knew is slowly fading away from him.
Looking into the eyes of the soldier directly in front of him, he searches the soldier's face for some support. The soldier is dark skinned and the whites of his eyes shine like justice. He smiles momentarily at the young man sitting in front of him.
"What's the matter boy?' he said.
He didn't reply, only shook his head as if to deny the choking fear, which had gripped his whole body.
Still smiling the soldier continued, "Ah, come on, kid. Don't clam up on yourself. You shut yourself up like a devil in a cage and the flames of hell will eat you up before this war does. Accept the fact that you're knee deep in this mess."
Jaw quivering, the kid mulls it over.
"Theres only one thing that can get you out of here alive and that's you.
we bled red rivers
in ditches we dug as graves
did we die in vain?
for fallen fathers
and the hope of a new world
we fought to no end
as long as we breathe
and this war lives within us
we live forever
translated from paper to the screen.
5 pages left to type.
Grey.
A veil of grey now suffocated his world. The war that they had told him and all his people was all but over had found its way inside their homes. Rooting itself like an apocalyptic weed deep within the heart of their homeland, it now worked to drain everything of life. Not a soul had expected such devastating doom to descend upon the earth but in a snap, it all happened. Over night everything had changed, but no one really knew anything; phone lines died, the television stopped broadcasting and all signals ceased. For a day before the bombings took place, his hometown had become a vacuum of silence. People woke up and turned on their television sets to the sight of stray electromagnetic fields, cosmic background radiation, and flickers of light broadcasting as luminance signals.
Ominous television snow.
Silence filled the airwaves.
There was no new news to tell, only the whisper of electricity beaming into living rooms and through car radios across the country. A country full of answerless questions.
All was quiet on all fronts.
Crushing the hush and solitude of uncertainty came calamity in the killing form of cannonade. It was as if they'd left his world in one long moment of reflection. They'd given the people chance to say their last good-byes, cross their t’s and dot their i's. After that day of silence everything changed.
Before the bombings, he gathered as many of his friends as possible. Each one of them felt as if they were standing in the eye of hurricane, waiting for the weather to worsen. He remembered coming home that night after meeting up with several friends, they'd tried to make sense of the silence. Messages had made it through and they'd heard enough so that they knew that this was no blackout. The silence reached as far as the West Coast, but nothing but nothingness had been transmitted from the East. Hypothesis flew about proclaiming an Electromagnetic Pulse had blacked out all forms of electricity. You know the kind of pulse that comes after a nuclear explosion kisses the earth in a long tongue in mouth kiss of destruction. Others believed terrorists had specifically targeted communication stations and cut off any messaging services before a warning could be broadcast. Still others blamed little green men come back for the human life they'd planted on earth so long ago.
Nothing made sense. What about the AM broadcasts? Why were those stations silent? Even the transistor radios spoke in silent syllables.
To no avail they argued and discussed the dead silence of the airwaves. Then they drank until there fear sobered them up. Then they drank some more. It was the least they could do. They all went home that night, expecting to wake the next day to television sets explaining the whole ordeal as a hoax. Dreaming like Christmas time children, they locked themselves in a slumber of denial.
The first blast came at four in the morning with his mind halfway through a dream. His home was pulled from its foundation like a magician pulling a sheet out from under a set dinner table. When he woke, there was an immense ringing in his ears. It was as if his head was inside an amplifier screeching feedback at the highest notch on the volume knob. Something had knocked him clear across his bedroom and smashed him straight into a wall before he landed heavy as a wet bag of bricks. He was a helpless human being immersed in a world beyond his own comprehension. A certain deer-in-the-headlights effect came over him as he tried to clear the silence from his head. This was when he noticed the numbness in his left arm. He was pinned under his mattress but something heavier yet was shoving his arm into the ground. As his mind returned he began to fight the mattress off his body. It must have been the headboard that kept his arm from moving. He hadn't even begun to think about why or how he was under his mattress, torn from sleep like a fish ripped straight from the sea. The ringing in his ears persisted, though fading minute by minute. Now his mind began to wander. What the hell had happened?
De-railing his train of thought was another rumble which grew louder and louder with each passing second. He stopped fighting his futile battle against gravity and waited for anything to happen. He laid there on the ground listening to the rumble grow louder. It was the sound of the belly of a war machine, growing hungry for death. The rumbling turned into drum beats, pulsating and pounding. His body twitched with each beat, the pain in his arm grew as the booms began to increase in volume.
