Part 1: Chapter 2
Short-round memories…
They’d used to show him pictures. All the time, those damn plates with people that had frozen, stuck in time. People in some other universe, prodding through a garden of hell. Muddy, wounded and broken men that were forever deemed to stay in that hell depicted in silver and grays. They would ask him if he remembered it. They would shove the pictures in his face, and then shove a thick wall of questions, about a life he had not lived, right down his throat. Then he would start to cry and his mother would ask Them to stop. But They never stopped. Not even after they all fell over, dropped to the ground and went still, would the pictures disappear. His first memory of the morning, and the last of the evening, was that of a man of frozen grays. A man with brain-matter and other unidentifiable lumps hovering beside that what used to be his face. His left eye caught in the momentum of sliding out of its shattered socket, like a poached egg. Forever stuck in the moment of death. Not living, not ever truly dying. They had shown him that picture every day for three years. Ever since he started speaking They would test him, always in search of some other person’s memories. He never told Them though. He would just shake his head and cry. Back then, before they all fell over, he wanted nothing than to be the child that he was. He never told Them that in his earliest memories, in the very first dreams he could remember, he saw men like those on the plates.
He walked among them, was one of them. They would laugh, scream, hurt, howl and die. His dreams were not silver and grays; but different shades of green light, brown shadows, and black nothingness. They were all together in a world of muddy trenches and leech infested forests. In his dreams of blood; they would sleep in holes filled with red slime. Rusty mud holes that held the musky, rich and damp odor of the grave. In the blood and decay he and his brethren slept as giant iron birds tore their enemies to pieces. And in the rolling thunder of predawn the pack would wake up and set out to kill. They would watch as black clouds built up and rolled across the landscape; flames exploding, spreading through the clouds. They would watch as the air compressed in waves as the world was set on fire. And they would howl in rejoice as the smell of burning oil filled the air with its greasy aroma. They were the wolves of war.
When he woke up he would cry. Far too young to comprehend when the dreams first came to him. He cried a lot when he was younger, so did his brothers. But his mind matured earlier than theirs. They did not have the dreams and eventually they stopped crying. They went still. “They went away”, his mother would say. Eventually he would stop crying too, hoping that he could join his brother in the stillness he imagined that they had gone to. But he didn’t.
His mother knew about the dreams and she told Them. He never told her and she never asked him, but she knew. She may not have liked what They did to him but nevertheless she let Them. After all, she was one of Them. In his heart he had always known that it was her fault that he was chosen among the others to be subjected to Their tests. When they all fell down she was the first. First to hit the ground, last to go still. He kept the memory of her smile in his heart, although he knew she had not been a good person he wanted to believe that she had loved him. In some way or another. The day they all fell over, he left. Shouldered a weapon and went out into the world. A ragged little boy sharing the hearts and memories of brethren he had yet to meet. The time would come when they would howl together again.