World War 4: Sticks and Stones

Peter's Rise

I lifted myself out of our tunnel and into the day. Grace did the same. Through searing pain we started walking. It took everything we had to take even just one step. How could pain that was doing nothing to my body be so intense? I took one step. Then one breath. One more step. One more breath. My skin continued to feel as though it was melting, but every time that I would look to my arm, it seemed fine. Then, it hit me. Halfway to the town that we were traveling to, I realized: what if the source of the pain ran deeper than the skin. My expression drew blank. "Grace, I think we're dying, Grace. We need to get to that town." I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her as I ran. She took only four steps and fell to the ground in pain. Her face started to go pale. I picked her up and I ran as fast as I could. It felt fast, but it seemed as though the town was not getting any closer. In exasperation, I collapsed. All around me was pure, unadulterated darkness. When I woke, I found myself in a building. I was surrounded by people hovering over me. I was strapped to a heart monitor. "Grace! Where's Grace?" An unfamiliar voice responded. "Relax, my friend, she's fine. She's just in another room. One more minute and you both would have been dead meat." The comparison to me that they made with meat disgusted me and I became terrified that I had discovered a society that had fallen into the same disgusting tactics as that that I had come from. "You don't eat babies do you?" The person looked startled by my question. "What? Of course we don't eat babies." I smiled a polite smile. "Well that's all that I needed to hear." I then asked the person's name. "Olivia. What's yours?" "Peter." "Nice to meet you Peter. So how did you get here? If you're here then that means that there's more people nearby." I explained my situation from the very beginning. Olivia looked disgusted. "How could someone, let alone thousands of someone's just immediately resort to something like that?" Her disgust satisfied me. I found my army. In only a couple of hours, I felt like new. I asked Olivia where the room that Grace was in was and she showed me to it. Grace was tired, but perfectly fine. I asked Olivia a question. "How did we heal so fast?" "So, while the radiation will most definitely kill you if you are out too long, it heals exponentially faster than any other kind of wound. Once we discovered this, we built our village. We got used to the pain pretty quickly, so it was all about remembering to go back to our bunkers quick enough." I wished that I had discovered that. It would have been amazing to just be able to live above the ground again. Then I wondered how they had prepared enough resources to avoid resorting to desperate measures. "Well, obviously we had prepared enough food for a meganuke attack, but we had some cattle and chickens and pigs down in the bunker in case we ran out. The fact that you and Grace were among the only ones to pack enough is absolutely ludicrous." "Exactly! I knew that her and I were not alone in thinking that there could have been another way. We have to fight back against this." "Woah there! This is not our fight. We have a gun and some bullets, but you're on your own after that." "See, that's where you're wrong. This is your fight. They are not only killing my future by the millions, but they are killing our future." Olivia explained to me that even if they were to help, the radiation was too potent to be able to travel back to my original bunker. Only taking a second to think, I replied. "Then, we wait."

And wait we did. A year left without any action, then another. Eventually, I found myself three years in, stowing away with the ones who would control my destiny. I had convinced the village that the war was to save those children that were being slaughtered daily, but my mind was convoluted by the rage that I had towards that bunker. Towards Frank, towards Rosemary, towards my gun that ran out of bullets and forced me to endure a life where I had to know that my sons were dead. Both killed by human hands. Every day that I waited, I imagined a life lived outside, above, before. A life that was normal. Where I didn't have to live in fear that one day a giant nuclear bomb, filled with enough radiation to peel the muscle from a body for a decade or more would come to meet the ground. I told Grace of my imagination and she played along with me. She took me back to the day after my thirtieth birthday and played it through her mind as if the bomb had never come. I woke up with her to my side. Kyle came running to our bed, laughing with joy that was incomparable to the joy of anybody else. I saw the fascination with life in his eyes and in his heart. In Grace and I's imagination, he grew up so fast. One minute, he ran around as the stump of a child. The next, we were in tears waving him away to college. This is what could have been. What would have been if it weren't for the griminess of the human hand. At the end of that dream, our imagination was when I decided that I would not rest until every single person who demonstrated their lack of "human" morality at my old camp suffered an unimaginable suffering. My heart knew that it was wrong, but I knew that as long as those evil people saw hope for the future, war would be an inevitable consequence. Since the beginning of time, as long as there was people, there was violence. I was not going to tell anybody. I wanted my army to believe that everybody was fighting to save the children, but really, those children were who I wanted to kill the most. I knew that they would be massacred anyways, but I wanted everyone to feel what it was like to lose every child they ever had. The emotions would be different for those people in the bunker, but their mouths were as close as I could get to their hearts. I would kill every woman and child in their child-bearing room. This was my condition, my disease, my destiny.