The booms grew so loud that he couldn't hear himself screaming in agony as he tried to kick the headboard and mattress from his body. His screams were muffled by the destruction happening all around him. As he finally managed to get the mattress from off himself a blast kicked the wall out from behind him. His arm bent under the headboard as he was pried from the ground with tremendous velocity.
He came to with his mattress on top of him once again but his left arm free. He wiggled his toes and moved every limb in his body before attempting to stand. There was a sickening silence floating about his bedroom. His intuition, though shaken, whispered to him that there would be more destruction yet. He moved the mattress from his body with his right arm, still weary about using his left. As he stood, he looked up to the heavens and was startled by the sight of the open sky peering back down into his room. His roof had been whisked away like some child’s play toy. It was still dark enough for the stars to be playing about the night sky but a dark haze skewed his view. The only thing inside his room that was still remotely intact was his mattress and its headboard. All else was rubble.
He remembered being a child, too scared to go back to sleep from a terrible dream and too frightened to leave the security of his bedroom.
Staggering across his room, he moved to open his door. As he turned the knob, it fell off its hinges and landed with the crash of falling timber. The rest of his house was gone. His older brother's bedroom had disappeared. His parent's bedroom was nowhere to be found.
For some reason he remembered the first time he got kicked in the nuts. And just as he did at that exact moment in time, he vomited all over his shoes.
As he dry heaved invisible vomit, a few more explosions went off in the distance. Everything around him glowed with the blinding red of fire. Smoke inhabited his lungs and his eyes welled with tears. His mind slowly crawled down his leg in a stream of piss. His heart and soul evacuated in a hurry, leaving his shaky knees to try to hold him steady.
His body without the permission of his brain began running at a full sprint.
A dog whimpered beneath the weight of a once standing wall two blocks away. For about an hour the dog had been kicking with its hind legs furiously to try and free itself. Though its efforts were lessened by now, the dog still whimpered and pushed to move itself from the wreckage. Its dark eyes searched the horizon for its master but all that was there was the nothingness born from the destruction. It's tail wagged behind, though covered by rubble, as the sound of approaching footsteps grew louder. The dog's white fur stood on end. It hiccupped a yelp and winced at the pain of excess weight pinning it down. The dog smelled a human, a human dripping with fear. The approaching footsteps crescendo in sound and the dog began to wheeze a whine. Could it be that its master had come back to save it from this trap?
In a panicked frenzy the dog began barking loud with the strength of every dog now quieted by the bomb blasts in the town. The boy heard the dog barking between the explosions trailing behind him. The explosions followed after his footsteps like rabid animals seeking their prey. He ran past the sound of the barking pretending as if he couldn't hear it but his conscience pulled his feet to a stop. His breath filtered out through his body in long spells as he stood firmly in place. He turned his head and his eyes directed him to the sound of distress. The dog then began to whimper and plead with the boy's conscience.
"Fucking dog," he said. He turned and ran in the general direction of the noise.
With each of the boy's steps the dog regained its will to fight. Its hind legs pushed once again at the rubble holding itself down. The boy kneeled beside the dog and looked it in the eyes. They stare at each other momentarily; both fearful of what the other may be capable of. Its dog tags read "Dookie" and the address read from a neighborhood a mile down the way. The bombings in the distance moved east and away from the two for the moment. They had but moments to spare. Gripping the wall with both hands, he used the strength of his legs to help bring the wall upward. Licking the boys face, the dog realized exactly what was happening as the weight of the wall was slightly lifted from its torso. Together with the strength of the dog still fighting to stay alive, the two managed to create enough space for the dog to squeeze out.
The dog crawled forth from the wreckage and immediately began to bark at the sound of the bombings. The fire in the sky began to sweep back west, headed straight at the two. For the boy, its like watching Hell running at a dead sprint straight at him.
"C'mon boy, lets go," he said as he took flight down the bombarded street. Dookie followed right after with no hesitation.
They ran in unison, both fearful of losing each other to the increasing sound of destruction. The boy decided to head North but the dog split left and made a turn South. Realizing that he's lost his only companion, the boy stopped running and momentarily caught his breath. Across what was once an alleyway, the dog barked for his friend to come follow.
"What's this dog know that I don't?" he said. His hands clutched his knees as he breathed deeply. The dog continued its barking from across the way, whimpering at its friend to give in to trust.
WHIIIIIIISSSSSHHHHHHHH.
