World War 4: Sticks and Stones

Ben's Fate

I stood. Gun in hand. I was offered hope once, but I was too much of a fool to believe in it. Or was it pride? Or was it fear? It did not matter now because I stood gun in hand, ready to beat the man that killed my friends to death. Or were they friends? Or were they excuses? It did not matter now. I would do what I had to. Not because it was right, or even because I felt that Peter deserved to die anymore, but because it was all that I knew. So I stood, and I looked Peter in the eyes. "I have to kill you, Peter." There was once a day when he didn't fight back, but this time he seemed ready. But not ready to die. He was ready to fight with all of the strength in his body and the will in his soul. But he was not ready to kill. Nor was I, but I had to. We stood for moments. These moments felt like hours, but to the observing eye, they would have been seconds. I finally swung at him. Peter ducked away quickly. He tried to grab the gun from me, but I stepped backwards. I swung at him again as hard as I could, but I missed and hit the wall leaving a cloud of dust. For a second I lost him, but his voice felt nearer than ever. "You don't have to kill anyone. You don't have to kill anyone, Ben." "You don't understand! Every moment of my life has been spent planning for this. I cannot throw that away." I found him and swung, hitting him in the stomach. He was dazed, but alert. He threw a punch into my nose, breaking it. Every breath that I took smelled worse and worse of copper. Every time I breathed in through my nose, I felt blood drip slowly down the back of my throat. I spit it out onto the floor, leaving a stain. The pain was nearly unnoticeable as it was drowned by the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I was dizzy for a second, but not dizzy enough to stop fighting. I swung my gun again at one of the three Peters in my vision. I hit one, but it was not the human Peter that I was fighting. I closed my eyes for a moment to gain clearance. I finally could see again, and so I swung into his jaw, throwing him against the wall and into the ground. I was blinded with rage, but it wasn't for him. I was confused. I had always hated Peter. I always hated everything that he ever did. I devoted my life to hating Peter, to making him suffer, to seeing his guts spill slowly out through a hole in his abdomen. But now. Now that I was fighting him. Now that I was fulfilling the fate placed upon me after the massacre in the bunker. Now that I was being who I was truly meant to be, it was no longer personal. Now he was just dying because I had to kill him. In this moment, I saw him less as an enemy, and more as a brother. I almost loved him in a way that I could not understand. But I must kill him regardless. So I swung downwards at his terrified head, but I missed. He moved away just enough that my swing would hit the dusty ground instead of his dusty head. I took too long to pick the gun back up. He grabbed it and started pulling. I had always thought, just based on our physiques that I was a much stronger man than Peter, but his heart. His heart was beating for life. His mind. His mind was so strong and so powerful that it could overtake the adrenaline in my veins. It was, I realized because my heart was just beating. My mind was just functioning as a normal mind, sending electrical signals to my muscles to move, and to swing the gun downwards as a mind should do. They fulfilled their purpose. They were doing what they were meant to do, but nothing more. They did not have the will that Peter's heart and mind had. Peter's heart and mind raged a fire. They burned through trees and spread at the speed of a jet plane. They roared like thunder, they struck like lightning. They could pierce through the earth like an earthquake. They could take down cities, they could send people into hiding like a nuclear bomb. His heart beat for life. His mind overtook the adrenaline in my veins. I was strong. I held onto that gun being as strong as I was meant to be, but Peter held onto it like his life depended on it. Like the lives of other's depended on it. Like there was love that depended on it. Like he had hope that depended on his life being lived. I held onto it as if my brain sent signals to my muscles to hold onto it. They fulfilled their strength, but nothing more.

My will was not as strong as his, and I lost. He pulled the gun away from my arms in a way that ripped the skin from my palms and started a bleeding in my hands. But I still fought. He threw the gun backwards and put out his fists as if he was going to protect it. "You have no will anymore, Ben. You have three choices. You can either kill me with your fists, you can fight through to try and kill me with this goddamned gun, or you can go." He wanted to say more, but I didn't care to hear it. He needed to die and I needed to kill him, so before he could say more, I punched him in the face. My fists burned at that punch, but so did Peter's face. The scars that I had left him with after our first encounter opened, and his face was covered in blood. But his will. His will was strong. His will was in love. My will did what it was meant to and nothing more. He fought back. I threw another punch. He opened his mouth and took the fist that I had thrown, and cut it with his teeth. He pulled a giant chunk of flesh from my fist and he spat it out onto the ground. I looked at my hand, oozing with blood and saliva. The bone was visible. The tendon was not broken. I could see the innerworkings of my hand fill with blood from the veins that had been opened. I grabbed Peter by the waist and I started punching him repeatedly in the side. We both were dizzy. We both were tired. We both could barely breath, but we both would not give up. I kept throwing punches as he tried to wriggle out of my arms. As he finally did, I lunged and grabbed him by the ankle. This threw him to the ground. His heart was beating for life. His mind was overtaking the adrenaline in my veins, but there is only so far that a will can take you before the human functions reach their limit. He tried to get up, and he slowly was, but not fast enough. To his right, I found a stone lodged in the base where the wall meets the ground and I started to dig it out. My bloodied hands were becoming filled with dirt, and I could feel dust lodge itself under flaps of skin that had become loose. I kept digging, and I eventually grabbed the stone, and walked over to Peter. Finally, I could be at peace soon enough. I raised the stone slowly, high above my head. I took a deep breath. "This is for the people you slaughtered!" I lowered the stone hard upon Peter's head. I took a deep breath. I felt something. Something that had been there for so long that I had been ignoring the existence of. I tried to ignore it again. I raised the stone high above my head. I took a deep breath. "This is for the children you maimed." I lowered the stone again, but much slower this time. I landed it upon Peter's head. I felt tears rush to my eyes. I felt a pain in my soul that all I wanted was to ignore. But I could not ignore it. Every time that I landed this stone against Peter's skull, it felt more and more wrong. I lifted the stone high above my head again. "This is for my father." I was shaking. I was sobbing. I felt nothing, but evil. I lowered the stone, but by the time it hit Peter's temple, it was just barely a tap. I took a shallow breath interrupted by moments of sobbing. "Peter, I don't understand." He spoke through chokes of blood. "You have two choices, Ben. You can finish what you started and be at your so-called peace, or you can go." I shook my head. "I can't just go. This has been my entire life. Every moment. If I don't kill you, then what did those people in the bunker die for? If I don't kill you, what did Bill have to die for? And Eliza. I don't even know if I loved her anymore if I don't kill you."

Peter and I sat in silence. I lowered the stone, and I placed it onto Peter's left side. I laid next to him on the right side. We laid in silence. I felt the blood from my hand drip onto the floor. "You can just go. I could have tried to kill you, Ben, but I couldn't. You are so much of myself when I was struggling to rationalize my actions, to make sense of them. There came a time when I thought that what I wanted to do was all that I could do. All that I deserved. But it wasn't. Ben, I am an evil, evil man. You of all people know this. But it isn't all that I am. There was a time when I thought that I had no choice, but to conduct that massacre. I thought that civilization as a whole needed to die. I was taking away your food source. I was taking away your way of life so that civilization would cease to exist, but it was never right. It never became right. When I found the body of your Eliza, I felt her feelings. I could see her last thoughts. She never stopped loving you. She never stopped looking into your eyes and believing in their beauty. She never stopped wanting your touch, to feel you close." I listened to his words, but I had to interrupt. "and that is what killed her?" "No. You have to accept it, Ben. I'm sorry. You killed her, Ben. It wasn't love, it wasn't fate. It wasn't your need and your desire to watch me suffer. Nothing else matters except the hand of the one that actually killed her. And that hand belongs to you. You killed her, Ben. You stopped loving her, Ben." It couldn't have been true. It couldn't have been. Every moment led me here. Why? Why? Why did I have to learn that my love wasn't real? That my thoughts were nonsensical? Why did I have to exist in this state of nonexistence. Where everything that I had ever done was for nothing. It was for my own worth. I wanted to kill Peter again, but now I no longer had the little will that I had before. And it was no longer for any sort of justifiable cause. It was simply because I was starting to believe him. I was starting to understand why he thought that he needed to live. I was starting to understand why he thought that my fate was just an excuse. I remembered those days when I did love Eliza. I remembered those days when all I ever needed was to feel her body on mine, but not simply because of her beauty, but because of the comfort and safety that it gave me. I remembered those days when life was simple. When life was love, and when life was beautiful. Then I remembered those days, where that beauty drifted away. It was dark. It was frightful. I remembered again those days when I was in love. I would have done anything to keep her alive, to protect her. I would never even have thought to kill her. She was everything to me. She had the beauty of the ocean. She had the vastness of it, the complexity of it. There was a day, there was a time when it was beautiful. When love was beautiful, but I wasted that love. I remembered the massacre. I remembered the moment that I devoted my life to the death of Peter. When I started to lose focus. When I started to lose love. Hope was forged in the fires of revenge for me. For her, it was forged in Destiny. For her, it was forged in her love for me. She loved me. She wanted to protect me, to keep me safe, and I ignored it. I let it fly above me through the clouds where I could never notice it. I wasted love on a fate that didn't exist because now I was laying with Peter, the man that I promised that I would kill. But I was no longer going to. There was not enough will anymore. My fate was just a lie that I made up to excuse my actions. And now I was a man, remorseful, but without hope, and long without love. We sat in silence again. Between us was bloodstained floor covered with bits of skin and patches of holes and dents in the ground where our fight had been most intense. Between us also was an understanding of each other that had never existed before. I laid hopelessly out of love in silence until, eventually, Peter spoke again.