A bright light tore across the sky above the boys head and even the dog stopped barking to see what’s made everything so bright. The boy guessed at it being a jet plane but a loud boom and a flash of light made the night sky turn to day for a moment.
A gust of wind blew the boy's hair back as the light from the explosion slowly became engulfed in the darkness.
The dog barked at the boy standing frozen by the sight of the blast but the boy didn't budge. In a panic, the dog ran up to the boy and with teeth began to tug at his jeans. The boy then turned his eyes to the dog, his face veiled in shock.
"Why is this all happening?," he said looking straight into the dog's eyes.
Whimpering first at the sight of this human's saddened face, the dog then let out a bark as if it were trying to speak a human tongue. Though the boy couldn't understand, the message was clear. The two had to keep moving.
In tandem, they ran. Six legs running steady together with no destination whatsoever.
Down the alleyway they disappeared into a wide spaced backyard.
This was when the Earth was taken out from under them. They were fine china and the ground beneath them a tablecloth being crudely pulled. The explosion didn't hit their ears until they were mid-air.
The only thing inside the boy's mind was the beauty of the night sky. He lost his mind somewhere in the milk way as his legs waved in front of his eyes.
He was awakened from his thought, as he and the dog were both embraced by water. They had landed in a swimming pool filled with water and swimming with computer pieces and networking devices. As he looked straight up, the boy saw the flames from the explosions, which had removed him from the ground. The fire screamed above the ceiling of water and immediately warmed the water temperature.
The brain inside his head was as a blank as a new-born baby’s.
So lost inside his shock, his eyes couldn’t relay the sight of a huge military truck screeching to a halt right in front of him.
“Get in the truck, now!” a voice demanded but the words bounced right out of his ears.
“Wake up, sunshine! We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here!” the voice persisted. In a daze, he lifted his head to see a woman dressed in army camouflage sitting behind the wheel of a heavily armored truck. Several soldiers reached out and pulled him up and inside the vehicle whereupon he sat staring like a blind man.
About 20 soldiers sat huddled in the back of the truck, all of them with their eyes wide. They had no fear in their eyes, just astoundment, bewilderment. This was the first living person they’d encountered in the wreckage thus far.
“Do you know how lucky you are to be alive, man?” a soldier next to him said. He was awake enough to hear his words but in denial enough to believe he was still dreaming.
The truck rattled as a loud booming sound grew louder and louder, waking the boy up from his daydream.
“Hold on back there!” the woman’s voice shouted from up front. An explosion went off on the truck’s left side rocking it off balance and shoving several soldiers off their seats. The driver corrected the truck’s equilibrium before stepping her foot on the accelerator once again.
“I tell you what, man. She ain’t exactly pretty, hell, she ain’t exactly ugly either. But that woman can fucking drive,” another soldier said as the rest of his compatriots scrambled back to their seats.
As the sun began to peer over the horizon, the realization of the situation finally dawned on him.
This was a war.
“Where are we headed?” he asked the soldier next to him.
“What?!” the soldier said shouting.
Realizing that he had spoken in a whisper, he repeated himself, screaming, “Where are we headed?!”
“Oh, to the border. They’re invading from the South. As far as we know, thats the only place these sonsofbitches have breached,” the soldier said.
“Wait, wait, you guys are gonna go out and fight?” the adolescent said.
“That’s right baby, lock and load,” the soldier said. As soon as those words emerged from his mouth, several of the other soldiers hollered “Oorah!”
His breathing ran rampant like that of a panting dog. He placed his right hand over his chest trying to somehow control the pounding of his heart. Inside his mind played the memory of the day he came home from having been kicked out of school for fighting. The world he knew is slowly fading away from him.
Looking into the eyes of the soldier directly in front of him, he searches the soldier's face for some support. The soldier is dark skinned and the whites of his eyes shine like justice. He smiles momentarily at the young man sitting in front of him.
"What's the matter boy?' he said.
He didn't reply, only shook his head as if to deny the choking fear, which had gripped his whole body.
Still smiling the soldier continued, "Ah, come on, kid. Don't clam up on yourself. You shut yourself up like a devil in a cage and the flames of hell will eat you up before this war does. Accept the fact that you're knee deep in this mess."
Jaw quivering, the kid mulls it over.
"Theres only one thing that can get you out of here alive and that's you.
we bled red rivers
in ditches we dug as graves
did we die in vain?
for fallen fathers
and the hope of a new world
we fought to no end
as long as we breathe
and this war lives within us
we live forever